Surveillance, Supreme Court, Censorship and More

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Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This is Sammy Wink and our namesake of the show, Victor Davis-Hansen.

And we have a lot on the agenda today.

This is the Friday roundup and we look at all the news from the week.

Today we have a few topics.

The Capitol police and surveillance of our congressmen, their staffers, and their visitors.

We'll look at the Supreme Court and then also the immigration issue with some studies suggesting that illegal immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than regular people.

And finally, the censorship in our high-tech and perhaps a little bit on Nancy Pelosi and her chastising the Chinese government.

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Welcome back.

And how are you doing today, Victor?

I'm doing very well, Sammy.

Very well.

I'm still, as I always start every one of our broadcasts, I'm still very worried about the drought here in California.

I guess we're now 45 days without rain, and that beautiful Sierra snowmelt of last December is just about gone.

And we're looking at a bleak agricultural irrigation, a bleak recreational Sierra summer, a bleak hydroelectric generation summer.

So we have a trifecta of worry, but there's such a thing called a March miracle.

And I've seen it in my 68 years happen a lot.

Three or four times where we get a diligent march.

So I'm praying to the rain god.

All right.

Well, let's start today.

I know that this week we had some information or news out that the Capitol police after the January 6th

have tried to change their way that they're keeping the Capitol secure.

So that's what the argument is, but seem to be also surveilling our congressmen, their staffers and visitors.

And I thought I would see if you had anything for us on that topic.

Well, there's two points here, Sammy, that you brought up.

One is the general background of the landscape and one is the particulars.

The landscape is everybody should remember that the media's cry about civil liberties and government overreach is a sham.

That belongs to the Democratic Party of the 1970s, when Frank Church, I think in 1975, had that committee to investigate the FBI, the CIA, the NSA.

That's gone.

We are now with a hard left Jacobin party, and they believe any means necessary are acceptable and even desirable to obtain a utopian agenda.

Now, what does that mean?

Very quickly, it means that if you're Barack Obama, you surveil the AP reporters to find out who leaks.

If you go after James Rose and you obstruct Congress on Fast and Furious, and when you're going out of office, you want to make sure Hillary Clinton wins.

So you weaponize your DOJ so they don't find anything wrong with the Hillary email situation.

You have Bill Clinton meet on the tarmac.

You suppress that information.

You weaponize the IRS under Lois Lerner.

And you really destroy the integrity of the NSA under James Clapper and the CIA under John Brennan and the FBI under

James Comey and the prevaricator Andrew McCabe.

I won't even get into the rest of them.

So that's the background.

And then we have Biden come in and he's in that tradition and they project.

So they say, Trump's going to destroy democracy.

Trump's overreaching, but I want them to tell me and our audience what exactly Donald Trump did to suppress civil liberties.

He had press conferences.

He couldn't even sneeze without talking to a reporter.

He welcomed all of these Trojan horse reporters into the White House and he poured his guts out to them.

And there was anonymous in the deep state that was undermining them.

There were people in the Pentagon undermining them.

So get that straight.

And then Biden comes in and what has he done?

I mean, he turned the FBI into what, a St.

Bernard retrieval agency.

So missing a laptop, Hunter?

Is this your third one?

FBI, go get it, get it from that repair shop and then sit on it until this election's over with.

And I don't know who communicated with whom, but that's what they did.

Oh, my daughter had a diary, maybe?

Go after James O'Keefe.

Go in the middle of the night.

Humiliate him.

Humiliate him.

Get that diary.

Accuse him.

Do anything you have to, but don't charge him with anything because he hasn't done anything wrong.

Just send a message that from Operation Veritas better pull back.

And that's how they operate.

And so in that climate, we have the January 6th.

And besides the point that January 6th, everybody's condemned the people who went in and desecrated.

And I mean desecrated by putting their feet up on desk and tearing things down.

You should never, ever touch a law enforcement officer.

I was taught that I've never done that in my life.

I've been pulled over a few times, and they did.

Okay.

But compared to 120 days of looting and Antifa conspiracy and going across state lines to riot and burn and maim and 35 people, it was nothing compared to that.

And we have no investigatory knowledge of any of this stuff because

it's taboo.

But Nancy Pelosi now

and this pseudo-January 6th investigatory committee has decided that there may be suspicious people that the Republican congress people are meeting with or influenced by, and they don't know it.

So they're going to help out.

They're going to say, you know, you guys, I know you're a little right-wing and you're, we're all big, happy house family, but we thought we would do you a big favor by monitoring people who come in contact with you.

And if we have some accidental colluding information that you give, well, that's the cherry on top of the Sunday.

So that's where we are.

Yeah.

And it seems like that the Congress, if you have the Congress, then you don't have to pay any consequences.

And I don't see, that's where I get stopped.

Like there's no road out of that conundrum to save a law and justice system.

Like this Congress is just going to let this stuff go on.

I don't see any, and because they can't, I don't see any Republican in Congress trying to get up and stop what's going on with this Capitol police.

There's no answer for that, is there?

Yes, there is.

And the system, Congress is not an investigatory law enforcement agency.

It has two roles.

It's a watchdog legislative body that investigates wrongdoing that has not been addressed by the executive branch.

And then it can send criminal referrals to the DOJ.

This is what we found.

This is broken.

And depending on which party is in office, they can or cannot act.

In the case of the Russian collusion hoax, every time Devin Noonan sent a criminal referral to the Obama, the waning days of the Obama administration, they didn't do it.

And then when Trump came in, the DOJ was run by Rod Rosenstein in the interim.

So they didn't do anything.

But there is a remedy.

And again,

the only remedy is to have not just a squeaking election.

by Republican margin by squeaker, is to get a 30, 40, 50 seat

win and then come in and unlike the Paul Ryan years, say, you know what?

We don't like to do this, what the Democrats are doing, but we don't have any deterrence left.

So

systematically, we're going to say the following.

That person, that person, that person is a hardcore leftist.

Eric Swalwell is compromised.

He should not be on the Intel.

Adams Shift has lied and lied in the cameras and probably lied under oath.

And he's not going to be on our intelligence committee.

Sorry.

Go back and pick somebody else.

And then they're going to have to say to John Durham, wherever this goes, go ahead with it.

There's not going to be any interference.

And they're going to have to get a sizable majority in the Senate.

I don't know if they can get a veto proof.

And that's the only redress until they get an executive.

And so got to remember how this works.

So

you're exasperated, Sammy, but it's all cloaked and layered.

and massaged with this talk of civil liberty.

Oh,

American Civil Liberties Union is not what it was in the 70s and 80s.

It does not believe in free speech.

It believes it's supposed to hunt out conspiracies and right-wing hate speech.

That's what it's for now.

And there is no civil liberties groups.

All the left-wing people in Silicon Valley, they don't believe in free speech.

Spotify doesn't believe in it.

GoFundMe doesn't believe in it.

We surely know that Twitter and Facebook don't believe in it.

They believe that they have the power and the money and the monopolies to massage American thinking into a particular way.

And the particular way we all know what it is, we're going to have a hard left socialist government with the proviso that we, the Platonic Guardians, are not subject to the consequences of our own agendas.

We'll take that as a fix for right now because I wanted to move on to the Supreme Court, if you don't mind.

And I was looking at, well, we have a case in the Supreme Court, Dobbs versus Jackson's, Jackson Women's Health, which would ban almost all abortions in Mississippi beyond 15 weeks.

And I know that you probably don't want to talk about Roe versus Wade and abortion, perhaps, but I was thinking maybe you could address the Trump picks, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.

Well, of all the three, with some qualifications, Neil Gorsuch is the most conservative.

And Kavanaugh and Barrett at times are a little squishy, but they're more conservative than not.

And Justice Roberts has evolved, devolved, whatever verb you want into sort of a neutral.

His main mission is to make sure there's no controversy around the court.

And wherever he feels there's a majority, that he will join.

But if it's a close vote, he will find a way or he will try to find a way not to hear that case.

So it's not a 5-4 decision that causes controversy.

And of course, Thomas and Alito are excellent.

So you've got two hardcore conservatives.

You've got Gorsuch, it's pretty conservative.

And then you've got two that are nominally conservative, but better than in the past.

But remember, when you look back at the history of the court, going back to Earl Warren

or Justice Harlan or any of these, you go black, any of these people that started out, whether they were Democratic or Republican, is conservative, they all go liberal.

And I think that's because it's a heady idea that you're on the court and there's two philosophies that you can pick from.

One, you can be a constructionist and say, this is what the Constitution says and this is how it would be applied today.

And then you're not going to be in the paper very much.

You're just going to be there kind of as a referee.

Or you can say, I'm going to create laws and I'm going to be a great humanitarian and the Washington, New York Nexus is going to love me.

I'm going to be invited.

I'm going to be a rock star.

And that's a big temptation for Democrat and Republican.

You saw what it did to David Souter, the Bush pick.

And that's what happens, even Sandra Day O'Connor.

So what I'm getting at is every pick goes left.

So the point is that when the Republicans try to nominate him, they try to go further to the right with the expectation they'll end up in the center.

The Democrats don't care.

They pick somebody hard left with the expectation they're going to go off out on the way to Mars or somewhere.

And so that's where we are.

And the Democrats right now don't quite know they're going to get one pick, but that one pick is only going to replace prior that they lost.

So they're not going to increase their margin.

So what they're trying to do is pressure the remaining justices.

And that's very brilliant what they're doing.

They just went back to 1937, 38, and they looked at pack the court and they said, well, you know, it failed.

But if you look at the Roosevelt court, it went hard left because people were afraid of losing their power.

And so if we kept saying to these guys, we're going to pack the court, we're going to pack the court, we're going to pack the court, then maybe they'll rule in a way that'll say, well, please don't pack the court.

And that's deterrence.

As far as abortion, very quickly, I think you can talk about Mississippi or any state, but I think that's a state matter.

That's under a federal system.

And it's such a hotly divisive issue.

I would imagine that if the Supreme Court resends

versus Wade, and we're starting to see a little bit in Mississippi, then there will be individual states.

The red states will be probably no abortions unless rape or incest.

And then the, and I'm not sure about that.

And I know the blue states will be abortion on demand.

And where I live here in California, it will become just like it is now an anchor baby tourist place where people come across the border to have children because they're U.S.

citizens and they can anchor a family.

It will be an abortion place where people out of state will come.

And I think that's regrettable, but that's what's going to happen.

It's just another separation.

It's an issue like guns.

It's separating the federal system.

I think that we're on a trajectory unless we get something radically different, that we have some balance, some antitrust legislation with Silicon Valley or some repudiation of the hard left.

We're getting into a situation where there's going to be a red state like Utah or Idaho or Oklahoma or Arkansas, and it will bear no resemblance to Massachusetts or California and the way that it's conducted.

It's getting that way now.

Okay, let's move on then.

That's a grim prediction for the way things are going.

But can we move on then to Nancy Pelosi and her warning to athletes that they should, quote, do not risk incurring the anger of the Chinese government because they are ruthless.

And I thought when she said that, why would we ever agree to having the Olympics in China if our leading officials find them ruthless?

And so I thought that was a very interesting statement.

I was wondering if you had any reflections on the Olympics and this issue.

Well, I think like most of our listeners, I know I haven't, I have a little rule in my mind.

I'm not going to turn on one damn second of that thing.

I've seen clips on newscasts, so I'm not an authority, but you get the themes that Nancy Pelosi, for example, whose husband and associates make a lot of money.

Same true of Dianne Feinstein, same true of Bill Gates, same true of Michael Bloomberg.

Same is true of all of them.

They make a lot of money in China, more money.

And we see this skier from San Francisco, who's 18.

And she grew up in San Francisco.

She's a U.S.

citizen, lifelong California resident.

And she put her finger in the air and she said, this is

the modeling and sports illustrated type contracts in this nation of 330 million.

And this is what I could get in 1.5 billion market.

And it was a no-brainer.

And then, of course, in our therapeutic society, she said, you know, I'm trying to be ecominical and bring us together.

But she's, I don't want to say a traitor, but she has no gratitude for the country that welcomed into her mother from a.

communist hellhole.

And by the way, she has no intention of going over there and living in China.

The other thing about the Olympics is, I mean, they hauled off a Dutch reporter right off the air when he said something that was not part of the narrative, the Chinese narrative.

The Chinese narrative is: we've got plenty of snow, it's really cold, it's really wonderful, it's not, and the athletes love it.

And we transcended COVID and we showed the world how modern we are.

And then the understory, which you can't report if you go over there, apparently, is the facilities are bad.

If you get COVID, you're sort of in a modern gulag for 10 days.

The athletes are not being treated well.

They're complete censorship.

And it's pretty much right along the lines of Hitler's 36 Berlin Olympics, in which, you know, they got a couple of Jewish guys to go out and that were half Jewish and, you know, light the torch.

And he let all the doves out.

Remember that?

3,000 doves Hitler let out to show that he had no intentions of, there was not going to be an Anschluss.

He was not going to go into Sudetenland, much less was he going to go into Poland because this was the start of a new golden age and this beautiful stadium and all of these propaganda movies and the synagogues.

He even allowed Jews to go to the synagogues.

He rounded up all of the SS local commanders and said, no attacking Jews as long as the international press is here.

And then he kind of let down his guard when Jesse Owens won.

But that was the playbook that I'm sure the Communist Chinese Party just looked at films and read about it and said, this is is the way to go.

And speaking of censorship, then let's turn to Facebook.

And I was just recently reading an article that they're censoring not just things that they think are misinformation out and out, but inconvenient facts on things like climate change.

And the article that I was reading, the example was that the scientist had merely studied people's deaths in hot and cold weather, and that he found out that 4.5 times more people die in cold than in heat, i.e., I guess that would suggest that the warming of the planet was a good thing, right?

And so they censored that, right?

So what the article was arguing was that it's not just misinformation, but it's really inconvenient facts that get in the way of their narratives.

So they're narrowing what people can know by

more than just the things they consider against their point of view, but anything that might even suggest.

It's very strange.

And I was wondering if you had any prediction on high tech and what's the future?

Are we going to get new avenues by which we can express ourselves or what?

Well, I mean, it's a pretty pessimistic situation when you have GoFundMe.

I'm including that as an online propagandistic slandered group that basically took $10 million from people and then decided, first of all, it was going to give to charities and then backed off.

And then second i'm going to we're going to give to charities that they specify and then third well you will if you ask us we'll give your money back and then they backed off and said well we'll refund it to people so you can see that they're judge jury and executioner this is in an environment where we had spotify go after joe rogan spotify i remember was the maverick this was the free speech platform that that attracted joe rogan to it so no they're not going to change and i think everybody should realize the reason why they're not going to change.

If you want to know why they're not going to change, here's what I suggest you do.

Drive up sometime if you can put up with it and go to Palo Alto and Menlo Park.

Go out to eat.

Walk down University Avenue, California Avenue, see who these people are.

Go to the coffee shops.

Listen to them talk.

Go around the Stanford.

campus if there happens to be a big lecture poke your head in look at the literature look at the cars in downtown menlo park do all that and you'll come away with the idea that these people are stark raving mad.

They have a sense about them.

They are a religious cult.

They're analogous to Synanon

or Scientology.

They really do believe they're there to save the world and they're better than anybody else.

And they do not believe in democratic politics.

They believe that that's what their allies do and they'll give them money to do that, but it's too clumsy.

It's too messy.

But when you control the mechanisms of communication and thought, and we're not even talking yet about artificial intelligence, then you can make changes.

So it's very Orwellian,

and they're not going to change.

And now there's going to be Devin Nunes, a friend of mine and friend of everybody's.

He lives right down the road here on the 99.

Known him a long, long time.

So he's going to have this group.

Truth, you know, that's going to offer an alternate media platform.

And it's associated with Donald Trump, and they're raising money, and supposedly they're going to have rollouts of social communication, social media.

But they're going to try to destroy that group, just like the 200 companies that Mark Zuckerberg bought or absorbed or put out of business.

And they're going to do it just like they did with Parliament, where all of a sudden you woke up one morning and this thing had 14 million people that were ready to join it and you couldn't get on it.

And Google and Apple and Facebook and Twitter and the rest of them conspire to destroy that company.

And they will do that to the new one.

They are monopolies and they're never going to change.

If you see them and look at them and understand their culture, the only way they're going to change, if they're forced to.

Yeah.

So I'm very optimistic in some ways that perhaps it will pull through and they'll make it through a,

you know, a gauntlet of Facebook and Twitter assaults on their new social platform.

So I have a lot of hope for them.

I wanted to then turn to immigration.

And I was recently reading a John Solomon article.

And I know that we're associated with John Solomon, but he had a really fine article on all of the crimes committed by illegal immigrants.

And I found in it a little link to a study that said that illegal immigrants are less likely to commit felonious crimes than the legal immigrant or a U.S.

citizen.

And they said it like like this, that they're two times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes.

U.S.

citizens are.

2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drugs, and then four times more likely for property crimes.

And so that obviously the argument is it's a great thing to have these illegal immigrants come in.

They're not as criminal as our own population.

Where do you begin with that?

First of all, immigration scholars in the university are all for open borders.

I know that because I've debated them.

On the right, they're libertarians who feel the market adjudicate, and the greater number on the left feel that this is the golden way to change the demography and get their agenda through that way.

So why would we believe, first of all, we don't have any statistics.

These same people that are telling us that a particular subset of immigrants, those who come legally and those who come subsets illegally, they can determine who they are and how many they are.

They don't know.

You can go on any station, go on any news site, and you will be variously told that in the physical year, the last 12 months, there has been A, 1 million, B, 1.4 million, C, 1.8 million, D, 2 million people cross the border illegal.

You can go on any website, you can go to the MIT study, you can go to the Yale study, and you will be told there is exactly 8 million illegal aid.

No, there's 14 million.

I think there's 21 million.

They have no idea.

All we know is really that the Federal Registry does keep statistics on whether people are here lawfully or not.

And I would suggest everybody go to the DOJ website or to the degree it's still up there.

I haven't checked in about six months or the FBI, and you will see that the number of people convicted for a federal felony who are illegal vastly exceed their approximated numbers in the population.

As far as all this database, local, regional, I don't think there's any doubt.

We don't even know who they are.

And I say that because I've had maybe four occasions where I've had identity theft or my, you know,

I think I've mentioned this before.

I wrote a check.

to, I would say, a Spanish-speaking place.

And then two weeks later, I got a call from the bank that I had a number of checks that were coming in weird.

And I went into the bank and they showed me.

And here was a person's name on checks that looked just like my own.

And they had the router number, but I'm saying.

And when I went to the bank to complain, they said, this individual, we don't know who the individual is.

And I think you'll see the number.

Put it this way, Sammy, go to those.

Social Security website if you can still find it.

I don't think you can find this information.

And ask how many people per year do not get their income tax rebates because they have so many felonious names.

And then ask yourself is it still a felony to give a fake name and fake id or is that basically amnesty out of existence that crime i don't have any confidence at all in people who quote those i do have confidence in my own eyes and ears and i have been on this farm since I was born and I would say in the last 25 years, I've had five people run off the road and either destroy vineyard, pipelines, or

trees, orchards, almond trees, whatever.

I've had bumpers dumped in my yard.

And in every single case of the people who did that, they left.

They left the scene of the accident.

And when I went out to get the wrecked vehicle and called the highway patrol, I said, I want that vehicle.

And they said, we're not allowed to do it.

And they've all said the same thing to me.

The person who picks up this vehicle, we have no idea who they are.

They have a fake name.

And you could go ask yourself, I think five years ago, the county of Los Angeles, I don't know why they did, but they gave some information on the number of people who were involved in hit and run accidents.

And the number of people here illegally was staggering.

And so that is absolutely infuriating to hear that.

Everybody knows the truth.

And so this, these little academic studies that do this and this and this and this, it's not.

You know, the fact is we probably, if you come here from Mexico or Guatemala, to take two examples, and you are dirt poor and you're coming from southern Mexico, which most are now, and you don't speak English, and the first thing you did was break the law, is that when they say they're more law-abiding, how can that be possible?

Because somebody who came across the border, A, broke the law.

And then B, broke the law because they resided here illegally.

And then C, in 90% of the cases, they broke the law a third time because they have fake ID.

And it's a rite of passage when when I go to the supermarket that a person brings out an EBT card.

It's, you know, used up another one.

Sometimes I wait there for six of them.

So these studies are written by academics that aren't in the real world.

They don't read a variety of news accounts.

I don't have any credence in it.

Yeah.

So the next topic, the Republican Party and its future in the next few years.

So I hope Victor is up for that.

We'll ask him after we have a short break.

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Welcome back.

Let's move on, Victor, to the next topic.

the Republican Party and its future in the next few years.

You know, we have a Republican Party that has a very populist wing.

And then, as we've noted, there's the Republican leadership that, you know, I don't think all Republican leadership is represented by Liz Cheney or Romney, but there's definitely that side of the Republican Party.

And I was wondering if you thought that there could be a coalition between those two segments of the Republican Party.

Well, that answer would hinge on two things.

One, on issues, on a platform and agenda, shared policies, and then the elephant.

I don't mean that in terms of weight.

The elephant in the room, Donald Trump.

And on issues, remember, go back to 2016, and Donald Trump of those 17 candidates was the only one who said, let's get...

China is never going to liberalize.

The more you show it magnanimity, the more they see it as weakness to be exploited.

And the border is never going to be closed because all these guys want cheap labor on the right and they want identity politics, new demography on the left.

And we don't need to go into the Middle East.

It's a bad idea.

We don't do well when we go over there anyway.

And we're going to pump enough energy and oil that we're going to be independent.

And then the fourth kind of major deviation was we're not going to go down the creative destruction route.

Maybe that's in theory, that's how capitalism works, but we're not giving up the deplorable, irredeemable industrial belt.

They got good energy, they got good, good infrastructure, they got good people.

There's no reason with a symmetrical trade policy.

They cannot compete.

And so that was adopted or grafted on to the Republican Party.

And then the question is: was it refuted or ratified in his four years of governance?

And it did pretty well.

So we didn't go over to the Middle East.

He was a major, only president in my lifetime that didn't start a major land operation somewhere, a major military operation, not no Balkans sustained bombing, no Iraq war, no Gulf War one, that kind of stuff.

Okay.

And then we did see remarkable

middle class wage growth without inflation, a lot of it among the non-college educated.

China is a more mixed record because the tariffs and all of that were so far behind in so many key fields that it was going to be very dicey.

This is all pre-COVID.

And the energy thing was a smashing success because gas was cheap, fuel was cheap, we're ready to go up and up and up on our daily production.

It was a good way to transition ourselves to, I don't know, batteries or hydrogen or some other fuel eventually, but it was working.

So I don't think there's going to be any going back to, you know, I'm an employer and I want an open border.

or I'm going to spread democracy all over the world and I want to invade Libya or Syria or go into Jordan.

It's not going to happen.

Or I think that we got to put 100,000 troops in Ukraine right now to deter Putin.

That's not going to happen.

I don't think we're going to say, well, you know, the people just take, they just take drugs and

they're meth heads and they're fentanyl freaks in the Midwest.

And I can't help them that they are loser white males that are doomed and they have a high suicide rate and a diminishing life expectancy.

Get with the program or we'll just write you off.

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

People are going to not do that.

So that policy was ratified by four years of successful government.

And so people agree on that.

You say, Liz Cheney, you know, even people that have power, she doesn't have power now.

She's been demoted.

She's not the third person in the House.

And she's not going to get reelected.

And she doesn't represent a constituency.

But Mitch McConnell does.

And he's powerful.

But I don't think that he's going to have any other agenda than the MAGA agenda.

And when we look at the nominations, up and down the Senate and the House, they're all, whether they like it or not, they have a rendezvous with a MAGA agenda.

They can kind of tweak Trump, but they're more or less going to say we're a national populist middle-class party.

We're not going to be caricatured.

as the party with John McCain's 11 houses.

And that's not to say Donald Trump is not a billionaire, but they're not going to be easily caricatured as an out-of-touch golf course party.

And so that's there.

Then the final issue is Donald Trump.

And the never Trumpers will never, ever come back with him there.

And they're about, you know, 9%, 8% of the Republicans voted for Democrats.

They're not a large group.

I think they're more influential a little bit in close elections like 2020, because they raised a ton of money from left-wing people, you know, 100 million, the Lincoln Project, and they just saturated certain.

Senate and House races with negative advertising.

And they were really, they were very successful, useful idiots.

They really were.

And they'll never come back.

And what I mean by that is if you sat George Will down or David Fromm or Bill Crystal and said, these are the policies that you've had for the last 50, 40 years.

These are the policies that were implemented in 2017,

economic board.

You're more or less on board with all of them.

And they would say, well, we don't want anything to do with them because they got Donald Trump's fingerprints on them.

And then you've got the base that's 100

and then you've got a 15 10 i don't know swing voter suburban mom soccer mom college educated republican suburban i don't know what you call them but they vote unpredictably in 2016 they were sick of hillary clinton they were sick of obama's lectures and they voted for donald trump at least they split pretty evenly a little bit for trump in 2020 they were tired of the tweets Do you think those soccer moms are going to go for the Republican ticket this time around?

Well, they vote on two things.

In a big way.

They vote on two things.

They vote on their pocketbook and especially prices, because a lot of the so-called soccer moms are the people who are tasked with establishing family budgets, paying their kids dues for various activities, filling up the car with gas, buying a new car if they have, you know, and going to the food market.

And that's bad for Biden.

And the other one issue is security.

They read about carjacking.

There are women on many of them.

And they think, you know what?

Not only if I go down to downtown Portland or Seattle or even a regional Stanford shopping center, somebody pulled a facsimile of a gun the other day, Carmel Jewelry store looted.

And if I go there, maybe I'll be accosted or attacked.

And so they want...

people to say you will not be and the person who dares try will be in jail if he's convicted and that's not going to come from the Democrats.

So it's setting up that they could, and they're starting, remember this, they're starting even.

They're not down like 2008 when they had the Democrats had a super majority in the Senate of 60 seats and they had 40 seats in the House.

And then that correction in 2010, that huge correction, it got them power, but

they were starting from so far behind.

Now, if they would get 30 or 40 seats, my God,

they would be in control.

And if they can get four or five, six Senate seats, they're going to be in control.

And they can stop anything Biden does and they can make life very difficult.

Because what happens, Sammy, is when you get that

pushback, it's not just political, that people say, look at the momentum, look at the ideology.

I want to get as far away as AOC as possible.

People have no ideology.

They have no firm beliefs.

That's only 20% of the people.

Most people, it's like they're 49er fans or Raiders fans when they're 10-0 and when they're 0-10, they don't wear the Raiders sweatshirt.

So if

you can discredit, that's very important psychologically.

Everybody should listen to that.

It's not an original idea on my part by any means, but they have to be discredited and humiliated.

And you have to have people like they were in 2016, their faces, they cry on the air.

And the only way that'll happen is if everybody goes out and votes and gives money to candidates and gets people to vote.

They lose 40 or 50 seats, they get close to losing the Senate, there won't be a squad, there won't be any more romance.

There'll be this among Democrats.

USOB, you lost me my 20-year House seat.

You stupid idiot.

Whoever heard that you, you know, opened the border?

That was your dumb idea.

And some of them will start to reestablish the Bill Clinton Democratic Leadership Council, stuff like that.

And Donald Trump has a, he's going to have a very, he has a Waterloo decision.

And is he going to be the senior statesman and

stamp all the candidates as acceptable MAGA nominations and then tour the country and barnstorm it and then let rest on his four years of great governance and then not get into and run his

new media empire with Devon Nunes?

Or is he going to get back in there?

And then that has two subsets.

If he gets back in there, has he learned anything?

Or will he curb his his social media insults?

And will he hit the ground running with a team of 1,000 or 1,500 appointees?

And they're not going to be Omarosas and Scaramucci's.

And that's what we'll find out.

Yeah.

Well, do you think if Trump didn't win, those old, I mean, the never-Trumpers would jump on board of the MAGA agenda or are they just disgruntled?

That's an excellent.

Nobody knows because look at the contortions they're going to have to do.

They twisted themselves out of shape by not only

reneging or refuting all of their life's ideological work as players.

It's almost like they said to the people who funded them, ha ha ha, I'm where I always want to be now on the left.

And you gave me all that money and I got my excuse to jump ship.

But now they're with Joe Biden.

If you, and every once in a while, I look at the bulwark or the dispatch, you can see the discomfort or the embarrassment.

Bill Crystal, maybe he's gone over it completely.

But if they get a, as you say, a MAGA policies with people other than Trump, some of whom they've worked for in the past, just look at the bylines of these Never Trumpers.

They'll always say at the bottom, worked on the Bush campaign, worked on the Cruz campaign, worked on the Rubio campaign.

Well, then they want to come back, and I don't think anybody wants them.

Yeah.

I wouldn't.

Would you?

Would you want to, all of a sudden, a person who's been

everything you stand for, making fun of people?

And the never Trumpers, remember, it wasn't just policy.

It was the style.

They were mean, mean, mean.

I know in the, you know, the bulwark, some guy that I used to know very well, who was an editor, he wrote a 2,000-word review of the book I wrote about Trump, and he basically said I was a Nazi.

The day he said that review came out, I was speaking at the Hudson Institute on the evils of anti-Semitism and

how I supported the Trump tough policy in Israel of moving the embassy and the Golem Heights and all that.

So these people are mean, and I don't think everybody is going to be so forgiving, and you don't need them.

Yeah.

So I don't think they're going to come back.

It'll be interesting to see the fate of the National Review.

I know that you once wrote for the National Review, but it would be interesting because they seem to be the sort of center of the Never Trumpers.

I don't think that, well, the center was george will

david from bill crystal to a lesser extent charles sykes and that bullwork but he wasn't an important he was not an important figure and the neoconservative people you know john bolton and those people now

but the national review if you read them their positions i know i had to park company for i think it was mutual but If you look at their point, it is simply Biden is the worst thing since he's evil incarnate on every issue that they hold dear, abortion, race.

And they're writing very good stuff criticizing Biden.

But the problem they have is there's always at the end of the article the $64,000 question.

Since we're not gods, or as Petronius says, non sumes diaz, said homenez, we're only men, not gods.

Then you take what is the better alternative.

And so people, when they read those wonderful articles that are critiquing the whole Biden agenda and the socialist agenda, then the reader says to themselves, well, yeah,

but if it's as bad as you say, we had a brief moment to stop it.

And you surely don't think that, well, the four years before it was bad.

So why didn't you just hold your nose and vote for something better, even if slightly better, rather than unleash this disaster on us?

And they've never had an adequate answer for that.

They'll say, you know, his personal comportment.

And you say, well, he didn't expose himself like LBJ, or he didn't sleep with virgins in the White House bed like JFK, or he didn't pull out his phallus like Bill Clinton.

Well, you know, he's a liar.

Well, he didn't quite lie like Joe Biden.

Joe Biden lies almost every single day.

So he's a divider.

Well, he didn't really say punish our enemies at the polls.

I mean, he's capable of that.

But the point is, by past historical standard, the argument that he was so over the top that that nullified a good conservative agenda didn't hold water.

It never has.

I mean, I'm sure National Review will change its face or its colors at some point, but it seems almost like a journal without a party to support at this point.

Well, you know, I was there for, you know, Rich Lowry called me 2001, 21 years ago and asked me to write a column on the day of 9-11.

And he and I had a very good working relationship.

And I have, you know, Jack Fowler, our friend Sammy, that does these things.

He was there longer than I was, much longer.

I had a lot of friends there is what I'm trying to say.

Yeah, so we wish them the best.

Yeah, I mean, I wish them the best on our side.

There were a few people there, though, that I just think when this is all over with and they look back at what they wrote, they're going to see that they went way over the top and unnecessarily in their hatred and venom for the person of Donald Trump and that that warped their entire political, you know, not all of them, but there were a few that did that and they're going to regret it because we're going to be very, very lucky if we can get out of this Biden mess because it's, Biden is just a name.

It's a construct.

Biden doesn't mean anything.

There is no Biden.

What we have is a full Jacobin Bolsheviks hardcore socialist assault.

The FCC person is it.

She's nuts.

The DOJ appointments are nuts and they're there and they have power and they're going to use it.

And that didn't have to happen.

All right, Victor.

I would like to remind your audience that you are the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

That you're available on your website at victorhanson.com and a bevy of social media sites, Facebook and Twitter and MeWe and Getter as well.

Those are our new ones that we added.

And you can find Victor on those.

We wanted to do, it's almost your last, the last before the case for Trump book today, The Second World Wars, and hear a little bit from you on the writing of it and the ideas behind it.

Yeah, and I don't know how that got up to a quarter million words.

It was supposed to be 180,000, but Laura Heimert was very gracious in allowing me to have it.

And the title meant two things.

One, there were a lot of wars that we were bundled together.

And what I meant by that, I want to really emphasize that when Hitler went into Poland on September 1st, 1939, and he won that war with the help later of the Soviet Union, and then he stopped.

And then he went into, you know, there was a phony war from October 1st to the next April.

But then he went into Norway and then he went into Denmark.

And then the Low Countries, the Netherlands, the Belgium, and then France.

And then he went into Yugoslavia.

And then he went into Greece and then he you know he bombed Crete.

Well, when he had those 10 other countries, they were still known as individual wars.

And the way we know that is they were referring to World War I as the Great War or the Great War or the World War, but they had not had a Roman numeral yet.

But 1941,

when they invaded, three things happened in 1941 to do the unthinkable.

He invaded the Soviet Union.

Now, everybody says, well, he had two fronts.

That was dumb.

Well, he didn't have two fronts.

He had what is today the European Union all in his grasp.

All of it, its population, its industry.

If he had been smart instead of a lunatic, he could have integrated those military economies, but he didn't.

He looted them, he raped them, he pillaged them.

But all there was was an innervated UK.

So when he went in the Soviet Union, why did he go in there?

He did it for three reasons.

Number one, Stalin had, he felt, humiliated him and asked in their Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.

He kept asking for more, more, more, and giving less, less, less.

So Hitler believed he was arrogant.

Number two, he didn't know how to get rid of Britain.

He declared war on Britain and then basically I'm paraphrasing, but OKW, the over-commander of the Wehrmacht, came to him and said, well, we don't have air superiority and we will have a blitz.

We can't bomb them into submission.

Goering was lying.

And then they said, we don't have naval superiority.

They have five to one.

Even your U-boats won't do it.

And so they couldn't do it.

They tried with the U-boat war.

They tried with the air.

And so he thought, well, you know what?

I will attack the Soviet Union.

And they'll never be able to have embargoes against.

Germany, as they did in World War I, because it's so rich.

So my point is that in 1941, they had three things happen.

They invaded the Soviet Union.

They declared Pearl Harbor.

and Hitler and Mussolini declared war on the United States, and suddenly it was seven continents at war, and there would be 65 million people.

And then very quickly, the other idea of the Second World Wars is I tried to talk about the modalities.

I have a question before you go on.

Tank wars, air wars, et cetera.

Yeah, I have a question.

I thought that the Nazis or the Weimar had more airplanes than the British.

So what's the assessment that they couldn't get air superiority in the Battle of Britain?

That was my understanding.

Was I wrong about that?

I thought they had about 2,500 and the British had about 1,500.

Yes, but that for a while, but during the Blitz, for nine months of the Blitz, British aircraft production was higher for Supermarine Spitfires and hurricanes than it was for Bf-109s.

Thank you.

Oh, okay.

They had all of Europe.

They were producing almost 500 airframes a month.

People forget that.

And then they had the entire empire that was supplying them with the raw materials.

And then, more importantly,

we know that it's about a factor of three.

In other words, that a person had three lives in the Blitz.

He could jump, he could crash land or he could parachute out and get back into war.

When a German was over Britain and he parachuted out, that was it.

He was in a camp.

And then, lo and behold, the Germans were shocked at the Spitfire

in about half the key categories, especially turning radius and ease of flying,

was superior to the 109, maybe not in acceleration or actual firepower in some cases, but it was as good.

And they and everybody thought, well, you know, the Germans have been at war since 1939.

And Poland, they're better pilots.

And the British were very good pilots.

And they had people from all over the world volunteering.

So it was a very stupid thing to invade.

Remember, I think I quoted in the book what the first sea lord said during the Napoleonic Wars when he was asked, will Napoleon invade Britain?

And he said, my lord, I don't know whether he will or not.

I can only assure you, he shall not come by sea, meaning he's not going to care.

There's no other way to get here.

And there was no other way to get to Britain unless you send an army across the sea and they were not going to do it.

They never were going to do it.

They never had anything close to British maritime superiority, the British, and they were just outclassed.

The big, I think, if there's a contribution to the Second World War, as I had these statistics and modalities, that Hitler had no idea to wage a world war.

He was doing these little border wars.

Blitzkrieg was just pretty good Western European roads.

They were near the factories of Germany.

The people were unprepared.

There were always a surprise attack.

And then when he went in the Soviet Union, guess what?

The roads were bad.

The rail gauges were different, the expanses were enormous, the weather, they fought in a way that nobody in Western Europe had done.

And that was the end of Blitzkrieg.

And then he took on the British Empire, the United States, and the Russian economy.

And at the end of the war, American industrial production and general production, GDP, was higher, higher.

than Germany, Italy, Japan, Britain, and Russia together.

We produced more airframes than all of them did.

We produced 90% of the world's aviation fuel.

Nobody had any idea what they were getting to when you, that was a different generation of Americans.

They were crazy people.

I mean, they just in the positive sense.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They out-produced everybody in that.

They did it with a smile on their faces.

They wanted to do it, and they proved to the world that it's a very dangerous thing to attack the United States.

Yeah.

Do you have a chapter on that in your

Second World War?

Yeah.

And what I meant by my modalities were this was a war, but it's unlike any other war.

If you said, and I got sort of the idea growing up when I would crawl under the table like 1960, and I had an uncle, and he thought in the illusions, he described, you know, Dutch harbor.

And then another guy would say, like, I did, wow, you know, I was on Tenyon and I had to crash land in Ewo and I flew B-29s.

And another guy.

a cousin would say, I rolled with Patton in the Third Army.

And then another guy would say, well, you know, I was a logistics officer.

And I'd always say, wow, these these have nothing to do with each other.

What does Okinawa have to do with the desert in North Africa?

So in a global war, there were people fighting.

And then I also tried to make the point, do you really think the Germans and the Bulgarians had anything in common?

Or the Bulgarians and the Japanese or the Chinese and the Canadians?

But the alliances were so big at the end.

I mean, the whole world, except for I think it was 17 countries, went to war.

So there were thousands of little wars, little theaters that were almost unconnected.

And only later in hindsight did we say, this was a simple world war.

And here were the three bad axes and here was the three major great powers and they went at it systematically on a big front.

No, it didn't happen that way.

Yeah.

Thank you, Victor.

That's the title of that book for everybody is The Second World Wars.

It's available everywhere.

I'm sure still.

It's still in print.

So please go out and buy a copy.

Thank you, Victor, for your wisdom today.

It's very appreciated.

You're always so eloquent in your presentation as well.

It's not just the wisdom alone.

Thank you, Sammy, and thank everybody for listening.

We'll see you next time.

I'll communicate with you somehow.

I won't be able to see you.

All right.

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