The China Connection

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

We are recording on Sunday, August 7th, 2022.

Victor Davis Hansen, who is the namesake and star 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 will be teaching in but a few weeks.

And on that, I'd like to make a quick little note before we speak to Victor about some important issues related to Taiwan, China, Biden, Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, et cetera.

Victor, when he is away, it'll be difficult to record live podcasts.

So I do ask if anyone would like to pose a question to Victor, we're going to pre-record a few programs.

Send me an email, Jack

R S L C,

Jack R S L C at gmail.com.

And we will put together a couple of episodes with listener questions for Victor.

So I encourage you, please mark in subject line V D H question or something like that so it doesn't get lost.

Let's get started.

Victor, with some questions related to China right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Hey, Victor, I know we're going to get started, but

another kind of little bit of a commercial and some praise.

I really, really strongly recommend anyone who's listening to this podcast now, if you don't regularly, if I added a syllable there, subscribe to this show, you should find the most recent episode in which Victor had this terrific discussion with Dr.

Stephen Quay about COVID.

And it was just so informative, Victor, and also embarrassing because not only are you yourself

the great

star of your show, but

in this particular episode, you were the host and you were the one asking questions.

And I felt, I'm like, oh my gosh, you do that a million times better than I do here.

I had a better guest than you did.

Oh, that's good.

That's very self-deprecating bueno so victor let's get started with hunter biden and joe biden and there's a piece in the daily mail on the 5th so we're recording on the 7th this was friday august 5th it's uh it's by josh boswell pretty important piece of course you won't you won't read it hear about it on cnn read about the new york times other places here's it's it's an exclusive here's the headline vp joe biden met with two chinese energy execs in the West Wing.

The 15th meeting with the businessman tied to his son's company, who days later sent Hunter a fawning email offering to fix his $102,000 luxury electric vehicle.

Let me just read these bullet points, Victor, and then get your take on

this most recent news.

Two executives for a Chinese energy company, I think it's pronounced Wan Jiang, secured a meeting with Vice President Joe Biden.

Vice President Joe Biden, not between Canada, not between, he's not private citizen Biden, he's vice president.

In the West Wing in July 2014, that's according to White House visitor logs.

A client of Hunter Biden's company, Seneca Global Advisors, partnered with Wanjiang in 2012 on a multi-billion dollar natural gas plant in China.

So a couple of days after this White House meeting, what happened?

One of the executives emailed Hunter

offering offering to service his $102,000 Fisker sports car.

I never heard of a Fisker until this, Victor, but

I'm just a Ford guy.

And he invited the vice president's son for a visit.

Joe Biden's meeting with these two Wanjang officials is one of 15 occasions he met with businessmen closely linked to his son.

And then there is the, I have to read this and then I'll shut up, Victor.

The lawyer for Hunter Biden was sent an inquiry by this reporter, Josh Boswell.

And this is his response.

This article that the Daily Mail has so many documents in it is so well reported.

But Chris Clark, that is Hunter Biden's criminal defense lawyer, he responded to the Daily Mail this, and it's, quote, please quote me, Josh, you are a parasite who lives of, I think he meant

off of other people's difficulties.

Your parents won't mount you.

I don't know what that means.

I'm glad my parents

didn't mount me.

Please include an explanation from News Corp lawyers.

I think he thinks

the New Testament is not owned by News Corp.

Correct.

It's not.

Of you, exclude this comment, this from your as to why you have done so after asking me, foe my comment, please.

I think this is a good example of how not to email while maybe under the influence.

So, Victor, more incriminating evidence that we have the Corleone family.

I would say the Manchurian candidate is actually

occupying the White House.

And then after this, Victor, we'll talk about some real foreign policy matters related to this.

Well, there's a lot of dimensions to this story because the first thing that everybody's thinking, we tore the country apart for over two years, actually three leading up to the the Mueller investigation over Russian collusion.

And when it was all said and done,

and we understood that Andrew McCabe lied four times, that James Comey couldn't remember 245 times, that Christopher Ray, as we see from his latest testimony, was knee-deep in this bureaucratic mess.

Christopher Steele had no sources.

Hillary's people were involved both in Moscow and at the Brookings Institution.

FBI lawyers altered a document in felonious fashion.

No need to get into Lisa Page and Peter Strout.

James Baker was peddling it around to media organizations before the 2016 election, etc.

And then we have this.

Can you imagine that Donald Trump, if he had said, I had never had any knowledge of anybody in my family doing business with the Russians, and then all of this evidence came out about him, he would have been impeached five times.

So

we knew this from the Hunter laptop.

We knew from pictures and correspondence that Biden had met with him.

We knew it from his lifestyle.

It was inexplicable without fusions of foreign money.

And we denied it because we all were sold this, Joe is a uniter, Joe's from Scranton, Joe's a nice guy, Joe's a lion of the Senate, and he will come in and he will bring peace and tranquility after the Trump bull in the China shop.

That's what we were told.

The problem with all of that wasn't just that Joe Biden was non-composmente,

nor that it was a cynical ploy to use an empty vessel to throw into it hard left agendas and then disguise it and get them across the finish line by a basement campaign.

The problem was it was based on a lie.

Joe Biden was never a nice guy.

He lies.

He lied repeatedly when he said he never had discussed these things with his son.

He lied repeatedly when he hadn't met any of his son's associates.

We have him on tape saying he was trying to fire, and he did fire, a Ukrainian prosecutor connected with Hunter's shenanigans.

We have him on tape lying from about everything that he was a,

and we've talked about this before, Jack, a blue-chip quarterback that might have made it at the Naval Academy to a long, you know, a semi-truck driver.

He lies.

That's what he plagiarizes.

He invents.

This is pre-senelity stage.

And yet we crafted this construct called Biden because the media, academia, the whole institutional deep, all of them wanted something other than Donald Trump.

And that's how we got it.

And now we have no idea yet.

because we've got Biden's prosecutor, Merrick Garland, who is probably the worst AG Attorney General since Eric Coldword.

He might be worse, who is a rank partisan protecting this Biden consortium.

But we don't know how deeply the Chinese are into

Biden.

Now, what does that mean into?

Does that mean they're funneling cash?

No.

What that means is that for years when he was vice president and between the Trump years, he was marketing himself as a possible future president, his family was receiving money.

And the people who gave the family money know it, and they have documentation of that.

And the Biden family knows that at any given time, a Ukrainian or a Chinese Communist Party member who masquerades as a captain of industry can release information.

So, yes, he's compromised.

And he has a rendezvous with some accounting when the Republicans take the house.

And then Kevin McCarthy is going to have to decide just what he wants to do.

Does he want to create a media storm and go through the whole thing again and impeach the guy?

And I think he's going to have to for this, but also the border.

So we're going to be into some stormy times because we've got a recession right now and we've got hyperinflation and we're in denial.

And we've got a crooked president who is not in control of his faculties.

And we have a new party coming in in November, at least in the House, I think the Senate as well.

And we're going to have a rancorous impeachment.

And the Democrats, this is what they will do after

impeaching a president in his first term, the moment he lost his House majority.

They're going to say, when the Republicans say, hmm, we've never done that before in a president's first term, impeach an opposition person once we got control of the House.

But since you taught us, that that's perfectly legitimate and you impeached him on a phone call And the phone call, in light of what we're talking about, Jack, looks pretty prescient when Donald Trump basically said, I want to put a hold on this aid for a little while.

And he didn't cancel it.

And it was more generous than anything Obama gave.

But he was suspicious that this family was crooked.

And they are.

So that was another one of Trump's instincts that proved correct.

But my point is that if we do this, watch the Democrats because they will, this is outrageous.

This is exactly what the founders were against, the idea that we're a parliamentary democracy and that when you don't have a majority anymore, then you get impeached, just like they did with the filibuster in the Senate on judicial appointments.

And at some point,

our independent swing voter should conclude these people are adolescents.

They are adolescents.

They

make these little rules like a little child.

And then when the rules don't favor them, they throw a temper tantrum and then they engage these levers of influence, you know, academia, media, popular culture.

But boy, how they sit here and watch this president

every single day say something insane or do something injurious to the country or give more and more revelation that he's compromised by the Chinese, by the Ukrainians, by probably by the Russians.

Who knows?

Hunter was all over the globe.

What I don't understand, Jack, is how does he rent a $20,000

a month rental in Malibu?

And why are we paying the Secret Service $30,000 a month to live out there on that celebrity beach to watch this crackhead?

It makes no sense whatsoever.

This whole family, I think all of our listeners should just take a deep breath.

We're just going to pass a bill that's almost going to double the size of the IRS, and it's going to send thousands of agents all over the country after the independent semi-truck driver, the plumber, the electrician that's a contractor, if they didn't do this and this.

And then right in the middle of this whole process of beefing up the IRS, you have the president who's got these beautiful, expensive homes, and we don't know how he got the money.

And then we have his son, who apparently doesn't have any more income and goes through money, I don't know, like a forest fire.

And yet he's got 20.

So Joe has been giving him money.

And we have Joe on tape.

Did he pay?

You can't do that after $15,000 a year.

Did he funnel it to children?

I don't know.

But this is just crazy to beef up the IRS when a walking IRS violator is the first family.

Right.

About that, Victor, just the $15,000 number you just mentioned, and I assume most listeners know but you can give an individual a 50 I think it's actually like 16,000 now 60,000 yeah I think it might have gone up to 17 I don't know yeah but it's not taxable but beyond that it's uh actually for the giver it's like a it's a gift tax which is crazy it's like 50 or something yeah 42 or something it's high yeah

Victor I wanted to talk more about about China, but you brought up the 700 now, 700 billion.

Oh, it's not, at least it wasn't, you know, it's much less than it was.

Well, it's going to be $700 billion

more pumped into

an

over-inflated economy.

It's just, gosh, it's insane.

But the point you, one of the highlights you just mentioned, of course, is the rampant, not rampant, well, it's aggressive hiring of IRS agents.

You don't need an IRS, by the way.

America for the longest time did not have IRS agents.

We collected money from tariffs for

we know how you could get money.

You could have a straight flat tax, 10, 20, 30%

on your income,

no deductions for almost, really, no deductions for almost anything, and just send in a postcard and you get more money than you have now.

Well, my point, though, is you're right.

I'm saying there's nothing inherent to our republic about income tax collection.

There is something inherent to our republic about that it's a sovereign nation with borders.

And we're hoping that.

Oh, you brought up borders.

I can tell you, Jack, that if I get in a pickup right now, and I don't want to name the direction because there's a lot of gangbangers around here, but if I were to drive one mile in one direction, I would see a little mart at a four corners stop sign.

And I could buy cold drinks,

I could buy clothes, I could buy shovels, I could buy flour, I could buy anything.

And I will tell you that I will not pay any sales tax.

And then I could drive about another mile and I could see one of the largest, I guess you'd call it, flea market markets.

And if I want a brand new shovel, bang.

If I want a mattress still in its plastic case, bam.

If I want a nursery expensive tree with the price tag on it, bam, I can get it.

And there is no sales tax.

And so what I'm getting is

this country has a huge underground black market where people are selling stuff all the time and they're not paying sales tax.

Some states, that's okay, but not in California, it's okay.

And my point is this, is that this unequal application of the law, that's what's driving people crazy.

When they say we're going to beef up the IRS, they do not mean that they're going to go after George Soros' taxes or even Donald Trump's.

They're not going to do that.

They're going to go, well, maybe Donald Trump's, they will, but they're not going to go after the very wealthy and they're not going to go after the very poor or the illegal alien.

Trust me.

They're going to go after the middle and upper middle class.

because those are the people they despise and they despise especially the self-employed business person and they're going to go after them and they're going to say, you know what, they're going to go after whether they have,

you know, they write off an office in their living room.

They're going to go after everything because they're desperate for money.

We've got $31 trillion in debt.

What's amusing about this administration is their Orwellian vocabulary.

So when you want to run up

the debt, and you want to fuel more entitlements, when you're running 9.1 inflation and you want to have all new programs, climate change, then you call it the inflation fighting bill, just like you call almost everything the opposite.

And that's what they do.

And so recessions are not recessions.

Inflation is not inflation.

The only way to crack inflation, we know that, is to have high interest rates higher than the rate of inflation.

We're not doing that.

Second is to restrict the money supply that we're expanding the money.

I think we've had $7 trillion since the last year of the Trump administration and reduce spending.

And we're doing none of that.

And so we're going to continue to have inflation.

And we're in a recession.

And we're going to get another quarter of negative growth by the third quarter.

This administration will lie, lie, lie, oh, it's not a recession or it's transitory or this or that.

And by 1981 standards, if we were to calibrate inflation and have its full effect to the, what I call the stuff of life, rent, housing prices,

the whole thing, we would be in double digits, way over double digits, in mid-double digits.

And so it's not that good right now.

And this administration has no clue how to get over it.

If you have an open border for them, you let in another million people until if you have prosecutors that won't put people in jail, then you get more of them.

If you are not pumping ANWAR or you're not going to build a pipeline, then you put federal leases off out of bounds too.

Whatever doesn't work, you double down on it.

And then you lie and say you're not, or you attack your people who are criticizing them as right-wingers or ultra-mega or racist.

And just a question.

I don't know the answer to this, but this brings up an existential question that's thematic to everything we talk about on these podcasts the last

year and a half.

What we're watching is not sustainable.

The border is not sustainable.

Inflation is not sustainable.

The energy situation is not sustainable.

This appeasing foreign policy, and it's not even appeasing, it's just incoherent, is not sustainable.

The woke movement is not sustainable.

At what point

do we see a general collapse, or does the pushback come muscularly enough and quick enough?

And I don't have that answer, but.

Victor, I was

yesterday dwelling

on this.

And I'll be the conspiracy theorist.

And I'm not saying you were wrong earlier.

You talked about these essentially these cry babies or you said Biden doesn't know how to get out of it.

It's almost this part and parcel of another aspect of the

self-infliction to destroy what we are as a people.

There's a war against farming, so it affects what we can eat.

There's a war against water.

There's a war against biology.

There's a war against Western civilization and our past and our culture.

Everything that's fundamental to us is

there's an onslaught and

it's conceived.

I'm worried about it.

It's dedicated and it's part of it.

This is what totalitarian means.

This is what I'm worried about because this is even, but this is even totalitarianism.

This is just pre-civilizational chaos.

If you look at the airlines, it's chaos.

If you look at Gavin Newsom giving people $500 if you're an illegal alien or $400 to fill up when he won't pump gas or oil,

or

$15 billion for high-speed rail when people are dying every day on these clogged, antiquated freeways.

Nothing works.

And you look at the border and you think, wait a minute,

of the 2 million plus who come across, can American do that?

In other words, you get the idea that if American just walks across the Canadian border without a passport or some ID, he's not going to get in the United States.

So we're basically telling the American citizen, and I wrote about it in the dying city, we're saying to them, you're a second-rate person.

We like this person from Oaxaca or Guatemala or Haiti or Iraq much better than we like you because we're going to require of you something that we're not going to require of somebody who's breaking the law.

What I'm worried about is

also,

this is very much like the St.

Just Robespierre reign of terror of 1793.

It is.

They just didn't go into big chateaus and strip them down and carry off their stuff.

They didn't just go out to the Catholic monasteries and butcher all the rape the nuns and butcher all the priests and the monks.

They didn't just go after all their political opponents.

They didn't just go after the oligarch.

They also went after the culture.

They changed the names of the days of the week.

They changed the names of everything.

They created a new God reason, secular atheist idea.

And then you had the pushback.

And that pushback was Napoleon.

And the same thing happened in Weimar.

It was nuts.

And then you got this crazy national socialism.

And if you look at Russia in that last two years of the war, 1917, 1918,

and then you look at 20, 21, and then you got the hardcore Bolsheviks.

Right.

And so

This chaos is going to get a backlash.

I think it's incumbent for everybody that we make sure that it is a constitutional conservative traditional backlash because there's going to be a lot of people who say this stuff i will end it now and you've got to be careful about that right not that napoleon was any worse than the reign of terror he's i mean he ended up killing more people and with his wars but my point is we're in chaos right now and we've got to stop it and the only way you can stop it is constitutionally and you've got to go out and vote.

You've got to vote for conservative, traditional candidates.

You can't vote for a Mitt Romney anymore.

Those days are over with.

You can't go out and say, I want a sober and judicious guy who wants to work with you.

You can't work with these people.

They interpret magnanimity as weakness to be exploited, as I would say, not to be reciprocated and kind.

So there's going to be a backlash.

It's just...

How, what is the nature?

When does it come?

How forceful.

And as a general rule, the more forceful you have a constitutional backlash, the less likely you will have an unconstitutional one.

And people are saying, this is not civilization.

So we're seeing things, Jack, you know, this monkey pox.

I'm just getting off topic, but think about it for a minute.

We know how it spreads.

We know when it spreads.

Our federal agencies say it's 95%

men and spread through sex

and spread through multiple sex partners.

And we know this takes place.

And so this crazy left,

they will tell you, Jack, if you have a relative that dies a year ago or two years, you couldn't go to the funeral.

Or they will tell you if you don't get a booster.

Fauci said it today.

This is a guy who's had two boosters,

two shots, and two doses of Pavlovo.

Okay.

And now he's saying, you've got to get this new booster.

And I'm guaranteeing it's going to be super, super, super.

We should believe him.

And if you don't do it, you're endangering everybody else.

Well, why doesn't he say as the highest paid health official?

And in addition,

we're getting a scary monkeypox.

But unlike COVID, we know a lot about it.

And we already have a sort of

idea who gets it.

We don't know.

We can't say 95% of these people get COVID at this particular type of activity.

We do know with monkeypox, we could stop it tomorrow if we had a widespread educational effort that said, if you are a man that has sexual relations with a man, we're asking you for a hiatus of multiple partners for three months, or we were asking you not to go to areas where there is group sex.

Any of that.

We're not doing any of that.

In fact, what I just said, I'll probably get rebuke.

No, no, but Victor, you're if this is Groundhog Day, this happened last year with the outbreak of, you know, one of the strains.

It came, there was some, I know this because my friends who are straight happened to be there in Provincetown.

There was some massive, massive,

you know, orgy going on there.

And then a couple of days later, remember, you know, some

that was when we were told that the Moderna and Pfizer were 95%

solid.

But this was before,

maybe we're not talking about the same thing.

No, no, no, I think we're talking.

My point is we can't, we will not, we, the government, will not talk about

certain protected classes when it comes to

public health.

We had this gay retreat, and all of a sudden people who were double vacc said,

I got Delta.

And then people said, well, maybe this particular variant, if you are very intimate, and I don't know what the thing is, but the point is that there was never any mention of the activity that might have made you more prone to get COVID despite being vaccinated twice.

Right.

Certain activities are more sacrosanct.

But then, I mean,

you're on the East Coast, so we're hearing polio is making its re-emergence.

Right.

And polio.

We used to lecture people all over the world.

You're not doing this.

You're not doing this.

Your sewer is this.

And the polio virus you know it can be excreted and it can do what did we think was going to happen when we look at our cities what do we think is when you walk over somebody and you see feces and urine and vermin and flotsam and jetsam all over the sidewalk in san francisco los angeles new york what did we think was going you're going to have a biblical plague and so we are

unable we're unable as a society to say there are no good choices, but there are choices that are better and worse.

A biblical plague is the worst.

And

bad, but not worse, is taking everybody off the street and building humane shelters away from the main town.

I don't know if that's a, you know,

baseball stadium parking lot or something to give humane housing, but take people out of a congested, congregated area and have toilets and facilities and designate people to clean up every day.

And we can't do that, right?

We just are incapable of doing that.

And we're incapable of dealing with any of these diseases.

There are going to be a lot more of them that come up.

And we're just incapable.

That's on the pre-civilizational level, Jack.

But when you look at the post-civilizational,

look at what Heather McDonald wrote today.

She was going through what the criteria are in medical schools.

And basically, she's saying people are being let into medical schools based on criteria that they never would have been admitted any other time.

Their test scores are either below the minimum or they're not even asking for test scores.

In other words, there's something now called woke admissions.

Who is that going to help?

And who's that going to hurt?

And so.

We're just saying to ourselves that right in the middle of a pandemic, when we have all of these new viruses and bacterial infection, everything coming out of our dark past,

what are we doing?

We're saying that the woke movement will ensure that we don't have the best and the best medical care.

And, you know, when I look at things about long COVID, and this is what is really strange, if you take long COVID

and you Google it under news, the daily things, you're not going to find very many news stories that say new drug being tested.

You're not.

You're going to be seeing stories like long COVID, new study shows long COVID disproportionately impacts this marginalized community, or stories from this particular community.

And what I'm getting at is they're therapeutic.

We are diverting a large amount of capital and labor and time away from this is a virus.

This causes COVID.

One in five, one in 10, one in eight, people can't get over it.

This is what we're trying to do to help everybody, everybody.

It reminds me of reading about the Soviet army, you know, when they went into Poland in 21 or 39 or Finland.

And instead of that is the enemy, this is the target, this is the plan, it is,

well, who was your grandfather?

And what did he do before the revolution?

And how did you get promoted?

And when you ordered that retreat, that was a failure of revolutionary fervor.

So we're going to shoot you.

And that's what it was.

And this is very scary because this country was based on a meritocracy and open and free ideas and empiricism.

And we're becoming deductive, anti-empirical, anti-scientific, pre-civilizational.

And

it's not going to end well.

It's not going to end well.

There are other things that might not end well, and that has to do with China and Taiwan.

And let's talk about that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

We are recording on Sunday, August 7th, and this particular episode should be up on the World Wide Web on Tuesday the 9th.

Victor, before

we

get your thoughts on Taiwan,

I do want to remind our listeners that you have a website, victorhanson.com.

And there is a plethora.

There's just every week, you're writing like three or or four original pieces exclusively for your website.

It also has links to everything else you do,

these podcasts, other appearances.

For example, last week you were on Megan Kelly's podcast.

There's a link to that on your website, plus the pieces you write for American Greatness and your syndicated column.

I want to really encourage folks to subscribe.

It's $5 a month, $50 a year.

You cannot read, get this wisdom that Victor is dispensing regularly unless you're a subscriber.

One of those pieces, by the way, just to reflect back on the discussion we were having, is Civilization in Reverse.

This is a three-part series where many of the things you just talked about are highlighted in this

three-part.

It's just terrific, and it's very, of course, it's very common sensible.

It begins, you say, we certainly have more freedom now from what?

To have our 90-year-old mother in a scary home rather than in the back bedroom, to spot our supposedly crazy brother as a homeless person defecating in the street rather than living in the garage back home.

And you go on and on about on a whole, you reflect all over society in many aspects.

So I do want to recommend folks read that, but read it by subscribing.

So,

Victor,

about

let me just ask, you mentioned this piece by Heather McDonald.

Was that in, do you remember where you read it?

Yeah, I think it was,

yes, I do.

It was

in City Journal.

City Journal?

Okay.

City Journal is the quarterly, well, they have a great website, but it's the quarterly publication of.

As I've said before, one of the first things I always do is

I always look at power lines.

Power line.

Yeah, those guys are really good.

They're an aggregator, but they also have their own original content.

But I think it was called The Corruption of Medicine.

It was in City Journal, which is an excellent magazine.

Sometimes I say it's the best magazine in America.

Brian Anderson is, you're a contributing editor to that.

Yeah, he's a wonderful guy.

Oh, gosh, so was Myron Magnet, the prior editor.

Never, never a bad piece there.

So,

Victor, you and Heather, Heather is courageous.

She just writes, she's empirical.

She just writes what is the truth.

And then she

knows that if she does that, she's going to be attacked and defamed.

And she doesn't care.

She'll take a, you know, she'll take a punch.

And literally, and again, before we get to China and Taiwan, back a little bit on what you were saying about what people should do in a constitutional response to things.

I think,

and there's two things.

One, to me, looking for leadership in this time that's um trustworthy is an

i think that's an important aspect but also individuals um have to learn to take a punch even they might get punched in the face literally but they can't live in fear they you know they can't put up they can't put up a black lives matter lawn sign because they're afraid if they don't their neighbors who are woke and aggressive are gonna you know they're they're just like they're living in a uh an apartment building in romania about 1950, and they're worried that the concierge is spying on them and will rat on them.

And that's the kind of, that's what, see, people don't realize that this, this is not liberalism.

This isn't even progressivism.

This is Jacobinism, Sovietization of the left wing.

And it's a natural trajectory of left-wing stuff.

It always ends up this way unless they stop it, and they didn't stop it.

So every revolution eats the revolutionary of the day before, and he will be eaten by tomorrow's revolutionary.

But you know what's just on Heather, it's very strange that three of the bravest traditional columnists who are writing from a conservative point of view are all women.

I mean, it's Molly Hemingway, Heather McDonald, and Kimberly Strassel.

They're blunt, they're courageous, they just write, and they get a lot of heat from the left, but also from the Never Trump right and also from the mainstream.

And I always try to read what they write because it's a surety that it's going to be true in the sense that they're going to write what they see as a truth rather than to, you know, well, I shouldn't quite say this and I might want not want to do this and etc.

Well, the enemy is, you know, people pick their enemies.

And

when you see that there really is a they and they are the left and they are out to destroy everything we believe in.

And meanwhile, as opposed to,

you know, the circular firing squad.

That's a good point, Jack, because

if we gave them everything they want right now, what would our life be like?

That's a very good question, because there would be no borders.

So it would be sort of like a tribal pre-Roman Europe, where we'd just have a large group of people would drift in and out.

They would sort of just settle in a particular place and then move on.

And we wouldn't have our cars.

Obviously, they would ban them.

So we'd all be queuing up for buses.

And they would probably make it very difficult to live in a detached house out in the country.

And you probably want everybody to be on mass transit run by unions and with the type of crime you see on mass transit going to your apartment, like the Soviets in the 1960s.

And then we would have these guys that had, instead of DACA, they would have these, you know, like the Obamas, their Martha Vineyard, their Hawaii, their Colorama Washington Mansion, the Nomenclatura.

And that's where we're headed if we don't stop it.

And they also, they shun people.

Again, recommending your Stephen Quay

interview, which is just terrific.

He mentioned that, you know, scientists, right?

This is about science, about facts.

That people he's worked with for 40 years have clearly let politicization into the scientific process and have shunned him for the work he's done.

It's

well, I mean, that's why he

in that interview and

his testimony two days after I did the interview, but two days before we released it, he appeared before the Senate and he talked about biblical things in the sense that this could be the next time it could be something that would bring civilization back a millennium.

And by that, he means don't think

that because

everybody now is coming to a consensus that the Wuhan Wuhan lab was the genesis of SARS, of the SARS virus and the COVID pandemic, don't think it stopped.

In other words, that type of research is continuing.

And

because there were leaks before the COVID virus, there will be leaks after the COVID virus.

Right.

And because...

There are people within an autocratic society in China who see that when the whole thing is said and done, the Chinese ended up better off after than before in comparison to Europe and the United States.

And therefore, they may sort of kind of

maybe

not be as eager to ensure complete safety in that lab.

Don't be surprised if we have people in the West that right now are contextualizing why they are sending equipment, but more importantly, expertise that allowed these Chinese rank amateurs to investigate things like genetically altered lungs within mice that resemble human lungs, so they could experiment.

That came from, as he said, that came from America.

That came from North Carolina.

It did, absolutely.

And EchoHealth channeled money from America.

And Fauci knew that that was going on.

And there were things from Europe that were,

I think the French built the lab.

So my point is that don't think that this is not going to happen again.

And we're in an age of globalization.

So, it's not like somebody can't get on a plane from Wuhan and be in Fresno in 20 hours.

Very easy to do.

Yeah, well, for a nation that doesn't really care when 10 million people die of starvation here or 20 million there, this worked out for them pretty well in the geopolitical

hegemonic sense.

Anyway, Victoria.

What I know is before COVID,

the Chinese military was not threatening taiwan to the degree they are after covet they were yeah covet plus afghanistan right yeah

well we could go on

well let's well let's talk let's talk about that yeah yeah just to pre to pre uh set up the the uh taiwan discussion well just two quick things one is uh this morning nancy Pelosi, whose visit to Taiwan set off, I think it's a straw.

It wasn't the sole event.

I think Afghanistan and Ukraine and Russia are the precursors to China's looking for an excuse.

And maybe she gave them the excuse.

But anyway, she said as a kid, oh, why is she, why is her fascination with things, China?

And it's because, well, when I was a kid, you know, we were told we dig a hole and dig the hole all the way to China.

And that's when I began my fascination with China.

And, you know, as excuses.

go, you know, I didn't inhale and a host of things we've heard politically.

It just sounds like such tripe.

And then the second little cultural thing related to China, Snickers, the Mars Candy Bar Company, which produces Snickers and MMs.

And let me tell you, I'm an aficionado on the MMs front.

I don't know if I will be after this, but they release some kind of candy in a few countries, put out some statement,

Asian countries, South Korea, I don't know, maybe the Philippines.

But they mentioned Taiwan.

Oh, no, Taiwan's a country.

So the people that make your MMs had to grovel and send out a new press release.

Oh, no, you know, Taiwan's not a country.

Sorry, so sorry, so sorry.

So, uh, that all that said, Victor, um, we have uh

communist China with

much more than saber rattling

directed at uh Taiwan.

And your thoughts on why this is happening?

Is it going to if you have any

how it might stop or when it might stop or why it might stop?

I'm not confident.

Okay,

USS Ronald Reagan is out there well aside from the question

is it a good investment to spend 14 billion dollars on a 105 000 ton aircraft carrier they're very valuable i'm not deprecating their use i'm proud of them i've been in a port when they come in abroad it's something to see but do we need 12 of them

when the chinese brag every single day they have the ability and i think they do have the ability to sink them very quickly when they get close within the taiwanese strait but my point is

i am sure that the regan has a diverse crew i am sure that they use they or he the proper pronoun but i am not sure that that is deterring the chinese and so what i'm getting at is china based on afghanistan

based on

these social justice woke things they hear about the Pentagon based on the fact that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs called his Chinese PLA counterpart, we're told, and he admitted and warned him that he was worried about his own president.

This is Dr.

Milley, you know, the psychiatrist.

And this is a president who was being criticized as being a neo-isolationist that wouldn't intervene.

But nevertheless, he said he could intervene and intervene anywhere with nuclear weapons.

And if he did, he was going to tip off the Chinese military in advance.

Okay.

We've talked about that before, but that gave a message.

The Chinese thought, this is so weird.

Who is this guy?

So now, have you been hearing that the Pentagon's calls are not being returned?

Because they have nothing but contempt for our officer corps, nothing but contempt for the U.S.

military after Afghanistan.

Nothing but contempt.

after all the social justice posturing.

Nothing but contempt about, well, we're going to support Ukraine, or we maybe not support Ukraine, or we're going to get Zelensky and fly him out, but maybe we shouldn't.

And Donald Trump shouldn't have done this.

And the Chinese are thinking, hmm, shouldn't have done what?

Told the North Koreans he had a bigger nuclear button than they did and stopped their test.

Hmm.

Told us that we couldn't do this and this and this, or we're going to have tariffs, which he pushed on us.

Hmm.

Said to Putin, if you go into Ukraine, you might find something, your spires in the Kremlin might glow, or something supposedly to that effect.

So they're thinking,

we're not worried about the United States.

We're not worried at all.

If we go into Taiwan, the question is, is it in our interest in a cost-to-benefit analysis?

That's the only thing right now that is saving Taiwan.

And they don't know the answer to that because the Ukrainian thing is not over yet.

One week, everybody says Zelensky is a Churchillian figure that stopped the Russian invasion.

Next week, he embarrasses himself as if he's a metrosexual with his wife in Vogue.

And he starts whining about the United States hasn't given him the latest weapon system after we've already given him $45

billion.

And we're squaring off with a power that has 7,000 nukes and has a bunch of nuts in its parliament that keep threatening us.

And the next week, he's making...

inroads again.

So we don't know how that's going to end.

The Chinese don't either.

They're calibrating the world response.

And everybody on the left said, see, this is what global Davos people can do.

We've really ostracized the Russians.

Those oligarchs can't get their yachts out of Cyprus or they can't get them out of Venice.

Ha ha, this really, no, they're selling oil more than they ever have.

The Indians and the Chinese, which are 40% of the world's population, are gulping it down.

Russia's flush with cash.

Okay, so we don't know how that is, but that and that alone stops that uncertainty for now, means that they're going to threaten Taiwan, but they're not going to go in until they see exactly what the Western response is and what the world says about Russia in the end.

And we'll see, but when Nancy Pelosi

decides to go over there, if you're going to take Vienna, take Vienna, as Napoleon said.

So she said she was going to go over there.

First time we've had a major third-ranking person in the government since Ginrich did it, but he did it when there was a weak China, not a strong China.

First of all, it was a stupid thing to do because Nancy Pelosi is a stupid diplomat.

And you mentioned to me about that she said she's loved China because there's a little girl she dug on the ground and thought she could go to China.

I'll let the left deal with that condescending, semi-racist, I don't know what it is, but it's Nancy Pelosi.

This is a woman who in 2007, right at the heart of the surge, right at the heart when the Assad

kleptocracy was sending thousands of jihadists to kill Americans in Iraq, right a year after

Syria and Hezbollah and all the Lebanese nuts had attacked Israel, she went over there and said the road to peace goes through Damascus.

Remember that, Jack?

Freelanced, right?

Tried to embarrass George W.

Bush.

And just a woman who was briefed on

enhanced interrogations and said, bring it on, boy, after 9-11.

We need more of this.

And then later said that these people were war criminals that had briefed her.

So she is an incompetent, and she's close to Biden's level of cognizance.

She's not aging well.

And she went to Taiwan at a nadir

in the

status of the American military.

So she basically talked loudly and carried a stick.

Once you say you're going to go, you got to go.

Otherwise, you're basically saying the Chinese have absolute veto power over where we can and cannot go, i.e., we are officials.

But then, guess what happened?

The Pentagon wink and nod, oh, please don't go.

The president, oh, I think the Pentagon said don't go.

So, you had the White House,

the Pentagon, and Nancy all fighting with each other.

And the Chinese love that because it showed them they were strong and united, and we were weak and divided.

And then she goes, and the Chinese,

we better not do anything when she's here.

But as soon as she goes back to her Napa Valley estate, we're going to really intimidate these people.

And they're doing that.

What did she accomplish?

I don't know what she accomplished.

All she accomplished is that the United States is not on the same page, that the Biden administration is confused, that there were no new initiatives, that China basically reacted in a way that scared everybody.

And people are now saying, please don't do this anymore.

But we don't have the ability to deter anybody in the South China Sea.

And I just wish that Mark Milley and Lloyd Austin would find a way to translate that, what is it, $700 billion budget into a mean and lean fighting machine that can deter people rather than a bloated, bureaucratic, woke institution that concentrates on white rage and the proper pronouns and pregnancy suits for pilots and so on.

That's where we are.

And it's met 40%, as we've said before, of its recruiting in the U.S.

Army.

So

Victor,

I don't want to cheapen our geopolitics, but

if I was Red China, here's a piece in the American Spectator, and this will be,

comment on this, and then

we're going to be running out of time.

But

this has to do with, here's the headline.

It's probably a piece by Francis Sempa.

Air Force drag queen show betrays the military's mission.

And

a couple of things before the drag show.

Parameters, which is new to me, but this is the flagship journal, the Army War College.

It now has a section on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

And the Navy, of course, has created a video to, here I'm reading now from Sempa, to instruct its members to use proper pronouns and create safe spaces for all Navy personnel.

And now the U.S.

Air Force reportedly hosted a drag queen show at the Joint Base Langley, Eustis,

as part of its summer festival on diversity, equity, inclusion.

This,

I'm going to read the military news reports, Joshua Kelly, that's the guy's name, aka Harpy Daniels, the Navy drag queen, performed for adults and children at the festival.

Victor, I raise this not so much as part of my, you know, right-wing Catholic jihad against anything I don't, that doesn't meet with the catechism.

But this is, we're in difficult times militarily and national security, and you would think a military would be sensitive to the dynamics of what's going on and how its actions are perceived as weakness or strength in the eyes of

nasty actors like Red China.

If I'm Red China, I'm looking at them like, who the hell are these people?

This is their military?

No, you wouldn't be surprised because the people who are organizing that

at the

captain, major, lieutenant, colonel, colonel level,

they understand

that their promotion or their ability to be attached to the National Security Council or a Pentagon post or whatever it is will not depend on putting so many shells on the target, but they're going to brag about their work with diversity, equity, inclusion.

So what, and remember when you said at a time of turmoil, what the message is coming out of Lloyd Austin.

Pentagon and Mark Mille's is that if you're a family, I don't know, what, in Oklahoma, and one member of that family died in Vietnam, and his son fought in the First Gulf War, and his son went into the surge and his daughter was in Afghanistan, and now their fourth generation is 18 in rural Oklahoma, and they think, I love this country, and I want to join the U.S.

Army Rangers or I want to go into the Marine Corps or whatever it is.

they get a message.

And the message is, well, you can come in, but you're under suspicion the moment you come in of white rage.

And we want you to read Professor Kendi's book about how you have to be a good racist to root out bad racists.

And you're suspect because of white privilege, and you're going to go to these certain workshops.

We're going to have drag queen entertainment.

We're going to have pronoun,

we're going to have pronoun workshops, etc.

You're going to do that.

And if you do all of that and you satisfy us that you're not a white racist, then we're going to send you to somewhere in the Middle East.

And you may be blown up in Afghanistan.

You may get blown up in Iraq.

You can be killed in Syria.

But whatever it is, we're going to guarantee you that you're going to die twice what your demographic is in the general population, you and your brother, your cousin, your friends.

So you have all this white privilege and all of this white rage.

And you know what that earns you in the U.S.

racially obsessed military, gender-obsessed military, sexuality-obsessed military.

That probably earns you a guarantee that you have twice the likelihood to die in combat as any of these other groups.

Again, I want to make it clear, I'm not trying to focus on race, gender, sexual.

I am reflecting the Pentagon's obsessions on that.

They will talk about that ad nauseum, except where it matters who dies and who doesn't.

So what they're doing is they are taking a demographic from rural America or from small town America of mostly white males.

who have a long family tradition of fighting in the worst places in the world in combat units and at dying twice their numbers in the general population.

And they are telling them, you are suspect.

And they're telling them that, not because they are suspect, but because the people telling them that want to get promoted and they want to have a career after they retire.

And they think the corporations that might hire them are woke.

And that is what they're doing.

And when they do all of this other stuff, I guess the premise, Jack, is if the Army can't get any more than 40% of its recruitment, it thinks, you know what?

We're going to have some drag queens in our combat units, and we're going to have a lot of pregnant women in the air, and we're going to drop the physical requirement.

We're going to have a lot of transgendered soldiers, and maybe they'll be just as good.

I hope they will be.

But that's an experiment, isn't it?

And so we'll see.

And we'll see.

It doesn't even matter if they will be as good.

It'll be the perception of what the Russians or the Chinese or the North Koreans or the Iranians think of all this, because they will take chances that they otherwise would not have taken if they feel the United States has lost its deterrence.

And when you have this going on at the grassroots level, but at the top echelon of the U.S.

military, you have people testifying before Congress that they are fixating on people's race and gender as somewhat culpable until proven innocent, and they are calling up their Chinese counterpart, or the retired officer corps is vying with one another to see who can come up with the most creative

slur against the commander.

When you have all of that going on, and I've been beating this drum and I've been really attacked for it, but the point is, as people who love the military, this is tragic what's happening.

And we're all going to be in danger.

I would just like to tell the military, you're getting a lot of money.

Now, Donald Trump gave you even more money because Obama had cut you back, but why don't you please spend that money on combat units and missile defense?

Reagan talked about Star Wars, but we never really did it.

Let's get a missile defense system that does to strategic weapons what Israel's does to tactical weapons.

And let's see if we can protect the homeland and let's cut out all of this other stuff.

Right.

I mean,

there are truly national security implications to all this woke idiocy.

All right, Victor, that's about all the time we have except to do our usual

business at the end of the program.

One is to, well, I need to make a little pitch for what I do.

Jack Fowler, I write Civil Thoughts for the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic.

I do more than that, but that's one of the things I do.

And Civil Thoughts is a free weekly email email newsletter that has a dozen 12, 13 recommended readings, and there's no cost, totally free.

Your name's not put on any selling email list.

It's just

food for thought.

And I think you might enjoy it.

So why don't you subscribe?

Go to civilthoughts.com, sign up.

And if you're interested in the Center for Civil Society, and we exist to strengthen civil society, and damn, it needs it, visit centerforcivilsociety.com.

Again, Victor Hanson, S-O-N-Hanson.com.

Please, you know, visit Victor's website and subscribe, and you will regret not having done so sooner.

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So we thank our listeners.

We're happy.

This seems to be

meeting your intellectual needs, this program.

Victor, anyway, those who do leave comments, here's one I just like to read from Teddy Toons,

who left this the other day.

And

it's titled Unassailable.

And his comment is sober, lucid commentary based on historical logic and reason, and armed with an inexhaustible supply of information retrieved on the fly during his analysis and entertaining rants.

I don't think they're rants, Victor, but it's

just ranting.

I got to be careful.

Maybe I can, since we're all victims, I can say long COVID did it too.

I had brain-swelling brain problems.

Oh, Maro Nami.

It's

your ants are lectures, really.

VDH is an absolute requirement for unraveling and understanding the apparent insanity that is gripping our world.

That's Teddy Toons.

Thanks to you, Teddy Toons.

Thanks.

all who leave comments.

We do read them, including the comments that are left on Victor's website.

There's some great stuff there, too.

So thanks, Victor.

Thank you again for sharing your wisdom, your ranting.

It's terrific stuff.

And we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Thank you, everybody, for listening, and we'll see you next time, or talk to you next time, or listen to you next time.

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