Leaks, Protest and Party Politics

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Welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

This is the Friday news roundup, and we've got a lot of things on the agenda today.

The Canadian truckers anti-mandate protest.

We want to talk a little bit about about Republican Party conflict or internal conflict in the Republican Party in the elections of 2022.

Maybe a little bit about Hunter Biden.

The thing, when anybody says his name, you always get the impression of a few little salacious things, but

we'll be talking about some of the other stuff about Hunter.

Yeah, I started laughing when you said Hunter, because there's one video or cut they put on the media a lot, where I don't know if his hair is combed that way, but they look like little satanic devil horns.

And he has kind of a snicker on himself.

You almost want to see a forked tail between his legs.

But something about him is like, you know, I kept emphasizing this weird trope about him.

And my theory was, and I think it's got validity, that

he wants to do badly.

He's not just a bad seed, but he wants to embarrass his family's name.

He wants to be the bad boy to get attention, but he has a deep resentment that maybe his tragically deceased older brother got too much attention for being the good boy and he was the bad boy, or that he feels that he carried the Biden family from lower middle class status to the hyper wealthy by his grifting, and he was never appreciated

for his natural inclination toward criminality.

And

he's somehow reconstructed his criminality, which he had a natural bent for,

even given his excesses.

But he feels somehow that

he didn't want to be a criminal, although he did.

And he made all these sacrifices, his name, his personal life, it's all destroyed.

And he gave it to Mr.

Big and Mr.

10%.

And the big guy, yeah.

And they don't, and they never fully appreciate it.

And those, remember, we've talked before in those emails or those traces where he said you know who's been paying for all these bills and unlike somebody i know i don't skim off 10

and yes well let's hold that right there victor and we'll start with hunter from the beginning but let's have a word from our sponsors first thank you

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All right, welcome back.

And we were just on Hunter Biden, and we're going to start with him and talking about his proclivity for almost a self-destruction, but also the destruction of his own family as well.

That there's something strange inside him.

I think you're right about that, I have to say.

He covers all the classical sins.

He's a glutton.

He cannot control his appetites, whether that be defined by alcohol or drugs or sex.

He's into a particular type of sexual congress that's demeaning to women.

He likes prostitutes, strippers,

etc., etc.

And

this is the trait that most is mystifying.

He didn't lose one laptop.

He didn't lose two laptops.

He lost three laptops.

And then he didn't just leave drug paraphernalia.

He left a crackpipe in a rented car.

And I don't know if that's a Biden family trait, because remember, the daughter lost her diary in which she basically alleges that her father,

Joe Biden, for just a little bit too long, took showers with her beyond the age when a child might have been entering puberty.

And so, I don't know if that's a Biden trait or whatever it is, but there's a recklessness there.

And you can see it in Joe Biden.

You know,

he loses his temper.

And when he starts talking about people, especially, I mean, I keep getting back to this.

He has a fixation on African Americans.

I mean, if you collate them, first clean black, first articulate black, when he says, Hey, you junkie, you ain't black, put you all in chains, and that whole corn pop saga stories.

And they're, they're told with kind of a meanness to them.

And he loses his temper.

He calls, you know, lying dogface pony shellja.

Hey, fat.

And hey, he said, he referenced an African-American high administration official.

He's called him boy.

And he's he's a bully is what I'm getting at, but there's something mean about him that that whole family

shares.

Yeah, they reflect it.

Well, you know, I just found something on just the news.

John Solomon has a new communication about the VP Biden saying that we need to communicate to him that, quote, Hunter's presence on Burisma board undercut the anti-corruption message the VP and we are trying to advance in the Ukraine.

And I thought that that was an interesting disclosure for a November 22nd, 2016.

So that was very long before a lot of the Russian collusion and that sort of thing was coming out, or maybe right at the same time, I guess I should say.

Yeah.

In the particular, everything that we were told by the media surrounding Burisma was a lie.

I mean, Viktor Slotkin, I think that was his name, and maybe our listeners can correct me if I'm wrong, but he wasn't a crooked DA that was hounding Hunter and Burisma.

He had a reputation

across the political spectrum of somebody who was trying to root out corruption.

And he was after burisma for the types of things they did, like pay off Hunter Biden.

So in front of the Council on Foreign Relations, as I remember, Joe Biden, in his usual braggadaccio, slurred him and bragged how he had gotten him fired.

and he was willing to hold up aid.

And this is very interesting because that's exactly the allegations that Alexander Vinman made against Donald Trump.

But there were key distinctions that the media lied about.

Number one, Joe Biden held up aid, but he never, and he and Barack Obama never allowed offensive weapons to be sold to Ukraine.

Donald Trump held up aid, but he did that.

He gave them offensive weapons.

And Donald Trump, there was something to, there really was something to the Biden chronic and serial corruption that needed to be addressed before you continue to give money to the Ukraine and have them funnel back to the Biden family or to funnel to anybody.

And yet Biden knew that, and he was trying to suppress what Donald Trump was trying to.

I'm not saying Donald Trump didn't do it for political reasons, but on a larger issue, Trump was right.

There was corruption and he didn't like it.

And Biden was wrong.

And there was corruption.

He tried to cover it up and punish people.

And that was completely lost.

And that, Sammy, raises

another more existential, greater issue.

And that is this whole Russian collusion Ukraine narrative.

And it's just absurd.

It's so Orwellian.

If you think about it,

that Donald Trump colluded.

or Joe Biden was tough on Russia.

Joe Biden was part of the Obama administration.

And it was characterized by appeasement.

That's what Hillary Clinton did in 2009.

She went over there on Obama's directive, punched that jacuzzi button they took out of a Swiss hotel and said that we were going to reset the terrible, awful George W.

Bush's sanctions and ostracism of Putin for going into Georgia over East Ossetia and West Ossetia, I guess, in 2008.

Okay.

And what followed was what?

We watered down sanctions.

We cut back oil production to the benefit and delight of Putin.

We stayed in a lot of asymmetrical agreements like that Missile Accord.

We agreed not to sell offensive weapons to Ukraine.

We cut defense spending.

We let NATO renege on all of their promises.

And it was all encapsulated with two manifestations.

The first was that hot mic in Seoul South Korea in March of the election year 2012, when Barack Obama got caught talking to

Medeved.

And he said,

tell Vladimir that I need some space.

This is my last election, but I'll be flexible after the elections on matters like missile defense.

And that was prescient because what happened was they all got what they wanted.

Barack Obama, guess what?

He got re-elected.

And guess what?

Vladimir Putin was flexible.

He didn't go into eastern Ukraine or Crimea.

He waited until 2014.

He got what he wanted, and he got rid of missile defense is what he wanted that we had agreed to undertake in a shared project with the Czechs.

Nobody said a word.

And then superimposed on that official policy with his freelancing.

And so Hunter Biden in 2015-16 was going to Russia.

Remember, we had the...

richest woman at the time worth $1.2 billion

who was the widow widow of the corrupt mayor of Moscow, who had ties to the Putin government, wrote a check for a Hunter Biden company for $500,000 while his father was vice president.

And then we had at the same time, simultaneously, we had Hillary Clinton.

She says she didn't pick a primary part, but she was Secretary of State, and she sat on a discussion where everybody deferred to her to okay the sale of so-called uranium-1,

20 of north american uranium holdings to a russian affiliated company and guess what the russians had invited and did pay bill clinton her own husband five hundred thousand dollars for 40 minutes of speaking now the russians are not stupid so they gave five hundred thousand dollars to bill clinton while his wife was adjudicating whether they could get their hands on our North American uranium in Canada and the United States.

And

Peter Schweitzer made a convincing case, and though it was denied with all these phony fact checks, but there were several million dollars given to the Clinton Foundation from companies with Russian connections.

And so what I'm getting at is that was all the appeasement and that was all the corruption on the left.

And then the result of it is it bore fruit.

They sowed the world war and we reaped, we, the American people, reaped the wind.

And what did we reap?

We reaped an aggressive Putin in Crimea and Ukraine, now he's I in Western Ukraine.

And then it stopped.

It stopped from 2017, 18, 19, and 20.

For some mysterious reason, Putin behaved.

I think it was because Donald Trump was unpredictable, merciless, demagogue, what you want about him, but he didn't know exactly the next day what Donald Trump was going to do.

But he did know that he killed Baghdadi, he killed Soleimani, he bombed the blank out of ISIS, he killed apparently nearly 200 Russian mercenaries who had attacked an installation of ours in Syria.

He got out of the missile deal, he sold offensive weapons to Ukraine, he really pumped a lot of gas and oil and crashed the world price, even going into COVID.

And

in other words, he jawboned NATO.

He was hated for it, but they gave what, $100 million up.

They ponied up another $100 million in defense expenditure.

And he raised U.S.

defense spending.

And Putin understood that and didn't do it.

And then now we're back again where Biden, the first thing he does is tell the Russians, hey, you guys, please don't hack.

And if you're going to hack, I got a list here of 16 companies and institutions.

You just don't want to hack.

So if you're going to hack, basically go ahead and do other stuff, but don't do this stuff.

It's too valuable.

It's too necessary.

And then he got humiliated by the Chinese in Alaska.

And then there was the Afghanistan mess.

And then now

we've got Putin in Western Ukraine.

Yeah, and Putin and Xi, China's Xi, must just think, why are these Americans electing people that don't have their own interests?

I mean,

that would be the

optimistic view.

The pessimistic view would be, you know, we played around with this commissar stuff.

in the Maoist period and the Stalinist stuff.

When you hire so many commissars, our version is, of course, diversity, equity, inclusion deadweight.

Commissars, yeah.

And you start chasing your tail and destroying capital and labor to pursue nothing, then you're not going to be very effective or productive and you're going to be divisive.

And it's a good time to take advantage of that if you're a communist power like China, an autocratic leader like Putin.

And that's exactly what we've happened.

But it's clear as day.

What the weird thing is, so you had this eight years of appeasement and accommodation and corruption with Russia under Obiden.

O'Biden, I'll call him.

How's that?

Obama.

And then we had the year that they went right back at it as soon as they were in.

And the media and academia and the corporate world all call that wonderful.

And then we had this four-year period, four years, where Putin was corralled.

He was in his little cage in Russia.

He didn't go into Ukraine.

He didn't go into Crimea.

He stopped talking about the Baltics.

NATO was kind of puffing up their chest.

And we were told that he was, that Trump was a Russian asset.

That was what John Brennan called him.

James Clapper said he was an asset.

John Brennan said he was a traitor, treasonous.

And we had the whole Russian collusion hoax.

So it was so weird that people in a psychological sense were projecting their own pathologies and their sins onto somebody who hadn't done it.

Anything.

I'm not saying that Donald Trump was a choir boy all i'm suggesting is that in his way of doing diplomacy he understood that putin was a thug and that you acted had to act tough with him to protect your people's interest

yeah and putin putin understood that he did the guy who writes the art of the deal you're better off wheeling and dealing with than brinkmanship right well they were they he understood that because What they had contempt for was the Obama policy of mouthing off on human rights.

I'm not making, I don't mean mouthing that that was wrong, but constantly telling Russians that they're morally inferior to the world, why they didn't back that up with strength.

So what they saw with Trump was he didn't lecture them on their human rights records, but he made damn sure they didn't, they stayed inside their territory.

And that's that's what Putin had contempt for.

Putin had sort of a sick respect for Trump because he thought, you know what, that guy may actually come to blows with me if I screw around with him.

But I don't like these other people will never, they're, you know, they're, and it was almost, he's like, Putin was kind of like Hitler, you know.

Neville Chamberlain tried so hard to be nice to, you know, peace in our time.

And, and he went out all the way over to Munich.

Why did he go to Munich?

Why didn't he have Hitler go to London?

But he went all the way over there and he had to put up with this ignoramus Nazi clique.

And then he came back and he was a hero, just a deluded hero.

And Churchill was a warmonger.

Okay.

And then what did Churchill say, what did Hitler say of all that magnanimity, all that forgiveness for going into the Taarland, all of that forgiveness for the Anschluss, all of that forgiveness for the annexation of the entire Western rump of the Czechoslovakia and the Sudan-Daytonland Germans were now be part of the German Empire and the protectorate of Moravia and Bohemia.

What did he say?

He said, I saw those people.

He was a worm.

I wanted, I think he said, literally, I wanted to get up and jump on the chest, jump up and down with that little man, that little man with his umbrella.

Meaning

Hitler had contempt for the man who did him everything he wanted.

Yeah, wasn't that a speech or a talk he gave in front of his commanding generals or something?

He did.

He did.

He was very angry because he thought, now I can't go into Poland as quickly as I thought because I have to.

have some time lag before I can go in because the lie would be too,

the deceit would be too manifest.

So we've got to cook up a pretense for going into poland and the generals were trying to say to him this is very good we're not prepared to go into poland and then some of the generals were for it in principle even but my point that the larger point is that people that are autocratic they interpret it and they always will interpret magnanimity as weakness to be exploited and never benevolence to be reciprocated and kind.

They just don't do it that.

And yet, that is exactly what the liberal mindset thinks.

They're so morally smugged, they feel that there's going to be so much admiration for their magnanimity that everybody's going to say, I thank you so much.

And this is very relevant even to the domestic political scene with so-called marginalized people in the Democratic Party.

One of the reasons that you're starting, there's many reasons, but one I think that hasn't been discussed why a lot of minorities,

i.e., African-American and Hispanic males in particular, are starting to drift away from the left-wing democratic regime is because they do not like that fake sense of moral smugness.

And listen, you guys, you're going to sign up with us for transgenderism, and you're going to sign up with us for open borders, and you're going to sign up for us with radical abortion.

And you're going to do that because we're your protectors, and we're for you, and we're for civil rights.

And this is what you're going to do, that talking down to somebody in moralistic terms.

And if you don't do it, you're a traitor or you're an ingrate.

You don't, you know, so when a guy with a nasal voice does that from Menlo Park to a Mexican-American guy out in Tulare, it doesn't work very well.

No, it's just.

And it's

starting to fall apart.

Yeah.

All right.

We've gotten a long way from Hunter, which is kind of a good thing.

I was hoping to get away from that, those images of his pictures.

But I wanted to get on to the next question that I have.

But first, I would like to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin Anely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

And you can find Victor at his website, victorhanson.com.

The website is called The Blade of Perseus.

And now I wanted to talk, maybe we'll go to the truckers in Canada and the anti-mandate protest.

They called their own convoy a freedom convoy, but the mainstream or the government has suggested that they're only a fringe minority.

And I was kind of attracted to this because they have made through GoFundMe over $10 million

and have had heroes welcome in cities and towns.

And Elon Musk, I think he said it right when he said, quote, it would appear that the so-called fringe minority is actually the government.

And in fact, an Angus Reed poll shows the majority of Canadians want an end to these COVID restrictions, which is not exactly the mandate, but nonetheless, the same issue.

And so I was wondering what your thoughts, Victor, were on this

Trudeau mess.

When you see this contrast between these burly guys and these trucks that drive all night to deliver goods and services, Many of them probably have had COVID and they still work.

You know, they get a bad sore throat.

Ah, what the hell?

I got a deadline to meet.

They're self-employed, many of them, and they're delivering vital goods and services.

They keep the country running.

And when you contrast that with that little sniveling Trudeau

and his kind of girly, weird attitude.

And this is a guy that dressed up in blackface at one time with his elite little cadre of young hipsters at a party.

So there's a big contrast.

And why the left is always very afraid.

They don't mind Antifa.

They like Antifa.

They encourage it.

What they're very afraid is when the middle class, the average middle class person starts to revolt because these people are competent.

And they keep the country running.

These are the people who get up at 4.30 in the morning and they go to what in California is a save mart and they check food out all day.

Or these are the guys that drive all night.

You know, when I have to go fly back to the East Coast, I get up about 2.30, get dressed, get on the freeway, drive up to the Fresno airport at, I don't know, 3.34 in the morning to get a five o'clock flight.

And guess what?

It's packed with truckers, truckers.

And I see delivery car.

These are the people who we told, you know, you brave COVID.

You brave COVID.

You have that little flower shop, you're going to go broke.

You have that little shoe we pair, you're going to go broke.

you have that electric company that electricians you're going to go broke but not zoom not amazon not all of these target not walmart they're going to do better than you can imagine i know at least five people in my immediate vicinity who become fabulously wealthy during this lockdown and they all have one thing in common they have skills that are attuned to zoom and staying inside and being secluded and i know 10 or 15 others that didn't do very well and they had to go out but the idea that you deprecate or demonize those people, the backbone of the country is insane.

And this Trudeau doesn't understand it.

And yet he's afraid of them.

He's got, he has no familiarity, affinity with the working class.

He's always been a spoiled, elite little brat who got by, I guess, on a superficial good look, but there's nothing there there with him.

And here we are in the United States, and we have a populist

tradition and a lot of people, the elite think, wow, Canadians are so much more polite than we are.

And they're good little socialists.

How can this be happening in Canada?

And the left should be praising, you know, working class people.

And I grew up in a Democratic household.

And Labor Day, people really took it seriously.

And I can remember when I was a little kid, my grandfather went to the Agrarian Grange meetings, and he was never sold his raisins to a private packer.

It always had to be the gospel of the sun-made raisin cooperative, which I thought was kind of inefficient and socialistic.

But nevertheless, it was populist.

That doesn't even exist anymore.

This elite alliance between the plutocratic classes and the very poor, they despise the truckers, the middle class, the store delivers, the checkers, the dock work.

They despise them.

And they despise them because of their cultural identity and cultural values.

And so that's what this is all about.

And it's not going to end well for the left.

No,

they're going to lose elections.

They're going to have these

two.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think they're going to lose them in Britain.

They're going to lose them everywhere.

They've also going to lose them in Europe because it can't get any better once you become straightjacketed by ideology.

You know, every day I get up and I read a real clear politics essay to this extent.

It's some has-been Democratic operative, you know, who says, this is how Democrats are going to win.

This is the pathway.

And it's always some little tweaking and we can get build back better.

I.e., we just hit $30 trillion in debt this week and we've spent more money in one year than we ever have, as far as I should say, more deficit spending we ever have.

And they think that all these pioneers guy socialistic programs and Build Back Better, if you just rammed it through, you would get, you become popular.

The Republicans did them a favor by stopping it.

And

so my point is that they're going to think, well, maybe we'll do something else, another initiative.

Now it's going to, maybe we'll beat cancer like a moonshot or something new, but they can't do what people really want.

They can't get up and say, we're spending too much money.

We've got to stop it.

We've got to stop inflation.

We've got to pump more gas and oil to lower the world price, make things less tense abroad, help the middle class here at home that commutes to work.

We've got to close our border.

We just can't afford it any longer.

There's too many people that are coming across without vaccinations, without audits, without testing, without criminal.

We're just going to stop it.

We got to get wise up to another speech about sending American troops to the other side of the world because we don't do it very well.

We just don't do it after Afghanistan.

So, and they won't do that.

They can't do that.

And so they're going to keep doing this stuff and it's going to get, you know, everybody says, well, they can't lose 40 seats.

They can't lose 50 seats.

I've had this discussion with a lot of politicians and stuff, and they'll say, Victor, it's not, we're starting almost even with them.

You got to remember that we're just five seats from taking the house.

So how can you take 40?

I mean, 50, you'd get way up there.

And I always say, I think it's possible because these people are digging deeper and they don't learn and they don't want to learn.

They're captives of ideology.

Yeah, and their own idea of how smart their ideology is.

I wanted to turn then to the Republican Party conflict.

And I noticed some things in the news.

And particularly, I'm talking about an internal conflict between the likes of people like Liz Cheney, who's done some strange things recently.

But I wanted to make a note about that.

And then something Newt Gingrich said about House Select Committee on January 6th, which Liz Cheney is a part of and seems to have allied herself with the Democrats on that January 6th issue.

And Newt said the other day in a comment about that select committee that that the leadership of the select committee were wolves that are going to find out they're now sheep and they're the ones who face a real risk of jail for the laws they are breaking.

And with that, what I really want to address is the Republican Party does have a bit of a divide, I think, but I don't know how significant you think it is and how it will affect the midterm elections of 2022.

Well, there's a lot there, but let me try to be very succinct.

There is no ideological divide anymore in the Republican Party.

There's a minor one, and that is whether there should be humane or moral interests that restrict capitalism.

And that works out to the libertarian free market wing saying, you know what, in the long run, we'll all be more prosperous if we let the market adjudicate versus the national populace will say, well, we're not going to let it because it enriches China because they cheat, or you bring people across the border as if the human capital just follows the market and it destroys people.

So that's an issue.

But otherwise, on all the so-called Trump adjustments, the border, there is nobody that says, I want an open border.

There were in the Republican Party.

There is nobody that says, I want blanket amnesties.

There is nobody who says we're going to spread democracy around the world with optional military engagements in the Middle East.

There is nobody.

that I know of who says that China will democratize the wealthier it becomes through engagement and association with the West.

There is nobody who says, well, you know what, these losers who didn't code, you know, we're in the post-industrial age.

You're not going to bring Brown Youngstown or Detroit.

There's nobody like that now.

So there is a consensus.

There is no Mitt Romney constituency, no John McCain constituency.

Even I like George W.

Bush, but there is no Bush constituency.

So that should be clear.

It's a different party now.

It has the potential to be very successful because it has the potential to make race, for example, subordinate to class.

It can be really a truly middle, upper middle class class party.

And the Democrats are, they hate that because they're hemorrhaging minority support.

When you get almost 50% of Latinos suggest they may vote Republican, you can see that's possible because of this new party.

They can't be caricatured of spending all day at the golf course.

They can't be caricatured like Mitt Romney, I think, on fairly, you know, holding dollar bills and bang capital, or they can't be caricatured of how many houses you have.

It was a matter of style.

Not that you couldn't do that to Donald Trump, but Donald Trump did not identify with the people that he hung around with.

So the only difference right now in the Republican Party is a tactical one.

Donald Trump created a new adjustment that needed to be made to turn the Republican Party into a middle-class party.

Okay, should Donald Trump at the age of 78 be the standard bearer in 2024

or not?

And as we've gone over this before, that's the only divide.

And you look at the polls, it's kind of narrowing now.

A slight majority, about 60%, say yes, because he's our attack dog.

Whatever you say about his excesses in social media or, you know, he calls, I'm going to pardon the January 6th guy.

I'm going to...

shoots him in the hip, he will shoot.

And so people think, you know what?

We're going to cut the leash and point him in in the right direction.

He'll take care of business for these people who deserve it.

And then the other people say, yeah, but he doesn't go down the middle of the street.

He goes onto this side street, this alley, and he gets in these psychodramas that make him easily caricatured.

And there's a lot of big money on the sidelines that are secretly, secretly sick and tired of the smash and grab, the carjacking, the CRT in schools, the Kendi lectures, that they're racist.

and they'll sit this election out with their big money.

But if you put Trump in, they'll be under such pressure, or they have such a visceral hatred, they'll come in on his side against him.

So that has to be adjudicated.

I still think if he wants a nomination, it's his,

and he will unite the party in some fashion, given the odious alternative for these people who are skeptical of his leadership.

But there is another, and this gets back to Liz Cheney.

So what I'm getting back to in this circular argument is that Liz Cheney has no constituency.

She really doesn't.

I don't think she's going to win in Wyoming.

I don't think that she's going to be a third-party candidate.

I think she might be maybe if CNN, after its recent disasters, is reborn, she might be a CNN anchor woman.

But there's no future for Mr.

Kensinger.

There's no Adam, there's no future for him.

And you look at what happened to Jeff Flake.

Where is he now?

Is Bill Crystal suddenly a voice to be listened to, David from Charles?

No, there's no constituency.

So that issue is mute.

It's gone, dead.

The old blue-stocking Republican Party and the pundits in New York, that's dead.

Okay, so what is the issue then?

The issue is A, whether you should have Trump, and then what you should do when you get power.

And there's a big divide on that.

And the one side says, listen, we're going to take the damn house and we're going to take the Senate.

And you'll never, ever teach the left to act in a normal behavior unless you make them pay.

And here's what you got to do.

Every once in a while, when Joe Biden, the last two years gets out of hand, you tell Kevin McCarthy to tear up his State of the Union address.

See how they like it.

And when they bring up some whacked out nominee for Supreme Court, you unleash just what they did against Kavanaugh.

You scream and you yell and you drag that son of a bitch out.

That's what they think.

Or if you get the majority, the first thing you do is you open an investigation of the whole damn Biden family and you go from A to Z for all their corruption and you put those bastards behind bars.

And that'll just be an iota of payback because it'll be real unlike.

the fake Russian collusion hoax.

And then you go in there and you fire everybody in the top 30 or 40 administrators at the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon, you just get rid of them.

And that's one view.

And if you, and you say, and if you do that, for a generation, the left will be scared to death.

And then you say to the left, we have all the power now.

And you know what?

We don't like the filibuster.

So if you say one more word, we're going to take you up on your offer and get rid of it.

And you know what?

you talk anymore about admitting Puerto Rico, well, maybe we'll divide California into three states and we'll get four Republican senators that way.

And if you keep talking, we'll have a national voting law and you won't like it because it will make mandatory a voter idea in every state.

Maybe unconstitutional, but that's the only way you can understand what you're following.

So that's the one divide.

And then there's the other, and it's, no, we don't go down to that level.

We have standards.

That's why we're the Republican Party.

Why would we want to emulate the tactics and the morality of the bankrupt left?

All we would do is in our vengeance and hatred become like them.

And by being noble and playing by markets of Queensbury rules and not resorting to those tactics, we can exercise power efficiently.

And over time, maybe not more naive, but over time, they will respect our greater restraint, sober, and judicious nature.

And

I'm kind of caricaturing each side.

Yeah.

But you can see where that's the big contention right now.

So when they take the house, and they will take the House, there's going to be a lot of people in the Freedom Caucus and say, you know what?

Joe Biden did not follow the rules of the land.

He took an oath to faithfully execute the laws.

And he didn't do it on the border.

He destroyed immigration laws and he let in 2 million people illegally.

He's responsible.

We're going to impeach him for that.

We're going to have a special prosecutor.

We're going to have a hearing.

We're going to have cross-examination and we're going to have a formal report.

And then we will impeach him and unlike the democrats there's a good chance that we'll get a lot of votes to convict him in the senate maybe not enough but a lot and there'll be other people and say well all you'll do is just lose the goodwill of the american people they're going here they are again they're doing what the democrats did we've got problems so that that's an issue that no one seems to have an answer right now yeah

okay well i'm just hoping you're right about the taking the elections in 2022 and so that's what I'm hoping for.

And I'm trying to be a believer, but sometimes it's hard.

Just because I watched the last election, and if you've got all of these people with mail-in ballots and extended election times, anybody could manipulate those conditions.

So we'll see how it goes.

But let's turn to Afghanistan.

And recently it's come out that there were, well, there's a leak from the situation room on August 15th of 2021 that they were still in the midst of finalizing plans.

They had just warned Afghan staff that they needed to begin planning relocation, that they were still trying to determine countries of transit, and that this had been in process for a long time.

Even Donald Trump had made some arrangements in May of 2020 for getting out of Afghanistan.

And yet, just days before they would finally be forced to pull out by the Taliban, which was invading into Kabul at the time, they were still trying to scramble for their.

Is there some explanation for that besides bureaucratization and inertia?

That's why.

I think it's called they lie.

They lie.

They lie, they lie, they lie.

As my third-grade friend, Gabriel Gomez, once told me, Victor, they lie like 10,000 dogs.

He would be talking about our teachers.

They always tell us that we could go out.

We'll get to go home today at 3.30 or something.

And then we always stay till 5.

And Gabriel would say, they lie like 10,000 dogs, but they do lie.

What's the elephant in the room?

The elephant in the room was he was going to have this elaborate, majestic kind of a parade and announcement that on September 11th, hmm, what would that be?

A 9-11 and the date would be 2021 and it would be 20 years to the hour after the

Afghanistan, Iraq, that all followed what?

The 9-11 bombing.

So you get the picture that Joe Biden, the great liberator and reformer, would take in the 20-year nightmare, how we had overreacted to 9-11, and now we were no longer in Afghanistan.

And he and he alone had closed that sorry chapter.

That was the idea.

But that drove everything.

So when he came in, there was 25 to 3,500 troops.

We had a billion-dollar refitted embassy.

We had $300 million invested in Bagram.

We had $80 billion in equipment.

We had sort of a working relationship with a thuggish Taliban.

We're not going to democratize you.

I mean, there were no pride flags, right?

There were no George Mural, what hadn't happened, but there would not be the equivalent of George Floyd Mural.

There was, I don't think there was a very big gender studies program.

There might have been under the radar from the State Department.

My point is that it was a workable plan at a very low cost.

We had the biggest Air Force base in Central Asia.

We had a de facto arrangement with the Taliban.

They might not have even wanted to get into Kabul, and we could bomb them.

We have 100% air superiority, and we could keep them out of some of the major cities.

Wasn't the best situation, but it kind of squared the circle of reducing our footprint, keeping our NATO allies there, and the Western alliance having some pretty valuable assets near China and Russia.

Okay.

And watching.

everyone from Iran.

If we ever had to go take out the nukes in Iran, we could have used Bagram.

If we ever had to deal with radical Islam up on the Hindu Kush, we could have used Bagram.

so there were some advantages to that and they threw it all away because they wanted to get out by 9-11 and to do that they had to lie and they had to rush and they had to do all of these things that got people killed both afghans and americans and they lost billions of dollars in equipment

it's the largest arms transfer in history

We argue whether we should give a billion dollars of equipment to Ukraine.

Can you imagine what Ukraine would be like right now if every company had the kind of stuff that was left in Afghanistan?

Humvees and night vision and artillery and mortars and machine guns, anti-tank weapons and shoulder, everything,

all of that there.

It's just incredible.

So they're lying about that.

And the guy who's really on it, besides a lot of good conservative investigative reporters, is George Packer.

He's a liberal.

He's a leftist.

And he's shocked at what he's finding due to leaks.

I know that sometimes I go on too long, but what I'm trying to do the audience and these sessions is to suggest to them that these incidents, these pathologies, these nightmares are not isolated.

They're not haphazard.

They reflect a very pernicious worldview of human nature and history and the present and politics.

And they will happen again and again unless they're checked, unless the system that creates them is challenged.

And so we have this myth that the left is somehow the champion of civil liberties.

It's not.

It's not transparent.

It never has been.

It's endemic, internal, innate to the left that their superior morality justifies any means necessary to achieve them.

And I did a little bit on Laura Ingram the other night on this same issue.

And my God.

It was Barack Obama who surveilled the Associated Press reporters.

He was the one that monitored the communications with James Rosen's grandmother.

They were the ones that stonewalled Congress and would not release any information about the fast and furious gun running scheme.

They were the ones that weaponized the FBI.

They were the ones that weaponized the CIA.

They knew what Lois Lerner was doing at the IRS.

They cooked up Russian collusion.

They being Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama's inner circle, and they were sometimes indistinguishable.

They did that, and everybody should know that.

This is not Frank Church in 1975 with a Senate Select Committee that's investigating the IRS, the CIA, FBI for all of their abuses.

This is not the American Civil Liberties Union in the 1960s that they even held, they even protected Nazis marching.

The ACLU is now an activist left-wing organization devoted to diversity,

equity, and inclusion.

It has nothing to do with civil rights.

It's against civil rights in the sense of the first or second or fourth or fifth or sixth amendments.

You got to remember that, that all of these things that we're talking about represent this divergence from a Hubert Humphrey, FDR, Harry Truman, JFK,

Democratic Party that had these propensities, but was checked because

it led to McGovern-like doom.

And now that check is over with.

They feel that the demography's changed, that we're in globalization, that the wealth is behind the left, whatever the particular catalyst is.

They're not Democrats.

They're hardcore socialist activists, you know, totalitarians.

And so they suppress individual expression.

They go after dissent.

They can't stand critics.

Jen Saki today was on the news, pretty much outlining how Spotify had to up it a little bit and go after Joe Rogan.

It wasn't just enough to warn him that from, they've really got to go after him.

And why are they going to go after him?

Because he doesn't quite believe that if you've had two vaccinations and you have a booster and you're a young person, that you're protected from Omicron.

And in other words, he believes if you're young, you're probably not going to get a serious case of Omicron.

And if you're vaccinated, there's going to be a higher chance for a younger person, not an older person or cold morbidity person, but a younger person would have a higher, it's small chance of side effects serious from the vaccination than dying or getting serious effects from COVID.

And therefore, it doesn't make any sense.

And it's kind of a joke.

I was talking to a roofer today and it's kind of a joke that he said, you know people that have,

we were talking about COVID and I said, you know people too that have had two shots in a booster and got Omicron.

He said, I don't know anybody that hasn't.

And so the idea that you're going to punish people in the military, the federal workforce, because of vaccinations are supposedly, they do one thing.

If you've had two of the, I don't know about the booster, but if you've had two vaccinations, you have somewhat better chance, it's proven clinically, of not going into the ICU.

Although it doesn't stop infectiousness, it stops the viral load.

It cuts back on the extent on the exploitation of the respiratory system by the virus.

And so that may, in fact, turn out justified.

But the idea that you're going to force people

to get vaccinated,

many of them, especially now with Omicron, what, 100 million people, maybe more, 150 million have had the original or Delta or Omicron, and they have natural immunity that's probably proximate to acquired through vaccination immunity.

But

you're going to demonize those people and make them second-class citizens, and nobody can point that out?

I think that people, at least worldwide, are starting to notice that.

For example, Britain stopped its mandates.

I think Israel has stopped requiring boosters to come into the country.

So there are signs that these governments are starting to

walk away from so many mandates.

You know,

one day about six weeks ago, I got so frustrated about this.

I listened to Anthony Fauci on CNN for about three minutes.

And I said to myself, everything that man says is likely going to be disingenuous or untrue.

And I'm going to, in real time, check it.

So the first thing he reiterated, there was no lab leak.

So I went on lab leak, Wuhan, origins of COVID, and what pops up, all kinds of information.

I mean, my God.

censored emails between Fauci and four scientists sort of trying to hide it.

A Canadian neurobiologist, immunologist lecturing the British Parliament on the likely engineered source in the lab, and on and on.

And then he said, and you know, masks are still there.

And I just looked up mask and I looked at all these double-blind studies.

And basically the aggregate was a cloth mask does nothing.

A surgical mask does very little.

An N95, which most people don't use, that's the kind I use when I work on the farm.

They have the two straps above above it.

You know, you get 3M.

They do have some efficacy, but nobody was using them.

They were expensive.

They were hard to find.

And yet he was talking about mass generically.

That was a lie.

And then the next thing he says, we know that if

you get your booster, you're going to be protected.

protected.

You're not going to be protected.

You're going to be infected and you're going to be infectious.

Just in some countries, you're more likely to.

I don't know if that's just because Omicron is spreading throughout the entire population, so even the vaccinated are being reached, or when you get, you panic and say, Omicron's here, I'm going to go out and get a booster.

And you do that in some, in the case of flu vaccinations, we know that they have a tendency to lower the white blood count.

There's some studies that suggest that maybe our immune system is shocked for a while while we develop additional immunity, but in that period, we misguidedly go out.

We are more susceptible to Omicron.

I don't know all that.

I'm not a doctor, but everything that he said, you could quickly, and then he got on finally, you know, that these other things, and he meant ivermetsin and hydroxychloroquine.

I wouldn't take hydroxychloroquine.

I took it in Egypt, the original precursor to when I was very young for malaria.

And boy, I had a headache.

And it does, if you take it long term, it has a slight chance of increasing some of your eye problems, but it's a very valuable anti-inflammatory drug for lupus, especially, and it has a long history of safety, and it's very inexpensive.

And guess what?

If you tonight, if you're listening to this tomorrow, just go Google hydroxychloroquine, you'll see in 2020 all these so-called studies that are damning.

And then you wait to 2021 and up pop double-blind studies from Brazil, from some European countries, from India, and they all say the same things as they do of ivermedicine.

If used early on, it has some, not absolute, some prophylactic ability and some ability in the early stages of COVID to stop the immune storm.

What I'm getting at is I don't understand

how Joe Wogan can be demonized for having a person on there that voices these concerns when the state in the form of the global WHO or the CDC or the NIH or the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases has been so wrong and disseminates so much inaccurate information and still persists.

And now you kind of see this.

Have you noticed, Sammy, that there's people that go on CNN or you get clips and they kind of say something like the following: I'm a big supporter of vaccinations, but you know,

I'm not quite sure that

given these are experimental NRA vaccines, and we don't think that younger people, I don't think I would have my five-year-old quite yet get vaccinated.

Well, thank you for telling us because there's a lot of states that are going to force people to go to school.

They can't go to school unless they have that vaccination.

And so that's why people are angry.

And I'm really upset about the military because you're going to tell,

I mean, I'm taking an aberrant case, but right now, but just think of what you're doing.

He just announced he wants several thousand troops to go overseas.

I think that, you know, I can understand that.

And then to adjust.

But that's not the message that the military has been giving the people who are going to go overseas and risk hazard.

They've been telling them two things.

We're going to look at you.

We're going to look at your social media.

We're going to ask you questions.

We're going to ask your friends questions about you and to see if you suffer from white rage and white supremacy.

And if you do, you're in big trouble.

There's no evidence that that is a widespread problem.

And it's based on a bunch of veterans that were screaming and yelling at the January 6th, I guess.

But my point is, in addition to that, they're telling some people, okay, you've had COVID.

Okay, we admit it.

You have naturally acquired antibodies, probably got 2,500 level top of the scale.

We understand that, but you don't have a vaccination.

And we understand your immunity may be comparable or superior.

And we understand that you really don't want a booster if you've had two.

And if you haven't had any, you do not want to be vaccinated on top of your naturally acquired immunity because you're afraid you'll have a bad reaction.

We understand that, but you're going to leave if you don't get vaccinated.

And oh, by the way, all of you people are going to go over there and you may have to go into Ukraine if things get really bad.

And we're going to drop for a minute, you know, our former demonization.

It's just not a formula.

And that's why

45% of the country doesn't have a confidence in the U.S.

military.

45%.

Yeah.

I think I turned it around.

This very informed audience that I really appreciate corrections will probably say, Victor, no, it's only 45%

have confidence, not 45% don't.

45% alone have confidence.

55% have none.

The way you put it, I mean, I would feel if I were a white male in the military right now, you might as as well just use COVID non-vaccination as your ticket out since they're going to also be on all over you for whether you're a white supremacist or not.

You know what I mean?

Well, it's tragic because the white male conservative movement never talked about race or gender in the terms of let's be exclusionary or let's even be identity politics obsessed.

It was just people.

It was the left who did that.

The left would say to a commander, how many people that were not white males did you promote in your carriers wing how many women in your ranger battalion did you promote okay

and whether they like to admit it or not and i talked to general i've talked to maybe three generals this last 10 days off the record i've got emails from maybe 15 majors and colonels they say the same thing that they lie that they're using criteria other than battlefield john Kirby, that guy that was the megaphone for Hillary during the Benghazi mess, State Department, now he's in the Pentagon spokesman.

He keeps saying, well, diversity is wonderful and it's making us stray.

In theory, it's good to have people of all different walks of life, but not if you're punishing groups and you're calling people racist whenever a person, I don't know, doesn't perform as well as they would like and we're becoming tribal.

Does John Kirby know anything about the history of tribalism?

Did he ever study the trajectory that led to what was the Yugoslavian or the Rwandan or the Iraqi crisis?

Because that's where you're headed if you keep encouraging it.

But what I'm getting at is it wasn't the right who said 74%.

You can look at different statistics, so I'm very careful.

73 to 75% of those who died in Iraq were white males.

They consist of about

33 to 35 percent of the population.

So they're dying in twice their numbers of the general population.

That's a great burden.

And some of these families have had two, three, four generations in the military.

I'm not talking about West Point or the Naval Academy.

I'm talking about the enlisted ranks or being sergeants or non-commissioned officers.

And their grandparents were in Vietnam, and their parents were in Gulf War I and their great-grandparents were in World War II.

And you're targeting those people.

And they are the backbone of this country's military.

They're not the only backbone, but they're the greatest number.

And you're going after them, except when you're in trouble.

And then you're going to have to have somebody do it.

But what I'm worried about, they're not going to be there because they're sick and tired of what General Milley and Lloyd Austin are doing to this military.

And boy, you talk to them and they have utter contempt for what they call political generals and admirals.

And these are people who go up in front and testify to Congress and win accolades from left-wing senators and representatives.

And then

they become the idols of the corporation.

And then they, in retirement, they go on corporate boards or they go form leadership outfits or consultation or lobbyists and they make a ton of money.

And this is all considered liberal, progressive, and woke.

So, and these enlisted people don't like it.

You could see it with the whole Benghazi, the whole subtext of the Benghazi crisis was that there was a lower middle class, middle class group of people who fought like tigers in frenzied fashion and saved dozens of lives and took a lot of hits and didn't have to because a smug overclass in the military and the State Department were not willing to make the same commiserate risk and hazards to save them as they were willing to save others.

And I think it's going to become more pronounced.

And you mean it's going to get worse and worse, this left-wing diversity, equity, inclusion over military merit?

Put it this way.

It wrecked the French army.

The French army in World War I was the great savior of the West.

And they shall not pass at Verdun.

They lost almost a million men.

They lost almost a million point eight, I think, in World War I.

And during the pacification and the demilitarization, the socialism of the 1920s and 30s, they were demonized.

And the French army lost those career soldiers and officers that didn't join up.

And they were absolutely obliterated in six weeks in May of 1940.

There was no reason for that to happen.

They had superior tanks.

They had...

comparable planes to the Wehrmacht, and they had completely destroyed the morale of that army.

They had political, aged generals that were incompetent.

And then they did the same thing in the post-war period.

Whether you like what they were doing in Algeria or Vietnam, they had a group of people that had been the Free French Army that were courageous under General Jeune or Tazignet.

They were just absolutely...

I mean, we'll make fun of the French, but they were wonderful fighters.

They were attached to the Third Army.

And they fought in North Africa like tigers.

And they could have won that Algerian war.

They did, till de Gaulle pulled them out.

Whether it was moral, I'm not talking about the morality or the political wisdom.

Same thing in Vietnam.

My point is, this is, and they were demonized, and they just left the French army in droves.

And the result is it's never been the same.

So you do not want.

Every country has a group of people of all different races that are dedicated to military service.

Maybe they'd like the adventure, maybe they have other reasons, but whatever the particular reasons are, they are willing to take sacrifices that most people are not, and you have to honor them.

And it turns out in this country, there is a Jacksonian demographic going back to the founding.

And these are the people who fought, whether you liked it or not, what they were fighting.

They were fighting at places like Chancellorsville for the wrong side.

They were fighting with Sherman on the right side, the Army of the West, the yeomen that marched into Georgia.

They were with Grant in the terrible summer of 1864.

They were the people who fought at Bella Wood.

They're just certain types of people and they keep the country safe.

And you got to acknowledge that.

And when you go after those people and you make fun of them, you're just insane.

And besides being amoral, and gosh, you know, I don't know how many times I've met some of these guys that are veterans of the, you know, going back to Vietnam or the first Gulf War.

They were in the Balkans balkans or they fought in um you know iraq and afghanistan and they're some of the smartest best educated people i've ever met and they're selfless and they're

every army you know one of the nice things at hoover we have generals that come from different countries and you get them off the record when they sometimes they come up and i've talked to them off the record and they all say the same thing There are no soldiers like the American soldier.

There's just none, nobody like them.

And they keep asking the second question.

It goes, where do these people come from?

You know, they're bigger, they're stronger, or they're meaner, they're tougher, but they have this view of America that we're soft, but we're not.

And so I don't know why we would, I just, I'm going off on a tangent again.

I want to apologize, but I don't know why we don't understand what's at stake.

Yeah, no, I think your listeners and I, that's a huge frustration.

It's definitely, yet no one can say it like you either.

Who knows?

Maybe the military will be listening to you.

I doubt that.

Not the military that I have been told in no uncertain terms that the current military and retired military is very angry to

the extent they even know what I say.

All right.

Well, we went a long way from Afghanistan through the left as the authoritarian and lying nature of the left all the way into the soldiers in our current.

So I I just could

go a long way.

Go ahead.

No, I just want to say that again and don't want to be too repetitive, but we're trying in our audience to take these things in the news and put them in a wider framework so that

we can understand from the past

what's going on in the present.

We can be prepared for the future because it's going to continue.

We have to see what's behind these people and why they are doing these things.

And

it's frightening, but it's going to be the only way we can stop it.

All right.

So let's just take a break for our sponsor right now.

And when we come back, we'll talk about two more of your books.

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Welcome back.

And Victor was just talking about the problem of the military and DEI

and demonizing young white military soldiers.

And I think all of us are, you know, a little bit concerned about that because we understand, especially from what Victor says, that they are the backbone of our military and

a lot of the strength of our military, given their training.

So I'm always amazed at the young men that I run into that are part of the military.

And then even the older ones that have left the military and gone into business and such.

It's very impressive what the military can do and the way of training.

But let's turn now because you have written a novel and it's your 20th book.

So we've been looking at your books at the end of your podcasts.

And this 20th book was actually a novel and it was a novel on a general at Paminondas.

And it's called The End of Spartan.

Could you give us a little discussion on how the writing of that book?

Yeah, I think I've mentioned this in passing that I had one kind of crusade in my late 50s, and that was I had spent, I'd written five or six scholarly articles and three or four book chapters about the strange man called Epaminondas, the great Theban liberator, who crushed the Spartan army, first time they'd been crushed at Leuctra in 371.

And then then that winter that winter led a great crusade of 60,000 Greeks into the heartland of Sparta and Lacedaemon and Laconia and then terrified them and then went over the mountain of Tyegitis in winter and freed a quarter million Messenians and then in subsequent invasions founded these huge fortresses all of you if you ever go to Greece go to the foundations of megalopolis and Messini they're still impressive.

Mantinea is not as impressive, but it was in antiquity.

And what I'm getting at, he never gets, he's not the Pericles or Themistocles, or doesn't have the reputation of the Spartans.

Part of that was because the sources for that period were anti-Theban.

It was kind of like, I don't know, the Fresno of the antiquity.

It was a very ancient, hallowed city of legend, but it was rural, it was agrarian, it wasn't, it didn't have a seaport, it didn't have the mystique of the Spartans.

So, Xenophon, for example, who wrote the hellenica the authoritative history from 411 to 362 doesn't mention a paminondas by name not once even though he's a central player in the history that he covers

and plutarch had from what we can tell a a really influential biography but we only have his partner pelopidus not a paminondas so just kind of tweaks of history and the manuscript tradition etc scholarship We've never given him do.

So rather than write, you know, there's been one Italian biography, a Pamananda, but I think by a man named Fortuna, and then there's a wonderful Pauli Vasova, that's the great German Encyclopedia of Classical Studies.

But other than that, there's nothing about him.

So I thought, well, why not write a novel?

But it won't really be a novel.

It'll be kind of a history of what he actually did.

And I could take characters that he interacted with, like Philip II, who was a hostage in Thebes when he was young.

I could have him meet people like Xenophon, who he wouldn't like, obviously, and I could have Pelopidas playing a role, and I could have Pleombratus the king.

So I would have actual history.

So I had the Battle of Leuctra

and then this farm up on the hillsides of Thespia and about an individual in this household that get excited and join this great crusade.

And it's kind of hard to read.

I understand that.

It had kind of an intricate plot.

And then I wasted six months.

I thought I didn't know really how, because I'm not a novelist, how to portray how people talk.

You don't want to have the king's English.

Some of the modern novels of the ancient world that I read, they're kind of silly.

They use a slang that, you know, I don't know any comparable slang quite and maybe in Aristophanes or some of the tragedies dialogue, but it's hard to do.

You can't say, hey, bud, I'll kick your ass.

And you, you know, it's sort of like a 1950s Hollywood costume drama of Rome or something.

So I actually tried to write out what they would say to each other in Greek based on my knowledge of some of the dialogue that you can see in the vernacular and also the narrative.

And then I would translate it back into English.

So, I think it was pretty scientific.

It didn't become a bestseller, but it sold pretty well.

And it's kind of an idealistic novel trying to argue that this man was a great man and he was able to galvanize Greek.

And that famous phrase, Alcadamus's famous phrase, God made no man a slave and he's a central character as well in the book yeah were you always going to call it the end of sparta or did you have another title no i i had it i i had another that was a very interesting question you asked because it was that was weird the title was i think it was something like sparta no more

or

the overthrow of sparta or the great march or freedom or no i think actually i take that back my no man a slave was the title no man a slave and that was from alaka diamonds so then right when i was writing this the 300 came along the movie and the director called and he actually drove down here the writer did screenwrite and they wanted me to consult i didn't do it the first time but i did a little bit

and i wrote a little prologue to their book about it and I was interviewed on the director's cut.

So in exchange for that,

they asked me what I wanted.

And I said, I just want for the premiere, my two kids susanna and billy really wanted to go so the three of us drove down there for their the initial opening at you know at the theater chinese theater everything big gala we've never been there never been there since but in that party one of the people who had been instrumental in sin city and the movie the graphic novelist i think his name is miller is that was his name yeah

yeah miller yeah he was a very sweet guy he's he's very accomplished i knew of his work and he came over and he said, what are you working on?

And I told him and he said, oh, you got the wrong title.

It's got to be the end of Sparta.

And I just thought, okay, it could be anything.

And then I started driving home and I talked to Susanna and Bill.

I said, maybe the end of Sparta.

So that's how it came.

It's his credit.

Frank Miller.

Frank Miller.

I'm sorry.

You know, I'm kind of tired after all this.

pontificating on my part, but Frank Miller was a very wonderful person.

And he actually called me later and I said, you know, I'm going to use that title.

So that's where it it came from.

It didn't come from me.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, why don't we go ahead and we'll save a few books, your 21st, 22nd, and 23rd for another time.

And we'll end the podcast here.

Thank you.

And thank everybody again for listening.

I didn't have a rant tonight.

They're always good.

Your discourse often weaves through so many things so smoothly.

Well, you know, I shouldn't use that word rant.

You know, every once in a while, Rush Limbaugh would call.

We got to be very good friends in his last, and he would, we would text about every three or four times a week, sometimes for an hour in the evening.

And he'd always use the word rant in a positive sense.

He'd say, hey, Victor, did you hear my rant today?

And he could do it in a very wonderful way.

I really miss him.

Yeah.

There's something about him that was magical.

And he just had that ability.

And there were some wonderful guest hosts, Sammy, but if I was driving, I just wanted to listen to him because he was funny, he was an impersonator, he was a ventriloquist almost.

And he was just, he could do anything.

And when he wasn't on, I didn't ask him.

I confess.

All right.

With that, we'll say goodbye to everybody.

And thanks for listening to us.

And this is Victor Dave Sanson and Sammy Wink, and we're signing off.

Thank you.