The Coming Elections

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Hello there and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This is our weekend edition and on the weekend edition we usually look at something cultural or historical or in this case we're going to devote the whole show to elections and the economy and things that really are associated with the election.

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 Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

We will get to the elections and topics on the elections in just a moment, but first let's have a break.

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Welcome back.

And, And Victor, we've got a very

important election coming up.

I think our last show, we talked that, you know, we have to win the election before we can decide how to deal with things.

So everybody be prepared.

And I thought maybe for the first topic, we would look at the polls.

I know that, and actually I was reading in a Real Clear Politics article, and they said it more concisely that,

well, they're announcing an initiative to to improve the public trust and confidence in political polling, but that's just it.

Nobody trusts the polling anymore.

And I was wondering if we could talk a little bit about the nature of polling in the six months or so before the election.

When we looked at those polls in 2016, it wasn't just the national poll that was kind of close at the end.

That all of the major polls, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Emerson, they all had Hillary Clinton up by three to five.

There were some outliers, inside Advantage, I think, and of course, Trofagar that had it about even.

But

it was the states.

They had all of those blue wall states that collapsed, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania.

They had Hillary up by anywhere from six to eight points.

So they were kind of discredited.

And then when it came around in

2020,

then

Biden, they did a little better, but they had, you know, Susan Collins down by what, eight, ten points in Maine.

When they looked at the Senate races, it was the same thing.

I think they were confident that Biden was going to win because they had changed the voting laws in March and April of 2020.

But the point was, they didn't have a very good reputation.

And so now we're at gut check time for this reason.

We're talking about the polls.

There's a whole controversy, a whole corpus of thousands of articles written that the mainstream polls are biased and there is a pushback from them that although we don't have as good record as, say, Robert Kahali, he's prejudiced or he was wrong too, but it's not in our interest to fool the public.

And so this is going to be gut check time because if you look at these races, they're very, very close.

And they all of a sudden they've tightened.

And I think you could say the polls are reflecting that tightening, but they're following the Kehale poll and others who have warned about it for a long time that there is no blue wave or no blue resurgence.

So it really introduces the point.

It's really funny.

What are they going to do?

Are they going to go for a short-term advantage and keep saying that all of these Senate and gubernatorial races

are

in the bag for the Democrats and they're going to hold the Senate and they're only going to lose less than the normal 30 seats and therefore they're going to depress Republican turnout and depress Republican fundraising efforts?

Are they going to be intellectually honest and run?

transparent exacting polls that show that it's dead even or if not a republican advantage That's going to be the thing that everybody's looking for.

Because right now, I think if you look at the Real Clear Politics latest,

they even have,

I don't know, I think even with those polls,

the GOP's got, I don't know, 25 seats that they look like they're going to average gain.

That's pretty much par for the course of midterm.

But the most important thing is there's 35 to 40 in play.

And what happens when you have these sudden shifts of opinion, they don't fragment.

You could see that with a Trump.

It wasn't that he won Wisconsin and lost Michigan and came close in Pennsylvania and squeaked by in Ohio.

Once Ohio went and Iowa went and North Carolina went and Pennsylvania went and Wisconsin, they all went.

because the same phenomenon was replicating itself, right?

Like some kind of organism or an amoeba or a cell.

And so what I'm getting at is these

cosmic issues.

Am I safe?

Am I safe in Detroit?

Am I safe in Phoenix?

Am I safe in Milwaukee?

Is gas too expensive in rural Pennsylvania?

Is it too expensive in Atlanta?

All those issues, once the electorate watches this,

they make up their opinion.

And although they're individual and idiosyncratic, they have common themes.

And once one state starts to show a pattern, it can be Xerox.

And so I think that's why there's a good chance that

the Republicans won't just end up with 220 seats, but maybe, I don't know, 250, 260, and that they won't end up 50-50.

They could end up 53, 47, and control the Senate.

So I think that's, I'll go and stay out in the limb.

I think that's more likely, even though there's going to be a lot of attention paid for,

you know, election and ballots integrity this time because of the last elections.

That's going to be a real issue.

And that's a wildcard that you and I can't, we don't, we don't know what's going to happen.

We don't know.

We don't know what...

to what extent right now as we talk, there's some left-wing activist on the phone with Zuckerberg or somebody and said, look, you guys helped us last time.

So we need those drop boxes.

We need these volunteers to go vote harvest.

And they're doing it.

And we don't know to what degree true the vote is saying we're on to those guys.

We're going to be everybody.

See what I mean?

It's a war of the shadows.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You just mentioned, and what I think I want to ask is about

how you right now go about for yourself, interpreting polls.

And it sounds like you look at what the polls say, and then given that you know they tend to be slanted towards the left, that you will

assume that they're undershooting any sort of Republican candidate.

Is that how you do it now?

Or is that, or are there good pollsters out there that we should look out for?

Well, by and large, on clear-cut issues when there's no controversy and the races are separated by five to seven points, then

all of these, the majority of the polls are more or less accurate because

it's easy to call and they don't think they need to be activists and intervene, right?

Yeah.

But when you have a controversial year

and there's a lot of passions and the country is divided 50-50,

then a lot of the people on the left feel that

their polls will not just reflect public opinion and forecast what might happen when all the mail-in ballots and all the early balloting and on election day are tallied, but they feel that they have to be an agent, an agent, a catalyst for the progressive project.

So they feel that they can add two or three points.

And maybe that will discourage 10,000 voters in Michigan saying, oh my God, we threw the book at them.

We gave them a whole broadside and they're still ahead.

Or some donor in Las Vegas says, I got a $5 million.

I was going to pour it into Blake Masters, but the guy's aped down.

I can't waste that money.

That's their thinking.

And the other thing is, and this is what Robert Kalhalli, if I'm pronouncing his name correctly, has tried to drive home.

And I think he has a point is that

when you hear that Bill Gates and this Davos mindset are trying to collect data on every single individual,

Or when you go on your computer or your iPad or iPhone and you've ordered something at Amazon and then all of a sudden stuff pops up from different companies, you know,

advertising.

Or when you're, say, you're traveling.

I was in,

how did they know?

I had to even turn on my phone.

I was in a little town in Texas speaking and all of a sudden I got all these things about Texas that I should be seeing.

So when they have that surveillance capability, And they call you and say, hey, we just want to ask you 32 questions.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

You say, sorry, not going to do it.

But if you call them up and say, we're only going to ask you five questions,

we don't care.

We don't want your name.

We don't care.

We're not tabulating it.

We're not tracing it.

You might get a better response.

Is that how he does?

Yes.

Yeah, he does.

He does.

He's done that for a long time.

In other words, his whole point, his whole edge, he thinks, is

that he can count better than they do because he uses intangibles and he gets a sense of the electorate and he understands how people are feeling that they don't want to come forward.

So ask yourself this: no matter where you live, if you're for Biden, are you more apt to put a Biden sticker or a Trump sticker?

I'll put it this way:

if you're an Idahoian and you put a Trump sticker in that deep red Trump, are you going to have more problems in Sun Valley and Boise

than if you're in Red State

Georgia or Red State?

I don't know, Maryland, and you put on a Biden?

I think you are going to have more trouble.

I think if you're a Trump sticker and you go into Sun Valley or Boise, or people are going to react to it.

And I think if you're a Biden supporter and you're driving around rural

Maryland, nobody's going to care because the left is so much different than the right in

ostracizing and demonizing.

And so I think he understands that.

So he's trying to say that the conservative Republican voter

is a little bit shyer about revealing his true intentions on Election Day.

And after all, Sammy, there is not a comparable vocabulary on the left to identify people on the left, I should say.

Anything like deplorables, irredeemables, clingers, dregs, chumps, right?

I don't know that they call people that.

You can say elites and stuff like that.

But so it's an asymmetrical, and he's trying to even it out.

So we'll see if he, it'll be very interesting to see if the Nate Silvers of the world or the Robert Cahallis are right in this election because in some of these individual state races,

they disagree by a magnitude of 10.

Yeah.

Robert Cahalli, he's his, the name of his

site or his company is Trafalgar.

Is that right?

Yes, yes.

Okay, let's make sure everybody knows that.

Okay, so Victor, I would like to talk to you about some of the election or the debates and elections, but let's take a break first and come right back and we'll talk about first the Herschel Walker Raphael Mournock debate.

We'll be right back.

Welcome back.

So Victor,

I would just like to get your impression on how Herschel Walker did and Warnock did in the debate that they recently had.

Yeah, well, the thing to remember about these debates, this is kind of a tired canard.

Nobody, except die-hard in-state residents, which matter because they're the voters, but nobody listens to these debates.

But they do

have access to YouTube and

blogs blogs and podcasts like this,

and TV shows and clips, and Hannity, and

Rachel Maddow type things.

So they pick and select individual excerpts.

And that's on the basis that people form the impression, number one.

And number two is they have pre-selected ideas where the media will predict somebody's going to do badly or poorly, and somebody's going to do much better.

And if that projection or that assumption are reversed, it really helps the underdog candidate.

So take Walker and Warnock.

Everybody said that it was going to be, it was going to be Cicero versus a Legionnaire, right?

That poor Walker would not be able to stand his own.

But when you look at the clips that were selected left and right,

they were pretty good.

And they may have been even because

You know, when Warnock said kind of smart ass stuff like, well, you know, we have the doctor and we have

the woman patient in the room.

And the last thing we need is the government telling them whether, you know, about what her body can do or not.

And he said, well, no, there's another person there.

It's called the baby.

Things like that were a good line.

And he had a lot of, he had a lot of good lines about Warnick.

Basically, his one-liners were that.

He can say whatever he wants, eloquent as he thinks he is,

but he's basically just voted for Joe Biden down the straight ticket on every issue, 100%.

So if you like everything, vote for him and don't vote.

And if you don't, that was a very cogent message.

And those sound bites, then, in addition, dispel the idea that

he was just wiped out.

He didn't have to win.

He just had to be kind of even.

And then it kind of says

to people in Georgia: would you have a

sophisticated, smooth person

eloquent, who's voting for this disastrous agenda?

Or would you rather have someone who's less articulate but has better common sense and knows inherently what's right and wrong?

In other words, what I'm saying, Sammy, it was not an antithesis between would you rather have somebody who's articulate and suave and can talk versus a bumpkin that doesn't even know where he is.

Well, in that latter case, you'd say, well, I'll go with a suave, articulate guy because the other guy is just a complete ignoramus.

But he didn't come off that way.

He came off as sort of at times a halting but sincere, genuine national and state icon.

So he benefited from that and he'll continue to benefit from those clips.

Yeah.

Yeah, I was wondering if how you think he's going to do, if you want to hazard a guess.

I don't know if you want to hazard a guess.

I think he's going to squeak by.

Yeah, good.

I think because he's the type of person when they get into the ballot booth they being the swing voter in georgia they're going to say to themselves

i'm left wing i'm independent but my god i can't walk out on the street at night and this guy is for all of these sorrels das are they're going to say to themselves i want to go to tennessee this weekend but i can't afford gas or they're going to say

I just don't think we can have this critical race stuff in our, I don't want to get into it, transgender, all that.

I can't think of the, I don't think this is going to be in our schools.

I don't think it can be in our schools.

Are they going to think I just went to the market and I can't even afford a chuckstick, much rep a ribeye?

Though that's out of the question.

And who gave me all that?

It was Biden.

And who was for Biden?

That guy.

So that's going to affect four to five percent of the electorate.

Yeah.

Um, so can I then I ask you about Oz and Fetterman.

How do you think that's going to pan out?

Well, I mean, we know how that was supposed to pan out.

It was supposed to be that Federman walked through the primary without really any opposition.

And he had this cool look of the Mr.

Hoodie.

He was a nerd.

Let me just start.

He was a nerd.

He was an overweight, bumpkin nerd who grew up spoiled rotten by wealthy parents.

And he never really had a job.

And then he went out to a little tiny town.

His dad gave him a bunch of money and he tried to redevelop and rebrand himself.

So he got the hoodie and he got the tattoos and he shaved his head and he got the

smooth shaven goatee, right?

Yeah.

And he looks like a hood.

And he's trying to rebrand himself as I am kind of just like you and the white working class of I'm a clinger.

And then he got through all this populist stuff about unions and all this.

And then nobody paid any attention to the fact that he lets criminals out.

He thinks that murders should be out.

He doesn't believe in incarceration.

He believes it in abortion to the moment of birth.

And so that didn't come out.

And then Oz came off as a suited dandy with a funny name, Muslim, vicious primary,

not a lot of money, kind of.

easily targeted and charactered as a New Jersey outsider, et cetera, et cetera.

And he had some slips.

But in the meantime, he had a stroke

and he hid his medical records.

He still does.

And he demands certain things that we've never seen before, like captions during a debate.

So it slowed down the communications and the back and forth and kind of curtail the actual amount of space dedicated to a debate, time dedicated to a bait.

And on top of the fact, he won't debate any time owls.

So he's now given the picture that he has something to hide.

Well, it might have been effective to say that a doctor should be more sensitive to somebody that is physically handicapped, but nobody forced him to run.

And we have all of this long history of the Democratic Party saying, you know, John McCain, winknaw, doesn't know how many houses he has.

He's senile.

Remember that?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And we, you know, and Donald Trump, you know, the guy is just crazy.

He's got to take the Montreal Cognitive Assessment.

And this Yale psychiatrist, they were perfectly willing to do that.

So it's not mean.

It's not unreasonable to have him bring forth his medical records.

A lot of us are listening.

There's people in this audience that have had A1 heart blocks.

They've had AFib.

They have all sorts of problems.

They understand

that having AFib

is not a joke.

And having a massive stroke is not a joke.

That big growth on his neck, he could just say, this is because of a vascular something, right?

He won't even do that.

And so,

what's the bottom line is that Dr.

Oz did a smart thing.

He didn't come off.

He learned not to come off as an elite, and he went out and he traveled like a maniac.

And he thought to himself, I'm in good health, and he's not.

And he can't cover the ground that I can.

And I am more articulate than he is now and probably always was.

So I'm going to talk, talk, talk and visit, visit, visit.

So I think it's a toss-up.

And I think Oz will squeak by.

Yeah.

Then a final senatorial race.

How about Ron Johnson and Mandela Barnes in Wisconsin?

How do you see that?

That's an easy one.

That's not even, I was just in Wisconsin last week speaking.

That's easy.

Ron Johnson was hated by the left because he had an open mind on Dr.

Fauci and alternative medicine and allowed people to come forward and say hydroxychloroquine, ivermetsin, and alternative methods of care were not quackery.

And why not try them?

It was reasonable to do until double-blind studies came out.

And

then the cycle of the Biden narrative, places like Milwaukee, crime is out of control.

I go there a lot.

In addition to that, the whole Biden project is falling apart.

So what I'm getting at, Sammy, is Mandela Barnes was the heartthrob of the left.

They loved the name of Mandela.

It was analogous to Barack.

They thought it was exotic, and he was familiar to Wisconsin's, and then nobody really vetted him.

And the more that Johnson vetted him, and the more that Johnson basically said, I don't give a blank about what the left says about me.

I'm going to go after this guy on his, what he said about criminal justice in the United States.

And he turned out to be,

he's a hardcore leftist and that's coming out now and the more that it comes out and the more that Johnson just sticks to the issues the more that the guy falls behind so he's gonna lose yeah yeah well let's turn then to governor elections and i i've been really curious it seems like they're neck and neck but i would expect kerry lake who is the republican versus katie hobbs who is the incumbent democrat in arizona i carrie lake just seems by far the superior but I think they're neck and neck.

But what are your impressions about that?

I think Kerry Lake is ahead, but you got to remember when you say you're bewildered that an articulate, attractive, charismatic candidate who knows the issues from A to Z like Kerry Lake is not way ahead.

You got to start on the premise that people in Arizona are bombarded with anti-Kerry Lake media because

all of these Republican candidates are being outspent from two to three to four times by their left.

Because this is not the America of Reagan, not even the America of George W.

Bush.

This is the America of, as I said, $11 million, $11 trillion

from San Jose to San Francisco alone.

This is the global wealth.

This is the...

era of a Bill Gates and a Mark Zuckerberg and

Warren Buffett Lisa Jobs.

This is the greatest concentration of wealth in civilization's history.

And it's all left-wing to speak of.

And so that money is pouring into these candidates, and it's run by what?

Sophisticated techies, and advertising, and Hollywood people.

And they make very effective hit pieces.

They understand messaging and they're ruthless.

So the fact that somebody like Carrie Lake is even even, and I think will win that race, is a testament to her superior abilities because they would have mowed down anybody else.

I think everybody's got to start that.

We all say this.

Oh, I'm so depressed.

The country's falling apart.

There is no border.

There's outlight racism

on the left.

Crime, we can be killed and nobody will care right in front of our home.

Wow, Afghanistan was the greatest humiliation in our history.

I can't afford meat.

I can't afford gas.

Why Why aren't people up in arms and saying this guy did it and voting them all out?

Because they have money and they're not running on their record.

Warnock not said, I voted with Joe Biden almost every key vote.

They're not doing that.

They're saying that they want to lower gas prices.

They've done all their way they can as inflation fighters.

They're for a strong America.

They want to get tough on.

That's what they're saying.

When you put money and sophisticated ads, it makes it very difficult.

And yet they're doing doing very well, the Republicans, because they've got

really good candidates.

Don't believe this.

I want everybody to just stop and take a deep breath.

Don't believe that J.D.

Vance is a bad candidate.

Believe that he has no political experience

and he's running against a lifetime politician in Ohio.

And he's doing very well and he's going to win.

Don't believe that Herschel Walker is a complete buffoon.

He has no chance.

He's authentic.

He's going against the money and the eloquence and the system in Georgia.

But I think he can win.

And Blake Masters is a brilliant guy.

And don't think he can't win.

But we've been conditioned by things.

Part of it was Mitch McConnell, Sammy.

He just sort of, oh, well, you know, I'm not going to go put any more money in Blake Masters.

And wow, it's just kind of like, you know,

what we did in 2014.

We, you know, we 2014, we had the big win in 2010, and then we thought we were gonna, we had to, we had to wait till 2014 for the Senate, and that's when I got the good candidates.

But in 2012, we blew it.

We got all the crazy, that's what he's trying to tell everybody, that the MAGA candidates are all inept.

They're not.

They're really smart people.

And these Mexican-American candidates along the Rio Grande Valley and in California, they're wonderful candidates.

And they're going to win.

They're going to win.

Great.

So then I have one more

gubernatorial election to ask you about, and that is Stacey Abrams versus Brian campaign.

What do you mean?

She's already governor.

How can she be running for re-election?

But she's, they say, or I was reading, of course, it was a left-wing thing, but

they said she's very clever about running a very strong race.

And I forget exactly how they put it, but I don't,

what do you see with that?

There's no way is it going to be a good thing?

She's a very clever porno novelist, too.

So what?

She's not going to win.

Has she ever won a statewide race?

No.

No.

What does she have behind her?

She has the whole left wing and a lot of money.

Yes.

And why?

Because she's articulate and

she's left-wing and she's from Georgia.

And she supposedly represents the new model, how to flip a red state.

And so she's going to lose.

She's going to lose because people don't trust her.

Because on the one hand, she's accusing everybody of insurrectionary election denial.

When before that even came up, for two years, she toured the United States and was introduced as a real governor of Georgia, right?

She lost by 50,000 votes.

And on the other hand, Kemp is a very sophisticated politician.

He was a Trump supporter, MAGA.

And then when the whole focus of the Electoral College for three or four weeks

from state to state went up focused on Georgia,

he did not reject the electors, right?

So he earned the wrath of Donald Trump.

But

I'm not going to get into who was right or wrong, but he was very sophisticated because he basically endorsed both Loeffler and Perdue for Senate.

And he kept telling everybody, it's not about me.

I'm not up for re-election.

It's about these Senate candidates.

And if we lose them, we're sunk.

And he was right.

And so he came across as sober and judicious and trying to help the Republican Party.

And whether it was fair or not, Trump was not out there campaigning and telling his base that their vote wouldn't count because it was all crooked.

And the independent voter thought he was sour grapes.

And meanwhile, these guys snuck through and won the elections.

So, my point is, he's got a lot of support in Georgia.

And he's going to, he's, he's, Kemp is a good candidate.

It doesn't matter.

I'm not talking about whether you'd agree with him or not.

I'm talking about whether he's a good candidate or not.

And he's going to win.

She's going to lose.

And then I don't know what's left for her to do.

She's facing the same thing as Lynn Cheney.

They have two choices.

They can go out

and become a consultant or a lawyer if they've got a law degree.

I don't know.

I can't remember if I don't think she does, but Cheney, I think, does.

They can go out to Facebook or Apple and make $5 million a year, right?

And just sit it out and become fabulously wealthy.

And then get on Face a Nation or meet the press once in a while.

Or they can go to the MSNBC and NBC and get a,

at worst, a paid consultancy.

By the way, Sammy, I'm not paid for Fox News.

I've never taken a penny.

I've never asked for any money for Fox, but that's like, you can make a lot of money and they can do that, or they can even get their own show.

That's what they're angling for because their future in politics is not existent.

It does not exist for either one of them.

Yeah.

Okay.

All right.

So, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break for some messages and come back and talk a little bit about, I have a list of what the left says are republican talking points that are lies so we'll be right back for that

we're back and victor i so i i found on a reliable republican publication the guardian a man oh wait wait wait wait wait wait wait sam i did i say republican i meant left i meant no i'm not i'm not criticizing that.

When you said reliable, it's not reliable.

They're reliably left-wing.

They're unreliable and reliable left-wing.

Okay, there we go.

They're like Pravda.

They're Pravda.

They're the most left-wing paper in Britain.

And

their American version is even worse than the British.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So Robert Reich wrote an article about Robert Wright.

Now we're going from the Guardian is reliable to thinking that Robert Wright is

sane.

So let's see what the insanity is.

Robert Wright.

Oh boy, what did he say?

Okay, so the lies that the Republicans are running on are this: Crime is rising because Democrats are soft on crime.

And

he says, though, that, well, okay, crime rates have gone up, but only, but mostly in states with weak gun laws.

And Democratic cities spend 38 percent more on police than republican cities such as as is what he said but i love that stop right there

this is an old

left-wing talking point okay

so what they do is

they say in these

rural and small-town red states, right?

They have one or two huge cities.

So Arizona has Phoenix

Georgia has Atlanta

Tennessee has Knoxville Nashville

okay

New Mexico has Albuquerque

and you see what I'm getting at Nevada so what they do is they look at these big cities that are run by whom

Soros DAs for the most part and left-wing governors excuse me mayors.

That's what happens in Dallas.

That's what happens in Houston.

And they have exploding crime rates.

And then they go around and say, look,

these red states have just as much crime.

No, they don't.

They have big cities have just as much crime.

But if you look at the rural areas, that's not an exact comparison.

What they should look at is

what is the crime rate outside the big cities of America in red or blue states that are not controlled by big city mayors and big city DAs?

And then you would see a radical difference.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

So the second

thing he says is a lie by Republicans is they claim that inflation is due to Biden's spending and wage increases.

And he says it's due to, well, he says there's global inflation, so therefore it couldn't just be Biden and the corporations are actually doing it,

raising prices.

Okay, so let me get this now.

So let's get this straight.

Donald Trump took office in 2017 and January 21st, 20th.

Okay.

And he left office

in January 21st of 2021.

During those four years,

There was an aggregate inflation rate yearly per annum that ranged from about 1.6, I I think, to 2.2, right?

Yes.

And it wasn't just COVID.

There were periods well before COVID.

And then Joe Biden took over.

And now he's nearing his second year.

And the inflation rate runs, but anything on the month per annum, as adjusted to a year ago at that month, somewhere between 8 and 9%.

So what I'm trying to ask, Mr.

Reich, is, I'm supposed to believe that in four years of Donald Trump's regnum, that all the corporations were not greedy.

They did not have a profit motive.

And therefore, and then now, all of a sudden, because of Joe Biden, they hate him.

They're just gouging everybody when they're under 10 times more scrutiny, 10 times more media coverage.

I don't believe that.

I'm sorry.

And I'm supposed to believe that did Donald Trump, was he physically sober?

No.

But it's aggregate.

And two things happened.

Biden took a spendthrift

George W.

Bush double the deficit.

A spendthrift Barack Obama double the deficit.

A spendthrift Donald Trump double the deficit.

And he's going to really, really double the deficit.

So if you divide his years in office versus the amount of money we borrowed, it's a record.

More importantly, he did this at a time of natural demand and supply shortages because we were A, coming out of a lockdown for two years.

People wanted to go out to eat.

They wanted to buy things.

They wanted to remodel their house.

They were sick of sitting inside for two years.

And they wanted to go crazy.

And they had money that was printed by Biden, especially.

And more importantly, that destroyed the work ethic.

So a lot of people said, why should I go work when I'm getting COVID relief checks?

Or they said, why should I go work when I'm terrified of COVID?

Or like me, they had long COVID.

I don't think I could go out right now and get a job as a carpenter.

Every time I try to do it, I sweat with a little fever.

So there's a lot of people.

There were a lot of reasons why it was an especially inopportune time to print money, encourage consumption, and discourage production.

And yet he did all of that.

And so he spiked inflation.

And he also spiked it because as the world was coming back and people worldwide were driving, that was the time not to keep the Trump production levels and Keystone at Trump era levels, but to even increase them further.

And we had the capability of doing that.

So instead of cutting between one and two million barrels of oil and more of natural gas, he could have gone on schedule and increased it by 2 million.

We might have three or four million right now.

So he did all of that.

He did it deliberately.

His only miscalculation, he's not mad about the price of gas.

Remember that, everybody.

Stephen Chu said it a long time ago.

They left once European prices.

What he's mad about is that you're mad about gas.

You're mad about gas.

He said that the other day in L.A.

They said, down here, it's $7 a gallon.

What are you going to do?

You know what he said as he ate his ice cream cone?

It's always expensive down here.

What's new?

He doesn't care.

He only cares that his policies may not get his team re-elected.

And then these people are calling him up.

And they don't call him.

He's in Delaware.

They call Ron Clain and all of his lackeys up and they say, God damn,

what the hell are you doing?

I'm going to lose my seat.

You understand that?

What am I going to do?

I'm going to lose this Senate.

I've been a House member for three terms.

That's what he's mad about because that we're mad that he did this to us.

But he likes the idea of high prices because he's got this green Orthodox religion that says that carbon fuels are satanic.

Yeah.

So here then is the third Republican talking point that's a lie, according to Robert Reich.

Yeah, I think I destroyed the first two.

Everybody did.

You should not listen to them.

They're just a joke.

And nobody but other than Robert Reich would even make that main attempt.

Go on.

Yeah.

And I also want to tell everybody that Victor was not ready for these.

So he's going off the top of his head on this.

So well, it's Robert Reich in my defense.

I mean, it's not anybody in the audience could do this because it's Robert Wright.

He's insane.

Okay, the last one from the insane man.

The Democrats hired 87,000 IRS agents to go.

Wait, wait, wait, to go after the middle class.

He says that's a lie.

What do you say about that?

He says they're going after the uber rich, that that's what they're really intended for.

Three things as I think of this, I'm formulating this third lie.

Number one, the uber rich are left-wing people.

The Democratic Party does not go after its own constituency, okay?

The people who give it money, they don't go after.

It's not just the hyper, hyper-rich.

It's the upper bicoastal professional elite that makes between $300,000 and $2 million.

That's their bread and butter.

Remember that.

Who went after them?

It was the Democrats.

I said to Devin Nunes, my close friend, I said, Devin,

if you guys in the House in 2017 pass a federal law that says that you cannot write off state and local taxes, right?

And so a California that's got a 13% tax rate is really only a 7% tax rate for that particular group, you're going to lose all of the independence.

But of course, the left is going to go irate against you and raise a bunch of money.

And he said to me, that may be true, but it's not fair.

It's not fair for no-tax states to bite the bullet and become physically responsible and frugal while all of these blue states like New York and Illinois and California spend for all these crazy ideas and then they want their privilege to write off that from their income taxes so that everybody pays for half of it.

That was his argument.

It was a very good argument.

But

the point of all that is

the Democrats do not go after that selfish group of people.

These are very liberal people, but remember one thing about very, very liberal people.

If you're John Kerry, you move your yacht from one state to another not to pay taxes on it, okay?

Property taxes.

If you're Al Gore and you're a carbon fighter and you believe in high taxes, then you rush a sale to carbon-spewing gutter so you can sell your bankrupt, failed cable TV station right before a change in the capital gains law so you pay less taxes.

That's what the left-wing mind is.

Their left-wing advocacy is a facade.

It's a projection that deep down they care about themselves.

So that's a long,

kind of windy explanation that A,

when they made those 87,000 new agents that are coming online, they basically have assured the very wealthy they're not going after them.

And number two,

if you look at where the money comes from, you won't get any money for these vast Biden projects that are so expensive in these multi-trillion dollar deficits by going after that class anyway.

They don't have, there's not enough of them.

So in California, about

175,000 households pay half of the income tax and they're leaving.

And California is come to Jesus moment because of that.

So if you want to raise taxes and you want more money to social experiment, then you have to go after the middle class.

And that's what they're going to do.

That's what the 87,000.

Number three,

the Republicans put forth a proposal when this was being adjudicated that they would support it if they had a proviso that they would not go after anybody that less, I think it was $400,000.

And who voted against that?

The Democrats did.

So,

what do I have to say?

Yeah, exactly.

He's insane.

And they're going to, who are they going to go after?

I can tell you who they're going to go after.

I hope the people are listening don't belong to this group.

Number one,

when I drive along rural California, when I get on the freeway, I see one type of person.

He's at a swap meet.

He has a corner taco stand.

He's selling clothes on the crossroads.

He's driving around with a horn saying, buy this.

He's a peddler.

There's thousands of them.

They don't pay sales or income tax.

Okay.

He's going after them.

Number two,

when you're a small business person and you have total sales of $300 or $400,000 and maybe you're profiting at $60,000 or $70,000 in your small business, and you buy a new leather chair for your office, or you buy a Toyota pickup and you kind of use it to haul stuff around, but you also take it to the lake, right?

And these people may write off, they're going to go after that person and they're going to, they hate them anyway.

They're the self-important.

They're going to go after, after, after that person.

So that's who this thing is after.

It's after the waitress at Denny's.

And maybe she's getting...

$10, $15 an hour, and she's making $80 in tips and she only reports $20.

They're going to go after her.

Trust me.

They're going to unleash.

And you can see why they're going to do this because if they really wanted to help the middle class, all they'd have to, and they really wanted to save money, all they'd have to do is hire 87,000 more Border Patrol people, build the wall, and then we wouldn't have soaring multi-billion dollar entitlement cost to house, feed, subsidize 3 million new

workers who wouldn't drive down wages of the American citizen worker.

But they don't want to do that.

So they don't care about the middle class.

If you just look at the effect of the policies right now,

they're aimed at the middle class.

They feel about the Biden and the left and AOC and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

Forget what they say.

Look at what they do.

They're run by the Mark Zuckerbergs and the Lisa Jobs and

the Bill Gates and the George Soros.

They hate the middle class.

They feel about the middle class the way the Robespierre brothers felt about the bourgeoisie.

That's who they are.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, Victor, we're almost to the end, and I just had one more because I did say we were going to do something on the economy.

And I've just been noticing that there are articles out that

we're headed for a recession next year.

And I thought, we've already been in negative growth for two quarters now.

Aren't we already in the recession?

But I was wondering your thoughts on the economy, and then we'll close this.

Yeah, we're.

well, you're right to suggest they're Orwellian because if it was a Republican president and he tried what Biden was doing, they're saying he's Orwellian.

He's trying to alter the traditional definition of a recessionary economy in which you have two consecutive quarters of negative growth.

Of course, they say that that doesn't apply to them.

But I have a feeling because we're, you know, we're

We're at the end of September, right?

We have the end of the third quarter

And we're going to hear, it takes a while, but I think we're going to hear that there was neither zero growth or negative growth.

Not that I trust bureaucrats to be always disinterested, but I don't think it's going to reflect well on the Biden administration.

And then

when you have a stagflationary economy, and the reason it's stagflationary is

when you pay all of that money, So you're doubling the price of gas.

So when Hector Mendoza fills up his pickup for $180 as he has to drive out to Kalinga for his sheetrock business,

he's taking $80 a week out of that economy just on fuel alone that he's paying an increased cost.

Some of it goes to oil workers and investment, but the most of the point, he's not buying things for his kids.

He's not buying new shoes.

He's not getting that doctor's.

He's not contributing in a way that he otherwise would to the economy because he's strapped.

He's straitjacketed by all of these inflationary pressures.

So his consumption starts to go down.

So

when you get into this cycle of you, you know, hedge, you lose,

tails, you know, you lose, that lose, lose,

there's no way out.

And we saw it with Carter.

So to get rid of inflation, you have to raise interest rates and discourage consumption.

When you raise interest rates and discourage consumption, then people pull back and then prices fall because not because of sound fiscal policy necessarily, but because you're in a recession.

When you're in a recession and you want to get out of the recession, you have to pump the economy.

But what's happened in this country is that all the tools that we need to get out of a recession have been exhausted.

And there's basically just three of them.

Number one, the Federal Reserve.

They can give us cheap interest.

But we've been in 2%, 3%, zero interest for 10 years, right?

So we've acculturated people.

It's not like suddenly we're going to have cheap interest.

We've used it.

That stimulation has shot its watt.

Number two, you can borrow money.

But we've already borrowed $31 trillion.

We've had the greatest stimulatory effect of deficits in the history of civilization.

Now we have to pay to service them at 6% or 7% pretty soon.

And that's going to be a half a trillion dollars a year or more, right?

Yep.

So you can have interest rates

or you can borrow money or

you can borrow money and you can stimulate it that way or you can increase

You can have entitlement giveaways, right?

You can say, yeah, like we're doing in California, we're giving everybody $1,000.

Okay.

So if they're filling up in a pickup for $200 and they get $100 a week, so we're giving them 10 weeks of gas subsidy, right?

And it's going to be a one-time deal.

So you can expand not just deliberately deficits and not just deliberately

low interest, but you can subsidize people by giving.

And what happens when you do that?

When you start giving them money?

Then you lose incentives and people drop out of the workforce on this, on the idea that they can make more by not working.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it looks pretty grim.

So maybe it's very hard.

The only thing you can do is you need a Ronald Reagan that comes in and gets some guy like Paul Volcker.

Yeah, Paul Volcker is a good example.

You get a guy like Paul Volcker, and Carter brought him in first, and you just kind of point him at Frankenstein in the right direction and say, go to it, and I'll take the flack.

And then you keep calling him up every day and say, Paul, interest rates are 19% for a car.

And mortgages are 12%.

You say, hold on, Ronnie.

Just hold on, hold on.

And you crush inflation.

But to crush inflation, you have to do one thing at the same time.

You've got to deregulate and cut the tax rate.

And that's hard to do because it's counterintuitive.

Because

when you're running great deficits and you're stimulating,

and you've been stimulating the economy and you need a balanced budget, all of a sudden you cut taxes and you're in an inflationary spiral.

And you try to encourage, well, the point is you're not encouraging people to stay home and not do anything.

And you're not encouraging them with funny money to go out and buy things.

And you're not encouraging them with dirt cheap

interest rates to go borrow stuff.

You're deregulating and you're telling them that if you do this, we have a new tax code or we have investment credits or you're not going to have the EPA on your back.

And Reagan did all of that.

And so, right before the 1984 election, about seven months before,

six months, the economy in the last half of 84 grew by 7% and saved him.

Had it not happened, he wouldn't have been president.

There were times when you looked at when Mondale was a potential candidate in March of 1984.

He was running almost neck and neck with Reagan.

And so it's very hard to get out of a stagflation area where you have high inflation

and a,

I don't know what you call it, ossified

production or ossified economy, recessionary economy.

Because whatever you do to lower inflation lowers productivity.

In theory, whatever you do to raise productivity artificially raises inflation.

So you need a genius to come in there and find particular targeted policies that will encourage economic growth without unnecessary discretionary spending, right?

And you have to encourage supply, supply, and production.

And then at the same time, you've got to find ways to

not just discourage inflation without a recession, but you've got to encourage this productivity to continue, but at a pace it doesn't increase inflation.

That means you can't print money and you can't have these vast surpluses,

excuse me, deficits when the economy starts to rebound and economic economic activity returns so it's like a fine-tuning an old automobile and i don't think they know how to do it anymore but i surely know that joe biden did the worst of both things he took an already supply short hyper-demand economy and he deliberately curtailed its energy supplies and he deliberately went after businesses with higher taxes and higher regulations.

And he deliberately incentivized staying home from work.

And so he did the worst of both worlds.

He increased the amount of funny money floating in the economy and especially to people through entitlements.

And he made that money chase fewer goods because less was being produced.

Lower productivity.

Yeah, absolutely.

And then we got this.

inflation and Robert Reich and everybody can talk about greedy corporations all they want, but corporations didn't wake up and say, I hate Joe Biden.

I'm going to be greedy this year.

No, they didn't.

All right, Victor.

On that note, we're at the end of our time.

So why don't we go ahead and close this down?

Thank you so much.

This was actually a wonderful weekend discussion about the elections.

I hope everybody appreciated it.

I hope so.

I kind of sound stuffed up, but I hope I didn't disrupt with coughs or anything, or I can be edited out.

Yeah, we'll see.

All right, thank you very much.

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

Thank you all for listening once more.