Prisoner Swaps and Shadow Banning

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Welcome, everyone.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor is an author of 28 books.

The latest one is The Dying Citizen.

He is a columnist for American Greatness and his own site, The Blade of Perseus, of course.

He also writes quite a lot of essays for The New Criterion, which is a cultural magazine.

So Victor has a plethora of other places and independent places that he writes for as well.

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

Today we're going to be looking at the most recent news and some of the things that are going on with our

prisoner swap for Brittany Greiner and then also Elon Musk's current dumping of some of the archival information from Twitter that reveals Twitter's censorship.

But first, let's take a moment for some messages and then we'll come right on back to talk to Victor.

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Welcome back.

And Victor, I often ask how you're doing.

I read recently in the news that we've got a

slury, can I say that?

A slurry of flu viruses coming on, as well as the coronavirus.

I thought maybe we should all be careful since our talk often at the beginning of this is about

the COVID virus.

But today

I think it's

this

respiratory virus infection and then the flu virus

and California is experiencing a resurgence of COVID.

The standard exegesis is that people were locked away for two years.

So their immune systems, I suppose the word would be flabby, They got sort of out of practice, like an athlete that doesn't really work out.

And therefore, when they emerge, they have to go through a

reclimatization with viruses and bacteria, I guess.

That's the idea.

I got the flu, I don't know, it was about a month ago.

It was very strange.

It was not that bad.

And then

it was gone, and then it wasn't gone, and then it was gone, and then it wasn't gone.

It just kind of lingered.

And I didn't know whether it was just this long COVID intensification.

But,

you know, my view about all these things is if you just don't do something stupid, you know, like go out in the rain and run a mile when you're sick, but you just try to go through it.

So through this whole long COVID, I don't think I've missed a day of work.

Just keep going and try to.

They have a fancy word now called neuroplasticity, which means when you have these bizarre symptoms, I don't know what's applicable, I suppose, to the flu or anything.

You don't just ignore it, but you just say, this is just your body,

you know, reacting to an immune

impulse and it's reacting.

So don't get upset about it if you've got a sudden migraine or all of a sudden your teeth hurt or you get into a coughing spree.

I mean, that doesn't mean to ignore them, but I think

you can train your body not to overreact.

I imagine that must work for some people and not others.

Not every, not people with serious chronic diseases.

Obviously, if you've got rheumatoid arthritis or lupus, just ignore what I've said.

For things like common cold or flu, I think it's

maybe even long COVID.

Yeah.

To a certain extent, but I don't want to get somebody.

Anytime I say something that's unscripted in the sense that I didn't think about what I'd say,

I will get a response.

I don't want to, I know there's millions of people out there with long COVID, and it's nothing to laugh about.

Boy, it's one of the most debilitating things, debilitating things I've ever had.

So I'm not dismissing it.

Yeah.

Well, let's turn to Brittany Griner.

I know she's either in the United States and so home, or she's coming home.

And

what the news is saying, she's being swapped for a prisoner, a Russian prisoner, and I believe that he was an arms dealer or something.

Victor Baut,

Boot, Bout, B-O-U-T.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so

what the face of this seems to be concessions made

to the hostage takers because she's not quite as valuable.

Well, I mean, I don't want to,

you know, hurt her feelings or anything, but not quite as valuable as the prisoner that we gave up for her.

But what were your thoughts on that?

Valuable in the sense valuable to the Russians, huh?

Yes.

She is valuable in terms of national security of the United States.

He was an asset in the sense sense that he, Victor Baut, was an international,

that was, you know, he's been

the subject of a film and he's he was an international arms dealer and he had a specific skill set in channeling arms to terrorist groups, I guess, in Venezuela or Colombia, people, places like that, that would kill American agents or operatives.

And so we put, we got him and indicted him and convicted him and he was in prison.

But remember,

we have this,

I don't know, it's an inconsistent policy.

We don't deal with terrorists, but we do deal with terrorists.

And we learned that with Bo Bergendahl.

Remember him?

He said that he was just going, he wanted to go find the Taliban and

didn't tell his poor fellow soldiers who thought he was either injured or lost or dead.

And they went out.

I think one of them eventually was harmed or killed, and there was a lot of effort to find him.

And then we found out that he really didn't,

he was very critical.

And his dad gave that bizarre, I don't know, little

Pashtun rant.

And the family was kind of left-wing.

And we were lied to by Susan Rice, and all these people said he distinguished himself bravely on the battlefield and was,

you know, taken prisoner in a fight.

It was all a lie.

And we gave up.

three or four terrorists that were put in a neutral place

in the Middle East, and they all made their way back to Afghanistan to resume their attacks on us.

So

that was the most recent example, and that lowers the bar of deterrence when you do that, when you negotiate.

In the case of Brittany Reiner,

we did not tell the truth.

Biden said, we were given a choice.

It's either Brittany Reiner or nobody, nobody that we've held.

And that didn't turn out to be, you know, we learned that there were were two people that were held, and one specifically was an ex-U.S.

Marine who had been, you know, he'd served four years out of a 16-year sentence.

And

we were told that the whole thing would broken down, and all we were going to get from the Russians was Griner and take it or leave it.

And you're not going to get anybody else.

It's just a one-off thing, one time.

And we learned from NBC that that was not true, that the Russian government was even more sinister than that.

They told us, hey,

you've got an ex-Marine there,

Paul Whelan.

We've had him for four years.

He distinguished himself as a Marine, or you can have a

professional woman basketball player who is black.

and gay,

celebrity, and she has a history

of, I don't know what, iconically attacking the United States in the sense that she was a loud voice, that the national anthem should never be played at the women's basketball.

So I think she's probably changed that viewpoint now that the country that she feels you should not celebrate before a game actually bailed her out.

And why was she taken?

She was taken because she was smuggling, not smuggling, that's a bad word, but she was illegally possessing in a country like Russia

a marijuana substance with a drug paraphernalia.

And so the Russians knew all that, and they basically said to us, according to NBC News, and which they quickly retracted because the White House called them up and said, retract it.

What the White House told us was not true.

It wasn't Greiner and nobody.

It was more sinister than that because Putin is a master evil propagandist.

And he wanted to do, as was confirmed on Russian today television, it's all over the internet.

Basically, he came up with this sort of diabolical idea to show you in this geos,

this geostrategic battle over Ukraine, he wanted to show the world and get some points.

And he did.

And he said, basically, to us,

you can have a guy who probably,

you know, the subtext didn't do anything wrong, but we arrested him on

quote unquote security violations.

I think he was teaching in Russia or something, ex-Marine, and he distinguished he fought for what Russia

today, I think I was self-quoted, said, he fought for the motherland.

Or you being you,

if you don't want somebody who really wasn't doing anything wrong, but we're going to put him 16 years and persecute him, even though he served as a Marine, we can give you another choice.

You're not going to get two.

You're going to get one.

But it's not one like you said.

It's one or the other of two.

And the other is a woman who, in a brilliantly genius fashion, tried to bring marijuana into a country like Russia.

You got to be insane to even think of that, but she did.

And, oh, by the way, she's had a domestic abuse

arrest.

And, oh, by the way, she slugged somebody on the WMDBA court.

And by the way, she's black.

And by the way, she's gay.

And by the way, she's a millionaire.

And by the way, she's a celebrity.

Now, given your values, because you are racially obsessed and gay, obsessed, and woke, obsessed, you will pick her.

And we know you will do that.

And so we want to make sure you have the choice.

So we're going to tell everybody you had a choice.

And you will deny it, but you did have a choice.

And of course, they picked the iconic figure.

Greiner, and they left him, Mr.

Whelan, over there.

And they left, you know, they left a teacher who, Mark Fogel, he was 61.

He's been there for, he did the same thing.

I think he had some arthritis problems.

He brought in some CBD oil or something, and they arrested him.

And he's there for 12 years.

And they thought, nah, teachers aren't important.

He's an old white guy.

We don't get anything out of that.

We're never going to negotiate for that guy.

But Brittany, boy, that will be in all the papers and Joe Biden and the woke base.

And that's what they did.

And then Putin, of course, went to town on the propaganda from that.

The problem, Sammy, is think about it for a second.

It really does, I know it's a canard to say it encourages more hostage taking, but it's a little worse than that.

It says to the world,

there is not one horrible person in the United States that we've detained, arrested, incarcerated that we won't give up.

Some masterminds of Taliban terrorism, we'll give them up if you, but the criterion is you have to be a deserter.

We'll give him up for an American deserter.

And Mr.

Bout,

international arms dealer, arms trafficker, we will give him up.

They will give him up, but they will not give him up for some stupid old white male guy.

It has to be an iconic woke person, or he has to have somebody

that has had a history of anti-American expression, so to speak.

So Bergdahl and Greiner have something in common.

One deserted and trashed the United States, and one trashed the United States and said she would never,

did not want to participate in any commemoration of the national anthem, and nobody else should either before a game.

And so that really sends a message.

And you know, it's ironic about it is if you were a terrorist, and there's a lot of them that will now, unfortunately, come to the fore, these hostage takers, especially from Iran, they're going to think along the following,

I don't want to go after a white male because if it's like Fogel or Whelan, they don't care.

I won't get anybody from them.

But if they've got any terrorist, it doesn't matter who they are.

They will deal if that person, A, has either been on record as trashing his own country, and we can get propaganda value or, or if he fits the woke definition.

He's transgendered, he's gay, he's black, and just so he's not a white male heterosexual.

And

I'm not saying that.

That's the propaganda that our enemies are now propagating all over the world.

They're saying, look, that's what they react to.

Meaning, and you can see how Putin is so devilish.

He's basically telling the terrorist of the world, hey, we just gave you a blueprint.

We just showed you that no matter how bad that person is, you can get him back.

But the key is you've got to make sure that the person fits their crazy woke definition.

And the person cannot like his own country or her own country, and they have to be anything other than white male, heterosexual, Christian.

And that's just sad.

It is.

It's scary.

And it's going to happen.

We're going to get more and more and more.

And, you know, the final irony is: if you were abroad and

you were distinguishably gay, or you were

black, or you're not, I think you'd be a greater target from these terrorists because they think that you would be more likely to be negotiated over.

And if you were just an old white male,

yeah, if I went across, if I went somewhere, they just say, or, hey, he's just an old white guy, he's expendable.

They won't do anything for him.

They'll just leave him locked up there and let him rot, like Whelan and Fogel.

They don't care.

So you got to find somebody that they care about.

It's really racist.

It's what gets me.

It's just part of this slow, slow decline of the United States with its fixation

on race and our trajectory to the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, or whatever.

Yeah, you know, I was looking at some of the other prisoner swaps we've had recently, and there were two relatives of the Venezuelan president Maduro who were convicted of drug trafficking that got swapped.

A Russian cocaine smuggler and an Afghan drug law that all have been swapped out for, I guess, Americans in some shape or form.

I didn't get the whole story, but so we've been doing lots of swaps.

We always do.

Thing about America, we always swap and then we give these sanctimonious self-righteous like, we don't deal with terrorists.

We always deal with terrorists.

So

she deals with terrorists.

Yeah.

And you know, the other thing I noticed about the story is that this Brittany Griner packed the marijuana.

It wasn't actually marijuana itself.

It was like...

CBD oil or something.

Yeah, CBD oil.

She was vaping it, vaping it.

Yeah, yeah, there you go.

And she,

and i noticed that some of the comments were that maybe she should have been known that and left it behind right but i i think that led me to thinking but wait some people don't understand how addictive marijuana is i mean they always have that that lore that marijuana is not addictive and but it is a really addictive substance it's psychologically addictive i've known people

very close people around me that have used it.

And I can tell you, if you were just from empirical observation, you would think it's addictive.

I don't think it's like an opiate or something, but it creates a pseudo-euphoria that people get accustomed to, and they like that feeling.

And they're pretty much, they do it their entire lives.

It's an anti, I think it's an antioxidant, and we know it's an anti-inflammatory.

So people like Willie Nelson.

The guy is almost, is he 90?

And he's smoked it almost every day of his adult life.

So apparently he feels that it's had a salutary effect.

I don't know if it does or not, but it is a pernicious drug otherwise.

Didn't he smoke it with Bill Clinton in the White House or something?

Or he went out?

I don't believe anything about what we say.

And all due, he's fair.

There's problems with Bill Clinton, and that is he's capable of anything at any time, anywhere with anybody.

And his critics on our side are capable of saying anything about that, anything.

So I don't know what to say about him.

I just don't, I feel better when I don't see a picture of him.

I don't hear his voice, and I don't especially see Hillary Clinton.

But she did a video the other day when she was in a

car, and she and then she was

she was with this Cardi B later in another video, this rapper, and she was patronizing her, and they had the lyrics of this Cardi B.

It was the most vile,

sick,

racist lyrics.

I'm not kidding you, Sammy.

It was the worst thing I have ever heard in my life.

It was intimate detail about genitalia, the inward

lubricants.

It was disgusting.

And the idea that she was going to worship this

this

figure from the rap world, I don't understand it.

I guess it was going to give her street cred for her potential 2024 race.

I couldn't figure out.

Why would anybody glorify the lyrics like that?

Yeah.

Well, in one of the videos, they were singing that.

I think it's Aretha Franklin song, isn't it?

R-E-S P.

Yes, that is.

They were singing that.

But I mean, she kept.

When you say that, that's a

contradiction, you know what I mean?

Paradox.

We say Hillary Clinton was singing.

All I can remember about Hillary Clinton was, I'm so tired, I came too far.

That Sojourner Truth little riff she did.

I think she was trying to imitate Barack Obama's phony inner city accent that he put on in Georgia to great effect, but it's false.

The first school kid from Hawaii.

I think she was trying to imitate Sojourner Truth.

I think Tony Morris.

Tony Morrison did a reading of one of Sojourner Truth's

speeches, and I think that that's where that accent resonated.

That's what it sounded like.

That's what her apologist said.

But she has a problem.

She has a problem that

she mimics whatever environment that she's in.

Don't forget, in 2008, they called her Boilermaker Hillary.

Remember that?

She'd go to rural Pennsylvania when she was campaigning against

Obama in Klingerland.

And all of a sudden, she would have photo ops where she was having a beer and a whiskey and at the bowling island, kind of like Elizabeth Warren.

Remember her little failed presidential gamble?

She opens up that commercial and she opens up, I'm having a beer, opens the refrigerator.

Oh, hey, this is really something I enjoy.

It's very funny how these people, they, in their their, they feel so inauthentic in their desperate search for authenticity, they will do almost anything.

Yes, but let's admit that that whole log cabin image of a presidential candidate or president

started way back in the day.

I mean,

I'm the

ordinary guy, and it started as a log cabin image.

It was the same thing about, you know, the fake Vietnam veteran.

It was the same thing in the 1870s.

Every race in America, a guy would say,

I was in the 8th Brigade of the Army of the Potomac Potomac or something, and this opponent said, you're lying.

You bought an exemption.

So they fought over who had, they raised the bloody shirt against each other.

And then they all had the log cabin commercial.

I mean, not commercials, but they'd have little lithographs of them.

Who could be the more authentically frontiersman or poor?

Okay.

Well, I'll stop my Hillary Clinton apologist mode and we'll turn to some

ads or some ads.

I'm sorry to say that.

We'll turn to some messages and come right back to the Victor Davis Hansen show.

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All right, we're back and I wanted to to turn to Elon Musk.

We got lots of information coming out from Elon about

conservatives being censored on Twitter, the blocking of the Hunter Biden laptop story, shadow banning of people like Dan Bongino, Charlie Hurt, and Jay Bhattacharya.

And I was wondering what your thoughts were about where this is all going, Victor?

Well,

in one sense, it's ridiculous because

unlike Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey, this man is a Renaissance man that has actually built physical things.

He's got the most successful space company in the world, SpaceX.

And he's actually, even all of his challenges, he's actually taken, remember this Chevy Volt and all these failures to have a viable electric car?

He was the first one to do it.

So he does things.

And those are more important than social media in some sense.

So I kind of think, well, why is he doing this?

And that was my initial reaction.

But as I've watched him,

he's not really, he's taken a money-losing, draining, failed company that is very important among elites.

And he knows he's going, he paid too much for it.

He knows it loses money.

He knows it takes his valuable time.

So why do it?

And

the why do it, I think he sincerely believes that we are entering a Norwellian world of electronic censorship and the left is at the center of it.

So what's fascinating is there's so many elements to the story is the left, who was always the American civil liberties, let it all hang out, is furious.

And again, remember there's one principle with the left, when they get angry at conservatives, it's always based on the principle.

they might do what I surely would do if I was in their place.

So if the left, say, took over Fox News, you know what they would do.

And so they're thinking, if we, you know, we took over Twitter, we got to Jack Dorsey and we made it very right-wing.

And so that's what, that's what he will do.

So they always are predictable.

They always get angry on the principle that

they suspect that you are going to do what they most certainly would do.

So the Republicans have taken back in the House, they take one example, and they think, you know what?

If I were them, I would tear up the State of the Union on national TV like Pelosi did.

I would impeach Biden.

And that's why they get so angry, because they feel that everybody's capable of everything that they do.

And so when Musk takes over, they think he's going to do just what Jack Dorsey did and what we did, because we would do it.

I don't think he is.

And so he's got, he's very, just think of the nuances of that guy's genius.

So he takes these people who are very gifted that have been ostracized by the left.

Michael Schellenberg, who ran for governor, who's a very thoughtful critic from the left of San Francisco and the disastrous culture of California under Newsom.

Then he takes Barry Weiss, that was ostracized from the New York Times and very successful on Substack.

And then he takes Matt Tleiby, who was the Rolling Stone leftist.

And so they're all leftists.

So he knows they're going to drive the left crazy, but he knows they're principal people.

But more importantly, they're not leftist hacks

because they have created careers that are based on their talent because they had to be based on their talent because the left hates them has tried to destroy them.

And yet, so that's the first thing.

And they're going to be his emissaries to this trove.

And then the second thing, he's like.

a Dickinsian novel, like Great Expectations.

He's releasing the information serially.

So everybody's waiting for Trove 1, Trove 2, Trove 3 in expectation.

And more importantly, the only way you can get it is to go to his product.

It would be as if Charles Dickens owned the London Times.

You know what I mean?

And you can only get great expectations if you went to his product.

So that's good.

And then

he's trying to make an argument when he, it's really about the FBI and the government.

He's not going to say that, you know, a private company can't can't do this or can't do that because he owns one, right?

So he doesn't want the government to come in and regulate it.

I mean, personally, I think that all these companies use the public airways in the way that

phone companies used to or power companies use

high-powered, high-voltage lines across public spaces.

And therefore, there has to be some regulation.

But forget that argument.

His argument is

this was different, as my Twitter trolls are going to show, because this was the U.S.

government.

And the U.S.

government, under the guise of the FBI, was censoring speech and interfering with communications and trying to warp an election.

And how did they do that?

They did it by hiring a private contractor, hiring or forcing or leveraging or employing a private contractor to do their dirty work, which they knew otherwise would be illegal, although they've done that before, as we saw with Russian collusion.

And so basically, this crazy guy

for Twitter and the crazy people around him were bragging that they were meeting almost weekly with the FBI and they would write handle when they got a request.

And it wasn't just the FBI, it was director of national intelligence, Homeland Security, it was all the DOJ.

These people were basically telling him

health story,

laptop story, this Trump stuff, and they were using their various tools that we as laymen, we don't know what shadow banning is or repressing the retweets of a particular conservative person, you know, Charlie Kirk or Dan Bongino.

We don't know what that means.

We don't know that they took Jay Bacciari, a colleague of mine at the Hoover Institution now, and

made sure that when he posted something on Twitter, nobody really bounced it around or it didn't show likes.

Those were all shadow ways of suppressing the dissemination of stories.

And they did that.

And they did it at the bequest of the U.S.

government.

And the U.S.

government is not supposed to take sides in particular campaigns.

And it's not supposed to tell people that what they can say or not.

And one final thing is the left keeps saying this is just the media.

This is a private.

This is no different than the New York times or the washing they can print whatever they want or censor no it's a little different they communicate this is a communication network it's not fox news it's not the new york times it's a mechanism by people the way people communicate this is now the equivalent of a phone circa about 1950.

can you imagine bell the bell phone company basically cutting off people when they're talking to other people on a party line and say, uh-oh,

you don't criticize Ike at all.

We have a computer or we heard you saying that Eisenhower is an idiot.

As soon as we heard that, bam,

you can't call somebody and talk about that topic.

Or, you know what, we heard you mention J.

Edgar Hoover.

No, that's what it is.

It's a communication company that relies on the public airways to

operate, to exist.

And so it has a responsibility, and that is to be disinterested.

And it wasn't that way.

It was an arm of the Democratic Party.

Yeah, sure.

It's going to, it would stop all of what we call democracy if it, if it's not, some, something's not done.

But I was wondering what you think

drives Elon to put so much energy into this and when he has his other companies that probably need his attention as well.

Did you have any ideas about that?

I mean, is he just a super patriot or something?

I think it's a mixture of both.

I think he's an egomaniac and he realizes that to run Tesla and to run SpaceX is to be known in the sense that Warren Buffett is known and Bill Gates is known and admired.

So,

but to run Tesla and to revolutionize Silicon Valley, that's to be the object of everybody's conversation.

and attention.

And he loves that.

That's not bad or good.

It's just a fact.

But then there's something else beyond him

because he is somebody, he's a man of the left.

And so

he mirror images himself with Barry Weiss and Pleiby and Schellenberger.

And he says, these people, even Bill Maher and those people, these are people like me that can no longer be like us because they made it impossible because they're not liberals.

They're fascist in a way.

Not in a way.

They're acting like fascists.

And I can't do that anymore.

And they're going to destroy the country.

You let this country go over to them and they will destroy it because they believe that their so-called moralistic ends justify any means necessary to achieve them.

If that means lying about Hunter's laptop when it's obviously authentic, they will do it.

If that means going after a wonderful person like Jay Bacharia at Stanford, and isolating them, ostracizing them, shadow, they will do it.

And who are they?

They're this hard left, hard left group of Bay Area pseudo-moralists.

And so you can see this because one of the first things he did, he walked around that office, he saw what it was doing.

He made the connection with Jim Baker, James Baker, the FBI lawyer that was the Twitter counsel.

And he said to himself, they can lie all they want, but I know why they hired him because they were dealing with him when he was at the FBI and his subordinates were dealing with him to suppress stuff.

So they got Mr.

Suppressor himself because he's the best practitioner of, now he's in the, he's the fox in the hen house.

So, and this is San Francisco.

And I think he's thinking, you know what?

This overstaffed, overfed, obese workforce in the sense that it's unnecessary is right in the heart of darkness in San Francisco.

And I am never going to be able to make Twitter transparent and open because these people will destroy me and they will sandbag me from the inside.

So I'm going to decapitate the administrative head, fire the CFO, fire the CEO, fire Baker, and I'm going to get rid of 60% of these people right now.

Get them out.

They don't know how to code.

And I'm going to do it under the guise of what are you doing besides using my money to gobble food at the lunch or go meditate on the job or to do yoga or whatever it is, but you don't code.

And essentially, people who make this thing happen are coders.

Get out, and he's going to move it apparently to Texas because he knows that if he stays there, it'll be subverted.

And so

he's sending a message.

And it's really, if you think about it, he's basically telling California in general, he moved, you know, all of his other businesses out of California, but he's also saying the Bay Area makes it impossible for any disinterested business that has anything to do with issues of the time to exist because it is dominated by the left and they will destroy it.

They will destroy with the on mitis test everything they touch.

So you got to get out.

And I was talking to a pretty prominent person from Silicon Valley not long ago, and he said something that

I don't want to even give any information about the landscape that anybody might identify in, but he's very knowledgeable, genius, very successful.

He said something to me, said, I don't think that Silicon Valley is going to be Silicon Valley in 10 or 15 years, because you can't run a business, even their businesses, on the principles of which they're established, which is at war with meritocracy.

So even though they draw on Stanford University, to take one example, and

what are you going to do when they throw out the SAT?

They throw out the ACT for admittance.

And now the graduate programs at the graduate level are throwing out meritocratic criteria and we're seeing the result already of that and we want engineers that know how to code and are the best in the world now if we go to caltech or we go to georgia tech we'll find them but we can't operate in that and you know there's been a rumor for years that that silicon valley has special tests for coders and for the top engineers that chart the course of these companies.

And by that, I mean,

think about it a minute, Sammy.

These are the people who say, you know, I'm for diversity, equity, inclusion.

I think it's great Stanford getting rid of that awful

SAT.

Maybe Stanford Law School should drop the LSAT and even the bars rig.

But secretly, when you come to work for us, we're going to give you a coder test.

And we're going to give you kind of a GRE private little test to see what you really know.

And we're not going to care about any of these diversity, equity, inclusion issues.

Not when you have the future of our company.

Now, if you look at the entire company, we can use HR or public relations, but we don't touch what makes us exist.

And I think that's true.

And so

if they start

killing the golden goose, which they are,

you will see

a Stanford engineering degree not worth very much.

And that's the feeder to all of these places.

You will see it diminish in value because people will say, we understand that that did not include a SAT for admittances.

It didn't have a GRE test for admittance to a graduate program.

And the graduate programs were monitored by diversity czars.

Therefore, we can't guarantee that graduate has the skills necessary for us to survive.

So we're going to go to Georgia Tech, as I said, or something, get there.

And if that's true, we don't need to be in Silicon Valley.

We'll just leave.

I think that's going to happen.

Well, speaking of Georgia, if we can change subjects here, I was wondering what your thoughts were after the runoff election between Herschel Walker and Warnock.

It looks like they came out with a three-point difference in the end.

It was a very funny race because it was almost dead even during the general election.

But people had remembered that just as Purdue

had

almost won a majority during the general election or an earlier election, and then he had to go on a runoff and then he was destroyed by Warnock, they understood something.

And that is when you have a special election, everybody takes a deep breath.

And if that special election

determines the future of the country, i.e.

the control of the Senate, then everybody is going to go full out in a way that they didn't because there were other elections that distracted them during the general election.

So as soon as the nation turned its attention to Walker Warnick,

I knew it was going to lose.

I said to someone, the only question is, I said, you want to bet?

Is it going to be lost at 1 in the morning or 11.30 night Pacific?

We knew it was going to be lost.

And so why did we know?

Because the money

and the early balloting mastery was all on Warnick's side.

He outspit him three, four, five to one.

He ran more commercials.

He snowballed him with get out the vote.

He mastered the early, you know, 60, 70% of the votes were already cast, just like Oz got very.

So there's generic reasons that apply to that election that applied to why the Republicans did so poorly.

Number one was they don't know how to do early voting and mail-in balloting.

Number two,

their pathetic little

win-red versus act blue.

It's not even close.

They don't know how to raise money, or they don't have the sources of money in their defense like the left does, which is the party of the hyper-wealthy.

And then the unions and stuff.

And then, number three,

they didn't have a message in the midterms, and he didn't have a message.

Walker never said, This is what elect me, and these are the exact positions I'm going to support.

And then,

you know, the polls were

all over the place.

So those were reasons that

they didn't have the tsunami.

But when you go, there was another reason that wasn't true of every race.

And

you can make fun of Oz, but Oz was not a bad candidate.

He was well-spoken.

He knew the issues.

And compared to his opponent, Federman, I mean, it wasn't even close.

So don't tell me that it's the races only depend on candidates.

They don't sometimes.

But sometimes they do.

And Carrie Lake was an ideal candidate, and she lost.

But

Herschel Walker was not a good candidate.

And Trump just got in the bandwagon.

They called him.

And people had said that the Democrats have four or five hundred pages on this guy, that he's going to have to be a strong opponent of abortion.

And they've got evidence or rumors or innuendo they will use to say that he advocated abortions for former partners.

He's a Christian, but he's an adulter.

He's

he wants to, we want to make the argument that Warnick attacked his wife and physically and was warned.

But how can we do that when there's people who are going to say Walker did,

you know, it's going to be your wife attacker against our wife attacker.

And so he was not a good candidate.

And then what was tragic about it is he's a very good person.

I think he is.

And so on all the issues, to the degree that he articulated them, he was right.

He just didn't give any dromise about what he would do.

But the point I'm making, what was sad about it is he had innate moral sense that you close the border, that you don't have a late-term abortion, that crime is stopped by deterrence, that you need the middle class to be able to afford gasoline.

So then you had this rhetorical preacher who made his life.

his living, his entire life out of spending these sermons, rhetorician, and he was a complete socialist.

And that's a euphemism for what he was.

So he was a disastrous candidate.

So the result of what I'm getting at is because of this peculiarities of these, you have to get a majority vote law in Georgia, and this peculiarity of the role of Trump versus the Republican Party, you had a red state like Georgia that has every other state office, lieutenant governor, attorney general, governor, solid conservatives, except the two most important offices, the two Senate offices.

And they're not Democrats.

They're not liberals.

They're hardcore socialists, both of them.

They have the two most left-wing members in the Senate of 100 senators, and they both come from Red State.

That's hard to pull off.

And that is a reflection of a complete bankruptcy in the Republican Senate leadership and the Republican Party to allow that to happen.

Yeah, it sure is.

It would never happen.

If they had a candidate like in this particular case, if they had a guy like Kemp, his twin, and he wasn't really a spectacular candidate, but he mastered the old folksy, Herman Telmage, you know, Georgia, I'm a good old boy kind of stuff without being, or the Joe Manchin type of that, whatever parties he's in, he can appeal to everybody because he's not arrogant and he knows their concerns and he's trustworthy and he's one of them.

And that crosses racial lines, class lines.

If they had had a candidate, and there was a lot of them to choose from.

I think Trump, in this particular case, I think he was a celebrity, as he was with Oz.

He had this idea that big celebrities like himself will resonate.

And sometimes they do and sometimes they don't.

But in Georgia, they had no margin of error and it didn't work.

Yeah, I sure didn't.

I was just before we need to go to some messages, Victor, but I thought maybe shortly this

new change for Kirsten cinema to defecting from the Democratic Party, if you had a couple of words on that at all, or is it worth it?

Well, I think she, I mean, a person doesn't get up in the morning and say, I'm going to switch, right?

So for a long time,

she started out as a, I guess you'd call her a European green and then I think she looked at what you know what these people want to do pack the court filibust get rid of the filibuster bring in Puerto Rico and what and she couldn't buy into that so she's kind of a democratic version of Lisa Murkowski but

she doesn't she didn't make that decision

I think she had told people and she was prepared before the election thinking that it was probably going to be 50-50

or the Republicans are going to take it.

Either way, if the Republicans are going to take it, she would have been in the majority party.

And then I think if it was 50-50,

as an independent, she would be really, really powerful.

And I think she didn't quite realize that the Democrats were going to hold the majority.

So that, and I think she would already cross the Rubicon, and she told enough people and she had to come out and confirm that.

And so that position is not as powerful as it otherwise would be, with one exception.

And that is that she used to caucus with Joe Manchin.

And one of the results of this election,

I mean, it's 5049,

but she, together with Joe Manchin, can flip it 5149 to the Republicans.

And that could happen, and they can get some leverage by threatening to do that because

the Democratic Party has taken the wrong lessons from this.

The lesson was was that they were on the losing end of issues, but the Republicans blew it and handed them a gift that they didn't earn.

And they misinterpreted that as a referendum.

And they will go harder and harder and harder left.

And that will make it more likely that Manchin and Sinema think, you know what,

Manchin especially, I can't go down this road.

And maybe on some key issues, they won't join the Republicans.

They just will oppose the Democrats.

yeah yeah all right she's going to vote to pack the court i do not think that she's going to vote for the filibuster and i do think those votes will come up yeah all right let's go first to some messages and come right back

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Victor, I have a few things that have come up in Germany, and we really haven't had a discussion about Germany, I don't think, in the past, but we have just a short time here.

But they're doing some interesting things like building a natural gas pipeline.

in eight months and one that they say should have taken five years.

And then also, there's been these arrests of extremists in Germany.

They sent out 3,000 officers and they raided 150 properties in Germany, Italy, and Austria.

And these extremists were right-wing extremists and anti-Semites.

In fact, they had burned down a

synagogue at one or attacked a synagogue at one point.

And I thought that that was

interesting.

They also said that these extremists they were after were part of QAnon conspiracy theory or believed the King.

Yeah, that's a lot to digest.

Sorry.

Start with the premise that of all the European countries,

what happens in Germany because of its size and population and history and economy is the most important.

But most importantly,

it has a very distinct view of the United States.

And by that, I mean, because we occupied it along with the Allies, and because we saved it after World War II from a Russian invasion and throughout the Cold War, and because we defeated it in World War I and we destroyed it in World War II,

they have a very ambiguous view of Americans.

Okay, that's number one.

And that's manifested, as I've said earlier, in these pew polls.

Go back and look at the 25 to 30 European countries from the Atlantic all the way to the Soviet border, and you will see that Germany rates the highest polls.

The polls show that they are the highest level of anti-Americanism, and it was not specific to Donald Trump.

It started with Barack Obama, or it didn't start with him.

It was reflected during him.

And it's only about 52%.

53% have a positive view of the United States.

So we got to be very careful about Germany.

And the reason I'm bringing this up is Donald Trump was right when he warned the Germans in that famous conversation when he said, this is just terrible what you're doing.

You are making a deal with Vladimir Putin just to get cheap gas with this Nordstrom pipeline.

And you know what?

The Nord Stream pipe.

And we're going to, and we're subsidizing you, and we're protecting you from Putin, and you're endangering all of NATO with its arch rival and greatest threat.

And you're making them wealthy to build up their defenses.

You shouldn't do that.

And everybody got mad at Trump.

Well, he was prescient.

And so now Germany is thinking, hmm,

we shut down nuclear plants.

We shut down coal plants.

We're pre-civilizational.

We're not even warm.

So we've got to be Germans again.

And so they're not shutting down German nuclear plants.

They're extending their life of the ones.

They're trying to reboot some.

They are keeping some of their coal plants so they don't have to cut wood and burn it, which they probably will have to do in many homes.

And now they're going to have liquefied

natural gas come in at

Wilhelmshaven, the famous World War II port on the North Sea.

Very famous, and it's kind of an industrial backwater, but now it'll be important and it'll get, I suppose, it'll get Middle East liquefied natural gas.

It will come in and they will get 20 or 30 percent of what they lost from Putin.

And when Germany said they're going to do it, and they're Germans, they will do it.

So, they basically did something that we would never do.

They built an entire new

industrial plant in about six months.

And they're very good at that when they want to be German.

So, they did that.

And

as far as these,

I mean,

I don't know what Q1 is.

The only reason I mention that is

about every six weeks, somebody writes me an email, not somebody, a lot of people and say, have you looked at your Wikipedia?

And it's always a group of leftists that have tried to smear you.

And then you have to have people go in and correct it.

And usually Wikipedia, which is left-wing, refuses to correct it until they're forced to show.

So the latest one was Victor Hansen has views endorsed by QAnon.

QAnon.

I thought, wow, I didn't even know what QAnon is.

I'd heard the name.

So I looked it up and I'd realized it came out of this pizza gate thing about child

pornography and pedophilia.

It was crazy.

It's a crazy conspiracy.

So I was smeared by that.

It's a nutty group that I had no idea what it was.

And of course, the first person who tried to change it, they refused to change it.

And then they were sort of told, if you don't change it, because it has a lot of lies.

What was really weird about it, they had quotes that I had said.

Victor Hansen said this about January 3rd.

And they put it in quotes.

And yet,

everybody knows if you want to know whether these quotes are authentic, you just take a two-second exercise.

You cut and paste the quotes inside quotation marks.

You put it on Google and you see what turns up.

And every time we did that, the only thing that turns up is the Wikipedia article.

So we know it didn't appear in anything I wrote or said.

And

I didn't write that.

So that's the, what I'm getting at is that must be a crazy thing.

That's if a left doesn't want like you and they want to smear you on the right, that's what they do.

And so when they say this group is a QAnon, I don't know what that means.

I have no idea what they are.

They're far-right, anti-Semitic.

Anti-Semitism in Germany is something you have to be very careful about.

because they have this history and they're very careful in their defense.

They have zero tolerance, they say,

but when you start looking at what the government's attitude is in the Middle East, you can start to see why they have to be careful because they have that, I don't know whether, if they're culturated to it historically.

And I want to just say one thing about anti-Semitism, if I could.

Donald Trump made a big mistake.

I think, you know, when he had dinner with Kenya West or Yi or whatever his name is, he's an anti-Semite.

And he made a big mistake when they didn't vet.

He brought in this Nick Twintis.

I don't know who he is either, other than once I saw the name, I started to

bone up on him.

He's a 20-something,

admires Hitler like Kenya West.

Okay, they should have never been anywhere near Trump.

And his staff, the person who allowed that dinner should be fired.

because he could not be trusted again.

Anybody would have those two eat with a potential president or presidential candidate should be fired.

Okay.

But the left seized on that, pounced is the word, and they said, see, it's anti-Semitism is on the right.

No, it's not.

QAnon and

these small splinter groups have zero support.

And what is dangerous about anti-Semitism today

is it is embedded, it's enmeshed in, it's nourished on the left, and it's part of the woke culture.

2013, if you Googled knockout game, you would see hit the Jew, hit the Jew.

If you want to say Hasidic Jews and attack, you will see African-American youth attacking Hasidic Jews.

If you want to look at prominent people who have espoused the most virulent hatred of Jews in Israel, it's Louis Farrakhan, It's Reverend Wright and Dim Jews won't let me talk to Brock.

It is Al Sharp.

And tell them, come over here with their Yarmouk on, and I'll do them.

It's Jesse Jackson.

I'm coming into Jaime Town.

It's Alice Walker, the beloved novelist who couldn't.

I mean, she endorsed a lot of this crazy guy who has this idea that we're lizard people and the Jews are running them.

And, you know, she said that famous remark, she was married to someone Jewish.

And they said, you got to be careful about Jews.

She said, yeah, but I married one.

And I think she finally reconciled with her daughter, who's half Jewish, of course, but she's just an utter anti-Semite.

This black Israel group, the Hebrew Israels or Israel Hebrews, whoever they are, that were baiting the Covington kids, they're complete anti-Semites.

You go to any campus, any campus in the United States, and you see anything critical of Israel that goes too far and starts to

get into Jewishness on my campus, just take a poster.

If you see Ben Shapiros coming to campus and there's a bug spray, you know, Ray, get rid of him so we can, what?

we can resonate the Holocaust and gas to get rid of a Jew.

We know who it's coming from.

It's coming from either a Middle East group or a left-wing group.

So the two largest anti-Semitic groups in the United States who are not disciplined by their over is the Linda Sashur, Ilan Omar squad, Talib group that equates Jews with Israel and says things like, it's the Benjamin's baby, as Ilan Omar did, or has maps in their offices with Israel not on it, or like Taleb says, you know, from the river to the sea shall be Palestine, i.e., we're going to kill every damn Jew they think in Israel.

They are anti-Semitic, that community, and then nobody polices them.

And nobody has the intellectual fortitude to take a deep breath and say, whether it's a professional athlete, football player, or Kenya West, or rap music, rap music lyrics, go look at it.

rap music lyrics or Alice Walker.

Nobody says the African-American community has a problem because it has institutionalized and greenlighted open overt hatred of Jews.

Nobody will say that.

So the problem is that the leadership of the African-American community and the leadership of the Muslim American community has not definitively come out and said

we have a problem of anti-Semitism.

It's evident in rap music.

It's evident on the street where we have an inordinate number of hate crimes that are committed against Jews by African-American youth.

It's evident in our leadership, not just Farrakhan, not just Al Sharpton,

but people like Jesse Jackson or some members of the Black Caucus are major figures that people

sort of look up to, like the novelist

Alice Walker.

And we have to deal with it.

Instead, what happens is they wait to some weirdo like Fuentes and they say, see, it's on the right.

It might have been the right in the 1950s, but it's not now.

And it's more insidious because you see,

all of the major media used to really, you know, be the watchdogs of anti-Semitism because it was on the right.

It was a very small group.

It grew out of the Klan and all that, and they were excellent in spotting it.

But when it's deeply embedded within their own ranks, they close ranks.

And it's even true of the Jewish American political groups, except for the Zionist Organization of America.

They criticize Donald Trump, even though they're conservative.

They have no problem doing that.

But you will not see a liberal Jewish group go after the people who are peddling this hate.

And it's coming from popular culture now.

And it's getting worse.

And you're going to see more and more of it.

When you have a guy, I don't know what his politics are, if he's MAGA anymore, but when you have Kenya West saying that these are a list of Jewish directors, or I'm going to go DEF CON 5,

or when you look at the lyrics of some of these things about the Jew, or you have the personal preacher, advisor to Barack Obama call them dim Jews that won't let me get near Obama, then you've got a problem and they're not addressing it.

Yeah.

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

So thank you very much for all of your thoughts on the brittany greiner case and elon musk kerschel walker and the things going on in germany today we appreciate that didn't we have an upbeat story somebody said eeyore you're getting too pessimistic you're too

well we had some laughs about willie nelson's life yes well there's one we'll end on one thought i'm looking out the window And there's a huge storm in California, and it's dumped four to five feet of December snow in the Sierra.

It's rained the last storm was an inch.

It's going to probably rain another inch this weekend.

And the

climate change people who warned us we were in a permanent drought and the rest of us said it's cyclical.

It's too dry, but I think we'll have a wet year and I'm hoping this will be a 2019 wet year and that'll make all the difference in California.

All right.

Well, we'll keep our fingers crossed for it.

I would like to remind everybody that you can read Victor's work and listen to his podcast at his website, VictorHanson.com.

It's called The Blade of Perseus.

And please come join us there for $5 a month or $50

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Thank you to our listeners, and thank you, Victor.

Thank you for listening, everybody, and we'll talk again next time.

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

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