Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. The last week we’ve been hearing a lot about these lies. I guess there’s no other word for it. One of the most egregious was the idea that Joe Biden was ever mentally or physically fit to be president.
I think everybody knew there was some sort of grand deal in 2020 during the primaries when these hard-leftist candidates—such as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, etc.—had no chance of winning a general election. And Joe Biden was used, basically, as a waxen effigy.
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Anybody over the last four years who objected to that and said that he was non compos mentis or obviously demented, tragically so, was branded an ageist or conspiracist or cruel. And yet, now after he left office, even the people who participated in this cover-up, media luminaries, have all now confessed that they knew he was unfit to be president. He was unfit.
This was the greatest cover-up on the American people since Woodrow Wilson’s stroke was covered up by insiders, including his wife, Edith Wilson. There was a second lie, though, that was just as harmful.
We just learned that the German intelligence services had long ago concluded what every one of us knew, that Case One of the COVID-19 virus was found to be right next to the Wuhan virology level 5 lab.
Everybody knew that the Chinese Communist Party, and then later the People’s Liberation Army, were operating a lab where they were engaged in very dangerous coronavirus gain-of-function research. And there was never an animal—a pangolin, a bat—that had this virus before a human case study of a human getting it.
So, we knew it came from there. But yet, anybody who said that was demonized and considered a conspiracist, a liar. And now, all of a sudden, everybody says, “Sorry. It was all a lie that it wasn’t. You were correct.”
And why did they do this? They did it because some had commercial ties with the Chinese government, lucrative in the corporate world. They did not want to endanger them. They didn’t want to accuse China of killing millions of people and maiming millions more through this engineered virus.
Some of them were self-interested, like Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins, that had transferred monies, expertise, and instrumentation, either through the National Institutes of Health, Fauci’s own Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases, or, now we learn, USAID.
Whatever the reason, that was a horrendous lie to put over on the American people. And yet, now no one denies it. They all say, “Yeah.” They just shrugged. “Yeah, it probably came from the lab. You were all right. We who trashed and demonized you and slandered you.”
A third very quickly was Russian collusion. Remember, this was this has-been, ex-spy Christopher Steele, who partly collated lurid sex lies and James Bond-like spy fantasies, along with Russian disinformation, and claimed that Donald Trump was working with the Russians to throw the election.
At the time, people said, thanks to Devin Nunes and Kash Patel and others, “Wait a minute. This was paid for by Hillary Clinton, this dossier, through the paywalls of the DNC, Perkins Coie, and Fusion GPS. And it was disseminated, in part, by the Justice Department under Barack Obama and, of course, the FBI under James Comey.” And yet, nobody said anything about it. They said, “You’re crazy. This is true.” And now all of a sudden, no one believes Russian collusion. Nobody does.
Same thing with laptop disinformation. Right before the 2020 election, the last debate, Joe Biden was going to be tarred, legitimately so, deservedly so, because of what the contents of his son’s laptop had revealed: pornography, drugs, but most importantly, collusion with the Biden family with foreign interests—Mr. Big, Mr. Ten Percent, etc.
So, what did he do? He got Antony Blinken, the future secretary of state. He called the interim FBI director, at one time, Mike Morell. They rounded up 51 intelligence authorities. And you know who they were. The perjurers John Brennan, James Clapper, the unhinged Michael Hayden, Leon Panetta. And they promulgated a lie.
And now, no one says that Russian disinformation was accurate.
I just want to finish with the border. We were told there was nothing that could be done with the border. Twelve million people flowing across was inevitable. We needed comprehensive immigration reform. That was all a lie. They deliberately destroyed the border. They wanted 12 million people to come. It was all a plan to change the demography, the constituency, to grow government, to increase social service as part of the liberal project.
What do all these lies have in common? One, nobody’s ever apologized for them. Nobody’s even tried to defend them. Nobody’s tried to deny them. Nobody’s tried to sustain them.
They all did terrible damage to the United States. It’ll take years to find 12 million illegal aliens. We don’t believe any of our agencies anymore—our health agencies, our investigatory, our intelligence agencies.
And finally, it destroyed the media. No one believes any of the legacy media. They promulgated and advanced all of these five ruses. They never apologized. [They made fun of anybody who questioned them. And then, now, we’re supposed to shrug and say, “You were right. They were all lies. We forgive you.” No, we don’t. We don’t.
These lies did terrible damage to the United States. And the people who are responsible for them have never apologized.
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