Roe v Wade Overturned by the SCOTUS

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, very lucky man.

I get to be a friend of Victor Davis-Hansen, and I get to host this show.

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

He's a prolific writer, and so much of his content, including exclusive content, is found at his website, victorhanson.com, about which we will talk later.

Much of this show, which is being recorded on Sunday, June 26th, that should be up on the World Wide Web on Tuesday, the 28th.

Much of this show's content will be about the recent Supreme Court decisions, in particular the abortion decision, but also

the Second Amendment decision that came out last week.

And we're going to get started on some rogue questions, and we'll do that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

So Victor, yep, you have to be living under a rock to not know what transpired.

Last week on Friday, the Supreme Court largely issued the opinion that had been leaked weeks and weeks earlier who the criminal, or I don't know if that was criminal, but the culprit behind that is yet to be found.

I wonder if they'll ever be found.

This is the Dobbs v.

Jackson Women's Health Organization case, a Mississippi case.

And in Justice Alito's opinion, which was a 6-3 decision, surprisingly, Chief Justice Roberts sided with the majority.

Roe v.

Wade, the 1973 decision that permitted unrestricted abortion on demand coast to coast is no more.

As Justice Alito wrote in his opinion, now this issue is back where it should be before the people and their representatives in state and local legislatures.

Victor, we had traded notes before this podcast and a couple of topics related to Roe that you want to talk about.

I want to throw a few in there also.

Well, first of all, if you have a general opinion about the decision and the dissents, please feel free.

Of course, it's your show.

But a couple of things you had talked about addressing are what are the actual consequences of this decision for everyday people in America.

And by everyday, I think it means what we commonly understand as everyday people.

We know a lot of elite people, a lot of first cousins of Antifa are out in the streets streets protesting.

I don't know if they qualify as everyday people, but what are the actual consequences for them?

And then Victor, more politically and immediate, the political consequences of this decision for the upcoming November elections at the federal level, maybe you have some thoughts on a state level too.

And that six, three decisions, then we're to understand Roberts voted with the majority, but he didn't participate in the majority formulation, right?

Correct.

That's what the criticism is of his.

Yeah, he thought that the ruling should have been restricted to the Mississippi law itself, essentially allowing for 15 weeks, a ban up to 15 weeks.

So I just wanted to clarify: he wrote sort of a sort of kind of maybe in theory dissent, but in actuality, a vote with a majority.

Is that right?

Correct.

Yes.

That's my understanding, too.

That's what my understanding was.

Well, if you're a young woman and you're in half of of population wise,

I think half the country lives under the aegis of blue states.

So, you know, the three big states, you know, you've got New York and you've got Illinois with Chicago and you've got California with LA and San Francisco.

And

there's no change.

The only thing I can conceive that might be different is our lunatic governor is sort of bragging that people are going to everybody's leaving California.

It's losing population and it's a dysfunctional dysfunctional state.

He has no solution for death on the freeways

or feces in the streets of San Francisco or smash and grab or carjacking or any of these things.

But I think he's starting to see that this is his moment where he's going to make it into a tourist abortion mecca.

And people would be invited and corporations have promised that they would pay for abortions.

So if you're a pro-abortion young woman and you're in a red state, then you would fly to LAX or SFO and then there would be a, what, an airport hub of abortion clinics or factories and you could come in, fly in on a Friday, get your abortion, fly out that night, I guess.

I guess that's what he's envisioning.

But otherwise, I didn't quite understand because half the population, the law is on change.

Our states want abortion.

There'll be some disagreement about late-term abortions.

Maybe.

I'm not even sure about that.

And blue states are so angry that they may just go back the other way, Jack, and even expand the limits or discard the limits on abortion.

They have already victoried some, like it's up to the moment of birth.

Yeah, yeah.

And I think that's going to cause some repulsion.

And then, second, if you're a young woman in Alabama or Wyoming or Utah and you want an abortion, I think

you can

be mailed.

I don't think the federal government's going to stop you.

You can go online like people do for Viagra or,

you know, steroids or whatever, and they get these Zoom doctors, I guess, and you can get a prescription and they will mail it to you.

And I don't see the federal government under this administration, do you, sort of filtering through the mail to see or to put these mail order abortion pill houses, clearing houses out of business.

I don't think they'll be in places like New York and California.

I don't see federal judges stopping that at all.

So what I'm getting at, Jack, is that I don't see that a woman's access to abortion will be impossible, even under the most dire landscapes, as they would interpret it.

I think, you know, maybe if they're four or five months pregnant and they have decided not to abort to abort to and then to not to abort them to abort and the pregnancy is along, then they're going to have to drive or fly to a red state, which I mean, a blue state, which will be, I think, more accommodating.

And then everybody's giddy about the political ramifications on the left because they feel that this is going to be the spark that ignites this somlent corpse of a party.

I don't see that happening for two or three reasons.

Number one,

every poll shows that while it's a very contentious, fervent issue for the people involved, it only polls about 6%

of the nation's electorate thinks it's the issue.

It's way behind, way, way behind the economy, fuel, the border.

So it's not going to be a lightning issue.

That's number one.

And then number two is the reaction to it.

And once people settle down and they see that they did not outlaw abortion, the federal government didn't, through the aegis of the Supreme Court, they just left it up to the states.

So then these battles will be within states.

And I don't think there's going to be many battles.

I think that they're pretty well decided that blue states are going to allow it and red states aren't.

And then there's going to be, as I just said, there's going to be mechanisms, at least in early pregnancies, to navigate around it.

So I think that fervor will die off.

But then third, and I think people are not talking about this.

If we had the discussion 30 years ago and we talked about the polls on abortion, it was about 60-40 for pro-choice or even when, you know, in their 80s.

And now it's 50-50, or in some cases, when you phrase the question a particular way about late-term abortion, it's not even 50%.

And that is partly, not all, but partly because of technology.

And people have been given these sonograms and scans that show a fetus is not some insect or what the left call fetus, don't use the word baby, it's a human being.

You can see it at a very, very,

almost, you know, right after conception, you can see this human life.

And so the idea that you're going to just run mecca

where people are going to fly in or they're going to drive across the border and you're going to abort board and Disneyland's going to pay, you know, your whole, or Lloyd Austin is going to brag that the Pentagon is going to facilitate abortion.

And it's going to, you know, it's going to be kind of gross because, not kind of, but very gross because you're going to have Goslin, Dr.

Goslin, or whatever his name was, scenario.

People are going to come in on the eighth and ninth month in which some of these blue states probably

have laws, I don't haven't looked at all of them, that discourage late-term abortion.

And they're probably in reaction to show their fee days that they're the bluest or the most pro-life of all.

They're going to drop that.

And you're going to see some grotesqueries that I don't think the left really can imagine.

We should also remember that we talk, you know, Europe is criticizing us, but if you look at the actual restrictions in most European countries at the last possible date.

that they permit abortion.

It's around four months,

16 weeks.

Some of them are 17 or 18.

I think France is 16.

And a lot of my point is that a lot of European countries are more restrictive than blue states are as far as the date when you can terminate a pregnancy.

Yeah, we had America's under row.

We were the most permissive nation in the world.

Maybe not with the heinous practices of, say, Red China, where they will forcibly abort women in their ninth month.

We don't have that, but as the law permitted, pretty aggressive.

You know, Victor, you talked about grotesqueries and if I said that correctly, but and some of those things, of course, over the years, many people criticized pro-lifers for the images that they displayed at rallies and marches.

Other grotesque situations, of course, were partial birth abortion where, you know, children were half delivered and then a scissor was stuck in the back of their neck and just things that

make you shudder.

But to me, when I got out of college in 1983, the first place I worked was for the Human Life Foundation, the Human Life Review.

One of the first things I ever did in my job was to proofread and typeset Ronald Reagan's essay, Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation, which was printed in the Human Life Review.

But

looking back at people over the years in this issue and so many acts of courage and so many acts of cowardice, one of the most grotesque things was Barack Obama as a state senator.

And this is what you talk about, what might we see at some of these blue states, that if a child survived an abortion, you know, then you have to, well, it's alive.

Now you have to save it.

But as he was a state senator who oversaw a committee that suppressed a bill to save the child, what do you do?

Throw it in a mop bucket and let it die?

I mean, he particularly

is a really nasty piece of work when it comes to this.

No, no, no, Jack, not when it comes to this.

One thing we haven't talked on this podcast is the moral decline of barack obama because no one takes him seriously anymore this is a guy that has by his acts and his lifestyle and his values refuted all of the empty rhetoric of his presidency i mean come on he lives in calorama he was getting this huge netflix spotify contract and now he's going over to amazon does anybody out there who's listening believe that he he has ever sat down for 90 days in his office and come up with a script and worked with producers and then produced a netflix or spotify or whatever it is that was very successful does anybody believe he even wrote his own memoir that he sort of confessed was a myth and this is a man who talks about equity and wants to bring the inner city remember his hud policies out to the suburbs and he

not satisfied with one mansion, I think it was $8.5 million in Washington.

Then he went out to Martha's Vineyard on a coastal cliff after warning everybody for eight years that the rising seas would engulf the East Coast.

Now he's got this huge, what, 2,500 gallon propane tank.

I got mine, screw you, in terms of a national crisis of fuel.

And not happy with those two mansions.

He has gone over to Hawaii and he's in an environmental lawsuit.

This is green Obama because he wants to build this his third mansion right on the beach and then he go you know he flies off and does some consulting talks and he plays i'm the role of i'm barack obama this is a guy remember if i'm continue my rant for another 30 seconds rant away my friend when he warned all of us that you remember that eulogy he gave it john um what's his name's funeral the civil rights leader john lewis john lewis And he hijacked his own eulogy and he went on a rant about the filibuster and he said it was a relic of Jim Crow racism.

This is a guy who in 2006 filibustered Justice Alito and gave a big lectures about we can't get rid of the filibuster.

So everything about him is a complete contradiction.

He always was and is a yuppie masquerading with this kind of Barry Sotero became Barack Obama identity.

And he always wanted money and status and the good life and saw the presidency as a means to getting to it.

And now,

after he stepped down and he thought that he had to be politically viable while president to kind of not fully embrace the hard left, then he saw that non-composment as Joe Biden had no cognitive ability to distinguish the left.

They hijacked his presidency and they had this hard left thing.

And until it imploded, he felt terrible.

Oh my God, I'm no longer the avatar of progressive left change revolution.

They outdid me, the squad, AOC, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders.

They're running the country in a way that I kind of wanted to, but I was afraid that I might not get re-elected.

And then he went all over the country and tried to be this

voice of grassroots revolution from his three mansions or his two and a half.

I guess there's that great picture of him in Hawaii when he's talking to either his engineers or I don't know who they are, his contractors.

You see that scowl on his face, like, what happened to my mansion?

Why isn't it built?

And so, yeah, he's a total, he is totally a,

he's a hollow person, a hollow man.

There's nothing to him.

He's a complete contradiction and hypocrite.

Victor, a few months ago, I remember going to the White House, I think almost intentionally to embarrass Biden.

Remember Biden chasing after him and the mob and trying to like that just seems so

kind of smirking with everybody mobbed him.

And Biden was sort of like your grandfather, great-grandfather, or great uncle up in the upstairs room that kind of came downstairs and was bumping into people who.

Yeah, like Bart Simpson's.

Yeah, I built this house.

I'm not in the old patriarch.

Hey, hey, hey.

And he did that intentionally because he's always had a mean streak in him.

He always has been a mean streak.

And so, you know, this is Barack Obama.

And on abortion, he was particularly bad.

I think it's going to the media and the Democrats are going to try to reinflate a collapsed agenda before November.

And they may get some air pumped into it for, I would say, by July 20th.

It's over.

And then after that.

Once we see how the contours of how this thing is going to work out, that there's going to be a lot of women who are going going to be bragging and boasting that I live in Mississippi, I live in Georgia, you know, I live in Missouri, and I got my abortion pill in the mail, no problem.

And then we're going to see Gavin Newsom and governors Gretchen, what's her name, in Michigan and all these people, written her,

they're going to say, come to my state, we have facilities.

And then we're going to start to hear things about people flying in.

And then we're going to see other states who boast to less blue states.

Well, we have no restriction.

Well, we have six months.

We have seven.

And it's going to start to, I think, repel the American people.

And this is in addition to or aside from the violence, because it's only been less than a week.

And all of a sudden, the January 6th thing is starting to be held up is, wait a minute.

Lynn Cheney, we love Lynn Cheney.

We love Lynn Cheney now.

She's one of us.

She's on the left.

She's going to get all of the blue Democrats, all 22% in Wyoming, to register as Republicans in the primary and vote for her.

And yet, what was she going to say about this?

So she said, well, I was always against Will versus Wade.

They're going to turn on her like you won't believe.

And she's done.

She's toast.

But more importantly, her committee, and with her, because she was the icon of that committee, she and Adam Schiff, And along with her implosion, people are going to start to ask themselves.

So let me get this straight.

It's okay to go in to the Arizona Senate House, state Senate House, and get outside and try to break through glass windows and keep those people hostage where they can't get out, the state legislatures.

And that's not an attack on our institutions.

That's not a violent insurrection.

And I think when you start to add these things up, the May 31st, 2020, Lafayette Park torching the St.

John's Episcopal Church, trying to flood across the street into the White House ground, sending Donald Trump and the first family into a bunker and the New York Times boasting Trump shrinks back.

You're going to look at all of these things and you can see that there's such a selectivity in what is an insurrection and what is a cry of the heart that people are going to, they're not going to listen anymore.

Well, you know, right.

And Victor, the people who who will be voting then, let's say it's mid-October or three months from now.

How many more people are going to be out of work or broke or business has gone under because of this economy?

And it's going to be, I think you're right.

I think it's going to be like the outrage right now on the left that

national and international sports federations are starting to tell biological women, at least through puberty, and biological men, you're not going to mix up your sports competition.

If you're a man through puberty, you're not suddenly going to retain your testicles and penis and your masculine frame and all that testosterone and quickly get shot up with estrogen and have cosmetic surgery and then prance around the locker room with, you know, as a male biologically, and then say you're female and destroy a whole lifetime of hard work and achievement on the part part of very gifted female athletes.

That's just not going to work.

And yet you would think, given the transgender hot button issue, that the left would be out in the streets.

They're not.

They're not.

And the reason they're not is that, first of all, there's a lot of feminists out there that are sighing relief.

And they're saying, you know what?

This is what we fought for, Title IX.

And I'm not going to get it out on the forefront.

I don't want to be criticized by the trans community and their supporters, but this is pretty good.

And the same thing is going to happen, I think, with Woe versus Wade.

After this thing starts to filter through, people are going to say, you know, it makes sense to let states determine.

They do almost in every other aspect of our life, whether it's drinking age or drug laws or gun laws.

So let them determine what their own culture likes.

If they want to abort somebody, we don't approve of it as conservatives, but I'm not going to go, you know, Indonesia.

If I was living in a conservative state i wouldn't go all the way to california and protest and try to stop them not that i agreed with them but it would be a futile exercise when i know the population of california and i know their values right their pro-abortion to the last day of a pregnancy values and that's the way that the federal system works federalism and let it live and let live and i think that's going to deflate a lot of this anger, especially as we said at the very beginning of this podcast.

the only group that I think is going to be disproportionately affected are women who are pregnant and they have decided beyond the period in which a pharmaceutical delivered through the mail can accomplish an abortion.

And then they are going to be

what put out by having to drive across the state line or to fly.

But they're going to learn very quickly that each corporation is going to try to outwake, be outwoke

next and offer a more lucrative jetaway package for their employees.

And then, sort of like the, you know, the ID laws in the Georgia when American Airlines and Delta Airlines were kind of bragging, I'm more against an ID than you are, and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, that stuff.

Let's talk about that, this culture war aspect of it, Victor, business community.

And also, you mentioned Lloyd Austin and the Defense Department.

Let's take on business first.

So, here's two things.

One, somebody sent me an email.

Steptoean Johnson, the very prestigious law firm, is giving all its staff, lawyers and staff, a day off to contemplate

this enormous decision.

It kind of reminds you of after Trump won in 2016,

exams being canceled, et cetera, because it was so disheartening and

weight so heavy.

Yeah.

But then here's of the many firms that have tried to race to the front to say how much happy they are to pay for abortion travel.

Here's one.

It's Dick's Sporting Good and Lauren Hobart, its president.

In response to today's ruling, we're announcing that if one of our teammates lives and restricts access to abortion, Dick's Sporting Goods will provide up to $4,000 in travel expense reimbursement to travel to the nearest location where that care is legally available.

This benefit will be provided to any teammate, spouse, or dependent, blah, blah, blah.

You know, one of the great attacks consistent over the years and repeated odd nausea recently about pro-lifers.

You only care about, you know, nobody cares about the kid after they're born.

I saw some clip on CNN, all these children in foster care.

Where are these companies running to the front to help support a teammate who is trying to say to adopt a child or somebody who's trying to get, you know, help a kid in foster care?

You know, where are they?

Where do they put their money?

They're willing to put their money up to kill a life, but they're not willing to jump to the front of any of these.

No, they don't want any, they feel disappointed.

So they feel disappointed.

And they feel we lost.

So that life is not ours anymore.

You didn't let me abort it.

Okay, I washed my hands of it.

That's their life.

They don't want to help at all.

You even had that Anne Navarro, that so-called Republican

observer who's on CNN and all over the network, networks, I guess.

And she said some very weird things.

You know, she's talked about members of her family in the context of they had Down syndrome or they had mental cognitive abilities and what a burden that was.

Intermention, right?

Yeah.

As if, and I'm speaking, you know, my daughter has a very seriously disabled daughter with something called Smith-McGinnis.

And my daughter, you know, they have ultrasound tests when you're pregnant and the computer profiles of the form of the baby are so accurate now, they can tell when there's something wrong.

And

so she chose, she wasn't really a choice.

She knew immediately that she wanted the baby.

And it's been an enormous delight to her, Lila has, but my gosh, there's a lot of work and stuff.

But the idea you would ever frame that question in it, that she has destroyed this family by being alive,

it's just obscene.

And so we're just talking about some of the ripples that are coming out of this decision that the left hasn't fully comprehended.

One of the things that's strange is there is a subset of never Trump conservatives who on this particular issue, they have identical views of most of the people who voted for Trump.

And they are high-fiving it now.

And some of them wrote for National Review

now or in the past.

And they are almost taking credit.

My long advocacy pro-life.

And yet it's shocking how none of them have enough candor to say, I don't like Donald Trump.

I didn't vote for him.

I think he's a danger to the Republic.

But in this particular narrow, very closely defined issue, his appointments of three justices that were pro-life and his advocacy of ending Roe versus Wade allowed my long-held views to be reified.

And in this particular case, I give him credit.

They can't do that.

Right.

They act as if they're op-eds in National Review or their op-eds somewhere or

lecture.

Yeah.

But the Atlantic.

Oh, that was really a game changer.

I was really in.

No, you had no influence, none.

So, yes, be happy that your life's ambition was actualized, but you should, if you had any character, you should say, there was a president that ironically that I despised and I tried to make sure he was never president.

But on this particular issue, I don't see how it would have been reified had it been any other president because we've had Republican presidents before and they have appointed judges and they have appointed judges like San Veda O'Connor or Anthony Kennedy or David Souter

or John Roberts, etc.

And I'm not even going to go back to Earl Warren, Paul Stevens, Brennan and Stevens and Powell voted for it.

Yes, he did.

Yeah.

But this guy didn't.

And that's just really weird.

Well, Victor, I think they knew at the time.

Remember, we were talking about this ahead of time.

I'll try to track this down for our next podcast if it's worthwhile.

But there were some people making an argument prior to the election in 2016 that, you know, the courts, they really didn't matter.

But everyone had to know when Trump, I think the game changer for the election in 2016 for a lot of people was when he took that Federalist Society list and said, okay, this is my, that was the difference.

And you can't be a never Trumper

and really take credit for this decision while it only came about because of that list, which is a campaign promise.

Absolutely.

It's the same thing about Israel.

There were a lot of people who were very pro-Israel in the right, beyond the neocon anti-Trump community, but especially them.

And they said that Donald Trump would be an anti-Semite.

And they knew that was a lie because, I mean, his daughter had converted to Judaism and his son-in-law was Jewish, an observant Jew.

His close friends that worked for him were Jews.

He was known as a pro-Jewish New Yorker.

Everybody knew it.

He told everybody what he was going to do.

He thought that the Golan Heights belonged to Israel.

He thought the embassy should be put into Jerusalem.

He thought that it was crazy to give money to Hamas, channel it, give it to the UN who give it to Hamas, et cetera, et cetera.

And then he did all of that.

And I swear that no Republican, no Republican of the past or present, not John McCain, not Mitt Romney, not even Ted Cruz probably, would either have done all of that or would have been able to do all of that and take the heat.

But just returning from Israel, I can tell you that the Israelis, I would say nine out of 10 people I met,

and this is even after the row between V.B.

Netanyahu and Trump, but nine out of 10, they may have criticisms of Trump, but they feel that he has been the most pro-Israeli president in history.

And they are very happy.

that he recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

I mean, they're very happy that the Golan Heights will never go back to this insane regime that tried to destroy Israel on numerous occasions from those heights.

And they are very, very happy that he was getting out of the Iran deal.

And they're very, very happy that he warned Iran that if it ever attacked Israel, it would regret it.

And he was very, very happy about a lot of things.

And yet there was no acknowledgement.

Nobody on the American conservative side said, I can't stand Trump.

I hate his guts.

I voted against him.

I got on TV every night and said he was, you know, a Russian collusion person.

He should be impeached.

He's a crook, monster, whatever.

But on this particular issue, that is advocacy for the Jewish state of Israel, surrounded as it is by its enemies, no president has been a greater stalwart defender, and they can't do it.

Right.

And you know, Jack, if we had a whole podcast, we could do this on a lot of issues.

We could say right now, you can say what you want about McCain or George W.

Bush or Mitt Romney or the other people in the 2016 field, but none were more vigorous in ensuring that Anwar was open or greenlighting that pipeline or getting federal leases out there and pumping oil and gas and getting that price down than Donald Trump or filling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

When prices started to go down because of COVID lockdowns, he said, this is a great chance.

It'll help the frackers and I'll buy it.

And he did.

And we could do the same thing with the border.

I know that people like Ann Coulter say, well, he only rebuilt the old wall.

He didn't do it.

He was under constant assault.

There were hundreds of lawsuits.

He had people in the DOD that were reactively his own appointees in Homeland Security.

And we know one of them called Anonymous, who bragged that they were completely ignoring executive orders and directives in his own administration.

And yet, by the time he went out of office, there was very little, if any, massive illegal migration.

He'd stopped it.

And he started to build about 20 or 30 miles of new wall after rebuilding all of the old porous wall.

So nobody gave him credit on that.

I'm not trying to defend him on thinkingly.

I'm just telling you on the key issues of our time, abortion, Israel, the wall, energy prices, I could add inflation, et cetera.

He was very good.

And the people who had been advocates for these particular issues and who voted against him are not able when these issues break their way unexpectedly to give him any credit.

Yeah.

I remember watching his last debate with Hillary Clinton, which was the weekend of the blank grab controversy.

But he had the debate anyway, and he knocked her down on abortion.

It was kind of shocking.

But yeah, he deserves credit for this win because the win is about

majority of justices and we got the majority because he held to his promises on these appointments.

And then the flip side, of course, was Joe Biden.

Joe Biden, before he was non compos mentes, made a career of being good old Joe Biden from Scranton, in which Remember he talked about the urban jungle and crime and he was not for outlawing all guns, but on the particular about abortion, all of those clips are just amazing where he said,

I'm not for it.

And it's got to be rare.

And you can't have late-term abortions.

And it's against my faith.

And he said that, Jack, all the way up to 2019.

I think he was for the Hyde Amendment.

And he came out during that campaign and endorsed it.

And then 24 hours, somebody slapped him around and said, you know what, here's the note card.

Read it.

Right.

And that's what he changed.

And now he's giving a speech.

I mean, he and Kamala Harris, you can see how this lawless government works now.

They don't care about whatever the particular law as handed down by the Supreme Court is if they disagree with it.

They're already thinking in their little brains, how can I find an executive order or a cabinet agenda or a protocol in the DOD that goes around it?

This does not apply to the federal government.

It applies to the states.

It just says that abortion shall be in the hands of the states.

It doesn't mean that the federal government can pass a law.

I mean, they can pass a law, but it doesn't mean that a non-legislative group or institution can suddenly make an edict in a particular state that transcends the state law.

They have to abide by the laws that, you know, they're in.

Well, let's talk briefly about that with Lloyd Austin.

And then one or two other things is, of course, another big Supreme Court decision on guns.

So let's follow up on what you just raised, Victor, right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

We're recording on Sunday, the 26th.

The show is going to be up on justthenews.com.

That's our mothership and other places.

On Tuesday, the 28th, I always go to Victor's website to see when the latest podcast is up, and that's VictorHanson.com.

On that site, everything that Victor writes, and all his appearances, you'll find links to them.

And what he writes, much of it, I say say much, a hell of a lot, is exclusive to VictorHanson.com.

How do you read it?

How do you read these exclusive pieces?

They're called Ultra.

You have to subscribe.

It's $5 a month, $50 for the year.

You don't want to shell out the 50 bucks.

Let me suggest you do $5,

test it out, see the copious amount of material Victor's written.

This great series he's writing.

going through right now about free-range Hansen children growing up on the farm.

I think it's terrific stuff.

So that's that.

Anyway, as for me, Jack Fowler, I write civil thoughts weekly, free, no strings attached.

We're not asking for anything.

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I write that for the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic, and we are trying to save civil society.

So if that interests you, check us out, americanphilanthropic.com, centerforcivilsociety.com.

So, Victor, let's just pick up, if you don't mind, quickly on the immediate actions of some people.

Lloyd Austin, we mentioned him earlier.

He's the head of our military.

He put out a press release immediately after the decision.

Quote, nothing is more important to me or to this department than health, the health and well-being of our service members, the civilian workforce, and DOD, Department of Defense families.

I'm committed to taking care of our people and ensuring the readiness and resilience of our force.

The department is examining this decision, the Dobbs B.

Jackson decision, closely and evaluating our policies to ensure we continue to provide seamless access to reproductive health care as permitted by federal law.

There is no federal law.

There is no federal law.

That's the point of the decision, Jack, isn't it?

There is no federal law that says you have a right to abortion anymore.

It doesn't exist.

Right.

But hypothetically, hypothetically, it could be in government funding.

Remember the Hyde Amendment that addressed Medicaid funds.

And there were, well, the Department of Defense used their funds to pay for abortions at, say, military hospitals.

So there could be some angles here, but I agree.

I think the immediate thought was: how are we going to thumb our nose at the Supreme Court's decision?

How are we going to focus on this issue instead of protecting our country, which is what I'm supposed to be doing?

That's a good point.

I mean, he's going to say, this is a Secretary of Defense that oversaw the greatest military humiliation in a half century and maybe in a century when we left 70 to 80 billion dollars in the hands of terrorists of military equipment.

Pride flag waving proudly on the embassy, which was $1 billion.

And then we gave the largest military base in Central Asia, a $300 million retrofitted air base to the Taliban.

And then he oversaw that.

And in that period that led up to it and during that, this is a secretary who went before Congress and A, reassured people in press conferences and in Congress that everything was, he says maybe he wrote memos to Biden, but everything was stable.

This wasn't going to happen.

And then the second thing he did is he lectured and preached on.

white supremacy in the ranks without bringing or adducing any evidence to show us.

He didn't hold up a piece of paper and say, this is a group of white nationals, the Aryan Brotherhood that's in the Army.

He didn't do that.

And so now he's weighing in and he's basically saying, I can't run the Department of Defense.

And under my tenure, the Reagan Foundation in a recent poll saw that 75% of the American people used to have a positive confidence, great confidence in the U.S.

military, only 45%.

So under my tenure, half the people, less than half the people have confidence that I can run this or that we can run this defense after our defeat in Afghanistan and our wokeness.

And we can send out all the videos we want about pronouns and, you know, contorting the English language to win virtue signaling accolades from these left-wing Congress people who seem to be in the majority temporarily.

And that's what we're going to do.

But worry about a drop-off in enlistments.

worry about the world thinks that the united states no longer has deterrence whether it's iran against iran or china or north korea or russia he can't do any of that so now he's completely incompetent but he has time to weigh in on this because he thinks that when next time he's called up, there's going to be a committee in the House or Senate, and the majority are going to be left-wing, and they're going to have some say over procurement or promotions, and he wants to get on the right side of them.

And I say that because I think he's apolitical.

I don't think he's left-wing Jack.

I think none of those people are.

This is a guy who was on Raytheon's board, and he gravitated, got his clearance or exemption, and went right on to Secretary of Defense.

And I swear to God, as soon as he gets out, you know where he's going to go.

They're going to call him up and say, General Austin, you've got a lot of knowledge about the labyrinth of procurement.

Get right back here at Raytheon.

And he's going to have a lot of subordinates that he oversaw that are going to be more than happy to talk to him when he's a Raytheon board member.

And that's how it works.

So it's really an insult for someone with that record to take time and divert his attention to tell us that there's going to be a federal reaction to this when the Supreme Court of the United States has just told us the federal government does not see an inherent right in the Constitution to an abortion, but maybe the states would like to adjudicate that because it's not any longer going to make a law that's not in the Constitution or not in the spirit of the Constitution.

So he's saying to us, Jack, that if you're at Fort Hood and you're in the great state of Texas and you're in base housing and you get pregnant, he's not saying that we're not going to stop federal mail with an abortion pill.

Well, you know, that's

federal mail.

He is saying that we're going to perform an abortion on federal property inside the state of Texas because we own it.

And that may be true legally, but think about that for a minute.

This issue, we're getting kind of to sanctuary cities and stuff.

Right.

Right.

And this is a sanctuary base.

And so do you really want in the spirit of civil military relationships, do you really want your military bases in all of these states to be directly in violation of state law and get in their face and say that?

And that's what he's doing.

That's where he's going.

And I'm not sure of the legality of it because I don't really know that a bureaucrat can dictate without any legislative support that, I mean, is there a law that says every federal bureaucracy must allow women to have abortions?

I don't know.

Until we have one, it's very murky.

I'm not saying it's illegal.

I'm just saying that it's stupid politically, given that the reputation of the Pentagon has dropped below 50%

of expressing great confidence in our military forces that he oversaw.

Well, also, to me, I'm just a layman, and you set me straight.

The military, the ethos is following orders, right?

Someone gives you an order from above.

There's a chain of command.

And to me, it strikes me as, okay, when the Supreme Court rules, it's the rule.

And for the military of all places, which is supposedly imbued with this ethos of, yep, that's the order, follow orders, to immediately come out and try to undermine the decision.

That's the impression I get of what Abrams did.

I find it very just another disconcerting thing about the ever-wokening American military.

I know.

He's deliberately trying to violate at least the spirit of the Supreme Court.

Right.

He's doing it because he works for a hard left administration, and he feels that the institutions that are going to ensure a lucrative retirement for him, i.e.

the corporate world, Wall Street, this lecture circuit, universities, Hollywood, entertainment, all of them are going to be conducive for people.

that share his views on abortion.

And that's what they're doing.

And that's something we haven't talked about, but I've hinted, but that is something, that is a topic that at some point I predict it's going to blow up.

And that is these three and four star generals

who,

while they are in service in bureaucratic billets, high-profile ones, and while after they're retired, they are weighing in on these very explosive social issues that even transcend Donald Trump.

And they're weighing in on guns or weighing in on parallels to Mussolini.

They're weighing in on border facilities.

They're weighing in.

And they're weighing in in lunatic fashion where they use hyperbole.

And it's all aimed at conditioning or massaging their profile.

And they all are involved in some way in corporation remunerative.

activity.

They have consulting business or they're a lobbyist or they're on corporate boards.

And people are getting really tired of it.

And that's one of the reasons that the reputation of the military has gone.

You know, I read emails that come to the author and to another email address I have.

And I would tell you, Jack, that I get about five or six a month, and they're all the same.

Dear Professor Hansen, I'm the mother of two children.

We have six generation.

I don't want my son to join the army.

He wants to join the army.

He wants to go in the Navy.

Would you please tell me what to to do?

I don't want him to be in a politicized, well, they'll go after him if he's not politically correct.

I look at these people who make money, and my son will, et cetera, et cetera.

And I usually say, you know, let your son decide.

But the point I'm making is that this is constructive criticism.

It's, I love the military.

I love generals, admirals.

I've always admired them.

I know a lot of them.

I know 30 of them I've met.

But I'm just warning them, not me, but I would like to issue a warning that

if they would talk to people outside of the corporate world, outside of Washington, D.C., outside of the left-wing billionaire class, just people,

they have no idea what they're doing to the reputation of the military, both by not winning wars, as Afghanistan seems to be iconic.

or the bombing in Libya or the misadventure in Syria or the protraction in Iraq, whatever it is, but more importantly, on the perception that people are making fantastic amounts of money when they retire in part based on the assumption that they have knowledge that can be monetized by a corporation that they gain during public service in the military.

And that doesn't go down well in the ranks.

Victor, you told me, we were talking yesterday, listeners, Victor told me about one particular person, the unnamed and the position unnamed, but that a corporate board position was approaching a million dollars.

And there's no question to me that if an intrepid reporter or a journalism institution did a profile of the earnings of board and other things from high-ranking military officials, there would be such rage because you would think this is what it was all about.

You did all this posing and posturing and letting things go to hell in a handbasket so you could cash in at the end.

Again, it's the military career.

We think this I'm going to put in my 20, 25.

No, the career is get through the military and then I think reach the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

And it's quite a pot of gold.

I think it's this strange idea that middle America that in inordinately sends her children into the military and even more inordinately sends their children into combat units, and even more inordinately are the parents of people who die on combat, have assumed that their top-ranking officers are interested only in military efficacy and winning wars, and have forsaken the life of the corporate grandee.

And now they're starting to learn that their children may not win a war or they may not be if there's an incident where somebody accuses them of an ill-timed artillery strike or if someone says that they were insensitive that the top brass will always err not empirically but on the side of which they feel which is the woke side that has the greater latitude or greater i should say trajectory for post-service remuneration wealth that's a serious charge and i'm not making it lightly and i've lost a lot of friends among three and four stars.

And I like them.

I like these people.

I think they voted 30 years, where they slept on the ground and they did all sorts of stuff in their early years.

And we appreciate that service.

But this is a cry of the heart, if I can use that over word, to tell these people, you don't know what you're doing to the reputation of the military when you get out there in public fora and you make these outlandish charges, or you start using these metaphors of Hitler and Mussolini and Dachau or Auschwitz, or you start to weigh in on these very sensitive and emotional issues like gun control or abortion, or you start to take a particular candidate.

And, you know, I will mention one person, and that is General John Allen, who had a very distinguished record in Iraq.

Now, he was the head of the Brookings Institution.

And by the way, Jack, the Brookings Institution has taken a lot of hits lately.

Remember when John Durham subpoenaed a lot of their records?

This is where I think you can say that Fiona Hill and Steele, in one sense of the word, I think Marco Cleveland wrote about it.

This was the incubator of the entire Russian hoax, some of their people.

Started right there.

And he was the director of the Brookings.

He's resigned now because what?

He was a foreign agent, allegedly.

for Ghatar, and he didn't tell anybody.

He was representing a point of view of a foreign government under the auspices of his sterling military reputation and his post-service dash retirement prestigious billing as the head of Brookings.

And he was making a lot of money representing a foreign government's financial interest and did not tell people and did not register.

Remember Paul Manafort?

Yeah.

That's what we went after.

And he was demonized by the left.

And that is what really hurts the reputation of the military.

And they've got to stop it.

They've really got to stop it.

I don't know what else to say.

You said it pretty strongly, and I think you're accurately.

We've got to talk about one more thing.

We don't have a lot of time left.

I promised we'd talk about the court's Second Amendment decision.

And we're going to record another podcast today.

So maybe we'll push that off to there.

But, Victor, I would like to talk about these Democrats using the cloak of the Stephen Colbert show who invaded the Capitol and get your quick thoughts on that before we say goodbye to our listeners.

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

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show recording on Sunday the 26th.

So, Victor, the news came out that the staffers of the Stephen Colbert show, and he is so damn obnoxious.

And I think we still outsize the value of these late-night shows because all of us still think this is America 1970, where half of America is watching Johnny Carson.

It is just not the case anymore.

I mean, more people are watching Greg Guttfeld than watching any of these network shows.

Nevertheless, they they have some sort of prestige.

But anyway, they somehow or other, and the somehow is your favorite congressman Adam Schiff, they got access to the Capitol and were arrested.

It's kind of interesting, isn't it, that one of the leaders of the January 6th committee is allowing other people to illegally access the Capitol building.

Victor, what are your thoughts about this?

Well, I mean, they're not going to argue it was not unlawful.

It was unlawful, or they wouldn't have been arrested.

They're going to offer the idea that it wasn't violent, but they did go over to a congressman's door and deface some of her literature.

And they did break the law.

And they were arrested.

And we'll see if they're prosecuted.

And there were congresspeople involved in facilitating that visit.

And it was organized by Stephen Colbert and his team.

I'm just saying that, Jack, because behind those statements that I just enumerated are certain generic nouns like conspiracy, insurrection,

pre-planning, organization, all of the words they used against the January 6th.

I mean, people didn't just show up and then open a door was unlocked and they walked in.

It was planned and it was coordinated with Adam Schiff.

And this is an Adam Schiff, remember, that he's got nine lives as a congressman, but he's extinguishing the lives of truth.

I mean, this is a guy who read in to the congressional electorate a complete lie, that his version of a document that wasn't the document.

This is a person who lied and said he had not met, coordinated with the whistleblower.

This is a person that said that he had not coordinated with Alexander Vinman in the first impeachment.

So the people involved in this were pretty shady.

And again, it's another example of we need a consistent policy.

And I think when the Republicans take power, they need a committee, and it should be called

the committee to investigate violations of federal property or threats to iconic federal property.

or organized riots or insurrections against federal property.

And they'll start with a May 31st riot that tried to get into the White House grounds.

They can go into the federal courthouse that was burned that summer.

They can do the January 6th.

They can do the Colbert.

They can go look at federal statues that were defaced, graffiti written on some of our most famous monuments, and start issuing subpoenas and then turn it over to the DOJ.

It'd be wonderful to see.

Well, Victor, we're about out of time.

We want to thank everyone who listens, those who go to victorhanson.com and who leave comments there.

Victor Victor reads them.

Sammy Wink, I read them.

Some of them I do.

For Apple podcasts, people have the opportunity to rate the show from one to five stars.

This is about four, nine plus rating over several thousand people who've left ratings.

We thank you very much.

Many people leave comments.

We read them.

I was going to read a few today, but I just got time for one.

And it's a nice one.

VDH is brilliant and humble.

VDH is so in touch with the world.

He understands the plight of the working class, but also understands the issues and the illiberal elites who are currently running our country.

Every podcast is enlightening and entertaining.

I can't get enough of his brilliance.

Blondie

BA

wrote that.

I wonder if Mrs.

Hansen would agree with those

praises of you, but that was awfully, awfully kind of true.

Well, yeah, I think she would too.

There were some others.

we'll try to get to another podcast

she's a great lady yeah so folks subscribe to victorhanson.com sign up civilthoughts.com for my little newsletter and victor i think that's about it i hope you're getting better i don't think you are maybe we'll talk about that on another podcast yeah i think i think

i'm on uh monday is two months of this long covet and i'm making progress i

try to exercise a little bit.

I have two steps forward and then all of a sudden I crash and go one back.

My biggest problem right now is weird neuropathies and insomnia and fatigue, but insomnia.

Wow.

So if somebody knows a little jingle or an app that says, listen to me and you'll sleep for eight hours, I would give my left hand for it.

Maybe you have a dream and I'm left-handed.

Those dreams about counting sheep jumping over fence.

I've done that.

Believe it or not, I've done that.

Well, maybe you should have dreams of Anthony Fauci jumping over a cliff or something

like that.

I didn't say that.

I thought it was a nightmare.

Come on.

Well, thanks, Victor, for sharing your wisdom.

Thanks, folks, for listening.

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

Thank you, everybody.