The Left Failing Or The People Disenchanted

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, and we are recording on Sunday.

August 14th.

And this particular episode will be up on the World Wide Webs on Thursday, August 18th.

Again, I'm the host, but what you're here for is to listen to the star, the namesake Victor Davis Hansen, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, where he's going to be in a few weeks.

By the way, Victor, I had mentioned last week that you are going to be at Hillsdale.

We were going to pre-record some shows based on listener questions submitted.

I probably have 100 questions that have come in from our listeners.

So I want to say A, thank you.

B, stop.

No mas.

No mas.

We have plenty of questions for the, I know, we're going to record about five or six episodes.

So thank you to those who did that.

A lot to talk about today.

And two initial subjects are going to be about the elite and how the elite, they're scared.

2022.

maybe continues some sort of an ascendancy, but maybe folks are looking down and seeing a cliff.

And we'll get Victor's thoughts on that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

So Victor, I am going to do that thing that I do so well and that's torment our listeners, but this is a setup for your wisdom.

And there's a great piece in City Journal, which, by the way, it's published by the Manhattan Institute.

It is a a quarterly.

It is a brilliant magazine.

Brian Anderson is the editor.

Victor, you've written for it many times.

You're even on the masthead, I believe, as a contributing editor.

I recommend it highly to our listeners.

The Elite Panic of 2022 by Martin Gehry.

And the subtitle says, From the end of COVID restrictions to Elon Musk's Twitter bid to the Dobbs ruling, startling developments threaten progressives' grip on power.

So

let me just get to the very end of this particular piece.

It's a very long essay, but I think let me read this.

And Victor, then you have your, share your thoughts on this general theme.

Are the elites, are they threatened?

So here's how Gary ends his piece.

It's a question.

Are we on the cusp then of an anti-elite cultural revolution?

I still wouldn't bet on it.

For obscure reasons of psychology, creative minds incline to radical politics.

A culture conf directed from Tallahassee, Florida, or even Washington, D.C., won't budge that reality much.

The group portrait of American culture will continue to tilt left indefinitely.

But that's not the question at hand.

What terrifies elites is the loss of their cultural monopoly in the face of a foretold political disaster.

They fear diversity of any kind with good cause.

To the extent that the public enjoys a variety of choices in cultural products, elite control will be proportionately diluted.

Here's the last paragraph.

Our cultural monolith, never popular, is today pounded by cross-currents that undermined its solidity.

Alongside the vast progressive choir, quieter voices, conservative, libertarian, religious, none of the above, could soon arise, leaving our culture more fractured, more divided, and more representative of the nation as a whole.

If that were to occur, sullen elites will point to 2022's springtime of discontent and remark with typical vehemence that their panic was fully justified.

Victor, is there panic

in the elite streets?

I don't know if there's panic, but it's definitely about half the country has entirely rejected the premise of our elites.

And by that, I mean what they do that they think makes them elite, nobody believes in anymore.

We've already spent a whole show, Jack, on the FBI director, the head of the CIA.

That doesn't mean anything anymore.

When you say you're the FBI director, you think of lying to a federal investigator.

If you're the head of the CIA, you think of John Brennan lying under oath.

If you're a FBI investigator, you think of Peter Strzok.

If you're a former head of the CIA, you think of Michael Hayden suggesting that the president of the United States might be executed

after the Morrow.

So it doesn't mean anything.

When you think of elites, when you think, I'm Jeffrey Toobin.

I have a Harvard law degree and I'm on CNN.

I'm a 20.

No, you're just a guy who pulled out his blank blank and masturbated on Zoom.

or

you know i'm david books no you were the guy that tried to convince america that they should vote for barack obama because you were impressed with his pants like crease

so they haven't done anything that would justify i'm mark milley chairman of the joint chiefs what does that mean that you called up your chinese so the elites that are proclaimed elites by their behavior and their record, they're not elites.

So they're in a period of disbelief because they went to the right schools.

They have the right titles.

They have the right letters after their name, but nobody cares.

I can feel it.

You know, I live out here in southwest Resnook County.

There were guys pouring 12 yards of concrete.

I had three or four people visit yesterday.

I don't think anybody gives a damn that I'm a blank, blank.

senior fellow at Stanford University.

Who cares?

Or I'm on this show.

Nobody cares.

And that's new in America because, you know,

I know we were an anti-aristocratic, but there's a deep suspicion of academia, the military, the deep state, and they don't get it.

That they think that because they have a particular zip code or a particular amount of wealth, that they deserve therefore automatic recognition of their elite status.

And most people could care less.

And we got that on our last show about going to college.

So the world that I live in,

if I can have a guy come out

like yesterday

and look around the house and say, entry for your office complex, take out the old cement driveway, pad, put in a new one, make a sidewalk along the side and do the back.

Oh, that's going to be 11 and a half yards.

And I can pour the whole thing with concrete tint and have it perfect in five hours.

Well, that's an elite, right?

Or if I can have a guy come out and go up in the attic and say,

oh my God, you've got 30 circuits and they're all bad and knob and two, and I can take the whole thing out.

And here's what I'll do with Romex.

And I'm going to burrow under your house.

I'm going to burrow under your walls, like, just like he's a brain surgeon.

And I think a lot of it was accelerated by COVID, Jack, because all of these elites said,

take Anthony.

We've hit him I mean I don't want to pick on him but Anthony Faustry no I insist okay well we went to him you know he told us he didn't talk about therapeutics he told us that these vaccinations were the end all Joe Biden listened to that and said the thing is over by July 4th of 2021 and he had told us that you can go on a cruise when the thing broke out and then he had told us that

you might not worry about masking.

Then he told us one mask, then two masks, and then there is no such thing as herd immunity or natural immunity with this five.

And then it's 60%.

No, it'll take 70.

No, it'll take 80.

No, it'll take 90.

And Pax Lawai is this, and boosters will protect you.

And,

you know, oh, no, there's not a chance in the world this thing was engineered at the Wuhan while we had our interview with Stephen Quay and you could see otherwise.

So when you look at him or Francis Collins or Burks or what they did to Scott Atlas

and people like that are Jay Bacharia.

And so you look in the medical field, you don't see that these people,

who's an elite elite right now is somebody that we don't know the name of, and he's in the University of Utah lab or somewhere like that, and he's on the verge of finding a vaccination that won't kill you or hurt you and will stop it cold, or he found a therapeutic medicine that will stop.

That's the type of elite right now.

Or a person that today in the St.

Lawrence laboratory, we learned that they had been able to ignite a fusion reaction.

Somebody did that.

And that is an elite.

Tell me that is an elite.

And there are elites, we hear them every day, that they save people's lives and everything, but it's not the credential of

no, and it's not.

And they don't get any respect.

I think that's why they're panicking.

You know, I mean, think about it.

Sandy Berger, his name is in the Lew's.

He was an elite.

I think he went to Harvard Law School.

He spent most of his life.

I don't want to speak ill of the dead, but he spent most of his life as a lawyer for the Chinese government.

Documents in his socks, as I remember.

Yeah,

feeling

Barbara Boxer, an elite.

She's down in Rancho Mirage after being a lobbyist for the Chinese government.

As soon as she came out of the Senate.

Or the Pelosi's elites.

Oh, wow.

Nancy Pelosi speaker, Paul Pelosi.

Nancy gives big speeches on climate change, and he gets in a while they the gas goes on porch and rams it off the side of the road drunk.

No, they're not elites.

And so I'm not just picking on people as the aberration, but when I look at the quality of an elite

and I look at World War II, just that generation, they built the Pentagon in 16 months, 6 million square feet.

Right.

And they went over there with nothing on December 7th, and they won the war in

four years.

They built a B-29 from scrap.

Those people were elites.

They absolutely were.

George Patton was elite.

Mark Milley's not an elite.

George Marshall was an elite.

Lloyd Austin is no elite.

So what I'm getting at is that

this generation substituted performance.

and achievement.

They substituted for that that they lacked credentials, zip codes, degrees, who you know.

Right.

And that's what happens to, we're like the Byzantines or the late Romans.

Same thing.

And

it's, it's terrible to judge people on what their credentials say they are or what their titles say they are rather than what they actually do.

That's why Donald Trump, I mean, think about it.

Whatever you think about Donald Trump, in four years, he basically solved the illegal immigration product in a humane way.

I mean, humane, humane, humane, that people were not, you know, what they are now, being separated, and raped, and hit, and killed, coming across a humane way.

He basically shut North Korea up.

China was not talking about going into Taiwan, and Putin was not talking about going into Ukraine.

And we didn't do what we did in Afghanistan.

We didn't have inflation.

We had a boom.

And

the guy had no credential.

Right.

He had no title.

His only credential was, I can understand it, I am a guy of big mouth and I'm going to talk crudely and crassly.

And by the way, I survived in the jungle of the Manhattan real estate market.

And if you think you can do it and take on simultaneously the unions, the mafia.

the green social activists, the racemongers, the corrupt politicians, the delays, and you think you can do all that?

I doubt it.

And that was what his credentials were, but he had no title, he had no experience, and yet, you know,

they hated him, right?

They can't deal with his record compared to the consummate

person with all the credentials and Joe Biden.

No, I don't think anyone

honestly, that's maybe

some people honestly believe, but if you go back in time and say,

well, not even back in time, current day,

Ukraine,

China pressing on Taiwan, et cetera.

This would not be happening if Donald Trump was president.

And much of this, of course, stems back to a year ago this week, as you mentioned earlier, Afghanistan.

I don't know if you want to say anything about that.

But, you know,

like him or not, and most people, it's on the or not side.

I don't think people would honestly say.

we'd be in these kind of messes

if he was still in the White House.

I just got back in early June from Israel and I talked to people across the political spectrum in politics and the military, the Israeli military.

And they

not necessarily thought Donald Trump was a suave, sophisticated student of the Middle East.

But they all said that what is happening in the United States and the ripples.

that are rippling, the ripples and the consequences in the Middle East would not be happening right now if Donald Trump was president.

We wouldn't have an ascendant Iran or we wouldn't have Hamas or Islamic Jihad convinced that the future is with them or we would have the Abrams Accords accelerated or but they not now.

And they are not invested in Donald Trump.

There could be no more person antithetical to what their vision of a successful diplomat is.

Because that's a society and culture puts a high premium on being educated and well-informed.

And they feel probably that Donald Trump wasn't, but

they feel that he had a cunning, an innate cunning that was unmatched.

And so, yeah, he's a good example.

This is what David Halbertson wrote about in the best and the brightest about the Vietnam generation.

They all came out of the wonkish 19 early 60s and

corporate

science of corporate governance and technology.

And they were going to go in there in Vietnam and manage it like they did General Motors or something.

And they did do it, didn't they, Armonicu, like they did in General Motors.

But I thought we were over that.

But now

I don't know.

That's a great, that is the great bias of

business school, that

this mindset and metrics can be applicable to any and all situations.

And they're not.

That's why the head, you know, the head of one airline is, then moves over and becomes the head of a car company.

Like, why?

You know,

I don't think these things are applicable to all kinds of situations.

We see this a lot in philanthropy.

You know, I'm in the philanthropy field and people, people just think, many people think metrics, metrics, metrics, but it's

well look at the great fortunes.

I mean, Sam Walton didn't have an MBA, right?

Bill Gates didn't have a BA.

Mark Zuckerberg didn't have a BA.

And And so there's no correlation I see between success and training to be successful in the science of corporate success, maybe

mid-level management, but

actual brilliance of analyzing the situation and having a product and the Jeff Bezos type brilliance.

I'm not a big fan of these guys, but I do give them their due.

And the same thing, I mentioned it before in my field.

When I look back at the shocking developments that radicalized classics and changed the entire paradigm,

Heimich Schliemann basically gave us an archaeological foundation for the Homeric poems.

The guy was a banker, or Michael Vintras, who said, no, no, no, no, no, the Greeks did not come in the dark ages.

Those Mycenaean Greeks, they were Greeks.

The Mycenaeans who lived in Greece did not have a Near Eastern language.

They're not Minoans, Linear A.

They were Greek.

and I just proved it.

I deciphered linear B.

He was an architect.

And, you know, Millman Perry was kind of a renegade.

He did go to universities, but he was, you know, proved that the Homeric corpus was orally transmitted and delivered.

And so these were not, that's what happens in all these fields, that people who are eccentric and outspoken

tend to be liberated by the ostracism they encounter within the field.

And often, not all, but often that entails their credential.

And we can really see it in

this science when you look at, there's been some courageous Ivy League doctors, but when you look at the people who are questioning federal health policy or they're engaged in

really dynamic research, they're not always from where you think they should be.

The CDC or the

NIH or the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

So that was always America's great strength, you know, the Wright brothers or Alexander Graham Bell or Thomas Edison, these weirdos that just accumulated expertise and knowledge through sheer brilliance and hard work, but they were not part of an institutionalized corporate culture or academic culture.

Well, I'll include you in the weirdos, Victor.

Well, I'm weird, but I don't have any expertise.

No, no, but I've told you this before.

I really do think in 2016, back when we were publishing National Review and you were writing that, you really were the

premier political analyst in America.

And

what was your education in classics or your role, your livelihood as a family?

I would just improve.

I don't have to do that.

Every time I talked to

somebody that I thought would hate Donald Trump, they'd look around and say, I'm going to vote for him.

I could not believe it.

And I said, that guy's going to win.

And,

but I, you know, I gave suggestions at National Review, not to pick on them.

No, no, I, no, yeah, I, I,

I wasn't listened to when I said the never-Trump issue.

I suggested we have a never-Trump issue and

a not-Never-Trump.

So you have two sides of the equation.

And

I suggested that after the access Hollywood 10-years old tape, that was deliberately, that that was not going to torpedo, but rather energize Donald Trump.

On the other hand, I said other things that will criticize.

I said Donald Trump lost

the first debate.

He got terrible advice to go and scream and yell from Chris Christie and those people.

And then Chris Christie went right back out after advising him to be combative and rude rather than to negotiate a longer debate and to be polite and let Joe Biden self-destruct.

He went on TV and attacked the person he coached.

Yeah, he's, I can't stand that guy.

Speaking of people, I can't stand, Nancy Pelosi, but Victor, let's talk about her and let's continue to talk about Trump because you've written some,

a piece on your website, one of the, one of the privileged pieces about the upcoming, well, 2024, 20.

the upcoming presidential elections.

And let's get your thoughts on that.

And maybe on, you've also written about Nancy Pelosi's

childlike diplomacy,

a great piece for American greatness.

So let's get to those right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show again.

I'm Jack Fowler.

We are recording on Sunday, August 14th.

Victor writes for American Greatness,

for The New Criterion.

He has a syndicated column, but he does write in other places, but he also writes three or four times a week now for his own website, VictorHanson.com.

Now, you go to that website.

You can find links to Victor's appearances on TV and other podcasts he does, etc.

But you'll find, you'll click on links and you won't be able to access them.

They're the ultra articles.

These are the exclusive pieces or the pieces Victor writes exclusively for his website.

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So, Victor, two of the

well, one of these is an ultra piece, exclusive piece.

We'll lift the curtain and

give our listeners a peek at it, those who are not subscribing.

Trump, DeSantis, Biden, Harris, and all that, part two.

This is a two-part series that you've written

for the website.

And it's your kind of

polyglot of

thoughts about the 2024

elections.

And right now, where does Donald Trump fit into all of that?

So would you share some thoughts before we move on to talk about Nancy Pelosi?

Well, this was written before the raid, but I tried to make the point that Joe Biden

was selected by the African-American community, James Clyborne, in reaction to the donor class.

Those two constituencies knew better than anybody else that that circus that was on the debate stage in 2020 was not viable.

that nobody in their right mind was going to vote for Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Beto, Beto, Spartacus, et cetera.

They just weren't going to vote for them.

And they were in a dilemma because the only alternative was someone

who was 75 years old and non compos mentes.

So they figured that, you know, they ran the basement campaign, they got him over the, but the devil's bargain, the Faustian bargain, was that he had to carry a stealth, hardcore, left-wing, progressive, socialist agenda while telling the country that he was just good old Joe Biden from Scranton.

And that worked perfectly.

And then what happened was, as any Faustian bargain, the contradictions were manifest within weeks of after his inauguration.

One is the agenda was not what the independents voted for.

It was a hard left AOC squad agenda, Sanders.

And then two, the guy really was.

cognitively challenged.

Okay, so now we fast forward.

He's not going to be a candidate for president.

And none of those people that were on the stage in 2020 are going to be a candidate.

And that affects the Republicans, because

when they say Donald Trump can't win again,

against whom?

Another Barack Obama, maybe not.

Another Joe Biden, even if they try it twice and have that bargain again, maybe not.

But there's not going to be a Joe Biden.

And there's no one that can have a pretense of being a known commodity that's sane.

Not that Joe Biden's sane, but the appearance of sanity.

So that screws everything up because the chief characteristic of everybody who opposes Trump was he can't win in the general election.

And he did lose a popular vote in 2016.

I think he probably lost it in 2020 as well.

And I think the vote is recorded.

I think he lost.

That's a whole nother question, but I think it had something to do with the 62% of non-election day balloting, but that's neither here nor there.

But my point is in 2024, he's not going to be running against Hillary Clinton and he's not going to be running against Joe Biden.

That generation is gone.

So you tell me who's out there who's not nuts.

It doesn't appear as nuts.

And so a lot of the candidates like DeSantis,

that's going to be in Pompeo and Haley and Cotton and all of them.

It's going to be a little bit more difficult because Biden is not going to be on the ticket.

And I think the impression will be that any of us can beat,

including Donald Trump, the Democratic nominee, whereas before it was, we don't tweet, we're not eccentric, we don't make fun of people.

Therefore, we can beat Joe Biden from Scranton in a way that Donald Trump failed to do.

I don't think that's going to be applicable.

I don't know what that means.

I don't think he should declare his nomination before the midterms.

He'll distract attention from them.

And then,

you know, if they do very well, and I think they will, he'll claim credit for it.

And that will disparage the candidates themselves in some ways.

And if they don't do as well, they'll blame him.

So he should just wait until it's all over.

I know you've written about Gavin Newsom and his Florida electioneering and coming out of kind of the woodwork for 2024.

Is there anyone you think of, though, that,

I don't know, I'm just riffing here myself, but, you know,

Michelle Obama.

She's the only one.

And

people were introduced to Michelle Obama.

I mean, everybody loves Michelle.

That was a packaging attempt after,

well, I mean, go ahead.

She had a lot of high negatives in that campaign of 2008 when she said she'd never been proud until Brock ran to be an American.

Right.

And then she said it was a downright mean country.

And she was headed for political albatross status.

And then David Axelrod said, shut the blank up.

And remember, they put her on ice and all of a sudden she started talking about peaches and cream.

And she got in there and then she went right back at it.

Oh, I was at a store and somebody asked me to reach up and that was racist.

All this stuff came out.

And then they said, stop it, stop it, stop it.

And they rebuilt her, but she's a loose cannon.

But she's better than the alternatives as far as they're concerned.

The late Rush Limbaugh used to always say that about Michelle.

They'll be kind when she runs for office.

And that was not a form of flattery or compliment.

That wasn't a compliment.

It's that it was, this is what we're going to be reduced to.

And so we'll see.

But she's said a lot of crazy things since she's left office.

And it's not going to be Michelle Obama who works hard and they always raise the bar.

Remember that?

They raise the bar.

We want to get braces.

They raise the bar.

We want to get a mortgage.

They raise the bar.

This is Michelle Obama as hmm, Barack.

Should we go to the $8 million Calaroma mansion or the $14 million Martha's Vineyard seaside estate that's immune from global warming, rising tides, seas?

Or should we go to the new $20 million

Oahu

beachside Hawaiian mansion?

Let's take your pick.

That's who she is now.

Yeah.

They were truly, even before

being elected president, with her contrived foundation position and his

1% of the 1%.

The thing about Obama's were they always gave the game away.

They always say

what they were not, what they would press they were not, was always confirmation of what they were.

When Barack Obama said, Well, if I'm going to run for president, I'm going to do it on principled grounds.

I'm just not going to go do it, you know, just for the title and make a lot of money.

That's what we knew he was going to do because he was no revolutionary community.

The guy was a grifter.

He got in there, and the last year of his administration, he took a vacation.

He let Hillary

and

Trump fight it out.

And he knew that the more you did not see or hear him, the more you liked the idea that he was the first black president.

And his polls went from about 41% up to 54%.

And he just cut deals with Netflix and everything while he was in office for his retirement.

And the guy's worth $100 million now.

And

he was always that way.

Tony, Resco, all of that stuff.

That was a stupid thing I did.

Oh, yeah, it was also illegal probably, but forget it.

And that's the way he was.

He was always a guy who

was pretentious and he was status hungry and he wanted money and he wanted nice things.

And then he understood something very brilliantly that

he was able, according to Harry Reid.

and Joe Biden, who both said racist things about him, of his speech and diction.

Right.

But it's not racist to say that that he was a

mimic and he could turn on an authentic

South Central,

Southern inflected black accent for his fee days, or he could sound like a wonk to Knob Hill supporters, or he could be the angry black guy when he had rappers in the White House whose leg ankle bracelet went off an alarm, or he could go in and reassure some multi-million dollar person he was not going to, you know, do something crazy and, you know, confiscate money.

So that's what he was.

And he could do it all with the idea that you owe me something because I'm a victim of racism, even though he was completely outside, exempt, unfamiliar with the American, continental American Black experience.

He was son of a...

a truly African person, and he grew up in an upper middle class household run by a very courageous, hardworking grandmother who made it to bank president and put him in prep school.

Forget about his crazy mom, but it wasn't necessarily a deprived childhood of the sort that we think.

And he went to Occidental.

He went to Columbia, Harvard Law School.

Did you ever

characterize, it was all characterized by mediocre academic achievement?

I was going to ask, did you know anyone who ever taught him?

Yes, I've met people who knew him and were a colleague of his.

I won't mention their names, two of them.

Okay.

And they had the same appraisal.

Okay.

Their appraisal was exactly what Obama appraised him.

They said to him on, was it CBS, Leslie Stahl, or whoever was it?

They said, what's your greatest weakness?

What's your greatest criticism?

And he said, I'm lazy.

He said that.

That wasn't a racist comment by somebody stereotype him.

That was what he said.

And what he meant by that, he didn't mean to be critical.

He meant to be

adulatory that i'm so gifted and like

and he's lazy like bill clinton is lazy bill clinton had a photographic memory but he just winged it and he knew that he could charm people and be glib but as far as deep thinking he didn't know anything neither did obama yeah

well well victor um

Let's talk about Nancy Pelosi now.

And you have a very interesting piece you wrote for American Greatness.

It's

over a week old at this time, but but still i thought it it's worth talking about it's nancy nancy pelosi's childlike diplomacy mirrors america's childlike posture towards china now

we've been over uh pelosi's uh visit and the consequences of it and the back and forth and the pitfalls and etc but if you don't mind i'm more interested and i think maybe our our listeners might be in the second part of that title about america's childlike posture toward china would you

what's what's childlike about about it and it why did she go to china well let me just ask is it just now or is this like is this uh attitude we have toward china historic okay

well

We made, we cut a deal in 72 in different circumstances.

The deal was

that Richard Nixon wanted to get out of Vietnam, and he wanted to either get the Soviet Union or China to stop supplying the Viet Cong-North Vietnamese.

And barring that, and he sent Kissinger in preliminary talks to create this doctrine that neither China or Russia would be better friends with each other than each one would be to us.

And it was called cynically triangulation.

That's where it came.

And so the price of that policy was

Nixon told Mao

that privately and domestically, we were going to praise Taiwan as a free, independent contrast to mainland China.

But formally,

in diplomatic terms, we were not going to recognize it.

We would only recognize communist China.

And the landscape of that was that China was weak.

It was coming out of Mao's Cultural Revolution in 1972.

No one in their right mind at the time thought 50 years later that an American aircraft carrier would be blown out of the water in the first five minutes of a war in the South China Sea, or they would openly talk about taking Taiwan and could do it, perhaps, or they would have nuclear missiles pointed at the west coast of the United States, or that it would be stealing patents and copyrights and dumping.

product for monopoly purposes of market shares and fixing currency and sending 380,000 students over here, which probably three or four or five thousand of them are active espionage agents.

Nobody ever thought that 50 years later.

Well, that's where we were.

And so that policy is archaic, it's ossified

because this is an existential enemy of ours, China.

Taiwan is an ally.

And what we're trying to do is to get Australia and Japan and South Korea and Taiwan and the Philippines and maybe Indonesia and Southeast Asian countries all in a alliance to curb and check Chinese aggression.

And they don't have to do much because they can't stand the Chinese.

Okay.

But what you don't do is you do that, but you don't then just flagrantly when you're weak and we're weak right now because the economy is weak and our military is shattered and lost deterrence after Afghanistan and Ukraine, all this stuff, and what we've talked about with recruitment problems and wokeness.

But what you don't do is you don't flagrantly just say, I'm going to go over there, even though it violates the spirit, and you have no idea why you're going over there.

And

you're going to talk loud and you're in ignoramus.

And I mean ignoramus.

So when you ask, why did you go over there?

Well, when I was a little girl, I would dig in the beach and my parents said, I guess you're on your way to China.

Ha ha ha.

Could you elaborate the next couple of days?

Okay.

Well, mainland China is one of the freest societies in the world.

Remember that Mike Bloomberg said that, that they had a constitutional constituency.

So she didn't know why she went over there.

She didn't help herself.

I have no problem with challenging that one China policy if that is a deliberate attempt and you talk to the president and the secretary of defense and you get everybody in that bipartisan committee, a community online.

She didn't do any of that.

She didn't.

She just freelanced, and no sooner had she announced it, and it was sort of a Napoleon general said, I'll take Vienna, but maybe it's too difficult.

Maybe I'll just hold back for a while.

Or maybe I'll do it next.

If you're going to take Vienna, take Vienna.

So if you're going to go, Nancy, you say, I'm going, no matter what.

And then Lloyd Austin says, she's the Speaker of the House.

She has a perfect right to go.

And the president says, that's what she wants to do.

We're behind her.

And so it was like leaking, hey, she's just nutty.

She's freelancing.

So it was a disaster.

It didn't bring anything except her little ego that she went back and said, people cheered me in China.

You know, I love communist China.

You know, it's the freest country.

And I dig in the sand.

It was a joke.

It was childlike.

You also wrote, she uses foreign.

She has a history of using foreign policy,

foreign visits to embarrass people politically americans politically yeah i can remember that when she did it she had that famous phrase about bashar assad all peace runs through damascus i.e we're stuck in the surge and

i'm going to go over to syria and we've won the midterms and now for the first time in life i'm the speaker of the house and we've got a big

presidential campaign and I'm going to embarrass George W.

Bush and trash the surge which worked so i'm going to go over to syria even though they begged her not to go and i'm going to praise the assad dynasty and you know what why i'm going to do that they're sending thousands of people across the open syrian iraq border to kill americans and they just fought a war with our israeli allies in lebanon and she went over there and did that And I can remember her right after 9-11, where she was in the news, that she was going and talking.

I don't know if it was John Brilliant or who it was in the Bush administration, and she was making these little bipartisan, oh, we've got to do whatever it takes.

And they were briefed fully on so-called enhanced interrogation, fully.

She never objected to one item of that type of protocol.

She knew all about Guantanamo.

And then as soon as...

The crap hit the fan and the left started to dominate the Democratic Party again and we got in trouble.

Afghanistan kind of slowed down, and

she, oh, this is torture, war criminal.

So, I've never had any respect for her.

I never have.

And I'm not just saying that in personal terms.

And then, that's well aside from the fact that she and her husband, when she left the local Democratic Party 30 years ago, they were broke.

They had not, I mean, she came from a political family, and he had a little money, but they were not worth $100 million.

That was predicated on what we just saw two weeks ago, things like that, where he gets a little cent of upcoming legislation that will spike a stock or make it go down a few points.

And then he buys en masse, sometimes futures.

And the way that Diane Feinstein's husband was a big, big Chinese investor, a billion dollars.

They all are that way.

And Barbara Boxer, you know, at one time I thought, my God,

we've got Barbara Boxer.

She retires.

She's a Chinese registered agent, I think.

Amazing.

And lobbyist.

And then we've got Diane Feinstein, whose husband made a killing, and she's got a chauffeur when she was head of the Senate Intelligence Agency, who's a certified Chinese spy,

which I guess nobody really worried about.

And then we've got this other Northern California ignoramus congressman, Swalwell, who is having sexual relations with, is there Feng Fong, Fang Fang, Fong Fang?

You knew her, right?

I knew her.

I met her.

Yes, I did.

She came to my office and I heard her on the phone say, you know, I'm a

diplomatic person from the consulate.

You've been writing things that are on true.

I want to go talk to you.

And she said, could I visit you?

And I said, no, but I'm on campus.

I can come up.

I said, okay, but I was not stupid.

I had the door open on my assistant there listening to the whole thing and I refused all of her gifts.

I'm not as handsome or young as Eric Swalwell, but I could see right away that she was a very, very sophisticated actor of things that were not interest to my country.

And I got, you know, that was it.

I just got in a big argument and then she broke into her Valley Girl slang and dropped her little innocent persona and started arguing with me about Taiwan.

And we got a heated argument about that.

And that was it.

No dinner.

I didn't want to go to her dinner invitation.

I didn't accept her gift.

But my point is, that guy who was sitting on the House Intelligence Committee, apparently, he hasn't denied it.

The accusation he had carnal relations with her.

That was another Northern Californian.

And then, you know, you go to Nancy Pelosi, and she's got her son with her investments.

And so

he's a big investor with Chinese interest.

And so is her husband has investments in China.

And so these are all left-wing politicians of the people.

And they all have a couple things in common.

They're fabulously wealthy and a lot of their wealth was predicated on their politics.

Right.

And eventually selling the rope to hang America with.

Victor, one last thing about this piece.

Could you give us a quick analysis of whether it's good or bad or if it's just a term that really we shouldn't obsess about?

Strategic ambiguity as America's policy towards Red China.

Good, bad, should we be concerned?

Is it meaningless now?

Talk about that term, please.

Well, the thing to remember about that term is that it was created or it was came into currency at a different, as I said, at a different economic, cultural, political, social, and military landscape.

And it was one that was sort of condescending.

Well, you know, we'll just tell everybody

that we're,

you know, that there's, there's one communist China, and that'll make Mao happy, and we can have good relationships, and then we will acculturate and guide them into the world community, and they're going to be kind of like a big Taiwan.

That's what they really believe.

I don't know if Nixon believed that, but Jimmy Carter, who expanded on it, and Bill Clinton, who really expanded on it.

And there were people in the Reagan administration that did too.

They really did believe that Teneman Square was going to lead to a Chinese version of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

And if not then,

then the massive amounts of American cash and investment and the opening up tariff-free markets of the Chinese would make them so westernized and so many students here.

And they'd be so wealthy that they would just, anybody who comes over here loves the United States and wants to be like it.

They never in their right mind thought these are hardcore commies, communist commies, same thing.

But they're coming over here for one reason, to take every single thing they can from us and to leapfrog and leapfrog over decades, if not centuries, of research and development and step slow steps to a modern, sophisticated, technologically adept society.

And that's what they did, did, all under the auspices of a ruthless, murderous regime that hasn't changed much except in magnitude and its killing from Mao Zedong.

And that's what it was.

And that's where it ended up.

And we appeased them and we did everything.

And now this policy is ossified.

The problem was.

that after the Cold War,

we blew it.

We didn't make necessary reforms.

We could have paid off our debts.

And I blame Republicans too for that.

Right, right.

George Bush doubled the debt and Donald Trump doubled, almost doubled the debt in four years.

Not doubled, but he ran huge deficits.

And we should have been investing and get our financial house in order.

We should have Merocratic universities.

And looking back,

9-11, it really affected me.

And I thought we had to deal with the Afghan problem.

And we did, and Iraq.

Iraq, but I never in my right mind thought we were going to go in there and try to put a George Floyd Murle on a street or fly the pride flag.

Or when I went over to Iraq twice, I couldn't believe we were building more sophisticated electrical grids than we had in the United States.

So somewhere or something went wrong, but my point is that we're weak now.

And China is growing strong.

And so you have a policy that reflects, that was birthed in the idea of America is strong and they are weak.

The policy hasn't changed, but they're getting stronger and we're getting weaker.

We're still stronger than China.

But so the policy now is ambiguous, really.

And it's,

if anybody in America, Donald Trump said it, I think he was off the record.

It was a stupid thing to say, even off the record, but he said, there's no way in hell we're going to be able to go over there and save 23 million people from 1.4 billion people.

You know, that's what he said.

And I don't know if he was right or not, but that's our problem right now.

And China knows it's our problem.

And when Nancy Pelosi gives them a reason

to be provocative,

they have a virtual, they had a de facto blockade.

They shot missiles over Japan's airspace.

So they're just telling people this is the reality.

And whether you like it or not, Taiwan is doomed.

And we have to either do one or two things.

We either have to say,

okay,

is there a way that we can save Taiwan diplomatically?

The answer is no, or we're going to have to get our house in order militarily.

We should have had a very sophisticated missile defense system.

And we, you know, Barack Obama, tell Vladimir

He'll just behave in the next election, give me some space.

It's my final election, then I'll be flexible, including missile defense.

And then he dismantles it and leaves the polls and the checks out hanging.

We could have been really investing in missile defense and different types of weaponry than we have right now.

I would rather have, I don't know, 500,000 armed drones than another $13 billion carrier.

Carrier, right?

Yeah.

Because I don't know how we're going to save one of those things.

And to the Chinese are concerned, they could give a blank blank that the 5,000 Americans on the Ronald Reagan are diverse or say he and him or they for their pronouns.

They don't care.

They do not give a damn about the diversity, equity, inclusion, or whether the crew of the Reagan, after a hard day, are reading Professor Kendi's work about anti-racism.

They don't care.

All they see is a big, fat American target with prestige.

I don't know what we do.

You know, David Goldman is a very astute.

Oh, I love David.

Yeah.

I like David.

He's been very critical of me in the past, but sometimes I deserved it, I I suppose.

Well, no, I know him personally, so that's why I love him.

But go ahead.

I like him too, because I like what he writes.

And I think he's been,

he's a very strange tone because what he is, is it's almost wistful.

In other words, you said, it's kind of like cry the beloved country, but he doesn't pull any punches.

And he said, I wish it wasn't so true.

It would have been so easy to avoid this.

All we had to do was invest in research and development.

All we had to do was strengthen our engineering and math and science.

All we had to do was

concentrate on China and not so much the Russian threat or the Middle East threat.

All we had to do was not punish the Chinese with tariffs, but make it so that we couldn't be hurt with tariffs or no tariffs, that we were so much stronger.

And he's kind of sad that we didn't do that.

So when he tells,

but he's very pessimistic, and that's hard to read sometimes.

But he's, I've never read anything where I disagreed with him on China.

Right.

Yeah, well, too many people making, too many people in America,

and maybe many I even know, are making too much money

involvement in China.

That's too much money to be made.

Look at LeBron James.

It's very strange how the Chinese are, they're very, very,

they have mastered the art of propaganda almost on every issue.

Remember what they said about Taiwan?

You know, we're not, don't treat us like we're George Floyd.

We're not George Floyd.

And they have a whole network of students and young people that hourly, every second, communicate back and forth with the regime, trying to try out tropes and propaganda.

And they understand that

they understand the left is corrupt.

And so they can understand that you can make leftists really, really wealthy, and I mean, with joint investments, and then you can pass that off as okay because they're marginalized people in a way the russians can't get away with it and they understand it they look at american a hollywood film and every hollywood action film when you want to get the foreign bad guy he's some ball-headed guy with an orthodox tattoo on his neck a gold tooth with a really thick russian accent big biceps and he's a you know he's a russian mafioso and not not a chinese person that would be taboo that That would be racist.

And they know that.

Yeah.

And so they feel that they're completely exempt.

When I was talking to our

representative of the consulate, she was very clear and trying that out

in our conversation that we were a racist society and this and this.

And Japan was a racist society.

And so.

I don't know, you know.

But the black guy who was in China when COVID happened found out what a racist society was.

A lot of them did.

It had signs on McDonald's, you know, I think it was McDonald's.

Black people don't come in.

And so, yeah.

And so that's that, they're so much more formidable than

Russia.

So what I'm getting at is this.

There are two collusion narratives right now that are circulating.

One has already been discredited.

It was the Russian collusion hoax.

In fact, it should not have been this, the term shouldn't have been discredited because it applied perfectly to Hillary Clinton.

She really did hire people to collect dirt on Donald Trump with the aid of the Russian government that were feeding him those lies, the PPT, all that, that came from the Russian government.

But nevertheless, it was a bankrupt narrative about a declining power.

But at the same time, there was a narrative.

that Hunter Biden, for example, when he went to China on Air Force II, when you had major family members of prominent senators, when you had somebody like Mike Bloomberg running for the Democratic nomination who had, what, $10, $15 billion invested in Chinese startups, when you had Bill Gates in the height of the COVID saying that China had handled this very well, when you had Peter Dasik and EchoHealth who were, and Lancet, I think, who was a recipient of Chinese money, people had suggested, were saying that there was no gain of function research at the Chinese lab.

My point is that there was a collusion with a Chinese, with a left wing culturally and politically that were mouthing Chinese platitudes.

And that was true.

And it's much more dangerous.

And it happens to be true than something that was not as dangerous and happened to be false.

And you can't stop it.

Not when LeBron think about it.

LeBron James can say that he's a victim of American racism.

Oh my gosh.

And then he can go over there and he'll have a billion dollars for the lifetime of that contract with the Chinese endorsement.

And

that is a nation that does not like black people collectively and does not like people who were religious, such as the Uyghurs or they were Muslims or they're considered

inferior race.

And yet he will,

when that happens, you can see how insidious they are.

You know, but I just, we've run out of time, Victor, and I just have to mention

the hate,

Red China hates religious people.

Cardinal Joseph Zen, the retired

Catholic cardinal of Hong Kong, is going to be prosecuted next month in open court

over the

Hong Kong, I would say, protests from two or three years ago.

And it's kind of...

What will be the official response of the Biden administration?

Well,

I don't know that.

The other concern is what's the official response of the Vatican, which has been kissing the

China's Heini.

And this good man, he's a good, great man, actually,

has been protesting

the diplomatic relations with the Vatican.

But anyway, it echoes back to what happened with Cardinal Manzenti and the great figure of Hungary in the late 1940s.

Communism hates religion, and

they will, on occasion, take on

the big guy.

And Zen is a big guy to prove a point.

Victor, before we end, just a quick question.

Did you know, ever have anything, come into contact with Salmon Rushdie, who is, as we're recording,

he was just stabbed violently.

I believe he's in and out of intensive care, but have you ever crossed paths?

No, I never met him.

I think when that...

ostracism

began, I supported him.

I wrote a column about it.

I knew Christopher Hitchens really well, who, along with Susan Sontag, was pretty prominent in defending him.

But there was a lot of people on the right,

to tell you the truth, that I had disagreements with that felt that he was

impious and that

his defamation of, it's not the good word, but his irreligious, yeah, blasphemous attitude toward Islam was transferable to Christianity as well.

And people like that and get what they deserve.

I won't mention the publication I read that in, but they were prominent conservatives who believe that, and so did leftists for a different reason.

That they felt that, you know, anything that's Islamic is good, and anything that's Western is bad.

And he was a Westernized person who got what he deserved.

But writers that

I'm ideologically not in tune with what he writes writes or what he says, but

I think he was a good writer.

And I think that

people

downplayed the threats that he was under, and they ruined his life for, I think it was nine years he had to live incognito.

Right.

Everybody should have the right to express whatever they feel like if they want.

The problem with all these things, Jack, is that people like him

that are persecuted or they're victims of efforts to squash free expression.

They all think that their natural allies are the Democratic Party or the left.

It never has been that way in terms of the hard left, but it was true in the Democratic Party under the ACLU, accepted, where they went to great lengths almost to allow pornography to be openly

and, you know, a free speech area or Mario Salvador.

That doesn't exist anymore.

Not at all.

So multiculturalism and wokeness have overtaken free speech.

There is no free speech speech on campus.

And if a professor, you know, goes on campus, Amy Wax or somebody or Heather McDonnell, they're going to be in danger.

And nobody's going to defend them.

Nobody's going to defend them.

Well, there is, actually, Victor, I just read.

But I mean on the campus itself, physically get up there and defend them or a dean or a provost.

Oh, sure.

Yeah, right.

No, there's going to be great college fix and all those groups.

Yeah, they're great.

And fire, they're wonderful.

But I'm just saying within the university community, the left-wing community, they're either going to be too scared or they're going to think they got what they deserved.

So that's new.

And there is no ACLU now.

It's not the Americans.

It's just an arm of the socialist left.

And so a guy like Rushdie, when this happens, you would think there would be a whole outpouring like there was 30 years ago from left-wing writers.

And I just don't think it's going to happen

because they don't believe in free speech and expression.

I don't think you'll see a thing from the squad.

I think AOC won't see a thing or Illinois Olmar.

They don't care.

And, you know, it's just, it's, you know,

I'd just like to finish on a pessimistic note that we don't know

because we're in the middle of the level of decline.

And I'm talking about moral decline.

I'm talking about intellectual decline.

I'm talking about material decline.

It's not just our military or our air travel or the homeless in our cities or the crime that's coming back.

It's things like the protection of free speech and expression, the integrity of the FBI or the CIA or the DOJ.

Because to sum it up very quickly, these are all

government institutions or cultural institutions that are liberal.

And

not that the conservatives are not capable of prompting these types of decline, but they're constantly under scrutiny.

Donald Trump was under a microscope from a left-wing press, a left-wing internet, a left-wing universities, et cetera.

But when you're on the left and there is no scrutiny because the left is the left, they're fused, then they get away with anything.

And they just keep doing things

that wouldn't have been possible if you had an independent arbiter like there used to be.

There were people,

whether we like it or not, in

the 80s and 70s and 60s on the left.

They ran CBS News, they ran NBC, they ran all the institutions, but they were not like they are today.

I wasn't a big fan of, you know, like David Brinkley, but compared to the people at CNN, he was

a moral paragon.

He was.

Yeah.

Actually, I think towards the end also, he came.

He was on a hot mic once and he really stuck it to Bill Clinton.

I forget what he's, I got to look that up.

Yeah, a guy like Eric Severide was an old lefty, but a guy was, he could, he was very analytical.

And so those people don't exist in the Democratic Party.

There is no Harry Truman.

There is no JFK.

There's not even a Bill Clinton.

Right.

And so right now, a lot of things that are really deleterious to the country are

taking root.

And nobody says anything.

I mean,

I thought Tipper Gore was kind of saying, saying, you know, we shouldn't have this type of music where you talk about raping and killing and beating up women, you know, and all of a sudden, you know,

that was

you couldn't, you couldn't do that today.

You couldn't do that.

You couldn't say that.

You wouldn't dare say that rap music should not use the N-word and contributes to racism and should not ever talk about kill the police, pop, pop, popo, the way that Kenrick Lamar did in one of his

to pimp a butterfly albums when he was a guest with Barack Obama, who idolized him.

Yet he had a lyric in there about killing police people.

So that type of decline is not questioned.

And

we're in a

commissars.

It's ideological now.

I was with some family members, my wife's family,

this past weekend.

And

I don't think anyone doesn't believe that this November November there will be a smashing election.

But at the same time, there is this despondency.

So, you know, we may win, whoever we are.

We will win, but for what?

Because it may be too far.

I think everybody listening,

this is not a political podcast in the sense of I'm not a registered Republican, but

you should vote and you should get everybody you know to vote.

Each according to their station should give the political candidates of your choice if you feel they're traditionalists.

I don't say conservative, I mean traditionalists that want to save this country because winter is coming unless we do something.

And

we're going to have to do something because

this system is starting.

What I'm getting at is when you have a commissar system that adjudicates merit on the basis of ideology, and you are admitted to a university, or you're hired at a job, or you're promoted in the Pentagon based on your stance on climate change or or race or transgender, whatever it is, and not merit, then finally it trickles down to the general society.

So there is a connection between the head of American Airlines

weighing in on voter ID and the fact that the airlines don't work.

There is a connection between the universities losing students, but also graduating people who are not educated and this wokeness and the loyalty oaths.

It's all connected.

And when you get away with, you just do away with merit, finally you end up with excretement on the streets of your cities and signs in the cars that say there's nothing here.

It's on law.

Please don't break in.

And that's where we are.

The ideology, what used to be a boutique academic lounge excess is now filtered down to the mainstream culture that the left runs and starting to destroy the fabric of from everything of forest fires in California, from not practicing timber policy to brownouts, to freeways that don't work.

You let these people have their way, and you're going to have a standard of living like the Soviet Union or Venezuela or Cuba

or North Korea.

We're not exempt from that.

We're seeing in Europe, what you're seeing in Europe right now.

All right.

Well, anyway, without rant and

happy note, let me just say thanks to our listeners.

And

for those who come to Apple podcasts or iTunes, which still exists, and leave rankings, thank you, up to five stars.

And practically everyone leaves five stars.

So we appreciate the fact that you appreciate what you're hearing here, Victor's wisdom.

Some people leave comments, and here's one.

Clarity, calmness, and empirical sanity.

I truly appreciate these great podcasts.

I am soon to be 69 and grew up with a fine basic knowledge that began in elementary school where I had introduction to Latin and good classical literature.

Since I began following VDH, he has taken me back to revisit some of those books.

I appreciate your tone in your speech.

I'm a music therapist specializing in neurology, and your clarity is so refreshing.

I long for our educational system to stop and start over.

We need a great model like VDH to be multiplied throughout our nation.

Pax et bonum.

This is signed by Music Nana one.

Thank you, Music Nana.

One

you want to be cloned, Victor?

Come on.

I'll invest in that.

Thanks, Victor, again for everything and for the wide range of topics we've recorded on this podcast, the other one we recorded earlier today, and the usual

great wisdom.

Thanks, my friend.

Thanks all for listening.

We'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you for listening, everybody.