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Hello, everyone.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show, and we are on the Friday news roundup.

This should be broadcast on the 29th.

of July.

So we're looking at the news for the week.

We're recording today on Tuesday.

Lots of information in the news and we're going to look at America's global strategic policy.

We'll look at European Central Bank and the American economy or some things on the American economy.

So that's what we have ahead of us.

But first let's take a break.

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Welcome back.

I want to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He is available on social media at the Morning Cup on Facebook and his Twitter handle is VD Hansen.

And he's also available on Getter and MeWe as well.

Victor is the author of 27 books and he has a new one coming out.

Victor, do you have any initial thoughts or do you want to tell us anything about your new book that you're writing?

Well, I was making some pretty good progress and then I got this long COVID.

So I have kind of a brain fog and when I write something,

instead of just writing it and moving on, I have to read it three or four times.

I don't know.

I'm kind of worried about it.

So I'm behind, but it's about civilizations.

or states or nations that go to war without understanding how vulnerable are and they're completely, they're not defeated, they're wiped out and they disappear from history and what that can tell us about the contemporary world.

So I think it'll be very apropos for Ukraine, etc.

But I'm trying to readjust because, you know, I'm 60, I'm going to be 69 and this thing hit.

I'm thinking, wow,

I've got to get over this.

It's not like I'm 30, you know what I mean?

I've got to get over this stuff.

92 days is enough of this.

And it's really starting to affect my ability to write.

And I've never, I mean, before I got this, I wrote the first chapter, I I think, in 35 days.

And I was on to be finished by now almost, but I haven't written a word.

And I'm trying to, but my brain is,

I'm sure the listeners have noticed it because

I'm not quite,

I don't know what the word is.

It's bizarre.

You get a case of COVID, you get over it, you test positive, positive, positive.

And then five days later, you're negative, negative, and forever, negative.

And then everybody gets well, but you don't in this case.

It's weird.

It's strange.

So that's what I'm thinking about.

We can move on.

Nobody wants to.

All right.

All right.

So my first topic is from an article by Walter Russell Mead, and it's published on the website of the Hudson Institute, which I believe he runs.

And I actually got it from the Wall Street Journal.

But he's talking about American strategic policy damaged by a U.S.

pivot from the Middle East.

And then, really, quite broadly, because he says that Americans are now making mistakes because they have two mistaken perceptions.

And the second one is America, that America's economic and military power plus our diplomatic prestige ensures our unchallenged supremacy for decades.

And he

talks a little bit, clarifies that a little bit further by he says, and the second one is that the so-called rules-based order we were using our power to build would be popular abroad and uncontroversial at home.

The economic benefits of the free market, free trading world system were so great that no serious country abroad or political movement at home would be insane enough to challenge it.

And the elegant international system was going to be so ethically beautiful and politically inspiring that countries all over the world would be irresistibly drawn into it.

And those are the perceptions he's saying that Americans have as they go out to engage in diplomacy.

And he's suggesting that

with all of those high-minded things and confidence in their high-minded ethical positions, that they've forgotten all the practical ones.

And so, for example, he says, look at

Afghanistan, which has resulted in all confidence and no strategy to win.

And so we lost it.

But I thought that was an interesting

thought.

It seems to suggest that we're really mistaking in our world diplomacy, we need to be more practical and less idealistic, I think.

Yeah, he's a very Walter Russell Meads a very bright guy.

He was a member of our military history contemporary conflict group at the Hoover Institution.

And in that article, he's looking at the wreckage of U.S.

foreign policy, and he's trying to analyze it in a longer-term pathology that transcends just the incompetence of Mark Milley and Lloyd Austin, Anthony Blinken and Jake Sullivan and Joe Biden, which is ultimately catastrophic.

So what he's trying to say is,

I think I'm putting words into his mouth, but he's trying to say there are deeper problems.

And one of them, of course, is that

we were diverted in areas that while they seemed important following 9-11, and they were, because we wanted to stop a subsequent attack on the United States with Radical Islam,

organizing it, that the 20-year misadventure in Afghanistan and the Iraqi misadventure and the bombing of Libya and all of these things are distractions from central U.S.

doesn't mean that we don't want to have a presence in the Middle East, but when you put U.S.

troops on the ground or you send in U.S.

planes and you have a protracted presence

and expeditionary force or Air Force missions, then there's a timeframe.

The clock is counting.

It's ticking.

And the American people have limited numbers of support.

And there's archaic ideas like victory.

And if you cannot win, and we didn't win in Afghanistan, we didn't really defeat all of the Islamists in the way that we wanted in Iraq.

ISIS came in, Libya is still a mess, then people are not going to support that.

And more importantly, when you start bleeding $80 billion

of equipment in one week in Afghanistan, or you lose, you know, 5,000 dead in these places, and then you look at the map and you see that in terms of GDP

and financial reserves and natural resources and population, these ancient metrics,

you've got to worry about China and what China is doing in Asia when it's pressuring your allies, Australia, South Korea.

Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines.

All of these countries are strategically more important than is Afghanistan or even Iraq.

So we have distracted ourselves, but we have not, and that distraction meant that we did not keep up a deterrent presence vis-a-vis China, vis-a-vis Russia, vis-a-vis Iran, vis-a-vis North Korea.

That's one thing he's saying.

The other thing is that this was simultaneously with an unfortunate sanctimoniousness.

So the United States coined these rules-based order and all these ideas that there was going to be some kind of Davos or super

collective leadership or transnational intercontinental leadership under Western elites, the EU crowd, the Davos crowd, the bi-coastal American crowd.

And they had certain values, and one of them was radical measures to stop climate change.

I think Europe has about 750 million people, and it contributes, I think, 0.2 of one percent to all fossil fuel burning and yet it's the most radical in destroying their economies to stop that and then when you look at china or india or africa the united states it just doesn't make sense and what he's saying is that this became almost messianic climate change human rights constitutional government

you can get into transgender rights, all these rights-based protocols.

And in the process of telling everybody that we and the Europeans are so much moral than the rest of the world, we sort of forgot something.

And that something is, how are you going to keep warm tomorrow?

What type of fuel are you going to have?

What type of materials will you have to build your home or asphalt for your road or medicine to stop malaria?

et cetera, et cetera.

And we preach to people and certain people didn't want to follow that.

They felt that we were secular, that we were agnostic, that we were atheistic.

Not just the Islamic world, but Eastern Europe, European Christians, or moderate Muslims or Buddhists or people around the world that felt that it's not healthy to be atheistic and completely secular.

Our founders didn't think that.

Or that when we also felt that we had the right to lecture people less successful than we are are about their illiberalities.

So we were telling African countries,

you're not embracing gay rights.

You're not embracing gay marriage.

What's wrong with you?

Or South American countries, you have to give transgender rights.

Or we're flying the pride flag, the pride flag

at Kabul while we're losing the country.

Or we're having George Floyd murals.

And so the picture was that we were projecting distraction and weakness and inconsideration about key issues at a very at the very time our enemies russia and china were warning the world these people in the west are weak they're loud they're sanctimonious they have agendas that you don't like and we're not going to listen to them and unfortunately for us there were countries that should have been our allies and they are our allies like india and Turkey that are starting to, I mean, they're helping Russia sell its oil.

They're not listening to us.

They're not dismantling their economies and transitioning, as we say, to a green future.

So

what he didn't say, and I'm not sure that ideologically that's easy for him to say, is that you can argue that the neoconservative

agenda got us into Iraq.

And you can argue the bipartisan foreign policy establishment got us into Afghanistan, all that stuff.

But the larger pathology is mostly a progressive project.

There's a lot of realists and Republicans and people that on the conservative side said, you know what?

I deplore

human rights abuses in the Islamic world.

I deplore them, the lack of

sexual equality in

South America.

I don't like the African idea toward homosexuality, but I'm not going to go into those countries or lecture them.

And I'm really angry that India is burning coal, but you know, we burn coal a lot longer and a lot greater volume than India did in the Industrial Revolution.

And so we're not just going to change the rules suddenly.

So I think it was a call for America to realize that

industrially, in terms of demography, in terms of power, military, it can't dictate to the world anymore.

And it certainly can't even be a major participant if it distracts and expends its blood and treasure and interest and capital and labor in areas that are not strategically significant.

And all of that, I think, is very helpful.

But one thing that I think he might have focused on a little more is that when people look at the United States, they're starting to ask questions.

And that is: is Budapest cleaner and easier and safer than San Francisco?

Is Shanghai, if you walk out at night in Shanghai, in Haifa, in

Madrid, is it easier to do so than Detroit or Chicago?

Are the streets of San Francisco cleaner or dirtier than those in,

I don't know,

take a country in Buenos Aires or Santiago, or you,

you know, are you likely to have, can you buy tampons and baby formula in Luxembourg or in Houston?

And so what they're saying is

we're showing the world America in a way that does not

does not earn admiration.

And people are saying, you know what?

These people are loud.

Their popular culture is everywhere.

And

I don't have to listen to them anymore.

And, you know,

Brazil and India are the second, the largest, and I think the third largest democracy in Indonesia as well.

I think it's the fourth.

And they're saying, and they're multiracial countries.

Are they saying, well, you know,

The United States was always multiracial and it was trying to honor the spirit and values of its constitution.

But

I look at racial relations, and is that what I want to be in India?

Is that what we want to do in Seo Paulo or Rio de Janeiro?

Is that what we want to do in Jakarta?

Is to go down the defund the police route or have those videos that appear every hour on the internet of somebody playing the knockout game or a hate crime.

And

they don't want to do that.

And so we get so obsessed with ourselves.

You know, we say to ourselves, well,

we're a model now.

45% of all commercials show African Americans.

And therefore, that's the model of a racially tolerant society.

And it integrates.

And the other people say, but you're not discussing the crime problem.

You can't walk in Chicago at night.

So why don't you talk about that rather than this?

And you can hear it when you go overseas.

When I was in Israel recently, people would come up and say, what the hell happened to the United States?

And so it's uh it's a call to be for the united states to work back to its fundamentals to be more humble to look for allies that share its values and not to hector people and to take care of their internal problems before they start lecturing other people on theirs

they the u.s seems to have a kind of a history of being a little bit more ideological and less practical even when compared to europe and i was thinking like right now the europeans seem far more practical in their addressing of the Ukrainian war, for example.

We've always been messianic.

And

their idea is that, you know, you guys are protected by two oceans.

You've got 330 million people.

You've got this huge economy of military.

We're a fragmented continent.

We're within driving distance of Kiev.

And once this Russian jagran, we don't want to play the Cold War.

Tactical nuclear weapons can take out every capital in Eastern Europe.

So why would you make Ukraine the cause-soleb of the entire world when,

A, the Ukrainians are dying and you say, well, they're dying for freedom, but

you're fighting somebody that is not Saddam Hussein and he's not the Taliban.

He is the dictator, savage autocrat of a sophisticated industrial state that has 7,000 nuclear weapons, and we're going to feel the consequences before you will.

That's the European attitude.

We call that appeasement.

I tend to often agree with that.

But right now,

there is a, I don't know what it is.

It's an evangelical zealousness about Ukraine.

I see when I went to Washington, they had Ukrainian flags on cars and stickers.

It's almost as if it's a surrogate anti-Trumpism or something.

It's almost religious that this was our moment and we got humiliated in Afghanistan and then we had that horrible Donald Trump and now we have something that's pure and we can get behind and Zelensky is a Churchillian, he's Christ-like.

And

that's not true.

I mean, we all want Ukraine to get the Russians out, but when you look at what Ukraine, I mean, that 2014 coup is really problematic.

We had people in the Obama administration that were crazy about trying to bring it into NATO.

We had a corrupt government, absolutely corrupt.

And Joe Biden says that, you know, I told that guy,

if I leave here before you fire him, and that was the barisma.

We had Hunter Biden in there.

We had people in the 2016

election.

the ambassador that were involving themselves in internal politics.

We had the whole steel dossier-Russian collusion with Ukrainian fingerprints here and there.

We had Mr.

Vinman, the architect of the first impeachment, who was bragging that he had been offered.

He said, you know, it was a cheap shot, character assassination to suggest he was Ukrainian rather than an American because he was an immigrant.

Okay, I agree with that.

But then if you have no Ukrainian ties, why are the Ukrainian government purportedly ready to make you Secretary of Defense of Ukraine or that

Minister of Defense.

And so my point is that Ukraine is not pristine and Russia is evil.

Russia has an evil, savage dictator, but the Russian people are not our enemies.

And Ukraine has a good leader, but he's not saint-like.

And there is some nuance there, but nobody wants to discuss that.

And when you only are meeting 40%,

40% of your recruiting goals.

And think about that.

The Army is only, it's here getting halfway through the year, and they've only got 40%

of the people.

And usually, when a person joins the U.S.

Army, almost 50% of them have a parent or family member that's in the military.

That's only 12% of this 40%.

And so, what does that mean?

That means you have alienated.

an entire rubric.

I don't know if it was because of Afghanistan.

They said, I don't want to die for a military that abandons its friends, its allies, American contractors, loyal Afghanistan.

I don't know whether it's Mark Milley and Lloyd Austin saying without any evidence whatsoever, they were going after basically white supremacists, white rage.

I don't know if that's it.

I don't know if the emphasis, well, we can have abortions on federal basis or we're going to have pay for gender reassign, all of that woke new.

agenda coming out from the Pentagon.

But whatever it is, they have managed to alienate the white male recruit that died at twice his numbers in the demographic in Afghanistan and

Iraq.

And so when people look at that, they think, wow, Ronald Reagan Foundation ran a poll.

Only 45% have great confidence in the U.S.

military.

40% of their recruiting growth, the Chinese look at that.

The Russians look at that.

We look at that.

So we're not in a position, I think Russell Meads is trying to argue that we can tell the world what to do or we can do it alone, not until we clean up the mess that's growing in America.

Yeah.

I have just one question before we take a break.

What is, I've seen this phrase bantered about recently, and I haven't really spent much time, and maybe our listeners haven't either.

What is rules-based world order?

What are the, that's a left-wing term.

What is, what are they trying to suggest by that?

What they're suggesting is that during the aberration of the Cold War, that is, the two allies that defeated Nazi Germany turned into nuclear opponents.

And so there was a particular order, and that particular order was real politique, that the Soviet Union and Communist China promoted Stalinist revolutions around the world, and the United States tried to counter that.

And sometimes they counter that with unsavory means, with coups.

John Bolton said he'd planned coups.

And then that was over with.

And the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union fell apart, and Communist China adopted at least a capitalist.

And so then there was this new messianic idea that things like the International Criminal Court, the Paris Climate Accord, the Iran deal, the Davos summits, there was a new consensus that was possible because we were not locked into a Cold War bilateral mindset.

And then elites with the proper education, the proper grounding, the proper resumes, wealthy, sophisticated, progressive, they would fabricate, make a rules-based order.

And it sounded great.

Free trade.

open communications on the sea, sort of a return to Wilsonian's 14 points and all that stuff.

The end of World War I.

No one one violates the borders of another country in the sense of invading, but migrants can go anywhere they want.

There's borders themselves will disappear in terms of immigration, but in terms of aggression, countries won't take other countries' territory, et cetera.

And then the problem, of course, is it's always the problem, whether it's the League of Nations or the United Nations, any of these intercontinental transnational dreams, who enforces it?

Or as Henry Kissinger said of the EU, who do I call?

So who's going to say this?

Who does anything?

And the assumption was America.

So if you have a rules-based order and he goes into Ukraine, then you tell Putin, please get out of Ukraine.

Or if they swallow Tibet and they won't give Tibet up and they swallow Hong Kong, you say, That's against the rules-based order, China.

Please don't take Hong Kong.

You violated your agreement with the British.

That was a rules-based agreement.

And they say to India, you know, you're our ally, but you got just a little bit too much coal.

And China, you just put online 16 coal plants.

And that's not what we want in our westernized rules-based order.

So the rules-based order is basically following up or adhering to treaties and accords that have been made multilaterally between countries.

mostly in the post-war era and then a certain set of mutual understandings about the role of sovereign nations and their commitment to global peace, climate change,

open borders, certain human rights that have been redefined as

transgenderism, gay issues, feminist issues.

kind of the progressive agenda, but it's

glued onto the global scene and a lot of countries are saying

okay i've seen what your wills-based order did in europe and i've seen what they did in the united states and you've got a a declining population 1.7 in the united states if that 1.4 in europe i can see that your borders are a mess and you're dealing with millions of illegal aliens you have no idea what to do with.

Your cities are fetid.

Your economies are stagnant.

And I don't think that these values that you're projecting for the rest of the world to follow work in your own country.

That's kind of an unfair characterization because everybody wants to go to Europe, the United States, and it's still better in the alternative.

But that's the criticism that non-Westerners have about this superimposed global paradigm.

All right, Victor, let's go to a break and then we'll come back and talk about the European Central Bank.

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Victor, I've noticed this week that the European Central Bank is trying to raise interest rates.

So it's buying up its bonds.

And some of the states in the article I was reading was particularly Italy is selling bonds so it can keep the interest rate a little bit lower.

So they're having trouble consolidating policy or keeping a consistent effort to fight inflation and that the central bank really...

the European Central Bank has a hard time controlling it, unlike our Federal Reserve System.

And I was wondering if you had thoughts on sort of the differences between the u.s and europe in those ways well i mean the european central bank doesn't have the clout or the the power that the federal reserve does because individual european countries are not like american states they're sovereign states and their first interest is to themselves So what is good for the Central European Bank is basically what's good for Germany, right?

Yeah.

And that's tight money, zero inflation, and a German export market.

And a lot of countries, especially in Southern Europe, say, you know, it's not good for us.

And in a sense, that we don't have Mississippi telling New York or Connecticut telling Texas, this new interest rate is not good for us.

No, it's everybody is here.

So that's the chief difference.

The other difference is

In the United States, I think people understand that when you have inflation, there's only two ways.

Sometimes they're antithetical, sometimes they're complementary, but the only way you can stop it is to limit the money supply or raise interest rates to discourage people spending and borrowing.

And I think in Europe, because of their social agendas, even though we're almost, I think I shouldn't be pointing them out, I think we have a government that's as large as the Swedish government in terms of GDP, but I'm not sure about that.

But my point is that Europe is is acculturated to socialism.

So when you start to talk about cutting spending on the government level, that means benefits and entitlements.

And when you raise the interest rates and you limit the money supply, that also means that the government has to pay its huge debts to bonds, to wealthy people that are bondholders or upper middle class.

And in

European terms, that means, okay, you're going to cut my housing subsidy, my retirement subsidy, because there's not enough money in the French or the Italian budget, but you are going to pay higher interest rates to somebody who's really wealthy that's buying government bonds.

Whereas in inflationary is

the government's going to keep spending money.

I know prices are going to go up.

My retirement's going to go up.

And then the guy that's got a lot of money in the bank is going to lose value.

I could care less.

That's their attitude.

So they're much less muscular in the way they fight inflation than the federal reserve at least until the biden administration but again you know we were told there was no inflation that was transitory or it was going to be gone or it was just a blip on the screen we were john you know the treasury secretary gutland said that and so did jerome powell the fed so did joe biden so did all of them It was all wrong.

They all knew it was.

Larry Summers and a bunch of Obama advisors of all people said, you know, you're lying.

You're going to have a big rampant inflation.

And we know that inflation rate 9-1 is not really indicative of what housing and fuel and food is like.

No, it isn't.

And to that point, maybe I could turn to the United States.

We have a lot of the administration trying to redefine terms like recession.

The classic definition of two quarters of negative growth is wrong and it's really just a transition or redefining inflation as an adjustment of the economy.

And I was wondering what your thoughts were on these new efforts by the administration.

Well, I mean, they all have, you know how the Democratic Party works.

They have some wonk that writes an email to the DNC and then they send it out to all the media.

And then they get the administration spokesman lined up and they all

see transition, transition, transition.

They're not allowed to say the recession word.

And the recession is two quarters of negative growth.

And why are they doing this?

Because they have a lot of negative growth.

And that's the second quarter.

So we're in six months.

We're in a recession.

It looks like the third quarter is going to get worse.

We haven't broken the back of inflation, that the annualized monthly inflation rate is going to be high.

I don't know if it'll be 9.1 still, but it will be high.

And we're going to start to, I don't know what the unemployment will be, but it might start to creep up.

But all of these things are going to come out this week.

And they are trying to prevent that or preempt it or envision that with changing the vocabulary.

And so one of their big things is we're transitioning to a post-fossil fuel world.

And that's rough.

And that's tough.

But that's part of the plan.

And it wasn't, I mean, they thought they could shut down all of this oil production and they could jawbone institutions not to lend to fracking, horizontal drilling, and then it would just slightly creep up.

And that didn't happen.

And so

their transition is a disaster and they still haven't answered this the existential question.

And that is when half the drivers in America own Tesla-like electric vehicles.

Let's see now, where do you get the lithium?

Which countries supply you the precious metal for this electrical storage?

Where do you generate it?

Japanese said it would take $36 trillion more in infrastructure and generation.

So are you going to have more natural gas?

We're trying to export it now to save Europe.

Are you going to have go back to burn oil?

No.

Are you going to build more wind and solar, vast acreages that don't work at night?

No.

Or what are you going to do?

Coal?

No.

The only answer for now is nuclear power, and that's taboo for the left.

So are you going to pay 50

50 cents a kilowatt hour to charge your Tesla?

It's not going to be any cheaper than gas or oil.

So this is what they call transition and they don't have an answer for it and they don't want to say recession, just like they don't want to use the word stagflation.

They don't want to use the word inflation.

They keep saying, well, on July 4th, you know, your ketchup was cheaper than it was a year ago.

Lie.

And who cares about two dabs of ketchup when you're paying double or triple for the steak?

And they always, they do this.

And it's funny that the left always gets angry when somebody points out the here and now.

They're always talking about the future or the theory or in the long term.

We're saints.

Don't just worry about, you know, mundane things like how to eat and where to find shelter and how to get in a car and move because they can't do these things.

They don't care.

Ultimately, it's a matter of morality.

They don't care.

They don't care about the effect on people.

It's always the Pete Buttigig is giddy now.

that gasoline in California is almost $7 a gallon.

You know, this is the best way to tell Miguel Gomez Gomez in Bakersfield to get rid of that 2001 truck that gets 16 miles a gallon.

Get rid of it, Miguel.

Come on and go buy a $90,000 Ford electric, get on the waiting list for an electric pickup.

Can I be Pete

Buttigig for a second?

Yeah.

But yeah, I really do care about Miguel because I'm just trying to make this world better for him and save it ultimately in the end.

And he'll come to understand that.

he'll come to understand it because miguel is not at my sophisticated level and i'm very aware because you know i was mayor of notre dame and my dad uh

southbend indiana my dad was a professor i'm gay so i have a lot more knowledge than miguel now miguel may be a master electrician and he may be able to go into a house and rewire it or he may be able to go and look at a circuit breaker and say these circuits go go here and he can do that in the way that Pete Buttigig would

implode but Miguel is dumb you see because Pete has a degree or letters after his name that's how it works so Miguel might say to Pete

okay

I have no problem with transitioning but let's do it slowly so you don't destroy the economy and if people flip on a switch they can get energy and that's not an exaggeration.

We're coming into August and we can get some 110 days in the San Joaquin Joaquin Valley of California and other places in the United States, and we'll see if we have brownouts or not.

Gavin Newsom is going to look like a fool if he's traveling the entire United States lecturing how successful red states are not as successful his failed blue state model.

But what's going to happen when there's brownouts and he's barnstorming to be considered president when he can't even keep the power on or

that this fire starts to get near the redwoods of Yosemite?

Yeah, it sounds like Miguel is useful and Pete is useless.

Even his ideas are useful.

Pete is useless.

He represents, he's an iconic totem.

He represents this person that is glib, but can't, has no knowledge.

And

he sounds great when he says nothing.

And he cares about issues that...

you care about once you can eat and once you have a roof over your head and once you can move.

And when you can't do those, you can't worry about those other issues.

And anything that requires knowledge and imagination and courage, like how do we get all of those cargo ships into the port of LA as quickly as possible?

How do we get the port of Oakland working again?

How do we start to drive,

let Americans drive for a day without going broke, paying for their fill-ups?

How do we get a person who says, I live in Fresno and I want to go to miami and i don't want to spend two days with missed connections how do you do that he can't do that he can't do any of that so he talks about being gay and and his uh paternal leave and go versus wade anything other than what he was assigned to do because it ultimately why was he picked to be transportation secretary Why was he?

Did he have such sterling credentials in South Bend?

Bike Path worked so well, Pete there.

Is that what you're saying?

No, he was picked for two reasons.

One,

he sparkled and he was glib compared to that dismal democratic field of 2016, 2020.

You know what I'm saying?

I mean, he was kind of in, not really in the race in 2016, but he was thinking about it.

2020, he came on the national steam and he sounded like he was kind of quick-witted compared to the other people on the stage.

And number two, he's gay.

So he fit into the diversity mosaic.

And he could be, we always want a first race, class, gender, diversity, equity, inclusion candidate.

So we've got the first gay, black, woman press secretary, and we haven't had a gay president.

He thinks he's going to be a trailblazer.

So that's why he's there and he knows it.

So he's going to glib us to death.

Yeah.

You know, I think that the American population is learning this about the cabinet.

I just saw, and I didn't actually read it, but that the polls from Americans on the advisors to the president are really low.

So Americans, I hope they're learning a big lesson that the look of something is not as important as the skill of the person.

Yeah,

I addressed that in a column not too long ago called Cabinet of Dunces.

in which I talked about Jennifer Granholm, the energy secretary.

And somebody asked her, what are you doing on the government level to increase supply?

That's hilarious i can't do anything and then she's and then we had anthony blinken and jake suddenly go to anchorage when this administration started they were just told you know basically screw you you're not going to talk to chinese that way we run the world get with it get over it that's basically the message that china gave those two once in a while he blinken squeaks about you know we're going to get a un group to see how racist we are and then you look at merrick garland and he's basically turned the Justice Department, the FBI into a retrieval service for missing, I don't know, missing Biden family diaries,

missing crackpipes, missing pistol, automatic handgun, semi-automatic handguns and laptops.

And I could go on and on and on.

When you go into Buttigig and you look at the Interior Secretary, all of them.

They're all in common.

They were there because of primarily their superficial appearance.

And I'm not saying that I think an all-white male would be any better because look at Biden and look at Blinken and look at Sullivan and look at Garland.

They're mediocre.

But they're there because, not because they're white males.

They're there because of their ideology.

The Democratic Party put them there.

It's ideological.

So

that's what American people did.

They got tired of Donald Trump's tweets and they got acculturated to low unemployment, low inflation, economic growth, and finally a secure border.

And they said, you know what, we have the latitude, the laxity now to have all of that, but we want a president that's decorous and

doesn't say things, you know, doesn't tweet, you know, that Anthony Fauci throws a ball like a girl.

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

So we're going to get old Joe Biden from Grant.

And when you tried to warn them,

you know, the world is not perfect.

You don't always get what you want, but you can.

And if you get this guy, he is a puppet, a veneer.

He is run by the hard left, and you're going to get the hardest left administration in the history of this country.

And they're going to go crazy in the first two years.

They would say, Oh, no, you're just a right-wing nut.

But that's what happened.

That is what happened.

Victor, let's take a break and then come right back to talk change

road here and talk about the fentanyl crisis and China's role role in it.

We'll be right back.

Welcome back.

Victor, I was looking at, of course, we have our border crisis, but I thought one particular aspect of the border crisis is that 166%

increase in fentanyl at the border, and they expect over 100,000 deaths this year from fentanyl.

And what i was thinking is well china because then you go on to read the article and that china is producing all the material for it and the drug lords are manufacturing and distributing it and so china really has a fundamental role in the production of this fentanyl and yet we see very little I mean, there's almost like it, maybe everybody just knows it'd be unproductive to accuse them of this fentanyl crisis crisis and the COVID plague.

Or maybe they're just expecting, well, we'll get a deadpan face because they really don't care anyway.

But I don't know what your thoughts are on.

Yeah, well, my thoughts are it's analogous to the Wuhan Lab.

I wrote something about a COVID aftermath on the website.

And let me just sum up the Chinese attitude.

China thinks that it is going to overtake us economically, militarily, politically, socially, culturally.

It hasn't yet.

Every time it starts to do stuff, we find out that its real estate market blew up or that everybody hates its Silk Road initiative or they've got internal, in any way, it's having trouble.

So then it comes up with ways to hurt the United States.

And one of them, I think, was in the Wuhan Security 4 lab, they were engaged in gain of function research and they were trying to enhance a virus well beyond their capability given the fact they had so many releases and security breaches before with coronaviruses and all viruses but they thought that they could make a virus a more mutable b more transmissible and maybe eventually more morbid morbid and they felt that uh and i'm not going to get into whether this was part of a bioweapons research or it was part of research for a vaccine or it was just intrinsic you know idiopathic uh research but it got out i'm not going to get in whether it was released or it got out by accident but it got out and what was their attitude is what i'm focusing on their attitude is for 12 days you couldn't fly anywhere outside of wuhan in china but you could take a direct flight from wuhan to lax

or SFO or JFK.

That's for me, that's everything because they were telling the world, screw you.

If we're going to have this thing, you're going to have it too.

Okay.

And then when people objected, you're racist.

And they had bought the WHO, basically it was on their side.

And then guess what?

They're going to go, what, and now what is their attitude?

What are you going to do about it?

Hey, all you American investors.

Hey, Mike Bloomberg.

who finances startup companies in China.

Hey, Bill Gates, who was one of the first investors in China.

Hey, NBA, who's leveraged the moral, their moral necks in it.

What are you going to do about it?

You know how much you need our money.

And they're going to say, get over it.

Nobody's, and the United States is going to say, you did this.

That lab is dangerous.

And it's going to happen again.

And shut it down now

before you destroy the world.

Okay.

And the same thing with Fenton.

And their attitude is, we didn't do anything.

We're just producing a chemical that's valuable in anesthesiology.

And I don't know how it all got into Mexico and Central America.

I don't know whether it's getting across the border, but I do know 100,000 people kill themselves a year from it.

And that's not necessarily a bad thing, as far as we're looking at.

So it's all based on asymmetry.

If you're Chinese and you've got money, you can buy a farm next to a U.S.

military base.

If you're an American and you've got money, you can't do that in China.

If right now,

right now, the United States was, I don't know, let's say producing tons and tons of Prozac, just to take it an arbitrary, and

there were people in China that didn't know how to administer it or were getting sick from it, and that was pouring across the border into China, and we knew that.

What would they do?

What would they do if an American bought land next to a Chinese military base?

What would they do if

some type of biology lab

was maybe doing a rabies gain of function?

Who knows what it would be?

And all of a sudden, somewhere on a military base, we shut that down and you could not fly out of that town anywhere in the United States, but you could fly directly to China.

What would they say to us?

So, the whole relationship is based on asymmetry.

And how does that asymmetry continue?

And why does it continue?

Because it is finesse to, it's honest to a scary magnitude.

My gosh, the attitude is: if you object to us,

we have a lot of countermeasures.

One, we're going to use your own propaganda.

You're racist.

You're racist.

You're racist.

Number two, you've got a lot of money invested in China and you're getting very rich, you elites.

You're going to lose that.

And number three,

we have a lot of pressure points around the world.

And pretty soon you're going to learn that when you want to go into the Mediterranean or you want to go out of the Mediterranean or you want to go through the Panama Canal or you want to go, I don't know, anywhere in on the ports of Africa, we control it.

So that's what they're doing and they're doing a great job of it from their point of view.

And they're not going to stop.

They're not going to stop.

And they look at us and they have utter contempt.

This is a country that called us racist.

And the first few days of the COVID outbreak, they began arresting African students in Beijing right off the streets.

And they had signs no Africans allowed at their McDonald's.

And they called us racist.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And four, they seem to

be completely unapologetic for anything.

You know, you can't address China's humane,

whether it's humane or not humane, because they really seem not to care.

We don't care about that.

You can't say anything.

And everybody is in it, from the Confucius Institutes on university campuses to the recruitment officers who get these Chinese students to come over and pay the full price without scholarships and maybe sometimes a 10% markup on tuition room and board,

to the corporate joint venture, to

academic magazines, medical magazines, medical journals, medical research, scientific, it's all got Chinese money in some ways.

And

it's going to destroy us unless we wake up and say, you know what?

No more, no more, no more, no more.

And

it would, you know, it's going to say, if you're a child of a Communist Party official, you're not going to send your child to the United States.

You're just not going to do it if you're a member of the Chinese Communist Party, because if you're a member of the Chinese military or you're a member of the Chinese Communist Party, you're not going to be a joint visiting professor in the United States.

If you're a Chinese national, you're not going to buy property in the United States.

I don't know.

I don't think we're ever going to be able to do that, but that's what they would expect us to do to stop what they're doing.

And that's what they do so that we would never do what they do.

It's that simple.

I think as America, if Walter Russell Mead is right and America's position globally is declining, then as America's position declines, we will be forced to become more practical.

We won't have the leisure to be so ideological.

That's the question, isn't it?

So a history of civilizations and when people start to see that they've got an illness that's existential, do they get help in time?

Do they understand the consequences?

Or do they just let it go?

And the point that we're at,

we have whole areas of American pathologies that we can't discuss.

We'll never be able to discuss them.

And I can give you three of the most controversial, even if I might be fired for mentioning them, but I'll just do it very quickly, Sammy, because it's.

Okay, and then we'll end the show.

Okay, go ahead.

Go ahead.

Go ahead.

So we have an epidemic of transgenderism.

Traditionally, in most societies, about 0.1 to 0.3% of the population feels that they have gender dysphoria.

Not so here.

We're getting up to 3 or 4%.

And what's happening in America is we have people coming into puberty

who are considering or are actually under treatment that involves dangerous drugs with long-term effects and surgeries in their teen years that are irreversible.

And we're getting to the point where we don't want the parents involved.

And

this is completely immune from any discussion.

Nobody can talk about it.

What I just said is a fireable offense in most places.

I didn't say anything that's negative about transgender.

I know a lot of people are.

I have no problem.

They have no problem with me.

I just think live and let live, more power to them.

But the idea that you're going to...

harness the powers of the state and turn the decision-making in part over to the state or to a child or a preteen or an early teen to make an irreversible decision in their life at a period when they're troubled, as all teens are, and you're going to engage in a drug protocol that you would never allow any other person.

I mean, this is a left-wing movement that said, don't take hydroxychloroquine and ivermedicine.

I don't know about the efficacy, but I knew know enough about science, they're not dangerous drugs given their long history of usage, but yet they will advocate some type of hormonal treatment that is dangerous.

That's one thing.

Number two,

you just simply cannot talk about China.

That's what we're talking about.

And we went through that.

You just can't talk about it.

To talk about China makes you, you can talk about Russia all you want, how evil it is, but you apply the same standards of China and you are an apostate.

Can't do it.

You can't talk about race in the sense if you say that the majority of hate crimes against Asians are committed by African-American young males, or if you say African-Americans are committing hate crimes in double their numbers in the general population, or if you say that in terms of violent crime in America, that 12% of the population, actually it's six,

when you take gender into consideration, are committing 50%

of the violent crimes.

Or if you say that in very rare cases, I want to emphasize that rare interracial cases that African Americans commit five times more violent offenses against people of another race than against themselves.

Okay, what I just, then that is taboo, unless you contextualize all that, that this is a natural reaction to racism and victimization rather than either government policy or cultural attitudes.

So you can't discuss that.

So if you can't discuss that, then there's whole things you can't do.

And one of them, the thing is you just accept that every Saturday night in Chicago, five people are going to be dead and 25 are going to be shot.

And there's going to be 800 dead every single year and 8,000 nationwide.

And you're going to have...

two Afghanistans every year in the United States.

You can't discuss anything else.

And if your child happens to go to school and comes home and says, I'm of the opposite sex and I talk to my counselor and I'm going to get hormone treatment as a prelude to surgery.

And you tell your 13 or 14-year-old, you're not.

That's going to get you in trouble.

And if you're,

I don't know, if you're a government official or you're a corporate head, and you said, you know what, it's time to get out of China, you're going to be in big trouble.

And I get, so there's elements in our conversation about crime and race and transgenderism

and what the Chinese are doing that we just can't discuss.

We can discuss anything else.

You know, if you're a bystander and you walked into the Capitol when the door is open, you can go to solitary confinement for eight months.

Fine.

But you won't discuss these other things.

You won't discuss,

you know, I don't understand it.

Is there one left-wing person that can't stand up in the Congress and say, if you're a four-star general, when you retire, we ask you for five years not to go to work as a defense lobbyist or on a defense contractor board because your knowledge of the Pentagon procurement process will be monetized whether you know it or not.

You are going to be compensated not for your knowledge of corporate efficacy and profit making.

You're going to be monetized for your knowledge of how the government buys things from your corporation.

Can't we say that?

I just said that, and I've got so many angry people that have written me about that.

And, you know, you're anti-military.

No, I'm not.

I'm pro-military.

But that's what's really scary when you say that the correction or the medicine is worse than the disease.

And I don't know how you

one final rant, and that is we have gone from 2.1

children for family to 1.67, I think it is, just in 20 years.

And we have up in about about 30 years the age of marriage from 23 to 28, 27, the first child is up to 32.

And from just a historical point of view,

you are on a trajectory where, and the popular culture reflects these new values, life of Julia, pajama boy, metosexual,

the whole, look at the profile of the rioting of the Portland rioter or the Minneapolis rioter or Antifa member.

But But my point is this, is that we have deified the idea that the nuclear family,

a house with three kids, two parents, maybe even one parent, that's all satanic.

And the new way

is the best way.

And the problem is the new ways never were historically.

And so you can't discuss that.

To do that is anti-feminist.

It's, I don't know what it else it is, but

it's anti-AOC when she said she would not have children because of climate change, etc.

But I'm just telling you that we have these existential crises, but we don't have the intellectual courage or the knowledge to identify them and act on them.

And there are ways to do it.

We should right now stop sending all of our wealthy kids to these tony prep schools and say, if you really want to help the world or don't go over to Zimbabwe or something, let's open up a classical academy in the inner city and you guys can go teach.

And why doesn't every wealthy family in Silicon Valley adopt an inner city family?

And I don't just mean to give them money.

I mean to advise them how to invest and what interest is and what the advantages of savings.

And the world isn't divided between those who get interest and pay and all the practical things to help another human being.

We don't do that.

But ultimately, that's the only thing that's going to save us, but we don't do it.

Instead, we virtue virtue signal.

And that's the worst thing that I've seen on the modern stage, this idea that you perform this performance art.

And,

you know, you take Nancy Pelosi gets in the Capitol and she gets down on one knee with an African flag around her neck.

And then all of a sudden, she's given medieval exemption.

So Paul Pelosi can do what?

make $100 million based on insider knowledge from her, or you get to go over to

Tuscan Beach during the summer when nobody can afford to turn their air conditioning, or you can have your $23,000 freezer and your $12,000, $13 pint ice cream and brag about it when everybody's locked up except you when you're sneaking up.

That's what I'm trying to say virtue signaling is.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Victor, I, yeah.

Well, I'm glad that we could speak about the unspeakable in this program.

It's fine.

I know I have things to do.

I'm going to hear about

the authorities.

Yeah.

Okay.

My authorities that seem to govern what I can say and do.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, thank you very much, Victor.

We're going to end the podcast here.

We'd like to thank our listeners.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

All right.

This is Sammy Wink, Victor Davis-Hansen, and we're signing off.