“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.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

“When you have an agency that has gone rogue and is interfering at the highest level of the country to affect an election; and the directors of those agencies are willing to alter or leak documents that they shouldn’t or lie under oath to federal investigators or lie to a committee by claiming amnesia; and they oversee a bureau that will wipe clean phone records that are under subpoena; or they will not prosecute one person, but they will another; then it’s institutionalized. And you’ve got to get rid of it.”

The FBI should be broken up and its primary functions shifted to other departments of the federal government, argues classicist, political commentator, and military historian Victor Davis Hanson.

He’s the author of “The Dying Citizen” and “The Case for Trump.”

The FBI’s armed raid on Mar-a-Lago is unprecedented, Hanson says, and it’s the latest in a war being waged against the former president, from the Russia collusion hoax to impeachment proceedings against him—twice.

“We’re in a revolutionary cycle where the left has now said, under the pretext that Donald Trump is so extraordinarily threatening to the Republic, that it requires any means necessary to end him. And therefore we’re going to do things that are revolutionary.”