New Old Talking Points for the Dems

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Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

This is our Friday edition when we do a roundup on some of the current events from the week.

This week, we're going to have a look at the claims by Democrats that the Republicans might try to steal the 2024 election and then maybe a few words on what's going on in the Ukraine today.

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Welcome back, and I would like to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin and Ily Anderson Senior Fellow in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, and the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

I am Sammy Wink, and Victor and I like to talk a lot about history, but also about current events.

And probably two very pressing things are a lot of word out there on the 2024 election and whether Donald Trump will run.

And we wanted to get Victor's take on that.

And then we're going to have a look at the Ukraine.

Victor, before you go into your discussion of Trump in 2024 and the Democrats' claims, I want to read a quote from the Atlantic on this idea that the Republicans, or at least part of the Republican Party, is a threat to the 2024 elections because of their ideas.

And these are the ideas that are put out there by Barton Gelman for The Atlantic in an article he's writing for the current edition in January, February.

He writes in it that Trump and his party have convinced a dauntingly large number of Americans that the essential workings of democracy are corrupt, that made-up claims of fraud are true, that only cheating can thwart their victory at the polls, that tyranny has usurped their government, and that violence is the legitimate response.

So he's packed a lot into that sentence.

And I would like to start with that, those claims that the Republican Party finds violence natural and Trump is convincing people of them and that everybody's convinced that there's corruption in our government and that there's going to be shenanigans in the 2024 and they're willing to use violence.

I remember when you look at these charges, you have to be empirical and then you have to realize how the left works.

The left embraces projectionism.

And by that, they think of all the things that they entertain or they have done and they put it off on their opposites.

And they, best of all, because they're so familiar with it, they understand how it works.

So they accuse their enemies of that.

And because they run social media and the mainstream media and entertainment and Hollywood, et cetera, et cetera, Silicon Valley, they can get that word out.

So you have to look at everything people like that say empirically.

Is it true?

And if so, what's the support?

What was the support for it?

But what that author is doing is just reflecting this very strange narrative that came up about, oh, three months ago.

And Hillary Clinton just the other day said, I'm very worried.

We're going to have autocracy if Donald Trump's elected in 2024.

And we had David Brooks saying, the Republican Party, I went to one of their conventions.

These people are nuts.

We had Sam Tannenhaus.

the book critic and former editor of the Book Review at the New York Times say, oh my God, we're going to lose democracy.

And we had Brian Williams, the prevaricator and the fabulous who's leaving MSNBC saying, I've never seen it this bad.

So what's behind this?

And all I can tell you is that from January 21st

till I would take an arbitrary date, August 15th, they thought democracy was wonderful because it had got rid of Donald Trump.

And the popular vote was clear, they said, and everything was hunky-dory.

And Joe Biden was the savior, and he brought unity.

He was going to get rid of the COVID virus.

He said that Trump shouldn't be president because he had killed over 300,000 people, i.e.

the commander-in-chief is culpable for every dead from COVID.

So they love the system.

And then what happened?

Afghanistan.

2 million came across the open border.

The Delta variant and the Omicron variant.

Biden could not control the virus.

And he's as culpable or as not culpable as Donald Trump.

And more have died on his watch than Donald Trump.

And he deliberately cut back on leasing and pipeline construction, et cetera, et cetera.

And we're down about 2.5 million barrels of production.

And the prices skyrocket.

He embraced critical race theory.

You can be racist to be racist, to stop racism.

You can be discriminatory to stop discrimination.

He embraced modern monetary theory.

Print more money and you get more prosperity.

It's just debt to yourself.

If you're going to print money, then you sell government bonds to pay for it and rich people buy it.

And every once in a while, you'll just have to tell the rich people, sorry, those bonds are no good.

Okay, so I could go into the whole Biden agenda to the extent that it's Biden and it's unpopular.

And now they're looking at the polls and what do they see?

Generically, Democrats are 10 down.

10 down in generic popularity.

That means they're going to lose the house if that were to be sustained, that on popularity.

and they look at joe biden he's anywhere from 37 to 39 percent his negatives are up to 55 57 and all of a sudden they look at polls showing donald trump the despised rascal who left the office supposedly in shame after january 6th and they say oh my god he's ahead of biden so then you ask yourself so this is what it's about when we get our people in there then the system is sound it's resilient it's durable but when we get the chance of a lifetime with the presidency presidency the house the senate the mainstream media the corporate boardroom wall street we got all the institutions and we still can't do it and they hate our guts now they being the american people not the deplorables the american people and say it's going to be a coup so then we look at other things we say to ourselves okay

What is the evidence that anybody on the right is trying to destroy?

We have one piece of evidence, and that's the only thing they cite is January 6th.

And what was it?

It was a buffoonish riot.

And almost all of the mainstream media narrative about that riot was false.

Donald Trump was impeached on the premise that there was an insurrection and a conspiracy to commit that inspiration.

But there wasn't.

We know that.

Why do we know that?

Because

of the FBI investigation that found no conspiracy.

Then we were told that Officer Sicknick was murdered by a Trumper.

That was not true.

He died of natural causes.

There was only one of the five people who were killed.

Tragically,

that was killed violently, I should say, wouldn't kill, died, and that was Ashley Babbitt.

She was an unarmed suspect.

killed by an officer in an age where any unarmed suspect, according to the BLM coda, anybody who's killed, the officer is immediately identified, his picture is shown, and then the mob on the internet adjudicates his guilt or innocent.

But we never found out who he was for months.

My point is this, is that take that away, which was kind of a fact.

And what are you left with?

What are you left with?

There's no sign that does any Republican or any person on the right say we got to get rid of the Electoral College because we were losing and losing and losing with the blue wall.

We lost for Obama.

We lost again to Obama.

We lost to Clinton.

They started off with Illinois.

They started off with New York.

They started off.

We can't win.

No, there wasn't.

Was there any Republicans that said, you know,

they're so crazy in Boston and Cook County and Chicago and places like the Bay Area and San Francisco and voting.

We've got to nationalize these elections contrary to the Constitution.

No, there wasn't.

We left it up to the states.

Even though the Republicans, remember, Sammy had lost six out of the seven last popular votes.

They had not won 51%.

So yet they were not clamoring to change the system.

And then let's ask ourselves, do they say, you know what, we lost the Senate.

We lost the Senate.

So let's get

two more states in here somehow.

Let's divide Alaska in two or anywhere to get four more Senate.

No, they didn't do that.

When they were in the majority and they lost the Senate, remember very recently.

But when they were in the majority, did they say, let's get rid of the 180-year filibuster?

No.

And when the Warren Court and all of that turned hard left, and it's still pretty hard left, even though there's Republican majorities,

do they ever say, let's get rid of the nine-person Supreme Court and pack it?

No.

So what I'm getting at is this.

All of the revolutionary changes in the system that would be contrary either to the customs and traditions of the country or the Constitution Constitution itself are coming from the left.

Now, as far as challenging the system, who was the two people who, I should say three, who inaugurated the idea that elections were unfair and you've got to challenge them and don't accept the verdict?

I don't know who.

A, Stacey Abrams lost by 50,000 votes and paraded around the country for two years saying she was the real winner of the Georgia governorship.

Number two, dear Miss Jill Stein.

Remember her, the third party candidate who ran in 2016 against Trump, lost, and then immediately as a surrogate for Hillary Clinton sued in three states for the voting machines, didn't accept that.

And so, who was the third was Hillary Clinton that said she was robbed.

And she said that to such an extent that Hollywood celebrities made videos appealing to the electors in an unconstitutional fashion not to accept the majority votes of their states, but to nullify them and then to accept the national vote, which Hillary won.

Okay, so when you look at, is there any evidence for any of these charges that we're heading into an autocracy?

No.

Is there evidence that people on the left don't believe in the Constitution and want to change

a lot of elements around it and the customs and traditions that found it because they're not suitable, they feel, for gaining and acquiring and using power.

Yes.

Why are they angry at the system?

Because they had a once-in-a-lifetime chance of having socialists completely in power in the House, in the Senate, in the presidency, in all of the cultural institutions.

And they were so bad at what they did.

A, they anger the American people because they lied to them and they said Joe Biden is in his basement because he's a moderate Democrat.

That was a complete lie.

He was an empty vessel who the left used to manipulate and gain power.

And number two, once they had that power, they used it.

And people got very angry from the COVID mandates to the open borders to the absurdities that right now in America, if you are one of 2 million people and you walk across the border unvaccinated illegally, you will not face any penalties.

If you're a U.S.

soldier or a U.S.

federal employee after January 1, you will have to be vaccinated.

If you choose to be unvaccinated, you will not get the exemptions of the U.S.

military.

I mean, you will not get the exemptions of illegal aliens.

And so there's no currency other than they are terrified.

And what are they terrified?

As I said, Donald Trump is running ahead of Joe Biden, and it looks like that the next midterm election will be something comparable to 1938, which I think they lost 72 seats, or 1994, where they lost 45 or 50, or 19, 2010, where they lost over, I think it was 60.

And they don't want that to happen.

So they're warning everybody that, you know, you've got to be careful.

You've got to get out to vote.

These people are cheating, cheating.

And what's the purpose of this projection?

The purpose is this so people like you and I said, oh my God,

they're saying that Trump is a conspirator.

They're saying that he is an insurrectionist.

They are saying that he is a revolutionary.

Maybe we can just ask him to calm down.

Please don't, Trump.

Just calm down.

Hey, everybody in the right, just follow your softer side.

Embrace peace and love.

Don't be so mean because the Democrats are so upset.

We don't know what they're going to do.

They think we're revolutionary.

That's what it's all designed for.

It's a preemptory strike because they're going to lose the House and maybe the Senate in 2010 and they're going to lose the presidency.

And And so this whole idea of revolutionary right is belied by the evidence.

And the evidence is that the Democrats want to make structural and systemic changes in everything from balloting to voting laws to the Supreme Court to the filibuster.

And remember one other thing.

They used the crisis of COVID to radically change the way we voted.

I'm not getting into conspiracy theories and, you know, computers that, you know, communicated with each other from China and all that Kraken and Sydney Pal stuff.

What I'm basically saying is this.

They pushed through, under the guise of a COVID lockdown, a laxity in absentee voting and early voting that rendered Election Day irrelevant.

And so that in 2020, for the first time in American history, 64% of the the ballots cast were not cast on Election Day.

And because they had challenged existing ballot laws of the state legislatures,

not in the state legislatures, because they didn't have the votes, but in the courts and by bureaucratic fiats and by governor's executive orders, they were able to change the laws.

And by what do I mean by change the laws?

That means that the error rate of a mail-in ballot that typically in most states had ranged from 3 to 5% went down to about 0.3 to 0.5.

And that's a lot when you have 102 million ballots.

So that was a result of the panic they created.

So what they're trying to do is go to a 150 million mail-in or early balloting and to render election day voting.

And all those people with blue hair that sit there, they used to in the old days, say, you know what, can I see your ID?

Can I cross off your get rid of all of that?

In other words, the way that voting occurs in most of the places around the world, except here.

Well, that's what they're into.

And they get these intellectuals and academics that will write and say anything that's belied by the evidence.

They're beating to death.

beating to death January 6th when Adam Schippt has a new book out and he's one of the biggest perpetrators of we're going to lose our government.

It's going to be gone in 2000.

No, you're going to be gone.

That's who's going to be gone.

You're not going to be the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee anymore.

You're not going to go out and twist your face and grimace and say oh

well there's a bombshell going off and and i can i can tell you that the walls are closing in on on democrats and the russian russian collusion is just terrible but you know i can't say anymore because they're top secret sources and uh i'm and i'm not going to disclose and meanwhile what he was doing is having clapper and comey and mckay and brennan go into his office and be asked, did you or did you not have evidence of collusion?

No, I don't have any evidence.

And then have those guys go back on MSNBC and CNN and say, Donald Trump is treasonous.

He's a Russian asset.

And nobody knew what the truth was because

they were saying something under so-called closed conditions in the Senate on the House Intelligence Committee.

But it finally leaked and we found out it was a complete lie.

They were lying to the public on television.

And then when it was a question of them being prosecuted for perjury, they surely didn't want to repeat those lies under oath and then of course

we know from adam shift about the whistleblower and the first impeachment his role that was dishonest he didn't talk about that then we get to the russian collusion one of the greatest attacks on american constitutionalism in our lifetime in other words we had a sitting president barack obama whose Department of Justice, as typified by people like Nellie Orr's husband, Druce Orr, and Nellie was working for GPS, deliberately seeding a false document throughout the halls of government, the State Department, to make sure the press would pick up a false story about Donald Trump, that he had urinated in a hotel in Russia, that Michael Cohen and all of these people had been going back and forth to Russia, that he was bought by the Russians, all based on an ex-spy who hadn't been to Russia in years, a totally disgraced Christopher Steele, who was what?

He was buying his information from a Ukrainian hack working for the Brookings Institution and another hack who worked for Hillary Clinton.

And he was being, his payments were being hidden by the Fusion GPS firm, which was being paid apparently by Perkins Coe law firm, which in the case, I guess, was being hidden by the DNC, which I guess was being hidden that Hillary Clinton was funding it through her campaign war chest.

And so Hillary Clinton was the person at the very fundamental sense that was trying to subvert A, an election, B, a presidential transition, and C, a presidency.

And they were capable of doing anything,

anything.

That means if they were going to submit false affidavits that assured a FISA judge that the Steele dossier was accurate.

That means if Kevin Kleinsmith, an FBI lawyer, was willing to forge a document, they did it.

That means if the FBI had possessions of cell phones of major players that might have had interesting information, they said they didn't know what happened, but they were cleared.

That means if Lisa Page and Peter Strok were having a paramour relationship and were both biased when they were investigating Trump, that means that they would be fired, but staggered, staggered, so nobody understood why they were fired, et cetera, et cetera.

So this bunch is engaged, as they always are, in this projection to smear people, to frighten people, and to say we've lost our democracy.

They, they don't like democracy.

The left never likes democracy because

they feel that they're moral, utopian superiors, and they are better than we are, and they're more moral.

And they can plan out our future if we just give our bettors power and they cannot ensure that they will have power through a democratic process that's why they always try to muddle around or fuddle around whatever word is necessary with the actual balloting that's why they always lose ballots that's why the media always will print things that are not quite true and because they really feel that they have you know the moral superiority.

And sometimes it gets really disgusting.

You know, Chris Wallace with a wink and a nod, I'm leaving Fox after so many years and going to where?

CNN?

Why are you going to CNN?

CNN has just been more recently disgraced because its top news person who had the highest range, which means he had about 30% of what Fox did.

Chris Cuomo, he lied on the air.

I mean, he lied to all of his superiors and they knew he was lying, that he was working for his brother the whole time and giving them inside tips from CNN sources and his own reportage.

And they lied about that.

Anderson Cooper, remember his monitoring of one of the debates.

I remember when he said to a guest, if Donald Trump crapped, he didn't say crapped all over this table, you would still claim he didn't.

And then we had the beheading incident with Kathy Quibba.

Then we had three major marquee CNN reporters that were fired.

I remember when Trump was running in the nomination, they overheard a CNN producer claim that she wishes plane would crash.

So this network is totally corrupt.

And, you know, when Chris Wallace poses as if he's on a higher moral plane by finally leaving Fox News and going to CNN, the subtext is that probably he was asked, they were asking him not to rethink of even being renewed.

And he was probably thinking that the only person that will take me or the people who take me or CNN, mostly for my value of talking like I'm going to do over the next two years by trashing Fox.

So this is the left.

That's a long explanation, but that's the left.

And now they're trying to scare us that we're going to have a dictatorship just so we will be so scared, we'll pull in our horns and they can do what they always do.

Yeah.

And so you're telling me that from the quote I have that it's all the Democrats that believe democracy is corrupt.

they make up their own claims of corruption.

They don't believe in a

cheat to thwart victory.

They don't believe in equality of opportunity.

They believe in equality of result.

And that requires some people have to be forced to do it.

It's not natural to the human condition.

And so it's worse, whether you see it, they love Fidel, but Fidel killed 20,000 people to take power.

And they love Shea.

He was a complete

psychopath.

And they loved, for a while, Stalin and the Russians and Lenin.

And they love Mao.

I mean,

even today.

Barack Obama's communications director.

Remember Anita Dunn, I think her name was.

She said one of her heroes was Mao, Mao Zedong,

biggest mass murder of the 20th century.

So, yeah,

you have to break a lot of eggs to make the good oma.

That's what they believe.

And so the ends are so noble, they justify any means if necessary of achieving them.

And we'll always do that.

And what gets me is these

people that say they're conservative.

You know, Mitt Romney, gosh, I mean,

I like the guy, but I mean, what they did to him, they turned him into a dog-torturing buccaneer greedy who had a wife who wore riding clothes and had an elevator in his car and then had hazed people when he was in high school.

That's how they got rid of him.

When they got John McCain, the Manoba War Hero, remember when McCain got in with it, with Trump and all the left said, oh, this is terrible donald trump has insulted the the metal you know just a metal

wearing john mccain well okay but who was the one that started it when john mccain ran for against barack obama in 2008

it was does john mccain know how many houses he has it was the whole it made i mean this was the beginning of the trope that Biden's senile, only John McCain wasn't senile.

But they made him into somebody who couldn't remember how many houses he had.

He was wealthy.

He was out of touch, all of that.

So they do that every time.

And then when a president is out of office or a candidate who runs for president is no longer there, and then guess what?

They canonize him and they compare him to people who are in office or running.

So all of a sudden, George W.

Bush, the Nazi that everybody was supposed to hate, the fascist, remember Al Gore said, you know, Brownshirt, Garrison Keillor called him the same, the whole left wing, Cindy Sheehan era, and then all of a sudden George W.

Bush is the sober and judicious retired president, in contrast with Donald Trump, the monster.

And they did the same thing with McCain.

He became the senior statesman now that he lost nobly.

Anybody who tries to win and win, especially ugly, the way Trump did, they despise.

And so

I think the people on the right are just going to have to accept that the hard left is never going to like you.

It's never going to respect you.

It's going to try to destroy you every time they can.

Don't fall for it and don't believe what they say.

And all of this idea that democracy is over with in 2022 or 2024 is just a mechanism to intimidate you.

So you keep quiet and you have to go on the offensive because they're the ones that are doing things that are destroying the country.

They're trying to destroy the system, the process.

And when you look at the results on the border, in Afghanistan, in the inner cities, in Nordstroms, in Carmel Jewelry stores, you name it.

We have never seen crime exempted as we're seeing today.

We've never seen more police shot so far in a single year as been shot in 2021.

We've never seen so many illegal aliens crossing the border.

We've never seen this type of federal spending deficits.

We've never seen anything like it.

We've never seen in 42 years inflation like it is now.

And all of that we're supposed to think is really for our good.

And if you object to any of it, then you're a racist, you're a homophobe, you're a nativist, you're a protectionist, you're a misogynist.

And that's how it works.

And it's never going to change.

I think it's some psychological impairment that people have on the hard left.

Yeah,

either that or they know it works.

I'm not talking about a person who's a person.

I'm not talking about a person who works $12 an hour and wants a better wage.

I'm not talking about somebody who, a mom who's divorced with three kids and wants better child care.

I mean, I'm not talking about any of those agendas.

I'm just talking about the elite left who are so venomous toward people and accuse and project what they're guilty of onto others.

And they're never going to change.

And they come out of a particular male of a high, upper end, upper middle class,

Ivy League, marquee university culture.

And then they intermarry with each other.

I just saw today Jake Sullivan has been,

you know, apparently John Durham's had a look at Jake Sullivan because he was somewhat involved in the steel dossier apparat.

And guess who Merrick Garland's subordinates is who is overseeing Durham's latitude?

It's Jake Sullivan's wife.

It's like Ben Rhodes, who's Ben Rhodes' brother.

He was president of CBS.

So they're an incestuous crowd, and they have a very exalted opinion of themselves.

And they get hysterical when you challenge them.

And I'm saying this if somebody for the last 40 years has been on the butt end of a lot of their attacks.

And it's always hysterical and it's never empirical.

Yeah.

Can I ask you, this is something a little bit back, but about the election fraud, it seems like both sides accuse the other side of election fraud.

How should we think about that election fraud?

It's the word fraud that the left has appropriated.

So I'll give you both versions.

The left's version is

that there are X number of people in America that are eligible for voting over 18.

But even that's not fair because There are X number of people living in the United States and their way of thinking, 16 year olds should vote, 17 year olds should vote, X felons should vote, illegal aliens for vote, as many people as you can, because they feel the more people, the more gripes and grievances they have, the more they're likely to appoint themselves as representatives.

They're white knights.

Excuse me, I can't say white knights, knights, although most of them are white, to be frank.

And so they feel that given that reality, if you lose a few ballots, it's no big problem.

If you change the law by an administrative edict or a bureaucratic fiat or a court order that says Victor Davis Davis Hansen, he didn't put in Hansen, just Victor.

And it says he gives him his address, but he has the wrong address.

Well, that's just because he was impaired.

He didn't have a fair chance.

So they're changing everything like that to make up for what they feel is unfairness.

The right, the conservatives basically say live and let live.

Here's the system.

If you're going to have an actual vote tally, And it's really going to be based on the rule of law, you have to be over 18, you're not an ex-felon, then there's no no way in hell you're going to be able to do that unless somebody does what he does when he goes and cashes a check or go buys a beer or goes to a rock concert.

He just pulls out an ID.

And once you do that, you can vote.

And after that, more power to, but we're not going to let all of these other people vote who are not eligible because we feel that either they're not going to be at 16, they're not going to be responsible citizens or they've had felony record and they should not be allowed to vote and have some cost to pay for the crimes they've committed whatever and that's the difference that's the difference so the republicans will say we're going to scrutinize the balloting the other thing is that when you scrutinize authenticate adjudicate legitimize whatever term you use audit you're going to have fewer of something And when you don't do that, you're going to have more of something.

So the Democrats always feel that the more of something is always better than the less of something.

And it's a difference between equality and liberty.

Equality means you're going to get the government and force itself down everybody's throat and make as many people as possible equal as you envision equality.

And liberty and freedom says, you know what?

human nature what it is.

We're just going to make sure there's a minimum safety net.

And we encourage all of you to help the less well off.

But you know what?

If you want to be a selfish SOB and make all your money and live in a castle and count your coins every night, as long as you don't hurt us, that's no problem with that.

I have no problem with that.

As long as you didn't get your money in an illegal fashion, and that's the difference.

I don't go, I don't, you know, as a conservative, I don't get up every day and take my 13-year-old Honda cross tour and drive around Fresno and then go into a shopping center and say, oh my God,

look at that SOB.

He's got a BMW.

Can you believe it?

I mean, I drove yesterday into

Walmart in Salma, California, that I think has a per capita, that's an intro, not per family, but per capita income of about $13,000 a year.

And I parked next to on the left, an Acura RDX, and on the right, a Range Rover.

And right behind me was about a $90,000.

thousand dollar top of the line quad cab everything forward pickup and i didn't get out and say, this is so unfair.

Three cars that this one's 80,000.

This one's 85.

This is 75.

Look at mine.

It has a real sale value of maybe $9,000 or $10,000.

And I'm supposed to be an important man of substance.

I have a house that I own and I don't get that.

How did he get that?

And then finally, I thought, none of my business.

I'm happy.

And then one of the owners came out, Mexican-American young guy, about 30 with his wife, and they got it in a Range Rover.

And he happened to be right next to me.

And I said, How does that drive?

And they said, Man, you would love it.

I said, Yeah, but is it reliable?

And so we talked, we got, you know, and I thought that was great.

I was happy to see them do it.

I'm not just hope they can afford it, but if they can afford it, great.

More power to them.

That's the Republican or the conservative more.

likely attitude rather than to grit your teeth and be unhappy and say the world's unfair and look at those capitalist insects that are preying on all of us.

You know, yeah, you're very good on why they want to accuse cheating, but their

actual accusations of cheating are, in fact, what you've just said, which is

that when you have the election, they're going to throw, they just call it throwing out ballots instead of, you know, the obvious that, well, some of these ballots aren't filled out correctly.

But they are afraid right now.

They're afraid right now because the

slow-witted, slow-to-action, flabby people like us that don't really follow everything as far as elections finally got really angry.

And they began to make citizens groups to sue and to oversee ballot integrity and to fund groups.

And five or six states that didn't have ID laws, they passed them.

And the Democrats are getting their little pencils out or their little computers, and they're starting to see that, hey, all the open voting and the illegal aliens we're going to allow to vote, and the non-citizens in local and state election.

These are in places like Chicago and New York and San Francisco.

We lost those states on the national layer.

They're already in our ledger.

What we're worried about is these sons of bitches are going into Arizona and Georgia and Michigan and Pennsylvania and ensuring that when a person shows up to vote, that that's the person that exists.

And they're trying to suggest that we go show up to vote and we don't turn it into a mail, you know, mail-in balloting with no authentication required.

That's what they're worried about, the swing states, because

that's what they need.

They need them and they're going to lose them.

And this is like your head's on the chopping block and you look up at that guillotine and you know it's going to drop.

Well, that's what the midterms are.

And believe me, They're looking at these issues now and they're saying, you know what?

It doesn't work to say gas went down two cents a gallon last week.

As long as you discourage fracking and natural gas production, horizontal drilling and cancel, you're not going to get cheap gas prices.

Then they're looking at that border.

When you tell people to come over here and you open it wide open, there's a limitless supply of people who will cross that border.

It's not going to get better from election year.

And then they look at Putin and what Putin's doing and what happened after what China is doing and what North Korea is saying, and what Iran is doing.

It's not going to be calmer after we skedaddle from Afghanistan.

And then they're looking at BLM and Antifa and racial relations, and they're thinking, you know,

that Rittenhouse trying to racialize that did not work.

And trying to smother the story of Waukesha did not work.

And trying to suggest that those three white self-appointed vigilantes who shot an unarmed black man would be let off by white racists didn't work.

And so they're looking for issues and they understand that the issues that they have are all breaking against them.

And this guillotine is going to drop.

This tsunami is going to break right on top of them.

And they've only got about 11 months.

So they're back on to Donald Trump.

They're back onto Donald Trump.

They have three things.

Donald Trump, January 6th.

and fascism, anarchy, and autocracy, and the end of democracy.

That's it.

A three-trick pony.

They're the authors.

They're the authors of the last two.

Why didn't they just say at least Jin Saki is lying honestly?

If I could use that oxymoron, what that is, inflation's good.

It shows there's good demand.

And we have the open border, and we're getting a lot of really...

good future Americans because kind of walking to hold hands and join us.

And you know what?

Gas prices are good because we'll have less carbon emissions.

And you know what?

We're out of Afghanistan.

And it was the greatest logistical retreat in history.

It was a success.

And you know what?

Critical waste theory is pretty good because you know what?

You have to be racist.

Come on to stop racism, discriminate to stop discrimination.

At least she goes through the motions of saying that this ridiculous policy and agenda that they are pushing down that nobody wants, they're proud of what they're doing.

Build back better.

I just listened to her the other day.

It was the most amazing disconnect I've ever heard.

We are running at inflation rate that is higher than at any point in 42 years.

And that's after it's been tweaked and massaged and warped, not to show the really things of life that count, i.e.

housing, food, cars, fuel.

Put those price increases,

that's what most of

what we most pay.

It's out of sight.

And

that's what's happening.

And she's she's out there defending it and no one is saying we didn't inflate they're saying either it's temporary and it's bad or it's good and permanent but i mean they have really screwed things up i know and it's only been one year that's my worry they've got three more we've got to go to january 21st come on we've got another

we've got another five weeks and to recover things like the geopolitics with putin and with China, you can't, you can't.

You lose deterrence.

It's very hard to get back deterrence.

Somebody has to die, unfortunately, and throughout history to restore deterrence.

And you cannot, it's very hard.

I farmed all during the hyperinflation.

It's very hard.

The only way you get out of a hyperinflationary cycle is a recession.

Then you get stagflation.

I went through both farming and I saw people blow their brains out.

When you get $1,440 of raisins per acre in 1975, six, seven, eight, nine, and everybody's brother wants to plant raisin vineyard, and then you see it crash from $1,400 to $440

and they're all wiped out, that's what we call boom and bust.

And that's the human condition.

And that's where we are right now.

A hell of a lot of people that are going out there with no money and saying, you know what, you can get a 30-year interest rate at 2.8%.

And they're borrowing monies for a hundred, you know, a million-dollar home in California.

That's nothing, but they're paying for it with a 2.8% loan.

And as soon as the bad times hit and they get laid off, they won't be able to make that payment.

And so you are convincing me that the Democrats are more and more desperate.

And I was hoping that we could talk about the Ukraine in just a second, but we have a word from our sponsor first.

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Welcome back.

And this is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

You can find Victor also on the internet at VictorHanson.com on his website.

He also has handles at Facebook, VD Hansen's Cup, Twitter, VD Hansen, and Parlor, Victor Davis Hansen.

And Victor, so I wanted to turn to the Ukraine, unless you had a little bit more to say about the Democrats.

I have no more to say, Sammy.

I was a little bit distracted.

I want to apologize to the office because I had this huge...

Labrador, whatever she is, dog, and she was running all around the room and she was knocking things over.

So I was trying to grab her while I was talking.

But I'm back into full, I'm no longer in my Biden mode.

Okay, so let's then turn to the Ukraine.

And then, so I have just some basic questions or a basic question.

Why do you think the Russians want to invade the Ukraine?

Like, what are they going to get out of it?

I don't think they want to invade Ukraine.

What are they doing then?

They're massing troops on the borders as if they do want to invade them.

And they want to apply pressure, pressure, pressure to the Ukraine.

They want to continue at it to show the world how weak NATO is, how weak Biden is, and to tell the Ukrainians that you better stop any resistance to Putin.

And they're telling the Lithuanians and the Latvians and the Estonians the same thing.

And they're going to sit there and they're going to watch and they're going to see what we do.

you know, if they feel that in a cost-to-benefit analysis, they can go in really quick and take it it like they did crimea and the eastern part of ukraine they'll do it but they don't they would rather not do it they'd rather have it handed to them and so it's very ironic that and i said this earlier but i can't emphasize it enough because we're on this topic of the left so clapper said that trump was a russian asset call him a traitor and Brennan said he was treasonous.

And they all said that.

Why do they say that?

Because Hillary started the Steele dossier Russian collusion hoax to explain her own miserable defeat.

Okay, and then we look at the record.

And

under Hillary, Russian reset,

lower the sanctions.

George Bush was too mean to punish Putin after he went into South Assasia.

Okay, the open mic with Obama and Seoul, South Korea in March of 2012.

Hey, tell Vladimir that if you'll give me some room, I'm up for my last election, then then I can be flexible, i.e.

then he dismantled,

which was a good program, missile defense in Eastern Europe to deter Iran from ever threatening Western Europe with missiles.

And he pretty much appeased Vladimir Putin.

And Vladimir Putin kept his bargain.

He was, he behaved.

And then as soon as the election was over in 2014, a year later, he went into Crimea and He thought to himself, well, you know, we hadn't been in the Middle East for 40 years.

And John Kerry asked us to come in and adjudicate whether Syria had WMD in 2011.

I kind of like that attitude.

So they won't care if I go into Crimea and Ukraine.

And they didn't.

And then Trump came in, Trump beamed Trump, screamed and yelled, da-da-da and kind of needled them about Russia.

It's all a big fake.

And hey, I might, Putin and I get along.

That just kind of got their goat.

And then what did Trump do?

He killed 200 mercenaries in Syria that attacked a U.S.

outpost.

He got out of an asymmetrical missile deal with Russia that

was really asymmetrical.

He said Obama should have sold the Ukrainians' offensive weapons, and he did so.

He kept the sanctions on the oligarchs.

He up U.S.

defense spending.

He went in there and tore into NATO and said, you got to spend another $100 million.

You're flabby and defenseless.

As I said, he raised the U.S.

defense.

He flooded the world with 2.5, 3 million barrels more of oil and natural gas and crashed the world along with the COVID lockdown.

They crashed the world's oil price, really hurt Putin.

Nobody in my lifetime has been harder on the Russians than Donald Trump.

My only wish is that Donald Trump would have said, you know, I'm very skeptical of Putin and just

give the correct bipartisan verbiage and then get tough on it.

But when he praised he praised Putin and then he really was hard on him.

Whereas Biden and the rest of them talk Putin down and they don't do anything.

And so they still haven't sold him offensive weaponry.

And then we had this crazy, remember Alexander Vinman?

He was the lieutenant colonel.

I'm a lieutenant colonel congressman, the guy who really cooked up this first impeachment.

He was the whistleblower, or he was the overt whistleblower who was in contact with a wink nod covert whistleblower that had all been orchestrated and choreographed by Adam Schiff, who denied it under oath.

And what was the whole point was that Donald Trump not suspended, but delayed foreign aid because he had a political vendetta against the Biden family, and therefore he should be impeached for imperiling foreign aid.

And what was the real truth of the whole matter?

The Biden syndicate had been knee-deep in Ukrainian politics and had pressured the government to relieve a prosecutor that was going after the skullduggery of hunters.

Trump comes in and wants to kill two birds with one stone.

That is, punish the Bidens for their corruption, but also maybe for their future political,

maybe that's bad or good.

I don't know, but that's what presidents probably do.

But the most important and the only thing that matters, really,

is that he approved the foreign aid and the sale of weapons that Obama had never allowed.

So we were in this Orwellian situation where Vinmin and all these Ukrainian Americans and lobbyists and Fiona Hill and all these people said, we endangered Ukraine.

No, we didn't.

We gave them more wherewithal than Obama ever had.

And now we get what?

They're all screaming.

Venman wrote an op-ed, another one today.

Same old thing.

Here's what we got to do to stand up to Russia.

No, we don't have to do what you're saying.

You had your chance.

You had a firebrand president that you helped take down, who was the best friend that Ukraine ever had, and had done more to harm Putin than anybody had done.

And what did you do?

You did your best to get rid of him.

You bring him down.

Yeah, and well, he did.

And it was very unethical, and it was probably a lot of it was illegal.

And so that's where we go.

So when I hear all this about Ukraine and Russia and Trump and Biden.

And the other thing about the Ukrainians are

they're just a little bit too intrusive into American domestic politics.

They should have never in the world had anything to do with the Biden family.

And they did that to curry favor with the Obama administration.

And they were basically paying Hunter Biden vast sums of money to give to his dad in part and for his dad then to go easy on.

And they didn't even get their bribery worth out of it because they didn't get their, what they completely wanted.

Then Trump came in and they flipped over as if they were friends of Trump.

And I think everybody's sick of of them.

And not that we're not sicker of Vladimir Putin.

I am.

And we have to protect as much as we can Ukraine, but Ukraine sits on the borders of Europe.

And I don't know if it's considered Russia or Europe historically, both perhaps.

But if it's very hard for America to say we're going to be at the forefront of protecting Ukraine when we have all these European countries of roughly the same GDP and population as we do in the EU-NATO, and they don't seem to be galvanized or mobilized to protect their Ukrainian brothers.

I don't know.

They want some guy from Beaumont, Texas to tell his 18-year-old, hey, get on a plane and go over there and die for whom?

Germany?

And then

they're buying all their gas.

I don't understand it.

Yeah, that's what I was going to ask you, that it doesn't seem like the Europeans are very interested in helping them.

And if the Russians are just testing things, if we see it, they must obviously see that, well, nobody's really interested in defending the Ukraine or the Ukrainians.

People who yell loudest about the sanctity of Ukraine are the least likely to do anything about it.

It's American left and the Europeans.

Neither one of them has ever done anything for Ukraine.

They keep talking as if they were.

And the person that they both mutually despise, Donald Trump, did more to protect.

Putin would not be on the board.

There's a reason.

Let's just be reductionist.

Why are Russians on the border of Ukraine right now?

It's because Donald Trump is not president.

Because you know what he would do.

He'd call up Putin and he'd say some crazy thing.

Hey, you know, I'm going to do this and I'm going to do this.

And who knows?

And Putin would go back to the Kremlin and say, this guy is nuts.

We have no idea what he's going to do because he killed Solomoni, blew him apart.

And then

he blew up Baghdadi.

And, you know, he said he was going to bomb the Shev of ISIS.

He did.

And then we had those 200 mercenaries that we thought could overrun and

humiliate the American.

He just killed them.

So let's just don't do anything till this guy's out of here.

That's what happened.

And with Biden, it's sort of,

we know Joe Biden.

He's the Joe Biden of the corn pop stories that

beats African-American youth with his self-measured chain.

Or he's the guy that calls an African-American reporter, hey, junkie, or you ain't black, or put you all in chain.

Mr.

Tough Guy, he's the guy that took the head of

a lunch counter owner and slammed it on the

counter because he was rude to his sister.

This is the guy that said, I'm going to take Donald Trump behind the gym and beat him up.

It's all talk.

It's all talk with him.

He's a not so tough, tough guy.

No, he's not.

Yeah, but it seems to me that just a last kind of question or observation for your comment that the Russians would notice that nobody's going to protect.

And if you're going to move troops onto the border as a method of brinkmanship, you may just decide to use them, right?

Or it's just too expensive.

Yeah, it's very expensive for a bankrupt country like Russia with only 145 million people to put 70,000 people out there permanently in military readiness or more or have reserves called up.

If they go in, they have to have reserve troops to support them.

And does Putin really want to send them in to have street fighting like turn Kiev into Basra or Baghdad or Fallujah?

Yeah, or does he want to go out in the country and round up all these Ukrainian guerrillas?

Ukrainians are pretty good fighters.

And so he's thinking, he's gaming all of this out.

And he's saying, what is the cheapest way to gain political power, humiliate the West, and make me look like...

I'm the strong man back at home.

And he says, the cheapest way is to mass a bunch of troops, keep them there with a sword sword of Damocles over their head for about three months, and then see these little squealing pigs give me concessions.

And that's what the Europeans will do.

And they'll come back to the Americans and say, come on, you know, you got to help us.

And then they'll say, well, please, please,

don't be there too much.

You might get us involved.

And so that's what Putin's hoping for.

Putin's idea is that anything that causes trouble for us is good for him.

And the sad thing is we still needed to get united.

We hadn't had that stupid Russian collusion hoax.

And Schumer and Pelosi were adults and just went to Trump and said, we don't like you and you don't like us.

But since the days of Henry Kissinger, the only way we check Russia was with China and China with Russia.

And now they're better friends with each other than they are each to us.

And that's a violation of the canons and tenets of American foreign policy.

So can't we go back and tell Russians, we don't like you, you don't like us, but you're scared, you got a border with China, and you know what China is doing.

And so we ask you not to vote along with him in the UN and to think about being neutral and not part of the Chinese orbit.

And then we go to China and say, you know what, Putin's got 7,000 nuclear weapons.

And so he's going into Ukraine.

That can't be in anybody's interest to go into Ukraine and bully people and see what happens.

Yeah.

You know, you can't do that at all.

And the second largest nuclear power in the world, Russia, with an anemic population and economy, and the largest economy in five or six years will be the largest economy in the world, the largest nation in the world, China.

And we've got them somehow on the same team.

And that wasn't a smart idea.

Yeah, that's a little bit scary.

Well, Victor, our time is up here today.

I would like to thank the audience for their listenership and thank you as well.

Hey, thank you.

And sorry, everybody, about the dog making the noise.

She's

exiled to Ukraine next time.

Yeah, okay.

All right, this is Victor Davis Hanson and Sammy Wink, and we're signing off.

Goodbye, everybody.