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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

We are recording on Thursday, January 27th, 2022.

I'm Jack Fowler.

The host, Victor Davis-Hansen, is the star and namesake.

He's the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

He's also the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Right now, I'm looking at his best-selling, most recent best-selling book, The Dying Citizen, How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America.

As you know from the title, it's about citizenship.

And I think we'll begin the show, if it's all right with you, Victor, by talking about illegal citizenship.

And

let's do that right after it.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show again.

It's recording on January 27th.

Got a note, Victor, to our listeners, our regular listeners, and they're aware that between the day we record and the day the shows are actually put up, you know, several days can pass.

So given the tensions happening globally and particularly in Ukraine, for all we know, that there will be a dramatically different set of subjects to talk about at that time.

But right now, we're going to talk about what's current now and today on the 27th, and one of those things has to do with a video that's gotten a lot of attention.

I saw it on Fox.

I saw it online.

It's of these adult males apprehended, caught crossing the southern border, which I also heard, I think last month there were close to 180,000 transgressions that.

we knew of at the southern border.

Anyway, these.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Are you saying that a transgression is a crossing jack?

well i'm about to make a note about something being criminal yeah latin word transgaro to bear a cross okay oh is that what it means i couldn't believe you were falling for the the euphemism of the uh homeland security people a transgression i'm sorry well i i i i should have meant and said an invasion yes or a bound yeah well they're criminals right so what happens to criminals where they they were quote unquote processed and you would think they'd be sent home to wherever that might be?

And what we do know is globally, but no, these, again, this from this videotape, the Biden administration took these criminals and put them on commercial flights and flew them throughout the United States.

And one last thing, Victor, to touch on some of the global tensions is at the same time, the Biden administration is upping its commitment, some military hardware, promising actually some U.S.

soldiers for the Ukraine, which is facing this tremendous hostility from Russia.

And many people have commented, why is the Biden administration more concerned with the border of Ukraine than it is with the border of the United States?

So, Victor, we have this, again, this video, single, adult, able-bodied, criminal men being brought into the, brought into the United States by the Biden administration.

Your thoughts?

Why are you so judgmental this morning, Jack?

All these adjectives who strung together before the and use that taboo word illegal.

Come on.

They're all over.

They've got all sorts of documentation.

They've got all sorts of documentation.

They just forgot it at the border.

They're undocumented.

There's so many things about this that are disturbing, but as a general rule, anytime that government is not transparent, they're breaking the law.

And why don't they do it at noon on a Monday afternoon?

You know, the reason.

There's zero support for it.

And so in that context, remember what we have to put in a larger political context.

We are in a very strange age right now where a cognitive impaired president was entrusted in a Faustian bargain to bring across the finish line disingenuously a hard left socialist agenda.

That's what he was supposed to do.

And he did it.

And they're in control.

The Elizabeth Warrens, the Bernie Sanders, the Obamas and the shadow, all of those people are in control.

Jill Byte.

Okay.

And they have an agenda that does not garner 50% support on any issue.

New Green Deal, cutback, oil and gas production, Afghanistan, you name it, no 50% support.

And they have an emissary of that agenda that's polling even less.

Okay, so what do you do?

And we know how they operate.

They try to change the rules, Electoral College, filibuster, national voting law, pack the court, or they try to dissimulate, do things at night, deny.

I think Jen Saki, didn't she say, Jack, that when she was asked about this before, she said, these are just women and children.

And it's a humanitarian missions these flights, because it's been going on, as you know, and you just said, you know, since summer.

And she's been called on it.

And she said, no, they're not males.

They're her family.

That was a lie.

She knew it was a lie.

So they dissimulate and they act as if they're moderates.

and so they act they try to emulate americans that they despise but they think that they can appease or win their votes or they try to change the demography and that is they imported two million people and people have said to me oh you're you know the great replacement theory and you guys are racist and you're all right you know what's a million and i'm thinking well we have 330 million people you do two million a year that's eight million and that can provide the electoral college margin necessary to flip a blue state in seven or eight blue states.

It's that close.

So that's what it's about.

And it's not going to stop because they don't have majority support and they have no other options to retain power.

And that's what they're doing.

The funny thing is, is the disparity between a citizen and not just a resident, but an illegal resident.

If you or I want to get on a plane, we're going to be asked for a driver's license.

And increasingly in many states, in all states, eventually, it's going to be a real driver's license.

I spent two hours of my life going to a DMV to get a real driver's license on the eve of COVID.

And you had to have your passport, birth certificate, and proof of residence.

And then you get a little bear for California insignia.

Of course, as I was in line, I wrote about that.

Everybody said, hey,

they're not going to do this, Victor.

I knew a guy there.

He said, they're not going to have all all of these people who are undocumented illegal in California in the millions go on a plane in August and not get on.

So they're going to make us do it, pay the fee, and the people who are legally here and legal citizens, et cetera.

And then they're going to exempt it.

And that's exactly what they did.

The only thing he hadn't anticipated was they did it on the guise of COVID.

So we all got real IDs and you don't need a real ID now until I think 2023.

And then you won't need it then either.

And so we we treat people asymmetrically.

So, Jack, what was the idea that they showed to get on the plane, like you and I do?

The idea was an arrest warrant.

So they were called on this and Homeland Security confessed that, yes, if you put a male on a plane and you have no license, no

passport, and he pulls out a citation that he was detained and supposed to show for a court hearing, and he has a name, that is a proper idea.

Of course, it's not for you or me.

If you get on a plane without a passport and a driver's license, say, you know what?

I got arrested for a DUI last week.

Here it is.

You're not going to get on the plane.

And so it's the same thing about asking our soldiers and asking our soldiers and federal employees to have a vaccination

when we know that if they've had COVID, that they've got better immunities than as offered by the booster shot, for example, and as good probably as two shots in the case of Omicron.

And yet we're not going to ask that of an illegal alien.

These people can just walk across the border with no worries at all.

As long as they don't get near Nancy Pelosi's Sonoma mansion, she's fine with it.

And so it's this disparity.

And, you know, when we talk about Ukraine, we're going to talk about it probably, but all these soldiers that Biden talks about, 5,000, 7,000, 8,000.

So you're doing all this in the country and they've sworn an oath and they will they will obey orders but are you going to check out their tattoos or are you going to find out if they're white supremacists or how are you going to find out that they're not white supremacists and they're not guilty of white rage because general milley and secretary austin said that's what they were going to do and then are you going to find out whether they've had covet but not a booster before you put them in ukraine for example

And so

this whole thing is destroying the very concept of citizenship because we're privileging people who are not only not citizens

but they're not legal residents they're here illegally and there's no background checks and it's part of a larger i think everybody in this audience knows that this happened to them on some occasion some manifestation that

they know that the government local state federal is going after them whether it's a speeding ticket or dropping a cigarette out of their car window or making a rolling stop because they want to feel important and to prosecute, arrest the law-abiding citizen so they can justify whether financially, psychologically, whatever, that they're giving a pass for the lawbreaker.

Because there's too many lawbreakers right now.

It says civilization's unwinding.

And if we had followed the law and put the people in prison, we would need a whole state to hold them.

This is one of the most unlawful places in the world right now.

But we don't have that statistical proof of it because we're not arresting people for the crimes that they commit.

I was driving last night to give you an example.

It was late kind of late.

I had a stuck-up drain.

I didn't want to get out of the house.

I went down to get some hydrogen or potassium hydroxide or something, you know, that the super, super Drano.

And as I was going by,

about nine o'clock, two cars,

a car was racing and another car was going to hit my bumper and he went around them and there were two young gangbangers that were speeding off and they went right through a red light right ahead of me and i stopped at the red light thank god there was a highway patrolman filling his or a cop or highway patrolman it was dark i couldn't see and he was filling his gas at the station then he went out and he i guess he had to choose and he took one of them And they must have known each other.

One was being chased because the guy that he couldn't pull over was sitting right at the side of the road about a quarter mile when I turned off to my road.

It was just sitting there.

I could recognize the car.

I thought, wow, you just ran a red light and you were speeding.

And here you are sitting to see whether you're going to partner again with a person after they get their ticket, or you can pursue them if they're a victim.

But you do assume they're not going to go to jail for driving 90 miles an hour and going through a red light.

Yeah, Victor, we should talk about this on a separate program, but we really have unleashed these inner demons that we have.

Some people, you know, have kept them suppressed because if they let them out, they would have gotten arrested.

And so you think about New York, city of 8 million people.

I mean, how many of those people would really get their thrills?

They just walk down the block and sucker punch somebody or intimidate some stranger.

And they wouldn't have done that.

under Giuliani or I have to

admit Bloomberg, but hey, now you can.

And it's just a spiral.

It begins this terrible spiral.

It is, absolutely.

And take, think of the left's logic.

They're always saying that if a conservative politician says one wrong word or a conservative Tucker Carlson says something, they call that inciting.

He's guilty of inciting.

And so they connect it with every mass murder.

But think how many times somebody like Joey Reed goes on television and just spews out utter hatred or Farrakhan or Al Sharpton or people who, and you know, 10 years ago, you didn't hear white privilege, white this, white conspiracy, white, white, white, white, white.

You didn't hear that.

And you do all the time.

So, according to the left's own logic, there are people out there, deranged, angry, who want to connect their own sense of dissatisfaction with society or their own career trajectories or their own unhappiness with some cosmic exegesis that will explain it.

And they turn on TV or they hear a rap song, and there it is.

And I'm all for free speech, but when you have these people who are taking this white supremacy theme and just beating it to death, it affects some people.

And that's why you have people walking down the street and slugging people they've never known in the head or throwing them into the subway or shooting them on two premises.

One, in a cost to benefit analysis, they feel there's a good chance they can either get away with it or if caught, they can contextualize it, or they're just so angry and so full of hate because they think that's the normal way and that's acceptable now.

They can get away with it.

Yeah.

And it's disgusting.

It really is.

In Minnesota, I was reading earlier today that some guy, this has to do with the George Floyd riots, and some guy was videotaped burning down a building.

And two months later,

digging up the debris, they found a dead body.

So he's being prosecuted, but the federal government, the federal prosecutor is giving him, well, you know what?

He had good cause.

He was really protesting.

And I mean, it's shocking is arson is brutal.

It's murder.

And yet our government, the Biden administration, Justice Department, is trying to softpeddle this kind of crap.

You know, it's what William Golding was writing about in Lord of the Flies.

And it's what in the first book of Thucydides, when he talks about pre-civilizational tribal life

or what Caesar's talking about among the tribes, it's the human nature stripped of its very thin veneer of civilization and order.

And we've stripped it off, deliberately so.

And we've let people revert to their natural state.

And it's the survival of the strongest and the meanest.

And we have the vulnerable who we don't really care about.

And it's a scary time.

I've never seen anything like it in my entire life.

And I'm speaking to someone who was taught by my parents that there were certain institutions that you did not criticize.

You would never criticize the FBI, the CIA, the DOJ, even the IRS.

My mother used to call me on April 15th, did you pay your taxes?

Make sure you pay in time.

Don't try to even hedge, Victor.

It's the state needs revenue.

That's how she thought.

And even the CDC, she would say, did you get your flu vaccination?

The CDC, I don't trust those institutions.

I don't like Jim Comey.

I don't trust Andrew McCabe.

I could care less about James Clapper or John Brennan or Anthony Fauci or Francis Collin or Mark Milley.

I don't trust those.

And I hate to say that because they're the foundations of our society, but something's gone very wrong.

My mom was the first, second women, female Superior Court judge in Fresno County, and I think the second state appellate court judge.

And all I heard was the sanctity of the law, blind justice, the sanctity of law.

And I, I mean, if I got a ticket, she would say, I got a ticket once.

I said, it's really unfair.

I made a U-turn.

It didn't say no, U-turn.

It just said nothing.

So I made a U-turn.

He said, you can't make a U-turn unless you have permission.

That's crazy.

And my mother looked at me and said,

are you raising this issue to think that I'm going to call somebody up in the municipal court and help you?

I said, no.

She goes, don't even think of it.

And so what I'm getting at is that story is repeated among millions of us.

And yet something's happened that we've lost the respect for this weaponized, politicized government that's doing these things, whether it's what you brought up about a flight in the dark of night to break the law and dump people with criminal records on unsuspecting communities that are going to wake up in the morning and they're going to see people who have criminal propensities that think that they have a complete blank check because the government paid for their flight to dump them and they're going to be unleashed and they don't don't care.

Or whether it's, as you say, these people in New York that go up and hit people or walk right out.

Wasn't that crazy actor Rappaport who used to scream and yell about Donald Trump all the time?

And now he filmed somebody in New York walking right out of a right aid.

Was it right aid?

Just stealing things?

Right.

And I thought, wow, you used to, I remember him from True Romance

that Tarantino wrote the screenplay for.

And he was that young actor.

And the only reason I ever remembered him was that he was always in the news as saying Trump is a monster, he hates him.

And I thought, okay, you got rid of your nemesis.

And now, what do you have?

You, why are you filming?

This is something that was a logical consequence of what we were talking about in the campaign when they were decriminalizing.

And

the DAs were decriminalizing the legal code and they were also defunding the police.

But I guess what we don't know, Jack, is I don't think any of our listeners know it, but I don't know either, is what extent does all this in the news, whether it's the immigration flights or it's the bold attack on innocent bystanders, or it's the brash and brazen looting in front of a security guard, or it's the train tracks in LA that look like, as Gavin Newsom characterized them, the third world.

What effect does that have

on the left-leaning independent voter and Democratic voter who voted for this and knew they voted for it.

Now, what are they going to do in this next midterm?

Well, let's look at that.

Okay.

So here's, let's, let's have a little bit of a political grab bag here.

And we can, let me, I'll put out a few things, Victor.

One is some of these polls that are out now.

Gallup put a poll out that from January, in January 2021, Democrats had a nine-point advantage.

Right now, it's a five-point advantage.

So in the difference of a year, there's been a 14-point swing.

Biden support among Democrats has fallen 20 points since July.

There is a new Pew poll out.

21%,

only 21% of those polled are satisfied with the direction of the United States.

NBC news poll, this is a new news poll.

Biden approval among black voters was 83% a year ago.

It's now at 64%.

And one last one.

What do we have here?

Rasmussen report shows that 17 of what were the likely voters strongly approve of biden but 50

strongly uh disapprove and a couple other things in this political grab bag and we're separating out we're going to talk after this about the breyer retirement which is certainly going to have political aspects to it we have nancy pelosi running again we have our the president of the united states calling a reporter uh stupid son of a bitch peter docey or fox who kind of took it laughingly.

And one other thing is, yeah, the State of the Union, you know, we're talking here on the 27th.

This is really around when the State of the Union address was given.

It's not going to be till March 1st, which I

wonder why.

Yeah, well, like, give is it given time that maybe, you know, like a stop clock is right twice a day, maybe something right will happen with the Biden administration that you can brag about.

My feeling is.

I think the Archangel, they believe the Archangel Mark

as the 7,000 doomed who were sitting in the nave of Santa Sofia on Black Tuesday, 1453,

when the Janissaries broke open the door and were going to shortly rape, butcher, and destroy what was left of Western civilization in Asia.

They were convinced that the angel, archangel, excuse me, Mark, would come in, take them up, and take their marbleized emperor and save him.

And it did not happen.

So they think before now in March, the angel is going to descend and say, you know what?

We're going to make it better on the border.

We're going to make it better on inflation.

We're going to get gas prices down.

That's why, that's where they are right now.

Was it really an archangel named Mark or was it Michael?

Because if there's an archangel,

there's one named Lou or Lenny.

Yeah, I better check.

There's only four of them that are named in the Bible.

Yeah, that'll be Michael.

And if you go into the name.

I don't know Michael as well well as you do.

Oh, he's he's he's uh he's the one that beats beats up Satan.

Well, anyway,

the archangel Michael is is is the one who is Satan's nemesis.

Wait, wait, wait, before we go, I thought there was, is it Gabriel or Michael?

Michael?

It's Gabriel, Raphael.

And there's, I had a guy that went.

Yeah, Uriel.

I had a guy that I knew really well, Uriel Mendoza, and he was named after.

I'm sorry, I meant Michael, not Mark.

Yeah.

Okay.

Michael's always referred to first, isn't he?

He's the main archangel.

Actually, in the, in every Catholic Mass, at the end of the Mass, we, there's a prayer to Saint Michael that is now mandatory.

So he kind of, I would say he kind of outranks the rest of the guardian angels.

I mean,

are they connected with the pre-Socratic ideas of air, air, fire, earth, and water?

No, the four elemental existences.

I can't remember.

I don't think so.

Okay.

I'm trying to get into a Pythagorean pre-Socratic

exegesis for this carryover that

Christianity borrowed.

Yeah,

I don't think it's happening here.

All right.

Well, anyway, the Catholicism of the angels and all that aside, Victor, we just, you know, I threw out this grab bag of things political.

We can move on if there's anything else you want to say about things political for Biden, because we have to talk about Breyer at Wuhan Labs and a great essay you wrote.

Well, very quickly, though, as far as Biden saying what a dumb, stupid son of a bitch, is that what he said?

I think everybody realizes there was no old Joe Biden is the old Joe Biden.

And what I mean by that is Joe Biden, stripped of his veneer of sanity,

is now the real old Joe Biden.

I mean, he's not old or new, he's Joe Biden, and this was the guy.

So, dogface, pony soldier, liar, fat, junkie, you you ain't black, hey boy, all of that stuff, even the donut shop, put you on change, all of that wasn't an indication that a good, nice Joe Biden was failing and was indiscreet.

It meant that the SOB, as you and I have talked before, who blamed an innocent truck driver for supposedly killing his wife in an accident

where she tragically died, or the Joe Biden that was malicious in the Bork and Clarence Thomas hearings and the Joe Biden that systematically would get on the floor of the Senate and attack people or praise to the skies, Senator Eastland or Senator Bird or bragged that George Wallace liked him.

There's a continuum there.

And so when he says, listen, you dumb, that's dumb son of a bitch, all he's doing is replaying the corn pop, I took a chain and went out,

or I'm going to take Trump behind

the gym and beat him up.

Or I slam that guy's head down on the counter.

Or I remember I want to tell you or that little story about how he told that guy, that son of a bitch, if he goes into,

if he keeps looking at burisma, I'm going to get him fired.

And son of a bitch, I walked out and he

scampered and gave me what I wanted.

And,

you know, he said, didn't he say at the beginning of his tenure, I just want to make sure that if anybody bullies anybody, talks to anybody, that son of a bitch is fired.

We're going to treat people with respect.

So he'd have to fire himself.

And then I remember he said a really terrible thing.

The worst thing he'd ever said was that Vladimir Putin's a bully, just like our president.

And he fears, I'm saying, I'm, oh, yeah, Donald Trump orders people to be killed all the time.

You know, it's just.

You remember during the debate, too?

Like he was to Trump, what a clown.

He's not a nice person is what I'm trying to say.

He was never a nice person.

He was an insecure product of the like me from the middle class, but he had a venomous inferiority complex.

He was a wannabe and he was a grifter and he became a very wealthy man.

If a fraction, and I and I know Peter Schweitzer is very accurate, but even if he wasn't and just a fraction of what he says in this new book is accurate, the 30 plus million dollars at the Biden family, it's just stunning.

And any other politician would be the end of it.

So these are not nice people.

Hunter Biden is not an aberration from that.

You look at his emails when he's talking about with his racist cousin about, you know, no Asian and all that stuff.

They're not nice people.

And this idea that it was old Joe, Uncle Joe, and whether it was

we're just going to forget that he blows in the ears of a 12-year-old.

I think most men that are listening to this audience, when they see a family come over for dinner or they have relatives and there is a young girl, 11, 12, 15, maybe attractive,

they don't even think of it in that term.

They don't even want to hug them.

If they do, they're very careful.

They practice all the decorum necessary so that young girl does not in any way possibly feel that the person hugging her is anyway creepy, sexualized.

And yet he does that routinely.

He always did.

It wasn't just a senality.

Nobody said a word.

Nobody said a word.

He was a young creep.

He was, absolutely.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, I don't know if we should call him an old creep, but Justice Breyer has announced.

I don't know if it's how formal it's been, but he will retire.

Joe Biden, while he's running, promised that he would appoint the first Black woman justice to the Supreme Court if he had the opportunity.

I don't think we're going to see a Justice Harris or even a nomination of the the cackling vice president.

One thing I'd like to say about Breyer and Victor, your opinions on him or how you think this might play out politically or any, how do you think maybe Republicans should act.

But I never got the

Breyer's a moderate.

You know, I don't know really how many degrees of separation there are between him and Soto Meyer.

And I remember flipping through C-SPAN channels, I know, it was probably 10, 12 years ago, and caught him on C-SPAN giving a speech to some college law school group.

And he was talking about how American jurisprudence should, to some degree, rely on the jurisprudence of other countries.

That was a big thing.

No,

he said that.

Yeah, but

I think what they meant was.

I think what he meant, they mean is he was moderate, i.e., sane in his expression of hard left ideology governing his jurisprudence rather than the Constitution, as opposed to Sonia Sotomair, who just made up a bunch of figures the other day that were completely off the scale about the number of children that were suffering from COVID and the ICU, for example, or managing in one speech, I think it was 27 times and mentioned she was a wise Latina, or when she was up for confirmation, she said that a wise Latina like herself had a better perspective on the law than a white male.

So compared to that, I guess they call him moderate.

Or compared to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who said, I don't really know in a New Yorker interview, remember that, I don't really know why people are upset about abortion.

They're kind of aborting the right people, aren't they?

Or maybe when she said, you know, we have a lot to learn from foreign constitutions like the Constitution of South Africa.

That's really working out really well if you're in South Africa.

So compared to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, what she said and what Soda Meyer says now, I guess the you know, there's a Wall Street Journal, I think, op-ed today saying that compared, you know, that's what they basically are hinting at.

But yeah, you're right.

He was a hard leftist.

And there's another way of looking at it, that he used his greater sobriety and skills to further a cause that did more damage to the Constitution than did Soto Meyer, perhaps, because she's incompetent.

But yeah,

it's disturbing.

But the whole Breyer thing is really mysterious.

I don't know if we're ever going to learn.

It sounds to me like

people came to him and said, do not play a Ruth Bader-Ginsburg ego trip.

And don't think that we're going to keep the Senate and the House.

And don't even think that they can't get 60 votes and a veto-proof thing in the Senate because we really screwed things up.

And don't think we're going to get a Democrat in the White House in 2024.

So this is our last chance.

So you're going to retire.

and we've got to get this through before the midterms or, you know, it's going to look bad if they take the Senate and the House.

And we've got a real problem.

They can stall and die and go.

And then they might have the votes to stop you.

And he said probably something to the effect, well, I kind of want to retire and I'll discuss the date with you.

And then they just leaked it because he didn't even know.

He didn't even, they,

he didn't, you know, he was not the people.

He was not the person who said he was going to retire, put it that way.

That came out of the White House.

And so they were putting pressure on him.

And so he's not happy about it.

And they're saying, you know what?

And I think he must be saying, well, I'm still compos mintes.

I'm in good shape.

I can.

So then the president.

Yeah, I'm better than Joe Biden.

I can last two more years.

We might get a Democratic president.

Why should I have to give up my seat?

I've been doing a good job.

And

somebody, a little, you know, this is the little angel on one shoulder telling that, and the little devil on the other side said, Ha ha ha, you're a white male.

You thought you could do all your little affirmative action gymnastics.

Didn't ever think it was going to come back to you.

Ha ha ha.

You thought about proportional representation and disparate impact.

And there's nine justices on the court.

And with Clarence Thomas, there's 12.7% African Americans.

And they have roughly, you know, 9% reputation.

So it's not that off.

And now it's going to, they don't need another African-American because it'll be 22%

and they're only 12.7.

No,

no, no, Mr.

Breyer.

That's not how it works.

We're not going to be proportionally represented.

We're going to be identity politics represented.

And you don't fit the bill and you got to get out of there so we can get in advance a Black woman.

You know, what's ironic about it is there's no doubt lots of Black women jurists, law professors, judges that are perfectly qualified, if not better qualified often than white male counterparts.

However, once you say that you're going to have a black woman, that person forever is going to be the black woman slot.

So no matter what she does, people privately, though not publicly, are going to say, well, she was appointed because she was a black woman.

And that's going to be partially correct, no matter what her qualifications are.

And so they keep doing this.

And then they're going to say that's racist, but they're the racist.

And then we have this idea that just because you're a particular race, you're wedded to a particular ideology.

And I don't know what to say about it.

It's just more of the same.

I think they're also, Jack, in great fear when they get together, they being the Democratic people in the Senate and the House.

They said, Look, we got to get Breyer out now, now, which is not that long.

We've only got about eight months, 10 months until these midterms.

And then, if we get schlack, we have no moral authority until we actually lose our offices in January of 2023.

But more importantly,

those SOBs could do what we did.

They might just say, you know what, tit for tap.

So they might do a Kavanaugh hearing on us, where all of a sudden out of nowhere, some guy comes out and says, listen, I dated you and you did this, or I smoked dope with you.

And I can't remember where it was when we dropped acid, but it was somewhere.

And I can, and then Michael Avenetti's version on the right can come out and say he's got, you know, all sorts of witnesses.

And then we can go look at their,

ask to see her diary.

And then we can start screaming and having right-wing protesters disrupt it.

And then maybe a Republican senator can go outside the Supreme Court doors and say, I'm coming after you, Kagan.

I'm coming after you, sort of my ear, like Schumer did.

And so they don't want to do that.

And who knows, if they lose the House, maybe Kevin McCarthy will tear up Biden's inaugural address via Pelosi.

So they don't want that.

They think, you know what?

We have a monopoly on doing crazy stuff.

And the Republicans are stupid and they follow the Marcus of Queensbury rules.

But you know, they might not.

And if they don't follow the Marcus of Queensbury rules and they follow our example, this nomination could be months of dirty fighting.

And gosh, we've got a lot enough time so we can get, we can call up Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates and the Apple people and get some money and get these PC, these PACs going and these special hit teams and get the offensive going.

And the talking points that we can mutter on network news and PR, that's what they're thinking.

that it could be a long, drawn-out process.

They need every minute.

Well, Victor, one maybe last reference to angels i thought more of the briar was uh reminding me of frankie pantagele uh frankie five angels from the godfather being encouraged to uh yeah frankie had a knowledge of history remember he talked about in rome they did this i i guess robert deval said that to him you know about suicide right yeah Before we move on, we'll talk about things Wuhan next, but let's get to that, but right after this important message.

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So Victor.

Yes, over the last couple of days, Brett Baer, particularly at Fox News, has reported on these emails emails that have come out about the beginning of the pandemic.

But the issue was

this virus evolutionary?

Did it come naturally from some pangolin and or was it

manufactured in this Wuhan lab, funded by the United States taxpayers through gain of function

research?

And then there was a corralling of opinions early on of virologists who thought, like, who thought, well, this is, you know, the evidence here is

that it's not natural.

And clearly, there was pressure from inside the government because within a few days, everyone's singing from the same song sheet.

The thought that this was manufactured at this Wuhan lab is crackpot stuff.

So there's a lot of evidence.

When last I saw Bear yesterday on Fox News, had not gotten any responses.

Maybe something's happened in the meanwhile.

Victor, I know you follow this

intensely.

What are your thoughts about these latest stories?

Well, there's two things that as empiricists, we have to do.

We have to know what the evidence is, and then we can speculate on what that evidence implies.

There's no question that

as soon as this thing was known, I think was the guy's name, Anderson.

He was from San Diego Scripps, I think.

And he wrote, he and three others who all knew each other, they sound like it was a very close-knit group of the world's leading virologists, epidemiologists, et cetera, immunologists, whatever term we use.

They were obviously very worried because the genome sequence, they hadn't seen it and they didn't think it could be from nature.

And they expressed their worries.

And

I think they had in the back of their mind,

they were aware that

the CDC and Francis Collins had routed money to this lab through EchoHealth, and they wanted to let them know.

And then they were politely told,

shut the blank up.

And then was it four days later, five days later, they dropped their initial suspicions.

And then

most reporters who are honest, then...

quote various sizes of grants that Collins control.

And it's in the many billions of dollars.

And so the impression is that that's how Fauci wields power and modulates and shapes and massages narratives by holding the purse strings.

And by extension, it doesn't reflect very well on independent PhDs and MDs

who

contextualize their own scientific research or preliminary speculations based on whether they're going to get money for it or not.

That's the truth.

But, okay, I don't think anybody objects to that narrative.

But what does that mean?

Because if you carry it out, you know, the coral or just work it down on the chart,

the end where you get is

macabre.

Because what you're basically doing is, oh, you say to yourself, gain of function was controversial in the United States and was banned.

And they cannot find a single animal from which this virus jumped over until people had had it and passed it on to animals.

And then they found characteristics in this genome sequence that were so insidiously capable of entering human cells and infecting people in a way that nature took a lot longer to develop by natural selection and mutations and variants and stuff.

And China's villainy in all this also.

Yes, and absolutely.

And so we've got 1.4 billion people in China with the second largest economy in the world, and a lot of their power hinges on their facade of global citizenship, and it will destroy that.

And it'll be the most deleterious propaganda blow to them that they've ever endured.

And so what

do you do about this?

If you're Anthony Fauci, you're basically, to use a metaphor, you're on the back of a wild hyena.

And the longer you can hold on,

the less likely he's going to bite you and scratch you, the hyena being the truth.

But it's getting harder and harder as you age and the hyena gets bigger and stronger.

At some point, you're going to have to jump off because he may bite you while you're on the back.

But if you jump off, you're dead.

So he knows the moment he retires.

And he's out of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, there are going to be literally dozens, hundreds of researchers are going to say, you know what?

That narrative is dead.

It's toxic.

The new narrative is it was the Wuhan land because there won't be somebody who takes his place who's culpable.

And they're going to come out and tell the truth.

And he's going to be further damaged.

And he knows it.

So he can't get off the hyena and he cannot stay on.

And that's his dilemma.

And that's why he...

he can't tell the truth.

He just makes up these narratives and he has no idea that some researcher at Fox News has all these clips.

And every night when Tucker goes on, he says, Tucker, I found all these, or Laura, I found all these.

Or he's somebody at Newsmax or someone who's not part of the mainstream media said, look at these talk shows.

Look at these contradictions.

He just keeps saying it as if you're going to lie your way out of line.

You never work.

So something new today, also, and like there's always some new

recommended protocol.

And this is for babes.

I mean, infants, six months, toddlers, six months old need to get three shots.

I mean,

how do we know what the ramifications of that are?

Little kids.

The CDC released two days ago a new study that said while heart complications are not common, I think there's still

100 cases per million shot dosage, they are far more common than in the natural world of human experience.

So they're saying that

two things, for people 15 to 30, you're in a cohort that have a 99, 99, 99 point

chance of not dying from COVID.

So you're the most resistant, but you're also the most likely to have a rare side effect should you get the two-dose regimen of the RNA vaccination.

That's pretty damning for the

CDC to say that.

And so that, and that's aside from whether you've had acquired or meaning, I think what we're on the verge of, Jack, and I'm saying again, as somebody who got two shots and got COVID and understand that when I got COVID, I did not even go to the doctor.

I was very ill for a couple of days, but it was because of those two shots, I feel, that the Deltavirant didn't do much to me.

Had I not been vaccinated, I might have been a lot sicker.

I don't know that.

But so I'm willing to give credit to that vaccination.

And I urge urge people who feel along the lines I do, if you agree, then do it.

But the point is

that the idea you're going to go get a booster and you're going to have immunity from infectiousness or you're not going to get Omicron is not true.

And the idea that your vaccination is going to be much more superior,

much more than having a prior dose of a case of Omicron is not true.

And so they don't, and that, what I just said would get me kicked off of social media or YouTube six months ago.

And that's where we are.

And,

you know, it's, it's when you don't have free speech and you don't have competing ideas in the arena of empiricism, where you say something, and then if it's absurd, it's immediately dismissed with no evidence.

But if it's, it has some logic and then people try to find arguments and counter and counter, then you don't have the scientific method.

You know, I was talking to a doctor not too long ago, and I said, we don't even talk about what you do.

We all say vaccination, vaccination, vaccination, booster, booster, booster, but we don't talk about

U.S.

citizen, you have COVID.

Here are your range of options.

Here are expensive drugs that we know

have efficacy.

Here are moderately priced that have some efficacy.

Here we have other drugs that are very cheap.

There are arguments, pro and con, whether they work.

And in that wide range, we have the CDC on their website say, let's do the cheap drugs, quercetin, pro, con.

Here are the studies and links.

French marine pine bark, just to take one out, pro and con.

Pepsid, pro and con.

Ace inhibitors, pro and con.

And then recommendations, cost to benefit analysis.

Then let's go to the next one.

Hydroxychloroquine, iron, pro and con.

Here are the studies.

Here's the counter studies.

Just put it all out there so that the person can make an informed decision about the risk involved, the cost involved, their age group, their comorbidity.

We didn't do that.

Oh, Victor, we've seen the politicization of science through COVID.

A little aside, International Review, where I used to hang my hat, we were being sued and the lawsuit's still ongoing from Michael Mann, a climate scientist who you would think would engage.

One of the things that researchers do, I was told, is they allow others to see their data so they could, you know, see if the data could be replicated or this is part of the whole back and forth of science.

But no, you have to, that was shut down.

The walls were shut down.

Why?

Because science...

the goal of many

scientists is to come out with a political conclusion and we're paying

the price for that and you've written and we'll talk about on the next podcast we record but how wokeism has run roughshod through america's institutions and we think oh yeah the academy but it's also run roughshod through the field of of uh fields of science so if anything more you'd like to say about this victor if not we've got a a bit of business to conduct and then uh i think very quickly i think that all americans realize that we have a particular standard of living We have clean water.

We dispose of our sewage in a way that facilitates civilization.

We have pharmaceuticals and a medical tradition that allows us to conquer once lethal diseases.

We have options when we get terrible diagnoses of cancer.

We have all sorts of information at our fingertips about diet, but it's all based on one thing, a scientific method of free inquiry, unfettered by government or religious coercion.

And that's the scientific tradition.

So if we have a Galileo here, we don't go put him in house arrest.

We just don't do it.

If we want to know what causes stomach ulcers, we say it's stress.

And then all of a sudden we say it's gastric acid.

And then all of a sudden we say it's H.

pylori.

But we, we, all of those theories, and we say you can't use proton pump inhibitors.

You can do it.

You've got to use Zantec.

No, it's dead.

All of these changing

pieces of advice and knowledge are subject to scientific dissent and approval and counter dissent and argumentation.

But when you suppress that, then you're going to the Soviet style, the Maoist style, the Orwell style.

And that ultimately will affect people's lives.

They will not have the standard of living that they're associated with.

And this is not a tangential medical problem, Jack.

This applies to the entire woke movement.

When you start telling Asian Americans, you're not going to get into Harvard because we don't know what to do with you.

You test too high and you got too many A's.

So we're going to use personality.

We're going to say you're cookie cutter cutouts of obedience or you have no personality.

When you start doing that, you're losing talent.

And when you start telling people that you're not going to go to jail, if you're a particular color, if you knock somebody in the face, you're endangering people.

So we we should all remember that when you destroy empiricism, meritocracies, the scientific method, then the civilization is here.

There's a reason why people are coming from Mexico.

It's not what Joe Biden tells you.

It's not what the left tells you.

It's

they are leaving a failed non-scientific environment where cronyism, tribalism, first cousinism triumphs, merit, and free scientific and free speech inquiry.

And they want out.

They don't know that in the abstract, but they surely know it in the concrete when their water doesn't come on or when they go to the beach and they come by back and there's a cartel member in their home and they can't get him out, whatever.

They want to come here.

But if they come here illegally and they bring that tradition that they're accustomed to and they're not assimilated and integrated and told you're here for a different paradigm, then they're going to recreate the conditions of which they fled.

And that's what's happening.

Everything we talked about today,

they have one common theme is a rejection of empirical thinking and regressing to a, I don't want to say medieval because I might offend you, because, you know, but a pre, a dark age idea that we're going to be deductive.

We start with the thesis and then we make the examples fit rather than have the examples lead to an inductive conclusion.

And historically, that is absolutely toxic for the survival of a civilization.

Victor, I appreciate your little comment there about not wanting to offend me, but I did hear what you had to say about Galileo.

So

my Vatican friends might not like that.

Every time I've said the word medieval in a derogatory fashion, I get a letter from quote-unquote a Catholic monarchist who said, now wait a minute, until we had the Enlightenment and all this relativism questioning religion we had a scholastic religious tradition thomas aquinas etc so it was and there's some there's some merit in there i understand you can just you can just tell them to back off that you discovered the angel the archangel mark so picture i would like to read some you know feet people rate us on itunes and they're still doing it's phenomenal the numbers are phenomenal and there are many uh many folks leave comments and here are two we're gonna read two today uh and one i i'm not reading it because my names mention it but does it's titled thank you jack sammy and victor i think they got that backwards it should have been sammy victor and jack i began listening and this is from matthew matthew r i began listening to victor's podcast just prior to the pandemic of 2020.

i was a senior undergraduate in california and was an avid listener to everything and anything victor had to say on his podcast in writing and on television in march of 2020 when my campus closed and my schooling abruptly ended i started a job bagging groceries at my local grocery store.

On my drives to work, Victor's wisdom shared through his podcast kept me going.

His insights, his calm demeanor, and his ability to analyze world events in a sober way kept me sane and grounded in an increasingly insane world.

I credit Victor for giving me a spirit of discernment for truth in such a chaotic time.

Ever since, Victor has been part of my daily routine, and one cannot express the excitement I have when the podcast app updates to reflect a new posted episode from Victor with Jack or Sammy.

Thank you to each of you for making such an impact on my life.

Sincerely, Matthew.

I think that's terrific.

That's very nice.

That's

very sincere, and I deeply appreciate it.

Yeah.

One more, though.

This is a little, this is funny.

It's from WA12 Dude, WA12 Dude, and it's titled Wisdom Shower.

Amazing podcast.

Love the connections of current times to the past, like a wisdom shower.

So,

thank you.

And quote, thank you.

Was that female or male?

I don't know.

It wasn't one of those showers in Russia, at least.

So, it was a wisdom one.

I'm Jack Fowler.

I have a, I write,

I'm the director of the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic.

Please consider visiting it, centerforcivilsociety.com.

And I write a weekly email newsletter, Civil Thoughts, and you can sign up for it free.

It's at civilthoughts.com.

Thank you for that.

Do visit Victor's website, VictorHanson.com.

Thanks for leaving your comments.

Thanks for your ratings.

Thanks for listening.

Folks, we'll be back again very soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Take care.

Thank you, everybody.

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