Eyes Open Wide: Hoaxes, Indictments and Whistleblowers

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Welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

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

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We got a lot.

This is the Friday news roundup.

We've got lots of news.

Kansas City shooting, Tucker, we're going to return to the Tucker interview for a second because Putin has come out with some new interesting observations.

And

what else were we going to do?

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We're going to do that too.

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And I'm going to lose $17,000 in two years.

That was what they offered me.

It's $17,000 less than what out-the-door price was.

But that was,

I drove it today to get it washed for the turnover.

Yeah.

And

I thought, why am I getting rid of my Echodiesel?

It runs really well now.

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So

all right.

And so we'll move forward with the news.

My Yorkis impeachment

in the house is also on deck.

So stay with us and we'll be right back with some with the news.

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Welcome back.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

So, Victor, just recent, just today, while we're recording in Kansas City, there has been a shooting during the Kansas City Chiefs celebration parade for their win in the Super Bowl, and one is dead and 22 wounded.

And I was wondering if you had any observations on that.

I think we just, it just happened three or four hours ago, so we don't know anything.

The only thing I can say is whenever you have a mass shooting and there's no news for a while, it tells me that it's crime or gang related.

And if it wasn't,

the left goes crazy and says that

they would have had a story now that Kansas City, Missouri has lax gun control laws, that it was a AR-15,

it was a white supremacist, it was a Trump supporter, but I haven't heard any of that.

And yet I heard that

they apprehended them, so I'm just assuming it's a gang fight.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, we'll see.

That news is yet to come out.

Well, we had Putin today, and I know that you talked extensively about the Tucker interview with Jack,

but today Putin gave an interview to Russian media and stated that Tucker is a dangerous man.

And I was wondering if you had any further observations on that interaction there.

Putin is a wily dictator and he's trolling us.

So here are the, I think here are the alternatives.

Number one,

he felt he would have been more effective if it had been a hardball interview.

And it won't get as much credibility because he ranted and raved about the pseudo-history of Ukraine and all that.

So he's genuine.

Chances that's true, 20%.

And then the third, second is

that he thinks Tucker lured him in to pouring his guts out, and he talked too much for two hours, and it might have domestic consequences.

And so Tucker is a dangerous person, as he said, because he's deceptive.

He just sat there and let Putin talk too much.

Percent, 30%.

The other thing is that he thinks that Tucker gives him a hearing, it's more sympathetic to him than anybody else.

And yet, if he praises Tucker because he's so widely hated, it will boomerang.

So he kind of trashed Tucker, and therefore that will give Tucker credibility, 50%.

That's my take on it.

And one last thing, I mentioned that to Jack, but,

you know,

there's been about six correspondents since the invasion of Ukraine that have interviewed Putin.

Nobody said a word, of course.

I looked at some of the transcripts.

They're a little bit more interruptive of Putin than Tucker was, but they were not talking to Tucker in

the Tower of Mordor with Sauer on top of them.

And then Tucker says one wrong word, and he disappears at the airport, and Putin assures us that he did not fall out of a window.

You got to give him some slack on that.

And the other is, I mentioned William Shire, but I should have pointed out very quickly that

he was,

the reason he went there, he was one of these left,

he was pro, you know, he and Edward R.

Murrow had a big falling out because he was on the Alger Hiss wing of the Democratic Party.

Murrow was a staunch anti-communist,

even though he went after McCarthy, Joe McCarthy.

But anyway, my point is this, is that

the first years he was in Germany,

he had married an Austrian woman.

He was very sympathetic to Hitler.

Much more more sympathetic to Hitler than

Tucker is to Putin.

And, you know, he accompanied the German army into France.

I was just shocked when I was researching the Second World Wars on that May 10th invasion.

William Scheier was accompanied by German officers, and he was actually at the armistice

at the famous train car in the forest where the World War I armistice had been

taken place, and Hitler tried to humiliate the French political leadership, and he was there.

So he was embedded.

I guess that was the word we use today.

He was embedded with the Third Reich troops.

Can you imagine if Tucker went over to Putin and he said, I want to be embedded with the Russian army as they go into, what would they do?

So

I think we were just so hysterical.

And he was trying to get,

he had two purposes.

He wanted to see if he could get back Gersokovich,

and he wanted to see if Putin would offer some outline of a peace treaty or some concession.

And he wanted everybody to see Putin.

And that was it.

The first 30 minutes were just...

You can't stop him.

It was a complete Foucaultian construct of the history of Ukraine.

And, you know, that it was part of, it had been part of Russia, but he didn't didn't mention one salient fact that in 1939 under the agreement of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of August 23rd they agreed a week later to jointly invade Poland and slice it up Stalin wanted to revenge for his 1921 to 23 defeat but he was late they were ill-prepared so Hitler went in and made all of his embarkation points and then he sat around for two weeks waiting for Stalin and the Russians and then the Poles were starting to reform, and they might have given a tougher fight, but then they turned around at their backs.

The Russians came.

Okay.

So after the war, we were their allies, and we said, okay, Joe,

can you give back what you stole?

And he said, no.

And they said, well, what are we going to do about Poland?

And Stalin said, well, take the Germans they lost, steal all of East Prussia and all of the eastern parts of, and cut off 25, 30% of Germany and give it to Poland.

And And as I said to Jack, that's how Gdansk

appeared out of Old Danzig.

But the point I'm making was

that was a fop

to Stalin.

If you get the trend, there's three parties involved.

Stalin steals Western Ukraine, 30% of Western Ukraine that had been Polish since the Middle Ages and Catholic, and won't give it back, and ethnically cleans the Poles.

Then the Poles say, I want that territory back.

And their allies sell them down the river and say, no, we're afraid of Joe.

You can't have it.

So we're going to take it from a third party, Germany, and take lands that you had quasi-claims, not as well as you did in Ukraine.

He didn't mention any of that.

That

most of the problems of Ukrainian territorial integrity were self-inflicted by the Russians.

Anyway, I thought that was interesting, his little Professor Putin's 30-minute discursive about all of the.

And you know, the other thing was

he's Mr.

Macho, but he was so whiny.

They hurt us, they don't treat us well, they're mean to Russia, we don't care.

It doesn't matter that they humiliate us, but you know, I thought he'd be more, you know, defiant.

Yes, but we know why that is, because he's playing to a Western audience.

Yeah, victims.

He's playing the victim violin to Western audience.

All I could say is that he had a script down, and Biden, if he was, if Biden had been interviewing him, it would have been a dis I can't even Biden could not give a pseudo-history like that.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Well,

the House finally got itself together and they impeached Mayorkis.

And I was wondering your thoughts on that too.

It was long overdue.

He violated his oath.

He kept lying to us under oath.

He just said flat out

the border is secure.

It was sort of like mostly peaceful demonstration when you saw the flames behind the, I think that was an MSCNBC reporter in June of 2020.

So he failed and he's humiliated and everybody says, well, they're going to be acquitted in the Senate pro forma, yes, but he's going to have to live with that, that he was impeached.

And he didn't give, you know, another reason?

Why didn't he give

Secret Service protection to RFK Jr.?

He asked for it.

His father and his uncle had been assassinated.

Remember, he asked Mayorkas, can I just have one or two guys protect me?

I'm getting all these threats, and he wouldn't do it.

He refused to do it.

That was just pure spite because he was running against his boss.

He's a bad guy.

The only thing I would further comment very quickly is they had to impeach, they had to make the attempt twice.

Because they had Gallagher, who's a good guy, but he thought it was a bad precedent.

And as I said earlier, Buck thought it was a bad precedent.

McClintog, these are all hardcore conservatives.

And then Scalise, the first time, was receiving medical treatment.

But my point is this.

A Democrat will be carried in on a gurney to vote.

There was no dissension.

Schumer, the squad,

Phillips, you name it, across the spectrum, they have absolute discipline and solidarity.

The Republicans, they get five or six guys and say, I'm principled.

I'm principled.

It will set a bad precedent.

Yeah, but you're not in Marcus of Queensbury rules of polite, I don't know, checkers or chess.

You're dealing with hardcore socialists, and they have no scruples.

They don't care about precedents.

They impeached a president twice.

They tried a president as a private citizen.

They tried to get a president off the state ballot.

They have no scruples.

And why do they do that?

Why do they just say, well, we have dissension, we're more principled, so we're going to, we think it's a bad president, so we won't,

you know.

Same thing with Santos.

Santos is a scoundrel, he's a liar, he's a fraud.

In other words, he's Senator Menendez, right?

From New Jersey.

There's no difference except one is a senator.

Do you think they'd ever get him out and just vote in the Democratic caucus to expel him?

No.

Menendez.

Yes, they're never going to do that.

Not like they did to Santos.

That's true.

No, and they lost that seat.

Yeah.

And they just had the election for that.

They tongue.

She lost by seven points.

Yeah.

Yeah, at least seven points.

I got a lot of money.

And Lee Zeldin carried that district.

It's an upscale district, and he carried it, and Santos won.

When he ran for governor, he won the majority of votes.

So, you know, she wasn't an ideal candidate.

She had one flaw.

You know what that was?

What?

She said that she was kind of for Trump, and she was kind of

had reservations for Trump, and she kind of sometimes

not quite.

She wanted him to come in the district kind of at the end, but maybe not kind of at the beginning.

You can't do that with Donald Trump.

No.

You either go full Trump or you don't go at all.

You can say Donald Trump is a unique person.

He's polarizing, but he's the not.

And that does not work to temporize.

Think of all the people who temporize and how well it did them.

It didn't do them very well.

Who are you thinking of specifically?

I'm trying to think of all the people in.

Almost everybody who ran against him in the primary.

Chris Christie, his chief advisor, then I shocked at Trump.

Nikki Haley, Trump's ambassador to the UN, who was unemployed at the time when he appointed her.

Now she's...

I wrote an article, if you remember, that I said she had four choices.

And she could just be an inert candidate and fade out and maybe hope for the vice presidency, or she could have been

admired for offering people a legitimate different point of view, or she could get out with dignity like DeSantis did, or she could be a dead ender

and ramp up the rhetoric and the venom and the toxicity, and that's what she's doing.

Do you think that she's destroying her 2028 chances?

She seems to me like she's

trying the waters to be a third-party runner because she does.

I thought, wow, maybe she and RFK will get together, but they would never agree on who would be the top of the ticket.

She's become very angry, and maybe Trump wanted to do that when he,

I thought, you know, kind of cheaply mentioned her husband and all that, but she's not doing herself any good, and this is her home state.

And she said that she's gaining ground quickly.

We'll see.

She may be, but if she loses by 20 points in her home state, she's done.

And she's done now, and she doesn't know it.

I I don't know what the point of this is.

Maybe it's to drain off campaign funds or to damage Trump and say, see what happens when you make fun of my husband or when you attack me, I'm going to try to destroy your chances.

You know, in 1976,

Jerry Ford made that charge against Ronald Reagan.

If you remember, Reagan ran for the second time.

He'd run in 1968.

And he almost he recovered after a series of early defeats and he came into the convention with the momentum.

He'd won more of the late primaries than Jerry Ford.

And then he was like a 90 delegate short.

And there was a raucous, he came up and he endorsed Ford, but the Reaganites did not want the Chamber of Commerce, Wall Street Journal, Republicans.

And later, when he lost to Carter, a very close race, he said, Ronald Reagan cost me the election.

People forget that.

I think he might have been right about that, too.

Yeah.

Well, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and and talk about China.

And

there's new evidence about the Russia hoax that Mike Schellenberg and Matt Taibbi have uncovered.

So stay with us and we'll be right back.

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We're back.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

So, Victor, I'm going to give you a little several things that I've heard either read in articles or heard talk about

China.

And then, I'm just wondering, is there something to fear about all of this intrusion into our culture?

So, number one,

TikTok seems to have captured the imagination of America's youth, so much so that even the Biden administration has run campaign ads on it.

Number two,

China's crossings of the border were 20,000, I understand,

last year.

So 20,000 Chinese have come in illegally into the United States.

And then finally, there is an article today about a research place called Citizen Lab, and they were looking at 123 Chinese websites that are posing as local news and so bringing in some of the local news but also lots of Chinese propaganda.

And I was wondering if there is anything to a fear of the impact of all of these sneaky Chinese ways into our community.

Did you say sneaky?

Yeah.

That's a Asian stereotype.

Is that?

But this is pretty sneaky, so I don't care.

Okay, you don't care.

You're talking about someone who lives 12 miles.

You're talking to somebody, as I speak from this farm, it's 12 miles away from Readley, California, where there was a Chinese biolab right under the nose of officials.

They drove, you can't, it's in downtown Readley.

And

they found vials of Ebola and COVID and all sorts of terrible toxins and genetically altered dead rats.

I mean, it was doing things that would be like a level three biolab right in Readley.

And this person was a Chinese national with ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

So yeah, I'm really worried about it.

I've got to remember one thing about China.

It is a master propagandist in a way that just makes the Russians look like pikers.

They pose as, they do two things.

Number one is Mao they realize for the American left is a romantic figure.

Remember the Obama press secretary who said one of her favorite people in history was Mao, and she had to resign over that.

And

when I first went to UC Santa Cruz, everybody wore a little blue Mao cap.

Not everybody, with a red star.

And his picture with that, he had that hand going forward and all that.

It was disgusting.

He was the greatest mass murderer in history.

So they know that, that there's a reservoir of romance about the communist Chinese revolution, and there isn't, in a way, there is not about the Russian.

Number two,

they play on DEI.

They're always saying that they are victims of racism and white supremacy, and it's so unfair what you're,

that was an Asian slur about COVID and the Wuhan virus, and when Trump said it's China virus, China, oh, it's so racist.

Think of the difference when you look at Russians.

They're all, as I said earlier, they're gap-tooth, tattooed, terrible accented, big, muscular white guys with shaved heads and all of Hollywood villains.

They're the Hollywood villain, not Chinese.

So they have been very effective in, there's about 330,000,

at least there was pre-COVID, Chinese students here.

Even if you have 1%, you're up to 3,500 of them.

And Silicon,

what I'm getting at, Sammy, is that they understand one

great thing.

They are like Japan in the co-prosperity sphere of 1935 to 41.

They understand that they have more discipline, they're more organized, they have an amazing ability to engineer and fabricate things and manufacture, but because they're a closed society, they are not dynamic, just like Japan wasn't before World War II.

So most of their design, they take an aircraft engine like the Japanese did, or they take a battleship design, they improve it, they nuance it, they construct it very well.

But they understand they have to get access to American and Western ingenuity and cutting-edge designs, and that's why they do this.

That's number one, why we have all of this espionage.

They think they can take something so while we're arguing or fighting over DI or whatever it is, they take the plans, take it, and then they do it quick.

The second thing,

they really like to

they like the idea that the United States is in turmoil.

and they like to press things.

So they like to send the Chinese balloon over.

They like to stonewall on COVID.

I mean, mean, a million people in the United States died of COVID.

And they still, they just say, screw you, we're not going to tell you.

But they like to provoke, and they understand one thing.

The second thing was I get into,

they have a lot of money, and they have compromised almost everybody in the Wall Street corporate community, and even in politics.

I can't.

The number of people who have worked for the Chinese government, everybody from the Biden family to

good old Joe Lieberman, they're all having business interests or lobbying interests.

It's sort of like the Saudi Arabia of the 1970s when they had all the petro dollars

and we had all of these former Bush won executives and former officials that were going over to Saudis and making a ton of money.

And so it's very hard.

It's insidious.

So they're stealing our technology.

They're infiltrating our border.

They are sending fentanyl to Mexico to be remanufactured.

When Trump slapped his tariffs on and Biden kind of said, okay, I'm not going to give him credit, but we're going to cut off the supply chain from China.

All they did was send stuff to Mexico.

So Mexico is the chief, I think it's the chief source of American imports now, but they're not being Mexico.

They're just the parts that they put together, and therefore they get around, China gets around the tariffs.

So, yeah, it's a very, it's a much more formidable enemy than Russia.

It just gets back to what we were talking about with Jack, that it's just insane to create or allow to be created a

North Korea, Iran, but especially Russian and Chinese axis.

We got to break that up somehow and play them off against each other.

Yeah.

Well, the second thing is

if the Chinese are sneaky, our CIA is sneakier.

And Michael Schellenberg and Matt Taibbi have a new report out on the Russian hoax.

And the things that are new in it are that the CIA targeted 26 Trump associates and workers in their investigation, which was illegal.

They illegally mobilized foreign intelligence agencies against them.

And the second thing was, and I never realized this, that it started with an Australian intelligence agent who said that

Trump and the Trump campaign had damning information about Hillary Clinton.

And those two things were just interesting.

Yeah, they got the so-called five-eyes.

Those are the English-speaking consortia of Canada, Australia,

Britain, New Zealand, and the United States, and they share intelligence.

And John Brennan, who remember we're talking about a person who lied two times under oath, once asserting that we never killed anybody in drone assassination attempts along the Pakistani border during the Obama administration.

The other was even more egregious.

He said, we never, in the CIA,

monitored Senate staff computers.

And then he had, he said both under oath, should have been prosecuted and indicted for perjury.

He was a really bad guy.

He voted for Gus Hall as a youth, the American Communist Party candidate.

So he was our CIA director, and he cooked this up, apparently, that he got the bright idea that Trump posed an existential danger.

So he got his five eyes counterpart and said, here's 26 names of people that are, if you can give me some dirt.

And we know what happened.

George Papadopoulos just went into a bar and the former,

remember Australian Ambassador Downer kind of baited him and then they arrested him in the airport and they just tried to destroy his life.

They just tried to destroy Carter Page's life.

They were really nasty, mean people.

And there was,

according to that story, there was some suggestions that that file that outlined that is missing.

And that gave conspiracists some idea that, well, maybe that was why there was the performance art Mar-a-Lago Mar-a-Lago raid to disguise the fact that they were after that, or that maybe that's why Trump took it out.

I can't, I don't want to, you know, traffic in conspiracy theories, but there's something really sinister about Hillary Clinton and Christopher Steele and the Obama administration.

Everybody should remember that Russian collusion, the hoax of Russian collusion, was cooked up in the West Wing

by John Brennan

and Barack Obama

and James Comey

and

Hillary Clinton, at least her Clintonite people, once it was decided she was going to run in to

continue the Obama project, and they've never accounted for it.

That famous Leslie Stahl interview in 60 Minutes when she just made fun of Trump and said, you're delusional when he said, I've been spied on.

And now we know that he was understating the case.

Yeah.

Well, let's turn then to the Elise Stefanik, who has filed complaints against the New York Attorney General, Letitia James, with the bar, and the complaints against her making all her public statements that have been very prejudicial and obviously the impact on a jury then.

And then she filed something else, Ms.

Stefanik, against that judge in Goran, you you know, that crazy guy,

that he filed ethics complaints against him.

Everybody should remember the context that

Letitia or Letitia, whatever however you pronounce her name, she and Alvin Bragg and Fannie Willis had all promised in their campaigns to go after Donald J.

Trump.

And they had used that narrative to raise money.

So they were not disinterested

prosecuted.

Everyone knows that they would have never used those charges against anybody had they been to the left or have Donald Trump.

Right now, Donald Trump would be sitting in Mar-Lago with millions of dollars in a retirement, and he would have no criminal exposure at all.

This was all to stop him from running again.

That's the thing to remember.

And

she, in case of Letita James,

she's charging Donald Trump with overvaluing a real estate asset that was probably undervalued, that was used to get a loan, which he paid timely and made the bank millions of dollars.

Period.

That's it.

And she took that to the cleaners, and I mean, to the bank, and

that was her whole career.

And there's nothing there.

And she's relying on, you mentioned the judge and Goron.

Well, I mean, Judge Kaplan in the E.

Gene Carroll case.

Remember him?

Another Democratic-appointed liberal judge.

And what did he say?

Well, technically,

Donald Trump, maybe not guilty of rape, but only guilty of sexual, but it was rape.

It was all but rape.

Judge has no business doing that, interpreting a sentence

that the jury has passed.

And then we go to, you know, the Fannie Willis case.

She's left-wing, and the jury will be left-wing, and same with Jack Smith.

And people are sick of it.

They really are.

And

there's a subtext here that we don't talk about, but Donald Trump keeps railing that there's a racial component, but Fannie Willis and Alvin Bragg and Letita James have used the race cart.

And she's went to, just to take one example, on Martin Luther King Day, she went to a black congregation and claimed that it was all about race.

because

the same narrative, a proud black woman that people are jealous of and want to take down.

And so there's an element there that in these inner city jury pools that they try to accentuate race in the sense that Donald Trump is a threat, could be to the black community, but it might be very ironic because there's a growing number of black males that might not feel the same way, and they could be in the jury pool.

It only takes one or two, you know.

Yeah.

Well, before we go to break, I just thought maybe we could get your ideas on there's been news out there that illegal aliens are going to be given jobs as police and fire department.

Did you have some thoughts on that?

I mean, that's crazy.

I have an Orwellian fear that as the author of Mexifornia, that one day I'm going to get a knock on my door with a policeman come in and said, you have violated some statute about making fun of illegal immigration, and he will be an illegal alien policeman.

So, yeah, I mean, that's, they're already in the military.

And again, that was one of the themes of the dying citizen.

The citizen was dying because there's no distinction between the citizen and the resident.

Can you think of anything a citizen

that a resident, whether legal or illegal, can't do that a citizen can?

No, nothing offhand.

I mean, well, they can cross the border without coming through customs.

They don't have to have a passport, do they?

Yeah, they don't have to.

How about a drive?

Do they have to have a license?

No, they get a special license.

Can they vote?

They sure do.

A lot of them here in California, the DMV lost 100,000 votes and doesn't explain where they went.

And school board elections are open about it.

They can serve in the military.

They can get welfare entitlements.

What's the advantage?

When the Simpson-Mazzoli law that

Alan Simpson and Representative Mazzoli passed,

1986, it offered a blanket amnesty for, I think, two million.

You know how many people took that up?

30%.

Why did they take, Everybody said, well, it was too.

No,

they didn't take up because there was no need to.

There was no difference between being an illegal alien with amnesty and a citizen.

Why would you want to go through the trouble to being a citizen when you had all the rights of DayFac?

We have 50 million people in the United States that were not born here, 27% of the population of California.

Well, plus,

they don't want to be entered into the system and watched by our government.

And if they remain illegal, they don't have to have any fear of that whatsoever.

How can you have a law enforcement officer whose very existence is breaking the law?

I don't understand that.

It just doesn't make sense.

And I keep saying, I have, in the 40 years that I have been flying, maybe longer, I took my first international flight when I went to Greece at 20 years old, so it's 50 years.

I have seen at least seven or eight people who, in the line at customs, they say things like, I lost my passport, or and they're trying to get in and you know what they do they put them in a room and if you watch them they take them right back and they send them home

and so why do you privilege people who are intentionally breaking the law over citizens if a citizen does what an illegal alien does they're sent home and believe me there's no but there's no sensitive liberal person said that's so unfair they sent him back to england he had to go back to Germany it's terrible he went back to South Korea he didn't have a passport no they don't care about that.

All right.

Let's go to a break and then come back and talk a little bit about Tony Bobolinski and the idea of a two-state solution for Israel, which our administration has floated here and there.

So stay with us and we'll be back.

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We're back.

We are part of Just the News organization.

That's John Solomon's site, and he is one of the best investigative reporters of the DC area.

So we encourage everybody to go to Just the News.

And then also social media, Victor can be found at Hansen's Morning Cup on Facebook and V D Hansen on X, which is the former Twitter.

So Victor, Tony Bobolinski was testifying before the House investigators and he said, quote, Joe Biden was the brand sold by the Biden family and also that Biden's family, quote,

sold out to foreign actors, unquote.

So some very damning testimony today in Congress.

Is there any impact of this?

Well, he's been saying this for, what, five years, and no one wants to listen to him.

The FBI didn't want to.

He comes from a very distinguished family that served in the military.

He served.

So he's a very upright guy.

And somehow, and we never really heard the exact details, he got hooked up with Hunter Biden, big mistake, in these financial foreign deals.

And Hunter, I think, approached him and said, look,

Joe Biden is the guy.

And so Tony Bobolinski's point is, here's all the details, but you don't even need the details because Hunter had nothing going for him.

He had no diplomatic skills.

He had no financial skills.

And he was making tens of millions of dollars.

Now, why was he making that?

Was it because his name was Biden, Wilson Smith?

It was only because of Joe Biden.

He was the only Biden of the whole Biden clan that anybody gave a damn about.

And they didn't give a damn about him because they liked him.

They gave a damn about him because he had a reputation of quid pro quo, old

Joe Biden from Scranton.

So they went and said, this guy is senator, was a senator.

He's now vice president, and he will be president.

You should invest in him.

And he's not your upright Dudley Do right type of politician.

He will scratch your back.

If you've got a prosecutor on your back, Viktor Shokin, he will fire him and he'll use foreign aid to get rid of it and he'll get away with it because the media is in the bag for him.

He can do anything he wants.

He's the type of guy that can not only fire a Ukrainian prosecutor, but he can go to the Council on Foreign Relations event and do what?

Brag about that he did it.

in front of the world on tape.

And he doesn't care.

He says, so what?

So

if we get into a reductionist fashion, what do we boil down to or distill?

These people had nothing going for them.

The Biden family, this is what Bobolinski said.

They had one thing, the name.

Take away the name, there's no money.

And do we think the Chinese and the Ukrainians and the Romanians are stupid?

That they're willing to give tens of millions of dollars for nothing?

No.

They don't do that.

They invested in the Biden, as Tony Bobolinski said, brand, and

he delivered.

And that's all you need to know.

And you can talk of all these left-wing politicians and Democratic

hacks.

They can say whatever they want, but they can't get away from the central truth.

They were selling the Biden name, and with the Biden name came Biden influence peddling.

And it's kind of scary because we don't know the story, so we have no idea.

The deals that went on with Ukraine, the deals that went on with China, the deals that went on with Eastern European countries, and we don't know how they affect American foreign policy today.

We don't know to what degree Joe Biden's policy in Ukraine is governed by the fact that his son was paid a million dollars a year by a crooked Ukrainian burisma.

cartel and that he himself intervened to protect the investigation against his son in Burisma.

How does that play out in our foreign policy?

We don't know.

We don't know any of this.

And so we're not going to know either.

Not until it's all over.

And then one day about 2029,

somebody's going to write a book and

get access with freedom of information.

Then we're going to go, oh my God, look what the Bidens did.

That will be forgotten.

Or it'll be, what, 2016 to now has been almost eight years, and they're finally coming out and telling us that the Russian hoax was

a bad thing by the way.

And, you know, everything that Biden has said is a demonstrable lie.

I had no knowledge when my son, we know that there are now records, tapes, emails that say, and phone calls that show that was an abject lie.

When he fired Shokin, he said that he was trying to fire a corrupt prosecutor and trying to reform.

That was a complete lie.

Complete lie.

He was trying to protect Parisma and his son from legitimate investigations into corruption.

Yeah.

And nobody cares.

I hope somebody does.

Well, let's turn then to the two-state solution.

I've been wanting to ask you this for many weeks because the administration floated the idea that that's what they would like to back.

And I just read an article today by Gaddy Tob, G-A-D-I-T-A-U-B.

I think it was on the free press.

And he was saying that no, there's no way any two-state solution is possible because, one, it would simply cause a lot more bloodshed because 75% of the Palestinians were behind Hamas anyway, so they would just go back at it.

Two, it was only ever a dream.

And three,

the whole idea that Palestinians yearn

for self-determination or to determine their own fate is

just a wrong concept if you look at how they act and how they have been acting in the sense that they get lots of money and they don't put any money into having a free, open, sovereign state.

They put it all into the ground for terror activities.

So it was a very powerful argument, I mean, article.

And I was wondering, you know, given that, any thoughts on this?

Well, I mean, we don't have to think, we don't have to speculate, we don't have to ponder, we have the record.

In 2005, we were told that if we could pressure Sharon, and Bush did, to get out of Gaza,

lock stock and barrel, get all of the settlers out, get everybody out of Gaza, and then have an election, a UN-sponsored election.

And we know what happened.

Hamas started to take the Palestinian Authority people and throwing them out of windows and liquidated about 200 of them and scared them, and they all hightailed it out.

So then they had an election, and the Europeans and the Americans praised it.

And it was a typical Middle East, one election, one time, and they never had another one.

And then they got all of this sympathy of poor Palestinians, poor Gazans,

maybe over the last 20 years, $700 billion.

And what did they do?

That city is the most sophisticated subterranean metropolis in the world.

It's got computers, it has computer air conditioning units.

It's got every, all in its under mosque and hospitals and schools.

And I don't know if the Israelis could, you could pump the entire Mediterranean Sea into that and not flood it.

And so we know what they're doing.

So what would you have a two-state solution?

For what?

To give Gaza,

make an independent Gaza right next to Israel?

And what would happen in 10 years?

Because you know what's going to happen.

If you do that, you're going to get a trillion dollars in aid pouring in there.

And Hamas is going to go door to door and put a gun to people's head and say, if you don't vote for us, and they're going to have one election one time again, and then they're going to take control and they're going to take the money, and they're going to do two things.

They're going to buy or get Iranian rockets with it, and they're going to go back and dig a subterranean city, probably into Israel, and then they're going to do it again.

I mean, it would be like saying, let's have a two-state solution with, I don't know, Germany.

We'll just let Hitler have part of Germany and we'll let the Democrats have the other half in 1945.

Or better yet, all these people that talk like this, I just have a modest suggestion.

Why don't we just apply the same standards to Ukraine that we do to Israel?

Because we're incoherent.

There are a lot of people in the West that favor Hamas, and some of them in our own government.

And they're spread thoroughly through European governments.

So, what is the logic?

What are the principles in these two wars, everybody?

Is it we always side against the aggressor?

Okay, I side with Ukraine, Putin was the aggressor, but Hamas was the aggressor.

They started the whole thing on October 7th, but yet we're siding with them sometime.

Okay, is it no, no, Victor, we always side with the constitutional government, the most democratic.

Okay,

but Mr.

Zelensky has suspended habeas corpus, declared martial law, and outlawed almost all of his political opponents and political parties and suspended an election.

He has blurred the difference between democratic, free Ukraine and a nightmarish autocratic Putin junta.

And then we turn to the Middle East.

And guess what?

Who is the constitutional democracy and who is the autocracy?

Who's more like Putin?

Hamas.

So that's not a principle.

It's not either who attacks first or we're always on the side of the defender, who has to retaliate.

We're always the side on the constitutional government.

Maybe it's we're on the side that doesn't commit atrocities.

So I can see it in Russia shoots prisoners far more often than Ukrainians do.

We know that.

And who commits more atrocities?

Who decapitates and who tortures and who mass rapes?

So that's not a reason.

So what is it?

Because there is an asymmetry between these two wars.

Think about it.

Israel has to drop leaflets and text people that the incoming bomb will not hit collateral

people.

I don't think that we never say to Ukraine, text everybody in the Donbass and Crimea that's around one of your retaliatory strikes.

We never do.

We always tell Netanyahu,

oh, you've got to get out, you've got to do this, you've got to do that, you've got to have a war cabinet, you have to bring in people.

We support the opposition.

He did.

He has a wartime bipartisan coalition government.

We never say that to Zelensky.

Listen, Mr.

Zelensky, just like we hammer Netanyahu, we got to hammer you.

You hold an election.

We did in World War II.

We held an election in 1944.

And you're going to have to do the same thing.

And you know what?

We held an election right, you know, in November of 1918, excuse me, 1914 on the eve of World War II.

We did.

1912, excuse me, on the eve of World War II.

And then he was re-elected in, what, 1916?

Right before we've been in the war.

But there was a war raging in Europe in 1916.

We did it.

So, Mr.

Zelensky, you do it.

And then why don't we do the same thing finally?

We say, Mr.

Netanyahu, we'll like it or not, we're using our $3 billion package to leverage you.

You're going to have a two-state solution.

So we go to Zelensky and we say, Mr.

Zelensky, whether you like it or not, we're giving you 10 times, oh, 30 times more than we're giving Israel.

So we're going to hammer you.

We want a two-state solution.

So we want the Donbass

and we want Crimea.

part of Russia.

That's a state, or maybe an independent pro-Russian entity right next to your borders.

And they're going to say, but why would we do that?

They launched launched an invasion from those quasi-autonomous pro-Russian territories.

We would say, sorry, you have to have the determination, self-determination of the people of the Donbas and Crimea.

So we don't apply the same standards.

And that then begs the final question, why is that?

Why do you think it is, Sammy?

I'm just asking your question.

I have some suggestions.

I think if Israel wasn't the Jewish state and and Ukraine was Jewish, and Selensky is Jewish, but if he was head of a Jewish state, it would be completely different.

We would tell Israel, go to town, because anti-Semitism is on the rise.

That's number one.

Number two, who are the people in the West that are soft on Hamas or pro-Hamas?

They're democratic politicians or socialist politicians in Europe.

And why are that way?

Partly, the left wing is the harbor or sanctuary of anti-Semitism these days.

But more importantly,

there is a huge Middle Eastern constituency that are voting in European elections and American elections.

Do you think Joe Biden would be so

wishy-washy and start, you know, bragging about how he's restrained Netanyahu if there wasn't a quarter million Arab voters in Flint, Michigan and the Environs in Michigan who claim that they will vote entirely on the attitude of the Biden administration toward Hamas?

And they feel that in a close election, and in 2016 it was about 12,000 votes.

They brag that they can swing the election.

So they have enormous clout.

That's number two.

And number three,

there's something about Russia.

I don't understand

what it is, but

as I said earlier about villains, and maybe it, there was a time, I mean, Hillary Clinton gave us the jacuzzi button.

Remember the red jacuzzi button?

They They took off a jacuzzi and they pushed it.

They mistranslated our ambassador did.

And it was kind of a farcical situation, but there was a romance for Russia.

George Bush was punitive over Osatia and Georgia and we're going to reset things.

And then

they just saw that they were thugs.

There wasn't Yeltsin anymore.

And so they started demonizing Russia.

And that was collectively, they always say, you can't blame the Gazan people.

Well, 500 of them accompanied the killers on October 7th and raped and looted and took hostages.

And when a hostage escaped, they swarmed them.

And when you look at the tapes of people being released, they spit on them.

And when you look at the tapes of people who were mutilated and dead, they were trying to fight to get to the back of the truck to kick them and desecrate.

So it wasn't exactly like Hamas did not represent them on October 7th.

But so we say, you can't collectively hold the Gazans.

Well, they voted them in.

The Russians never voted for Putin.

And we don't know how much.

So why do you blame all of Russia for Putin?

I don't understand that.

But yet, every villain in popular culture is a Russian.

And so there's so many differences

that explain this inconsistency.

They just can't get it down.

They can't just say, we will support a nation whose boundaries were violated first.

Israel, Ukraine.

We will support the more democratic nation, Israel, Ukraine.

We will support the side that tries to conduct war according to the laws of war and not

murders or rapes or mutilate.

Therefore, Russia, I mean, Ukraine and Israel, but we don't do that.

I know, you know why the Democrats cannot be consistent?

Because they are trying to cobble together identity politics.

So they are trying to make happy everybody, which Joe Biden is not succeeding on this issue because recently we just saw protests and they have blood dripping out of Joe Biden's mouth and B.B.

Netanyahu's.

So those voters do not think he's doing enough.

So I don't see anything.

Are you suggesting a very controversial thesis that it's very easy to

demonize crazy white Russians that are Orthodox and right-wing, and it's very hard to demonize poor victims of Middle East colonialism and imperialism that are poor Arabs.

I think that is that what you're trying to say?

Yeah, that's part of it.

And

they give Hamas a pass that they don't give Russia, and I don't think they should give Russia a pass.

I just, my point of all this is not to say, be easy on Russia.

No, I'd like to be hard on Russia.

Just be hard on Hamas to the same degree, because Hamas is worse than Russia.

Because I think that there are more citizens in Russia that are worried about Putin than there are Gazans worried about Hamas.

I just think that's true.

And there's a lot of people that don't like what's going on in Russia, but the Gazans didn't turn on Hamas.

They were jubilant on October 7th.

They were celebrating the street.

Maybe now they can say, well, we didn't want this.

Well, you didn't want it because you're suffering for what you used to be for.

It's kind of like Germany, you know, you couldn't find anybody who would criticize Hitler up until about, I don't don't know, August, maybe December of 1941, a little bit, and then after Stalingrad, everybody.

And you couldn't find a German that wasn't for Hitler, when the Americans arrived, at least.

All right, Victor, well, we're at the end of our podcast today, and I have a comment from one of our listeners on Apple Podcasts, and it's kind of like a haiku poem.

So very concise, the best, five stars.

I am sure the left hates you.

Andy

I

what a pleasant thought that that the left hates you but that's a kind of a compliment so well done Andy we like it yeah I think that's well I work

I work in hostile territory on the Stanford campus and every once in a while somebody if I happen to go into Trader Joe's or I get coffee at

I don't know if they watch Fox or what but I can feel it, the hatred, and I can feel it on the Stanford campus.

So

it's just the way it is.

Yeah.

Every once in a while you see those neophytes to Hollywood where

they're doing their job and they can't believe somebody would criticize them.

They've got to be careful about that because a lot of conservative pundits will say, you don't know what I put up with.

I'm on the cross.

I get hate letters.

Yeah, I grow up.

Grow up buttercup.

I mean,

you get hate letter, but that's

part of the game.

Yes.

Every once in a while, some guy will stalk you, or the guy that showed up at my house with a pickup out in the orchard, and you wouldn't leave, and stuff like that.

But it's the amount of people who are nice and good far outnumber the other people.

Just have to concentrate on that.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, thank you very much, Victor, and thanks to our listeners.

Thank you, everybody.

This is Sammy.

Oh, once again.

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