The Traditionalist: All the Lies and Pretense

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Welcome, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show, the the traditionalist.

The namesake of this show is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

He's also the Wayne and Marsha Busk Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor Davis Hansen is many things.

Farmer, classicist, military historian, husband, grandfather, father.

He's also an essayist at American Greatness.

He is the editorial guru.

I don't know if that's the official title, but he is the boss of the Hoover Institution's Institution's very important online journal, Strategica.

Check it out at Hoover.

Also check out Victor Hanson, S-O-N, VictorHanson.com.

That's his website, Private Papers.

And when you go there, you'll find a treasure trove of original stuff.

You're not going to find it anywhere else.

I also encourage you to go there to find the link to Victor's forthcoming new.

book.

It's coming out in October.

It's going to be very important.

Sure, it's going to be a bestseller.

It's called The Dying Citizen.

I'm Jack Fowler.

I'm the former publisher of National Review, the co-host.

I'm also the director of American Philanthropic's Center for Civil Society.

Victor, I do want to say thank you that you, when I've given my title, you've never laughed at the association of my name.

I haven't said Catholic monarchist in residence either.

True, true.

Well, we'll forgive you for that.

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Victor, we got a lot, a lot, a lot to talk about today.

There's so much happening on this episode of The Traditionalists, which we're recording on June 11th, 2021.

You have two important pieces in American greatness.

One is titled The Lethal Wages of Trump Derangement Madness.

That's your big essay.

And then the smaller piece is, This Isn't Your Father's Left-Wing Revolution.

We have Kamala Harris going to Guatemala and kind of screwing up.

We have Joe Biden now in England for the G7 summit.

We'd like to get your take on these foreign policy efforts by the two top people in this administration.

We have inflation.

Thank you, Joe Biden.

Anthony Fauci says, essentially, I am science.

Cuckoo Kachu.

There's a really good piece.

Victor, you raised it.

And so we're going to talk about it on the show that a guy named Dave Marcus.

has written for Fox, Fox's website.

And he's talking about the third wave, the new third, just born wave, the future of conservatism.

I'd like to get Victor's take on that.

What else do we have?

Omar, Congresswoman Omar, attacks Israel and the United States.

She's counterattacked by a dozen Jewish Democrat members of Congress, and she counters the counterattack.

So let's look into what she's up to.

Another lie.

has been exposed for being bogus.

Donald Trump cleared out Lafayette Park last June for a photo op.

Just not true.

But Victor, let's begin today's podcast with something I didn't put on the list of things we're going to be talking about.

And that's this Jeffrey Toobin lunacy.

So, you know, quickly

he was caught in a Zoom call with colleagues

performing Onanism.

I think that might be the theological term.

But yesterday he was back on CNN with

getting, I don't know, has he been rehabilitated?

Our friend Megan Kelly tweeted yesterday that if a woman had been caught doing what Jeffrey Toobin had done, there's no way in hell, no way in hell she would have been rehabilitated and back on TV in short, short order.

You know, Brian Williams lies his pants off.

He goes, I don't know where he goes for a little time, probably some spa.

And then, you know, he's got a show on again.

Toobin does this.

He's rehabilitated.

Victor, what do you think, if anything, of this?

Well, in the general cosmic sense, it really, when all of us say, how can people believe this stuff?

This woke stuff, this left-wing craziness.

And the answer is they don't need to believe it.

It's just like you and I going into the insurance office and buying insurance policy.

And that's what wokeism or leftism or whatever you want to call this is.

So when Jeffrey Toobin is a woke New Yorker, writer, CNN, left-wing guy, then he can attack Kavanaugh and he's useful for this agenda.

Then you get insurance against this stuff.

And that's why, you know, Joe Biden can go around the country and lectures on the N-word and then, you know, racist this and racist that when his own son is,

you know, emailing just horrific

racist

commentary and using the N-word.

That's the general thing you come away, but I don't quite believe him when he said it was an accident.

I don't think he goes, a person goes onto a Zoom.

There's 24 hours in the day, Jack.

And if you want to masturbate, if that's what he wants to do, you don't just pick a one particular time when you know there are going to be younger women on that call who are going to be looking at you.

Because that's a sign of an exhibitionist and a narcissist that really is so deluded that he thinks, given his godhead, that somebody is going to look at that, i.e., a young woman, and be so impressed, they're going to call him up or text him and say, hey.

And that's how sick and deranged he is.

And

so remember, in this council culture, the left has created, they destroy people's businesses.

They destroy people's careers.

They destroy people's livelihoods on a tweet 10 years ago, not something like this.

So, yeah, I mean, he took out woke insurance, and then he got on TV, and he lied, and he said that he didn't know the Zoom camera was on.

And then he's...

He's been very miserable.

And of course, when these leftists give these apologies, within a nanosecond, it becomes all about themselves.

So what did he say?

Oh, I suffered and it was so miserable and I had to write a book.

And oh, look at this.

But, you know,

they gave me another chance.

And, you know, I don't, you know, well, he should come down to Bakersfield and Fresno or see how people live and what is real melodrama and tragedy, not this psychodrama.

Yeah, he was kind of a...

deplorable guy without the insight.

Yeah, he was.

Absolutely.

I mean, he remember that Jeff Greenfield's daughter was a colleague of his, Jeff Greenfield, the sort of noted and distinguished writer on the left who all of us read when we were younger.

And his

daughter had an affair with a married Jeffrey Tubin, was pregnant.

And then he sort of strong-armed her to get an abortion.

When she refused to do that, he claimed that he wasn't the father and wouldn't pay child support.

It ended up in court, in which his legal genius couldn't overcome the facts, and he lost, or he was forced to pay.

So he, when he says that they've gone through my whole career and they didn't find anything else, I don't quite believe that.

I think there's a lot of stuff there, but they don't rise to the occasion.

I don't want to use that word, rise to the occasion, but

I couldn't resist.

Okay,

well,

let's switch to let's pick Anthony Fauci.

I mean, we talk about him every week.

So, this week, he responded to a criticism.

I think it was from

Senator Black.

I'm I'm from Tennessee.

I'm drawing a blank as I usually do.

Anyway, his response essentially was talking to CNBC, Chuck Todd.

If you attack me, you are attacking science.

I don't think those were the exact words, but pretty damn close.

And Victor, you mentioned narcissism.

I don't know.

That seems pretty textbook to me.

What do you think about Anthony Fauci this week that maybe you haven't thought previous weeks?

Yeah, he was like Louis XIV wasn't the state is me.

I'm the state.

I'm science.

And of course,

he was smarter by half.

We start with the fundamental, I use the word of the left, existential problem Fauxi always had.

And that was when this whole thing started in China, he knew that it was illegal and it had been to finance gain of function research.

to enhance viral toxicity, lethality, transmissibility.

Okay.

And there had never really been any gain-of-function virus that showed tangible benefits to the medical community.

At least the defenders of that research couldn't make that argument.

Right.

So, what did he do?

He funneled it to Dr.

Dask and then the Echo Health people, maybe six million.

And by the way, they got over 100 million in various government contracts.

And then, with the foreknowledge, apparently, that they were funneling it to Bat Lady and the Wuhan gain of function research going on at that level for virology lab okay that was known jack right at the beginning January

and there was a little leak and anybody who who put up antenna and transmitted that story was considered a nut a creep a conspiracy and he he put a a damper on that and then if you think about that

that story, I think you can calibrate all of the iterations of Dr.

Fauci.

In other words, at the very beginning, his narrative was: well, this is nothing.

Don't put your eye over there at Wuhan.

It's nothing.

It's not transmissible.

And then when

you've got to trust the WHO, they've already come out.

China's a partner.

Don't worry.

And then when it started to be, that narrative was no longer tenable is, well, I don't know if we want to go to all this trouble, the lockdown and masks, because masks, you know, and then when that narrative is no longer tenable,

then it was, oh my God, this thing is going to get out of control.

If it's out of control, then there might, you know, trace my fingerprints back to where

I signed that grant.

So then it was, oh, wow, masks are really important.

And we've got to get two masks, and we've got to lock down.

And we're going to,

this thing's going to stop.

And then it was Donald Trump.

So then Falci thought, you know what?

I can regain Fiday's and credibility.

I'll be the non-Trump advisor, the anti-Trump.

So he kind of triangulated and stabbed Trump in the back all the time.

He went to Fox.

He went to CNN.

And then as soon as Trump lost,

the mask came off and he revealed who he really was.

But this whole charade was an effort to suppress the fact of this horrific truth.

Because, you know, we're talking very casually about this, Jack, and our listeners are, you know, they know the story.

But if you just...

came from Mars and you were an alien and you just looked at that, somebody somewhere would say, wait a minute, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which was the lead investigatory federal bureaucracy that set policy on this epidemic, the head of that had approved funding from the U.S.

government through a firewall to this laboratory, which this virus first took its toll and then denied that that virus laboratory was the source or the font of this epidemic.

Is that what you're trying to tell us?

Because if you, again, if you strip away all of this, somebody somewhere is going to make the argument, if the United States had not enhanced and funded this crazy bat lady and her team, then maybe they wouldn't have had this virus.

And if that were to be true, you can see where it's going to lead.

And that's why he's

saying, you know, he's on TV non-stop.

He's panicking.

He's 80 years old now.

He doesn't have have a lot of time to get the narrative.

And all of a sudden, he went from a national icon, folk curl, the anti-Trump rationalist, and, you know, and he helped demonize and destroy somebody who was a very good advisor to Donald Trump, Scott Atlas, and who's a colleague of mine in Hoover.

And whose advice about lockdowns and the pandemic are being shown after a torture of six months, they've been shown to be correct.

So he really tried to destroy a lot of people's career.

And now suddenly that Ubris has earned him nemesis.

And I don't know what the dimensions or the final consequences will be of this story, but if it is verified that he knowingly gave U.S.

money and routed it through EchoHell,

and that money ended up enhancing viruses in China, and then he denied it.

both under oath, in congressional testimony, and in emails to colleagues.

And he was shown in emails to be frantic to get the narrative down.

And he enlisted people to sign petitions or to come forward.

Then he's in big trouble, I think.

And I don't mean, just mean big trouble in the sense of a public relations disaster, big trouble legally.

Well, Victor, let's move on yet, but you just mentioned untenable narratives.

And we have yet another narrative that proved untenable, bogus a lie.

And that was the Lafayette Park Fracas from, I think it was the end of June or early July last year with the story that predominated in the media was that Donald Trump essentially got federal law enforcement goons to bully protesters to clear the park for a photo op.

It just was not the case.

Victor, would you like to talk about this?

Yeah, it's one of these, it joins this

this catalog now, Jack.

We've had the Wuhan lab narrative that turned out to be false, that it was of an animal origins of the virus because Donald Trump said the opposite.

And then we had the hydroxychloroquine completely useless because Donald Trump said that it had utility and that's been debunked, I think.

There's a lot of studies that have come out showing that it does have efficacy.

And then we had the Russian collusion narrative hoax and that That was a product of Donald Trump

opposing these crazy hoax.

So now we have this idea that he deliberately militarized the Capitol to prepare his photo op with the Bible and all of that following the burning of the St.

John's Episcopal Church.

And that was all over the, and it really resonated, Jack, because it was not just he had a photo op,

but that he was going to bring in federal troops.

and he was going to militarize and we had all of these outraged generals, you remember?

I won't mention all of their names because some of them I work with, but they all said things like, this is a landmark event that he has destroyed the separation between the military and the civilian control.

And he deliberately manipulated our

finest men in uniform so that he could have a photo.

Well, that was a complete lie.

So what I'm getting at, Jack, is: okay, it's a complete lie.

So where are we there?

I tuned in to MSNBC and CNN last night, and did they say we're sorry?

No.

You know what they said?

They said, well, the inspector general must be pro-Trump, and he's not asking the right people.

And so they don't even accept that this was a lie that they promulgated.

Have we had any military officer, retired officer, any of them, who have said, I was mistaken.

I said that Trump was militarizing law enforcement so that he could have a calm to take advantage and manipulate the situation to divide us by having a photo op.

That was untrue.

Or have they said, if we're going to criticize Trump for even considering the use of federal troops in places like Minneapolis or Seattle, then by all fairness, I must also condemn the use of 30,000 troops following a much smaller riot in the Capitol VI

so-called assault on the Capitol.

Has any of them said that?

No.

Have any of our intelligence community said, you know, during the campaign, we came out and we signed a petition saying that Hunter laptops,

the discovery of Hunter Biden's laptop was a Russian disinformation campaign, and we did it with a wink and nod that Trump was behind it, or Rudy Giuliani, et cetera.

We are sorry, that is an authentic laptop, and Hunter will not deny what's on.

Does any of them said that?

No.

So if you're not going to correct a lie and the narrative has no consequences for your career, then you're back into Jeffrey Toobin.

This is a journalistic masturbatory counterpart to what Toobin actually did.

And there's no consequences for it.

And yet, as you said with Toobin, if any, you quoted Megan Kelly,

and she knows and you know that if

If anybody had said the opposite about Joe Biden and completely fabricated four or five narratives that

ate up $40 million in 22 months in the Robert Mueller investigation or endangered, endangered our response to the COVID crisis or the treatment of people suffering from COVID or endangered the relationship between the military and the civilian population, then

I don't know, they would probably, they would be disgraced.

They'd be over with.

That would be the end of it if the left had their way.

So it's very disturbing because I get up some morning, I think maybe you do too, and you think, wait a minute, this is the United States.

Why are people in solitary confinement, essentially, as Julie Kelly's written after the Capitol Riot, when there was no arms insurrection, nobody died violently except a 14-year military veteran who was shot while she was on arm by an officer that the Capitol Police will not release his or her name, nor will they release release thousands of hours of video.

And why is that?

When 14,000 people were arrested in the greatest series of riots in U.S.

history, and most of them were let go and very few were indicted, and I don't think we've had any convictions.

And so when you look at this and then this asymmetrical media, you think, wow.

You know, George Orwell was a novelist.

That was just something that he thought up,

or that was the Soviet Union.

It couldn't happen here, but it's incrementally, insidiously happening.

And I think all of us know now that if we say certain words that are offensive, or we do certain things the left doesn't like, that the military, industrial, intelligence, political apparatus has a way of destroying a person's life.

And that's deterrent.

It's a deterrent they're using.

Well, let's get on that point then, Victor.

I was going to talk about it a little later, but you have your piece of American Greatness

titled This Isn't Your Father's Left-Wing Revolution.

I want to remind folks, go to the American Greatness website if you want to read this or any other piece.

Victor writes it twice a week.

The subtitle of this piece is, Today's Revolutionaries Aren't Fighting the Man.

They are the man.

And let me just read the end of this, Victor.

And if you want to back into what you wrote throughout the piece, you wrote here, you write here, our revolutionaries hate dissent.

They destroy any who question their media spun hoaxes like Russian collusion, the bad origin of COVID-19, or the idea that Hunter Biden's laptop was a Russian plant.

Truth is their enemy and fear is their weapon.

60s paranoid revolutionaries warned about

George Orwell's 1984, but our revolutionaries are 1984.

While this elitist leftist revolution is more dangerous, than its sloppy 1960s predecessor.

It is also more vulnerable given its obnoxious top-heavy apparatus.

But only if the proverbial people finally say to their madness, enough is enough.

Victor, tell us why this revolution is not our father's left-wing revolution.

You know, I was in high school and I graduated from high school in 1971, and then I went to UC Santa Cruz.

And I watched this, you know, from a rural high school.

There wasn't much of it here in Central California, but I watched it on television or I was advised about it by my parents or I had an older brother who was a little bit more aware of things but it was a cultural mouse revolution as I wrote it had everything between get rid of your old plastic glasses and put on wire rims grow your hair long wear tie-dye don't shave your legs if you're a woman don't wear a bra don't wear a petouli oil not regular perfume uh

say the f word and i remember being a class in uc santa cruz where a person passed wind and everybody laughed and said, Well, that's what we do now and go barefooted.

Okay.

But it was sort of a, as I said, a sloppy, it wasn't very well organized.

Not to say that there wasn't SDS murderers and weathermen murderers, but they were a small minority.

Most of the people were just along for the good time ride.

And when we started getting lottery, when I turned 18, I got a lottery number.

And when I, later in the year, I think it was in 72, they abolished the the draft.

When they did, when they started giving lottery numbers and people,

a half of the protest movement knew they would never go.

And then when they quickly then ended the draft, that whole movement collapsed.

It really did.

And then the oil embargo of 73 and the economy.

So it wasn't a serious revolution.

And it was sort of a live and let live, let it all hang out, do your own thing, drop out, tune in, turn on.

But this thing is different.

These are serious Maoists.

And as I wrote in the piece, in that revolution of the 60s, people were marching on the Pentagon.

They weren't inside the Pentagon, setting Korean-like brainwashing sessions.

In that revolution,

they were trying to say, you know, F the police from the free speech area at Berkeley or Stanford or Harvard or Yale.

They weren't the administrators saying, don't dare use free speech as they are now.

So, and they were the ones that were saying, you know, love the one you're with.

They were not the one that said, you know, he winked at me a different way.

And that was a sexual harassment moment.

They weren't Victorian.

And

so what I'm getting at is that these revolutionaries were not very serious people.

But this time around, they are the establishment.

And as I said before, they've run the corporate boardrooms, as we saw with Coca-Cola and Disney and Delta.

They run Silicon Valley.

As you can see, they can block the President of the United States from expressing an idea.

They don't do that with the bloodthirsty leaders of Hamas and Iran, but they do it with the ex-president.

They can control the way we communicate.

They control the way that we search on Google.

They monopolize professional sports.

They have a monolithic message that all the athletes parrot every time

they suit up for a game.

They control the content of television and movies and even commercials.

They control Wall Street.

I think everybody in Wall Street realizes that you have to be pretty liberal and you have to mouth certain platitudes.

I could go on and foundations, most of the great foundations in terms of endowment are all left-wing.

So these are the revolutionaries.

So people are saying, well, why are they doing that then?

Well, they're doing that.

And part of them, half of them are doing it because they're afraid that Robespierre and the Committee on

Public Safety is going to come after them, the woke police.

But the other feels that I got so much money, I got so much prestige that every once in a while I'll say I have honor and white privilege if I happen to be a white person or if I happen to be a minority person, I'll have to say, I really suffered here or there was this woman who didn't really understand that she committed a microaggression against me.

And they feel that they have the power, the influence, and the latitude to get around the consequences of their own ideology.

No better example, Jack, Jack, than the Obamas.

So they're worth about $100 million.

They have this Colorama Mansion in Washington, this $15 million Martha Vineyard Seaside Estate.

And every once in a while, they venture out of their castle and say, this is a racist, horrible country.

My kids are in danger of all these white races running around.

And then they go back in.

as if they've done their duty and that nobody's, you know, nobody will ever get into their estate.

Remember that.

We really do have defunded and underfunded the police.

There's enough security around the Martha Vineyard estate that they're not going to live the consequences of their own advocacy.

Well, Victor, let's move on to

a new controversy that bubbled up this past week.

And again, we're recording on June 11th.

So on Monday, which would probably be the 7th,

Elena, however, Congresswoman Omar,

she says her first name, apologize, from Minnesota, she got into a contretemp with Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.

And I'm reading from a news report here right now.

And in the actual exchange, Ms.

Omar pressed for an investigation of human rights abuses, both by Israeli security forces and by Hamas, but on Twitter, she seemed to compare Israel and the United States, not only to Hamas, considered a terrorist group by the State Department, but also to the Taliban.

Here's what she tweeted.

We must have the same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity.

We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban.

Well, Victor, that did not go over well with some of her Democrat colleagues.

And within a day or two, a dozen Jewish members of the House, Democrats all, put out this short statement.

Equating the United States and Israel to Hamas and the Taliban is as offensive as it is misguided.

Ignoring the differences between democracies governed by the rule of law and contemptible organizations that engage in terrorism, at best, discredits one's intended argument and, at worst, reflects deep-seated prejudice.

The United States and Israel are imperfect and, like all democracies, at times deserving of critique.

But false equivalencies give cover to terrorist groups.

We urge Congresswoman Omar to clarify her words, placing the U.S.

and Israel in the same category as Hamas and the Taliban.

So that was the Volley.

And here's the return Volley, Victor, and then we'll have you please

give us your thoughts on all this.

She tweets back the next day.

It's shameful.

for colleagues who call me when they need support to now put out a statement asking for quote-unquote clarification and not just call.

The Islamophobic tropes in this statement are offensive.

The constant harassment and silencing from the signers of this letter is unbearable.

I, well, I could sense the unbearability.

Victor, there is trouble in Nancy Pelosi paradise.

What do you make of this?

What do you have to say about this?

Well,

where to start?

Notice that One of the things about the left is that when they call people terrible things and blasphemy people and

use character assassination or equate a democratic society with terrorists, and anybody just says in a very polite way, that's wrong, and then they go back to the, I'm the victim, I'm the wounded fawn.

How dare you?

It's been unbearable.

Why did you suggest that you're an Islamophobe?

And so for us to have a conversation about any major issue, I think everybody that's listening and you and I, Jack, we all have to start with the premise, it doesn't work.

Call me a racist, call me a sexist, call me a homophobe, call me an Islamo.

I don't care.

And until we are liberated, we're going to be captives of this paradigm.

And so that's the first thing to remember.

She's no more a victim than anybody.

Second, when she says we need accountability, I agree.

Here's my suggestion.

You want people to be accountable for what you say.

You came into this country.

Supposedly your brother was in England and there was a serious allegation that you married him for immigration entree.

And then you had a common law husband that you were not married to.

And

that came to the attention of authorities, that came to attention of the public, and you never really addressed that.

You have to be accountable.

Explain that weird paradox and also explain why

your current husband was a campaign, what, a contractor that you passed money to for services rendered.

Is that ethical?

I want some accountability.

And then the third thing is, Jack, there were 12 people that signed that letter.

If I'm not mistaken,

there's 219 Democratic representatives in the House.

Are you telling me that,

what, that you only got about 5% of the Democratic House body that is shocked that she compared a constitutional consensual society to a terrorist organization like the Taliban and Hamas, and that's all that could muster signatures, 12 people, with maybe a lukewarm milquetoast commentary from Nancy Pelosi and Stinny Hoyer.

That's it?

And that really shows you something about the Democratic Party.

And

what am I getting at?

The Democratic Party caucused, and people said, well, wait a minute, it's kind of crazy what she said,

but I got a midterm in the year and a half.

And if I get primaried by some nutty woke person, our AOC and Representative Talai

and Omar unleash their furies, I could get primarily, I could even lose, or I could be weakened for the general.

So I fear these people more than I do the Republicans.

So I'm just going to be quiet.

And that's where we're at.

And then for the 12 who signed it,

I read their petition.

It was almost bewilderment.

How can this be happening in the Democratic Party?

Don't people know that Israel is a democratically run society?

Don't they understand that it was attacked?

Where's the logic?

We don't understand what's happened.

And the answer is that these people are not Democrats.

They're hardcore Marxists.

And finally, when she talks about,

this is more controversial, accountability, there has to be some idea of gratitude.

So her family came from war-torn Somalia, and that was not a result of anything the United States did.

And they chose the United States.

They had all places to go all over the world, but they chose the United States.

And no sooner did she get here, she got immediately with her family entitlements, state assistance, educational subsidies.

And then guess what?

In a district that is overwhelmingly white with strong minority participation, she was elected to public office a series of times.

So if this is an is an unfair or systematically, systemically, I should say, racist society, then her whole career would make no sense.

And when you put that all in the totality, you'd think at one time she would praise the United States.

Instead, she compares us with the worst regimes in the world.

And she does that because she feels that her political constituency in left-wing Minnesota will approve of it.

She's playing a court gesture to the public.

And that's the role she's decided to play.

She gets attention, she gets hits, downloads, page views, you know,

clicks.

That's what she does.

But

as far as being a responsible House member or drafting legislation, no.

All her purpose is, is to keep calling people racist.

And so more influence, power, money, attention accrues to herself.

And I think everybody in the Democratic Party that's got any brains left knows that.

Well, Victor, since we're talking a little bit about foreign matters here on Israel, let's stick overseas.

And let me lump these two together, even though I'm sure they deserve their own podcast.

First of all, Joe Biden is at the G7 summit.

And I don't know what you make of these things at all.

You know, there's a lot of

media attention.

I don't really know what

they account for when all said and done.

But there he is.

He's abroad representing the United States.

I would argue probably from a weaker position than there was a year ago.

So, your thoughts, first, your thoughts on Biden and general foreign policy at this point, given where he is and who he's meeting with.

And the second part is the vice president, who was down in Guatemala

last early, well, earlier this week, and has been, her trip there and her responses, her talks have been widely criticized, including by

presidents of

Mexico, I think, Guatemala, I think El Salvador, on the point of why is there border madness in the United States?

It's because of you.

It's because of your incoming administration turned on the green light and essentially said,

come.

Of course, the vice president still has yet to go to that border.

She said she was down in Guatemala to see the root causes of why there's trouble at the border.

I don't think she used the word trouble, but you know, maybe it's actually a strange thing that some recognition that, oh, there is a problem.

Anyway, Victor,

she kind of had a bad week, I think.

What do you make of

her performance and any consequences?

And again, Joe Biden, as America stands now with its G7 allies.

I don't know if they're allies anymore.

Well, ostensibly, the Europeans and even the people of the G7 are delighted that the United States now is a globalist, multilateralist, UN, EU, pro-U

advocate.

And so when Klaus Schwab at this Davos crowd in the International Economic Forum says he's going to have the great reset, and that is he's going to aggregate power with Bill Gates and Prince Charles and

the Chinese billionaires, and they're all going to get together in a room and tell us what's good on climate change, identity politics, open borders.

They couldn't really get that off the ground because of Donald Trump.

And now they're delighted.

I mean, you can see almost immediately the G7 is going to thinks they want to implement a global 15% tax on corporations.

I have no problem with corporations paying more because they don't pay enough, some of them.

But my point is that they're telling countries all over the world, Ireland or Singapore, if you don't comply and you think you're going to undercut us, then we're going to consider you an international scab because we're not going to use lower tax rates anymore to get corporations to come to Ireland.

We are going to have a uniform global governance.

It's kind of scary.

Platonic guardians are going to rule the world and that was going to be completely impossible.

But then they got this gift.

They got the gift on the one hand that Joe Biden agrees with them and maybe he's more left than they are.

And two, he doesn't seem to be in.

full control of his faculties.

So they feel that he's

easily persuadable if he should be stubborn.

That said, they have to be very careful, though, because remember the game the Europeans and these internationals play with the United States.

It's we are Socrates and you're Caesar.

You're the legions that are unthinking with all the organization and power.

And we're the philosophers in robes that tell you what to do and think of the great ideas.

So you're the enforcer.

And the way the game is played, we ankle bite you all the time, call you all hillbillies and dupes and deplorables.

And then you, when there's a problem, whether it's World War I or World War II or crazy people in Korea or the Soviets or the Berlin wall, you bail us out.

You protect Japan.

You protect.

That's your role.

Okay,

so they don't want somebody like them.

And so now they're getting somebody like them in spades and they're thinking, this is wonderful.

The United States is going to give all this money to the Palestinians.

They're going to get back in the Iran deal.

They're going to get back in the Paris Accord.

They're not going to press us on NATO contributions.

They're going to have the UN adjudicate the use of force.

This is wonderful.

And then they're thinking, hmm, what if Vladimir Putin goes into western Ukraine?

What if he starts bullying the Baltic states?

What is Joe Biden going to do?

Have a conference?

He's supposed to go say, listen, Putin, do not have territorial acquisition or else.

And And then the Europeans are supposed to say, How dare you?

That's so unilateral.

But then

quietly have a side read.

That whole game is in danger now with a guy like Piden, just as it was with Jimmy Carter.

And they used to damn Reagan, and they were relieved about Reagan.

Oh, he brought in Pershing missiles, that warmonger.

He's going to have a nuclear winner.

And then

privately, you talk to him.

It's wow, Jimmy Carter's not there anymore.

Thank God.

So that's what's going on there.

As far as Kamala Harris,

I think what the Biden administration is doing is anytime there's a issue that will be controversial and it's a lose-lose situation, they're going to have Kamala as tip of the spear fixer.

because there is no solution to the mess that they've created because the solution would be Trump's solution.

By that, I mean the border was secure.

It was calm finally.

We had great success with the wall.

And we really, you know, the South American governments you mentioned, Central America and Mexico, they feel they went out on a limb for Trump and now they've been sought off by

Biden.

But the point I'm making is that a lot of these leaks about how unimpressive she was are coming from the Biden people.

And they're being fed to CNN and MSNBC.

So when she appears on there, she wants to say, you know, I'm a person of color and I'm a woman and I'm from California and I'm PC and I can just giggle and chortle and ha ha.

And they actually, Lester Holt, and they actually said, well, when are you going to the border?

And you haven't been there.

She's going there.

Yeah, it was.

And then she's saying, wait a minute, you know what she's thinking.

Who in that Biden administration, who did this?

Who told you you could ask these things?

So she's in a weird position that I think from now on,

Biden is.

protecting his turf.

And whereas

the general opinion was that he won't be there much longer, now it is we're going to neutralize, emasculate, put on ice Kamala Harris, because every time we have, as I said, a crisis that we don't want to deal with and there is no solution, we're going to put her in charge and she's going to look like an idiot.

And then people are going to say to us what they said with Richard Nixon during the Watergate.

Well, he may be an SOB or crazy, but you don't want Agnew.

And then that you may be, you maybe think Joe doesn't know where he is, but she knows where she is.

And it's even scarier.

And so I think that's that's what she's doing.

And you can even see it with Jill Bot, Jill Biden, you know, Mrs.

First Lady.

Mrs.

Woodreau Wilson.

Yeah, it's Edith Wilson all over again.

And

Biden is not, I guess, technically in a coma like Wilson was in 1919, but he's close.

He sometimes seems comatose.

Well, she's sort of parading herself around and to reassure the American public, she's got a binder.

She's a doctor.

She's going to be a partner with Joe, and you don't need to get rid of him and put Kamala in.

And she hates Kamala Harris.

Remember that during that debate, when Kamala said to Joe, you're a racist, basically.

She came up after the debate and confronted her and said, how dare you say that to my husband?

So there's no love loss there at all.

So that dynamic and that paradigm is going to be increasingly frequent, where Jill is going to be very high profile.

Joe's exposure to the public is going to be increasingly curtailed.

And Kamala is going to be forced to go out in places.

And wait, Jack, till she gets to the border, because at some point she'll have to go.

She'll have to.

She'll have to, because even the left is asking.

And when she goes there, it's going to be a mess.

Except, you know, maybe they'll have Trump's policies for two weeks to calm it down before she arrives, deport a bunch of people, finish the wall, or maybe she'll go where the wall is.

But the point I'm making is if she goes there and if it's the one million immigrant who've come in disaster still

then it's not going to look good somebody's going to say well are those cages that you used to deplore over there with all those children stuck in them then another journalist you know somebody from Fox is going to say well wait a minute you're President Biden is lecturing us on the we all have to get vaccinated even children and there's some side effects to it but how about all those kids over there are they vaccinated is that guy vaccinated is that woman vaccinated?

How come a million people come in without a vaccination and yet you're making people who have already had the virus and children under the age of 12 at some risk to their health, according to quote unquote, the science?

You're making them be vaxxed, but these people get what?

An exemption?

Are you saying to us?

that U.S.

citizens have less rights than foreign nationals.

Is that what you're saying?

So you can see what could happen.

It could be an explosive, unscripted.

Yeah, she'll cackle in the midst of that.

She will.

That sounds

right.

She'll use the Hillary defense.

Hillary always did that.

Remember, she just started cackling and laughing as it was absurd.

And I don't think it's going to work.

What do you mean, with a cloth?

That idiocy with Hillary.

All right, well, Victor, we've got two big articles to round out.

uh the program with one you wrote and one is by david marcus let's talk about the one you wrote and it's it's for american greatness again folks that's the website and uh you that's what victor uh writes uh twice a week the lethal wages of uh trump derangement madness victor you're the point of this very long and detailed uh essay

um i don't want to put people off i mean it's it's it's a it's not that long it's not war and peace it's great read

uh is that uh there's been a bloody toll as a consequence of Trump derangement system.

And again, let me read the end of this piece, Victor, because, you know, folks listening to the podcast, not everyone goes to the website.

Just so for a little context, and then you could please back into what preceded this.

You end this piece by saying the lethal examples of the wages of irrational and deranged Trump hatred are nearly countless.

A once calm Trump border is now the scene of utter chaos, misery and death as the erstwhile advocates of immigrant children abruptly grow mute.

A once calm Middle East and the successful Abraham Accords disappeared and were supplanted by mayhem death and destruction.

A once-booming energy sector and inexpensive fuels are now mired amidst spiking prices at the pump, an end to new federal gas and oil leases on federal lands.

The

National Wildlife Reserve put off limits and pipeline projects canceled, irrationally hating.

Everything Donald Trump touched was not just pathological, it often became downright scary and deadly for Americans.

Victor, would you talk about this piece?

It's very dangerous to be deductive, and that is not to be empirical, just as a matter of Pavlovian knee-jerk reaction to something you don't like, and then that encompasses a whole rejection of everything associated with it.

We all know that.

I want the economy to boom, and we have high GDP right now.

I do not want inflation.

I don't want...

people getting paid not to work.

If Joe Biden can solve that problem and stop this crazy subsidies that have more incentives for people to stay home than to re-enter the workforce, and if he can restrain inflation, I will be so happy and I'll praise him.

However, when you're deductive, as they are with Trump, it's not just that you look foolish, that you cause a lot of harm.

So when you insist, insist that Trump is crazy for even thinking that that lab had anything to do with this pangolin or that bat,

then what you're basically saying is we're going to suspend all judgment, inquiry, examination, analysis of the origins of this virus.

And that meant very early in January and February and March, we took China's word for it on a lot of things.

Bill Gates said to do it.

Fauci said to do it.

CDC said to do it.

And that's dangerous.

People died.

Had we known in January or February where this thing came from, we could have said right away, why don't you put the army around that vivo lab because these two people have died in it?

We could have done things like that.

We could have forced the HWHO to say, let's have a quarantine immediately.

But when it was this, you know, just a natural thing, it was kind of like things happen.

Just, you know, there's a bad here.

He just kind of flew around and kind of crapped on somebody's head, or he got his wing cut up in a market, and we couldn't help it.

So it was a very different response predicated on the origins.

The same thing with hydroxychloroquine, the same thing with Russian collusion.

We wasted a critical amount of money and time

to pursue this farce of Russian collusion.

We did a lot of damage to our security because we did something that Kissinger and a lot of skilled diplomats said never do.

We drove Russia into the arms of China.

And we were supposed to triangulate between these two atrocious regimes so that neither one liked each other more than they liked us.

And they didn't do this.

So that, I think, it's just not that hatred of Trump and everything he did was not benign.

And we're really seeing it on the border, as you read, and with energy as well.

Well, Victor,

you just mentioned droxychloroquine.

And we talked about it last week, but I just want to restate again, you know, the studies coming out, and some of the experts think

there's over 100,000 unnecessary deaths, as if there was a necessary death.

But 100,000 people died because of the politicized ban on

that drug.

So

obviously it's the point of

your piece.

There are lethal ages to Trump derangement syndrome, and the only reason it was banned was because Donald Trump mentioned the word.

So, Victor, let's move on and,

well, end the show, but close the show with a discussion of a piece you sent to me earlier in the week.

It's by David Marcus.

He's a New York writer, writes for the Federalists.

He's got a book coming out on the pandemic.

He wrote this piece for Fox News.

It was published on June 6th.

The title of it is The Periodic Table of the New American Right.

It's a really interesting piece, goes down rabbit holes, has all kinds of, you know, I don't know as much as a periodic table.

I think it was kind of zoological because he's looking at what is the right now and classifying.

He has about six or seven,

you know, clusters of where people might fit in.

But let me just read the beginning of this piece.

And Victor, he makes some claims.

I'd like to get your thoughts on the validity of some or all or invalidity of any of it.

So here's what, this again, David Marcus, the periodic table of the new American right.

At a modest distance from the presidency of Donald Trump, one thing has become entirely clear.

The American conservative movement has irrevocably changed.

The aftermath of the Capitol riot was the fierce last stand of the old guard, marshaled by Mitch McConnell, as Cheney, Mitt Romney.

The attempt to turn back the clock and restore the Republican Party to what it had been for the last 25 years utterly failed.

For a few days, there seemed to be an opening, but honestly, there never was.

Now, Cheney is out of the leadership.

There is no going back.

What is not so clear is what the conservative movement looks like and represents in the wake.

of Trump.

This lack of clarity is rooted in the fact that the new right is still being created, created, still in its populist, swaddling clothes.

Everyday American conservatives are forging in the smithy of their politics the conscience of this new party.

What can be identified and described in these early days are the factions that are framing the elements of this new political force.

These elements point, at least in broad contours, to what the future holds for the new right.

So I guess, Victor, that's how he launches this piece.

And I guess the basic claim, you know, we're now at an irrevocable point.

We've turned, we're in a new dimension of what it means to be conservative.

Do you agree with David Marcus's premise?

And if you would like to say anything else about the piece, I'm not sure it matters what I agree, it just matters what the facts are.

And it seems to me that people who would disagree with him, and let's see who whether they would be former Senator Jeff Flake or Liz Cheney or the Dispatch people or the Lincoln Project or the Bulwark.

Do they have a viable alternative to him?

And the answer is no.

And then I would say, what do the polls show?

And the polls show that the MAGA agenda and the Trump popularity, it's about 90%

are for that agenda.

So what was that agenda that he's trying to, in a very systematic and I think scientific fashion, express all of the contradictions or problems or

future of.

And it was largely a Republican agenda in a sense of conservative judges, opposition to abortion on demand as far as social issues go,

limited government, distrust of the bureaucracies.

But there were these wrinkles that Trump introduced.

One was free trade is not fair trade.

So if they dump or they steal patents or copyrights, we're not going to trade with them and tariffs are not the T word anymore.

And then the second one was,

we don't want to go in the Middle East because these optional military engagements don't pencil out in a cost-benefit manner.

And we have to close a border

until we have legal only

immigration.

That was new.

And then I think another one was the Middle West,

the area between Michigan and Alabama or Ohio to

Nevada, that's not, don't write that off.

They may have not done well in globalization, but that's not because they're deplorables or they're clingers.

It's because you guys in Washington and New York created a bi-coastal culture and you deprecated muscular labor, which was more efficient and more ecologically and humanitarily sound than what goes on in China.

or Mexico or other places in the world where you people outsource and offshore.

So that was the wrinkles.

And he's trying to say that that's not going to go away.

I think he's right.

And we look at the potential candidates for 2024.

Look at them.

I don't think Pompeo or Tom Cotton or DeSantis or Christy Noam or any or Mike Pence are going to run on anything but that mega agenda.

So then he says, well, there are contradictions.

And yeah, I mean, you and I know the roles of capitalism, whether you like them or not, are the roles of the world.

That's the way people think.

They mimic individual behavior.

So there is such a thing as Schumptower's creative destruction.

If you, you know, subsidize, subsidize, subsidize smokestack industries and they don't modernize, that's bad.

But what he's trying to say is,

but you just don't say creative destruction justifies just destroying vast swaths of people's lives.

You work with people, you try to train them, you try to tell employers, is there ways that we could use government policy that would still make us efficient rather than just the law of the jungle?

He's trying to search for that medium, in other words.

And he says there's a lot of groups that will be part of this equation.

There's a suburban soccer bomb.

There's the Catholic cultural issues group.

There's small business people.

There's people in the new minority community who feel that they're getting shorted by democratic policies on energy, gasoline,

checkbook issues, workplace issues, all because they're supposed to be captives of this critical race hypnosis and they don't want to do it.

So it's a pretty comprehensive attempt to say that the mega agenda is here.

A lot of groups are buying into it for different reasons and now we need a theory of uniformity to galvanize it and to make sure that these coalitions stay there and it can win.

I think the missing tesseraic is that no one knows the role yet of Donald Trump.

I think it depends on the news cycle, how Biden does, whether he's going to run or not.

But I think most people feel whether he runs or not, his agenda that he created is now institutionalized.

And number two, his attitude that you cannot deal with the hard left and you have to fight back 24-7 is correct.

But the third issue is, well, do you have to do it on Twitter and make fun of people personally and get an ad hominem?

And that's about a 50-50 debate right there.

And people people are saying, can you have the agenda and the fiery pushback, but not gratuitously say to Anthony Fauci, you throw like a girl.

You don't know how to throw a baseball.

And I don't think people have an answer for that because they feel that if they're not sure yet that a guy like DeSantis that's right on the Trump agenda and right in fiery pushing back can fill a stadium of 50,000 people.

because he's part of an establishment as all the candidates are.

And he can't go in there and just say anything at any time to anyone, anywhere, the way that Trump has.

And that has an appeal to people.

Yeah, well, Trump.

He cannot be replicated.

No.

Neither can Victor Davis Hanson.

So, Victor, I want to say, as we close here, to thank our readers.

Readers, well, I think you should thank readers and people who go to victorhanson.com and read your material there, but thank our listeners.

And I just want to draw attention, point or two.

This is the fourth or fifth or sixth podcast we've recorded.

We're We're now on Just the News.

That's John Solomon's

website and podcast base and other podcasts on this.

Just the News are Jenna Ellis and Cheryl Atkinson.

John Solomon has his podcast.

And, you know, this is not bragging, but this show, we were on National Review.

We had a podcast on National Review for over a year and takes a while to build an audience and was somewhat highly rated and ranked.

And people had trouble finding this podcast, but they found it already, many of them, and it's doing very well.

And it's gotten a number of very strong reviews.

So we want to encourage people, you know, listen where you can, subscribe where you can, download.

But if you do listen on iTunes, it's now available on iTunes.

You've gotten 88 reviews, Victor.

They're all five stars.

And some of the comments people have left are really terrific.

I want to read one.

It's by someone named Brack Toon, and he writes, There is no voice more clear, no mind as sound, no thinker as grand as VDH.

Listen in awe as Professor Hansen weaves together huge swaths of the human epic and relates them to ever-maddening world.

Thank you, sir.

The title of that post was Get Smarter and Calmer as You Listen.

There are many others like it.

We thank folks who are listening to this podcast and thank folks who are leaving reviews.

Again, we do,

Victor and I have two podcasts a week.

This is the traditionalist.

We also do the classicist.

And if Victor, if there's anything else you want to say about the expanding platform of

Sammy interviews me.

We're just starting one called The Culturalist.

And we just did the first one on the role of Homer as a historian and a cultural critic and a literary epic poet.

And then we talked about that tradition as it reappeared in Greek tragedy and as it applies to the tragic.

We've talked about this before, you and I, Jeff, but we went in depth about the foundations of tragic heroes in the military,

everyday American life, and Western movies.

And then next week, this week, I should say, we're going to talk about underappreciated people in history that we don't really give them their due for a variety of reasons.

Did you talk about Shane?

Because if you did, I have to listen.

Yeah, we did.

We did talk about Shane.

Okay.

Shane come home and all of the tensions there.

But

we said that he was a disruptive force for all of his kindness, and he is.

Anyway, I'd like to thank everybody for tuning in once again.

Okay.

Well, thank you.

Thanks, Victor.

We're going to record another podcast

for this coming week.

Again, we are recording on Friday the 11th.

and so sometime during flag week, we'll be out there flying another one up the flagpole.

Hope, folks, you all salute it.

Thanks very much, and we'll be back soon with a new episode of the Victor Davis-Hanson Show, The Traditionalist.