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Welcome to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

This is the Friday news roundup where we look at the news from the week.

We have a lot on our agenda today.

The Ukraine, the Supreme Court nomination of Katanji Brown Jackson, Iran, and the American education system in the dark ages, according to one of our articles.

So we've got a lot to do today.

Before we get to that, I would like to remind everybody, Victor is the Martin and Ily Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution.

the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, and he can be found at his website at victorhanson.com, where you can sign up for a free subscription or buy a subscription for $5 a month or $50 a year for his ultra articles, which are approximately 2,400 to 4,000 words a week in addition.

And we've had some, I don't want to offend you, Victor, but as though there isn't always great articles, but the most recent ones have been really pithy articles.

So please join us at victorhanson.com.

We will take a moment for a break and a few messages, and then we'll be right back to get to our agenda.

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Welcome back, Victor.

I hope you're ready for the show today.

We've got a lot on our agenda.

And I would actually like to give you an opportunity to choose where you would like to start.

Do you want to start with the Supreme Court or Ukraine or Iran?

We'll go to Ukraine, but you know, I want to make a statement about Joe Biden, Kamala Harris.

I mean, I think all of our listeners should take a deep breath and pause.

I don't think we have ever seen a destruction of a presidency so soon or to such a degree.

I mean, if you look at some of the polls that are coming out, that Seltzer poll today had him at 34%

approval, 52%.

He's down 18 points.

And before you think that, well,

that can't be right, the left-wing Reuters has him down by 14 points, Politico 13 points, Rasmussen 15 points, Quinnipac

13, and Mammoth boy, he's down 16 points.

It's an utter free fall.

Yeah, can I tell you why that is?

It seems that his own side is turning on him with that New York Times article.

Is that correct?

It is, but when you have to define your own side, because there's two theories about what his own side is.

One is the base, and that says, well, he didn't get us what he wanted, but the base knows they're not that stupid.

They know it's 50-50 in the Congress, and they only have the tiebreaking Kamala-Harris.

And the base knows that they don't represent very many people, not more than 20%.

So what I'm thinking that represents is a huge slice of people that we used to call Democrats.

And that is from the middle of the old Democratic Party, Bill Clinton's Clinton's Democratic leadership, people in their 60s and 70s, all the way over to the Independents.

What I'm trying to say is that 10 to 15%

of the Democratic constituency has joined the Republicans and the Independents.

And why is that happening?

Because when you look at every single issue, and we're just going to dovetail into what we're going to talk about, the Supreme Court justice and Ukraine, et cetera, they are underwater.

The people do not want an open border.

They do not want Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security, asking people to volunteer to come back and work after he's insulted and called them whipper.

They do not like what happened in Afghanistan, and they think it could happen again in Ukraine.

They think they could lose the second country, Ukraine, and Taiwan could be the third.

They do not like critical race theory.

They don't like this racial animosity.

They don't like to turn on the TV and hear white, white, white, white, white, white, white from very wealthy, privileged African-American pundits from white bicosta elites, etc.

They don't want to hear that no matter what color they are.

They do not want to hear that there's a carjacking, there's a smash and grab, and there's no consequences when somebody throws somebody down the stairs.

They're sick of it.

They do not want to hear that you can't do anything about gas prices.

They know that Joe Biden walked over in a rally and pointed his finger at a young lady who asked a question and said, fossil fuels will be eliminated in my term.

They know that and they know he's responsible for the gas price.

So we're watching something that there's no solution because they're not going to change, but the people are going to change them.

I think we're going to have a historic meltdown in November.

Do you think that the recent information coming out from the left themselves about Joe Biden and Hunter's laptop and just accepting that that was a truth out there is an effort.

And then perhaps, I don't know, we don't know for sure, but they are trying to get Joe Biden out of the presidency, that they're going to use that as a dramatic change to the party that will allow them to change course and go in the right direction.

Do you think they would use it in that fashion to maybe gain back some of those voters?

The problem is that Joe Biden has never had any political ideology.

All his ideology was is, hi everybody.

I take the train.

I'm old Joe Biden from Scranton.

It was a mythology that he was a moderate.

He could tell people that it's a jungle out there and his mom is threatened, i.e.

by black crime, if he had to do that.

He can say junkie.

He can say you ain't black.

He can say you donut people.

He can say all of that.

Or he can say we're going to eliminate fossil fuels.

So the problem is not his ideology.

He will adapt.

The problem is he's non-composmente.

He doesn't know where he is.

So then you go to Kamala Harris, and the problem is not that she's, they like the idea she's a black woman.

They like the idea she's left-wing.

The problem is she's inept.

She's childlike.

She's puerile.

She's an adolescent.

She gets up there and when she can't answer a question,

she cackles.

Reminds me, if I could just do a very quick anecdote.

I was in graduate school and there was a student.

very attractive who had no business in graduate school no business she had gone to a prestigious undergraduate school and been promoted and promoted.

They got her into this graduate.

So I'm not even going to mention the names of these institutions, but she was in class.

And boy, when you get into a PhD program in the 1970s in classical philology and you have a European linguist, philologist, classicist, and they are talking about

whether you should use a subjunctive or optative in xenophon, Selenika, in indirect discourse, or whatever they're talking about.

Or please explain.

I want you over there to explain the use of the articular infinitive in Thucydides and where do we get parallels.

Or here's a passage in Aeschylus.

Can you please tell me if it's emulated in Sophocles?

And they would call on her.

You know what she would do?

She'd go like this.

That's so great.

Oh, I want to make a statement about that.

Oh,

and that's what she got caught, is what I'm saying.

And then it was sad.

And that is what Camilla Harris is.

She got caught.

And by being caught, people are saying, how did this person get to where she is?

She was started out as a young, attractive, biracial woman who was left-wing, right-wing, the consort of Willie Brown in California with a one-party.

Okay, when she ran for president, the Democrats knew there was nothing there.

She got zero delegates, and now she's going to be president of the United States.

So they're in a dilemma, and they're not going to change.

The only answer that I can see is that Joe Biden, 25th Amendment, they come to him and say, listen, USOB, we're going to get you out of here because you're destroying the party.

So we want you to resign.

And then they're going to go to Kamala Harris and say, would you resign too?

And they're not going to do that because it's Nancy Pelosi who wants to run again.

There's no way out.

No way out.

And they are going to take this party to historical destruction.

And everybody knows it.

Everybody knows it.

The polls see it.

I see it.

I see people I cannot believe.

I went in town the other day into a predominantly Mexican-American town.

I shouldn't say predominantly.

I will use the word exclusively.

I got approached by five people, five at the post office, at Home Depot, et cetera, at a restaurant.

And they came up.

They didn't say, oh, I know who you, they said, what is happening to the country?

They're destroying us, us, us.

They're destroying us.

People are angry.

They cannot afford gasoline.

They cannot afford food.

I was at Home Depot and I said, how much would a piece of conduit for electrical, I'm burying a conduit?

And then they said, that'll be $13.

I said, it was $3.

Well, I said, can I order some?

And they said, yes, but we don't do deliveries.

Can I order, you know, 50 links?

No, we we have a limited supply.

That's everywhere now.

And the whole sinews of this civilization are unwinding.

And everybody's looking at these people.

And what do they get from them?

I don't care.

I got to go to Delaware for the weekend.

If you're Kamala Harris or Nancy Pelosi, well, Joe Biden is just perfect for this moment.

There's a big wound out there and they're pouring salt in it like F you.

And that's not going to work.

No, it's not going to work.

And so on that note, though, let's turn to the Ukraine where things are even worse, I suppose.

I don't know if you can compare between the two, but where Kiev is surrounded and Maropol is 80% destroyed now.

And the Russian military moves on.

This is Putin's, quote, humanitarian mission of invasion.

So what are your thoughts this week on what Putin's up to and if the only way forward is negotiation for Zelensky?

We know the contours of the war now.

I don't think that Putin can, it was in doubt the first week whether he could absorb Kiev and to the east.

And I don't think anybody thought a state the size of Texas he was going to absorb.

He thought that it might capitulate.

That's not going to happen.

He's not going to get Western Ukraine.

He can shell cities in Western Ukraine, but it's not going to happen.

So we're now talking, will he surround Kyiv and take it?

And the problem he has is we're starting to see the challenge response cycle in military history is that these javelins, and they're not talking about a thousand, two thousand, and the Swedish-British version, we're talking about 20, 30,000 of these.

So you've got teams of one or two people with these things and are all over eastern Ukraine.

And that means that they have nullified the use of armor, which is the Soviet trademark, and now is the Russian trademark.

And so they're not going to be able to just smash in.

So when they go into Kiev, there's going to be somebody in a window.

There's going to be somebody in a manhole.

There's going to be somebody under a car.

And you cannot use a vehicle.

So it is going to be like this Stalingrad or the siege of Leningrad or the siege of Berlin.

It's going to be a hell.

And then the question is, Putin knows that.

And so he's looking, Maripol, he's going to destroy.

He's destroyed.

It's 90%, I supposely destroyed.

It's sort of like Sevastopol.

When the Germans couldn't take it easily, Van Meinstein surrounded it and flattened it.

And the question is, how much longer do you want this stalemate to continue?

And there's some in the United States, you know, I mean, I don't know what we call them, but they want to give even more and more.

They want to send planes because they want to hurt Putin.

And I do too.

And they want to do all this stuff, but they want to do it at the the price of somebody else's life and so I'm not sure that sending even I'm all for sending weapons in there as we're doing but sending planes and escalating and upping the ante like a lot of people in both the Republican and Democratic Senate want to do is going to be very dangerous because this deadlock is now an existential war of exhaustion and attrition.

And the side will win that has the most resources, human, material, and spiritual.

And right now, the Ukraine have the spiritual edge.

They probably have the supply edge per man, but they don't have the manpower.

And so it's going to be a deadlock.

And what would be the, I wrote about what, and for a Fox op-ed this week, what would be the contours of a settlement?

I think Zelensky is saying, I don't want to.

join NATO.

Okay.

He said that basically to Putin in the beginning.

Putin says, well, I knew that anyway.

And then he's going to say, okay,

all of those slivers that are Russian-speaking along our border will give you sovereignty.

Well, they were sovereignty, basically.

There was a war going on, but what else do I get for destroying your country?

And then Zelensky is going to say, Well, you're destroying our country.

We want reparations.

You've killed thousands of people.

And Putin says, I need some tangible victory.

And Zelensky says, Okay, well, you're controlling Crimea.

Maybe we can have the UN or an international body come on and have a plebiscite, like they did in the Saarland, for example, on the eve of World War II.

And Putin's going to say, well, we know I'm going to lose.

So what good would that be?

And then what Zelensky is saying to him, well, what do you want?

And he's saying, I want you to disarm.

And I have Austria and Finland work that way.

And he said, yeah, but that's when we had, you know, NATO and the Warsaw Pact lack together and you don't have very much.

And so there's going to be a lot of discussions, but the Ukrainians, after losing all of these lives and all of this indiscriminate murder on the part of Putin, it's going to be very hard to give away any parts of Ukraine to this monster.

And it's going to be very hard for Putin when he goes back to his people and then the oligarchs and the military and his prestige to say that I got 20,000 Russian lives killed for nothing.

all i got was a destroyed so i think where we are now is putin is saying to zelensky i may not be able to take even half of Ukraine.

Okay, but you're not going to believe what I'm going to do to you.

It's going to take you 50 years to rebuild your cities.

And in that time, I'm not going to have to worry about you because there's going to be three or four hundred miles of wasteland.

I created my own corridor between east and west.

It's called destroyed Ukraine.

You want that?

Because it's almost happening to you.

And I don't know where it goes.

But why people talk about World War III, Sammy, is this.

So those are the contours of the deadlock.

And somebody somewhere in some military planning session is saying, this will break the deadlock.

I don't know if that is a no-fly zone.

I don't know if that is supply of MiGs.

I don't know if that's supply of Patriot batteries.

Or somebody in the Russians are saying, you know what, we can use a half-kiloton nuclear tactical weapon and take out a Ukrainian city.

And after that, they'll stop.

But somebody is going to come up with an escalation that is going to be replied to in kind, and then Trumped, and then the anti-up and up.

And that's why it's really important

to have some kind of provisional ceasefire now.

I'm getting really upset at all these people who call, you know,

certain people.

I disagree with certain people on the right that think Zelensky is a complete fraud and Putin was justified.

Okay, but I learned from that point of view.

I mean, I disagree with it, but they're not traitors.

But I get really angry with these people, the never-Trump people said, those people are traitors.

And they start calling people names, you're a traitor, and we've got to go help.

But they want to fight, they want to fight Putin to the last Ukrainian and get them all killed.

Or they want to escalate to a point where we're looking down the barrel of a nuclear missile silo, and I don't.

and so when they people keep saying like lindsey graham said we got to assassinate putin and we've got to have no

i just want to say to them okay we do that and then they do the following then what do you want to do and then when they do that at some point you've got to stop that escalation because we're destroying half of a country you know, something the size of Nevada, we're just in territory or the LA basin from Bakersfield to the Mexican border.

We're destroying.

We being the people of the world and Putin, because we can't stop Putin.

And to stop Putin, we need a level of force that risks everybody's lives.

And he knows it.

He's not crazy.

I get really tired.

Well, he's insane.

He's not the Putin I knew.

Look how fat he is.

He's on steroid.

Maybe, maybe.

But he knows that when you start talking about nuclear weapons, that that sends a chill.

So he's talked, talk, talk, talk.

And 90% of that is bluff, but we don't know to what degree 10 of it is real and he knows that and the more he talks about it the more he convinces himself that that 10 is maybe 50

you know if i were putin i would be negotiating for odessa and the black sea area and he would say i would say you know i'll leave kiev if you will give me this area which he's right down there all on top of.

They're never going to give him that because if they did that, then they have a solid band around the black sea and there's not one ship from the west that can go into the northern black sea and find a port and where's ukraine going to be supplied by sea can't be done it's a landlocked country then and they're never going to agree to that they would have no port and so his idea is that i'm going to destroy your port cities when he gets to odessa and he starts to level up beautiful city, then I think we're going to see some very escalatory measures.

And so I don't know how it ends, but there is an end.

There's always an end to something.

And people never, there was an end to World War II in the Pacific.

It was called not the invasion of Japan, but two nuclear weapons.

There was an end to Germany, and it was the complete annihilation of the Third Reich and the destruction of the German cities.

But nobody ever thought that in 1939.

And there was an end to World War I, and it was called, you know, 17 million dead.

So there is a, somewhere out there in murky land, there's an end.

We just don't know what it is yet.

Yep.

All right.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and have a moment for some messages, and then we'll be right back, and we'll turn to Supreme Court nominee, Katanji Brown-Jackson.

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All right, welcome back.

Victor, we have a new Supreme Court nominee, as you well know, and our viewers do too.

And I wanted to just remind everybody of a short interchange between Marcia Blackburn and her, where Marcia Blackburn asked, can you provide a definition for the word woman?

And Jackson said, I can't.

And she said, you can't in the question.

And Jackson said, I can't, not in this context.

I'm not a biologist.

And now everybody's talking about the last part, but what bugs me is this idea of of saying in this context, there's no context.

It's give us the definition.

You're going to be a Supreme Court justice.

And I hate it when people say that in this context.

There's two questions here.

One is, why did you say something stupid?

And two, why is it stupid?

And people said, well,

I don't know.

I'm not an astronomer, but I know that the sun is not the moon.

I can tell you a definition of the moon and it will be different than the definition of the sun, even though I don't have a bachelor's degree in astro,

you know, physics or something.

So we know that she could give a definition.

She could say a woman in terms of muscular mass, skeletal formation is not as strong physically as a male, not usually as big.

She has unique properties of reproductive capacity.

You could say the male evolution in an evolutionary sense is usually larger and stronger, and he participates in the sexual congress with sperm, but he cannot produce or carry a baby himself you could do any one of those you could even get to the cultural history of male and female okay and if she wanted to and she really knows that she could say and occasionally

nature misfires and we call it gender dysphoria where one sex has the mental or the hormonal or the psychological profile the opposite sex but it doesn't match the biology but that's very rare but she can't say that.

That's my point.

And she knows she can't say it because this small sliver of less than 1% of the population has captured the democratic elite.

And they figure that they don't have really a civil rights.

The African-American question has pretty much been solved in the sense that affirmative action has been here for 60 years.

They feel they have a trajectory.

Same thing with radical feminism.

So this is gay rights, gay marriage.

It's all here.

So this is the last frontier, they think, and they're not going to give it up.

And if she crosses that base, then those multi-billion dollar foundations and PACs turn on her.

She understands that.

So she can't say that.

And the Republicans understand that, and they want her to say that.

So that's the first thing.

And the second is, this reminds me so much of the Sodoma confirmation.

Here is somebody

who

everybody knows is a leftist.

Everybody knows when she gets onto the court, she will make up law rather than follow constitutional precedents.

And everybody knows that she's not going to admit to anything other than being an old-fashioned Democratic moderate.

Everybody knows that.

And then she's polite.

And then the New York Times write very impressive stellar judge and she gets confirmed and then she goes wacko.

So in Sotamair's case, she said,

I am a wise Latina and she said Latina in a speech, I think it was at Hastings or Bolt Hall, 30 or 40 times in one speech.

She even said that a wise Latina brought more to the bench than a white male.

In other words, she was saying that the race and gender that reflect her profile was better than the white male.

It didn't matter.

They were not going to reject.

a Latina woman.

And so that's where we are.

They're not going to reject a black woman.

And the Republicans know that.

And so they're going to make it difficult for the Democrats by bringing up some really embarrassing inconsistencies and sentencing child pornographers.

And the subtext is

she is a very aggressive person that naturally, by instinct, by training, by education, sympathizes with the accused rather than the state.

And so she's going to find ways to mitigate a sin.

And she did.

And they know that.

And it's embarrassing.

So that's the price the right will pay for her for saying, okay, you're playing this game and you're saying that you're a moderate.

We know you're not.

We know you're going to get confirmed, but we're going to take something out of you because, and here we get theme number three.

They know what they did to Brent Kavanaugh.

And they went back to when he was 17 and 18.

They brought in that nut Alvinetti.

They brought in Susan Blasey IV.

They brought in everything but the kitchen sink.

They called him a drunk.

They called him a rapist.

They call him a pervert.

They went through his calendar when he was a college student.

They destroyed that man's life.

And the Republicans are saying, we're not going to do that because we can't, because that's not who we are, but we're going to get pretty close in a couple of questions only to the point where we want to remind you.

And this

In finishing, this brings up a key point that everybody should take a pause and think about.

The Republicans are going to take the House, and there's two schools of thought.

One school says you don't want to get down to their level.

So, you're going to confirm Katanji Brown Jackson.

We're going to confirm her.

We're going to tough question, but we're not going to do to her what they did to Brett Kavanaugh.

And we're not going to try to eliminate the filibuster when we have the majority in the Senate.

And we're not going to try to pass a national ID requirement and nationalize voting like they did.

Okay.

And the other side says, okay,

don't do it.

And they never learn.

So you're appeasing them and they're going to interpret that moderation and that magnanimity as weakness to be exploited, as they say, and they're not going to return it in kind.

And they say, as soon as you get in there, the first thing you need to do when you control the House is impeach Joe Biden.

Doesn't matter if you don't have the 60 votes in the Senate to convict him, but just impeach him because he violated the oath of office and he deliberately destroyed immigration law and let in 2 million people.

And once you impeach him, then they'll get the picture that every time a president is elected, the opposition party, if they take the Congress in the midterm, will impeach the president.

And that's what the game will be played from now on.

And so there's two schools of thought, and it's playing out with you got the Ben South people who say, you know what, let's just question her and then get it over with.

And then you've got Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz and said, no, we're going to make this as painful as it is because this is a preview of what you're going to face when we take the Congress in November.

So you'll never do it again because we know what you've been doing to us and you've destroyed the protocols and the manners and the traditions of the Senate and the House.

And you'll never get them back unless we teach you that there's a cost to that.

And the other people said, well, if you do that, then then you're just lowering the tenor of the reverb body, and etc.

So that's what's playing out in the subtech.

Or you're upping the ante on what people will do once they get control of the Congress and they don't have the presidency.

They'll just keep escalating.

I don't know.

Who knows?

Let's turn then to the COVID.

It seems to be winding down in the U.S.

with a thousand, oh, just over a thousand cases yesterday.

What do you foresee with COVID?

I mean, we do have a new variant, BA2 Omicron, which is out there lurking about.

How do you see this unwinding with COVID, if at all?

We've got almost a million deaths from it in the United States.

Well, I always kind of look at California because it was one of the most locked down states.

It's a one-party state.

Everybody had to have masks.

So the restrictions are off.

And yet when I go places, I'd say 25% are so acculturated to wearing masks that they still wear it.

I drove yesterday in town.

I would say 20% of the cars I saw were people wearing masks while driving alone.

I saw people walking into the post office outside with masks on.

So this is there.

It doesn't really matter to them that there's less than 100 Californians on average dying of COVID.

And we know now from the CDC's own mouth that that means people with four comorbidities, mostly over 65.

So my larger point is that it's going to be something like the flu and it's going to be here forever and there's going to be variants, but so many people have gotten either the original COVID or Delta or the Omicron variant, or they've been double vaxxed or boostered or quadruple shot, whatever, that it's going to be very hard for a new variant to be as lethal as the initial appearance.

And so I think what's going to happen is that custom and rote and just popular knowledge and popular behavior and cultural attitudes are going to overtake Anthony Fauci and the CDC as well.

And they're just going to say, you know what, we're dealing with it.

Like we really appreciate you to give us the latest news on this year's COVID variant.

And I think we'll start to see COVID shots every year.

And they will be timed to match the likely variant.

But we're never going to get rid of it.

And it's never going to, I think,

develop a variant that's going to wipe out people like we originally thought between the ages of, you know, five and 65.

It's going to be largely a very serious infection if you're over 65 with one proviso.

We don't know yet, and this is a $64,000 question, we don't know yet whether prior cases of COVID and prior shots will give you a level of immunity that mitigates against a deathly experience if you're over 65 with a new variant.

In the case of the flu, there's some research, as I understand it, that people in their lives who have had five or six terrible flu experiences in their 30s and 40s and 50s, and that every year they they get a flu shot, there's some suggestion that when the flu shot is off, didn't match the variant,

and they've had all of these other natural immunity antibodies, that when they do get a new variant, they don't die.

In other words, they have some residual immunity.

I just say that because I have so many dear people in my family over the last 40 years who died after the age of 65.

And I can tell you that it was cancer, cancer, cancer, or a heart attack, a heart attack, or heart problems or a rare disease, but they did not die of the flu.

They weren't sitting home and got the flu, and then they had to go to the hospital.

If they did die, and there was one person I think that was flu-related, it was because of three or four comorbidities while hospitalized.

And I think that's the trajectory we're going to follow with COVID.

Thank you, Victor.

Let's take a moment for some messages, and then we'll be right back to talk about the education system.

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Welcome back, everyone.

Victor, I know I said we were going to look for a moment because there was a very interesting article on American Education's new dark ages that I wanted to talk about.

But first, I wanted to ask you about Iran and what you think about the deal going through.

It seems that America might be giving up a lot of concessions to Iran for this deal.

And so what were your thoughts on that?

Well, we should remember what happened with the first deal.

Everybody understood that if it was a transparent deal you wouldn't have to send 400 million on palace in the middle of night which the obama administration did remember what it was it was part of a larger scheme to create a shia

persian iran dominated crescent from iran all the way to the mediterranean incorporating lebanon syria hezbollah and by extension maybe hamas as a barrier to or better yet a counterweight to our loyal allies, the Israelis and the conservative Gulf sheikhdom.

So that was what it was about.

Trump came in and got out of it, but more importantly, he put on crippling sanctions.

And then COVID hit, and the Iranian economy was about destroyed.

There were popular protests, and then Biden came in.

And basically, the first thing he did was, let's start the Iran talks again.

He thought that there would be, you know, John Kerry didn't get his peace prize, but he thought maybe he would get some upside from it and what was bizarre is he used the russians as an interlocutor so they were supposed to adjudicate differences and go back and forth like kissinger did with the palestinians and the israelis shuttle diplomacy but all they were doing especially as the ukraine mobilization heated up all they were doing was simply telling the iranians we're going to help you get a good deal but we want you to know that if sanctions hit us when we go into Ukraine, that you're on our side

and

you'll buy stuff from us.

We'll help you channel your oil to the Chinese, et cetera.

But we've got to be on the same team.

And that's where we are today.

And what's really scary about it is

what's not spoken.

And that is, as I said earlier, Russia dominates the skies of Syria.

And it's very cozy now with Iran.

And Iran is on a trajectory to get a bomb.

And Israel will have no choice but to preempt.

If it should preempt and get on the wrong side of Russia, which is what people in the West are forcing it to do by criticizing Israel, which Zelensky has done very foolishly and said to Israel, why don't you sanction Russia?

And the Israelis are thinking, yeah, I'll sanction Russia.

And then all of a sudden we'll have a swarm of Syrian-based missiles coming at us.

And the Russians will say, sorry, we can't stop them.

And oh, by the way, don't go in there and try to get those missile bases in Syria.

We're going to shoot you down.

And then more importantly, the Russians are going to say, you know what?

They're going to get a bomb.

And if you try to preempt and go into Iran, we may put them under our nuclear umbrella.

or we may give them the most sophisticated anti-aircraft batteries we are.

So that's where we are today.

It's all created, again, by Joe Biden.

I know that sounds partisan, but all he had to do was pump oil, deter Putin, don't be humiliated in Afghanistan, keep Bagram, keep the city, and keep those sanctions on Iran, and we would be in a very different place.

But it's part of a very sick idea that you want to make a balance in the Middle East with a revolutionary fervor of these governments against what they consider the establishment of the Saudi-Kuwaiti dominated Gulf sheikdoms, emirates, and Israel.

I don't understand it, but it gets back essentially at the origins of the whole disaster is that the leftist mindset just cannot stand Western governments that are very successful and that are capitalist, democratic, consensual.

And there's something about that that they always want a foil to it.

And that's why we're dealing with these two odious governments, Putin's government and Iran.

And by the way, how can you ever take the the left seriously and their anti-Russian phobias right now when they are using Russia to be their spokesman with Iran?

It makes no sense whatsoever.

So they must hate Israel so much

that they're willing to use the hated Russians as a tool to empower Iran.

Yeah.

I know you have a trip.

that you're leading in Israel this year.

Are you a little bit worried about what might be happening?

Yeah, I am.

I mean, I've taken 16 trips to the middle east europe etc for this i should say mostly to europe military history group it's a wonderful group of people we do it every year

the last one was supposed to be a very easy one to go to israel we had a really wonderful itinerary we had generals we had people like carolyn glick going to speak to us we were going to masada jewel the whole thing and then suddenly covet hit literally in 2020 at the last moment it It was canceled.

We said, no problem, we'll get a handle on this.

We took some financial losses, but we'll do it again.

And 2021, we were all ready to go.

And then whammy, the war in May and COVID restriction.

So now we're betting everything, going over and trying to get our suppliers to care who have been paid one more year.

And we're going to go on May 23rd.

Let's hope it doesn't happen.

But I'm very worried about a war or a reaction to a COVID variant but we'll see.

We'll see.

All right so then American education I know that we talk about this all the time because that in fact you also wrote on Who Killed Homer a book called Who Killed Homer and Bonfires of the Humanities.

But I found a new article, American Education's New Dark Ages by a scholar, William Derisiewicz.

And I'm probably going to say that's probably pronounced very terribly, but I believe it was in Unheard, the website Unheard.

And he is a scholar and an educator.

And it was partly a personal discussion of encountering in the best schools students who were very easily or could quickly read and write things like they would off the internet and, you know, blog posts, et cetera, and talked about themselves as able to write in a casual manner.

And those were the students words but he said when he started teaching them and again you want to remember it's the best schools they didn't have any depth of ability in either reading or writing like grasping complex arguments or addressing themselves in a very formal essay and so he started it with that and he then he went on though to say okay so these students that are coming in don't have skills at complex argument they go through k to 12 where they are basically programmed to jump through hoops.

So they're not being taught to think, but they're being taught to the test, as it's often said.

So when they show up at the university, they get caught up in just what are they supposed to think?

And so then they're prone to all the wokeism.

And he really painted the whole picture.

He said, and then on top of that, all of these universities are hiring on, and he gave one example, a vice president of social justice or diversity deanlets.

And he ended this article by saying, Well, there is thinking going on in the university, but it's, and he said it's in all the corners.

And I want to quote him: he said, It's in institutional cracks where it can evade the surveillance of diversity deanlets and persecution by the PC police.

It's behind doors of classrooms, in quiet offices, and in a a few brains of recalcitrant students who insist on being individuals.

And so the whole thing was really sort of this turn to lack of thought in the university and the end of individualism.

And it was really a powerful argument.

And I was wondering what your thoughts were on this new dark ages.

I read the article and it's one of many that are out there.

And there's two things we can say about it.

One, if a person wanted to dream up an educational regimen that would do the most harm for quote unquote marginalized students, first generation students, students from white working families that had their first child was the first person in their family to go to college, or African Americans or Hispanic, they couldn't do a better job than what the left has done.

because they've basically taken an entire group of people and saying, you are children.

You're not up to a rigorous empirical education, classical type of education.

So we're going to water it down.

So you will graduate ignorant.

By ignorant, I mean is you will not know what Homer's Iliad is.

You will have no idea what the inferno is.

You will have no idea what the Pythagorean theory is.

You will have no idea.

what astrophysics is.

You'll have none of that, but you will be arrogant because you will find isms and ologies and oppressions everywhere.

If you study the Civil War, you will know nothing about the summer of 1864 or Sherman taking Atlanta or first and second Bull Run or the question of slavery prior and to and Reconstruction after, but you will know Harriet Tubman.

Okay, that's what they're doing.

And these students then become very arrogant and shrill, but they have no information.

I'll give you one example and I'll move on.

During the woke summer of 2020, when it was the iconoclasm epidemic of toppling statues, they went in, I think it was in North or South Carolina, they toppled the statue of J.C.

Lee, General Lee, the logistics czar, airborne commander in World War II, who some people credit him with a pre-war airborne concept of parachute.

Whether that's true or not, I don't know.

But they thought he was Robert E.

Lee.

It was right out of Caesar's, Shakespeare's Caesars, where they killed Senna the poet, thought he was the insurrectionist.

And so they're ignorant and they're arrogant.

And when you're in a university campus and you encounter these students, it's really frustrating because they get in your face, they yell, but they don't know anything.

That's number one.

Number two is, so what's the reaction to it?

When he mentions the corners, there's a lot of students and parents that tell their children to take these vestigial courses.

So they're taking Shakespeare and they're reading modern novels without deconstructing.

They're still reading Kill a Mockingbird or The Sun Also Rises.

They're still taking Latin.

And the result of it is that we have a two-tier system.

The traditionalists are very educated.

And now we're starting to see after 20 years of this

that conservative traditional students are far better educated.

And the left knows that.

So what's the reaction is they get angrier and angrier because when they start to argue argue on campus about free speech or at the Yale law schools, we saw the people who have been traditionally educated are far better equipped to argue and think and to be empirical.

And so that causes a reaction from the less educated people who confirm the stereotypes that they weren't able to do the work because they were never given the opportunity for a rigorous education.

And I saw that at Cal State Fresno when we had this classical studies program designed to give traditional education and the most rigorous manifestation to students without prior familial college histories.

And so these first generation Southeast Asians, Hispanics, African Americans, and poor whites, Latin, Greek, history, archaeology, art history, composition, humanities.

When they were educated, then what would happen is that students that they knew or faculty that they knew, and they noticed that these kids were getting much better educated than some of the faculty were,

there was that hostility toward them.

And it was almost like, well, you think you're better than we are, or you represent the white tradition, or something like that.

It was just this frustration.

So we're creating a two-tier system.

I know people are going to think this is partisan, but if I have to deal with a Stanford Daily editor by email, and I have before to write articles, I think I've written two of them in the past decade.

And then I deal with the Stanford Review, and these are these kids that have got traditional education for the most.

It's like night and day.

It's not ideological.

It's just the way that people talk and reason.

And so that's the ultimate manifestation.

It seems, though, to me that the shrill people seem to win out over those who are hiding in the cracks.

That's the whole problem.

Well, they do, though, because of why.

Why is that?

Because everybody always gravitates to the least resistant.

So you get into Harvard

and then the magician comes up to you, Dr.

Faustus, and says, on my left hand, here's your choice.

Take these courses.

You're going to get an A in them and everybody's going to agree with you.

And we can give you a cattle brand Harvard BA and then you can go to graduate.

You may know nothing and you will know nothing, but you will be in the prestigious elite and you'll get a great job and people will not dare suggest you were not educated because of your Harvard degree.

And in the right hand, he said, okay, but we'll give you an alternate.

Go in and study, study, study, and get a B plus from very rigorous minority faculty, meaning they're in the minority, and you won't be tied into the mainstream of the Harvard ideological pipeline.

So what's a student who's 18 going to do?

He's going to do the Faustian bargain, lose his soul and succeed.

And then around 50

or 40, you can start to see the manifestations that you, I'll be blunt, you can see it with Kantanji Jackson.

And here she is.

She's got all the right credentials, but when asked to define a woman, she can't do it.

And when asked to explain some very bizarre sentencing, she can't do it.

She can't really come up with answers because she hasn't been trained well.

And that's really tragic.

And you know, here we have Ted Cruz, and he can be obnoxious.

He can be mean-spirited, but no one on the left will say that Ted Cruz cannot answer questions in a fashion that the left will be impressed by, even though they don't agree with him.

The same is not true of the other side.

That's what's tragic about when you go look at Sodomair and you go back and look at that confirmation hearing and you compare it, let's say, with Neil Gorsuch.

My God, the whole subtext was, you don't dare ask Sodomair an embarrassing question.

If you do, you're a sexist and a racist.

with gorsich or kavanaugh anything is fair game and so everybody knows that and what it does is it just perpetuates the disequilibrium and the asymmetry was where if people really worried about quote-unquote marginalized people they would have a marshall plan to enroll them in latin 1a

and then they would say these are the great books and you would turn out the best educated people.

If you really were worried about African-American disparities, the the African-American elite would get together and say, look, we are going to create a number of charter schools and private academies, and we are going to insist on a code of educational excellence.

And within 10 years, our reputation for excellence as a minority group will excel those of Punjabis or Koreans or Chinese or so-called whites, because we can do it.

And then all of the racial disparities would end because I'm a firm believer that African American, there's no distinction in natural ability.

They could do it very easily.

But it's so unimaginable the resistance that the reformer would encounter.

They would call him so many names or they would try to disparage her in such a way that she'd say, why am I doing this?

So that's what the left does historically.

It really does.

you know, for this mandated equality, it changes the rules, it destroys meritocracy, customs, and traditions.

It's this leveling process.

Then when it's all done and they have created an anarchy or chaos, whether it's in Cuba or Venezuela or North Korea or in the former Soviet Union, then the elite say, hmm, this was a good ride.

We had our DACA, we had our palace, we're the Castro family, but what now?

We created a desert.

Well, I guess they're going to have to live in it and try to drink the water of the desert.

All right, Victor, we're at time here, so I'd like to thank you for all of your wisdom today.

Thank you very much, Sammy.

All right, and thanks to our listeners, and we will be back next week with the Friday roundup of news.

We'll see everybody later.