00:00:00.000Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Great America Podcast with Lou Dobbs,
00:00:04.200always in the fight for truth, justice, and yes, our American way of life.
00:00:09.220And now, here he is, the Peabody award-winning voice of truth, the great Lou Dobbs.
00:00:14.280Hello, everybody, and here we go. Welcome to the Great America Show. Great to have you with us.
00:00:19.840I guarantee you we have lots to discuss, to sort through, and to cogitate over for days to come.
00:00:25.860And we are the right place for all patriots committed to the fundamental principles of truth, justice, and the American way,
00:00:33.700the only way here on the Great America Show. So welcome, and let's begin the proceedings.
00:00:39.460Here's where we seem to be. The Truckers Freedom Convoy, resolving peacefully, at least on the Ambassador Bridge,
00:00:47.680that is now clear and commerce once again moving between Canada and the United States.
00:00:52.860We're told some two dozen protesters were arrested over the past 24 hours.
00:00:58.960But in Ottawa, some eight hours driving time from the Ambassador Bridge, the Freedom Convoy protests go on.
00:01:06.580And good for the truckers, who are demonstrating against vaccine mandates and an imperious authoritarian government.
00:01:13.640And they're all too precious and princely Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who is an insufferable, preening, poppin' jay, and reliably useless.
00:01:24.240All he has to do is say, no more mandates. Get on with it, Mr. Trudeau.
00:01:31.340Turning to Russia and its strongman, Vladimir Putin, there is no word of an invasion of Ukraine.
00:01:38.040Not yet, not even, as President Joe Biden would have it, a minor incursion.
00:01:44.680That's a bit like my grandfather, Dr. Dobbs, used to say of surgery.
00:01:49.340Someone else's surgery may be minor, but your own is always major.
00:01:54.480Putin, despite the view from the White House and corporate news media,
00:01:58.480has already accomplished much without so much as firing a single shot.
00:02:03.720And the witless West has been oblivious as he's carried out de facto annexations of Belarus,
00:02:11.020where he already has 30,000 of his troops in place, in position, and ready to go.
00:02:16.720And Moldova, where he has several more Russian brigades in reserve.
00:02:21.640In plain English, if Putin chooses not to invade Ukraine,
00:02:25.500he has successfully already pressed Russia's borders outward,
00:02:29.840effectively annexing Belarus to the north and Moldova to the south of Ukraine.
00:02:36.720And nary a word, a single word, from the European Union, NATO, or for that matter, the Biden White House.
00:02:44.480The only open question, it seems to me, is it enough for Putin?
00:08:45.700We saw that with the Russia collusion story and so forth.
00:08:48.220They just forget about it and move on.
00:08:50.100There's no accountability, and that's going to happen with this as well.
00:08:53.180They're going to claim that it was Trump who caused the lockdowns or was behind the lockdowns,
00:08:58.320and Biden wants to open up the economy, when in fact it was exactly the opposite.
00:09:01.820Everybody knows that Biden's core voters, the sort of liberal gentry, were the most pro-lockdown, pro-mask, pro-mandates of any constituency in the country.
00:09:11.560Many of them are still there in that mindset, and they are aghast at what they're seeing their governors do.
00:10:47.360If you go to your doctor and you have, God forbid, some kind of an illness, you will explore different options.
00:10:52.640You could take a more invasive, drastic option for the illness you have, but that could put you out of work for a while.
00:10:57.780Or you could try something more light, something a little bit less likely to work perhaps, but one that will allow you to stay on the job or continue to enjoy certain activities, whatever it is.
00:11:10.080We make these cost-benefit analyses in our own lives, and that's what people expected from the people making public policy during the pandemic.
00:11:17.140As long as Fauci was held in check by some of the economic advisors on Trump's team who were pointing out some of the severe costs of doing what Fauci wanted to do, you had more of a balance.
00:11:27.660And Trump, to his great credit, decentralized the management of this crisis.
00:11:31.880There was a great article by Christopher DeMuth in The Wall Street Journal in 2020 pointing out how Trump, unlike all of his predecessors, Republicans and Democrats,
00:11:41.060Trump had not increased the power of the federal government to deal with the pandemic.
00:11:45.920He did some sweeping things, there was some spending and so forth, but he actually decentralized the management of the pandemic.
00:11:52.040So he preserved the ability of the states to experiment with different models.
00:11:56.140We saw the Florida model, we saw the New York model, we saw which one worked.
00:11:59.640And there was a balance in the Trump administration's approach.
00:12:03.260He also, with Operation Warp Speech, tried to experiment with different therapeutics, different vaccines.
00:12:09.220He invested in things before he knew they would work because he wanted to be ready for whatever contingency arose in the future.
00:12:16.900With the Biden administration, we got the old habits of increasing the power of the government, mandating things, regulating things, and putting all of their eggs in one basket.
00:12:26.160They took the vaccine program that Trump left them and they said, that's going to be our ticket out of here.
00:12:57.640And that's when things really went wrong.
00:12:58.980Not only did it increase division in American society, but it actually made the response to the pandemic worse.
00:13:04.660Because every mistake that the federal government made was now compounded.
00:13:08.900When they suspended the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, for example, that increased vaccine hesitancy.
00:13:14.820When they decided they weren't going to buy tests several months ago, that meant they weren't prepared for the Omicron variant when it arrived.
00:13:22.320All of these decisions were made because they increased the power of the central government and they gave scientists absolute authority.
00:14:08.020But it's also interesting to me, Joel, that, in fact, as hyper-frothing, as many on the left were, talking about your endangering all of society with your hard-headed insistence on no vaccination.
00:14:26.640It turns out that the number of people who did contract Omicron did so, in many cases, with double and triple vaccinations.
00:14:38.440And, in fact, there is still open science on whether or not those vaccinations made them susceptible, increasingly susceptible, to the wave of Omicron.
00:14:50.440Right. And, again, you need a variety of strategies because the reliance on the vaccine alone meant that once the vaccine could not contain these breakthrough infections, you had no other alternatives.
00:15:05.820Trump talked about therapeutics all the time.
00:15:08.740Whenever you heard Trump talk about coronavirus or Kayleigh McEnany in the press briefing room, they were always talking about not just Operation Warp Speed, but they were talking about therapeutics.
00:15:29.040I mean, the thing with hydroxychloroquine was that it wasn't harmful, at least.
00:15:33.100It had been used for so many decades without serious side effects from most people.
00:15:37.200And so we were in the middle of the pandemic at that point.
00:15:40.280And so Trump was willing to try anything.
00:15:42.640Now, Democrats were the ones spreading fear at that time.
00:15:45.640You had governors in New York and California.
00:15:48.420You had Kamala Harris, Joe Biden talking about how they would not trust the vaccine.
00:15:52.200They needed to test it again and all sorts of nonsense.
00:15:54.660But that was just about political power.
00:15:56.680Once Trump was out of office, they decided that it was their vaccine and they were responsible for it.
00:16:01.740But again, that desire for power meant that they ignored the other alternatives.
00:16:06.120They didn't want to be part of the therapeutics that Trump was there developing.
00:16:09.200And so this conglomeration, this accumulation of power is not good for public policy.
00:16:17.020We need a balance and you need a decentralized approach, which is what will remain so remarkable about what Trump did in 2020.
00:16:24.420We need a vigorous American system of government, a constitutional republic and federalism that is honored, not the target of the Marxist left in this country.
00:16:41.660And no one should make any mistake about this.
00:16:43.940This is a strain of Marxism running throughout not only the political left in this country, but also through corporate America, through our permanent bureaucracy as well.
00:16:54.360And even expressed in simple things like school boards and city council meetings where you will where you see autocrats rising up from from a neighborhood to take over the thinking of an entire community.
00:17:11.140It's it's it's really quite interesting to see what is happening to this country, not all of it, thank goodness, but and thank God, but much of it.
00:17:25.520Well, thankfully, we still have the states.
00:17:28.380We still have federalism and people have explained the crisis in Canada to me by pointing out that Canada doesn't have a Ron DeSantis.
00:17:35.420If Canada never had a province that followed a different path, even though the provinces in Canada did have the authority to set their own policies to some degree, even the more conservative Western provinces had vaccine passports and things like that.
00:17:49.720There was nobody willing to stand outside the consensus and say, we're going to try things a different way.
00:17:54.740And Ron DeSantis in Florida took all kinds of heat for that.
00:17:57.780He was constantly the obsession of the Washington media.
00:18:01.320In fact, the White House press corps seemed eager to ask the Biden press representatives to attack Ron DeSantis rather than asking the White House what they were what Biden was doing and why he was failing.
00:18:14.220But that's the beauty of the American system, the preservation of federalism and the authority of the states.
00:18:57.340And it is suffocating because it is also caught up in the economics of it all.
00:19:03.160It's much easier to put a bit of a wag in a White House press corps and send his or her bill back to the network headquarters for their strong efforts in asking predictable questions with predictable answers than it is to go out to Austin, Texas, or to Atlanta, Georgia,
00:19:27.200to start finding out what's happening with the state legislature, what is happening with the governor's office and what are the effects of policies.
00:19:36.920It's really it's it's television network economics and corporate America politics at work to really deprive the public of their right to know your thoughts.
00:19:50.500You know, Holman Jenkins of The Wall Street Journal had a column on Saturday that was very interesting.
00:19:55.780He pointed out that the reason corporate media behave the way they do is because they've become like other bureaucracies.
00:20:02.420And for bureaucrats, the main point is to learn which behaviors get you ahead, which behaviors get you promoted within the hierarchy.
00:20:09.900So when the people at the top have these left wing views, that's the view the organization adopts.
00:20:15.260These individuals eager to get ahead, to get the next promotion, to get a slot behind the anchors desk or whatever the prize is that they're reaching for.
00:20:23.000They start doing and repeating the things that they think their superiors want to hear.
00:20:27.960They're not thinking about the readers or the viewers anymore.
00:20:30.280They're thinking about their own career prospects.
00:20:32.680And so the tone is set by people like CNN's executive management, for example, which made their network into an anti-Trump channel all the time.
00:20:41.360You saw competent journalists, formerly respected journalists like Jake Tapper, start to become anti-Trump obsessives.
00:20:49.920And it has destroyed their reputations.
00:20:52.060But that's how people behave in large bureaucracies.
00:20:55.500And that's the problem with how corporate media have started to operate in this country.
00:21:00.260They have basically started to operate like government institutions.
00:21:03.280And people learn what behaviors get them ahead rather than focusing on doing their jobs.
00:21:09.240Yeah, Jake Tapper, something of a reform flack, is not always the first standard to which I would repair when talking about independent objective journalism.
00:21:33.880Let's turn to Putin and what has been made of all of the disinformation, misinformation,
00:21:43.000the lies, the cheating and stealing of the propaganda wars between Moscow and Washington.
00:21:49.820And we are sitting here still waiting for what, hysterically, Biden had said would be an imminent invasion based on the best intelligence that money can buy.
00:22:00.560I assume that he was not talking about our agencies.
00:22:06.900I mean, our agencies are not terribly well-respected anymore, given their behavior over the last few years.
00:22:13.640But we don't really know what's going to happen in Ukraine.
00:22:17.040What's interesting is that, of course, the Ukrainian leaders are telling anyone who will listen that they don't think an invasion is imminent.
00:22:23.820And maybe there's some self-interest in that because they don't want their country to panic.
00:22:40.700They keep using this word imminent, imminent invasion.
00:22:44.180Jake Sullivan coming to the White House press briefing room late last week and telling everyone that an invasion was possible within 24 to 48 hours.
00:22:53.700And, of course, the weekend's gone by and there's no invasion.
00:22:55.680They might say, well, see, that's a sign that what we're doing is working because by warning about these things, we make sure they don't happen.
00:23:00.640But they are just dialing up the alarm.
00:23:05.320And, you know, by this time next week, we could see an invasion.
00:23:11.020What's interesting is that this never happened under four years of Donald Trump, that we never saw this kind of a crisis on the boundaries of NATO because Vladimir Putin respected Trump and he didn't know what Trump would do.
00:23:24.800Now we have instead of the Russians trying to figure us out, we're trying to figure the Russians out.
00:23:29.640And every time Biden is asked about this, he says, well, we don't know what Vladimir Putin is going to do.
00:23:33.440It's almost as if he's advertising how poor our intelligence is.
00:23:36.920We ought to keep that close to our chest if we really think that's the situation.
00:23:40.900If we really think that it's hard to figure out what Putin is going to do, we shouldn't tell the rest of the world that we should make it clear what we are going to do.
00:23:47.700And I think that Biden has not made it clear that our allies are safe.
00:23:52.940Look what happened in Afghanistan and so forth.
00:23:56.140Yeah, I mean, I do not understand why anyone would take anything said by this White House, this president, to heart.
00:24:07.360As Bob Gates, former Secretary of Defense, he served Democratic and Republican administrations with distinction, a bright fellow, Texas A&M president.
00:24:20.180And the scholar in him couldn't resist.
00:24:22.660He had to say about Biden that the man hasn't been right on any foreign policy issue for 40 years.
00:24:30.040And here he is holding forth and indeed in charge of that foreign policy.
00:24:34.920The man is so enfeebled, so weak, he can't get across a stage without guidance and assistance.
00:24:42.820And we are pretending that he's the president of the United States in full power, in peak performance mode as we confront a possible national security crisis.
00:24:56.500It's not that yet, but it was, given the behavior of this White House.
00:25:02.640It's abominable what we're watching, that performance.
00:25:08.120Jen Psaki saying that the U.S. Army report on the Afghan withdrawal didn't exist.
00:25:14.340The president of the United States saying he rejects it in its entirety.
00:25:18.480I mean, we're dealing with something here we've never seen before.
00:25:24.720Any independent agency that produces a report they don't like is somehow discredited, like the CBO talking about how the Build Back Better bill was going to explode the deficit.
00:25:35.300Well, they weren't to be trusted anymore.
00:25:37.140We have these other economists we want you to talk to.
00:25:39.040So that's been the Biden administration's approach.
00:25:41.740But there's an additional element when it comes to foreign policy, which is not only has he shown bad judgment, but we don't know whether he's bought and paid for in these various situations because it's coming out.
00:25:55.060And my colleague, Peter Schweitzer at Breitbart, has written a book about it called Red Handed.
00:26:00.340We've discussed his book for some time.
00:26:02.660And by the way, it's a continuation of his reporting on the Biden family, on the dreaded influence, the pervasive influence in this country of the CCP.
00:26:14.360It is stunning that what they have gotten away with, they being the Bidens, the Democrats, the left wing and corporate America and Wall Street.
00:26:23.940Yeah. And the media, which invented commercial interests for Donald Trump in Russia, at the slightest hint of fake news from the Steele dossier or from law enforcement that turned out to be lying to the public and so forth, they would claim that Trump or his family were getting money and so forth.
00:26:46.420Meanwhile, Hunter Biden rakes in millions from China, from Russia, from Ukraine.
00:26:54.400And during the impeachment investigation, the first impeachment, it emerged that the State Department had actually raised the issue of Joe Biden's conflict of interest in Ukraine.
00:27:05.660And they were told to call the vice president's office.
00:27:09.460And when they called Joe Biden's office, they were told he's mourning his son, Beau Biden.
00:27:16.560They just never got an answer to what was a glaring conflict of interest.
00:27:20.300The Bidens thrive on these conflicts of interest.
00:27:22.400And so when you look back at Biden's history of being wrong on foreign policy, you now have to look at the wealth his family has accumulated and ask whether some of his very poor judgments on foreign policy were actually bought and paid for by people willing to bankroll the Biden family budget.
00:27:38.800No, I think your point is absolutely exact.
00:27:41.620Now, let's talk about what is, unfortunately, its subtext rather than the glaring, bright headline that it should be everywhere.
00:27:54.900And that is John Durham's motion and filings Friday, in which he reveals the charges against Hillary Clinton, a technology company, Democratic lawyers, and their role in trying to first block a presidential candidate, Donald Trump, and then overthrow a president, the very same Donald J. Trump.
00:28:27.120So there are definitely more charges coming.
00:28:30.020We don't know if Hillary Clinton herself is going to be charged, but we certainly can anticipate, based on Durham's filing, that there is other illegal activity that he's aware of, and he has a lot of evidence.
00:28:40.880As you said, Clinton operatives spied on candidate Trump and then President Trump using the defense contract that a university, which has been named as Georgia Tech University, that university had housed some servers.
00:28:58.040They were handling White House traffic and other traffic, and they were able to mine the data to get cell phone data from Trump Tower, the White House, the executive office of the president, and Donald Trump's private residence, and all kinds of other places.
00:29:52.200But they gave this data to people who then used it to claim that there was secret law enforcement information on Russia collusion.
00:30:00.720And they made their own false story more credible by saying that we had data on it and we've got the private information, all that sort of thing.
00:30:08.740And that was the basis for at least some of the Russia collusion allegations.
00:30:17.800But the fact that this spying continued into the White House makes this scandal, to use a funny cliche, worse than Watergate.
00:30:25.960Because Watergate was about a break-in at the Democratic National Committee in 1972 during the election.
00:30:32.420But this is essentially a break-in and a surveillance of Trump's campaign, his personal cell phone that continued beyond the 2016 campaign and into the presidency itself.
00:30:44.480They spied on the president of the United States.
00:30:47.140And there's no interest in the mainstream media about this.
00:31:47.860I prefer to believe that he's slow with this investigation because he's being so careful because he knows what the blowback will be when he comes down with what evidence it's clear he possesses.
00:32:00.500But, you know, Ratcliffe is saying point blank to Durham that you've got enough evidence here to bring all sorts of charges.
00:32:10.780And that is where I, you know, Ratcliffe is, first of all, he's a very good attorney.
00:32:16.440He was a terrific U.S. attorney as well as a DNI for a very short period of time.
00:32:33.880And what's interesting is that Netanyahu in Israel, former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, seems to have been targeted in a similar way.
00:32:42.940He was targeted by Israeli law enforcement officials who were using cell phone spying technology, and they spied on him.
00:32:52.400They used private information to turn some of his aides against him, all of which seems to have been illegal and may invalidate the case against him.
00:32:59.820With all of that surveillance, by the way, they really came up with nothing.
00:33:02.680I mean, the corruption charges against Netanyahu are so flimsy, things like he asked a newspaper owner for better media coverage, and he didn't get it.
00:33:11.000I mean, that's the essence of the charge against him in one of the cases.
00:33:14.420So they're all ridiculous charges, but now there's an agenda behind them and this use of surveillance by the government.
00:33:21.940I think at some point they had hundreds of police officers assigned to the case.
00:33:25.340It tells you there were people within Israel's own version of the deep state who didn't like this populist politician who was rocking the boat.
00:33:33.760If you listen to Carolyn Glick, who's a great columnist and analyst of these things, she says it was part of the Israeli military establishment that didn't like that Netanyahu was building up the Israeli Navy.
00:33:42.440Netanyahu saw the Navy as a strategic asset, but in Israel, the Air Force is sort of the king of all the branches, and so they didn't like it.
00:33:50.400So there are these agendas, and you have the same thing in the United States.
00:33:53.660Now, we haven't seen a link yet between what Durham's come out with and the actual Obama administration or people in government making these decisions.
00:34:04.540There's very interesting timing here, which is that the Clinton operatives went to the tech executives to get them to spy on Trump in July 2016.
00:34:13.900July 2016 is also the month that we know from congressional testimony that John Brennan and the others in the Obama administration started their investigation into allegations of Russia collusion.
00:34:26.920What we want to know and need to know is were these things connected?
00:34:30.420Did the Obama administration's investigation into Russia collusion rope in the Clinton campaign, and did it use the Clinton campaign to get at this cell phone data second or third hand?
00:34:41.740Because that would then implicate portions of our government, portions of the Obama administration in this spying.
00:34:48.800And I think we need to figure that out.
00:34:51.640And, Joel, you know what my first clue on this is, and my jumping off point, the incipient point for me and all of this, the biggest scandal in American history, in my opinion, not just Watergate, the biggest ever.
00:35:05.500There's only one man who would have had the arrogance, and I think the bandwidth to have laid out such a broad conspiracy.
00:35:16.760And that arrogance is so – if there were DNA, if there were forensic evidence of a propensity to arrogance and everything he touched, it would be a sure test of Barack H. Obama.
00:35:35.360There is no question in my mind that he is the starting point.
00:35:40.740He is the alpha and the omega of this entire sorry scandal that has ruined so much of one presidency.
00:35:49.840Right, and we still don't know exactly what happened in those early January meetings in the Oval Office where Obama was giving orders to his various subordinates in the closing days of the Obama administration.
00:36:02.320You know, we hear a lot from the January 6th committee and the Democrats and the media about Trump resisting a peaceful transfer of power, which I don't think he did.
00:36:09.940I simply think he did not believe, sincerely, that there ought to be a transfer of power because he believed then and believes today that he won the 2020 election.
00:36:19.020But we did see that Obama, who was termed out anyway, was resisting the authority of the new incoming administration and set all kinds of traps, started all kinds of investigations designed to undermine the successor.
00:36:31.640And Democrats have never been held accountable for that, nor have the media who helped him do it, and nor have these private actors who are now finally, finally seeing some accountability in the John Durham investigation.
00:36:42.360Although, as you point out, it has come rather late and rather slowly.
00:36:45.540Now, and it astonishes me still, naively, as I may consider it, that the national media, irrespective of all of their preferences and their prejudices, that they will not acknowledge that there was a conspiracy to entrap the national security advisor in the first month of the Trump presidency.
00:37:14.540Presidency and an outright frame up against Michael Flynn, it's it's it's there, it's in black and white empirical evidence and the media won't touch it.
00:37:29.840Well, to add insult to injury, the person who now has Michael Flynn's old job, the national security advisor, is Jake Sullivan.
00:37:37.320Jake Sullivan was deeply involved in spreading the Russia collusion hoax.
00:37:42.280He was involved in this false story about Alpha Bank being some kind of a conduit for Russia to reach Trump.
00:37:48.620That has now been the core of the Durham charges against Michael Sussman, the former Perkins Coie lawyer.
00:37:56.400Sullivan also briefed the media on Russia collusion in 2016.
00:38:00.220He testified in front of Congress at the House in 2017 that not only did he believe Trump was colluding with the Russians, but he believed that Michael Flynn was colluding with the Russians.
00:38:10.060And he, instead of being held accountable for these lies, has been promoted to Michael Flynn's position and the media never asked him about it.
00:38:18.180They never say, how can we trust what you're saying about Russia and Ukraine, for example, which is a matter of fundamental national security, international security.
00:38:26.460How can we trust what you're saying when you lied to us about Russia for years?
00:39:25.360Well, I'll just add that the issues that you're focused on, that you've been focused on for years,
00:39:29.900are the issues in 2022 in terms of the congressional elections and the fate of the country.
00:39:36.960The bread and butter issues that affect working Americans.
00:39:41.140Those Americans are the core of the Trump constituency.
00:39:45.480They're also the core of a constituency that's emerging of people who didn't think they were Republicans or wouldn't vote for Republicans, but are voting now in Virginia, other places.
00:39:54.600There is a backlash, not just against wokeness, but against an elite that is trying to drum the rest of America out of business.
00:40:03.120And the issues you talk about on this show are at the core of where the debate needs to be.
00:40:07.900If Republicans want to win in 2022, if Democrats want to try to save as many seats as possible, they have to tune into these issues.
00:40:14.780Unfortunately, I think Democrats are trying to save themselves in other ways, and Republicans tend to get lost in abstract arguments over internal politics.
00:40:23.940But these issues that affect working men and women, moms and dads, grandparents, kids, these are the ones that are getting the truckers out in droves in Canada.
00:40:33.460These are the ones motivating people to go to the polls.
00:40:36.040And that's why your show is so valuable.
00:40:38.640Well, thank you very much for that, Joe.
00:40:42.540And you just described all of my peeps, whom I love, and where the American dream shines brightest, and for whom the American dream is a birthright.
00:40:54.800And we need to do everything we can to preserve it, the American way of life.
00:41:00.100Joel Pollack, Breitbart, thanks for being with us.