The Traditionalist - To Plague or To Be Plagued

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Ladies and gentlemen, this is the Victor Davis Hanson Show, the traditionalists. We're recording.
on Friday, June 5th, in the year of Our Lord, 2021.

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

Hansen is also the Wayne and Marsha Busk Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. Guess what? He's also a best-selling author.

The Second World Wars, The Case for Trump, Mexifornia, The Savior Generals, and a forthcoming book, which I'm sure is going to be a bestseller, but more importantly, a consequential book, and that's called The Dying Citizen.

It will be out this October. How do you get it? How do you pre-order it? You go to victorhanson.com, which you should be going to anyway.

That's Victor's website, Private Papers, where there's a ton of original material published. There you'll find a link for The Dying Citizen.
Victor is a farmer, a classicist, a military historian.

He is an essayist at American Greatness. He will have some pieces coming out later this year in the new criterion.

He is the guru, the editorial guru of Hoover's very important online journal, Strategica. Victor, today we've got a lot, a lot to talk about.

Anthony Fauci, emails, and the Wuhan Lab. We have your pieces from American Greatness.
One of them is a great essay, The New Regressive Dark Ages. The other is, Never Let a Plague Go to Waste.

Let's talk also about Kamala Harris,

who has now been tasked by the president, who I believe is in a basement at some beach house in Delaware,

with fighting election reform bills. She's adding this to her the border crisis portfolio.

She also gave a speech to graduates of the Naval Academy where she talked about military powers based on solar energy and other kinds of similar lunacy. Bibi Netanyahu

is out as Prime Minister of Israel. And then let's wrap it up by once again, Victor, talking about Joe Biden, who has been attacking two Democrat senators, Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema.

They're the reason his very progressive leftist agenda seemed not to be passing. Victor, I just want to say first of all, I'm very, I listened to the podcast.

Now we're up on just the news, the platform, John Solomon,

Jenna Ellis, others have programs, Cheryl Atkinson. So it's great to be on this platform.
But it was great to hear that the show begins with the Gary Owen.

And I want to thank you for that, Victor, making appealing to my Irish heritage there, although we all know that it was also General Custer's.

Yes. Well, you can be Errol Flynn

to my red cloud. How's that? That's all right.
He died with his boots on. So I took mine off so I don't make any noise while I walk on the floor here.
Victor, let's begin. Let's talk about Joe Biden.

And back from that, we'll go into his

president in training, Kamala Harris. So Joe Biden, yeah,

he's got this monstrous left-wing agenda. We must remember he campaigned.
I'm not a socialist, but he's got very thin partisan margins in the House, a very thin one in the House.

Depending on the issue, no margin at all in the Senate.

based on how Joe Manchin and Kristen Senim

are where they're coming down on a particular issue. But it seems to be their fault that his agenda is collapsing, maybe, non-executive order agenda, his legislative agenda.

Is he obtuse to this?

Victor, what are your thoughts about Joe Biden's ranting?

Well, Joe Biden is a construct. I mean, there is no Joe Biden.

There's a guy that used to be Joe Biden, who was old Joe from Scranton, the moderate, supposed Democrat that represented the working class. He didn't didn't exist.

I don't know if he ever did, but that was the construct that the left used to carry them across the finish line in the election.

So what we're dealing with now is two

forces of gravity in the Biden administration.

One are his advisors and his planners, his chief of staff, the Kamala Harris people, the Obama input, all of the hardcore progressives, the Elizabeth Warren, Bernie

Sanders wing. It's not the wing anymore.
it's the center of the Democratic Party. And in their way of thinking, as socialist and hardcore leftists, they want power.

And power means that you increase government and you go after the private sector.

And so in their way of thinking, how do you get power when the individual agenda, as you know, Jack and our readers know, is not popular.

Nobody wants to pay here in California $4.20 a gallon for gas unless you're Mark Zuckerberg and you can afford that fuel in your airplane, your jet. Nobody wants an open border.

Nobody wants to shut down Anwar, stop federal leasing and fracking, cancel pipelines, tamper with the calm and peace in the Middle East, print another $4 trillion, get the debt up to $30 trillion.

Nobody wants that. And I'm not saying that's my opinion.
I'm saying that's what the polls show. So in the past, they had two solutions for that.

One was Joe Biden is a moderate and he's not Donald Trump. He does not tweet.
He's not mean. He's a uniter.

That doesn't work anymore. Donald Trump is out of the picture.
He's a private individual. He can't even communicate with his supporters on social media.

He's been banned, deplatformed, canceled, ostracized, whatever word we think best describes his limbo that he's in. The second thing was COVID, COVID, COVID, mass, mass, mass.
Dr. Fauci says this.
Dr.

Collins says this. Donald Trump didn't do this.
That's over with. As much as they want to prolong it, as much as Dr.
Fauci

wants to retain his media sensationalism and celebrity, it's waning. Operation Warp Speed did work.
The Johnson, the Moderna, and the Pfizer vaccinations were useful and they're not deadly.

And the result, when you combine the vaccinated percentage of the population with those who have antibodies, is we're nearing the end of the virus.

virus and that means god for thank god for this we're ending the tyranny of dr fauci and so that's not an issue anymore that donald trump uh is a racist who called it the chinese virus and he did all these bad things it's not that's not going to be viable so we're back to unpopular issues and that's the long windy explanation jack that these unpopular issues are not what they want to talk about they want to talk about a racist under everybody's bed.

And that means a white supremacist. It used to be a Russian under your bed, now it's a white supremacist.

And the problem they're having with this exegesis is there's too few white supremacists for all the horrible things they're allegedly going to do to you.

And we've had 120 days of continuous riot, looting, arson last summer. And believe me, Antifa and BLM were not white supremacists.

And when you go to try to burn down a federal courthouse or destroy a precinct with policemen inside it, that is terrorism.

As is James Hodgkinson trying to take out the Republican hierarchy in a baseball game in 2017. As is Major Hassan

trying to

wound 30 people, yelling Allah Akbar as he killed 13. And yet that was called workplace violence.

the hit on the Republicans was called, in the case of Hodgkinson's death, death by cop cop or death by suicide.

What I'm getting at, Jack, is that they're pushing this racial agenda to take everybody's attention off the fact that they have no more excuses and they've got to talk about what they've actually done in the first 130 days.

And what they've actually done is not very popular. And so we're getting the bogeyman of the white supremacists.
And it's really hard to push that narrative. Think about it.

I mean, you've got to tell people that 65% of all the anti-Asian anti-asian quote-unquote hate crimes are not committed by african-american males who make up nation you've got to say it's these mythical white supremacists and you've got to say that your eyes are lying when you see jewish americans in los angeles in new york attacked by males of middle eastern descent you've got to somehow say that Trump or the white supremacists did that.

Or you've got to say about the January 6th uprising. Well, it was armed.
We found all of these people with guns in their possession. They had ties they brought in to kidnap.

They murdered Officer Sicknick. They tried to break in the windows and they were shot as they threatened people.
That's not going to work. All those narratives are falling apart.

So they don't have any proof. They don't have any data.
It's just don't look at the curtain because the man behind it.

pulling the levers, whoever he is, is doing things that are not very popular and are going to earn a tremendous backlash in the 2022 election.

Hey, Victor, we'll talk about Kamala Harris in a second here, but Andy Nagao, I think that's, I'm not sure how to say his name, independent journalist has been covering Antifa.

As far as I can tell, he's an Asian. His family's from Vietnam, and he just had the crap beaten out of him and thought

he was going to be murdered by a Portland mob. I didn't read anywhere that there was an Asian hate crime going on there, did you?

No, if he was African-American and the perpetrators had been white and probably most of them were white, then Joe Biden would have a national address and say that we're in a crisis and our whole founding origins, protocols, traditions are flawed from the beginning.

And we're going to have to do the following to increase the power of the federal government to go after these people. But this is politically correct violence.

And Antifa, remember, it was, I think Joe Biden said it wasn't an organization, just an idea or something. It wasn't a loose conglomeration of something.
It's a state of mind.

About Kamala Harris, the vice president, two things, Victor, maybe we can just talk about her in

one lump.

She gave a speech to the Naval Academy. Well, three things.
That was kind of, I don't know, shocking talking about our future military as being,

our soldiers or maybe the Marines are going to be dragging around batteries.

You know, so warfare is going to be powered by solar power and

windmills, I guess. The other thing,

we recorded our last podcast on the cusp of Memorial Day while she was giving a speech where she now infamously talked about have a good long weekend or something to that effect, a real obtuseness to what is probably the most sacrosanct of days

on the calendar for Americans. And then

finally,

to round out this lump,

she's now the border czar, who's, as far as we know, has never been to the border to see what the hell, the madness that's going on down there.

But this week, she has also been appointed by Joe Biden as essentially the voter fraud czar, which to me means get out on the road.

And where states are adopting election reform legislation to prevent voter fraud, such as in Texas, happened in Georgia, Kamala Harris is going to show up and rile up the troops.

So here we have our president in training, vice president. Any thoughts about her, Victor? Yeah, I have kind of an unorthodox take on that.

I think there's kind of a rivalry between the Biden and Harris camps. The Biden people are terrified that Joe is increasingly non-composment.

He loses his way. He gets that dazed look where he slurs his speech and he gets angry over

elements that he speaks about that shouldn't make a person angry. And the Harris people feel that sooner or later, but more sooner, he's going to be gone.

And the Biden people are very sensitive to that. So how does that dynamic work?

When we read these amazing stories in liberal magazines or newspapers about rumors from the White House that Joe loses his temper or it takes hours to brief him, that's coming from the Harrises, the Harrises, meaning the Harris people.

But on the other hand, the Biden people are not stupid.

So they think to themselves, what are the two issues that we did to pacify or to empower or to cement our ties with our left-wing friends, like Kamala Harris?

Well, they were the open border that they pushed us into, and

we're open border people now. But that thing is a mess and it doesn't pull 40% approval of what we're doing.
So that's what we're going to turn over to Kamala Harris.

Of course, Kamala Harris's people say, don't get near it. Just smile, do your Hillary cackle laugh, and don't get near it.
Then the Biden people come out.

What was the other issue that we really pushed that nobody wants? And that is that you don't even have to show an ID to vote.

And that's basically the center issue on this new voting legislation, national voting legislation that's intended to override the state's constitutional right to set rules and regulations during a national election.

And they're saying, you know what, this thing polls about 40%. Let's give it to Kamala Harris.

And believe me, just as she never went down to the border, she is not going to barnstorm the country and go throughout the country and saying, you know what, it's racism to say you need an ID.

Because even minority voters who that appeal is targeted to feel it's condescending and quasi-racist to say that

they can show an ID when they buy alcohol or they want to buy a gun or like anybody else, if you cast a check, or like anybody else orders something online that requires an ID or getting a vaccination, but

they and they alone can't seem to find it when they want to vote. So we all know that.
So those are issues that I think she's going to really resent and avoid.

And I think the Bidens will have another one coming up. Right now, the Biden people are thinking, hmm, what is this other dumb thing we did?

Well, we canceled ANWAR and we canceled all federal leases and we canceled the pipeline and we told trackers and horizontal drillers that basically in 10 years they're going to be out of business.

And that's not popular with gas planes. So you know what? Harris will be our energy point woman.
Yeah. And so that's what's going on.

A different kind of triangulation where she's caught in the middle hey victor i'd like to remind our listeners that uh you are on twitter at vd hansen if you're on twitter follow victor there on facebook check out and subscribe to vdh's morning cup there's also a very good actually excellent victor davis hansen fan club on facebook want to recommend people follow that and again victorhanson.com not victor davishansen.com victorhanson.com is is the website with

remember you have to say S-O-N

because S-O-N are Swedish people and not S-E-N. Those are Danes.
Swedes are, we Swedes are

Scandinavians with our brains blown out, unlike Dane. Okay.
Well, it's just, you know, it's the Bronx way. We talk about Swedes.

Forgive me. All right.
Well, Victor, let's move on.

Let's take the foreign policy aspect first before we talk, get into Anthony Fauci and your American Greatness pieces uh so just give us a little insight first uh bib netanyahu uh if you if you don't mind you have some relationship with him maybe just you met him a few times or maybe maybe it's if he saw you on the street he probably would he know you you'd know him do you have any relationship with him and then your assessment of what his departure as the prime minister of israel might mean for Israel, might mean for peace in the Middle East.

Well, you know, I think he he's analogous to Margaret thatcher she was about had about a 12 year is it 12 years 10 year reign yeah and she trained an entire generation of british conservative parliamentarians and politicos that you don't have to take the labor paradigm anymore that you have to empower the working classes and get them off the idea of class struggle.

And she changed a quasi-socialist state into

a booming capitalist economy. And she was tough.
She said, you don't just take it from the left, you fight back. And the same thing with Netanyahu.

He took a socialist Israel and opened up the economy. And he trained a whole generation of students of politics

how to deal with the left, how to deal with the Palestinians, how to deal with the Arab world, how to deal with Iran.

And I think they both became sort of victims of their success in this way that a lot of people, I think Carolyn Glick, the gifted Middle East columnist based in Jerusalem, kind of got it right recently when she said that most of the people that are trying to dethrone Bibi are working with leftists and they're conservatives and they've sort of sold out their soul in the way that remember Margaret Thatcher had sort of a coup d'état by her own conservative people that were supposedly loyal to her, that she had trained.

And I think what happens is these people, they see their leader very successful. They emulate the characteristics and the policies and the attitude of their leader.

And then they say, wait a minute, it's been year one, it's been year two, it's been year three, it's been year four, it's been year five, it's been year six.

And the same thing was true of FDR after, you know, 12 years.

So I think what Vibi's facing right now is he was so successful in training a whole array of new conservative, gifted leaders that they kind of have a cabal that want him out.

And they're willing to make alliances with the Israeli left or the Israeli Arabs, which is contrary to their ideology, but they don't care because they felt they've been men in waiting

and they've never got their turn and he won't step down and he's lost a step.

I don't, none of that is true, but that's what happens when really revolutionary leaders, I don't mean revolutionary in the sense of being left, but people who change not just policies, but the whole practice of politics.

And the FDR or Reagan, there's a lot of people that remember George Bush. Reagan had those great eight years.
And as soon as George, and he basically, you know, trained George H.W.

Bush in what it was to be a new conservative, because Bush was not. And then as soon as he stepped down, all of a sudden we started hearing George H.W.

Bush talk about compassionate conservative and a thousand points of life and a kinder, gentler nature. And you thought, well, wait a minute, Reagan was kind.
He had all kinds of points of light.

But I think part of that was the resentment that he had been sort of the gopher for Ronald Reagan. And that's what happened.

Yeah.

I thought it was voodoo

or voodoo economics.

Okay, Victor,

let's get to the mother load of our discussion today on the traditionalist. And that is Anthony Fauci.

These release, these dumps of emails, these articles that have been going through various emails to, I think essentially, and you'll correct me, find out

just how involved was Anthony Fauci

in the manipulation of this deadly virus? Was it manipulated?

The thing that's been killing millions of people, was it manipulated? Was it manipulated in Chinese military-run lab? Was American money in some way involved with this? lab.

I think there's evidence, significant evidence on these things. And then

when we tried to find out the reality of the situation, what was Anthony Fauci doing? Was he trying to cover this up? And there clearly were attempts to cover this up.

You've written about this in other places.

We'll talk about later, this guy, Peter Dazak, some British zoologist, so that people who were trying to discuss what was really at hand here, such as your Hoover colleague, Scott Acklis, would end up being crucified for trying trying to get to the truth.

So there's a lot to unpack here, but Victor, how do you assess this situation? How do you assess this at this point, Anthony Fauci's role in any of this, his culpability?

And are we seeing the back end of him now? Well, that's a lot to digest, but let's do it this way.

Where do we have our information right now about what actually happened in the lab and the origins and the nature and the protocols surrounding COVID.

We have it from a very brilliant article now by Nicholas Wade,

the former New York Times science writer, where he went systematically through all of the possible exegesis of how this thing was created or came from nature.

We have a lot of work by a friend of mine and a friend of the military history working group at Hoover, the Hoover Institution, Miles Yu.

Remember, he co-authored an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, I think, in February with Mike Pompeo.

And Mike Pompeo and Miles Yu and others with access to superb knowledge of China in the case of Miles, a dissident who left after Teneman Square.

And his first language is Mandarin.

They, in association with people in the intelligence departments of the White House, Matthew Pottinger and others, they early on this year decided that the old narrative that this sprang from a bat or a penguin was impossible.

And then they cited, as did Tom Cotton, very early on, as did Rand Paul very early on.

I wrote about it, and that was one of the reasons that I'm not a gifted writer of science by any means, and I have no knowledge and expertise, and that was brought out against me.

But I did say that I do have some ability to be logical. And

logic dictates, Occam's razor, that the easiest explanations that came from a lab. And what all of these different sources agreed on were the following.
There was never

this SARS virus that causes COVID-19, there was never an incidence that that exact virus was in a pangolin or a bat. It just didn't happen.

So it must have skipped a lot of mutations to suddenly appear in humans for the first time.

We know that that level four lab had been cited by international and especially American investigators as being sloppy.

We know that the Chinese were lying about the exact dates in which they detected the virus in Wuhan.

We know that there were people, not staffers at a low level, but high-level researchers who got ill with a pneumonia-like respiratory virus that seems, in the Chinese view, was the COVID virus.

And most importantly, we know that this lab had ties

with the Chinese military and was engaged in something that I think most in the scientific community did not think was worth the risk.

That's gain of function viral enhancement, and where they take natural viruses, they tinker, re-engineer them, and make them both more lethal, but especially more contagious and more easily able to overwhelm the immune system.

And people who were engaged in that type of research were under a lot of scrutiny because people said, you have never one time, not on one occasion, have you shown how re-engineering or enhancing a virus led to a better vaccination or a cure or a pharmaceutical.

So, what are you doing this given the risk that a flu virus

can escape? And we know that they've escaped before.

But this was the mother of all engineered infectious viruses because, unlike

other natural and engineered viruses, this thing really did spread in a way that none of the others had. No virus had since the swine flu epidemic.

I should say the Spanish swine spew, if I can say that in 1918. So that's what we know.
So what was the cover-up about? Why did everybody say

this is racism, xenophobia? And that had two elements to it. The first was that Donald Trump, with his Manhattan animal cunning, and he's got an instinct to understand where something is wrong.

He said very early on that it was connected to Wuhan. And he said that because they were lying.
They were sending people into the United States and Wuhan, why they locked that country down.

They didn't tell us that county, that province, that city. And it just bothered him.
And he said the World Health Organization lied about the origins, the transmissibility, the level of threats. Okay.

So that was one reason they did not want to give credence to that narrative.

Because anything Donald Trump says, if they even in the mainstream media and the political left say this could be true, it might be true, then they feel they empower him politically.

So whether it's Russian collusion or whether it's the Hunter Biden laptop or whether it's the efficacy of

hydroxychloroquine or ivermedicine, or whether it's the Wuhan

lab connection to COVID, or whether it is Operation War, they will never never give him any inkling, any smidgen of credit. So that explains a lot of the reasons why people resisted that.

The other reason is more nefarious because we know that Anthony Fauci and his communications has been an advocate of gain of function research.

And in the last months of the Obama administration, when that was outlawed, he objected. You mentioned Peter Dasnick and Echo Health Alliance.
That was a ficionado of Fauci.

and Fauci was channeling several million dollars to his research. But his research couldn't go on as it had, given that it was banned.

They got some exemptions from the Trump administration somehow, Fauci did. But by and large, when the Obama ban went into effect, that grant money that went to Echo Health

had to outsource, find a platform where it was permissible to continue their research.

And they saw this French-built Wuhan lab and they started to funnel not a lot of their money, not all six or seven million, but $600,000 to a particular fat lady and others.

And they had access to that. So what's the point of all this? So when Donald Trump was warning us about the Chinese virus and the connection to the lab and Tom Cotton and others, Dr.

Fauci was saying something that was very, I think, intellectually dishonest. He said there is no connection.

And like Bill Gates, who had financial interests, he had an interest in saying that China was not culpable. Because if China was culpable, then China, how was China culpable?

Maybe the lab was culpable. If the lab was culpable, why was it culpable? Maybe it was engaged in gain or function research.
If it was engaged, where did the money trail go back?

It went back to Anthony Fauci.

So for the last 14 months, and I think it did a lot of damage to our efforts to stamp this virus out because we we were looking for bats and pangolins and all sorts of natural sources when it was very unlikely that that was the cause of the virus.

And we could have put a lot more pressure in the Chinese, maybe earlier on, to help speed up any pharmaceutical

solution to this. And so he's been saying one thing publicly, and then his emails and his private life has been completely different.
It's a scramble to cover this up.

And one of the ways he covered it up was he and the head of the NIH

and Dasnik and others, they got the scientific establishment, the medical establishment, to write in Lancet magazine, the prestigious British medical journal, that this was crazy, this idea of a lab relationship.

And then they did something else. They floated this other narrative, as they always do on the left, or in this case, the bureaucratic mindset.

They said, well, we weren't really objecting, we weren't really objecting to the idea that it could might come from the lab.

What we were objecting to was the dominant narrative that all of these right-wing nuts and Tong, they were saying that the Chinese in a devious, stereotypical fashion that has a terrible history of racism were tinkering in their basement in that lab to create a bioweapon.

And they unleashed it to kill us and it destroyed Trump's administration. And that was what, but you know what?

When you actually go back, and I did this the last week, and you look at, you don't find that narrative very often. It's kind of a crank.

The main narrative was the one that they were deathly afraid of, and they had to demonize and disparage by making this false narrative

to fuse or absorb it or to engineer it. And the real narrative was, it's just too much of a coincidence, and Chinese are just too

non-transparent about all of this. And there's just too little evidence of a pangolin and a bat.
And there's just too much much evidence of the type of sequencing.

And therefore, this thing was probably leaked at best, and who knows what worst. And that's what they were afraid of.
And I think now it has entirely destroyed the reputation of anti-Fauci.

I'll just finish by saying, when you look at the 14-month career of the octogenarian Fauci, you start with the idea that he never once said this.

I don't think this is a threat to the United States, but I have an open mind. And right now, I'm going to consult all of the world's experts and form task forces so I can assess this.

This was, I'm talking about February of 2020.

He never once said, I don't think masks have a history of having a lot of efficacy, but I'm not sure about this virus yet. And we don't have a lot of data about this particular type of coronavirus.

So I'm going to get task forces.

Or he didn't say, I don't know what herd immunity is 60 70 80 or 90 percent but i'm going to find out and then go on msndc or nv or cnn or fox maybe once a week and try to be one one week on fox the next on cnn the next on msc msc no what he did was just the opposite he argued by authority that masks were not helpful, that then they were helpful, that then two masks were better than none or better than one, that 60, 70, 80 percent herd immunity was necessary.

And when he was caught, he said, I'm engaging in a noble lie. I have to, because you ignoramuses don't know what's good for you, and I do.

So, if I mislead you and make you panic into buying a mask, then my professionals won't have them. So, it was good to think that they weren't useful, even if they did expose you to the virus.

That's a you know, collateral damage. And so, he's been one head, he's been one step ahead of the,

I guess you would call it the gain of function posse.

And he's been in a whirlwind of frenzied activity, going on the media nonstop 24-7, 360 degrees, trying to update what he said the day before.

And when you start to do that, and you put your finger in the wind, and you see where the political currents are coming and going,

and then you're emailing a

voluminous corpus of messaging on government email, then all of that dissimulation is going to catch up with you. And it really is a perfect storm now.
So people, he's lost his popularity.

He's lost his credibility.

He's lied under oath, as Ryan Paul has hinted when he said he knew of no gain of function subsidies going from the National Institute of Health or the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases that he oversaw.

That was completely untrue.

Victor, one quick thought and and another uh maybe give us a quick uh answer on something um my i saw today mike pompeo going after uh fauci and uh i think this this experience shows again just how difficult it is to to uh be a president uh let's say you be president donald trump when you have this bureaucracy that is uh intent to fight you as many many of the folks fighting against bringing out the truth on this situation were State Department officials

and very confounding to the Secretary of State.

But the other thing I wanted to bring up, I was watching

Laura Ingram's show the other night, and there was a doctor on, I forget his name, but he was talking about a new study. You mentioned before the hydroxy

chloroquine, however, I can't say it, but how this became a politicized drug and a banned drug. And the new study

showed, but show again

how helpful it was to COVID patients.

And he believes unnecessary deaths attributable to the, I'll call it the political prohibition against the use of this drug, it was could very well be over 100,000.

It was a really discouraging and almost, well, you're watching it, you think

this is clearly some role for Satan in this. I don't know if you saw that.
I did. I did.
No, I saw it. What do you think about that? Well, he was very reluctant.

Laura pressed him, and he did not exaggerate. He tried to be circumspect about these estimates that you quoted.

But we also remember that I think it was the third month of the epidemic, somebody wrote and said there were more Google searches about hydroxychloroquine than the virus itself, because it became a cause celeb for the left to say this Trump is crazy.

He's getting this lupus drug that is dangerous and causes arrhythmias or this parasite drug, ivermedicin, and he's pushing it down our throats.

And you've got to get a sophisticated Harvard or WHO or FDA or CDC expert on with a PhD from this particular school and this particular resume.

And then he's going to tell you that this particular sophisticated $5,000 shot antiviral is the only things that work. And that's what we went through.

But and then when we learned that in Brazil or India, they were flooding the zone in some areas with these cheap drugs.

And to the degree that they could get them to patients early, they had some utility. And some utility in the case of COVID-19 virus was a lot of utility.

And then we, of course, we didn't run double blind, or if we did, we found people on ventilators that were near death and gave them hydroxychloroquine and said, see, it didn't work.

And so it's part of a larger narrative, though, Jack, that I think as historians look back at this, there were deaths because the media felt it was more important to

frame Donald Trump as a quack and a threat to public health than it was to take a disinterested scientific examination of the efficacy of drugs that can save lives, and lives were lost because we didn't do that.

In the same vein, I think just because Donald Trump said that the Wuhan laboratory had a role in a gain of function virus that is probably the source of the COVID pandemic.

Therefore, we're not going to allow anybody to discuss it.

And if you do discuss it, even if you're a senator, a Tom Cotton, even if you're the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, even if you're a respected journalist, we're going to demonize you and try to destroy you and discredit you.

People died because of that, because we did not get ahead of the actual origins of the virus. And by the same token, when you say

that Donald Trump colluded with the Russians, and Vladimir Putin stole the election from Hillary Clinton, and Vladimir Putin poodles Donald Trump, and Donald Trump is an asset, as James Clapper said, of Vladimir Putin.

At a time when Donald Trump was harder on the Russians, I'm talking about in terms of sanctions on their oligarchs. I'm talking about killing 200 Russian mercenaries in Syria.

I'm talking getting out of that asymmetrical anti-missile treaty, short-range missile, excuse me. I'm talking about

empowering Ukraine by selling them lethal weapons that were unavailable during the Obama administration. And you forget that truth.
And then when a new administration comes in and

all of a sudden they talk loud about the Russians, but they don't do anything.

What I mean here is, Vladimir Putin says, I am angry at those guys for blaming stuff on me that I didn't do and demonizing Russians. I'm capable of it, but I didn't do it.

I did not collude with Donald Trump. I might have liked to.
I might have wanted to. I might have attempted to, but I didn't do it.
And yet they're blaming me. And yet these people are weak.

They're not going to do what Trump did. They're not going to pump a lot of oil and crash the prices.
They're not going to get out of treaties.

They're not going to sell lethal weapons to the Ukrainians.

So they're just loud talkers and they carry twigs so you know what i'm going to do i'm going to unleash my hackers and they're going to be very sophisticated about this bunch because i know how they work if i go after pipelines they've canceled pipelines themselves so what's biden going to say when i shut down one of their biggest pipelines in the country well he's going to have a lot of nuts around him and say great we want to have you know stephen chu's idea of ten dollars a gallon or what do you then i'm going to go after meat packing because they've said and i think a month earlier, a lot of people in the Biden administration and their supporters said, you know, meat is bad for the environment.

It takes too much capital. It takes too much

space and it's bad for your health. So we've got to cut down on meat.
And so look at these devious people are doing. They're getting shelter and sanctuary from Putin.

He's outsourced his anger at the United States. He doesn't expect any consequences.

Indeed, we've already paid a bribe to them. And yet he's targeting areas where there's members of the left that are not necessarily unhappy about it.

And even though it hurts our national security, it's quite dangerous to most Americans. And this is very, very scary.

So, what I'm getting at is when you create these lies, and you know they're lies, and you do it for political purposes, and it's all because of your derangement syndrome about Donald Trump, Wuhan laboratory, valuable drugs that can combat COVID, the strategic role of Russia, then people die and people and they don't seem to care, but they better straighten out because Donald Trump is not there anymore.

And if they're going to keep living the next three years by saying, should we accept this truth or not, it doesn't depend on whether it's true or not or there's evidence for it.

Hey, you guys, find out what Trump said about it. What was the Trump position? And then just do the opposite.
That's about as unscientific as what Dr. Fauci has been saying.

Well, Victor, this picks up on an old Democrat line that you've taken and twisted a little

for a new piece in American greatness. So the old line is Ram Emmanuel's never let a crisis go to waste.
And your column is never let a plague go to waste.

This perfect segue from what we've just been talking about.

Victor, I'm going to ask, read a little very short section here, which asks a question, and I'm going to ask you to answer the question, which you answer in the piece, which again, I recommend everyone go to American Greatness and find Victor's articles.

This is Never Let a Plague Go to Waste. In this, Victor, you wrote, you talk about the elite left, and it's the global elite left.

Manipulating COVID-19, this is what you write, is not just an American left-wing effort.

The World Economic Forum, otherwise known as the Davos crowd, is now talking of using the global crisis to push the great reset.

These platonic guardians wish to create global rules governing the world's economy, energy, transportation, education, climate change, wealth distribution, and the media.

In other words, a few anointed elites will seek to override local laws, referenda, and voting. And here's the question, Victor, you ask, and will you answer it for us?

What do all these dystopian efforts have in common? Well, they have in common that they're not democratic. You don't see people out on the streets demonstrating for the Davos Great Reset Plan.

They just don't do that.

You just, Klaus Schwabel, the architect of 83-year-old German academic and entrepreneur and philanthropist and activist, is not barnstorming the United States to drum up public support.

He's talking to John Kerry, he's talking to Prince Charles, he's talking to Chinese billionaires, he's talking to people in the Middle East, talking to Bill Gates. He's talking to Mark Zuckerberg.

That's who's behind this. And why is that true? Because it doesn't have popular support.
Why it doesn't have popular support?

Because it is the dream and the work and the vision of very wealthy people who operate on the premise that I've got a hundred million dollars in my bank account. I've got 5 billion.

I've got the house. I've got the private jet.
I've got everything I want. But I'm worried that maybe it's too smoggy out there.
Or I'm worried that I see all these fat people walking around.

I'm worried, I'm worried, I'm worried. So I'm going to craft out what's good for them because they're too stupid to know what's good for themselves.
And I'm not going to have to pay a price.

If I have to raise taxes, like the great Sueset wants very high, or they want to redefine capitalism. In the mind of a Bill Gates, it's sort of, well, what if it costs me a billion extra dollars?

I don't care. I'm worth $70 billion.

and so that's the second thing about it it's elite top-down anti-democratic and as i said these issues don't have popular support and third they really feel that uh the democratic process doesn't work for them except if there is a national crisis so in 2008 Rahm Emmanuel during the campaign and then later when he was chief of staff after the election he said, you know, never let serious crisis go to waste.

And he was criticizing. He said, you know what, it's a chance to get through things that are unpopular.

What he meant was that you can scare the hell out of people and they think the apocalypse is coming and Armageddon and they'll do anything you want.

And then Hillary chimed in and said, you know, this is this pandemic. She said, remember the old don't let a crisis go to waste?

Well, Hillary, you should know it better than anybody because the Clintonite Emmanuel resurrected it. And she then, during the crisis, said, you know, this is a chance to get health care.

And what she meant was, I tried like hell to get single payer when Bill was president. And Obama tried even to get single payer.
And Obamacare quite didn't get it off.

But now, when we tell everybody that you're dying because there's not enough ventilators and ventilators are the answer to everything,

then maybe you'll get single payer health. And then all of a sudden, Gavin Newsom thought, you know, this is a good idea.
So I'm going to give $500 million to California illegal aliens.

I've got the tax rate up to 13.2%.

I've got the gas taxes, the highest in the country.

I've got the highest bundle of sales and income and gas in the country, the highest electricity. And you know what? I think this COVID is not going to allow us to come back the way we were.

So, I suggest we create a new progressive capitalism during this crisis. And I could give you more and more examples.
It's not what you or I say, Jack. It's what they say.
They are so arrogant.

It's like that Time magazine after the election when this leftist authors bragged about how they basically warped the election legally.

And so they are bragging about how they are using the COVID crisis to push through an agenda that otherwise would not have legs, but it's running now because of the fright that they were able to instill on people they have no respect for.

And it's quite frightening. And

Klaus Schwabel and the

International Economic or World Economic Forum looks at America and they think, you know, the obstacle for this great reset was Trump.

And those crazy people we saw on TV here in Germany or Switzerland. We looked at those guys and they're screaming and yelling and they have Trump and you can't work with those people.
But Biden.

Biden, you can work with. And he said, remember, we're going to build back better.
Well,

how in the hell is it better than, I don't know, January 2020, with record low minority unemployment, with the first real gain in middle class wages in 12 years, with almost record peacetime unemployment of about 3.4%,

over 2% GDP growth, low interest, tax reform, deregulation, record energy production.

low inflation. What was so bad about that?

So build back better means we don't consider that stuff good because it only benefits the middle class, but it's not going to help them 20 years from now when we think that they need a entirely new paradigm.

That's what's going on. But remember, everybody should remember it's not us, not we,

not you, not me, that's saying this. These are people who are bragging openly.

defiantly, arrogantly what they're doing by manipulating the COVID crisis for a long-term political agenda that otherwise no one would want.

Victor, we have about six minutes left and i want you to i'm going to throw some out here maybe one minute and then i want to spend the rest of the time talking about your essay uh in american greatness on the new regressive dark ages you you mentioned before about now this is excuse mongering by bill gates and others they're worried they're worried do you really think they're worried i don't i mean i think they're they're really they they the they the only they like power they like lording it over people it's intoxicating and they don't need an excuse for it.

But I guess if they have to say publicly they're worried, then they will. But they thrill to the controlling of other people's lives, even if that means the diminishment of other people's lives.

Is that

stupid of me to think that way? No, no.

And there's a lot of reasons why that is true. Part of it is that they've made so much money.
that they don't really know how to spend it.

And they do feel it's contrary to their utopian ideology of neo-socialism, but they don't want to give it away in the way that, you know, by paying taxes.

They want a foundation, a tax-free foundation that would, you know, further certain ideas they have. And that part of that is out of guilt.

And they think they can still get to secular or atheist heaven somewhere by doing their good deeds the way they want to do.

And then part of it is they feel that just as people in their corporation or their organizations bow to them, they like that sense of being a deity. And they don't feel the rule.

They're completely exempt from any rules. And so Bill Gates, you know, what's wrong with flying around with Jeffrey Epstein? I don't believe.

And if I get in trouble with him or I get besmirched by guilt by association or I indulge or whatever, the downside, the upside is I'm Bill Gates. It doesn't matter.

get on the phone and call Fauci or I can talk to Fauci on the phone anytime I can. So can Mark Zuckerberg.

That's why most of the redactions in the Fauci email trove in the way that Hillary Clinton's email trove and the way John Podesta's email troll were redacted.

It wasn't that it was classified information. It was all of these grandees that were communicating over public policy with the implicit assumption that they were going to get special treatment.

And finally, This is an old, you know, the idea from Nietzsche or Chesterton that if you don't have faith in a God and a hereafter and that your experience in your corporal existence on earth has some bearing on the future of your soul, that's an innate human need, just like breathing air, drinking water.

We're born with it from God. But if you don't believe that, it doesn't mean the need goes away.
You find a secular religion. And so this secular religion is progressivism.

You can tell global warming people that this is the data on global warming and this is what you can and can't do, this is what the cost, and they won't believe it.

You can tell people that they have a heartbeat at a particular day of a fetus after conception and they will not believe that that is a living being.

You can tell people that critical race theory is completely flawed.

You can tell a classicist that you can't, you can no more have classics as an undergraduate major without Greek and Latin than you can have physics without mathematics.

And they won't listen to it because it's a faith-based superstition. And that is what a lot of these people operate on.

So when you lose your God, then you adapt a pseudo-scientific way of believing in something. That's what the Hollywood people do.
That's what the NBA people do. That's what Wall Street does.

That's what the corporate world does. For some, it's national voting rules and the white supremacy.

That's what they all do because they want to believe in something because they don't believe in anything else. And they bring, you know, religious zeal to it.

But unlike the person who believes in the Judeo-Christian tradition and the supremacy of God and the sanctity of Jesus Christ, they don't admit that what they do requires faith. A Christian does.

The Christian says, well, I can't tell you why I might have cancer today when I did everything right. Even science with its genetic and pharmaceutical research can't.

But there is, I have to have faith that there's an answer somewhere.

Or if there's not an answer, there's not

these guys say, no, no, no, no, no, no. My God, progressive scientific scientism, or whatever you want to call it, always has an answer.

And that's, they don't want to admit that it requires a leap of faith. And that's why they're dangerous people because they're zealots.

Well, keeping on this kind of religious theme or some vocabulary anyway, Victor, we just have a few minutes left. I wish we had more time, but you've wrote a very long and typically

deep essay for American Greatness. It's called The New Regressive Dark Ages.
And one of the themes is you talk about, again, about the elites and how they are super spreaders and false multipliers.

force multipliers of false knowledge. So there are two things, there's a ton in here, but two things I wish you would talk about as we close out today's episode.

One is the war against science and logic. These are the people of science, right? These are the children of the grandchildren of the Enlightenment, but they are

leading the war against science and logic. And also the use of the word regressive.
Again, the title of this piece, and you'll find it on the American Greatness website, the new regressive dark ages.

Victor, I thought we were living at a time when

the progressives were running the show, but you're talking about the regressives. Will you talk about that and the war against science and logic?

Yes. They don't believe in the Enlightenment.

They don't believe in induction, that you look at a series of data or you have empirical observations and you examine it and then you come to an inductive general conclusion or rationale or explanation.

They start out with a doctrine of what they call truth, and then they pick and choose examples that reaffirm their deductive premise.

They do that everywhere on the environment, on social policy, and politics, on foreign policy. And why do they do that? Because they have a sense of themselves as morally superior beings.

And why would they think they were morally superior? For some, like Bill Gates, they made a lot of money at the Harvard

Foul. For others, like Dr.
Fauci, it's 40 years as the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the highest paid bureaucrat in the government.

For others, it's I have a nest at Harvard or Princeton or Yale, whatever it is, it's always the argument by authority or reputation. They don't want to look at things deductively.

So they have contempt for people who do. And notice in this whole COVID dilemma that we're having, they always say, this person's not qualified.
How do you, how dare you?

When Fauci Fauci gets cornered by Rand Paul, rather than answering the questions of a U.S. senator who happens to be an MD, he always, oh, that's ridiculous.
Oh, I don't think people always say that.

He's just a mess.

And so it's very scary. And I think that's one of the great dangers, Jack, in this society today.
We are a very complex society. We're electronically wired.
We engineer viruses.

We have deadly weapons.

And when you have a group of elites who feel that they're not subject to inductive audit and that they're morally superior, and you give them power and they're not, you don't have a decentralized government.

This is exactly what the founders and their brilliance were worried about. And so we have them in the military.
We had them in James Comey's FBI. We had them in John Brennan's CIA.

We had them in James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence. We had it with Bob Mueller's dream team.

And we have it now in the COVID mess. These are all people who feel they went to the right schools, they knew the right people, they live in the right zip code, and guess what?

Therefore, they're better than everybody and they're going to dictate to them. And

they never say, this is what I actually did.

This is what I actually did.

And this is why I have authority because I have achievement. And what did Dr.
Fauci do during this crisis? What did he actually do at one time that saved lives?

Did he ever say, I'm not convinced about hydroxychloroquine, but I know the drug.

It's been used for 30 or 40 years safely within reason for the treatment of inflammatory diseases and malaria, lupus, malaria, and it's a cheap drug.

And short-term use will not be dangerous, especially as we don't have a lot of other pharmaceuticals, so you're not going to substitute a bogus drug for a successful drug. He didn't say that.

He just, you know, it's Donald Trump or Donald Trump wants to drink bleach, that kind of stuff. So I find these people really dangerous.
Well, they do posture very

well. Yeah.
I mean, I spent most of my life, rightly or wrongly, growing up on a farm with pragmatic people in a community.

welders, mechanics, farmers who, when they had a theory or they had an idea, it didn't matter.

If I said to my brother or to a packer, you know what, I think that when I thin plums, your idea that every plum should be the distance of four fingers between each other or they won't size, I don't think that's right.

I think you can have a plum tree that has a plum only, you know, one finger apart. And then when maturity came and they're the size of cherries rather than plums, I pay for it.

But what do these people pay for?

What's Dr. Fauci pay for? What do the people at HWO pay pay for? They don't pay at all.
And so that's what they're unaccountable. And that's what theorists do.

So every time a person has a theory or an idea, we should say, well, have you audited it through practice? Have the muscular classes had to experience it so you can see whether it works or not?

And the answer is usually no. The more specialize and the more pretentious education becomes and gets separated from knowledge, real knowledge, the more dangerous it is.

I don't want to use the word medieval, Jack, of the medieval church. Well, it's all right.
You've used dark ages, so I know there.

So Victor,

on another podcast, we'll get to the bottom of how you ruined the plum crop one year. But that's about all the time we have left today

for the traditionalist. Again, recommend folks go to Victor Hanson, S-O-N, sorry.

my Swedish friends, Hansen.com, private papers, that's Victor's website, at VD Hansen on Twitter, VDH's Morning Cup on Facebook.

Go check out Amazon and get the Dying Citizen pre-order, the book that's coming out in October. Victor, thanks a lot.
It was a tremendous discussion with you today.

And I look forward to being back with you next week. We're on a new platform again, folks.
Just the news, find us wherever, Stitcher.

I'm sure now we're on iTunes, we're on all the other available and all the platforms.

But we'll be back again next week with another episode of The Traditionalist from the Victor Davis-Hansen Show. Thanks, Victor.
Thank you, Jack, and thanks again for everybody listening in.

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