Victor Davis Hanson | War in Ukraine

he didn't use the full force the full wherewithal that was at his disposal for the first four or five days he's been shocked he's been shocked at the ukrainian resistance he's been shocked that nato is now talking more like winston churchill than neville chamberlain the german chancellor gave a stunning speech that he basically repudiated everything that germany has stood for for 30 years [Applause] it's terrific to welcome victor davis hanson back to this conversation series he's the martin and early anderson senior fellow in residence in classics and military history at the hoover institution stanford university california professor hanson has also several other prestigious academic posts he is an historian of both ancient and modern history with a special emphasis on the history of warfare he also has his own podcast the victor davis hanson show where he speaks at length about global and american affairs and cultural issues his latest book the dying citizen how progressive elites tribalism and globalization are destroying the idea of america has just been released and i certainly commend it we'll turn to it shortly well victor a million thanks for coming on again we agreed to talk about uh this very very important book the dying citizen the last time we spoke to push it along a bit in australia because i think it ought to be read as widely here as it ought to in your country but of course in the meantime the world has really reached a very dangerous place in terms of the russians ukraine and let's not leave china out of it and how we might respond in fact your book is entirely relevant to what we were looking at i think you you've got the world now dividing you've got two massively authoritarian and very threatening countries uh giving us a choice between a new authoritarianism dominating the globe and versus what might be called the citizenship model of the west where we're in danger of giving up that citizenship voluntarily your book says its name says it's all the dying citizen so these are worrying times but if you don't mind i just i'd really like to get your views on the most pressing global issue at the moment that's obviously russia and the ukraine it's clear that putin has aspirations to annex the ukraine in some form or another it seems like a throwback to 19th and 20th century attempts by empires to reclaim historical territories what do you think is putin's game why is the ukraine such an important prize and we're plainly in very real danger if we're not already in a cold war of being in one possibly a hot war in coming weeks if this is mishandled i know that's a big issue but i love your feeling uh your your insights well i think putin feels that the post-court cold war era didn't work out for russia the way that he had envisioned it and by that he means that he does not have the wherewithal to be on the stage same stage as superpowers like the united states and china and he thinks he could be should he reclaim most or much of the 100 million people he lost in population when the soviet union evaporated and the 30 of the territory and when he looks at the map he sees ukraine it's rich in natural gas it has precious metals it's got europe's most fertile pharma and he thinks that this is central to these irrigan dentist plans to reclaim as you said this sort of russian empire and how that goes about he looks at georgia or he looks at eastern ukraine or crimea and the degree to which he acts immediately is predicated on the status in the west and the status in the west and that includes japan and australia south korea as well as the eu nato and the united states and canada it depends on whether the world price of oil is high and he's rich in petrol dollars and we're paying out the nose for energy that we can't or won't produce ourselves it depends on whether nato is at each other's throats or they're following the german lead of not meeting their their defense obligations to spend two percent of their budgets on military readiness or germany is conducting something like this nordstrom 2 pipeline and also the american president if the american president is begging putin to pump more oil when he won't or when he's asking him to lay off 16 entities when the russian hackers are disrupting a pipeline in america as they did in january but he's begging him not to stop or forcing him not to stop but just divert a little bit his attention to other uh other entities when you have that situation falling in afghanistan then he feels opportunistic and he feels the west either can't or spent or won't defend its own interests so i'm going to go into ukraine i think what in this particular instance what's fooled him is that he didn't count on the response because of these things i talked about but it was so embarrassing to nato in the united states and the west that he so flagrantly went in to kill people and and wrecked that country he didn't use the full force the full wherewithal that was at his disposal for the first four or five days he's been shocked he's been shocked at the ukrainian resistance he's been shocked that nato is now talking more like winston churchill than neville chamberlain uh the german chancellor gave a stunning speech that he basically repudiated everything that germany has stood for for 30 years you know we're going to produce energy fossil fuels no nordstrom pipeline we're going to rearm we're going to have two percent we're gonna meet the two percent everybody should and it was no green anti-american boilerplate i wish our own president would emulate that uh speech and so putin now is he's befuddled he's confused but it doesn't it doesn't erase the point that he has the ability and the potential to crush ukraine if he puts all of his resources there and that's what he's going to be doing in the next next week and now it's just a race between a belated western effort to send javelin missiles which by the way i think is the most effective weapon in the world now in terms of cost efficacy at 200 000 plus 80 for the for the charge or the the bullet so to speak and then you can take out a tank at two and a half miles with you know fire and forget so it's a very valuable but expensive commodity and we have not given them enough donald trump uh reversed the obama decision not to give them that but we but we still haven't given them up and i don't know why the west didn't pour it in november and december and january because when you see those columns john of for you know 40 miles of russian materiel on trucks and tanks coming in to destroy kiev you would think they would be easy targets but not easy targets if you don't have enough anti-tank weapons and so now we're in a race to supply them and that has finally brought a response from vladimir putin he's a student of history and he knows that no invasion can put down an insurrection unless the borders are closed we had trouble in iraq because of syria and iran supplies we had trouble in afghanistan because of the pakistan open border we had problems going back to vietnam and korea korea with china afghanistan as well with the pakistan border but also in the case of vietnam with southeast asia and the ho chi minh trail as you remember from the australian contribution so he's looking now and he says i can i can destroy this independent country and absorb it but not if nato wakes up and they use their four corridors of you know romania hungary poland slovakia and pour these weapons in that can nullify my advantage so now he's threatening the use of nuclear weapons uh vaguely but not you know not ambiguously so to to nato he doesn't and he's he feels he won't be able to win i think if he can't close the borders so you're painting a picture that actually this has proved much more difficult than he expected because surprisingly europe has very belatedly but nonetheless quite surprisingly stepped up i mean germany's turnaround is something to behold who would ever have thought frankly that they would do it but am i hearing you say that he will probably succeed in the ukraine but but his broader objectives of putting much more together after that and somehow prospering from it now looks pretty blunted yeah i think the next five days will tell whether he succeeds or not and that will be predicated on how quickly these weapons are in the hands of ukrainians that know how to use them i i think it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the world's supply of javelin missiles and american shoulder-fired anti-missile uh shooters are now on the way to ukraine i think that all of the nato countries the united states probably you in australia you're emptying your stocks and you're pouring everything in there it's up to 15 000 i think javelins and they're so expensive that you know a lot of these countries don't have a lot of them and so if they come in time and and they can make the difference and putin will be stymied along with the sanctions but i think he thinks they won't because he'll threaten people who are supplying them but more importantly he feels that if you and i had this conversation a month from now john that he will be successful and that we will not be talking about the rough time he had the first five days or six days or the deaths and the destruction or his unpopularity of the sanctions but he in his calculus he will be thinking they'll say oh my god vladimir putin in the 21st century just swallowed an entire country and he did it in less than three weeks and what are we going to do because he's got his eye on the baltic states he's going to be pressuring every russian-speaking former republic he's got his eye on it what are we going to do and so that's what i don't know if that's accurate in reality but that's what his impression is that the aims will be so beneficial to russia that he's willing to what he considers these you know these detours or cul-de-sacs on his way to get there that were now enmeshed in and then our euphoria that he didn't win like he did in crimea or georgia or east ukraine he didn't win in the first 72 hours we're euphoric but i think if we stand back uh you know it's sort of like the polish army fighting very heroically the first couple of days in poland and then they were surrounded by three invasions plus the soviet union they collapsed and so i i am cautiously optimistic but when i hear people some of my colleagues say putin will be disgraced he's embarrassed he's broke there'll be a coup of an oligarch a general will come in they'll remove him it'll be millions in the streets of russia i don't see that every time he went into crimea and georgia there was a huge uptick in his popularity they weren't as bad the first three days as this but if he can turn this around and i hope he doesn't and i hope these weapons come there and we're and we're very forceful it's interesting to contemplate to know the russian economy is only a tiny bit bigger than the australian economy we're just 25 million people we're with a lot of debate here about our one-shot military as a senior military guy referred to it himself the other day you know we need to do a lot more but we might come back to that in a moment in the meantime here is an economy that has benefited from uh and will continue to benefit if they can find a way to trade from the west's confused policy on energy i would have thought now as i understand it under both obama president obama and trump america became energy self-sufficient uh fracking was allowed if i'm i think i'm right in saying obama once i said thank god for fracking it's helping us reach our environmental objectives trump well he was a late he he didn't open anwar up the alaskan uh reserve that's got about a potential of a million to two million barrels a day that was closed and he did stop federal new leasing of federal lands for natural gas and he was ambiguous they had committees and they about keystone but it was not greenlighted but because the price of gasoline got so high and he was under pressure he sort of said well if the trackers want to do it i won't really stop them but we never got up to this incredible 13 million barrels so when trump came in he opened the anwar field he opened new federal leases on new lands for gas and oil he green lighted keystone and then more importantly he told banks and lending agency that he wanted them and they they were to lend to frackers and horizontal drillers and then he went and told them that you're heroic people and the result of the jawboning and these policies were that we had an incredible surge in which we became the largest uh natural gas producer and oil producer in the history of civilization we were we were on our way to 13 and a half 14 million barrels of oil alone were energy insuff we were energy of self-sufficient if you look at you know we were exporting and importing but the the net total was we were producing more than we were consuming and so it was a stunning success and then in addition to that i think we sometimes forget this he said to the germans almost right when he came to office that famous confrontation when he's talking to the nato members and he says germany has no business with this nordstrom 2 and we're going to sanction it but we have a carrot we are going to open up new federal lands and we will have billions of cubic feet of natural gas and we'll we're going to have liquefied natural gas ports and we can send it a lot of it to you and what we can't send to you were really high on this cypriot greek israeli pipeline the so-called east med project that was going to send another whole slew of natural gas through italy and so he was trying to find ways to break this log jump and when people came back to him and said that'll cause global warming or the turks won't like it or the russians want he didn't that was oblivious so when he left office here in the united states gas was very cheap it's it's doubled in price in california doubled and we've never paid i've never in my entire life paid five dollars a gallon which we are paying now in california so it was a stunning achievement and biden came in and his candidacy and then his transition and his presidency was in the hands of bernie sanders and elizabeth warren i think the obamas and the squad and they all were john kerry radical green uh advocates and we we've lost almost 3 million barrels a lot of this was tragic because it it really meant that it was a contributor to this seven and a half eight percent annual inflation that were suffering it was a contributor to sort of bad relations with canada when we reneged on the uh the keystone pipeline that would have given us alberta oil it was uh it showed that we were weak when we were begging putin and the saudi royal family both of which had been targets of sort of virtue signaling criticism from mr biden so uh if he had just said you know these are all my achievements and plagiarized trump's work and i would have preferred that everybody would have and then he could have taken credit for what was very successful but he wasn't interested in pragmatism it was ideology ruled everything so my point out of all of that yeah i take what you're saying um is these though that once again in the west in this case its leader america the most powerful of the western nations has weakened itself in pursuit of ideology rather than pragmatism and recognizing what's really happening at the same time as it said in train factors that in a way strengthen putin's hand you know high energy prices play right into putin's hand he did i would have thought so here's the rub in a way for for what you call liberals we what we might call in australia greens to so pursue energy policies in you know because of their concerns about climate that they place at risk the liberal global order and increase the chances of us tipping over into a world that's dominated by authoritarianism that would be the worst possible outcome for everyone including people worried about climate i would have thought because there's no evidence that the chinese or the russians give tapani about um about emissions not really the past has subsidized green groups in the west they love green groups and the chinese have as well and you know i think you summed it up pretty well tonight is the president's state of the union address in a few hours and he's got a big problem because his green energy protocols and which override and pragmatism a war on fossil fuels the open border the inflationary new modern monetary theory policies the afghanistan the woke movement the political politicalization of the military now they're not domestic issues anymore john they have foreign policy ramifications as we see in ukraine so the american people are saying wait a minute if our border is open and two million people invaded how do we have the intellectual heft or integrity to go over there and say to the ukrainians you've got to secure your border if we have this inflationary policy and we're printing 2 trillion a year and we have 30 trillion in debt how can we engage in a successful financial war with china or russia who have surpluses if we are begging putin for energy and europe is dependent on his gas and oil and he's you know he's rich in petro dollars that are flowing in in the billions every day with this increased price why are we deliberately not using the resources we have that are greater than either russia's or china's and if we want to have a military that deters people like putin why do we get get out of afghanistan the way we did why is mark milley our chairman of joint chiefs saying that our existential threats or the twins of climate change and white rage or lloyd austin or defense secretary saying white supremacy rather than battlefield efficacy being our our prime consideration and cutting the defense budget under um he his first budget uh biden suggested we cut the defense budget so what i'm getting at is that this woke green whatever we want to call it initiative that's not unique to the united states has i think you are suggesting it has foreign policy ramifications it weakens the west and when you start to collate what the chinese and the russians say it's pretty clear that they they like what we're doing to ourselves and they say that we're decadent we're at too affluent we're too pudgy they have all different mechanisms and metaphors and similes but uh and you know we have we as conservatives have to be very very careful because we know that what they are saying there's truth to it but we don't want to in agreement with them by any mechanism or means or any any methods suggest that therefore because they're right that we're in us in a cannibalistic mode they have a right to take advantage of it i think a lot of conservatives will say well we're decadent putin was right we've destroyed our deterrence putin was right it's none of our business let him go in there and that'll show everybody what happens and you know maybe there won't be pride flags and george floyd murals at least in ukraine well that's the wrong attitude we've got to find a mechanism to say yes putin and china saw how weak we are but we're going to go full board and correct those those vulnerabilities and determine sort of like during uh world war one when uh world war ii in the united states we had the america first but we were uh there was a lot of isolationism but after pearl harbor uh the criticism there were two types of isolationists there were the people who said we warned you that you were you were kind of a socialistic country and you were not and then and they were incorporated into really the leading spokesman of war against japan and then there were the charles lindbergh people who said we don't want to get involved or and they became irrelevant and so i think conservatives have to not confuse what's at stake it reminds me it's the foreign policy here in this country john it's a foreign policy equivalent of the the rancor over the election we all know that in 2020 the laws in the key states that determine the electoral college outcome were altered and they were altered in an unconstitutional fashion by court edict and bureaucratic fiat against the constitutional prerogatives of state legislatures who had laws and the result was we had 102 million ballots for the first time 64 were mailed in our early voting we've never had that before the air rate went down and that was that was catastrophic for trump but i don't think you can make the argument from that oh well the ballots were rigged or the computers were communicating with china kind of a sydney pal linwood kraken and to do that and say well on election day all the computers were these conspiracy weakened that that legitimate that with the legitimate criticism so i hope that conservatives and their anger at how we've been uh uh warped by wokeness and political credence don't let that anguish uh channel into sort of uh well let let putin do what he wants or he's at least he's christian or something like that we've got to be very careful i think yeah i've heard uh you know a little bit of a hint from some american conservative commentators that are so let's just retreat the overtones of that isolationism again now as uh that that would be a disaster globally can i put an australian perspective on this that i find quite interesting a couple of days ago very interesting poll he revealed that two-thirds of australians are truly shocked by what's happened in the ukraine and it's been a giant wake-up call they see it as a a serious threat to global security but three quarters see china as an even greater threat so in a sense i think they're starting to see clearly that we are at a very dangerous tipping point globally as i see it anyway can we just tease out putin must have been very surprised in fact i'm very surprised where i sit in australia that the europeans have got their act together a bit and germany in particular has been prepared to really take some big risks you know with the pipeline the gas pipeline being suspended saying they will double defense spending that their military is not ready they want to get it into shape what i'm really driving at here is that it seems to me that if there's one thing that americans i take and still broadly agree on is that china is the number one threat there agreed that china is a problem for years i think a lot of thinking americans have said the europeans and nato need to step up and do more for themselves is there a prospect that they will do that and leave america in particular free to focus on keeping the pacific stable that would be the hope and there's a great euphoria here on both sides of the aisle people are making grandiose claims that now europe uh is taking defense seriously and that putin has been a great gift because all the jawboning of presidents clinton and obama and bush and trump could not achieve as much as uh in you know 12 or 16 years than uh putin did in just a week and that's there's some truth to that but let's wait two months from now john and let's heaven forbid not hope but keep up with the possibility dreadful though it be that putin takes ukraine and he's bragging that he absorbed not a crimea or an eastern ukraine but a whole country and now he's on the borders of you you know once again he's on the borders of poland and romania and hungary and he's very close to austria and czech republic and in germany and at that point what will be the the reaction when he says you're very cold next winter and i'm not gonna and you want my natural gas and oh by the way i have decided that you cannot you cannot have this particular type of offensive weapon in your nato country and after his performance if it's successful in ukraine it'll be see if it'll be curious to see if the germans either are able as as a richest nation and nato and the second largest in its population are they able to say no we we we adhere to what we told you a year ago or a few months ago our army is determined to repel you if you come in we have nato allies and we don't need your energy we don't want it i don't know if that's going to be possible for them to reverse a 30-year mentality in a matter of months i hope it is and i think the united states can do them a great service by helping them but you make another very good point and it's been very it's been widely i've been very surprised how aware amer americans are of it it breaks down left on right here the the left says to people the existential enemy is ukraine ukraine ukraine and russia i mean the russians in ukraine and these crazy conservatives are still talking about the real threat as china and the conservative says well putin we have to deal with him but he only has 140 people 40 million people and his economy is small is one-tenth the size of nato and the nato's aggregate economy and nato has a billion people so if you look at wherewithal china versus russia it's china and the problem we have with this on the conservative side is that russia is a very primitive propagandist you know better than i do john in every western movie the villain these days is a white russian with gaps in his teeth covered with orthodox tattoos with a bad accent pitted against some hollywood young starlet but and so it's easy to to see how primitive and caricatured russia russian propaganda efforts are china's a different story china's insidious they they have really tapped into the woke agenda and you dare criticize them and on monday they will say you're racist and you're continuing a long western tradition of the yellow peril or japanese and prison camps during war ii and then on tuesday some ceo michael bloomberg of mark zuckerberg or bill gates uh a jamie dimon or somebody in wall street will sort of suddenly say you know the chinese aren't bad and then on wednesday the nba or hollywood will say we have a huge market or we have endorsements or they're working well with us in joint ventures so there's just so much more devious and effective propagandist and more powerful that i think you're wise that we have to be very very careful by thinking that once putin is contained we're home free and in china they've been very brilliant in their reaction to ukraine the first moment they came out with ostensible support and then they scanned the horizon shocked of the european and the american and the other western response they pulled back from putin a little bit but not enough to put them in a position not to go back and approve of him if he wins and so now they're sitting on the sidelines uh giving mixed signals watching the pulse of the battlefield if he loses they're going to say it's outrageous and we warned him not to do this and we don't agree in this territorial acquisition but if he wins they're going to fault the west for it and say this is uh he had a right to go into ukraine because of russian speakers and you know where that's going to go with vis-a-vis taiwan do you buy into the theory that the chinese would be watching very very closely uh that western reaction and then and you've got a division between those who think we'd better keep the global order in some sort of condition so that we can trade that's our prosperity key and those who say no reunification's so important that we're now so advanced and so powerful that we can do it so you've got that tension between the two obviously of great interest to us in australia we don't want taiwan to be this region's ukraine the chinese you know they really have it's been an extraordinary game they say they always respect other countries territorial sovereignty they've sat on the fence they're the one people that putin could not ignore if they were to say pull back you know and the civilized world ought to note that the chinese are the people who have the power to do it and they haven't used it further than that if you stop and think about it the rest of the world is prepared to wear the pain at least for now sanctions what does china do say well we'll buy your wheat we'll buy your oil we'll buy your coal another 100 million tons of coal which ought to be noted by the greens so that they know what we're really dealing with here yeah i think china on the one hand as you point out they are worried about public opinion to the degree that affects their uh their accessibility to western markets and infiltrate western universities and western military alliances and ports and their silken road and all that that's all predicated on the nice happy face china that has been unfairly maligned by western elites that's their their view but on the other hand they cannot condemn russia because that's exactly what they are planning to do in taiwan they feel that a country that has native speakers on their borders has innate ties that supersede any international law about a country that declares themselves independent they don't think taiwan is independent russia thinks that ukraine was never independent they feel they're they have the same language the same culture and their tools of the west to weaken them and so they're going to have to they're going to be subtle about it but they're going to eventually and ultimately side with russia in ukraine and hope they win i wouldn't be surprised if they're doing more than just wishing their win because they're going to go into taiwan maybe sooner or later or later and sooner we don't know but eventually they're going to try to go into taiwan and they can't be on record that that would be contrary to international law and they would resent that and i it'll be interesting to see uh what will be the lesson militarily from ukraine how long the ukrainians last and if they're analogous to how long the taiwanese would last and what would be the effect of sanctions on china because after all it's easy to say an oligarch can't pull up his huge yacht into you know barcelona or the piraeus or it's easy to say that you're going to deny a general an atm when he's on you know vacation in france but it's quite another thing to tell that the chinese with all of that money and all that influence that they can't do this and they can't do that when you have so many joint ventures investments students athletes actors the whole cultural apparatus of the west is so invested in china that i just don't think we would be very effective trying to do to china what we're doing pretty successfully with russia west is so small and it's so despised anyway but china is both playing the uh the marginalized person card but they're also so powerful and compared to russia you paint quite a bleak picture just as a matter of interest we've all been taken by the courage and determination of the ukrainian people it is worth remembering that it's a place where there's a lot of corruption and in fact despite all of their natural wealth that corruption seems presumably lies at the heart of the reality that the average ukrainian has even lower income uh streams than the average russian yes absolutely they're poorer than the russian despite all their natural resources all of their natural advantages they don't have points you're absolutely right you know i think there's a big not that people thought they would roll over but they thought they would be analogous to here in the united states people thought they'd be analogous to the crimeans or the georgians or ossetia in other words they would fight for a while but given their corruption and given that they have some of the most lucrative uh assets in terms of farmland metals and fossil fuels in europe and given they haven't utilized them to the benefit of the people and given they have interfered i mean we're talking about alexander benmen and the whistleblower were responsible for the impeachment of a president on the grounds that he somehow suspended aid for a while to ukraine to investigate the binds when subsequent news shows that he was the only president in history who demanded that ukraine get offensive american-made weapons and b what he thought the biden consortium he was doing with ukraine was was underestimated we know now from the investigations of john durham and the laptop of hunter biden that that corrupt government was interfering in the politics of the united states going way back to 2012 and joe biden was vice president so given all of that baggage i don't think anybody thought you know that ukraine would capture the hearts and minds of americans and yet it has and so it's a testament to the people and uh there is a sense too that and like maybe you feel it in australia john or your listeners do that that example of zielinski and the citizens of kiev i think it's telling westerners that you have wrong priorities the world doesn't revolve around jay-z or the super bowl bowl halftime show or what oprah says this or what uh bill maher a comedian at night says and you're you know you don't really you're you're a vacuous superfluous culture in many ways and there's only existential things that count a secure border united population a readiness to defend your values and be unapologetic if they're better than the alternative you don't have to be perfect to be good and the ukrainians far poorer far more disadvantaged in some sense than we are are showing a level of courage i think a lot of western leaders and their and their elected officials are saying i wonder if we would do that given the postmodern status of our population and our popular culture so i think that it's it's a wake-up call that maybe the woke you know oh you didn't you weren't born in 1776 you were born in 1690. oh you can't put up a statue of lincoln oh we gotta tear down jealousy oh we've got to rename father juniper sarah boulevard or something all of that is superfluous when it gets down to it and ukrainians are reminding of us about this is an old iron law i would have thought that conviction will overcome uh self-doubt and self-loathing any time and as you say all these massive attacks we're seeing on our history now look like attacks on history but are actually attacks on our culture leaving our young people thinking well you know why would you stand up for a dreadful nightmares culture like this but to come to the taiwanese for a moment they're different of course the ukrainians it's a highly successful democracy very prosperous place population roughly the same as australia a wealthy country as i mentioned um would they would they inspire us with their willingness to stand up for their citizenship we'll come to citizenship in a moment yeah i think they do i think they do i think what's happening to the west is that it's very ironic is that the established west the anglo-speaking west the former british commonwealth in the united states and then the countries that com that make up nato and the eu with the westernized democracies in democracy in taiwan and south korea and japan uh the heart of the what if you think if you look at all of those western countries the heart of it was traditionally in washington london and paris and yet at the core of the west there's the greatest degree of agnosticism timidity uncertainty and i know that you suffer from those same symptomology but you're still a frontier country you're right near china you have no margin of error you're very rich one of the richest continents or nations in the world naturally but you don't have a large population you're and that makes you a target by china so there's still a garrison mentality among many australians that you don't have that margin of error that europe and the united states has traditionally the same is true of taiwan the same is true i think of south korea for a while longer japan perhaps but i i think americans in eastern i mean what i'm getting at john is western europeans are going to get inspiration from eastern europeans that don't have that level of affluence and historical protection or from southern europeans like the greeks and the same thing is true of the americans when they look at australia and the same thing is true that japanese when they look at taiwan or south korea so i hope that these i guess donald rumsfeld got in trouble for calling old europe and new york but he was trying to make that point 20 years ago that when you you're up against it and you have existential enemies in your neighborhood and they're very clear about what they want to do to you then it's very hard to worry about the ethnic makeup of the diversity program at your university it really is or whether you should put a homeless person in a permanent shelter or a tent i mean this is what we're obsessed with in the west and in countries that don't have the margin of safety that we do or the level of affluence at leisure can't afford to do that point taken well that's a a very useful segway i think into what you've been writing about the dying citizens if you stop and think about it it occurs to me that if you look at the ukraine and you contemplate what the chinese might like to do with reunification what they've already done in hong kong it's a denial if you like of the people's sovereignty of their self-determination by authoritarian regimes that don't respect the individual and don't have a system of common law because they don't have an idea of the universalism of the of the population if you like that all people if you like born equal even if you get unequal outcomes in life they should be subject to a common law um on the other hand i think in in essence what you are arguing that the title says it all the dying citizen um in the west we're giving up voluntarily our citizenship but can we explore this for a while what do you mean by citizenship and why is it a citizen different if you like to a subject it's a very late concept john we civilization is 7 500 years old it starts in the near east but it didn't appear our citizenship until about 2500 years ago in the 7th and 8th centuries in greece i wrote a book called the other greeks trying to explain the economic basis of it but essentially it was a revolutionary idea that residents that had either been serfs or slaves or subjects or peasants took it upon themselves to create their own government and they were given rights they failed inalienable rights and they had responsibilities to perpetuate them so property from that from was theirs they could pass it on they could invest in it when they were 80 years old and the idea that their children had a legal right to it and so it was the rule of law for everybody regardless uh at least there were there was a movement to get rid of property qualifications very early on and people were going to be equal uh not on the back end but on the front end and so that idea waxed and waned throughout the west and my point was that if you looked historically through that odyssey there were certain i guess they would call them organic challenges or pre-modern challenges and then there were contrived or constructed or post-modern challenges and i kind of divided that book in two and the the organic natural status of man was not to have a middle class to have a lord and a serve a master in the key peasants around the walls that's the story of mankind but in greece we did have a middle class there was a word for it the messoi they were the hoplites of the phalanx they were the uh voters in the ecclesia and they owned about 10 acres of farmland and they controlled their own method of production if i could use that marxist term and then in addition to that they said they were not just residents they just didn't come and go into attica or argos they had borders and borders meant that they didn't have the arrogance that they could spread these ideas everywhere that the more that they deluded from the sinner the more they spread they deluded themselves so they said this is thebes and inside we'll have thieven democracy and outside in the athenians can go radical or what a globalist whatever they want but we can't if we can't influence and and if we try to we're going to dilute it so a border was very essential and then third people gave up their tribal identities i mean we say greeks but they had all sorts of tribal identities as you know the word tribe is a latin word from the three groups that were pre-state but once you give up your affinity to your so-called first cousin and you replace it with an abstract loyalty to the state then you have a meritocracy and we don't you know i go to the middle east i've said that a lot but i often ask people in such a wealthy country as yours in you know libya or algeria or egypt what's wrong and i usually get the same answer we hire our first cousins victor we we don't hire the best person we're loyal to our particular tribe or clan and yet here what i'm getting at is all of those distinctions that that birth citizenship in this post-modern age we're losing the middle class by every economic data point we know that we're losing borders we're becoming mere residents and we're becoming tribal we're re-tribalizing and so that's what i'm very worried if you ask an american 30 years ago i am a resident what can i not do that as citizens can do the citizen would say well you can't leave the united states without a passport i'm sorry you don't have that right if you leave the united states you might not get back that's gone at least in the southern border people come across all the time the person said you can't serve in the military only citizen that's gone the person would say you can't enlist or affect or participate in a u.s national campaign that's gone they would say you cannot vote in an election and we know now that new york said 800 000 illegal aliens will vote in the next municipal that that's starting to be gone and we're only left and i can think of only one distinction a non-citizen cannot hold office and we're already having that challenge and so once you blur that distinction then you're tribal and you have no middle class that you're not going to have nationhood or since citizenship and then i mentioned that there was constructed elite top-down efforts and that was uh the rise of a permanent class of government you have that in your country judge jury and executioners uh legislative executive judicial powers within a non-elected bureaucracy that war against a citizen with an enormous powers the citizen lacks there's evolutionaries in your country as ours these are people who feel that the original founding principles or passe got to get in our country get rid of the filibuster get rid of the electoral college get rid of the 15 person supreme court get rid of the state's right to establish voting laws then finally and this is probably the most dangerous this global cosmopolitanism that wealthy elites on the coast feel that their first allegiance is to some type of international body wouldn't it be good if the international criminal court could adjudicate american military behavior wouldn't it be good as secretary of state anthony blinken said if the u.n commission on human rights could could run an inquiry to see if we were systemically racist and what do you end up with when you do that you end up the who world health organization controlled by china assuring us that the virus was not transmissible or parodying the chinese line or you end up with vladimir putin now that the rotating chair of the security council yeah on this issue you actually write in your in your book page 269 that one threat that you've just been talking about this to citizenship comes not from foreign countries curtailing our liberties but from americans themselves britain's australians everywhere deliberately widening the idea of citizenship to include the peoples of the entire world david goodhart and his book call them the anywheres as opposed to the somewheres and the anywheres are quite profoundly dismissive of the common people and their ideals i think they're ignorant they don't think they know what's good for them don't global events at the moment in some ways shock us into realising how ridiculous this is i mean how to be global citizens what's the role of a global citizen if in fact the authoritarian regimes that have no regard for citizenship at all only for power where do you fit into that if you desert the ideals that made our western societies the envy of the world well if you don't have any roots or values of knowledge of your past why would you fight for anything and when we look at these ukrainian interviews at least the ones being aired in the states there's a common theme that all of these people men women children the elderly they all say things like this my father fought and grandfather fought in world war ii this was my home i left wall street to come over here and fight this is where i live this is my language this is my soil so you can you can see that traditional citizenship has galvanized that nobody is saying well you know if ukraine is lost i can just set up my zoom business in germany or i can move over to poland i mean that people obviously will do that if it's lost but they're not on record to suggest that that's going to be an incentive to save ukraine so all citizens i think at least that the traditional protocols are of any value when we look back at them what makes a citizen is a a sense of place they know their neighbors they know the history of where they're living they they have a loyalty to the past they don't want to let down the people who gave them something and died or no longer with them there's a shame culture i know that i'm living in a house that's uh i'm the fifth generation here it was built in 1870 which is very early i guess for california but i have memories not just of my mother living here in this room when she was a little girl she told me about it and not just her father but her father who was alive when i was telling me that his grandfather whom i seem to know even though he died i think in 1920 and i was born in 53 but i feel like i should keep it up or i should fix things even though i should half of me says oh just move to the coast and sell out but the other half says that well you were given something to preserve and there's a particular shame culture would you want to be found wanting by your ancestors or and those are all ridiculed today but they were traditionally throughout time and space very important whether in greece or rome or renaissance italy or during the even during the enlightenment this idea that a western citizen has roots and loyalties and patriotism and nationhood that makes them distinct and i guess the left feels that after world war one or world war ii patriotism was a bad word or nationalism is a bad word but they haven't replaced it with anything international marxism or internationalism or cosmopolitanism has i if anybody will show me the the uh the fruits of that of that project i'd be curious because when they tell me well internationalism allows free trade and allows commerce on the seas i say no it doesn't the u.s navy does take away the u.s navy and you've got the pirates in the red sea everywhere take away nato and you've got chaos so it's still nations and partnerships and alliances not internationalism and at the heart of that surely is this idea that all cultures are equal when in reality they are not some have plainly established on very different grounds i would say in the west you know the the sort of judeo-christian idea of the dignity and worth of every individual in the eyes of a higher authority whether we agree with them or like them or are cleverer than them is irrelevant we have to have a a reasonable degree of respect for them and all that's being washed out but they i you talk about the hollowing out of the middle classes my understanding is that real wages in the united states have flatlined now for something like four decades yes and the increase in consumption has been debt financed yes we've had a series of resp sorry yeah we'll go ahead four decades of static but 12 years of actual real decline well this is really frightening and comes to the heart of i think uh the cultural problem for those who say oh you can be a um a personal uh progressive and liberal but an economic conservative it's not working out that way not working out that way at all because if you stop and look at it the problem of flatlining real wages has been made much worse by inappropriate responses to something that should never have happened that people hadn't lost their moral compass which was the great financial crisis covert has accelerated it and inappropriate responses knee-jerk reactions playing to populism on climate change i'm not saying i'm a climate change denier i'm not but what i am saying is sound policy is a world away from bad knee-jerk policy their turbo charging this terrible problem of the squeezing of the middle classes while the t-shirted billionaires team up almost like a new clericy as i think uh joel potkin puts it with the greens with the activists with were in the background of weak government and technocrats to say we're not going to give up our lifestyle they are becoming richer and richer every day asset prices continue to explode people can't young people can't get into homes my australian listeners will know that i talk about this quite a lot but the squeezing of the middle classes and almost a sort of um marie antoinette desire to say well just let them eat cake because we've got to get on with saving the planet yeah we see that in colorado where's the leadership from people who ought to know better well you mentioned culture and religion and things of that sort and when you are very very wealthy it's a natural tendency a natural human arrogance to conflate your ability to make money or to be very successful with infinite wisdom and and entitlement and a lot of these people feel that reason pure reason or per your logic and their own brains got them where they were so they don't believe in a transcendent soul they don't believe in hereafter and how that manifests itself in the real world they love humanity in the abstract let's save global warming let's have a policy but the the humans before them they have no concern for there's no sermon on the mount worry about the hungry and the poor and you can really see that totemic example is john kerry he's always worried about the fate of mankind but he's willing to be culpable to destroying gas and oil production as he jets around in this private jet and that will destroy the livelihoods of millions of americans it is now as we speak i know people that second generation mexican-american people i met today that said that they can't fill their gas for five dollars a gallon and they can't go do their landscaping or their work if they have to pay six dollars they won't be able to do it yet john kerry is worried whether vladimir putin will be a partner and believe me he will be a partner into restricting emissions because that'll mean more oil for him and less for others so i think it's partly that arrogance and then finally the real world manifest manifestations of what you're talking about when you lose a middle class and they're not viable you can see it in this country 1.7 trillion dollars in aggregate student debt and tuition rose higher than the price of an annual price of inflation and the more the federal government eliminated this moral hazard so the universities just loaned and loaned and loaned the federal government said we'll loan we'll back it up and back it up the students pay supposedly or to pay their tuition debts about 50 to 60 70 000 per student and there were there were ramifications of that the age when americans get married has gone from 23 to to about 28 the the age when they have their first child has gone all the way up into their early 30s the fertility rate just in 25 years has gone from 2.1 to 1.7 the age when they can buy a house has gone up to their middle and late 40s 30s and you know we're back up to a high uh inability to buy a house we only have about 63 percent we're up to 64. i think now we're 62 percent i'm going to correct myself uh that are homeowners and i think this is true the western world in general it's sort of what topville said in the democracy of them in america that you would have a prolonged adolescent when there was not an economically viable system of free market capitalism that allowed the middle class to to thrive and to profit and to have property pass it on a home then they would become wards of the state life of julia pajama boy here in this country where they expect you know they just want to if you remember the pajama ad that the obama administration ran a guy in his pajamas sometime i guess midday is drinking hot chocolate and he's urging everybody to vote for obamacare but uh you know the ukrainians can't afford to do that and other people can't and it's a lotus eater narcotic for western societies this strange phenomenon with grown men young men that are not plugging into the economy or they feel they either cannot or they're they will not man up to it go get a job get married have children buy a home you know that's culture and the culture then reflects the economic inability they justify it and they they say it's great but really it's just an artifact or reaction to the fact as you point out that economically it's getting very hard to do it raises the question how long can you opiate the people i mean ultimately the french revolution showed that people will break out in extremely ugly ways and if they're not careful land themselves in an even greater mess as i look at america and i think of its very proud tradition of individualism of people accepting their responsibilities of working hard the so-called protestant work ethic all the things that the talk talked about so long ago surely that's latent to some of some degree please tell me it is uh people like you and i know jordan peterson uh other media outlets like the daily wire with ben shapiro they've got audiences now in the tens of millions of america around america and indeed around the world the national review recently reported that millions of parents across the country are fighting back against the spread of critical race theory and that's had political implications in america by protesting its presence in their schools at least you've got a culture or sometimes in australia it seems to be impossible to move anyone but the point really is do you think this can change anything i know jordan peterson i don't want to put words in his mouth but in a recent conversation he said to me you know this is where you will change opinions now you won't be able to do it through the mainstream media they won't concentrate well enough they're too interested in conflict they're too lacking in professionalism it's only a very few high quality journals left to explore ideas but you go online the very thing we're doing here i mean i'm unashamedly trying to inject a higher quality of reason and debate into the public arena because i don't think you can get good public policy without it but i guess the question is how optimistic are you that in view of everything that's happening i mean i mentioned that australians have got a surprising handle on where the real dangers they understand how dangerous ukraine is even though it's so far away they understand that china's an even greater danger which shows you that the elites haven't been totally successful in hoodwinking the people how do you see it in america unfolding are you optimistic that perhaps there can be a turnaround i've been more optimistic than i ever have been the last five years and for a variety of uh indicators i've never seen the left so paranoid they tried to destroy who's not really conservative he's a empiricist moderate joe rogan he's got a larger audience than all than all the network news combined and for one word or inarticulate expression than ours they misrepresented him they tried to destroy him they tried to destroy jordan peterson they are so paranoid that they censor facebook twitter they looked at what happened with the canadian truckers here and they stopped gofundme in other words they think to themselves we own all the institutions of communication and influence wall street media silicon valley k-12 academy the foundation sports entertainment and yet these stupid people are still not with us and they look at this mid-term and if you look at some of the polls there there's an old truism in american politics that the republicans on a generic question can get within minus five when a person answers who will you vote on the ticket the person with a republican or a democratic affiliation if they say republican but they're only five down then the republicans usually win because they have greater organization and turnout right now it ranges from anywhere from plus seven all the way up to plus 12 depending on the pole so you've got record anger the republican party is making inroads and minorities uh here in the san joaquin valley of california i've never seen anything like it and talking to mexican-american second-generation americans they sound like they're a mixture of barry goldwater and ronald reagan they don't want anybody telling them that they have to pay for transgendered operations they don't believe in abortion on comm demand they do not want people coming across the border into their communities that have criminal records they don't understand why they have to pay five dollars a gallon for a san francisco pie in the sky dream of some wealthy person so and then we look at the midterms and unlike 2010 or 1994 where the republicans made enormous gains in a first-term presidency they started way down john the house is almost even so when they talk about 30 or 40 seats that's not winning you know that's like winning 70 when you're 30 down and if you lose four and the senate's already even they lose four or five seats and essentially within months this progressive agenda will stop and it will have to hinge on either a court ordered agenda by a liberal judge or an executive order by joe biden and unlike barack obama and bill clinton who had enormous care charismatic influence and abilities they were very articulate they were young they were dynamic and they had unpopular agendas but by the sheer weight of the personas they were able to push these agenda through joel biden is a very old and infirm 79 and he was never eloquent and he was always petulant and those those traits unfortunately been accentuated so i don't see a good future for them i look around the party and i say nancy pelosi is 81 james clybourn that majority whip is 82 i think chuck schumer's 74 they don't have a lot of youthful energetic leadership and when you talk about a ben shapiro or joe rogan or any of these grassroots people they it's very funny they don't reference their bas phds mas journalism degrees even though many of them are highly educated their appeal is their performance whereas the left of all ideologies they are the most uh antiquated and they hire and they reference by their the school they went to their certification scene i work for the new york times i have a phd in journalism from columbia this kind of stuff so they're ossified they're calcified and the real dynamic fluidity podcasts videos talk radio it's kind of it it thrives because it's sort of like in the arena thumbs up and thumbs down and the popular audience reacts to it and i grew up with this idea that all these 60s people were you know they're marching on the pentagon marching on the capitol marching on uh the tv station well now they're all in those places and their idea of a revolution is become a kind of a stalinist bloated apparatchik on the mayday dios as you watch the the missiles on mayday parade and they're like the soviets they're old they're tired they're intolerant they're paranoid that's the left and i think in the west and the energy now is with the right part of it's because youth are always rebellious against the orthodoxy but part of it is that um [Music] they're very afraid of what the left wants for them the left does not believe in civil liberties anymore in fact it believes in the opposite it believes in the powers of the fbi the cia the nsa to spy to surveil to use powers of government for superior moral means they feel they want the tools so they can enact a superior moral vision for us so i think i'm very optimistic i have never seen anything and i i speak to you as i know that i've come on before john had been a little bit pessimistic but things are rapidly changing here and ukraine is sort of a wake-up call on a lot of fronts here in the united states i was listening to a senator today who has voted against every energy and initiative and i and he was asked on the radio deliberately are you going to support fracking and are you and he said i've always supported fracking why are you doing this to me i mean he just blatantly lied because he felt it to reveal his true intentions was a suicide pact in november what sort of names should we in other parts of the world look to as rising stars politically in america we have a great interest in this we want america to put itself back together i mean we're great believers in the free world and you're still the dominant player no uh i think on the political scene there's a lot of there's a lot of dynamic people i think whether trump runs or whether he gets the nominations mike pompeo or tom cotton marco rubio marco rubio has matured a great deal from when we last saw him and ben shapiro obviously candace owens uh jordan peterson very influential joe rogan these are all people who made it on their own talents it wasn't an old boy network that said you know your yale dean calls cbs vice president to get you a job so they're they're merecratic people and uh in each of these fields we're talking about when i look at academia and i see who are the innovative people who are challenging orthodoxy say where i work at the hoover institution and there are people who are pariahs and you know neil ferguson the historian not the the oxford epidemiologist modeler but he's become very influential and he's becoming more and more conservative andrew roberts who's a visitor the the biographer scott atlas who was ridiculed and defamed is very inspirational because all of what he said about our medical protocols has been confirmed and what he warned us about was right even though he was destroyed and and smeared so there's people that i work with tom soul is still active i'm very proud to have their association even though they're considered eccentrics or outliers but i think there's a lot of reasons to be happy and one of the in our country this will we will succeed or fail in the degree to which whether it was wise or not opening our borders and destroying the immigration policy we have let in 50 million people now who were not born in the united states and we have a lot of people who are hispanic african-american and mixed heritage who have been told by the democratic party that you will be a victim and we will identify the victimizers of you and their white male christian heterosexual uh middle-class people and that that message is boomeranging and so we're seeing astronomical changes i i've never in my own community if you told me that 45 percent of the mexican-american vote voted for donald trump or that californians would recall a school board by 73 percent of leftists and i shouldn't say california's john i mean san francisco liberals and here in state we voted to maintain prop 209 which forbid the use of race as a criterion for admissions and hiring in california so i think part of it is that we can't take credit for it on the right this is the first administration in my memory that was unapologetically socialist or hard left and they wanted the reins of power and they got it legislatively judicially and executively and what did they do this has been the greatest disaster of any first year president in memory every single issue is underwater every single issue has failed the people whether they're left or right black white male or female they say i can't afford gas i have ten thousand dollars in the bank that's all i have i get zero interest it's declined in value by seven or eight percent i don't know anything about real estate i can't even buy a house i don't know how to invest in the stock market i only have a pass book account i just heard that story the other day they go in and buy plywood i put some plywood on this home a year ago john it was seven dollars for four by eight sheet of ply five eighths inch fly uh plywood and i was told by the roofer guess what victor we're in luck we got plywood for 55 dollars a sheet it's not nice it's not 90 anymore like it was a few months ago 90. wow these are astronomical changes i flew over the port of los angeles over the weekend i've never seen anything like it john there were ships they looked like a checkerboard just these huge tankers cargo ships all backed up because the port is dysfunctional and i guess covered mandates or or high-priced labor whatever the particular or regulations on a part of california and so as we were turning in this it was a prop plane we also looked at the train yard and it was scattered with trash where people had been looting the union pacific trains coming out of the port and i said to myself this is what this is the face of chaos and it was chaos incurred in one year and it was self-induced it was suicidal was cannibalistic and everybody's seen that so we have a i hope we don't blow it we have a great opportunity on the traditional side to tell the people this is why you're dissatisfied we agree with you and here are is a protocol an agenda or contract that will that will fortify your worries and institutionalize changes so we never get back to this this uh terrible place we have been in on the issue of blowing it it does uh there's an aspect of this which really concerns me you mentioned neil ferguson his wife ayanne hersey ali says that we're in danger of no longer living in a democracy but in an emocracy where everybody emotes and confuses as thomas soul puts it thinking and feeling they think feeling is thinking we must i think avoid the trap as we push against the left that is strangely unacquainted with facts data reason and reasonableness not to fall into that same trap we want to argue the facts and not deny our own commitment to recognizing the worth and dignity of even people we vehemently disagree with i think that's been so alienating in our culture and it's one of the great achilles heels of the progressives their nastiness we've got to avoid falling into that trap it seems to me do you have a view i do i i think that we have to do two things as i look at the i try to look back at ancient revolutions in greece and rome or what brought the jacobins to power or what brought the bolsheviks to power and i think there's there's two lessons people have to be courageous and forthright and honest to oppose that and they can't sit by the sidelines or the minority will seize power and destroy their culture and their nation but by the same token i agree with you that in their zealousness to defeat that danger they can't alienate people and i'll give you an example of what i mean and i voted for donald trump i'm a big supporter and we've talked about that but the other day he gave a speech to cpac it was a good speech but at one point he said putin is a genius but he gave a whole preface about all the bad things putin did and he meant to say that putin had figured out us and therefore he was a genius and we were appeasing and weak and therefore we were dumb but as it came out he didn't use a qualifying adjective and so the the headlines the next nanosecond was trump calls putin a genius his own president dumb whereas if he had just said putin is one of those evil geniuses one of those dangerous geniuses if you just said biden is acting tragically dumb or unfortunately don't so we we on the the right and conservatives have to be very very careful given the media is against us in the popular culture to be very careful in the the words we say the expressions we use and it's much better to be quiet and smiling and carry a club than it is to be angry and loud with a twig so my i guess my advice to conservatives is the more that you can be civil the more forceful you can be and the more that you want to go down a cul-de-sac and argue and scream and yell and and uh smear somebody the less clout you're going to have and i would rather have a lot of clout and not pick fights that are gratuitous well the whole idea of citizenship i think is that we do accord every one of our fellow human beings a degree of appropriate respect and dignity and you've been very generous with your time but i actually want to just read in something that roger kimball wrote about your book because it summarises what we've been talking about and i think i'm just keen for people to pick it up and read it he says that you've shown that political freedom is inextricable from the life of citizenship and citizenship is not a given it's an achievement and an achievement moreover that must be tended to survive most of history unfolded without citizens only subjects surfs slaves and sycophants and just as they were ages before citizenship so we can see from our own experience that citizenship can decay and fail those are i think um very powerful words and a great summation of of the ideas that you're so effective at getting across and i'm certainly trying to get across myself as an australian who believes in the dignity of all and and the idea of people coming together in a democracy hanging onto their freedoms recognizing that they own their freedoms and we only surrender such freedoms as we need to for the common good by consent to government whereas we live in a world that wants to reverse that it's very fragile and you can see that with the can i if somebody had told me five years ago that justin trudeau would declare a martial law and seize the assets of people many of whom were protesting peacefully and take their trucks away from them i would never believe it canada but on the other hand if somebody had believed have told me five years ago that during the covet lockdown until recently in my own hometown if you were a small mom-and-pop flower store or shoe owner you would be shut down why walmart who sold shoes and flowers would be wide open and that decision would be made by an unelected bureaucrat and it would have the force of law i wouldn't have believed that so we've got to be vigilant because we have to realize that we're an aberration historically and contemporaneously citizenship is is there's fewer demo democratic or constitutional governments in the world today than non-constitutional governments and that's a natural order of things for men to be too busy or not equipped to handle the burdens of citizenship and we can lose at any time even in your country and i know i get this third hand because i'm not i'm not in your country but it seems to me that you suffered the same perils and challenges that we did with the lockdown and that you you went after people um that might have had let's say a very severe case of covet with a high antibody level and yet they either were worried about getting a vaccination because of the reaction or i don't know but here in the united states as in australia we had people who might have had one vaccination but not the second or they chose not to get a booster or they were just so they had very high levels of antibodies and yet we we stripped away their constitutional rights and more importantly we demonized them we said they were subversives they were going to kill us they were we made them second tier citizens i i went to new york with a restaurant and i had the two modernist shots and a case of kova in a very high antibody level and the person that was ahead of me was talking to me in line and he was asking me have you ever had an antibiotic test i said doctor gave it to me without my knowledge and it was 2400 which was very high he said mine was off the scale too but he said let's see what happened so he went ahead of me and they would not let him in to eat they said no you can't get in here you don't have a even though natural immunity we find out later was as effacious as it's effective uh in most cases it's a vaccination and these these decisions were not made in a democratic fashion they were made by anthony fauci or mr collins at the cdc so kovid like ukraine have been wake-up calls i think to us all that what we inherited is very very tenuous fragile transitory if we're not careful you've been very generous with your time i i deeply appreciate it and let's press on wherever we can seeking with reason with firm politeness with respectful engagement to push it back against the enemies of freedom from within and without that's what we now confront so i really appreciate your time well thank you and i have a high regard for your show john and i i'm always delighted to come on and talk to your audience thank you did you enjoy this episode we cannot get good public policy out of a bad debate if you value vital conversations like this one please like share subscribe and join the conversation [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: John Anderson

Views: 295,810

Keywords: John Anderson, John Anderson Conversation, Interview, John Anderson Interview, Policy debate, public policy, public debate, John Anderson Direct, Direct, Conversations, putin, biden, ukraine, war, russia

Id: vFRsMs4Ltxw

Length: 82min 54sec (4974 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 02 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Globalruler__]

This guy is a quack. He’s not a reputable historian or a foreign policy expert. Take anything he says with a grain of salt.

[u/gabsierra]

Enthusiastic Trump supporter, claims Biden is a 'radical', the most radical in history even.

He can't tell Trump for the imbecilic, narcissistic grifter that he is, hard at work trying to destroy American democracy yet he talks about leadership qualities as if he knew.

He is a far-right quack and a sore loser like his orange idol.

[u/flamand_quebec13]

Hanson is a supporter of Donald Trump, authoring a 2019 book The Case for Trump. Trump praised the book. In the book, Hanson defends Trump's insults and incendiary language as "uncouth authenticity", and praises Trump for "an uncanny ability to troll and create hysteria among his media and political critics." - Wikipedia. Yeah f* this dude. We don't need this kind of talkshow here.