Victor Davis Hanson: The Chinese Spy Balloon, Orwellian Newspeak, and the Top-Down Revolution Engulfing America

February 14, 2023 AMERICAN THOUGHT LEADERS

Victor Davis Hanson: The Chinese Spy Balloon, Orwellian Newspeak, and the Top-Down Revolution Engulfing America.

AMERICAN THOUGHT LEADERS

JAN JEKIELEK

“I’m just bewildered that these two evil regimes are so asymmetrically treated as we saw with the balloon … Had Russia done that, we would have shot that down the moment it got near the Aleutians,” says Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist, military historian, and author of a number of best-selling books, including most recently “The Dying Citizen.”

In this broad-ranging interview, we discuss the Chinese spy balloon, Orwellian newspeak, and the woke revolution he sees gripping America.

“When they were trapped about the balloon, the new Soviet talking point came: ‘Balloons came in during Trump. Trump ignored them. Trump ignored balloons.’ And that talking point, it was sort of like the old Roman maxim that a lie travels around the world before the truth can catch up. And that’s how they operate.”

Unlike the protests of the 1960s, this current woke revolution “was staged from the top,” Hanson says. “The left was not marching on the Pentagon. The left was not marching on the campus administrator. The left was not marching on Anaconda Copper or I.T.T. as they had been. They were inside the boardroom. They were inside the president’s office. They were inside the FBI. They were inside the CIA. They were inside the Pentagon.”

Ultimately, we are witnessing the unraveling of Western civilization, Hanson says.

“It’s actually an attack on meritocracy, and the whole empirical system of hiring the most qualified better person for the stability and success of society … Where this ultimately goes … it means that, as you see in Cuba or Venezuela or Colombia, very successful societies start to break down and they can’t deliver the essentials of life because they have a commissariat, a commissar system of ideology trumping empiricism,” Hanson says.
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Highlights taken from the full transcript:

“Mr. Jekielek:

Victor, you wrote a piece recently titled “Anarchy, American Style.” You talk about a revolution that’s happening here in America, but you actually describe it as being something more serious and more dangerous than what was happening in the ’60s. Can you explain this?

Mr. Hanson:

The ’60s was a cultural revolution, and it was largely confined to young people. It germinated from the Vietnam War, to be frank. When the all-volunteer army came into practice, it petered out, and it was bottom-up or middle class-up. This is very different. It’s holistic, almost totalitarian. By that I mean it affects all aspects of our lives.

We woke up one day and instead of 70 per cent of the electorate voting on election day, it was 30 per cent. We woke up in California and mailed a ballot out to every single person they had on their files, 10 million of which were never returned. They don’t know what happened to them. So, the very aspect of voting changed. Suddenly, everything was on the table.

The filibuster of 180 years, the Electoral College of 233 years. Packing the court was a slur. Now it’s a serious discussion. Whoever thought that you would bring in Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico? And then, all of our references like the border. It’s not that the border was as porous as it had been, it doesn’t exist. Five to six million illegal entries.

Nobody ever thought that the savior of the American energy industry, natural gas, of which we were the largest producer in the world and gave us options in the Middle East—it cut back the consumers’ energy bills. It was clean burning and all of a sudden we were told that it was a pollutant and it caused asthma and you were going to ban natural gas stoves, which people had been urged to buy.

This revolution was staged from the top. It was Al Gore-down, John Kerry-down, CIA-down, and FBI-down. What that meant was that the protests were flip-flopped. The Left was not marching on the Pentagon. The Left was not marching on the campus administrator. The Left was not marching on Anaconda Copper or ITT as they had been.

They were inside the boardroom. They were inside the President’s office. They were inside the FBI. They were inside the CIA. They were inside the Pentagon. They were mandating radical reforms that didn’t have public or popular support, and that was very new. I think people on the traditional conservative side said, “This can’t be happening. Nobody would open the border and destroy it.””

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If it’s aimed at repertory advantages for “marginalized people,” then you would be much better to start at K-1, 2, 3 and go into the inner city and have Latin required or mathematics rather than woke education, but they don’t want to do that. If they don’t want to do that, then we know where it’s going to go,
13:11– because we can see it in Cuba, we can see it in Russia, we can see it in areas of Iran, we can see it in North Korea, anywhere where ideology replaces empirical discussion and merit. That is really scary. Nobody thought the United States would do that.

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Mr. Hanson:

Yes. Everybody thought that the United States ran on autopilot, that from Little League you picked kids to Babe Ruth to high school sports, that you picked people based on their ability. It was a good thing to be a National Merit Scholar. And yet, we learned that that information was suppressed from students so they would not be better than someone else. Teachers deliberately tried to hurt the college application process of National Merit Scholars, because of their superb scores.

Or to take another example, Stanford University just announced the incoming class of 2026, and they boasted that there were only 23 per cent white applicants in a demographic that has three times that number. In other words, we’re into compensatory or repertory admissions. But here’s what was interesting. They would not tell you of the people who were admitted how many did or did not take the SAT, which is optional now.

But they did want to emphasize that those that took the SAT and got a perfect score, which is almost impossible to do, a perfect score on the SAT, they proudly announced they rejected 75 per cent of them. It’s almost a boast that we’re not going to be bound by meritocracy and what that means.

So, I was very interested in this phenomenon because I knew it was not new, and it had been going on. I talked to some people off the record in Silicon Valley and I said, “Is this affecting you the last two or three years?” They said, “We have our own test that we have to give now. We don’t talk about it.” And one person, if I were to name his name, everybody would know him. He said “We would rather have a coder from Georgia Tech than we would from Stanford.”

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

Victor Davis Hanson, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Victor Davis Hanson:

Thank you for having me.

Mr. Jekielek:

Mr. Hanson:

I’m a big supporter of the defense budget. I grew up with Efrem Zimbalist Jr. and The F.B.I. on television every Saturday night. I supported the CIA. These became revolutionary, weaponized institutions. The same thing with the school boards at K-12. The same thing with the old stereotype of the liberal professor with elbow patches and wire-rimmed glasses, kind of an eccentric old Adlai Stevenson liberal. He vanished and was taken over by these wokesters.

We’re still baffled by it, and that’s why it has been so successful, because people have not yet galvanized a counter-revolution. I think it’s coming, but when you have control of all the institutions, it’s very hard.

Mr. Jekielek:

There are some mea culpas that are coming in, and this is interesting. I did notice that you were discussing, and this is something I was looking at as well, in this recent article in the “Columbia Journalism Review,” basically talking about the Russiagate hoax as a real hoax in a very important publication that I wasn’t expecting to see that in.

Mr. Hanson:

Yes, that was a 79-year-old veteran Pulitzer Prize winner. He systematically went through the media collapses of the last four years, the Russian collusion hoax, the Alfa Bank ping hoax, and the laptop disinformation hoax. He even went into some of the January 6th exaggerations.

He was trying to show and he was giving a warning to the media that prior to the woke movement of 2020, they were starting to incrementally regain some credibility, but after they had completely given up their independence as the Trump administration wore on. And as the woke George Floyd phenomenon absorbed them, they had no credibility.

That showed in the poll. Only 26 per cent, he points out, support the media now. You see that, and you can see it in the latest Newsweek. There’s a graduate student, PhD and MD, and he’s now mea culpa. He uses the word mea culpa, that we were wrong. By insisting on total lockdowns and quarantines, we didn’t evenly apply them across class lines. We spiked the suicide rate, the familial abuse rate, and the spousal abuse rate. We robbed kids of two years of school. They have never recovered.

We created psychological problems for people en masse that made them more prone to act erratically, i.e. rioting and things like that. That was all an introduction to the economic damage we did, and now he’s saying, “I was wrong.” But juxtaposed to that, you see Dr. Fauci announced today that he’s getting $100,000 on the lecture circuit and he’s in demand. So, he will never issue an apology, and yet he’s more culpable than anybody.

Also in all of this, we’re starting to see it in entertainment, Dave Chappelle, Bill Maher, and some people like that. And I think they say if this goes on, we know how it ends—the Salem witch trials, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the Robespierre Brothers, it eats or devours its own, and they understand that. The people in the street are starting to worry that they felt the woke revolution was kind of crazy. It affected history departments or English departments or Hollywood actors squabbling for parts or Disney cartoons.

They’re starting to see that it’s actually an attack on meritocracy and the whole empirical system of hiring the most qualified, better person for the stability and success of society. We’re starting to hear about in the last 30 days two near-misses of aircraft. There has been some suggestion of pilot error and air traffic control error. I was traveling the other day, and I went very early to the airport in Los Angeles. That was last week, at LAX, when the whole power went off, and everything went off; the scanners, the boards, and the planes couldn’t get passengers out. It was just total. It was somebody that had damaged the electrical system during construction.

These are things getting more and more common. Here we have the wettest year in memory up to now, and we’ve let about 75 or 80 per cent of that precious water out to the ocean. It’s either ideological, anti-empirical activity by government employees, or it’s promoting people like Pete Buttigieg who are total incompetents. They have enormous power and they’re failing.

Where this ultimately goes, we know where it goes. It means that, as you see in Cuba or Venezuela or Colombia, very successful societies start to break down and they can’t deliver the essentials of life, because they have a commissariat, a commissar system of ideology trumping empiricism.

Mr. Jekielek:

I’m remembering Alana Newhouse’s piece from perhaps a couple of years ago, “Why Everything Is Broken.”

Mr. Hanson:

Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:

I hadn’t really thought of it as the consequence of ideology incrementally trumping good governance or good decision-making and even engineering.

Mr. Hanson:

Stanford was the birthplace of the whole Silicon Valley phenomenon. It’s electrical engineering, it produced Hewlett Packard and Terman and all these people. And so, it’s starting to affect us everywhere. It’s a war on meritocracy, and it’s inequality by results-enforced mandate. It’s all done under the guise of being morally superior, but it’s a very amoral system, because it destroys the lives of people who play by the rules and try to achieve.

If it’s aimed at repertory advantages for “marginalized people,” then you would be much better to start at K-1, 2, 3 and go into the inner city and have Latin required or mathematics rather than woke education, but they don’t want to do that. If they don’t want to do that, then we know where it’s going to go, because we can see it in Cuba, we can see it in Russia, we can see it in areas of Iran, we can see it in North Korea, anywhere where ideology replaces empirical discussion and merit. That is really scary. Nobody thought the United States would do that.

Mr. Jekielek:

One of the things that disturbs me the most is it’s all done under the guise of a moral quest. But in reality, it seems to be patronizing and looking down on people, like you’re not capable of doing certain things, so we will lower the standards for you, as opposed to helping people shine and be the best they can be, actually.

Mr. Hanson:

That’s a good take on it. That take is saying that a bi-coastal, largely white, and to a lesser degree Asian elite who’s very Left-wing says, “We’re going to help people.” It is very condescending in that they establish how they are going to help and what they are going to do. But a more conspiratorial exegesis might say that they have something wrong with them. I can look at the lives that they live, and I see them going from a very poor area in the San Joaquin Valley on a Monday and then going to work at Stanford on a Tuesday. It’s almost like, when I look at their lives, they’re not comfortable with the people that they help and they abstract them.

In other words, it’s almost like a psychological mechanism, and it functions across these issues. So, John Kerry wants that private jet, but he says he’s for climate change, so that’s a circle he can’t square, except he says, “Well, I’m not just going to be for climate change. I’m going to be a fanatic for climate change. I’m going to tell you that your leaf blower or your lawnmower is a problem. And the more radical I or Al Gore get, the more exemption I get to fly my jet.”

Or the Stanford administrator, the more that he virtue signals and does performance art that he only has 23 per cent whites, and that basically means he eliminated the entire white male working class from Stanford, the more likely he’s going to have his child get in through special admittance as an administrator, or he will call up a donor and let that person in.

A lot of this wokeness is self-serving, you can see it, and I’ve used this kind of metaphor. You have the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, and she has that iconic interview with Oprah Winfrey, another billionaire from Montecito, and when you listen to them and they were swapping stories of microaggressions, you got the impression that they were desperately trying to dig up some victim status to justify their privilege.

Because they understand that in America, race and class are no longer synonymous. That’s something that they don’t want to talk about. They don’t want to talk about the white working class, that’s something that’s a taboo subject. They keep saying, “White privilege, white privilege, white rage, white rage, white supremacy.”

And then you say, “Okay, let’s look at this very carefully. So, you’re suggesting that the white male is raging and doing all this damage to people of color. Let’s look at some statistics. With homicide, is he vastly overrepresented? No, he’s not. He’s underrepresented as a demographic. With suicide, he’s vastly overrepresented. He commits suicide twice as often as latinos or blacks per capita.”

“How about we look at people of color in a white man’s war overseas, as we heard of Vietnam, which was untrue by the way. No, he dies at double his demographics. 75 per cent of the deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan were white male. How about the rare interracial crime? He must be preying on people of color since he’s raging. No, he’s more likely to be a victim of interracial crime. African Americans commit six times the racial crimes against whites as vice versa.”

You think, “If it’s white, white, white, white, white, he’s committing hate crimes.” No, he’s vastly underrepresented as a demographic in hate crimes. The marginalized group, African Americans, commit double the number of hate crimes based on their population percentage.

When you look at who would be the most likely victim of a hate crime, it’s Jewish white people. It’s just not even close. They are 3 per cent of the population, and it’s about 10, 15 per cent of all hate crimes. When you look at anti-Asian hate crimes and you look at the perpetrator, it’s not white males. It’s African American, disproportionately, and yet we don’t talk about that.

When they keep talking about this, it’s very hard to find data that would support it. It’s almost a rage. When you hear it, what’s scary is this is not coming from Black Lives Matter, Antifa, or the academic lounge. This is coming from Lloyd Austin and Mark Milley. The other thing about it is when they’re doing all of this woke commissariat, what are they not doing?

We look at the Pentagon and we say, “You told us that Ukraine would fall in a week. It didn’t, and you were wrong, but then you were wrong when you told us in June and July that Afghanistan was sustainable when it collapsed. And then, you left somewhere between 10 and $50 billion of equipment and you told us that the Taliban would never sell it and Putin wouldn’t want it. And Putin is now negotiating to buy some of it.”

“At first, you told us that this balloon was a weather balloon, and then you said it was a spy balloon, but that it had no efficacy because it was slow. When we learned that in fact it had advantages over a satellite, then you told us that you didn’t shoot it down, because you were afraid of hurting people. But it entered the Aleutians with one person per square mile or five or six in Montana, where it would have been easy to shoot down.”

“When that kind of folded and the State of the Union was coming up, then you told us that these balloons came in during Donald Trump’s administration and he didn’t do anything. We talked to the head of NORAD and he said, ‘They may have come in, but we didn’t spot them, so of course we didn’t tell anybody.’”

All these people in the military are not doing what they should be doing. They’re doing other things, and the result is that some areas of the Army and the Air Force and the Navy are 50 per cent short on soldiers. People are not enlisting. We have a great walkout. Everybody thinks everybody’s walking to Tennessee from California or from New York to Florida. It’s also that they’re walking out of these institutions. They’re leaving the military because they feel insulted and targeted.

The Grammy’s, the Tonys, and the Emmys are failing. Nobody watches them. Even the NBA is going down like this. Netflix, when they went on the whole woke theme and Michelle and Barack advised them on that type of woke material, it went like this. So far, half the country or 55 per cent doesn’t want all this, but they’re not galvanized to fight for their institutions. They say, “I’m going to walk away,” or, “I want to make sure my representative doesn’t vote for a new $100 million FBI building.”

But what they should be doing is saying, “These institutions are ours. We built them just as much as you did. We’re not giving up Stanford University. We’re not giving up the CIA. We’re not giving up the FBI. We’re not going to make alternatives. You hijacked them.” And then, they can take them back.

Mr. Jekielek:

So many things I want to talk about with you right now, but one thing you mentioned was the Grammys, and there was this unholy piece. I don’t know if you’ve seen it.

Mr. Hanson:

I saw it, the Satanic…

Mr. Jekielek:

I saw a clip of it and I just couldn’t watch further. But what do you make of that? Are we supposed to think this is somehow normal? This is the part that I find so bizarre. Is this part of the revolution?

Mr. Hanson:

Yes. I got a PhD in philology, so you specialize in both Latin and Greek literature, and you can pick areas of emphasis. One of my areas of interest was the author Petronius who wrote a novel called The Satyricon. It’s about cross-dressing, transgendered issues, dancing, public fornication, defecation, urination, it’s all in there. This author wrote around 60 AD in the reign of Nero, and he was called the arbiter elegantiae, the tester for elegance, what they called elegance for the emperor. What he’s trying to convey is that this society is so affluent and leisurely and so disconnected from its agrarian past and the ethos that created it, that it’s doomed.

It’s eerie that when you watched that, it was the first thing I noticed. I looked at the ratings and they had gone from just 20 years ago 40 or 50 million people down to 12 million. It had gotten down to eight million, and they thought this was the recovery from COVID. But they have only 25 per cent of the audience they had just at the millennium. It’s because nobody wants to turn on their screen and one; be lectured by a very, very wealthy, privileged person about how illiberal they are. And two; they don’t want to look through a window at these people’s lives, because they feel that they’re decadent, morally bankrupt, and dangerous.

When you see these people, and these people know, they would rather be right with a revolution and have no audience, than wrong with a revolution and be popular. So, when this person puts on devil horns and gets into a red union suit and then is dressed up as a woman and then simulates fornication with dancers and sex acts, he’s saying, “I’m part of the revolution and I have revolutionary fetes, and I don’t care that I’m destroying this institution. In fact, I’d probably like to destroy this institution.” He feels that he has an embryo or a blanket around him that will protect him as an elite. We’ll see if that’s true.

I don’t think that is true. I think that you will see people walk. People are walking away from Disney. People are walking away from the Grammys. When zero people watch them, then you go broke, unless you can change the capitalist system, and they know it. That explains why politically they’re so intent on this new protocol.

Tear up the State of the Union address on national TV. Deny the Minority House Leader the ability to select committee members. Put Steve Bannon or Peter Navarro in leg irons and use performance art arrests if they do exactly what Eric Holder did who refused to go when subpoenaed to Congress. They’re trying to change the rules or change the system like you see in Venezuela or Colombia or Nicaragua or Peru or Cuba, because they understand there’s no political support.

So, we’re kind of in a race right now, and that is, can they change the system and capture the so-called administrative state to such a degree where popular counter-revolutionary activity will be nullified? They understand that nobody wants this. That’s why you can see poor Karine Jean-Pierre, the Press Secretary, is in an impossible situation. She has to take revolutionary fervor and then spoon it out to the media as good old Joe Biden from Scranton.

Because if she would deliver what Joe Biden is really doing, destroying the border or destroying the energy industry or destroying the centuries of jurisprudence, nobody would want it. I don’t know how long this is going to go on.

Mr. Jekielek:

A couple of things. First of all, do you think these mea culpas are starting to come? I’ll just mention that I noticed that at the National Press Club, where I’m a member, Dr. Anthony Fauci was actually there swearing in the new president recently. Certainly, there aren’t mea culpas in some areas. But the Columbia Journalism Review was unexpected. As well as the young scientists like this one that was published in Newsweek. Do you think that is the sign of the change?

Mr. Hanson:

It is, with one caveat. I think the fellow’s name was Bass in the “Newsweek” article.

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes.

Mr. Hanson:

We look at Bari Weiss who was forced out of The New York Times and started this Substack phenomena or energized it. Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, these were all people on the Left, and they all bumped into the Left. At some point they were not revolutionary enough, not that they didn’t try to be, but they were turned on in a very unfair manner. It could be because of their desire to be a classical liberal and be fair.

So, we’re having people that the Left cannibalized and then they become anti-woke and they’re very valuable, but so far we have not seen the conservatives that were always skeptical about this. The majority of people, we haven’t seen what they’re saying about it. And we didn’t see it in the midterm elections. Partly it’s because they still don’t control the institutions.

We can talk about these changes all we want, but Mark Zuckerberg is Mark Zuckerberg. He’s still going to give millions of dollars. He gave $419 million to warp the election in key precincts in 2020, and Disney is still doing it. They had a cartoon the other day about race saying that Lincoln was basically a racist. Professional sports are still woke, and you can argue that so is the corporate boardroom and BlackRock investment.

We haven’t seen people say, “We’re losing the country. We played by the Marquess of Queensberry Rules. We tried to elect Trump so he wouldn’t be a John McCain or Mitt Romney, and they destroyed him, basically. We should have won in 2020. We should have won in 2022.” But when you don’t understand absentee mail-in balloting or vote curing or vote harvesting, and the Left does, we got stymied there. We’re frustrated because we feel the country is slipping through our fingers.

What are we going to do? We are going to have to go to a whole new mentality of getting organized and raising money, and everybody has to get involved. If they do that, it will be like the French Revolution where one day Robespierre is in the French assembly basically saying, “Then this person, this person, and this person is going to be beheaded.” And the next moment the Thermidor comes in and grabs him. They take him in and that’s the end of him. He gets what he did to other people.

Of course, I’m not using that simile to suggest the guillotine, but what I’m suggesting is that it can happen very quickly if people will get galvanized. It just takes one or two very prominent people to say, “I’m not going to do this anymore.” You just need one S. I. Hayakawa. When I was a student and people were yelling profanities at San Francisco State, he just walked up and pulled out the cord. He was the president and that was it. Basically he just clamped down.

When the Weathermen were blowing up people, they indicted them. It wasn’t like Antifa. They indicted them and they sentenced them and they were in prison for 20 years. We had six or seven Antifa members who went down to Georgia and shot people and they were arrested. If they try them and convict them if they’re guilty, and they sentence them to 20 years, that will send a message, but so far we haven’t done that.

But it can be done very easily if people will just follow existing laws and understand that all of us have a target on our back. We all have a rendezvous in some manner or another. It could be you’re a teacher and a woke administrator, your child could be beaten up on a bus like in Florida and you complain. You can be a doctor riding down the PCH [Pacific Coast Highway] near Dana Point. A person can run you over, injure you, and kill you.

You can be lying on your back in the intersection and someone who hit you can come up and say, “White privilege, white privilege,” reportedly, and stab you to death, and it won’t be covered in the news at all. Nobody will know about it, essentially. That fate is everywhere, unless we change. It’s very scary. It’s Orwellian, because Orwell was trying to warn us that when you married electronic technology with totalitarianism then you destroyed individuals, and so we’re creating a level of cynicism.

When you see a crime reported such as the recent Florida attacks where two young African American youth beat up a nine-year-old girl who happened to be white and the bus driver did nothing and the attendant did nothing and it’s not reported, then people think, “Didn’t this happen? Was I just imagining that?” And then, you can read the comments. It’s very weird in the comments section, have you noticed that? People are almost hyper-Right-wing, almost racist, they’re so angry.

The media allows those comments after these stories. In other words, they so warp the news that they want to get people angry to go in and comment, and then they uncensor that. They say things that are almost revolutionary. What I’m getting at is people understand that you could walk out of this room today and somebody could shoot you, and if it was a transgendered person who shot you or somebody who was not a white male, it wouldn’t be a news story in this revolutionary climate that we’re in. It really wouldn’t.

Everything is predicated on ideology. I thought I saw a balloon on television. I thought I saw somebody take a picture, and I thought it was from China. I thought that it was a sophisticated spy device, because somebody said it had the weight of two buses. But over that week I was told that it was inadvertent, or it was, as I said earlier, of no value or it was just a mistake.

There was a very sophisticated article trying to explain that China lost control of this device. And then, we were told, “Well, there were a few others.” We get these narratives similar to the Russian collusion hoax or Hunter Biden’s laptop. The president of the United States says on the debate stage, “That is not my son’s laptop. That is Russian,” and then he never apologizes. He said the other day, “When I came in, inflation was roaring.” It was about 1.6. It got up to seven. It’s down to about five-and-a-half to six now.

Even his reduced rate is three or four times higher, and nobody in the media challenges that. We have all of these narratives where the poor citizen is now saying, “Wow, I feel like Big Brother is watching me or I’m feeling this is groupspeak or newspeak.” It’s an alternate reality.

Mr. Jekielek:

What is the impact on a society when the media stops being truth-seeking?

Mr. Hanson:

It’s the same thing as people in Eastern Europe circa 1965, or in the Soviet Union in 1958 with Pravda. In other words, they usually thought that whatever Pravda told you it was the opposite, so it created mass cynicism. We’re in a fluid revolutionary system where someone like Jordan Peterson or Joe Rogan or Ben Shapiro has a much larger audience than CNN, which used to be in every airport when I was growing up. With Ted Turner, it was mildly left of center, but it was pretty empirical. Now, they’ve blown it up.

We’re in a radical chain of flux. You can see it in Silicon Valley where they are issuing massive layoffs at Facebook,Twitter and Google. They’re not resonating like they used to is what I’m saying. People are looking for alternatives, and it’s very hard to find alternatives, because we have been asleep for 20 years. They make J.P. Morgan and the Rockefellers of the 19th century look like amateur monopolists. They control the whole thing, and they’re highly weaponized.

That was very radical, and we still haven’t appreciated it. If you do a Google search and you say, “Russian disinformation,” it will take you 200 entries until you find the truth. It’s usually going to say that the collusion was true. People are starting to catch on, but it’s so bewildering, and it’s on almost all of the (search) engines. You can see people who are so wealthy and so privileged lecture people on revolution with revolutionary fervor.

If you look at “The View” and you see multimillionaires Joy Behar or Whoopi Goldberg or Sunny Hostin, and they’re lecturing people about their white privilege, they are the most privileged people. You think, “What is so wrong with your lives? What is so wrong with the system? How did you become so successful? Who did it? Who created this system?”

“Why do you hate it so much? Why are there 5 million people trying to get into this country? Why is China trying to destroy this country? What is it that you hate about it?” Why is Ilhan Omar so critical of a country that took her from god-awful Somalia, which was basically a hellhole on Earth, and she never has a nice word to say about the United States? I don’t know if it’s performance art or what, but people are getting very tired of it.

Every once in a while I go to my upstairs bookcase and I pull out letters from my namesake, Victor Hanson who was killed on Okinawa. He came out of a rural high school. He was 22. He went to the University of Pacific. He got a bachelor’s degree, very rare for that Swedish family. They put him in the 6th Marine Division, and that division had 92 per cent casualties and was completely destroyed on Okinawa.

He was writing letters to my Swedish grandfather from Guadalcanal right before he landed in Okinawa. He was adopted, because his mother died during his childbirth and his father was blind. So, my father, who was his first cousin, adopted him as a brother.

He’s writing, “Gosh, Grandpa, here’s $50. If you could just go to a Fresno pawn shop, here’s a picture of a 1911 .45 automatic. We don’t have money in the Marine Corps, gosh darn it, but they’re great people and would you please buy it, Grandma, and I promise to send you the money as soon as I get off Okinawa. If you could just send it to Guadalcanal.”

He’s got all of these letters about how wonderful it is to fight for the Marine Corps, and then he’s killed. I was thinking about that. I thought, “Wow, all those people.” And that was just repeated thousands of times, millions of times in our history by people of every race and every background—and it’s all coming to this? That’s what it was all for?

For the Grammy show, or what the halftime show in the Super Bowl? That’s what it’s all for? And then, to add insult to injury, this generation with the most sophisticated computers in the world, can’t stop two planes from almost hitting each other twice in one month. Then, they have the audacity to go back and blame these prior generations for defeating the Kaiser or Hitler or Mussolini or Tojo or Brezhnev or Mao. It is really stunning how arrogant, incompetent, and bankrupt this generation is.

Mr. Jekielek:

Victor, as you’re speaking about all this, I am thinking back to this piece that you alluded to that Bill Maher put out recently. The message was, “If you’re involved in the revolution, you should look at history.” And frankly, that is one of your most powerful contributions to this discourse.

Mr. Hanson:

What he was trying to say is that the reference for the woke movement is not Lenin or Marx, it’s Mao. Because they believe in a class revolution and they tried to change vocabulary on the whole, but not to the degree that Mao did. Mao was responsible for killing 60 to 70 million people. And that was a totality, 24/7, 360 days a year.

They went after people with eyeglasses. They went after people that had a foreign accent or had a degree. They had the Red Guards going out. They had dunce caps. It was sort of like this woke revolution, permeating every part of society. It’s not just political—it’s cultural, it’s social, it’s racial, and it’s trying to change the way we think about our country. And that’s what is scary.

Orwell would always say, when he talked about Eastasia and Oceania and the memory hole, and it’s mentioned explicitly twice in the novel, he says, “We in the present can control and alter the past to ensure the future.” What he’s saying is you can go back and if you’ve got control of the institutions, like Harvard and The New York Times, you can convince people that 1776 was not the founding of the country. It was 1619 when the first slave was landed by the British, and your revolution was not what you think it was for in fighting the British, because they wanted to free slaves and you wanted to keep them. You can make that false narrative.

You can institutionalize it, then in the future you can justify everything from reparations to repertory admissions and hiring. Ultimately, it’s always these revolutions from Mao or Stalin or Robespierre, they’re always from the upper middle class. It’s the nomenklatura, and this thing is top-down. You can look at Ta-Nehisi Coates or Professor Kendi or Van Jones, a recipient of $100 million Bezos award who lectured people that the five African American policemen were guided by white racism, in a city that’s 68 per cent black, against a poor innocent African American man who was beaten to death by the Scorpion Unit, which came from appeals in the black inner city to a black police chief, and a black assistant police chief to deal with out of control black crime.

Van Jones is going to take that entire matrix, and from his $100 million perch is going to say, “That’s white racism and whitelash.” Then, you jump the shark. Nobody believes you anymore. What’s the use of arguing anymore if everything is racism? You couldn’t go beyond that, but they do go beyond that, because then they said, and I’m talking about they being the wokesters in the media, “Well, the fact is these people were so quickly charged with murder. Chauvin wasn’t charged with murder as quickly as they were. It was racist because they were black, and the unit was racist. The idea of having a special anti-crime unit to help the inner city helpless was racist.”

That’s where we are going, and we’re cannibalizing people. That’s why you see, as we said earlier, Matt Taibbi or Bill Maher defecting or peeling off. You would think by now, when it has been two years since George Floyd, you would think if you were an alumnus of Stanford University and you thought it was a great university that had helped cure cancer, and it has, and you saw what they were doing to their admissions and you saw all this woke stuff on campus, you just wouldn’t write them a check anymore. But no, it’s not happening yet.

Mr. Jekielek:

You’re reminding me of a very short tweet that I noticed, and it said something really profound. Basically, and this is me paraphrasing, “Just remember you have the opportunity to change your society until you don’t.”

Mr. Hanson:

Yes, that’s a good point. At some point it doesn’t matter anymore. I don’t know how close we are to that point, because what that means is that at some point you’ve lost control of the institutions and the institutions are reformulated in a way that ensures you have no power.

So the FBI has been reformulated. We’ve talked about that before. Robert Mueller, Andrew McCabe, James Comey, Christopher Wray, they all have something in common. They all falsely pled amnesia under oath. If you were Mueller, you say you didn’t know what the Steele dossier was. If you’re Comey, you say you can’t remember 245 times. If you’re McCabe, you lie four times to a federal investigator.

If you’re in the CIA, John Brennan, you lie twice under oath and there’s no consequences for any of this. If you’re James Clapper, he weighed in the other day on the balloon and said, “This is nothing. This is just Right-wing paranoia.” This is a man who said Donald Trump was a Russian asset, and then he lied under oath. Rather than face perjury charges, he said, “I gave the least untruthful answer.” And he’s still a commentator.

The FBI, IRS, DOJ, CIA, Homeland Security, I think they’re gone right now. I don’t mean that the Pete Buttigiegs and the Andrew Mayorkas have taken over. I’m talking about the permanent employees in the GS class. They’ve been completely permeated by those people and warped. You saw it with Donald Trump when he was trying to make changes and you had “Anonymous,” a low-level person in Homeland Security bragging that they were opposing every single executive order or trying to derail every type of legality, and he had faced no consequences. He was made a hero.

So yes, at some point, I just don’t know. It will be very interesting, the 2024 election, if conservatives can say COVID is over. Before COVID, 70 per cent of people voted on election day. You’re going to have to show your driver’s license or some ID just like you do to cash a check. We want you to be in person. We’re not going to mail out ballots to everybody. We’re not going to change balloting law and see if the courts will allow that to happen or the Left will allow that to happen.

You and I talked previously about Molly Ball’s February 2021 seminal essay where she bragged in Time magazine. She used the word cabal and conspiracy. The gist of that article was that these conservatives are so stupid they didn’t understand the power we have with social media, Silicon Valley, the Chamber of Commerce, the corporate boardroom, and the DNC.

“We were ready to control the Antifa BLM riots to go back on if Trump got elected, and to stop them if Biden was elected. We were ready to send our people into pre-selected precincts to absorb the work of registrars. We were able,” and this was very eerie, “to modulate news and disinformation.” She really tipped her hand, because a year later we learned from Elon Musk exactly what was going on.

When you have the FBI hiring Twitter at $3 million a year, and then you have Twitter, finally, the most Left-wing organ in Silicon Valley, the old Twitter saying, “Wait a minute, we don’t do that, Adam Schiff, we don’t do that.” Even they were outraged at the level of turning them into ancillaries of the government. That’s what is scary.

I don’t know why a man like Christopher Wray is still at the FBI, given the performance art rating of James O’Keeffe or the Mar-a-Lago raid or the asymmetrical treatment of the FBI with the Biden papers vis-a-vis the Trump papers or those silly confrontations where the media’s tipped off about a Navarro or a Bannon or a John Eastman or going after parents at school board meetings.

Until those agencies are brought back under civilian control and they’re not rogue agencies like they are, it’s going to be scary. I think everybody understands that. You can look at the asymmetrical sentences that were handed out; 13 months for illegal parading for being at January 6th, for parading around without doing any damage.

You can look at people who in 120 days of rioting and mayhem in 2020 burned and torched precincts, courthouses, and iconic churches with very little consequences. We woke up one day and the whole canon of jurisprudence had changed—smash and grab and carjackings with no penalties. Hit a guy in the head with an ax at 9:00 in the morning and be out by 5:00. It doesn’t make any sense.

Mr. Jekielek:

We have a new Congress, and there is a committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. There is a whole subcommittee on that, and there’s a subcommittee looking at the COVID response. What do you see these entities can do here?

Mr. Hanson:

With our government, in Article I, II, III of the Constitution, there’s three parts of government. Even with the Trump appointments, the majority of judges are still Left-wing. Second, we have a bicameral legislative body, and the Senate is Left-wing, especially with the Vice President. You might get a rogue Democrat that votes 50-50, which won’t happen. You look at the presidency, who can veto legislation, and that’s Left-wing.

You’re essentially saying you have half of a third, which is the House, and in that House you only have a four to five vote margin. That requires an enormous amount of discipline. What can one half of one third do as far as stopping the woke revolution? It seems to me they can do three things. They can propose legislation that they know the Senate will not approve and will die, but they can do that as an iconic sort of display of consciousness. Do people really want to vote against closing the border? Do people really want to vote against allowing the American consumer to have cheap natural gas?

They can do that and they will do that. It will fail, but it will send a message for the next election. Then, they can shut down the government and say, “We’re in the House. We have the majority. We’re not going to fund these programs.” The problem is that every time they have shut it down for the debt ceiling, they get demagogued as robbing your Social Security check, so they lose politically.

The third thing is that they have the power to subpoena people and have these investigations. And out of these investigations, they can issue criminal referrals. But you don’t have the executive branch, and they don’t, and you don’t have the DOJ. In fact, it’s not that you have a Democratic DOJ, you have a woke, weaponized DOJ under Merrick Garland. No referral will have anything that will happen to it.

They have to count on having a lot of hearings that expose this skullduggery. They have to hope that the media can get it out and that there will be like the Church Committee of 1975. If they can show that the CIA, which I think the most recent news report suggests were working in concert with the FBI and Silicon Valley, if they can show the CIA was monitoring people, that is a red line no matter what the Left’s control is.

If it comes out that members of the CIA were negotiating with the FBI to work with Twitter, as these latest revelations suggest, then they can’t stop that, the Left can’t. If they show either through a word search of the laptop contents or they have DNA or fingerprints on any of these classified documents that were in the various Biden locations, if any of them can be shown to have been used by Hunter Biden, who did not have a security clearance and his father or somebody gave him a classified document, then that is a red line, and that will end the Biden presidency and get Hunter indicted, and maybe his father.

What I’m getting at is we’ve come to such a degree of this woke revolution that if you were able to show that, and the people could digest that, there would be a terrible popular outcry. They’re going to do that, and I admire them. They’re going to have to do it at the same time they’re trying to be constructive and pass legislation they know will be vetoed, which is always hard to do.

It’s like going into a class and saying I’m gonna write the best PhD exam that I’ve ever done, but I can’t use it because they won’t accept it. And so, that’s what happens when you use all that energy. When people say, “Well, they have to be positive. They have to pass legislation.” Yes, they do, but it’s hard to do that when you know it’s going nowhere and you’re not going to appeal.

These are not Democrats. They’re not progressives. They’re woke radicals, so they have ironclad discipline, almost Leninist discipline. You saw that with the McCarthy speaker votes. Every time there was a vote, there were Republicans peeling off. And they had not one person waver, they were a block, and on every single vote they had internal discipline. If there’s a few radicals that didn’t want to give money to Ukraine on the Democratic side, they were squashed. It was almost Stalinist.

I would conclude that it’s mostly minority revolutions that succeed. They don’t have popular support, but they have ironclad discipline and they have media talking points and they have party lines that are very effective. During the Russian collusion hoax, somebody writes in the DNC the words, “operative, as walls are closing in, and bombshells.” And then, for 48 hours, in every single media outlet, “Bombshell, Trump’s bank is communicating with Russia. Walls are closing in.” It was exactly the same.

When they were trapped about the balloon, the new Soviet talking point came, “Balloons came in during Trump, Trump ignored them. Trump ignored balloons.” With that talking point, it was like the old Roman maxim that a lie travels around the world before the truth can catch up, and that’s how they operate.

Mr. Jekielek:

Victor, I actually want to talk about the balloon narrative, but just this final thing, I refuse to believe that all of the Democrats think this way in a block with this woke ideology. My supposition is that it’s more party discipline than ideological agreement. What we’ve been discussing here is hopefully there’s some people who are getting closer to making the decision to break away.

Mr. Hanson:

I wish that were true, but I could point to maybe three or four fissures that I thought would allow an opening and a Democrat could come through and be an old JFK Democrat or Bill Clinton Democrat. One of them was the vote to keep Ilhan Omar off the Foreign Relations Committee given her long record of antisemitism, and given that there are a lot of Jewish congresspeople on the Democratic side. Not one of them, not one of them. They all supported her maintaining this position.

When you get to that point where somebody who is Jewish and is a member of a constituency that has been libeled and smeared by one of your colleagues, and yet you still will vote for her to be in a position on the Foreign Relations Committee that will affect Israel, then I don’t see it. They’ve created a climate of fear such that if you’re a Democratic person, they’re going to call you a racist, or they’re going to call you a homophobe, or they’re going to call you a bigot, and they are going to cancel culture you, isolate you, and ostracize you.

If you’re a corporation, they’re gonna boycott. They do it with NBA players that try to defect and say things. The Turkish American NBA guy who tried to complain about their incestuous relationships with China, they all pounced on him. You wish that there would be people who would make this decision, “We only have one life, and it’s still a comfortable country. If I speak out and I’m canceled, I can still maintain a lifestyle, but I won’t be a slave to this woke movement.”

So far, the people who have defected have made the decision after they were attacked and destroyed, and they then got angry and they bounced back. But what we need is people who do that before they’re destroyed, and a lot of them.

You could destroy the whole woke insanity if tomorrow we woke up and the president of Princeton, Stanford, Harvard, and Yale, said, “We’re not going to use race. We’re going to have meritocratic criteria. We’re going to try to help people from marginalized communities at K-12, so that we don’t have to worry about what one’s superficial appearance is. But right now we’re not going to do that. We’re not going to do race-based criteria, we’re not going to have theme houses, we’re not going to have segregated dorms, and we’re not going to have safe spaces set aside. That was what the civil rights movement was about.

Or you could have people in the FBI or the CIA who said, “We’re not going to do that. If you had an FBI director who said, “Look, we’re not the private retrieval service for the Biden family. This is the laptop. It was entrusted to us. We did forensics. It is an authentic laptop no matter what Joe Biden says or what the President says.” And until that happens, nothing is going to change.

Mr. Jekielek:

I don’t see a solution without there being some kind of action across the aisle.

Mr. Hanson:

I noticed something. I have an office up in the tower at the Hoover Institution, and I would say once a week a student will contact me. There are two types of students. One is because of the classics, and I don’t know what their politics are. Others are Stanford Review-types, conservative students, and they come up. I can tell within five minutes without any reference to politics who’s conservative and who’s Left-wing. Because the conservative students have taken traditional coursework in language, philosophy, history, and they have deliberately avoided this therapeutic stuff.

They’re far better educated, far better. I’m not saying they’re nicer or anything, or better people. I’m just saying that our side, the conservative, traditional side, is far more educated, populist, and more aware. All of the statistics show that when they used to attack Rush Limbaugh’s audience, they would do studies of people and ask some general questions of his audience versus NPR, and it was amazing.

They were better informed on the news of the day, and that’s something that’s valuable. Thucydides in the third book of his history, ostensibly, he wrote a history of the Peloponnesian War, but it wasn’t really. It was a philosophical treatise on events within the Peloponnesian War that reflected wider themes. He picked and chose what to emphasize or to diminish, but it’s also a history.

He writes about a little revolution on what is ancient Corfu, Corcyra. The Left goes after the Right and vice versa, and it’s brother against brother and language changes its name and there’s radicalism and they start killing everybody. But he says a very interesting thing. One of the reasons why the traditionalists lost is he said that the blunter wits were unthinking. The blunter wits had advantages over them, because they, themselves, were too complex. They thought, “This can’t happen. We have certain protocols that we follow,” but the blunter wits were more determined.

He was really talking about Bolshevism, Robespierreism, Jacobinism, and Maoism. You get to that state where the means are always justified by this one focus, and they can be blunt. I would like to think that our side, conservative thinkers, intellectuals, Hillsdale College, some people on television, Fox News, some brilliant guys on the Republican side, that they can win this. But the other side is more determined and they’re blunter.

You have Chuck Schumer, who used to be an old liberal, and now he’s woke. He goes before the Supreme Court doors and he says, “Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, you don’t know what’s going to hit you. You sow the wind and you’re gonna reap the whirlwind.” And then later, against the law, people go outside on the Supreme Court justices’ lawns and demonstrate about an impending case, and then an assassin pulls up. So, that has zero impression on trying to influence Supreme Court cases or intimidation, and there’s no penalties for that or for breaking into the Kavanaugh hearings and disrupting the hearings or swarming a congressman?

With all these Jan 6th people, not the people who were damaging the Capitol, let’s write them off. But there were other people surrounding the Capitol that were nonviolent, and some people walked through an open door. You’re calling it illegal parading, and you’re going to sentence them more? You’re going to say that we had representatives that are insurrectionists?

And yet, this senior senator who at the time was the Minority Leader of the Senate directly threatened two Supreme Court justices by name and said, “You don’t know what’s going to hit you if you go through with this.” And there were no consequences. That was pretty blunt is what I’m saying. And he didn’t care.

Or you have Harry Reid who was asked, “Senator Reid, in the 2012 campaign, you lied. You said that Mitt Romney had tax consequences, and hadn’t paid his income tax, and when he was finally forced to release them, he did. Do you have any comment?” And he said, “We won, didn’t we?

I just think, like all of these Jacobites in history, they feel that they’re morally superior and that their agendas are so enlightened and rarefied and necessary that they’re not bothered by the means of obtaining them. And so, it’s going to be very difficult. And again, to reiterate, I’m very happy about Bill Maher, and I admire what he’s doing. I admire Bari Weiss. I admire Dave Chappelle. I admire all these people speaking out. I admire Mr. Bass in “Newsweek.” I admire the “Columbia Journalism Review” for doing what it does.

But until you get a mass of people and from the conservative side that is, “Non hic porkus, not this pig. I’m not going to do it anymore. No more, no more. I don’t have any fear of you. I don’t.” Then, they can be liberated. The veil of fear will be away and they’ll just do what they have to do—vote accordingly and speak accordingly and discredit these people and not worry about the consequences. Everybody’s worried about something. I don’t know what, their careers or their image. They don’t know what has happened to the country.

I’m kind of rambling, but one thing I thought of when you mentioned the dancing at the Satanic transgendered spectacle that almost nobody can really watch, they just got glimpses of it because it was so disgusting. But the Left had told us and Nancy Pelosi was always saying, “Children are sacrosanct and you don’t subject them to matters of sex. And I think that was a good development. If somebody commits statutory rape or downloads one picture of a child underage, then we throw the book at them.

With many of these spectacles, and we see them at libraries and everywhere, there’s young kids there. There’s young underage kids that are watching adult men dressed up as women simulating sexual intercourse and saying things in the lyrics that you have to bleep out, and the Left has no problem with it. In fact, they have a new word for underage sexual relationships that’s not pedophilia or pederasty anymore, it’s underage minors. They’ve even created a lexicon of euphemism.

So, everything is topsy-turvy. The woke obliterates everything, and it’s destroyed liberalism. It’s taken a sledgehammer and destroyed it. It used to be, when we were growing up, all these brilliant, innovative, hard working women athletes said, “You know what? We’re gonna get Title IX. We’re going to have swimming records. We’re going to try to get as many men to watch women’s tennis, and we’re going to have parity on the golf course.

It was wonderful what they did. They created the whole phenomenon of highly-qualified, engaging, and entertaining women’s sports. And then suddenly these Leftists came along and they destroyed it. They said, “You know what? This man who is a biological male who went through puberty, who has testicles and testosterone, now once he’s had the benefit of that muscularity and genetic advantage, he has decided he is going to compete.”

“He was a mediocre swimmer as a male, but he’ll be the top woman, and he’s going to destroy a whole record of women’s achievement.” And liberals say, “That’s great.” If you disagree, like the author of “Harry Potter,” her only advantage is that she’s a multi-billionaire. Otherwise, they’re trying to destroy her. It’s something else.

Mr. Jekielek:

Tough times, indeed. I’m aware that many people in what you might call the health freedom movement, who hardly would call themselves conservative, have started asking a lot of the same questions and started taking action as a result of some of the COVID policies. They are asking themselves, “What are my political affiliations?” There may be a broader movement afoot than just conservatives, but maybe we can put a pin in that and build on it in a future interview.

Before we finish, we talked earlier about this bizarre ever-evolving Chinese balloon narrative and some of the implications that it raises given our apparent deep, deep commitment on the Ukraine side of things. Because of this capture of the media and this unilateral voice in which information is put out, it continues to be very, very difficult to know what is going on, both with respect to the balloon and with respect to Ukraine.

Mr. Hanson:

This trial balloon was very important, because it was what the Left calls a teachable moment. Because what the Chinese did is obviously they’re developing a balloon technology and they feel that while most sophisticated rivals have abilities to stop satellites in space or spycraft, that a low-tech primitive device in some ways can get through NORAD. We now know that the NORAD Director said, “In fact, that’s true, three of them have gotten through.”

Of course, they blamed them on Donald Trump, when even NORAD didn’t know it. Nevertheless, we know what this was. It was a “weather balloon,” but was an actual surveillance system that in the past had gotten through. And they thought, “We’re going to increase the size and we want to see how big it could be. How daring could we be, and at what point could we get it through the United States, and it would be a win-win situation. It would convey data back that is in some ways ancillary or better than spy data.”

Mr. Jekielek:

Like from satellites, you mean?

Mr. Hanson:

Yes, because they’re so quick and this is so much closer to Earth and it’s much slower and you can stop it. With a satellite, you can’t tell the satellite to stop. You can reverse course. So, there were some advantages. Then they thought, “We want to know how to pursue this technology, because it’s worked in the past and it was undetected. This is going to show us, and not only going to give us information, but we’re going to see at what point it is detectable, and then we can find out whether we went too far or not with the design.”

And then third, even if they shoot it down, it’s going to go through. We have a hunch that given what we saw in Afghanistan and what we’ve seen in Anchorage, Alaska with their diplomats, they will probably embarrass themselves as they argue back and forth. The Left is in control now and they’ll let it go a long distance.

And if that’s true, then China can take this and apologize publicly. They can then go back to the Philippines, Australia, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea and say to them, “Do you really want to be under these people’s nuclear umbrella? Do you really think they’re going to help you? Do you really think that if you’re in our neighborhood and when we tell you to jump, they’re going to say you don’t have to? We just sent a balloon across the continental United States and they could not even shoot it down.”

What happens if anybody tries that over China? If you don’t believe me, look at 2001 when we had a spy plane in international airspace. China said, “We don’t like it.” So, they took the life of a pilot to crash that thing and bring it down. And then they took those 24 people and kept them for 11 days and dismantled that plane. They said, “That’s what we do. That’s what you’re up against. That is your protector.”

I think it was very successful. Why was that? That’s what is interesting because there’s some subtext to that. You get to this ridiculous situation that we are pledged to Ukraine to preserve the sovereign borders of Ukraine at any cost, apparently. We have defined victory in accordance with Zelenskyy’s agenda that every Russian must be out of Ukraine so that the borders resemble 2013.

We know that contrary to the Verdun-Somme stalemate where 200,000 had died, Ukraine cannot do that against a country three-and-a-half times more populous, with 10 times greater GDP and 30 times more territory, unless we give it not 100 billion, but probably 200 or 300 or 400 billion of our most sophisticated weapons, which will drain our arsenal and put us very vulnerable. It will take five years to get back to a Javelin level of what we were before we gave them to Ukraine.

We’re willing to do all that for the principle of sovereign borders, but we’re not willing to protect our airspace in the same fashion, unless we deprecate our own security needs and enhance other countries. That’s another question because that involves the southern border as well. We don’t care about the southern border. We care about Ukraine’s border more. But more importantly, ideologically, it shows you that if you’re a Left-wing country, you will go to great lengths to make sure Ukraine fights against this evil Russia, but you will go to great lengths to deprecate or diminish the threat from China.

Why is that? Because you and I know, and I think everybody knows that if the Russians and Vladimir Putin wanted to embarrass us like he did, and he had the ability, which he probably doesn’t, to release a similar balloon, and had it crossed the United States and Donald Trump was president in 2019 and he was deliberating whether or not to shoot that down for a week and then only under pressure, he would be impeached.

He would’ve been impeached a third time. You had James Clapper say, “I told you he was an asset.” We have to explain that asymmetry, and there’s a lot of explanations. One is China vis-a-vis Russia. Russia is the stereotypical Hollywood villain. Russia is the personified tattooed, gap toothed, baldhead you see in every Hollywood movie.

China runs Hollywood. China says, “I don’t want dark-skinned actors.” And that’s okay. Hollywood jumps to it. Why do they jump to it? For two reasons. Russia is a midget in the financial world compared to 1.4 billion people in China. They have all the money, and China has much more effective propaganda.

We wanted to shut down flights from Wuhan to SFO and LAX 11 days after the outbreak. They’re shutting down all travel outside of Wuhan in their own country, but sending people all over the world, and you can’t even fly to Beijing from Wuhan. But then you’re called a racist or, “This is like the Yellow Peril again.” Some Chinese propaganda said, “This was like the way they treated us during the railroads’ construction.”

They deliberately entered into the race diversity, equity, inclusion stuff. They said, “We are not white people, and the Russians are hyper-white people.” That’s one thing. The second thing is, everybody understands that Putin is a thug, and everybody understands that his government is Right-wing. China is thuggish, but they’re Left-wing because they’re communist. So, the Left in the United States, as China knows, will give them a pass on the Uyghurs. They will give them a pass on forced sterilization or forced organ harvesting.

Any horrible thing that the Chinese government institutionalizes, the Left will give them a pass on, at least compared to what they do with Russia. Of course, I’m not defending Russia. I’m just bewildered that these two evil regimes are so asymmetrically treated, as we saw with the balloon. And again, if Russia did that, we would’ve shot that down the moment it got near the Aleutians.

The third thing is, psychologically, the Left was so invested in the Russian reset in 2009. We forget these origins. The Russian reset was created by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. They were the ones that pushed the jacuzzi button, the red one, and mistranslated it in Geneva in 2009. Remember, it was directed at George W. Bush and his mild sanctions of Russia over Georgia and Ossetia. They said, “We’re not going to have a confrontation. We’re not cowboys anymore. We want to reach out.” The Russian Foreign Minister was there and it was a love fest.

And then systematically, we had Barack Obama on the hot mike in March of 2012, “Tell Vladimir if he’ll just give me some space, this is my last election, and I’ll be flexible even on missile defense.” What’s forgotten about that conversation is that he was very flexible. He canceled missile defense, which would’ve been of some advantage, as you know, in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Putin was very happy to give Obama space during his reelection. He didn’t go into Ukraine. He didn’t go into Crimea. He waited till he was reelected, and 16 months later he went into both. Remember what that reset was. It was to talk loudly about human rights and carry a twig. Be Left-wing risk-averse and be so arrogant, like the Left’s attitude in Kabul where you put up George Floyd posters and pride flags and do gender studies, and then you skedaddle.

The same thing with Russia. We let them do almost anything they wanted from 2009 until 2017, and yet we harped on them. We lectured them. Putin’s got to let up on his opposition. They have no human rights. That was the worst combination. Then, Trump came in, and he killed Russians in Syria, mercenaries. He got the missile treaty, he upped sanctions, he flooded the world with cheap oil, and he sent Javelin missiles. For all the impeachment talk, he did send them offensive weapons that Biden wouldn’t do.

Mr. Jekielek:

The Ukrainians.

Mr. Hanson:

Yes. Out of that whole matrix, the Left then got very angry. They had been embarrassed by the Russians. When Trump rubbed it in and said, “If you want to look at Hillary’s email, ask Vladimir, maybe he can find them, “ that just enraged them, and he played on that. He would say to them, “Putin’s no different than anybody else.” And so, they created this false narrative of collusion and disinformation, and they were wedded together. That all failed, it failed. Mueller, their godhead failed.

The whole laptop affair helped them get elected by them lying about it, but it did ultimately fail. It was false. Everything they said about Russia was false. Now they’re trying to say, “We were right all along about Putin. He was always evil and we empowered him and now we’re going to stop him.” It’s almost like he’s some kind of totem or surrogate for all of the disappointments, as if anybody on the conservative side ever thought that Putin was anything other than a thug. We all knew he was, but for them it’s fixated.

You drive or walk around Palo Alto or Menlo Park and what do you see? You see Ukrainian flags on the lawn. You don’t see Uyghur flags. You don’t see Tibetan flags. You don’t see anything about the poor people of Cuba. This has become their cause celebre, and they’re going to show everybody that Putin is evil, and he was evil all along, and he was disinformationing and he was colluding. They’ve blown it all out of proportion.

You talk about, “Let’s have negotiated settlements where we have a plebiscite with the major powers to survey the people in Crimea and the Donbas regions. Let them vote. If they’re the Russian majority, let them vote. We’ll have a demilitarized zone like Korea.”

They say, “You’re a Russian puppet, you’re an asset. You can’t discuss it. I don’t think we should give F-16s for a variety of reasons. You’re a Russian puppet.” So it’s the same idea. They’ve taken these other failures and now they’ve made this the litmus test or the benchmark of who is moral and who isn’t.

It’s so glaring because the bookend of it is China. You would think they would apply the same rigid, absolute moral standards to China and say, “My God, what China is threatening Taiwan with every day, what they’re doing to their own people, what they’re doing to the Uighurs, what they did to Tibet, and now they’re doing this balloon, this is horrible. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.”

That’s what’s so inexplicable about this balloon story that there had been no anger. The only anger, the only effort they took to react to the balloon was to create another false narrative that Donald Trump knew about similar attacks and like Biden or worse than Biden, he never shot them down. He just let them go across.

Then, you get John Bolton who hates Donald Trump’s very existence saying in front of a camera, “No, that didn’t happen. No one ever told us.” You get the head of NORAD saying, “No that didn’t happen. They never told us.” The other subtext of this is when you have the head of NORAD saying that the Chinese on previous occasions apparently sent balloons that apparently we didn’t know about, the Left is insisting that this is either a weather balloon or would be so primitive a device that it would be ridiculous. Then the head of NORAD says, “No, it’s such a sophisticated low-tech device that we never expected it.” That’s pretty amazing.

Mr. Jekielek:

As we finish up, I can’t help but think about your “Pravda” comparison earlier in the discussion where we have some considerable number of people on the Right, conservatives who somehow, because they’ve been told all the narratives that you’ve just been discussing, believe the opposite. For example, they discount the right of self-determination for the Ukrainian people or believe that somehow Putin is a good guy in all of this.

Mr. Hanson:

Yes. That is a problem because Putin is not stupid. He doesn’t have the propaganda resources that the Chinese do, but his propaganda is for the Europeans and the Americans, and he’s made commercials. If you’ve seen them, they’re very brilliant, but they’re nefarious. What he’s saying is, “I’m an alt-white Russian federationist, and I stand for Christianity and I stand for traditional values and I stand for whiteness. You people are being swarmed by Western decadence and consumer capitalism and transgenderism and cross-dressing and wokeness.” And that’s who he is trying to appeal to.

What I’m saying is, if you’re a conservative, you can reject all that. You can despise Putin. You can want Ukraine to win. You can even want them to have weapons to expel Russia back to where they were in 2014. And I think that’s where most of us are. They don’t like Putin. They know what he’s doing. They want Zelensky to win.

But at some point you say, as a disinterested observer, “Wait a minute. Zelensky and the Ukrainians are six or seven prominent names that interfered in the 2016 election just as much as the Russians did. They had the ambassador to the United States writing op-eds endorsing Hillary Clinton among other things, and trying to find dirt on the Trump campaign. The Ukrainians did this, and they were involved with the Biden family and they may have compromised the Biden family. They’re not saints.”

You can say, “If this war continues, in terms of humanity, it’s going to be a disaster. You’re going to get up to 400 or 500,000 dead. It’s going to be the largest death count since Vietnam with 3 million people on all sides dead. And then, you can say, “Geostrategically, we don’t have the same interests as Ukraine. Our interest, according to foreign policy canons throughout the Cold War, is that we want communist China to be no friendlier to Russia than it is to us, and Russia no friendlier to China. That was the hallmark of Kissingerian realist realpolitik.”

“What are we doing now? We’re drawing Russia in with China. Well, that’s hard to do. They’re both now taking the former clients of each, i.e. Iran and North Korea. So, Russia is now supporting North Korea and China’s supporting Iran, and they’ve got kind of a new satellite on the periphery of India, which is buying Russian oil. We’ve got Turkey over here buying Russian oil and being a haven for Russian oligarchs and talking about attacking Greece and talking about vetoing Finland and Sweden.”

“What we’ve done is we’ve almost created a coalition of half the world’s population with China, Russia, India, Turkey, North Korea, Iran, and that’s hard to do.” And yet, we don’t care about it, and if you discuss it then you’re a Putin apologist. I’d like to know, and I wrote this article, and I was asking these questions.

One, “If you’re for giving Zelensky everything he wants and you know that that drains the arsenal, then obviously you’re going to ask to up the defense budget from 3 to 5 per cent GDP, because we’re going to have to have a Marshall Plan-type of rearmament. Five years to get back to some of these stocks, draining 300,000 artillery shells from Israel.”

Number two, “If you’re going to really be zealous about it, then you’re going to apply that same theory that America has to be a deterrent, and has to take an active role in the world and support people who are quasi-democratic against China. Otherwise you’re a complete hypocrite because China’s a far greater offender, not by intent necessarily, but by means, than Russia is.”

Mr. Jekielek:

Right, and Taiwan’s strategic importance, I might add.

Mr. Hanson:

Yes, and that’s the third thing I was going to say. We are not talking about the destruction of all of Ukraine. Even the most confident Putinist does not believe they can take all of Ukraine. They’re talking about taking the borderlands and Crimea. They don’t have the wherewithal. They proved that with Kiev. China has the wherewithal to take all of Taiwan.

So, if you’re fighting tooth and nail, and you’re trying to convince us to give everything we possibly can, and you’re not worried about the human cost to save the borders of Ukraine, then surely you would make the commiserate effort to save all of Taiwan. You don’t see that same zealousness, especially when they’re interconnected.

Because to the degree that we’re draining our resources on Ukraine, if China was wise in the sinister fashion, and they are, in the next two or three years they might say, after sophisticated analysis, they might say, “We’re not able to do this. We don’t have the stocks or the supplies, and the Left is in power and they’re not going to up the defense budget and they’ve drained everything.”

What I’m getting at it is that the Left hijacked the government and the Pentagon and said, “We like you for your woke agenda that we forced upon you and we like all the stuff you have, but we’re going to use it for this particular ideological crusade, but we don’t like what you represent. We just want to use you. When it’s over and we’ve exhausted your stocks and we’ve hollowed out your recruitment so you’re only at 50 per cent, you won’t be able to do anything. And we’re not going to reenlist and suddenly say, ‘Just as we stopped Putin in Ukraine, we’re gonna stop Xi in Taiwan.’ It’s not going to happen, not going to happen.”

If you don’t believe me, just look at the NBA, for example, the woke NBA and what they say about China. Or look at the corporate boardroom. Look at Michael Bloomberg, the fifth richest man in the world. It’s basically a consensual society. Or look at what Bill Gates said, “They’ve handled COVID really well.” And I could go on, but there’d be no point in further embarrassment.

Mr. Jekielek:

It’s a very depressing interview, isn’t it?

Mr. Hanson:

I hope not. But my wife said that to me the other day. She said, “You’re very effective about pointing out the pathologies, but that has a depressing effect on people, because it makes them feel impotent. So, what do we have to do?”

I’ve said this before, but I’ll reiterate it. Everybody has to vote. There’s no excuse for sitting out a vote because your candidate is 52 per cent conservative, and you say, “I don’t care who wins the nomination. I’ll probably have a preference, but if they’re not woke, I’ll vote for any of them over the woke party.” That’s where we are now. You have to unite around a candidate. That’s number one.

Do not give any money whatsoever to a university that is woke, even with strings attached. If you want to give money, give it to Hillsdale College or St. Thomas Aquinas College or the new University of Austin. They all could use it. Give all you can. But do not give it to Stanford or Harvard or Yale or Princeton or any of those places. Just don’t do it. It’s like giving heroin to a heroin addict.

Speak up. If somebody calls you a racist when you haven’t done anything that mildly implies racism, then just say, “Call me anything else. Call me five times, I don’t care anymore. You understand that? It means nothing. That word has been so overused it means nothing.”

In your own life, try to reach out to people who are not like you. I don’t mean not like you just in race, but class. With the bi-coastal elite, let’s get Maria their housekeeper and Fernando their landscaper, and instead of saying, “I gave Maria some used clothing. I gave Fernando an extra shovel he needed,” why don’t you say, “I’m going to go out to dinner with him.”

Take your kids out of a prep school and put them in the public schools, if that’s what you need on the Left. On the Right, it is monitoring the schools. Monitor the schools all you can. Encourage people who are making podcasts. Listen to them and grassroots media like you guys are doing, new media organizations that nobody knew 20 years ago.

It’s important for people to support the Epoch Times, and you’re growing in support. Again, there has to be a recapture of the language. When you mentioned the GRAMMY shows, I don’t know what you said, decadent or something like that. Yes, it’s decadent. It’s disgusting. We have to say that. It’s disgusting, it’s decadent. We don’t just say it’s problematic, it’s disgusting.

Recapture the vocabulary from there. You made a good point that people on the Left feel that the revolution is inevitably going to devour them. You don’t say to Matt Taibbi or Bill Maher or Bari Weiss or Kevin Bass in Newsweek, you don’t say, “You guys are hypocrites because when we were fighting this, you were in on it and you’re only gonna join us because they’re after you now.”

No, you say, “We don’t care what your past is. Join us because we’re trying to save the United States.” And then, don’t let them change things. Don’t let them topple statues. Sue them. People are suing in the courts all the time. I know that when I was at Stanford University and a wonderful colleague, Scott Atlas, warned in a series of op-eds before he went to the White House, that the utility of a mask is problematic to use their word. And social distancing can work in particular areas, but it’s not a cure-all. And natural immunity will prove as efficacious, if not better than the vaccine. And if you spread all of your assets over all the age groups, you’re wasting limited assets when you should concentrate on 60 years old and above. Do not let anybody into a nursing home without an antigen test, but don’t shut down the schools. And you don’t need to test somebody K-12 or K-8, that was all proven.

But when he did that and he tried to argue with the Stanford medical faculty, 85 of them wrote a letter and said that he should be dismissed and he was promoting false knowledge. The faculty senate went after him. People at my own institution went after him, and only about two of us spoke up on his behalf. He was a wonderful person.

When you see somebody like Scott Atlas or Jay Bhattacharya or John Ioannidis or Martin Kulldorff, who were the best doctors, speak up for them. Speak up for them, that’s really important. I just hope that they don’t get into a civil war with DeSantis-Trump in these primaries. I think we need the primaries. They both need to perform on stage and the debates. The other candidates should have a legitimate right to run even though Trump has been president and he’s trying to be reelected, sort of like Teddy Roosevelt coming back or Grover Cleveland after a hiatus.

But whoever it is will be, I don’t know what, I can’t get the right adverb, but so much more preferable than Kamala Harris or Joe Biden in their current manifestation, and don’t forget that. And I think that’s very important as well. Make sure there’s no third-party candidate. Make sure the party coalesces.

Speak out against the Never-Trump people because they have been taking Left-wing money. They said their animus was directed only at Trump, and yet any other candidate that embodies a conservative platform who is not Trump, they will oppose. They will oppose everything they’ve done their entire life and say that it is affected by Donald Trump, even though he, if he’s not the nominee, will have a conservative probably in the Reagan mode and yet they will oppose him now. It’s very important that people understand that. There’s a lot we can do.

And then, you can do negative things, too. Don’t go to a first-run Hollywood movie. When I read about the NBA and the China stuff, I don’t watch the NBA, not one game. I won’t watch it because of that. If you think Elon Musk is trying to do something good, you don’t have to be a saint. Then my wife said to me, “Let’s buy a Tesla. Let’s hook up to Starlink. He needs support,” and we did. You have to act a little bit like the Left does. There’s nothing wrong with that.

If they have institutionalized boycotting, do the same thing. If during the next election, you have to, if it’s legal, vote harvest just like they do. Don’t do the Mitt Romney Marquess of Queensberry Rules. Don’t do that. If you don’t do that, you’re going to end up like the Mensheviks and Kerensky or Chiang Kai-shek. I hope that’s an upbeat way to think. I have never quite put it this way, but here’s a positive thing.

Mr. Jekielek:

Victor Davis Hanson, it’s such a pleasure to have you on again.

Mr. Hanson:

Thank you for having me.

Mr. Jekielek:

Thank you all for joining Victor Davis Hanson and me on this episode of “American Thought Leaders.” I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.

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