The Eric Metaxas Show - Victor Davis Hanson (Encore)

Episode Date: August 9, 2022

Victor Davis Hanson covers key issues of the day with ideas from his latest articles, including, "How to Erode the World's Greatest Military" and "The Left Should Be Happy with Biden." (Encore Presentation)

Folks, welcome to the Eric Mattaxas show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit legacy p.m.investments.com. That's legacy pm investments.com. The Texas show with your host, Eric Mettaxas. Hey there, folks. Oh, my goodness, Albin. It's Monday. I know. I know. Now, look, folks, we have been taping this late night talk show. I'm exhausted. It's been insane. Tomorrow, Albin and I will give you a full update on the lunacy.

I mean, it is, we may take the whole hour because there's so much to say. But since tonight we're taping the final one with George Hamilton, ladies and gentlemen, George Hamilton, we're not going to, we don't have time to go into this. But tomorrow we're going to get into all that, okay? That's number one. Number two, we are going to right now, or in the next segment, we're going to play my interview with Victor Davis Hansen. We played it once before, but there is nobody like Victor Davis Hansen, a brave, heroic, wise voice. He is a sage and a hero. Victor Davis Hansen, we're going to play that.

That's in this whole hour and then into the next hour. And then after that, we talked to my friend Pastor Alan Jackson. at World Outreach Church in Murfreesboro. I've spoken there many times. I love Pastor Jackson. So we're going to play that. We've not played that. So that's coming up.

And then tomorrow we're going to give you the crazy update. Now, Albin, I have a really annoying letter that I want to read. People write us letters. And usually they're encouraging. Sometimes they're funny. Sometimes they're not much, you know, but I read everyone. and sometimes they're annoying. This one was annoying.

So I'm not going to give the name. I don't think I'm going to give the name of the person who wrote it. But I want to read the letter. Now, before we read the letter, two things I must mention, must mention. You know that we're doing a fundraiser for food for the poor. We get serious, folks. We believe in giving, in doing what we can. times are tough, but there's always somebody out there suffering far more than we are.

There are people right now all around the world suffering in our own communities that are suffering. So you can't just say, well, it's all terrible. What can I do? You got to do something. What can you do? Our recommendation, our request to you. And we do this every couple of months. We do a fundraiser for something that we have vetted, that we know is worthy.

one of the organizations we've worked with over and over and over and over is food for the poor. They are a Christian relief organization. They do God's work. They find people who are suffering and they help them. They feed the hungry. Food for the poor feeds the hungry. Right now, as you know, innumerable families have left their homes in Ukraine because of the war and they're suffering. We don't know where these people are politically,

theologically. We don't know anything. We just know that these are families that are suffering and that we, through food for the poor, can help them out. So we're simply asking you to do what you can. Before I read this annoying letter, which I think you'll find entertaining, I want to remind you to go to our website,

our radio website, metaxis talk.com. You'll see the banner. I'm simply saying, folks, do what you can. By the grace of God, we do what we can, and God gives it the increase. We're not all able to give $10,000. Some people can give that and give more. And we ask you if you can give significant amounts to help because food for the poor, it's just one of those organizations.

We trust them with our money. That's why I'm telling you to please go to metaxis talk.com and to give to them. If you'd like to call 844-863 Hope, 844-863 Hope, 8-4-8-6-3 hope, or it's 844-8663-hope, or it's 844-8-6-3-4-863. 8-4-6-7-3 or 8-4-4-863 hope. there are millions of people waiting for food. If you can put yourself in their shoes, imagine not being able to feed yourself. Then imagine not being able to feed your kids, your grandkids. We have an opportunity to do something.

It doesn't matter what you do, a little bit would be great. So you can go to our radio website, metaxis talk.com. You'll click on the banner at the top, Metaxus Talk. dot com or dial 844-8-6-3-hope 8-8-4-8-6-3 hope we need everybody to do what they can please folks step up to the plate you'll feel great you know when you do a little something 8-4-463 hope and just real quick any amount that you give it's going to qualify you to possibly win one of many grand prizes this time around books and and t-shirts and hats and stickers and all kind of great It's a fun thing. It's something we do. Just encourage you. We want to send you a bunch of stuff. So we will, we'll do as many of those as we can. But if you give anything, it doesn't matter, whatever amount you give, your name goes in a hat. And we will choose those winners. Okay, Alvin, I got to read the annoying letter. Before I read the annoying letter, let me remind people. There's a new film out, SalemNow.com. Salem now.com. It's called Uncle Tom 2, Electric Bugaloo. No, it's just called Uncle Tom 2. It's a sequel to Uncle Tom made by our friend Larry Elder. We've got to educate ourselves. It's something we can do.

it's important. Okay, now I'm going to read the annoying letter. Are you ready? Oh, boy. Are you ready? Here we're ready. Oh, I'm ready. Okay. So we got Victor Davis Hansen coming up, but a little, a little, I don't know, this is like the lighter side of. Yeah, a little. Somebody who, I don't know, I'll make up a name, Dennis from Florida. Yeah. Right. Hello. Hello. Whenever I catch one of your lectures, which I always find insightful, I find myself drawn to your wardrobe. Now, okay, so this person is kind of setting me up by saying something nice. I'm listening, right? This person checks out my lectures or my talks, whatever. It says he finds them insightful.

We're calling him Dennis from Florida. He says, I find myself drawn to your wardrobe. Now, when I read that, I'm starting to worry, what's he going to say? What's he going to say? Yeah. He says, he says, people write these things to me. He says, I find the combination of clothing to be kind of irritating. Uh-oh.

By the way, it suggests that you are all things to all people. Hmm. Well, the scripture commands us to be all things to all people. So I don't know how that's irritating, nor do I know why my clothes would suggest that. But I, so anyway, dressed like St. the expensive double-breasted coat or jacket, the $100 shirt and tie, the hanky in the pocket,

i.e. very cultured. Then the blue jeans that suggest you are one of the common people, and then finally back to the expensive shoes. Now, I'm horrified that anybody's paying this close attention to what I'm wearing. He says, I can't think of too many people who dress this way. I think you'd get a lot more traction with everyday people if you would dress like the rest of us, dump the jacket, the silk tie, and the hanky, maybe just a sport coat, keep up the good work, quote unquote, Dennis.

Now, I just, I don't know where to start. Like, I find it funny because I don't know Dennis. And I'm sure Dennis is a nice guy. I mean, he's like, but what he's, he's basically. basically, you know, giving me this unasked for advice about my wardrobe. And I think, you know, how do I respond? I'm glad that I have fooled you into thinking that some of my clothes is very expensive. Maybe, maybe that's a good thing. But I wonder what he's trying to ask me to do, because you'll notice that a lot of people who think of themselves as conservatives have unwittingly

taken in some of the egalitarian messages of the leftist culture. Like we all need to dress like schlubs, like the working man, like Mao, Saitung wanted everybody in China to dress the same because we don't want people, you know, to look too good. We don't want people to look like they have more money than we do. This is a leftist faux egalitarian idea. And Dennis has unwittingly fallen into this trap. to warn you, Dennis, that you've made a grave mistake in thinking this way. In fact, I'm thinking

of never wearing jeans again because that's so egalitarian. Anyway, there's so much more to say about that. Thank God for the audience that I'm out of time. We'll be back with Victor Davis Hanson. Just yesterday morning, they let me know you were gone. Susan, the plans they may put an end to you. In case you haven't been paying attention, the Biden administration has caused a financial crisis, and they have no clue how to fix it. Oil prices have skyrocketed, and when oil prices go up,

the cost of transportation and shipping spikes, leading the prices of goods to rise. And when we're already seeing record inflation, that's the last thing we need. Our economy is in trouble, and you need to take steps to protect yourself. If all your money is tied up in stocks, bonds, and traditional markets,

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Call Legacy at 866-5281903 or visit them online at LegacyPMinvestments.com. Tell me, Eric, why is relief factors so successful at lowering or eliminating pain. I'm often asked that question. The owners of Relief Factor tell me they believe our bodies were designed to heal. That's right, designed to heal. And I agree with them. So the doctors who formulated relief factor for them selected the four best ingredients, yes, 100% drug-free ingredients, each helps your body deal with inflammation. Each of the four ingredients deals with inflammation from a different metabolic pathway. And that right there, approaching from four different angles, may be why so many people find such wonderful relief. So if you've got back pain, shoulder, neck, hip, knee, or

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Victor Davis Hansen is my guest. Welcome. You're a great encouragement, not just to me, but there's so many Americans, and we love talking to you. So thank you for making the time. Thank you. They say Swedes have big heads anyway.

I've not heard that. I wanted to hear something I'd never heard before. Are you kidding? I've never heard that one. No. My mother had, I had a twin brother and we're Swedish and we were born in 1953 and I weighed almost nine pounds and she weighed eight pounds, but we have huge heads. So she said that she's sacrificed on the altar of childbirth for us.

They also say Swedes are Danes where their brains blown out. Oh, my gosh. I've never heard so much Swedish. ethnic humor in any of my programs. And so I want to ask you, first of all, we thank God for the size of your head and we thank your mother for putting up with that. I want to talk to you about everything that's happening in America right now. But before we get into the really serious issues, you look like you've put up a fake, you know, Zoom or Skype background to make it look like you're sitting in some kind of a kitchen or something like that. Is that what that is?

No. I have a, I live in the house at my great. great grandmother built in the San Joaquin Valley, and I have a 150-year-old barn. And about five years ago, I built a complete little house inside it. I mean, bedroom, living room, this kitchen, and it has two walls, so it's quiet. You know, you have a lot of farm equipment and noise, so it's very quiet, and it was for my daughter, and I use it for television and podcast. but it has two different, you know, it has an interior and an exterior wall, and nobody, I shouldn't be saying this, but nobody knows where I am and people just drive by and they think it's an old barn, but it's not. Nothing is what it seems. But it's self-contained. Let that be our theme.

Well, okay, there are two articles. You've been writing for American greatness, which is happily one of the places that has emerged where we can find actual journalism, actual truth, so to speak. American greatness.com. One of the articles you've written is how to erode the world's greatest military. The subtitle is alienating half the country is not a wise strategy of military recruitment. I'll say, so yeah, tell us what you've been seeing. And frankly, it is hard for me to process that the deep state, whatever we want to call it, the nuts have over the course of decades taken such control that they're capable of this kind of madness, that they're capable of enacting it is what I mean,

because there've always been crazy people, but it didn't seem to me possible. It's kind of like abolishing the police. There's certain things that you just look around and you say, well, this is, no one will take this seriously. And yet we're living in a time when some are. Yeah, I was trying to be empirical. So the Reagan Foundation runs a poll on attitudes toward the military. And only 45% of the American public has confidence, great confidence in the U.S. military.

That's a radical drop from the last time they did it in 2018. And then this year, Eric, only 40% of the recruitment targets have been met. So they're down 60%. And most importantly, somewhere between 40 to 50% of all. All recruits have parents and grandparents that were in the Vietnam War or the Gulf Wars or military service in general. But now that figure is just crashed down to about 12%. So what I'm trying to get at is we have had a massive reluctance of the traditional families to go into the military. And who are those people?

Well, we don't like to talk about it. But since the left started talking about proportional representation at all areas of military service, white males have died between 74 and 77 percent of all combat deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq. And that's about double their numbers in the general demographic. And those are the people who have been targeted by, as you remember, Secretary Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chief Millie in these congressional testimonies that they were going to ferret out what they called white rage and white supremacist, and they were referencing Professor Kinney's work, but they gave us no data. By that I mean when they testified before Congress, they didn't say,

here is data that shows that the white male is prone to more racial chauvinism or discrimination or supremacy than is Latino or Asian or black counterpart. They just threw it out there in the hysteria following both the George Floyd riots and then the January 6th. So I said the crisis, they don't have enough people. And so I said there has to be three reasons. And one, of course, was a humiliation in Afghanistan. And remember that Joe Biden had told us that everything was on course and Millie and Austin, even though they had been told by their mid-ranking officers, if they pull everyone out, it would be a disaster.

We did so. It was a disaster. We abandoned a $1 billion embassy, a $300 million retrofitted airbase, 60 to 80 billion, which is twice what we've given Ukraine in military hardware and infrastructure. And then we lost deterrence. Putin went into Ukraine. China is openly talking about going into Taiwan. Iran is bragging that it has a bomb or is about to get one. The second thing that really caused this fall off in recruitment was,

Because when you target the people who are traditionally enrolling, and not just enrolling in the military, they're enrolling for the most dangerous type of service, and you perpetuate that agenda is on hot-button issues. So you say we're going to pay for transgender sexual reassignment. If there's going to be a repeal of old versus Wade, we'll talk to senators maybe about having army bases used as abortions in. So they are on the forefront of social justice at the very time their military efficacy around the world and with the American public is dubious.

And then finally, we have a crisis in leadership. When General Millie said that he had contacted his counterpart in the People's Liberation Army because he felt, according to, I guess I could call him, Dr. Millie's self-diagnosis that Donald Trump was on hinge, and then it was his duty to tip off the Chinese. And then in addition, he called in all of the theater commanders and said, should you get an order for Donald Trump about a strategic strike, you go through me. When he's an advisory, by statute, he cannot interrupt the chain of command. So in other words, that was almost an abortion of the chain of command on his part.

And when you compound that with the retired military, Colonel Nagel in another vote in op-ed saying that Donald Trump won the 2020-11. he might stage a coup. Millie should intervene if that were to happen. We had nine or ten retired officers who called their commander-in-chief the following, a Nazi, Mussolini, comparable to Auschwitz jailers. A liar, Admiral McRaven said he should be removed sooner than later. Those are all violations of Article 88 of the Uniform Court of Military Justice that say you should not disparage the commander-in-chief. If you're an officer active or retired, I'm in the United States, you're an officer active or retired, I'm just finished by saying, and then what got people very angry is that this was asymmetrical. So the other day, recently, within the last 10 days, retired Lieutenant General Volensky, as you remember, tweeted out that Jill, Jill, not the commander, not a cabinet officer, as defined in the statute, but Jill Biden, the wife of the president, but a private citizen was hypocritical because she once said that we couldn't say that women. were the only people who get pregnant. And then she said that Will versus Wade was a woman's issue. He pointed that out.

He had a contract with the Pentagon. As all these retired generals do, either directly or indirectly through their corporate lobbying firms and board members, and he was fired. He didn't call the president a liar. He didn't call him a Nazi. He didn't call him Mussolini, but he was fired.

And you put all of that together, and I guess the takeaway by these families is half of us either supported, or voted, they say, and I've talked to them, Donald Trump, and the U.S. military says, therefore, we are suspect, and yet we're the ones that die when you have these optional wars in the Middle East, and we're not going to do it anymore, especially when you go and hound us. And I don't know what the military is going to do. It's a national crisis, given what's on the horizon abroad and the dangers that are accruing in this presidency. And I don't know how you

restore confident to that particular demographic that has died inordinately to protect this country. Well, there's so many questions I have. Let me, we've only got 30 seconds left, and you can try to begin to answer this. But let me just start with Millie. How is it possible that someone like General Millie could be this much of a gullible idiot? How is it possible that somebody becomes the general, where he is, who could be this obtuse? 10 seconds, and then I will ask it again and again and again. I think the conditions in the country and the Congress favor a high-ranking officer that mouse woke platitudes,

and he feels that's the fastest way to promotion and retirement, lucrative corporate membership. Yeah. Well, for doing what he did, he should be executed if we had a rule by law. I mean, it's unbelievable to me. We're even discussing this seriously. But we'll be right back to continue discussing it seriously. My pillow is having their biggest sheet sale of the year. You've all helped build my pillow into the amazing company it is today.

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The offer will not last very long because these percal sheets are known to sell very quickly. Order now with promo code Eric at MyPillow.com. That's MyPillow.com. promo code, Eric. Folks, welcome back. I have the joy of having as my guest, Victor Davis Hanson. He's writing many articles at American Greatness. You can find it at AMG greatness.com.

AM greatness.com. I just asked kind of the obvious question. Most people, first of all, I believe most people in America, see basically what you're saying. The joy, however, is that someone of your stature says these things, publicly, writes about them publicly, so that we all know that there are still sane people in the republic who see things as they are. But my question, you know, to start with Millie, how is it possible? And you sort of answered it. But when people like me growing up, you would think that people in the military, I used to think people in American corporations, they

have to deal with reality. Corporations, they've got to deal with the bottom line, nuts and bowls. How do we make money? When we're dealing with medicine, when we're dealing with the military, you have to deal with reality, and it's much less possible to be sucked in by woke ideology or by any kind of ideology because you're having to deal with reality. Obviously something has changed. Obviously, people in the military like Millie somehow don't have their eyes on the the bottom line as it were, this idea that we need to project strength, that we need to, how, I mean, you sort of said it, but I still think most Americans can't believe someone could become a general and be that dramatically obtuse. So, so, well, it, it mimics what's what you know so well in the corporate world in academia.

And that is, once you've developed a climate that one's ideology, in this almost the Soviet system of commissariat is what matters rather than actual results, then people make the necessary adjustment. So there's wonderful officers in the military. I know a lot of them. There's wonderful generals. They are as good as we've ever had.

But when you have a system that generals and admirals who are a lieutenant, colonel, up the chain of command that want promotion, if they weigh in on certain hot butt issues, and if there's a general climate in the country, in general and a democratic, at least de facto majority in Congress, and you're going to testify before these people, and you have the Biden administration, then people make the necessary adjustments. And what are those adjustments? You don't say that, you know, I commanded a carrier

group and we only had three of our pilots missed the cable, or I had an artillery battalion, and we put every shell in practice within a foot of the target. You say, I promoted this number of race and gender people or I had this, I introduced a new workshop. And then when you called into Congress or you're up for promotion, a Senate or House staffer says, hey, that guy is on our side. And then that sends a message throughout the military that that's what you emphasize. And then when you add the force multiplier that upon retirement, Lockheed, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Northrop, they want sort of a United Airlines, Coca-Cola, Disney-type. figure that they feel is sophisticated in woke messaging.

So you bring these generals. And they know that before they retire. So they prep themselves for post-retirement. But they're not, Eric, they're not the old $100,000 a year board members. We're talking about stock options that make these people multimillionaire. They prostitute themselves. They're whores for money and power. and it is absolute dereliction of their duties.

And it is a horror. When you mentioned, reminded me of what Millie did by contacting his counterpart in China. In any kind of sane free society, that man would at least be behind bars, if not executed for treason. I can't even imagine that we're talking about this seriously. When you say imagine, ask this. So Millie is now still the chairman of the joint chair. It's obvious that Joe Biden has cognitive challenges, cannot really read off a teleprompter without reading the prompt itself. So will General Millie right now, again, self-diagnose the president and say, you know what?

I'm going to contact Secretary Austin. This man is dangerous. He says things. He already has been on record that he wants to remove. Vladimir Putin, who has in his arsenal 7,000 nukes. This is scary. So I'm going to call my Russian counterpart, and I'm going to tell him,

if Joe Biden wants to remove Vladimir Putin, I'm not going to obey that order. I want to warn you, so we're not going to get an escalate. What would happen if he did that? He would be removed in an eye blink by, I think he would be. And so it's not just what he did. It's the ideological landscape in which half the country or the people in power now feel that what he did,

even though it was illegal, was conducive to an ideological agenda in which if he had done it in a different way, he would have been, what you said, he would have been censored and canned and removed. Well, I mean, I guess I've been warning for years that, you know, the reason to elect Donald Trump is in effect because if anyone else of these actors is in office, it's the end of America. So what we're talking about right now is the end of America. America is dead as we know it. Either we figure out a way to resurrect America as she was, or it continues in this direction. But it's clearly madness. And again, I think that folks like you, you're encouraging because you help most of us realize we're not missing anything. most people in America see this.

It is why military recruitment is down because people don't want to put themselves in harm's way for maniacs, for nut cases, which most of these folks clearly are. We're going to pivot to Joe Biden when we come back. We're talking to Victor Davis, Hanson. Well, my daddy left home when I was three and he didn't leave much.

Tomorrow and me, just this old guitar and an empty bottle of boo. I don't blame him because he's running here. Be encouraged, ladies and gentlemen. I have, as my guest right now, Victor Davis Hansen, he writes in American Greatness. You can go to AM greatness.com. And he seems to see what I think most Americans see but don't have a voice to express. And so it's, it is encouraging to hear someone of your stature put some perspective on where we are.

You wrote an article about Biden and how the left ought to be. happy with Joe Biden. Tell us about that. Well, you know, we all knew what Hunter Biden's laptop was, and that was censored by the FBI, and we all knew Joe Biden was not capable of a normal campaign. We all knew that he was cognitively challenging, and yet that was massaged by the media. He was elected, and part of that Faustian bargain he made with Jim Clyburn and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren was he was going to have advanced the most radical agenda in history and get it across the finish line under the cover of old Joe Biden from Scranton. He did that. And so he destroyed the border.

We have a stagflationary, recessionary economy. We're paying the highest prices for energy. We mentioned the Afghanistan disaster. We have the highest increase in violent crime over a 12-month period in modern memory. I could go on, but you get the picture. And that has resulted in this 32 to 33% approval. But more importantly, every one of those issues polls as low as Joe Biden are lower. So now they're blaming Joe Biden. They're saying, you know what? We almost got away with it. This guy is incompetent. He's bringing down our popularity. We're going to get killed in the middle. Let's get

rid of him or prep the way to get rid of him. And the problem is he's the messenger. If he had just kept every one of the Trump proposal, and had the secure border, had the 1.5% inflation, going up to 15 or 16 million barrels of oil, we were projected to be a very careful consulate, consolidating the Bagramme Air Base, all of those things. You and I would now be saying, well, the guy has got some cognitive problems,

but the country's in great shape. So what I'm getting at is they keep thinking they can switch the messenger, but it's the message. It's them. It's not Joe Biden. They manipulated him to be a mouthpiece. They got the wrong mouthpiece. They're looking for another mouthpiece, but they'll never change the message. And that's the problem. Well, I don't know that they got the wrong mouthpiece. I think that if it had been somebody who had been, as you said, not Joe from Scranton, they wouldn't have gotten in. I mean, look, this reminds me of, you know, when Hitler had Hindenburg running cover for him, right?

You know, this old wheezing link to the past of Germany's great past, Hindenberg, if he's around, everything will be okay. So Hitler's running things, but Hindenberg is there to run interference and to kind of make it seem like, well, we've got a firm old hand, you know, on the tiller, even though we've got this maniac in the boat with the funny mustache. Effectively, that's where we have been, and that's why they made that, you know, secret pact to get rid of Bernie and Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren, and they all said, we're going to get behind because they understood that in order to win, they had to make this

devil's bargain. So I guess what I'm wondering is, what do you suppose, I am convinced, Biden will not finish his term, absolutely convinced. The question is, what do you suppose, who are the players? Is it Elizabeth Warren? Is it Obama? Is it Hillary Clinton? Who do you see behind the scenes jockeying and, you know, smelling the blood in the water and willing to...

Well, I think you've named most of them. I think it's a consortia of the prominent hard-left people in the Congress, about five or six of them, Plyburn, Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, Schumer, that poll the consensus of the squad and those people. And then they represent a voice along with the two Obama's, Michelle and Barack. and they have their team in the White House, in the executive branch. And then in addition to those two groups, I think Jill Biden is the go-to person. So the congressional left-wingers, the Obamas,

and then, of course, what I would call the technocrats, the billionaire people who are the face of the Democratic Party, the big, big, you know, the Mark Zuckerberg types, they all three of them in concert way into Jill and then she filters that into Joe and they've got what they want. Their problem is they haven't, they thought, well, our problem as a country is

that we have an Agnew problem, as people have pointed out, that as long as Agnew wasn't indicted and, you know, he wasn't inert, nobody, and I'm not saying Nixon is like any of that, but I'm saying there were people who thought Nixon had done things that should remove him, but they didn't want Agnew. So no matter how challenged Joe Biden becomes people in that party, and then Republicans in general will say, you know what? This is a hard call because here's somebody that's cognizant like Elizabeth Warren that has a vocabulary of 500 words. and then there's Joe Biden who's not cognizant.

And so what would be the purpose of getting rid of Joe Biden and turning the country over to her? And so I think what they're doing now is, is there a way to get her out? Like we got Agnew out. Does she have a skeleton? I love the fact that you're going back to 1973. Thank you.

Because I remember, I'm old enough to remember that era, but I don't remember, and I've, because I was too young then, but to have heard the idea that Agnew, who was vice president, of course, under Nixon, that he stood there in a way as Kamala Harris does today. Oh, absolutely. That was the left speak.

That was the anger of the left. Every op-ed said Richard Nixon deliberately appointed this crazy governor from Maryland who had a checkered career. Right. So he would never be impeached. And they didn't know what to do. And then they found out, they went way back and found bribery in his past and brought it back out. And then they got rid of him. Right.

I mean, I remember when he resigned. I was in sixth grade for those who were scoring at home. But I remember. And then, of course, this, you know, another old hand, Jerry Ford, University of Michigan football star, you know, kind of rhino establishment Republican. He comes in. And then, you know, Bob's your uncle. Suddenly he becomes president with two asterisks by his name.

But that's the question is who is jockeying right now? People that I know tell me that Elizabeth Warren has quite a lot of power in the current White House. We've got a few minutes left, folks. We're talking to Victor Davis Hansen. Please stick around. Folks, if you've tuned in, you've tuned in just in time. talking about Spiro Agnew. It's always my secret goal to bring the conversation eventually around to Spiro Agnew.

I have in my home a Spiro Agnew trash can. He was a Greek-American politician of whom we are all now mostly ashamed. But it's an amazing thing, Victor Davis-Hanson, that you would recall this, because I didn't, that he was the bulwark. They didn't want to get rid of Nixon because if you do, you have president Agnew, uh-oh, we certainly don't want that. Right now we're in a similar situation with Kamala Harris, who is really hard. I mean, I think she makes Agnew look Churchillian practically. I mean, I've never seen anyone as dramatically shallow and incapable, at least as she appears publicly.

So who do you think would be jockeying and what do you think is possible? I mean, I keep thinking that there are all kinds of scenarios. We've got a long way to 2024, and I can see people changing. I could see a lot changing. This is not, you know, something that's imminent. We have quite a lot of time between now and 2024. Yeah, I think what you're watching now is that everybody in the Democratic Party and the country realizes that Joe Biden is a lame doubt. So whatever happens in the next two and a half year, he will not run again. Can't. So you have Gavin Newsom suddenly touring the country and attacking successful red state governors. And you have other people but a jig, you know, we can have a supply disaster with ships out to the horizon. We can't get a flight that's on time. We can't

afford gas to get on the highway. He's transportation secretary. All he's talking about is Roe versus Wade and Donald Trump, January. So you have these people who feel that they are more effective spokesman for the hard left agenda, and therefore the hard left agenda, be tolerable. And why are they doing that? They're not just positioning themselves for 2024. They're positioning themselves in the eventuality that some type of solution has been found to get rid of Joe Biden. And that would be something like maybe a big appointment for Kamala Harris somewhere. I don't know. A senator, I don't think you could do it, but maybe someone would resign or somebody would give her a big appointment.

or there'd be a big corporate billet, but they're trying to find a way to get around the Constitution. I mean, I don't mean illegally. I mean just practically because it's perfectly legal. But my point is that they know that if they remove Joe Biden and they've got to get rid of him, they feel at least by 2024, if not earlier. And they have her in there. And they don't want to go through the 2024 primaries where they're attacking a black woman as incompetent. So just because she is put that to the side. Let's just not mention it because it's bad for business, right? Yeah, yeah. Is she even black?

I think all of these things are subject to question. I don't know what she identifies as or it just kind of- She identifies as black. She's from her father is a professor emeritus at Stanford, who was Jamaican-American, who actually started out as a hard leftist, but now in commentaries to the press, he's been very conservative. Her mother was from India. But in our very racially fixed, fetusized world, if you're, I mean, it's kind of tragic that we're going back to the neo-confederate idea of one drop.

That if you're partly black, then you're black. And I don't understand that. Right. And it's, of course, exactly where the Nazis were with Jews. If you got a couple of drops of Jewish blood, you're a Jew, except in that case it was negative. folks, we're going to drag the great Victor Davis-Hansson over the border into our two for one more segment. If you are able to, folks, please don't forget to sign up for the newsletter at ericmetaxis.com. That's my name, Eric Mataxis, not the dot-com part.

But please do that. And don't forget that this month only Nutrimetics.com is offering us 30% if you use the code Eric, nutrometics.com, 30% off. This month only July, if you use the code. Eric, we'll be right back with Victor Davis Hanson.