← Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
Victor Davis Hanson: What I Fear Worse Than Socialist Democratic Government
00:54:44
In a new March Madness-style series that will pair off “16 terrible issues” against each other, Hanson will act as the judge, ruling on the greatest existential threat to the United States.
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- [00:00]
A
There was another report of a Chinese researcher who entered the United States with botulism. The other, I think it was last week. And that's in addition to the two Michigan researchers that were caught with a biological rust mold type of weapon that would theoretically destroy grain crops. And then that is in addition to in our environs. We're 10 miles away in Reedley, California. Last year, a bio lab was found by a Chinese national who had abandoned it and said it was for the making of vaccinations. But there were 200 dead genetically engineered rats and there were vials of Ebola, aids, Covid, almost every deadly, deadly disease. So something's going on.
- [01:04]
B
Well, hello ladies and hello, gentlemen, and welcome to Victor Davis Hansen in His Own Words. I'm Jack Fowler, the host, but you're here to listen to Victor Davis Hansen, who is the Martin and Neely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Wayne and Marcia Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, and the senior contributor at the Daily Signal, which is the happy home of this podcast. Victor, I'm actually even wearing my Daily Signal cap today. We are recording on Tuesday, December 23rd, and this episode is a special episode, the first of four special episodes, and this one will appear on Tuesday, January 6th. And we're doing a series of podcasts on where we have 16 terrible issues. What are the things that keep you awake at night? And we're going to treat them like March Madness, pair them off against each other and see which is the worst of the 16 issues. And Victor is Victor is going to rule. He's going to be the judge.
- [02:09]
A
And I'm looking at what I have no idea what you're going to say to me. So I'm okay.
- [02:13]
B
Ignorance is bliss, my friend. Unsuspecting, the last thing you are is ignorant. Well, we're going to get started with discussing China, China's might, mighty military, China versus. Rogue nukes. Which of these things is worst? And we're going to get to that when we come back from these important messages. We are back with Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. Again, this is a special episode. And Victor, thank you for, should I say, playing along. But we're trying to create some episodes to carry through as Victor takes a.
- [03:00]
A
Little R and R recovery for I'm taking an Audi. I'm trying to get home to Ithaca, Jack, and I'm on an odyssey. And this week I've been dealing with Cyclops, the Sirens, Circe, Calypso, the Laestrygonians. But I can just see Ithaca's shores.
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B
Yeah.
- [03:20]
A
Next, a week from today.
- [03:22]
B
Is there a dog involved with that?
- [03:24]
A
Yes. Argos. Argos. Poor little Argos. Argos had lived 20 years. And when Odysseus is in disguise, remember he comes back as a beggar so he can scout out what the suitors are doing to his household. He sees Argos and poor Argos was a great hunting dog, but he's all mangy and the suitors have treated him terribly. And he's on a bed of manure. And Argos, of course, can spot Odysseus and he wags his tail and smiles and dies.
- [03:58]
B
Wow, that's. It's spectacular and heartbreaking at the same time. So. Well, we have 16 issues and we're going to call this what the sour 16. And the first matchup is between again between China and its tremendous military might. And that might, that might surpass America's military might, plus its spying and its control of critical materials. So Red China as a, as a thing that will keep you up at night versus rogue nukes. Victor?
- [04:32]
A
Yes.
- [04:32]
B
Which of those things do you think is more troubling?
- [04:38]
A
What do you mean by rogue nukes? You mean nukes that are not under control of the Chinese Communist Party government?
- [04:47]
B
I would say that. I would say. Or nukes that are in control of a nation that everybody.
- [04:54]
A
I think that worries me the most because we have 6,500 nukes. Russia says they have 7,000. Israel has about 200. Pakistan has about 150. I think India's got about 400. France has about 180. Britain used to have 200. I don't know how many. North Korea has. They say about 200. China is estimated, I think last year to have 6 to 700. And it was building 30, 30amonth. So it was going to get about 350 more a year. And there, as I understood it, within about 15 years they were going to have as many as we did. And at that, at some critical mass. I have read a lot of, I think a lot of us have read these strategic assessments. At some strategic juncture, when they get about 2,000 nukes, then they feel that nobody's going to bully them on Taiwan. I don't mean bully, I mean react to what they, they want to do with Taiwan. By the way, there was a. Another report of a Chinese researcher who entered the United States with botulism. The other. I think it was last week. And that's in. In addition to the two Michigan researchers that were caught with a biological rust mold type of weapon that would theoretically destroy grain crops. And then that is in addition to in our environs. We're 10 miles away in Reedley, California. Last year, a biolab was found by a Chinese national who had abandoned it and said it was for the making of vaccinations. But there were 200 dead genetically engineered rats, and there were vials of Ebola, aids, Covid, almost every deadly, deadly disease. So something's going on. And if you.
- [07:04]
B
It's hard to believe there's just one of those places in the United States also.
- [07:08]
A
No, there's not just one. And then we had the mysterious reports about the drones on the East Coast. There's all sorts of conspiracy theories. We had the balloon coming across. We had the Chinese diplomats exploding to the Japanese prime minister. I think they said something, we're going to cut your head off. And then we had them, you know, 20, 21, dressing down Anthony Blinken and humiliating Jake Sullivan in Anchorage. So they were unapologetic. I wish the left and I wish people listening would understand that the problem is not Donald Trump. The problem is that there are major forces in the world, Russia, but especially China and radical Islam, that want to destroy the United States. It's just that simple. And to the degree that we let down our guard or we lose deterrence, they'll try. And so it's very important that we be united and keep up. I think the left thinks this. Jack, just to finish this topic, we'll go to the next. They think that because we're now a multiracial, multicultural society and 30% are victims and they're not victimizers, that Russia and China know that, and therefore that they feel that 30% of a country is not toxic white supremacist, and that 50% is left wing. So we're really, you know, empathetic to China and Russia and Iran. That's what they think, the left. I think they're wrong. Right. They. They'll hate Joy Reid just as they'll nuke Joy Reid just as much as they would nuke you and me, put it that way.
- [08:51]
B
Well, they might especially.
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A
Yeah.
- [08:53]
B
Nuke Joy Reid. My understanding is if you are a black person in China, you are. You're not well treated. But anyway. Well, Victor, why is the 2000 you mentioned as an. As a threshold of nukes? I. I don't. What's the logic behind that? I'm not. You're saying. You're saying that. Well, you said it. So they say, well, why. Why is it not. Why is the 1000 insufficient.
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A
Yeah.
- [09:20]
B
And 2000 triggers some mag threat.
- [09:23]
A
I'll give you an example of what I mean. I want to be very careful. About 10 years ago, I wrote an article about nukes and how ridiculous it was to have a thousand or two thousand, three thousand, four thousand. But I also read other studies from the 1950s that suggested that it wasn't stupid. And here's what happened. I was speaking in Carmel, California, and you know what? I was speaking about California farming. And a person came up to me from a major Asian country, I won't identify it, and said, I am a four star general and I am touring California. And I read your article and I'm in the audience. I do not want to talk to you about agriculture. Could you have coffee with me? I said, okay. He apparently overvalued my value. He thought I was important, but I wasn't. So he said, he took a little piece of paper and he said, you have 6,000 nukes. And he said, we think that you have about 25 to 3,000 nukes to protect the United States from deterrent. That meant that if China or Russia or anybody tried to nuke you, you had enough nukes to destroy them completely after a first strike. Okay, so let's say that we wake up right now, Jack, and we hear that 600 nukes and 2,000 are coming from Russia. And we have 10 minutes. We have enough to warn them in advance. If they were to do that, they will cease to exist. Okay, 2000. So then he said, and you're NATO. And he wrote a little thing and said, NATO only has 5, 400 nukes. Can you believe it? They're bigger than you are Europe, and they only have. And so we think that you need 2,000 for them. And then he said, you have commitments in Asia, you have commitments in the Americas, you have commitments with Canada. And then he said, there's not enough nukes left for us. And I said, well, this is insane. And he said, do you. We would like to know that. And this was in. I should be very clear, Jack, this was right during Barack Obama said that he wanted to take the 6,500 nukes and put them in operative and bill down. Do you remember to 1500? Because it was insane. I could see what he said. He just said, we're going to put them not ready. And that was discussed. And this is what prompted my article. So I didn't give you the full story. So this guy was saying you basically need four or five thousand nukes to protect Europe from a first strike. And that type of deterrence. You need that type of deterrence for the United States, you need more for North America, and then you have all these allies in Asia. And he said, well, where are our nukes? And I said, what do you mean? We said, well, take North Korea. He said, if they have 200 nukes and they're not sure you're going to protect us, you need three or four hundred nukes that you have made clear to us and we can make clear to this. This country said to them that if they attack us, they're going to be hit with 400 nukes. I thought the whole conversation was bizarre. He gave me a nice present, a silk tie. I shouldn't have taken it, but I didn't want to offend him. I said, I shouldn't take this. No, no, I took your time here. But I thought it was really absurd. But that's the logic of nuclear poker, and Kissinger wrote about it. So each country feels that if they're not going to become nuclear, that they need a sufficient number of nuclear weapons to ensure their existential enemies, that if they wake up one morning and there's going to be a first strike, that the enemy knows they shouldn't do that because they can take the hit, and then they will have more nukes to destroy that country. And because, and this is the important point, there's at least 10 European countries that could make nukes in, I don't know, six months. Japan could probably make, I don't know, 4,000 nukes in a year with their plutonium. South Korea could do it. Taiwan could do it. So the point being is these countries don't do it because the United States has assured them that there's sufficient wherewithal in the United States for each country to be protected under our umbrella. And that would not have been possible, according to this person, if we went down to 1,500. That's what I should have said at the beginning, because we would need four or five thousand nukes for our global responsibility. I just said, well, one megaton bomb is kind of the end. No, it is not the end. It is not the end. A one megaton bomb is a city, but it's not 500 cities. So don't talk like that, Mr. Hansen. That's what he said. Anyway, let's go to the next topic. So that's a frightening thing.
- [14:20]
B
Well, we'll get to the next topic in a second. But first, to our listeners and viewers, if you want to drop extra pounds, boost energy levels or reduce swelling in your legs and feet, then this message is for you. Pure Health Research is on a mission to make America healthy again. And two of their best selling health supplements are leading the way. The first is Liver health formula. Over 100 million Americans have a sluggish liver riddled with fatty deposits. This can kill your metabolism, pile on the pounds and make you feel tired. Liver Health Formula takes care of that. It supports three thriving liver health with special nutrients like artichoke extract and milk thistle. This is one of the easiest ways to slim down and revitalize your energy levels. Next is lymph system support. If you struggle with fluid buildup or swelling in your legs, ankles or feet, this is for you. The natural ingredients in lymph system support help gently flush extra fluid and toxins out of the body. And right now, for a limited time, listeners and viewers of Victor Davis Hansen, in his own words, can get 35% off liver health Formula and lymph system support along with 50 plus health supplements that Pure Health Research has to offer. So head over to PureHealthResearch.com and use the code VICTOR at the checkout. That's PureHealthResearch.com with the coupon code VICTOR to save 35% on your order today. And we thank the good people from Pure Health Research for sponsoring Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. Victor, let's the next battle is going to be massive debt versus the destruction of the nuclear family. Both things are terrible things. Both things are looming and horrible mass of debt is really looming. It says 37 million, but I have a feeling with the unfunded mandates, it's quite much more than that. But the nuclear family is central to our civilization. So which of these things, Victor, keeps you troubles you?
- [16:27]
A
Yeah, you know, that's a very good point, Jack, because it's immediate versus insidious. And by that I mean obviously if you're paying $3 billion a day in debt right now and 1 trillion a year in debt. And I think Neil Ferguson revived that formula from an earlier Ferguson, no relation, who had said that anytime a country's interest cost on their debt was larger than a defense budget, it was headed for oblivion. And that's our case. Right now we're paying a trillion dollars. That's why Donald Trump, everybody gets mad at Donald Trump because he badgers the Federal Reserve. But this fourth quarter economic report came out and it is amazing. It's 4.2% GDP and the inflation is down to 2.6 to 2.7. Of course, the Wall Street Journal always Uses the term unexpected. This was unexpected. No, we expected it. Our listeners expected it. Anytime you deregulate lower taxes, energy development, foreign investment, promise AI all that sort of what I'm getting at is we are trying to address the existential debt by if we can get the interest rate down. The reason we got into this mess everybody is during the Obama period, all the way through the first Trump period, we had almost zero. Remember, I think that's a fair zero inflation. I mean zero interest rates. The interest rates were about 2%, inflation was about 2%. Inflation could borrow money and that meant that you could keep borrowing 6, 8 trillion dollars as Biden did over the four year period. And the actual interest cost was no more than before because when you have a third of say 7 or 8% interest, then you can have three times the debt and still have the same debt load. But it caught up to us under Biden's last year. So what I'm getting at, that is a problem. But that's an immediate problem. One billion. And if Trump can lower the interest rates that we could go from $3 billion a day to 2 billion and he would make progress on the deficit. That's a long windy explanation, but insidiously we're not talking about certain things. And you point out that the nuclear family, in some things it's only 40%, that is a two parent family. And can I add to that a 2.0 fertility rate. So the old idea that fertility.
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B
Yeah, that's going to be a separate issue, but go ahead.
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A
It is, but it is kind of. You know, when you say the nuclear family, the family is there to raise children, to tell you the truth. But my point is if you, if only half of your marriages are a nuclear man, woman, partnership with two children, then it's not going to work. And I say that in two senses. You're not going to, you're not, you're going to have an aging shrinking population and you're not going to have a two family, two parent household. You're not going to have mostly I'm suggesting a father in the picture. And you can see with the inner city crime and et cetera, all the common denominator to the why African Americans Males consist males of ages 18 to. I should take that back 12 to 40 consists of about 3% of the population and they commit about 50% of violent crimes. As a attributable, I think almost entirely to there's no father in the household. 60, 70, 73%, I think of African American families have no father. There. So there is no nuclear family in a lot of communities. And that's, that's going to kill us if we keep it out. Yeah.
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B
Well, thank you, Uncle Sam. And the, the housing projects of the, of the last 70 years and, and welfare.
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A
Yeah, that was. They destroyed. The black destroyed. Tom Soul has written so eloquently, he's gone through statistically and he's looked at Black illegitimacy in 1950, Black divorce, Black home ownership. It was on a curve to reach parity with whites around 1960. It wasn't that much different. And now it's radically different after we spent $20 trillion to subsidize things that were injurious to the black family or to any family. So that was the legacy of the left. And yet if you question that you're a racist.
- [21:36]
B
The wholesale destruction of many of their communities, small towns and big cities, just if you were in a black neighborhood, odds are it was even if it was, let's say, shabby, it wasn't necessarily a slum. It was going to be leveled. And what was going to happen, all those people and all the.
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A
That's what I think everybody.
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B
Shelby Steele has talked about that they.
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A
Should really try to go online and look at a lecture by Tom or Shelby Steele. And the subtext of everything they wrote and said was the left is not moral. The left keeps saying that they gave us civil rights and they made equality. But the process was in the 1950s and 1955 when we did not have a full fledged civil rights. We were starting to do it, but we didn't accelerate it at the expense of the black family. But when the left came in with the Great Society, they bulldozed down whole neighborhoods. They made those ugly project high rises in Chicago, in New York, they subsidize women to have children by the baby. So they made marginal, they gave affirmative actions so people were suspect that they had not earned their jobs. And more importantly they felt that as a beneficiary of affirmative action, then they always had to keep showing society that they were victims of racism, otherwise they wouldn't need it. And so we got the whole victim cult. And so I guess what their message was, don't make fun of the 1950s, the 1940s, yes there was problems with racist and institutional and systematic discrimination, but there was an intact tool. The black family and black communities and black self help and entrepreneurialism that would if emphasized and helped and get the federal government out of it would have resulted in parity without the, the nuclear destruction yeah. Yeah.
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B
Well, Victor, I want to recommend to our listeners and viewers, if they have not yet seen Shelby and Eli Steele's wonderful documentary, what Killed Michael Brown. The last half of that is Shelby focusing on the issues you just talked about. But all that said, you got to pick one, Victor. Massive debt versus destruction of the nuclear family. Which one is the worst of the two?
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A
Two. Well, it's long. I think it's the. I think we can handle the debt because there's the money there. I mean, NGOs, that's like George Soros foundation, they have $14 trillion in assets. So there's the money is there. It's just how do you tap it and how do you get the discipline? And you know, as Herb Stein, the famous economist said, anything that can't go on won't go on. So at some point they won't be able to and they will make the correction because we are vibrant. The main thing to remember is as long as you have 4% GDP growth and you got all this energy and all this food and all this technology, you can handle that. But the problem is that that luxury and affluence works with the left to destroy the family. Without the family, you have no, you have no future.
- [25:10]
B
Well, we, we have a couple of other topics, competitions I should say to take on, and we're going to do that when we come back from these important messages. We are back with Victor Davis Hansen in his own Words, recording on Tuesday, December 12th, 23rd. And this episode will be up on Tuesday, January 6th. Victor, by the way, you just mentioned you said something about the NGOs. I think you maybe were also more broadly talking about philanthropies.
- [25:45]
A
Yes, I should say that. Absolutely.
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B
And one way to do something in that area. You're on the board of Bradley Foundation, Bradley, but the laws are. Well, all you have to do is spend 5% of your assets in a year, and that can include administrative costs. And for many of these foundations, they spend the 5%, they probably spend 4%, and then 1% are in things administrative. But meanwhile their invested funds grow 8 or 9%. So the bloat continues. There's a sense of prediction perpetuity to these things. I'm not advocating this one way or the other. I'm just saying if that 5% number changed to 7% or 8%, they had to spend the money more. And there's a philosophical argument to be made for that to be spent now as opposed to 50 years from now. I think that would have a cataclysmic effect on, on the, the left wing philanthropy world. So anyway, just saying. Saying that is a thing of interest.
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A
No, you're absolutely, you're absolutely right. Why is George Soros. All these foundations that are so overtly political, why are they tax exempt? I don't know.
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B
Yeah, well. Well, we're going to look at another dust up and we're going to. Let's pick the. The growth and spread of radical Islam. That's one on one side that'll keep you awake at night. Keeps me awake. Versus socialist democratic government, which seems to be in some ways an ascendancy, at least in some places in America. Maybe it's overstated because it's always on the front page of the New York Post, but socialist democratic government versus the growth and spread of radical Islam. Victor, which is the worst of those two?
- [27:44]
A
No, I'm more, I'm far more worried about radical Islam for this reason. Two reasons, negative and positive. Why did Mandami get elected? And why do we have these socialist candidates in blue states? And why now? Got to remember that Barack Obama was a socialist. And when he left office, he lost 14. He lost the House and he lost the Senate and he lost 1400 state and local offices that were Democrats. He destroyed the Democratic Party, essentially. He did. He made it possible for Trump to win. So what happened that resulted in this phenomenon? We got to remember that Bill. I don't know, Jack, but Bill de Blasio was just a dull form of Mondami. I thought he was, you know, it better. New York. He was a socialist. He wasn't as bold, but he was a socialist. He was just more incompetent. But we don't know how incompetent Mondami is. He's slick. So what I'm getting at is these socialists are a phenomenon of the last, largely four years in Obama years, but especially the last four years when we borrowed $8 trillion, we had an aggregate inflation rate of 21%, 5.2% a year, and more importantly, the things that count, insurance, electricity bills, natural gas bill, gasoline at the pump, cars to buy eggs, staple foods. That was up by 25 to 30% over four years. And we did not get over 2.53. We didn't get the growth that would have increased. Wages, real wages went down and housing went way up, over 30%. So that was a reaction to the Biden. So the corrective is 4.2% in the third quarter. And that is despite the shutdown. I would be surprised. I won't be surprised, Jack. That In January, when the fourth quarter because the third was belated because of the shutdown, the fourth quarter could be four and a half and the first quarter next year could be five and a half. And so if the economy's growing and inflation is going down, that socialist argument will have less resonance is what I'm saying. They make fun of it like Rasmussen and Trafalgar. They're all excellent polls. And today it had Trump at 50%, 42. And it had a better record in 2024 than Harvard Harris, than all of the rest. Gallup, everyone. So I'm not worried. But radical Islam, we have a quarter million students from the Middle east and it's open season on Jews. They kill them at museums. They kill Jews at museums. Harvard and Yale don't want to do anything about it. Where I am at Stanford, I watched them tear down the Jewish hostage posters. I saw their encampment, radical Islamic, pro Hamas encampment for four months on campus. I was on campus when they ransacked the President's office. 12 of them. Did pro Palestinian protesters going back to Major Hassan Allah Akbar kill 13 soldiers. The San Bernardino slaughter. What we saw in Bondi beach slaughter. I don't know what the Brown shooter's motivation, the Portuguese guy, we'll find out. Probably not, but there were initial reports, not substantiated, that he might have yelled something like Allah Akbar, but we don't know. He was just an outlier. But that's going to increase because the west in Europe, they're getting up to about 15 to 16% illegal alien, non native born immigrants, illegal, poor, angry and not assimilating in Germany, in France, In Britain, not 16 in Britain, but getting on that trajectory in Spain, in Italy, Meloni just deported some imam. And they're emboldened and they do things like behead the head of a priest or they make the French cower and cancel their chandelier Christmas parade. They do it in Germany. Here in the United States, you can't say anti Semitism without Islamophobia. Walt says that they're picking on Somalia. So here you have the Somalia community. It has a large number of people here illegally. Their representative, Ilyan Omar, most certainly, almost certainly married her brother for and committed immigration fraud. She's a multimillionaire. How she did that by marriage, I don't know. And they have embezzled somewhere between 2 and 9 million billion billion dollars right under the nose of Tim Waltz and Ellison. And anybody who explain, explains this in a rational fashion is an Islamophobe racist, et cetera. So radical Islam thinks that we are decadent, leisured and they want to come over here and they want to create enclaves that are not assimilating or integrating and they feel that demographically they're going to enlarge and their first target are Jewish Americans, which 6% of the population. They think they're already at 3 or 4 and they're going to put it this way and I'll shut up. 10 years ago if Tucker Carlson wanted to give a talk at Charlie Kirk's then nascent organization and he said why are we picking on Muslims? Why are we picking on Muslims? I don't understand that. Well, Tucker, we're not picking on Muslims. I mean why would you say that right after Australia or why would you say that after what we've seen on campuses? Or why. But he wouldn't have said that 10 years ago. He said it now because the Gulf money is much more emboldened in funding things. In the United States, Al Jazeera is even more powerful. There's a quarter million students. Many of them stay on. It used to be unthinkable that somebody would openly root or wear a green Hamas headband or flag. You see it on campus all the time. So it's changing. And that's dangerous. It really is. And what we're seeing, I think the worst is what we're seeing in Britain where you have grooming and mass rape of young native born English women, teenagers by Pakistani immigrants for the most part and no one indicted, prosecuted, convicted and jailed them and they're a protected group and they will censor your speech if you disagree. That's where we are.
- [34:53]
B
You see the videos of the mayor, the mayor of London where he meets council and some of the mark members of the Conservative Party and they say essentially what the hell's happening here with these grooming gangs etc. And he will sit there and go, I don't know what you're talking about. Could you please define what you're talking about? He plays this dumb game, but you, he's, he's not dumb when he's doing it. You know, he's being very calculated and very condescending and to think that that great city is in the hands of this. I'm not going to say the bad word at who.
- [35:26]
A
Let's, let's be, well, let's be more blunt. The two greatest cities in Western civilization and Christendom, historically in population are New York and London. And they're both going to be run by overt Islamicists, I think. And Mandami, one of his first appointments, had to bow out because she had a history of wretched anti Semitism in her social media account. He's just hired a California exile who oversaw multibillion dollar fraud in California and the Department of Labor. State Department of Labor. So, yeah, that scares me a lot more. Yeah.
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B
Well, we have one more topic to. One more dust up to raise and we'll do that when we come back from these final important messages. We are back with Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. Before we get to this final little matchup, Victor, I do want to mention you mentioned before about Obama, and I wasn't ignoring. I was looking at my phone because I was trying to dig up a Stanley Kurtz article. Stanley was a phenomenal biographer of Obama's radicalism. But Obama, actually, he was, no question, he was a Democrat socialist, just like Mandami. But he also, I'm, I couldn't find it. I thought he was. When he was running for office in Chicago early on, city council and that sort of.
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A
Yes.
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B
That he was actually running at some kind of crackpot party, like.
- [37:05]
A
Yeah, he was. No, he was his, I think his first House campaign that he lost. Remember about Bobby Rush? I think the ex Black Panther, he was trying to at one point be more radical than Bobby Rush and a Black Panther famous, infamous Black Panther member. And the only way he got elected, to be frank, was that mysteriously, David Axelrod and others, somebody was able to have the viable Democratic candidate in the primary who was ahead, have his sealed divorce records leaked. And there was some suggestions that. And the same thing happened in the general twice. In other words, Obama's primary and general opponent both had sealed records about divorce and they leaked them. And in one case, there was a suggestion that he had taken his wife to a porn thing, another one that he'd pushed, pushed her. And both were very good candidates. I'll recall the name in a minute, but they were. And then I think Obama said, well, that was convenient, though, you know, very convenient. I don't know what happened. You know, I was in the primary behind, and all of a sudden he dropped out. And here I was in the general election. I was an underdog, you know, and all of a sudden he dropped out. How'd that happen, David? Tell me how that happened. So that was, that was who he was. But Mondami is beyond that. Obama was slick and. Well, Mondami is slick, but Mondami is. I mean, Obama's basic desire in life was to make money and have A good life, or to quote him verbatim, I'm really lazy. That's my problem. They asked him, what's your biggest flaw? I said, I'm lazy. And what you know, he said, I, you know, I like a third term if I could just phone it in from the basement, didn't have to wear a tie. And that's what he basically did. That was prescient under Biden. But Mondami is different. He really is a hardcore communist, socialist, whatever you want to call him. He does believe that if the Capitol leaves New York, that's good. And he wants to go into what he said, whiter neighborhoods and tax them. He doesn't like those people. He doesn't like Jews, I don't think at all. And he wants to make it something like Cuba or Venezuela. I really believe that he doesn't see that I don't. Those people don't see Cuba or Venezuela as a failure. It's that old Tok de Tocqueville. Tocqueville analysis or kind of Tocqueville at one point. And democracy in America, size and says, you know, the problem is most people want to be equal and poor than to be all better off, but have some people a lot better off. So Victor, if Victor's making $100,000 and I'd rather have everybody make $100,000 and the country be poor, than to make $100,000 and have somebody, or make 200,000, but have somebody make a billion a year. No, no, I don't want that. I don't want more money for myself. If somebody has a lot more money, I'm willing to have less for myself if everybody has the same. And that's what Tocqueville said, that that was a peasant mentality and that was what he hoped in America, the independent middle class entrepreneur and upward mobility would make democracy different than what the parliamentary vestiges were in Europe.
- [40:43]
B
Well, our final topic, dust up here is fertility, free fall, which you talked about, touched on already versus gain of function, bioweaponry, I have a feeling.
- [40:56]
A
Well, I've already talked about fertility. I've already preempted you and everybody. I didn't know what Jack was going to ask. I think he sent me, but I wasn't sure. So bio. Well, as somebody who in 2023, on May 1, went to a big speech and gave it and then came back with COVID and then kept going to, you know, I had to speak overseas twice. I didn't take one day off after I tested negative And I got long Covid and my current problem, I'm convinced, had something to do with lung damage from that. And then I got over it. They always said, you're going to have it for three or four. I got over it six, seven months. And then I got on June 1, Covid from my tour with Al Phillip, the group we lead every year. I got it Normandy on the way home on the plane. And I had that from June 1 to December about a year ago. And that, I think intensified how I have breathing problems now is kind of like that. And then I got over it. And then I had three months in the last two years free and then I got the flu and the thing started over again. So I'm not very sympathetic to the Chinese because I think that they. First of all, there's two different views. One is there was three different views that they had a gain of function lab and it got out. And they got out because they were incompetent and they didn't know what they were doing. Two, they were incompetent and didn't know what they were doing. And it got out and they thought, well, if it's out and we're going to suffer, we might as well cancel all flights from Wuhan to every Chinese city and allow every international flight so we can get a million carriers to go to Europe and the United States. So we do know for about 12 days before we caught on, you could fly from Wuhan to lax, San Francisco, Boston and New York direct from Wuhan. And I'm not sure about Boston, but I know the other three, you could and you couldn't fly from Wuhan to Beijing or Shanghai and you could fly to Rome and Paris. So they were deliberately allowing people that they knew were infected to infect the west while they were trying to curtail. And then the third and the most nefarious is they were under the control, and we know that, that soon they came under the control of the Chinese People's Liberation army, was running the lab and they were experimenting with gain of function, not to make a vaccine, not to help mankind, to make a bioweapon and that either accidentally or deliberately was let out. And we know that there are conspiracy theories. I don't know how accurate, maybe they're not that they were at the same time working on this gain of function SARS virus. They were working on a vaccination for it. So this is. Stephen Quaid talked about all this in his medical research. So that is very scary because I don't think when I Learn about the lab in Readley and the latest with importing E. Coli, deadly E. Coli strains, and then the fungal infections of grain crops. It's a pattern. And then what's even worse about it is we had Stephen on our podcast three times. He made a very good. He made a very good point. It was very subtle and I didn't emphasize it enough, but his basic message is that when Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins at the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases under Fauci, and Fauci was really, even though by title and budget, he wasn't the main player, he was the main player. He'd been there 40 years and by fiat, he basically ran CDC, FDA, everything because of his stature and Covid stature. He was the. But the point Stephen was making very quickly was that although he only transferred $600,000 to Peter Dasick at Echo Health for gain and function research, and that's bad enough, people had criticized that and said, well, you know, this thing was, I don't know, it was $100 million lab. The French helped built it. What is $600,000? And it was illegal to do gain of function since 2017. Even Obama said no. And they. That's not the point. The point was once he allowed Peter Dasek to have the 600,000 to go to the lab, then that was a green light. So if you were a researcher in the United States or you had instrumentation or you were a company that had particular types of machinery, shouldn't say that. That's a clumsy word, instrumentation that would affect gain. You got a green light. So we were transferring expertise and instrumentation to facilitate gain of function research. I don't know what Fauci thought he was going to get out of it, that maybe he thought they would share the results. And maybe if you have a pleasant view of him, that he thought that would aid in vaccination research. I don't have a pleasant view of him, but that's a lot since it was illegal. Yeah. And that's going to happen again. It's going to happen again.
- [46:55]
B
And, well, we are going to say, your decision here is the gain of functions.
- [47:00]
A
You know, a lot of people say, well, Covid Victor, I had this so many times to me they've said, oh, I don't know what's wrong. I didn't even know I had Covid. It was nothing but a flu. Well, that's true for most people, but there's 20 or 30 million Americans who have a. I just got the genetic testing back on my pathology biopsy. And I can tell you, when you look at, tells you exactly what has been wrong with you your whole life that people kind of scoffed at. So I had a mastocytosis histamine problem. And I've had people say, I have some red wine. What's a little blush? I said, I get anaphylaxis with. And there it is. Genetically, it's on there. And then they said, ah, you know, iron, you know, come on, you can have a red meat. I said, I, I, I feel achy. And then it comes back, you have hemochromatosis. And then it comes, well, with two different genes, not the same gene twice, but when you have two different ones, it's the same. And then it has one about the immune system and it says higher propensity to post viral, you know, inability T cells and all that. So what I'm getting at is that virus affected a lot of people. I know a lot of people who have called me. I know them. They're never the same. They have lung damage, they have brain damage, they have autoimmune damage. And we've never really come to grips with that. What the Chinese did, they all made fun of Trump when he said it was a China virus. But it's like Lyme disease or the Ebola virus. That's just an eponymous word where it started. And it did start in China. And it was, I don't know how we were ever going to protect ourselves from them again. And I have a feeling that there's going to be a lot of a million Americans that are never going to get over this long. Covid, I know that people make fun of it, but it's real, I can tell you.
- [49:01]
B
Well, Victor, we are, we're discussing what we will call not the sweet 16, but the sour 16. We did eight of this. Of the sour 16. They move on to around. We're going to call the hate 8. And moving on here will be rogue nukes, gain of function, bioweaponry, the destruction of the nuclear family, and the growth and spread of radical Islam. And in our next episode, we are going to look at the other eight traumatic, troubling, scary issues that keep us up at night. And we're going to pair them off against each other. And we will do that when we'll.
- [49:41]
A
Have to have a light side. I'll try to connect it with literature or something upbeat. But Anyway, thanks everybody.
- [49:48]
B
Dr. Frankenstein, maybe. Well, you've been terrific, Victor. Okay, well, we will be back soon with another episode of Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. Bye bye.
- [49:58]
A
Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal. Please like share and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website@victorhansen.com and subscribe for exclusive features. In addition.