The Waning of Trust in Our Leaders

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Hello, ladies, hello gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

We are recording on the last day of July.

It's July 31st, Sunday.

I'm Jack Fowler.

It's kind of, it's getting late in the evening here in Milford, Connecticut, but back, back in beautiful California.

Overpriced, but beautiful California is Victor Davis-Hanson, the star.

The star.

Hey, Victor, I was out there the other day.

I bought some gas.

You were right.

It was freaking $7 a guy.

I paid over $6.

Yeah, it's crazy.

You know, in case the folks are new listeners, they should know, Victor, that you are the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

We've got plenty to talk about today.

The first item will be that, you know, the gift that keeps on giving, Hunter Biden, and the FBI and their collusion, maybe.

Let's talk about that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

Victor, maybe collusion was the wrong word, but the news,

some news this week is that Senator Chuck Gray from Iowa, who's the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, has written Attorney General Merrick Garland about some whistleblower information that shows that the

FBI,

not low-level agents, but higher up was a conspiracy.

Yeah, we've never heard about this before, that the FBI agents of leadership engages in conspiracies, but that there was a determined effort to suppress the news about what was the potential of Hunter Biden's

laptop and the FBI was engaged in some sort of political disinformation campaign before the 2020 election.

Victor,

what do you have to say about this other than you're not surprised?

Well, I mean, when you get to the FBI, we've kind of beaten that dead horse, but the Washington hierarchy, I mean, just think what we've seen, Jack, in the last four years.

We've seen the FBI put that laptop on ice.

Now we learn that prominent agents, operatives and the FBI,

were actively working on behalf of

i guess the joe biden campaign to keep that laptop investigation on ice until after the election we've seen james baker the chief legal counsel who was trying to peddle it or negotiate with the media before the election we've got james 245 times i don't remember comey before congress We've got Robert Mueller.

I have no idea what the steel dossier or fusion GPS is.

We have Kevin Kleinsmith, who forged a document, or I should say altered a document to incriminate an innocent Carter Page.

We've got the lovebirds of Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, who mysteriously were reassigned from that special committee a month apart.

We never knew why, Jack.

Isn't that weird?

And

we've got them all there.

And we've got cell phones that nobody can find and no information that's under subpoena can be brought forth.

So the FBI has been weaponized.

It's not its agents in the field, make no mistake about that, but the hierarchy in Washington is corrupt.

Much of the CIA is too.

And you mentioned the 50 professional intelligence operatives or intelligence officers who I think it was James Clapper, wasn't it?

Or was it Brennan or both of them who solicited that letter on the eve of the 2020 election to reassure us that Vladimir Putin was behind that laptop.

They had no evidence of that, but they hinted sort of kind of, this is what it is, and they squashed that story along with the Washington Post, NPR, New York Times, et cetera.

Think of that.

That was 50 of them, and they joined the pantheon of our experts, Jack.

If I could just expound a little bit.

The reason that why Americans do not trust the government or do not trust their alphabetic soup personnel in the federal government is because they're weaponized, they're politicized, and they have mortgaged their expertise to ideological concerns and careerist aspirations.

And by that, I mean those 50 joined that stellar array of economists.

Remember them, Jack?

15 Nobel Prize winners who assured us that Joe Biden's rampant spending, his subsidy for labor non-participation, all all of the low interest, that would not lead to inflation.

They told us that.

That's like the 1,200 medical professionals in May 2020.

They assured us that all of us dupes and rubes had to stay inside our homes.

We had to be math.

However, however, if you were going to go out in the street and protest

in the George Floyd hysteria, then it was more important to your physical and mental health to do so on mask and spreading the virus in a phalanx of protesters, many of them violent, than it was to stay home.

So they were all exempt.

I could go on, but where do I could mention the 100-plus professors at the Stanford Medical School who assured us that Scott Atlas was incompetent and almost professionally, you know, actionable, that he gave us this crazy idea.

that maybe the vaccinations were not the end-all of the virus.

Maybe it would mutate.

Maybe we should focus instead of a scatter gun approach.

Maybe we should focus on the elderly, but keep the schools open.

There would be more damage from spousal abuse, miscancer, cardiac screenings in the long run than there would be from deaths to COVID, and that red states would probably in the end have no more deaths per capita, but keep their economies intact.

For all of that, experts at Stanford Medical School censored him.

So that's why we don't trust these people.

I won't even get it.

You notice how I didn't mention Dr.

Fauci and the CDC and

the NIH and the other academic kind of thing.

Well, that's, yeah,

there's more than enough fodder here just for the FBI.

Victor,

you don't have to comment on this, but I just quickly read this.

paragraph from this letter.

Again, it's from

Charles Grassley to Merrick Garland and to Christopher Wray.

And I have a, you know, if Chuck Grassley isn't listening to this podcast, he has done a good, well, he must be channeling it somehow, because here's how he put it, was quite in line with things you've been saying for a while.

He wrote,

he had a laundry list of allegations from whistleblowers about the FBI's monkey business with Hunter Biden.

And he says, the aforementioned allegations put a finer point on concerns that I have raised for many years about political considerations infecting the decision-making process at the Justice Department and FBI.

If these allegations are true and accurate, the Justice Department and

FBI are and have been institutionally corrupted to their very core to the point in which the United States Congress and the American people will have no confidence in the equal application of the law.

I don't.

Nobody else does.

Why would we when this agent, I think his name was Thibault, he was retweeting Lincoln Project stuff, anti-Trump stuff a month before the election.

And he kept that, he suppressed evidence.

He violated FBI guidelines.

And the only reason we're hearing a whistleblower among the ranks of the outraged is because Joe Biden is considered a liability now, not an asset to Democratic aspirations in 2022.

and 24.

Believe me, if he wasn't, we wouldn't have any whistleblowers coming out.

And so people want to get rid of him.

So there's a lot of people who think, you know what, I don't mind that the FBI is helping the left.

That's what we do now.

But we can help them even more by leaking some incriminating evidence about Hunter to get rid of him because he's an albatross around our neck.

It's very miraculous, isn't it, that it's happening right now, right on the eve of the midterms when they want to get rid of Biden or Hunter or so-and-so.

But this is reminiscent of the textual exchange between Stroke and Page, you know, when they said that Trump has to be stopped at all costs.

They had this secret plan, or this plan to Andrew had a plan, or they go into Walmart and the Trump people smell,

you know, or the C, just like the CNN reporter said he's got more teeth than everybody in the crowd at a Trump rally.

And it's another argument.

We've made this so many times before, Jock, that the FBI

should be transferred.

If it's not going to to be broken up and its responsibilities distributed to other agencies within the the doj homeland security then its headquarters should be moved to lincoln nebraska or kansas city and get them out of that media cesspool that political cesspool right that intermarriage my brother looks here my brother right the intermarriage right that that that needs to be get them out of the andrew mckay my wife is running for a virginia office and getting money from a Clinton-controlled PAC, you know,

while the FBI and he in particular are investigating the Hillary Clinton email.

But it's no conflict of interest.

So it's corrupt organization.

I hate to say that because I admire every FBI agent in the field that I've met.

I've met a few of them.

I like them a great deal.

They do a wonderful job, but their hierarchy, their superiors, their elite in Washington cannot be trusted.

They're dangerous.

They're very dangerous.

They're dangerous people.

If you get on the wrong side of them, they'll show up as they did with Roger Stone

with a SWAT team as if this 60-something old man was an existential threat.

Or they're going to frog march James O'Keefe in his underwear for what?

I don't know.

Somebody let him look at a diary that his Ashley Biden forgot in an apartment.

That's a cardinal thing, isn't it?

They're going to go get Peter Navarro and treat him like he's in, I don't know, Devil's Island and handcuff him and his ankles.

That's That's all for show.

That's all to show everybody.

We're the FBI, and we're going to go after ideological opponents, so don't screw with us.

If you call us before Congress, or you write an article about us, or you go after us, we'll find a way to get back at you.

It's almost like Lois Lerner in the IRS or Loretta Lynch and the Special Products.

That's what they do.

They use government to go after people.

That's why people understandably fear government.

Well, Victor, another another reason to fear government is how it screws up our economy.

So,

second topic for today's discussion.

And by the way, this particular podcast should be aired, I believe, on August, Tuesday, August 2nd.

Again, we're recording on Sunday, July 31st.

So, Victor,

recession, the meaning of recession has been redefined.

Joe Biden

staring it in the face.

No,

we're not in a recession now.

Of course, he's been immediately aped

by,

I'll just call it the media,

for example, the great Nobel Prize-winning economist, Paul Krugman.

No, it's

not in a recession.

And on top of that, those who do say it is a recession,

I forget that I saw something on

Daily Mail.

I forget the name of the conservative economist, but he was fact-checked by the Facebook or whatever the hell it's called now.

Official fact-checkers, sorry, you know, you say we're in a recession.

We're not.

The current numbers don't

define.

This is just this.

Well, it's not nuts.

It's to be expected.

Victor, your thoughts about what does it mean to be

in a recession, if not by name.

We certainly are by reality of what it's costing us.

Well, I mean, this is what Orwell was saying in 1984 in animal farm that because the left has the moral superior ground then its means are justified by its moral ends so they change things this is we're back to overseas contingency operation in the obama administration or you know workplace violence with major nadal who kills people

uh innocent enlisted men and so

Believe me, in 2008, and I look, Jack, when in the transitionary period after September 14, 2008, when the economy slid into a recession in the last quarter and the first quarter of the Obama administration, they said, we're in a recession.

Poor Barack inherited a recession.

There's two quarters of negative growth.

That's what they said.

And I don't see why they say it's not a recession because of the following.

A, We have almost record low consumer conference.

I mean, the dip in it is quite amazing.

We have two quarters of flat negative economic growth, and we have 9.1 inflation.

And they say, well, we only have, we're 3.5 or something in unemployment.

That's great.

It would be great if you considered two things.

One,

are we back since COVID is mostly the fear of it is gone?

They say, are we back to pre-COVID employment level?

The answer is no.

And then two,

what is the labor non-participation rate?

Because that governs whether how we judge or adjudicate the unemployment rate.

And labor non-participation is at a record level.

And so what's happening is there's a lot of people who theoretically are in the workforce, but A, they still have COVID funny money checks and they don't want to go back.

Or B,

They like being off for two years.

So they retired early or they quit altogether.

Or three, they read

about

new strains of COVID.

They have some comorbidities.

They just do not want to go back out in the workplace.

Or they've got, I think it's 10% of the people that have had COVID.

Some people say 20.

I don't quite believe 20, but 10, they have long COVID, are not able to work.

It could be seven or 10 million.

But the point is

that the only reason that labor or workers are short is that there's a lot of people who traditionally would be in the workplace that are not.

And

second thing, or third thing rather, is when you have a economic constriction and interest rates are rising in reaction to inflation, then psychologically business owners, industrials, corporations start to plan.

And they're planning right now for

less adventurous borrowing, less expansion, consolidation of resources, pulling in their horns.

And we should see this unemployment rate start to creep up as the economy slows down.

And, you know, it's very strange when this administration says, well, you know, gasoline has went from 460 to 430.

Wow.

And you think, well, yeah, but in most of the country, it was 280.

And so what's so good about context 430, given how quickly it rose.

In California, it didn't go down.

Right.

Saw it the other day, it was $665

for gasoline.

Victor, there's a piece in just

the news, which is the mothership of

this podcast by Kevin Bessler, who wrote this on July 30th.

In rural areas,

over the last two years, people are paying $2,500

more a year for gasoline.

$2,500.

That's a good point.

You know, here we are in southwest Fresno County, and it has a poverty rate that's lower per capita than Appalachia.

And the price of gas and diesel are pretty much what it is in Los Angeles or Monterey or San Francisco.

And about two weeks ago, I stopped in downtown San Francisco and got gas, and it was exactly the same as what it was in rural Fresno County.

I don't know if that's because they're closer to the Richmond refineries or what,

but California's, it's expensive everywhere.

And this economy is shot.

I hope it's not shot, but it is.

I don't want it to be in a recession.

I don't want to be in stagflation.

I would rather have Biden re-elected than have these millions of people suffer.

But they're suffering, and these people do not care.

So they play these word games with the word recession because they're afraid that their careers may be aborted or their reputations may be tarnished.

They're not doing one thing that has to be done.

And the first thing they could do is

stop draining the strategic petroleum reserve and start going barnstorming Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, North Dakota, and saying, listen, you guys, you're heroic.

You need to get out there and frack and horizontal drill and build these pipelines and open up ANMAR and get more federal leases of the kind you need.

And we're here to help.

Tell me what to do.

And psychologically, they could really help, but they're not going to do that.

Do you know a country is experiencing 12% GDP growth?

Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia.

Yes.

Saudi Arabia.

It's insane.

We're buying their oil and we're impoverishing our country.

It's crazy.

Just think, I wish everybody that's listening could just take a deep breath and say, we have a president

who

thinks it's a national emergency as if it's a war or a natural disaster.

So he is draining the 800 million barrels strategic petroleum reserve that the horrible, vile Orange Man filled up and topped off.

He is draining it because he will not pump oil.

So it's an ideological decision.

He wants to save his skin politically by getting the price of this supposedly horrific fuel down, but he does not want to increase the supply otherwise.

So he's telling his green supporters, his base, don't get mad at me that I'm draining this reserve.

It's already been pumped out of the ground.

It's different than new stuff that's pumped out of the ground.

And then consider, he goes over to Saudi Arabia, a government that is illiberal and which the left has been very critical of because of the Khashoggi matter and other things.

And his attitude is, I'm going to go over to Saudi Arabia and I'm going to tell them to pump more of this

toxic fuel that we have in abundance more than they do, but we won't utilize it fully because we are their moral superiors.

But at a time of record prices, when they've got all of these expansion projects on their agenda and they need the cash for them, I'm going to tell them to voluntarily pump more so the price of everything they pump goes down as a favor to me.

And how did that work out?

That's a rhetorical question, Jack.

Yes, I know it's a rhetorical question.

Okay, well, I think we should move on to another topic of disappointment.

And that's Joe Manchin.

And let's get to it.

I am disappointed in him.

Yeah, well, I want to hear about that, but let's first hear these important messages.

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And still,

every one of them, every one of them, still very relevant.

Victor Baucho Manchin, yeah, you know,

a guy that we thought was saving America at some level, at least frustrating Democrats, conscious and critical of how expenditures of federal government spending has

played a key role in this inflation that's crushing our economy, impoverishing people.

And

this week past, he comes to some agreement, climate-based agreement with Chuck Schumer.

And it looks like, you know, maybe Joe Manchin will have scored one for the bad guys.

What are your thoughts about what Manchin?

Well, I think we're going to learn in the weeks subsequent that Joe Manchin, in that large bill, or with a nod, there are certain understandings about West Virginia coal industry that are exempt.

And there will be special entitlements and a lot of federal spending in West Virginia.

And he will go back to his constituency and say, listen, you guys, you've got one Republican senator.

It's good to have a conservative.

I am a conservative.

He'll say, Democratic senator, between the two of us, we bring in more port capital than almost anywhere.

And this is what I did for you.

And that's, and he'll list all the new entitlement programs and say that, you know, Cole's exempt.

But if he thinks that anybody believes him as a time that when we're going into stagflation, 9.1 inflation with negative economic growth, that a 740 billion plus

new reconciliation bill that has an array of increases on corporations.

He's crazy.

Does he really believe that when you have 1.9% inflation that corporations and they're looking at two quarters of negative growth that they're going to not pass on these tax increases to their consumers?

And maybe their consumers won't have the money to pay for the increased cost of business that corporations are doing.

But the point is, it's not a stimulatory measure in a time of recession, and that's what we're in, or hyperinflation.

So there was no reason for it.

And the only reason that we're doing this reconciliation is so that we can say Joe Biden has momentum.

It was a good week, as they said.

And they said, oh, wow, who cares about negative economic growth?

Because it's not a recession.

We redefine the word.

But we got 30 cents a gallon drop in gas.

And we got Joe Manchin.

I don't know what Senator Sinema is doing in Arizona.

I I imagine that in the bill, there are certain provisions that allow her to pick and choose or to voice to her constituency her opposition.

And then in reconciliation process between House and Senate, the left will say, well, Senator Sinema doesn't want this.

And then she'll go back to her constituent and say, I cut this out or whatever.

So I think she will eventually vote for it too.

And then Kamala Harris will break the vote.

It just reminds us, I don't want to look back.

I always like to try to to look forward, but those two seats in Georgia and 2021 should have never, never been lost.

Right.

And they didn't need to be lost.

Yeah, that all for, you know, for want of a nail, the heat the shoe was lost.

It really, it's just, it's a, there were critical, critical elections.

Victor, okay, next topic,

if we can have a kind of a catch-all on red china here, because this, there's a lot to talk about.

I break it down to three things, but your thoughts on those or whatever related to China, of course, are

I know our listeners will want to hear.

First thing, China buying up American farmland greedily.

And I saw some report, or I don't know if I may have heard Charlie Kirk say something on TV today on Fox.

that

the Republican governor of North Dakota is actually wooing China to buy American farmland.

So that's one thing.

We have Nancy Pelosi's high-stakes,

I was going to visit Taiwan, which seems now to be dead.

Your thoughts about what that was all about.

And then the third thing is Joe Biden in the midst of this,

China's threats.

If Pelosi came to Taiwan, it would be, you know, put us on the brink of war, essentially.

And then Joe Biden had a call with Chairman G.

A two-hour call, Jack.

Yeah.

Well, I can't imagine him doing two hours of anything.

Well, maybe someone promised him an ice cream cone at the end.

So

the optics of that have been criticized.

I know on.

I'm sure Alexander Venman was listening in with

paper and pencil to find an impeachable.

phrase or sentence.

Well, we know that G has

he's got to have the goods on the big guy.

We have to, we have to believe that.

Anyway, Victor, there's lots, lots of red China stuff going on.

Do you have any thoughts you'd like to say?

Yes.

Napoleon said, you know, I think it was in reference to the 1809 failure to take Vienna quickly.

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

If you're going to announce the world, you're going to go to Taiwan, then go to Taiwan.

Because the Chinese communist government and Xi do not have a veto power over whether the third-ranking official in the U.S.

government can go go to an independent and sovereign nation.

And if she backs out, which the Pentagon wants her to do and which Joe Biden wants her to do,

then we've basically ceded the freedom of our own government to do what it pleases.

So

we've essentially made China in control of American travel plans.

So that demands a second question.

Why are they doing this now?

They didn't do it between 2017 and 2020.

They didn't do it.

So why, why, why now?

And I think, number one, you remember that Anchorage, Alaska summit, Jack, in March 2021, when Blinken strutted in and wanted to talk about this.

And they just said, you know what, you're a racist country.

The LM is right.

And they just took all of the left's talking points.

and shot it in our faces and insulted us.

And then we just sat there and took it.

And G said, see, look, this is who these people are.

And then you remember that we pulled out of Afghanistan.

It wasn't just we pulled out.

We left a billion dollar embassy, a $300 million refitted base and $60 to $80 million in equipment.

And boy, China said, hmm,

we would never do that.

Why did they do that?

They're weak.

They're in decline, just like we saw in Anchorage.

And then they're thinking, And then in this meeting, you know, people are discussing, well, maybe that's right.

And so what was that guy's name, Ju Cheng?

I don't remember.

I think that was his name, Zhu Ching, Zhu.

I'm mispronouncing it, but he was Mark Milley's PLA counterpart, chief of staff of the

joint forces.

They copy everything we do.

So they've copied our military organization as well.

And they said, wow, Mark Milley called us up.

And he kind of suggested to us that.

It's okay.

We've got a crazy commander in chief, but if he does anything that I find volatile, I'm going to tip you off and warn you to keep everything calm.

And by the way, I violated the chain of command and apprised my theater commanders that they don't have to listen to an order from their commander in chief as the statute says they do.

And the Chinese are thinking, wow, we'd execute a person who did that.

They have that much fear of us.

that they're calling their head military guy is telling us as a renegade that he would prefer that we not be agitated and he's willing not to agitate us to such a degree that he's going to sort of sandbag his own president

and you know if that wasn't enough they look at the u.s military jack and they thought wow

recruitment 40 of their target the army has recruited that's it 40 percent And then they look at all of these stories about the transgender movement in the military and sexual reassignment and women in combat and pregnant airsuits for pilots.

And they said, you know what?

This is not the feared U.S.

military of the past.

This is a social justice organization.

We heard Mark Milley

and

Lloyd Austin testify before Congress.

In fact, we got a lot of ideas when they said they were going to root out.

white rage.

As I said earlier, some Chinese military analyst is going to say, yes.

Yes, yes, they're going to root out white rage.

And remember,

those people who are not joining the army died at twice their numbers in the demographic in

Afghanistan and Iraq.

So they put all of this together and they have concluded that there is no deterrence left.

And so Iran is announcing, aren't they?

We have a bomb or we have a veritable bomb.

And North Korea decides to let off a lot of new tests.

And Russia decided to go into Ukraine.

And then China looks at Ukraine and they say, wow, first thing Biden did was try to offer Zelensky a ride out of the country.

And then the Europeans gave all of these Lepanto brave, you know, we're going to save the West speaks.

And now the Germans are talking about what?

They're going to have to burn wood to keep warm, or they're going to have warm rooms where everybody goes together like pioneers or something.

And the Chinese say, this whole culture, this whole civilization is in decline.

And we, for the first time, can say as Vladimir crushes and wears down Ukraine and demands further and further U.S.

commitment and ties them down by massive resupply to Ukraine in vain, that we now have a blueprint to take Taiwan.

And we're going to tell Nancy Pelosi that you better be careful.

So their surrogates are announcing even that they might shoot it down or they might deter it.

And what did Biden do?

Did anybody in the U.S.

government say that

any effort to intercept a U.S.

government plane in international airspace is a violation, an act of war?

Did they say that?

No.

Meanwhile, what is China doing?

They're rapidly trying to make sophisticated long-range, I think 100 of them, missiles pointed at us.

And what are we doing?

Are we spending multi-trillions of dollars?

Is that what this reconciliation bill is about for missile defense?

No.

And then, you know what's so ironic about this, Jack?

When you look at all this and you can see the contempt that the Chinese have for the U.S.

military, and you can see that this administration looks at the military as a social justice vehicle to fast-track all of their crackpot ideas without the hassle of congressional give and take,

the top echelon of the military likes it.

Because they had a president, mercury though he was, that up what, $80 billion in defense expenditures, got NATO to pony up $100 billion,

praised the military, got exemptions for Kelly

and Mattis to be in

cabinet official roles and McMaster and Flynn.

At one time, they had four generals.

And my God,

they they hated it.

The military hated him.

And they were even, you know, what they said about him, but I don't get it.

Do they like what's going on now?

Is that what the idea is?

They love the Biden administration.

They like what the Chinese are saying about them.

Right.

I mean, all Mark Milley could say about Afghanistan was it was a strategic setback, but it was a logistical success.

And that's right after he declared.

the killing of what 10 civilians as a righteous strike and this is our military this is not our military.

This is our military Washington echelon.

Right.

And the Chinese have contempt for us, for it.

And I'll get back to that Reagan Library or Reagan Foundation periodic polling of Americans' attitude toward the U.S.

military in the context of only meeting 40% of its Army recruit.

And remember what it said.

It came out two or three months ago.

It said about 45% have good confidence in the U.S.

military.

And it used to be way over 50%.

And you say that into, I've written that same column in different manifestations and it, and it,

and so many other people have.

There was one in the Wall Street Journal that was similar, and no one listens.

They just say, oh, you're critical of the military.

Somebody, you know, from Stanford called me up and said, why did you hate the military?

I love the military.

The problem is they will.

they will not endure any criticism.

They're completely oblivious to the effect that putting Mark Milley in front of the nation in congressional testimony and saying that he's going to find out where white rage is, he and Austin, and the white supremacists, and not put up one iota of data that suggests there is such an epidemic in the military.

Can you imagine what would happen if

some future chairman, the joint chief, said, you know what, I've been looking at the crime rate and African-American crime has just soared disproportionately to their demographic.

And I'm really worried about hate crimes because African Americans are doubly represented and then brought in no FBI or DOJ crime statistics to support that allegation.

How long would that guy last for saying that?

For indicating

this entire rubric.

Yeah.

And that's what he did.

And that's why the numbers of new enlistees is

why they're not going to come back.

Yeah.

Victor, you know, every aspect of our government is a bureaucracy.

And I don't think it's any surprise that the Department of Transportation, say, as time goes on, becomes more consumed with it being a bureaucracy than its role, right?

And various departments have the same development.

That is what's happening to our military.

It seems to me, anyway, as a layman, more consumed with its bureaucracy.

And as time goes on, also, like Chris Caldwell wrote a great essay about this a year and a half, two years ago at Claremont Review of Books.

It's really how HR, human resources, has become one of the most powerful and defining things in our country.

You see that in

local, in your own company, your businesses.

And you take the HR ascendancy, you take the bureaucratization, and that's what we've got in the military.

Whatever its function is, is secondary to the obsession of bureaucratization.

Absolutely.

We talked about that before.

I mean,

we had a principle that every single prominent critic, retired four-star on a corporate board who criticized Donald Trump in the most serious form of disparagement, there were no consequences.

Then we had this one, what, Lieutenant General Belinsky, and he made fun of Jill Biden.

He didn't make fun of her.

He just said she was a hypocrite.

We discussed that with

Sammy, and there was what?

He was summarily fired from his contractual work with the Pentagon, singled out for insulting a private U.S.

citizen while other people who were lobbyists and working for corporate boards, their associations commercial and otherwise with the Pentagon were not endangered when they clearly violated Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

And why?

Because the Pentagon is an ideological military now.

Maybe that's good.

Maybe it's a nation in arms like the Napoleonic Army, Revolutionary Army.

But the left feels it is a revolutionary army.

They feel the FBI is a revolutionary investigatory force.

They feel that the CIA is a revolutionary intelligence force and that people like Clapper and Comey and Brennan are figures that advance their social agenda and therefore they're completely exempt from ramifications of their behavior.

And it's very similar to the Commissar system.

And it's scary.

It's really scary.

And that's why so many people are turned off.

You know, when I give lectures, even if it's off topic, these people ask questions.

Why should I send my son to the U.S.?

Because you're patriotic.

That's why.

And that you're an exceptional family that fought probably in World War II and Vietnam and the Gulf War.

Without people like you, the rest of us would be helpless.

Victor, I met a prototypical such family this past weekend.

Grandpa and

Dad and

Marines served, fought, shot at in Vietnam, you know, wounded.

And the last thing they want is for their grandchildren to enter the military.

I get emails every day.

I got one three days ago.

Dear Professor Hanson, my son wants to be a Ranger.

Da da da, my grandfather, my father, my uncle, the whole line of selfless, patriotic service in the family, but we do not want him to go because we feel that he'll be singled out.

He will be disparaged.

He'll be called names.

It'll be the onus will be on him to prove that he's not racist or sexist.

He won't be promoted.

He will be discriminated against.

They'll send him to Afghanistan and he will die over there.

Or if he does something to save his comrades, they'll draw him up on charges that he committed some war crime, or they'll turn him over to a criminal court, something like that.

And the military better wake up.

They better wake up because they're going to endanger all of us because we're not going to be able to protect our interests, our allies, and ourselves unless there's radical changes.

The moment, the moment it was known that Mark Milley called in theater commanders and told them that

strategies, operations, decisions involving nuclear weapons came through him.

when he has no legal authority to do that, that goes directly to the Secretary of Defense, not the chair.

And the moment he confessed that he had called up his Chinese communist counterpart to warn him, he should have been summarily dismissed, fired.

Kapoot, end of story.

And the fact that he wasn't gave a message to everybody in the military.

See,

if you have an ideological voice, you're exempt.

So you're going to retire in two or three years.

So you better adopt the Millie Austin tone and ideology because there's a lot of lucrative woke boards out there for you.

You don't want to go down the Michael Flynn route because they will destroy you.

You'll end up broke.

They'll frame you.

Your legal costs will be unbearable.

And you'll be written off as a right-wing nut, even though you've had a distinguished service career.

And that's the message.

And people will make the necessary adjustments.

And the funny thing is, Jack, the reason that we are better

than the Chinese or the Russians is that we were a meritocracy.

That ideology, you didn't have to admit

to be a high-ranking officer, you don't have to be in China, you have to be a member of the Communist Party under the Soviet system.

In Russia, you have to be

one of these oligarchical cliques.

You have to have connections, but not in the United States military, not now.

You have to be of an ideological sort

to get promoted fast track.

And everybody knows it and everybody is cynical about it.

And the people who have a choice not to put up with it, 60% of them, 55% of them are saying, not this pig.

And it's tragic.

I'm not at all happy about this.

It's tragic.

And somebody who has the moral and intellectual courage in the military has got to stand up and say, enough is enough.

People are going to get killed.

We're going to send a military over there.

And it's going to be a social justice organism where people do not get along in the ranks based on sex or gender or race or ethnic and they're going to be jealous about promotions and people who are outspoken or too patriotic or they sound too they're going to be punished and it's going to be a mess.

And that's going to go all through the officer corps.

You're going to need a commander in chief who embraces

embraces.

And I don't know.

This is a disaster and it's not never remarked upon.

And it deserves this discussion because of all the things that Joe Biden has done, this weaponization of the military is the most egregious.

It really is.

And it's not me just ranting and spouting off.

It's sophisticated polls that show that confidence of the American people has been shattered.

And it's recruitment statistics coming from the Pentagon that they are paranoid, that they're only 40% of the way to their enlistment targets.

And so, for this particular period, and you know, I don't, maybe the Marine Corps has a special rubric.

I hope so, that they get a special type of, they send the message to families that they're not to the same degree politically corrupted.

I don't know, but they seem to be doing a little bit better.

Yeah.

And the Chinese, this is all a windy explanation of why the Chinese are doing this and openly and boldly sending signals to the Australians, to the Philippines, to the Taiwanese, to the Japanese, to the South Koreans.

See, see?

The Vietnamese.

See, see, see?

We have the, just snap our fingers and we can stop a U.S.

military plane taking the third ranking official to Taiwan.

Do you want to be with those people?

Is that who was going to back you up when we mass troops on your border or we send a rocket missile over your island or near your territory?

Do you really want to be with those losers?

They're in decline.

We're in the ascendant.

It reminds me so much of the 1940 Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere that Japan made the same message when they said, look at the Dutch.

Look at the French in Indochina.

Look at the Dutch.

Look at the French.

They folded in six weeks in France.

You want to be colonized by those people?

Not that colonization was good.

it should end.

But right abruptly, they just went into Indonesia.

And then they said to the Dutch East Indies, we're going to take shell oil fields.

Look at how many days did the Dutch last?

Two days, three days?

These people are spent.

You deal with us.

We're the new rising sun.

It's the same messaging.

And

who's to argue with it?

Hey, Victor, we've got a little time left.

And I want to get the last part of that previous question: your your thoughts on China and farmland, and we'll get to that and a closing review of the show that has a criticism that I think might deserve a response.

We'll get to that right after this important message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

So, Victor, if we can just close out that previous talk, it was much of it about the military, and but initially, the question had to do with some subjects on China.

And as I mentioned earlier, Red China purchasing gobs and gobs of American farmland.

I don't know, maybe they're in a race with Bill Gates to do the same.

Do you have any thoughts about

that, Victor?

Yeah, I do.

I mean, I have a remnant of a family farm, 40 acres, and most of the people I see during the day are farmers.

And as a general rule, people like injecting capital into farmland because it raises everybody's price.

But that said, no farmer wants a foreign government coming in and buying land.

And I don't know if it's conspiratorial or factual, but that

much of these purchases are near or adjacent to strategic U.S.

compounds and bases is no accident.

So the narrative goes.

And it brings a very important point.

There is a lot of magnanimity by allowing China to do this on the part of the U.S.

government.

But that is not interpreted as friendliness.

to be reciprocated.

It is interpreted as weakness to be exploited.

By that, I mean this.

If Joe Biden was going to say the following, what would the Chinese do?

What if he said this?

We have no existential problem with the Chinese.

We're not out to replace the Chinese communist government.

We want to be friendly.

We want to have a friendly competition.

But we're adopting a program of symmetry, symmetry.

And whatever the Chinese policy is toward us, we're going to have the policy toward China.

China can buy all the farmland they want near strategic places if we can do the same in China.

If China does not allow Americans to buy farmland in China, there will be no Chinese purchases here.

And we don't need any, by the way, libertarian talk.

Well, that's not who America is.

No, this is an existential, deadly question about our survival.

It's not about free market economics.

And then we say this:

we have 2,500 students in China, and you have 380,000, the vast majority of them children of the elite and the Communist Party membership.

We're not going to do that anymore.

From now on, there's going to be 2,500 Chinese students in America.

And we're sorry, multi-billion dollar endowed Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton.

You don't need that money because at least one to two or three percent of them are direct operatives of Chinese intelligence, and that can be 3,000 or thousand people.

So, we're not going to put up with that anymore.

We just don't want to do it anymore.

So,

for every American student in China, there will be one Chinese student.

And for every violation of a copyright or a patent, there will be a punitive action on that Chinese company.

It will be barred from the United States.

And I know that everybody will say, well, Victor, we don't have that independence.

We're dependent on protective gear, on penicillin, everything from abroad.

Yes, we are.

We have to work to be autonomous, even though that'll be more costly to us.

And I'm just as critical of the right as the left because a lot of these people on the right said it's essential to our prosperity that capital flows across national borders without any consideration of politics.

Yeah, that's really well, except when you get into a, you know, 10 million people dying worldwide from COVID, or you're in an existential fight with China.

So symmetry, symmetry, symmetry should be the U.S.

policy with China.

Reactive to what they do.

Every time they do something, we do the same and see how long they like it.

And I think we could really hurt them if we denied them all access to Silicon Valley, to major university researches, to visiting academic appointments, et cetera, et cetera, to participation in learned journals, medical journals, medical research.

No more 600,000 from Dr.

Fauci's, you know, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases over to Peter Dasik's Echo Health over to Bat Lady and Wuhan.

No, no more.

And I think we should say it.

I do that.

You know, Victor, as you're talking,

I'm just thinking of Hansen 2024 bumper stickers and pins, not to mock what you said, but it is a powerful and simple, basic position.

And you really need to be able to do that.

It's natural to the American people.

It's one of the innate traits of everybody who's listening is the American sense of fair play.

It's the elite, the elite who always come up with some convoluted, crazy, nutty idea why you should not engage in fair play.

Well, you don't understand.

They may feel that we're racist.

Who cares?

Oh, you don't understand.

This is sophisticated economic law that the United States is the receptacle of global.

Who cares?

This is a matter of life and death when they say they're going to shoot down or forcibly deter or force the flight plan to be changed of the third ranking official in the u.s government and that is pretty scary stuff

so fair play or no play and i think it would be and any republican candidate that can articulate that position i think will do very well i agree and i think you mentioned the biden family and I think you did it in jest, but you were serious.

And the $64,000 question is: we have no idea

how a drug addled, alcoholic, miscreant like Hunter Biden can get on Air Force II when his father is vice president, fly into China, meet the Chinese version of Ukrainian or Russian oligarchs, and come back with millions of dollars of money and connections, much of it funneled in, as we see from his houses and lifestyle into the big guy's 10% coffers and get away with it.

I don't understand it.

I don't.

And maybe Uncle Jim,

who's part of this too, he's not drug-addled, et cetera.

You know, so

I, you know,

I would spread the blame around.

Hey, Victor, we've got to end.

I have a feeling this might be a little bit of a long ending, though.

I want to do a couple of things here.

Just for, first of all, I want to.

Not on Hunter Biden.

No, no, not on Hunter Biden.

No, it's going to be on.

It's going to be on water.

I promised two people I'd give them a shout out.

I saw them this past weekend, and it's Joe Joe Mahoney and Ann Murray, just big, big, big fans of Victor Davis Hanson.

So God bless them.

Great people.

That was one thing.

Second thing, thanks to all our listeners.

Now, no matter where you listen, listen, Google Play, iTunes, Stitcher, et cetera, we thank you.

Numbers are grow, grow, grow.

My understanding from the great Sammy Wink, who rides roughshod over all this data, is that, hey, by the end of this.

particular day that we're recording, there may be a million downloads this month of Victor Davis Hansen podcasts.

And that's,

I mean, this is a great sign of its popularity.

So we thank those who are listening and those who do do listen on

Apple podcasts have the opportunity to leave not only rankings, one to five stars, and practically everyone leaves five-star rankings.

And they can also leave comments.

So, here is

a comment.

It's a two-star ranking.

By the way, Victor, I was in, as I told you before, I was in Palo Alto and Northern California this, well, Napa, these past few days.

And in Palo Alto, I stood, I stayed at the Creekside Inn.

You may be familiar.

Yes, I know where it is.

Do you know what the problem is with the Creekside Inn?

You know what?

There's no creek.

There's no creek at the Creekside Inn.

There's a ditch there, but there's not a lick of water.

It reminds me when out here, when Fresno was expanding and they destroy a vineyard, they'd call it Vineyard Estates.

Or when they'd uproot a plum orchard, they'd call it Plum Corner estates.

So it's the same idea.

Adios plum.

So here's the comment.

California water politics.

Just listened to an hour of Victor Davis Hansen pontificate about the California water crisis.

And he mentions climate change once in reference to historical collapses and then summarized the issue.

as a political one while blaming the left.

He is an incredibly short-sighted, I guess, man, on a massive climate issue with no insight outside his politics.

It was a disappointing waste of my time.

Alberta's phone.

Wait, wait, let me just say one thing first, Victor,

because no question

there's a drought, but there's no question,

basically, there are billions and billions of gallons of water that could be going to the people of California that we know are being pumped into

the Pacific Ocean.

But, Victor, if you just take a quick rebuttal of a minute or two.

Well, I mean,

everybody

knows that the planet has radical changes in temperature, and some of them can take place within the short span of a century.

But I mean, there's people,

Freeman Dyson, Bjon Lomborg, just to mention two of them,

there's a lot of them.

And they have said either they don't know to the degree that man-made carbon emissions are the main main contributory factor to this heating of the planet, which is about, you know, it's one degree, and they don't know whether a one or one and a half degree change in temperature heating up, they don't know what the exact catastrophic results will be completely.

Al Gore thinks he knows.

Barack Obama thinks he knows.

That's why I guess he knows, Jack, because he always buys a multi-million dollar estate near the ocean.

So he must know that that rise in temperature will not cause some type of sea deluge on his properties.

Or we don't know to the degree

how much we in the United States, 330 million people of 7 billion, can radically alter our lifestyles in order to decrease global emissions when the Chinese and Indians are increasing them.

Or we look at Europe, who I guess the caller or the writer or the critic would agree with their green policies.

And to take one example of Germany, they shut down 17 nuclear plants or in the process of finishing that shutdown.

They've shut down most of their coal plants.

They're targeting their natural gas plants, and they went solar and wind like no other country to the effect that in messianic style, for the last 15 years, they've blanketed the globe and said German technology and German industry is going to save the planet.

We're going to have massive solar farms in North Africa that'll supply all of European,

da, da, da, da, da.

And where are we?

The German chancellor said that,

what?

He said that Germany's got a lot of wood.

And they're going to be burning wood.

How are the older people going to keep warm?

They're going to be in warm rooms, probably during a COVID spike again.

And they're all going to be huddled together because there's not going to be enough energy to heat their apartments.

And they're already stopping hot water showers in public spaces in Germany.

And they're going to outlaw space heaters and everything.

In other words, they're going back to a pre-industrial model

because of this green.

enthusiasm.

1687, here we come.

As I said to everybody,

I want to be green.

I ordered a Tesla.

But I'm wondering where are you going to get the electricity?

The Japanese say it's going to be $30 to $50 trillion in infrastructure and new generation to accommodate a fleet of electric cars within 10 years.

So here in California, our noble governor was going to shut down Diablo Canyon, clean energy,

10%.

of our grid.

And now suddenly he says we can't do it.

Now, I didn't say he couldn't.

He said we couldn't do it.

When we have the highest electrical cost in the continental United States, and it's destroying families.

And so, yes, I believe that there are periodic changes in climate.

And I don't know from what I've read the degree to which this drought in California,

what we have is a two years of drought, one year of normal weather or heavier than average rainfall, another two years of drought for the the last decade.

And I don't know the degree to which this is going to be extended.

It's permanent.

We're in a cycle or it's due to carbon releases in the United States.

I don't know that.

But I don't think they know it either.

And I don't think they know

the price that they're inflicting on people who are not like them.

who don't have the money to run the air conditioner in their homes, who are going to Walmart to keep cool, who are paying $7 for their used diesel pickup.

They don't know, they don't care.

So that's my answer to that.

Right.

But there are two questions here, Victor.

And we do have to wrap up.

The one is, as you've just explained, there's an energy issue.

But when it comes to water, which is his, you know, this writer's complaint, there's no question that water in California and most places, why wouldn't it be?

Is a question of

capacity and distribution, right?

And And the people of California have spent billions and billions.

First of all, the people of California for many years had, as you've explained in other shows, created these wonderful projects that have collected and distributed water so not only people can live, but that

the barren fields of the

certainly weren't barren.

They were quite fertile.

The fertile fields of the Central Valley could grow and feed America.

So there is water politics.

It's not the money that was spent.

I mean, we have

all the reader has to do is go online and look at the California Water Project and the Central Valley Project, the federal version, earlier version.

And the whole purpose of the whole project is that two-thirds of the people live where one-third of the precipitation is.

Starting in the 30s, 40s, and 50s with the federal project, starting in the 60s with the state project, they're now fused together.

We had a huge distribution system of a wet north supplying an arid center and south.

And it was designed for a population between 15 and 20 million people envisioned.

Okay, we have 41 million people now, and we have not built a dam for purposes of irrigation or flood control or hydroelectric power or recreation in the Sierra Nevada or the upper mountain ranges, maybe LA Water District has,

since 1983, the new Milonas Dam, and the population has doubled.

And more importantly, when you have, as we did three years ago, a record-setting,

record-setting wet year of snowmelt, no one said,

hmm, this is global warming is due.

Well, they did say that.

They dropped the word global warming and they said climate change.

So for that whole period when the dam up north, Fort Will Dam almost collapsed, they said, wow, this this is climate change.

It's too wet.

Well, before it was too dry, that is a philologist.

I can tell you, when you go from climate to climate change from global warming, it tells me something.

It means whatever it's too cold, too hot, too wet, too dry, it's all because of the industrial state.

But the point is, there was a way right now in this drought to have water.

And it was called the California Water Project's Tertiary Dams at Temperance Flat, Los Banos Grandes, and the site reservoir in the Sacramento River that would have given us seven to eight million acre feet that would have filled up three years ago, and we could have ridden this out this year without doing what we're going to do.

We're barely going to make it.

If we have a drought next year, there's going to be 5 million acres on California's west side along I-5 from

the Ridge Route or the grapevine all the way up to Los Banos and beyond beyond that are going to go out of production.

And they're already pulling out orchards.

And everybody says, Well, that might be good.

California uses 90% of the water.

Okay, then don't go to Whole Foods and say, you know what?

I can't afford $10 a pound for grapes or fresh fruit because you take all of that land out of production.

And that's what you're going to end up with.

And by the way, drive down I-5 today or drive down Manning Avenue or go through Avenue 7 and look at that irrigated patchwork on the west side and then go back to the natural

pre-1962 that I can remember as a little boy.

It was arid and dry.

It was a natural habitat of sagebrush,

valley fever.

That's where valley fever took off every fall.

The dust and the dirt and the spores.

So we're going backward.

And yes, I believe that temperature changes.

I don't know to what degree it changes.

I don't know the effects of it.

I don't think the critic knows either.

I don't know how much damage we can do to the middle class and the poor to enact these bromis of the elite, which they will not affect them.

And more importantly, I don't know the degree to which the United States any longer is a per capita contributor to the problem.

The Paris Climate Accords targets, we met.

We met.

And some of the people in that accord did not meet.

And it's a question right now, for good or evil, fair or not, what are you going to do about 40%

of the world's population in India and China who are not going to follow any cue of Europe or the United States, believe me?

Victor, let's.

That's my rant.

Well, you just, by the way, you mentioned going backwards, and I'll end with this.

You do have a piece, a couple pieces up

on your website, VictorHanson.com.

They are the exclusive Ultra articles, and they're called Civilization in Reverse.

And I want to urge our listeners to find them, read them, and to subscribe.

So, Victor, thanks so much for all the wisdom you shared.

today.

Thanks to our listeners for listening.

Thanks to everyone who reviews even critical reviews.

We thank you for taking the time.

Yeah, thanks so much.

Thanks, Victor.

And everyone, we'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Thanks.

My animation is contagious, Jeff.

Right, it is.

Thank you very much, everybody, for listening.