――In the United States, liberal freedom of speech continues to be more protected. In this context, Elon Musk, who bought Twitter, has begun to expose various past internal decisions. What is the current state of free speech in the U.S. and how do you think Mr. Musk’s actions will affect the state of free speech and the liberals on the left in the future?

Victor Davis Hanson: The Left once cherished the First Amendment largely due to the cultural revolutions of the 1960s and the hippies’ and radicals’ desire to air pornography and controversial, leftwing inflammatory politics.

But once in power, as it is now with control of our institutions, the ossified Left has become reactionary and equates free-speech criticism with “hate speech” and thus wars with the First Amendment—in precisely the fashion that Orwell warned us long ago about leftwing totalitarians seeking to warp expression.

It was never about free speech for them but always power: when they lacked it, they screamed “censorship,” when they aged and took over our institutions, they about-faced and yelled “hate speech”.

Mr. Musk is despised because he is a 19th-century, dynamic and confident figure who actually makes and builds successful real things like excellent rockets and cars, and because he is rich and unafraid, and, finally, because he not only believes in free speech but understands as an insider how Silicon Valley is destroying it and becoming a Pravda-like instrument of leftwing governments in lieu of popular support.

 

More Americans ‘Do Not Believe in Any Sort of Transcendence’

――In the U.S., the number of working people continues to decline because the Biden administration has handed out too much money despite the fact that the U.S. has prospered from the work ethic of Protestantism. How do you see the relationship between the American work ethic and faith?

Hanson: The rise of EU-style atheism and agnosticism in the U.S. means more and more Americans live to satisfy their appetites and do not believe in any sort of transcendence, much less the Protestant work ethic that is written off as the fuel of “white privilege” or “white neuroses”.

Historically, the symptoms that follow atheism are well-known and always destructive: a radical drop in fertility and a demographic crisis of an aging population; a self-centered and sanctimonious national creed that dwells on the self as we see currently from record labor non-participation rates; and a lack of any moral compass, given “humanism” has no real concept of shame or sin, or the innate pathologies of the human species.

Religion is a bridle on the appetite and yet gives us hope that our endeavors serve a wider purpose than just the good material life.

 

The Ongoing Violent Revolution Reminisces of the French Revolution

――It appears that American liberty was not about guaranteeing equality of outcome, but equality of opportunity. What are the underlying reasons for this interpretation being distorted?

Hanson: In two words, leisure and affluence–a Western plague. As we grow more leisured and affluent, in our ignorance and arrogance we believe we can create heaven on earth, and what follows is the new deity of radical “equity.”

That woke notion postulates that all inequality is due solely to culpability on the part of “oppressors” and “victimizers” that exploit “oppressed” and “victimized” usually on the basis now of race or gender or sexual orientation rather than class concerns.

Such disproportionality then requires an all-powerful government to step in and ensure equality of result by punishing the perceived more successful—regardless of the myriad of reasons why one person does not have or enjoy what another does.

It is a dangerous trajectory, given it destroys all meritocracy and ends in something like the Cuban, Venezuelan or Soviet implosion. And, of course, mandated equity explains the murder and mass death of Jacobin France, the Bolsheviks, Cambodia and Maoist China, especially since it fraudulently claims the high ground of “fairness” that excuses any means necessary to gain and hold power.

Equality of result is precisely what the Founders feared and thus they tried to create a republic not a radical, Athenian-style democracy.

 

A Continual Demonization of Trumpist Republicans Will Lead to Yugoslavian-like Civil Strife

――The U.S. Biden administration has labeled half of the population by saying that the Trumpist Republicans are semi-fascist, and that democracy is at stake if they win the midterms. What are the dangers if such arguments are allowed to prevail?

Hanson: Biden’s accusations were unfortunate.

First of all, they were untrue, and half the country who objects to the border mess, hyperinflation, rising crime, the sacrifice of energy independence, racial tribalism and Afghanistan-like disasters abroad has legitimate grievances that should be addressed not smeared.

Secondly, no constitutional republic can write off half the population and expect to govern, as the U.S. learned in 1861 when it split apart in the bloodiest war in our history.

In addition, those who seek a revolution are not the traditionalists, but the Left that wants to destroy the border, end the filibuster, pack the Supreme Court, end the Electoral College, jam in Puerto Rico as a state to ensure two more liberal senators and override the states’ constitutional mandate to set balloting laws. These are revolutionary and never-before-attempted radical institutional measures.

So, Biden’s continual demonization of the Trump or conservative population will only lead to Yugoslavian-like civil strife.

 

The Leftist Tactics of Leveraging Unrest, Marxist Projection and Mastery of the Electronic Age

――It seems that more often than not, liberals, while calling themselves “liberals”, seem to move in the direction of suppressing the speech of other conservatives, as represented by the Big Tech and BLM. Even though they claim to guarantee equality to the people, they seem to be doing so without regard to the procedures that are very important for democracy, namely, to disseminate correct information to the people and to let them make decisions. In the end, it seems that the government is trying to achieve domination by a few elites. What are your thoughts on the current method of governing its people?

Hanson: No one votes willingly for a left-wing agenda, contrary as it is to nature. The Left instead looks to unrest like the 2008 meltdown, Covid, the George Floyd death, the Trump “menace,” “Russian disinformation” or the January 6th “insurrection” to expand power in “never let a crisis go to waste” fashion.

And the Left practices Marxist “projection” of accusing others of precisely what it is doing as a means of distraction and character assassination. For instance, Hillary Clinton in 2016 hired Christopher Steele to draw on Russian disinformation and the help of the FBI and private contractors to smear her opponent—and then cover her tracks by manufacturing the absurdity of Trump-Russian collusion.

The same goes for the Hunter Biden laptop suppression before the 2020 election, as “experts” assured us that it was Trump-Russian disinformation when in fact they were misinforming the public about the laptop’s authenticity.

Unfortunately, in our electronic age, the Left is light-years ahead of conservatives in mastery of high-tech, the internet and social media, and thus manipulates everything from the order of Google searches to shadow-banning on Twitter, while the Right is either clueless or always one step behind in stopping it.

The Left has destroyed the entire idea of Election Day and Election Night returns, under the cover of Covid and the George Floyd riots and turned elections into 70-75% early mail-in voting phenomenon, in which audit and authenticity are almost impossible, and which overwhelmingly favor the Left, to the degree that by Election Day, the race has already been decided months earlier.

 

Globalism Exposed: Internationalists With No Political Loyalty on an Endless Search for Profits

――It appears that Big Tech, such as Apple and Google in the U.S., and big companies such as Coca Cola and Nike are generally liberal and pursue profits as a supreme goal. It seems like they make light of U.S. prosperity as a nation. What are your thoughts on these issues of globalism?

Hanson: Globalism has been revealed, as many of us warned years ago, as largely a euphemism for Western companies to disavow all social responsibility to their own citizens, betray their own nation’s values and seek profits by becoming internationalists with no political loyalty other than their endless search for greater profits—defined over the last 30 years as fusing and partnering with the Communist Chinese government, while overlooking its atrocities, and undermining of Western governments.

These corporations profess leftist shibboleths like “climate change”, “diversity” and “sustainability” as distractions from or cover for their otherwise piratical practices.

Klaus Schwab and his Great Reset reveal to us the anti-democratic nature of the globalists who seek to transcend elected governments and rig the international commercial system to fit their own agendas.

They hate the middle classes of the Western nations who are self-governed and skeptical of top-down dictates.

 

‘Liberalism’ Hates Liberty, The Right to Think and Act for Yourself

――What do you think is the true nature of liberalism?

Hanson: The liberal creed is an unfortunate naïveté that human nature is always improvable if the state can control education and has the wherewithal to regiment individual lives according to utopian bromides.

How odd that today’s “liberalism” hates liberty, or the individual’s right to think for himself and act accordingly.

The idea that man is born flawed and saved only by religion, the time-tried laws and rules of civilization and an adherence to past successful cultural traditions and customs is an anathema. The Left despises the idea of tragedy in human affairs and worships therapy.

 

The Republican Agenda and the Immoral Policies of the Biden Administration

――What are the truly pressing issues that the Republicans face now that they have a majority in the House of Representatives, and what do they need to work on?

Hanson: Without the Senate or the presidency, in our system they have only two real recourses. One, they can investigate, and thus must haul in the Biden family and draw out the evidence of the laptop and Hunter’s associates, which more or less confirms a picture of the Biden family selling Joe Biden’s political trajectory for profit and at the expense of his country and without proper tax accountability—as well as investigating the federal health usurpation of individual liberty during the Covid crisis and the misinformation it promulgated to aggregate such power.

Two, a well-disciplined Republican majority can stop all of the Biden Administration’s disastrous new legislation and render him an executive-order president.

Given the Biden record, the downturn in the economy, rising crime, and massive illegal immigration, the Republicans had an opportunity to win both Houses, but unfortunately infighting, naïveté, the lack of a positive agenda, and cluelessness about the extent of leftwing money-raising, non-Election Day balloting and the use of social media, all once again stymied them.

――What is your view of the measures taken by the Biden administration, which appears to be immoral policies, such as the legalization of drugs, and pandering to the public, such as student loan forgiveness?

Hanson: Biden’s pre-election pandering was shameful: he sought, likely successfully, to buy young voters by trying to drain the strategic petroleum reserve and in vain to beg illiberal regimes to pump more oil that we have in abundance but will not tap— all to lower gas prices he had deliberately spiked.

Both gambits were contrary to the national interest.

The same is true when Biden suddenly offered amnesties for drug offenders and loan defaulters: both to purchase votes at the expense of the common good.

These ploys were also hypocritical given Biden and the Democrats impeached Trump in 2019 on the specious pretext that he was warping U.S. national interests by delaying shipping offensive weapons to Ukraine (which the Biden-Obama administration previously had refused to authorize) as a way of improving his impending reelection efforts at the expense of his likely rival Joe Biden. Only after the midterms, did we learn belatedly of the massive Ponzi-schemes of mega-Democratic donor Sam Bankman-Fried, the illegal possession of classified documents by Biden, and his unreported and untaxed income in relation to his son’s unethical activities.