The Return of Trump?

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Hello, listeners to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Welcome to the Friday edition.

We will have a look at the news of the week or some of the news from the week.

That's what we usually do on the Friday edition.

Today, we're going to talk a little bit about Donald Trump and the campaign for 2022.

But first let's have a word from our sponsors.

Welcome back.

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

How are you doing today, Victor?

I'm doing very well, Sammy.

All right.

Are you ready to talk a little bit of Trump?

Are you ready to trumpet about Trump?

I think I am.

You said how was he doing in 2022 rather than 2024?

So I think

the intent of your question then was, what is his role in the midterm?

Yeah, but I'm also just kind of curious, maybe what the role in the midterm is, but also for 2024.

I mean, given what, if you go look at the news about Trump today or yesterday, it says that he directed the mob and that a Capitol policeman is suing him on January 6th.

Of course, everybody was bashing him about January 6th on its anniversary as they had it.

His family is being subject to tax fraud allegations.

And they're, of course, accusing Trump already before 2024 has come around of inciting, possibly inciting insurrection and that 2020, as they saw it, or January 6th, was just the warm-up for 2024.

At least that's the impression I'm getting from the news.

So back to you.

What do you think Trump's going to do either in 2022 or 2024?

Well, he's going to use his endorsements and he's got a very good record of about 150 something

successful people who won primaries after his endorsements

versus two or three that didn't.

Whether he endorsed people who were already well ahead is another question, but give him his due.

So he's going to play a substantial role.

And here are the general principles, at least in 2022, I think, as far as Trump goes.

Number one,

any

person in the House that is actively against Trump, not to mention his agenda, either will not be reelected, probably like Liz Cheney, or won't even run like Adam Kensinger.

That's number one.

Number two,

the idea that Trump was going to be labeled as a liability and he's an insurrectionist and he's a revolutionary terrorist.

is going to destroy a candidate.

And all I have to point to is Ted Cruz's blunder the other day when he called January 6th, a terrorist attack, and he went on Tucker Carlson.

Not very much need be said,

except he didn't do a very good job trying to explain his way out of it.

And he was probably

virtue signaling or performance arting or whatever we term we use, but it's not a viable

strategy to turn on Trump.

And when Chris Christie does it, it's pathetic.

So that is number two principle.

And number three principle is given one and two,

and given Biden's dismal record, the Republicans are going to win the House, maybe the Senate, but it's a question of how big they're going to win in the House.

And the more that the Democrats call Trump a terrorist, as

Cruz did, basically, the more that they talk about destroying democracy, the more they talk about he's going to wage a military coup,

the less resonance they have.

The New York Times just did some focus groups and they asked Democrats about January 6th and they were shocked because a lot of the respondents in their left-wing focus poll expressed sympathy for the frustrations that made people go out, they said, out on January 6th, which begs the question,

are they even Democrats anymore?

I.e., the New York Times thought because they voted for Biden and they're registered Democrats, they would voice a predictable exegesis about January 6th, but they didn't, suggesting that they're well beyond the

well beyond the independent voter now.

And what I'm getting at is there's two questions here.

One is, is Trump influential and if he wants the nomination, can he have it?

And the answer is yes.

Can he win?

I think he can probably beat Biden.

I don't know who else would run, but I think he could probably beat Biden.

But then the more fundamental question number two.

Is it in Trump's interest, given his businesses, his new social media empire he's trying to create?

He'll be 78 years old,

his

rumors of people within his family that don't want him to run.

Is it in his interest?

And is it

in the interest of A, the country, and his party?

Because

the Democrats and the left are lifeless.

They're inert.

They're ossified.

They're calcified.

They have nothing.

But you mention the word Trump and they come to life almost as if they're zombies that have been woken from the dead.

And

he's all they have.

So if you take him out of the equation, they have nothing.

But then on the other hand, if you take him out of the equation, do you have a pit bull who's willing to go out into the arena and fight?

And I don't know.

DeSantis seems he's willing.

Pompeo seems unafraid.

But that's the $64,000 question that looms over both the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential race.

But and then there's one other corollary.

Has Trump learned to get even rather than just get mad at his opponents?

That is, if he were to be elected, would he hit the ground running with no more Alma Rosos or Steve Bannons or people that divert attention from his agenda and

sound

the mooch, Scaramucci, all of that stuff, Michael Cohen, those types of people that are in it for other reasons than advancing the Trump agenda.

And so that's the question.

And then would he hit the ground and not have appointees from the bipartisan establishment like a John Bolton or a James Mattis that aren't on the same page as he is?

And that means

does he have a team?

Does he have a contract with America?

And will he plan it out?

So when the moment he takes office, he says, I'm a revolutionary.

I only have four years.

I maybe have the whole Congress behind him.

Let's go and let's be professional and let's be disciplined.

And we're not going to talk about somebody we call horse face or loser.

We're just not going to do that.

We don't have time.

What would be the contract for America that would get us back to, I don't know, there's no normalcy, but get us back to an America that's vibrant, you know, prospering, et cetera.

That's the contract.

Number one, you got to be very careful because

political conventional wisdom says don't spell out all of your positions and tie yourself down to

concrete promises.

Either you won't be able to keep them or the contours of the campaign three months from now will warp what you said.

Forget that.

You have to have one.

And then, number two,

how specific and whether they're your, because there's 50 or 80 things they should do, but the main 10, let's do the 10 commandments.

I was writing that

today for the ultra,

the behind the paywall for our ultra readers on the Victor Hansen website.

And I think I remarked what Clemenceau said of Wilson.

Wilson's 14 points.

Remember, Clemenceau said, my God, God only needed 10 commandments.

Why does this deity need 14?

So let's keep it to 10 so we don't outrank or try to outpace God.

The first is, I think you have to get control of spending.

We can go back to the old Simpson Bowls Commission.

They had a good outline, how to get to a balanced budget in five or six years, retaining incentives for investment, production, and then reasonable cuts.

And some of them are entitlements.

But you have to do something.

You can't have $30 trillion in debt and borrow and print $2 trillion a year because you're just a squirrel in a cage running around around.

You give more money, more money, more money to people.

And then they go to the store and they're paying 20% more for meat or $5 a gallon for gas.

And then they run around their little squirrel cage and want more money.

And,

you know, I went through that farming in my 20s.

It's scary.

So you've got to do that.

Okay, hold on.

But Donald Trump is not known for having kept his own budget low.

Is he even capable of doing that?

Donald Trump is a businessman who loves to borrow from banks and he loves inflation because he pays back what he owes the bank in inflated dollars and he hates high interest because it cramps business.

So it's going to be very difficult.

But we're musical chairs now.

Everybody knows the music is going to stop.

And whoever doesn't have a chair, and that means whoever's president doesn't have an escape route is going to take a hit when the recession comes.

So, you can do one of two things.

You can slow it down gradually by getting your mortgage rates up to five or six percent, or the Fed up to four percent, or you can just let keep going and get drunk and go over the cliff.

But

it's up to you.

I mean, it's going to happen.

You can't continue like this.

Even Larry Summers, everybody quotes him, but I mean, Larry Summers is a pretty hard Democrat.

Number two, it seems to me it's really important

that we get back to a closed border.

And I mean, finish the wall first thing.

You go into office and you say, you're going to get this thing done in a year.

And, you know, they made fun of him because he said, let Mexico pay for it.

And I know that Mexico didn't write him a check, but Mexico probably paid more than their share of the wall when they put guards on the border and deployed soldiers with their their border with Guatemala.

And they were spending a lot of money because Trump threatened tariffs and to get out of the free market arrangements we've had with them,

free of tariffs.

So you can pressure Mexico, you can build the wall, and you can deport people who came in during the Biden administration and the last years of Trump.

And then start looking at other people who are here residing illegally and ask,

how long have they been here?

Have they committed a felony?

Do they have skills, et cetera?

But that's the second thing.

You've got to control the border.

Number three,

it's extremely important to get back to a natural gas full production oil economy.

It gives us

a wedge, a lever against inflation.

And we have, as we speak, we have $5 a gallon gas now.

I filled up the other day in a diesel pickup and it was $5.10.

So that's crazy.

And we're taxing the middle-class commuter with these high energy prices.

And look what we've done.

We've reduced ourselves to say we don't want any of this icky fuel.

So we're going to cancel pipelines.

We're going to cancel federal leases.

We're going to jawbone banks not to lend to oil companies.

We're going to tell frackers your days are numbered.

And then we're going to go beg the Russians and the Saudis, please, please pump more oil and gas.

It's crazy.

So we have to get back to a full energy-independent natural gas, coal, and oil economy until we can find an economically competitive and viable alternate source of energy, whether that's nuclear and batteries for cars or whether it's hydrogen.

It doesn't matter, but let the market adjudicate.

And remember that when you're energy independent,

you're not dependent on what the Iranians or the Saudis or the Russians do.

And you're really not dependent or eager to have an optional military engagement in the Middle East.

So number three, that is very, very important.

Number four, I think you've got to do something about the administrative state.

We've seen Anthony Fauci, masked, no mask, two mask.

The various heads of the CDC

give us conflicting information on testing.

They all told us vaccinations were our magic bullet.

You couldn't get the virus if you were vaccinated, etc.

And what we've learned is that entire COVID from day one was weaponized.

In other words, we were struck with this terrible virus, and yet here were the rules.

You could not mention the fact that the Chinese knew where it originated, the manner in which it was developed, and the gain of function research that was involved in it, or that they had deliberately allowed people to leave Wuhan and fly to Europe, the United States for anywhere from 10 to two weeks while you couldn't set foot out of Wuhan.

If you were in Wuhan, you wanted to go to Shanghai, you could not do it.

If you wanted to go to San Francisco, go to it.

And we couldn't even talk about that.

We were told that the travel ban was xenophobic.

We were told Nancy Pelosi and Bill de Blasios, come to our cities, have a drink at our bar, come to Chinatown.

And then they flipped and said, Trump did it.

And then we went into a full lockdown.

Remember, it was Flatten the Curve, Sammy?

Three weeks, two weeks, 10 days?

That became, and then we were told, if you are going to protest for George Floyd and if you have sympathy with Black Lives Matter, then go out there shoulder to shoulder, spitting, screaming, yelling.

And guess what?

It's more important for your psychological health to protest peacefully or not than it is to protect your fellow citizens with what we told you was an ironclad quarantine.

And then we were told from the Pfizer Company originally in late summer that they would have an announcement in October and the trials were in and it looked like there was going to be a vaccination announcement, i.e.

right before the election,

natural course of events, Operation Warp Speed was going to bring dividends.

And then we had a final in late October press conference.

Oh, nope, we were mistaken.

It's not ready.

Uh-oh, Operation Warp Speed didn't work, Donald Trump.

And then, right after the election is over, we hear within five days, oh, hit data.

We were wrong.

It worked.

And so we found out that members of the Pfizer team board, etc., were communicating with the Biden campaign.

And they try to deny it, and they cannot deny it.

So, and then we get into the Biden administration, and we hear from Biden, oh,

not one person was vaxxed until I became no, 17 million were at a rate now of a million per day.

And then he said, hmm, I look at this.

I got my vaccination from Trump.

I got the Pfizer, I got the JJ, I've got the Moderna.

The original

mutant, there is no mutant.

The original

Omicron is, excuse me, the original COVID-19 is bumping up against herd immunities, whether naturally acquired or through vaccination.

And I'm going to take credit of it.

In fact, I said during the campaign that any president with $250,000 deaths is absolutely culpable for every one of them should resign.

That's where we were, completely politicized.

And then he said, by July 4th, it'll be over.

Have a good 4th of July.

And then guess what happened?

The Delta came.

Pretty virulent, much more infectious, a few breakthroughs, and then Omicron came.

And

Joe Biden, with his, as I said before, is angry, get off my grass, get your vaccination, get your mask.

That's all he could say.

And then it was never therapeutics.

These are the, these are an array of off-use, legitimate cheap drugs now in use.

Here's some new avenues down the pike.

Take your pick.

No.

It was vaccination or nothing because he

wanted to get rid of it and take credit for it.

And a lot of people paid the price because we did not pursue therapeutics and treatment of patients that had it.

And then we found out that,

lo and behold,

the number of people who are actually dying of COVID

and COVID alone is much smaller.

And we're hearing from the CDC.

And this would have got you kicked off, Sammy, from Twitter and Facebook.

Had you said a few months ago that you need four, the average person dies with

four comorbidities, not covet and that the average number of people in the world that die every single day has stayed absolutely constant through 2019 2020 2021 there have been no excess world deaths okay so in other words this virus to be very brutal and crude and mean-spirited was a culling factor.

It went through the human herd and just very, without mercy, just took away people who

were age-wise were over the average median lifespan.

And that's what it was.

It doesn't mean it wasn't terrible or horrible.

It didn't mean it didn't sometimes kill younger people, but that's what it was.

And we weren't told that.

Now we're told that.

And why are we told that?

Because Joe Biden is at 40%

and we're desperate to find something to revive him.

So the CDC

and the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases and the National Institutes of Health, they're all together, FDA, they're all saying,

oh, you got to live with COVID.

Vaccination isn't the magic bullet.

We're looking at treatments.

We've got some new stuff coming.

So it was weaponized.

And the answer I'm getting at is go after and break up some of these agencies.

Take the FBI and get it out of Washington.

We know what it does now.

It's a private retrieval service for the Biden family to find diaries and laptops or to go after some guy like James O'Keefe.

And we saw what Mueller, we saw what Coming, we saw with McCabe, we saw what Klein Smith, we saw the FISA mess.

It's got to be broken up.

So we've got to look at the Pentagon, the CIA, the FBI, the IRS, and all of these alphabet soups and our public health because they're not doing what they should and they're hurting people.

The Pentagon has no business going after so-called white supremacists after losing in Afghanistan and losing deterrence with the Russians and Chinese.

I can't go through all 10 of them, but just very quickly, a couple more of them: foreign policy, no better friend, no worse enemy, a deterrent foreign policy, and shift emphasis in the Pentagon from quote-unquote diversity, equity, inclusion to battlefield combat readiness.

Americans do not care.

If you ask Americans,

I can get you

the most ferocious special forces teams in the world, or I can get you the most diverse, that will not be as ferocious.

They'll say, we don't care about diversity.

We want the most ferocious.

That's our lives at stake.

The Pentagon says, well, that's a false alternative.

I can get you the most ferocious and the most diverse.

And yet, I don't think they've proven they can.

because they're not using battlefield criteria to make those selections.

So we've got the deep unelected state.

We've got to really break that up.

You've got to do it quick or

we're really losing.

And then of course crime.

Crime.

The federal government's got to come in and say, listen, if you go from one state across state boundaries to another to commit violence as part of BLM or Antifa or even some right-wing, any, it doesn't matter.

You go across state lines, you use social media, if you transmit this intent to commit mayhem, we're going to charge you with a federal racketeering crime and break these stuff up.

And we're going to tell these local BAs, if you don't charge people with violent assaults, we're going to charge them with violating people's civil rights.

We're going to do this just like the left does, but we've got to really stop it because it's destroying the sinews of civilization.

Joseph Epstein had a very brilliant uh little essay in the Wall Street Journal when he's, you know, he's an octogenarian, I think, and he said life as he knew it is gone.

gone he can't even go across the street to get take out food he lives in evanston a suburb of chicago and life in that peaceful suburb is not life anymore it's sort of escaped from new york and just living out here in rural salma and going to fresno most people that i know think if I park somewhere, am I going to lose my catalytic converter?

If I stay out after nine and I walk to the parking lot, somebody's going to carjack me.

And there's this inability to deal with it because of these district attorneys and defund the police.

And then we have to, let's talk about race, honestly, and this crazy idea that BLM was based on a legitimate complaint that law enforcement were killing online black suspects in greater proportion than whites or Latinos or other groups according to the number who are arrested.

We have 11 or 12 12 million people in the United States arrested and blacks are killed about 25% of all unarmed suspects are black.

But that's, it's true, it's double their numbers in the population, but it's just about where they are in terms of total arrest.

And they're underrepresented in terms of those arrested 50% for violent crimes.

And it was a lie.

More police officers got killed this year by black suspects than police officers killed black suspects.

And so you've got it in the foundational mythologies of BLM that Trayvon Martin

was killed for no reason, and he did not beat George Zimmerman, who didn't fire in self-defense, was found bogus by whom?

Not just a jury, but Eric Holder's Department of Justice, Human Rights, Civil Rights Division.

And the same thing with the other foundational myth, Michael Brown at Ferguson.

He wasn't shot in the back.

He didn't say, hands up, don't shoot.

He charged Darren Wilson for the second time after trying to reach in his car and get his gun.

Then he ran and he came back again.

And Eric Holder, guess what?

Found the same thing.

That's why he was acquitted and he was not charged with a federal crime.

And so this was based on a myth.

And out of BLM, we've had everything from what?

Drugs now that might save lives for COVID that are coming out are going to be adjudicated.

They're allotments on the basis of race.

You're going to have white

small W, but black big B.

You're going to have 55% or 50% of all commercials now will be African-American.

And, you know, pilot training will be based on African-American affirmative action.

This is not good for a multiracial society.

We're not doing proportional representation.

We're doing repertory representation.

And the sins of a prior generation, such as they were, are falling on what?

A new generation.

So we're going to tell some person in, I don't know, the Bronx with a bad back and maybe some diabetes, a white guy, 45, 58, who worked his entire life delivering a truck in noisy Manhattan, that when he has COVID and he goes down and tries to get a Pfizer pill, they're going to say to him, hmm,

check, check, check, you are white, move away.

And then we're going to have some,

I don't know, take a hypothetical person, a multi-million immigrant from India, and I know a lot of them are from South America, and I know a lot of them who are now in the United States as legal residents, quote-unquote, people of color, very wealthy, and they're going to go to the same clinic and get, and they're young,

let's take a number, 35.

But race triumphs everything.

And they're going to get a life-saving drug and this other and they don't need it and this other guy's not this is madness yeah so i'll stop there i can go on

i was gonna i was gonna say we're we're at eight which so we better stop at least too short of god yeah all right and i have because i have another question i have a feeling we're gonna talk a little bit about some of those other things you've mentioned in our weekend edition So the second question, of course, was about campaign commercials for the the next year.

It should be pretty exciting.

There's 435 seats up coming up to be replaced and or the incumbent voted in.

435.

There are also some of the senatorial seats as well.

Yeah, the census of 2020 has led to redistricting and that redistricting is kicking in for this election.

So it should be pretty interesting.

The blue message is suffering or the lefts or the democratic message is suffering right now and they know it so what do you expect in this coming campaign for i expect in 1938 and 1994 or 2010 somewhere between i don't know 40 and 70 seats they're going to pick up i think they're going to win the senate i say that because

statistically the first midterms of any presidency the president takes a hit Trump did, everybody did, George Bush didn't because of 9-11.

FDR didn't because of the Depression.

But usually they do.

And it's going to be magnified by the fact that this is the worst first year that we've seen in any presidential history.

It's just been a total catastrophe from Afghanistan to the economy, the energy, to the border, to the race, to the COVID, you name it.

So he's going to take a hit.

And we've got one of the highest numbers, I think we're in the high 20s now, of incumbent Democrats who do not want to run for reelection because they don't want to spend the money.

They don't want to do the effort and get beaten.

And so it's much easier for a congressman to be re-elected than for a fresh face to get elected in a contested election.

Those are all sort of boilerplate criteria, but more importantly about commercials,

you can imagine, you can see

chaos at the Afghanistan airport.

When we have, remember those pictures, people clawing each other, dust, dirt, screaming, yelling, poor soldiers trying to hold back the crowd.

Then we'll just have a,

I guess we call them a Chiron, those letters that come down at the bottom of your screen on the video, and it will say, Joe Biden, say, everything's fine.

It looks good.

Or this was a great success.

And that will be absolutely devastating.

Or then we'll have the border with those early pictures of thousands of people sitting under that bridge and coming across the river.

And they're going to say two millions.

And then superimposed with text, two million, with quotes from Secretary Mayorkis or Joe Biden, everything's fine, the border is secure.

Or, and I think this will be, you know, you see these little stickers, Biden did it, but you'll see some person pull up to the gas station, and maybe it'll be a California Bay Area gas station, and they'll show a picture of his gas tank at half or three quarters,

and they'll say, look at the pump, and he'll say, wait, wait, where's my gas?

And they say, well, we only sell you $100 worth at a time.

He said, but it doesn't fill up my tank.

Sorry, get out of the way.

We got another person.

So things like that.

And then, you know, Christmas, somebody said, where's my present?

And they'll just show a whole thing in Target with an empty shelf.

And you know what they're going to do as well.

And I'm not saying this in condemnation, but politics is hardball.

They're going to show pictures of carjackings.

You've seen those videos, Sammy, of Nordstroms in San Francisco or Walnut Creek or Beverly Hills.

Just hordes of young kids, mostly inner city, just reading.

And then they'll have clips from the Philadelphia DA or Gascon in LA

or the San Francisco DA saying this is not a problem or this is all concocted by the right.

There's a lot of rich quotes material there.

And so, boy, they're not, it's going to be incredible.

The only thing that the Democrats have for them is Trump, Trump, Trump, coup, cool, cool, January 6, 6, 6.

And where is Mark Zuckerberg?

We need that $419 million again to pour in to our pre-selected

precincts so they can be taken over by private, you know, partisans and

get, quote unquote, get out the vote.

And so that'll happen, but we'll see.

The other thing to watch is what's the percentage of the non-election day vote.

It was 64%

2024.

It usually usually is about 40% at most in 2016, but in most years, it's 20 to 30%.

So if the Democrats can get out 65% of votes that nobody really shows their driver's license because they mail it in, and we know how there's been irregularities in registration, et cetera, then it's all bets are off.

So we'll see.

But right now, it looks good.

But I mean, it looks good for the Republicans also.

And

ask yourself, Sammy, so what's the game plan for the Democrats?

Is it to take Kamala Harris in a room and say,

during the riots, you said this will never stop.

You were gleeful when you said, this will never stop.

It's not going to stop.

They're going to run quotes of that.

And then you bailed out people.

They're going to run quotes of you doing that.

And then you were president.

And you never went to the border and you made fun of that.

So I haven't been to Europe.

And then you compared, you compare, you got those those acting kids.

You didn't even have a spontaneous group of children.

They were actors.

And then you got up on January 6th and said it was comparable to the 3,000 dead on

9-11 to the 2,500, 2,400 that were killed at Pearl Hall.

That was an insult.

What the blank are you doing?

That?

I don't think so.

Are they going to tell Joe, you've got to take...

I don't know, Adderall, or you've got to take the Montreal cognitive assessment that Trump took, but you can't go on like this, just screaming and yelling as an old shrill man, the same thing, mass, mass, mass, vaccination.

It doesn't work.

You're just, you are

a force multiplier of your failed agenda.

Yeah.

And I think that the one thing that you talk about quite often and that the Democrats talk about, I don't think they're going to be able to use it in another six, seven months because the January 6th calling it an insurrection, because I don't don't think very many people are believing that anymore and as you said it's a lot of their their own voters 56 57 58 percent don't believe it and you know why it's going to be higher because when somebody is mad they've been lied to that if you get three vaccinations you're home free and that guy over there that actually suffered through delta or Omicron and he's got naturally acquired immunity that he has to get a vaccination to protect when you know it won't protect him.

And there is some studies in Europe that suggest that people who have been vaccinated, as in the manner of fluchcott, sometimes for a small window of a week or two, four weeks, your immunity can go down as it adjusts to the vaccination.

And so more people in some countries have had,

have had COVID after being vaccinated than the momicron variant than the people who were unvaccinated.

So they're not not going to change.

They don't have a message.

The only thing I can think that can save them is a lot of money.

And,

you know, if they put Trump back on Facebook and he starts posting every day, if they're really smart, they restore his Twitter account because that was not helping him.

And then if COVID dies out with the Omicron, one way to look at Omicron, I'm not endorsing this, so I hope I'm not kicked off, but there are a lot of voices.

I heard someone in the news today

that said it's kind of like a booster shot.

In other words, most people get no more serious reaction to being infected with Omicron than they do a second Moderna shot, for example.

And therefore, it's creating a widespread herd immunity, at least for a few months, and driving out the more virulent strains.

And that's good, because we would have never got people to be so well, I should say, naturally vaccinated.

So that could help Biden, because we know one thing about Biden.

He takes credit for every good thing that Trump does, and he blames them for everything that was not Trump's fault.

So.

Yeah.

Well, I see them walking back their COVID policies anyway.

When they start saying that the

COVID, well, you know, when they start saying that, well, we think people are dying of other things in hospitals now, right?

After Trump has gone, you know, they're going to be walking back.

It was weaponized, as I said earlier, when we started off.

This thing was weaponized from the day one.

And it was, I'm not, don't you remember what Jane Fonda said?

And I'm quoting almost literally by memory, but she said something to the effect: thank God for COVID.

It destroyed Trump.

It was the only way to get rid of him.

And that's what the left felt.

So they equated Trump with the virus.

Everything he tried to do.

He had two reptilian advisors, Burks and Fauci.

They couldn't wait to see him gone and run over to CNN.

And was surrounded, you know,

by people who were trying to weaponize the virus in the bureaucratic state.

And they overwhelmed him.

And he did a good job with Operation Warpsbeat, the travel ban.

And innately, he was right.

And so was Scott Atlas, and so was Jay Bachari and the other Stanford epidemiologists who were all vilified.

Where I worked, they've been all vilified, and their characters have been attacked, but they were all right.

They all said the same thing.

You're not going to get rid of COVID.

This is a mysterious, virulent coronavirus.

We're going to

protect the sick, the vulnerable, and the elder.

They have to be vaccinated.

They have to be isolated.

You can't go near your granddad.

If you think you've had it, we can test people who are going to come in contact.

But the idea that you're going to get mass testing and mass vaccinations every couple of months for a new variant and you're going to ignore trying to find a protocol to treat it is insanity.

And they were right.

And what did they get for being right?

They got nothing but vilification.

Yeah, I know, but I'm just afraid that

the left's going to walk back their policies.

They're going to say, We did everything we can, we kept the numbers low.

It didn't end up being the Spanish influenza after all.

And now we're changing.

Now we're changing.

You think it's too late?

Okay, good.

I hope you're right.

You just said we kept the numbers low.

Depending on how you

start the first COVID death, you can make a good argument about 380 to 400,000 people died on Trump's watch when he had no vaccinations, not one, until after the election.

And you can argue that Joe Biden inherited three vaccination

protocols that were effective for the first original strain, and yet he's got more,

more,

we're up to, what, 840,000 deaths, more people died on his watch.

Can I say something?

You have to ask me, Sammy, you're the ghost.

But that is

the calculus, is not that.

They all just say we kept them low compared to what they could have been and left it, leave it at an imaginary number.

And now we're switching policy because it seems to us that the Omicron is less, it may be more virulent, but it's a lot of studies coming out that says, you know know what?

You think it's not a zero-sum game.

It is a zero-sum game.

So you took all these millions and millions of people that needed surgeries and mammograms and PSA tests and asthma treatments and millions of children that needed to have social interaction and companionship.

and instruction and hundreds of thousands of special needs kids that needed constant attention.

And you shut them in their homes and you made their parents lose their jobs because unlike the Newsoms and the Pelosis and the rest of the people, their families, they didn't have the money.

They had to quit and stay home and watch your children fail on Zoom.

You did all of that.

So there was a cost to your timidity.

And then adding insult to injury, every single one of you people broke the protocol.

How dare you tell us that we have to wear masks when Gavin Newsom went to the French laundry, when London,

the mayor of San Francisco went to the French laundry, when Nancy Pelosi snuck to a hair

dresser, when the governor of Michigan's husband cut in front of the boat line to launch his boat, when Mayor Lightfoot broke the protocol.

All of them did.

Fauci did at a baseball game.

AOC was giving, still giving lectures about three shots and boosters, and New York is wonderful, and Florida is terrible where she

stealthily flew down there and got caught without a mask, and then hugging people in Florida.

And guess what?

She got COVID.

Well, what happened to the three shots?

She wasn't very stealthy, if I can put that in.

Well, she's never been very stealthy, but she didn't announce I'm going to Florida, obviously, because

that's supposedly no man's land.

Florida's becoming the left-wing mordor, you know.

Okay, so I hope that you're right, and the clarity of the American people is what you say.

However, I think they're still going to say we kept them low compared to what they would have been, and all those measures were important.

They're going to make an argument.

They will say that.

You're right about that, but I don't think it'll be convincing.

I think they're going to have a big, big shock.

I have a feeling that they have no idea how angry people are about gas and immigration and especially crime and they are sick and tired of being told

that race race race is the end of everything it's all there is is race race race they're tired of the word diversion equity inclusion they're tired of being told they're supremacist or they have privilege and somehow

the black leadership hangs out with the white elite leadership.

They're both elites, the Opras or the LeBrons and the Pelosi.

I don't know what the problem is, but they don't understand

that out of the 250 million,

I guess it's 250 million, 240 million white people, the vast majority of them are middle class and there's more in actual numbers who are poor than other groups.

And when they're told they have privilege, they don't see it.

Their kids don't go to college.

They didn't go to college.

And they don't like the white elite bicostal bunch any more than anybody else does.

So when you start demonizing those people, they get angry.

And now there's two constituencies of the woke movement: the minority community and wealthy white suburbanites.

Well, the minority community is on record that they do not want to defund the police.

They do not like people grifting off the BLM movement.

They do not like these district attorneys letting criminals out and coming back and killing them.

And the white rich community is scared to death that the Range Rover will be hijacked or that another person will be shot in a Beverly Hills mansion.

or that somebody will follow you home in your jaguar and rob you as you park in your bel Air Estate.

So they've already lost the white middle class and white working class, but they're going to lose a lot of minority voters and a lot of white suburbanized on the one issue of crime alone.

All right.

Well, Victor, we need to take a minute for a word from our sponsors, and then we'll come right back to talk a little bit about some more of your books and your experiences writing those books.

So let's have a word from our sponsor.

Welcome back.

I just want to remind everybody that Victor has a website, victorhanson.com, and please come.

We'd love you to buy a subscription, but there's also the free subscription, and we've just implemented a newsletter and post mailings, emails, for each post that we put up, or at least every two posts.

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But please come be one of our paid subscribers and get the VDH Ultra content.

Victor, we've been talking about your books at the end, and I think we're on the Who Killed Homer with John Heath, Wars of the Ancient Greeks, and which was an edited volume, I believe, and then The Soul of Battle.

So, we would love to hear your experience or your writing, what you did really to write these books.

Well, in 1998, i co-wrote who killed homer which was about the death of classics and the rediscovery of greek wisdom with my co-author john heath a professor of classics at santa clara university somebody had gone to graduate school at stanford in the phd program in classics so i'd known john for a long time over 20 years when we wrote that and our argument was simply this and i think it's kind of prescient about academic in general that

you're a professor you're supposed to do research

to do two things advance the field collectively and enrich your teaching so you're always coming across new ideas to help find new angles of instruction new enlightenment to your students but we have created sort of a a wealthy elite in academia, mostly at the Ivy League prestigious schools, and their teaching loads went down and their time off went up and yet when you look at their research it was of two types so narrow or in the R field philological that you know I mean I'm not saying that an article called the use of the optative mood in the speeches in Xenophon is not valuable in some weird way it could be 20 years ago but not valuable in the sense of how much money was invested for that professor to take a semester off and not teach He could do that or she could do that in their evening.

And then the other problem, we were subsidizing what was then called race, class, and gender, which was the parent that bore the bastard offspring, diversity, equity, and inclusion.

So there was too much research, too much snobbery, and not enough populist teaching.

It was kind of the MAGA agenda for academics.

And then we said that people who were very affluent and very privileged were cannibalizing their own cultural heritage.

They were saying the United States was flawed at the beginning.

Western civilization never outgrew its pernicious origins and birth, and it has to be destroyed or recalibrated to find salvation.

And we said this is not only non-demonstrable and false, but the people who say this are the perfect epitomies of Western affluence and leisures and they're hypocrites.

And that was made in kind of a take-no-prisoners argument, and we just quoted people.

So we didn't say that they're doing esoteric research, we quoted it.

We didn't just say they're doing politically correct essays that will be worthless in 30 years.

We quoted it.

We didn't just say that

they're not teaching.

We gave statistics on the average load going down.

So students' tuition went up, their room and board went up, the cost of education went up, their indebtedness went up, and the number of people who were were really trying to major in legitimate fields like history or classics went down and those who did major in those fields were not getting adequate instruction i noticed just to finish very quickly i noticed i i started i got a phd in 1979 80

and i farmed for four and a half years and when i went back in 84

I did keep up Greek and Latin every night when I was farming, but my point is this.

By 1995, when I would interview, I hired maybe 10 or 12 people over that 21-year period.

I noticed that they did not, these are people from Harvard or Yale or Stanford or Berkeley or UCLA or Princeton.

They did not know Latin and Greek very well, not the way that we'd been taught.

And when you asked them questions about, well, here's a page from Tassus, would you read it?

they objected that that was an unfair way to interview them.

Or how would you teach Caesar or you know lysias to an undergraduate so they were not leaving instruction when you ask them questions in the interviews that all they want to do is talk about their thesis i would say how far is athens from sparta blank why did the misenian world collapse blank

what's the difference between athenian democracy and roman republicanism blank

Tell me how a trireme was powered.

How did it work?

What was it operated on?

Blank.

How many plays did Aristophanes write?

What's your favorite one?

Why?

Blank, blank, blank, blank.

Can I ask you, what did they know?

Like, what would they tell you?

I can tell you what they knew.

They wanted to tell me.

They wanted to tell me that they knew the

poetics of gender in Menander's Deus Clause.

And they wanted to tell me that they knew the sexual ambiguity of the rights of Sibylle and Asia Minor didyma or something.

That's what they wanted to tell me.

It was some very esoteric thing that they'd written a paper on in a very esoteric seminar and they wrote a very even more esoteric thesis on it.

And so

that, and for our students that were quote unquote marginalized, they were mostly Mexican-American or Southeast Asian or poor whites from the Oklahoma diaspora.

How could you hire those people and turn them loose?

You couldn't.

It was very hard to find somebody and we found very good professors but they were usually not from those schools but the problem was that they had so strangled the profession there were no jobs so the profession was turning out 150 10 phds and there were maybe 10 or 12 jobs so all of a sudden cal state fresno that started you know at better salary than Stanford did, it was cheaper to live here, you get people that wanted to teach.

And they were doing you a favor, they thought, but we thought we were doing a favor for them because they were unemployable.

We put all that in the book, but also, you know, about what the West was.

And we went through every

criticisms of the Greeks, slavery, sexism, racism.

We went through all of it.

It's all there.

And I think it's been a pretty good,

it's stood the test of time.

The other book, The Wars of the Ancient Greeks, was a weird thing.

John Keegan, the military historian, once called me and said, I'm I'm doing a

history of war for each chronological time period.

Would you write the first one on the wars of the Greeks?

And so I just said, well, what's the rules?

And he said, you know, here's so many pictures.

I need, this is the type of audience.

So I wrote it.

And it sold pretty well.

the basics of what causes wars in the ancient world, how were they fought, were they decisive, what did they solve, not solve?

How many people were injured?

What was the religious, economic, social, political, cultural impact of war?

How was it portrayed in literature, art?

It's all there.

But it was funny when that series was sold

to different countries, I got a call from the French publisher, and they said, I won't mention a person's name.

He's a very famous French classicist.

And he said, this is,

I was not asked to do this.

This is is an insult to my dignity that you would quote unquote ask

an american farmer from the provinces of the united states who teaches at a third tier state agricultural school to dare write this when i was available and then he wrote 20 pages of what he thought were corrections, all in French.

So I was out farming during the summer, so I spent a whole month and I read the entire French thing.

And out of the 28, I think 31

complaints, I found one where I had defined the Hellenistic period in a different way, a 19th century ending date.

Rather than the Battle of Actium, I had used the destruction of Carthage as people had done in one line.

And that was it.

And I bet he still felt good about his, you are a provincial fool.

Yeah, he did.

I said, this is the most.

most, and then what was funny was I

read the whole thing in French.

He wouldn't read, you know, he had to read the French translation of mine.

And then he said things that weren't true.

So I went back and I thought, this guy is at the Sorbonne or maybe it was the University of Rennes.

I don't know.

But I thought, surely he knows English.

So I went and took the English thing that I wrote.

And then I took the French translation and I collated line.

And it was so bad that he was was attacking a French translation that had mistranslated in English.

And he never even took the time to read the English.

So he was accusing me of things I hadn't written.

So when I did it, I sent them, and John Keegan just said, send it to the publisher.

And you know what I got back?

A little quirk line in French.

All your criticisms

are legitimate.

And the objections are unfounded.

That was it.

No

thank you for spending 50 hours of your time, you know?

So I have a certain eccentric anger about that book, not directed at the late John Kiggan, who was a wonderful person, but the French who did that.

It went into about four or five languages.

And the final one was, you said the wars.

The soul of battle, but why don't we save that for our next.

We are definitely out of time.

We would like to thank everybody.

We have new social media faces on me we and on gitter so please if those are your preferred social media come join us before i leave i got some emails criticizing me uh-oh

because you say victor can i say something

and you can say whatever you want i'm i know that i'm a blabber mouth but

you just have to interrupt and say this is the way it's going to be take charge all right all right i will become alexander the great or somebody such as such

you know you don't be clear papta or something oh i i i i'm offended you know what i i get offended when they feel like women have to aspire to be some great woman from the past i think that gender doesn't make any difference and you should aspire to be some great whoever the great was not male he was uh non-identifying is that what you're saying

That's true, but I didn't actually mean that.

I just meant, you know, with all the power and force of Alexander the Great, he was quite a combatant on the battlefield.

At least that's my understanding of him.

There he was.

Okay.

All right.

Thanks, everybody, for listening.

Yeah, thank you.

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