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Hello to the listeners of the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Victor is a commentator and analyst of current affairs and both political and military.

He's a trained classicist and philologist and has written much on both the ancient and modern world, especially on agriculture and warfare, but on many other other things, of course.

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

We are on our news roundup today, and so we'll look at a lot of the latest news,

whatever you want to call it, the things in the news.

And the first one is, of course, Hunter's plea deal, which was rejected by a federal judge.

So stay with us, and we'll be right back to discuss that.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

And Victor, so we have Hunter,

who is

his lawyers were putting in a plea deal, and apparently the judge saw through that plea deal and decided that the two misdemeanor counts of tax evasion and felony possession of a weapon while addicted to crack cocaine.

That plea deal was not going to go through.

So he'll be tried.

I believe that's the upshot of it all.

I was wondering your thoughts on this.

Well,

I'd just like to ask the listeners, just bear with me a second.

So you, listener,

have made a million and a half dollars from a foreign government.

You haven't registered as an agent of a foreign government, which is, by the way, what they really threw the book at Paul Manafort and threatened Michael Flynn with.

Manafort, with his Ukrainian-Russian connections, Flynn, remember, with Turkey.

And let's say you made a million and a half dollars in 2017 and 18, and you just forgot to pay taxes on.

And depending on the state in which you were in, it could be 38 federal and 10

state, state, not 13.3 is in California.

But let's say that it's just 45%.

So you didn't pay a million and a half and a million, $3 million.

You didn't pay 1.2 or something.

Maybe you had a lot of deductions.

And you just forgot.

And then in addition to that, you wanted to go get a firearm, but you had a problem.

You have a felony.

You can't have any felonious record, nor can you be a drug user.

And you lie about that.

You say you were not a drug user.

Okay.

And then you go in with your lawyer to a federal judge.

Remember, you have deliberately not paid well over, I don't know what they say.

They may say $4,000 or $500,000, but for us, it would have been 45%.

And then your gun, you just tell the judge, I don't know what happened to my gun.

Yeah, I'm a drug user, and I didn't tell federal authorities that.

And my gun ended up in a dumpster.

So, sorry about that.

An irregularly obtained

gun ends up in a dumpster, and you don't pay taxes for two consecutive years.

And your lawyer looks at the

mean SOB prosecutor that we're all terrified of, and he says, Hey, tell you what we'll do.

You'll just get probation

and no prison and

you pay a little bit of taxes.

And that's it.

And by the way, we're going to kind of have de facto

exemption for anything else we dig up in the course of these investigations.

So you get kind of what?

Future amnesty for things you don't even know what you're going to be.

Nobody's going to do that.

The judge said that herself, Nareka.

She said that Judge Nareka said that she'd never heard of this before.

And so this was Merrick Garland's federal prosecutor.

It was just a joke.

And then when you add layers onto it, at almost the same time as this hearing is taking place,

Hunter is,

we're told that his paintings are fetching $700,000 to $800,000 cumulative for a series of them.

And the buyers, which were supposed to be not known to Hunter, not known to Hunter, remember that?

Blind gallery, blind artist, blind buyer.

They have been appointed to kind of a prestigious commission, and they have been bundlers for Democratic politicians.

And so this is, and at the same time this is going on, Joe Biden's, I have never discussed business with my son, Hunter.

Remember that in the 2020 campaign and throughout subsequent questioning?

Now it's, according to Corinne Jean-Pierre, it is, Joe Biden has never engaged in business.

And we've said that a million times.

No, you haven't.

You've said that he's never even discussed it.

Well, after it came up in a

Senate inquiry, excuse me, a House inquiry where Representative Goldman was showboating and I'm going to get you guys, you whistleblowers.

And then when he said, isn't the fact that Hunter and Joe discussed the possibility of creating a new business proof that he wasn't engaged in an actual business and they just nailed him i mean what an idiot they just said well isn't it also proof that they were discussing business which he never said that they would ever do so the whole thing is a disaster and it shows the corruption of the biden doj

corruption of the whole legal system.

Anybody in there that had no money would have had the book thrown at them.

And the judge admitted that.

And it was pathetic.

The best thing about the whole thing was when the judge asked the federal prosecutor,

so

you're not going to, you're not going to give them, it looks like to me you are, but you're not going to give them future de facto immunity, exemption, amnesty, whatever we call it.

And they said, no, and then the hunters,

lawyers get, no, no, that's not right.

You know, deal off.

So they couldn't even get their story straight.

So, I hope he's a trial, and maybe he can get a,

I don't know, a DC jury that usually nullifies left-wing people when they come to court.

But,

what do you, you know, I was thinking about when you're talking, the prosecutor and the defense are kind of both on the same side because the prosecutor is the DOJ who's run by Garland,

and obviously, the defense is on

Hunter's side, so I I don't get this.

I mean, the judge was the only thing that stood between

us and this plea deal that would have gotten Hunter off of everything.

She must have been because the prosecutor and the defense are on the same side.

They're not.

Our system is supposed to be work like the following.

The prosecutor kind of overcharges.

So then the defense

has to

renegotiate with the prosecutor and give ground to get some of those counts dismissed or has to spend a lot of money in court.

Usually, federal prosecutors throw the book at you.

They charge you with 10 felonies.

And then it costs you $200,000 to get these ridiculous charges dropped, right?

And the prosecutors know that.

So then you come back and say, oh, shit, I don't know.

I can't afford that.

But can I have a deal cut with you?

Oh, you want to cut a deal?

Okay, we'll drop all these phony charges and charge you with one.

That's how they work.

Not this case.

Not this case.

Well, I was used to hear, my mom was a Superior Court judge of Fresno County and then a state appellate court.

And she never discussed individual cases, but she would discuss the theories with them.

And yes, she was a Democrat and all that.

But what really would set her on fire if some

very well-known person would come into court

and the prosecutor might have negotiated something that she felt

favored the person because of their class or prestige or position.

And it's very rare for a judge to interfere.

Very, very rare.

They're neutral.

But if it's so egregious that the government is in league

with the defense attorney because of the position of the defendant, then sometimes they do.

And they try not to do it for political reasons, although in the case of Michael Flynn, they did.

And so she would get very, very angry at that.

Yeah.

If a very prominent person had the charges negotiated with their defense attorney in a way that not per se on the idea, but if the charges were not symmetrical with other people.

In other words, the judges had a record or a book or they had a general guidelines.

And if some prosecutor came in there and all of a sudden, for the first time in their career, said, we're not going to follow federal guidelines, and here it is, or the discretion was so liberal or lenient, there had to be a reason.

And then the judge then steps in as they should.

So Judge Nareka did that.

And now we're back to square one.

But it's not, we should not hold our breath.

It's not that they're going to, the federal prosecutor, we're not to the point where the federal processor goes, oh my God, you're right, Justice.

I'm going to throw the book at that SOB.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

She says, now you go back and negotiate something else.

And so I don't, I think what she's saying is, I got to have some jail time for Mr.

Crackhead and Mr.

Tax Cheat and Mr.

Gun Idiot.

Who recorded his own crimes, by the way.

So we definitely know that.

I mean,

I've done a lot of dumb things in my life, like leave my car keys on a table at Stanford University when I was a graduate student and then wonder why my car was missing.

And I've done a lot of other stuff.

Like I think I've lost three wallets,

but this guy has lost a crack pipe in a rented car, lost two laptops,

and lost a gun in a dumpster near his school, or his wife threw it in, whatever.

But the point you're making is he lost, he

lost a laptop, at least had four felonies.

It has him using illegal drugs.

It has him bragging about felonious conduct.

And that's where we got Mr.

10% and the big guy off the laptop.

It has him engaged in illicit sex,

pay for pay,

I don't pay for screw sex.

And there's some suggestions that there may have been somebody underage as well.

So it's all there.

And yet it's there because he left it.

But then that's the whole Biden family.

I mean, Ashley Biden, his sister,

she leaves a diary in which she says that she, now that I think about it, I was a little bit too old to have showers with Joe, you know, but the whole family is creepy.

I mean, he bought, I don't know, 20, no, I don't know how many years ago he bought that huge DuPont mansion.

Where did he get that kind of money?

He was making $45,000 a year at the time of this center, and he buys a mansion.

I mean, the guy has always been shady,

he's always been mean-spirited.

He's a plagiarist,

he's a known liar.

And this old guy, I just cannot stand this transmogrification of Joe Biden into old Joe Biden from Scranton, the little guy's fighter.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

Racist, racist, racist he's been.

He's been a blowhard.

He's diminuted, whether it's the golden hairs on his leg the inner city kids used to like to touch when he was wearing cutoffs as a lifeguard.

That was the corn pop saga, or it was you ain't black, or you're a junkie or

you name it you know put you all back in change or Barack Obama can

is clean and articulate I mean

he's a mess yes

he's sure they did one thing that was brilliant what he announced in advance in the aftermath of the George Floyd hysteria that he was going to pick a black woman

and he looked around and there were not a lot of prominent black women on the national stage stage.

So, unless he wants to pick maybe

Maxine Waters.

Stacey Abrams.

Yes, Stacey Abrams, the virtual governor of Georgia.

And remember, all the left says, Donald Trump introduced the idea of election denial.

No, he didn't.

They've been doing it for years.

Stacey Abrams was introduced by left-wing prominent politicians as the real governor of Georgia, but he picked Camilla Harris.

That was his Spyro Agno out.

And now that explains so much of this whole saga.

What can you do?

Because the Democrats want to save their party from her and the country and the Republicans want to save the country from her.

So hand in glove,

they kind of agree that, you know, you've asked in the past,

why don't they impeach Joe Biden?

Yeah.

Well,

they know that the Senate wouldn't convict it other than the optics that, you know, they think he's,

you know, you don't impeach somebody who who is losing his party

popularity and support.

So he's digging, digging, digging deeper.

Maybe they don't want to intervene for that reason.

But just say that they did impeach him.

And let's just say that the Democrats caucused in the Senate and said, hmm,

this could be very good.

We get rid of Joe and the left wing said, we'll put Camilla in.

And

nobody wants that.

So everybody agrees that this guy, unless you're just partisan on the Republican side, and you think our country can withstand her for a while in case the Senate did convict

Joe.

And that's my, everybody said, Victor, don't be so stupid.

It's

51, 49.

They're never going to convict Joe.

You never know what's going to happen if they get an impeachment writ.

And in the meantime, we get stuff with Joe with a Ukrainian oligarch produces a tape where Joe and he are talking about bribery.

Would you want to run in your state after you said that you let Joe off when there was a recording that said that he was taking money from Ukrainian, guilty of treason and bribery?

No.

But would that to do so would give you Camilla Harris.

So as we've talked before, the strategy is to

damage Joe enough so that he does not run.

And Gavin comes in, young, dynamic Gavin who destroyed California.

And then you get rid of Camilla.

You say, I like Camilla, but she can't beat Gavin, apparently.

And that's what they're doing.

And the Republicans are kind of,

well, they lowered the bar on impeachment.

They made a mockery out for a phone call.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that was, you know, you got into my next topic

inadvertently.

Yes, because this whole idea,

McCarthy's kind of floating the idea of impeaching Joe, et cetera.

And the newspapers are getting at least the right wing's hopes up etc

but they don't seem to be the the right the gop does not seem to be able to get to get themselves together to impeach anybody when the left has impeached trump for a nothing and how do you

don't be hasty don't be hasty they're letting there's a lot of stuff coming out there's a lot

coming out i know wait a minute like like alejandro myorkas and the border uh merit garlands do j targeting conservatives christopher race

i think what they're trying to say is

that you're not going to convict anybody if you don't have the votes in the senate and they don't so then you

waste all that time on mallorcas

and

joe and then everybody says that

i would do it if I were them, especially for this reason.

They lowered the bar on impeachment so low.

Remember what they impeached Trump at the end of 2019?

They said the following.

You made a phone call to the President, Mr.

Zelensky, of Ukraine, in which you said the Bidens were crooked.

And therefore, I want you to look in to see if that's true.

because we have approved a lot of aid, including offensive weapons that the Obama administration did not approve.

And I'm going to delay that until I can be assured that the people around you are not operating in cahoots with American politicos.

That's what they impeached him for.

Notice that he did not cancel that offensive weaponry.

He delayed it.

Okay, keep that in mind.

Now we

transfer to Joe Biden.

Joe Biden

bragged

that

he went to Ukraine.

He didn't threaten to delay the billion dollars of aid.

And the billion dollars of aid did not even include offensive weapons.

He promised to cancel it outright.

So I'm going to leave.

Remember, he looked at his watch.

I'm going to leave in so many hours.

And if I'm gone and you don't fly for Victor Slokin.

So he's then he said he didn't, he wasn't like Trump, vague, just investigate corruption.

And Trump, nobody's saying to anybody in the Trump family, the Republican Party was involved in this.

Joe Biden went over there and said, you fire this prosecutor, who at the time was looking at barisma.

It had all kinds of people.

It had an aide, I think, of Mitt Romney on there.

It had John Kerry,

what's his name?

Kerry's stepson.

It had all kinds of people, but it had Hunter.

And they impeached him because they said, you went out to damage

the likely, likely, not the nominee, just a likely person running for president, Joe Biden, and you use your power of office for political purposes.

Now look what happened.

Were the Bidens corrupt?

Yes.

Did Donald Trump cancel the weaponry?

No.

Did Donald Trump enhance the package by, for the first time, giving Ukraine offensive weapons, which may have saved Kiev chaplains?

Yes.

Yes.

And was

Donald Trump assured at that time that Joe Biden was the leader of his life?

No, no.

Biden was flailing.

He was flailing.

You remember that?

He didn't even take off until the South Carolina primary of 2020.

Now

just oppose

Joe Biden.

He knows right now that Donald Trump is the leader, and yet he has got a federal prosecutor going after him, not just apparently for the documents, but January 6th, everything.

He is using the offices of the Department of Justice to go after his likely political opponent.

That was what we impeached Trump for.

Number two,

Joe Biden, as I said, was going to cancel these things.

Number three, he bragged about it.

It wasn't in a call that was classified that Mr.

Vinman, the now present arms arms dealer, leaked to the quote-unquote whistleblower, he bragged in front of a session of the Council on Foreign Relations and said, son of a bitch, they fired him.

It was all braggadachio.

It's so asymmetrical.

And they had lowered the bar so low, they know it.

And this whole thing about Trump, the subtext is this,

that whether it's Russian collusion or the laptop hoax or the impeachment farces,

they set precedents.

And the Republicans now are looking at this and they're saying, you mean you're going to object to us if we impeach him when there's far more evidence and there's far less political maneuvering than what you impeached a president for in the Constitution.

Remember what it says.

It says high crimes and misdemeanors, but it also delineates in exact language what prefaces that, bribery and treason.

No one ever said that Donald Trump was guilty of bribery with Ukraine.

Nobody ever said that he was guilty of treason.

Nobody even said it was a high crime or misdemeanor what he did.

They said the following, that

when you have a majority in the House, you can do whatever the blank you want.

Gerald Ford said that.

There was no legal precedent.

They had no special prosecutor.

They had nothing.

And yet.

Joe Biden, if this is true, and his son was working for a government-related energy company and getting bribes.

And by the way, when Joe Biden went out of office in 2017, in January, guess what happened to Hunter's burisma?

$83,000.

It was halved, cut in half.

And you're going to say, well, it wasn't completely ended.

Well, it wasn't completely ended because he was going to run for president.

So they wanted to ensure that they'd have some more leverage by giving him half, but for the next four years, he'd have no influence.

So Joe Biden was really selling out

the

independent position of the United States vis-a-vis Ukraine by having his son take money and channel it to himself.

That means his interests were not the United States foremost, which is treason.

And second, it's bribery.

And then we get into

nebulous territory.

And if you ask, because we could ditto this whole thing with a Chinese energy company that also apparently gave a lot of money to Joe Biden.

Remember, this is in relation and relevant to the phone call where Hunter said, I'm sitting right next to a man that you should know.

He's talking about his dad to a Chinese

person of interest that was enriching him.

So when you think of all this, it's

why is he

Why is he so soft on the origins of Wuhan?

Why is he so soft about this espionage balloon?

Why is he so soft about the complete saber-rattling of the Chinese about Taiwan and threats to destroy it and take it over?

Why, why, why, why, why?

And why is he so prompt Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine?

And, you know, I wrote an article this past week saying the Russian way of war that I said this is Verdun and this is the Somme and this is the Maginot fortifications, not that they could, and they were breached only by air power.

But my point is, it's a meat grinder, and yet we're pouring stuff in.

And so it really begs the question: does Joe Biden have some fear that these national entities could release things that were embarrassing, especially if an oligarch is not lying when he says he has of 17 phone calls, he has two where Joe Biden is on tape engaging in quid pro quo.

It's really interesting to see that.

It's scary, but

that's what they're leading up to bit by bit.

But you have to

understand that McCarthy and Comer, all those guys have a problem, and that is they're dealing with an administrative state that's left-wing and an FBI that's lost its integrity, and they won't give these documents.

They say they're, or if they do, they

excise them, they censor them.

They redact them, and it's very hard to get stuff out.

They're playing out the clock.

That's what they're doing.

And so I and I don't know what McCarthy's going to do.

I tend to defend him because I think he's been a lot better than everybody thinks he was going to be.

And he's trying to

press ahead.

But I think he's going to be under a lot of pressure from his House grassroots to impeach Joe Biden.

And that would be very good for the Democrats because they kept saying, oh, once you're impeached, that just ruins your reputation.

You're not going to be a credible candidate.

Okay, well, well, Joe Biden can run if he just chooses to be a candidate in 2024.

He can run as somebody who's been impeached.

See how he likes it.

Of course, what we're doing now, we're setting the precedent that anytime you lose your House majority in the first midterm, you're going to be impeached by the opposite party, something the federal

the Federalist Papers and the Founding Fathers were very worried about.

It's not a parliamentary system.

When you lose majority support, then you're out.

We have scheduled elections and there's a purpose for that.

You're not supposed to interrupt that cycle by partisan politics of impeaching the president when he loses his support in the House.

And that's what the Democrats

have started to do.

Yeah.

There's just so funny.

It's so weird about them.

They're like adolescents that whenever there's no consistent principle,

there's no,

this is the way the policy, this is the way the institution works.

It's whatever I want to do because I'm morally superior.

I can change it, then change it back.

And filibuster, no filibuster, yes, no.

Pack the court, don't pack the court.

Bring in extra states, no.

Blue wall good,

electoral college good.

Blue wall falls, electoral college bad.

It's just like a little kid.

Yeah.

Yeah, it sure is.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back.

And talking about little kids, maybe we'll talk a little bit about Kamala.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

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Welcome back, Victor.

So Kamala, you've brought her up as probably not even the Democrats' ideal candidate for the presidency or for the vice presidency, such such as she is.

But recently, she wanted to make a spectacle of Florida's new,

I guess, their

rules for the education system for the teaching of African Americans in history.

Now, if I could just speak for a second, as having taught in the California system for some time, that as far as African-American history goes, it has

been probably over the last 40 years that historians have looked at the institution of slavery and the period of time in which blacks were in slavery.

And they've said, okay, well, we don't want to just present them as patsies that were enslaved, but to look at their skills and the

slaves within the system that did things extraordinary, et cetera.

And there are, of course, a lot of things like that.

And so that has been the trend in history to bring out agency among blacks.

And here we get to 2023 and Florida is

expecting that, sure, let's teach about blacks with agency

even though they're under slavery

in our schools.

And yet here we have Kamala out yelling about the whole idea that somebody might suggest that blacks under slavery were capable, skilled, intelligent despite the slavery.

And I was wondering if you had any reflections on her complaints.

She's not read the Florida

relevant sections in their

text about slavery and race relations.

We know we have.

I mean, one of the authors has been very public about what he wrote.

He may have been naive about how a left-wing person could manipulate what he wrote, but that's not a crime.

What he basically said is what you just said, that in any oppressed group, you know,

and I mean, people go to prison, and it's a terrible experience.

Some of them, all of them, most all of them, they're guilty, unlike slaves, but they do get skills in the process.

Or when you get sick, there can be some

something that you pick up that can be of later value.

That's all he said, that under slavery,

there wasn't, in some cases, there were people who were trained to help the the slave master exclusively, but as a byproduct of that theft of their labor, they did develop a skill, but which upon emancipation was of some value.

The only problem I have with that, they have to calibrate to what degree that was an important

phenomenon that manifested itself in free or was an incidental.

See what I mean?

Yeah.

And so, but it's not

ipso facto wrong, but what, but the whole point of this is

that

she wanted to shed her reputation, that she's that she treats her staff like crap and they quit in droves, that nobody in the Biden hierarchy trusts any major decision with her, that she pointed her border czar when she's never even been to the, had never even been to the border.

The border is a disaster.

Then they talked about her as space czar, and that was that phony little interview she had with the kids.

It was all scripted with actors.

Everything she touches turns to dross because she's never really earned any of the accolades she's got.

And she passes herself off as a person of color who's been a victim her whole life when she's the daughter of two PhDs, a cancer researcher and a Stanford professor.

She's lived a life of middle-class privilege, and she's a construct.

And that's, and now she thinks, as

criticism mounts because she's afraid that to hear her speak is not to like her, or to hear her speak is to think she's a fool, or to hear her speak is to think she's nearly illiterate.

She has a vocabulary of about 500 words she keeps recirculating.

So this is a bad press.

She's considered mean behind the scenes.

The Bidens leak about her.

They don't entrust her with anything, even less than a usual vice president's responsibilities.

And her tenure is winding down, and there's an election up.

And usually, if you're a vice president of an incumbent

president,

you're going to have either one of two major roles: either he's going to run for re-election, in which you're going to be the running mate.

They very rarely drop the running mate.

Sometimes they do, but it's very controversial.

George H.W.

Bush kept Dan Quayle.

Remember that?

He did.

And there was talks about junking Biden, and Obama

stuck with

Biden.

So there's two things that happen in an election cycle.

Either the president decides not to run and the vice president is the leading contender, i.e.

Hubert Humphrey and

Lyndon Johnson, or

they are vice president and the ticket.

And she's afraid neither one is going to be true.

That if Biden stands down, she's not going to be the presumed nominee.

It's not going to happen.

They're going to look at Newsom or somebody else, not her.

And there's a 50-50 chance,

I would say 60-40 that Biden were not to run.

And if he were to run, it would be very interesting to see how he can get her off the ticket without being called a racist and sexist.

So

that's what she's,

that's the problem she's presented with.

So she's looking for a hot-button issue, something that appeals to the passion.

Remember during the George Floyd thing, she got up and bragged that she was bailing out Antifa and BLM criminals.

And then she bragged that, remember, she said, that was very strange on, I think it was on CNN.

She said,

these demonstrations are not going to stop, nor will, should they stop, and they will not stop.

They're going to keep going and going all the way to the election.

And everybody on the left goes,

Man, that's really incriminating because there's 120 days of riot and 35 people got killed and $2 billion of damage and

1,500 police officers injured she didn't mean that snopes and polyfad oh yeah well she was really talking about non-violent she never will use the word violent or kill and that was what they did and so she she's just unreliable and she wants she tries to inject herself from time to time into current controversies and that's what she's doing she has her little radar and aide comes up and says hey kamala

DeSantis is running for president and he's got this new overhaul of the curriculum that's anti-critical waste theory.

And we've looked through there, and there's a sentence here that says that some slaves picked up skills under their oppressed slavery that could be of value later on.

That's justifying slavery.

Let's go demagogue it, get down there.

And that's what they do.

And then she's supposed to appeal to a base.

So, what she's trying to do is when Joe Biden's people come to her and say, Camel, you did a wonderful job.

You were a path-breaking woman of color, first woman of color, vice president.

It was just outstanding what you did, but we can't reuse you.

And then she's supposed to say, I just riled up my base.

Do you want to offend a lot of black people?

Because I am their advocate now.

So, this is her third iteration that is fiery defender of minority interests.

And I think this script will go for a while and then she'll screw it up.

Well, then she, what you're saying is she'll bring the black vote along with her for any political candidate that she's with or for herself.

It's hardest to believe because she's only half black and she's not from the American Black experience.

Her father's from Jamaica and her father apparently is not particularly fond of her political career because he reminded her when she was demagoguing slavery on an earlier occasion that it wasn't too long ago that

the Harris family had slave owners on Jamaica in their past.

So she might have said, I'm especially attuned to the sensitivity about slavery because my great-great-grandfather held slaves, but we didn't hear that.

Maybe she then, when I'm looking at her, I'm thinking, well, they pigeonholed her as having to deal with black issues.

And maybe that was the tragedy for her.

Like maybe if she had not been pigeonholed into that and she could have taken on other things,

maybe her career might have been more successful.

No.

Okay, just checking.

She had no skills.

She always adopted a persona that she felt was valuable.

When she was very young, she was going nowhere.

And she met Willie Brown, who had a tendency to like young women.

And he was married and he

distanced himself for his wife, moved in with her.

And then Presto, she started appearing on all these state well-renumerated boards with no experience whatsoever.

Then, he

mayor of San Francisco, he engineered that she would run for city

county of San Francisco, then city attorney.

And she thought in that period, the Clintonian and the early 21st century, when it was kind of anti-woke, she decided she was going to be a black woman who was tough on crime.

So she started prosecuting cases against dope possession, marijuana possession, truancy of Kids in Hunter's Point.

So that was her reputation.

And then

Willie Brown, she broke up.

Then she flipped over to be radical California statewide black woman who was elected senator.

So

yes, but even if she doesn't really kind of fit the

or illustrate the problem well, it seems to me that for

black intellectuals that get caught up in the left agenda, they just get pigeonholed like that.

And I feel sorry for them.

I, you know, they, I don't know whether it was on Hannity or one of the others, that I think it was Jesse Waters, actually.

He interviewed, I think, two different Black historians from Florida who were part of the committee that wrote the curriculum for the,

and they, you know,

just said they had just acted like historians.

So they were just talking about the whole issue as historians.

And I look at that kind of skill and talent.

I think, wow.

And then if you get into the left party and the left wing and the left positions, they make you become this, you know, voice for.

if you're black for blacks and then to hold these really outrageous positions and do stupid things like kamala harris has to

that's the greatest argument against affirmative action because affirmative action is sort of an indentured type of subservience to the left.

Because what happens with white elite liberals, every time

somebody like a Justice Thomas or something says something they don't like, they say, oh, you were a beneficiary of affirmative action due to our courageous efforts to get something for you.

You owe me.

And then they get stereotyped and pigeonholed.

And as I said before, like a broken record, when I came to the Hoover Institution, I was empirical.

I had no reason to reach out or not reach out to black people.

But I quickly discovered that

the two

most incisive thinkers there were Tom Sowell and Shelby Steele.

And the idea they needed affirmative action would be a joke.

They excelled on their own merits.

And they were never pigeonholed.

I've heard a lot of people criticize from the left, Tom Sowell, but nobody ever said he got where he was because he was black.

No.

If you read the corpus of his work, it was on his intellect.

And he had this weird, strange ability to reduce a very complex

Gordian knot of ideas.

And he was like Alexander's sort.

He just cut it in two and then just say,

reduce it to

a simplistic answer that was brilliant.

And so my point is that That's one of the reasons that you should be happy.

We should all be happy that affirmative action is gone, because then

I think anybody can say, I got to where I am on my own merits, and I don't owe the left anything.

And I think you'll see a lot more independent thinking African Americans, and their reputations will be based on rise or fall and their own performance.

But your suggestion that when you see an African-American with an Ivy League degree, they have to labor with or fight with the stereotype that they were a beneficiary of affirmative action and that follows them and haunts them their whole career is true.

It is, for good or evil.

And I think the left white liberal elite like that.

And

they use that.

I can tell you that I've seen it in academia and I've seen it among very wealthy people that are white liberal, that they love

affirmative action, African Americans in fellow of the same social and economic class as themselves.

But believe me, if any of those African Americans show

conservative or traditional sympathies at odds with the majority of left-wing people

with which they circulate, they're in trouble because that same person will turn on them and then suggest that they owe either they owe them something or they didn't earn it.

So, yeah,

that's absolutely right

and even

i think she has two i think she has a sister that's a lawyer and because i've seen her on tv that's kind of strange and she has a

i don't know i think her sister is married to a guy that's a lawyer so yeah and well victor family was it

took advantage of affirmative action but and they're all very successful and they're lawyers and people

when they look at her and the sense of i I didn't know who Camilla Harris really was, and I live in California.

And then I heard her speak during her Senate campaign.

And I was shocked because somebody I really respect said that she had all the credentials to be a very successful new type of Democrat.

And what he meant by that was she's coming out of San Francisco with a record of a hard-nosed prosecutor.

Okay.

And Willie Brown at the time was suggesting that he was a renegade politician, not easily stereotyped among the Democrats, and worked with conservatives in the legislature when he was speaker.

And then she was, and then I heard her speak when she was running that Senate campaign, which she won.

And then

I heard her speak right before the convention about the riots.

And then I heard her speak the last three years.

And there's nothing in

nothing that she said

fits or

synchronizes where she is.

I mean,

she talked about artificial, this is artificial AI.

It stands for artificial intelligence,

something she needs.

Yeah, and then she talks about the space thing and the border.

It just like.

Yeah,

it very sounds very child.

Fifth grader could do that kind of thing.

It's very funny.

I think all of our listeners are thinking right now.

You guys are thinking,

yeah, Victor, it's kind of weird, isn't it, that when she screws up and reveals her inner

inane and how inane she is, she's protected because people think she's a woman of color in the same fashion that when Joe Biden can't finish a sentence, he's protected because we're not supposed to say anything about his dementia, because that would be cruel and elder abuse.

So, both of them, in contrasting ways, have these exemptions that protect them from an honest appraisal of their mediocrity.

One is acquired

through sonality.

I shouldn't say acquired.

He was always that way, but it's now manifest.

And she has constructed it because she keeps emphasizing it.

She's black and female.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and we'll talk a little bit about RFK.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

Welcome back.

Don't forget to

find all things Victor at his website.

It's victorhanson.com, V-I-C-T-O-R-H-A-N-S-O-N.com.

And it's called The Blade of Perseus.

So come join us and be a subscriber or come and get a free subscription and you'll get our newsletter that comes out about three or four times a week with the new things from the website.

Well, Victor

RFK, Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr.

was testifying before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Censorship, and it seemed that the Democratic panelists didn't want to let him talk about anything and they were accusing him of anti-Semitism and

anti-Asian rhetoric.

And I was wondering, what was that all about?

Number one, I don't know why they were cutting him off.

Like they didn't want to hear him on something, but that wasn't evident from the things I looked at.

So what was it all about?

And

what are your thoughts on it?

Well,

start with the idea that they had a hearing on censorship, right?

And then right in the middle of everything, they started censoring what he was going to say.

Debbie

Blabbermouth Schultz cut him completely off and wouldn't let him even reply.

And all he said, it was crazy, but

they tried to kick him out and not even let him in because when they heard he was going to testify and some of his positions were not doctrinaire left-wing, the left thought, uh-oh, he could be if he could siphon off votes for Joe Biden.

We've got to not disinvite him.

So they went through his entire record and he said some weird things.

And, you know,

that

what he said was that there were theories out there that the COVID virus had been

gain of function engineered with an intent to target particular

DNA genotypes.

And he said that

he had read, for example, that it had been engineered

to attack, I think, whites and blacks, blacks, but not Jews and Chinese.

And

that's what they got him on.

Oh, you believe?

He didn't say he believed it.

He said that there had been accusations

that the

Chinese, and there has been, I don't know particularly about race, but there was a lot of

talk and things have been written that in this lab at Wuhan,

the COVID-19 virus that escaped was a precursor to other types of SARS viruses that they were experimenting that were A, more lethal and more intricate in their engineering, among which they were exploring bioweapon applications, among which might have been the ability to craft a virus.

And we know some viruses can fall more heavily on others than some races than others, depending on either prior immunity or specific genotypes.

But my point is, is, he didn't say that I agree with this or I oppose or support it.

He just said that this was some of the things that were involved

about the COVID virus.

And the context, as I remember, was most of the people questioning it had been completely disingenuous and swearing to us for three years that this

virus was not associated with that lab, but that it was from a pangolin or a bat, which, no, as I said before, we all know that before the human, the first human was infected, there was no evidence that any bat or pangolin had this particular type of engineered virus.

And so he was talking about that when he mentioned, and to support that view, it had been engineered, he said there were theories that, and that's what That's what really got.

That's what they were accusing him of.

But why did they want to stop him from talking at this censorship?

All the stories are about them doing it and accusing him of anti-Semitism, etc.

But they weren't talking about, well, the Democrats were doing this because they wanted, they didn't want JFK to say, and I'm like, what?

To his RFK, sorry, RFK to say, and what, you know, what, what, what were they afraid he was going to do in their censorship?

It doesn't have anything to do with that.

It has one thing to do with it, that Joe Biden right now is running even with Ron DeSantis, and he's running a few points behind, really behind Donald Trump.

And he cannot win if he were to run again, if Cornell West were able to get to, I think,

in 200

even when Al Gore won, remember?

Yeah.

He lost,

I think it was 1.5%

to Ralph Nader, remember, in the third party?

And there were a lot of people who argued he lost Florida for that reason.

So my point is, in a very

state like

maybe North Carolina or Georgia or Michigan, if Cornell West were to run and take enough black votes away, and these states are won or lost now by 10 or 20,000 votes, you could lose the whole electoral count.

And then, when you add a much better known person than Cornell West,

you know,

the son of the iconic Bobby Kennedy and the nephew of the iconic JFK and Teddy Kennedy, and you put him out there, and people don't follow these news stories about vaccinations and autism and all this stuff.

They just know the name.

There's going to be a lot of people that like the Kennedys, especially when he says he's for reasonable border security, reasonable Second Amendment laws against censorship.

And

I don't know.

I doubt, I don't think his connection between

vaccines as the primary cause of autism is well-founded.

And it's probably scientific.

But when he's expressed doubt about these COVID vaccines, we're reading every single day that the number of

serious side effects has been deliberately suppressed by a magnitude 10 of hundreds, even.

It's much more widely

suspected than it ever has before.

So I think the scientific data is veering toward his point of view.

But the point is that so they got him on that.

They said he was a vaccine denier.

And then he said that

he

had some crazy theory that the virus was ethnically targeting different races disproportionately.

And then they said

he was making light of the

Holocaust, or he's using the Holocaust in an anti-Semitic way by suggesting that

when you create these mass vaccines and you subject the population to them and you're using biological interventions, it's something like the genocide of the Holocaust.

So you're trying to tell me that these

Democrats on this committee were trying to just subvert him as a possible candidate.

But I have a feeling that making spectacle of him like this is actually working to his advantage and not to theirs.

So I don't think they've achieved what they were trying to do.

If there was nothing that they didn't want him to say,

you know.

Well, when you listen to Representative Goldman, he's an idiot.

He's the billionaire heir to Levi Strauss, and he's embarrassing himself.

Like I said earlier, he was the one that pretty much proved to the nation that Joe Biden was, contrary to his denials, speaking about his business with Hunter.

He just forced the person to admit that, and that was boomeranged right.

And then we had that African-American woman who was testifying and she was reading from a script.

And they had a person right behind her who had memorized what she was supposed to say.

And she was so worried that this representative, Congresswoman, could not read the script that she was mouthing it almost loudly, whispering to her as another additional prompt.

And then she made a mistake and she went and whispered in her ear.

She had to get up and go whisper in her ear.

This is what the script says.

You know how to read?

Not represented, but misrepresented.

Yes.

And then when you listen to Debbie Wasserman Schultz and listen to her talk, it's just

banality.

And so

when you have all these people that are attacking this iconic name, and he's, you know, he's got dysphonia.

He can't speak normally because of an auto, I guess it's an autoimmune, but it almost adds kind of a mystique to him because he doesn't sound

swarmy like Teddy Kennedy.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

And

he.

he looks kind of beleaguered and sounds beleaguered.

And you put all that calculus together and what they did, yeah, you're right.

They backfired.

And they'll continue to backfire.

And, you know, they can say that what they're worried about is a debate because Joe won't debate.

And if he's so crazy and he believes in all these weird conspiracies and he's not in touch with reality and they put him on the stage with good old Joe, who I, you know, we have all these

corrupt media figures say, oh, he's muscular.

He's in better health.

You try that when you're 80.

Yeah, okay.

We'll put him on the stage with RFK.

And then supposedly Joe, who's sober and judicious, will tear him apart.

No, that's not going to happen.

This guy can bench press his own weight.

And he's going to go on there.

He's vigorous and people like him.

And he's going to tear Joe Biden apart.

And that is an explosive thing to happen.

And they'll never let it happen.

They want to abort his candidacy by bringing him in.

They didn't call him in.

The Republicans called him in.

Yeah.

because they wanted to hear what he said about censorship.

And he was basically saying that Twitter and the old Twitter and Facebook were McCarthy-like in demonizing, deplatforming, canceled culture,

shadow, whatever you call it, and shadow banning and all these terms we use for ostracism.

So that's why he was there.

And then he kind of made a quip that, wow, I'm being censored at a hearing on censorship.

Great.

Well, you know, ancillary to that story is that there was a Pew poll that asked U.S.

adults if they wanted the government to protect against, quote, false information online.

And I was really surprised about the results.

In 2018, it was 39%,

but in 2023,

it is 55%.

I find that shocking.

I'm shocked that 55%, because they're not just polling Democrats, they're polling everybody.

I know, but you've got K through

senior year in college for the last 20 years where you've had K through 12 people indoctrinating students all day long, and they created new terms like hate speech and disinformation and misinformation.

And when they go to college, that's all they hear.

that these racists, these white privileged, these white supremacists, they hate people.

All they do are peddlers of hate.

And then they, you know, they hear that.

And there are conspiracy theories.

And the last six years, it's these fat-bellied deplorables out there in East Palestine are screaming and yelling, and we've got to stop them.

Remember that woman?

I think her name was Byers.

She was a Silicon Valley mid-level company CEO, I think Ben Breckford or something, right after the Trump election.

She just pretty much spelled it out.

She said, these people are horrible.

They live in shit,

excuse the language, towns.

They don't have any culture.

They're not like us.

And that's the attitude that they have.

They really do.

They really do.

So they feel that they are so morally.

And that's what they've told these students.

And they hear it.

So the liberal thing to be now, if you're a Stanford student and you're 20 years old, you're coming to that campus at 18 with 12 years of that indoctrination.

You get there, and that's all you're going to hear.

You're not going to hear about the McCarthy period, only in a very partisan context if you are.

You're not going to hear about the free speech fights.

You're not going to hear about the old ACLU.

You're going to hear, or

you're not going to hear about William O.

Douglas and all the other, the older Brennan and, you know, Earl Warren and all the old lions of the liberal free speech, you're not going to hear that.

You're going to hear that there's a lot of people who peddle hatred and they use the internet and social media as disinformation.

We've got to ban them because we're liberals.

And that's, so I was surprised it was that

close.

I thought about 70% would want censorship.

You know, another statistic, though, is so 55% in 2023 said that it would be great if the government would,

I guess, censor, but

stop

false information online.

But then that was only 55%.

65% said they'd be happy if the tech companies would do it themselves.

Now, that's, to me, isn't an additional shocker.

Like, you got to be kidding.

They are.

I know.

De facto, they're doing it, but to say you want them to do it just seems weird.

Well, it's nobody got upset.

One of the things that they got angry was about Elon Musk.

Why do they hate Elon Musk?

Because he opened up the Twitter books and he got guys like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi to say what?

That the FBI

had a number of people in Twitter on their payroll whose job was to get lists from the FBI of disinformation, misinformation and ban that.

And chief among those topics was Hunter's laptop right before the debate and the election.

And then we find out that it was sort of like the general dynamics, Lockheed, Northrop, Raytheon to the Pentagon.

In other words, when you rotate out of the FBI, I think there were 11 high-ranking FBI people that went right into Twitter, maybe some to Facebook.

Among them, James Baker, the general counsel of the FBI, I think he went from about $200,000 a year to $8 million in compensation.

So it was really incestuously corrupt.

And they both had one thing in common.

They wanted to ban any information,

not on the grounds that it was libelous or conspiratorial or not factual, but if it aided Donald Trump and they wanted to suppress it.

And they did.

And so when Donald Trump was saying that the, that's what's so ironic about when he says that the election was rigged,

if he would just say the ballot

on the day of the election took place was probably accurate.

However, the long march to that election day was rigged because they changed the voting laws in key states under the guise of COVID.

Mark Zuckerberg infused $419

million

to absorb the work of registrars in key precincts.

Yeah, and the information that the voter had was manipulated and warped by the FBI and Twitter and Facebook.

That's for sure.

And so that is a form of rigging.

That was more or less what Molly's Hemingway's book, Rigged, was about.

It wasn't that the Dominion voting machines on Election Day or the actual ballot count was completely inaccurate.

It was the process we got there.

That's what was tragic about Donald Trump.

If he had saved all of that rage on Election Day and spent it in March and April and just blew his top when he heard about all this and said, you know what?

We've got to spend millions of dollars to stop stop this and we're going to sue.

I don't know if he could have, but that would have been a little bit more preemptive than reactive.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, Victor, we're at the end of our conversation today.

Thank you very much.

And I'd like to thank also our mothership, John Solomon's Just the News.

And thanks to all of our listeners as well.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

We'll see you next time.

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