The Misinformation Racket

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Victor, how are you doing today?

I'm doing fine.

I'm headed out for a week's trip this week and looking forward to that.

And we had our first rainstorm the season.

It was very heavy.

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I think it will.

Yeah, that'll be great for the valley and for all the water that we need.

All right, let's go ahead and take a break and come back and we'll talk a little bit on this weekend edition about misinformation since we're bombarded with it and our elections are coming up.

So we'll be right back.

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Welcome back, Victor.

You know, I was thinking about voting actually,

and I was thinking how also a lot of people people are get very disenchanted in a democracy because we're just bombarded with accusations, at least, and we're never too sure about misinformation or

what were Trump's words more often, although Hillary apparently used them first, fake news.

And so, I was hoping that we could go through some historical examples of

misinformation.

I don't really quite know what to call it, I confess, but misinformation and sort of get some handle on especially current incidents as well.

Go ahead.

So disinformation, I think, is contrary from D in Latin.

So

not duce, bad.

That would be Greek bad.

But I think it's D, meaning oppositional information, information deliberately distorted.

Yeah.

for a political purpose.

And misinformation is

crackpot conspiracy theories put out there as if it's information.

And so they use the two interchangeably, but I think

there's a little difference as to what I'm trying to tell you.

And remember, fake news started with the left accusing Fox News of fake news and other news outlets, but then the right boomeranged it on them.

And now I think fake news is really

synonymous with left-wing news.

Yeah.

Okay.

Can we look at history first?

I know.

Give me some examples because i don't know i yeah so i was look i was thinking of all the cases that i knew some in america some outside but um i've i know a lot about the french revolution and there's even a category called grub street in historiography of the french revolution and they study all of the

revolutionaries that had printing presses in their basements and such and they were just printing everything like anything like there was no no hope of controlling what was true and not true.

And I was thinking also in that period of Thomas Jefferson and Adams' election and all of the mudslinging between the two as well.

And, and, you know, whether it was true or not, nobody really knows.

That's, I think, where the first place where we hear Jefferson had children with one of his slaves.

In fact, I think that was one of his accusations.

They used that of the French Revolution.

I think it was a,

as as I understood, grubb, you know, grubby, it was places, it was a grub street where hack writers in London published like pamphleteering.

It was very influential in the American Revolution.

So all these, it was kind of like a precursor of the internet.

So people who had been denied, you know, the Times or mainstream outlets or publishing houses just started writing stuff.

and then self-publishing or publishing it in, I don't know what they call them, less reputable publishing houses and to get attention and traction, what they called, I guess their version of Plicks, it was to be as

wild and conspiratorial and surreal, sensational, anything possible.

And so the hoity-toidy or the elite called them Grub Street.

And then they used, they appropriated that term, I think, to talk in the same terms with the French pamphleteers.

Yeah, yeah.

Did you have anything about that?

I mean, it seems to me, if we look at Jefferson and Adams, that, you know, American politics have always been this way.

So for all of our listeners that feel like,

just overwhelming, right?

It's not really different.

What's different about it?

No, not the level of vituperation or invective.

It's not different.

No, no.

Even Adams, you know, Alien and Sedition Act.

So they went out to get each other and to weaponize it.

The difference is that when you wanted to attack somebody, you wrote something out with

an ink bottle and a squill.

And then you wrote it out, and then you went into a publisher or a publishing house, and then he used movable type, and then he cranked it out, and then you had to get a pamphleteer, right?

And you had to distribute it all over town.

That took a long time.

And the point I'm making is that it took some digestion.

Today,

it was not more than,

I don't know, 25 minutes after the report of the Pelosi thing surfaced that the left was saying that this was proof that this guy was a right-wing nut because somebody had found a blog.

And then the next cycle said, but he lived in a commune.

The next cycle said, but he lived as a nudist.

And then he had BLM flags and pride flags.

And he was a child molester and an illegal alien.

And then it went back and forth.

But

it was at, I guess you'd say, Star Trek warp warp speed.

And it's like Jesse Smollett.

And then

some people said, well, it's a Joe, that Buck incident in L.A., the guy was in his underwear.

Before you knew it, it was off to the races.

You know, Paul Pelosi was

not a victim.

And that was from some of the conspiratorial right, I suppose.

And the conspiratorial left was trying to say that, you know, that this guy's sitting in a room with headphones listening to the internet or something on his computer.

And he says, oh my God,

somebody attacked Nancy Pelosi.

I'm going to go over to her house at two in the morning and kidnap her.

I mean, this guy, then I'm a fairy.

Jesus is the Antichrist.

That's how they thought he thought functions.

So it was absurd.

But it's speed.

It's speed right now.

There's no check.

There's no second or third thought.

It's just instantaneously.

So it's.

It's kind of like just muttering like a verbal tick and it gets out there and it doesn't reach, you you know a hundred thousand people in philadelphia or fifty thousand or ten thousand it reaches a billion people yeah that's the thing

yeah the speed and the reach

you know rumor flies

yeah and it's also i think social media and i think that's why all these social media magnets are, well, you know, they have really intense,

you know, research things going on

that are quite separate from trying to censor somebody necessarily i mean in the sense that you know they have advertisers so they need to know

but they are using that now to censor techniques so i think they started out by saying if you go on the internet

and you're in houston and you're looking for a restaurant and you say steakhouse i'm just taking examples of

thin air

and you say ruth christ right well they know your ip address so when you get back to fresno then all all of a sudden you open your computer and they said, Why not go to Ruth Kristen Fresno tonight?

So they know that, or you buy something on Amazon, and the next thing you know, all these ads pack up, pop up for the same item all over, not just on Amazon.

Yeah, well, that surveillance ability is now, and the ability to intrude into your life and manipulate it has been applied to politics.

So, when you Google, if you Google conspiracy theories, it's going to be all right-wing for the next 10 pages on your computer.

It's not going to be balanced.

They've got logarithms, algorithms, excuse me, that

are weighted.

And I think that's one of the reasons I hate Elon Musk.

I don't know if you can burn evidence, but I'm sure that as he takes over those headquarters, they're wiping hard drives as fast as they can or destroying evidence.

Because if he gets in there,

he will find out the degree to which Twitter was in cahoots with other social media And he will,

you know, expose it.

Yeah, it's very scary.

But let's move on to another

event, I think, that's really broadly known.

And that is the Dreyfus affair, where they swore that Dreyfus had betrayed the country of France.

And they were.

really it seems or at least how it's presented is they were really out after him he was jewish and they wanted to get he had a competitor in the military and they wanted to get rid of him that's how I understand it.

But they spread all sorts of speaking of misinformation about him in the presses, you know?

Yeah, I mean, the Dreyfus affair was, it was really

important because it showed the rot in the French command, which would kind of, I don't know what it was, 1905 or something.

I guess it was early 1890 or something, but it really showed you that it was not a merocratic

because he was a very very accomplished artillery officer, and

it was not a

merocratic system.

It was embedded with anti-Semitism, and it was an old guard.

And it was very important because people had thought the Napoleonic tradition of merit operated, and they found out, no, it didn't, that they slandered and smeared, and

it created Jaq's Zola.

So it was the same misinformation,

problem, exactly.

Disinformation.

Yeah, I was wondering, how is that different from, for example, Nazi and Soviet propaganda?

You know, because it is a different sort of situation, but I think it's

really put out into it.

It's put out into the arena of

exchange of ideas.

So if you're a Nazi propagandist like Goebbels, or you're the editor of Prabda, that's the only outlet.

So they warp the news by having a complete monopoly on it.

It would be as if there was no parlaire or there was no true social or there was no Elon Musk taking over Twitter.

It was just the state.

So, well, it is that way in a sense that when you have Mark Zuckerberg confessing that he was working with the FBI, then Facebook becomes an extension of the federal government.

But that's

de facto.

It's not de ure.

I'm now kind of punting on Justice Sotomaire, who used, was bragging about de ure and de facto the other day in the affirmative action, got him completely crossed up

and said de ure was you know the way that things just happen without the law,

common protocols and practice, and day

de facto was the law.

It was the law, it's the fact of the law.

I mean,

she's a Supreme Court justice, but that's the difference that Goebbels, you couldn't, you couldn't,

if you wanted to, you couldn't publish a disinformation or misinformation article in Germany.

I mean, there was Der Sturmer

and stuff like that, and that was all state propaganda.

And remember, propaganda was not considered a pejorative word.

It was prop, probe, aganda from ago to be done, things that were done on behalf of the state.

So it was considered that must be done as a gerundive.

So things that must be done on behalf of the state, that seems like a noble principle.

That's how they started.

So there's no opposition voices.

What's really funny is all these people on the left, through their Ministry of Information and Department of Homeland Security, or the fusion between Silicon Valley and Democratic administrations, or the legions of techies in very left-wing enclaves like Austin, or

Silicon Valley, or Cambridge, Massachusetts, or Seattle, Washington, that have the ability to get on the internet and influence the ebb and flow of information.

They're all left-wing.

and their purpose is to silence anybody

yeah so that's a little bit scarier than for having better if it paid better they'd be fascist they would if they're not already

yeah and it's a little bit scarier than for example in the 1890s and forward joseph um pulzer and william r hurst they both sort of competed with each other using sensationalism and hearsay and they would publish basically what were lies as though they were truth, or at least hearsay as though it was the truth.

And that was always very scandalous, I think,

in the at the time.

Yeah, that was always based on an element of truth, Pulitzer.

And it was, I guess, in the, you know, it's our yellow journalism, they call it.

It's our version of cowboy journalism.

It's always.

It was always, it was, and it really grew up about the Spanish-American.

Remember the Maine, you know what I mean?

It was the Maine we don't know what happened to the Maine, there's a lot of disagreements about it.

The battleship Maine that was in a harbor in Cuba, but the idea was blown up and we're not doing anything.

It's very ironic that Pulitzer, the Pulitzer Prize, was given to an

eponymous prize to somebody that created yellow journalism and his rivalry with hers to see who could outdo each other and getting more scandalous,

exaggerated stories.

But

elements of truth.

And

yellow journalism is a competitive back and forth battle between the tabloids by taking a truth and then expanding it to preposterous proportion.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, anyway, I was thinking

we should be kind of happy then that we have at least a healthy environment where disinformation or fake news, regardless of how the politicians are using it, is at least debated, right?

So we know that we're somewhere above it all.

But I was thinking of periods, too, like Joe McCarthy's naming names and sort of manipulating the news, I think, is what he did.

That was a very, yeah, that was a very, you know, when I was about five years old, my mother had something called, there was a little group called, not a little, but it was called Dollars for Democrats.

And you went, we lived in a very, we had an 800 square foot farmhouse on the edge of town, about about two miles, three miles outside, and to a very poor Hispanic west side.

It was on the wrong side.

So my mom would get us three, and we'd go on our old jalapi, 51 Ford, and we'd go to visit households.

And then my mom would go up to the door and say, can you give $1?

And who was it for?

It was for mainstream Ubert Humphrey-like Democrats.

They weren't nutty.

And you get on a list.

So then I would go out and get the mail when I was five or six across the road.

My mom finally finally let me cross this rural road on my own, and I would bring in all the mail.

I was so happy to do it, like a little dog.

And there were these letters.

Do you know?

And then you open it.

It was published on pink paper.

Or, do you know you're being used as a pinko?

And it said, dear Mrs.

Hansen, do you know you're being used as a pinko by the commies?

and government.

It was kind of funny, but that's, that was the edge.

And see, it started out again with an element of truth, and there were truth in it, because the American people could not make sense that we fought this war and lost 430,000 people to free

Eastern Europe, is where it started, and Poland to free it from Nazi totalitarianism.

And we ended up giving it over to the Soviets.

So what was the point of the war?

And why did we have this alliance with this mass murder?

That was the argument.

And then

there was all this tension.

And then we lost China.

and we'd given billions of dollars in modern dollars to Shang Kai-shek but he was up against a certifiable evil genius and Mao and so we lost who lost China and so all of a sudden these two big countries and nuclear weapons pointed at us and there had to be a reason rather than just misjudgment there was we knew Alger Hiss was a commie we knew that there were people at the Rosenbergs who were commies I don't know how many of them but that was a truth and then Joe McCarthy came who was an alcoholic and kind of a weird guy.

I won't get into his weirdness.

And he took that truth that there were communists at Yalta, or his communist sympathizers are liberals who in their youth had been in the Communist Party during the Depression.

And he created this whole

I have a list here with a name, you know, 190 names of all the commies in the State Department.

Will you please show us a list?

Well, I, you know, I can't.

So that was the mood of the country to try to explain the inexplicable, how we lost China and Russia.

And

it was, you know, the Hollywood people had all flirted with communism or been, not all of them, but a lot of them had been.

And then, you know, John Wayne and Ward Bond and all those guys said they were going to root all the commies out of

Hollywood.

There were commies.

So we have to be careful when you say McCarthy.

You have to deplore the means by which he conducted this so-called witch hunt.

But unlike a witch hunt where there there were no witches, there were communists in the government, and they did do a lot of damage because they had a very naive, if not,

I don't know, conciliatory view to mass murdering people like Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin.

Yeah.

You know, we have a healthy distrust, I think, in our culture of the media.

And I think a lot of that started with the Vietnam War and the way the Vietnam War was related to the people by the government versus journalism.

And I want to take a look at that after a few messages.

So we'll be right back.

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We're back.

And Victor, so I wanted to turn to the Vietnam War because I think that a lot of, you know, I don't know, maybe it's the time I grew up,

but we've, you know, most of us have some distrust of the

government and then too of the presses, if not the presses.

And I think that a lot of it had to do with the Vietnam War.

So I was wondering what your thoughts were on the development of that misinformation culture out of the Vietnam War.

Well,

it started, I mean, let's face it, all of the major newspapers by 1964, three, when it was that period between JFK before assassination in 63 and then LBJ in 64, 65, that's when we really got in there.

At that time, the New York Times, all of these papers, were mostly center left.

I say center left, they were old-fashioned liberals, right?

A lot of them were anti-communists.

They were old

hawks, but they were the Democratic Party.

And they had Democratic presidents in Johnson and Kennedy.

And so they were for the Vietnam War.

This was the best and brightest.

It was going to be a surgical strike.

Robert McNamara, who had revolutionized the auto industry supposedly with these merocratic, informational people.

And Daniel, you know, Daniel Ellsberg was the guy and the Rand Corporation sort of typlified that.

And they were going to quantify everything.

So they were going to go to Vietnam just as they would gone to Korea.

But unlike Korea, where it was three years of messy fighting, Vietnam was going to be run by liberal people.

It was going to be run by technocrats.

And they were going to have body counts.

And they were going to do this.

And they were going to have sectors where if you're going to bomb Khe Song, you would have so many bombs per the grid.

So it was a scientific approach.

They were going to have sophisticated Agent Orange new napalm type, a better type of napalm.

So that was the idea.

And then they went in there and

it wasn't like Korea.

Korea is a pretty easy place to go in because there's not jungles, right?

And you can use air power and you don't have, it's got a very small border with the Soviet Union.

And most of it, it's a peninsula, but Vietnam is jungle and it's in a bad neighborhood.

And China is too close.

closer not that it wasn't close to Korea, but just the mechanics of getting down that peninsula into South Korea were more difficult for the Chinese than they were in Vietnam by supplying it.

And so the point was, it was very hard to win that battle.

And it was a different country in the 1960s.

It was in the middle of the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the environmental movement.

It was all protests.

So what happened is when, you know, Truman lied all the time about Korea, all of them lied about it.

That's what they do.

But when they lied about Vietnam, oh, we've killed, you know, 417,000 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese.

We're sitting in the end of the tunnel.

That was LBJ all the time.

It was not true.

We bombed so many, they would talk about as if they were producing cars.

We dropped so much tonnage this month.

And then people would ask them, well, how many planes were shot down?

And what were the effects on production or trade?

Or what percentage?

18.3% of the Ho Chi Minh Trail

products that were coming in have stopped.

Haiphong Harbor is, you know, attenuated by 72%.3%.

That's how they talked.

So everybody wasn't going to listen to that.

So they started an alternative journalism.

So you had,

you know,

left-wing people all cut their teeth.

Everybody at CBS News became famous.

And when Cronkite said, you know, the Tet Offensive

was a disaster, that was a complete lie.

The Tet Offensive in 1968 was a dumb, crazy idea of the North Vietnamese to empower the Viet Cong to take over the South by attacking key points, the embassy, the airport bases, and it utterly failed.

And they wiped them out for an entire year, and nobody reported that.

Instead, it was, how do they get to the U.S.

embassy grounds?

We've lost the war.

And you had, you know, Peter or Nettie, I saw, you know, they had to destroy the village to save it.

It was that kind of stuff.

And, you know, it fed into the popular apocalypse now and stuff.

So you never got an accurate information because the government started lying about the war.

And then the left-wing press picked up on that line.

And then it went to the same extreme and started lying.

So by 1971,

72, 73,

when you had a guy like Creighton Abrams and you started to bomb not just carpet bombing with B-52s, but you started to use smart first first-generation smart bomb.

And you went into Hanoi and you started targeting the homes of the people who

really started the war.

We were winning.

And you could argue that by 1974,

the war was over.

We hadn't had ground troops in there for two or three years.

Viet Cong was stabilized, if not ossified.

There was functional South Vietnamese government.

And then Watergate, Democrats took over.

They cut off all a da-da-da-da-da-da.

And a conventional force just drove down Highway 1 in Vietnam and took over.

But that was the results of a bastardized media.

And people had accurately reported and said this war was lied about by Kennedy to get us in there.

It was lied about by Johnson, how well we were doing.

We've lost 50,000 people because of a screwed-up Johnson administration and

from 64 all the way to January 69, and a Pentagon and EP

bunch of four stars.

But we got some guys in there, kind of Grant and Sherman guys, by 71, and they really knew how to fight it.

And we were winning, and we kind of won the war.

And nobody wanted to talk about that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, it seems like what we're looking at is that the government lied and then or presented a distorted picture maybe i'll give it that much and then the media got into it and and i think that what our modern politicals have um

um learned from vietnam is that they they need to control the media as well that the viet in the during the vietnam war the government failed to control the media and so it got out of hand.

And so as time has gone on, the 1990s and 2000,

the political campaigns and the political personnel around a

politician try, they'll lie for all sorts of reasons.

And then they also try to control the media.

I think that's what came out of that Vietnam War as far as the legacy.

The thing is to remember about the media and politics is this,

that

whatever power

is in, it needs an adversarial media so it can check it and audio.

And the way the media has traditionally functioned in the 20th century is it was left-wing.

The schools of journalism provided the reporters, and they're in a university and they were left-wing.

So, what happened is you had these liberal media

giants, especially the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, later the Los Angeles Times, although for a while had been conservative, San Francisco Chronicle, et cetera, et cetera,

and UPS and AP and Reuters.

Okay.

And so

they were

pro-left wing.

So when you had a Democrat in there, they just assumed that, you know, if there was a 60 Minutes report on CBS or NBC, Meet the Press, they were slanted.

But not like today, but they were slanted.

So they felt they could do whatever they wanted.

And how did that work out in the real world?

So Watergate was a bad thing.

There was a bunch of low-level people, but Nixon didn't know what was going on.

And then when they told told him, he thought, it's just a second-rate bird, big deal.

And then they said, you know, the left wing is saying that this is this and this.

And Deep Throat was probably a dissatisfied, if it even was a person, FBI agent, that was just feeding stuff because he wanted to be director.

So the point is that didn't right, that if you compare Watergate to what Hillary Clinton did with Russian Collusion, where she actually hired a foreign spy and paid him, which is illegal to interfere in a campaign, and then had him tap a former campaign aide, Charles Dolan, for fake Russian smears that he got, and then collaborated with Dashenko, and they created this whole file.

And then

she seeded it among all her contacts in the State Department, people like Victoria Newland, and then they went into the FBI, who was paying him.

It was 10 times bigger than Watergate.

It affected an entire election.

But the point I'm making is then: so look at Donald Trump.

Nobody in the media liked him.

They were attacking him every second.

So he couldn't be crooked in office or he couldn't do anything because they were all leaking.

There was a fusion between the politics below the president and the media, and it kept Trump straight.

It made his life miserable.

But when you get Biden in there and that same media says, we won,

so now we're going to go from hypercritical to we're state-run media.

We're probed at.

So Joe Biden is not senile.

That is ableism, if you say that.

He's perfectly fine.

John Fetterman's perfectly fine.

I just had a conversation with him.

He wowed me.

He really is astounding in private chitchat.

And if anybody, that reporter who said that he wasn't is lying.

That's what you get.

on the left.

And what that does to the left is empowers them to be even more bold because they can't believe anybody would ever turn on them in the media because they're the same people.

When Jin Saki leaves as press secretary, she goes, you know, right into the media, and that's what they do.

And so, Chris Matthews was a politico.

That's what they do.

I mean, there's some on the right, but not nearly as much as the left.

So, what it means is that a Republican, not because they're born more virtuous, although I think conservative thought and traditionalism tends to promote the truth more than leftism,

but they don't have any alternatives.

There is no monopoly that has fused with them to lie about them that has the power of the left.

They don't have the universities.

They don't have the TV networks.

They don't have cable news except for Fox.

They don't have the publishing industry, the newspapers, the Silicon Valley.

So, what that does is made the Democrats flabby.

They just do whatever they want and they get in big trouble for it because finally it gets so outrageous, Russian collusion.

We should talk about some of these big disinformation things and that's happened-the three or four great lies that were promoted.

Yeah, absolutely.

Um, and it sounds to me like what you're saying is that this is why they can continue a Russian collusion case for three, four, five years or

go for two years with they do that because there's COVID-19.

Yeah, look at what are the consequences of Max Boot writing that the Russian collusion was a fact?

Or what was the consequences of the whistles, you know, that whole offer blog,

the walls are closing in, or those CNN reporters that said, you know, Trump Tower

had a computer that was pinging with the Alpha Bank in Russia.

What was the consequences?

All those people are still there.

They didn't pay any price for lying and trying to warp and destroy a presidency and warping an election and transition.

I mean, Michael Flynn was set up.

Peter Stroken, we know that.

Andrew McCabe and Comey bragged about the fact that they just walked in there because Trump's team didn't know what was going on.

And then they planted it.

And then he wrote in his notes that he was truthful.

There's no such thing as a Logan Act.

That's just

an ossified law that nobody's ever been prosecuted successfully on.

I think two or three of it have all, but they used that and they destroyed him.

And that really hurt that administration.

It was a complete lie.

It was complete disinformation.

And you mentioned the Wuhan Lab.

If we had this conversation a year ago, and I did, and got in trouble at Stanford, as did other people, but if you said

it's, we had Stephen Quay on there, he just laid out the scientific information, as you remember, on our podcast.

But if you just, and you look at ProPublica of all places, it's just published this long article that kind of draws on Nicholas's Wade reporting, these left-wing outlets are now saying,

well,

we maybe have been wrong.

Maybe Peter Dasek shouldn't have been a disinterested arbitrator of whether it was in the lab or not, since he was routing money to the lab and getting grants from Fauci.

And maybe Fauci was not credible when he said it was a pangolin or bad or wet market, since he had been funneling money and he was redacting emails and paranoid with Francis Call.

So now we know what.

Yes, if you have the virus and it originates in a communist country under a military lab with a history of sloppy procedures that the French built but then quickly wanted no part of,

and you get a virus that has never had an animal or any living creature before it was infected into humans, with a case, no case of any animal ever having COVID-19 until humans got it.

And it was right in Wuhan, Wuhan, right where the lab is, was where it originated.

And the Communist Party lied about it and still lies and will give no information.

And they were sending people all over the world out of Wuhan on international flights, San Francisco, London, Rome, Los Angeles, New York, but not anywhere else in China, then you know they're lying.

And we know that scientifically, we know that with common sense, we know that politically.

And yet, if you said that,

then you were in big trouble, which that begs the question.

Why were you in big trouble?

Why were you in big trouble?

Why were you in big trouble if you said that the Wuhan lab was the source of the virus?

You know why?

One, because Donald Trump said that.

He called it the Wuhan Lab.

And you wanted to perpetuate a narrative that he was an anti-Asian racist to destroy him politically.

So if you said that his travel ban was wise,

which it was, and that it started Wuhan as he said it did, then you were empowering Donald Trump and you would lie not to do that and say it was a pangolin.

And number two,

why did they punish people?

Because the people at the Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases under Fauci,

the people at the CDC and the NIH

were knee-deep in funding this outlaw type of gain of function research.

They had a paper trail, if I could use that ossified term for emails.

They don't want to give information.

That will be exposed when the Republicans shortly take the House and resume control in January.

And third, the Communist Party is brilliant in its propaganda.

Now,

you say Russia today, and what do we think about Russians?

We think of white guys, Orthodox Christians with crazy long beards, gap-toothed, tattooed, heavily accented, racist villains in all of our super cop, superhero movies.

It's just a bad deal.

That's Donald Trump, Russia.

But China, which is so much more dangerous, so much bigger, so much more powerful, so much more sophisticated in their

propaganda.

That's racist.

It's the yellow peril of the 19th century back again.

It's the Japanese internment camps.

This is Donald Trump.

it was hard to do.

So that lie really took off with the media.

And now, the third lie, I just thought of one.

How about

we saved you from COVID by closing down the schools and the economy?

And

if you object to that, then you're a vaccination denier.

Or you should be put, remember, there were people saying that if you get COVID, then you should not be treated if you didn't get vaccinated or if you were an advocate of opening the school.

Or Ron DeSantis killed thousands of people.

by opening the school.

He didn't.

Mario Cuomo did by sending people that were infected into pristine

long care facilities where people were wiped out by the virus.

But my point is that that lie was

really dangerous because now you know why we know it's dangerous?

Because what do you read every single day?

Let's just forget about this acrimony.

Now, on the one hand, people were worried about the virus and they maybe a little bit exaggerated its ability to kill children.

And there may have been a little bit of undue influence by the teachers' union.

And yes, maybe more people have died from missed medical appointments and procedures and alcohol and spousal abuse and drugs and the riots and going crazy, stirried up, you know, stir crazy for two years.

However,

it did save some things.

So that's what the left is doing now.

Let's just move on for all the damage they did.

That was a third great lie.

That was

all those were not misinformation.

They were deliberately designed.

The Wuhan lab lie, the Russian collusion lie, and the lockdown is working and is much preferable to just, you know, protecting elderly people and the vulnerable and then trying to work out work during the virus.

That was a deliberate lie.

And that was intended.

Again, what was the political basis of all of these lies?

It was to injure a despised despised president.

They thought that if this Wuhan lab thing

can be manipulated politically and we shut down the economy, we'll take the biggest booming economy in history and we'll ruin the Trump administration.

I don't say that promiscuously.

Gavin Newsom said

this crisis, i.e., the lockdown, offers us a chance for a, quote, more progressive capitalism.

And Hillary Clinton said, this is a opportunity we don't want to waste because we can push through things like single-payer health care that we otherwise wouldn't.

And Klaus

Schwabel at the Davos Group said,

you know, he wrote a book called

The Great Reset and COVID.

And it was about using the COVID crisis for one world government.

We have one more.

Yeah, we have.

Yeah, Hunter Biden, right?

But, you know, that seems to me the most extreme.

But let's go ahead and take a break for some messages and we'll come right back to talk or to go down the hunter rabbit hole.

We'll be right back.

We're back.

And Victor, so yeah, the Hunter-Biden lie to me seems like the deepest and greatest of all because they shut everything down that was on that computer.

They really shut it down.

But so go ahead.

Well, they went after

where they really crossed the line is they went after private people on blogs and writers.

A lot of us wrote columns.

We were attacked, but they went after the New York Post that had access to it.

And they went after Bobolinski.

Remember the guy that was on CBS and just laid it out.

And he had emails from Hunter and the Biden family.

And they knew it.

And then they dug up these 50 quote-unquote retired intelligence officials.

And I think that was headed by John Brennan and Clapper, who just hated Trump.

And they said very cleverly, this could kind of sort of be, maybe should likely be Russian disinformation, but we didn't say that.

And then they, Joe Biden, being Joe Biden was out on the campaign.

Oh, 50 people support me.

It was all I.

Russian disinformation by the Trump people.

And that, and then we had a poll later, and then a large percentage of voters said if they had known that the laptop was accurate, they might have changed their vote.

So it did affect the election.

And it was another fusion effort by the DNC, the permanent deep state, as exemplified by these intelligence officers and the media.

And they suppressed it.

And if you went on Twitter and you Facebook and you started writing about that, you were going to be kicked off.

And they suppressed it.

And then it was all over and it worked.

And Molly Ball, again, I beat her dead horse, but in time, February 2021, she laid it all out, how they conspired to suppress information, which she called disinformation and misinformation.

And so that's what they did.

And that was very scary.

Because remember, when you have a view about Russian collusion, or you have a view about the Wuhan lab, or you have a view about the efficacy or not of lockdowns, or you have a view about a laptop.

And you're afraid that if you voice that, you're going to be destroyed.

And I can tell you, working on a university campus, if you said anything, you were going to be destroyed on all four of those counts.

Finally, you know,

I think the greatest thing is the 2020 election.

You can't say one word that there were irregularities.

So if you say the following,

If you say one word, then you're a Sidney Paul Powell Kraken person who's talking of, oh,

if I say today, right now on the podcast, that when you go from

a few million absentee ballots or early ballots to 102 upwards, and maybe over 65%,

60 to 65%, we don't know the actual total, and you render Election Day a minor event of 30%, 35% voting on Election Day, and you've never done that in American history, and the error rate, the error rate for wrong signatures, signatures that don't match the registration, et cetera, goes from, in many states, three to five to 0.2 or three when you got 102

ballots to deal with or to work with.

And you change the voting laws in these legislatures.

And you know, I wrote something about this, and I published it in the Stanford Daily, left-wing paper.

And I got...

It took me 10 iterations with the editors because they kept saying there is no factual basis that the idea that these laws were changed.

And I had the email exchange.

And now all of these courts are sort of ruling, wow, you guys went and you, by bureaucratic edict or lower court decision, cherry-picked a judge that you changed the laws.

And that was unconstitutional according to our state constitution.

And so now we know when it was all over that that had an effect.

And it also had an effect when Mark Zuckerberg

picks up $419 million,

and it was padded and added to by his Silicon Valley monopolist.

And they go in and they pre-select purple districts or blue districts, and they absorb the work of the registrars.

And they start bringing their team or they hire people to create drop boxes, to go to people's homes, to vote harvest.

And they don't do it symmetrically.

They just do it in their interest and they funnel this money through nonprofits as if these nonprofits are not political.

That's so illegal to do that.

And they do it with impunity, and that affected the election.

And they know that because, again, it's in the Time magazine article.

So

if you say that, then

you're an election denialist.

And remember, Sam, this is juxtaposed to Hillary Clinton

trying to warp an entire election by hiring a foreign national to warp the election and then saying after that gambit failed that Donald Trump is quote illegitimate and then telling Joe Biden that if he loses the popular vote in 2020, he should never accept it.

And then she's

joining the resistance as a Mackie fighter out in the hills.

And then she's palling around with Stacey Abrams, who's still under the delusion that she's governor.

And it's just, it's fantasy.

And I mean, it's, it's so strange.

She is the denialist.

She's the denialist.

Exactly.

I was learning.

I often thought it was audacious that the left was going down that gamut of calling people denialists and that this is somehow a crime against the state.

She just didn't tantively deny the 2024

election.

She said it's not going to be illegitimate.

I thought, okay,

tell us why it's not going to be illegitimate.

Is it because

when the

Republican loses, he's not going to say, not going to concede as you urged?

Is it because when the Democrat wins, the Republican loser is going to call him not legitimate as you did?

Is it because the Republicans are going to spend millions of dollars through three firewalls to hire a bunch of Russian or Chinese agents to, you know, make a false dossier to spread dirt about it like you did.

That's what's so funny about it.

So

we've talked about projection.

It's either the psychological phenomenon where a left-wing person thinks, this is what I would do.

So I will project it on my opponent, or I'm guilty as hell and I'm going to hell, not biblical hell, but Silicon Valley hell, die at 40 without being able to buy five Teslas or something.

Well, Victor, you know, we're coming to the end of the podcast, and usually I like to try to end it on something positive or something,

you know, uplifting, but you're scaring me more because not only are you saying that it's different in the modern age because of the

reach and the speed with which information and that social media is out there now and anybody can publish on that.

But you've just said, in addition to that, that the

social media tends to be left and the deep state tends to be left.

And

that's an even more scary,

even scarier scenario, I think.

And so I'm sorry to our listeners.

Well, that's in a private, a big, a public bit of optimism.

And this has been so egregious.

And people are so sick of these people.

And they're so sick of these little urban metrosexuals lecturing them, lecturing, lecturing them, and this arrogance of this tech group.

There's a pushback, and it manifests itself in a lot of ways.

And one way is Elon Musk, of all people, who was very left-wing.

And suddenly Mr.

Tesla, that everybody loves, is Shanghai Twitter, and they're going crazy, because it could be disinterested, and they don't want that.

And Joe Biden is at historic lows.

Now, we did have to pay a big price of two years of socialism that's wrecked the country, but we've never had this naked left-wing nihilism so exposed as it has been.

And people are sick of it.

And the media is so worried about it that they're not talking anymore about, oh, the red wave was a complete melodrama.

No, they're talking about voter fraud, voter fraud, voter suppression.

right-wing extremism, Fox News, disinformation, which can be translated as, hmm, we tried tried to do all that and we lost, and we're going to lose big, and we're scared to death of two things.

One,

they're going to say that we lost because we're left-wing socialists who finally got a try, and that will

smear our brand forever.

And that, and that's terrible.

And two, I'm afraid those guys are going to do what we would do if we took over.

Man,

because if I was a Republican right now and I was in this position,

excuse me, if I was as a leftist, if I was a Republican in this position with a big tsunami coming and a recapturing of the House and Senate, man,

I would impeach that SOB Biden in two minutes.

I would go after Mayorkas.

I would have Garland.

I'd tear up the state of the Union.

I'd kick the squad off every damn committee there could be.

There wouldn't be one justice that got approved, not one.

That's what they're thinking, because that's how they think.

So they're really angry, and they're going to start accusing people.

You're going to end the filibuster.

I heard that the other day.

Well, that's what they want, but not when they're in the minority.

And you're going to pack the court.

You don't enlarge the number of justices.

You just pack it with concern.

Yes, that's what administrations do.

And

Joe Biden will never get a Supreme Court judge approved.

Yes, he won't.

It'll be Robert Bork all over again.

So that's what they're scared about.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know what?

Just not to digress too much, but I was wondering why didn't they in the filibuster, they had both houses.

Why didn't they pass

legislation?

They didn't.

They did not, because

Cinema and Mankin were in purple states or actually red states, and they were very scared because they had looked at internal polls.

And if they had rammed through, they're already in trouble because they voted for that stupid Inflation Reduction Act,

Inflation Increase Act.

And they knew that they were not going to be reelected.

So they said in advance, we're not going to join the other 48 senators.

So they needed 50 senators plus Kamala Harris.

Yeah, I got it.

Okay.

And so

they didn't do it.

But what they did in the process is they green lighted that if anybody else wants to do it, they had no objection to it because they will object, but they'll look so silly.

It was like Barack Obama

when he was at

the funeral and he said, the filibuster is a racist Jim Crow relic.

And I'm thinking, okay,

so you employed a racist Jim Crow

relic and amplified it so Justice Alito wouldn't be in the Supreme Court because that's what he did.

I know.

God, I'll just end on this thing.

Be optimistic because

Barack Obama's back, and he looks like he's Rip Van Weakland.

He woke up from 2008 and he's gray.

So he's got the same long-sleeved shirts rolled up.

He points out, he gets in front of people, and then

he goes, I'm going to give you some wonkish little data about they're going to cut Social Security.

But now I'm going to go to my Southern African-American authentic activist.

You know, they're just, you all out there, you're just going to do it.

That kind of stuff.

Faith.

that's a pretty good imitation that's what he does

no that's what he does and he's gonna go into his little psychodrama i'm gonna lose my temper now for five seconds and they're gonna

stir after you work you work so hard and you work so hard and you did that and he goes and he thinks and he comes off stage it was great brock and then you know on tv that night on cable news well he's a heavy hitter he he's still got the magic and then he said he gets off and he says to michelle well where do you want to go do you want to go go to the new Oahu Mansion or should we go to the Calorama Mansion?

I want to go to the Martha's Vineyard Seaside 40-acre estate with a 2,000 propane tank.

Okay, let's get the private jet and come.

And that's what he does.

And it's so phony.

And everybody knows it's phony.

It doesn't, it doesn't work anymore.

He went all over the campaign.

And I tell you that none of those candidates that he endorsed are going to win.

Because to listen to him is just like,

okay,

you said, you know, that they're going to cut social security.

They're not going to do that.

You know that.

You said that your whole administration.

And you said the country's divided.

You did more than any other president to racially divide this country.

Remember the Skip Gates thing where the police were all stereotyping?

He said, remember, he threw his own grandmother on their bus and said she was afraid of black women, like she's some nut who raised him.

Remember the Trayvon Martin?

That's the son I never had.

Remember, get in their face.

Remember, take a gun to a knife fight.

Remember, get angry, don't we suppress your anger?

Remember the felon rappers that went in the White House with their ankle bracelets went off?

Yeah, you're telling me all these things.

You didn't know how to be a statesman.

That's no.

What he did was he said, just like Biden was supposed to play the quiet dunce.

The deal with Biden was, I'm Joe Biden from Scranton.

I'm your old moderate guy who said, you know, it's a jungle and we got to get tough sentencing.

And you know, me, I don't, I'm a,

I'm

an old Joe Biden working guy.

And then they said, okay, now here's the deal.

You just do that.

You don't have to do anything else.

Just get us across the funny shoe.

But once we do,

then you're going to get an open border.

You're going to get the Green New Deal.

You're going to get the big city attorney approach to no bail crime.

And you're going

to get a rapid printing of money and spread the wealth.

Okay, okay.

And what they didn't count on is he's president.

So he has to come out for formal occasions.

And to see him, to listen to him is to not like Joe Biden because he was always an SOB.

He was always mean-spirited.

He always said racist things.

He always lost his temper.

So, you know, dogface pony soldier, hey, fat, I'm going to take Trump behind the gym and beat him up.

Let me tell you about corn pop when I measured off six-footed chain, went out there, and let me tell you about the little black boys that looked at my golden hairs on my leg.

You know, I mean, he was sick.

Yeah, he wasn't a nice person.

And the irony is that sonality was his greatest gift.

Yeah, now he's just

always did.

And now people said,

well, I don't take that seriously.

He said there were 54 states.

I don't think he ever knew there were 50, but now when he says there's 54 or that gas doubled, it was $5 a gallon when he was when he entered.

When he lies now, I said, Oh, it's just too bad.

It's just sonality.

Yeah, it's not.

There you go.

All right.

So, with that happy picture of our current,

they're going to, they're going to win the mid-tunes.

Thank you so much for all of your wisdom today, Victor.

We really appreciate it.

Well, thank you, and thank everybody for listening.

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

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