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Jack
Hello, ladies. Hello, gentlemen. Welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. He's got a website, the Blade of Perseus. You'll find it@victorhansen.com you should be subscribing, and I will tell you why later in this episode, why that should be the case. So many things to talk about, Victor, in this episode. We're recording on Saturday the 31st. Yeah, it's going to be out on Thursday, May 5th. A little space between these dates. We'll tighten them up over the summer, folks, but I think we should begin.
Victor Davis Hansen
I have a little space because I got my surgery date for.
Jack
Cottage cheese.
Victor Davis Hansen
Mining expedition and it's gonna be a week from Wednesday, so I will be out for a while. Apparently I've had a more extensive surgery before and it was. I was out for quite some time. But I'll try to record them. We won't miss anything.
Jack
So little spelunking.
Victor Davis Hansen
Well, Victor, unless I was. If you would pray to St. Nazo. I asked, by the way. We were at the. We didn't get to stay at the reception because we had an early flight home.
Jack
They don't know what reception. They don't know which one.
Victor Davis Hansen
Yes, at the Bradley Prize. But there was a man of the cloth, Catholic priest, good friend of yours. And when you left, I asked him, naso, being nose in Latin, was there any saint that he could think of to open these passages, miraculously drain this cottage cheese that are pounding on my thing for three months and then avoid a surgery? And he was very helpful, really.
Jack
Did he give you a name? Did he tell you Saint Peter?
Victor Davis Hansen
No, but he said that he would research it and offer a prayer. So I appreciate that. And you know what? I've had so many people write me. Oh, my gosh, so many people. And carnivore diet. Pretty much on a carnivore diet. Gamma globulin shots. I haven't quite gone there yet.
Jack
Iodine, nasal somethings or other.
Victor Davis Hansen
Yes, all sorts of diets. And all of them were very helpful. Just that I live on this dusty climate. When I got the flu, you know, I get inflammation. I had long Covid. All of that just makes steady inflammation. So we have to drill, drill, drill, drill. Sarah said, drill, baby. That's what I basically have said to the surgeon. I have a lot of confidence in him because he did the last one.
Jack
Okay.
Victor Davis Hansen
And the little ones and the little ones. Before that.
Jack
We are going to talk about China. Maybe we're going to talk about sinuses again, but we'll, we'll talk about Sino. We've talked about sinuses. Let's talk about Sino. And we'll do that when we come back from these important messages. We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen show. All that talk about sinuses, Victor makes me want to wipe my nose. So by the way, the priest you were talking to and this was at the Bradley Prize reception last week was Father Hartman, who is from. I had just met him, he was from Milwaukee. So he's, you know, Bradley's centered in Milwaukee and he happens to be a leading official at the Catholics, the United States Catholic Conference in Washington. And his brother is Mike Hartman, who is very well known in conservative philanthropy circles. So it was nice to meet him there. The saint, by the way, is Saint Blaise. And Catholics will remember Saint Blaise is one of the few things Victor and what boring are maybe even enraging some of my Protestant brothers with this kind of saint talk. But there were some very demonstrable things Catholics did. And in early February they would mark Saint Blaise's day. And Saint Blaise supposedly saved some young kid's life by taking a fishbone out of their throat. So kids would go to a mass and everybody would. And you get your throats blessed by two candles that really like an X. Yeah. And in the old, old days the candles used to be lit, but they stopped that cuz some of the girl's hair went on fire. But Saint Blaze Blaz is the ear, nose and throat saint. So Saint who would. And Saint Blaise was a martyr.
Victor Davis Hansen
All I know so far is that Saint Navaj, Saint Doxicillin, St. Z Pack, Saint Zytol, St. Iodine, Saint Coital, Silver, St. Probiotic have not worked. But you know, you mentioned Cyno sinus. You know, it's just the Latin word for cavity or bay. So you can see why they named sinus. But cyno. You made a good point about China. And I think that is from. And I'm just doing this. That's from the Greek word through Latin, sinai in Greek, sigma iota, nu alpha iota. I think and it's a word that the Greeks, they had knowledge of China and they called them the Sinai. But I don't know whether that had anything to do with a bay. It was a big but it does mean cavity in Latin and via Greek. But that idea of Sino relations or Sino American that comes from the Greek word for China, but I don't think it's Greek is what I'm getting at. I think they adapted it because it's not. It's not. I don't think it's an Indo European word. I think it's a. Well, it is Indo European, but I don't think it's Hellenic branch of Indo European.
Jack
Well, Mount Sinai must be a Hebrew word. Sinai as in.
Victor Davis Hansen
Yeah, but that's a Latin word from Sinai. It is, but I think that has to go with. And I'll check that out. There is an Arab word for Oriental or Asian or beyond the Arab world. And I don't know if that is back to Sanskrit or not, but it's an Eastern word and that's where the Greeks got that word. Sinai. Sign us are for China.
Jack
Well, now we're going to talk about China. Headline Hegseth Sounds alarm on China's quote unquote imminent Taiwan Invasion. And this is from the daily mail from two days ago. U.S. defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a chilling warning on the China threat during a defense summit in Singapore. He said on Saturday that the threat from China was potentially imminent as he pushed allies in the Indo Pacific to spend more on their own defense. Hegseth, speaking for the first time at the Shangri La dialogue in Singapore, Asia's forum for defense leaders, militaries and diplomats underlined that the Indo Pacific region was a priority for the Trump administration. The word imminent is pretty disturbing. Victor, any thoughts on.
Victor Davis Hansen
Yeah, I think the big problem there, Jack, is there's a twofold problem, and that is that Asia's a long way from Europe, so the Europeans will have no role and they'll be busy with Russia and Ukraine. And then it's the question that we have giving so many weapons to Ukraine and we have given a lot to Israel and do we have enough stockpile to stop them? And I mentioned Anduril that that company by I think his name is Palmer Luckey. He was the one that got a tiff when he endorsed Trump over with Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg, although I think they're working together.
Jack
Oh, they forced him.
Victor Davis Hansen
Yeah, they're working together again. They buried the hatchet. I shouldn't say they buried. I think that Mark Zuckerberg buried the hatchet after firing lucky for being a Trump person. But that's just speculation. But the whole point is that they're trying to make a lot of less expensive weapons, drones, maritime and aerial, and flood the zone so that if you would envision an invasion across that 90 mile sea and the United States had at its disposal, say, platforms that could release say four or five hundred drone missiles. You could think, I mean, drone missiles and drone subs or surface like jet skis or something and just you could do a lot of damage. They still, I mean, it's a lot more than 26 miles that Hitler couldn't get across. I hope there's a Taiwanese. There's a Taiwanese admiral somewhere. When the prime minister calls him up and said, can China invade? He will tell the. Tell him as the first lord of their admiralty told the British. When Napoleon, he said, I don't know when or if or how he's going to invade, but I can only assure you he shall not come by sea. That meant in those days there was no way he was going to make it because the British had naval superiority. So I don't know if we have the weaponry yet. And that's why I think he's worried. And Jamie Dimon was worried. And then the other thing is, would the Taiwanese fight like the Ukrainians and the one, you know, the Ukrainians are as close to the Russians as the Taiwanese are to the Chinese or ethnically and religiously to that degree they're atheists, I don't know, but I get different signals from people from Taiwan. Some people say, you know, we're so integrated with the mainland that they're just absorbing us anyway. And others feel they would fight, but that would be very important because if they wouldn't fight, we're not gonna fight.
Jack
Victor, you mentioned Jamie Diamond. We were talking on the last episode about the same idea of produce much more weaponry. And I did want to make a movie reference and I forgot I'll say it now. Folks who don't have an idea of what was once the might of America to create weaponry should look at the movie the Best Years of Our Lives. And there's a famous scene there of Dana Andrews walking through the airfield of the abandoned airplanes. But actually they had a flyover scene also. And that was one of the smaller places in America post war where they had thousands of.
Victor Davis Hansen
I think we made over 20,000 four engine bombers, B17 24 and 29s, 5,000, I think, B29s. And just amazing what we did. They created the B29 basically in three years, most sophisticated plane. They got 25,000 individual parts. And I don't know, when you look at the news, you don't know if we have it in us like that generation did. And what's even stranger is that the more that you have doubt that we have it in us. The more that the young generations fault that generation. That's very strange because they are here because of that other generation that fought in World War II, and yet they criticize them as racist, sexist, and they couldn't match them in one second. What those guys did, whether it was women in the factories working 20 hours a day or guys that were not just minding their own business, they had no desire to go to Europe or Japanese. And then these dictators called them over there and they just uprooted and went over there and fought pain killers. Everybody forgets about World War II. The Japanese have been fighting since 1933 and the Germans had been fighting since 36 and 7. So the time we joined them, they were trained killers, and yet they did very well.
Jack
Well, let's stay on China, Victor. Donald Trump on Truth Social, issued a. I think they do. They call it a truth. As opposed to a tweet. Is it called. As opposed to they call. Two weeks ago, China was in grave economic danger. The very high tariffs I set made it virtually impossible for China to trade into the United States marketplace, which is by far number one in the world, went, in effect, cold turkey with China, and it was devastating for them. Many factories closed, and there was, to put it mildly, civil unrest. I saw what was happening, didn't like it for them, for us. I made a fast deal with China in order to save them from what I thought was going to be a very bad situation. And I didn't want to see that happen. Because of this deal, everything quickly stabilized and China got back to business as usual. Everybody was happy, exclamation point. That is the good news. The bad news is that China, perhaps not surprisingly to some, has totally violated its agreement with us. So much for being Mr. Nice Guy. I don't know, should he. Should anyone have been surprised by what China did, let alone.
Victor Davis Hansen
Well, I think there's two things going on. Number one is they're counting on district judges to take away that blanket tariff. I don't quite understand because there's no. There's a procedure that Trump can do the way Obama, George W. Bush, Biden and other presidents did on tariffs, but just not blanket tariffs. If he gets ruled against that at the Supreme Court. But I think he could just individually level, just say this is just for this particular country, then go through a procedure that would take a little bit longer, but wouldn't have to go to Congress. That's one of the things China is counting on, that Trump's domestic opponents and the judiciary will Hamper him, hamstring him. And number two goes back to an early point we made on the earlier broadcast that everything is connected. So why did Putin choose to go on February 22nd to 24th into Kiev, 2022? I think it was because Joe Biden was cognitively inclined that he had told Putin, if you're going to do cyber attacks, knock off hospitals. He'd seen Blinken and Sullivan humiliated at the Chinese Anchorage summit, mini summit. He had seen Biden say, when told they were massing on the borders of Belarus, he said his reaction would depend on whether it was a minor invasion. And then most importantly, of course, was the disaster in Afghanistan in August. And he completely shredded any semblance of deterrence. And so Trump inherited a country without deterrence. And then he tried, and then he had. He was verbally relying on the fumes of his unpredictable first administration, where, as we said earlier, he got, you know, Baghdadi, isis, Soleimani, Wagner group, they all fell to Trump's wrath. When he threatens the Houthis and he threatens Iran and he threatens Putin, then you've got to be, at some point somebody's going to call our bluff. And then that'll be interesting to see whether the greater supporters are the Jacksonians or they're the neo isolationists. But you have to be credible with your word. You should speak very quietly and carry a club and not loud and twig. Biden was loud. Trump made a really good point about negotiation with people like Putin. They said, why were you so friendly? And why don't you attack him as a killer? What good did that do? Biden called the Royal Family corrupt and killers. And remember that about Khashoggi. And then he had to go beg them to pump oil before the midterms. And he said that Putin was a murderer. We know that. But when you try to personally insult somebody you're going to do business with, it's not likely you're going to get a deal.
Jack
Well, we should talk about. You mentioned Joe Biden. Tough guy, big talk. And let's start that. And then I've got to read a little spot, but we'll start on down the Biden Road. Victor, Today's Today's New York Post. And today again is Saturday the 31st. Biden says politics are so divided in first speech since cancer diagnosis. Okay. He, he joked Friday that he was mentally incompetent. He joked and he said his metastas metastasized prostate cancers. Prognosis is good. In his first public appearance since the diagnosis became public, you can see that I'm mentally incompetent and I can't walk.
Victor Davis Hansen
Yeah.
Jack
And I can beat the hell out of both of them by name.
Victor Davis Hansen
Doesn't he. When he said beat the hell out, was he talking about the authors?
Jack
Yeah, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. That's who he was talking about.
Victor Davis Hansen
I don't think he could. Do you?
Jack
No, I don't.
Victor Davis Hansen
But should we recite by memory his threats? He said to Donald Trump on two occasions he was going to take him outside the gym and beat him up. He said he told the my favorite is a corn pop. Where he said, I went down the basement. I told him to measure me some chain. I got about six feet of chain. Went back up there and I looked, I stared down corn pop and said, you want to have a chain and corn pop? You know, he backed down. That was that one. And then there was the one where I landed on that counter. And that guy had been making fun of my sister, so I just took his head and I just slammed it on that counter two or three times. Remember that?
Jack
Yes.
Victor Davis Hansen
And he always talks. He reminds me. Did you remember in high school, there was always someone. I went to a pretty rough high school, but there was always somebody who was a really loud mouth and he was always threatening everybody. And then every once in a while, periodically about, there would be a kind of a Charles Bronson character from Once Upon a Time in the West. He didn't have a harmonica, but he would just look at him. And the guy did it one time too many, and he would go there and just beat the holy blank blank out of it.
Jack
Yeah, those are the things.
Victor Davis Hansen
And I think Biden. I think that happened to Biden. Trump said something that was very profound when he. I was driving. We were driving yesterday home from SFO and Trump, they just out of the blue, just a stream of consciousness. He said, you know, Biden's not a bad guy. I don't think he did the border. He's not that bad. But, you know, he's not smart. And then he started thinking about it and he's mean. Everybody thinks he's not nice. He's a mean guy. He's been digging and he's. He's absolutely right about that. He's one of the. When he got caught with plagiarism, you remember, he said, what did you get on? I'll. I'll challenge my record against yours anytime. And he would. He was really mean. You know what I mean? And he was racist, too. He put you all the boxes yeah, he did. He did. He did. By the way, pathological fabricator and plagiarist.
Jack
Since I went Catholic earlier, Victor, one of the threats was to somebody who criticized him. This is back in the early 90s. You say that again, I'm going to shove my GD rosary beads down your throat. Yeah, okay, that's.
Victor Davis Hansen
Then remember you and I've talked about. You wrote an article about how he defamed that poor truck driver who was not culpable and was not intoxicated and besmirched his reputation and would not stop. The person got cancer and died. And then finally he stopped after I don't know, 10 or 15 years of using. He has a bad habit of using a person. A personal tragedy. No, for political purposes. He does that with his first wife. He did that and just spontaneous on the stump he would mention about drunk accuse that guy. And then on the case of his tragic loss of his son, he would blame burn Pitts. There was no evidence. Then he would say that his son died in Iraq, which was not true. And then he told that to the.
Jack
Folks who went to get their children dead. Slain soldier bodies from the Dover Air Force base immediately played his.
Victor Davis Hansen
Talked about his. His. Yeah.
Jack
So like they were equivalent.
Victor Davis Hansen
Yeah, he does that. He does that all the time.
Jack
Well, we have a few more Biden things to get your take on Victor, but first, message to our dear listeners and viewers. In today's fast moving world, your team needs to stay connected to your customers. Without mixed messages, communication silos or slow phone systems. A flexible and efficient business phone system isn't just nice to have, it's essential to succeed. Enter OpenPhone. OpenPhone is the number one business phone system that streamlines and scales your customer communications. It works through an app on your phone or computer. So no more carrying two phones or using a landline. With OpenPhone your team can share one number and and collaborate on customer calls and texts like a shared inbox. That way any teammate can pick up right where the last person left off, keeping response times faster than ever. Plus with AI powered call transcripts and summaries, you'll be able to automate follow up, ensuring you'll never miss a customer interaction again. Sorry for the slow reading here, my friends. So whether you're a one person operation drowning in calls and texts or have a large team that needs better collaboration tools, OpenPhone is a no brainer. And see why over 50,000 businesses. That's a lot of businesses trust OpenPhone to manage their businesses calls and texts. OpenPhone is offering listeners and viewers of the Victor Davis Hansen show. 20% off your first six months@openphone.com Victor that's O P E N P H o n e openphone.com and if you have existing phone numbers with another service, OpenPhone will port them over at no extra charge. OpenPhone, no missed calls, no missed customers. We thank the good people from OpenPhone for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson show. Victor I have two more Biden things but we'll do one and then we have to take a little break. This is White House press secretary Levitt who said Jill Biden, Jill Biden needs to answer for lies on Joe's mental decline. I think this was a tweet. White House press secretary Caroline Levitt called on former first lady Jill Biden. Jill Biden to answer for her role in the massive cover up of her husband's declining mental health aptitude, accusing her of still of still lying to the American people. Not in this Victor, but some somewhere else. I read today it seems like like her chief of staff was that. Yeah.
Victor Davis Hansen
Her chief of staff. Yeah. He's been on television.
Jack
Former chief of staff was the person calling the shots within the White House or had an uber significant role in that. In the yeah.
Victor Davis Hansen
And I always thought was Ron Klain. It would be interesting to see who if they if when they do bring these people in and put them under oath, if they will testify that they were the ones that put the bill in the auto pin, I think they can get out of it. They can just say well Joel was right there and he agreed that I should do that. But that'll be interesting. I don't think they're going to get much out of her because she's just going to claim that she has spousal exemption, can't testify de facto against her husband. But there was also a Secret Service whistleblower that said Joe went into the closets. I must have big clothes. And he couldn't get out. He just wandered around. I didn't know how that works. My closet's about the size of a telephone booth.
Jack
Yeah. He this was a conversation between Sean Hannity and Senator Hawley and Hawley said this. You know they since Butler he had spoken to many Secret Service agents and yet one of them was actually on the Biden White House staff and said he could not find his way out of out of the the closet. Literally. It's not a gay thing.
Victor Davis Hansen
One of the in the I haven't read Original Sin. I'm not going to buy the book. I don't want to subsidize Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. But there were two stories out this week, and one was that was it had only sold some like 54,000 copies. With all that free publicity, it had disappointing sales. And I think that's because people resent the idea that somebody who was deeply enmeshed in the media cover up, then wants to recalibrate himself as a speaking truth to power and then make a lot of money off of it. And he probably got a huge advance. The other thing is that Jake Tapper's explanations are just so laughably unpersuasive when he says that they couldn't penetrate the White House wall around Joe Biden that was covering it up. No, you were part of that wall. And we know that's true, because when Donald Trump was president, your station and others like msnbc, you guys all ran with the story that Donald Trump was mentally challenged. There was nobody trying to. There was no conspiracy. There was no evidence that he was, except he went to, I think it was the Air Force graduation or something. It was raining and he was on a ramp. And he took Joe Biden's steps one time downhill, and they said, see, he's got Parkinson's or he's got something wrong with him. The other time, anyway, such was the lies about Trump that. Remember acting FBI Director and Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Andrew McCabe discussed while under oath that Rosenstein had volunteered to wear a wire and entrap Donald Trump to prove that he should be subject to removal under the 25th Amendment because he was mentally. And then I think it was Schumer or was it Elizabeth Warren? But they got this discredited psychologist or psychiatrist from Yale, Dr. Bandy Lee, and they brought her in front of the Congress and she testified, without ever diagnosing Donald Trump, that he was mentally challenged, should have an intervention, and she edited a book. My point is that all of that stuff was media generated and they ran with it. And when they had denials from the Trump people and the Trump doctor, they ignored them. And then Donald Trump volunteered and took the Montreal cognitive assessment, and it was clear that he got a perfect score. So if they want to, they can believe what they want. But if they were so eager to lie and create a false narrative that really took off and really hurt Donald Trump, that he was mentally incompetent on no evidence, when you had all of this evidence and they kept quiet, in other words, they were trigger happy about the mental state of a president under Trump, but they were unarmed when Biden so It's just patently unpersuasive. And they know what they did. They know what they do.
Jack
Yeah, our lying eyes, Victor, as we take a phrase like the cheap fakes. And it's almost like a memo goes out in the morning from the dnc. And all of a sudden that day, everywhere, they run NBC.
Victor Davis Hansen
Remember Ram Posa? Remember Ram Posa came to the White House. Ambush. Ambush. Ambush. Ambush. Ram Posa was ambushed. Ambush. He was ambushed. He was ambushed. He was ambushed. And it was all from the dnc. And by the way, everything that Trump said about that guy turned out to be post facto true that he told Elon, we want you to give us free Internet and you have to have a black South African owned a 30 year company. And then he backed off after Trump and then he was back to it again. And then the other thing about kill the boar, he said that they don't do that or something. And then afterwards he said basically it's not. Yeah, Trump had his number, by the way. Everybody remember we did, I did a. We mentioned. He requested that interview. Ramposo, he was getting zero tariffs free trade from us. He was getting $500 million of US aid. He knew that they killed somewhere between 1500 and 3500, depending on how you define the mechanisms, and raped and killed and assaulted white farmers on the basis of their race. He knew all that. And he was a crook himself. He's probably a billionaire. So when he requested that meeting, he was in ambush. I went back and looked at the media and all the media account was Ram Poso ready to show Trump evidence, Ramposo ready to contradict Trump. It wasn't an ambush. He wanted that. He said, you know, Trump probably thinks this and this, and I want free trade with the United States and I want all the South Africans who are black to come to the United States on visas. And I don't want one white South African coming to the United States because they're cowards. Remember that? Cowards, he called them. You're supposed to play the odds and stay there. The odds are that we won't kill you because of your race. And you're a coward to want to when you don't want to play those good odds. That's what he was saying.
Jack
Where's that highway with all the crosses on it?
Victor Davis Hansen
Yeah, well, those weren't really memorials because there wasn't a body. And Donald Trump intimated that they were actual corpses beneath the. And that was all they could muster, that they were cenotaphs and not actual grave sites.
Jack
We have stuck our toe in the Democratic Party water with the, with the Biden White House. And you have a piece on your most recent syndicated column, Democrats and their DEI Albatrosses. And I'd like to expand on that a little bit to get your thoughts on the state of the Democrat Party. And we'll do that. Excuse me. When we come back from these important messages.
Victor Davis Hansen
Foreign.
Jack
Victor Davis Hansen show. At the outset, Victor, while we weren't talking about saints, real and fake, that we, I did mention the Blade of Perseus. That's your official website. Durhanson.com is the web address. If you're a fan of Victor, you can go there and sign up free for the weekly newsletter that's put out. And then you'll find links to everything. Victor's various appearances. You saw Megyn Kelly, you'll find the link. His books, you'll find the links. His American greatness, essays, syndicated columns, archives of these podcasts galore. They're all there. Then you'll find Ultra articles, Little Black Box Ultra. Twice a week Victor writes an exclusive piece for the Blade of Perseus. And once a week there's an exclusive video. $656.50 month. Stick your toe in the water, check it out and if you like it, get a discount for the full year.
Victor Davis Hansen
I did three essays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays for about five years and we decided to have a video. So now I do Tuesdays, Wednesday, 700 words only for Ultra members. Then we have a video only for Ultra. But we've never missed one. Sometimes the person who was supposed to post them has been out of town. So it might have been delayed that day, but I don't think I've ever missed one. So if you do sign up, and I hope you do, you will not see the site blank. And I'm not going to take a vacation. There'll be five new pieces on that website. There'll be two syndicated columns on Monday and Thursday. Then there will be two Ultra pieces on Tuesday and Wednesday. And then there'll be a video on Friday.
Jack
And then the links to the four podcasts you do.
Victor Davis Hansen
And there'll be links to our four podcasts. And there'll be links to my American Signal five minute videos that can go on X. I think I'm doing 10 videos a week. Five for the daily Signal, just short ones. And then we do four, Right. And then I do one for the website.
Jack
Yeah. Victor, you're overexposed.
Victor Davis Hansen
Overexposed? Yeah, it's a cheap fake.
Jack
Well, one of the things you wrote that people can find on the website is that piece Democrats and their DEI albatrosses. You wrote the left created dei, the use of race to adjudicate every political issue. And like any addictive toxic drug, they now can neither survive with DEI nor without it. You know, Victor, you could. This is your piece. Say whatever you want, but this is. We're on the cusp of. Actually, we're in June as this is being broadcast. So we are half a year out already, plus half a year plus from. Actually, it may be the half a year date of the presidential election. Disastrous day for the Democrat Party. And the party has a no leader. They have a message still, as you point out in this article, more of the same dei, but I don't. How do they. This is a tailspin. How do they get out? I'm not that you should give them any advice.
Victor Davis Hansen
No, they're like an addict and an addict has to have a fix, and yet the addict's fix will kill them. So everything is in dii, so they can't do anything. So if you want to reform the schools of the inner city and help say African American children with vouchers or school choice or charter schools or private academies, you're going to deal with a teachers union who hired dei and then they're going to call you a racist, that you're not fair because you want to worry about the children rather than about incompetent faculty. If you want to talk about the border, they're going to say you just. You let in 48 white people and that's not fair. 12 million people from all over the world except Europe and 48 South Africans. So that'll be racist to fund the police. That was because considered the police were racist. Roland Fryer blew up that and probably got Claudine Gay to try to fire him because of that. And then energy, that's become a DEI issue. That was way an old DI. I think it was in Mexifornia 20 years ago. I talked about a person who said that the air five miles from where I live was more polluted because it was more of a Mexican American community than my community. So DEI permeates everything and it's paralysis. It paralyzes the democratic people, the operatives, the activists, the politicians, the officehold. They can't make a statement because it will be seen only through the prism of race or sexual orientation. They can't just say there might be a possible sort of kind of danger about castration and chemical castration and breast removal for children and 13 or 14. So we're going to look at this. No, that's transphobia. Transphobia. And so every issue, they've redefined it as a DEI issue. And now without official dei, they don't have their lodestar to guide them. But they've done a lot of damage. They've driven so many people out of the party.
Jack
These rallies that AOC and Bernie Sanders had, which was. Which were subject of great contrived joy for Democrats for a bit there. And then the contrivance, you know, AOC might be a viable presidential candidate.
Victor Davis Hansen
She's not going to win, I can tell you that. Kamala Harris is not going to win because there's too many people that know that right now. If they were in power, there would be 10,000 people coming every day and there would be a lot of criminals. And every day. And they know that they would be on the side of Hamas or the Houthis, or they would do what Biden did and say, the Houthis aren't really terrorists. I removed that terrorist designation. Or they would be talking in generous, more generous terms about the Iranians, or they would be sending a blank check to Ukraine with no strategy how to end the war. And anybody who suggested that it was a Stalingrad, they would say is an appeaser. They don't. That's what they would be doing. Everybody knows it and they don't want it. So they only have one thing, and that is change the demography of the country. And they tried that. And that's kind of boomeranging because the new demography doesn't like them any more than the old demography. Or it's Donald Trump on Monday through Friday, seven days a week, 360 degrees, 24, 7. Let's take him off the ballot. Let's raid his home. Let's charge him in five local, state, federal courts. Let's claim that, you know, he killed a bunch of koi fish. Let's, you know, just. He's on the laptop. He was lying about. It was cooked up in Moscow. What he's. Putin tried to rig the election with Donald Trump in 2016. Axios, ping pong, ping, ping. Donald Trump lied when he said it was at the Wuhan lab. It couldn't have been. It was a little pangolin bat. A little pangolin who was picked up by a bat. And then the bat kind of flew over the wet market and bombed him and dropped the little pangolin. And then he dived in and they cut them up and somebody ate them. And that's how it started. So everything, the lies that we have lived with and there's never. I'm sorry we lied. We 51 intelligence authorities. I'm sorry about the Wuhan lab. I'm sorry about Russian inclusion. I'm sorry about laptop. I'm sorry about Joe Biden's cognitive decline. I'm sorry about his cancer diagnosis. Never. It's on to the next one.
Jack
The lies are always accompanied by performance art. Yep, Victor, and we've talked many times. Most recent podcast, of course, the performance art on campuses which was actually violence and beating up Jews and tormenting Jews and providing aid and comfort to terrorists. Another version of performance art, and you mentioned Elon Musk before with South Africa, has been the destruction of Tesla's vehicles. And there was an article out the other day said, I don't know where it got this from. It said, in a recent study from Guardian services, researchers surveyed 508 Tesla owners in the United States. This was done to explore how vandalism, insurance hikes and other public perception are reshaping the EV ownership experience. As 44% of Tesla owners reported they have received intentional damage to their vehicle. This accounted for an average repair bill of nineteen hundred dollars.
Victor Davis Hansen
Anyway, they could stop it tomorrow. They could stop it tomorrow, Jack. All you'd have to have is a little press conference with four people. Bring out old Joe, the ex president, bring out Kamala Harris, the ex candidate for president, and on one side have Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority leader, the other, hikem Jeffries, and say, we don't believe this, not in our name. This is not who we are. And all those little shibboleths that they always bring out and do not touch a Tesla, but they won't do that, believe me. Elon Musk had been as he was until the first assassination attempt and he had to endorse Kamala Harris. And he had said something about Trump negatively and Trump. People got mad and they were doing this to Tesla, they'd be in jail, every one of them. Every one of them.
Jack
Victor, mentioning immigration. We have two immigration headlines. And. And we've talked again recent podcasts about Donald Trump's disappointment with the federal judiciary and including conservative judges. But the Supreme Court, his headlines, supreme Court hands Trump win on revoking parole for 500,000. So these were illegals. They were. Of course, like everything that happens in America, some lower court judge stopped executive action. The Supreme Court stepped in and this isn't a final verdict on this issue, Victor, but it was to allow the continued Deportation while the lower courts then go through the process. But still, I consider it a win.
Victor Davis Hansen
Yeah, I mean, but it's still this bizarre regional district judges that a think that they're in San Francisco or Texas and that they, whatever they happen to say applies to the whole United States for at least until they're stayed. And they have the right to do that, I suppose, to make a national law by fiat, even though they weren't elected and they're the lowest of the three rungs of the federal court system, not to mention the state and local court system. It's not gonna, it's not gonna continue forever. Because if it is, you wouldn't have a United States. It's not sustainable and everybody knows it. And then when you put in your ego and all these narcissists that want to be known and all the Soros money and all the legal fund, national defense, all of this acl, all this money from the left and foundations, that's why Trump wants to tax them. And it's just ridiculous what they're doing. And again, we get back to the other idea that it is illegal to deport someone who came in here illegally and resided illegally, but it's legal to do that. But it is illegal to take that same person who's in violation law and ask him to go home. And I don't think that American people will stand for that. They surely won't.
Jack
Well, Victor, we, we went through several years of the lawfare against the president and others that nobody could be above the law. And we've heard that from judges. And now we have a judge, infamous judge from Wisconsin, Hannah Dugan, who gained some notoriety a few weeks ago when she aided, abetted and arrested illegal from being picked up in the courthouse by ice. So here's a headline. Whiskey Wisconsin Judge who shielded a legal immigrant from ICE Shares latest defense. I'm absolute. I am absolutely immune. She claims that she has absolute judicial immunity.
Victor Davis Hansen
Wait a minute, Jack. I thought they said no one is above the law. That was like ambush, ambush, ambush. No one's above the law. No one's above the law. No one's above the law. And now someone's above the law.
Jack
Absolute immunity.
Victor Davis Hansen
That's not going to happen. Does she think that they've never indicted a judge in the history of the United States? They've impeached judges. She doesn't understand. These people are. She tried to obstruct a federal officer and put in theory his safety in jeopardy by siding with an illegal alien who was here unlawfully and was a criminal. And she canceled her court session to make sure that the illegal alien criminal could escape federal authorities. And she says she's immune from that. If she's immune from that. She thinks she's immune from everything. I don't think so.
Jack
Hey, Victor, I want to get into the get your thoughts on topic I had hoped to bring up before, but there's some really interesting fighting going on within the gay community. One of our fans has sent me some stuff related to conservative gays versus left wing gays, all related to the trans issue. And it I'd like to get into that. And I'll do that after we take our final break. And I'm springing something on you here now because you say you're going to have all this recovery time, but you are. Of all the things you do, that laundry list of you mention of articles you write, et cetera, you are writing a book. I'm just curious, how is the book coming along?
Victor Davis Hansen
Well, I started in January and I have a research assistant that I have finished the rough draft. So I've got about 120,000 words, 400 pages, and she's putting it on icloud and checking grammar and everything. And then I'm going behind her and I did all the footnotes and so she did the title. I don't like links, you know what I mean? Just links without the title written out. So I'm having her write the title out of all the links. I have over four or five hundred footnotes. So yeah, I have the preface. And then I think the first chapter is Downfall. It starts in mid sentence about January 6, all the things they did to Trump coupled with the polls that backfired. And then I take a deep breath and I said, this is the new maga. How is it same? How is it different from the first administration? This is who is opposing them and why they're opposing them. Chapter four is the campaign of 2024 and the primaries general. And then chapter five is the nature. Chapter five is a transition and the counter revolutionary. And then chapter six is Foreign Domestic affairs in the first hundred days. And then chapter seven is Foreign affairs. And there's an epilogue, chapter eight. Can you have a MAGA movement without Donald Trump when he's no longer president?
Jack
That's really interesting.
Victor Davis Hansen
So it's a lot of work, but I've been working four or five hours even with my Saint Naso problem.
Jack
But so you have. You have to pick a cutoff date because you could keep writing this book.
Victor Davis Hansen
That's a hard Thing I did this before when I wrote, you know, I sent the first book, why Trump Won, and the editors changed it to the Case for Trump, and that made it sell better. But there were a lot of people said it was propaganda because of the title, but it was. This is just an analysis of how somebody could stage the greatest political comeback in history. I mean, Bill Clinton had a little comeback after losing New Hampshire, etc. And Richard Nixon had a big comeback in 68, given his humiliation in 60. But I don't think anybody. If you go back, Jack, and you look at the press accounts, February, March of 2021, I mean, it was just. I'm not talking about the left, I'm talking about Democrats. I mean, you should remember, read some of the things Mitch McConnell said. This is what he deserves. He's all through, blah, blah, blah. Liz Cheney, who had voted 93% of the time with him, they really did believe that it was a new Republican Party, that he was gone, MEGA was dead, and it was going to be run by Mitch and Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol, Charles Sykes and Jonah Goldberg and all of those guys. They really did believe that. And then, yet every time they acted, they being the Never Trumpers or the left, and did something, whether it was 25 states trying to get him off the ballot or the five court, the 93 indictments, his polls went up. And then he put it, you know, I'm looking at the primary. He put DeSantis and Nikki Haley in a lose, lose situation, as I said. Because if they said, how dare they go into Mar a Lago? This has never been, oh, you support Trump. Or if they said they should have gone, he shouldn't have, oh, you're turning on one of your own. So there was no way for them to square that circle. And the left, the left really did think that.
Jack
Yeah, neither of them have come out of this looking better, by the way.
Victor Davis Hansen
Yeah, I mean, the left had convinced themselves. If you say, Donald Trump's a racist, Donald Trump's a racist. Donald Trump's a racist. Donald Trump's a racist. We have 10,000 today, 10,000 new people from Mexico, 10,000 from Latin America. If he's a racist and we're letting in 10,000 people a year, then we're going to win all the Hispanic vote. And you wanted to say, but you're obnoxious and you're flooding poor communities with illegals that don't speak English. They have no money, some of them have a criminal record and you're dumping them in communities that are trying to have advanced placement in their high schools and good care and no crime. And every time they wander into Martha's Vineyard or Manhattan, you people have an apocalyptic attack. So I'm discussing why they lost the middle class vote, the Hispanic vote, and it really hurt them that they lost, you know, 16% of African Americans, maybe 16% of black African American males.
Jack
What's the working title, Victor? Is there one?
Victor Davis Hansen
Yes, it is. The Return of Trump and his MAGA Counter Revolution.
Jack
And expected publication date?
Victor Davis Hansen
It's due. My goal is the due date, I think is September 1st. So I've been doing this because I had this sinus infection. I knew I had to get an operation. So I'm going to lose some time. But I hope that I'll have. I'm going over all of the first draft right now and some of the edits that I have made and my research assistant have made. And then I'm going to finish that in three weeks. And then I'm going to go. I don't have a lot of books. I've just gone, you know, on journal articles online. So I'm going to look at about 100 books that have been published and any new data or things of interest, and then I'm going to try to send it in in August. But the problem is, I learned with the first book, everything you write is out of. If I had turned this in in March, it was Donald Trump had ruined the economy and the trade war. And then if I had done it in April, late April, it was Donald Trump had saved the stock market. It was booming. If I had done it, you know, one day we're going to have peace in the Middle east. The next day, it's just so volatile. Part of it's because people hate him so much and they just, you know, they just write things that are crazy. And part of it is he's staging a counter revolution. If he was a regular Republican, a McCain or a Romney or a Dole or a Bush, this would be kind of swell. What do we do today? I don't know. Maybe we'll lower the capital gains rate, but it wouldn't be this, hey, everybody. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.
Jack
Yeah, something like this. Here's headlines. Trump fires National Portrait Gallery director Kim Saget over DEI support. Boom. That never would have happened in another Republican administration.
Victor Davis Hansen
No. No Republican would do that. Somebody would call them up and say, I know this person. They're sober and judicious and they're with us 10%, 20% of the time. And they went to Harvard. So they're good people and they were susceptible to that. Essentially, as I said in the first book, they wanted to lose nobly rather than to win ugly. And not since, you know, George Bush's 19, Lee Atwater, when they had that guy in 1988, George H.W. left the Republican convention 17 points behind. And then they unleashed Lee Outwater and we gave it Willie Horton ad, the Boston harbor ad, the tank ad, the Willie Horton ad. And he said, I'm going to take the bark off him. And we apologized later due to caucus, but by today's standards it wasn't very dirty. But they wanted to win. And then George, basically George H.W. bush and the party said, we're never going to do that again. That was ugly. And the Democrats were really close with Ross Perot. He ran, he took I think 19% of the vote. And most of that vote came from Bush. In 92. They've lost seven out of the last eight popular elections. I mean popular votes until Trump, I think. And they haven't won 51% of the vote since 1988 when they beat DU caucus.
Jack
Well, we have time for one more topic and it's, it's about the gay wars and we will do that when we say gaylords. Yeah, that's what I said, Gay wars. When we come back from these final important messages, we are back with the Victor Davis Hansen show. I should have mentioned earlier also Victor's website, in addition to his website, the Blade of Perseus. He's very active on X D. Hansen is his handle. You if you're on Facebook, there's VDH's Morning cup and there is a friendly unofficial fan group, the Victor Davis Hansen fan club. Got 50, 60,000 members there. So you should check that out. I'm sure I'm leaving out some other ways you can find the overexposed Mr. Hansen. So anyway, this a friend who sends me something on via Facebook and this is what he writes. Victor, right wing gay Instagram accounts are some of the finest and funniest critics of surreal transsexual phenomena. It would be worth looking at, I think a third of the gays pulled for Trump. We, we're really not all on board with delusion. It's worth noting what he was. His point is why is there this component in the gay community that is embracing trans, I mean just trans has really nothing to do with gays. Right. If you think about it. But it has become a cause for a significant part, about 2/3 maybe of the gay community. And his theory is this, that the leading outside of marriage, the leading cause for gays say 30 years ago was we have AIDS and we need develop some medication to fix this. Right? And this happened. So if you have HIV now, you are going to live the same general length of, you know, you're not going to die at the age of 30 or 40. Thank, you know, for the medication that has been developed because that issue then went away. He says a new rev. And this is my gay friend Joe Reigns. A new revolutionary movement was needed to keep the foss the coffers full hence. And he writes ladyboy athletes. So anyway, it's a very fulsome debate going on within, on social media and part of the community. I think it makes a very interesting point. This is a cause celebrate because we are absolutely.
Victor Davis Hansen
They always have to have a victim class. And the civil rights was stale. I mean you had blacks and Hispanics and women and then gays. And now they were saying, well, there's 55% of Bas go to women and black women have incomes comparable to white women. And who is the oppressed? We've got a. Oh, it's transgendered people. So they took a very, very small demographic that we had known as gender dysphoric. And I mentioned that before, since antiquity. And all the classical sexologists mentioned it. And they made it from 0.01% or 001% into 20% of the student body and transitioning. And then they said, but that required a lot of gymnastics, belly flips, belly flops, flips. Because they had been really criticizing, critical of the ama remember unnecessary surgery, dangerous surgery, surgery on children. And then all of a sudden you should have, you know, If a kid's 12 and wants to have his. Her breasts removed, that's fine. Chemical castration. No, no problem. Very dangerous drugs from big pharma. So they switched on all of those key issues. And then the thing that's killing them though is that it, this happened right near us, about 30 miles away in Clovis. They had the state high school championship and they had. This is it A.B. hernandez. They had a pretty identifiable biological male that swept all the events in the track and field. His mother, her mother has been very vocal about that. He was a victim. But they essentially destroyed women's sports because it's not that there were a lot of transgendered biological males and women, but they all had a rendezvous with one if they got to the high level of competition because males had such a muscular skeletal advantage. So in other words, a young woman today says well, if I win the local swim meet and then I win the county and then I mean the state and I trail, I'll eventually, at some point, butt up against a male and I will lose. It's also changed all of our things. I don't think that women today are saying as they do, well, women are just as strong as men. Remember that in the military, there's no difference. I think they're saying today, no, there's difference. You cannot compete against someone with larger lung capacity. And they understand there's exception that there's small, scrawny men and there's big, powerful women. But by and large, on average, the male skeletal muscular system gives them physical advantages. And they accept that now. And they also accept that they are lying that a transgendered person is no different than the person who was born innately into that gender or sex. Because there's no one, no one, no one. There is no women who are transitioning to males who are winning any male events. Sorry, it's not happening. And you should ask yourself why you who say that men who dominate women's sports are just good athletes and there's no difference between them and women. So everything, there's holes in all of their arguments they don't talk about. And you know, another thing that's very controversial is that each of these prior civil rights movements had gestation periods where people were polite and worked to the system until the radical fringe. So there was a suffragette movement. Women, you know, didn't want to be treated as sex objects. They had all of these convincing arguments before they get went into really crazy radical feminism. And then you had the gay movement where people didn't want to be harassed. They didn't. Until you got to the Sisters of Perpetual Grievance or whatever they are.
Jack
You know, indulgence.
Victor Davis Hansen
Indulgence, yeah. And then all of the piercings and the mockery of Christ and nudity and all of the excesses. And then you had the civil rights movement. When you had Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King, before you went into rap Brown and the Black Panthers, you had the Chavez movement, equal wages. Until you went into La Raza. This group didn't have that mainstream movement. It just went right into the radical fringe. Really angry, violent. It was weird that it didn't have that. That mainstream. And I think that's why they have lost. They've lost the American people. That's an issue that Donald Trump was right when he said it's a 70, 30, 80, 20 issue.
Jack
Yeah, well, they'll have to Correct.
Victor Davis Hansen
I hope the Democratic Party understand. I don't hope that they understand it. I think that if they don't understand it and they don't seem to. They think the medicine's worse than the disease. They would rather lose an election than have the trans group mad at.
Jack
I mean after November we saw how they. How within their own party leadership elections, how weird they were.
Victor Davis Hansen
Yeah. David Hogg and that crazy guy from Minnesota.
Jack
Yeah.
Victor Davis Hansen
Yeah. They just doubled down and aoc. Has AOC had ever won single piece of legislation that helped her district? No. Or maybe she's never had a piece of her own written legislation.
Jack
Well, the big complaint is she's never in her district. And of course her district would have benefited in part by now had she not prevented Amazon.
Victor Davis Hansen
Amazon from being there.
Jack
Yeah. Significant.
Victor Davis Hansen
She didn't care. She had a good job and all of her expenses paid.
Jack
Yeah. Well, Victor, we are. We've come to the end. I have to get a hard stop here because I have to go be holy. Go pray to somebody.
Victor Davis Hansen
Saints and angels do some things too.
Jack
Well, let me. Let me end up as we typically do. We read a couple of comments from so many comments have come YouTube, Rumble Apple, Victor's website. We thank those who take the time to write them and I try to read them as many as I can. Here are two. Corey Roush, 5681 writes this from YouTube. I'm always impressed by Victor. All the topics he talks about is without notes. He just rattles off. He always has a great real life example, usually from history that helps paint a picture. Gosh, help us Victor. If you had notes, what would that mean? And then put he didn't write that. Corey didn't write that. Patricia Horror 6450 writes the way you two things talk about you and Sammy the way you to bring the current news and history is so interesting, so easy to hear without making my heart race while telling the truth. Thank you for not being involved in the drama. Amen. I want to thank folks that sign up for Civil Thoughts. That's the free weekly email newsletter I write for the center for Civil Society. I think you're going to like it. I know you're going to like it. Go to civilthoughts.com sign up and every Friday you'll get my email which is 14 recommended readings. Great articles I've come across the previous week. Don't forget Victor Hansen's website.
Victor Davis Hansen
I'm having jet lag right now, so I'm quiet.
Jack
All right. I know you are, Victor. Go. Go take a nap, Victor.
Victor Davis Hansen
I gotta go. Call Joe Biden and tell him I'm sleepy, like he.
Jack
Go in your closet and get lost.
Victor Davis Hansen
I will.
Jack
All right. Hey, Victor, you've been terrific. Thanks for everything.
Victor Davis Hansen
Thanks, everybody.
Jack
We'll be back with another episode soon of the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Bye.
Victor Davis Hansen
Thank you for watching and listening.
Summary of "China Threat, Biden Outing, and DEI Addicts"
The Victor Davis Hanson Show
Host: Victor Davis Hanson & Jack Fowler
Release Date: June 5, 2025
The episode begins with Victor Davis Hanson sharing a personal health update. He reveals that he is scheduled for a significant surgery due to persistent sinus issues, humorously referring to the discomfort as "cottage cheese" affecting his sinuses. [00:55] Victor explains that despite previous extensive surgeries, he remains optimistic about recovery and intends to continue recording episodes during his recuperation.
Jack Fowler adds levity to the conversation by mentioning a Catholic priest, Father Hartman, whom Victor met at the Bradley Prize reception. They discuss Saint Blaise, the patron saint of the throat, highlighting Victor's attempts to find miraculous relief from his sinus problems through prayer. [03:15] This segment underscores the hosts' ability to blend personal stories with broader discussions, setting a relatable tone for the episode.
Transitioning to geopolitical issues, Victor delves into the etymology of "Sino," clarifying its roots from Greek and Latin origins related to China. [05:00] This linguistic exploration sets the stage for a deeper discussion on the current threat posed by China.
Jack introduces the topic by referencing U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's alarming statement about China's "imminent" threat to Taiwan, as reported by the Daily Mail. [06:18] Hegseth emphasized the urgency for Indo-Pacific allies to bolster their defense budgets in response to China's aggressive posturing.
Victor critiques the U.S.'s preparedness to counter a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan. [07:02] He highlights the logistical challenges, such as the vast distance between Asia and Europe, and the current allocation of U.S. weaponry to Ukraine and Israel. Victor mentions innovative defense companies like Anduril, led by Palmer Luckey, which are developing cost-effective drones and maritime platforms that could potentially deter or mitigate Chinese aggression. [07:38]
He draws historical parallels, citing the British naval superiority that thwarted Napoleon's plans to invade Europe by sea. Victor questions whether the current U.S. defense capabilities are sufficient to prevent a similar scenario in the Indo-Pacific region. [08:45]
Jack shifts the focus to former President Donald Trump's recent statements on China's economic challenges and subsequent deal-making. [11:12] Trump claims to have alleviated China's economic woes by striking a swift deal after imposing high tariffs that significantly hindered China's ability to trade with the U.S. However, he criticizes China for violating this agreement, questioning Trump's sincerity and effectiveness in handling Sino-American relations.
Victor responds by analyzing the potential judicial obstacles Trump may face in overturning existing tariffs. [12:50] He suggests that China might be banking on legal challenges that could delay or nullify Trump's tariff policies. Additionally, Victor links these economic tensions to broader geopolitical maneuvers, including Russia's actions in Ukraine, attributing some of the current global instability to shifts in U.S. foreign policy from Biden to Trump.
The conversation transitions to President Joe Biden's public statements regarding his health. [15:42] Jack references Biden's appearance post-cancer diagnosis, where Biden humorously remarked on his mental competence and mobility. [16:25] Victor critiques Biden's demeanor, recalling instances where Biden made aggressive remarks, such as threatening to physically confront critics like Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson.
Victor reminisces about Biden's past behavior in high school, likening his current combative stance to that of a habitual aggressor. [17:19] He contrasts Biden's behavior with previous political leaders, suggesting that Biden's public persona undermines his credibility and effectiveness as a leader.
Jack introduces a segment on the Democratic Party's challenges with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, referencing Victor's article on the subject. [32:36] Victor elaborates on how DEI has become an "albatross" for Democrats, intertwining race and identity politics into every issue, thereby paralyzing productive discourse. He argues that DEI's pervasive influence forces Democrats to frame all policy discussions through a racial or sexual orientation lens, limiting their ability to address substantive issues effectively.
Victor cites examples such as school reforms, border policies, and energy initiatives, explaining how DEI considerations have complicated these areas. [35:33] He contends that this overemphasis on DEI has alienated both traditional Democratic supporters and the broader American electorate, contributing to internal fractures within the party.
Jack brings up internal debates within the gay community, particularly the tension between conservative and left-wing perspectives on transgender issues. [44:23] A listener's comment highlights the schism over the intersection of gay identity and transgender activism. Victor responds by criticizing the rapid expansion of transgender advocacy within the gay community, arguing that it detracts from core issues such as HIV/AIDS and diverts resources from meaningful progress.
He points out the physical advantages of biological males in women's sports as a contentious issue, asserting that transgender women often do not compete on equal footing with cisgender women. [55:18] Victor believes that the radicalization of transgender advocacy has damaged the LGBTQ+ movement's credibility and effectiveness.
In response to Jack's inquiry, Victor shares updates on his forthcoming book titled "The Return of Trump and his MAGA Counter Revolution." [44:23] He outlines the book's structure, which explores the resurgence of the MAGA movement post-Trump's presidency, its impact on American politics, and the broader societal shifts. The book aims to analyze the sustainability of the MAGA ideology without Trump's direct leadership and its implications for the Republican Party.
Victor expresses his commitment to completing the book despite ongoing health challenges, highlighting the extensive research and analysis involved. [49:15]
As the episode wraps up, Jack reads listener comments praising Victor's engaging and informative style. [61:17] The hosts encourage listeners to engage with Victor's various platforms, including his website and newsletter, "Civil Thoughts," which offers curated readings every Friday.
Victor concludes by acknowledging his jet lag and humorously referencing Biden's infamous closet anecdote related to mental health. [62:41] The episode ends on a lighthearted note, maintaining the dynamic rapport between the hosts.
Victor Davis Hanson at [00:55]:
"I've had a more extensive surgery before and it was... I was out for quite some time. But I'll try to record them. We won't miss anything."
Victor Davis Hanson at [07:02]:
"There's a twofold problem, and that is that Asia's a long way from Europe, so the Europeans will have no role and they'll be busy with Russia and Ukraine."
Jack Fowler at [16:25]:
"Biden jokes that he was mentally incompetent. He joked and he said his metastas metastasized prostate cancers."
Victor Davis Hanson at [32:36]:
"They can't just say there might be a possible sort of kind of danger about castration and chemical castration and breast removal for children and 13 or 14. So we're going to look at this. No, that's transphobia."
Victor Davis Hanson at [44:23]:
"They always have to have a victim class. And the civil rights was stale... now they were saying, oh, it's transgendered people."
This episode of The Victor Davis Hanson Show provides a multifaceted exploration of pressing geopolitical tensions, internal U.S. political dynamics, and social issues within the LGBTQ+ community. Through candid discussions and incisive analysis, hosts Victor Davis Hanson and Jack Fowler offer listeners a comprehensive understanding of the challenges facing contemporary America, both domestically and on the global stage.