Upside Down and Inside Out

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Hello, ladies. Hello, gentlemen.
This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show. We are recording on Friday, January 21st, in the year 2022.
I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

Our namesake and star, Victor Davis-Hansen, is the Martin N. E.

Lee Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskie, Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He's also the best-selling author of many books, the most recent being The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization are Destroying the Idea of America.

Victor, I think that title, maybe if you'd written the book now, would have included, and a guy from Delaware Destroying America. Let's talk about that guy.

Let's talk about that guy and the press conference he had and his fumble-fingering about the Ukraine and Russia right after this important message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hanson Show. Again, we're recording on Friday, the 21st.

Victor, a couple of days ago, Joe Biden, for the first time in ages, came out from the basement in one of his Delaware mansions, where we learn now he spends a quarter of his time in Delaware.

But maybe that's a good thing. He had a press conference.

By most standards or critiques, it was another borderline fiasco.

In particular, he confused the nation and the world about American policy in the very tender spot right now of Ukraine and its confrontations with Russia.

So, Victor, let's get your opinions about the press conference in general, his demeanor, how he handled himself, how he represented America.

But first, if you would start by taking the slice out of the press conference and what he said and did about Ukraine and Russia, its ramifications for the U.S., for that potential conflict, and any other thoughts you might have about the conflict independent of Joe Biden's bumbling?

Yeah, I think they're in a fundamental paradox because they know a president, as you said, can't be home 25% of his time, and he can't have the fewest press conferences in modern memory.

And his polls are going down.

And deep down inside, they know his polls are going down because people see him,

but they also go down because they don't see him. In other words, he's derelict on the job.

But when he is active on the job, they like him even, you know, it's kind of like Obama in 2016, Jack, during the campaign. His polls were running about 42, 43.

And then he just abdicated and let Trump and Hillary have the spotlight and they fought and he went back up.

But you can't do that with Biden because when you occasionally saw Obama, he was slick, he was young. But you can't do that with Biden.

So the more you see him, like that press conference, and hear him, the more his polls go down. When you're satisfied you don't have to do that, they go down still because he's not being president.

So they don't know how to handle that.

So they think that if he can stand, you know, they prep him for four or five days, they cut out his schedule, they probably give him some Adderall or whatever they do, and they rest him.

And then they say he stood up for two hours. I was driving the other day in Geraldo.
You know, that was a success, he thought, the fact that the president could stand for two hours.

So that's where they are. And we all know that he has a problem, a cognitive challenge,

not because of his age necessarily, but because we all know people 79, 78, 80 who are sharp, very sharp, but not Joe Biden. So he says things that don't make any sense.

So when you look at the transcript,

It's very different than watching him. When you look at the transcript, it's utter nonsense.

When you see him struggling and he gets angry and he's yelling and he always had that chip on his shoulder of old joe scranton from pennsylvania that wasn't properly appreciated for his genius but now when you see him and he's making gibberish and it just the visuals are so bad he looks like i got in trouble for saying this on fox but i'll say it again he looks reptilian like an aged lizard he really does he does he looks like he's made up a little bit yeah he is he is he's had a lot of work over the years, plugs and everything, and it doesn't work well.

So

he starts off with that deficit. And then when you ask these questions, and remember, I think 85% of them were on Ukraine.

So probably with a wink a nod, they told that press corps, and remember Biden had one occasion, if we remember, said, we weren't on the list, or they know.

to whom or the questions are mostly going to come who's going to mostly pose the question so i think it was a ukraine moment because almost all the questions were on ukraine and nobody mentioned really one question on the border or inflation or covid not very much

so he can't really answer that because it requires some complexity and so what does he do he just says things well they they kind of have a little bit a little invasion is kind of a little pregnancy you know if you cross a sovereign border with the intent to attack an enemy it doesn't really matter you're You're an invader.

And that poses the question, what do you do about it? And so what Putin is doing, Jack, is he's deeply emotionally attied to the Ukraine. And he has some, not all, but some reason,

valid reasons, because I mean, the 5 million people died in the Ukraine in World War II. It was the scene of the largest envelopment outside of Kiev.

of troops in a single battle in history. About 750,000 Russians were captured or killed.
And the ones that were captured died mostly around Kiev.

So the idea that this is just a foreign territory like Sweden, you know, is not quite true. So then the question is:

well, the big point, and there are several points of contention, is that you can't tell Ukraine not to be in NATO. And that's right.
He shouldn't do that. But do we want Ukraine in NATO?

If Ukraine was in NATO right now, Jack, would there be a NATO?

Because the first thing it would do is evoke Article 5 and say, I am under threat and I ask all my NATO partners, I demand them to come to my assistance.

And you're all obligated by collective defense in the treaty. So the guys in Cappuccino land in Florence.
are looking at girls in Amsterdam.

They're going to drop everything and get on their uniforms and go over to Ukraine. I don't think so.

I don't think somebody from Ohio is going to want to fight Ukraine for for the sovereign border of Ukraine when we can't. We don't even have a sovereign border.

We're letting 2 million people invade us and nobody's invoking with NATO.

I always thought that that would be a good thing for somebody to do is to say, in a military, can you please evoke Article 5 to help us close our own border?

But my point is, if you evoke Article 5 and nobody comes to your assistance and they won't. to Ukraine, then you don't have an alliance.

So what we're trying to do to cut to the quick, we're trying to say to Russia, we won't make Ukraine part of NATO, but we can't say that because you are putting a gun to our head to get that confession.

But it hasn't been part of NATO for 30 years. And so, and they didn't invade until two things happened.
Barack Obama was elected president

and Hillary Clinton pushed the red jacuzzi button in Geneva. And that was in 2009.
And then we, you know what happened? We cut back oil production. The price of oil helped Putin.

We

lowered sanctions that had been placed on oligarchs and assorted Russians after their invasion during the Bush administration of Ossatia.

We had the hot mic exchange. Remember that? Tell Vladimir I want to be flexible, you know, after the election.
This is my last election. So he dismantled that Eastern European missile defense program.

We were in a very asymmetrical missile accord.

And, you know, we cut the defense budget. So he sized up NATO and Obama and he went into, and I think February of 2014, gave Obama a break and said, I'll wait till after the election unless you ask.

He went into Eastern Ukraine, and that was months long. And then he went into Crimea, and we couldn't do anything, or we didn't do anything, or we didn't want to do it, whatever.

So then we took a deep breath and Trump came in. And what did Trump do? Remember, he was the Russian puppet.
James Clapper said that he was a Russian asset. John Brennan said he was treasonous.

And what did this so-called traitor do? He flooded the world with cheap oil. The price crashed and Russia was severely hurt.
He jawboned the Germans.

Do not sign a pipeline deal, the Nordstrom pipeline with these guys. He killed 200 Russians.
Remember the ones that attacked us in Syria? He killed Baghdadi. He killed Soleimani.

He acted crazy with North Korea.

And then he got out of the missile deal. And he told Putin to be careful.
And Putin didn't do anything for four years.

He thought Donald Trump was either nuts or so unpredictable that he, if he was going to kill General Soleimani or bomb ISIS or kill Putin's mercenaries or trade insults with North Korea, he's capable of anything.

So he didn't do anything.

And then we went back to Biden, and we never got rid of this dead corpse of Russian collusion. So we did.
Biden and Obama had done the worst of both things.

They kept saying collusion, collusion, collusion, Russia under every bed.

But Biden was defeated in Afghanistan in a humiliating fashion. He betrayed our NATO allies by just, you know, running out of the country, but without informing them in advance.

And then we had these press conferences where he couldn't articulate a grammatically correct sentence. Right.
And

grandpa eating his farina, you know. Yeah.

What image does that project to Putin?

So Putin said, you know what, I'm tired of these guys

claiming that I

colluded with Donald Trump. If I colluded, I planted sources for Mr.
Dolan, Hillary's subordinate in Moscow, Mr. Dashenko at the Brookie.
They got the whole story wrong.

You know, he wanted Hillary to be president because she'd signed over a lot of uranium in North America to him. But the point I'm making is that

now Putin has sized this up in Afghanistan. He sized General Milley up.
General Milley, he thinks,

maybe he'll call the head of

the Russian army and say, I want to warn you that Joe Biden might be doing something.

Or he thinks that right in the middle of an American airlift, Lloyd Austin's going to tell everybody our main objective is to fight climate change. And Millie might say, no, no, Mr.

Secretary, remember, it's finding out white supremacy and white hatred. So we got to read more Kendi.
So when he looks at all that, he says this U.S. military and this government have lost deterrence.

And that's why he's considering the unthinkable. But I really do think that this administration,

if they were to restore deterrence,

they would have to say, to Putin, don't tell us what we can do, but they'd also have to tell the Ukrainians,

we can't put you in NATO. You were always historically more aligned with Russia.
We'll protect you. You can be like Sweden.
We'll sell you weapons.

We'll coordinate defenses with you, but we're not going to ruin the alliance by having you evoke Article 5 when only about half the NATO countries would show up. And that's a fact.
Putin knows that.

I think he wants them to be in NATO in a weird way. Well, Victor, a couple of things.
I want to apologize to any grandfathers that have farina and oatmeal.

I'm 68, so it's getting close to home. Okay.

And

when you mentioned Hillary and jacuzzi, I just thought my life flashed before my eyes. I know the jacuzzi button.
So

we'll carry on.

So Victor, about the press conference and the post-press conference, and this now involves the vice president, a couple of things, a bit of a doubling down on the need for election reform, which we can also talk about.

The Senate tried, tried again. Chuck Schumer break the filibuster.
It came up, as we all knew, it's going to come up empty-handed.

But in his press conference, Joe Biden continued to, I think, denigrate Americans who disagree with this leftist bill.

And the day, let me just throw Kamala Harris into this because the day after the press conference, she was sent out to, like a lot of people, sweep up after the elephant and i think she complicated things in her own right because she got pretty snippy with some of the tv hosts and then she said that foreign leaders i don't know if she said this to the today show hosts but foreign leaders are asking her concerned what is wrong with america with this uh and the republicans we need this voting bill passed and can you imagine the president of france or the of any country bringing this up as but she was so like full of it with that rhetoric And Victor, I'm going to shut up in a second because I know our listeners want to hear you, but I do want to bring up a recent poll.

We can talk about this defeated bill, but Biden's opinion still on Americans who disagree with him on this. Scott Rasmussen published this week the results of a poll.

80% of Americans favor requiring a photo ID before casting a ballot. 76% favor requiring all ballots to be received by Election Day.

85% favor requirement for states to clean voter rolls by removing people who've died or moved from the list.

This is a staggering, overwhelming amount of Americans who want election integrity and reform.

But these people with these kind of views, and by the way, it cuts across all party lines, all races, 65% of blacks. want voter ID.
I guess they don't know.

These are the blacks that hate blacks, I guess, according to the the Biden-Harris arithmetic. So Victor, there's a big ball there.

Your take on their continued take on election reform, the integrity of the forthcoming November elections, and their disdain, their easiness with how they cast Americans as bigots and racists who disagree with this clearly leftist agenda.

In a very weird way, the Republicans, they had no choice, but they did them a favor by stopping build back better and the voting act because there was no support for it and americans

and every poll jack they poll they want somebody to close the border they want inflation stopped they don't want to be humiliated overseas they're very skeptical of this new critical race theory and polarization so these are issues that nobody cares about you know whether or not presenting an idea is racist.

It's not, it's just irrelevant. But yet they keep January 6th.
Yes, they keep January 6th. Nobody cares.
The polls are clear on that. So they keep pushing, pushing, pushing.

In a weird way, it reminds me of the Bush administration. Remember that Bush announced he had a mandate and the first thing he was going to do was privatize Social Security?

And that was in the middle of the Iraq war. And I thought, no, you either got to win Iraq or you've got to...
calm the country or you got to do something. That's what people are upset about.

But they're not interested in privatizing their Social Security check. They're just not.

And that's coming from someone who thinks maybe they would have got a higher return, as one of my colleagues, John Cogan, who was involved in that effort, proved.

But nevertheless, that was politically inert. And they took a terrible hit and they kept pushing it.
So

they keep pushing these two things, Build Back Better, which will only increase inflation, deficit spending, and as will increase the voter anger over this voting bill.

And yet they do it and do it because they have have nothing else and they want to have this weird sense of momentum.

I can't stomach these pundits that'll get in on TV or they'll say something on the radio like, well, Joe Biden was looking for a big win with voter reform and he was looking for a big win with, well, that wouldn't have been a big win.

That would have not been happening. People, independents, especially, wouldn't have liked that.

So he got a big win by losing in the sense that he's not going to get any worse than he is because of those two issues. And he could have got a lot worse had they passed.

So they've got it wrong on there. He just keeps talking about things that people are not interested in.

We know why they're fixating on the voting bill because they hit pay dirt in 2020 when 102 million people, 64% of the electorate, did not vote on Election Day.

And whether they admitted it or not, they were able to warp that fact, whether it's Mark Zuckerberg's $419 million that went in for abnati balloting or mail-in balloting or early voting or changing the laws through court suits against the legislature.

That paradigm is what they want to institutionalize. They never want to go back to stroll down to the precinct, show your ID and vote.
They don't want that. And we know why they don't want it.

There is a way to audit that in a way you cannot audit as carefully a mail-in ballot.

And so that's what they're doing.

They're saying, you know, you're a racist, you're a racist, you're a racist, but my gosh, if COVID goes away, we'll go back to the old system and that won't give us this 64% mail-in ballot.

So they have to call everybody racist. It's weird how they're calling Mansion and cinema racist, you know.

I don't understand that. You call these people racist and they're horrible people, and then you say, well, maybe we'll have chunks of it and that'll pass.

So then you're selling to, you're going to say to Mansion and cinema, well, you you know you're really not george wallace or jefferson davis and you're only kind of sort of a racist for rejecting the voter law but now you're good for a while so would you vote for a chunk of the billback better it's funny yeah well it's really not funny but

it is well victor we have a couple of things to talk about on today's program again we're recording on the 21st of january of 2022.

i do want to make a few notes a few program notes i want to remind our listeners that you write a ton of material every week for VictorHanson.com, Hansen, S-O-N.

I want to encourage our listeners to visit the site. Anything you do, your radio appearances or podcasts or various things, anything you write, you're going to find the links there.

There's exclusive content. It's called Ultra.
five bucks a month, folks. It's not a lot of dough.
If you're not subscribed yet, go ahead and stick your toe in the water. Try it out.

We're going to talk about one of the pieces that you allowed out from the paywall because it's a pretty important piece.

There's also, for folks who are on Twitter, at V D Hansen, that's Victor's handle. Oh, you're on Facebook also.
And there's a great club. It's called the Victor Davis Hansen Fan Club.

It's on Facebook. I encourage folks to join there.
So, Victor, two other topics we're going to talk about today.

One is Donald Trump seems not, and the Trump family, not to have had a good week legally.

The Supreme Court ruled nine to one against the president, essentially, had to release papers related to January 6, 2021 at the Capitol building.

And then the New York Attorney General, Letitia James, is going after the Trump family for financial shenanigans.

Victor, do you have any thoughts about how these two things might affect Donald Trump politically this year or

in the future? I don't think, even if it were to go go to a federal attorney and he's going to have an indictment, I don't think it's going to go. I think people are just tired of going after Trump.

They're beating a dead horse, number one.

But number two, one of the charges is he overvalued real estate for the purposes of collateral for loans. I mean,

I took a lot of loans out of my life, especially farm loans. And I can tell you, when you talked off the record to the ag loan officers, they'd laugh.

They said, you know, this guy over there, he's got sandy soil like your south side. And he came in and told me that that place is worth da-da-da.
And I started laughing.

Or when you'd go buy a car, you'd say, What are your assets? You'd tell them. And I'd always deliberately downsize my assets.
But he'd say, Wow.

They're worth more than that. And I said, Well, why are you saying that? Because he said, Everybody lies.

I'm not excusing it, but the idea you're going to ruin Donald Trump because his company exaggerated the value of property on a document to get a loan.

It's not a good ethical thing, but that's almost like, you know, taking an extra deduction. They all do it.
And then we have the symmetrical program.

If Donald Trump did something wrong and he violated law, then all power to the attorneys and indict him and convict him. But it's so selective.

I mean, we got Hunter Biden, who has written documentation that the big guy got 10%

and that he was angry at paying some of joe biden's bills directly out of his slush fund it would be very easy to take all the money that was wired to hunter biden and distribute it to the biden family and then just subpoena every one of their income tax returns and see if they add up and i don't think they will but nobody's going to do that and so until there's a symmetrical application of the law and that gets back to another thing that we've talked so much about, January 6th versus 120 days of rioting.

And Russian collusion versus what? Are they going to go after people and the way they went after Donald Trump? So I think people are just saying, you know what? I don't trust federal attorneys.

I don't trust the military. I don't trust the CIA.
And that's tragic. The FBI.

When you look at their performance down with the hostage taker, where he was freed freed before they stormed and killed him. Right.
The hostages were. We didn't learn that.

And that we were told it had nothing to do with Jews, even though the guy shouted out he hated Jews. It was anti-Semites.
Yeah, we're looking for a motive.

Exactly. So why do they, why is their first impulse to take credit for something they didn't do and then to downplay that? And you know that if it had been.

Joe Billy Robb from Arkansas Hills and he had gone in and taken hostages in a synagogue, he would be an anti-Semite boy.

Victor, they knew that parents talking at school board meetings were white supremacists.

So yeah, I think what I'm getting at, Jack, in a very clumsy manner, and I apologize to the listeners, is this.

This is an obscure tax case against the president, but it's very, very important because what we have seen

is a weaponization of these federal institutions.

The FBI now is a what, private investigative force for Joe Biden's family to trace down where Hunter's latest laptop is missing or to find out where his daughter's nasty diary ended up and how.

That's what the FBI does. And then go after school board meeting parents in attendance, as you mentioned, or to

storm, what, this latest Democratic congressman who was sort of

being a pain to Biden by saying, you know what, I don't like this border down here. He was

Hispanic, Mexican-American, and all of a sudden the FBI is showing up in Mr. Quello up in his office.
So there's an impression that the FBI is now something out of a totalitarian society.

There's a perception that only 45%, that's a fact in a poll, now have confidence in their military on the eve of this Ukrainian crisis.

It's a fact that the CIA's reputation has gone down, the DOJ's. So this is very dangerous in a consensual society that people cannot trust their federal institutions because they have so much power.

And I think the only answer, and people have talked about, you and I've talked about it, is you've got to break them up.

You've either got to break up the FBI's various divisions and distribute them through the Department of Judges or move the whole thing to Wichita or Lincoln, Nebraska.

Get it out of Washington and that incestuous culture where one person, you know, Lisa Page is an lawyer working there and her husband or boyfriend's working there and they're all, or Ben Rhodes, as you know, he's a deputy national security advisor, and his brother's the head of CBS News.

These power rearrangements, just break it up and move them to Nebraska, the heartland, move the CIA, move them all out of there because it's a toxic atmosphere. And this is a symptom of it.

I just wish they would just say, you know what?

We're not going to go after Trump anymore. The guy was here for four years.
He did not surveil the AP reporters like Obama did. He did not go after a Fox News reporter's communications like Obama did.

He did not tell Congress to jump in a lake when they asked for information about Fast and Furious in the way Eric Holder did. And we're not going to do that.

We're going to be symmetrical, but they can't. I guess the only other thing besides breaking them up is to retaliate with megatonage.

And so when this Congress comes in, Kevin McCarthy would do the following, Jack. He'd say, I don't want to do this.

But the only way we can restore sanity is to tell the Democrats this two years, we're going to show them how it feels. So all of your nominees to key committees are going to have to come through me.

And I can tell you in advance, do not dare put anyone on the squad because I'm going to yank them off those committees.

And then he should tell Joe Biden, if you get up and give a State of the Union address, I may tear up that address on national TV. So beware of that.

And the moment we come into office with a majority, we are going to impeach you, Joe Biden, because you, under, I think it's Article 2, Section 3 of the Constitution, that the President of the United States has an obligation to carry out the laws faithfully, and you violated that.

You did not enforce an iota of immigration law on the southern border. You let in 2 million people come into this country illegally.
So, and then impeach him.

And we don't really care if the Supreme Court justice justice was once to be in attendance because he was not in attendance with a second impeachment.

And we may have to impeach you twice, and we may have to try you when you're a private citizen. I don't want that to happen.

But until there's a fear that that may happen, I don't see any chance that the left is going to stop. I really don't.

The only thing that's stopping him is the humiliation that they sat quiet while Joe Biden telecommunicated in the last campaign. They knew he was non non-composmentes.
They did nothing.

They were in on it. And now it blew up in their face and they're embarrassed.
But other than that, that's their biggest problem right now. What to do with Joe Biden?

Because he threatens to take them all down with him. And leave Hillary standing.
Well, Victor,

some of the things you... That's a DEF CON 4 scenario.
Yeah, I'm thinking of Hillary and her jacuzzi again.

Victor, we have some of the things you mentioned are part of an important piece you just written, and we're going to talk about that right after this message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Victor, we teased this a little bit on one of the more recent podcasts of an article you wrote for VictorHanson.com.
It was an ultra piece.

It was an exclusive piece, which meant it could be read by people who subscribed. But you saw the,

you were convinced of the wisdom of this agenda you've written. It's called the Ten Commandments.
Now, it's from the Selma, from the Central Valley, not from Mount Sinai.

But this is an agenda of 10 points. Some of them are complex or have a number of aspects to the particular point.

But it's an agenda that you believe Republicans should consider a la Newt Gingrich's contract with America. This piece was published today in the New York Post, and it's out and about.

So I want to recommend to our listeners, try to look it up, find it. So, Victor, some of the things you talked about earlier are part of this agenda, but all that said,

would you talk about this piece and talk about some of the items that you think republicans and conservatives should run on in this coming federal election in november well i agree that you know that i'm not new to ginreach and that you can't get a contract with america for everything you want to do and the federal government under the federal system can't do everything and there's a great debate whether it's wise or not to put in advance what you're going to do when you don't know what the opposition is going to be like, etc.

But that said, I think that Donald Trump, if he's the nominee or whoever it is, has to have some concrete vision because now we're just DeSantis and Trump are feuding or what's the status of Pompeo or, but nobody's talking about what we're going to do.

One of the biggest affairs is crime. And the federal government is not responsible primarily for state and local crime where most crime takes place.

But it surely can say that if you cross state lines or if you use interstate communications, that's a racketeering offense.

And that applies to a lot of people involved in smash and grab, in looting, in arson.

They communicate, they show up places, and the federal government has got to step forward and say, we're going to prosecute these people, even if Mr. Gascon in Los Angeles isn't.

And we're starting to see some requests for that. So if you're going to have an 1890s-style train robbery in LA, we're going to prosecute you.
And I think they need to let that be known.

They also need to say, you know what, look what happens when you don't have energy. Forget climate change.
When you don't have energy, Russia is strong. And we get sucked into the Middle East.

And when we do have energy, Russia's weak. It's optional what we want to do in the Middle East because we have choices.
And we tell our European friends, we've got more natural gas than anybody.

So we will send you liquefied natural gas so you can wean yourself off of russia and when you don't you get into problems like we are with russia now the idea that germany is going to run over to ukraine and say we're here to help you when they're buying natural gas from russia is a joke when 50 plus pull an unfavorable view of the united states so you got to have energy you've got to have this idea that You don't have a country without a border.

We don't have a border. It's not that it's insecure.
It doesn't exist in the South. If you and I go down, fly down to Mexico City and we want to walk across the border, we can do it.

And it's especially important because it's not just a border. It undermines all respect for the law.

If people have sanctuary cities, then others say, well, if the immigration law doesn't apply in Fresno, then maybe

gun rules, Endangered Species Act, uh federal title IX, we're not going to honor them in Utah.

Or if a federal employee has to have a mandate for being vaxxed and he's got antibodies from an acquired infection, he says, but there's 2 million people.

And it's a downwards slope, Jack, non-enforcement. Today,

someone asked, well, how are all these illegal aliens getting on planes and flying all over in the United States?

And a Biden administration official said, well, they have IDs. Well, how do they get IDs?

You have to have either a a driver's license or a passport or a state identification card, which means you have to be a legal resident or citizen. And they say, well, they have their arrest warrants.

When they crossed illegal, they hand them a little piece of paper. Ah, that's valid L D.
That's what happens when you don't enforce a border.

And you have to have traditions and honor the Constitution. So in the year of our nation, 233, you just don't wake up one morning and say, you know, I don't like.
conservatives.

I don't like the way things are going. Nine-person Supreme Court junk.
States primary responsibility for balloting in national elections junk. 233-year-old Electoral College junk.

Filibuster, 180-year-old, junk. 60 years of 50 states, junk.

And you can't do that. Let me go back to the idea there's Election Day.
The Republicans say our goal is to get 60 to 70%, as was traditional, voting on Election Day.

It's a national holiday, so to speak. It's an iconic date.
And we're not going to let everybody just get a ballot one day

and then vote the same day. And then we're not going to do it.
So we've got to restart. I don't want to be too dramatic.
What's the problem with waiting in line?

If whatever that is, there's no problem. There's no problem.
I mean, we glorify people who wait in line for days. They buy some freaking Apple phone and they, you know, their

hollyhood and television. Do you really believe?

Let's game this out. You think in 2020

that if

100 million deplorables got together and say, we're going to do mail-in balloting, we're going to get all the vets, all the white working class, and they did, and Biden lost, but yet he won the election of those who voted on election.

Do you think we'd be seeing any of this? We'd see none of it. There's no issue here.
They understand that. As I said the other broadcast,

I go almost every day into a community that is predominantly Mexican-American or Mexican nationals,

and it's got about a $13,000 per capita income.

It's the poorest part of Fresno County, which is, I think, the third poorest county in the state, which is the state which has the highest number of people below the poverty line at 22%.

So this is Appalachia. And when you go in there, you see the weirdest things.
People still pay with checks. And believe me, they flip out IDs like it's second nature.

I don't know if they're valid or not, but they do and they cast their checks. So they don't feel imposed upon at all.
So there was no issue here. And they know that.

They know that in times of inflation, the worst thing when you're running a $2 trillion deficit and you owe almost $30 trillion in national debt, you don't want to print another $3 to $5 trillion.

They know that. But they also know that they want to spread the money around.

Very quickly,

I mentioned, I think it was called a Don't Tread on Me foreign policy. That is, no better friend, no worse enemy.
I'm quoting. Right.
That's what you called it. Right.
Yeah. Yeah.

The consul Sola. Jim Mattis, I think, picked that up in some of his speeches, but it comes from Plutarch's life of Sola.

And not that Sola was a great person, but the point is that we protect our friends and we do not. protect our enemies or even neutrals.

We try to win neutrals as friends, but it's a cost-benefit analysis. So if we want to put troops on the ground anymore, it's what is the end game? What's the end game of Ukraine?

And whatever it is, do we have the means to achieve it rather than moving across the border in Ukraine? We've got to go send the Arab 101st.

We've got to stop that. We've got to think it out.

And there are moral calculations, of course, but.

But that no better friend, no worse enemy, Victor, was

defined what happened in the Middle East under Trump. Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, what were the Abrams Accords about?

They were like Saudi Arabia and all these other countries that were ready to jump on to what other countries had already jumped on.

And that is, wow, the United States is going to stand up to Iran and protect us. We're not going to have to go nuclear.
And they have told us that

Israel and us have one commonality that overrides everything else, fear of a nuclear Iran. And so they're a dependable ally.

And then we, Japan and Taiwan and South Korea and Australia and the Philippines have said, wow, the United States is standing up to China or the United States is not going to let that nut in North Korea send missiles over our territory anymore.

So that was what it was. And people want to join in on that.
But when you're like Biden and you...

you send mixed messages or a little bit of invasion is not too bad,

then

it works in reverse.

And I think the Democrats know that silicon valley is a cartel it's a monopoly i think facebook has bought up 200 companies they know that when you you do a google search the results are rigged politically the order in which they appear on your computer screen they know that social media tried to apple google facebook they tried to destroy twitter i mean uh parlair and they almost did they understand that they work in concert to censor conservative voices and you can't do that because there are public utilities they have to use the public air.

What the air that we're breathing right now is not Facebook's property. They have to use it to communicate electronically.
And that requires some adjustment by the government to make up for that fact.

And when the government gets involved, they have a responsibility to regulate it in a way that's fair. So we're going to have to regulate Silicon Valley.
I think I had a couple of other ones.

We have to really enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It says no public agency shall predicate the use of its services, etc., on the basis of race.

No more clinics saying, you know, if you're this color, you get monoclonal antibodies in extremists. If you're not, you don't.
Things like that. Right.

Race-based tests, race-based medical treatment, race-based admission, race, all of this. It's contrary to what the 1964 Civil Rights Act, as I read it, says so.
I think we also have to do debt.

Trump is culpable for debt as well, but everybody understands you can't keep printing money.

And I went back and read the Simpson Bowles Commission report that Obama commissioned and then, of course, rejected. But it wasn't that radical.

It was a five or six year plan, four to six years, I say, to get to a balanced budget while encouraging productivity and simplicity, you know, three tax brackets, et cetera.

It was really, it was really well crafted. It was bipartisan.
And it would have got us by now to a balanced budget. Did you know Alan Simpson? I know him very well.
Yeah.

I was in a club with him and I'd see him every summer.

I like him. He's an eccentric iconoclast.

And we've disagreed. I've debated him in front of people on the immigration issue because he also lent his name to Simpson Mazzoli, which I think was a catastrophic piece of legislation.

But I don't think he intended it to be. I think he thought that if there was an amnesty, then the promised border security would follow.
And what happened, the Democrats sort of faked them out.

They got the amnesty first, and then the security never came.

But on the Simpson Bowls, it was a blueprint of how to get to a situation without radically raising taxes by cutting spending and then simplifying the tax code and encouraging investment and productivity.

The final thing, as I remember, was no federal funds for lawbreakers. Yeah.
Why do we give money to people who break the law? Why do we tell a university, here's all these federal research dollars?

Oh, by the way, we don't mind that the First Amendment doesn't exist on campus, that you're shouting down speakers, or you're disinviting people, or you're telling people they can't go out in the free speech area if they're fundamentals Christians or they're pro-Israel.

Why do we do that? Or why, when somebody is accused of crime, do we deny them the fourth, fifth, and sixth amendment protections, the right to see the accused and habeas corpus and all that?

It's like a star chamber trial on the universe. I can tell you, I've watched it.
I participated in disciplinary hearings, and they're not run like the Constitution says they should be run.

And so, why do we give money to jurisdictions that say, oh, by the way, federal immigration law does not exist here? And Trump's tried to do that.

He was going to, remember, deny transportation funds to sanctuary jurisdictions. Right.
Yeah. He had a lot of good ideas.

but of course, I guess what happened was, I look back on it, and this is a little bit tangential.

It's a tangent to what we're talking about, but he had all of these good ideas, but two things were wrong. One,

he had no one to implement them because he was an outsider. So the people within the government were hostile to him.
And as Anonymous showed us, were trying to undermine him. Kelly, all of them were.

And then two,

there was so much much rancor involved with upsetting this 80-year status quo that a lot of people that were independents or so-called moderates got into a fetal position, put their hands over their ears, say, let's just make it all go away.

If I just vote, if I just vote him out or I don't vote for him, then maybe it'll be quiet. And I can go back in the airport and listen to CNN.
It'll be sane again.

Or maybe George Will will go back and write nice columns, or maybe Bill Christo will have a new weekly standard. It'll be all okay.

And that's what we'll do. It'll just, I just can't.
And so that he couldn't really get that through. Right.

So if he was going to run again, he would have to, you know, get a phalanx of a thousand people and say, this is your task to get a thousand. And then they're going to get a thousand.

So when we go into

Washington, we have a army of 300,000 appointees that are going to go rush in and they're all going to be vetted and they're all going to be on the MAGA agenda.

And then we're going to have absolute discipline as far as tweeting social media and we're serious about this.

And that would have helped. But sort of like what Youngkin has done in Virginia.
Absolutely. I mean, every time I read about that guy, I'm just bewildered because.

I've been to Virginia a lot, not as much as you have, but my God, it's not a red state. It's not a purple state.
It's a blue state. And it's turned into half the state is a Washington, D.C.
workforce.

Everybody's in the news, you know, for a

dastardly deed, you know, ends up living in Alexandria or somewhere. So my point is that how he won, I don't know.
I know, but it was just amazing. And then I thought, well, he's going to be a squish.

That was just campaign record and he's going to go back to McCainism. He's not.

And he understands that you can, if you are polite to people and you explain things and you can articulate this vision, you can be very conservative.

And you have to be, because if you let up, they're going to destroy you. So I think he's got a big future.
He does. He's likable and he's sane and he's sensible.
And

that's a winning combination. And I think many states are far more purple than they are blue, but for having a Republican leader who has those qualities.

But Victor, I'd like to, you know, we're recording again on the 21st and most people will be hearing this several days later.

So if you want to find this piece that Victor has been talking about, well, one way is to, again, to subscribe to victorhanson.com and the article is there.

But it has been published by the New York Post under the title Gold Bowl, GOP, 10 Commandments worth running on in midterm elections. Victor, that's almost all the time.

we have to talk today, but we thank our listeners for listening. And those who leave ratings on itunes, thank you.
And those some of you leave comments, and we thank you for that too.

Some of them are critical, particularly a Fowler. Many of them are wonderful.
And here's one from

Mrs. Cochise,

vet U.S. Army.
So I'm assuming Mrs. Cochise, Cochise on the Warpath is what she calls herself.
She writes this to a patriot and friend I've never met. Mr.

Hansen, I'm proud to call you a patriot and a friend that I've never met. It is my belief that your love and pride for America is as important to you as it is to me.

I thank you with all my heart for that. Please keep your river of knowledge flowing.
We have a generation to save. Oh, this is from Mr.
and Mrs. Kochis, a veteran.

So we thank them for their kind words. Victor, before we leave, anything you'd like to say? I'm trying to be...
less confrontational.

One of the reviews said that I was too hard on our poor mutual friend Sammy Wink, because she does this. She says, can I ask a question? Of course you can ask a question.

But I tend to ramble and be dominant.

Well, it is called the Victor Davis-Hanson. I know, but one person said that he was thinking of disconnecting because of my treatment of poor little Sammy.
Yeah.

Yeah, about your pent-up anger. And I communicated with Sammy and I said, Sammy, are you a Peter Strzok or something? What are you doing?

Are you planning anti-BDH stories because you think that i'm a bully and i'm hounding you and she said and of course what did she say sammy says i was on the phone with her and she said can i say something

oh your trade okay sammy your trademark can i say something

we all like sammy she's doing a great job she's a terrific terrific lady hey victor i gotta make a little pitch here for myself i would like to our listeners please visit centerforcivilsociety.com that's where i hang my hat hat.

I'm the director, and I also write a weekly newsletter called email newsletter. It's free, it's called Civil Thoughts, and you'll find that at civilthoughts.com.

It gives a dozen or so links to worthwhile pieces on the World Wide Web. So that's all I've got to say, except thank you folks very much for listening.

And we will be back in another day or two with the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Thanks kindly.
Thank you.

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