The Latest from Elon to China and Ukraine

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor is an author, scholar, columnist, essayist, political, and cultural critic, and most known for, I think, by those who have listened to him.

And for you who are new, or his sober, and judicious, and dispassionate analysis of current events.

So if you haven't listened to Victor's show recently or at all, this should be a great moment for you to come to understand or know the.

Hey, wait, wait, wait, wait.

I'm going to interrupt you.

What do you mean by sober and judicious?

For most of my life, when I wanted to caricature somebody, I said, well, he's sober and judicious.

It is a compliment coming from me because, you know, we don't get a lot of sober, judicious analysis these days.

They tend to be partisan and/or extreme, I think.

I went to a professor once in graduate school and I said, This professor is really boring and

everybody's asleep in class.

I shouldn't have said it's none of my business.

I was just a puny student.

And he said, Victor,

he's very professor X is sober and he's judicious.

And so,

so you're afraid that

you want ready to sleep?

Yes, I become what I used not to like as a young person.

We all do that as well.

Yeah, but I have no worries that anybody's going to fall asleep today because we've got lots on the agenda.

Elon Musk and his censorship of Elon, the unrest in China and Arizona as a purple state now rather than a red, and maybe a little bit on the Ukraine.

But first, let's go to some messages and come right back and we'll start with Elon Musk.

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We're back, and I would like to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin and Ellie Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

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Well, Victor, Elon's been in the news, so I can't say he's in the news again.

He's just in the news.

And the

government seems to be a little bit leery of him owning Twitter and his aspirations for a free

discussion area or freedom of speech and freedom of expression on his Twitter platform and say that they are, quote, monitoring the situation, or at least that was Corrine Jean-Pierre's explanation.

I was wondering if you had some thoughts on that.

You know, he's got a calculus or

a methodology that has confused Silicon Valley.

And it's brilliant because,

first of all, unlike Tim Cook or the Google guys or Bill Gates,

He's not just a tech guy.

He doesn't deal in intangibles or cyberspace or informational retrieval or social media like Mark.

He builds things.

They're concrete.

They're real.

He's a throwback to the 19th century.

He builds rockets, my God, and the rockets work.

And he's beating his competition.

It's, you know, it's formidable.

And nobody does that today.

And then everybody talked about electrical cars, you know, electric-driven cars, but he actually built one.

But it just didn't build one.

He beat Ford and he beat.

GM and he beat Toyota and he has a product that gets 330 miles on a charge.

And he's basically the largest capitalized car company in the world.

And it didn't even exist 10 years ago.

So this is incredible.

So in this fight that he's having, number one,

he's done something.

He doesn't need this, is what I'm trying to say.

It's extraneous.

It's not essential to who he is, like it is to these other moguls.

It's incidental.

And then, second, he's not a right-wing nut.

He's not a conservative like the listeners and myself or you.

He's an old classical liberal guy.

And so it's very hard to demonize him as, oh, he's some kind of right-wing nut.

No, he's not.

I wish he was more conservative, but he's not.

He's an open-minded, and I don't mean that as a deprecatory label against people like myself, but he's willing to vote Democratic and Republican, depending on the candidate.

Very hard for me to vote Democratic because of their ideological straitjackets.

But nevertheless, that's another thing that's very interesting about this.

And third, he's not this dour guy like Bill Gage, you know, or

Mike Broomberg.

He's just kind of off the wall.

He's laughing, he's tweeting, he's scaring investors.

How can a guy with, you know,

net worth of $200 billion be wasting his time replying to tweets, right?

So

he's not orthodox.

He's unorthodox.

He's iconoclastic and clastic.

And this is really important.

And so he represents to

the

seven to eight trillion dollar corridor between San Jose and San Francisco an existential threat because he's going to come in here with a very popular and money-losing social media platform that nobody was going to buy because it was a lose-lose situation.

But not if you're worth $200 billion.

He can absorb that loss.

And he's going to shake things up.

He's going to offer an alternative platform.

And they are scared stiff that the control of social media and all of its manifestations, Yahoo, Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, all of that did two things.

It monopolized

the transference of knowledge, Google searches, et cetera.

The order of the searches,

the communications,

where you get your news.

He's not going to change all of it, but he's going to offer a little exit for people who feel that they would constrain.

They can go to Twitter and say whatever they want.

They can exchange news.

They can say Hunter's laptop was real.

They can say Robert Mueller

was a fraud, basically.

The whole investigation was based on the fraud of collusion.

They can say, you know what, vaccinations will not prevent you from getting infected.

They may help you weather disease, but it's not as advertised.

We can say the Wuhan lab was this sort.

They can say anything.

And

that's frightening because social media was supposed to package the news and communications in the interest of the Progressive Project A, and it was supposed to channel billions, whether it's 419 million in one shot by Mark Zuckerberg in the 2020 election, or what Molly Ball outlined in Time magazine, magazine, what she called a conspiracy, or what we saw this election with Mr.

Sam Friedman, excuse me, Bankman, I keep calling him Friedman, Bankman Fried, and his $70 million

infusion.

So he represents a challenge to all that.

And so, you know, I don't think Orwell

necessarily ever said it, but he's been attributed that if they're paid better, they'd be fascist.

And he's showing these people to be outright fascist.

you think he's going to what?

Oh, do you think he's going to weather the storm?

Yeah, I do.

I do.

I think the way he looks at it is

what I've been through with trying to create from the bottom up an automobile in the way that nobody else, the story of the American automobile history and industry has been any upstart was crushed.

crushed, crushed, crushed.

If he needed brakes, if he needed a drivetrain, if he needed, there was a monopoly, he couldn't get into that

market.

And he did.

And NASA, NASA, NASA was rockets.

The idea that a private entrepreneur would make these huge rockets and go into outer space with a pretty much predictable record of efficacy, it's amazing.

So when he looks at all that and he looks at social media, he's coming from a different perspective.

It's like somebody broke in from nowhere into the major leagues, right?

And then on the side, he coaches Little League.

And everybody said, Oh, wow, Little League's hard to coach.

No, it's not.

Not if you're a professional baseball player that came from nothing.

And that's what he looks at.

And so these, he's dealing with people.

This is their whole life.

This is Mark Zuckerberg's whole life.

That was Jack Dorsey's whole life.

That is

Tim Cook's whole life.

And it's not his whole life.

So he takes a different perspective.

And I think finally and fourthly,

whether it's true or not doesn't matter.

He believes it's true that he's on a kind of half Don Quixote quest and half a mission to save the United States.

And he really does believe, quixotic as he is, that if he can break up this monopoly and open up free expression on social media, he will save A, the media.

And he's good for Tim Cook, and he's good for Mark Zuckerberg, and he's good for the Google people, even though they don't know he's good for him, because he's going to open it up and get it more robust and preserve it from government regulation, which if he doesn't, if he fails, the government's going to step in because you can't go on as it is.

And he thinks he's going to save the United States.

He thinks that this is very serious because they threw an election.

They basically said on the 2020 eve of the election that this man, Hunter Biden, had left his laptop in a store and on that laptop there was information that showed that the biden family the syndicate so to speak had been getting millions of dollars from foreign governments and was probably not paying taxes and not paying gift taxes with the transference among member to member and was getting all of that by virtue alone of joe biden's status as a vice president of the united states and that he was compromised and he and that was so clear on that laptop and it was confirmed by Tony Bobolinski that that would have really, as we know from later polls, that would have affected people's votes.

But when those 50 intelligence officials lied and said that it was likely Russian disinformation, and then social media and Silicon Valley just said, you can't, if you mention this as authentic, you're going to be

off.

You're going to be kicked out.

You're going to be suppressed.

Yes.

We will go after you.

Yes.

And so he's saying that we're never going to do that again.

We're never going to give these people that much power because we're going to have all.

And then finally,

he looks at this and he sees that

Parlier by Rebecca Mercer is a wonderful person.

Everybody's on the left denigrates her, but there's never been a more generous person and astute.

And she had 20 million people ready to join Parlier.

And he crushed it.

He being, you know, Amazon and Apple and this Google too, the Google apps.

And they crushed her.

They crushed the company.

And he knows what they're capable of.

So he went into this with skeletons.

And not that, I'm not suggesting that Parlier's done.

It's still around.

But it could have been almost another Twitter.

And they strangled it in its cradle.

And he knows what they're capable of because he's seen it.

And yet he went in anyway.

So I admire him.

I don't think I would be, I'd want to be in a room and talk with him, but I admire him.

I think he's doing enormous good for the country.

I like the fact that he's eccentric and

he deserves a lot of support from everybody.

Yeah, yeah, I imagine he must dominate a room, that's for sure.

Well, they do say that his Twitter is still strong and that not as many Twitter ratio

have not really left Twitter.

in the middle of the day.

He's getting more people joined

than before

before he took over.

And more importantly, he's sitting on an atomic bomb.

It's called the Twitter Archives.

And it's all electronically

data

in his hands.

He owns it.

And he's going to start releasing troves of information that's going to show you what Twitter's employees did and how they suppressed particular things on political purposes.

And you know what?

He's going to have Twitter communications with members of the DNC and the Democratic Party.

He's going to have the whole list of Twitter contributions, et cetera, et cetera.

And

he's not stupid.

He's a brilliant guy.

And he's going to

release these troves at strategically important times.

He's just not going to let it all go out and say, there it is, I'm done.

No, he's going to let it out and say, this is something.

Wait to the next one.

Wait to the next one.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's certainly certainly very smart and smarter.

I think his craziness makes people underestimate him.

And that's where I think they're.

It's the same thing with Donald Trump.

He was completely unpredictable.

And,

you know, Elon Musk is not president of the United States.

So unpredictability and its extremes can be dangerous.

But nobody knew what to do with Donald Trump because they didn't know what he would say on any time, anywhere to anyone, anytime.

And

that's an advantage.

And it really worked in foreign policy because people sat across the table from Donald Trump.

They didn't know what he was going to do, whether they were North Korea or Iran or Russia or China.

And the same thing on a lesser scale is with Elon Musk.

So Tim Cook just met with him.

And if reports are accurate, he basically assured him that

Apple would not do to Elon Musk what it did to Parlier

and keep it off its app store.

And I think one of the reasons he did is that A, Elon Musk is the wealthiest man in the world, and B, he's totally unpredictable.

And he has mechanisms and ideas that would make life a little bit more uncomfortable for Tim Cook and Apple.

And then second, people have had it with Apple, they've had it with Google, they've had it with Facebook, and they're about a micro

millimeter, micrometer away from regulating that whole damn industry.

And by that, I'm saying they're going to at some point say,

you guys use the cyber space,

cyber sphere.

You don't own it.

That's a public domain and you're communicating through it just like wires and telegraphs and just like television signals and radio megahertz.

And

you're abusing that freedom we've given you as a startup industry.

And we're going to go in and we're going to regulate you.

And one of the regulations that is going to be,

and I had Marcia Blackburn on a podcast that will probably be out by the time we listen to this, and she made, she went through the whole list of what they're looking at.

You're not going to tap people's private information or their geographical location or their buying history without their permission.

You're not going to collude with other Silicon Valley mega companies so that you can deny people access to purchase Twitter or purchase parliament.

And so they have a whole,

we're going to look at how many companies you have acquired to stifle competition.

And so, and we're going to see if you have logarithms that,

algorithms, I should say, excuse me, algorithms that on your Google searches are intentionally designed to put conservative or traditional stories at the very bottom and left-wing progressive themes at the top of the search, irrelevant of their frequency in the news.

So they're going to look at a lot of that stuff.

And so I think Tim Cook has got a lot of anxiety when he meets Elon Musk.

Yeah, he sure does.

Well, speaking of controlling people and controlling the cyberspace, but more controlling people, I would like to turn to China and talk a little bit or get your thoughts on the apartment fire that occurred that killed 10 people.

But it was an apartment fire on an apartment apartment building that had been locked down for COVID.

And people's apartments were locked from the outside, so they couldn't get out.

And protests.

Basically, that means they welded the door shut like they did during COVID earlier.

Oh my God.

But anyways, the protests of that turned to protests for freedom and democracy.

So there's a little bit of unleashing of the Chinese people in this incident.

But I was wondering what your thoughts were.

Well, I mean, there's 1.4 million people that don't have freedom, and they're completely regimented out of something like Brave New World or 1984.

And

they have won over the West through bribery and through this kind of Tom Friedman dash, Bill Gates dash,

Mike Bloomberg dash, admiration for their efficiency and their economic development where they are now from where they were just a few years ago.

It's an impressive achievement, but

it's

totalitarian.

It's complete regimes.

It's like an anthive or a beehive, and there is no freedom.

And people, as they get more affluent, it's not that they're going to be like Carmel, California, but they want to have some say in the way they conduct their lives, and they have zero say.

So they're doing all this.

They're protesting.

They're going on in Iran.

And what is this government doing?

They're They're completely neutral on it.

John Kirby was on Fox various times.

He's been at press conferences.

He articulated the position that it's about as milk toasty as you can get.

We support the right of people to protest anywhere in the world.

First of all, that's not.

They didn't support the truckers in Canada who, you know, when they were protesting or the people who objected to lockdown sometimes.

So that wasn't true.

But more importantly,

why he was talking about this,

Apple, getting back to Apple again, had recently infused $275 million

in sophisticated research and development to China, I think as kind of a bribe.

So they would lay off production of iPhones because they were starting to hyper-regulate or intrude into the efficacy of Apple production, which is...

terribly leveraged by China because that's one of its chief sources of production.

And the point I'm making is that there is this accusation that the surveillance necessary to put down

this grassroots, I guess you'd call it, populist or democratic protest, some of the surveillance tools that can tell people, can allow this

Chinese communist government to know who is protesting, where they're protesting, when they're protesting, how they're protesting, came from part of Apple's large iCloud array of surveillance.

And in other words, Apple basically, as a private company, was saying, you know what?

We're going to not endanger our productive capacity of iPhones in China.

So we're going to pay bribes and we're going to call it research and development help.

And we're going to give them access to Apple surveillance tools.

And then when asked about that, John Kirby and the Biden administration say, well, it's a private company.

They can do what they want, but not Elon Musk.

He's not a private company.

So, if he wants to open up Twitter and destroy the left-wing monopoly of information coming out of Twitter, we're going to go after him because he's a single person, as Elizabeth Warren said.

He's a single person.

He shouldn't have that much power.

But Tim Cook and Apple should have that much power, even if they're using it to suppress freedom in China.

And finally, it brings up a larger question, Sammy, and that is:

think a minute.

In 2009, we had a green revolution in Iran.

Obama came in in the first months.

He said nothing.

You would think that this Chicago social community organizer, this left-wing champion of individual liberty and freedom, he said nothing.

And why did he say nothing?

Because he did not like Saudi Arabia.

He did not like Kuwait.

He did not like Jordan.

He did not like Mubarak and Egypt.

He hated Israel.

And his crackpot advisors that surrounded him said to Barack Obama, because it wasn't original, he didn't have an original thought.

They said to him,

it's kind of like social organizing in Chicago.

These are the overdogs of the Middle East.

So why don't we help the underdogs, the Shia, the Iranians, the Syrians, Hezbollah, Hamas.

the Palestinian Authority.

We'll balance it and create creative tension.

But to do that, you can't attack the theocracy because they're sort of the underdog.

And believe it or not, that's what we did.

If they shot down a drone, he didn't blow it up, even though that technology was quickly reverse engineered and a decade later it appears in the hands of the Russians from Iran, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And the same thing now in Iran.

He won't say a word, Joe Biden, and the Obama people around him about Iran and the people who are risking their lives on the street, because deep down inside, they see Iran as part of this crackpot Middle East

theory that

we're going to show Netanyahu, we're going to show the Saudi royal family, we're going to show Mr.

Sisi in Egypt that we have alternatives, and we're going to kind of stick a little pin in your ribs and say, How do you like that?

That's really stupid because these people are our allies right now.

And they're precious and valuable allies.

And to do this is crackpot.

And the same thing about China.

They look at China and they think, you know what?

These people

have had a long history.

Mao was our, you know, as the Obama figure did, said to us, I was one of her heroes.

And

these are revolutionary people.

And when we are, when I was at Stanford or UC Santa Cruz or Yale, we used to have Mao little red stars on our cap.

We have posters of him.

They have a romantic idea of communism.

And when you add in that,

well, there was the yellow peril, there was the internment of Japanese, we've had a history of racism against Asians, and therefore we don't criticize what China does.

And think about that.

That sounds crazy.

But right now, if Vladimir Putin, forget Ukraine, but if there were people out on the street and the Russians were

welding their doors shut and killing people,

we'd go ballistic.

When Putin kills people, we go after him and we sanction oligarchs.

When's the last Chinese oligarch you've heard of that has been sanctioned?

Zilch.

And so

what I'm getting at is that this administration, like the Obama administration, gives a complete exemption from regimes that are totalitarian and

dictatorial and autocratic if they have a veneer of leftism or anti-Americanism.

And that's why that explains pretty much this bizarre attitude we have about

keeping our mouths shut about China.

And then you add the force multiplier, of course, that when you have a Mike Bloomberg who had $10 billion investment in China for startup companies associated with the Communist Party, or you have the Apple plants, or you have the

Nike shoe factories, or you have the NBA franchises, or you have the Hollywood movies where the Chinese government is telling you, don't have anybody in these films that you're going to show in China that has dark pigmentation, then we're completely compromised.

We being our elite in, you know, business, entertainment, sports, et cetera.

Yeah, yeah.

Chinese make no bones about that kind of thing either.

Victor, you did bring up Iran.

I just before we go to a break, wanted to see if you had anything to say about the Iranian soccer players whose families were threatened after either they didn't sing or they only sang half-heartedly their own national anthem.

But were your thoughts on that?

If you have anything quick?

Well, I mean,

I have to be very careful because when Americans go over there and don't salute the flag in a

ceremony, I'm very angry, but I can make a distinction.

Because the American pampered athletes who deliberately tried to embarrass their country in the past in international games and the Olympics were coming out of the most free, liberal, and tolerant society in the world.

When other people emulate their tactics, but they come from a police totalitarian state, then I have admiration for them.

As

superficially hypocritical as that may sound.

So yeah, they were very brave because you see, when an American who's coming from an affluent and leisured and free society puts a fist up in the air and says it's a very terrible country, He knows that when he comes back here, nobody's going to say anything to him.

If they do, it's probably going to make him wealthy, like it did Colin Kaepernick

or the soccer woman.

But when you do that in Iran, they're going to go after your family.

They're going to go after you.

They're going to destroy you or kill you.

So they have a far greater degree of courage than our own athletes do who do that.

Yeah.

Well, let's take a break and then come back and talk about Arizona.

But let's listen to a few messages first and we'll be right back.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

I would like to remind everybody that Victor is found on many social media channels.

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And now let's talk.

I've become interested in Arizona.

I know that Georgia is the big interest actively because there's still a campaign going on there, a runoff.

But Arizona,

I don't want to be bleak, but it was a red state and now as some of the papers are calling it, it's purple and they elected in or already had elected Democrats for senator.

governor was elected a Democrat and even the Secretary of State.

So Arizona went in for everything that we see that seems to be destroying our country.

And it just astounds me, but I was wondering if you had any thoughts on that.

Well, I mean, Arizona, it's been millennias since we had, it was the Arizona of Barry Goldwater.

Let's face it.

It was, it became very, very conservative.

It was conservative innately because it was a state of ranchers and farmers and rural people.

And then it became the first really retirement state in the United States where people went there to retire and enjoy the sun, et cetera, et cetera, low taxes, et cetera, in your retirement.

And now there's been a lot of centrifugal forces.

There's been illegal immigration, and there's been

influxes of people to enjoy the sun who come

not for the conservative climate, the conservative climate, but only the natural climate, i.e., they're liberal.

And then,

so that was that was that explains some of it.

And then

the Republican Party has been schizophrenic.

This is also the party that was John McCain's stronghold.

And so

when you had Trump candidates, they had to be almost perfect Trump candidates because they were going to offend a strong McCain tradition in that state of maybe 10 to 20 percent.

of the Republican Party.

So when you, if you're not going to win over the Latino vote as promised, i.e., 45%, and the Latino vote is getting very big in Arizona, and you're going to lose 10 to 15% or 20% of the McCain vote.

And by the way,

the McCain voter hates Donald Trump going back to the McCain-Trump spats during the 2015-16 election cycle.

And so you add that dimension to it.

And then you add the dimension that

Kerry Lake and Blake Masters, while I think they would have been superb officials, had no political experience to speak of.

She came out of the television industry.

He came out of the investment portfolio industry of Peter Till's group.

And so,

and then you add one other wrinkle, and that was that Mitch McConnell was sitting on a huge pot.

of Republican Senate dollars, and he didn't give any to Blake Masters, but for some reason, he wanted to ensure that a conservative Republican lost in

Alaska, and that Murkowski won because she was a sure vote and support for his majority leader status at some future date.

And that was very short-sighted because he's never going to be a majority leader if you don't win a seat like Arizona or Pennsylvania, which he didn't really get behind.

You put all that together, and it explains the dismal showing of Republicans statewide.

And then

I don't know the degree of voter irregularities, but you start with this assumption that Arizona is a far smaller state.

It's got a, I don't know what it is, a fifth or fourth of the population of Florida.

And Florida had all the returns in within 24 hours, two, three, four weeks, and Arizona can't do it.

And so then you have Kerry Lake, who the Trofagar poll, an insight advantage.

And other polls that had a good record, see, and I think they were off, but nevertheless, they were, never had been off by eight or nine points.

Some of them had,

and there were others, but I think Joe Faguar was seven or eight points.

She was supposed to win.

And then to suddenly lose and not to have the vote tabulated,

that sparked naturally questions of voter irregularity.

And so

she complained and she filed.

complaints and she went on public media and social media and suggested that maybe the computer has altered because you know their printers went out people were in line they couldn't vote and they sanctioned her a federal judge was going to fine her i think he said that you can't do that i thought that was very interesting because the current speaker i mean this current majority leader in the house mr hakem jeffries came to the attention of the nation basically in 2016 when he said that the president of the United States was not legitimate and that the vote had been rigged by the Russians.

And not a no, I don't remember any judge complained about that, or that that was an election denialist par excellence.

And he's, he's now the most important Democrat in the House.

But Carrie Lake is for doing the same thing.

And she was a candidate and was directly affected, is considered an unhinged nut and worthy of federal judicial sanctions.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well,

I mean, I feel, I mean, I'm usually the one trying to be optimistic with your audience, but I feel that, you know, something, the Democrats really are onto something here

as far as turning red states purple, at least, as they call it.

So

everybody in the audience should realize what they're doing.

They have a perfect storm

approach to changing the demography and the way that we ballot.

On the fundamental level in the American Southwest, they've opened the border.

And while immigrants from south of the border will eventually, eventually, eventually, eventually pause, pause, pause, likely be conservative voters, you're talking about three generations.

And when you bring people in from the poorest regions of the southern hemisphere and you don't integrate them or assimilate them, and they're in dire need for the appearance of parity with American citizens, they're in dire need of educational, legal, school, medical, housing subsidies.

They're going to have fealty for three generations to the left that grants that stuff.

And when you do that and you complain,

they're going to call you great replacement Tucker Carlson aficionados.

They can call it demography is destiny and gloat that they've changed the demographic, but you dare say that that's what they're doing.

They're bragging that they're changing the demography by demography is destiny books and articles and triumphalism.

Then they call you white supremacists who embrace the great replacement theory.

So that's one thing they do.

The second thing they do is

this is very brilliant.

It's kind of like a feint in military operations where you have a feint, where you go after a wing on the battlefield and then the main body destroys you.

So what they did was they put a lot of media sensationalism into voter IDs are racist, voter IDs or voter suppression, and it got the right inflamed because everybody knows when you check, cash a check, you get an airplane, everyday stuff, you show an ID, but the most important element of your civic life is to vote.

So obviously you would show an ID.

To do not to show an ID would be guaranteeing fraud.

The right, you know, that

get all these organizations, rightly so.

But you know what?

It's 35% of the vote in most states.

And so why we were, you know, we were,

I guess, we were in the, we take the chicken house and we, you know, we put wire over all the door windows so the fox couldn't come in, the door was wide open.

And he just came in the back door and ate the chickens.

And so what I'm getting at is why we were worried, worried, worried, worried about voter ID, 70% of the vote doesn't require voter ID.

It doesn't occur on this ossified idea, unfortunately, of election day.

So they were changing voting laws by executive orders, by governors, by bureaucratic fiat, by

cherry-picked judges' decisions.

And what was the result?

Your name doesn't necessarily have to match that on the registral.

You can register to vote in some states on the same day.

You can mail in your ballot after the deadline.

Your signature doesn't have to be complete.

Your address can be

partially complete.

And we can cure the vote.

We can call you up and have it redone.

We can harvest that.

We can have third party.

And so all of that was just, that was the issue.

And nobody contested it.

And so that was another element of changing the way that we vote, not just the demographic changes, of changing the actual people who vote and destroying the idea that there's a difference between a citizen and a resident, that residents,

but that's what we did.

Can I interrupt you for one second?

I'm sorry about this, but they gave the reason for all of this mail-in balloting, etc., as

it was important for equity and COVID, COVID, COVID, too.

Etc.

Yeah, and COVID started it.

And it's almost as if

COVID started it.

They said that was the explanation.

This is so all Americans can vote.

We need this 70% mail-in ballot.

And then they saw the returns on that for their own party.

I mean, I don't know.

That's what it seems like.

You know what's ironic about it?

I got attacked by the Stanford Faculty Senate in January and February of 2021.

And I replied in the Stanford Daily, and boy, I want to tell you, trying to get somebody who's not far left

to have a letter in the Stanford Daily went through, I think, 10 iterations of edit, change, edit.

But nevertheless, one thing I noticed and I mentioned in that article is Stanford University was so worried,

it's law school, that in the COVID lockdowns, people in the legislature had proposed all of these changes where election day would not be necessary.

So Stanford wasn't in on the con.

So a lot of left-wing professors looked at this and their legal teams, and they came up with a suggestion that this is crazy, that you can't authenticate people who are registering in all these different agencies and the ballots are being mailed out automatically to households where we're not sure that the recipient is even there anymore.

And we're not using close

collation between registration list and actual voters.

And they they concluded that the right, the right, might be behind this.

It's very ironic, but and of course, it was the left behind it.

And then, since they discovered the left was behind it and it worked, they've never said another word, they've never done another study.

But my point is that this it was all rushed through like so many things from a repertory hiring and admissions through the whole George Floyd-COVID crises.

And

I don't think it's going to take a lot of historians that are disinterested to go back and look at

March 2020 to November 2020 and call it the most pivotal year in American history.

Because in that year,

we basically did the following.

We gave the federal government

in the form

of the federal health bureaucracy the power to cancel contracts between tenants and landlords.

We gave teachers' unions a de facto veto over school instruction for our children.

We changed the balloting laws in almost every state so that Election Day suddenly became a construct.

And it was just radical from 2016.

It flipped from

70%

on Election Day to 70% not Election Day, just four years later.

And then we went into these universities' repertory admissions where they were not, it was bad enough, proportional representation without meritocracy, but disparate impact.

That went to, we're going to let the grieved groups have percentages of the admissions that's way over their demographics.

And we did all of that in this year.

So we were coming in.

to a trifecta in 2020.

We were hit with George Floyd's death and the reaction to it manifested by 120 days of rioting, arson, looting, but more importantly, repertory policies.

And number two, we had an election that we've never seen before where the candidate was not a candidate.

He was a virtual candidate.

He stayed in his log cabin basement and he didn't go out.

And the media colluded in monopolistic fashion to hide that fact and present this false image that he was a vigorous aviator Joe.

And then, third, we've never had a national lockdown before.

We had a complete quarantine.

We never have done that for any infectious disease.

And that created all sorts of paranoias and

depressed immune systems and suicides and spousal abuse and alcoholism and drug use, familial abuse, missed cancer screenings, higher death toll, probably we're going to learn than what COVID took.

And so, all those three things made that year, that year, one of the most devastating in the history of this country.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, we've gone far from Arizona, but that's okay.

It is a purple state.

I don't see that changing necessarily in the future, but I would like to go even further and look at the Ukraine.

I was just looking at an article that was actually on Professor John Mersheimer, who is a foreign policy guru or professor.

He represents the realist school usually in foreign policy, meaning, you know, it's a

competition and the strong survive and they're all looking for regional power.

And

that's how you can understand the actions that countries are making.

In this article, they said that

Merseheimer has had a, or is arguing these days that Russia just wanted the Ukraine to be neutral.

And letting this conflict go on is starting to get us into areas where, you know, nuclear warfare is

he didn't say it's inevitable, I'm using my own words, but you know, nuclear war or this breakout of war more broadly, all these possibilities are on the table when they don't have to be.

That was his point.

And I was wondering what your thoughts are on the Ukraine in general, but also on that

thesis that if we'd only just let the Ukraine be neutral, meaning not part of NATO or the EU, just a country,

not joining the West, but something neutral, Russia might not have done this.

Yeah, I'll preface that by saying, you know, I've read his work a long time.

I disagree with it on many areas, especially

his hostility toward Israel.

But, you know, I have a feeling that to the degree he even knew me, he'd probably hate my guts because of things I've written.

But

I try not to be personal.

I just look at the arguments.

And he's made some arguments that are, I don't know, they're completely persuasive, but they're worth looking into.

But more importantly, he's got to define what,

and I haven't read the entire article what he means by neutral.

And I think what you're suggesting he wrote and what he's written elsewhere is the following: that after the fall of the Berlin berlin wall had we gone to russia and said

we

are going to take the former warsaw pact and on a case-by-case basis admit many of them into nato and maybe more of them into the eu

and that's going to disrupt the russian sphere of influence And we're going to do this because of the historical tensions between the East and West, and that that was a buffer.

But as far as the former Soviet, predominantly Russian-speaking republics, we understand that you have much closer ties of linguistic and ethnic bonds with these countries.

And therefore, we're going to ask you and prod you to allow them to be independent if they so choose through referendum, which they all did, in most cases, I should not quite all.

But we're not going to try to put them into the EU or NATO or make them Western countries right on your border.

And that's what he's saying.

Had we done that, and that would have involved the jewel in the old Soviet crown, which is Ukraine, which had, you know, for most of its history, not all, but for most of its history, it's been allied in some fashion with Russia, whether mother Russia of the Tsars or Soviet Russia or post-Soviet Russia.

Had we done that, he said that we wouldn't be in this situation.

So then he thinks that we provoked it, we being the West.

Okay.

That's okay when he's looking at our behavior.

But if you were Vladimir Putin and you were not thinking like Vladimir Putin, but you were thinking the way we thought you should think, we thought he would say the following.

We thought maybe

better angels of our nature, we thought, well, Putin, and we're very, you know, naive and we're also narcissistic in the West.

So we thought he would react this way.

Okay,

hmm, well, they've got their butt right in my face, but they're a dynamic capitalist

and they have this wide open economy.

And for all of this old Soviet propaganda, we don't think they're going to have a first strike against Russia.

And historically, they played off Russia versus China, China versus Russia.

So therefore, they're really not going to be an existential threat to the Russian Federation, and they might even enrich it by

westernizing some of the economy, maybe our economy.

Well, that's what we naively thought when we did that.

So he's correct.

in assessing what I think what we did, even though people in the Bush administration, the George W.

Bush, the George H.W.

Bush, the Bill Clinton, they'll all vehemently deny that and say, oh, no, we never said that.

But I think he's right, that we basically did.

We basically, our project was to get Ukraine

into the Western sphere, right on the border of Russia.

And we thought that they wouldn't object too much because it would be, in our view, in their long-term interest, because we were not a Beloca preemptory aggressive power.

So that's what he's saying.

But then when he says, how does Putin really think?

How does Putin

think?

Putin really thinks the following.

The destiny, the history, the destiny of Russia is to be the main power in the world.

And we have some of Western culture and civilization in our country, but we're superior because we have Orthodox Christianity and we have a Belicos history of surviving various assaults.

And we are a tough people that reflect this climate, and we have a destiny.

And anywhere there are Russian speakers, they belong in an irredentist fashion into the Russian Empire.

And at one point, under Catherine the Great and Peter the Great and the Soviet Union, we were the dominant power, perhaps, until the rise of the United States.

And we will be that way again someday.

So, in those plans, Ukraine is, was, and will always be Russian.

And that's how they think.

And so, so there was an inevitable clash well what we're at now is

i think everybody in the west um

and europe europe the united states and the former british commonwealth and westernized country they've all come to a consensus and the consensus is putin is a thug he's ruined his economy basically at some point even though he's for now getting rich with high oil prices, but he made a catastrophic error.

He thought he was going to have a thunder road, shaken off, take Kiev, declare half of Ukraine, part of Russia, and then, you know, gobble it up, digest it, and then gobble the rest in five years, just like he did Crimea and eastern Ukraine, just like he did, level Chechnya, just like he did in Ossatia, etc., with Georgia.

And he overestimated his powers and the decline of Russian military capability and economic capability.

He's getting older.

He's sick, and he blew it.

And now he's mad.

So

he's going to lose, and we're going to help him lose.

And okay,

but they're all missing something in that.

They're coming to a consensus, but they're missing something.

They know something is true, but they're not saying what's true.

And what they're not saying is this.

Russia has

30 times the territory, even in its diminished state.

It has almost four times the population, has 10 times the GDP.

So while they perform very poorly as an expeditionary force outside of its borders, and they're depleting their stocks, and they're losing because nobody in Russia wants to die to force Ukraine back into Russia, that doesn't mean that they're going to lose the war.

That means they can't win as long as the combined economies of the European Union and the United States supply Ukraine in a fashion that Russia could never compete with, whether that's sophisticated artillery platforms or javelin missiles or drones, etc.

Okay.

But at some point,

Ukraine to win as they define winning, and they have defined winning as getting every Russian not out of their country as they were in February of 2022.

but more importantly, as it was in 2014 before they absorbed Crimea and eastern Ukraine.

Okay, so how do you win and defeat the Russian military and get them all out of your country

without provoking a humiliated, ailing dictator with 7,000 nuclear weapons who has the largest

in our depleted state, because we're not pumping natural gas like it could, he's probably the largest national gas exporter in the world.

How do you do that with control over the German economy?

And they don't have an answer for that because they know the answer.

For Ukraine to win and to absolutely cleanse every Russian soldier off of all of Ukraine as defined in 2014, you just can't fight in the trenches.

You've got to do stuff like sink the Black Sea fleet.

You've got to do stuff like have helicopter raids in and blow up all of the staging areas.

You've got to blow up their oil supplies.

You've got to kill 300,000, not just 100,000 Russians, 300,000.

And so the point is, where are they going to get the wherewithal to do that?

They're only going to get it from two places.

They're going to get it from the EU, and the EU is in a pre-civilizational winter with no, basically, not enough energy to be a modern state, the EU.

And it's going to get worse.

And it's going to get worse every year because they're not going to go to coal and nuclear power.

They've got this idea that they're going to virtue signal their green solar panels and turbines while Vladimir Putin gives them clean burning natural gas.

And that's not sustainable.

And then there's the United States.

And we have given them, we're going to close to $100 billion.

If we learned anything from the Biden family and Burisma and the first impeachment, that government is utterly corrupt.

That government being Ukrainian governments in succession.

And so we're pouring this money in.

We're depleting all of our weapon stocks.

We're becoming less prepared to defend South Korea and Taiwan in case of communist respective engagements.

And Mr.

Zelensky at times becomes erratic.

He says that this missile that went into Poland was from Russia and that could have started a war.

He wanted NATO to react to it.

I have great admiration for him, but

he's in a desperate situation.

So what's the answer?

Is the answer, do we get the EU and we say, you know what?

All you Germans get in your warm rooms and your apartments, get everybody to get that lobby, and you all get in there because there's no heat, and your body heat will warm you up.

And then get your little patrols out into the forest and start cutting wood for the winter.

And we tell all the Americans, you may have inflation.

You may have stagnation, you may be on the border of recession,

you have to choose between whether you're going to fill your car up all the way with gas or have, you know, pot roast.

And by the way, we're going to keep, keep, keep, keep giving billions to Ukraine to stage what is increasingly going to have to be preemptory and offensive operation.

I just don't think it's sustainable.

And to say what I just said

gets you in big trouble because the politics and the atmospherics of this is the left that was anti-war

and conspiratorial conspiratorial and said that the United States shouldn't stick their noses in other countries' business has latched on this in psychological mechanisms when they saw the Russian collusion thing blew up,

blew up, they were so angry because they wanted to prove that Vladimir Putin was Satan incarnate.

Well, we knew he was Satan incarnate.

Everybody did, but they said that, no, they were colluding.

So what they've done is they've transferred their emotion and their fur from Russia, the failed Russian collusion.

It's almost as if they're saying, take down that Devin Nunes is a Russian stooge sign from Mylon and put up the Ukrainian flag in its place.

Because that's what they've done.

Ukraine for them has been a talisman.

It's been some kind of,

I don't know, amulet around their neck.

And it's all of a sudden

it's the one measure that proves whether you're virtuous or not, that you really did finally sort of at last prove that Vladimir Putin and the Russians were under every bed.

They're horrible people.

And even if they didn't collude with Donald Trump to steal the election, they did other things like Ukraine and it's the same thing.

And that's what they've done.

They've adopted this as their cause to live.

It's the foreign policy version of transgenderism.

It really is.

They're fanatic about it.

And they're not reasonable.

So if you say, Do you want to fight this war to the last Ukrainian?

There's been 200,000 dead.

Do you want to sink that entire Russian fleet on the Black Sea and say, see, what degree of humiliation is necessary for the Ukrainians to get back to 2014 in terms of Vladimir Putin and the Russians?

And we've even, and then the subtext of all this is

who empowered Vladimir Putin?

Who put their finger on the fake

jacuzzi button in Geneva in 2009?

It was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

They were the ones that said, oh, George Bush was so mean to Vladimir Putin after the Osatia, Georgia crisis when he put on sanctions.

We're going to have reset.

We're going to be pro.

We're not Iraqi warmongers.

And so they appeased Putin.

And who did the hot mic in Seoul, South Korea?

in 2012?

Who said, hey, tell Vladimir if he'll just ease up, this is my last election and give me some space.

I'll be flexible on missile defense, i.e., I'll dismantle missile defense in the Czech Republic and Poland, which would have been, by the way, very handy right now.

Those missiles that went into Poland would have been shot down.

But Vladimir Putin got a big break from Barack Obama.

And people forget about that deal, that it worked.

Because Putin did behave until Obama was re-elected.

And as soon as he's re-elected, he started gearing up.

And a year and a half later, he went into

you know, he went into eastern Ukraine and Crimea.

Who did that?

And then, on the flip side of it, who was the one that killed all those mercenaries in Syria?

Who got out of that crazy missile deal with Russia that was to our disadvantage?

Who put higher sanctions on the oligarchs?

Who flooded the the world with cheap oil?

Who said, don't do the Nordstrom pipeline?

It's stupid.

Remember that tape of Trump talking to the Germans?

They were laughing at him.

He said, it's very inappropriate for us to defend you from Russia while you're colluding with Russia and buying their natural gas on this pipeline.

And they were laughing at him like he was a buffoon.

And

I could go on, but I mean, who was very tough on Russia?

It was Trump.

And all of a sudden, that's all forgotten, reset, the Obama hot mic.

And all of a sudden it is, We on the left have always been anti-Putin.

No, you weren't.

You appeased him.

And I haven't even got in because I'm on a rant right now, Sammy.

But why did he go in in February of 2022?

Why did he go in now?

Why?

Because of two reasons.

He went in in 2008 when George Bush was a crippled, lame duck president, hemorrhaging from Iraq.

And the last thing in the world he wanted to do was get involved overseas in another optional military engagement.

So he went into Ossatia.

He went in in 2014 when the price of oil was sky high under Obama, and Obama was an appeaser.

So he took Crimea and he and eastern Ukraine and he went into Kiev under Joe Biden because he was a doddering non-compost Mentes president that had humiliated him, secondly, humiliated the United States and Afghanistan.

And Putin looked at Afghanistan, he said, wow.

They left a $300 million refitted Air Force base, the biggest in Central Asia, which was a pain in my back and my butt.

And second,

they led a billion-dollar embassy.

They just built an embassy and abandoned it.

They left several billion dollars of equipment.

They even left their own allies and they skedaddled out and they were blown up and they skedaddled out.

And then they had a pride flag.

And George Floral, who are these people?

They're not going to do anything when I go into Ukraine.

And that's what he did.

I feel the humiliation for the Americans.

You're very good at explaining that.

Oh, wow.

It's humiliating.

It's, and it was.

No surprise.

Who did that?

Who did that?

It was aviator glasses Joe.

He did it.

And they appeased him and appeased him and appeased him.

They did it with Reset and they did it with Afghanistan.

And

who was the president who said, oh,

no javelin missiles, no javelin missiles?

We're not going to send offensive, provocative weapons to Ukraine.

That's the one thing that the sanctimonious Lieutenant Colonel Vinman could not answer in the first impeachment when he was asked about that.

If Donald Trump was so awful and so injurious to your country, why did he sell them javelin missiles and your heart throb Barack Obama did not?

End of story.

End of story.

Well, Victor, we need to have one more break and then we'll come back and talk a little little bit about the head of the Democratic Party.

We'll be right back.

We're back.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson show.

The mothership, I think, as Jack says it, is John Solomon's Just the News.

John Solomon is an investigative reporter and he has a wonderful website, Just the News, and they are the mothership for this podcast.

So we encourage everybody to go to Just the News.

I wanted to turn, Victor, to the head of the leader of the Democratic Party in the House now that they are the minority party, and that is Jakeen Jeffries.

I think it's been finally, you know, decided that he's going to be the leadership.

And I was wondering if you had some thoughts on

his

choice for leader.

Well,

two things, three things.

A,

he is, if this is possible, to the left of Nancy Pelosi.

He's hard, hard, hard left.

And so there isn't, and he's the hard, hard left.

A man that is hard, hard left will be the minority leader and maybe one day speaker, because there is no Democrat that's not hard, hard left.

The so-called blue dogs, Democrats, they don't exist anymore.

The party was absorbed by the hard left.

It's not a Democratic Party.

It's a neo-socialist party.

So that's who he is, and that's who his party is.

Number two, he doesn't have the Machiavellian experience of 82-year-old Nancy Pelosi.

So he will not be as effective

a

manipulator, leader, navigator in the way of Mitch McConnell or Nancy Pelosi.

Maybe someday he will.

He's not now.

And number three, this is highly ironic, Sammy, because we just went through a midterm election where the Democratic Party blanketed the airways with money from Sam

Bankman Freed.

And they told us that if you can't vote for an election denialist, do not vote for Carrie Lake.

She denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

Do not vote for Blake Masters.

Do not vote for all of them.

They're all election deniers.

They're enemies of democracy.

They're insurrect.

And so, who did they pick as their minority leader?

Mr.

Jeffries was notable in 2016.

He said that Donald Trump was an illegitimate president.

He said the election was rigged, quote unquote.

He said the Russians selected Donald Trump.

And so here we are that the party that preaches that election denialism is a mortal sin has just picked for their nominal leader

an iconic election denier, and nobody says a word.

It's like it's Orwellian.

And when he's asked, nobody will talk about it.

And,

you know, it's, I think, you know, we all wake up.

Each morning, we feel like we're strangers in a strange land.

After just what I said,

George Will, as I mentioned to Jack a long time ago, wrote an op-ed

praising Jeffries and said he is the model Democratic leader.

He is a centrist, bipartisan, young, brilliant guy.

It's the kind of people we want in the Democratic Party.

And this is just during the period where he suggested that everybody go out and vote Democratic and humiliate Donald Trump and the Republicans and take back

the House, which they did in 2018.

So I can't figure it out.

I have no idea.

I just think that he's a hard leftist.

It's a hypocrite.

And the only good thing about his appointment will be that for several years, he won't know what he's doing.

And that could help it.

And they, well, I mean, does the minority party do much anyway?

I mean, the leadership, I mean, obviously, anybody can be

able to do that.

I'll give you an example of what it does.

So Kevin McCarthy got five to seven votes, depending on, I guess there's a one or two thing.

That's all the margin he has, right?

Yeah.

And

so let's say that he's got 10 people that are far right and said, I'm not going to vote for that.

And so then he reaches out and thinks that maybe out of the 200 and some Democrats, there might be a couple from the South or from Wyoming or Montana, you know, or Idaho that he can reach, you know, hey, you know, you vote for this.

It's a conservative thing.

It's for, and then Nancy Pelosi says, you do that, and I guarantee your life will be hell.

You'll never be on a committee.

You'll never get one dime of campaign support, and I will primary you.

And that's what she did.

Absolutely.

She had absolute iron control.

Her daughter bragged about it in the documentary.

So Nancy Pelosi's way of being a minority leader was, we don't have the majority.

But we're not going to have one defection, not one defection, because there will be Republicans that defect and they can't win in a close way.

And we're not going to have one defection.

And when we're in the majority, it doesn't matter whether we have 50 or 5

vote plurality.

We're going to push through anything we want because we have absolute ironclad control.

And they did.

And how did she get the control?

She just said, anybody who disagrees with me, primary you.

Anybody who disagreed with me, no money for you.

Anybody that disagrees with me, no committee assignments.

Anybody that disagrees with me, bad office.

That's how she did it.

And

yeah, it matters.

And let's see if he does that.

And he knows how to do it.

I hope not.

I hope not.

I don't think Paul Ryan did that.

Do you think Paul Ryan or

any of the other past Bob Michaels of the old days or any of them?

I don't think any of the House Republicans did that.

Mitch McConnell didn't do that.

McConnell got out on the eve of the election and said, you know what?

I just don't think we're going to take this in.

We probably want candidates.

So I just think, you know, I can't guarantee anything.

We're coming to the end of this, but

I think

the House members that voted to impeach Trump were pretty ostracized for having done that by the Republicans, weren't they?

Well, Kevin McCarthy did.

I think

he removed her from

minority whip.

But when you say ostracized, it was mostly the voters.

They just either, those all of the 10, I think eight

either got redistributed, they got re-proportioned.

And they thought that the district wasn't suitable for them and they didn't run, or they lost in the primary, or they got zero support from the only one.

I mean, there's two, but the one that we know, the best here in Central California is David Valladeo.

He was my congressman

out of the blue.

He voted to impeach Trump and he never said a word about it.

He didn't defend it.

He just kept mum and said,

I had to impeach him, case close, and everybody said he was a dead duck because he was in a plus 10 Democratic

district and he was never going to raise any money.

And then he came up with a kind of, I give him a lot of credit.

He came up with a very brilliant strategy and it was based on two

central principles.

He told the Republicans, you don't have a chance to get this seat unless I'm here because I'm an incumbent.

and the other people have no name recognition and no money.

And you may not like me as an SOB, but I'll I'll tell you something:

it's going to be a close midterms, and you're going to need every single seat in the House.

Don't look at me as the guy who impeached Donald Trump.

Look at me as the guy who you may need that vote to keep Republican solidarity.

And I have a record of being voting on most cases with Republicans.

And a lot of Republicans who said they would never ever vote for him in January, February, March, 2022 did in November 22.

And then he went to independents

and blue dog Democrats.

And there are some voters in this area of the Central Valley, conservative Hispanics, some old-style Democrats.

And he said, you know what?

You may not like me as a doctor Republican.

I'm not saying he said this, but this was the image he

projected.

And he said, I voted to impeach Donald Trump.

I'm an independent Maverick.

I'm just not.

And they said, you know what, you're right.

And he pulled out enough defections from the Democratic Party and he squeaked by.

And more power to him because it's one more seat for the Republicans.

And had he not done that, and other people like him had not done that, and there was a few others, not the impeachers, but a few others, they wouldn't have had the House.

So

he's not a Mike Garcia that, you know, was a very strong, principled Democratic guy.

He may be principled, but he's not conservative like Mike Garcia.

But people underestimated David Valdedo.

And I would have voted for him, but I'm not in his district any longer.

I'm in a different district that's basically got a Democratic candidate, Jim Costa.

But

I have

been at a lot of occasions with David Valdezo.

I like him, but I regret that he voted to impeach.

But

I'm not going to dwell on it.

And I'm glad that he got elected because he helps the cause.

Yeah, absolutely.

It's better than having the Democrat in.

Well, Victor, this is the end of the hour.

So thank you very much for all your wisdom today.

And thanks to our listeners for listening.

And thank you, everybody, once again for putting up with me.

I appreciate it.

This is Victor Davis-Hansen and Sammy Wienkan are signing off.