Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.
Sami Winc: So, Victor, I do know what they’re going to do. They are going to, apparently, from what they talk about, impeach everybody they can possibly impeach.
Of course, everybody’s seen the news with Pete Hegseth, but they are threatening Kash Patel, [Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.], and even some of them say, we want to go all the way down the chain of command and get the people and the underlings for following illegal orders.
Victor Davis Hanson: If they were honest, they would say we want to impeach Pete Hegseth for five reasons. One, he has too many tattoos. Two, he uses the word “warriors”. He changed it from Department of Defense to Department of War. He talks about testosterone. We don’t like that.
Three, he had two wives, and he drank a lot, and he was a party animal for a while in his life, and he’s young and handsome.
Four, he worked for Fox News. Five, he is a Christian, an overt Christian. So they don’t have anything, so they came up with this [Thomas] Massie congressman.
TRENDING ARTICLES
Remember, he can’t even be nominated in his own state in the Republican Party. So he is on his way out. He’s got 60 days, so they… This is so funny. The Democrats say, we need to be bipartisan, so let’s get this failed congressman who blames Israel and the Jews for all of his problems.
Remember, he said his opponent is in Tel Aviv now on election night? And let him impeach Hegseth. So what does he do? He says he bombed Yemen, and he got us involved in illegal wars, meaning no congressional authority.
Hey, Massie, do you ever read a book? Bill Clinton, with a Republican Congress, bombed Serbia for 77 days in 1999 with no congressional authority.
OK, how about Barack Obama? Seven months in Libya with no congressional authority. So you don’t have to get a question.
Then he said he hit collateral targets in a school in Iran. Yes, that was sad, but that was because Iran created the human shield theory that was so effective in Gaza. In other words, that school was put near the command-and-control center of the theocracy.
And every hospital, every mosque, every school, every iconic civilian target is next to a military target by… But if you don’t believe that, Congressman Massie and Democrats, you might ask yourself, who ordered 550 drone assassination missions on the Pakistani-Afghan border? They killed 2,300 terrorists, OK, but they also killed anywhere from 400 to 800 citizens.
Excuse me, collateral civilians. And they killed five U.S. citizens. Five U.S. citizens. Did anybody say you need congressional authority or that’s a war crime to kill a U.S. citizen? No. That was Barack Obama.
And then his CIA director, when he was asked, are you killing? We’re hearing you’re killing civilians as collateral damage.
No, we haven’t hit one. And he lied completely under oath, and nothing happened to him. And then Massie said Hegseth fired generals. Yes. And who fired Jim Mattis at CENTCOM when he was right at the height of his powers, trying to coordinate the entire Western military to stop Iranian aggression?
It was Barack Obama because Ben Rhodes said that Mattis was too independent. And who fired Stanley McChrystal because somebody in his general vicinity, when Joe Biden called, said, “Joe, bite me,” and Rolling Stone leaked that? And they fired him. Who destroyed Michael Flynn? He was the intelligence director at Army intel, the military…
But who fired him, Michael Flynn? Who entrapped him when he was national security adviser? Barack Obama did. And then he said, there’s terrible security leaks because Hegseth used, was it Snapchat, without…
No, nobody ever got on that call. There were people who got on the call who shouldn’t have been there, but to our knowledge, nobody leaked it. Unlike… Does anybody remember the Fat Leonard scandal, where this guy, I guess he was in the Philippines or something, he was this defense contractor, and he ran off with $30 million, and he was bribing Navy people with wine and presents and prostitutes?
Does anybody remember when Bill Clinton sent Monica Lewinsky over to a Pentagon job to hide her? Does anybody remember that Lloyd Austin was required by statute to have an audit of all military expenditures every year? He didn’t do one in four years. Does anybody remember he went AWOL for two weeks for prostate problems?
I’m not suggesting that he didn’t have cause, but he could have called the president and said something, if the president was there. And then he said, in addition to all of that, there’s been a lot of scandals. I can’t remember what he said. Massie, there’s been… It’s not like there’s Chelsea Manning giving away all of our secrets.
It’s not like Edward Snowden. Remember him? He just typed in everything and handed it over. It’s not, as I said, Fat Leonard. It’s not like Robert Hanssen, that FBI guy, for 20 years spying out of the Pentagon for the Russians. I could go on, but my point is that every single writ that he brought up against Hegseth applied to either a Clinton, Biden or Obama Pentagon 10 times more.
And the Democrats used him because they didn’t have the guts, or they were not quite shameless enough to go in there and do what he did when they knew that the majority for the next 60 days would have said, OK, let’s talk about bombing Libya, and let’s talk about hitting the Chinese embassy when we bombed Serbia, and let’s talk about the 550 drones, and let’s talk about Snowden and Chelsea Manning and Robert Hanssen, all these people, and let’s…
Why did you hire Monica at the Pentagon? And let’s talk about no congressional authority for any of these wars, and scandal after scandal, leak after leak. And so that’s not going to go anywhere until they come in. So far, they haven’t said anything. They don’t have any power yet, not until January 3.
But so far, they haven’t had a Contract with America. They haven’t said anything about affordability. They’re just… Robert Garcia, the guy who said… I couldn’t believe what he said the other day. There’s a stereotype. If you were a bigot and you were a homophobe, you’d say gay people are really pricky and fussy and anal-retentive.
And he said, I am a gay man, and I’m really prickly or picky, and I’m gonna go after these people. I said, “Are you sane?” You’re just giving an argument, a stereotype about your whole gay community, and you’re gonna go after … Rep. Garcia, what have you ever done? You’re from California.
Can’t you just talk about the Paradise Fire that’s burned up a whole… Northern California, the Aspen Fire? Can you talk about the Pacific Palisades Fire? Can you talk about the high-speed rail fiasco? What’s going… What are we gonna do about it? Can you talk about the Monterey battery storage that blew up, was supposed to store all of our unneeded solar panel energy?
I think we’re at 110% in the daytime and 50% short at night. You don’t wanna… He doesn’t wanna talk about any of that. He just wants to get on TV and say, ah.
Sami Winc: Yes, but…
Victor Davis Hanson: People are worthless. They really…
Sami Winc: There was one more writ, or one more part of the Thomas Massie proposal.
Victor Davis Hanson: Charges?
Sami Winc: Yeah, charges. And that was suppressing free speech of Mark Kelly when he implemented the Code of Military Justice, when he encouraged people to go against orders.
Victor Davis Hanson: The Code of Military Justice. I’m doing this by memory. The Code of Military Justice, Article 88, it came in… It’s called the uniform because prior to 1950, ’51, the Navy had rules. The Army had rules. The new Air Force, we created it. So they said, we’re gonna make it uniform for everybody, because people in the Air Force would say, that guy in the Navy did what I did, and they let him off.
So it was uniform across the services.
The second thing that motivated it is Douglas MacArthur had been relieved of duty because while he was in Korea, and after the humiliating retreat from the Yalu River in November, December, Chosin Reservoir, the whole disaster, when he said everybody was gonna be home for Thanksgiving because he’d almost won after Incheon, the brilliant Incheon landing he did, he started in on [President Harry] Truman.
He said, there’s no substitute for Truman. Truman doesn’t wanna win. And he was attacking the commander in chief. So they codified the law, and it says, if you are an officer and if you publicly disparage the commander in chief, publicly disparage him or a Cabinet official or the secretary of war, you are subject to court-martial.
And this applies to retired officers. Kelly is a retired officer. So he gets on a video, and he says essentially that Donald Trump and the Pentagon are issuing, in his opinion, illegal orders. No evidence. And then he’s… I think it was about hitting these drug people that were coming in from Venezuela on boats.
And he never said anything about, I should have impeached, we should have disobeyed orders, all you guys, because Obama didn’t get our permission, and he went into the Afghan border with 500 drone missions, and he killed over 2,500 people, and he might have killed 800 civilians, and he killed five U.S. citizens.
But I didn’t tell you to disobey. Hey, Predator operators, disobey that. So it’s nakedly partisan. But the point is, he violated the article because he publicly trashed a Cabinet officer and the president of the United States while he was in retired officer rank.
OK? And I want to make another point, because you brought it up.
The first term, General Hayden, head of the CIA, he said that Trump inherited the quote-unquote cages. Obama built them. And he said Trump was like the guards at Auschwitz. He even took a picture, I think it was Birkenau, and he put it right on there and said, this is basically Trump.
McChrystal said that he was a liar, I think. [Gen. Barry] McCaffrey said he was Mussolini. My friend, and I have utmost admiration for him, Jim Mattis, said that we thought the enemy on the other side at D-Day were not the Germans, but now we don’t know where the enemy is. I don’t want to go on, but you can see that all of those were in violation of Article 88.
Nobody enforced it. In the wilderness years, Trump said he was going to get a defense secretary that would enforce that. Have you noticed that none of the retired generals have been mouthing off? No Mussolini, no Hitler, no Auschwitz, because they know what’s going to happen. They’re going to get court-martialed, and you lose your pension.
And that was what Kelly… And he knows what he did. It’s just that they didn’t feel that they wanted to make a big scene and bring him before court because he basically advocated… He basically said the president of the United States and the secretary of defense are acting criminally, as if they’re insurrectionists, and therefore all of you people do not have to obey that order.
That’s insurrectionary, and it’s a completely vile attack on the Cabinet and the Pentagon Cabinet officer and the president of the United States, and he’s lucky he didn’t get prosecuted.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.
Read the first chapter of The Woketopus right now for FREE
Today, even with President Trump’s victory, leftist elites have their tentacles in every aspect of our government.
The Daily Signal’s own Tyler O’Neil exposes this leftist cabal in his new book, The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.
In this book, O’Neil reveals how the Left’s NGO apparatus pursues its woke agenda, maneuvering like an octopus by circumventing Congress and entrenching its interests in the federal government.
You can read the first chapter of this new book for FREE in this eBook, The Woketopus: Chapter One using the secure link below.
The Daily Signal depends on the support of readers like you.
RELATED ARTICLES
Don’t miss the
Don’t miss the signal
