The Cheney Matrix

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Hey there, welcome to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

This is the Friday news roundup where we look at the news of the week.

And this week we have Liz Liz Cheney and Salman Rushdie and more

news coming out of Mar-Laugo and the raid on Marlago.

So we'll get to those things.

I would like to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin and Neely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Hold on for a few minutes and stick around.

We'll take a quick break and then we'll be right back.

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We're back and Victor, I know we've got a lot on the agenda today.

We particularly want to look at Liz Cheney, but it's been a week since Mar-laugh Go was raided or it will be when this is published.

And I was wondering if you had any thoughts now that we're a little bit further into it and maybe we know a little more.

Well, I think all of our listeners realize that the promises of a week ago of quote-unquote nuclear secrets and national security have been not followed up with very much concrete detail.

So today,

there was this bequest to disclose the contents of the actual warrant, the extent of it.

Those are never really open to the public, at least initially, and then they dribble out with Freedom of Information Act lawsuits.

But it does seem that the idea that Donald Trump had information at his private residence that was time-specific, in other words, that it required this psychodrama of having 30 armed agents swarm Morlog or rope off the entire estate because he had nuclear secrets there made no sense.

I mean,

18 months or 17 months that Biden has had an opportunity to do so.

And so just to conclude very briefly, Sammy, there's two theories that have been given the most prominence.

The first is that this was a phishing expedition, and the real intent was for the January 6th committee to get their hands on things there.

In other words, they didn't quite know what there would be there, but they assumed, i.e., from an informant, either a Trump employee or more likely a Secret Service agent.

that there might be contents in these boxes that would further, at least initially, incriminate Donald Trump.

And then the other theory, and I think this was from Cash Patel, who's a pretty smart guy, I mean, really smart guy, was that Donald Trump took, declassified it with a wave of his hand, but he took items that he felt would either be destroyed or burrowed away in some vault, never seen.

And those were communications or information from the administrative state that highlighted or emphasized the illegality that was part of the whole Russian collusion hoax.

Either one of those two theories.

But the irony, as we mentioned before, was that Merrick Garland gave this defiant press conference and basically accused the accusers

that the FBI and the DOJ were, you know, how dare you?

besmirch their reputation.

I'm not going to stand for it.

And the only people who have besmirched their reputation is Merrick Garland and the FBI themselves.

So I wrote a column, you know, about Merrick Garland losing the people.

If he really wants the FBI

reputation to be restored, you know, I just thought of something, Sammy.

I'm going to write a column called 10 Commandments for the FBI.

Commandment number one, the director shall not lie.

Commandment number two.

An FBI lawyer shall not alter a document.

We'll just go down the whole thing, but that's the problem.

And that's why he gave that he's going to i think he's going to be impeached he won't be convicted he won't be removed from office because they don't have the votes come january but come january

this thing

so far does not justify the first and only attack raid

swarming of a president's private residence.

And if you'd done it with Barack Obama or Bill Clinton, people would right now be calling for the immediate impeachment of the president.

Just remember that.

So you think that Biden will be impeached?

Biden will be impeached.

Yes, I do think he will be impeached, depending on how big.

I think they can take 10 or 15 Republicans that will probably vote against it, but they have enough votes if they win 40 or 50 seats.

And he will be impeached on multiple counts.

The first will be that he sabotaged or did not faithfully exercise and follow his oath of office by enforcing all the laws.

He just simply blew up the southern border and rendered null and void immigration law.

And then the second is they will subpoena every type of document from the DOJ and the White House to see if there was anybody in the White House that greenlighted.

I just don't think Merrick Garland

sounds like the robust, muscular, proactive, dynamic DOJ attorney general

to initiate an historic raid like this on his own.

I just don't think he's not that type of person.

Yeah.

I'm not saying Joe Biden won't pull a Robert Mueller and say, well, no, it's steal dossier who never heard of

GPS, but

he knew at one moment of clarity, he knew what he was doing.

He didn't think about it.

You know, they all talk about this is

unprecedented.

It is, but it's a political act.

It's not just a violation of the code or unusual or maybe even illegal, but it's a political act.

People have to put that in perspective.

The president of the United States

used his office via the Attorney General and the FBI director to go out 90 days before a referendum essentially on him,

i.e.

the midterms, to help destroy someone who is the likely nominee two years from now and who is polling ahead of him in head-to-head polls.

And they impeached Donald Trump.

Remember that, everyone,

for the Ukrainian call.

And you go back and read that transcript of that House hearing.

It wasn't just that he used his office to halt or delay foreign aid to a government that had been approved.

It was he went after Joe Biden and his family, Hunter I.E.,

who was likely going to be later that year, i.e.,

after February of 2020, the nominee or likely nominee of the Democratic Party who would face Trump.

That's why they impeached him.

And remember why James Comey let Hillary off?

He said that it would be not appropriate.

Most federal attorneys would not indict somebody in her position, meaning he did not want to alter, he said, an election by indicting one of the two candidates.

In other words, we have precedents where people either used or did not use the candidate in such a fashion that it affected whether they were going to do something political or not.

And so none of them were as flagrant as this.

None.

Yeah, I know that.

According to Comey's Comey's logic would be, you can't go into the Trump House because it would affect an election.

And the House impeachment logic would be,

well, the reason that we're going to impeach you, Joe Biden, is because you went after your political,

and that's all I'm saying.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, it seems to me that, you know, I'm just a novice at politics, but just the

timing of it all seems like it's political.

And the fact that they're leaking stuff seems like it's political.

I mean, that's, you know,

that's all they're trying to do.

He gave a lecture about the professionalism of the FBI and the DOJ.

And a few hours later, the Washington Post got information from where?

The FBI or the DOJ, obviously, to leak.

And then to have the psychodrama, melodrama that it was nuclear secrets.

And then we were, as I said in our last podcast, we were off to the races with Michael Beshloff.

tweeting pictures of the Rosenbergs and that nut Michael Hayden, who, you know, said that seems right to me,

he should be executed.

And this guy just the other day said, what?

Donald Trump and the Republican Party are the most dangerous people.

This is what Liz Cheney is.

So they're already off to the races on this whole thing.

And it's all coming from leaks.

And now they're saying,

oh, you're going to, if you release this, Donald Trump wants to get the names of the FBI agents.

They'll be doxxed.

This is what they do.

This is what they do to everybody.

They just project.

And they're scared because they think that

some Republicans or independents might be thinking along the same lines as they do routinely.

This is their modus operandi.

You do something extraordinary, impeach a president twice, impeach him as a private citizen, impeach him for a phone call, ruin his administration with 22 months and $40 million worth of worthless investigations.

And then you leak, leak, leak, and you leak to NPR, PBS, washington post new york times network news and then once that's out there they come back to you and you say no comment we're professionals no comment and it came in a circle we know that from andrew mccab yeah who lied four times about his leaking we know that from james baker when he was trying to negotiate right before the election on the contents of the steel dossiers so

and then you know it's really bad that people out here listening and us,

so we talk like this, and then we're told that we're unprofessional.

Republicans,

they're anti-police.

No, they're pro-FBI.

They're just not pro-James Comey and Andrew McCabe and Kevin Kleinsmith and Christopher Wright and Robert Mueller and Peter Stroke and Lisa Page and James Baker.

That's who we're not pro-FBI for.

They're anti-FBI, not us.

They're anti-FBI.

yeah and so you brought up liz cheney so maybe we can turn to her she just gave her acceptance of having lost the primary for the republican

so and boy was that some speech i i just don't i didn't know what quite you know ostensibly

she she did lost just for to so we get all on the same page she did lose uh her the um challenger got 66 percent of the vote and she only got 28.

I think it's the greatest margin of loss that any incumbent congressperson has ever suffered.

40%.

Poor old honest Liz.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, there's a general rule in American politics.

If you attack somebody and you resort to ad hitlerum,

hitlerum, that means you go so low as to say he's a Nazi.

or he's like, you know,

just what one of our

former defense secretaries did when he compared Trump to the people on the other side of the D-Day beaches, the Nazis,

or

Al Gore comparing George Bush or John Glenn comparing George Bush to a Nazi.

And by the way, in 2006 and 2007, I wrote, I think if anybody wants to look them up, just Google my name plus Nazis plus Bush Cheney, and you'll see that I defended both of them from, especially Dick Cheney, from being called a Nazi.

But when you do that, you've lost the argument.

By the same token, in a positive sense, when you compare yourself to Abraham Lincoln, you've lost the argument.

Remember Barack Obama?

He was announced he was going to run for president from where?

Springfield, Illinois.

Why?

Because he was the new Abe Lincoln from Illinois.

Barack Obama, the community organizer from Chicago, was just like old Abe.

Think about that,

Ubris.

And that's what she did when she compared herself not just to Abraham Lincoln, and she got the facts wrong.

I remember she said that he lost his first

senator race.

Senate race.

He didn't.

He won the popular vote.

He lost the electors, the state electors who picked senators.

I think he only lost one race in his entire life, a House race.

And unlike her, he only served one term in the House and then voluntarily retired to keep his promise.

But

the thing about that concession is then she compared herself to Grant, who, after the wilderness campaign in the summer of 1864, decided after defeat not to head north, but turned around and said, Well, you know, I'm going to fight it here all summer.

So, think of that.

So, Liz Cheney is Abraham Lincoln, who had some setbacks before he became president, i.e., before I Liz became president.

And then I'm also Liz Grant.

And when they have forced me out i'm not turning my army around i'm going right into the cauldron to take richmond and that's what she thinks she didn't mention that the wilderness is one of the bloodiest stupidest poorest conceived battles that the north fought and they never did take richmond they surrendered when

Uncle Billy Sherman came up from the south in the Pincer's movement.

They knew that they were doomed, but they never did take Richmond.

And then this idea that she's a disinterested chairman, the January 6th Committee, while she and her dad just come out and say the purpose is her existence is now to go after Donald Trump.

It's sad.

It's a tragedy.

It's an American tragedy because nobody

knows what her strategy is other than she is taking money from, she is associating with people, with people.

She is enhancing the agendas of those people who called her family Nazis and Darth Vader and Hal Burton Grifters and Crooks and corporate lackey.

My vocabulary would be exhausted if I could go through the entire litany of disparagement and vector they used against her father.

Remember when he accidentally down there in Texas shot somebody?

Yeah.

Jake Cheney shot somebody in the face as if he tried to do it.

So So she, and then it was just so incoherent.

And so.

Yeah, she seemed to suggest she was the big defender of democracy, and yet she's running a show trial or star chamber, as you've been calling it.

And that's not a defender of democracy.

She only had one role in democracy.

She only had one role this week.

It wasn't the committee.

You're right.

She ran for a candidate.

And under the democratic system, people had a choice.

And they said, I would not want that woman representing me from Wyoming by a 40% margin.

That's contrary to what she's doing.

She's on a January 6th committee, where the only two criteria for a Republican to be on that committee are you have to have voted to impeach him, and you have to have no political future.

Neither she nor Adam Kinzenser have that.

And then there's also this idea that we're perfectly okay with the idea that Nancy Pelosi, for the first time in House history, has vetoed the minority leaders' nominees to a committee as if that's not going to be reciprocated in January.

And then there's no cross-examination.

There's no special counsel.

There's no special counsel report.

There's no hostile witness, nothing.

It's just, and it's just to go do what?

Make sure Donald Trump cannot run.

Yep.

And that's what the raid was as well.

And she thinks everybody's looking at this and thinking, wow,

she's another Bill Crystal, profile and courage.

She's as tough and as principled as John Bolton, who was politically inert and would have no future and couldn't even get confirmed when George Bush nominated him as UM ambassador.

It was a pocket appointment, recess appointment.

And

guess what?

Donald Trump took a chance on Bolton and he got him.

He didn't need to have him confirmed.

He had it.

It was National Security of the United States.

All he had to do was promote the Trump agenda and he didn't do that and they fired him and guess what he wrote a memoir about the person who rescued him out of political oblivion saying that he's a threat to democracy what i'm getting at sammy is that liz cheney is a fish that swims in the washington aquarium and she looks out through the glass she has a distorted she doesn't have a clear view of america wyoming fresno anything.

They live in that water and they swim around.

And when that's disturbed, they think everybody cares nobody cares about her nobody cares about john bolt nobody cares about bill crystal nobody cares about david from they don't care about me at least i know that yeah and that's what's so weird about all these people who think they're going to go mono to mono with donald trump and they're going to take him down and in that speech

because they're obsessed they're obsessed yeah in that speech she made that really evident that she's in the aquarium looking out and she doesn't understand the outside She said, Well, in order to get votes from these voters in

Wyoming, that

she would have had to accept the

accusations Donald Trump was saying about the elections being fraudulent.

And she wouldn't, she couldn't bring herself to do that.

But all her voters, all her stupid voters believed that.

That's what was the implication.

And so it was just insulting to her own constituency.

It was, or people that should have been in the world.

She had contempt for them.

She had contempt for the people.

The people of Wyoming, and I've been to Wyoming a lot.

There's only about 450,000, 500,000 people there.

Outside of Jackson Hole, they are among the people with,

similar to Idaho and to somewhat to Montana.

They are the most independent, clear thinking.

smart people in the world.

I've got tons of friends there and they are mavericks.

You can't fool them.

That's why they're in Wyoming.

They're independent.

And the idea that she was going to fool those people into thinking that,

you know, that

she could insult them like that and they would go along because of the Cheney name was ridiculous.

They weren't going to do that.

They knew that she didn't represent any of their views.

And everything she said was incoherent.

She voted 93% of the time

with Donald Trump in the four years that he was president.

So in 2014,

her first symptom of megalomania, there was Senator Enzi.

He was a great guy.

I met him once when I was in Wyoming.

And, you know, he was a lifetime senator.

He was a great senator.

He had a tragic bike accident.

I had one too, but he died from his in 2021.

79 years old, as I think he was.

Why would she primary him?

She primaried him.

Remember that?

Or she was going to primary until her candidacy collapsed.

And then she waited.

And then she ran for the state's only congressional seat.

I think it was 2016.

She was elected on the Cheney name.

She was only in office two years.

And guess what?

Kevin McCarthy, and a sign of magnanimity, and he wanted women in the Republican Party.

He wanted to promote her overweening ambition.

They made her number three in the Republican House.

She was ahead of, I think it's called the Republican Conference Committee or something, number three.

So when she says, this Republican Party is gone, no, this Republican Party picked you out of obscurity after you had almost destroyed your career by primary or trying to primary a distinguished member of the Republican Party.

And you thought he wasn't right-wing enough, I guess.

He was a great senator, but you tried to destroy him.

And that didn't work.

And then you ran for Congress.

And then the House leadership of the party you despise fast-tracked your agenda and your ambition and your career.

And you didn't wait your turn.

And all of a sudden, you were number three.

And then you voted 93%

for three years with this man who you say is an existential threat to the Republic.

Didn't you know who he was?

If he was so bad?

Oh, I woke up on January 6th.

My God, this man I supported 93% is a devil.

He's satanic.

I didn't know.

Who would have known?

That's what she wants you to believe.

And if you don't believe that, there's a guy named Ron DeSantis, and he's open

that he has the same agenda that she voted for in 93% of the

occasions.

Okay, so you're saying, well, I don't retract my vote.

I voted 93% of the time for the Trump agenda.

It was just Donald Trump whose filthy, dirty fingerprints on that agenda nullified it all.

Okay, reporter asked, there's the agenda.

There's Ron DeSantis.

You couldn't have a more impressive Beltway, not saying he's from the Beltway, but I mean, Harvard Law School, U.S.

military lawyer in a combat theater, distinguished athlete, wonderful family.

Gosh, everything's perfect about him.

So he has the agenda.

She votes 93%.

He's not Donald Trump, existential threat.

And what does she say?

I don't think I can support him.

So what does that tell you?

And then she says, when I run, I'm not going to take left-wing money and I'm not going to have crossover votes from Democrats.

I'm not going to encourage that.

Well, that was when her head was huge and she thought January 6th is going to propel me just the way Kevin McCarthy did when I got into the House.

So I was only a one-termer and suddenly I was number three out of the whole 400, well, you know, the 210 or whatever they were Republicans.

And because Donald Trump is finished, I'm going to pile on and take over this.

January 6th is an insurrection, and I'm going to be number one.

I think that's what she thought, Speaker.

Yeah.

And guess what?

People looked at that.

They didn't like January 6th.

They said it was a buffoonish riot.

They didn't like it, and they didn't like people desecrating the Capitol.

And then they digested it, and they said, this was wrong.

We want the people prosecuted who broke the law, but we in the United States don't shoot unarmed women for the crime of going through a window.

They shot this 105-pound veteran.

And when we do shoot people who are unarmed, we know who they are, the police.

We don't hide their names.

We don't lie and say that a person who died of natural causes was killed by a mob and spread that lie.

We don't militarize the Capitol to to make it into a Reichstag fire excuse and the greatest weaponization of the Capitol since the Civil War and Jubal Early's raid.

So they looked at this and they said, we don't put people, 800 people in jail

without charging them and in solitary confinement in many cases.

That's not who we are.

And then we believe in symmetry of justice.

So we have 120 days in 2020 of riot, looting, protest, 14,000 arrests,

$2 million in damage, 35 dead, 1,500 police officers injured, St.

John's Episcopal Church torched, federal courthouse torched, police precinct torched.

So,

where is that commission?

So, they looked at all this and they said, this isn't America.

And guess what?

That wave did not crest.

It didn't rise.

It just sort of sputtered out.

And so, that's what she wanted to play a high-stakes hand.

And she folded.

It's over with.

And she's destroyed her career.

It's the greatest, saddest, maybe.

Some of you are saying, no, Victor.

It's not sad.

She deserves it.

Okay.

Whatever it is, it's one of the clearest cases of political suicide I've ever seen.

And it has a precedent in other fields.

John Bolton.

was getting, what, $6 million a day, I mean, a year from conservative donors.

He had a huge huge pack at his disposal.

He could disperse it to any cause, any candidate he wanted.

All he had to do was just say, you know, I disagree with you, Mr.

President.

I think that I had a neoconservative view of foreign policy.

I feel you're two neo-isolations for me.

I thank you for allowing me to be the national security advisor, and I hereby resign.

That's all he had to do,

rather than to provoke being fired and then write a stealthy memoir memoir and leak it here and there to the press and then basically become a hostile witness to Donald Trump during that critical impeachment time.

By yes, I will say, no, I won't say that kind of sort of will kind of maybe testify, all of that.

And the same thing with all the pundits, every one of them.

And they all have one thing in common.

They had huge egos.

that they were on Olympus and they could nod down and we're all going to say, oh my God,

that's John Bolton.

He doesn't like Trump.

I'm not going to vote for him.

Oh, my God, Liz Cheney.

She said that he's an,

that's true.

Oh, my God.

Bill Crystal said that Trump is just evil.

They're right.

I'm not going to vote for him.

Sorry, that just didn't happen.

That didn't happen.

And then what do you do when it doesn't happen, Sammy?

Do you say, hmm, that's a slap in the face.

I'm going to change my ways.

And you know what they did?

They doubled down and tripled down and quadrupled down.

Well, they're not listening to me because I wasn't gross enough.

I wasn't loud enough.

I wasn't mean enough.

I'll double down and then they'll listen to me.

No, they won't.

No,

I know.

They seem to think that Donald Trump was so evil.

Of course, people have to eventually come around to their side.

So,

Victor, let's take a break and come right back.

And I was going to ask you, where is she going to go with her?

I think 7 million that she still has in her staff.

I think she has more than 3.

Yeah, but I think she's

got promises for even more.

Where is she going to go?

Well,

wait a second.

Let's have a break first, and then we'll come right back.

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Welcome back.

And sorry, Victor, for interrupting you.

Go ahead.

Where is she going to go with that?

Well, it's not original on my part, part, but everyone

says

round up the usual suspects if you're a useful idiot for the left.

And what would that be?

Well, there will be the book, and what should we call it?

Audience, Conscience of a Conservative?

Something like that.

What's going to be the

Jim Comey, Andrew McCabe type of advance for useful idiots?

It's going to be a million dollars plus.

And

there will be an MSNBC.

I don't think she'll get on at CNN.

Everybody says that.

The new president just fired, what's his name,

Zelter, that buffoonish guy that, you know, took a picture, had himself filmed in his underwear, broadcasting kind of a

Jeffrey Tobin-like type of deal.

I think she'll be an MSNBC talking head or

anchor woman or something like that.

And then it's just a question of whether she wants to play Ralph Nader

or an anemic version of Ross Perot.

She doesn't have the money or the talent of Ross Perot

and run for a third party and then say to the Democratic Party and to the nation that

I won enough votes in, let's pick our state, Pennsylvania, Michigan.

that I didn't I siphoned off enough votes from Donald Trump that he lost the Electoral College.

And and I get credit for ending an existential threat.

And then what?

Does she think there's going to be A,

Joe Biden's second term or Kamala Harris or whoever wins, she thinks it's going to appoint her to what, Secretary of Defense?

I don't think the left ever pays their debts.

Remember Game of Throne, a Lannister pays his debts.

A Democrat never pays his debts.

So she was very useful, and they're going to say, sorry, honey, we're not going to do it.

I'm being sexist because that's the way they talk about people.

And then is she going to go back and say, hmm, now that I've destroyed Donald Trump, the party of Mitt Romney and

the McCain wing, it's back and I will be available for service.

That's not going to happen.

Marco Rubio, Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo,

Ron DeSantis, Tom Cotton.

You think they're going to appoint her?

If they did, they would be politically inert, dead.

That's it.

So there is no political future for her.

She's going to bring everybody down with her.

But one more thing.

Molly Hemingway was celebrating that the Bush-Cheney-Romney-McCain era is over in the Federalists.

What do you think about that?

Is it over?

Are we into an

GOP?

It's cyclical.

I mean, they were

George Bush in 2000 ran.

Do you you remember what he ran on?

He ran against Al Gore on the following premises, that Bill Clinton had been a nation builder and had gone over to Serbia and got us bogged down and tried to create democracy where it was impossible.

Yes, I'm serious, where it was impossible to have democracy.

And he was going to be a realist like his dad had.

Don't go to Baghdad in 1991.

And so people changed.

And then after 9-11, he wanted to build democracies all over the world, I guess.

But, and that was sort of the, he was advised.

I mean, I supported going into Iraq, I didn't Afghanistan.

I didn't support staying there forever, forming a democracy.

But

there were people around him that were called neoconservative.

That just said, neo is just a Greek word for new, new conservatives.

And I didn't like.

I kind of broke with them on the border because they were for open borders.

But what I'm getting is they go through cycles and i'm not saying it's impossible for that republican party to come back or what was there before at the jerry ford bob michael country club set but if they come back it's always going to be a minority party because nobody wants to

there's not going to be anybody in the middle class because they come off as mitt romney you know, at a convention saying, I can't ever appeal to 49% of the country.

They're on the take.

Anybody that takes Social Security is on the take, I guess.

So they're not aware of what's going on in the country.

And they believe, I agree with a lot of stuff

they stand for.

I'm for low taxes, smaller government, deregulation,

but I'm also for Social Security, even though it needs to be physically reformed.

And I want the border closed.

And I don't want to go back into the Middle East.

I don't want to go into Libya.

I didn't want to go into Syria.

I'm empathetic to the Kurds versus the Turks, but I do not want to put Americans from African Ohio in between the two people to adjudicate them as they wanted to in Syria.

I don't want to defeat Vladimir Putin with 7,000 nukes to the last Ukrainian for my sense of, well, we stop this Russian colluder.

No, I think he's evil.

I think it's terrible what he did in Ukraine, but I'm not going to advocate an all-out war, the United States get involved in there any more than we have, et cetera, et cetera.

I'm tired of people appearing in Vogue magazine on the cover from Ukraine.

So my point is that, yeah, there's going to be cycles, but if the Republican Party goes away from this workers' party, this caring about people on the basis of class rather than race, if it wants open border, then it's dead.

It's dead.

Donald Donald Trump didn't destroy the Republican Party as charge.

He took a wobbly

invertebrate Republican Party and he formed it and energized it

with a stem cell graph in the vertebrae.

And that was, he said to the middle of the country,

don't sit out another election and let Barack Obama win.

I'm not John McCain.

I'm not Mitt Romney.

I want people in Toledo to have a good job.

I want people in Texas and North Dakota to frack like you've never fracked before.

I do not want to beg Saudi Arabia for oil or Venezuela or Iran or Russia.

I want a stronger military.

I want it so big and so strong that nobody dares screw around with us, but I don't want to waste it.

in non-existential or optional wars.

I want to treat China just like they treat us, tip for tap.

They dump currency, we pay them back.

They steal copyright, then we pay them back.

They have 380,000 students, we have 2,500.

Maybe they should have 2,500 students.

That's what it was.

And so

that was the only thing that

I'm not a registered Republican or Democrat, but that's what,

you know, that's why I would vote.

I voted for that.

That would be a good agenda.

Yeah, absolutely.

If you had a Republican right now,

I don't know who there is none anymore.

They're all gone.

But John Kasich came back, huh?

John Kasich and Liz Cheney.

How about that ticket?

I wouldn't vote for them.

I would not vote for them.

I wouldn't vote for probably the left-wing Democrat either, but I just wouldn't vote.

Or I'd vote for, I don't know, nothing to protest.

I've seen that.

And I like what they might do in the economy.

They might make some good economic appointments, Federal Reserve appointments, all that, but they would open the border wide open.

And they would, you know, say that we're pledged to send 100,000 people from the Midwest over to this war.

And then they'd all be on corporate boards when they retire.

And they're all, you know, they all do that.

I'm sick of that.

I'm sick of Liz Cheney giving moral lectures while her husband's on a law firm with big Chinese contracts.

Tired of it.

And I'm just sick of that whole swamp where, you know, I'm married.

I'm Ben Rhodes and my brother's the head of CBS.

I'm Andrew McCabe and my wife's running for legislature, getting Clinton money and that kind of stuff.

I'm just tired of it.

Power couples, power siblings, corporate boardships, lobbying, et cetera.

And then anybody who objects, how dare you object?

Lloyd Austin, how dare you object that I was a Raytheon board member and made a fortune to tap my knowledge of the Pentagon?

And they made me defense secretary.

And I swear to God, when I get out of defense secretary, I'll go right back to Raytheon or maybe better.

And then they, you know, that's that's tired, been there, done that, sick of it.

Yeah, absolutely.

You know, speaking of our representatives in DC, we have two that often make theater of, make theater obvious.

I suppose it's always a bit of theater in our Congress, but

Ilan Omar is one of those.

And of course, AOC is the other one.

And recently there was an article written in tablet by Armin Rosen.

And she's, you know, Omar is a bit of an enigma for most of us, but he really went in to explore her background and the circumstances of things in Somalia and Kenya before she came to the United States.

And I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about the new things that have come out about Omar.

Well, he doesn't have any new disclosures, but he's a dogged reporter that read

her memoirs and everything that's been written about her and had first-hand autopsy of

her locales and her acquaintances.

And he's very sober and judicious.

He's not trying to, I think he's a little bit

too much so.

For example, Scott Johnson writes on Powerline.

And every time he's referenced as a source, he always says conservative, conservative.

Who cares?

Scott Johnson's more than a conservative.

He's a very bright lawyer.

Why do you have to put that adjective to show everybody that you're not biased by calling him a conservative?

You say liberal, liberal, liberal?

I had some criticisms of it, but it was a very well-researched and very well-composed essay.

And essentially, the takeaway from it was.

If you were Mr.

Rosen, I don't want to get into the accusations that she married her brother and committed immigration fraud, but it's probably true.

I don't want to get into the accusations

that while she was married and the mother of three children, to the father of her three children, her second, I mean, I guess that was not really a marriage, it was a quote-unquote Islamic marriage.

But while I was married, I was funneling thousands of dollars to a political operative to run my campaign, whom I was sleeping with and got married.

That's probably true.

And

I'm Ilon Omar, and I'm pretty much an anti-Semite.

And every time I say I'm not, I betray myself because a vote comes up against Israel, or my friends in the squad put pressure on me, and I always bend and go a little bit too far in my anti-Semitism.

And

your image of me, of Ilan Omar, the poor little

deprived refugee from war-torn

Somalia, is not quite true.

I lived in a walled compound.

I had a chauffeur, maybe in a Toyota, but it was a chauffeur in a car.

And my father, I don't want to get too into it.

This, I'm kind of paraphrasing the attitude of the author, Mr.

Rosen, but there is a lot of information

that

Omar's father was in the military Daesh security business and was deeply feared.

And when there was a revolution against that revolution, that communist revolution, then he was

endangered, but he had the resources.

And how he got them in a third world country connected to the government, everybody should, you know, make the necessary conclusions.

He got his family to the United States.

So it was basically an elite

from a corrupt government that had a horrific human rights record coming to the United States to the Somali community and then being treated to a wonderful education, a wonderful country, a left-wing environment, capitalizing on her race and gender and status and name, propelling herself on a political agenda.

the entire time without showing any transparency that she was an elite and she was on the wrong side of the Somali effort to be democratic and then blast people who were elites and being illiberal when her whole family had a pretty illiberal, privileged existence.

Yeah, under a communist regime, a Barre, I believe.

Yeah, not just a communist regime, a bloodthirsty, horrific, nightmarish communist regime.

That's who she, that's where she came from.

And we're supposed to see her on the barricades as this marginalized person.

I think we all have a very limited amount of patience when somebody crosses the border, either as a refugee or an illegal alien or a permanent resident from a very poor, destructive,

dysfunctional society and almost immediately makes claims against the American people as being ungenerous because they let in 2 million rather than 3 million people, or turning over a whole enclave in Minnesota to the Somali community.

So I have zero patience.

And one of the anecdotes, which has been reported before, is when she came here, she remarked how dirty and filthy the United States was.

And they didn't have homeless people in Mogadishu.

Well, they don't have homeless people in Mogadishu because they're starving to death and they're not just eating scraps on the sidewalk and they get rid of them, right?

Yeah.

I've been in the Middle Ages.

I've been all over the Middle East.

And if you're in a Middle Eastern country, if you're in Libya and you pull out your

penis and you urinate on in front of somebody and

they'll have a way of getting rid of you or doing something to you, clubbing you, whipping you, something.

So yeah, you can clean up the homeless tomorrow if you want to use Somali-like tactics.

She can get her dad to come back out.

She can say, dad, you had a pretty good career in Somalia with the security and the military forces.

We need people like you.

Can you go into downtown Minneapolis and clean it up?

We want it to look like Mogadishu.

I guess that's her message.

Yeah, I guess.

I was going to say also she lived in a compound, so she probably didn't see it all that often.

You know, the city.

I can see that all these people, all these people live in compounds.

And they all give lectures about the United States being

on egalitarian.

Bin Laden lives in a compound.

Dr.

Zawahiri lived in a compound.

Omar lived in a compound.

By compound, we mean in the third world, a big wall around your multi-level house that has air conditioning, color TV, etc.

And the wall is to keep people out.

I have no problem with a compound.

I just don't like people suggesting that the United States that they flee to when they leave their compound or when they try to attack from their compound is somehow culpable.

In gratitude, you know, you get older, ingratitude seems to be the worst of the sins.

It really is.

It really is.

There's something about ingratitude that I know that people make fun of

loyalty as a positive or as a virtue, but there is something about loyalty, not blind loyalty, but measured loyalty that's calculated, not in a bad sense, but rational loyalty.

But this ingratitude by these people who come over here and they have immediate writs and charges and accusations and indictments of their new country, it doesn't make any sense.

I see it in the university all the time.

Well, speaking of the Middle East, we have also Salman Rushdie was stabbed 11 times when he was giving a talk.

And I was wondering if he had some thoughts on why the time, why is now he's getting, I mean, he's been under a fatwa since 1990, I believe it is.

So, what do you think?

Now, why would that be, Sammy?

That's what I'm wondering.

We're playing t-ball now, and you put the little ball right on the stand, but I'm not going to hit it.

You hit it,

yeah, because it woke likes Iran, and so therefore, Solomon Rushdie should have a fatwa against him.

So, you're suggesting that when a president does not one day just take out Solomani, right,

or threaten to retaliate big time if they send another missile into Saudi Arabia or get out of the Iran deal or act like he's crazy or say, I'm going to move the embassy to Jerusalem.

I'm going to declare the Golan Heights, what the Golan Heights is, a part of Israel, or I'm not going to fund the Iranian tainted Hamas anymore, that that's kind of a deterrent.

That the people in Tehran say, Who is that crazy SOB?

I don't know what the guy's thinking.

He could do anything to anyone, anytime, anywhere.

Let's just not do stuff.

But when you come into office and you say, Let's get back in the Iran deal, let's get these.

John Kerry knows everybody over there.

Let's just start talking.

Let's start going after the Islamophobias again.

Then people say, Hmm,

we're going to reciprocate that magnanimity with

scolding and lack of respect and

contempt.

Yes, that's the way the world works, and that's what they're doing.

And they've threatened Bolton.

They have threatened Pompeo.

They threatened Bolton, and he finally had to say, they're threatening me.

Does anybody care in the government?

They're threatening the former national security advisor of the United States.

And they're threatening Pompeo.

And all we would have to do is say no Iranian diplomats are coming into any UN meeting because it's in New York.

If you don't like it, take the damn UN out of New York.

But you're not coming in here till you stop threatening the lives of American former officials.

And by the way, we're going to revoke the passports of all these Iranian intellectuals.

who are Iranian citizens and they're not dissidents.

They're connected with the current regime over there.

And we can say that if any American diplomat is murdered by an Iranian-connected agent, there are going to be retaliations.

And we're not going to go back into the Iran.

We could do all of that and stop it tomorrow.

Yeah.

But not if you have sympathies with that regime.

And what I mean by sympathies, Sammy, is that we are seeing a reoccurrence, rebirth of the Obama crackpot theory of the Middle East.

And that was, as you remember, that we were going to empower Iran.

We were going to de facto admit that it would be nuclear in in 10 years.

And the Shia

community and the radical theocratic forces in the Middle East, that would be Iran,

the rulers in Lebanon, Syria,

and Hamas, that they would be a counterweight to the Gulf states and Israel.

And that creative tension then would prevent any one side from dominating the other.

And we would be kind of a neutral adjudicator.

Oh, royal family, we don't like some of the stuff you did.

We might, you know, sell some stuff to Iran.

Oh, Iran, stop beheading gays.

Or we're going to go over and

see if the Saudis behead fewer gays than you do.

That kind of stuff.

That was what the plan was.

And the sick thing about it was it was all at the expense of israel it was deliberate and that's what the obidin the bidens are doing the obidens the obidens yeah yeah all right um it's that's an interesting way of looking at it poor old solman rushd was not really ready for what happened to him i hope he i don't think he's going to make the connection

that he's living in a country of which iran has contempt for and feels that it can do things that it could not do in the in earlier years.

But I'm worried about him because I like him.

I think all writers have to be protected.

I'm a writer, and I think that they should be able to say and write whatever they want.

And I don't think it will be safe in the future to write things that are critical of the Iranian government or radical Islam unless this administration makes it clear there's going to be geopolitical consequences for this.

Yeah, and I don't see that coming, but we wish him the best.

He sounds like he's on the men, so that's a good thing.

I hope so.

Yeah, well, let's take another break and then come back and we'll talk maybe a little bit.

It's been a year since the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

So we'll be right back.

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Welcome back.

And before we talk about Afghanistan, Victor, I was wondering, Greg Gutfeld has become the king of late-night entertainment comedy.

And he has 2.3 million to Stephen Colbert's 2.1 million viewers.

So

what's bringing him up?

It's wonderful.

I'm happy for it.

I know it.

He's beat all of these people, Jimmy Kim,

all of them.

And

he came out of nowhere.

And if you watch his show, you can see why people would rather listen to him

than Colbert.

And it's not just that.

He's funnier, but when he's, he's as political as Colbert, but the difference is he's overt about it and he's funny when he does it.

And Colbert is not funny and he's not overt.

He acts as if he's not the partisan that he is.

And then the guest, he has these guests that are very good, Gutfield.

Yeah.

There's about a circle of 20 people.

They're funny and they're blunt and they intersplice the interviews with these little clips.

The guy that plays Joe Biden is getting pretty good at it, actually.

Yeah, he's better than Joe Biden at being Joe Biden.

It's kind of getting eerie that the more he plays it, the more he looks like Joe Biden, or maybe Joe Biden looks like him.

But it's eerie when I see him.

I kind of get that when I don't do that anymore.

It's too spooky.

Yeah, exactly.

So back to Afghanistan, then.

This is the one, we're getting close to the one-year anniversary.

Do you have any thoughts on Afghanistan as we approach having left one year ago in great disaster?

The administration,

everybody should remember, was 52% or so a year ago.

And I don't know how that's possible, but it was.

That was the so-called honeymoon, six months, seven months of honeymoon that we give a president, the uniter, Joe Biden.

And the philosophy of that administration a year ago was

Donald Trump pumped so much oil,

we can just cut it back and the price will stay low.

The economy is growing at 2%.

We can screw around with it.

We'll still grow.

And you know what?

His inflation was 1.8%.

We can go up to 3% or 4%.

That's okay.

He closed the border completely.

We can let in 300,000.

Nobody, and that's what they thought they could do.

And then they could trash the guy who did it, which they did.

What they didn't realize is they opened the floodgates and it was a very, and Donald Trump had to go to court.

and fight the media for four years to close the border.

And it took a lot of time to build that pre-COVID economy, which structure was still in place.

And so it wasn't the natural order of things.

And they thought it was going to run on autopilot where they gave sermons and pontificated about Green New Deal stuff.

And they screwed it all up.

It just took them a year.

They destroyed the economy.

They destroyed the border.

They destroyed foreign policy.

They destroyed racial relations.

They did it all.

And Afghanistan was the front bookend.

That was the beginning of it.

And then they created a narrative that was a total lie.

So Donald Trump and Pompeo said, yes, we're going to get out of Afghanistan.

But if you look at what they were doing, they were going to have a residual force that was going to transition, i.e.,

reduce, stop, reduce, stop.

And Donald Trump was a businessman.

So it was real estate, real estate, real estate.

So in his way of thinking, hey, we put 300 million bucks into this Baglam Air Force Base.

It's the biggest thing in Central Asia.

It's got a window on Russia and China and Iran and the Gulf.

This is really valuable.

And we're not going to give it up unless we get stuff forward and we got a billion-dollar embassy.

But they,

so when they say Trump, it was Trump's plan.

Well, nobody wanted to stay in Afghanistan after 20 years, but staying is not defined as having a huge Air Force base ringed with fortifications that was defensible, controlling the airspace, and making sure that Dr.

Zawahiri didn't walk around in freedom on a balcony in Kabul.

And that's, you know, and I don't think Donald Trump would have had a pride flag flying from the embassy or a George Floyd mural or I guess he

under his administration, somebody snuck in a gender studies program at the University of Kabul.

But all of that stuff blew up in Biden's face.

And then they claimed it was sad.

All those people got killed.

13 people got killed.

And then we blew up an innocent family and Millie said it was a righteous strike and obfuscated for at least a week.

Pentagon was not transparent about what we had done.

Joe Biden serially lied.

Any American that wants to go to the airport could just go to the airport.

That's a big lie.

Kabul is secure.

The Afghan army will not collapse, all that stuff.

And then when it all did, he said, oh, it's a logistical success.

So it was just a bad idea.

It's what happens when you get somebody like the hard left in control of foreign policy and they are in control of it.

Yeah, they sure are.

You know, I think Americans, at least, I don't know about our listeners and I am too, getting tired of the lack of transparency on things that when we find out later, it was nothing in there except some sort of political deception.

And that's getting very tiring, I think, for most Americans.

It is for me.

I know that.

It is.

It is.

And you think, look what it just two years have done.

Putin would have never gone into Ukraine if Biden was not president.

He did not go in during the Trump four years.

Taiwan is now targeted.

And China did not talk like this before 2021, that it was a matter of when, not if they invaded.

And Iran would not have been, as we said earlier, threatening American former official.

And I don't think North Korea would have resumed its missile test.

And so that's all, that should be a lesson to all of us that human nature being what it is, what keeps the world going is deterrence.

Yeah, it sure does.

Whether it's the streets of our major cities and criminals, they make calculated cost to benefit analyses every day.

When they go into McDonald's and they just determine, hmm, I'm going to slug the guy in the face because the french fries are cold, or I'm not going to slug them.

It depends on what the consequences are.

And if they think they're not going to be arrested, if arrested, not indicted, if indicted, not convicted, if convicted, not incarcerated, they'll do it.

Well, Victor, thank you so much for your explanation of and discussion of the concession speech made by Liz Cheney and on

Ilam Omar's life and

methods and also Solomon Rushdie, who we hope gets better.

And thanks just for your wisdom in general.

We really appreciate that.

Well, thanks, everybody.

I appreciate everybody listening in.

And make sure you come to Victor's site at victorhanson.com and please subscribe.

You can subscribe for free and get the stuff that's free on the website, or you can subscribe for a paid $5 a month or $50 a year subscription and get the VDH ultra material.

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So please come.

And thank you all for listening.

And thank you, Victor.

Thanks, everybody.

We'll see you next time.

All right.

This is Victor Davis-Hansen and Sammy Wink.

And we're signing off.

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