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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the jet-lagged host, just back from sunny, beautiful California.

Victor, gosh, it's so gorgeous.

It really is that state.

Oh, I wanted to say that you're the namesake of the show, right?

And you are also

good.

I'm glad you know after all these years.

You're the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, best-selling author, rancher.

No, you're not a rancher.

I'm sorry, farmer.

Sorry to loop that in there.

I'm going to call their farms ranches, though.

Okay.

All right.

See?

All right.

I'll tell you.

Even though we don't have any cattle.

We won't edit that out.

military historian and so many other things, Victor.

And you write, you're one of the most prolific writers in America.

And much of that,

much original content you publish is at victorhanson.com.

And we're going to talk about that a little later.

Victor, there's a lot of political things we're going to talk about, but there's a lot of political news that's been happening.

And

one of the, I don't know, it's just

part funny, part disturbing, but it's once again, Donald Trump at war with Mitch McConnell and his wife.

And we'll get to that and a lot of other things right after these important messages.

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

So Victor on Truth Social, Donald Trump's platform.

As we know,

he's been banned from Twitter and Facebook.

Don't know if there's going to be a Facebook at the end sometime next by next year.

I mean, the stock is in a collapse.

Anyway, on his platform, he wrote this yesterday.

I saw this on Twitter.

Someone named Aaron Astor is tweeting, says, please tell me this is not an actual statement from a former president of the United States.

And if you'll indulge me, Victor, and our listeners, and then please, Victor, you have at it.

Trump writes this, is McConnell, Olmich McConnell, approving all of these trillions of dollars worth of Democrat-sponsored bills without even the slightest bit of negotiation because he hates Donald J.

Trump and he knows I'm strongly opposed to them?

Or is he doing it because he believes in the fake and highly destructive Green New Deal and is willing to take the country down with him?

Question mark.

In any event, either reason is unacceptable.

He has a death wish, and death wishes all caps.

must immediately seek help and advice from his China-loving wife, Coco Chow.

And Coco is spelt C-O-C-O like Coco Puffs, and Chow is spelt like dog food, like Purina Dog Chow.

So, Coco Chow, I don't know if that's an insult.

I think it probably is.

It's,

I mean, it's typical Trump, kind of like a, I mean,

a guy in a bar.

It's kind of funny in its way, in an insulting way, but it's kind of disturbing also.

So, anyway, Victor, the elections are, people are already voting in the midterm elections.

And

I think some of the criticisms of Trump doing this would be: he is,

well, the fire should be directed at the Democrats.

Here we are.

Let's have a circular firing squad.

That might not be your position, but Victor, any thoughts about this Trump McConnell fracas?

Well, I always thought that Coco,

right,

was a

nickname, permissible nickname for what?

Cordelia, Colette,

Chloe, Corinne.

I went to high school with a girl called Corinne.

They called her Coco.

I never heard it jacked.

In all honesty, I've never heard it used for Elaine.

So I have to, by process of elimination, suggest that it's a disparaging word.

And I think Trump knows her name is not spelled C-H-O-W, right?

So the Coco challenge.

He nominated her for cabinet secretary.

So it's just what Donald Trump doesn't want to do

is do what he did because he's going to be in a primary

and he's going to argue that his MAGA agenda is adopted by everybody, but he doesn't quite understand that that hurts his cause because people are going to make the argument: well, if they're following an agenda that was successful, whether or not you inaugurated it, then maybe we can have the sunshine without the sun.

Trumpism without Trump.

But you then have to prove that you're an asset of force multiplier.

And he can do that by his huge crowds.

But the criticism of him is this stuff,

that it distracts from the narrative.

And what is the narrative?

The narrative is the midterms, like you said, Jack, and the issues in the midterm, and the border, and crime, and inflation, and gas prices and critical race theory and school boards and Afghanistan, the whole progressive, regressive project.

And what is he doing?

He's fighting with the Senate majority leader over what?

If Mitch McConnell

can't stop the legislation, right?

He can jawbone, he can complain, but they have Kamala Harris as the vice president.

They have 50 votes and they vote in block.

And that's, you know, maybe he could peel off Joe Manchin.

They try to.

But my point is that this politically on so many different levels doesn't help Trump.

All it does is suggest that he's petty, that he is

vulgar, that he's using maybe some type of ethnic slur,

that

he's fighting if he's going to be president, that he's telling the voter, if you elect me, the first thing I'm going to do is have a huge fight to get rid of Mitch McConnell, right?

So I don't understand it.

And it plays into whom?

Ron DeSantis.

Because Ron DeSantis, while this is going on, is the hands-on governor of Florida.

And he's beset with a historic

tropical storm dash hurricane dash.

disaster and he's doing pretty well.

And he's acting like he's got fire in the belly saying this is a Second Amendment state.

If you loot down, we're going to get, and he's acting statesmanlike.

I'm not going to get down the gutter with back and forth, with Joe Biden didn't call me.

Who cares?

We're going to work together.

So he's doing everything that the voter would feel

is acceptable.

And he's tough.

And he's not tweeting about Mitch McConnell.

And so.

Trump doesn't realize that he should be tweeting right now about let's get together as a party and show these the left-wing people what they've done at the border.

Hey, everybody,

we're going to help J.D.

Vance.

We're going to help Blake Masters.

We're going to help the Laxop candidacy.

We're going to do all of this as a party together.

I'm the senior.

Let's get to some more rallies.

He's not doing that.

Or if he is doing it, it's not being reported because of this stuff.

So then the voter says, well, I really liked what he did, but I told you that if he gets elected again, he's going to do this all the time.

He's going to distract.

He's going to empower the left.

They're going to fundraise him.

And we're going to be off message for four years.

But I can get the same

bang for the buck without the

downside from Luan DeSantis.

So I don't understand it.

Maybe you can enlighten me, but I don't see the

yeah, actually,

and this is a follow-up

topic, has to do with things looking better for Republicans.

And let me, if you don't mind, Victor, because this is on point about DeSantis, in part on point.

There's a piece by

Matt Contanetti and Matt, it's published on National Review today.

Yeah.

And it's been on other places.

I mean, Matt writes

for the rescue, that one.

Yes, yeah.

And it's a very, you know, I love Matt.

I know him.

He's in DC.

So I can see people say, well, of course he's part of the dc small one and he is a pro let's call it a pro mcconnell piece but um two things one is that mcconnell has now unleashed a lot of money at his um

uh stead through the senate campaign finance committees and it seems to be helping in in a certain number of the states uh a number of the races that we thought people were Republicans chewing their fingernails, oh my God, you know, we're going to lose Pennsylvania definitely.

We may lose Wisconsin.

We may lose Ohio.

No, the numbers are much better than thought of.

But now back to DeSantis.

And

the,

let's call it the pro-democratic trend of news that was happening through August and early into this month was broken up by DeSantis when he just totally, this is the, I'll just read here what Matt wrote.

On December 15th, Ron DeSantis of Florida upended the electoral cycle.

His one simple trick, sending a plane of Venezuelan asylum seekers to Martha's vineyard.

Suddenly, Democrat-friendly topics vanished from the headlines.

Abortion, student loans, and mar-a-lago disappeared from cable news Chirons.

They were replaced by a controversy over an issue, border security, that favors

the GOP.

The stunt was a public relations coup.

It reset the national debate.

It sent the left into a frenzy, and it boosted dissent to star power at just the right moment.

Yeah, so exactly.

So, what was this distraction that Trump did?

It was a distraction.

A, it's not going to do much because it's a tweet.

And two, if it did distract people from a needed discussion that favors the Republicans about the issues, it's not going to work well.

It's a Civil War tweet.

I mean, it's an internescent.

Mitch McConnell will be, when Trump is president, he'll be 82 or 83 years old.

And his work, whether you like him or not, and I understand why people think that he's a rhino and all that, but his

legislative genius got Gorsuch and Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

And if it was not for him, we would have Merrick Garden right now as a Supreme Court justice.

So there's value in that, and Trump should understand that.

But it just doesn't serve any point at all.

It's just out of the blue.

And what it's going to do, whether it's fair or not, it's going to cement this image of Trump, a little bit of, you know, as I always use that metaphor, one little Tesser in a larger mosaic that he is still undisciplined and he gets off topic.

And he does so as he did between,

you know,

the end of the election and the special election in Georgia, where he did this.

And meanwhile, we got two socialists elected in Georgia.

when he should have gone down there and begged his base to go out and turn out and that the election would matter and tell

swing independent voters that these people were socialists.

But he didn't.

He just harked back.

And so this is,

I don't understand it.

I don't understand it.

I understand Trump is capable of doing that, but I don't understand why he thinks it's in his interest or why there are not people on the staff that are proofreading it.

Right.

Well, I don't know who has

sway over him.

I don't think anyone, maybe even

his daughter or son-in-law.

Well, anyway, that aside, Victor, I can speculate till the cows come home.

One more thing on Republican

election

hopes.

Here's another piece.

This is Dan McLaughlin in the National Review, and he's writing a piece about Trafalgar, who seems to have been one of the more accurate pollsters in the last few cycles.

It's reporting and some analyses from other

unsuspected places, the Washington Post, the New York Times, who are saying, you know, Republicans are being undercounted in these polls, which to Republicans are like, yeah, duh.

I mean, the sunrises in the east, of course, we're under

counted,

but it's part of a tactic to undercount them.

And then you have these, oh my God, maybe we will lose.

Maybe there won't be a wave here.

Maybe, and

what's a factor in

suppressing a wave, if it's at all possible, is to distort the polling but it seems to be that the polling is um actually not looking bad and again i said this earlier that some of these close races even even in um

in um pennsylvania with uh with oz and fetterman uh that seems to be uh tightening and and uh people are a little less likely to jump off a ledge about the outcome of that election today than than a few weeks ago even though voting is starting it's it's pretty dramatic the Wall Street Journal

has that same thing, that daily chart.

And I think there's a version that's in Power Line today, and it shows the Asian and Hispanic vote is moving five points

recently toward the Republican.

And remember, because the Democratic Party mortgaged its future by alienating the white working class and relying on this Obama diversity concept that anybody who is not white is in a harmonious 30 to 40 percent of the nation and every one of those constituencies is absolutely vital when you lose the white working class they can't lose any of them and they're losing them and why are they losing asians and hispanics they're losing them on every single issue because they're working classes and the republicans oddly enough are appealing to them not on racial solidarity.

They're trying to be what the Democrats said they were in the 1960s.

They didn't care about the color of one's skin.

They cared about the content

of the character, but mostly they're appealing to them on class issues, like you can't afford to fill up your truck under Biden.

You can't afford to pay your rent.

You can't afford to buy a chuck steak.

You can't afford to turn on the thermostat this winter.

You won't be able to, or the air conditioner now, or you're not going to be able to find anything from a tampon to a Romex coil of wire in the store.

And that is what is appealing to them.

And then the other issues are,

they're not bread-butter issues, they're cultural issues, and that is there are two sexes.

You can call whatever you want a person who's suffering from gender dysphoria, but biologically there's two sexes.

There's something called, the Greeks called hermaphidism, hermaphrodism,

where there's a mixture of sexual organs, but it's still a conglomeration of two sexes.

And there is something called abortion, and there is a religious tradition, not in all religions, but that it involves the killing of an unborn person.

And all of these issues become the dessert to the bread and butter issues, and none of them favor

these particular constituencies voting Democratic.

And that's what's happening.

And the Trofago group are pretty good because

they've got, I mean, they're not always always right, but they're right more than the others.

And their theory is that when somebody calls you or Jack or our listeners and they say, hi, I'm from the Harris Harvard poll.

You hang out.

And you hang, why do you hang out?

You hang up, A, because you don't want to hear that nasal voice on the other end of the phone.

B, you get frustrated as she or he reads you the poll question and you know that the question is warped and presented in such a way to encourage a predetermined result.

And three,

you feel, hmm, if I say something right-wing or conservative, they've got my phone number and they're going to put me on some list.

And James Comey or Christopher Wray or Andrew McCabe's FBI is going to show up at my house.

And

Kale He, is it Kayhe,

Robert, the director of Trafalgar?

Go ahead.

I got to pronounce his name right.

But in any case, he understands that.

So he tries to

calibrate what percent that results in, that people just don't talk to the polls.

I think he's up to three to four percent.

He tries to find that voter.

And he points out that most of these other polls do not reflect the actual demographics of the electorate in terms of party affiliations, because the Democratic Party in the last year or two has bled so many adherents who have left and either become independents or Democrats, and they don't really show up yet.

And there's a prejudice anyway if they did show up.

So I think it's going to be very bad.

And Sammy and I were doing one the other day, and I just reminded people, don't believe the post-Labor Day hype.

This is a broken record.

I understand it, but they are going to tell you not to give to candidates, not to show up at the polls, not to pay attention to the election, because it's hopeless and the left is going to win when just the opposite is true.

The left is terrified that despite social media, Wall Street, corporate boardrooms, Disneyland, entertainment, professional sports, professors, academia, they don't have power over us and they can't stop us on Election Day.

And I think they're going to have a rendezvous with a shock.

Yeah.

Let us pray.

Moremus.

Well, Victor, we're going to stay on politics and we're going to talk about Kamala Harris, who has had an incredible week of

word salads and gaffes and just

pure bizarre

things and racist things.

And we're going to get to that right after these important messages.

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If you're a Victor Davis-Hanson fan, is it just with your ears?

It's with your eyes too.

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And he writes a weekly syndicated column, a big essay every week in American Greatness, frequently essays at the New Criterion and other places, but there's a ton of content every week at his website.

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those articles called ultra five bucks gets you behind the wall five bucks check it out fifty dollars for the year five bucks covers a month um but you'll get to see everything that was there already if you haven't done it yet you will when you finally do and you will you'll say why did i do this sooner so victorhanson dot com so victor gosh about kamala harris there are i think i got four things that maybe we should start with the least least the the most disturbing one And it has to do with the hurricane damage,

immense hurricane damage in Florida.

And, you know,

I wonder if there's a

community in America.

We've got to assume in Florida, there's some town, some city that kind of tracks America's demographics in every way, the racial balance, et cetera, et cetera.

And, you know, everyone who's hurt by this storm or any storm or any earthquake or anything that happens,

they are Americans.

But in the eyes of this administration or the eyes of the mouth of Kamala Harris, what is important?

Equity and color.

And she was giving a talk the other day after the hurricane, and she said something that, you know, like as if there's going to be a line, a priority of who's getting federal assistance.

And she said it was communities of color and relief that would be based on equity.

What if you're in a, I don't know what a community of color is, but but let's assume.

I live in one.

I do.

Okay.

Well, what if you're not in a, you know,

what if you're in a community of Americans that happens to be more majority white?

And if you're a black, that person that lives in that community, I guess you're screwed because, you know,

your community, based on

its demographic content, is going to be at the end of some line if Kamala Harris has her way.

I'm kind of shocked by what she said.

What are your thoughts, Victor?

Well, she said she was going to

prioritize community of color, communities of color.

Remember, she also said something to the effect that people don't all start out at the same level and therefore implication, implication, that in time of crisis, it would be the duty of the all-wise, all-powerful federal government

in

person as Camille Harris, to know who starts out lower, who had the advantages, who didn't, and then she will equalize it on the back end.

And she's framing this socialist paradigm in terms of color, she says.

But

first of all, the whole idea is absurd.

I was out all summer in my yard, swimming out, working the yard.

And

I have olive skin, and I had a lot of people working on this old house.

And I can tell you that a lot of quote unquote Mexican Americans were much lighter than I was.

And if you saw them, and you didn't know they had a Spanish surname, you wouldn't know what background, Italian, Armenian,

Black Irish, they call, who knows what they are?

Right.

Who cares what they are?

So she's going to define communities of color.

And I, you know, I've spoken and traveled in Florida a lot.

You go up into the panhandle around Tallahassee out in the country.

There are very poor, poor white people.

northern Georgia, northern Florida.

Okay.

And you go down to the Miami area and there is a lot of very, very wealthy Cuban people, very successful, and Arab Americans, very successful.

And so she's going to go in there and say, if you trill your R or your name is Roberto,

what, Gonzalez, rather than Bob Smith, then we're going to give you priority in

rebuilding your house.

That is insane.

And she knows it's insane, and they will try to walk it back.

But in her defense,

she's only reflecting a consensus in what used to be the Democratic Party, which is now this progressive, regressive party.

She's just a megaphone for what those values are.

And the idea that this daughter of privilege who grew up with a PhD father and a PhD mother and tries to play along as she's some kind of victim is just absurd.

And so, and if you're a poor white person and you have a two-bedroom bungalow and it's floating down the street and you're trying to get FEMA, you're trying to get water or you don't know where a tent and you turn on the news and you hear this, what do you think?

You're just going to cause tensions and

anger at the federal government.

And not very many people came out.

The state, at the state level, DeSantis people rejected that, but did Joe Biden's people come out and say, that's crazy?

They didn't say it's crazy, Jack, because they don't believe it's crazy.

and that's what's strange about it this whole thing everybody should remember that when you take identifiable class differences and you ignore them and you substitute racial differences as if it's 1930 when race in some ways was a touchstone to class in a way that it's not anymore it's absolutely absurd.

The idea that OPA or LeBron James or the diversity coordinator at Stanford or the professor of African American studies at Wesleyan

or the post office worker, that all of those people because of their skin color are oppressed.

And as I said, some guy up,

I don't know, in Santa Rosa or somewhere who's working as a mason who's a white working class, and he is not because of his skin color, he is not privileged.

This was all thought up by privileged white people on the coast.

It really was.

And they surround themselves with upscale minorities, and they want to ingratiate themselves with them because they feel guilty that they live segregated lives from the middle classes, especially the white working classes, but they're terrified of the lower minority classes.

And one of the ways you square that circle is you start to come up with these ideas.

And

it's just absurd.

It's cruel, too.

It's kind of it's also it's it's a tool to to be evil, also, because this kind of mirrors the kulaks under the you know, you're a discernible group of people, and um, we are feeds into this narrative that we've heard: the semi-fascists, the ultra-maga, the deplorables, the clingers, the irredeemables, the chomps, the drags.

We've heard it all crazies, and it just people are sick of it.

Well, Victor, uh, two

other things about Kamala this past week.

One was

a

gaffe of

declaring North Korea a great strong ally of America.

Amazing.

The Democratic Republic of Korea, which is the Kame Stalinist state, she added the word North Korea, which should have been a tip-off.

I could see if she'd said the Democratic Republic of Korea has always been a staunch, loyal ally of the United States.

Okay, and we've had goodwill toward because she confused it because there was no prefix or adjective North.

And all commies who aren't Democratic by nature always use the word democratic, democratic socialist republic, et cetera.

But she didn't do that.

She created her own little name, the Republic of North Korea.

So she put the word North in there.

And she doesn't know that, Jack.

She does not know what North Korea is.

And I thought she was reading it.

I looked at the, I saw the text.

I said to myself, we got to look at the video.

I got me.

Look at the video because she couldn't have, she read it off, it looked like.

So who wrote that?

Yeah.

Well, she didn't know that.

I thought, well, she's firing all of her staffers.

There's been like 18 of them that quit.

Is she down to student interns?

Or is she hiring people like she did, those student actors for that little space skip?

From Canada, even.

Is she cackling like she did?

So, yeah, I mean, she doesn't know anything.

And remember, that's

that's a striking thing to say, but this woman is 57 years old.

She's been a U.S.

Senator.

She's been the Attorney General, and she doesn't know anything.

And you know what it also says to me?

So she's on a 10-hour flight, 12-hour flight, right?

Right.

To Korea, and she's told that this is very important.

And it's told that she will be under

a,

you know, sort of a microscope of scrutiny, given her past gaffes.

And then she's told that she's not to cackle.

And she's told all of these things.

So don't you think she'd have a little book and it'd have a big letters.

the name of

where she's going, the little

backgrounder to the politics, what to say and what not to say.

I mean, the woman graduated, I think, from the University of California Law School at Hastings, right?

So that just, it's another indictment of our educational system.

There's just no knowledge there.

Right.

Well, literally, Victor, she didn't know, was right.

Did you see the video of the

of the American,

was it colonel?

She says,

North Korea way over there.

He's like, it's right here.

It's like five feet away.

Yeah, you know what to remind me?

I saw the guy look and I thought, this is,

we're back to Hank Johnson testifying that if you get to one end of the island of Guam, it's going to flip over.

And then that general was looking at his face.

Yeah,

we're looking into that.

We're prepared.

So, well, I'm just saying, if everybody rushes to the side of Guam, the whole island will flip.

He had that same look.

It's like, where the blank of this person, what other planet did this person come from?

Yeah.

I think he's on the January 6th committee, too, Johnson.

I could be, I could be wrong about it.

I think so.

Well, Victor, one other related to this trip, you know, again, people should

try and find the videos of Kamala Harris.

She had these

binoculars.

I'd never seen them.

I saw them.

I saw them.

Yeah.

Yeah,

something out of Star Wars, but obviously this is high-tech and what our

troops use.

And she just kept looking through them, looking through them.

But then she started talking to

both South Korean and American military about

the Hubble telescope or the Webb telescope, as if, oh, you could see these things there.

Like, what is she talking about?

What does the freaking Webb telescope have to do with looking at the top of the hill over there of North Korea?

So I think she

thought

somehow or other

our military in South Korea is

using these

NASA tools

for security purposes.

Although the freaking telescope's looking at the center of the universe, it's in the opposite direction.

It's 3 billion miles.

I know, and I really liked it when I looked at the...

mainstream media characterization.

They always use the word misspeaks.

She misspoke.

And then, of course,

North Korea didn't it send off a bunch of missiles when she arrived or after this just to show her that

they don't give a blank, blank, blank, blank.

And

what was the purpose of the visit?

The purpose of the visit, and this is her dilemma because there's no solution to it, there's no good answer.

She hadn't been to Europe.

Remember when they asked her about the border?

She said, Well, I haven't been to Europe either.

So, why go to the border?

But her point was that I am vice president of the United States, and I'm vice president of the United States, not because I was a particularly impressive senator from California.

In fact, I knew nothing.

And not because I was a particularly successful presidential candidate, because despite raising hundreds of millions of dollars, I didn't get one delegate.

I was vice president because after George Floyd's death, and 120 days of writing, Joe Biden went in a full panic and the left wing of his party said, We're not going to support you unless you now, in advance, designate a black woman.

So he did.

And then everybody said, Well, wait a minute.

It's not like there's Shirley Chisholm or Barbara Jordan around.

What is there?

Who is it?

Oh, Stacey Abrams.

Well, no, she's an election denialist.

So they, and a

trashy novelist.

And she still thinks she's governor of Georgia.

So they appointed her, and she just thought, I'm a black woman, and I'm just going to cruise around and do the same, you're a racist talk and the people of color and disproportionate and disparate, I'm going to do all that stuff.

And that's what she did.

And then Joe Biden thought, you know,

she is breathing down my neck.

So I'm going to appoint her to a series of jobs starting with the Borders Are.

and that's a lose-lose situation because i've opened the floodgates so she's going to have to go down there with a backdrop of millions of people crossing the border and say that the border is secure right and that's what she's doing and then she thought uh oh

i'm getting bad report i'm getting bad press because i cackle and i repeat myself in these you know circular sentence structures and i have a vocabulary of 500 words and I've got to be presidential.

So I've got to start traveling.

I've got to beef up my national security fee days.

So I'm going to go to Korea and get right on the DMZ.

So in a debate in a year or two, I can say, I stood on the DMZ.

I looked through a telescope.

I looked through binoculars and I saw how close Armageddon is, that kind of stuff.

But it doesn't work with her because

If I was a conspiracy freak, I would think that Joe Biden had a staffer in her entourage who said, you know what, you should go

Korea and give a lecture because she is the only person

stopping people from impeaching Joe Biden.

And if they had, well, he'll probably be impeached because they know that she won't become president because they don't have 60 votes in the Senate.

Otherwise, they would never dare impeach him because she is terrifying.

Whereas you can say that he has age-onset dementia.

What do you say about her?

She's 57, 57.

Right, right.

You would think she going to the border of another country, right,

would be played and probably has been.

I haven't followed, but she can go to the border of North Korea and South Korea,

which, by the way, are secure borders, right?

She won't go to America's southern border.

It's crazy.

I'd wrap that around her neck.

And speaking of our president, as you just did, Victor, in his creeping dementia,

We have this

kind of sad,

pathetic

incident from the other day with Jackie

Walarski, who's the Indiana congresswoman who was killed several weeks back in a head-on car accident.

And

so there's an event and he does, where is she?

It's not as bad as, you know, the guy that couldn't stand up.

Come on, stand up that he did when he was running for office, you know, to the guy in the wheelchair.

But it was, it was, uh, yeah, it was embarrassing.

Not only was it embarrassing, okay, the guy, the guy is, this is a sign of, I think, of his

senility.

But then the White House, two things, the White House immediate spin was, oh, you know, she was at the top of his mind.

And then there was a bill signing ceremony that related to former, you know,

the late Congresswoman, naming, I think, a VA,

something at a VA care center after her.

And that was off limits to the media.

No video allowed.

Of course, it's because no one, they didn't want a question thrown at Biden about how he screwed up her

mere existence a few days prior.

So it was

troubling, Victor.

If I just let you.

He was talking from a teleprompter and he went off.

So if he said,

Jackie, I think he said something like, Jackie, are you here?

Oh, my gosh, he could have said, because 10 years ago, you mentioned the person in the wheelchair.

He said, oh, my gosh, stand.

Oh, he corrected himself.

But that was 10 years of, you know, 5 million more brain cells in his head.

And so he didn't do that.

He just said,

I saw him.

He said, Jackie,

are you here?

Where's Jackie?

She was going to be here.

And it was almost as if he was.

screaming as she's stepped out.

She's not here.

He had no idea that she had passed away.

And then he was asking the crowd or the people around him for help.

And

so we have a choice with him.

When he finishes, what a speech, he turns around.

Usually he walks to his right and he shakes invisible hands of people who don't exist or ghost or

he addresses people who have passed away.

And that's not talking about all of the crazy things he said, like we're going to defend Taiwan with American soldiers or Vladimir Putin's got to get out of office.

As if, you know.

So

it's not just the medium, it's the message, too.

You get a double whammy with Joe Biden.

He says crazy things.

He slurs his words.

He doesn't finish sentences.

He suffers from brain freezes.

There's periods of just total silence while he tries to remember.

And then in addition, when he does remember and he does say things, he's he's a mean SOB

and he's not very bright and he's not very informed.

He went down to Georgia a year ago and he said to that very accomplished African-American, where's my assistant, my boy?

And gosh, if Donald Trump said that,

nobody said a word.

But he's...

I think everybody's got to really be very careful with him because he's a very dangerous person.

He is in power right now.

He's got his finger on the button.

He does not know where he is.

He has a hair-trigger temper.

He loses his temper.

He says things that are crazy that people abroad can't figure out.

His dementia is one of the reasons.

Afghanistan is another why

Vladimir Putin chose February 23rd of this year to go into Ukraine on the assumption.

that Biden wouldn't even know where he was.

And

remember, Biden at the beginning of this Ukrainian debacle offered Zelensky a free ride out.

Right.

And he had not sold offensive weapons.

He put many of them on hold as he did during the Biden presidency.

So

it's very scary right now because

we're at a point where we do not have strategic deterrence abroad.

Yeah.

That's what I, yeah, as much as we giggle about these things

and shaking invisible hands, et cetera, but there are, yeah, there are, I don't even think serious is the right word, ramifications to this particular man

being in office at this time.

The results could very well be catastrophic at some point.

I think they will be.

I really do.

I think we have a rendezvous.

I don't see how we get out of the rendezvous that we have with the Russians in Ukraine.

If everybody,

everybody, meaning the Europeans, the NATO members,

the Biden administration, America, and Russia and Ukraine, of all six of these parties, continue with these mutually exclusive

trajectories, they're going to collide.

And I don't know what's going to happen, but they're not compatible is what I'm saying.

yeah sammy and i talk a little bit but they're not compatible yeah did you did you talk i haven't heard but i know you and sammy recorded it another podcast um and i don't want to uh repeat anything did you did you talk about the the uh russian pipeline and not so much yeah do you have any thoughts on on what's behind well i have a lot of admiration for tucker and he got a lot of heat over it and his point was that biden said there will not be a pipeline and there's not now.

And he referenced that Ronald Reagan had done some type of disruption with a Russian pipeline earlier.

However, I think it's pretty clear that Putin right now is cornered and he's trying to do a lot of things.

What are those a lot of things?

He's calling up 300 troops, 300,000.

The Israelis say that he's moving bombers capable of carrying strategic nuclear weapons closer to the border and missile missile batteries maybe as well.

He is also trying to pressure individual countries.

He is also talking about nuclear weapons strategically and tactically.

He's also

feeling his

way around his oil customers.

So he wants to stop shipments to Germany and to Europe so that they will peel off from the alliance or

the coalition that's supporting Ukraine on this assumption that 40% of the world, that is, you know, 2.8 billion people in India and China, have the currency now to buy his oil.

And it's come winter

for all these

talks in Germany that they're not going to be there for Ukraine.

No, they're not there now, Jack.

It's basically a 90% American deal.

And so basically, we're getting down to Zelensky's heroic figure.

Everybody accepts that.

Ukrainians are probably at this moment in time the best fighters in the world.

And they're pushing the Russians today.

They did a great encirclement and they trapped hundreds, if not thousands, of Russians.

And they will push them back.

But remember what's happening.

These borderlands that are 70% Russian speaking and which have been in Russian hands more or less since 2014 have now been declared mother russia they have been absorbed into russia not that they actually are but in putin's mind he's had these phony uh referenda and he feels that they're now russia which means that the ukrainians are fighting on russian soil and which means that his propaganda has been recalibrated to say

these western proxies these people whose intelligence comes from america that's killing assassinating generals whose intelligence and weapons are blowing up things inside Russia, whose missiles are hitting our ships.

They are waging a war, not just on Russian soil periodically, but now right on the borderlands, which are Russian now.

So he's declared them mother Russia.

Doesn't mean you have to believe him, but what I'm getting at, I want to know

what the plan is.

So, does Mr.

Zelensky think that the Europeans or he's lost 7 million people have fled?

He's probably got 30 or 40,000 dead civilians.

He's probably got $5 trillion in infrastructure destruction.

Does he really believe that the Germans or the Belgians or the French are going to keep supplying him?

I don't think so.

And if you look at the American strategic arsenal that is at his beck and call, it turns out that these platforms are very expensive and they're very hard to create.

And we're way behind supplying them.

And we don't have, we're draining our reserves to supply him.

And we are $31 trillion in debt.

And we just lost a basket of somewhere between $10 to $80 billion in Afghanistan.

And we are the only reliable supplier of Zelensky.

And there is no conversation, dialogue between the Ukrainian government and us

because he signed his little application to join NATO.

If he was in NATO right now, we would have a nuclear war

because we would be pledged to go to his defense and he would invoke Article 5.

But Victor, back to what got us into this line.

None of this would be happening if Joe Biden wasn't president of the United States and wasn't weak and

didn't

perform the disaster of Afghanistan.

We know that it was right after Afghanistan, and we know that North Korea would not be sending missiles 20 minutes after Kamala Harris finished that ridiculous speech.

We know that Iran right now would be terrified.

to announce to the world that it essentially had a bomb.

We had enough

fissionable material material to make a bomb.

None of this would, we would know that Qi would not be bragging, that it's a matter of

when and not if it goes into Taiwan.

All of that's occurring because these countries feel that after Afghanistan, and as they watch Biden and as they watch the U.S.

military turn from a destructive force that can really hurt our enemies into a social justice organization, i.e., the testimonies of Millie and Austin and Milley's freelancing and bragging how he called the Chinese counterpart and the PLA

and warned him that Trump may be crazy and he wouldn't obey an order and all that.

They look at all that piece by piece, and the picture that they see is

we can go into Ukraine and there will not be ramifications.

And, you know, I want Russia to fail.

I want Ukraine to recapture its ground.

But at some point, somebody is going to have to be an adult and go over to the Zelensky and say, we are so into you

financially, economically, militarily.

And Russia has anywhere from

6,500 to 7,000 nukes.

And they're not just pointed at Kiev.

They're pointed at every major city in the United States.

And we haven't voted that we're going to pledge the suburbs of Atlanta

or the boardwalk in New Jersey or Disneyland for your

agenda.

And so we'll see what happens because Germany's that, all those speeches those Germans gave, Schultz and all that,

that was just all hot air.

They need energy and they're going to be burning wood, as I said, and being in hot rooms trying to make body heat so people don't freeze to death because they don't have any energy and everybody says well they're building all of these sophisticated terminals for liquid natural gas the united states has been cutting back on right where are they getting it from where are they going to get it we could we could deliver it to them if we would just lease federal lands he's leased fewer federal lands for exploration for gas and oil than any president in history since the age of the modern fossil fuel industry.

He shut down ANWAR.

He shut down Keystone pipelines.

He's told financial organizations, hedge funds, pension funds, do not invest in fracking and horizontal drilling.

So we have a wonderful chance right now.

to tell the Europeans, we're going on a Marshall Plan to pump natural gas, and we're going to be shipping it to you in weeks and enormous quantities.

So get those terminals ready.

Then we have an enormous chance to go to the Cypriots, the Israelis, the Greeks and say, we're sorry, I, Joe Biden, canceled your EastMed pipeline.

I don't know what it was, 10 billion cubic feet a year going up to Trieste or somewhere in the Tyrian and the Adriatic,

this underbelly of Europe.

And we're going to do that now.

That's a win-win-win situation.

It will enrich our allies and it will help Europe get weaned off Russian oil.

He's not doing any of that.

And so we're very vulnerable because the Europeans are not going to be there.

I'm kind of getting really tired of

all of this

Zelensky and Ukraine's winning and they trapped whole Russian armies as if it's 19, you know, it's the German army trapping Army Group,

Army Group Middle trapping 750,000 out of Kiev or something.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

They're fighting a country that has 145 million.

They have 40.

And as Edward Lutwack pointed out in that Strategica article, they have the ability to call up 20, 30,000 a month, given their demographics.

So calling 5 million a month, a 5,000, excuse me, 20 to 30,000 a month, calling 5,000 is nothing.

And maybe they don't want to fight, maybe they do.

But

this idea that we're going to go into winter and every Russian is going to be kicked out of a Russian-speaking borderland and Putin's Putin's going to say, Well,

that was a mistake, wasn't it?

I just got to call up all these angry oligarchs and my fire generals, get some of the opposition protesters in the street, and say, You know what?

I screwed up.

Sorry, that's not how it works in Russia.

And not that we are invested in keeping him in office, but we're not invested in cornering a nut elderly tyrant with a bunch of bombs under his thumb.

And I don't get this

transmogrif, I guess it's a transmogrification of all of these left-wing people who have now become

neo-imperialists that want to have this holy crusade to kill all these Russians and get them all out of Ukraine.

I understand that you want to help Zelensky free the Ukrainian nation and punish Russia for the mayhem it's inflicted.

But

and then when Zelensky talks about reparations, trillions of dollars, he said the other day,

I don't understand that because what's moral and what is due to him is not what's going to be in the real world coming.

You only give reparations, if it's after the Versailles Treaty or during World War II, when you defeat and humiliate the enemy.

And then you dictate to him.

And we're not going to dictate to Russia.

We're not going to do it, we're not able to do it.

Right, they are not going to be completely destroyed, and we're going to stand over them and say, shake our fingers at all of these Putin replacements and say, You did this and you did that, and we're putting these people in a Nuremberg-like trial for all the atrocities.

I wish we would, but we're not.

And we're going to make you pay for all this infrastructure destroyed.

It's not going to happen.

And why talk about it as if it is?

Well, Victor, you mentioned Strategica and to our listeners,

there is a, we're going to talk about Strategica.

That's the online journal that Victor

oversees and edits

published by Hoover.

We're going to talk about that on our next episode.

And we have one more quick thing to talk about.

I hate to do this.

See if maybe just, because we don't have much time left, but see if we can get some quick thoughts from Victor about the Iran protests that are now ongoing, I think, almost into their second week.

And we'll do that right after these important messages.

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And we're back live during a flex alert.

Oh, we're pre-cooling before 4 p.m., folks.

And that's the end of the third.

Time to set it back to 78 from 4 to 9 p.m.

What a performance by Team California.

The power is ours.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show coming

around the turn and into the home stretch.

So, Victor,

I hate to tell you, three minutes, my friend, but

could you give us just a quick three, four, five minutes

sketch of what your thoughts are about

where Iran is right now?

I mean, to me, these,

we've seen this before, people out and en masse, and it never seems to reach the point that

Of course, it doesn't seem because it hasn't happened.

It doesn't reach the point where it topples a government that it seems a large percentage of the population is sick of.

It's not going to happen.

It's not going to happen.

Just like the Arab Spring was not going to happen.

And everybody, I mean, we got,

it only happens when the United States gets involved.

So when the United States got involved and pulled the rug under Mubarak, and then they got this crazy Morrissey, whatever his name was, and then we finally, we got Sisi.

But my point is that we went through this.

I don't know, six months into the Obama administration in June of 2009.

Remember that?

When this horrible Ahmadinejad was elected, and they all came out in the streets.

I don't know if they called it the Green Revolution or the Green Movement, but everybody was euphoric.

There was a million people in the streets of Tehran.

They all looked toward the United States.

And what happened?

A left-wing government, Barack Obama's, thought, why are these people protesting?

We're going to make a Nehran deal.

This is a revolutionary government.

These are Shia.

These are Persians.

These are the persecuted orphans of the Middle East.

They deserve a Shia crescent.

They deserve Tehran ruling the Middle East via Syria, via Lebanon, all the way to the coast with Hamas thrown in.

They are the necessary check, the balance to these corrupt, pro-American, oil-producing Gulf states and this problematic, bothersome ally we called Israel.

So the first time it happened, it upset the entire idea that only African-American, cool Mr.

Obama with the sort of exotic name could come in and adjudicate this new path-breaking solution to Middle East tension, which was, oh, we're going to kind of light a fire onto the Shia Persians and promote the Iranian theocrats, and then we're going to tell the Sunni autocrats and Israel, be careful.

We might just push you.

And then when they pushed our former allies, then we would tell the theocrats, well, be careful, these are our old allies.

And we would have something, I think they call it creative tension.

And that's what they do.

So if there is a left-wing administration in Washington, and if there is a grassroots democratic uproar in Iran, it's going to go nowhere.

Because Joe Biden will no more say that he supports the women on the ground and their aspirations for revolution and democracy than Barack Obama did.

Because as we see that

incompetent Mali is still trying to, and with John Kerry's fumes, are still trying to beg these awful people in Iran to cut a deal.

And it's not going to happen.

It's not going to happen.

And it's so strange because these left-wing people all talk about democracy on the side of women.

They killed this poor Kurdish woman.

They've got a wonderful cause,

but it's not going to happen.

And if there was a different, if Donald Trump is right now in office, we would get some pretty crazy tweets, but he would have no hesitation in saying America is on the side of the women in the street.

Right.

He would.

Yeah.

Because I think Americans are.

Just the American leftist elites.

Yes, but nobody in America is saying anything because our government is mute.

And our government is mute because they're still chasing this Iran deal unicorn and this bankrupt, fossilized, calcified Obama plan to create a strategic balance to our former allies.

The only good that came of the whole disastrous Obama-Middle East plan that Biden is pursuing, it brought the Sunnis

and Israel closer together with a common enemy of Iran.

Right.

And so it's not going to happen.

I wish right now that the United States government, that Biden, Anthony Blinken were saying, you know what?

The American people are on the side of the women in the streets.

They want a constitutional government.

They're tired of theocracy.

We stand with them.

And we warn the Iranian government they're facing steep sanctions that we're going to slap on immediately if they start killing people in the street.

What's so hard about that?

Well, somebody's saying, but don't do that.

Yeah.

Because I've got this idea of the Iran deal.

It's still possible.

we can still we can still do it and we can still get a pose a nobel

prize exactly that's that's that's john kerry we can bring him back john kerry is still working on the shadows in a nice logan action fashion he's still got his little feeders out he did the whole time during trump don't screw it up that's how they think

well victor we've uh nearly run out of time um lots of wisdom shared by you today uh brilliant as usual.

I'd like to thank all our listeners, and particularly our new listeners, and those numbers keep growing every week.

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You can also leave comments.

We read them.

Here's one

from Kristen, 620, 1969.

I have a feeling, Victor, that's Kristen's birthday, but it's titled, Thank You.

Here's the quote, Buck Sexton.

Buck Sexton tells his listeners about you often.

I learned of you from him over 10 years ago.

He admiringly refers to you as VDH.

Thank you for all you've done for our country and continue to do as a busy, homeschooling, business-owning, self-employed family.

I appreciate being able to listen to your wisdom while I do otherwise mindless tasks.

Maybe that's vacuuming.

I don't know.

Thank you.

Thanks again to you, VDH, Sammy and Jack.

God bless you.

Kristen, by the way, Victor, Buck Sexton.

Jack Fowler and Anthony Fauci went to the same high school.

I just want to.

Yeah, well,

you got to offset

But was he younger than you?

He's much younger than me.

Yeah, yeah.

So now you guys picked on Anthony Fauci when he came back.

No, well, that's another.

We were talking about

unnecessary tweets as we began this.

Yes.

Could you recall that?

I think DeSantis wanted to...

to cement his reputation for being a little out of hand when he said that he'd like to take that elf and throw him back across the project.

Did he say that?

Did he?

I don't know.

I didn't hear that.

I think really.

Oh, wow.

He called him an elf?

All right.

I think he did, but I know our listeners are much better informed on some of these issues than I am.

Yeah.

Well, so I mean, that was pretty.

Yeah, this is a little bit of a sought-off runt.

So

I don't know.

I think Dissent is, I think he even called him.

I think he said little.

And I know that he said throw or chucked or tossed.

Yeah, there used to be a not politically correct

game.

Is what I mean game activity weird thing, but dwarf tossing.

I hope he wasn't channeling that.

I think the Fauci's are now worth what, $12 million.

Yeah.

He's got awards.

He's got royalties.

He's

at least one corporate board membership.

And I'll finish my.

thought for today.

Right.

He's got a rendezvous with Rand Paul.

Oh, he does.

Yeah.

I want front row seats on that one.

So, well, Victor, thanks.

Thanks as ever for you.

You've been wonderful.

Thanks, everyone, for listening.

We'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody.