“When you have an agency that has gone rogue and is interfering at the highest level of the country to affect an election; and the directors of those agencies are willing to alter or leak documents that they shouldn’t or lie under oath to federal investigators or lie to a committee by claiming amnesia; and they oversee a bureau that will wipe clean phone records that are under subpoena; or they will not prosecute one person, but they will another; then it’s institutionalized. And you’ve got to get rid of it.”
The FBI should be broken up and its primary functions shifted to other departments of the federal government, argues classicist, political commentator, and military historian Victor Davis Hanson.
He’s the author of “The Dying Citizen” and “The Case for Trump.”
The FBI’s armed raid on Mar-a-Lago is unprecedented, Hanson says, and it’s the latest in a war being waged against the former president, from the Russia collusion hoax to impeachment proceedings against him—twice.
“We’re in a revolutionary cycle where the left has now said, under the pretext that Donald Trump is so extraordinarily threatening to the Republic, that it requires any means necessary to end him. And therefore we’re going to do things that are revolutionary.”
Mr. Jekielek:
Well, Victor, let’s start here. On August 8th, the FBI sends an estimated 30 officers to Mar-a-Lago, spends 10 hours there. It’s described as a raid. What was your initial reaction as this news hit?
Mr. Hansen:
When I was watching it, my first reaction was that there have been a lot of disagreements about archives. George W. Bush had one. He even nullified the archival law with an executive order to not comply with it for a while. Barack Obama did not hand over what was requested. He resisted all Freedom of Information requests. I think he spent $30 or $40 million. So this was not new. They all do it, and you can see why they do it. You have a little note somebody writes you as a foreign… Is that yours, or is it the State’s? So I thought this is crazy. They can’t deal with this. Nobody ever does this.
The second thing I saw was this was part of a series of incidents, both against Trump and against people related with Trump. If you want a lurid diary of Joe Biden’s and you’re in the FBI and you become a retrieval service for the Biden family, you drag out James O’Keefe in his underwear. You go to Roger Stone’s house with a SWAT team. You put Peter Navarro in leg irons. You go to Rudy Giuliani’s office and mess it up. You send this message that we can come for you. If you have a diary that’s embarrassing, or if you have a laptop, we’re going to put it on ice before an election. So it was part of that series that the FBI and this DOJ are out of control, and they’re trying to send all of us a message: “We can do this, and nobody’s going to stop us from doing this, and you better make the necessary adjustments.”
The third thing I thought is, oh my God, we’re 90 days from an election. Didn’t James Comey tell us that when he was investigating Hillary Clinton and he found thousands of emails that were classified, and there was evidence that she took a hammer and broke up her devices and BleachBit program to bleach it, he basically said, “Well, she did things that were wrong, but she’s a candidate. I’m not going to interfere in an election.”
Then I remember when they impeached Donald Trump, it was on a phone call, and the phone call was this Biden family’s been very crooked. In the past, they’ve been bragging about how they’ve interfered with an investigation of their son. Since we give you a lot of money, we don’t want to give you a lot of money, because we can’t trust you because you tend to give favors to the Biden family in order that you continue to get aid. In fact, Joe Biden had bragged, “I stopped that aid. I said, ‘I leave. They get no money.'” And they impeached him. If you go back and look at the transcript, the reason they said they impeached him was that Joe Biden would be a likely candidate. Therefore, Donald Trump was using his office to preemptively hurt a possible candidate. So this is the locus classicus of everything, and there was not a word.
Mr. Jekielek:
To your point, we have all these very known characters that have a huge antipathy towards former President Trump, like Andrew Cuomo saying there better be something good. I think Megan McCain is saying there better be something good. You better have the goods. I’ve seen that. There’s a lot of that from people that typically you don’t associate with statements like that.
Mr. Hansen:
But they never say, “Or what? There better be something good or we’re going to do…” what? The what is interesting because when the Republicans take the House, and I think they will in November and they will assume power in January of 2000… are they going to have an article of impeachment of Merrick Garland? I don’t know. Will they impeach Joe Biden? But they’re going to have to do something if that what is not answered.
This brings up a larger question because we’re in a revolutionary cycle where the left has now said, onto the pretext that Donald Trump is so extraordinarily threatening to the Republic, that it requires any means necessary to end him, and therefore, we’re going to do things that are revolutionary. What do I mean by that? Well, they tried to do things legally, or they tried to do things that were institutional. Let’s get rid of the filibuster. Let’s pack the court. We’re going to bring in two more states. We’re going to have a national voting law. We’re going to get rid of the Electoral College. None of that’s worked yet.
Now they’re doing things extra-legally. What would that be? Well, we’ve established a precedent that the House minority leader has no say about the nominations on a committee. The Speaker of the House says, “Nope, Nope, Nope. No one is going to be on the January 6th Committee and bother us unless they meet two criteria. They have to have impeached Donald Trump, and they have to be politically inert with no future in the Republican Party. Then you can serve.”
Now the message is they’re also saying, “If we don’t like the State of the Union, we tear it up on national TV. We just tear it up.” Nancy Pelosi has told us, “We just tear up the State of the Union.” You know what? We’ve never quite done this before. Andrew Johnson was the last time, but he wasn’t going to be a two-term president. We’re going to impeach a president in his first term the moment he loses the majority in the House and we’re just going to do it. We’re going to impeach a president twice. We’re going to impeach a president when he is a private citizen and out of office.
So they have set precedence that… We’re not even talking about the Supreme Court. We’re going to set precedence that the Senate minority leader is going to go to the Supreme Court doors and threaten by name the Supreme Court justice. “Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, you have sowed the wind; you will reap the whirlwind. You will not know what hit you,” so spoke Chuck Schumer. There’s a federal statute that says that people cannot go to the homes of justices, federal justices, intimidate them, threaten them for purposes of altering their opinions and their rulings. That’s exactly what’s happened. Merrick Garland was nowhere to be seen. In fact, they even went to a restaurant to roust out Justice Kavanaugh. Is that what we want to do?
So when the Republicans take office, are we going to be in a revolutionary tit for tat, or do the Republicans say we play by higher Marquess of Queensberry Rules? In other words, will Kevin McCarthy say, “I don’t like Joe Biden. It’s another one of his lying speeches. I’m tearing it up on national, too.” just to show you that you shouldn’t do this. Or will he say, “Squad members? None of you are going to be on the committee. I’m sorry. But Nancy taught me a good rule that you’re just too troublesome and you would get in our way. So not any of you get to serve on a congressional committee.
By the way, it’s time to impeach Joe Biden. Take your pick. We can impeach him on… He destroyed federal immigration law. He harassed individual citizens. He didn’t pay tax, we think, on money he gave Hunter, and he didn’t pay income tax money Hunter gave him. So we’re going to investigate that.” Or we’re going to say, “And by the way, Joe, we’re going to probably have to impeach you a second time. If the first one doesn’t work in conviction, and we might do it when you were a private citizen and we might even have to go into one of your three homes.”
That’s what happened in the Roman Republic. It happened at the end of Athenian democracy. That’s what happened in 1793/94 to the corrective of Napoleon that was happening in Germany. So that’s what the Democrats have started. We’ll see how it plays out and whether they want it to play out and whether the Republicans are going to be high-minded and not let it play out or feel they have to play it out to achieve deterrent so it never occurs again.
Mr. Jekielek:
So many directions we can go here. Let me just start with some very simple ones. You laid out how this event is connected with a whole series of others that we’ve seen. Let’s just focus specifically on January 6th, what it symbolizes and the whole January 6th Committee. Is there a direct relationship you feel between these two events?
Mr. Hansen:
I think there is. The January 6th Committee, ostensibly, was a bipartisan select committee. Because we do this all the time in America, we know how it should operate. That is, Speaker Pelosi and Minority Leader McCarthy meet, and depending on the size of the committee, say, “Well, here’s our seven Democrats. Here’s our six Republicans.” They get a team of lawyers, and they adduce evidence. They bring in witnesses. Usually the majority party presents them, and the minority party tries to tear them apart, and then they switch roles. Then they go in front of the public and they argue in front of each other. Out of this [inaudible 00:10:56], they distill the truth. They don’t know what the truth is. They’re inductive. At least that’s the pretense. So you have Adam Schiff and Devin Nunes dueling in the House Intelligence Committee to find out about what was going on with the Mueller investigation.
It doesn’t bear any resemblance to it. There are no Republicans that are really Republicans on the committee. The votes are all unanimous. There’s nobody who votes against them. The witnesses come in and they are told, “This is what we want to hear even if it’s exactly opposite of what you’ve tweeted or posted on social media. Are you going to do it, or do we have to cite you in contempt, or do we have to have a criminal referral that would cost a lot of money for you?” These witnesses go in and then flip or they contradict each other. But there’s no cross examination. There’s no special counsel. There’s none of this. That’s the first problem with this revolutionary committee.
But the revolutionary committee ostensibly says that we have to look at the rare occasions when people riot on iconic federal property. They went into the Capitol. True, they did, and they desecrated the birthplace or the center or the focus of democracy. But on May 31st of 2020, there was a huge mob, a BLM mob and an Antifa mob. It was organized openly on social media. It flooded Lafayette Square. It scorched the iconic St. John’s Episcopal Church. It broke across the street. The Secret Service requested municipal police support. The mayor of Washington refused. They were ready to storm into the White House grounds to go on their intended target: Donald Trump and the White House. He was frisked away by Secret Service agents and put down in the ground in a secure bunker, in which, by the way, the Washington Post and the New York Times sort of laughed in their headlines: “Trump scared. Trump fled.” The vice president candidate, Kamala Harris about two weeks later, said, “This is not going to stop. This will not stop. It should not stop. It will not stop.
[Sound bite/Kamala Harris]:
They’re not going to stop. This is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not going to stop. Everyone beware because they’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop before Election Day in November, and they’re not going to stop after Election Day. Everyone should take note of that on both levels that they’re not going to let up, and they should not, and we should not.
Mr. Hansen:
If this committee was really disinterested, it would say here’s the January 6th, who was behind storming and trying to basically injure the president of United States? Who wanted to go into the White House, which is as iconic as the Capitol is? Who was the people who encouraged this? Who were the social media people that allowed this to happen? Who were the national political figures that egged this on? To use the same barometers that they are using on the January… There’s nothing. Yet we know that summer there was 35 people killed, $2 billion in damage, 14,000 arrests. It dwarfed what happened on January 6th. So there’s none of that. There’s no investigation on January 6th.
If you had one Republican member that was genuinely in the opposition, they would say something like… Michael Rosenberg is a Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times reporter. He says he knows more about January 6th than anybody. He was caught on tape telling James O’Keefe that the FBI informants were everywhere, and it was a joke. It was more like a party. It was not a systematic insurrection. We’re going to bring him in and interview him. Who said that Officer Sicknick was murdered? That was a narrative. He was lying in state. Who said that? They knew that was false. He was not murdered. He died of natural causes. Since when, when you shoot an unarmed, especially an unarmed female military veteran of 105 pounds for the crime, which is a misdemeanor, breaking a window and going into the Capitol, you shot her and killed her. Who was the officer? Why wasn’t his identity released? We always released officers when they shoot unarmed suspects. That’s just the way Americans do. Who tamped that down, compressed knowledge of it, covered it up? We could have all of these questions. There’s nothing.
Dick Chaney gave the game away. He did that two-minute campaign ad for his wife, and they were so happy with it. They put it all over the internet. Remember, she’s the ranking Republican such as they are, such as she is on the committee, so her ostensible purpose is to find out what happened. She should be saying, “We don’t know what happened. That’s why I’m here. I want to know who was responsible. I don’t know. I wouldn’t have the committee.” But instead her father says, “There’s only one person that can stop Donald Trump. He’s an existential threat to the country. We’ve never seen anybody like it. Liz can do it. Liz is every day stopping Donald Trump.” So he just admitted that her purpose was not to find out what happened as an inquisitor. It was sort of, I don’t know, some prosecutor out of Les Misérables, Javert. Her part was to be judge, jury, executioner, and find him guilty in a deductive Stasi-like inquiry, and that’s what it is. We’re supposed to feel that she’s courageous.
So the left looks at all this and thinks privately they like this. They said, “Wow, we’re finally getting down to business. We were using the brass knuckle. These guys are scared of us. We can SWAT team them. We can haul them out in their underwear. We can put leg shackles on them. We can bankrupt them. We can make them look stupid. We can even get into Mar-a-Lago. We can even go to Melania’s closet. This is great.” This is how they’re thinking. Then we can excuse all the stuff on the media. That’s where they are right now.
I think they’re a little scared because they keep thinking, “Well, maybe there’ll be a reaction to this and maybe the midterm reaction,” because they’re not talking about inflation. They’re not talking about gas prices. They’re not talking about Afghanistan. They’re not talking about crime. They’re not talking about the open border. That’s what people are worried about, according to the polls.
Mr. Jekielek:
Victor, I’m going to read something from an interview we did sometime ago. This was in November, 2020. It’s actually kind of remarkable because they were tracking the presidency and the next subsequent presidency. This is in November 2020. You said, “I’m really worried because no president has ever been systematically attacked like this, and no president has ever fought so fiercely in return. So we’ll see what happens. Donald Trump was some kind of talisman or he was some kind of touchstone where everything that he got near revealed the true essence of what we all suspected but we knew would never be revealed. He was a cipher.” I don’t know if you remember.
Mr. Hansen:
I do, yeah. He was a magnet that drew all of their toxicity to him, and it was pretty amazing to see people reveal themselves in such a way. It was remarkable of the Never Trumpers. Everybody, if they were going to look at Charles Sykes or David Frum or Bill Kristol or Jonah Goldberg, there was nothing wrong with those people saying, “This time around I feel that Trump’s character is a little bit too much, so I’m going to not vote this.” But they didn’t do that. They got obsessed with him. The hatred of Trump, I guess it was his culture, his crudity that was antithetical to what they thought they were. But they became so obsessed that they began almost in this autoimmune stage to reject everything that they’d ever stood for.
Now they’re tweeting or they’re messaging about how great Joe Biden is and abortion should be on demand. It’s almost a Trump elixir that he’s given these people, a truth serum. Then you want to say, “Well, why were you sending us letters for 30 years that said, ‘Give Bill Kristol money. Give the Weekly Standard money. Give National Review money. Give me money because we’re the bulwarks of the conservative movement.'” Then when you don’t get your way, you don’t just say, “I’m going to sit this one out.” You hate everything that you stood for. Because after all, Donald Trump’s agenda is being embraced by every single Republican candidate. They don’t find it extreme, the people don’t find it extreme. Yet, it’s almost what the Never Trumpers always wanted. So it begs the question, is this where they always wanted to be? Have they completely flipped out? What’s the ability of Trump to make people go stark raving mad and embarrass themselves?
Mr. Jekielek:
Well, there’s something very interesting. Just a day before where we’re sitting down here today, I came across a thread by a man who identifies as someone who changed his mind about what he saw in America. Essentially the thing that made him change his mind, kind of a lifelong Democrat from what I understand, was in the midst of the BLM… You might remember that there was this moment where something like, I can’t remember, a thousand, several thousand health professionals, I’ll say that in quotes-
Mr. Hansen:
I remember there were 1,200 of them.
Mr. Jekielek:
… 1,200 of them, essentially said that racism is a much bigger public health issue than the virus. This was at the height of let’s call it COVID insanity. This is where a number of people… He said that “That’s when, whatever, blinders on my eyes came off.” A whole lot people-
Mr. Hansen:
I wrote a column about that. Basically it was, everybody else, you’d better mask and stay inside your home and don’t go out. But anybody who’s going out to protest in ranks with Antifa and BLM, you can be excused even though you’re going to be in a phalanx and even though you’re going to be shouting, and these are the classic environments that spread the virus because you won’t be masked and you won’t be social… But it’s more important, because we’re health professionals, in a health sense that you be able to express yourself than to sit.
As soon as that happened, that was an iconic moment because most people said, “Well, maybe my funeral or my mom’s important, too. So maybe I should just go to my funeral if that’s what’s happening, or maybe on 4th of July, that’s a very important moment.” So everybody has those moments. That really took the curtain away from what was going on. They more they kept talking about the science, the more you knew they were talking about the science because they didn’t believe in the science. That was Dr. Fauci and all the rest of them. They told us so many different narratives on masking, on herd immunity, on the origins of the virus. It was just, “Whatever particular narrative is useful this week, we’re going to promulgate it.”
Mr. Jekielek:
Just to go back to Theo Jordan, that’s his name, this thread that I mentioned. So something he said I thought was very interesting. “MAGA has become this thing of the left actually now, this inordinate focus on Trump and MAGA, but actually America First, most people I know, kind of believe in America First actually.” So it’s almost like they’re trying to conflate these two things, but really because the corollary being there’s this, let’s call it, globalist or some other agenda with some of the items that you described. But really America First is kind of a-
Mr. Hansen:
So they had to put an adjective because to assuage your worry. Everybody said, “Well, yeah, make America great. That’s what we all want to do, and America First, yeah.” Then they said, “Okay, that didn’t work. So we’re going to call it Ultra-MAGA. You guys are Ultra-MAGA, meaning you’re an extreme version of that, and therefore, that’s bad.” But they all say that. America come home, make America right. Every party does that. It was just Donald Trump’s fingerprints were on that expression. They tried to connect him with Hitler and Mussolini and all of that.
All of this is a pattern throughout our institution. This discussion could be paralleled with the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon especially, the IRS, the DOJ. All of these institutions are staffed in this very small area in Washington by people whose siblings, their spouses, their parents, their children are all involved, and they have the same values. They run this system, and they’re very far left. They say they’re liberal, but they’re not. They’re revolutionary left. They despise people in the center of this country. They despise conservatism. They feel, because they’re morally superior and intellectually superior, that they have a right to use any means necessary for these exalted end, and we know what the exalted ends are: climate change, mass transit, get everybody in a high rise, critical race theory, ESG social policy or corporate policy and investment. It’s promulgated from Davos, Switzerland, every year.
Mr. Jekielek:
I was just reviewing Dr. Aaron Kheriaty’s new book that will be coming out. It’s called The New Abnormal, looking at the biosecurity state, so sort of authoritarian public health, for lack of a better term, somehow fits into all this. To use the term, this really would be a great reset if things go this way.
Mr. Hansen:
What’s tragic about all of this is they all say they must take extraordinary means for these existential threats, but they don’t care about the existential threats. We all know what they are. We have a rogue lab in Wuhan, China, where there is no security that is comparable to the West. Yet, they have imported Western instrumentation protocols knowledge without a hundred years of give and take, audit and learning, and trial and error. It’s like putting a firecracker in the hands of a 12-year-old. That’s what’s happening at Wuhan. So they are continuing to do gain of function research under the auspices of the Chinese military.
What happened with Wuhan? We know from Steven Quay and others that its genetic pattern, its ability to mutate, in fact, the ability to confuse the immune is extraordinary and was known to be extraordinary by the Frankenstein creators of it. We know it’s going to happen again. It’s happened before, it happened now, it will happen again. Nobody’s worried about it. In fact, the Western elite is more worried about not accusing China of what they know is to be true because there are so many people, the Bloombergs, the Bill Gates, the LeBron James, all across the spectrum that have investments in China and vested interest. So they’re not talking about that.
We know that when you’re dependent on oil, it usually means you’re going to go into the Middle East, and it means you’re going to have an optional war, and we know it’s not going to turn out well. So when we, from 2017 to 2020, went full blast up to 13 million barrels, we were scheduled to go to 16, Keystone and ANWR. We didn’t go into the Middle East. We were the largest gas and oil producer in the world. We did it much more environmentally prudently than any other country. We earned foreign exchange. We lowered the price for our own… It was a win-win-win situation. We hurt Russia. We hurt Saudi Arabia. We hurt Iran. We hurt Venezuela by lower prices.
Yet, here we are, deliberately so, by the Biden administration. So that is an existential threat. We know that our Pentagon has, for a variety of reasons, lost deterrents. By that, I mean it is no longer able to scare somebody into not doing something stupid. So every day, a Putin or a Xi in China, they say, “We would like to do this, but in the cost/benefit analysis, does it work out for us if the United States were to be unpredictable and react?” Now they think, “No, they’re not going to react.” They got humiliated in Afghanistan. They left $80 billion in equipment, a billion dollar embassy, a $300 million base, 13 people were killed. They didn’t even worry about them very much. They killed a bunch of civilians and said it was a righteous strike. It was a mess.
Joe Biden came in. The first thing he did in Ukraine, he wanted to airlift Zelenskyy out and abandon the country. He wouldn’t sell them Javelin missiles. They’re not going to do it. The economy’s a mess. Their crime’s spiking. They’re fighting over this stupid critical race theory. They don’t react to what we do. So Putin went in and Xi says, “Well, why would we worry about the US military when the chairman of the joint chiefs called up our PLA guy and said, ‘Hey, I’m Dr. Milley basically, and I’m a doctor. I’ve just diagnosed our president who I thought was an isolationist, but maybe he’s an interventionist within nuclear weapons. But if he is, I will call you in advance and warn you that I’m not going to fulfill an order.'” You know what the Chinese said to themselves, “This is bizarre. You think this is true. Is this guy is really true?” “Yes, President.” “Are you sure? Because if you said that to me, I’d shoot you.” They couldn’t believe it. So they had nothing but disdain for the military.
When they looked at all of the retired generals, there was a whole slew of them that said that their president was a Nazi or Mussolini, etc., etc. They looked at all the military, people who had gone in the government and fought with it. It was just a broken record of the military is not up to its prior responsibilities. It’s become a social justice institution that the left has adopted as a pet because it can enact transgendered surgeries or women being pregnant flying planes or whatever the particular agenda is. They can do it without legislative give-and-take, its chain of command. And they love that. Everybody knows that.
Then you could see that when Lloyd Austin and Milley, as I said earlier, went after white males and said they were prone to white rage and they were going to ferret out white privilege. When I heard that, I thought, as somebody who writes essays on Afghanistan and Iraq, I can tell you that in combat units, white males, mostly from the rural middle class or the suburbs, died in Afghanistan, about 75% of all deaths were white males, and Iraq, it was about 74.
I said this instantaneously as I watched him, I thought, “Wow, you’d better be careful. You are accusing an entire demographic of assumed racism, and you’re asking that demographic to read Professor Kendi that says it’s okay to be racist to stop racists. This demographic, their great-grandparents were in Korea. Their parents were in the first Gulf War, their grandparents, first Gulf War. Their parents were in Afghanistan and Iraq. They are now 18, and they’re dying at double their numbers in the demographic, and you’re berating them. I thought, “If you continue this, it’s not going to work.”
Two weeks later, I looked at the US Army’s recruitment level. They’ve only achieved 40% of them. Then I looked at the breakdown from the Army’s data. It said that traditionally 50% of all recruits claim a parent or a mother or father who were in the military. In other words, it’s handed down in a particular group. It was only 13% now.
The reason I was worried about this, because when I gave lectures, people would ask questions completely off the topic of the lecture. They’d say, “Mr. Hansen, I got a question. I know it’s off topic. You talked about the administrative state, but my son wants to join the Marines or the US Army. He wants to be a Ranger, or he wants to be in the 10th Mountain. I don’t want him to go.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Because he’s got a target on his back. They will make him go to a workshop. They’ll make him be indoctrinated. Then even if they don’t do that and he survived, they’re going to send him over to some place like Afghanistan where he will have to shoot somebody and get killed. When it’s all said, they’ll just pull out and say it was a waste.”
When you look at the Reagan Libraries, often they have a poll: Do you have confidence in the US military? It’s usually 70%. This time it was 45%. Do you have great confidence in the efficacy of the military? 45%? I didn’t do that. Critics didn’t do that. They did it to themselves because of the woke agenda.
Mr. Jekielek:
Well, I can’t help but be reminded that ostensibly part of the woke agenda is actually, not to sound melodramatic, but the destruction of Western civilization. So that would seem to be on point if that’s indeed the case, wouldn’t it?
Mr. Hansen:
When you say Western civilization, you mean that largely affluent upper-middle class whose children go to universities and they who themselves are teachers and professionals. They have decided that in their cultural milieu, they are not just offering constructive criticism, but they are hypercritical of their own culture and of Europe’s culture and hypercritical in the sense that they express that by supporting tearing down statues, renaming buildings, cancel-culturing certain people, pressuring Disney to do this or American Airlines to do that. Yes, that’s what they’re doing.
The question is, why are they doing it? I think partly it’s because the Democratic Party, their receptacle is not the Democratic Party of Harry Truman, and it’s not the one of JFK. It’s not even Bill Clinton. It is the manifestation of globalization and enormous wealth that we’ve never even imagined. When Jeff Bezos can say, “I don’t know. I’m going to give $100 million dollars to Van Jones and $100 million dollars to this celebrity, Andrés, a celebrity chef, $100 million dollars,” that’s it. Or Mark Zuckerberg can say, “I want everybody to think right. I want them to think correct. I’m going to give $419 million to the election effort in certain precincts.”
So there’s a staggering amount of wealth that’s gravitated to the left, and these people are exempt from any worry about shelter or food. They’ve got Gulfstreams, they’ve got limos, they’ve got mansions, they don’t need anymore, and they still have money. They couldn’t possibly spend it in a million years. So they’re pouring it into certain critical race theory, BLM, climate change. The right and the center, they’ve never seen anything like it. This is not the limousine liberal Kennedy family. These are radicals.
I guess the closest we could get to ascertaining their motives, we’d have to draw on psychology because I think a lot of them feel that… They’re largely from white or Asian groups, and they associate largely from white or Asian groups. They live in homes whose square footage is at odds with their climate change bromides. They fly on private jets, which you’re not supposed to do because of their huge footprint. They hate charter schools and school choice, but yet their children are all in academies. Almost all of them are in private schools. In other words, their lives are completely antithetical to the egalitarian rhetoric that they live by.
How you square that circle, I suppose, is they virtue signal. They performance art. They say you’re a racist and trans issues. Then in their own life, they’re pretty traditionally acquisitive and material and obsessed with status. They want their kids to go to Stanford. They want their kids to go to Princeton. When you see them on TV, they have a bunch of titles. They love to have alphabet letters. “I was vice president of CBS News or my brother works for…” that kind of stuff, that name dropping referencing.
Yet, they’re revolutionaries because of all this money at their disposal, and they don’t know what to do with it. So to suggest that they are racist or segregationist or elitist or privilege, which is what they are because they never say to Manual Dominguez, “Hey, Manuel. You came over and cleaned my house. You did a great job. Let’s go have a beer together.” Or they never said to Dolores Espinoza, “You cooked breakfast for the kids today. Hey, we got an hour. Let’s go to Starbucks together and have coffee. Then I’ll come over to your house tonight for dinner.” They never do any of that. Yet, they feel terrible that they don’t do any of that, that they have all these people that work… So they square that circle with abstract advocacies that hurt the one group that they despise. They just absolutely hate the middle class. It lacks the romance of the poor, and it lacks their own taste and culture. They’re up in the attic, and they don’t want any guy with a Winnebago or jet ski trying to climb up that ladder to join them. That’s how they look at America.
Mr. Jekielek:
We’ve just connected a whole bunch of, again, different kind of realities into the same pot, so to speak. But a lot of people are saying that this raid on Mar-a-Lago recently is actually crossing the Rubicon. It’s something different, something we’ve never seen before, not just actually, but also symbolically. How do you see that?
Mr. Hansen:
Well, when somebody says, “We’ve never seen a Mar-a-Lago raid before,” so I always ask myself when I hear these sweeping generalization, I always want to, as a classical philologist, when somebody would say, “Xenophon uses the subjunctive and secondary clauses when he should use the optative mood,” then you say, “Okay, let me look at all the speeches of Xenophon’s that he has and let me look at the mood of the speaker to see if that’s true.” So when you say that, let’s look at it. There’s been all these presidents, 45. How many have had their private residences raided? Zero, when they went out office.
There’s been a dispute with Donald Trump. How many disputes have there been? Was there a dispute with Barack? Yes, there was a dispute about records, and he sued repeatedly about freedom, as I said, of information. Was there a dispute about George Bush, many disputes with George Bush? Was there a dispute about Bill Clinton? No need to get there. They even accuse him of taking things out of the White House. Was there a dispute of the elder Bush? Yes. So it never happened before, but we have all of these disputes.
Then if it never happened before, how were these disputes adjudicated? Just as the archivists came out to Mar-a-Lago in June, they come out. The president’s lawyers meet, they laugh, they have a beer, or I don’t know what. Then they say, “Well, Donald Trump, I know the Australian prime minister said, ‘Hey, Donald, go MAGA.’ You think he wouldn’t want that in the archives? That was a private note. He handed it to you through the window of the limo. It wasn’t official. We think it was. Maybe historians would like to see his close relation.” Trump said, “No, no. He told me. This is all…” That’s the kind of stuff they did. So this taking it to the militarization level where you’re actually going to get armed people and go into the president’s residence has never happened before.
Then the second thing is, is this a one-off incident? Are there other things that they have done? Well, yeah. Donald Trump was president 11 days and they introduced articles of impeachment. Rosa Brooks wrote in Foreign Policy, a very distinguished foreign policy magazine, an ex-Obama lawyer in the Pentagon, “We’ve got to get rid of him. There’s only three ways to do it. You’ve got the 25th Amendment, impeachment, too slow. Military coup? Yeah, military coup.” Then we had the Mueller investigation. Then we had the two impeachments. Then we had the Alpha Bank fiasco. We had all of these psycho-dramas. It never stopped.
So that gives us context for this, that there’s a war on him. Then we say to ourselves, is this something that has happened? Something like it, is it symmetrical? In other words, have people had charges or insinuations that they did stuff to papers or archives? Sandy Berger, did he take stuff and put it in his pants? Hillary Clinton, did she BleachBit? Eric Holder, did he refuse to give any of the materials about Fast & Furious when he was censored and held in contempt by Congress, first attorney general? The answer is they all ended peaceably. Did anybody get mad when Loretta Lynch happened to bump in with Bill Clinton on the Arizona airport tarmac so they could find out off the record what to do about Hillary and make sure she wouldn’t be charged? Did anything happen? No. So this is different, and it’s a war on a particular figure. You asked yourself, “Well, why him? They never did it like this…” I mean, they hated Bush, the Bushes, but they never…
The answer is he’s never held political office. He was the first person who didn’t play by the Marquess of Queensberry Rule. He gave it back in kind. He used a vocabulary and a bearing and mannerisms that were considered un-presidential. He was very popular to a demographic that people consider uneducated, retrograde, racist, sexist, protectionist, xenophobe, you name it, irredeemable. Just think of the adjectives that Biden and Obama and Hillary have used collectively for them and throw in John McCain too, crazies, dregs, chumps, clingers, irredeemable, deplorables, or Peter Strzok, smelly people at Walmart. I think it was that guy, that CNN Caputo or whatever his name was, CNN reporter said, “I got more teeth than everybody at the Trump rally,”
So he was a representation of that, and that’s who they hate. They just despise those people. They think, “You know what? We would be accepted by Europe. We could be kind of a big EU member. The UN would love us. But we’ve got this 150 million, 200 million losers. What do we do with them? Who are these people?” That’s how they feel about America.
Mr. Jekielek:
I’m going to read you something from one of our columnists and commentators, Marc Ruskin. He was a 27-year FBI veteran. He was undercover for a long time, former federal prosecutor. This is what he describes, at least from what he knew about this FBI raid, “The disregard for traditional norms and apparent lack of concern with the appearance of impropriety is indicative of an abandonment of even a veneer of independence and objectivity.” Of course, you’re speaking to this, but what is this… I say this knowing a number of people in the FBI who I value and respect deeply. What does this say about the FBI right now?
Mr. Hansen:
Well, the FBI’s narrative on the conservative side is something like this. There’s a toxic hierarchy of careerists that run the FBI. They rotate in and out of the FBI, and they go into private enterprise. They condition or massage their ideology to fit their own career trajectory, so they want to be on a corporate board, or they want to be a lobbyist, or they want to be a lawyer. They get great jobs, and they want to be loved by the media. If you’re Andrew McCabe, you want to be on MSNBC as an analyst, if you’re James Comey, that kind of stuff. But they don’t represent the rank and file because we all, like you, know them and we love them, yes, sort of.
But my problem with that is who were the people down there in Michigan that were hiring FBI informants to egg on a bunch of nuts to kidnap the governor of Michigan? Who was Peter Strzok? Who was Lisa Page? Who was Kevin Clinesmith? He was a lowly lawyer that felt that he could just doctor with impunity a federal FISA application. When I look at these people that do these things, who are the people that… They sent Peter Strzok over to interview Flynn, hahaha. So I don’t believe it’s just the hierarchy. I believe the hierarchy has permeated its values all the way through the FBI. There’s wonderful people there, but they understand that they’re not going to be promoted or recognized unless they toe a particular line. So, yeah, I’m worried about it.
Do we have a lot of investigatory intelligence police bureaus? Yeah. So why not break it up? We could take all of those who are worried about entrance of foreign agents, perhaps, terrorism or undercover espionage thing and we can give them to Homeland Security. There’s a lot of FBI people that go after counterfeiting or currency viol… Give them the Department of Treasury. We have a lot of them who work with the Pentagon, put a division with the Pentagon. Just take the entire agency and disperse it throughout the federal government. Then take that building and let other people use it in Washington.
But this idea of a Federal Bureau of Invest… you have too much power, and its record is too dangerous to democracy. The left always says democracy dies in dark. Right now at this moment, the FBI is one of the great threats to democracy. What do I mean by that? It’s a terrible thing to say, but think of what I’m saying. Do they intervene in elections? Yes. They hired a foreign national spy who illegally was working…. You can’t do that if you’re a foreigner and work for a campaign. He was basically being paid by Hillary Clinton, GPS, DNC paywalls. Perkins Coie, they hired him. They tried to spread a dossier. They ruined the life of Carter Page. They went after Papadopoulos. They tried to destroy Michael Flynn.
Their leaders, when asked to explain what was going on, lied. Andrew McCabe lied to federal investigators. James Comey pled amnesia. He broke the law, and he disseminated confidential memos. What I’m getting at is they tried to effect that election. The next election, in 2020, they tried to effect it. They had a laptop. The person said, “This laptop was given to me by Hunter Biden. I looked at it. I think it’s pretty serious.” He made a copy of some of the materials on it. They gave it to the FBI. The FBI had it in its possession, said, “We’re not going to talk about it.” But when 50 intelligence officers did want to talk about on no basis and said, “Looks to us like Russian disinformation,” they were asked, “Well, you have the laptop. Can you [inaudible 00:50:40]?” “No.” They were effecting an election. Because after the election was over and the narrative changed and that Joe Biden suddenly by 2022 was a liability, guess what? Stuff started to come out about the laptop. We started to get leaks about it, and that could come from the FBI.
The FBI went after, as I said earlier, Roger Stone or James O’Keefe. They don’t do that with the left. So they interfere in elections. Do the directors lie? Yes. I just mentioned two of them. They lie. Do the directors…? They lie under oath. Mueller lied when he said he didn’t know what Fusion GPS or the Steele dossier. McCabe admitted he lied four times. Comey basically lied when 200… If I said to the IRS, they came here and said, “Mr. Hansen, we can’t find $20,000 of the write-offs you took. Where are they?” I’d say, “I can’t remember. I’m not going to address that.” “Well, do you have any records?” “I can’t remember all that.” That’s lying, and that’s what Comey did.
My point is that, do they have people that destroy evidence? Yes. Clinesmith did, Comey. Oh, Mueller did. They asked for FBI phones, critical. They erased them. So when you have an agency that has gone rogue and is interfering at the highest level of the country to effect an election, and the directors of those agencies are willing to alter or leak documents that they shouldn’t or lie under oath to federal investigators or lie to a committee by claiming amnesia, and they oversee a bureau that will wipe clean phone records that are under subpoena or they will not prosecute one person, but they will another, then it’s institutionalized, and you’ve got to get rid of it. I think you do.
This idea that once you have a bureau, you’ll always have it, I don’t understand that. It’s so ironic because we’re all in this era of we’re not J. Edgar Hoover. We think that J. Edgar Hoover polluted the wonderful idea of the FBI. It may have been all along that the FBI’s pernicious idea polluted J. Edgar Hoover. That is, in a democracy and a constitutional republic, do you really want a national federal police force, a Stasi-like [inaudible 00:53:20], a Gestapo? There’s no need for it. We have a federal system. The states have it. We have cabinet bureaus that are equipped to go across state lines for matters of immigration or terrorism or currency in Treasury and Homeland Security except the DOJ. We can do that, but we don’t need this massive behemoth that is out of control.
You can really see it when you look at the directors. What was the one common denominator in the last four during their testimony? When they had Mueller come in and they ask him about the Steele dossier, he went like this, “I don’t know.” You don’t know? That was your entire 22 months and $40 billion budget. It was based on the dossier and the GPS information. “I don’t know.” And they let him off. Then when they had Comey, he said, “I can’t remember.” Then when he went to a private group to push his book, he could remember very well because he said, “Let me tell you how we got Mike Flynn. We just kind walked in there. They usually want to check. They didn’t check. So I said, ‘Send them in,’ and we got the guy.” “What were you looking…?” We were looking for the Logan Act violation. Logan Act’s never been prosecuted.
Then you look at McCabe. “Did you say that?” “Yeah, I misled this. I didn’t tell the truth. I shouldn’t have done that.” And Ray, “I’m not going to…” “What do you think of…?” “I wouldn’t use that word, Russian collusion. I wouldn’t use the word hoax. I wouldn’t use this about the [inaudible 00:54:51]. I wouldn’t say this. I have an appointment, and I got to get out of here.” Grassley says, “Well, we gave you a Gulfstream luxury jet. Can’t you give us 10 more minutes?” No, he couldn’t. He had to go to his vacation home. So they are completely out of control, completely. Probably have the FBI knocking on this door by the end of the interview.
Mr. Jekielek:
I hope not.
Mr. Hansen:
I hope not.
Mr. Jekielek:
I want to go back to this idea that you mentioned way back in 2020, that Donald Trump is a kind of a talisman or a totem, or Theo described it as kind of a mascot in a way. There’s been all these takes about what the implications of this radar. I think actually the Megan McCain tweet that I mentioned said, “If you don’t have something good, you’ve just handed Donald Trump 2024 on a silver platter,” or something like that. That’s another take. But another take that I heard from actually someone else who’s working with us, Jeffrey Tucker, and apparently the Wall Street Journal subscribes to some extent, is that this is something that would actually be good for the Democrats to have everything focused because they can rally-
Mr. Hansen:
It would be good.
Mr. Jekielek:
… to have Donald Trump be the focus of the 2024-
Mr. Hansen:
It’s almost some type of-
Mr. Jekielek:
… and forward, that this would-
Mr. Hansen:
… catharsis.
Mr. Jekielek:
Though, that’s actually quite interesting because… Well, perhaps you can rally everyone exactly in the way that you were just describing before. I’m just curious what your thoughts are about that.
Mr. Hansen:
Well, there’s two theories among conservatives. One theory is the catharsis theory. That means that there were a lot of pernicious characters, that beneath that happy little go-lucky smile of James Comey and Robert Mueller, they had been doing a lot of bad things, or we really didn’t know what Chuck Schumer was capable of, that he would actually go out… But Donald Trump came along, and he turned the heat up so much that the frogs jumped out of the frying pan. We saw them for the first time, and he exposed it, and that was good.
Then you have the less radical interpretation that went something like, well, everybody’s got sins, but the definition of a person is not his sin that’s innate, but the ability he uses to repress that sin. So Donald Trump was so provocative and such a flawed person and he enraged people that their protective mechanisms, which otherwise wouldn’t have worn down, were worn down, and then these aberrations started coming out, so people that, our whole lives, we thought were such nice people. We loved Bill Kristol, but finally he just got worn down, and that was not necessary. So that’s the other view.
My view tends to be that he’s a catharsis, but I’m going to give equal credence to this view. This translates into what’s coming up in 2024 because the Republican Party now has answered one question. Are you committed to the MAGA agenda defined as Jacksonian rather than interventionist overseas, punitive rather than nation building, wedded to the idea that asymmetrical trade is not sustainable and will be replied to in kind, redeveloping and reinvesting in the industrialization of America, full bore gas and oil as a transitionary fuel that has to remain affordable, smaller government, more deregulate, tough policing, tough DAs, longer sentences, that whole what we saw.
If it’s Pompeo or Nikki Haley or [inaudible 00:58:58] or DeSantis or Cotton, they’re all on that page. So that issue’s over with. There’s not going to be a Liz Chaney that says, “I’m going to run for president on issues that are…” what? She voted for 93% of his bills. She has no agenda that will be markedly different. You won’t see anybody disagree with any of these things. So what will be the disagreement? The disagreement will be that, “I’m a better emissary, a better messenger. I don’t tweet. I don’t make fun of Anthony Fauci the way he throws a baseball. I don’t make fun of people. I don’t call Stormy Daniels horse mouth. In fact, I won’t even have a Stormy Daniels in my campaign to do that.” So that’s the argument.
The counter argument is, well, Donald Trump is chemotherapy. When you take chemotherapy to kill cancer, you vomit. Would you rather have sugar water to make you feel good? It’s not going to do anything for the cancer. So that’s the argument we’re having now. It’s very strange. It’s on the personality. The Trump people will say, “DeSantis, I know he went to Harvard. I know he’s a lawyer. I know he was a JAG guy in Iraq. I know he’s got the perfect family. He’s actually run a state. But when it comes push to shove and they go after his family, he’s not up to it. He’s not.” Then he will say, “I am up to it. I’ve taken on Disney. But the difference between me and Trump is that you only have so many resources, so I don’t go down these cul-de-sacs and alleys and get in a stupid little fight.”
This is what’s all the subtext of this election. I think it’s going to come down to those two people. The argument is going to be Donald Trump’s personal style is counterproductive, and he alienates too many people. His supporters are going to say, “No, he knows how to fight, and he brings out the worst in bad people, which is important.” Then DeSantis’s are going to say, “We can get the same agenda without the downside. The left will not be as effective in attacking me as they will Trump.” I don’t have the answer for that.
But I think the raid in Mar-a-Lago tended to help Donald Trump a great deal. I can’t figure that out quite because it seemed to me that the Democratic Party kept telling us that Trump was not viable and that nobody liked him and he was done for. Yet, they made a great effort to damage him, but they did it in such a sloppy, counterproductive way that it helped him. Everybody says that. The polls show that already, that he’s been helped. It seems like maybe they believe that he would be more difficult to beat than a DeSantis. I don’t know. I don’t believe that’s true, but I think that’s what they think. So it’s a very interesting time. I’m not just being unfair to the other candidates. We could get a candidate like Cotton or Pompeo or Haley very easily, and I think everybody would support them.
One final note is it’ll be very interesting on the Never Trumpers because they told us that the agenda was not the problem. Liz Chaney, as I said, voted for 93% of the agenda proposals of Donald Trump. Yet, she’s already said that she has problems with DeSantis. So you can get the impression that it wasn’t just Trump, the person. That they have now been swimming in new waters that are very comfortable for them, warm, and that’s big, big left-wing money. I think when people make that break, whether they’re Bulwark or whether they’re The Dispatch or whether they’re the Lincoln Project or whether they’re Liz Cheney, they’re just overwhelmed by the amount of money there is on the left, entertainment, professional sports, celebrities, corporations, big tech foundations, and it just pours in at them. Then they start to think, “I don’t want to go back. I’ve got to get an excuse to stay here. It’s much more comfortable.” They’re finding those excuses now with, “Oh, DeSantis is too rude or Cotton is too blunt.” But otherwise they would’ve voted for their agenda 100%.
Mr. Jekielek:
Well, Victor Davis Hansen, it’s such a pleasure to have you on again.
Mr. Hansen:
Thank you for having me.
Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you all for joining Victor Davis Hansen and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.