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Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show, the traditionalist.

We are recording on Friday, June 18th in the year 2021.

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.

Victor Davis-Hansen is an essayist at American Greatness, a farmer, classicist, military historian, best-selling author.

And he's also the editor-in-chief of a very important Hoover online journal called Strategica.

We'll talk more about Victor's bio in a minute, and we'll be talking today about the G7 Summit, the Chinese lab virus, and some Title 10, excuse me, Title IX.

I gave it an upgrade there.

Some Title IX issues, but we'll talk about that and we'll be back right after this message.

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Folks, welcome back to the Traditionalist, one of the three podcasts that Victor Davis Hansen is now doing.

The other, well, one of the others is the classicist, and the other other is the culturalist.

But today, we're talking on the traditionalist.

Victor, welcome.

We're recording two days before what used to be called Father's Day.

I have a feeling our friends on the left might translate this into impregnating Persons Day.

I don't know.

Mother's Day is gone because they're birthing people.

So I don't know what we'll call fathers, but I hope by the time people are listening to this, I hope they will have had a good one, whatever you want to call it.

Victor, let's start today talking about the G7 summit.

And there are three, I'd like to break this into three areas that we can discuss separately.

One is the summit itself, the meetings of the heads of states and your take on it.

The second is the specific meeting between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin.

Was it a mistake to meet with him?

Was there a winner or a loser in that?

And then the third thing is related for the initial meeting of the G7 were the finance ministers and Janet Yellen, the Treasury Secretary of the United States, and her scheme to create a global tax, minimum tax on corporations that was approved.

And I think there are some issues there, not only the tax itself, but what this says about sovereignty that I would like to get your take on.

So Victor, let's start off with Putin and Biden.

Two stub questions here.

Was it a strategic mistake for Joe Biden to have met with Putin?

Did he have to meet with him at all at this point in his presidency and given the contentions between both countries?

And then then the second part is, okay, they did meet.

Was there a winner?

Was there a loser?

Is a head of state, a winner or a loser?

Or the countries?

Did America come out better from this summit having happened than they went into it?

Well, they came out worse, but he's the president of the United States.

So when there are questions about his cognitive and physical material health, and so he had to meet Putin.

And of course, the Europeans wanted him to meet Putin because they wanted him to appease Putin and they wanted him to overlook deals such as the Nord Stream gas for Russia.

So he did that.

And then Putin being Putin, he made some very effective propaganda points.

He said, don't lecture us on human rights.

You had the capital insurrection.

You shot Ashley Babbitt, you have BLM, you've had riots in the streets, your police shoot on armed blacks.

And basically he said, we're not doing anything here that you don't do yourself.

So in some sense, he was acting as if he was a Russian hacker, just as hackers went after the pipeline and the meat packing process and said, well, you know what?

You don't like meat and you don't like pipelines.

So what's the big deal?

You gave us these talking points.

It's your own pathologies that we're just reading about in your newspapers.

So don't lecture us.

So that was very effective.

And Biden had a brain freeze and he snapped at reporters.

He looked frail.

He sort of wants, he has that Joe from Scranton, tough guy image, but it doesn't work well at 78.

And so I think also Putin was just, he just went back and looked at the films.

of the Anchorage Chinese Mini Summit in March.

And he said, you know what?

You just go in there and you tell this American administration all of the pathologies that you're reading about from their own left and throw it back in their face, deny anything that you've done wrong, and then threaten them that if they have sanctions, there's going to be penalties.

And it worked.

Europeans are delighted because they don't want to confront Putin.

Well, Victor, about the summit itself, the core of the summit is the annual meeting of these heads of state.

Do you have any take on it?

Was it just same old, same old

benefit to America this time?

Or again, like with Putin, does America come out of this particular summit worse off?

Very briefly, they had this image of themselves, the EU, and the G7 are the worst of the EU.

If I can say that, the most sanctimonious and condescending.

They're Britain and France and Italy and Germany.

And then we have Tudeau and Canada.

So there you have it.

But what I'm getting at is they view themselves as Greek philosophers.

They're Socrates and we're Caesar.

So we're unthinking muscle and they have to point us in the right direction.

Sometimes we don't listen and we get in trouble.

But when our European philosophers control things and they tell us certain things and we get impressed by them, you know, we ape their positions on the Paris Accord.

We've got to get back into the Iran deal.

We have to have wind and solar and mass transit, all this stuff.

And we have to protect them, but we pay for most of NATO because that's what we like to do to do.

And they're willing to let us, you know, defend them, but they don't like it.

But if we really, really want to push and pay the majority of the NATO, they're willing to let us.

That's their attitude.

So Trump came in and he just blew that all up.

And they went ballistic, even though if you looked at it rationally, it was in their interest to have reciprocal and fair trade, to have subsidies of NATO up so the defense alliance would be more serious in the eyes of Putin and the Chinese.

But nevertheless, they didn't want to do it because of their social agendas.

And now Biden came over and basically said, I'm going to outleft all of you.

I want a global tax.

We're printing money like crazy.

We're destroying the power of accumulated capital and savings.

And

we're socialists.

And don't lecture us about socialists.

We're greater socialists than you are.

And they just sort of look starry-eyed, Jack.

They thought, wow, this guy is more European than we are.

This is great.

And when they look at BLM and they looked at Antifa, you know, they had their little versions of it.

They got a little scared because of their aristocratic sensibilities.

But otherwise, they like what's going on.

They're happy.

And that's why even though NATO will be weaker, even though trade will be more asymmetrical, even though China and Russia will be more emboldened, even though Iran and North Korea are kind of laughing about the whole thing, even though Israel, Taiwan, and Japan, South Korea are going to be a little bit more scared, they're happy.

Victor, third part of this summit review, I'd like to first remind people that you have a website.

It's victorhanson.com, and you write a ton of original material for that during the week.

So folks should check it out.

When they do, they'll find a link to your forthcoming book, The Dying Citizen.

It'll be out in October.

And

I'm confident it is going to be a profoundly important book.

So, but I'd like to use The Dying Citizen or the concept of citizenship to maybe launch into this next question about Janet Yellen and the finance ministers of the G7 countries meeting and agreeing.

to Yellen's proposal for a global tax, a minimum corporate tax.

So there are two aspects of that, I think, worthy of your take if you want.

One is the actual tax itself.

Do you have any thoughts on it and its value or its destructiveness?

The second question, though, has to do with citizenship.

And

yeah, I'm reading a book right now.

Yes, I can read

by Robert Toombs.

I don't know.

He's a...

kind of an elder historian over in England.

I don't know if you know of him, Victor.

I've heard of him, yes.

Well, the book is called, it's new, it's called This sovereign isle written in and out of europe and what's interesting about it to me is it's kind of doing an analysis of of uh brexit and and what led up to the eu and these uh international economic schemes are disastrous economically and they are the concoctions of elites and they one of their casualties seems to me to be sovereignty so here we are america you know

we're a country because we were po'd about taxation without representation and now we have this globalist scheme going on.

That, to me,

puts us at arm's length from our sovereignty, our ability to control situations, which includes taxation.

So, Victor,

long-winded way of saying, I wonder if there's any way of looking at that through the lens of citizenship and its impact and sovereignty.

I think so.

I think the keys to citizenship are, one, you have to have a vibrant middle class, and that means your country has to have your interests first on matters of trade and foreign relations.

And this is antithetical to that.

The second is you have to have secure borders.

And if you look at that 25-page document that came out of the G7, it's pretty clear that they don't believe in sovereign borders.

And then you can't have tribalism.

That means if you're a multiracial democracy, you have to assimilate, integrate, intermarry people, but not identify by your race first and your citizenship affinities last.

They have a bigger problem than we do, even though they have fewer minorities because they don't have the melting pot tradition, but they believe in the salad bowl, not the melting pot.

And then more importantly, they're administrative states.

So these are elites.

None of this desire came from protest in the streets of Paris.

This came from the Davos.

And it's Klaus Schwab's latest book, you know, COVID-19, the Great Reset.

And it's just falls, the G7 falls it to a T.

He has all these proposals in it.

And the pretense is that nobody in their right mind would agree to them in times of calm.

But they're using, just as Newsom said and Hilary said, and once upon a time Ron Emmanuel said, you take a crisis and you don't let it go to waste.

So this is based on the fear.

And then, of course, they're global citizens.

They don't believe you owe your first allegiance to people that live within your borders, which, of course, don't exist.

And they're always changing things.

They don't believe that a constitution can read human nature in 1789 forever.

They think that it has to be constantly updated to the latest trends.

So yeah, that's what's behind it.

And think of what this global taxation is telling Ireland that it's traditionally poor.

Well, you're not going to undercut us by offering Google or Apple or Facebook or Exxon a 12% or 14.5% tax rate.

No, no, we're going to punish you if you don't charge them 15%.

And it's, you know, just to finish, it reminds me of what's our federal system, where each state has the choice to set their own tax rates.

And when they do, corporations adjust accordingly.

So we're having a mass flight of capital jobs and labor out of California into places like Florida and Texas and Nevada and Idaho, low-tax places.

And the government and the left hates that.

So they want to reintroduce the state and local tax deductions.

So you pay 13% in California, you only actually pay an effective rate of seven because you can deduct it all.

And that means it's not as bad as in comparison to Texas.

It's not twice as bad.

It's only they're zero.

We're 13.3 on the top rate.

So the world will be seven.

So it's the same idea that they don't want individual entities to compete with each other.

They don't believe in competition.

They don't think it's hurtful.

So that's the idea.

I don't know what a country like Singapore is going to do.

As I mentioned, Ireland, there's other places in Asia that have very low tax rates for corporations.

They get a lot of capital.

Vietnam is another one.

And so they're basically saying that, you know, we're ossified aristocratic states and

this is the way it's going to be for all of you.

And when you see them on TV, especially Trudeau, but also Macron, they're all so pompous and full of themselves.

And they're so giddy that Trump is not there and that they can manipulate Biden and they praise him.

And it was a sad spectacle.

Victor, let's keep on the president and his administration before we move on to China.

So this week, the Biden administration issued an edict edict on Title IX.

Title IX

were the regulations that were supposed to protect women's rights under the Obama administration.

The rules of Title IX were redefined.

I'm going to read here a little from an editorial from my former publication, National Review.

It says: the Obama administration proceeded to mandate that federally funded schools use students' preferred pronouns and permit students to use bathrooms, locker rooms, and accommodations, and participate in athletics on the basis of self-identified gender rather than biological sex.

Donald Trump came in and tore that up.

Joe Biden has come in and using the Supreme Court's Bostock decision, resuscitated these Obama Title IX regulations.

Victor, do you have any thoughts on this?

This is an idea that came into trendy American thinking in the 80s with the importation of French postmodernists.

They weren't new.

They adopted it from Germans in the Frankfurt School, Nietzsche, Hegel.

But the point is, it's relativist.

Michel Foucault, Lacan, Derrida.

And they basically said that society makes artificial distinctions, and they're artificial.

They're not based on reality, which there is no reality.

It's just whatever one person's own point of view happens to be of it.

And so law, custom, tradition, it's all just a farce.

And they said the same thing about gender.

Okay, but notice where they stop.

They say, if you have testicles and a a phallus, that doesn't make you male if you don't feel like we're male.

We do have there's a gender dysphoria.

There's people, we call them transsexuals, and they're all over Roman literature, transvestites.

The Addis poem by Catullus, Addis is a tragic figure who gets in a bacchic frenzy and castrates himself because he thinks he wants to be a woman.

We read Petronius's Statiricon.

There's people cross-dressing and acting as if they're women that are men and vice versa.

So it's not a new phenomenon.

A very small, select group of population hormonally or neurologically feel they're in the wrong body.

We all understand that, but nobody then thinks that this is a common phenomenon, that people just drift out and in of a particular gender depending on how they feel or their

hormonal balance.

But notice what I'm getting at.

You can't do that with other things, apparently.

Why don't we just say that race is a construct?

Genetically, it seems to be.

Everybody has the same gene.

And so just as somebody has brown or red or blonde hair, if somebody has darker skin, who cares?

So So why don't we just say if you are white and you want to be black, I think Rachel Dozel did that.

Or if you're white and you want to be Ward Churchill, you can be Native American.

Why not let people do that?

And the answer is, well, you can't do that because you're taking minority privilege when you're white.

And what was this whole movement on whiteness, whiteness, whiteness, whiteness?

I can tell you that whiteness is a far less descriptive term than gender because when I see people on the street, I don't know where whiteness ends and whiteness begins.

I'm living in a community with a large number of Mexican-Americans, but when I go get my hair cut, most of the women are whiter than I am.

And when I see black people, I don't see black people.

I see black people of all different colors.

Some of them look like white people, some of them look like Hispanic people, some of them look like people from Africa, but it's a wide variety.

Same thing with so-called minorities like Hispanics or Latinos.

We would hire when I was a teacher, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Hispanics from Spain.

But everybody then, you can't change that construct.

You are a minority.

But you see what I'm getting at.

This is all based on fad and trend and politics.

So you are perfectly free to create whatever gender and then have this larger society adopt accordingly, but you are born with a racial stamp.

And even though you can't be determined by that through the visible manifestation of yourself, we will find out.

We will find out either with one drop like the the Confederacy did or your DNA or something.

But we just can't have white people saying they're black and black people saying they're white and Hispanic saying they're white and black.

It's just not going to happen.

So the whole thing is a joke.

It's all about politics and the various identities and the commiserate payoffs in the larger society that are accorded to them.

Yeah, well, you could be one 1,024th Cherokee.

That was the big thing when I was in college.

Everybody said they were

116th 116th Cherokee, and therefore they deserved affirmative action until they finally cracked down.

Now I think they're back allowing it again.

Well, Victor, I'd like to remind our listeners about a few things who folks who would like to follow you and get more of you.

And there's nothing wrong with being a Victor Davis-Hanson addict.

Again, VictorHanson.com.

That's your website, private papers.

If you're on Facebook, there is not associated with you formally, but there's the Victor Davis-Hanson Fan Club, which is a great place that catalogs all your work you do.

On Twitter, it's at VD Hansen.

So follow Victor there.

Back to Facebook, you do have a page called VDH's Morning Cup.

And I know soon on the website, there'll be a link for folks to sign up for VDH's week in review email newsletter.

So again, on victorhanson.com, you'll find the link for the dying citizen.

So, Victor, we're going to end the show the next few minutes talking about things related to the China China virus, the lab,

and the ramifications of the positioning of the cultural elite and our lords in denying reality.

So two things.

One is a piece you've written for American Greatness.

This is your shorter, but still very powerful weekly column.

This one's called A Chinese Lab Virus.

So now what?

And in it, you write about a number of what you call lose-lose scenarios about China's failed efforts to lie about the origins of COVID-19.

I'm just going to read quickly one of the four lose-lose scenarios that you have written about.

Here you write, we tend to block out the unthinkable.

Nonetheless, in a few weeks, more information from within China could leak out that the virus was a joint weaponized creation of civilian virologists and the Chinese military.

How the virus escaped would not be clear, but millions the world over would suspect the worst of any involvement of the Chinese military.

Victor, I agree with that.

I would not say millions.

millions.

I would say maybe billions would be suspect.

I certainly am and would be.

So Victor, that's one of your lose-lose scenarios, but would you talk about this one and anything else you've written in this column?

And then after this, we're going to talk about Jon Stewart's appearance on the Colbert show.

Well, very quickly, remember, all of our listeners are kind of shocked, as we are, that the whole narrative suddenly changed.

Remember, Donald Trump in March of last year said that the lab was connected to the virus.

That set a precedent.

Anybody who agreed with them was a conspiracist.

They were banned from Facebook, Twitter, NPR, all of the major New York Times stories trashed that view.

And now that is the normative narrative.

So what happened?

Trump's out of office.

So therefore, there's no political gain to be had by just rejecting it outright.

More importantly, we have the emails of Dr.

Fauci now, and it does seem that many of his half-hearted denials about gain and function research were false.

He has a very close relationship with Peter Dasek of Echo Health, who was not very candid about his pressuring scientists to sign a letter for Lancet and to pick a,

I should say, cherry pick a group to go over to Wuhan, all of whom would say there was no chance of an engineered virus.

Why?

Because he was involved in channeling U.S.

dollars to Wuhan and so-called bat lady or Dr.

Bat or whatever we want to call her in her gain and function research.

So all of the narrative is changing as we speak.

And now there are reports, I don't think they're verified, there are reports that maybe one top-level counter intelligence agent from China has been working with the Defense Intelligence Agency and may have given them information that makes that connection more likely than not.

And so here we are.

We have all, and now what, Jack?

We have all of these new alternatives.

What's China going to do?

Well, they're blaming it on Port Dix, but pretty soon that's going to be flimsy.

So are they going to keep being like OJ and say it didn't happen, it didn't happen?

I don't think that'll be tenable.

Maybe they're going to call us up in private and say, well, it did happen, but you better stop it because if you don't, we're going to say it happened because you funded it, funded part of it.

So then you're going to go down with us.

Or maybe they're going to say,

it may happen, it may not.

We're trying to help and we promise that it may, never, may sort of never, kind of never happen again.

Ha ha.

Meaning they have deterrence because they're going to say, well, if we're going to get blamed for it, we might as well tell the United States we can do it again and ruin the entire global economy, but especially yours.

So we have to take in consider that.

And then most Americans and most of our government don't want to consider the other alternative, can't be ruled out, that the military was involved and oversaw the research.

And they were experimenting with gain of function, coronaviruses, to see and some kind of existential war, whether they would have a bioweapon or not.

The other alternative, I don't sign in to sign on to,

but that's something that will be, we should watch because we know nothing's impossible.

That is that that the military may have taken control of the lab and allowed it to get out.

I don't think they would have because I'm not sure they had assurances that it wouldn't hurt their own people more than us.

The reason why we're even engaging in these speculations, Jack, is because essentially two or three things.

One, people for 12 days left Wuhan to Europe, the United States, when the Chinese government would not allow them to go in or out of Wuhan.

In other words, the Chinese government willingly allowed people that were infected to spread it worldwide.

Why?

Two, the Chinese government corrupted the World Health Organization that insisted it was not a transmissible virus to humans, that it wouldn't break out, that it was not dangerous, that it would never be a pandemic, and that travel bans were racist and xenophobic.

And three, we had people, as I said earlier, in the United States government that were compromised and set a U.S.

medical policy, and we can't believe them anymore because they never came out from the day one and said, you know what, we're funding gain of function research and this coronavirus has never ever been found in an animal.

And it's jumped from something to something, but there were not mutations in between.

And this thing replicates and mutates and gets into the body in a way that we've never seen with one of these animal viruses.

That's where we are.

And there's a lot of levels of conspiracies, but we won't know until we get more information out of China.

And so far, the only way we're getting it is through defections.

And we have 330,000, 370,000 Chinese students in the United States.

And there's estimates that maybe a quarter of them have their parents have ties to the Chinese Communist Party or military.

So it's an unstable situation, but it works two ways.

Not only are they conduits for information back to China, but often they become westernized and doubt whether they should go back to China.

And in some rare cases, they can help us.

Yeah.

Well, China does consider the diaspora still de facto owned by the government.

Victor, I didn't mention this.

I sent it to you in an email when we were discussing the show, and I forgot to bring it up here, what we were going to talk about.

But a nation that says you can only have one child and it engages in rampant forced abortions and forced sterilizations and right now is engaged in some horrific culture of rape against the Uyghur women has announced in the last couple of weeks that its whole one-child policy, which became a two-child policy about seven or eight years ago, is now a three-child policy, which all points to China,

which will do anything and has done anything, does have some massive problems that it's not on the horizon that I think it's in the middle of.

Would you like to talk for a minute, or we can pass on and talk about it another time, but about what China is facing on a demographic front?

Well, there's two issues here, Jack.

One is a scientific issue, demographics and fertility.

And we know that if a population does not reproduce itself, and that would mean if China was at 1.2 billion and they decided to have one child mandatory, they would slow down the rate of growth.

But when they got to about 1.4, 1.5 billion, that one child policy would have terrible effects and they would reverse back to 1.2, 1 billion and then start shrinking.

But they wouldn't just shrink, they would age.

And that would mean the number of people who provide taxation to take care of the older number of increasing older people would not be sufficient.

One is shrinking and one is growing and that's the same problems all Westerns have.

So China understands that for economic reasons and we're in a new age of technology it needs more people, at least 2.1 to replace its population.

More importantly, they've looked at the West and they see enormous problems in the West and they call this Westernism, the Western disease.

And that means that when you have an affluent and leisure population under free market capitalists and

personal freedom for a variety of reasons, emancipation of women, all these good things that we count on, then people do the following.

They get married not at 21 or 19.

They get married at 29, 20.

I think the average age now is 29.

And the first child is not at 23.

It's all gone all the way up to 31 or 32.

And what happens is you get a period of prolonged adolescence.

So if your population is not buying a home, they're not borrowing to buy a family station wagon or SUV.

They're not getting married.

They're not having children.

These are all of the incentives for conservatism and traditionalism.

Instead, they're out in the street with BLM or Antifa.

Half the students are on the university campus.

And what are they doing?

They're getting embittered and angry because they're getting a lousy education.

They're being indoctrinated.

They're arrogant.

They're ignorant.

And they owe $1.7 trillion for degrees that are not market in many cases.

You add all that up and you have the ingredients of sort of what the average person 30 years old thinks about in France or Britain about France and Britain or the United States.

They start ankle-bodying their own culture.

They're smug, they're sanctimonious, they're hypocritical.

And so it's not a healthy thing when young people divert all of their energies to themselves.

They become self-centered, they become narcissistic, they become arrogant, as I said.

So they look at all this and they said, you know what?

This communist regime doesn't want a lot of people like that because they'll start to do, they'll start to see China the way Americans see America.

And that's not strategically or economically, socially, politically, culturally tenable.

And so I think they're going to lift off the ban and people, I don't think they're going to have three, four, five, six as they used to.

It's not an agrarian society anymore and women are emancipated, as I said.

So I think they're thinking, well, we can get up to 2.7 or eight, 1.7 or 1.8 billion people with no problem now in a high technological society.

And this will be much better for us.

So I think that's something we'll see.

Well, Victor, let's stick on trying to end the show back on the Wuhan lab and the culture and politics is downstream from culture.

One of the avatars of our culture is the comedian Jon Stewart, who this week went on Stephen Colbert's late night show.

He was royally treated as he came in.

And I think he shocked a lot of people.

I'm particularly, I'm not necessarily a fan, but he shocked a lot of people with his take on this, the Wuhan lab being the the source of this pathogen, which is certainly not the thing that Stephen Colbert or his other late night hosts on other networks or other avatars of our culture

subscribe to.

So, I don't know if there was a sense of a balloon being popped there because Stewart's performance was pretty relentless and strong and mocking of the theory that it could have come from some bat kissing a monkey or something.

I don't think I may be overstating.

Is this performance, is this appearance appearance something that's important or not, overstated or not?

You have any take on it?

Yeah, I think it is important.

It's sort of comedy's version of Joseph Welsh, the Army Counsel, saying to McCarthy during an Army hearing when he held up a piece of paper and said, I have the names of 2,200 non.

He said, have you no decency, sir?

And so it kind of shattered the illusions that McCarthy was a serious and sober investigator.

And there was communism in the State Department, but not of the hysterical sort that he said.

Okay, so when when he says this, it did a couple of things.

First, it said to other comedian, we can't exist any longer if you self-censor yourself.

Comedy since the age of Aristophanes is obscene.

It's mocking.

It makes fun of people who are powerful and pretentious.

But if we have to pull our punches or adjudicate what we say based on race, class, gender, we don't have anything to do.

We're just Soviet Union comics or we're third-right comics that perform for the operator.

So I'm warning you, is what he's saying to them, that we won't be in business.

Look at Stephen Colbert.

He's not funny.

He's not funny.

And

the other thing he did was, it was sort of a Allison

through the looking glass moment when everything, you realize everything's upside down, or maybe the old, I don't know if it was Grimm's fairy tales or the English fairy tale about the emperor with no clothes.

Everybody thinks he's Hans Christian Anderson, yeah.

Yeah, Hans Christian's Anderson.

He's lavishly robed, but he's the pretense is he's lavishly robed, but in fact, he's naked and a little boy who's not overtly sophisticated is the only one that can see it or the only one brave enough to say the truth.

And so what he's saying is, hey, everybody, this is a coronavirus.

This infects your lungs.

This started in Wuhan.

There is right next door a coronavirus lab, a level four.

It is run by the Chinese military and virologist, and they investigate what?

The type of disease that is COVID-19.

And they were engaged in gain and function research.

And there's no pangolin bats anywhere near this.

And nobody's ever found them with that.

That's basically what he's saying.

And so he's also implying on any other circumstances where Trump's fingerprints not on this theory, come on, you would know that that's what it is.

I mean, if this was racism and somebody was shot and there was a Ku Klux Klan headquarters a block away, a black man was shot, another black man was shot, there was a Ku Klux Klan meeting going on and everybody walked in with sniper rifles, would you investigate that or not?

Or you'd say, you know, that's racist to go investigate investigate the Klan.

They were at least a mile away, and we think, you know, there was some kind of natural phenomenon.

There was an earthquake or something that toppled a building and killed this person.

No, you wouldn't think that.

The first place you would go would be the Klan headquarters a block away if such a thing existed.

So he's trying to just dispel the madness.

He says, I'm the last sane comedian in America.

Come on.

This whole thing is absolutely blank, blank crazy.

I think he had an effect.

Well, Victor, thanks for sharing all your insight and wisdom today, as you've done the last few weeks, as you've done for, well, for the last few decades, but last few weeks on this new podcast, the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I want to remind our listeners that there are, it's the show, is an umbrella of three sub-shows.

One's the Traditionalist, which we talk about

politics.

Then there's the Classicist, where we talk about more cultural matters.

And then there's the Culturalist, which talks about academic matters.

And that's just started with the great Sammy Wink.

So we encourage our listeners to listen to all of them.

You can listen on Just the News.

That's the platform where we are now located.

The Victor Davis Hansen show is located.

You can also subscribe at iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or any of the other podcast platforms that you're familiar with and you use regularly.

By the way, I'm Jack Fowler.

I'm the former publisher in National Review.

I'm the director of the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic, and I'm the man lucky enough to be able to talk to Victor twice a week about various matters.

So, we thank our listeners for doing that.

Listening, encourage you to please do check out victorhanson.com and we'll be back next week having celebrated what used to be called Father's Day on the Victor Davis Hanson Show, The Traditionalist.

Thank you, Victor.

Thank you, and thank you, everybody, for listening in.