The Unappealing Ultra Left

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, and we're recording on Sunday, June 26th.

This episode should be up on the last day of the month, June 30th.

Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Wayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He's a farmer, a classicist, a military historian, best-selling author.

Much of what he writes, including a lot of exclusive writing, can be found at his website, victorhanson.com.

You should be checking that website out regularly.

We've got a lot to talk about.

We had wanted to get around to talking about the also very important Supreme Court case on Second Amendment rights.

We're going to do that today.

And we're going to do that, in fact, right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

So, Victor, we talked a lot in our most recent podcast, of course, about the Dobbs decision, which was the overturning of Roe v.

Wade.

But the day before, the day prior, there was a very important Second Amendment decision handed down.

Here's David Harsani, who's just a terrific writer.

David's now with the Federalists.

He had been at National Review.

He was back with the Federalists before that.

David, he knows his stuff when it comes to gun rights.

This piece is titled, The Supreme Court's Gun Decision is a huge win for the Constitution.

Two things here, Brichton.

The case was New York State Rifle and Pistol Association versus Bruin.

And by the way, if you lived in in New York City, you'd be a criminal have a gun.

If you were Schmo like me or somebody else that wanted to have a gun and have

a carry permit, what you got was tortured by the government and usually denied.

But here's what the court found: quote, New York's proper cause requirement violates the 14th Amendment by preventing law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defense needs from exercising their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms in public for self-defense here's what you know clarence thomas wrote the opinion he said and this is really interesting i think we know of no other constitutional rights that an individual may exercise only after demonstrating to government officers some special need That is not how the First Amendment works when it comes to unpopular speech or the free exercise of religion.

It is not how the Sixth Amendment works when it comes to a defendant's right to confront the witnesses against him.

it is not how the Second Amendment works when it comes to public carry for self-defense.

So, Victor, someone like me, especially after 9-11,

who thought like, wow, I took, as you know, Victor, I commuted into New York City every day, a lot two hours each way from Connecticut into New York and thought, well, I am sitting on a target.

There's no question.

And if I was some member of the ISIS, I would think, I know how to screw things up.

We'll shoot up a train full of commuters in New York.

And they would have been dead ducks because nobody could carry a gun to defend themselves.

Some possibly may be able to have carried it in Connecticut, but if we were going to go into New York, that wasn't going to happen.

So anyway, Victor, it is a great decision for people who want to have law-abiding citizens who want to enjoy their Second Amendment right.

What are your thoughts?

Well, you know, I mean, it wasn't really situated in the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms.

It was in the 14th Equal Protection.

If you think about it, I hadn't really thought about it in the way that Justice Thomas expressed it, but why is Nancy Pelosi, when she goes out, why does she have armed guards?

And people are protecting her in states that have very restrictive gun laws that no one else could do that.

They're basically saying is that every individual, regardless of their status, has a right to protect themselves with a firearm.

And if you look at the statistics, and I'm just quoting from memory, but I think they're usually a couple of years behind, but there's about 40,000 gun deaths a year.

And you know, there's about 55%, 50%, somewhere in between there, that are suicides.

So say about 20,000 people are killed in a gun lethal shooting, i.e.

a murder,

a lethal assault.

And of that number, I don't think that on average there's more than 40 to 50 or 30 or 40 that are killed by an active shooter, you know what I mean, a mass shooting, if you don't count somebody in Chicago shooting three or four people.

But by mean an active shooter, somebody is going around and trying to shoot people.

I think they distinguish that from going to a party where a guy just goes up and sprays everybody and kills people.

But my point is this.

When the left got so angry at this and said people are going to die, people are dying right now, 20,000 a year.

But they're not being statistically, they're not even being killed as horrible as that is statistically in great numbers by these nutty kids or shooters that go into school.

We can stop that.

I think we can stop it very easily by having armed guards.

In fact, it's already happened on one or two occasions when you create a sense of deterrence.

If you have signs around a school that says there are armed guards or armed teachers here, and they are authorized to use lethal force to prevent anybody who's entering unlawfully with a firearm, I think you would stop it.

But my point is that there are so many things they could do to get that 20,000 down, that number.

Why don't they just say, if you are a felon and you have a conviction of a felony, you cannot have in your possession a firearm for five years after the commission of a felony.

And why don't they arrest people for that?

So take the 800 people who are murdered every year in Chicago.

Why wouldn't they just have the policemen walking down there if they see somebody violating a statue?

Maybe they ran a stop sign.

He said, Do you have a gun?

Or search if they have a gun and they have a felony record, then they go to prison for a year and that gets them off the street.

And they won't do that.

They just will not do that.

That's called over-incarceration of a particular group.

Right.

But that's where the problem is.

The stop and frisk is racist.

So therefore, we will let the guns go out and let people die.

So basically, what we're saying is that as a nation,

19,900 people are going to be shot every year in domestic disputes or gangland activity or during the commission of a crime.

And the vast majority of those people are going to use an unlawful handgun or they're going to use a lawful one under existing statutes, but they have a criminal a prior conviction.

But we're not going to care about those people.

We're going to focus on these areas where there was an assault weapon perhaps let's just get see the data how many lives could possibly be saved 40 or 50 versus 10 000 15 000.

so when they talk about a grand compromise there is only one grand compromise if you want to say ar-15 should have the same status as alcohol and that they should not be purchased you know, until you're 21, then just say if you're a felon, you cannot possess a firearm for five years after the conviction of that felony.

And the left would go berserk.

They would.

Well, Victor, maybe one last thing on Justice Alito.

He also wrote the very important Janus decision a few years back, which was a First Amendment, great case to say, no, you don't have to pay your government union workers cannot be hostage to their unions and their hard-earned money taken and spent on political campaigns that many of the workers themselves oppose.

So I just think Alito is a real rock star.

I think he's not sung enough.

He's unsung.

Not he's unsung.

He's undersung.

Do you have any thoughts about Alito before we move on to the topic?

He's always been my favorite justice.

Remember, he was the replacement for Harriet Myers, that withdrawn nomination in 2006, I think, wasn't he?

That George W.

Bush nominated a Harriet Myers, and then the rank and file and the Congress said, nope.

And then he went back to the pool and got somebody who was not just a constructionist, but a brilliant one.

I think no one would question that.

He's developing, he's turning into the scalia of our generation.

And he is that now, but I don't think he's recognized properly for that contribution, but he will be.

So, yeah, I think he's brave.

I think he's unflappable.

I think he believes in the Constitution.

And he's not afraid to take criticism.

So he's the one that the left now hates more than, I mean, they hate Clarence Thomas.

I think that has an element of racism in it among wealthy white liberals.

Because if you look at the Twitter feeds today or yesterday, they're using the N-word.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And they feel that's kind of they're rubbing his nose in it.

Ha ha ha ha.

We're going to use this because you're conservative and we don't like you.

And left-wing blacks allow us to do this.

But it's racist.

The left hates Alito.

They hate all of them, but there's no way for the left to get around the fact that this court is not going to be the court that they want, which made that assassination try or attempt or consideration, whatever noun you use against Brett Kavanaugh really scary because there's a lot of lunatics out there who lap up all of this left-wing rhetoric and then they distill it into, hmm.

They either have to pack the court or you have to replace a judge during a Democratic administration.

Presto, I'm going to go to Judge Kavanaugh's house.

Right.

That's the truth, too.

Victor, these two big decisions and victories, let's call them victories for conservatives, that occurred last week are signs that the culture war, which many conservatives, high-level elite, find icky, right?

or rather much talk more about things economic than things cultural.

As we've discussed before, there's always an element of class to this sort of stuff.

But it shows that middle Americans who were the heart and soul and the ground troops, say, of the pro-life movement, they fought, they fought for 50 years.

By the way, there's going to be 50 more years of fighting to come.

There's no question about that.

But these culture wars are worth fighting because they can be won.

I don't know.

I think it's something.

worth noting and do you have any thoughts i do they're winning for a couple of

besides their own efforts they're winning because as the left starts to lose they start to reveal their motivations their agendas their protocols their mechanisms and it's ugly and so in the case of abortion it wasn't just legal but rare but they're celebrating it when you see these demonstrations and you hear people talking as if they start to brag about their abortions and how this abortion was so important for me And I had two abortions.

No, I had three abortions.

And so that's something that, and then we have these gosmal stories.

Then you have the, and then technology, as I said earlier, in an earlier podcast, it has a role too, when you can start to see a conceived human at a very, very early age as a human.

and then not a human.

And this is well aside from partial birth abortion, except this is very early in a pregnancy, almost instantaneously.

And so so the point I'm making is that they are starting to gravitate from, we don't like abortion any more than you do, but in some cases, the psychological trauma or the physical trauma, et cetera, they use all of these extenuating.

They don't do that anymore, Jack.

They glorify it.

And that has really turned people off against them.

And then the other...

element in this is we're starting to see on gun control and on abortion, we're starting to see the underbelly of the new Democratic Party.

And it is a party of very, very wealthy, highly credentialed BA, PhD,

MD,

JD,

MBA stamped bicolsteel elites.

And they're very, very in your face.

They have nothing but contempt for the middle classes, particularly the white middle class, but I think the Latino community, especially the Mexican-American community, is going to quickly discover that when they turn their wrath on them, they're going to be Clarence Thomas.

They're going to make fun of Mexican people.

They're going to stereotype them.

They're going to caricature them.

They're going to talk to them as ingrates in a way that I don't think Mexican-American people are prepared for because they don't quite have the experience yet.

with what happens when the bicosta elite feel that anybody crosses them or doubts their wisdom or their moral superiority.

Do you think they'll be caught short temporarily?

Because I would think it would just be adding fuel to the fire and that it would accentuate the departure of Hispanics from the Democratic Party.

Well, what's happening really rapidly right now is it's a very strange thing.

The Democratic Party is talking to apparatus.

from the Mexican-American or Latino communities.

I mean by that, three-term state senators, six-term congresswomen, people like that, party chairs for 30 years, the apparatus,

and then the AOCs, the college train, the people who were on campus and said, I'm a person of color,

that group.

And that group is very visible, but it only comprises about 10 to 20% of the Latino community.

And that's the group that the Democratic Party and the left talk to.

What's happening, they always told the Democratic Party, we can deliver the votes because we go home and talk to our parents or we gin up the illegal immigration border issue or, you know, whatever it is, and we can deliver on election day with the SCIU or what.

I don't think they can anymore.

And I think the left's going to say, wait a minute, we lost the Rio Grande Valley.

We lost the San Joaquin Valley in California.

What are you doing?

And it's because they don't go talk to the rank and file.

And the rank and file tend to be more against abortion than for it, more for Second Amendment than against it, more for tough penalties, including the death penalty for criminals, especially for murderers that deserve a capital sentence, than against it, more for things like affordable housing and less regulation, affordable energy, affordable everything.

And they don't see the Democratic Party cares about those issues.

And they're very skeptical of transgendered issues.

They're going to lose that community and they're going to lose them very quickly.

And then things are going to change.

I think if they lose the Mexican-American community in the next midterm, then I would think that there's going to be a lot of people who are going to drop comprehensive immigration reform.

And they're going to say, you know what, let's close the border because we do not want these people coming in because we can only count on them for one generation when they're docile and poor and they need us.

And then once they become independent and upwardly mobile, they see that what a con this is and they turn on us and we don't want them.

Victor, to me, the most, I don't know, pro-family experience I've had in the last four or five years was

actually the last time I was out in Fresno a couple of years ago.

Maybe it was last year even.

I saw you, but I had to go to church and I had to go to church on Sunday.

And I could not believe this church.

It was all, people were out the the door.

It was totally Hispanic.

I would assume a Mexican.

It seemed to me like it was approaching a thousand people.

Kids everywhere.

There was nothing high-falutin about it.

It was, if you had to classify it class-wise, it would be lower-middle class, but it was so instinctively religious and Catholic

in a decent way.

And I was kind of floored by it.

I was very happy.

But yeah, if you don't grasp that aspect of the Mexican or Hispanic community, you're screwed.

I can tell you that I went to school a mile and a half, two miles from where I'm sitting right now in K through three,

and then from four to six before I went to the only junior high in Salma.

But this was the West Side Hispanic schools, and it was 90% Mexican-American.

I can tell you that in fourth or fifth grade, my friends, which were all Mexican-American, would say, hey, Victor, guess what?

The Virgin of Guadalupe appeared on a shower door right over there on Silvia Street.

Let's go.

So, right after school, we would walk and I would kind of divert and go over there and get in line.

And people would get in line to look at this.

And so, it was a very ecstatic

evangelical Catholicism.

Yeah, that's the right way to put it.

And then they would tell me, I'd come home to my mom and say, Mom, are devils green?

They tell me all these people tell me that the devil is green.

I thought he was red.

And then Catechism was on Friday afternoons, and there was nobody in class.

It was great.

There was about three of us that were Protestant families, and the whole class went out to the St.

Joseph Catechism class on Friday afternoons.

We just got to read books.

You couldn't conduct class.

So that's not still true to that degree.

But when the left decides that you are our constituents and you're going to listen to what, you know, some guy at Google tells you to listen, or a silicon coder, or a guy at Whole Foods and Menlo, Palo Alto.

I just don't think that's going to be a winning strategy.

I really don't.

I don't think those messages go well with people of the middle class in general.

Right.

Victor, the middle class is also, you know, getting tortured in many ways, gas pump, supermarket, culturally, and at, of course, airports.

And we're going to talk about your second favorite person in the world, Pete Boudigej, right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show recording on Sunday, June 26th.

This show will be up on Thursday, the 30th.

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Just a hat tip here, by the way, Victor, we do it every couple of shows.

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So Victor, my friend, yeah, I had nobody's experience what you did last year.

Oh my God, I cannot believe the things you endured traveling across America, airport to airport, stop, short, go to another, we need to fill up with gas.

I mean, whoever, whoever experienced that, I had a rough week of traveling, but I got where I was going.

I got to admit, got there three in the morning, but I got there.

But there were many people at the airport.

I was at O'Hare, Chicago, just beside themselves because so many flights have been canceled and their opportunities to schedule a new flight were not the next day or the next morning.

They were like three days away.

And how people can endure this is beyond me.

So I think about three or so shows ago, Victor, we talked about pete boudigége who was calling together the heads of the major airlines and was gonna

you know rant and rave at them actually the things he was suggesting were things at that meeting that that airline officials said would probably make things even worse

but one of the things that an airline there's a piece i think on the daily mail today or yesterday one of the airline heads has pointed out was that you know why we can't fly you know why we're cutting back flights to major airports, say Newark, which is a huge hub, Newark Airport, New Jersey.

It's because there's not enough air traffic controllers to handle these flights.

So we have to cut back.

Who's responsible, Victor, for air traffic controllers?

I ask you.

Is it Pete Budigej?

Do you have anything you'd like to say about this?

Yeah, I mean, he's the Secretary of Transportation.

And you tell me what prior notable achievement in that area of expertise qualified him for that job.

I think what qualified him for that job, he was snarky, he's sanctimonious, and he's glib.

And on those debates, he always had a one-liner or he always would pontificate.

Sorry, Jack, for the use of that word.

But

in these debates,

he was an empty suit, but he was an impressively sounding empty suit.

And then when Joe Biden came in, they thought, we're going to bring all these people under one tent so they don't freelance.

And they gave him this post.

He knew nothing about transportation, and it shows.

So he really says about three things about transportation: that the highway system was racist and it plowed into the inner city.

That doesn't seem to affect what we're going to do with overcrowded freeways right now or how we can fix them.

Or he brags that he is gay and he is a father and he took time off at a critical time when the ports were closed.

Or he gives larger lectures on things like abortion or Green New Deal that are completely out of his purview unless he's running or eyeing to run for president two and a half years.

So he's been a total failure because our ports don't work.

The price of our transportation fuel is unaffordable.

And we're watching.

as you point out, this airport thing explode.

I had to go.

I didn't feel all that hot either.

I had to go to Reno, which is only by the crow flies about 300 miles from where I am.

There's no direct flight.

So I flew to Las Vegas, flight delayed, five-hour layover, layover delayed, got on a flight delayed.

And by the time I got there from leaving my home and going in this triangle route, it was about 15 hours, delayed on the way back, the first flight to Vegas, delayed to Fresno.

And when you get to the Vegas airport, there was, I know, you can't sit in the slot machine chairs, but there was not one chair to sit down near a weekend.

It was just crazy.

And the bathrooms were not conducive for use.

There was nowhere to sit.

And there's a lot of airports like that, that they're third world.

They remind me the biggest shock I ever had.

I was 20 years old and I flew to Cairo in 1973 and I got out into the old Cairo airport.

My God, that reminds me now of what Kennedy or LAX is or Vegas is, where it's just a mob of people, nowhere to sit, nowhere to sit down and eat, people jostling.

Sit down in your chair, there's wrappers and food.

You get on the plane, people don't follow basic rules.

You go to a flight, there's 15 wheelchairs that makes the boarding delayed.

Then, when you get off to get a connection, suddenly nobody's in a wheelchair.

They've gone from immobile to a sprinter.

Maybe they were watching some

religious broadcast.

I was there in Vegas listening to people, and they said, we got to get overhead space.

So they had wheelchairs, and then they sat across from me.

And then when we landed, they needed a connection.

They just zoomed out.

Nobody addresses any of these issues.

They're off limits.

The bathrooms are filthy on the planes now.

They're short.

The people are tired.

And I think it's the last gasp of this funny money, $4 trillion that was printed.

People have all of this money.

The airfares don't reflect the actual price of airline fuel or labor.

They're going to go way up.

But for right now and this summer, still

suffering from a two-year lockdown, people want to get out and the system can't handle it.

And Pete Buttigig has no clue about hiring air traffic controllers.

And then there's the woke element.

You know, we hear that this number of United pilots in training are going to be African American or this number of air traffic controllers are going to be people.

We put an ideological harness on a free market system

and it's dysfunctional.

And I think I've already told a podcast, I had to go from Chicago.

They had a direct flight to Fresno not too long ago.

And we got to the airport and we were told that there was no baggage.

There was only one guy.

And so the plane came.

We were going to board in 45 minutes.

It just sat there right in front of the window, no baggage.

And we watched the clouds get darker and darker.

And everybody was saying, can't they unload the plane so we can get it on?

No, they couldn't.

One guy, two guys, finally they got it unloaded.

We were late.

There was a storm.

They delayed it.

Okay.

And then it was time to get back on.

We got back out and got on the plane and the person in the tractor to hook us up and push us back.

No tractor.

We finally get taken off.

We wait for an hour in line at O'Hara.

We get in the air late at night and a voice comes on and says, I can't believe this either.

Now, we're headed to Fresno, but there's no fuel in Fresno.

So we're going to have a brief stop in Denver, Denver, to top off our tanks.

So the plane tomorrow, when it takes off, has fuel.

But it won't be long.

When they say it won't be long, three hours.

Three hours.

I had the similar experience, 18 hours last year to get to Detroit, Michigan, from California, from Los Angeles, 18 hours diverted to Grand Rapids to fuel.

So it doesn't work anymore.

It's like the Greyhound bus station of the 1960s.

And everybody knows it, but they want to travel and they have money.

So it only compounds the problem.

I will make a prediction, Jack, that by next March, it's going to be back to normal, only because we're going to be in a severe recession and the money will be used up that was so promiscuously printed and the fares will go up and there will be people wanting to work and it'll be a little bit better.

But it's tragic.

It really is that the American people are not arrogant, but their elites are very arrogant.

And they have this image of themselves.

I guess it's the techies that they're so hip and this is the place to be, you know, Silicon Valley, Upper West Side, Cambridge Mass.

This is where it's at in the world.

It's not.

When you go abroad and you look at airports in in different countries, if you look at the Israeli airport in Tel Aviv or even the Athens, they're better than ours.

And you go on roads in Greece, for example, the TOLA, they're much better than ours.

And

so we are redistributing wealth.

We're not creating it.

We're regulating wealth.

We're not encouraging it.

And after a while, it's starting to show.

It's nowhere more than in California.

We have leaders, when they can't address the felony, they fixate on the misdemeanor.

So Gavin Newsom will talk about all the money he's given to illegal aliens during COVID, that he's going to be point man on welcoming people to California for abortion.

But we're in a drought and he has not built a reservoir.

He has no clue how to do it.

We're going to have Brown out.

Stanford University, Jack, I was over there this week.

There was no power.

no electricity.

One line went out and they were flummox for three days.

It won't be fully functional until Monday.

Damn.

Five days.

And these are the most sophisticated engineers in the world.

And there's no power.

I mean, this never happened.

I was a student there from 75 to 1980.

It never happened one.

And so what I'm getting at is that we're starting to see, especially in California, the breakdown of basic stuff.

You can't get in a car and drive from say Visalia to Bakersfield without almost getting killed on the 99.

You can't go where I am to Stanford because when you get on 152, it goes down to two lanes, one in each direction, and it's Road Warrior for 20 miles to Gilroy.

And then you've got a time when you get on 101, which is an archaic thing in itself.

And then you go to a place like, you know, LAX and it's...

It's a nightmare.

It's out of Doxie's Inferno.

It's the worst airport.

It's

what an owl hole.

You go into San Francisco and you feel like you're in 1860s london or paris it's toxic toxic or you start to notice when you go to washington even or these cities that there's no women on the streets after 8 30 at night no women i've noticed that no single women are walking around our major cities in the dark so we shouldn't be so you know woke and bragging because

These are the distractions that we brag about because they psychologically justify or they accommodate our failures on the stuff of life.

And it's really sad to see Newsom go in there and brag about something.

It's like Bloomberg.

It was the Bloomberg effect.

He could never get the snow off the streets of New York, but he would talk about supersized cokes all the time.

Right, right.

He's worried about your gut.

Yeah, that was a terrible snowstorm, and he was epic failure on that.

I will say he did carry on Giuliani's stop and frisk policy, which when he ran for president, he of of course threw under the bus.

He's been a beneficiary of Bill de Blasio.

Well, in hindsight, yeah.

I mean, who wouldn't?

Hey, Victor, let's talk about more annoying, depressing things.

And that would be Joe Biden and oil and America's quote-unquote energy policy, or maybe it's anti-energy policy.

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back with the victor davis hansen show victor you wrote a piece for American greatness last week.

It's titled Biden and Oil Destroy America in Order to Save It.

Very lengthy, very detailed.

I just want to read one little passage of it and then discuss what you will, how you want any part of this piece, or your, of course, your views on Biden and energy.

So his little passage.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre also reassures the country that there is no reason to pump more oil and gas.

Instead, she says, we just need to refine more.

At her press conference, she reads all her answers from prepared notes, but apparently Jean-Pierre's 20-something press preppers were oblivious that the United States, thanks to hard-left green opposition, has not built a major refinery since 1976, back when there were 110 million fewer Americans.

Jean-Pierre has no idea why she cannot now and will never in the future answer a question about fossil fuels honestly.

She knows that the left for now got what it wanted since January 2021.

It has all but destroyed the idea of American energy self-sufficiency.

Victor, you talk about Biden having several strategies.

Talk about that.

Talk about this piece, please.

Well,

start with the idea that Joe Biden doesn't know what he wants.

If Joe Biden saw Joe Biden at 50, he would consider him the prince of darkness.

At least that's what he's prompted to say now.

Joe Biden is an empty vessel whose whole job was to get re-elected, put on a stretcher, carried across the finish line, and let the left take over.

And these are mostly former Obama appointees, and they're advised by the Obamas.

They're Elizabeth Warrens.

This is Bernie Sanders, Obama, Elizabeth Warren, government.

Okay.

And in their view, they need to transition.

They're not scientific people.

They say they follow the science.

They don't believe in that.

But they're religious people.

And as good atheists, their God now is radio.

And they think it's reason is global warming, and

they worship the reaction that you must take to global warming.

So they hate the internal combustion engine.

So they want to get rid of it.

Not for themselves, remember.

These are high priests.

They still have gold trinkets and robes.

So they will not get rid of private jets or big, you know, Tahoe SUVs

or

Barack Obama's 2,500-gallon propane tank or three or four homes, each over 4,000 or 5,000 square feet.

No, no, they don't do that.

But for us, we have to transition.

So they're crying crocodile tears over the American village that they nuked to save it.

Saving it is defined by we're all going to be in a Tesla or an electric car.

But they have no idea where they're going to get the lithium batteries or the mining ingredients or the electrical power from nuclear power.

They don't worry about that.

They just say, you know what?

I drive a Tesla.

If I can do it, everybody else has to.

And therefore, they want gasoline to be as expensive as humanly possible.

So they're going around with this veneer of caring,

but they're not doing anything about the price of gas.

They talk about the strategic petroleum reserve or 18 cents.

What's 18 cents off a gallon?

It's about $2.50 every time you fill up or $3.

They know that, but they want to give little tidbits to the mob that Marie Antoinette cake so that we don't get too angry while they

war on refineries, war on leases, war on frackers, war on lending institutions that help coal, oil, and natural gas.

war on pipelines.

And they want to do that to get the price as high as they can get and still become elected and retained power.

And they figure right now it's about $7 a gallon for diesel and $6.70 for gasoline, California prices.

And that's where they are.

Then they think at that point, they can fob off on the mob, the Petroleum Reserve, as I said, or their crocodile tears or getting rid of the federal gas tax and then keep it going up very slowly.

And then we're all going to be an electric car.

That's the plan.

So they want to destroy transportation, the ability to commute, the old idea of a Sunday drive with your family, going out of town to visit your grandparents.

That's gone.

If you want to travel, in their view, you're going to be in a BART in San Francisco or in a commuter train with Jack going to New York.

But they are not going to ensure that that train or rapid transit system is A, going to be clean, B, going to be safe,

C, going to operate independently and on time of the chaos around it.

So that's where we are.

That's what I meant by they want to destroy us to save us.

That piece, by the way, can be read at victorhanson.com, but it is a piece written for American Greatness.

Victor writes twice a week for American Greatness, so you may check it out there also.

So, Victor, one other topic,

big topic to discuss today, and we haven't talked about it, you and I for a while, kind of deferred to the great Sammy Wink for this, but you had brought up, maybe we talked about the Russian way of war and how Ukraine is like Chechnya.

So I read the Daily Mail, I check it out throughout the day.

And when the Ukraine war started, I mean, every story was about Ukraine.

And it has kind of fallen off a lot of radar screens.

Story today, you know, my understanding is things are not really going that well from the Ukrainian perspective.

You may correct the story on that for give us your perspective on what's going on.

But the story today was, oh, some big fat general came out of retirement, some 280-pound general Russians had to bring in because so many of their generals have been killed or fired, etc.

So, kind of a weird story.

But yeah, what's going on there now?

And the particular thing you want to talk about is the Russian way of war.

So give us the lowdown and give us some prognosis also.

Well, you know, it's remarkably similar to the two Chechny wars of the 90s.

And I think the other one you could say ended in 2009, the second one.

And at first, the Russians, as Russians, just went in there and they thought they were going to take Grozny and Chechnya and slap it around, Shakhanov, Thunder Road, and it was a mess.

The insurgents, guerrillas, house-to-house fighting, and they lost.

Very similar to the first seven to 10 weeks in Ukraine where they thought, you know what, we're just going to do a shach and all take Kiev, slice off half the country, and then threaten the western half.

And we'll take that after we digest the eastern half.

And that's not going to happen.

So that's what caused the euphoria.

But what people didn't realize is there was something called the Second Chechny War.

And that's when they brought in the Zhukov-type people, Koniev, the type with a World War II mindset.

And they just said, they told Putin, do you want to win this or not?

He said, yes.

And they said, okay,

we don't have the resources of the Soviet Union, but we have the same artillery doctrine.

So we have about 20 times more artillery than the Ukrainians.

So we're not going to go in with lightly armed troops or personnel carriers or even tanks anywhere near them.

We're going to pull back from the border, fortify, and unleash missiles, rockets, and artillery.

And we're going to, sort of like Khe San in Vietnam era, we're going to put grids and we're going to obliterate them.

And then we're going to move massive amounts of people among the rubble.

And we're going to slowly grind them down on the borders.

And when we get to the borderlands and they're completely destroyed, we're to declare them part of of a Russian confederation.

And then we'll try to rebuild them.

But for right now, we have to destroy them.

And then when we do that, we're going to go back into Ukrainian territory.

I think you could make the argument that the

Second Chechnyan War lasted for 10 years.

I know that the acute phase was eight months, but when they got done, there was no Grozny.

It was destroyed.

And they called that victory.

And that's what they're doing.

This is the Somme or Urdun on a smaller scale.

And I don't think the world, the West, is up to it because we're basically now the only real big supplier, not Germany, not France, not Western Europe, Britain to a lesser extent, but it's the United States and Britain and some Eastern European countries.

Nobody else.

The major countries in the world by population, India, it's buying Russian oil at 40% of the real cost.

They have no problem.

China, so same thing, 2.5 billion people are on the de facto on the Russian side.

And

South Latin America, there's nobody helping the Ukrainians except Europeans and the United States.

That's it.

And we've already, we're going to, I think we're up to $45 billion right now.

But I think everybody who wants to liberate Ukraine to the last living Ukrainian has to understand where they are now.

They are in a Chechnyan war where the Russians are bringing up all of their assets and they're going to obliterate the target 20, 30 miles ahead of their troops and they're not going to set foot in there until there's smoking rubble.

And it's not going to be sending a column across a river and a paratroop shooting a small brigade, sending a thin tank column on the way to Kiev.

All of the easy stuff is over with.

Now it's World War II, and that's how they fought World War II and that's how they fought the Chechen War.

And they're prepared to do it for a long time.

And during this long slog, they're going to threaten us.

They're going to threaten the Europeans.

They're going to say all kinds of crazy things.

And they're going to try to create dissension within NATO.

And we said, no, no, it united NATO.

It united NATO for a while.

But already, if you look at the foreign policy of France and Germany, it's at odds with all of the Eastern European members.

Turkey is now deciding, you know what?

we played both sides but the russians are probably going to win so we may have to slack off and sending drones to the Ukrainian.

And the Ukrainians understand that.

I said before, when the Ukrainians had the momentum, I thought it would be wise to get their third party supporters and have an armistice and then adjudicate these Russian majority speaking areas by a plebiscite.

at the Donbass or Crime Aid.

Just have an international group come in and say, we're going to vote.

But I think we're down past that because I think that Russia is going to destroy destroy those areas, literally, and then annex them and then rebuild them.

Right.

Wow.

Discouraging.

Well, Victor, we're going to end the podcast.

Traditionally, we read comments that listeners have left at Apple Podcasts, and I am going to read two of them, but each one is a question.

The first one is from

Brett Victor Lee.

By the way, no matter what platform you listen to this podcast on, thank you very much.

Apple Podcasts offers the ability to leave a rating, one to five stars.

The vast majority of people leave five-star ratings.

We thank you very much for that.

Many people leave comments.

We read them.

So here's one.

How do I get good, timely news with Victor?

Victor and Jack explore the issues that a well-informed citizen needs to understand regarding history and a well-functioning society.

Thank you.

Can Victor share where he gets such accurate and timely information?

Some call it news.

His knowledge of recent and current events is always ahead of the so-called major media outlets.

Also, to those on the left, not classic liberals, if you insist on ignoring history and fallen nature of man and want to throw out our constitution and inventions, you would be well advised to let Victor be your benevolent dictator.

He would be the possible outcome.

Yours truly, Brett Victor Lee.

So, Victor, we did a YouTube show for our old friends at Ricochet, Ricochet, and that question came up essentially, yeah, Victor, how do you get your news?

And I remember you talked about Power Line and other places, but we never shared that with our podcast listeners.

Maybe you would like to answer Brett Victor Lee's question that way.

Well, I usually go to the Wall Street Journal first.

And then I try to look at what the left is saying.

I don't want to subsidize the Washington Post or the New York Times.

So I get bits and pieces of their stories or people send them them to me.

But I get some idea of what the left version of the news is.

And then I try to get what I would call conservative and liberal online magazines and blogs.

And that can be, as you said, Power Line or Daily Caller or all of those.

And then I look at once in a while, like I said,

what the left is saying.

And that can be Slate or Vox or even Drudge has gone left just to see what their take is on it.

And then I go to what I would call sprinkling of the spirited,

the out there ones.

I won't mention them.

These are people who are firm on the right and firm on the left, and they're more of a personal blog.

Some of them are pretty smart.

And then out of that, I try to augment it by, if I've been traveling, I go on to Fox News or CNN, I look at what people have been saying on the air like that.

And so, out of that, I spend probably two or three hours a day.

Wait, wait, not day, but what time a day do you start this?

Oh, I wake up increasingly early because I can't sleep with this long COVID.

But usually, when I'm normal, say I start reading at five in the morning until 6:30 or 7,

and then I check in again for about an hour after lunch.

And then I write three ultra pieces a week, 2,500 words.

I do a 700-word column for American Greatness in Chicago Tribune or Tribune Media Content Agency.

And then I do a long 2,000-word.

And I'm using writing.

Right now I'm writing a series of essays for the new criterion, 5,000 words each.

And I'm supposed to be working on a book until I got this bug.

So it's pretty busy.

But in all of those processes, I come across things that you have to research and stuff.

One of the things that's really depressing is that the the order of searches when you go into Google or you look at Yahoo News or Google News or Apple News, I think people have to realize it's not just that the news is biased, but if you Google something like anti-abortion or pro-life or pro-choice, the way they list the searches or all be the results will all be biased for preference of

liberal sites and conservatives will be way down there.

If you want to find that Barack Obama said, get in their faces, or in his memoirs, used to say that they went to the homes of banking officials who were redlined, you won't be able to find that.

It'll be very hard.

So there's things that you know, it's like an Orwellian experience.

You know, that you know them, and you want to double check, and you go back.

I know that Barack Obama said to the Latino community, we've got to beat them at the polls.

He went on and on like that, and you won't find that.

Put you all in chains or the corn pop stories.

You can find them, but not in detail.

Right.

You won't find really the stories that are embarrassing to the Mueller investigation.

That's what's strange:

you've got to use your own filters to figure out what this person on the television screen says is the truth is a lie.

I experienced that in America where the sources of information, I knew that when I was a kid, John Chancellor or Walter Cronkite, Huntley Brinkley were biased, but they were biased in a gentlemanly fashion within certain parameters.

But I've never seen where this takeover of the major outlets of news and communication that is so Orwellian,

and you just think you're going crazy because you know something happened, but you can't find proof that it happened.

Right.

And

down the memory hole.

Did you see?

I sent you a link, not that we were going to talk about it, but Dave Mastio, who was an editor at the opinion editor at U.S.

News, got fired, but he tells the story.

I recommend our listeners go find David Mastio.

He gave a long Twitter, you know, multi-tweet explanation of how the Gannett News Service has

choked any

aspect of a conservative thought.

There are no, for example, many papers in this chain or what's left of the chain.

There's no conservative cartoonists anymore.

There's no conservative opinion makers allowed anymore.

Yeah, now he got the boot.

Very discouraging.

Victor, you mentioned before about Google searches, et cetera.

Peter Schweitzer had a great documentary he made a couple of years ago called The Creepy Line, and it's very disturbing about the whole search process and how it's twisted and tainted and how it could affect things political.

One other question, Victor, as we wrap the show up today, and it's a pretty heady question, but I hope you'll give it, you know, just a minute or two.

This is from Bernie Reaps.

Bernie Reaps.

It's titled, Could You Speak?

I love the podcast and listen regularly.

I am from the San Joaquin Valley.

I live near Fresno.

I enjoy hearing Victor's perspective and find myself often nodding in agreement.

10 stars for this podcast.

Can VDH speak about John Brown?

I'd like to hear his perspective on this abolitionist.

Thank you.

I don't know.

I thought it was kind of like out of nowhere.

But yeah, well, what the heck?

Victor, you know, since our times, so much that's happening in 2022 kind of echoes back to 1859 and 1860 in a way where our society is standing yeah i want to answer bernie's question what do you think about john brown you're a historian well i mean he was if you look at the person who arrested him or or subdued him is colonel robert e lee so lee at the time represented the forces of law and order.

And John Brown was an insurrectionist that broke the law, break into a federal armory.

But if they look at the long history of it, the idea that somebody was going to be

an abolitionist and free slaves rather than someone was defending, whether knowingly or not, as a federal officer, a system of chattel slavery.

John Brown was on the right side of history and Robert E.

Lee was on the wrong side.

But there's a twist to it, and that is the methodology.

He hastened the idea that there would not be a peaceful solution to slavery.

And that had been tried, you know, for 40 years, whether it was the Missouri Compromise or the Great Compromise, or how you let in slave states vis-a-vis or the Underground Railroad.

There were all these mechanisms that were in play that were trying to explore some type of resolution that would A, end slavery and B, end a war that would kill 700,000 people.

And that was lost partly because of people like John Brown used a level of violence at a very fragile state.

There were people in the South that did even worse.

So my point is, that's how to look at it.

He had the moral high ground as being an abolitionist versus Lee, who was a slave owner himself.

But his methodology pretty much helped preclude the idea in 1859 that there was going to be a peaceful solution that everybody knew that if you went to war, it was going to be an idea.

And he was really advocating not just arming slaves and having them kill people, but the problem with that is that there were only about 3%

of the population that owned slaves.

It depends on whether you call them households or individuals within the population.

Then there's the more murky question, to what degree were the lower, there wasn't really a middle class as we know it in the North at the time, in the South.

It was basically the slave class and the plantation owners and then the people who served the plantation system, slave owners, slave traders, transportation people.

Slavery warped and ruined the southern states.

It meant that all of their transportation system was very primitive compared to the north.

It was based on the idea of getting cotton to particular ports, not serving a middle class.

They didn't have a lot of industry manufacturing in a way.

They were kind of like big tech.

They just were a one product economy.

They were sort of like Silicon Valley.

And they had the same fixations on race as Silicon Valley does.

And they had the same idea about federal nullification that Silicon Valley does.

And they had the same detestation of the middle class like Silicon Valley does.

So it's kind of strange.

But just to sum up.

There was only one way to avoid that war.

And the way to avoid that war was to sit down in Congress and say that we're going to phase out chattel slavery very quickly, five years, something, and we are going to pay you money

to free slaves, purchase them, and then free them, and then give them rights under the Constitution, which they deserve as citizens, and give them citizenship, which they deserve, which they de facto should have been.

But the abolitionists said, wow, I'm not going to reward evil people who, you know, enslave people.

And the plantation class said, the amount of money that I would get is still not going to be as valuable as a slave.

So there you have it.

It wasn't going to work.

And I can't think of any other solution other than the Civil War that would have solved the problem.

And that was what Brown was trying to do.

He was trying to go down there.

break into an armory, get weapons, lead a slave revolt against their masters in the South, and that was not going to work.

But all it was going to do was hasten the secessionist movement, which it did.

Wasn't that Antifa group, their John Brown society?

Yeah, well, he murdered prior to Harper's Ferry.

He was involved in the Kansas

Kansas.

I don't think you can.

I'm a person who believes that the ends don't justify the means, what I'm trying to say, very crudely.

And when you go out there and murder people that are innocent for a greater cause, anybody who does that is suspect because most of the genocide in the world has been based on that principle.

There were ways to, as I said, solve the problem of chattel slavery, but the abolitionists were not willing to authorize Lincoln.

Lincoln had all sorts of ideas.

And there were a lot of solutions.

One of the solutions was let the South go.

A lot of people said that.

And let it have a slave society and it would end slavery.

They claimed, the Southerners claimed that they would do it by 1920.

That was a big thing later on.

Well, we wouldn't end slavery in 1920.

Tell that to a slave who would have to be enslaved for 60 years.

Right.

But you could have an armed conflict.

You could peacefully separate.

You could have federal money used to purchase slaves, give them their freedom.

And then the South could use that money to hire labor, et cetera.

the emotions took over and John Brown was a catalyst of those emotions, those violent emotions.

Well, Bernie, that answers your question.

And as you can tell, we are very open to getting your questions and seeing if we can work them into the show from time to time.

Maybe again, Victor, at some point we might accumulate some when you've got to be away and have a VDH question show.

Send questions my way.

Well, I'll look at them through the Apple podcast ranking section.

Or, hey, Jay Fowler at americanphilanthropic.com you want to send me any directly go ahead so anyway victor that's all the time we have today i appreciate as ever that i have the chance to talk to you and pose some questions to you so you can share your wisdom on a variety of topics with our listeners in another great episode today thank you very much for that i thank our listeners for listening and promise you we'll be back again with another episode of the victor davis hansen show very soon you get the last word victor thanks everybody for listening.

I deeply appreciate it.

I read your letters and correspondence and learn from it.

Thanks.