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Welcome to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

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

And this week, of course, Ukraine has top billing with most shows, so it does with ours as well.

So we'll be looking at the Ukraine and maybe a little bit on Black Lives Matter and the Smollett case and some on oil prices today.

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Welcome back.

And today we're going to look at all the news from the week.

And Victor, I would like to know how you're doing spiritually again.

I know you're in a drought, but your spirit seems to be high.

Let us

it is high.

I'm upbeat as much as one can be by

$7

a gallon diesel fuel, $620 gasoline,

and Joe Biden seeming lost in the woods, singing and hymning and talking about, I guess tonight on, I saw a clip where he's talking about black male nude pictures.

And every time he goes in that little low voice and he blows, I think that there's, I just think to myself, I'm glad there's not some preteen girl anywhere near him because he's in that kind of, let me put my hands on your shoulder and talk very softly.

Something is wrong with him.

And

he's the president of the United States and we're in a very serious crisis.

We are.

No, JFK or Reagan, he ain't.

Yeah,

that's true.

Okay, so we are in a very serious crisis, at least globally.

Oh, and nationally, too.

I won't forget about that.

But the Ukrainian crisis seems to be looming quite large.

And Putin has a fairly heavy army in there.

It looks like the Ukrainians are putting up a pretty strong fight against him.

However, but I have a lot of questions around this issue.

If we could go through some of them.

And the first one.

Yeah, so the first one is that it seems like the left is trying to lure the right into an anti-Ukrainian position so that they can say that tacitly they are pro-Putin and, you know, make them look bad.

And I was wondering, what were your ideas about what the conservative position ought to be?

Well, I have, you know, I have kind of been,

how do I say this delicately, kind of pushed off one Fox show and pushed on another.

And I'm very sensitive to the fact that as we go into the midterms, the left has

no other issue.

Not the border, not Afghanistan, not critical waste theory, not inflation, not the price of gas, not anything.

All they have is a war that they're really trying to, you know, Putin did, he did the gas price hike.

Putin did the, Putin did it, Putin did it.

It used to be Trump did it.

Now it's Putin did it.

So we should be aware of what's happening.

And then second, they're the ones in this typical projection mode that appease this guy, this dictator.

I mean, what if we had missile defense right now as envisioned under the Bush administration, where we had a plan for Poland and the Czech Republic to have forward missile defense?

We'd feel a lot more secure.

Obama canceled it.

Why is Russia in the Middle East?

Obama invited him in.

Why did he go into Ukraine and Crimea in 2004?

Obama said he needed space.

And if he

got him space, he'd be flexible.

And flexible he was.

And why did he go in 2022?

Because Afghanistan in 2021 and August was an utter disaster.

Then we had kind of, it was kind of what we call missile of the month.

I mean, it's like, okay,

October, China sends a hypersonic missile.

Why did they pick October 2021?

Send a missile around the world.

And then all of a sudden, Iran says, don't count me out.

I'm going to send 12 missiles into Kurdistan right near the American consulate.

And then North Korea says, hey, wait a minute.

It's power on time.

I'm going to launch more missiles in January than I have

my entire life.

And they did.

Where is Team America?

And then all of a sudden, Putin says, hey, you know, I started this.

I'm going to send a missile near Poland.

It was the left that allowed this to happen.

So what are they doing now is they're saying that if you're a conservative, and remember that in a recent poll, I think it was 75% of Republicans want to get tough with Putin and about 73%

don't.

Now, I'm not saying there's not a fringe right group that sees Putin as an alt-right white supremacist champion of medieval, I don't know what, crusader, but that's a very small number.

So most conservatives are, well, the left appease this thug, and he's a carnivore.

They let him out of his cage.

He's on the prow, just like we warned you.

And now they want to go to DEF CON 5 so they can gent up a crisis.

True, true, true.

And so what I think the conservative position is.

Give the Ukrainians, they only had about 500 javelins when the war started.

Everybody criticized Trump.

He withheld aid from the Congress.

Well, he approved the javelins, but they were only like 150 javelins.

That was like a day's supply.

So send them more stuff.

Yeah, Sams, and maybe you want to train them how to use

a missile battery like the Patriot system.

I think they take 90 or 100 people.

You can even do that.

But do not get in to a no-fly zone.

Don't do the MiG deal.

I mean, so we're going to give them all these MiGs and we're going to give F-15s.

to Poland.

They're going to give them these old MiGs.

We don't know if they can fly them the same, if they're NATO coordinated, and they have to be NATO uncoordinated.

But, you know, they shot a missile at a base from probably in Belarus.

So you can send missiles through a no-fly zone and not be in the no-fly zone.

And all you're doing is giving Putin, who's a wounded tiger now, he is desperate for some straw, I shouldn't say a tiger, that's a mixed metaphor, for some little dry piece of jerky that he can gnaw on and say, they started it.

We're going to have to go.

He wants to escalate because he's cracking down on dissidents.

He's going medieval in Ukraine.

He's sending missiles because he's losing.

And all conservatives have to do is say, yeah, we support people to be constitutional and they have sovereign rights.

And this guy invaded.

And once he invaded, all the other questions are off the table for a while.

Why did he evade?

And then when it's all over and he's defeated, and I think he will be defeated, at least in his, then we sit down and we say, you see what you guys do when you talk about climate change and you cut oil and gas production or you cut missile defense or you supply them with blankets of the Ukrainians.

This is what happens.

And no, we're not going to make Ukraine a NATO member.

We're not going to westernize.

It's been part of Russia, independent of Russia.

They have long standing differences, affinities.

Why don't we just allow them to gravitate toward somewhere like Finland and Austria, which after World War II, NATO and the Warsaw Pact agreed that even though there were Russian troops in Austria, and even though Finland was gravitating toward us, we said they will not be in military alliances.

And

I have a feeling that the left will not like that because they're off on to a moral crusade to turn Ukraine into Carmel, California or something.

They're just fanatic.

So don't play into their hands.

Don't praise Putin.

Don't try to contextualize why he had a reason that Victoria Newland.

That's all true.

We interfered in the internal affairs of Ukraine.

They interfered in ours in the 2016 election when you had their ambassador writing pro-Hilary Opez, Christopher Steele, all that.

They interfered, we interfered.

That doesn't matter until we defeat Putin.

And once we do, then we can adjudicate all that.

But don't let the left tag conservatives that have legitimate worries about the expansion of this conflict and its manipulation by the left for political purposes.

Don't fall in that trap.

Oppose Putin, want him out, arm the Ukrainian through the teeth, but don't send anybody in there to start World War III, is what I'm saying.

Yeah, okay.

And my next question kind of is a corollary to what you were just saying.

Is the left partly happy and maybe wants this war to go on so it can distract from its own domestic problems.

Well, they already have, haven't they?

All of a sudden.

I mean, think of the logic they're using.

Before Putin went into Ukraine,

they said the following.

Yes, that there's inflation, but it's only temporary.

Remember that, Janet, Yellen?

And then they said, yes, there's inflation, but it's really what the elite people worry about.

That's just, you know, your Peloton came late in the mail, something like that.

Or yes, there's inflation, but it was caused by Donald Trump.

So my point is they were talking about, yes, there was inflation pre-Ukraine.

Now they're saying, oh, there was no inflation until Putin went in.

Same thing with gas.

They were paranoid about gas prices that had gone up about 30 or 40%.

And now they've doubled more than that.

And now all of a sudden, Putin did it.

So

yeah, they want to use this and milk it for every political recovery they can because they have nothing else nothing and that's what they're that's what they're so desperate and they're all and it's couched in you know we want to have a no-fly zone we want to expand this we want to expand that and here's the thing about the country you have to be careful about when the left wants to go to war like vietnam remember that was jfk and lbj

The right is always, you know, we're Jacksonian.

Hell, we don't really like what the left did, but heck, if we're in a war, my country, we're for it.

That's what the right always is.

But the left, once they go to war, man, they become McCarthyite.

They go after people

and they use it for political purposes.

It's a people's war for them.

And there's no right.

There's no opposition.

Because basically they're pacifists and they're appeasers.

But once they hit a wall and say the appeasement doesn't work, we got to go to war.

We got to go to Vietnam.

We got to do this.

Then you got to be careful because there's no opposition to it, and so conservatives are really in a bind because we know what they're doing, we sympathize with Ukrainians, but we don't want to have American pilots over Ukraine because you know what will happen.

They're far better pilots than the Russians, they have better equipment, they'll shoot down a bunch of Russian planes, and Putin will say, We only are losing this war because of the United States, so we've got to escalate.

And they'll send a missile into some country, and here we are.

Yeah, well, the war seems to have been a perfect gift for the left because I don't see anything about the border in the news these days.

I mean, it's just absolutely gone from the United States.

You mean the American border?

Yeah, the American border.

Well, yeah, I mean.

So

it's a genius for the left because that was a very losing issue for them.

Yeah, you've got a good point.

For them, it's just basically who the enemy is.

If the enemy is hard left, they have no problem with Venezuela.

They've always loved Cuba.

They've got a hardcore communist socialist in Mexico.

They don't care that he's invading the United States.

And

that's the way they are.

And it's very important to remember that because they're accusing people now of not being patriotic, calling them traitors.

What are they doing when they went down to Cuba when this guy was causing all sorts of problems, or Nicaragua, when they used to go down there?

Remember the Sandalistas,

the left-wing hippies that would go down and with that thug and murder Ortega.

So for them,

if the country is left-wing, then you identify with it and trash the United States.

If the threat is right-wing, then all of a sudden you've got to go into war and nuke him almost, or you're not patriotic.

And that's how they look at the world.

It is.

What did you think of Zelensky's speech to the Congress this week?

Well, Every time in history when somebody

got himself into a jam, and he did get himself into a jam.

and by that i mean if you want to stand up to putin and you want to tell putin that whether you join nato or not is your decision and it is it's a sovereign nation and if you want to tell putin that someday you

you might not want to have any relations with russia or whatever you want to do then you better be prepared for it and when those troops started massing the borders, they should have gone to every European capital and they got on their hands and knees and begged for weapons.

And they should have had everybody ready for a big invade because that was going to happen.

Instead, he spent most of the time, as Joe Biden was trying to gent up the war, he was afraid that Putin was listening.

So he just said, no, there's not going to be a war.

So my point is, he got himself into a jam.

He's got 42 million people.

This guy's got 140, 100 more million people.

So it's so asymmetrical.

So obviously, he's like Russia that's, you know, when the German army is 17 miles outside of the spires of the Kremlin in December of 1941, Stalin just said, I need this right now.

And when you get in that begging position, you're not very polite or gratitude's hard for you.

So he doesn't really say, stop this, do this, do this, do this.

And we're saying, well, wait a minute.

We have Japan, we have Australia and South Korea and Taiwan and NATO.

We've got all of these interests.

We just don't drop everything and go to war over Ukraine.

We've got all these other interests.

So we're doing our best, but we're not going to get drawn into a nuclear war.

You know, what I've found odd about this war, this invasion by Putin is that he never actually declared anything as the reason.

Or maybe you can correct me on this.

I don't see anywhere where he's.

I know that you said that

he said he was going in there to stop the Nazification

of the Ukraine

and that

he was going in there because the West had broken their promises of 20 years not to expand NATO

into the Warsaw Pact and they did that and he didn't do anything and then they went beyond that and now they're trying to slice off part of Russia

and

the whole thing is slanted because we never said to Poland like they had said to Poland after World War II, you're going to be in the Warsaw Pact.

We said, if you want to join NATO, join.

If you don't, don't.

And, you know, there's countries that don't want to join.

Sweden doesn't want to join.

Austria doesn't want to join.

And so that's what he said: that we forced everybody to join NATO.

Whatever he said doesn't matter.

What we just have to concentrate on is this: that this country was huge.

It still is huge, but it's 30% smaller now.

It's lost 100 million people and it's absolutely paranoid.

And it's got 7,200 nukes and 6,000 that are serviceable.

And Ukraine was an integral part off and on Russia for 500 years.

I know sometimes it was semi-autonomous, but the language, the literature, the archaeology, it's Russian in part.

Okay, and it's got a very tragic history.

But

the idea that the West is going to go suddenly and say to Ukraine, you're a member of the Western bloc, and then 50 years, 40 years from now, they're going to have rap music and discos, and Hillary Clinton's going to go over there, her Chelsea, and give them lectures about

right next to the Russian border.

It's not going to happen unless somebody takes out Putin, like Lindsey Graham wants to do in very reckless talk.

The only thing that can happen is that Russia itself slowly, carefully, deliberately liberalizes, but there's no evidence that's ever done that.

No, I don't see any future of it.

When Lindsey Graham says, well, we're going to take out Putin, okay, who are you going to put in there?

Who are you going to put in there?

And the question then becomes,

did Putin make the Russians like him or did the Russians make Putin like them?

I mean, we've had all of these Kim characters for, I don't know,

70 years in Korea.

Does anybody ever get to the fact that maybe the North Koreans didn't really mind them?

And, you know, everybody says, well, chi, chi, you know, he hijacked the post-Mao period.

No, he didn't.

He represented what the people wanted.

Not that he's consensual.

He's not.

But at some point, when these countries get dictator after dictator after dictator, and then you start lecturing them on, we're going to take out the latest incarnation.

It's very naive.

for us to tell them that.

If you take out Putin, you might get a more benevolent, drunk guy like Yeltsin, and that's an that's an that's an improvement.

I'm not laughing, but it's you know

a drunk is better than an ex-KGB agent, that's what you're saying.

Yeah, I think I'd rather have guys stumbling around urinating on the tarmac than plotting how to put nerve gas and pellets in people's legs that criticize them

or diox and poisoning in their food.

I know, not that Yeltsin probably didn't do some of the same stuff.

Yeah.

Zelensky also said that he thinks World War III is starting.

What are your no, I don't, I don't like, I don't like that.

If everybody says World War III is here, World War III is here, World War III is here, then the first nuke flies and everybody said, well, that's World War III.

What took it so long?

There used to be the shock.

See, what they're doing is they're lowering the shock bar down to nothing.

And we shouldn't even talk about that.

And,

you know, the left was the one that did this with the Reagan.

Reagan never did this.

But when Reagan put Pershing missiles into Europe, because the Soviets had all of these intermediate missiles pointed at Europeans, so Reagan said, if you're going to point them at us, we're going to point them at you.

And then all of a sudden, remember they had these TV shows the day after, and they had all these

made-for-TV shows with, I don't know, all these left-wing actors and actresses.

And America had been nuked.

There was one where the little girl said to her mom, What was sex like?

I never had a chance to experience it because of the nuclear.

This is a very left-wing take on what would be the worst thing after Armageddon, of course.

So, I mean, all of these things are always, the left always has those scenarios that, you know.

Yeah.

And so, speaking of the left, and one more question I have about this Ukrainian crisis, Joy Reed spoke of.

Oh, my God, you had to say that name.

I know.

Sorry.

She said that if the Ukrainian war were anywhere else in the world, and she was asking a rhetorical question.

She said, if it were anywhere else in the world, would we see the outpouring of support and compassion?

And the rhetorical question was obviously intended to be answered no, because she was suggesting it was white people.

And that's the reason.

The people who are killing white people are white people.

Exactly.

So we're thinking of this.

So she's saying, you white people,

you don't care about anybody but white people, but you're a threat.

You may end up nuking the white people.

It doesn't make any sense.

And so I'm trying to be rational to a complete maniac, but

she has a point that if it was a war between, as happens all the time,

you know, Uganda versus Chad or Nigeria or Kenya, we probably wouldn't have the world's attention.

But on the other hand, the reason we wouldn't isn't just because these are white countries.

Believe me, if China starts to go into Taiwan, it will get more attention than Ukraine.

It really will.

But these are so-called yellow people.

The reason is that strategically, technologically, economically, there is not as much at stake.

in those realistic terms, say, in Uganda than there is on the border between Europe and Russia, that front, because that's where there's two nuclear powers.

If she can tell me that there's two nuclear powers that might go to war over a country in Africa, but we almost did in 1973 over what?

Quote unquote brown people.

So what was she saying that we had too much worry about Arabs and Jews, all you Anglo-Saxons?

She's incoherent and she's insecure and she can't get off her obsessions of white, white, white, white.

And then she keeps thinking that brown people or dark people or marginalized people have inordinately been left behind or sacrificed.

She should be happy because she does not like white people.

And in Afghanistan and Iraq, 75% on average of the fatalities were white males.

And they were overrepresented in terms of gender and race by about

double or more.

She should be happy about that.

She should say, Oh boy, I love those wars because those crazy rednecks go over there and fight for America and they get killed.

This is wonderful.

So

she's a disgraceful human being.

She really is.

She doesn't understand one thing.

If you say every single day, and she does, white supremacy, white privilege, white hate, white supremacy, white rage, white, white, white, and you mean that collectively for everybody, two things are going to happen.

One, some guy is going to think, hmm, I'm going to go throw down somebody and I'm going to go play the knockout game because they deserve it.

So she is preaching hatred of just the type that people used to say that the southern white Bull Connor was, and therefore he was collectively responsible for acts of individual violence against blacks.

So that's what she's doing, like Jesse Smollett did, the same thing.

And second, she's saying to the world, I'm not going to think of people as individuals.

I'm only going to think of them as collectives.

And I've gone tribal.

So everybody who's black gets exemptions and contextualization.

And everybody who's not doesn't.

So then what's somebody going to do?

They're going to say, hmm, that guy's got a tribe.

That guy's got a tribe.

They're the Gurmani.

And they're the Swabi.

And they're the Gauls.

Or we can go into another timeframe.

They're the Vandals.

They're the Viscos.

They're the Oscars.

I don't have a tribe.

And then Joe White Guy will say, yes, you do.

You're white now.

That's your tribe.

So you just talk about your, and that's where it's going to go.

So

it's going to be, and it's getting that way.

So, you know, I have a, I have a lot of very liberal friends, and believe it or not.

And once in a while, they'll say things like, do you know that not far there was a hate crime and this African-American, now I'm not saying that it represents anything, but this African-American, I hit this woman five or six times, where they'll say things like, on the Stanford campus, there's a lot of, have you seen

there's a lot of theft.

And you know what they're saying.

They're terrified that there's an inordinately amount of African-American males who represent 6% of the population committing 50% of the violent crimes and they're scared they don't know how to say they're scared so they go over to somebody they think is conservative and try to egg them on and so you'll say something that they'll say oh i didn't mean that how dare you and then they get a psychological chill when somebody reifies what they're thinking and so and that's sad because that's where we're headed where's al sharpton where's uh

Juicy, the Smollett family.

Where are all the leaders of the Black community that say all the time, they can't finish a sentence without saying black, black, black, and white, white, white, white?

Okay, if there's a pandemic of black crime, why can't they stand up and say something?

Al Sharpin said he started to.

He said he was very upset that toothpaste was locked up in pharmacies because of all the smash and grabs.

And he said that he had to stop that.

And he got criticized for it.

Well, Victor, let's just take a moment for some messages and then come right back and we'll talk a little bit about the Smallett case and the latest BLM activists caught stealing from BLM.

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Welcome back.

And yeah, we have some interesting developments in a Smollett case this week.

And also activist Monica Cannon-Grant is on trial for her

siphoning off of BLM money, I guess that's the best way I can put it.

What are your thoughts on the Smollett case in particular or BLM?

Well, as I speak, Juicy Jesse said that he was psychologically challenged by his one night in jail, and he's not going to commit suicide, a la quote unquote, suicide, a la Jeffrey Epstein.

And an appellate court felt sorry for him.

So basically, here's how justice works in America.

You can be some guy with a University of Michigan football sweatshirt on and go to the Capitol and just kind of lounge around and say, Hey, Trump, Trump.

He said to go here and protest and then get swept into it.

And you can be one of the 800 people arrested and they can destroy you and you can get fired and they can throw you into jail

and you can sit there for six months and have the guards try to, you know, really intimidate you.

And no charges are filed and they ruin you.

And you're still in jail in some cases, but you can almost cause a race riot because you've basically, day after day, you've got Hollywood and professional sports and Joe Biden, the sure nominee of the Democratic Party and Kamala Harris, the future vice president of the United States, to tell everybody that you're a victim of racism.

on no evidence at all other than his fantasies of two big white guys with MAGA hats and rope and bleach at 2.30 in the morning in this black area of Chicago, waiting for somebody like Juicy to Jussie to attack.

And so he did a lot of harm, not to mention the distractions, diversions, dislocations of time and money on the part of the Chicago Police Department.

And, you know, he got nothing.

He has a fine, I suppose, but he's not.

paying any price and the fact that he had to pay any price by being convicted of something BLM went you know they all said this was a travesty.

So let's get this straight what the Smollett family and a lot of members of the black community and BLM are saying to America.

They are saying that Jesse Smollett never organized that and planned it.

He had no relationship to those two Nigerian-American trainers.

He never gave them a check.

They never were seen on a video buying rope and bleach or hats or whatever they had.

They never wore red hats that night.

He never really faked anything.

He was just walking and two big white guys appeared out of nowhere and they threw bleach and somebody said, time out laws of chemistry, it won't freeze.

And it splattered him.

And then,

you know, I'm still trying to do that thing where you hold one hand with the cell phone and one with the sandwich and then the noose is around your neck.

And then you're trying to say,

and I beat him off.

I mean,

how did he do it?

how did he get away i guess he grew his angel wings and flew up or i don't know how he did it so it's ridiculous but yeah and and that's what the blm wants to believe and so it's very tragic and i'll be very careful what i say but following the tragic death of George Floyd, there was an enormous outpouring of empathy, anti-police, it was hysterical.

And then we had the violence.

And all of that capital has been eroded.

Because if you look at, and I'm not saying this as Victor Hansen says this, I'm just reflecting the polls.

And I wrote an article for the latest issue, the current issue of new criterion on BLM.

And about 5,000 words, and I did a lot of research for it.

All the polls show that BLM is underwater, and it wasn't.

People have no popular support for it.

It's because Ms.

Quellars and the other architects,

you know, she's off into Ponga Canyon and they're buying real estate everywhere.

They're investigated for fraud, for embezzlement.

And it was just one big corporate shakedown.

And all these regional directors, they have a very sorry record.

After the Waukesha,

the self-appointed Milwaukee BLM person basically said, this is a revolution.

Think about what he said.

I mean, running over and killing those innocent people and injuring so many.

And he said, this was a good, basically a good thing that should that should inaugurate a revolution.

So something is very wrong there and i don't think the rest of the country is gonna is going to put up with it they don't have any empathy for them anymore and all these academics and corporate people look like they're just insane they have no moral integrity no empathy for victims and it's unleashed by defunding a police and calling every police and every da a racist you've destroyed natural human deterrence.

And so you have these thugs on the street and many of them are African-American.

They think, you know what?

They arrest, I commit a felony, they arrest me.

And you look at these latest cases where they almost beat to death that poor Asian woman, or they threw that other woman down the stairs, or they killed that woman in Los Angeles.

I could go on and on.

Every one of them has been out on bail or no bail from serious felonies.

So it's like the country's lost its mind.

Yeah, where do you think this is going given the recall of George Cascone in Los Angeles?

Oh, I think he's going to be recalled.

Do you think that it's going to happen?

Yeah, I think, because it's not, anything that's not sustainable and can't last won't last.

You're either going to have an escape from New York Nation

or you're going to have law and order.

I grew up in, you know, I came of age in the 70s.

And I had gone to New York.

I think the first time I went there was 73.

I was a student at the Yale Greek Summer Language Institute.

And I was 18, I took a train up to New York to Times Square, and I thought it was hell.

I really did.

I thought I was in Dante's Inferno.

And that's what New York was like, and that's what it's going to be again, I guess.

And then people, you know, said, this can't go on.

Same thing with San Francisco.

It can't go on like this.

And so you're starting to see people on the left privately think, oh my God, my entire ideological construct, my whole theory of human nature is destroyed.

I got what I wanted.

What I wanted is destroyed everything.

And now what do I do?

Who do I blame?

And some of them were thinking

the problem, dear Caesar's, dear Cassis, is not in the stars, it's in us.

And I think there's be a few that'll see that.

And that brings also the Seattle.

I think Amazon it is, is completely moving out of Seattle because of its nutty left politics have destroyed the downtown.

Is that isn't that funny?

Sad.

So, all of a sudden, Seattle went from 1995, everybody had faded Levi's with the grunge look and holes in their pants, and they listened to Kurt Cobain and Urvana.

And they had this new thing called Starbucks.

It was a cool place.

And Bill Gates was got all this the place to be.

And now

they created a desert and they call it peace.

Calga, I guess, the

British chieftain in

Tacitus Agricola.

So that's what they do.

And they've done the same thing with Portland.

Is there any major city that once they got completely hard left got control?

I'm not talking about the old Democratic governors, union guys of the 60s and 70s, but is there any major city once they've gone full left wing, they haven't destroyed?

I don't think so.

Yeah.

What did you think of that judge's lecture to Smollett?

I was kind of surprised by it.

I thought he would just be droning on about the facts of the case, but he started saying, and now your name is just a joke.

I could not believe it because he had this oily long hair.

He was kind of a big guy and he looked like a, I don't know, refugee from the 60s.

And so I thought he was just going to be quiet or.

give us this little thing about George Floyd.

You know how they all do.

This is not who we are, that kind of speech.

And then he just went into this really sophisticated psychological dissection of Jesse Small, you know, narcissists, egocentric, insecure, and then all the possible things he was guilty of, prompting racial tension.

And you should be ashamed.

It was wonderful to hear this guy do it.

And

I always remember.

My mom was a superior court judge, and she would call me all the time.

We were very close in appellate court.

She always said something to me there is a fine line when a judge sentences somebody because you want to have a little sting when you're so angry at this abhorrent crime or

convicted person but you have to be very careful of what you say because they all come up on appeal and she was an appellate court research attorney then appellate court justice later on so you know what he's going to do he's going to say the judge's lecture to me was racist and show that this motion that was denied earlier on was confirmed by his rant.

But for now, it was a very good rant as rants go.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, let's turn then to the oil crisis or the rising price of oil, which you would think would spark oil producers to expand their businesses and bring even more oil in, given the amount of money that it's bringing in.

But we don't have that.

And what's your analysis of that?

Of the, I mean, if you would think in a economy free of the real world, I guess I would say, that higher prices would encourage oil companies to make even more money by

expanding their operations.

They are as much as they can.

The problem is they're making more money pumping 12 million barrels a day than they were, you know,

excuse me, 10, than they were 12 or 13.

So, in their way of thinking,

why would I want to go take a big loan out and get a bunch of rigs and start looking for new oil fields when this administration has told us that we're going to be phased out when I've got to go beg some pension fund or bank for investment money?

And they're going to give me a lecture about, you know, who's diverse on your board and what are you doing about green green sensitivities.

And so they don't want to do it.

And then they have Jim Socky saying, 9,000 leases, 9,000 leases they're not using as if the fact you go into it, it's kind of like.

you're a real estate guy and you go take a building permit out for an inner city fix-up.

And then you've got another,

you do this all the time.

And then you say, no, I'm not going to do it.

I looked over at the neighborhood.

It doesn't work out.

Just because you apply for a permit or you get a permit, there's no reason that it's going to be reified.

So yeah,

they have permits everywhere.

And the Biden administration gives them the worst ones they can, but it doesn't mean they want to go borrow money.

And,

you know, my dad was a very wonderful guy.

And he had this wildcat thing.

He had no money, but he.

knew some friends in the valley that were farmers who had done pretty well.

And they got this oil rig and they wanted to go in the Kettleman Hills and

look for and he just studied it.

He did maps, he went and got permits.

He did everything he learned about environmental law.

It was wonderful to watch him.

He had these big maps, and he'd say, He'd point here and here, and we're going to make, and he had these wonderful family friends.

They had him get the permits and do the research, and they had the capital.

And then they all went out and they drilled.

My dad was like in his mid-60s, and he was out there near Kalinga in a rattlesnake heaven and a trailer trying to drill.

Of course, they didn't find anything, but the point was they had all these permits, but just because they had permits didn't say they were going to use them.

You know what I mean?

And that was so diseasing about this administration, which is so disingenuous.

You know, they said the other day about inflation, we didn't cause it.

So, I guess when I heard that, and all of our listeners heard it, they said, hmm, vastly expanding the money supply,

encouraging people not to work with COVID checks long past the COVID threat,

keeping interest rates at almost zero,

and going on a federal deficit binge and build back better in infrastructure and printing or borrowing $5 trillion had nothing to do with inflation at a time of natural pent-up demand when the planet was sick of the quarantine and you released everybody with funny money from the government.

And guess what?

You had too many dollars that were cheap and printed and they were chasing too few goods because there wasn't people, either they were in quarantine or they were paid not to work.

And Biden had nothing to do with it.

It was Putin that did it, apparently.

It's just so strange because the left is always saying, we demand accountability, we demand truth.

get some accountability and give us some truth as well well victor let's take a moment.

Did you have something?

I'm sorry.

I would just remember that Jack Nicholson line.

You can't handle the truth.

That poor Peter Ducey from Fox News, you know, he's in those,

he's in those press conferences.

He's like the only,

he's like Diogenes with a candle looking for one honest man.

And he's not there, Peter.

There's not going to be one reporter who's going to ask an honest question because they're all on the same team and they want so much to create a bunch of platonic guardians and socialize the rest of us.

And so they're not going to ever join you in your outrage.

It's not going to happen.

It makes Deucey look like a little gadfly, Socratic gadfly.

He's got a very good, yeah, he started out, you know, kind of it was slow to develop, but now he's developed a very effective style in a very strange way, but he has a style of his own.

And he's, it's always, don't you think that this might possibly be true?

And could you address it since you did not kind of sort of not address it last time?

And it's the most, but it's the most, you know, right on embarrassing question.

And then that crazy Jen Saki's freckles just leap out of her face.

And it's like,

I don't know, it's an abusive relationship.

There you go.

Yeah, she's the abuser.

All right.

Well, after that little bit, let's go ahead and have some messages.

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All right, welcome back.

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

You can find Victor's writings and his podcasts on his website at victorhanson.com.

And he is on many different social media platforms with a lot of his works and sometimes even beyond what is on his website.

So, find him on the various Facebook, Twitter, and Getter and MeWe.

Victor, there was a review you did of, I think, a recent book by Barry Strauss on the Battle of Actium.

And so, I thought we would close off this segment by your evaluation of Barry's new book and the Battle of Actium.

I always find that an interesting battle.

I confess I haven't read a lot on it.

I've known Barry Strauss.

Let me see.

I met him in 1978, believe it or not, when we were both 24, I think.

And Josh Ober, a classicist at Stanford University.

And we were all working on the same area of the Attic countryside during the Peloponnesian War.

And he wrote a lot of really good scholarly books as a Cornell scholar.

But, you know, about 12 years ago,

he started to write on areas for the pop so-called popular reader and he had this scholarship scholarship and the writing style and the ability to do that very well.

So, Thermopylae's Salamis, The Caesars, The Death of Julius Caesar.

They're all really good books.

I've reviewed some of them.

I've read them all and blurbed some of them as well.

So, he has this one on the Battle of Actium, the great battle between Anthony and Cleopatra against the sullen, sickly, but you know, brilliant Augustus, the sea battle that took place in northwestern Greece in 31 BC.

You know, it's very ironic that Augustus proverbially got sick on the battlefield.

He was so nervous or scared, but in the back hallways of power, he was a genius, whereas Anthony was politically naive, but he was a pretty good guy on the battlefield.

But by this time, he was a debauchee and he was, you know, he was enthralled with Cleopatra, who had been the enchantress of Caesar himself and had a child by him, Caesarean.

So he had this great battle.

And Barry's point was that even though the battle was not in itself as close as we think, that is, that the Egyptians were out of their depth and they were way up in northern northwestern Greece at the harbor of Actium.

You can go to Actium.

I went there with the American School, I think, once or twice, and I've been there on my own a couple of times.

There's an inscription there.

It's got a beautiful view of the harbor where the battle took place.

But his point is this: that had Cleopatra won,

then there was a likelihood or a chance that the capital of the new Mediterranean world would have probably been in Alexandria.

And as it was, the wealth and the weight in terms of commerce and finance and population and food, Egypt was the greatest food producer in the world at that time, even greater than the grain fields of Tunisia or Libya and greater than the Pole Valley in Italy.

or the great Thessalian plains of Greece.

So he was trying to say that the West came came very close into not being the West quite as we see it today.

It's a very ancient divide.

So when you go to Eastern Europe today, for example, or the Balkans or Greece or Russia, you're Western, but you're confronted with the Greek Orthodox or the Armenian Orthodox or the Serbian Orthodox or the Russian or the Ukrainian now Orthodox.

And there's a different take on the West.

And that would have been standardized throughout the Rome and you wouldn't have had the other

what would become the more I guess liberal or more consensual that we associated later post-Roman with the Renaissance or the Enlightenment.

So he really develops that theme really well but it's a very good book and

it was one of the great, it's like Salamis.

or Trafalgar or Midway, Actium is one of the great decisive sea battles in history that had it gone one way or the other way, I think there would have been a very different Roman Empire.

Really, how so, though?

Do you mean that it would have been overtaken by Eastern customs or something?

Well, I think what happened later with the foundation in the early fourth century under Constantine, where he took the old Greek city of Byzantium and he renamed it or refounded Constantinople, and that lasted for more than a thousand years.

And why did it last in the East, let's say from

oh take a date a traditional date of the fall of from 476 a.d and go all the way to 1453

why didn't the west survive that long why did it go through the period of the dark ages and the answer has been variously given as well

the greek east was far more defensible or byzantium didn't have borders quite like the danube and the rhine that were easily crossed or the people people before the rise of Islam in the eighth, seventh, and eighth century, it wasn't confronted with a type of, you know, the Persian Parthian menace.

They were not as dangerous as the Goths or the Viscoths or as warlike as the Vandals or the Huns.

It doubled down as the West became wealthy and luxurious and had all of these new Christian schisms, the liberists, the Manichaeans, the Augustans, the Catholic movement.

The Byzantines went the other way.

They just, they systematized and normalized Christianity and got rid of the sects under one Orthodox banner.

And then,

you know, they very under Justinian, they sort of wiped out during the Nica riots all the civil service bureaucracy, the so-called deep state.

They created this beautiful city with Hagia Sophia, the great cisterns, and the Hippodrome and then the Justinian law code.

So they doubled down on what Rome was good at in the second Renaissance.

And people in the West criticized them, and still the term Byzantine is an adjective, usually of a pejorative adjective of unimaginative regulation and rules at the expense of creativity.

It's a caricature, but there are some elements of truth in it.

That Byzantine Empire said, we're in a hostile territory.

They were kind of like Israel.

And we are on the east.

And by the eighth or ninth century, there was Islam on the rise and then they had the Persian Empire on the rise and then they were not on good terms by you know the fourth crusade with the west and there was a garrison mentality and they were very good if you read Maurice's stratagems and ideas about warfare or you look at the history of Greek fire or chains across the Golden Horn they were very adept at fighting with a chronically small population.

And it's tragic that, you know, when the plague hit them during the Justinian plague, you could make the argument, as Edward Lupbach did in the Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire.

He said basically, I think he was right about that.

I reviewed that book, I think, for the TLS.

But his argument was that right at the moment where Justinian had sent Belisarus into North Africa and had destroyed the Vandal kingdom and gone into Sicily and freed Sicily and was in Italy and was to be joined by Narciss, the other brilliant Byzantine general, the eunuch.

And they were just about reclaimed half from the Gothic kingdom of Italy and they were going into Spain and they had taken the Balkans and they had recreated, in other words, the Western Empire.

They had got a lot of North Africa back.

The plague hit.

the bubonic plague and it killed over 500,000 people at the center of the empire.

And Justinian himself was infected.

And I wrote about this a little bit in the Savior Generals on the career of Belisaurus, the savior of Byzantium.

So you're saying that if the Battle of Actium hadn't turned out as it did, that the Byzantine stronghold of Roman culture wouldn't have been what it was.

Is that no?

I'm saying that the Byzantine paradigm

that grew in antithesis to the West would have been the orthodoxy in the West itself, because it drew on the Greek language and it drew on indigenous cultures or it was had greater exposure in Asia because of its location and to Africa and Asia and it was closer to the Eastern fronts.

And so there was a different type of influence and that would have started at the very beginning of the principate.

So if Augustus had lost, Anthony and Cleopatra would be almost oriental dynasty.

And then they would have been much more centralized, as in the caricature of an Eastern despot.

And

that tradition would have made one religion.

There wouldn't be as much religious diversity.

They would have had an orthodoxy very early, and they would have had very different ideas.

It wouldn't have been as liberal a tradition, I think, but it would have been one that was more durable.

I don't know.

When I was a graduate student, there was a Vassiliev's great history of the Byzantine Empire, and there was a lot of scholars, and they were trying to have a Byzantine renaissance and saying all the caricatures of intrigue and backstabbing, kind of what went on at the Vatican, but was ubiquitous and

was false.

And it was actually a very creative.

and exciting culture.

If anybody's been to Mistros, the Byzantine capital of mainland Greece that fell, I think, 15 years after Constantinople.

It was a renaissance in art and literature.

You can go there today.

It's right outside Sparta on the hillsides of Mount Taegetus.

I all urge you to do it.

It's a beautiful place to go.

There's a five-star hotel now quite near it.

Well, thank you, Victor.

I think that we're going to conclude today with that.

And we'd like to thank our listeners as well.

I don't know how we got from javelin missiles to Mistras, but we did.

And I want to thank everybody.

I want to thank everybody for listening.

Yeah, thank you.

It's the crazy news of the week, I think, that got us there.

So, yes, thank you for listening.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hanson, and we're signing off.

Thank you, everybody.