Confronting the Left

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Hello, ladies, hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

We are recording on Sunday, March 13th in the year 2022.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, the star.

The namesake is Victor Davis-Hansen, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

He is the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor writes a lot, and all of it can be found at victorhanson.com.

We'll talk a little more about that later.

There's much to discuss.

The first thing is going to be Project Veritas' video trapping of a New York Times journalist.

And we're going to get to that right after this important message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

So Project Veritas,

that is the conservative undertaking of videographer, video journalists, and his team, James O'Keefe.

And they pulled a sting on the New York Times national security journalist, Matthew Rosenberg.

He's a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Yes, he is.

True, true.

He's also written a lot about January 6th and the 2020 and the attack on the U.S.

Capitol.

So it's interesting, Victor, when he writes, he sings from the insurrection song sheet that the rest of the media seemed to sing from.

But he was caught on tape by Project Veritas belittling the media's over-the-top reporting about January 6th, about claims of danger.

Rosenberg said that the protest outside of the Capitol was an experience of quote-unquote having fun.

He mocked young New York Times reporters who were at the Capitol for being drama queens.

And that was not what he called them.

He didn't call them drama queens.

He actually called them effing little dweebs and effing bitches.

And he didn't say effing.

He said the word, the real word that effing stands for.

Victor, there is a plethora of ways to approach this Project Veritas expose of America's media, of the New York Times itself, of Rosenberg.

Victor, effing have at it.

Well,

start off.

No offense, but does this guy guy think he's Clark Gable?

Using my generator, or I don't know.

Is he Brad Pitt?

I mean, come on, when you're approached by an attractive young woman that wants to hear about what you're doing at a bar,

and you're in the New York-Washington Nexus, and the conversation goes to things that are not usually of an interest in a bar.

How many times, Jack, if you went into a New York bar today or tonight or tomorrow and you overheard conversations of a man and woman, they'd be talking about the January 6th riot.

So, I mean, that shows you right off the bat, the guy is either a narcissist and ego or completely naive.

And then, you know, he made fun, as you said, of all the people who felt they were traumatized because they weren't.

You said there were basically.

it was it was there were fbi informants everywhere that the people he had talked to were nice i.e., the protesters, and there wasn't much to it except a bunch of buffoons.

And remember, he had attacked people personally in print that had said basically what he just said, said they were enablers.

And it raises another point.

I think I'm going to write an article.

I just got this idea, Jack, that we should consider what the left says about the left, because this is not unique.

So all of us out

in Red America, and I'm counting the the San Joaquin Valley as Red State America,

deplored the buffoonery, the desecration of the iconic capital.

But when we were told that this was a coup, an insurrection, five people died, we didn't quite rush to judgment because we had seen the Juicy Smollett, the Duc La Cross.

the Trayvon Mars.

We know how the left operates.

And sure enough, this person on the left now has said basically

you had suspicions because this was not an insurrection.

This was not an impeachable offense as they used to impeach Trump.

And all the people who were genuine

was a joke.

And he mentioned this in the context of a cultural war at the New York Times between supposed sober and judicious liberals like him and young people who kind of what I guess Ben Rhodes also characterizes 20-somethings that know nothing that are very you know fertile for echo chambers that can be manipulated so he did this but think of the other times that these other people have done the same thing you know i'm perfectly willing to say that donald trump lost the 2020 election

because

he and his supporters were not attentive enough in March and April when there was a concentrated,

I dare say, conspiratorial effort to change the voting procedures, the balloting procedures.

Financed by Mark Zuckerberg to the tune of $419 million.

And when you have 102 to 4 million ballots and they're cast either as early ballots or mail-in ballots, and the error rate, as I said, goes down by a magnitude of 10.

So in most states, usually it's 3 to 5% and it got down to 0.3 and 0.4%,

then you're going to to have a lot of avenues for fraud okay

but what i just said would get you sanctioned at stand i mean that was one of the reasons that i was brought up before the faculty senate for saying just that at stanford university and now guess what molly ball in time magazine just like mr rosenberg can't keep her mouth shut.

She has to gush.

And she uses the word conspiracy.

She says that they coordinated.

Remember all those brave, principled, idealistic protesters for 120 days wrecked the urban cores of all these cities that we all waived requirements on quarantine and masks.

Remember those guys in 2020?

Now we know that they were modulated.

They toned down their protest on the orders of the DNC, the Silicon Valley mob, corporate CEO, so they would give the impression that the left was not unruly and it was going going to quiet down so Joe Biden could not seem like he was a captive of kind of an updated SDS left.

She said that.

She's left-wing.

She used the word conspiracy, just like this Rosenberg laughed this off.

And then we get to the dossier.

And all of a sudden, we're told all these left-wing people come out.

And you know what?

We learn about Mr.

Sussman, we learn about Nadurh, that these people and even some of the techies techies from Georgia Tech, they are saying that they were upset or they felt put upon because they didn't feel comfortable going through the private communications of the President of the United States.

And then when they did, they didn't feel that the one-way

subscription autopilot pings to the Trump.

tower server from some kind of advertising company working for Alphabet was proof of collusion.

They said that.

And

now we get into another, yet another fourth example, and that is all of us, Jack, have been saying, you and I have done three or four podcasts on it the last year, that if you continue to cut back on natural gas, whether it's Europe or the United States,

and you cut back on oil and you either don't develop nuclear power or you shut it down and you just laugh at clean coal and that can be reified.

But take your pick, cancel ANWAR, cancel federal leases, jawbone lending agencies and pension funds not to lend to frackers and drillers.

Tell frackers and drillers and Keystone pipeline people, your days are numbered.

Do what you can to lower production by 2 million when it could have been raised by three.

So it could have been a three to five million dollar difference.

If you do all that, you're going to weaken the United States and you're going to send petro dollars and make Vladimir Putin rich.

So everybody has said that.

And then we said, you know what?

NATO is a joke.

Germany is deliberately suppressing that 2% contribution.

So you say all that, and everybody said, oh, you're trying to destroy NATO.

Or you don't understand climate change.

And I've been attacked in print like that.

And now, well, guess what?

Mr.

Oleg Schultz, the new chance, fairly new chancellor of Germany, he gives a speech and he says, oh my God,

we should have paid paid our two percent oh my god we've got to rearm oh my god we've been empowering vladimir putin oh my god schreuter and all this gas prom connections between our elites oh my god we've got to drill and frack and it was like okay

but can't you just one second

say who's culpable for all that and just say i want to apologize to people in the united states who pointed this out to us and were called isolationist or pro-Putin people.

Why doesn't he call Donald Trump up and say, you know, Donald, I remember that conversation when you yelled at the ministers of NATO and you said, How can I fully get NATO on board and fully get it up to speed when you Germans, when Germany is cutting deals with Putin, whom Americans in Germany are supposed to defend Germany against?

So I guess what I'm saying is that just take the left, whether it's the hoax

or the wiretapping of the Russian collusion hopes or the wiretapping of Trump towers or

the conspiracy and their words, not mine, or Mr.

Rosenberg, the laughing, the laugh he has over January 6th, that it was a bunch of buffoons and a charade, a circus, not an organized coup, or whether it was the Germans now and people in the United States are suddenly begging,

you know, begging people to pump oil.

If the right is so crazy about fossil fuels, then why is the left calling up Venezuela and Saudi Arabia and earlier Putin and Iran of all people?

Why?

Why, why?

Why?

According to them, you don't need to.

We have wind and solar.

I'm speaking a little passionately, Jack, because I went in to fill up my diesel pickup.

And guess what the price of diesel fuel is today?

Not in San Francisco, the coast.

I'm talking about the second poorest county in California, rural.

Is it over $6 a gallon?

Yes, it was.

Is it closer to $7?

No, it's $6.09.

But there's a little new wrinkle.

They have, you guys have a $100 limit back east?

No, I'll find out soon enough.

Yeah, well, I have a 30.

These new pickups have a 30-gallon.

tank, but they've lowered it to $75.

So I was at this gas station and all these guys were filling up gas and diesel and they were going to either pulling out another credit card or they were going to a different service station.

So it was packed and there was panic.

Yeah.

They think they're rationing.

Yeah, I think that's next.

I really do because these Russian sanctions haven't hit.

I don't think the problem will just be,

as you did, I lived through the 73 oil embargo and I was in Greece part of the time.

And then again, the 78 and 79.

As you remember, the problem wasn't just the high price.

It was surreal at the gas pumps.

Yeah, it was.

Yeah, you could only, depending on your license plate, you couldn't get gas on a certain day of the week, right?

Yeah, it was even an odd, even an odd.

And I remember my poor dad, we were driving in to park.

We were all in the car, and some big guy in a pickup pulled right in front of us.

And he wasn't in front of the pump.

He just kept backing at us and we had no either he was going to hit our bumper or we would have to back out so he could take our pump and we got in a big argument with him and he just said listen this is my truck i need to make a living i need gas i'm sorry i'll do whatever it takes and i mean whatever it takes and that was what was crazy about it

and it was so desperate and people i remember they took the old old 88 and olds 98 you know those gas big old oldsmobile and they rushed in

they just reconverted a gasoline engine i guess they put a heavier head on it and then you know injectors instead of a car and they made it into a diesel engine because they could get 28 miles the gallon when everybody in those big heavy olds 88s olds 98s were getting i don't know 18 16 12.

and so we went out and leased one and of course they were never designed from the ground up as diesel so after about 50,000 miles, they just had cracked and it was no good.

I remember all the junky cars that were going out because they were trying to make economic kind of what was that car?

I don't, I forgot.

It wasn't a Hugo, but Hugo was a little later, but it was that the Ford Fiesta.

Is that what it was?

No, no, no, no, they had little ones.

The Pinto, the Nova.

Oh, yes, yes.

Those were the Nova, which they tried to sell in Spain.

Nova, Nova.

I remember those were the biggest piece of crap cars.

My grandfather, poor guy, he was, you know, he was in his seven, he was 83, and they told him that his old 1947 international flathead six, he'd had for, you know, 30 years.

And he decided that he was going to get a Ford Courier.

Remember them?

They first came out?

I think it was 70-something and to save gas.

And it was 18 miles the gallon on a little four-cylinder engine.

Can you imagine that?

That's how inefficient we were.

Percolators.

Maybe we'll get there again.

I hope not.

But this generation, this green generation will be very surprised that if there's a shortage in fuel and it's $7 or $8, what they will see at the...

And it's not only the gas pump, Victor.

I mean, petroleum is used for everything in our economy.

I know, but plastic.

Fertilizer.

Fertilizer is just sky high.

All these farmers that I'm talking to can't afford it.

I already have a term called the arena

for this ARCO station that's 10 to 15 cents lower than anything else, you know.

AMPM ARCO.

It's a rural station.

It's right down the road and it's packed because if gas is, say, I don't know, 550 here, 570 a gallon, it's 520.

But you should see it.

Jack, it's got a line out and the people there are desperate.

So before the latest latest Ukraine, I would kind of, I avoided that.

I've been in there a couple of times and I've almost seen, you know, gang wars and fights over gas, but wait till this spreads nationwide.

And the greens are going to see what they've wrought.

They've sowed the wind and they're going to reap the whirlwind because you take away gasoline from Americans and you can take it away either by being

too exorbitantly priced or just a shortage.

And you're going to see stuff that we haven't seen since the 1970s.

Well, we're going to, not this podcast, but on our next podcast, Victor, we're going to look at some of the polls and how this plays out with folks.

I'll say two things.

One is that today I drove, I always go see my, I'm a good boy.

I go see my mother in the Bronx.

I take her to church in the morning on Sundays, and I had to get gas on the way down.

It was $4.59 a gallon, but I also went in on Tuesday to see her.

And the same gas station was $4.09 a gallon.

So it's just in a few days, 50 cents.

I'm sure most people in America have experienced the same thing.

The second thing I want to say, I was jealous of Rosenberg, you know, that some pretty lady approached him in a bar.

And I have to say, only one time that ever happened, by the way, she wasn't necessarily pretty.

It was 1979, and she wanted to know if I wanted

some of her pea soup.

It was quite strange.

He's had better encounters in bars than I've ever had.

So

I have a lot of women that approach me when I'm traveling, and they're usually the sweetest persons in the world, and they're over 75 and they're 80.

And I'm 68, so they're in my age group, but it's never sexual.

It's always

reminiscent about our shared generation that is under assault.

But they're

complete strangers.

You're a rock star at the bingo hall.

I know that.

So,

all right, Victor, let's move on.

Item two that we're going to talk about on today's episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show has to do with Ron DeSantis.

So as we've heard and read and seen, the Florida legislature passed a bill.

It was signed into law by DeSantis that in part precludes teaching toddlers about sodomy.

The same left

that proved in Virginia its obtuseness to what sorts of things are the rightful province of parents and not the province of public education ideologues.

That same left has embarked on another attack aided of course by their media fellow travelers of desantis and he's not shied away from fighting back and calling them out for their the lies they have put out there that this bill somehow or other

claiming is a is an effort to trash gaze and so we have desantis pushing back against that publicly but then on top of that the disney corporation which is a big deal in florida uh it took a momentary break from it's doing business with Red China and genocidal Red China to drop some virtue signaling on DeSantis, and he punched back at them.

So, Victor, I'm seeing in this another

DeSantis, I'll call it a victory, a political victory, and a thing that has enhanced his political stature, pushing back against the left.

What's your take on how he's performed on this issue?

The left's salaciousness, Disney, have at it.

Well, I think if he is going to be a rival to Donald Trump, originally before we got even near the midterms and the beginning of the political cycle,

the supporters of a DeSantis versus the supporters of a Trump

candidacies would kind of be along the following fault lines.

The supporters would say he's just as MAGA MAGA as Trump.

He believes in revitalizing the industrial wasteland of America, the Rust Belt.

He wants to close that border.

He doesn't trust China.

He wants symmetrical.

He doesn't want trade and commerce with China.

He wants an end to optional military engagements.

He's a Jacksonian, et cetera.

But

they would say, but he doesn't tweet.

He's Ivy League.

He's well educated.

He doesn't bring the baggage, the personal baggage.

He's never been in a wrestling ring.

And

so, and then the Trump people would say, well, he's colorless.

He's too professional.

He can't, he'll never be able to get a crowd of 60,000.

So I think in part of that, to that tension, what he's doing now is he's going out toe-to-toe, whether it's on masks or quarantines or Ukraine or

this

surreal effort of the left to indoctrinate children on issues of private sexuality and transgenderism, all this in the very early era.

And he's becoming kind of a Trumpian figure that he loves this and he's good at it.

And we'll see whether it's effective in a political sense to rile up that base.

And the key will be, will he say things like Trump does that get embarrassed or will he be just as tough as Trump, but he won't give tweet material stuff.

And we'll see.

As far as the issue,

it's very strange.

Every time you meet a person who's married and has children, they're kind of, especially women, they're so gifted.

They're able to balance all of that.

I, gosh, I go to dinner with people and when they have two or three kids, I just amaze how well

the so-called American mom functions.

And then when I meet teachers, I'm a teacher.

My son is a teacher.

My son-in-law is a teacher.

My father farmed and taught.

So I'm from a family of teachers, but I'm always underwhelmed.

And the idea that we would, somebody gets a BA in today's watered-down curriculum and they go through that education therapeutic mill for a year and a half.

It's all therapeutic.

And then we're going to turn over our children's futures from

very aware, sober, and judicious parents and mothers and outsource that.

So these very sensitive training on sexuality, we're going to allow these people because they have a credential, it's just insane.

They don't have a sterling education.

And

because

something we haven't talked about, Jack, this whole woke movement and equity grading has really destroyed the idea of meritocracy and education.

So it's not hard to get what I'm getting at, it's not hard to get a pre-teaching BA.

It's not hard to get credential.

And this idea that they're professionals that know better than parents is not, even if you believe that, it can't be verified anymore because the degrees are worthless, almost worthless.

And, you know, this is, I just wrote a long article for the new criterion called R Satiricon because there was a great novel written in 65, 68.

AD by Petronius, a Roman noble who was, it's kind of a parody of Nero, but it's a brilliant novel.

And we have about 100,000 words left of it.

Now, I'd like to do, maybe I'll get Sammy to talk about it at length sometime, but the point I'm making is that is a very prominent theme, not just bisexuality or voyeurism or sadomasochism, but transgenderism.

And it's sort of presented empirically as the natural expression of a very, very wealthy, urban and leisured society that Rome was in the Neronian period.

And the novel is not written by a Cato-like old Roman agrarian.

It's written by Petronius Arbiter.

And he's probably the same Titus Niger Petronius, who was a confidant of Nero himself, and indulged in just the things he's writing about.

So I think in all this discussion that we're having about the Florida law and everything, I do think people have to ask ourselves, there is something called gender dysphoria.

It's a biological condition, but it's much rarer than the number of people who have coming forward and saying they're suffering from it.

It's a very dangerous thing.

to start to jump the gun and operate or give dangerous hormonal treatments to children when the percentage of the children who say that they are suffering from gender dysphoria is probably larger than medically is attested in the literature.

And there's a long tradition in Western civilization and literature and history and comedy that transgenderism has a lot of social

and cultural influences that promote it and fuel it.

And we're not even talking about that.

But I think that's very important to keep in mind.

I know that Hollywood wants to say that it was a bunch of cowboys used to dress up or, you know, in dresses and they didn't, you know, they were all this bisexual, gay.

No doubt, the numbers are the numbers biologically, whatever time period we're talking about.

But I'm really worried about it because I've had a couple of friends that have, I've talked to, and they had children that never from birth on.

never expressed any of these affinities or proclivities.

And then under the pressures of the public schools and the peer pressures of their friends and associates, they began to almost demand of the parents that they would be allowed to have hormonal treatment.

And I think that's,

we haven't talked about that because, you know,

the left is so strange, Jack, because they're always lecturing us about big pharma and putting unnatural substances into your bodies.

Then suddenly they get on a kick.

some kind of leftist control kick and whether it's vaccinations or it's very dangerous hormonal treatments, they just, you can't even talk to them about it.

Well, for the longest time, Victor, there have been some studies about, you know, the birth control and its relation to breast cancer, but you dare not say it, you know, because there are certain sacred cows that just cannot, well, be pushed over, I guess.

So, but I agree.

We should, you know, at some point, my former colleague, our former colleague at National Review, Madeline Kearns, has done tremendous work on this issue.

She's pointed out in some cases that you find in some schools, it becomes a craze.

All of a sudden, you know, 10% of the ninth grade girls want to become boys, etc.

So, and on top of that, the rights of parents who are saying, wait a minute, this is my kid.

I get to, they are cut off and they're even threatened legally.

I'm really worried.

And I don't say this as some person who's claiming to be a biologist or neurobiologist or anything.

I'm talking about a historian.

And when you start to look at certain types of literature, a little bit in Aristophanes, but not nearly as much in novels like Apuleius's The Golden Ass or Petronius's Satyricon or some of the shocking things in Suetonius's Lives of the Twelve Caesars, a lot of that gender transition back between male and female and sexuality is all predicated or described or located or constructed in a larger environment of wealthy, leisured, urban landscapes.

And it's often of the elite classes.

And it becomes almost a fad.

And it's tied up with other things.

And the ancient mind, I'm not claiming those are my views.

In the ancient mind, it's claimed, it's considered to be co-committing with, you know, feminization of the attack on masculinity.

or sexual ambiguity in the sense of bisexuality.

And these are things we're not allowed to talk about, but I think if you have somebody in your family who's transgendering, I would be very careful to at least give them opportunity to read historical and cultural texts that suggest this is not new, but it was seen in the past as, I'm not going to say decadence, otium or luxus in Latin, but it has something to do with a rapid transition from a traditional society to a sophisticated urban, affluent, leisured society.

I think that's what's happened in the United States in the last 50 years.

Right.

Well, Victor, I want to remind our listeners that you have a website, victorhanson.com.

Everything you write, or I think practically everything you write, can be found there.

And a lot of what you write is exclusive to that website and requires a subscription to read the pieces.

So I want to encourage our listeners to do that.

It's very modest, yeah, it's very modest.

It's uh, it's five dollars a month or fifty dollars for the year, and as I've said before, I believe if you take all the exclusive content on a monthly basis and corral it together, it makes up consistency of a typical magazine, and you'd pay a lot more than uh four dollars and 75 cents for a newsstand magazine, especially if it was a Victor Davis-Hansen magazine.

So, it's very modest, and I know most people that have done it are quite happy with it.

So I say that as a preface to one of the pieces that is behind the quote-unquote paywall.

But let's bring it out for the sake of discussion on today's episode.

And that's a piece.

two-part series.

It's titled The Liberal Left from Appeasement to No-Fly Zones in the Blink of an Eye.

Victor, you talk in this about the record of left-wing appeasement, and then all of a sudden, tough guyism, newly found.

You analyze the left's saber rattling.

You raise a question also about why is Barack Obama so quiet about Ukraine.

So Victor, yeah, could you address the theme of the piece on how the liberal left went from appeasement to a no-fly zone, like boom overnight?

And then if you don't mind at the end, your thoughts about Obama.

I know I've written a lot about this left-wing embrace of projection, that Freudian term where when they're insecure about an inconsistency in their ideology or their politicking, they project that pathology onto other people.

And when they do, that's usually a tip-off that they're guilty of it.

And they do it all the time.

And so I've been really

interested in how they will come up with something

and they'll say, these people are pro-Putin or these people, they'll come up with nothing actually.

And they will say, these people are pro-Putin or these people have been appeasing.

And I go back to a lot of articles I wrote early on, two or three years ago.

And there was a classic shorter op-ed.

You remember it, Jack, by Walter Russell Mead, basically, who is not a conservative, I don't think.

And he pointed out that if you didn't know anything about Donald J.

Trump and you didn't know anything about Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or Joe, you would have thought the left was appeasing Putin on Ukraine.

And he pointed out, and what he pointed out was that the record of Donald Trump vis-a-vis Russia and Ukraine is pretty clear.

He

did not take down sanctions against oligarchs.

He increased them.

He opened the spigots of oil and crashed the world price.

Some of it was COVID, but he helped do that.

That robbed.

Putin of income and it made Europe that's dependent on fossil fuels a lot, gave them a lot more leeway.

Obama just wouldn't sell a javelin.

That was the irony of the whole Venman indictment and that first impeachment when he got on there and said this phone call and they suspended.

And a few, I thought, on kind of impotently, but nonetheless, a few Republican inquisitors said, but Trump sent them 500 javelin and Biden sent them blankets.

Come on.

And nobody really picked up on that, but Trump did that.

He delayed it for a few weeks but he sent them offensive weapons he killed those mercenaries i at the time i think secretary pompeo said there was 200 killed in syria we hadn't done that since i don't know the cold no at no time in the cold war did the united states kill 200 russians and we did that in syria we got out of the intermediate missile deal the treaty, and it was very unfavorable.

And Putin was cheating.

And nobody in the Obama's administration dared to do that.

He did that without a blink of, he just did it.

You know, and they all say, well, he undermined NATO.

He said this, he said that.

Well, yeah, because that's the art of the deal way of talking that he does.

And it's often misinterpreted, but he talks loud and brash.

And then he offers a concrete proposal when he disarms people.

So he said to NATO, I don't know why we're doing this.

And I don't know why we're defending NATO.

And oh, by the way, I think you better up up your arms.

It's going to get hairy and dangerous.

And they did by 100 million.

And he increased our defense budget probably by 80 to 90 million dollars, a billion dollar.

I should say billion.

So what I'm getting at is, how in the world would anybody say that Donald Trump had appeased Putin?

Unless you would believe, Jack, and I think I put it in these terms before.

Putin sits in the Kremlin with his advisor and say, wow, I'm glad Trump gave him those javelins.

It was about time.

Wow.

Ah, we were just taking him on that missile deal.

I'm so glad he got out of it.

It was embarrassing.

Wow.

I feel a lot safer now that the United States and NATO have increased their respective budgets in aggregate by $200 billion.

This is great.

And then you contrast all that with Obama.

And my gosh, the hot mic in Seoul.

And again, what was forgotten about that hot mic was that the quid pro quos were fulfilled.

Putin did behave during the election as Obama requested him.

Obama did dismantle missile defense.

And Putin did then go into Crimea and Ukraine after he postponed it.

And Obama did nothing.

He didn't do anything about either invasion of eastern Ukraine or Crimea.

And then when you add into that,

you know, Jack, the Russians hadn't been in the Middle East since 1974, almost 40 years.

And what did he do?

He invited them in.

Kerry did.

You You remember that about the WMD in Syria?

We're going to have the Russians come in because he was afraid to enforce his own red lines.

He didn't want to bomb any Assad insulation because he had, in a moment, of his own braggadaccio, had said that, you know, this is a red line.

If we see stuff moving around,

then that's it for me.

And then they did exactly that.

And then he wanted the Russians to come in and save him.

And they're still there, but they hadn't been there before.

And when you get into the steel dossier and you get into the Ukrainian ambassador in the 2016 election, as Paul Sperry has pointed out, Real Clear Politics, writing an op-ed attacking a presidential candidate, or you get into Alexander Venman bragging.

that he had been offered three times the Ministry of Defense by the newly inaugurated Zelensky, or the Biden family shaking down the Ukrainians and demanding as they interfere in the internal affairs of Ukraine,

as Ukraine has interfered in our internal affairs.

Put it all together.

And it's very clear that Donald Trump

deterred Putin.

Biden-Obama

appeased him.

And the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

He went in in 2014, twice to other countries.

He had done it under Bush when we had high oil prices and we were bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And he didn't do it in 2017 and 2020.

I was in a discussion this week with David Eisenhower, a very wonderful guy.

And

he had a news show about the future of the conservatives.

And I didn't know who the panelists were going to be, but one of them was the editor of the Never Trump Bulwark, Charles Sykes.

And he kind of introduced to the discussion in a very heated way what I just said is ridiculous.

In other words, he said, well, the reason that Putin didn't invade in the Trump tenure was because Trump gave him everything.

And John Bolton said that Trump wanted to get out of NATO.

Well, you know, it was John Bolton said, and Trump said, and Trump did this, but it was no discussion about what actually happened, what actually happened.

Biden has appeased Putin.

He appeased him when he said, let's just discuss putting stuff off

limits.

So, if your guys are going to hack us, here's 16 sites that we don't want hacked.

Or earlier in the fall, can't Vladimir

pump more oil?

This was before Ukraine.

And

that's a very important point, Jack, because he's telling everybody that oil went up only because of Ukraine.

Well, if that was true, why was he he begging before Ukraine to pump oil?

Because he'd cut it out.

And then, in addition to that, Afghanistan.

I mean, Afghanistan was just a gift to Putin.

And it's still the ripples of Afghanistan are now lapping up in North Korea with these scary new missile tests.

They're lapping up with the Russians and the Iranians colluding against us and against the interest of Israel.

And so it's pretty clear what I'm saying is that when the left starts to accuse people of not being tough on Putin, they are the people and they're projecting.

They are the people that.

Yeah.

You know, another thing is just, I get really angry about that because they go after, I mean, you can disagree with Laura or Tucker or some people.

Angela Cotaville was a great scholar, but

he wrote things that suggested that we had transgressed.

But Putin is a carnivore, as I said, he's a tiger and we let him out of his cage.

And you can discuss how that happened without saying that you approve of the carnivore eating somebody.

It's just a given that a tiger in a zoo will always jump out and kill somebody if he has the opportunity.

By blaming the zoo keeper or the zoo architect, that doesn't mean you approve of the carnivore doing that.

And so I think that's really important for conservatives to make this point.

Putin, at any moment, anywhere, anytime, against anyone will move if he can.

Now, that fact doesn't defend or justify when he does move, but what it does do is it emphasizes don't let him out.

Don't ever let down your guard.

Don't open the cage.

Yeah, a strong majority of Americans agree with that, Victor, right?

I mean, most Americans believe that.

Or more Republicans, I think, I think, than Democrats.

But also, I mean, a majority of Americans believe that if Donald Trump was president, none of this would have happened, you know, so it matters who's, you know.

That's an astounding thing to say, too, Jack, because when you looked at that poll, you have to contextualize that the media hates Trump and the media had been feeding Americans just the opposite, that Trump loved Putin, that he was, I think, as John Brennan said, he was a Russian asset or James Clapper and a Russian asset.

Brennan called him treasonous.

They've been hearing that for three years, and yet they still thought Trump, despite all that propaganda, the collusion, the impeachment, they still thought Trump was tougher on Putin than was Biden.

Victor, I'd like to take this question in another angle.

This is a curveball I'm throwing at you about some news that has just broken today, and it's about some action in the Middle East.

But we'll do that right after this important message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

So Victor, I just wanted to pick up, we'll move not too far away from Russia, but sort of again along the lines of with Biden as president, what's now happening that didn't happen and we don't think would have happened had Donald Trump still been president.

And today there's news of Iranian rockets barraging in Iraq near a U.S.

consulate.

I got to believe that wouldn't have happened had Donald Trump been president.

I would have to believe it is happening because Joe Biden is president and how he's performed over the last year.

What are your thoughts on that?

I get angry about it because I think of all the never-Trumpers.

I think of all of these self-assured sanctimonious leftists that told us joe biden was going to be the compromise the unity the restorer there a had been never any evidence in that man's career that he was anything other than a plagiarist than a liar than vindictive than mean-spirited and two

the only saving grace was that he was cognitive cognitive challenged.

So those traits that I just delineated might not have been fully expressed because he wasn't all there.

And yet they put him in the presidency.

And if that was not enough, in advance, they said they were going to look at no vice presidential candidate unless she was African-American and female.

And that meant when you looked at the Senate,

or you looked at the governors, you didn't see a lot that would fit that category.

And you ended up with Kamala Harris that has to be the worst vice president in the last hundred years.

And that's saying a lot.

And so here you have these people, and we don't understand what the United States does.

I mentioned the tiger before, but we are on a tiger.

It's called the China tiger, the radical Islam tiger, the Russian tiger, the Iranian tiger, the North Korean tiger.

And you sit on it.

And you control it.

You don't get rid of those people because human nature being what is, there's always going to be manifestations of evil and autocracy and dictatorship and killing and violence.

But what the United States does, and to the lesser extent, its allies in Japan, Australia, South Korea, the EU, NATO, et cetera, Canada, it rides that tiger and it keeps it in certain...

parameters.

And when you get off that tiger by either not pumping oil

or

having this ideological agenda that says you're going to open all of the borders or you're going to cut defense or you're going to woke the military or you're going to get out of Afghanistan in the most humiliating fashion imaginable

or you're going to

not respond to Iranian aggression, but instead you're going to appease them and beg them for another deal.

Or you're just going to let North Korea go right back to where they were then you jumped off the tiger.

Or it's kind of like the Greek myth of Helios and the chariot and the sun and

faithon.

And you get off the chariot and the sun goes everywhere and it burns the earth.

And that's what's happened.

And they don't understand that.

They think it's that the world works according to, I don't know, the rules of preschool or the faculty lounge.

It doesn't.

And it just seems so repetitive and simplistic to have to reply to these people and tell them that but the natural order of things is chaos the natural order is anarchy and violence and when you're not you don't understand that and you appease it or you neglect it then it increases and so Joe Biden has lost one war and lost one country that was pro-U.S., the government of Afghanistan.

He's on the cusp of losing the second, Ukraine, to Vladimir Putin.

If he loses the second one, Jack, I think he'll lose a third one in Taiwan.

If he loses Taiwan, I don't know what will happen to the Middle East, but I would imagine that the so-called Sunni crescent that was some bankrupt idea dreamed up by Ben Rhodes and Barack Obama will come to fruition.

That is Syria, Lebanon, Iran, all going down to the Mediterranean, all Shia,

or more Shia than Sunni, led by Persians, anti-Sunni, anti-Arab, and anti, of course, Israel.

And so he jumped off the tiger Joe Biden has, and now it's running wild.

And I don't know

how you see that.

And

even if there's a

overwhelming Republican majority taking over Congress next January.

They don't set full impact.

Yeah.

Right.

We've got three more years of this.

No,

you have something called executive orders on domestic policy.

And you have,

what, the State Department and their bureaucracy.

I don't think they can check what's going on.

They can reduce it or minimize it, but not stop it.

And we've done a lot of damage.

It's very sad when you think about it because Trump and Pompeo had those ABAMs accords.

And my gosh, we were on the...

the threshold of seeing Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and some of the more powerful Arab countries join others and having a new alliance against Iran.

We were just starting to see this new group of Australia and South Korea and Japan and by

Association Taiwan starting to wake up.

The Philippines even offered us to go back in there and have their base there.

So you could see that there was an element to check Chinese expansionism.

It's gone.

It's gone, gone, gone.

And then all these experts that told us that they, in their great erudition and their vast scholarship, could tell us chapter and verse about Donald Trump's inability and the world was chaotic.

They're silent.

They say nothing now.

They don't even talk about it.

I don't know where they are.

Where's John Bolton right now?

Why isn't John Bolton?

Why isn't John?

I was talking Trump the other day.

Yeah, about NATO of all things.

Yeah.

I'm thinking, wow, the German chancellor just said

exactly what Donald Trump said in that famous video.

Remember across the table when he said, I'm sorry, I'm going to interrupt.

I want you to tell, this is unsustainable.

The German, Germany, your biggest country in NATO, cannot cut a deal on this Nord Stream II pipeline and enrich Putin and ask Americans to protect them from, we're not going to do it.

That's exactly what the German chancellor admitted now.

We can't do it anymore.

It's wrong.

And what is that occasion?

Bolton comes out and says, This is an occasion, an opportunity, a moment to attack Trump because supposedly he said at one point he didn't want to be in NATO anymore.

You know what I mean?

That's like a guy saying, you know what?

The guy that fixes my car took too long.

I don't want that guy anymore.

But he does go back to him.

I mean, rhetoric, rhetoric, rhetoric.

And again, it's back to that old question: don't look at achievement, just look at rhetoric.

And so I don't know what, John, why would he do that?

And why doesn't he come out now and say, you know what?

Here is a 10-point plan that we need to adopt as an old foreign policy hand.

And this is what's wrong with Biden.

But they hate Trump so much.

They despise him so much that they would rather.

They would rather lose and they would rather see things go to hell with a non-Trump person.

And it's really scary.

It really is.

And I think the greatest zealots that are willing to do that are people that used to be conservatives.

I just, you know, every once in a while, I'll go look at the dispatch or I'll go

to the bulwark and I'll see things that are written.

And I cannot believe it because what they're basic, the subtext of them is

everything you heard me write, everything I said on TV,

whether it's abortion or whether it's the border or whether it's strong national defense or whether it's suspicion of China or whether it's it's the melting pot rather than salad bowl, or whether it's suspicion of identity politics.

Just forget all that.

I never meant it because this guy who represents that whole agenda, I hate so much that I'm willing to cast all of that prior advocacy and accept this whole left-wing agenda that was antithetical to everything I tried to persuade you to believe.

And it's just mind-boggling.

Victor, I have to think envy, envy, which is at the base of many sins and failings, is the essence of how folks with at the bulwark, or they had a, there was a conference two weeks ago.

I think it was called From First Principles.

You know, it's the Bill Crystal, bulwark-y kind of officer to CPAC.

By the way, there's a great, very well-written analysis of that conference by a guy named Declan Leary.

It's been published in the American Conservative.

But yeah, you can't help but think the Bill Crystal looks at Donald Trump and says,

I'm the smart guy.

You know, why is the loudmouth the leader of the front?

Well, in this conversation that I had with David Eisenhower, I think it'll be online.

Mr.

Sykes, the editor of the bulwark, at one point,

I was asked, what's the future of the Republican Party?

And I said, we're not going to go back to Romneyism.

It's not going to, it didn't work.

We were very successful at the local and state and regional level, but we weren't very successful at the national level of electing presidents that were conservative or electing anybody.

And I said, I think the party is now

open

to people of all different races and ethnic backgrounds that have a shared class suspicion of the bicoastal elite.

And this is exciting because Mexican-American people, Black people, poor white people, they all on these issues of the border or energy or transgenders in the schools, they all are getting to be on the same page.

And it's ecomenical.

And so when you hear these never-Trumpers say, oh, he's racist, he's racist, but if he's so racist, why are half the Hispanics after his tenure ready to vote for a Republican?

He's done more for the Republican Party with Hispanics than anybody.

And they used to just dote over George W.

Bush because he got, I think, 40%

in 2004 of the Hispanic vote in Texas.

So I don't understand it.

It's insane.

I remember Mr.

Sykes at one time said,

when I said, and it's no longer,

people don't listen to that elite anymore.

And he said, that's the problem.

They don't.

Something to that effect.

I'll have to wait to the thing.

But so I think you're right.

A lot of these people like Bill Crystal feel that they were

a merocratic or they inherited certain privileges from their social milieu or their parents or they were just resume people.

And what they said was not going to be defined or audited or adjudicated on the merits or the logic or the wisdom of it, but who said it?

And when Trump blew that up and destroyed, think of all the careers he destroyed on the right.

He destroyed 40 or 50 of the most prestigious neoconservative Washington, New York Nexus careers.

He just destroyed and he blew them up.

And all they talk about now is Donald Trump.

All they talk about.

They can't talk about anything else.

And they can't mention even a conservative position that they

hold that might be in any way similar to Donald Trump's agenda.

So therefore, they're not conservatives because they box themselves into a corner that they can't even say, I think we need a secure border because immediately somebody will say, well, that's what Donald Trump did.

They're incapable of acknowledging any similarity between themselves.

And you're right.

It's so inexplicable, Jack, that can only be explained by the irrational or the idea that there was something about Trump's accent, his hair, his mannerisms, his body lifestyle.

I don't know what it is, but it just was a perfect storm that destroyed the conservative intellectual's sense of self.

Yeah.

Not a perfect comparison, but you know, Fredo was furious at his brother Michael, right?

I'm smart.

I'm smart.

But I thought we were saving him for

Chris Cuomo.

Yeah, sorry.

He applies to many situations.

Hey, Victor, we've got time for one more subject to discuss, and we'll get to that.

And it's this unsettling poll about patriotism in America.

And we'll talk about that right after this message.

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

We're recording on Sunday, Sunday, March 13th, a few days before the IDEs.

So there's a Quintipiak poll that came out a week ago.

It's gotten some, probably a lot of attention, lots of questions about Biden's competence, et cetera.

Much of the questioning in this particular poll had to do with Ukraine.

But there was one question, Victor, and here it is.

It says, if you were in the same position as Ukrainians are now, do you think that you would stay and fight or leave the country?

So here's some of the breakdowns of this response to that question.

In the total, 55% of adults said they would stay and fight.

38% of Americans say they would leave the country.

Republicans stay and fight 68-25.

Democrats, 40-52.

It means a majority of Democrats would split.

Independents were 57% stay and fight.

Men, 70 versus women 40 to stay.

I have a thought about women and the elderly on this.

I'll get to it before we ask your overall thoughts.

As any number of other people have commenting on this survey, have pointed out, Victor, one of the things that have jumped out is the age bracket answers.

So from the ages of 18 to 34, the respondents, 45% said they'd stay and fight, 48% said they would leave the country.

Breakdown by race,

whites, 57% stay, 35% leave.

Hispanics, 61% stay, 33% leave.

Blacks, this is pretty shocking here.

Only 38% stay and fight, 59%

leave.

There's a buffer to everything.

Military households, 68% would stay and fight, 27% leave.

Victor, I think on the leave side, you know, you have to factor in my blessed 88-year-old mother.

She was asked this question.

I hope she'd answer.

answer i can leave you know i don't want my mother staying and fighting so i think we have some aspect to that and then some aspect to people who still view things traditionally like war fighting is the stuff that men are supposed to do and i could see women saying no i'm going to leave i'm going to take my kids and my husband's going to fight or the men are fighting I'm sorry if that's too Cro-Magnon a way of looking at things, but there's still a lot of that sentiment left in America.

So Victor, all in all, the total 55%, I was kind of like, whoa, the youthful numbers, discouraging.

Some of the racial breakdown numbers, also discouraging.

You may not be discouraged.

You may think this is realistic amongst, you know,

applicable across generations.

Victor, what are your thoughts about the response to this question?

Well, it confirmed what I think we all knew that

the left is sort of a postmodern left.

They really, put it this way, let me just stop.

People fight

for things they like and praise, and they fight against things they don't.

So let me ask you a question.

If you would rephrase that question to the Democrats and the left, if there were a lot of MAGA people and they were taking over your country, would you stay and fight them or leave?

What do you think they'd say?

I think they'd say 90% they'd fight them.

So I don't think it's just that they're cowardly.

I think that they feel

that their chief threat right now is the Trump MAGA people.

They hate them.

That's what they're told.

And so I think if you ask them, would you stay and fight Donald Trump or would you stay and fight if Putin came over?

They would rather fight Donald Trump.

That's the one thing.

Because that's what they've been told, Jack.

All the propaganda is how horrible the deplorables and the chumps and the dregs are.

We've heard more horrible things about the MAGA people on January 6th than we have the Russians or anybody.

So that's number one.

And number two, you have to have a positive view of the country.

And if you don't believe we were created in 1776, it's just another construct in 1619.

It's just as good.

From Nicole Hannah-Jones, the person remember who's our national iconic expert on dating and doesn't know when the Civil War, which is about the most iconic war, race, freedom, foundational themes you can have in American history.

She thought it started in 1865.

And that was not just something she said.

She wrote it out in the tweet.

But if you have people like that, either don't know about the United States, they have no civic education, or they don't like it, you can't ask them to fight for it.

And then finally, you know, this idea that there are people from, it's kind of an old idea, there's people from

some place, and then there's people who live in no place.

And by that, I mean there's a certain type of upwardly mobile professional person that if you plop them down in La Jolla, California or Carmel or, I don't know, Menlo Park or

Montecito or the Upper West Side or Palm Beach.

It doesn't matter.

It's just that it's all, you know what I mean?

It's, it's there, but it's nowhere.

They have no region.

They

They don't have any, they move to a house, they expand it, they expect to be there four or five years.

They have no interest who lived there before them, why the other person left.

They don't really get to know their neighbors.

It's the lifestyle, the education, the degree that they find people like that, but they have no roots of being.

They're not people from Ohio.

They're not people from the San Joaquin Valley.

They're just itinerants.

And if you have that attitude, then you have less a stake in your immediate environment.

You just leave.

You think, you know what?

If somebody comes in here like they did in Ukraine, I'm out of here.

And there's going to be a place somewhere in the United States that I can find, or I'll go to Europe.

It doesn't really matter because I don't believe in a unique United States.

Where I think you ask a lot of the people that I grew up here with, they're neighbors.

They would say, if any SOB comes into our town, we're going to, that's it.

We'll fight them.

Fight, fight, fight.

You know, I have an anecdote.

I was talking to a guy,

a guy from Mexico, and I was walking the dogs once.

And

sometimes my wife comes with me most of the time, but every once in a while I go by myself and he had a gun.

And I said to him, you know, in broken Spanish, and he had broken English, is that gun okay?

And he said, yeah.

And I,

and I said, well, why do you do it?

And he said, it was during the riots, Jack.

And he said, because they're going to come here.

Yeah.

And I said, here out here in an almond orchard.

And then I mentioned it to one of my law enforcement friends who's Hispanic.

And he said, yeah, a lot of people thought that.

They were getting guns.

They wanted to protect Selma.

They wanted to protect their community because they live somewhere.

So when I go to Palo Alto, I don't think anybody, there are communities.

I shouldn't be so,

you know, I've had dinner with some wonderful people and they really know their communities in Silicon Valley but the younger generation don't they drift in and out they move here and there they're not rooted to any place they have no loyalties to the soil to a home to a memory you know what so it's all negotiable yeah they just make the necessary adjustments wherever they are you can plop them down anywhere because they're nowhere people

not people, as that kind of stereotype phrase has been popularized.

I actually think that would be a great theme for an essay, Victor.

It's in the dying citizen.

I said that's part of the problem right now: that we have too many people that are globalist and they have no allegiance to anybody or anything other than to an income or

a culture that's transient and mobile and transferable, but not a unique place.

And I can remember when I was a young guy and I was going to Greece, and it was 1973.

My grandfather was born in the room, the house I'm now speaking in, in 1890.

And he was 83, and he was starting to weaken a little bit, but he still worked a full day.

He had a heart attack when he was 86.

But he said to me, it was about, it was right after the grape harvest.

He sent that year the grapes to the winery because he was getting old and there was nobody at home and i was going to greece i was 19 and i was going to stay a year in greece and he said victor come on down and sit down so we sat in lawn chairs and it was a very beautiful day about 80 and he had never been really reflective or loquacious but he said you know This is the God's country.

This is a beautiful place.

And he started pointing to the umbrella tree.

He said, this is where I used to have a swing.

And he said, I know that barn doesn't look very good, but you should see how happy we were when we cut down the eucalyptus poles.

And they're still in there.

And he started to describe it all and how lucky he was when he heard stories of, you know, bleeding Kansas and the Missouri mess before the Civil War and how his grandfather had come out of the Civil War and his grandmother and that had.

kind of brought them here in 1871, 72.

But he felt so thankful.

And it was, he was trying to tell me about the weather and how unique it was and how beautiful everything was.

And he showed me, you know, he pointed to the house.

And this was all a prelude to, I know you're going to go to that Athens.

And I know you study the Greeks and all.

I think that's wonderful, but do come back.

Don't just go

over there because you'll meet a lot of really sophisticated and you'll have a wonderful life, but you'll miss something.

You've got to come back.

You know, if you don't want to live here, that's fine, but you got to come back.

You've got to keep this.

And it was,

I think, I think it was a kind of a sense he was going to die pretty soon, but he wanted to be sure.

And then when I got back, I saw him.

He said, you're back.

You didn't spend all summer in Europe.

And I said, no, I didn't.

I wanted to come home.

And then he said, come out and help me.

And we had this old torn-up vineyard.

We called it the Sandhill.

Got about a ton and a quarter.

It was terrible, but he, you know, and he was putting in post in it, new impost.

And I said, Grandpa, this thing should be pulled out.

Well, that'll be your decision someday, but you know, you might want to keep it.

If you want to keep it, you need in post.

I won't be here.

So I went out and bought, you know, a thousand dollars of in post.

And he was trying to put them in before he died.

He was never going to be able to see them, but he thought it might make it a little bit easier for the person who followed him.

I wish people had that attitude.

I know it can be parochial and insular, but I don't know.

It's value.

I think it's really valuable.

Yeah.

People have those roots.

One of my favorite movies is Meet Me in St.

Louis.

And it begins with Margaret O'Brien, who's still alive, I think.

She was a child in the movie saying to Mr.

Neely,

Chill Wills, who was the actor in the ice wagon, wasn't I?

so lucky to be born in St.

Louis.

And they just see this love of community.

And

there's nothing wrong with being provincial, you know?

I think so.

I think it's, I know it has something to do with shame, too, and family.

I know that when I was 20, I applied to two graduate schools, Berkeley and Stanford, and I got into both, but Stanford had a much better financial package.

And my mother had gone there, and I said, well, I guess I'll go there where the money is, but I'd rather go to Berkeley because it had, at that time, it had a much better classics department.

than Stanford did, but it didn't, you know, you didn't have any money.

You had to, it was unsure.

But Stanford gave you four full years, full tuition.

And so obviously I was going to go there, but my mom said, it doesn't really matter which one you go to.

It's what you do when you get there.

So what if you have a Stanford or Berkeley degree?

It's whether you learn something.

So go where you want to go.

But you have to do something.

It doesn't matter that you go to Stanford because I went to Stanford, but I learned something there.

And I learned.

I was given something.

And don't ever think that your credentials are,

and it was kind of a shame thing too.

Don't shame your family, don't shame yourself by goofing around saying, now I'm at Stanford.

So when I got there, I mean, I literally, I think for three years, had zero life.

I'd get up at six, I'd study, study, study, Greek and Latin, German, French, Italian, pass the exams, and I would stay up till midnight.

I never had a life because I was so worried that I wanted to excel.

And I had been given a great opportunity because I had brilliant professors there.

But there was never any diet you're at Stanford.

I didn't care where I was.

But I think that's really important that you have a sense of a code and a sense of family shame and duty and reverence for your, you know.

I didn't want to think, well, my mom did it and then I couldn't do it.

I was only, you know, 20, as I said, when I got there, but I don't think we have that anymore, that people just think, oh, I have this degree or this degree, or I went this place.

And you want to say, well, what did you learn there?

And what was the purpose of it?

Given my job, I meet a hell of a lot of dumb people from Ivy League and Stanford with all these degrees and all these professional, these alphabet soups, and they're stupid.

And then I meet all these people like today, two guys up in the attic again for day, I don't know when, rewiring an 1871 house with, you know, glass insulators.

And these guys are geniuses.

They're trying to figure out what 150 years has done and they're trying to find out everything.

And they're inquisitive, they're empirical, they're smart.

And

I don't think they have a college degree, but you got to judge people and what they do and how their sense of professional code.

And I think that's something's really wrong with this transient.

That's what I'm trying to say, not very elegantly, this idea that you have these degrees and you're somebody.

And I look at all these young guys,

people who write these silly columns and all these people who go to Washington and they have that particular attitude, a particular nasal voice, a particular, I'm somebody, and they haven't done anything.

They haven't shown any by accomplishment or deeds or a record of achievement.

They haven't, it's all, I know this person or my mom and dad were this people or I have this cattle brand BA, PhD, MA, L, you know, JD.

It's something's really wrong.

And boy, Putin blew that up when he, he to the Europeans because they were really into that idea of argument from authority and political correctness.

And then this thug just went in and said, you know what, what are you going to do about it?

And then all of a sudden they thought, oh my God,

he doesn't care anything for this particular UN

committee or we're the EU.

Does he understand that we're NATO?

No.

If you're NATO, you're NATO.

You stop him.

If you're the EU,

you sanction him.

And then they had to relearn things and i think it's been very good for them well victor we're almost out of time here actually we've probably gone i think i went over no i don't but our listeners don't mind you going over becoming maudlin i think well that's it's eeyore eeyore is part of your your essence so Let me thank our listeners, especially for listening, and especially those who go on to itunes and leave ratings.

One person who left a,

actually, a lot of people in the last week or so have left comments.

But here's one.

It's a little lengthy.

It's from Claire in Atlanta.

It says, thank you so very much for sharing your generous and amazing intellect and analysis.

I enjoy and later think about and consider your comments, evaluations of current events so that I may try to be ready to explain my thoughts and conversations, which your thoughts inspire.

Another true plus is your discussions of your publications and books.

I've happily joined VictorHanson.com on a yearly subscription with the great articles, and now your podcast discussions to point me to read or audio books such as The Second World Wars and the Savior Generals, which opened whole new worlds.

And I found fantastic thank you.

That was Sammy's.

I appreciate that.

That was Sammy's idea.

Every Every idea that's worked out, I think, is Sammy's idea.

It's almost always, thank you.

One more thing.

A few podcasts ago, you recommended E.B.

Sledge's memoir of the Pacific World War, Two Battles.

Again, thank you.

I've read and listened to and so enjoyed this wonderful book.

Amazing.

I recommend you and Jack and Sammy and the books I have found so enlightening to all my like-minded friends.

Thank you for your brilliance and wonderful body of work.

Sincerely, Marin, in appreciation for your fantastic contributions so this is by name of marin but it's also signed claire in atlanta and that's pretty long pretty pretty effusive but represents a lot of the sentiments that folks have is that is that name m-a-r-e-n m-a-r-e-n yes marin

that's my first cousin who grew up with us after her mother died her name is marin m-a-r-e-n that's danish for mary she's danish but anyway we have a reputation in in the comments for mispronouncing a lot of things.

Well, if it's a foreign name, it's hard to

know exactly whether you say rodeo or the proper rodeo.

Rodeo drive.

Yeah.

But anyway,

that's a very strange name.

And E.B.

Sledge wrote me a letter.

I was so happy I reviewed his book.

And then I also was asked for the Wall Street Journal.

20 years ago to rank the five best memoirs.

And I put him number one of war.

And he was an etymologist from the University of Alabama.

He wrote me a very moving letter.

I had written about William Manchester's Goodbye Darkness, which is also a memoir, but which I didn't think was quite as accurate because I knew a lot about Okinawa.

And he wrote me sort of a letter and said, Be careful about using William Manchester.

It's a beautifully written memoir, but a lot of the details were not valid.

That with the old bury, I mean, that is absolutely stunningly, beautifully written book.

Well, Victor, as we leave, I just want to get in my two cents.

If you're interested in what I, poor Jack Fowler, do, visit centerforcivilsociety.com.

We care about localism and strengthening civil society.

We were just talking about, so centerforcivilsociety.com.

And also, I write a weekly email newsletter.

It's free.

It's called Civil Thoughts.

You can sign up for it at civilthoughts.com.

Thanks to those of you who do, please again consider subscribing to victorhanson.com.

And we will be back soon enough with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Thanks for listening, folks, and thank you, Victor, for your wisdom.

Thank you.

Thank you, everyone, for listening.