Ukraine in Crisis - Who Will Help?

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Welcome to the listeners of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

This is the Friday news roundup, and there's lots on our agenda today.

We've got Peter Schweitzer with the new book out red-handed.

We have Pelosi suggesting or claiming that she's going to make a bid for re-election in 2022 and the Ukrainian crisis.

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victor.

Welcome back.

I would like to remind listeners that Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

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So we welcome everybody to come to the website.

How are you doing today, Victor?

I'm doing very well, Sammy.

Very well.

Yeah.

Is the weather good out in California for you?

Yes, it's good in the sense that we have nice crisp mornings.

It gets about 34 to 32 degrees when remember our deciduous fruit and vineyards need about 500 hours below 50 degrees for the winter.

We're on course to get that.

My only worry is that that really bountiful rain and snow of late December 2021 is melting fast.

And we haven't, every morning I look at the radar and there is not a big storm.

out in the Pacific.

And the ones that are coming from Australia or Asia, they seem to be heading right for California and Los Angeles, Fresno, and then they get about 600 miles and they take a left turn.

They hit a high pressure barrier and then they go up to Oregon, Washington,

Canada, and Alaska.

So we've got to have water or we're going to be in trouble.

Yeah, okay.

Well, we'll all put in our special prayers and thoughts water for California.

But today we want to talk about Biden.

At least first we want to talk about Biden and a little bit about what Peter Schweitzer's new book is showing us about the corruption, especially with China.

But also, I wanted you to talk about Biden's proclivity to slur reporters, as he did Peter Ducey recently, calling him a stupid SOB.

So, let us have your thoughts on this Biden world.

Well, let's look what the media and the democratic construct was.

It was

there's working-class, good old joe biden from scranton who went to delaware and he was a tragic guy it's true his wife was killed one of his children and

he was in the senate he was a lion he was a colleague of john kerry and ted kennedy and he represented that idealistic pragmatic hubert humphrey guy and

He ran for president twice, sober and judicious, and he was just the right guy to put a little damper on that crazy 2020 Democratic nomination field.

In other words, he was not Corey Booker.

He was not Kamala Harris.

He was not Nutty Beto.

He wasn't,

you know, Michael Bloomberg, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren.

So Pete Buttigieg.

And that was the construct.

He was going to get the agenda.

The problem was, everybody is listening, he had severe cognitive problems, and he was never a nice guy.

And the cognitive problems were such that the veneer, the veneer of Nice Guy Joe was torn off.

And you saw Joe Biden not as

an Alzheimer-like patient or irrational or an atypical.

You saw the real Biden, who he really was.

And old age does that sometimes to people.

It accentuates prior characteristics.

So he has no blinder.

He has no brake pedals.

It's just pure Biden now.

And what do we find out?

If a guy asks him a question that he doesn't like, he says to Peter Doocy, what a son of a bitch.

If he's on the campaign trail, he says, hey, fat, to somebody who's a little overweight.

Or he says, you're a dogface, lying pony.

So, you know, dogface, lion pony soldier, whatever.

Or he tells an African-American, just jockey, hey, you ain't black.

Or he'll tell a reporter, an African-American, and he does concentrate on race, remember.

He says, you're a junkie.

What if I called you a junkie?

Why would he assume an African-American is a junkie?

Why didn't he talk about his own son as a junkie?

That's accurate.

Yeah, it is.

Or he goes in to tell a group of very distinguished professionals when he was running earlier, you know, going to put you all back in chains, as if, you know, an African-American is going to allow that to happen and needs Joe Biden to stop it.

Or he was lately, he told an African-American subordinate, he said, I got a boy here.

And so we have the corn pop saga, remember, I cut six feet of chain and went out, you know, and then the little African-American boys touched my legs and my golden hair.

They're kind of creepy.

I'm not even, we don't have time to go into the blow on the hair, fixate on the pre-18 year old teen girl, whisper in the ear a little bit too long, the whole Tara Reed accusations.

But let's just say that the construct of good old Joe Biden from Scranton never was.

It never existed.

And now we see Joe Biden in the raw.

It's like looking at a mahogany table and then using your fingernails and that veneer shows you beneath there's pine.

And that's what he is.

He's always a mean-spirited SOB, to use the long term.

Yeah.

And I see the media all the time trying to pan it off as, well, he's just becoming adult, that it's old age addled, but the old age adult is just really revealing the truth below the veneer is what you're trying to tell us.

Yeah, yeah, and it's not a pretty picture that emerges because he always prevaricated and he is now.

I mean, he says you're not going to have mandates and you do have mandates, don't you?

And he says it's untrue that we're giving aid to illegal aliens.

We are giving aid to illegal aliens.

And he was knee-deep in the Russian collusion.

And he lied and said the generals never told him, unless they're lying, but I think that three to one or four to one gives them premacy of the argument, that they never told him that if he pulled out, it would be a disaster in Afghanistan and on and on and on.

And he even lied.

I mean, I had a letter, I think, to one of ours said, well, he didn't say that when he said, we didn't have any vaccines when I got here.

I don't know whether he meant they didn't exist or there were none in stock, but that's what he said.

That was a complete lie.

And so he's not a nice guy.

He never was a nice guy.

He, when that tragic accident, he went around the country.

And if you look at the case very carefully, a truck driver was going not over the speed limit.

And Mrs.

Biden may have pulled out a little bit too early.

And the truck driver had the right of way and he swerved and he hit her.

And that somehow was transmogrified on the stump for political purposes that Joe Biden's truck driver who killed his wife and child drank his lunch, I think he called it.

In other words, he was an alcoholic and he was a DOD and he did that and did that and did that for 20 years.

And finally, the family said, please don't slur our father.

And the guy died in misery.

And it was terrible to do that to someone.

I was never part of this school that said that, you know, it's tragic that such a a dynamic nice guy is is reptilian now but yeah i think it's the real joe it i guess we could say old joe biden is the old joe biden yeah the current old joe biden is the old joe biden we always knew and that's what i think is hurting him because when he gets down to the 30s for do you have confidence in his leadership the only way you can get that pole up a little bit bit when he has terrible leadership schools is they like him.

It hurt Bob Dole.

People, you know, when he got older, he was mellowed, but when people didn't think that Bob Dole was an effective candidate, when he was running against Clinton, they would say, well, you at least you like him.

And they said, no, we don't like him because Bob Dole is blunt and he's rude.

And so that helped Jimmy Carter because even though Jimmy Carter could be mean and spiteful, he was a Christian.

He was kind of mellow.

And they kind of liked him.

They kind of liked Mitt Romney.

He seemed like a nice guy.

Yeah.

And so,

but maybe tougher on his image is the stuff of Peter Schweitzer's new book and the family corruption.

Have you either read or do you know the content of I know the argument and I've read the excerpts, but I haven't purchased the book.

I've been very impressed with Peter Schweitzer.

He was a member of the Hoover Institution.

I was sorry that that relationship ended because I think he was an asset to Hoover, a great asset.

And he was bipartisan.

I mean, he took on the Congress and he was very prescient because now we're learning that Nancy Pelosi and others of both parties have been predicating their stock gambles on insider knowledge of when or when not government was going to spend or not spend or prime or not prime or the Fed was.

going to or not doing something.

So he already had delineated the corruption there.

But on this thing, what was staggering to me is I can't, and I don't know, so I haven't read the book, but how could you have a magnitude of, you know, we all thought maybe a billion dollars, but he is suggesting that the aggregate fees might have been in the multi-billions, like 30 billion.

So where did it go?

I know he's got that huge estate.

Biden does by the sea.

He's got a pretty wealthy lifestyle.

We know what Hunter, but when you look at the whole family, how did they go through the amount of that magnitude?

And of course, it raises the question, for every dollar that came into the Biden syndicate, it had to A, be reported.

And I don't think they did.

And so the only way you can find that out is by the dollar that was spent.

So how did they spend all of that money without having to report how they got it?

Because no one, to my knowledge, has been indicted for income tax evasion.

But they all talk about Trump, Trump, Trump.

But it seems to me that that whole family is going to have to do a lot of explaining.

And then it raises the other question.

Lee Smith has raised that because of the Hunter Biden laptop.

And

there may have been people in Russia that got a hold of that.

To what degree do the Chinese and the Russians have some information on Joe Biden, which might explain

his tardiness on Ukraine or his, you know, when he says just insane things.

Remember when the Russians were hacking, what, pipelines and energy companies?

And

he confronted, I shouldn't say confronted, it was like when Obama said to Putin, knock it off, Vladimir.

Well, he said, basically, if you're going to hack, get your guys to hack, please don't touch these 16 vital industry.

Hack the rest, but not these.

But what would make a person do that?

And

people have suggested that the family has been into so many shenanigans that there are some things that we don't know, but the Chinese and the Russians do know it.

I don't know if that's true, but I think it's more that he's just incompetent and he's venal.

And

so these are things that just absolutely beg the question, raise the question, whatever term we use, is why are we fixating on Donald Trump, whether he overvalued an apartment building when this guy is president,

his family may have shaken down 30 billion, 20 billion from foreign leaders.

And, you know, it's when you get into Ukraine and you think, wait a minute, Hunter was on barisma.

There was a billion-dollar payoff there.

Biden finder wanted Shokin, the prosecutor, fired.

It was going after barisma.

The government complied because he threatened to cut off foreign aid.

That was never something I understood.

I didn't understand in the first impeachment.

Here, Joe Biden brags in front of the Council on Foreign Relations that he told the president of Ukraine, you fire that prosecutor or I'm leaving without signing out your foreign aid package.

And I have the power to do that because I don't want that prosecutor, quote unquote, understood, three dots, going after my crooked son.

And he got away with that.

And then Donald Trump was impeached for saying on a phone call, we give you guys a lot of money.

And I got to know what's going on with this Biden stuff, you know, and Hunter and everything, because

Biden was going to hold up aid.

What's your deal there?

And of course, the subtext of that was Biden was afraid to give them offensive weapons, i.e.

Obama, Biden never gave them offensive weapons.

And Trump was impeached for supposedly endangering their foreign aid, which he, I guess, suspended or delayed, but did not cut off and did give them offensive weapon.

Yeah, so the whole Ukrainian thing was a big devocal for the Biden family, I would say, you know, the implications of their corruption in it.

Well, so far it's been a big money maker because they've made a lot of money and they have paid no price for it.

No consequences.

But that's true.

The interesting thing was it's predicated on one

fact that may not be a fact anymore.

What empowered them was the lack of deterrence.

In other words, Hunter called up Joe and Joe called up his brother and said, you know what, we can rob these SOBs blind.

And the Washington Post, the New York Times, Hillary's not a competitor anymore.

They're never going to say a thing about it.

So they had no fear of the press and they had no fear of the left-wing DOJ.

And now he's not an asset anymore.

He's a debit.

And people are looking at Biden on the left.

They're saying, oh, my God,

this guy can't even get our,

you know, our agenda across the finish line.

He can't get a national voter.

He can't get Bill Back better.

He's doing all this stuff.

He is a detriment.

So let's just throw him to his own crimes.

Let's just tell people, hey, go ahead and prosecute him.

We don't care.

Hey, CNN, run a story about how quick of the get the SOB out.

So I think he could be for the first time in his life in trouble.

Could we talk a little bit about Pelosi and her re-election bid?

And even James Claiborne as well is going for re-election in 2022.

What are your thoughts on this old guard?

I mean, how are they ever going to get rid of them and do they have anything to replace them?

Yeah, it's funny.

There's so many dimensions to that because Nancy Pelosi is 81, so she's going to be 82 and then be 84 and Clyburn's 81.

And then you look around for youthful vigor and you think, well, Joe Biden is 79.

And you think, well, look at Elizabeth Warren, blonde hair, but she's 72 or or three.

And Chuck Schumer's 71.

And so in one sense, that old guard that came of age into politics in the late 60s and 70s and was there with the Clinton moderate group under Obama, they saw the country going left, so they made the necessary adjustments.

because they're all narcissists and egoists like most politicians they never created a farm team they never had mentors that were Clintonite moderates.

So when this woke thing came and it started under Obama, they had no successors.

And so they said, you know what?

We're just going to hang in there.

And what after us, they'll deluge.

And so what's going to happen, you can see is that they're all wealthy white people, right?

And, you know, Sanders is 80.

And as I said,

they're all wealthy white people.

And that's not who the Democratic Party say they are.

They don't mind the wealthy part, but they are quote unquote marginalized people.

They're the squad.

And so these people are contradicting their own terms.

They're woke, but not woke for me.

So they're going to cling to their last breath on holding these political positions of privilege.

I'm not going to hand them over to anybody.

And you know what's going to happen?

It's going to be like suddenly they're going to drop dead.

in maybe asrebus, maybe in office.

And then who's going to take over the party from them?

It's not going to be somebody they had groomed that grew up with bipartisanship and at least fame moderate.

It's these nuts, squad nut type young people, and they're radical.

And so this is exactly what they don't want now because the people, whether they're Hispanic or African-American males or increasingly Asians, they're not necessarily radical.

And so I don't know what's going to happen when they drop dead in the saddle because the people who are going to jump on the horse are pretty radical and they're not going to have even the veneer of moderation that that's one easy take on the situation the other is what a degree of narcissism that they feel that they are so important they cannot be replaced and you ask yourself why did they like it so much it must be terrible to have people call you and have to beg for money and then you have to grip i mean they're all the pelosis made what was it five or six million dollars on stock trading while she was there ie hey you know hey hun I talked to the Fed, you know, they're going to keep interest rates low, or hey, hon, we're going to not go after big tech.

Let's and then go buy big tech or go back into, you know, real estate loans or something.

So that's what they do.

And you think that they would get tired of it.

It's the same thing about Anthony Fauci.

He's 80 years old.

And, you know, I've used that metaphor, I think, with friends.

It's like he's on a life raft and he's out in the ocean.

And he knows that it's not sustainable anymore to be at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

But if he jumps off that life raft and tries to, he's just going to sink into obscurity.

So he would rather cling on there to a slow, pitiful existence and a political death.

That's what Fauci's doing.

He should have quit a long time ago, 15 years ago, but he can't do it.

And he's not even, he's even a character of himself.

He can't go to Congress anymore because he loses his temper and he's petite.

He's a petite little,

you know, petty, petite,

small-minded little monster,

angry, but he's a kind of like a punk now.

He wasn't like that.

He just revealed himself.

you know, ran, Senator Powell, I looked at your website and you're,

it's like Biden yelling.

So he, and, you know, they all have to stay to the bitter end because they don't have an identity.

Pelosi just can't go back and say, you know, like I was speaker, my husband has made 100 million bucks.

And I got a big palatial estate in Napa with a nice big wall that I don't like because I'm against it on the border.

And I've got a big, beautiful San Francisco.

I got family and grandkids.

I've got them in prep school.

I got everything I wanted.

I've been got a $20,000 refrigerator with $10 of pine ice cream.

I'm just going to, you know, 81,

I'm going to take it easy for four or five.

Look Look at the sunset in my Napa Valley estate.

No, I have to be on the, I have to be fighting.

I have to be in the center of attention.

It's really pathological.

I can see sometimes when septogenarians and octogenarians do that, but that's because they have something to offer.

If you're Winston Churchill, you can come back because you have something to offer.

But, or you're de Gaulle, you have something to offer.

But does anybody, did she ever save a nation?

Was she a commander in during war?

What has she ever done

but bicker and fight and lower the dignity of the Congress and hyper-partisan and reflect her class interests of being a very wealthy, entitled person that hates the middle class and idealizes the remote poor that she romanticizes but under no circumstances wants to be around?

So you can see what's happening with all these people is you're going to have a lot of African-American and Latino and young people and Antifa types that are going to come in there at the very moment when they're going to lose the house.

And these people are going to say, well, they lost the house because they were not radical.

They were old fossilized dinosaurs.

I saw it happen in 72 when Hubert Humphrey almost beat Richard Nixon.

And any wise person that had a modicum of sense would have said, we had the formula, even though people did not like Lyndon Johnson, even though they hated the Vietnam War, even though poor Hubert Humphrey was captive and couldn't really campaign as a unique politician separate from LBJ that was lingering over him with all of his stink.

Even that, as that campaign of 68 wore on, he wore down Nixon.

Nixon had the money, Nixon had the organization, Nixon had the experience, and he wore Nixon down.

So when we got to Election Day, 1968, it was really close.

He almost won.

When everything went wrong for the Democrats, they had the 68 Chicago Convention.

They had the hippie movement.

They had everything.

So they could have got together and said, you know what?

We might not want to nominate Humphrey again, but we'll get a moderate and we'll win.

Instead, they said, ah, Humphrey wasn't radical enough.

Hello, he lost because a bunch of radicals stormed the Chicago convention.

It was terrible optics.

And people were sick of that.

And so they nominated George McGovern and they changed the rules and they had, I don't know what it was, McGovern.

They were so sloppy and unorganized.

They had a marathon convention.

McGovern gave his acceptance speech.

I think it was something like midnight.

They got Eagleton and they had to get him off.

They did Sergeant.

It was a mess.

And then that was a landslide.

And then they finally said, well,

guess what?

We shouldn't have done that.

And now let's go back and we're going to, you know, get a guy with a southern accent again.

So then came Jimmy Carter and they won, one, and then Bill Clinton.

But this is what's going to happen.

These left-wing people are going to destroy that party.

And then some adult in the room is going to come back and say

there are moderates out there somewhere.

I don't know any.

If you know anybody, I don't know any of them.

I don't,

I've never met a democratic moderate.

That brings me to the democratic strategy since you were talking about it with the 68 campaign and forward.

I was reading recently an NPR, NPR, so a voice of the left, and they were laying out the strategy that the Democrats were looking to for 2022 and 2024.

And they said, well, now they're pouring millions into community organization.

They're going to put huge efforts into expanding voter capabilities, if I could put it that way.

And hold on,

I have a question here because the last thing was combating voter misinformation that candidates are far left.

And so that was the last thing that I was curious about.

This idea that there might be a middling Democratic voter.

They seem to suggest that they think there is, but it's impossible to be middling, isn't it?

No, they don't.

They don't.

They're hard left.

They're proud they're hard left.

They look back at 2020

and they said, we won that election and we beat an incumbent and that never happens and it did it because i'm just quoting now directly from molly ball's time magazine essay because we modulated the protest that we got to you know we told the guys in the street we know you're not idealist we know you don't have principles we know you hate trump like we do just cool it and you'll get Biden and then from Biden you'll get the Sanders BLM Antifa agenda and they did and she bragged that they cut back on the flow of information remember that they banned the New York Post from Twitter for running a true story about Hunter's laptop.

So they told us that Pfizer wasn't going to have a vaccination in time for the election.

And we knew it was.

And they didn't have it.

They held out.

So they, that's their model: 102 mail-in ballots.

That worked.

So they say, when they say that, they say, we can't win on our principles.

We can't run on Afghanistan.

We cannot run on the price of gas.

We cannot run on 7% annualized inflation.

We can't run on high food and gas that are not part of the consumer price index.

We can't run on racial harmony.

We can't run on the open border.

We can't run on anything, but we have mechanisms to win.

We've got to get this COVID

model institutionalized of 102 mail-in ballots, because you don't have to present a license.

You don't have to show an ID.

You don't have to show up.

You can vote harvest.

You can go to somebody's house, same-day registration, third party.

That's what they want.

And so what does a party do like they do that's a revolutionary Jacobin party when their

agenda and your policy have no support?

Would they have a few choices?

And I think they're taking all of them.

Choice number one.

If you can't play by the rules, change the rules.

Try to get rid of the Electoral College.

Try to pack the nine-person court by by enlarging it to 15.

Try to get rid of the filibuster, 180-year filibuster.

Try to get rid of 50-state union, get 52 states.

Try to have a national, nationalized, institutionalized voting law from Washington contrary to the Constitution.

That's one thing.

And they've tried all that.

They haven't been very successful yet, but they're very close to getting that one vote.

they need.

Okay, that's one thing they're going to do.

The second thing is, well, hell, the demography has betrayed us.

They didn't appreciate our genius.

So we got to change the demography.

So let's just destroy the border and let in 2 million impoverished people.

Let them in without vaccinations, let them in without tests, just swarm the border, let them in, and four years we'll have 8 million new people.

And New York, 800,000 who are undocumented are voting.

That's going to be the model.

And now they're saying, hmm, but the problem is

those damn Latinos are 50-50,

and we might get a short-term gain, but they don't even like us.

We did all these things as nice white people.

We gave them all this.

That's how that bicosto white elite thinks.

I'm so smart.

I'm so moral.

We did all these things for these poor people, and they owe us.

But now

they're not gracious.

They don't have gratitude.

So they don't know about that.

Well, that's the second thing they can do.

The third is they can control the institutions that make up for the lack of public support.

So they say to themselves, control the flow of information.

Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple, and Wall Street, and Equity Capital, and

corporate boardroom, Coca-Cola, American Airlines, Hollywood, celebrities, academia, K through 12.

school board, all that stuff.

And we don't need, we can change reality through these levers of communication and advertising, internet, et cetera.

That's That's another thing.

And then the fourth is a lie.

And you touched on it.

Oh, well, we're not radical.

We'll just put old Joe Biden.

Now, it's true we want to institutionalize and nationalize your voting laws.

And we want everybody to have to buy insurance if you buy a gun.

And it's true also that we want no borders, but we're moderate open borders people and we're moderate high gas people and we're moderate get out of Afghanistan people and we're moderate $50 for a T-bone people.

That's what they're doing.

And I don't think they're going to work.

I think.

I think.

Well, it worked in 2020.

And I'm just curious what your

favorite thing is.

Can the people be fooled twice?

Can they be fooled twice?

They're going to do it again.

They're going to go middle.

They got a record, though, this time.

Before it was, whatever we are, we don't tweet.

Whatever we are, we don't have orange skin.

Whatever we are, we don't have a yellow comb over.

Whatever we are, we don't have a queen's accent.

Whatever we are, we don't yell at rallies with a bunch of people with no teeth.

That's what they said.

And now they've got it.

And they have four years and it's a disaster.

Every single poll asked that eternal, all-important, all-encompassing question in politics.

And we know Reagan was the one that popped, are you better off now

or were you better off before?

And every poll says people a year from now said they were better off a year ago.

And what happened in that year, they got what they wanted.

And I'm talking specifically about a very volatile demographic, the so-called independent voter that elected Trump in 2016 and hurt him terribly in 2020.

And most of that, I'm talking about the 55%

of independent women that did not vote for Trump.

And what do they care about?

Issue number one, security.

They They do not want to be hijacked, carjacked in their Honda pilot when they go to the shopping center.

They do not want to go in for Kroger's or something and have somebody walk out with food with impunity.

They do not want to have their kid come home and said, we learned that homosexual sex is okay.

They don't want to have that.

And they're getting it now.

And so if that rubric were to break 50-50, then the Democrats are done.

If the Latino population votes, they say 50-50, if it votes 40%,

they're done.

And so they're worried about that.

They're worried about the soccer mom, you think?

It sounds like that's what you're saying.

I know a lot of soccer moms, and they don't like what they're seeing, and they feel that.

that they don't have security.

They're the ones that go and, I'm not being sexist, but they tend to look at the budget and they go and buy food and they come home to their family and said i'm not going to buy you a ribeye steak once every two weeks i'm going to have to buy some hamburger and we're not going to go take a sunday drive down to the aquarium or something we can't afford it and that's what they're saying and they're saying it's going to get worse

and it's not fair that they have a five-year-old that's never had their mask off since they were three do you think that they're going to remember that the economy was going pretty well and very prosperously with donald trump or not you know are they going to get beyond the mask of that that's recreated of trump i think so they're not ideologues they're just pragmatists but they got influenced by donald trump and especially in georgia after donald trump contested the election and then they went down to georgia and that was the nadir of donald trump you look at some of these polls with do you like biden do you like or not do Do you like Pelosi or not?

Do you like Trump or not?

Trump's in the plus category now.

They're in the negative category.

Part of that is everybody likes a person that's not in control because there's no downside.

It's all abstract and theoretical.

But nonetheless, I would be very surprised if they don't break 50-50 or pro-Republican.

We've had a 14-point change.

That's amazing.

And generic

question,

were you more likely to vote Republican or Democrat?

And the old wisdom was that Republicans didn't have to be 50-50 because Independents tend to be more conservative than left-wing.

So if Republicans could get within five points, you know, 45 would vote for

the average person, 45 would say, I would vote Republican, and 50 would say, and then five would on the side, then the Republicans won.

But when they get ahead of Democrats, we also know that the first midterm of a president, except in two or three cases, is a disaster.

And then when you look at retirees, because 94% of incumbents get reelected, 30 retirements already for Democrats.

So those are 30 seats they could very easily lose.

Speaking of the elections, I was wondering if you could talk to us a little bit about how the Ukrainian crisis may play into not just the elections, but really the Ukrainian crisis all on its own, Europe's position on it, its global implications.

Could you give us a little talk on that?

It would be interesting.

I kind of look at it as that Aesop's fable, bell the cat.

Remember that old Aesop's fable, all the mice get together and they say, this cat is picking us off one by one because we never know when the damn thing is near us.

He's sneaky.

So one guy raises his hands, I got a great idea.

We'll put a little bell around his neck.

And the other mice go, yeah, let's do it.

And then they say, I appoint.

And they look around.

I am not going to bell that cat because the little mouse who goes out is going to be swallowed.

So this Ukraine thing is sort of like, you can't have a global order where there's a boundary, a border, and a guy crosses it or says he's going to unless he collapses the government.

And so Putin stacks 100,000 troops.

He just sits there, you know, twiddliness them.

And he watches NATO go crazy.

And then everybody said, this can't happen.

So this is what we've got to do.

And then no one wants to bell the cat.

So NATO says, hmm, we've got what, 1 billion people in NATO, members of the 30 members, a GDP that's eight times larger than Russia.

It's a no-brainer, they think.

And guess what?

Somebody, the biggest, richest, the richest country of NATO is Germany, and they have the Nordstrom II pipeline.

And they say, not so fast.

We're going to maybe give a field hospital to Ukraine, but we're not going to get involved here.

We have too much energy from Russia.

We feel bad about World War II.

We poll.

We don't like Americans.

I think it's 55% don't have a favorable impression of us.

60% want better relations with the Soviet Union.

So in the case of Germany, let's face it.

They're not a NATO member anymore.

They do not make their 2% commitments.

They're wealthy.

They don't like us.

And they they are not going to do anything for Ukraine.

And then we go to the second biggest NATO member, Turkey, largest army, largest population, second, you know, it's in, I shouldn't say second in terms of population and manpower in the military.

They're the biggest.

And they have a lot of reciprocal agreements.

technology, military hardware with the Russians.

The Turkish population, like the German population, Poles, anti-American.

So we talk about NATO.

That's a construct.

But the actuality of it is the two most important members, when you get in a pinch, don't like us.

And they're not going to do anything because they think Russia is more valuable to them.

That's number one.

Number two, there's Afghanistan and there's Biden's cognitive issues.

And a lot of people say, I don't want to go to war with those guys.

When we were in Afghanistan, he cut and run.

He left his NATO allies, 8,000 of them.

Didn't even tell us he was leaving.

He'll do the same thing in Ukraine.

So that's the second thing.

NATO people don't trust American leadership.

And then we turn to the American public.

And they think, you know what?

I'm tired of Iraq.

I'm tired of Afghanistan.

I'm tired of Libya.

I'm tired of the humiliation.

And I don't trust Biden to go over there and do anything.

So the American people, if you look at the polls, the vast majority do not want to use military force to bulk up the Ukrainians.

And then there's another element, Sammy.

They're thinking, hmm, well, we know Hunter's a crook, and we know the Biden family is dishonest, but it takes two to tango.

So, who were those Ukrainians that were paying all this money to gain influence during the Obama administration with Vice President Biden?

And who were they in the meantime between administrations?

They thought Biden might come back someday that were paying him money.

And who was it that impeached Donald Trump?

It was expatriate Ukrainian-American Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vinman who testified that he was in close contact with the whistleblower because he listened to a call when nothing went on really that was worrisome.

And then he said that, you know, this and this and this.

And he worked with Adam Schiff.

Adam Schiff lied about that.

And people are saying, well, maybe Ukraine didn't like him.

Well, if they didn't like him, why did they offer him the position, which he bragged and beamed when asked about it under oath, that he was going to be minister of defense of the Ukraine.

So think about that.

This country that was going to make Alexander Vinman Ministry of Defense now says it's the duty of the United States to lead NATO.

And then people in America are saying, well, wait a minute, they always make fun of the deplorables and the irredeemable.

Who in the hell is going to go over there?

And we know who's going to go over there because we know who died and I keep beating that dead horse, but we know who died in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And we're now in the age of identity politics.

And so a lot of these working-class white people are saying, you know, I don't classify myself as white, but everybody else goes by tribe.

And 74, 5, 3, 2, whatever percent in Iraq and Afghanistan that were on the front line who died were double the numbers in the population.

And these people are hated by the left who make fun of them and call them toothless and smelly.

And they go to Walmart and smell up Walmart, according to Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.

Or they're the chumps this joe biden or the crazies that mccain called and you want to send them over what are you going to do on the way over when you send those 8 000 troops are you going to say hmm make sure you have a vaccination or you don't get to go to the front lines in ukraine and by the way we suggest that when you dig that foxhole looking at a hundred thousand russian troops you better have a booster and by the way you are not going to get to go to the ukraine front unless

general milley certifies that you're not a white supremacist, racist, xenophobic protectionist, homophobic misogynist.

If you can pass all of that criteria, you get to go to Ukraine.

I don't think so.

And so what's lost in all of this is we know the reality.

We know the, and there's all, oh, excuse me, Sammy, there's one other thing.

And that is.

There is one other thing.

It's Hunter Biden and information about bribing him that the Ukraine will bring out to old Joe.

I'll make your, we'll make your life miserable if you don't come help me.

Well, they have a long relationship, but Ukraine is not Poland.

It's not a member of the EU, it's not a member of NATO, it's not quite in Europe.

Ukraine, off and on for the 600 years of modern Russia, was a member more likely than not, more often than not, I should say, of Russia.

January 22nd, 21st, the night of the 21st, 22nd, 1941, 1941, 4 million, 3.7 million Nazi Germans, Eastern Europeans invaded the USSR and they went Army Group South, Army Group Center, I should say, south, both of them went through the Ukraine.

And the Kiev pocket was the most deadly encirclement in the history of warfare.

Over 800,000 Russian soldiers were encircled.

When it was all over, Ukraine was the bloodstained battlefield of the Eastern Front.

Okay.

Five and a half million Russians and Ukrainians died.

Four and a half million or four were Russians.

They fought together.

There's only a quarter million fought for the Nazis who were Ukrainian.

So whether it was coercion, whether or not when Putin looks at that, he knows that Russians think the following.

We die for this.

Even Sevastopol, we lost 100,000 people when trying to stop Army Group South under Ivan Manstein.

So we have a more claim, we have more interest in our neighbor than the United States does.

That's what they think.

And so that's another problem in the world stage that's not quite a European country.

It's something that used to belong to the USSR, and they feel they have a Monroe doctrine in that area.

And then what's the counter argument?

The counter argument is a good one.

It is you can't run a global system when every thug wants to mount a bunch of people, you know, like take a hammer over your head and say, I don't know when it's going to drop or not.

We got 100,000 troops there, and you're going to get rid of that government, and you're going to get a pro-so-Russian government, and you're never going to go into NATO, and you're going to demilitarize it.

And by the way, we're going to demilitize.

all of Eastern Europe that used to be the Warsaw Pact.

And by the way, we might go into the Baltic states next.

That's what he's saying to us.

And nobody can or will bell that cat.

They've got 7,000 nuclear weapons.

If you're David Goldman, who's a brilliant guy, and he writes these articles that people are not fond of, but what he writes every day almost is pretty telling.

He's got one today where he says, now, wait a minute.

Ukraine has one of the lowest birth rates.

in the world.

It's down to 1.2.

And Ukraine has 9 million people who have fled that supposedly enlightened constitutional government in Western Ukraine.

And Ukraine, if you look at its per capita income, despite its energy and its natural resources, it's lower than Russia's.

So whatever Ukraine is doing, it's not working because people are fleeing that country in droves and they don't have confidence in it to have children.

And it's not doing as well, not just with its Eastern European neighbors, but with Russia.

So it's a very complex issue.

And then when you put in the final Tessras in this bleak mosaic, it's Joe Biden, and he gives that press conference.

Well, if he takes a little bit of Ukraine, you know, if he, it's sort of like, I won't get mad if you take off my arm and leave me two legs and an arm.

So I believe in deterrence.

I believe that we should deter him, but we only have two deterrence left in a realistic fashion.

One is to sell him arms, and we're doing that.

And the second is to consider sanctions, and we'll probably do that.

And then the only thing that will keep him out is is his own sense of cost-to-benefit self-interest.

If he thinks that he's going to go send 100,000 in there, and there's going to be Ukrainians behind every building with an anti-tank westernized weapon that's going to blow up his tanks, and then every plane is going to be shot down by a handheld surface-to-air missiles, he might not want to go in and fight a guerrilla war.

So, that's all we can do now.

And I say now because this is very funny: 2009 to 2016,

he went in in that eight-year period, 2014 specifically, he went into Crimea and eastern Ukraine.

Stop 2017 to 2020.

Did he go in anywhere?

No.

2021, first year.

Is he going into yes, now western Ukraine?

What is the pattern?

The pattern is if you have an Obama or a Biden, he gets a big smile on his face.

And the left says, we're going to reset.

Putin's a great guy.

We're going to include him.

And George Bush was really mean about Georgia invasion and he put sanctions on Putin.

And everybody hates Bush.

So we're going to press a reset button in Geneva in 2009.

And we're going to like Putin.

We're going to send Mike McFaul over there.

We're going to lecture him on human rights.

And we're going to turn Moscow into the Bay Area.

And it didn't happen.

And the worst thing you can do is ridicule somebody and carry a twig.

And that's what we did under Reset.

And then it blew up.

But we remember what part of reset was?

It was telling John Kerry telling the Russians, oh, you didn't come into Syria.

We haven't been there in 40 years, but you're a player in the Middle East now.

Bang, we made you a player for nothing.

And then it was, hey, tell Vladimir that I'm up for my final election.

And after the election, if he kind of behaves, I'll be flexible on missile defense, i.e., I dismantle missile defense for Putin.

He didn't go into Crimea or eastern Ukraine in 2012 in the election, and then he went in 2014, hunky-dory.

That's what it was.

What did he do?

And then you brought in Trump.

Putin looked at Trump and they said, collusion, collusion, collusion, hoax, hoax, hoax.

There was all this back and forth.

And Putin's intelligence guys come to him and say, you know, we can't figure this out.

This Hillary Clinton, who we'd like to be president, because, you know, under her, she's a left-wing person that begged us for reset and she sold us 20%

of North American uranium reserves.

So we want her in there.

But her stupid people are using Russian people to say that Donald Trump is working with us and he's not.

And they were figuring out what is going on.

And so when she lost, but they said, you know, it doesn't matter because Trump will lose, but Trump won.

So then they got angry and they created this Russian hoax of collusion.

You know, he's an asset.

He's a traitor.

He's treasonous.

Clapper, Brennan, Comey, McCabe, Mueller, a whole whole bunch of them.

And they're not, and what did Russia?

It got Russia mad.

Well, it hamstrung Trump, too, because it was difficult to have.

So, what did it do?

It hamstrung Trump.

It got Putin mad and the Russians mad, Russian under every American bed.

And Trump was going, beam Trump, art of the deal.

Read the books.

It's all triangulation.

Trump was saying, hmm, I'm going to reach out to Putin and I'm going to tell him that, you know, China's got a border problem with you and India and China's expansionary and you've got 144 million people and they've got 1.4.

We've got some interest here together besides radical Islam threatens you and us.

So that's what we did.

China's no better friend to Russia than it is to us.

Russia's no better friend to China, etc.

That's what Kitchinger told us.

We just blew that up.

And what did Trump do?

Why didn't he go in during Trump?

Well, Trump killed mercenaries when they attacked in the insulation in Syria.

Remember that?

We killed them.

And then he just said, kill them if they're going to attack us.

And then he got out of an asymmetrical anti-medium-range missile.

He said, get out of it.

And then they said, Solomoni, get rid of him.

And Baghdadi, bomb him.

ISIS, bomb the crap out of him.

Irandi, get it out.

Paris Accord, what a joke, get out.

Move the embassy to Jerusalem.

Fine, why not?

Golden Heights, Israel's, that belongs to them.

And oil prices pump like crazy.

Three more million barrels.

Let's crash the world price.

See what Putin.

He was Putin's worst nightmare.

Unpredictable, decisive, capable of anything at any time, unpossible to peg or predict.

And he didn't do anything.

And then we got Biden.

What was the first thing Biden did?

The anchor.

Remember the anchorage, Sammy, where the Chinese came over and Blinken was going to be Mr.

Professor and lecture, you know, well, this is the way that this, and they just said,

forget you guys.

You're weak, you're pathetic, and we're going to scream and yell at you for the next hour.

And you're going to sit there and take it because we're Chinese.

And that's what they did.

And they said, hmm, this was very undiplomatic.

This was,

this wasn't sober and judicious.

And the next thing, very quickly, what did Biden do?

They were hacking.

They were attacking companies and pipelines.

And he said, Vladimir, now I know that you have control over those Russian thuggish hackers, but here's the deal, pal.

Here's the deal.

One, please put 16 nice companies that are human services companies or corporations or government offline.

Please, subtext, hack all you want.

I'm scared of you.

Just don't do stuff that really hurts people.

And that's where we are.

So then they got together in Putin's office and some guy said, hey, Vladimir, this guy is just about on his last legs.

He's appeased us.

The Democratic Party, remember, they were the reset party.

I don't like them anyway because they accused us of stuff we didn't do.

Trump is out of the picture.

And if we're ever going to break up NATO, now's the time because all we got to do is pressure, pressure, pressure Ukraine.

And then NATO will fight with each other as they all blame you, Bell the cat, you bell the cat, you bell cat.

It's a perfect scenario.

And if it works, we turn right around and we go up to Lithuania and Latvia and Estonia and we tell the Baltic republics, you saw what we did in Ukraine.

We're just going to sit here with 100,000 troops and look at you and see if your big NATO friends are any more

helpful than they were in Ukraine.

And by the way, the Chinese are sitting over there and saying.

Thank you.

Clappy, clappy, clappy.

This is a perfect blueprint for Taiwan.

Taiwan, yes.

That's what I was thinking in the global politics.

That's it's a mess.

From A to Z, it's a mess.

It's a mess, mess, mess, mess, mess.

Well, with that grim message, we need to take a moment for our sponsors and then we'll be right back to.

And you can have a last word on that and maybe talk a little bit about poor old Neil Young doesn't want to be on Spotify anymore, but let's hear from our sponsors first.

Welcome back.

And Victor, you were just finishing up on the Ukraine, so I wanted to just give you a moment if you had anything more to say.

But it was a pretty grim picture and pretty well painted as it was.

But was there anything you needed to do?

Oh, I mean, I am not an isolationist.

I am not a fan of Vladimir Putin.

I'm not an alt-right pro, whatever the neoconservative critique is, but I'm just saying that

the Democratic and bipartisan Washington establishment from 2009 to 2016 and from 2021 got us in this mess.

They destroyed deterrence, they flattered Putin, they disparaged Putin, and they did everything but deter Putin.

They talked loudly with their little tiny twig and they created this mess and they glorify NATO and they idolize it and they praise it.

And you look at NATO and there is no NATO because the two biggest members, as I said, are pro-Russian.

They're not pro-American.

And then anybody who points this out to them is some traitor that doesn't want to go over there and fight with a bayonet against Russians.

So I'm sorry, but.

I don't see a lot of options other than I support sanctions and I support sending them offensive arms.

And we'll see how, what the Ukrainians do with it.

They may fight tenaciously and make it a guerrilla war that Putin curses the day he was born.

Or they may be part of the 9 million people who left the country in peacetime and just say, you know what?

If Putin's Russia is wealthier than ours and we've got a lot of Russian speakers, maybe it's better just to kind of cut our best deal we could.

And I don't want Americans to have to fight for Ukraine until I know that Ukraine is a transparent, consensual society that says to us, we're going to fight.

And so, I mean, and I don't want Americans over there on the ground.

I'm sorry.

No way.

And so, but I hear things that are scary.

I turned on CNN and MSNBC, and I've got all these people who want to go over there and fight.

They don't want to go over.

They want the deplorables that they despise to go over there.

Yes.

And it seems kind of risky for the Democrats to start up a little bit of a war in the hopes that that will get them re-elected.

I just can't see that happening.

But they often do that, right?

To just.

If you don't do wag the dog, what's the alternative for them?

I guess they can run on the border.

Maybe we've done this before, Sam.

They'd say, you know, Stephen Chu, we thought we were going to get $10 of gas.

We're on our way.

You know, that's what they can run on.

Or it's so good that people don't like each other based on race.

We did that.

You've just talked a long line of why nobody would.

from the United States would ever want to go to war.

And then you just said right now that, well, it might be in the democratic interest to send us to war because they have nothing else.

That's grim.

That's all I can say.

But did you want to move on?

I have one last question, something a little bit lighter.

Do you want to respond to that?

I, you know, when I was in high school, I played Cinnamon Girl, Cowgirl in the Sand.

When I was in college, I listened to Heart of Gold, all of those Neil Young.

He was kind of up in Woodside above the Stanford campus when I was a graduate student.

So I kind of like Neil Young's music.

Wait a second.

Wait a second.

You didn't let me get my question in.

So can I ask?

So you previewed it before.

Well, that's true.

Neil Young and he's not, doesn't want to be on Spotify anymore if Joe Rogan is going to be on Spotify.

And so I thought we could hear a little bit about what your ideas on that because he says Joe Rogan's misinforming people about COVID treatment.

Yeah, Joe Rogan said that these are on tested vaccines and they're pretty safe, maybe with one or two, but each time you get one and you're in a group that is not of high risk and you get a booster that's three of them and you're going to increase geometrically maybe

your chances of side effects but more importantly we know that the spike mutant is not going to be stopped by the booster and we now know that a person who's had two vaccinations and COVID is much better protected than two vaccinations in the booster without having had COVID.

And we know that a person who's had a recent case of COVID is probably better than people who have been vaccinated nine months earlier.

That's what he said, basically.

And he also has been saying that people who have had COVID, there has to be a way to have an antibody tighter.

And if they have antibodies through natural acquired immunity, then that is comparable as it is in Europe.

And Neil didn't like that because Neil Young is part of that weird generation of 60s people who acted like they were free love, free drugs, let it all hang out, do your own thing, drop out, tune in, turn on.

No,

they were never that way.

They were always authoritarian.

They were always wanting some cadillo.

They romanticized Mao or Fidel.

And when they took power and they're in power now, they want to have absolute power so that they can sit there and control.

He's a multi-multi-millionaire, and he wants to control his immediate environment and people around him.

And he wants to live to 100.

And he wakes up every morning, like all these people, these so-called Karens, is

some little virus is now floating in the air and it's come all the way up to my house.

And it came from somebody driving down on, you know, 280 that wasn't vaccinated.

And it came out of his air conditioner.

Now it's right in my house and it's him.

That's how they act.

And so what I like about the story is that all these tech companies are amoral, not immoral, amoral.

They don't have a moral universe.

They wear flip-flops and tie-dyes and they gouge people.

You know, if you've got a Mac computer every two years, they change the cords, they can charge you another 70 bucks.

They do anything to make money, they do anything to monopolize power and profits, they live like kings, they're the wealthiest generation in the history of civilization, and they're amoral.

So when they look at this question,

some of them say, hey, Neil's kind of left-wing, and he's kind of a folk hero.

And Joe Rogan's become right wing.

His Bernie Sanders days are over.

So let's help Neil.

And then they say, nah,

accountant, come in the room.

How many Spotify people download Neil Young's song?

6 million.

Oh, that's pretty big.

How many Joe Rogan?

200 million.

Oh, end of discussion.

Tell Neil to shut the F up.

And that's what they do.

And at least sometimes they do.

In 2020, they,

you know, they thought that they could have it both ways, but usually that's just money, money for them.

And that's what it was.

And poor Neil, if you, if I go outside of my

agricultural fortress house with a wall and the dogs, and I go into town and I ask the first 10 people, who is Neil Young?

not one person will know who he is.

If I say, who's Joe Wogan?

A lot of Mexican-American kids, you know, men and guys listen to her.

He's got 20 million listeners, I think, per week.

Oh, I thought you said 200 million.

No, those are people, I think, that download his shows

in a given time period, the same as Neil's, Young's.

Oh, got it.

It's just a Neil Young is not Mr.

Guy on the stage with Crosby, Stills, and Nash, where everybody's, you know, yelling and screaming, and he walks backstage, and women are throwing themselves at him, and he can say this and that.

And the final irony is that remember during the Reagan movement of the 1980s, he kind of went right wing for a while and he said

we shouldn't give back, I think, the Panama Canal.

And everybody got angry at him.

They really burned his wings and he came down to earth and thought, oh, wow, I can't say that again.

So he's a Canadian, too.

He's not an American.

Maybe he's become an American citizen, but I don't think so.

I think he's a resident.

So on that note, we're going to end this conversation.

Thank you very much, Victor, for all of that on the modern, on the current news events.

Always love it.

Thank you.

Yep.

And thanks to our listeners as well.

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