The Traditionalist: The Mess of Getting Out

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Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

We are recording on Friday, August 20th.

I am Jack Fowler, the host.

I'm the director of the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic and the author of its new weekly email newsletter, Civil Thoughts.

It's five o'clock here on the East Coast, early afternoon where Victor is out in the Central Valley.

That means we've seen one of the things we're going to talk about today is Joe Biden's, I think, kind of pathetic speech about Afghanistan.

So we'll talk about that.

We'll talk about the issue of refugees.

Should some of the leaders, these defense and military leaders of our country resign given the poor performance.

And another topic to talk about today is the insurrection that wasn't.

The FBI finds no evidence.

Victor Davis Hansen, the namesake of our show, is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Wayne and Marsha Busk Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

In just a few weeks, he will also be the author of what is sure to be a best-selling book, The Dying Citizen, How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are destroying the idea of america you should order that and here's how you should order it you should go to victorhanson.com that's victor's revived bulked up groovy

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So, order it now, and you'll get it as soon as it comes out.

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Victor, let's start off talking about the president's speech today, and we'll do that right after this important message.

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The president came out with the vice president, with the secretary of state, both wearing masks, quite distant from him, not saying a word.

I think maybe Kamala Harris was blinking out Morse code, 25th Amendment.

That's possible.

But the president talked.

He took five questions from a mildly aggressive, in part, media, and then left.

There was a lot said.

A lot of it seemed to be lies.

Victor, what did you make of this appearance today by Joe Biden?

Well, you know, I can remember at six years old in an old black and white TV watching a press conference by Dwight Eisenhower.

I can remember JFK.

I can remember, you know, we're not going to send American boys over to Vietnam to do the work of Vietnamese boys.

That's what LBJ did.

And Rixon, you know, Nixon, I'm no crook.

And I heard, you know, Jimmy Carter and the Malay speech of Jimmy,

I mean, Jerry Ford and the Win Buttons speech and Ronald Reagan, Time for Choosing Earlier and the rehash of that when he ran.

I can remember the George H.W.

Bush.

I can remember Bill Clinton.

I can remember George W.

I can remember Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

I have never heard a performance seen, heard or seen a performance that was more depressing because

Everything he said was either incoherent or absurd.

Let me just give you an example.

He said, said, well,

you know, people say, well, can Americans, why can't they get to the airport?

It's too, they can get to the airport.

It might be a little crowded.

Just show your passport.

So we're going to think that 10,000 people are going to listen to that.

They're going to get in this, get in their little, you know, jeep wagoner and say, come on, kids, hop in.

We're just going to drive down the boulevard.

It's going to be a little rowdy, kind of like the county fair.

And then we'll just be waved right into the airport.

Are they going to try that?

I don't think so.

I think it'd be very dangerous.

And then

what was so absurd about it was, first of all, the press acted like they were going to be journalists, but they basically lobbed softball questions.

But even with that, what we didn't learn was, A,

why did you pull out 2,500 troops in the case of air troops from Bagram at night?

and you left 10,000 diplomatic and contractor personnel as well as nearly 100,000 of our so-called translators and supporters in the Afghan community.

Why did you leave $50 billion if it was so inevitable and well planned that you left $50

billion, billion dollars of Humvees, M4s,

our version of RPG, machine gun, you name it, drones, jet aircraft, Apaches.

That's going to be the haven and terrorist mark for every jihadist for the next generation.

Why did you tell the NATO allies, they have 8,000 troops?

Why don't you say we're coordinating this?

We're all working together.

That's what you advertise yourself, Joe, that you were going to build back better as an internationalist.

Why didn't you or the infamous now General Milley or Secretary Austin, why can't you just have a little inventory?

You had seven months.

Mr.

Smith lives on you know this boulevard and Mrs.

Jones here.

What was so hard about that?

They have no inventory.

They don't know how many people are even there.

And then when you said, well, my whole point was to get the troops out and I got them out.

I'm like, no, you didn't.

You pulled out 25 and now you've got 6,000 people who are eating K rations or, you know,

military meals while they're sleeping on cement.

So everything about it was a distortion of reality.

And then he gets angry when people ask questions.

Everybody said Donald Trump was, you know, a tweet mean, but Donald Trump never, I mean, he would just be blunt to reporters, but he wasn't, wasn't this?

You know, I don't know if our listeners have ever seen Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

I think it was a brilliant movie by Quentin Tarantino, but there's a scene where Bruce Dern wakes up and Brad Pitt wakes him up and he's senile and he doesn't know what's going on.

And he starts screaming and yelling at his benefactor, Brad Pitt.

And that's exactly the way Biden is.

He gets angry.

He has these senior moments.

He storms off.

And when you look at all of it and digest it, you think, wow, this was one of the most dishonest journalistic feats in history to hide this person's cognitive challenges and to let him campaign from a basement.

And every time he sneezed, it was Cicero doing this.

And every time he went on a mind freeze, it was Pericles doing this or Lincoln.

And that's not what we were told.

And now we're reaping the

wages of that.

And it's going to be scary because it's going to be, as I said before, it's geometric.

It's getting worse.

And my God, when he talks about Afghanistan in the way that he does, that I inherited this, but it was inevitable, but it had to happen this way, but it was somebody's fault that it did happen this way.

But

I have to follow Trump, but I've never really followed Trump.

I mean, you don't know what to make.

2,500 dead, their families, 20,000 wounded, their families.

And then he's telling them, well, you know, suck it up.

I always said it was a waste of time and treasure and blood, and it had to end this way.

So get over it.

That's basically the message he gave.

Well, it was.

And the tone.

And this reminds me of things we've discussed on this podcast over the last 18 months.

This tough guy, Joe, ram the rosary beads down your throat,

corn pop, etc.

That in the not today's talk, but the speech or whatever the hell it was earlier in the week, where there just seemed to be this rank callousness and I, and then almost like a perverse enjoyment that he was doing what was being done.

This is like too bad.

Deal with it.

And this is an example of him being a tough guy again in a weird way with, you know,

national security is the price we're going to pay and the deaths of thousands of people.

But I sense that.

I don't know if.

Yeah, I mean, it was, it was, I'm going to cut off some chain and beat corn papa with a head with it.

It was, I slammed the

guy insulted my daughter.

I slammed his head on the lunch counter when I was 12.

Oh, I told Trump, you know, if you were in high school with me, I'd take you behind the gym and beat the crop out of you.

So that's what he does.

So it's very important for our listeners and for the country to remember this is a myth that this man was a kind, sober, and judicious person.

This person was reckless.

He was dishonest.

He was a plagiarist.

He was a proveterquetter.

He was a liar.

He was mean-spirited.

No person who has ever been president has said so many racially offensive things as Joe Biden.

That's a fact.

The way he characterized Barack Obama, called him journalists junkie, you're not black, a whole audience of successful professionals put you all back in chains, the donut, this, you name it.

Hunter Biden with the N-word and hatred of Asians.

I'm so sick of this guy.

And the idea that Good old Joel from Biden has a couple of senior moments is that, no, bad old Joe Biden from Scranton is getting worse

because he's incoherent as well as mean-spirited.

He was very mean-spirited.

And then the idea that, I think everybody is just so sick of being,

I think they can stomach the lectures and the sanctimonious finger pointing from General Milley and Austin.

But then when they're incompetent, the natural question that's begged is, well, if you're rooting out white supremacist and you want to understand white rage and critical race theory, General Austin's going around the Asian community abroad and telling us that the anti-Asian epidemic of violence is part of a bigger problem, i.e., white supremacy.

Well, then, why don't you just first, before you do any of that, just ensure that you know how many people are in Afghanistan.

Just take an inventory.

Just make sure, you know, I don't know, we have all these sophisticated multi-billion dollar contracts.

How about some kind of plan to get about what four miles to the airport from downtown?

Just, you know, have a corridor?

Maybe that wouldn't be too hard, but they can't do their job.

They're like the airline executive from American who lectures Texas about how racist it is to have an idea.

And then he tells everybody, you know, I don't really,

you're racist.

And then his planes go in the wrong directions hunting for fuel.

And that's where we're at now.

I think this wokeness is, this is really clarifying wokeness because it really shows you that it's that it's either a distraction and it has consequences

or it's a cover-up for pre-existing incompetence or both.

Well,

let's stick with the incompetence of Millie and Austin.

And as bad as my view, Biden's speech is this week, when Austin got up the other day and

that joint press conference he had, I felt like, wow, this is a nader for America almost in a modern America of hopelessness.

We can't save our own citizens.

Victor, did you

see that?

I remember when John McCain chewed him out because he was clueless about Iraq and he didn't have a very distinguished record when he was an active general and then he went to work for Raytheon and then he got hired from Raytheon to go straight.

So I don't see any Sterling reputation or credentials and that's worn out by his performance.

It's all political.

He's been deceptive and disingenuous from the beginning.

He never tells the truth.

He's bought into this idea that the people who are dying at 73 to 76% on the battlefield, i.e., the white middle class, is somehow full of supremacists and racists.

And then he tells us we're going to have to have proportional representation and look like we are.

Why don't the dead look like we are?

Just have a quota.

Oh, you know what, white middle class that I don't like and think you're all white supremacists, pull back from that Afghan airport because you've died in sufficient percentages Let somebody else have a crack at dying.

And, you know, when he said that, it was almost, well, why would I know?

You know how many people?

I don't know.

Can you go and get them?

And escort, well, I don't think so.

We don't have that capability.

Will you, as if, why ask me?

It's their problem, not mine.

And then you correlate that with what Jake Sullivan and Blinken have said the last week.

It's basically, well, we told them to leave and they didn't want to leave.

So it's every man for himself.

i'm thinking no you didn't tell them to leave you told them that this the afghan national forces and you were going to provide calm and you know if you told them what you knew from your intelligence report they would have left but you hid it from them so you know this really begs another question that is all these people that gave us these sanctimonious lectures about Donald Trump's tweeting and his uncouthness.

Okay, maybe he was on presidential, but look at his issues on the plan to get out of Afghanistan versus this plan, or the border that was secure, or the energy independence with Anwar and Keystone going back online, a new federal leasing, or a stable crime and punishment system, or an economy that was not inflating at an annual 6%

or more.

And so once you empower the left, you get this other stuff.

You don't even get good old Joe Biden from Scranton who doesn't tweet in the bargain.

You get a mean-spirited bully, bully boy who insults people gratuitously.

You know, he really has some thing with the Afghan army.

I mean, we're not talking about nearly 40 million Afghan.

And I don't like the idea that they folded and they just dissipated.

But as I wrote in a column, they put their finger in the air and they said, I'll take my chances we're surviving with the dark age Taliban and counting on the postmodern Americans to provide air support.

Victor, let's talk about that column that which you wrote for American Greatness.

And typically, we discuss those American Greatness pieces on the other podcast I did with you, the classicist.

But this is called Ripples of Kabul.

And you talked about

wrote here in this piece.

And I do encourage our listeners to go to American Greatness to read the entire piece.

Victor, two things.

One, I'd like you to expand on what are the ripples of what happened this week.

And then let me just read the very last paragraph.

And if you, it's so matter of fact and so dead on, I don't know how you could expand on it.

But you wrote, if Joe Biden were a Republican, the current Democratic House would long ago have impeached him.

After the Kabul catastrophe, even the bipartisan Senate might well have convicted him, and both would have been right to have done so.

So Victor, if you'd like to talk about that and some of the other consequences and ramifications of our dismal performance as America this week.

Well think of what the new definition of impeachment is thanks to the Democratic House.

It's the Constitution says, you know, treason and bribery and high crimes and misdemeanors.

There's always been a little mystery of high crimes and misdemeanors, but they impeached Donald Trump on one Ukrainian phone call and they said he abused his power and he bypassed or he went, he did not treat Congress well.

And then the second one was he incited a riot, essentially.

And that was impeachable.

And they impeached him.

Now, he didn't convict him.

Joe Biden systematically,

after taking an oath that he would faithfully execute the laws of the United States, systematically destroyed federal immigration laws, we know it.

He told 2 million people all over Latin America and Mexico who are anticipated to come, and many of them have come, that they're not going to face any enforcement of immigration.

They're not going to be deported.

They're not going to be subject to any

punitive action.

Their refugee status will be automatic.

They'll be caught and released if need be.

That's an impeachable offense.

And then this thing, where he deliberately misinformed the American people, and then he pulled out U.S.

troops and yanked them out for cheap political gain and left 10,000 Americans who were doing their job to aid the American effort.

He left them completely vulnerable.

And then he lied about it.

And he continues to lie and say that people can go to the airport without worry.

According to the Democrats' own standard, this is an impeachable offense.

As far as the stages of ripples or repercussions, the mediate are, what are the media?

The immediate are, we have about 10,000 people in there.

And the $64,000 question is,

what are they going to do with them?

Are they going to take hostages?

We know that they got the vice commander now of Taliban by the Bo Bergdahl release.

One hostage got him for Kingpin, one of whom is directing in a large capacity their own strategy.

But immediately, they have $50 billion of everything from, you know, machine guns and

M4s, M16 variants.

drones, craft, helicopters, trucks, everything, light armor.

Okay, so that's going to be the terrorist mart of the world.

Every jihadist who wants to,

you know, in jubilation at the jihadist wave will go to Afghanistan with impunity.

They can buy cheap weapons.

They can be trained.

It'll be a haven in the sense it was before 9-11, but with two important distinctions.

It's got a lot of lethal equipment that it didn't have before 9-11, and it is resonant.

They are giddy.

And it's going to make something like ISIS resurrection after the pullout in Iraq by Obama look like child's play that's the immediate the short term is that

people in the area Iran especially but also the Palestinians if if we had a war in the Middle East because Joe Biden restored aid to the Palestinians divorced himself from publicly from the Netanyahu government and begged Iran to enter nuclear negotiations again, just think what this will do.

This will empower every renegade regime there.

There will be no more fumes of the Abrams Accord, and people will take unnecessary risk in Iran.

They'll think, you know what?

America won't do anything, so why not try this?

Long term, in the wider world, I think as you look, I tried to look at English language Chinese papers the last two days, and they are giddy too.

They're making the argument again and again to the Taiwanese and to a lesser extent, the Japanese.

If you think you're going to challenge us and you're going to pick a fight with us, i.e., we're going to pick a fight and blame it on you.

But nonetheless, if you think the Americans are going to come to help you, they're about as reliable as you saw on TV in Afghanistan.

And Russia will come to the same conclusion and North Korea will as well and Iran.

Now, a lot of people say, yeah, Victor, but look at the 1975 Saigon.

embarrassment.

Look at the 84 barracks and Lebanon embarrassment when we skedaddled skedaddled after the 83 bombing.

Look at the Iranian revolution earlier in 1980.

This is temporary.

We're the biggest economy with a strong.

That is true, but the country is not the same as it was 40 and even 50 years ago.

It's much more divided.

It is much more incompetent.

It is much less merucratic.

And we have a president, unlike...

JFK or Nixon or even Ford or Carter or Reagan that's not in control of his faculties.

And he has a series of blunders, as we talked about, the economy, the border, oil production, critical race theory, all of this stuff.

And so I think a lot of people are going to make the mistake and think the United States that has so much power is afraid to use it and defend its interest and allies that they're going to do something very stupid.

And then we'll see what Joe Biden does.

Weakness is very provocative.

And when you don't apprise rivals of what you're capable of and what you will do if they provoke your interest then it gets very dangerous and joe biden knows that and that's why his insecurities are masked by this talk

uh talk talk it's you know he carries a twig and he talks loudly and everybody's tired of it abroad and knows what he is and it's very scary frightening victor there's a headline of a uh commentary piece out today by noah rothman it's titled the biden white house is betting that america is finished.

And it quotes from a Reuters story, but then from a piece in The Atlantic that tries to get to the, like, what the hell are these people of the White House thinking?

What's, is this calculator or is this just ineptitude?

And they're implying there's some degree of calculation here.

So the reporter Peter Nicholas writing in The Atlantic, let me just read this quickly.

The administration is hoping that grisly images of desperate Afghans clinging to C-17 fade, replaced by collective relief that no more Americans will die in a murky, brutal war that spanned two decades and four presidencies.

According to people close to Biden with whom Nicholas spoke, the Afghan crisis will be a distant, perhaps even pleasant.

That's that's perhaps even pleasant memory by the 2022 midterm elections, much less the 2024 presidential race.

Indeed, the insiders Nicholas spoke with frame the Afghanistan crisis as another myopic fixation of the Washington bubble, one that average voters outside the beltway will subordinate to pocketbook issues and the ongoing pandemic.

There's more to this too, Victor.

Well, if you look at every, that's a very funny thing to say, because if you look at other issues,

they pull worse, even the signature issue.

And remember what I mean by signature.

Joe Biden was given a secure border.

He was given a stable foreign policy.

He was given a pin-up demand, recovering, booming economy.

He was given 17 million people vaccinated.

And what did he do?

All he had to do was appropriate them and, in typical Biden fashion, plagiarize and claim that he thought them up.

And he couldn't do that, except in one case, the COVID.

He didn't really undo any of Trump's policies.

He just took them and he rebranded them and said, I did it.

Of course, he lied, as Biden does, and said there were no vaccinations when he entered office.

But with all the others, he overturned them.

and they all pull below 50

there's fear on the border there's worry about inflation there's anger about critical waste theory and cancel culture so is he saying this author is nichols is saying well he doesn't really have to worry about the bad optics out of afghanistan because all these other things are going so well no no he's actually he's saying this is what the folks in the white house think oh i mean that's what i mean though that's what right he's saying that these people think that.

I mean, they're absolutely insane.

Because another thing about Americans are

Americans are very strange people and they're rational and their head tells them that this thing was a disaster being there for more than five or six years and they're glad we're out.

But they're very keen on being compassionate and humanitarian and they do believe in duty and honor.

And this thing is shameful.

This thing's full of lies.

This thing is full of betrayal.

This thing

resonates weakness and fear and terror.

And they don't like that.

And they don't like to be lectured by Joe Biden, that the fact that they do feel this thing way, that there's something wrong with him.

Because that press conference was accusatory.

It was like he was shaking his finger.

It's, ah, I don't have anything to apologize hard.

You know, it was like,

you know, I used to go to my cousin's house and there was a little corner house with green, lush ryegrass, and we'd cut across the corner on our bikes, and this guy would come out and say, get off my grass.

And that's what Joe Biden was.

Cranky and mean.

And they don't like that.

They don't like that.

They'd like Bill, they would prefer Bill Clinton's insincere biting his lip if necessary, or Donald Trump's tough, this is the way it is.

Rude as it may be, but not this, not this kind of accusatory, whiny, snarky.

And that, I think that press conference was a disaster.

And I think even the media had started to ask questions and they just took a collective,

you know, they looked at each other and they thought, you know what?

We better just tone it down because if we keep asking this stuff,

we're not going to have a Democratic Party.

And what do we do then?

So they didn't really ask, where are the 10,000?

Americans, would you know where they are?

Or why did you leave all the equipment behind?

Or why did you leave in the dead of night?

And so they pulled back because they were knowing what the public perception of this would be yeah it's interesting afterwards uh in another press conference that uh i i don't remember her name she's the national security reporter for fox news was uh jennifer griffin i think maybe yeah yeah she was going after the the uh spokesman for the the for the um department of defense and bring there were four lies i mean there were probably ten lies but at the it's biden said allies have not been critical of his actions al-Qaeda is gone safe passage is ensured and that America has no interest in Afghanistan and it's just I know I thought I was laughing when he when he said that al-Qaeda is gone that's what Obama basically said when they were JVs and returned to JV status in Syria and Iraq And then as far as the allies were okay with it, remember the German foreign minister said this is the worst defeat the West has experienced and the British are now fighting about in parliament and blaming Biden and they all agree on one thing that he's a ning tongue poop and we have no strategic interest there and I'm thinking hmm we have nuclear Pakistan right next door

and we have a lot of drugs sent to the United States from there and this is a terrorist haven that launched an attack that killed 3,000 Americans yeah we have strategic interest there and he always talks about forces over the horizon and you think wow they're just a few miles offshore there is no seaco when he says they're just over the horizon he's talking about a carrier way down you know in the persian Gulf and making those long flights over hostile territory.

And so he has no force over the horizon.

That's like saying the people who were trapped on Benghazi, it was no problem.

We had a force over the horizon.

We had a force right in Sicily and they didn't come.

And so, you know, and John Kirby, the Pentagon, I feel sorry for him.

Remember, he cut his teeth on the Benghazi lies.

about what really happened.

He was, I think,

one of the State Department, one of them.

Or maybe it was Pentagon then, but everything he said about Benghazi was questionable.

He doesn't look like he enjoys it.

I kind of feel so when his face is pained.

It's like, God, I do not want to play the role of Baghdad Bob one more day.

Well, Victor, we have a little bit of time left, and I would like to spend most of it, I think, you would talking about this news that came out today about the insurrection that wasn't.

But before we do that,

we're recording this episode of the Traditionalist on Friday, August 20th.

Just a quick thing, if if you don't mind, about America taking refugees, Afghan interpreters, whatever way these people helped us over the years, them and their families, some consternation about this.

I may have misheard something on Fox last night, but kind of grimacing.

I don't know if we should be doing this, essentially.

But what's your position on our obligation as a nation to these individuals and bringing

them here as refugees?

Well, in a normal sane world, we would do something like the following.

We'd send them to Diego Garcia or even Okinawa or somewhere.

We'd have a humane large camp and then we would systematically process them.

We would have a family come in and we would say, show me your documents of when you translated, who you work for.

We'd do a couple of background checks, get on the cell phone, say, hey, remember this guy where you were stationed in?

And we could do that.

And then in hundreds and 200s, hundreds we would send them to pre-planned areas united states but we're talking about administration jack that in the middle of a pandemic for cheap political purposes is going to let in two million people without vaccinations without covet testing without legality without english without skills without capital and they're going to let them into the united states and we're going to turn this thing over to them It's going to be an ungodly disaster.

So yes, we have to get some of them out, but we have to have a process because we don't know how many are Taliban, how many are al-Qaeda sympathizers, how many never worked at all for the Americans, how many have an infectious disease.

We don't know any of that.

And yet we're going to let them in.

Okay, I have, I agree with that if you want to let 80,000 in.

I don't want to let 150 or 200 or a million in.

But

every question now for the next I hope not, three and a half years, because I think, well, I shouldn't say I hope not, because Camilla Harris would be, would be worse, I think.

But as long as Joe Biden is president, every one of these questions is going to have to think,

well, we can't really debate the merits of the case.

We have to talk about the implementation.

And it can't be implemented because this guy is completely incompetent.

And it really raises this question about the C V

skill sets of this Washington, New York Nexus.

Blinken, Sullivan, Wendy Sherman telling the Taliban, this this is personal with me.

Okay, Wendy, you know, we've talked about that before.

She gets in a fighter plane and goes over to Afghanistan to show how personal it is.

So they have a weird idea of themselves that because they went to Oxford or they went to Cambridge or Harvard or Yale or Stanford, they're somehow wise and experienced and people listen to them just because in prep school people thought they raised their hand all the time.

It's pathetic.

It's absolutely pathetic.

Based on what their record of achievement or lack of, they don't deserve any respect.

And they're doing some things that are really dangerous to a lot of Americans,

and they're insulting to a lot of Americans.

And they have no idea that they act in such a way or they're perceived in such a way.

Victor, let's take the last chunk of time on today's program and shift back home to the insurrection that wasn't.

So here's a Reuters.

story published today.

And I'll read the very beginning of it.

The FBI has found scant evidence that the January 6th attack on the U.S.

Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result, according to four current and former law enforcement officials.

Though federal officials have arrested more than 570 alleged participants, the FBI at this point believes the violence was not centrally coordinated by far-right groups or prominent supporters of then President Trump, according to the sources, who have been either directly involved or briefed regularly on the wide-ranging investigations, et cetera, et cetera.

Victor, there's no question something

really bad happened on January 6th.

I don't like to see my capital attacked, but it was not an insurrection then.

This is kind of news like the sun is rising in the east.

Okay, yeah.

But to a lot of people who have staked a significant amount of moral superiority and capital into the fact that this was an an insurrection.

This comes as unwelcome news.

What are your thoughts on this?

I think everybody knew what was going to happen, and we knew what because there was no evidence it ever was.

And yet, think about what the FBI just said.

The FBI just essentially said that the entire premise that Donald Trump led an insurrection to take over the government was false.

And he was impeached on that, and he was tried as a private citizen in the Senate.

That was all a lie.

It was just like the lies of Hunter Biden's laptop being rushing disinformation that 50 former CIA and intelligence officers swore to us, just like the 22 months and $40 million of Robert Mueller that there was Russian collusion.

That was a lie.

And what else did he say?

He said that all of those military officers and people in the permanent state and the transition and the beginning few weeks of the Biden administration was a lie.

When they, what, stationed 20 to 25,000 troops throughout Washington.

They put barriers or put barbed wire to prevent an insurrection.

And why did we know that was a lie without having a corrupt FBI tell us that?

We knew that because

when the headlines blared out on January 7th, arms insurrection kills five, that we didn't believe that then because nobody ever had a gun.

Nobody was ever arrested for possession of a gun.

Nobody was ever arrested using a gun.

There weren't five people killed.

There was one person killed.

And the one person killed was a Trump supporter.

And she was on arm.

And Ashley Babbitt was a military veteran, and she was guilty of feloniously entering a building.

And for that, she was executed, shot in the neck.

And people were standing right in front of her with SWAT gear on.

apparently did not think that she posed an existential threat.

She was not George Floyd over 6'1, 220, who was resisting arrest after passing a counterfeit check.

She was a tiny, tiny, petite, fairly harmless woman going through illegally a window and she was shot.

And we do not know the name of the officer.

We don't know any of the context or the official inquiry notes or records.

We don't have 14,000 hours purportedly of video.

We were told that Brian Sicknick was murdered.

He was laid in state.

Nancy Pelosi used his death for a cheap political purpose.

And we found out that he was not bashed in the head by an irate Trump supporter.

He was not sprayed in the face with bear spray that created a lethal, he was probably

sadly and tragically, he died of a stroke.

Maybe he was stressed out the day before.

But that was a lie.

And almost everything, there was nobody charged with insurrection or very few or racketeering.

There was no blueprint and they were so desperate for a blueprint jack they said a Lego set that they confiscated of the White House of the Capitol.

That was proof.

It was pathetic.

And yet it's all a lie.

And you know what's even worse?

Nobody says, no, we're sorry.

There are people still in preventive detention, as it is, that are just sitting in jail for seven months.

And then this is all juxtaposed to 120 days of riot,

arson, thievery, murder, shooting.

28 dead, $2 billion in damage, 14,000 arrested, destroying a federal courthouse, attacking a precinct, trying to light it up with the police inside.

This is what worries everybody, that we're almost like we woke up in a strange planet that's not Earth and not America.

So for the FBI to tell us that, it was just, I mean, it was a relief, but it was sort of like, well, why did you ever, why were you ever complicit in this whole scam?

Right.

And they were complicit in it.

And this is also what sparked.

And other scams, too.

Yeah.

I mean, it was Uncle Nilly when he said

white rage and he wanted to understand white supremacy and the whole subtext was the capital insurrection he said right and so gosh these people are just

they can't get up in the morning without lying and they lie for careerist and selfish purposes at the expense of average people and i don't know jack I've been a big supporter of the military, the intelligence agencies, the FBI, law enforcement, and I still am.

But when I see this, this systematic disingenuousness, this lying, this self-righteous sanctimony, and all these people with these peacock medals on their breasts, I saw my, and I'm not picking on him, I feel bad for him.

He looks terrible, he looks very stressed out.

But I thought to myself, that ribbon is for the victory in Libya.

That ribbon is for the smashing success in Afghanistan.

That ribbon was for going into Iraq and stabilizing it.

And that's what we expect, but that's not true.

Well, it's the lying that, and as we just discussed,

it masks incompetence on top of it, which is all the more galling.

And we've talked on other programs also, Victor, about this is

career plans.

We begin at West Point and end up on the board of Raytheon.

I mean,

there's

a lot of upside on that.

It's not Matthew Ridgway.

It's not him.

It's not.

George Marshall.

It's not Hap Marnell.

I mean, they may have later on life had company ties and industry and stuff.

It's not Jimmy

This generation goes into the military and gets these degrees in academia and then goes, you know, goes to the top and they go into the Washington, New York corridor, and then they end up becoming multi-millionaires for defense contractor boards because their expertise on the procurement labyrinth is monetized of the Pentagon.

And so, I mean, that's a very serious thing to say, but I think it's true.

And boy, I wish if we could just say, Jack, if you want to be a four-star, we want to warn you, you're not going to get a security clearance when you retire.

And you're not going to be able to monetize that with winks and nods on CNN.

Oh, by the way, you're not going to be able for five years to go join a defense contractor board.

Can't do it.

And by the way, there is such a thing called the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and we are going to enforce it.

And if you violate the tenet that says a retired general who's on a military pension or subject to reactivation in times of crisis, if you disparage the commander-in-chief and you attack your chain of command in the civilian sector, then you're going to be fined or subject to military discipline.

If we just said that, I think we'd have a lot different officer corps.

Well, Victor, that's about all the time we have, except a little bit.

more at the end of the programs now.

Just like to read one today quickly.

Some people have kindly leaving five-star reviews on iTunes.

We thank you for doing that.

If you listen to these podcasts, the traditionalist, the classicist, and with the great Sammy Wink, the culturalist, all under the umbrella of the Victor Davis Hanson Show, please consider leaving a review, five stars, a rating, and if written reviews also.

And here's one message someone left the other day.

It's titled by somebody called Burbank Speaking.

Thought I'd lost VDH, but now I'm found.

Loved him when I started reading VDH in early 2000s, then National Review, then Classicist, now his own gig or channel or brand or whatever.

I marvel at his easy, in-depth mastery of the classics and how deftly and effectively this is used to assess the modern world.

Is VDH the inheritor of Bill Buckley's mantle, the intellectual leader of conservatives?

He is

for me.

So we thank you, Burbank speaking, for writing that and all others that write.

We do read them.

Victor, thank you very much for this.

We want to encourage our listeners to also stay, you know, keep in mind, come find the other, the classicist, the culturalist.

We're doing three or four podcasts a week now.

Even that is insufficient for PDH lovers.

So thanks.

Thanks, Jack.

And I'm getting a little irate, I understand, out of character, perhaps, but what we've been watching in Afghan sand is just maddening.

So I apologize to our listeners.

I don't think they're expecting an apology from you.

Thanks all.

We'll be back soon again on The Traditionalist.

Thank you.