Strange Awakenings

Hi there.

Welcome to our listeners.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor is a scholar, columnist, essayist of political and cultural norms, and does a lot of critique of our political situation right now.

So we're always happy to hear from him.

Today is a news roundup of sorts, at least we're doing current news.

And we have the Alaska election, Mikhail Gorbachev, Biden's speech, and maybe a little bit on the G7 plan to cap prices with Russian oil and the UN and its publication of a letter against the human rights abuses of China of the Uyghurs.

So stay with us.

We'll be right back after this break.

Welcome back.

I would like to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He is available on his website, victorhanson.com.

Come join us.

There's subscriptions.

You can get a free subscription and we'll put you on our mailing list.

And there's lots of free material.

And then there's the $5 a month and the $50

an annual subscription where you have available to you the VDH ultra material that is fairly extensive, somewhere between 2,400 and 3,000 words each week.

So please come join us.

Victor, I always ask how you're doing today, or if there's anything on your mind, do we have anything?

I am broadcasting from Hillsdale College.

And I left the Central Valley when there was zero humidity in 107.

And now it's about 68 and raining with 100% humidity.

How's that?

Still.

And I'm having

a neuroplasticity talk with my brain every morning and saying, you know what?

You feel like you've got the flu, you're fatigued, muscle ache, weird neurological.

You don't.

That's your immune system.

So you tell them there's just a little old dead spike protein.

Do not get excited.

Calm down.

So we're getting along.

This is my new strategy.

Oh, nice.

I hope it's working for you.

I think it will.

I'll tell my

stop those leucotrines, cycotin, system and just calm down.

You don't have to get excited about something that's long ago past.

I'm going to try to retrain my brain if I can.

Yeah.

Well, let's turn to Sarah Palin and her strategy.

And the Alaska elections, they have a ranking voting system,

and she lost.

She lost whether you just took the straight-up vote or when they instituted the ranking afterwards.

So they go with the straight-up vote, which she lost by almost 10 points.

It was 31% of the vote to Palin and the Peltola.

got 41 40 percent of the vote and then a republican took away 28 percent and his name was nick bed begich i think so the point is and

the conservative candidate complex would have won by 20 points

had they had a regular election where they had a runoff between the two top vote-getters.

But since we have ranked,

and since people are not familiar about the importance of a second-place person, i.e., you should,

Sarah Palin, you're going to vote, you leave the second and third choice blank.

The

irony is that 60% of the people wanted a conservative candidate and they ended up with a Democratic liberal

just simply because of this rank system, which doesn't really work well because the electorates got problems enough without trying to follow all the myriad strategies of whose name you put in the second or something alternative and how that is calculated into the ultimate result.

Yeah, they should have never had that system, but it's not the end-all because this was a fill-in for a deceased congressperson, and they're going to have another retry in November.

And then the question will be,

will these two Republican candidates caucus and one of them will bow out?

If that should happen, then that Republican seat will be held.

Yeah.

Victor, what's your assessment of how Republicans are just doing broadly beyond the Palin election here?

I'm not a registered Republican.

I'm not a registered independent, but we keep talking about this.

They have to nationalize the election.

That just means that when Trump holds a rally, as he did yesterday, we all know what they did to him at the rate.

We all know that it was injust.

We all know that the various exegesis, explanations, analyses, why they went there keep changing with the day.

But so what?

We expect that from the left.

What we don't want is a replay of 2020 in Georgia where Trump blasts the the system, and then his base doesn't vote, and then the swing voter gets turned off.

So, what we want is for Trump to say, what they did to me is a terrible injustice, but it won't be nearly the injustice that's going to happen to you if you don't go out and vote on an array of policies.

And here they are: energy, inflation, the border,

Afghanistan,

crime.

These are existential threats, and we have to unite and make sure that every single candidate for the House or the Senate asks

their Democratic opponent, do you support the border policy of 3 million illegal entrants?

Do you support a historic rise in crime?

Do you support

near-record energy cost?

Do you support 8.5 point inflation?

Do you

support what happened in Afghanistan?

And see, and that would be a big win for the Republicans.

Nobody does because I know that from the polls.

All those positions I just delineated don't poll 50%,

nor does Biden.

They're all giddy, the Democrats.

Oh my God, he's recovering.

Aviator Job.

And what do I mean by recover?

He's gone from 38 to 41.8 or something.

And the Reuters has him back down at 38.

So he's an anemic, hopeless candidate.

But that doesn't mean he's going to lose.

And I think that's really important for everybody to understand what's going on.

There was a January 6 melodrama, and then it petered out.

And then we had the three weeks ago, the RAID psychodrama at Mar-Lago,

and nuclear secrets, and Trump's mementos.

and Russian collusion.

You know, that was just the bombshell walls are closing in.

Same playbook as the Russian collusion hoped.

And now I think we're going to have an indictment, but what are we not having is a discussion of how wretched this administration's record is.

And that's by design.

So the left wants to let off these bombshells, and they've done it for the last six weeks.

And every time they talk about

we're going to go Donald Trump and he's going to get angry and tweet or do something, then we're not talking about the price of gas or the spiling crime rate or the unlivability in downtown America or the open border.

So that's what's happening with that.

At some point, the Republican Party, I think traditionally, the campaign starts after Labor Day.

They're going to have to rise up and say, this is a contract with America.

This is what we're going to do if we take the House and Senate.

We're going to introduce legislation to

finish the wall, secure the border,

use federal attorneys to urge them.

I mean, They don't have the presidency, but their idea is to have federal attorneys charge people with crimes and mean it when they charge them.

And then we're going to have to have some kind of physical responsibility.

We open ANWAR, Keystone, more federal leads, all of that, and make it a national election on those issues.

And I think they would pick up 40 seats or 50 seats.

But not if they allow the news cycle to be melodramatic.

Donald Trump is, you know, Satan incarnate and he's going to react.

And so, again, everybody should remember what's going on.

It's January 6th.

It's the Mar-Lago raid.

It's going to be an indictment.

And right now, we're in the middle of what?

The

semi-fascist dash disloyal American MAGA people, Biden.

And that's what.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, since you've mentioned that, let's turn to that Biden speech.

He said so many outrageous things.

I just am stunned.

He said, quote,

mega people are extremists, number one.

They do not respect the Constitution.

They do not believe in the rule of law.

They do not recognize the will of the people.

They are working to give power to partisans and cronies to decide elections.

They promote authoritarian leaders, fan flames of political violence, and threaten personal rights, the pursuit of justice, rule of law, and the soul of the country.

I was just shocked because it seems to me that the Democrats can find.

Yeah, exactly.

But go ahead.

What do you think?

Remember when he said, Didn't he say they embrace anger?

They thrive on chaos.

Yeah.

And I like that one.

They live not in the light of truth, but in the shadow of lies.

And I think John Meacham probably wrote that speech.

He had a lot of presidential historians go in and advise him.

And then they went out and told everybody about a great speech it was.

It's if Biden took their advice, so therefore it's a great speech.

But

it's just classical projection, isn't it?

So if you listen to that, you think, okay,

Donald Trump, when he was president and he had that mega agenda, he hired 87,000 IRS agents.

Oh, no, he withdrew.

the contractual arrangements between student and federal government on student loans, and he forgave what they said was $300 billion, but more likely $500 billion, eventually to a trillion dollars with a stroke of a pen.

Oh, he weaponized the FBI.

They put Robbie Mook, remember him?

He was Hillary's campaign.

They put him in leg irons, didn't they?

Oh, no, they took Jake Sullivan, the guy who was knee-deep in collusion, our national security advisor.

Did they grab a cell phone at an airport?

I don't know.

Did the FBI director go into,

you know, did he go into a meeting with

Biden and then go out and memorialize it and then leak it to the New York Times?

Is the FBI,

is the FBI, I don't know what we should say, are they forging documents?

Are they wiping clean subpoena phone records?

Where did that all happen?

That all happened in opposition to Trump and MAGA.

And so I could go on and on and on.

Lois Lerner meet Bill Clinton on the tarmac and then arrange some kind of deal in which Hillary probably wouldn't be tried?

Do we have 50 Trump CIA experts or intelligence operatives who swear that the Hunter laptop is what, Russian disinformation when they knew it wasn't?

And where's the DOJ investigation of Hunter where he admitts on a computer and he says that his father's Mr.

Big Guy, Mr.

10%,

Pedo Peter?

Who is packing the court?

Who wants to pack the court?

Who wants to get rid of the 180-year filibuster?

Who wants to destroy 233 years of the Electoral College?

Who wants to nationalize balloting in

contrast to what the Constitution allots that responsibility primarily to the states?

Who wants to let in two more states after 60 years just so they can get four senators?

Who is rioting for 120 days and 2 billion damage and 35 dead, 1,500 police officers injured, 14,000 arrests.

Who said, wait a minute, who said it's not going to stop?

It won't stop before and after the election.

It shouldn't stop.

I think that was Kamala Harris.

And so

you tell me who's the insurrectionary party.

And who was the one that said that the Supreme Court was illegitimate when they were in Spain?

Wasn't that Joe Biden?

And when there was an assassin who turned up?

near the house of Brett Kavanaugh.

Did the White House say anything?

And did they say anything when they went after Kavanaugh in a restaurant?

Did they say anything when Chuck Sumer got to the doors of the Supreme Court and said, you sowed the wind, you're going to reap the whirlwind.

You're not going to know what hit you, Gorsuch.

Kavanaugh, that's threatening the Supreme Court, Judge.

Did anybody,

when Trump was president, did they say when Trump left office, did they write 10 days into Biden's

tenure?

Did they say, you know, there's only three ways to get rid of Joe Biden.

There's the 25th Amendment, there's impeachment, and we can get a military coup, the way Rosa Brooks did in Foreign Policy, which published that article.

Did a bunch of retired officers start calling, I don't know, Biden, conservative officers call him a Mussolini, a Nazi?

Did two retired colonels advise Mark Milley to go out and remove Biden from office?

Did Admiral McRaven all of a sudden say that Biden should be removed sooner the better from office?

No, they didn't do any of that.

And so when he says that they're anti-constitutional or if they're threats, he's talking about himself because they're left-wing revolutionaries.

And they always do that.

They project.

That doesn't mean that

the Republicans aren't playing smart.

I mean, they've got to.

What they want to do, in other words, Sammy, is they want to get them so angry with all of these false accusations that they go crazy.

And when they're called and they say, well, if they're going to call us insurrectionaries and disloyal traitors, we might as well.

And they want a street, they want another January 6th, five hours.

Because in their mind, they can riot and loot and destroy for 120 days and no one cares.

But you do it and go to the Capitol.

And by the way, it wasn't just the Capitol was iconic because the White House is pretty iconic too.

And on May 31st, 2020, they tried to break out into the from Lafayette Square, right into the White House grounds.

So my point is that

they want to provoke people, and you don't want to get into that cycle where you're reactive.

You just want to take a deep breath and say, You can call me anything you want.

You do your worst, we'll do our best because there's going to be a reckoning, and we're going to get every person out to vote.

And we're going to vote on the issues,

and we're going to have eagle eyes, and we're going to watch every SOB that tries to put $419 million

to selectively absorb absorb the work of registrars in key precincts or congressional districts.

We're going to watch you this time.

We're going to make sure that you don't do what you did in 2020 when only 30% of the electorates showed up on Election Day.

So that's what they need to do.

Electoral integrity and the issues and not get into this.

And, you know, everybody's kind of analyzed it to death, but it was sort of like Phantom of the Opera, wasn't it?

That said, that red glow.

Was it supposed to be red, white, and blue?

It was dark.

Yeah.

Everybody's been saying they felt it was so inappropriate.

And after reading the speech, I thought,

this speech is so dark and it's so calling Satan and satanic things that I'm sorry I didn't think it was a very appropriate backdrop.

But you know what?

I've given, I don't know, probably two speeches a month for 30 years.

I don't know how many, that's 25 or 30 speeches easy a year.

Probably,

you know, a thousand speeches.

I have never once taken my two hands and had fists and clinched them on either side.

Because you know why no one in their right mind would do that?

You know who did that?

Was Adolf Hitler.

And I'm not trying to add Hitlerium, reduce it down to Hitler, but no speaker does that because that has been a nefarious posture ever since.

we saw it on our, you know, on documentaries.

But for Biden to do that and then to grimace and then to have this dark black and red glow coming out, like it's, as I said, I mean, people have said it was like triumph of the will or Lindy Riefenstel's outtake or something, but to have U.S.

Marines there.

And I thought that Mark Milley apologized when Donald Trump walked over after the May 31st riot and Milley accompanied him.

He said, I shouldn't have been there.

That was too political.

A presidential address is the only place where U.S.

military are going to to show up.

I apologize.

Where's Mark Milley?

General Milley, are you going to say this was very inappropriate?

There were two

there were two Marine Guards there, and they were used as sets.

And this was not a presidential speech.

Well, he's not going to say that because he was never upset about the principle.

It was Donald Trump that he felt that people were objecting to, and he didn't want to get on the wrong side of them because he's got a lucrative career when he retires.

And so, this is, I mean,

according to what we were told, you can't use the military if you're a president, if you're acting in a partisan or political fashion.

So everything about it was creepy.

And then,

I mean, I don't want to be cruel, but when you put that black set,

and then you have him there screaming and yelling with that hoarse voice, and he's got that lizard-like white tail

complexion with that black-red,

as I said, phantom of the opera.

And then you've got the military rifle and a guard there.

It's just eerie.

It was the person who dreamed that up are those three historians that argue that he should get tough right before the semi-fascist and this thing.

I think it was Michael Beschloss, Doris Kearns-Goodwin, and

John Meacham.

I think they've all had, I didn't understand why they would advocate.

anything because they went on, I think

Michael Beschloss said, well, this this is a wartime, this was like a wartime call.

We're not at war.

Who are we at war with?

Who are we at war with?

This is the Civil War porn that we talked about earlier, insurrection porn.

They're always talking about insurrectionary civil war.

Whenever you want to find an article, just Google

Insurrection section, Blue Exit, or whatever you call it.

It's the left that talks about that.

And so they

Victor, let's take a moment for some messages and come right back and finish up on this topic.

So let's go ahead and go to some messages.

Welcome back.

Victor, we were just talking about the Joe Biden speech.

And I think that given the nature of the speech, which was to try to make everything Trump do seem satanic and the backdrop kind of fit in with that, although I understand how inappropriate it was.

I do have a question, though.

He quoted

a Fourth Circuit Judge, Michael Lutig,

that Trump and his allies are clear and present danger.

And I thought that was very strange of Michael Lutig to have said that.

He's always going to find that right.

I know, but you can always find a Republican to do play that role.

You always can, because his name is now in the paper.

Until I said no so emphatically, believe me, if you're, say, at the Hoover Institution, you'll get a call from the New York Times and it'll go something like this or the Washington Post or Political.

They'll say something like the following.

We're doing a story and we understand that you're a principled conservative and we would like to know, is there anything that bothered you about that Trump rally?

And then you're supposed to say, well,

and then they use that name.

You see what I mean?

They say, oh, conservative.

And so that's the game.

So you never talk to those people because they're not, they're disingenuous.

But, you know, when you were quoting all of that, the worst thing about that speech,

and we quoted a little bit of it, but you remember when he said,

I don't know what, he said that

in Donald Trump's America, you couldn't.

What was it?

You couldn't marry the one you love.

Oh, yeah.

And that was just a complete, he said, you know, they they want to take us backwards.

They had, you know, have no right to privacy.

Everything he said was a complete lie.

So when he said you have no right to privacy or choose, you do.

All the Supreme Court said was

you have a choice.

This is a democracy, a constitutional republic.

So whatever state you're in,

contact your legislature or have a ballot initiative because you know what?

You have the chance to choose whether you want an abortion law or not.

And we don't care.

It's your business.

So do you have no right to choose?

And if you lose out and you

want to have

pro-abortion and you're in, I don't know, Idaho and it says you can't have an abortion at the time you want it, then just

drive, you know, for six hours, eight hours into California.

And it's...

Half the states are going to be blue in the terms of abortion.

And he said, you have no right to contraception.

You can buy birth control pills in the male now.

And you have no right to marry the one you love.

It was Barack Obama.

Do you remember that, Sammy, in 2008 when he ran and they asked him, do you believe in gay marriage?

He said, no,

marriage should be between a man and a woman.

And they got mad at Biden because he got in one of his senior moments, he let the cat out of the bag that that was a lie.

They were going to flip on that issue.

And then Obama was forced to change.

And so that was all, by the way, that was just a theft from Ted Kennedy's smear of Robert Bork when he was up.

You know, in the world of country of Robert Bork, you wouldn't be this.

And it really was effective.

And these little speech writers got together, historians, I guess, and they thought, let's get this old corpse out and bring it back from the dead and smear MAGA like we smeared Robert Bork because it worked.

And

he had a fundamental contradiction in that speech because 75%,

75 million, I don't know, a little bit more, voted for Donald Trump.

And Donald Trump lost no more Republicans than did John McCain and Mitt Romney.

They were different Republicans, but he got 90% of registered Republicans in 2016 and 2000, maybe 89 and 2020 to vote for him.

So when he says

MAGA, he's talking about most half of the country.

And when he says the MAGA Republicans, well, 90% of them voted for Donald Trump.

And you know that he's disingenuous because every single primary contest in the Senate or the House, when they thought that there was a moderate, you know, a MAGA person, but who wasn't full in for Trump, what did they do?

The Democratic Party that has so much money to burn, they gave it to the extreme MAGA candidate, the ultra-megas, they would say.

So they were fueling MAGA candidates in the primaries, which they said were insurrectionaries now.

Why were they doing that?

And if they thought it was so toxic.

All that was missing from this speech was he should have held up a paper and said, in my hand,

209 known MAGA supporters in in the government.

And he would have been Joe

tail gunner Joe McCarthy, which he is.

It was just right out of Joe McCarthy.

And I say that not out of

flamboyance, but because he gave no indication.

He didn't give any data.

He didn't say anything.

He said that everybody.

They said that people said those who rioted on January 6th were patriots.

They didn't.

A very small group of people.

I said it, it, what everybody else said.

They said there were a lot of buffoons there.

Not everybody that was in the general area went into the Capitol.

Some went in because they were welcomed in with open doors.

But the people who committed violence should be punished.

And they were punished.

But there were a lot of people who were charged with, what, illegal parading?

And Joe Biden lied about every detail in that January 6th.

Ashley Babbitt was shot while she was on arms.

She was the only person probably killed, maybe another MAGA supporter.

Officer Sicknick was not, he was not murdered by MAGA protesters.

He died of some type of reaction or stroke the next day.

It might have been induced by the stress, but it was not coming at the direct hands of a MAGA supporter.

And for those who did attack police, then shame on them.

But

Joe Biden didn't say a damn word for 120 days when there were 14,000 arrests and people firebombed police.

They tried to burn down a police spring sink.

They attacked a federal courthouse.

And

he never used the word insurrectionary.

And his current vice president praised them and not only praised them, but said it wouldn't stop and it shouldn't stop.

So that's what is really irritating about him.

But the other day, everything he says, it's, you know, where's the Washington Post with their list of presidential lies like they had when, you know, Trump was in office.

The other day he said, and you know, an AR-15 has a,

that, when they shoot that bullet, it goes five times faster than most guns.

I think if you took a.44 Magnum with a full load, it goes faster than an

AR-15.

That's not true.

Maybe 10%

faster than some rifle calibers, or depending on the ammunition.

But in most cases, an AR-15 round will not go any more any quicker than, say, a 30-06 six or something or a handgun with a blow.

That was a complete lie five times faster, like a hypersonic missile or something.

You know, most, you know, 2,500 feet per second is he's talking about what, 10,000 feet per second.

It's Russian Vladimir Putin's hypersonic rocket.

So he just does that all the time.

He just makes stuff up.

Yeah.

You know, I'm surprised that you said that

they consulted historians and three historians on this because it really just sounded like the rantings of a deranged mind.

So I thought he wrote it himself.

But think of the people who he, the news accounts said that they had urged him to go big.

And then there were leaks out yesterday that he listened to his historian advisors to be tough.

But look who they were.

I mean, Doris Kearns Goodwin was fired from PBS for plagiarism.

Michael Beschloss.

I mean, just the other day, when they had the Mar-a-Lago raid, he tweeted out the Rosenbergs and their, remember their fate as if Donald Trump should be what, electric, in the electric chair for stealing, giving, what, nuclear secrets to the Soviets?

He just completely made that up, that he was, you know, any way equivalent to the Rosenbergs.

He's an historian.

John Meachin was already chastised prior

by

the media for not for commenting on a speech that he helped write.

That would be like, hey, Victor, this is Donald Trump.

Would you please let me talk to you about my rally speech?

Okay, Mr.

President.

I think you should do this.

And I think you should really go big.

I think you should really let the left have it.

Just let them have it.

Say everything you can.

I'll give you some historical references, too.

Just like, I'll get a Robert Bourk speech, that Robert Bork when Teddy Kinney attacked him.

Let's use that.

Oh, good.

And then he gives it.

And then then I go on Fox.

I said, wow, that was a brilliant wartime speech.

That was just great.

Oh,

I guess I was one of his advisors who just talked to him.

Oh, I guess

I've been in the past either guilty of plagiarizing or comparing Joe Biden to the Rosenbergs who should be electrocuted, or I've done this before.

Praise the people who wrote the speech, of which I was a part of the speechmaking team.

That's where we are.

And nobody says a damn thing about it.

Nobody says a damn thing.

No, I don't know.

There's an elite historians, and

I guess you can plagiarize.

That's a weird thing.

Believe me, if some guy at Mississippi State or Cal State Fresno or Cal State Sac State, if he

plagiarizes, they're never going to be on anything again.

That's it for you.

Unlike Doris Kearns Goodwin.

And if you tweet out that the ex-president of the United States basically should be executed by posting a picture of the Rosenbergs

and suggesting that so-called nuclear secrets were espionage on the part of

Trump.

And you don't know the difference.

Then

if you had done that without the protection of that beltway

elite classification, you'd be fired.

You'd be done for.

And believe me, any legitimate historian who was contacted by a president to write something for that president, and then as a media commentator, started praising that, they would be done for.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know,

I could go on about this because it's just so strange what Trump has done to everybody.

I know we've talked a lot about Trump derangement syndrome.

Reverse derangement.

Reverse derangement.

Yeah.

Oh, I mean,

he brings out the word.

He chose the real person, is what you're saying.

Yeah.

He's like a distillery.

He distills them down.

He does.

And

this has got to be the worst speech ever given by a president.

And he's, you know, he's really made him do it, I guess.

Just incredible.

Well, I mean,

yeah, he has that ability to completely look what he, I mean, look at.

Look what he has done to people.

John Bolton was a respectable person.

He went completely mad in his hatred of Trump.

Look at Bill Crystal.

Look at that Michael Hayden, the ex-CIA director.

He's been tweeting that Trump is

his border cages, he called them, that he inherited from Obama were like Auschwitz.

And then he retweeted that

Michael Beschloss,

you know, Rosenberg illusion.

You know, I know it came from John Meacham because, you know, The Soul of America kept talking about, that was the name of a,

you know, that was the name of

a book that Meacham wrote.

He just talked, he just talked to him.

So basically, I think you could say,

basically,

John Meacham went and talked to Trump and said, you know, I wrote a book called Soul of America.

I mean, talked to Biden, said, I wrote a book called Soul of America.

And

I think that you...

that would be a very good thing for you to incorporate in your speech.

And,

you know, this is what's so

what's so weird is that he was bordering on what he did before.

Because I think that, what was it?

And it was right after, right after the election, I'm sure of it.

And he was, right after the election,

he praised a Biden speech that he wrote, that he ghost,

that he helped gut ghosts right.

And

I think he was at the time, he was chastised for it at Vanderbilt.

And And

I think he left Vanderbilt.

I don't know

what the cause and effect was, but my point is this, that if he's done it before, he's gone to Biden and he said, look, write this.

Then he went on TV and praised the stunning speech.

And then he goes back and does it again.

And he uses the soul of America.

And he shouldn't be commenting on it.

And Michael Beshloff should not be commenting on it.

He advised.

And none of them should be.

But it's part of it.

It's almost as if somebody said, let's think about how would you be a real swamp creature?

I know

you would be in the cocktail circuit in Washington, D.C.,

and you'd be on CNN and MSNBC, and then you would go talk to Biden, and then you would go in an incestuous circle and brag on it.

And so it's.

Unless you're going to disagree with me, Sammy, and say this, no, Victor, this had the mark of a brilliant Biden creation.

He wrote it himself.

I think he must have written it himself.

But, you know, I was thinking, well, just even compare it to Lincoln's first inaugural when they're headed into the Civil War.

I mean, Lincoln's first inaugural had to tell the South that they were unambiguously a union and that separation wasn't going to.

But he didn't go into this demonization.

Like the whole speech was this demonization speech.

FDR didn't do it on, the FDR didn't do it on

December 8th when he declared war on the Japanese.

Remember the day of infamy speech have you ever heard it?

It's very calm, it's resolved.

He said, and he doesn't raise his voice, he doesn't call them those little bastards or they're just,

he didn't say anything.

He said, these people have don't know what they've gotten.

And

he was calmer than he was calmer about talking about an existential enemy than Biden was our own fellow American.

Yeah, so I still am surprised that he consulted anybody and not just his own deranged mind.

But I think we should move on to

I think that I should start

advising politicians and then talking about which of their speeches are the most brilliant.

And you know how that will turn out.

Oh, no.

Yeah, you're right.

All right.

So

a small topic I had.

I thought maybe you might have some words on Mikhail Gorbachev, who just died at 91.

He's the architect of trying to fix the Soviet Union, but having

probably

helped its dismantling instead.

But what are your thoughts on Gorbachev?

Well, Putin didn't even have a state funeral, did he?

He didn't even mention him.

That's not good.

Well,

I mean, I think.

the left, you know, they really loved him because they hated Reagan.

So during, it was kind of a political

version of the Bobby Fisher chess.

Remember, Boris Spassky and everybody on the left wanted the Russian chess master to win.

So in the Cold War, Gorbachev,

you know, it was Reagan who was very suspicious at first.

That being said, for a Stalinist, and he was a hardcore communist,

Perestroika was not intended to end the way it did.

Remember that.

Glassinovs and all that, that openness, transparency, and reformation of the economy and all of that was supposed to make communism more competitive, not get rid of communism.

But the key point was that when Eastern Europeans in the Warsaw Pact started to start talking freely, he didn't send in the tanks as they'd done in Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Hungary in 1956, and he didn't kill Russians.

So, and when you're on the back of a tiger, that's what you have to do to keep that state.

He believed in the Soviet state, and he was never going to rise above that.

But at a critical moment,

he did not, you know, spur the tiger and stay on.

He got off.

And when you get off, the tiger devours you.

So the whole Soviet system collapsed because it was based on fear and death.

The other thing was weird that once they allowed the republics to break away, he was sort of the titular head of the Russian, of the Soviet Union, which he thought still existed, which he thought he would win an election, but he didn't realize the largest republic would be Russia, and that was Boris Yeltsin.

And so for a while, he didn't quite grasp what was going on, that he had allowed the republics to break away.

And the biggest one, i.e., that we think of synonymously with Russia, with the Soviet Union, was Russia.

the synonym almost.

And Boris Yeltsin very insidiously, very quickly got more power than he did.

And then he was the head of the Soviet Union when there was no Union.

There was no Soviet.

So he was just a figurehead for a while.

So he was kind of tragic, but

he didn't kill people when he had an opportunity.

And the world that we live in, that's something.

Yeah, absolutely.

All right, let's go ahead and take a break and come back to talk a little bit about the G7 cap price cap

for the Russian oil and maybe a little bit on UN human rights abuse, UN accusing China of human rights abuses.

We'll be right back.

We're back.

And so, Victor, I found this article that the G7 had

rolled out a plan to cap price on purchases of Russian oil and so limit their revenue.

And I thought, what?

You're just going to end up with no oil for your own people.

But what are your thoughts on that?

It's weird.

It's so EU utopian.

Mean Mr.

Putin, we're freezing to death.

And we're going to be in hot rooms, our older people, so their body heat will keep them alive in their apartments.

And we're going to be burning wood.

But you know what?

We're not going to pay any more than this price for your damn natural gas.

Okay.

I guess the Indians and Chinese would prefer it.

So you never issue any type of ultimatum when you're, or any type of silly declaration unless you're from a position of advantage or strength, right?

And they're completely what energy dependent, they being especially Germany, but most of Western Europe on Russian natural gas imports and oil.

So when they say that they're going to limit, they're just going to take a little bit of heroin.

Is that what they say?

Yes.

They're only going to pay so much for

each dose.

And then pay any more than that.

And then Russia is just going to cut off the IV to their arm.

It just cut off.

He's already done that.

He's already done that.

You know what he does?

About every three weeks, he goes, oh, we have a mechanical problem.

We're going to have to shut it down until we find out what's wrong.

And then

he waits for about a week, and then the prices double again.

I think they're up 600% in some countries.

They're talking about the price of, I don't know, what is it, a beer in Britain is going to be 20 bucks or something.

20 pounds.

Yeah.

They don't have any way to heat them.

And why don't they have any

means to heat themselves this winter?

Because they will not frack.

They will not try to develop clean coal.

They will not keep nuclear plants open.

And they won't go out in the north you know out offshore they the can't the east med pipeline that was going to bring them natural gas along with biden's support they canceled and so they just wanted to buy

it was very funny they're like california the eu they want to buy dirty awful stinky fuel from vladimir putin and the mid

the middle east and then they want to make fun of those people or they think they're morally their inferiors they are but so what they need the fuel or Or they're going, and now they're going.

Same thing with California.

I remember one day, I think it was for four seconds, Californians said, We're energy independent with renewable fuel.

And it was like this little glitch where they interrupted, I don't know, natural gas burning.

And for one moment, it was that wet year.

We had hydroelectric 10%, nuclear 10%,

solar and wind 40%.

It was a downtime.

And for four seconds, we weren't importing

dirty fuels from, I don't know, Colorado or Arizona or Utah or Alaska.

But it's the same idea that we in California don't pollute.

We don't get our hands dirty with those icky, messy fossil fuels.

Now, we may be the second largest consumer of gas and oil of the 50 states after Texas, but

we make other people get their hands dirty.

We just use it.

So we don't have anything to do with the heroin trade.

We just inject it.

That's what they're saying.

And

give it to us or house, but we will not deal with it and we will not refine it and we won't make it.

But we bet we got to have it.

Yeah.

Well, let's turn then to China's failings.

And the UN has

put out a report on human rights abuses by the Chinese of the Uyghur population.

So that's the usually they're very tight-lipped on anything China's done wrong.

So it's kind of unusual for the UN to actually

critique them for what they're doing to Uyghurs in the council.

They must not have paid off enough people.

Usually they pay them all.

They do.

I believe.

Or they threaten them.

Yeah.

So

bribe them.

Yeah, but nobody cares because China is, you know, 1.4 billion people and they've got...

trillions of dollars investments in all of the European and American elites and they're not going to say anything.

So the thing about China is that the whole thing is about transparency and overtness.

People who

collude with China, they have a deal with China, and that is just don't rock the boat.

If you're going to do Hong Kong, do it over a year.

Don't go out and shoot people.

It makes us look bad.

And so with the Uyghurs, just keep them in the distance.

But when they're in the news too much, it makes us look bad that we're on the tape.

And so we might have to vote against you.

You know, don't take it seriously in the UN, but we're going to have to do something or we're going to have no moral credibility because we trash the United States and Israel every day.

And we won't have any credibility if we don't itsy bitsy once in a while, sort of kind of object to yours.

But please don't do anything overt because it makes us, puts us in an untenable position.

That's their attitude of the people who will bet

China,

like the UN.

Yeah, I suppose.

And I don't see any help for these poor Uyghurs.

I guess that's what I'm sitting here thinking.

Like, it's just so sad that they're doing.

Their problem is that they live in an atheist empire and they're Muslims, A, and B,

they're not ethnically pure Chinese in the eyes of the Chinese majority.

And that's one of the most racist societies on earth.

So there's so many things going on there.

And then politically, they're not attuned to communism because they're religious.

So, politically, religiously, ethnically, the Chinese have no use for them.

They're lucky.

I mean, I don't know what goes on there.

They're probably harvesting stuff from them.

I don't know.

But it's tragic.

And,

you know, it doesn't bother Bill Gates or Michael Bloomberg or anybody else to make billions of dollars in China.

And yet they're lecturing us, you know, about supersized Coca-Colas and climate change.

Yeah.

So that's pretty crazy.

Victor, that's all I had today.

I want to just say, you know, we're, we're working, you're in Hillsdale and we're working with equipment that's not our usual.

So we probably have some sound issues.

So we would like to apologize.

Yeah, I'm sorry for that.

I have a little tiny,

what is it called?

Feathy or whatever?

It's a little tiny mic.

And I'm sitting here at it.

It's very funny.

I have a little tiny desk with a bunch of books and a laptop, and it's all falling apart.

I've got wires everywhere.

So

it's my fault, not on your end.

Yeah, no, no problem.

All right.

Well, thank you, though, for all of the forays into especially the Biden, the Biden speech.

We really appreciate that.

I know your listeners do.

And

yes.

The Biden speech.

Is it a speech or was it just a rant?

Exactly.

It was just a rant, or it was some weird descent into the inferno or something.

I'm not really dead sure about it.

It's the strangest speech I've ever seen.

Yeah, it does.

And then, if you're

telling me that these historians consulted with them, I'm expecting the next speech to be Purgatorio and then the final one to be Paradise.

So I'm hoping.

I know.

I think when you walked up there, you were going to see the glow in Biden, and you were going to say, abandon all hope, be winter here.

Yeah, exactly.

All right.

Well, thank you for everything today.

It was a great talk.

I enjoyed it.

Okay, thank you.

All right.

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

Thanks, everybody, for listening.