The Dangerous and the Deadly

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, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler.

Victor Davis-Hansen is the star and the namesake, and he is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

We We could talk three hours today, Victor.

We can do three podcasts just on Joe Biden and the documents.

But let's just

talk a lot about him.

And then there's some other things to talk about.

There's a war in the Ukraine.

We've got the Dobbs leak, right?

Has still not been uncovered and probably never will be.

So there's plenty to discuss.

And we'll get to the Biden stuff right after these important messages.

If 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 home titlelock.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, titlelock.com slash victor.

Audival's romance collection has something to satisfy every side of you.

When it comes to what kind of romance you're into, you don't have to choose just one.

Fancy a dalliance with a duke or maybe a steamy billionaire.

You could find a book boyfriend in the city and another one tearing it up on the hockey field.

And if nothing on this earth satisfies, you can always find love in another realm.

Discover modern rom-coms from authors like Lily Chu and Allie Hazelwood, the latest romanticy series from Sarah J.

Maas and Rebecca Yaros, plus regency favorites like Bridgerton and Outlander.

And of course, all the really steamy stuff.

Your first great love story is free when you sign up for a free 30-day trial at audible.com/slash wondery.

That's audible.com/slash wondery.

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

Victor, Joe Biden, who was out in your neighborhood recently,

out there in California, maybe you want to talk a little bit about that at some point in this podcast,

says,

no regrets.

There's no there there about where these documents, these classified documents, ended up, how they ended up.

Victor, there are so many aspects of this

controversy, and you can pick them apart and do whatever you want.

The listeners want to just hear Victor talk, but if I can say this, to me, there's the search and how this search for the document has been compromised.

There's the China angle on all this.

I sent you this document that

Lindsey Graham had put out that UPenn has gotten $70 million from Red China.

Yeah, he worked for the Chinese.

He just had a front man called the University of Pennsylvania.

Yeah.

And then

there may be another front with the University of Delaware because there's a Biden institution.

No, there's two Biden centers.

They never taught a class at either one of them.

Yeah.

And then there's the, you know, the media, the media interest in this.

Why all of a sudden when will it win?

So you have at it, Victor.

Tucker Carlson's been pounding that point.

I think I made it in a column two weeks ago.

There's a reason why

suddenly the heart throb of that Washington incestuous pressroom Kareem

Jean-Pierre is all of a sudden frazzled,

off-putting, obnoxious, stonewalling, and she's getting feedback.

Why are they doing that?

Because they're willing to go with the Hunter laptop disinformation lie.

They were willing to go with the Russian collusion lie.

They were willing to go with the Nunes

majority report was flawed lie.

They lie all the time.

Not now.

And I think Tucker has it more or less right that

Biden, I mean, he was kneeling on one, you know, did you see him on TV?

Was it the Warriors or the Golden State or whoever it was in that photo op?

He was kneeling on one knee like he was some kind of

game of thrones minor

vassal or something.

But he's starting to get embarrassing, is what I'm trying to say.

And

he's peaked at about 43, 44 with all of his supposedly strong momentum.

I don't know what he's done.

He's just borrowing more money and more money.

And he didn't lose the midterms, I guess, in the Senate as it was supposed to or as bad.

And they've tried to

make him into aviator Joe that he's confident.

But

the point I'm making is they're starting to leak.

And they feel that his time has passed.

In other words, he served a vital function as an empty vessel to carry across a Marxist neo-socialist agenda, the Elizabeth Warren, the Obama, the squad, the Bernie Sanders agenda, which we're suffering from right now, and give it a thin patina of respectability and old Joe Biden from Scranton.

And then he was supposed to sort of,

you know, just go through the motions, which he did.

But he can't go through the motions anymore.

So they find him expendable and they'll look for somebody else.

I don't know who that will be because maybe it'll be Camilla Harris.

I'm going to have a hard time ditching a vice president that you announced in advance that you wanted a black woman, you got a black woman,

and suddenly you're going to get rid of her.

That'll be very difficult to pull off, except she's so obnoxious that her black supporters that feel that race is the end of everything, it's the touchstone of everything, they will

probably support her to the very end.

As far as Joe Biden, there's just a general rule.

Every single time, the NPR, PBS, CBS, NBC, New York Times, Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN says the following, of course, there is no correlation between the Biden intelligence shortcoming and the Trump.

And when they do that, that is

surety that there is

a great deal of difference, but not the great deal of difference that they think.

It's much worse.

And this is the reason why.

And people have hit this nail so much.

Donald Trump was a president.

He had a whole post-president security detail.

Joe Biden wasn't.

And

you can say that, you know what?

I declassified him.

I didn't, you know, maybe you can argue whether he left a formal memo or whatever, but that is in theory possible.

The second thing is when you look at that garage deck, you're trying to tell me that's easier.

It's easier to get into Mar-Lago.

I've been to Mar-Lago.

I didn't see Trump there.

I went for a dinner.

It had nothing to do with Trump.

But believe me, it's got a lot of security.

Are they trying to convince us that a person who wanted to improperly look at or examine papers would find it easier to get into Mar-Lago?

than that garage.

That is absurd.

And number three is that the FBI,

the FBI made a whole phony photo of them.

They were everywhere.

They had a raid.

They put the papers and scattered them to make it look like Trump had done.

They didn't do any of that.

They didn't even contact.

They just let the lawyers handle everything who had no security clearances.

And then

Merrick Garland said he couldn't address these questions because he wasn't going to leak.

That was supposedly why we didn't hear it during the midterms.

Ongoing investigation.

That didn't stop them with Trump.

No sooner had the FBI gone in there than the DOJ and the FBI were leaking that it was nuclear codes, nuclear secrets.

Donald Trump

may have wanted to monetize and sell things.

He had letters that were embarrassing, they said, from Kim Sung-un.

We heard all of these crazy things.

None of them ever substantiated.

None of them ever apologized for.

And that was very different.

And then as far as commenting on an ongoing investigation, the President of the United States said on 60 Minutes when he was asked, What do you think of Donald Trump handling of classified documents?

And he should have said, This is an ongoing investigation of my administration.

And I can't comment on it.

Instead, he said it was unfathomable.

It was, you know, he just attacked Trump right in the middle.

And Trump's not guilty yet of anything.

I don't think he ever was guilty.

And so I could go on and on, but it's much different.

And another thing is, Donald Trump is a likely,

I don't know because, well, he is a candidate and he could be a nominee.

And he would be running against Joe Biden.

Joe Biden is the president.

He has a conflict of interest.

So the president sent the FBI into the home of a likely

potential, whatever term we use, presidential rival in 2024.

But

Joe Biden was investigating himself, his own DOJ, his own FBI,

his own lawyers.

That was all an in-house operation.

So there was no reciprocity.

He didn't say,

the way that I treat my potential rival in the next election is going to be the way that I treat myself.

In other words, it was, I'm going to punish this guy and make him look like a blank, blank idiot, and I'm not going to do anything because

I can get away with it.

So it's just so asymmetrical.

And it's just the way that these people grasp for straws and they try to plead,

you know

that they're embarrassed.

And they would have been better off just stonewalling it like they did the Hunter laptop.

I don't know why they didn't call up the old Twitter or

the present Facebook or tell Google, hey, Google, make sure on the searches you don't have anything

that comes up about the Biden garage.

Or, hey, Mark, you gave $4.19 million.

Why don't you just work with the FBI and squash these stories?

That's the way they usually do it.

And so there must be some kind of internal rivalry within that White House or that administration or DNC where half of them want to use the bureaucracy and weaponize it to preserve Joe Biden, and the other half wants to weaponize it to get rid of him.

Victor, do you think the search itself of the Biden documents, which

I don't think I'm of any heightened intelligence than anyone else listening to the show,

but it really shocks me how

corrupt the investigation seems to be so far.

But do you think it's too nuanced for much of America to care about?

We send in these guys who are most lawyers who get all their fingerprints all over.

Yeah, I think they don't.

The details are not yet.

It's like Watergate.

Remember Watergate?

People forget that Watergate was known.

It was known before the 72 Nixon re-election, and he won by a landslide.

In fact, I think that was the largest victory of any presidential candidate in the West.

Yes.

And they knew about Watergate.

I think it had been reported in August, but it didn't register.

This hasn't registered.

But like Water Day,

it's not the actual burglary, to use a trite phrase.

This thing

is opening up discussions of things they don't want to be discussed.

And one of them is this multi, multi-million dollar gift.

that was fronted by the University of Pennsylvania, who's like a mafioso consortium, skimmed off their their percentage, and they put this phony think tank, and then the Bidens were at the trough along with the potential Biden government in waiting.

And it was funded in large part by the Chinese.

And so that is something that will have to be investigated.

The other thing that people aren't talking about yet

is

the papers go from the White House to the Biden Center, which has been been inert for a long time.

And we're talking about six years.

Another asymmetrical point is that Trump's papers were only out of there for about a year and a half when all this started to break, maybe a year and three quarters.

But this stuff has been going on for almost seven years.

These papers have been exposed and they've been sloppily kept.

But nobody has explained yet how the papers went from the White House.

Some of them went to the Biden Center.

Some of them went to the Biden home.

Some went to a room in the Biden home.

Some went to the

library.

Some went to the Carvet

garage.

And then we get another something that's much more incriminating as the Chinese

conduit is, and that is that Hunter Biden was paying to rent his own father's home $50,000.

I'm sorry, but you don't rent houses in Delaware for $50,000 a month.

And some of that, there's been some discussion that the exact sum shows up on some documents, which suggests that maybe he was laundering

the

Hunter Biden, burismic, China, Russia shakedown, Ukraine shakedown, and giving the money to his father, while at least on one affidavit, he claimed that he owned it, the house, which Joe Biden is on record that he owned.

And then it's a very simple matter to see if Joe Biden reported that income, which Hunter Biden apparently did

as a rental fee.

And I don't think he did.

The preliminary report said he said it was something like $19,000.

I don't know what it was, but he vastly and deliberately under.

That's tax fraud.

So there's tax fraud, there's a Chinese connection, and then we haven't got to the $64,000 question.

What's that?

Why did he have these documents out in so many places and what was on them?

All they will say is they can speculate from A to Z on Trump, but they will only say, well, there was a matter of Ukraine and there was a matter of

China and there was a matter of, I think it was the U.

Oh, Iran, Ukraine, and the UK.

But my point is,

what were the papers?

I know they were going to say it's classified, but can't they tell us what was the general area of concern?

Why did the Bidens have access to it?

And was Hunter Biden?

He was apparently living in this house where these papers were unsecure, and they kept moving around.

I mean,

it's consistent with the Biden modus operandi of Ashley Biden's mobile diary and Hunter's multiple laptops that keep getting lost.

So I guess what I'm trying to say in this circumlocution is, did Hunter Biden or Joe Biden or Joe Biden's brother use classified documents to bone up on classified information about foreign governments by which they thought it would give them an edge or an advantage in their transactions?

And that's what I'd like to know.

I think everybody would.

Because if that's true and Hunter and the Biden family don't have security clearances, I don't know if Joe Joe Biden has a security clearance.

I'm not acquainted with law that if a vice president for the rest of his life has a security clearance or not, or it has to be renewed.

But the point I'm making is there was a reason why they took those documents out, and they haven't given us a convincing explanation.

They said he was frazzled, it was a rush, or he was going to write his memoirs.

which he did and had them ghostwritten.

So

there's some things they don't want to talk about.

Otherwise, they'd be transparent.

They would have said, Yeah, this is what happened.

Or they would have just announced before the election, said, You know what?

We found some papers.

We called the FBI.

They went over and got them.

Big deal.

Everybody, you know, Hillary and Trump and me, and we all

get confused by the law.

But the FBI went in and got them, and they have them.

And it's no big deal.

He would have said it that on November 2nd when they notified the DOJ.

Should have got on that day.

By the way, on the Biden family, I saw a clip the other night on Fox.

I don't know what show it was, but it was another brother, Frank, who's down in Florida.

He's probably low rent compared to

Jim Biden, but he's getting his beak wet

by involvement with the family enterprise and using the brother's name and

minor league grifting.

And then the sister, Valerie, runs that Biden Institute at the University of Delaware, which I've got to be confident there are people on the right who are trying to see, well,

what money is China or Ukraine or whatever hell else giving to that institution?

And how is that filtering down?

You know, the funny thing about this is we're all talking about this.

And it's in the news.

And it's been going on since Peter, I think Peter Schweitzer was the first person to break it.

He did.

Great book.

Yeah, he didn't get enough credit about the marisma.

And we had that strange talk.

Was it in Massachusetts at Boston University?

Or was it somewhere where Biden said, oh, son of a bitch, I got that guy fired.

I threatened to get him fired.

That's that brag about how he was

mad at the Ukrainian prosecutor that might have been investigating, I guess, his son or his family.

And he was bragging how he withheld foreign aid, much more egregious than anything that got Trump impeached for.

But my point is that this has been going on so long.

And if you ask the normal person, they'll say, yeah, he's corrupt.

If you look at the houses he has, the lifestyle he has, the money he has, it doesn't make sense.

He couldn't do it in just the period of 2017 until he was a candidate.

There wasn't enough time as a private citizen for the first time to make that huge amount of money, though he tried.

And so my point is that China does not give that amount of money to a former vice president unless they think there's a 50-50 chance that he will be a presidential candidate and maybe president, and it's going to be money wisely invested.

And of course, Joe Biden has backed off from the Trump confrontational attitude toward China.

And

we'll see, but

the family is obviously utterly corrupt.

We have the evidence that's on this crazy laptop.

When Hunter complains that nobody understands what he's done for the family and that he's paying Joe Biden's bills, and we now know that he paid him $50,000 a month to launder

this,

I guess, I don't know what, this shakedown family business, he gave $50,000, and then he calls him the big guy and the 10% guy.

I mean, what more evidence do you need?

He's utterly corrupt.

And the other thing about Joe Biden is people keep forgetting, They're always shocked how mean an SOB he is, that he tells Peter Doocy, you're a stupid son of a bitch, or he makes fun of people.

They all said Trump did, but Trump talked to everybody.

He couldn't keep out of the limelight.

He wanted to talk to every reporter he could see.

This guy insults people.

He's mean.

He's an ego.

egocentric narcissist.

Every story is about him.

Joey, my pop said Joey, my brother said Joey, Joey, Joey.

And then it's always this raggedaccio about corn pop and slamming the guy's head on a lunch counter and

the Walter Mitty stories of the semi

long-haul semi-truck driver.

Yeah, he BS'd that

everything.

Martin Luther King the other speech the other day, he BS the kid about going to

yeah, he just knows what he does is nobody remembers him all of his lies he's so senile that all of his lies that sank his previous two presidential runs which he had to apologize he regurgitates but he takes away the apologies so he's back now claiming that he was a long haul trucker he's back saying that he was a marquee college football player he's back saying

that he was arrested in South Africa.

He's back saying that he was an active civil rights.

There's a tape of him that said, you know, okay, I'm sorry.

I really wasn't a civil rights activist, as I implied.

Now

he's back to it.

Yeah.

Hey, do you know how you say Biden in Italian?

No, I don't.

Corleone.

Anyway,

that's an insult to the Corleone.

True.

One last thing, Victor, about Joe Biden.

I know you recorded a podcast with Sammy where you talked about the climate and weather situation out in California, but Joe Biden was out there to discuss that, amongst other things.

And you had a couple of remaining thoughts you want to get in.

Yeah, you know, this is what's happening in California.

We've never seen such a concentrated trough of storms.

It just keeps coming in.

And almost every day since before Christmas, it's rained.

And now we have not just about double the normal precipitation for this time of year, but double for the entire year, the seasonal year.

And yet, when you look at this very sophisticated but ossified and now inert, because it hasn't been expanded, it hasn't been kept up, but it was a jewel in the 1970s of these reservoirs.

They're not full, Jack.

They're not even at the 75%

where you cap them and you prepare for storage for the snowmill.

They're way down.

They're at 55%.

I went by the San Luis Reservoir.

It's way down.

And so what's happening is they're letting the water,

these flood-level delusions, they're going out to the ocean.

They're not banking them.

And the reason they're not, because they are wedded to a drought.

And why are they wedded to a drought?

Because they want control.

They want to

dismantle the agricultural

multi-billion dollar west side and cut off their water and let it revert to a natural valley fever, tumbleweed, dirty, dusty place that it was when I grew up before irrigated agriculture came.

And they want to cling to this myth of

man-made global warming is going to destroy the planet in 5, 10, 15, fill in the blanks, and therefore you have to give us all this power to outlaw natural gas stoves in California, natural gas heating, which is now outlawed.

It's going to be in new homes.

Diesel big trucks and pickups are going to be, you've got to give us this power, but you can't

believe the drought is over because the reservoirs are half empty.

And when summer comes, we're going to be right back with 40 million people.

And so in other words, what I'm getting at, we passed a ballot, top one, years ago that said build three big reservoirs.

And that was in there.

And they just, stonewalled it as the executive administrative swamp state did, just sort of broke the law and

mired in lawsuits.

And so, what I'm getting at is they deliberately don't care about the lives of 40 million people.

They don't want to bank water that would be precious.

It'll be 110 here in Fresno County in August.

And I mark my words, they will say that we're in a drought, even though these reservoirs will, they'll be full, but they could have been full all the way to December of next year or January.

And what I'm getting at is they're wedded to this idea.

So Joe Biden comes out, and

without missing a beat,

it's climate change.

When he came out last time, it was climate change because of the drought.

So, how can you win?

It's a historic drought, and it will never be back to a normal weather power because of climate change.

Take a deep breath.

It's a historical flood stage, California.

It's wet, and this is chaotic, and it's because of climate change.

How do you win?

Every single slight aberration from a historic norm is climate change.

Too cold, climate change, too hot, climate change, too wet, climate change, too dry, climate change.

And that's what's disturbing about it.

And he just, he didn't come out here and say,

How can I help

store water in California?

Shall I turn on the pumps?

So so the federal Central Valley Project, which is merged with the California Water Project, can start moving water from a wetter

northern California through the Delta, into the aqueduct, and fill up as quickly as possible San Luis Reservoir.

Can I do that?

Can I give you some federal money to finish Temperance Flat or the Seitz Reservoir in Sacramento River or maybe Los Banos Grandes down the road from San Luis?

Can I do that?

He doesn't say anything.

Is it climate change?

In the discussion, we're helpless, climate change.

And that's how they do this.

And

it's starting to affect everybody, I think.

I think that when you have a shortage of water when it's raining,

or you have a shortage of affordable fuel when you're sitting on the Monterey

shelf of natural gas and oil, it's huge, or when you're short of money to pay for electricity at 30 cents a kilowatt and you just plan to dismantle a nuclear plant you dismantle two prior ones then people are saying it's not in the stars it's in us we're deliberately in a suicidal pattern we're we're destroying ourselves and so this guy came right in the middle of it And somebody just said, climate change, Joe, just say climate change.

Don't get into storing water or helping the state.

So that's what he did.

And then they asked him some questions, of course,

softball questions, actually, about the documents and papers.

And everything's okay.

Move on.

There's no problem.

And I guess what he's saying is

it's my DOJ, it's my FBI, and it's not Trump.

So

we send the FBI after Trump.

We don't let his lawyers adjudicate what's

secure and once.

We leak, we photo-op,

and

we use the press to demonize.

And we don't do that with me.

And I'm president, therefore, I can do it.

These people, I think everybody should listen that these people, as I keep saying, I know I'm getting a broken record, but these people are dangerous.

And they are not Bill Clinton Democrats, which is bad enough.

They're not even Obama Democrats, and they're certainly not great society, naive liberals like LBJ or Hubert Humphrey.

These are

Jacobins, French revolutionaries.

They are Stalinists.

They're Orwellian.

And

they're very, very dangerous people.

And they're disciplined and they're organized.

And

they have

all during Russian collusion, somebody said the operative word is bombshell for the Nunes memo.

Or

bombshell for,

I don't know, the PP tape.

And then all of a sudden, you just turn on CNN, MSNB, bombshell.

Donald Trump urinated in a hotel in Moscow, bombshell.

And then it was the operative word this week is walls are closing in.

Walls are closing in.

Walls are closing in.

Walls are closing in.

That's how they operate.

Little automatons.

They remind me of commissars.

You remember they had that journal list scandal from several years back where everyone actually did get a memo.

And here's

the song sheet.

Oh, they sing on it.

There was no downside for all those journalists.

In addition to the journalists, there was the Podesta email.

Remember, he used the word password for his password.

And when they hacked into it, there were all those New York Times and these Washington Post people that were emailing Hillary Clinton

and Podesta.

What should I say about the campaign?

And then was it the guy that was at the,

he got promoted after that to the New York Times.

He said, I know I'm a hack for doing this, but can you give me some talking points that I can use in a story?

As if

he did that.

So it was pretty embarrassing.

It had no effect whatsoever.

They don't even make an effort anymore.

And so that's why you have to be, you have to, it's legitimate to say that if they're asking

anything other than a t-ball question to Joe Biden, there's a reason for it.

It's either that they're embarrassed of him and he's a liability now.

or there's a move, a more calculated backroom donor move to get him out.

Not because they're embarrassed.

They're not embarrassed of him.

If he was up at 60% right now and he was just babbling more than he is now, they would be fine with him.

But they're embarrassed because he's down at 43

and he supposedly had a good

month.

So they're going to, I think a lot of people are just, the only quandary now is who do they replace him with?

Yeah, well, enter Michelle.

Well, Victor.

Absolutely.

The last thing Rush Limbaugh said, I mean, I used to text with Rush almost every night.

He kept saying that in his text.

He was a very astute, prescient guy.

And everybody thought he was an entertainer, but

he had a political

sixth sense.

And I remember he said, remember, Michelle is in waiting.

And Obama wants a third term because he is considered now passe by these people.

And he was right about that.

Yeah.

Well, she would be another opportunity for people to prove that they aren't racist, as what happened with Obama in 2008.

How many people, like, oh, thankfully, I can put a lawn sign on and show it.

I am the virtue signal.

They can take their Ukraine.

This house is for Ukraine sign.

There's no racism in this house sign and substitute it with, never been proud of my country.

They always raise the bar on me.

This is a downright mean country.

We got to read her dissertation.

Well, speaking, you mentioned Ukraine, Victor, and that's another topic we were going to get to today.

And it looks like

there's a Russian offensive about to begin.

So let's get your thoughts on what's happening on the other side of the world there right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Hanson Show.

I'd like to encourage our listeners to visit VictorHanson.com.

You'll find links to all of Victor's appearances on other podcasts and radio shows, the things he writes at American Greatness and other entities, and the things he writes exclusively for VictorHanson.com.

They're ultra articles.

How can you read them?

Well, if you subscribe, you can read them.

If you don't subscribe, you can't read them.

And if you're a Victor Davis-Hanson lover, you're going to want to read them.

So five bucks gets you in the door.

And $50,

the reduced rate for an annual subscription.

Right now, there's a, I don't know if it's at the end of the series, but it's part four of What the Left Tells Us About the Left, another

great series of

original and exclusive thoughts that Victor does for.

Again, VictorHanson.com.

Victor, I was looking at a Drudge Report headline: Putin's secret attack plan would be Ukrainian nightmare.

So it seems like an offensive is brewing.

The Ukrainians are demanding more money.

I thought I

don't know if it was an analyst talking the other night on Fox to the effect of needing $400 to $500 billion in additional military aid.

Something about Germany will not give tanks unless America gives tanks.

And

also, Putin has unleashed these

Russian criminals, prisoners, and they seem to be

being somewhat successful where they're engaging so far.

So anyway, the war that seemed like it was going to be over and everyone was about to see Ukraine's one and winning.

It

hasn't happened and things might go south.

Yeah, I mean, I've been trying to say that.

It reminds me of that scene in the seventh book of Thucydides when the Athenian fleet has decided that they have one last chance to save this terrible expedition to Sicily, and they're going to put all of their triremes into the great harbor of Syracuse.

You can still see it today.

And they fight, and you don't, the people, the army is lined up on the shore.

And every time the Athenians sink

a Syracusan ship, they say, we're winning, we're winning, we're winning.

And then then when they

get, we're losing, we're losing, we're losing,

because they have the point is he's trying to show how emotional it is, and nobody has the ability to ascertain what's really going on.

And we saw that with Ukraine, you know, it was Putin, Putin, Putin, Putin was going to take Kiev, you know, and then they didn't.

And then it's, oh my God, Zelensky's Churchill, and we're going to give it.

And there were people where I worked and said, this is going to be over by Christmas because they're now pushing this corrupt, incompetent.

And no one just said,

rule number one, look at the comparative resources.

The reason that Zelensky is still fighting is because of NATO and the United States is providing weapons and capital because Russia has 10 times the GDP,

almost four times the population, 30 times the territory.

As long as they're willing to do that, they can have a Verdun Stalingrad's Somme stalemate.

But we're starting to see that this warm winter is getting a little colder in Germany, and they don't have, and they're right on the verge of a border with Russia, and Russia's talking more and more promiscuously that they're not going to lose.

If they're going to lose, they're going to use nuclear weapons.

And that has frightened some of our allies, and we're back home, and people are pointing out, you know, you said 100 million and then it's 200 million.

You say you're not going to give Abs tanks, but you're giving mobile, what we would call in World War II parlance, tank destroyers.

In other words, it looks like a tank.

It's got a mobile platform.

It's probably got 150-millimeter cannon on it.

It looks just like an Abrams, but it doesn't have the armor to the same degree.

But it's pretty much a mobile artillery platform.

And the Germans are saying, well, you're not giving Abrams, so we're not going to give our leopards.

And the Leopard was sort of designed to nullify the latest, I guess they're called T-90 Russian tanks.

So the idea is if Zelensky can get 200 or 300 of these German tanks that are in the hands of NATO allies, then they can stop this offensive and blow them up, and they would do pretty well.

But Germany doesn't want to do that because they feel that Putin is telling them privately that we view that as an escalation.

And we are bewildered here in the United States because, on the one hand, we know that during the Vietnam, going back to the Korean War, there were Russian pilots flying MiGs in Korea.

There were Russian pilots and Russian anti-missile battery operators all around Hanoi that were killing Americans.

They were supplying our enemies in Afghanistan, to a certain extent, Iraq.

So they do it all the time.

So the fact that we are equipping

the Ukrainians is a little different, but there is a couple of differences that we're not talking about, Jack, is that afghanistan was over in their territory but it wasn't uh it wasn't part of the form of mustang filiate union iraq was over in their territory vietnam was so all of these fights in which they have supplied our enemies they would say it's because they're in our back door if you had another Cuban missile crisis, we know how paranoid you guys got, but if you were fighting all the time in Latin America and the Caribbean and we were supplying them right on your doorstep, or if you were fighting over a former state that had defected, then you would have a different attitude.

We don't factor that in, but

there's some currency in that argument.

And so

now we're back where things are starting to favor the Russians.

It's hard to have a counteroffensive for the Ukrainians.

The Russians are dug in.

The Russians are close to their own border.

They have short supply lines.

The Russians are sending 300,000 more people up.

The Russians are trying to forge a sort of de facto Chinese, Turkish, Iran memorandum of understanding, and they even have India sometimes buying their oil.

So it's a very complex situation.

And then the question is, what is the assumption of Joe Biden or our bipartisan foreign policy

And I always look to see what Henry Kissinger says, because he does have a brilliant strategic mind.

And he said, I disagree with him, but the other day at Davos, he said there has to be some kind of strategic

breakthrough through negotiations.

And he mentioned that Ukraine might want to be in NATO.

I think that would be a mistake.

But you can see that if you sat down and you said, we're going to arm Ukraine to the teeth, we're going to give them all the defensive weapons so you can't do this again.

And then you said, but they're not going to be a NATO.

And then you could negotiate the Ukrainian territory that was annexed in 2014, compromise, plebiscite, something.

And if you don't want to do that, you say that's rewarding Putin, and all you're going to do is nullify the heroic sacrifice of Ukrainians and the 100,000 that may have died for nothing.

And if that's what you believe, then what is your assumption of victory?

What is the strategy?

What is it going to take, according to our American

people in the media and the generals and everybody, that they want to, as I understand it, Jack, they want every single Russian out of Ukraine, including those who have been there since 2014 when they invaded under the Obama administration with impunity.

So now the new strategy is, think about it, Jack,

Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama's reset

failed, but we're not going to mention all the ways it empowered and appeased Putin.

And then we were asleep at the wheel in 2014 when he grabbed Crimea in eastern Ukraine, but we're not going to talk about it.

But now anybody who says that we

should allow that to continue is a sellout.

He's a Putin appeaser.

It's just incoherent.

And what do they want to do?

How are they going to get every Russian out from 2014?

They're going to raid what?

They're going 450 miles into Ukraine now, destroy fuel and supplies and bombers.

And as I said with Sami,

they have prompted Putin to put air defense systems around Moscow.

And they have taken out a capital ship in the Black Sea fleet.

You're going to have to do more of that.

It seems to me.

If you want to get every Russian out, you'd have to do the following.

You'd have to get a lot of harpoon missiles, and you would have to blow up that entire fleet.

You would have to get a lot more drones, and you would have to blanket the skies of 400 miles within the Russian-Ukrainian border and hit supply trucks, convoys, supply depots, oil refineries, power plants.

And you would probably have to get a fleet of three or four hundred superior Western tanks and start having armor thrust into the borderlands to make them leave.

And that's all going to be presumed

that it will not incite Putin.

And you'll have to say to Putin, you've done this to us in the past during the Middle East wars or Korea, Vietnam, as they said.

You're not going to escalate.

We're not going to let you escalate.

So you do not escalate.

You do not talk about nuclear tactical weapons.

You don't this.

And I just don't think that's a viable strategy.

If that is the strategy, if that's not the strategy, I don't think we have one.

Right.

And then the strategy

after war is who's paying to clean up the mess?

Well, you know that.

You know that.

We're $31 trillion in debt.

So what Joe Biden is,

remember what the left is doing now with Joe Biden, is that we're paying $450 billion

in interest, and we're letting in $5 to $6 million illegal entries since he's president.

And the Heritage has some astounding numbers on the cost of that per person that needs immediate federal, local,

state

entitlements to achieve some similar parity.

But my point is,

we're going to borrow a lot of money.

We're going to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars and pay 6% on T-bills for it and send it over to Zelensky to bring back the 8 million people who fled, rebuild the infrastructure, the roads,

the apartment buildings, and then have him come and have him an icon in his green T-shirt tell us it's not enough.

Not enough.

Sorry.

Not enough.

Not enough.

And this is all predicated on the idea that the Ukrainian ambassador, if you go back to 2016, wrote an op-ed interjecting herself in a campaign, a pro-Hillary op-ed.

Mr.

Venman, Colonel Lieutenant,

I'm a lieutenant colonel, Representative Nunes.

Remember that exchange where he corrected Devin Nunes and said that he was actually a lieutenant colonel.

And

he was a U.S.

citizen, but he was offered the Defense Ministry post, we're told, three times by Ukraine.

And we had a lot of Ukrainians that have been involved in American politics, is what I'm getting at.

And

the first impeachment of the President of the United States was knee-deep in Ukrainian

intrigue.

I'll use that term.

And so,

and Ukraine is at war, so they basically have a de facto martial law where they filter the news, filter this and that.

And so, it's a messy, dirty war, and the left has glommed on to it, not just because of humanitarian.

Some of them are legitimately worried about, as I am, the 200,000 dead probably on both sides, but a lot of them see this as the magic key that unlocks the Putin door.

And they think, you know what?

We know that guy colluded with Trump.

We know that that laptop was Russian disinformation.

We know that that Nunes

memo was fake.

We know that James Clapper was right when he said that Donald Trump was a Russian asset.

And now, look at this, Ukraine.

We see Putin and he's getting what he finally deserves.

And that's how they look at it.

It becomes for them just weird.

All of these leftists that told us that anytime an American expeditionary force or supply ship or plane left our shores, it was imperialism and neocolonialism.

And now it's on to Moscow.

You know what I mean?

Well, they're destructive ideology, and here's real destruction.

They thrill to it on whatever level they can get.

And they libel anybody.

Anybody that has any legitimate doubts.

And I've had a lot of doubts at where I work and with other people, not about,

I'm very pro-Ukrainian, I want them to win, but I just don't want them to win at a cost that's going to destroy their country and get the United States in a nuclear showdown with a sick dictator that has,

I don't know, 5,600 deliverable and maybe 7,000 total nuclear weapons.

Putin has more nuclear weapons than all the countries in the world put put together.

We have about 53, we have about 6,000, and then 53 may be deliverable.

And then you add 200 here, 300 there, 400, India, Pakistan, China, France.

And

Putin's got more than all of that, is what I'm trying to tell you.

So you've got to be very careful in what you say and do.

But these people are just reckless.

And

where do we get the wherewithal?

It's sort of, okay, doesn't matter.

We're the United States.

We can get the next year's supply committed of Javin

anti-tank.

That's Ukraine's.

Don't worry about it.

Oh, the drones?

We're giving them all the drones.

Don't worry.

And you know what?

We just emptied 300,000 artillery shells in an Israeli depot that we use in conjunction with Israel.

If it's an extremist and it needs suddenly to have artillery in unlimited that doesn't matter, no problem.

We are sinking down as far as our ready

reserves and men and materiel, and nobody talks about it.

No one talks about it.

Well, Victor,

speaking of no one talking about things, no one seems to have talked about who

leaked the Dobbs memo, the Dobbs decision memo.

And we will get your thoughts on that right after

this final important message.

Back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

I'd like to make a little pitch for the thing I do.

The Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic publishes a thing I write.

It's called Civil Thoughts, a free weekly email newsletter that has a dozen plus recommended readings.

My hope is you subscribe.

You can do that at civilthoughts.com.

There's no advertising.

We're not making any money.

We're not asking for money.

It's just a little exercise in intellectualism.

And my hope is that the readers of Civil Thoughts will say, hey, I never heard of this publication, Unheard, UNHERD.

It's a British.

Oh, wow, great writer.

What a great piece.

Oh, Plow Quarterly.

What an interesting magazine.

What a great essay on this or that.

So that's my objective is to share interesting things I've come across in the previous week.

I think you'll like it.

Sign up at civilthoughts.com.

So, Victor,

the draft of the Dobbs decision, which was leaked,

maybe the first time that has happened in

well, not maybe not the first time, but in the last century of Supreme Court decisions.

And we're going to find who that leaker is and has not been found.

The Chief Justice came out this week and

no dice.

I don't know if it's shut down at the investigation, what there is in an investigation.

Sounds like it.

But

I mean, honestly, there's a finite people, a finite number of people that could possibly have done this.

I really don't believe

what it merited in response, investigative response, came close to what was actually done.

Anyway, Victor, what are your thoughts on this?

Well, I mean, it destroyed the trust of the court.

So I don't think any of the nine justices can trust any of the clerks, any, you know, meetings and oral give and take.

They should just assume that it's going to leak.

Sort of like the Trump administration, that anytime there were people

in the administrative state that were in meetings, you just should assume they were going to go out and leak.

So they were going to talk about whether it was too wet for Trump to take a helicopter.

Somebody was going to leak and say he said the people who died at Normandy were suckers, even though 29 out of 30 said he didn't say that.

So that's what the Supreme Court has been reduced to.

And then the left says, well, maybe it was some right-wing guy to leak it so that they couldn't back out.

Roberts couldn't get weak.

But

it's more likely that they leaked this to create, because that was their.

You just have to ask yourself, which particular side of the ideological divide has targeted in

non-traditional mechanisms, means the Supreme Court?

Which side wants to pack it?

Which side wants to go storm and protest around the

justices' homes?

Which side produced somebody who was,

which side was the potential assassin on?

Which side goes into restaurants and tries to force Kavanaugh out so he can't finish his dinner?

And if it's one side, then it makes sense that that side would see nothing wrong with illegally leaking what is essentially a classified document.

And so, yeah, I think the left did it.

I think they feel that

although it didn't stop the Dobbs decision, it galvanized people, and that momentum led all the way

to the reaction of the Dobbs decision and the midterm.

Into the midterm.

They think it's a success.

And remember about this administration, they have weaponized everything.

So if you're a DOJ lawyer, prosecutor,

and you've assigned somebody to work with the Supreme Court internal investigation team,

you're not going to ruin your career with all of these politicos and say, you know what, I'm going to go find this person, whoever it is.

You're going to just say, you know what?

Things happen.

And that's that's what this administration does.

You had Christopher Wray at Davos yesterday saying, you know what?

We have really started working with a very constructive relationship with Silicon Valley and social media.

And everybody said, yeah, you have.

We know about James Baker, and we know about Adam Schiff, and we know about your FBI 80 agents assigned to

trying to suppress the expression of American citizens stealthily and paying Twitter over $3 million.

And yet he he was bragging about it.

And so I think what's happening to our country is that young people that go into

social media,

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, Apple, Amazon, all of those places, or they go into levels of government, the FBI, CIA, DOJ, IRS, CDC, NIH, they just understand that you're not going to go anywhere unless you're going going to be woke or at least sympathetic to it.

Right.

And they make the necessary adjustments.

Well, Victor, a lot of the generals, which you've talked about many times, generals who

have as part of their career plan getting on a corporate board after retirement, it seems like if you're an FBI agent today, a modern FBI agent,

that

a post-FBI career in the Silicon Valley is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Oh, absolutely.

And

it's not just FBI.

It was the entire

Obama.

It was the entire Obama administration.

Remember the EPA director that had the

fake name, what was her name, Winsdorf.

And

she was writing and everything.

And then she

there was scandal after scandal after Obama's EPA director.

And finally, she left.

I think she ended up at at where?

She was an environmental

administrator for Apple, I think.

And so the whole,

wasn't Anthony Fauci's daughter working for Twitter?

She does, yes.

I think that Lisa Jackson, I may be wrong, but I, I mean, as soon as she got into hot water, they just bailed her out and packed her off to Silicon Valley.

It's kind of

Silicon Valley's taken the place of the old New York investment firms.

You remember when they wanted to get rid of Monica?

Did they call Revlon up or something to offer $80,000?

Just go over there and keep your mouth shut.

And that's what they do.

They just call those people with unlimited resources and they gravitate back out to Silicon Valley.

I'm sure, isn't John, where's Gin Saki working now?

I think she's working for, I don't know, but

that's a logical place she's

that will end up.

Hey, before we end, Victor, before we end,

I'm giving you an opportunity here.

Do you want to take a pot shot?

That should be wrong.

This is a wrong phrase, pot shot, but Alec Baldwin.

I had the temerity to ask you on a recent podcast about your thoughts on Prince Harry.

I got some feedback from some folks

on Victor talking about People magazine kind of stories.

But anyway, Alec Baldwin has been such a

pontificator and kind of an insufferable virtue signaler for the last 30 years.

And there's some comeuppance here for a lady that he killed and the other one that he injured.

All right, I'm babbling.

I'll shut up, Victor.

Do you have anything?

Anything you want to say?

Yeah,

I understand that they had a quote-unquote firearms expert, but she had the purple hair and all that.

So I'm not sure she grew up in a gun culture and understood the cardinal rule.

Right.

I think I was six years old when I got my first Daisy BB gun.

I was seven when I got my Crossman.22 caliber 177 caliber pellet gun.

And I was eight when I got my.22 short single-shot savage.

And then I think I was nine when I got...

to use a pump.22 and a 20 gauge break open.

And then a 20

and by the time I was 10, my parents would say okay if you want to go shoot rabbits go shoot opossum in the tree go shoot squirrels whatever you need to do go do and take the 16 gauge pump shotgun or the my point is that every single time that was uttered it was followed by this remember

every gun is considered loaded under all circumstances unless you double check it.

And even when you double check it, you don't point it at somebody and you never pull the trigger thinking it is empty okay so you have all of these Hollywood people who hate that gun culture and it's very paradoxical because they don't know anything about it so yes there should have been people that checked that and Alan Dershwitch has written all this but how could an anybody an actor pick up that gun And I understand they have to shoot at people in all these scenes, modern and ancient, Western and detective movie.

I get that.

But when you, before the cameras roll, why in the world would he not look at that gun and see what type of ammunition was there and what's the difference between a blank and a real bullet?

And I don't, I mean, why didn't he do that?

Or why didn't he shoot it once in the floor?

And you're going to say, well, nobody does that.

Well, everybody does who has guns.

I don't know any one serious hunter or gun shooter who has ever taken a gun and pointed it at somebody and pulled the trigger with the certainty, 110% that

it was the guess, I suppose, or the supposition that it was empty.

They either, if they're going to do that, and they never do that, they look to make sure that the gun does not have live ammunition.

And even if it doesn't, they don't point guns at people.

So that was a real gun,

obviously.

So I don't understand why you couldn't have a facsimile that makes, you know, that was being capable of doing that.

Right.

So

he's charged with involuntary manslaughter.

That seems to me quite appropriate.

And

he's a tragic figure because he does have, remember, there's been some movies where he has obvious talent, but he's become a character of himself.

He's a buffoonish character now.

And he's always in some psychodrama.

I remember he had his.

new wife who said that she was Hispanic or Latino and found out she just went out to a Spanish island vacation with her parents and was all made up.

She's speaking English with a Spanish accent, and she didn't really speak Spanish.

Just a joke.

She has seven.

I think they have seven.

He always has these outbursts.

They have that tape where he's yelling at his daughter.

Remember that?

Just bullying her.

Yeah, he called her a pig, I think.

Yeah, I mean, he's not a nice person.

He's not a good person.

He's

a complete hypocrite paradox.

I don't, I mean, this was a tragic situation, but ultimately he's responding.

The person who pulls a trigger, a gun, pointing at somebody, no matter what the circumstances is, has a degree of culpability.

I have never, I've had, in my upstairs, I probably have 12 guns all around.

I don't have any handguns because I have grandkids, but I have, I can swear at 69, I have never, ever pointed a gun.

at anybody and pulled the trigger.

Even when I knew that it was empty, I did not do that.

I've been so ingrained since I was six, seven, eight, nine that if you ever point a gun at somebody, I can even remember being told, when you walk with your friends from high school, and you know kids that are 17 with automatic 22s will have a tendency to shoot anything that moves.

My father always said, you do not point the gun at an angle at the ground.

You might hit their feet.

You do not swing the gun.

I don't want you to be with a group of young boys that have guns.

I'd like you, if they insist on doing it, you stick back from them and you do not do what they do because they will do something wrong.

And I think everybody's had.

I had Hunter's safety course when I was seven years old where we had, you know, my mom, my mom would take us after work and go out to the Readley High School gym and shoot 22 targets.

And we got lectured.

Ad nausea.

Don't do this.

Don't do this.

Don't swing the gun this way.

The idea that people without that training or that acculturation would just take a gun and shoot and say, it's not my fault.

It was her responsibility.

Yeah.

It's just absurd.

And people who say it's not absurd don't know anything about guns.

Yeah.

It's, you know,

I didn't pull the trigger either, which, so good.

I think it's really important for kids.

That's one thing I really like about Hillsdale College.

They

try to tell people that guns are a

part and parcel of the American experience, but they just don't preach.

They have an up-to-date, state-of-the-art gun range, and people take courses.

They learn how to do it safely, they learn how to shoot, they learn how to be responsible, and they neither glorify nor are terrified of firearms.

That's the way it should be.

And,

you know, there were people in the revolutionary period that said, you know, the

Bill of Rights, there's only one amendment that mattered, and that was the second, because that gave you the ability to protect yourself to ensure that all of the other amendments were not abrogated by government.

So it's essential, the Second Amendment.

But my God,

if you don't have people

who know how to use them,

it's sort of scary.

Well, Victor, we're just almost out of time.

And as we do every episode at the end of the podcast, we thank our listeners, no matter what platform they have come to this show on.

Thanks, especially if you're a new listener.

Well, I should say, especially if you've been with us for a long time.

Thanks to all.

Those folks who do download or listen through Apple or iTunes can leave ratings, zero to five stars.

Practically everyone leaves five stars.

Thank anyone who rates, thank you.

And some people leave comments.

And here's one.

And it's titled Just Joe.

And

he writes, I first discovered VDH listening to John Gibson radio over a decade ago.

Immediately, I realized I found a connection to one of the most important voices in modern life.

He's become part of my everyday since then, whether it is his books, podcasts, guest appearances, commentaries, and lectures, all make perfect sense to my beliefs, opinions, and what I believe should be every citizen's way of life.

Thank you for sharing your knowledge and life to better my own.

Now, if I could only pass you on to my young inexperienced naive woke children i would die a happy man that's joe joe sanja thank you joe and thanks everybody else i really like john gibson you know he i used to do his radio show a lot and he he had that four o'clock slot on remember that a real yeah a long time ago long time ago before uh who took it over i i don't know it was oh i think it was megan kelly initially that took over and she did a wonderful job.

But then he went on to radio, and I used to do a lot.

He's from Fresno, so we had a common

reference point.

At least he was in Fresno for large, but he's a wonderful person.

Okay, well,

hey, Victor, thanks for everything you shared today, and thanks again, listeners.

We will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening, and we'll see you next time.