The OTUS Among Us

41m

POTUS, VPOTUS, and nominee for SCOTUS -- Victor Davis Hanson and cohost Jack Fowler look at the record and at other things that reveal America asunder. Who is responsible?

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Transcript

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show, recording on Monday, February 28th.

I'm Jack Fowler.

The host, the namesake, and star is Victor Davis-Hanson, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

We'll talk a little more about Victor's website, victorhanson.com, and some of the places you can find him on social media and some of the places you can find me.

But the first thing we're going to talk about is something that hasn't happened yet.

We're recording the day before

the State of the Union.

one of the latest state of the unions since the presidential swearing-in dates were changed.

While we talk, fences are going up around the Capitol.

Remember those fences from last January?

I do.

I do.

Well, they're going up.

I don't know what to protect America against Biden's lunacy or protect Biden against pigeons.

Who knows?

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

So, Victor, this is a little bit of game playing here.

We have this very delayed State of the Union.

We talked about it a few weeks ago.

I don't know how delaying anything for Biden in the hopes that some good news will come.

It just is not going to be the case.

It never has been the case.

God knows if he gave the State of the Union on April 1st, the planet will probably have exploded by them.

So, Victor, if, though, Joe Biden does not have a lobotomy, brain surgery, the Archangel Mark or Michael comes to him and

whisper in his ear.

It's a mortal sin to say, yeah.

It's all right.

It's just forgiven.

You're forgiven.

What could this Joe Biden plausibly say to,

I don't know, do good, to have some kind of positive impact on America's standing, the woke war, inflation, et cetera.

Is there anything he could say, or is it just beyond the pale to think that is even possible?

Well, you use that subjunctive dash optative could say

or would say or will say future tense.

So we know there are things he could say.

that would improve the situation radically if he were to follow up on them.

And then would say no?

So what could he say, Jack?

He could say this.

I, Joe Biden,

feel that with all of you Americans, great empathy and excitement and renewed confidence of the West at the heroic resistance of the Ukrainian people to naked aggression.

And as part of that solidarity with Ukraine, we're going to up shipments of the following weapons.

And we're not trying to get into a nuclear standoff with Russia, but we feel it's in the interest of Russia as well to keep within its borders.

And we have a new NATO solidarity to remind him of that fact.

Now,

this is not the period or time for recriminations, but there was a reason that Vladimir Putin went into Ukraine.

And therefore, I'm going to correct these reasons why he did go in so that he never goes into Lithuania or Finland or other countries again.

And I today

suggest the following: We are going to complete the Keystone pipeline.

We need another 800 or 900,000 barrels.

And we want to do this because we are friendly with our great ally to the North Canada.

We want to buy energy from people that share our values.

And that will increase about 900 to almost 1,000 to 1 million barrels.

I also want to open the Anwar Reserve in Alaska.

We've done extensive studies.

It's not the best alternative, but at this time and place, it will give us in time another million barrels.

I'm also very worried about the vulnerability of Europe to energy blackmail, which got us into this mess.

So therefore, I propose the following.

One,

we

will sanction any European country that completes a pipeline deal with Russia and no more vetoing of these sanctions.

Number two,

Europe needs help.

So I reverse my opposition to the Cypriot-Israeli Greek East-Med pipeline that will bring in billions of cubic feet of natural gas into Italy, and it will help relieve the pressure off Europe.

In addition, I want to open up federal lands for leasing, especially natural gas.

We have 100 years of proven reserves.

We can liquefy that natural gas.

We can send it across the ocean and it can be more economical for Europe and surely safer and better for the security of the West for them to buy it at us at a reasonable price.

That too will alleviate pressure off Europe so it doesn't do something stupid again.

You won't say stupid.

by concluding something like the Northram deal.

In other words, while we all want to have more green energy, the transformation can only occur to renewable sources of fuel in a time where the middle class is not bearing the burdens to increased commuting costs and the inability to heat or cool their homes.

And part of that renewable energy package must include hydroelectric and especially nuclear power.

Okay, and then he could say the following.

We all agree that we need emphasis on social justice.

An army, a military, a navy, an air force, a marine corps that feels solidarity across racial and gender and ethnic lines is more potent on the battlefield.

That being said, it's not the time or place for the United States military to target one group and accuse it without evidence of being somehow racist or supremacist and therefore go through the ranks and ferret out potential subversive.

That's not the American way.

We're not McCarthyites.

We're going to cease that.

And the emphasis on promotion and recruitment will be on fitness to protect the security and the safety of the United States and that is the primary objective that the military will now follow to deter enemies and in the rare cases when we have to use force to defend our interests and our allies we will do so in rapid and lethal fashion there will be no more afghanistans on my watch And I think if he did that, he would, Jack, he would soar up in the polls.

He really would.

He would get up to 50% from his 35 to 37.

Now, will he, would he?

No,

because he is not Joe Biden in control of the White House.

He is run not by leftists so much by as leftist ideologues.

And these are people like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and the former Barack Michelle team that is layered throughout the Biden administration, the squad.

And they shake their fingers at Biden.

And they said, listen, you're old fool.

You didn't even know where you were.

You were in third place.

And then all these operatives of the Democratic Party came to us and said, you guys are not going to get elected.

You're not going to get your Green New Deal and your wokeness and your critical base theory in power unless you use this carcass of a president, Joe Biden, presidential candidate, and get him elected.

Your guy is not going to make it.

Bernie won't make it.

Elizabeth won't make it.

Corey Booker won't make it.

Nutty Bale won't make it.

Mayor Pete, the crazy Mayor Pete, will not make it.

None of them are going to make it.

The American people don't trust him.

So carry this guy on your back across, shut the blank up, carry him across the finish line.

Put up with his, I'm good old Joe Biden from Scram.

And once you drop him on the other side of the finish line, it's all yours.

That was the deal.

And so now they can't, he can't renege on that because if he does, you know what they're going to do.

They're going to not vote or not not turn out and they're and he can't do it he's captive to them i say he i don't know what he means anymore i guess it's dr jill biden jill biden and ron clain and somebody around him mrs uh mrs woodrow wilson ii yeah i like victor that you called him a carcass of a president i don't mean that in a cruel way i really know it's well it's a day it's an essential hey look here you mentioned the polls so here's some of the polls that came out over the weekend abc Washington posted a poll.

Let me just read these numbers quickly.

50% of Americans blame Biden for inflation.

58% disapprove of how he's handling the economy.

54%

say the economy is worse since he became president.

54% say he lacks, quote, mental sharpness to serve effectively as president, end quote.

59% say he's not a strong leader.

55%

disapprove of the way Joe Biden is handling his job as president.

And lastly, as we approach the November elections, it breaks down 50%

a favor of the GOP, 40% Democrats, 10% right now of no opinion.

And that's for preference for

partisan control of Congress.

So those numbers don't motivate.

him or well ideologues maybe don't get motivated by numbers since they're always right anyway victor that's just out over the weekend any thought about them i was a little disappointed jack because what you just and i looked at that poll but are you serious that 42 of the american people believe that joe biden is in control of his faculties i mean that's no no no no i think uh that oh yeah

you're right i would have meant 46 sorry about this

no but i mean who who are these people i mean he gets up on there and he doesn't know where he is and they say, my God, that president's in control of the situation.

You know what I mean?

It's incredible.

So,

yes, the polls are terrible, but there's still

a residual who.

Yeah, it's actually 40% and 70% undecided.

So it still means that much.

Don't see a faculty.

I'm being facetious, but it is incredible that that many people still have some iota of confidence in him.

And I think a lot of it is.

There are elements within me that are the same way.

I think it's two things of the 40%.

One is, my God, I'm an American.

This guy's got his controls of government and he's doing some terrible things.

But if you keep trashing him, that it's a wrong way of thinking because you've got to get him out of there.

But, you know, legally, you've got to.

on elect him get him out maybe the left will do it for us and give us camel i I don't know.

But there are people who say when you tear him down, you're tearing down the effectiveness of the United States.

I understand that.

And then second, there's a lot of people who say, you know, and I have elements within me that I,

it goes like this, Jack.

I had an uncle, I had a grandfather, I had a parent that I started to see the beginning of Alzheimer's or cognitive decline.

And it's not something to laugh about.

It's tragic.

And when I see him struggle with words, you know, as i said before your little angel on one shoulder says you know it's a sermon on the mount victor come on and then the little devil with horns on the red union suit and the pitch tail he says

are you serious he didn't did your grandfather ask to be president of the united states did his wife force him to run did he really is that really a moral thing to put him in charge of the united states where they knew what he was and you wouldn't let him drive a car exactly is that nice to put your parent who was enfeebled or cousin and you know and behind a semi-truck just because you didn't want to hurt his feelings?

So that's the other point of view.

But I've never seen a situation like that with most people understand that he's not capable of carrying out the duties of the president of the United States, especially physically.

So he cannot, he has to go to Delaware where he feels, you know, when he sees a door or you know, a window, he said, that's a window, that's a door because it's something he sees every day where he's in the White House.

What is this?

I've never seen, where am I?

And that's, that's, you know, when people have that cognitive decline, they want to retreat to their cave where everything is familiar over years.

I understand that, but not when you're president of the United States.

So you've got this Zelensky out in the street with an armored vest going all around Ukraine, telling, what do you need, General, Colonel?

What can I do?

What should I say?

How do I help you?

And then you've got the president in Delaware hit.

It's not good.

And the left, I blame the left for this.

I really do, because they knew this.

And they were so damn cynical.

They said to themselves, this is the only way we're going to get back power for ourselves.

Our positions, our agendas, our policies people don't like.

And we have two ways of getting around that.

And they're not working.

We can't change the system yet.

Pack the court, get rid of the Electoral College, national voter law in the filibuster.

And we don't.

We can't bring enough people in across the southern border to change the demography.

And when we do it, some of them aren't loyal to us anymore.

After a generation, they hate us as much as other people hate us.

So maybe we can get Biden in there and sneak him in.

This is the most left-wing agenda we have ever seen in our lifetime.

Not since the first two years of the Roosevelt administration.

Just a fact.

And it got in through stealth.

and Donald Trump's, you know, his unpopularity and tweeting and all that, first debate, all that stuff.

But it's really scary what the left gave us.

And they did it intentionally.

And they didn't care about the security of the United States.

And I put at their feet Afghanistan.

I put at their feet Ukraine.

I put at their feet inflation.

I put at their feet high gas prices.

I put at their feet an open border.

I put at their feet critical race theory.

I put at their feet this nutty, crazy array of appointments of the people that they bring before the Senate to be confirmed.

Ronnie.

Yeah,

absolutely.

Well, Victor, I'm going to spring this on you.

We just talked about the carcass of a president.

How about the cackler of a vice president?

She went off to save the day in Europe, and I don't think she did anything.

And let's talk about that briefly after this important message.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hanson Show recording on February 28th.

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So Victor, yeah, let's quickly, I snuck this in here, but I'd forgotten Kamala Harris went off as an emissary to NATO prior to the invasion.

you know i don't know what to do but laugh about that from even a nato leadership are they are they going to take her presence

with any authority?

Could she possibly have stiffened the spine of anyone?

I just don't, I don't get it.

Don't cackle.

It's similar to what we just said about Biden.

On one hand, the little angel on the shoulder says,

yes,

it's tragic.

but she's a very pathetic figure.

When she can't finish a sentence, it means anything.

there's no there there

I don't think she'd ever been to Europe before or she claimed she didn't she said I'd never been to Europe and all of a sudden a person who's never been to Europe or never studied foreign relations or never read much about foreign policy or never run a business or anything that would require any element of strategy would be put in charge of unifying the NATO alliance.

If you ask her, what is the NATO alliance?

How did it come about?

What were the NATO members' origins?

What were the debates in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s?

I don't think she would know.

So it's tragic.

And then the other side, just like in the case of Biden's cognitive inadequacies, says, are you crazy?

She's been a conniver and her schemer her entire life.

And the only way to protect us is to make sure people like that don't have power because she

is a zero, but she's a zero that has schemed her way to the top from her Willie Brown consort days and don't have any empathy for this person because she's doing a lot of damage to your country.

So that's what I kind of wrestle with that.

I think everybody does.

But we're in a terrible situation when, or maybe we're in the situation that Biden is not so cognitively challenged in the first place because he did the Agnew thing as we've talked about when he said, I'm going to pick only a black woman as vice presidential candidate, running mate.

There weren't weren't a lot of black women on the national scene as governors, unless you wanted Stacey Abrams, who I guess was a virtual governor.

She said she won the election and she didn't lose it by 50,000 votes.

And there were people addressing her as Governor Abrams.

But other than that, there was really only Camilla Harris, who they felt was presentable.

And everybody who knew her here in California thought it would be, nobody in their right mind would make her a vice president.

She's now one missed thought away from the presidency.

Yeah.

or walking through the window

instead of the door in the Delaware home.

So Victor, speaking about appointments based on pigmentation, the president followed through on his promise to nominate a black woman to replace Stephen Breyer, who was forced off.

Well, he's still serving, but his service on the court will end with the end of this term.

That woman is Katanji Brown Jackson.

She's been a federal judge for a number of, I think, seven, eight years, the last year on the U.S.

District Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia, sometimes the little Supreme Court known as.

I just want to read a piece from an editorial from my old Stomping Grounds National Review, which was critical of this appointment.

And it says here, credentials aside, however, Judge Jackson has not distinguished herself with scholarship or the quality of her legal writing.

And she has a discouraging record of her decisions being reversed even by fellow liberal judges.

Progressives championed her because of her record as a federal public defender, seeing her as an advocate for soft-on-crime approaches to sentencing and the criminal law.

Liberals cheered her rulings against Donald Trump.

Nobody has attempted to present her as a faithful steward of the Constitution.

Expect to hear a lot from Democrats about race, gender, sympathy, and empathy.

It will fall to Republicans to talk about law and the constitution.

Victor, one of Biden's greatest polling hits is this soft on crime stuff to nominate someone to the ultimate determinant of law and order of the Supreme Court, someone who's soft on crime as yet another head scratcher.

Your thoughts, Victor?

Yeah, I don't think it to the Democrats, they don't look at a Supreme Court.

appointee or a nomination.

They don't look at it in terms of the law.

They really don't.

And the sense that we have a constitution, we have some latitude, that the conditions today are different than the founders, but we try to have a serious group of legal scholars follow original intent.

And they understand what this country was created legally.

And they understand maybe you need women to vote.

Maybe you need 18.

I don't mean maybe in the sense that.

that was a you do need them but at certain times they they pondered what would eventually follow and there was a a process in the country that the judges could make these adjustments for a very sophisticated postmodern world, very different.

But it didn't mean that they were going to change the intent of the founders, or it didn't mean that human nature changes.

It improves as the progressives who progress in the sense that we're getting better people because our brains work different than Thomas Jefferson or Washington or etc.

So that's what conservatives believe.

And liberals believe when you get a left-winger on to the Supreme Court, their job is to do what a deadlock Congress cannot do.

Or when the Democrats are in a minority, that is to nullify legislative laws that have been signed by the president and substitute with liberal edicts, fiats.

So a judge can suspend a ballot proposition or they can suspend a wrong-headed school board.

They can do any of that, not because what they see as violations of constitutional statutes, but because they feel as progressive legislators, they're allies of a Congress that's now impotent.

And that's how they view it.

And they look at all the great things they think happened in the world and it was due to the Warren Supreme Court.

So that's why she's appointed.

And then I don't know how

effective this

makes the Supreme Court look like America.

There's nine judges.

So

12% of the population is African-American and what I think it's eight or nine percent is Latino.

And we have on the Supreme Court one Black justice and one Latino Justice Sotomayer.

And there's nine and two divided by nine, got to be somewhere around what, 22% or something.

So what I'm saying is the present court as constituted reflects the demography of Hispanics and Blacks.

And then we have three female judges, 33%.

Maybe that's what he meant.

We wanted to have another woman so that we're going to get close to whether it's 5-4 or 4-5.

But my point is the court looks like America now, almost looks like it, but racially it does.

And yet no one ever, nobody, I don't know what anybody in the right said, what do you mean?

You're saying that Justice Sotomayere

and Justice Thomas, two of the nine justices, you know, it's almost a quarter to almost 25%, about 20% of the court is not a white male.

Is that what you're denying?

And nobody makes that argument because I guess they feel that they don't want to pander to the left's mode of thinking or argumentation.

And I think what I'm getting at, Jack, is we are leaving proportional representation, that old doctrine of the left, that in every aspect of the American experience, cultural, political, economic, and social, the exact ratios of the demographic makeup of the country shall be by mandate and fiat and quality of result, they will reflect exactly these percentages.

And now we've gone beyond that.

Instead of proportional representation,

it's repertory representation.

So the left is now saying that's not good enough.

So if 12% of the incoming class of Princeton and Stamford are African-American, that reflects the population regardless of test scores or grades.

It's going to be 15 now.

And the same is going to be true of Latinos.

And we're going to have less white males admitted because of historical grievances.

And if the NFL is 70% African American, that doesn't matter.

We're not going to apply proportional representation to the NBA or the NFL.

And if we look at commercials on TV, we're going to insist that 50, 60% of them are going to have black faces because of historical grievances, not 12% as in the past, and Hollywood roles and everything.

So this is non-sustainable because what you're doing is you're putting an enormous onus on a particular ethnic racial group and you're saying, we're going to take your membership and we're going to by fiat make sure that you are in a role proportionally that is greater than your numbers in the population.

And unlike the NBA or the NFL or popular entertainment or people who have succeeded on their merits like Oprah or Beyonce.

We're going to do this by fiat.

And it's not going to be a natural meritocracy.

And I don't think it's going to end well.

But when Joe Biden says he wants a court that's going to look like America, what he's basically talking about is one white person, one white male, I guess, rather than three or four that are, you know, they're 34% of the population.

And he's thinking that because in the past, they were all white males.

You know, there was a time when this country was 95%, or until recently, about 90% white, so-called white.

So, this is a very dangerous thing, not just to adjudicate performance on the basis of superficial appearance, but to bring in this reparations through the back door by having these quotas that don't represent the demographic percentages of particular tribes, but exceed them.

And I don't think that's going to work.

And I think that's going to really blow up as well on a Democratic project.

I'm just trying to think where the Democratic Party Jack is headed in November.

So, are they going to use this nomination to recover ground they lost through inflation or Afghanistan or gas prices?

And they're going to say, wow,

whatever Joe Biden did, he announced in advance that he was only going to look at black women.

And that's a winning idea because Clarence Thomas, to paraphrase Joe Biden, you ain't black, Judges Thomas.

That's what he's thinking because he's not subservient African-American in the way Biden wants.

And try to technologically lynch him.

Well, we remember, Victor, after the last election, it was the Democrats in that exposed meeting they had, like about to fund the police, how insane this was.

And if that can be wrapped around this nominee, I don't see how she does anything but harms the political fortunes of Democrats this year.

Yeah, I think what they wanted to do in times like this is push all the identity politics buttons as part of the Faustian bargain they made to get Biden elected, that he owes all of these people particular appointments, the left, Bernie Sanders, the Obamas, Elizabeth, all of them, the squad.

And then two, they didn't want a firebrand that was famous for controversial, cutting-edge, hardcore leftist opinions.

They wanted somebody that was predictably, when you look at a court case,

they want want somebody to rule in favor of unions, in favor of identity politics, affirmative action, in favor of large government edicts and social programs.

And I think she fits that category perfectly.

Well, Victor, we have time for one, maybe a second quickie topic, and that would be American culpability, political and cultural for what's going on in Ukraine.

And let's talk about that right after this important message.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show recording on February 28th.

Victor, in the previous podcast we recorded, we talked a lot about culpability political,

obviously of the Biden administration and the Obama administration, sins of omission, omission, sins of commission regarding dealings with Russia and other matters that have led to this conflagration of sorts in the Ukraine.

I'd like to focus a little more on America's culpability culturally, in particular, you know, our corporate and cultural elites whose antics, whose virtue signaling and the like have created this image of America as a nation coming apart.

And to me, that comes off as a nation that's therefore weak.

And I think that the docs easily connect to what is transpiring these past few days in Ukraine.

I could be wrong.

It could be deeper than that, even.

Anyway, Victor, your thoughts about that.

And I just want to add as a little kicker.

I know we're not going to talk about this separately, but I saw a tweet yesterday that Nicole Hannah-Jones, the queen of 1619, is hacking all the press coverage of Ukraine, the war in Ukraine, as racism.

Too much.

Too much.

Many white people, you mean?

Yeah, yeah.

I thought she would like it because white people are killing white people.

Think of that.

I'm channeling Whoopi Goldberg.

Why worry about the Holocaust?

It was white people gassing white people.

These people are racist.

They're absolute racist.

And they don't like to hear that, but they're racist.

They judge people by their superficial appearances.

And they do so to enhance their own careerist trajectories and power.

And they're despicable people.

This is a woman, remember, Jack, get me on a tangent, ignoring your plea for conciseness.

But nevertheless, she told us that 1619 was the foundational date of America, and she did so as a journalist with no historical background.

If you doubt that she had a historical background to make such an assessment, then she also tweeted that the Civil War started in 1865.

Just think of a person who had enough influence to cause a national debate over whether 1776 or 1619 was the actual date of America, and that the whole time she had no idea when the Civil War started, the one war that was emblematic of race and foundations and violence.

And she, it's just, it's just mind-boggling.

But it leads into your point that A country's deterrence is not just military or not just economic.

It's on whether people will fight.

So when Hitler went into France, just to take an example, Hitler knew that the indomitable French army of World War I had bent, but it never broke.

You know, they shall not pass at Verdun.

He knew that the Shar B tank was superior to the Mark III even.

He knew that many of the French fighters were state-of-the-art and they were comparable or even in some ways on paper superior to the Bf-109.

And yet he went in.

He knew they had a Maginal line.

He went in because he thought they wouldn't fight.

He felt that all during the 20s and 30s, they said that World War I was started by militarism, the socialist governments didn't want to talk about Verdun in their textbooks, et cetera, et cetera.

Thomas Solas was, when he had, on his book on an electric, was very good on this when he looked at the rot in the French intelligentsia.

So the point I'm making is that one of the reasons that Putin went in, and I think a lot of conservatives, I don't want to criticize them, but they misinterpreted what Putin was doing.

They said, you know, Putin is Christian and Putin has legitimate complaints against us and therefore he has an alternate paradigm.

He's an extreme version of some of the Eastern European.

No, no, what he was, he doesn't believe in anything.

He just looked at America and he said, look,

how can I weaken and undermine their deterrence?

I can do it in two ways.

I can praise their group.

Remember how he used to praise American environmentalists that were cutting back on oil production?

He said, we want to work with John Kerry.

He did.

He said that all during the Obama administration.

There was actual, I think he funneled money into some American environmental causes.

And then the second thing was he kept deploring that the United States was weak.

It was international.

internally

full of dissension.

It had no confidence.

So he was doing both.

It was propaganda, but it wouldn't have worked as all propaganda.

It has a kernel of truth to exaggerate.

And what I'm getting at is that if you don't know what your foundational date is, and you don't know what Shiloh is, or you don't know what Chancellorsville was, or you don't know who Andrew Jackson was, or you don't know, I mean, let's be fair, you don't even know who Frederick Douglass is or Booker T.

Washington, and you don't know who Tecumseh was.

If you don't know any of the complexities, the glories, the tragedy, and of your own country, and you don't come to the conclusion that it's better than the alternative, and there's no other alternative better, and you don't have to be perfect to be good.

If you don't believe that, then you're not going to know what to do about Ukraine.

You're not going to be able to defend your country.

You're going to wake up the military in the most deleterious fashion possible with wokeness.

And that's what he's doing.

And you're right.

Every time we start to destroy meritocracy and go back to tribal selections, a criterion for admissions or appointments or hiring or whatever,

or any time we start accusing each other of you ain't black or you ain't white or it's white people fighting, any of that weakens the United States.

And it's all predicated on a very...

profound ignorance of history that multiracial governments of any sort, but particularly democracies, don't have a very good record.

Former Yugoslavia, after the Cold War, dabbled a little bit with elections and they ended up killing 140,000 people.

Rwanda tried to do a little bit, they ended up killing almost a million people.

One of our problems with founding constitutional government in Iraq was that when it pushed came to shove, people said, I'm either, you know, I'm Kurdish or I'm Shia or I'm Sunni.

And when you start unraveling a cultural, racial, racial, economic unity, and you start to unravel it and go to tribalism, everybody will go tribal.

Everybody will go tribal.

And Brazil doesn't work for that reason.

India doesn't work very well either for that reason.

And so we want to be very careful because ultimately, like every other issue, they boil down to national security.

I don't know what Hannah Jones thinks, but does she think she's going to fly over to Europe and people are going to say, well, you're a black person that hates the United States, so we're not going to criticize you as an American.

They're going to look at the way she talks, they act, her values,

popular culture, and they're going to say, she's American.

And so these people better wake up.

Unless you want to move, you represent America.

And you may not think you do, but you're as American.

I mean, there were a lot of Black militants in the 1960s that went over to Africa and tried to live.

Some of them stayed, but the majority said, I'm not African, and they don't expect me to be African.

And I've had a lot of friends that were Mexican-American who, coming of age, thought they were going to go down to Mexico and be greeted as returning liberators, you know, or Lafayette, we are here.

Sort of stuff.

And

it was the Mordita, the Mordida, the Mordida, and Gringo, Gringo, Gringo.

And you ain't Mexican.

And that's the

Mordida.

The bite, the little bite, excuse me.

Mordos.

In other words, if you're a policeman, I want to bite you.

You cross the border and you're a really spiffy new CR-V Honda and you drive around to meet your people and

get in contact with your roots and you get pulled over and the guy says, I need

50 US dollars because your taillight blinked a couple of times when it shouldn't.

And then you say, but I'm Mexican and I'm speaking Spanish to you.

And they say, you know, you're a gringo and your Spanish sucks and, you know, pay the Merdito.

And that's happened to a lot of people.

They think that they're really still Mexican, the second generation.

They're not.

And that was the one truth about the dreamers.

They couldn't say that, but the ones that were not born in the United States, but came here at four or five, they parade around like they're La Raza activists and authentic Mexican.

But deep down in their hearts, they know if they go back to their dreamland, Mexico, they're going to be treated like gringos.

And it's not going to be the same type of country they expect here.

Well, Victor, that's a little cultural wisdom.

I appreciate that on the Mordido, Mordido.

Mordida, the little Mordida, Mordida, Mordida.

Thank you.

They have, you know, back.

I guess what your frame of reference is Middle East, so you know it is Bakshish, I guess.

That's more of like, you know, begging.

And why is my frame of reference Middle East?

Because you're Italy.

Is Italy all of a sudden a part of the Levant?

I don't know.

Well, anyway, everybody.

you know knows the backshish but yes we do yeah all right well we're running out of time we just have to conclude with a little business One is to thank our listeners wherever they listen to this on Victor's own website.

That's VictorHanson.com, Stitcher, Google Play, et cetera.

If you're on iTunes, please consider leaving a five-star review and appreciation for Victor's wisdom.

And if you leave a comment, we will read it.

We read them.

Some of them sting a little bit, but that's all right.

We're big boys.

We can take it.

Sammy's a big girl.

She can take it too.

But there's one review I just want to, very quick.

fantastic is the name of it and it's written by won't stop simple fantastic is the name quote i love to listen to this man rant and i love his unique pronunciations of people's names and then there's a little smile winky thing going on there so thank you can't stop won't stop i love that too about you victor and plenty more we thank everyone who does listen.

And Victor, I'm going to say goodbye and thank you for listening to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

And I thank everybody, and I want to apologize, Jack, because your frame of reference is Latin, because a churchman, so I should have said more ditus,

fourth principle part of more dereo to eat or to grab or to chomp on.

Well, thank you, Yui Bus.

I appreciate it.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye.