The Culturalist: Without Self-Reflection

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Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

This is The Culturalist and we are looking at a few things today on the climate change accords, the infrastructure spending bill mandates, and also the attempted assassination of Prime Minister of Iraq and maybe a few other things.

Victor is the Martin and Nilly Anderson Senior Fellow in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, and he is the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

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Welcome back.

Victor, how are you doing today?

I'm doing very well, Sammy.

I'm going to do well.

I'm at a Bradley board meeting, the nonprofit philanthropic board in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

I just arrived.

Oh, great.

And so you have a good week ahead of you, I hope.

How's your book doing?

It's doing very well.

It's, let's see, this, they're in the middle of this week.

And when everybody listens to this, it's released.

There'll be still a few more slots.

But Megan Kelly, the former Fox and NBC anchor, interviewed me for the new criterion that Roger Kimball hosted for about an hour and 10 minutes.

And that should be aired on, I think it's C-SPAN 2, Book Talk.

And Peter Robinson just came out with an on-common knowledge hour in the Hoover platform on the book.

Yeah, and I've listened to that.

That's an excellent interview.

Really?

Thank you.

And then as well, Hillsdale College, I did a number of hours of taping.

They have a very professional production team, I mean, with the sets and the actual video.

I hope I lived up to the quality of that show, but they have an online, I did a World War II course, but I think in about 10 days, they're going to have a course on the dying citizen.

And I did an hour for each chapter of the book.

So it's going to be kind of a long course.

And I think they are going to limit it to the first 20,000 people that sign up.

Okay.

And I thought that was already filled up, or is that not already?

I think it's close close to being filled up.

I haven't filled

in the last two days.

This is the fourth week that the book is out.

It just, yeah, so it's doing very well.

It was on the New York Times bestseller list for three weeks.

I imagine by now it's probably off a little bit.

Okay.

Are you ready for some questions on the current news?

Yes, I am.

All right.

I am.

Well, the first thing on dock is the infrastructure spending bill, I think it was $1.7 trillion.

The Democrats seem to be lamenting that it wasn't passed before

the elections, the Virginia elections, and they feel like it affected Mikoloff's, well, the fact that he was defeated.

And I was looking at some articles in the Atlantic, and I know that they're arch rivals and owned by Steve Jobs' widow.

And so tend to be, yeah, Lisa Jobs, but found this interesting article on the current infrastructure bill, and they wrote in it that moderate Democrats worry the price tag for the safety net bill is too high,

meaning the cost of it.

Progressives think it's too low.

The two camps have been slow to coalesce, but Biden associates hope their collective fear of a drubbing next year in the elections might just force a detente.

And it goes on to talk about that the Republicans are currently engaged in voter suppression and gerrymandering districts.

And I have to say, I kind of smiled at that from here in California as we watch our own districts getting gerrymandered by Democrats.

But nonetheless, I was wondering what your thoughts were on this bill and those reflections by the Atlantic.

Well, when you, depending on whom you talk to, whether Democrat or Republican, Liberal, Conservative, the word infrastructure is the key, how you define it.

And I think Republicans think about 80% of the bill is

inclusion, diversity, green, you know, wokeism, entitlement, social spending.

And remember, we had that talk about a month ago where we were using the word infrastructure.

We Americans now for everything, you know, prenatal care is infrastructure, abortion advice is infrastructure.

Solar panels are infrastructure.

Everything is infrastructure.

So the actual amount that the people in America thought they were getting, this trillion dollar plus for what, widening 101 in California, maybe helping the 99 in the Blood Alley in the Central Valley here, building another reservoir at Temperance Flat, just to label regional concerns where I live, I don't think you're going to get any of that.

But then it begs a question.

And oh, by the way, Sammy, you said, well, the Democrats Democrats thought that if they had passed this, they would have had momentum and they might have avoided the catastrophe in Virginia.

And that's a very strange way of thinking that they have.

In other words, people were angry at the entire Biden agenda, and then they're saying, if we just had given more of the agenda before,

they would have liked us.

Now, they didn't like anything we did.

They didn't like you know spending money and printing money and running up two trillion dollars debt and and having zero interest rates while you're printing all this money and we're up to 5% to 8% annual inflation.

But if we'd just been more inflationary, that's absurd.

So

the real issue is, why in the heck did 13 Republicans, I understand Adam Kissinger and all those people, you know, the people who, some of the people who impeached Trump and will not be running again.

But there were a lot that weren't.

And I don't understand why you would sign on as a Republican conservative, if that would be true, you were conservative.

Why would you support this bill, given that it's not going to be a very effective way to build infrastructure, given all the lard in it?

Yeah, didn't 12 Republicans sign on to 13, I think.

13.

And then you're going to empower Joe Biden.

And I mean, When you vote for this and he gets momentum, this isn't just a Democrat versus Republican.

This guy is whether he knows he is, he's a socialist.

And so what these 13 Republicans did, they gave him a boost and that boost will ripple throughout the border, $450,000 for illegal alien families who broke the law and are going to be rewarded apparently.

And it's going to empower the

cutback on federal leasing of new oil lands, liberal judges.

That whole agenda has been empowered.

It's a very radical agenda.

This is not Bill Clinton and bipartisanship of the 90s.

So, why would they do that?

I don't understand.

It was nihilistic.

And why didn't the Republicans have some inkling of it?

Because when you talk to Republican congressmen, they were very nonchalant, nobody in their right mind is going to vote for this.

Well, yeah, 13 of your guys did.

You need more control.

And, you know, they should have lobbied them.

And that sets up a lot of momentum for this reconciliation bill, which is going to be really inflationary.

And so it's the same thing with the impeachment of Trump.

I mean, if Liz Cheney thinks that there's existential problems with the way Trump conducts himself, well, then make your point and criticize him.

But she did vote for about 85% of his initiative, but then also balance your criticism of Trump with this socialist left that is actually opposed to everything that you've ever embraced.

And by that, I mean you say to yourself,

I'm against abortion.

I want

deregulation.

I want energy development, especially in Wyoming, to take her case.

I want conservative jobs.

I'm getting all that as I've never gotten it before with Donald Trump, but I've got to work on him because he is uncouth, crude.

But on the other side, I surely don't want to empower them because they represent everything

that my entire family is opposed, socialism.

What these people do then,

they get obsessed with the tick on your nose, and then they, you know, they take a chainsaw and cut your head off.

That's what they've done.

And they've empowered this agenda.

And this is another example of it.

So I was very disappointed.

I think everybody was shocked.

And they're just thinking, you know what?

This is why you can't trust the mainstream Republican Party.

I think conservatives, populist nationalists,

everybody's upset at this.

That's something about this Orthodox Republican Party.

They all want to get along with these people who are destroying, not all of them, but a lot of them want to get along.

They don't want to stand up and speak out.

So, you know what?

You vote for this thing, and it's not infrastructure.

It's not infrastructure.

You are giving them hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars for things that have nothing to do other than to grow government and feed their constituencies and bloat the government even larger.

And you know what happens.

You can just look at Northern Virginia.

This is a bill that feeds that whole Northern Virginia paradigm of federal workers, bureaucrats, et cetera, et cetera.

Why would you want to empower that when you don't get any bang for the buck as far as actual infrastructure dollars?

And yet they do.

And then they're going to, you know, as I said, it's like pushing.

Joe Biden was trying to go up the top of the summit and he was sliding back.

And as he slid back, millions of lives will be better off that he's sliding.

And these guys came in and they pushed him over the top.

I think everybody's a little unsettled too, because it's clearly going to lead to inflation in a time when the economy is slowing because there's no workers.

So there's going to be this whole stagflationary, or at least there's this uncomfortable feeling that we might be headed for a stagflationary period.

Well, because this way, if you are getting, if you've got $10,000 and you put it in the bank and you're getting half of 1% interest and you're losing 7%

of your money just sitting there, what are you going to do with it?

Well, you're going to do what everybody does.

You're going to go put it in the stock market.

But that stock market's not reflecting actual business performance, corporate profits.

It's not.

It's just reflecting the fact that everybody didn't do anything for a year and they got a bunch of funny money and they can't get any money in their savings accounts.

And they're losing it now at 7%.

So they're looking for real estate, you know, flip a house, go into a mutual fund, do anything.

And that's not reality.

That's not a healthy economy.

All right.

So let's move on then to the 26 states who are pushing back against the mandate and filing petitions with the federal system.

And also recently,

an interview by the Surgeon General, Dr.

Vivek Murthy, where he was defending it, saying that, and I think this is the democratic argument that it protects co-workers and customer and/or clients of businesses.

And that's why they're asking for these businesses with more than 100 workers to have this mandate or to have regular testing.

And so that's more or less what it is.

And what are your thoughts on it?

I know that there's new antiviral pills pills coming out too and I meant to mention that as well.

Well start with the premise that Joe Biden said he wasn't going to have mandates.

He was asked that.

You're going to have mandate?

No.

And the reason he said that at the time, I think, was to get the larger landscape.

Joe Biden came in and inherited Operation Warp Speed, Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson-Johnson, which were shortly going to come out.

And then 17 million people were vaccinated, a million a day, and there was no Delta virus.

And so if you look at the precipitous drop in February and March, he took credit for it.

And so all of March, he said, hey, look at me.

Donald Trump is responsible for all 390,000 people that died.

Well, now 370,000 have died in a much shorter time under his tenure.

And so you can't believe anything he says.

So now he's the mandate because

it was out of control.

It wasn't just out of control.

It was out of control after everybody said it was over with.

And this new mutant.

And then it was out of control if they said this.

We've got to remember, Sammy, what they told us about the vaccination.

If you get the two Pfizers, if you get the two Modernas,

you're 96% protected.

You don't have to ferret out every little person and say, oh, you're not vaccinated.

You have armor on.

You don't care.

You're not going to be a Karen.

That's how it was sold to everybody.

Get vaccinated and let everybody worry about their problem, but you don't have a problem now.

And then the Delta variant came along.

And this arrogant, quote-unquote, science that never expresses any doubt or uncertainty with these pseudo-ideas, they were embarrassed.

So then they said, well,

it does protect you from serious illness and hospitalization, and that is true.

It is.

And so it's a wise thing to get, probably,

but they don't know exactly the cost-benefit analyses for certain groups.

Obviously, if you're my age, 68, it makes sense to err on the side of vaccination, given the tables,

age-related morbidities.

But if you're, I don't know, 15 to 30 and you're a young male and you see some of the side effects, small though they are as a percentage, but COVID is a smaller percentage.

So everybody should have that freedom to make those choices.

They're intelligent people.

And then the second thing is we heard and heard and heard from the whole establishment that natural immunity faded, it wasn't as effective.

And yet, when you look at the Israeli study of the Pfizer vaccination, which I think most scientists think is the most comprehensive and detailed and has the less innate fallacies or flaws in the methodologies, they kind of show that natural immunity, at least originally, gives you many more antibodies.

We don't really know the role of T cells and B cells, but more antibodies and probably for as long or almost as long a time as the Pfizer and the Moderna do.

I don't know about the Johnson-Johnson.

So my point is,

the Johnson-Johnson are weaker, but my point is, let's just review very quickly.

So there's probably,

I don't know what there is,

we're getting on the projections of two and a half to three per known case, we're getting up to about 100 million people have had COVID.

There's going to be overlap with vaccinations.

So what I'm getting at is we've got about 75% of the country that's either vaxed or had natural immunity.

A, we know a lot more about the variant, the Delta variant now.

We know how to treat it.

It seems to be more infectious, but when you look at the actual fatality rates, they tend to be probably less than initial COVID variant.

And what's happening is it's slowly starting to fade.

Now it may spike again in winter, but my point, at least in the United States, is

we're getting near that taboo word herd immunity.

And there's all these protocols with monoclonal antibodies and

certain types of antiviral drugs, certain therapeutics, and now we have the Merck and the Pfizer pills coming out.

I think the Merck, or maybe it's the Pfizer, I can't remember which one, is promised to be 80% efficacy.

Take a pill.

All of these then suggest that why would you fire a soldier or a 10-year military veteran because he doesn't want to be vaxed when A, he may have had COVID, wouldn't you at least give him a chance to have an antibody test to see if he still has antibodies?

Yeah, I don't know why they don't include that, right?

They should.

Or why don't you just put a stay on it because the virus is starting to dip and let's see if these therapeutics have less side effects than the vaccinations and greater or as good efficacy.

So you're out in the field and you got a headache, you take a field kit.

If you've got COVID, just like if you got the flu, you take one of these pills and you're not infectious probably within 48 hours.

So, I just don't see it.

It's now kind of a control thing, I think, with Biden.

He's got that age-related fixation: wear a mask, get a vax, get a vax, wear a mask.

Then, just when you think, okay, I'm willing to concede that, then you see him without a mask or sneeze and has sinus material on his hands, and then shakes with it.

So the whole thing is just a joke.

And, you know, I, as I said earlier, I did the right thing.

I got the Moderna.

I had a really bad reaction, probably because I had always had bad reactions with an immune problem I had.

I don't, I did what they said.

And then I think I got COVID only because

Two weeks ago, I was asked to get an antibody test for a medical procedure and I had almost 20, over 20, 2,300 antibody level and they thought that would be highly irregular after nine months of the Moderna.

But if that 101 fever I had for two days, you know, two months ago was COVID, and I think it was because people, I was around, people had it,

it was about like the reaction to the second Moderna shot, and it was over.

And so I don't know.

It just seems that the more the virus wanes, the more people are vaccinated, the more we have 100 million people probably with antibodies, the more strident strident they're doubling down on these mandates.

And as I said earlier, this is the left that told us

that

the

Republican riot, the white supremacists, they were massaging COVID and the lockdown on racial terms to hurt marginalized people.

That's what they told us.

And remember in May of excuse me, June of 2020, we had all of these protests where a thousand medical care providers said, oh, by the way, social distancing, masking, all that doesn't apply to people who want to go out and protest for BLM in George Floyd.

Would they get an exemption?

Because their mental health is more important than COVID.

In other words, we don't really care if they're super spreaders and they all congregate and spread it because...

We don't have any science.

We're just political hacks.

And we make it up as we go.

Because

what I'm getting at, Sammy, is that right now, when you go to a restaurant in the Bay Area or you go to a restaurant in New York and they have an ID requirement, i.e.

a vaccination ID requirement, it reflects the numbers of people who have been vaccinated.

And the left said that people of color for historical reasons were not being vaccinated and this wasn't fair.

Well, if you think that's not fair, then don't have that requirement because what you're doing is you're turning it into Lester Maddox and Bull Connor's lunch counter circa 1960 in Mississippi.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, their whole agenda is turning everything to that, it seems like on the left, at least in education.

You're just crazy.

As I said earlier, I was in New York and I saw an African-American family and they went in and they said it was a breakfast place.

And he said, I've had COVID.

I believed him.

But I mean, if he had an ID card that could just show an antibody level, why wouldn't you let him in?

And they turned away the whole family.

And then I looked around and I thought, wow, everybody here is either asian or white and i thought who's behind this rule oh it's bill de blasio the person who calls everybody a racist so i don't have a problem either way but when you start injecting race and you do it selectively then it's bankrupt Yeah, and it really shows that the left is not very self-reflective, is it?

So let's turn then to the climate change conference, the UN Climate Change Conference.

I was just reading an article from the online magazine Spiked, and it was on climate derangement syndrome.

So you know it's got to be good.

And he got down to saying,

talking about how all of the conference attendees came out with all these crazy statements about climate change after it.

And he said, prime ministers, bishops, princes, and noisy greens all tried to outdo each other with their apocalyptic warnings.

It has been a grim competition of catastrophes and orgy of hyperbolic prophecies that wouldn't look out of place in the book of Revelations.

And then he went on to show all the quotes from everything they were saying.

And I thought two things were interesting on all those quotes.

One is he didn't have a quote from Joe Biden, so I don't know what happened to Joe Biden's.

you know, quote or persona.

And then finally, Greta Thunberg got out there blaming the entire industrial revolution and therefore Britain, because it was the first one, was the most culpable on the primary of her villains.

So I thought that was an interesting lead into

what are your thoughts on that climate change conference or climate change in general?

Committee of Parties 26th is a total joke.

Either you got four, what, 400 private jets fly in?

to Glasgow of all places, a thousand gas guzzling limels.

Why didn't everybody just go there and Teslas?

Or why didn't they fly commercial?

Or why didn't they take some kind of alcohol-fueled train?

The point is they're always lecturing everybody and they never live by the ramifications of their own ideology.

So sick of Prince Charles and this Greta Thunberg.

She reminds me of, you know, the Children's Crusade.

She's no Joan of Arc, that's for sure.

She's like that guy that, you know, after that tragic shooting in the high school, he's become a big spokesman.

So they get these underage kids, underage meaning they're they're not adults kids that are underage and then they

they we're supposed to listen to them as if they're because they have no reason an education they have some kind of divine voice that goes right to you that's kind of like the joan of arc syndrome that they haven't been corrupted yet or they're innocent and they're truth-telling and she's a total moron and she has this problem where she looks like the exorcist actress you know she gets angry and their eyes start to look Linda Blair.

Yeah, it's sad.

And then people listen to this stuff.

British Empire, most of the reason that she's in Glasgow right now and she's not in some god-forsaken place in, you know, I don't know where Outer Mongolia or central Uganda or in the high...

you know, Andes Mountains trapped is the industrial revolution that Britain created, that created every good thing that we have today.

I mean,

the modern industrial world has made man's longevity go up from about 40, 38

to 76, 78.

She's going to live a long time because of that.

But only why anybody would showcase that?

Then there's this principle that as no one but John Kerry.

Without self-reflection, right?

No, and it's just when they, John Kerry, I remember, was asked last year about it.

He just said that he had to fly the Heinz ketch-up jet, his wife's jet that he married into,

because he had to get there faster and quicker and more efficient with less wear and tear on him because he was doing it all for us.

It's what Al Gore said when he sold his cable TV to an anti-Semitic Al Jazeera that was funded by Gutters.

Petro Dollars.

This is a green Al Gore.

And then he tried to rush the sales so he could avoid the capital gains tax increase.

And by the way,

thinking of John Kerry again, that's exactly what John Kerry did when he moved his boat to Rhode Island, I think it was, or New Hampshire, so he could cut back on his property tax after advocating higher taxes.

So these people do this stuff in part

as a ritual of a performance art, a virtue signaling, because they do not ever really give up the comfort of their own lives.

And so it's aimed at the middle class.

It's aimed at the middle class.

They're saying, you know what?

You have three bedrooms and two baths, and it's pretty ugly.

And that house, and it's so crappy, and you've got that stupid SUV, and you've got a Winnebago parked around the back, and you've got all this crap.

a snowmobile on you water ski we're just going to cut all out you don't have any of the taste of the stuff go read vanity fair or vogue if you want to see how you're supposed to spend your excess money and then we get down to the heart of the issue and that is is the climate changing?

Perhaps,

but it always does.

And we don't know as humans yet because we don't, we've only been in California has not been collecting data that was accurate on climate, for example, since about 1850.

I mean, only since 1850.

So we're going to be able to do that.

Yeah, sure.

We don't really know.

The Industrial Revolution made that all possible too, by the way.

The collecting of data.

I can tell you that in the 1970s, maybe it was 73 73 or 74,

our class had a little thing on the new polar ice age, the little polar ice age.

And there was Newsweek.

Everybody knows that cover.

They showed a picture of the earth and then it was covered with ice.

And I can remember in high school that you, for about three years,

we just didn't go to high school every morning because of a fog alert.

It was so wet and so cold.

And of all places, the San Joaquin Valley, you would get 100 nights a year, it seemed like all of November, December, January, February, where you would get foggy mornings.

And then you got enormous, I can remember where my

10 miles from my house, the Kings River flooded, and then all of the Tulare Lake basin filled up again.

And everybody was saying, this is, I don't know, we're going to, and all the fruit growers said, I don't know if we're going to be able to farm because

the the blossoms are all getting blossom rot from these range, you know, as early as late February.

And then we get get too high humidity, you're putting all the sulfur on the grapes or rotting.

And now it's just the opposite.

Oh, we were below average rainfall, da, da, da, we're in a, we're in a drop.

The difference is then they didn't say, oh, the world's, we've got to,

we've got to get a bigger V8 so we can warm up

the world, you know.

We've got to leave our thermostats on so we can get some more heat because we're in the ice age.

It's not what they said.

Now we say that.

We've got to do the opposite, but they don't have enough exact knowledge.

At least they don't have enough exact knowledge, put it this way.

I'm not a climate denialist.

If you show me the data, and I've looked at some of it, that incrementally in the last 30 or 40 years, the United States has got a little warmer.

But I don't know if we know exactly why that is, or at least why it is to the extent that you would wreck the economy.

Because if you wreck the economy, you're going to destroy the lives of millions of people, just like the quarantine did.

But they always go out this, you know, if you lock down and you flatten the curve, oh no, not flatten the curve for two weeks, for a year, then the Oxford model will be avoided that says 3 million Americans are going to be killed or 2 million.

And then all of a sudden we think, wow,

all of these surges in prostate cancer, breast cancer, heart problem, all of these people just stayed isolated in their homes, terrified to go to a doctor for, what, 15 months?

And so they have to be a little humility involved and just say, why don't they just go to this and say, you know what, there's kind of an irony here.

We all flew because we wanted the ease of modern life and we really appreciate it, but we're not sure whether our lifestyles, especially our lifestyles, the elite that are here at Glasgow, contribute to an artificial climate that might, if it raises global temperatures a degree or two, it could really affect seaside communities, etc.

Therefore, we want to give incentives for private enterprise to accelerate electric cars if they have a power generation source.

And then we start getting into what?

Just to finish the paradoxes.

You know why they don't say that?

Because there's only really one power source that's clean burning according to their definition and doesn't release heat from the fuel.

Let me guess.

That's nuclear.

And to a lesser extent, hydroelectric.

They hate both of them.

They think hydroelectric, they want to blow up dams.

They don't want to, serious, they do, they talk about it.

They don't want to build more dams.

And more importantly, they do not want to build, they're decommissioning nuclear plants.

But that is the only way you're going to produce enough electricity.

to fuel these batteries that they're going to power us at night or our electric cars, etc.

And they don't even get near what are you going to do with these millions of new batteries and cars and appliances, et cetera, et cetera,

that are going to have to be discarded somewhere.

I don't know what you're going to do with them.

Can they be recycled?

And the big elephants in the room are India and China, the two biggest polluters now.

I think not just per capita, but in the world.

And so what are you going to do with them?

Are you going to go tell Communist China with 1.4 billion people that's about ready to invade Taiwan, hey, I think you guys got, you're building way too much coal.

Do not import coal from the United States or Australia.

Just don't do it.

President Qi, we're not going to allow you to do it.

No, he's going to say, screw you.

And then if you're India and you tell the Indians that, they're going to get even more clever.

They're going to say, as Greta Thunberg said, well, you had the Industrial Revolution.

We're having ours.

So you had 150 years of coal.

We're going to have another 150.

You know, they don't quite say that, but that's a subtext.

So if you're not going to address almost a third of the world that are the big polluters, the United States has reduced carbon emissions faster than any major industrial country in the world.

Yeah.

And yet, we have to listen.

We're still flagellating ourselves.

Yeah, we are.

We always do.

And Donald Trump was right to get out.

He basically said,

I don't want to be in any group that impinges on U.S.

sovereignty, A, gives a blank check to China to pollute, and C,

when we have already met their goals by converting from coal to natural gas, and we want to increase nuclear.

That was the way to go.

And everybody said that what he was filling the blanks.

All right.

With that, I would like to segue into the Iraqi Prime Minister Al-Kahimi, who they tried, someone tried to assassinate with.

And what I thought was interesting about the story is the attempted attack was by drone

and

also that there's still this internissant strife in Iraq where there is a pro-Iranian Shiite group that was out protesting outside of his government buildings which I interestingly are still in the green zone that the United States has set up

and so all of those things together just seem to me very interesting about this Iraqi assassination attempt, not the least of which is that the prime minister himself was wounded by a knife.

So I don't know what these drones, what these drones were carrying, but the whole thing just sounded interesting to me, but I'm not sure.

And just actually, what are your thoughts?

We haven't heard much about Iraq.

I mean, they seem to have a prime minister.

They seem to be limping along in some sort of consensual government form, but what are your thoughts?

We'll start with iraq i wrote an article i don't know three or four years ago and then i kind of wrote it again and i said people had it wrong about the good war and the bad war remember that obama institutionalized this idea that iraq was this horrible place and it was a horrible place and the war was terrible maybe it was but afghanistan afghanistan was the only thing that bush did right and he actually surged troops.

But if you look at the two, by any measure, Iraq was always more important.

It was right in the Middle East.

It was converting its oil revenues to nefarious purposes.

The UN had condemned it.

The U.S.

Congress had voted with overwhelmingly democratic support to remove Saddam.

And it wasn't just, as everybody said, weapons of mass destruction.

That was the error of the Bush administration.

And I had written that as well, because all they did is say, weapons of mass destruction.

There were 23 reasons that the U.S.

Congress said that Saddam is a danger to the United States and the Western world and the Middle East and the world at large.

And they listed them.

He violated the no-fly zones.

He's giving $25,000 to every suicide murderer that goes into Israel and kills people.

He's got every terrorist in the world.

Abu Nadal is there.

He's got the architects of the first world trade bombing that tried to take down the, they're there he has wiped out a lot of the marsh arabs he's committed genocide against the kurbs he's violated all of the 1991 so-called peace accords that we did after the first i could go on there's 23 of them and so we had reason a lot more reasons at just as many reasons to go take him out in theory than we did maybe the Taliban.

Because once

Bin Laden left and was up in the Hindu Kush war, way up in the Pakistan, the Taliban said he's gone.

We have no problem with you.

They're lying, of course.

They were enablers.

But my point is we really overdid the good war, bad war.

And then when you look at the mechanics of the war, Afghanistan was always the harder nut to crack.

It had rough terrain.

We had to have Pakistan, a nuclear Pakistan, right across the border.

appeasing, feeding, winking and nodding at us, threatening us, cajoling us, begging us, blackmailing us, where they empowered the Taliban.

There were no ports.

You could not bring in supplies by ocean.

It was surrounded by the Russians and the Iranians and the Pakistanis.

And it was landlocked and mountainous, and it had no history of modern industrial life.

And when you looked at Iraq,

it had all this oil.

It had a pretty clear terrain.

I was embedded there twice.

So when you go there, when you get up in a helicopter or a plane, you can see for miles.

It was kind of tailor-made for a United States firepower if you had to use it, as we learned in the first Cold War.

And there were some key U.S.

interests right next to it, i.e.

Israel and the Gulf oil-producing states.

So that being said, and

there was a much greater tradition of what I would call people in Iraq.

that were educated and some of them westernized, not a lot of them.

But what I'm getting at is that it doesn't surprise me that there was a president and a parliament and more or less elections going on in Iraq in a way that had not been as true under us in Afghanistan, and that the opposition, while it was major, was not taking over half the country.

And when they did do it, Donald Trump said he was going to bomb the S.

out of ISIS.

And he could do that because of the terrain.

And a lot of people were against it.

So it's a 65% Shia country.

And they're angry because

their various parties, Hezbollah-affiliated parties, are not running the country as Iran has told them to do.

And the Iranians are telling them, look, you're part of a Shia crescent.

And we're going to go from Tehran all the way down to the Mediterranean.

And just as Assad is dependent on us now in Syria, And just as we've taken over Lebanon, you were part of the deal.

This is a final reckoning with the Arab world.

The Shia

and the Persians were always given second shtick, and Barack Obama wanted us to have parity.

That was the whole keystone of his policy, whether it's in Yemen or whether it's in Syria or whether it was in Iraq or whether it was in Lebanon or whether it was in Iran.

So, are you trying to say that

you're impressed that they're maintaining this consensual government given the fact that

I cannot believe that Shia Arabs have been participating against the wishes of Shia Iranians and they seem to be as we were told they're more like it and it reminds me of the 81 82 83 Dana and on and on Iran-Iraq war where Saddam Hussein

found that 65% of his country fought for this crooked, murderous autocrat Sunni dictator, Saddam Hussein, against Iranian Shia Persians because they were Arabs and they felt they were more Iraqi.

And so that was just contrary to the whole establishment in Washington.

Oh, you know, Joe Biden, we have to have a Kurd state.

We have to divide it into three parts.

He was really big on that.

Biden wrote a bunch of op-eds on that lunatic idea.

But here we've got a president, and he's been able to hold the country together.

And they had recent elections, and most of the Shia Iraqis, who were the overwhelming two-thirds of the population, they rejected the hardcore Iranian

surrogate.

Surrogates.

So then they tried to take out the president and cause chaos again.

And

I don't know.

We don't know much about the drones.

It sounds like they were suicide drones where they just came in a general vicinity and then blew up and sent out, I don't know, particles, knives, explosive ball.

I don't know what they were, but they were very powerful.

But just hope to pray, pray God, that these sophisticated drones were not reverse engineered or in part exported out of Afghanistan to Iran and to

its surrogates in Iraq, because it sounds like they achieved a level of sophistication.

Maybe it had gone even 10 or 15 miles they can, you know, these small little drones.

They sound like they have a level of sophistication that we're not really associating with militias in Iraq or even Iran.

I mean, I'm afraid that we're going to see a lot of this stuff if Afghanistan is exporting this technology or selling it off in a world terrorist arms mark.

All right.

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All right, welcome back.

And Victor, tell us about your flight.

And, you know, what would you do if you had control of the airline industry?

Well, first thing I wouldn't do, I wouldn't be like the CEOs of Delta and American when people are waiting six hours on their helpline or their planes are going in the wrong direction, sniffing out fuel anywhere they can find it, except the destination.

Then I wouldn't.

start virtue signaling that you're mad about voter ID laws in Georgia and Texas and that's what they're doing.

But I counted, I think it was 16 trips and 12 to 13 of them, there was a delay or a cancellation or redirect.

I just had to go speak to a group down in the desert and I went to Palm Springs.

I met them.

I got back.

Flight was delayed out of Palm Springs.

Got to San Francisco,

missed the connection.

They said plane was sitting out.

I ran to the door.

They said the door is closed.

You can't go out.

I went and said, go over to help to get redirected.

There's a later flight.

Ran across to another terminal.

It was 35 people and one person at the counter at night.

Ran back.

The plane's still there right outside the window.

I asked the person, can I please board now?

They said, no, it's against FAA rules.

You cannot, we close the door.

We're not going to open it.

I said, well, why is it still here?

Almost an hour.

Oh, we only had one baggage carry.

They put the bags in wrong.

It does not balance.

We're taking them out and redoing it.

And then, well, you still have 11.30.

That was canceled.

And so that's pretty much, you know, go to Chicago, 11 hours delay.

Oh, by the way, we're on our way home and we're going to stop in Denver to top off the tanks because there's no fuel in Fresno.

Okay.

Wait a second.

Can I ask you something that sounds really scary to me?

So they have just random people loading bags, but they need to have a precious, but they need to have a precious balance.

And, you know, what if one of these planes take off unbalance?

Because

i didn't want to be morbid i said there's going to be a wreck you go to lax and there's so many planes and there's so little margin of error when they park and taxi and you look at the people out there with the batons and the baggage handlers and the supply they're they're short people because people you know during the slowdown quit or they were laid off and they haven't all come to back because

gavin newsom and joe biden are giving them a lot of money to stay home so they're hiring hiring anybody.

And some of them are very good workers and some aren't.

And so if I could just list in the last three months why I have been delayed, it is, oh, flight attendant didn't get up this morning or she didn't show up.

There's no other flight attendants.

We get very sorry.

Oh, there's no fuel.

There is fuel, but we have to go in the wrong direction to go get it, 200 miles away.

Oh,

we're circling, circling, circling because the riding line is crowded, so we're going to have to divert to Grand Rapids.

But don't worry, there's a lot of fuel and there's very few planes.

You land, there's very little fuel, and there's a lot of planes.

Or,

oh, we just decided to cancel that flight.

Could I book tomorrow?

No, we've canceled the whole flight forever.

It doesn't exist anymore.

Oh, okay.

Oh, by the way, we

have to change the size of the plane.

And so 20 of you are going to have to get off because we have to use a smaller plane.

We didn't really know that.

We're sorry.

Can we get 20 people?

And if not, we're going to have to just choose the people who, you know, have less miles.

And that was interesting to watch that near riot.

And that's how it goes

every day.

So

today, I thought, I looked at the record of the flight that I took to get to Denver, and it was.

very checkered.

And then everything went pretty well.

So I thought to myself, since I wasn't worrying about that flight and I'm not going to fly for six months, I said, I can't do it anymore.

No more, no moss.

Okay, but still,

what would you do if you had to control?

I'm very keen, Sammy.

I'm a very keen observer of this.

Farmer from Selma, Hicksville.

I know you are.

I'm bringing my raisin expertise to the sophisticated field of avionics and airline transportation.

I think you're even scaring the airlines with your keenness.

I know.

One guy wrote me a note about two years ago when I started going on a hole.

hole everybody's sick of them though first of all go ahead what they did was they started charging to check-in baggage so people got bigger and bigger bags and the carry-on size went from you know a little compact the size of your forearm to some monstrous thing they call carry-on at the same time

they crammed more people into the plane They narrowed the leg room.

And then these over, there's a few new planes that have really nice overhead compartments and it solves some of the problems.

I mean, they're very generous.

I don't know.

I think there's stretch 737s.

I was in one, I couldn't believe it.

You could crawl up there and slept in them.

But they were like international, but most of them aren't.

The one I was on today.

So what happens is nobody wants to pay money to check in their bags, and they all bring in these things in, and then they say, oh my God, I didn't know that this thing is three times as big.

And they try to hammer it in.

Then they have to go all the way back.

So boarding used to be 10 minutes, it's 30 minutes and they should do the opposite they should just tell everybody if you check your bag in you get free if you take a carry-on you're going to have to pay five dollars per carry-on

and that would give a different incentive number two they always tell you you cannot get on the phone only get on the phone text or call people once you're in the plane and you can keep doing it and then when the plane's ready to take off no okay why don't they just say this when you step foot on the ramp as you give your ticket you got to shut off your phone because i've watched stuff the last three months i cannot believe it's the typical person is some overburdened woman or man and they come in and they've got a thing slung over their shoulder and they're eating and they've got a carry-on and they're on the phone with one hand and they stop and they try to do this and this and they hold up everybody.

Why don't they just say, shut the phone off?

That's an FAA regulation the moment you get on that plane until you take off.

But they don't do it, so everybody's talking.

And I have a computer that just, I mean, a person dropped their whole suitcase on it.

It was a Mac, it was a wonderful computer, and it got a big dent in it, and it kept working.

But I mean, that's the kind of stuff you can be injured.

So they have to do that.

And then I have another crueler pet peeve, I think.

And that is, I've noticed something.

When they say,

you know, you're eligible for a wheelchair and i i've had a lot of uh infirmities in my life and i had a ruptured appendix once in libya and i had to come home in a wheelchair so i i'm not criticizing people who are disabled i've had disabled people in my life but this is what i think they're going to have to do because i was on a flight out of fresno and there were nine nine

wheelchairs and there were two poor young women that were trying to handle the whole thing and they were not big and the people in the chairs were enormous.

And so what I'm getting at is if you are in a wheelchair, then you must stay in the plane and you must disembark on a wheelchair.

That's just the gift.

You should not be able to say, I want to be the first person in on the plane in a wheelchair so I have room for my huge overhead and I may or may not have an infirmity that would have prevented me.

But if it did, I have no problem.

But when you land and you've got to get a connection, suddenly it's like the air was some type of miracle of healing power because people I see come in and they're wheeled all the way into a seat and then they're the first person's on the plane their luggage and then the next thing you know you land in Phoenix or Salt Lake and wham, they're like Jesse Owens going out the door.

And so it doesn't make any sense.

So just be consistent one way or another.

And I think that would make boarding a lot easier.

And finally and fourth in this too long rant, but I think it's important because we all fly and it's an industry that the United States used to be preeminent in and I'm terribly afraid it's dangerous and it's really sad to see the erosion in air travel even though we're traveling more people.

We're sending more people across the country safer, statistically, at a cheaper price than we ever have before.

But the level of satisfaction, the comfort, and the margin of really of air is down to be infinitesimal.

I mean, there's not much margin of air left.

But fourth is that I understand the pilots have problems, but when you have all of these glitches and they tell you,

I was just on a plane where they said, we'll be,

we're sorry about the delay.

We're now going to leave in five minutes.

And then 10, 15, and then you look out the window and they're still loading the bags.

For some reason, there's only one bag carrier out there, but we'll be out in three minutes and then 20 minutes more.

We've got the bags on.

That's the good news.

The bad news is that we don't have our baton person here to guide us out, but there's, he's right over there.

He'll be here shortly.

It will not be more than two or three minutes.

Two or three minutes.

And this goes on and on and on.

And it's 45 minutes.

And then you look at the faces of these poor people and you can read, I just missed my connection.

I'm 80 years old.

How am I going to sprint with a four minute margin of error?

So their lives are ruined.

And it's all predicated on having one person

short, one too few people,

and then 140 people are just devastated.

And it doesn't make any sense.

And the pilot cannot be candid.

So that creates cynicism.

So everybody looks at each other.

He's lying.

Or the woman next to me said, when they say five minutes, remember it means 15.

When they say 15, it means an hour.

And we left 55 minutes on the tarmac, each time in segmented warnings that we will be underway within three or four minutes.

So it's sort of like Baghdad Bob is running the airline.

Yeah, sorry to interrupt, but that just sounds like a CEO problem.

I mean, these CEOs should be on the, somebody should be putting the fire under them.

Well, as I said earlier, in my earlier rant, if you're diverting your attention, your labor and time and capital to the commissaria, and you've got commissars everywhere, and you yourself are performance virtue signaling, then you're not having your eye on the ball, just like General Milley didn't or James Comey didn't, et cetera, et cetera.

But this is not just an academic exercise.

These are people's lives.

And I'll give you one last example, and I promise to stop, and that was I was in a...

an airline.

I won't mention the name because I don't want to denigrate some of the airlines, but some are worse than the others.

And I fly a lot, unfortunately, and I'm going to stop as of this week for six months.

But my point is, I saw a whole group of young girls, about 15,

and their parents that were going on a cruise up to Seattle.

And they'd never been on a cruise.

I was talking to them.

And we had a seven o'clock flight to Seattle on a nice Sunday morning.

It should have been like clockwork.

they were there and they had to get onto the cruise boat that was leaving.

And they had about a two-hour and the airline announced that they were short one flight attendant, i.e., Saturday night.

People liked to party.

Somebody was hungover.

She came about an hour late.

They did a very quick private exam.

And when she walked in, everybody sighed because they knew that she was in no condition to get on the plane.

Okay.

Well, they usually have a person or two in every city that are...

kind of like firewomen or firemen.

You call them for any airline and they'll jump up, even on their day off, to make sure that doesn't end this labor short.

They couldn't find anybody.

And so the result was all these people, they missed their flight.

It wasn't just, they canceled the flight.

And then you unleash all these people in a small regional airport like Fresno, and they're trying to find ways.

It was very sad.

I guess what I'm trying to say to finish, they have to have a systems backup.

They have to be built in the system that they anticipate fuel shortages, labor shortages, the known unknowns, and then they have to have that margin and error so that that doesn't become typical or chronic or characteristic of them.

But when they came out of the COVID, they had a bad situation going in and they made it much worse because they wanted to make revenues up after losing their shirts when nobody flew during COVID.

They laid off experienced crews and pilots.

They came back.

A lot of their workforce retired.

A lot of them won't work.

Given the incentives to stay home, they're hiring people that are not up to the same standards they had, but they have twice the patronage.

And the result is there's no margin of error.

And then you add the CEOs who are so scared of losing their job if they're not woke.

And it's tragic.

The United States created air passenger travel.

We created it.

And we had the best planes, the best airports.

And now you look at these airports and you look at it's just chaos.

And people are, you look at their faces when they go into the airport and you look at the way the TSA treats them.

You go, it's just sad.

Yeah.

Eventually it'll be a disaster.

but

somebody's gonna die i'm afraid somebody's gonna die that's why i took precious time and i know that our listeners don't want to hear about people who fly because a lot of them don't fly and they don't want to fly rightly so but i think as americans they should be very worried about this industry because it's going to get someone they know and love injured or hurt if they don't very quickly abruptly radically shake up the airlines, the airport authorities, the federal government's TSA, and they better do it very quickly.

Yeah.

All right, Victor Davis-Hanson, thank you very much.

This has been a great morning, afternoon, maybe evening for some of our listeners.

And we look forward to our next show.

So I want to thank you and the listeners.

Thank you for having me, Sammy.

All right.

And we'll talk to everybody very soon with Sammy and Jack.

All right.

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

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