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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show. Victor is an author, scholar, a news commentator, and we talk a lot about politics here and culture.

Today's show will be on the last political stories of the year. And then next show, the Saturday show, will be on

Victor's cultural pics. And we'll be looking at that later.

Victor is the Martin and Ellie 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.

We're going to talk a little bit about George Santos, the new

elected, currently elected New York representative, and a little bit about Putin in the first part of this episode. So hang in there and we'll be right back after these messages.

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Welcome back, Victor.

Can I ask you, how

is the weather unusual or not out here in California? Yeah, it is very unusual.

I think we have had

for the fiscal, for the rainy year,

I think it's July to July, we've got almost 60% now the entire year, and we haven't got to the rainiest months or traditionally January and February. So it's really, really raining.

And the Sierra's got about six to eight feet at 7,000 feet, central Sierra.

So it looks good. I mean, last year it looked good, but not this good, but then it didn't rain for three months, and we had a semi-drought.
So we hope this continues. But

the ground had been so dry that here in the San Joaquin Valley, it didn't really, the water just soaked in. And now, after a week, you can see it pulling everywhere.

So, if it continues, there's going to be flooding in some of these rural towns. They have mudslides, so

maybe, I don't know.

Lemore is about 20 miles away, and they've had some flooding already.

Any low spot or town that doesn't have an adequate drainage system, which is about every one of these rural towns. Yeah, yeah.
Okay. Well, Victor, we have a current

elected representative coming in, and he's told a lot of tales, George Santos, about his education at Baruch College finance degree, his experience working at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, and that he's a proud Jewish American.

And a lot of our veterans, which is good, have looked, checked these things out, and they don't seem to to be true. What are your thoughts on George Santos?

Well, everybody agrees that he's a pathological liar, okay?

But

it takes on importance because he was one of these, I guess there were four of them, that flipped districts in the Long Island. I think his even goes down to Queens, Santos's does.

So they were Republicans. And people didn't vote because they liked George Santos.

They voted because they didn't really know who he was, obviously, because he'd run before and nobody had checked him out and he'd lost. So they voted because of what he said.

And what he said was almost everything opposite of what

the New York state, in particular, apparat and the hierarchy in Washington and the Biden administration was for. So

that's what the voters wanted. And now we're told, because he was such a pathological liar,

that it has reached. No, notice what I'm saying.
I'm trying to be very careful.

The left is not saying that that is a disqualifying factor, or they'd have to get rid of Senator Blumenthal from Connecticut, who not once, but serially lied that he was a Vietnam veteran.

I don't think he'd ever been inside. I know

he was in the reserve, but I don't think he'd ever been inside Vietnam. It was a pathological lie.

And

so

people are saying, yes,

politicians lie, but this reaches

a new level of lie. He lied about his Jewish ancestry.
As you said, he lied about his education. He lied about his work history.
He lied,

et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And why didn't people check him out? He kind of posed as he was a gay Latino from Brazil.

And I think he felt that as a marginalized, quote-unquote, person, he was going to be exempt. Maybe he was.
Obviously, he was exempt for some reason.

But the issue boils down to: did his complete fabrication exceed the Liars Club in Congress? Because they all lie, right? They all pad their, not, I don't mean all, but a lot of them do. Okay.

But there's a little twist to it. And we're just talking now, Sammy, about whether he should be expelled.
And,

you know, he's got the left-wing DOJ, the institutional DOJ, and if he lied about where his income came from in connection with campaign donations to himself,

or he lied, you know, it's not like he's Mark Zuckerberg. They can get away with giving 419 channeled through a so-called quote-unquote nonprofit, which I guess was tax deductible.

But he will be in big trouble, and that's the one way they will get him. If they don't get him, and then I think they need two-thirds of a vote of the House, which they won't get.

So there's two issues here. One, the House, you know, it's seven seats in general, so the Republicans can't afford to lose very many.
And more importantly, five of them,

maybe it's down to six, seven, six seats, but five of them are not going to vote for Leo McCarthy.

Excuse me. Let me cut that.
Yeah, cut that.

So there's two issues. One,

the House Republicans have a very slim lead. And two, Kevin McCarthy's got five, I don't know what their strategy is or what their mindset is, but they won't vote for him.
So he needs every vote.

So Santos is just

as disrespect

and Santos is odious of figure that he is,

probably is critical to A, the Republican majority on many bills because he's a solid conservative, or at least he poses as one.

And B, McCarthy needs him to become Speaker. That's the one issue.
The other issue is the elephant in the room. We have a pathological liar as president.

And when you look at Santos, you say, well, he, Victor, he lied about his biography. He did.
But

look what Joe Biden did. He bragged that he was first in the top third of his class.
He was in the bottom third. He didn't tell us about that.
He plagiarized and he was put on suspension.

He claimed that he was getting an offer to the

Naval Academy, but because he was a football star, but not quite at Roger Stahlbach's level, that he didn't get, that's a complete lie.

He said he was a semi-truck driver. It's a complete lie.

He said his son died in Iraq. It's a complete lie.
He said he was arrested

in what? South Africa in a protest. That's a complete lie.

The worst lie that he did, and this is very controversial, though, his first wife died tragically, I think, with his daughter in a traffic accident at a well-known intersection. It was very dangerous.

And after that happened, he stormed the country in every one of his campaigns, presidential and senatorial, and said that this guy drank his lunch, i.e., he was a drunk truck driver.

And he was implored by people, don't do that. That is a lie.
The family

of the truck driver begged, and the poor guy died, never knowing that people didn't realize he was innocent.

And it's kind of controversial, but to the degree there was any culpability at all, it was probably Joe Biden's wife who made either a rolling stop out in the intersection.

The truck driver tried to avoid her.

What worse thing is there to do than libel a man and his family that he caused the death of a wife of an important senator? It was horrendous. He was asked repeatedly to stop, and he wouldn't.

And finally, he did, you know, after, I don't know, 20 years.

So, I mean, and then he

went around giving these speeches, and he was the first in his family to go to college, and they were all,

I don't know, minor coal miners. It was a complete lie.
It was completely lifted from Neil Koenig's labor speech in Britain. So, what I'm getting at,

and this is all besides, I'm talking about biography and personal matters. I'm not talking about things like

the back vaccination will protect you from being infected or being infectiousness, or there was nobody vaccinated until I came to be president, even though

17 million of them had been vaccinated. This is completely different than those pathological lies that he's, the border is secure, all of that stuff.

And so I don't know what the answer is because I want to know what the standard is. Do you allow pathological liars to hold office on the idea that they're there for their views

or they haven't committed a crime? And we'll see. But I will say that the DOJ is going to go after this guy.

And I have a feeling they're going to find some technicality, maybe not a technicality, a major crime about where the money for his campaign came from.

And if they can do a Dinesh T'Souza on him, that is a trumped-up federal charge, then they can have him removed from Congress or at least in jail. He won't be able to perform.

I mean, not that a lot of people don't belong in jail, but I think they may get the two-thirds if he's convicted of a crime. It'd be pretty embarrassing.

Although Senator Mendez was, you know, accused and went on trial, and he was perfectly fine as a senator. He didn't resign.

So, what I'm getting at in this windy answer is: I don't know what the rules are or the protocols.

I'd like it to be if you are a pathological liar and you make up things about your university degrees, you make up things about your son's military service, you make up things about your athletica bill, your work history, your arrest record, what more fundamental is there to a person's, to a persona?

Then you shouldn't be in office. Are we going to remove Joe Biden? No.

So this is patently political,

but

you see what I'm getting at?

It's, well, they're going after George Soro, George, excuse me, they're going after this Santos fellow because they want to whittle down that little lead and maybe they'll find, pick up two or three, I don't know, never Trumpers, and they'll be able to deadlock the Republican investigations and agenda in the House.

And so... They say, well, these Republicans act like they're so moral and they're allowing this Santos fellow to get off of McCarthy.
Well, yeah,

of course. That's politics and exactly what you're doing with Joe Biden.
You never call him to account. There's not one major Democratic politician or liberal pundit.

I saw that Bill Crystal was really on this story about this is the new Republican Party. I'm thinking, well, wait a minute.

What are you doing? What did you do when Joe Biden said that his son

died in Iraq? What did you do when he said there wasn't any vaccination? Did you just say, well, that's good old Joel from Scranton, who's non-composment?

Because that's what they say. Well,

don't call him a liar because he's got mental impairment, which they play up.

Well, maybe Mr.

Santos has mental impairment. He does seem to, he's a little crazy to really fabricate from whole cloth his entire existence.

So that's where we are. It's a political matter now because there are no standards in Congress or in political life.
It's up to the voters. There's nothing in the Constitution.

There's nothing in statutes that say, if you've been convicted of a crime, you cannot run for office.

And maybe if you're not eligible to vote in some states because you're a felon, maybe that's a crime. But there's no federal statute is what I'm getting at that I know of.
Yeah, sure.

And it seems like they should

blame the presses for not vetting this guy. I mean, that's what we expect our presses to do is to go in and check things out and vet them.
Especially because

he'd run before,

but he was a minor figure. I think part of it was that the liberal press,

just when he, you know, he had been married before, but he was very clearly gay. He bragged about that.
He had a husband and he had an Hispanic name.

And I think, wow, we don't want to go too deeply into a gay

Hispanic Latino person's profile, we might get some

might find something we don't like. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

It's not like, you know, so

I don't know. It's just,

it's, I just can't get into the chorus and say, oh, my God,

this is terrible. This is how the Americans have, this is how low politics is stupid.
You're allowing a complete pathological liar to be in Congress. Well,

we had a president named Bill Clinton that was

basically disbarred for lying under oath, right? They disbarred him from the practice of law, and nobody, and nobody in the Senate,

nobody, I mean, they didn't get a

two-thirds, they didn't even get a majority to impeach him. I mean, to convict him.
He was impeached, but he wasn't convicted.

So am I going to say, how can you do that when the president lies under oath in a federal

interrogatory and he's the president? and you're not going to do anything? No, they're going to say that's just a private matter. And most of what Bill Clinton said was a lie.

And then we can go on and on, Sammy. So,

how did Barack Obama birth his career?

If you think about it, it was Dreams from My Father, that memoir, and that jump-started his entire persona on the 2004 convention speech, and he ran for Senate, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And then we learned from a few people that he mentioned that it was a complete lie. It wasn't his memoir.
He just made up stuff. And then

the crescendo of information became so

great that his flax, when he was present, said, oh, it was impressionistic. It was kind of true.

I don't mind him changing the names, but he just made up stuff. And then there have been scholars who looked at that thing and they found exact phraseology that came from other writers.

And there was the suggestion that Bill Ayers had, so there were all kinds of doubts about that. And he was president of the United States.
And I can tell you right now

that if somebody said to me, you just made up everything when you wrote Fields Without Dreams, I changed the names, but it was accurate.

In fact, it was so accurate that to this day people don't speak to me about it, then I would be through.

And if I plagiarized any of the books I wrote, I'd be through.

But not Joe Biden, not Barack Obama. So I get it.
It's a little ironic that these people are now demanding this character be, I guess, not admitted to the Congress.

And the Congress can get rid of him anytime. They just need it.
I think it's a two-third vote. You can correct me if I'm wrong.

For

ethics abuse or something like that? Because it seems to me. It doesn't have to be be anything.
It doesn't have to be anything. Just two-thirds of the sitting Congress can just say we don't want him.

Yeah. And they don't do that because

in our system of checks and balances, if you start doing that to a Republican, they'll do it to a Democrat. So

and then half of them are crooked anyway. So they want to say, wait a minute.

It's got to be so egregious. We don't do that.
We don't completely, you know, we lie like Joe Biden and Barack Obama and Senator Blumenthal,

and we've got some thuggish people like Bobby Rush, the ex-Black Panther. We've got a lot of people, but

we don't lie. I mean, we don't lie about everything.

So that's the point.

It's just the degree to which he's a pathological liar, I suppose.

Yeah, yeah. And I don't think there's anything you can really do about that.
I wish there were. I wish there was some consequence so you wouldn't get pathological.

Okay, but what would be the standard? What would you get? Exactly. Exactly.
There wouldn't be any

political.

If you run for Congress or the president, you can have one plagiarism offense.

You can have two complete made-up lies about being a football star and a semi-truck driver.

You can pretend to be an ethnicity if you would like.

You can be Senator Warren who had high cheekbones, and she was the first Native American Harvard law professor with 0.1%

of Native American. You can do all that.
And then when you're president, you get five lies.

So

if you don't have any standards, I don't know what you do, but they think they do have standards. That's what's so ironic about it.

You know, they don't have any standards.

Well, that. That's just a further lie that, oh, we really do have standards, but we're not going to tell you all the people that break our own standards.
I mean, Joe Biden, if you think about it,

he said he was at the top of his class, top, I don't know, third, but he was either 75th or I don't know what it was.

There was like 80, I don't know, 86, 85. He was like almost the last person.

And then he just completely plagiarized

in his first year.

And he was just,

it was just,

I don't know, it was just

so flagrant.

There's no way to correct that except to say that the presses should have been revealing this way before, and they're corrupted now. So that's another part of the problem, I think.

But, you know, the thing was, I mean, his wife pulled out at an intersection in front of a truck.

And that happened, I don't know what, in the 70s, early 70s. So for

30 years, he just went around the country and accused this truck driver of being drunk. And even though they got nobody, they investigated.
Nobody ever charged him with that.

I remember the National View, Jack Fowler, our dear Jack Fowler, he wrote about it. And Jack went back and reviewed the case.

There was no, the prosecutor didn't even say there was no evidence of that.

And

finally, you know, the poor guy died. And I remember that daughter was on TV and she said, Mr.
Biden, will you just stop it? Will you just stop defaming, hurting our family, my father's memory?

We just stop it. And he finally did.
And he basically said, I'm a pathological liar. I build a lot of my sympathy online.
And that's what he does. He says his son, who,

you know, had a brain tumor, died in Iraq. Did he die on the operating table? And when a person gets a brain tumor, do they go over to Iraq for specialized neurosurgery? Is that what we do? No.

Then he said he died from a burn pit. You know what I mean? My mother died of a brain tumor.
Do I go around and say we all lived in a farm and she grew up on a farm?

But in Roundup, gave her the brown. Oh, nope, nope, it was Paraquat.
No, nope, nope, nope.

It was diazinon and sue and make up that. Oh, my mother, she died of chemicals on the farm.
My daughter passed away. Do I do that

without evidence? That's what this man who's president of the United States does serially. And nobody says a word.
And so this is what gets me mad about the whole thing.

And then I know that the left says, well, that's called

what about some?

You know, you just don't excuse a pathological liar because he's

in a league with pathological liars. No, you don't excuse him.
I'm not accusing him. If it was up to me, I would ask Joe Biden and this guy to resign, both of them.
Get out. You're pathological liars.

You deceived the voters. They didn't have enough information.
That's the argument. Yeah.
Yeah. All right.
Well, Victor, something that gets me confused is Ukraine and then Putin and his

new sort of reign of terror that he has

implemented through bombing of the Ukraine. And I was wondering what your thoughts were, given that the winter is coming on and Europe is getting colder and Putin is their main source.

It's the same old thing that we've talked about. I mean, I sound like a broken record, but

Russia has 30 times the area. It's got 10 times the GDP.
It's got three and a half times the population. It's got 7,000 nuclear weapons.
It's got a very sophisticated arms industry.

And

the moment it is not far away from the Russian borders in an expeditionary fashion, as it was trying to take Kiev, it will fight very doggedly.

And the only way that Ukraine has survived, and I admire Zelensky, I admire their troops, they're very brave, they're up against the odds, but at some point, somebody has to say,

you're now fighting in majority Russian-speaking areas because of your courage, you pushed them back close to the 2014, post-2014 borders, and you want to reclaim this land from them.

But we all know to reclaim that land from Russia, who stole it or annexed it or absorbed it in 2014, it requires a level of violence and an offensive preemptory strategy, whether that's attacking Russians inside Russia along the borders, blowing up their supply depots, taking out their grid, sinking another three or four capital ships in the Black Sea Fleet, whatever it is, it's going to be provocative.

And

I don't think anybody ever thinks about that. They just think Russia's evil and Ukraine is noble.
And

we like the Ukrainians because in the 2016 election, the ambassador wrote in op-ed and a lot of Ukrainians were very, very pro-Hillary and they hated Trump. And then we remember that

they were pretty good when a lot of the people came forward and helped give evidence and impeach Donald Trump. And so we all love Mr.

What was he? Lieutenant Colonel, Mr. Nunes, I'm Lieutenant Colonel Vinman, not Mr.

Remember that in his exchange. So we all love Mr.
Vinman.

He was offered Secretary of Defense by the Ukrainian government. He was very inter,

he was the person who got Donald Trump impeached. And he was a Ukrainian American and they just worshipped him on the left.
So in their way of thinking, Ukraine, they transfer all their disappointment

that they had had with Russian collusion and the laptop, and they wanted to tie Putin to Trump. And they transfer all of their worship of the Ukrainian anti-Trump people to this conflict.
And so

the inexplicable arises. This anti-war left has found an imperialistic project that they really like.

They want to give two, three hundred probably billion dollars to get the last Russian out of these disputed borderlands. More power to them.
But they don't ask ever.

They don't say ever what are going to be the risk and the cost. They never do.

And so people keep falling out of the windows.

There's not an all every time an oligarch hiccups a slight sign of disagreement, he falls out of a window in India or somewhere. And so Putin is methodically exterminating the opposition.

There is not going to be a popular uprising like people talk about, that suddenly all these Democrats that have been hiding around Moscow or St.

Petersburg are going to rise up and march on the Kremlin or get rid of Putin and then get finally a democracy. It's not going to happen.
Anybody knows that there's been a democracy in Russian history?

I'd like to hear about it.

And there hasn't, and it's not going to happen. And they're going to fight and fight and fight.
And when Mitch McConnell says the Republican Party in general general and the Senate in particular

considers that the most important issue, defeating Russia

in Ukraine, when we've had 5 million illegal entries just pouring across the southern border, causing all sorts of mayhem.

And you tell me how you're, I don't know how many are permanent residents, but probably around 4 million. How are you going to offer thousands of dollars per person when we're broke already.

So it's not the most important issue. And I support Ukraine.
I'd like to see Ukraine win, but I do not want

people in the United States telling them that they're going to fight to the last Ukrainian and there's no danger about nuclear weapons and Putin is just mouthing off and we've got plenty of money.

We've got plenty of missiles. We've got plenty of drones.
We've got plenty of everything. We're just going to completely supply you.
And that's what the left is doing now.

And some people want to do that.

Do you think that this supporting the war in the Ukraine is just deflecting from all their failures here at home in domestic politics? Partly.

Yeah, partly it is. Because

that's why I can't figure out McConnell. I think he loves to be Senate minority leader.
He doesn't want to deal with conservatives in this party that he would have to as majority leader.

He's at an age where he's a totem in Washington and he feels, you know, I'm sober and judicious. I'm the steady hand of the Republican Party.
I like being minority leader.

What's the advantage of being majority leader?

And I will voice at certain times bipartisan tropes, and that's what he's doing.

But, I mean, in a perfect world, we all want Ukraine to win. These people are very brave.
Russia had no business adjudicating this

problem through force of arms, surprise attack. They got what's coming to them.
They've wrecked. I think their economy will be eventually wrecked.
But,

but, we're talking three, four years of this. And Ukraine is not a democratic government.
It's as corrupt a country as there is in Europe, more corrupt than almost any country in Europe.

And they don't have the wherewithal to fight this war. And they are saying to us, give me all that I want and let me fight this war against your main rival in Euro-Asia.

And

I can do whatever I want to win, and you just keep giving me. And that's not how things work.

They just don't work that way. At some point, we ask ourselves, what's our geostrategic relationship with this thug in Moscow, with Putin's Russia?

And it's more complicated than that, given their nuclear arsenal and their traditional

triangulating role with China vis-a-vis the United States. So

we've given up a lot. We've allowed a new

kind of a Turkish,

Chinese,

Iranian, Russian alliance.

And when you put India kind of sort of in that mixture, you've got about, you know, you're getting 45% of the world's population.

And you've got nuclear India and you've got nuclear China and you've got nuclear Russia.

I mentioned India because it's is basically buying all it can from Russia and keeping Russia afloat with its energy purchases. And it's very neutral in this.
And it doesn't. And so.

Speaking of emergent energy purchases, I was hoping that we could talk about Europe and Europe's status, but let's take a moment for some messages and then come right back and we'll turn to Europe after these messages.

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welcome back victor um so i know you were just finishing up with russia russia is an important supplier not just of india but also of europe And obviously, their gas and energy is very important too.

I mean, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the status of Europe this coming winter at this time. What are your thoughts?

Well, they're very lucky. They were very, very lucky because

they started hoarding natural gas, liquefied natural gas, and they thought it would be a very cold November and December.

And while it's been very cold here, it has not been as cold cold as usual in Europe. So they have adequate stocks.
But

we're not even halfway. We've got January, February, and March in Europe.
And I think it will get cold. And they will deplete those stocks very readily.

And a lot of people are already angry about the price of energy. I mean, electricity is just, it's obscene in Europe.

And they're not going to be able to have a fleet of electric vehicles at the price of electricity.

It's going to be, and some countries, and I think Germany is one of them, and Britain's getting close, the price of driving a Tesla is probably comparable or more than a gasoline-powered car.

And so

it's not a sustainable situation.

And maybe we, especially when the world's largest natural gas producer, the United States, will not produce the natural gas it's capable of because of the Biden administration.

If Biden said, we're in an existential fight in Ukraine, we want to flood the world with cheap energy to weaken Russia's price advantage, and we want to help our brethren in Europe.

And I announced today that we're opening up

Anwar, and we're going to finish Keystone, and we're going to open up more offshore leases in the Gulf, and we're going to have areas of California and Utah put back into play.

Yeah, that would be a good policy. He's not doing that, he's doing the opposite.
So the Europeans, I'm actually pretty sympathetic because

we deprecate their contributions. But if you look at the total package of all of the EU and the other countries within Europe, financial and military, it's getting close to what we gave, number one.

And number two, the direct consequences of this war are hurting them far more than us.

And so

we'll see what happens. But, you know, this was all, I don't think anybody understood what Putin is.
I mean, they keep saying he's a monster.

Yeah, he's a monster. He's capable of anything and he will do anything.
So they said he wouldn't, he's sending what's

the catalyst for this conversation we're having is today he sent 1,

20 missiles and drones and he's you've got large cities in Ukraine with 90% of electricity gone. The grids destroyed.
People are freezing. He's waging an aerial war of terror, and they can't stop him.

They keep saying, well, we shot down with our, you know, our imported anti-missile, anti-drone

deterrent. We shot down 59.
It doesn't matter how many shot down. More than half got through.
And he can keep doing that. He's buying them very cheaply from Iran.

And he's buying weapons from Turkey, who's, I think, selling to both sides stealthily to Russia.

And he's got an arms, an arms industry within Russia. So he's going to continue to do that.
And he's reducing day by day Ukraine to a

pre-civilizational status.

And I don't, people are shocked that he would do that. They say, wow, now we know he's an utter thug.
He's just a barbarian. It's a war of terror.
Yes, that's what it was always about.

And that's what he'll continue to do. He'll up it.
And if it doesn't quite work, he'll drop a nuke at some point, just because he can.

And I don't get this idea that we in the United States have declared Russia evil and Ukraine noble, and therefore Russia is not allowed to wage war the way it does. That doesn't make any sense.

That's what thugs do.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Well, given that we're putting so much money into billions into the Ukrainian border, let's turn now to our border and talk a little bit at the end of the year on your reflections about the continuous lies of the Biden administration.

Well, that's the right word, Sammy, because I mean, I think everybody's really frustrated. They were confused and then they were frustrated.
Now they're furious because

you see these

films, pictures, videos. And I know that the PBS,

NBC, ABC, CNN, MSCBC,

CBS doesn't show this, but the word is getting out.

You see these images of people just walking across the border.

There's no border. It doesn't exist.

El Paso looks like a homeless camp. And we're in a recessionary time.
It's going to get worse next year. And so we're going to get five million.

We're letting in a million, five greater Fresnos every day. And these people are going to need billions, billions of subsidies.

And then when you bring in somebody, everybody says, well, they're noble. I don't think it is too noble.

I think if the first decision you make in your migration is to break the laws of your host, the second is to ignore a summons or to live there or reside there illegally.

And the third is to make the documentation fit the crime, that is, have fraudulent paper. I don't think that's such a good thing.
I really don't.

And you get all these very loud elites. And

I just saw Bill Crystal, and I'm kind of focused because somebody sent me some stuff he wrote and saying, you know, this is really good about immigration because we have

a need for workers. No, we don't have a need for workers.
We have a need to up the labor participation rate. It's at a historic, what, 62%?

It was 67% in 2000. If we just cut back the incentives a little bit, people would work.

But when you pay them and we, you know, $80,000 to $100,000 in some states like New Jersey, it's better to stay home for a household.

We have millions of people, not just people afraid of COVID, not just people with long COVID, not just people who retired early during the lockdown, but people who are being subsidized not to work.

And the idea that you're bringing in these people

because we need workers is A, absurd, but what makes you think they won't catch on very quickly?

You know what I mean? I have a ritual.

I won't mention the location because it's, you know, I don't want to impute illegality, but I go to a grocery store not very far from where I live, and it's a ritual.

You get in line, the person ahead of you opens the purse, the wallet, and they bring out EBV card, electric banking, EBT card, transfer card A,

and then B,

and then C,

and then D.

And then sometimes they divide them up in little piles on the grocery belt. This is the alcohol, this is this, this is that.

And

so the point is they're buying EBT cards, or

one person couldn't have four or five EBT cards.

But that's not unusual. It's normal.

And so what I'm getting at is I don't think we're going to get 5 million people who broke the law by entering, broke the law by residing, have false ID in many cases, suddenly jump up and say, I'm here to work.

Maybe,

but there's another agenda up there. And, you know,

when the left is on us, they brag about demography is destiny. And then they say, if you don't believe that, you're a racist who believes in the great replacement theory.

But the great replacement theory and demography is destiny is the same thing.

It's just two different words for the same thing, importing a lot of people for political purposes because you feel that once they're nursed on illegality and once they're nursed on subsidies, they will be loyal clients to the left.

And they will. They will because they provide amnesty from illegality and they provide subsidies in every sense of the word.
Yeah, and

it's crazy, though. It's just

when I see that that Karine Jean-Pierre say, the border is secure. Our Mallorca, the border is secure.
Our Biden, he doesn't even know where he is.

He said the other day, the border, we had more important things to do. No, he doesn't care.
The only thing he'd care if

in the 2022 elections had all of those Hispanic conservatives won,

and if

the

polls came back, basically that 65% of the Latino vote went for conservative candidates. They would close that border tomorrow, just the way they do with Cuba.

They don't want any Cubans coming in unless they're dirt poor and they're certified left-wing potential voters, but otherwise they don't want them in.

This is all about changing the demography for political purposes because your standard political orthodoxy has no 51% support. I really don't think it does.

It has to be massaged either by changing the voting laws or changing the nature of the voters or having the institutions, as we see with Twitter and the FBI and Mark Zuckerberg's infusions, do something and changing the voting, all that stuff.

Yeah. Well, right now,

after two years of Biden administration, I think we have 5 million that they've counted that have come in illegally. And we're going to get another 5 million.
That's 10 million by the end of the year.

I think we on the conservative side really need to change the atmospherics, the landscape. We have this idea that it's the noble immigrant.
He's a noble person.

It's not noble to go willingly across a border and

break the law. It's not noble to willingly reside into a country illegally knowing so.

It's not noble to get housing and food and educational and health care supplements to free up your own cash and send send it back to Mexico.

That is to take the magnanimity of your host and manipulate it so they can care for your basic needs, so you can free up money with a cynical

approval of the Mexican government. And that's what we're doing.
Until we say, oh,

the poor migrants don't have somewhere to sleep in El Paso. Yes, I'm very sad about that.
But they did a day earlier when they came in, right?

So it's like,

you know, they're going to make a statement and they're going to get cameras and say, I'm going to break your laws in America, and I'm going to keep breaking them.

And now I don't have food or shelter, and I'm right here. And then the left will say, well, they haven't done anything wrong.
They just want to better themselves.

And they just obliterate any mention of criminality or drug cartels or smuggling or being wards of the state. Any of that doesn't matter.
To the degree you even mention it, you're a racist.

Yeah, so the left has mastered the rhetoric around the whole issue, whereas the Republicans are, they just seem to be, I mean, they're not completely stumped in their own circles because they'll talk about all the crimes coming across the border and the large crime base, which, you know, it's a matter of numbers.

You were talking earlier about

how much can be taken on by our our welfare systems, et cetera. I mean,

that's the key to it. There's so many of them that are going to start onto the welfare system that it's going to be burdened.

I'll tell you what a 24-hour, I wish, I'm getting back to Bill Crystal, when people say things like Bill Crystal, I wish he could just come here. I invite him to stay at my house.

And I would just say, here's 24 hours. So yesterday I walked through the orchard.
It makes me weep when I see the neighborhood that we used to own, the neighboring vineyard, excuse me, orchard.

It looks like Market Street in San Francisco out in this beautiful rural area. There is a car seat.
There are old diapers. When I go into the orchard, there are towels with,

what would you call it? I don't know what the word is for the

excretion after sex. Yes, that stuff.
In towels, and the dogs, you know, want to sniff. And there's drugs.
There is a refrigerator.

And it gets bigger. Every time I walk, I see a new one.
And then I drove the long way into town, which is about a mile from my home. And I go down

this beautiful rural road, and there is a oven,

and there is a refrigerator. And I get to the corner, two intersections down,

and

it looks like the county dump somebody has gone on the corner and dumped appliances and then the next person the next person the next person and the owner is saying i guess screw this i'm not going to clean it up myself i want to make a statement i'm not going and then the word gets out hey

you know we don't have to pay for dump fees we'll just go out and it looks like a

it's a

A cargo container couldn't contain all of that junk right out on the intersection. And then I look at these standpipes.
These are concrete,

big pipes, three, five feet in diameter that rise out of the ground on the underground ditch system or pipeline system throughout this area. And

these poor farmers, they paint them, and there's all of these gang insignia.

These Serenios, the Norteños, the M13, they're just completely covered with it.

And then at night, have four dogs, and it's like each night, are they going to let off illegal fireworks like last night, so you get cherry bombs and everything all night long, so the dogs go nuts?

Or are they going to shoot guns? Is there going to be somebody out in the road shooting a gun or dumped off after beating up a woman, apparently, according to the sheriff's report?

I don't know. But that's what happens when you let 5 million people, and a lot of them are coming to California.
They're bused in or they're flown in, and nobody says a word, these elites.

And they say, oh, you're a racist for saying that, Victor. How dare you? So today, I walked this morning, and I was thinking about this, and I saw a new kind of scattered trash.

And I went over there, and I said to myself, I'm going to be empirical. I'm not a deductive person.
I'm going to look at the lettering of all the documentation that goes in. It's all in Spanish.

It always is. And it's very careful.
It's not an envelope that says, this is my address. It's an advertisement.
It's a newspaper. It's labeling on some direct, you know what I mean? It's just,

and at some point you say,

the environmentalist in me is getting very angry that they're destroying the natural habitat of rural California.

Or there's these labs now, meth labs and marijuana farms that people don't want to go in parts of the Sierra. It's dangerous because the cartels have their people up there working.

And it's booby-trapped, and they've got automatic weapons, semi-automatic weapons. So this is the underbelly of what's going down there.

So when you see people crossing, and unfortunately, they're mostly young men,

and

it's not going to be, hello, I just crossed your border illegally, and I've been staying in your, and I don't need public assistance. I wouldn't dare do that to you.
You're the host.

That would not be kind of me. And you know what? I'm going to learn English very quickly so that you don't have to spend money on interpreters.
And I am going to

go to work. What do you need me to do? I will be self-supporting.
I don't think that's going to happen.

It doesn't happen. Some cases, it happens after two generations.

Three generations, it happens in a lot, but not the first generation, not with 30 million people likely here illegally.

I picked up my laptop, I opened it up, and here is a local local town, and they have a school board meeting, and the parents are all, we mentioned that before, they're all angry because they're from Oaxaca,

and there is no interpreter.

No interpreter at the school board meeting. So, and the news account is condemning

this bankrupt town, and that we're all kind of bankrupt in California now. The state is 25 billion in the hole, and we've we've got 200 billion in unfunded liabilities.

And these small communities can't afford adequate water and sewage and policing. But this immigrant from south of the border is angry because her children she brings in don't have an interpreter.

She doesn't have an interpreter. And I have sympathy for her because, you know, she's at a board meeting.
She's a parent. She gets probably, she buys things at the store.
She pays sales tax.

But whoever,

who or what transmitted the message that you come into a foreign country, you don't learn the language, and then you make demands on

to have expensive interpreters for your benefit. That's how far we got.
I lived in Greece over two years.

The idea that I would go, I don't know,

down to

City Hall in Athens, and I'd say, I've decided, and I came legally, and I had a green card, too. I was able to work if I wanted, and a student visa.
And I said

to myself, what if I went down there and said, you know what? I'm learning, I just want everything to be in English because I need that. They would have hung me from a lamppost.

It would have been so absurd to my Greek host. And I was, as I said, I was legal.
So I don't get this.

It's just when you look at that border and the cost and the mayhem and the drugs and the coyotes and the smuggling and the smug smile on the faces of Mexican grandees who are encouraging this.

And you see the Biden administration, Vice President Harris, President Biden, Secretary of Homeland Security, Mallorca's, Press Flack, whatever her title is, Karine Jean-Pierre saying, the border's secure.

You know, it's not quite, quite, I guess it would be gaslighting, you know, but

the lights are. It's a weird stream.
Yeah.

I mean, it's like, are you insane, Victor?

You think the border's not secure? It's completely secure. Those 5 million people that are on TV every night, they're not crossing the border.

They're just coming over to say hi and they're going to go back. They're just, you know, visitors for a day or an hour.
That's what they want us to believe. It's really,

I've never seen anything like it at the border. Never, never, never, never in my entire life.
Well, the media has been relatively quiet for two years and about nine, ten months.

And then they had this little blip in the last month where they started saying, wow, look, there's a

huge numbers coming across the border.

I'm talking about the media, the mainstream, everything but Fox News, who has been covering the numbers coming over the border and the crimes coming over the border.

But otherwise, it's only been in the last month where they've said a couple of things, but I guess that's drifted into nowhere land recently.

I think they are getting worried because some of the people on the left have been

kind of like the woke. You know, when you hear Tim Robbins, the actor, or

Bill Meyer, or some of the people that left the New York Times, you know, damning the cancel culture and wokeness. Same thing about the border.

It's so out of hand that they feel it can be, and they look at the polls, and it's like 65% of America's want it closed immediately.

And they feel it could be a toxic political issue for them at some future date.

And so they're starting to

think, gee,

this is something that

we don't want.

We're kind of in Orwellian. territory when the governor, the outgoing governor of Arizona, and Arizona is a special case, case, so we have to, you know,

isn't Governor-elect Holmes, who was in charge of the voting as when she was a candidate at the same time, is now asking to send in a court to censor Kerry Lake for challenging the election that had a lot of voting irregularities, apparently, in some counties.

But nevertheless,

Governor Ducey just put these cargo containers too high, and it was pretty smart. They look like a pretty good temporary wall.
And the federal government is suing him.

And it's like your house is broken into 20 times because you don't have the money or the will to do it. And the neighbor puts in an iron rod fence next to him.
He just kind of fences the frontage.

And you sue him.

And you say, how dare you do that?

Well, it's not your territory, but you'd think it would be something that would be, or, you know, you can't drive a car, your car's broken down, and all of a sudden your neighbor drives in and says, Here's my car, and you say, you trespassed.

How dare you give me your car?

I'm going to arrest you. How dare you try to help me enforce federal law on the border? That's the attitude.
It's just crazy.

Everybody should realize that this is not the Democratic Party. This is not liberal America.
This isn't even progressive America. This is hardcore socialism-communism.
It really is.

And it's not just AOC and Tlaib and Ilya and Omar saying they're members of the Socialist Party or whatever they claim. This is serious.

These people are nihilists. They really want to destroy the United States as we've known it.
They really do. They want to destroy the border.

They want to destroy the election system, how we elect our officials. They want to destroy great universities by just getting rid of all criteria to get in, as far as that goes.

It's serious. They want to destroy the military.

Yeah, and they seem to think that with all that destruction, they may come out on top as well, which I don't know if they're accurate or not in that assessment.

But Victor, let's go ahead and take a break for a moment and come right back to talk about one of their one among their number, Pete Buttigieg. No, not.

We'll be right back.

This is a real good story about Drew, a real United Airlines customer. After almost four years of treatments, I was finally cancer-free.
My mom's like, where do you want to go to celebrate?

I'm like, let's go somewhere tropical. And then pilot hopped on the intercom and started talking about me.
And I was like, what is going on here?

My wife beats cancer too, and I wanted to celebrate his special moment. That's Bill, a real United pilot.
We brought him drinks and donuts. We all signed a card.
I was smiling ear to ear.

Best flight ever for sure. That's how good leads the way.

We're back. And yes, Pete Buttigieg among the why do you do this to me?

It's like, okay, we've tied you up.

You're tied up and we're turning on his voice.

Whoa, we've had all these scenes on the television about Southwest Airline customers not being able to get to where they're supposed to be and some even renting a car to drive two days instead of taking well, because they didn't, weren't able to take their flight.

But I was wondering, this is Buddha Judge's world. What are your thoughts on what's going on currently? Well, we know that

when there is a transportation crisis, and we've had a lot of them. We've had the supply chain problem where the port of LA has cargo ships stacked out to the horizon.

And we've had Wild West robbery of trains coming in and leaving the port. And we've had shortages of everything from children's Tylenol to baby formula.

When we have that problem, when we have an entire airlines that

became completely dysfunctional, right in the holidays, canceling 70, 80 percent of its flight and stranding people with not a care about their welfare, their baggage, how they're going to get home in these blizzard conditions.

When we have

even prior to that, we had a broken down transportation system where I can attest at least on four occasions, the pilot informed me that we had to detour because there was no gasoline in the plane, basically, that he took off with less than he needed right at the FAA requirement.

But he needed to go to San Francisco, he needed to stop in Denver,

wherever it was. We had that problem.

So we've had these transportation problems that are just, and I'm not even getting into

the California freeway system that's just dysfunctional. And the nation's freeways around the capital, just dysfunctional.

So whenever you have these problems, the Secretary of Transportation will be in one of three mindsets. He will be taking maternity leave.

He's not having a baby, obviously, but his husband's not having a baby either. But I guess they've had an adoption of some sort or sperm donated to a willing recipient who's given birth, whatever.

But he will be off for two months. Or he will be on vacation in Portugal.
Or more likely, he will be lecturing the country that their clover leaves, their overpasses, and their freeways are racist.

Racist.

And that's what he does. Oh, there's a fourth thing he will do.

He will get in a van or car, and then he will tip off reporters and get on his bike and ride the last three miles into work on a bike while he lectures everybody how they've got to change their gasoline, guzzling, bad habits.

So, this guy is a complete joke. He has no experience in business.
He has no experience in anything.

He was the governor of, I mean, the mayor of South

Indiana. Yeah.
I guess we know it because of Notre Dame.

And he was a disaster. He was a disaster.
And every time he gives a speech, he seems so sanctimonious and so,

I don't know what it is. He just exudes this arrogance and self-righteousness, and he never says anything.

Yeah, and it smells on the other side. Yeah, it just

odious. It smells of he never does anything.
He doesn't do anything, and yet he's being talked up as a presidential candidate. What are the backrooms of the Democratic Party?

Well, we have Mayor Pete, and, you know, he screwed up the train system at the Port of L.A., he screwed up the supply stuff.

The airlines are dysfunctional. We gave Southwest $7 billion with no strings attached as COVID money.

And I guess they just thought, you know what, we're going to use these antiquated computerized booking systems and route systems and plane systems and luggage systems until they just fall apart.

We don't care. And he's overseen all of that.
And he did such a good job, we think he's presidential timber. It doesn't make any sense.
It doesn't. Oh, it sure doesn't.
He's of all those,

what do you want to call them without being illiberal? I would call them identity politics appointments. Does anybody believe he would have been appointed if he was not gay?

manifestly

mentions he's gay at almost every avenue of any conversation, any juncture. He's always got to say that.
He wouldn't be there.

Just like Corinne

Jean-Pierre, we were told that not that she, her qualifications, not of her superb repartee, not of her ability to answer questions without aids of memory, right at her fingertips, but she was the first black gay woman, press secretary.

And

that

people were saying, well, what's wrong with woke? Well, what's wrong with woke is it becomes the primary criterion. And you don't ask yourself, is the Secretary of Transportation qualified?

You know, you can say Elaine Chow was an insider and Mitch McConnell's wife and Trump appointed her so Mitch and he could have some type of workable relationship.

But her family did own a big shipping company, right?

And she grew up with shipping, shipping, shipping. So you could at least make that argument.
And she had been Secretary of Transportation prior to that.

So, but this guy hasn't.

And then almost every speech is all about the racist this and the racist that. It's not about,

you know,

I don't think, I think we're so desperate and we're so estranged from reality that we

can't even dream anymore. We can't say, what would be a Secretary of Transportation like?

He would fly into California and he said, I have a list in my hand of a commission that said the following 10 freeways are killing people at an inordinate, and I'm going to channel federal money to each one of those.

Or I have a list, I'm Secretary Budigig, and these are the 10 terminals in our airway system that chronically have backlog logs and delays that affect the entire air grid.

And I'm going to make sure that the federal government can help

these terminals or these airports, whatever we want to call them, get up to stuff.

I can't even imagine he would do that. But that's what people should do.
And they don't. It just doesn't make any sense.
Again.

No, and you know, so maybe we can leave Pete Hudijed to his bad job, his workless and worthless political hack that he is, and turn to somebody who is the exact opposite and

kind of my favorite person of the year, which is why I want to talk about it. And that's Elon Musk, who, you know, in contrast, as you've often said in other

podcasts, that he has produced so much. But in addition to that,

he was the darling of the left in some ways because he invested in companies like Tesla, and well, actually, built Tesla, and invested in companies like Solar City. So they used to love him.

And then all of a sudden, his buying of Twitter has made him, you know,

they put a big target on his back to take him down. And I guess that's why I kind of appreciate him.
He seems to smile bigger the more.

I guess you did appreciate him because I guess you bought a Tesla and

you signed up for Starlink. Yep.
Yeah. And

you go out and buy some, what are they, Tesla batteries

to support solar panels.

Yeah, to capture the energy of the solar panels. I'm thinking about it.

Okay.

I like him too. And the reason I like him, he builds things that we talked about before.
NASA had a monopoly on space exploration. So this week,

they hate Elon Musk, and he's had, what, the 59th straight launch, I think it was, this year, successful. And I don't know, they're like a shotgun.

They have 20, 30 satellites that pop out, this huge rocket, and it's recyclable, lots of it is. And so

everything about him, I mean, he's giving the Starlink, this internet, and he's giving it to Ukraine for free. So they damn, damn, damn.

What do any of these other people do? What is Mark Zuckerberg doing for Ukraine? What is Bill Gates doing? Maybe they're doing things, but not providing a very quick, efficient

internet system by which all of their sophisticated weapons rely upon. And he's doing it free at the expense of Russia.
And, you know, that's amazing. And he's got this car that actually works.

300 miles plus on a single charge. And people in all these cities love it.
Love it. And so, and then he's taken on this Twitter, and it's like

he's peeled back

this

can of sardines. He's taken the lid off, and it's all rotten.
And he's letting it air out. He says, look, the FBI was using this company as a private contractor to evade.

government's restrictions that a federal agency cannot suppress free expression. And they did that through this contractor to the extent they paid them over $3 million to do it.

And he's showing everybody that. And he's showing that they had 80 FBI agents actively engaged to the degree that the Twitter left-wing censors were like, hey, now don't overdo it.

We can't find a, there's no law or regulation to ban this or that.

And so that's pretty bad. And then with a wink and a nod, I guess people in the FBI said, we want to assign you to to work at Twitter.

And they're going to pay us, but you better get out there. You can make some ties.

And if you make some ties, you can get hired by it, like James Baker, our chief FBI attorney, who we had to fire, or we had to force his retirement. We had to wink and nod, allow him to

leave because he took the steel dossier before the 2016 elections, and he was trying to peddle it to journalists and to a lesser extent to people probably in the State Department already knew about it.

And that's not, and we're going to put him over there in Twitter and he's going to do the same damn thing. He's going to try to politicize a private company the way that he did a public agency.

And he did. He was one of the persons that was the most strident trying to ban Donald Trump.
Keep the Taliban, keep the theocracy in Tehran, keep Putin, keep all the Russians, no problem.

But Donald Trump,

James Baker's got the goods on him. He can't use Twitter.
So Elon Musk exposes all of this, and you'd think they'd be delighted. They're civil libertarians.
They always quote the ACLU.

They talk about the McCarthy period. They talk about the free speech.
Mario Salvo was their hero. So they would want somebody to come in.

and you know just expose all his efforts to destroy the first amendment Instead, they don't. They hate him.

And

when you bought this Tesla, I went online and I thought, you know what, I'm going to look at the Tesla website and stuff. All of a sudden, I noticed there's a lot of Teslas for sale.

You couldn't find one. And they're new Teslas and they're got maybe 2,000 miles.
And people are trying to, I guess, trade them back in.

It's amazing. And, you know, I work at Stanford and

when I go over to the Hoover or I'm on campus i heard i saw teslas and i heard everybody talking about their teslas i don't hear people talking about their teslas

and i don't know whether the stock it's gone from over 400 down below 200 closer to 100 or something he's lost i don't know 200 billion dollars in stock the company has maybe it's over half a trillion and

it's all because i think we're in a recession and there's a lot more competition in the electric vehicle market, but a lot of it is the Twitter.

You know, he bought a money-losing company for $40 something billion.

You know, if somebody handed me Twitter and said, Victor, Twitter is yours.

It's worth $45 billion.

All you have to do is run it. I couldn't run it because it would be losing a billion dollars every year.
It's worthless in that sense, unless he can turn it around.

And then he exposed all of these leeches, these drones that were, you know,

coming in to the extent anybody came in. The 7,500 employees, they had gourmet food, they were doing their yoga class, they were chatting, they were involved in since they were not productive.

And he's running it with about 20%, 25% of the employees that they had before he came. I thought they like all this, but they hate him.
And just despise him because he's making them look stupid.

He's making Lynn look stupid because he's showing the country that the left are fascist, that they were knee-deep along with their hated FBI. They love the FBI.

That's one of the greatest revolutions of our time. It really is.
This amazing flip-flop where the left

used to be the watchdogs of our agency, even to an extreme degree.

If you look at Frank Church's 1970s, mid-70s oversight committee in the Senate, when he exposed CIA and assassinations and FBI, domestic spying, and all of that, whether you agree with he went too far or not doesn't matter.

And you would think that the left would say, you know what,

J. Edgar Hoover's FBI or James Comey.
No, they love the FBI. They love the Pentagon.

They love the CIA because they're enacting a woke agenda at the bequest of the left without any interruption in Congress or the courts. They just do it by fiat.

We should have biodiesel. Oh, well, the Navy will buy it.
Hey, we need subsidized trans,

I don't know, transgender stuff. The Pentagon will do it.
Hey, we need women, like what would be the most unlikely thing we could get.

Maybe women could get into special forces units and we'd lower the physical standard. Yeah, the Pentagon can do that.
That's how they look at it.

You just immediate fast-tracking of this social agenda, and that's why they love them. And then in turn, the FBI said, you know, CIA said, you know,

I don't know. DOJ said, you know, Pentagon said, you know, if you think about it, who's the party of big government? Who wants to raise taxes for more revenue for us?

Who,

I don't know, who rewards

fealty better, the Democrats. So let's just be woke.
So if Hunter's got a laptop and the Biden Joe doesn't want it, we'll just suppress it and lie about it.

And, you know, with a wink and a nod, we'll get 51 former FBI, CIA, NSA, whoever they are, will just lie and say it's fresh and disinformation. And you know what?

If Ashley Biden, they want Ashley Biden's diary back, we'll get that crazy James O'Keefe in his underwear and humiliate him, even if he doesn't have the diary. So that's what they're doing.

And the right was always, well, these people are, they enforce the law and they keep law and order and they keep traditions and that's why we need a strong military.

I agree with all of that, but that's not what's happening right now. And so you're seeing conservatives

very critical of the FBI, very critical of the CIA, very critical of the Pentagon. And you're seeing the left saying, hey, don't make fun of John Brennan.
He's one of us.

He may be a liar, but he's our liar. And don't make fun of James Clapper or James Colmier or Andrew McCabe or Peter Strzok or Lisa Page or James Baker or Robert Mueller.
These are the good guys.

These are the good guys. And it's fascinating to watch this reversal in American politics.

Well, they've managed to get 51% of the population behind them, even though they are often exposed as corrupt and hypocritical. Did you say that 51 because of Joe Biden's election?

Yeah, yeah. Joe Biden's election, the red wave never happened in.
I mean, I know that the conservatives won in some waves, but that red wave. Well,

they had more votes. They had about three or four million more votes nationwide than the Democrats.
But yes,

they didn't have the right to. That's not like 10 million.

Joe Biden had 10 million more than Donald Trump

over the whole population, right? Donald Trump was a guy. If you go back to the history of Aristotle's Constitution of Athens or books for, especially, about the nature of democracy in Aristotle,

or very early in Tocqueville's Democracy in America, just to take some examples, you get a constant theme, and that is that when you have a radical democracy, not a republic, but a radical democracy, and we're becoming that way, then the people will always vote themselves larger and larger entitlements, and they'll always find justification for that by saying

he's greedy,

she's exploitive,

he doesn't need it, I do. And two, as Aristotle most famously said,

once a man votes equally with another man,

I'm not saying male, but person,

then he feels that in every aspect of his life, he should have the same equality. So you and I are voting, you can vote, I can vote, so we're equal.
But you have a Tesla and I don't. So why is that?

How'd you get that Tesla? I don't have a Tesla. I have a truck.
I want your Tesla. I want something just like it.
We ought to be equal. And that's how the democratic mentality ultimately devolves.

I think there's a word devolve. I know it should mean the opposite of evolve,

day down from X out of, but

that's what happens.

It's kind of, you know, all these typologies of democracy that Aristotle is talking about, the worst, the worst was the most radical

without any qualifications for participation and urban. And that's what we have.

And so we're... Maybe dynamic people can save us, Victor.
We need to end this on a

dynamic.

Elon Musk is one, but go other dynamic people that can help us.

Okay.

Well,

here's five people in the news this year, right?

And you tell me if they're going to save us.

Elon Musk, I give you credit. I think you're absolutely right.

He's doing more as a private citizen for the United States than any man in my lifetime by doing, exposing this at great financial risk to himself.

I'm just worried he's going to drop dead and his very valuable SpaceX and Tesla and all these wonderful things he's created are going to die in the vine. But yes, you're right.

How about our main medical officer who guided us through the lockdown and COVID, Anthony Fauci?

Wait, I want people who are really good at the media. Talking about the most prominent.
Yeah, okay. Okay.

Anthony Fauci, Dr. Burks,

Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg,

ah,

ex-Mayor Bloomberg. Maybe, I don't know, Pete Buddy Jake.
So I can't see anybody.

Generals, maybe. I'll look toward the military.
I'm looking for a Sherman,

a Matthew Widgway,

Dwight Eisenhower. Ah, Mark Milley, Lloyd Austin.
Nope.

Maybe a law enforcement officer.

We have that. Christopher Wray? Mark Coleman at the border.
I guess he's not longer.

No, he's retired, but he's very good. He speaks it.

So you're right. I'm just being badly facetious.
Who do we want to leave on

an upward note of somebody that

has tried to do something? for the United States recently.

And I mean, everybody hates Donald Trump apparently now, but if you look at the four years of governance, what he did on energy

and foreign policy and deregulation and almost everything, energy development,

he really did a lot. The border, he really did.
The economy was going great,

there's no doubt about it.

Absolutely. There are people that I admire, yeah.

I always had some differences with Rand Paul, you know, because I thought that he was sort of a neo-isolationist in a way.

But the more that I have listened to him lately, and he's been dead on on Fauci.

He's been absolutely courageous.

And he was one of the first major politicians who saw what this guy was doing: that he was a megalomaniac and that he had no sense of cost-to-benefit analysis of the results of his policies that were detrimental to millions of children, that were based on faulty science, and were partly

hiding his own culpability and gain of function subsidies to the Wuhan lab. So I really admired what he's been doing there.

And then on budget issues, he's getting, I really think of all the senators, he,

Tom Cotton, there's really some really good ones. So I want to end on that.
There are some, I like, I know everybody doesn't like Josh Hawley, but I like him. And DeSantis, right?

He's been taking on all sorts of issues. I think he's, it's very funny because you keep thinking that a politician is going to have a fall as he becomes more and more well-known.

So the left-wing press is going after him. They're going after his biography.
They're going after his wife. They're going everything about him.

But the more that they go after him, and Trump has been going after him,

but the more that people go after him,

the better he does. So when we had this latest drag show where they had almost, I'm not saying, well, maybe it was simulated sex acts and there were children in the audience.

And he spoke up, even though he'd got so much criticism. And he basically said to the nation,

we've spent decades getting laws that protect children from

overt sexuality. There's a reason why they can't access pornography.

There is a reason why they can't appear in pornography. There is a reason why they don't go to adult theaters.
There's a reason why they don't go to bars.

And yet, you, under the guise of woke transgenderism, are exposing them to language and simulations that

would be felonious in any other realm. And he did it again.
He's making that argument. So, yeah, I think he's...

I know that a lot of people in the Republican Party fear him in the sense that they feel that the big Republican money on the sidelines,

it will bring back the Romneys, the Bushes, and the establishment aristocratic Republican Party by funding him solely because he's not Trump.

And I know there are other people who think, you know, and I've said this before, we don't know whether he'll be the great Scott Walker Hope of 2012 that you know,

that didn't do well, or 2016, I should say, that didn't do well.

Yeah, it does great.

Yeah, the calduan of being on the stage with Donald Trump.

So we'll see. So it's premature.
But I'd go to Calm, let him fight it out. I think it'd be very, I don't think it would be deleterious.
I think it would be beneficial. But I do admire DeSantis.

I think he's,

he's, and I just saw a poll today that whereas

Trump

beats Biden by one point, I think, and I think it was in a Zogby poll, which is pretty liberal.

It's a blowout with DeSantis at this early, early, early, early point that he handedly beats. When you watch him, when he handles the press,

I can't see anybody that's been better at it than he has.

And he's not gratuitous. I mean, he's tough, but he doesn't just go out of his way.

That's what's tragic about Donald Trump. Like, they did a hit piece in him, I think it was in that New York magazine.

It was kind of unfair, of course, as everything is, but he tweeted about and said, a very unattractive woman. Who cares? Why say that? Unattractive woman.
You know what I'm saying? Yeah.

Don't quote me literally, but it was something to that effect.

He was commenting, I guess, on her physicality.

Which often turns a lot of people off.

Yeah, it's like Megan Kelly, when she was in that debate and she, that was a legitimate question, whether you think she was, that's That's what people do, they ask tough questions.

And when she said that, about

she gave examples of his treatment toward women, and it was kind of funny about Rosie O'Donnell. Remember that? Yeah,

and then he later said she was gushing, was it blood coming out of her nose, or I don't know what it was. There were suggestions that he was mentioning or referencing menstruation, but

there was no need for that. She's

a successful journalist since she's,

you know, when she went to NBC, she was treated pretty badly. And she's now got, I've been on her podcast.
She's a very,

she's very conservative. I think she always was, but she's a very effective interviewer.
And so you don't need to do that to someone like that is what I'm trying to say.

You don't need to do it to anybody like that. And

that's what's tragic because I think you could make the argument for the four-year period in which he was president, there was no president ever that had more dastardly opposition where people broke the law with a Russian collusion hoax and the laptop

suppression and the outsourcing of contractors like Twitter. And it's not just Twitter, Sammy.
We're going to hear about Google and Facebook as well.

that's going to at some point they will come clean will have to come clean and yet through all of that and then we had Anonymous, who was bragging that he was undermining the very mechanism of the internal Trump administration.

And we had the generals, an admiral, Admiral

McRaven, whom I have great respect for, but he wrote up that said he should, the sooner the better, he's gone. That's, I mean, there's elections.
You don't need to say that, right?

Yeah, exactly.

And yet, he did so much. He gave us growth.
He had almost record peacetime unemployment.

He didn't, everybody conspired against him at the border. I don't know where Ann Coulter gets off and says he didn't do anything with the border.
Well, he was being sued day and night.

There were people in the Pentagon undermining him. There were people in Homeland Security undermining him.
And he finally did replace a lot of the rickety wall, hundreds of miles of it.

Didn't get a lot of new wall built. But he did his best.
He tried to. And he did wonders with energy.
And he would have done more. So what's tragic? Diplomacy, too.

His diplomacy was shutting things at peace.

Well, we have Saudi Arabia right now close to Israel. We have the Abrams Accord is still functioning.
He was right on about Iran.

Even the Biden administration tried to give the entire store over to Iran, and they said that's not enough. And even they now

are very skeptical for the first time of the Iran deal. And he saw that right away.
And he did just everything he did was successful. And what was tragic about it was

that

I'm not saying they wouldn't have hated him anyway. They're going to hate DeSantis.

You know, that's what's so ironic about Dick Cheney attacking Trump as if he's extraordinarily repulsive and gets this

reaction. They hated Dick Cheney.
I wrote two columns listing all of the scandalous, horrific things they said about him. You know, not seeing brown shirt.
Al Gore called George W. Bush a brown shirt.

So

all of that rebuke, I know they hated him, but

he acted in a human-like fashion, but it was counterproductive. It was self-destructive.
When he,

you know, we've said that before, he made fun of the way Fauci looked or they threw a ball or he did that. And all that did was fuel.

his opponents and then the independent voter, of which I talked to a lot of them, and I would argue with them.

They'd say, Victor, everything he did, especially, you know, I talked to a lot of the donor class in politics. I met some pretty wealthy people in various venues at lectures I gave.

They'd come up, Victor, everything you did, a okay with me, but my wife can't stand him or my husband can't stand him because he, and then it was,

you know, a tweet.

So, and a lot of people say, that's why I voted for him. Well, yes, but you can't get elected with a popular vote, even especially the way the voting is set up when you change the voting laws.

So you have to win by five to six points in the popular vote to win by one

under this mail. And I think DeSantis could probably do that.
But I'm not going to make any predictions. I'm not going to endorse anybody or anybody.
I want them to play out because.

We'll see if Trump exercises more discipline and stops his self-destructive last month and a half of gratuitous

attacks here and there and stuff. And we'll see if DeSantis

performs as well as he governs in the political sphere on the national stage.

All right. Well, Victor, we're at the end of our time.
In fact, we're way beyond it. I haven't forgotten to remind people that they can find you at Victorhanson.com.
That is your website.

And you can sign up for a free subscription and get your name on our mailing list and get your articles, a newsletter sent to you, which always reminds people of what articles have just recently been put up.

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buy at VictorHanson.com. So come join us.
Victor, thanks so much for

bringing us back to reality, as you say, and maybe opening up the

future a little for us to dream again. I hope so.
This is a wonderful country. It's got wonderful people, and we can recover, and I think we will in 2023.
That will be the beginning of the recovery.

All right. Well, thank you very much, and have a good new year.

Thanks, everybody.