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Hello, everyone.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

We hope everyone is enjoying their holy days.

We have Ramadan month going on.

We have the beginning of Passover for Jews and we have the Christians in their Easter weekend.

So we hope everybody has an opportunity to commune with their God.

So we have a lot on the schedule today.

Frank James, Elon Musk, and the Moskva, I hope I pronounced that right, which was sunk in the Black Sea.

And then something special for Christians.

Not so much we're singling out any particular religion, but Victor does happen to know a lot about the New Testament.

And so we're going to ask him a few questions on that New Testament.

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

All right, welcome back.

So, Victor, I hope everything is going well for you.

I think I was noticing today, because I know I always ask you, how is it going?

And you tell me how the weather is and the drought is going.

But I was noticing something today on that issue that, you know, nature doesn't change.

And I think that's why people like to go into nature or national parks exist so that they can get away from this human world that is often in change.

So, you know, for example, you can have the Russians putting huge artillery holes in the ground in the Ukraine, and yet here, out here in Central Valley, nature is growing wildly to create all sorts of fruits and nuts.

And I kind of appreciate that today.

Yeah,

it gives you a regularity, a schedule, a predictability.

And I always, I was very fortunate, I think that half the country grew up with people who were born in the 19th century and half didn't.

And when you had that opportunity, feel bad that my children didn't.

But I was born in 1953, and my grandfather was born in 1890, and the other one was born in 1889.

So when I came of age, say at 73, they were already in their 80s, but I remember them at five and six when they were in their 60s.

And so I inherited a glimpse into a premodern world.

And my gosh, what a treat or enlightenment.

Like you look back and you think, wow, they live, you know, imagine that.

They, they live by the nature, you know, well, Victor, get now we're going to go to the high school graduation tonight.

And, you know, between the 10th and the 15th of June, every year we'll get that cold wind, that storm will spin in and we'll need a coat.

Or

boys, it's time to pick those walnuts up.

And we go out and pick the walnuts up.

And then we're going to do the persimmon trees and they're just all self-sufficient stuff for the winter, like we were squirrels.

Yeah.

And then I, it was so strange.

You'd work all day and you'd think, wow, this was a drag.

What a workday we had.

That's nothing better, you boys.

Boy.

And guess what, Victor?

Grandma, your grandmother's got a fresh apples in the porch and a frosty root beer with a scoop of ice cream for each.

Oh my God, what a life we have.

Can you believe it?

What paradise.

It was this people who, I think, just in this little.

It's not a ranch.

It's not a ranch.

You know, when I was looking back at the farm when I took over, and my brothers, I had a neighbor, and he said, I'll never forget, he was a very brilliant guy.

He's from India, and he had leveled his entire place.

We were in a beautiful, it was like Habatan out of Tolkien's the Habit or Lord of the Rings.

There were hills, a pond.

And the modern farmer, when the cat three or four came of age in the 1940s, they leveled it because it was all furrow irrigation 600 feet you turned on the irrigation it went right down the furrow and you went home not us we had it all pipelines so different elevations it took an engineer to figure it out but we were only doing like two acres for an orchard or eight acres for a vineyard we had all these weird names called go down and irrigate the vineyard between the ponds or go over there and get the sandhill irrigated.

Victor and our neighbor would go, wow,

what are you boys doing?

But it was beautiful.

It was like Tuscany.

It really was.

Everybody came to look at the farm because there were hills and he had never bulldozed it.

He would never bulldoze it.

There were alleyways, trees lined.

So you'd roll down your window and get a peach or a Santa Rosa plum, Alberta peach.

But it was uneconomical unless you were willing to work all the time because it was so labor inefficient.

And he worked all the time.

And he said once to me, this neighbor, he said, you know, you're going to go broke unless you level that whole damn place.

Just tear the crap out and level it.

And I said, now, why would we do that?

He said, your grandfather lived to work and you boys work to live.

Understand that difference?

You like the good life.

He liked the good life of work and sweat and toil.

And only he could do that.

And he created, he'd look at the land to create.

beauty and you look at the land to create a living.

And that's good because that's how you survive, but you cannot do what he's doing.

What he was saying, it was the 19th century.

My grandfather said, How do you live on a penny and a half a pound for raisins?

Excuse me.

One penny for one pound of raisins is what they got during the Depression.

I have all of his diaries, so I read them.

I've read them my entire life, and they're very tragic.

And it was like, I'm going to get a penny a pound, and I'm going to put a half a penny for each pound in the bank because I'm going to do that.

As he said to me, you know, Victor, life is a catastrophe, and someone is going to die, and someone's going to get married, and someone's going to buy a home, and somebody's going to need to get buried in this big family of ours, and they're going to need something.

And most people don't think like that, but I do.

And so, everybody would kind of caricature him for being very stingy because he wore these railroad pants, overalls, and he ate liver and cottage cheese, and he put everything away, but he was the most generous person.

Nobody ever remarked that, oh, oh, my daughter died, oh, my daughter's crippled, she'll have, oh, we're going to get married.

We don't have, go see Mr.

Davis, go see Grandpa Reese, go see dad.

And he would pull out that checkbook and he would write a check for an entire six months of farming expenses.

And then he'd be back to near zero and he'd save and spin shot himself.

Then he'd write another check for somebody.

And he kept everybody going.

And it sounds like he really knew.

Yeah, he knew really how to predict people.

So if I could use that as a segue to Elon Musk, he seems kind of unpredictable a little bit, but very interesting bid for Twitter at, I think, $43 billion for Twitter.

And a lot of disturbance of stocks, the stock went down.

Steifel said that the stock was unstable because of a, quote, full-blown Elon circus.

I love that.

um quote so i had to bring that in here but what are your thoughts on elon musk's efforts to take over Twitter?

And will it lead to, I think my bigger question is, is it going to lead to big cultural change that the left seems to be worrying about and the right seems to be happy to expect?

Well, you start with the premise that in societies, there is a rare breed, maybe one tenth of one-tenth of one percent.

We all have gifts.

Some of them are never tapped or discovered.

They're innate, but we don't appreciate them in people.

But they have a gift to understand capitalism and how money works.

And we know them from the past as J.P.

Morgan or Andrew Carnegie or J.D.

Rockefeller or the Mellons or the Guggenheims.

And our generation, there are certain particular people, Warren Buffett, Charles Munger, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg.

They have a knack not just to create a new, they're not at, these are different people than Alexander Graham Bell or Thomas Edwardson or the right, but they are the inventive.

These are people who can take these ideas and make them into an empire.

And they love doing it, not just for the profit, although they're profit-minded.

And he's one of these rare people.

But what separates him from a Bill Gates

or a Mark Zuckerberg is he's multi-dimensional.

So he brings this.

exuberance and this know-how to look at look at a problem and get a solution and then magnify how it can be expanded to everybody and make a ton of money.

But he's not interested in the money to live it up as he is to use the money to do another one.

And the result is, if you need an electric car, he created the entire industry and they've never caught up to him.

And everybody who had tried having a motor company other than the big three,

Ford, GM, and Chrysler, had failed in the modern era.

Not him.

His stock is worth more than all of GE.

And it's going to be worth more and more as the price of energy apparently will be artificially constructed.

Space, he's space.

Rapid internet all over the world.

Ukrainians are using his space satellite.

So now he's looking at Twitter and social media and he brings all that expertise, but he's not in it for the money.

He wants the money, but he really wants to cause chaos.

That's true.

And he looks at these people that are one-dimensional in Silicon Valley, the Apple people, the Google people, and they have monopolies and they're smug.

And he thinks.

that just as there's impediments to space travel or there's impediments to rapid internet use or there's impediments to electric wide-scale application of electric cars and he's going to solve it he sees this as a retrogade reactionary smug incestuous group that needs to be blown up and why does he believe that because he as he said you know first of all Twitter is kind of a fraud.

It doesn't have 330 million followers.

It's got bots.

Second, it's not very profitable.

I think it's ninth in the social media revenue ratings.

And then, more importantly, it does some very terrible things.

It affects elections.

It just puts a lid on the Hunter Biden laptop story.

And it runs with the fake plot to kidnap the Michigan governor that was half cooked up by the FBI.

And it bans the former president of the United States.

It banned my wonderful colleague Scott Atlas.

It banned all these people, but it will not ban the Taliban.

It will not ban an Iranian terrorist.

It will not ban a Russian oligarch.

So it's not just hard left and against free expression.

It's lunatic, crazy.

So he's going in there and saying, I'm going to blow this thing up.

And I know it's got up to 70, but I'll offer 54.

You should take it because it's too high anyway, because your company is not very profitable.

And more important, here's, I think, the subtext.

These Republicans are going to take the House and the Senate, and there may be a 30 or 40% chance that the blowout is so big we've never imagined it, and they could take the Senate with 60 votes.

If they do that, they run the government, and Joe Biden is confirmed in his dottage.

In other words, they can pass a law, Biden can veto it, they can override the veto.

I don't think that's going to happen, but he doesn't know.

But anyway, he senses the country is sick.

of this monopoly and they know it and they won't change or sort of like the Democrats Democrats heading to Armageddon in November, they won't change.

But he's kind of, I think he's saying to them, I can change you, but if you don't want to have my help, you're going to get it from these red, mad, angry Republicans, and they're going to shake you up.

And then he's also saying to them,

you got, you know, you kind of destroyed Parlaire.

It's kind of resurrected a bit.

Are you going to, what are you going to do with true social, the Trump, and all these things that we all say they can't make it?

Well, they said the same thing about Tesla.

Don't count Trump and Nunes out.

I think they'll probably make it.

So what he's saying is you're getting competitors on one hand that are going to be open fora so that people can express their ideas without violence.

Trump, true social is not going to, it's not going to censor left-wing people the way that Twitter and Facebook do right-wing people.

So that, and then there's a final challenge that Musk is looking at.

The younger generation, I don't know much about social media.

I have never written my own tweet.

I think staff has written stuff.

My point is this, that these young kids, when you talk to them, they're on TikTok, they're on Snapchat, they're on you, you know, they're not on Facebook and Twitter.

So the market, those are becoming ossified.

I never thought I could imagine it that way, but it seems like Twitter is the mature.

professional classes and Facebook is people in their 50s and 60s with family albums and all that but the

edgy, you know, the young kids that are glued to their cell phone, they're not doing Facebook.

So what Musk is saying is there's a lot of centrifugal forces and movement.

There's a government ready to pounce on you guys for your probably illegal behavior.

There are competitions that are going to offer an open fora.

And there's new social media that are making you ossified that you may not be able to gobble up with your monopoly money.

You may, you may not.

They own YouTube, for example, Face.

So, put all that together.

This is a good deal because I can

take it.

Yeah, Twitter.

Yeah, they should take it.

And if they don't take it, I think he's basically implying that the shareholders would sue the board for

abject incompetence or ill will or something, because that's a great deal.

And I guess he's on paper worth $270 billion.

So the $54 billion,

those are levels of magnitude I can't imagine.

I just know that if those ratios are comparable to any other people I know that are pretty wealthy, they're not liquid.

So

I bet he's worth 270 billion on paper with all these projects.

I bet his outflow is such.

I bet some of these new companies are not yet profitable.

So I bet he's probably liquid with only, I don't know, 10%, which is 24 billion, which makes him one of the most liquid people in the world.

But 54 billion is a lot of money it is but if you're a bank i don't know it sounds like a good risk to me but i'm not a banker everybody likes him because even you know he's i mean everybody likes him because so many of the right of the wrong people hate him so i know people will say that i can't stand that person and they hate elon musk therefore i like elon musk i don't really care that all of those guys are narcissists and egomaniacs but i like mavericks and i like non-traditionalists i like people who have contempt for that smug i'm you know i'm mark zuckerberg i'm bill gay you listen to me i'm the dalbo set and he doesn't he represents peter till's another one that's like that that i really admire yeah well you've made they're there to shake things up yeah you made it sound like Twitter will be ahead of the curve if they allow for them.

Yeah, if they take it.

Well, he said

not only that he's not going to get on the board, that was kind of a faint you know i'm going to get on the board and they all went into panic

nah if i'm on the board i'm wedded to your company i might want to blow it up that's right now he says well i may not even

i may not buy all of it you know i might even sell my shares i think i'm trying to remember but i think it was uh

oh what's his name I'll remember his name in a minute, the big millionaire, a billionaire that tried this earlier with Twitter, like three or four years ago.

and he he bought he bought a few hundred million and it didn't quite work to get control with the company but he was a good conservative sayer paul uh singer paul singer he came in with his investment hedge fund company and he bought a lot of shares of twitter and i think they kind of were trying to ease i think they did ease dorsey out they thought they would get a conservative or a balanced and i don't think it quite worked

the arabs hate the saudis hate elon musk they don't you know, the Saudi royal family owns, I think, the second largest shares, and they don't want him.

Why would you want to open a company that was completely unfettered when you more or less know it's corrupt now?

And not only does it censor left-wing, but you basically tell them, don't attack the house of Saud.

You know what I mean?

Why would you want to open it up?

All right.

So let's turn from a guy that's doing some good for us and helping us in our world to Frank James, someone who is creating and committing a lot of evil.

So nobody said this yet.

And I know that getting shot is not a good thing, but he shot 33 times in a subway car at one that was full at passengers.

And he hit 10 of them, but he didn't really even.

kill anybody.

I know some of them might be badly in the hospital.

So of course that's not good.

But what a bad shot is the first thing I thought.

And that was probably a good thing.

Like evil doesn't learn to use their

military arms.

Like, you know, for example, those guys in Benghazi, like super well-trained, you know,

be careful.

The Las Vegas sniper was a crack shot and he systematically killed dozens of people.

That's true.

Yeah, that's true.

This guy was.

They're all insane and crazy,

but that's no excuse.

But this guy was, in his life was so messed up and incompetent.

I mean, he was out of shape.

He was ranting.

There's videos of him ranting racist dribble

all the time.

So he was a bad guy.

He was an abject racist.

And he had been picked up 12 different times by cops in New York and New Jersey.

And so we all wonder, how does this happen?

How does the FBI not see somebody who is a social media fixture who threatens people's lives, who walks down the streets of New York shouting insults, who's been arrested for all sorts of violations, and people have reported, and yet it has the time to go investigate the Virginia School Board parents controversy, or it can go out and find James O'Keefe's supposed one-time encounter with the Biden-daughter diary, or it can put onto wraps on her laptops.

It's kind of, this is again and again, it reminds me of the Sarnap brothers, you know, remember them, the Boston marathon bombers the the russians of all people warned the fbi that these guys have gone into your country and they are islamists as terrorists and we didn't do anything and yet it's commentary on a lot of things but i would say something a little bit controversial with this case of the subway shooter but also i'm trying to remember the fellow in waukeshaw is that named bennett was that his name this is uh or brooks was it brooks yeah Brooks.

Brooks.

And he fit the same profile.

Remember, he had a whole social media presence where he talked about inflicting violence on white people.

And

the point that I'm making is it was very similar.

He killed, was it six people in a walker show and he ran down 60.

He had the hatred on there.

And it drew out BLM people from Milwaukee who said, you know, this is the start of the revolution.

No one said anything.

They had said

that the Rittenhouse trial was about race.

It wasn't.

This was a racial hate crime.

And yet they didn't give a description of the guy as black initially.

They kept it silent and he did this.

And my point is this, is that in the first hours, we were told, what, that this guy was a dark-skinned suspect and he was five, five and heavy set.

And why didn't they just say he was black?

That would be a helpful description because they were so, they were more worried about

seeming to be politically incorrect than they were saving lives, is what I'm trying to say.

So they kept his race quiet for a whole day, and that was unthinkable.

And then the left is very funny.

They say words matter.

That's what we were told.

And that what you say can trickle down to a nut.

So if you say anything that is politically uncorrect, or perhaps even overtly or subtly or systemically racist, then some nut is going to take that and see that as a green light.

Okay, I don't know if that's true or false.

I can see the argument behind it that you have to be very careful about your speech because you do not know how it will affect those that are not completely all there.

And they will act out your rarefied abstractions into very concrete realities.

Okay, so maybe this is what Mr.

James did.

Maybe this is what the Waukesha killer did.

In other words, they listened to that drumbeat every night on

MSNBC.

They listened to Joy Reed.

They listened to Don Lamon on CNN.

They listened to Mark Milley ranting about White Rage or Lloyd Austin.

And do they ever say that what I'm getting at is, do a Lloyd Austin

or a Mark Milley in front of Congress hold up a piece of paper and say, here is this data sheet that I have of my Pentagon million person in the field, Army, Navy, Air Force.

And this is the percentage of the people on social media that have expressed white hatred.

These are the members of the Klan.

These are the members, they never do that.

They just say, This is the problem.

Do they say, These are people that are white supremacists, proud boy, and these are the people in Antifa that we think, and these are the people in BLM.

So we're going to look at extremism.

No, they just spout this crap and they don't care how it sounds and they don't care about what the effects of it are.

So, what we've done is we have created this new term called white rage, white privilegy, white supremacy.

And notice the word white.

And that means it can be Jane Fonda can be white.

It can mean Elon Musk can be white.

It can mean Mark Zuckerberg is white.

But it can also mean the janitor in Birmingham, Alabama is white.

It can also mean the unemployed forklift driver in Bakersfield is white.

And then those are the oppressors collectively without exception.

And then the oppressed are what?

Opa, who's mad because some Swiss person in a boutique didn't show her right away a $38,000 crocodile purse.

Remember that?

Yes, I do.

Yeah.

Or Michelle Obama, who says she's worried from one of her three mansions that somebody might attack her black daughter.

I understand every parent has that word, but if that were to be true, it's not going to necessarily happen in her neighborhood.

And the assailant statistically is more likely to be black.

So my point is that every black person then becomes a victim and every white person, and we have no margin for individuality.

You know what I'm saying?

So Tom Soule is not a victim.

No.

Shelby Seal doesn't feel he's a victim.

The Hispanic people I see every day in these parts are upwardly mobile.

That's why they're going to vote.

Half of them are going to vote for a Republican candidate because they feel they don't want to be condescended as victim.

And the guy in Bakersfield that drives a forklift or the tire changer in Dayton, Ohio is not a victimizer like a Mark Zuckerberg may be.

So it's co-crazy.

But yet when you do this collective and you say white, white, white, white, it's like the South and Jim Crow saying black, black, black, black.

They gave no ability to individualize anything, as if all white people in the South in 1945 were wonderful and all black people were terrible.

Well, now we're saying all white people are terrible.

I'm not exaggerating.

You remember there was that Yale lecture.

I remember this because I wrote about it.

I think her name was Kill Alani or something.

And she said she had this fantasy.

She gave a lecture at Yale and says, I have a fantasy, you know, and I just kind of dream of taking this revolver I have.

I had it in my dream.

I had a revolver and I just kind of dreamed.

And you know what?

I dreamed of shooting a white person in the head.

And there was another guy, too.

I think his name was Young.

And he wrote in New York Times.

He was of New York Times.

He said, you know, whiteness, it melts the polar ice caps.

It shortens our life.

It pollutes our air.

It destroys everybody.

It kills people.

And then

does that have an effect on Daryl Brooks to hear that in the popular, be reported in the media?

And this guy named Elie Mostell, he was on TV the other night, you know, attacking Herschel Walker.

He's the guy who said, you know, when COVID's over, I don't think white people got any better.

I'm going to limit my exposure.

His wife works for a stockbroker company.

And then there was that, I'm on a rant now, but these images are coming to me.

And then there was Obama's presidential painter.

Remember that guy?

Dende Willie or Wiley or something?

And he had this, his art form was black beheadings of white people.

Remember that he would take classical art.

and he'd change it so a black person would be like perseus and the white person would be medusa and they asked him about it he was a presidential painter said oh it's kind of a kill whitey thing

well my point is i think that guy's name was brooks the driver and and he and frank james that filters down just as the white racism filters down and they act on it and yet there's no culpability for those people to say it and you know we're going to get into a hobby and bellum omnia contra omnis a war of everybody against everybody if if we all disengage and go tribal.

Tribalism, as I said before, is like nuclear proliferation.

Once one tribe goes tribal, the other tribe says, you know what, for my own survival, I'm going tribal.

And, you know,

we should have learned something about what happened in the 1970s in Lebanon or the 1980s in Latin America.

or 1990s in Rwanda and Yugoslavia or the 2000s in Iraq.

The common denominator is tribalism.

Nigeria.

Yeah, somebody has to speak up and say it is not racist.

It is not racist.

It is not racist to say that a Joy Reed, who every single night starts to hammer white, white, white, white, or Whoopi Goldberg talks about the Holocaust as white on, white, white, white.

Or people say the Ukrainian war is white, white, white, or Mark Milley, white, white.

These people are racist and they are inciting racial violence.

And it trickles down.

And you get nuts of all races, but in this particular manifestation of it, you get a Brooks or a James, and they will act out on it, and they will tell you they're doing it.

They will post social media.

And then, you know, maybe the mayor, who everybody is very conflicted about in New York.

because of his contradictory statements, but when he says, you know, these types of violences represent oppression and all that, Frank James is not oppressed.

He's certainly not starving.

He was, maybe he could say he was mentally unstable, but he had a whole history of threatening people.

What he said on those videos about Asian people was some of the most vile racist hatred in the world.

I think people are going to have to say, I don't care what your race is.

If you express a racist thought, you are a racist.

I don't care how much money you have.

I don't care what color you are.

If you do that, that's going to trickle down to every nut.

And your particular type of racism is going to be a justification for him to act on it and so to that psychiatrist in new york who went to yale and gave a lecture and says she wants she dreams of shooting white people in the head and that was all over the media people like you are responsible for triggering these crazy racists they're waiting out there for some little green button to be pushed yeah some validation yeah absolutely absolutely and i hear it you know all the time in universities when i see this word

we've got to confess our white privilege.

There's two things I think.

You live on a different planet than most people.

And number two, you are privileged.

If you want to confess your white privilege and just say the following, as a wealthy, white, elite, zip code, blue chip, influential, privileged person, I want to confess my white emphasis of that.

But I do not speak.

of the 230 so-called white people in the United States.

I don't speak for 75 of them who are poor and live before below the poverty line or in the lower middle class.

I don't speak for them.

They live in a world I can't even imagine.

And they have nothing in common with me because they share the same pigmentation.

They don't have Latino maids and they do not have people doing their yard work.

They're just different.

And I don't live in the same world as they do.

I wish they'd say that.

Yes, I think maybe it's breaking down because my impression in academia is that they don't know how to get away from making all of the people of color or the marginalized people victims, but they want to and they want to impress on us agency, but they can't have both of those things at once.

So it's starting to be quite a quandary for anybody in academia.

You know, do you say this particular group were all victims?

Or are you going to pull out the people in that group that had agency and did things and try to say you can't have it both ways you know very marxist that's right out of das kapital that there's whole collectives that are you know oppressors or mouse will red book these are the oppressors you always have to have a collective that makes no allowances for individuality yeah it used to be defined by class or income or inheritance now it's classified by race not class

okay victor so we need to take a moment for a few messages and we'll come right back.

And I still have a few things on this case to talk to you about, but let's first listen to these messages.

Okay, welcome back.

And Victor, where was the New York Police Department in all this?

Because Frank James turned himself in.

and in fact called crime stoppers, I think, to turn himself in.

And so the whole case went on around where the cops were running all over New York, who knows what they were doing.

And it sounded like Frank James was out on an eating spree.

And then he decided, well, you know, I'm going to call Crime Stop.

They had a description of where he was going to go.

That's true.

He was in a pickle.

So my point is, well, I think your point is of this self-congratulatory society.

So every time there's sort of an obvious arrest, we get this lecture from the FBI how wonderful and brave and heroic they are.

And there are many agents, but they never say anything about the San Bernardino terrorists they missed or the Sarna brothers they missed or why they are, you know.

storming somebody's house that's a Trump supporter or something like that, or James O'Keefe, they're going after him, or they're bragging that they're undercover at the school board meetings, or they help stage the kidnapping of a Michigan, supposedly helped stage a fantasy of kidnapping the Michigan governor.

They never tell us about that.

So yeah, but that's a therapeutic society.

Everybody, you know, something happens in a tragedy, and I don't care what the tragedy is, whether it's a school shooting or a fire, and I understand first people, but before you hear anything, the person gets up and starts thanking thousands of people.

And I'm thinking, and often when you read the details, it's some guy was driving along the side of the road and he just jumped out and saved the person.

And so that's self-congratulation

is a trademark of this society.

And you see it everywhere in university.

I'm always shocked when somebody talks about Dean Solana and Professor So-and-so.

I think if you people are so great,

then how did you cook up a system where $1.7 trillion in student debt as you raise the price of tuition movement board higher than the rate of inflation?

Or why are students leaving your university with less knowledge on when they came in?

And you're congratulating yourself all the time.

It's just, it's kind of insidious.

Yeah, it sure is.

And the last thing on this, Frank James, is they're obviously going to mount an insanity defense of him.

But my hope is that we'll get a judge, like in the Juicy Smallett case, and there'll be some reckoning and not.

There was no reckoning.

Well, Sammy, he's out.

Okay, but he got a lecture.

He did get a lecture.

He got a lecture and then he he said, oh, poor Joe, it's really cruel in prison.

And my life will be threatened by horrible white racists.

They let him out.

And what did the first thing he do?

He did a video or a rap song or something where he accused everybody of being racist and he was completely innocent.

They should have made him go to jail for all of the racial strife that he conjured up and the lies under oath that he.

spread and all the damage he did to the police department.

And there was no hope.

Yeah, they've got to, they've got to stop letting these guys off on these insanities what did he what did nancy pelosi and joe biden have in common not their sonality or but beyond their sonality they both were one of the first to sympathize with juicy when he concocted that fantasy and what a racist country along with kamala harris they can't just take a deep breath is what i'm saying and say

i don't think you can throw bleach on somebody at two in the morning and put a rope around their neck while they eat a sandwich and call on their cell phone and beat you off with kung fu like kick.

Just a little crazy for white MAGA people to know empire episode by episode and to be into a liberal, you know, prowling around with a noose in hand waiting for somebody to symbolically lynch like Juicy.

And so they should have known that, but they didn't care.

It was, it was redukes of the Covington kids, the Duke La Crosse.

At some point, it's all going to accumulate.

And I don't think this election in November is about race, but I do think it's about Joe Biden and this hard left agenda, whether we define it as not prosecuting crimes or the crime wave, the smash and grab phenomenon or the inflation or the energy or the open board.

But there is a reckoning coming.

And I think it's, I don't think these political scientists are aware of it.

They keep murmuring things like, they do the following.

Have you noticed, Sammy?

They'll say things like, well, there there are people who think,

they think they could be 50 seats, but that would be something

because

the House is on like 2010.

It's almost even and the Senate is even and five senate.

That would be amazing.

You'd get like a 55 or 56.

That couldn't happen.

Well, yeah, it can happen because A lot of people say, you know what?

I'm a Democrat, but I'm not a Democrat with $7 diesel fuel.

Or I'm a Democrat, but I'm not a Democrat when I go down to Beverly Hills and somebody follows me home to take my Mercedes and hit me over the head and take my Rolex.

And I'm a Democrat as long as my kid can get into Harvard or Stanford, but not when they use race and gender against him after I paid, you know, $300,000 for prep school.

That's testing my Democratic

features.

And so a lot of these people are going to go into those polls and they're going to look around.

Knowing the left-wing mind, they'll be home with their mail-in ballot and they will check a Republican and then they'll look around their own home and see if anybody's watching over their shoulder.

They're so guilt-ridden.

And then they'll go to their cocktail party and say, Oh, we lost.

I voted.

You know, we lost.

And they're going to vote opposite of what they say because they have no choice.

This is Armageddon that this party is leading us to.

Yeah, it sure is.

Well, let's turn then to a grim, but maybe, I don't know, I want to say hopeful or inspiring situation in the Black Sea.

We have a ship, the Moskva, that was sunk somehow.

The Russians claim that it was an accidental, the ammunition area was blown up, and the Ukrainians say that they sunk it with their Neptune missiles.

So, very interesting because it was the flagship for the Russian fleet in the Black Sea.

And so, some exciting news in the Ukrainian war, but but exciting, but I don't see the war quite ending.

But what are your thoughts on the war in Ukraine?

Well, everybody has a thought about the strategic outcome and what the negotiations are going to look at.

And we've all pointed this out on numerous podcasts that Ukraine's got 43 million people.

They've got 148.

They've got 30 times the territory, 10 times GDP.

So Ukraine has some advantages because you do need a three-to-one, supposedly proverbial margin attacker versus defender.

defender and they are being supplied not by a country or two but by the whole western world which has a much greater capacity of munitions production than does russia so there are ways of thinking so now they've sunk a ship we don't know how they did it they claim it was an indigenously built adopted old soviet rocket system that they

refabricated into a shortish ship attack weapon.

I think if that's true, the Russians may have hit the factory and it won't be there, but it may be that these are harpoon missiles, which Joe Biden refused to sell.

And somebody in that administration changed policy and they did sell them.

And they don't want to tell people that was an American or European-made weapon.

But in a larger sense, it's kind of scary because, I mean, there were reported two nuclear weapons on that ship.

And that was the Moscow was the pride of the Russian fleet.

By that, I mean it was supposedly somewhat like our Aegis-class frigate, carrier, destroyer.

We don't really have the same World War II classifications of destroyer, escort, destroyer, light cruiser, medium cruiser, heavy cruiser, battleship based on the tonnage of displacement.

But this thing was about 12,000 tons, which would have made it a heavy cruiser in World War II.

And last time one was sunk, which you remember in the Falcons war, the Belgrano, and there were 300,000 people on that ship, 350.

This had, because it's automated, it had about 500 people that got got off, supposedly.

When they say it was a pride of the Russian fleet, it wasn't the size, but remember Putin's 10 years ago bragged that he was going to redo the military and particularly the Navy?

And this was the crown jewel of the Black Sea Fleet.

When you see an aerial picture of the Russian ships at the military base at Crimea, it just dwarfs the other Russian ships.

And it was supposed to be a Western-style, sophisticated radar, computer-equipped ship with all sorts of defense mechanisms.

Although being Russian, if you look at their munitions mentality going back to World War II and before, it's always offense, offense, offense, offense.

It's never survivability or defense.

In other words, you build a tank, you want it to be able to inflict punishment, artillery inflict punishment, not make sure the tank shells are in a water encase box at the rear of the tank so it won't blow up the crew.

They're expendable.

So I doubt very seriously whether this had the level of Aegis protection that you would find on its Western counterpart.

And so, but mine getting that larger point, it's like the Spanish Civil War, you know, from 36 all the way to 39, that was the laboratory for World War II.

So that was the first appearance of Stukas.

That was the whole idea of close air support for Blitzkrieg.

There were little tankettes that were used.

And it really showed that although the Soviet weapons were pretty good,

who backed the Republicans, the nationalists had German and Italian weapons, and they tended to be a lot better and their German advisors were a lot better.

And that was supposedly a prequel to what happened in 1939 in Poland.

I think it was accurate.

And then you remember,

I think it was November of 1940, first year of the war, the British decided at Toronto to hit the Italian fleet.

And they came in, they had carriers with torpedoes, especially modified torpedoes with the shallow waters, and they sunk a battleship and injured and basically forced Mussolini to take his beautiful new battleships and move them far to the north out of Mediterranean airspace.

But it was the first one I'm getting at: a carrier torpedo surprise attack.

And that was a year before Pearl Harbor.

But that was the blueprint that woke the Japanese up and said, my God, we could do this to Pearl Harbor.

So when you look at all this, and the Chinese are looking at this, they're thinking, hmm,

so one little missile or two, maybe with some drone help of distracting the defenses, this took out a multi-billion dollar ship, which was providing, you know, sort of radar support, missile support, battery attacks, cruise missile for a large area of that theater.

So what does this tell us about going into Taiwan?

And one Chinese general is saying, ah, this is really good because it shows you that we have thousands of these ship-to-shore missiles and they're better than these indigenously made Ukrainian ones.

So when they put that U.S.

Pacific fleet out there, we can just pick off just a dozen missiles.

It'll go through it.

And the other general said, hmm, yes, we're better than Ukrainians, but maybe the American defenses are much better than the Soviet, the Russian.

And then they're also thinking, but wait a minute, we're going to need some kind of ships to get our guys over to Taiwan, right?

Yeah.

We can't just parachute them in because there's going to be tens of hundreds of thousands of them.

And what if the Taiwanese look at this and all of a sudden they say to the Americans, we need 10,000 harpoons over the next three years, and we're going to put them in bunkers, air, you know, bomb proof bunkers along.

We're going to ring our shore with them.

And we'll be able to sink these Chinese ships with hundreds or thousands of Chinese soldiers on them up to 40 miles away from our coast, halfway.

They won't even get, they'll they'll get halfway and we'll be able to sink them.

So I think this is unfortunately a laboratory and we're looking at a whole new type of war that, you know, this is always happens where there's a challenge, a response, a counter challenge, a counter response.

The same thing is going on with armor.

A lot of people are saying $2 million, $3 million tank and a guy with a shoulder javelin, an $80,000 weapon, or a cheaper British version, or a cheaply made Russian knockoff in Ukraine-made can knock out these Soviet tanks.

And there's just like teams roving.

This is the future of war.

Then somebody else said, ah, yes, this is an aspect of war.

But when it gets down to the nitty-gritty and you're in eastern Ukraine and the sweeping plains, if you put little teams, you know, in furrows, irrigation furrows, or behind one tree in an open expanse, a tank from two miles, away with has pretty good armor with sensors with air support will blast those people out and they won't even be able, you need tanks to get near them that are better, you know, can get near the tanks.

So to fight, fight the Russians now, you need traditional artillery and you need tissional tanks.

Maybe in the streets of Kiev or the suburbs, javelins will do that.

So each person is trying to figure out in this laboratory what it entails for the future of.

the near future of warfare.

Well, speaking of the laboratory, I read one article, and I don't know if this is true or not, but that the Turkish military provided a distraction for the ship and its defenses with drones and that the Ukrainians then hit it from the other side with their missile.

Now, obviously, we don't know if that's true and Turkey seems to be wanting to take a neutral ground, so I'm not sure.

if they would aid the Ukrainians in that fashion.

But, you know, the drones also play into that laboratory are going to be interesting.

Yeah, as long as you don't say the word Turkey did, it's Turkey supplies drones for a price.

And Ukraine finds them cheaper than what we give them or previously had sold them or Europe had sold them.

And cheaper in the sense of

for every dollar per pound of drone, so to speak, they're a cost of benefit.

pretty good deal.

They're not as good as Americans or Europeans, but they're a hell of a lot cheaper.

And so they're buying them en masse from the Turks.

And so, yeah, supposedly they had two or three of these things that came over and, you know, maneuvered around and all of their air defense systems fixated on these threats.

And that gave for a brief moment a pathway through the radar field by which these two missiles were able to come on detectors.

That's the theory.

But Turkey, when they define neutrality, they mean not passive neutrality, but active neutrality, i.e.,

we're going to make money.

So this is a golden opportunity.

So we're going to cut deals with the Russians.

We're going to say, you know what?

You want to come out of the Black Sea?

We can just shut it down.

You'll be cooped up.

Here's the price.

You want to get around sanctions?

We're here to help you.

You need banks and ATMs and apartments for your oligarchs.

They can't go anywhere else.

And they need to monitor the business.

Move them to Constantinople.

for a price.

And then they tell the Ukrainians, we can sell you all the drones you want at double the normal price.

And the Russians are not going to do a thing because we have leverage.

And they're going to tell the Russians, we're going to do all you want.

The Ukrainians are not going to do a thing because we have leverage.

We're selling them drones.

And if the Russians say, but you're killing us, they're saying, yeah, and we're saving more of you by opening up the Red Sea.

And then the Ukrainians saying, but you're killing us with your sanction buster.

And they said, you want your drones or not.

So that's the way the Turks are operating.

Yeah, nothing wrong with a good businessman, I suppose.

But my last question is on the expansion of the war.

You were talking about, well, it's a test, it's a laboratory, and China might be testing, putting its toe in the water at some point.

But how long or would Putin ever consider something like, well, look at all of these allied powers sending weapons.

I'm fighting them anyway.

So I might as well expand this war since the Ukrainians are getting so many supplies from all the various directions.

I mean, I could easily see him expanding into Poland since a lot of things are coming through Poland or maybe some of the other countries on the

he cannot go on, he will not go into Poland.

Why is that?

Unless it turns nuclear, tactically nuclear.

He can't.

He doesn't have the wherewithal because

for all of the flabby incompetence of NATO, it's heads above the Russian army when the Russian army leaves its home territory.

NATO would not do well going into Russia, but you take that army and turn it into an expeditionary force.

It requires sophisticated communications and logistics, and it'll flop.

And NATO has better planes, better pilots, better armor, as good artillery, better drone capability.

And there's 30 nations and they're backed up.

by the United States.

They've just increased their defense budget by $100 million.

So they would destroy any Russian column that went into a NATO country.

And I think they have the will finally to do that.

So he won't do that.

But there are rules that emerged out of the Cold War.

And the rules were simply this.

The world can survive an asymmetrical war with a nuclear power and a non-nuclear or a minor nuclear power.

a Yugoslavia bombing campaign, an Iraq, two Iraq wars, two Afghan wars, one Russian, one American, and nobody intervenes.

That's a major power.

And we're talking basically France and Britain, they have about 170 nukes to 200, Pakistan with 200, India probably with 300, but especially the United States with 6,200 and the Soviets with 7,500.

Maybe the Chinese are...

by now up to three or 500.

My point is this, that there were rules and you allow supply of your enemy.

So we're fighting in Korea and we don't go across the Yalu River and go start bombing Manchuria, Mao Sunu, and then in exchange, the Russians don't intervene.

So what they do is they give Russian pilots and MiG-15s and they supply and they even fly and they have anti-aircraft batteries, but they don't actively say they are.

And we know that, but we don't escalate to using nuclear weapons to stop them.

In Vietnam, they have Russian pilots, they have Russian advisors, 40,000 of them.

They're going right into the harbor of Haiphong and unloading Russian weapons.

The North Vietnamese would have lost that war in year two without Soviet weapons.

They just gave them anything they want.

Same thing about the Middle East wars, especially the 73 war.

When they gave them anti-tank weapons and shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, they almost devastated Israeli armor.

And nobody said, this is all coming from Russia.

And Russian advisors are in Egypt.

And therefore, Russia is responsible.

So we're going to nuke them if they don't stop.

And I can say the same thing about Iran supplying shape charges that killed hundreds of Americans in the 2003 Iraq war.

And Afghanistan, the Russians were supplying the Taliban.

That were the rules.

So when this thing came along, the Americans are telling the Russians.

You made the rules.

You always intervened against us.

You supplied it.

We could have won all these wars if it hadn't been for you.

We lost Vietnam because you supplied these people.

We lost in Afghanistan because you supplied them.

We lost, basically, we got bogged down in Iraq because you sent thousands of arms to these Baathists.

You probably armed ISIS originally.

You're in Syria.

We lost, or we had a deadlock in Korea because you intervened.

So we intervened, but then you intervened by supplying.

So we're going to do the same thing you did.

And that's what we're doing right now.

We are flooding Ukraine just like you did with Vietnam and Korea and all these other wars.

That's the rules.

So you're not supposed to escalate to nuclear war.

You're supposed to find a way to stop it.

If you can't, and we couldn't, we couldn't find a solution once you armed our enemies to the teeth and turned it into a war of liberation against imperialism.

And the insurrectionaries were well armed.

So what we're doing is we're calling you imperialist and neocolonialists, and we're calling the Ukrainians.

an insurrectionary war of liberation and wow they're going to get better weapons than you are and don't dare go nuclear because we never did in the past and we'll see if putin plays by the rule there's one thing that nobody can figure out you get all these weird weird weird weird stories that he's pumped up on steroids that he's suffering from colon cancer that he's gone through bouts of chemotherapy and radiation, that he's in some bunker, that he's paranoid about having no immune system and doesn't want anybody around him.

So he's completely cut off from most human contact communications.

And he feels he's dying.

And if he's feeling he's dying, he would like to be the bold savior of the former Soviet Empire.

And maybe if he can't, he will be considered a martyr.

And that makes him very dangerous if he's cornered.

And so what our president's doing is very, very dangerous.

He's doing the two worst things you can do in the game of strategic deterrence.

He's mouthing off butcher, murderer, bully, genocidal.

He's, oh, Mr.

Zelensky, if you want to get out, we're going to give you a ride out of Ukraine.

Let's get that embassy out right away.

It's too dangerous for us.

Oh, let's not sell them harpoon missiles.

Ah, Trump gave them javelins.

That was enough.

Oh, Mr.

Putin, please pump oil.

If you're going to go into Ukraine, pump oil before you do.

Oh.

Don't touch those companies or those entities.

There are 16 of them.

Here's a list.

Please don't hack them.

That is what we're doing.

And then we're calling calling them a murder.

And that just enrages a person.

Kind of like you're in high school, a bad high school.

And I went to what would be called a rough high school.

And there was some guy who just kept saying, hey, you asshole.

Hey, you blank bang.

Hey, you monk.

And then he never could back it up.

And finally, you'd watch some guy just say, you know what?

I am tired of that and walk over and just knock him out.

Shut the blank up.

Or, you know, some guy, once in a while, you'd see a guy that said,

you're an, you you know, you'd call him names and he said, what are you going to do about it?

And the guy goes, I'm sick of your name call.

And you go, and they would duke it out.

But that was rare.

Often people will, if they are not able to establish real deterrence, they think they can substitute it with verbal deterrence.

That's a deadly misconception.

That's what Barack Obama did.

He kept saying, if they move that stuff around, they move those WMD, that's a game changer.

That's a red line.

That was in Syria.

And, you know, he said the other day, I had to fight everybody to control Putin.

No, you didn't.

You didn't control him.

You gave him the Middle East.

He went crazy in Syria because you invited him in after 40 years of absence.

You dismantled missile defense and handed on a platter so he'd behave for a year or two during your re-election.

Then he gobbled up Ukraine, Eastern Ukraine.

Biden, everybody said he's full of bluster and braggadachio, the corn pop Biden.

That's just a continuation of Obama was that way.

Obama was always, I'm the hero of all my own fantasies, but when it got down to real tough decisions, the only good thing about a good thing in the strategic sense, not a moral sense, is Obama was like Biden, and he didn't care about people.

He is totally self-absorbed, narcissistic, egocentric, callous.

So that guy, you know what?

He could, he could do whatever he wanted.

He didn't, Benghazi, you think he missed a sleep?

He didn't care about those guys that died in Benghazi.

He didn't care at all.

You know,

all he cared about was, well, send, we can still send people from Sicily and say them, well, I'm up for election.

Can't do that.

Can't do that.

He definitely wasn't the father of the nation, huh?

Susan Rice.

Taking care of

a black woman, do I have solidarity with Susan Rice?

I have points.

Not really.

She's going to be more believable when she lies because you can't touch her because of her race and gender.

So I'm going going to send her out five times on the talk shows to lie, lie, lie, lie, lie.

And that's her problem if she ruined her reputation.

No skin off me.

That's how he believes.

He's utterly amoral and callous.

And so is Biden.

They don't care about people.

You said to Joe Biden, if you sat him down and you said, Mr.

Biden, I'm your advisor, Ron Klain.

Now, this is a problem.

And I want to be very careful.

I'm not blaming you.

I want to say this very, very, very methodically and clearly.

We shut down Anwar.

We canceled the pipeline at Keystone, which would have been open.

We put all new federal leases off limits.

We told our lending agencies, our government bureaucracies, our investors in this country not to lend to frackers.

We told them, you said on the campaign you would end all fossil fuels.

You created a very terrible psychological climate.

And now diesel fuel is $7 dollars a gallon on the west coast and a poor trucker who's going from los angeles to virginia he has two 100 gallon tanks and that's 200 gallons and he has to pay seven

dollars a gallon seven dollars a gallon so do the math these people are paying what $1,400 $1,400 yeah $1,400 to fill up that's impossible for a poor trucker And that's his insurance.

And we have to empathize with him.

And you know what Biden would say?

Here's the deal, man.

You know, let me tell you about corn pop.

Hey, junkie.

Hey, fat.

Who do I shake my hand to?

He didn't care.

He never did before he lost his mind.

They don't care about people.

That's why they're leftists because they create this facade, this rhetorical facade of therapeutic caring.

And once you do that verbally, then you can act physically and material in the real world any way you damn please, because you have squared that circle.

It's like you're a medieval sinner.

All right.

Victor, we need to take that a sarcastic, all right.

Well, I was just thinking when you said that, he can't be a good person, and I hesitate to say this, but he can't be a good person and have a son like Hunter.

When you were talking, I was thinking, oh my God, yeah, there's something wrong with him.

His son is a political bad bad seed.

I guess, on top of being raised by Joe Biden.

No, as a former farmer, I can tell you that you can go by from the nursery 650, 750 vines per acre, and you can plant 100 acres and you will walk by and they'll all be uniform.

And guess what?

There was some screw up because everywhere there's going to be two sickly, weak, pathetic vines.

And who did it?

I don't know.

So you can't blame the nurserymen that nature intervened and created something.

Because I do think that I don't believe that, you know, there's this nature is everything, but it's something.

And there's that symbiosis between nurture and nature and environment.

That's true.

But the eccentricity with which Hunter let himself be abandoned to

must surely come a little bit from the actual.

No, no, I keep saying this to you, Sammy.

Nobody listens.

I keep telling you, it's very easy to figure out Hunter Biden.

Okay.

They always say hunter, hunter, hunter.

Let me ask you a question.

If Joe Biden was the chamber of commerce head in,

I don't know, Flint, Michigan, would every, would Hunter have had a career?

If he did, it would be like a little county crook.

No.

If he was a member, if he was a House representative.

from Delaware or Rhode Island.

No, he would have none.

If he was a senator, he would have none.

I mean, there's, what, 100 100 senators?

Every one of their families are probably conniving to get, you know, but they're doing things like put your wife on the payroll or chief of staff or campaign.

It's mild stuff.

But you put somebody as vice president of the United States with aspirations to be president, and you have all these foreign governments that think that family is something that I got to spread my money.

And that will be one of the people I want to buy off.

Then that creates a hunter.

And then he does, his dad says, Hunter, I'm going to be vice president for eight years.

And this Biden family has spent their whole life in quote unquote public service.

And what do we have?

Nothing.

So I want a big house near the ocean and I want a big heated pool.

And I want Jill to have one of the nicest landscape estates around.

And then I want a nice pad in Washington.

I need another coastal thing.

And then the rest is yours.

So go to it.

Just drop my name everywhere.

Make me do some photo ops, write some recommendations for Chinese Communist Party's kids.

I don't know, get Bob Olinski or whoever these guys, Heinz, get them all in here, cash in.

And that's what he did.

And so they do the Joe Biden from Scranton tough guy.

Vice President Biden, have you talked to your son about?

What the hell are you talking about?

The Biden family's like gold, that name, you know, that kind of stuff.

Where they, some little meek little mouse in the State Department, go over and write a little memo, very concerned about the Vice VP's activities vis-a-vis China, as it might impair diplomatic relations or flex.

And then he would call, who's the SOB that wrote this memo?

I want him fired.

How dare he say that?

Or he'd go to the council and foreign relations.

Well, I told that SOB, you'll be fired and no more A.

That's how he operates.

And so, and that was hard on Hunter because he was the dirty bad guy.

He was Fredo.

And they made fun of him and they did that.

And so he finally got up and he thought, you know what?

As he wrote to his own daughter, I gave him 50% sometimes.

I'm not asking for half.

He, you know, Mr.

Big Guy got 10%, but sometimes he took half of everything I made.

I paid his bills, his phone bill, his repairs.

I fixed that seawall.

And all he does, he allows the press to call me a creepy cokehead or a

sex craze monster.

And dad is a creation of me, not me of him.

So, you know what I'm going to do?

This is what he's thinking.

I'm going to be crazy.

And I am going to be an artist that writes paints with my nose or something.

And it's going to be trash.

And I'm going to sell it for $500,000 a canvas and get every creepy lobbyist from every creepy government buying it.

I'm going to smile to the press and see how dad and the family like that.

And then they're going to know that if you keep, you know, know, voicing the Hunter narrative, I can be even crazier, dad, because I created you and you're a rich man and Jill and you had the good life because I was sordid.

That's how he thinks.

You know, he leaves a crackpipe in a car.

He leaves, what, two laptops he loses.

And I mean, it's not deliberate, but it is deliberate.

And he's so, he didn't care.

He's.

Yeah, it's his recreation.

I had a member of my family.

I don't want to, people might listen to it, but I had a very, you know, public-minded person in my family, and they would take people in my family on excursions.

And sometimes they, you know, they had a tight schedule, and sometimes some of the kids would get out in a boat on a lake, and it would be time to go.

And the person who was the disciplinarian in charge would say, it's time to go.

And the person would be sitting there in the boat and saying, can't hear you.

That's hunter.

That's hunter.

That's hunter.

And like it said, and they had all the leverage, didn't they?

Because all they had to do was stay out in the boat and nobody's going to leave a 10 or 12-year-old kid at a lake.

And

you can't get to them.

And they know that when they paddle in, they're going to get disciplined.

So they're not going to paddle in and prolong it.

He knows that he's got a rendezvous with a bad ending, whether it's prison or ridicule or OD.

And until that happened, he's telling Joe, I am untouchable.

You tell your flunky little kiss aides and staffers and Jin Saki to lay off old Hunter.

Yeah.

If you thought that art stuff scam was bad,

I can double and triple that scam.

Yeah, I think we've seen the beginning of the end, at least.

He's embarrassing people.

You can't embarrass a bureaucrat.

So if you're a federal prosecuting attorney in New York or

Delaware or Washington, you can't keep it on because it's just so flagrant now.

No taxation on this hidden income, cash payments, bribery.

It's just, it's so embarrassing that there's going to be somewhere Dudley Dew Wright in a federal attorney's office, and he's going to go up to his boss and said, I am a public servant, and this is wrong.

And if you don't file charges and run an investigation, I would resign and I'm going to go to the press.

And that will have a, you know what I mean?

Is that guy Pierce in that LA confidential?

Didn't he play that?

Kind of.

Yeah, he did.

That's That's a good.

Guy Pierce did do that.

And he blew the whistle and he was willing to go down and destroy himself, sort of, he thought.

There are always people like that.

That's what's good about this country.

And every terrible, dysfunctional, corrupt bureaucracy, there's always one or two people who they're kind of like, you know, that movie network.

I can't take it anymore.

Go out and scream.

We're not going to take it anymore.

And there are a few people like that that are willing to, Samson might pull the columns and bring the house down on everybody.

Yeah, okay.

Well, let's, I was going to some messages, so let's take a moment for those messages, and we'll be right back.

Welcome back.

I want to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution, and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

That he is available at his website, victorhanson.com and on a series of social medias, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and we have Getter and MeWe as well.

So all sorts of sites you can contact him.

We're looking into starting a locals channel as well, where there will be live discussions that Victor will have and people will be able to come participate.

So we're excited about that.

It hasn't quite gotten to the end point of the beginning, but we'll get there.

And so now we're on the last part of this show, Victor.

We wanted to talk to you.

I know that you've taught the Gospels before, or some of the Gospels, and you've read them in Greek.

And so I was wondering if we could hear a little bit about the significance.

you know, to the Christians of the Gospels.

And I think you were particularly interested or you've done a lot with the Gospel of John.

So how about you tell us the important things about it?

We know for 20 years I taught introductory and advanced Greek and I used Chase and Phillips.

And over the semesters, that was the standard text of the time.

I think it's still the best, but that would be subject to a lot of disagreement.

And anyway, in the final few weeks, I was always looking for accessible Greek.

For the first two or three years, I've taught, you know, kind of channeling what I did in graduate schools as I did as an undergraduate, and believing nobody would read the New Testament at UC Santa Cruz in the 1970s.

So I would try Lysias against on the cripple, or I would read Xenophon's, not the Hellenica, but maybe portions of the Anabases that were really good, Thalassa, Thalassa, or maybe even a little segment of the Medea from Euripides, things that would be comprehensible after a couple or 300 hours of Greek, both in class and the students.

But then I started to read the New Testament, John.

I had done that in an intensive thing when I was 18, a wonderful teacher, graduate professor at Yale.

He was a graduate student, John Madden, and he had been religiously, I think he was at one point thinking he was going to be a priest.

But the point is, he had us read John.

It made a profound impression on me reading it in Greek.

And I had only read it once.

I think my grandmother gave me 10 cents for every 100 pages I read of the New Testament when I was a kid.

She was a very strong Methodist, but I didn't really understand it.

And then, when I started teaching, I didn't know which of the,

so I would try Mark or Luke or Matthew, and they were too difficult.

They were not that difficult, but they're difficult if you only had.

So then, John is written, you know, by probably one of the disciples, John, and not the Revelation John.

And he probably wrote it somewhere, I don't know, 70 to 80.

I'm just thinking off the top of my head, AD, and it was compiled, edited, and published by church fathers, say around 90 to 100.

So it is

not that far from the proposed death in the 30s and 40s of Jesus Christ.

And it's easy.

He was probably not a native Greek speaker, maybe Aramic speaker.

So people, when English is their second language, often the vocabulary is more repetitive.

So I think you could look at the New Testament Testament.

And if you had a vocabulary of six to 800 words, you could probably follow 70% of it.

And the word order, unlike Latin and some sophisticated Greek, maybe non-prose text, is subject, verb, predicate.

So it was comprehensible and I taught it for 20 years.

And boy, some years we just sailed through it.

And just thinking back, And I try to read it.

I try to read Mark, Luke, or John sometimes, but John's very different.

You know, it starts in te

arche ain o logos.

In the beginning was the logos, logos.

And it's this, I don't know if you'd call it Gnostic, but it's this idea that Christianity and the Christian God is not just a matter of divine power and morality, but it's also logos.

It has a thinking component to it, that this divine plan is very, very sophisticated.

And you intellectuals out there who want to poke holes in it and think it's just you know spontaneous or wrong it's it's a product of a very sophisticated view of nature and man and there is a rationale to it and john understands that and he's trying to explain and that permeates the text so that I guess what separates John from the other three to one degree is these miracles, turning water into wine, for example, bringing Lazarus back from the dead.

And they're not presented necessarily as tricks,

you know, as

miracles that he's a wizard or,

you know, that those series of texts in the 1970s, you know, Jesus the magician, they're just saying he was one of the tricksters.

A lot of people wrote about that.

No, no, they're not just tricks.

They're not even, they're not tricks or miracles that Jesus is able to ask God to do for him, but they're signs, they're connections with divinity.

So he's trying to show you things like part the curtain for a second and these things can happen as if these happens all the time that God is capable of anything.

So he's not doing them.

He's sort of saying, okay, we need wine and God is capable of that.

Just watch what happens.

I'm just a witness as you are to it.

So they're divine signs rather than miracles that he can.

concoct himself.

And that's, again, it's characterizes this thinking element of the of the Bible.

I know we're out of time almost, but you know, another component is that in the latter chapters of John with the crucifixion and resurrection, and that it's not quite the emphasis of Mark, Luke, and Matthew that Jesus came onto the earth to die for our sins.

It is, but there's another component that it's less sacrificial.

In other words, according to some of the emphases on the life of Jesus, he is God incarnate, the Son of God, and he's here to take upon the burden of sin and then to give you a new testament.

In other words, that the sinner who's violated the canons of the Old Testament can still find paradise and peace with God if he confesses his sins.

And he can do that because the Son of God came here and suffered.

on the cross for the sins and forgave his perpetrators.

And then that established a new rule.

But that's in John, but it's also

more,

I'm only here for a time.

I'm visiting you.

I want to feel God needs to feel like it is to be carnate, to have a body and to have temptation.

And then I'm naturally being recycled back to where I came from.

And my exposure to you and knowledge of the physicality of man, I get a deeper appreciation of the fallen nature of man.

But while there's a sacrificial element, it's not emphasized as much, if you know what I mean.

And so you don't get.

And then, of course, it's kind of eerie because this person comes out of nowhere, like all the gospels, and says, only through me can you find everlasting the water of life.

And that's because I am the true emissary of God.

And John the Baptist is much more prominent, I think, in the Gospel John, with his prescience that Jesus is coming.

So it's much more personal.

It made a profound effect on me so that more as someone who started out through graduate school and has exposed to eight years undergraduate and four years graduate school of what I would say,

I guess I could say that without being deprecatory, because I have a lot of respect for my professors, but I always approached Greek from agnostic or atheistic professors.

And when there was a mention of the New Testament, it was always implied that there was another group of classicists that weren't really classicists.

These were New Testament scholars.

And unlike people who learn Greek for an appreciation of the ancient world and to reconstruct what happened and the beauty of its literature and its influence in the West, they were more limited in the sense that they wanted to find the word of God in its original expression or close to it as they could find it.

And therefore, they never, we always say, you know,

anybody who can read Pindar in Greek or an Aeschylian chorus or Thucydide in speech with 10 minutes of prep can just go race through the New Testament, even though some of the vocabulary has specialized liturgical meaning.

That's not true for a New Testament scholar.

They may be able to spend their life and know what these

canonical vocabulary is,

but you put them and try to read a poem of Pindar and they're lost.

So there was kind of an arrogance that this was a bastardized version.

And I was prejudiced by that and biased.

And so when I began teaching it, because I was teaching it in Cal State Fresno, so a lot of the students I had were Hispanic Catholics or Oklahoma diasporas, Church of Christ types, or

a lot of Asian, Southeast Asian Catholics.

And they would ask me religious questions rather than just grammar and syntax as I had learned it.

And they had much more influence on me than I did, although I never tried to ever teach, you know, religion is good or bad or I was just neutral.

But finally, over the years, I began reading it on my own.

And one of the things I drew from John that I didn't from Mark, Luke, and Matthew was that the religious experience was possible with a direct relationship with Jesus Christ that could, it would be nurtured and enhanced.

by a formal church and an organization of disciples.

But it wasn't impossible to be a good Christian if you could read and understand the words of Christ right out of his own mouth.

And if you were to try to emulate, at least try to emulate the type of morality and the belief in a hereafter, and you were willing to also develop from the text a sense where you're sinning and how you have to improve or confess your sins, or at least have an appreciation for them, then you could become a Christian without, like, say in modern terms, becoming a formal Methodist that goes every Sunday.

And that wasn't necessarily because you were lazy, because it's not lazy to master the original language of the New Testament and know Latin as well and read the Vulgate.

The way I read it all, I'd always, when I would prep for class, because I taught Latin and Greek only, I only taught Latin and Greek for 10, 15 years until I started teaching in translation in Manny's or history courses, but to make sure that I would have a little Bible, the New Testament on one page would be Greek, and then there would be St.

Jerome's Vulgate translation.

So, if I was at a stoplight, bam, I open it up, read the Greek, and then just read how the Latin.

And from that, I really understood how the Roman mind or Latin looked at certain Greek words and translate them into Latin that were different than the way we vision today.

And that gave me a deeper appreciation for how it was envisioned by non-Greek speakers, very different than non-English speakers.

So, what I'm trying to say is a secular agnostic experience became deeply religious over the years.

I read them.

It seemed like every time I'm sick, that's a kind of a confession of weakness.

And I've been, you know, I've had, I don't know, eight or seven or eight major operations, some of them life-threatening, torn ureter, ruptured appendix in Libya.

I always, you know, would go back to that.

So are you trying to say that the reading it in Greek, you saw in John at least the personal experience was more emphasized, whereas as it was translated into Latin, they, you know, the communal mysteries and sacred nature of the miracles, et cetera, was emphasized more or something to that.

I think the difference is when Jerome and the church, let's say between, I mean, these church fathers were organizing the, you know, in Greek, it's the diotheke kine, the fresh interpretation.

They don't mean

new literature necessarily, but it's a new take on Christianity.

And they compiled in this period after the death of the gospel writers who probably died around 100, 110.

I'm not a biblical expert, so I can't off the top of my head.

But in that formative period between 100 and 300, people organized these gospels.

You know, it was a big explosion in scholarship in the 1990s, the Gnostic Gospels.

And why did these four become canonical when these other gospels that were known and read and considered as canonical dropped out.

And that refers to the Augustine, Jerome, that emphasis in the 400s to weed out the liberus, the Manichaean, the Donatist,

and the Gnostics, and get something that was conducive for an organized church.

When you take Acts and Revelations and letters and the four gospels, there's 26, 27 formal chapters or books in the New Testament, but that is an arbitrary selection and that reflects certain church goals.

But John kind of sticks out.

It's something that you feel more directly connected to the word of God through Jesus Christ without maybe editorial or conscious interventions to place that word within a more organized early church effort that was going on.

All right, Victor, I think we better leave it there and conclude this podcast.

We went all the way from Elon Musk to the Gospel of John.

So lots of excursions along the way.

I hope everybody enjoyed it.

Thank you so much for your wisdom.

And thank everybody for listening once again and putting up with us.

All right.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hansen.

We're signing off.

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