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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

I am Jack Fowler, the host, the star and namesake is Victor Davis-Hansen.

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

Everything Victor writes, and some of it is exclusive, can be found.

at victorhanson.com.

We'll talk a little bit more about that later.

We've got a lot to talk about today.

By the way, today, when we are recording, is Sunday, April 24th.

And I have it on good authority that this podcast will be aired on the World Wide Web on Thursday, whatever that is, the 28th, I think.

So, thanks, folks, for listening.

The first topic we're going to talk about today is little Anthony Fauci, and he's angry.

He's really upset.

So,

let's get to that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

So, Victor, Cardinal Fauci, he's very upset.

You know, science, remember, he's science.

Science,

whether or not it includes the funding of the Chinese virus manipulation or actually the funding of heinous experiments on dogs, all things that have happened with U.S.

taxpayer dollars on Anthony Fauci's watch.

Science has no business being ruled over or overruled by a federal judge.

Tony, who at the beginning of the pandemic, remember Victor, he was hawking cruise travel, go on the cruise.

He's very upset now that the CDC's mask mandate was kiboshed.

The courts, the United States courts, which are as I don't know, my recollection is they are a branch of this we the people thing we call the Constitution.

They should have no say in what Fauci calls, quote, unequivocally public health decisions, end quote.

Today, Sunday, he was on one of the CBS morning shows attacking the federal judge that is Catherine Kinisell, who overruled the mandate.

Also, Victor, as we know, and I don't know if you spoke about it on the podcast with Sammy Wink, you may have.

I didn't catch them all, but then Joe Biden also pledged that his administration was going to appeal that mandate, which I go ahead.

do it, dude.

It'll just help the pylon in November.

Victor, your thoughts about the head of the

Anthony Fauci, who believes he transcends the courts of the United States and just about everything else.

Yeah, you know, he in his descent into oblivion, I mean, he's not, he's not going to end well as a public figure because you mentioned cruise ships, but I mean, you know, masks have no utility.

wear one mask or two oh i lied about it because you would otherwise as a fool go out and buy a mask and then a a doctor wouldn't have one.

Herd immunity, 60, 70, 80.

I lied about it because otherwise you fools would not get vaccinated if you were waiting for herd immunity.

Masks are completely what we want.

Now we learn that N95s have some small percentage of utility, but most all the others are receptacles, if anything, of vira.

So they don't help unless it's an N95.

And even then, when you look at the data from, I think it's Bangladesh,

they've had a large study in some places in Europe, and they're not very impressive.

So he's been wrong.

And think what he said, Jack.

First, he attacked a federal judge.

The left used to use a word for that.

They called it obstruction of justice.

When somebody deliberately attacks a public figure's,

a judicial ruling, they felt that that was a violation of the law.

It's not, but that's what the left said.

But think of what he said, that he, Anthony Fauci, and he said before that he's the science.

So

why stop at masking?

Why not talk about gain of function?

So I, Anthony Fauci, have the absolute power to take your taxpayers' dollars, route it through Echo Health,

because otherwise it's illegal to do gain of function research in the United States, and then have them support gain of function in Wuhan, China.

And that's the type of autonomy that I demand that I must have.

He doesn't understand democracy.

It's really ironic.

And the fact that the left has been absolutely quiet about it is just telling.

So he doesn't believe in constitutional government.

Otherwise, he would say to himself, I am a lifelong bureaucrat.

I serve at the pleasure of an elected government who is in charge of the federal bureaucracy.

I'm a member of civil service.

I'm not fired capriciously, but ultimately, I do not have the ability to make laws, and I'm not in a position to attack federal judges that interpret them.

And especially given my reputation is at its nadir, given that I was wrong on mask.

I was wrong when I, remember when he said vaccination?

I want to detour here a bit.

Vaccination and masking was sold to us, Jack, and the original incarnations in 2020 as don't worry about the other person, worry about yourself.

If you are vaccinated,

if that fool doesn't want to be vaccinated, more power to him.

If that fool wants to not wear a mask, first of all,

that virus can't hurt you now because you've got 96% immunity.

And two, you've got a mask on.

So if the idiot is breathing out particles, they're going to hit your mask and bounce off.

If they're the inner of your chest, your little antibodies that have been developed by Moderna Pfizer are going to kill them.

That's what we were told.

And it's been a devolution ever since, ever since.

And so he's stuck to that.

he never modulates anything he says based on actual cases.

He never says, well, there's a thousand cases versus 10,000 in California this

six-month period or three months.

Therefore, we're going to adjust.

It's never that way.

It's all or nothing.

And he never admits error.

He never criticizes anybody that violates and humiliates his own edicts.

He never says to Gavin Newsom or Lori Lightfoot or London Breed or Nancy Pelosi, you'd better wear those masks or Chris Cuomo, wear those masks.

Come on.

He only picks on people that are conservative or he thinks

or yokels that don't have his sober, judicious temperament and education.

So

I want to say he's a tragic figure because

because he's done some good, but you look at the history of his tenure, some 40 years there, he's a very vindictive guy.

And he punishes people who don't, are not obsequious to him in the scientific community, and he favors people that toady up to him.

He's been very, I think he's been very deleterious for health policy, along with the CDC directors and the NIH people.

And that was the one thing that I thought Trump might have corrected.

had he been re-elected.

I think he, if he had people like John Yannidis or Jay Bacharia or Scott Atlas, I think he would have had a much more realistic approach to the COVID.

Remember, there was no emphasis on therapeutics from the get-go.

There were doctors who say,

you know, there was anecdotal, but finally there were blind studies that said, you know, this level of vitamin D will do the following, or there are certain things in these new studies.

And I mentioned before, I think Pepsid had some benefit.

It wasn't a lot.

Quercetin had some more benefit, not a lot.

Zinc had a little bit of benefit, not a lot.

Azestyltine,

there were studies that said that had some.

But the point is, you could have said these things are not going to harm you.

We don't have to go the full hydroxychloroquine or ivermedicine route.

You can do these other things, and maybe that will cut down the viral load a little bit.

He never got into any of that.

It was...

get the chemical the pharmaceuticals antiviral $2,000 dose or nothing.

Right.

So

how can you, Victor, how can you be about public health and right and just forget about the rest of the health that was not coronavirus?

He kneecapped Scott Atlas, who was truly concerned with a broader impact of Scott Atlas had one, he had a lot of messages, but he had one big message.

He was a voice in the wilderness.

He said, if you shut this thing down for more than three or four weeks to flatten the so-called curve, two or three things are going to happen.

You're going to kill a lot of people who are not going to get cancer screenings.

They're not going to get critical cardial treatment.

The record of suicides and spousal and drug and alcohol abuse is going to spike if you continue this for a year or two.

And it all did.

And then he said, in addition to that, he said, and this all or nothing, that you have to eliminate the virus entirely, extinguish so there's not one case, like as if it's smallpox, will require a level of government expense and power that's not commiserate with the risk versus benefit factor.

Said that.

Everybody laughed at him.

And the third thing he said is much of the stuff that you're doing,

quarantines, mask wearing, should be not in scattershot approaches, but focusing on the people who are dying.

This is a disease of people 60 and over with one or more comorbidities.

So isolate the restrooms, the long care facilities, but don't go into the schools and shut them down and cause enormous trauma on three, third graders and eight year olds.

And so, and don't take the society.

So you take away visual recognition.

There's all sorts of damage.

And for all of that,

He was considered enemy number one, and they demonized him and they demonized him and they demonized him.

And at my university, where I work, over 100 medical people signed a petition that he should be censored, or there were people talking about going after his license.

And those of us who tried to support him were attacked.

And it was the weirdest thing in the world, Jack.

It was like a mob.

And he was right.

And he's been proved right.

And yet there's no apology from any of these people.

And the people who were absolutely wrong, Burke and Fauci, there were no consequences.

So here we are now with terrible supply chain problems, with psychological trauma.

I think everything from the George Floyd whole rioting to these children, special, special needs children that have just regressed terribly, we know, to a higher incidence of cancer and heart attacks.

All of that is the trauma of these policies.

And

at the end, Scott said something very controversial.

He said, among the non-elderly population, there will be, between vaccinations, which he supported,

and COVID, there will be something that we're not supposed to say.

He said, eventually there will be a herd

immunity.

It may not stop you from being infected or being sick, but that immunity will not kill you.

And we will look at COVID perhaps as a bad case of the flu.

That's what he said.

And it was absolutely correct.

And that's where we are exactly now, right now.

And Anthony Fauci wants the mask up and get the fourth booster.

You get what?

Three months,

three months extra protection with a third or fourth booster.

And for to take in, you know, and that might be good for some people, but it seems to me that a lot of people that I know and a lot of studies I read about say you get a third or fourth booster.

And you're one of these people with low normal white blood count, it's going to, your ability, your reaction of your body to gear up and go full blast to create antibodies is going to lower your white blood count or its effectiveness, one or the other.

And you're going to get sick.

And for the next three or four weeks, if you expose yourself, and then yet you tell people that get that booster, get that fourth.

It's going to really help you.

And then they think, wow, I'm.

ironclad armor now.

I'm going to go out.

And they go out more than usual.

And you're setting people up to get sick.

So yeah, take the third or fourth booster.

But if you do, maybe stay home for a while.

He never said that.

And he laughed at people who did that.

And that's what he is.

He's a creature of the pharmaceutical companies.

He really is.

Almost everything Joe Biden said was a lie, too.

He said that Trump was personally responsible, de facto, personally responsible for,

I don't know what it was, 370,000 cases of people who died.

fatalities.

He said he was going to end the virus.

He said he was going to end the lockdowns.

He said Trump's ballet.

So he gave him no no credit for the vaccines.

And what a note, we've got so many more people have died on Biden's watch, even though Biden came into office with, even though he denied it.

Remember, he denied people had been previously vaccinated until he appeared.

17 million have.

But it's just a tragedy.

It really is.

Well, Victor, speaking of Biden.

He's pledging to appeal the mask mandate.

But before we get your thoughts about that, you traveled last week.

So did I.

I traveled a lot the first day of the full day of no mask mandate.

It was kind of interesting at the airport in Hartford, Connecticut.

I would say at the airport, about 90% of the people were wearing masks and eventually flew on through Charlotte to Arizona.

On the plane itself, maybe 10 to 15% seemed to be wearing it.

And mostly, I don't know, it just seemed like older couples, maybe folks who were a little more concerned than the most had their masks on.

Very few people at the airport in Arizona or on the flight had it.

So I assume your experience may be a little different.

The Fresno mindset is probably a lot more conservative and anti-mask than the liberal Northeast that I experienced on the first day.

But people did not want to wear the mask to begin with.

We've heard that in the planes themselves, you couldn't find better air quality than in an airplane.

Joe Biden, though, wants to fight Judge Mazell's ruling.

I find this crazy,

also crazy politically, but then again, he's the guy that

let Afghanistan go to hell in a handbasket.

Why should we be surprised that he would do that?

But I welcome it because I think it will only make political matters worse for him and his party come November and in 2024.

What are your thoughts about the politics of his design?

I don't know why he's

first of all.

He confused the mask mandate overturned by the judge with member Title 42.

So he gave it when they asked him whether he was going to repeal, which essentially is an application of an existing law that says you can stop immigration during a pandemic.

He thought they were talking about the masks.

So he doesn't know what he's talking about.

To tell you the truth, he has no idea.

Any given moment, ideas come into his head and they flitter around like seagulls and they fly out.

He has no idea what he's doing.

You can't even talk anymore about what he thinks because we don't know what he thinks and he doesn't know what he thinks.

But the politics of it is I think there will be people around him that will bitch and moan and then not challenge that order.

I.e.

they know that the public is tired of the mask.

They know we're going into summer.

They know that people are getting Omicron very often and frequently, and it's not putting them in the hospital as Delta was or the original variant was.

And so they're starting to gradually become acculturated to the idea that they can live with it.

I know I had to speak at an event Thursday night and I must have shaken hands with 100 people.

Nobody was wearing a mask at the hotel, maybe two people.

I got into the car.

The driver didn't have a mask, drove me to the airport.

My view of the Phoenix airport that particular day,

Friday morning, I would say 50% had masks.

I got onto a plane and I would say 5% got mask.

I landed in Fresno.

I'd say 6%, 7% had masks.

And then I had to go, as I said earlier, I went to a high school reunion.

Nobody had a mask.

Everybody was hugging each other.

Now, we can all get super spreader disease tomorrow.

But I think what I'm getting at is we are reaching a point where almost everybody in the United States has either had one or two shots

or has

had COVID and didn't know it or had COVID and knew it.

And there is probably getting up to 70 or 80% have had COVID or had a previous battery of shots.

And the result of it is that where we're all going to get COVID now and again, and it's probably going to give us a headache or a fever or something like that.

Eventually, there is such a thing called herd immunity for all the bad press it's been getting.

And

that's where we're going to end up.

And that's kind of where Scott Atlas said we were going to end up.

The only thing that's ironic about this, Jack, is that getting back to him,

he didn't say don't mask up and don't quarantine or isolate.

He said the fact that you're doing it to everybody means you're doing it to nobody, that it was entirely inadequate what you were doing

in New York for elderly people.

Had you not had to try to do it to everybody, you would have the resources and the focus to do it where it should have been done.

So he was tarred for something that we all came to accept.

I think I'd like to write an article about all the people that we ruin and try to destroy that were completely on target.

And we don't say, remember Carter Page?

We just destroyed him.

He did nothing wrong.

He was actually helping the FBI and the CIA.

We completely destroyed him.

He didn't do anything wrong.

And, you know, I don't, everybody says, you know, you can't say that about Donald Trump, but he didn't collude with Russia.

There was nothing wrong, given what he knew and what we now know about the Biden family in Ukraine.

There was nothing wrong with saying to a Ukrainian person, we're going to give you this money, but we want to hold it until you can assure us that this.

family conglomerate is not shaking you down.

There was nothing wrong with that.

Maybe it was had the appearances because Biden was going to be a candidate someday against Trump look bad, but there was nothing wrong with that.

Yet we destroyed him over that.

And then I don't even want to get into the me too.

We destroyed the people who needed to be destroyed, like Harvey Weinstein, but then we just went way over.

It's like this country gets into these fits of mass hysteria.

After George Floyd, all of a sudden, the woke thing just took over.

And all of a sudden, you know, Thomas jefferson or alexander hamilton statue was going to be destroyed and the same thing with the masking i don't know what causes this there's a lot of classical literature and commentary on the fickleness of the aklos what they call the mob but i think in modern times electronic communications like the internet coupled with atheism and agnosticism means that the natural human inborn idea that you want to be transcendent that there has to be something larger than yourself.

When you replace that with atheism and you say there is no God, there is no soul, but you still have that urge.

So you adopt these humanistic, so to speak,

solutions, these utopian bromides.

So you put a person who's an atheist and he believes he's highly educated and he's going to do well for everybody and be a missionary, a zealot, and you give him a mask as a crusade or global warming.

That's what's happening.

Yeah, that describes Anthony Fauci.

Yeah, it does.

It does.

Absolutely.

That's who he is.

And he did a lot of damage to, as I said earlier, Donald Trump, once he sized him up in April of 2020, at the latest, he should have put his arm around him and said, you know what, this man is an esteemed public servant.

And that's why he's been at the CDC well beyond 65, normal retirement.

He's 80 years old.

He's exhausted from his public service.

He's done a wonderful job.

And I regret, I'm just going to miss him so, but he's retiring tomorrow at 7 a.m.

And then he should have said the same for Burke.

She's a wonderful person.

She said, but we just aren't going to be able to use it.

We just can't.

I wish we could.

We can't.

And then they should have brought in very early Scott and Bacharia and Yanidas for Michael Levette.

Ironic thing about the whole thing, you know, I'll end with this, Jack, was

the Stanford University medical community and a lot of the faculty went after after Scott Atlas and they tried to destroy him.

When, in fact, the best advertisement for Stanford Medical School was that Michael Levette, Nobel Prize winner, John Iannides, the guy who broke the Thuranos farce that you could put one drop of blood and find out your whole blood chemistry.

and Jay Bacharia and Scott Atlas were all in the news.

They were all right about the pandemic and they were the best advertisement for the people who tried to destroy them there could be.

If they had just said, we at Stanford Medical School believe in free exchange of ideas.

We don't always agree, but these four researchers are esteemed researchers.

They have a wonderful history in public health or immunology, demographics, et cetera.

And we're proud that they give a dissenting view and create controversy.

And they couldn't do that.

They called them merchants, basically merchants of death.

And that's an academic for you.

Right.

nobody ever apologized they never apologize right no no one who signed the letter would do that just like any of the 50 plus guys who signed the russian uh the hunter body yeah where's where's james plapper now where is john grenad oh i'm sorry this laptop that was in the possession of the fbi for several months and it leaked out in october i guess the russians didn't kind of sort of fabricate it but you know what you don't care because i've already lied under oath twice to you.

I told you we don't spy in Senate staff computers, and I told you that our assassination drones don't kill people.

Or Clapper could have said, Well, I lied, but you know, you knew that anyway, because I told you the NSA under oath never spies on anybody.

That's where we're at.

No, there's never, I'm sorry.

But again, it's that hysteria, hysteria.

I remember on her laptop, hunter laptop, hunter laptop, Russian disinformation, or alpha being Trump, Trump has some type of of server.

Sources close to the intelligence committee tell me that Trump has a machine that's communicating back and forth with Russian financial and oligarch interests.

Remember that story?

And now we learn that the people who monitor presidential communications were basically in

what, cahoots with Sussman, according to John Durham.

Well,

we're going to talk about John Durham and what's going on there.

Maybe this is a good point to take a little break, Victor, and how about when we come back from it, we'll talk about Durham and what's up.

But we'll do that after these important messages.

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Hey, we're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

We are recording on Sunday, April 24th.

This show will be put up on justthenews.com and other places.

That's the home for the podcast on Thursday, the 28th.

I want to come back to Biden after we talk about the Durham investigation.

And Victor, you're going to forgive me and our listeners will forgive me.

I'm going to look, I'm looking right now at a piece out over this weekend.

It's in The Spectator.

Durh springs the trap on Hillary Clinton's lawyer.

It begins the month of May won't be a merry one for Michael Sussman, one of Hillary Clinton's top lawyers at her favorite election law firm, Perkins Cole, who is facing a criminal charge on lying to the FBI when he passed information to the Bureau's general counsel, James Bacor.

Sussman stated explicitly that he was writing writing as a good citizen, not as a lawyer for Trump election opponents.

The article, this is by Charles Lipson.

And you know, Victor, I shouldn't be reading articles at all because

I ran over my glasses the other day.

So

I can barely see anything.

But it seems like the, I know Andy McCarthy, my friend and former colleague at National Reawote something saying, expecting big things to come soon from Durham, and that possibly Sussman would spring information on others further up the Hillary Clinton ladder, including Mark Elias, who was one of the troublemaking lawyers.

So, anyway, this is

an investigation.

Yeah, it's perkling.

What are your thoughts?

Go ahead.

Well, we're nearing a gut check decision from Mr.

Garland, the Attorney General, and Biden.

Are they going to stop this investigation or not?

Because if they don't stop it, we know where it's going to go.

It's going to go to Mark Elias,

and then it's going to go to top members of the DNC, and then it's going to go to Hillary Clinton, whose campaign has already been fined for not reporting expenditures that went to the steel dossier.

But what Durham did was very brilliant.

You said traps.

So he basically in this circular fashion said that Sussman was untruthful to Mr.

Baker when he called him and said, I have information.

It should come to your attention.

And in the course of that later meeting, he said, you know, and he was asked directly, according to FBI,

are you working directly or indirectly for Hillary Clinton's campaign?

He said, no.

Then he kind of laughs now and thought,

you know, it's my word against his word.

It was a private meeting.

So, and then, you know, Durham, I think, alluded to the fact that Mr.

Baker had talked to other people.

And so you could bring those in as collaborating witnesses.

But then Sussman would have said, I talked to other people too, and they'll testify that I said that I was a private citizen.

But what apparently Durham had in his possession was Sussman's own billing

for things like that to the DNC via Perkins Co.

And so he convicted himself.

He will convict himself.

And then we get into the proverbial $64,000 question.

Is it Mr.

Joff?

I may be pronouncing his name.

I'm sorry if I'm pronouncing it wrong, but are these people who were the techies that were involved with monitoring normal or cataloging or categorizing normal presidential communications and they overstepped their bounds and started to work with mark sussman and try to see if they could find dirt and trump's private and came up with this ping that was nothing there and one of them said there was nothing there what are they going to do when durham goes after them and he's going to ask them point blank did you are they going to turn state's evidence and then they're going to go to mark elias and these people say you are you going to turn state's evidence Then they're going to go probably to John Podesta.

Did you know?

And it's going to, that's how it works.

And it requires a lot of time.

But I think what Durham's done to finish, Jack, is that he's taken months and months and months too long, but he took a long time to figure it all out.

And he's got it all down on paper.

And now he's walking through it.

and seeing how far he gets.

If I was Hillary Clinton, I wouldn't keep saying, you know, that Donald Trump stole the 2016 election,

that Russian collusion, because if there was any collusion, it was

her funneling money through three paywalls,

three paywalls, DNC, Perkins-Coeve, Glenn Simpsons, Fusion GPS, to Christopher Steele, who was a foreign national working on a campaign as a paid consultant for Hillary Clinton, basically, and then trying to invent a false narrative through a dossier to destroy the campaign of Donald Trump.

That's what it was.

Somewhere along that chain, there's some felonies, and somebody's going to pay for it, I think, unless they stop it.

Well, Hillary is engaged in projection, which is a thing you have been on top of for a long time.

And if you want to know what the Democrats are doing wrong, just listen to what they're complaining about, Republicans doing, and probably they're doing it.

So, Victor, let's jump back to

Joe Biden, if you don't mind.

And I think of this next issue as like solar-powered Abrams tanks.

But Joe Biden has pledged that all military vehicles will be climate friendly.

This is something he said last week.

It seems to me to be common sense, unfriendly, even if it's climate friendly.

This is another sign that our national defense, whether it's now actual

armaments, of course, the leadership of our military, they seem to be more involved with protecting ideology rather than they are with sovereignty or unalienable rights.

Victor, I don't know how a tank can be climate friendly.

I have an electric leaf blower.

I was going to say it sucks even though it blows.

It's very easy.

It's very easy.

So take Ukraine in the Donavas tank battle.

So you have...

500 electrical chargers and they're spread throughout the battlefield and each each side has electric tanks and at certain moments they call a truce and everybody goes to the serger and charges up.

That's what John Kerry thinks.

But these are massive pieces of equipment and they all have either gas turbine engines or big diesel engines.

And the idea that you can give any sort of range.

through an electric we're not quite there that maybe i wish we were but we're not and then there's the question of okay so we all go to sustainable engines cars where do you get the electricity Because solar and wind don't generate what would be an increased demand, an enormous demand on the power grid, since you can't go nuclear or you can't go natural gas, because those are both for different reasons taboo.

So these people are nihilists.

And John Kerry, it's very ironic that this man who married a multi-billionaire and has

unlimited resources at his disposal and flies a private jet keeps talking about what we're going to do.

do he's not going to do it and do we really want to i mean right now do you think that vladimir putin cares whether our abhams tanks are hybrids or not he could care less and so in the military until the private sector offers a viable and affordable alternative Maybe some general is saying, you know what, we'd like to have electric tanks.

They'll be really quiet.

They accelerate it more quickly.

That's good.

But right now we don't have them.

So we'll go with what we have

but just at some point all these stories have a common denominator it's usually somebody who lives between boston and miami and la jolla california and seattle who's very very wealthy and highly educated starts pontificating what they're they they they in between are going to do

and they're not into the sinews of life.

They don't know anything.

They don't know what they're talking about.

And are they going to say, we're going to have a Marshall plan to make sure we go electric, so we're going to have lithium mining and nickel mining,

try to get every lithium mine we can.

No, they're not going to do that.

Basically, their idea is that I always have enough money.

So if I'm going to go from

Pacific Heights down to Minnelo Park for the day,

I can either pay $10 a gallon for gas or I can use my Tesla.

You know, go buy a Tesla.

That's what Biden is basically telling everybody.

That's a very dangerous thing to a civilization when you lose the middle class and your dialectic is the poor, poor, poor, poor.

And we have to help the poor, poor, poor, poor by enlarging the government program.

And then we are exempt from the consequences of our own ideology because we are so morally superior to the

Soviet way.

It's the

regard of the Confederacy.

It's the old Confederacy.

Fixations on race, no middle class,

states' rights, sanctuary cities, all that is a neo-Confederate idea.

I want to recommend our listeners, if they haven't listened already, to the past podcast that Victor did with Sammy Wink.

You brought up the Confederate, the plantation

aspect of the economy.

I think it was well worth the listen.

But now, Victor, we've got a little time left.

We're going to talk about hopefully two or three more things.

We're going to compact two into one, and this has to do with Russia, both the Ukraine and nukes.

Again, you talked with Sammy the other day about nukes, but over the weekend, there are two articles came up on the Daily Mail, which seems to be increasingly my

favorite website to go to if you want to see what's actually going on in the world.

The first story has to do with new Russian threats.

So, here's a Russian military commander, Rustom Minikayev.

He hinted that after Russia takes control of Ukraine's territory on the Black Sea, which is what Russia is trying to do right now, it would essentially create a land corridor that would give Russia access to Moldova, and which that borders on the Ukraine's west.

And he said something about, oh, that the Russian, the oppressed, quote-unquote, oppressed Russian speakers in that country may need the help of the mother country.

So that's one

new aspect coming out of Putin's plans to use the military for control of the old empire, I think.

By the way, on the side, I just want to say some stats that have come out about the war with Ukraine.

873 Russian tanks destroyed.

Of course,

Moscova is at the bottom of the sea.

179 aircraft gone and almost 22,000 dead Russian soldiers.

Kind of shocking.

Anyway, that's the Moldova thing I'd like you to talk about.

And then separately,

I know you talked with Sammy about nukes, but it came out today that Putin is threatening with a new, it's a Sarmat missile.

It's dubbed the Satan II.

Satan II, yeah, Satan II.

Yeah, and it could, one missile.

The claim is one missile could take out the entirety of France, the entirety of Great Britain, that geographical landmass.

So, hey, it's going to be ready this September.

I can hardly wait.

This is MERV, multiple independent

re-entry vehicles.

So, it's got several, I don't know, 10 or 10.

It has 10 warheads.

Yeah, 10 warheads and some decoys in there.

It has a range of like 11,000 miles also.

So, Victor, two aspects to Russia and the war.

Go ahead.

Well, it's very interesting what he's doing.

He mentions nukes all the time.

He launches tests of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

He talks and hints about tactical nuclear weapons.

He had, remember the Russian TV anchor people that were laughing about nuking New York?

And so everybody thinks he's never going to do that.

It's just talk.

But because they're nukes, 99%.

of what he's talking about is crazy, but you can't rule out the 1%.

So do you want to risk annihilation?

Is that a good 1% odds?

Probably, but but for a lot of people it's not because that's the end of everything and so he knows that so what he's trying to do is talk nuke trash and the more he talks nuke trash the more he feels that they will be reluctant to supply conventional weapons because he may nuke them The other thing that's really weird is he's trying to draw a wedge between the United States and Europe when he threatens to nuke Britain, or Macron had to answer him the other day, and the Eastern Europeans.

That tells me that he thinks that Biden is weak and is afraid to give Europe a resounding reaffirmation of the nuclear umbrella, so to speak.

And so the more that he talks about nuking individual European countries without nuking the United States, they're going to say to Biden, would you come out and say something that we are under your nuclear umbrella if we are?

So we can know that.

And Biden hasn't done that.

And he won't do that.

But if you're Britain and this country with 7,200 nukes says they may be able to nuke you very soon,

your natural response will be, where's the United States?

It has 6,200 nukes and they're better than the Russian.

Why don't they make a statement?

So it's very confusing.

And I think it gets back.

I know I don't want to beat a dead horse, Jack, but it gets back to the Obama administration when they had their strategic assessment, which that is the national security advisor of every administration is responsible for having a coherent plan disseminated about what this administration sees as the threats in the world and how to deal with them.

And under those strategic assessments, it was pretty clear they felt that the United States was provocative with its large stockpile of weapons and we were downsizing them and we got, we tired a lot of them and we didn't spend money to update the rest Or we spent far less than was necessary.

And then we canceled missile defense.

Nobody talks about that.

It's just like a non-topic.

We had a missile defense deal with Poland and the Czech Republic.

And we know it because Obama said he was going to be flexible at it if Putin behaved for at least a while while he was up for re-election.

And he did.

But my point is that.

That really hurt us.

If we had a full-fledged missile defense system over our NATO partners on the borders of Ukraine, we'd be in a very different position now.

And if we had done what Reagan promised or what we thought Bush was going to do, that is build a systematic fashion, build an anti-ballistic missile system here in the United States, we'd be in a very different position.

Instead, we limited our mothballed offensive nuclear weapons and we canceled defensive anti-ballistic missile program.

And then we substituted that with this trash talking from Joe Biden.

Well, maybe solar power will fix it all, Victor.

Hey, let's take a trip now to La La Land, and we'll do that right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show recording on April 24th.

This is being broadcast on the World Wide Web on Thursday the 28th.

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So that's VictorHansen.com.

So Victor, I mentioned American Greatness, and twice a week you write for that website.

And the most recent piece you've written that I have is called How America Became La La Land.

And it begins with this sentence: America these last 14 months resembles a dystopia.

Actually, it's two sentences.

It is becoming partly the work of George Orwell's 1984, partly the poet Homer's land of the lotus eaters.

So, Victor, I'd like you to explain this piece, why you wrote it.

And towards the end, you asked a question, what explains an America that suddenly no longer works when you have three reasons why that is the case?

Victor, tell us about this piece.

Well, I think I try to ask people just when I'm talking to them, if I'm at an airport or after a lecture, they'll come up and say, things are very different.

And I'll say, what do you think is going on?

And they don't know.

They'll say, it's not that the border is not being enforced.

It doesn't exist any longer.

It's gone.

And it's not as if people are dropping dead like flies with COVID and they can't figure out this quarantine and mass that continues and continues.

And they hear Biden, you know, Build Back Better or Rescue Plan and they see these trillions of dollars.

And they think, we owe 30.

Where are we getting the money?

So is he inept?

Is he mean-spirited?

Is he an idologue?

Why are these crazy things?

And they look in their everyday lives.

They think, well, maybe I can escape the border or what we've talked about, foreign policy, but they're paying $150 to fill up for gas.

They can't afford the prices in the hardware store.

They can't afford food.

And it's new to them.

They can't remember any time in the history of the United States when people were talking about food shortages.

And then they look at Afghanistan, Jack, and they said, $1 billion, that embassy, $80 billion of hardware we left with the Taliban, $30 or $40 billion

in the whole Middle East project, $300 million alone for Bagram's remote.

What is going on?

We can't figure this out.

And then when they were asking these questions, they were told that, you know, when somebody shoots a bunch of people in a mall, it's because of gun control.

It's these phantom guns, these shadow guns, these ghost guns.

They're doing it and they're saying, no, they're not.

I mean, these are guns that are stolen.

The people who make their own weapons that are illegal, these are not the guns that are doing this.

Don't go after the legal person, or it's abortion.

They want to take away your abortion rights, or it's something that doesn't have anything to do with these existential issues that I just talked about, and they can't figure it out.

And

why doesn't America no longer work?

As I recall, I said, you know, these were all self-induced.

There was no war, there was no, I don't know, earthquake or tsunami that caused this economic dislocation.

You can say COVID exacerbated it, but that was two years ago.

What I'm saying is that this was a Biden plan to borrow a lot of money and give incentives for people not to be productive but to stay home at a time when there was natural post-COVID demand.

And we had a classic situation of too much money and too much demand and very few supplies.

And

when they look for Biden, the second thing they're bewildered about in the larger picture, Jack, is that he doesn't seem to care.

He doesn't seem to care about anything other than mask

or screaming and yelling about guns or you know, racist or bias, but nobody ever hears him say,

i'm going to build 500 miles of additional wall i'm going to bring back an end to catch and release i'm going to make refugees apply for asylum overseas he doesn't say any of that you know he says oh i'll get the strategic petroleum reserves they said well if you want to do that you're going to get a million barrels but you could get a million barrels by doing

you know the keystone pipeline and anwar give you more but he doesn't answer these questions he just is in la-la land and so they're saying wow they're not only self-induced,

but I guess ideological constraints have stopped him from even considering the solution.

And

the final thing is he blames people.

Putin did it.

Trump did it.

You did it.

And they don't like that.

And so then he finally, I should add, fourthly, he says, Presidents aren't responsible for this.

That's their new narrative of the left.

It's not Biden's fault.

Who could stop inflation?

Who could stop illegal immigration?

It's going to happen.

It's going to happen.

Who could stop COVID?

That's almost like saying all the things that Joe told you during the campaign that he was going to do.

Remember that no malarkey, Joe?

No malarkey.

That was all a lie.

He can't do it.

He's impotent.

There's no way you can address these issues.

They're existential cosmic issues.

Americans don't have that mentality.

So the fact they're floating trial balloons like this tells me they have no answers for the problems they created.

Victor, I'm going to throw in a curveball here because as we were recording this podcast and we recorded another one previous today, the French election results came in.

This was the runoff between Macron and Le Pen, and Macron has prevailed handsomely, 58 to 42 percent.

I don't think it should be

not scoffed at.

That's the wrong phrase, but Le Pen's numbers may be surprisingly large given her, I don't know, the baggage she brings to the table, but it means four out of every ten French voters are kind of sick of.

But they're going to have six more years of Emmanuel Macron.

I didn't raise this before.

We were talking about what we were going to talk about on the show today, but if you had any quick thoughts on that, have added.

If not, we'll maybe talk about it next episode.

Well, Macron had all the machinery of the EU endorsed him.

It was a NATO crisis at the moment.

The public was worried worried about whether Le Pen would be deterrent toward Russia.

And to be frank, when you had the American vote and you had the Brexit vote,

as bad as a malign Trump, nobody believed he was, you know, a racist or he had ties with people who were exclusionists.

And there was not an easy...

hard, hard right target behind Brexit.

And so with Le Pen, you're right.

So he's able to, and you look at some of the things that he campaigned on it was that she was a virtual fascist and she was going to turn back all of the ecumenicalism and then he took all the stuff that she wanted so he not only demonized her as an extremist but he kind of gave indications he was going to be tougher on immigration and he was going to have a more nationalist policy and so he expropriated the agenda then he put his blow-dry hair on it and basically said, I'm a presentable person and she's not.

She's the Marjorie Taylor Greene of France.

That's what he campaigned on.

That's still pulling 42%, not unimpressive.

Hey, Victor, I have one other thing I want to add, and that is listening to one of your more recent podcasts with Sammy.

You were talking about George McGovern, and you mentioned how he had purchased some place and the reality of life descended upon him about what it's like to run a business.

And that place was the Stratford Inn.

I live actually about a mile from it by sheer coincidence.

It still exists.

I didn't know that.

No, no, it doesn't.

It was there for ages as anyone who's driven up or down the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut in days of yore over the Sikorsky Bridge, which is named after Igor Sikorsky, the great helicopter inventor.

And right across the street from the Stratford Inn is the headquarters for Sikorsky helicopters.

So Blackhawk helicopters are made there.

But yeah, a long time ago, McGovern purchased that.

And I know because he talked to Bill Buckley, who was a friend, about I can't believe this when you, all the regulations of government that make this impossible, you know, to run between local, state, and federal government.

It's now, it was sold and it's now an assisted living place that happened a long time ago, but it just geographically warmed my heart to hear you talk about something so close.

Anyway, that said, I want to thank our listeners for listening.

And today we are number nine on the charitable standards for political podcasts in the nation.

And that must mean we're doing something right.

And that must mean lots of people are listening.

And we appreciate that.

And we appreciate that you appreciate the wisdom he shares.

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Some people leave comments.

And here's one.

It's a little bit longer, but I think it's cool.

And this is from M.

L.

Foster.

And it's titled, Thank You for Clear, Rational Common Sense.

And here's what M.

L.

Foster writes, as a former native of Southern California's inland empire, I grew up in a predominantly Hispanic, formerly agricultural community, similar to Victor Hansen.

I heard Professor Hansen for the first time while listening to a conservative LA talk radio station.

Then I read his book.

I was immediately struck by his clear thinking, boldly factual and concise communications as he elaborated on subjects important to me in the same context or frame of reference as I.

Common sense exudes from this man.

Since retirement a few years back, most of my entire family and good many friends have fled California back to family origins in Oklahoma and Texas.

One of the people I think about daily who's still slugging it out in California is Professor Hansen.

Anytime I'd see he was scheduled to deliver news commentary or a documentary, I'd watch or read.

It's as if I'm watching or listening to a neighbor or family member with the same outlook and experience as I talking about the same relevant issues, problems, or apprehensions in a dramatically simple, rational, at a dramatically higher level of common sense.

Slow to trust social media.

I recently loaded the, it says Parker app.

I'm not sure what the Parker app, and quickly happened across Professor Hansen, which led me to this podcast.

While listening to my fourth or fifth episode in a row, my teenage children were in the car and I did something I rarely do with their short attention captive.

I pointed to the car's media screen and told them that if there was one person out there to listen to and trust every word they say, it's this man, Victor Davis Hansen.

Don't forget that.

My belief is understanding Professor Hansen's words, thoughts, ideas, as well as a few others like him, will yield useful information to make decisions or confirmations to live your life today and in the future.

Thank you, Professor Hansen.

That's M.

L.

Foster.

That's a very

sweet and I appreciate that.

And

that's why we do these podcasts, because I have this gut.

instinct that there's a lot of you out there and we all know what's going on and we're all frustrated at the deception involved and they're all going to have a reckoning and it's going to be peaceful democratic but overwhelming and they know it's coming i've used that metaphor before they're tied to their own railroad tracks with ideological rope and the locomotive called the midterms is coming right at them and they're squirming they're doing anything but they they created this and they're going to atone for it November.

And it's going to be big.

And I think we talked about a 40 to 56 seat correction when they already basically were even in the House almost in the Senate.

But it's coming when they're dead even now.

So it's going to have even more importance when it hits.

And there's nothing they can do about it because they'll lie, they'll say anything, they'll bring in anything, but it's too late.

People have made up their mind.

American people are very funny.

They're very open-minded.

But once they make up their mind, they say, that's it.

I'm done.

Then they

vote.

Oh, I can hardly wait till November, Victor.

So, hey, my friend, thanks so much for sharing the great wisdom that you did today.

And we'll be, you and I will be back in a few days recording other episodes.

But until then, thanks, everyone.

Thanks for listening to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody.