Landmines and Reckonings

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

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

He is a political and cultural critic and he has a

his most recent book is The Dying Citizen and that is on the crisis in citizenship in the current now, right, in the present.

And he has a new book that he's doing, The End of Everything, and that should be out.

Is it going to be out in the fall or spring, Victor?

The due date is the delivery of the manuscript has to be June 15th, which I would have been six months earlier had it not been this long COVID.

So what I'm trying to do right now is I'm trying to catch up and make up all the canceled.

lectures, appointments that I did.

I had to cancel for at least the first two months.

And then then I got, you know, I'm doing the four podcasts and the two syndicated columns.

And I'm the writer in residence this year for new criterion

journal as I was last year.

So I'm working on six, five, thirty thousand words for them.

Kind of, you know, very busy.

And then we have the new ultra.

So on our website, victorhanson.com, if you pay the paywall fee of $5, I try to provide

about

2,500

new words every week so that the people, and I don't ever recycle their column that's all unique and it's on agriculture, farming, California, the world, everything.

And those are for people who are subscribers.

And I do spend most of my, I mean, I spend a lot of time on that.

So that, and I don't think in the, have we done, i don't know if you i don't know if it's been a year or not if you've done that a year but i do know that i haven't missed one um deadline in the sense that everybody who subscribed did get the three columns each week

exclusively yes absolutely and you can subscribe at the blade of perseus which is found at the url victorhanson.com and it's five dollars a month or $50 for a year subscription.

And you can also just subscribe for free to get our newsletter so you know what is being written at the website.

And there's lots of free stuff for you.

So, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and we'll come back to talk about some of the bombshells for the Biden administration that may or may not happen, but some of them seem to be forming.

But we'll be right back to talk about those.

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Welcome back.

We're glad everybody made it back.

And Victor, I just wanted to ask you one thing on your new book.

You said that you're getting it to the publisher by June.

Do you expect a publication date and the the book to be available in the fall of 2023 or the spring of 2024?

Yeah, I think all of our listeners are curious about that.

So we go into the computer age, right?

And when you get a Microsoft program and you turn in a manuscript, it's kind of pre-publication quality, right?

And in the old days, you did this, you typed it out.

You know, you typed it out.

And I even use, as I said earlier, scissors and paste to cut.

And then you Xerox that page if you can make it neater.

Then you send it in, and then they sent it back with what they called general editing, step one.

And general editing was, you know, take out this paragraph.

Oh, I don't like that argument, whatever.

And then you sent that back, and you had to type the whole thing over.

And then they sent it back with what they call line editing, and that's grammatical syntax, except for vocabulary, right?

And then you sent, and that sometimes, depending on the publisher, would allow you just to, you know, okay that the red marks is all red.

And then they sent something they called galleys, and that was the first form of typesetting it.

And then you looked it over, and then

they made your corrections and they sent something called page proofs.

And that was how the actual book would look.

And then you did that.

So when you got into Microsoft, you kind of jumped right into it because

with these grammar and spelling checks, you kind of, I mean, there's still line editing, but you, you just,

there's no misspelled words, really, unless you have homonyms, and that can happen, you know, there, T-H-E-I-R, T-H-E-R-E,

stuff like that.

But it just cut that back.

And then there, the formatting was there.

But what I'm getting at is it's no sooner.

It's still roughly about a year.

So if I send this in June 1st,

the whole editing, and that's during the summer, and New Yorkers, no offense to you, New Yorkers out there, but they're notorious for their August vacation where they just split for 30 days,

unlike us hardworking Californians.

And anyway, then

That process begins.

And I would say I had a four-book contract with BASIC.

And I mean, I had a whole chapter on intelligence that was cut out in the world and Second World Wars.

I wish I had fought that and included it, but I was way over the

prescribed length.

I think the link called for $150,000, and I was up to over $220,000.

That was a big book.

And so then you hash that stuff out.

So I think, and you only publish in the spring and the fall, like May and October, those are the two seasons to

issuances a year.

So

I don't think that process by any, they have to be sure you're going to turn it in so they can put it a year in advance.

So it would be listed, I think,

in the spring 2024.

Yes.

Okay.

Well, Victor, we've had lots of

news on the oversight, the House Oversight Committee and its investigation going on.

And I just read a great article by Miranda Devine this morning in the New York Post summarizing all that is known about Hunter's Ukrainian deals with Burisma in particular.

And I was wondering if you, what were your thoughts as this case goes on and as

our new House with its Republican majority starts to investigate?

Well, you know, yeah, they're asking, and I think they were given the middle finger today by Hunter Biden and his, I don't know how he affords his lawyers, thousand dollars an hour lawyers, because they requested a lot of

income and IRS records and billing and stuff.

And I think what they're doing is,

and everybody who's ever dealt with the IRS knows that while they can be very prickly about deductions, right?

So if you have an office like I do at work, and like most people that are listening, if you're an indoor worker, you don't write your, I have our office here at home, but I don't write that off.

I don't write the electricity or anything off, even though I am here a lot.

So, but that's something you hash out with the IRS if you want to risk it.

I try to not take any deductions because I feel like conservative people are targeted.

Or cars, you know, you can say, well, I...

If I drive over once a week to Stanford, I can't write that off.

It's a business expense.

That's just a commute to work.

But if you were to do stuff like that, then you would

get in a back and forth ERS.

That's one thing.

But if you don't report income

and that's sizable income, that's a whole different question because that's not negotiable, right?

I mean, you either get income or you don't.

And that's what I think they're going after, Hunter, because

they are looking at the laptop and they're seeing not just felonious behavior,

but they're looking at expenses.

And when he says things nonchalantly or incidentally, like I'm paying all of Joe's expenses, right, at his house, that's a gift.

That's income.

And he had to pay gift tax on that.

Or if he didn't pay income, anytime the money is exchanged in America, the IRS wants a chunk of it.

So either he pays gift tax or if he rerouted it directly

without him, when he says, I'm paying for it, either Burisma, to take an example, paid him.

He paid income tax on that money, and then he gave it to Joe in the form of, you know, $4,000 or $5,000 for his electric bill, gas, all that.

But he had to pay gift tax on that.

If he didn't do it that way and he had Burisma pay Joe directly, Joe had to pay income tax.

And a lot of people are looking at his three monumental homes and they're looking at his lifetime in politics.

And except for that hiatus

between leaving office in January of 2017,

right, and then running for a candidate, I mean, basically he was running in 2018.

He only had two years of his life that he really wasn't working for government or in the process of running for office.

So how did he afford all that stuff?

It just boggles the mind.

So if they can get those records, I think that's, we're going to talk about bombshells.

That's a bombshell.

If they can't, and I'm not going to get into the left, walls are closing in, bombshells, because they always said they got Trump.

But this is a little bit different.

It's different in the sense that the left controls the government now.

So they're going to be much easier on Biden than they are on Trump.

But this is about money that came from foreign sources.

that hasn't been reported.

And that's what

they're after.

And that's what the lawyers are there for.

The Biden family basically has hired these guys and they're going to withhold documents.

And it's very, and see, this enters into another question that we've all struggled with.

And we'll talk about it maybe at the end of the broadcast, this tit for tat.

So

when

the House Ways and Means Committee, they requested from the Treasury Department Trump's tax records, and they thought they were going to get Roadrunner, but they didn't.

I mean, they got it.

And so they set a precedent is what I'm getting at.

They set a precedent that the House committee can do that.

So then the Republicans take over and they said, well, we don't like going after people's tax records, especially a president of the United States.

But since you did it with Donald Trump, and

he handed it over

under appeal and through court protestations and didn't show anything other than Trump is a lousy businessman, apparently, or at least he was during his presidency when he couldn't operate the companies.

He lost millions of dollars.

But now they don't know what to do.

Oh, this is fair.

We can't do that.

You can't look at the tech.

Well, yeah, you can.

You set the precedent.

Just like

they said, oh, my gosh.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, she yelled liar.

They've destroyed the decorum of the house, these yokels, this white trash.

Yes, but the person who destroyed the

protocols of the House was Miss Bay Area sophisticate Nancy Pelosi when she tore up a federal document on national TV, the State of the Union, which

he's obligated to hand over to the Speaker formally for her to record it.

And she tore it up.

And at that moment, there were no rules left anymore.

Yet the Speaker can do that.

Anybody can do it.

So we're going to get into a very interesting cycle now where

the House Republicans are going to say you know what we have a blank check because they destroyed all the protocols and road bumps yeah you know and so we're and you've already seen it with getting ileana omar off the foreign affairs committee getting uh swallow swallow and shift off the intelligence committee and then they get angry and scream like adolescent this is not fair We are supposed to be able to do it to you because we're morally superior and we're for the underdog, but you can't do it to us.

what you're supposed to be like mitt romney and play by the marquis of queensbury rules we love john mccain you're supposed to be like john mccain right george hw he was a gentleman now of course they trash those people when they're running against them or their president but when they're that's how they they operate yeah

it sure is and what are your thoughts on the classified information and that's another bombshell so that's a land i guess a long land i don't like to use bombshell because they used it to death.

The left did.

That was a landmine.

That's sitting there, the income.

And on any given day, if the Treasury Department or Hunter is forced to give up those tax returns, it's going to be a landmine.

It's going to blow up because I know those guys did not report all that income because it was illegally obtained.

It was illegally obtained.

So then the next landmine is the one you just brought up, and that's the the classified documents.

We've alluded to that before,

but if you think about that, we've had the house, the library in another room, the garage, the pen,

Washington office.

And now there's a whole trove in the University of

Delaware repository of his papers.

And if they go into a fishing expedition for that,

and he brought them out as a senator, now you can say, well, he was vice president and Obama declassified him or something like that, but he was a senator.

And if they start bringing stuff out like, you know, that he had classified documents, and if any of those classified documents,

either when he brought them out as a senator or he brought them out as a vice president, if any of that information is connected with any of Hunter's businesses or his brother's business.

Now, what would I mean by?

I'm just not throwing stuff out.

Let's say that there's a classified document that comes out that analyzes the leadership of the Ukrainian government, okay, or talks about the relationship between certain Chinese oligarchs and the Central Communist Party, i.e., CIA-level type briefing, right?

Yeah.

And they use a national security assessment that was used for the interest of the United States government to get an angle.

And you already see a little inkling of it when Hunter,

who is almost a semi-literate,

has this email where he's trying to impress a corporation that they should hire him on a retainer fee because he's got this sophisticated analysis of the effect of sanctions on the Russian oligarchs and how that will affect oil and trade and commerce, Ukraine, Russia.

He's incapable of that.

So that information ostensibly came from somewhere.

And if that's shown, if there was, I said, DNA or fingerprints on a document or

a phraseology, a word search, that he was using classified documents, which is illegal, but if he was trumping that by using them illegally for personal profit, then I think that's going to be bad too.

That's a landmine that could blow up any time.

And that's why you can see that Hunter is just

frantically stopping any request about the Biden tax liabilities.

He doesn't want them to do what they did to Trump.

And then, secondly,

they're fighting every tooth and nail about.

And then Joe Biden the other day said, Well, they're just after my family.

They're just after my family.

You mean like they went after

Don Jr.

or Eric?

I mean, and this gets into that other topic I said, that dovetails, that they can't stand the tit-for-tat, the symmetry.

They have to be

symmetrical.

So the Trump two boys have to be evil, and Hunter has to be an unrecognized genius, or in the words of Joe Biden, the smartest man I've ever met.

Of course, you and I have talked about it before that when you read the emails, at least the ones that have been public, and they're on a PDF, you can read most of them, it's very clear that Hunter Biden has a lot of

What's the word, angst about his father or bitterness, that he's the dirty guy, he's the guy that is the bad man, he's the guy that has the legal exposure.

While Joe and his younger wife, aviator Joe, gets in the vet, drives around, and lives a lifestyle that Hunter gave him.

And I suppose Joe says, Well, listen, Hunter, I'm the vice president.

You created on my name, not yours.

Then Hunter says to dad, Yeah, Dad, but nobody was willing to get into the sewer like I was.

Yeah, and yeah, so so willing to do that.

So I think, so I, so when this all comes out, I guess what I'm saying is Hunter

plays the role to Joe Biden that Michael Cohen did to Donald Trump.

You know, the loyal person, but was full of bitterness and anger and then flipped.

Yeah.

And that could happen because Hunter is capable.

And that's why Joe Biden says things that are just patently absurd, that Hunter is the smartest man he ever met and stuff like that.

He knows he's one of the dumber people he's ever met.

Yeah.

And did you,

this is a small digression, but the very fact that he has classified information for years and years and years, and even some of it that he took out as a senator,

is that normal for the archivists?

I mean, it seems weird that they don't have, if it's classified, they should have some review, you know, of who's.

I think it's very hard for 100 senators, so they don't know what's what.

So when Sandy Berger did it, they found out about that because it was topical.

In other words, there was a documentary being made that made the Bidens look, I mean, the Clintons look very bad

pre-9-11 that they had allowed an appeasement.

So he went in there and searched the archives.

and then stole some stuff and brought it out and stuffed it in his pants.

But the only reason that they knew that is because he had gone in there and actually requested to look at a particular document.

He didn't take it out earlier.

So what I'm getting at, I don't think they have any idea.

They don't have a central registry that maybe they do now, but every time any document among 435 congressional representatives and 100 senators and the White House staff is stamped, classified, if that goes into a computer, I don't know.

And you know how the bureaucracy is,

they go after, you know, parents at school board meetings, but they can't do what they're supposed to do.

They should have a computerized inventory.

So

when an administration or a person leaves office, they send them an email and say, these following documents were classified in our records, and we haven't seen them yet.

We need these back.

Apparently, they don't do that.

So I don't think anybody knows.

that they were there.

And so why were they there?

Why did they find these things out?

And that's the $64,000 question.

They keep saying that they reported them and they complied.

And we all know that's not true.

I was listening to

Ro Kahana or whatever his name is, the congressman on the radio, and he was giving a pontification about, well, Joe, I don't know what they, you know, we're all very concerned about the, we all have to follow the classified rules of.

of discretion and but uh it's very clear that joe biden has willingly um brought this to the attention and he's complied no No, he didn't.

He didn't do that.

He only did that because he was afraid that after he sicked Merrick Garland on Donald Trump, when Trump was arguing, and that was transparent, Trump just said, I'm not going to, I declassify them.

They're mine.

And they said, no, they're not.

And they argued.

And then Merrick Garland called up.

Joe Biden and said, hey, before the midterms, we can send the FBI out there on a performance art SWAT-like rate.

It'll be great.

And Joe said, yeah, absolutely.

And then maybe an aide said, Hey, Joe, be careful because that's how they impeached Donald Trump because they said he went after you

in that phone call and said that you were crooked and he was using his office to diminish a potential presidential rival.

And he's going to run for president and you're raiding his home.

And Joe said, That doesn't matter.

He's got the documents.

So they did it.

And then somebody came in and said, Oh my God.

Oh, my God.

Joe Biden might have a bunch.

Hey, go check on those.

And then probably an aide said, yeah, Joe's sloppy.

And they went in there and they probably don't want to tell us who took the documents out.

Somebody did.

Yeah.

I don't know if Joe did, but it was somebody.

So then when they found them,

they weren't transparent.

They didn't call up the archive.

Hey, it's November 2nd, and we're going to have a midterm election in five days.

And we just want to inform you that the President of the United States, unlawfully in his possession has classified documents and he did it as a vice president and they were that was illegal so we want to tell you they didn't do that

they kept it silent so i get so tired of that self-righteousness he didn't buy any he's not complying now he's they're going to find more stuff it just depending on how it's like pulling teeth wisdom teeth out of him.

It'll be very hard.

And then if they ever get into the Delaware repository, they'll find even more stuff.

And there's more stuff scattered around.

And

we know one thing about the Biden family, whether it's the daughter Ashley's diary or Hunter's three lost laptops or Joe Biden's papers, they just, they don't take anything seriously.

They just throw stuff around and then they give their little aviator Joe tough guy corn-popped lectures.

That's true.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk talk about a little bit more about the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

I know that we talked about it for yesterday's podcast, but I wanted to talk a little bit more about it as an act of war.

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

Welcome back.

Victor, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline,

there's lots of information out there and it's so much information and some of it seems so credible as we were talking yesterday.

But I thought maybe you could clarify more on the idea of it as an act of war or the meaning of that to the Biden administration.

Well, you're bringing up landmines today.

You're bringing up the IRS, which is a landmine, we said earlier.

And if Hunter had used classified materials in his father's possession for profit with his very, very, that's a landmine, and this is a big landmine.

And in other words, there is this accusation that we discussed at length earlier that the United States,

through its military, blew up a

Russian-owned pipeline, three of four pipelines.

And there's so many dimensions to this.

But first of all, we should establish that nobody wants to talk about this.

Seymour Hirsch was a hero to the left.

He's 85 years old.

When he broke the story about Abu Ghraib, they went gaga, the left did.

It was not well as sourced as this one.

This has detail of meetings and everything,

but they thought he was a saint.

Oh my gosh, that shows you that George W.

Bush is Hitler and they're torturing poor little kids in Iraq.

And we got to get out.

It did a lot of damage.

If whatever your views are are in the Iraq war, it really hurt the Bush administration.

And they got Gagaga when he talked about Guantanamo and water torture and waterboarding and all this stuff.

And the same thing with My Lai.

And now you think this is a bigger story than any of them, much bigger.

And you ask, what are the ramifications?

If it's true,

at a time of peace between Russia and the United States, I don't know if there's a proxy war, the United States military attacked in international waters a Russian asset and blew it up,

number one, which is an act of war.

And number two,

they lied about it.

It wasn't just they, it was the president of the United States.

And

I don't understand that because

they not only blew it up

and they lied about it, but they didn't just lie about it.

What's the word?

They pre-lied about it and post-lied about it.

Before they blew it up, Joe Biden said if he goes into Ukraine, he won't have the pipeline.

Victoria Newland said, one way or the other, if they go in, they will not have the pipeline.

After they blew it up, Victoria Newland said to Senator Cruz, we're very happy that it was blown up.

And when Tucker Carlson mentioned all that, they said he was a conspiracy theorist, and nobody but Tucker would believe that the United States was capable of that.

So that's the first issue that the United States, if this is true, and we don't know if it is or not, but it's very mysterious why the media doesn't.

You know what I mean?

Why don't they investigate it?

It's nowhere in the news after that initial story.

But if they blew it up, I think they're kind of scared because we essentially did a Pearl Harbor on Russia.

That's the first thing.

And the second thing,

this is a little bit conspiratorial.

I don't buy into it.

But a lot of people have argued that because any covert operation requires

that a gang of eight representatives from the Senate and the House be briefed and they have to sign on on it.

That's so the president doesn't use these covert things for his own particular advantage.

It has to be in the national interest as adjudicated by Congress.

But

that's not true if it's not covert.

So when Joe Biden stupidly announced that

they weren't going to have the pipeline, and

Victoria Newland, who's supposed to be sober judicious rather than non-composment,

said the same thing, you get the impression they were trying to put it out in the public space, right?

So then they could say it wasn't covert.

And if it wasn't covert, we don't have to tell you and get your permission because we didn't get your permission.

And if that's true, that's a second dimension to the story: that they deliberately warp U.S.

law, which is kind of in a racketeering conspiratorial fashion, so they could violate it by you're back to Iran-Contra territory.

That's another thing, you know, supplying the Contras without the knowledge of

the Congress.

Yes, and, you know, they went after cabinet-level officials in that.

And then the third, as we said, if you think about it, Germany's, it's cold right now, and people are in warm rooms.

I mean, in apartment buildings in Germany, they're all huddled together because they have no natural gas.

And it affected all of Europe.

Britain's natural gas is unaffordable because what Russia was doing, they were flooding Germany with these

natural gas deliveries and more than Germany could use, and they were selling at a great profit to France and Britain and Italy.

And so if that were true,

we injured an ally, a NATO ally,

and maybe with the help of the Norwegians and the Dane, which is going to be problematic.

And then

for

it's not our property, and we're in a time of peace, so we just essentially blew something up

we blew it up and

you know it's an ally and yeah and it was it was 50 60 70 million dollars of damage yeah

you know if you go over and you throw a firebomb at a well i i was going to say if you burn down a federal courthouse you're going to be in prison the rest of your life but apparently not after

may and june of 2020.

but so there's a lot of ramifications and that is a big landmine.

And I don't know what's going to happen with that story.

Either

Seymour Hirsch is going to be written off as an 85-year-old octogenarian.

Whack.

Yeah, wreck, senile, demented, unhinged, or that's going to be the biggest story of the last 10 years.

And that'll bring down the Biden administration if it was true.

I don't think anybody, any American, if you say to the Americans, we had to blow up the Russia, nuclear Russia's pipeline during the war

to ensure that Germany, our ally, doesn't buy more oil from Russia and help Europe get through the winter with it.

No.

And then we had to, we couldn't tell anybody, so we announced it kind of in advance.

And

that's a landmine.

And there's a peripheral story about...

a pattern here because the same thing is true with the balloon.

I was listening today about

this congressman, Roe Conna, and he was making the argument that as soon as

the Biden administration adjudicated that they were following it, and then as it went across, they took it down, which is proper.

And he was asked by the Fox reporter, but they let it go all the way through.

And they knew about it, and they didn't tell anybody.

He said, well, we're going to have a policy.

That was the right thing to do.

They were advised about debris.

And so he said, is that the policy?

He said, no, no, no, no.

It's not a political.

It's bipartisan.

We're going to have a new policy that the moment it gets into Alaskan or Pacific waters, we're going to take it out.

And then the logical question was, so then it was wrong to let it go through.

Do you have to have a policy to shoot down a balloon that's from China?

Come on.

You see the contradiction?

So they don't want to spin it.

And they've lied so much about it.

Weather balloon, no.

Obsolete

surveillance system that is much more inferior to a satellite.

No, it's much slower and more accurate in many ways if you're stupid enough to let it go.

We reported it.

No, you didn't.

You would have never told us if this guy in Montana hadn't seen it and took pictures and told everybody.

For the debris, we were worried about the debris.

No, Montana's got five or six people per square mile.

The Aleutians have one.

So you could have done it anytime.

So what was the real reason that Blinken was going to China and they have been appeased by China?

And even Biden said, was asked if this affects China.

Remember?

No, this doesn't affect.

No, no, there's no problem.

There's no problem.

So Blinken was really angry that he was forced by public opinion to cancel because he couldn't go over there.

But he wanted to keep it quiet and then then go over there and just kind of say, Oh, by the way, you guys sent a balloon all the way across the United States and no big deal, don't worry, we're still friends.

But he couldn't do that anymore.

He had to not only

disclose the fact, not only take it out,

but cancel his trip.

And all of those were not done by their own volition, it was done because it got caught.

So I think all of our left-wing friends, if there's any listening, should keep all of these in mind: the laptop, the blowing up of

this pipeline hunter biden and joe biden's use of classified materials and this phony balloon story that's so we have four landmines any one of those if you had a a a truly investigative journalism uh sector in this country would

go to town

yeah i suppose but maybe some of your listeners feel like i do we i we sit here and talk about these things that are breaches of the law by the president.

And yet

something in the back of my head keeps saying, oh, he'll get away with it.

They're not going to do anything.

And I hope you're right.

And this new Republican House shows that there's a different path.

But I'm a little skeptical, I guess I'm trying to say.

Okay, I agree.

I mean, I watched some of the

I watched some of the House hearings today for just a bit, and they were interrogating the Twitter people.

And now they've got the F, another committee's got FBI people coming in and basically saying they've destroyed the FBI.

I work for it.

It's weaponized.

They have no hiring standards.

It's woke.

And

one of the congressmen from California, from Virginia, left-wing guy, said,

Well, I want to, and somebody mentioned Lois.

I want to correct you that Lois, the IG, that's the nonpartisan inspector general,

IG, of the Department of the Treasury.

He was wrong.

Lois didn't do anything wrong.

She was spying on, or she was denying other

nonprofits.

Yeah, she was, but it was an asymmetrical ratio, you idiot.

It was predominantly Republican-conservative groups that were targeted before the 2012 re-election bid.

And that's why she resigned.

And that's why she staged that little phony thing where she asked somebody to ask her a question so she could inadvertently disclose something and not get caught at it.

And that's as if she did it voluntarily.

But my point is.

Then the guy went on to discreet about how wonderful the FBI was and how the insurrectionists on January 6th and all that stuff.

And that shows you how weird the left has become.

I mean, they just worship the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon, all of these groups.

And it's the conservatives that are supportive of them, but they're supportive of these groups in the sense that they're supposed to be what they should be.

They're supposed to go to their original mission and that a bunch of left-wing people have hijacked these agencies, which the left likes.

Yeah.

It's almost like a coup.

It really is.

It's like there's

swamp coup that just decapitated the old FBI, CIA, DOJ,

and Pentagon and

DOD and runs it now.

And the left is just ecstatic about it because it gives them, you know,

Ashley's missing her diary.

Go get it, FBI.

Hunter got another laptop.

Go get it.

Sure.

Okay.

Joe's got a problem.

He didn't,

he didn't, you know, he has classified stuff and we're after trump and and you guys did this what oh don't worry don't worry no problem you guys go and search the houses yourself we don't need to get involved and that's how they operate yeah sure they're doing the bidding of the left they are

victor let's turn to um another i don't know if it's a landmine maybe a little

bomb bomb a little uh what do you call it hangernade a little hangernade here um zelinsky it we've heard, had a conversation about making a deal with Russia and

potentially agreeing to not become part of NATO and that the administration has said no, they don't want to discuss that.

Have you heard that?

Or am I on the wrong tangent?

No, that was a story that has been vehemently denied by the left because, of course,

they don't want to have any dissension in the ranks and they don't want any peace agreement.

They want to fight this thing.

And that's a whole nother story, but that story

was hotly denied and it came out

in a number, that wasn't like, let me put it this way, that wasn't like the pipeline story that was smothered.

because that came out of Israel and that came out of the former prime minister

Naftali, is that his name?

Naftali Bennett.

And he gave a long interview.

And in the interview, he said essentially that there was a point

where the Europeans and he

had worked out some sort of deal where Zelensky would not be assassinated by the Russians.

And Ukraine would agree not to go into NATO.

And Ukraine would agree that the 2014 borders for now would remain there.

In other words,

that they would back off areas that they had taken back from Russia.

And Russia would back off any areas, if there is any, that they were beyond the 2004 border.

Sort of like a green line, the 2014 borders, which themselves reflected Russian aggression.

So that was the key, that Zelensky was willing to give up stuff.

And what was the stuff he was willing to give up?

He's willing to say, you guys stole Ukraine from us and you stole the borderlands and for now you can have it, but you got to get out of Ukraine.

You got to stop killing us.

You got to stop that.

And then the Russians would say,

okay,

all this 150,000 dead was for nothing because that's where we started.

Okay, we'll do that.

We won't kill Zelensky, but you can't get into NATO.

And then Zelensky said, okay, we we won't get into NATO, but we have to have security from the big powers.

The Israeli person was then commenting and saying, well, you know, I told Zelensky that you can't trust anybody.

Israel doesn't trust anybody.

You can't rely on big powers.

You got to be armed to the teeth.

You don't have to be a NATO, but arm yourself to the teeth.

So that was tweeted out by everybody from

Mr.

Mate, the investigative reporter, who was a man of the, is the man of the left,

and then also Elon Musk, and it came out under the rubric of the United States vetoed that.

And we would have had a peace in tens of thousands of people.

And then the left went crazy and said, no, that's not right.

And then even the ossified censors that are still there on Twitter.

you know, they marked it as misleading because it's a long, long, long transcript.

And they said, well, they didn't put in contacts and maybe could have, should have.

So that's, but if that got out, that the United States

was in control, really, of Ukrainian selections, choices, free will, because we're giving them so many arms and we're the ones that are demanding that they keep fighting, that's pretty damn, that would be really damning.

Yep.

Not impeachable, but damning.

Not impeachable, like the failure to report income on the part of the Bidens or the illegality of using our classified documents or the people's documents to profit

for the Biden consortium or blowing up the pipeline of an ally and starting a war with Russia over it.

Yep.

But it's up there.

There's another one.

I just, the other one is.

Another landmine was,

so everybody's mad at the FBI, and the FBI had 80 or so agents assigned to Twitter or to social media, and 11 of them got sweetheart deals.

They went to work for Twitter, including their legal counsel, James Baker, upon retirement.

And we know that they were paying $3 million.

And we know that it's against the law for

a federal government agency.

to suppress the First Amendment rights of its citizens.

So they got around that by saying to Twitter, look, here's $3 million,

and we want you to

squash the laptop story, squash the Trump is innocent story, and cancel these people out.

And we're going to give you $3 million.

And if you do it, you're a private company.

You can violate First Amendment rights.

We can't.

And, okay,

that was where we are.

But then something popped up, and it turned out from another trove of Twitter documents that the FBI was not just doing that, but they were acting as a rotating door for other federal agencies, such as DOD.

And so, DOD said, Well, the FBI is getting rid of all their critics.

We got some guys that we don't like either.

So, maybe we can give the names of the FBI, they can give them the names to Twitter, maybe Facebook, and cancel them.

Still, that's bad, but then the CIA came up, and that's important because in the CIA charter, they're not allowed to surveil or gather information on U.S.

citizens.

And if that was true, that the CIA

was using the FBI to convey its demands to Twitter to block certain news stories or to cancel people they did not want to air information, then that is a big landmine.

And I would think if that were to be true,

that the CIA director would be culpable at the time.

I don't know exactly the timeframe who it is, whether it was at the end of the

Trump administration or it's that I think it's in the Biden administration.

Wasn't the New York Post canceled by Twitter right before the election of 2020?

So, right,

they got because of the Biden file, the Biden laptop.

And so, I don't know if that was the CIA or just the FBI, but anyway, that was well, we thought it was just the FBI, but this new series of documents suggests it wasn't just the FBI, that the FBI got in on it first, and then the other agents say, hey, that's not fair.

You got a good deal.

You got social media in your back

pocket.

So

if that were true, and it is, you're right about that.

I think the woman's name was Gina Haspell.

She was kind of the swamp creature that

Trump appointed.

I think she was a deputy when Pompeo left to become Secretary of State.

And then among the MAGA people, there was a big outcry that she was a swamp creature, which she was.

So

if she had people in the CIA going to the FBI and giving them lists of names and people that should be canceled or stories that should be suppressed, then

man, that is bad.

Yeah, that sure is.

All these things are bad.

And if we had a real viable, if we had any press, these would be front's fate story.

We should pick up the New York Times tomorrow.

And

the right side of the headline would say, U.S.

may have blown up Russian pipeline.

Germany upset may have been illegal.

And then on the left hand, they would have said, Hunter

suing may have.

tax exposure and on reported income.

And then below, they would say Biden family scrambling to keep track of documents and to refute charges that these documents were used for personal enhancement.

And then on the other side, there would be an article that says it may be true that the CIA unlawfully

monitored U.S.

citizens.

And on the other side, it might say U.S.

may have intervened in the highest councils of the Ukrainian government and pressured them not to accept a viable peace offer between Zelensky and Putin.

But we don't know.

All of these, I'm not saying any of these are happening.

I'm just saying that they're of such a staggering magnitude, if they were partially true, they would be bombshells, or the walls are closing in to use CNN's language.

But it's nothing.

Crickets is just nothing.

Yeah, it's very strange.

Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk about the Never Trumpers and their future.

Stay with us, and we'll be right back.

We're back.

Victor, maybe we'll end on something a little more optimistic, which is the Never Trumpers have nowhere to go, it would seem.

But what are your thoughts on all of these Never Trumpers and especially ones that have been getting money from the left and have really sort of voiced left agenda ideas.

Do you see them doing a Hillary Clinton and tacking back to the right or what's going to happen to him?

Well, there's a lot of, there's three gradations of never Trumpers, supposedly.

There's the extreme never Trumpers, and these are the conservatives of which I would put Charles Sykes and

Bill Crystal, say that bulwark route, or the Lincoln Project.

Okay.

Yeah.

And they use the idea that they're quote unquote Republican or Democrats, even though I think most of them have left the party.

And they say that they're,

they said to the left, Pierre Amador and the big money guys on the left, hey, we can be really valuable, useful idiots because we have a lot of credibility because you know me, Bill Crystal and Charles, we were strong conservatives, Republicans, and we're going to turn on Trump.

So if you give us six or seven million bucks a a year or whatever he gave, and let us have a magazine and pay us

ask, we'll just start trashing Trump.

And that will help you get Biden elected.

And we will say that he betrayed the principles of conservatism, but they're way beyond that now.

So, if you pick up the bulwark,

right, and I don't try not to read it, but if you pick it up, I mean, there's a tax on DeSantis.

And yeah, and so, I mean, DeSantis is about as conservative as you can get.

He's not so

they're after MAGA.

They're after MAGA then.

Then, well, yeah, except they're going after everybody.

They're going after

McCarthy.

So you have to ask yourself this.

They've gone step one where they say what they said, well, we're only angry at Trump.

He's destroyed, but we want real conservatives.

Well, if you look at DeSantis's

agendas, you can say that he's a little bit forceful about trying to stop critical race theory or whatever, but it's pretty much what

a rock hard, rock bed, whatever term we use, conservative is, and yet they're after him now.

They're after him.

So that first group is gone.

They

it,

I don't think they ever thought it was about Trump.

I think they were not conservative ever.

I think it was all where the money was from the very beginning because you just don't change and flip like that.

So now their position: A, we're conservatives and we're going to make a lot of money because we have authenticity as the voices of reason in the Republican Party and give us a bunch of left-make money.

And then

they thought, oh, crap, what happens if Trump's gone?

Because Joe Biden is a hardcore leftist.

He's in the back pocket of socialists.

And I mean, these people want abortion to the day you're born.

These people want tax confiscatory taxes.

These people

want

everything.

I mean, they're socialists.

We can't buy into that.

We won't be credible as conservative.

So

maybe we can support.

You'd think they would support DeSantis, but they don't.

They're attacking DeSantis because their paymaster said, no, no, no, no, no.

I think DeSantis is just as dangerous as Trump, or he might be the nominee.

So turn your fire over Santos, puppy dog.

Yes, master, we will do that.

And that's what they're doing now.

And so they're leftists now, is what I'm saying.

And I think they're to the left of the old Democratic group.

They're to the left of Bill Clinton, if you read those people.

So that's the first group.

The second group is

these are people like the Dispatch, Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, David French, Kevin Williamson, and they have had it with the Republican Party and the MAGA people

and Donald Trump.

But

given their entire lives have been so-called zealots for libertarian conservatism, they look at what the alternative is and they realize that their opposition to a DeSantis only empowers AOC, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders.

And for them, even though they're getting left-wing might, that's a little hard to take.

So that's the second group.

And so one day they'll say DeSantis

is a fanatic, I don't know, he's a fanatic evangelical, something taking on Disney or something.

And then the next day they'll be pretty good, but they're waffling and they don't know what to do.

Because remember, all this is predicated on getting left-wing money so you can be a useful idiot.

And the Bill Crystals is happy, is doing well.

But these guys who are getting some left-wing money feel that they're the voice of true conservatism, and they don't know where it is.

It's out there.

I mean,

it's out there.

I mean, when you talk about MAGA, what are you talking about?

You're basically talking about four or five additions to the straight Republican Party.

And one of them is don't put so much emphasis on capital gains reduction at the expense of cutting some guys Social Security or get tough on China.

Don't just hand them the store anymore or close the border there was a lot of people in the pre-maga republican party that that's where it came from so

it's going to be very hard for them to say

i'm a conservative and i don't know what to do now because uh ron de santis is maga and i'm the true conservative uh yeah but you're you think that who's closer to your true conservatism ron de santis or even donald trump or Joe Biden.

So that's the second wishy-washy group.

Then there's the third group, and they're the people who said, I didn't vote for Trump either time, but I am a conservative.

And I think those are the people I used to write with at National Review, most of them.

Maybe Rich Lowry or

I don't know who's there anymore, to tell you the truth.

Everybody's left.

But those, Andy McCarthy and those people, they are, I think,

genuine conservatives.

And their problem was,

they said it was Donald Trump's personality.

So if there is nominated a Mike Pompeo, a Nikki Haley, or a Ron DeSantis, I think they would endorse them.

Yeah.

And that would be a passing phase in their conservative odyssey.

The other, the middle group, I think, is in some ways the most opportunistic because they're struggling with the contradictions of their own situation.

They don't want to fold up and say, you know, we were creatures of a day and we got rid of Trump or he lost in 2020, helped in part to us, and he won't get the nomination, maybe if that's true.

And now we can go back the fold because to do that would...

They're never, nobody, everybody's angry at them.

Nobody wants them back.

So I don't think, I don't know how they'd be viable.

And then the first group I mentioned, that's just a sham, it's just a veneer that even they know they're not conservative.

You read that, if you read that bulwark on any given day, or you look at what those people are saying,

it's pathetic.

I think you could say John Bolton is in the middle group, guy like that.

What about Colin Powell?

He's dead.

Sorry,

that's right, he died of COVID.

I'm sorry, I I completely forgot about that.

Well, he was elderly, eight in his mid to lates, but he would have been in the,

I think he would have been in the middle dispatch group.

In other words, he had so ingratiated himself and been so accepted by the left.

He voted for Obama, I think, that he had long ago left the conservative movement.

And he was waiting for it.

So he wouldn't have voted for Ron DeSantis.

Yeah.

But he wasn't, he wasn't, but he would say he's still conservative and he was hoping for the good old days.

He would, he was hoping for a John McCain or Mitt Romney come back, although he voted against McCain, I think.

Yeah,

so

and so all of these people, though, have a problem, and that is they

renounced.

I think a George Will would say that he's still a conservative, he's still a Republican.

If you take

Trump out of the equation, he would be in group two.

In other words, he probably has problems about voting for Ron DeSantis.

He's not in group three where he would just say, you know what, it was Trump, his personality, and DeSantis is pretty much a solid conservative.

You can call him whatever you want, but he's not that much different than things that other people ran on before that were Republican.

I'm going to support him.

I don't think that's going to happen.

Yeah.

And then, of course, we're talking about how they view things.

And then you have to ask how people view them right

yeah so how do conservatives that are listening to this view them

i think it goes like this very quickly the first group they have utter contempt for they feel they're opportunist they're they're just trying to make money the lincoln project was a perverted group of losers who absconded with millions of dollars and lined their their pockets.

That Rick Wilson person is an odious figure, all those people.

And they don't want anything to do with them, and they couldn't come back if they wanted to.

They think they helped get Joe Biden elected, and that has been a national catastrophe the first two years.

And they feel like they were, those people lied to everybody for 30 years that they were conservative.

They never were.

They were just where the money is.

And when the money was shut off, when Trump came in, they went to find it otherwise.

The middle group, people feel that they're,

I think they feel they're kind of egoist, that they

are pouting because they all made extravagant claims that they were not going to endorse Trump because he had betrayed the conservative doctrines that they had so adamantly

pushed.

And then when Trump A

sort of

was a very good conservative, that hurt them.

And then they're sitting out the election or voting for Biden.

They were basically, they bought that lie that Joe Biden was good old Joe Biden from Scranton, a kind of a conservative, you know, kind of like in the LBJ Bill Clinton tradition, if you could even think they were conservative.

And that was turned out.

So they're kind of like useful idiots and people feel bad for them, but and they feel that they just got angry because they were used to being on TV and listening and having presidents call and nobody cares about them anymore.

So they're just kind of pathetic.

And then the other group, I think people have kind of respect for them.

They say, you know, you guys were naive.

I know you think that Donald Trump did a lot of damage, and not in my name, and all that stuff.

But basically,

when you refuse to help the Republican nominee, you empower Joe Biden.

And when you empower Joe Biden, you turned the country over to AOC, the squad, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and the Obamas.

Everything you told us that we should be aware of.

So

I'm trying to be dispassionate.

I've been really attacked by the first group, the bulwark, that wrote, as I said earlier, I think 2,500

Gabe Schoenfeld basically said I was an anti-Semitic Nazi

writing the Trump book, which wasn't an endorsement of Trump.

It was just an ex an exegesis how he was elected and why he was,

it was a convenient time time in the country to have somebody like that that you know cut through the crap and rebranded the Republican Party as a middle-class party.

But

those guys are very nasty people, aside from what my treatment with them or my experience with them.

Yeah.

And I've had experience with all of them, and I can't disclose conversations I've had with them, but

from personal contact with all of the first group, I feel they're opportunistic.

All of them are.

I've had some, you know, if

a lot of this stuff in groups one and two is personal disappointment and loss of lecture income, loss of attention, loss of media platforms, loss of speaking fees and stuff like that.

I'll give you a story very quickly, and I won't mention the person's name.

I spoke to a group of,

I guess you would call them orthopedic surgeons.

I won't mention the group either, but let me say just a group,

one of the largest in the country.

And I went down there, they were wonderful.

And afterwards, they asked me to have a drink, and everybody was kind of drinking.

And one of them said that this very prominent conservative, I would say he was one of the most prominent,

they had wanted to have him, but he wanted to be flown out private, which all the way to where they were located was about $50,000.

And then he wanted, I think it was 50 to 60,000, 100,000 bucks for an hour.

And they couldn't afford it.

And then after all of this

crashed, right, the Never Trump and all that,

they were telling me that recently he called them and offered to speak for $5,000

and would pay his own way out.

And they, and so I said, so you did it?

And they said, no, we don't want him.

Why would we want him?

But that shows you that that's true.

If that's true.

And I've heard that from other people in the lecture fee business, because, you know, some people call you up all the time and say, would you go speak to this group or that group?

And you say, and they'll say, well, this person got this or this person got that.

And I can say their market value declined by about 90%.

And that really hurt them.

It hurt their ego and hurt their pocketbook.

And they blame Trump for that.

Yeah.

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

So I would like to thank you for your thoughts today on all of those

potential,

you know,

pit holes that Joe Biden may step into.

We'll see if any of them

manifest themselves.

I'm going to use the word.

They're not pits.

They're not, walls are closing in.

They're not bombshells.

They're not potholes.

They are landmines.

They're just sitting there under the surface.

And everybody's thinking they're just

not to be worried about or the media won't do it, but they're tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

And one disclosure about any of those topics would blow this whole administration out of the water, if any of them prove to be true, because they have consequences that are global.

You can't have a CAA, you cannot have the CIA involved in domestic surveillance or suppression of free speech.

You can't go up and blow up

a German-Russian pipeline.

You can't do that to your allies, and you don't want to dare do that to a nuclear adversary in a time of peace.

You cannot have the vice president of the United States and then the president taking out classified documents and being treated differently and having those documents turn up

in the business annals of that family consortium.

You cannot have the Biden family not reporting huge sums of income.

And you cannot have the United States after they convinced every single person that this war

was necessary and the Ukrainian people were behind it.

And we have to go back them because they do not want to back down one square inch.

And everybody's in on this.

And then if that were to be true, that the Europeans and the Ukrainians wanted to negotiate a settlement, and we vetoed it.

All of these are unproven or they're in progress.

So I'm not advocating that they're actually true.

I'm not advocating they're false.

I'm just saying they're evolving stories that the media does not want to touch because they're afraid of them.

Yeah, and that's been so interesting today to hear all of them.

And so we'll see what happens.

I'd like to thank your listeners as well.

We always appreciate the audience.

I do too.

I thank everybody.

We read all of your comments, and

I know it's hard listening to a lot of podcasts.

There's so many out there, but the fact that

you listen to these podcasts are much appreciated.

Yeah,

that you choose ours.

Thank you so much.

Well, Victor, thanks to you.

Thanks to the audience.

And we'll be seeing you in our next episode next week.

This is, did you have anything more to say?

No, not at all.

No, okay.

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