The Left's Manufactured Reality

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, the star, the namesake.

That's Victor Davis-Hanson.

He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor's got an official formal website, The Blade of Perseus,

which is the web address is victorhanson.com.

And Victor has exclusive pieces there.

We're going to talk about his American Prabda

three-part series later in this podcast.

I think, Victor,

we'll kick off

with two stories that bring to mind the question, what the hell did they expect was going to happen?

And we'll get to that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hands and Show.

So Victor,

two separate areas.

One has to do with the illegal immigration and the outrage it has created in inner city neighborhoods.

And then, separately, it's back on the trans issue and

how dudes are taking advantage of the ability to claim a certain status.

And I think this all fits under the umbrella of, well, what did we think was going to happen after all?

So, let's start with Chicago.

And I saw Eli Steele,

who has a sub stack.

He put a link to this recording of a community meeting where the residents just furious about

the influx of Mexican or who knows Mexican illegals from around the world are coming through what used to be the border.

And they were

just so unreserved in their in their

critiques.

But it's worth noting what they said, Victor.

It's also worth noting, like, well, what did they think was going to happen when they elect these kind of socialists?

I don't have a lot of sympathy for

anybody who elects these people whose policies were announced during the campaign.

They were enacted, promises made, promises kept, and then the consequences were predictable.

And so

if these constituencies keep electing radical leftists who are never subject to their detrimental policies, then what do you expect?

The only thing I was surprised was when I looked at some of these clips was the

explicitness of the hostility toward

Latinos by the black community.

And that was sort of strange.

And there's a lot of tensions between the two communities.

Remember during the BLM and Antifa riots in some areas of Los Angeles, to take one example, they were not affected because of Chicano gangs said, you don't come in here.

And there's always been a tension between those two particular groups.

And now I think immigration, but the activists had a point as well, and that is when you let in 8 million people who have never,

they're not from the border.

They're from southern Mexico, one of the most

impoverished areas, if not the most impoverished area in Mexico, and from Central America.

Many of them are indigenous people and they've been subject to a great deal of racism by the Mexican elite in Mexico City, etc.

They come up here, they have enormous needs immediately, and that means legal, educational, housing, food, and health.

And so if you've never been to a Western doctor and you come up here and you think, wow, I've got bad allergies.

Wow, I have an irregular heartbeat.

Wow, I'm 50 pounds overweight.

I have diabetes.

Then you go where?

You go to health facilities.

You go to kidney dialysis.

You go to the ER.

And the people who use those facilities, then it's a zero-sum game.

And the left says there's no such thing as a zero-sum, but there is.

I can tell you that because I see it in my own hometown.

And when those social services that people depend on are rationed or they are non-existent, they get angry and they say, we are U.S.

citizens.

These are not U.S.

citizens.

And the problem the left has is they don't believe there's a difference.

They believe that residency is synonymous with citizenship.

So when their base constituencies say, we want preference, we want preference

over a illegal entry, an illegal foreign national who came in here without the permission of the government.

That's a very conservative argument to make in these times, and yet these constituencies are making that argument.

And the left has no answer for it.

The left is trying to tell them, I think, now hold on, don't get so angry.

I know there's

short-term dislocation.

But, you know, we get some defections from our marginalized communities, and they're getting older, and the birth rate is starting to taper off.

And these crazy conservatives are gaining traction.

So we're importing 8 million potential constituents and they will have children that will be U.S.

citizen.

And they will be on our side and they will help elect people that will give you stuff.

So don't get too angry.

That's the long-term message, but it doesn't resonate in the short term.

Right.

Well, you know, in fact, I don't know this is, I'm going to riff here a fair assessment, but there's sort of a

prejudice, I mean, a racial prejudice, that people who live in the inner city deal with reality, real reality, more than me in the suburb of Milford, Connecticut, or you in rural California.

But I don't think

that's true, but they do deal with a different reality, a harsher reality.

Maybe I'm going to walk out of my house to maybe get a quarter quart of milk at the store, and I'm more apt to be mugged and beaten.

So, you know, Hobbes's reality of life being

dull, brutish, nasty, and short.

Yeah.

But, but, but there is,

you've written just the other day, you wrote about this.

They elect people who deal with what you call an alternate reality across the board.

Well, I mean, people, yeah, they just lie.

I mean, we look at Mayorkas and he just says, you're crazy.

The border's secure.

Well, how about these people right behind you that are coming across the board?

It doesn't matter.

It's secure.

Corrine Jean-Pierre says the economy is wonderful.

It's working well.

You know, if you're paying, you know, $180 for Romex and you paid $40 before, it's still working well.

That $96 of plywood is no problem.

Or

that Leah Thomas, that's not a man.

six feet tall, big shoulders, thin rear end,

that's a woman.

And she has a right to go in and destroy 50 years of women's efforts to get parody and set records and get acknowledgement.

So we say, but that's not reality.

And they say, yes, it is.

And it's right out of Orwell.

It really is.

It's a constructed, manufactured reality,

fantasy-dash reality, and nobody's buying it anymore.

I feel like I'm living in Warsaw about 1960.

And we have problem

telling us all this stuff that we know is a lie.

And that's the biggest problem with the Democratic Party right now.

It's not Bill Clinton's party.

It's not JFK.

It's a Marxist Jacobin party.

At least its leaders are.

And they have to lie because it doesn't work.

Baghdad, Bob-like.

They have to keep lying about the border, about crime.

And

they're going to have to tell their own people that there is such a thing called collateral damage.

Hey, you people in Martha's Vineyard.

Hey, you people in Manhattan.

Hey, our people in Chicago.

You guys are collateral damaged.

Sorry, you have to suffer for the greater good.

Hey, you people that are, you know, Hispanic and you live in Mendota and you're dependent on federal services and you have to drive 70 miles to work in Fresno and your 1991 Ford

pickup is getting 18 miles the gallon and you're paying $6.30, or 640 this week for gas, you're collateral damaged.

I'm sorry.

And oh, by the way, you hipster who takes buses and does all the right things, you're for ending climate change, you're for BLM, you kind of go and participate in Tifa and you get stabbed or killed or raped or car jot, you're collateral damaged.

It's the greater good.

I'm sorry, but

that's a hard message to sell.

And it gives the biggest opportunity for Republican candidates in my lifetime because we've never had the progressive project with all the reins of power and

free to realize its wildest dreams, which are our nightmares.

And they did.

And people don't like what they did.

Well, one of the things it's done, Victor, to my mind, it's unleashed

misogyny in a particular way.

You just touched on it a little bit about Leah Thomas.

Kindly, you didn't add that when you described his frame, you did not mention that he

still had

carrying his junk that he was born with

and showing it off in the locker room.

But two things I think

bear.

Well,

on the transition, let me just raise two stories.

And Victor, you please share your wisdom.

I think there's a cowardly, coward, I think there's a misogyny going because here's a headline It was from National Review the other day.

World Aquatics forced to cancel transgender division swimming competition after no one entered.

Why wouldn't the Leah Thomases of the world who are swimmers want to compete with their

equals of a certain sort?

I think there's two things.

They want to win, so they want to beat women, but they also want to beat women.

there's some enjoyment that comes out of that.

I think that's true.

And notice

Leah Thomas says that he is a woman, right?

There is no such thing as his testicles and phallus, that he has now reconstructed himself psychologically, spiritually, even physically.

I suppose he's taking hormonal treatments as a woman.

Okay.

And therefore, He has a perfect right and he has no advantages

over women.

Then I have a question for Mr.

Thomas.

Why is it that women who remove their breast at the age of 18 to take an arbitrary date and they take testosterone and their muscularity increases and their hips shrink?

And maybe some of them even go the full nine yards and have a

prosthesis phallus or penis attached to themselves.

Why don't they excel in male sports?

They are male, according to Leah Thomas now.

They're not just transgender.

They are full-fledged males.

But yet, and maybe our listeners can remind me, I don't know of any transgendered male baseball stars.

I don't know of any long-distance runners.

I do not know of any sprinters.

I do not know of any swimmers who collectively, in each case,

continually, predictably win their events against men that are biological male.

I don't know any.

So that in itself tells me that they don't believe that.

Because if Leah Thomas says there's no unfairness because he's just a woman and he's winning, then why don't women who become men win too because they're equal?

Because if you don't believe that,

And you say, well, Leah Thomas is winning because he was a biological male and he still is in terms of his muscular skeletal frame and his years of male development

and that is why women who transition to males cannot win because they were born with different bodies and their internal chemistry is still different despite what they're trying to do to it and they can't win against a male

that was born a male then the whole thing is just it just blows up right and when you offer a transgendered special category for trans males or females and you put them in there and no one wants to show up, that tells you that there must be an incentive to gain what?

Notoriety,

attention, money.

Because put it this way, where was Leah Thomas before this?

He was a mediocre swimmer that was rated like 500 in the nation.

And now he's wealthy, he's got attention, he's getting speaking, he gets everything.

So it was a calculated move on his part.

I'm not suggesting there's not something called biological gender dysphoria.

It is a documented medical

phenomenon, syndrome, where people psychologically or in terms of brain chemistry are in the wrong body.

But we know traditionally for the last hundred years that that particular group represents about 001% of the population.

So, when you hear that Brown University has 40%

who express a desire to be transitioning, there's something going on other than biology or medical questions.

And

it's why Me Too went after Garrison, Keillor, all these other people.

And now we don't hear about Me Too.

It's why we were told that Professor Kendi was a a wave of the future.

You had to be a racist to stop it.

And now we don't hear about it.

It's why BLM and their architecture, these brave women,

and now they're all ensconced or they've retreated to their

sequestered, and they're in their big homes that they used with appropriated BLM money.

So we have this.

pet rock, hula hoop, dunkin' yo-yo phenomenon in a mass democracy where occasionally we go stark raving mad, and that's what happens.

It doesn't mean that the cause is illegitimate.

It just means that we go to such excesses that it becomes fatty and then it dies out.

And this is what the trans, for this generation who wasn't in the civil rights work,

and when we had civil rights, equality of opportunity,

And we still had, as human nature goes, we still had disparities.

And they said, well,

the next phase of the civil rights is not a quality of opportunity, but quality of result.

And then they tried to do that.

And they had repertory this and repertory this, and it didn't get the intended result.

They were looking for a new frontier, and they found it, they thought, with trans.

And they went full hog.

And

people were scared to death of.

That's the one issue that people are scared to death of.

Yeah.

More than race, more than class, more than gay issues,

this trans issue.

And by the way, Hillary Clinton said that the other day.

She said that we needed to deprogram Trump supporters because of their anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-marginalized people

bias.

It was really eerie because it was almost

a clear amplification of what lost her the 2016 election.

It was the deplorables irredeemable speech, but very carefully delineating explaining who the deplorables and irredeemables was.

In other words, if you disagree with Hillary Clinton, which I think most people do, then you're in a cult and you need to be deprogrammed.

That is, I guess the government should take you into an indoctrination camp, which is basically what we call universities today.

Well, Victor.

Anyways,

well,

all right.

Well, I'd like to hear you elaborate a little more on one of the aspects of the fad,

and that's the

continued abuse

of men

to

claim this status as a woman.

And we'll get your thoughts, expanded thoughts on this right after.

These important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

Before we pick up the theme of, well, what did they expect was going to happen?

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Victor, my friend,

I didn't know about the feminists.

I consider feminism a thing of the left.

I know there were conservative feminists, et cetera, and

women's groups on the right, like Heather Higgins and the Independent Women's Forum, which is just a terrific organization, amongst others.

But in general, National Organization of Women, Ms.

Magazine, et cetera, these are all things very much

of liberaldom and the left,

and

either supporting or silent on the trans craze.

And here's a headline

from the, I'm reading the New York Post on Friday, October 6th.

And it's a column by Kirsten Fleming.

It's titled Progressives Patriarchy.

In a bid to expose more women to better careers in tech,

a female-centric job fair only exposed gender ideology for the farce it is.

The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women, that's its name, title of this organization, kicked off last month in October, Florida, with recruiters from companies like Amazon, Apple, and Google.

But judging by photos and social media footage, the event looked like less of a sisterhood of STEM and more like revenge of the nerds.

The place was simply overrun by dudes in t-shirts, khakis, and giant backpacks, fellas, and I mean possessors of XY chromosomes, who gained entry by registering under the rather amaphorous non-binary banner.

And the ladies were livid.

Well, they should be livid, but you know, they should be livid at their, you know, the leaders of the feminist movement who I think have been on the sidelines.

Or you just talked about Hillary Clinton, who was always talking about, you know, women, women, women.

But who are bearing the brunt now of this kind of crap?

It's women, of not only women's sports, high school sports, but here now at job fairs.

Any thoughts, Victor?

Well, I mean, as you say, what did you expect?

Because when you say that sex

is

socially constructed and not biologically determined, and you put a rewards and punishment

system and you superimpose that.

In other words, being trans is something that is preferable in jobs or selection, even though you say that you suffer enormous discrimination, then there's going to be people who feel that they can, what, arbitrarily declare their sex temporarily as the situation demands.

And you can't say anything because who are you to say in this relativist world of ours, who are you to say you're not a woman or you're not,

you know, fluid?

And so you can just declare your gender.

The only thing I have, I came from, I had a kind of a quirky reaction to this because there is one area still where we do not allow Foucaultian, Derridas,

postmodern nihilism, and that is race.

And by that I mean you can say that even though you have testicles and a penis, that you are a woman by putting on a wig and taking some hormone,

or maybe even getting, you know, wearing a bra with whatever, but you cannot declare your race, and that is predicated on your skin color, I guess, and some characteristics cannot be constructed.

But how can they not be constructed if genitalia can be constructed?

You see what I'm saying?

The most, I mean, is being darker of a darker you, is that a greater leap of social construction than having testicles and a phallus?

It doesn't seem so.

So, but every time somebody tries to socially construct their race for a particular careerist advantage, and we know who they are, Ward Churchill, Rachel Dolzgow, I think her name was, Elizabeth Warren, you name it, they're exposed in ridicule.

But I think we're going to get to the point, and I think universities universities who basically are using the 1/16th drop from the old South are going to be in a dilemma because you're going to get increasing numbers once you throw out the SAT, which they have done, and once you throw out, to take an example, the ranking of comparative high schools that adjudicates what an 4.0 really is,

given the wide divergence in curricula at these high schools, and you center on the essay, and the essay is about race, then you're just inviting yourself for people to declare that they are something that they're not.

And because you can't say that they're not,

because

all race, all gender should be socially constructed, what are you going to do?

Are you going to have DNA tests?

Like,

well,

right.

What if I whipped out one of those 23 in May test results that showed I was 3%

Mohican Indian, you know,

and exploit that?

Well,

I have to believe that's going to be coming fast and furious at these schools.

Yeah.

And so they are becoming racial essentialists.

And if you become, they don't understand something

that once you become a racial essentialist, then you are one with a very sordid history of racist.

Because eventually, ultimately,

the racial essentialist has to have criteria to adjudicate his racism.

And you think because you're left-wing and you're utopian, you don't fit that, but you do.

And in Nazi Germany, they had to adjudicate who was Jewish.

And so they had sophisticated lineages, one-eighth, one-sixteenth grandparent.

And because the whole system was so bogus, they couldn't spot Jews that were fully assimilated in Western Europe, and yet they wanted to put yellow stars on them, they had to get genealogists to come in.

In the old South, they arbitrarily decided that it was 1 16th,

and they had genealogists to say this person

was black or this person was not black.

And these racial essentialists of our age follow in that tradition.

And yet, because they're telling us that based on your superficial appearance, that you're going to get particular treatment.

And based on your

superficial appearance, you're not going to get particular.

And that rewards and punishment is going to invite people to err on the side of getting rewards.

And you have to adjudicate who's eligible and who's not.

And that's out of control right now, I can tell you.

I don't know how many Stanford students that I have met in the last 21 years,

and I don't know how many CSU students I have met in another 21 years that to all visual

recognition, you would not know they were not white, okay?

But they were on some sort of affirmative action or EOP support preferences because they had a grandparent or a great-grandparent or

their mother

married a Hispanic and divorced, and then

they inherited their

stepfather's name.

You name it.

And it was just a joke.

And so

in the old South, it was a joke.

In Hitler, it was a joke in the sense that it was so irrational and

stupid that that finally the members of the Nazi Party were going to Himmler and Himmler's divisions and saying, I want an exemption for my wife because I found out, she found out that her great-grandmother was Jewish, and they got them.

And it was just,

and that's what we've descended into, that morass.

And I think the trans thing is a reminder that

If you say that you can arbitrarily declare your gender,

I say arbitrarily because I think Leah Thomas did it pretty arbitrarily, then you can assume anything.

You can just say that you're a particular race

and nobody's there to tell you that you're not.

And it's so funny.

In my life,

I think in academic context, I must have heard 100 people say, as a black woman or as a black person,

and I would have had no idea,

nor would anybody else know that they were black.

I have no idea at all.

They were, to all visual perception, they were pure white.

And yet they must have had some person, or they must have been adjudicated or something.

And the big fraud, of course, was Native Americanism

because

people who say they're Native American

in many cases, most cases these days are not.

And the idea that you have high cheekbones and you're Elizabeth Warren, that makes you eligible to be the first Native American law professor at Harvard or to edit a cookbook on Native American recipes, and you're shameless about it.

And yet everybody knows you're blonde and blue-eyed and you're as white as can be, and you're using this for career advantage is that's where we are right now.

It's really illiberal and it's very sick.

It's racist to the core.

And everybody is trying to find a cachet.

I kind of beat a drum I don't like to beat, but with Sammy, I've mentioned students I've had in the past who were completely assimilated, or you wouldn't know what particular race they are.

And in our classics program, the wonderful thing about it was people of all different ages, all different backgrounds, they all would be in these classes.

We had people in wheelchairs in their 70s.

I had an epileptic professor in it.

You name it.

It was as diverse as you could get.

We had Asians, whites, blacks, Hispanics.

I think whites were the minority, given the student body profile.

But my point is that after they left and got this really good education, I would say about half of them,

if they stayed in the academic world, and many did,

they were susceptible to these pressures.

And they began to self-identify and re-tribalize and make the necessary adjustments.

And I knew that because sometimes I would be getting a request to write recommendations.

And finally, I just quit writing them because I didn't want to perpetuate these frauds and that they had been the victims of discrimination.

And in one case, someone who

wanted an independent study to go to graduate school, and I had, I think, nine of them that semester plus four classes.

And the only time I could do it was five o'clock in the afternoon.

And I had a daughter who played 37 miles away or something in softball.

So I would have to give an independent study of this guy and then get in my pickup and drive 80 miles an hour to Selma High School.

So she wouldn't be sitting on the softball field for more than an hour.

That person,

you know, pretty much remanufactured himself as a victim and an avatar of racial essentialism.

And so that's what's happened in the last 40 years, and we all have to deplore it.

And we all have to take the high ground and say, look, we are the high ground.

We're the one that says race is incidental, not essential.

They are the racial essentialists.

And they're doing it for careerist purposes.

Well,

that may be a great lead.

Same thing with the trans.

And the trans have just taken the racial

paradigm and superimposed it.

The problem that we're having, as we saw with Juicy Smollett, is there's too many victims and there's not enough victimizers.

And so when you have that disequilibrium, you're going to have people create victimization because it doesn't exist in sufficient numbers to satisfy the demand.

So you end up with two guys in a black neighborhood walking around at three in the morning with bleach, with MAGA hats on, looking for African-American males so that they can put a rope around their neck and threaten to lynch them while in one hand they're eating a sandwich and the other hand they're on their cell phone and the other hand there's a noose around their neck why they kick as kung fu experts and and beat off these MAGA night prowlers who then as MAGA white prowlers know Empire the black series so intimately that they recognize and they say F Empire and we're supposed to believe that and I say we're supposed Nancy Pelosi Camilla Harris they told the nation that was true.

And he still maintains it's true, even though the people that he hired to dress up as the thugs have, he wrote checks to them.

And we have him online buying the stuff on a camera at a store, the rope and et cetera.

And he defied the laws of chemistry.

He took bleach at minus something degrees in the middle of the early morning and he threw it and it didn't freeze because he's Jesse Smollett.

So when you get to that level,

then the whole thing is starting to implode.

Well, you hear a story, and we know we'll hear this again at some point.

Professor claims noose hung on classroom door.

Your immediate thought is going to be.

I think in my universe, I've been affiliated as a visiting professor

or as a full-time professor with five universities.

And I think I've at least experienced,

and while I was on campus, 10 of those incidents I don't mean personally experienced but have been reading about them as they occurred and in all 10 there was no evidence that somebody put a noose there yeah I mean a white racist put it and

and I tell you another thing when the evidence was overwhelming that it had been concocted the investigation ceased In other words, people just said, there's not enough.

We deplore

systemic racism anywhere we found it.

However, the investigation is still ongoing.

That's what they said.

And then it just we forgot about.

They never said that this person likely put the noose or scrawled the n-word or something.

Yeah.

Why not?

Because those are where the rewards are.

You use the phrase careerist purposes, and

you find it in many places, Victor, including, I think, the FBI.

And we're going to get your thoughts on some of the latest antics of that agency right after

these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

So, Victor, just two headlines.

Prefacing, we've talked about the FBI many times in the past.

Initially, like with the military, and I think we tend to

compare the two or think of them in the same way.

Problems are higher up leadership level,

not really the case in the lower ranks.

I don't know that there's fair to say there are lower ranks of the FBI relative to the military.

I believe that related to the military.

But with the FBI, I don't know anymore.

So here are two headlines.

Both are from the Daily Mail.

FBI agent accused of lying about censoring Hunter Bay and laptop dodges testimony before Jim Jordan.

Another headline: FBI DOJ officials were openly mocking congressional inquiries into Hunter Biden investigation, memo

alleges.

Victor, our problems with Ray or the predecessors and the various high-level creeps who were involved in

the Russia disinformation BS.

I think there just seems to be that

down into the guts of the FBI and the bureaus

investigation, it's as an infection, as a virus here throughout.

I never quite bought the traditional, it's only the Washington hierarchy, for a couple of reasons.

Where did Andrew McCabe come from?

And where did Robert Mueller come from?

I mean, do they just suddenly get hired from the outside or do they work their way up from the ranks?

Or they were somewhere in the bureaucracy?

Where did the FBI people who went to the Latin Mass services or the school board meetings or who were the FBI

people

who were hired by

Twitter?

Did they object?

And when they retired from the FBI, who were the 11 or 12 people who were hired by Twitter as former FBI people.

Where did James Baker, the chief counsel for FBI, come from, came from, who left probably a quarter million dollar job and made $8 million a year at Twitter.

So there's just too many of them, and they're too pervasive to suggest that it's Andrew McCabe, Robert Mueller, Christopher Wray, James Comey.

It's not.

They have created a culture within that bureau.

that allows them to take measures that are way beyond the Constitution and they feel they can get away with.

Who were the FBI agents who swarmed the anti-abortion protester and went in and basically treated him like a terrorist at his home?

Who were the people who swarmed Mar-Lago and arranged those things for that perfect little picture of documents on the ground?

Who were the

FBI agents who gave kid gloves treatments to the Bidens?

So there's just too many of them to say that it was hi, the agency has been hijacked.

And that's why on Tucker, to mention that, I was asked about that.

And I really do think you have to break it up.

And by that, I mean you take one division and you give it to Treasury, maybe counterfeiting division.

You take the terrorist division and you put it in Homeland Security.

You take another one and keep it under DOJ.

You take another one.

and put it maybe the Department of Interior for crimes across state lines and you break it up.

And then each one will absorb a particular culture that is not holistic.

And you're not going to give that much power to those few people

and give them a sense of entitlement that they can do anything and there's no checks on them.

And they would then resemble local police horses, but with intrastate power.

But you wouldn't have them concentrated.

And then you wouldn't have somebody like a Christopher Wray or James Coleman.

And because think about it, Jack,

we've gone now for almost a quarter century through FBI directors.

And what was the difference between Robert Mueller and

James Comey and Andrew McCabe and Christopher Wray?

Did they all stonewall it?

Yes.

Did they all plead amnesia?

when they were called to speak the truth.

Robert Mueller said he didn't know what the steel dossier was.

He didn't know what fusion GPS.

Those were the catalyst of his entire investigation.

James Comey said he couldn't remember 245 times.

Andrew McCabe admitted he lied four times under oath.

I don't need to get into Christopher Wray.

He can't tell the truth anytime.

He just stonewalled.

So what was the culture that produced them?

They're not identical twins.

And the next one, I have no doubt, if that agency is left out, the next FBI agent will be the same.

They have a sense of entitlement.

It doesn't mean they're not heroic and there's not great people in the ranks.

It's just that there has been a culture of uniformity and obsequiousness to get promoted that allows them a sense of entitlement to stretch or break the law or to do things that are anti-constitutional.

And you do not want to get the FBI angry at you because they have mechanisms to make your life miserable.

You will.

And it's scary.

It's scary.

It's just like the IRS.

It's like the DOJ.

And

you'll be, your doors will be kicked in at 6 a.m.

because you were seen jaywalking.

I see it.

30 years ago, when you had polls of Republicans and Democrats expressing support for the FBI and the CIA,

Republicans supported them on the blind loyalty of patriotism.

These were American institutions that were after bad people.

The left on civil liberties, excesses,

they were very skeptical.

Same thing was true true of the military.

Now you flip it and guess what?

It's the left that loves the FBI.

The left loves the CIA.

The left loves the Pentagon.

Now, why do they do that?

Number one, they have been weaponized to go after people who are conservative.

And number two,

they can enact by fiat social woke legislation and agendas that otherwise would be paralyzed in the Congress and the legislature as they were adjudicated and fought over.

You get Mark Milley, he says, we're going to read Kendi.

We're going to have woke criteria for promotion.

James Coleman, same thing.

And now that authoritarian streak in all of those institutions is very seductive for the left because they can pursue and enact agendas that have no popular support and would never get through the Congress by an instant.

And then people say, well, why would they do it, Victor?

They do it because they're Washington-centric and they live in that city.

And if you're a colonel attached to the Pentagon and you want to be a general, you understand where the power is in the popular culture and the political committees.

And the same is true of the FBI and the CIA.

And that's why we create people like James Clapper, who lied under oath.

And that's why we

create people like John Brennan, who lied under oath twice.

Or for that matter, that's why we create Anthony Fauci.

These authoritarian figures that are not accountable and they have enormous power and they're highly political and we've got to monitor them and break them up somehow.

And I think you need to say the same thing with the CDC and the FDA and the Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases.

You've either got to have a civilian board that oversees them or you've got to break them up and decentralize them.

Because when you give $50 billion of grant-making authority to a guy like Anthony Fauci for 40 or 50 years,

then you're going to have scientists all over the United States that are going to warp their research to fit preconceived agendas to get money from him.

And when he rewards and punishes people on the degree to which they agree with him, and we know now from communications and data he did just that,

then you've corrupted science as we know it.

Victor,

I mentioned earlier in the podcast that you had

written these exclusively ultra articles for your website.

One of them is a series, American Pravda.

And we'll get your

little pre-see on why you wrote, what it's about, why you wrote it.

And maybe if we have time, we'll touch a little bit on Ukraine.

Not sure if we'll have the time, but we'll do that, all that, right after this final important message.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

Okay, Victor, American Pravda now is,

as we're talking, it's a three-part series.

I don't know if it's concluded,

but you've written it for

your site, and it is exclusive, but we'll give people a peek behind the curtain.

Can you tell us a little bit about the American Prabda series?

Well, I've written a long article not too long ago called Empire of Lies.

And by Amir Pravda, we have this mechanism.

It's partly Silicon Valley.

It's partly cable news.

It's partly social media.

It's partly traditional print.

It's partly network news.

It's partly PBS and NPR.

And they have official narratives.

And those narratives increasingly do not bear any resemblance to reality.

And so when they tell us something is true, such as we just discussed in a prior podcast, that the only reason that Joe Biden is building this wall is because he's been forced to because of appropriation that said it had to, the funds had to be spent by 2023.

And reluctantly, at this particular moment, he's going to build 20-something miles.

But he didn't want to, and he didn't renounce his plot.

And it has nothing to do with the chaos in left-wing cities and their mayors and their governors who are complaining to him.

When you have that type of distortion

and you're told that's reality by MSNBC or NPR or New York Times,

then you're living in an empire of lies.

And it creates a great deal of cynicism.

And so when people say, well, you're a conspiracist, or you don't, the New York Times said this, or Dan Rather said this, or Brian,

what's his name, said this.

You don't trust those people anymore.

So, you, what would be a conspiracist?

Somebody who didn't believe the prob

assertion that the Wuhan lab had nothing to do with COVID?

Somebody who

gave us the assertion, all of the media, that Hunter's laptop was

Russian disinformation, and that laptop was fabricated in the Kremlin,

And all that detail from Devin Archer and Tony Bowl was all crafted by experts and counter-espionage or what espionage in the Kremlin.

We were to believe that right before the election.

Or we were told there were no FBI informants to talk, speak of on January 6th, or we were told, you name it, that the vaccinations are ironclad, 96%

defenses against being infected are infecting someone else, or that they have no side effects to speak of.

There was no danger for people, young males, taking the two Moderna shots or Pfizer shots as far as cardiovascular issues were concerned.

It can go on.

But

so that is, that's why we have conspiracy theories that are not conspiracy theories.

What they are is a demand for the truth because our probda mechanisms don't allow it anymore.

Because they feel, and I'm not just saying this.

I hope the listeners say I'm not just spouting off stuff.

I'm just regurgitating or summarizing what the left says.

I'm serious.

Jim Rutenberg, the New York Times columnist, Christian Amanpour, the CNN

talking head, Jorge Ramos, the kingpin at Univision, just to name three, when Donald Trump took office, they all said,

they all said that disinterested journalism was now impossible, and you had to be advocates for fill in the blanks.

The planet would be destroyed because of climate change unless you were advocacies.

Donald Trump was a racist.

You had to be an advocate against, et cetera, et cetera.

And they admitted that they were no longer journalists as we used to define it.

Not us.

They said it.

They said it.

And Molly Ball said it in that Time essay that I keep referring to, where she said it was a conspiracy, her words, not mine, and a cabal

to warp the election, to censor

news as disinformation or misinformation, to modulate the pulse of street protests, to get corporations on board, to raise money from Silicon Valley, etc.

She said it.

Yeah.

Well, this was also going on for years, too, with Journal List, which was exposed maybe at Denver there.

I was on it.

I was mentioned in there as one of the idiots that they went after.

And so that was,

that didn't stop them at all, though.

They just got embarrassed for a few months.

Right, minutes.

And then the John Podesta archive, remember when we had

New York Times reporters saying to Podesta,

Here's what I'm going to write about you.

Do you have anything about Hillary?

Do you have anything that would enhance it?

Oh, man, I feel like a hack doing this, but I'm going to do it.

They said that.

Nobody was ever punished.

They were coordinating their entire narratives and showing them in advance to

the Clinton campaign.

And everybody knows when

there's a particular news story and there is a word to use, walls are closing, and you just turn on television and they're all saying the same word.

They even have the phraseology down.

We're getting that from the DNC to say that.

Does that mean the Republicans don't do it?

No, they try to influence, but they have no power to influence the media.

It's too dispersed because it's an alternative media.

And so people are all free-ranging and freelancing, and it's very hard to herd these conservative cats, but not the regimented left that control the mainstream media.

Well, Victor, you mentioned, of course, the title of this is Pravda.

This makes us think of Russia, makes us think of a war with Ukraine.

And maybe we should end the program with

your thoughts

on

Rand Paul was interviewed the other day.

And there's nothing shocking or new here, but I think he summarized

concerns that people have

about this war and about Ukraine.

And it's simply, It's not a democracy.

Elections have been canceled.

Ukraine is a a corrupt country.

Ukraine's a bleeding country.

So you take the practicals: like, when the hell, what is the end game here?

When is it the total bloodletting of your population?

Why are we, as why are some in this country, including some on the right, including a lot of people on the right,

positioning Ukraine as some,

I mean, democracy.

It's uh, anyway, the reasons I

to not support the war in Ukraine

does not mean you are not a conservative.

I guess that's one of the areas

I think is worth hearing from you about.

I'm not saying we should not support in some way, but the glorification of their president and what is essentially a corrupt country is a little, it's galling.

I think.

Rand Paul does.

Your thoughts, Victor.

Well, I think most Americans, Americans, when they saw the Thunder Road

Soviet,

I'm saying Russian, but it was kind of Soviet-like

attack on Kiev in February of 2022, they were very sympathetic and they wanted to help the Ukrainians and they were very glad that Donald Trump had greenlined javelins and sold them to Omega Obama and Biden had not.

So

what happened after that was in that jubilation,

the left and the neoconservative right said, these people are purists.

They stopped Putin, and nobody in Crimea had done that.

Nobody in the Donbass had done that.

Nobody in Georgia had done that.

This is amazing.

These are freedom fighters.

And they gave them a blank check psychologically, politically, and soon militarily.

And you could understand that.

And then

they they

eclipsed reality.

In other words, they never said to themselves, there's 145 million Russians, there were 40 million Ukrainians, 10 million are leaving,

and they have 30 times the land mass of Ukraine,

and they have

three and a half times, four times, or excuse me, 10 times, 10 times the GDP of Ukraine.

And they have a long history of both tension and incorporation of Ukraine into the Russian body politic.

And they never said to themselves, and given all of that, these disagreements are about Crimea that has been Russian since 1783 until 1954, within administrative gesture, the Soviet Kremlin gave jurisdiction of Crimea to the Soviet Ukraine.

And then when Ukraine

announced its separation from Russia, when the wall fell in 1990 and 1989 and then in 91, Crimea was an independent republic, neither Russia nor Ukraine.

And Ukraine took it.

They took it.

And the same thing is true with the disputed borderlands.

So the point I'm making is that had a long history of border disputes, and Russia traditionally exercised power in Ukraine.

So we come along and we see what Putin has been doing, this terrible person, and trying to reconstitute or recombobulate the Soviet Union with this irredensist agenda.

And we said, he's evil and these people are pure.

And as far as the details, that maybe, just maybe, we could have worked out something where there was originally a plebiscite in the Donbass and Crimea, or they were demilitarized.

We didn't do any of that.

Instead, during the Obama and the Bush administrations, there had been an effort to westernize Ukraine in the sense of bring it into the EU, bring it into NATO, not formally, but informally, these centrifugal forces from the West were at work and to cleanse them of this Russian pollution.

And given Russian traditional paranoia, this was going to be a cause.

You couldn't do any of that, what I just said.

You couldn't, because they didn't want to hear that.

If you said that Western Ukraine was Polish and Catholic until 1939, and then Joseph Stalin invaded it, took it, and after the war refused to give it back.

And the only reason there's a Poland today is that we were decided, we decided Churchill and Roosevelt are Truman, we can't deal with Stalin.

He's too powerful.

So just because he stole one-third of Poland, we're going to steal from the defeated Nazis, we're going to steal East Prussia.

And we're going to ethnically cleanse 13 million Germans and give Poland East Prussia.

Fine, I support that.

But don't forget the fact that Poland lost a third of its country because Ukraine took it.

And today, there are no Russian,

there are no Polish-speaking Catholics to speak of in Western Ukraine.

And that is a very modern phenomenon.

And that confirms this greater picture that the borders have always been fluid.

There has been rivalries between Eastern Europeans, Ukrainians, and Russians.

It's a Balkans-like mess.

And you've got this huge colossus, Russia, with 7,000 nuclear weapons that has a dispute with Ukraine.

And it is a trigger.

And then you try to tell people very calmly, we had rules of proxy wars in the Cold War, that if we went into Vietnam and Russia supplied the North Vietnamese, they did not give the North Vietnamese missiles to hit us.

And we did not give the South Vietnamese permission to attack Russia.

And the same was true in Korea.

Same was true in Afghanistan.

We told the Taliban, here's stingers,

you attack Russians, but do not go across the border in Russia and start hitting Russian planes, even if they're on their way into Afghanistan.

And anytime anybody broke that proxy rule, like 1962 when Russia supplied a proxy with nuclear missiles that were pointed at the United States, and we had Turkey that we were using for missiles that were pointed at, you had problems and we almost went to war.

or when germany as i said earlier in a podcast when germany in 1917

the foreign minister mr zimmerman telegraphed the mexican consulate and said uh the german consulate and the british hacked that and said if you intervene and put pressure on the southern border and we win the central powers will give you our ally parts of what basically the Gatson purchase had taken away from them.

And we went to war over that.

We went to war over the Lusitania the year before, but that was the final straw that broke us, and we went to war over that.

And the same thing with the, as I said earlier, with bin Laden.

Once the Taliban, we had learned the Taliban, a third-party proxy, had given

the wherewithal for bin Laden to hit us, we went after the Taliban.

So the idea that we're going to give Ukraine offensive missiles to take out the Russian Black Sea fleet in Russian home waters, or we're going to give them the type of ability with F-16s to conduct missions to bomb transportation, rail lines, military bases, oil depots inside Russia is a violation of the understood rules of proxy war for the last 80 years, and there's going to be consequences.

Not that I want them to, of course.

I wish the Russians wouldn't do a thing, but that's very naive.

So, what we have is the left and some on the right just cheering and cheering and cheering.

And there's two things that they will not talk about.

Actually, there's three things that are off limits in this debate.

They will not allow a discussion.

In fact, when I say this right now, when I get back to work, I will be under attack from people.

And here they are.

Number one, you cannot say that giving Ukraine the wherewithal and the encouragement to attack sites in Russia, which is

militarily logical.

That's how you win a war.

But

it's dangerous.

It violates all post-war protocols, and they have nuclear weapons, and we're putting the United States in an untenable position that's very dangerous.

If you say that,

you're a sellout or a Putin stooge.

The second one.

If you say the Ukrainian government is not only corrupt, but it has been unduly interfering within United States politics for at least a decade.

You cannot say that.

If you say the Ukrainian ambassador in 19, excuse me, 2016 had no business writing an op-ed or encouraging Americans to vote for Hillary Clinton, or that Hillary Clinton was

influenced by Ukrainians in the Steele dossier, whole Russian disinformation.

Or if you say

that the Biden family was compromised with a willing knowledge of the Ukrainian government, and finally they got Mr.

Shokin, but they were, the government was corrupt and it was corrupt in its dealings with the United States.

And if you say that Mr.

Vinman, a Ukrainian American, was offered the Ministry of Defense position because as a reward for he instigated, he was the whistleblower.

Wasn't Mr.

Sarah Marla had no knowledge of the phone call.

He engineered the impeachment of the president of the united states because he felt that the president had not been duly attentive to his home country's need for weapons and that he had delayed them and therefore he should impeach a president and he started that ball rolling even though he was being rewarded by the ukrainian government for that activity by a high position And even though to this very day,

despite his protestations, he's making money off the Ukrainian war as a merchant of arms.

So you put all that together, and it's bothersome that it is a corrupt government.

And

as we know, there are no elections right now.

Britain was still at war in July 1945.

They had

all sorts of exposure in the Pacific.

They were going to help us at Okinawa that was coming, that was still going on.

It hadn't been officially declared secure, I think, till July July 15th.

And there were going to be other,

Burma was not completely, it was still fighting in Burma.

And they threw out Winston Churchill.

He had led the, they had an election during the Japan, still the Japanese phase of World War II.

They threw him out.

And FDR,

he ran for election in 1944.

And he was elected in November of 44 during the Philippines campaign.

And

he could have easily lost election.

That was the closest election he had.

But we didn't stop elections because we were planning to go into Iwo Jima and Okinawa or that the Battle of Bulge.

We had intimations that maybe this would be dangerous, that the front in Europe was not stabilized.

We had a full election.

And so the idea that the left or the right says that Ukraine can't afford to do that, well, was this war any less existential than World War II?

I mean, Britain was being reigned upon, had just been recovering from V-2 attacks, and

they had a coalition government, and they didn't even, and put it, has Zelensky got a coalition government?

In other words, in 1940,

on May 10th, when Churchill was asked to form a government, he didn't just get conservatives.

He just said, I need to get everybody involved.

Has Zelensky said, I need to have a coalition government.

And so that's the second thing you can't talk about.

Not only the dangers of going inside Russia.

You can't talk about the corruption and the anti-democratic impulses of this government in Ukraine.

And I mean corruption, because they fired a series of high-ranking defense ministers from charges of skimming off foreign aid to selective selling of draft deferments, etc.

And then the third is, you can't talk about the death and destruction.

The left, which

was,

do you remember during the Iraq war?

I thought it was a very handy, useful tool, but they had daily two or three websites that told you every single day how many Americans were wounded, how many British were wounded, how many Iraqis were dead.

The whole thing was there.

It's still there on Afghanistan and Iraq.

I don't find anything like that with Iraq.

It actually seemed like a gleeful countdown from

the point was to build up opposition to the war in Iraq and Afghanistan by showing us the real cost in an hourly basis.

They don't do that with Ukraine.

Every once in a while, you can get somebody to tell you what's going on, or you can read something.

Usually it's from Eastern European sources.

But I think the general consensus is there's somewhere between five and 700,000 wounded, dead, and missing, with perhaps 200,000 plus dead Russians and maybe 100,000 dead plus Ukrainians and the rest with horrific wounds in many cases.

And we don't hear that.

We just say it's going on.

We're going.

You don't want to talk about it.

You cannot talk about the death and destruction.

And then this gleeful idea that

18-year-old conscripts were killed in Russia, we get really glad that we're killing Putin soldiers, soldiers, but these are not Putin soldiers.

These are,

it's like, kind of like the highway of death in 91 when the Iraqi army invaded Kuwait.

And I'm sure that those people thought there was booty to be had, but once they were kicked out and we had to

destroy, I suppose, the Republican Guard, but we took that highway and we just blanketed it with napalm.

And I don't think Americans were very happy that they had to kill all these young Iraqis.

I wasn't.

You know, you saw those pictures of people being incinerated and tanks and jeeps and stuff.

Well, why this glee that we're killing these 18 and 19-year-old Russians?

I don't understand it.

Or why not talk about the tragedy of Ukraine?

And then the other thing is, besides those three things that we can't talk about, there's all these lies, lies, lies, lies.

That the spring offensive, remember in March, it was going to burst through?

It was going to be an armored thrust like we hadn't seen since World War II.

And then you looked at the map, aerial views, you saw trenches, you saw minefields, you saw tank traps, you saw cement fortification, you saw dragon's teeth, you saw this huge hundreds of miles long, you know, half a mile thick, and you said to yourself, Ukraine is going to get through that and into Russia?

I don't think so.

I do not think so.

And if you saw that, you were considered a nut.

And yet we were told

it's winning.

We're winning.

No, it's not.

You're not winning.

You're into Stalingrad or Verdun.

It's churning up human flesh.

It's destroying people's lives.

And why?

And you can't negotiate because it'll just reward Putin.

No, you don't have to reward Putin.

Ukraine should have never been in NATO, never been in NATO.

And that was just a...

Because do you really believe that somebody having Cappuccino in Florence or or sitting on a canal bank in Amsterdam is going to rush off and get into his NATO unit and die in the Donbass to protect the Ukrainian border from Russia?

I don't think that we're going to do that.

Or do you think somebody in the parliament in Belgium is going to say,

we have pledged Brussels as a nuclear site to protect Kiev?

I don't think so.

I don't think so.

And yet every time you expand NATO, that is the premise upon which you do it.

And so all we were asking is just have a little humility and just have a little truth and let's just have an open discussion.

And there was another thing that's not talked about.

Part of the left-wing zeal for Ukraine was a continuation of the disappointment about Robert Mueller and Russian collusion.

And that disappointment was further exacerbated with Russian disinformation and Hunter's laptop.

What I'm saying is that the left tried to tell us that they had never appeased Putin, that from 2009 until 2014, when he went in under Crimea,

they had appeased him.

They had attacked George W.

Bush and said he was too hard on Putin, that Hillary Clinton pushed that jacuzzi button in Geneva in 2009 and announced that it was a new reset.

And then we were never to think that Barack Obama and that hot mic and Seoul, South Korea, had basically given away Crimea and the Donbass by saying that if

in 2012, if Vladimir gave him space,

gave him space,

he would then cancel

missile defense.

And we forget that

that bargain was held.

We did cancel missile defense.

And after Vladimir did give Obama space, Obama was elected, then he went in, as expected, to no consequences.

And we never talk about the idea that it was never the position of the Obama government in 2014, in 2015, in 2016, nor the position of the Trump government in 2017, 18, 19, 20, nor the position of the Biden government in 2021, 22,

and 23.

It was never the position that the United States would help Ukraine get back the disputed borderlands and Crimea.

No one ever said that.

Trump didn't run on it.

Biden didn't run on it.

Obama didn't say, this is what we have to do.

Put a Ukraine flag in your long.

We're going to get it back.

They didn't.

They only occurred after February 24th of 2022 as an expanded agenda of the Ukrainians once they stop the Kiev

attack.

And so this thing has been so characterized by what the left calls disinformation and misinformation and censorship and demonization.

Does that mean I want to cut the Ukrainians off?

No, but I would like to have a transparent accounting for all the aid that goes to them.

I would like to give them defensive arms so that they can defend themselves from aggression.

And I would like them to have elections and have a and see what the Ukrainian people want to do.

And then I would like some statesman in the West to say, eventually, eventually, to stop the 600,000 casualties that's going to hit a million probably by the end of the year, if it hasn't gone way over 600, we will have some type of international NATO-sponsored, who knows,

plebiscite in Crimea and Donbass to see whether these 70% Russian-speaking people are terrified of Putin, or they're just sick of all the destruction of their infrastructure and lives lost, or they like the Ukrainians.

Who knows?

But let them decide.

Then as a carrot for Putin, we would say

if these elections are conducted fairly and if they want to be part of Russia, they will be part of Russia.

And we pledge that we will not put Ukraine in NATO, but we will arm it to the teeth.

So, if you try this again, you're going to take a lot of hits.

And we're going to stop the line.

So, we're going to tell the American people the truth about these weapons.

We're not going to say, if we just had Patriots, that would be enough.

If we just had HIMARS, that would be enough.

If we had the Abrams tank systems, if we had the javelins, they could win.

If we have the F-16s, they could win.

No, we're not going to say that anymore.

We're going to say you can give them all the weapons you want, and they don't have the manpower or the wealth or the ability to take on this huge Russia.

And it doesn't do any good to say, well, it's a declining, failed state.

Its economy is far less than California's.

Come on, Victor.

They're just a paper tiger of what they would.

No, they got 145 million people.

They have 7,000 nukes.

They're run by a thug that doesn't care about human life.

And

they've got a lot of allies, and they're getting more allies.

They've got Iran, and they've got Turkey, and they've got North Korea, and they've got China, and India, and wants no part of the Western Boycott Alliance.

So there it is.

There it is, Victor.

We wouldn't have been talking about this if Joe Biden hadn't.

effed up

in Afghanistan, which is

how many dead bodies are there in destroyed nations because of that?

But we, my friend, we have to, I know you have a schedule to keep, so we've got to conclude.

That was a great analysis, the unspeakable things about, unmentionable things, I should say, about Ukraine.

So,

Victor, thanks for all the wisdom you shared.

Folks who

do listen, you obviously are listening.

If you care to rate the show, you can do that on iTunes or Apple.

We encourage you to rank it up to five stars.

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So thanks those who take the time to do that.

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We don't have time to read, actually read a comment now, but we'll read more as we typically do at the end of every show.

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Victor, thanks again for all the brilliance you shared today.

Thanks, folks, for listening.

We will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

Much appreciated.