Politics in America

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Victor is an author, scholar, columnist, essayist, and a political and cultural critic.

He is also the Martin and Ely 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.

This episode is our weekend episode, and we're going to have a look at American politics.

It seems that lots of the stories recently are exposing new aspects of our democratic government, and they're taking me back to a passage in Madison's Federalist 10 where he argues that the system of checks and balances would set one man's ambition against the next.

And this would be helpful to exposing corruption in the system.

system and I think he may be right or maybe he may be too right but we will look into lots of political stories today after these messages

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Welcome back.

I would like to remind people that you can follow Victor at VictorHanson.com.

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Victor, how are you doing today?

I'm doing pretty well.

We're in a 10-day cold, but respite from the California flooding.

And remember, we're still in a drought because it's very precious to the Newsom conglomerate to have a drought so they can

you know, destroy California agriculture and put everybody on water rationing.

So they let out, I think it's up to 13 million acre feet now.

We had the wettest December 15th to January 15th on record, and yet the reservoirs, I said last time, are still less than 60 percent.

So that's very depressing, but it's part of a

you know, it's a pattern with California.

It's been a subject of Fox News shows a lot.

I did one with Laura the other night, but Tucker had done one and they all are doing it.

And Sean Hannity

about the states and free fall, which which we can talk about that later.

What

Newsom was

posturing as a presidential candidate because everything he's done has been an utter failure, but that's beside the point.

Other than that, it's sunny today, cold, but sunny, and cold for California.

Got up to 58 today, so that was something.

Well, yeah.

Well, let's turn then to politics in America.

And I first noticed a article in the Federalist by Samuel Mangold Lennett.

And he was talking about, okay, the polls, and he had a Harvard-Harris poll showed Trump ahead of Biden and of Harris and a 10-point lead over DeSantis for 2024.

And he says, he said, but the polls are not everything.

And so Republicans should not rest on their laurels, I guess you would say.

And here's a quote, the American political system no longer operates on the pre-2016 paradigm in which someone seeking to buck conventional wisdom and break with the permanent Washington has a fair shot you just can't challenge the managerial elites job security and he and he was saying that you're really up against the permanent bureaucracy, the media and corporate elites.

At least Trump would be.

And anybody actually, I think he was suggesting that it's really changed politics.

I was wondering your ideas on that.

Well, I mean, what he's saying is that you either have to co-opt them or crush them because they're going to crush you if you're a conservative.

And who is, you know, that famous line in Sam Peck and Paul's The Wildlife said, they, they.

And who is they?

I'll tell you who they is.

Remember, the Edmund O'Brien said, I'll tell you who they is, and I can tell you who they is.

It is the permanent administrative state.

And who is that?

That's the FBI, the IRS, the CIA, the DOJ, the EPA, those people.

I wrote about them called the unelected chapter and the dying citizen.

But

I mean,

they're the ones that do everything from count the votes to

determine who gets charged with a crime.

Just think about how they change things.

So the permanent state suppressed, they had 50 former intelligence operatives who told us that the laptop is Russian disinformation.

They tried to destroy the Trump campaign in 2016.

They destroyed the Trump transition as typified by Michael Flynn.

They destroyed two years of his administration with the whole Mueller hoax.

They have enormous powers and they're not accountable.

I keep hitting that same nail with that same hammer, but it's, you know, the four last FBI directors have either lied or misinformed the American public and the Congress while under oath.

And

so it's the permanent state.

It's the media.

And what do we mean by the media?

We mean everything from the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, those big four.

And then we're talking about ABC, NBC, CBS, network news.

And one of the most predictably biased is our own public stations, PBS and NPR.

And we're talking about two of the three cable news larger stations, MSNBC and NBC.

And then we're talking about the whole Silicon Valley nexus.

And that's

the old Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Google.

And so you have that.

And then you have another part of that triangle.

And that's

the ability to raise enormous amounts of money.

And I don't think being the conservative side, we always grew up with the idea that Republicans or conservatives were wealthy.

That's ancient.

We have no, I mean,

the magnitude of wealth of a Bill Gates or a Warren Buffett or Mike Blumenthal or Mark, it's just staggering.

It's the largest concentration of wealth in history.

And when you can superimpose that riches on this populist dialogue that they're doing it all for us.

We're going to eliminate all your natural gas for you.

And John Kerry is flying on the private jet for you.

And Al Gore's selling to Godhar, the carbon-spewing oil exporter, his worthless cable station for $100 million for you.

And that's really hard to fathom that.

And so

It's very hard when they have the money and they have the government and they have the media and they don't have the people.

So we get all of the people, 51 to 55% of the people, don't like what's going on with crime.

They don't like the border.

They don't like suppressing oil and gas production.

They don't buy into the Green New Deal.

They don't buy into critical race theory, white rage.

But it doesn't matter because they have ways of manipulating the flow of information from everything on the order of your Yahoo or Google search

to you know

arresting somebody and

Peter Navarro

Steve Bannon performance art arrest in a way that they would never

you know they would never do that with Eric Colder when he refused a subpoena so one day of the capital

120 days

summer of 2020.

They're very asymmetrical.

There's no equity under the law either.

That's very important.

Equity under the law.

Quality, I should say.

It doesn't exist.

Well, you know, you said you mentioned the 51%

don't like what's going on.

And if I could go to another sort of topic or angle on that, A.B.

Stoddard had an article in Real Clear Politics that was arguing that McCarthy had

was compromising with the extreme right and that was cultivating the fright, you know, the fright or making swing voters afraid, which would cut into your 51%.

And so, her argument was that McCarthy was enabling chaos and attacks, and this freedom caucus, and that that was going to cut into the vote for the Republicans.

What are your thoughts on that?

When I grew up, the extreme right with all the power was the conspiratorial

corporate America or ITT or Anaconda Copper,

the big money.

Who is the extreme right?

She's talking about Matt Goetz?

Yes.

About what?

10 people?

And what was their crazy ideas?

The craziest was that somebody could call a vote of no confidence with a speaker.

Okay, you can do that in about 10 seconds.

And so what?

So Matt Goetz says, I think Kevin McCarthy should have to step down.

Let's vote on it.

Well, they can do it quickly.

It's a distraction, but it's not crazy.

And some of the other things about the committee assignments and balanced budget and investigating the weaponization,

they were sound.

When you talk about radicalization,

I mean, nobody in, oh, maybe one or two, nobody says in Congress on the right that I'm a member of the, I'm a card-carrying member of the John Birch Society, but whether it's Bernie Sanders or the squad, they all are openly socialists.

They say they're socialists.

And the squad is not some fringe group.

They have as much or more control over the Democratic Party than those holdouts do over the Republican Party.

But see,

these people cannot just look at things down the middle and say this, this, this.

They have to go extreme right.

And

they're not worried about what the stream left does.

I mean, the squad are socialist.

Members of the squad, you should go back and read the corpus of things they said during the rioting.

Hannah Nicole Jones, the architect of 1619, said looting was not a crime, just property.

So BLM, Antifa.

Go read Molly Ball.

I keep hitting that nail down all the time.

But in February of 2021, she outlined the whole operator.

And she told us that they had the ability to modulate the Antifa BLM demonstrations, which is a confession that those hard-left

groups were joined

the hip with

the Democratic Party.

And

if A.B.'s daughter is so angry,

why does she just for one nanosecond say,

wow, Hillary Clinton

put money into the DNC, her campaign put money into DNC,

and then they put money

into

Perkins Co.

law firm, who they put money in Fusion GPS, who put money in the hands of a foreign national to subvert a campaign and make lies.

And then they fed it with the Clinton connections into the government, and they tried to destroy the integrity of an election.

And that's pretty radical.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Well, I'll just tell you, she did have a poll she was referring to.

She said that there's a new Navigator poll that shows only 21% of the independent voters approve of the new House majority.

So she was,

that seems small, but maybe I'm

wrong.

Yes, but

I mean,

what does that mean?

That

Navigator, I think it's a research company.

So

you have,

as I said, all of this media saying these people are crazy, these people are crazy, these people are crazy, they're right-wing, right, right.

And then you take a poll and it says, you know what, people think they're kind of crazy, but we'll see.

Yeah.

Crazy, they won the majority, didn't they?

So if she's saying people don't like what there's going on, it's not like they woke up and said, wow,

there's these Andy Biggs guy.

They knew who the Republican Party was, everybody who ran for office.

And they won.

And they should have won by more, but they did win.

So, how does she explain that?

Yeah.

And

I'm perfectly willing to be symmetrical.

I can say, well, you know, they won the Senate and they had Bernie Sanders in there.

And they had a lot of nutty people in the House.

And because there's a lot of nutty people in the United States, that's why you get what you get,

but it's not some conspiracy to hoodwink the voter.

Oh, wow, we voted for Republicans and they're all right-wing.

All right, so let's go on then.

I was wondering if you could, you have an article out

that, well, the Real Clear Politics actually called it problem is FBI corruption.

But you had 10 things that were

not wrong, but were a contrast between Biden files and Trump files that were found in either's residences.

And I wanted, since there's 10 things, I wanted to just ask you about three of them.

And I'll state them, and you can go ahead and talk about them.

You said that they have passed judgment on Trump, but not Biden, that the FBI acted asymmetrically, and that the Biden files raised the specter of uh chinese biden malfeasance and so i those are my words um on the last but more or less that's what it sounded like

well it's an ongoing criminal case in both cases right yeah so you the doj says you don't comment on criminal cases So the president of the United States is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States in some sense.

So what does he do?

He goes on 60 minutes and he says that Donald, it's irresponsible.

What Donald?

He's unfathomable.

How can he do that?

It's an open case.

How can he be the subject of an investigation and say there's no there there?

So he was commenting on cases in the case

in both cases before there was a special counsel.

In other words, his own DOJ was investigating a rival.

And remember, remember, and

in the first impeachment, filed in 2019, I think it was finalized in December of 2020,

the charge against Donald Trump was that he got on a phone call and he used the powers of the executive office to delay a shipment of military equipment to a corrupt Ukrainian government on the grounds that they had to clean up their act.

left said that that was an indirect salvo against his potential Democratic rival in 2020, Joe Biden.

So remember that, because Joe Biden just ordered a raid against Mar-Lago, who is his chief,

more than likely at the time, he was probably the chief rival to Joe Biden in 2024.

That was an impeachable offense, we were told.

The other thing is, of course, you mentioned the FBI and symmetry.

So

the way to answer your inquiry would be,

let's just do it this way.

The FBI is going to treat Joe Biden exactly the same as they treated Donald Trump.

Okay.

So three big SUVs with people with guns show up at the Delaware house in the garage.

guys with tight t-shirts and big biceps fully armed guard the premises they swarm into the houses unannounced unannounced.

They go through everything for 10 hours.

They don't let the Biden lawyers tell them what to do.

They decide to go into

Jill Biden's underwear drawer.

They go into Hunter's little child.

When he was a child, they go into his clothes.

And then when they leave, they scatter papers on the ground and take pictures of to show you how sloppily, supposedly, or they go into the garage and they take that, those lopsided piles of classified documents, they pour them on the ground by the Corvette and take pictures, and then they leak all this to the press and they say,

you know what, Joe Biden had nuclear codes there, had nuclear secrets.

They just let that out.

And that's what is the big difference between the way the FBI

one particular classified document problem and another.

And another thing that it's really gets me is that, so now

there was the Pence matter, but then the Biden.

And now, guess what?

Everybody is saying,

well, we've got to address the entire classified filing system and document system.

And you know what?

You look at these TV stations or these people on radio on the left, they say, they always ask these rhetorical things, do you think that we overclassify things?

Yes, I do.

On the Mar-a-Lago, what if I had gone into Fox just as minor voice and said, you know,

I think the problem with Mar-lago is they over-regulate things.

They would have said, oh, wow, you're an apologist for Trump.

How dare you?

That only came up.

They don't know whether we over-regulate or under-regulate.

They don't even care.

That only came up because Joe Biden was as guilty or more guilty in this article.

I think I made a convincing case that he's a lot more guilty than Trump.

A lot more.

Yeah.

When you went to Donald Trump's Mar-lago, and by the way, anybody in his right mind knows today,

excuse me, not today, but a month ago, if, excuse me, before Joe Biden was president, when he had those documents, and he did have them before he was president, you could have gone into that garage much easier than gone into Mar-Lago after Donald Trump was president.

There were secret service people there.

There was no secret service people for years at the Biden residence.

This thing is leading to something.

When you go into Donald Trump's Mar-Lago and you get the things, they tried their best to leak.

They said, well, maybe he was keeping mementos so he could sell them.

Or he was trying to pry.

All of that was trial balloon leaks, but they're not going to lead to some bombshells, walls are closing in, psychodrama, melodrama we've heard before.

Joe Biden, because he is so corrupt and because he has been so sheltered by the media, when you get a pry bar and you open a little seam and you stick your head through, i.e., you the documents,

then you look at the whole sordid family and almost immediately people say, my God, the Chinese Communist Party gave several million dollars to the University of Pennsylvania to help make a think tank for Joe Biden.

Why would they do that?

And the next thing we we know is, wow, Hunter listed this as a resident.

Hunter Biden was in that house and had access to that garage where these classified documents were there for years.

And he was doing business with Ukraine and UK.

And there are emails where in very

detailed fashion, he lays out geostrategic scenarios that are beyond his pay grade, believe me, that may have come.

So there's all these things that are coming out of it in a way that they won't come out of Trump.

Not because Trump is necessarily morally superior to Joe Biden, but because he's been

washed, rinsed, and dried by the left.

They know every inch of him.

And they don't know one inch of Joe Biden or they don't want to know.

So once you get your hand in there and you pull back the curtain,

it's pretty revealing.

We're going to to see a lot of stuff that's going to leak, especially because there's a sizable number of the donor class and members of the Democratic Party and the senior level that don't want him to run because they have a lot of Senate seat exposure next round.

And he is declining geometrically, as I said.

Yes, of course.

Yeah.

And then the last one was the specter of a Chinese Biden malfeasance.

I said malfeasance.

I don't know if that's the correct word, but

well, I mean, I said the Chinese don't do anything unless there's something to be gained.

So

why not endow Josh Hawley's think tank?

Why not go and just say, let's have a Rand Paul?

Let's, or, you know what I mean?

They do it for me.

And they usually pick out left-wing candidates, not always, but usually, because they think they're going to be more sympathetic for state-controlled governments.

And they play the race car that we're victims of, you know, racism, which resonates.

They got very effective propaganda.

And they think these people are very prone to be compromised.

Eric Swalwell, a good example.

And they're right.

They're right.

Barbara Boxer, who was our senator for, what, 20 years?

She's a registered Chinese agent.

lobbyist.

Diane Feinstein, she had a Chinese lawyer, driver, chauffeur for for 20 years.

Her husband, the late Mr.

Bloom, made a fortune in China.

The Pelosis, who knows?

Who knows?

So my point is that

they don't do anything unless there's a prophet.

But in that article, I tried to be pretty comprehensive.

I only get 800 words in a, you know, in a syndicated column, but

there is, you got to remember another thing, as Joe Biden was investigating Joe Biden, right, until the special counsel came,

and he was investigating Donald Trump.

So he was basically investigating the, Joe Biden was investigating two of the likely nominees in the next election as an incumbent president.

That's nobody really,

nobody really talked about it.

I mean, you mentioned.

commented, as I said, he weighed in on an investigation that was in progress.

And

you know what I got angriest about?

I think all of the listeners did too,

this mantra that was all over the airwaves.

Joe Biden self-reported as soon as he found out he took it very serious.

No, he didn't.

He had it for 15 years.

He walked out of the Senate with that stuff.

He walked out of the vice presidency in 2016-17 after the election and before he lost office in January of 2017.

He's known it this whole time.

Why do we find out now?

Only because they were investigating Donald Trump and somebody leaked it.

Or they thought somebody would leak it because they thought, wow, Joe is a sloppy mess.

And before we go on making this classified question

a political act to behead Donald Trump, we better make sure it doesn't swing around and cut us.

But they didn't do it out of, you you know,

or they would have done it, done it much earlier.

They suppressed it before the midterms.

They knew

just like they know about Sam Bankman-Free.

They knew that about the midterms.

But this,

you know, and, you know, time and space, think of that.

So much more time, these documents were in the Biden

hands and so many more spaces.

So there were so many more opportunities for them to, I don't know, get into the wrong hands, i.e., Hunter's hands.

And I hope they do fingerprint

DNA analysis of all of Biden's papers.

And it would be funny to see

who pops up as somebody who perused those documents.

They can't even come up with a reason why he took them in the first place.

They tried trial balloon number one.

It was just hectic when Joe Biden left the vice president.

Joe Biden was compromised compromised both

uh legally morally spiritually and cognitively as vice president that's what obama basically summed him up he said don't underestimate joe's ability to f it up

and

he was singularly rushed stressed it's just and then they said you know he's writing his memoirs he first of all he doesn't write his memoirs He hires somebody.

But the idea that Joe Biden was there diligently looking at these classified information in a skiff and then he just made a mistake and took a few papers, it's just ludicrous.

He took them out of there,

probably

because he was commenting to members of his family on critical decisions or background information on foreign leaders of which they were doing business.

That's a very likely, that's a very good possibility.

Whether it was Russia or China or the UK or Iran or Ukraine, and here are Ukraine and UK and Iran,

he thought that he could lend expertise to the family members.

Nobody would ever find out.

Nobody would ever talk about it.

Joe might not even have told Hunter.

He would just regurgitate.

I think he was a little bit more explicit of that.

But that's why he took them out.

And they know that, and that's why they haven't speculated.

They haven't mentioned one iota of what's on those classified documents.

And they could, you don't have to say this document pertains to this.

They can say these were matters of assessments of foreign and foreign leaders.

These were

geoeconomic analyses of tariffs or something like that, but they don't.

Which makes them that much more suspect.

Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and we'll talk a little bit more about the FBI and the Charles McGonicle indictment.

Stay with us.

We'll be right back.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

You can find Victor on Facebook at the Morning Cup and on Twitter at VD Hanson.

And so please, if you're a social media aficionado, join us there.

That'll be great.

Now, Victor, I wanted to ask you about this McGonicle indictment.

He seems to have been a senior FBI official that was secretly working for,

and this is the indictment though, so I don't know if he's guilty or not, but for a Russian oligarch, Oleg

Derepaska,

I really messed up that word, but tough word to say.

They think

he had possibly received $250,000 in payment.

And this same guy was a key player in the Crossfire hurricane targeting Trump on Russian collusion, and he seems to be the real Russian collusion.

What are your thoughts on him?

So it's a reification of that idea of projection anytime these guys start to accuse something something somebody of something that doesn't exist you know they're doing it so this guy the whole time

the entire time

that

mueller was active that devin nunes was trying to trace it down he was a principal player in trying to suggest to as part of the fbi that donald trump was compromised by collusion at that same time he was i guess you would call it munder lawn money laundering

a quarter of a million dollars from a Russian oligarch.

And

the only thing that surprises me, I can't believe that he was indicted.

Why do I say that?

Because Andrew McCabe was acting FBI director and he lied four times.

He admitted he lied.

They didn't indict him.

James Comey went before the

Subcommittee on Intelligence and said,

don't remember, can't think of it.

Not

my job.

245 times.

Robert Mueller, we mentioned him with the dossier and the fusion GPS.

Christopher Wray,

they don't get Kevin Klein,

they just gave him a little slap on the wrist.

I think he's back

practicing law, even though he admittedly altered a document and diluted a FISA court.

And of course, they all gave the FISA court cut and paste folios from the fraudulent dossier.

And then they signed off that it was a legitimate and trustworthy piece of evidence.

And they knew it wasn't because at the time they had expressed in writing doubts about the dossier, and yet not doubts to the FISA court that they wanted to give them the right to surveil people.

And during the Mueller investigations, when they subpoenaed the phones of the pertinent FBI investigators, broken paper, they were wiped clean.

So,

what will they not do?

I keep returning to that tired old question.

What will the FBI not do?

But in this case, they're saying that he was working for the Russian oligarch, right?

So is that, I mean, not that you can weigh the differences in criminality necessarily, but that does seem a little bit more extreme than

mucking around in U.S.

politics.

I don't know.

Maybe I'm wrong.

And I'm sure your listeners would probably

think that way.

trying to destroy Carter Page, bragging and laughing about how you did an ambush interview to destroy Michael Flynn on an ossified, crazy idea, the Logan Act, and then boasting about it.

As I said, taking an email and altering the email to deceive a federal judge, cut and pasting things to deceit from a phony dossier.

It was,

you know, Donald Trump urinated on the sheets in some hotel to get back at the Obama, that crazy stuff.

Yeah.

Submitted that to a judge when they knew it was false, lying to a federal investigator while under oath, lying to a congressional committee.

How about James Comey meeting with the president of the United States in a one-on-one confidential conversation and then going out and recording it on an FBI apparatus, I guess an iPad, and then taking that thing and leaking it through a third party to the New York Times.

It had to be, and then saying, well, it wasn't top secret classified.

It was probably maybe confidential.

What would be more top secret than a one-on-one conversation with the president of the United States in which he lied and said, you're not under investigation?

He admitted that he was under investigation.

Yeah.

I mean,

they are so arrogant.

I mean,

why do they have to put leg cuffs on Peter Navarro?

Why do they have to see

stop a guy, John Eastman, at the airport and grab his cell phone?

Why do they have to go with James O'Keefe at two in the morning, march him out in his underwear?

Why does CNN show up at the very time that the FBI does when they want to raid Roger Stone's home?

Do they have any, why don't they just, if that's the way that they want to enforce the law, why didn't they do that with Eric Colder?

He refused a subpoena.

Why didn't they investigate

Barack Obama?

If you think that there was quid pro quo, he said on a hot mic

that he wanted the Russian government under Putin to give him space and, i.e., not act up so that he would be flexible on missile defense.

And guess what?

We canceled missile defense and Putin put off until after Obama was re-elected the invasion of Crimea in eastern Ukraine.

Investigate that.

So

you get the impression that insidiously, incrementally, we've lost our freedom.

It's scary.

We have people who are not elected to anything, and they have judge, jury, and executioner power, and they exercise it, and they're arrogant, and they feel there's zero consequences.

When the FBI director, Christopher Wray,

given the controversies that swirled around his previous three predecessors, Mueller,

Comey, McCabe, and given that in the news there had been FBI agents that were sent on the prompt of the teachers' union to go in and surveil parents that were worried about the indoctrination of their kids through mandatory critical racial theory indoctrination, given all of that that was going on.

All of that.

You would think that Christopher Wray, when he was in front of a congressional senatorial committee, that he wouldn't just say, I got an appointment.

I can't stay much longer.

I have an appointment.

And then get into a $60 million

FBI jet and fly to the Ariondax

for his cabin, his vacation home.

That requires a level of hubris that's just stunning because he's basically saying

the law is me.

I don't care.

I can do it.

Given the background of all of this sordid FBI news, you'd think that he'd be careful.

I think

his attitude is apré moi la deluge, that I'm going to enjoy this until I'm going to ride this FBI job and its retirement until the whole thing blows up, because they must know it's going to blow up.

Yeah, I think they do, you know.

And well, I just, it seems to me, I know you're going to worry about this, but it seems to me that colluding directly with or working for directly a Russian oligarch would be more akin to treason than the things that you've said.

But maybe, once again, I'm wrong.

Sorry, I'm pushing this.

It seems to me, yeah.

Go ahead.

Is there a precedent?

So who did the dossier?

Was it Christopher Steele that, you know, he went all the way over to Moscow and he traipsed around with a magnifying glass and a pipe and tried to find this scent on that trail?

No.

He hadn't been to Russia in, I think, 15 years.

He called up whom?

Charles Dolan.

And who was he?

He was a

Clinton former lackey.

And then he went to the other Russian in the Brookings Institute that was a Clinton

satellite.

And what did they do?

They fed Hillary Clinton stuff.

And what was the stuff they fed from the dossier and other stuff?

It was probably

Russian disinformation.

So essentially, cut out all the paywalls, cut out DNC, Perkins Cove, Husan GPS,

and cut out even the dossier itself in its final form.

The material that Hillary Clinton compiled and was releasing through the State Department and the DOJ, the Bruce Orrs and the FBI, James Baker, to all of her pet journalists, right?

Mother Joan, all of that stuff.

It was coming from the Russians.

A lot of it was.

It was Russian disinformation.

They knew it.

They knew it.

And they knew on the eve of the election that Hunter's laptop, we know that they knew it was not Russian disinformation.

So when the Russians were disinforming us, if I could use that strange for participle,

they didn't care.

They denied it.

And when it wasn't, they created it.

And by the way,

this had national security

implications.

If you let me, just a minute.

So this had national.

Okay, go ahead.

because we're in a war, a proxy war with Ukraine.

Okay, none of us like Putin, he's a thug, yes.

And we don't cry any crocodile cares when this murderer gets an unfair deal or bad publicity, but we're talking about the interest of the United States, not Putin.

So, when you use

Russian collusion and you know it's false, or Russian disinformation, when you know it's false, i.e.,

you broadcast fake news that Donald Trump was colluding with the Russians in Afghanistan and had the Russians had a hit list of Americans they were going to kill, and you know that's false.

And you spread the lies that the Russians created Hunter Biden's laptop and you know that's false and they know it's false.

And then you

spread the lie that there's billions, millions of dollars that are coming from Russia for ads, and they have bots everywhere when you know it's only a minor little operation and you know that's false.

At some point, what you're doing is you're telling this foreign volatile government that we're going to systematically lie about you and use your reputation and what you do inside American politics.

And it wasn't like they didn't have legitimate things to get angry about Russia.

After all, they were hacking, hacking, hacking.

Barack Obama said, Hey, cut that out, Vladimir, cut it out.

And Joe Biden said, You're going to, Vladimir, if you're going to hack us, here's a list of stuff you're hacking.

Take these four out.

No hacking.

So, what I'm saying is that they have helped prep the battlefield in this strange

new Cold War with Russia because they have systematically used Russia to fabricate Russian crimes that didn't exist for political purposes of getting Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton elected.

And then the crimes that did exist,

that did exist, like going into Crimea and going into eastern Ukraine during the Obama administration, or hacking vital U.S.

institutions.

Obama and Biden didn't do anything about about it, which brings us back to the original premise.

Who appeased the Russians?

Who created RESET?

Who took that jacuzzi button and ran off

at the last moment to the summit in Geneva, took it from a hotel and pushed it, mistranslated apparently.

It was them.

It was the Clinton, Obama, Biden nexus.

They were the ones that said, oh, we were too tough on Russia after Georgia.

Oh, we're going to reset.

Oh, we're going to modulate those sanctions.

Oh, we're going to push democracy.

They got this whole mess because they did the two worst things you can do in foreign affairs.

Talk loud, accusatory,

provocatively, and be weak.

So

they went in there and they signaled Putin.

Obama's got to get elected.

Part of the reset basically is for you to behave until he gets re-elected.

Well, that's just a coded word.

After he has re-election, do what you want.

We don't care.

If you say, I don't have space until I'm re-elected, you're saying after I'm re-elected, I have space to let you do what you want, i.e., get rid of missile defense, do what you want.

And so they appeased him, and then they gave these lectures to him.

You have to support democracy.

You need open, transparent.

You're not treating gays right.

Women don't have a full.

That's what they did.

And that just enraged him because he thought, these guys are weak.

And these weak people are lecturing me, Vladimir Putin.

It was a lot better for Trump to do just the opposite.

Think what he did.

He praised Putin.

That's why Crazy Clapper said,

Trump is a Russian asset.

He acts like a Russian asset.

That's what Brennan basically accused.

They all did.

And what did he do?

He just said, I have no problem with Putin.

He understands me.

I'm not demonizing him.

And then he raised the sanctions on the oligarchs.

And then he killed, what, 200 mercenaries in Syria when they attacked a U.S.

installation.

And then he got out of that crazy missile deal with Russia.

And then he sent offensive weapons to Ukraine that Obama and Biden were too timid to send.

And he did that.

He did a lot of other stuff.

But

he talked nice and was tough.

And they talked

tough and were weak.

Yeah.

All right, Victor, let's go ahead and have another break and then we'll come back and talk about Adam Schiff.

I know you say a lot of things in a lot of places kind of independently, but I thought maybe we could have a moment where you have a time to just sort of look at his whole career, if I can call it that,

in the intelligence committee.

So everybody, hang in there and we'll be right back.

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welcome back victor so adam shift

We all know he's a bad egg, but I haven't heard anybody fully explain and discuss him.

And I know that you know a lot about his

career beyond even the intelligence committee.

So I was hoping you could give us some explanation or discussion of him as a politician.

Well, he was in the California legislature.

That's what I remember him back in, I don't know when it was, it was the 90s.

And he was sort of, he was just one of these super achiever kids.

He went to, I think he went to Stanford, he went to Harvard Law School, and then he got elected to Congress.

And he was on that intelligence committee that Devin Nunes chaired.

And I think he used to praise Devin Nunes for being tough on Russia, because you remember in the 2014 election and the 2012 election, the presidential 12 election and the 14 midterm, Nunes was warning everybody that Russia was trying to wage disinformation.

And Schiff was sort of an ally of his.

He wasn't.

I know that in this area, the only reason I remember him that he, the local Armenian community, was always trying to get some needed and necessary resolutions

about Turkey's treatment, you know, admissions of the genocide.

And Schiff was, I think he came to Fresno once, but

he was very prominent.

And then, and then he got into

the entire 2016 cycle.

And look what he did.

Almost everything he did

was either ethically or illegally

done or was amoral.

Such as

they had, when Nunes was chairman, he had the majority report where he systematically, succinctly laid out how the dossier was formed, how the FBI had a role in hiring Christopher Steele as a contractor, how the information was likely false, how Carter Page

was framed, how they abused the FISA process,

and how they used this conglomeration of DOJ, FBI, to ambush Michael.

It was all true.

And what did he do?

He said it was all lies.

He said it was all lies.

And then he issued a minority report as the ranking minority member on that committee.

it was all lies.

If you ask any leftist today,

your life depends on this answer, which is a more valid document, which is more accurate, the Schiff minority or the Nunes majority, they will tell you the

majority report was.

Do you remember during

the impeachment where he read into the congressional record what he said was the Trump phone call, what he kind of made up?

And so Trump says this, and then Trump said this.

And then it was all, it was all impressionistic.

It wasn't a transcript, but he acted as if it was.

He swore that he did not know

who the whistleblower was or anything about Vinman.

Vinman had contacted him.

The whistleblower had contacted Vinman

and said, you know,

there's this phone call and

back and forth that Vinman heard and the whistleblower hadn't heard it.

Vinman had, you know, I should say that Vinman probably called the whistleblower and they concocted this

operation to suggest that Donald Trump did a quid pro quo based on Vinman listening in.

And then they

corroborated with Schiff,

which was the basis for the entire impeachment proceeding.

And he denied that.

He completely denied that.

And the worst thing he did was he went on television serially for over a year in the midst of the Mueller investigation that was leaking like a seed.

And they would ask him,

what is the status?

And he says, well,

I can't disclose everything because, of course, I'm the chairman of the intelligence committee.

So

I can't disclose what I know.

But let me tell you, there's a lot there, and that's what he did.

There was nothing there.

So he abused his position on the intelligence committee to give a false impression of what these classified documents showed.

So we could go on, but his whole career, the last five years, has been nothing but amoral.

And

now he's declined, he's decided he's going to run for U.S.

Senate.

That will be interesting to see in this state

because, you know, it's a 65%

blue state.

There's not one Republican statewide officer.

There's supermajorities in the legislature.

There's only, I think, I guess there's, what, 11 or 12 congresspeople out of 52, 53 seats that are Republican.

So on the one hand, he should be a strong candidate, but he is also woke.

And he is a white male and he's a rich kid and he's obnoxious.

And so I don't think he's going to win.

I don't, because there's a lot of other candidates that have more vote credentials than he does.

And he's going to be running in the same year that maybe Donald Trump is at least running in the primaries.

And all of the things that he accused Trump of doing have proved to be false.

And so a lot of people, his opponents, I don't know what they're going to do with him.

He's an embarrassment.

And he's so,

see right now, he's so angry because he cannot be on the intelligence committee.

You take Adam Schiff off the intelligence committee and it's like you emasculated him.

You know why?

Because he had one

effective mechanism.

He would get on television and he would wrinkle his brow and he'd look troubled and say,

I'd like to talk, but I just can't because.

This is classified information, but let me assure you, it's damning.

And when you can't do that, what good is it what good is he he has no value and so they know he can't very smart mccarthy is really surprising a lot of people he's been very tough he's been very smart he didn't say i'm not he can't be on a committee he can be on the water resources committee he can be on the

i don't know the 50 cent commemoration committee he can be on anything but he can't be on the intelligence committee And that's what's driving him crazy because that's the one he wants to be on.

That's where all the power is, right?

Pretend like you've got

that's where somebody can lie.

And by the way, I mean, it was the director of national intelligence, I think Radcliffe, who said

that they had a pretty good idea that the people who were leaking on the House Intelligence Committee was Adam Schiff and his circle.

They were leaking stuff all the time,

as was the Mueller investigation.

So

it's, it just,

I mean, we'll see how far his Stanford, his Harvard, his arrogant demeanor goes in California.

Well, I have one.

Oh, go ahead.

Yeah.

I have one last question then.

And we know now,

rascal and scoundrel that he was,

he was using backdoor channels to Twitter and I think also Facebook to try to get them to de-platform or counsel or suppress or censor his critics, people he didn't like.

And apparently they did.

And so that suggests to me that he had an in with Silicon Valley, which in California, there's three things you have to do to win a state office.

You have to be Democrat.

You have to have some identity politics fee days, because 45%

of the electorate is Mexican-American or Latino, and then the other 15 to 20% is Asian or

African-American.

I think the so-called white population is down to 40 or below.

You have to have that features.

And the third is you've got to tap into Silicon Valley money.

And he's a Democrat, and he can tap into Silicon Valley money, but I don't know.

I don't think people like him.

Ultimately, the irony of white male politics is that if you're a left-wing white male and you convince everybody, like Mark Merley tried to, that there's white privilege, white privilege, white privilege, and there's white rage, white rage, white rage, and there's white supremacy, white supremacy, white supremacy, and all of your identity politics, people of color almost are saying, you know, whiteness is a plague and it's toxic.

a woman in her days say it's like animals.

It's every day someone says something.

But you're a white male male.

At some point, you see what I'm saying?

It's like holding a, it's like holding a firecracker in your hand and lighting it.

At some point, somebody's going to say, yeah,

Adam, you're one too.

You're a white male.

And white males are toxic.

They don't say, none of these people say, Millie didn't say, I'm going to go out and ferret out right-wing white rage.

Or they don't say, I'm going to go out and see

conservative white privilege.

They don't even preface it without.

They They don't preface it.

It's just white.

And Adam Schiff has been a purveyor of that.

And he thought he could run, he could ride that tidal wave of identity politics, but

he fits the profile that people are targeting.

So maybe he can.

Yeah, he sure does.

I'm the good white male.

I hate white males too, but I'm the good white male.

And we'll see how that works.

Yeah, see how that works.

That's the Gavin Newsom

gambit, isn't it?

Yeah, he's got the same problem, absolutely.

Well, Victor, I have one last question.

What

lecturing on why the Second Amendment and the Republicans that want guns are so awful when he's surrounded by all these people heavily armed that are protecting him?

Yeah,

I have one last question.

I mentioned Madison's Federalist 10 at the beginning, where he says ambition

against ambition will root out corruption and make the

federal federal system even stronger and after we finish talking here i have the question is maybe it doesn't make it stronger but it it weakens it and i was wondering what your views are on that well when madison

wrote

when madison and and jefferson madison wrote

the constitution and and Jefferson Hamilton and others have been writing specifically Hamilton

and people in the Federalist papers, they all agreed on one thing, that factionalism is innate to humankind.

So one of the driving forces of our Constitution was take it as a given that if we are united now against the British, the moment we have no common enemy, we're going to break into factions.

It always happened.

And they had studied the Catalan conspiracy in Rome.

They had studied the Gracchai violence.

They had studied Cleon in Athens.

They had studied the execution of Socrates.

Okay.

So they were trying to craft not a utopian solution of ending factionism,

but a checks and balance so that one faction would not be more powerful than the other and eliminate it.

and then end in autocracy.

And so innate to our system is there's always going to be differences and they're going to have a creative tension, a yin and yang.

But no one is going to be able to aggregate absolute power because they felt that that was a more dangerous threat

than ossified political,

you know, stasis that you're not doing anything or you're fighting all the time or talking.

And, you know, that's, it's arguable whether they were right or not.

I think they were, but they created our system where it's self-correcting.

So President goes in and he's got 65%

on election day, and he's usually down to 40.

And if he's a crook or he's got legit, you can impeach him or you can override his veto.

And he can make appointments, but he has to have the appointments confirmed.

And when people are frustrated with the system, then they try to empower the deep state and elevate the FBI, or they issue executive orders that they shouldn't be doing,

or they stack the courts, or they try to get rid of the Electoral College or end the filibuster or bring in two, but they have to find mechanisms to go out of the constitutional system, which

is pretty ironclad.

It's very hard to be a dictator in the United States, given the three branches of government and the checks and balances of each.

But when we have abuses,

when we have abuses, it's usually not because necessarily

one party controls both houses of Congress and most of the courts and the presidency.

That can happen, but it's rare.

It's when

our informal mechanisms of audit, and I'm talking about the press mostly, the press.

When you have the media and it joins a political party and it's suppressed, and you do that in the electronic age of instant information accessibility, then you've got a real problem because you have a fusion party.

It's something, and it's no accident.

When you read 1984, that genius, George Orwell, in 1946, understood when he looked at the Soviet Union and communist parties forming in Europe after the war, he understood

that

if you control news outlet, the problem is in Eastern Europe or in Russia or what was happening in China,

and

you have the means of production, and I'm afraid that our corporate world is becoming very, very woke.

And

then you can really warp a constitutional or consensual government.

You really can.

That's what's scary.

That's what happened.

Because we, look what's happened.

We impeached a president twice.

We impeached him as a private citizen.

We impeached him the moment he lost majority in Congress in his first term.

We'd never done that before.

We'd never done that before.

We've never done all that at once.

And

that was pretty scary.

We tried to overthrow a government.

We tried to, we did things that you can't even imagine.

Rod Rosenstein and McCabe thinking of tapping a president, James Comey listening in to

participating in the conversation and then memorializing and leaking it

with exemption,

FBI director lying, and all of that we didn't know about.

That was all suppressed on her laptop.

Just can you imagine this?

I can't, but just

imagine that

George Bush is president and his daughter,

they used to call him Gin and Tonic.

Gin and Tonic, yeah.

I don't know what their real name is.

His daughter were part of an international consulting firm and they had made $50 million

in Kuwait or Iraq or somewhere and

they were complete i mean they they went after them because in a party i think it was in latin america one of them had too many gin and tonics.

Can you imagine if they were crackheads?

And can you imagine if they had a laptop and partial on dress

using drugs with hired gigalos, gigalos, I should say.

And you can imagine that they said,

I'm getting tired of the big guy and Mr.

10%,

and then throw in a Bobolinski character.

Could you imagine what the left would do to George Bush?

I mean, they called him a Nazi as it was.

So it's so asymmetrical.

At some point, we need to discuss why is it?

Who are these people?

Is it the journalism schools?

Is it the mood on campus?

Is it the idea that a young person, 18, 19, 20 that majors in journalism, he goes to journalism

school and he scans the landscape?

and the environment and he says, uh-oh,

if you want to get ahead and you want to make a lot of money, you've got to be on the left.

So I need a card-carrying left card.

And the more that I slant the news and the more that I am propagandistic, I will get a job at a network news

and work my way up.

That's what I think it is.

Young people see all the rewards on the left career.

Yeah, that's true.

Yeah.

You know what?

If you write a conservative story, never going to get a pool of surprise.

Can't do it.

Never be hired in the New York Times unless unless you're going to be

one of these columnists that they hire as kind of a paid, useful idiot.

So

that's the problem.

There's no incentives for these people to be moral.

There should be.

Person should have an innate morality, a sense of a compass within themselves, but these people don't.

Now, and I think the university ultimately is the embryo that sprouts these people, that births them,

that that is responsible.

Well, that's another story for another day.

Yeah, that is.

We've touched that topic a couple of times, but maybe it needs greater treatment.

Well, Victor, that's the end of our time.

Thank you so much for all of your wisdom this hour.

Oh, and I would like to remind your listeners here, especially in the Valley, that February 6th at Clovis Community College, they're going to have Daniel D.

Martino.

He is a Venezuelan who is getting a PhD at Columbia University in Economics, and he lived his early life in socialist Venezuela.

He will be talking at 6 p.m.

at Clovis Community College.

And if you could text your attendance to 559-492-7282, that's 559-492-7282.

That would be great.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

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