The Traditionalist: Biden, Borders, and Other Left Breaches

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Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show, The Traditionalist.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

We are recording on Thursday, September 23rd, 2021.

Fall is here.

This is the first day of fall.

Victor Davis-Hansen is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Later, we'll be talking about some of the things I do and what Victor does at VictorHanson.com.

I want to recommend, as we have a weekly, that you visit his website.

We've got a lot to talk about today on the traditional list.

The first thing we will be talking about is the very interesting press conference at the White House featuring Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of England, and Joe Biden.

And we'll get to that right after this important message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show, The Traditionalist.

Victor, my friend, I'm sure you saw that weird press conference, Boris Johnson asking a few questions of the, at least the British press that were in the room, and the White House staff kind of comically, crazily shooing reporters out, shouting over them so that Joe Biden could not really be asked any question, hear any questions, answer any questions.

Victor, that's kind of a sorry state for the leader of the free world to be babied, maybe the wrong word, but what are your thoughts about what happened?

Well, in their defense, Jack, he has la la goria, I guess you'd call it.

He's able, Joe Biden is able to say anything, any

time, anywhere, anybody that can lose his presidency.

That's just a fact.

You know, Churchill in World War I, when he was Lord of the Admiralty,

he said

of Admiral Jellicoe that had so much power as the Admiral of the Home Fleet at the Battle of Jutland.

He said he was the only man in the war that could have lost it in one afternoon.

Meaning, if he was completely, abjectly incompetent, all of these dreadnoughts would be wiped out.

And then the Germans, even with their reduced forces, could go and bomb the shore of Great Britain and

use U-boats with unlimited success.

That's Joe Biden.

On any given day, he can lose the presidency or destroy the Democratic Party.

So what are they going to do?

They cannot ever let him say anything that's unscripted.

It's bad enough that he doesn't follow the teleprompter.

Now you're going to say, well, yeah, Professor Hanson-Victor, but you're not being equal.

Trump could do the same thing.

Yeah, Trump could.

He could say things that were controversial, but he could say them in a way, even with mangled syntax, that were at least coherent.

And you could argue against them, but you knew what he meant.

But Joe Biden can say things that make no sense at all.

Nobody knows, has any idea of what he's talking about.

And so they have wisely now decided that they're going to wheel him out, read off the script, and wheel him back.

And the press made a Faustian bargain during the 2020 campaign, and they said, we are hard-left progressives.

We are politicos first and journalists second.

And we will do our part as a part of our fusion bargain to make sure the American people do not know how leveraged, incompetent, unhinged Joe Biden is.

And that's what they've done.

And so every once in a while, I think all they request of the administration, Jack, is just don't embarrass us.

Just don't allow the British press secretary or the British press to go at Boris Johnson.

And then the people are going to ask us why we didn't.

So don't put us in that position where we look like the hacks that we are.

And so that's their only worry that they've so compromised their integrity and independence that it's being rubbed in.

I mean we know what politicians do from Barack Obama.

Once you sell your soul to the diabolical president, he doesn't appreciate that magnanimity or reciprocate it in like kind.

He takes it with contempt.

Remember Ben Rhodes?

These people know nothing, he said.

We created an echo chamber and fed them things about the Iran deal and they lapped it up.

That's what he said.

Or Jonathan Gruber, remember?

You just basically can lie, and the American people will believe anything.

That was what the Obama message was: absolute contempt for the press because they had sold their soul.

And that's what we're seeing now with Biden to the nth degree.

Well, not all the American people believe everything, Victor.

So, Gallup's

poll is out, and Biden's approval rating continues to fall significantly.

It stated at 43 percent support.

I didn't get the numbers, but he is much higher support numbers among Black Americans, but there it has fallen sharply.

Also, I have a feeling it's the numbers actually today would be far lower than that.

Part of that, Victor, it would be, would have to do, I think, maybe with the border.

And so, maybe let's talk about the border for a minute, two things.

Let's go, but just before you do, sure, I might so rudely interrupt you.

Yeah, it's your show.

Go ahead.

Where does he turn for good news?

Afghanistan, he's tried.

He said basically Trump did it, but even though he did it, I did it, but it was good.

We got out of that.

He said that to the UN.

We got it.

And the polls are about 70%

negative about the way.

Is it the border?

No.

How about inflation?

I'm keeping inflation to, you know, 8% per annum.

Or is it Anwar and Keystone and our energy policy?

I cut us back 3 million barrels of oil.

And that's why you guys in California are paying $4.55.

And that's great.

You're reducing your consumption of fossil fuel.

Or, you know what?

I can really forecast we're going to have natural gas shortages.

Guess what?

We're going to be short coal and natural gas for your heating bill.

You're not going to be polluting the atmosphere.

Or is he going to say, you know, I really got divisive on critical waste theory.

It was really good.

We were getting along too well with this Martin Luther King junk.

And so I came back and got kindy out there and tonahese coats's ideology and you know you got to discriminate to stop discrimination you got to be a racist to stop racist so what is he going to say i i can't think of anything aoc the squad right new green deal there's nothing there because he's got this on midas touch everything he touches turns to draws Yeah, and worse.

And worse.

So two things.

Well, we stick on the numbers, Victor.

Part of the free fall among black voters, of black Americans, not necessarily voters, is the vaccine mandate, which has gone over like a lead balloon in particular with that community.

If you want to say anything about that and about the vaccine mandate, please go ahead.

Well, the problem with these mandates are multifarious.

First of all, I think, but who's counting, Jack?

I think it was on over 10 occasions when asked as candidate Biden, presidential elect Biden, and president Biden about the mandates.

He said no.

He didn't believe in them.

And why did he say no?

That he had demagogued the issue.

And he said, you know, the 350,000 or so people who had died at COVID when he inaugurated were all the fault of Donald Trump.

He said he killed them.

And then he said that nobody had had a vaccination, even though 17 million had, until he was inaugurated.

So he was the person who came into office during the natural beginning

wane of the pre-Delta COVID.

And he just assumed, as many professionals did, that the more people had it, the more the people were being vaccinated, as he said on July 4th, we would be returning to normal.

And that didn't happen.

And the Delta virant came, and you know, we're up to about 660,

600,060, 600,070.

We're going to get close to 700,000 dead.

According to Joe Biden's logic, he's going to be culpable for half of them.

And if you do it per day in office after the arrival of the virus in March of 2020, he has more dead per day probably than Donald Trump did on average.

That's not an unfair comparison, but since he deals an unfair comparison, it's going to boomerang on him.

So he's given us these mixed messages, but the simple truth says he can't explain to you or me or anybody a couple of things.

A, if you have antibodies, we were told that that was inferior to vaccination.

Now nobody believes that.

They believe that naturally acquired immunity, the entire virus in your system, creates an entire immunity and not a particle or a replica or semblance of it as a vaccination works.

In other words, there might be 100 million people who have natural acquired immunity.

That doesn't matter.

They're going to have to be vaccinated.

And some of them are going to get a greater chance of side effects to increase those antibodies even more so, which begs the question, if don't, Joe Biden, remember, Jack is telling us, if you have acquired immunity, and yes, it is better than vaccinated immunity, nevertheless, you must have both.

You must have vaccinations.

So then people are going to say, well, I never got COVID.

I only got vaccinated.

And since we know being infected is better, and since we know that you want both, then I guess I'm going to have to go out and expose myself and get COVID.

So then I have both.

Or they're going to say,

okay,

every U.S.

soldier's got to have the vaccination, whether or not they've had COVID.

thousands have had COVID.

So they're on a plane on a C-17 and they're full of Afghan refugees.

And guess what?

They have to be vaccinated, even though they've had COVID.

But the people on the plane, even though they have not had COVID, perhaps, don't need to be vaccinated.

So think of the logic there, or think of the logic on the border of 2 million people scheduled in a fiscal year to come across the border without even asking them.

These are not U.S.

citizens, not even asking them.

to be vaccinated.

So when he has a mandate that federal employees must be vaccinated, what are those people in ICE thinking?

Okay,

I've got to get vaccinated.

I had COVID, so I had to still get vaccinated.

And now I'm arresting this guy from Haiti and this guy from

Guatemala and this guy from Mexico and this guy from who knows where.

And they're all breathing on me and they've got, I'm being exposed every day, but they don't have to be vaccinated.

Why wouldn't the federal government have booths all through that group?

Why do we have, there's a federal government a collective Karen who says, I'm going to hunt you down wherever you go in your house, when you go out to eat, and you're going to get vaccinated.

And yet, you have all these people with all these maladies sitting there.

And we could easily put a little booth and say, you know what?

If you're going to be an illegal alien, come in, we're going to vaccinate you.

They won't do that because they don't value citizens.

They do not value citizenship.

It's a construct.

For them, the fact that you are walking on the soil of the United States is equal.

to being a citizen.

There's no difference in the left's mind between a resident, illegal, or illegal, and a citizen.

They just simply don't believe in citizenship.

Well, Victor, that

now down to the border, which you've just touched on, more than touched on.

Do you have any thoughts about

this

bogus act of racism, the agent on a horse with reins, but he was whipping?

Well, he wasn't whipping.

Of course, this is one of the few times

the liberal media has put any attention on the border is with this contrived act of racism.

What thoughts do you come to mind over this

incident?

One, the left knows that this has been optically, public relations-wise, politically, a disaster for Joe Biden.

You cannot have 12,000, 13,000 people in hot weather bathing, urinating, defecating in a polluted river without a pandemic on the rise at a time of a pandemic after you had said that Donald Trump was Hitler.

We had General Michael Hayden, remember, said that the cages were analogous to

Birkenholl

and Birkenhew and Auschwitz.

So that same mentality is silent now and everybody knows.

So they're looking for something.

And they have a few pictures of people on horses that are reining their horses, and the reins are loose, and they look like they're whipping people.

They're trying to block them from coming in.

And I can tell you, well aside,

if you're an impenetrable object and somebody's going to run into you, there's going to be a two, there's going to be a collision of sorts.

But these people are not riding into the water to ride people down

shores to block their interests.

Third, I have a little,

I have an undisclosed aspect of my life, Jack, that you don't know about.

Your horseman?

Well, my Swedish grandfather, who was disabled in World War I, was an excellent horseman, and they had drafted him to be a teamster to train African-American quartermasters in World War I.

And so he, that's what he did.

And then he went into combat and was severely wounded and disabled.

But in his disability in his late 20s, he had a little 40-acre farm and he broke horses for a living and had a a little dairy.

So when I came of age in the 60s, we would go down there every weekend and he taught us how to ride and he had some pretty wild horses and we would ride only bareback first and he'd teach us how to saddle.

So I spent, oh, most of the Saturdays when I was 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 riding.

And then when he passed away,

His donkey, Jack, and his final horse, Jack

and Jim, were transported in his creaky old trailer, which had two flats on the way, over to our farm.

And we quickly built a corral and a barn, we did our barn.

And from my high school career, I rode.

And

they were reined horses, the rein across the side of the neck.

And I can tell you that they were pretty wild.

And so when I would get on them, not being an experienced rider, like my father, who was an excellent rider and grown up riding, when I would ride around the farm or when we had Easter or Thanksgiving, everybody was around, we'd always have the horses out.

And even when I was a professor, my father then wanted to go back to his childhood when he was widowed and when my mother died.

So he bought four horses.

And in his way of thinking, he was in the 70s, you never buy a domesticated broke horse.

You always buy a wild one.

And that's what my grandfather did, is break them.

So we had them out on a stake and let them go around in circles, you know, and tried to break them.

So we were actually teaching our own children how to ride these horses that were not broke.

And I got bucked off in my 30s a lot.

Most of them were Welsh ponies, so they weren't, and Shetland ponies are very mean, but these Welsh ponies were nicer, but they weren't full-size horses for the kids.

So my kids grew up riding them.

But my point is this: that when you have a lot of people around a horse and the horse gets edgy, I can tell you that you try to get the rein, the rein alongside of his neck, and you try to get his peripheral vision to see the reins that you're in control and you're and people startle the horse you get though you feel like you're going to buck buck off you don't you can't even a good horseman and i wasn't a good horseman but i rode a lot uh it's kind of scary and if you take a picture i i i can visualize these april and may and june parties of my family out on the ranch here and four horses you know being tethered and eating the grass, and then people jumping on and off of them, and then riding around in the middle of people.

And believe me, it looked exactly like that scene on the border.

The idea that people are just going to, you know, make an impenetrable wall of horse flesh, and the horse are going to be mute and inert and stand there while people are rushing at them is impossible.

So, I don't think they were whipping anybody.

I think it was just chaos.

Well, Victor, I think it's a good point to remind our listeners again about Victorhanson.com.

There is a cornucopia of original content that you write.

You have written.

You'll find it there.

You write a lot also.

You can only read it there.

Much of what Victor writes, he writes, of course for American Greatness.

We talk about those pieces on another podcast, The Classicist.

He's written some pieces recently for a new criterion.

But much of what Victor writes is for Victorhanson.com.

And if you want to read it, you should subscribe.

It's very affordable.

So we strongly recommend that.

Also,

on the website is a link for The Dying Citizen, Victor's forthcoming book, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America.

I'm Jack Fowler.

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

And my websites are centerforcivilsociety.com and civil thoughts.

That's for the weekly newsletter I write for America Philanthropic.

So please consider subscribing.

It's free.

Victor, let's move on to,

we've got a lot to talk about

more about Biden's.

In this case, though, I think Hunter Biden.

But first, let's look at the Democrat, the growing hate.

and I think hate may be the right word of progressive Democrats for Israel.

And there was a contention this week about Israel's iron dome missile defense, which is funded in part by the United States.

I think that was some agreement that came about with the Obama administration.

This funding was absent from this monster bill that funded everything in the world except iron dome missile defense.

There was a vote today.

I don't know the result, consequence.

I think it was, it probably passed, but a separate legislation to restore that funding.

Victor, first of all i'm you know what your your thoughts are political thoughts about uh well general thoughts about this uh hatred of israel growing hatred amongst them the growing part of the democratic party and uh you know how could how could a bill that came from nancy pelosi and stenni hoyer have been not had this uh in it I mean, had everything else in humanity in the bill.

How come not this?

We know, Jack, that the Democratic Party represents the left-wing youth movement in the United States.

I can tell you as a person who's on campus, it's anti-Semitic.

Stanford University had a flyers when Ben Shapiro appeared as a speaker that looked like

bug spray.

So you're really allowing students to put on posters that deliberately try to resonate gas.

that's lethal.

And when we were accused in the academic senate, we being Scott Atlas and my colleague Neil Ferguson, our accuser who said that we were intemperate in our remarks, was putting anti-Semitic literature on his own website with impunity.

So it's everywhere on campus, on the left.

And many of the old-time Democratic politicians are now retiring.

And so

just take three off the top of my head, say Chuck Schumer, Barbara Boxer, and Diane Feinstein.

Barbara Boxer has been retired for a number of years.

Diane Feinstein, I think it's 89.

Chuck Schumer is kind of marginalized, but these were the traditional liberal internationalists that were Jewish, but not just de facto Jewish.

but they were interested in the survival and integrity of Israel.

And they had a lot of supporters, Jewish and not, in the Democratic Party.

And Republicans, remember, were about 50-50 in the 50s and 60s versus Israel.

And then they gradually got up to 70-80 and above support for Israel.

And now what's happened in the reverse direction, this new left-wing movement has taken over the Democratic Party.

Part of it is because of immigration.

Part of it is...

progressivism.

We know that it's anti-Semitic because Omar herself, remember that quote about it's the Benjamin's baby and Talib and having the map with Israel not on it and AOC's various comments.

So they are in control, at least of the optics and

the center of attention in that party.

The second thing is, and they run it.

I'm not saying the old breed won't, the old guard, whatever we call them, won't.

The old standbys will not quietly, you know, Nancy Pelosi is part of the old Democratic Guard or the old breed of Democratic politicians.

She won't not fix it

behind the scenes because it is embarrassing.

But think about it for a second.

This is a defensive system.

It's not selling, you know, surface to surface or air to surface or any type of offensive weapon.

It's not giving, you know, riot gas or anything.

This is just a system that protects the state of Israel, which includes well over a million Arabs, 20% of the population.

And so you're denying the Israelis financial help to protect Israeli citizens, among whom are not only Arab Americans, but people on the West Bank in close proximity to the border.

And remember that this is a very expensive system because Israel's enemies flood the zone with cheap offensive weapons.

And the Iron Dome then at $80,000 versus $800 knocks them down.

So when that last flurry of missile attacks, Israel spent a fortune.

The people who tried to destroy Israel did not, but they did protect the Jewish people and the American, Arab Israelis.

So it was a defensive system.

They don't even want it to have a defensive system.

And then finally, think of the irony, Jack.

I was thinking this right now.

So Joe Biden and his administration abandoned over $80 billion, whether it's weapons alone or weapons that aggregates the training cost in them or prorated over 20 years, whatever method of calculation we use.

It was huge.

We've given Israel in today's dollar,

dollars we didn't give it much until after the 67 year war 67 war but if you look at that period i wish you could call it a 73 or 74 year period we've given them in today's dollars about a hundred billion dollars so basically

they are telling us that they're not too upset

because they haven't said much that we allowed 85 billion dollars of that money to to go into the hands of terrorists in the Middle East, but they're very concerned about $1 billion to help preserve lives in a defensive sense.

It's really weird.

If they're so worried about American weaponry being used by people, wouldn't they say, Joe Biden, how dare you let 80 billion plus dollars in the hands of the Taliban that's going to kill innocents, rather than how dare you spend a billion dollars to protect the citizenry of a democratic and consensual society like Israel.

But that's what happens when you're anti-Semitic and anti-Israel.

You're not logical because you can't be logical if you're a supporter of constitutional government.

You look at what Israel is compared to its neighbors.

Yeah.

Well, the roots are back,

they do go long back.

I mean, it seems now like maybe it was even 40 years ago, 30, 40 years ago with Jesse Jackson and Jaime Town.

So it's

not like this hasn't been.

Remember all shrunk and so I'll get on my yarmica and come over here.

Yeah.

Get on your yarmic and come over here.

And it was dim Jews.

And then remember Reverend Jeremiah Wright, I think I'm quoting him exactly by memory right now.

I haven't talked to Obama.

Dim Jews won't let me talk to him.

And then I think he was peddling literature from his pulpit.

Remember when Obama was, when he was the confidant of Barack Obama and his personal pastor, as Obama said in his memoir, he said that he passed out literature that said the Israelis had built Arab-sensitive guided missiles that could go out and look at Arabs and kill them and distinguish them from Jews.

So the whole black Islamicist and black nationalist movement, of which the democratic core now is heavily influenced, has been anti-Semitic for a long time.

Yeah.

Maybe we should talk about this another time, Victor, also.

But I saw something recently about ethnic cleansing, and it was a list of about nine nations which had small Jewish communities

no longer do, including Afghanistan.

The last

Jew left the country last week, I believe.

But let's get everywhere.

Just as

it's everywhere.

I think yesterday I read the San Diego Teachers Union went on record that

Israel was not a legitimate state.

I don't know at what period we get to peak anti-Semitism, anti-Israeliism,

where the Democratic Party can no longer hide it.

When I saw that picture of Middle Easterners going out of their cars and overturning tables, remember in Los Angeles

this summer during the May, quote-unquote, war, and the Democratic Party was silent, or they just called it a hate crime.

Or when I look at FBI statistics of hate crimes, and I see that Jewish Americans are right up there with the most targeted per capita minority of almost anybody, and that

Muslim Americans and African Americans are most likely the perpetrators of hate crimes against Jews in the case of blacks against Asian Americans.

And I see the efforts to hide that

by the

left-wing community.

We just saw, just peripherally related, Jack, we saw a group of African Americans who wanted to go into a restaurant.

Was it in Staten Island?

Carmines.

Yeah, it was in Manhattan.

It was in Manhattan, well, wherever it was.

And then there was an Asian American waitress who asked, as was required by statute and by her employers, to produce vaccination IDs, and she didn't have them.

Then she was terribly assaulted and sent to the hospital.

And yet, when you looked at the

media, there was no mention that she was an Asian American attacked by African Americans, and maybe there was a racial element within it.

However, had that waitress been, let's say, just

for the sake of it, been African-American and there were three people from Texas who wore MAGA hats and were white, then we would have heard it all the time.

So what I'm getting at is the democratic machine, the progressive project,

it's going to have trouble hiding these glaring consistencies.

Really, anti-Semitism, which I concede was largely a right-wing phenomenon in the 1950s, has now become mostly a left-wing progressive enterprise.

And the only shoe that hasn't dropped is at some point, one of two things are going to happen.

Either Jewish Americans are going to forsake their fealty to the Democratic Party, or

that term Jewish Americans will be a construct.

In other words, the third and fourth generation of the Jewish community either is so unconcerned with Israel or unconcerned with the Jewish faith that it doesn't, it sees itself like I do myself, Swedish.

You know, if somebody came in and said, Victor, there's a there's a Swedish cause that you have to go down to Kingsbury and support.

I

mean, I would look at the merits, but I wouldn't identify with it because I was Swedish.

And maybe that's what's happening, you know.

Yeah, breathe the reindeer.

Victor, let's take on in the little time we have left.

I think we have about 10 minutes left.

Two Hunter Biden-related stories.

One, I'm going to play off of James Freeman, great guy.

You know, he's a columnist at the Wall Street Journal.

And he has a piece the other day.

It's titled, Selling Access is a Scandal About Joe Biden, not Hunter.

And this has to do with Hunter, the new great artist.

He has some

shows coming up allegedly late.

this month.

There's not much of the month left in New York and Los Angeles.

In

James's piece, he quotes from another piece by the Atlantics Casey Michael, who wrote: At some point in the coming weeks, hundreds of thousands of dollars will be funneled to the son of the sitting American president, and none of us will know anything about who sent the money or where it originally came from, or why anyone would choose to send it in the first place.

Victor, your thoughts on

what is the meaning of Hunter Biden Painter and the big guy?

Yeah, I have a kind of an eccentric take on it that I've mentioned in print.

And that is, so we know that Hunter Biden was involved in the Ukraine and Burisma.

And we know that he was on a vice presidential jet to China.

We know that Joe Biden

was...

was exposed in the so-called missing Hunter Biden laptop where

he was the big guy.

he was Mr.

10% why the IRS hasn't looked at that or I don't know because I would be very surprised if he reported all the income that came through his 10% venue but what is striking about this and then we know the coke and he leaving the coke

I think this is his third or fourth laptop he's left we left his coke apparatus in a rented car we have these selfies where he's semi-nude and worse okay i can go on with the luridness but that's all known.

That's all known.

This is 2021.

His dad is president.

So you, and we know what happens when you have a Donald Nixon or, you know,

a wayward, Billy Carter.

Billy Carter or wayward

Clinton brother.

Oh, yeah.

Roger Clinton.

Yeah, the team, the presidential team goes to them and they say, you know what?

You're not going to do that anymore.

And then he calls the president and says, and the president says, oh, I love you, but, you know, you can't do that.

And they take care of business, but Joe Biden can't do that.

And the question is, why?

And the answer, I think, is that Hunter Biden, and now I'm extrapolating from the temper of his emails that I've read recently that have been, you know, Miranda's demeaning has been very good on the New York Post.

But there's also elements that have been released to the public.

And it's really amazing how angry he is at the big guy.

He says to one of of his relatives who wants money, I'm the one supporting this family.

I do all of this stuff.

I don't get any credit.

And I'm the moneymaker and I've elevated, basically

I'm summarizing that I've made the Biden family dynasty wealthy.

And I'm not going to, and I'm tired of getting,

you know, pegged as the bad son.

So I think what he's doing to his father and the people around him is I'm going to keep doing it.

I'm flat broke.

I drugged away all my money or partied it all away.

I have nothing.

I've been disgraced.

And now that he's my father is president, they've shut me down because you can quid pro quo or you can hustle or you can grift when your father is vice president, but there's just too much.

too much heat when he's president.

And I resent that.

So I'm going to go ahead and do this art project with my mediocre talent.

And I'm going to make a mockery of the whole thing.

I'm going to draw these primitive pictures and then I'm going to have a guy auction them off to anonymous donors who think, and maybe be correct, that I will transmit their concerns to the appropriate people in the administration.

And even though my dad might say, you know what, you're not getting near me, Hunter, you're toxic.

There will be thousands of his subordinates throughout the federal government who think they can win approbation by saying, I helped Hunter wink nod.

And so that's what was going on.

He's just saying, yeah, I'm a grifter.

What are you going to do about it?

Yeah.

And there are other means, other members of the,

don't call it a crime syndicate, but it does a great impersonation of one.

And the media, brother,

think of the media.

This is the media, remember, that put a hold on, I guess that's the wrong word, put a blackout on all reference before the election of the Hunter-Biden laptop.

Let's see.

Remember James Clapper?

John Brennan, they and was it 50 CIA and former intelligence officers circulated a petition where they completely lied and said that this was a product likely of Russian disinformation?

Right.

They said, yeah, this was the

laptop had, quote, all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation, and that they were, quote, deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.

And Victor, this is

wishful thinking, although it would be a great project for an enterprising journalist for the 50 or 51 that signed that letter.

And then, you know, what do you have to say now?

Now that some of these,

this is verified, this was his laptop, these emails that were in it and other things are authentic.

And not only for those providing cover, this was, I think.

in October this happened, providing cover for the Biden election team, but also, as you mentioned, the big tech, big media access of censorship on this particular point.

Who made these decisions at NPR, various entities, to not report on this?

Or the only thing they did report on was the bogus Russian claim, or who at Google, who at Twitter, et cetera, were responsible for these decisions of suppressing the truth.

Well, we know that the media, and I don't mean that term generically or loosely, but what I'm specifically talking about are the news agencies, AP,

the revitalized UPI, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times, public entities, NPR, PBS,

the main Silicon Valley vehicles of rigged or warped searching such as Yahoo, especially Google, Facebook, Twitter,

Apple,

Amazon, people who went after Parlier.

We know that they're warped and they're not disinterested, they're not transparent, and they have an agenda.

They're not media anymore.

They admit that.

When I, on the rare occasions, I'm asked to comment on a story, I always say I cannot because you're not truthful people and you will either warp what I say

or you will not use it if it's contrary to what you want.

And you're not credible journalists.

You're just political operatives.

The young people that are tasked with that job of talking, you know, interviewing low, non-influential people like myself are agas.

Oh, you can't believe that.

It's almost to say, well, I graduated from Columbia Journalism School with an MA.

How can you say that about my employer?

This is the best job you could get.

But until we, the listeners, and all of us have contempt for these people, because that's what they deserve, they're still going to operate in a way that's very dangerous to the Republic.

We just have to say, you know what, you're not journalists.

We're not going to take you seriously.

And, you know, what's even worse is that this is not new.

So James Clapper, to take two examples, and John Brennan signed that affidavit, but James Clapper told us that

Donald Trump quote was a Russian asset.

And when he was going on the cable news programs, as was John Brennan, as was all of those guys, they were called in, remember, to the House Intelligence Committee when the Republicans still had the majority, and they were asked under oath, do you have evidence for what you just said publicly?

And although that was in secret testimony, a lot of people leaked, including Democrats.

And the message that came out of those testimonies is no.

So in other words, think for a minute.

Our intelligence leaders who had run the government intelligence bureau, Clapper, Brennan, and Comey,

They were saying one thing when they were under oath and they were saying another thing to the public.

And then finally,

lying is nothing new for them.

I hate to be so cynical, but when Clapper said that Trump was a Russian asset and that was proved to be not true, he never apologized.

He never apologized because he was asked under oath, remember, does the National Security Agency ever, ever surveil or monitor the communications of U.S.

citizens?

And he said, no, we wouldn't do that.

And then later, when it was shown that they did and that shown that further that he knew they did, he said, well, I gave the least untruthful answer.

Get that message, what he did.

He just said, I perjured myself before the U.S.

Congress.

And I perjured myself because I knew, even though I was under oath, there would be no ramifications.

Just like when John Bridden was asked under oath,

has CIA ever monitored the staffers' computers of U.S.

senators?

Oh, no, we wouldn't do that.

Next question, a little later.

Has the administration ever killed anybody on these targeted drone operations along the Pakistan-Afghan border that they shouldn't have, i.e.

civilians, collateral?

No, we haven't.

And then they were both shown to be complete lies.

And

he never said, I'm sorry, I lied, or there was no federal prosecutor to step forward as there was with Robert Mueller.

Why couldn't a federal prosecutor say, I'm seeking the indictments of John Brennan for lying under oath, of James Clapper for lying under oath?

And by the way, I want to look at James Comey because on 245 occasions, under oath, he said he could not remember or didn't know key elements.

about the steel dossier and fusion GPS, which sparked his investigation that he took on himself.

And as a final Phillip, Robert Mueller spent $40 million of FBI, former director, and he spent 22 months.

And his entire case was based on the seated fake dossier that was seated by Fusion GPS.

And guess what?

He was asked directly on television, no less, can you tell us about Fusion GPS and the role in the Christopher Steele?

And he said, I don't know anything about it.

I don't know anything about it.

That would be like Victor doesn't report his income taxes for 2020.

And the IRS comes out here and they put me under oath and they restart recording.

And I said, Mr.

Hansen, you didn't file a 10-40.

I don't know anything about it.

I don't know.

I have no information about that.

Or if I want to do the John Brin, I can swear that I did.

I did.

Or I can be James Clapper and said, well, you know, I couldn't say I did.

And I gave you the least untruthful answer I could.

What would happen to me?

I'd be indicted and put in jail.

And so this is what's really scary with this so-called administrative or deep state, especially this military-industrial intelligence complex.

And boy, when you add in the equation to that equation, the recent behavior of General Milley

and some of the other retired generals, and it's really scary that we have a lot of unelected, very powerful men.

in these positions of enormous influence that are acting in a political fashion contrary to their own purview.

Right.

Making big bucks and with no sense of honor, it seems like no sense of honor, no sense of remorse, no sense of empathy for the people whose lives they destroy, like Carter Page.

Not one bit of empathy for him.

Not one bit of empathy for the people they put through hell with the Mueller investigation.

Not one bit of empathy that John Brennan has attacked mercilessly.

And the fact that these people have security clearances and use them to parlay

their billets on television for profit.

I'm John Brennan, I'm James Clapper, Wink Nod, I have a security cleanse, and my sources tell me that's what they've been doing.

John Brennan at least got his yanked.

The others, all of them should not have it.

None of them just have a rule that if you have a security clearance and you go on television and you testify or you comment or you say something about a strategic question and you reference at all the fact of your former position and you use the word sources, then you should have that yanked.

Well, Victor, that's all the time we have, except for a minute with some last-minute things.

One is

we thank our listeners who leave ratings.

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We thank those who have done that, and especially those who take the time

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And here's one from the other day from someone who refers to himself or herself, I guess, as Bisenberger, titling this remark eloquent and wise.

And Beisenberger writes: Lots of pundits out there, none combine thought-provoking issues with rich historical fact.

Like Victor, Americans are blessed to have a scholar like Victor, who is also a true patriot who believes in the idea of America and loves this country.

Listen to this podcast, educate yourself in history, and heed his warnings of the desperation to come if we don't turn this country around.

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Happy Fall, everybody.

Thanks, Victor.

And we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show, The Traditionalist.

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I very much appreciate it.