Cabinet of Dunces

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Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This is the Friday news roundup and we are going to talk a little bit about domestic politics today, maybe have a look at Joe Biden's cabinet.

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Welcome back.

Victor, as I always ask, what's on your mind today?

Well, I've got my hands around this little COVID bastard, she's a thing, I'm squeezing in.

And as I go

today, 20 today,

accounting, I have got back 50% of my energy and I haven't been coughing.

And I'm headed to Israel

in 24 hours.

And I'm going to defeat this little guy, this bad guy, this engineered virus.

And when I'm in Israel, I'm come back perfectly healthy.

How's that?

Yeah, I I think that that's probably just about right.

And you probably will be healthy in the next few days.

When this podcast plays, it will be, you will be in Israel at the time.

So

let's talk a little bit about

the midterm elections.

And what I noticed this these in all the elections and the runoffs that they were having this last week, that the Democrats were celebrating some of their Pennsylvania winners, Summer Lee, who was Sanders endorsed, and John Fetterman, who is a Sanders supporter himself.

And I thought that was unusually odd.

And I was reading in Politico, they were celebrating this as a remaking of the Democratic Party to a more left, to more left.

leaning policies.

And I was wondering about your thoughts about the midterm or this democratic trend.

It seems like it's a victory, as one newspaper put it, for the squad with Summer Lee.

So

I don't think so.

The key thing to look at is when a majority party has fewer who turn out on Election Day than the minority party and the Democrats have far fewer.

participants in the primary, then they're in bad trouble.

And Fetterman had a stroke.

I mean, he was talking.

I mean, he was

his communicators about his victory came from the hospital.

So there wasn't, it was a mixed bag.

And we don't really know, as I'm speaking, if Mr.

Oz is one or not, but

you get both views.

What people are trying to do right now is to say, did Trump, the main story is that, is Trump endorsement

of little or no value, a lot of value, or that kind of split the difference, some value.

It depends on, I suppose,

uh

the candidate we forget a lot about things when we say about endorsements i mean if you endorse a bad candidate i don't mean ideologically but i mean just somebody who's not charismatic or doesn't speak well then you're not going to do well and so

you don't get 10 to zero but if you're you know 60 40 and trump is

that's pretty good but his endorsement some you know um

His endorsement's not an ironclad guarantee.

And what we're, I guess what I'm saying is with this primary, we're getting close now to a constant drumbeat.

Is Trump going to win?

Is he going to run?

Is he, his candidates are going to win?

Is he going to run?

Is he going to announce after the midterm?

Most likely, can you have Trumpism without Trump?

And

that's going to be very interesting to see

how Trump treats that.

I think you could make the argument that 80%

support his agenda, but maybe 60,

oh, I don't know, 55, 45 want him to run again, if

that means somebody like DeSantis, who has executive experience and has been really sharping his spurs the last two months, taking on Disney, taking on critical race theory, taking on the transgender

extremists.

So

what DeSantis is trying to do is saying, you know what?

You can get the Trump agenda with me.

You can get the ferocious counterattacks on the left with me but you won't get you know these tweets about stormy daniels or something like that we'll see we'll see what's going to happen but i don't i think the democrats know what's coming they've accepted it it's going to be a huge shock they're going to try to do anything they can roe versus wade january 6

um putin's price hikes uh the Buffalo shootings, racism, racism, racism.

But,

you know, it's it's I keep using that image of a locomotive and they're tied to the tracks.

And I just don't think that they're going to get out of it.

They're not going to, they're not going to moderate, they're not going to negotiate, they're just going to go stay there on those tracks and say, look, look.

Yeah, well, the results that I just talked about in Pennsylvania would suggest that you're correct in that, that they're just going to keep leaning, not just leaning left, but falling over left practically.

So that doesn't seem like it pleases half of the members of their own party so i i think they are just going to trip over themselves and lose in the november elections yeah i mean everybody says well you know trump endorsed madison um cawthorne and he he lost he barely lost i mean he was a flawed candidate believe me it was almost every single day a new photo emerged with

I don't know what the word would be, sort of homoerotic or pederastic or I don't know know

themes that were.

And then he made all sorts of astounding, crazy statements and Trump stuck with him, but he had to.

But it raises another interesting question is how does Trump endorse these candidates?

Because some of them are pretty much ideologically aligned.

And

you wonder who are their handlers and what is their influence with Trump's handlers.

And I hope that, you know, that these candidates are not bidding for contracts with outside campaign consultants who then promise them that they're going to get Trump's endorsement because

enough said, but you can see what that happens.

When I see one of these talking heads say, well,

you know, I'm going to,

Trump is going to do this and Trump is going to do that, as if they are negotiating between Trump and the candidates and they're very highly paid.

It's not good.

And that's politics, but

I guess what I'm trying to say is in the last analysis, we have one issue, and that is everybody accepts that Trump's program, other than spending too much money, was far superior to the antithesis.

The antithesis is even going to get worse.

So then the question is, who is going to

direct that?

that agenda?

Is it somebody who created it, Donald Trump?

Or is it someone who watched Donald Trump, emulated Donald Trump, and feels that his strengths commiserate with Donald Trump's, but he doesn't have the downsides?

And then left on said or left unspoken is 90% of Republicans, whatever they feel about the nominee, they will vote for Donald Trump if he's a nominee.

Yeah, that's true.

It's hard to predict, though, what he's actually going to do because he's going to be 79 years old.

Yeah, I was going to say.

I mean, when a person's, I'm 68 and, and, you know, after three weeks of COVID, and I think, would I want to do what?

I mean, I almost had sympathy for Joe Biden today, flying around.

And God, I thought, wow, I couldn't figure out today.

I watched a clip and he's 70, was he 79?

And he was walking down the steps, right?

And there was nobody around him.

And he had a mask on.

And then he came down to meet all these people and he took his mask off.

I thought, wow, wow, this is so weird.

Is it a photo op mask or what?

He's trying to get COVID

and destroy his lungs with all the fibers in a mask at the same time.

This COVID, I know people with hyper.

I have a hyper allergic.

I get, you know, I have histamine problems.

I get hyper allergic.

And they say people that are hyperimmune then

have a bad response to COVID.

I've heard people that have a hypoimmune, low immune response, they They need shot after shot booster to get immune.

I don't, and you know, children are getting Omicron.

Omicron has just said to the whole pandemic, everything you guys said, Omicron virus stands on its back legs and says, everything you guys said about COVID is a lie.

I can infect children.

I can make people sick very long.

I can put more in the hospital than Delta.

And I'm changing.

So somewhere there's, somewhere there's a truth that I would very, I would like to live long enough to see some open inquiry to look at this virus and have a chart and say, look, this is its ability to mutate.

This is its

ability to be infectious compared to other viruses and see if it's normal.

It doesn't seem normal to me.

All right, Victor, let's move on.

Let's get away from medicine or we'll get into monkeypox.

I don't want to go.

Okay, let's talk about the Durham investigation instead.

So we have emails showing a cozy relationship between Michael Sussman and the FBI director James Baker.

And actually, they were texts.

I take that back.

And then testimony that Hillary was informed on the taking of information to the FBI, to James Baker, by Michael Sussman.

So that was a revelation in the court just a couple of days ago.

What do you make of the Durham investigation at this point?

Well, here's what is exposed.

And I think Debanuna

had more or less outlined it, but he didn't have access to these testimonies.

But let's just walk through what happened.

Hillary Clinton

in

mid-early 2016

cannot stand Donald Trump.

And she's terrified of him, and everybody's terrified of him.

And then we had the email scandal, and Trump joked about, hey, maybe Rush can help us find it.

She went ballistic.

So she called her personal lawyer and her DNC lawyer, Mark Elias, and said, this guy is out beyond the pale.

You've got to do something.

So then he went to his former friend at Perkins Co., he met Michael Sussman.

And remember, these people are not minor players.

Mark Elias is probably one of probably the chief left-wing ballot voting change the rules lawyer in the country.

And Michael's husband was a cyber expert lawyer and with vast

prosecutorial experience.

And they're working in the same law firm.

And they said, you've got to do something.

And

someone mentions Fusion GPS.

So they think, well, you know, there was that dossier that some of the right wing, we'll just call up old Michael Steele.

Christopher Steele, excuse me.

So they get, there's two tracks then.

One is Christopher Steele in the dossier, and it's fake.

He hasn't been to the Soviet Union in 13 years.

I think Fiona Hill, remember her from the impeachment?

The anglicized former British subject who is so prim and proper and professional.

Well, she was the one that was the liaison between Dashenko and Christopher Steele.

So then Dashenko just lies and makes up all these rumors.

And then he hands them over with

Mr.

Dolan, this Hillary former subordinate that's now

in Russia himself.

And they concoct all these crazy stories.

And then Steele has the ability to put into a what a brew plant, like it's a fake serious document, you know, capital letters, borders, all this crap.

And the same time,

Sussman has another GP, Sussman via Clem Simpson, they have another line, another

wave wave of assault.

And that is they contact

apparently a number of techies who have a contract to examine some of the communications emanating out of Trump Tower.

And Rodney Joff

is

pretty much a self-described expert, one of the best in his field.

And we remember that.

email that came out during the trial that he was bragging to people that if Hillary won, i.e.

his vested interest is to see Hillary win, then he would be chief of cybersecurity.

And he comes back and tells Sussman that there's this strange thing going on and there's pings going back.

So there we are.

So what does Sussman do?

He contacts

Elias, apparently.

We'll see.

That's going to come out.

But then he thinks, nobody's going to believe me if I plant this story.

I'm going to plant it, but we need some authenticity.

So I'll call up my own old buddy.

James Baker claims he wasn't as friendly.

Or how do you have my cell phone?

Well, that's

a ruse.

So he calls him up and says, I'm not working for anybody.

You know, James Baker says,

he told me he wasn't working for anybody.

You believe that?

Come on.

Michael Sessman calls up him on a cell phone and says, I'm not working.

I'm a patriot.

I just got this Joff, who everybody knows is a Clinton partisan, and he's just found some mysterious pings.

So, and Durham is very professional.

He doesn't editorialize.

He just presents the evidence.

And then Baker,

I guess, calls Comey out.

Comey, then,

you know, he has the FBI look at it, CIA look at it.

Immediately, they start leaking.

I think it was Slate.

Jake Sullivan is the National Security Advisor of the United States.

He was tweeting out that Donald Trump is communicating with the Russians.

It was a total lie in a back channel.

And Hillary Clinton was doing that.

So that's what she concocted it all.

She used a paywall.

I said a firewall.

So she didn't want to be connected with Mark Elias.

So she said he's the DNC attorney.

And he didn't want to be connected.

So he said it's the Perkins-Coe law firm with Sussman.

And Sussman says, well, it's Fusing GPS.

And Fusing GPS says, well, you know, it's the steel dossier and job.

That's how they work.

And the bottom line is they destroyed

three years of the Trump administration and American life because Hillary Clinton concocted a total ruse.

She gaslighted the nation.

She made it out of whole cloth.

She fed it to every media.

They ran with it.

They ran with it from the day he entered office.

When I would drive down the 99, you would see posters about billboards with Devin Noona as the puppet of the Russians.

That was the narrative.

22 months, $40 million, dream team, hunter-killer, lawyers, all-stars.

They gushed over these people that left it, and there was nothing.

Do you think Donald Trump would have been harder on the Russians if those things hadn't been going on while he was in

the Russians, anyways?

He re-armed us.

I was waiting for you to say that.

So, what did Donald Trump do to the Russians?

Did he have a hot mic like Barack Obama and say, tell Vladimir to get me some room and I'll be flexible on missile defense.

And this is my last election, if you keep quiet.

And he kept quiet.

And Obama got re-elected.

And Obama got rid of missile defense and the polls and the checks.

And then when he fulfilled the bargain, he went into eastern Ukraine and the Crimea.

That's what Obama did.

He also put a hold on javelin missiles.

So Trump came in and what did he do?

He said, no more reset.

And he sold offensive weapons, which nobody seemed to care about.

Mr.

Binman didn't care about it when he was the ringleader of impeachment.

He delayed him a little bit because he had a crazy idea, Sammy.

Donald Trump got it into his head that the entire Biden regime, and this is in the interregnum, he left the vice presidency and he was still, that's when he was most lucrative because he wasn't in office, but he was a private citizen, but he was winking and nodding.

He would be president someday.

and that family but they were doing it when he was vice president as well but that family donald trump thought was crooked i don't know where he got that idea but he got

he got impeached for it he got impeached for saying that it was and joe biden had writing son of a bitch i fired that guy

he's bragging about it so

That's what it did to the country.

And Donald Trump raised sanctions.

He killed 200 mercenaries, Russian.

They called up, the military called him up and said, we've got a bunch of Russian militaries that are approaching this insulation in Syria, and they're ready to attack us.

He said, kill them.

And they did.

And

people in his national security team said, you know, there's an intermediate missile

treaty with Russia.

They always break it.

He said, get out of it.

You're telling me that this steel dossier and this bugging of the Trump towers really didn't stop Donald Trump from doing the things he would do with the Russians anyway, right?

So because he stayed as tough as he was.

When I wrote the case for Trump, I read 10 of those books.

And it's just the same narrative.

It's ghostwritten, but it's the same thing.

You don't insult the person you're going to crush.

You brag on, you say you get along with him, you talk with him.

Everybody got mad at Trump.

I like Putin.

I can talk to Putin.

And then he crushed him.

He got out of the missile deal.

He killed Russians.

He upped sanctions.

He poured oil.

He crashed the Russian oil price.

He made NATO spend 100

billion.

I'm glad they did, or they wouldn't have weapons right now to send to Ukraine.

He upped us, our military budget, by 80 billion.

He did all he could.

He triangulated with the Chinese back and forth.

He did all he could to weaken Putin.

And Putin, don't believe me.

What did Putin do from 2017 in january to 2020 so he didn't invade the ukraine he didn't invade he didn't invade uh georgia elsatia he didn't invade the donbass he didn't invade crimea

yeah he didn't and what did he do right after trump led office he tried to take decapitate kiev that's what he did and so you can we can have all these

i don't know pointy head brilliant brilliant, strategic thinkers, but the fact is that's the record.

And so he was very hard on Putin.

But he could have made a deal with Putin and kept Putin out of Ukraine had he had some flexibility, but he couldn't because anything that was interpreted as moderate to a man who was overseeing 7,000 nuclear weapons was considered.

proof that Donald Trump was a colluder.

So it really destroyed his ability to make foreign policy.

It really did.

And it consumed that administration for 22 months.

And the moment it collapsed in the spring, an early summer,

they went right into impeachment.

And you look back at that first impeachment and the whole Mueller investigation, it was a damn joke.

When you get involved, good old Bob Mueller gets in front.

of a Senate intelligence committee and he's put under oath and they ask him what was the steel dossier's role and what was the fusion GPS doing in this?

I don't know,

get in there.

The two pillars of the investigation.

Then they bring James Comey in.

That was under

lock and key, that was secret testimony, but apparently 245 times he said, I don't know.

Was it my purview?

How should I know?

And then you get Andrew McCabe in there, three times he lied, or maybe was it four to a federal investigator?

No need to go into Brennan and

Clapper.

So these were pathological liars and dissimulators, and it really hurt the country.

And Hillary Clinton,

all those lead to Hillary.

All lead to Hillary.

And so this is what Durham does not leak.

He doesn't have late-night phone calls with the press.

He does not trust the press.

He will fire anybody on that team that leaks.

He goes after one individual and he finds a clear-cut crime.

Did you or did you not lie to a FBI official, Mr.

Sussman, when you said you were not representing anybody?

Well, it's my word against his.

No, it's not.

He took notes.

Well, so did I.

Well, he showed his notes to other people and they confirmed right after that that that's what you said.

Well, that's what he thought he said.

Okay, then why did you bill the Clinton law firm if you weren't working for them?

Well, I was doing a lot of stuff, but you know, it's not his only hope, the only hope to crush Durham right now.

There's three things that can crush it.

This Judge Cooper, who's an Obama partisan, or this thing goes to a jury and they're counting on a Washington, D.C.

jury to be partisan and jury nullification,

or Merrick Garland steps in and just stops it.

Yeah.

And that's not going to happen, probably.

We'll see.

Or maybe.

Well, he may feel like he needs to save Hillary, I guess, is what you're saying.

If Merrick Garland stops Durham and the Republicans

win the

midterms and they will.

They won't remove him, but they will impeach Murray Garland.

I think they're going to impeach Mayorkis as well.

He should.

I mean, this is a guy that created the Ministry of Disinformation and then completely failed to take his oath of office seriously and he didn't enforce federal immigration law.

Victor, hold on to that idea and let's go ahead and take a few messages or a moment for a few messages, and then we'll come right back and talk about the Biden cabinet.

We'll be right back.

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Welcome back.

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

He has a website, victorhanson.com, and he does a lot of exclusive material on that website, VDH ultra material and articles, some 2,400 to 3,000 words a week.

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Victor, you started right in on my next subject, and that was Biden's cabinet.

And I thought maybe we'd do a little roundtable and talk about each one.

And you were on Merrick Garland, the Attorney General, and you feel that he could or possibly might be up for impeachment if the

Congress turns Republican, turns Republican.

If Merrick Garland would fire Durham, I think he would be subject to impeachment.

Yes.

Oh, got it.

I don't think he would be subject to conviction in the Senate because I'm not sure they're going to get 60 votes.

But what is Merrick Garland?

You know, let me just say that one of the weirdest things, I had an older brother that was a novelist, a very good novelist, NALS, N-A-L-S.

And 42 years ago, he introduced me to a book called Confederacy of Dunces.

And it was written by this guy named John Toole, John Kennedy Toole, who I think he committed suicide.

He lived with his mother.

And it's kind of an autobiographical

story of misfits in the American society, very brilliant people who can't make it.

And they have pathologies, you know,

and they don't make it.

But they're kind of sympathetic, but in their self-destruction,

they reveal some of the

the contradictions in American life.

Okay, Confederacy of Dunces.

This, I'm just using that because

this cabinet is a cabinetcy of dunces.

It is.

If you look at Merrick Garland, this is a man because a teachers union official concocted the idea that these wonderful parents that were worried about their children's education and the school system in Virginia, and there was an election coming up,

he said that these people are threatening.

Everybody gets threatened.

I get threatened all the time.

I don't call the FBI.

It happened five or six times in my life, ten times probably altogether.

I mean,

if you look at if you call threats, a private email and said, if you ever come to Washington, I'm going to shoot you, that kind of stuff.

Yeah.

So, okay.

So Merrick Garland set up a particular task force and assigned the FBI to investigate parents for questioning whether their kids should be indoctrinated.

And there was even suggestions that these FBI undercover were going to school board meetings that's the guy who's the attorney general right now yeah you know he's he's the one that i guess went after james o'keefe and i guess the fbi has become a retrieval service for hunter's laptop and biden's but missing his daughter's missing diary

okay

he's the attorney general Look at the Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin.

He's on record that the two existential threats to the U.S.

military are climate change and white supremacy.

And I guess when you look at the world, North Korea and the Iran deal coming up and China vis-a-vis Taiwan, white Russia is doing Ukraine, we're all worried right now about climate change and white supremacy.

That's what he said.

He also said something that I think was

really, really stupid and dangerous.

Austin said the other day that the purpose of our efforts with Ukraine is to make is to weaken Russia to the extent it can never do something like this in Ukraine again.

Okay, we all want them to get out of Ukraine.

They're committing war crimes.

Let's have them defeated.

But you do not say publicly that the purpose of the United States in Ukraine is a proxy war to weaken a nuclear power.

Because we're getting into a situation.

And we had a very spirited discussion about this on the Hoover Web podcast, Goodfellows, where I think our colleagues split 50-50, John Cochran, the eminent economist, and H.R.

McMaster, the illustrious general and former national security advisor, vis-a-vis Neil Ferguson, historian, and myself.

And our point was

that to win, as we are defining when, and as Wloyd Austin defines when, it means getting them all out of Russian-speaking majority areas.

Okay, fine.

But they are going beyond that.

They are now having commando raids going into Russia.

Fine, those are staging areas.

Those are fuel depots.

And they want to stop the supply of Crimea and they want to open the supply to Ukrainian-held Odessa for the betterment of mankind.

They get food out fine.

But they're talking about, they being our American strategists, they're talking about sinking the Russian Black Fleet with harpoon missiles that we're going to give the Ukrainians 75 to 100 miles.

So these ships leave the Russian forts, they blow up.

That's an attack on a nuclear power.

And so when Lloyd Austin brags about the stuff we're doing and he says openly,

that sort of thing, believe me, we don't know what the Russian people think right now.

My suspicion is as they get up to 20,000 dead and one-third of the army destroyed, and they see that the world hates them and that their oligarchs are broke, are going to be broke pretty soon, they're going to be very angry with Vladimir Putin.

But you go into Mother Russia and you start running raids and you start sinking Russian ships away from the coast of Ukraine, you're going to see a huge change.

And so that's what Lloyd Austin, he's our Secretary of Defense.

I don't even want him to get into Jake Sullivan.

He's our national security advisor, except we brought up the Durham investigation.

He was the guy who had all of the points.

He was tweeting.

He was her campaign advisor.

So Jake Sullivan was tweeting out to the American people: hey, there's a new story out that Donald Trump is communicating with a back channel in his tower with Russians.

Well, Mr.

Sullivan, you basically called a contender for the president of the other party a Russian puppet or agent or was committing treason.

And you did it on no evidence.

And that's the good interpretation.

The bad interpretation is you knowingly knew as a close associate of Hillary Clinton that she was paying for this.

And he is now the national security advisor in regard to budget jig.

So I flew over to LA right before, you know, I got a little ill.

And I went over there.

And you know what?

It's now, it was early April, mid-April.

Those

container ships are still stacked out there to the horizon.

And the port of Los Angeles, you know, I think

four or five

hundred thousand people in ships and trucks are employed by them.

They got, I don't know, 7,000 acres.

It's huge.

It looks like

you took a domino board and turned it upside down from the air.

And where was Pete Buttigig during this whole time in January?

He was home with his husband on a two-month maternity leave while they were having old West-style train robberies along the tracks leading into the port and places.

And no, why did he say, I need to the department of transportation that's a federal offense i'm getting merrick garland i'm going to go there and visit those train robberies and you are interested interrupting interstate commerce that's a federal crime we're going to get special investigators we're going to overrule mr gascon can i answer that question yeah while he was home with my husband watching his two children and babies i understand They can't, well, that, and they can't use the police.

It's the left wing.

There's no, that's not an option.

So they don't have anything they can do.

I guess they couldn't get a fit FBI to rank to line up the gang leaders who were organizing those that looting and theft.

Well, the saddest thing in my life was not my life, but this year I saw all of those

little

COVID-19 test kits.

Yeah.

And they were all there on the ground.

People had ordered them and they're never going to, they never got them.

There were probably medicines.

There was everything there.

Nobody cared.

It's a destruction of civilization.

This guy is home and he doesn't do anything.

He hasn't built, he hasn't done anything.

But

you know, that I'm Pete Butterjig and I was mayor of

South Bend, Indiana and I, the Notre Dame town and I was sanctimonious and snarky and

I'm gay and you got to like me because I went to Afghanistan.

So that's what he's, that is our Secretary of Transportation.

Look at our Secretary of Energy, Jennifer Granholm.

Remember they were, they asked her in a Bloomberg interview, well, you know, as gas gets up in California to $6 a gallon, what are you and as energy?

That's hilarious.

I don't run the oil companies.

Oh, you don't?

You just tell them, you just tell private financiers on Wall Street not to lend to frackers or you make it difficult to put out lines of credit for horizontal drillers or you shut down Anwar or you cancel Keystone or you say no more federal.

Then we had this Deborah Deb, I think they call it, Holland, the Secretary of the Interior.

Did you see her the other day?

She was basically saying that we have the five-year plan where all the leases and

Manchin, a Democrat, was

interrogating her with Josh Hawley.

And they said, well,

where's the plan?

You know, it's $5 a gallon.

It's $7 for diesel.

Where is the plan?

We got all this oil and gas.

We're working on it.

You know, it reminds me: there were 12 of our kids on this farm.

And when they got together, the first cousins, I mean, it was holy terror.

And every once in a while, an adult would take them somewhere and they would get out on the lake and get in their little canoes or something.

It would be time to go.

And so the parent who was put in charge of discipline and bring them all back home in the fruit van, they would say, okay, Billy, or okay,

Benny, or whoever the one, one, it's time to go.

And they'd say, Can't hear you.

Can't you?

They were like 20 feet offshore, and you couldn't get them.

We're trying to hear you.

Well, that's what she was doing.

Yeah, we're gonna do it.

And while she was doing this, her aides were frantically sliding her notes, talking points, and what to say.

So she was looking down her note.

Oh, okay, I'm supposed to say this.

It was the most pathetic exhibition I've ever seen.

It was just, it was was pathetic.

And

so my point is.

It's because, though, they're the, they're, they are the party of lack of security and false therapeutics.

I mean, that's all they do.

It's crazy.

But go ahead.

Sorry, Victory.

I mean,

it's, it's,

you know, it's, it's absolutely right.

And so my point is, I don't have time.

We don't have time to go through all of these people, but what we're seeing is the ideologues that are, everybody says says this

who in the hell is running the country it can't be joe biden and then there's a big national debate well maybe it's jill bid jill dr jill

well dr jill doesn't know any more than joe biden so if it is dr jill she's just a conduit well then who is on the other end of the conduit is it the squad maybe

is it nancy pelosi sort of kind of maybe is it elizabeth warren's group probably bernie sanders likely and the obamas hovering around saying you know what we sold out or we compromised we didn't we weren't the great revolutionaries that we but we're going to do it under biden's auspices so that's what the debate is about who's running the country the second debate is

is he crazy is he just mean

Or is he, are they so crazy and mean that they think this is success?

I wrote a column about that last week, week, that we think the border is a mess.

They think, wow, we got 2 million in.

We're going to go for four.

That's what we want.

We don't care about COVID.

We want everybody to come in out without vaccinations, without tests, no background on it.

Ha ha,

the right will go crazy.

They'll start talking about the great replacement theory, the one that we created by calling, you know, the great demographic shift, the new democratic majority, demography is destiny.

They were the replacement theorists, but maybe that's why.

Or crime, they'll think, wow,

crime, crime is a construct, doesn't represent any natural law.

A bunch of wealthy white Christian heterosexual males dreamed up this idea that it's a crime to go steal a Snickers bar or take

some toothpaste.

They don't ever do it, so why do they care?

But all the people who need to,

then it's a crime.

It's a construct.

And the same thing with the pipeline, Keystone, XL.

You know hey we've canceled that and we got rid of anwar and stephen chu would be so happy he may be in his 70s but his dream in 2008 as the designate energy secretary is coming true we're getting close to europe on price of gas we'll beat him yet And Afghanistan, that was the greatest pullout we've ever had.

It did so much better than the 75 helicopters on the roof.

We just left those allies.

We just took off.

Maybe that's how they look at it.

I think that is how they look at it.

I do too.

I think they think they're doing great.

Yeah.

And in fact, they talk about how great they're doing.

They do.

Remember inflation?

Oh, it's transitory.

Oh, it's no big deal.

It's a bunch of wealthy people in their exercise machine.

What they're basically saying is they like inflation because it erodes the value of people.

wealth.

If you have $100 in the bank at the end of the year, it's going to be worth $92.

If you have nothing and you had low interest then you are going to be in a better position you're going to get cheaper loan until the whole blank blank hits the fan and you have to correct it for hyper but they don't even want to do that

interest rates to correct this locomotive that's going off the tracks of inflation it should be about seven or eight percent right now yeah it's not nearly enough so they're going to drag it out and drag it out and because they're scared to death of causing a recession before the midterm and they're most likely going to make the correction a lot worse than they are.

By waiting, they're going to make it a lot worse.

So there's a debate about who's running the country and there's a debate whether Biden is crazy and he just doesn't know what's going on or he does know, but they're incompetent or they all know what's going on and they'd like it.

And I think that's the latter.

But the third debate is, when you have all this ideology and crazy stuff, how do you translate it into policy?

at the ground level.

You do it with cabinet selections.

They take over the bureaucracies and they start doing these executive orders and fiats and that's the pete buttigigs and the lloyd austins and the jake sullivans

and the jennifer van home and the deb hollands and the pete buttigigs and they are utter incompetence

and they can't open their mouth they being uh the biden administration people without saying something that has nothing to do with whether the person is going to be qualified, could be, maybe

except their race, class, and gender.

So Pete Buttigig, we've been told not that he had vast experience in transportation issues.

No, that he was our first gay

transportation secretary.

What's her name, the new White House Precretary?

Karen, Karen, Kareem John Pierre.

Kareen John Pierre.

Jean-Pierre, yeah.

Yeah, John Pierre.

What do we hear about her?

We heard that she is the first black woman, gay, first black gay woman.

Not that she is a complete disinformationist and has a whole record of crazy tweets about Donald Trump didn't win the election, all of this stuff, a denialist.

And all we heard about was her race, class, and

race and gender.

And the same thing with Lloyd Austin and the same thing, Jinsock.

No one ever says this particular person brings wealth of experience.

They all say that they got this degree, or they got who cares about where they get a PhD, if they do have a PhD or a JD or anything.

We want to know what they've done.

Did they create a company?

Did they reform an institution?

No, they're all partisans and they

start talking about identity politics.

So

if you Googled, I'm just saying this off, if you Googled

Deb Holland, the Interior Secretary, you wouldn't find anything whatever I just said about her pathetic testimony.

You would hear again and again, she's the first Native American Interior Secretary.

Jennifer,

same thing with Jeffrey.

She's a female Department of Energy Secretary.

It's really weird.

And it's just completely, it doesn't mean that people who are picked for identity politics purposes are necessarily not as qualified.

It's just that these bunch that they get

also have the added requirement that they have to be hardcore ideologues on the left.

And so we've got a cabinetcy of dunces right now.

And it's going to, it's dangerous.

It is very dangerous.

Victor, let's take a second for some messages and come right back to talk about what you just touched on, which was the good news angle of the Democratic Party and our Democratic leadership.

We'll be right back.

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Well, everybody, Victor was talking and he went right on to my last topic here, which is that the way that the Democratic Party presents their administration's news is that all these things are great.

Inflation's not so so bad.

Afghanistan, a little bit of a foible, but not too bad.

The immigration, just forget about it.

Hey, we forgot.

It's not a big deal.

Baby formula.

I just remember

no big deal because didn't Venn Midler say, well,

just go breastfeed.

That's what you should do.

Just go breastfeed.

Well, maybe kids are allergic to any type of, they have to have a special formula.

Yeah, well, the Democrats are so in fantasy land that, of course they they would say something that stupid.

Yeah, maybe men, and if men can get pregnant, maybe they should breastfeed too.

Okay, so my question: well, I

came across this quote from Social Nietzsche where the guy was talking about this dis well, we can call it disinformation if you'd like to, because it really is this idea that, oh, all things are just so great in the economy right now.

He goes, Social Nietzschean put it right, put it straight when he said, We know they are, quote, we know they are lying.

They know they are lying.

They know we know they are lying.

We know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying.

And I was wondering, so I thought, yeah, so what is the pathology here?

Are these liberals, quote-unquote, liberals, really just communists and fascists?

Or are they just desperate and have this really poor leadership?

80% of the people have no ideology.

So they just want to be in a winning team.

So when the Obamas came in, they did certain things.

They did something that things that we'd never heard of and they've never been properly held accountable.

They created this word diversity where they said anybody who's not white, forget about how wealthy it can be LeBron, it can be an Indian immigrant, it can be a techie from Punjab, it can be an orthodontist from Korea.

They have claims against the majority.

They're diverse, 30% of the population.

And that's when all this.

And

they you know trayvon was like the son i never had and we're exceptional only to the degree of greeks they said things that were just crazy apology to okay so that was the new frontier and people thought that's the future and when you add all of the rise of globalism and the enrichment of the two coasts most people thought you know what The corporations are kind of cool now and Wall Street guys, I know they're making a lot of money, but they're kind of hipsters.

They give to clean energy.

And

look at Mark Zuckerberg and he's skateboarding in his tie-dye t-shirt.

And wow.

And Jack Dorsey doesn't have a ring in his nose.

And they have flip-floppers.

And that was the, that was the whole mood of the country.

And so most people wanted to be on the winning team where the money was.

And the globalization and tech was where the money and the hipsters were.

So that explains the rise of a lot of these people.

But the hardcore ideologues, these are people in the media who were trained by academics.

Academics,

this isn't being led by the Long Shores Union.

It's not being led even by the SCIU.

It's not being led by the United Coal Workers.

Those guys are gone.

This is a top-down elite academic.

These are professors of environmental science, professors of literature, professor of political science at the top schools that are writing this stuff about let's get rid of the two senators in each state, let's get rid of the filibuster, let's reduce Puerto Rico, let's get 3,000 people in the house.

These are revolutionaries and they're very angry at this country that has enriched them.

They're the wealthiest generation in the history of civilization.

They're the most leisure.

They're the most privileged.

So it's very hard to be an angry revolutionary for them.

So they start to look at oppression.

And there's too many

oppress for the number of oppressors.

So they take, what, 0.2% of the population that's transgendered or what we used to call transsexual, or maybe some are even transvestites, and they make this a majority issue.

That, you know, we're going to all, this is a horrible country unless men that transition

can swim in women's sports.

That's the new cause of.

Or, you know, nine, an abortion in month eight or nine.

That is a, that's a human rights issue to die on.

So that's what they're looking for things in this fat land of plenty, and they're looking for the underprivileged.

And

they keep redefining the underprivileged, and they're all wealthy, and they are all privileged, and they feel so rotten about it.

They feel really rotten, but they're for affirmative action.

But when Johnny doesn't get into Princeton, they make a phone call to so-and-so who knows the dean to get him in.

And when they think those walls just are just terrible, they've got a nice Nancy Pelosi wall around Napole.

What does she have one around her home for?

Really, think about it.

If she doesn't want one around her own country, why would she want one around her own home?

Wouldn't she want people to come by and say, you know what?

I was out working in the fields.

I'm tired.

I mean, I didn't, I built one funny myself, but in the old days, I would have open.

And I still do.

I mean, I had some Hispanic guys that were, A couple of three or four years ago, they were riding horses at night.

And they just pulled in and said, senor,

we got trapped.

It was the wrong time of night.

And we got our horses.

They were all dicked out with sombreros and rodeo costumes.

And I said, just tie those horses up right over there.

And there's some good grass and let them munch and sit down and have a good time.

So she can't do that.

And they want, they hate teachers.

They hate any.

teachers who go into charter schools.

They do not like

school choice, and yet their kids and they're all for teachers unions and public schools and their kids are all in private school all of them yeah and so you're trying to remember that they're hypocrites and they're never never never

subject to any downside from their loud ideology in a

thing that they don't care

you really think that pete buttigig cares about people can't get formula and they can't get it into the port of los and no you really think jennifer Granholm is upset that a guy over here in Sanger, he's got about a 20-year-old diesel ram and he's getting about 15,

you know, three miles, three quarter, yeah, 15 miles a gallon, three quarter ton truck, and it's full of all of his paint equipment.

You think he can afford $7?

I just filled up today.

It was

$6.60 for diesel.

It went down a little bit.

Do you think he, she didn't care?

Not what her lifestyle is.

She doesn't care.

You think Jake Sullivan cares that he concocted a whole myth, helped to concoct it, and it really hurt the country.

He doesn't care, he doesn't care.

No, I think he went to Raytheon.

He was Raytheon lobbyist, and then he went into the defense secretary.

Where will he go after he's secretary of defense?

He'll go back to Raytheon.

Yeah, he cares about.

I don't think they care.

And I think, though, that the lying is going to cut into their constituency, because I think that their constituency is, as you've just said, ideologues and then the entitled

people who are getting money from them through entitlements.

But there's a big third of their constituency that's going to get really sick of being lied to like they are.

And they're going to, they're seeing it.

And I think we see that in things like, yeah, yeah, exactly.

And I think we see that in Elon Musk, who used to be left-wing and he's now on top of everything, or, you know, a whole host of other people that are just starting to start arguing on Twitter with his own newspaper.

And then you've got Netflix that hired the Obamas to be creative consultants and they poured out all that trash and they lost, what, 200,000 subscribers.

And then we have Bill Maher, who egged on all of this.

And all of a sudden he thought, oh my God.

This is a Medusa.

And I cut its head off every night and flip.

Or, you know, Disney, you think Disney really likes what it's going to happen to it.

So yeah, I think that the line is the thing that's really going to win.

I think it's the existential.

I think it's one thing to humiliate the country in Afghanistan.

I think it's another

to

do critical race theory.

I think it's another to turn Chicago into tombstone and

Seattle and Denver into wasteland downtown.

But it's quite a different thing

when a mother with an allergic child cannot get formula, or a very hardworking guy who's an independent contractor cannot afford to fill up his pickup to go to work, or a guy that drives 18 hours on that road in a diesel semi can't make any money.

He's going to have to park that

or

somebody in the inner city can't walk across the street to a park without being shot.

So the stuff of life, the existential question, can you get up every morning and find food to eat?

Can you find fuel to move?

Will you be safe in your neighborhood?

And is your country safe, whether it's on the southern border or vis-a-vis China?

And the answer is no, no, no.

And people are saying this is in America.

And the last question is, are you going to continue to believe these liars, these lying people?

I don't know.

We'll see.

Well, the

first shoe to fall is going to be the Mexican-American community because they have been nurtured with the Democratic in a very patronizing fashion.

You owe us.

You owe us.

We opened the border.

We gave you all these entitlements.

You owe us.

And these are usually young Latinos who are in academia or in the media, but they're not the majority.

And I think a lot of Mexican-Americans, I don't know anybody.

I work get up every day and I work hard.

And who I am or what I look like is determined by my character.

And I can't work under the conditions that you forced me to work on.

And I can't buy a house and I can't pay rent.

And I can't take my family and drive 30 miles to a movie.

You did that.

I didn't do that.

And I'm not going to vote for you anymore.

And we'll see how smart the Republicans are.

If they go back to I'm Mitt Romney and I can never reach 47% of the country because they're on the dole or, or,

you know, I'm Bain Capital, or they make fun of John McCain because he can't remember his 11 houses or whatever, and he doesn't fight back.

He doesn't fight back at all.

Or he gets Steve Schmidt or a guy like that as advisors, or then we're not going to, it's not going to work.

But if you get a fighter and a person who is a person of the people,

doesn't mean he can't be educated, he can't be degreed, but a person who feels comfortable with himself and within his own male.

And he,

I keep saying this anecdote, I know people are sick of it, but I talked to two or three people.

I never, I didn't particularly like Trump.

I didn't support him in the primaries.

I thought he was cruel, but I was intrigued by his, you know, our farmers, our soldiers, that empathy for the losers that nobody had expressed.

And I asked

some very well-known

successful people.

And one person said something I'll never forget.

He said, you know, I looked out of a building once and I saw him pull over.

Nobody knew he was watching.

And he had a black suit and black, and he walked in the filthy dirt to talk to a bunch of cement workers.

And they all clapped.

Why would he do that?

Maybe it's, I don't know.

But he did feel comfortable with people

of the middle classes.

Look at his diet.

You mean those, you mean those McDonald's hamburgers and ice cream?

Well, Obama was bragging, I remember about, we're worried about the price of arugula, which I like, I like arugula.

But, you know, and so that's what I'm getting at, that if the Republicans can have a populist, nationalist, inclusive party and make class one of the

unifying points and not race and not wealth and not just capital gains.

I'm for reducing the capital gains.

I really think deregulation would unleash a lot of

primordial energy.

I'm for that.

But they have to talk about: we're going to create a climate where you can get a good job,

you can buy a house,

and we're going to allow people to build homes, we're going to allow people to develop cast, we're going to allow people to mine and cut wood.

And that, and we need you people to help us.

And that's what I hope follows from this.

Yeah, it's coming.

I think that we'll get back to a state like that, Victor.

Well, we're going to call it a day here.

Thank you very much for all your wisdom on the domestic world and the cabinet in particular, which was an interesting roundtable, if I can call it that.

But thank you very much, Victor.

Thank you.

And thank everybody for listening.

I appreciate it every day.

I'm always, when I travel, people come up and say they listen to the podcast.

I'm just astounded because, you know, I'm up in this old house in this upstairs bedroom thinking that maybe there's six people somewhere.

that are listening.

And the fact that there's more than that is,

it makes me have a lot of gratitude for all of you.

Yeah, thank you.

All right, thank you.

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