A Helpless, Weeping Child and Other International Issues

Flu season is here and COVID cases are still climbing across the country.

When people start getting sick, medications disappear fast.

And that's why we trust All Family Pharmacy.

They help you prepare before it's too late.

Right now, they've dropped prices on ivermectin and mabenzazole by 25%.

Plus, you can save an extra 10% with the code VICTR10.

You'll also get 10% off antibiotics, antivirals, hydroxychloroquine, and more of the medications you actually want on hand.

Whether you're fighting off a cold, protecting your family from flu season, or staying ready in case COVID makes its way into your home, having a few months' supply brings peace of mind and control.

They work with licensed doctors who review your order online, write the prescriptions, and ship your meds straight to your door.

Go to allfamilypharmacy.com/slash Victor and use the code Victor10 today.

Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

We are recording on February 21st in the year 2022.

Some people call it President's Day.

I still call it what it's legally called Washington's birthday.

I'm Jack Fowler.

I'm the host.

Victor Davis Hansen is the namesake and star of this podcast.

He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

And he is the author of many a best-selling book, the latest being The Dying Citizen.

You will find a link for that and many other things at his website, victorhanson.com.

We're going to talk about that a little later.

Victor, I do want to preface the show that President's Day means

in the broader sense that we're also honoring James Buchanan, Millard Fillmore, Jimmy Carter.

Wait a minute, are you homophobic, Jack, by mentioning James Buchanan first of all the mediocre presidents?

You sniffed it out, my friend.

You caught me.

But anyway, let's just, it's Washington's birthday.

But hey, Victor, all the levity, little here, levity aside, big things are happening.

We're going to talk about the Ukraine crisis right after this important message.

Cooler temperatures are rolling in and as always, Quince is where I turn for false staples that actually last.

From cashmere to denim to boots.

The quality holds up and the price still blows me away.

Quince has the kind of false staples you'll wear non-stop, like supersoft 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters starting at just $60.

Their denim is durable and fits right and their real leather jackets bring that clean classic edge without the elevated price tag.

What makes Quints different?

They partner directly with ethical factories and skip the middlemen.

So you get top-tier fabrics and craftsmanship at half the price of similar brands.

When the weather cools down, my Quint sweaters are a go-to.

My cashmere short sleeve that works under any jacket, formal or casual, or my thick, long-sleeve, go-everywhere, do-everything sweater that pairs with any pant or jogger.

Quince products are my favorites, which is why I went to Quince to buy my recent very beautiful purse that leaves the house every time I do.

Keep it classic and cool this fall with long-lasting staples from Quince.

Go to quince.com slash Victor for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns.

That's quince.com slash victor for free shipping and 365 day returns.

Quince.com slash victor and we'd like to thank Quince for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

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

So, Victor, over this past weekend, there was talk of a French-brokered Biden Putin summit to de-escalate Russia's threat to the Ukraine.

Putin flipped the bird at this idea.

He said it was too early.

Victor, I'd like to know your thoughts about the crisis.

And I want to categorize maybe two sub-questions.

The first is, well, is Europe really on the brink of a war or is this really just some really high-stakes theater?

And the second thing is whether or not the conflict, an actual conflict happens, I hope it doesn't, by sins of omission or sins of commission, is Joe Biden, and we have to remember that Joe Biden was selected by Barack Obama to be his running mate because he supposedly had all this foreign policy gravitas.

Is that Joe Biden culpable for the situation now being faced in Europe?

Victor, your thoughts.

Yes.

And

first of all, notice that the things are so dismal everywhere in the world that this cry, everybody wants to jump in.

So

Boris over there in UK is just about ready to be dethroned.

I should defrock, abdicate, whatever the political equivalent is.

And so he's jumping in and saying, you know, we're going to go after Russian companies and this is the Munich moment.

And then French macron being French think, hmm, this is a chance to triangulate and restore the glories of France as the disinterested broker, right?

So he's now trying to get, and then of course the Biden team is thinking, hmm, no good news in the past, no good news in the present, no good news in the future, midterms, I'm going to make Joe into Winston Churchill.

So there's a lot of different agendas that are around this mess, but it's very clear.

In fact, Jack, as I'm thinking of it, I'm going to write a column this morning and I'm going to call it Russian 101 or better yet, Putin 101.

It's very easy.

I know that he's duplicitous.

He's opportunistic.

He's enigmatic, but he is predictable.

And I think he functions on three or four principles.

Principle number one, when oil prices are low,

i.e.

world global price per barrel, natural gas included, then he's not restive.

He's quiet.

He figures his people are suffering.

He doesn't have the money.

And

when they're high and he's rich in petrodollars, he gets aggressive.

So in 2008, as you remember, after the Iraq war,

the insurgency there and the unrest in the Middle East, Israel, et cetera, et cetera, prices were very high.

One point they spiked to $90 a barrel.

And he went into Georgia.

He was full of cash.

And then when we had the 2009 to 2016 Obama interregnum, prices got high again.

Remember, they ridiculed Sarah Palin for saying, drill, baby, drill to get out of the crisis.

What was it called, Jack?

Cash for Clunkers?

Yes.

which was a disaster economically.

Yes.

And we had Solyndra,

and we had all of these green projects as the price of, and he went into

eastern Ukraine and Georgia.

When Trump came in and it was suddenly we were the biggest producer of oil and natural gas, even before COVID, the price had dropped.

He lost money.

He was quiet.

So that's number one.

Number two, very quickly, when the U.S.

is increasing defense spending and showing deterrence, he's quiet.

Another corollary.

When the U.S.

is bogged down or looks weak or there's dissension at home, he's active.

When Bush's popularity because of Iraq went down to about 30% and there was widespread Bush's Hitler and the whole country was in turmoil, they got wiped out in 2006.

He went into Georgia.

When Obama cut defense,

he went on an apology tour.

He had Hillary go over there and push that reset button and appease Putin.

And then he got caught on the hot mic in Seoul, South Korea in 2012.

And he said, essentially, tell Vladimir if he gives me some space, I will be flexible on missile defense because this is my last election.

And Presto,

Putin was quiet that year.

We got rid of missile defense, kind of betrayed our Eastern European allies on the front lines who were willing to take risks to go along with us.

And Barack Obama got re-elected.

And then when that was done, he went into Crimea and Ukraine in 2014.

And so, that is clear.

When Trump was president, he killed Russian mercenaries, he got out of an asymmetrical missile deal, he kept the sanctions on the oligarchs, he got obnoxious and bombastic and jawbone the Nordstrom pipeline Merkel-Putin deal, et cetera, et cetera.

He sold offensive weapons to Ukraine, despite what Alexander Vendman might say now.

And

guess what?

He didn't do anything.

So, that's another second corollary.

Third, very quickly, Jack, when NATO is in disarray, he gets excited.

When NATO is not or is trying not to be in disarray, he is circumspect and hesitant.

NATO was really angry about us in the Iraq war, French especially.

He went into Georgia.

Obama came along.

For all this talk about Obama, the Allies loved Obama, German anti-Americanism didn't have anything.

It wasn't Obama's fault.

It started to peak before even Trump came in.

It got even more anti-American when Trump came in, but it started with Obama.

Germany was getting assertive.

They were angry at Iraq.

And then Obama got very frustrated.

And he called them, was it free riders, Jack, in that interview?

He said they're New York or the Atlantic.

He said, they're just free riders.

And he trashed them.

And

only two at that point were making their commitment to an annualized budget investment of 2% in defense.

And Germany was starting as West Turkey is acting very on NATO-like, and he went in.

When Trump came in, I know that everybody's going to get angry at this and say, well, he alienated the Allies.

I don't care if he alienated them verbally.

They forked up $100 million in increased defense expenditures.

And they went up to six to eight.

countries of the 30 began to meet their 2% commitments.

He increased the U.S.

defense budget that Obama had cut.

And NATO is stronger today than it was before.

And he started to deal with the NATO problem.

The NATO problem is Germany.

Germany polls anti-American, pro-Russian.

Germany is dependent on its energy needs with Russia.

But he started to attack Germany.

And he started to say, listen, you are not acting NATO-like.

Same with Turkey, the largest army in NATO.

Okay, so that's the third corollary.

Oil, a president's deterrence, and beefing up.

There's a fourth one.

It's a little bit subtler.

And that is anytime the U.S.

president talks trash to Putin and is weak, he gets infuriated.

And then he gets opportunistic when he sees that that macho rhetoric is not backed up.

So when Biden called him a bully, he's like, Trump, he's a bully.

And then they went insane with the Russian under every bed collusion hoax and Russia's Trump is a Russian asset.

And then at the same time, this started with Obama, the collusion stuff in 2016.

But remember what Obama did?

He went over to Russia and told, remember he was bragging about how he had told, I think he told him, correct me, Jack, he said, when they were hacking, he told Putin, didn't he say something to the effect, I told Vladimir to cut it out.

I think that really scared him.

And then what did Biden do about the same continuous hacking?

He said, I went over to Putin and I gave him a list.

I think it was 16 companies or institutions and said, please, if you're going to hack, hack, but don't hack these.

And so when a president talks tough and carries a twig, he gets emboldened.

And all of those

variables coalesced from 2009 to 2016 and a little bit in 2007 and 8, and they're coalescing now and he's active.

And they did not.

coalesce to the same degree in between 2017 and 2020, the very period the left said that we appeased Russia, and yet they didn't move.

And so that's all you need to know about Vladimir Putin.

Well, Victor, many of our listeners, they've heard sporadically, we've brought up Strategica.

Now, Strategica is this important online publication at the Hoover Institution.

You oversee it.

We'll call you sort of the editor in chief.

It comes out.

you know, every three weeks, every four weeks.

I invite our listeners to visit the Hoover site or, you know, just Google Strategica.

Sounds sort of like the board game we all played nerdily Stratego, but it's S-T-R-A-T-E-G-I-K-A Strategica.

There's a new issue out, issue number 77.

It has a few pieces by Ralph Peters, Gordon Chang, and I know I'm going to say his name wrong, Jacob Greigiel.

You can correct me, Victor.

You normally do.

But the issue is about deterring Russia and China.

And Ralph Peters has the lead piece.

It's titled, quote, the decadence of deterrence.

So Victor, I'd like, if you wouldn't mind, if you would share with us what Ralph means by decadence and your own views about his essay.

And I just want to read the very short last paragraph of his essay.

I think this is a terrific little piece of writing.

Ralph Peters writes, ultimately, there is no deterrence without risk, but there is nothing but risk in the absence of deterrence.

We primly warn bullies that we might not share our candy with them tomorrow, so they take all the candy they can grab today.

Victor, your thoughts?

Well, I think Ralph is absolutely right.

It's what I meant by my fourth corollary, and that is it's bad to be weak, and it's bad to bully or insult some verbally seek deterrence.

And it's terrible to do both.

And so what Biden and Obama do, and I think it's characteristic of the left,

when their illusions of utopia are shattered because they, I don't care whether it's Castro or Chavez or the Iranians or whomever it is, when they court them and then these people take them for a ride, they get angry and they get petulant and they sneer and sneer and and so they waged a verbal deterrent campaign against Putin.

And the left was really weird.

It was almost like we were in the McCarthy area again.

There was a Russian under all of our beds lurking there to get us.

And then they're weak.

Then you not only don't have deterrence, you further the public awareness in the world that you don't have deterrence.

And so that's what Ralph was, I think, quite correctly doing.

And that group, we have about 25 permanent members, Jack, of the Strategic, the Task Force on Military History and Contemporary Conflict, under whose auspices we edit their papers and publish them every three weeks.

But we try to get a lot of different views.

And in that group, the late Angelo Cotavilla, he had a very, I'm going to say paleoconservative or nationalist, realist, I don't know what the word populist view, but it was diametrically opposed to post-war internationalist.

And we had a lot of people like that.

So there's a lot of different viewpoints in that group.

And I never edit them.

And David Berkey, my assistant, who does the line editing and a lot of the content editing as well, as well as Bruce Thornton, there's three of us that look at them.

None of us edited on content or ideology.

So we're trying in this magazine not to tell people, you don't dare say that if it butts up against one of our own particular political views.

So it's pretty wide-ranging.

And Ralph is sort of saying, don't puff up your chest when you don't have a rib cage.

You know what I mean?

That's what he's talking about.

Well, Victor, we're going to move on to Canada.

A lot going on there.

And we'll get to it right after this important message.

At a time when Americans are more divided than ever, Connecting America is a place where everyone can gather and express their opinions with no disrespect.

And what better place than a Jersey diner to host this show?

Because where else but a diner can you find a buffet of opinions, ideas, and real connections?

Connecting America, a brand new national program that aims to truly connect everyday people and is dedicated to showcasing ideas and embracing civil conversation.

We'll also include amazing ways to improve your fitness, health, and nutrition, revive your spiritual self, and give your home a makeover.

Connecting America streams live every weekday from 7 a.m.

to 9 a.m.

Eastern Time.

Our program is led by a group of award-winning journalists, including me, Jim Rosenfeld, plus Allison Camerata and Dave Briggs.

We'll also hear from America's psychologist Dr.

Jeff Gardier and former Fox News senior foreign affairs correspondent Amy Kellogg.

Join us wherever you get your podcasts.

If you're shopping while working, eating, or even listening to this podcast, then you know and love the thrill of a deal.

But are you getting the deal and cash back?

Racketon shoppers do.

They get the brands they love, savings, and cash back, and you can get it too.

Start getting cash back at your favorite stores like Target, Sephora, and even Expedia.

Stack sales on top of cash back and feel what it's like to know you're maximizing the savings.

It's easy to use, and you get your cash back sent to you through PayPal or check.

The idea is simple.

Stores pay Racketon for sending them shoppers and Racketon shares the money with you as cash back.

Download the free Racketon app or go to Racketon.com to start saving today.

It's the most rewarding way to shop.

That's R-A-K-U-T-E-N, Racketon.com.

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

We are recording on Monday, February 21st.

Before we get into Canada, I do want to remind our listeners,

oh, about me.

Yeah, I run the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic.

We are very much interested in strengthening civil society.

So why don't you visit it?

Centerforcivilsociety.com.

And I also write a weekly email newsletter that recommends 12 or so worthwhile intelligent pieces.

And that's called Civil Thoughts.

And you can find that at civilthoughts.com.

It's free.

There's There's no strings attached.

So, Victor, about Canada, whatever it was by reputation, whatever I think its own citizens thought of their country and its supposed tolerant ways, it seems to me that that Canada is gone.

And we've talked about this before.

My own opinion is that the mere fact of the Truckers freedom protest up there exposed a deep, a very deep and prolonged class-based division.

So

that aside, now we have Justin Trudeau,

the prime minister, using an emergency law, first time ever used, to blow up what freedoms are held there north of the 49th, parallel not only to suppress the protest,

but to punish those who supported it.

Writing on Barry Weiss's Substack, a venture capitalist, David Sachs.

Do you know him, by the way, Victor?

I know.

I know of him,

Jeffrey Sachs, the economist, capitalist that was probably responsible for helping to wreck the post-Soviet economy.

Yeah.

No relation, I think.

No relation, maybe that.

Well, anyway, David Sachs, he writes that what we're seeing in Canada now is the implementation of a sort of a communist Chinese social credit system that intends to place the deplorables of Canada in financial purgatory.

So, Victor, you have a new essay out on American greatness.

It came out this weekend.

It's titled The Gathering Storm in the West, in which you hammer the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, more than hammer him.

You call him clueless and worse things.

Victor, would you share your thoughts on Justin Trudeau and anything else you might want to say about this essay you've written?

You know, when you just look at Trudeau, there's so many antithesis.

So North America, and I'm including, I'm going to kind of merge United States and Canada because we're in the same media market.

We have the same pathologies.

They have a bi-coastal elite, we do, and they have an interior conservative, we do, and we speak the same language, et cetera.

But think about it for a minute.

The whole North American popular media trashed our border patrol because was it three people on horses were riding along the banks of a river?

And somebody used to ride horses knows that when you get sun hitting water or any little thing, horses get jittery.

And then you had these people coming toward the horses, they were trying to block their advance.

They had these long reins they used to hit both to rein the horse but also to sort of a whip, not a whip and a lash, I should say.

And we were told that they were whipping immigrants, and everybody got excited.

So I'm going to use the equestrian equinine imagery.

So here you have horses in downtown Toronto, and these are not non-citizens.

These are Canadian citizens.

And you've got, and according to these YouTube pictures I've been looking at this morning, they ran right over them, Jack.

They trampled about three people.

One of them looked like she was an Indigenous Native American.

Nobody said a word.

Second thing.

This Trudeau evoked martial law as if this was an existential threat.

And he said, you cannot block roads.

Okay,

there's an argument to be made that after a period of civil disobedience, even if it's largely peaceful, but it interrupts commerce and the state has to take action to restore the vibrancy of the economy.

But,

but he also bragged at the same time.

This man who called martial law and went after the financial records of his own people and tried to financially destroy these protesters and anybody who helped them, he bragged that he went out on the street with BLM.

Again, Jack, there were violent protests in Toronto of BLM, but in North America in general, BLM and Antifa gave us $2 billion in property damage, 35 to 38 dead, 1,500 to 2,000 officers injured.

arson, mass looting, 14,000 arrests, many of them dismissed by Soros-funded city and county attorneys.

But my point is, if you want an occasion where there was violence, then it's BLM.

This organization has stolen.

Think about it.

He froze the fund of GoFundMe to the truckers.

He hasn't even mentioned BLM.

There are people in Canada giving money to BLM right now, where the three architects of that organization have already absconded.

One of them bought, what, $4 million almost of three or four homes.

Nobody has any accounting.

It's completely corrupt.

So what I'm getting.

Including a Canadian mansion

in Toronto.

Exactly.

Owned by a very hardcore left-wing group.

So my point is that this man has no principles.

He brags about BLM that was violent, that he participated in a show of sympathy, but then he went after people that were largely non-violent, that were his own citizens.

And then he went after people who had helped fund a non-violent protest.

And he didn't do anything about the people who in Canada had helped fund a violent protest, just like the border.

Then he said, they are dismantling the economy of Canada.

I don't know how you can do that in three weeks, but he did his best in two years to have one, except for maybe New Zealand and Australia, having one of the tightest lockdowns in the world.

Talk about destroying.

an economy.

Then a fourth antithesis or paradox or hypocrisy was was he couldn't finish a sentence like most people in the United States, such as Fauci and Biden, without using the science.

And you look at the daily infectious rate, such as it is, and the daily death rate when this thing started, and it goes down daily.

What I'm getting at is what Bill Gates said yesterday about for the first time in his life, he made a public pronouncement that was a non-controversial and largely correct, and he regretted it because it took away the luster of vaccinations.

Kind of shrugged and said, Well, Omicron's kind of like a vaccination.

And what he meant was its natural immunity was on par with or superior to

the vaccinations, which he spent most of his post-Microsoft life promoting worldwide and various manifestations for particular diseases.

So, what I'm getting at is these truckers were saying these masks, these vaccination mandates, they're not needed.

You You got to let them up.

And we're solo guys in a cab most of the day.

And 90% of us are back.

So we're trying to tell you we're worried about Canada and the economy and what it's doing to us.

And as they were speaking, the science was backing them up.

More people were getting natural immunity.

It was safer to go out.

Omicron infectiousness, as it was, had had the unexpected, the paradoxical effect of getting a lot more people sick and a lot fewer very sick.

And it was serving as a vaccination to the 20% or so of people who had deep, either religious or scientific or personal or even quirky reasons.

They didn't want to get vaccinated with this experimental RNA vaccination.

And what did he do?

He posed as if he was the avatar of science and the truckers were

deplorable Yahoos, and yet they were right on the science.

I think in that piece, I also said, finally, Jack,

there was a big divide in optics.

You know, I've written a lot, and I've kind of used that a lot too much, maybe the pajama boy view of that little guy in his pajamas.

It's a prolonged adolescent having hot chocolate.

No, you haven't used it enough, I don't think.

Well, that was the Obama's stupid idea that there was a whole nation of pajama boys that sit until 10 in the morning in their pajamas like little children.

Just like Tocqueville said that the nanny state, essentially, he didn't use the word nanny, but would create a period of prolonged adolescence where they don't want to go get out into the arena and get married and have kids and buy a house, but they're sheltered.

And that's who their constituencies are.

They go take three units, they take six units, they drop out, they hook up, they get that kind of amorphous lifestyle.

And that view of that guy, and you look at Trudeau, and you look at this guy with that coiffure, that pompadour haircut and soft look,

kind of wimpy little delivery.

And then you look at the truckers.

And I was looking at one take, man, that guy, he took a, you know, 18 wheeler, you know, 20 tons.

He parked that thing like it was a Volkswagen.

And when I was farming, we would have semis come out to the ranch.

I myself drove a big long, you know, flatbed.

16 foot flatbed, a lot, which is nothing compared to a semi.

And when you get on the road and you see those people, they're very competent people and they're very independent.

And they're some of the most important people in the North American economy.

And they were out there fighting COVID and infectiousness when the first variant could be very dangerous.

And they didn't whine.

So you got this whining Zoom class that this guy is iconic of, and he starts

libeling them and smearing them and calling them racist and they harbor nazis and they harbor confederates and they're trumps i think as one of his cabinet officers said oh they're trump supporters and then you look at these guys and they're happy they're having religious services their wives or children are out there and that was a moment it was like the tinneman square tank man that said you know what screw the tank or the arab peddler in

Tunisia and said, I'm not going to pay your stupid regulations anymore and lit himself on fire.

Not that these things will create an instant revolution, but they do filter through and they do take their toll.

And one of, you know, that was when Qaddafi was all through in Libya next door and there was there were ramifications.

And I think this thing everybody thinks is over.

And that was the point of the piece, but I think Trudeau has really been exposed and he's going to get weaker and weaker.

And he's shown for the fop that he is.

And the final thing, Jack, I don't understand the American left anymore.

I really don't.

I mean, think about it.

1,200, it was over a thousand.

I think it was actually over 1,200 healthcare quote unquote professionals in June of 2020 wrote all these, this big petition that you have to waive quarantine, waive social distancing, waive masks for BLM people to go out and get very angry on the street, otherwise their mental health would suffer.

And now they're telling all of these people, oh, you're violating all of our rules in Canada.

How dare you?

So what I'm getting at from fauci to trudeau to biden everybody's sick of this bicoastal elite class the zoom class that made out like bandits during the lockdown and was served almost as if they were medieval lords in their keep by a bunch of peasants that were bringing them food and taking out their trash for them.

And yet they demonize those people.

And that's unconscionable.

A lot of our listeners here know you through the podcast, maybe only through that, and others maybe only through that, and through your appearances regularly, two or three times a week around Fox News.

I really do want to recommend that our listeners visit American Greatness.

They don't advertise here.

I have no ownership

in that place.

But twice a week, you're writing.

these terrific essays and they're brilliant.

And I'm sorry, you just indulge me here, listeners, because this is why you should be reading what Victor writes.

And from that piece, just about what he just talked about.

Bear with me.

The truckers remind Western audiences that modern progressivism equates muscular labor and hourly wage compensation with a sort of Neanderthalism.

That is, the unfortunate clingers supposedly never quite understood globalization, much less how an 8 billion person market rewards those who type on keyboards and in relative terms punishes the supposedly less aware who physically deliver, fix, make, and repair things.

We can almost reduce the divide to the embarrassing optics of a pouty-faced pajama boy prime minister with a pompadour coiffure issuing threats to calm but beefy and calloused workers each time Trudeau speaks to his nation.

The visual message is that any of the truckers could do a better job than he is in both setting and explaining policy, while he would become a helpless, weeping child if placed behind the wheel of a big rig.

Victor, I think that's terrific writing, as is most everything else in this essay.

And I really do encourage our listeners to visit that and visit your website, which also carries these pieces.

So thank you for tolerating my.

Thank you there.

Okay.

So number four, number four of our five items today that we're going to talk about on the Victor Davis Hansen show.

Victor, you saw this, I think you saw it.

I sent you a link, but you may know about it anyway, a piece from the Daily Mail reporting that the infamous chain link fence that was used to shroud America's capital following the January 6th riot last year, it's going to be reinstalled ahead of Joe Biden's much delayed March 1st State of the Union speech.

In part, I think that's the rationale, is to protect against the possible developing U.S.

version of Canadian trucking protests.

Victor, do you have any thoughts on whether that might actually happen or just this, I think, pathetic optics of taking out this chain link fence once again, which symbolizes a lot of nasty things to Americans?

There's two things that we can see right away: how asymmetrical it is.

I mean, we're back to the whole January 6th, summer 2020 dichotomy.

So we have one person who died violently in January 6th, Ashley Babbitt, and the country went into a paralysis as if there were armed people shooting and five deaths.

New York Times just completely pathologically lied about it.

We had one petite young woman who was a military veteran who was lethally shot.

for the crime of going through a window window illegally into the capital and then we juxtapose that with that 120 days we just talked about.

And it's the same thing.

You don't care about in the United States, we don't care about an open border.

We don't care about 2 million people come in.

We don't care about smash and grab, carjacking, but it's January 6th when we get up and it's January 6th when we go to bed and nothing about the loot.

Same thing with Canada.

They've ruined their economy under this man.

He's completely inept.

They had the whole BLM hysteria.

They were more awoke than we are.

And now they see a bunch bunch of independent, successful, brave, patriotic Canadians who are trying to make their voices heard that this is insane what this man is doing by keeping that economy locked down.

And what are they going to do?

They're terrified of him.

And the second thing is it introduces another...

I think a lot of our listeners know what I'm talking about.

There is something about this bi-coastal elite that's very insecure, unsure of themselves, because they are entirely, and it's gotten worse during COVID in their Zoom sanctuaries, they're entirely divorced from nature and the muscular working classes, and they're scared of them.

And so when they talk to each other, when they're alone, when they dream, when they watch their MSNBC, they have these images of all of these dregs, chumps, clingers, deplorables, irredeemable, and they get paranoid and then

they don't know.

And then when they come into contact with them, Jack, the electrician, the plumber, the Amazon delivery, they just,

you know, they either condescend to them or scared of them or they're afraid that they'll see through them, whatever.

But they're just, I don't, it used to be that our upper classes had experience and came out of that class.

But this bicosta leak, these pajama boy life of Julia types, they're completely divorced.

And I've been in a unique or unfortunate maybe position, or maybe it's fortunate that I get to be on this farm.

So half my life is with those classes that I grew up, you know, with, and then the other half is in this rarefied hothouse on the Stanford campus.

And it's, it's almost at 68, you know, I've been doing this for 20 years.

I did it as a graduate student and undergraduate.

So it's almost makes you go insane, the schizophrenia.

coming, you know, going in southwestern Fresno County.

And this week I was watching these people,

you know, tiptoe on a 40-foot roof, 40-foot off the ground with 90 pounds of shingles on one shoulder and hammering and making the most beautiful roof, having my roof be done

and laughing and then coming down and just working non-stop.

And the foreman, the guy that was running it all, was like a maestro at a symphony.

You know what I mean?

These guys are rebuilding the joist over there, your roof stop.

These guys are doing the plywood.

These guys are getting the plastic.

These guys are putting the presidential shingles on.

This is going to take so many days.

This is so many hours.

And then I go on the campus and I listen to this stuff.

And it's just talk, talk, talk, talk, talk.

And the snides, nights, nights, nights, night, and smear, smear, smear, and nihilistic, cynical.

Just that whole academia and that, you know, I go out to eat in Palo Alto and I listen or Los Al, I listen to these people.

And they're the successors of the successful.

They're the ones that made out like bandits because they can tap on a keyboard.

They can't do these other things.

So I guess what I'm saying is we need to really, and I'm kind of glad.

I wish we didn't have an inflationary economy, but I'm glad I don't mind paying additional thing to people who make things and build and nail.

I don't like paying a lot of money for people who type on a keyboard, more and more money to them.

And I know that that sounds quirky or, unrealistic, or somebody's going to write me and say, now listen, Victor, this sophisticated economy is guided by masters of the universe, tech and capital, insurance, and law.

And if they didn't do that, all your romanticized, your nostalgic little workers wouldn't, bees wouldn't be doing it.

There has to be a queen bee to organize things.

No, the queen bee doesn't work.

And the drones don't work.

It's the worker bees that do it.

I'm out here in an orchard.

It's blossom time, Jack, and I, those bees that all are covering, you know, 7,000 almond trees, they're the worker bees.

They're bringing the honey to the queen.

And something is wrong with Trudeau and Biden and all these people that make fun of the working class.

And you can really see the terror and

the paranoia as we get closer to November with these little

bicoastal wimps, as I can use it.

They know that a tsunami is coming and they're going to pull out every stop.

They're going to use the race cart.

They're going to call them protectionists, nativists, xenophobes on the border.

They're going to say everything they can because that working class has had it with them, whether it's a school board in San Francisco or the elections in Virginia, or even comedians that are sick of it.

And it's coming.

The left always likes to reference their Game of Thrones.

Well, winner is coming and they know it.

Bigly.

Bigly.

Bigly.

Hey, Victor.

We're going to talk about a woman who wants to be the Queen Bee.

She's the greatest.

When do you do this to me, Jack?

You're supposed to calm me down and say, Victor, calm down.

Well, I'll calm you down.

We'll have a commercial.

But when we come back from the commercial, we're going to be talking about America's greatest ever cattle, a futures trader, Hillary Clinton, right after this message.

If you're a homeowner, you need to listen to this.

In today's AI and cyber world, scammers are stealing your home titles and your equity is the target.

Here's how it works.

Criminals forge your signature on one document, use a fake notary stamp, pay a small fee with your county, and just like that, your home title has been transferred out of your name.

Then they take out loans using your equity and even sell your property, and you won't even know what's happened until you get a collection or foreclosure notice.

So, when was the last time you checked on your home title?

If your answer is never, you need to do something about it right now.

And that's why we've partnered with Home Title Lock so you can find out today if you're already a victim.

Go to home titlelock.com/slash Victor to get a free title history report and a free trial of their million-dollar triple arc protection.

That's 24-7 monitoring of your title, urgent alerts to any changes, and if fraud does happen, they'll spend up to $1 million to fix it.

Please, please, don't be a victim.

Protect your equity today.

That's home, titlelock.com/slash victor.

Audible's romance collection has something to satisfy every side of you.

When it comes to what kind of romance you're into, you don't have to choose just one.

Fancy a dalliance with a duke or maybe a steamy billionaire.

You could find a book boyfriend in the city and another one tearing it up on the hockey field.

And if nothing on this earth satisfies, you can always find love in another realm.

Discover modern rom-coms from authors like Lily Chu and Allie Hazelwood, the latest romanticy series from Sarah J.

Maas and Rebecca Yaros, plus regency favorites like Bridgerton and Outlander, and of course, all the really steamy stuff.

Your first great love story is free when you sign up for a free 30-day trial at audible.com slash wondery.

That's audible.com slash wondery.

Okay, Victor.

You're ready, Victor?

You're ready, my friend.

We're back.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show recording on February 21st, 2022, George Washington's birthday by federal law, because it's a Monday.

His actual birthday is February 22nd, although his actual, actual birthday was February 11th, back in 1732 on the old Julian calendar.

And can you imagine, Victor, how much it took for those papist-hating colonials to have to admit to the Gregorian calendar named after a pope and

update Washington's birthday to the 22nd.

We'll get into things Catholic another time.

Anyway, my friend, my friend, your most recent column, column, not the essay, column in American greatness is titled Hillary Clinton's Greatest Masterpiece.

You begin with these two sentences.

Hillary Clinton's never-ending shenanigans in 2015-2016 could be summarized as an attempted slow-motion coup, four years of national hysteria, a divided nation, and dangerous new tensions with Russia were some of the wages of Clinton's machinations.

Victor, would you explain this slow-motion coup that Hillary Clinton commenced and as far as we know, is still engaged in?

Well, it turns out, and

it wasn't the point of Durham's writ.

His writ was to suggest that Mr.

Sussman had a conflict.

of interest in his legal team that shouldn't be admissible in court as his representatives.

But in that matter of explanation, we find out that there was A, the steel dossier, that Durham has already exposed, if it needed exposing after the failure of the Mueller-Russian collusion hoax, melodrama, psychodrama, tragic comedy.

But Durham, remember, had shown that the sources for the steel dossier were a Clinton functionary in Moscow and a confused, messed up source working for the Liberal Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

And most of the whole thing was fabricated.

But there was a parallel track jack.

And through the same series of paywalls, i.e., it's like a dog doesn't learn new tricks,

Hillary got the DNC.

Hillary's campaign gave the DNC money.

The DNC gave Perkins Co.

They got the same people, Sussman, probably Mark Elias.

They got Fusion GPS, wall, wall, wall.

So you couldn't trace it back to Hillary.

They call up, they find out that they've got a sympathetic Trump hater that is a domain server type of business.

He

says, you know, basically, if this is all true, and I'm not saying it is, I'm just saying what one can adduce or extrapolate from Durham exegesis, and that is

they had access to the communications of the Trump White House and apparently the Trump Tower.

They

went out.

Mr.

Joff went out.

And if you look at that guy's history jack, it's pretty spotted, checkered, whatever term we use.

The guy was not a reputable person, put it that way.

He's in all kinds of shenanigans.

He'd been cited for bad business practices and other things worse.

Anyway, he gets some techies from Georgia Tech and they kind of warn him that there's nothing there, but they go through all, they use his key to unlock this Trump data trove, which is probably illegal for them to do that.

And they're all going to say, after all, well, we were just doing it because that's our job to audit.

No, it wasn't.

They were looking for stuff and they found this communication one way

from the Alpha Bank, a Russian bank to the Trump Tower.

And they didn't tell people that.

that was a domain name, Trump email that an advertising company had used to further Trump business.

And this bank had got a hold of it, like it gets a hold of thousands of others' names.

And they just send

one-way ads.

Like when I wake up in the morning, all of a sudden, I open my email, and there's 15 of them every minute in the clutter box coming in, and I can't reply back to them.

Well, he couldn't reply back to the Alpha Bank, even if he knew what it was.

He didn't.

And they then knew that, apparently, and yet they went to the CIA and the FBI and the intelligence community, and they said, you should be investigating this.

And they did that so that they could do the following.

So they could go to their friends in the media, their spouses, their cousins, their brothers, their friends, that whole incestuous satanic group of people in Washington.

And then they told them the FBI

is investigating.

The CIA is interested.

And so then they were off to the racist jack with all sorts of unfounded and on-sourced stories about sources tell us an unidentified expert assumes etc we know what it's like and that trump all of a sudden not only was urinating in a bed in moscow according to the steel dossier but its twin the alpha bank story was telling us that he and his little elves were up in trump tower and conniving back and forth with a russian financial group to make money off of collusion and that's basically what the narrative was.

And so Hillary, this when this came out, Hillary was in the process of her, what, fifth or sixth remake, reboot when she saw Biden's polls.

She saw how he had been, his agenda was polling, which pretty much was her own agenda, was polling negatively.

She's like a cuckoo clock, Jack.

Anytime.

the moment is ready to strike that the Democratic Party is unpopular, then she pops out out of this little box and says, here I am.

I'm here again.

And I am now Hillary drinking Boilermakers and bowling like I was in 2008 when you went off the rails and went after Obama or when you had those crazy left-wing people in 2000.

Here I am.

I pop out.

I'm Bill Clinton in the Democratic Leadership Council, that phony stuff.

So here she is, and she's very angry at it because it shows that she's one of the most, and I said the word, she's an artist of standalone, and this was her probably her greatest masterpiece if this is all true how she ever was able to get her fingers through her long fingernail subordinates on to the internal communications of a u.s president for the purpose of trying to destroy first his campaign then his transition then his presidency is pretty amazing and when you add up her canvases in the gallery of Hillary's scandals, you've got Cattle Futures, Remember that one?

There was Travelgate.

There was the missing, I like the one with the missing Rose billing records that they were subpoenaed.

And some, I don't know, a mouse got them in its mouth, walked in and dumped them on the White House floor or something, right?

They dropped out of this chandelier.

I don't know how they got there.

She didn't know either.

And then remember when she said that she cleaned, what did I do?

Take a washcloth and cleanse my server.

There was the emails.

and then they took a hammer and broke the hard drives.

And there was Russian collusion and then the dossier.

It goes on and on and on because she has no moral sense whatsoever.

All she's done her entire life is two things.

In a very retrograde, primitive, Neanderthal fashion, she hooked herself to a very glib, rhetorically clever, opportunistic, pathological liar, good-looking guy like Bill Clinton, who was a genius at skulldoggery, but more important at politics.

And she saw that she was going to play for a while the subservient,

you know, but brilliant person who displaced her non-career.

She had no career.

She was kicked off the Watergate committee for unethical behavior.

She never had done anything except be very left-wing.

And she she was now going to play the sort of behind the shadows.

I'm really more brilliant than Bill.

Remember those stories in the 90s?

Hillary's really the brains.

And when they finally let her out of her role and she broke out with Hillary Carr, the most harebrained scheme that almost destroyed the Clinton presidency and had one of the largest losses in the House in 1994 in history.

This woman has never done anything.

And when she wanted to run for senator, all of a sudden they started pardoning Puerto Rican terrorists in New York so that she wouldn't lose the Puerto Rican.

Then she quoted the Jewish nothing.

And that was one thing she did.

And the other thing she did was she always

said to herself, I am malleable.

I'm rubber.

I'm a chimelian, any metaphor you want.

I will change into Bill Clinton, the centrist, or Elizabeth Warren, like leftist, depending on where where 51% of the perceived vote is.

When she thought Obama had gone too far to the left, she was having Boilermakers in Pennsylvania.

And she was talking with that slang.

Remember that slang, awful slang voice she had, that she was a working woman.

And they, I think Obama called her Annie Oakley, didn't he?

That she was,

I think he did.

That was a good line, by the way.

Yeah, yeah.

And they were sick of her, and the left were sick of her.

And then when he came in, just so he could watch her, keep your

enemies, you know, your friends closer than your enemies, he had her as Secretary of State and he watched her.

And she then was the left-wing crusader that she had been in the past.

And then when she lost, she kind of ran moderately in the center a little bit.

And then when she lost Trump, she said, I have joined the resistance.

Trump is illegitimate.

Joe Biden should never concede, even if he loses the vote.

So she was a left-wing insurrectionist.

And now she's back back to Boilermaker Hillary because she sees where Biden is.

And I don't understand it because you put her into a political situation and she will screw it up.

She's like politics.

She's to politics what Biden is to governance.

Remember when Biden said, when Obama said of Biden, don't underestimate Joe's ability to screw things up or Gates said there hasn't he hasn't been one right on one major foreign policy decision of the last 30 years.

Well, Well, that applies to Hillian Paul.

You put her in West Virginia and she will promise West Virginia and she's going to shut their coal industry down.

You put her out in the Midwest and she will have just told everybody that they're deplorables and irredeemables.

That's how she operates.

You put her on Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign trail and you turn her loose.

She will say, and you want to get Middle America on the side of this left-winger, Bill Clinton.

Clinton, she will say, well, at least they didn't stay home and bake cookies.

And that's what she is.

She's Michelle Obama on steroids.

I still can't get the image of Hillary as a cuckoo clock coming out

every hour.

I'd shoot that clock.

Maybe an ostrich.

Okay.

Hey, Victor.

We have just a few minutes left before we get on to our usual end of show business.

I know you were at Thomas Aquinas College a couple of days ago.

What were you talking about down there?

You know, it's kind of an oasis in a very

isolated area.

It's in the

part of the coast ranges, but it's, you know, between Magic Mountain and the coast.

And you go down five and you make a right turn.

I think it's 123.

If Sammy was here, she could tell me

or you could tell me, but you're not a Californian jack, unfortunately.

But I've been there.

All I can say is it's a beautiful space.

Yeah, it's up in the foothills above Santa Paula and about 10 miles or so from Ojai, which is becoming kind of a boutique mini Carmel.

It's trying to at least.

There's some beautiful places.

And they asked me to give a talk on Friday night on

the end of citizenships, many of the themes in the book.

And then on

Saturday morning to talk to some some board member associate spouses and people during a board meeting, the people that weren't in a board meeting on the issues of the day.

But I got to meet the students.

And, you know, it's a beautiful campus, as you said, Jack.

It's a symphony of a lot of good ideas.

So the students do work.

They're like the College of the Ozarks.

It doesn't matter, boys or girls, they do all the gardening on campus.

And there's no security, Jack.

I shouldn't say that.

Some criminal will go up there, but there's just a a gate.

And there's a curfew that they all obey.

And they have one class, basically, the great books in chronological order.

And for four years, they make their way from classical Greeks to the modern Enlightenment.

And they're using the original texts.

Using the original text mostly.

And the students remind me, you know, if you see a bike up there, there's no lock on it.

It reminds me a lot of Hillsdale, only it's a little bit more remote and it's Catholic orientated.

So you don't have to be a Catholic to go, but Catholicism is a theme and it's kind of the Catholicism that I remember that is true to Catholic doctrine.

I mean, as an observer of Catholicism,

it's not the Jesuit Loyola, Santa Clara University, or even, you know.

Decidedly not.

Yes.

And it's while it's associated with the church, it's really the creation of former people that wanted to have an alternative to Catholic education that was in the pre-woke days was already

turning or channeling to the left.

So, yeah,

I had a very good time.

The people were very polite.

The problem, you know, that I have with going to St.

Thomas Aquinas or going to Hillsdale, you get into this frame of mind when you're there, you can just say,

this is so logical.

People are trying to really learn something.

They're studying philosophy and history and language, and they're learning to write English prose composition and speak elegantly.

And they're learning in their own lives to match physicality, whether it's weeding around a magnolia tree or going in and reading Plato.

And it's holistic.

And it works.

You look at the buildings, they're immaculate.

Look at the grounds, they're immaculate.

There's not trash.

There's not, and the same thing is true of Hillsdale College, and it's true of some other colleges.

But that's not what's going on in the country.

And so you get kind of, wow, is this going to be like the fifth century AD where out in North Africa, you had these little settlements of the remnants of civilization?

I don't know, but I get excited when I'm there to see how it works.

But then I get kind of morose when I leave and think, well, how many are there compared to the majority culture?

Right.

So

just a handful.

Right.

Yeah, I don't know if they're atolls or they're sanctuaries, is what I'm saying.

Yeah, right.

Are they equivalent of the fifth century and sixth century monastic movement where people went up literally in this case to the hills and said, we can't cope with the insanity and the destruction and deterioration of civilization.

So up in the hills, we're going to craft an alternative and hopes that we either can save society.

If we can't save society, we can save some of the people.

Well, I think they'll succeed.

And we must remember.

I do too.

I hope they do.

And I think they are succeeding.

My guess, that's a clumsy way of me saying, I wish there were more of them.

Yeah, well, they're expanding.

So, well, anyway, I'm glad that all went well.

Victor, we only have a minute or two left.

So, you know, as ever, we thank our listeners for listening.

And whether you're on Stitcher or Google Play or iTunes, please, if you do listen on iTunes, consider giving a review for the program, one to five stars.

I think Victor deserves more than five, but five's the limit.

So if you do that, that would be very kind.

Those who do leave written comments, you know, we read them all.

We appreciate your thoughts and sentiments.

And one of them, of the many that have come in the last couple of days, one of them actually said something nice about me, but I just can't read that.

This says something nice about Sammy.

I'd read, I'd read it.

But this one's simply titled VDH, and it's by Green ID Monster.

So I think it means green-eyed monster.

Quote: I was asked recently if I could sit down and talk to anyone in the world, and who would that be?

Guess my answer: Yep, Victor Davis Hansen.

I love listening to you winding through the historical stories you tell, Mr.

Hansen, but I especially enjoy the stories of your father.

He sounds like my father.

Love the podcast.

You know, the podcast touches many people in many ways.

So, thanks, Green-Eyed Monster.

We're glad that you took the time to leave that comment to all who've done that.

Please visit victorhanson.com, Subscribe.

It's $5.

Test drive it.

If you like it, it's $50 for a year.

That's almost four bucks a month.

And I think the amount of copy Victor writes that's exclusive there, it's probably half a cent a word or something like that.

He writes a tremendous amount of copy that's original.

And you can only read it there, Victorhansen.com.

So, Victor, thanks as ever for the brilliance you shared on this wonderful day.

This is the first of two podcasts we're recording today, so we'll get to the next one shortly.

But to you and to all our listeners, thanks very much, and we'll be back again with another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.