Military Matters and FBI Racket

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor is an author, scholar, columnist, essayist, political, cultural critic.

He is currently working on his 27th book,

obviously 2026 already completed.

So that current book is the end of everything.

And so we're expecting it out hopefully next spring.

So we've got a little ways to go.

Victor's almost done with a first draft of it.

We have a lot on the agenda this Saturday.

This is our Saturday episode.

So, we do do things a little different, often culturally.

And today, we're going to start a chronology of looking at wars in history.

And the Persian War is the first thing on deck.

And we'll look at, of course, some news as well.

But stick with us, and we'll be right back after these messages.

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Welcome back.

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

You can find Victor at his website, victorhanson.com.

The name of the website is the Blade of Perseus.

And Victor, if I could entertain you for one second, exactly what is the meaning of the Blade of Perseus?

Just for people maybe who haven't gone to it yet or are still wondering, why the Blade of Perseus?

Thank you.

And

in Greek mythology, we always remember Medusa.

And she was,

she's referred to by a proper name Medusa, but she's also known as Gorgo.

And we know Gorgon in English from it.

So there were lots of Medusias.

And these were sort of...

females.

Remember all the, I hate to say it, but all of the more venomous characters in Greek mythology, whether it's Circe or Calypso

or Medusa, they tend to be female, the more deadly of the species.

And they have

these

various venomous, dangerous, deadly snakes in place of hair.

And

the idea is if you look or gaze or stare into her eyes, she has the ability to turn you in stone.

And

there's a word in, I guess, anthropological lexicon that apotropaic.

It's a way of turning you away from something.

And

it's not like the evil eye, but it's something that you

show to someone and they, oh my God, and you don't look.

And there are a lot of, I guess you'd call it a version of evil or something.

They're on a lot of metopes and Greek temples.

And

there were, you know, I think she even had two sisters.

I know one was named Theno.

And they're the

they're most associated, of course, with in

poetry, Ovid, Metamorphoses.

I think Pindor

refers in some

with the hero Perseus.

He's the one.

So the blade of the Perseus is the person who cuts off this monster's head.

So why is it the title of our website?

Because we're trying to be Perseus-like in decapitating metaphorically, metamaphorically, metaphorically, these forces that are Medusa-like, that if we let them alone, they're going to turn us into stone.

Oh, got it.

Well, very good.

And

we are going to head into the Persian Wars, but there's some current news that I would like to deal with first.

And one of them is recently Gordon Chang

published a article at the gatestone at the Gatestone Institute.

And it's about, you know, he's discussing the spy balloon and he seems to suggest that the spy balloon and the course that it took was very close to places where they could surveil our nuclear capabilities and that China has been lasering a dormant volcano on Hawaii and adding that together with

their that he Gordon Chang says this and I know he of course knows China more than anybody that I know of in our culture.

He says they are mobilizing in China their whole society for war.

And he says the United States is not preparing itself for what may come from China, given all of those things together.

But I was wondering what your thoughts were on the spy balloon in general.

And then, yeah, well, there's been reports that of green, what they call green lasers,

coming from satellites, and people had all thought that they were from American satellites because apparently, as he references, there's some utility utility in charting pollution.

And so the idea was:

well, our civilian scientists that, you know,

sort of like the Stanford faculty that wrote, I think 187 people signed a letter not too long ago, quit picking on Chinese scientists in America in joint exchange programs after, after, after one had been arrested.

for a neuroscientist for being employed by the Chinese People's Liberation Army.

It's kind of ironic.

But his point is that they're dual usage, that these satellites project these lasers and they're using them to target pre-selected points in the case of a nuclear exchange

because they could guide hypersonic vehicles along that beam into

their guidance systems, in other words.

And then he dovetails into what this spy balloon was doing.

And this is all part of a larger warning that we're utterly unprepared.

We should, as a footnote, point out that we have been asleep at the wheel because we have 6,500 nuclear devices.

Remember, Obama wanted to reduce that to 1,500, and that was stopped by Trump.

But the point I'm making is they are in a breakneck race to match the Russian and American deterrent.

They want to get up to that number and they're going to get there very quickly.

And unlike our stockpile, many of which are being decommissioned, they're going to be new weapons devices.

And to be frank, they're all copied or enhanced from our technology, which I think everybody should stop and pause.

They don't have the technology.

to keep up with us.

They do have the technology to keep up with us.

If they send their students into

top-ranked physics, engineering, computer programs in American universities and get advanced degrees, come back to China, and of the 350 to 70,000 students, if 1% of them are actively engaged in espionage,

then they have 2,000 or 3,000, 4,000 people that are expropriating technology.

And that explains why they're so good at what they're doing.

So

as far as the,

it

is tangential to the balloon, what he's saying is, I guess he's saying, don't believe the military, don't believe the Biden administration, because they've said, and we've talked about this before, but now we've got the whole account from them, and it goes something like this.

We shot the balloon.

We did not shoot the balloon down because the waters were too cold in Alaska and we wouldn't have been able to retrieve it.

We didn't shoot the balloon down because we buttoned up our Muguter sites and bases and knew when it was coming over so they couldn't get any information.

We didn't shoot the balloon down because it's kind of a primitive device and it has no utility.

We didn't shoot the balloon down because it showed no harmful intent.

We didn't shoot the balloon down because we weren't sure it was Chinese.

We didn't shoot the balloon down

because we didn't want the debris to drop on people.

We didn't shoot the balloon down because

it was at 60,000 feet and we don't have the capability to go up that high, so we didn't do it all in on town.

We didn't shoot the balloon down

because it's $500,000 a rocket.

We weren't sure it was just an amateur balloon, not worth the cost-benefit analysis, the cost of taking it down.

We didn't shoot the balloon because we wanted to trace it and watch it and study it.

And

all of those are mutually exclusive and they all are ad hoc.

They were produced each time somebody rejected one of those exegesis,

exegesis,

every time somebody said, well, there's,

you don't mean you can't shoot something down and have ships ready to pick it up as it falls and watch it.

You can't shoot something down when there's one person per square mile in the Aleutians or only five to six in Montana.

You can't do that.

You don't have any ability to shoot down something at 60,000 feet.

And so, and we on and on.

So all of those exegesis were rejected.

And so

what was the explanation?

And that's scary because it dovetails into two

parallel trains of thought.

The first is that we actually are vulnerable.

And the second is we project the aura.

of vulnerability and they're connected of course.

Let's go back to are we vulnerable?

Well, yes, because the head of NORAD and many of our top generals have said the following.

My God, I didn't really, it just skipped by us.

I mean, apparently we went back and guess what?

By God,

there's been balloons that probably were Chinese that were coming in all the time.

We didn't even know it.

They might have been, I don't know, it's not our fault.

They could be UFOs.

So there is a porous

character to our radar shield

the Chinese have exploited.

And don't fall for the idea that this is a primitive device that has no utility, which the Biden administration told us vis-a-vis satellites.

It has a lot of advantages over satellites.

If you can just get on your computer and Google Chinese large balloon or large payload, you will see that they have been experimenting for a long time

in developing two, three, 400-foot balloons that have enormous lift capacities that can carry and be carry about a ton, 2,000 or 2,000 plus pounds,

long distances and can be self control.

It can be controlled back in China.

And so they're very valuable in a way that a satellite cannot be by being stationary over a missile silo or a base.

But they have a dual use.

And the dual use is they can carry something.

Now people said maybe it's an EMP device that would disrupt electrical transmission.

Maybe it is a guidance system

that

could be used to guide some type of drone device.

But we should remember that a one-megaton bomb during the Cold War, there was miniaturization ability to get that down to under a ton.

I think six, seven hundred pounds.

So you could put maybe two of these, three of these on one of those balloons.

And if you've got the ability to go through U.S.

radar without being detected, and apparently they do, then you can see that they can be as effective as an intercontinental missile.

And again, when the Pentagon says we don't know, we're not able to stop that,

and at the same time dismisses this as a low-tech weapon, it's pretty scary, especially when we know that they've been experimenting with them for this purpose.

But more importantly, all of the other balloons that either were not Chinese or Chinese or sort of Chinese or private balloons that have been coming through our airspace and haven't been detected.

Notice what Russia is doing right now in Ukraine.

They're doing exactly that.

They're taking low-cost balloons and setting them

free in the air to blow over.

Some are not directed.

That is, they're not navigable, but some are.

And they're just blanketing the skies in particular areas of Ukraine to disrupt radar ability to shoot down

Russian missiles that follow them.

So we've got a problem.

We've got a problem with

we don't know if we can stop a Chinese military balloon should it come.

And we don't know if hundreds of these were to be let off, if that would confuse us as this has confused us.

And we have another problem very quickly.

This balloon, the Chinese balloon, we were told was 55 to 60,000 feet.

I think Mr.

General Milley said that, well, and this is another exegesis that was added post facto to protect the Biden asleep at the Wheel administration.

He said, well, when it was over Montana, we shot, but we missed.

And it was too high to get up there.

I don't know what this means.

Apparently, the balloon didn't have enough of a radar presence because it's non-metallic or it's gaseous and the side minor $500,000 missile missed it, or maybe the plane went up to a particular height and thought it could shoot them down with some type of

cannon, but it was too high.

And the answer to that is, well, you're telling us, Mr.

Military, that you don't have an aircraft that can function in a military capacity over 50,000 feet.

I thought we had something called the spy plane, the SR-71.

Didn't we we have a military version that was a takeoff of that?

The Russians did.

They have this

MiG-20 feet, 25, the Foxbat, the ancient old, I think that's 50 years old, but that went up to 55,000.

And now they've got a MiG-32 that can go up to 70.

So we've had the capacity in the past to have a plane that could have shot that down had it been militarized.

And they have, the Russians have the capacity right now to do it.

And what do I mean by capacity?

I mean sending a jet, going right near it, and firing a

30-millimeter cannon, taking it out for a few hundred dollars, rather than sending 500,000 missiles that miss all over the aerospace.

And so you can see that we have some military problems.

And these balloons have shown us that we have problems.

And the administration knows it.

So we are actually vulnerable.

And more importantly, the Chinese have discovered that we project vulnerability by creating all of these excuses and letting this device go all the way across the United States before we took it out.

And then saying we did this deliberately at first so we could study it.

And we knew it was coming the entire time.

And then we added eight or nine different.

reasons that were all mutually exclusive.

So it's a mess.

And the subtext of this whole issue is that this administration really did

want a mini-summit with China as some type of Joe Biden

world's diplomat achievement.

And it was on the eve of the Blinken mission.

And apparently the Chinese, I think, either didn't want to talk to us or deliberately sent something over that would be so embarrassing that

one of two things could happen.

They would both be good in their eyes.

One, that we would be forced to cancel the summit.

And two,

we would,

as Joe Biden said the other day, didn't affect our relations.

We'll still have a summit.

We may, we may, because we're weak.

Yeah.

And they took our nose and stuck it in the mud and we're groveling for this chance.

So

it was very

indicative of this directionalist administration.

And, you know, when Fox Hitter and I said we're looking for a Reagan-esque figure that could bring order, and we do, but I didn't mean to suggest that it was just Joe Biden.

This problem permeates the entire military and diplomatic team in Washington.

So when you have political operatives like a Jake Sullivan that was knee-deep in the Russian collusion hoax when he was working

for Hillary Clinton, Clinton, or you have politicals like Blinken, or you have Mark Milley.

No need to go into Mark Milley, his call with a PLA counterpart, his photo apologies, his white rage

sermons he gave in front of Congress.

When you have people like that in control, and I don't know how they get there or why they stay there, then you're going to have these problems.

And we need, it reminds me so much.

I think all of our listeners who are ancient like I am can remember the Iranian hostage crisis and

the groveling and the submission and the appeasement that the Carter team and Cyrus Vance and then the botched rescue that was just a catastrophe.

And we bent over backwards and then they were so eager to humiliate Carter.

They kept the hostages.

until the last moment of his administration.

And then he so he would never get credit for bringing home the hostages.

It happened the first minute to Ronald Reagan.

And remember, it happened very quickly

because Ronald Reagan, through that whole campaign, basically, and I'm not quoting him verbatim, but most of his remarks were very diplomatic, respecting, i.e., no Logan Act,

theatrics,

but respecting the administration and power.

But he just sort of nodded and said, there will be no hostages.

Governor Reagan, what do you think about the hostage during the camp there will be no hostages when i'm and that message terrified the theocracy and the moment he came in they let them go yeah now i'm not going to defend all of the things the regan administration did because we remember the blowing up of the barracks in lebanon we didn't do anything in response just shot some you know battleship

Volkswagen-sized shells into the back of Ali and said, well, that's that.

And so I'm not saying that Reagan did everything everything right, but we're in this moment where we're looking at someone who wants to restore deterrence, restore the defense budget.

And a final

side note,

there's going to be a great, and we'll talk about that later,

a reassertation.

We're going to reassert

that this woke stuff didn't work.

and it was disastrous and there's going to be a reaction against it.

And one of the reactions will be, we're not going to appease China anymore, and we're going to have a sense of purpose and we have to unite this country and realize that we have an existential adversary in China.

And when you have that, there's no reason any longer to have these Confucius Institutes.

doubted all over our campuses.

There's no reason anymore to have Chinese communist professors coming to our STEM programs.

There's no reason to tell you the truth.

They have 360,000,000 Chinese students.

We didn't do that in the Cold War with Russia, and

that's going to have to stop.

Yes.

And I think there's going to be a lot of other things we'll talk about later.

when we have this reaction.

But the woke movement is very deadly and it manifests itself in a lot of different ways.

And one of them is the appeasement

and

soft gloves treatment of China, which is very bellicose.

And I use this trite phrase that they, when they look at our magnanimity or laxity, and they sure interpret it or conclude that it should be exploited.

And they never, never think it should be reciprocated or repaid in kind.

Yes.

That's what I'm saying.

And it's for you.

Yeah, it sure seems like they've tested us and we've failed the test.

Well, maybe passed it from their point of view in the sense that they can take advantage of us the more that we say we want to have discussions or talks with you.

But I was wondering what you thought about, if anybody reads that Gordon Chain article, it sounds like war, I mean, I'm paraphrasing, but war is imminent.

That's what it really sounds like.

I think it's quite imminent.

But what Gordon, and he's a member, I should note here of our Hoover Institution Military History Working Group.

We have a number of wonderful people on China that, you know, Matthew Pottinger and Miles Yu.

So we have a lot of expertise.

But

what he's trying to do is wake us up because I think what he's trying to say, as he has said in other article, they are preparing to

take Taiwan.

And they have certain agendas that they feel are progressing quite well.

They like the idea that their perennial rival Russia is tied down and weakening.

and they like using Russia to

tie down Ukraine, but more importantly, to exhaust the stocks of weaponry and NATO and the United States.

So when they hear stories that we're taking our artillery shells out of depots in the Middle East, or it's going to take five years to restock our javelin arsenals, or we're short on mines or rockets, they feel that this war should be lengthened, prolonged,

because it will draw up munitions that could be supplied to Taiwan.

And when they use these balloons and they humiliate the Biden administration, they're probing because they feel, well, if we sent a balloon of such magnitude over the United States and it paralyzed the administration for six days and humiliated them in front of their own people,

the same thing might happen

if we send a missile into Taiwan.

It would just paralyze them.

So they're always probing, probing constantly, night and day, 24-7, 360 degrees, and seeing what the reaction is.

And that's a prelude, Gordon believes, I think he's right, for a major operation against Taiwan.

Yes.

And

they

And while he thinks it's imminent, I'm not sure it is.

I don't think our listeners know when it's going to come.

But there is this argument that he uses that it didn't come, and this would not happen under Donald Trump.

If Donald Trump was president, he would have shot it down to the extent he knew it.

If the military might have tried to hide it from him, as we see from Mark Milley, who was freelancing with his counterparts in China.

But if they did tell Donald Trump, he would have shot it down.

And I don't think they sent a

balloon of this magnitude under his watch for that reason.

And I think they feel that there's going to be a change in attitude mentality in the United States because they know that if we continue this path, this trajectory, we're going to be very vulnerable.

And you're going to get either Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis as president.

And either one is going to be a lot different.

And it'll be more like or Mike Pompeo.

I shouldn't leave out anybody.

And we saw what Pompeo's attitude was toward China and what Trump's was.

And so they feel there's a window of opportunity.

And there is a window of opportunity for him.

And that's going to be very dangerous the next two years.

Yes.

Yes.

Well, before we go to break, I just have one small question since you went into potential candidates.

We know that Nikki Haley has announced her run for the presidency.

And I was wondering, do you think she's

aiming or

looking really to being named vice president?

Well, I mean, this is a question that it comes up, Democrats and Republicans.

So when you have these huge fields of people who are running, and very quickly

it doesn't seem like they have the wherewithal financially or the skill or the experience to become president, then one of two things are going to happen.

Number one, they're looking for

an opportunistic break, right?

So they put their hat in the ring very early.

And Donald Trump, what do I mean by an opportunistic break?

There could be a scandal about Ron DeSantis.

There won't be, but that's what they hope for.

Or Donald Trump could be indicted or he could get ill and then you have somebody who declared early and is there.

Or

more likely, they feel that

If they can raise money, they have to, I mean, they can't just declare like a John Bolton said he was.

You have to be not just viable.

You can't be a Julian Kosprow or Corey Booker.

You have to have the media and the money like Cameroon Harris, or in her case, she had the race and sex angle as a black, half-black woman.

So you have to be viable.

And then when you're viable, then you drop out at a key time that helps the perceived winner.

And then like Pete Buttigig or Elizabeth Warren, for example, or Bernie Sanders.

So they, after the South Carolina, Nevada primary, they dropped out and sealed the deal for Joe Biden, and then they negotiated something.

And Camilla Harris had dropped out early.

And

she didn't have the wherewithal to get that if she had been a white male.

But she was the only viable black woman on the national scene.

So he had announced in advance he was going to have a black woman as vice president.

So she was there.

But believe me, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren got something from dropping out by running.

And that was,

you may be president, Joe, but these are the following agendas that we want.

And so when everybody says, oh my God, I voted for Joe Biden.

He's good old Joe from Scranton.

He's aviator Joe.

He beat up corn pop.

Oh,

he's a moderate.

No,

he is non-compos mentes.

And Joe Biden and the Obamas basically negotiated with a hard left.

And that was Obama.

And that was Elizabeth Warren and Sanders.

And it's their agenda.

So that's what they got by running.

And so all of these people that are going to run will try to be president.

And they're there in case a lucky break happens.

And, you know, it can happen.

LBJ all of a sudden pulled out.

And everybody thought, man,

Eugene McCarthy,

who in the hell heard of him?

Senator,

wow, George, all these people.

But once he pulled out, they started to become viable.

And so that can happen.

That can happen.

And we don't know what's, and that's why they're they're running.

And we'll see what happens.

But

so far, the polls today show that Donald Trump runs three to four points higher in the primary.

And he squeaks by Joe Biden and the general, but Santos has a three to four point edge in the general.

So the general consensus right now, and it's so early it's almost worthless to even mention, is

that Donald Trump has the advantage of getting the nomination, but he does, he's at a disadvantage vis-a-vis DeSantis in the general election.

And that is perplexing the Republicans.

So just to answer your question, both parties have existential problems.

The Republican

party is is that if Donald Trump, Donald Trump is likely as of now to get the nomination, but should he get the nomination, there's going to be a lot of people in the party that will not want to fund him very well or will join the Never Trumpers because they feel he's not viable.

And he will bring out all of the hatred and all of the money in a way that even DeSantis, who's being attacked constantly now by the Never Trumpers especially, won't.

I don't know if that's true.

And the Democrats' dilemma is

how do you get rid of someone who's

cognitively unfit to be president and who every single day geometrically declines?

And that's what he's doing, Joe Biden.

And so they do not want this man to run.

The people are almost three to one don't want him to run.

But then you get Camilla Harris.

And how do you get rid of a black woman after you boasted that you were so liberal that you were gonna you were going to nominate no one but camella harris and she cannot finish a sentence that's coherent and as i said i think i said that on fox she has a vocabulary of about 800 words she just recycles the same thing that's it she's the object of jokes and but

in her

credit, she's been dutiful, right?

They've given her all these bad tasks.

You're the borders are.

So she, you know, she can't do anything to the border because even if she wanted to, it's Joe Biden and New Yorkers want an open border.

They want an open border.

How can you close a border that you think is just what you want?

You want it non-existent.

Yes.

Because you want 5 million people as constituents to come in.

And so

I don't know what they do.

Can you imagine if they said

Joe is going to step down?

He's not going to run again,

but we're not going to back Camilla Harris.

I am sorry.

We're not going to back her.

What would James Clyburn?

What would Axine Waters?

What would the Black Lives Matter movement?

What would the Black caucus say?

I know what they would say.

They say, okay,

you get rid of Camilla, but you're going to nominate this Casey Abrams or somebody.

You know what I'm saying?

That's even more lunatic because they're racially obsessed.

And the Democratic Party asked for, they have the greater dilemma than the Republicans do right now.

But it's it's a long way.

We'll see what happens.

Yeah, we'll see what happens.

And I promised an ad, so we will go to an ad.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson show.

We've been talking about the spy balloon over the United States that was shot down.

And we're going to come back and talk about the Persian Wars.

So stay with us.

We'll be right back.

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Welcome back.

So, Victor, we're going to go a little bit back in history and start on our Odyssey of Wars from the past, and the Persian Wars is the first.

And if I could just put out a couple of questions I think maybe our listeners might have and that I also have before you go into it.

I think what I always wonder is, you know, I've read about it, but an explanation of the much smaller army's victory over a much greater army in numbers at Marathon.

How does that happen?

And I would be curious to hear your answer.

And then the the significance of Herodotus's history of the Persian Wars in the sense that he starts the whole thing, I think, with about five books on the Persian Empire.

And I always found that curious.

So go ahead.

What are your thoughts on and how would you want to address it?

I would just preface it by, I thought what we would do is we would start.

with the first major global war, and then we're going to work down to the present.

So in these broadcasts, and we're not just going to do it out of historical, you know,

inquiry,

interest, inquiry, curiosity.

We're going to do it because it has relevance on the present.

So, we have a series, in this case, the Persian War, is the first East-West conflict.

And this is going to be replicated when Rome went into the East, for example, with the Parthians, or it's going to be

repeated with Belisarus and the Byzantines and their wars, or it's going to be replicated with the Crusades,

or it's going to be in the colonial period,

or it's going to be with bin Laden.

And there's this east-west dichotomy.

And so, before we go into the Persian Wars, I'll answer your question very quickly.

Okay, so

you asked me why did basically 11,000 to 12,000 hoplite soldiers, these are heavily armed Greek infantrymen, with bronze breastplate, greaves, some type of ankle protector, 18-pound wooden shield with a

guild on it, a bronze covering, probably weighed about 18 pounds with a porpax, an antilabar, or a way to hold the shield on your arm to relieve much of the weight, an eight or nine-foot jabbing spear, what we call a Corinthian helmet, and a small dagger.

And that soldier then arrays eight deep and a phalanx of various widths.

And at Marathon, that was about 10,000 men, about eight feet, eight men deep.

How did they win?

They were outnumbered three to one.

And so

there's the classical explanations that transcend Persian Greek, and that is the defense does not have to be as large as the offense.

Usually the offense has to take it to the defense.

So once you land on the beaches of Marathon, you have logistical problems, you have ignorance of geography, you have a time bomb ticking.

Once Napoleon goes into Russia, once the Germans go into Russia, you just don't meet them on equal terms.

So the Greeks have the advantage in that sense.

The second sense is if you're going to nullify that advantage, you need

maybe three to one, four to one, five to one advantage.

And in the ancient world, an amphibious operation is very difficult.

So the Persians usually use Greek triremes from their Ionian subjects along the coast of Asia Minor, which is now Turkey, basically from Bodrum or Halicanarsis all the way up

to

even up to the Bosphorus.

And they bring this huge fleet

and

they land at Marathon in 490s in the fall, and they can't get too many people.

So they probably have about 30, 25,000, 30,000.

And it's a, if anybody's been to Marathon, it's sort of a confined plane and the Greeks deliberately want to ring the plane that's operable for infantry and cavalry.

And the cavalry, we don't know where the cavalry was.

It's a big question.

There's a

Byzantine footnote about, you know, that it was not there, but apparently it was.

But the point is that the Greeks have the advantage because they are heavily armored hoplites, weighing anywhere from 30 to 40 to 50 pounds.

And the people, you know, are 5'7, 5'8, and they only weigh

probably 140 pounds.

So it's very clunky, if I could use that slang, and it's very hot even in the fall.

And so

they are confronted.

Their center starts to

fold the Greek wings before the center falls, envelop the Persians and destroy them.

The cavalry either was not embarked in time or it was insufficient numbers or tactics so it couldn't outflank because of perhaps geographical impediments that the greeks had had lined up in space and then they were trapped

so to speak and then

phidipides uh runs back to Athens to tell them, you know, it's 26 miles.

We all run the marathon.

I never run it, but i have walked uh on a hike from marathon into the central bus station at athens about 22 miles and

he reports that hey

they lost the battle and be aware because the fleet was going to come around and then land the survivors and the Greeks were ready for them and they could have repeated a marathon.

So that's one reason.

As far as that's why the Greeks won, won, they had superior weaponry, they had the advantage of being on the defense, they were fighting amphibious troops, and more importantly, they used the geographical contours of Marathon to protect their flanks.

And they had a much better general Miltiades who knew what he was doing.

And they had a

pan-Athenaic force.

In other words, the Spartans came two days late.

They came, they were asked, every time you ask the Spartans to go anywhere, whether it's Thermopylae later on or a marathon, they always say they have the Carnea or they have a festival.

Sorry, can't leave.

And the reason they can't leave, of course, is they have 300,000 helots and there's only 10 to 12,000 Spartiates.

So they're very reluctant.

They're kind of like an SS shock troop.

And they have a subordinate population that is very restive.

They're not slaves.

They're between slave and free.

We call their

hellata means those who have been taken.

They were conquered in the rich plains of Messenia over on the other side of Mount Ethomi.

So they're very reluctant.

So they came late.

So they wanted to look at the Persians.

They'd never seen them before.

They were dead on the beach.

And that was the first battle of the Persian Wars per se.

And I'll explain that in a second.

As far as your other question, Herodotus, one of the reasons that we we know so much about the persian wars it's the first battle

uh battles series of battles wars that were chronicled by a historian he is the first historian some of you say well he couldn't be the first historian he only wrote

430 to 420 maybe i don't know 60 years after it he's talked to people who might have been there aeschylus wrote plays he was there he he had some contacts but surely there were people in Persia.

There were people in Africa.

No, there were not.

We have rest gesti or the recordings of what people do, and they're usually toadies for the monarchy or the

king or the queen or someone.

But the idea of an independent writer chronicling an event

and free to write what they want and bringing in evidence and digesting it and coming up with with the next, that's brand new.

Nobody had done it before him.

And remember, this is pretty early 430 BC.

And he writes in an Ionic dialect because he was born in Haliconarsis, which is in Turkey.

If anybody goes to, you can go to Haliconarsis and see the monument there, the mausoleum.

of Mausolis is still there.

Well a site is still there.

You can see the Turkish wooden boats that are very famous at Bodrom, but that is in Asia Minor, and people did speak a dialect of Greek that is different.

So when you read Herodotus in Greek, it is an Ionic dialect, somewhat related to

Homeric Greek, but a little bit, it's later and a little bit different.

Differently, the case endings and some of the prepositions and the spellings are different.

But my point is, he was the first independent investigator.

And this was what is very important.

He, because he came from Asia Minor Minor and he was a subject

of the Persian Empire, he was disinterested, but he was curious about the Persian Empire.

So to lead up to the Persian War, you've got to read five books.

And you have to learn how Cyrus the Great and Cambias and the entire Achmenid family line came into power.

Gyges, there's wonderful stories.

And so later, the Greeks, Plutarch, you know, writing around 100 AD,

half a millennia after, he said he was Philobarbaros.

He was too friendly to the barbarian.

He was too fair, in other words.

Other people said his numbers were wrong.

And so

throughout the Renaissance, he was very, I think part of it was the Ionic dialect, but also he was considered archaic.

People originally thought he wrote, you know, as a near contemporary, although he mentions the Peloponnesian War in one or two cases.

So we know that he was writing after 431 in some cases.

But he's been downdated over the last century by 10 or 15 years to be writing more likely in the 430s or 420s.

So the point that people are making is that this disinterested empirical way of observing war was revolutionary.

But why he was criticized by his contemporaries and by later scholars in the Renaissance and on through the Enlightenment, he told stories.

He talked about

magic big ants.

He talked about phenomenon in Persia that nobody could believe.

He investigated stories about Egypt.

And people said, these are tall tales.

He made them up.

And

a great classical scholar at UC Berkeley, I knew him very well, and he was very kind to me, Kendrick

Pritchett.

And he was active for 60 years.

He wrote once a book that I, it was very scholarly and sort of narrow, but it was called The Liar School of Herodotus.

And he went through every single story that appears in the histories in the first five books that people had cited for centuries, but especially now.

and as proof that Herodotus was lying.

And he looked at anthropological, scientific data and everything from oil to coal, things that he mentions, and there were all historical

bases for believing his account.

And it restores, I think, the credibility of Herodotus.

More importantly,

in a weird way, the postmodernist of the 1980s gave him a little boost because they said, well, you know, Thucydides outlines his scientific method.

in book one, section 22, when he says, you know, here's the speeches, and the speeches are things that I either heard and knew firsthand and tried to, as a reporter, put down, or more importantly, what I thought they should have said in that occasion, meaning I could have made them up.

So what they're saying is,

if something like this, if Victor goes to town and buys a loaf of bread,

He can say, I went to town, I drove this way, I got a loaf of bread.

But the fact that he's telling you all this means doesn't mean it's true he's just acting as if he's a scientist to give you details about something he's fabricated whereas if he just said you know what i'm kind of hungry i went there and he was very vague but he had a lot of stories it's no more or no less valid i don't buy into this but there was a

a school, I'd say, of thinking in the 1970s, late 70s, 80s, 90s that said, Herodotus gives you all these stories.

He doesn't judge.

He doesn't say this is false.

He doesn't say this is true.

He doesn't say this is my method.

He just aggregates information and lets you, the reader, determine.

And this is much more honest than the so-called scientific historian who wrote probably 10 to 15 years later about the Peloponnesian War.

I don't believe this, but it's a very popular school of Herodotus and scholarship.

So those were the two introductory questions you had.

And now we should go to the Persian wars right yeah yes absolutely well when you say persian wars notice it doesn't say peloponnesian war it's plural so what do we mean by wars we're talking about a period of a half century from 499 bc

down to 449 or 450 50 years

and the first

phase of it is called the Ionian revolt.

These were Greek city-states in places like Ephesus, Miletus, Heliconarsis, what we call Ionia, that rich area on the coast of Turkey today,

where Izmir is, for example.

If anybody's been over to Ionia, you can see that it's got superior fertility, farmland than mainland Greece.

This is where Greek civilization probably was most dynamic in the 7th and 6th century.

This is where many of the Greek lyric poets came from.

This is where the pre-Socratic philosophers in large part came from.

And so it was a very dynamic area, and it was conquered by the Lydians, Croises, and then reconquered by the Persians.

So they're a subject people, and they revolt.

And the Athenians and of all people feel that they are ethnically related, that they migrated over from Ionia.

as Ionians, and they lend aid and they lose.

There's a battle at Mikale, and the Ionian revolt is crushed, although they had periodic success.

They burned the Persian satrapy capital at Sardis, for example.

And in retaliation for that,

the Persians say they're going to punish.

They had a failed 492, there was a failed effort.

But finally, Darius, remember, he was, of all the Achaemenid kings, he was there in power, I don't know, 345 years.

So he's there a long time, both before and after Marathon.

And he engineers with his lieutenants to go and punish these Athenians and bring back a dictatorship, Hippias, of Hippias and Hipparchus in fame.

And they're going to put a dictatorship back into Athens and get rid of the Cleisthenes

experiment with democracy.

And it fails.

So then what happens?

Well, in 486, Darius dies.

So the Persians are steaming and they want to come back.

But it's going to take a while.

And in the meantime, the Athenians let down their guard.

It's sort of like the British or the French after World War I.

You know, Germany, we beat Germany.

We're not going to listen to General Folk who said, you know, this is just an intermission before they come back.

So people were warning.

And one of the people who was most prominent was this half-thracian Greek Themistocles, an absolute genius.

And he's able to convince the

democracy at Athens not to spend their wherewithal, their great discovery of a third strike of silver at Lorian, the Lorian mines right outside, about 20 miles outside of Athens.

Don't distribute it to people like most democracies would.

Invest in ships.

And rather than say it's against the Persians and scare everybody or for whatever reason, he says it's against Aegina, the island out

in the Aegean that looks toward Athens.

And so they build a fleet, and that's very, very

important.

But the Athenians now have a fleet, and so they're going to be able to intercept the next wave.

When he dies, the next king is Xerxes.

Xerxes is not as confident as Darius, but he decides he's going to end the problem, the Greek problem.

So he makes this huge armada in 481, 480.

And

it's not what Herodotus says, a million people, but it is the largest combined amphibious land operation until D-Day.

And it crosses the Chersonesus.

with a bridge five and a half miles long.

And so they pour

into Europe and so you can see part of the army coming through Thrace and down through Macedonia and it's accompanied by a huge fleet and combined probably a quarter of a million people I think the Americans and the British had something like 160,000 soldiers that they embarked on the first day of D-Day

but this was larger in that sense.

And the Greeks don't know what to do.

So they meet and they have a meeting at Corinth.

And of course, every Greek city-state, and there's 1,500 of them that's closest to this army, i.e.

up in northern Thessaly or Thebes, we got to do something.

We got to do something.

We got to do something.

And the ones that are way down south in Sparta, yeah, we got to do something.

But before they get to us, because they don't have any word in their vocabulary called natia or nationhood, they're separate political autonomous entities, They expect somebody to go.

But finally, they get a force, not a big one, to go up to the Vale of Tympe.

That's one of the ways to get into Greece.

The other is Thermopylae.

There's about three ways, but these are the two chiefs.

And they think they can block the pass.

And the Greeks, they don't have enough soldiers to do it.

And the Persians come in and they're going to head for the next pass at Thermopylae.

So then

in August, they panic and they say, we've got to go up there.

And we've got to go up there.

And the Athenians say,

okay, but we're going to be, you know, in charge of the maritime force.

So for in a very rare Leonidas,

the king of Sparta takes, I don't know if he takes 300 or 299, 300 Spartans, either include the king or not, but it's very rare for the king himself to take such a small group.

And he goes up there to show the Greeks that the imperial, I shouldn't say imperial, but the shock troops of Sparta, the best of the 10,000, are with a king.

And he assembles a Pan-Hellenic force.

They've got Thespians, they've got Thebans, they've got everybody up there, about 7,000, and they hold that pass.

That's the idea.

If anybody's been to Thermopylae, you have to kind of reconfigure that the sea has silted and it's about half a mile out.

And it's near Wolos, but

in antiquity, it lapped up against this high mountain pass.

And so it's about 300 or 400 yards.

And it's sort of like imagine, well, you saw

the 300,

that kind of cartoonish movie that was accurate in some ways, but cartoon in the rest.

Anyway, what I'm getting at is They hold the pass until a traitor,

and he's, I think he's in the fifth rung,

some of my listeners will correct me of Dantes Inferno, the classical traitor, Ephialtes, and he shows them Anopis, and that's a route around the pass.

And so the Greeks come running down the hill and say he's broken through and he's going to come up surrounding us.

And Leonidas makes the decision that with

700, I think 700 thespians and 300, they're going to hold, hold, hold.

So the rest of everybody can retreat and warn the Greeks and they're going to try to hold them.

And then they have that last day,

really heroic battle

that's recorded in Herodotus.

You know,

we're going to darken the sun with our arrows.

Leonidas, oh, fine, Mr.

Persian envoy, they won't fight in the shade.

And we demand that you

hand over your arms.

And he says, come and get them.

And that is kind of a, they they use the um

in greek in herodotus they use the second aorist participle molon from coming

uh take

literally it says coming and then the imperative of lambano the aorist

imperative that means one you know just a sudden take

so literally the greek says coming take

but in english parlance it goes come and get it come and get it yes yes uh i was embedded twice in Iraq,

2006 and 2007.

I kind of made an informal little

chronicle of how many U.S.

soldiers, many of them in special units, had mulan labe on their arms.

Come and take it.

And there was about seven I counted.

And

a couple of them had the accent wrong, which I didn't want to, you know what I mean?

Tell them that.

Yeah, because I mean, I don't know how you change a Greek accent in ink on your, but it didn't matter.

Some of them had them in English rather than Greek letters.

But anyway, they break through,

and then there's this word that we have in Greek called me-dizy.

You're going to join the mead.

And so all of these cities in the pathway start to provide what...

is called earth and fire.

We're going to give you food and hospitality and join you.

And they meidize all the way down to Athens.

That's about 300 miles.

So this huge, just like a huge wave of Persians is absorbing Greek city-states, dozens of them, probably hundreds of them.

And then they get to Attica.

They come through the pass and they're in Attica.

And what do the Greeks do?

And Themistocles says, if you go out and fight these people, you're going to lose.

It's not marathon.

You're not going to be on a coastal enclosed plain.

You're going to be out in the plain of Attica and you will lose.

So we've got to abandon the countryside and flee over to

the northern coast of the Peloponnese at places like Troyzen and we've got to go to Salamis.

And they take up everybody except a few die-hard, I guess we'd call them conspiracy buffs.

They think that the wooden, and there's a Delphic oracle says, trust in the wooden walls.

They say, hey, no, no, it's not ships.

It's the wooden ramparts on the Acropolis.

No, sorry, they're going to be overrun and killed.

And Athens is burned.

The first Parthenon is burned.

And the Greeks are all sitting there without a city.

And then they try to convince everybody, you got to fight, you got to fight.

And a lot of the Peloponnese said, sorry,

you lost your city, you're Ionians.

It's kind of in our interest that you lost, because, you know, it's only six miles wide at Corinth, the isthmus.

We can build a wall.

We have a wall.

We can reinforce it.

And Themistocles said, this is an amphibious fleet.

You're nuts if you think you can stop it.

And if we go, and we might just leave ourselves.

We got 300 ships now that we built from the silver.

We might just go over to Sicily and leave you people.

So they're finally,

being Greeks, they argue and they decide they will fight in the Bay of Salamis, even though they're outnumbered.

I should say, as a footnote, why they were fighting at Thermopylae, they had a large fleet at Artemisium.

It's right off the coast

at the northern part of the island of Euboea, Evia Evia in modern Greek.

And it's a draw.

There was a big storm that wrecked a lot of Persian ships.

They fought very well, the Greeks, and then they retreated when they heard

that the decision was being made to evacuate to Salamis.

So the Greeks had had some success at sea, and they used their fleet and what ships they could get from other sea powers like Corinth, etc.

And they form a fleet maybe of 350 triremes.

I don't think we need to think they have 12, 1500, as some of the later sources suggest on the Persian numbers.

But they're outnumbered at least two to one, 700, 350, maybe a little.

And they, in the confined waters, the numbers of the Persian ships are not an advantage.

And the Greeks may have had heavier ships or they may have known the currents better, but they destroy that fleet right in front of Xerxes, who's sitting on an outcropping watching the battle.

And you can see where he's sat if you go to Salamis today.

It's hard to get to Salamis because it's a Greek naval base.

Love it.

I've been there twice, but a lot of the areas are enclosed.

Barry Strauss wrote a really good book about Salamis, if you're interested in reading it.

It's very accessible.

In any case, they win that battle.

And at that point, the Persian wars change because the

attacker is going to be attacked.

He is now facing what the Germans faced at Stalingrad or what Napoleon faced at Moscow.

They're a long way from home and they're not on the attack and they're sizable armies and they're very dangerous, but they're basically a wounded lion.

And so what they do is they retreat back under Mardonius into Thebes to rest for the winter.

And then Xerxes just hightails it with the fleet and lets them go.

Just, okay, you guys, you've got a lot of troops.

You're on your own.

You can beat these guys next spring.

And that gives the chance for the Spartans now to say, you know what, the Athenian fleet is getting all the credit.

And where we were heroic at Thermopylae, we lost.

So we've got to fight these people at land and show them the Dorian spear is the real Greek.

And so the next spring, at the Battle of Plataea, you can go to Plataea today.

There's ruins of the Hellenistic rebuilding of the classical town.

You can see where the battle was fought.

The Greeks assemble probably one of the largest hoplite armies they've had.

It's Panhellenic.

The poor Thebans are on the Persian side.

They'll never live it down to the great liberator of Pamanondas will finally regain their reputation.

But

they destroy the

Persian army and they destroy it because they've got Athenian and Spartan hoplites and the same dynamics that we talked about at

Marathon kick in

and they defeat them.

And then what happens?

The orphaned Persian army has to go, what, 500 miles back.

And at the same time they defeated them,

they

send the fleet to break the bridges across the Charsenes

and the Hellespont, and it's already broken.

And they're not going to be anybody there anyway.

I should say that battle was Michale.

I might have mislabeled it.

The other earlier one in the Ionian revolt was La De, La De, L-A-D-E.

And at that point,

the kinetic part of the Persian wars is over in 479.

And believe it or not, the Persians have not just lost, but they've lost a quarter of a million men, perhaps.

And they're humiliated.

And then there is a pan-Hellenic effort to go in and destroy Persian occupation, to liberate Ionia and liberate Cyprus and liberate Persians in Egypt.

And

from 479 to 449, for that 30-year period, the Greeks are on the offensive.

They meet with a catastrophe in Egypt, but they do pretty well off the coast of Asia Minor, off the coast of Asia at Cyprus, and they begin to liberate and they liberate Ionia.

And so what is happening now is there's something called the Delian League will be formed to be a Pan-Hellenic alliance.

And in 449, there's this big scholarly controversy whether there was a former former peace treaty, the Peace of Callius.

It's not in Herodotus per se, although I think it's obliquely mentioned.

I think there's 150 articles on the Peace of Callius, scholarly articles.

But nevertheless, it doesn't really matter whether it was formulized.

But at that point, there's no longer any hot fighting.

Persia has said, you know what, the Aegean is a Greek lake.

We understand that.

Xerxes is dead.

Artaxerxes comes into power and they start to retreat and they go into decline.

And from now on, when they want to interfere in Greek politics, they do it as proxies or vicariously, or they back Athens versus Sparta, or Sparta versus Athens, and they won't really

get paid back until

Xenophon and the 10,000, and then, of course, Alexander the Great.

And the rallying cry will be: they interfered

in our politics, they invaded us at Marathon and at Salamis, and we're going to pay them back.

And Alexander, even though it's 150 years after Marathon or so, that's very powerful propaganda to justify his imperialistic attack, a rant

romp, I should say, all through

Asia.

Persian Empire, remember, at the point, it's larger than the Roman Empire in the East will be.

It's all the way from Thrace and

Ionia all the way to the Persian Gulf.

It's a huge empire, as Alexander's going to discover, but it's now inert at 449.

So that 50-year period becomes symbolic of a brave, free people

who

defeated an imperialistic totalitarian attacker.

The Greeks were fighting for their freedom, for their homes.

They were united,

and they were fighting a foreign aggressor from a different culture.

So it's a cultural divide.

It's democracy versus autocracy.

It's the defense versus the attacker.

It's West versus east.

It sets the paradigm for the next two millennia.

And more importantly and more tragically, it sets off a rivalry because the Athenians will say, we won the war at Salamis.

Come on now.

Before Salamis, they were on the attack.

After Salamis,

they were on the attack.

We done them in.

Yeah, we done him in.

And the Spartans will say, no.

You won the sea battle, but who was going to knock off all the hoplites,

all the soldiers they had?

It was us hoplites, the Spartan spear.

And the Spartans take credit for Plataea.

And that is iconic of the tension between a Dorian, landlocked, oligarchic, parochial

land army versus a cosmopolitan, democratic, Ionian maritime power.

And so the Delian League that was supposed to be be Pan-Hellenic will start to see, we don't like being run by Spartans.

They're too crude.

They are too laconic.

We don't like them.

And it will transmogrify into the Athenian Empire.

And very quickly, people will say,

we don't like the Athenians either.

They'll have about 200 subject states.

And we have the nucleus then for our next talk on the Peloponnesian War, which the two allies of this great Greek Pan-Hellenic effort will turn on each other.

It's It's very similar to World War II, where the Soviets and the Americans and the British were partners, and then as soon as the common enemy is defeated,

they're going to have a Cold War for 50 years.

Yeah.

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

Are you complete?

Are you finished?

It has a lot.

I'll just say this before we finish.

It has a lot of, as I said, resonance because

it brings this divide somewhere

right along the coast of Turkey, right along the coast of Turkey.

And it says everything on the eastern side is different.

And it doesn't even say it's worse.

It just says it's different.

Herodotus, I should say, doesn't say it's worse.

but on the other side, it's very different.

And that divide will pretty much be in existence with major changes, whether it's Alexander the Great or the Ottomans.

People will fight over that divide in East and West, but that divide is still there today.

So that if you are in Athens and you fly to Anchora, it'll be a very different experience, very different today.

And

that line goes all the way into

the Mediterranean, Eastern Mediterranean versus Western Mediterranean.

And

so

it prefaces colonialism.

It prefaces a lot of great wars during the Ottoman period and the Roman period.

And it's East and West and the differences that each represent and which are discussed pretty well in Herodotus for the first time.

Yes.

Well, let's take a break and come back and we'll bookend this with a discussion of the current FBI agent, Charles McGonicle, and his antics.

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

Welcome back.

And Victor, I wanted to bookend this Saturday episode with a current story about a FBI.

He's the head of counterintelligence in New York, or he was, and his name is Charles McGonicle, McGonagall, sorry.

And he met secretly with with a Russian contact and the British surveillance picked this up and they let us know about it.

He's currently being charged with taking money from a Russian oligarch, Daripaska.

And

it seemed to me that the article, he clearly had shared intelligence about

his rivals, Daripaska's rivals in Russia.

So very strange.

And another FBI case, I saw you thought.

I don't know why.

Why did it just, I guess, because of his firing and I mean, excuse me, because of his arrest, because he had been retired, but that happened, I think, five years ago in 2018, but it's just coming out now.

And

he's a bad guy because he was probably the

New York Assignment District

is the most prestigious as far as counterintelligence because you're in our largest

city and you're there with all the

media and you're there with banking and wall street and he's in charge of that whole area and we find out now that he was using his position

to

get paid off by russians and what broke the story apparently was he was having a paramour who noticed all these bags of cash and he must have dumped her and she then went to the fbi and we found out that it wasn't just russians that he was dealing with the Albanians because an Albanian oligarch was paying him money to use his position,

use his position

to find dirt on

Albanian opposition political leaders for his oligarchical friend.

And then those political leaders started to investigate and found out that their enemy was crooked and using the American FBI for information.

And this all doves tails with Hunter Biden, because in this long, sordid story, we found out that there was a connection

from the FBI's,

from Mech Gonegal, the FBI's rogue agent, there was a connection that he was working with an Albanian who was working for a communist Chinese-owned company.

And that company's leaders were in league with Hunter Biden

and the Biden family.

And

they wanted assurances that when they went to the United States, they would not be hassled because they were for espionage

charges.

And apparently,

Hunter Biden had some contact in the FBI, whether it was with Mexican Ghana,

we don't know, but he has some correspondence where he assures his Albanian counterpart that he is going to work to make sure that their shared contacts with the Chinese will be of some value to both of them.

And of course,

the Chinese got deported anyway, so they were angry that they paid good money to Hunter and his Albanian counterpart for the FBI, apparently in some way connected to or maybe

just involving McGonagall, this FBI.

So what is the significance for our listeners?

One, it's further evidence that Joe Biden's family, who had enriched Joe Biden,

was claiming that they had some relationship with the FBI and some leverage with the FBI

to monetize

their business with the Chinese and use the FBI for a purpose the FBI otherwise wouldn't have wanted to, and that is to reassure Chinese rogue actors that they would not be deported or they would not be surveilled.

And apparently, Hunter Biden did know McGonagall.

So that's number one.

And that's very, very serious.

Very, very serious.

Number two is the FBI.

My God, what?

I think I wrote an article about six weeks ago.

It was entitled, What Will the FBI Not Do?

What will they not do?

Will

the current director

not?

He wouldn't, would he?

Would he wouldn't tell Senator Grassley, I can't answer any more questions.

I got an appointment.

It's important.

I got to get in my Gulfstream that I use for personal purposes and go out to my Arionda vacation home.

Can't talk to you.

Sorry.

Or what will they not do?

Will they go surveil parents that are concerned about critical race theory being taught their children and basically assume they're domestic terrorists?

Will they go after people who are traditional Catholics and believe in the Latin Mass and consider them terrorists?

They reported so.

How about this, Sammy?

Will they hire Twitter for 3 million

to be used as a vicarious agent so that they can suppress the First Amendment rights of free expression of American citizens, which if they did it themselves, they would be in violation of the law?

So they basically tell Twitter, we're the doorman for the government.

Here's a list of people that we do not want to be talking.

expressing, writing anything about Hunter's laptop, et cetera.

And oh, by the way, we're your doorman.

We pay you $3 million to go do our dirty work.

And you know who wants in?

The DOD wants in.

The CDC wants in.

The CIA wants in.

Well, we got a problem with the CIA because it's against their charter.

It's illegal for the CIA to be interfering with domestic surveillance, et cetera.

So we got to come up with a word.

We'll call them another government agency, OGA, but that's the CIA.

That's what they were doing.

Or maybe, you know what?

We'll just lie to spy on American citizens like Carter Page.

So even though we have offered 1 million, this is everybody makes fun of John Durham, but John Durham found this out.

One thing that his investigation did in dissussman was to bring up all the dirty laundry about the collusion hoax.

And what the FBI said was to steal,

this dossier is a joke.

You made it all up.

So here's what we're going to do.

We're going to pay you $1 million if you can find one thing that's true.

That's all we're asking.

The PP tape,

all these meetings with Trump people.

Just tell us one thing that's true and give us.

And he couldn't do it, even when $1 million.

And they had earlier fired him because they said, don't leak.

And of course, he'd leaked.

And then after doing that, Sammy, they took that dossier they knew was fake and they put it in front of a FISA judge as evidence.

And even

Comey said that, and McCabe said that without the dossier, they would have had no evidence for a FISA court to surveil an American citizen.

And then if that wasn't enough,

that they were using a dossier that they knew they couldn't prove one item in, Kevin Kleinsmith had to alter an email to make it more incriminating.

And he submitted a false document to delude a FISA judge.

I don't know what else, but Mr.

Rosenberg from the New York Times said that when he went on January 6th, he saw all of the FBI informants.

He said they were everywhere.

It was a joke.

Everybody got psyched up.

You know, it wasn't that big deal.

And we, to this day, one asked under oath, Christopher Wright, will not tell us

who was there.

What else won't the FBI do?

If you subpoena

phones and you have a court order for the Mueller FBI investigation, the Mueller team that was using the FBI, would you please give us these phone data?

Oh, sorry.

They're wiped clean.

We don't know how it happened.

I guess they just did it.

So they will resist a court order.

Will they ambush a national security designate, Michael Flynn?

You bet they will.

And James Comey will brag about it, saying, these guys didn't know anything.

They were Wookiees.

Usually, when we want to go to question a designated cabinet officer status type person,

we've got to go through a whole rigor.

I just thought I'll just send him in there.

And we acted like we were here as friends.

The idiot didn't even get a lawyer.

And then after it was all over, Peter Strzok, that was sort of the Zylig, he was everywhere.

He wrote a memo saying, I think Flynn didn't do anything wrong.

Didn't matter.

They leaked it that he was a Russian.

I don't know what they did, but they destroyed him.

Is there anything they won't do?

How about Peter Struggle and Lisa Page having a relationship

while they were investigating Trump, while they were texting about Andrew McCabe, who and Andrew McCabe says to them, I guess, according to them, don't worry.

Peter says to Lisa.

And he says that there's no way Trump's going to be elected.

That's pretty scary.

And then then they fire them.

And Mueller doesn't say we fired them for an improper relationship.

And we fired them because they were using FBI devices

to conduct their affair, but we're going to hide it.

So Lisa Page is reassigned.

And we'll wait about a couple of months later.

And then Peter Strzok, we won't tell you why we reassigned them.

And

how about the directors?

If you're Robert Mueller, as I said before, I don't know what the fuse in and GPS is.

I have no idea.

I don't get into the dossier.

You idiot.

That's why you're there because of those two pieces of evidence.

And if you're calling me, can't remember.

Don't know.

Didn't he say, oh, wait, not killing me.

I'm sorry.

I muted.

150 at 151, can't remember.

210, don't know.

230, can't

know.

245,

not my concern.

So he did that under oath, 245 times.

So then we go to number three.

All right, Andrew McCabe.

Michael Horwitz, the inspector general, says he lied, lied, lied on four occasions to a federal investigator under oath, lied about leaking.

And what did Bill Barr do?

He said, well, it was just about leaking.

He didn't prosecute them.

I mean, they are going after every single Trump person for lying.

And here you have the acting director of the FBI that lies, according to the Inspector General of the Department of Justice, and he does nothing.

And then we get Christopher Wright.

He's going to be the anecdote to Robert Mueller, James Comey,

and Andrew McCabe.

And what does he do?

He is sick on the parents of school children in Virginia.

He performs the performance art, I could call it, Arrest of Roger Stone, where they leak to CNN, so all the cameras are there when they frog march him out.

He goes after James O'Keefe and his underwear about Ashley Biden's missing diary.

He does the performance art Mar-Lago raid, and they, I guess, his agents, they spread all the stuff on the floor as if Donald Trump is in there.

you know, just throwing stuff against the wall or something.

They photograph it.

They go after Peter Navarro and another performance art.

They put a little, I guess, plastic leg irons.

I don't think they were leg irons.

They go after Eastman, grab his cell phone.

They go after Bannon.

I mean, that's the improvement on the other three.

And so getting back to the question: what will the FBI not do?

This rogue agent, I guess you could add to that corpus of examples.

The FBI is capable

of

trying to sell information about the security of the United States for cash.

And they are, and whether that's Albanians or whether that's a Russian oligarch or whether that is a front company of the Chinese Communist, it doesn't matter.

He's got over $200,000 and he's not him.

I say he and somebody's going to say, well, that's not the FBI.

No, that is one of the top lieutenants in the FBI.

That is the head of counterintelligence of the entire New York district.

And by the way, we just talked about four directors.

And if that's not enough, the chief counsel of the FBI,

FBI, James Baker, was leaking this dossier or finagling around with the media to make sure that it was out

before the election of 2016.

And what was his reward when the FBI was using Twitter as a domestic surveillance, repression, whatever to repress the expression of America?

They hired him, Sammy.

They hired James Baker.

And he went from a salary of roughly $200,000 to $8 million.

$8 million.

So you could argue that, I don't know, he was making,

oh, whoa,

I guess

40 plus times what he was making at the FBI.

And more importantly, they had at one time a reportedly 60, 70, 80 agents working.

And guess what?

When they were done, 10 of them or so went to work for Twitter.

So Twitter was under, Dorsey was working like Lockheed, Northrop.

Raytheon,

General Dynamics does with the Pentagon.

In other words, words, when you come out, then you go to work and they use your expertise as a reward for what you, you know, your

knowledge would be for procurement.

So basically, the FBI works to censor conservative expression on Twitter, and it's a doorkeeper for other government agents.

We don't like this guy.

We don't like this guy.

Go after this site.

harass this person that's talking about the taboo laptop.

And, you know, I'm making 150.

And I look at what these little

geeks are making with purple hair in San Francisco.

They're making 200.

So I'm just going to retire from the FBI and go right into there.

And I'll be, quote unquote, a security expert.

And that's what at least 10 of them did.

So in this rant,

I think it's, again, it's fair to say, what will they not do?

They will alter documents.

They will submit false documents, phony documents to a FISA court.

They will erase data.

Their head of counterintelligence will work with our enemies for cash and betray his country.

Our

interim director of the FBI will lie under oath.

Another

two of them will shrug and deceive a congressional committee under oath.

and they will violate the Bill of Rights by using surrogates in San Francisco.

And I'm not dumbed.

We're out of time.

So the question is: okay, Victor, you've kind of ranted for a while.

We know we got the point.

Shut the blank up.

What are you going to do about it?

Well, what you're going to do about it is right before the House right now, I think there's a procurement bill for $100 million

to build an FBI monument, monumental office in Virginia.

I wouldn't give them one blank dime,

not one blank dime.

And

they should be calling for the resignation of Christopher Wray right now.

Everybody should, after this latest, because he was put in there as an end term to address the lying and the abuse and the excesses

of Andrew McKay, James Comey, and by extension, Robert Mueller.

And all he has done is added to it with these ceremonial arrests and all of these disclosures about improper activities and surveillance and you know

going after

throwing documents on a ex-president's closet floor and then going through his wife's underwear drawer and then asymmetrically

having soft gloves with Joe Biden.

You think they ever did that with Joe Biden?

You think they surrounded Joe Biden's garage?

with a SWAT team and then they went into that garage.

You think they went into Jill Biden's underwear drawer?

I don't think so.

They're still being tipped off, and they're still working with the quote-unquote lawyers.

And they did not,

and this guy is still the head of the FBI.

And I'm saying this as a person who's always supported the FBI.

We need an FBI.

What we need to do is take the headquarters out of Washington, D.C.

Let's put it right in Kansas City, right in the middle of the country, and let's make sure that we don't have any political appointments at all.

We don't want directors whose spouses, whether male or female, are in politics

working for a particular candidate.

We don't want any of that.

We just want them in Kansas City and they coordinate and

be done with it.

But get them out of this toxic miasma in New York, Washington corridor.

Yes.

Well, Victor, with that, we are way beyond and we love your rant.

So don't worry about that.

Thank you so much for our,

you know, the current two

cases of just incompetence.

And in the second case, the FBI, the corruption.

And then I look back into history and all of the discussion of the Peloponnesian War.

Really excellent

Saturday morning.

I was kind of wiped out.

And then I've been drinking while we're speaking the Elevate hydrogen water, you know.

Oh, my God.

I was going to ask you about that.

Yes, I know.

This This is not a commercial I'm getting paid for or where I'm paying anybody, believe me.

It's just that a friend gave me this elevated water when I got long COVID, and I drank three or four cans a day.

And it's

where do you get it?

I don't know.

It's drink elevate.com, D-R-I-N-K-E-L-E-V-A-T-E dot com.

And

it's got high.

The only thing I know about it is that

you have to keep it cool.

And

I think they say one to three.

I don't know if you're not supposed to drink more than three.

You get hydronated.

But once you open it, you got to drink it pretty quick so the hydrogen doesn't dissipate.

And you can buy,

I think the company or others make stuff where you can hydronate your own water, but I find it very

helpful as far as energy goes.

And that's what, and I try to drink it right before I go on here because at 69,

I don't want to fall asleep on you, Sammy.

Yeah,

nope, and I don't, I nobody could fall asleep on you.

I'm sure everybody's been entertained as we have.

Do you remember Gladiator when he's in?

Well, I appreciate it.

I really been entertained.

I appreciate every listener.

I read every email and comments, and I really appreciate this.

And

I really appreciate what you're doing, and Jack, as well.

So, with that,

with that, this is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hansen, and we're signing off.