TRIGGERnometry - "This Will Be The Nastiest, Dirtiest, Scariest Election In Our History" - Victor Davis Hanson

Episode Date: February 21, 2024

Victor Davis Hanson is an American classicist, military historian and political commentator. He has written on modern and ancient warfare and contemporary politics for such publications as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, National Review, and The Washington Times. He is the author of many books, including, ‘The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation.’ Victor’s books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Victor-Davis-Hanson/author/B000APGQDU/ More from Victor: https://linktr.ee/victordavishanson  Use our code TRIGGER to get $5 off your delicious, high-protein Magic Spoon cereal by clicking this link: https://magicspoon.com/TRIGGER SPONSOR: Dissident Dialogues, New York, May 3rd - 4th. Buy your tickets now at https://dissidentdialogues.org/ Join our Premium Membership for early access, extended and ad-free content: https://triggernometry.supercast.com OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube: @xentricapc  Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/#mailinglist Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The right window treatments change everything. Your sleep, your privacy, the way every room looks and feels. At Blinds.com, we've spent 30 years making it surprisingly simple to get exactly what your home needs. We've covered over 25 million windows and have 50,000 five-star reviews to prove we deliver. Whether you DIY it or want a pro to handle everything from measure to install, we have you covered. Real design professionals, free samples, zero pressure. Right now, get up to 50% off with minimum purchase, plus get a free professional measure at blinds.com. Rules and restrictions apply.

The whole idea of democracy is that it's meant to be fair. Everybody gets one vote. And then the person who wins wins. And if you don't like it, tough. That's democracy. I understand the left. I grew up with it. I see it. I'm in academia for 50 years. I know what they're capable of. And so it's going to be the nastiest, most expensive, dirtiest, and scariest election in our history.

You tell yourself, no one wants your colleagues. college-era band teas, but on Deepop, people are searching for exactly what you've got. You once paid a small fortune for them at merch stands. Now, a teenager who calls them vintage will offer that same small fortune back. Sell them easily on Deepop. Just snap a few photos and we'll take care of the rest. Who knew your questionable music taste will be a money-making machine? Your style can make you cash.

Start selling on Deepop, where Taste recognizes taste. Victor, such a pleasure to have you back on the show. Since we last spoke, I think many of the things we talked about are starting to materialize, which is very sad for all three of us. One of the things we really wanted to get your expertise on and your take on is the invasion of Ukraine, the Iranian-backed attacks on Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East. It sort of feels like the world order in which the West was strong and dominant is coming apart. Is that fair to say?

Yes and no. I mean, if we had this conversation, oh, in December 2020, you could argue that Iran after the death of Soleimani and the fact that the United States had got out of the so-called Iran deal and it had suffered $90 billion in oil sanctions was not supplying its surrogates in the, way it is now. We had talked to Hezbollah here in America. The Houthis were on an international world terrorist list. We had cut off all aid to Hamas via the United Nations Relief, World Relief Organization. We'd cut off it actually to the Palestinian Authority for siphoning money for non-humanitarian purposes. And the Middle East, to quote Jake Sullivan, the current national security advisor, was, as he said, just, I think he said that in September, was one of his quietest portfolios. And as far as Ukraine went, they had invaded in 2008 at a time of the United States was bogged down in Iraq, and George Bush was a lame duck president facing, you know, 35 percent approval.

rating and they went into Georgia and annexed parts of Ossetia. And then they did it again in 2014 into Dombas in Crimea. I think that was partly a result of the Obama hot mic when he said, tell Vladimir if he'll just behave during my last election, I will be flexible in missile offense. They both kept their bargain. And then Obama was elected and he invaded a year and out later. And then he went in during the administration, as we know, on February 24th of 2022. So he did not go in during this intervailing four years under the Trump administration. So I guess what I'm saying, if we'd had this conversation, December 2020, we would say Russia is pretty much still within its borders. Iran is suffering terribly from an oil embargo and world ostracism.

Hamas is desperately trying to get money back from us and on the Houthis are not attacking anybody. And it was pretty quiet. It's not to say that there weren't existential reasons. We had this at that time, $31 trillion in debt. And we were just finishing a four-year effort to fight the courts and the Congress to finally close the southern border, which by December 2020, it was essentially closed. So there were long-term problems in the West and general, the United States in particular, but not to the degree we're watching right now. It's a short-term manifestation of this present administration.

And this is what I'm hearing out of everything you're saying is the situation we're now in is not accidental. It's a consequence of behavior. It's a consequence of signaling. What is it that you think has happened that has allowed all of these things to happen? Is it that the West has been signaling weakness? Is it division? Is it that, you know, the president of Russia and the people in Iran just think this is a good time

because they've got all their own problems and the president doesn't seem like he knows what's going on? Like, what do you think it is that is provoking all of this to happen? Well, the long term is that in the case of Mr. Putin, Europe of the 30-some NATO nations, only about five or six had met their 2%, which is a very modest investment in defense, of their GNP, Donald Trump and his art of the deal, wild annex, had ponied up maybe four more were going to do that. But they were underarm. They had immigration problems.

They had socialist welfare states. And when somebody like Vladimir Putin looked at them, and he thought, you know, they either can't or won't respond unless the United States is muscular and takes an active role. But when they looked at what had happened to the United States in Afghanistan in August of 2021, when we had a pride flag flying at our embassy, we had George Floyd murals. We had a gender studies program at the University of Kabul, but we didn't have a deterrent. And we fled in the most ignominious retreat in our history, really, and left behind 50 billion in munitions. He looked at that, and I think he thought, the United States is not. not going to be able to galvanize the Europeans to a degree that's going to save Ukraine.

That may be a flawed assessment, but that's what he thought. And the same thing I think was true of the Middle East. In the Middle East case, the Biden administration is a bastard product of a Faustian deal where Joe Biden in 2020 said to the party who was terrified of Cory Booker, and Bernie Sanders, Libeth Warren, Pete Buttigigig, all of these hard left candidates that were winning, or at least ahead of Joe Biden. And they thought, good old Joe Biden from Scranton

is the moderate veneer we need. So we'll put him in there in South Carolina. Jim Clyburn got the African-American vote, Nevada, South Carolina. He got the nomination. And then basically the squad, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and the Obama's said, we're going to have a hard left agenda, and you're going to present it under the auspices of your moderate veneer.

And that's what happened. And part of that bargain was we moved away from Israel very markedly. And there was a perception among Hamas, at least, that the United States wouldn't really object all that much if they resumed some of their activity. And there was also a part of the naivete and the part of the Israelis. I had been to Israel those prior two years, and it was kind of like La La Land. They were so affluent and successful. They were bragging.

People in the street were telling you that Hamas needed 20,000 workers every day in Israel. And they were getting along with everybody. And it was just end of history, complacency, I think. Victor, how disastrous has the Biden presidency been, not only for Americans, for America's internal politics, but also for America's standing in the world? Well, to answer your second question first, I think there's a general perception that if you're a neutral and you want to ally with the West or the United States or both, you have to be very careful because. this new block of China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and then apostates, maybe like Turkey or Gutter, all these people, are saying these people are more likely to cause us trouble than the United States is to protect us. And then allies look to the United States and they think,

you know, the game is up. We in Europe, they think, for 50 years played this kind of game where we always ankle bit the United States and said, you know, you get in Iraq, you're imperialistic, you're neol colonialist, you're all over the world. And we are, you know, we're Greek philosophers and you're Roman legionaires. And we have to tell you how to behave, especially with the French. And so finally, they got their wish with the Biden administration. I mean, they can criticize Trump all they want, but he, he killed 200 of the Wagner group in. Syria. He killed Soleimani. He bombed the proverbial S-H-I-T out of ISIS. And he was very unpredictable and dangerous, at least as far as North Korea saw him. But with Biden, I think the Europeans are

kind of shocked because if they want to defend themselves, they're going to have to defend themselves because this administration, it talks a big game, but it's not going to do anything. It let a Chinese balloon just traverse the United States. The Russian shot down an American drone in international waters. China serially threatens Taiwan, and this administration doesn't really. The Iranians are just out of control, harassing people, doing anything. They want 170 Iranian surrogate attacks on American insulation. If we had another president that would be over in one day.

He would just tell Iran, the next time you do it, we're taking out your grid. the next time you do it after that, we're taking out your ports. Next time you do it after that, we're taking out your oil. And that would stop. And he did. Yeah, absolutely. Because the thing I find quite encouraging, because you've been very perceptive and analyzing the weaknesses within the American leadership and Biden in particular.

But you're looking at our enemies, for one of a better word. I mean, China isn't doing great. Neither is Russia. And neither is Iran. So they're not like these incredible people. powerful enemies who are going to sweep all before them? No, that's a very good point. Again, what I'm trying to convey is it's a recent phenomenon.

It's not necessarily indictment of Western capability. If you look at every weapon system, Putin talks a great game about hypersonic missiles. That was a Western idea. He talks about AI and drones. All of that came out of the West. China's desperately. I work in Silicon Valley. There's estimations that there's three or four percent of the Chinese resident population is actively engaged in espionage. So all of these autocratic, totalitarian systems don't have the ability to create new ideas, new weapons, new munitions. And even this, you know, we're all short manpower, but the United States military, if it's decoupled from comasar, leftist intrusions, D.I and white this, white supremacy,

white privilege, all about boilerplate. It's still a very lethal force, even after Afghanistan. So it's a matter of willpower. And the Europeans, they have a larger in aggregate all of the countries of NATO and the EU, if you put them all together, GDP and population than we do. And they're the birthplace of Western ideas.

So if they wanted to, they could rearm, fix their immigration problem very quickly and cut back on some of the socialist entitlements. And they could be a juggernaut. And I don't know if that will ever happen, but it's possible. But there's two people who do live in Europe. That sounds implausible at this point. Victor, one of the things I wanted to ask you, though, maybe to counter a little bit what you and Francis have just been talking about is my concern. has been is, you know, the West's and America's dominance relies on the fact that we do not continually provoke challenges to our authority in the world. And the truth is that we cannot simultaneously be

funding a war in Ukraine, supporting Israel, keeping Taiwan safe, et cetera. And the world order that we've been talking about that existed until now relied upon the fact that people did not mess with us. Are we going to be able to put that toothpaste back in the tube when the political situation changes in the United States if it does? Yeah, I think it's a little bit, there's a problem beyond the political, and that is the economic. We had a 30% rise in staple goods, maybe 40% in the last three years. Our entitlements are completely out of control.

Even Donald Trump said that he wouldn't touch them. I don't know how you're going to, when you're getting up to 115% of GDP and you're debt. That's an existential problem. We have a big problem with civil discourse, civil discord, I should say. I mean, we're going into red state, blue state. We have massive immigration. It's unsustainable from blue states where I live, we're losing 250,000 Californians. And they're not just Californians. They're the upper middle class, entrepreneurial class. And they do not want to pay 13% state. tax on top of 39% federal tax and get, you know, the eighth worst schools of the 50 states, the 49th ranked infrastructure, the highest property crime for capital city in San Francisco,

smash and grab, carjackings, terrible infrastructure. They just don't want to do it. So these these blue states, Minnesota, Illinois, New York, California, and these cities, Washington, Baltimore, they're in a doom loop where the more people leave, the more they tax because they're broke. And they don't, they're all democratically run. And to be frank, 70% of them are African American city councils and mayors that are very unpopular in the African-American. city councils and mayors that are very unpopular in the African American community now because of immigration, massive immigration that finally the red state border governors got wise instead of absorbing 8 million people in their own environs, they bust or flew to all these

blue states. At first, they virtue signaled their delight with it. And shortly that ended when they got up to about a million people in these cities. So I don't see this blue state model working and because we have a federal system, I don't know what's going to happen, but we're getting a geographical force multiplier of discord. So if I go to, I speak a lot or it used to speak more, but when I go to a Tennessee or Florida or Utah or Wyoming, and then I go to Illinois, New York, or California, they look like different nations, countries. They look different. If I go to downtown Portland or downtown Seattle or down.

It's all familiar with it, but it's not so much in cities, say, in Florida or Tennessee to the same degree, maybe Memphis. But otherwise, the Red State model seems to be working a lot better. I don't just say that. I just look at the number of people, the outflows and the inflows and people voting with their feet. So that's a big problem we're having. The DEI has been a disaster. If you look at our major universities, Times Educational Supplement about 10-year-go, rated research, major research universities out of the top 20, I think, 17 were American. And when you look at those admission policies, say where I am working at Stanford, last year they led in 20% white students, 9% of the white males, even though they consist of about 67% of the population.

So they threw out the SAT, they threw out comparative rankings of GPAs, so they don't really know which high school is better than which high school. And it's a completely commissar race gender. I admit class. And then the result is, if you look at the 9% white males who are admitted, they're all the children of academics that teach at Stanford or deans or wealthy people, donors, athletes. So we have completely erased the idea of a middle class,

meritocratic, brilliant white kid having a chance to go to these universities. And we're going to lose a lot of talent. And so, and D.I. is affecting everything. It's United Airlines training, it's movies, it's commercials. And whatever good it brings by making people inclusive is outweighed by the divisiveness that it's incurring in a multiracial society. You know, I've just talked, I live in a community that's 95% Hispanic. And a guy asked me yesterday, why didn't we have a Mexican national anthem at the Super Bowl?

Why do the blacks get their national anthem? And we're all Americans. If we're going to add something to the Star-Spangled banner, we have more Latinos than they do blacks. And I said, well, why not Asians? I have almost as much as you guys. But when you start talking about you guys and those guys that get into our Yugoslavian types and tribal syndrome, that's where we are.

You guys are doing it too in Europe, but maybe. Yes. And we are trying to push back as hard as possible against it. But come back to my question. with me, which was about geopolitics and whether the toothpaste of continually inviting challenges to our authority can be put back in the tube, if there is a change of presidency or a change of party in charge? I gave too long a windy answer, but I was trying to suggest that it's going to be very hard

to address some of the long term. So I don't know what we're going to be like in 20 or 30 years, but short term, yes. So what do I mean by yes? Let's say that you had elected Donald Trump. They widened the House majority, and they were able to take back the Senate by two or three seats. And it's 50-50 almost now, 51-49. So what would they do to answer your question specifically? Well, the first thing they do, and you talk to people, they would slap a huge oil embargo on Iran.

They would declare the Houthis a world terrorist organization shut them out of all banking. They would cut off all money to Hamas and Hezbollah. They would probably tell China, if you go into Taiwan, we're going to stop you. We may not be able to get in the South China Sea with a carrier. We're not going to put any ground troops. We have air power that can make a cross-sea invasion very costly for you. We wish you would not do that. I think they would go to Putin and they would tell him, from the people I talk to,

they would tell Putin, okay, you've been in Donbass and Crimea, they're disputed territories, majority Russian speakers, and you can tell your people after 600,000 dead and wounded that you institutionalized it, and we will probably

concede that they're now part Russian, but you're not going to get any more territory after February 24th. So get back to where you were, where you started, and we will not put Ukraine and NATO, but we will arm it to the teeth. And I think that was something that Putin would go for.

And then I think this administration would, this putative administration would probably do all it could to break up this axis of Iran, China, Russia. Try to do what Kissinger said. China should never be closer to Russian than it is to us. Russia should never be closer to China than it is to us. and put North Korea back in its box. It could all be done.

And when you talk to, the only thing that gives me some optimism is when I talk to some of the Trump people, they convey an idea they didn't know what they were doing in 2016 because they didn't think they were going to win. And everybody demonize them. They had no talent. 2020, they were very naive. They didn't understand the effect of non-election day in early,

balloting were 70% of the people in these swing states under the pretense of COVID did not show up for election day, but nevertheless voted with far less guarantees that the ballots were authentic. And now, now they say, we've got four or five thousand names of people. And when we hit the ground, we have an agenda. And I think they could do it if they take the House and send it. And I think there's a 50-50 chance they can do it. I think, Victor, the issue is, You look at the Democrats. You look at Biden. I don't know how you could vote for that person in all good conscience. I just don't know how it's possible. It's come to the point now where it's not even a joke because there's no way you can make light of that situation. I find it terrifying, quite honestly, that he's in power.

You should. We're all terrified. We all predicted this. I think I wrote a column in 2020. a month before the election. And as I said earlier, he's a result of a Faustian bargain. He's just an empty suit who's going to be a veneer for a hard left cabal of people who would never be elected. And after he was elected, you look at every single issue, interest rates, inflation, foreign policy, crime, energy, the border. They don't even poll 50% support for these initiatives. So he's now, he just polled 33% approval in the ABC poll. he's a disaster and unfortunately as I think you infer he's the world's disaster for the next year

and that's very dangerous because if you read Robert Herr's report it wasn't that he was trying to be gratuitous as Kamala Harris said but he just said he doesn't know he doesn't know when his son died he doesn't know when he was vice president he doesn't he's an elderly nice old man I don't believe he's nice he was always a mean I thought SOB as a senator but he's very dangerous and I say there's a, I think a lot of people think there's a 75% chance that this decline is so geometric, not arithmetic, that he would, he'll have trouble finishing his term. But you see what's happening in America, you've got to remember that everybody wanted Nixon, I think kind of unfairly,

but they wanted him out. Even the Republicans did because they felt he was an albatross in 73, but they didn't know what to do because of Spiro Agnew, who had been kind of known. known as a crook and he wasn't a bad guy, but he was in, nobody wanted him as president. And that's what Nixon used. You want Agnew? Well, then the Democrats got smart and they dug up an old bribery charge and they went to Agnew and said, we're going to resurrect this charge. And otherwise, you don't have to do anything. You just say no low contender, and there'll be no ramifications. You'll have a great life next 20 or 30 years, but get the hell out. And once they did that, You appointed Jerry Ford, good old Jerry Ford, and they could threaten it.

They were going to impeach him and he resigned. But there's no mechanism for the Democrats to do that now because they have a black woman who was selected in the words of Joe Biden because of her race and gender. So people are as terrified of Camilla Harris, given what she says and acts as they are Joe Biden. So nobody knows what they're going to do. he's one fall away from oblivion. If he trips or something, what happens? Are you going to get Kamala Harris? I guess you would.

She would step in. Then she would be an incumbent. Would you try to replace Biden at the convention and say, Joe, you're going to have to give your delegates to whom? Are you going to get rid of a black woman and give it to Gavin Newsom, who's been in charge of the worst state's record of all the 50 states? Are you going to have Michelle Obama come out of retirement? So I've never seen in my entire life, and I'm 70, this level of confusion on the part of the left about what they're going to do.

Because believe me, when you talk to some of them, they have more concerns than you do because they have more intimate knowledge of his daily decrepitude than you or I do. Victor, don't you think it says something incredibly damning about the American political system that you can have a man like Joe Biden at the helm of a country? I mean, what does it say about America as a place? Well, if you take an autopsy of how this happened, the United States has run, not to be conspiratorial, but it's run by a bi-coastal elite. These are people in tech, finance, entertainment, professional sports, the foundations,

the corporate boardroom, K-12 that run it, especially academics, and especially the traditional and new media, Silicon Valley. If you look at the Fortune 500 or 400 of the world, you get up to the top 100, about 90% of are American billionaires, and unlike the old 400, they're not in agriculture, mining, construction. They're in tech, tech, finance, finance, media, globally. And then you have this bipartisan, Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, John McCain, Mitt Romney, the Bush's, Clinton's. You have this group of people.

And they kind of control things. And then when you had Donald Trump come in, who was completely not a part of that paradigm, and more importantly, he scared them because he wasn't just a Ross Perot, but he was making this appeal in a national, populace sense to people across racial lines. You know, he started saying, we're our farmers, we, our workers. He started, you know, he got almost 35% of the Latino vote. He may get 45. We got 9% of the Latino vote. He may get 45. We got 9% of the black vote. He may get 20 next time. So they didn't know what to do with him. And of course, because his art of the deal style was to be crude and vulgar and make fun of people, that fed this image that he was a revolutionary. And so, you know what they did?

They weaponized the FBI. They tried to spy on him with the Russian collusion. They got a foreign national, which is illegal Christopher Steele, to be secretly hired by the Clinton campaign. They went into laptop disinformation. They impeached him over a phone call. It was accurate that the Bidens had been compromised by Burisma. The first time anybody has ever been tried on an impeachment trial as a private citizen. Nobody's ever been impeached twice.

They tried to take him off the ballot. They've got four indictments, none of which are meritorious. They're all political. Two of them are imploding as we speak. they got some crazy woman to sue him for $83 million, her suit was backed by Silicon Valley billionaire. So that fear brought out the worst of us, and that is one of the reasons that Joe Biden stepped up.

They said, we got to stop this guy because Hillary, that doesn't work. So what we're going to do is we're going to say we're all in fear of COVID. we're going to change the voting laws in nine or ten states where it counts. We're going to get 70% to mail in their ballot or vote three months in advance. And we're all going to say it's for COVID. And we're going to spend $4 billion to Trump's billion and a half. This podcast is brought to you by Carvana. Selling your car should feel like one less thing on your list.

Not one more. With Carvana, it is. Just go to Carvana.com. and to your license plate or VIN and get a real offer down to the penny. No back and forth, no surprises, just an experience you can trust. Like your offer? Accept it. Schedule pickup, and we'll come to you with a check in hand.

Your car, your timeline, your terms. Visit Carvana.com to sell your car today. Carvana. Pick up fees may apply. And so there wasn't a conspiracy in the sense of changing the voting machines or anything. They just did it quasi-legally. and I don't think that Trump himself has any idea who these people. I work at Stanford University and I'm, you know,

10 miles from the Apple or Google headquarters. So the people, when I go up on my farm and during the week and I walk around and have dinner or have coffee somewhere or I'm on campus and I talk, I don't think anybody has any idea who these people are. They're entitled, they're wealthy, they're confident, and they have no moral compass. and they feel that they have been entitled on terms of D.I and ESG and green this and green that,

that they are the masters of the universe, and any means necessary or justified for the utopian end. So they hate Donald Trump with an existential venom I've never seen in my life. Never. It's very interesting, Victor, because we travel to the U.S. frequently. And I don't think France is either Francis or I

were massive fans of Donald Trump. The style that you referred to was off-putting, I think, to a lot of people, certainly around the world, but in America as well. But at the same time, I think when you look at the hard facts of it and the geopolitics the way it is now and the situation in the U.S., it certainly feels like given a binary choice, that is a situation that just, as Francis said, you've got a guy who's president who's barely there. However, I put it to you that all the things that they did to Donald Trump, and

And this is one of the things that you have to, if you're a fair commentator, you have to acknowledge. The media lied about him nonstop and misrepresented him, claimed that he said there were fine people on both sides when there wasn't, and there was hundreds of these situations over and over. But I put it to you, they're going to be even more desperate this time, surely. They must be. So, I mean, what the hell are they going to do now? I don't know. That question is on everybody's mind.

When you talk to a passerby or you go to any group, local political caucus, anything, that comes up immediately. And the answer is, everybody is sick of Biden, but it won't matter because they're going to, they don't really say rig, but they have so many resources, this minority of the population, that they're going to find a way to get Trump of some way. And sometimes the fear is, well, yeah, they let off Biden so egregiously when he admitted he took all these things out for 20 years and he put them in non-secure locations and he didn't tell the federal authorities, even though he's on record that he had them. But it doesn't matter. Smith will still get Trump for the same thing. Or they'll say, yeah, Fannie Willis lied under oath. And yeah, she hired her boyfriend. And yeah, she sent lawyers to the White House to get Donald Trump.

And there's nothing to it. But they'll get him. Or, yeah, Alvin Bragg, nobody's ever used a non-disclosure form as a campaign finance violation, but he'll do it. Or Latita James, nobody in the history of real estate has ever been indicted for overvaluing assets that were used for a loan that the bank eagerly, with its army of auditors allowed, made millions of profits and interest. The loan was paid off, interest in principle, timely.

Everybody was happy, and he's under indictment for it. So there's just a sense of incredulity about all this. And we share it with you. And we say, who are these people? Well, they're the 3 million people that we created and the administrative, the James Comey, the Robert Mueller's, the Andrew McCabe's, the Christopher Ray's, the Anthony Fauci, all of these people. They're judged, jury, and executioner.

They got enormous, Anthony Fauci alone had control of $50 billion of research money. So people would say to me, well, he said wear masks, don't wear masks, wear two months. Get the, it was a panglin closet. It was a bat cause it. But now we have emails where he said we've got to squash that story. Well, how do you get this power? And then you talk to a scientist or a researcher in American says, I am done if I criticize Anthony Fauci because he either has director and direct control over billions of research monies.

And if you're an anti-abortion protester or you don't want transgendered stuff in your, you know, explicit, fundal sexual cartoons in a book in your sixth grade library, and you go to a board meeting, the FBI will be there. So a lot of it is fear that, and I think it was deliberate to deter people. And you can see Mark Stein owes a million dollars for speaking the truth. that Michael Mann's hockey stiff had been criticized by an array of scholars. So it's not even confined, as you know, to the United States. It's a Western elite, leisured and affluent, and feels that they are at the end of history and they no longer have to worry about what made the West unique, you know. Well, this is the troubling thing, Victor, because we've got ourselves to a situation.

We had a, we interview a bunch of young people and the Zuma generation. I don't think they particularly care about democracy anymore because they're going, there is no way to vote ourselves out of the nightmare that is currently our present. And when that situation occurs, then the question for a lot of people is, well, we elected Donald Trump in 2016 because he promised to address many of the problems we were concerned about. Then this elite class that you've just been talking about essentially prevented him from governing and got him out. let's say we elect him again

the elite do effectively the same thing where do we go from there and another question I put two questions to you because I think there's a collary to this which is on the left the thing that bothers us

is one of the things that bothers us is there's this cultivation of the victimhood teaching everybody to be a victim but it seems to me like even in the conversation we are having there's a lot of kind of well they are doing this thing to us and I guess you know if you're Donald Trump you have to accept that they will try to do all these things.

So how is you going to overcome that? That's what I want to know. If I were an American like you and I wanted to vote for Donald Trump, the question for me would be, why am I electing you if you're going to spend the next four years whining about how the elite won't let you do anything? Yeah. Well, again, as I mentioned earlier,

I'm a little confident just for little things that people don't report. The Heritage Foundation was a mainstream, Romney, McCain, Bush, research fund, a biggest conservative one, much bigger than we are, but in a different, it was more applicable to more activists rather than research.

So now they're working on an agenda for the first 100 days. They've never done that. Kevin Roberts, the director, is just open. We're going to get a list of four or five thousand you can trust. And we're not going, and then you talk to the Trump people,

and they say, how stupid were we? We were told that we couldn't fire all these low-level DOJ people, and we found out that Obama fired everybody. And they were from day one trying to go after Michael Flynn, and they were going after Donald Trump Jr. Yes, they know that now. And you say to them, well, what are you going to do about it? And they say, we're not going to care what anybody says. They're going to be fired. And we're going to do exactly what the Obama's did only on steroids.

And that is what that talk is manifested in the global media in the following way. Trump is a dictator. Trump promises revenge. Trump promises retribution, nightmare coming. And that's how they, and that shows you that they know, I guess what I, to sum up, they know what they would do if they had suffered what they did to Trump and it happened to them and they were on the verge of regaining power. They know what they would do,

and they project that on to Trump. The irony is that he never did anything what they did. He never weaponized the DOJ, the FBI, the CIA, the IRS like they have. But they expect him to because that's exactly what they would do if they took power. But he's not going to do that. He's going to try to change the administrative state and get people in there that are, are loyal to the mission statement so you don't have a homeland security guy like

Majorcas who's on homeland insecurity. His whole purpose is to destroy federal immigration law. And that's what he's done with every department of energy. The person is there to stop energy production. Department of Interior is to make sure that we don't promote our resources or develop them. Department of education is to make sure that education is not meritocratic but therapeutic. And the real revolutionaries are these people, the hard left, because they want to destroy America and then start over under new auspices. They're very much like Soviet comissars.

They're a big drag on the economy because they're always looking over your shoulder. Do you want to sign the DEI statement? Oh, do you want this grant? What is your idea about race or diversity? All of that stuff. And I think we can beat them. I really do because they don't have right on their side. They don't have morality on their side.

And they surely do not have the people on their side. And they are terrified. There's a lot of so-called non-white people in America that have had it with them. And it depends on how well the Trump administration can stay on message. So some days, Donald Trump, like after the Iowa primary, he gives a Lincoln-esque speech. And then, yes, two days ago, I know what he meant about NATO that I do anything I can. I say crazy things. And then the result of it is I get more countries to arm themselves.

But when he says, I told Russia, go do what you want if they don't want to protect themselves. That comes across in the United States. Is headlines, Trump wants to destroy NATO. And then you get some, some person calls you up and says, well, Victor, I was going to vote for Trump. But he wants to destroy NATO. And then he said, Nikki Haley's, and I, you know, you try to explain it, but then you say, why does he do that? And he does it because he wants to shock and troll people. But this is not 2016.

It's not 2020. This is kind of our last chance to stop this. And everybody's got to be disciplined and come together, whether they like Trump or not. And Trump has to allow them. Trump has to give a reason for the ex-Biden, the old Reagan Democrat, the independent, the moderate, the swing voter, the suburban soccer bomb, a reason to vote for him. And they're 90% there because they see what Biden is doing in the left. But they need to be reassured that what the media says about the Trump people is not true. Victor, you sound hopeful. Are you?

I do. Yeah, I am hopeful. I am. But, you know, I've been wrong before. I was hopeful in the I was hopeful before the midterms, and then never in my right mind that I think that they were going to leak the Roe versus Wade thing, it's against the law, or they were going to drain the strategic petroleum reserve to drop gas by a dollar a gallon, or they were going to just illegally issue a fiat that said student loan payments don't have to be repaid. And he did all of that right before the midterm, and they'd lost, but they should have been wiped out. So you got to, I'm hopeful, but I understand the left. I grew up with it. I see it. I'm in academia for 50 years. I know what they're capable of.

And so it's going to be the nastiest, the most expensive, dirtiest, and scariest and scariest election in our history. Believe me. I mean, those are. I want to disagree with you, Victor, but I can't because, again, I'm no fan of Trump. I think he's divisive. I think his rhetoric is needlessly antagonistic. I think his very presence is inflammatory. But you see the way that he's been treated and you go, this isn't fair.

This isn't fair. And the whole idea of democracy is that it's meant to be fair. Everybody gets one vote. And then the person who wins wins. And if you don't like it, tough. That's democracy. Exactly. But they don't, they don't, they're, this isn't the Democratic Party of Bill Clinton even.

It's not Hubert Humphrey. It's not John Kennedy. These are hardcore neo-socialists, so-called progressives. And they believe that they have an entitlement to certain issues and to run this country. and they will do anything. And everything you say, everything they've said about Trump was something that we knew about the left all the time.

I mean, take about, oh, the election was rigged. 2004, Barbara Boxer and 34 representatives tried to stop the election by not certifying in Congress, the Ohio electors to give John Kerry the election. 2016, leftists rounded up celebrities, politicals, they saturated the airwaves in December. Do not vote your constitutional duty to reflect the majority of popular vote in your state, but swing your electors to Hillary Clinton. That was insurrection. Nobody said a word. Nobody said, if you look at the violence in terms of billions of

dollars of damage, 35 dead, historic iconic buildings, police precinct, federal courthouse, St. John's a physical church torch, trying to get on to federal property, storm the White House grounds if you can and get Donald Trump. 1,500 police officers, and you compare it to January 6. January 6 was a lark and compared to that. And yet there were no indictments to speak of. All the arrest, the police officers did their job in those four months arrested 14,000 people. 90% of them were let off. And yet the people who were on the White House ground. grounds illegally, but did not go into the capital, they're facing LinkedIn prison sentence. And so it's very hard to fight the left. They have the money. They have the media. They have the academic and corporate cachets. And they, it's very hard. People, it's like everybody

knows the Aesop Fable or the quasi-Esip Fable. You have to bell the cat to warn the mice, but nobody wants to go out and face the cat to put a bell around his neck. Because when you do, they try to destroy you. So you see all of these people. And the only way that it's going to work if they all come out on election day, they all go to the polls, they look at drop boxes, they self-police the election just by the sheer numbers. But they're going to need three to five percent of the popular vote edge just to counteract the type of, you know, motor voter, automatic ballot mail to your house, vote harvesting, drop ball, all of that stuff that, you know, Mark Zuckerberg gave $419 million to absorb the work basically of registrars in key precincts. So that these people have unlimited

imaginations and money. Well, Victor, one of the things that hopefully will be different is I think Elon's purchase of Twitter has changed the media landscape very, very significantly. It has. And so there is perhaps, certainly the scenes we saw in 2020 and the early days of 2021, I just don't think they're going to be replicated in the same way where, you know, the sitting president of the United States is getting banned from social media, stories are suppressed on social media, et cetera. I just don't, they're not going to have the same chokehold and information that they did.

I think that's a good point. I think they've also played a lot of their hand in the past. So you know what I mean by that? When it's Russian collusion, Russian collusion, Russian disinformation, Russian disinformation, impeachment, impeachment, get dropped them off the ballot, get off the, pack the court, pack the court, get rid the electoral college. Everybody, oh, yeah, not that again.

Everybody's heard it. And I was one of the people who believed Russia collusion, for example. So fool me once, shame on you. But I'm not going to be fooled again because I don't want the shame on me. So I think that's kind of the deal for a lot of people. We've got to move to locals because we've got some absolutely incredible questions from our supporters. But before we do, last question, as you know, we always ask is, what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that you think we should be?

Well, it's kind of a nebulous thing, and that is we have in the West, as you know in Europe, and it's now here a lost generation of young people between the ages of, say, 18 and 30, and they bought this idea that plumbing, electricians work, carpentry is beneath them. They're going to get a degree at a university. They're going to take three units, one semester, six units this semester. They're going to hook up here, hook up there, and all of a sudden, you know, they're not doing what made the West. They're not getting married.

They're not having children. They're not buying a home. They're not plugged in. they're not the muscular classes that make this country go. And you know, you talk to everybody and they'll say, I have 10 nephews and nieces, only two are married, only one has children, only three bought a house. What are they doing?

Oh, they're in the basement. They're dripping around from jobs. So we've got a huge number of on-tap talent and people who are not reproducing. Our fertility rates crashed from 2.1 in 2000. at the millennium down to about 1.8, 1.7. And I don't know what, it's a Western disease. You see it in South Korea, Japan, Europe,

but unless the West, there's something about the West, the creation of capital and leisure and affluence that creates an ennui or a lethargy. And it's not new. I mean, people will be marked about it since antiquity, but this is very dangerous to the West. It's one of the, all the things we've talked about, military readiness, preparedness, deterrence,

it has something to do with this phenomenon. Absolutely. Well, Victor, follow us over to locals where we're going to ask questions from our supporters. See you there. What period of history most closely resembles the cultural and political landscape we see in the world today? How many discounts does USA auto insurance

offer too many to say here. Multi-vehicle discount, safe driver discount, new vehicle discount, storage discount, legacy discount. How many discounts will you stack up? Tap the banner or visit usa dot com slash auto discounts. Restrictions apply.