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Hello, ladies, and hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor Davis-Hansen is the star and the namesake.

He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hooger Institution and the Wayne Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He hangs his hat at victorhanson.com.

We'll talk more about that later in this episode.

Lot to talk about today.

The first item will be the January 6th committee report and Donald Trump's reaction to that.

And we'll get Victor's thoughts on this important topic and other important topics right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor, you all

ready for Christmas?

Even though people are listening to this after Christmas, you know, the stockings are hung by the chimney with care and all that jazz at

the Hansen Show.

Yes, I was surprised that our president didn't, when he had his Christmas message, I found it

doubly insulting.

I hate to say that at this time of the year, but he called for unity and he said there's too much heated rhetoric.

This is after he had given three speeches calling half the country un-American and semi-fascist.

And then he didn't mention the birth of Christ or the religious centricity, the central matter of Christ.

He didn't say, he didn't even mention it.

It was this, I guess somebody who writes the scripts, they're so secularist or atheist or agnostic, that's taboo.

I don't think I've ever heard a president

address the nation on Christmas, but doesn't reference at all what Christmas is for.

Are you surprised, Victor?

You're surprised that

Joey wishes the world well on December 25th.

It's just amazing, though.

I know he's in his

dementia years, but it's amazing how

he has transmogrified from old Joe Biden, from Scranton, the Catholic, all this phony.

He was always an obnoxious, mean SOB, but now he's an empty vessel.

And it's almost as if Michelle and Barack and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and the squad are coding.

You know, they're typing in every day into his brain cells what he's supposed to do with no pushback.

I guess his wife was always much more far left than everybody had assumed.

So she plays a central role.

You still think, Victor, strategically, even Obama would probably say,

you got to have Jesus in here.

Get this, but we got to, we got to check this box, you know?

You would think, but I don't think there's anybody in the Democratic Party at the top echelons that has any iota of religiosity.

I know the Obamas tried to play on that in 2008 and it boomeranged with Reverend Wright because he was

some ways he was the anti-Christ.

Well, he was the Antichrist.

I mean, when he said,

they won't let me talk, dim Jews won't let me talk to Obama and then goddamn America and then these mysterious missiles that are sniffing out Arabs that the Jews may, all this crazy stuff.

Right.

So it didn't work well, and he dropped that.

Remember, that was very funny because he said he went to every, they said in a, I think, a Chicago Sun interview, they said, are you really that religious?

Meaning, we're left-wing atheists and you're our champion, so we're kind of disturbed.

And he said, Yep, because he was trying to appeal to the working democratic classes, which he did win.

And he said, Yep, I go to church.

And he goes, Really?

And he goes, Every Sunday.

And then when he was asked, Did he sit there?

And I think he did.

When Reverend Wright went on about goddamn America, he kind of went, Well, we didn't go every Sunday.

So it was,

he's another example of somebody that was a chronic prevaricator and he was never called on.

I think

in the Illinois legislature, on many an occasion, he voted present.

No, he was famous as Mr.

President and both sides didn't like that.

He was from the very beginning, he ran for Congress member against, was it Bobby Seal, or who was the ex-Black Panther in Chicago that had the congressional seat?

And he was just wiped out, Obama was.

I think it was in 2002.

And then he made that speech in 2004 where David Alex Orad said you know the country's torn over Iraq you're the first black president candidate I won't go on with I won't finish that with the Joe Biden adjectives but viable and he said you know you got to say there is no red country there is no blue we're going to unite and that was the first and only time he ever said that

and that launched his career

i think he still might have lost.

You know, remember the Republican

had ended up being Alan Keyes, right?

But there was a Republican guy.

I don't remember his name now.

Seemingly very viable.

And he had a lot of people.

You've been talking about his prior Senate race.

Yeah, yeah.

And the Senate.

Yes.

That was in 2006, wasn't it?

Yeah.

And somebody released this guy's divorce records.

Twice, Jack.

They released the divorce records of his primary candidate.

And supposedly, the guy guy had gone to a, I don't know, a peep show in Paris with his wife, and they had a messy divorce, and she complained about it.

And then they leaked it again in the general election, both, and they were under court orders to be sealed.

And he said at one point, this was quite fortuitous.

It helped us out.

That was David Axelrod,

contacts as an ex-journalist turned political pro.

And they had all of these

journalistic menions that had contacts with the the court and access

to people inside the

record keeping, and they did it twice.

It worked twice.

And otherwise, he probably would have lost.

Yeah, it's amazing on such,

right?

He had Tony Resco giving him a lot, you know, basically for

well

below market price, which was a gift, which he didn't play gift tax on, and which the IRS let him go.

And then he had all sorts of liabilities.

But the big problem was that,

and this is why we got Trump, is because neither John McCain or Mitt Romney could appeal to eight to 10, I don't know what you call it, 10 million Reagan Democrats, Pero voters,

working class white Democrats that were so turned off by the

aristocratic golf plane

Republican establishment that they voted for this hardcore leftist, thinking he was going to be a strong union guy and support them.

They didn't realize that he was the one that was going to inaugurate race as the barometer of oppression and discrimination,

not class.

And so they lost out.

And it was Donald Trump that got them back into

voting again.

Actually, Victor, and we'll talk about the January 6th committee in a few minutes, folks, but my wife, who works the polls,

was recounting the

2016 primaries.

And when she came home that night, she said, you're not going to believe what happened.

All these people started showing up.

They were either had never voted or were Democrats, who were trying to vote in the Republican primary for Trump.

It was clear that something was brewing

of disaffected voters,

again, including many democrats i have a kind of a bitter memory i have a bitter memory of those i was not for trump in the primary but by february of 2016 it was clear to me that he was going to be nominated and he was going to win for the reasons you talked about and when he went through those midwest states and he had those rallies you know in late spring and early summer they were still trying to get case each and all this crap

and he started saying things when you listen to him he used that I pointed out so many times, he used that first person possessive pronoun, we, our,

you know, we out here and our, and, you know, as if he was one of these working people, nobody had ever said, you know, you guys, no, farmers are noble, pipe fitters are good.

It was, uh, it was a really brilliant insight to capture empathy with that, that rubric, that demographic.

And nobody had ever, everybody had said, ah, they're, they have the highest suicide rate in the country.

They're written off.

The white white middle class is done for.

Demography is destiny.

Ha, ha ha.

It's the minority vote.

It's going to count.

And he carved out a whole new constituency by appealing to the forgotten American.

And I was writing for the National Review, those essays every week, you know, in July and August.

And gosh, I don't think anybody in National Review,

I think every single person thought it was insane.

Not me.

You didn't.

That's a euphemism insane.

They thought I had gone crazy and toxic, and that's another story.

But

I was reading other essays in the magazine how he couldn't win.

It would be impossible for him to win.

I was reading about George, reading George Will and Bill Crystal all over the Real Clear Politics aggregate.

and David Frum and how the Republican Party just committed suicide.

It's going to be the biggest landslide in history.

And I couldn't see it because, boy, you get eight to 10 million people that have never voted in eight and two presidential elections.

You get them out.

That's quite an achievement.

Yeah,

it truly was.

Okay.

What's another achievement, Victor?

Maybe not a good one.

The January 6th committee, the clock ticking, the time has run out.

It issued its report with all kinds of findings.

Donald Trump responded to it.

Charges of criminality, recommendations that Donald Trump, under the 14th Amendment, not be allowed to serve in public office again,

etc.

Victor,

what are your thoughts, if any, about

not if any, what are your thoughts about the final report produced?

Of course, if you want to talk about the committee in general, and anything, if you have any thoughts on Donald Trump's response to the report.

Well, I mean, it's not going to be remembered, put it this way, for a couple of reasons.

One, it's intrinsically flawed.

And why is it intrinsically flawed?

Because the interrogatories and the testimonies

of the witnesses are now under lock and key, and they've been selectively edited.

And we know who does that the best of any of the Democrats is Adam Schipp, who's a proven liar.

So you, when you see these with the report, and there we have these Trump aides are saying things, we don't know what they've said because they just selected it.

And usually that wouldn't be a problem if you had a bipartisan committee, but to be on the committee, if you're a Republican, you either had to, if I said before, vote to have impeached Trump or you have no political career and you'll be out of office in a few weeks.

And so there was no cross-examination and they set this precedent that the

majority the minority leaders' nominations to committees will not be honored by the speaker.

And that's going to haunt them.

That's going to haunt them very quickly because Adam Schiff and the squad will not be on committees, and they shouldn't be, to remind the Democrats of Pelosi's precedent.

And then they've never released the, and the House Republicans have a report out.

And we know the January 6th people conveniently

ignored all of the communications that pretty much show that Nancy Pelosi was in charge of security and she deliberately or inadvertently or stupidly or adroitly, whatever adverb is necessary, she did not have adequate security.

And we know that they promulgated a lie, including all the way to the president, that Officer Sicknick was killed by MAGA people.

And that the headlines, I went back and looked on, the first headlines in January,

three people killed, two people killed.

And there was only one person killed.

The others died of natural, I mean, they all died of natural causes except one, Ashley Babbitt.

And then the circumstances around her

killing have never really been aired.

We didn't get the entire unredacted report and who testified and what about the officer in question, whose name and identity were deliberately suppressed.

If he had been a white officer, And she had been an African American going through that window unarmed with a military,

superb military record,

and they had suppressed the identity of that officer, that would have caused a huge riot in this country.

And that's very ironic because these people accused of rioting, they did riot, but that would have been nothing compared to what would have happened if the wills were reversed.

I could go on, but that

committee is completely discredited.

And we know it's discredited because the two Republicans who participated are now politically inert.

They talk, you know, grandly that they might, you know, go to cable news or third party, but Liz Cheney is toast.

I don't think she'll ever go back to Wyoming and stay more than a couple of months.

She will be a creature of the Washington

Beltway, and she has no political viability in her home state.

Zero.

Adam Kissinger is done for.

And

that's the legacy of it.

And they're going to have another, I mean, they had a report, they'll have hearings, and we'll find some things out that I think will be shocking.

We're going to find out eventually how many FBI informants were there, as Mr.

Rosenbloom told us when he was, I guess you call it an ambush by Project Veritas when he bragged about

it was nothing.

It was a joke.

It was a carnival.

There was FBI informants everywhere.

Everybody knew that.

So that stuff's going to come out.

And And Christopher Wray was asked directly under oath, and he would not even give

a scintilla of information about how many FBI agents he put out there, which is kind of interesting, Jack, because we know now there were more FBI informants involved in the quote-unquote

kidnapping plot of the Michigan governor than there were actual planners and participants.

So

we'll see.

Victor, I'm a broken record on on the FBI

allocating its resources to things like that and to hunting down parents who complain at school board meetings.

But one of the great threats to America has been Antifa.

It's brutal.

It's organized.

It destroys cities.

And here's the thing that the FBI doesn't seem to be allocating resources to.

No, they're completely exempt, and they've even threatened when I think Elon Musk took some of them off Twitter.

They threatened to go trash Teslas.

The FBI didn't care.

The FBI doesn't exist anymore, Jack.

There was an FBI once.

This is not the FBI.

This is a group of rogue agents that hired Twitter as a subsidiary to spy, suppress, warp public expression, not just on Twitter.

We're going to learn very quickly it goes to Google and Facebook and Apple and warped the news and paid these people as contractors, as they did Christopher Steele, because if they had done it themselves, they would be in jail in violations of the First

Amendment.

And there's nothing they're not right.

There's nothing they won't do.

I mean,

you want to find out, you get a subpoena that they have to turn over phone records, they'll wipe them clean.

You want the text of stroke and page, the full text to find out exactly how much prejudicial activity they were involved in during the mueller investment they will get rid of it it will disappear you want to get a FISA a series of FISA writs to spy on Americans and they will submit verbatim cut and paste passages out of the steel dossier which at the time they knew were false and you want to

if that's not enough you want to doctor a document and forge it, alter it, they will do that as Kevin Kleinsmith did.

If you want to go a little further and you want to declare school parents that are worried about critical waste theory, that a potential terrorist, they should be on a watch list and you should go surveillant, they will be willing to do that.

Ashley Babbitt leaves her.

diary in an apartment.

People, a couple of grifters find it, want a profit for them.

They will spend their time going after it and they will take James O'Keefe at three in the morning and put him out in his underwear in the hall, humiliate him, and never charge him with anything.

They've never charged John Eastman with anything.

They just confronted him at a restaurant and took his cell phone, and they've never charged him with anything.

They've never, Peter Navarro was in contempt of Congress.

They stopped him at an airport and put, you know, cuffs on his legs.

And he was guilty.

He was as guilty, as innocent as was Eric Holder when he said, I'm not going to appear for Congress.

And they cited him in contempt of Congress.

Had the FBI gone after Eric Holder, they would have been fired as racist.

So, and I could go on, but we, you know,

they've changed two elections.

In 2016, they ran with the,

they paid a foreign agent to involve himself, which was a felony, in a campaign.

Christopher Steele, in 2020, they deliberately sat on a laptop and they allowed people with contacts with the FBI, the 50 so-called investigative intelligence former operatives, to sign a letter which the FBI knew was false.

And yet they went to Twitter and said to Twitter, these guys are accurate.

And anybody who tries to say that this thing that we have, that we know is authentic, says

if anybody tries to say it's authentic, we want them censored on social media.

So when you get, and then, you know,

Sammy and I talked about the last four directors, three of them have lied or misled Congress under oath.

And

I think Christopher Reyes got pretty close to it.

Then we get the Mar-Lago performance art raid, where they leaked that there were nuclear codes and nuclear secrets, and now they've leaked that that's not true.

So you put it all together, and there's nothing that they're not incapable of, and they should be broken up.

The first thing that Christopher Reyes should meet is a

fire notice that he's dismissed the moment Biden is out of office.

They should fire him.

They should break up the FBI and they should parcel it out to other agencies.

And they should never, ever again

give that much power to a Washington Investigative Bureau.

It's just a prescription.

And the omnimus bill, $11.

Yeah, $11 billion as a reward for the FBI.

$375 million for a new headquarters.

And they shouldn't, in Maryland or Virginia.

They shouldn't have that headquarters.

As I said earlier with Sarah, it should be built in Salt Lake City.

Get it away from Washington.

Victor.

Anyway, if you did that, you wouldn't have Andrew McCabe investigating Hillary Clinton while his wife is running nearby for Virginia state office, getting money from the Clintons, and then being told there's...

absolutely no conflict of interest while you're investigating the Clintons who are channeling money to his wife while while she's running for office.

I think we are, we delude ourselves sometimes thinking, and I know this doesn't fit neatly into a timeline, but the FBI institutionally pushing back because Trump was

harming the reputation of this institution.

We're not going to let this happen, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But we've seen

quoting directly, Andrew's not going to let that happen.

That was Peter Strzoks then about McCabe, you remember, to Lisa.

Well, true, but

our major institutions, the Academy, we see problems.

Me as a Roman Catholic, like what the hell's happening in the Catholic Church?

You think these things are

more

reactions in real time, more proximate to us now.

But they really represent rot that has been going on for quite a long time.

By the way, I'm not attacking my church in this regard, but there are problems.

And I think you look back, these things are happening.

The causes are from 70 years ago you look at the academy bill buckley was writing god a man at yale in 1950 you know so this stuff has been percolating and brewing for ages so it's just not you know something was going on the fbi before 2016 that you would have so many people so ideological that's a really good point because we have so many people that we're close with that keep writing that this was uh

a pathology among the Washington elite, the McCabes of the world, the Muellers of the world, the James Bakers of the world, the Lisa Pages of the world,

the James Company.

Where'd they come from?

They came up from the ranks, many of them.

And

what are they doing now?

There's a few whistleblowers, and they're all closing ranks, and they're ostracizing them, and they're demonizing them, and some of them are under suspension without pay.

So there's something institutionalized within the FBI.

There's an arrogance, there's a hubris, whatever it is, it is channeling people.

It is warping them, grooming them, forming them so that when they get into positions of power, they start to appear in the news doing things like interact.

I mean, the people in Twitter are not the director that were dealing with Twitter, whether they were retired and working for Twitter or they were the 80 or some agents that were scanning social.

They were not the top people.

They were willingly doing it.

And if you look at their communications, they're full of hubris and arrogance.

So something's wrong there.

And if we don't stop it,

we're going to be prisoners of these people.

And I think the right has to give up this idea that we on the conservative side always support intelligence and military

and surveillance because they're supposedly hyper-patriotic.

No, these people are revolutionaries.

They really are.

And they're sort of like a

people's FBI.

And

it's scary.

It's a people's in the communist sense of People's Democratic Republic of

People's Military and a People's CIA and a People's FBI and a People's DOJ.

And they're woke and they're very dangerous.

And you should be very careful of them.

Wait till we get the 87,000 IRS agents and the People's IRS.

I can tell you one thing, two miles from Ajax, there is about 5,000 000 people every sunday and they have one of the biggest marts in california where everything is for sale i'm not talking about plants and used clothes i'm talking about things right off the shelf if i want to get a brand new shovel or i want to get a

gas blower whatever i can go down there and get a new one don't ask me where they come from but

There is millions of dollars that change hands.

And I can guarantee you that the new IRS or the state franchise board is not going to go after that to see whether they're paying sales tax or not, or whether those people who are selling because they're a protected demographic, they will go after the person listening to this who is a small business person or professional who maybe deducted one quarter of his office while he had an office at the plant or something.

And they're going to go after and harass and harass you.

They're not going to go after the wealthy.

They're not going to go after the poor.

They're going to go after the upper middle class that they despise.

Victor, I don't know how anyone's going to have any money to spend $600 or not after this $1.7 trillion omnibus bill has been approved by Congress.

And I'd like to get your thoughts on this monstrosity right after these important messages.

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We're back with Victor Davis Hansen Show.

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So, okay, Victor,

this bill, this massive,

massive bill.

Well, I got really angry.

I know everybody is beating up on Mitch McConnell, but he said something that was so self-incriminatory and damning.

He said, well, what were we supposed to do?

You only had two choices.

You either vote for this bill or you shut down the government and the military.

That's not true.

You could have had a continuing resolution and go over in January.

So they had a...

a bill that no one read 4,000 pages that was concocted together very quickly.

They voted voted on it at night during the holiday season in a lame duck Congress.

And Republicans went along with that.

And there's, you know, Rand Paul showed of the 1.7 trillion, 400, 500 billion was just worthless.

I mentioned the FBI, but I mean, they gave money to sanctuary cities to deliberately violate federal law.

And they gave money to Middle Eastern countries to work on their border security, where we have 5 million illegal entries back and forth, or whatever you want to call entries, since Biden took office.

So it wasn't just neutral.

It wasn't just, I guess, negligent and not addressing

inflation, gas prices, energy crisis, border crisis, crime crisis.

There was no money for any of that.

But it actually rewarded stuff that was adding to that problem.

First, by its inflationary, we're $31 trillion in debt.

Interest rates are up to 4.5.

We're going to pay $450 billion in interest.

We don't have the money, Jack.

And so we're going to run a 1.7, almost the amount of this bill, and there's going to be others, is the amount of money they're going to have to print because they don't have revenues for it.

And they're getting 300 to 500 billion year after year in additional revenues.

because of tax increases.

Remember when the Republicans, and I think that lost them the 2018 congressional elections, when they eliminated the state and local tax deduction from states like New York and California, that just poured in the money

when you couldn't write off your state taxes.

And then in addition to that, when Joe Biden raised the rates, the income tax rates on individual income, household income.

So they got a huge surge.

They've had more money than they ever had, and yet they're spending at double that rate.

And so it's just a joke.

These people are just, it's just like somebody with a credit card who goes out and he buys, you know, he buys crazy things.

He buys his nephew this and his cousin this.

They don't need it.

He gets a seventh cell phone.

He gets three Apple watches.

And it's all on credit.

It's just insane that the government would do this and sneak it through.

And that Republicans would participate in this.

And more on McConnell, Victor.

Let's, for whatever reason, let's say the bill had to pass.

We had to have this omnibus.

Why didn't McConnell at least try?

I don't know what he got out of it, what he got out of it and saying he is allegedly a conservative representing certain things we believe in.

I think I know what he got out of it because if he had gotten a continuing resolution, which they could have had, they could have funded the government up till January.

And the Democrats would have had to go along with it.

I mean, then we're going to vote to shut down the government.

So they could have done that.

And then the House was going to flip in January.

And it was going to be, it wasn't just that there were seven or eight Republican edge, but a lot of these races, there were MAGA people in there, in the House, at least.

And he was scared stiff that they were going to look at this bill item by item and hold it up.

And then the Republican Party would be called obstructionist or whatever, and it wouldn't be considered sober judicious.

And remember about McConnell, he's at a point in his career that he is obsessed with Donald Trump.

Maybe it's justified, maybe it's not.

He hates him.

He hates everything about him.

And Mitch McConnell

would rather be,

I think this is incontestable.

He would rather be minority Senate leader than have the Republicans win the Senate and he not be Senate majority leader.

That's clear.

And that's why he didn't fund Blake Masters.

That's why he didn't fund, that's why he funded Lisa Murkowski in that Civil War and in Alaska.

So that's what he is.

And he's, you know,

I don't, I mean, he did one great thing, and that is he saved the Supreme Court by his legislative gymnastics.

He was a master at that, and everybody owes him a debt of gratitude.

But after that, his leadership has been ossified, calcified, sclerotic.

It's just not, it's not,

even if it was politically neutral, it was inert.

And

it's not his age.

I mean, look at Nancy Pelosi.

She's 82, and she did a lot of damage in her 80s and late 70s.

And another thing is, just to finish this discussion on the bill, we're going to build a San Francisco federal multi-million dollar building to Nancy Pelosi.

She's going to be remembered for three things.

One, she tore up the State of the Union address on national TV.

No one ever did that.

No one will ever do it again.

Number two,

as Speaker of the House, she set a new rule in the Congress that she could veto any appointment from the House minority leader.

And she will see that boomerang on immediately in January.

She did that.

And she, as Speaker of the House, she was in charge of capital security.

And we're going to learn that she either deliberately or with a wink and the nod forgot to get security on January 6th.

Right.

And yet we're going to honor her with a building in her name, just a joke.

Her daughter's making a documentary of her.

It's on TV.

Nobody's done more damage to this country than she has.

Wow.

And profited from her position.

They're worth a couple of hundred million dollars.

How can you do that when you're in politics?

Basically, every appropriations bill, every regulatory statute, every financial regulation, her husband found out about it in advance, didn't he?

And he made the necessary adjustments.

How else are the real estate acquisitions?

How do you go from, I mean, nobody's been more adroit at that?

than the late, except the late Harry Reid.

Harry Reid, right?

Yeah, he became a multi, he and his family became multi-millionaires by being a week, a month ahead of the actual policy announcement, and they invested accordingly in Nevada.

Just to wrap this up,

I used to be the congressional reporter for national review way back 30 years ago.

And the process at the time, since we're talking about this, you know, federal spending, was

a

the appropriations committee had subcommittees for labor, HHS, et cetera.

They would meet, they would produce produce a bill, the full committee would do its work, it would go to the full House, Senate would do the same thing.

It would have to be based on a separate process.

That was the appropriations process, but it was supposed to meet an authorization process.

The defense, the Armed Services Committee would produce, would author...

produce an authorization bill for spending.

And these things would percolate, each one separately.

And the president president would sign or veto and then would go back, et cetera.

And so much of

it's all gone.

It's all gone.

But through that process, the spending was exposed at various levels over so much time.

And now it's for the money.

It reminds me of the Roman Senate in the time of Tiberius or Nero.

You know what I mean?

It's the same thing.

It's a joke.

It really is.

And it's tragic.

But

there's always a correction, and there is a correction.

And that means if you're going to be 123% of GDP,

your debt,

and the interest rates right now are 4.5 on federal bond holding,

and we know what's going to happen because everybody thinks the recession is over.

No, it's just getting started.

And when these interest rates go up to on federal debt 5.5% or 6%,

that 31 trillion is going to go up to, you know, it's going to get up to 600, 700

billion.

Eventually, and in about three years, it's going to be 25% of the budget.

And you're either going to have to go back to the, you know, something like, as I said earlier,

the Simpson-Bowles formula of 2010 to reduce the debt, which by the way, had we adopted, as I said earlier, we would have been right now owing $10 trillion, not $31.

But you're going to have to do something, or you're going to have to default on the debt.

And we talked about that with Sammy, all the various machinations that would happen if you confiscated 401s and gave somebody Social Security credit for it, or you just told the bondholders who make a certain income,

sorry, you made a bad investment, just like Wall Street.

We're not going to honor it.

Or you just do the Weimar Republic route of inflating your way out of it.

Or you keep borrowing and borrowing and borrowing and borrowing, and then you're just taxing people to pay interest to people who have bonds.

And you know how that's going to work.

There's going to be a typical Democratic demagogue who said, they have so much money.

They have more money than we all do.

Why do we give them interest on their bonds?

Just cancel it.

Just like this student debt.

Yeah.

So that was what was the scariest thing about the whole lockdown, that Anthony Fauci essentially violated or had the ability given to him to violate or to break contracts between a landlord and lessee and the government and student loans because he just said it's COVID.

It's COVID.

It's COVID.

You've got to lock down everything and you've got to, I give authorize the government to do this and this.

And he did.

That's another person, you know, not only are we going to learn about January 6th, but if you watch Anthony Fauci lately, he looks like a very worried person.

He came out the other day, this week, and said that he got back on the science.

I represent science.

Did you see that?

Science.

Science.

And I thought, what is the science that you represent when you told us that the vaccinations would protect all of us at 96% from being infected or being infectious?

or that no mask, one mask, two masks were optimum, or natural immunity really was subpar.

And then you had said it was, and the Wuhan lab, he's still insisting, remember, that the Wuhan lab was not the source of this pathogen.

And we're going to learn as soon as he's gone and as soon as the house starts investigating it, we're going to learn not only was the Wuhan lab the source of it,

and not only was the People's Liberation Army in control of the lab, but we're going to finally learn, I think, that this type of research was ultimately under the control of the Chinese military for bioweapon purposes.

It doesn't mean it was a bioweapon.

It doesn't mean that they did it deliberately, but the type of accelerated research led to this weird engineered virus.

And he's going to look really stupid because he channeled money to it, and he knows he did.

And they're going to, I mean, he's, he really, if you just

came from Mars, Jack, and you studied the situation and you didn't know about his history during the AIDS crisis and the blue-red dichotomy over quarantines and COVID policies, and that Trump Biden, get rid of all that and just look at the evidence.

It's really frightening.

You come back to the idea that the United States funded gain of function research for coronaviruses and gave the money to the Echo Health people

who were beneficiaries of other federal largesse, and they channeled it to researchers at Wuhan, and a engineered coronavirus broke out.

And once it broke out, the Chinese government suppressed information and allowed travel to Europe and the United States of infected people, but not out of Wuhan.

They shut down all travel out of Wuhan.

And for 11 days, these people were spreading it all around the world.

And that's the truth.

And that is a damning indictment of Anthony Fauci.

Yeah.

Victor, he'll go to his grave, I think, like Alger Hiss and others, lying the whole way and without a scintilla of shame.

And he will be iconic.

You still meet old fossilized liberals who claim that Alger Hiss was innocent.

You'll see people still have their Anthony Fauci bobble toy

miniature statue in their window.

You know, they still will.

Still, the idiots who wear Che Guevara t-shirts.

Same thing.

Hey, Victor, let's, you were talking about debt, and debt has a color in culture, and that color is red.

And red is a color that has been abused for ideological and political purposes.

And we're going to talk about that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

So, Victor, you know that right after you, one of my

favorite people in the world and old, old friend is Dan Mahoney, professor or emeritus at Assumption University.

And Dan even sat in one of our podcasts a long time ago to talk to you about the dying citizen.

So, Dan has a great piece up on the American mind,

which is a website

produced by the good folks at the Claremont Institute.

And it's called The New Reds.

And Dan goes through, you know,

for what was, for all of us, was kind of an obvious history.

Red, that was the color of

the French Revolution.

It's the color of the communists.

We call fellow travelers pinkos, right?

Which is a variation variation of the color red.

But something

happened in America

in the year 2000 that this color, which was

so associated with the left, all of a sudden became associated with

conservatism.

So according to Dan, this piece, again, it's called The New Reds.

It's up on

the American Mind website.

Let me just read one quick little paragraph paragraph here.

The political meaning of red was once loud and clear, no more, at least in the United States.

A unilateral decision was made by the national television networks in the contentious presidential year of 2000 to have red represent the Republican Party and blue the Democratic one.

One prominent network television executive justified this arbitrary and counterintuitive decision by pointing out that the Republican Party begins with the letter R, hardly a compelling reason for reversing political symbolism deeply rooted in the political experience of modern man since the late 18th century.

As a result, American conservatives are now the new Reds, a change of language and symbolism that is truly startling if anyone took the time to think about it.

Victor, I think this is a simple case.

that Dan makes,

kind of an obvious case, but one not spoken about much and one that that I think has cultural consequences.

Do you have any thoughts on this?

I shared this article with you.

You have anything you want to say?

Well,

he was right.

I mean, traditionally, the Republicans were blue, and that came way back in the 19th century because of their blue uniforms in the Civil War.

So when you had earlier sketches and you wanted to show the dichotomies, vis-a-vis the Mason-Dixon line, you had the blue areas, and that was the blue.

And then you had the gray areas of the Democrat.

You had the old blue, remember the blue-gray football game?

Blue was a Republican color.

And then, as he points out, in 2000,

they came up with this bogus idea of red, Republican.

But I mean, they didn't say blue, what?

What does B stand for?

So we know that that wasn't symmetrical.

And

I think they wanted to

demonize Republicans as the, you know, the flag of revolution, red.

That was very clear they did that.

And it's kind of, it was kind of dormant.

And then when Trump came in, they've really had the idea of red and insurrection in January 6th.

And

it reinforces that image.

But they don't use it in Europe.

I mean,

the red party in Europe with the red flags are commies.

And that's pretty clear.

Red means proudly so the people who embrace the color of revolution.

But

say Republicans are red, you could just say, well, no, red's already taken.

It stands for revolution or whatever.

And I think originally the idea of red and revolution came from blood, you know, that they were willing to shed blood for a cause.

But blue was a Republican color.

It always had been.

And when it was tied to the Civil War, and it's not anymore for the last 22 years.

Yeah.

Thanks, Victor.

Yeah, there's a little self-embracing that's gone on now.

I don't know how, you know, the bell here has been rung, how it can be unrung, but

so be it.

We have one other topic to talk about in the remaining time.

And by the way, folks who are listening, if you're hearing a noise in the background, again, it's Christmas Eve and there's people in the Fowler house, so

we got to deal with it.

There is a new issue of Strategica out.

So Strategica is the online journal at the Hoover Institution that Victor oversees.

We'll call him the kind of editor-at-large

for this very worthwhile publication.

I think everyone who's listening to this program should visit it.

Strategica.

It's

episode, excuse me, not episode, issue number 82.

And Victor, it's about tactical nuclear weapons and more.

It's about,

well, here's the lead piece.

So there's always a lead piece in the Strategica articles that others use as a jumping-off point, comment on it, or use it

for related topics.

And this is by

Thomas Karako.

I may have mispronounced his name.

You will correct me, Victor, if I'm wrong.

And it's titled Deterrence, Air Defense, and Munitions Production in a New Missile Age.

So we're in a new missile age.

Victor,

what's the purpose of this new

issue of Strategica?

Well, it grew out of obviously Ukraine, and I was worried that there were people in the government that each time

Putin was threatening the use of tactical nuclear weapons, and sometimes they weren't tactical.

There were members, remember in the Duma, the Russian legislature that were sounding off about sending a missile into London and then sending a missile into the West Coast, et cetera, et cetera.

And everybody everybody had been arguing they wouldn't do it because there's no reason to do it.

So I thought, well, maybe we should find out what was the history of nuclear,

the discussions of

tactical nuclear weapons usage.

And

are they still viable on the battlefield?

Are they more viable?

And so we always have a background or a long essay.

So we had Thomas Carrico, and he's with the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic International Studies.

I think you could say that he's the world's expert on that.

And in that long essay, he points out that the days of the Scud missiles are over.

The sophistication in guidance and payload and hypersonic speeds and mobile platforms mean that

along with drones, they're saturating.

They're just saturating the skies and they're much cheaper.

So it's sort of like a musket versus a carbine or a machine gun.

And so you have the ability just to blanket an entire country with cheap missiles that can be pretty much produced ad infinitum.

And so that's what's happening in Ukraine.

And it makes the ability to shoot them down much more costly because the guidance system in an anti-ballistic or an anti-rocket ballistic missile is very expensive.

And so, and there, and you don't get 100%

accuracy.

So, when these swarms of missiles come in and you want to shoot them down, as the Israelis have discovered, to get a 95 or 94 percent hit record, you spend hundreds of millions of dollars.

And you can't do it forever.

So, we're in a new stage, is what he's saying.

And throughout history, you have the predominance of the offensive.

You know, you have catapults that can knock down old stone walls and then you get big stone walls with mud brick or dirt inside and the catapult doesn't work and then you get the the

era of the defensive keep or castle and then gunpowder comes in and back back and forth well right now

we're in the the phase of the offensive missile because not because they're bigger than ever and they have more nuclear payload than ever, but because there's thousands of them and you can miniaturize tactical nuclear weapons.

So he could send in, I don't know, 500 missiles, and we wouldn't know which one is nuclear and which isn't.

And so, and what would be the purpose?

And then the accompanying by Jacob Gregel and

Bob Kaufman discuss

whether this would be a viable strategy or not to have a nuclear weapon.

And I think they kind of agree that, first of all, it would be counterproductive in the long run, but that would depend on whether he would be foolish enough to take out, say, Kiev with a tactical nuclear weapon or take out Chernobyl vis-a-vis

going into a battlefield or an empty area and demonstrating that he's capable of anything.

And if he were to do that, I think while Bob Kaufman is a little bit more

pessimistic that he could do that and he could find some strategic advantage than Gregel is, but nevertheless, it would be along the lines, see, I broke the barrier.

I'm the first person since Hiroshima in a wartime environment to let off a nuclear weapon, which means I'm capable of everything and I'm crazy.

And so I want this war stopped on my terms.

And then what would be the reaction?

Would we send these billion-dollar Patriot, I think we have 90 of them, and they have $1 million missiles.

We've given one of these batteries with, I don't know how many missiles, Patriot missiles, they're very sophisticated since their first appearance in the First Gulf War, but

would you have to build them?

And then I think all of them, all three essays come to the agreement that while the United States has been worried about counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan and light footprint and reforming the Marines to make it more mobile, that they completely lost the ball.

What was going on with hypersonic missiles in Russia and these swarm batteries coming out of China, and they re-engineered that drone, remember, that during the Obama administration crashed and

crashed in Iran.

And the result is that we're way behind the eight ball.

We should be making tens of thousands of these light missiles and more missile batteries batteries and more drones.

Otherwise, as Ukraine has shown us,

we're in big trouble.

Ukraine is sort of the 1936, 37,

38 Spanish Civil War, where it was a laboratory for World War II.

And, you know, they were sitting in the stuk of

dive bombers, a Mark I tank,

and they just...

They tried to discover what would work and what would not.

And Germany and Italy learned a great deal, as did Russia from it.

And we're all learning from this laboratory.

It's killing 250,000 civilians and soldiers.

Victor, this sounds all offensive.

And then it means like, well,

how the hell could this be prevented?

I mean, is there even a thought of like an SDI?

Would it matter anymore?

Not until we get to a new phase.

So

everybody has to remember this about weaponry, that you have a knight and he's protected

from sword thrust and javelin thrust and a lot of arrows.

And then you get a crossbow that can go through his armor.

And then you make him have heavier armor and he's immune.

Nothing can hurt him.

And then you get the arbacus

and you get primitive musketry and that can penetrate him.

And then you have a, I don't know, 400-year reign of the superiority of bullets.

And then you get Kevlar and heavy plates.

And we're getting back to the idea that you've got some protection.

And back and forth, back and forth.

Well, right now, we're into a phase, as I said, where because of the sophisticated guidance system, these aren't Scud missiles anymore.

They're very, very accurate, and they can be very, very small.

And they can still carry a lot of

explosive, and you can't stop them, along with drones who can be very slow, but go at very high altitudes, but especially they can move in a way a missile can't, go around corners, go through windows,

hover in one place.

And

we're not able to offer defenses.

Or if we are able to offer defenses,

the item is so expensive vis-a-vis the offensive missile, the defensive, it's not worth it.

You couldn't knock them all down.

It would cost a fortune.

So then you would have, and you can see where we're going with this.

So somebody in the Pentagon is on the ground in Ukraine and Ukraine's infrastructure is being systematically destroyed by these drones and missiles.

And he's saying,

okay,

there's only one strategy.

We can't knock them down.

You've got one Patriot battery, but it's $100, it's a million dollars for every launch.

So you've got to go to the source.

Where are they coming from?

Where are the launching areas?

And once you get into that, you're into attacking Russia on Mother Russian soil.

And that's going to be very scary.

But

these three essays discuss some of this, but they also discuss if

Putin himself runs out of some of these missiles, and he seems to have fewer missiles than before, seems to be buying things from North Korea and Iran,

then maybe he would want to go, you you know, trump that with a display of a tactical nuclear weapon.

But as they point out, you don't need to do that yet, as long as you have the wherewithal to blanket the skies of Ukraine with missiles.

I think this is very important because we're going to talk about Zelensky.

And when he came and addressed our Congress,

it was kind of strange.

I mean, Tucker Carlson went after him, and some of the right did.

And then Michael Beschlop, that now discredited presidential history.

I I don't know what's happened to him, but he used to be somewhat sober and judicious, left-wing, but within the parameters of credibility.

He just said, we need the names of every

Republican legislature or congressman that didn't stand up and give him an applause.

That was sort of right out of Stalin's addresses.

But my point is that when Zelensky came here, he asked for, you know,

even though we're running, as I said, a 1.7 trillion annual deficit, 31 trillion, he asked for a lot of money, and we gave him, I think it's going to get over now the 64 and the 30, it's well over 100 billion that's going to Zelensky.

But he implied that wasn't enough.

So, given the destruction of the infrastructure and they've lost 100,000 dead, and his population is only

about a third, maybe a fourth of what Russia's population is.

He's going to be

a complete dependent on the United States' goodwill.

And

I don't know what he wants, but he apparently wants more and more of these patriot batteries.

And some of the, I won't go into individual authors, some of the authors are kind of criticizing us in this strategic issue, saying we should have built more of them and had more research so they were cheaper, but we also very early on, Thomas Cockero says that we should have very early on been giving them more as a deterrent.

I don't know, but I could say that somebody named somebody who was president at some time had a hot mic exchange when he said to the president of Russia, tell Vladimir if he gives me more space, this is my last election,

in exchange, I will be flexible on missile defense, meaning I will pull the rug from the Czech Republic and Poland so they will not have missile defense capability.

And of course, both sides of that bargain were kept.

Does his name rhyme with Blow Obama?

Victor, I believe.

Oh, Biden, I say.

I guess both of them were involved.

Oh, Biden, the great Irishman from Kenya.

Victor, did you, you, I think you discussed at length

Zelensky and his visit in America with Sammy, the great Sammy Wink on one of the other podcasts, if I'm correct on that, correct?

Yes.

We talked about it.

Okay.

So I encourage our listeners to, I'm sure they do anyway, but find that particular podcast and

where Victor delves more into

this.

So that said, that's about nearly all the time

we have today.

We thank our listeners, no matter what platform they're on.

And those who do take in this show via Apple Podcasts or iTunes have the ability to rate it zero to five stars.

Still, again, five stars, nearly five-star average rating, 4.9 something.

And some people leave comments.

They also leave comments on Victor's website, which are terrific.

On the piece you mentioned, Victor, I know you talked about it with Sammy on the 10 steps to save America.

A ton of comments there, very worth looking at.

Anyway, on

Apple podcasts, we have a few, and here's one from

Ernstigator.

And it's titled Excellent Podcast for Struggling Academics Like Me.

Love Victor's show.

I appreciate the wit, wisdom, and sheer intelligence Victor brings to examining current events.

I especially appreciate how Victor has helped me better understand the world of academia.

I came to academia after 30 plus years in business, leaving as a CEO.

Academia made no sense to me.

I'm still curious how it stays alive.

Thank you, Victor, for shining the light.

Simply the best, Ernst de Gator.

Thank you, Ernst de Gator, and everyone else who does leave comments.

I read them.

I know Victor and Sammy read them too.

Really appreciate it.

Victor, again, this is Christmas Eve.

We're recording.

I hope that you were not a naughty boy this year, that you were nice.

I think whoever is the opposite of Santa has saddled you with long COVID and

at least two cases.

I had three.

Yeah, I've had three acute cases.

I just got over the third one two weeks ago, but

it was a pansy COVID.

I mean,

when you take take the test,

the antigen, you know, you get that strong bar where you don't want to see it.

Right.

That bar with me looked like it was gray rather than solid.

So I was convinced that it wasn't until I went on the internet and decided I was told that if you have any bar at all, you have it.

But maybe

the fact that it was faded reflected the fact I had long COVID.

So I have some antibodies.

But I'm getting, so anyway, I strangled that third case as I use that term.

And and I am still going to try to be back to normal in 2023 is my goal.

You got to be.

You got a book to finish, right?

Yes, I am way behind on a book, but I'm going to finish it nonetheless.

Okay.

Well, Victor, I hope Santa leaves you nice toys and goodies in your stocking.

The same for the great Mrs.

Hansen.

And thanks to our listeners.

I know this is coming after Christmas, but I hope you had a merry one.

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

Bye-bye.

Thank you everybody for listening.

Have a wonderful holiday.

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