The Culturalist: The Deep State

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Hello, and welcome to The Culturalist, a segment of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

The Culturalist is dedicated to events and people, past and present, that have influenced the way we live and things we value.

Victor, the namesake of this show, is the Martin and Illy Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

His podcasts are published by John Solomon's Just the News on the Art19 platform.

Welcome, Victor, too as well.

Welcome to your own show.

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Welcome back.

And Victor, I wanted to remind everybody about your website, victorhanson.com.

I understand it just went under a renovation and it looks very stunning, I must say.

Did you have any comments on your new website or any inspiration for the people?

Well, instead of just going gradually and having a beta model, we went full blast.

So all of you have patience.

I know that we've had some new features.

It's now going to be called the Blade of Perseus.

Remember, Perseus' blade

beheaded the Medusa.

Not that all of our enemies are Medusas, but some of them certainly are.

And not that we want to believe in decapitation.

That's a metaphor, although a gruesome one, I confess.

And then we have a new feature, Sammy, that those who want to read more, we have a paywall or a subscribers list.

That's a nicer euphemism.

And

I'm going to try to provide two to three thousand words.

And we've had trouble the last four or five days, I know, for those who signed up, but I think today it's there and it's going to get refined tomorrow.

So you'll know which articles will be flagged as

paywall after the first couple of paragraphs and how to and you'll just press on and then log in.

So So, I think everything is coming to fruition as planned, although we had a few rocky steps and starts.

Yeah, we sure did.

I know that.

I would like to then also remind your listeners that you can be found at Parlor, and your handle at Parlor is at Victor Davis Hansen.

You're also on Twitter at VD Hansen and Facebook at VD Hansen's Cup.

There's also a Facebook fan book page, Victor Davis Hansen's fan club, and they are not affiliated with you, but they do a wonderful job of finding all sorts of articles and lectures and that kind of thing for the listeners.

So that's a highly recommended page to become a part of.

Today we have the topic of the deep state.

that we're talking about.

But I know that you just recently came back from a long trip and you wanted, I think, to say something about your experience with the airlines on that long trip.

Yeah, you know, I don't like rants, although I've been accused of a ranter.

But I had these very strange experiences.

After COVID lockdown started to ease up, I had commitments to go places that I had promised in person.

So I did.

And in the first trip, When you get to Salt Lake City from Fresno, they're building a new terminal and that's unavoidable, but just the sheer process of getting out into a bus and then getting the bus and going to the terminal should have been very simple.

But it's not simple if workers are getting incentivized not to return to work.

So immediately after coming out of this lockdown, and I did this in May, where all four of my junctures, flights, connections to Milwaukee were canceled, all four of them.

And I had to take a new flight home.

This time around,

it turned a very simple thing into a laborious process.

So I said, you know, things are tough.

We understand that.

So then the next trip was to San Francisco.

And it wasn't scheduled to San Francisco.

It was scheduled from Fresno to Dallas and on to Nashville.

Okay.

You get in the plane and we're told we have to have a little fueling restop.

What does that mean?

I've had that happen twice in my life.

Once in Egypt where a pilot got on and said in 1974

that although we're going to Athens, we have to make a little stop in Alexandria, which we just went up and went straight down because somebody had not paid the bill for gasoline and they didn't get it topped off.

I had it again in Mexico about 14 years ago when we had to make a quick stop in Texas as soon as we crossed the border because they wouldn't give us gas.

So I didn't expect that in the United States, but we went 180 miles in the opposite direction from Fresno to San Francisco to find aviation fuel, if you think of it.

And when you're in the window and you're watching this process and you look at tasks that, in your own experience of some 40 years of flying, you saw three to four people handling the refueling, or three to four people handling the baggage, or two people with batons guiding the plane in,

or two or three people at the counter, and you only see one,

then the process is slowed considerably.

And because it's a domino-like experience, once one of these pieces gets out of whack, out of sync, then the whole thing starts to not work.

And it all was culminated in this recent trip two days ago to Milwaukee, in which I got the flight.

There's a new flight from Fresno, Chicago.

I was ecstatic.

I'd taken it once.

It was late, but you know, I thought I'd give it a second chance.

And we sat on the tarmac and we sat on the tarmac.

And we sat on the tarmac because of a storm that was passing through Chicago.

I understand that.

So when you land there, then everything is late and you've got to drive to Milwaukee.

Okay, on the way back, I thought it can't happen.

Twice, got to the airport very, very early as a neurotic person, I suppose.

I kept checking the app, is it on time?

And then all of a sudden, bam,

a notice.

Your flight is going to be canceled because Fresno is obscured with smoke.

Smoke?

The fire is 250 miles away.

So I just left Fresno.

This is impossible.

And another person next to me said, it's smoky in Fresno.

I just called my wife.

And I said, I just called a friend and others.

And there's no smoke at the Fresno air terminal.

So I got kind of weird of what happened.

I went to the desk.

He said, oh, that's wrong.

There's no fuel.

And I looked out the window.

There's fuel at Chicago.

And then somebody said to me, we better hurry up because there's a big thunderstorm scheduled.

We are scheduled to leave at a certain time and it's going to be at least an hour before this thunderstorm.

So I thought, well, this won't affect us.

There's oil, gas here.

And then, of course, when the plane came in that we were supposed to take, it sat there for about an hour while nobody attended to it.

You could look at it.

There was nobody getting the bags.

There was nobody guiding it in.

There were nobody there.

And then when it started to get in finally, then of course, the thunderstorm hit and you can't have people out on the tarmac and be subject to lightning strikes.

So it all shut down.

And I mean everything shut down.

And suddenly you talk about a super spreader event when you have the busiest airport in the world crammed packed with lines to go to the bathroom, with lines to get a drink of water, and everybody's packed.

Either this virus is going to kill us all or it's very hype because every single one of these airports under current conditions is a super spreader event.

And I can't believe when I look at the death toll every day in California, 40 million people.

And I look at the COVID, I don't pay any attention to the cases because that's problematic.

You can be asymptomatic and test positive, but there's 10, 20, 30, one day, four, one day, 40, but it's very small.

It's tragic.

No information on comorbidities or age, but these are the types of things that didn't make sense.

Anyway, you get on the plane and we're told that we can't go to Fresno because there's no fuel, but everybody says there's fuel, but we have to top it off to the max, the max, fill every little inch of the gas tank.

Why?

Because there's no fuel in fresno well why does that affect us we're going to fresno because in the morning the flights leaving from fresno they won't have any fuel so supposedly we will burn half of it and then half of it will get the plane to wherever it's going to go without having to refuel its home port this is absurd so we watch the plane finally come in that we're going to get on after an hour or so of no service and then the storm the storm lifts and now we're talking two and a half hours later we all go on and then we were told, well, we have to put a lot of fuel in this plane, a lot.

So we start to fuel it again.

And then we look, notice that, oh my God, there's a baggage guy.

I thought we had the bags loaded 30 minutes.

It's one person.

And the pilot says, oh, they forgot they have more baggage.

So another hour.

And then we get into O'Hara when they unleash.

the planes again after a three-hour stoppage and it's total chaos.

And then we take off.

But then guess what?

Even though we topped off the tanks, even though we've got enough fuel probably to fly all the way to Fresno and back again, we've got to go to Denver because we've got to top off this two hours of fuel because there's no fuel in Fresno.

You put all of this together with crying children on the plane and weather and not enough labor.

And everybody is at a boiling point.

And then here's my point, Sammy.

Then I start to see these things that say unruly passengers more frequent.

yes because what are they told during this seven to eight to nine hour ordeal we'll be leaving shortly be patient next one an hour later we'll be leaving momentarily next one 45 minutes good to go in a few seconds next one 30 minutes a few minutes longer i know we understand but we really treasure your patronage and now finally 45 minutes later and you're all in this hot plane with children and the bathrooms are crowded and there's lines and and everybody's got to wear a mask and then they wonder no kidding there's people who have short tempers and then of course we have the weighing in of our CEOs why all this is happening to us in America and the airline system is absolutely broken and it's broken because A, the airlines after losing money during the lockdown, wanted to get every last drop of passenger blood on that plane.

So they scheduled all these flights without any worry that under Joe Biden's generous funding of state unemployment, you can make $21, $20 not working on the tarmac or the baggage handler when you might make 10 to 15.

So they're not working, A, and yet that doesn't seem to bother these CEOs.

And then when you say we're going to cancel Keystone and the frackers are going to be phased out in 10 years because we're going to go to the AOC model and we're going to shut down Anwar and there's going to be no new federal leasing of, and you talk talk talk down fossil fuels where you want want want want more of them then you're not going to get enough aviation fuel and if you do have aviation fuels the guys that drive the trucks are not going to work at the wage they can make in cash at home or if you're in california when you need water trucks i'm told a lot of the drivers were drafted to go fight fires and bring water to the fire you add it all up and the last thing we need is ed bastion of delta to weigh in on the illiberality of showing a ID to vote when you need one to get on his plane.

Or Mr.

Parker at American Airlines saying he's shocked, shocked, as if there's gambling in Casablanca, that you need a voter ID in Texas to vote.

This is unfair.

And I want to say to him, well, why don't you just do this first?

Editorialize to all of us, but just promise America that when a plane takes off, you point it in the right direction and it has fuel.

We can find gas at the gas station.

We don't take a friend in a car and say, I'm taking you to Los Angeles.

But by the way, on the way to Los Angeles, we're going to turn around and go up to San Francisco to find a gas pump.

People don't do that to each other.

They don't treat people like cattle or animals.

So, and then when you have finally United Airlines that cannot, cannot meet a deadline, cannot find the target, And I was on a United flight, I was on a Delta flight, and I was an American flight.

And that's why I'm focusing on these three CEOs.

When the United CEO says, in our commitment for diversity, equity, and inclusion, we're going to refashion our training program so 50% of this group will be admitted to the pilot training.

Well, what does that mean when they say that?

It's a positive, positives, not zero-sum game.

Oh, we're just going to change it.

That means 50% of the people under the prior.

meritocratic standards are not going to be adjudicated on that basis.

And that means that they're basically saying to us, it didn't matter that we had grade point averages or test scores or performance on a simulator or prior military piloting experience or navigational skill.

That doesn't matter.

And in fact, it hasn't mattered for 50 years.

We're going to just put people in our training program no matter what their background.

And guess what?

That's the way it's going to be.

And I'm going to tell you, Sammy, and I'll just end this rant.

Right now, we have millions of people who are angry with their planes are late.

They don't reach the destination.

I flew with a very nice guy, a engineer, wonderful guy, Mexican-American guy.

We talked.

We're from the same area.

I'm a little older than he is.

He's been a lifelong expertise engineer mechanic.

And he flew to Chicago with me.

And when I got back.

after a day and a half in Milwaukee, he was still in Chicago.

All of his flights were canceled.

His bags had been sent to Buffalo, and he was in the same clothes.

And they treated him like he was some kind of criminal.

I mean, the idea that you take a person and then you cancel his flights and then you can't book him back to his destination and there's no hotels in the region that are open, and then you just expect him to sit there in his clothes and wait, wait, wait till there's some type of connection is inhuman.

So, my advice to the airlines is: first, until you can guarantee services at a minimum level of, let's say, let's take some countries that we should emulate.

I would say Libya and Mexico.

If you can't emulate Libyan and Mexican air service, then shut down.

Second, do not talk about any woke issue until you can guarantee your planes have gas and you have employees.

And third, if you persist on this, this is a very scary thing to say, but it's macabre.

I am terrified.

that your airlines are going to get somebody killed because when you look out the window, I don't care what their rhetoric is, FFA standards here and we're committed to excellence there, all that rhetoric.

But when you look out that window and you see one person running at full speed after he's exhausted, guiding planes in and then he just jumps in, or you see somebody with no real practical experience trying to steer a mobile connector ramp so he can get off the plane, or you see one baggage person where you used to see three doing it.

Or you see one person at the counter when there used to be two or three.

And

you you think about how crowded and how underperformed these employees have to be because they're exhausted.

Somebody's going to get killed.

There's either going to be an accident on a runway, or there's going to be some kind of miscommunication in the air.

And that's very rare because we have these computerized,

almost pilotless airplanes that are so sophisticated, and the engines are so superb, and the electronics and the avionics are such that they tell us immediately when there's a potential problem.

But we are doing our best to screw up those safety measures and firewalls.

And somebody's going to get killed unless the airlines shut up, pay attention to business, and only offer flights that they can guarantee that their customers will reach in a reasonable amount of time.

If they can't do that, then they should shut it all down.

Well, I was going to ask why you think the CEOs who are clearly cost-benefit analysis are doing what they're doing, but I think we need to move from the deep airlines to the deep state.

So we can get to that today.

So, okay, so let's turn to the deep state.

And it has lots of meanings for everybody.

So what I wanted to do is just allow you to go ahead and explain what you think the nature of the deep state is.

We all sort of know Comey and Brennan and Clapper.

And the Russian collusion is probably the biggest example for the right, but even the left talks about things as the deep state.

So go ahead and tell us what your understanding is.

Well, there's a lot of synonyms for the bureaucracy, the red tape, the administrative state, the permanent state.

And what we're talking about in present terms are about two to three million federal employees and double or triple that number at the regional and local and state levels.

And these are people who out of the French bureaucratic tradition

Starting a lot, to be frank, under the Napoleonic reforms, there was an idea that the unelected, the people who had bureaus or desks,

could be in a scientific fashion efficient managers because they weren't going to go in and out of office.

They weren't patriot sunshine officials.

They weren't part-time legislature, the kind of people the founders were.

No, they were going to be experts, technocrats.

So we created these huge bureaucracies, and it really took off during the New Deal, the Civilian Conservation Cover, National Recovery Act, all these things, some of them very good, regulators, nuancers, warpers, refiners, whatever term we use.

But the problem is that what they do and who looks after them is very hard for a revolving door legislature or executive or even a court to monitor.

They are there permanently.

And with civil service protections and the idea that nobody ever gets fired and the idea that your race or your class or your gender is sort of a woke insurance against accountability in some cases makes it much, much harder.

And so they tend to favor progressive candidates because they all want to enlarge government.

They believe government can do a better job in the private sector.

They believe higher taxes mean that the wealthy are putting their money, disposable income supposedly, into better hands, etc., etc.

So these people then create these empires that make life very difficult.

And that's just rhetoric until I can give you an example.

So the FBI then decides that there is something called Russian collusion based on the fantasies and fables of Christopher Steele.

They pay him.

He lies to them.

They get in bed with the fusion GPS.

And the result is that we have 22 months of wasted $40 million inquiry to undermine an elected president and much of the elected Congress.

And then we find out that James Comey on 245 times our administrative state FBI can't remember.

And Robert Mueller has no idea of the Steele dossier, the genesis of his entire investigation.

And then we have all of these deep state people who John Brennan, James Clapper, Eric Kleinsmith, Lisa Page, Peter Strzok, they either break the law or they lie about it or they deliberately offer false testimonies when all of us will go to prison if the IRS says, hey, Victor, you said you made X amount of dollars, but we see here that you put X amount of dollars in your account and we can't synchronize.

What happened.

And if I start lying, I'm guilty of a felony.

And so these people are exempt from accountability and they regulate and they slow down the economy in a way that they were supposed to protect us.

And believe me, when I was at the Chicago airport, I did not see a lot of effective bureaucrats regulating that chaos.

I didn't hear anybody say, Well, the FFA have decided that it's unsafe the way it is now, that a plane takes off with a half a tank of fuel or can't find fuel or an airport can stay open when all of its fuel tanks are empty.

So they don't even do what they're supposed to do effectively.

And we see this another person, the highest paid bureaucrat in the United States is Anthony Fauci.

He's 80 years old and he has told us that masks were initially ineffective and silly, then very effective, but even more effective with two masks.

He's told us that herd immunity can be achieved at 60, 70, 80, 90 percent only to deprecate herd immunity.

During the election year, he said there was no chance that we'd ever see a mRNA, messenger RNA vaccination before 2021.

Of course, we found one that worked in mid-November and was given en masse by December.

He was wrong on it.

He told us he had no idea about gain and function research.

Of course, he funded it.

He didn't just fund it.

He funded it in Wuhan, China, of all places, the font of the COVID-19.

So they're all around us, these lifetime bureaucrats, and they always make arguments by authority and by their degrees, not on inductive empirical analysis.

You mentioned historically they're very common.

Versailles had, what, 16,000, 17,000 people out there under Louis XIV and beyond.

The Escarol during the Spanish Empire outside of Madrid.

Spanish clerks and overseers, they had to write permission to, you know, to blow your nose in the new world.

And we know that the word Byzantine is kind of unfair, but the group of people who surrounded what is now the top Capi Museum area, the Ottomans inherited it, but that huge apparatus from Justinian really started it in full afterwards became ponderous.

And the Ottomans had a very problematic, deep state.

Do we have any sources that address like what they thought needed to be done or should be done?

Or do we just have sources?

I don't think we should go there I don't know maybe Procopius'

secret history

exactly Procopius says at one point the blues and the greens and all of the other cliques remember what they were these were people like the Oakland Raiders or the 49ers fans that were

unions,

they were political activists, and they were bureaucrats.

They could shut down the government and they were obstructing change, like the compilation of the Justinian Law Digest, or the desire to build Hagia Sophia

or to make a Hippodrome, because they had enormous demands on the treasury.

So they just put them all in the Hippodrome and they close the doors and they unleash the two great military minds of the Byzantine Empire, Narsus and Belisars, and they kill them.

Yeah, but does Procopius have any suggestion even of what should have been done done instead or is he just reporting on what did happen?

He's more or less reporting on what did happen.

Yeah, if you look at Bernald Diaz, the history of the conquest of New Spain, and you look at Navarez and Cortez and you see all of these, he's coming from Cuba and of course Cortez is coming from Spain and you have all of these rivalries and who has jurisdiction in Mexico and who's going to arrest whom and who's going to do this.

It's all based on this bureaucratic infighting that's slowing down what they want to do.

And finally, of course, Cortez, in Gordian knot fashion, just burns his ships and says to Navarez's people who came to arrest him, I don't have enough people to take Mexico City, but we're going to take it.

You better join us.

There's a lot of money there.

And then he tells the priest, you can get a lot of souls to convert.

I'm not condoning any of this.

I'm just telling you that it's a man of action.

He decided to cut the Gordian knot and go ahead and do it.

But the Spanish Empire fell down, fell apart because of this cumbersome oversight, I think.

Yeah, but he was also far enough away from the deep state to do that kind of thing and maybe get away with it, but none of us really are.

We're all caught with the DMV and the IRS and the GSA, you know.

No, the problem, I think the best way to sum up or define the deep state is created, maintained, and fueled by elite ideologues who are are never subject to the consequences of their own ideology.

So when we talk about deep state

and you ask a Nancy Pelosi, she will tell you it's wonderful.

It's necessary for equity and equality of result.

But if you say to Nancy Pelosi, we have an open border, we're busing everybody, they're not tested from COVID, you've got a beautiful home in Napa and that neighborhood is underpopulated.

We want to bring on 400 people off on the border to pitch tents outside your home.

Or you've got a beautiful Pacific Heights home.

There's no reason why we can't have a homeless shelter right next to it.

Or if we said to Stanford University where I work, which is a hotbed of progressive thought, I don't know, you've got three or 4,000 vacant rooms.

They're not going to be occupied, if at all, till September 1st, why don't we bust people in there?

There's legal care, there's medical care on campus.

Wonderful solution.

Or if we said to Joe Biden, you know, You've got a lot of nice homes, you and Bernie Sanders, let's just use one of them.

Because, you know, given the fact fact that you're stopping all evictions, you don't really believe the landlord has a legal title, full title to the use of his property, and given that you're giving incentives for people not to go to work,

and given that you're going to forgive student loans, and you don't really feel that people have to pay things back, I think you should, in the spirit of that critique of capitalism, open up your home to people that need your help.

But it never works that way.

Never, never, never, never, never works that way.

I think that's very important because the whole essence of this woke movement, and I can reduce it down to a simple proposition, it is elite people, either wealthy people, elite by money or inheritance, or wealthy people by professional expertise, so-called, or wealthy people by influence.

And they live lives that nobody has any idea about.

They're so privileged and they feel terrible about it and they feel that they're inauthentic and they feel their communities will find them counterrevolutionary or targeted.

So they become the avatars and the engines of these revolutionary woke changes with, again, with the presumption that they have the money and the influence to get around them.

So we're all supposed to wear masks.

We're all supposed to, even if we're vaccinated, social distance and you go to the Obama's party and what?

huge bash by multi-millionaires at Martha's Vineyard and it's a super spreader event and we're told you're not supposed to do that.

And then you look at Obama's outfit he has on, and yet he comes out occasionally with his megaphone and says, you know, my child might be in danger from, you know, i.e.

an alt-right person.

Or you look at Oprah, or you look at Megan Markle, or you look at Hillary Clinton, or you look at Bill Gates, or you look at Al Gore, or you look at all of these people that yell at us and yell at us and yell at us, and yet they violate the very tenets.

And that's woke.

Why would we believe that JC and Beyonce have any credibility to tell us what life is like?

Now maybe they came from unfortunate circumstances but that's ancient history.

And so I think everybody, whether it was getting rid of Cuomo, Democrats would have never gotten rid of Cuomo.

There's nothing he did in their calculus that was wrong in the sense that political considerations trumped their so-called consistency on women's issues.

He violated the dignity of every woman he came across, but they didn't care about that because they thought he was an effective anti-Trump spokesperson.

Same thing with Gavin Newsom.

He was untouchable.

Now there's no more Cuomo, and I think Gavin Newsom will be recalled.

Why?

Because there is a mass pushback, bigger than the Tea Party, bigger than the silent majority of the 1960s and 70s.

It's starting to say, I am sick of this.

I'm sick of the inflation.

I'm sick of the open border.

I am sick of AOC's rants about fuel.

I'm sick of $5 gas.

I'm sick of lumber at $70 a sheet of plywood.

I'm sick at COVID on yes on Monday, no on Tuesday.

Vaccinations are great, maybe great, maybe sometimes great.

I'm sick of the disinformation.

I'm sick of critical race theory.

I'm sick of the idea that you have to be racist to stop racism.

You have to discriminate to stop discrimination.

I'm sick of very wealthy people of all races.

trying to find victim status.

And it's starting to manifest itself.

And I think there's a good chance that Gavin newson believe it or not will be recalled so i want to ask you just one more thing though on this deep state that's hard question and that is we have people who have in the deep state who have committed felonies so just take comey for example and in fact he said they have evidence that he leaked classified information and then he said he leaked classified information and yet we don't see any indictments and that's probably the biggest frustration for me and maybe your listeners too well yes but remember what they say they always

if you're a person like dinesh d'Souza who wanted to contribute to a political candidate who lost and violated what had been technicalities that was wrong to do what he did and that was divide his contribution among other people so that they could get into i think the limit's 2500

well they put him in prison for that When James Comey had four private, that's four or five private conversations with the president of the United States and went out and memorialized them on FBI equipment.

And then he leaked them to a person in the media or connected to the media as sort of his parachute or insurance policy.

Then what did the deep state do?

They said, well, we're not sure that those were classified rather than just confidential.

Think of that, a private conversation with the President of the United States with the top director of the FBI, and he memorialized it, and then he did not try to catalog it.

He just post facto said it wasn't classified, so therefore I didn't break the law.

So they always find a legal excuse.

There's always a lawyer like an Eric Klein Smith or the dream team, all-stars, hunter-killer team of Robert Mueller that can bend and warp the law on spec or a federal judge that will do that.

That's an ideologue and not an empiricist.

The second thing is, and finally, on that question,

it's sort of what happened to John Durham?

Did he ever exist?

Was he a figment of of our imaginations?

Did we wake up one day and say, remember John Durham, that guy with a grim look on his face that kind of stood next to bar?

And we were told, we're going to come to a conclusion in March 2020.

And then the left said, how dare you do that during election year?

And you're thinking, well, we're riding right along until August.

And then that was over.

Now we're into 2021.

And we know that even if John Durham was to come back and say, James Comey lied under oath, and the IG was right that Andrew McCabe on four times misled people under oath, under oath.

And Eric Kleinsmith committed a serious felony and he should have done this.

And he was

hand slapped.

It wouldn't matter, I don't think, because I think the Biden Justice Department would not prosecute any findings at Durham.

And I'm not sure what his status is.

We keep seeing he's an independent counsel, but does that mean that he's really, if he does find improprieties and illegalities, that he's going to on his own with his staff start issuing indictments?

I don't think so.

So your answer seems to be that it just depends upon the political party that's in.

It's a little bit deeper than that, I think, Sammy.

I think what we need to understand is there are no saints in politics.

And I don't believe that Donald Trump is any more lawful than Joe Biden necessarily, but I do believe he acted more lawfully because every moment he sneezed, every moment he coughed, he was under constant examination from a hostile press and there was deterrence.

He knew that if he did this or did that, they were going to pounce on him.

So he had people advising him.

He thought that.

Joe Biden had the opposite incentives.

He was told, assured, that whatever he said, if he walked up to a speaker and allegedly said, I just wiped my butt, or he ate a piece of egg that was stuck on his chin, They would think that was brilliant.

He could say anything.

He could do anything.

We right now have his son who confessed on camera that he was taping, that he can't account for these laptops.

There were hunters at the computer store.

There was another one lost.

There was one lost with a Russian prostitute, Ukrainian prostitute, connected some way with Russian intelligence.

And these, we know from the transmission and the communications on these laptops that he refers to his own father as vice president, as the big guy, as Mr.

10%.

And he's very candid about the drugs he takes, the sex he has.

He says he goes through gazillions of money.

Well, under a transparent and self-critical society, some person in the IRS would say, oh,

right there.

I'm going to subpoena him and I'm going to ask him to produce all of his credit card accounts, all of his checking, all of his associates' checking.

And I want to see how much he spent.

And then I want to see where is the evidence for the income for that.

And did he report it all?

And then I want to see where the money went to every member of the Biden family.

And when Joe Biden brags about his big home and his swimming pool, I want to square that with the salary that he was earning from the government until he purchased that.

That's what they do with Donald Trump.

So the point is, Donald Trump may or may not want to skip corners.

We find out that they arrested his accountant for suggesting that that some of the perks that he got, like freak tuition, he didn't report, i.e., like most faculty members at the IV League.

Okay, we're going to go, I have no problem with that.

That's the standard, but that's not the standard.

And then when it's not the standard, that creates and embolds laxity.

So the left does not have a watchdog press.

And you can see what it did to Andrew Cuomo.

The more that he lied about the long-term facilities and the people who were dying, the more that he lied about destroying the dignity of the women around whom he operated, the more he expected the press that gave him what, an Emmy award for his press conferences to lie and make excuses for.

Just like Harvey Weinstein knew that.

Yeah.

That's what happens when you don't have a diligent press.

You have, you know, mice as far as leftist and then tigers as far as people who are conservative.

Yeah.

And you seem to be bringing me around and be closing this off here to the question that I shied away from originally, which was the deep airlines.

And you almost really explained what their cost-benefit analysis is, is that the left and the left agenda is going to, as you've often said, buy them indulgences with this press.

And so better do that than worry about complaining that the government has made the gas situation impossible and the employment situation impossible, right?

So your CEOs are not out there complaining about Joe Biden's policies.

They've cost-benefited

analyzed this whole thing you're talking about and said, let's just get out there and talk about this crazy left agenda, this woke culture.

It's just sad.

That's a very good point about cost-benefit analyses, because that's what guides and directs a CEO.

And what they mean by that is,

let me see if we put people, as many people people we can in planes, even though we know that we can't guarantee sufficient aviation fuel supplies, and even if we know that we don't have enough employees to maintain standards of travel and service that we had prior to COVID, it's still a win-win situation because the odds are that they still want to fly because they've been suffering from a year and a half in their apartments and homes.

They want to get out and they love to travel and there's a lot of money to be made.

And with these sophisticated jets and computer systems, there's not any likely, we think that there's going to be a crash.

There's going to be slowdowns.

There's going to be inconveniences.

There's going to be all sorts of disasters, which I described.

But in a cost-benefit analysis, we can keep saying we're here to save you and we're here to help you and we're going to give you the top all that rhetoric.

And that's why they do what they're doing.

But on the other hand, they are terrified that Georgia, which is the headquarters of Delta, or in Texas, the headquarters of American, that a woke person on Facebook or Twitter or a politician of the squad will say, you're a racist.

You're the biggest employer in this particular area and you're a member of the community and you haven't said anything about the racism of producing an ID.

And they say, hmm, let me think about this.

Is there anybody in the right or conservatives saying, if you dare say that producing an ID in the fashion that all drivers do when stopped or when people do when casting checks or everybody does to get onto Mr.

Bastion's land, are they going to get mad?

No, they're live and let live.

Conservatives are busy.

They're all caught up and hung up on their families and traditions and their jobs.

And they don't really...

habituate Twitter to the same degree.

They're not going to say a word.

And they'd still want to fly.

So screw them.

We're going to go out and make all of these empty, loud gestures.

And sometimes they're not empty in the case of United Training Program.

And we're going to virtue signal and we're going to performance art, if I can make that noun into a verb.

And we're going to do all of this because it makes good business sense.

And then, you know, because they have no ideology, I don't have a problem.

Corporations shouldn't, they will start to pivot when enough people say, I'm never going to fly United or Delta or American.

But then They're outsmarting us.

They're going to say, well, where the hell are you going to fly then?

Frontier Airlines?

Try it sometime.

So they are the doppelganger of social media.

You don't like Facebook.

You don't like Google.

You don't like Amazon.

You don't like Twitter?

Where are you going to go?

Parlay?

And guess what?

If you dare do that, we're going to shut it down.

We're going to have a night of the long knives.

You're going to wake up one morning and all your apps and connections to it don't exist any longer.

And so that...

is what monopolies do and the airlines have about three to four large airlines and they have a monopoly and all the ceos

sound the same and what the United States is waiting for is one brave voice in the wilderness who says, I don't care.

And my airline is devoted first to you, the passenger, second, to my employees and make sure they're well compensated, they're well treated, and they can do their jobs without interference of ideology or anything else.

And three, I'm devoted to the transportation safe

system of the United States.

And all of these other issues are very important to a lot of people, but I don't have time or the resources to get in and to be an editorialization machine for every single one of them.

And when that happens, I think he would be surprised or she would at the public support that would meet them.

I mean, got to remember, we're in not just Jacobin times.

We're in crazy times.

We're kind of like the Soviet show trials of the late 1930s.

When students at the University of Wisconsin look around their campus and say, well, we got rid of that guy and we changed that name and they gave in to us on that class and they're puffed up and somebody says, I don't really want to go take my physics class anymore.

And somebody says, you know, it's a drag to study Latin all day.

And they think, oh, look at that rock over there.

Check that out.

And so they go and they study and study and study and study and study and they find out, you know.

What is it, 80 years ago, somebody called the rock with an N-word?

Oh, the rock is racist.

Let's take, get a crane and demand you take that rock out.

And then they think, I've never met an administrator that wouldn't bend.

All you got to do is go to his office, threaten him, and they want their job more than they care about justice or logic or sanity.

And they remove the rock.

If you're in a system like that, then you can see why CEOs say, I'm not going to fight it.

Yeah, exactly.

So I think that what you're saying then to me is that people need to start to speak out.

They need to stop patronizing businesses where this rhetoric is coming from, and they need to join parlay.

Is that correct?

Yes, it is.

And I would say that I know Rebecca Mercer, who's one of the principal owners, and so I am not unbiased.

I've known her for 15 years, and I can tell you that most of what's written about her, if not all, is inaccurate and unfair.

But she's not into making parlay the biggest social media conglomerate in the world that monopolize.

She's just interested in one thing, and that's not her primary source of income.

It's not her primary interest.

Actually,

I can't speak for.

I haven't asked her that, but I'm assuming that she wants people to be able to go somewhere and within reasonable limits, not advocating violence or horrific things or rampant race, within reasonable limits to communicate openly and honestly without a censor.

And that you can't do that.

And they feel that if people can do that with

parlay or any of these other alternate media sources, substack, then we've got to destroy them.

We either got to buy them out or we got to tie them up in court or we've got to band together and sue them and run them out of town by bankruptcy.

And that's what they're doing.

And the funny thing about it, the irony is we've seen it all before.

This is what built the country.

It wasn't completely bad, I suppose.

This is what Rockefeller did with Standard Oil.

This is what Carnegie did and J.P.

Morgan did in the terms of finance and steel.

You find find a process that you do very well.

You buy up your competitors.

You're willing to take a loss or hit for a while to make sure that the people who can't afford that go broke.

You buy them out with offers they can't refuse.

You vertically integrate and you make more money than Croissus.

And then when you're finally done with it all and you stifle competition, and you start to feel kind of bad about it.

So you set up a foundation and you fund liberal progressive causes as medieval penance.

And that's what they all do.

That's what Bill Gates is doing.

That's what Mark Zuckerberg, he feels so bad that he's worth $160 billion and he's destroyed all the competition, that he's going to give $500 million in the last election to make sure that election officials can adopt his principles and particular precincts of how we should vote and how that vote should be tabulated.

All right.

Well, Victor, we're at the end here.

I'd like to thank you for all that.

What a great discussion of the deep state and maybe some of the things things that we can do about it.

I like that we ended on an optimistic note again.

So, I would like to thank all the listeners.

Be sure to check out VictorHansen.com, Victor's new revised website.

It looks absolutely stunning and has some nice features to it.

And this is Victor Davis Hansen and Sammy Wink signing off.