The Traditionalist: Special on Afghanistan

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Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show, The Traditionalists.

This is a special episode we are recording on the East Coast in the late afternoon of Monday, August 16th.

Today, Victor will be discussing, exclusively discussing, what is happening and has happened in Afghanistan and a little different than our regular shows.

Victor, I think the thing I'll do is lay out a few topics to discuss, and then we'll take our little commercial break, a little bio stuff, give you a little time to see what's coming at you from me.

So, Victor, the president gave a speech this afternoon.

His speech blamed Donald Trump, blamed the Afghan military, admitted to surprise at how quickly events were unfolding and the collapse of the government in Afghanistan.

Then, about our policy, American policy of leaving Afghanistan in general: is that good, bad, et cetera?

Third topic: how we executed the departure from Afghanistan.

To me, that seems to be the crux of this insanity that has rolled out in the last few days.

But you are a military historian and your thoughts on how we, America's ACE military leadership, executed the departure.

A couple of other topics, Victor.

What are America's interests in Afghanistan?

Or at least a week ago when we still had some degree of power or some modicum of authority there.

What were they?

And what are they?

Two other topics.

Victor, what are the consequences to American security from this, what's happened in the last few days?

And not only to American security, but to the security of other nations, those in the Middle East, Taiwan, maybe, other nations who exist in the shadows of hostile powers, those nations who look to America.

for protection.

So what are the consequences of Afghanistan?

How might they affect that?

And the final thing, Victor, has to me.

You're going to have to write these down and read, and I'll do one at a time and then hit me with machine gun

questions.

I will.

I just want to let you know what's happening.

What's going to be happening?

The final thing will be images.

And we've seen already some dreadful images.

And how powerful are they?

Are they just pictures?

Are they pictures that are going to have consequences for American foreign policy?

Will they symbolize the standing of America?

So, Victor, those are the things we're going to talk about.

So much has happened in the last few days, and that's one of the reasons why we're doing this special episode.

I do want to remind our listeners of a few things.

One, that you are the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busk Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, best-selling author, forthcoming dying citizen, military historian, as I just mentioned.

Victor, our listeners should know that your website, victorhanson.com, it's been revised, updated.

Existing features are still there, but there's a new feature.

And there's premium content, and that requires a subscription to access some of that premium content.

And those who do that will be able to read your new piece called Our Afghan Agonies, which I'm confident will contain some of the things we're going to be talking about here in a few minutes.

So, Victor, we'll get at these topics right after this message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show, The Traditionalist.

We're recording on Monday, August 16th.

This is an episode where Victor is going to talk, discuss exclusively what's been happening in Afghanistan.

So the first thing I mentioned, Victor, was the president's speech this afternoon.

Would you assess it?

It was incoherent.

I mean, he was on vacation.

He came back and he started out basically blaming two entities.

The Afghan Army, which has basically been the chief ground force since 2014.

We've been in the support on the ground and supply effort, but not actually fighting as we once did for the first 12 years, 13 years.

But they have been fighting and they have maintained basically control of the cities predicated on U.S.

air support.

Okay, so he blamed them.

And then the second thing he did, of course, is blame Trump.

And he said that Trump had a disengagement plan settled with the Afghans that he had to abide by.

Well, where do you start with that idiocy?

First of all, has he ever abided by any pact, agreement, protocol that Trump left him with that was working?

Did he follow the Abrams Accord?

No, he destroyed them.

Did he say, you know what, we've made a decision to get out of the Iran?

No, he wants to go back in it.

Did he agree with the basic understandings we had with Latin American leaders in Mexico about catch and release refugee status in the border?

No, he blew up the border.

Did he follow an agreement with the Canadians to allow Alberta to export oil through the soon-to-be completed Keystone Pipeline?

No, he renounced it.

And then ditto Anwar and did all federal leasing.

So that's all he's done.

So then in cowardly fashion to suddenly say, well, I couldn't do anything.

I had to follow Trump's precedent.

He never did.

Second,

in lunatic fashion, he contradicts himself.

He says, Well, I had to follow this crazy Trump idea of withdrawing, but it's a good idea.

And I did.

And so we're out.

Okay.

And then third, he made no distinction

between withdrawing

and withdrawing

in shame and dishonor and chaos.

We got trapped up in November 1950.

MacArthur did.

His lieutenants did

up in North Korea.

And that was the longest military retreat in U.S.

history.

And it was since World War II had been the greatest number of deaths per day by the American military forces.

And when we left the Yallow River territory, it was horrific.

But we left in order, as much as you could do with a million Chinese on your back and in competent military command.

And Matthew Ridgway came in and he stabilized it.

And today, South Korea, for all of the ordeal of the last 70 years, it's a successful democracy.

So we know how to withdraw or retreat and save the situation.

This was France 1940.

So his blame, blame, blame.

And the blaming, of course, being Biden was incoherent.

And that's what he first did.

And then he blamed the Afghan people themselves

and then finally uh he kind of blamed his own military he kind of said well i i discussed this and these were military options i was given and yet the military being the military these days they have leaked like a sieve telling us that general miley and general austin had gone into biden and appraised him of all the alternatives and he didn't listen to them that's the narrative that the military is floating and then finally he blamed Obama.

He said in 2009, he was against the

in 2009, the little mini surge that Obama did.

Remember that?

He said, I was against Obama in 2009.

So he has a habit.

It's not just a habit deriving from dementia, but a habit that was with him for all of his life, whether it was facing plagiarism charges or cheating charges or whatever he was or speaking downtruths.

He blames people.

And Victor doesn't come off well when you're president you mentioned and i mentioned earlier the execution of the departure and i'd like to also get your thoughts on the policy in general about america leaving afghanistan as donald trump proposed let's talk about that first and let's let's talk about the actual execution so what are your thoughts on that was that a wise policy is it good that america not have military presence in afghanistan well a military we have 150 military presences around the world 150.

and so that's a little late in the game to say we don't have a military presence we shouldn't so there's presidents military presences and there's military presence they're not all the same right so we had come got to a bipartisan consensus that after 20 years we were not going to have foot soldiers and fighting in frontline combat units and carrying the weight for a three as biden says a 300 000 army with multi-billions of dollars in sophisticated military.

Everybody agreed with that.

But,

and Trump especially, it was his, under his influence that we accelerated what had been pretty much going on anyway.

And yet, Trump did not pull out.

He kept 2,000 or 3,000 people.

We had the Bagnum huge Air Force base.

He was telling the Taliban.

I think he said it, you know, point blank as from what reports are, not just from his friends, but from neutrals, that he was willing to do to the Taliban what he did to ISIS.

And he had a model when they told him, you've got to go in after Obama pulled out of Iraq, and you've got to go in, and you've got to save these innocents from beheaders.

And so he did go in with spotters and auxiliary advisors.

And then he just unleashed the U.S.

Air Force and they demolished ISIS.

And that was his plan.

You can critique it.

You can say it wouldn't have worked with the Taliban, but that kept the Taliban from january 20th to this past two weeks that kept them at bay so he did have a plan of a policy that he inherited he inherited you know biden said i'm very loose from trump when then he praised the plan after he trump he blamed trump it was very ironic trump had a plan that biden says that he inherited and and likes but that his implement implementation of it, which led to chaos, was better than Trump's implementation of it that did not.

And so you figure that out.

And so

how you operate a plan is as important as the plan in the abstract.

And we could have gradually turned over unit after unit and given some punishing airstrikes on the Taliban and say, I'm not defending the Afghan army, but ultimately the people in the street, not our one million westernized elites, but the people in the street and the people in the armies put their finger up to the wind and they said, on the one hand, it's a horrific return to the dark ages of Islamic fundamentalism and the Taliban.

On the other hand, it's our lives depend and henja and Joe Biden's consistency.

And they decided they take the chances and would prefer the dark ages rather than count on U.S.

air support to prop up this sort of veneer of Westernism.

Victor, we've talked before on podcasts about the military leadership and General Milley himself.

And why not?

About let's make him the poster boy for all that, all this.

He and other military leadership have given the impression that the purpose of American military in the last year has been to

root out white supremacists, to read critical race theory books, etc.

I would have thought they maybe would have been planning for a withdrawal in a particular way that is done militarily.

So you're not leaving people behind, you're not leaving material behind, you're executing it in the best way possible.

This does not seem to have happened.

Is that correct?

A and B, Victor, is there anything you might have heard about the real blunders in this departure?

I saw something online that said, you know, we're attacking the Afghan military, but we withdrew critical logistic support before there was any ability to prepare for that.

So they're kind of, you know, in a sense, a rug was pulled out from underneath them.

I don't know how accurate that is or not, but anyway, is there anything you know along those

followers?

Well, I was flippant and I was snarky, which I'm not, I hope.

I would just say something along the following.

Hey, General Miley, what was the racial composition of those Marine and 82nd airborne units that you sent into the middle of that chaos?

I want to make sure.

that they were proportionally represented and that we had the proper sexual orientation, gender, race for all those frontline units.

And I want to make sure that those poor white kids from rural America and small town America, that before you send them in there to fight the Taliban or to keep the Taliban away from slitting throats and beheading, I want to make sure they got a clean bill of health that they're not alt-right supremacists.

Can you guarantee us that?

And that's what sums up where we are.

So he should resign, Jack.

We haven't seen anything other than General Miley Milley, whatever his name is, the last

two years, other than things that are absolutely preposterous.

He came out there.

Remember, we were induced to him when he apologized for having a photo op with the president.

He only did that because the left criticized him.

And you know, the left is the one that adjudicates when you retire out of the military,

whether you go with exemption or criticism back into a corporate defense board contractor and you become a millionaire.

So I'm not disparaging his integrity.

I'm just telling you that that was a careerish thing to say, I shouldn't have had a photo of, because that's what they all do.

Every single president and every single chairman of the Joint Chiefs do that.

And then, when he implied and bought that narrative that Donald Trump had used tear gas, and there were retired generals who alleged that to clear out the grounds so that he could have a photo, that was a complete lie.

The Inspector General of the Interior,

Department of Interior, told us that was a lie.

Many reappeared reappeared in congressional testimony, as did the Chief of Naval Operations, in a very incoherent fashion.

He said that he was recommending these critical race theory, Kendi type books.

But, but he was doing so on the principle, as he said, that he reads Mao and he reads other hostile thinkers to understand the mind of the enemy, but he was telling us to read them because they're not the enemy.

They're the models that we're supposed to emulate.

It made no sense.

Now, when he was doing all of this and he was talking about rooting out the alt-right, well, where's Afghanistan?

Would have been so hard to have one press conference and say, you know what, I'm very worried.

And then when we talk about the retired military, let me just pick on somebody.

General McCaffrey said that Donald Trump was Mussolini.

retired general because he canceled a New York Times subscription because of its left-wing bias of some federal agency.

Has he weighed in?

Is calling the President of the United States Mussolini over a newspaper more important than talking about the strategic future of the United States abroad?

So where are all of these people?

They told us day in and day out that Trump is a Nazi, that he's using Nazi cages at the border, that he's Mussolini, that he should resign sooner and later, even if there's an election schedule.

So they were all in our face.

And where are they now?

They're not there at all.

And finally, I think we're speaking of this cadre, and I'm not exempting the intelligence agency.

The CIA was caught once again completely blind.

The National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, FBI, all of these guys have been weaponized in the era of John Rennan, James Clapper, Andrew McCabe, and James Comey.

And I think we've got to just take a deep breath and say, you know what, this may not be nice or fair, but we're going to not issue any security clearance to a retired intelligence operative, military high-ranking officer or diplomat who goes on left or right television, because they go on there and they wink and nod.

I've got my sources tell me the data that I've seen and they politicize the intelligence.

And I say that without exaggeration.

Over 100 of them told us that Hunter Biden and his laptop were Russian disinformation when Hunter wasn't even saying that.

And so we need to do that.

And then we need to tell everybody in the military today, you're all subject to the Civil Rights Act of 1965.

And you are not to discriminate on the basis of race or creed or sexual orientations when you appoint people to very important positions.

It's got to be meritocratic criteria.

And they're doing that now.

They're reverse discriminating against people.

And then third, we've got to tell our retired or active military, if you want to be a general or an admiral, do that without any thought you're going to get rich.

And I don't mean get rich with a very lucrative salary and pension.

I mean going right out of the military and right on to Lockheed or Raytheon or Jill Dynamics or Northrop, and then sitting there with stock options and on the assumption that they have hired you, not because you're Einstein or Clauswitz, but because you have intimate knowledge how the apparat of the Pentagon works and how contracts are adjudicated, and these are multi-billion dollar issues, and that that expertise can be purchased by a defense contractor.

And so, if you want to do that, you've got to wait five years, five years after you retire, and you cannot go back into the cabinet level or sub-cabinet level for five years after you leave that.

And I think you'd have a very changed culture.

I really do, because it's very insidious, Jack.

It doesn't just mean that they make decisions on the basis of defense contract or corporate America.

They make decisions on ideology because these woke corporations know that the members that they pick from the military, they're not only purchasing their expertise, they're purchasing their wokeness so that they are in line with their own corporate wokeness.

And more importantly, they by being woke have earned an exemption and an insurance policy from

the knee-jerk attacks of Chuck Schumer or Elizabeth Warren or AOC about military-industrial conflict.

So that has really hurt our military readiness.

We've got so many people in the Pentagon and the CIA, especially, who are making military decisions that are not based on sheer battlefield efficacy.

They're based on either their promotions and what they feel is most palatable to a woke Congress or a woke hierarchy or a woke administration, or which will be most conducive for a post-retirement and a post-retirement, post-career in government again.

And on cable television.

Yes.

Victor, speaking of that, in your piece, Our Afghan Agonies, that's on at victorhanson.com.

It's premium content.

We just talked about who's culpable in a way, the president, Biden, the CIA.

The final lesson you write, Victor, when there is no free press, a president loses all fears of lying and obfuscation and counts on pet journalists to hide his untruth, or at least claim they are minor exaggerations.

Biden, to the extent he has even compassment, assumed his assertions that Afghans would fight effectively given their numbers and U.S.

equipment and training, would never be seriously cross-examined by a morally bankrupt media, which always puts partisan interest over the national interest.

So he simply went on lying.

Victor, is there anything more to say about the media than that?

All presidents, whether they're conservative or Democrat, Trump or Biden or Obama, it doesn't matter.

They have to be audited because they have enormous powers.

That's what the founders knew.

And one of the ways that they're audited is through the First Amendment.

And people then freely express their criticism and make the president not only accountable, but a little bit fearful.

They have deterrence.

They'll say, you know what, if you're lying, we're going to embarrass the hell out of you.

Press Congress.

But once a president knows that the media has transmorphied into a ministry of truth it loses all the term so joe biden can just say you know what there were no vaccinations i gave the first one flat lie or he can just say this is all donald trumps did not me flat lie and he they have been so toadish and toadish and obsequious that Joe Biden hasn't been empowered by them.

They cover up when he can't think, when he can't speak, when he eats a piece of egg on his chin, you name it.

They will cover up.

And he knows it.

So that only makes him more empowered and it enfeebles his ability to articulate and engage in repartee.

Think about Trump.

Whatever you think of Donald Trump, that guy talked nonstop and went head to head with people who hated his guts because he had to, because they were attacking him non-stop.

And he had hundreds of meetings.

on the tarmac outside the office on the sidewalk rolling down the window he didn't care he jousted with him and it made him more effective right But these media have a great deal of responsibility for this disaster because had they been pressing Joe Biden in February, March, April, May, or General Miley, or General Austin, they didn't.

They never did.

They were a state-run Ministry of the Truth fused propaganda machine.

They were provided.

And so now all of a sudden they're starting to think, hmm, on the one hand, my entire career has been based on helping the progressive cause.

But on the other hand, I've been so flagrantly biased that now when you see the wages of that bias and prejudice in this humiliation in Afghanistan, maybe I have to start acting like a journalist for a couple of days.

So now they're starting to ask tough-pointed questions.

Probably, you know, then they'll go and have drinks from the administration people and said, I had to do it.

Next time I'll, you know, I divorce a lawyer.

Let's take that word humiliation and let's repose some of the things I brought up earlier.

What is going to be the price of this humiliation?

What are going to be the consequences of Afghanistan, particularly how this has unfolded in the last couple of weeks?

So the consequences to our own security.

Victor, are you and I more likely to die by a terrorist attack within our own borders because of what has happened in Afghanistan?

And then

to our friends.

I don't know who would want to be our friends.

It's difficult to be a friend in need to the United States, it seems right now.

But to nations in the Middle East, to Taiwan,

right there in the shadow of China, Red China, who dependent on our power and protection for their own security, I've got to think they're shaking in their boots a little bit.

So, what are the consequences to security national and global to what has happened in Afghanistan, Victor?

Well,

we had a little reminder that when Joe Biden came in, he publicly, loudly, clearly disassociated himself from the Etanyahu government.

This is what Joe Biden says, he's wedded to prior policies.

He renounced basically the Abram Accords, stopped it cold.

He restored money to the Palestinians in general and some filtered to Hamas in particular.

And he told the Iranians for all of their terrorist activity and publication, he wanted to get back to the the land deal.

And what was the result?

We had a Middle East war.

Because people in the Middle East came to two conclusions.

Our friends, like the Saudis and the Kuwaitis, and the Gulf monarchies and Jordans said, you know what?

Damn Americans, every time I stick my neck out against the Arab street and say, okay, I'm going to recognize Israel.

I want to get normal relationship, economic activity, general prosperity, good security.

Some American president cuts the legs out and says, I'm inauthentic.

I can't do this.

And then he gives a message to to what?

He gives a message to the enemies, go ahead and be bolder and bolder.

I'm not going to do anything.

And so people watch that and they think that traditional U.S.

deterrence is no longer there.

So if you're in, if you're a Chinese admiral, you tell the Central Party Committee, I think I can go not three miles, but six or seven into Taiwanese waters or Japanese airspace.

And if you're dealing with a former Soviet republic or a frontline NATO power, then I would think you would just fly over their airspace and see what happened.

And if you were North Korea, just let off a couple of missiles and see what happened.

And so that's what I think we're going to see.

And if we start seeing it simultaneously, then it's going to be very scary.

I don't think Joe Biden understands that peace is the abnormality.

War, tension, violence, pre-civilization, murdering, that's the norm of the human condition.

And what gives us civilization and these parentheses, as Plato called them, is deterrence.

And the United States government has more or less said, often in bipartisan fashion, if you do this, you're going to get in big trouble.

And once it makes an example of someone successfully, then the other people don't do something stupid.

In other words, deterrence says, A, B, C, B, E, F, G nations in this room.

I know what each of your capability is.

It's all transparent and you know exactly what's going to happen.

And then you have peace.

But when each nation nothing happens, and they're not sure who is what, and somebody they know more powerful doesn't use it, they become aggressive, unhinged.

Bad things come into their head.

And that's where we are now.

And we were after Jimmy Carter.

We were for a while with Barack Obama.

And so Joe Biden will be tested in the next six months after this debacle.

And let's see what happens.

Victor, the last thing on my little list here are the images of two in particular to me.

One is of Biden at Camp David.

To me, had an image of being lost, aloof, unserious, distant, not presidential.

That was one image.

And the other, of course, is this video we've seen of these people trying to get on the sides of airplanes as they're rolling down the tarmac and then actually falling from the skies off of airplanes in their desperation to leave.

Very powerful images.

Sometimes images have consequences and become symbolic of a country and of their leaders.

Am I wrong here, Victor?

No, I mean, one of the reasons we went into Afghanistan were two reasons.

One was a picture of people jumping off the 9-11 Twin Towers to their death.

And then the second image was in the rubble below.

George W.

Bush and one of the rare, but the finest moment of his president puts his arm around the fireman and says to the world, you're all going to be hearing from us.

And so those images and the Saigon, I was a first-year graduate student when I remember the Saigon helicopters.

My biggest image is a helicopter being, and planes being knocked off the deck of an aircraft carrier into the ocean so they have room for the larger aircraft carriers shuttling people in.

So I don't think this generation has lived through what we can expect to see.

Unless you assume, you being Joe Biden, that the Taliban have a record of humanitarianism that surpasses that of the North Japanese.

I don't think they do.

So I imagine that there's going to be a lot of, oh, we're going to get along.

Don't worry.

We're going to get the power on the water.

Our Taliban militias will start patrolling.

And then everybody in the West will say, well, just like they did with Vietnam, you know, James Pond was so happy and everybody.

Journalists stayed in Saigon to interview.

And then When the spotlight shifted, they got down to business and got down to business in Kabul will be, they have the names of everybody, they'll get the computer rosters of everybody in that army above the rank of captain, and they will go in and kill them.

And then they will rape their families and destroy their families, and they'll go after everybody who is westernized to set an example of what happens the next time a Westerner comes in to attack us because we're supporting terrorists.

And that's what we're going to watch.

So those images are very important.

And the ones of those poor people falling, clinging to this airplane.

and then falling off

10,000 feet.

And then I suppose splattering the ground were very powerful.

And one of the things that they remind people is: if you want to get out abruptly,

then what you do is the military is not the first people to get out.

They're the last.

In other words, we know that from every single famous military retreat in history, from the British Army to the American, to the Pousson perimeter, you make a ring around your vital assets, and then men are willing to die to protect men who don't know how to fight.

And then you let the civilians, the diplomatic corps, your interpreters, the helpers, they fly out while you hold the line.

But this president took them out first, told the rest of the people, hey, sucker.

And let's not forget the 2,300 plus Americans who died in Afghanistan.

I feel really terrible.

I've been very depressed all day, and that's why I'm a little animated because a lot of us thought that that was the good war.

That's what we were told, Jack, that it was the good war, that this is the one that the UN approved.

This is the one there was never an anti-war movement.

Karzai was the modern, I don't know, Adenauer.

And that you got a prize, I think, in Philadelphia in 2007.

And this was the good war.

Iraq was the bad war.

That was the W's war.

That was the preemptive war, bada.

But in truth, when you look at Iraq and Afghanistan, Afghanistan was always problematic.

And that's why it was so difficult.

It's landlocked.

There are no harbors.

It's neighborhood.

It's not like Iraq with a long seaco.

Iraq has some pretty good neighbors that we can use, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and Israel is not too far away.

But what do we have there?

We have Pakistan, Russia.

We don't have Iran.

We don't have anybody in that neighborhood.

We have to fly everything overland.

And Iraq, for all of the horrors of the Baptist party, was a modern industrial state.

There was an infrastructure.

We don't have any of that in Afghanistan.

So it was always going to be very much more difficult.

And everybody should have known that, but they made this idea that it was this perfect war that they dare not criticize because it seemed to be in reaction only toward 9-11 where Iraq somehow was not.

Well, dismantling of the Taliban was, but the decision, the decision to continue to stay there and to create an anti-terrorist, anti-Islamic fundamentalist state was not that much different than Iraq.

It was the same policy that guided us in Iraq.

And, you know, historically, there was so much misinformation.

They were saying, well, it's the graveyard of empires.

Yes, but the British did fight three Afghan wars.

And the final one, they kind of caught on what you're supposed to do.

And Alexander the Great went into there and had a terrible time in the mountains.

But for the next 200 years, his Hellenistic successors were able to have some sort of imprint.

And from after World War I until that Soviet-inspired coup of what, 1973, there was a monarchy in Afghanistan.

Remember in the 60s, it was a nice little place you went, everybody was mellow, they left you alone, you got all your dope, your hashish.

That was the 60s hippie image of Afghanistan.

Okay, well, what did we do?

We said, you know, we're not going to listen to that and we're going to try to westernize the entire country.

And I mean that to the extent that, you know, everybody's talked about, but it happens, it happens to be a stereotype that's true, that the embassy was issuing guidelines and LGBTQI,

that means tolerance and flying the gay pride flag in a time of crisis in a fundamentalist Islamic state.

And that's supposed to win adherence over to us.

Whereas if we had it just said,

we can't control the mountains.

and we can't control the borders there, but maybe, maybe we can control the plains and then cobble together a bunch of tribes of different persuasions, the Northern Alliance people, the Tajik, all of these people, and play them off against one another.

And then go tell Pakistan that we're going to be very angry if you continue to ship them IEDs, et cetera.

And I think we could have bought some time.

I don't know if we could have ever had a presence there, but I think we could bought some time in the way that people in the past that were Western did.

But the idea that you're going to take an Afghan person and turn him into somebody from, you know, Carmel, California, or the upper west side of New York.

It's crazy.

And this is finally, Jack, this opens a lot of questions about immigration because we've had this open border with 2 million people that have had no allegiance to the United States whatsoever.

And many of them have come in untested and with COVID.

And the subtext is that Joe Biden doesn't believe in immigration law in this particular southern border because he sees these people as lucrative potential dependent voters, constituents, once they get acclimatized and he gets his rolling amnesties in force in direct opposition to Cubans.

Cubans, 100,000 of them reportedly want to come.

He told them, no way, don't try it, you right-wing, anti-communist, reactionary Trump supporters.

You know, we've had 50 years to acclimatize you to progressive policies and attitudes.

And what do you do?

You still vote against me.

So I don't want any Cubans.

I'd be curious what is that reaction to Afghans, because they may be like the Southeast Asian community.

And we have one of the third largest areas here in Fresno.

And although the younger generation is sort of woke, the older generations were very conservative because they're anti-communist.

And so I don't know what he's going to do, but this is immigration is going to come up very soon because in the next two weeks, there's going to be literally tens of thousands of people.

who are going to tell us that unlike the people coming across the southern border who are not in existential danger, these people are.

And what will Joe Biden do?

Will he say they have no stake in illegal immigration claims for legal residency?

Because they haven't done what?

They haven't been as loyal as the people from Oaxaca or Chiapas have to the United States or the people in Honduras.

They have much more pro-American fides than these guys who interpreted and helped us and fought with us.

I think it's a mess.

And it's going to get really nasty the next six weeks.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, a depressing or discouraging day to be an american or you know at least we believe we give our word we're going to keep it and friend in need and friend indeed and that just is not proving to be the case when joe biden is the man at the top victor thank you very much for taking the time to do this special episode and want to encourage our listeners again to visit victorhanson.com you'll find plenty of wonderful stuff there free content but there's also the new premium part of the the website.

And do consider subscribing, and you'll get some of Victor's most pressive writings that way.

So, that's it for today.

We'll be back with other episodes of The Traditionalist, the Classicist, and with the great Sammy Wink, the culturalist, all parts of the Victor Davis-Hanson show later this week.

Thank you very much to our listeners, and thank you, Victor.

Thank you, Jack.

And I'm going to be a little bit more upbeat, I hope, in the next podcast.

Let us pray.

Thank you.