Spy Balloon, Squad Rage, and Proxy Wars

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Hello to the listeners of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor is a scholar, author, columnist, essayist, and political and cultural commentator.

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

The name of the website is The Blade of Perseus, and you you can get a subscription for $5 a month or for $50 a year.

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Today on our show, we're going to be looking at a few of the current news stories and then we're going to take a deep dive into the Ukraine and proxy wars as we get towards the end but first let's listen to these messages and we'll come right back

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Welcome back.

I would like to remind everybody that 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.

Victors, how are things going today?

What's the pulse on the nation today?

Are we going to start to pull out of our slump at all?

Joe Biden gave an economic address, and he said that you could only ask questions about it because if he didn't require that stipulation, nobody would ask a question.

And so I listened to part of it, and it was, he had a good jobs report.

I mean, we're getting two different

sets of data.

We're getting these massive layoff statistics, say, from California and Silicon Valley.

And then we're saying 500,000 new jobs.

And the left says, this is wonderful.

And the right said, no, it's just that you can't make a living under 7% inflation anymore.

So people are taking additional jobs.

And that accounts for a lot of the 500,000 new jobs.

And as I feel, some like, you know,

I work at the Hoover and then I do podcasts.

It would be like me saying, oh, I got a new job doing podcasts.

Oh, I got a new job writing ultras.

Oh, I got a new job writing for two columns a week for American Greatness.

Oh, I got a new job

writing books for basic books.

Oh, I got a new job as a member of the Bradley Foundation.

That's the argument that people are getting additional jobs to get by.

And so Biden, and then of course he didn't mention the balloon.

I listened to the, we'll talk about that, but I listened to the DOD's Pentagon

press conference.

It was pretty pathetic, but you can go ahead and ask.

Well, yeah, let's just go with the balloon first, since that's the most pressing thing.

So we have a, perhaps a

spy balloon over Montana.

What are your thoughts on it?

Moving into Kansas.

Well, I listened to the spokesman at the Pentagon, and this is what I learned.

One,

this is not a weather balloon.

It is a surveillance balloon, as if we didn't know that.

I don't think China is interested in the weather of the United States.

Two, it was going over defensive ICBM sites, i.e.

mapping them out for potential targeting.

Three, that didn't matter because

they took measures.

to prevent that balloon from taking photographic evidence that would be incriminating.

I don't know what that means.

Four, that was a violation, we were told, of U.S.

sovereign airspace.

Five, it was a violation of international law.

Six, they have to be careful that if they were to shoot it or it might endanger, or no, excuse me, let me start over.

It does not endanger American people.

Well, think of that for a minute.

It does endanger American people if this particular system has a superior or an improved ability to surveil than a regular satellite, which some

studies show that in fact they do.

So in other words, if the United States government knows that China sent a surveillance

balloon over our territory at 50 to 60,000 feet,

and they didn't do anything about it because they said, well, you know, they had the capability anyway because of satellites and it didn't hurt anything because we took but why should we have to worry why should we have to take defensive measures what put tarps over our icbm so silos i don't know when they're buying farmland all around it so the point i'm making is it's the same old same old why didn't we just shoot the sov down

and china would have considered that

something to take in account.

When we were magnanimous, I always use that old formula.

They look at our magnanimity as weakness to be exploited and not as,

you know,

conciliation to be reciprocated.

So when they look at that, that's what they conclude.

In fact, I would go so far as that had a dual purpose.

One was to surveil ICBM sites and military bases, and the other was to gauge our response, i.e., as they prepare to go into Taiwan in the next year or two.

They're thinking, well, we'll try to have, they probably have a list of provocations.

We'll allow North Korea to send a missile over Japan, see what the U.S.

says.

We'll go into Japanese or Taiwanese waters, see what the United States says.

We will tell Kevin McCarthy he can't go to Taiwan.

We'll see what the United States says.

We will send a balloon over U.S.

bases, see what the United States says, to see if they see a pattern in the Biden administration.

And that would then, therefore, as Hitler thought, remember, well, I went into Czechoslovakia, I went into the Saarland, I had the Angelus,

all forbidden by the Versailles Treaty.

Why did they declare war on me when I went into Poland?

I'd been doing it for three years, so it's very dangerous when you don't respond.

It's much more dangerous than responding.

That was number one, I thought of.

Number two, this is a pattern with this Pentagon.

And think of Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

We were told the chairman of the Joint Chiefs decided for now they were not told Biden supposedly not to respond.

Okay.

But Mark Milley was the one that we learned

contacted his PLA,

People's Liberation Army counterpart in Beijing to say, essentially, I think that Trump is unstable.

If he orders me to go to DEF CON blank, blank, I'm going to call you up and warn you I'm not going to do it, which I thought was a treasonous act and should have been,

you know, I'm serious about punished accordingly.

Yeah, sure.

It should have been addressed.

Yeah.

And then here's the same Mark Milley who assured us, along with his Pentagon cohorts in June and July, that the Kabul government was stable when Joe Biden was lying about how big the army was and how it was invulnerable to Taliban attacks.

And then we were told by the same Pentagon that this was one of the most impressive evacuations as if they're Churchill ordering Dunkirk, right?

Which Churchill at least had the honesty to say it was a,

you don't win a war by evacuations it was a defeat and then this is the same pentagon

that uh in the summer of 21 as you remember

uh lloyd austin and mark milley testified before congress and virtue signaled and performance art their way into caricature when he said i'm trying to you know we're we have kendy reading reading list and i'm trying to understand white supremacy and white privilege and white rage and that was an accompaniment of all of these diversity, equity, inclusion czars they've hired, some of whom have been in the news for

blatantly racist pronouncements.

But the net result was they basically took a constituency, as I've been harking on, the white male constituency that died at twice, 75% of the deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq, roughly, were white males who make up 34%

of the population.

And they targeted that constituency as if they had to prove they weren't racist and that they were the targeted constituency to have to prove that the diversity, equity, and inclusion industry would be focused upon.

And lo and behold, if you look at the military recruitment in some areas, it's all 50%.

which suggests to me, and I looked at the data very carefully, and of that 50%

that has opted out,

most of them, not all, but most of them are white males, as you would think, that tend to focus on combat units.

So, in other words, he insulted

the one constituency that, for good or evil, the military has relied upon.

And, of course, the Pentagon and Mark Milley told us that the Ukraine would

not be around very much longer after the first week of the Russian attacks, which prompted Joe Biden, remember, to offer Zelensky a free ride out of town.

And so when I look at all that, and then I see this,

it just cements a picture is what I'm trying to say, that

the Pentagon is slowly eroding deterrence.

And we know what happened with Afghanistan.

It prompted the Putin raid on the February 23rd invasion into Ukraine.

Remember,

Biden said a lot of things.

He said that, you know, I wouldn't get too angry unless it's a big attack, i.e., if he just goes in there,

I guess that was okay.

But with Afghanistan and the joint chiefs and the political correctness and going after white males and accusing them of being racist, and

you...

you put the balloon in on as the cherry on top of the disaster.

And I think it's very dangerous because I think the Chinese are thinking, hmm, this is very atypical of the United States.

And we don't know how long this is going to continue because there does seem to be a force that's pushing back.

So they have a demented, incompetent president surrounded by a bunch of pro-Chinese neo-socialists.

And this is an opportune moment to take advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime chance.

Yeah.

Yeah, it sure does.

Well, if I could keep on that, the theme of racism, apparently Ilhan Omar was not, was kicked off of the Foreign Affairs Committee and the squad, we got to see sort of a circus of screaming and yelling at the podium in the house.

And in fact, Talibi said the entire house was systemically racist.

And the only reason she got kicked off was because she was a woman and she was black.

And she started crying on that.

And I can't even believe anybody would believe that.

I mean, they might be angry she got kicked off, but it was because she was a Democrat, it seems to me.

But what were your thoughts on?

It was just psychodrama.

And

she got kicked off because she's an anti-Semite.

And she's an anti-Semite as evidenced by the fact that she said it's the Benjamin's baby, meaning a $100 Benjamin Franklin bill and Benjamin Netanyahu.

And then she said, oh, something happened on 9-11.

Yeah, they attacked the United States from the Islamic world and killed 3,000 people.

And then she said, well, you know, Israel is hypnotizing the world.

So she, and she wants to be on the foreign affairs.

This is a woman who married her brother.

Everybody knows she did.

She can't refute it to say that all she did was do what she did the other day, weep and call people racist.

And it's not, she can be on other, Kevin McCarthy said she could be on other committees.

She can be on the ag committee.

She can be be on the mining committee, but they're not going to put her on the Foreign Affairs.

And if they were racist, as she alleges, then why would they kick off Eric Swalwell from the Intelligence Committee and Adam Hsu?

Do they hate Eric Swalwell because he passes wind?

I don't think so.

I think it's because he had sex with a

Feng Feng Chinese spy.

And you can't be on the intelligence committee and having sexual intercourse

when somebody is having sexual intercourse with you, not because you're Robert Redford and his youth, but because you're an idiot, naive, narcissistic dumbo like Swalwell.

Yeah, and so that's why they took them off.

And then she didn't say a word, of course, when they took off

Lorraine

Burbet

and Marjorie Taylor Green, and of course,

the people off the January 6th committee.

So, in other words, take it all out out of context.

And she says that

I am

Ian Omar.

I'm a woman.

I am black.

I'm an immigrant.

No, you're just a loudmouth anti-Semite.

And you've been kicked off the committee because you've displayed views that make it impossible for you to, in matters that will come before the

Foreign Relations Committee, it'll make it impossible for you to be disinterested.

But more importantly, the speaker is picking people who were especially egregious in retaliation for your party and Nancy Pelosi that inaugurated a new custom in the House.

It had never happened before that the House minority leaders' nominations to the committee can be rejected.

So you're rejected.

You can call it iconic,

but you're rejected.

Swalwell is rejected.

Adam Schiff is rejected because he serially went before the cameras, wink and nod, and said, I'm on the House Intelligence Committee.

I have matters that you can't have access to, but I've looked at them and I can guarantee you that the collusion is real.

And he did that contrary to the Mueller report, contrary to the Nunes majority report, contrary to Michael Horowitz's, contrary to belated investigative journalism.

In addition to that, he read a psychodramatic

version of the Trump phone call and really didn't tell people he was making it all up as he read it into the record.

In addition to that, he swore that he didn't have any contact with the quote-unquote whistleblower when he and Venman and the whistleblower met together, staff, and he did.

So he's a pathological liar.

And

he's very angry, Adam Schiff is, because he wants to run for Senate.

And to run for Senate, you got to be on TV.

Every time you're on TV, that's so many thousands of free dollars and

ads.

And he can't get on if he's not on a high-profile committee, right?

Yeah.

So he's mad about that.

And that's the only reason he's mad.

And I think it's good what Kevin McCarthy.

He didn't, he's been very careful.

He didn't say you're not going to be on any committees.

It's this particular person on that particular committee.

No.

And then what was the height of

irony is the left said, well, those committees won't be representative then.

Was the January 6th committee representative?

You think that Adam Kinzinger and Lynn Cheney were representative of the majority of House members?

You know, this is what's weird about the left.

It has this adolescent mind that is so self-righteous and sanctimonious.

And it just accepts that you don't dare do what we do to you.

We tear up the state of the union on national TV.

You don't.

We kick off your members from committees.

You don't.

We try to pack the court.

You don't.

We vote for or against the filibuster when it's in our interest.

You don't.

And, you know, finally, I think we finally got a speaker that says, no, we're not going to do that.

If this was Paul Ryan right now, I have nothing against Paul Ryan, but I'm sure that

he would have acquiesced and put her back on.

Really?

I don't see where they have any claim to actually being on a committee.

Why does she think she has a claim that she should be the one?

She's not the one appointing who goes on committees.

Because Nancy Pelosi,

Nancy Pelosi,

when this squad was formed two to four years ago, Presley, Tylee, Omar, and AOC was paranoid that this was the new wave of the Democratic Party, i.e.

women of color,

and they drove it in.

ad nauseum into the Democratic Party.

So she thought,

hmm, I better give each of these people a plum assignment.

And PLUM is measured by the degree of TV exposure.

So as I said, if you're on the House Oversight Committee, the House Judiciary Committee, the House Foreign Relations Committee, the House Intelligence Committee, you're going to get a lot of

media as any crisis.

Those are where the crisis has come up.

House interior,

yeah, but not on some others, which, and so they gave these people rare opportunities because they were scared of them.

Yeah.

And they were scared of them because these people do,

these four and others like them, scream and yell.

And they call everybody racist and sexist.

And the Democratic Party is terrified of them.

And to be frank, there are a lot of people in the House who are Democrats, who are of Jewish background, that are delighted about this.

They just can't say so because they know these people are utter anti-Semite.

If you got Adam Schiff in a room

and James O'Keefe in Operation Veritas was not there, and you said, Do you think that Omar is an anti-Semite?

And you think she should have been off the committee?

He would agree with you

privately because she is.

And she understands one thing about the current pathology in the United States.

She comes to this country from a bankrupt,

failed state.

And immediately, her father and she, she kind of laughs at her father, said, This is a terrible place.

And then she comes here and she gets fellowships, affirmative action.

She gets, there's all sorts of the Somali community fraud and COVID.

They're investigating welfare fraud.

It doesn't matter.

She understands this country, that instantaneously, the moment you come here, you're exempt.

So to get into the United States, she married her brother, right?

Doesn't matter.

They're never going to go after her.

She understands that.

The moment that she

has this live-in

consort, the father of her children, then she starts an adulterous affair with her campaign consultant, PR guy, and starts funneling campaign cash to him while she's dating him.

who now is her husband.

She knows that they're never going to go after that.

She knows they're never going to go after that.

So she understands how this country works at this particular low point in its history, that you just call people names and you say they're race, and everybody says, oh, please don't call me racist.

Don't call me anti-immigrant.

Don't call me sexist.

Please, what do you want?

I'll give you anything you want.

You want to marry your brother?

Go ahead.

You know, you want to give campaign cash to your boyfriend and have it.

If you're Maxine Waters, do you want to hire your daughter and give her $200,000 to do campaign work for you?

Yeah, yeah, go go ahead.

That's how we are.

Yeah, that is very sad.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break for some messages and come right back and talk a little bit about Hunter Biden's lawsuit.

Please stay with us.

We'll be right back.

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Welcome back.

Victor, before we talk about Hunter Biden, I just want to remind everybody who's in the area that there is a talk on February 6th, Monday at 6 p.m.

at the Clovis Community College.

Daniel D.

Martino, and he's speaking on the problems of socialism, and he is from Venezuela, so it'll be a personal view.

And please text your attendance at

559-492-7282.

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So they can kind of get a gauge on how many people are coming.

Thank you.

Victor,

Hunter Biden has a lawsuit, and I think

we were talking about it, but the key person that he is targeting is the poor guy who he left it at the computer shop.

And I was wondering if you had some more reflections on that case.

I mean, this is sort of analogous to what we we were just talking about with Representative Omar, wasn't it?

Because we were talking about types of special treatment.

And so in America, if you can claim an identity politics victimization-oppressed status, you will get unequal treatment that is beneficial.

But if you're also

from the bi-coastal establishment and you're wealthy or you're politically connected, that serves the other end of the spectrum.

And that's what Hunter does.

So

he knows that, well, let me just preface it this way.

Joe Biden said when this laptop was exposed and the New York Post ran with it, he said that it was Russian disinformation.

He was in a debate with Donald Trump, and Donald Trump mentioned the laptop from hell, and he said that it was Russian disinformation.

They interviewed Hunter Biden on four occasions in which they asked him specifically, they being the liberal press, is this yours?

He said, I don't remember once.

It could be.

I don't know.

It may be.

I doubt it.

So he basically did not own up to it.

Okay.

So now the laptop.

is reached a red red line.

And the red line is this, that it has information on it

that may reflect, and we don't know the answer, but it may reflect his unlawful perusal of government documents that were classified in his father's possession, among other things, because there's a special investigation of him right now.

And there are

congressional appeals to release other documents.

So he has got some of the most

expensive lawyers in the nation.

How and where the money is coming from since he's has no, does he have any visible?

I can't, I can't think of any visible form of support.

Do you?

I mean, no, no, no, absolutely.

No, he has none.

So he's got this high-priced team.

And the first thing they did, and I don't know why you pay $1,000

an hour for a bunch of idiots, but that, I mean, I'm not a lawyer.

My mother was a lawyer, and I learned a lot about the law from her.

But I think the first thing you do is you're very careful and you don't self-incriminate.

So one of the first things they did was they requested

from the DOJ.

Think of that, that the son of the president is asking his father's DOJ to do him a favor by investigating this poor John Paul McIsaac, I guess his name was, that

he

improperly released contents of the laptop that was Hunters.

And then all of a sudden somebody said, oh my God,

Hunter, you know what we just did?

You just paid me $1,000 this last hour.

I just admitted that the laptop was yours, but you've denied it.

And the President of the United States said it wasn't yours.

What the hell?

What are we going to do?

Oh.

I know what we're going to do.

We're going to print an addendum.

So they went back out and said, we want to clarify and say that if the contents were hunters

or if they were somebody that was simulating that they were, we feel that this is an infringement on his personal property.

And then they went after this

McIsaac guy.

And so the guy turns out to be really smart.

And he understood when he got this laptop that he fixed it and had stuff on.

He called Hunter apparently two or three times.

Hey, you're over the 90 days and you haven't picked it up.

And I've spent money on this and I'm out money and I've got this thing here.

Would you please pick it up?

And there was no reply.

There was no reply because Hunter's a crackhead.

Yep.

And I've dealt with people in my immediate vicinity that have had drugs and you don't deal, you can't deal with them.

And he can't deal with Hunter.

So according to the contract, and believe me, everybody knows that if, I mean, there's a whole, isn't there a whole TV show on storage containers that are abandoned?

And so you, you

buy them sight on scene and then presto, we open it up like Geraldo's vault and see whether the stuff that you can claim is, it's not yours, right?

But it is your, it is the storage companies.

They own it because they haven't paid their bill.

So this guy didn't pay his bill, so the guy owns it.

So that's ridiculous.

that he

Hunter owns his laptop.

He doesn't own any of it.

He can do whatever he wanted because he confiscated it because Hunter owed him money and Hunter signed a contract.

So why are they doing all this?

They're trying to scare people and trying to say, oh, my God, let's not, let's just stop.

And the thing that we're not talking about was the only real important issue was the laptop for almost a year before the 2020 election was known.

The New York Post printed a number of articles from that referenced the laptop that made pretty everybody sure that it was authentic.

Tony Bobolinski went on 60 minutes of all formats and quoted chapter and verse why that laptop was authentic.

And guess what happened?

The FBI, who had paid Twitter $3 million, did its best to suppress that story.

Twitter killed it.

Facebook killed it.

They killed the New York Post.

And people started reviling Miranda Devine, who, Devine,

had exposed it.

So

it combines a lot of very bad aspects of American society.

One is this idea of privilege that you're Hunter Biden and you can get these high-priced lawyers to bully a small

computer store repairman who has no resources and did exactly what was you know, what his contract called for and try to bull him into submission.

And then you lie, lie, lie if you're the president of the United States to the American people in an American debate.

And you not only lie, you call up your lackeys, John Brennan and James Clapper and say,

I need some cover.

And they get 50, 50 of our quote-unquote most distinguished intelligence operatives who lie and publish a letter on the eve of the election that says that the laptop is a product of Russian disinformation.

But, wink, nod, sort of, kind of, it seems like it is, so that the media doesn't put the seams in, right?

But the seams is there so that when they know that

it is an authentic laptop.

And after Joe Biden gets elected, when you go back and you say, listen, you guys are pathological liars.

You tried to warp an election.

We said seems.

We said seems.

That's what they were doing.

And that's what Joe Biden referenced.

He said to Donald Trump, oh, that's such a lie.

This is Russian disinformation.

You should know about that.

James Clapper, some of the most distinguished people in the United States have authenticated that it was Russian disinformation.

They should be ashamed of themselves.

And so I don't know what a judge, they're going to have to get the most left-wing Obama judge.

to adjudicate this because any judge who sees this is going to ask Hunter's lawyers, well, you just said that you're not even sure it's Hunter's, but you said it was Hunter's, which is it?

And

did you mean you don't have a contract that Hunter didn't sign when he dropped off the laptop?

Did Hunter ever return the guy's calls?

We have phone records, we can easily ascertain that.

Did he ever call back?

And so after 90 days, the owner of the computer store doesn't have the rights of possession as a

you know, as a counter or as some compensation for the time he put in.

And that's that's what

I just don't think it's going to go.

It's just like, it's just incredible because in the old days, when there was Roger Clinton and Billy Carter and Don Nixon, right?

And what was

aunt, what was her name?

The Obama aunt that he threw under the bus.

Oh, yeah, I can't remember.

And then they had another cousin or brother that was.

They're all in trouble.

They were immigration violators.

They violated welfare.

But the point is, everybody understood that that a president,

a president's sibling, and

there was the Bush kid too that was involved in Silverado, the younger brother.

And all of them have,

you know, embarrassments.

Yeah, sure.

Don't forget gin and tonic.

Yes.

Well,

all they did is have a gin and tonic.

The two Bush girls.

But I mean, usually it is a brother who has resentments against the more successful sibling that's in the White House, and they kind of leverage that.

And they say, Oh, you want me to get drunk in public?

You want me to urinate, you know, in public?

Ha ha ha.

And they get indulgences.

But everybody knows that.

But this guy broke the rules.

He went so far beyond that by taking pictures of him naked with hookers, with calling his father up and asking for more money for setting up a family Ponzi shakedown mafioso scheme for hawking this pathetic art.

And that really prompts the question: why is he doing this?

You know, why is he doing this?

And I think the answer is in the email exchanges with his cousin when

he says, Hey, I've been carrying this family.

Resentment of his father, yes.

Exactly, exactly.

He said, I've been carrying them.

The big guy,

Mr.

10%,

I even pay the bills for him at his house.

And I think Joe Biden thinks, you know what?

This kid of mine is no damn good, but he's crazy.

And he has ability because he went out and shook down foreign governments using my name with my permission and my encouragement.

And he made me a multi-millionaire.

And I'm happy he did because I got three nice homes.

But he can say anything about me.

And if I don't tell the world that he's the quote, smartest man i've ever met he could get really angry

and that's yeah yeah and so that's where we stand yeah that is

about it um victor let's turn then to the ukrainian war we're coming on the anniversary i think they invaded russia invaded on february 23rd was it yeah i think it was

23rd maybe the 26th but anyways we're coming on its anniversary and the ukraine war seems to be going on and on and i wanted to discuss the possibility or what your thoughts were.

Are we being drawn?

Is this now formally a proxy war?

And how does it measure up to other proxy wars, either recent past or distant past?

I mean, for example, I would think that the Greeks had, the Athenians and the Spartans had their own proxy wars.

But there's two types of proxy wars.

There's a proxy war when you have two major powers, right?

So Germany and Japan and the democracies

with some help from the Soviet Union communists in the Spanish Civil War, so that each side supplies arms and maybe even advisors and stealthily some pilots or something in a war between two separate powers.

That's a proxy war.

Spanish Civil War, or what happened

on the eve of the Peloponnesian War, that is the period from 433 to 431, where two major powers, Corsaira, who was democratic, and Corinth, that was oligarchic, had

these disputes over Epidamnus and places Apollonia, which became Apollonia, up in northern Greece.

And the question was, the Athenians then were going to support the claims of the

Corsairians, and the oligarchs of Corinth looked for support in Sparta.

And then eventually these things heat up, and it draws in.

And the other proxy war is that one of the major powers is actually fighting,

like Hitler is fighting Britain, and you are then giving money to Britain to defeat Hitler.

It's not just

two other parties, and each side is fueling them.

And that's more what this is.

In other words, a major superpower, nuclear power.

And as Putin says, this is the only time in history that a nuclear power

has been fighting a huge conventional war on its border against the

proxy efforts of NATO or its enemies.

And so that's what's different about it.

But that one of them, it's, and I mean that in the sense, that's what's more dangerous about it.

It's not just Kazakhstan and Ukraine or Belarus or Ukraine fighting and Russia pouring in weapons and we doing the other.

It's more sort of like us in Iraq or Afghanistan and Putin sending in weapons to the Taliban or the Iranians getting involved.

It's a lot more dangerous.

Why do you say that?

Why is it more dangerous?

Because you can draw a major power in

because he's in.

And I'll give you an example.

During the Vietnam War,

we tried to shut down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and we sometimes succeeded, but we could not stop

the maritime shipment at the harbor of Haiphong from China and Russia.

So there was a question arose, could you mine that harbor?

Yes, you could.

We could have stopped it easily.

But then the point was,

well, you'll blow up a Russian ship and you'll be in a nuclear war.

So we didn't do it to our disadvantage.

And when we started to have our two bombing campaigns over Hanoi, they had Russian-supplied anti-ballistic missiles.

They shot down over 500 American planes.

And

we know now, in retrospect, they were Russian advisors.

And during the Korean War, when we were fighting along MiG Alley near the Chinese border,

when the MiG-15s came in and they were superior to our F-80s, we know now that there were Russian pilots in those planes, and we killed a lot of them.

So my point is that

when you have

a major power like Russia,

and

will it show the restraint that we did

should the United States do what it's doing and increase that?

And I don't know.

I don't think it will because it's not like us.

I mean, we said, yes, the Iranians

are getting involved and hurting us.

Yes, the Syrians are.

And yes, the Russians are playing an active role in encouraging that.

Yes, North Korea is shooting missiles and threatening us, and China is playing an active role in that.

Yes, Russian pilots are flying MiGs and killing Americans in Korea.

But we're not going to respond accordingly against them.

And so

our attitude is this.

Okay, Mr.

Putin, Russia, you have done this against the United States every time that it was directly engaged.

Now you're directly engaged, and we're going to do to you what we did to you under Reagan and Afghanistan.

We're going to supply the hell out of them as our proxies.

The only problem with it is Lloyd Austin and Millie shouldn't be so triumphalist.

You know, we want to make sure that we're going to so erode the ability of Russia to stage expeditionary operations that they won't be able to do this.

You don't tell people that.

You deny it.

No.

And that's what's strange about it.

We're bragging.

And then when you juxtapose all of these efforts to this non-existent southern border where 6 million people have crossed,

and

you,

you know, you juxtapose it to what happened in Afghanistan, and you say to yourself, what is the mill and the balloon?

And you say, you know what?

The United States can't even

protect itself from disgrace in Afghanistan.

And my God, the United States has a balloon, a Chinese balloon going over its territory.

My God, 6 million people have crossed the border with impunity.

And

we've suddenly made that Ukraine is more important than all of that.

So that's what's strange about it.

And so, and the other strange thing about it is usually the aggrieved party that of the proxy war.

So when we were helping South Vietnam,

whether it was General Cai or General Thu Tu,

they were, you know, they were combative, but we told them, this is what you're going to get, right?

Yeah.

And our Mr.

Rhee and Korea, this is what you're going to get.

And then we gave it, and they were happy to get it.

They didn't turn around and say, I mean, Shung Kai-shek did a little bit.

He bit the hand of fiance.

But the problem with Zelensky is

no sooner does he get a particular patriot

billion dollar battery, or these

HIMARS or whatever you call them,

these very accurate missile platforms or Hum Vs, then it's,

but where are the Abrams tanks?

We wanted the tanks.

So then you give him the Abrams tanks, he says, well, where are the F-16s?

We want the F-16s.

And you know, when you give him the F-16s, he's going to say, well, where are the F-35s?

So there's a complete density on his part.

And it's all predicated on the idea that he has the image, I don't think he was culpable, but during the impeachment of Trump, Ukraine, and during the, I'll go back earlier, during the 2016 election,

given Hunter Biden and Joe Biden's involvement with Ukraine, given going way back to Victoria Newland and the American involvement with Ukraine,

and given the Ukrainian ambassador was writing, I think, an op-ed attacking Trump in 2016, given the ubiquitous

lieutenant colonel, Lieutenant Colonel, Congressman Nunes, I'm Lieutenant Colonel Vinman.

That guy,

who was offered the defense ministry, he told us three times of Ukraine, while he bragged that his loyalties were only to the United States.

We have a long history, is what I'm trying to say with Ukraine.

So a lot of people have conflicted views.

Yes, it was invaded.

Yes, we want the Russians to lose.

Yes, they're preferable in this war.

But what nobody is talking about is, one,

there's been over 200,000 dead.

What is the trajectory?

How many more dead?

Two, we're inching closer and closer and closer to a showdown.

with the so with the former Soviet Union, Russia, Federation.

It's just a fact.

because because it

people don't and you and i've talked about this ad nauseum i kept saying the same thing it's like a broken record i know people please excuse me listeners but they do have 30 times territory 10 times gdp three and a half times the population so they have the ability to grind down ukraine the only reason ukraine has not been ground down because it's been heroic and more importantly that it has the combined multi-trillion dollar economies of

the EU and the United States.

And we've been pouring stuff in there, economic and military aid.

But nevertheless, on the ground, they're going to put more and more and more and more Russians in there one way or the other.

It's a totalitarian, authoritarian system.

They will put soldiers in there, and they will be able to grind Ukrainians down, unless

Zelensky can get more and more and more and more platforms and more and more and more risky operations.

So you're already hearing in the United States, if anybody goes online and looks at particular magazines, websites,

they will inform us that Zelensky cannot win unless he gets superior F-16, refitted F-16s.

not just 50 or 60 leopards and

British, I don't know if they're challengers or whatever they call them, and Abrams, but maybe two, 300,

and additional Patriot batteries.

And, and this is the killer,

and that they stage offensive operations into Russia and do to Russia what Russia is doing to Ukraine.

And what the problem with that is not the morality or the logic of it.

It's perfect logic.

And it's moral to do to pay back what they did to Ukraine.

But we don't live in a moral logical world.

We live in a crazy world in which Vladimir Putin has 7,000 nuclear weapons and Ukraine has zero.

And it's a big, big country.

And so what you want to be fair and logical and moral isn't so.

And they have the ability to say, you know what?

If you take out a Russian,

if you take out a Russian apartment building, or you hit any more Russian fuel, or you take out any more Russian ships, we're going to send in a tactical nuclear weapon, see how you like it, just for the hell of it.

Everybody says, well, what good would that do?

All it would do is wreck the legacy that no one's used a tactical nuclear weapon since Hiroshima in a combat situation.

Yes.

And there would be no military target.

Yes.

And it would.

the winds might blow the opposite way and hurt Russia.

Yes.

And therefore he might do it.

Just for the F of it.

And so I don't think they understand his mind very well.

And

it's, again, I remark, I have close friends.

I mean,

it's so weird how this cause

has captured and engulfed them and obsessed them.

And it's a good cause, but they don't give a damn about the border.

They never talk about it.

They never, I'm just sitting here in Central California

and

18 miles miles away, the cartels executed six people, shot a woman and her child in the head.

They run.

They run this state.

And just the other day, the first Salma police officer in history was executed, basically, by a gangbanger.

And no one's, no one, these are probably, just...

Yesterday, a person was riding on the PCH, a doctor, an MD, on his road bike, and a criminal tried to run him over.

And then when he knocked him over, that wasn't good enough.

So he got out and stabbed him to death.

And

I'm worried about all that.

And

I'm more worried about the people who live along the Rio Grande, whose communities are being destroyed, and people in the central San Joaquin Valley whose whole lives are overturned with illegal immigrants than I am.

about the Ukraine.

I'm sorry, I am.

And they're going to say, well, you can worry about both, Victor.

But you don't.

You never do because you could stop Majorkas tomorrow if you had bipartisan pressure of the caliber that you're using in Ukraine.

All that pressure from our elites in the Senate and the permanent government that

explain over $100 billion Ukraine could have been applied to equally to other problems that are much more germane to Americans.

And they don't.

They don't.

Yeah.

Well, Victor,

there's a few more things on this Ukraine war I want to talk to you on, but let's take a break for some messages first and come back and we'll have a few more things on the Ukrainian war.

We'll be right back.

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We're back.

Victor, I was looking at the Federalists the other day, and there was a

article by Warren Davidson, and he was saying the three who want

the war to go on and on, or who will benefit from a long war.

And his three were this.

Putin, if the war goes on, Ukraine doesn't get into NATO, is what he said.

The military-industrial complex, and we always hear that argument.

And then China, and as long as the U.S.

is depleted by this war, China grows stronger.

What are your thoughts on those beneficiaries of a long war?

Hold just a second.

Can we stop it for a second?

Yeah.

okay.

So, I want you to rephrase that again because uh,

the dog came right up to the door.

I thought he was going to bark, and I got up for a second.

Can you just go?

Okay, yeah, okay, just go.

Okay, wait, so before Robert starts this up again, I said the three who want the war to go on or benefit from a long war are Putin, who keeps the Ukraine out of NATO by a long war, the military-industrial complex, and China, for whom the longer the U.S.

is kept into a war and depleted by it the stronger it grows

yes well

okay so

five four three two one oh wait oh

stop go back again

so i i'm having uh what do you call it

just cut out just a second

oh it's okay it's probably my side yeah okay well yeah

that's the problem just go back yeah just go back and do it again

Robert.

We'll just

right now, very quickly before we go back,

we won't have Putin and then you faded.

Oh, okay.

Before we go back.

Okay, so I said Putin wants to have a long war because he'll keep the Ukraine out of NATO that way.

Yes, yeah.

The military-industrial complex will benefit from a long war.

And China,

as long as the United States is depleted by the war, it grows stronger.

Okay, so do you need to repeat that or have you already said it?

No, I don't.

I've said all of that, so we'll just start with your...

Okay, okay.

So five, four, three, two,

one.

Well,

I don't know.

Putin is a beneficiary.

He made a strategic mistake when he thought that he could have a thunder road lightning strike to decapitate the government.

in Kiev and just absorb the country.

I think if you ask Putin today,

go back a year ago to February 23rd, would you do what you're doing now?

And he would say no.

I think he's sort of like Hitler, oh,

right around October of 1942.

He would probably say, oh, I shouldn't say he probably would.

He said to Gwadarian, if I had have known about the T-34s, I never would have went into Russia.

And then he talked about all the reasons why he didn't go into Russia.

And then he said, you know, they were going to attack all these crazy lies.

I don't think they were going to preempt.

That's a big controversy.

But my point is,

at this point, it's not in Russia's interest

to be in Ukraine in the narrow sense.

They've lost 100,000 plus dead.

They've lost over 1,000, maybe 1,500 tanks.

Their military-industrial complex is

exhausted, and they're going to have to continue to fight.

because if they they're an autocracy and if he loses prestige at home, he's in danger of being removed because there is no constitutional system.

And he's, you know, the Chinese are looking at him right now, and the South, and the North Koreans, and the Iranians, and the Syrians are thinking, hmm, should we still stick with this guy or not?

So I don't think he's benefiting anymore.

I think he would have had he been able to pull it off as he thought he could, and as apparently, our Pentagon insisted that he would.

our industrial military

well

uh up until now we were spending less on gdp um than almost any time in recent memory and they were sort of it you know they had this strange thing where they want all of the conservatives support the defense budget so we buy more weapons from them but then they're also woke But the woke social activism, social services aspect of the Pentagon is so huge now.

And I'm including benefits, retirement, bureaucracies, that there's less and less money for their weapons.

And because they felt in a cost-to-benefit analysis, the best thing for them to do was to sell $14 billion aircraft carriers and $5 million tanks and $150 million jets, we don't have very many of them.

And so this comes along, and a lot of what they're selling and and

you know producing are smaller stuff

artillery shells uh

you know ammunition for personal weapons mines all that stuff and they're really you know they're really gearing up for it they're really producing it and more importantly

in their view we're at a historical low as far as our reserves of javelins, our reserves of artillery shells, our reserves of everything.

So when this thing is over, they're going to get huge orders.

And so, yeah, in a very simplistic reductionist sense, anytime they make a product, it's like a farmer when he sends raisins

to the raisin packer and they're sitting out there and nobody's using them.

You want somebody to go, you know, and consume them because then you can replace them from the raisins that you have stacked up.

But if nobody consumes them, then they just sit there and the only way you can replace them is when they get old or obsolete or moldy or something.

So, yeah, it's in their interest.

And China,

it's very strange about China.

I think

anytime

it views the world as controlled by four centers of power: the United States and its Asian allies, Taiwan, South Korea, Australia, Philippines, and Japan,

the EU,

right?

The EU, itself, and Russia.

And anytime you can get all of those people fighting,

not you, but each other, and it's expensive,

that's in their interest.

So the idea that Europe now is sending a lot of its military wherewithal, such as it is, to Ukraine, and the United States is draining its strategic stocks to Ukraine

and Russia is bogged down.

It thinks it's the winner.

Absolutely.

They're the winner so far.

And they would love to see this go on for two or three more years

and the United States to be completely

depleted of its strategic missile capability.

It will have to put its shipbuilding on hold to supply all this weapons that we're consuming in Ukraine.

And they would like to see the EU

obsessed with Ukraine.

They would like, I think they would even, they don't want Russia to lose, that's for sure, because Russia's doing them a favor by occupying the attention of the West while they send over balloons and stuff.

And then

they're also looking at, because it's a laboratory like the Spanish Civil War was for Hitler and Stalin.

He's looking at this and trying to, they're trying.

As we're speaking right now,

strategists in China are trying to calibrate to what degree this was wise or stupid.

And it depends a lot on who wins.

So if Russia should win and have a spring offensive and they crack open the Ukrainian army and they just start spreading across Ukraine, then they'll probably invade Taiwan.

They'll say, you know what?

We have 1.4

billion people.

We have 10 times the population that Russia has.

I think Russia has 140 million, so 10 times that much.

So we we don't care about human life.

That's not the problem.

We just want to know if it's doable because Taiwan's across this 90-mile sea.

So they're looking.

And so it's valuable for them, too.

What they don't want to happen

is

for

Russia to be completely humiliated and defeated.

and Ukraine to be triumphant and push every Russian back beyond there,

and then the United States and the EU take a victory lap and then keep defense spending up at that level to replace their stocks.

And then Russia gets so pissed off that it sends a nuclear weapon in some fashion because they don't want that at all.

Not that they don't mine nuclear weapons, but they've got about 300 of them and we've got 6,800 of them.

And they don't want that threshold to be lowered until they get what they need.

And by the way, they're doing all they can 24-7 to build as many strategic nuclear weapons as they can.

A lot of it with American technology they steal.

Isn't the problem with these proxy wars that they tend to kill a lot of civilians?

And I don't know if it's more than World War II, for example, but

wars in the past didn't tend to involve the civilian population.

But now these proxy wars in particular seem to take a high toll.

they did they did involve the Sophilian

population you know in the Thucydides history of the Peloponnesian War we know that from the period 431 until his narrative

runs out of gas and

I shouldn't say runs out of gas but stops abruptly in 411 that there are events that other

historical traditions that are that survive in places like Diodorus or Plutarch

we know that there were events that he doesn't talk about, but he does look at particular events that he thinks are iconic.

And, you know, the Median dialogue is one, because it wants to show the change into a ruthless imperialistic power on the part of Athens.

Or the expedition of Sicily, that famous thing in Book 7, Section 87, 6, where he says,

This was the most catastrophic defeat in Hellenic history.

The

invaders were defeated, humiliated, and lost in every aspect.

And few of many came home.

And one of them is Corsaira, modern-day Corfeu, where the oligarchs and the Democrats, and these were civilians, were fighting.

And it was kind of a revolutionary war.

This is where he took off in that famous riff on language, that words had to change their meaning under the the pressures of the time.

And it was kind of a brother versus brother, and then it was fueled by the oligarchs of Sparta and the Democrats of Athens helping their particular faction.

And in fact,

you're right about

civilians today, but I think it's always been true that a lot of these proxy wars begin, like Vietnam or Korea, over civilian

or civil wars over ideology or politics.

Often, and the country is split in two, or there's two factions buying for control of the country.

And that's what explains it and that means by definition there's a lot of civilians that are killed what's bizarre about this one is that russia just sends over missiles and artillery shells and blows up people you know blows up plants blows up civilian apartments kills and there hasn't been very many civilians killed in russia because putin has suggested as i said

that that would be a threshold When I said that was a threshold, I didn't mean that it's not, as I said, it's logical that they should do that, but what's logical and moral is very difficult to achieve here because

if you start doing what Russia did to you, it might be militarily effective, but at some point you're going to change this war into an attack on Mother Russia, and that never works out well

if you start doing that.

And so it is one-sided.

It's asymmetrical.

It's one-sided.

Again,

the only thing that I don't quite understand, I understand the neoconservative nation building, Victoria Newland, State Department, all that stuff, and people that I used to know very, Bill Crystal, Robert Kagan, David Fromm,

all those guys want

us to get involved and win and spread that.

I understand that.

But what I don't understand is the zeal and this cause that the left has picked up on.

I don't quite understand it because the left was always very critical of this.

And the left was always,

how dare you use American assets abroad when we have social problems at home?

Or who are you?

We're so bankrupt.

Who are us?

Who are we to say who's better than that person or that person?

We shouldn't get involved.

Or they're isolationists.

So this is very strange that they've adopted this as a cause celeb.

And as I said before, it's almost as if the Russian collusion petered out, the laptop petered out, it didn't work.

The impeachment, the clapper,

Trump is a Russian asset, that didn't work.

They've been humiliated.

It's all been discredited by the IG and by parts of the Mueller report and the media finally.

So now they think, well, Putin really was horrible.

We were right.

He was horrible.

So this is what we're going to prove.

We're going to get rid of him.

Yeah.

And I'm just, as an observer, I'm just flabbergasted because I went back the other day and retrieved my name plus Russia

from 2008

to the present day.

And I think I wrote over 30 essays, and they all were the same.

They were sort of boring and monotonous.

It was, be very careful about reset.

No, George Bush did not antagonize Putin.

He went into Georgia over Ossatia.

That was a right thing to do to sanction him.

No,

this idea you're just going to push a jacuzzi button in Geneva and everything's going to be all right.

And why don't you reply?

Where is the Obama administration in 2014 when he went into eastern Ukraine?

Why are you letting him take Crimea?

Why don't you sell the Ukrainians' javelins?

Why don't you up the sanctions on the oligarchs?

Why don't you get out of that stupid blank-blank asymmetrical missile treaty?

Why, if the Russian mercenaries or the precursors to the Wagner group are bullying, attacking our assets in the Middle East, particularly Syria, why don't you just lower the boom on them?

Why don't we flood the United States, our allies, the world with cheap oil?

We can do it and crash the world price of oil and make Putin go broke.

That's what I wrote.

And then Trump came along and I thought, wow, this is pretty good because he's doing this and more.

And then I thought, wow, how can they be calling him a Russian stooge asset when he's 10 times tougher on Russia than was Obama?

Is it because he said stupid scrap that he was kidding?

Like, hey, Putin, if you have Illinois

emails, tell us

what's in them, you know, that kind of stuff.

And then the next day, New York Times, Donald Trump seriously suggests that the Russians should, who he's he's in communication with, should disclose.

You know, that's, I guess that's what it was.

But he was so much harder

on

Ukraine than was the Clinton, Obama, Biden, Nexus.

And by gosh, we wouldn't be talking about this, Sammy, if they had have reacted in 2014.

And it's almost as if there's some motto carved in a building somewhere in Washington that said, thou shalt not criticize Barack Obama.

Commandment two, thou shalt never bring up the hot mic conversation in Seoul.

Because that's what he did.

In March of 2012, he said to Mededved, he said, tell Vladimir, by the way, and nobody thought they could hear him, so it was inadvertent and therefore honest.

He said,

This is my last election.

If you be flexible and give me some space, I'll be flexible on missile defense.

And that's what happened.

He was flexible and dismantled missile defense.

Putin did not go into Crimea and embarrass him.

He did not go into eastern Ukraine and embarrass him.

Obama got re-elected.

Putin got his missile system canceled, and then he went in.

And then Obama didn't do anything.

So that would be...

If that had been Trump, that would have been an impeachable offense for collusion.

Because that was a deal.

That was a deal that the president of the United States used his personal interest of being re-elected at the expense of the United States national security issue, which was a joint project

in Eastern Europe.

I think our ambassador, Rick Raber,

during the Bush administration, had worked very hard to establish the basis for a missile defense system with the Czechs.

In Poland, in Poland, we threw it away.

We threw it away.

We did not want to antagonize Russia.

And for those very people who were the architects of that reset, and I won't mention any names because some of them are my colleagues, but the very fact that they were the architects of that, and then for them to turn around and call people soft on Russia and assets and poodles is disgusting.

It really is.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, it certainly feels like today that

the United States is like a pincushion, that Russia and China are just poking at it and trying to see if it's going to turn around.

Well, if you were trying to buy it.

Yeah, if you were the left and you looked at the world right now,

you would say the following.

What does China have on Joe Biden?

What does he have on Joe Biden?

Because

he does not.

get tough on sanction.

He won't discuss the origins of the Wuhan virus.

It's taboo.

We all know it came from the lab.

Yet every member of that damn administration keeps clinging to the lie about some pangolin or bat or something.

He won't talk about this balloon.

What is it?

When he went over there and was vice president with

Hunter and they got all these millions in Chinese investment, is that it?

I don't know.

I'm not saying I believe that, but that's exactly what they said about Trump.

Yeah.

Well, I was going to conclude this by asking you what you expect from the state of the union next week, but you just started.

What do we expect?

I know what we're going to expect.

What?

Well, there was

two polls this last week.

Every, let me repeat that, every major issue, Joe Biden is underwater.

He has less than 45% on the border.

He has less than 45% on Ukraine, believe it or not.

He has less than 45% on the economy.

He has less than 45%

on social relations within the United States, i.e., race.

He has less than 45%

on energy.

Okay, so

he's not going to say,

I got you 7% inflation, although today he said inflation's going down.

I think you better wait on that one.

But my point is,

he's going to talk about that he created a lot of jobs and he created a lot of jobs, I said, because people are looking for second jobs.

And more importantly, we were in a depressed economy after COVID.

He came in and

people,

at least some of them, started to see their COVID entitlement support under him start to taper off.

And they're re-entering the workforce.

And inflationary wages are so high now that you're starting to attract people back into the workforce.

But it's not because we have dynamic new industries industries or stuff like that, or we're robust.

The interest rates on a home, a 30-year home mortgage in some places, are already 7%.

When it gets up to nine, and they're going to raise rates further this year,

that's going to kill the housing market is overpriced and not moving, but it's not in free fall yet.

Give it another three months when somebody purchases a house for sale and says, this is a million-dollar house.

I know because I bought it for a million dollars two years ago.

Yeah, it's not.

It's worth worth $600,000.

And you can put it on the market for nine months if you want, but you're not going to get that million dollars for it.

But they haven't got to that point yet, is what I'm trying to say.

And that point is when, oh-oh,

I don't have any money.

I got to move.

I got a job out of state.

Or my gosh, my mom is in a rest home.

I need the money.

Or my kids are in school.

I got to pay their tuition.

I got to get unload this house.

When that starts to happen, when they get into a fine, and that's happening, just starting.

But as you look at the data,

then we'll see a bad economy.

So, what is he going to talk about?

He's going to.

Well, you know what he's going to talk about.

He did it right before

ultra-maga, ultra-maga, ultra-maga, the ultra-maga agenda, Donald Trump, the ultra-magata, the far right, da, da, the house extremists, the house people who didn't pass Build Back Better point 2.0,

Inflation Reduction Act 3.0.

It's the right wing, the right wing, the right wing.

That's what he's look at his face when he talks.

When he talks about what he's done, it's going to,

Joe Biden,

I've been created more jobs than any other president in history.

And then look at his face when he talks about MAGA and Trump.

And that MAGA and the semi-fascist act.

That's the only thing that prompts him.

And he's always been that way i went back and looked at the tapes of the

of the robert bork hearings and the clarence thomas hearings and the only time he got animated is when he went on the attack on board on bork and thomas and he's always been that way he he really doesn't he really is a

if you the poor truck driver that tried to swerve from his first wife when she, I think, entered the intersection, He went after that guy.

He was merciless.

He's merciless.

He's not a nice person.

And so that's what animates him.

Yeah.

Well, I remember last year, he just said everything was going great and had all the, you know, the economy and the,

I don't know, even, I think he might have even suggested policing, et cetera.

And anybody looking at the

United States at the time would be like, that was just a complete lie.

So I just expect him to do another

as well yeah but i don't think he'll talk too much about the stuff that where there's hard data he'll say things like gas i think he will say well gas prices are going down i mean they're not going to go down where they were when 235 or 240 nationwide when he came into office and you know interest rates are starting to taper off and inflation is starting to redo he'll say that

starting to but hasn't or that all the indicators are positive or robust job job growth will power the economy, that kind of stuff.

Yeah, but it's not, but it's going to be,

you know,

the ultra mega, the ultra mega, the people who want to take away the back all the abortionists,

the people who don't want Tommy, your son, to get a student loan forgiven.

You know, we have people who are working six jobs and they took out some money.

All they wanted was to go to school and they were late on a payment.

And there they go.

They don't allow us to give them, you know, a little bit of help, that kind of stuff.

Yeah.

And then the Republicans are going to shut down.

All they want to do is shut down.

They just want another tax cut for Roots.

We know what it's coming, is other words.

And it will be mumbled.

And he'll be pretty robust for the first 10 minutes with his Adderall and 20 hours of sleep.

And then after 10 minutes,

it'll be that kind of, I don't know what to call it, slushy.

I mean,

after I had a bike accident, you know, and I had 10, what, 70 stitches, 70 of them inside my, sewed my lips together.

I shouldn't talk because I have

trouble pronouncing words now because I have, you know, dead spots in my lips and the nerve damage.

And my cheeks are all, you know, they're scarred inside from they went in.

So I'm very sympathetic to that.

But I.

That being said, you can't understand 50% of what he says.

It's not because he's meandering.

It's that's, you know what I'm talking about?

That, I don't know what it is, is it kind of reflux breath or

slurring his words?

Slurring.

Yeah, slurring.

He's just kind of elides over words.

Yes, I think that's it.

It would be as if I said, it was like,

I'm going to,

you know, that's what it is.

And so I, and I guess it's, you got to get a hand it to the left.

They have really manipulated this to their advantage that any

incriminating development.

Oh, the investigation is over.

We found some classified documents in the University of Penn office in a secure location, but now the investigation is over.

There were some more papers that showed up in the Biden residence, but they were in a secure location.

There were some that appeared in the library.

There were some that appeared in the garage, that kind of stuff.

When you look at all that, he just says, what I'm getting at is when people like his press secretary do that and they ask him, because these are very embarrassing revelations.

Then you think, the guy doesn't know where he is.

He shakes hands with people who don't exist.

He hugs bunny rabbits.

He forgets who he is.

He talks to a dead person, a dead congressperson in an audience.

And then the other day, where's Doug?

So that's been very effective because people say, you know, I don't think he did know when he took out his Senate papers.

I don't think he did know when he took out his vice presidential papers.

I don't know whether he ever knew anybody that worked with Hunter.

I don't know if Hunter took out a whole file of classified documents to bone up in Ukraine.

Joe wouldn't know.

See, it's very effective, the fact that he's non-composed.

Yeah.

And you don't think of the paradox of that.

Paradox.

You've got a president of the United States that doesn't have the same level of cognitive ability as most people in the United States.

And he's dealing with the Russians and the Chinese and the EU and the Arab world and all of these

challenges.

And he's not up to, you know, were,

I don't know, a kindergarten teacher.

And

yet.

That's an advantage because when everything goes to hell, he says he doesn't know what's going on.

It's the biggest para, it's the weirdest thing in the world.

You think at some point, somebody in the Democratic Party would say, you know, he did his job.

He was an empty vessel, and he got us over the finish line, and we took over and tried to ram down the throats of a bewildered America, a hard left socialist agenda.

So he did his job, but now

he's worn out.

We need another vessel.

So we got to find somebody else.

Maybe Gavin Newsome, I don't know who, maybe Bernie Sanders, but he's getting to the point of embarrassment.

But they're not.

And I guess that's because

when they look at Spartacus or Pocahontas or Bernie or

Buttigieg, I think I saw he was leading in one poll after his tremendous successes as Department of Transportation head.

And by the way, I just came out of LAX and walked in the door, and all the power went off for almost an hour with canceling.

Can you imagine every single electrical outlet out at one of the major airports in the world?

And

Mayor Pete didn't have much to say the next couple of days.

But my point is this: that they don't have a lot of other people.

And so I guess they're going to say he's president.

And

when the president is an incumbent, he has the power of the presidency.

And you can see what the power of the presidency was during the midterms.

If he got in a jam, then he can promise amnesties for loans and dope, or he can drain the strategic petroleum reserve to get the price of gas down.

President can do a lot of stuff.

So that's something I guess they're thinking about that's on the plus side of another otherwise long negative ledger.

Yeah, and the presses can get clips of him where he sounds very lucid.

So the left-wing presses are going to play him as, look at how lucid he is.

And that's what their constituency will see.

So we'll see who's got the greater constituency, I guess,

in the long run.

I think so.

Well, Victor, we better end it here because we're way over, but it has been a really fine time with you today.

Thanks, so, thank you so much.

And I'm sure your listeners would like to thank you as well.

Okay, thanks everybody for listening.

Much appreciated.

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

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