Victor Davis Hanson: The Left are now desperate to drop Joe Biden

the left has decided that Biden is The Road to Perdition and they want to get rid of him hello and welcome to Off Script my name is Stephen Edgington is the American Republic under threat or is America more united than it first appears to discuss the state of the Republic Joe Biden and conservativism I'm joined by the historian and classicist Victor Davis Hansen is the American Republic under threat it's said to be under threat mostly by the left but uh it's a pretty resilient uh form of government it's the only one of its type it's the oldest democracy or constitutional republic in the country it's whether the Civil War the Great Depression the 60s cultural evolution uh the problem we're having right now is that it is not working for the left and so when it doesn't work for the left they say the Republic is in danger and they want to change the institution so they want to get rid of the 180-year filibuster of the 150 or nines Justice Supreme Court the 233rd year of the Electoral College the 60 years of the 50 state union because they feel that the electorate is drifting away from them and their agendas which they've implemented the last year and a half especially uh do not warrant on any poll 50 percent support and their president is at a historic low at 29 for first-term president so yeah they they think that's what we're told but I when you actually look our elections being held or uh this that agreed on winners taking power is legislation being passed yes yes it is I think the lockdown the quarantines set the Western World in general a little crazy that I think we're recovering from now how seriously should we take them when they say they're going to pack the courts or add DC as a 51st state and change the sort of as you say these historic kind of elements of the American Republican Constitution because they've been saying these things I guess for a while now the last few years at least but they haven't done them yet we should take them very seriously because if you look at the Supreme Court which was their darling for the last half century because it was a legislative executive in judicial ground so on one and when an occasional Republican president wished to nominate justices that would bring a little balance they flipped so Earl Warren flipped and all the way to David Suter and John Paul Steven and Potter Stevens they all flipped and now they don't and so all of a sudden they want to pack the court and to pack the court they just need to eliminate the filibuster and get every Democrat on board I don't know if they will or not and then they can flip it and then they can vote to restore the filibuster which they said they would do because they're going to be a minority party and they'll need it in the fall I never in my lifetime I don't think any of you foreign observers thought that mobs would uh congregate around the homes of Supreme Court Justices as they have in the case of Gorsuch and Thomas and others and especially Kavanaugh and then intimidate them when that's a federal offense in Merrick Garland district attorney is not prosecuted we never thought that Joe Biden would go overseas and attack the legitimacy of the court in front of his Spanish host we never thought that they would talk about a 10 year old who was forced to have an abortion because she could not obtain it in Ohio and she went to Indiana this was a result of against us perhaps and yet as this from this point on even liberal fact Checkers can't find the victim they can't find the Ohio State Attorney General said this morning he's trying to desperately find the Vic the perpetrator to indict him we have no information at all I never thought that uh you would leak a confidential memo of a preliminary ruling which was a felony which the court did and this is all in the context that the Biden revolutionary sort of government approves of this they don't say the transportation secretary Pete Budig said he had no problem with swarming uh justice Kavanaugh he ate dinner at a restaurant and of course we know it's asymmetrical if if the Republicans were going to the home of Sona Sonia sotomayir or they were leaking documents or they were threatening to change the size of the Court that's been there since I think 1860 they left would be furious but it's all predicated on the notion is we all know from history modern and ancient that the left feel that it's morally and actually Superior and therefore they're those exalted ends can justify almost any means to obtain them do you think that there are exaggerations on social media and in the traditional press in terms of the threat to democracy and whether you're talking about January 6th which by the way is what they would say to play Devil's Advocate they would say well you mentioned about the mob surrounding Kavanaugh what about the mob that went to inside the Capitol Building I think you're right uh when you look at that empirically everybody condemns a bunch of buffoonish demonstrators that broke into the house Chambers and desecrate we all want them to be prosecuted but at that point we should have a disinterested body of inquiry and everybody thought that we would have a committee and they would look at this period in American history where we're assaulting Federal property I.E let's look at the capital right on January 6. let's look at the riot on May 31st 2020 that burned the Episcopal historic church tried to spill over from Lafayette Square and storm the White House grounds which sent the president of the United States into a bunker and the Secret Service world man let's look at a federal courthouse burned in Portland with impunity so we could have that inquiry and then we have never in modern history said in the house that the minority party cannot put its members on a committee the speaker always defers and says you pick your members we pick ours but Nancy Pelosi de facto her Criterion for membership of the January 6 committee was we will take Republican house members that a are not viable in the fall and will not be here next year and be able to do impeach Donald Trump that left only two or three people and they were the others were disqualified so there is no cross-examination there's no special counsel that support uh presents us a report there's just a one-sided barrage and it's intended you know to to make Donald Trump a nurse it might be ironic because some of the Republicans want him to be a nerd and have another candidate and they may fulfill the Republican supreme but you can really see what I'm talking about Illustrated very quickly by they're not interested in the number of FBI informants that were there on January 6 even though Michael Rosenberg who was the New York Times Point man and had won a Pulitzer Prize and he he said in an unguarded moment that it was kind of a joke everybody overreacted he said there were FBI agents Galore and he thought it was just it was just a picnic a Frolic a buffoonish group of people with cow horns and such we've never I don't know why we we withheld the name of Officer Byrd who shot lethally Ashley rabbit 105 pound person who went who committed a misdemeanor by breaking going through an already broken window and we didn't get any information even though it's common practice in the United States the moment any officer lethally shoots an unarmed suspect their picture name and IDs are plastered all over social media the internet and paper that didn't happen so there's something there about January 6 and the communications about the need for security between Nancy Pelosi and the capital they're not released the 14 000 hours of videos if they lose the house and I think they will the left then I think you're going to see a massive number of Investigations about what how actually happened on January 6. it's not going to whitewash the people who desecrated the capital but it's going to be I think very interesting because there's there's something there that the left does not want to talk about now let's put these debates into their historical perspective recently it was the 4th of July your Independence Day and as someone who's interested in British history and the French Revolution and I'm sort of constitutional monarchist if you if as it were can you persuade me why that American Revolution was so important and why it's been so successful uh since all the way back in 1776. well I mean I'm not a chauvinist that we have sort of modern criteria when we look at countries that chose not to do what we did uh at that period in history Canada Australia a little later their their viable countries are very successful and they operate within the British sphere of influence still and with parliamentary democracies but you could argue that this system that we inaugurated was a more radical system and it gave more personal Liberty to the individual and it had the effect whether intended or not to draw people all over the world who felt that they were rejected or they had little opportunity and they had Boundless Energy and they came here under this system with the Bill of Rights and we have very peculiar things that you people don't have over in the Second Amendment the cherries the right of arms and we don't have really libel laws though it's a wide open arena and it has its drawbacks and dangers but it has a restlessness so if you look at criteria all over the world I mean we're in an age of China ascendance and American decline but we have 330 million Americans and they produce almost twice the goods and services of 1.4 billion Chinese if you look at the 200 universities that are ranked by the times education supplement on the University of Tokyo almost of the top 20 I think 15 or 16 are American and in a failed State like California I think we have five in the top 30. Silicon Valley dominates the world's got six trillion dollars of market capitalization and 10 square miles so the U.S military even with its debacle in Afghanistan is the largest most lethal military in the world so there are things about this country that are not explicable just by its size or population if you compare it to India or China or Russia so it has a dynamism but it's also it requires a Stern hand as an executive otherwise these propensities can get out of control and they have at various times during the 60s and even on the right during the McCarthy period because of this restlessness and pushing against Norms of behavior and other countries have much more careful class considerations shame you don't do that that's not proper behavior the United States has sort of obliterated the idea of clouds even though there is class distinctions that our idea is that anybody who's a welder or a mechanic can go right up to Bill Gates the airport and say you know blank blank you and so there's this familiarity among the classes and there's it's dynamism and it's kind of it can be a very dangerous mix and when you add a multi-racial uh multiracial woke element in the recent it's very volatile and it requires you know constant reaffirmation that we're a Melting Pot we have common values and we don't we're not a blood and soil country but it's nobody's ever tried this before Brazil and India are multi-racial democracies they're not doing too well but the idea that Barack Obama could be chancellor of Germany or prime minister of Japan this is a joke he couldn't be wouldn't have never happened and if I want to go to China and say hi Victor Hansen as a so-called white person I want to be a Chinese citizen that could not happen it would not be fully accepted it wouldn't be fully accepted in a lot of places and I don't think that the community where I live which is about an 85 Mexican-American any of them who identified as such would have a successful career uh in Continental Europe maybe in the Anglo sphere in Britain perhaps in Australia and Canada but not not in Continental Europe from what I can tell I've been there 50 or 60 times and just I just don't think that would be viable so it's a different type of paradigm now that Revolution and the Constitution that was created was one of the most extraordinary documents throughout the Enlightenment and and history really but obviously it sort of it links back to the Magna Carta and other really important constitutional documents in Britain and and in the western world but one of the things that I think some Brits particularly Andrew Roberts the historian wants to sort of get right about the American war of independence is this idea that George III was some sort of terrible Tyrant um this authoritarian Monarch who was imposing these awful taxes on the Americans and Andrew Roberts argues in his latest book that nothing could be further from the truth that uh that George III was benevolent and that the American revolutionaries were using propaganda to rile up their troops as it were to to claim that George III was this terrible Tyrant figure but in fact they had other motives to to declare independence from Britain which were fantastic motives and Andrew Roberts admits you know this is one of the first Revolutions in history where that people are not rebelling against the Tyrant but they're rebelling for for reasons of freedom and liberty and sovereignty but also economic interests and other things like that so do you accept now can you accept uh Andrew Roberts's hypothesis that uh Georgia third was no Tyrant I I agree with a lot with Andrews he's a colleague of mine at the Hoover institution I know him very well I think he had a point what I think his point distilled down to its Essence would be for an American is look you Americans by the uh standards values and Norms of the time as we see in other British colonies especially as I said you know New Zealand or Australia which weren't really a colonies in the state Canada or what would happen in the 19th century uh you were given a level of Freedom that was just amazing nobody ever ever had it the Spanish the French didn't do this but you redefined your desires or your expectations to such an incredible degree all men are created equal and you were going you were intent on opening this up to the world and the logic of the Declaration the Constitution was really an abolishment of the class system and personal Liberty at the expense of I guess internal cohesion if that was necessary and the result was that the colonists um fell and they were all products of the British Enlightenment Scottish Enlightenment and they acknowledged that there's many more Diaz that in the British tradition but the result of that is they had expectations that the crown could not legitimately satisfy and they tried to work with the colonists and the colonists at some point said look we're going in a different direction and we're going to put a high price on enlightenment expression and freedom and we're going to libel the crown if we want to we can do and the British found that intolerable and then the war came and the passions arose and each side had propagandas so I think he's he's on the right track if the United States had stayed within the British system it would probably be a sort of like a large Canada today Canada is a very Humane nice place but there is a reason why other than size that people in Canada that are in the artistic music Community Tech Community they come to the United States and it's not just climate there's other reasons that dynamism that we talked about earlier but the crown but if you look at 500 Revolutions in history the uh the target of the American Revolution was probably the most liberal and accommodating of any of any so-called colonial power do you think that Americans understand that Revolution and the Constitution today do you think people are are educated on these things in a deep way or is there sort of loss of misconceptions they don't know anything about it I I grew up in a rural Heist uh Rural High School World grammar school where there was 10 percent of the students were so-called white but they were traditional education we all read the Constitution we all know this was in the 1960s and early 70s and we were all got a very good education that was thrown out during the 60s Cultural Revolution and we had these studies courses gender studies peace studies leisure studies Environmental Studies and they were therapeutic sociological classes and they crowded out the core not just Civics but also English and math so and history so Americans if you if we were to walk on the street of any major city and ask somebody uh who was George Washington or Thomas Jefferson and I don't just mean the name but just say who he was they would have no idea they being the majority of people much less if you ask what the difference between the executive or judicial plan this is part of the the school system and this this Western malaise of equality of result and the idea that if you have only an equality of opportunity and you have a strict meritocratic system than a larger and larger number of people are not going to achieve the median and therefore the system has to be destroyed and the standards of walleye so that they will be radically equal and this in American history these Tendencies when you have open migration or you have enormous civil rights movements then that these pressures occur it's like Aristotle said once a man votes in a democracy and he's equal with his vote to every other citizen then the logic is that he believes he should be equal and other every other aspect of his life economic political social cultural and that's sort of contradictions of radical democracy and we see it here and so if a person is not exactly equal in the United States to someone else then there has to be for that so-called victim there has to be an identifiable victimizer and we will go after that person or our Institution and that's a pathology that's that's playing democracy for a long time and usually what happens the bad things that happen democracy usually happen in the more radical ones first so we don't have the constraints the tradition the knowledgeable population that other democracies have and so whatever is happening here usually it tends to exude and go elsewhere so is this the last days of Rome I don't know everybody says when they say that I I ask myself well which room are you talking about the sterile inert last days of the Republic when people were satisfying their appetite you had to bankrupt the league and people of the time said that you would never recover from Nero and Caligula and tiberias and the year of the four Emperors and then suddenly you get dysphasian Titus and that ushers in nerva Marcus Aurelius trajan Hadrian Antonius Pius and given says this is the greatest period of human prosperity and history and there was that that hundred year period at and then it starts to decline in that cyclical process went on for 700 years continued for another thousand in the east on the Byzantine so we have an enormous uh ability to self-correct the problem that we're facing now is uh in this Modern Age we have an enormous amount of debt and we do we're starting to politicize debt we feel that debt does not have to be repaid modern monetary theory has got us into this hyperinflation we're starting to identify by our superficial appearance with this hyphenation that's gone mad I am Latina I am black I am white I am Asian rather than I am American so there's some fundamental problems that were there in the past but I guess the the covet crisis or the internet instant Communications or whatever these outside stimuli are they they've made it a crisis level and we we're waiting for Marcus Aurelius type of figure a Lincoln s figure that say wait a minute this is not sustainable you don't have a country if you don't have a southern border you cannot have eight nine percent hyperinflation you have you have the energy develop it as you transition to other fuels uh you cannot just abandon 80 billion dollars in equipment and hand them over to terrorists in Afghanistan and not expect people like the Chinese and the Russians not to take advantage of that sense of loss to turn so we need somebody like that and we don't have them now and we'll see in the next election there is an argument that today things move much more quickly in terms of decline because of globalization and the internet um so obviously Rome as you said took hundreds and hundreds of years to to find a collapse or even to move over to um to the east but today this may happen within I don't know within a few centuries within a few hundreds yeah tens of years yeah that's I mean if if George Floyd if a officer shelvin had his foot on his neck or his knee on his neck and he dies the news of that in any other age would have been in local papers by another take a week there would be wire service but before that nobody would know about it but one little incident can ignite an entire country and vice versa and the left seems to think that this is a very valuable thing to have these iconic totem incidents that they can inflame people as I mentioned the ten-year-old dubious story of a 10 year old girl who was raped and had to go out of state but it's a double-edged sword so the right can do it too anybody can do it and the left doesn't seem to understand that and what's happening now is the right is using iconic stories uh yesterday there was a bus in San Francisco where the school children got off and it delivered them right in the middle of a homeless camp with needles and crime and filth and feces and that was blurred all over the United States and so I think what I'm trying to say is that the left feels that they can have this revolutionary movement and change the Constitution change the customs and traditions and get a radical egalitarian woke Society but they don't understand that once they destroy those institutions for everybody then it becomes an Athenian democracy whatever 51 percent of people want to do on any given day and I do not think that the left has 51 my reading of polls and just History of the United States it tends to be a center-right country still and what's really a radical almost revolutionary development is that the slow process of 17 or 18 percent of the population of so-called Hispanics very diverse from Mexico Central America Venezuela Cuba but they were starting to reassert certain values of family religion tradition and they had all come from socialist countries that they they left on their own Coalition and the left always thought that by opening borders and allowing their friends and family to come across and then giving them generous benefits they would have a captive constituency but the problem was that in America they became upwardly mobile and they began to get property and they began to have communities and they wanted what the white Community has and they were getting it at the Asian Community have and all of a sudden the left's uh social they had the margin of error now to say you know what the border is not that important to us we want to close because we're impacted by these Mass influx as they come into our schools they overrun them we have crime we'd have cartels we have gangs and you know what I don't think transgenderism or windmills or radical third trimester abortions are as important to me as gas inflation crime and so they're starting I think we're going to see one of the great Revolutions in American history in the next four years they're starting to um completely abandoned the Democratic party and the point that I'm making is a Democratic party and it's hubris had so alienated the white working class which used to be its Mainstay and that's you know 70 of the country is so-called white and about uh two-thirds of that are working class that they cannot afford to lose any of their black Latino Asian Coalition so we're seeing some things that could happen in November and then 2024 we haven't seen it yet and that would be a dilemma for the left because the conservative surge would come from young non-white people and I don't think anybody in their right mind ever expected that now this conservative Instinct against revolutions and radicals and revolutionaries has been a historic uh concept for conservatives I mean go all the way back to the French Revolution the great speeches and and writings of Burke obviously the American Revolution is an exception in a way um but today there are many conservatives including one I interviewed recently Andrew Sullivan and he says that conservatives need to make sure that they are themselves not becoming revolutionaries and that he sees Trump and Trump voters and Trump himself as a sort of revolutionary populist and that it's important that we remember what our instincts are and I made the argument to him that well maybe things are so bad that you do need a bit of Revolution you do need to for example go through the FBI and try and replace the people whatever or go through all the institutions that have been captured so so there's an interesting debate isn't there between conservatives as to whether they should themselves be be revolutionary or be reformers or rabbit vehicles or whether we should just let sort of let things pass as it were yeah I don't I don't I don't know Andrew Sullivan I met him a couple of times I think I remember me but he I I don't consider him a conservative at all during the Obama years he cheered on the Obama Revolution by the Obama Revolution I just don't mean moving the country to the left I mean unleashing Lois Lerner in the IRS on people right before the 2012 campaign I'm talking about Eric Holder who was the first attorney general be held in contempt for not turning over subpoenaed documents and so in some ways uh the the Obama Administration was a revolutionary they were the first Administration since the Nixon Administration to use the institutions of power the enforcement intelligence agencies as for political purposes and they knew all about it and Barack Obama was uh president when the FBI and people were spying on Michael Flynn and and interrogate him and said that he had done nothing wrong and yet they pushed that and push that and push that so I and then you know I as I look at um people on the left now I think Andrew Sullivan should realize that the people who are the pillars of money and power and the use and abuse of that are on the left right now I mean Barack Obama gives he Ventures out of his kalorama or Martha's Vineyard our new Oahu Mansion occasionally to lecture people on their ill liberality or Bill Gates does who's the second richest man in the world the Democratic party has become a party of the very wealthy powerful who feel that because they're left-wing and they virtue signal their liberality that that gives them the ability to enjoy the wealth that they've accumulated and to use it in ways that the Republicans had never even dreamed of so I see if Andrew Sullivan means are there Fringe groups on the right proud boys and those yes I suppose they are but if in real numbers there's two two main differences and real numbers they're dwarfed by BLM and antifa but more importantly the major institutions of power in the United States Social Media the regular media the universities corporations professional sports they have green lighted the left-wing revolutionaries they can freely use Facebook to plan to burn down abilities and the investigative institutions are all over the right and the right of this right-wing Fringe group is identified I mean when you have the Secretary of Defense and the chairman of the joint Chief state that they're going through the ranks to audit to see if there's anybody that's full of white rage when they have no documentation they have no evidence if that's true they didn't say well we're also simultaneously going to go through and see if the violence we've seen on the street with BLM and antifa has permeated the military they didn't say that and they said it in a very strange way because they were then they said they wanted the military to look like the United States proportionally I guess representative and I thought to myself 75 percent of the debt in Afghanistan uh and 75 roughly in Iraq were white males so according to your own logic you're going after a rubric that you have smeared as potentially revolutionary when you at the same time expect the lower middle classes uh to go into Iraq and inordinately join combat units and die at Double their numbers in the population and according to your own logic they shouldn't do that so there is no revolutionary movement on the right that I know of I don't know anybody in the right who is uh who was saying right now let us dismantle these institutions let's get rid of the filibuster let's get in a couple more States let's get rid of the Electoral College let's have a National voting log to override the constitutional rights of states that set balloting protocols uh I just let's pack the court uh when Trump was uh president he I didn't hear him say we could really solve this problem with 15 justices let's get and I don't remember from sicking the FBI on reporters James O'Keefe or I don't remember the FBI becoming the personal retrieval service of the president United States when his son loses his laptop or his daughter loses her diary so the politicalization of our institutions took place under the left and terms of importance that was much more dangerous than what Trump's tweets were or what these crazy proud boys do or the buffoons in the house Chambers on January 6th I think Sullivan knows that I think he's transitioning back as a conservative voice and a lot of these a lot of our spokesmen go back and forth and the elephant in the room is the figure of Donald Trump because he on the one hand he was the most successful conservative president in 50 years on the other hand he completely rejected the bipartisan establishment Republican and Democrat partly because he was not a part of it uh partly because they wanted no part of him and partly because his personal comportment was at times crude and crafts and we'll see what happens if there is a subsequent figure that incorporates the Trump Revolution that is the appeal to the middle classes of all different backgrounds but lacks or does not seem to be necessary to go into Twitter or Facebook and to be gratuitously mean and so-called that said we'll see if that person also has that Outsider status and fire in the belly to take on the that system that system has to be taken on it's huge the unelected I do want to talk about DeSantis who I think is probably probably who you're talking about um in a moment but just just very briefly you said the institutions of the United States that have been captured by the left and you gave a long list of those institutions one of those institutions which you mentioned earlier hasn't distinctly hasn't been captured and that's the Supreme Court and as you say that's been flipped from being a liberal dominated Supreme Court to a heavily conservative Supreme Court and you know you have to give Donald Trump a lot of credit for that because he appointed three conservative justices do you think that this is the greatest victory for American conservativism as a movement in the last 50 years I do think it is and I think we know it is because the 10 of the elite and they are the Elite that never trumpers this is the one thing they're fixated on so when you look at the American commentarian all they're writing for the last month is do not give credit to Donald Trump for reporting message in Kavanaugh and barricone don't give him credit he didn't flip it no no he didn't but when you actually look at the record of his three justices they're not a hundred percent conservative but they have not done a John Roberts they have not done a David Suiter they have not done a John Paul Stevens they haven't done what every other Republic on Anthony Kennedy every you know even Sandra Day O'Connell every single Republican picked a Justice who when they got to the court they made the necessary adjustments for the culture or the landscape of Washington Georgetown whatever you want to talk about and they became increasingly part of the left-wing board he didn't he deliberately outsourced that to the federal society and he said I want conservative strict constructions give me a list he didn't know any of them he never met them and then nobody believed that he would actually honor that commitment he did to the letter and yeah he did he single-handedly changed uh the court to a constructionist reversion back to constitutional principle he got very little credit for it but he did that let's talk about DeSantis and Trump now I imagine for many conservative voters and academics and activists in America they want DeSantis to run and Trump not to run and for the reason and for the following reason as you mentioned Trump was unappealing to many voters his approval ratings are still low and he is crass and he can be rude and as you say he's got many advantages all the Supreme Court picks and all the other foreign policy achievements he has are fantastic but as a personality he is divisive and his actions during the last election sort of you know off post-election period were very controversial at the time so do you think that there's any chance that DeSantis could could run and Trump and and beat Trump or Trump wouldn't run because it looks like Trump is going to run yeah I think the betting odds are that he's going to run and we're in a dilemma because uh people say and you I think you reviewed the Dilemma that conservatives have very carefully what we know is that nobody is running on a McCain Romney agenda nobody is saying well we need more people let's open the border that wasn't too bad or we've got to have radical transitions to Green energy so when Mitt Romney opens his mouth and articulates a position it has zero support so the Trump agenda for better for worse is now the Orthodox agenda of conservatives everybody agrees with that then the question is who is the best Taskmaster to implement that and Trump did pretty well I wouldn't he wouldn't have had the agenda in the first place enacted but people were weary and now they're in a period of introspection where we're worried because the media just went crazy and Trump brought them out of the woodwork and if that's so maybe we should just not be worried and fight them back now they've exposed themselves or why don't we have somebody who is more subtle and can not just push these gratuitous buttons but uh be be as Direct in implementing the agenda and I think the 64 000 question that nobody knows is would a character figure like a DeSantis Pompeo Tom whoever they are would they be able to fill a arena with people would they have the fire in the belly or would they be contextualized and tempted and compromised is the way that all politicians are we look back in the 2016 that was the greatest we were told the greatest field of conservative nominees we've ever had would be nominees and remember that Scott Walker was very similar to DeSantis he was a very effective purple State Governor he had fought the unions he was absolutely on yielding uh in their opposition they tried to smear him and everybody thought he's tough he's run a state he's dealt with a left and he completely imploded on the stage so what I'm getting now is we don't know how DeSantis will do he's doing very well right now and he's very combative and he doesn't yield and he's he's well spoken he's his resume is Sterling but we don't know how he'll do on the Sturman drag of 16 18 months so we're gonna I think everybody should have an open mind we don't know what Trump is going to do we don't know if from if it's within him to say you know what I had the agenda I have the fire but I'm going to be 80 years old almost 79 I'll be 83 if I were to be elected I'd bring all these people out maybe I should change my behavior a bit or something it's all a mystery right now what is not a mystery is that there is no one on the left in the foreseeable Horizon that is going to be a viable candidate and that can change but people look at Kamala Harris the biggest problem on the left is how do we get rid of Joe Biden right now and not have Camilla Harris because constitutionally that we have no other alternative and I I'm not just saying that to be flamboyant but we didn't hear one word about Hunter Biden's laptops contents we were told it was Russian disinformation it was alleged and all of a sudden the last week The Washington Post and New York Times everybody is talking about the horrendous horrific things in the Biden laptop and I think that will be followed by the Biden diary and the point is the left has decided that Biden is a Road to Perdition and they want to get rid of them they look at the 500 word vocabulary of Kamala Harris and they say you know what that's not maybe Pete buttig he's so glib he's so well spoken even though he's even harder to the left and he would only bring them more misery because their agenda is what's turning off people and he is just a creature of the academic Lounge but nevertheless because he's glib and he's gay and he's got all these uh left-wing criteria they're looking at him now but they've got a constitution in front of him of them that makes it very hard to a point it's not a parliamentary system it's difficult to be fair to Joe Biden maybe I'm in a bit of a echo chamber or something but every video clip I see of him he's just stumbling on his words it's embarrassing can you just assess Joe Biden try and be more fair than I just was then maybe um or in your own words how is this presidency gone so far I know I keep asking this question in all our interviews but I do think it's interesting for British viewers to understand the perspective of Americans we have to remember that and start with the premise that Joe Biden was never a nice person never a nice person he was always a dubious character he got caught plagiarizing Neil kinnick almost word for word he was a plagiarist he lied about his resume he lied about uh his standing in law school he left the he left the campaign not because he was losing but because he was discredited in 2000 2008 when he returned and tried it again he left because he said a number of extraordinary things I mean he said that Barack Obama was the first clean articulate black presidential candidate and that was not true Barbara Jordan was much more articulant than Obama so he he and then he he when he went in 2020 he had these Corn Pop you know quasi-racist stories that he'd made up and he would call a person fat or lying dog-faced pony soldier or he tell an African-American young person uh interviewing him your hey junkie or you ain't black or he told he referred to one of his subordinates and not an accomplished African-American um you're he said boy to and boy he said negro which is now not correct parlance so he was never a nice guy so he was never healthy according to his age and so he was always of dubious character and people didn't like him okay the third thing the problem was is it had been known since his vice presidency that he was compromised that a senator does not end up with a compound like he has three Mansions or a son that has somewhere 50 billion that the Chinese the ukrainians the Russians and all of these people had uh paid under the Biden family Consortium so he was bankrupt so when it came around after Hillary decided not to do it again the left was Gaga because now they would have no traditional swamp creature and they had Cory Booker and they had Camilla Harris and they had Beto and Elizabeth Warren and Julio and all these people and so guess what we saw them for night after night for a year and a half and they were Stark raving mad they talked about opening the Border they talked about Mass amnesties they talked about modern military theory for giving 1.6 trillion in student debt you name it it scared the crap out of people so then Joe Biden was losing because of the reason cycle and so Jim Clyburn and salka they said you know what this guy will be an important empty vessel he stutters he's only a one-term president but he gives a presentable facade given his past and we can have him carry this agenda so he ran and he didn't run we had never seen a campaign like that was a 19th century Log Cabin campaign where a guy sat on his front porch and reporters came to him he never left his garage or he went to a parking lot where there were cars it was a joke he had no rallies so Trump mistakenly thought that that was a sign that he was going to lose because nobody wanted to hear him and he didn't realize it that his his minions were everywhere all over the United States getting out the vote changing the voting laws uh brought the whole stuff so anyway he he was good old Joe Biden from Scranton we all know Joe he said that uh there was a jungle out there in the 70s of crime and he said that abortion should be rare and that's what they played up and Joe said I want to unite everybody but he was never that person and he and so when he got elected sure enough his cabinet came in they were the most radical left-wing people they put Joe out there he had reached such a degree of non-composed mentalism cognitively he was so challenged that he couldn't read the telephone but yesterday two days ago he said repeat this line the ones in brackets on a teleclunker he can't he can't work a five-day week he can't get go up and down stairs he's a very old 79 and uh they now want to get rid of him and they want to get rid of him by saying he's unpopular but he's only he's unpopular because he implemented and gave them their agenda had he just said this when he was United I don't like Donald Trump and then said privately get that wall finished just as I say we we're going to open the board don't let that border be open and then say we're going to transition to winning so make sure we get up to 16 million barrels get that Keystone and add more going and he said make sure we have federal regulations and Camp down on that crime we bet we can't let this these DA's keep doing what they're doing had he done that and been as cognitively challenged as is now people would be writing the New York Times uh yes he forgets things but he's a vigorous 79 he's got 70 60 percent popular he would so it was the agenda and then his own character flaws and age uh uh inabilities were forced multipliers of that and that's what the Democrats don't understand because they kept thinking we're going to get a young guy who's glib like Pete butter jig but no Pete button is going to have none of the veneer and he's going to bring that left-wing agenda in its full naked Essence and it's going to be it would be a disaster for them and everybody wants him to be everybody everybody on the right wants a Pete butter jig to be the spokesman because he's sanctimonious he's self-righteous he's glib and he's really incompetent he's never done anything let's talk about the economy this is a major problem for Joe Biden obviously coming up to the midterms it's a problem across the West do you think that Biden's unpopularity is simply unfortunate for him because he's inherited a bad economic climate with covid with lockdowns with rampant inflation Across the Western world because of international supply chain issues the war in Ukraine Etc he he inherited he yeah he inherited the elements of a strong recovery it already had started when he came people had warned him and I don't mean just people people on the conservative side like Biden advisors Larry Summers they were saying to him you have inherited a deregulated uh robust economy until covet it's going to come back it's there and you're going to have an enormous demand for goods and services and Donald Trump for all the talk about the left was a very liberal economic president in the sense that he ran up a trillion dollar plus deficit and there's a lot of funny money out there so don't do this do not print three to five trillion dollars do not subsidize labor non-participation with these fat covet checks do not uh discourage oil and gas production and they warned him down the line what not to do and all and then they said covet is not over with the vaccinations have are porous he didn't believe that all he did was saying the pandemic's over I developed the vaccination we're going to do this and he rejected and overturned the entire uh Trump agenda he printed probably it'll end up about five trillion dollars he'd pay people not to get home people were terrified of covid 10 to 15 percent of people who got covet have something called long covered 12 weeks or more they're not fully able to work so we have a record small labor participation rate 60 60 61 percent and we've got enormous demand for goods and services and we cut back on and more we canceled Keystone we canceled new federal leases we job owned the crackers and horizontal rendered fillers that their days were numbered and we discouraged energy we should be up to 16 million barrels and so had they he just left everything alone we would I don't think we the Afghanistan debacle wouldn't have happened Russia would not have invaded Ukraine they had never done it during Trump they had only done it during the Obama Administration in the last years of the Bush Administration they probably wouldn't uh North Korea and Iran would not be acting up right now and uh the wall would be almost finished by now and I think we wouldn't have any of these problems we would have mostly a media that was fixated on Donald Trump's tweets but we wouldn't have these problems I want to end the interview by talking about a few historical comparisons to contemporary times and figures can we compare today to the 1970s huge inflation massive economic problems high oil prices is Joe Biden the Jimmy Carter of uh of today I would say yes but that would be unfair to Jimmy Carter I don't mean that facetiously because I I grew up with Jimmy Carter um I was in college and the thing about Carter was yes it was a disaster he printed money he had all of these crazy left-wing policies but once uh the Soviet Union went into Afghanistan and after he had humiliated himself by appeasing the Iranian theocracy he really started he was the one that inaugurated the the Reagan defense budget and his uh budget and build up he had the Carter Doctrine that basically said any pro-western government in the Middle East will not be overthrown by Iran or by the Soviet Union and he completely flipped on that he had been a a peaser par excellent we don't have any more inordinate fear all that so he flipped on that and then the second thing he did as he was going out he looked at this 12 to 14 inflation and he Unleashed Paul volcker at the Federal Reserve and Paul volcker I mean he broke the back of inflation and that was very valuable to Reagan because when the interest rates got up to 18 percent and Reagan was very unpopular in 80 uh and during the midterms of 82 Reagan just said you know what I I just inherited Volker I'm just going along with Carter policies and then that broke the back of inflation uh in late 83 and then we had that seven percent GDP jump for six months but Carter did change Biden will not change and then the other thing to remember very carefully is Carter's left was not like Biden's left the left was sort of a 1960s 70s Let It All Hang Out flowered children free speech flip the guy the finger on TV uh say whatever you want uh sex drug it was not uh we're going to put you in jail for saying that it was not in a Victorian uh prudish type of of left that we have now and they were not they were not neo-marxists they were kind of anarchists kind of crazy people that would with sort of a weird agenda mostly fueled by the Vietnam War but this these group these are these are sort of dry angry disciplined stalinists they want to take away not just your guns they want to take away your free speech they want to have a long march to the institution they want to warp the Constitution they're serious people they're Jacobins they're not just anarchists do you think that if let's say today is the 1970s and the economic answer to that is the 1980s as it were with Thatcher and Reagan I mean I don't see as you rightly mentioned earlier Donald Trump printed a lot of money increased the national debt in a huge way same thing in Britain you know the conservatives here have been spending a lot of money you could blame covid for that um but you know certainly be the being the end of austerity as Boris Johnson called it when he became prime minister in 2019. do you think that monetarism is dead do you think the ideas of Hayek and Friedman and Powell and Keith Joseph is is that is that ideology being defeated no I don't think so I think what happened was the right as the left started spending all of this money the right for utilitarian reasons thought well how are we gonna how are we gonna fight this everybody gets free stuff because that's very popular and then the second they created sort of pseudo economic theories and they went sort of like well we don't really know the use of GPS or social media so if a driver is driving down the street and there's Amazon and all of a sudden he's going to the wrong address the GPS corrects it so he goes to the right address so technology has made us so much more efficient of the computer systems uh the airlines don't crack so we are so much more productive that even though we're violating all the canons of conservative monetary Theory uh and we're creating these vast amounts of wealth the system has so changed that we really don't have to abide that we can that we can afford to do this because the technology has redefined work so one worker uh with it without a lot of Education it goes to his lathe and he sees this computer print out and he pushes buttons or a McDonald worker they just pushes a Coke or a hamburger doesn't make a mistake this has revolutionized and I think they they were fooled by that because some some things never change and what never changes is if you've got if you keep borrowing you have a 30 trillion dollar debt and the only way you can sustain that is was de facto zero interest then what you're basically doing you're telling 150 million Americans have played by the rules and put their money in their savings account fifty thousand dollars life savings we're running a three percent inflation rate and you're getting one percent you're losing two percent because that's going to the less well-off or borrowing money uh for homes or something at three percent and that that was a gradual but Insidious uh redistribution of wealth in the United States and now with an eight percent nine percent it's a revolutionary redistribution that people's 401ks are crashing that they're getting one or two percent still on their money but they're losing eight or nine percent and that was a wage of spending too much money and now the the Federal Reserve is saying you know Mr Powell is saying nobody foresaw this well everybody did we all wrote about it but he's saying I've got to go up with interest rates but we don't know how to pay for it because once you start paying eight or if the inter if the inflation rate is 8.5 which it is I don't think it really is because by 1970 calibrations if you use the same metrics it'd be about 12. the interest rate should be two percent higher it's two percent higher you've got to get rid of about a quarter of the federal budget because of the interest rates on T bills that will have to pay as you know will be 12 or 14 and we can't afford that and so we don't we're we can't do what we need to do and we can't go on and so right now the medicine is perceived as worse than the disease but the disease is so chronic that it's not sustainable now forgive me my final question is going to be slightly lighter than the other ones yeah um but could you cost Joe Biden and Donald Trump back as a using your classical brain as a sort of classical figure from history is there anyone you can compare those figures to no I don't think either one of them is periclean but uh Elsa bides was a much younger Dynamic figure than Donald Trump but he had some of the same talents he when he went into a room people wanted to talk to him he said outrageous things he was multi-talented but he was also kind of a slave to his appetites he was excessive but he if you look at the Sicilian Expedition should have never gone there was his idea but if they had to listen to him and gone straight to Circuit they would have won if they had gone uh the final battle I mean at uh agus Pottermore if they had listened to him and followed it they would have won so he was somebody that was considered so outrageously a violator of norms but so instinctively with an animal cunning and I think Aristotle said he was a when you raise a lion you better deal with him you know if you raise him you better make use use of him he's a very uh trumpian figure uh Biden is he reminds me of one of these um figures uh you know they're the minor figures the names don't matter but they they appear in the the pages of Cicero uh piso or somebody like that these minor old senatorial totems that are fossilized and they come out and they tell Caesar you can't do this or they tell Cicero you got it and then and they're completely that Roman senate by uh oh 40 BC was completely corrupt bankrupt they had been making a fortune off the new Imperial oppositions and Greece and and North Africa and nobody took them seriously they were pompous and see a guy like Caesar just looked at them and said you know what these guys are completely corrupt and I'm going to just deal with them the way I want and there was a couple of people like Cato especially with maybe Cicero that had some principles but most of the senatorial class was making so he was a typical Roman late senator you can name what six or seven people like him but he Biden is corrupt is ancient his family have used him as a lever to to bring in an untoward fashion prophets and he was always incompetent but that's who's president now and it it really is it's kind of frightening people it's very ironic in America everybody was frightened about Trump but the result was that North Korea behaved Iran we've got all the deal and they didn't dare do anything Israel was uh well protected and Japan was well protected Australia kind of liked what we were doing by confronting China Europe hated Donald Trump but they increased the NATO budget 100 100 uh billion dollars which comes in handy now with Ukraine with their Depots are full the United States military budget went up we would we had a plan to keep Bagram air fresh War space and the residual port and everybody hated it and they got what they wanted and it turned out to be an utter ungodly disaster well let's hope there's no Civil Wars uh around the corner I hope so too I hope so too thank you so much Victor for joining us I really appreciate it okay well thank you

Channel: The Telegraph

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Keywords: Telegraph, News, victor davis hanson, victor davis hanson joe biden, victor davis hanson wokeness, hoover institution, vdh, victor davis hanson trump, victor hanson, hoover institute, trump, freedom, the case for trump, liberty, joe biden, biden, president biden, israel, president joe biden, news, joe biden speech, us politics, us, biden administration, white house, joe biden moments, sleepy joe, woke, wokeness, woke culture, woke disney, florida, ron desantis, governor ron desantis

Id: 8VVD9NdrltI

Length: 61min 54sec (3714 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 29 2022