Wars and Culture Conflicts

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Hello to the listeners of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show and welcome to our Friday News Roundup.

We're going to look at lots of things today.

Of course, we'll talk a little bit first about the Ukraine just to get a feel for how things are going, at least from Victor's point of view.

And then we'll look at the January 6th Select Committee, Generation C

and perhaps some discussion of culture wars at the end.

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Welcome back, Victor.

I always ask how you're doing, and I'm hoping that I'll get some answer about your spiritual well-being.

Well,

not to beat a dead horse, maybe I'm killing it, but we're back into this weird.

We had a little glimmer of hope in late February, a little glimmer of hope in early March with these little tickly strains and then nothing, not up.

And so I've been driving around and looking at these well drillers.

They're all drilling, like they're busy.

I talked to one the other day.

He's got two rigs going full time.

We're going to have a really hot, dry California summer.

And

wish we had some reservoirs three years ago that would be full of water, but we didn't.

So no need rehashing the past.

So I'm up.

Yeah.

I also had to go over the coast and drive to Davis and speak to some dairy farmers, wonderful people.

So I've been kind of had the opportunity to drive around California.

And believe me, boy, if any of you are listening, do not take the 99 freeway at night between Sacramento and Fresno because the first 50 miles are road warrior right out of that epic Australian movie.

I mean, the concrete dividers come.

I was going about 65 miles an hour at night, Sammy, and I go into the divide here where I go to the left and the other two lanes go to the right, one lane.

It was two lanes.

And lo and behold, some poor person has freaked out.

So it's dark.

There's no lights.

Most of the copper wire have been stolen out, no doubt.

And they should be going at least 55 but there are no margin of air on either right with concrete pillars and guess what the person panicked and was going about 10 miles an hour when i went around a curve so i started spinning out and fishtailing and i don't think i hit my new truck i hope not that's right i felt i felt bad for it because when i got on it's one of those drivers you know when you go by them when they finally got out of the labyrinth their nose was one micro millimeter from the steering wheel very heavy set where they cannot turn their neck at all they're sort of frozen like a i don't want to say jab of the hut would be cruel but very heavy

okay well we can't blame them for being so frightened at night on the freeway i was frightened i was frightened and i'm a youthful i'm not youthful but i'm a 68 year old person but i was boy i thought how many people are going to die on this freeway why gavin newsom you know chases the unicorn of high-speed rail and the other one is that battery factory in moss Landy, where all the solar and wind energy is going to go to Moss Landing.

That beautiful old natural gas electrical plant instead, they're going to be

stored into these huge new batteries that what have caught fire twice now.

This $10 billion plant that hasn't produced one ounce of battery electricity.

So, that's what we do in California.

We dream and spend and waste on the abstract, and then people die in the concrete and sort of say, Well, that's too bad.

Yeah,

All right.

So drought is a driller's dream, and California is like Mad Max, right?

We're all sort of playing in the wild, I think.

That's a nice word, driller's dream.

Well, those.

Your misfortune is none of my own.

Yeah, it's those things and more that make Victor the Martin and Ellie 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.

So Victor, I think what I want to ask you first is just to give us what are your impressions about the Ukraine right now?

And then maybe I have a few specific questions after that.

Well, if you look at the map of central Ukraine, you can see what Putin is doing.

He's got one tentacle coming from the north.

It's starting to get...

It looks like it's going to encircle Ukraine from the west.

And then you look at the borders of Russia, and you can see that what they've already lost is sort of half the circle.

And then you look what he's doing on the Ukrainian ports on the Black Sea, and they're starting to inch upward.

And you get the impression that he's going to do a 360 around half of the country.

And I don't think he's going to have blitzkrieg because of the weaponry that is available to the Ukrainians, but I think what we're going to see is something

like Grozny and Chechnya, where he encircles the cities.

They can't, nobody can go in or out.

He gives them an ultimatum and then he just ruins them.

And so it seems to me that's what's going to happen.

And I don't know.

It's so similar, as I said earlier, to the invasion of Poland on September 1st, 1939, where the Wehrmacht invaded from East Prussia, from the north, from Germany, from the west, and then from the south, from occupied Czechoslovakia.

And they looped in and met the Russians, and then everything in between, they either leveled or they surrendered.

Or it's much, you know, that eight-month war in 1999, 2000, Chechnya.

So that's what's happening.

So the question is, right now, they've got about 15,000 stingers

and javelins, and they have really controlled the lower airspace, apparently.

So that means it's very hard for the Russians to fly in with airborne troops, fuel, food, and occupy air bases.

But the higher flying planes with these versions of J-Dams, these smart bombs and missiles, and the bases seem to be based in Russia and Belarus.

They have fields that the Ukrainians can't get at, and they're flying at altitudes that would require probably a Patriot battery, which I think is on the way.

And so right now they control the upper airspace.

And I know the Ukrainian Air Force is somewhat intact, but it's going to have to go up and challenge those planes and shoot them down.

Whether they can do that or not, I don't know.

And I think we're into a months-long slog,

nasty fighting.

I think Putin will not, he won't go into the cities and occupy them until they're leveled.

Yeah.

Like Stalingrad type leveled.

Yeah.

You know, I was just reading an article by Guy Shepard in The Spectator, and he basically was saying that Putin is a 19th century statescraftsman and after some territory, and that the current technocrat world citizen type of diplomat, he has no respect for, and that we need to have somebody come in, and Europe needs a new

touch to things.

Like Churchill.

I was thinking of a more coarser Donald J.

Trump under whose

four-year Trump tenure there was no incursion because as he's been bragging, he was going to make the spires of the Kremlin glow, I guess.

But my point is, he's absolutely right that we get this.

This is not possible in the 21st century.

You can't do this.

And Putin...

doesn't believe human nature changes.

He's very cynical and pessimistic.

His attitude is, well, for me, I lost six or seven thousand dead in Chechnya, which was a republic of Russia,

my own land.

They didn't break away.

They were kind of acting as if they would.

And I killed 20,000 of those SABs.

And nobody who talked, you know, he's emulating Hitler about the Armenians when they said, Meinfuhrer, you're killing innocent people.

He said, who remembers the Armenians today and what the Turks did to them?

So in that evil mindset, he's saying to the world, I'm going to level these cities.

And by the way, who gave me lectures about Grozny?

Who wanted to die die for Chechnya?

And then people will rejoin and say, Well, wait a minute, Putin.

This isn't even Georgia.

This isn't eastern Ukraine.

This is on Europe's doorstep.

And he's thinking, So what?

I'm going to kill a bunch of people, and you're not going to go in there because I talk like I'm crazy with nuclear weapons.

And what's going to happen a year from now, Putin thinks.

A year from now, I'm going to have at least half of all of Ukraine.

May not be the, I might have to muster hair up a little bit, but it's going to be all of my country.

And if I can't digest Western Ukraine yet, I will do it in five years, or my successor will, but I'll be the most famous man in modern Russian history.

The man who got back Georgia, eastern Ukraine, Crimea, put down Chechnya, and he got most of Ukraine, the breadbasket of Europe.

He's controlling 20%, da, da, da, da.

And you know what will happen?

Putin thinks for all those Churchillian speeches you mentioned, Sammy, he's thinking, hmm, these guys,

I'm quoting Hitler now, I've seen them at Munich.

They're worms.

They will call back to me in a year from now and say, please, please, can we have the Nordstrom pipeline?

Can you, we promise we won't put any offensive weapons in the old Warsaw Pact states.

Oh, please, please.

That's what he thinks.

I hope he's wrong.

I hope that these people become, you know, like Finns in 1939 and 40.

And, you know, they say, we're going to come in, take everything you have.

He said, come and get them in thermopylae fashion.

So, you know, you know, I was just thinking because it just feels really surreal that we have our diplomats playing parlor games in Italian cafes.

If I can,

while Putin's just clearly blowing up women and children, and just as you've outlined it, his goals are clear.

And I that's why John Kerry, did you hear John Kerry?

John Kerry,

I had a column about it, Jay, if anybody wants to read it.

But

he says, this is making a terrible impact on our climate change discussions.

I'm thinking, impact?

Does he mean like the impact of 650 missiles blowing apart people?

And then I thought, then he says, this terrible.

I thought, is this like it's terrible to carpet bomb a whole city?

Is that what he means?

And no, he doesn't mean that.

He means I can't jet in my private jet all over the world lecturing and talking down to people about how stupid they are to fill their tank with gas.

And I'm worried about that because I'm the special envoy for Joe Biden, but he didn't care about anybody.

And that's another theme that we've seen.

I was listening to Jen Circleback

Saki the other day.

And man, she's got this entire riff that the Putin price spikes.

So, you know, out here in California, gas goes from 280 to $4,

but it goes or $420, but it goes after Ukraine, $420 to $520.

And it's the Putin price heights when two-thirds of it was Joe Biden's telling corporations, this crazy ESG,

we're going to save the environment.

We're going to be diverse.

And all of you corporate boards should not care about your stockholders' profits.

We're so rich, wealthy, we don't.

It's their money, but we'll just say that we're morally superior to everybody.

We're going to to tell those damn frackers and horizontal drillers and Alaskan companies, North Dakota, Texas, don't do it.

We won't lend.

We're not going to invest our pension funds.

The banks won't lend to you.

And then he went around and canceled Landwar and then he canceled the Keystone Pipeline, 800,000 barrels.

And then he canceled all new federal leases.

And Sake says, well, we have 9,000 permits.

That's like saying,

Well, I don't have a house to live in, but I've got eight some houses that fell apart, but they're still in my name.

I mean, you don't, just because you get a permit doesn't mean you're going to go drill because you do a cost-benefit analysis of whether there's enough oil in that potential field.

So they shut it down and they're happy.

And the subtext of this entire thing is Pete Buttigig gets together with the Bides and the Carries.

Maybe they bring in for instruction and tutorial Al Gore, and they think, this is great.

This is Stephen Chu's European-level, i.e., $10 gallon dream reified.

We achieved it.

So all we have to say is we lament this.

We're sorry.

And we got to get over to the midterms.

But the idea that gas is going to go maybe to eight or nine a gallon, it's wonderful.

It'll make our green visions come true.

But they have a problem, and that is

three things.

The Germans don't have any fuel.

And they don't want to sell them liquid natural gas.

So they're going to have to cut a deal with Putin.

And they have, and they're going to continue to do it no matter what they say.

They haven't quite said that the pipeline is, the Nordstrom is off limits.

It's temporarily in suspension.

And they will get it back because they're going to have to.

They don't have any fuel.

And they, what are they going to tell

Americans, the long-hauled truck driver who's barreling down from Sacramento to Phoenix in one day, you know, a thousand miles?

And he's got to pay $200

more for his diesel fuel, which, by the way, is no longer in California the same price as gas, but it's up to almost $6 everywhere.

So that guy makes $200 or $300 a day and it's gone.

It's up in smoke.

And so they don't know how to handle him.

So what they're doing is very strange, isn't it?

They are not going, as I said, to Alaska, North Dakara, Texas.

They're going to the narco state in Venezuela and saying, forget all the bad things we said about Maduro and Chavez.

We like you.

And we're not going going to say, would you please, please give us a million barrels a day?

And then they're going over to the theocratic terrorist state in Iran and they're reopening the Iran deal with a Russian interlocutor who's going to help us, i.e.

screw us even more.

And they're saying, would you terrorists please give us this icky, dirty, foul fuel that we hate?

Because we have it, but it's too icky.

It sticks to us.

We don't want it.

We want you to drill it.

And you know what?

Forget the environment.

Just screw the environment over.

Just give it to us.

You know, here we're kind of prissy.

We make sure that they clean up the drilling field.

You don't.

And that's better.

We need it right now for the midterm.

And then they're going to the Saudi world.

Remember, Biden said they're corrupt.

And when I'm president, we'll have nothing to do with that horrible.

And now they said, please, and the Saudis and the Kuwaitis wouldn't even answer the phone when he called.

And then they went to, and they went to Putin right before he went into Ukraine.

Would you please increase that we got dependent on you again?

Would you give us another million barrels?

So think about it.

They have sacrificed the national security of the United States for the pipe dream of batteries.

And they don't give a damn about all these people who are working every day.

I go down, I want to cry when I fill up in the.

on the way to Palo Alto the other day.

I stopped at the service.

Oh, you should see these people.

I went the night before.

You know, I don't have enough money.

How do you fill up?

I got to go to Mendota to work 50 miles.

I got to go over to Woodlake.

I don't know how to expand, you know.

And these people, you think Jin Saki or Pete Buttigieg and his

subsidized limo service where he stops and gets his bike out of the trunk and rides around for everybody?

He cares.

They don't care about anything.

He was talking about what?

More

charging station.

I think I'll tell the guy I talked down at the, he came in with a big used club cab full of tiling, a tile cutter, tile in the back.

I was talking to him, I think I said, don't worry, Pete Buttigig is going to get you an electric charging station.

So you can trade in that mess you have and go get an electric truck and plug it in and pay 100 bucks a day to plug it up at 27 cents a kilowatt hour.

Don't worry, Pete's on it.

So that's how these people don't care.

They love humanity and the abstract and they hate humans and the concrete.

That's what they are.

It's not just this, Sammy.

It's every single issue:

they're never subject to the consequences of their own bankrupt ideology.

So, where were we on Ukraine?

On the Ukraine, exactly.

I was just going to say that I liked the solution, or at least a small solution that Guy Shepard suggested.

He said that at the very end, he said the Europeans need to be paying not 2% of their GDP to NATO, they need to pay 20%, and then maybe Putin will listen to them.

Basically, he said that.

I mean, think about the traditions of Europe.

I mean, siege of Vienna when the Polish cavalry charged down at 10 miles an hour, straight down the cliff, and come in and slaughter the Sultan's army.

I mean, come on, or the Czechs' resistance, or boy,

they were crack fighters.

I don't need to.

I think, Sammy, you've intoned that you have quote-unquote German heritage, so I won't go there, but they were responsible for three wars in Central Europe when they took on the whole continent.

So they had a distinguished martial history.

My point is that if they wanted to, instead of just 2% of their annual budget devoted to military readiness, if they spent 5%,

they would be quite formidable.

Remember, NATO has 11 billion

people.

It has a GDP that's, I think, 10 times, eight to 10 times larger than Russia aggregate.

Maybe it's more than that.

And

they could crush Russia if they wanted to.

And they have nukes.

I mean, we have nukes, and Britain has nukes, and France has nukes.

That was a big sticking point during the Cold War because every time we had salt negotiations with Brezhnevs and Kosygin, they'd always say, yeah,

but how about France?

And we'd say, the force de Frop is neutral.

Oh, no, no, no.

When we start nuking each other, they're going to jump in on your side.

And they would have.

So they have a lot of problems, but we're not utilizing our assets.

And everybody's in this self-congratulatory mood.

And there's much to be congratulatory about, given the zeal and expertise and optimism and idealism of the Ukrainians.

But

they are a mouse, and this huge eagle's talon is squeezing them.

And the the eagle wants to fly up and drop them on the pavement.

And that's what it's going to do unless we can find a way to deter.

How do you do this in classical military strategy?

It's pretty simple.

You look at Putin and you think he's got this vast country, and then you think, where is he vulnerable?

He's vulnerable with his Indian neighbors.

He's vulnerable with his Chinese neighbors.

He's vulnerable with his Afghan neighbors.

But the problem is that after we left Afghanistan and after he's cutting deals basically with China and India, he's not vulnerable anywhere.

So he's emptying out all of his military reserves and sending them to Ukraine, and there's nowhere to pressure him.

And we're trying to do it economically.

But, you know, this Chi is like the Cheshire cat because he's...

he's in a great position.

He's thinking, hmm, we've got trillions of dollars in reserves.

They got food.

We need it.

They got precious metals.

We need it.

They got a lot of coal.

I think Russia is the largest coal producer in the world.

And they've got a lot of oil.

We need all of them and we'll give them cash.

And, you know, because

they're in a precarious position, we're going to tell little Shorty Putin, listen, this is what we're going to pay for your stuff.

And it's not going to be market value.

So they're going to get cheap natural resources and they're going to give them political cover.

And the world should be, oh my God, China is just as bad as Russia.

Damn them.

We're going to pull our corporation out.

No more Zoom, no more joint ventures with Stanford.

We don't want anything to do with these are the better.

No, no, no, no, no.

There's too much American money and joint ventures.

So we're screwed.

And it's going to be a new Russian-Chinese overt axis.

And money and natural resources is a potent combination.

Nukes, nukes, nukes, nukes.

7200.

Having brought in China already, I noticed an article in the Guardian that said China might be the peacemaker.

I thought, oh, God, that can't be even real to be writing that.

But they tried to be sort of moderate in the middle on that.

But I don't see China as a peacemaker.

Oh, I don't think they want peace because

And they don't surely want a Ukrainian victory.

If Ukraine should win and Putin should fail, then all these people and the Chinese, you know, Politburo are going to say, wait, wait, wait, wait.

We thought we could go into Taiwan.

It's half the size of Ukraine in population.

Or, you know, it's got much, I don't know, 120th the size of the territory.

It's all set to go, but maybe they might fight like Ukrainian.

Maybe those decadent weak, anemic Westerners might rally to their cause like they do Ukraine.

Maybe they'll flood it with javelins and missiles.

And who knows?

Maybe they'll sanction us or

maybe we can't control Hollywood.

Maybe we can't control the NBA.

We're not quite to the point they're thinking where we don't need a United States.

We're almost there.

That's what they're worried about.

And so, and

maybe our diplomats should remember that, that stopping Putin is not just about stopping Putin, but about stop, you know, that impression that you leave with the rest of the world, especially the Chinese.

You know, I quote it to death, but I read all three three volumes of Kissinger's memoirs.

I know he's a much reviled figure, but he has a very sharp intellect and he understood human nature.

And when he said, he's a little cynical about it, but when he said Russia should never be closer to China than it is to us, and China should never be closer to Russia than it is to us.

And this point was, we have certain common interests with Russia and China.

And whatever, who's ever the bigger power, we want to help the smaller power.

So when Russia was the mammoth, the mastodon, and China was the pipsqueak under Mao, we had that opening to China.

And now Russia's the pipsqueak in comparison.

So we should be really trying to get over this.

And I know he's a thug and he's a murderer, but he could be useful to balance China.

At least we I don't mean he could be useful in the amoral sense.

At least we shouldn't drive him into the arms of the Chinese.

What do you make of the bioweapons issue that Victoria Newland in her testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, what do you make of that?

It's hard to know.

What I should make of it is that she was telling the truth that after the breakup of the Soviet Union, it's Joel McCrown, Ukraine.

That's where Chernobyl was.

It was a mess.

We were going to give them money to clean it up.

And we did, we being the West.

And they had nukes, and we didn't want another nuclear player at the nuclear poker table.

So we

had them, you know, surrender their arsenal, so to speak, on the condition that basically, if you go back and look at what was said at the time, George Kinnan wrote about it right shortly before he died, that it would be kind of a buffer state and it would not be part of NATO.

It was copying the role of Austria and Finland in the Cold War.

After the occupation of Nazi Germany and the Axis powers, the agreement was,

well, Finland is ambiguous and Austria is ambiguous, so we'll make a deal.

They won't be part of the Warsaw Pact and they won't be part of Austria.

And that's what we did.

And so although Russia seemed to have an inordinate amount of influence in Finland, we had more influence, I think, than they did in Austria.

But the point I'm making is that that was sort of the deal we're making.

So we did all these good things in the nukes.

And one of the elements of those protocols were biological weapons of the Red Army.

So I think what she was trying to say, there were labs over the years that were Wuhan-like in nature, and we were working with our Ukrainian partners to make sure that those were neutralized.

Now,

deep breath.

She looked very flustered when she was trying to explain that.

And there was no need to be so nervous about it.

And I think she was thinking in her mind, nobody believes anybody in the American government when they said things like, Yugoslavia is completely secure, it's not going to fall, or they said there is no such thing as a lab-created virus in Wuhan.

So she seemed nervous.

And that raised the specter that...

Is this lab a useful surrogate for the United States in the fashion that Wuhan was, i.e.

Western militaries could experiment with various nerve or biological weapons outside the auspices of their own governments in the way that Collins seemed to outsource, ban research on gain of function virology pathways to Wuhan.

So that's what it was about, I think.

Yeah, the Russians seemed to accuse the United States of it.

But when I heard that, I thought, well,

it seems to me that the Ukraine was part of Russia, especially in a time of Cold War.

So these labs might have predated U.S.

No, no, they did.

They were U.S., they were Russian labs.

There's no doubt about it.

Just like there were Russian nukes, just like all those bases we see were built by Russia.

No doubt, even like the Ukrainian weapons stocks.

So some of the weapons they're using are 40, 30 years old.

They were Russian-made.

Their air force was Russian-made.

The point, though, is that what do you do with all that stuff when Ukraine said it's not part of Russia?

And we, after the end of the Cold War, sat down with the Russians and we cut all these deals.

And one of them was they're going to give up their nukes and they're going to give up their deadlier weapons.

I think this was one of the understood

weapon resources.

And then we came in and said, we're going to help you do that.

We're going to help you.

decommission your nukes.

We're going to help you clean up Chernobyl.

We're going to help you dismantle this lab.

But the lingering suspicion is that given the record of lying by the U.S.

government and given the apparent nervousness, when I think it was Marco Rubio asked her the question, people are starting to say, well, wait a minute, maybe it was a convenient program that had an official decommission cover, but under that pretense, we were furthering that research, which is otherwise banned in the United States, a la Wuhan.

And I don't know if that's true or not.

Then she said, well,

and then the left said, well, and maybe it's the right too said well if russia starts to get near that place they're going to let some stuff out and claim it was us false flood i don't know yeah i think that's what they were worried about so well victor let's take a moment for a few messages and then we'll come back and i have one more question on the ukrainian war

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All right, welcome back.

And I wanted to ask, last thing, it was again from the Guy Shepherd article.

And the overall theme of the article was that world that Francis Fukuyama heralded and brought in with his work, The End of History, that the world was now going to be populated by liberal democratic states, that Putin has actually brought that to an end.

And I was wondering your thoughts on that thesis.

Yeah, I brought it to an end.

I would say something like, put the headstone on a corpse or somebody who was dead and buried 30 years ago, because the thesis

was always flawed.

It was sort of a Kantian thesis that assumed that an evolving human nature and better people would craft a better world governance.

And the only viable form given popular culture spread

was consumer capitalism under the auspices of constitutional government.

And so that was the dream.

But of course, there's been hundreds of millions of people killed in the last 30 years all over the world.

I mean, millions.

I shouldn't say hundreds, but maybe 100 million or over in places like Rwanda or the Balkans, and that wasn't supposed to happen.

And right now, we have fewer democracies.

I think it's less than half of the countries in the United Nations are democratic, and they're regressing.

And I think Fukuyama didn't understand that human nature being human nature, it takes a lot of responsibility and preparedness and activism to participate in a participatory government.

And a lot of people just can't do it or they're not educated.

They don't want to do it.

And two,

when he created that thesis, he didn't really look at periods in Western civilization when democratic culture fell victim to what the Romans called luxus, affluence, luxury, atheism, agnostic, and they fell apart.

So the Byzantines didn't have an end of history where their model, which was more consensual and fairer than the alternatives outside the walls on Tuesday, May 29th, 1453,

it didn't help.

And it didn't mean that, you know, that all of a sudden people in Europe were going to tell Hitler, you're not on the bus.

But he said that we've had so much affluence and we've got so much communications and the science is so changed and the education is so evolved that this time cosmopolitanism, a nice ancient word that Socrates often employed, I'm a politesse

to cosmu, I'm a citizen of the world.

Now was our moment and it wasn't.

And I don't think it'll ever be.

Who is chairman right now of the Security Council in the United Nations?

Vladimir Putin.

Russia?

Yeah, Vladimir Putin.

So I mean, I mean, and when Anthony Blinken said he wanted to call in the United Nations to assess whether we were systemically racist after George Floyd, who were the people who have been traditionally on the UN Commission on Human Rights?

Iran?

Yes.

You know, Palestinian state?

Yes.

Every illiberal regime in the Middle East?

Yes.

Venezuela.

Yeah, all of them.

So it's not going to change.

No, it's not going to change.

So let's change subjects here then.

And you did mention the wealth of our civilization, probably a wealth of a civilization never before seen.

And I wanted to ask you about the Generation Z, as they call it, or the Zoomer generation.

I kind of prefer the Zoomer generation.

I was reading an article in The Hill that said it's not true that they are snowflakes, they don't vote, they want policy to be perfect, and they're all socialists like AOC and addicted to technology and thus socially stunted.

That all of those things about Generation Z are completely wrong.

And I was wondering your views on this generation growing up in our very wealthy civilization.

Well, put it this way.

I entered college in 1971.

I was 17.

And all the new supposedly Solve All Our Problems campus with the University of California at Santa Cruz built up in the Cal Ranch.

Beautiful.

And they robbed or they attracted all the young hip faculty from the Ivy League.

We were, Cal College was a sister college to a Yale college.

and the Yale classics and English, they all came out there and they thought they were going to, I mean, everybody, when you went into a room, the professors had moccasins on, long hair, call me Jack.

Oh, I'm not Dr.

Smith.

Call me Bill.

Oh, we don't use professor.

And there were no rules about interaction between students.

I think a lot of them were sleeping with their students, marrying.

And I had no problem.

That's their business.

But my point was, they were the age of the Aquarius.

But here's what I'm getting at.

When I took Latin and Greek from those people, they were classically trained by the 1940s and 50s generations.

And that was probably the best generation of intellects we've ever had.

I know some of them are Marxists, but they were classically trained.

They knew languages.

They had certain inductive principles.

They were disinterested about the empirical pursuit of inquiry and knowledge.

And so I got that from them.

But the people I was with, they didn't honor those people.

We were one generation from the greats.

And we got the good, the last little watered-down version of the greats from our hippie professors.

But we didn't transmit it.

So when I started, you know, I was a little late, I was 29 by the time I went back from farming.

But I looked at people my age, and they were not transmitting that.

knowledge.

And I started to see it in classics with theory and reader response and Foucault and Derrida and Lacan

and New Historicism, et cetera, et cetera.

And these people were not classically trained, or they did not know Latin or Greek, and they did not transmit that on.

So each generation, well, this new generation is what I'm getting at.

I don't know if there's Z's or what.

They're being taught by ignoramuses that are three generations from the greats and they don't know anything.

And I mean that literally.

You take any course, you know, and you just, all I ask ask the listeners is to go into a course catalog online and look at the course title but then especially look at the required reading in the syllabus a lot of people will say oh we haven't changed we're doing western civilization part one you look at the reading list and it's gays feminism the oppressed part one and this is on top of the specialization in academia where the narrower and narrower and narrower and narrower your thesis topic and the narrower and narrower your research, then you're the expert.

And if you're doing pencil production

with armor and hammer and in the style in this is Russia, and

that's too wide.

You've got to do erasers of pencil production by arm and hammer in SAL.

And then nobody knows more than you do.

And you add that to this theoretical stuff.

And we've got an what I'm trying to say, Sammy, that's the cause of all the problems.

We've got too many people with too many letters after their names that are no, they're much less qualified, much less competent, much less intelligent than a good plumber or an electrician or truck driver.

Yeah, so Generation Z then has been poorly educated and it's not their fault, is that?

They're not.

I mean, there are people at the university they could hunt out.

And now we have equity grading.

So we've got the whole woke movement.

And, you know, if you don't come to class, it's because your ancestors were oppressed by somebody else's ancestors.

So yeah, it is their fault and it's the fault of their faculty.

And

the problem is that we're combining ignorance with arrogance.

So we're handing out degrees as we've never had before.

So you meet these people in the university communities.

I'm professor, I'm the Galen Smith.

professor of with a PhD from and they don't mean anything the universities just hand them out hardest thing about the Ivy League or Stanford

is to get in.

I'm not talking about Caltech, I misspoke, but is to get into the university.

But once you're in there, it's a contractual bargain.

You pay the $100,000 a year and they fulfill their bargain and get you through.

And they inflate the grades and then you get these letters after your name and you're on the pathway to big money.

And I can tell you, they're helpless people.

You know, I'm having people look at the house and wiring.

And I don't think the two people that are wiring went to college.

But when they were explaining to me these tube, this old, you know, with the insulator, separate wires, frayed, the whole house could go up any minute.

It's 150-year-old house, probably 100-year-old wiring.

And I mean, they sounded like Albert Einstein trying to find the home run of the wire, the one wire that feeds all the other wires and all this stuff.

And then they were conceptually seeing how they would do it.

Same thing with the roofer.

These people are very bright people and

when i talk to people in stores that as i say run a 7-eleven or a farm gosh i went over to some brothers that had a big packing house nearby of mandarins and just talking to one of their sons who

had an engineering degree but He was like an artist.

He created an entire 80,000 square foot packing labyrinth.

And it was brilliant where there's almost nobody working there and i thought wow i've never met a professor in my life that could do this i've never met anybody a law professor that could do anything close to that i look at justice soda myir or i look at people i won't mention other names that i might be incriminating but i think that yeah you went to the ivy league and yeah you got a lot of letters after your name but education is education there is no more education but you have the arrogance what i'm getting at is the arrogance and the entitlement that comes with education, unfortunately.

And then you have the ignorance of modern education.

That's a fatal combination.

Yeah.

And those who are not getting that education seem to be a lot smarter about their jobs and tasks than

those who get it.

You're absolutely right.

Today's trucker is a pretty good trucker.

Today's professor is not.

All right.

So another school question then.

There was a protest by students outside of a Pittsburgh school.

I think it was called Sewickley Academy.

I don't know.

I'm just laughing.

When you say protest by students, it's hilarious.

Yeah, I know.

But it's not.

This is even funnier because

the article said that they were protesting the school bringing police to the school and that this was a terrible demonstration of repression by the school.

But they never said why the school brought the police.

Oh, the police there I did.

Yeah.

But anyway, he said, the writer said, this is a terrible thing in a culture that is founded on Thoreau's on civil disobedience and a terrible example for these students.

And I was wondering with this, I just thought, well, Victor, what are your thoughts on Thoreau and civil disobedience?

And is that culture at risk if the culture is as we think it should be?

There's only when you read Thoreau or even Elements of emerson or martin luther king letter from a birmingham jail the key to civil disobedience is that the protester has to have a clear moral edge on the establishment which he's protesting against it has to be clear and then he has to make the argument that i am breaking a law i'm breaking my compact as a citizen with the government because i love this government and i want to instruct it to follow the better angels of its nature and its own principle.

And once you go through that process, yes, there's a role for civil disobedience.

And so, as long as you don't injure anybody, non-violent civil disobedience, I think the truckers were doing that in Canada.

They were saying to Tudro, you're not living up to the spirit and the laws and the culture of Canada.

And we're not asking to, you know, get more money from ourselves or make new laws just for us.

We're just saying respect people's right under our constitution and customs to be free.

And that's what they were trying to do.

But the problem is, if you have a school and the crime is sky high, and people's lives are in danger or their safety, and you have administrators that won't do anything because they're afraid of the woke movement, and they're perfectly safe because they're adults and they're going to go home to secure places.

And they're telling these kids,

you know what, we're not going to have any police to protect you and people are getting beat up, then

I don't think anybody has a high ground.

I mean, the protesters have a higher moral ground to say, we don't want any police here.

And the administrators thought, well, we had to bring police.

We don't want to, but we kind of sort of will listen to you.

And

the only...

obvious answer is if you're going to be criminal like as students and you're going to prey on the weak, then we're going to bring in, if you're a little wolf pup and you're eating a lamb, then we're going to bring in a big wolf and they're going to not allow you to do that because that's the moral centrality of the argument that you, all these arguments are based on

justifying the predation on the weak.

And so that's what I don't like.

I don't like the woke movement about defund the police when an African-American woman 75 years old is in her apartment, can't go across the street.

I don't like the idea that that when somebody is 12 years old going across the street, he's shot by a gang member because you're afraid to go after that gang member.

And I don't like the idea that you let somebody across the border who broke the law, you have no idea whether he did or not.

And then you tell some guy from Mexico City or India who's patiently following all the rules, you're an idiot.

You should have just crossed the border illegally.

That's what I don't like about the whole woke leftist movement.

It always,

what it does is it's cowardly and it always goes to the perceived stronger person for its own political and selfish purposes.

And then it dresses the whole hypocrisy and the whole pedation up under this,

you know, this edifice of caring and that we're moral and you're not.

And that's what I don't like about it.

It's amoral.

It's like we just talked about the green.

the green movement's perfect.

You know, we have all this money.

We're bicostal elite.

We've got solar panels but you know what if some guy out there in iowa is freezing because he can't turn on his thermostat you know that's his problem he should learn coding yeah yeah so i'll answer my own question the thorough culture is not at risk the problem is immorality and they're in i don't think uh

no i don't think so i think there's a a risk that anytime the right oversteps,

it's very easily characteristic characteristic and identified.

When Nixon was finagling around with the FBI and the CIA to do things that were beyond their constitutional prerogatives, people could see that.

And when Hitler did atrocious things, people could see that.

But you still have apologies for Stalin, who killed more people than Hitler, and you have apologies when the left does it.

How many times have you heard, Sammy, the last year in the whole Russian collusion hoax, all of these, Donald Trump did this, that Barack Obama weaponized the IRS under Lois Lerner for his own re-election campaign.

How many times

have you heard that he dealt away U.S.

security at that hot mic conversation in Seoul, South Korea?

Remember what he did?

He said to Med Adev, tell Vladimir that I need some space because this is my last election coming up and I can be flexible on missile defense.

He He was Barack Obama.

Yes,

Barack Obama.

So, and what happened, people forget what happened afterwards.

All three conditions of that nefarious pact were met.

A,

Putin behaved, and Barack Obama was elected.

He got his space.

And B, Putin forced us to get...

anti-ballistic missiles out of the Czech state and Poland.

And they would have been very useful now when Putin threatens everybody.

And see, Putin got what he wanted.

He went into Ukraine and Crimea two years later.

Nobody did a thing.

But does anybody talk about that?

That was amoral.

Or Uranium-1,

or,

I don't know, weaponizing the FBI and the CIA to go after the Trump campaign in 2016, or James Comey to have his FBI lawyers forge a document of FISA requests.

So what I'm saying is if you're left and you're progressive, then it's like buying insurance policy.

It kind of works like this, Sammy.

It doesn't work like this, but it's a good way to conceive it.

You're an academic, you're a lawyer, you're a government bureaucrat.

You think, hmm, the media is left-wing, popular sports are left-wing, foundations are left-wing, Silicon Valley is left-wing,

everything is left-wing.

Corporate boardroom, Wall Street.

I got to buy some insurance.

So you go to your left-wing insurance salesman and said, look,

I want to indemnify myself so they don't go after me.

And he says, it's very easy.

Sign on the dotted line.

And here's what you say.

Check, we're boiling because of greedy oil producers.

Check, we're a racist country.

Check, we hate gays.

Check, transgender.

Check, check, check, check.

And then when you make a slip like Joe Biden, and you say, he just made a slip the other day on race again.

And it was really bad.

He walked into a room and he saw two black people and he said, these are going to be basketball players.

And there's a guy with a shaved head and he goes, He looks like he's a bomber.

I mean, he does that all the time, but he bought insurance.

And so nobody goes after him when he says, Put you all in change or junkie.

And that's what's so scary.

And you can really see that with this.

Were you going to ask me, or had that come up about this Matthew, is it Rosenberg, the Project Veritas reporter?

Oh, no, I hadn't, but go ahead.

Well, James O'Keefe, who is basically under a lot of trouble, and not his making, that it's concocted where the New York Times leaked the raid by the FBI that went after him for the purportedly possession of a diary that somebody offered him that purportedly was, I think, Joe Biden's daughter, which had racy things in it.

So anyway, he...

has this huge empire of investigating Mike Wallace ambush journalism, right?

Where I guess there's two types of avenues he uses.

One, he puts his people into a situation and they get friendly with somebody and the friendly person, usually over a drink or in a casual atmosphere, pours his guts out, kind of a whistleblower.

But I think more now, from what I can tell from his people who come forward, it's mostly that he's a kind of a clearinghouse where people within an organization that are not directly working for him call him up and say, this is bad stuff.

We want to, you know, they're not so much employees as helpers.

But my point is

that the latest one is we've been told by this New York reporting team that January 6th was an insurrectionary movement, and of course, the steel dossier.

And so, what he did was, I guess, what do you call that, Sammy, when you get a very attractive young woman and you get her to help you.

Some sexual appeal going so that the guy will pour his guts out.

Yes, given the fact, the ancient factors that A, young men, like all men, are egomaniacs.

They want to talk of their braggado.

They're very braggadocious.

They want to talk of all their heroic episodes.

And you add a little alcohol to it, and a receptive, attractive young woman, and you got the ingredients for them making complete fools out of themselves, but not liars necessarily.

And so this is what happened.

And he got this,

I think his name was Michael Rosenberg, wasn't it?

And he,

yeah, he said, all that stuff I wrote in the New York Times about this being an insurrectionary

rebellion, it wasn't true.

It was a joke.

They're buffoons.

There were so many FBI informants, they were everywhere.

I mean, it made kind of a Steve Bannon version look like it was tame.

And this is the guy writing about it who was the expert Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.

And he said, Nobody, you know, they basically didn't say

remember him saying AOC, but all these psychodramas about people being in danger.

These people were kind of Midwestern amateurs.

There was no danger, there was no insurrection, there were more FBI people than anything.

And then he turned to the steel dossier, and the piss tape was all concocted.

The whole steel idea was full of SCIA and FBI sources that were trying to ruin Donald Trump.

Nobody ever believed it was real.

But the problem was he was one of the guys that people referenced on MSNBC and CNN as the authority on these left-wing capers.

And so when he was asked about it, I think today, he said, I stand by it.

I mean, he can either say I'm a liar and I was lying and boasting to a woman I wanted to pick up, or, you know what, what are you going to do to me?

And he said it seems to be the attitude these days.

Yeah, but he also had another point.

He said that the New York Times was in basically a civil war against old-style liberals, i.e.

himself, and wokesters who were coming in and were kami-causing the whole operation.

So I don't want to dwell on it because I know we're almost out of time, but I'd like everybody in our audience to just envision something.

So I had to do an interview with a wonderful man, David Eisenhower, two days ago, And there were guests to discuss the future in conservative.

And you weren't told who the guests were.

One of the guests was Charles Sykes, the editor of the Bulwark, who was very animated and obviously didn't like me and didn't like what I was saying.

But he referenced the collusion and Trump, Putin, and then he referenced, as of course, you would expect, January 6th was a revolution and all this stuff.

Okay, so here you have the premier leftist marquee reporter saying that a lot of the information people like Mr.

Sykes have been enlightened by was a joke.

He just did it.

He just wrote stuff that he knew was not true.

And you could find that out when the government wouldn't release 14,000 hours.

of tape.

They wouldn't release the officer who had kind of a checkered

shot in the neck, Ashley Babbitt, for the crime of entering a broken window.

I mean, that's not a cause for death in the United States, and then hiding his identity, they'll never release how many FBI informants.

I'm not condoning it.

It was kind of a, but it was a riot of bumpkins and misfits, okay, that actually went into the Capitol.

What I'm getting at, Sammy, is the left, in the words of the left about the left.

And then look at Wuhan.

We were told that if you met, I gave an interview to a Monterey, I don't know what it was, radio station way back and said I had doubts about the coincidences, coincidences.

Level four biology lab, Wuhan.

Wuhan is ground zero of COVID.

COVID people are flying all over the world, but not within China.

In other words, China's locked down, but not for 12 days or coming into San Francisco and New York and Brussels and

Rome, et cetera.

I was called up.

I had people at Stanford write me.

I had the alumni situate people call me and say, what are you doing?

And so my point is, now we have the correspondence from Dr.

Fauci and Colin,

and we have information from their mouth about Echo Health and Peter Dossig and their whole phony Lancet.

And they basically confirm every conspiracist view.

Oh, we don't, I don't know what was going on there, but we got to make sure that didn't get out, that we were channeling $600,000 to gain a function, basically, although they wouldn't mint that to Rand Paul.

And then we had the dossier in the left's words when Christopher Steele tells a British court, I don't have any footnotes.

I don't have any sources.

Well, would you please produce them?

He was in a civil suit.

I don't have them.

And then we have 22 months, and we're thinking that good old Bob Mueller, he's on top of everything.

Well, no, he's not.

He testifies under oath.

Mr.

Mueller, what was the role of the twin pillars of your investigation, i.e., GPS

and the Steele dossier?

I don't know.

Don't know.

Have no idea.

And then James Comey, the guy who was really telling us that Donald Trump, remember he had those tweets and Facebook postings where he's kind of walking in the snow, quoting your friend Sammy Thoreau

and Kant and every philosopher that he could name-drop.

And he goes in front for his moment of clarity before the House Intelligence Committee and he says, I don't know.

I don't know about that.

Never heard of it.

245 times under oath.

So what I'm getting at is the left themselves and the great, terrible, horrible right-wing revolutions of our age, i.e.

the January 6th demonstration riot, whatever you want to call it, the whole steel dossier, the whole Russian collusion, the whole COVID pangolin story, all of that was blown up, not by right-wingers, by themselves in on guarded moments or being ill-prepared that they knew that those were concoctions and constructs and so that's where we were and you know oh i just remembered something what was her name the time magazine author molly fast

and after the election she wrote a long time magazine article and in it she said how the conspiracy saved the election and in it she brags on Mark Zuckerberg's $400 million contribution to warp pre-selected.

And she says there was a conspiracy, conspiracy to coordinate the people in the street and the corporate boardroom, i.e.,

that these sincere revolutionary BLM and Antifa people that you can't even dare control because they're so ideal.

They just kind of simmered off and ran out of gas mysteriously around August.

And guess what?

They did not embarrass uh anybody anymore they said you know what if you keep doing this

people are going to get angry at you because you're destroying a lot of crap you're up to two billion dollars 35 deaths 1500 police officers and joe biden will not be elected so he she was saying and they coordinated with the c remember all the ceos and the generals and all the

Trump is Mussolini, Trump is Hitler, Trump is this.

I'm not going to do this.

It was everybody from Jamie Dimon to, you know, all of these people.

Okay, she's now telling us that it was all concocted and it was a wonderful thing.

So, what I give me out again is: I'm beating, beating, beating, stepping on, stomping this dead horse, but they themselves tell us that what they told us was a complete lie and they were cynical about it.

There was a conspiracy not to change voting or do anything, but to pour money and to enlist all the levers of influence and power in this country to warp that election, to get up to 204, 203 mail-in ballots and to make sure that the evil trollish satanic lucifer trump didn't win and they succeeded and then they didn't even have they didn't even have the humility to shut the blank up She had to write this article and rub people's snouts in it.

Ha ha ha, you idiot, deplorable.

We took you to the cleaners because we're smarter and wealthier.

We had a better conspiracy.

Just like this Rosenberg guy, he goes to a bar.

He sees, ah,

I pulled, you don't know, you know, what's going on.

I pulled a fast one on those rubes.

They believed all that stuff about an insurrect.

Man, that was just a county fair, buffoonish riot or something.

There are more FBI there, and it's full of them.

That's what they think about people.

They can't even hide their tracks.

Told James Comey, do not say 245 times under oath that you don't remember.

Couldn't somebody say to Bob Mueller, here, get little cue cards.

This is called GPS.

This is what the left says was the authority for collusion.

They hired Christopher Steele.

This is Christopher Steele.

This is the dossier.

This is what they told us in BuzzFeed 2016 was

real.

And they can't even do that.

They're so arrogant.

Yeah, you know, and what you're telling me is that we've got a bunch of Judases in our journalists' cadre who are supposed to be the fifth column of a democracy.

And it's really difficult to do.

Not fifth column.

Oh, you mean, well, well, they're the backup.

They're the.

Yeah, but fifth column is sort of a pejorative word.

But I think you, with all condensing, if I can be

if I can, if I can be condescending, they are the fifth column in the sense that they betray democracy.

The insiders that are ahead of the left-wing revolution from inside, gnawing away at us.

Yeah.

Boy, I remember the old days, there used to be liberal journalists, and every once in a while they would go after a Democrat.

Yeah, let's take a few moments for some messages and then come back and I have a few questions or a question about the January 6th Select Committee.

Then we'll do that in just a moment.

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So, Victor, you were mentioning the January 6th, and we have a select committee that's investigating.

And I know that from the right-wing position, all of the people they wanted wanted on that committee were not accepted.

And then they had people like Liz Cheney appointed, who's supposed to be a Republican.

And so it's...

broadly seen as leaning very left in its methods and in its goals.

And one of its goals just recently they're talking about is bringing a criminal case against Donald Trump.

They claim that he knew on the day after the election that everything was fair and yet he misused his power and talked about overturning the legal results of that election.

And that would be the charge against him.

And I was wondering your thoughts on that.

Well,

they're not going to win that case.

They're not going to, I mean, if they can say all the criminal referrals they want, but nobody is going to believe them because they have to prove in a court of law if anybody were to take up the referrals or if they were going to present it to the Congress as if it was really a writ of impeachment and therefore they were were going i mean if he was still in office although that doesn't really matter anymore but my point is donald you'd have to prove that

donald trump i think didn't believe any of that he had no grounds to believe any of it he didn't believe any

and he deliberately sicked his troops his conspiratorial group to take power in a cynical fashion and he knew that he lost That's at an odds with what the left is saying.

Because for every person who believes that, Sammy, there's another leftist who's written, this guy is totally deluded.

The scary thing about Donald Trump is he believes it.

He really does think that guy is nuts.

He really does think he won the election.

That's number one.

And then number two,

after that writ, that he really, really, really didn't believe that he was robbed, then you have to find people.

I mean, they're going to find three or four now they've called insurrectionists or something, but you have to find some coordinating group.

I mean, he said, go out and go over there to the Capitol.

That was a dumb thing to say, but he said, peacefully demonstrate.

So they're not going to find that.

And they know they're not going to find it.

And why are they doing it?

They're doing it.

because they are scared stiff that Donald Trump is going to be nominated.

And their record is so horrible that even Donald Trump can get elected in a split election and he's going to go in there and he's wiser than he was when he went in in 2017

and he's going to hit the ground running and he's going to be merciless to those people and he's going to fire people throughout the CDC

if he can, if it's legal, and the FBI and he's going to do some revolutionary things and they don't want him in there and they're going to try to prevent him right now from doing it.

And they don't have a case.

And then there's a third thing, Sammy.

You have to say, okay,

he said things that were insurrectionary.

Nobody's saying he directed things, but what did Hillary Clinton do in 2016?

She said she was robbed.

They did do things.

They got Jill Stein and they, you know, to go up and sue in court in three states to overturn.

Then they got a very res, I thought it was revolutionary at the time.

They got a bunch of grade C Hollywood actors and actresses.

You remember that?

From November, mid-November to probably somewhere around December 1st.

I don't know exactly that year, what year the electors met, but every night there was this Grade B, C D actor saying, people of people of

Pennsylvania, people of Michigan, don't vote the way your state voted.

It was crooked election.

Change, flip, vote your consciousness, reflect the federal vote.

And that's what they did.

And she was behind that.

And the left was behind that.

And nobody said a word.

And then when she wanted to lay in, she wouldn't, she said, ha ha, I am part now of La Résistance.

I'm a member of the resistance.

Well, what does that mean in a court of law?

Does that mean you're going to go out in the maquis and get your stench machine gun and start killing people like the French resistance did?

Is that what what she meant?

Or then she said on the eve of the election, Joe Biden, even if you lose the election, do not concede.

Are we going to bring her up?

So the number of Al Gore in 2000 election?

Or how about I mentioned the Time magazine and I just remember her name was Molly Ball.

I don't want to, Molly Fass is another writer for the Bulwark.

They're both very left-wing, but Molly Ball is, I think, considered more sane.

But my point is, Molly Ball wrote that, are you going to call her up up and subpoena her and said, what?

You just admitted to a conspiracy to warp an election.

Who are these people?

What are your sources?

Who gave you the money?

Who turned it on and off the spigot of street violence?

Who in the corporate boardroom colluded with the people in Antifa?

That's what you said.

Did you mean it?

No, it's not going anywhere.

And Adam

Kenzinger, I always say Kissinger.

It's Ken Zinger.

It's Ken Zinger.

He can't make a statement before he burst into tears.

And he's now talking about he wants to go into Ukraine and have a no-fly zone.

So, a lot of people who thought who might have been sympathetic to him, not me, but apparently somebody was, they're thinking, this guy is crazy.

He's a nut.

Get him out.

And then Liz Cheney from a distinguished family, I had utmost regards for Dick Cheney, but the problem with her is that she was the third person in the House Republican hierarchy.

And her her job was to advance Republican issues.

And she voted for about 90%

of the Donald Trump, if not more, agenda.

And so when this came along, she could have used proper,

I don't know, tragic diction.

She could have said, I don't know what happened to Donald Trump.

This is not the guy who led this agenda that I overwhelmingly voted for.

I voted for him.

I voted for his agenda, but I was disappointed in him.

But

no, it became a cause celeb for her.

And for every time

she attacked the left, which is now not at all, she attacked Donald Trump a hundred times.

So now the question is raised, okay.

You got Joe Biden.

Is this what you spent your whole life for to destroy the southern border and to let in 2 million people?

Did you spend your whole life to ruin the economy and get this month 7.9% annualized inflation?

Did you spend your whole life to get the Afghanistan pull out?

Did you spend your whole life to shut down the greatest oil and gas producer in the history of civilization and beg the Iranian?

Is that what you wanted to do?

Because that's what happened.

So that's not, they're not tenable positions and they're going to go tragic.

They've destroyed and blown up their careers.

In the case of Liz Cheney, she had a wonderful career.

I wish somebody could have gotten hold of her and shake her and said, don't keep doing this.

You're destroying yourself.

Yeah.

She never saw the wisdom.

She never stopped.

She just kept going forward, even when it looked worse and worse.

She followed the paradigm of the never-Trump people when it all boiled down to it.

And you see a never-Trumper and you say to a Never Trumper,

everything

you lectured, you sermonized, you pontificated, you wrote, you spoke, your TV, your radio.

It was all there in 90% of the Trump agenda.

All you had to do was say, I agree that he had a good agenda.

It represented my life's work, but his personality trumped the agenda.

But they couldn't stop there.

They had to say, you know what?

He's Hitler.

He's Mussolini.

He's this.

He's Stalin.

And they destroyed their careers.

And the cynic would say, they're mad because nobody listens to them anymore.

Nobody wants them on television.

Nobody wants to read them.

You know why?

Not because they're not right.

Not because they're not informed, because A,

They suspect they're always now where they always wanted to be.

They always wanted to jump ship and this anti-Trump tanker pulled up and they jumped over to the other side and they feel where they are.

They feel relaxed.

And two, they hate Donald Trump because he destroyed their lucrative career.

And that C, there was a lot of money to be made in the Lincoln Project and all the bulwarks left-wing money and all of that.

So that's it.

But it wasn't, it wasn't on principle because they got a president that gave them 90% of their agenda and there were ways to voice their criticism of the excesses of Donald Trump without calling him an existential threat or a Hitlerian figure.

Thank you, Victor.

That's a perfect ending thought here.

And I think we better bring

it.

Thank you, Victor.

And why don't you shut the blank up?

No, I was thinking, I was going to give something that was optimistic at the end because sometimes it can get a little bleak.

And yet, that actually was very optimistic that Donald Trump's four years had a lot better result, a lot more good results than it had any sort of damage.

Your growing legion, your conspiracy, I'm now thinking like Richard Nixon to undermine me with your legions of supporters who write me, please, please, poor Sammy, she has to request.

You're interrupting poor Sammy.

Victor, I didn't see the sight of you before.

So.

Okay, Sammy, call them off.

This world is tough, and it's good to have some supporters.

That's all I can say.

Yeah, we all need all the help we can get.

All right.

And I want to make one correction.

I said fifth column, but I think I meant rear guard at the

journalistic cadres, the rear guard.

You know, now that I think about it, to be fair to you, Sammy, and to be fair to Sammy's supporters who will write me, why'd you bite off Sammy's head, you pedantic fool?

Well, it is a fifth column because they act as if democracy dies in darkness, you know, but they're actually

undercover trying to destroy the give and take and the consensuality of government and get a monopoly of thought.

And they don't believe in civil liberties or free speech anymore, which should have been the mother's milk of the whole journalistic profession.

All right.

We'll call that the end of the podcast today.

Thank you for this Friday news roundup, Victor.

Thank you.

Thanks, everybody, for listening.

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

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