Depositions, Elections, and Military Questions

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

This is the Friday news roundup, and we've got a lot on the agenda.

Hunter Biden has just testified before the Congress Select Committee on his

China dealings.

And the Michigan election just took place.

So stay with us, and we'll talk about those two things following this message.

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Hello, and welcome back.

Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor can be found at his website, victorhanson.com.

It is called The Blade of Perseus.

Please come join him there for all of his published articles, his podcasts, and some of it is not...

is behind a paywall, which is $5 a month or $50 a year, and it comes out three times a week, and it's called VDH Ultra Material.

So, Victor, we just had

Biden's,

Hunter Biden's testimony.

Did we learn anything new from this testimony?

Well, we don't know.

It was behind closed doors by request.

I think he got a lot of leeway.

Supposedly, he wouldn't do it.

I don't know what that means.

He wouldn't do it.

because he was subpoenaed.

And Peter Navarro and those other people had to do it.

And if they didn't do it, and they didn't, they are going to go to jail.

So they could have said, no, Hunter, you don't,

we can videotape it if we want.

We can go beyond three hours if we want.

And if you don't like it, resist the subpoena and go to jail.

But apparently, they didn't want to do that with the president's son.

So the left came out.

The squad type people came out, and Raskin and all those people, Eric C.

Wallace, and said, it's devastating.

There was nothing there.

And then

James Comer and Jim Jordan and the rest of them came out and said, we got, you know, three hours or two, an hour and a half to two hours of testimony that will prove valuable.

The problem with the whole thing is

they have no skills.

Jim Biden, Frank Biden, they have no skills.

And their entire lives have been selling influence to their brother.

And Hunter has no skills.

And he's posing as if his addiction was imposed upon him rather than one of free will.

So he's acting like a victim.

And then he says, well, I was under addiction at the time.

Then he says Jared Kushner did it.

He did it.

Well, Jared Kushner was not making money with the Saudis when his father-in-law was president.

We don't.

have any evidence that he was passing money to Eric Trump or Don Jr.

or

Melania Trump or any of them.

So it's very different.

I mean, do all of them, all these political people, when they leave office, do they cash in?

Yes.

But this was different.

He was a senator and a vice president, and he was cashing in.

And so the point is that

the left is saying to the Republicans, well, you know, they were skilled diplomats, they were corporate fixers, they did all these services for the Communist Chinese, the Ukrainians.

What's wrong with that?

Can you prove?

And then the right says, well, there's over 29 emails, 300 emails mentioning Joe Biden's

presence among these figures that surrounded Hunter.

There's

Tony Bobolinski, there's Devin Archer.

They all say that he was essential.

And Hunter just says, well, he's my dad.

I always kept him a prey.

Well, Hunter, he's already told us that that wasn't true, that that he never discussed anything.

So, what I'm getting at is kind of a disconnect.

When you read the laptop and it says the big guy, and I've been paying his bills, and then he gets these huge checks that say debt repayment from his brother, and then the left says,

Well, prove that he did anything wrong.

And it's like, prove that the moon exists.

Have you ever been there?

Well, if they have no skills and they made $25 million,

and Joe is referenced throughout, why do you think anybody abroad would give them one penny unless two things were true?

One, Joe Biden was involved, and two, Joe Biden was willing to do something.

So this whole inquiry is going to hinge not on how much money the Biden's got.

They'll just talk their way out.

The left is

and it hinges on two things.

One is the actual case.

Can they show that Joe Biden lobbied in a very inordinate way

that was consistent with the money target?

In other words, did he fire the burisma

prosecutor, Victor

Slokin, in the way that he bragged?

And was Shokin actually going after the burisma people involved with Honduras?

I think there's evidence that he did.

Did he try to get a concession for mines for the Chinese in Africa?

Did he try to, did Joe Biden try to facilitate technology transfers?

These are accusations.

I don't know the answer.

But that's the key.

If they can show

that, they can show they got the money, but all they're going to say is we gave advice.

And once in a while,

we said, hey, dad,

you know, I'm dealing with the Ukrainians.

I'm dealing with the Russians.

I'm dealing with the Romanians.

And good old Joe dad from Scranton, what do you think?

Well, you know, I can't get involved.

I'm a public servant, but, you know, just hypothetically, and that's what they're saying, it was.

But if they can actually show that money was given to them and Joe Biden did something that benefited these Chinese communist companies, for example, then I think they can show it.

The other thing that's going to happen in these cases that will determine the course is to what degree they want to get rid of Joe Biden.

He just had a physical and the guy said he's completely fit.

He doesn't need a cognitive test.

I mean, that's just absurd.

So if they think that he

won't be able to campaign this summer, and they want to remove him at the convention or take his delegates away, we can talk about that later, how they'll do it, then

they're not going to put up a big fight.

But if they think that he's their only way and they look at all the other candidates, Gavin Newsome, Amy Kobuchar, Josh Shapiro,

Kamala Harris, and they don't poll as well as Biden does against Trump, and I don't think they do, then they're going to think, ah, he's innocent.

But

if they poll better than Biden, they're going to say to Joe, you know what, we don't want to remove you, but you've got cognitive problems and you're corrupt, so you got to go.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well,

let's turn to another subject, the Michigan election returns or results.

It looks like Trump won by 40 points or more against Nikki Haley.

And I was wondering if there's anything more to say about that.

She was very disingenuous.

She lost by 40 points.

And, you know, she gives this little line.

I'm an accountant.

40 points isn't 50 points.

But then she makes the argument that in these crossover primaries, the 40 points represent the 40% of the Republican Party that won't vote for Trump.

I don't think that's accurate.

I think those are Democrats and Independents.

And maybe 10%

are Republicans, number one.

Number two,

there were about 100,000 ballots cast by Arab American Daesh Muslims that fell into the not Biden category.

Okay, and they were bragging because they deliberately low-balled it and said, we're only going to get 10,000.

Well, we got 100,000.

That shows you we're a potent force.

There's seven

million voters in Michigan.

I think five or five and a half million cast ballots.

Now, I know that the margin has been as close in Michigan as, what, 12,000 in 2016 and maybe 100 or so in 2020.

So they think that 100,000, if, if they all say what they're going to say, and I don't believe they do, because I think they're rock-solid Democrats and they're not going to, when a push comes to shove, they're not going to abandon Biden.

But let's say that

they are able to do one of two things.

Either sit out and cost Biden Michigan.

I'm not sure that will be determined, but it could be.

Or

they're doing what they're doing now.

They're threatening Biden, and Biden is translating those threats to leveraging Bibi Netanyahu,

which he's doing.

That would be stupid.

There are 100,000 Jewish voters, and they have a higher rate.

who identify as Jewish in Michigan.

They have a higher rate of participation than the 200 plus Arab Americans.

But more importantly, they're much bigger donors.

And more importantly, that is a bigger constituency nationwide than the Arab American community that's only localized in Michigan and a few places on the West Coast, maybe New York.

All blue states.

So what I'm saying is, any upside that he gets from pandering to the Arab community has to be careful because if he forces the Israelis on the verge of wiping out Hamas to stop, and then Hamas takes over again, he's going to lose 40 or 50% of the Jewish vote, which is more powerful than the Arab.

But they're not as loud, those constituents.

And they don't occupy the Brooklyn Bridge or the Manhattan Bridge or the

Bay Bridge or the Golden Gate Bridge or they don't storm UC Berkeley or whatever they do.

So they're not as loud.

But I think there are smart people in the Democratic Party.

So they're telling Joe Biden on Monday you say you Israel's gone too far and Tuesday you you say I'm a Zionist.

And that's what he does.

So he's and it's very funny because they all say

there is no Republican Party anymore.

They've destroyed it.

It's all MAGA now.

Trump dictates.

Maybe, but the people who've destroyed a party are the Democrats.

There are no Clinton Democrats anymore.

There are no Hubert Humphrey Democrats.

There are no JFK.

There's no Bill Clinton Democrats.

It's a hard-left progressive party run by the Obamas, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, the squad.

And there's no tolerance for anything.

but three genders or transgenderedism.

There's no tolerance for anything but abortion to the moment of birth.

There's no tolerance for anything but unqualified support for the Palestinian.

There's no tolerance for anything except you've got to give Ukraine and Russia, Russia, Russia, the Russian collusion, disinformation, all those hoax.

There's no, they run the whole thing.

It's unrecognizable.

Printing $6 trillion

when they're done.

We'll get up to $37 trillion in debt.

And so there is no old Democrat.

The Democratic Party has changed much more radically than the Republican.

You look at what Trump will run on, and I challenge people to say that that's much different than what George W.

Bush or Mitt Romney ran on.

There's going to be some differences on optional military engagements abroad, but Romney and Bush both level tariffs, and they both clamp down on China, not to the degree that Trump did, perhaps, but on energy, on crime, on abortion.

on cultural issues, on the border, maybe a little bit on the border.

Romney said we had to build a really high wall.

Maybe George W.

Bush was more Chamber of Commerce corporate.

But what I'm getting at is you compared the Democratic agenda to what we were used to 20 years.

It's unrecognizable.

Yeah, I think you're right.

Everybody should remember what the left does.

It always projects whatever they're ashamed of or vulnerable about, they project that malady onto the Republican.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, I know that you're writing an article on the 2024 election, and you have some new ideas on predicting what's going to happen.

So I'd like to hear about that.

Well, let's start with the

Democrats.

I don't think it's a question of if, it's a question of when and how they removed Joe Biden.

He is failing as I beat that dead horse geometrically.

And I saw him tonight on a news conference.

He has no syntax known to mankind.

His vocabulary about the second syllable of a polysyllabic word is lost.

If he wants to say constitution, it's construct.

If he wants to say republic, it's

you don't know what he's saying.

He slurs his words.

He has a raspy voice.

His gait is unsteady.

He's one bad step away from oblivion.

I'm speaking to somebody who fell five feet on my back when a dog knocked me over when I was swatting a bee from the behind, and I fell on on my pelvis two weeks ago.

And the trauma that I got from that, if I was 80 years old, I would be all through.

I can hardly walk.

I'm sitting, as I'm speaking right now, on a donut on an ice pad, two weeks later.

So my point is, he can fall at any minute, and if he does, he's all through.

So the question is, how do you get out of it?

And they have the spiro agno problem,

and that was Nixon they wanted to get rid of because they thought he was a liability when his ratings went down below 35.

So

he said, you want Agnew.

And then the left and the rhinos said, well, we'll get rid of him and we'll put good old Jerry Ford in and we'll say that we'll just dig up an old offense that everybody knew about in Maryland.

And they indicted him.

So he had to resign.

He pled no lo contendere that I don't say I'm guilty.

I don't say I'm innocent.

I'm just not going to object.

They gave him kind of a light sentence.

And Jerry Ford was vice president and then president.

I think he was the only person to be both who was never elected to either position.

So the point is that

example transfers to Camilla Harris.

And by that, I mean she is the Spiro Agnew.

And by that, I mean

If you keep Kamala on the ticket,

there's no upside in getting rid of Joe Biden because she's polling of all politicians, major politicians, by that I mean Speaker Johnson,

Chuck Schumer,

Joe Biden, Donald Trump, etc.

She polls lower than every single one except Mitch McConnell, who today resigned,

said he was going to resign in November as

Senate Minority Leader.

Okay.

So they've got to get rid of Biden and they have to get rid of Harris.

And there's no way to do it through the primary system.

And everybody says, you can't get rid of Harris because she's a black woman.

Yes, you can get rid of her.

So what you do is you go to the convention,

you get Joe in a room, and you say, Joe, you had a good run.

We're going to make sure that

you're taken care of.

Don't worry about it.

But you're not going to run.

There's too much corruption.

There's too much cognitive decline, and your issues are very unpopular.

So you have a trifecta, and you're polling between 33 and 38, and Donald Trump is ahead of you in six of seven swing states.

So we're going to release your debt, meaning Joe's going to release his delegates, right?

And they're going to be like confetti thrown up at the three-day or four-day convention.

And then it's a free-for-all, right?

So you have all these people who want to be president.

You'll have Josh Shapiro, Amy Kobuchar, Gretchen Whitmere,

and the most obsequious, toadious

person of all, Gavin Newsom.

Remember, Gavin Newsom's been.

Why is Gavin Newsom circling the country when this state is in full freefall and he's saying things that are just absurd?

It's a modeled presidency, what he's done.

It's a beautiful presidency.

When you go into a room, he's just a master of everything.

Well, he's doing that so that Joe Biden will steer his delegates to Gavin Newsom.

So I think there's a way to get rid of Joe Biden.

There's a way to get rid of Camilla Harris.

And you just have a free-for-all for the delegates after Biden releases them.

And then when Camilla loses, the hierarchy of the Democratic Party says, we wanted you to win, but it wasn't us.

There's over, you know, 3,000 delegates.

You've got to go appeal to them, and they voted against you.

Well, and then Gavin will come in.

And I don't think that's going to be an improvement.

His slogan is going to be, what?

I'm going to do for the United States what I did for California.

It's not a winning.

So that's the problem that they have.

They're going to try to get rid of him.

If he lasts until then, he's declining, as I said, so rapidly.

On the other side, Donald Trump,

he's got three challenges.

He's got these court cases.

And

it looks bleak right now because he owes a $500 billion in fines, interest on the fines, the Eugene Carroll, the Letitia James,

and the legal cost, $500 billion.

He'll get up to, I mean, $500 million, he'll get up to a billion dollars.

So that's bad.

But if you look at the individual cases,

I think Fannie Wills, today we had

Nathan Wade's partner, Terrence, is his name Terrence?

Yes, Terrence.

What was his name?

It was Terrence Bradley.

So Terrence Bradley got up on the stand and he basically said, What?

That all the stuff I swore under oath, I can't recall what I was saying.

I don't know what I was doing.

I had no evidence.

It's kind of like that guy in the Godfather.

Remember, they bring in the mafioso that it was, and then they bring in his brother from Sicily.

I don't know, they just put a bunch of stuff in front of me.

That's what he was saying.

So, that thing is, they perjure themselves, they've got

it's a clown, it's a clown show, and the judge will be forever ridiculed and will be

just a complete

joke if he doesn't stop this.

And if they put it into another jurisdiction, I don't think anybody wants to continue this.

So then when you look at Alvin Bragg,

maybe not he'll get a conviction, but he's basically taking a minor campaign violation, if it's that, not reporting the non-disclosure or whatever.

And that's a federal offense, not a local offense.

And Letita James,

every day there's a new video of the thing she said, we're going to get Trump.

We're going to do this.

And now she's posting the interest and the money each day on her Twitter, gloating.

And then there's Jack Smith.

Maybe the Supreme Courts will say that the President cannot be charged or committing a crime while he's president.

The idea that Donald Trump is an insurrectionist when he says people to go assemble peacefully and patriotically and they don't find one person with a gun and there's no aftermath, no conspiracy.

You know,

I

I think all of these are gaining him empathy, and either one of two things will happen.

Either they won't come to trial before the election, or if they do, they'll give him popularity, even if he's convicted.

And then if he's elected, he can pardon himself.

The other thing he has to, of the second thing he has to, he's going to be outspent.

It was $3.5 billion, I think, to a little over a billion in 2020.

And

the Republicans don't have the money.

The money, if you look at the Fortune 400 and you look at the top 400 billionaires,

75% of them are left-wing.

And you look at the zip codes where

what money is, or you look at congressional districts that are the highest per capita income, it's all blue, blue, blue, blue.

It's a result of globalization.

And

the money in real estate and construction and assembly and mining and agriculture and forestry and oil and gas is considerable, but it's not finance, international media, insurance, and especially Silicon Valley's $9 trillion in capitalization.

So he's going to be outspent, and that's going to be a real challenge.

Well, Victor, and there's one other.

Go ahead, sorry.

The other thing.

If he can raise money from donors and say it's not going to my $1 billion liability legal, and they're still willing to give him, and he can get within half a billion dollars of Biden or whoever it is, Newsom.

And if he can, and I think he's got a 60-40 chance to beat these raps,

he still has to,

we haven't had a Republican, he still has to get 51 to 53% of the vote because

we've lost six out of the last seven popular votes.

Maybe it's seven out of eight.

The last person to win a popular vote, I guess, was George W.

Bush in 2004.

Because in 2008, McCain lost.

In 2012, Romney lost.

2016, Trump lost the population.

In 2020, he lost.

And

the thing is,

so he's got to raise money.

He's got to beat these raps, and he's got to get this magical, mystical,

missing two, three, four, five percent of, you can call them whatever you want, independents, swing voters, Reagan Democrats, rhinos.

These are the people they say, when you meet them, they say this.

And I know all of you listening have met these people.

They'll say, well,

I had no problem in those four years.

He was a great president, but I'm not going to vote.

That guy is so, you know, the tweets, the tweets, what he said.

Why does he call her bird brain?

He made fun of Haley's husband.

I don't want to go to a party and say I voted for Donald Trump.

It's just not done.

So you have to win those people back.

And he can do it if he, as I keep beating another dead horse, if he sounds like he did after the Iowa primary or remember the town hall with Laura Ingram?

Yeah.

He was sober, judicious.

He was really good.

He doesn't need to rub Haley's snout in the mud.

He doesn't need to do it.

She's imploding.

She's getting shriller and more angry every time.

She's about to go into the no-labels third party, you can tell.

There's no way she's going to be able to reconcile with Trump given the stuff she's saying.

She's basically said that Donald Trump is as senile as Joe Biden, that he's corrupt, and that

his personality is so toxic it can never win.

She's saying that when the polls all show that right at this particular moment, he polls much better against Biden than does Haley.

That was her only argument.

That you may not think that I should be president, you may want to go MAGA, but I can beat Biden and he can't.

That's no longer true, according to the poll.

So if Trump can raise the money and

he can handle the

legal jeopardy and he can tone down,

I'm not saying that he's going to reinvent himself.

He believes in deterrence, that you act crazy and loud and crude and then they don't screw and screw around with you.

But he's got to show

magnanimity when he's so far ahead to win back those people.

I think he can.

He's a very funny guy.

And the thing about Trump is that

it's only a downside because he's actually magnanimous.

He doesn't hold grudges.

He didn't weaponize the DOJ.

He didn't weaponize the FBI.

He did not weaponize the CIA.

He didn't do what Biden and Obama did.

He hired people that clearly didn't like him.

Kelly didn't like him.

And he didn't really punish him.

Fauci didn't like him.

He didn't fire Fauci.

Burks didn't like him and hurt him.

And no, the one that left was Scott Atlas.

That was the one that was really right and was trying to show Trump this is the logical extension of the MAGA philosophy.

I'm here.

And yet he left before Berks

and Fauci.

He didn't fire Comey soon enough.

So he agreed to Mueller.

So my point is that

he has that ability to be, I don't know, likable.

And he can.

And if he can do that, he can win the three to four.

And that's important because if he does that and he gets 51 or 52 percent of the vote, he'll win the Senate.

He wins the Senate.

And by the way,

we're going to have an interview with Tim Sheahy, the ex-Naval Navy SEAL, to follow.

We're trying to do some senators.

So we just did Ron Johnson.

That's coming out Saturday.

Is that right?

Saturday, yesterday.

That was a wonderful.

He's such a wonderful guy.

He's so smart.

He's so courageous.

I really like him.

He's a wonderful senator.

He's not afraid of anything.

He just lays it out on the line.

And he's unorthodox.

You don't know exactly what.

You can't pigeonhole him.

He's got some great ideas.

And I thought that was a pretty good interview and we'll have sheehee from montana but my point is they're gonna you know there's a lot of there's a lot of reasons to hope that the senate can stay and can the incumbents can be reelected and they can take the senate if trump has coattails and that will depend on the ability to win this

swing amorphous group of people that like what he did but they don't like him they have to like what he did and think he'll do it again and then say i don't like like him, but I don't like him enough not to vote for him.

Yeah.

Well, Victor,

let's go ahead and go to a break because we're way into the show, and then we'll come back and talk a little bit about the Biden polls hitting rock bottom.

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So, Victor Biden's polls are hitting rock bottom.

They're somewhere between 33 and 38.

And my surprise is that they're not lower given all the trouble in the United States right now at the border with crime and the economy.

But

what are your thoughts on this?

On his polls.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, he's talking about the border now.

What,

three and a half years too late?

How many people have been beaten up, killed?

How many people died of fentanyl?

300,000 since he came in, 100,000 a year from cartel easy access to the border.

Tragedy in Georgia.

He had a press conference.

He didn't even mention it.

We're back to Kate Steinley again.

All these people are dying.

We have these thugs that come in and they commit crimes and they're let out, or they brag that they have children.

I mean, I'm not trying to stereotype the entire group of people, but the left is even desperate because they're big city mayors and they're blue governors.

They're broke and they don't want it anymore.

And yet they know that they were responsible for it because they thought that they were and

I do think this in a cynical fashion that five years from now they're going to say it was worth it.

We got 8 million, 9 million people in here and now they're all voting through mail-in ballots.

Because I think a lot of the people coming in will be at residence where people are getting ballots through the mail and they'll just hand them one and they'll just fill it out.

I really do believe that with a fake name or something.

It happens all the time in California.

DMV loses $100,000 in just shrug.

Things happen.

And

so

now and only now, because it rates in most states the number one issue and are the number two in all of them, either one or two.

And it's a downer for the Democrats.

And it's one of the reasons you ask why he's polling 33 to 38.

Because even the mainstream media, PBS, NPR, the network news, they can't hide what's going on at the border.

And they're hearing from their constituents in the Latino and black communities.

And that is really starting to

worry them.

So he's going to go down to the border, I guess, tomorrow and say something.

You know, we know what he's going to say.

I could write a speech right now.

He's going to say, well,

we don't know what that means, but translated into that language.

Maybe it's some dialect of Ionian Greek or something.

I don't know what it is, but I think I can translate it when he goes,

I know what he's saying.

He's going to say, well, give me the tools.

I need the tools.

And I had a bipartisan.

I worked hard.

And those Republicans just, they didn't give me the tools.

They just walked out.

They just wanted to play politics.

They just take orders from Donald Trump.

And

the media kind of nods, and not one person that needed it says,

Well, Donald Trump didn't have any more money than you did, and he had no new laws.

And you overturned over 60 of his executive decision orders fiats and that's why the border's open all you have to do is don't ask for any money joe don't ask for any legislation just go back to january 20th and look exactly what was going on and copy it and there will be no illegal immigration but so he's not going to say that he knows what he did he's happy what he did every the republicans have one problem they keep referring to this open border like these people are incompetent

these people are just lax.

No, they're not.

They're very competent people.

They want that border open.

They wanted to destroy the border.

They want 8 million people.

Count the ways why.

It will grow government.

They're getting $10,000 credit in many of these states.

They're going to print money.

They're going to raise taxes.

They're going to expand the welfare state.

That means more welfare workers, more Democratic voters.

And these people are going to vote.

I don't know when and how, but they're going to vote before they're citizens.

And that's the idea.

And if you object to it, they're going to say, you're a racist.

You're for voter suppression.

How dare you?

We're all going to hear that.

And so that mayor in Georgia and Athens, you know, he was, they had a tape of him.

He was all for sanctuary cities.

And then the people got angry and started yelling at him and that gibberish he was saying about, we're doing all these steps for increase.

No, you're not.

You allowed your city to be a sanctuary city, and somebody came in here who was illegal and he killed a young woman and destroyed her life and the family's life and he didn't care.

And now he's trying to give that little mishmash.

And so they really got to hit the Democrats on this.

This is a very vulnerable issue and they're going to pay a heavy price at the polls, both in the Latino communities.

And by the way,

If you're going to make the argument against the Latino communities that they've been soft on illegal migration, because 90% of them are coming from Latin America.

That's no longer true.

It's 50%.

And the other 50 are coming from Asia and Africa.

And they have no sympathy with that other 50.

And

that other 50%, 4 million people, are going to be competing with them for social services.

They're not going to like it.

Yeah.

Well, not only the

other portion of them competing with social services, but they'll be competing with Americans for social services.

I know people right now that can't get into a doctor, a heart doctor they actually need because they just booked up.

I needed to go see a doctor, a specialist, and I wanted an appointment.

And the earliest I got was one month for an irregular test I just had.

And I went there and I sat two hours plus.

And the waiting room was completely full.

And if I had done that five years ago, and I'd called up and said, the test came back, I guess it's irregular, I need to come and see you, I would have been there in three days.

And I would have gone to at my appointment time, there would have been two people there, and the doctor would have been able to spend 30 minutes.

Now it's three to five minutes.

Yeah.

And that's just the way it is.

And that's the gift that keeps on giving of Obamacare.

And then the people who created Obamacare, do you think Nancy Pelosi has that weight?

Do you think they all have concierge doctors at big university med center?

So it doesn't affect them.

So

I don't know.

I don't know.

Everything has gone to hell.

And 8 million people, everybody just says 8 million, 8 million, 8 million.

What does that mean?

That means 10 San Francisco's.

And you're going to do what?

You're going to get 8 million people coming that have never had a tuberculosis test.

They've never had a filling.

They've never had a PSA.

They've never had a mammogram.

And if you don't do that, you're going to say, you're racist.

You're just treating the immigrant community.

So the idea in America is that if you walk from the poorest, most corrupt, most dangerous place in the world in Chiapas or Michokan or Oaxaca, and you get up here very quickly or Venezuela, then immediately, as soon as you cross the border, you're entitled to the exact same care as a U.S.

citizen.

on the premise that because there's so many of you, the care for the U.S.

citizen is going to diminish in this limited good, right?

It's a finite pie.

And yet the left never cares about that.

They don't care about citizens.

They really don't.

And they don't care about immigrants either.

It's just a mechanism to hold power and increase their power and influence.

They don't care about people getting killed.

It's just collateral damage.

No, and they don't care about the attitude of these immigrants that are criminal.

And I don't want to remind you of the guy that flipped the cameras off as he got out after kicking cops in the head.

And the guy on TikTok video who held up a baby that was born in the United States and he wasn't.

And he started bragging on my baby is bringing in food and paying for my apartment and livelihood.

Just think what two, three, four babies, five babies can do for you.

What kind of attitude is that?

And think of the parent who will raise six kids with the message that the first thing I did was break the law by crossing the border.

The second thing I did was break the law by residing illegally in the United States.

The third thing I did was probably getting fake ID

and now trying to tell my most generous host that I'm taking you to the cleaners because you're stupid.

And that's their attitude.

And I don't think

you want him to raise people to have that attitude, But they're doing it.

There's no magnanimity, there's no generosity, there's no

people are so, there's no gratitude at all.

You think that people would come here.

It used to be when we were growing up that you'd get some guy from the Hungarian Revolution, you know, 1956, a fail, they were almost wiped out, or a Cuban would come fleeing Castro, and they'd say, oh my God, what a wonderful place.

Thank you.

And they were the most hyper-patriotic.

We have some, but not like it used to be.

The idea is the left has told them that this is a white supremacy, majority, racist, sexist, transphobic country.

And the moment you come in, if you don't fit that paradigm, you're a victim.

And we're here to, A,

make sure that your grievances are heard and accelerated and expanded against the majority population.

And B, give you repertory treatment at the expense of printing money.

I just say that because we're 36 trillion in debt.

You know, one last thing, and the same thing they don't care about,

the left doesn't care about the law.

This thing with Letita James, we talked about,

she has now set a precedent, a law.

And when you listen to Eric Adams, when he was campaigning against the Crackers and he was campaign, remember he said,

they're going after me, but because I'm black, and look at look at the people sitting up there.

They're all we've never seen so many

chocolate.

Yeah,

he's an utter vile racist.

And then we had Letita James just giving all this, getting trumped.

So if you're a business person, you understand that if you're going to do business there,

you've got to give money to Eric Adams, you've got to give money to Letita James, and you've got to give, I think you've got to give money to Alvin Bragg as well, the Manhattan District.

And if you don't.

They can confiscate your wealth and put a federal judge or something in charge of your finances.

Or they can fine your children $4 or $5 million each.

Or they can bar you from doing business for three years.

They can steal your assets in bills of attainer.

That's what they're doing.

And I think what they're going to do is I think every single person that has a business in New York is going to have a subsidiary business with assets in Florida or Tennessee so that the moment they start, they get any inkling that that's what they're going after them, because this is like

I don't know, this is like a big fat fish to a shark.

Once they gobble and taste Trump's blood, they're going to have an appetite for like a man-eating tiger, to change the metaphor.

And they're going to think, hmm, Bill Ackman, remember him?

Didn't he go after Claudine Gay?

Wasn't he a Zionist?

Let's go look at him.

And that's how they're going to think.

And I hope Mr.

Ackman, who's far smarter than I, has a parachute.

I would have a whole company.

So the moment you get since, you just take all of your assets and keep them in your other company.

And you don't let New York have any of them.

And the same thing is true in California, too.

So

they've destroyed all fairness,

symmetry, equality under the law, and that's going to boomerang back on them.

New York is going to be a huge city of dependent people who demand social services from an ever-shrinking people who are able to provide them.

And it's going to be just the opposite in these red states.

Florida, Tennessee,

they're going to have all the, Texas, they're going to have all this capital flowing down there.

And

they're pretty tough on the way that they dole out services.

They're going to have budget surpluses.

And it's kind of like a doom loop in the blue, and it's a grow loop in the red.

And what's tragic about it, when you look at

I flew over San Francisco last week and landed.

It's the most beautiful city in the world, so it's really hard to destroy it.

And they had the most wonderful generations in the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s.

They built the Golden Gate, they built the Oakland Bay Bridge, Quake Tower.

It's just a beautiful,

it's a beautiful city, and they've just trashed it.

Trashed it in five years.

Well, speaking of Eric Adams, he seems to have some regrets and is making noises of calling for the end of the New York Sanctuary City status.

But I have a feeling it's a little bit too little, too late.

He reminds me of Louis XVI.

After everything happened, he'd start saying, oh, okay, I think this should go on.

No.

I think he's,

people remember him calling everybody a racist as he handed out bottled water to the bust-in illegal immigrants.

He thought that was so great.

And I think his polls are about 25%.

And

I can't figure out one in four people actually like that guy.

That guy, I don't know, something about him, he's not sane.

He just says things that are so repugnant.

They're usually racist, they're angry, they don't make any sense.

He's completely destroyed that city.

And I don't know why anybody would vote for him.

When you look what Bloomberg, and Bluegram was a Liberal Democrat, finally, he had gone from Republican or Independent to Democrat, but he did a good job.

Not as good as Giuliani, but he did a good job.

And so those, was it 16 years of Bloomberg and Giuliani,

he destroyed it.

He and

his predecessor.

Well.

Okay.

Well, let's go ahead and take a break, and then we'll come back and finish our last segment.

And we have Alexander Smirnoff and John Kirby on deck, and Bibi Netanyahu, maybe, if we have time.

Stay with us.

We'll be back.

Welcome back.

So, Victor, what do you make of Alexander Smirnov, who was a one-time trusted FBI informer?

One-time over a decade they praised him.

Yeah, they praised him a lot.

And then he told FBI handlers that Joe and Hunter each received $5 million from the Ukrainian business burisma.

And he's now jailed, not allowed bail because they say he has Russian contacts and he may

flee the country.

So very strange.

What do you think of that that case?

Or maybe not strange.

What do you think about it?

I'll ask you for a change and I'll reply.

I think that that poor guy got himself into a Hunter Biden rabbit hole

and he can't get out.

Well, whatever he did couldn't be worse than Christopher Steele, who was an FBI informant and who created a dossier with Russian help, probably, that was complete lies and got paid for it both by the FBI and from Hillary Clinton through her three-pay wallet.

So I think the point that I'm making, and he was a minor faker, and whether the FBI knew or not that he was feeding the Republican investigatory community, I don't know, but I think they kind of wanted him to,

what,

have all this attention go to his head and then cut his legs from under him and see if they could use him to destroy the Republican case.

But in the great scheme of things, the left is

going crazy.

Their whole case depended on Smirnov.

No, it didn't.

But

I mean,

it's like saying

their whole case depended on Smirnov, therefore he was wrong.

And that's a principle we always abide by.

And so Russian disinformation did not depend, Russian collusion did not, it didn't depend on Christopher Steele.

So when he was completely repudiated or Kevin Kleinsmith forged a document, that didn't mean anything.

In fact, when they spent $40 million and they showed that the dream team was completely inept and couldn't find any collusion, they still are saying it today.

It's still Russian collusion.

They're just, they're starting it again and again.

Russian collusion, Russian collusion, Russian collusion.

So I don't think it's such a big deal.

Yeah.

I mean, the FBI is so corrupt these days.

And so when they have these informants and they

think about it, I mean, their directors lie under to federal investigators.

They claim amnesia.

They surveil school board meetings.

They go after,

they do performance art SWAT raids on political directives.

They put how many ungodly informants in January 6th and then lie about it.

They don't.

Christopher Wray can't answer a simple question without claiming some type of national security exemption.

So I don't know what it would be much better, as we've said before, just to take the various divisions of the FBI, examine each one to the degree, you know, it's counterfeit division, DOJ.

Anti-terrorism, go to the Pentagon.

Just break the whole thing up.

It's got too much power without enough audit.

And it's completely politicized now.

That's one of the great achievements of the left.

They were able to drop their intrinsic hatred of quasi-military or investigative authorities and they adopted them and they got smart and they thought, you know, why get mad at the Pentagon?

Why make fun of generals?

Why get mad at the FBI?

Why say the CIA overthrew Allende or Mossadak?

Why not just use them?

and flip them so they go after the right?

So we'll get all the generals in the Pentagon and they'll be talking about Professor Kendi.

And we won't say a word about Revolving Door, going into contractor jobs.

We won't say a word

about, I don't know, conflict of interest.

We won't say a word of anything.

Just flip them.

So suddenly we woke up and all of our retired generals are left wing and the FBI is left wing and the CIA is left wing.

And

that was pretty smart of the left to use them.

And they used them not to go after our foreign enemies, but to go after us, the American people.

And everybody said, well, the right just turned on the FBI.

No, the FBI turned on the right.

The conservatives want to like the CIA and the FBI and Pentagon.

But the Pentagon's the one that got rid of 8,400 people because they didn't get a vaccination when most of them had immunity anyway from prior infections.

They were the one that...

destroyed the

white male combative

recruit by putting him under a cloud of suspicion that he was a white supremacist conspiracist when they found no evidence of that.

The FBI was the one that went after the entire Trump team on no evidence.

So

it's a very strange thing how all of these agencies have flipped.

And the left just decided once that, yes, they have chain of command.

Yes, they're authoritarian.

But

Throughout history, communist revolutions have been based on that very fact.

So let's use them.

And now they're the shock forces of the left.

They really are.

Yeah, that's frightening.

Well, Victor, what do you think about John Kirby coming out and assuring us all that the nation's soldiers are not going to be on the ground in the UK?

After, the reason that he did this was after President of France Macron said, Western, what do you say?

He said, Western forces are a possibility in the Ukraine, i.e.

we're part of those Western forces.

What do you make of that?

Are we going to end up with soldiers somehow getting close?

No, I don't think they're going to stand for that.

I don't think

there's no support for it.

They would like to.

Macron is crazy.

It's very easy for him to say that because he's not going to send very many French.

They don't have any wherewithal.

What he's basically saying is we're going to put a few Frenchmen in there and then shame the United States so they'll put 200,000 in.

We're not going to do that.

And the more they say Vladimir Putin would never use a nuclear weapon as he threatens, or this general or that parliament, who knows?

They don't know that.

And the more that they get this thing goes on and on and on, and it's more likely we're done, the more likely somebody's going to do something stupid.

And we all know what's going to happen in the end.

The Ukrainians are very brave, they're very heroic, they're defending their territory.

They're not going to get back Crimea just as

Barack Obama didn't demand it and Donald Trump didn't demand it and Joe Biden didn't demand it until now, I suppose.

They're not going to get the Donbass.

They could get Putin back to where he started in February of 2022 if

they cede formally Donbass and Crimea, which Zelensky before the war was willing to do in a grand bargain, and if they don't go into NATO.

And

there's a mechanisms of a deal there that would stop this horrific killing and bloodshed.

But the left doesn't want that.

You know, it's really weird.

They have taken this Russia-Ukraine thing, and

I'm not at all sympathetic to Vladimir Putin.

I hope he loses.

But they have taken that, and they have transmogrified it into Russian collusion, collusion we didn't get, laptop disinformation we didn't get.

Ah, we finally proved that Russians are evil.

And

they're fixated on Russians.

And we've talked about that before.

I mean, they don't call for a ceasefire with the Ukrainians and the way they put these pressures on the Israelis.

And they don't romanticize the Russian people.

They always say

the Gazans have nothing to do with Hamas.

They don't have anything to do.

They don't have anything to do with Hamas.

They're just separate.

And you see these pictures of all the civilians spitting on Israelis, desecrating bodies, 500 of them, tag-alonging in to rape and kill when they heard there would be no consequences and there was no deterrence, looting, torturing people, raping them in the tunnels, and the left says there's no connection between civilians and Hamas, and yet they have condemned the entire Russian people of being absolutely guilty of Putin going into Russia.

I don't mind whatever they'd say.

They're either collectively innocent or collectively guilty, but they're the same.

So you either say that the Gazans are innocent and the Russian people are innocent, but they hate the Russian people.

Or you say they're both guilty, or you call for a ceasefire in Ukraine, which has much greater carnage.

And you know, there's nobody, there's no Russian immigrants, is there, here saying, please stop the killing.

We're killing people.

We're killing Ukrainians and Russians.

So

it's so inconsistent what they're doing.

It's an extension of this nightmarish Russia, Russia, Russia, everywhere fixation.

They're like addicts.

They need a new fix about every year of Russian hatred.

Well, and this year in particular, since it's 2024.

Well, speaking of Gaza, then, did you see that interview with Bibi Netanyahu on Face the Nation, where the interviewer was trying to poke him with things like,

Bibi, you're facing growing

distrust in the U.S.

Congress and the Biden administration.

Shouldn't you heed their reservations?

And then Phoebe Netanyahu went over all the different reservations that the United States had that he did not heed, and he was successful in going in and taking out the tumult.

She was like a formaldehyde toad, and he was dissecting her and cutting her appendages off as he was in the eighth grade biology class.

It was pathetic.

Everybody said, you know, all these, he just said they were,

not going to end.

He just said, there's three things we're going to do.

We always said it.

We said it at the beginning.

We said it in the middle.

We're saying it now.

We're going to destroy Hamas.

We're going to try to get the hostages back.

We're going to make sure Gaza is not run ever again by Hamas or anybody like Hamas.

That was all he said.

And the more...

People say you can't go into 300 miles, they're booby trap of tunnels.

You can't do it.

It's impossible.

You can't separate the civilian, their shields.

And

they're doing it.

Not as fast as everybody would like, but with very tolerable casualties and they're systematically destroying Hamas and they have to be allowed to do that.

And I think a good rule for all of us is each time someone in the Democratic Party starts attacking Netanyahu, you just use that argument and apply it to Zelensky.

Are you, you know, are you fully democratic?

Do you have a wartime cabinet?

Mr.

Zelensky, do you have a wartime cabinet?

Are you bipartisan?

Or did you suspend habeas corpus in all elections and all political parties?

Are you proportionate, Mr.

Netanyahu?

Are you disproportionate?

Mr.

Zelensky, for each rocket that comes, we want you to fly with only one rocket.

We want you to be promotion.

Are you giving anybody notice that your rockets are coming and your bombs?

Are you texting?

Are you dropping leaflets?

Mr.

Zelensky, do you drop leaflets when you hit civilian targets?

It's collateral damage.

And

when you take out a bridge and occupied Crimea, just do the same thing and see what happens.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, that's the end of our show today.

Thank you so much for all of the analysis of current politics.

Did you?

We got over a very wide topic.

Yeah, we got it.

A lot of wide topics.

It's going to heat up to this election.

It's going to be the nastiest, meanest,

cruelest election in history.

Everybody, go back back and read the February Time essay by Molly Ball, how

the cabal and the conspiracy that saved the election for the Democrats, and just read it.

How you modulate Antifa and BLM, street thugs, to turn on and off the riots depending on the election cycle, how you get corporate America to give money to only to the Democrats and specifically to change

the balloting laws in the key swing states, and how you get Silicon Valley to suppress news you don't like.

It's all there, and that's the blueprint for 2024.

Wow.

That's sad.

But

I don't doubt that the Democrats are going to do it all again, and

they may be successful.

I hope not, but I have my doubts about how things can go straight.

But thank you very much, Victor, and thanks to our audience, too.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

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