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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

The star and namesake of this show is Victor Davis-Hanson, and he is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor is a historian, military historian,

ancient historian, not your age, Victor, although you're getting there.

I'm 69.

69.

You're still a young man.

A farmer, syndicated columnist, political commentator, you name it.

Victor is it.

He hangs his hat.

on the World Wide Webs at VictorHanson.com, a thing to which you, fair listener, should be subscribed.

And we will discuss that later.

A bunch of topics to talk today.

We're going to start locally, kind of local, California at least, and we're going to talk about this scandal with the LA City Council.

And we're going to get to that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

So Victor, I was happy to open the Wall Street Journal today and see my old friend.

You know him, Will Swame.

Will runs the California Policy Center, but he had an op-ed, a leaked audio exposes the racial underbelly of LA politics.

And briefly for our listeners, I assume most have heard of this, but the city council president

for Los Angeles, Nouri Martinez, has been forced to resign, not only resign as the head of the city council, but then also her seat.

Why?

Because she was in some meeting with a couple of other members of the council and a

a union guy, Ron Herrera, Los Angeles County's top union leader.

And during this this meeting with someone audiotaped, they were

slandering or mocking, using racial

epiteths against other council members and one guy and his child.

I think he's a gay guy who adopted a kid.

He was mocked for that.

This got out.

Even George Gascon, the...

the infamous DA of Los Angeles came in for their opprobrium.

I'd like to just read this one little

passage that Will wrote, and then Victor, maybe have your thoughts on this aspect of this drama or anything you'd like to say.

And Will writes, it is,

it's ironic.

The Democrats who rule Los Angeles fly the woke flag of social justice proudly, yet here they were behind closed doors, speaking like Jim Crow racists.

And also,

Will writes, after the 2020 murder of George Floyd, Martinez, the city council president, pledged to cut funding for the Los Angeles Police Department.

She called on her colleagues, quote, to finally end the sin of racism and all its illogical, dehumanizing, and sometimes deadly consequences, et cetera.

Victor, we're never surprised by the hypocrisy.

uh of uh the left and left politicians but here's one that got caught and actually forced out what are your thoughts victor well everybody or listeners should remember that these are not minor characters in the race industry.

I think all of us in California came of age of listening to Kevin DeLeon, who ran for Senate against Diane Feinstein.

I think he even had the day and the accent mark.

And I think he even claimed that he had Guatemalan or even Asian.

background, which is really interesting because one of the rants that Martinez went on was against indigenous people, i.e.

Oaxaucans, down there near Central America and Asians.

But he was mutant.

And if he really was true about his ancestry, you think he would have objected.

And then Gil Sedillo was in the state legislature.

Herrera has been a labor flack for years.

So these were the movers in shake.

Martinez was always praised as the face of the new Latina power structure of Southern California.

That's one thing, Jack.

The second thing is they were not apologetic at first.

The first thing she said was,

well, sometimes I'm, you know, kind of sloppy, basically, when I'm working for people of color, marginalized communities.

She put that out there.

And then she thought she could resign as chairman and then keep her seat.

And then the pressure mounted, mostly from the African-American and gay communities.

And then she had to resign.

But then even then, She said, I serve as a model for Latina.

So she was still playing the race cart.

And all of them, I I think Herrera finally was forced to resign.

I'm not sure about De Leon and Sedillo yet.

The point is,

they didn't think they did anything wrong immediately.

This was an older conversation that had only recently surfaced.

It was months old.

So they had, they were perfectly fine with it.

And why were they perfectly fine?

Because they worked on the intersectionality assumption that if quote-unquote people of color

they are incapable of showing racism.

And if they are capable, then they deserve no punishment because they have equal victim status.

But, you know, if they had just said, called

their bonin, their associate, the white bitch, and I think they would have gotten away with it because, you know, white, who cares?

Nobody cares when you defame the

so-called whites.

But they went after blacks and they went after Oaxacaans.

They went after Asians and they went after gays.

And they had no allies in the intersectional community.

But they were not ashamed.

And the third thing to remember is this is the ultimate manifestation of where tribal politics lead to.

It doesn't lead to a salad bowl.

If you eject the melting pot and your superficial appearance, as I said, is essential, not incidental to who you are, then every single group goes tribal, just like every single nation goes nuclear once its neighbors goes nuclear for their own self-survival.

And so that's what we're seeing because they were talking about reapportionment and that one premise in that talk about, well, he doesn't do the Latinos any good and the white guy's not on our side.

And he's, they use all this horrific language, little monkey about blacks.

But the subtext of it was that if you are a black person, you can only represent blacks and you're only going to advance the interest of blacks.

And if you're Latino, you're only going to advance the interest of Latinos, which is what we all knew when you go tribal, given the former Yugoslavia or Rwanda or Iraq or any other tribal society.

But the funny thing is, we were told that wasn't true.

of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the woke movement because it was a rainbow coalition of the non-white.

But I, and you know what?

I'm going to make a confession.

As someone who lives in a 95%

Mexican-American community and grew up in a school, Eric White School in Selma that was predominantly Mexican-American, I can tell you that most of the racial slurs and smears did not come from white people in my experience because there was very few of them.

But it came from the Mexican community.

And in that community, there's a great

silence about

race.

And I've had people working side by side me pruning or building things where they said, in the afternoon, I've got to wear a long-sleeve shirt, Victor.

I said, it's 100 degrees.

And they said, I don't want to get too dark.

I've known grandparents who've told me, I have three grandchildren, I've only, and two of them are blank, blank.

They're too dark.

And that comes back.

That goes back to 1521 and the Cortez,

you know, the conquest of the Aztec Empire when indigenous people and matzizos and all that were fused, and there was a racial hierarchy in Mexico of who could claim the greater degree of Spanish blood.

And that still exists.

And that's a subtext of here because Martinez,

when she said they were fejo, very ugly, she said, Muy Fejo, I think.

Oaxaca, what she was basically saying is, I'm a light-skinned descendant of the Spanish conquistadors, and these other people don't even know how to wear shoes.

And so

it's a reminder that

this whole myth that there's a white 70% oppressor class and there's a 30%

oppressed class is a myth.

And that everybody, if you don't want a war of everybody against everybody, a Hobbesian

bellum omnia contra omnes, then you better stop it right now because that's where we're headed.

And

the last shoe that's going to drop is that this

that a councilman who is white is being attacked and everybody's claiming affinity and loyalty first to their ethnic group, eventually.

And gay, and he, as a gay person, he identifies first with gay people, apparently, at least that that's what his accuser said.

Eventually, somebody who's white is going to say, this is my tribal affinity.

Well, you would, I believe it was the last episode we recorded that you were talking about, I think when you were in Egypt, it was either Egypt or Libya.

You were talking to a doctor

and we got into the, you know, like, why?

Why is the situation here economic?

I ask that question all the time.

Right.

So I have to hire my first cousin versus hiring, and that's tribalism.

That's that's the consequence of tribalism.

That's also what America's, what makes America different.

I had a ruptured appendix, and they had to leave, they didn't do a drainage tube in this, you know, on a, basically on a wooden table in a Libyan clinic and they left two stitches open so it was draining and I had a high fever and you shouldn't be traveling but I had to get out of there so this Libyan friend who befriended me with government connections said I won't mention the airline but he said I can get you on that airline even though you have an open wound if you bind it And I said, how can you do that?

He said, I know the pilot.

I said, you know him?

He said, he's a member basically of my tribe, my clan.

And I'm going to call him.

And he's going to insist that you get it.

And I said, well, is that how it works?

He goes, that's the only way it works.

This was in a socialist utopia paradise called Omar Qaddafi's Libya, but it still worked on tribal assumptions and protocols.

And that's why it was impoverished.

And when you look at these bureaucracies and when you listen to that

back and forth in the LA City Council, that is an explanation of why that place is corrupt and why it doesn't work, because everybody is out for their own particular clannish agenda.

And

it's going to get worse and worse and worse.

That's one of the reasons, along with Silicon Valley

multi-trillion dollar wealth, why this state is doomed.

Victor, one last little thing that jumped out to me at this piece, again, it's in today's Wall Street Journal by Will Swame, although everyone knows knows the story.

Here he writes quickly: uh, when the

when the 15-member council attempted to meet Wednesday morning,

African-American activists swarmed the chambers and demanded that the three council members resign immediately.

When that didn't happen, the activists shut down the meeting in the presence of city police dressed for a riot.

One protester was arrested.

Isn't that a local insurrection?

I didn't see, I didn't see that attack on democracy get much attention anywhere else.

No, I don't think.

Of course it was.

And you think that's going to bind the wounds and bring ecomenical healing to the LA Multicultural Coalition?

No.

Because one of the reasons, I'll be frank, one of the reasons that none of them resigned immediately was they were under the assumption that what they said might resonate with people in their own community, i.e., well, at least they're fighting for us.

They're fighting for us.

And so they thought that they could write it out.

And now the greater pressure from the community forced them to resign.

But one of the council, what they were arguing over was a replacement for one of the council members, right?

An official who had just been removed for what?

Fraud?

And he was an African-American guy, and they had removed him.

So the whole...

The whole council, the whole concept of tribal politics is by definition synonymous with corruption.

It always is.

And when you that that's just the raw form, Jack, that's the street version.

That's the Tammany Hall version of what we do in Tony admissions discussions, hiring of deans,

hiring anchor people.

It's all a racial tribal discussion.

It really is.

Right.

Well, Chinese are delighted about this.

Yeah.

Well, I'm sure they're helping to ferment it in there.

Yeah, whatever way they can.

Absolutely.

Hey, Victor, let's, I want to, I got the Wall Street Journal on my mind today.

I want to

use a piece by Kim Strassel,

her most recent column, as a jump off into getting your thoughts about the FBI and

John Durham.

So here's how her piece is titled, Durham's FBI Indictment.

And I'd like to get your thoughts about the actual case Durham is prosecuting and the broader thought about just how

bad this federal agency is.

Special counsel.

Go ahead, Victor.

I think what was most disturbing about all these FBI stories

is that we now know that the FBI hired Deschenco

and Christopher Steele,

and they know that both had previously been in the pay through the Clinton campaign via the DNC, Perkins-Coe, Fusion GPS.

And there was a fusion there between the Clinton campaign and the FBI to first destroy the Trump campaign and then the Trump transition and then the Trump presidency.

But what we didn't know was how

All of us, I remember

writing about

that the dossier was was phony because I went through and I, you know, I just collated all the people that pointed out that, you know, there is no Russian consulate in Florida and all of this factual disinformation that he just threw in there.

But, and remember, people criticized.

It was almost like suggesting that the M

messenger RNA vaccinations would not completely be ironclad.

You know what that brought on you.

Well, if you said that at a particular time,

especially where I work, then you were called a denier.

That was how effective the FBI had promulgated that lie.

But what was funny about it is the FBI offered Christopher Steele $1 million if he would just prove one iota of that dossier.

And we find out from the interrogation fight,

Durham, with these FBI so-called experts, he couldn't.

And they tried to keep giving Deshenko $200,000 and immunity.

So they were, you get the impression, in other words, they were invested in the lie and they were desperately using these disreputable characters to save them.

And then after all this.

And taxpayer dollars.

That's a kind of money.

It is.

And then after all this was over, they knew that this dossier was fraudulent and could not be proved.

And under Andrew McCabe and Comey, they passed it off to a FISA court as genuine,

even if they didn't know that Kevin Klein-Smith had helped them by forging documents.

Right.

And then you put all of this in with the fact that James Baker, the legal counsel, had met with all of these media organizations before the election and was working with them to get the story out.

And then you put it in the larger context of these four FBI directors, Mueller, Comey, McCabe, and Ray either misleading Congress, or in the case of, I think you could say Comey lying to it, pleading amnesia 245 times under oath, or McCabe admittedly lie.

And then you put in this extraneous page,

I shouldn't say extraneous, this page struck lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, prejudice, prejudice, prejudice.

And then you get the phones that mysteriously disappear.

And then you put in Ray's contribution to

the soup with the Peter Navarro, the James O'Keefe

performance art arrest,

John Eastman, all of the, and then the Virginia monitoring.

And what is it?

I could go on, but stop for a second.

And what is the picture you get?

It's a picture that it's not just the director and his inner circle, it's the entire hierarchy of the FBI.

These people are

almost criminal and they're arrogant and they're on out of control because they are paying people to lie to destroy an American citizen's life in the case of Carter Page.

What will they not do, Jack?

Will they not hire

a foreign agent, basically, which it's illegal for a foreign operator to work for a campaign?

He did, and they knew it.

Will they

cringe about the very thought of altering a document before a federal judge?

No, they'll do that.

Will they wipe devices clean?

No, they'll do that.

Will they

lie under oath?

Yes.

Will they lie to federal investigators?

Yes.

So there's nothing they won't do.

Will they pay bribes to people who are disreputable to try to authenticate something that can't be authenticated to save them?

Yes.

So

I hate to say it, but I said it before.

It's not a revolutionary act.

And this is what I got really angry at Mike Pence, because he said that criticism of the FBI

should not come from the conservative side.

It should come from the conservative side.

Right.

Because conservatives believe in small government and the threat of the strangulation of their liberties from permanent bureaucracy, no matter who they are.

And when you empower the FBI and the DOJ under Merrick Garland, you've got a real problem.

So I don't see it at this point,

and especially

after listening to Christopher Wray's flippant attitude about, I got to take a plane and go to the Ariondax and cut off discussion.

And it was under him that the FBI was surveilling parents at school board meetings and did all of this retrieval work for the Biden family about the diary.

And then we didn't even get into the FBI misleading

the country about the dossier and putting it on ice to warp the 2020 election, nor did we put on,

we haven't discussed the 660, I think, sexual assaults that were hushed up among FBI agents.

And we haven't even discussed the idea that whistleblowers were punished for trying to bring this to the attention of the FBI hierarchy.

So it's irredeemable, to use Hillary's word, and it should be broken up.

The first two things that a Republican president, if he's got the Congress or she's got the Congress, should do is number one, break up the FBI and farm out each particular division to another branch of government.

So it's decentralized.

It's too dangerous.

It's too dangerous to anybody,

politically conservative or liberal.

And the second thing they need to do is to break up this incestuous Silicon Valley nexus.

where you've got people like Alexander Mayorkas, who had worked for as a consultant with Apple Apple, or Tony Blinken, who had worked, excuse me, for Facebook.

So did Tony Blinken.

And you've had all of these people, I think there's 51 of them, Jack, in the Biden administration that came from Silicon Valley.

And then we find out that Mark Zuckerberg was what, talking to the FBI about censoring expression.

We're going to get into that later, but I think the FBI has got to be very carefully

broken up.

We're talking about the acts of commission.

We're not talking about the acts of omission.

Yeah, yeah.

I was just going to ask you about that, Victoria, especially as regards the FISA courts, because

I mean, that's an act of commission on the FBI's part to mislead, but I kind of wonder, like, is the court that connival?

Or are they sloppy?

Or are they?

I don't know.

I think they're complicit or they're incompetent.

Yeah.

But I was even thinking of they were tipped off by Russian intelligence about the Sarnov brothers in Boston.

They didn't do anything.

They were tipped off in advance about the San Bernardino Islamic terrorists.

They didn't do anything.

They never, they don't, they don't do what you want them to do.

Right.

Like Antifa.

Why haven't they

traded Antifa, which has been around for 20 years?

And notice this fusion between government and so you have all this censoring of anything to do with anybody who had remarked about January 6th was kicked off.

But Antifa and BLM, we know, use social media to coordinate all that arson and looting and violence.

The FBI, nobody cared about that.

So this is scary.

We're in a very scary time.

And

you could say one thing for the left.

This was a center-right country.

And

the left then was the champion, they claimed, of the First Amendment.

They ran the press.

They were the watchdog.

But when they take power, the hard left, there isn't the

conservatives don't have access to that.

They don't have any media.

They don't have a corporate boardroom.

They don't have professional sports.

They don't have K through 12.

They don't have academia.

They don't have newspapers or Silicon Valley.

That's all left wing.

And when they take power, they fuse and they get an Orwellian degree of strength and force and they use it.

They use it.

They're punitive.

So

I don't know what the FBI is doing, but they're surely not going after Antifa.

They didn't investigate the financial cons of BLM.

They're a politicized, stasi-like organization.

And I think James Comey and Andrew McCabe and Christopher Wray and Robert Mueller all owe apology to the American people.

When I saw Robert Mueller get up before the House Intelligence Committee and when he was asked directly about Fusion GPS and the Steele dossier, the twin catalyst of his investigation, and he just daughtered around, I don't know.

I don't want to get in.

I don't even know much about that.

Or when I saw James Comey on 245 occasions, it was leaked, but I read some of the transcripts.

I don't know.

I have no information about that.

I can't remember.

Or Christopher, I read the Inspector General's report, how Andrew McCabe on four occasions.

had flat out lied about leaking, flat out lied, and they would have fired anybody else who did what he did.

And then when I saw that

disdain that Christopher Wray showed Congress when they were asking basic questions about asymmetrical treatment,

I don't see any hope.

If these four people all represent different aspects of the FBI, then there's no hope.

And so you got to take it apart and then

And then I don't know what you do, but I don't think it should be

recombined because it'll inevitably happen again.

And they all, and you know what?

They all evolve in and out.

James Comey was a Lockheed lawyer for a while, and they all go to the corporate world.

And I think James Baker, the legal counsel, who was knee-deep in the Russian disinformation and all that,

he ended up as a Twitter legal consultant.

He's the head legal.

I think he's the head legal officer at Twitter.

And so I, you know, and Twitter has been very careful to modulate coverage of all of these FBI-related stories.

So,

it's shocking.

It's beyond shocking.

Well, Victor,

let's next talk about

the final hearings of the January 6th Committee, and we'll get to that.

Your thoughts on this right after these messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler.

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Victor, back on the,

I don't know, if there was a sound effect, it probably would be womp womp for the conclusion of the uh January 6th committee.

I'm just looking right now, my old our friend and colleague at National Review, Andy McCarthy.

He is a piece out today.

The January 6th committee ends with a whimper.

Victor,

clearly, this committee was a political act and a political act in part attempting to address the forthcoming elections.

It's failed

in a lot of ways, but it is for people paying seven bucks a gallon for gas and going broke trying to pay their

bills in cities racked with crime to see that the Democratic Party has invested so much capital

in this committee is almost an insult.

It's not that there weren't things that happened on January 6th that

did not deserve our decrying and maybe even criminal charges.

But

this whole enterprise seems here to have ended with a thud.

That's Andy's view.

I agree with him, but what are your thoughts, Victor?

Well, I mean, it was flawed from the beginning because this was the first committee in modern memory, maybe ever, where the House minority leader was not allowed to put members, his own choices on the committee.

And

that hadn't happened.

And so they put people in on the committee who had

only two criteria.

They had to have voted to impeach Donald Trump.

And they were politically ossified.

They were not going to be back next term.

And then that made them them prejudicial.

And then the committee chairman, what was his name?

Bernie Benny Thompson or something, Benny Thompson.

He was an election denier from 2004.

He had voted not to accept, I think, the Ohio results and tried to sway the election to John Kerry and stop the Bush re-election effort.

So the whole thing was flawed.

And what was the purpose of it?

The purpose of it was to bring bad publicity all of 2020 to divert attention.

And if anybody thinks that Lynn Cheney wasn't part of this, they're nuts.

She was down in Arizona just campaigning for the

Democratic alternative, the Democratic candidates that are running for governor and senator against her own party.

So they were knee-deep in it too.

And the whole point of it was to distract.

from, as you said, gas, inflation, critical race theory, school board problems, record crime, no border, Afghanistan.

It's analogous.

It's no different than the quote-unquote nuclear secrets were stolen at the Trump home raid

or the Biden were surrounded by semi-fascist Phantom of the Opera speech.

All of that was a mass distraction.

And so it's back up again, tried to, no one cares.

No one cares.

It's not equal application of justice.

Because as we know, there should have been a 2020 committee that invested the role of Antifa

and BLM, a fraudulent organization that absconded with

$100 million probably.

There should have been an investigation of 120 days of continuous looting, arson, killing 30 to 40 people, depending how we count them, and 1,500 officers, $2 billion worth of damage, appropriated territory in Seattle and Washington, where people just claim this is no longer the public domain.

It's ours.

Nobody did a thing.

No FBI investigation, no FBI informants, nothing.

And there should have been an investigation of that, and there wasn't.

And so,

you know, and if you talk about, you know,

it all raises the question of symmetry.

And at some point, you know, when you talk about using political acts to affect national security as a way that Trump was charged.

And I'm thinking back all the the way to the first impeachment, Jack, where one phone call to the Ukrainian president said, you know what, this family is corrupt, true, and they are using their influence to get money for themselves, true.

And therefore, until you weed out this corruption, I'm not going to release approved monies, but I will.

And he did.

And he did so more generously than the Obama administration because he sold offensive weapons like javelin to Ukraine.

he was impeached for that that one phone call what is the difference in that between the hot mic and so south korea in 2012 on the eve of the obama campaign where he said tell vladimir that if he gives me space i'll be flexible on missile defense he gave vladimir gave him space did not invade ukraine or crimea

until two years later Obama kept his part of the bargain, scrapped missile defense that had been approved with Poland and the Czech Republic and the United States.

And guess what?

One of the reasons he's in there is that Putin wanted Obama to be re-elected and knew that once he gave him space and was making a quid pro quo deal, he could go in with impunity, which he did.

And he really, really wanted missile defense dismantled, never started, which he did.

and which would have been of enormous importance right now in the Ukraine crisis.

Is that impeachable?

Or how about one last example?

That should have been impeachable.

But how about Joe Biden going over to Saudi Arabia earlier and begging the Saudi royals and then begging OPEC to pump an additional one to 2 million barrels of oil before the midterms, which in conjunction with draining the strategic petroleum reserve might lower gas prices enough?

So he could get his team re-elected, so then he could spike them again for the agenda of high prices transitioning our way to a green utopia.

How about that?

That was mortgaging our national security, which with dire consequences concerning the Ukrainian war for the re-election efforts of Joe Biden.

And yet, is he going to be impeached for that?

And this is what's scary right now.

There is no equitable application of a law.

And the bureaucracies know that there is no one who is going to punish them or hold them accountable.

And the common denominator is to the degree that you lean woke, then you get exemption.

Unfortunately, when you go too far, maybe this is a historic moment as we just discussed with the LA Council members.

They went so far that their woke identity insurance policies didn't hold, weren't valid.

They weren't true.

They didn't hold enough clout because they were so egregious in their racism.

And maybe at some point people are going to say to Joe Biden, you better stop it.

You can't just go around the world and try to promise people stuff or beg stuff, going down to Venezuela and winking and nodding or people and saying maybe the sanctions could ease a little bit if this communist rogue government pumps more oil.

Who hasn't he asked to pump oil the last two years?

Russia, he did before the Ukrainian war.

RA did.

Venezuela, he did.

The Saudis, he did.

OPEC, he did.

Think about that.

The day we're recording here, Victor, I think the Keystone pipeline would be up and fluid had he not stopped that.

So would Amore.

He stopped more federal leases of gas and oil than any other president.

And it had ramifications because out here in the San Joaquin Valley, you hear one thing from farmers.

I can't afford ammonium nitrate.

I can't afford ammonium sulfate.

I can't afford chemical fertilizers because...

Essentially, they're made with natural gas.

And nobody has, they can't afford it.

The price is so high.

And we have it in abundance, in abundance.

We have Germany now saying, well, thank you for giving us the liquid natural gas, but you're price gouging us.

You're harder on us than Putin was.

And it's not that we're price gouging that we're not pumping it like we used to.

And so this is an existential threat, this president.

He really is.

Yeah.

Can I, I hate to, I know our listeners hate when I interrupt, but I do want to let our listeners know, and maybe you'd comment a little further that what you've just talked about in part is part of a piece you've written.

Joe Biden plays the old ugly American.

I think this is your most recent syndicated comment.

Yeah, absolutely.

He is an ugly American.

The left used to say, oh, wow, these horrible Yankees in Washington, they go into Central and South America and they pressure governments to give them sweetheart deals.

And the governments are illiberal.

And then, you know, it's for the fossil fuel or the natural resource selfish grasping nature of America.

That's what they used to say.

Now it's, hey, Joe Biden, go down to that awful communist human rights violator, Maduro, and beg him on your knees to give you a natural resource.

It's not in the interest of the Venezuelan people to pump if they've already curtailed it.

And then take that so you can use it for your own political and selfish agenda in the midterm.

That's what we're doing, nobody in the left believes in that anymore.

They don't believe in the First Amendment.

The ACLU is not an advocacy group for free speech.

It's for censorship of conservative views.

Silicon Valley University, the same thing.

The left, and that's what Tulsi Gabbert had said.

I mean, that was one thing that everybody hit upon, that the left has become an enemy of free expression.

And it is.

It's a totalitarian Orwellian movement.

Victor, we have a little time left, and I've got a a little maybe delicate subject here, and that'll continue to be about Joe Biden and his use and abuse of his

dead children.

And let's get to that right after this final important message.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor, you've talked before about

that your daughter had passed away.

And I, of course,

I remember back when that happened and you're writing me and it was just very painful to see the pain you were in.

Many of us, you know, we have friends.

I have friends who have lost, you're a friend, lost children, and but I've never seen anyone.

I've seen people talk about it and talk about, you know, the pain they've had and maybe employ it.

That's probably a bad bad word, but to use it when somebody else goes, walks through this terrible situation to give them comfort, but never to use it for any larger purposes.

And we have Joe Biden, again, we've talked a number of times on this podcast about how he has tried to,

for quite a while, over a decade ago, further exploit the death of his first wife and his daughter.

I mean,

how much empathy can you want?

It's this like bizarre sickness.

And now last week, he's talking about his son, Bo, who died a few years ago,

originally claiming that he died because, well,

he died of cancer, but he must have gotten that from.

fire pits while he served in Iraq.

But just the other day, he said,

my son died in Iraq.

My son died in Iraq.

I mean, it's just like shocking.

Why would there's so many strains of this because we think that the cognitive liabilities that he has are going to hurt his political chances, but he doesn't look at it that way.

He thinks that he can continue his lifelong mendacity, which he always was a liar.

He plagiarized things.

He made up stuff about his career.

He's always, even the New York Times has had to use the word storyteller about him recently, that he lies.

That whole corn pop racist saga was a big lie.

And, but that is cloaked now on, it's kind of like Federman, Federman's record, terrible record on crime.

You can't really discuss it because where he really

knew what he was doing and where he's non compos mentes is blended and fused.

And the same with Biden, because when you start to do that, you said, oh, you're just picking on him, or he just forgot, or he can't remember.

No, he was always that way.

And I think you, Jack, wrote a really good piece maybe five or six years ago on the anniversary of it.

Nellia, was that her name, Hunter, his first wife, in that 72 accident where

they lost their 13, 12, one-year-plus infant.

And the truck driver was, the inquest found that he was innocent.

And if anything, I don't want to

allocate blame.

It may have been just circumstances, but we know one thing, that the truck driver who hit her, A, was not liable and culpable, and two, made an heroic effort at some danger to his own person to avoid her when she went in the intersection.

And yet, three,

for years, Joe Biden went out on the campaign trail and stumped to get sympathy and claim that that truck driver had drank his lunch and was drunk and killed his beloved wife and daughter.

It was a complete lie.

And then the family, I think in your piece, you mentioned the family had begged him for years to cease and desist that lie and that smear and that slander.

Right.

Well, what does it say about a person that, can you,

like him talking to you?

I mean, I can't imagine, I would not want to walk in your shoes, Victor, is

what you've been through.

But for the sake of discussion,

What does it say about the psyche?

And you've just addressed it, so I'm being rhetorical here.

What does it say about the psyche of a person that tries to get more, even more?

You cannot give more empathy to a guy that's just lost his wife and his kid.

And

one of the sons, I think it was Bowen.

Actually, I think it was Hunter, who was severely harmed also in that accident.

How could you get...

squeeze more empathy out of that?

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know why you do it.

I haven't talked about my daughter because it's personal, but

when she passed away, it took me two years to go.

I couldn't do it.

But I finally went through

her medical records and she had, I thought it was a sudden, abrupt case, is what we were told of a very rare form of AML leukemia that struck her without warning.

And it did.

And it killed her within three days.

But my point is this, she had gone to a doctor.

in Los Angeles because she had fatigue three weeks earlier.

And all she wanted was a a white blood, just a blood test because she said something was wrong.

I read the doctor's report.

And you know what?

They did a thyroid test and they did a mono test.

They did not do a complete blood test.

Okay.

So should I say, oh my God, they didn't do it.

It's none of the, nobody wants to hear that.

That's called tragedy.

It's not melodrama or psychodrama.

I'm not going to go down.

At the time, I didn't call up that doctor and threaten to sue him.

I don't know what transparent, why he didn't do something that in retrospect I would have done, but I'm not even a doctor.

But the point is, you don't do that.

You don't go in the public domain and start allocating blame and fabricating things for your own personal, I don't know what, psyche, psyche.

For him, it was political.

And he still stopped.

And finally, the poor, that truck driver died not knowing that his reputation had been salvaged.

And finally, I think Joe Biden did kind of sort of maybe say he wouldn't do it anymore.

And then when he stopped that narrative, he went on to the Hunter Biden.

There's something that has been undiscussed that I brought up, and that is

when you collate what Joe Biden, as I said, has said about Hunter, that he's the smartest man he's talked to, or he's a perfect son, or he's never critical of him.

Okay.

And then you look at the Hunter laptop corpus of messages, Mr.

10%, Mr.

Big Guy, I'm doing all the work and somebody else gets the money.

Pedo, that term.

And you put that all together, you can say that one thing Joe Biden is absolutely terrified is that Hunter is a loose cannon and is capable of saying anything to anyone, anytime, anywhere about Joe Biden.

And one of the proof of the pudding is, one proof is

With all that scrutiny that he was a grifter and a shyster, what does he do?

He opens up this fraudulent

in cahoots of this gallery and he paints with his what mouth as if he's kind of reminding everybody he snorts and he's doing this this horrible art and then hawking it to interested parties who want to what get quid pro quo

uh

i guess

access to a member of the biden family it's just reprehensible and joe biden is terrified of that kid he really is he thinks, you know what?

If I criticize that kid, he's going to snort something and give an interview where he says that for 20 years, he kept the whole Biden family going by his illegal quid pro quo lobbying.

And we didn't pay him enough attention.

And

he's, I think it was his cousin that writes him or his sister and wants money.

And he says, look,

I don't get enough appreciation for what I do.

He's got a point, right?

He was the bag man.

He was the Mr.

Dirty Hand.

They were the removed and clean version of the syndicate.

They were the mafioso, the equivalent of the mafioso people who didn't want to know what was going down on the street.

And so that's why Joe, the whole thing is sick.

And it's all juxtaposed to this fake idea that we hold people accountable in the age of Trump and we're going to investigate this and impeach him twice.

And we're so careful about quid pro quo.

That's just, it was all political.

All political.

Well, Victor, we're almost totally out of time.

And I thank you, thank you for all the wisdom you shared today.

We've got to do what we typically do at the end of

an episode.

And that's to thank our listeners for listening.

And particularly if you're brand new to this podcast, thanks.

Come back, go to Victor's website, victorhanson.com.

You can find links to previous podcasts.

By the way, Victor,

I am told that the podcasts we recorded once upon a time at National Review, which are kind of long in the tooth now, are still very popular.

I listen to that.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Well, why not?

You know,

your wisdom is timeless and evergreen.

Hey, no matter what platform you listen to this on,

Stitcher, Google Play, Apple, iTunes, thank you.

Okay.

On

Apple,

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Thanks to those who do that.

And you can leave a comment, and people do, and we read them.

And here's one.

It's from Agent Kate.

Agent Kate, this is short and sweet.

Victor David Hansen is amazing.

One of the two best podcasts available.

The other one is Mark Levin.

Victor is insightful, highly intelligent, and all substance.

Did you know that, Victor?

I never miss an episode.

Thank you, Victor.

Amen to that, Agent Kate.

Again, thanks, folks.

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