Left Strategies: Delay, Distract, Delude

1h 13m

Listen in as Victor Davis Hanson and cohost Jack Fowler discuss the Fetterman-Oz debate, the attack on Paul Pelosi, modern ground troop tactics, and Alaska's ranked voting system.

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, the star, the namesake, Victor Davis-Hanson, 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.

Victor, do you know what November 1st is?

November 1st, the day after Halloween.

Yeah, it's all Saints' Day.

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Okay, but all levity aside, well, I don't know.

Maybe there's a little levity in the first topic we're going to talk about, and that's the

Pennsylvania Senate debates between Oz and Fetterman and we're going to get Victor's views on that debate right after these important messages

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

Victor, I have to believe you watched the debate or saw clips of the debate.

I was watching a little bit of

the Fox Media show, and this was a big, big topic of course

the um

fetterman comes on to the uh starts the debate by saying good night uh fetterman answers a question most awkwardly about fracking you know victor the post-debate analyses some people disregarded it totally ignored it msnbc type some didn't There's a lot of, oh, you know, I feel for him.

He shouldn't be up on the stage.

I'm a lot less sympathetic personally.

He and his wife knew exactly the condition he was in and I think actually tried to exploit his

health status in order to prevail in November.

Anyway, Victor, these polls have closed.

I saw a recent poll now that Oz is actually ahead,

quite a distance from where he had been weeks ago, months ago.

Victor, what are your thoughts on on, if you don't mind, on the debate performance itself and on the analysis of the debate performance well

remember that was it an nbc reporter or cbs that told the truth and said in the pre

interview chit chat he was incoherent and of course they turned on her

and she was redeemed by the actual performance i saw a lot of clips maybe 20 minutes worth 30 minutes

and

I think the narrative from the conservative side is these people should be ashamed of themselves for putting somebody out there.

But remember what their strategy was.

So, as far as answering your question, the debate was pathetic.

He had brain freezes.

When you start off and say good night, you know, for good evening, it goes downhill from there.

He didn't know what to say about fracking.

The thing that we remember about the debate is, had he been 100% cognizant, he still would have been a bad debater because he was a hard leftist who believed in a revolving door criminal justice system,

defund the police, no bail laws,

open border, you name it.

And he would have had to lie to win that election and say that he didn't believe.

And he tried to, but it was a force multiplying effect that he's cognitively impaired, which brings up this larger question of the strategy.

He delayed and delayed and delayed and delayed.

And then he finally conceded and he did two smart things.

By delaying, we had, what, 600,000 ballots or something that had already been cast.

That was the point of the delay.

Right.

And then second, the closed captioning took up, I don't know, 15%, 20% of the allotted time.

So he had less time in the debate while not saying that, you know, I only want 30 minutes.

He had the normal time span, but it really wasn't the normal time span.

And then, of course, that provided him with an excuse.

Well, he had to read the closed captioning.

Of course, nobody's had to do that before.

So, you know, it's how ridiculous is a left

in that trope.

We demand closed captioning.

We won't have as much time in the debate.

Good, but it's going to be a little bit more difficult because we're demanding something and then we blame Oz for it.

He's going to lose, Jack.

And what's happening is collectively across the country,

these

races, people are looking at the news cycle and they are seeing they can't afford meat this week, they can't afford eggs, there's supply chain shortages.

They go to the supermarket and they see gaps in the supermarket shelves, they go to the gas pump.

I just left, came back about an hour ago.

You should see what the psychosis is about diesel fuel.

People on a Sunday morning are filling up with diesel fuel, and it's nearly $7 a gallon.

And that's not sustainable.

So nothing is getting better is what I'm trying to say before the election.

And we know that's true because we look at the reaction of the left.

Whether it's Kerry Lake's opponent or whether it's Maghasson in New Hampshire or whether it's John Fedderman, none of these people want to debate.

Because if they were to debate,

Because they all either, as congressional representatives or senators or as local or regional candidates, they supported 100% the Biden

two years that have been an utter ungodly disaster.

So you would expect them to do one of two things.

I'm happy that we have this open border of 3 million people is great.

I'm happy that the crime rate is spiked because at least we have fewer people incarcerated.

I am happy that we're not polluting the atmosphere as much by shutting down Anwar, new federal leases, Keystone Council.

That's what I like.

And I like the inflation rate at 8% because these old money bags, rich people get their pile diminished every year by inflation.

Okay, they're not defending it, but they're not changing it.

They're not saying, okay, let's build, you know, 100 miles of the wall, or let's at least restart Keystone, or can't we at least get rid of this no bail crazy?

They're not saying that either.

So what are they saying, Jack?

They have a third alternative, and that is delay, distract.

And let's not debate at all.

Let's say that Carrie Lake, somebody broke into,

Ms.

Hobbes, somebody broke into my campaign.

It was her.

I didn't say that when they found that Culp had nothing to do with Karen Lake.

Or the Pelosi, we'll get into that perhaps later.

The Pelosi situation.

Oh, it's proof that right-wing rhetoric is causing mayhem in the streets for people.

Or it is January 6th, a Mar-a-Lago raid.

or the semi-fascist.

They won't talk about the issues that they supported.

They won't defend them.

They won't change their course.

They go mute.

And everybody was waiting for something.

And the little abortion tick gave them a little bit of breathing room, being the media that is fused with the DNC.

They turned that nothing burger into, oh my God, there is a blue wave after all.

You know, everybody from Michael Moore on was claiming it was going to be a big wipeout.

So that's over with.

And now it's just a question of prepping them for the result in the next eight days.

And we know what that is.

voter suppression.

Voter suppression, Jack, is not incompatible with record turnout, as we learned from the press secretary, Jean-Pierre.

It's not incompatible.

And we know that there's armed thugs at the balloting in Arizona.

Look at the Pelosi break-in.

And remember, Jack, this is just like 2018.

There was the Tree of Life tragic synagogue shooting synagogue where 11 people were killed.

And

that nut,

Bowers, or whatever his name was, he said that it was because of the Jews that were causing all the problem,

traditional classic anti-Semite.

But he also said that Donald Trump was too pro-Jewish,

i.e., his son-in-law is Jewish and his daughter is a Jewish convert.

And he said he's a globalist and he didn't like Trump.

And never mind, in the next eight days before the election, it was Donald Trump's rhetoric.

He's causing mayhem.

It was a world story.

It was all all over the world.

And then they had the shooting, I think, at a supermarket they added, and the mail-in bombing, even though that guy was a nut.

And before you know it, I think it really hurt them in the 2018 election because it was like, well, I don't know who to vote for, but I can't vote for all this violence because it's Trump.

And that's what they're doing now.

So they're going to try in the next eight days to translate the news cycle into a larger theme of Republican killing democracy or violence in the streets or ultra-mega violence.

It's not going to help them.

It's sort of like you're on the train track, you're tied to the tracks, the locomotive is coming, and you're screaming, you know, stop, or this isn't going to happen, or this is a conspiracy.

You're going to get run over.

And people are sick of these people.

We had a great experiment.

We were the lab rats.

They were the mad scientists.

They got their wish.

They got the House.

They got the Senate.

They got the presidency.

And they unleashed the mad scientists.

And we got these crackpot theories that no one in a right mind thought anybody took seriously.

Men as women in sports, dragged shows for kids,

canceling these really vital pipelines, shutting down oil fields, begging the Saudis, begging the Russians, begging the Venezuelans, begging the Iranians to pump a fuel that we have in abundance but will not.

An open border, it's not an open border, there's no border, three million people.

They had that mad scientist experiment.

We were the lab rats, they killed off the lab rats.

We suffered, and now they're not going to have any more lab rats.

People are going to say, you know what, I'm not going to go through this experiment again.

Electricity took over and they've destroyed the country, and we've got to get rid of them for very survival.

I think

these news reports

about how drastic the impact has been on school children

from lockdowns and masks in most places, two years behind.

It's different if your kid happened to be in a private school that was open.

Catholic school kids had

no deleterious effect, but the lab rat kids, hostages to the teachers' unions,

have just been a horror show.

I have a personal interest in that because I have a seven-year-old special needs granddaughter with a very serious Downs-like genetic problem called Smith-McGinnis.

And she went into COVID with toilet training and she was not melting down and her cognitive abilities were being developed such as they were.

And then bam, two years,

California schools shut down and she went in direct reverse and she has not recovered.

She's not recovered from her mental stability.

She has not recovered her cognitive of what she had.

They were really working with her.

And

she's never going to be the same, not for years.

And that's true of all of these people.

And I think you can even argue, Jack, that the country went sort of crazy.

So the George Floyd

whole aftermath was force multiplied by this shutdown.

Even the weird things, like there's a news this morning.

You know, I had the flu for two weeks, a really weird flu.

And I was looking in in the paper today.

It said, this is the earliest and most widespread flu they've had in decades.

And I think that was my own crackpot medical theory is, but it's been substantiated by experts from whom I've read that when you put people in lockdown for two years.

and you don't have their three or four cold exposures and one or two flu, their immune systems get flabby, right?

And now you're putting sort of an indigenous people sort of like, we're the Aztecs and

the flu is Cortez, and we're all vulnerable to being infected again.

So there's what I'm getting at is, and the cancer rate, the total death rate, what I'm getting at is there's so many

insidious incremental disasters that are hurting the body politic that all originated from

this policy of Dr.

Fauci's.

And I will say, I know I beat this drum and I know the leaders are the leaders, but if you put yourself back in 2020 on the eve of the election, anybody who just said what I was saying, and there were three or four very courageous people, as I keep saying, John Yannides at Stanford and Michael Levette at Stanford and Jay Bacharia at Stanford and especially Scott Atlas at Stanford who was directly helping policy.

Jack, being on that campus, it was surreal what they did to those people.

They wrote letters in the paper.

They had petitions.

They defamed their character.

They couldn't walk across the campus.

They couldn't go in an elevator without getting confronted by this mob.

And now it's sort of like,

well, we didn't do that.

Everybody knows that the lockdowns were a mistake.

You're even seeing these people.

It's just incredible what the left does.

This Save-them-witch trial mentality, it's the same thing with collusion.

Well, we didn't say that Donald Trump was working with the Russians.

We never said that the the Wuhan lab

couldn't be the source of COVID.

Yes, you did.

Yes, you did.

Yes, you did.

You demonized everybody.

We didn't really say that Hunter's laptop couldn't, couldn't, couldn't, shouldn't, might have, maybe

was authentic.

But every major story that's affected our lives, the lockdowns, the Russian collusion hoax, the known evidence that this crazy plague started in that lab, that the truth that from the very beginning, everybody knew that that laptop was authentic, they were lying to us and they demonized people.

And that's really good.

It's very angry, it gets me very angry about what I saw firsthand on the Stanford University campus, these cowards.

We didn't have one person in authority to say, you know what?

This is ridiculous.

I don't care how many people sign a petition trying to disbar Scott Atlas or take away his license or defame Jay Pacharia.

They are medical experts and they have dissenting opinions.

And if you don't like those opinions, then you wage war against them with the war of ideas in journals and in the public discourse, but you do not try to defame them and destroy them personally.

And yet, no one said that.

Not one person

that was in authority that had the authority to stop it.

The truth is the enemy

the left.

It is,

I don't recall, is just not only James Comey, it is Alger Hiss.

245 times James Comey.

Yeah.

Remember he's a hero.

Yeah, right.

Think of that.

It's just like you we talked about that column I wrote, the

unimaginable.

It's just unimaginable that the head of the FBI 245 times under oath would say, I can't remember.

And then his successor would lie four times to a federal investigator with no consequences.

Then his successor, Christopher Ray, said, I can't answer that.

I got to get in my FBI private jet and fly to the Arian docks.

Or the first one in the sequence of liars.

How could old Bob Mueller get under oath and say with a straight face he doesn't know what the steel dossier infusion GPS is?

That was the pillars of his investigation.

So

it's

all I can say is if everybody goes out and votes, and there is what I think there's going to be a tsunami, you can chew gum

and talk at the same time, and you can have a legislative agenda.

It'll be vetoed by Biden, but you can have an agenda and you can have investigative reporting.

And when they bring Anthony Fauci in and they see how he manipulated stories about the Wuhan origins and about funneling money to conduct gain of function research, it was illegal in the United States, but he funded it in China.

And then he and Francis Collins made an effort to suppress

revelations of that funding, either by a wink and a nod of,

well, we're in control of $50 billion in federal health grants, so maybe kind of, maybe they won't be issued to certain people, or that they redact it.

That's going to come out.

He's going to have to come before Congress.

And because the Democrats have now established

the precedent that you can't do the Eric Holder.

You can't say, I'm not going to be into a congressional subpoena.

I'm Eric Holder.

No, no, no, no, no.

If they're going to put people under subpoena, they're going to put them in jail if they resist the subpoena.

Anthony Fauci is going to have to go.

He's going to have to explain things under oath.

And there's a lot of people.

I think they're going to bring back James Comey and they're going to ask him, Did you knowingly take a dossier?

Did you knowingly take a dossier?

And you said under oath or through an affidavit, it was a valid piece of evidence to a FISA judge at the same time.

Exactly.

You were offering $1 million if Christopher Steele could substantiate one blank, blank thing in that doll, and he couldn't do it.

And you knew that, and yet you passed it off as authentic.

And you helped change the course of history by doing that.

So there's going to be a lot of investigations.

I won't even get into the investigation of Hunter laptop.

That laptop has been sent around now by that organization that has access to it with 2,000 footnotes.

Right.

And I don't know what they count.

I've lost count.

They were saying there were 300 felonies, they think 400 felonies.

It's just an incredible amount of felonies that will.

Plus, Victor, his laptop aside, this Chinese woman, Chinese spy, was his secretary.

This is insane.

Is it any more insane than the colours?

They have the goods on the whole.

The freaking president of the United States, China has the goods on.

Chinese chauffeur of Diane Feinstein when she was head of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

I mean,

gosh, and why her husband had sizable, late husband had sizable financial holdings in China.

And she's the head of the intelligence committee.

She's on the phone talking about security matters where her driver is what?

Oh, don't say anything.

That's racist.

Is that what the, is that what the,

I don't know what the excuse was, but that went on for years.

And she wasn't charged.

She wasn't charged with lax, nothing.

So this, this is what everybody understands.

If you are hard left or liberal or progressive, whatever term you use, it's like going into an insurance agency and buying an insurance policy.

And says, you can commit felonies if you're Anthony Fauci, maybe, or for sure, probably one of the FBI directors, and you're not going to have any consequences.

But if you're a pro-life dad who defends your kid outside of a clinic,

you're going to have your house broken into by an FBI SWAT team.

But if you throw a firebomb through the window, nobody's going to care.

Nobody's going to care at all.

Well, Victor, you know what?

There's more political stuff.

You talked about

what you believe is a forthcoming tsunami, and I just want to read a couple of most recent poll results, but then as a precursor to getting your thoughts, deeper thoughts on what's occurred over the last few days with the attack on Paul Pelosi, I know you have a piece coming up in American Greatness on that.

And we're going to get your thoughts on these things, Victor, right after this important message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

So Victor, I'm not expecting you to comment on these, but I just want to make note of

some of the following

numbers I've seen of tightening races.

I saw a on Real Clear, I think it was on Real Clear Politics, New Hampshire Journal poll

of 1,098 likely voters now has

Hassan and Bullduck, the Republican, conservative Republican, tied at 45%.

In

Washington state, state, a Trafalgar poll has the Republican conservative Smiley one point behind Patty Murray, who has got to be the dullest politician in America.

That's a poll of 1,207 likely voters.

I can't attribute this poll.

I don't know where I found it.

I didn't write the note down, but Lisa

in Alaska.

And if we have time, we're going to talk about Alaska's

stack voting system.

Murkowski is 42%.

Kelly

Chabaka, 41%.

And the Democrat Pat Chesrow quite behind at 17%.

Gosh, I thought I had one other race I want.

But let me just

mouth off quickly, Victor, and then we'll get to Pelosi.

Let's see.

In Oregon, the Oregon governor's race has

Christine

Drazen ahead of Tina Kolek.

This is a Trafalgar poll, 41

by a point, 41.40.

New Mexico governor's race.

Michelle Luhan Grisham, the Democrat, is at 45.5%, but the Republican Mark Ronschwell is ahead, 46.6%.

In Michigan, Dixon, the Republican, is but

a half of a point behind Gretchen Whitmer.

These are all Trafalgar polls I'm looking at.

In Minnesota, the Republican teams, Jensen and Burke, are a point ahead of the Democrats, Waltz and Flanagan.

So anyway, I'm just looking at Trafalgar's website.

So, yeah, Victor, I do think, wow, these are, if you're a Republican, if you're a partisan person, these polls are very

heartening.

And if, you know, if New Hampshire's in play, you just got to think, well, holy crap, they may run the table on Election Day.

And who knows?

Maybe

states like Colorado could be picked up in the Senate.

So, okay, Victor, those aside,

again, you mentioned you have a

tell me anyway, you have a piece coming out, I think it's tomorrow on American greatness.

You've talked about the Paul Pelosi

attack.

Again, we talked earlier there,

meet the press this morning.

We're recording on Sunday.

There's evidence that there was a third person in the house, maybe actually even opened the door for the attacker.

I mean, like, what the hell's going on here?

Yeah, I don't, I don't know.

I mean,

I'm not a conspiracy.

I get emails that people write me when aren't you going to write about this?

I read very carefully.

I don't want to, I don't rush to judgment like the left.

Remember that Jesse Smallet rushed to judgment by people like Nancy Pelosi?

But, yeah,

given the DUI

incident where they were not transparent immediately, remember we had to wait and wait and wait.

First, it was a collision.

He was in a collision.

And then there were police officers who came later to the scene.

And then there was a DUI test.

And then we found out that he flashed some kind of donation card to police, fraternal organizations, and then it went on and on.

So the initial report was

that

this person who was a right-wing anti-Semite burst into the house and attacked him with a hammer.

And then a brilliant,

intuitive dispatcher, given Paul Pelosi's brilliant tact of leaving the phone on, could hear the conversation, hear the tremors in his voice.

So then sent the police who were there in two minutes.

And that saved everything.

Okay.

But the problem is: number one, the guy is an anti-Semite and white conspiracy, but he's a lot more.

He is a left-wing nudist nut.

He made marijuana hemp jewelry.

He lives in a Berkeley commune.

I think Michael Schellenberger has a piece where he went over there and looked at it.

There's pride flags, there's BLM flags.

He has been accused of molestation by his children.

So he is a certifiable nut.

And to the extent

that he has a political ideology, it's all over the map.

Maybe it's right-wing now.

The other day it was left-wing.

Maybe tomorrow it'll be left-wing.

Maybe it'll be right-wing.

But the idea that this guy is listening to Republican rhetoric and he's going out and attacking people is ridiculous.

Number two,

he essentially broke in, we were told, to the Pelosi residents, I guess, with a hammer or or some type of sharp instrument.

And that's what we were told.

But when you look at the glass, it doesn't seem like you hit something and the glass goes in.

The glass seems to have gone out.

When people pick that up, that could happen.

Maybe it's no shatter glass.

It goes straight down.

I've had no shatter.

I've looked at glass on the farm a lot and I've had a lot of broken windows.

But usually when somebody has shot, and that's happened two or three times in my porch, when they shoot through the window the the glass goes in with by the force of the projectile not out

people have mentioned that i don't understand so a third person answers the door

but there's a an intruder that's loudly broke glass in the house and then they invite the police in and they do what they show the police where to go to where the the incident is taking place but if that's true, why wasn't the third person of some help?

If he knows enough to direct the police where to go, or he's expecting the police, he or she or whoever it is, then why wouldn't they earlier have gone in to lend assistance?

Doesn't make any sense.

Am I wrong about that, Jared?

Unless it was a true coward.

Yeah, I mean,

why weren't they involved in de-escalating or whatever you have?

And then who brought the hammer?

So what I don't understand was

the hammer, was that the instrument that was used to break the glass to allow the intruder in?

But then supposedly

Paul Pelosi had the hammer and then they were fighting over the hammer.

Actually, Victor, if I may, I heard the first report I had from the cops was that

he had the hammer and came down the stairs with it.

Like

it was his protection.

But let me get this scenario right: is the police report, as I looked at it, that they arrive.

And when they arrive, there's not yet, there hasn't been an ongoing violent confrontation.

It begins when they arrive.

That's what they do.

Simultaneously, when they arrive.

Right.

And then they at first say drop the hammer to both people.

And they don't, I don't know who, and then they intervene, but they intervene, what, too late?

And he's been already seriously injured.

So, what I'm getting at is the left-wing narrative that this is some right-wing anti-Semitic, crazy nut who was enraged after listening to right-wing verbiage.

So, he took out his map, I guess, and knew exactly where the Pelosi home was.

And then he, what, got in his car and drove over there in the middle of the night or got his Uber.

So, we don't know any of that.

So, before we say anything, I think, and I'm saying this to the people on the conservative side too: before you say anything,

we need to wait four or five days.

We need to find out the following information.

We need to know why the window, how it was broken, what instrument broke it.

We need to know the name and the identity of the third person and what they did before, during, and after they called the police.

We need to know when the police,

what was actually happening when the the police confronted the two.

Were they fighting?

Were they not fighting?

Did they begin fighting?

And we need to know:

does the person have a map?

People said he had a list of other people he wanted to attack.

Let's see the list, etc.

But that didn't stop people.

It's Jesse Smollett all over again.

All of a sudden, they're all over the whole thing.

And of course, there's irony here.

And if you mention the irony, then you're a

horrible person.

But Rand Paul tweeted out that

Nancy Pelosi's daughter, when he was hit, and remember, when he was tackled, when he wasn't looking, didn't have time to brace,

he had a punctured lung that turned into pneumonia, and he had to have part of his lung removed.

And then

when he got cold,

he wasn't the same.

And if you look at him, he's aged.

He's been six old

six ribs broken.

It was really violent.

It was a horrific thing.

And Nancy Pelosi's daughter tweeted, the neighbor was right right yeah and that's been deleted but there's a screenshot of it and then you you add into this that not very long ago

after an assassin mr roast showed up at the step doorstep nearly figuratively but near near the house of ret kavanaugh with the appurtances to kill him and was talked out of it, I guess, by a family member, then there was outrage.

And because the people were protesting, and there was never any connection between Chuck Schumer going to the doors of the Supreme Court two years earlier in March 2020 and saying, you're going to reap the whirlwind if you go ahead with this, i.e.,

Will versus Wade, and you're not going to know what hits you, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

Hits you.

That's about as volatile and stupid and dangerous a thing to do, to get in front of a violently angry crowd, go to the doors of the Supreme Court, call out two justices by their names, say they're going to reap the whirlwind, i.e.

they seeded the wind, and they're not going to know what hit them, and then have people sound insurrectionist to me.

Two years later, a person go up and show up there and not one peep from anybody on the left about people outside justice's home or the fact that prett covenant was in a restaurant and they tried to run him out they did run him out of the restaurant and they hounded hounded him and my person

there was a peep victor aoc mocked them yeah they did

just like they mocked donald trump uh on may 31st when they torched the st.

john's episcopal church and they tried to storm the white house grounds the new york times ran trump flees into his bunker as if he's a coward.

He's supposed to stand there and fight the mob on the White House grounds.

That's an insurrection, I think.

But the point I'm making is that

there wasn't any anger about this, but

there was a discussion that the Supreme Court justices needed personal protection.

And the bipartisan Senate passed a law

funding or asking for the House to quickly do its part and pass it to give the justices protection.

And who held that up?

The Democrats and Nancy Pelosi.

She said, they're not in danger right now.

They're not in danger this weekend.

Even though they had

a majority port, she would not put that Senate pass bill

because either she thought that Joe Biden would have to veto it or that

if they approved it, then it made them look like there was a real threat.

In other words, Nancy Pelosi was thinking, hmm, if I pass this bill that says the justices need protection after this crazy pro-abortion nut shows up and wants to kill a justice, then I'm trying, then I am legitimizing the threat that it's real and that the justices need protection from people that are so crazy about abortion, they'll show up and try to kill them.

So, I'm not going to do it.

I'm not going to do it.

I'm going to let it settle down and people forget.

Then I'll, then I'll do it.

But I'm, and she did, she held it up.

And so, there's an irony here.

And I wish the best for Paul Pelosi.

He's 82 to be hit at that age at 82.

It's going to be some, you know, I had a severe concussion when I was 62 on a bike failure.

And you get a fracture or a concussion, it's bad.

And when they say, well, he's going to make a full recovery, they don't know that.

He could be very ill from surgery on the brain.

And

so I have great sympathy for him, but it's incumbent now because this is right before the election.

And we saw, as I said, what happened with the Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018, how they demagogued that incident and they demagogued the mail-in balloting to form a lie that there was a wild white supremacist, anti-Semitic cabal that was fed and nourished on right-wing dogma.

And that was right before the 2018 midterms.

And it really hurt the, I think it helped them lose six or seven key seats that were very close.

And they're doing the same thing right now, right before the midterm.

But this time, it's not going to work.

This is the crisis, one of the crises that should not go to waste politically from Democrat

perspective.

Absolutely.

Victor, I also want to mention on this, and then we'll move on to another topic.

You know, Lee Zelda was the most pathetic knife attack attempt in recent history, but who wants any knife attack?

But Lee Zeldon, the Republican candidate for governor, was, you know,

what what happened to that person?

He was let, he's out now.

He was let out a few weeks later to an alcohol recovery.

He was just an alcoholic.

He was not fed on left-wing rhetoric, we were told.

And the same is true with James Hodgkin, who was an admitted left-wing activist, was in the pay of Bernie Sanders' campaign at one point.

And he went out hunting for Republican legislature.

He shot six people

and almost killed Steve Galise.

Nobody said that was a result of left-wing

anti-Trump activism, anti-Republic activism.

So

there's a pattern here, and that is when a conservative gets attacked, it has nothing to do with any left-wing rhetoric.

It only happens the other way around.

And then the second thing is that left-wing people,

when they talk about violence or insurrection or anger, that has no consequences.

So when Barack Obama said, get in their face as a candidate, or he said, I'm, you know, take a gun from a knife fight.

I'm here in Philadelphia and I hear you guys love a good brawl.

Or when he said, I don't think you should not get angry.

I don't want you to get angry.

That has no consequences.

Anybody actually takes him up on that or one of all the violent acts that happened in Chicago?

Or

if you're Hannah Nicole Jones, right at the heart of the rioting and you said taking looting is not a crime.

Usually people don't like their stuff taken, but these are unusual times.

That had nothing to do with it.

And then 17 days after the attack on the Trump White House grounds and the trying to torch the St.

John's Episcopal Church and the crowd in Lafayette, BLM and Antifa motivated, if you're Kamala Harris, U.S.

Senator and soon to be vice president.

17 days later, she said, these protests are not going to stop.

They shouldn't stop.

They're going to go on and on and on.

And then our quote-unquote fact checkers, remember that discredited genre?

They say, well, you don't know the context.

She was only referring to nonviolent protests.

No, it was 17 days after

one of the worst riots in our history in Washington, the Capitol.

And I didn't see 30,000 federal troops in Bobbed Wire in reaction to it.

But that's not inciting, nor is, as we said earlier, is Schumer inciting, right?

Or is Madonna, Jack, when she on Inauguration Day said she dreams of blowing up the White House?

That is not inciting.

Nor is Joe Biden when he calls people semi-fascist.

And then, in that Phantom of the Opera speech that I think John Meacham had a hand in writing, remember that speech?

Yeah, Septimber, and he says that half the country lives in the shadow of lies and the darkness, as if they're some kind of morlocks or orcs or something.

So, if that's true, and according to Joe Biden, that half the people are insurrectionaries, they don't believe in democracy, they live in the shadow of lie.

Well, what do you do to them?

Do you unleash the FBI at them?

Do you unleash the IRS at them?

What do you do?

Do you put them in jail without any sentence and put them in solitary for a year to make them think about it?

Do you put leg irons on them or do you get them out in the middle of the night in their underwear?

Is that what you do?

So

that rhetoric under this paradigm has no effect.

It's only, and then of course it's projectionism.

Just like Stacey Abrams will deny, deny, deny that she lost the election, just like Hillary will deny, deny, and say Trump, then they will accuse people of voter suppression or rigging away.

Hillary just did it again.

Same thing about racism.

You can say, boy, you can say, you ain't black.

You can say, junkie.

You can say, Obama's the first articulate black person who's ever ran for president.

You can say donut franchises in Delaware are all full of a bunch of Indians.

But you're the authority on calling other people racist.

You can say it's racist to be in an airplane and be an economy because there's

a whole second.

Yeah, he did it.

I know.

So that, you can collude.

You can hire Charles Dolan and you can hire Dashenko to give Russian Fed lies to Christopher Steele to destroy a campaign, a transition, and a presidency.

And they are the colluders, not you.

You are the colluder.

So what they do is whatever they do, they project.

And they know that they can say all the incendiary rhetoric they want, inflammable rhetoric,

and no consequences because they're accusing other people of doing what they're doing.

Do you remember if you were a store owner in America?

I know this happened in New York City in

the last week of October, first week of November of 2020.

What were they doing?

They were boarding up their windows again.

Why?

Not because Joe Biden was going to win.

It was the thought that Donald Trump might win.

Remember Molly Ball, her time essay, that infamous February 2021 essay where she gushed and bragged.

I've kind of beaten that story to death in columns.

But what she did was she wrote and said, hey, this was so great.

We had a cabal.

We had a conspiracy.

We got Silicon Valley money to go into pre-selected precincts to MAGA the vote, i.e.

to warp the vote.

Wow, we got Chamber of Commerce and we got big corporate people to come out against Trump.

And we even talked to the demonstrators so we could modulate the demonstrations.

And they kind of either taper off or they were ready to get back, Jack.

If Donald Trump won, they were ready to go right back out there.

And she was gushing about how wonderful that was.

And then everybody goes, Ah, Molly, why'd you write that?

Gosh, use the word conspiracy, use the word cabal.

All you're doing is suggesting that some of those guys who protested in January 6th were onto something.

Don't do that.

That was a reaction to it.

She didn't mean that.

Fact check.

Cabal was used in a satirical sense.

Conspiracy was not meant to be taken literally.

That's how the fact checkers.

Man, that is one hell of a discredited genre.

Fact check.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah.

Victor, we're going to talk about, we switch a little bit here, and we're going to talk about foreign policy, actually military.

of policy and a new issue of Strategica, the magazine, the online magazine you oversee at the Hoover Hoover Institution.

And we're going to get your thoughts about this new issue right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

The mothership of the Victor Davis Hansen Show is John Solomon's justthenews.com.

And Victor writes Victor's own mothership, if I can call it that.

Where does he hang hang his hat online?

It's victorhanson.com.

You should visit it and you should subscribe to it because Victor writes a lot of material exclusively for his website, probably three pieces a week.

It's terrific stuff.

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So that's victorhanson.com.

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What Civil Thoughts is, is a recommended 12 to 14 readings, interesting stuff that have come across in the previous week.

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And thank them for doing so.

So that's civilthoughts.com.

That's where you can find that.

Strategica

is the

online journal that

its subhead is Conflicts of the Past are Lessons for the Present.

The

new

issue is number 81.

Victor is the editor-in-chief, we'll say, of Strategic.

It's very important.

Military historians come and look at

current situations, not only foreign policy, but also military.

This one happens to be military, and it's rethinking major interventions abroad.

And Victor, you have the lead piece

in this issue is by Williamson Murray, who's written before.

Let me just, if you don't indulge me here, folks, a second, and then let's get Victor's thoughts about

this

rethinking of

U.S.

military intervention abroad.

And here's what, here's the lead of Williamson Murray's piece.

He wrote, any major intervention abroad, if it is to achieve a lasting political settlement, will almost inevitably involve the commitment of ground forces.

America's air and naval forces are impressive, and there are few, if any, who can match them.

But in the end, air and naval forces cannot seize, much less hold ground.

The bottom line is that the United States will have to commit its ground forces in defense of its interests as well as those of its allies if it is to achieve its larger interests.

The problem is that war in the 20th and now the 21st century has come to involve much more than straightforward defeat of enemy conventional forces.

It now involves unconventional conflicts, hybrid warfare, the suppression of terrorist movements, and cyber war against unseen enemies.

It demands a political and military leadership that understands the historical and political complexities of present and future enemies.

Victor, that's a pretty damn impressive kickoff kickoff

and cycle to this issue.

And I think there are two other pieces in this by

Gibson and Joseph Jaffe.

So, Victor, tell us about this particular issue of Strategica.

Well, everybody should try to look at Strategica.

It's in its ninth year, and Jack said it's 81 issues online.

And we do something differently than most

online journals about war or strategy,

and that is we have what we call a backgrounder.

And this is the background.

it's a long essay that uh

covers the landscape, and then we try to get op-eds.

In this case, we have one by Joe Joff, the editor of Derzai.

I think some of you knew Joe Joff as the European editor for a while.

I think he may still be of Newsweek.

And then we, of course, had Chris Gibson.

He was a U.S.

Congressman, Jack, for three terms, and a military veteran and decorated lieutenant colonel in Iraq.

I went over, I was embedded twice, and once I saw Chris over there, and he was a very courageous guy, and he's president of a small college in New England now.

But

Wick Murray is, I think everybody understands, he's the, I think it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say,

the most distinguished living American historian of the Luftwaffe.

And his contribution to military history is he really showed how the Luftwaffe went from a preeminent military armor, the Third Reich, to absolutely being destroyed in about 14 months.

And that was due to

underappreciated American strategic bombing in World War II that really hit fuel supplies and transportation of fuels.

And then indirectly meant that the Luftwaffe pilots were not going to have enough fuel to get the necessary training hours when they went up in the sky.

And then they were being slaughtered by P-51 and P-47 Americans in better better planes with better training and more hours under their belt.

And by 1944,

late 44, there was no Luftwaffe as an effective arm, maybe until the

ME262 jets came, but that was just a temporary pause.

But it's a brilliant series of books he wrote on World War II.

A War to Be Won was also he co-authored.

And he, in this piece, has a long essay.

And his argument is simple, I think.

And it is that we have kind of dismissed the need to put ground troops abroad, particularly in the Middle East, because it doesn't end up well in Afghanistan or Syria or Iraq or anywhere we are, Mogadishu.

And he's right.

And what he's saying is that ostensibly, we don't want to do that anymore because no matter how tactically, tactically successful they are.

And you think of Benghazi, where that small skeleton force just really did a number on their attackers.

Or you think of Mogadishu and look at Black Hawk Down, read the book, watch the film, read their film, how they, I mean, the subtext of that is they just butchered, they really, I don't mean butchered,

they really, really did a number on the Somali warlords, even though the mission was kind of stupid.

So what I'm getting at is that he's trying to say that the problem has not been the American fighting man or at the captain, captain, major, lieutenant colonel, colonel level.

Tactically, we win, but strategically, we're inept because we put burdens on these interventions.

We either have them last too long,

or they get sidetracked into idealistic nation building, or they have cultural assumptions about, well, we're going to make them liberal like Carmel, California.

No, you're never going to do that.

So when you take on these added burdens, it's not just that you can't do it, but it nullifies, it ensures the destruction of the project.

That is, the tactical efficacy that you have will be wasted because the strategic goals are either unrealistic or crazy.

And in the two subordinate articles, Chris Gibson is trying to, I think, build on that, on Wick's saying.

He said, you know what?

It's nice to talk about democracy, but

we're in a real world.

It's very, very dangerous.

And you have to be sort of Jacksonian and realist.

So you don't get the choice between utopia and hell.

You get the choice between 51% and 49% to be an ally with or your strategic interest with.

And sometimes you're going to have to pick.

He didn't write this, but

he would probably argue: as bad and horrible as Putin is, it's kind of stupid to send him into the arms of China and India and Turkey and Iran and make a new coalition

just just because he represents things we don't agree with, i.e., a liberal FDR was willing to ally with the greatest mass murder in history to the time Joseph Stalin in World War II.

And then Joseph Joffe is sort of saying,

you know what?

Don't go into the Middle East.

You just don't understand it.

You don't understand Islam.

You don't understand the Muslim street.

It's just not going to work.

And so Wick is sort of giving them the ammunition.

And then, and what he's saying is, though,

it would work if you went in there and you went in in force for a short time and you had leaders and people in the military at the strategic level, i.e., one, two, three, four-star and civilian overseers that really understood the culture of Yugoslavia, former Yugoslavia, or what was going on in Libya or the Middle East, but they don't because they're poorly educated and the school and the system of our universities is poorly bankrupt.

So it's really interesting.

I picked the issue and some of the mechanics of it, but the managing editor is David Berkey, and he is the one that actually puts the issue together.

He gets the illustrations, he does all of the communications with our contributors.

And then we have a brilliant editor that helps him, Bruce Thornton.

Both are research fellows at the Hoover.

And this is, like I said, I think it's a preeminent.

And one thing we try to do is is we compensate our group very well.

So we get people like in the group, Joseph Jaffe or William Sonmuri, but, you know, we get Neil Ferguson and H.R.

McMaster

and Andrew Roberts.

And we had

late Angela Codovia.

We get just a wonderful group of people.

And we have them across the political spectrum.

And I can guarantee you that half of them don't agree with what I believe or what I write.

And yet I ask them to join the group and I encourage them.

One of our stalwarts is Ralph Peters, former

Fox military.

I don't know why he's still not on the air.

He was a wonderful contributor.

Very entertaining, too.

He was.

He was blindful.

He was blunt.

He was funny.

He's a very learned person.

I disagreed with him on Donald Trump, but that doesn't mean anything because,

you know, a guy like that has such talent and you respect his opinion.

So I tried to get people like that in the group.

And it gets kind of wild sometimes, the disagreements, but these issues are very insightful.

I'm glad that Williamson Murray was able to.

He had been ill, but he's getting better.

And I can't think of anybody who knows more about the American military in 20th century wars than he does.

I want to encourage our listeners to visit the Hoover website.

That's hoover.org.

Actually, if you can follow this now, it's hoover.org/slash publications slash strategica.

But you know what?

Go to hoover.org, type in strategica, and it will take you to the point.

Yeah, you know,

to the website.

I appreciate that because you know what we do for every meeting, you have to contribute.

We just don't pay people to come and talk.

They have to contribute.

And not just to the magazine, but to essays.

Then we build a corpus of essays, maybe 50 of them.

And then for the next year, we add those essays that are relevant to each of the themes.

So, David Berkey and Bruce Thornton then edit these essays.

And so, for this issue, you don't just get those three, you get a good essay by Bing West.

People know Bing very well, and he's

how you sustain a military organization.

He's one of our best members of the group, right?

And then we have the very gifted Mark Moyer.

Boy, he came on the scene with Victory Denied, you know, Forsaken that Cambridge University counter

and that contrarian view of the Vietnam War, basically saying that we had won the war and until we did a lot of stupid things like assassinate Diem.

It was a great history.

He's now a Hillsdale professor of military history.

He's got a great partner there, Ed Guterres, and a wonderful retired professor, Tom Conner.

And that they've got other people there.

It's one of the best military history programs.

It's brand new.

And he's got a great essay about the leadership and the support that's needed to do these things.

And then we have,

I'm a big fan of Peter Manseur, and he's sort of saying how we get tired about this.

And Peter, of course, has written about the

generals in the U.S.

Army during World War II.

And he's really, he's got some great essays and a book about the level of command and competence or lack of of our generals in World War II.

Something I wrote about in the Second World Wars, and I discovered what a great bibliography Peter had accomplished.

And then we have former military strategist and veteran Jerry Hendricks.

And, you know, his point is, if you're running a $31 trillion debt and you're underfunding the military and your strategic existential enemies are what?

Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and you're spending a trillion dollars a year in something like Iraq or Afghanistan, you better rethink it.

And there is a connection.

And I think Jerry's trying to say, you know, that's the subtext of what he's talking about, that if you're in Afghanistan and you flee Scedattle out of there, and you get Marines blown up for nothing, and you leave a $300 million refitted Baglam Air Force Base,

or you leave a billion-dollar embassy, or you leave, and I know this is controversial, everybody, whether it's 5 billion or 60 billion, depending on how you calibrate the real costs, you leave that behind.

It's no accident that Vladimir Putin, a few months later, on February 23rd, decides to invade Ukraine.

Gosh, it all, not at all, at all start on election date, but that is the

that botched, terrible withdrawal has

produced so much misery for our for the entire world victor we have just a little time uh left and if if you may if you will uh

since we've talked a lot about politics i wonder if we could i wonder if you could just take five minutes uh and talk about um alaska and this rank and this ranked voting you know i want to encourage our listeners to if they can check out the wall street Journal this earlier this week, Kim Strassel

had a, who lives in Alaska, had a terrific piece on how

ranked voting is really bogus in many ways.

There are many people who will not rank.

They'll vote for who they want,

but by not

doing number two and number three,

somehow or other, the mathematics of it can end up boomeranging in your face.

Lefties have been saying, oh, this is great ranked voting, but it really isn't.

It does not produce

outcomes that are truly desired by the majority of voters.

And in Alaska, which is a conservative state, I mean, that's so strange that this has happened there.

Well, not strange because Lisa Murkowski created it,

backed it to protect her own political hide.

Remember, six years ago, she won.

It was kind of remarkable.

She won by write-in campaign.

Maybe the first and only time that's been done, U.S.

Senate.

But she's politically tenuous and concocted the scheme for her own protection.

Anyway, Victor, great piece by Kim Strassel.

I don't know.

It seems uncitizenly to have this kind of a system.

Well, what are your thoughts?

She's a she's a resident of Alaska.

I think she called, I think you're talking to the, is that that Wall Street Journal, Willie Gate essay she wrote when she compared it to a crazy sat test or something?

Yeah.

What she's saying is that all of these strategists on the left, they calibrate which kind of they get candidates and then you get X number of votes.

And it requires a physics degree to figure out how many of your ranked votes you use and to whom you give them.

So it becomes a mathematical process.

If you've got two conservatives or three Democrats or vice versa, do you just vote for one Democrat and not the other two?

Or do you vote for maybe a Republican that can't win?

So that's the formula.

And the result is that she, I think she said that, you know, a state that went 10%

for Donald Trump and

70%

Republican or so-called conservative registrations, it just elected a Democratic representative.

And Sarah Palin would have easily won that seat if it had been up or down.

I feel kind of, I have to be very careful because

the intellectual support for and policy

promotion of comes from the Hoover Institution.

We have a couple of scholars who have insisted that this is more democratic.

It's a big left-wing thing.

And I've been, you know, my 13th command is not to criticize a fellow

Hoover senior fellow, but believe me.

It's not a good idea.

I think you, didn't we use it with the New York

Mayorial?

Yes.

And it took, what, two weeks to find out what the actual vote would be.

Right.

And so it's an idea that was concocted by the left under the guise of more egalitarian voting or the real, the real feelings of the voter can be manifested in more than just an up or down, yes, no, this or that.

And then what happens is the strategists take over and certain candidates run, and then they come out.

You have to come up with a sophisticated calculus of

how you use your votes rather than just vote for your favorite candidate.

It makes it

a total disconnect with human nature, I think.

There's five people, and I go, well, I'm going to, I'm going to give them an order of my preference, but that's not how people vote.

And that's not how a lot of people vote.

A lot of people voted for Donald Trump because they hated Hillary Clinton, you know, or people vice versa, just to pick one

election.

And with ranked voting with multiple candidates, it almost is like a game of Stratego.

You know, it's like, I'm not really giving you my preferences in order.

I'm using this scheme in order to

cut the legs out from underneath some.

Absolutely.

And then what I, my biggest complaint when I heard about this crackpot idea and I heard about it at Hoover and I read and researched it.

For me, it boiled down to this, that most people don't have the time or inclination to study up on two candidates, Republican and Democrat.

And so

when those candidates are there, then all of this stuff comes out and each side does awful research, right?

So take Georgia.

So our guy, Herschel Walker, they find that he paid for an abortion.

Now they're accused.

And their guy, and then they say he was abusive to one of his spouse or whatever.

And then their guy ran over his, right?

That's the normal yin and yang, sturm and drang of a campaign.

But when you multiply that, what if there's five candidates?

And how are you ever going to know whether to give your second, third, accept, sub vote to which candidate when you don't know anything about them?

How can the voter process all the people who are potentially going to be recipients from one voter?

and not from individual voters.

So it means that the individual voter has to take it upon him or her

to make informed decisions beyond what one vote is.

And in my experience, that's just too much to ask from the American voter.

And so people get mixed up.

They vote the wrong strategy.

They're told by their

you know, their party, do this, vote for this person, but not this person.

Or there's three people in your party, but don't vote for two of them or vote for only one, but then don't, you know what I mean?

Or vote for the opposite party's worst candidate, you know, right?

Vote for number four Democrat and only number one Republican or number three and four Democrats.

It doesn't work.

And it's a disaster.

And then, as she pointed out, as I remember in that article, the judges have to intervene.

And then they start saying that this is not constitutional and that is constitutional.

It's just a mess.

Why do we make things difficult when it could be very simple?

Yeah.

To me, me, it's a first cousin of the open primaries, which, oh, we'll use, we'll have our guys go in there and vote for the business.

Same thing, jungle primary.

Yeah.

It's just same thing.

And then,

I don't know.

And these podcasts, we're always trying, Jack, to put it into a larger.

framework or to distill it down to what is the catalyst, what is the instigation, what is the impulse behind it.

We know what it is.

It always has a similar theme, that most people

do not want a hard left agenda.

It's contrary to human nature.

So the candidate that promotes that will lose if there's enough information out there for the voter at his disposal or if the candidate is candid.

And so the left knows that.

So they either refuse to debate or they lie about their record or they act as if they're moderate for a few weeks.

Or if you're Tom Ryan in Ohio, you're really a centrist Democrat that has warned Pelosi all the time.

They never run on their record and they never run on their ideology.

And then they expect

that this rank voting or voter suppression or

motor voter ID or early balloting or mail-in balloting at 70% of the electorate or reducing election day to a construct, whatever it is, they look to that rather than to trust just, here's the vote, people.

Come out on Election Day,

go an ID like you do, cash a check so we know who you are, make your list just like we did for 100, you know, and I voted, I don't know how many times in person,

I go to the registrar, they have a list that says Victor Davis Hansen.

I show them my ID.

That was all what we did until the left took over California.

But they don't want that because that is too democratic.

So you do all the other stuff, and then you say democracy dies.

It dies

anti-democratic.

So we're doing all of these machinations and contortions and gymnastics to get the real, the essence, the real American expression.

And that's what they do.

Right.

Well, Victor, that's about all the time we have today for this particular podcast, except we'll do what we do at the end of the show and thank our listeners.

And here's,

I have a

comment to read from somebody who posted this on

Apple Podcasts, by the way, whatever you listen to, Stitcher, Google Play, et cetera, on Victor's website, adjust the news.

Thank you very much.

Apple slash iTunes, you can leave a rating one to five or zero if you want.

If you hate Victor, zero.

But up to five stars.

And I have to tell you, 99% of the people who have left ratings have left five stars.

And we thank them.

I guess we're doing something good here.

Actually, Victor's doing something good here.

And Sammy, the great Sammy Wink.

So folks at

Apple podcast can also leave comments.

And here's one in Victor.

The headline was written in Greek.

And I ran, I copied and pasted into Google.

And some listen, listen to the pronunciation.

So

I'm going to say this.

It's F Hari Sto.

Ah, thank you.

You're right.

Yeah, F.

Hari Sto.

That is the third person polite pronoun, polite imperative with the adverb

in classical Greek, oo.

U.

Yeah.

epsilon, epsilon, but it's f, that oo, that oopsilon becomes a hard F in modern Greek.

So it's f haristo, let there be good cheer, grace to you.

Well, that's that is the sentiment.

So it was the right

word, thank you.

Thank you.

It was the right headline.

Yes.

So it says here, Victor and team, you are a beacon that illuminates darkness.

You give this pleb

a peek into the unknown.

I'm elated for each new episode notification as if I was sitting fireside listening to the wisdom-filled words of my grandfather.

Wow, he has a classical reference, pleb.

Yeah.

What about an episode or two whereby, well, this is a thought.

I'm just going to read this, whereby Victor and Thomas Sowell spend some time together on air.

Two Titans, one more.

How about?

I'd love that.

But, you know, Tom is, I think, 94 or 95.

I just heard from him the other day.

I just got a book from him.

He He sent me a very valuable book by Louise Simple, who was a famous geographer in the 1920s.

And he gave me one of his copies.

So we correspond, but I haven't, I confess I haven't.

I think it's because I had COVID and Long Cove.

I didn't want to, you know, Tom was somewhat vulnerable because of his age, so I didn't want to go and bug him.

But that's a good idea.

I know that

we're going to have some interviews as we did before with Dr.

Stephen Quay and Devin Nunes.

We're going to have Scott Atlas on

and some others.

Man, Troy Sinek.

Troy Sinek, yeah.

We're going to have Troy on on his Gulver Cleveland book.

Yeah.

And I have a few others.

So we're going to try to do that maybe once or twice a month.

That'd be terrific.

Well, let me just finish up here.

This one other suggestion.

And

I think we should consider this for some times when you're away and we pre-record podcasts.

This says, how about a list of must-reads for those of us who want to expand our minds in a way to be more useful to those around us and society at large, i.e., be more like VDH.

And this is written by 5UA5

Ponty.

5UA5 Ponty.

Thank you, O Ev Haristo,

for your kindness of the comments and the thoughts you gave us.

We will consider them and see how practical they are.

So, Victor, thanks to all who leave comments.

We read them all.

Thanks to you, Victor.

You were terrific today as ever.

And all our listeners, we will be back soon.

Oh, wait, if you're Catholic and you still have time, it's November 1st, you better go to Mass.

It's a Holy Day of Obligation.

Thanks for listening, and we'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Thank you again, everyone.