＂This Will Be The Nastiest, Dirtiest, Scariest Election In Our History＂ - Victor Davis Hanson
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Summary
In this episode, we re-unite with Victor Navarro to discuss the Ukraine crisis, Iran's aggression in the Middle East and beyond, and why the world order in which the West was strong and dominant is coming apart.
Transcript
00:00:00.160
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00:00:15.540
The whole idea of democracy is that it's meant to be fair.
00:00:19.540
Everybody gets one vote, and then the person who wins, wins.
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And if you don't like it, tough. That's democracy.
00:00:34.440
And so it's going to be the nastiest, most expensive, dirtiest, and scariest election in our history.
00:00:43.260
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Leveraging AI to help you gain quicker insights and reduce bottlenecks.
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00:00:58.320
Victor, such a pleasure to have you back on the show.
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Since we last spoke, I think many of the things we talked about are starting to materialize,
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which is very sad, I think, for all three of us.
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One of the things we really wanted to get your expertise on and your take on is
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the invasion of Ukraine, the Iranian-backed attacks on Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East.
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It sort of feels like the world order in which the West was strong and dominant is coming apart.
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I mean, if we had this conversation, oh, in December 2020, you could argue that Iran,
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after the death of Soleimani and the fact that the United States had got out of the so-called Iran deal
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and it had suffered $90 billion in oil sanctions, was not supplying its surrogates in the way it is now.
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The Houthis were on an international world terrorist list.
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We had cut off all aid to Hamas via the United Nations World Relief Organization.
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We'd cut off it, actually, to the Palestinian Authority for siphoning money for non-humanitarian purposes.
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And the Middle East, to quote Jake Sullivan, the current national security advisor, was, as he said,
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just, I think he said that in September, was one of his quietest portfolios.
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And as far as Ukraine went, they had invaded in 2008 at a time the United States was bogged down in Iraq
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and George Bush was a lame duck president facing, you know, 35% approval rating.
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And they went into Georgia and annexed parts of Osatia.
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And then they did it again in 2014 into Donbass in Crimea.
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I think that was partly a result of the Obama hot mic when he said,
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tell Vladimir if he'll just behave during my last election, I will be flexible in missile defense.
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And then Obama was elected, and he invaded a year and a half later.
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And then he went in during the administration, as we know, on February 24th of 2022.
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So he did not go in during this intervailing four years under the Trump administration.
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So I guess what I'm saying, if we'd had this conversation December 2020,
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we would say Russia is pretty much still within its borders.
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Iran is suffering terribly from an oil embargo and world ostracism.
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And Hamas is desperately trying to get money back from us.
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That's not to say that there weren't existential reasons.
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We had this, at that time, $31 trillion in debt.
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And we were just finishing a four-year effort to fight the courts and the Congress
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to finally close the southern border, which by December 2020, it was essentially closed.
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So there were long-term problems in the West, in general, in the United States in particular,
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but not to the degree we're watching right now.
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It's a short-term manifestation of this present administration.
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And this is what I'm hearing out of everything you're saying,
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is the situation we're now in is not accidental.
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What is it that you think has happened that has allowed all of these things to happen?
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Is it that the West has been signaling weakness?
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Is it that, you know, the president of Russia and the people in Iran just think this is
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a good time because they've got all their own problems and the president doesn't seem
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Like, what do you think it is that is provoking all of this to happen?
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Well, the long term is that in the case of Mr. Putin, Europe, of the 30-some NATO nations,
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only about five or six had met their 2%, which is a very modest investment in defense of
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Donald Trump and his Art of the Deal, Wild Antics, had ponied up maybe four more were going
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And when somebody like Vladimir Putin looked at them and he thought, you know, they either
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can't or won't respond unless the United States is muscular and takes an active role.
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But when they looked at what had happened to the United States in Afghanistan in August
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of 2021, when we had a pride flag flying at our embassy, we had George Floyd murals, we
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had a gender studies program at the University of Kabul, but we didn't have a deterrent and
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we fled in the most ignominious retreat in our history, really, and left behind 50 billion
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He looked at that and I think he thought the United States is not going to be able to galvanize
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the Europeans to a degree that's going to save Ukraine.
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That may be a flawed assessment, but that's what he thought.
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And the same thing I think was true of the Middle East.
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In the Middle East case, the Biden administration is a bastard product of a Faustian deal where Joe
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Biden in 2020 said to the party who was terrified of Cory Booker and Bernie Sanders, Libeth Warren,
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Pete Buttigieg, all of these hard left candidates that were winning or at least ahead of Joe Biden.
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And they thought good old Joe Biden from Scranton is the moderate veneer we need.
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Jim Clyburn got the African-American vote, Nevada, South Carolina.
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He got the nomination and then basically the squad, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and
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the Obamas said, we're going to have a hard left agenda and you're going to present it under
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And part of that bargain was we moved away from Israel very markedly.
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And there was a perception among Hamas, at least, that the United States wouldn't really
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object all that much if they resumed some of their activity.
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And there was also a part of the naivete on the part of the Israelis.
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I had been to Israel those prior two years, and it was kind of like la-la land.
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People on the street were telling you that Hamas needed 20,000 workers every day in Israel.
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And it was just end of history complacency, I think.
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Victor, how disastrous has the Biden presidency been, not only for America's internal politics,
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Well, to answer your second question first, I think there's a general perception that if
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you're a neutral and you want to ally with the West or the United States or both, you have
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Because this new bloc of China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and then apostates, maybe like
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Turkey or Qatar, all these people are saying these people are more likely to cause us trouble
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And then allies look to the United States and they think, you know, the game is up.
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We in Europe, they think, for 50 years played this kind of game where we always ankle bit
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the United States and said, you know, you get into Iraq, you're imperialistic, you're
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And we are, you know, we're Greek philosophers and you're Roman legionnaires and we have to
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tell you how to behave, especially with the French.
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And so finally, they got their wish with the Biden administration.
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I mean, they can criticize Trump all they want, but he killed 200 of the Wagner group
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And he was very unpredictable and dangerous, at least as far as North Korea saw him.
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But with Biden, I think the Europeans are kind of shocked because if they want to defend
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themselves, they're going to have to defend themselves because this administration, it
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talks a big game, but it's not going to do anything.
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It let a Chinese balloon just traverse the United States.
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The Russians shot down an American drone in international waters.
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China serially threatens Taiwan and this administration doesn't really, the Iranians are just out
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of control, harassing people, doing anything they want.
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170 Iranian surrogate attacks on American insulation.
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If we had another president that would be over in one day, he would just tell Iran, the next
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The next time you do it after that, we're taking out your ports.
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Next time you do it after that, we're taking out your oil.
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Because the thing I find quite encouraging, because you've quite, you've been very perceptive
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in, you know, analyzing the weaknesses within the American leadership and Biden in particular.
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But you're looking at our enemies, for want of a better word.
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So they're not like these incredible, powerful enemies who are going to sweep all before them.
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Again, what I'm trying to convey is it's a recent phenomenon.
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It's not necessarily indictment of Western capability.
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If you look at every weapon system, Putin talks a great game about hypersonic missiles.
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There's estimations that there's three or 4% of the Chinese resident population is actively
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So all of these autocratic totalitarian systems don't have the ability to create new ideas,
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And even this, you know, we're all short manpower, but the United States military, if it's decoupled
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from commissar, leftist intrusions, DI and white this, white supremacy, white privilege,
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all of that boilerplate, it's still a very lethal force, even after Afghanistan.
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And the Europeans, they have a larger in aggregate, all of the countries of NATO and the EU, if
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you put them all together, GDP and population than we do.
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So if they wanted to, they could rearm, fix their immigration problem very quickly and
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cut back on some of the socialist entitlements.
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And I don't know if that will ever happen, but it's possible.
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Victor, one of the things I wanted to ask you, though, maybe to counter a little bit what
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you and Francis have just been talking about, is my concern has been is, you know, the West's
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and America's dominance relies on the fact that we do not continually provoke challenges
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And the truth is that we cannot simultaneously be funding a war in Ukraine, supporting Israel,
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And the world order that we've been talking about that existed until now relied upon the
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Are we going to be able to put that toothpaste back in the tube when the political situation
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changes in the United States, if it if it does?
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Yeah, I think it's a little bit there's a problem beyond the the political and that is
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We had a 30 percent rise in staple goods, maybe 40 percent in the last three years.
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Our entitlements are completely out of control.
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Even Donald Trump said that he wouldn't touch them.
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I don't know how you're going to when you're getting up to one hundred and fifteen percent
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We have a big problem with civil discourse, civil discord, I should say.
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I mean, we're going into red state, blue state.
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It's unsustainable from blue states where I live.
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We're losing two hundred and fifty thousand Californians.
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And they're not just Californians or the upper middle class entrepreneurial class.
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And they do not want to pay thirteen percent state tax on top of thirty nine percent federal
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tax and get, you know, the eighth worst schools of the 50 states, the forty ninth ranked infrastructure,
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the highest property crime per capita city in San Francisco, smash and grab carjackings,
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So these these blue states, Minnesota, Illinois, New York, California and these cities, Washington,
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Baltimore, they're in a doom loop where the more people leave, the more they tax because
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And to be frank, 70 percent of them are African-American city councils and mayors that are very unpopular
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in the African-American community now because of immigration, massive immigration that finally
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the red state board of governors got wise instead of absorbing eight million people in their
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own environs, they bust or flew to all these blue states.
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At first, they virtue signaled their their their delight with it.
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And shortly that ended when they got up to about a million people in these cities.
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And because we have a federal system, I don't know what's going to happen, but we're getting
00:16:11.200
So if I go to I speak a lot or used to speak more, but when I go to a Tennessee or Florida
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or Utah or Wyoming and then I go to Illinois, New York or California, they look like different
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If I go to downtown Portland or downtown Seattle or down, it's all familiar with.
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But it's not so so much in cities, say, in Florida or Tennessee to the same degree, maybe
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But otherwise, the red state model seems to be working a lot better.
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I just look at the number of people, the outflows and the inflows and people voting with their
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If you look at our major universities, Times Educational Supplement about 10 years ago,
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rated research, major research universities out of the top 20, I think 17 were American.
00:17:19.540
And when you look at those admission policies, say where I am working at Stanford, last year
00:17:27.980
they let in 20 percent white students, nine percent of the are white males, even though
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they consist of about 67 percent of the population.
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So they don't really know which high school is better than which high school.
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And then the result is, if you look at the nine or 10 percent white males who were admitted,
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they're all the children of academics that teach at Stanford or deans or wealthy people,
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So we have completely erased the idea of a middle class, meritocratic, brilliant white kid having
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a chance to go to these universities and we're going to lose a lot of talent.
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And whatever good it brings by making people inclusive is outweighed by the divisiveness
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I live in a community that's 95 percent Hispanic.
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And a guy asked me yesterday, why didn't we have a Mexican national anthem at the Super
00:18:50.700
If we're going to add something to the Star Spangled Banner, we have more Latinos than they
00:19:01.040
But when you start talking about you guys and those guys that get into a Yugoslavian types
00:19:08.020
You guys are doing it, too, in Europe, but maybe.
00:19:11.920
And we are trying to push back as hard as possible against it.
00:19:14.900
But come back to my question with me, which was about geopolitics and whether the toothpaste
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of continually inviting challenges to our authority can be put back in the tube if there
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is a change of presidency or a change of party in charge.
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Well, I gave too long a windy answer, but I was trying to suggest that it's going to
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So I don't know what we're going to be like in 20 or 30 years, but short term, yes.
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They widened the House majority and they were able to take back the Senate by two or three
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So what would they do to answer your question specifically?
00:20:00.740
Well, the first thing they do, and you talk to people, they would slap a huge oil embargo
00:20:07.600
They would declare the Houthis a world terrorist organization, shut them out of all banking.
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They would cut off all money to Hamas and Hezbollah.
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They would probably tell China, if you go into Taiwan, we're going to stop you.
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We may not be able to get in the South China Sea with a carrier.
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We're not going to put any ground troops, but we have air power that can make a cross-sea
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I think they would go to Putin and they would tell him, from the people I talked to, they
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would tell Putin, okay, you've been in Donbass and Crimea, they're disputed territories, majority
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Russian speakers, and you can tell your people after 600,000 dead and wounded that you institutionalized
00:20:58.780
it and we will probably concede that they're now part Russian, but you're not going to get
00:21:07.600
So get back to where you were, where you started, and we will not put Ukraine and NATO, but we
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And that's, I think that was something that Putin would go for.
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And then I think this administration would, this putative administration would probably do all
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it could to break up this axis of Iran, China, Russia, try to do what Kissinger said, China
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should never be closer to Russia than it is to us.
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Russia should never be closer to China than it is to us.
00:21:40.760
The only thing that gives me some optimism is when I talk to some of the Trump people, they
00:21:55.640
convey an idea they didn't know what they were doing in 2016 because they didn't think they
00:22:01.080
were going to win and everybody demonized them.
00:22:07.640
They didn't understand the effect of non-election day and early balloting where 70% of the people
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in these swing states under the pretense of COVID did not show up for election day, but nevertheless
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voted with far less guarantees that the ballots were authentic.
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And now, now they say, we've got four or 5,000 names of people.
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And I think they could do it if they take the House and Senate.
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And I think there's a 50-50 chance they can do it.
00:22:36.680
I think, Victor, the issue is you look at the Democrats, you look at Biden.
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I don't know how you could vote for that person in all good conscience.
00:22:51.720
It's come to the point now where it's not even a joke because there's no way you can
00:22:59.860
I find it terrifying, quite honestly, that he's in power.
00:23:07.520
I think I wrote a column in 2020, a month before the election.
00:23:13.140
And as I said earlier, he's a result of a Faustian bargain.
00:23:16.320
He's just an empty suit who's going to be a veneer for a hard left cabal of people who
00:23:23.840
And after he was elected, you look at every single issue, interest rates, inflation, foreign
00:23:31.520
They don't even poll 50% support for these initiatives.
00:23:35.500
So he's now, he just polled 33% approval in the ABC poll.
00:23:42.260
And unfortunately, as I think you infer, he's the world's disaster for the next year.
00:23:48.380
And that's very dangerous because if you read Robert Herr's report, it wasn't that he was
00:23:54.940
trying to be gratuitous, as Kamala Harris said, but he just said he doesn't know when his son
00:24:05.240
He was always a mean, I thought, SOB as a senator, but he's very dangerous.
00:24:10.540
And I say there's a, I think a lot of people think there's a 75% chance that this decline
00:24:17.620
is so geometric, not arithmetic, that he would, he'll have trouble finishing his term.
00:24:25.560
You got to remember that, that everybody wanted Nixon, I think kind of unfairly, but they
00:24:31.340
Even the Republicans did because they felt he was an albatross in 73, but they didn't
00:24:37.160
know what to do because of Spiro Agnew, who had been kind of known as a crook.
00:24:42.480
And he wasn't a bad guy, but he was in, nobody wanted him as president.
00:24:49.660
Well, then the Democrats got smart and they dug up an old bribery charge and they went
00:24:55.160
to Agnew and said, we're going to resurrect this charge.
00:25:04.640
You'll have a great life next 20 or 30 years, but get the hell out.
00:25:08.540
And once they did that, you appointed Jerry Ford, good old Jerry Ford, and they could, they
00:25:14.480
They were going to impeach him and he resigned, but there's no mechanism for the Democrats
00:25:19.620
to do that now because they have a black woman who was selected in the words of Joe Biden
00:25:27.400
So people are as terrified of Kamala Harris, given what she says and acts, as they are Joe
00:25:37.920
If they, if he fought, he's one fall away from oblivion.
00:25:46.980
I guess you would, she would step in and then she would be an incumbent.
00:25:51.200
Would you try to replace Biden at the convention and say, Joe, you're going to have to give
00:25:59.120
Are you going to get rid of a black woman and give it to Gavin Newsom?
00:26:02.380
Who's been in charge of the worst state's record of all the 50 states.
00:26:06.860
Are you going to have Michelle Obama come out of retirement?
00:26:09.520
So I've never seen in my entire life, and I'm 70, this level of confusion on the part
00:26:16.100
of the left about what they're going to do, because believe me, when you talk to some of
00:26:21.100
them, they have more concerns than you do because they have more intimate knowledge of his daily
00:26:30.160
Victor, don't you think it says something incredibly damning about the American political system that
00:26:38.120
you can have a man like Joe Biden at the helm of a country?
00:26:43.500
I mean, what does that say about, about the America as a place?
00:26:47.780
Well, if you take an autopsy of how this happened, the United States is run, not to be conspiratorial,
00:27:02.200
These are people in tech, finance, entertainment, professional sports, the foundations, the corporate
00:27:09.540
boardroom, K-12 that run it, especially academics and especially the traditional and new
00:27:19.520
If you look at the Fortune 500 or 400 of the world, you get up to the top 100, about 90%
00:27:27.480
And unlike the old 400, they're not in agriculture, mining, construction.
00:27:32.960
They're in tech, tech, finance, finance, media, media globally.
00:27:37.640
So, and then you have this bipartisan Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, John McCain, Mitt Romney,
00:27:45.460
the Bushes, Clintons, you have this group of people and they kind of control things.
00:27:54.860
And then when you had Donald Trump come in, who was completely not a part of that paradigm,
00:28:00.460
and more importantly, he scared them because he wasn't just a Ross Perot, but he was making
00:28:07.240
this appeal in a nationalist, popular sense to people across racial lines.
00:28:12.600
You know, he started saying, we, we're our farmers, we, our workers.
00:28:18.480
He started, you know, he got, he got almost 35% of the Latino vote.
00:28:28.360
And of course, because his art of the deal style was to be crude and vulgar and make fun
00:28:34.820
of people that fed this image that he was a revolutionary.
00:28:43.320
They tried to spy on him with the Russian collusion.
00:28:45.580
They got a foreign national, which is illegal, Christopher Steele, to be secretly hired by
00:28:55.280
It was accurate, accurate that the Bidens had been compromised by Burisma.
00:29:00.780
They, the first time anybody has ever been, uh, tried as an, on an impeachment trial as
00:29:06.600
a private citizen, nobody's ever been impeached twice.
00:29:11.980
Uh, they've got four indictments, none of which are meritorious.
00:29:19.520
They got some crazy woman to sue him for $83 million.
00:29:23.160
Her suit was backed by a Silicon Valley billionaire.
00:29:28.160
So they, that fear brought out the worst of us.
00:29:33.380
And that is one of the reasons that Joe Biden stepped up.
00:29:36.300
They said, we got to stop this guy because Hillary, that doesn't work.
00:29:41.520
So what we're going to do is we're going to say, we're all in fear of COVID.
00:29:47.160
We're going to change the voting laws in nine or 10 States where it counts.
00:29:52.280
We're going to get 70% to mail in their ballot or vote three months in advance.
00:30:01.460
And we're going to spend $4 billion to Trump's billion and a half.
00:30:05.880
And we're going to, and so there wasn't a conspiracy in the sense of changing the voting
00:30:14.360
And I don't think that Trump himself has any idea who these people, I work at Stanford
00:30:21.340
university and I'm, you know, 10 miles from the Apple or Google headquarters.
00:30:26.560
So the people, when I go up from my farm and during the week and I walk around and have
00:30:31.000
dinner or have coffee somewhere, or I'm on campus and I talk, I don't think anybody has
00:30:38.040
They're entitled, they're wealthy, they're confident, and they have no moral compass.
00:30:43.100
And they feel that they have been entitled on terms of DI and ESG and green this and green
00:30:52.320
that, that they, they are the masters of the universe and they, any means necessary or
00:30:59.540
So they hate Donald Trump with an existential venom I've never seen in my life.
00:31:04.840
It's very interesting, Victor, because we travel to the U.S. frequently and I don't
00:31:10.680
think Francis, either Francis or I were massive fans of Donald Trump.
00:31:13.920
The style that you referred to was off-putting, I think, to a lot of people, certainly around
00:31:20.440
But at the same time, I think when you look at the hard facts of it and the geopolitics the
00:31:26.700
way it is now and the situation in the U.S., it certainly feels like, given a binary choice,
00:31:33.080
that is a situation that just, as Francis said, you've got a guy who's president who's
00:31:38.920
However, I put it to you that all the things that they did to Donald Trump, and this is
00:31:42.580
one of the things that you have to, if you're a fair commentator, you have to acknowledge.
00:31:46.280
The media lied about him nonstop and misrepresented him, claimed that he said there were fine people
00:31:52.100
on both sides when there wasn't, and there was hundreds of these situations over and over.
00:31:56.880
But I put it to you, they're going to be even more desperate this time, surely.
00:32:02.280
So, I mean, what the hell are they going to do now?
00:32:08.280
When you talk to a passerby or you go to any group, local political caucus, anything,
00:32:19.600
And the answer is, everybody is sick of Biden, but it won't matter because they're going to,
00:32:25.520
they don't really say rig, but they have so many resources, this minority of the population,
00:32:30.500
that they're going to find a way to get Trump of some way.
00:32:34.960
And sometimes the fear is, well, yeah, they let off Biden so egregiously when he admitted he took
00:32:42.000
all these things out for 20 years and he put them in non-secure locations and he didn't tell
00:32:46.480
the federal authorities, even though he's on record that he had them, but it doesn't matter.
00:32:51.560
Smith will still get chumped for the same thing, or they'll say, yeah, Fannie Willis lied under oath
00:32:56.900
and yeah, she hired her boyfriend and yeah, she sent lawyers to the White House to get Donald Trump
00:33:05.960
Or yeah, Alvin Bragg, nobody's ever used a non-disclosure form as a campaign finance violation,
00:33:13.140
Or Latina James, nobody in the history of real estate has ever been indicted for overvaluing
00:33:19.420
assets that were used for a loan that the bank eagerly, with its army of auditors allowed,
00:33:29.060
The loan was paid off, interest in principle, timely.
00:33:31.880
Everybody was happy and he's under indictment for it.
00:33:35.320
So there's just a sense of incredulity about all this and we share it with you and we say,
00:33:44.280
Well, they're the 3 million people that we created in the administrative, the James Comeys,
00:33:49.660
the Robert Mueller's, the Andrew McCabe's, the Christopher Ray's, the Anthony Fauci, all of these people,
00:33:58.740
Anthony Fauci alone had control of $50 billion of research money.
00:34:04.460
So people would say to me, well, he said, wear a mask, don't wear a mask, wear two months.
00:34:13.900
But now we have emails where he said, we've got to squash that story.
00:34:19.040
And then you talk to a scientist or a researcher in America and says, I am done if I criticize Anthony Fauci
00:34:26.300
because he either has direct or indirect control over billions of research monies.
00:34:31.020
And if you're an anti-abortion protester or you don't want transgendered stuff in your explicit frontal sexual cartoons
00:34:44.820
in a book in your sixth grade library and you go to a board meeting, the FBI will be there.
00:34:50.360
So a lot of it is fear that, and I think it was deliberate, to deter people.
00:34:55.980
And you can see Mark Stein owes a million dollars for speaking the truth that Michael Mann's hockey stiff
00:35:05.600
So it's not even confined, as you know, to the United States.
00:35:09.480
It's the Western elite, leisured and affluent and feels that they are at the end of history
00:35:15.520
and they no longer have to worry about what made the West unique, you know.
00:35:20.280
Well, this is the troubling thing, Victor, because we've got ourselves just,
00:35:25.900
the situation we had, we interviewed a bunch of young people and the Zuma generation,
00:35:30.780
I don't think they particularly care about democracy anymore because they're going,
00:35:35.740
there is no way to vote ourselves out of the nightmare that is currently our present.
00:35:41.620
And when that situation occurs, then the question for a lot of people is,
00:35:45.720
well, we elected Donald Trump in 2016 because he promised to address many of the problems we were concerned about.
00:35:51.100
Now, then this elite class that you've just been talking about essentially prevented him from governing and got him out.
00:36:06.160
And another question, I'll put two questions to you because I think there's a colliery to this,
00:36:10.180
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,
00:36:20.340
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.
00:36:26.540
And I guess, you know, if you're Donald Trump, you have to accept that they will try to do all these things.
00:36:36.180
If I were an American like you and I wanted to vote for Donald Trump, the question for me would be,
00:36:41.520
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?
00:36:47.840
Well, again, as I mentioned earlier, I'm a little confident just for little things that people don't report.
00:36:54.880
The Heritage Foundation was a mainstream Romney, McCain, Bush research fund, a biggest conservative one, much bigger than we are.
00:37:07.500
But in a different, it was more applicable to more activists rather than research.
00:37:12.460
So now they're working on an agenda for the first hundred days.
00:37:18.560
We're going to get a list of four or five thousand you can trust.
00:37:23.920
And then you talk to the Trump people and they say, how stupid were we?
00:37:28.240
We were told that we couldn't fire all these low level DOJ people.
00:37:34.680
And they were from day one trying to go after Michael Flynn and they were going after Donald Trump Jr.
00:37:42.320
And you say to them, well, what are you going to do about it?
00:37:45.320
And they say, we're not going to care what anybody says.
00:37:49.600
And we're going to do exactly what the Obamas did on only on steroids.
00:37:54.560
And that is what that talk is manifested in the global media in the following way.
00:38:08.620
And that that's how they and that shows you that they know.
00:38:13.580
I guess what I if 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.
00:38:24.620
They know what they would do and they project that onto Trump.
00:38:28.460
The irony is that he never did anything what they did.
00:38:32.420
He never weaponized the DOJ, the FBI, the CIA, the IRS like they have.
00:38:37.420
But they expect him to because that's exactly what they would do if they took power.
00:38:44.580
He's going to try to change the administrative state and get people in there that are loyal to the mission statement.
00:38:54.380
So you don't have a homeland security guy like Mayorkas who's on homeland insecurity.
00:39:00.300
His whole purpose is to destroy federal immigration law.
00:39:03.420
And that's what he's done with every Department of Energy.
00:39:10.740
Department of Interior is to make sure that we don't promote our resources or develop them.
00:39:16.860
Department of Education is to make sure that education is not meritocratic, but therapeutic.
00:39:21.300
And the real revolutionaries are these people, the hard left, because they want to destroy America and then start over under new auspices.
00:39:33.380
They're a big drag on the economy because they're always looking over your shoulder.
00:39:50.960
I really do, because they don't have right on their side.
00:39:55.220
And they surely do not have the people on their side.
00:40:00.400
There's a lot of so-called non-white people in America that have had it with them.
00:40:06.120
And it depends on how well the Trump administration can stay on message.
00:40:11.160
So some days Donald Trump, like after the Iowa primary, he gives a Lincoln-esque speech.
00:40:16.520
And then two days ago, I know what he meant about NATO, that I do anything I can.
00:40:24.740
And then the result of it is I get more countries to arm themselves.
00:40:28.620
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 as headlines.
00:40:38.360
And then you get some person calls you up and says, well, Victor, I was going to vote for Trump, but he wants to destroy NATO.
00:40:45.760
And then he said, Nikki Haley's, and you try to explain it, but then you say, why does he do that?
00:40:52.440
And he does it because he wants to shock and troll people, but this is not 2016, it's not 2020.
00:41:02.740
And everybody's got to be disciplined and come together, whether they like Trump or not.
00:41:08.220
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 Mom, a reason to vote for him.
00:41:20.140
And they're 90% there because they see what Biden is doing in the left, but they need to be reassured that Trump, that what the media says about the Trump people is not true.
00:41:41.420
I was hopeful before the midterms, and then never in my right mind did I think that they were going to leak the Roe versus Wade thing 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.
00:42:07.120
And he did all of that right before the midterm, and they squeaked, they lost, but they should have been wiped out.
00:42:14.640
So, yeah, I'm hopeful, but I understand the left.
00:42:23.960
And so it's going to be the nastiest, most expensive, dirtiest, and scariest election in our history.
00:42:32.460
I mean, those are, I want to disagree with you, Victor, but I can't, because, again, I'm no fan of Trump.
00:42:45.120
I think his rhetoric is needlessly antagonistic.
00:42:50.260
But you see the way that he's been treated, and you go, this isn't fair.
00:43:00.860
And the whole idea of democracy is that it's meant to be fair.
00:43:17.900
But they don't, they don't, they're, this isn't the Democratic Party of Bill Clinton, even.
00:43:26.220
These are hardcore, neo-socialist, so-called progressives.
00:43:30.860
And they believe that they have an entitlement to certain issues and to run this country.
00:43:38.200
And everything you say, everything they've said about Trump was something that we knew
00:43:47.700
I mean, take about, oh, the election was rigged.
00:43:52.440
2004, Barbara Boxer and 34 representatives tried to stop the election by not certifying
00:43:58.480
in Congress the Ohio electors to give John Kerry the election.
00:44:02.480
2016, leftists rounded up celebrities, politicos.
00:44:10.620
Do not vote your constitutional duty to reflect the majority-popular vote in your state, but
00:44:22.860
If you look at the violence in terms of billions of dollars of damage, 35 dead, historic iconic
00:44:30.140
buildings, police precinct, federal courthouse, St. John's Episcopal Church torch, trying to
00:44:36.480
get on to federal property, storm the White House grounds if you can, and get Donald Trump.
00:44:48.900
And yet, there were no indictments to speak of.
00:44:53.700
The police officers did their job in those four months, arrested 14,000 people.
00:45:00.120
And yet, the people who were on the White House grounds illegally, but did not go into
00:45:05.580
the Capitol, they're facing LinkedIn presence in.
00:45:24.160
People, it's like everybody knows the Aesop fable or the quasi-Aesop fable.
00:45:31.180
But nobody wants to go out and face the cat to put a bell around his neck.
00:45:37.600
So, you see all of these people, and the only way that you, that it's going to work if they
00:45:42.380
all come out on election day, they all go to the polls, they look at drop boxes, they
00:45:50.120
self-police the election just by the sheer numbers.
00:45:54.020
But they're going to need three to five percent of the popular vote edge just to counteract
00:45:58.580
the type of, you know, motor voter, automatic ballot mailed to your house, vote harvesting,
00:46:06.660
drop box, all of that stuff that, you know, Mark Zuckerberg gave $419 million to absorb
00:46:13.920
the work, basically, of registrars in key precincts.
00:46:16.840
So that, these people have unlimited imaginations and money.
00:46:21.820
Well, Victor, one of the things that hopefully will be different is, I think Elon's purchase
00:46:27.200
of Twitter has changed the media landscape very, very significantly.
00:46:31.160
Uh, and so there is perhaps, certainly the scenes we saw in 2020 and the early days of
00:46:38.160
2021, I just don't think they're going to be replicated in the same way where, you know,
00:46:43.340
the sitting president of the United States is getting banned from social media, stories
00:46:50.320
I just don't, they're not going to have the same chokehold and information that they did.
00:46:55.960
And so I think they've also played a lot of their hand in the past.
00:47:01.060
When it's Russian collusion, Russian collusion, Russian disinformation, Russian disinformation,
00:47:05.220
impeachment, impeachment, impeachment, uh, get Grofman off the ballot, get off there, pack
00:47:09.300
the court, pack the court, get rid of the electoral college.
00:47:15.320
And I was one of the people who believed Russia collusion, for example.
00:47:18.560
So fool me once, shame on, on you, but I'm not going to be fooled again because I don't
00:47:25.500
So I think that that's kind of the, the deal for a lot of people.
00:47:29.040
We've got to move to locals because we've got some absolutely incredible questions from
00:47:34.160
But before we do, last question, as you know, we always ask is what's the one thing we're
00:47:38.320
not talking about as a society that you think we should be?
00:47:46.760
And that is we have, uh, in the West, as you know, in Europe, and it's now here, a lost
00:47:54.380
generation of young people between the ages of say 18 and 30.
00:47:59.920
And they bought this idea that plumbing, electric, electricians work, carpentry is beneath them.
00:48:09.300
They're going to take three units, one semester, six units, this semester, they're going to
00:48:16.320
And all of a sudden, you know, they're not doing what made the West.
00:48:24.940
They're not the muscular classes that make this country go.
00:48:29.440
And they're, you know, you talk to everybody and they'll say, I have 10 nephews and nieces.
00:48:41.100
They're going, they're drifting around from jobs.
00:48:43.060
So we've got a, a huge number of on tap talent and people who are not reproducing.
00:48:51.620
Our fertility rates crashed from 2.1 in 2000 at the millennium down to about 1.8, 1.7.
00:48:59.700
And I don't know what, it's, it's a Western disease.
00:49:05.140
You see it in South Korea, Japan, Europe, but unless the West, there's something about
00:49:11.120
the West, the creation of capital and leisure and affluence that creates an energy or lethargy.
00:49:20.580
I mean, people will be marked about it since antiquity, but it's, this is very dangerous
00:49:26.280
It may, it's one of the, all the things we've talked about, military readiness, preparedness,
00:49:35.640
Well, Victor, follow us over to Locals where we're going to ask questions from our supporters.
00:49:42.760
What period of history most closely resembles the cultural and political landscape we see