McCarthy, Trump, and Musk: All Contested

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Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

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honor of sitting in this seat.

And I do know I have the honor of it.

Hey, Victor, lots political and lots cultural and lots academic happening.

So one of the more pressing things is

the

fate of Kevin McCarthy as the potential speaker.

We have Donald Trump's playing cards.

Those are two big political stories that we'll get your take on right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

So, Victor, hope you're well, by the way.

Week before Christmas, I don't assume there's no snow in Selma, but hopefully up in the mountains.

Very foggy and cold, no snow.

Okay.

Kevin McCarthy

today on Sunday has restated what everyone I think knows who's been following this story: that the handful of GOP members who are opposing his speakership are holding firm, are not budging.

And that vote for speaker should be in two weeks or so, January 3rd.

It

doesn't look good.

We've talked about this before, Victor.

any thoughts i i don't know what the game plan is i guess these holdouts five six seven that have the ability to deny him the speakership

they're going to draw it out and then they don't have an alternative candidate it's not like they're they have a slate this candidate or that candidate versus mccarthy i guess the the idea is that they're going to hold the whole speakership process hostage, and then they're going to say to McCarthy,

we don't know who's going to be, but you're not.

And so sit down with us and tell me which people you would like in your place, and we'll pick one and then we'll vote, and everybody will vote for us.

Or they're going to give him a set of demands that he has to pursue.

The problem is that

they're a very small number.

And so the majority of people are behind McCarthy, the vast majority.

And so at some point,

that vast majority is going to say,

you destroyed our thin majority.

And you're a nihilist and you don't have any ability to get another person.

And so, or they're going to have to go, somebody, either side is going to have to go to the Democrat.

If they do that and they ask for four or five so-called blue dog votes from Democrats, it's going to be a disaster because they've mortgaged their future.

And the sad thing about this is, although they should have won 30 to 40 seats, they did take the House and they did lose the presidency and they did lose the Senate twice.

And they gained seats in 2020 when they lost the presidency

and they took the House.

So in some sense, whether you like it or not, McCarthy has a much better record electorally than Mitch McConnell does.

And notice that nobody's doing this in the Senate as for his minority leadership position.

So at this point,

yes, I understand that they have legitimate grievances, maybe,

but we're so bad off in this country that we've got to go with

what's reasonable.

And

Kevin McCarthy, I know a lot of people don't like him and they think he's a rhino.

He's not a rhino.

You can make the argument, I think the argument that his critics make is he's ineffective,

i.e., he's not a Devin Nunes.

And I don't want to beat this drum too much,

but

had Devin Nunes

been the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, which he would be right now, he would be in

a very good position.

That's all I'm going to say.

He's a very close friend of Kevin McCarthy.

He's very loyal, but he's the type of fighter that understands a left-wing mind that would have been essential right now.

But I'm for them.

Not that I matter, but I think at this late day, all they're doing is contrasting the unity and the party discipline under Pelosi,

and they don't have that in the House.

They don't have the ability to unite.

Nancy Pelosi wrecked the country with six or seven vote majority in the House.

And the Democrat, Republicans, apparently, can't save the country with the same margin.

Yeah, that's

an important point about the psychology of the two parties.

Well, Victor, let's get a little more of your psychological assessment.

And

this is of Donald Trump and

the news from not only the news, but the activity from this past week.

So the president, the former president, announced, major announcement, and it turned out

he was promoting a digital playing card series that

dozens

of cards, not real cards like baseball cards, but digital of the president in various poses.

It was selling for $99 a set, a limited number.

They all sold out within a day,

netting

the president or whomever was behind it over $4 million.

Lots of people find this

exasperating, another straw on a camel's back.

Maybe it's broken it for some people.

Let me just read this

piece from

the Washington Examiner.

So

one of the people who find this exasperating is, of all, Steve Bannon, one of the Donald Trump's most loyal warriors.

And here's a piece.

Let me just read this quickly, Victor, and then get your thoughts, not only on this particular thing, but then also more broadly about former presidents cashing in on their presidency.

Okay, okay, I can't do this anymore.

And exasperated Bannon said, this is on his podcast, while playing a clip of Trump promoting the digital cards on his war room show.

He's one of the greatest presidents in history, but I've got to tell you, whoever, what business partner and anybody in the comms team, anybody at Mar-a-Lago, and I love the folks down there, but we're at war.

They ought to be fired today.

Bannon recoiled alongside former Trump administration deputy assistant to the president Sebastian Gorka.

Can you imagine Gorka criticizing Trump and former Trump campaign advisor Stephen Cortez?

Some of their unease stemmed from a video Trump cut of promoting the NFTs.

Those are the cards.

I saw that.

I saw that.

The laser coming out of his eye.

Yeah.

In the promotional video, Trump used that he was, quote, hopefully your favorite president of all time, better than Lincoln, better than Washington, end quote, never should have happened.

This is now

Gorka speaking.

I mean, look, it's fun.

It's hyperbolic, but whoever wrote that pitch should be fired and should never be involved.

I don't want them making the presidential napkins at Mar-a-Lago.

Victor, okay,

fire the consultant.

But at some point, Donald Trump said, yeah, let's do this.

So

I look at what his opponents say.

And here's what's happening.

They are shifting their animus, their invective, their smears toward Ron DeSantis right now.

That's who they're going after.

And they have outsourced their hatred of Donald Trump to the legal system.

So gradually,

Donald Trump is not going to be the obsession of the left anymore because A, they think that DeSantis is a much more formidable candidate in the long run and may have a chance to get the nomination.

And B, they feel that if somebody's digging their own grave, don't interrupt them.

And so they're not going to go after Donald Trump.

They're going to let Merrick Garland do it.

They're going to go out.

They've gone after his company for taxes.

They're going to go out.

They've got the special prosecutor who's got Obama ties.

They're going to trump up something with Mar-Lago.

So that's what they feel.

And that tells you that they don't feel any longer that Donald Trump is the existential threat that he was.

And why do they feel that way?

And I wrote a call: Does Trump really want to be president?

And the answer is, I don't know.

He's going to be 78.

Maybe that's the reason.

But if you really want to go to be president, you don't attack on the eve of the midterms Ron DeSantis and alienate his supporters.

You don't tell people with a wink and nod you're going to run because that'll just get people out on the left in some districts.

to vote who might otherwise not have.

You don't go after Glenn Yonkin and make fun of his name as if it's Chinese.

You don't make a racialist attack on Mitch McConnell's wife.

You don't bring in Nick Fuentez and Kenya West

into Mar-Lago.

You don't speculate publicly about changing the laws or maybe even the Constitution.

Maybe it was in fun, maybe it was this kind of a riff.

But you don't do that as if you can replay the 2020 election.

And you certainly don't make a existential announcement that you're going to have a major policy.

And then it's this

hawking of money, you know, to make.

And you also don't go out and

try to get candidates,

anti-McConnell candidates, and Herschel Walker, Blake Masters,

Dr.

Oz.

And then when the going gets rough and you've got this big stash, on raising money on your post-presidency, you don't distribute it liberally.

In other words, $5 million in the last week to Herschel Walker, $10 million to Blake Masters.

You didn't do that.

So then, if you don't do that, then your criticism that Mitch McConnell was hoarding his cash and wasting it on a civil war in Alaska between two Republicans and backing the least conservative, then you don't have as much, I don't know, persuasion on that because everybody's going to say, well, yeah, Mitch screwed up or he's selfish or he's only self-interested, but why didn't you step in with your stash?

And so there were all these things and the answer is why, why, why?

Because otherwise a new cycle is drifting Trump's way.

He was a Cassandra screaming out to the atmosphere, there's no Russian collusion.

Yes, now that's proven.

The Wuhan lab, everybody, this was a...

This was an engineered virus.

It might even have been a bioweapon.

Yes, that may be true, Mr.

Trump.

Gussie, I'm telling you, Hunter's laptop was authentic.

Wow, Trump was right again.

So

they banned me for Twitter, and they have no rationale.

They let the Taliban on.

They let the

theocracy in Iran.

Yes, Mr.

Trump.

Now we understand why you're upset.

So all of those conspiracy, quote unquote, were not conspiracies.

They were the truth.

And he said them when everybody thought he was nuts.

And then you look at the Biden record, border, inflation, fuel, racial relations, Afghanistan, debt, crime, and you contrast it with 2019 and 20.

So everything would be breaking his way.

All he had to do was say,

you know,

I am going each week, he could have said, I'm going to talk about an issue.

This week, it's crime.

This is what I did in 2019-20.

This is what I'm I'm going to do.

It's going to be even better in 2024.

This is what I did on energy.

This is what I did on the Abrams Accord.

And go down the list and don't talk about the 2020 election to the extent that,

except

we're going to really address 70% mail-in early balloting that makes the last three weeks of a campaign or election day voting or election night tabulation irrelevant.

We're going to address that.

But you can't do that.

And that begs the question.

There has to be three explanations.

One,

his advisors are gone.

So the people who tried to that had good advice to maybe, I don't know, Stephen Miller or Kaylee McElhaney, whoever they were,

are gone.

And they've got obsequious toadies down there at Mar-Lago that just want to cash in with him.

Or B,

he doesn't want to be president.

He just he wants to just be a post-president that is a quote-unquote candidate for about a year to raise money.

And then he just wants to be a kingmaker and say, I'll give my endorsement to this, or I'll walk, or I'll take my base with me.

That's the second.

And the third is

there's something wrong with him.

You know what I mean?

That no rational person

starts a campaign with a sizable lead over all of his Republican primary candidates and a 50-50

poll against an incumbent president this early, and then manages within

two months,

less than two months, to destroy that so that he's in some polls behind DeSantis and in others behind Biden.

So that just suggests that there's something wrong.

Either

there's a, I don't know what it would be, but it's either going to be he doesn't want to be president,

you know, he doesn't want to be president, or he wants to be some type of kingmaker, or he thinks he's too old, or he's got, he's just too erratic.

And I don't, and his, who knows?

But it's one of the strangest implosions in modern political history.

And it's still, I want to qualify that, it's still early.

So if he brought a new team in there and they had absolute discipline and you know what I mean on his social media content et cetera etc maybe they could recover but at the way he's going to bleed support now from his base when you got guys like Mike Flynn Steve Bannon Sebastian Gorka Steve Cortez when they what they're really saying the subtext is

miss Mr.

President Mr.

Trump you're putting us in a position that is untenable.

We're not going to defend you in 100% fashion.

Roger Kimball had a good essay today about all of this,

and he was amused that Trump, nobody else, could hawk trading cards and be widely caricatured for such a prank or gambit or whatever you want to call it, and still make money on it and have it sold out on the one hand, but nobody else would do that.

So he was, I mean, Roger's been pretty supportive of Trump.

And like I said, I wrote a...

Excuse me,

this is an American greatness?

Where did he write this piece?

I think it's an American greatness, yes.

And then, you know, I wrote a column, does Trump really want to be president?

Another one, is Trump a Captain Quig?

But

it's a tragedy, I mean, because

I look back at

those pre-COVID and then during the COVID years that were pretty stressful for the country and for Trump.

I look at all of the smears and all of the invective

banning from social media, the first crazy impeachment that was absolutely indefensible, the Russian collusion hoax, the laptop trying to affect the weaponization of the FBI.

And then under all that pressure, he finally secured the border.

He finally got crime down before COVID.

He finally got unemployment way down and with almost 2% growth and no inflation.

And he had a current foreign policy.

He may not have liked liked what he said, but he beefed up NATO.

We could go on and on.

We were energy independent.

Fuels were low.

Cost was low.

We were expanding.

Keystone would have been built.

Maybe the Constitution natural gas line.

Anwar was it was all going well.

And so this is.

You should have won a Nobel Prize for the Middle East peace.

The intractable.

Now, what do we read?

We read that the Arab world is terrified of Iran.

They don't think the United States will do anything about Iran.

They think the United States is not on their side.

I'm talking about the moderate regimes.

And the result is that almost every week there's a news story that a Chinese diplomat or a Russian envoy is somewhere in the Middle East trying to take up that vacuum.

And then second, that the moderate regimes who have rested populations, especially Jordan now, are becoming increasingly hostile to Israel because they feel fear that the United States will not back them.

Or worse yet, they feel a recurrence of the Obama bankrupt crazy insane policy of 2009 to 16, in which the United States apparently thought they were going to balance Sunni,

right-wing,

moderate toward Israel governments and Israel as well with support with a wink and a nod for Iran, for Hezbollah, for Syria, for Hamas, and create a tension there and then be the adjudicator.

That was absolutely insane.

And I think that's what we're back to now.

This administration will go to any depth to get an Iran deal.

They've restored money via the UN to Hamas.

They don't.

If they say anything about the Middle East, it's not critical of the Assads.

The Assads are Hezbollah.

It's always critical of Israel.

And

the Arab world looks at that and they put their finger up in the air and they think, hmm,

we have a natural propensity to be hostile to Israel and maybe to the West in general, but we're afraid of the United States and we respect the United States.

And when the United States is on your side, it has the ability to give you top-notch weaponry, intelligence, money.

And now it's drifting to that Iran bloc.

So we're going to make the necessary adjustments and maybe cater to our own radical populations that hate israel and break up this new growing alliance between moderate regimes and israel it's i mean if you sat down jack and you said and i wrote that column how to destroy the united states in 10 steps if you if you just said how would you in 24 months destroy the united states You could not do a better job than what's been done on the border, on inflation, on energy, on the Middle East, on Afghanistan, on crime.

You couldn't do it.

Right.

Was anybody talking about reparations three years ago?

Was anybody saying, as they were in Oakland, San Francisco the other day, with a $25 billion California debt?

Sammy and I talked about this.

Was anybody saying, no matter what you give, it's not enough.

It's never going to be enough.

We want $800,000 for a house, each African-American.

And you know

That's not enough.

So was anybody talking about crazy things like that?

Or even small, like city councils giving you your trans, we're going to give you monthly payments.

$25 billion

in deficit this year in California.

And business is fleeing.

San Francisco looks like a ghost town.

Los Angeles looks like.

Escape from LA movie.

You name it.

The whole state is in an implosion.

Gavin Newsom may be the worst governor the state has ever had.

And that's saying a lot given some of the people in the 19th century that were governors.

But this is insane.

And it just frames this question.

Why is Trump doing this?

Because he's letting down millions of people.

They were looking toward him to

correct his cul-de-sac tweets and all that extraneous things, hit the ground running with his reelection, be very disciplined, have a blasting, critical, tough critique of leftism and the Biden record, remind us about all these threats to democracy with these conspiracies, and they were conspiracies.

If you look at the FBI,

vis-a-vis Facebook, Twitter, et cetera, laptop, all that stuff.

And it didn't happen.

Instead, we're talking about trading cards.

It's just insane.

Victor, we're talking about that at a time when

hundreds of thousands of Americans are dying every year

from drugs, and that is related to our border.

And we're going to talk about that, get your comments on that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show recording again on Sunday, the 18th of December.

This podcast episode will be up on the web, justthenews.com.

That's the podcast home, John Solomon's website.

On Tuesday, the 20th.

Speaking of websites, VictorHanson.com is Victor's official website.

I encourage our listeners to visit it regularly.

You will find links to all kinds of appearances by Victor.

For example, the other day he was on Megan Kelly's podcast.

You'll find that there, other appearances, all his writings links to his books which by the way there still may be time to order some some for as christmas gifts for those people particularly those who love military history i always encourage the second world wars what a what terrific gift that would be for somebody uh you know and love who loves military history but there's a tremendous amount of material that victor writes for the website called Ultra.

They're ultra articles, and you can only read them if you have a subscription.

Subscriptions cost us $5

a month, $50 for the year.

Take the five bucks, stick your toe in the water.

You're going to wish you had done it sooner.

Wonderful material.

Hopefully we'll have time to talk about one of those pieces, Victor, the eight-part series you've done on the leftist hysteria.

So

all that said, Victor, today, again,

on Sunday, there's an op-ed, an editorial, I should say, in the New York Post, and it's about the fentanyl disaster.

I mean, it's staggering what is going on in America.

A few months ago, before the election, a few congressmen, Chip Roy,

Jim Banks of Indiana, Chip Roy's from Texas, publicly pressed the administration, like, what the hell is going on at the borders?

Not only the flood of people coming in, but clearly the drugs and resultant rampage of deaths

across the country.

No response from Joe Biden.

Two small little paragraphs from this editorial.

Our open border is an open invitation to sophisticated, violent, and vast Mexican cartels.

For over a decade, these syndicates have been shifting their production and distribution efforts from cocaine and heroin to synthetic drugs, meth and fentanyl.

Those drugs are much easier to overdose on and far more addictive.

And their flood into our country is clearly responsible for the brain-shattering increase in drug deaths.

In 2007,

these numbers are horrific.

In 2007, the nation saw 27,000 overdoses.

Last year, 107,000 per CDC data.

Of those, the agency estimates around 71,000 were fentanyl involved.

You know, Victor, I did a little math over Vesalia town near you, 141,000.

Think about that.

In two years, two years of drug deaths from just from fentanyl in America is equivalent to a major city in California.

And

the Biden administration.

100,000 dead a year.

100,000 dead a year.

It's Afghanistan, it's Korea, it's Vietnam, it's Iraq, all put together nearly in one year.

And they know what's going on and they they welcome it.

And we've got the socialists in Mexico City who has virtually declared war in the United States.

These caravans now are coming with the aid of the Mexican government.

And you could stop it.

And I think that,

well, I want to be very careful what I say, but I think you could make the argument that Corinne

Jean-Pierre's statement that the border was secure or they're working to secure it is the biggest lie in the history of any press secretary.

And she knows it's a lie.

And when you hear Majorca say the same thing,

he should be impeached.

He won't be convicted.

And I've got to the point now where they, I know that it's a distraction, but they should really consider about having an article of impeachment about Joe Biden because this is, we've never seen anything like this.

Four to five million illegal entries, that is crossings, not necessarily probably 3 million persons, but just the cross that are here now.

And this is, they're coming at a time, you know, when COVID is

in L.A., it's epidemic again.

And it's started, you know, I had it a third time a week ago.

And these people are just coming right across the border.

There's no vaccination.

There's no mask.

There's no test.

And that just makes a mockery of all of this.

Oh, we have a sophisticated COVID pulse.

They're coming across and

there's no money to handle it.

They need almost immediate legal help, educational help, food help, shelter help.

You name it.

And there's no plan for that whatsoever.

It's just a mockery of every legal immigrant who's followed every rule, gotta every I crossed, every T is waiting in India or South Korea to come or France, wherever to come.

And they're just mocking them.

And they're coming across the border with a blank check.

They're encouraged to do it.

And then this

Corinne Jean-Pierre is lying every single day.

Mayorkis is lying every single day.

And then the left-wing media, to the extent they're not

overtly embarrassed, will say, you're racist.

And they publish continually this demography is destiny, ha ha ha.

And if you say, yeah, That's what you're doing.

They say, you're a racist.

You're an advocate of the great replacement theory.

No, it's your theory.

You're the one that calls it demography is destiny.

And it's just unthinkable.

And they don't, what it's based on is this.

Ultimately, if we want to cut through all of the rhetoric, the crap, the partisanship, it's based on this, that the elite, bicoastal elite, is not fertile.

They don't believe in child raising.

They're big advocates of abortion.

They feel their lifestyles are so gifted.

They're so affluent.

They're so leisure.

The last thing they want is two to four kids running around the house in dirty diapers and up all night.

So they, and the data show it, that fertility is much less in the blue states, blue cities, and red states.

It's about 1.7 nationwide, 1.68, I think.

So it's at historical lows in the United States.

We haven't seen this since the Great Depression.

And so in lieu of that, these people want

nannies, they want cooks, they want yard people, they want landscapers, they want people to take care of their parents.

If they have one child, maybe they want somebody, you know, as I said, to change the diapers.

So they want

human capital to come in.

Corporations want human capital to come in.

They don't care.

about the social or cultural costs or the problems that we're a salad bowl host.

We're not a melting pot anymore.

We do not have confidence in our values, our histories, our customs to say to those people, you chose to come into this country.

The first thing you did is you came in illegally.

The second thing you did, you resided illegally.

You willingly broke the law.

So you're going to be deported and you're going to go back.

And next time you come back, we're going to evaluate you on whether you have skills, whether you speak the English language, whether you're diverse, and whether you're going to do it legally.

And we could stop it in a minute.

We stopped it by 2020, and we know how to stop it.

You get rid of catch and release,

get rid of it, as Trump did.

You go tell Mexico City, if you don't stop it,

you and Venezuela and Colombia and the Castros and Cuba, here's what we're going to do.

We're going to tax 10% on all these remittances because these people are coming over here and they are sending money back to your government by design, and we're making up that difference.

We're offering them thousands of dollars a year in subsidies to free up cash so they send back to you $60 billion.

But we're going to put a 10% tax on them.

That's going to be $6 billion.

And that $6 billion is going to go for the wall.

And we're going to finish it in one year.

And if you keep doing it, we're going to go back to the re-examine trade and taxation and tariffs, as Trump did.

And we could stop it tomorrow.

And we're also going to make sure that if you think you're a refugee from political persecution, you have to apply in your home state.

You're just not going to cross the border.

And we talk about fentanyl.

It's a war on us.

Chinese, there are places in Northern California, in the foothills and the mountains that are de facto run by cartels south of the border and Chinese interest.

That's just a fact.

So they're overrunning the country and they're killing 100,000 Americans a year.

And this president apparently thinks that's a tolerable cost to create a new demographic that will supply cheap labor.

And I don't think it will because there's no work ethic anymore in America.

So when somebody crosses the border, he's not going to get the message, this is a can-do up-by-the-bootstraps, tough society where you work.

It's more, oh, I just crossed the border.

They tell me I have grievances against the host because they're racist and sexist and transphobic and homophobic and they're generous in their entitlements.

Why should I work when they feel that their labor participation is already 61%,

61% of the available workforce is laboring?

So it's a mess, and it's by design, it's deliberate.

And they think there's political, there's cultural, there's social advantages in doing this.

And they say that.

They boast about it.

And when they say comprehensive, final thought, Jack, there's two words they always use.

One is, oh, our immigration system is broken.

No, it's not broken, not a passive voice.

You broke it.

You intentionally broke it.

It's broken because you won't enforce existing.

immigration laws because you're revolutionaries.

You have sanctuary cities, which are illegal.

There's South Carolina 1860-type nullification of federal law.

You brought that on.

You stopped the wall.

You brought back catch and release.

You coddled the Mexican government.

So it's not broken.

You broke it.

And second, we need comprehensive immigration reform.

Well, we did that with the Simpson-Mazzoli Act.

And the great bargain, if you remember, was Ronald Reagan,

Al Simpson, said, well,

we're going to give amnesties for people who have been here under certain conditions.

Okay.

And in exchange for that, we're going to let the INS

deport people who are here illegally, and everybody's going to have to have an I-9 form.

We're going to pull back from the border

and we're going to give amnesty on the right, but the left is going to allow

us to deport people and we're going to have, and you can't work.

And that they never, of course, they never fulfilled their bargain.

So that Simpson-Mazzoli Act was an abject failure.

And we've done comprehensive.

And comprehensive immigration reform is a euphemism for an open border.

That's what they want.

All we have to do, again, Jack, is just finish the wall, fix the rickety sections like Trump did,

end catch and release, pressure the government south of the border, and

deport people.

And it would stop tomorrow once the message got across.

You don't go in the United States.

You will be deported.

The monies that you gave the coyotes will be, and then we can go into the United States once we have a secure border and we can start to distinguish people who are here illegally.

And the vast majority should be deported.

If they've been here five years, let's say they have no criminal record, they're gainfully employed, maybe they would be able to apply for legal residence.

But

that's not going to be the majority.

The majority, we've got three or four million people that just came in this year.

Joe Biden's plan is, everybody should remember that, in the eight years that he thinks he's going to be president, he wants eight to ten million illegal aliens.

He wants a city the size of New York.

That's his legacy.

And he thinks that he's going to make Nevada and Colorado and Georgia and Arizona as blue as California and New Mexico were.

That's the idea.

And he does this while the young men and women of Scranton

die.

Yeah.

They care less.

He's

not the lie.

I mean, think about it.

If he's pressed, what does he revert to?

I think people should realize what Biden does.

Under the cloak of dementia, he just simply lies.

He just the other day said that his, what, his uncle got the

purple heart, yeah.

And he said his son died in Iraq.

He just, he just says things.

And then people say, well, you can't criticize Joe.

He's got some memory problems.

And that's how he, that's how he operates.

He just says things that are completely untrue.

The border is secure.

The right wing doesn't want comprehensive immigration.

It's just they broke the immigration.

It's just, that's how he operates.

And people has always operated.

He always did that.

The difference now is before when Joe Biden lied, there were consequences.

When he plagiarized Neil Koenig's speech, he dropped out.

When he said Barack Obama was the first black presidential candidate, basically speak the English language, clean and articulate, he finally dropped out.

When he lied about his

college record and didn't tell us that he was kicked out for plagiarizing for a semester, I think.

or he talked about being a long semi-truck driver or football,

there were political consequences.

He was a joke.

And then Barack Obama resurrected him.

He said, you know,

don't underestimate Joe's ability to blank it up.

And his Robert Gates, his defense secretary, said he's been wrong on every major decision.

So they knew about him and they resurrected him.

And after that, there were no consequences because he could always plead that he had a little memory.

That's just old.

Joe, just Joe, it's like

your granddad, great guy, but now and then he drifts drifts in and out of reality.

So don't say he's a liar.

He's not a liar.

He's not a fabulous.

You know, when your grandfather can't quite remember your birthday, you call him a liar.

That's Joe Biden.

Right.

He's a demented Walter Mitty and always has been.

So Victor, you talked about

these things coming about by design, that they are deliberate.

And I think that will mesh very well with

getting your reflections on this significant series you've written for your website, Left Footing Hysteria and the Art of Psychodrama.

And let's get your thoughts on that right after these final important messages.

Hey, Zach, are you smiling at my gorgeous canyon view?

No, Donald's.

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See T-Mobile.com slash ISP for details and exclusions.

Back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Jack Fowler here.

I got to put a little plug-in for myself.

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scheme up our sleeve.

So,

Victor, I hope we let's talk about this and I hope let's try it also to shoehorn in, and that probably deserves its own podcast, but another piece you've written about comparing two billionaires.

But I'd just like to

reinforce that you have written this significant series for your website.

It's ultra articles, Left-Wing Hysteria and the Art of the Psychodrama.

And at the end of this, you talk about the three

important days in American history.

And here, let me just read the very final paragraph.

You wrote three days, a COVID-19 panic-driven decision to lock down the U.S.,

a national hysteria following the death of George Floyd, and mass madness following January 6th.

And what do these three days in turn share?

They were crisis fodder that the left saw as gifts that ensured permanent changes in American life otherwise impossible without such pretext.

Victor,

if there's anything you'd like to say in summary about this

series, I greatly appreciate it.

I think it's terrific what you've written here.

And then we can maybe move on and talk about

Bankman Freed

versus Musk.

Well, what I was trying to do in that series was suggest that left-wing, progressive, socialist, whatever you want to call the hard left, is contrary to human nature.

And by that, I mean people do not believe society should be equality of result.

They feel there's human rewards and punishments, and all people are not equal.

And the way to make people equal is not to create an all-powerful, ruthless government.

but to create a moral or religious sense of brotherhood to other people less fortunate.

Nevertheless,

the left maintains power.

So, how do they do that?

How do they get control of the institutions?

And in this series,

I use this word, you know,

psychodramas or whatever.

They wanted to change the United States.

So, Gavin Newsom told us that the COVID lockdown was an occasion to create a more progressive capitalism.

By that, he meant things like reparations or what you talked about, subsidies for transgender people in San Francisco or letting the homeless have free hotel space or whatever it was.

That was the more humane capitalism.

Hillary Clinton said the same thing.

She said, COVID allows us to have a single-payer health system, sort of like a socialist European health care.

And then, of course, we had Klaus Schwab and Great Reset that said this was a time to make us more diverse, more green, et cetera.

And by that, he meant to transcend elected governments and create a platonic guardian class internationally that would force corporations to follow their rules or maybe enlist them because it money would be willing.

And so that was what COVID did.

And then the second, you know, there was also January 6th.

If anybody had said before January 6th, the left is going to militarize Washington, wring it with barbed wire, put 30,000 troops on the streets with no definable threat

and

keep that there for weeks to remind people that the right wing are an armed insurrectionist, and then to broadcast a lie that there were armed insurrectionaries inside the Capitol, or that Ashley Babbitt was an existential threat and had to be shot by a sober and judicious officer, or that there were no FBI informants blanketing the grounds and inside the Capitol.

Nobody would believe that.

And yet that moment really that moment led to

the, or aided or fueled the weaponization of the FBI, this idea that the only real threat from terrorism comes from a bunch of people with cowhorns and paint on their face and gave us Christopher Wray's FBI.

And what followed was logical from that, whether that was putting Peter Navarro in leg irons or confronting former Trump supporters at airports or going down to Mar-Lago and trying to raid an ex-president's home over a dispute of whether a document was classified or not.

All of that originated from that opportunity the left saw in January 6th.

And let's make no mistake about it.

I mean opportunity because we did have 120 days of mass rioting from May to election time in 2020.

This wasn't a bunch of people buffoonishly rioting, illegally, committing probably misdemeanors and low-level felonies.

These were people who were responsible for 35 deaths.

They burned a federal courthouse.

They burned a historic church.

near the White House.

They tried to storm the White House grounds and sent the Secret Service and the president into a bunker.

They burned a police precinct with police in it.

They tried to kill them.

They did, as I said, 35 to 40 people died.

There were $2 billion

in property damage.

And there were 1,500 police officers that were injured.

And there's no, nobody, and anybody who suggested we might need to have some federal troops help police was damned as a fascist.

And yet, these were the fascists who militarized the capital for iconic and virtue signaling purposes and political agendas.

So what I'm getting about all these psychodramas, and

there was a lot of them, was that they changed the United States.

And I meant that about this new...

So what were the changes that came out of January 6th to take that one example?

That was a speech, the Phantom of the Opera speech, that all of a sudden Trump supporters were semi-fascist and non-American.

And that really changed that midterm.

I think it did.

And out of the COVID lockdown, the government got the power to do almost anything.

They could tell a landlord, you can't rent, you can't collect rent.

I don't really care about you spent a lot of money painting the apartment or fixing the plumbing or rewiring it.

I don't care.

You're not going to collect any rent from your noble renter.

You are suspect.

And Anthony Fauci told us that, that we had the right to interrupt you because of a national emergency.

Interrupt meaning cancel out your lease.

And the same thing with balloting.

We woke up one day, Jack, and what was called, we used to have this word called absentee ballot, where you kind of wrote and said,

you got your notice about voting with an application.

And you said, you know, I got a terminal illness.

I got a chronic illness.

I'm going to be out of town.

I want an absentee ballot.

And they sent it with no discussion.

And that was anywhere from 10 to 25% of the balloting.

And we all got together on election night.

We all went out on election day, showed our IDs, we voted election night, we looked at the returns, we stayed up till two in the morning and we had a result.

And now suddenly that doesn't exist.

It's mail-in, early balloting.

The last debate of a campaign does not matter because the majority of people have already voted.

We have something called third-party vote harvesting.

People come to your house.

They wait outside.

They hand you the ballot or you have the ballot.

They tell you what to vote.

They deliver it themselves to a ballot box.

We have same-day registration.

If your signature is incorrect, if it doesn't match the registrar's list, if you only have partial addresses, if you mail it in after election, it doesn't matter.

And this is 70% in many states.

And there's no way to authenticate.

That is a revolutionary act.

And that came out of

on the COVID as well.

I could go on and on because it's a long nine-piece.

I don't need to.

But what I'm trying to argue is that the left scans the horizon for

opportunistic moments of chaos, the 2008 economic meltdown that gave us just that huge spending stimulus and one-payer basically Obamacare and almost one-payer health plans.

And they find that there's an opportunity to push through in times of chaos agendas that otherwise people would never, never, never,

never support in calm times.

I guess this gets back a little, Victor, to the first topic we talked about.

And I didn't get into that.

Even McCarthy.

Yeah, I didn't even get into George Floyd.

That tragic death.

Right.

led to a revolutionary change in the United States.

Nobody remembered in that May Day that that death would mean

that

hiring

and admissions to universities, everything from commercial, everything in the United States would change because of that one death.

And the whole idea of a lockdown and social distancing mask was entirely discredited.

once people started demonstrating with BLM and Antifa and the healthcare community said, it's more important for you to go out and demonstrate than wear a mask or social distance, but everybody else must, except these people.

And so those three dates, you know, the George Floyd

death and the COVID lockdown, that one-day decision, and the January 6th, changed the country.

Well, just to finish my little thought there, Victor, and I'm sorry to

cut you off there.

It was like the six, seven handful of recalcitrant Republicans or opponents of Kevin McCarthy, you talk about the left seeing, well, scanning the horizon,

and there's just a lack of that on the political right.

It's quite discouraging.

Victor, I think we have time for one more topic.

And

you wrote...

You wrote a column, your last syndicated column, two antithetical billionaires, comparing the infamous Sam Bankman-Fried, who still

and never will, I think, attain the status, the despised status of Bernie Madoff.

And you compare him with Elon Musk, and I'll just read how it ends.

How sad that the left despises a man, Musk, who built real things against the odds and took risks to champion free speech, and how predictable it

worshipped a leftist fraud who built a million investors and ruined the lives of thousands.

The hatred of the accomplished Musk and the worship of the hollow man Bankman Fried are sad commentaries on how liberalism has descended into progressivism and ultimately into Stalinism.

I think that's a really powerful claim at the end there, Victor.

Talk about this column.

Well, remember, he spoke to a group, I think, sponsored by the New York Times recently, and he was applauded.

And he had gone on this sort of nerd stick where he wears all these sloppy clothes.

He looks down,

he says, I was very idealistic.

I was naive.

I tried to do good.

I wanted to do this.

I gave to Republicans fraction.

I can't tell you who I did, but I did.

He has this whole little propaganda thing, and people were buying it, and they liked the idea, both before the midterms when he was a saint and then mysteriously after the midterms and then mysteriously when he was going to testify and get six hours of testimony before congress he was suddenly indicted by merit garland so

he was an icon and he gave 40 million probably more through packs in the last election 10 million he'd given to Joe Biden.

He promised a billion dollars.

They loved him.

He was salting that money around left-wing media.

We don't even know all the media, the sites, the blogs,

the traditional media that he gave money to.

But he understood something about America.

If you are a crook and a Ponzi scheme person and an extortioner, whatever you are, and you feign that you're left-wing and you're doing it all for the cause and for humanity,

and you salt money to the media and to the left-wing, you're going to get exemption.

And he did get exemption.

He was sort of the financial counterpart of Jeffrey Epstein or Harvey Weinstein.

And they knew that.

Weinstein knew that he could assault women without worry as long as the media said that he was brilliant.

He was left-wing.

He was liberal.

The Obama daughter was a intern in his empire.

You name it.

And the same thing was true of Jeffrey Epstein.

He had a desk at Harvard University because he was one of the anointed big donors.

No one looked twice at what he was doing.

He had Bill Clinton on his plane.

Nobody cared.

They understand that.

So this guy understood that at 30 and people worshiped him.

And then along comes Elon Musk.

And nobody had been able.

I know he got tax credits.

I know he got help from the government.

But nobody, remember the Chevy Volt?

Nobody could make an electric car.

And the future of electric cars is dubious because it depends on whether or not the United States is going to create nuclear fission plants and maybe someday fusion, because it's going to need a huge amount of cheap electricity to power these things.

And if you don't do it, it's probably not going to be a wise investment.

But nevertheless, he actually built a car.

And it was not a Buick.

It was not a Ford.

It was not a Dodge.

In other words, he went outside of the big three in a way that everybody who's tried it since the 1950s has failed, and he succeeded.

And then he created a rocket company, and he had a very excellent record of sending.

He revolutionized the ability to put satellites in space at a low price.

And he does it all the time with mostly success.

He not only outperformed NASA, but he outperformed his competitors.

And my point is that he had a record of success.

and he was beloved by the left.

I couldn't walk down through the Stanford shopping center, down through downtown Menlo Park without seeing Teslas everywhere.

I couldn't walk into the Hoover Institution or Stanford without everybody saying they wanted a Tesla.

It was a mark of green authenticity.

And then he did something that was even stranger.

He looked around.

He said, I'm going to go into Silicon Valley, of which he knew well,

because with Peter Till, he was one of the original PayPal people.

And he said, what the hell happened to Silicon Valley?

It used to be a bunch of eccentric, brilliant people who were against the man.

They were against the big Xeroxes, the big IBMs, the old establishment.

They were the kind of Steve Jobs, kind of off-the-wall people that were irreverent and funny and neat and libertarian.

Let your do your own.

And they're Stalinist.

They don't believe in free speech.

And I'm going to buy this Twitter.

And, you know, when I heard this, I thought, wow, this company is double, is worth one half of its stock, which is driven up by the elite's monopoly of it on the Two Coast.

It loses money.

Jack Dorsey, with this Manson look and the ring in his nose is...

is

bizarre to say the least.

But more importantly, he's kind of been kidnapped by the ruling elite they kind of made him irrelevant as he did his yoga or Zen thing and they took over the company and then they lavished money on themselves with you know restaurants and yoga classes and were in San Francisco and they were stalinists they just went through a list and got the FBI, they got about 80 FBI agents working with them, and then they told them, if you retire, you're going to get a job.

And we've got almost as many working for Twitter.

And it was a scam.

And it was the idea was, hey, if anybody from Hollywood calls or the FBI calls and they want that guy off, get him off.

And then lie and say that he violated Twitter policy or don't say it at all.

And be vindictive.

And as I said earlier, you know, don't go after the Taliban.

Don't go after the Ayatollahs in Iran.

Go after Donald Trump.

He's a much more serious threat.

And that's how they operate it.

And he came along and said, I'm going to lose a lot of money and I'm going to have to fire everybody, but I want to do two things.

I want to restore free speech.

I know he's eccentric.

He didn't do it systematically, but that's what he has done to a certain extent.

And as far as doxing, you know,

if I were him, I would have had a board of doxers,

auditors that audit doxing, but he doesn't have time.

He's losing money.

So he just said, don't print information about people's homes that leads to purported or possible violence.

And they did it, and he banned them, and they went nuts.

And he cleaned them out, and they went nuts.

And he's got a lot of files that's going to expose that the FBI used Twitter as a contractor.

In other words, they knew it was illegal for the government to suppress free speech.

So they went around that constitutional.

iconic law and they said, these people can do it as a private company.

And we're going to give them a list of people we want uh silenced and we're going to have kind of a revolving door in the same manner we do with you know lock eat or raytheon we'll just do it with twitter and silicon valley in general and he scared the hell out of them jack because we know that facebook is doing it and we know that when you go on google and you search those search results are not going to be entirely the most read or the most important articles necessary to find out something.

They're going to be arranged by logarithms, algorithms, I should say,

that

the order will be predicated on ideology because that's what they want to do.

They want to persuade you or indoctrinate you.

And all of that's coming, and that's why they hate him.

So they're trying to destroy him.

And this is a guy who, whatever you think about him, he did create material things.

He just wasn't a

creature of the air or of the cyber world.

He actually did things.

You can see them.

You can watch television and you can see a rocket take off.

You can see a Tesla go 300 miles on a battery charge.

You can see what he's done.

And Mr.

Bankman-Free did nothing.

And I don't know what we call it, but we know now

what he did.

He put coins.

It would be like I have an orange tree.

You know, I have orange trees on my farm.

Right.

And I say, you know what?

These are about the, these are very scarce commodities.

And if you buy an orange, I can guarantee it's going to go up in value.

And then all the people buy these oranges on the tree.

And I said, you know what?

I have a record of each one of your oranges and what you paid for it.

And as more people want those finite number of oranges, their value is going to go up.

And then I went out there and picked them and sold them.

And they don't exist anymore.

And I took the money that they bought, bought them with, and I used it for other reasons.

Probably I thought that because they don't really produce anything but rot on the tree, I'm going to invest in other areas, speculate, use it for pad politicians' pockets, media pockets, whatever.

So it was, I mean, he didn't produce anything, did he?

It was just based on a lot of people want what I have and they're going to drive up the price.

So I'm going to be worth,

the company's going to be worth $40 billion, even though there's only probably $11 billion in real money.

And then when people saw that and how high it was going, they thought, about time to take it out.

So we thought, uh-oh,

I can't cover that.

So I, at that price, so I'll either need a new person to buy at the high price, and I'll lie and lie and lie about how stable it is, and I'll get

favorable coverage in the media, and that will allow people to put new money in so I can pay the old money that's leaving, or and I will take the money from their individual accounts and try to make a bunch of money.

I don't know, in the stock market startup, you bought a lot of startups, et cetera.

He was a crook, in other words.

He's never created anything.

He played on what?

He played on the fact he grew up at the Stanford campus.

His parents were well-known left-wing law professors at Stanford.

He went to MIT.

He was left-wing.

He hung out with left-wing nerds.

He went down to the Bahamas and tried to avoid taxes.

So that's what the left likes.

They like somebody like that.

And they hate somebody that accomplished something like that.

Right.

It's not right, Victor.

It's not too deep in the human psyche, at least

the masculine.

You go back to St.

Crispin's Day, right?

You're holding manhood cheap.

Others will.

And people do resent on even a local level, the guy that can

be creative, can make things, the guy that can

paint his house, the guy that can use a chainsaw versus the guy that can't.

It's a real resentment.

I think everybody should have a policy or an ideology or an aspect of life, no matter what you're doing, no matter what you're doing.

If you see somebody else who's creating something positive, for society and you know you couldn't do that yourself, then I think you're obligated to have some degree of respect for them, for their accomplishment, even if their private life is not yours, or even if you disagree with their ideology.

If they can do something real that really helps people, then

I think you need to admire them because they built something.

And

I don't understand this idea you hate this person or you don't like

what they represent if they do something, because there's not very much of it anymore.

We don't build dams, we don't build reservoirs, we don't build new freeways.

We don't do any of that anymore.

We can't.

We've lost the ability to.

Maybe we'll talk about that in the next podcast about what our universities are turning out in terms of engineers or

scientists or mathematicians or whatever it's necessary.

But we're not doing it like we used to.

And I don't think we have the ability to do it.

So when somebody comes along like this as a throwback to the 19th century, then I think everybody should say, you know what?

There has to be a place for him in society.

Right.

And I think he's going to be a tragic hero.

I really do.

I think kind of like Donald Trump, because he's under so much stress.

He's spread far too thin.

It's far more important, I think, for the world, for his space and Teslas than it is for Twitter.

But he thinks that Twitter is an iconic moment where if he succeeds, it'll be a domino that knocks down all the other dominoes.

And that Silicon Valley will be so terrified of what he revealed and what a conservative government might do when it comes into power that suddenly Facebook and Google and Apple and all of them are going to come out of the woodwork and say, okay, mea culpa, how could we, you know, reform?

That's what he thinks.

So that would be very important if he were to be successful.

But I don't know.

I feel that he's spread far too thin.

They're going after his family.

He's human.

He's going to react.

He's not getting enough sleep.

His time is at the expense of two successful companies, his time at Twitter.

And when you read these stories that the Twitter office is completely empty and that these worthless employees are gone and he's got these Tesla engineers

frantically working 20-hour days to keep the thing going until he can get it back up and he's got 100% negative coverage in the traditional media.

You just wonder how he can do it without having a complete physical breakdown.

So I wish him well.

I want him to succeed.

And

I don't really care that he's eccentric.

He has to be eccentric in some ways to do what he's done.

And may he succeed, but

I'm afraid that...

Like a lot of tragic heroes, after he did what was necessary, people are going to say, Oh my god, I'm so glad that he went in and shook up Twitter.

But he tweets, why did he have to tweet that about you know Fauci?

Oh my gosh, why does he get in arguments?

He's kind of like, Oh my God, I can't, I can't take him anymore.

And I think that's what happens to tragic heroes.

Their methodologies start to grate on people after

they've accomplished something that aids everybody.

And people think, well, he did a good thing.

I don't need him anymore.

Right.

Well, Victor, appreciate all your wisdom today.

And there was a lot of it.

And we appreciate everyone who listens to your wisdom.

There are 40,000, 50,000 downloads an episode of your podcast.

It's

doing very, very well.

Thank those people who, particularly on Apple, iTunes, where they have the ability to rate the podcast that they do so zero to five stars.

The average ranking now is 4.99

for Victor's Wisdom.

So

doing something right.

You are anyway.

Some people leave comments on Apple.

Here's one

from

Lucene Jan, L-U-C-I

L-U-C-I-N-E-J-A-N.

Love listening to you.

I've been listening listening to you from nearly the beginning of this podcast.

I had recently read the Soul of Battle, recommended by a friend, and found it fascinating.

So when I heard you had a podcast, I knew I had to listen.

I've never been disappointed.

I find myself making sure if I only have time for one show, I make it yours.

And as a third generation

Armenian American,

albeit originally from New York, not California.

The fact that you occasionally mention Armenians and and know our history, especially in the U.S., just gives me a little extra joy.

First Christian country in the world, Armenia.

Yeah.

Well, the Ark's up there somewhere too.

That's a Christian country.

No ethnic minority has been more successful so quickly.

Had you gone there, Victor, when you were over in...

No, I didn't.

I have not.

But Greece has a lot of

Armenian residents.

and it's very close because it's an Orthodox country.

It's a different type of Orthodoxy, but it's part of the Orthodox world, so they're very close.

And of course, they have one commonality, and that is they've both been slaughtered by the Turks.

And that was one of my major prejudices I've tried to overcome is because I lived in Greece three years in total, probably.

And

I had a prejudice against the history of what Turkey has done in that region to Armenians and to Greeks.

And I'm not sure that the Turkish people today, I don't think they're responsible for their past.

But the government today is very eerily similar.

It threatened the other day to send a missile into Athens.

It claims the Bodecanese islands.

But just to finish that, Riff, before we end,

I grew up in the agricultural industry, and there was a lot of prejudice toward Armenians because they were masterful packers and shippers.

And my experience with the Armenian community has been one of admiration.

It's just one of those ethnic minorities, Greeks are another one,

that just changed the United States.

They are so hardworking and they're so competent.

They put such a high premium like Koreans on education.

And they've just been a plus plus.

And we're patriots, too.

They're patriots.

They're very accomplished.

The diaspora is now intermarried.

So when you say Armenian, the numbers of, they're in the third and fourth generation from the diaspora after the genocide.

So a lot of Armenians are no longer members of the Armenian, the center of their life that kept the Armenian culture vibrant was the church.

But that has been diluted as it happens to every, you know, speaking of somebody who's a fourth, third generation Swede, Swedish-American, and that's been completely diluted.

But nevertheless, for that moment, they really did a lot.

And whether it's an ag company or

business, you name it.

If I had time, I could go on about Fower Packing or other

companies like that that are international companies and from local talent.

created technology and marketing and agricultural principles that are far advanced anywhere in in the world, right near where I live.

So, and that was part of that Art Menian tradition of hard work and excellent.

Well, thanks for that, Victor, and thanks for everything for today.

And thanks, folks, for listening.

And guess what?

We will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, everybody.

I appreciate it.