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Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This is the Friday news roundup where we look at the news of the week and Victor's thoughts and ideas on the impact on culture.

This week, we'll get a little update on the Ukraine.

We'll look at the opportunities that are being addressed, I guess I would say.

by Iran, North Korea, and China, and maybe a little on the coronavirus and inflation, all of which seem to be the top stories this this week.

But first, let's take a moment for some messages.

At a time when Americans are more divided than ever, Connecting America is a place where everyone can gather and express their opinions with no disrespect.

And what better place than a Jersey diner to host this show?

Because where else but a diner can you find a buffet of opinions, ideas, and real connections?

Connecting America, a brand new national program that aims to truly connect everyday people and is dedicated to showcasing ideas and embracing civil conversation, will also include amazing ways to improve your fitness, health, and nutrition, revive your spiritual self, and give your home a makeover.

Connecting America streams live every weekday from 7 a.m.

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Eastern Time.

Our program is led by a group of award-winning journalists, including me, Jim Rosenfield, plus Allison Camerata and Dave Briggs.

We'll also hear from America's psychologist, Dr.

Jeff Gardier, and former Fox News senior foreign affairs correspondent, Amy Kellogg.

Join us wherever you get your podcasts.

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Welcome back.

And as I always, can I ask you how you're doing?

Are you feeling inspired this morning in particular?

You've got lots on the agenda.

Well, I'm very,

I'm very upbeat because

I had a week, eight days on the East Coast, and then I hopped on a plane and we had 110 people go to Israel.

And by the time I got back, it was 14 days and I had to go to Reno.

And I thought I was never going to get an improvement with this long COVID.

It was so weird.

But now that I am back on the farm, I remember my words of my father and grandfather.

If I was in Egypt or I had a ruptured appendix in Libya, they always came back to me.

Just get back, somehow get back to the farm.

And all you have to do is just lay out in the sun and you'll be healed.

So I've been doing that for four or five days.

And for the first time in seven weeks, I'm starting to feel just a little bit that I

can see that I'm getting better.

So, I'm very ecstatic.

I know that's pathetic, but I know it is.

And it sounds like you are relaxing and de-stressing because every time I go out to the country or up to the mountains or something, it just seems like you lose track of time.

You get detached from all of the hustle and bustle.

It's nice.

But

I've almost finished all these projects.

And then last night the dog barked, and I have an outdoor bathroom hooked to an outdoor studio.

And guess what?

The septic tank collapsed.

This is not the new system, an older system.

And the lid collapsed.

And I went in there and I thought, no problem.

I'll just make a lid, get the guy.

So I called a guy to come and make a lid.

He came out and said, but it's dry and none of your sewer pipes are emptying it in.

And this is, I mean, they're not used a lot.

So then there was apparently the guy who put it in didn't, he tapped two lines into one and then they're going somewhere.

So when you plush the toilet the last five years, nobody knows where they're going.

I think I know where they're going.

I think when I dig out there tomorrow, I'm going to find a rubber coupling where he didn't use a plastic coupling.

And that thing over the years has disintegrated and one of the bathrooms sewage is going in there into the ground.

And I can see the land start to sink.

So what I've got to do is have him come out today, dig it all out, and put a whole new four-inch connective system into this tank.

And it's just one thing after another.

But if you have determination that you're going to turn an 1870 era compound into a modern livable place for your children one day, I hope that's true, then you press on.

You're making me think, you know how that Bob Via makes this old house seems like such a pleasure to remodel old houses.

Your forays into your house troubles seem endless and don't make it seem quite so romantic.

They always say that about writers, that they write for the first 20 years of their life to buy a house and they write for the next 40 years to regret they bought it or to fix it up.

And it's just a drain.

It would have been so easier.

30 years ago if I'd had the money to demolish it and then build a brand new replica.

Yeah.

It would be even easier to go to one of those hotels near a airport that sells only a bed and a little hotel.

I know.

That's a good point.

If I wanted to get over, I supposedly long COVID, I would just get a condo right next to SFO or San Jose Airport in California.

And my whole life would be living in a one-room

writing, you know.

And then no, and then having food brought and then go walk to the airport and fly somewhere with no connect with no connection rather than have all these weird connections, 16 hours to get to Reno from Fresno via Las Vegas or something.

Or to have all these people come in, hey, Victor, don't want to bug you, but

there's a four-wheeler that was stolen.

Do you know who the guy?

Did the guy come on your property?

Hey, Victor, don't want to bug you, but you don't have power to one of your pole sheds.

Hey, Victor, I don't want to bug you, but you've got an open septic tank out there and there's nothing in it.

So where's the septic going?

Okay.

I don't want to bother you, Victor, but your well pump has rusted or gummed up and now you have to put a whole pump, new pump in.

Yeah, everything.

The pump went out.

I thought it was a low wattage because I was trying to put a new conduit.

I had the conduit dug and then there was a mixed communication.

The person didn't use the conduit for new wire.

He used the old buried cable 70 years ago that wasn't in a conduit.

The new pump, four years old, burned out.

I don't know what burned it out.

It might have been low wattage.

It might have been old, but I just got a three horsepower new one.

So okay.

And you are the auntie.

I worship this house.

I don't mean that in a salutary, I worship this house.

I don't mean worship and love it, but I'm a

it's some kind of master that owns me.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

So you're going to have a show, this damned old, lovable house.

Yes, be careful what you say, everybody, when your mother tells you when you're 30, I really worry about this house.

It really took much of my life to keep it going.

I don't want to do that to you, but could you possibly keep it from falling over?

Yeah, mom, no problem.

I'll do it.

No problem.

Then when you're 30 and 40, you use your labor rather than your brain or your pocketbook.

And then when you're 50,

you've got a little brain and you've got a little pocketbook, but not enough.

So

I know the audience is getting sick of this.

They say, Victor, get on to your life.

I think they're almost as

amused as I am, Victor.

Don't worry about it.

But let me remind everybody that Victor is the Martin and Neily Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution, and the Wayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor has a website, victorhanson.com, where you can come and subscribe for $5 a month to try it out and then $50 a year if you would like to continue on and we welcome everybody.

Victor, we're going to look at some of the international news today and I thought first we'd go as we often do since there is a war in the Ukraine and it's peripherally involving us at this point.

A little update on the Ukrainian war, the war in Ukraine.

And my impression from reading news is that Russia seems to be a little stronger and it seems to be that it's digging in and ready for, as many, as you've said, a Verdun-like episode, right?

Ready for the long run in the Ukraine.

And I was wondering what your recent reflections are.

You know, I've written a lot about this.

I've had, this was a discussion of the military history working group.

at the Hoover Institution, where we had, you know, everybody's view from Edward Lutwax to David Goldman to H.R.

McMaster, spirited.

I discussed it, I think, last night on Tucker Carlson's show.

I've had a very spirited discussion on the Hoover website, Goodfellows, where my friends and colleagues, John Cochran and H.R.

McMaster, sort of disagreed with my position.

And I think it was shared by Neil Ferguson, another good friend.

So I think everybody is getting a picture of what's going on.

You have a country

with

four times the population, basically 160 170 million versus 40 million, and 10 times the GDP,

and 40 times the territory.

And it thinks with a shock and awe thunder run,

it's going to do what it did in Georgia or Ukraine or eastern Ukraine.

It's just going to go in there on February 23rd, and they got all these sparkling brand new weapons and it didn't work.

They were incompetent for those types of operations.

The Russian military does not do well with preemptive shaken aw combined arms operation.

Okay, so then the Ukrainians heroically, as if they're the 300 at Sparta, they hold the pass and they hold it long enough that all this weaponry comes in and all this capital.

And all these pacifistic, appeasing Europeans suddenly think they're the rowers at Lepanto and they're going to get out there.

They're not really in the long run, except for the Eastern European.

But France and Germany talk as if, as I said, that they're on the Fourth Crusade or something.

So

Ukraine wins and they push the Russians back.

And then the war then is a question now

of

Russian-speaking borderlands along the eastern Ukrainian border around the Black Sea and the key peninsula of the Crimea.

And in their exuberance, the Ukrainians feel that they are moving, moving, moving, and they don't really care about the odds against them.

They care, but the Russians are so incompetent, they don't think they can mobilize.

Meanwhile, the world is sanctioning Russia and they think Russians are going to go broke.

Now, there's about seven or eight mistaken assumptions in that scenario I just outlined.

Number one.

Sanctions will hurt Russia, but the Russian people,

I mean, this is a country that lost 20 million in World War II.

This is a country that suffered poverty for 70 years

under Soviet communism.

This is a populace with a declining fertility rate and a declining longevity.

So what I'm getting at, they can take a lot, a great deal of hit, but because they're one of the largest food producers and the largest

oil producer after thanks to Joe Biden, and they are one of the largest mineral producers.

The West needs it.

And the West, with these sanctions, has found that it hurts the West.

It doesn't hurt the West as much as it hurts Russia, but the point I'm making is the Russians can take a lot more poverty than we can because they're used to it and we're not.

And number two is we have a redress of grievances.

You sanction the United States and we hurt, then we get rid of people.

They don't.

So

the people around Putin are living as if they're Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg.

And the people that are suffering have no means of grievance.

I know there's a lot of wild-eyed talk that, oh, we're going to have a revolution.

We're going to get, no, you're not going to have a revolution.

If you do have a revolution, you're going to get another younger Putin.

Listen to some of those speeches in the...

the Soviet Politburo.

I mean, the Russian Politburo, Duma, whatever you want to call it.

They're to the right of Putin.

They're nuts what they're saying.

Okay, so that's where we are.

So now we are in a war of attrition.

Ukraine has pushed them mostly out of Ukrainian majority speaking areas.

They're fighting to reclaim, they think, given their momentum, given promises of aid, to restore the pristine borders of Ukraine prior to 2014.

to effect that strategy they need

10 times the artillery they have, which I don't think is in the arsenal of NATO.

I don't think NATO has as many artillery pieces as Russia does.

But that's what Ukraine needs.

They need more planes.

They need more drones.

They need more rockets.

They need everything.

We've already given them 40 billion, 40, 50 billion, probably with all of the AIDS.

We're giving them another billion in cash.

The Germans and the French are worried because, you know, they pay $8, $9 a gallon.

It's going up to $11.

And so they're afraid that their economy is going to crash.

So is there a solution or do we fight this Verdun Somme Passchendae to the last Ukrainian?

Because that's what it is.

It's right near the Russian supply lines.

They don't have to fly in helicopters over to Kiev.

Not that they won't try to take Kiev if they win, but right now it's a stalemate.

for a while, but we're starting to see the Russian way of war where they bring in all these massive rocket and artillery batteries and planes.

And they just, it looks like a caisson in Vietnam.

They just have a checkerboard and they just pick a square and they obliterate it.

And then they bring in their conscript soldiers.

And then they go to the next one and obliterate it.

And they go into the next one, obliterate it.

And to stop that, you've got to do something.

And that something risks escalating the war.

That something would be to have airlifts every hour to give counter batteries, to get Russian sophisticated aircraft from the Eastern Europeans that have it.

It would mean people should listen to the Goodfellows podcast.

It would mean, as some have advocated, to give them sophisticated shore to ship missiles and take out the entire Russian Black Sea fleet that's supplying Russian troops along the Crimea and Sea of Azov.

Or it would mean bragging that you've killed now seven generals and you're going to kill 10 10 more.

We tend to be bragging about that.

Or it would mean, contrarily, to go into Russian territory and blow up supply depots.

And I don't think that's a viable solution.

I think the ultimate solution is to have international people come in there and say, these are Russian-speaking areas.

Let's have an international plebiscite.

I think Putin might go along because he'd think he'd win.

And if it was crooked and he didn't, then keep going with the sanctions.

That's fine.

But I don't think it's fair of the West to tell the Ukrainians, yes, you can win.

Yeah, but we're hurting and we don't, we're going to pull.

Yeah.

And then we're going to fight this, as I said, Salmer Verdun to the last Ukrainian to get every single Russian out of that territory.

And Ukraine, in terms of population, it's...

kind of like Mexico versus the United States in terms of GDP, kind of like Canada, the United States.

I mean, we could screw up, but we would win a war.

And that's what's going to happen.

It's going to kill a lot more Russians and Ukrainians, but they can lose a lot more.

And they have an autocratic government.

So let's try to think of creative ways where we have three or four objectives.

We do not do preemptive military operations that will spark a nuclear conflagration.

Two,

we will supply Ukraine enough to prevent Russia from expanding westward in a counteroffensive.

Three, we will not have the Ukrainians with American supplies go into Russian territory and blow things up or kill people, i.e.

assassinate generals, and we'll try to get them to a point where they can resist any inroads further to the west, and then we'll have an international plebiscite.

And I know that somebody says, well, you don't like the UN, I don't, but I'm just throwing things out there because

long war is just not viable.

Long war is just not viable.

It's not viable for Ukraine.

And I bet you everybody says poor Russian people, they're captives of Putin.

Yes, they are.

But if you ask the average Russian person, do you want to win in Ukraine or do you want to pull out?

I have a feeling they would say they want to win.

They look at Ukraine differently than we do.

They look at Ukraine in the manner of

this was the bloody battlefield of World War II.

The encirclement around Kiev was the largest loss in a single battle, captured, killed, or wounded, I think, in military history.

The siege of Sevastopol is one of the most bloodly, deadly

attacks of any siege in history, conducted by Erich von Manstein in summer of 1942.

And you go back to the Great Famine.

And so this is where Russian history has been horrific,

both bad and good.

So it's imprinted in their mind.

This is not just Poland or the Czech Republic.

These are predominantly, at least in the eastern part, Russian speaking.

And so if you want to encourage independence and westernize it and make it a part of the EU, okay,

but then you're going to tell the Russians you're going to put the EU and maybe NATO one day right on their border.

It's not going to happen.

I don't think it's going to happen.

And that doesn't mean you're appeasing them.

So give them enough weapons to prevent Putin moving any further west and pressure them to deter Russians along that Verdun border, but try to find some diplomatic solution so we don't end up killing, I don't know, 5,000 or 6,000 people a month over a disputed borderland where the majority of the people in it are identified as Russian speakers and may or may not want to A, be part of Ukraine, B, have their independent puppet government, C, formally be annexed by Russia.

Thank you, Victor.

Let's go ahead and leave it with those suggestions.

Those are all very constructive.

So we'll see what happens with that.

Let's take a moment for some messages and then come right back and we'll talk a little bit about how U.S.

policy is encouraging Iran, North Korea, and China.

We'll be right back.

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Welcome back.

Victor, let's turn to Iran and North Korea and China.

We know that China has been saber-rattling over Taiwan and its military in the South China Sea, that North Korea just recently fired eight missiles into the Eastern Sea after South Korea and the U.S.

finished joint naval exercises.

And Iran has launched a rocket or is planning on launching a rocket that will carry a satellite, but continuing with its military development and nuclear development.

Recently, two scientists died in Iran as well, and they're blaming the Israelis for those deaths.

So we've got a lot going on with these three countries.

And

I'm pretty sure that you're going to see that or represent it as biden and his administration really just showing weakness but you know what else and what more can we see with this

well the world works on the principle of deterrence that's a latin word deiterio to frighten somebody away from something.

And it accepts human nature for what it is, not what you would want it to be.

That is, we are Neanderthals.

And when there is no deterrence, then the strong strong dictate to the weak, and the weak, in Thucydides' terms, obey as they must.

That's what we see on the subway in New York.

That's what we see with Smashing Grad.

That's what we see with the war of everybody against everybody on the streets of the homeless.

The strong prevail.

That's not what we see in civilization.

And so the United States, for good or evil, following the post-war order, with Japan flattened, Europe flattened, the Soviet Union ruined, China in a culture, whatever, we were the enforcer of a liberal world order at great cost to us,

but it kept people in their own corners.

And after

the

fall of the Soviet Union, the United States continued that role, and often not in a very bright way with expeditionary optional wars that didn't, in a cost-benefit analysis, turn out right and cost us enormous amount of blood and treasure.

Okay.

But Joe Biden came into power thinking

that Donald Trump's warning to North Korea, I have a bigger button than you, you better not ever threaten the West Coast of the United States again.

Or to Chi when he said at a dinner, you know, I just took out some Russian mercenaries and I wouldn't go into Taiwan if I were you.

Or I like Vladimir Putin.

Vladimir Putin's a great guy, but.

If he goes in there, he's reportedly threatened him to do.

And the same thing with Iran.

He took out Solemni.

He bombed the crap out out of ice so the point i'm making is that all of these countries

for good or evil in a cost benefit to analysis they said the united states is unpredictable and it's strong and we do not know for certain if we were going to invade south korea or taiwan or ukraine or send a missile toward Israel what the United States response would be but we are afraid that it would be inordinately destructive to to our interests.

So they didn't do it.

Biden comes along and all he did was trash that successful policy.

He virtue signaled to our enemies,

as well as begging them to pump oil, that the policies of his predecessor were flawed.

And he went so far as to basically allow the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to call his Chinese counterpart and basically tell him to, and no certain, I mean, I'm not quoting Bervadin, but he basically said, I think Donald Trump, in my humble opinion, is nuts.

And if he ever gives me an order to go onto nuclear alert, I'm going to warn you guys.

And then he called his commanders in and said, you know what, you don't report to Donald Trump via the Secretary of Defense as the Constitution allows, but you report through me, which the Constitution doesn't even mention.

And his description of his job is an advisor to the president.

He has no command authority.

And so this is a guy, Mark Milley, who gave lectures about about the Constitution and coups and Donald Trump.

But basically, if we were going to take a deep breath, he staged a slow-motion coup in appropriating power away from the executive branch that he did not have to overrule the executive branch in a national emergency by having theater commanders be cut off from the executive branch via a conduit through himself.

Everybody get that?

And then freelance diplomacy, he's not a diplomat, contacting the Chinese.

So what I'm getting at, Sammy, is all of that, all of that foreign policy was bad.

The force multiplier was A, the skedaddle from Afghanistan, the idea the United States turned over $80 billion in weapons to terrorists, the idea they gave up the largest Air Force base in Central Asia after millions of dollars of refits, the idea that they had a billion-dollar embassy, flexing their cultural muscles with the pride flag, with George Floyd murals, with gender studies, but then without any heft, military heft to enforce that cultural imperialism.

And then a third multiplier was they completely dismantled the one asset of the American foreign policy that allowed us to be autonomous and free.

to make our own choices when we're going to intervene and not.

That is energy sufficiency.

And then

they compounded that error by begging the Venezuelans, the Iranians, the Russians, the Saudis to produce a fuel that we felt was beneath us, although we had in great abundance.

Add it all up.

And then we had a final mosaic to that, a final tesser to that awful mosaic.

Joe Biden was non-compos mentes, and people saw him.

And he was befuddled.

He was addled.

He couldn't finish a sentence.

He said crazy things.

He had to be corrected.

And they said to themselves, we Iranians are going to shut down all the cameras in our nuclear enrichment facilities.

We're going to kick out inspectors.

We're going to go full blast because this is a gift from Allah.

And then the Chinese said,

before we make a decision about Taiwan, let's just look at Ukraine.

All these Western guys puffed up their chest about the Ukrainian heroes at Thermopylae, but maybe, maybe, maybe it's going to be a war of attrition.

And six months from now, nobody's going to care unless they get their oil.

So we go into Taiwan, we've got 1.4 billion people.

Russia only has 140 million, and they can do it.

So we might be able to do it.

And then North Korea thought, you know what?

I don't think Joe Biden's going to say a word when we violate missile treaties and we scare the hell out of our neighbors.

So we're going to do it.

And that's where we are.

And deterrence is very hard to accrue and to establish and it's very easy to lose.

Yeah.

But can I be the devil's advocate and say that, well,

the left wing seems to think that, well, we're so strong that this method of deferring and

backing away from at least acting as world dominance is not going to really do anything to us because, after all, our military will still be the strongest military.

So, what's the problem with it, right?

That's what the fact is, the left has not ensured that is true.

What the left always does is this.

They say, well, these right-wingers, these capitalists, these corporations, these greedy people, they did all this stuff.

Remember, Madam Albright, well, you got such a big military chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

When are you going to use it for me?

I need to use it in Yugoslavia.

But she had no idea whether it was dismantled under the Clinton administration.

So what they do is they just feel that, well, a bunch of right-wingers made a big military, a bunch of right-wingers drilled a lot of wells, a lot of right-wingers did all this.

So, we got all this stuff.

They don't.

They didn't do all that.

They fought tooth and nail to get the minimum.

Our fleet is under

sized.

Our army is undersized.

We're not able to conduct a war and a half anymore.

So, if these enemies on their horizons coordinate their activities, i.e.,

Russia going into Ukraine, China going into Taiwan, Iran starting to send missiles to our allies,

North Korea prompting a war with South Korea.

We don't have the wherewithal to stop that without going nuclear.

And if we start to go nuclear, we're going to discover that we don't have a hypersonic nuclear platform like Putin does.

Remember Obama, he wanted to decrease the number of deliverable nuclear weapons to 500.

I was speaking once, and I won't mention the person's name, but a South Korean general came up to me after my speech, and it was on nuclear deterrence.

And he said to me the following: He took out a piece of paper and he wrote 7,000 nukes on it.

And then he said, This is how much for the East Coast,

this is how much for the West Coast, this is for Alaska, this is the mainland, this is the European mainland, this is Japan.

And he totaled actual nukes up.

Yeah, and they were were over 500.

So he said, Where's my nuke?

I started laughing.

I said, Are you crazy?

Nobody counts like this.

And he said to me, The Chinese do.

And I said, What do you mean by that?

And he said, If you go down to 500 deliverable nukes, you're not going to have them in a crisis to protect me.

And he was right.

Yeah.

And so this is very fragile.

The way you should look at this, the human condition and this globalized world is it's a nasty, big, fat, sharp-toothed tiger.

And for some other reason, the United States is sitting on top of it.

As long as the United States has its hand on the back of that tiger, it'll walk.

But when the United States starts to pet it and say, this is a nice little tiger, it's so cute.

It's going to throw that, the United States off and just start devouring people.

i.e., the tiger is human nature and the dark side of human nature.

Yeah, so everybody knew that.

That was what's so sad.

George Kinnan knew that.

A Democrat, he understood that.

George Marshall, an apolitical person, understood that.

A Democrat JFK, John Kennedy, understood that.

Doesn't mean that they didn't do things that were to excess, like Vietnam, but they understood that.

And even people like Pat Buchanan, who were called isolation, they were America first in the sense that they wanted a huge defense budget, not to go overseas, but to have missile defense.

They were the people behind the Reagan doctrine of Fortress America.

And we don't have any of that.

So, one of the things the next administration should do is to invest heavily in missile defense and update our nuclear deterrent and just say,

we would love diversity, equity, and inclusion.

We would love LGBTQ, but we don't have enough money

if it's at the price of a destroyer, and then we're going to have to look at some of our platforms.

I don't think we can afford $14 billion carriers that can be taken out with 500 missiles, you know, from the Chinese shore, sent at night, six inches above the water, you know, at 900 miles an hour or something.

I don't think you can stop them all.

Yeah.

So, and apparently they feel that we know that.

So we're not going to put a big carrier between Taiwan and China.

So we need more drones.

We need more platforms.

We need a World War II-like attitude where we flood the world with platforms that are cheap and inexpensive.

You know what I mean?

We should have frigates that have on them 100 drones.

Or if we have a carrier, we should have it with 500 drones way away.

And we need to have very few people on it.

That's what we need to do.

You know, we're not doing that.

And we need to encourage industry by which we can produce those drones and microchips and things that are needed in those countries.

It's so tragic because I think everybody's got this.

I hope our listeners I know don't because I read their notes and they're very sophisticated, right people, but they must be frustrated because the left and much of the American population believes that their birthright is $3 a gallon gas.

Their birthright is $7 sheet plywood.

Their birthright is, you know, $4.95 ribeye steak.

Their birthright is to get on a flight and have a 40-minute easy connection in a beautiful Kennedy or SFO airport or LAX.

And that's not happening because every single thing I mentioned requires the work of ages.

It requires discipline.

It requires investment.

It requires honoring the people who do that.

We've got this bankrupt bi-coastal elite.

And because they made a lot of money, I don't care if it was bitcoin or facebook or google or apple or amazon whatever it is they have made a terrible leap of calculus by saying i'm very wealthy and i live in a good zip code and my kid is at stanford or yale and i'm annoyed at and therefore you should listen to me no we shouldn't listen to you we should listen to the electrician who wires your house.

We should listen to the mechanic that can fix your Tesla.

We should listen to the concrete mason who can fix your foundation.

And we don't do that.

But those are the people who keep this country running.

And I deal with them all the time out here, especially this year.

And every time I meet them, I grow respect for them because they're competent and they keep the muscles of America taut.

And we got a flabby brain.

We don't have flabby muscles.

We have a flabby brain that's governing these muscles.

Yeah, sure.

And we need a

leadership.

Yeah, the thing of this whole thing I keep coming back to is Hunter Biden.

When I see that guy, privilege, money, and what did he do with that?

I mean, excess sex, excess drugs, excess alcohol, excess being spoiled and pampered by his father.

And then this idea that he's got these expectations, these entitlements, that he deserves this and this.

And think of all the people who service that family.

It's just.

Yeah, he's done enough that at least several people need to go to jail for the things he's done.

I'm sure.

He should go to jail.

He should go to jail.

He should stay in jail.

He's never reported his income.

The IRS let him off when he said he had back taxes.

And that's in a terrible message.

He had a gun that he lost.

He was violating.

I think he even was not honest about his drug history when he filed for the permission to get a permit.

Can I say something that's a digression here on since you brought up Hunter?

They've been showing this picture of a torso with the gun and nobody's questioning whether it's Hunter or not.

We've all seen so much of his body.

We're all, yep, that looks like Hunter.

It's just his torso.

Red flag, huh?

Red flag.

Joe Biden gives us a lecture every day about a red flag.

I almost hope there is a red flag because the first thing I would hope to do with Joe Biden would call up law enforcement and say, there's my son.

Don't give him a gun.

He's mentally unstable.

He's a crackhead.

He

frequents prostitute.

He shows and twirls his gun when he's having sex.

Don't give him a gun.

Yeah.

And then he would say, somebody arrest him or I will.

Yeah, here's the deal.

No, what he would do is say, hey, Merrick, would you, you know how you did that thing for me when my daughter lost her diary, when Hunter lost his laptop?

Could you get your FBI boys and go find out where Hunter's gun is?

And maybe we can get him a permit again.

I think he threw it in a dumpster and it turned up somewhere, but it's got to be somewhere.

Oh my gosh.

Okay, Victor, we better go on to another track here.

Let's turn to the economy and the

downward turn.

I'm sure all of our listeners are up on the latest statistics, but I'll give you a few just to work with.

We have an 8.6 annual inflation rate according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and we have a negative 1.5 the first quarter of 2022 growth rate, GDP growth rate.

So those two things are huge in showing that this economy is started on a downturn.

We have two more quarters to have negative growth before we're officially in a depression.

Joe Biden got up and said, and I think we've seen a lot of accounts of this in a speech.

I don't want to hear, I don't want to hear any more of these lies about reckless spending.

We're changing people's lives.

And so they are changing people's lives hasn't he heard about climate change and how we use the word change to mean a lot of things and it could be the wrong way right well he's changing people's lives my life has been changed everybody that's listening has been changed he's changed everybody's life

I can't go to the store, grocery store without spending $200 and for not that much.

It just seems outrageous.

It used to be $100.

I know that their inflation rate doesn't say 100%, but it sure feels like 100% when i'm there yesterday i made my little pilgrimage to get wire to finish the last bit of rewiring i got two rolls i'm thinking i did this so many times in my life two rolls were always 60 it was 400 almost with tax four hundred dollars it's crazy then i talked to the carpenter he said you know He's putting a four by four frame over an old cement floor and put the wiring and plumbing underneath it for this little annex.

And he said, we better go from three quarter inch just to be safe to inch and a quarter.

And I said, okay,

what would that be?

Oh, it's over $110 a sheet.

I remember when that was $25.

And so my point is that

He's changed our lives.

He's changed the very ability to build, the very ability to have a decent meal, the very ability to drive.

He's done all of this.

And

so far, when he says, well, I don't care about that, we're going to spend, Build Back Better would have destroyed the country.

And yet anybody who opposed that, and Joe Manchin is a hero for opposing that, where are they now?

Are they still the evil people?

No, they're the heroes.

And how about the people who push that stuff on us?

And we don't have an 8.8% inflation rate.

Anybody knows if you look at the stuff of life, it's about 16%.

Or if you use the old Reagan dialectics, statistics, criteria, and any way you discuss or you compile data from the 1970s or 80s, it's about 15%.

So we had negative growth the first three months.

They say that we're going to have zero growth, but zero or negative for two consecutive quarters, I think is a recession.

And I think we're going to go into the third quarter with negative.

And I think we're going to go in there.

We have stagflation.

There's so much money still pouring out there.

And there's so many people who are not participating in the economy that they're spending money, but there's not enough supply to justify it.

And so what's happening is as you raise interest rates on big ticket items like houses and cars, they're going to pull back because they're starting to run out some of the money.

But there's still a lot of money for other things like.

you know, food and gas and stuff.

So we're going to have high prices and I think low economic growth with high unemployment yeah and joe biden just he cannot tell the truth he said oh you know wages have gone up under me well if they go up three percent and prices go up eight percent then you're down five percent why is he saying that he's just deliberately lying you know when he get i'd like to know who in the white house calls him in and says joe you're good old joe biden from scranton Give him hell, Harry Truman.

You go out there and you yell and scream as if you're a fighter for the the working man.

It comes off so phony and mean spirited and repulsive when he starts yelling and screaming and twist his head.

And he reminds me, I mean, I'm 68 and my biggest fear, if I live to be in my 70s, is I have a contorted, angry face like he does.

It's, it just, it's a bad advertisement for aging to be like him.

Yeah, and he's mean and he's nasty and he's cruel and he's not Joe Biden, the nice guy, like all the Never Trumpers told us.

They told us, oh, he's Joe Biden.

We've known him for years.

Yeah, we knew him for years.

We knew him during the Robert Bork hearings.

And we knew him during the Clarence Thomas hearing.

And we knew him when he was posing and plagiarizing and stealing ideas and making racial insults to people.

That's the Joe Biden I remember.

And he has not aged well.

So this is really strange.

I think everybody's concerned because they're looking at a panorama.

They start on the left side of their visual field and they say, oh my God, prices are out of control.

Then they go to the center left and they say, oh my God,

I can't even fill up at my tank and there's shortages.

They put me at $100

limit and I'm only got half full.

Then they go to the center and they said, oh my God, there's no border.

There's no border.

These people are just flowing in and destroying communities along the the border and taxing our scarce federal resources at a time when people need them.

And then they look to the right and think, oh my God,

this whole multiracial democracy is everybody's at each other's throat.

Every single racial arsonist is out there and nobody says enough already.

Stop it.

Stop identifying by your tribal fee dates.

And then they look abroad and they said, oh my God,

when did Putin start threatening us with nuclear weapons when did we start pouring 40 billion dollars into a country to protect its borders when we can't even protect our own and they look at this and they said tick tick tick tick tick tick tick this is going to get really bad It's not going to get better.

The prices are going to get higher and the economy is going to get lower.

And we're going to be in stagflation.

Half the country, Sammy, was born after 1980.

They have no idea what it was like to live during the Carter and then the first two years of the Reagan administration.

I farmed that period.

1983, when the hammer went down hard, and those interest rates got up to 16, 17%, and they broke the back of inflation.

Ronald Reagan, there used to be things called Reagan Vineyard.

There were posterites, I'd see them because, you know, when you're farming, the price goes from $1,400 to $450 a ton, and the price of sulfur bags and diesel fuel goes up.

How can you make it?

You can't.

I have vivid memories that people have no idea what that was like and what it could be like.

And I remember that a woman was divorced.

She had a small settlement.

She had three little kids about a mile away, and she bought a 20-acre vineyard at the boom, way overpriced, 15,000 an acre, very poor-producing vineyard.

And then she had it for one year, broke even at high prices to make her overpriced mortgage.

And guess what?

The hammer came.

And I drove by one day and she was out there about 50 with three children rolling trays right before a rain.

And I pulled over on Highway 43 and I said, what are you doing?

And she said, we have no money.

We can't afford.

We got to roll.

And I got on my hands and knees and I went down two rolls and rolled with her.

And I said, now look, I just rolled 150 trays.

You've got probably 10 or 20,000.

You're not going to be able to do it.

And she said, We have to.

And then I said, I'm sorry, I got to go get some captan.

So I drove on that poor woman.

She lost everything, everything.

And I saw that.

And I saw suicides.

I had a friend, I won't mention him, but he put a rope around his neck.

He took a strong sedative and he blew his brains out.

And he turned on the carbon monoxide from a car in the garage and he did it.

He told me he was going to do it for a long time and I kept trying to persuade him to get help and all that.

But all of that was the emotional wreckage that when you see the whole economy be destroyed.

And that's inflation is terrible, but when stagflation hits, See, inflation is like two horses.

Inflation outruns the productive horse.

So you're always running, running, running, running to catch up to inflation.

But when you get stagflation, the horse goes backwards.

It dies.

It just drops down its lane.

And you can't ever afford anything because you have no job or you have no customers.

So that's what I'm really worried about.

And

the idea that this was caused by the left, the humanitarian party, that's always empathetic.

I think it should finally tell people, these people don't care.

When I see that poor press secretary for Joe Biden reading off those scripts and anybody asks a question that's off her reading notes, she cannot answer it.

She doesn't care to answer it.

She doesn't want to answer it.

When Joe Biden would just explain it why prices are going up or why,

why hasn't he fired John Kerry?

John Kerry said the other day, we're not going to drill oil.

We're not going to drill more natural gas.

We're not going to produce more coal.

And I'm thinking, well, yeah, you're in your private jet that you married into.

So why do you care?

You're flying all around to fight climate change.

He should be fired.

If Joe Biden really cared about

the American people, when he opens his mouth and says, the oil companies are making too great a profit, they've got to produce more oil.

And then on the other side of his mouth is John Kerry.

We should not produce.

Why does he just say, listen, John Kerry,

you're saying the opposite as the president of the United States is.

You're fired.

Very good thing for his falling.

He might pick up one point.

He might go from 34 to 35% if you fire John Kerry.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I guess that your point is, is that this crisis, I don't know how much of it's natural, but a lot of it's created by the current government and it doesn't need to.

And it's going to lead to people committing suicide and such as the economy keeps dropping.

you know, keeps declining and declining.

So that's

very worried.

All right, Victor, let's take a moment for some messages and then come back and we'll talk a little bit about January 6th.

We'll be right back.

Victor, so let's look at January 6th.

Can I summarize what I think the January 6th panel and so the left's position is?

It is that Trump lied about the elections and incited riots on that January 6th and attempted a coup based on those lies.

And the attempted coup was that while Trump didn't know exactly what would happen when he encouraged protesters to go to the Capitol, he had a good sense that they could do something.

And the very fact that he encouraged him to go to the Capitol makes him culpable for the break-in of the Capitol, which they're calling a coup.

Well, I have no problem with a January January 6th committee in theory, if

Nancy Pelosi said there have been attacks on federal property by organized groups of protesters who turned violent.

So we're going to have a bipartisan committee.

I'm going to pick the majority of the members, say six.

Kevin McCarthy is the House minority, and he's going to pick five.

That's the way we always do it, a select committee.

And they're going to investigate systemic

attacks on federal property, such as the January 6th storming of the House chambers, A, B, the May 31st, 2020 riot out of Lafayette Park that torched the historic St.

John's Episcopal Church and tried to surge onto the White House grounds, forcing the president of the United States to go into a bunker.

Remember, the New York Times bloated, Trump shrinks.

from protesters, shrinks.

They were giddy.

And the attack on federal property, such as a federal courthouse or state precincts, policemen, in places like Portland, Minneapolis, Seattle.

And that would be fine.

And we're going to have, you've seen those house select committees.

They are raucous.

They are argumentative.

They're wild.

They're good things to watch sometime.

And you could put a guy like Jim Jordan fighting Adam Schiff, and wow, Jordan would say the following.

Why was Ashley Babbitt shot?

Is it a felony to go through a window unarmed?

Why was, if it's an insurrection, there was not one person found with a gun inside the Capitol, and only a few had them outside.

And mostly they weren't involved in insurrectional activity.

And why didn't you give us the officer's name?

Why was Officer Bird protected?

Did he have a record of laxity?

He apparently did.

And why did you say to the nation that Officer Signant was killed by a Trump supporter when he died of natural causes?

And why

and how and when did all of these FBI informants spread throughout the whole riot?

Because Michael Rosenberg, who was the Marquee New York Times co-Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, who has written extensively about it, got caught off guard by Operation Veritas.

And he said, you know what?

These people, it's just, they blew it out of proportion.

It was no insurrection.

There was a ton of FBI people there.

Well, what was he meaning?

Bring him in.

Does he deny that?

And then I would go through everything.

And why is this person in definite detention?

Why hasn't this person been charged?

And then find out exactly who the FBI informs.

So that's what the Republicans would do.

And then the Democrats would bring in their own witnesses.

And then we would turn to the second phase.

Why did the vice president of the United States, Kamala Harris, just three weeks after people tried to storm the White House grounds, say these protests are not not going to end.

They're not going to end.

I want to warn everybody: beware, they're not going to end and they should not end.

Why did Chris Cuomo, CNN, say, since when do protests have to be peaceful?

Or why did the 1619 architect Nicole Hannah-Jones say, yeah, properties, destroying property is not violent?

And did these people in Antifa and BLM, did they coordinate, did they plan these 120 days, one to two billion in damages, 14,000 arrests, 35 people being killed, 1,500 police officers injured and attacked.

Did they plan that on social media?

Why were they allowed to do that?

That's what the Republicans would do, and the Democrats would counter.

They would talk about, and then out of that entire give and take, we would get the truth.

We would get the 14,000 hours of videos.

We would get the internal email communications, not just from Trump staff, but from Nancy Pelosi and Democratic leaders.

We would hear about why these protests in the nation's capital wound down right before the election.

We get all of that.

Yeah, and you would calm people down instead of rioling.

What did she do?

She said the following.

You ain't going to put your Republicans on my committee.

I'm only going to let people on my committee.

who are willing to serve if they voted to impeach Donald Trump and they have no viability in the fall.

And two people who raised their hand and said, I voted for Donald Trump, and I'm either not going to get elected or I'll get, I won't run.

And she put them on the committee, Ken Singer and Lynn Cheney.

And that's never happened before, maybe in an isolated case, but never systemically like that, systematically, I mean.

We've never had a House Speaker reject a nomination.

We had this discussion before how to stop this.

I think the thing to stop it is when they take the majority, Kevin McCarthy is just going to have to say, look, for one year, one year, do not put AOC

or Representative Omar on any nomination for any select committee.

They're not going to serve.

I'm sorry.

They're not going to serve.

I will pick people from the Democratic Party that are on my select investigation committee of Hunter Biden.

And they have to have two criteria.

They have to be Democrats, of course, but they have to have no political viability.

And they have to hate Joe Biden and want to impeach.

And they had to vote to impeach him.

And if you, if they fill that criteria, they can serve.

That's where we're at.

Yeah.

But wouldn't it be better if the Republicans, when they get in, they did something like this?

We're going to impeach Joe Biden, but bring in a panel that does have the left wing so they can make their argument so that you can satisfy both sides a little, probably not well, but a little.

And then the penalty could be more less, and yet you would still have had the impeachment trial.

I mean, it seems to me that would be a better process if you want to calm the population and not rile it up against each other.

You have to have a double track.

You've got to get your heavy hitters to say, if you take the House and Senate, of course, they're going to...

block every piece of Joe Biden's legislation.

He's going to be an executive order president to the extent he knows what he's doing, but they have to send up legislation that he has to veto, Keystone, Anwar, and let him veto it in front of the American people when gas is $8 a gallon.

But they have to be constructive, and then they have to get the attack dogs.

And they're going to say, you are going to find out what the hell Hunter Biden was doing when how he got so rich and how Joe Biden had homes and a lifestyle that are inexplicable without outside cash that he probably didn't declare.

And that's your investigation.

And then he's going to have another investigation.

We want to really find out what happened on January 6th and these riots.

That's fine, too.

And then we're going to have to have a series of investigations of our interior secretary that opened the border.

And then we're going to have to have some impeachment hearings.

I don't know if they're going to get the votes, but if they feel Joe Biden did not faithfully

swear to execute the laws of the country, then he should be impeached.

And if Mayorkis didn't faithfully execute the laws as he was entrusted, he should have been impeached.

And if Merrick Garland turned the FBI into a private retrieval undercover agency to what, scout out parents at Virginia Education school board meetings because some teachers union told him to, or because Joe Biden's daughter lost her diary or Hunter lost his laptop.

But that's what he's turned the Department of Justice.

He should get impeached.

And we'll see.

First thing they should do is they should call General Millia and they should have an investigative hearing.

What in the hell happened in Afghanistan?

Why did you, in July and August, keep telling people that Afghanistan was stable when you were leaking to the press and to the opposition that you had worries.

Did you voice those worries?

Joe Biden said you did not voice those worries.

You said you did, and investigate that.

How much equipment was left?

How much did it cost?

Where is it now?

We've never had those answers.

And find out that.

And then I think you can say, do not send up a federal judge.

They're not going to be confirmed.

I'm sorry.

We wanted to confirm federal judges that were moderate Democrats.

You don't send any up, and you have tortured and made life miserable for every nomination we did and we're going to just just just take a hiatus we've got enough of them we control the senate now and they're not going to be advanced and see what happens yeah yeah i think you're right on that there's and then finally they're going to say we did this do it for a year say now do you like that and they might say okay We have 55 seats in the Senate.

You guys talked about the filibuster.

You said it was unfair.

Barack Obama said it was racist.

It was a relic of apartheid.

Okay, we got it.

Now, do you want to get rid of the filibuster?

Tell us right now.

If you do want to get rid of the filibuster, we'll get rid of it.

And that's what they should do.

And we'll see if they want to get rid of the filibuster and give the Senate the power to run the government.

I don't think they will.

No.

That's what they need to do.

And, you know, I like Senator McConnell and Mitch McConnell, I should say.

And I have no problem.

You know, I'm not, but at some point, that Republican leadership will say, these people are destroying the system unless they understand the consequences of their own action.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And maybe, Victor, if we can end this tragedy on a comic note, there was an article in the bulwark that rag that is run by Bill Crystal, and it was intending to talk about Joe Biden's accomplishments.

It was entitled, Everyone Leave Biden Alone.

And so I went in to read it and it had his accomplishments and it was appropriately short, mind you.

So it gave itself away just in its length.

And his accomplishments were that he's had a steady hand, which I'm not sure he has, and he's avoided getting us into World War III, the Ukrainian war.

And that was it.

So not much to say, even from people who are trying to advocate for Biden on his own side.

Yeah, I think you're referring to, maybe you are, that article that I saw, or maybe it was by Tom Nichols, leave Biden alone in the Atlantic.

Yeah.

Yeah,

I don't think I've ever met him, although he's attacked me numerous times.

He is supposedly a military analyst, but he's...

got a

i'm not on i've never tweeted in my life i know people that work for a military history group put stuff on that advertise what we're doing but he seems to be a creature of Twitter and Facebook and social media.

He's very critical of other people, but when one looks at his own, you know, corpus of history, it's, it's singularly unimpressive.

He's very mean-spirited.

I don't, he's one of these never Trump, I suppose, Republicans.

I don't know anything about it, but the idea that leave Joe Biden alone.

I mean, I wrote a book about Donald Trump and I use words like crass and uncouth.

I said he was a tragic hero because he was so uncouth and crass that he had particular skills that would not be appreciated in the way that the gunslinger who cleans up the town is not.

But I never said that, you know, leave Donald Trump.

He's a nice guy.

He's really soft and fuzzy.

And leave Joe Biden alone.

And so what he's basically saying is that, you know, 65% of the American people don't know what they're talking about.

Yeah.

I don't know.

I think he used the word Superman.

We look toward the president as Superman.

And the subtext is we have such high expectations.

No, I had low expectations of Joe Biden.

I had no expectations.

Right now, if Joe Biden had come in and he'd said the following, oh,

I had a great plan for Keystone.

I've got Anwar and I'm going to pump oil and I'm going to transition to so and we had $4 a gap.

I'd say that was smart.

He did it with vaccinations.

He said, nobody was vaccinated till I came in.

In other words, he lied and took over the vaccination.

He didn't understand that they would lose their efficacy, but had they not, he was perfectly willing to appropriate that.

If he had said, you know what, we got to have

the border.

I didn't build that wall, but it's almost built.

I'll finish it.

And just took everything Trump did and stamped Biden on it.

And he would be very popular right now and then do his, we're all friends, Joe Biden's dick.

That's what we were told we were getting.

I had so many conversations with friends and never Trumpers.

And they said, oh, everybody loves good old Joe.

He's a unity.

No, I'd always say, no, there's no record of it.

Show me one instance where that person tried to bring people together, calling a person fat on the campaign trail, calling a person junkie, making fun of a people, Indian in a donut shop, saying, put you all back in chains, first black who's articulate about Barack Obama.

I can't think of anything he's ever done that united people.

But had he done that, I would have been perfectly willing to say that, but of course he didn't.

Yeah.

Just in finishing, another subtext is they are terrified

that Joe Biden is going to be impeached.

Yeah, but that article didn't do anything for him, given that.

No, but their attitude is remember how the left mind works.

We are so morally superior, intellectually more rigorous, so much more familiar with history.

We're just demi-dogs and you stupid deplorables don't understand us.

So you have to understand there's a big difference.

When we impeached Donald Trump twice and the first time as a private citizen, we knew what we were doing.

We were exactly following the Constitution.

We were subtle.

We were sophisticated.

Now you, who try to emulate us and do that to Joe Biden, you're just hoi paloi.

You're deplorable, you're dregs, you're chumps.

And the fact of the matter is that even if Joe Biden goes down to 32%, that 32%

is really each one of those person is worth three of you.

They're superior.

They're knowing.

they understand that he's really a nice guy.

That's what the article says.

It's very arrogant and elitist, and like all of these people.

Yeah, yeah, and they're probably going to lose in 2022.

Doing this with a captive media, this is what's so funny for somebody like Nichols and Biden himself and his team.

They start complaining about the public and the media reception of Biden when NPR,

PBS, CBS, NBC, ABC,

CNBC, MSNBC, CNN, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Google News, Apple News, Yahoo News, the whole Silicon Valley monstrosity.

It's an echo chamber of left-wing affirmation.

And the only reason it's slightly critical is not because they want him to be.

They're just afraid that they keep telling us that he's Socrates and he's so inept that people are, they're going to completely destroy their credibility.

So now they're going to go, well, maybe kind of, he may not be Einstein.

Wow, he's not quite Jesus Christ.

That's what they're doing.

And yet these people are complaining now.

Yep.

All right.

Okay.

Victor, this is our time is up.

So thank you very much for your wisdom.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

Yeah, this is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen.

And you can catch us every Friday and Saturday for this podcast, The Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

We're signing off.