State of the Union

Flu season is here and COVID cases are still climbing across the country.

When people start getting sick, medications disappear fast.

And that's why we trust All Family Pharmacy.

They help you prepare before it's too late.

Right now, they've dropped prices on ivermectin and mabenzazole by 25%.

Plus, you can save an extra 10% with the code VICTR10.

You'll also get 10% off antibiotics, antivirals, hydroxychloroquine, and more of the medications you actually want on hand.

Whether you're fighting off a cold, protecting your family from flu season, or staying ready in case COVID makes its way into your home, having a few months' supply brings peace of mind and control.

They work with licensed doctors who review your order online, write the prescriptions, and ship your meds straight to your door.

Go to allfamilypharmacy.com/slash Victor and use the code Victor10 today.

Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor is the Martin and Ily 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.

He has a website, victorhanson.com.

It's called the Blavet of Perseus.

We welcome everybody to subscribe for free and get our newsletter or subscribe to read the VDH Ultra articles for $5 a month or $50

a year.

Today we have a lot on our agenda.

Biden's just finished his State of the Union address and we'll be talking about that.

We have a new article first though on Nord Stream 2 and the blowing up of the pipeline into Europe.

So we'll talk about that first.

Hang in there and come right back after these messages.

If you're you're a homeowner, you need to listen to this.

In today's AI and cyber world, scammers are stealing your home titles, and your equity is the target.

Here's how it works: criminals forge your signature on one document, use a fake notary stamp, pay a small fee with your county, and just like that, your home title has been transferred out of your name.

Then they take out loans using your equity and even sell your property, and you won't even know what's happened until you get a collection or foreclosure notice.

So, when was the last time you checked on your home title?

If your answer is never, you need to do something about it right now.

And that's why we've partnered with Home Title Lock so you can find out today if you're already a victim.

Go to hometitalock.com/slash victor to get a free title history report and a free trial of their million-dollar triple lock protection.

That's 24-7 monitoring of your title, urgent alerts to any changes, and if fraud does happen, they'll spend up to $1 million to fix it.

Please, please don't be a victim.

Protect your equity today.

That's home, titalock.com/slash Victor.

Welcome back, Victor.

We got a lot going on.

I hope that things are going well for you and your various

what?

Various activities.

Various activities.

Yeah, I've been stepping it up as this long COVID is fading.

It's almost gone.

It's kind of a miracle.

I'm suffering COVID euphoria.

Doctor said that that's he not, he was treating me, just a guy I know.

And he just said, look forward to COVID euphoria when you feel like you're liberated.

I'm feeling that way.

I wrote an article on the state of the union today.

It comes out tomorrow.

I talked about that on Laura.

I'm writing a long piece on the triangle between Stanford University, Silicon Valley, and Bay Area left-wing politics and how they mutually are integrated, they're integrated and intertwined and how powerful they are and that ideology that emanates from them.

I'm writing a review of Mark Moyer's book, Triumph.

Regain.

It's a really good book about the Vietnam War from 1965 to 1968.

It's the second volume in a multi-volume history, revisionist history of the Vietnam War,

which is really good.

I'm on my last chapter of my book, actually, I'm working on, I just finished the

fall of Carthage in the Third Principic War, and I'm doing the 1453

sack of tragic, mixed tragic reading, just reading about Constantinople,

Bastion of the West in Asia Minor.

So

I've been, you know, and we do these four podcasts a week.

So I did a good interview with Devin Unes today.

He has a podcast called On Plugged.

And it's kind of weird.

They live stream it.

And so anyway, I did that today.

And you've been, you had an interview with the Epoch Times as well, I believe.

Yes, I had to, yeah, I had to go down to Visalia and I had an, that's going to come out, the Epoch Times interview.

I did an interview a long time ago for that American Requiem that's on Fox Streaming now.

I'm in that.

I'm trying to think.

I did, we had the Bradley board meeting, some subcommittees today.

I just haven't had a lot of time to write, but

because of these,

I've done, I think, four Foxes will be this week.

And I think that's because of the state of the union, which we'll talk about.

So I've been very, very busy.

And I think that I've been very blessed because when I got this really bad COVID and I got long COVID, there were points where I didn't know if I was going to get over it.

When you talk about

when you shouldn't do this, you should never talk to somebody who's had it, or you don't want to read it because it's one of despair.

But I was always upbeat and thought, you know, it's a self-limiting disease.

And I think I have some

leftovers with my eyesight and hearing and stuff.

But otherwise, it's miraculous.

So I'm very full of gratitude that I feel so much better, at least for now, knock on wood.

Yeah, knock on wood.

Well, let's turn to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

We have a recent article in Substack by Seymour Hirsch, who said his source had direct knowledge of operational planning.

But we saw Tucker probably a couple of months ago when the Nord Stream pipeline was blown up say that he noticed that Victoria Newland had said,

quote, if Russia invades Ukraine one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not go forward.

And that's the end of the quote.

And Tucker was saying he thought the U.S.

might be implicated.

But

this new article by Seymour Hirsch has a long argument that is pointing to U.S.

direct U.S.

sabotage of Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

I was wondering what your thoughts were on that.

Well, it's very, very confusing, and you've got to be

very careful about this because it's 85-year-old Seymour Hirsch.

If you're my age, you remember Seymour Hirsch about the My Lai.

He was the one that broke the My Lai.

He didn't really go into Vietnam.

He wasn't like all of those famous

you know, journalists that were on the front lines.

He was more of a rear guy that covered the Pentagon, the CIA from the home front.

Not that he didn't go occasionally overseas, but he had basically the story right, although he sensationalized it.

And you remember he was the one that also said that the bin Laden raid was kind of lied about and that it wasn't quite what.

And

there were elements of that that turned out kind of right.

My point is, I could go through this all day of all of the sensational conspiracy theory things he said.

Some have been rejected as outside law, outright fabrications.

Some have been more or less reified into what we now consider facts.

Some are a mixture of both.

But in this article in Substack, I read, and you obviously read it, it's, oh, I don't know, four or five thousand words.

And he says he has these, of course, he always deals with unnamed sources.

But what's weird about this is

he's got sources from the Navy diving, from the salvage and diving government, you know,

in Panama City, Florida.

He's got people who apparently, a source he says, was on the intimate meeting and planning session.

He's interviewed.

And what our listeners want to know, well, what the hell is it?

Well, it's this.

He sets it up pretty well.

You're right.

Victoria Newland had assured people that that pipeline wouldn't go forward.

And Joe Biden, remember, had had said earlier that if they go forward, he would take care of it.

And then he, Tucker, and when it was blown up in September, I guess, of

22,

Tucker immediately came out and on his show, he replayed, I think, two clips of Victoria Newland.

One in,

you know, and then she doubled down later, I should say, with Ted Cruz, you know, that we're both happy that it's no longer there after it was blown up.

So she has a clip.

He had a clip where she said it would not exist.

And then after Tucker did that, he had an addendum months later with a clip with her in an exchange in Congress with Ted Cruz.

And she says, we're both glad that it's not there.

It's junk.

And then there's a clip of Joe Biden saying that they're going to take care of it.

Which was kind of crazy to say.

But then there's also that clip.

You remember in September after it happened that he

Joe Biden categorically said, I deny this happened.

It did not happen.

This was Russian espionage and disinformation.

And that was feeding into the pre-midterm

Russian disinformation, laptop, coercion.

So everybody,

but what I'm trying to say is, Sammy, they got away with it.

Yeah.

That everybody today says, if you say that the United States blew up the Nordstrom 1 and most of the Nordstrom 2 pipeline, that is a conspiracy theory and you are a nut.

After this story is over, I think this came out today.

There's the onus, well,

you've got to

rebuild this, rebut this story.

You've got to do it.

Rebuke it, rebut it.

Come out.

Just like the Wuhan virus, you said people were nuts because they said it was a PLA-dominated or controlled viral lab

that was the embryo of the COVID.

And that turned out to be true.

And there were people who said from the very beginning the mRNA vaccines will not achieve lasting immunity, and you laughed at them.

So we're waiting.

We're going to see what the government so far it's hotly, hotly denied it.

Now, why would that be?

Because if you think about it, just think dispassionately, take a deep breath, and say, nuclear Russia

is in a war with Ukraine, which is our proxy, and we intervened in that war and on the high seas and international waters, attacked a Russian asset central to its economy and blew it up.

Okay?

And the article goes on the intricacies of how

only the United States could have done it with our technology and our trained divers, and we could have only done it with the help of the Norwegians and the Danes, which is very dangerous for that to come out because they're very vulnerable.

And the Norwegians have always been very pro-American.

And the Danes, and so anyway, they, with their full knowledge, they allowed their base, a base in Norway and they allowed

the waters off their coast to be used by the United States.

And we

sent people down there and attached these mines.

And then we dropped a buoy

with a signaling device, sonar device that could detonate them on the command.

And this is what's very important for our listeners.

Originally, they were going to have a timed

detonation.

According to this, tomorrow somebody could say the guy is 85.

He's like Joe Biden.

He doesn't know where he is, Seymour Hirsch.

But according to the story, then Joe Biden changed his mind and wanted personal control over it.

So then they had to alter the mechanisms.

They dropped a boy where he could send an electronic signal and blow them up.

But if this is true, these are the implications is what I'm getting at.

Number one, the President of the United States, unlike Dwight Eisenhower, when he was confronted with Gary Powers and he lied one time and then he came, he had to come clean when the Russians had a press conference.

But Joe Biden has lied repeatedly and said that he did not do that and the United States did not do that.

If that's true, if the story is true, if not, he's right.

And he's accused the russians of doing it number two

if that's true

the the pipeline was owned by a consortium of german and russian interest

so if this were to be true we blew up

a natural gas series of deliveries systems to germany on the eve of winter,

which is our ally, and caused enormous amounts of hardship and maybe even death to Germans that could not get warm in this, and the winter's not over.

Three,

if this is true, we've lied about it, and we're going to be exposed as international liars.

And I think Victoria Newland, who may have been the point woman

in the Biden administration, and I think she would have to be fired.

And I think there'd be an outcry about Joe Biden.

And four, and this is very important, if this were true,

every covert military operation that takes, that certain elements of the military take part in, and even though they try to outsource some stuff to the Danes or the Norwegians, or they got this salvage group, quasi-government group, nevertheless,

that's not going to cut it.

This was done by specialists in the U.S.

military, and those covert operations

have to go before a congressional oversight.

I think it's called the Gang of Eight.

You know what I'm saying?

Yes, I do.

The article suggests that they used a different group so they could

subvert or go around.

I think they did originally, but I think as the level of expertise

to have the absentee to change the mechanism by which it could be fired.

It began to involve the fleet maneuvers with our allies in the Baltic.

It began to involve people

in the

special services of Norway and Denmark.

And those liaisons were beyond this particular salvage group.

And so, in other words,

they tried to circumvent the law, and that introduces two interesting questions.

A, did they just flagrantly break the law?

I'm sure the Biden administration has no problem with that.

And two,

are

people in the Congress lying about it when

they say they weren't told or they didn't know about it, or maybe they did know about it?

I don't know.

I don't know who's in the gang of eight.

But that's going to be very interesting because they did impeach Donald Trump for

supposedly violating

the law by supposedly

making a quid pro quo request of the Ukrainian government to delay that either they investigate his potential 2020 presidential opponent in exchange for resuming a temporarily suspended shipment of offensive arms.

This would be much, much worse.

This would be the President of the United States flat out lied and said the United States didn't do this.

And then he ordered an attack on a nuclear power in the midst of a war.

And he destroyed the essential property that was co-owned by a NATO ally, Germany.

And he warped the law and did not apprise congressional oversight.

And

this is true, and I don't know if it is, because Seymour Hirsch, as I preface this conversation, doesn't have a good reputation for dependability and accuracy.

But nonetheless, if all this were to be true, then he would be impeached.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, when I read it, my question, I'm sure your listeners' questions was exactly on Germany.

I mean, okay, so it could be an assault against Russia, and Russia is your enemy, but doing this, you just made Germany a quasi-enemy of sorts.

I mean, what would

it do?

You know, that doesn't look

very smart.

I mean, everybody says Donald Trump was a criminal.

Donald Trump told Germany, face to face, no stealth, no artifice, what you're doing with Russia is very dangerous.

You should not be entirely dependent on your natural gas supplies from Russia, given it is threatening the peace and stability of Eastern Europe and Ukraine.

Don't do it.

And they did it anyway.

And they did it because the natural gas is plentiful, it's cheap, and whatever Germany can't sell in this huge terminals they have,

they market up and sell to Western Europe.

But he didn't, he didn't, he didn't blow it up.

He didn't.

He didn't break the law.

This administration came in as we're going to be the most transparent administration in history, the most law-abiding.

And it did two things.

It reversed Trump's sanctions on the pipeline.

Because in the mad dog, Pavlovian, anything that Donald Trump did will do the opposite, even though they would have approved of, supposedly, if you're going to blow it up, at least you would have approved of the milder

sanction.

But they got rid of the sanctions for a while.

And then they decided, well, he went in there or he's going in there, and now he's in there.

And

we've got to change and not only sanction Putin, but we're going to blow it up if that's true.

And

it's just so

mind-boggling that you, this left-wing propensity to project,

to project, Donald Trump is unlawful, and he, he's not.

They were, if this is true.

And then Tucker Carlson, as you know, took a big hit, I think in September when he replayed those two

damning and self-incriminating quotes from Joe Biden and Victoria Newland.

And he said, case closed.

And of course, Joe Biden said he was being hypothetical.

And Vittoria Newland said she was being metaphorical or rhetorical.

And everybody said,

every American said.

And then Joe Biden got very angry and said, Russia did it, Russia disinformation.

But he's played the Russian disinformation laptop card, the Russian disinformation

collusion card.

the Russian disinformation alpha

ping-ping bank card that he has no zero credibility.

But yeah, you're right.

So

I just went through the repercussions if this were true, but they can be essentially boiled down to we attack the Russian Federation at a time of war with Ukraine,

and

we attack the property of an ally

that is very dependent on natural gas for its heating during the winter.

And we did it right on the cusp of winter.

And possibly

we circumvented or found some gymnastics to get around the law so that we didn't have to inform Congress that we were using the military in a covert operation that was military.

So that's the story.

Yeah, if Seymour Hirsch's article is all true and we've established that he has some,

he's had some problems in the past with the accuracy of his work.

But you also said that he has had accurate things in his work, so we don't know.

Maybe it's partially there and not quite all there.

I think you could sum up his work like this.

He doesn't like the United States.

He's a critic of it.

And he searches the horizon every morning.

He gets up to find an embarrassing, contradictory example of American barbarity, crudity.

My lie, I'll give you another example, Abu Ghraib,

the prison in Iraq.

So he got wind of that and the pictures remember of the people humiliating.

And then he exaggerates, torture, systematic.

No, it was a bunch of untrained people taking pictures of people naked and all sorts of horrible things, but it wasn't a systematic gulag.

But my point is this,

that that doesn't mean it's inaccurate.

If his intention is to hurt the United States and his intention is to exaggerate it and to deprive it of all context, whether it's my lie or Abu Ghraib or the bin Laden raid, it doesn't mean that what he's saying is false.

That's what you have to remember.

And I kind of wrote that one about Abu Ghraib.

Nobody dislikes Seymour Horsh more than I do, but when he laid out that evidence, And I know what the purpose was that he printed that, and it did enormous damage to the United States, both in Iraq and the international scene.

But I couldn't write that he was making it up.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk about the State of the Union address.

We'll be right back.

We're back.

Welcome.

So Joe Biden gave his State of the Union last night, and

there was a lot in it, and a lot not in it, and a lot of problems that have been unaddressed, and yet the whole sound of the speech was that things were going good.

What were your reflections on this?

That was what I wrote a column today, so I can probably answer that.

There were three themes to the speech:

number one, misinformation and disinformation, number two

omission, and number three, slander and smear.

So the speech had a lot of disinformation.

So he's a president that's at 41% approval.

37%

only want him to run again in his own party, in his own party.

66% think that since he's president, the country's in the wrong direction.

Kamala Harris polls even lower, and that is because he inherited a 1.4 inflation rate and he spiked it up to 7.

He inherited $241 a gallon gas, and it's now at $3.50 and it's down from $5.

He gave us 20%

inflation on key food items, $7,

$7

a dozen for eggs.

It got up two, three weeks ago.

$15 a pound for some steak.

$95?

I saw that with my own eyes about six months ago at Home Depot for a sheet of plywood.

So

what he did is, given that, then he just said, well, it's going back.

So he said, inflation's coming down.

Gas is coming down.

Well, where was it now?

What is it down right now compared to what you inherited?

Nobody likes to fill up a 30-gallon tank and pay $30 more than when you weren't president.

So

what I'm saying is this whole disinformation is

destroy, destroy, destroy, destroy, destroy.

And then when the level of destruction starts to taper off because it's reached its maximum level, he can say, I'm reducing things and restoring it.

But the destruction is still there in two senses.

Inflation, interest rates, 2.6 for a 30-year mortgage when he came president, 6.5 now.

I could go on.

Natural gas tripled in one year.

Natural gas tripled in one year, heating.

So he inherited a very strong economy with these good

indicators, and he destroyed it.

How did he destroy it?

He stopped the Keystone pipeline.

He stopped new federal leases.

He

symbolically stopped the EastMed pipeline.

He jawboned lending agencies so they should not extend lines of credit to the oil companies.

And

he created a climate of antagonism to the entire oil industry that could not lease.

And then he took, most importantly, he shut down the entire on war,

the Arctic

wildlife

refuge.

He shut that down.

And he shut down vast areas that could no longer be explored for gas and oil.

just at a time when demand was peaking and he had fueled that demand with $4 trillion of easy funny money.

So

he created the inflation, he created the gas crisis, he caused interest rates to go up.

And all of that was never discussed, nor was the fact that we're $31 trillion in debt.

It's gone up $4 trillion.

And what did he do?

I'm going to give this group, and I'm going to give this group, and I'm going to give this, and this, and this.

And then he

misinformed.

You know,

the rich are going to finally pay their fair share.

Rich are going to pay the 1%

of households that file income tax pay 40,

40, 40%

of federal income tax.

50% of Americans don't pay any.

So how can that be the rich are getting maybe the hyper-rich like him?

you know, or George Soros that have whole armies of tax liars, but the upper, upper middle class is paying through the nose.

They're paying, you know, 39% federal income tax.

In states like New York and California, they're paying 10, 12, 13%.

And when you add Medicare and Obamacare penalty, they're paying 60% sometimes in income tax.

So for him to disinform was really awful.

And then he ignores.

So if you listen to that speech, You'd never know that 5 million people cross the border illegally.

He said, 70, we're going to address 70,000 fentanyl deaths.

Well, you did it.

You should tell people it comes across the border because when you opened it, Mexican cartels have factories that are designed solely for export.

And when there's no border, you up and it's actually closer to 100,000 dead.

He didn't mention the crime wave of all of his

defunding the police.

He's talked, you know, defunding the police, defunding the police, defunding the police.

He didn't mention

the

end of U.S.

energy independence that were more dependent.

What do I mean by that?

I'll be specific.

He went to Venezuela and begged them.

He begged Iran.

He begged Saudi Arabia.

He even begged Russia before the invasion for them to pump more oil that he had an abundance and would not.

And then he drained the Arctic,

the, excuse me, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

He drained that right on the eve of the election.

He doesn't tell you any of this stuff.

Nothing.

He brags that he created more jobs.

But if you actually look at the jobs, they're not very much.

I think there's only, he said 12 million.

There's only about 2 million.

Yeah, he said he created 12 million

labor market was down by 30 million because of COVID.

All he did was he sat there and had ice cream and dozed off in

Delaware.

And during that natural period of recovery, people started to come back to work.

Not to the degree they were working, but they did.

And if you can tell that by the labor, the best indicator of job robustness is the labor participation rate.

And we've had it up to 64 or 5% of the available workforce.

And

when he came in, it was over 63%.

And now it's low 62%, and it's going down.

So fewer people are participating in this economy.

He's going to get stagflation if we don't, or not already in it.

So he misinformed, and then he ignored, and then he attacked.

So he accused the Republicans of planning to cut,

what, Social Security and Medicare, and they have not done that.

And then they yelled at him like an English parliamentary back and forth.

And then he lied and said that the tragic death

in

Memphis by a black youth that was beaten to death by five black officers in a city that's 65% black with a black police chief and a black assistant police chief was all a sign of overreach by law enforcement in general who make 11,000 arrests per year

and this is why poor black parents have to give the talk, he said, give the talk.

The talk is, you better be careful when you go outside this door because the white police and the white racist country are going to kill you.

That's the talk.

And that's what he did.

In other words, he smeared people who had nothing to do with this shooting.

And if he wants to talk about interracial crime,

which he wants to, but there was not a good example, then he could have talked about this poor girl that was nine years old.

And it's analogous because there were officials of the state on the bus, the driver and the enforcer, supposedly, the intendant, and they watched

impantly why two African-American youths beat the hell out of a nine-year-old girl.

And if he really wants to talk about interracial crime, he can talk about another iconic, because he likes iconic cases.

He likes to take an individual and make that a collective abstraction.

Okay, there was a very, very accomplished doctor, as we and I talked, riding a bicycle on the PCH near Dana Point.

A African-American of mixed race deliberately swerved his Lexus and knocked this poor person

head over heels into the intersection, slamming him on the pavement, and he was still alive.

And then he went out with a knife and systematically executed him, allegedly saying white privilege.

Did he mention that?

No.

He even tried to connect Paul Pelosi to January 6th.

I don't know how you do that, because the assailant of Paul Pelosi was an illegal alien from Canada, and he lived in a commune that was dressed out with Antifa and pride flags, and his politics were all over the map.

So that's what he does.

And

misinform,

leave out facts.

attack, attack.

And you notice something else about him, Sammy.

Most of the time, he slurs and stutters and he makes up words.

And

it's just incomprehensible.

If you look at the transcript, if it's printed accurately, not what he was reading, but what was actually said and recorded as a spoken word, it's incomprehensible.

There's words there I've never heard before.

They're just mush.

But

when he starts talking about the Republican, they're going to cut us again, and he starts shouting, and suddenly his voice rises, his face gets red.

His eyes get beady.

He frowns.

His eyebrows.

He turns into,

it's very strange.

That's the only thing is what I'm getting at.

That's the only thing that excites him.

He gets angrier at Republicans than he does at Putin.

He gets angrier than he does at the Chinese.

And when I say, you know, he...

he leaves out he didn't even talk about the balloon except that it shoot it down he doesn't say and he he doesn't say that the balloon came across U.S.

soil and his team was ordered to lie.

They said, oh, it was too crowded.

Oh, it was probably a weather balloon.

Oh, it was a primitive spy device that had no efficacy.

Oh,

we covered up everything so it couldn't have done anything.

Those were all either half lies or complete lies.

And then you're left with a paradox, as we said earlier, that

he's sending billions of dollars to protect the border of Ukraine while he discounts any chance of a nuclear response from an exasperated and crazy and desperate wounded tiger Putin.

And yet he's so afraid of the Chinese that he won't shoot down one of their satellites when it involves the sovereignty of the United States.

Scary.

Yeah.

Very scary.

Yeah.

Well, did you, how about the after or before he came to his speech did you have any observations on dc culture and the interactions that you saw

it's very funny um

because um

i was talking on tucker's right before that and then so i was out in the barn here on the ranch and by the time i got in it was already you know close up the automatic system i came in here and it was already going on but he loves the ceremony of walking in.

And it was very funny to see all these supposed radicals who were so anti-American, like Maxine Waters and members of the Black Caucus, just rush the aisles to get pictures with him and selfies.

And I thought, why would you want to do that?

You're so critical of the country and yet the president, and yet there was almost But that was not, I'm not saying it was based on race, I'm talking about ideology.

All these people who are so far left want to be seen in the center of action and power on TV.

And then afterwards, he didn't leave.

He was there longer, I think, than any president in history.

And there were these fascinating little vignettes with this hyper-sensitive sound equipment of television.

So everybody's mixing up.

And there's all these little cycle dramas going on.

There was Adam Schiff runs up like a little puppy dog with a bone in his mouth.

That was wonderful.

And nobody believed that that.

And what he was basically saying as I was watching him, you know, he was just trying to be so toady and obsequious to Biden, the man of the hour, tough Adam Schiff, who's now lost his TV exposure because he's been canned from the House Intelligence Committee, and he has no platform to lie anymore on TV.

And he's running for Senate.

So he's basically up there begging Biden, I guess, to endorse him.

And he just got kind of, Biden just kind of, I don't know if it was because of senality or what, he just kind of pushed him away.

And then on the other side, there was the pathological liar,

George Santos, who comes and Mitt Romney, a man of the Christian faith, who's so sanctimonious.

He says he just

I guess everybody's afraid of getting caught on a photo op.

It's kind of like with a mass murder, you know, who goes to a political event and nobody knows.

Then years later, later, they show a picture of Jimmy Carter with that clown guy that killed everybody, and they've tried to blame Carter.

Well, you can get blamed if you get a picture, so everybody's afraid of this guy because they don't know what he's done or will do, he's nuts.

So, they all, but Mitt Romney sees him and he says, You don't belong here,

and then he turns around and he calls him ass,

ass,

and then

you can see Santos calls him, You're a big asshole.

He has the hole to ask.

Wow.

So then you're getting into this whole insight into Mitt Romney.

And,

you know,

I've only met, I've had breakfast once with Mitt Romney, and he's a very religious guy.

And he's very sanctimonious, self-righteous, as many people can be in that.

position of influence and power.

But this is not his brand to make, even against a pathological liar.

And then later he said he's a sick puppy and all this.

And I thought, what has happened to Mitt Romney?

Did Donald Trump crush him?

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

Donald Trump, I guess Donald Trump's sin was A, getting the nomination, B,

I think it was wrong to do that, but to tease him and dangle out the Secretary of State so that Mitt would on all fours bark and go up to Trump Tower and then be humiliated when he said no.

But then Donald Trump backed him for Senate.

And then when he was elected Senate, probably with the help of Donald Trump, that sort of said he had mega feeds to the Utah electorate.

And then

he started attacking Trump and voting against him.

He was the one sure vote that whatever Donald Trump want, Mitt Romney voted against him.

And before he was even elected, you remember in 2016, Donald

Trump was ready to get the nomination.

And at the last days of that sure thing,

the remaining remnants of the opposition appointed Mitt Romney as a tack dog.

So he gave these videos, remember,

Mitt

Romney, and Donald Trump, Trump whiskey, and Trump steaks, and Trump, you know, they're phony as this.

And it just was just a fuselage of hatred of Trump.

And

I don't get it, but it's one of those people like a Bill Crystal or Joe Scarborough or Michael Hayden who have completely become irrational and they've destroyed their brand.

Mitt Romney's brand was he was kind of a stuffy square guy and he would always lose 46% or 47% in a presidential.

He'd tried once or twice before.

He played by the Marcus of Queensbury rules, but he was a good human being and he was polite and sober and he had a certain sense of decorum.

But then when he started screaming about Trump and he begged Trump for the endorsement and then he bit the hand that fed him.

And then, with this, this was not necessary.

Everybody knows George Santos is a pathological liar.

Exactly.

Why would you want to go get an encounter with him?

And so you just punch down to his level.

And so

that was an exchange.

What about the kiss?

Oh, my God.

I hadn't seen that before.

You know, I can say something

personal.

I

give,

I didn't this year because of long COVID, but in the previous 10 years, I probably, and I'm going to quit because I'm too old to do it anymore, but I probably gave an average of two or three lectures a month.

So 30 to 40, 50 a year.

And sometimes they were 40 people, sometimes they were 2,000 people.

Depends on the venue.

And you have a lot of people come up.

And

half of them are the opposite sex.

And some are 80 and some are 20.

And some of them are very formal and careful to shake your hand.

Some were afraid of COVID.

They didn't want to get near you, thank God.

Others were huggy type, squeezy types, right?

Some of them wanted to kiss you on the cheek, I suppose, once in a while.

I have never

had a woman kiss me on the lips.

Never, never, never.

So when I saw the husband of Kamala Harris and the wife, first lady, Jill Biden, kiss, and they went right to it with a long,

what would you call a funnel kiss?

It was weird.

I've never seen that.

Have you?

Is that what happens?

When somebody just,

what?

I guess they lock lips?

So I was just dumbfounded.

And I was amused.

I'm making a mountain out of a molehill, but it was almost

when you saw that happen, it was almost as if,

I mean, if you were going to make a cartoon out of it, you would say that Mr.

Harris is stuck with Camilla and Mrs.

Biden is stuck with Joe, and they both know it.

And for a minute of unrestrained candor, they kissed in such intensity to commiserate.

I'm just being stupid now, but that's what.

It was very weird.

There was another psychodrama, and that was when they

attacked the Republicans, they being the Joe Biden speechwriters through the mouthpiece of Joe Biden.

And he accused them, I think the word he used was sunsetting, sunsetting, sunsetting.

Sunsetting Social Security.

Yeah, when he did it, March V.

Taylor,

Green had some kind of big white coat, and she jumped up and said, liar.

And that set off.

Last time that happened, I think that guy was named was kind of a nut, Joe Walsh.

And he, I think in 2008 or 2009, you remember he was that weird guy from South Carolina.

And he

said, you know, when Obama

was talking about,

I guess, Obamacare, and he made some fantastic claims.

And he jumped up and said, you lie.

You lie.

And that was like a scandal.

It shows you how far the house has fallen.

And today I looked at some of the commentary and all the left goes, it was just an English parliamentary circus.

It was a third world screaming.

And the Republicans

should be ashamed.

No,

who destroyed the decorum?

Do you think there's not consequences when you're the Speaker of the House and on national TV?

You frown, you growl every time the President of the United States says something, and then when he hands you a document belonging to the U.S.

government, you break the law as Speaker of the House and tear it to shreds, as Nancy Pelosi did.

I didn't see Kevin McCarthy doing that.

So my point is they broke the rules of decorum, and now there are no rules, apparently.

And Joe Biden, everybody said, this is what I don't understand about the left.

They think we're stupid.

They say

Joe Biden baited them.

And then they ended up showing their true colour.

No, he didn't.

They yelled.

And most times when somebody yawns or yells, the president smiles and goes on, right?

Yeah, yeah.

He doesn't lower himself.

He got into an argument.

No kidding.

No, I got the documents of proof.

And he went off on this tangent two or three times.

It was like he was negotiating

a bit of legislation too.

He goes, well, okay, then we've settled things.

None of us want to do anything to Social Security.

So you know that

the long and the short of it is if you can't explain how you,

how or why you spiked inflation to a 40-year high

or interest rates to a 20-year high,

or you doubled the price of gas at one point, you tripled the price of heating oil, you ran up the debt $4 trillion,

and you eroded middle-class wages.

And

don't take my word for it, the polls show that everybody is angry at you for doing that, then what do you do?

You disinform, you ignore, and you attack.

And that's what he did throughout

the whole circus.

And you notice that he always has these things that he latches on the buzzwords of the evil white male, Christian, heterosexual, Republican, conservative.

So you knew what they were.

They were climate change and cigarettes and guns and January 6th and race.

So when he got through it, you thought, oh my gosh,

he's suggesting that every gun-toting, chain smoker, racist, January 6th insurrectionist who wants everybody to die from an abortion, an illegal abortion, that's who his enemies are.

And that's what he did.

The whole thing is,

I think just to finish up, what we all are desperately wanting as a president to go up on the stage in the State of the Union and talk for 30 minutes, right?

30 minutes, no longer.

And number two,

no personal little stories.

I feel great about all the people they bring in with these tragedies.

And then the president talks about his tragedy.

Even Sarah So

I thought

Miss Sander Huckleby,

Sarah Sander Huckleby, did a very good job, but she even got into the anecdotal.

Just do 30 minutes, no personal melodramas, no anecdotes, no guests, no call-outs to the gallery, and just tell people the truth.

We are $31 trillion in debt.

We're adding a trillion dollars to it.

Our currency is being devalued.

We're paying $450

billion

in interest.

We're spending 2% to 3% on defense, and we should be spending 5%.

And

we are a naturally rich country, and we're going to start using our natural gas and precious metals for batteries and oil.

But they won't do that.

But if they did that, it would restore sanctity to

the institution.

I think the state of the union has become like, I don't know, the Tony, the Oscar

Wars, the Grammys.

It's just a joke.

Yeah.

Well, they're trying to move the audience by emotion rather than just stating what, you know, to appeal to their reason.

And so, you know, the classic Socratic problem there.

You shouldn't be moving people by emotions.

You should always appeal to reason.

But people like to have their emotions played with.

Yeah, I think so.

They do.

But

it's,

you know,

it's just getting,

I don't know, I just think that it's,

you sit there and you watch this guy take all of this bad news and then claim that it's all bad, but recently it's not quite as bad as it was at its peak, but it's still a lot worse than when I inherited it.

I made it a lot worse.

And then he tries to lie about it.

And then there's, and then you think, what would be the most important thing for a country?

The sovereignty of its airspace, a secure border, affordable eggs, the ability to fill up the gas, gas for not, you know, 10% of your income.

And he can't, and then he just ignores all that, ignores it, ignores it, ignores it.

He talks about Putin, Putin, Putin, but you want to say, well, why did he go into Ukraine?

Because you, idiot, said that if he went in and it was a minor incursion, it would be tolerable.

And then

you destroyed our deterrence in August of the prior year that convinced him we wouldn't do anything because we fled from the Taliban and the worst military humiliation in our history.

And we left all that stuff.

And now Putin, of course, is reportedly going to buy some of that stuff.

And if he blew up the Nord pipeline after he lied about it,

he has one advantage.

And I think everybody understands it better even than I do.

The fact that he's non-composment, he's not in possession of his mind.

And he hugs bunny rabbits.

He shakes imaginary hands.

He makes up words.

He drifts off to corn pop territory.

He shouldn't be in office.

But that is also an advantage because when he lies about things of Social Security in the case of the Republicans or his own record, people think,

oh, I have a grandfather that's 85, and I don't call him a liar when he claims he was, you know, that his son died in Iraq.

I don't call him a liar when he says that his wife was killed by a drunk truck driver.

He doesn't know, Victor.

He doesn't know.

And that's what he does.

So

you can't hold him to account because, on the one hand,

he's not in control of his faculty.

Once you cross the Rubicon and say that it's okay for a president to be cognitively

challenged, then once you say that, and you're always going to make up for him and you're going to point him in the right direction, stage left, stage right, once you do that, three-day work week, 10 hours of sleep at Delaware or this,

once you do that, then

and people will believe it and they're willing to put up with it, then you get some advantages.

You just say, well, you're making fun of a sick man?

Okay.

You're making fun of an octogenarian?

Oh, that's really big of you.

And so, you know, that's what they're doing.

I mean, if he was my grandfather

and my grandfather was, I don't know, a lawyer or something, I went and watched him in court and he acted like Joe Biden.

I wouldn't make fun of him.

I wouldn't.

Yeah,

somebody would say, well, hey, your grandfather's demented.

I'd say, how dare you say that?

And that's how he uses that, is what I'm trying to say.

Or maybe Jill Biden, who's increasingly, Dr.

Jill is increasingly

becoming sort of the power behind the throne, or at least the conduit to the powers behind the throne, whether those are the Obamas or the Elizabeth Warrens or Bernie Sanders or the hard left donors.

She's the conduit.

She's very similar to Pete Buttijik, too they're both very sanctimonious self-righteous incompetent and incompetent yeah and untalented um and um i think that most of your listeners and i would say though most octogenarians are not trying to be president and so if he's going to try to be president and have those handicaps then to you know it's it's no i agree with you i'm just i'm just telling you not that i approve of it i'm just telling you

that, and I don't have a grandfather that was a lawyer, but if I had a grandfather, I wouldn't say to myself, he shouldn't be practicing at 85 where he gets what he deserves.

But when I saw what he deserves, I would stick up for him because he's my

I felt bad for him.

Yeah, of course.

So,

well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about the Ukrainian war, the war in Ukraine, and

some of your thoughts on that.

Stick with us.

We'll be right back.

Welcome back.

So

the Ukrainian war, the only thing I was reading some stuff actually for the State of the Union, and I came across a Trump article about the State of the Union.

And what Trump writes is that, and

this is the heading.

I saw that.

Biden is leading us to World War III.

When everything is said and done, nothing matters in his speech, except that's an impression I got.

So I think he's referring to the Ukraine.

Do you have any update on the Ukraine war?

Well, I mean,

I don't think any of you who are listening are going to get much knowledge from Seymour Hirsch's story, because I think it'll be suppressed.

about the Nordstrom.

That would be a big story, wouldn't it?

Yes.

But the biggest development, though, is

we're sort of waiting for this impending Russian spring offensive.

It's a long history in Russia of the spring offensive once the mud dries up and everything.

And we'll see, and that's going to determine a lot because he says he has 300,000 fresh and this time well-trained troops.

They're better supplied.

And, you know, Ukraine.

cannot afford to lose 100,000 casualties or deaths, fatalities as Russia can, because Russia's got three a half times the population.

So that's going to determine a lot.

But I think people are starting to ask,

they're not questioning the premise that Vladimir Putin is a monster who crossed the sovereign borders of Ukraine against international law and tried to decapitate that government.

And then, in frustration, as he lost on the battlefield,

waged an aerial campaign of terror and deserves to lose.

We all agree with that.

But what we're starting to see is that

to give the victory to Ukraine, which our left and never Trump right insist on, and which all of us would probably all, even our brothers like to see, is going to require a strategy or

a requirement of goods that I don't think are compatible with what we can do.

Because to win,

and if victory is defined by getting every Russian out of the borderlands and the Donbass and Crimea

and putting them all back in Russia, then you don't ever do that in war without attacking the source of supply.

So you're going to have to start waging, as I keep saying, a lot of preemptory offensive expeditionary type of operations inside Mother Russia.

And when you do that,

The Swedes, the French, and the Germans, you just don't do that inside Russia.

and you defeat russia when it's overextended in japan in 1904 or in finland in 1939 you do not defeat russia uh a hundred miles outside of moscow if you're the french or the germans you just don't do it and you're not going to do it this time so are

if biden really wants to win this war then he should have a

a press conference and he should stay.

I'm committed to getting all of Vladimir Putin's out.

And we are going to commit another $350 billion.

And

it's going to be a nightmare of casualties.

And we are going to warn Mr.

Putin and Russia, there will be no use of nuclear weapon.

If you're not going to do that,

And I don't think you should, but if you want to win, that's what you'd have to do, then if you're not going to do that, then what's going to happen?

You know what's going to happen.

It's going to be Verdun.

It's just going to be the spring offensive will kind of peter out.

They'll get it 15 miles further.

And then the Ukrainians will counterattack and they want more Humvees.

You give them Humvees.

They want more Abhims.

You give them more Abhims.

They give them.

They get the Abhims, then they want more HIMARS.

You give them more HIMARS.

Then they want more Patriots.

You give them Patriots.

And they say, well, why didn't you give us F-16s?

As if our related.

Meanwhile,

China, Russia,

North Korea, Iran, India, Turkey, maybe, half the world's population starts to galvanize against the West.

And

so

that's what's dangerous.

Nobody's talking about how to, what the end game is.

There's only one endgame if you don't want to win absolutely.

And you believe that Vladimir Putin will not use nuclear weapons,

then it's to get him all out of Ukraine.

And that's, I think, it's going to be far beyond what Europe and America and Ukraine are able to pay for.

So then, what's the solution?

There's only one that I can think of.

Screw the UN, but you get India and you get China and you get Russia and you get the United States and you get NATO-EU.

And you say these areas that are now contested are going to be demilitarized.

There will be a truce and each side pulls out of Ukraine militarily, and we're going to have a plebiscite in these Russian-majority-speaking areas.

And I think most of them would vote

to join Ukraine after this horrible war, but who knows?

And then you say to Ukraine, we're going to allow you to have most of this equipment and keep it, and we're going to tell Russia They're going to be armed to the teeth.

You're never going to be able to go into Ukraine again.

They're going to repel you.

They're not going to get caught this time.

They're much better armed in their experience.

And we're going to ensure that but they're not we we agree they're not going to be part of nato and see if that leads anything yeah well you when you're talking i was thinking well in north i mean in korea they tried to have elections i believe and then the south and the north they they just didn't go through i think the north just rejected um accepting the elections if i recall they tried it they did in vietnam as well and they did it in vietnam as well and they neither of them would accept the election process

But that was the entire country that was involved.

I'm just talking about our small regional area and see what they want to do.

The problem is this, is that

if this was so important

and this is the great existential issue, why didn't we stop it in 2014?

I think I wrote an article saying it was called something like Putin on the Prowl.

And I said, the more you appease this guy with your reset

and Hillary Clinton, you know,

promising that she was going to

redirect the harsh policies of George W.

Bush, and you overlooked the Missile Treaty, you overlooked,

you lowered the sanctions,

you absorbed a green agenda that allowed

oil to spike in 2012 and 13, which made Putin even richer.

You talked about phony red lines with the Russian foreign minister in Syria.

All of that, when you were doing all that,

and then you had the hot mic deal where give me some space

and I'll get rid of, i.e.

give me some space, don't invade, and I'll get rid of, I'll be flexible on missile defense.

They kept the bargain.

Putin got what he wanted.

you know, missile defense in Eastern Europe.

Obama got what he wanted and re-elected without re-elected, without Putin Putin embarrassing him by going into what he did go into in 2014.

And nobody talks about that now.

All these zealots, never Trump right,

the hard left.

I just want to say to them,

why weren't you this animated before?

And then the second question I asked them is:

let me get this straight: 2014

and 2022,

but not 2017, 18, 19, and 20.

Now, why is that?

Why is that?

Is it because

what James Clapper said, the Russian puppet was not a puppet, and he deterred Putin, and aviator Joe was a puppet, and Barack Obama was a puppet, and he took them both to the cleaners, but for four years he's kept within his borders.

Is that possible?

Nobody's talking about that.

So if you don't know how you got in Ukraine in 2014 into this mess, how are you going to get out of it?

Yes, exactly.

Are we going to leave it there, Victor?

Because we've come to the end of our time.

Or were you going to add something to that?

That sounds bleak, I guess, is what I don't want to end on a bleak.

I know you've said that, and I'm very sensitive because I did an interview with former Representative Nunes.

He said, you're very bleak.

And somebody else just said that.

Oh, I did an epic time.

You're very bleak.

I'm not bleak.

I'm trying to be realistic about we're in a revolution and we're losing.

And we've got to galvanize.

Everybody, according to their station, has to speak up,

laugh in the face of the cancel culture.

go on the attack and get back the country.

It's not the left's country.

And what is our solution to this war in Ukraine?

The war in Ukraine?

What should we be doing with the war in Ukraine?

We should be telling President Zelensky that

we believe that the continued escalation is destroying his country and insidiously we're on a trajectory to a nuclear showdown with Russia.

I know what he'll say.

Well, that'll be good because you can, and we're going to say no.

And so we're going to say to him,

we want you to negotiate the Russian majority-speaking areas of Ukraine.

And in exchange for that, we will ensure that you have enough arms to protect yourself in the coming decades.

But you're not going to be a member of NATO.

If he was a member of NATO right now,

we would be in a nuclear war.

Or there'd be no NATO.

And

some Russians today, that Chechnyan governor said that Poland is next, but, you know,

and I'm not, I'm not a, I've never been accused of appeasement, so I don't like Putin.

I think I want Russia to lose.

But there has to be a better way to solve this than to kill three, four, five hundred thousand civilians

in the heart of Eastern Europe and

to

exhaust the strategic arsenal of the United States and to lose deterrence and to drive Russia into the hand the arms of China and Iran and North Korea and Turkey and this new Indian

India's buying Russian oil Turkey's shielding Russian oligarchs Turkey's selling arms to both sides India is an arms buyer from Russia it's

it's it's it's and then while we're doing all of this we have a wide open border that 5 million people crossed.

And we have an airspace that we can't defend.

And the Pentagon goes, these are very primitive devices.

They would not be able to be

operating a level of sophisticated satellites.

And you want to say, you idiot, then why did they build them?

And then the next day, the NORAD general says, well,

apparently I've discovered maybe that there had been previous intrusions.

There must be some flaw in the NORAD system.

Will you think that they're trying to make a sub-technological or a basic primitive system that might not have the metal or the radar exposure or some mechanism to befuddle us and get in under our system?

And so, and so,

you know, they made fun of this congressman who said there might be a bioweapons lab.

That was preposterous.

But what if you wanted to do that in a bioweapons, right?

I mean, people make bioweapons for a purpose, right?

And that is in an existential war to use them.

So you can see that if that had been a bioweapon, it would have just gone right through.

And so it was a telling moment.

Yeah, it sure was.

Well, we need new leadership, that's for sure.

I guess we need to welcome them.

Yes, and I'll just finish with we need to have a new Pentagon leadership.

And when I saw those generals at the State of the Union, I wanted to say, I wouldn't be so proud, you people.

You misled the American people yet again about the Chinese balloon.

You should have shot it down the first day.

You made excuses, excuses, excuses.

You lied, you disinformed, and then when you got caught, you tried to claim that Trump knew about earlier incursions, which was a flat-out lie.

You won't tell us who leaked that to the press because you want to protect that liar.

This is on top of: you told us that Ukraine would fall very quickly.

You told us that Kabul would last not quickly, but forever.

It was defensible.

And you contacted your Chinese counterpart to warn them about your own commander-in-chief.

You told us about white supremacy and white rage that you were hunting out in the ranks.

On, on, on, and on.

Anything but keep your blank mouth shut, keep out of politics.

and make sure that we win on the battlefield.

If you can't do that,

Yeah, and that the country is safe.

Yeah.

If you can't keep a balloon out of the United States and you won't help Trump build the wall, which the DOD didn't do, and we can't keep the southern border and you lose Afghanistan after all those American deaths and you leave behind because you just flee in flight and terror billions of dollars of weapons, many of them actually will end up in Vladimir Putin's hands.

And then you have no business lecturing us about race or wokeness or anything.

You're a complete failure.

And they need to get their act together very quickly.

They need to get somebody.

It kind of reminds me of the period in which Halleck was chief of staff of the army, and we were rotating between McClellan and Pope.

and Hooker and Burnside.

And then all of a sudden, somewhere out of nowhere, came this former drunk from

Delena, Ohio, Ulysses S.

Grant,

and Glena, Illinois, I guess it was.

And then we got this manic depressant, William Tecumseh Sherman.

And between Sherman and Grant,

it was a victory.

As soon as they got control, there was not going to be a question.

The war turned around, that's for sure.

And we need people like that.

Somewhere,

somehow,

there is a Ulysses S.

Grant or a Matthew Ridgway or a William Tecumseh Sherman or a George Patton who's not a yes man clerk.

They're in the military.

I've met them before, and we need to find them and to promote them like Eisenhower did over the tops of this dead weight immediately.

We need to tell every general,

you're not going to serve in a civilian

cabinet post when you get out.

There's going to be, we're going to enforce, and I was wrong about that.

I wrote an article that we should give these people waivers.

We should not.

They should not serve as civilian.

And we should say, if you go into the military and you are in the highest officer corps and you retire from the military, you're not going to work for Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop, Lockheed within five years.

Sorry.

We're going to wait till your expertise and your contacts get stale.

about using your clout and your former rank to help hawk your company's weapons to Pentagon procurement officers, of whom you know a great deal about from your former command.

And that is

upbeat.

That's upbeat.

Thank you so much for that.

Thanks.

But seriously, thank you for everything that you've imparted on us this episode.

It's

we did.

It's absolutely fascinating.

Thanks, everybody.

I really appreciate that you're listening, and I enjoy reading reading your comments and

postings.

Again, thank you.

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