The Sound of Gun Fire

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Hello, and welcome to the listeners of the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Victor is the Martin and Nealey Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

This is the Friday news roundup, and we take some time to look at the news of the week.

We are podcasting on Tuesday, June 7th.

So I hope everybody's having a good week out there and things are looking up.

Victor, how are things for you?

Well, I have my Eeyore wine.

This is my sixth week from getting COVID.

And

I, the 35 or 36 days, I think I was only home nine or ten, which is kind of stupid because I was speaking back east and I led this tour to Israel.

And I'm just confident that.

it's going to go away but so far i have zero energy and my brain was

you still have a brain fog yeah well let's hope that it's not um too much of a brain fog but i have a feeling that your 50 brain fog would be 100

activity for any normal person we'll let the audience judge but yeah one of the weird things is i feel like i have pens and needles on my whole body looks like i'm plugged into electric circuit or i'm taking a bath and um Alka seltzer.

Yeah, that must keep you awake and live.

I can't sleep.

Yeah.

But anyway,

nobody wants to hear a whiner.

But I do have so much empathy for people who have long COVID.

And if I've ever, I mean, I never doubted that this was a serious disease, but I don't think I was attuned enough to the people who are really suffering out there with it.

And people over 60, 25%

have sustained, you know, long or medium COVID and maybe 10% of everybody.

You're talking about millions of people.

And I can tell you that I'm very fortunate that I'll be able to sit here wiped out doing a podcast rather than the poor people out there that are truckers and carpenters and masons and teachers.

I don't know how they do it, but this is an unappreciated

factor in our labor non-participation rate.

I've convents.

It's not just kids that are in the basement getting COVID release checks.

There's millions of Americans, landscapers, and sheetrock hangers and stock boys etc etc that can't physically go to work after getting a routine and in my case it was relatively mild i got over it in a week just i got over delta almost eight months ago you know and in three days so you know you can't predict it but what i'm saying is that

I think it's had a role in making labor scarce.

And we haven't really talked about that.

But if the projections are right, you're talking about millions of people who are not fully able to return to productive labor.

And I think that's been one of the reasons that labor is so scarce.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, Victor, we have a lot on our agenda today, but let's take a moment for some messages and we'll be right back.

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Welcome back.

Victor, I wanted to talk about Biden as a liability to the Democratic Party.

I know a lot of the current politicians that are running in elections are avoiding association with him.

So we will talk about that.

And also the upcoming midterms, just some reflections that you might have on either the polls or maybe specific midterm races.

And then I would like to address what I hope is the end of the woke revolution and look at the Uvalde massacre to talk a little bit about the possibilities of gun control or what it really meant.

And then finally, the Ukraine, if we we have some time, we'll get an update on that.

But first, Biden, as a liability to the Democratic Party, it seems that the polls are telling us, and these are taken from a real clear politics polling, which usually is a compilation of polls, that 70% of citizens believe the U.S.

is on the wrong track.

40%

is Biden's approval rating, and 60% disapprove of the direction direction of the economy.

So what are your thoughts on the

Biden's as a problem for the Democratic Party?

Well, the latter was the most important diagnostic, that is, that he is way underwater on the economy.

And when you ask people which issue is the most importance to them, as they look toward the November midterms, it's overwhelmingly the economy.

And that happens to be what he's done in their perception the most poorly on.

So that's going to be very determinative.

But more importantly, we have, as you CNN of all places, has been

running this story, but we know

over the last 80 years

that

when you ask a voter, do you,

in the midterms of the general election, do you intend to vote for the Republican or do you intend to vote for the Democratic candidate?

When they're even or minus one or minus two Republicans, Republicans have sizable victories.

And that's because there's so many independents that tend to trend more conservatively.

And Republicans tend historically, I don't know if this is always the case most recently, but they tend to be more likely to go out to the polls.

But now that poll is almost two, plus two or plus three.

And a lot of people who have done modeling suggest this is going to be a historic 1938, 1994,

2010 correction.

If that were to be true, you're talking anywhere from 30 to 70 seats.

And here in the San Joaquin Valley, I've noticed that most of our candidates for the state legislature, the state assembly, but also Congress are Mexican-American, Democrat and Republican.

And I've noticed in the Democratic literature that I'm inundated in the mail every day, and I got back from Israel, it was just plogged.

It was the Democratic candidate was not talking about the issues that Joe Biden is for, open borders or depolicing or defunding the police or alternate energy, etc.

They were all saying the following, tough crime fighter.

I will keep the streets of Fresno safe.

Put criminals behind bars.

Mind you, these were not Republicans.

And so

de facto, they're running away from Joe Biden.

And when Joe Biden and the real clear politics, one thing that I think all of our listeners know better than I do, when you look at real clear politics aggregate polling,

he's about 40%.

But when you look at it in detail, there are some polls there that are 34, 35%,

A, and they're not right-wing polls.

They're not even supposedly conservative like Rasmussen.

But more importantly, there are polls like our Hoover-affiliated YouGov that are pretty liberal.

All you need to do is take a couple of the very well-known left-wing polls out of the calculus, and he's down to about 36%, 37%.

So I think that the Democrats haven't really calculated or comprehended the extent of this disaster that's looming in just a few months.

Yeah, I had more statistics on the disaster that's looming in just a few months because the Pew Poll asked voters, or actually they asked Americans.

I'm not sure if they were all voters, but how many trusted government?

And they came out with 20%

of those who were polled trusted government.

They asked about whether the government is doing too little for the middle and lower incomes and retired people.

And the polls came back 65 to 69 percent, almost 70 percent of people said that the government is not doing enough for the middle classes.

Declining confidence in the career government employees has dropped from 61% to 52% in 2022.

Most politicians, voters would say, seek their own interest at a 65%

voting rate.

So the population is very disgruntled with their politicians and the government employees.

And it really seems to be a harbinger of this big turnover that we're going to see in November.

At least I hope it is.

The polls look good to me.

Yeah, I think what's happened, people are getting, when you say they express a distrust of government or they're frustrated, and that manifests itself in whether they can't find baby formula, or they park their diesel pickup at $7 a gallon, or they have to, you know, they have a 10-year-old gas pickup that, you know it's got toolboxes and lumber in the back and it gets about 12 miles the gallon and it's five plus in many of the western states so they feel that the very stuff of life is not there and then when they read the news or they they ask themselves do i want to go to disneyland in los angeles do i really want to go to fisherman's wharf in san francisco the answer is no it's too expensive it's too dangerous so they feel there's a breakdown in the very

the very elements they always took for granted.

And they don't know why, as we get technologically more sophisticated, we get morally and ethically less moral.

In other words, with technological progress comes moral regress.

It's really bothering them.

And then they look at the asymmetry.

They can't figure it out.

They think, wow,

we got this Hunter Biden, and he violated a gun law.

Nobody said a word.

We got this Hunter Biden, and he just casually meant that he didn't pay income tax.

A million dollars.

Wow, we got Joe Biden who paid some of his legal bills and he didn't pay gift tax.

And then they say, wow, they put Papadopoulos, to the extent they know about it, in jail for 14 days.

They wanted to put Mike Flynn for six months for supposedly lying to a federal official.

But wow.

The acting director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, lied three times to a federal official with no consequences whatsoever.

John Brennan lied twice under oath to a U.S.

congressional committee.

James Clapper not only lied under oath, but he admitted that he lied.

No consequences.

We just saw them Peter Navarro in a Nashville airport.

Why would they do that?

A man is 72 years old.

He doesn't want to go testify before Congress.

Okay.

Maybe that's a violation of a federal statute.

If it is, why didn't they go arrest Eric Holder, who completely refused to cooperate with a subpoena from a congressional committee over the Fast and Furious scandal.

He was the first and only Attorney General to be cited in contempt.

Did anybody think?

What would have happened if he had been arrested at an airport?

They would have a national cry.

So when they look at this and they say, wow, the Democratic Party, they're going to the homes of Supreme Court justices.

Their demonstrators are going into churches.

They're having these transsexual parties with small children in attendance when they've got obscene stuff right there.

Anybody else?

I mean, these are the things that Child Protective Services prides itself in investigating.

So they feel there's what I'm trying to say, Sammy, they feel there's an enormous asymmetry in the application of the law.

And to the extent that the government is there, it's either unfair or it's incompetent.

And when they look for answers, they see Joe Biden mute or Kamala Harris, you know, missing in action, or an idiot like Pete Buttigig, Transportation Secretary, talking about everything

from government subsidies of food to abortion, except

why cargo ships are stacked up to the horizon still after a year in the port of Los Angeles, or why trains coming in and out of that port

resemble 19th century Wild West train robbing.

I mean, they're looted.

And he can't or won't address those things.

And I could ditto that with, we've talked before about an article I wrote with the Jack Fowler cabinet, you know, of

dunces.

And so they don't see anybody, it's in control at the top.

And they feel that to the degree that anybody knows what's going on, they are not fair, they're not balanced.

And that gets them very angry and afraid.

Yeah, yeah, and justifiably so.

But on this topic, then of voters and the midterms, I just have one more question for you.

The Kemp in Georgia won the GOP or the Republican nomination over the Trump-backed Purdue.

And I was wondering what you can make of that outcome.

Yeah, I think the problem there was that if you looked at Kemp on the issues, vis-a-vis Trump, he's almost identical.

And he was an incumbent.

And Trump he drew Trump's ire because he did not want to decertify the results in Georgia.

There were irregularities, no doubt, but to the degree whether he, as a Republican governor, wanted to go investigate them and overturn the election, I don't think that was going to happen.

And so Trump did something that he usually didn't do on these endorsements, of which he has a 90% plus

successful record in endorsing people that eventually win these primaries.

And by that, I mean he usually endorses somebody who's going to win.

Sometimes he doesn't.

I mean, Oz was sort of a gamble, and J.D.

Vance was behind until he got the Trump endorsement.

But in Georgia, theoretically, there was no reason for Perdue to have run.

You remember, he almost won in the primary, re-elected, his re-election in the primary.

All he needed was 51%

in the primary, and he would have won.

So he was a shoo-in to be senator.

He was a good man.

He should have been re-elected.

But because of the election, Bruha and all the money that was sent down there, he lost that election.

I think if he had have just waited and gone at some point back into the Senate race, he would have eventually been re-elected at some point.

But he

was persuaded, I guess, by Trump to run against Kemp because he would represent the mega base.

But that wasn't really an issue to run on, if you know what I mean, because each day there was distance between the November election.

And all Kemp had to do was say, I like Donald Trump.

I just disagreed with him on the election, but I'm trying to do almost everything he wanted to do.

And there was really very little difference between Purdue and Kemp on the issues.

And so that was going to be a hard election for him to win anyway.

And now I hope that he can, I think he, I've met him, he's a very nice person.

I think he can be very magnanimous and say.

Stacey Abrams is the problem, not Kemp, and get people.

I think he won 28% of the vote or something.

They have to unite to stop Stacey Abens, who remember told everybody that she was governor during a climate when to do so was

to be labeled an insurrectionary or rejectionist.

It didn't apply to her.

She lost by 50,000 votes and was introduced as Governor Abrams for about two years at speaking engagement.

Oh my God.

All right, Victor, let's take a moment for some messages and come right back.

Welcome back, Victor.

I wanted to turn to the woke revolution.

I get the sense in some ways myself that it's coming to an end, but I was wondering what your thoughts on it.

And I have one article that I was looking at.

Your friend Ilya Shapiro wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal about him, he's quitting Georgetown.

Yes.

So they exonerated him, but then he said he's quitting because he felt that the exoneration, it didn't exonerate or defend free speech.

Instead, it was a joke.

Yeah.

Oh, go ahead.

I'll let you explain it.

Go ahead.

I met him.

I was a mentor when he was 21 at a intercollegiate studies institute event.

And

I think it was in 2000.

I want to be more specific.

I think it was in, yes, it was in 2000 that he came out and stayed here on the farm for almost a month.

And he and my family traveled and he got to know my children.

He mentored them.

And so I got to know him very well.

And I followed up with him.

And he's a very impressive guy.

He's not a confrontational guy.

He's candid.

He tweeted, you know, essentially that by

limiting the field to a black woman, i.e.

in advance, that is showing a racial and gender discriminatory attitude, that Joe Biden had limited his choices.

And one candidate, although a liberal Indian American, would not get that nod.

And therefore, he used the word lesser black woman.

He didn't mean women that were African American or lesser.

He meant that in this particular case, the field of likely appellate court judges who were black women were not as impressive as this Indian American, in his opinion.

And then he said, this is kind of good for conservatives because this other person would have been more effective in advancing the progressive cause.

And for that,

he didn't do it artfully, as he used that word, that adverb, but for that, he hadn't worked at Georgetown.

He was to assume control of this conservative legal center.

And for that, he was tabled, and then they investigate him.

And the dean was very schizophrenic.

He was scared.

And he was all over the map.

Whatever group he spoke to, he was trying to, I think, diminish the stature of Ilya Shapiro in hopes that he wouldn't accept this position.

And then they were investigating the, you know, the diversity, inclusion, affirmative action people.

And finally, they came through and said, you know what?

He did this six or seven days before he worked.

And we can't go back through the history of everybody.

and find out what they've done in the past.

After all, if they did, Joy Reed wouldn't be at MSNBC given her homophobic and anti-Semitic, you know, tweets.

And so

they thought that was going to be a clear bill of health.

And then the dean said, well, you know what?

I have his back and he can come back now.

So then Ilya apparently was exuberant and he wrote at Wall Street Journal that I'm back and how the dean said he'd had my back.

But then they officially

sent their report and basically, if I could summarize it, trying to be fair as I can, it is, well it was only because you said this before but we are going to be monitoring you now to see if any similar statements are made and the dean concurred with that so he said you don't have my back all you're doing is sloughing off this decision of this committee and they've now warned me in advance that i won't have the same free expression as anybody else and i'm suspect and they won't tell me really what I'm suspect for other than to say

maybe in an inartful manner that you should not use race and gender to discriminate against people which is what he said yeah and that is supposedly going to be used against me forever as if it's some kind of star chamber or spanish inquisition and he said i refuse to accept your terms he also in his long letter and other people who had supported him added a lot of additional information that was quite stunning and During the Kavanaugh hearing, there was a law professor in the same school in which he will be participating who basically said that they wanted to kill Republicans and their corpses and it was just horrible filthy things and they had other people who use you know inappropriate language another professor and the university and they were both leftists and of course the university boasted about their free speech fee days and how they're committed to free expression and they're not so ilya pointed that out you know yeah if he had said anything approximate to what they do so let's get the let's get everything clear there is no free speech in the American university.

The degree to which you are punished depends on your ideology, not what you actually say.

But what gives you a sense or a feeling that this woke agenda is wearing itself out is

Sami.

It's not on the university.

But where is it wearing itself out?

Yeah, go ahead.

The universities are going to be not the blue chip because they don't make any pretension, Stanford, Yale, Harvard, that they're educating people in the empirical traditions.

Their basic sell to people is:

if you're an employer or you're a law firm or you're a medical practice, hire the guy that got a Harvard or Stanford or Yale BA because it was tough to get in.

We did the work for you.

We looked at his SAT, his GPA when he worked hard.

But once he got to Stanford or Yale, he didn't do it that much.

It's all politicized.

It's ideological.

And now,

because we know that there's repertory admissions, that is, that African-American and Latinos are admitted in numbers greater than their percentages in the population, and it's killing two birds with one stone because it comes at the expense of white working-class males who are a merocratic criteria are not getting in at 33 to 35% of the population.

Getting into these universities means, A, that you're a particular race, you're a particular gender, your parents have money, your parents have connections, or you're an athlete.

And so they've lost their blue chip advertising to an employer.

And they're not going to teach these people in, as I said, traditional Western culture, philosophy, science, math.

It's all going to be dash studies stuff for the most part.

And the grades are going to be inflated because they're going to be audited by diversity czars.

And any professor who is entirely merucratic and there is a pattern that a particular group doesn't do as well as another particular group is going to come under scrutiny.

And they're not going to die on the altar of meritocracy.

So they're going to further inflate the grading system.

And the result of all that is, and then when you look at people with this $1.7 trillion in debt and COVID and the lockdown and the rise of Zoom, it's kind of a perfect storm where a lot of people

are not going to go to the university in the numbers they did.

And the universities are going to be in big trouble because they spend too much and they're too inefficient for what they deliver, which is not much.

And so they're not going to change until they're bankrupt or forced.

But the society at large, whether we're looking at, we'll see, I don't want to preempt, today is an election, a recall election in San Francisco.

And we'll see what Mr.

Boudin, the district attorney, I think he'll be recalled, which is an extraordinary thing to say given that San Francisco people are very, very left-wing.

But how can you be left-wing when the society no longer functions and people break into your car?

If you're, say you're a a person that always votes hard left, and you park your Tesla on Polk Street, you come back, and the windows are broken, and it's ransom.

And then you go to your home, you walk up to, I don't know, Presidio Heights or down to Presidio Heights, and there's somebody defecating on the sidewalk leading to you.

And then you have to pay for your private security.

And then you go,

your daughter has

a headache or a fever, so you just go down to your local pharmacy and everything is locked up behind the key and most of them are closed.

At what point do you say, this doesn't work?

My ideology has brought me misery.

Not that they cared about other people, but they're caring about themselves now.

And I think that that's going to be a big shock.

And then when you look at just little, and these are kind of stereotyped, people have beaten them to death, but it's nevertheless true that I don't think Netflix is going to give Megan Markle or the Obamas these multi-million dollar contracts anymore.

They lost 200,000 subscribers.

The Dave Chappelle thing hurt them.

I don't think Disney is going to sound off as much as they did about transgender issues.

Their stock is down.

Their attendance is down.

I don't think a big CEO for American Airlines is going to lecture people on the racism of voter IDs.

And

I think this midterms

is going to have shocking results.

We've got to remember something.

Average people have no ideology.

They want to be on the winning team.

And because the institutions are all controlled by the left, and because of their animus directed at Donald Trump, they felt that the left is where we're going to go.

They didn't like it, but they felt, you know what, I've got to be on a winning team.

But after November, that's going to be a losing team.

And people are going to say, you voted for all that crap on the street.

You voted for empty shelves.

You voted for Wild West train robbing in LA.

You voted for Tombstone Every Night in Chicago.

You called that a logistical success in Kabul.

You voted for Joe Biden, who's non-composment, or Camaleja.

That's you.

I don't want to part because the majority of people have repudiated you.

And so that's going to be what it's going to be very interesting to see what happens because I think they're going to lose and lose

bigly, as Donald Trump said in November.

Absolutely.

And so in that, you see the end of the woke revolution coming.

Is that what you're attempting, you're saying to me?

Yes.

I'm thinking that the person in the street who was naive enough to believe the lies that Joe Biden in the past, present, and in the future was and would be a uniter, that's why they voted for him, was sorely mistaken and feels that he was hoodwinked or tricked, that he was just an empty vessel that left-wing ideology was poured into after the election.

When you're filling that tank up at $7 a gallon for diesel fuel, or your child has an allergy to milk and you go to get a formula and it's not there in the shelf,

or you've ordered something, you're a builder and you've ordered a plastic pipe or a conduit and it's not there and it won't come and you can't do the job.

You say, Who did this to me?

The answer is going to be Joe Biden.

Yeah.

And people.

And maybe there'll be more, maybe there'll be more Ilya Shapiros who stand up and gracefully say,

I'm not associated with you anymore.

Well, Joshua Katz, the classicist at Princeton, what was his thought crime?

His thought crime was when the Princeton faculty, in a very cowardly fashion, gave in to these demands by so-called marginalized student groups.

that people of a particular race or color or gender were going to be given extra privileges and not subject to the same criteria of adjudication as other faculty, and that this came through coercion, he objected to it in an essay in Quillette.

As soon as he did that, guess what?

They went back through his entire career.

It's right out of the Soviet Union.

You show me the man and

Beria,

head of the KGB, just said, you show me the man, I will find the crime.

So they said, you show me Jonathan Cass and what you want done with him, and I will find you the crime.

So they went back to 20 years past.

Where did they find that he had a consensual relationship with a student who I think was over 21 who never objected and that was adjudicated and he was put on a leave for a year.

He paid the price.

And then they thought, well, how do we get this guy?

Because if he gets away with it, other people might be emboldened to speak freely about the absurdity of using race in a way that's prejudicial to people.

And so we've got to go back.

So they went back and they said, well, he wasn't entirely cooperative.

And then the person that changed her testimony and then this and then that, you know, he thought they told him that he could come back.

And it was just like Ilias Sapiro.

Well, not really, you can come back.

So they went after him and now they have removed him.

He was a fantastic teacher.

He's a great scholar of early Greek language and dialects.

And it's a tragedy that they would do that to somebody.

And they did it because they wanted to send a message.

And the message is, if you dare speak out against diversity, equity, inclusion, ideological agendas, we're going to go back to your whole past.

This is very important, Sammy, that our readers hear this.

We're going to go back through your whole past and find anything and bring it back up, even if it's been tried or adjudicated or examined before, with one big exception.

If you don't object, and you approve of what we're doing, then we're not going to look at you at all.

So

do you really believe that in the School of Arts and Humanities, of which Jonathan Katz is a part, that there's not a single male or female professor who has had a consensual sexual relation with a student?

I don't believe that because I'm a veteran of graduate school and undergraduate, and I saw that routinely when I was in academia for 20 years.

So my point is this, they know that, and they know they will not be re-examined in the way Jonathan Katz will because they're ideologically correct.

So then everybody says, hmm, I take an insurance policy out to make sure that an uninsured driver doesn't ruin my new Tesla.

Okay.

And I have a health policy that in case I get lymphoma and I can't work, I don't go bankrupt.

And I have a fire insurance in case I get a spark in the attic, my house goes up.

But I don't have woke insurance.

So I better take it out.

So I'm going to sign petitions.

I'm going to consider Jonathan Katz or Ilya Shapiro enemies number one and two,

Emmanuel Goldstein, so to speak.

I'm going to have my three minutes of hate.

And through that process, I get indemnity insurance.

And you can't go through my past and see if I've had an incorrect tweet like Ilya Shapiro, or maybe 16 years ago, I got involved with a male or female student consensually.

Boy, if he, I mean, he wasn't Samson Jonathan Katz with an arm around every pillar, but he could have said,

and my Zoe, he's too much of a gentleman, a nice person.

I've met him.

I like him a great deal.

But he could have said, before you throw that stone at me, I ask you, who without sin will cast the stone at me?

Because I think a lot of professors violate that.

Yeah, of course.

And they're hypocritical, and they took out woke insurance to ensure their pastor is not scrutinized the way Mr.

Professor Katz's work.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, let's turn away from wokeness and to the tragedy at Uvalde in Texas and the inevitable claim or cry by the Democrats for gun control.

My question to you on this is, do you ever think that Democrats are going to get gun control?

after one of these events for these reasons because they always say it and it never happens and it's almost becoming non-news and it shouldn't be non-news given the numbers of people that were killed But the gun control claim is usual and it's unusual that they never do any legislation after that.

And then finally, in addition to that, what's the meaning of Uvalde, the massacre there?

What do you see?

The problem is this, is that these are terrible things that go on.

And let me be very precise.

We don't have a definition of a mass shooting.

We do, but we don't use it.

So if somebody goes in Philadelphia and shoots three and sprays and wounds, or 20 people get shot in Chicago on a Saturday night, nobody seems to care.

And we don't say anything because

these cities where this takes place, Baltimore, Los Angeles,

especially Chicago, have very strict gun laws, but they're not enforced.

But then when we have these psychologically deranged shooters, these young kids, two things happen.

Because of protection of young people, remember, we have defined upward what adulthood is.

Used to be about 16 in the pre-industrial age, 17, 18.

Now you're considered a child into your mid-20s.

So if somebody who's 17 or 18 says repeatedly, he's going to do this and this and this, we don't do anything about it.

We don't say, no, you can't do that.

So then when they go crazy, we're also a risk-adverse society.

And our military is risk-averse.

Everybody is risk-averse.

And so, the main thrust of law enforcement is to protect law enforcement, not to protect the innocent that don't have guns, that don't have body armor, that don't have training.

So, when these things have happened, this wasn't the first time that police arrived on the scene.

If we had an Audi Murphy type of person, Remember Audi Murphy, what, 5'7, 140 pounds, took on a whole German Corps?

If you had somebody like that that burst through there and was not willing to, you know, risk bodily harm to stop this person for almost an hour, and he was not barricaded in.

He was not covered with body arm.

He could have been stopped.

There were people outside that sat there, stood there, whatever the particular position.

They didn't do anything.

So how do we add all of this up?

When we can't do anything,

We try to say we're going to take guns away.

Now, I have no problem.

You know, I know a lot of of listeners are going to get mad at me, but if you have a kid and he goes in to a liquor store and he can't buy a beer at 21,

right, then maybe you shouldn't be able to buy a semi-automatic weapon.

You'll have to, you know, settle for a revolver.

How's that?

And that would be a huge concession.

I don't like giving a concession because that only emboldens a lot.

But if you were willing to do that and say, okay,

if you have a semi-automatic weapon that has a magazine of something, a person should be 21 years old before they're able to buy it.

It doesn't mean that a family couldn't buy it and a guy could use it.

You wouldn't make it illegal, illegal to use it.

You just said you couldn't buy it.

In exchange for that, you think the left would say, okay, we're going to go halfway and we're going to pass a law

that any ex-felon

in possession of a firearm within five years of his conviction, it's a felony, one year imprisonment.

Now, why wouldn't they do that?

That would save thousands of lives.

Yes.

So you see, the schizophrenia is that on the one hand, they have this image, and this person was Hispanic.

The person who was in Texas who killed a family of five was Hispanic.

The person who went to Tulsa and shot the doctor was African-American.

The person who went to Texas and shot three Asian Americans was African-American.

I'm only saying that because the stereotype that the left promulgates is there's all these beer belly, crazy, either middle-aged white guys or spoiled brat suburban white kids.

Not that there hasn't been, but I think proportionally,

the mass shooters, quote unquote, more or less represent the demographic of the United States.

But my point is the left sees this as a political ideological lever to get some traction out.

But do they really think it's going to stop shootings?

I don't think it will.

But I think I know what would stop shootings if they retrain police forces and they teach them that you run to the sound of gunfire when there's children.

Maybe not everybody, but when there's children that are unarmed in a school, you run to the sound of gunfire.

You don't stay back.

Number two,

that you find retired police officers who have an unblemished record and you hire them armed to patrol the grounds.

Three,

that you, as I said, you make it a felony with a mandatory incarceration for a felon to buy or possess a firearm.

And they were not going to do that.

They're not going to do any of that.

Even though we know that would cut down on crime, it would cut down on death.

They're not going to do that.

Instead, they would rather say that conservatives want people to shoot innocents with automatic weapons.

And so the Republicans haven't come up.

with a

with a consistent defense against that.

They're trying, but they've got to come to the people to the degree that this is an issue and just say, you know what, if a guy has got a clear mental problem and it's been adjudicated and he's under 21, maybe he should not be allowed to buy on his own a semi-automatic weapon.

And we're willing to negotiate that if the left will allow police officers in retirement or on, you know, in the summer or whatever to patrol school grounds.

And we can make sure that people in the inner city that that are walking around with unlicensed firearms in violation of federal and state and local statutes who are felons are not allowed to do that.

If they're apprehended, they're going to go to jail.

And that deterrence, I mean, you'll have a lot of people going to jail, believe me, and that's what the left's afraid of.

Yeah, but that sounds like a great compromise.

Victor, let's take a moment for some more messages and come right back and talk about, speaking of gunfire, we'll talk about the Ukraine.

We'll be right back.

We're back.

Victor, I was hoping to get your update on the Ukraine.

I've been reading articles talking about how the war in Ukraine is starting to look like World War I trench warfare.

And I was wondering, meaning, right, many deaths and casualties and few gains in territory.

I was wondering what your thoughts were on the war.

Well, everybody is, it's kind of a yin and yang, isn't it?

First it was shock and awe, Russia wins in five days with this superb military that has hypersonic weapons, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And then after about a month is, oh, it's all conscripts and they're poorly trained, poorly fed, poorly led, and they are losing and Ukraine will push them all the way back out.

And then

after 90 days, it was a seesaw and it was incumbent upon the West and the United States in particular to give them sophisticated, more sophisticated weapons.

Stingers and javelins were not doing the trick, so we needed to give them shore-to-ship missiles, or we needed to give them artillery 30-mile ranges, 25 miles, or maybe even rockets, artillery rocket platforms that would be, you know, 40 or 50 miles.

Okay.

And we're not talking about the ultimate problem.

The ultimate problem is that Ukraine has about a fourth of the population of Russia, about a tenth of its GDP,

and zero nuclear weapons.

And so ultimately, if Vladimir Putin wanted to take the international heat and the domestic risk, and he's, I think, got a terminal cancer, it sounds like.

then that would be an incentive for him to do that in his lifetime, then he was going to win as long as he was willing to pay the price.

And that price, I think, will be 50 or 60,000 Russian dead, all of Ukraine, just west of Kiev, a wasteland,

and being an international pariah.

But he can do it if he wants to.

And that's where we are right now.

And so what do we want to do to stop that?

To stop that,

you're looking at a degree of escalation that everybody better be very, very cognizant of.

And maybe if I could give an ad, Hoover Institution has a very fine podcast of john cochran my history colleague neil ferguson and hr mcmaster goodfellows and we did an an hour i think it was an hour and 15 minutes on this very subject and you can go look it up it's posted the hoover websites on youtube and it was very acrimonious heated

i think neil ferguson and i were sort of on one side and john cochran and hr are on the other side and the issue was do you think

that supplying, I want to be very fair, but supplying sophisticated rocketry with the ability to sink the Russian Black Fleet is a good idea if that American weapon were to be used in that capacity?

Or do you think providing intelligence to kill Russian generals and then bragging about it, I think that's happened, or do you think that supplying the intelligence and perhaps the armament to go into Russia and to destroy supply depots and oil.

All of that would be justified in a particularly military sense, but it's not.

It's a political military sense where we have the first land war in European history in which a nuclear power is directly involved as one of the combatants.

And in that discussion, I think Neil and I thought it was unhinged to try to sink the Russian Black Fleet or to go in and blow up big fuel depots or to keep killing Russian generals and then bragging or leaking it from America.

And to be fair, I think the other two thought that you shouldn't disclose that information.

But anyway,

that's where we are.

So if they want to expel everybody out of Ukraine that is pre-2014 and have all of Ukraine as it was in 2014, that's going to require a level of violence and force that is going to lead to escalation.

It has to.

They cannot get the Russians out of the Donbas without destroying their depots and their sources of supply.

And to do that, they have to engage in military activities beyond their own borders.

And I think Mother Russia won't allow that to happen.

Whether they should happen or not, I'm not interested in.

I'm interested in Vladimir Putin saying, if you do this, I'm going to shoot a missile into Warsaw, or I'm going to send one into Berlin, or I'm going to send one near the east or west coast.

And I don't care.

A hypersonic missile.

Everybody says, oh, he won't do that.

You don't know that he won't do that.

No, but do you know what?

That's where we are.

So, and what was the solution?

And the solution is, I think at some point, somebody says, as you mentioned, this is World War I.

This is a psalm, not the psalm, but it's something that could lead to be something like Verdun or the Psalm if it goes on for four years.

And they're destroying the area that they're fighting over, the Russian-speaking borderlands of Ukraine.

And so somebody says, okay,

we have an armistice in situ, wherever everybody is, and then we have plebiscites.

Even have the UN or the EU conduct them.

And everybody who is in the disputed area votes.

Do you want to be part of the Russian Federation or an independent Russian-affiliated republic?

Or do you want to go back to where you were as Ukraine in 2014?

And they monitor.

I'm afraid that it would be 50-50, but maybe we'll see.

And that would solve the problem, wouldn't it?

I think it would.

And then we could discuss later on whether you lift all of the sanctions against the Russian economy, depending on the damage they inflicted gratuitously in eastern Ukraine.

So we said, you know what?

If we lift these sanctions, you're going to make another $100 billion this year from oil sales.

If you're going to make that extra money with a price that high, we want you to divert two, three, five, $10 billion to undo the damage you did.

So there's all sorts of things that could negotiate, but I don't really, I support Ukraine.

I think what Putin did was horrible.

I want him out, but I don't, as an outsider, want Ukraine to die to the last Ukrainian for the idea that Ukraine is going to be like 2014 again.

2014, we didn't do a damn thing.

Barack Obama or Joe Biden when he went in and he took Crimea and he took eastern Ukraine.

In fact, we encourage that by not selling them offensive weapons.

And B, in that infamous hot bike and sold South Korea when Barack Obama said, I have an election coming up.

If Vladimir will just give me some flexibility,

flexibility in my re-election, then I will be flexible on missile defense.

And subtext of that was,

Barack Obama had no foreign policy crisis.

Putin did not go anywhere in 2012 and 13.

Obama was elected.

Obama kept his promise.

He dismantled all those efforts in Poland and Czech Republic to have missile defense, which, by the way, would be very handy right now, wouldn't it?

If you said that these countries had missile defense against a Russian attack.

And the result is history.

As soon as the deal was signed, both sides abided by it.

And then when it was expired, basically de facto, he went in in 2014.

Nobody talks about that because to do that would be a moral indictment of the Obama administration and Barack Obama in particular.

And the left in general, since he went back in when Biden came in, we didn't see any of this during Trump's administration, right?

So

that's something that just is the elephant in the room, isn't it?

You're supposed to be an unsophisticated dullard if you say, hmm, in a reductionist sense, they went in 2008 into Georgia when Bush was weak and because of the Iraq war and oil prices.

Oh, he went in 2014 twice during the appeasing Obama, but why didn't he go anywhere between 2017 and 21?

It couldn't be because

Trump was unpredictable, mercurial, had a record of doing what, killing Soleimani, bombing the SH blank-blank out of ISIS.

killing Russian mercenaries of what would later become the Wagner group.

So maybe that's why he didn't go in there.

You can't say that, Sammy.

That's the unsophisticated.

Oh, I see.

So I'll take it all back.

Take it all back.

All right.

Victor, thank you for everything today.

Very fascinating discussion of a woke revolution, the midterms, and the Ukraine.

I really appreciate that.

Thank you.

All right, this is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hansen, and we're signing off.