Nordstrom Invasion, Catholic Discrimination and Trump Facing More Charges

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

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

Victor Davis-Hanson is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshabusky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

I got to tell you a little something about Hillsdale, Victor.

And there is such, there's an avalanche of matters

important to get your

views on, Victor.

We'll talk about, I think we should, we'll start off talking about this store invasion of Nordstroms out in California.

We have issues about

Catholics, practicing Catholics, not allowed to be foster parents in Massachusetts, practicing Catholics being much more of a target by the FBI than the FBI has had

admitted to.

We have charges coming up likely this week against Donald Trump in Georgia.

And if we have time, a piece about the January 6th committee.

And we have the special prosecutor we haven't discussed.

Oh, okay.

I thought you and Sammy had done that.

Well, we should do that.

Yeah, we should do that right after we talk about Nordstrom's.

Yeah,

we touched on it briefly, but I wanted to say a couple of other things.

Okay, all right.

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And let's get to Nordstrom's right after these initial important messages.

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

Quick about Hillsdale.

Victor, this past week,

past Friday, I was at

the Blake Center.

I had mentioned this on a previous podcast.

Someone, the founder of Friendly's, which is a big chain in the East.

I don't know how far west it went, ice cream sandwich shop, had built a replica of Monticello as a home

in Summers,

Connecticut, which is on the border of Massachusetts.

And he passed away, and his family left the property to Hillsdale, and Hillsdale's turned it into the Blake Center.

And they had a huge event up there.

The other night, Molly Hemingway came and spoke, Bill McClay and some others.

I saw Larry Arn.

And I just had to tell you, there's

people found out I hosted the Victor Davis-Hanson show.

Their VDH love was so effusive.

And actually, Molly

when she gave her talk, she was talking a little bit about the recent Hillsdale cruise and that

the fun began even before the cruise began because she got to ride in a cab.

She and her husband Mark with you and the great Mrs.

Hansen on a cab ride over to the ship, I guess.

So anyway, it was...

Even though you were not there, you were beloved

in spirit.

And I know you're heading out there in a couple of weeks, right?

Yeah, I have my annual sojourn and

lectures, et cetera.

This year is the first in 20 years.

I'm not going to teach.

I'm going to be lecturing.

And then my tenure will be

eight days rather than the more recent two and then the earlier three and then the earlier four and five weeks.

So

it's a new type of

guest lectures rather than

a continuous class, intensive class.

So I'm looking forward to it.

I always like going out there.

Yeah.

And I just want to tip a hat to lovely Jean.

I won't say anymore.

She was from, other than she was from Georgia and she had met you on the cruise.

Yes, I remember Gene.

Jean, yeah,

she sought me out to let me know how much she admired you and the podcast.

So, well, Victor,

yeah, obviously the special counsel then is

big story we want to get your thoughts on.

But prior to that, we've seen in the last

two days,

I saw it just yesterday, I think it was late yesterday, this ransacking of a Nordstrom's in California.

That was in Topanga, yeah, that was in Topanga, Canyon.

That's really upscale, right?

And then the other one in

Eve, excuse me, St.

Laurent and

Glendale.

And that is a very peaceful, supposedly community.

But

Jack,

they're not stealing roast beef and rice.

These are upscale, and Nordstrom is really upscale.

And

you look at the videos, they're taking out high-end

purses,

clothing, jackets, in both of these cases.

So

let's just dispel any idea that the needy are going in because they are victims of a capitalist system and they need to eat one more day.

Excuse me, Victor, which is why these shoplifting laws have been

neglected.

That's the pretext, right?

Yes.

Yeah.

$950

makes it

a mere misdemeanor.

But one of those bags that you saw, everybody had three or four.

One of those bags is a couple of thousand bucks.

So they weren't even worried.

We've descended so much that the earlier shoplifting

and the discrimination to be sure to not go over the 950s out the window.

We're in the age of the post-George Floyd to fund the police, everything goes.

And there's a bill in the California legislature right now, I think in the state senate, to penalize

store employees that might want to intervene.

I think in one of the video clips from the Topanga Kanya, there's a store employer tugging on

the bag.

And then there's some suggestions in that Modesto case where the two Indian immigrants have a stick hitting that

shoplifter that they may face

an indictment.

So

this is a new territory we're in.

We're right back in the pre-civilizational period where people, I guess they

organizing code or something on social media, they pick out a high-end store, they swarm it, and they have

some assumptions.

Number one, there will be no police.

Number two, the security guards are a joke.

They had bear spray in one instance.

Three, if by chance somebody trips, falls, and is apprehended,

then he will not be

arrested.

Or if he is arrested, he won't be indicted.

If he is indicted, he won't be convicted.

We'll go through, as we've said before, if he can convict it, he'll serve no time.

And so that means it's a war.

One thing that I think is very controversial about this, Jack, is that, and I don't like to bring it up, but we're saturated with collective racism, collective.

So all we hear, there's a professor, I think the University of West Virginia,

excuse me, there's a professor,

West Virginia is

slicing all of its

world languages curriculum, but not its diversity, equity, inclusion classes.

And we had another professor, an Asian professor, American, who said that when African Americans attack Asians, it's because of white supremacy.

And you can say white supremacy, white supremacy, white supremacy, white privilege, white privilege, white rage collectively.

That's okay.

I mean, that means everybody.

But you can't say the same thing about African Americans.

You You shouldn't about anybody.

But one of the things I'm getting at is

if the so-called marginalized community is using collective terminology,

then I guess that's the rule.

Because the vast majority, if you look at the videos of the Glendale and Nordstrom and what we've seen in San Francisco, are African-American youth.

Let me note that California's population of African-Americans is about 3.5%.

And so

if

we were going to go by the left's proportional representation,

3.5% of those looters should be African American, but they were overwhelming.

And yet no one talks about this.

And the only time we talk about race collectively other than whites, who are all identical automatons, who all benefit, even, as I said, the proverbial forklift driver in Tulare, who makes minimum wage and never been to college or ignore his parents.

but nevertheless, he's a beneficiary of white privilege, supposedly, but we never talk about any other group.

And in this case, I think somebody in the African-American community, instead of just using banalities and generalities, should say, if we talk about ourselves collectively without individual discrimination, i.e., it's this socio-economic crowd of the African-American community, it's this particular geographical.

No, we just say say all blacks deserve reparation.

They're all black, this, this, this.

Well, then why doesn't some civil rights leader say this is epidemic in California and other places?

The African-American male between the ages of 12, maybe, and 35 is committing these smash and grab

decivilizational crimes at a rate,

wow, probably, if they're about, they're about, I think they're 3.5% of the national, I mean, 12% African-American, 6% male, probably that age group is 3.5%.

They're committing this crime at an astounding, disproportionate ratio.

And no one wants to address it.

Why does anybody address it?

Why don't they just say in the mail or the Daily Mail or the Newsweek or anything, just say a group of largely African-American, and they don't say it.

And yet they will say it about other groups.

And I don't get this.

I don't think

it does the African-American collective group any favors.

Right.

Victor, first of all, for those who have not seen the video or the story

about this, just in one of those stores, there were 50 looters.

I mean, it looked like ants coming to a picnic and just

taking everything out of this high-end section of the store.

And the other thing is, as you say, Victor, to me,

someone who's reasonable would think these,

particularly within the black community in America, who cares about the progress and prosperity of blacks, would think these laws are going to

come back to bite us in the heiny, big time.

America was progressing significantly, racially, until recent years.

And this is, we've already gone backward thanks to Obama.

But these

Obama?

Well,

where is

he on Martha's Vineyard right now?

Yeah, he's either in Martha's Vineyard or Oahu at the beach, but at his other mansion or his third mansion, pulling the strings of the Biden administration, Calorama.

But he can't.

He can't miss any news item without coming out and blasting the supposed conservative forces of darkness.

Where's Al Sharpton?

Where's Louis Farrakhan?

Where's Maxine Waters?

Where's the Black Caucus?

Where's anybody saying our black mayors in San Francisco and our black mayors in Los Angeles are confronting an epidemic of smash and grab mass looting that is disproportionately committed by African-American males, say between 12, 15, and 35.

And therefore, since we, as civil rights activists, use collectivist terminology, we will

say that the black community must stop this unless you believe in some type of Marxist redistribution, that this is just, oh, these are just high-end stores for wealthy white people.

So who cares?

They have insurance, and the people in need will take them and get another day of...

essential foods.

If you believe that fantasy, I suppose you could justify your silence.

But it's all it does

is create greater and greater and greater disunity among the population.

Because there are people there that are in that store and they are trying to pay for things.

There are employees that are in danger.

There is an owner.

There is a manager who suffers.

It's not just these high-end, too.

They go into Walmarts and all the 7-Elevens, and we don't even think about this.

And at some point,

people are going to say the answer to

this violent crime among the African-American community, way out of disproportion, whether we're talking about a Saturday night in Chicago or whether we're talking about Baltimore or San Francisco or L.A.

or Memphis or Washington, is not being addressed.

by having 50% of television commercials

participated in by African Americans.

That's a goodwill gesture to show everybody that we have to break stereotypes of our past.

I get it, but that

therapeutic gambit is not stopping what are radical increases in inner city crime.

And in some places like Chicago or Oakland, African Americans are stepping up and saying, don't do this.

Don't defund the police.

Don't delegitimize theft.

You are unleashing a criminal element within our own community upon us and others.

But

it's just amazing.

Where's Gavin Newsom?

And, you know, when you look at San Francisco, and

this has happened again and again in San Francisco, and when you have places like Whole Foods or Nordstroms or others are packing out and leaving, and you hear this term now in San Francisco, doom loop, doom loop, doom loop.

The more you have homeless, the more you have crime, the more you have smash and grab, the more you have carjacking, the more stores close down.

I think it's got the highest vacancy rate in the United States.

It's over 25, 26%.

And then people leave and then fewer people go downtown.

So then you have fewer commercial transactions, less sales tax, less income tax, corporate tax, because these businesses are leaving, and then less municipal expenditures for police, public safety, public health, cleanliness on the streets.

And it just spirals down into something like 1960s and 70s Detroit.

And there's nothing stopping it because there's nobody,

there has to be some brave person.

And that's when I was getting back to that article I wrote about Leo Amory

in Britain in 1939.

And then again in 1940, when he shouted down the labor surrogate leader, Mr.

Greenfield, and said, who will speak for England?

And then in 1940, on the day that

three days before Germany invaded France, three days before Churchill had to take over and save the country, he said, be gone with you.

And he was talking to Neville Chamberlain, quoting Oliver Cromwell's attack on the short or the long, the long parliament.

So my point is,

somebody is going to have the, some politician is going to have the guts to say,

yes, there is bias, yes, there's systematic racism, discrimination, but

the crime rate among young African-American urban males, to be very focused and accurate, is so far disproportionate to their 3.5%

demographic that we have to do something because they're going to destroy, if this continues, they're going to destroy all of commerce.

And it can't go on.

When you go into a store and you just swarm it and you loot, and everybody sees that you're doing that, then the individual shoplifter says, hmm, well, maybe I won't do that.

But if you're so blatant, you just walk in and you take over a store, then what's stopping me from just pinching here and pinching there?

And we have an epidemic.

And, you know, you've got to encourage the others by making, if you had taken that Nordstrom smash and grab,

and somebody had called the police, and the LA PD had

made a ring around that store.

And as they came out, they just diverted them to one side, handcuffed them, put them on the curb, took all of the bags, put them in a big pile, had the

employees come out and take back their merchandise and then get a huge bus with bars in the windows and put each person accused, not convicted, accused of theft or conspiracy to commit a felony or whatever the particular RICO charge, and put them on and then followed up and give them five, six years prison sentence, it would stop.

It would stop quickly.

Well, Victor, you know, as much as these corporations are the victims of this, they're also complicit.

There's culpability here.

Why, even at smaller places, and we didn't talk about this

a few weeks back, like Lululemon, which, you know,

I didn't know what what the hell it was.

Obviously, some hoity-toity little store, but employees who try to stop are

fired, of trying to stop shoplifting, are fired.

The corporate policies are to let this go on.

They've helped create this madness.

And part of the madness is not just the stealing and the reselling of these items, but it's got to be the creation of these

newfold, new mafia-type criminal organizations that are going to expand as time goes on.

This is their venture capital, this kind of crap.

I do want to say a word for my old friend,

Robert Agostinelli, our friend, because he's involved with Sachs Fifth Avenue

as an investor.

And in New York City, after the George Floyd riots,

Sachs hired these guys with German shepherds to protect the stores.

And it was like, damn, good.

Here's some place saying, no, we're not going to permit this.

We're not going to allow this.

But it's a singular anecdote.

No, it's not.

Corporate America is not, is not, because they're afraid to.

I think they're not.

I mean, no, they, and what, what the, what people should do, they have flexed their muscles.

And you can see what they did to Anheuser-Busch and Target and Disney and others.

They should just say,

this is a list of stores whose policy is not to react at all to looting or shoplifting.

Just give them the names.

And then everybody should say, I'm not going in that store.

Because if you go in that store when these people are looting, it's dangerous.

And if the store is not going to protect its own property, it's not going to protect you either.

I wouldn't even go into any of those stores whose policy is not to try to enforce the law or to stop shoplifting.

It's another indictment.

There is a Home Depot where I live, and it's a smaller community, 25,000.

And when I go in there, about every fifth or sixth time, there's a Selma policeman in the parking lot, and they've arrested somebody for,

I guess, smashing grab.

I don't think they smash much, but running out with things.

So there is a sense of deterrence.

And when I go in there,

after a particular hour, all of the

checkouts, especially the self-serve, are closed and everybody is funneled into one with a line.

So if you go in there at 9:30 at night and it closes at 10, good luck, you're going to be in a line and everybody is metered out.

And so there are stores that have decided they're not going to allow that to happen.

And they will take whatever,

you know,

steps they can within the law that can help them.

But ultimately, the people voted for this stuff.

And they voted for the proposition that decriminalized.

And they knew.

And why did they do it in California?

Because

25 years ago or so, we had three strikes in your owl and it worked.

And we built a lot of state prisons and everybody got angry.

They said, we're criminalizing the drug dealer who's just,

you know, he's just satisfying a need.

We should criminalize, we shouldn't decriminalize drugs or we're decriminalizing people of, whatever you want to call it.

But we had some of the safest years in California at the beginning of this millennium.

And everybody got used to it.

And they said, you know what?

It wasn't three strikes and you're out.

It wasn't the incarceration of criminals.

It wasn't the building of new prisons.

It was human nature.

We were so tolerant that everybody changed their nature and they got along.

And now we don't need these laws.

Well, no, human nature is constant.

And so we got rid of that law de facto.

And now we have the survival of the fittest.

And unfortunately,

you know,

the thing that also gets me angry about this is

that there is no equality in the application of a law.

So if you're in Glendale or Toponga Canyon

and

you're driving down the street and you hit by accident even a pedestrian, properly you should be stopped and you will be stopped.

And they will investigate that.

And

you may go to jail for reckless driving.

Or if you're near that shopping center and you have a tenth of one point

over the DUI level and you make a go through a yellow right too clear too close to being red and they pull you over and you've had three beers and you have 0.9.

You're not going to have your car there.

They're going to take it away.

And they should.

But my point is the law is being applied still across the board on most things that affect the middle class, but not the very wealthy, apparently, and not the underclass.

And that's why we have these cultural phenomenon now.

You know, it's right.

I mean, somebody has to ask why I was just driving down from the mountains today, Jack, and there's this guy, Oliver Anthony, this bluegrass singer, who

he just, I think he'd been an alcoholic, or, you know he wrote this song all those rich men north of rich all those rich men north of richmond richmond yeah yeah and i you know it's kind of a

double barrel shotgun blast but it's a populist what is going on in this country and then he's got another one he i think i think he's the first singer in history to have two the number one and the number two songs on the top 10 not the bluegrass or country i mean all the charts right tailors

everybody.

So, how can that be possible?

And the reason is, is there is a growing anger, growing anger about the disparity of the application of the law, whether it's Hunter Biden versus Trump or whether it's smash and grab mass looting with no ramifications

versus some poor guy who is pulled over by the highway patrolman for going 75 in a 55 mile an hour zone.

Good.

Let's ticket him.

Let's give him a 400.

But if you're going to give him a $400 ticket for speeding, then damn it, then you better arrest somebody for stealing $4,000 of goods right out of a store.

And if you're not going to do it, then don't ever, ever say, as the liberal media does,

we don't want to return to vigilanteism.

That would be the undermining of the rule of law.

No, vigilanteism is a pre-civilizational reaction to the lack of the law.

It's pre-civilizational and that's where we are.

We have destroyed the corpus of jurisprudence.

There are no laws in many areas of our society and therefore you're starting to see vigilanteism as we saw in Modesto, California.

And those two guys that took the wooden stick, the one guy did, may

in the end, I thought he wouldn't be prosecuted in Modesto, but he might well be.

It just kills me how all of these people get up and start yelling and screaming about vigilanteism, but they don't care about the average middle-class person who, A, is a victim of theft or attacks or violence, and

there is no remedy through the police because they've either been defunded or they've been emasculated

by the left who are screaming, don't dare.

You can see why this is really important and how this dovetails into the whole Second Amendment debate.

You can really see why the left does not want people armed because

if they destroy laws concerning theft or assault, then the only remedy is the police.

And they control these big city governments and they can meter out or they can warp or apply here, but not there.

protection depending on your politics or your perceived ideology.

They can't stand it.

The gun argument is very similar to the person in an individual car who distrusts taking mass transit, which is a nightmare today here in California.

I think the muni mass transit in San Francisco is down by 60% from its pre-COVID.

And BART, they don't even, they have a policy.

They won't even release the videos of violent acts because they think it might stereotype particular groups.

So people respond by driving because you're a king of the mountain in your own car.

And the state state hates those individual cars.

That's why our whole freeway system is decrepit, why we spend, you know, $300 billion on the high-speed rail from Bakersfield to Merced.

And it's the same thing with guns.

Take away people's guns and they're dependent on an ideological government for their own security, which will demand a price from certain groups and not from others.

Right.

Well, Victor, we're going to,

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

So, Victor, yeah,

I have to

plead innocent here a little bit to our listeners.

I did not yet get to listen to the episodes that you

recorded with the great Sammy Wink this weekend.

But you said you may have talked a little about the special prosecutor.

We're talking about David Weiss, who Merrick Garland announced would be the special prosecutor investigating Hunter Biden.

This is the same existing prosecutor that was cutting the

ridiculous deal that a federal for Hunter Biden, that a federal judge blocked,

I think, two weeks ago or 10 days ago.

So,

Victor, this is a false problem.

Yeah, it is.

He's basically,

there's a lot of ways you can look at this.

So, why would he appoint as special counsel

a

DOJ federal prosecutor who had slowwalked for five years the Hunter Biden investigation, which allowed many of his capital crimes to not be indictable because of a statute limitations by intent, I think,

would protect Hunter Biden.

And then the judge, who was honest, had to step in and tell him, this is a farce.

I'm not going to accept accept this deal, plus, your immunity from any other crime that hasn't yet turned up.

So, why would you appoint that person as a special counsel?

Why would you appoint a special counsel in deliberate violation of the law?

The statute says they have to be outside government.

Why would you pick somebody that's not only outside, not outside government, but works for Merrick Garland

and was involved in the case?

I mean, when

Jeff Session was under pressure by the left in Congress to appoint a special counsel to look on the fraud, the non-existent Russian collusion, he picked somebody outside of government, Robert Mueller.

But Robert Mueller, even then,

was supposedly, according to James Comey, his desired special counsel.

And that's why he leaked the private memo with Donald Trump to prompt the appointment of what he thought would be likely

filled by Robert Mueller.

But the point is, what if that had not have happened?

What if

Jeff Sessions had appointed someone who was in the DOJ

who had been looking at all of this and giving

lectures that there was nothing to Russian collusion?

At least he'd be telling the truth.

This man, Weiss, is not telling the truth when he basically had this sweetheart deal for Hunter Biden.

But the left would have gone berserk if they had seen something like that.

Yet

they're quiet about this or they're praising the appointment.

So then we get down finally to why he appointed him.

One, they are absolutely terrified

of this story breaking out.

Because when you go on television, if you're this Representative Goldman or Schiff or whoever you are,

Pelosi, and you say there's nothing there, then you've got a problem, Jack, because you're saying that Hunter Biden on his own laptop, when he whined

to

his sister, that unlike his father, who took half of Hunter's income as the

basically the cost of using his name, he wasn't going to do that to other members of the family and mentioned Mr.

10% and the big guy.

Okay.

And then there was Tony Bobolinski, Devin Archer.

We had eyewitness testimonies that Joe was involved in the business, that he phoned people, etc.

Then we had a third source of information, oligarchs who claim that they have been on a personal phone call with Joe.

We'll see if they bring the tapes of Joe Biden.

And then we have a fourth sense, and that is the whistleblowers, the IRS whistleblowers, who say they were impeded in part by Mr.

Weiss himself from following the logical trajectory.

And the logical trajectory was neither Hunter or Joe's tax returns, in their view, reflected the amount of real income

they derived, which

would not be easily traceable within the confines of the United States, although it might say in an offshore bank, with either the money that they reported or the types of lifestyles they enjoyed.

Joe Biden in 2016 filed for his 2016 income filed a return jack of like $400,000.

The next year for his income in 2017,

he filed a return of $11 million.

So what was so magical?

He was getting royalties as vice president.

What was so magical?

Where did he get 11 times the income, more than 11 times, 20 times the income in 12 months?

And that's just what he reported.

It was teaching one Saturday morning a month at the University of Delaware.

You can count it up.

You can count it up.

You can count five or 600 there, 600 there.

You can't come up with 11 million.

And so that's what he reported.

So there was all, there were, and then we have the fifth font of information.

Does anybody believe that Jim Biden or Hallie Biden

or Hunter Biden or any of these people will have any

revenue streams when Joe Biden is out of office?

Why wouldn't he?

They would get the Biden name, Sterling Biden name.

Would they get the

petroleum expertise or energy expertise of ERISMA?

They're international consultant.

So obviously they have market value that because the left tells us it has nothing to do with Joe Biden.

He was just calling about the weather.

Fine.

So as soon as Joe Biden is out of office and he can't run for president or he chooses not to, what will all of those eight or nine or ten Bidens market value be?

It'll be zero.

Nobody will want anything to do with them.

And now, why would that be?

And the answer is self-evident.

And so.

What I'm getting at, this thing is overwhelming.

It's absolutely overwhelming.

So they are paranoid about it.

So they appoint this prosecutor.

And what it tells all of us is they are more worried about this coming to the light of day under a genuine, disinterested, autonomous special counsel

than they are the shame, the rebuke of this skullduggery where they appoint someone who has a record of being biased and the appointment itself is in violation of the statute.

And then there's a second reason.

If Mr.

Weiss is a special counsel, as sure as the sun rises up, that he was on the witness call list for the House Oversight Committee and other committees, and they're going to call him and he's going to say, I can't testify about any of those

decisions or anything that explained why the judge rebuked my plan for Hunter because I'm the special counsel.

I can't do it.

And you know what?

I also can't give you any of the data or records that I was using in that investigation because I'm still investigating it.

It's an ongoing investigation, the magic word we hear in Washington all the time.

So that's what they're doing.

And then there's a third sept.

Joe Biden's got to finish his term.

Now, there's two threats to it, Jack: his mental and physical cognitive disabilities and his sheer corruption.

If this thing is what I think most of us think it is, it is so egregious.

We have never seen a sitting president who shook down foreign companies via his son who flew to China with him on Air Force 2.

And now we learn he was a crackhead for 16 years.

And this guy is being entrusted by billionaire foreign entities because he has access to Joe, which Joe reaffirms every once in a while by calling in.

But this thing is so egregious that it could be Nixon-like.

Remember, Nixon was never impeached,

much less was he tried in the Senate after being impeached.

He just resigned.

They came to him and said, you know, this is overwhelming.

Just leave.

So

that is what they're afraid of, that if this stuff comes out under a genuine special counsel and he leaks like Robert Mueller's team did, I hope he doesn't, but he might because they all leak.

And we see Jack Smith leaking, and all of these prosecutors are going to put a gag order on Trump, but they're going to leak like crazy.

But if this were to happen, somebody might say, Joe, this is so overwhelming that

even if they, if you think they're going to impeach you in the House, but you're going to get off in the Senate, it's going to destroy our label.

Or

you're not almost non-compos mentas now.

The stress of this will be too much for you.

So we think

you're going to have to step.

You're going to have to finish your term, but you're going to have to not run for re-election.

And so I think what we're seeing now is a paranoia that if they had a real special prosecutor, they might find something in the next year and a half to the degree that he might even have to step down, or

it might be the coup de grace that means he's physically incapable.

And then we know what happens.

We get a 2023 or a 2024

or a January 2025 Kamala Harris.

And they think that that person will ruin the Democratic brand for

two decades.

So what they're saying basically is, Joe.

Whatever you do, you're going to finish this damn term.

You understand?

I don't care if Merrick Garland has to humiliate himself.

He's got to put a lid on these investigations so you can finish your term.

And you've got to be able to work more than a day or two a week, or maybe you can work six hours if that's what it is, but you're going to finish your damn term and you're not going to have to resign and you're not going to be impeached or convicted.

You got that?

Because we cannot allow this mistake of yours to be the head of the Democratic Party for the next eight years or president, much less.

And so that's what's behind it all.

And everybody is stunned and saying,

how can Merrick Garland treat people?

We're not stupid.

No, he's not, he doesn't think you're stupid.

He thinks he's got a way to stop you from investigating the Bidens.

He's got a phony special prosecutor.

He's got a concrete wall that he's built around the House Republican subpoena power.

And he's got a way of squashing any controversy so that Joe can limp and

stumble through

January of 2025.

He's also got an FBI that lies to Congress.

And Victor, I think we should

talk

about that.

Director Ray, and I mentioned at the beginning some Catholic-related, two Catholic-related topics, and maybe we can lead into that but first but first we have another i want to take a um take a minute victor to let our listeners know about um another great sponsor and that is gold co

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So, Victor, there are two Catholic stories, but maybe we just have time for one

because I think we also want to get to

the forthcoming, your thoughts on these charges that are likely to be coming out in the next few days.

FBI Director Ray went before Congress

a few months ago or a few weeks ago when it had come out earlier this year that the Richmond Office of the FBI was investigating what we call traditional Catholics.

You know, there are practicing Catholics, but then there are traditional

usually means folks who prefer their religious service the old way, Latin Mass.

But these were folks who who are

who practice, who go to Latin Mass, probably conservative.

I don't know anyone who'll be a liberal will go to them, but maybe.

Everything's seen politically, right, Victor.

So they must be,

they have the earmarkings,

earmarks, according to some of the

FBI staff,

of being potential domestic terrorists.

So he was called before Congress.

Oh, this is terrible.

And as soon as I heard about it,

stop this.

This is not what the FBI is like.

Well, it's freaking, yeah, it's what the FBI is like, because this past week, more information has come out about this.

FBI offices in Los Angeles and Portland, and for some reason, I think Louisiana were also involved in this.

So it's much wider spread.

And okay, you know, I'm Catholic.

We joke around a little bit about faith matters and angels and that sort of stuff, Victor.

But, you know, because you're someone practicing religion, our government,

through the FBI, thinks you may be a threat

a second-class citizen and lies about it.

Yeah, this is a Catholic version of selective harassment of Protestants, which remember, they don't go after Unitarians or Episcopalians.

They're always after evangelicals and the cake guy or the person in Utah or the Mormons or the person

that was at a pro-life that they swarmed his house when he family research council

By the Southern Community Law Center.

In their view, Catholics are bifurcated in the same way.

They don't go after Catholic liberation theologists.

They don't go after the minority

Catholic communities because they would lose constituents.

They go after a particular subset of Catholics, the people who go to, they're in a diocese where a bishop or some high Catholic official will not give the rights

rituals to a particular politician who's openly pro-abortion on demand, or people who want to hear the Mass in Latin, what they feel are,

you know, old reactionary.

So that's what they're doing.

And the thing about Ray is different.

He's a little bit different than Mueller and Comey and McCabe.

And that is,

you know, they just say, I can't remember, or

that that was what they did.

Remember, Mueller couldn't remember Fusion GPS or the steel dossier and Comey couldn't remember 245 times under oath.

But Ray always says, and McCabe, you know, who lied four times to federal investigators, but Ray's always, I'm here to help you.

Whatever it needs, I'll look that up.

Yes, I'd like to talk to it, but I got to get going.

I have an appointment.

I get on my Gulf Stream and go to my vacation home.

And yes, that will be forthcoming.

And yes, we're going to call.

I don't know,

but we'll find out.

That's what he does.

He has this pseudo-veneir of cooperation.

And then he's the most obstructive of all of them.

They had to, the whistleblower stuff about the Bidens, he didn't want to give up any of that.

And he turned in, it was under his watch that the FBI

turned into a retrieval service for the Wayward Biden family.

Remember, they went after Ashley Biden's diary that she abandoned in a house which she rented or a room that she rented.

They went after

the laptop and the people associated with it.

Made sure that we all knew by paying Twitter as a contractor that it was Russian disinformation.

That was Anthony Blinken and Mike Morrell's gambit.

And they probably had a hand in this with the Secret Service and finding another wayward Biden missing item.

And that was Hunter's gun that was

fraudulently registered by him lying under oath, lying, I guess, on an affidavit.

So that's who he is, and that's what the FBI is.

And their attitude is sort of like Merrick Garland's.

We're an old institution.

We're vital to American security.

And I cannot believe you're even questioning it.

It's kind of like the Pentagon, too.

So I can tell you that if I, on these podcasts, have suggested that the FBI should be broken up, I don't mean dissolved, I mean broken up.

So

its various various branches could be Harbored and Homeland Security, Department of Treasury, Department of Justice, Department of Interior, and its headquarters moved to Kansas City or something.

Or if you suggest, why don't we just not weigh the exemptions for generals to come back as Department, Secretary of Defenses, Secretary, or let's enforce the Uniform Code of Military Justice that the retired generals and admirals do not not disparage the commander-in-chief with epithets like coward, liar, Nazi, Mussolini.

Or let's just suggest that when you leave the Pentagon, you got to have five years before you can go to work and capitalize on the people you know very well who used to work under you in the military.

Five years before you can work for Lockheed,

Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop, etc.

You know what I get?

I get emails.

How dare you attack the Pentagon?

I thought you were conservative and patriotic.

How dare you attack the FBI?

And that's where we are.

But

I'm not attacking.

I want to save the FBI.

I think it's a necessary institution.

I want to save the Pentagon and the military.

The people who are destroying it are the left.

And

they've broken their vow to

follow the foundational mission of these agencies.

They were apolitical agencies, and there were rules and regulations that prevented them from using ideology as a mechanism to warp it and be selective in their application of their duties.

And they are the betrayers.

Same way with the CIA.

John Brennan betrayed the CIA.

He knew, he was there on day one in the Obama Oval Office when he told them that

Hillary Clinton had been

hiring a foreign national to compile dirt on Donald Trump under the guise of Russian collusion.

And there were people involved with the CIA that were furthering that.

And he himself lied twice under oath.

So that's the problem with all of these agencies.

And the FBI is

goes,

I guess the better question, just to finish the segment, Jack, is what will the FBI not do?

What will the FBI not do?

Yeah, everybody out there listening, some of you say, well, Victor, I know what they won't do.

They won't go go to school board meetings and try to eavesdrop and see if they can go after parents because the teachers' unions have told

the attorney general who's told the FBI that they're terrorists.

You know, they did that.

They won't go after an ex-president and show up with a SWAT team in front of his house.

uh over an archival dispute in a way they would never do with joe but no they did that

and

they won't, we had, what was the reason?

I don't know.

There was a 300-pound

5'6, 74-year-old nut who was writing threatening letters.

And he was just killed by the FBI.

I don't know.

They haven't released any details, but the guy couldn't walk, really.

So he was housebound.

And he was just a nut writing stuff, threatening this, threatening that.

Don't you think you could find a way to shut off his his power or something or wait till he waddled into his car to drive his 200 yards to church services and just intercept him without getting into a confrontation and shooting him because you think he's going to shoot Joe Biden?

He's not going to shoot anybody.

But

it's lost all of the public trust and it's sad.

Yeah, the last thing I'll say, Victor, is about this particular Catholic situation.

The early thought was, okay, you got one nut in the Richmond office.

Someone with a bug up is behind, and he's behind it.

But no, the fact that it's wider spread and here and many other issues, like pro-lifers, parents, et cetera, that agents can feel empowered to do these kind of things that are very ideological is

quite disturbing and a sign that

there's rot there and it's it's been there for a while this just doesn't happen overnight too much power it's too much i think everybody in the conservative side has come to the conclusion that there's too much power that doesn't have civilian audit by lifetime employees of bureaucracies that have enormous budgets and they're concentrated in washington and they tend to be asymmetrical politically and they can they can do a lot of damage unless they're audited in check

And so

that's the problem.

You've got to break up all of these agencies, move them out, farm out their, cut back radically on their payroll, move them into other agencies, but do not create an independent, Washington-based, secretive, non-transparent FBI or CIA or DOJ with an unlimited budget to go after people.

And if you do that, you're going to to end up with them hiring Twitter to suppress a true story like the Hunter's laptop.

And just remember what the FBI did, everybody.

They had that laptop for a year.

Remember that.

They had that for a year and they knew it was authentic.

And they sat there while Morale and Blinken organized 51, 50 people.

Many of them former CIA and FBI people, to say that this had all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.

In other words, they were telling the American people, you know what, you guys,

Russians are, those Ruskies are so clever that they took this laptop that looked just like Hunter's and they

made pictures on it with prostitutes and Coke.

And the guy who was a perfect actor, he looked just like Hunter.

And then they had Tony Bobelin.

They knew exactly all the people that Hunter communicated and they replicated all of his emails.

They even had Hunter and his

sister talk disparaging Asian Americans when he was trying to have her help recruit women for purposes of process.

They were brilliant and they did all of that and they did it so well that Hunter didn't even know that it wasn't his.

Because when he was asked, he said, I'm not saying yes or no.

That was how good the FBI

found out about these Russian operatives.

Nobody believes that.

And yet they ask American people to believe it, just like they ask us to believe that Mr.

Weiss is a disinterested, unbiased special counsel and he will get to the bottom of the Biden thing very rapidly and quickly.

No, he won't.

No, he was picked precisely that he would not do that.

Well, Victor, we have time for one other significant

item.

As I'm looking at the judge report, the homepage,

big banner, indictment watch, Trump team behind voting system breach, Georgia grand jury soon.

Victor, it seems like

that this is not news news, that there was going to be another big indictment, shoot or drop against Donald Trump, but it's coming.

And there is a new angle here regarding the quote-unquote Trump team.

Victor, do you have any thoughts about this?

Well, I mean, Donald Trump tweeted that Fannie Willis, I kind of calls her phony Fanny, that she was incompetent.

She was racist.

I know that she had indicted a state official in Georgia with bogus charges, and he was totally exonerated and elected.

Then she used that to raise funds for.

So she doesn't have a sterling record.

But when Trump, you know,

says that she's phony and that she had an amorous relationship with a gang member that she was investigating as a prosecutor and she's racist,

he's basically wants to have a showdown.

And that is, will she dare ask the judge?

And would the judge grant a gag order?

And he's going to be shocked.

I think maybe he wants this to show you the bankruptcy of our system.

But what I see happening from Jack Smith and Fanny, this is the third prosecutor now,

along with Alvin Breg, and we're going to get Miss James in New York.

And

I guess Donald Trump thinks, you know what, there could be three to 500 indictments.

This thing has cost me 50 million bucks.

It's going to cost another 50 million.

And they're going to put me before

a inner city jury in New York, maybe in Washington, maybe in Atlanta, maybe in Miami, and they're going to nullify any evidence, and I'm dead cooked.

And so I might as well just bring it on, just try to

yell and insult them too and see if they like it.

The thing that's weird is among all of Trump's crude bombasts, he has a point that

you can't have these special

sorrels elected prosecutors going after him

for things that they never go after anybody else

and then leaking, leaking, they all leak, just like Mueller's, and then telling him that he can't even consult particular documents unless his lawyer is there, much less talk about them.

So he's not going to do this, and we don't know how.

It's so volatile, Jack.

We have no idea how this is going to end up.

We've never been here before.

We have never been here before.

We have a 2024 election where the leading Republican, very early, but the leading candidate was a president, and he is running against another president whose administration, at least in the case of one of the prosecutors, is going after Donald Trump and trying to neuter a possible, if not likely, opponent of Joe Biden in the general election.

We've never had a president who was up for reelection with a special prosecutor going after him now, not after him, but nominally after him, while Donald Trump, the purported leading challenger, is facing a lot of legal jeopardy, as I said, in part from Joe Biden.

So we've never been here before.

And

when you look at the things,

if we're going to criminalize what Alvin Bragg said, that all of these candidates to the degree, what was, you know,

Bill Clinton had a bimbo eruption where he had a special team that went all through Arkansas and environs and tried to find every woman he could remember that he'd slept with and had non-agreements and see if they could somehow.

Nobody ever put him up in jail.

I mean, they finally got him for lying under an app when he said he didn't have sex and the Paula Jones laws.

That was a civil suit.

But my gosh,

they got Trump on a campaign violation.

Bragg thinks he does.

And James is going to get him a campaign violation.

Oh,

that was

an expenditure for your campaign, that non-disclosure, and therefore you didn't report it.

And that's a felony, kind of like Hillary's $100,000 fine, which is a slap on the wrist for paying Christopher Steele over a million dollars to destroy Donald Trump's campaign, keep it off the books.

She never was indicted by anybody.

And the same thing as we know with James.

You're going to indict everybody in New York that has exaggerated on their property portfolio to get a loan, a loan which they got and which they paid back on time.

Then you're going to, you might as well get 5,000 prosecutors.

And if you're going to prosecute everybody who takes out documents as president and has a beef with the archivist,

you can have the Obamas, you're going to have Bill Clinton, you're going to have all of them.

The only problem with Donald Trump was he was rude and crude about it.

And he just said, screw you.

I'm not going to.

And that was the big difference.

But Joe Biden was a vice president and a senator.

He didn't have any authority to declassify anything.

And he had them in three unsecure locations.

And he didn't cooperate with the archivist.

That was a leftist trope when he got caught.

In other words, when somebody discovered it, we're going to cooperate.

No, you didn't cooperate because you had it for 15 years.

All you had to do was, you know, in 2008, 2009, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22.

All you had to do during that long period is say, hey, National Archivists, this is former Senator Joe Biden and Vice President Joe Biden.

And I've got stuff at my house that's maybe classified.

Could you come and take a look?

No.

He didn't.

So when you got such vast asymmetries, I don't know what the effect is.

The short-term effect is it's given a lot of empathy, I think, is the left plan for Donald Trump.

But whether that will sustain itself in the general election if he's got hundreds of indictments and he's not been, I mean, when you listen to his rallies, he does have an online plan for America that's very comprehensive.

It's very similar to Ron DeSantis.

They're both comprehensive.

But when he's at those rallies, Jack, he's talking more and more about his anger of his judicial

miasma and much less about the border and crime and Ukraine and energy, et cetera.

And so that was the point that the left is trying to do.

And it's very tragic because you can see what they're doing and you can see how they lie about it, but no one has figured out how to stop them.

The only thing that's going to stop them is you get a Republican candidate who

makes the argument that these have been the disaster years under the left and then gets that person elected.

They increase the margin in the House and they take the Senate.

And they can't be a rhino because the rhinos won't do anything.

It has to be a solid movement conservative.

And you get somebody like that.

And then you can do something.

But that's what the left is trying.

That's the subtext behind all of this.

Stop that.

Well, Victor,

we have a little more time, but as we close out the show, we're going to hear you have some books you would like to talk about, and we're going to get to that and talk a little about your website and maybe another thing or two right after this final important message.

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

I'd like to remind our listeners and inform our new listeners, which I think we have a lot every week, of your Victor's official website.

It's called The Blade of Perseus, and its web address is victorhanson.com.

I'd like to recommend that you,

like voting in Chicago, go there early and often.

You will find links to

all Victor's,

well, I can't say all, but many of Victor's appearances, the archives of these podcasts, links to Victor's syndicated columns and weekly essays for American greatness, and his ultra articles.

Ultra articles are pieces he writes two or three a week that are exclusive to The Blade of Perseus.

You can read them if you have a subscription.

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Thank you for those who have done so.

So Victor, you have a couple of books that are of interest to you and you wanted to let our listeners know about.

What are they?

Yeah, I've been getting usually in the mid, I get caught up a little bit in the middle of a month.

I get a lot of books in the mail, and some from friends, some not.

And I try to, I don't have time to read them all, but

some that I do.

And so I'm looking at three or four that I'm reading almost simultaneously.

One is this, my friend,

20 years Tom Soule, and he's got a new book, Social Justice Fallacies.

And it's in some ways, it's derivative of his entire life's work of research, trying to point out

everything

from

what racial policy was

and how it affected blacks.

before the Great Society versus after the Great Society.

The other is just to try to talk about slavery and racism and try to show that these were global phenomena

and

they were much more egregious, say, in the Arab world or even in Africa.

And what was unique about the West was it was the only

civilizational culture that tried to and did succeed in outlawing slavery.

and which had not been and slavery had not been predicated by race but it's so i i'd urge all you to get it.

It's a very short book, and it just has a summary, pretty much of his life's work, but calibrated to show

the fallacies.

That's

what he's talking about of contemporary.

Victor, can I just contemporary issues?

Yeah, you're reading a galley or pre-copy.

So I just think folks should know that the book comes out in

is formally published in mid-September.

Yes.

So they can pre-order it now on Amazon.

Yeah.

You get it another month.

And then another one I'm reading, and I just started this one,

was

Mark Levin,

and I consider Mark a very good friend.

The Democratic Party hates America.

And some of you are going to say, well, it hates America.

What do you mean by that?

And what he's trying to say is he's talking about the Democratic Party today.

And when you start reading in depth, what Mark is saying is that

the Democratic Party had this potential that it was on the left.

And the

constitutional history of this country, the Declaration, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, early court decisions, it was an antithetical to the French Revolution.

It was not a revolution that guaranteed an equality of result, but of opportunity.

And as the left became more and more, especially in the 20th century, the party of redistribution and equality, it started to despise the foundational documents.

And now it's reached its zenith with this new Democratic Party that hates America.

What he means by that is they hate the United States that still functions to some degree according to the foundation documents.

And I kind of wrote, I would agree with him because I wrote a lot about the dynamics.

They hate the idea of two senators.

They hate the idea of the Electoral College.

They hate the idea of the Supreme Court now that it's conservative, et cetera, et cetera.

And it's a damning indictment

of modern-day leftism.

He wants to get rid of the idea that there is a kind of,

oh, Adlai Stevenson leftist and

Eisenhower,

or there's a JFK on the Democratic side, and then there's a Nixon,

maybe even an LBJ or Bill Clinton versus, you know,

a Barry Goldwater.

It's different.

These from the age of Obama on are revolutionaries.

They're way beyond the left word mainstream of the Democratic Party.

They hate America as they see it.

They want it to crumble and be rebooted, recalibrated like a phoenix arise from the ashes as a utopian socialist republic.

There's another book, and I'm reading, and I'm almost done with this one, Radical Mind by David Horowitz.

I know he's written a lot, and this is sort of like Tom's soul, in that I think David is 84 now, and he has summed up everything he's written in the past.

But this time, like Tom did on social and economic matters, he's applied it to the last three to four years of woke, abortion, and crime, and the university, and the border, et cetera.

And he's trying to show everybody

that this was the logical culmination of leftism.

It had to end this way because it was getting more radical and more radical.

So over the last hundred years, yesterday's,

you know, counter-revolutionary

counter-revolutionary is today's public enemy.

Yesterday's radical leftist hero is today's sellout.

It just kept getting more and more radical.

And

it's pretty frightening.

And what he's trying to say is, what makes it

scary is that when he was a radical in his 20s, before he flipped to the conservative side some almost 60 years ago, there was this Democratic Party that Mark Levine had chronicled, had turned in from a leftist.

you know, redistributionist party to a wacko-socialist Marxist party of today.

And that's what

Horowitz is saying.

What's really scary about it is in the old days, there was an establishment that they reacted against, that he

marched against the Pentagon, they marched against the college president, they marched against the police, they marched against the FBI headquarters.

Today, the FBI headquarters, the CIA headquarters, the corporate board headquarters, the Pentagon, they're the left-wing revolutionaries.

They're either the 60s generation in their 70s or 80s, or they're the children that were brought up by that revolution.

So it's a revolution, not just from the bottom up, but from the top down.

And so it's a, I thought it was pretty good.

And, you know, there's a fourth book very quickly that I've just started by Daniel Greenfield.

I know him a little bit, not well, but he works at the Horowitz Center.

He's got a book called Domestic Enemies, The Founding Fathers Fight Against the Left.

And what he's saying, Jack, is he's taking the argument way back

earlier than the Democratic Party of the 1930s or 40s or 50s or 60s that Horowitz has transmogrified from being left into what we have now.

And Levine pointed that out.

Tom Soule did as well.

But he's saying at the very beginning, the idea of a left in America that was redistributionist and didn't believe in personal liberty, but in

egalitarianism or equality by result as the French Revolution.

This was a danger from the very beginning.

And he was trying to say how that left-wing hatred of the founders.

manifests itself.

It manifested itself with inflationary, you know, the whole silver, greenback versus gold argument.

He was talking about foreign policy.

And then even remember the social utopian movements of the 1820s where they set up these free love communities all the Midwest.

And

then he goes into the labor movement, Samuel Gompers and Eugene Debs.

they're going into the riots.

And we forget that,

and he's really hard on the Democratic Party because he makes the argument that the one party that was just adamant that race was the central problem in the United States, and it was the idea that blacks were now numbering several million, and they did not deserve to be protected under the Constitution.

And that was entirely a Democratic monopoly, at least party-wise.

And so, these are four books.

It's a pretty interesting, that's kind of unique, and it's chock full of historical examples.

So all four are pretty good books.

They all came and they're kind of tangenti related to each other.

So if anybody's interested, they're all going to be coming out in the next 30 or 40 days.

And they sell.

I mean, everybody knows Tom Soule's books are wonderful.

They know Mark Levin's books.

They've read David Horowitz for half century.

And I think.

Daniel Greenfeld's less well-known, but

this is kind of a unique book.

I didn't quite, I know

the left always says, don't ever say that we were the party for slavery.

And that was not us.

That was just an imaginary Democratic Party.

And after the Civil War, you know, in the South, that was just the Southern bastardization of our party.

And then, you know, you guys voted against the civil rights.

No,

it wasn't a bastardized form because it was based on radical egalitarianism, redistribution, and you looked at African Americans as threats to that.

And so it was inherent in the DNA of the Democratic Party going way back.

That's his argument.

And I haven't finished the book to adjudicate it, but it looks very interesting.

I think people should give it a look.

Okay.

If I had to bet, Victor, I'm sure our listeners, they would like to hear you

on one of your occasional special Victor Interviews podcast talk with Tom Sowell.

I'll try to do that right away.

Yeah, that would be terrific.

Well, Victor, we have we're going to wrap it up by thanking our listeners for doing just that, listening.

And to those especially who via Apple and iTunes leave rate the show, which again, zero to five stars.

Practically everyone gives it five stars over 4.9 average for this since it's

first started a couple of years back.

Some people leave comments.

We read them.

I read them

on

Apple.

I also read the comments on your website, which are, oh my gosh, the ones in response to your most recent American greatness essay.

There's like 120 comments there already.

It's terrific stuff.

But anyway, we have one from Michigan, Judy, who writes, never miss an episode.

In my opinion, Victor is the smartest person in the podcast world, and that's why I listen to him.

Whenever he is on, he is calm, so informative and fact-based.

If I was running for office, I would follow his advice, Michigan Judy.

You know, Victor, I hope there are some people running for president who would follow your advice also.

Michigan Judy, maybe you'll run for office someday for president.

Victor will

give you a 10-point plan.

So thank you to her and everyone else that takes the time to give their opinion.

Thank you, Victor, for all the wisdom you shared today.

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

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.