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Jack Fowler
Hello ladies. Hello gentlemen. This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show. I'm Jack Fowler, the host. You are here to listen to Victor Davis Hansen, the star namesake. He is the Martin and Eli Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. Victor's best selling author, syndicated columnist, farmer, classicist, philologist. I think I said that right. He's got a website, the Blade of Perseus@VictorHansen.com I'll tell you why later in this show. You should be checking that out and even subscribing. We are recording on Saturday 14th December and this episode will be up on December 19th, Thursday, December 19th. Santa Claus is going to be coming in a few days, so maybe we'll get a Christmas item in here. A lot to talk about. Victor on an issue I think you've written about it. Mexifornia Immigration we got a couple of immigration stories. We have outgoing or leaving or departing I should say, because he's not very outgoing. Mitch McConnell departing majority Republican leader with some caustic words towards Donald Trump and the MAGA world Secret Service craziness, Daylight savings under Trump attack. All that and more. We'll get to that when we come back from these important messages.
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Jack Fowler
We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Victor, I guess maybe we should start out with Immigration. There are a couple of headlines to get your views on, and the first is the headline that's been missing for years from the New York Times. After the Election finally. Oh yeah, guess what? There was a border crisis. There were a lot of illegals coming through and now we're talking about it. Your thoughts about the Johnny come lately journalism?
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, it's part of this trend that all of us were considered insane and now we're insane. And by that I mean we all said the border was. You know, we saw these clips every night of these thousands and tens of thousands of people coming across. We were told it was secure and now the New York Times says, well, yeah, it's secure, but we've got more foreign born in the United States at any time in history. 15.5% over near 55 million people. And we have, we had the greatest influx ever in a four year period, even greater than the great diasporas of the Irish and the Italians, Eastern Europeans. And we just discovered it. We just found out after the election that we didn't know it, we had no idea, we thought it was just a MAGA conspiracy. You know what else we found out? We found out, Jack, that the Wuhan lab, a mile and a half away from the first case where they were conducting virology with very poor security procedures and being funded with expertise and some money by Anthony Fauci via Peter Dasak's Echo Health. We found out after the election that the Wuhan lab had something to do with the creation of COVID We thought it did, but we were then reminded we were nuts for four years and it had nothing to do with. It was a pangolin or a striped back or a little cave bat. They were infecting everybody.
Jack Fowler
We were bigots if we thought.
Victor Davis Hanson
No, you were horrible if you thought that. So we didn't know about. And you know what else we didn't know? We had a suspicion that Joe Biden in the primary of 2020 was losing his mind when he couldn't finish sentences. But we were told he was fit as a fiddle, he was hearty. That I think Jean Pierre, Karine, Jean Pierre said she was invigorated being in a room with him. He was so forceful and dynamic and masculine. And now after the election, some they just say he's demented and he's not able to do things. It's leaking every time we hear about it. And the media, the media is saying, look at him, he wandered off in the Amazon forest. This is embarrassing. And it all, I guess it all happened after the election. In other words, suddenly after November 5th, Joe Biden had a stroke. And for the first time we found out that he was demented. And then for the first time after the election, we had some people cross the border and we didn't know it. And for the first, the first time, in addition, we had some new information that that lab was insecure. We didn't know that before. So we're being told that you were not crazy. You people, all you people listening who thought Joe had problems, or you thought the lab might be the culprit, or you thought there were a few, just a little bit too many people coming across, you were right. However, had Kamala Harris won, you were wrong.
Jack Fowler
Don't forget, the New York Post was right when Miranda Devine reporting about a laptop.
Victor Davis Hanson
So you want to know another thing? Kamala Harris said a lot of things during the election. She said she was for fracking. She was foreclosing the border. Well, she's there now at vice president. Why doesn't she carry out her campaign promises? Why doesn't she tell the oil industry, drill, baby, drill, I told you that I was for fracking. Why doesn't she say, joe, don't sell off that wall. You're selling it for a penny on the dollar. Those big segments for $5 a ton or something. It's prime steel. It's there. Let's build that wall. Like I told people that I was for border security. I've already said that. No, I told you on this podcast, Jack, that whether she won or lost, she would revert back to her lifelong idiotic, hardcore progressive. And that this hundred days was a complete fake. And all these positions that she had adopted, she didn't mean. And people got to give credit to the American people. They knew that better than I did.
Jack Fowler
Yeah. Well, another immigration related story is Tom Homan, who will head ICE under President Trump. And he's been giving endless interviews. I love this guy. He's just like a really real deal. And he says, excuse me, the first major city that he plans to put significant efforts into finding these illegals, especially the criminal ones, is Chicago. Of course, he's also had some very good back and forth in New York City with Eric Adams, who was even going to issue executive orders to facilitate what ICE is doing. But in Chicago, the mayor there has doubled down on sanctuary mumbo jumbo. Your thoughts about Hohman and focusing on.
Victor Davis Hanson
I know if Donald Trump just said Joe Biden was right about a lot of things, I'm going to apply the Joe Biden standard to Mayor Johnson. Mayor Johnson, did you know you were involved with the Turkish government and you have been a lobbyist for Turkey? And we're going to indict you just like Biden indicted Eric Adams because he disagreed with. So they set a precedent. If you disagree with the federal government on immigration policy, then you were going to be indicted. So you're going to be invited. I guess what Homan's doing, you know, there's that famous phrase in French and I can't pronounce French very well. I can read it but not pronounce it very well. Pour encourage L'art to encourage the others. And it's a phrase that comes from, as I remember Voltaire's Candide doing this by memory. But he says at one point in that novel is kind of a weird novel, brilliant but crazy. He says the British have this peculiar custom that every once in a while they hang an admiral to encourage the others. And he was referring to Admiral byng somewhere around 1750 or 60. He was kind of a corpulent, status quo functionary, talentless, but part of the nomenclature of the British aristocracy. And he, the British did not perform well on his squadron. And I think it was in Mallorca where they lost. He couldn't defend the grass in Mallorca against the French and so they decided to try him even though they had never done this recently. And they didn't hang him. As I remember, they shot him and he was kind of just why are you shooting me? I'm just a retiring 50 something in corporate fat admiral that like the rest of you. And so Voltaire being very witty said, basically every once in a while you've got to show something. So what Homan is doing is thinking, oh my gosh, who is the admiral being of all of these 600 jurisdictions that I have to encourage you? Ah, I know the most obnoxious, the most crazy, the most nullification advocate and one of the second or third largest cities is Chicago, that crazy Mayor Johnson. So we're going to tell him first, you try to stop the federal government and you think you're South Carolina 1832 or you think you're firing on Fort Sumner, you're going to be, you're going to regret it because you were breaking federal law. And we have a lot more federal laws that you would want us to follow in your interest than you do federal laws to break. And that's going to be interesting because what Homan is basically doing is talking over the mayor's head to the black constituencies of Chicago and saying, don't worry, your mayor doesn't. He's going to break the law, but I'm going to follow it and I'll put Him in jail for your benefit, so that you don't have to worry about Venezuelans and Colombians shooting you or taking over your social services.
Jack Fowler
Victor, ton accent francais et mar encourage lotre his quoting.
Victor Davis Hanson
I remember a professor in those days, there were confidentialities about transcripts, and the student did not have a right to look at them. I had been applying for Classic Shops with my recently minted PhDs. I was just turned 26, and there were no jobs for white males in 1980. So one of these professors who was interviewing me said, have you seen your file? I said, of course not. He said, your chairman wrote that while you had amazing and quick graduate school, that you looked at the graduate exams as mere hurdles and not intellectual exercises to appreciate. You just try to get in and out as quickly as possible. And I said I did. And he said, although he knew Greek and Latin superbly and he had a reading knowledge, we were disappointed that he wasn't as fluent. As fluent or fluent at all in the spoken languages, which are the mark of a true intellectual. In other words, for a classicist, you have to be able to read Italian, Greek and German. He could do that. He passed the test, but he didn't go to the opera, he didn't hang out with us, he didn't speak French. So we find him wanting. And they put that in there. And the only reason, this guy, it was some college in Tennessee. And he was trying to tell me that he liked that idea, that the guy couldn't fault me for being a classicist, but said I was not a true intellectual because I did not go to the salon on. That was on the campus and speak French all day. On Saturday, I had a gardening job. I mean, I had a little ranchero, remember rancheros? I had a bunch of gardening tools. And I had about seven to eight professors. And they all had. In those days, the most expensive thing in Palo Alto or Menlo park was to have a Japanese gardener. And they would go in, they were wonderful. And they would go in and they would examine diseases, fungi, pruning. But they didn't like to go in and weed and take all the brush out. So they would tell the Japanese gardener. There was two of them that I followed up as kind of the catfish, garbage fish. They would do all of the elegant stuff. And then I came in about an hour later and picked up all the trash and did all this. And then I took it out to the Palo Alto dump by the ocean. I did that for two years on Saturdays and Sundays.
Jack Fowler
Well, it was a living.
Victor Davis Hanson
But I did not learn to encourage the others very well.
Jack Fowler
Well, I think you had the last laugh on that, Professor. Hey, Victor, before we tackle one last immigration related item, I just want to take a moment to welcome our new sponsor, Home Title Lock. If your title isn't being monitored, scammers can transfer the title of your home into their name using a one page document document they file at the county, then take out loans against it or even sell it behind your back. You won't find out until collection or even foreclosure notices start arriving in your mailbox. But by that time the damage has been done and you're left with a financial and legal nightmare. The best way to protect your equity is with triple lock protection from our friends at Home Title lock. Triple lock protection is 247 monitoring alerts of any changes and God forbid if the worst happens, restoration services at no out of pocket cost to you. So, dear listener, when was the last time you checked on your title, huh? Well, you can check on your home's title today and make sure you're not already a victim. You can get a free title history report and a 30 day free trial of triple lock protection today by going to hometitlelock.com and using the promo code Victor. Or click on the link in the description. That's hometitlelock.com, promo code Victor, hometitlelock.com and we thank the good people from Home Title Lock for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson show. Final est mon ami. Finally, Victor, illegal caravans as opposed to legal ones. I don't know if they're all legal ones, but the immigration migrant caravans in Mexico seem to have disappeared. I read a story. Can that be true? If it's true, what has happened?
Victor Davis Hanson
You know, there's a common denominator with this administration and that is that they don't understand the laws of deterrence. That's a very good word. It comes from Latin, de terrio de terrere. It means to frighten somebody from doing something. And almost every humiliating thing that Biden did can be defined by no deterrence. So he was not able to tell the Mexican government, it is not in your interest to facilitate thousands of people to come across your territory into the United States just so that their governments can get in Central America 60 billion. And Mexico's case, 63 billion. It's not in your interest. And we're going to make it very clear to you why it's not in your interest. It's not in your interest, Mr. Taliban, to attack and kill Americans. It's just not in your interest, Mr. Putin, it is not in your interest to go in Ukraine and we won't tell you what we're going to do, but we can assure you by demonstrations elsewhere, it's not in your interest. Mr. Hamas, Mr. Hezbollah, Mr. Rand. I would not go into Israel and slaughter people. So all of those things happened because Biden didn't understand deterrence. So suddenly Trump is going to come in and he said to Ms. Sheinbaum, the President of Mexico, that he was going to slap a 25% tariff on all imported Mexican goods. And then more importantly, he had his subordinates hint, wink, nod and say that they were thinking of a 10 to 20% tax on remittances. That would be enough to pay for the wall. And Trump can say, I was always going to pay for the wall, but we're taxing, we're going to get 10, $12 billion on money sent back to Mexico, mostly by people here illegally. And so all of that has. And then he said, you know, what should we do about the cartels? We're going to declare them a terrorist organization. So that would mean anybody who's arrested working for M13 Norte Serenos, these South American gains would be considered a terrorist. They could not fly anymore. They couldn't do anything. They couldn't use the banking system. So he's got all of these things and suddenly everybody's surprised that there's not going to be a caravan that everybody predicted because they were afraid of him, not because he's a bad person, but he's bringing normality. The madness is over is what I'm trying to say. And I think the same thing is true of abroad. You know, people make fun of the fact that it's just a coincidence that, you know, George W. Bush straining under the unpopularity after the Iraq and Afghanistan war, this lateness term. And suddenly Mr. Putin tries to go into Georgia and East osatia and it's Mr. Barack Obama. It's 2014. Putin has sized him up. He remembers Medvedev had said Biden had told him, the then president of Russia, to tell Vladimir that this is my last election in 2012. If he'll just give me space, I will be very flexible on missile defense. And then Putin thought, yeah, he dismantled it just like we ordered him to. And you know, I didn't invade Ukraine. But now, now that the space weaponry is gone from Eastern Europe, the anti ballistic missile plan, and now that he's elected, all bets are off. I think I'll go take the Donbass and Crimea. And then there was Joe Biden. And Putin is thinking, I think I'm going to mass on the border because I just know this guy is demented. Oh, wait a minute, it's August. And he skedaddled out of Afghanistan and he left 50 to 80 billion dollars in munitions. Beautiful Humvees, machine guns, helicopters, artillery pieces. This is great. I'm going to go into Ukraine. And that's what deterrence. Biden didn't think that it was important. So we lost all deterrence on the border. We lost all deterrence with China on trade. We lost all deterrence with Putin. So what Trump is trying to do is act like a crazy person because that's how he thinks he can restore. I'll put on 25 cents. Or terrorists, I'll tax your remittances. Hey, I'll go after the cartels if I want. They're terrorists. I'm going to tell the Chinese they can't send any more fentanyl into Mexico or we're going to blow it up. And I'm going to say. And then they thought, wow, this guy is nuts. We better at least do something. And that's what he's trying to do. It's all about restoring. And another synonym for deterrence is sanity.
Jack Fowler
You know, Victor, I think other than Anthony Fauci, who is a government employee, I don't say necessarily he was a Biden administration appointee, because he wasn't. But I think he was the most disastrous person in our government after that.
Victor Davis Hanson
But he was a William McKinley appointee.
Jack Fowler
Wasn'T he was the busboy at the Last Supper. I think Mayorkas is probably the most reprehensible of the entire lot.
Victor Davis Hanson
Wait, a lot in Cabinet, the henchman?
Jack Fowler
Yeah, yeah.
Victor Davis Hanson
More than Sam Bankman or whatever. What was his name? The guy that stole women's luggage and dressed up as a woman.
Jack Fowler
Baldy. Bald guy with the blue lipstick. Yeah. The Energy Department guys.
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah. Or the Assistant Surgeon General.
Jack Fowler
Yeah. Levine. Rachel Levine.
Victor Davis Hanson
Mr. General Levine.
Jack Fowler
Yeah.
Victor Davis Hanson
It was a hard choice. The Interior Secretary was crazy. All of them were crazy. How about you're saying that Mayorkas was worse than Pete Buttigieg, the person who found out that all the clover leaves in Los Angeles were racist.
Jack Fowler
Racist, yeah. Yeah. Well, sorry I brought it up. We could be talking forever. On.
Victor Davis Hanson
No, it's a hard call, but you're right, Mayor, I think was. You know, why? But he was affected. He could just look at the cameras and flat out lie and then get angry at the person. And he would say, things like we're not going to allow people to whip. They're whipping hatred. We're not going to allow that. And then three months later, I didn't. I never said they were whipping it. I never said that. I said that was grounds for suspicion that they were whipping. He did that all the time, bald face, just brazenly lie and say it was secure. And Biden left him in there because he thought he was useful. Useful for what? For destroying the border and bringing in 12 million people who they thought would be constituents and flip states from red to blue in the process that they had done for 20 years with California, Nevada, New Mexico, maybe Georgia. It's that simple. That's what they wanted.
Jack Fowler
Well, Victor, we have some political analysis to get from you on Mitch McConnell and on the Democrats as a whole. Six weeks after the election, have they gotten it? And we'll get to those topics when we come back from these important messages.
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Jack Fowler
Good people. We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen show recording again on Saturday the 14th. This episode will be up on Thursday, December 19th. Victor's got a website, the Blade of Perseus. The web address is victorhansen.com Go there. Subscribe. When you go there, you'll find Victor's links to these podcast archives, Victor's articles, weekly essay for American Greatness, weekly syndicated column, links to his books, other appearances and then you'll see Ultra articles, Little Black Box Ultra. You'll click. You can read them if you subscribe. Victor writes two or three a week ultrapieces, so if you're a fan of Victor's writing, you are mistreating yourself. If you're not subscribing 5 bucks a month, $50 discounted a full year. It's not Christmas yet. Give yourself a Christmas present and that's a subscription to the Blade of Persis.
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Jack Fowler
Victor Mitch McConnell let's talk. Let's start off with Mitch. I have a note here. Let's see. Headline this is from website woaks by Mitch McConnell Tax Maga. Here's what he says. Outgoing Senate Majority Leader it's not Majority Leader, he's minority leader Mitch McConnell claims that the America first slogan is similar to those used in the 19 thir before World War II. McConnell told the Financial Times, we're in a very, very dangerous world right now. Reminiscent of before World War II. Even the slogan is the same. America first. That is what they said in the 30s. The cost of deterrence is considerably less than the cost of war. Blah blah blah. He does not like Donald Trump and does not like the people who like Donald Trump, who I would assume with the vast majority the voters of Kentucky.
Victor Davis Hanson
Senator McConnell, could I be so arrogant from my Selma perch to school you on a reality that you seem to be totally Ignorant of? In 1939, the U.S. army was smaller than Portugal we had no air force to speak of. It was not even independent. It was part of the Army Air Corps. Our Navy was smaller, at least in the Pacific, than the Japanese and much smaller than the British Navy. We spent almost nothing. There was no Pentagon. Today as we speak, the United States spends more money on defense than China does. And if you take China out of the equation, we spend more than the next 10 nations combined. I know a lot of it's on health care, di pensions, but we have an enormous. We have reduced our fleet and our air force, but we have about 50,000 people all over the world stationed. And you could argue that except for the Philippines in 1939, we were almost nowhere. We have 6,500 nuclear weapons and they were the best nuclear weapons in the world. There's six times the number of China. To suggest that somehow this country is like it was in 1939 and asleep to threats with this enormous power is absolutely ahistorical and reckless. If you mean that we have no will to use it, I think you don't understand that we just came out of $4 trillion and 20 years in humiliating fashion Afghanistan and we have been 20 years more or less in Iraq and we've lost totally somewhere around, I don't know, seven to 8,000 dead. And we have about 150 installations all over the world and that our soldiers have been attacked from the Red Sea to Syria. Are you aware of that? Are you aware that our Navy was just knocking down with anti ballistic missile systems and our air force Iranian projectiles going into Israel. We are fully engaged even under the derelict Joe Biden. This suggests that anyone who says after 1.5 million dead, wounded and missing Russians and Ukrainians, a devastated Ukraine, where 12 million people, about 28% of the population are no longer in Ukraine, where about 55% of the population of Ukraine polled wants a settlement, even if it involves the surrender of already appropriated Ukrainian territory to Russia, that is Crimea and the Donbas. And to suggest that the people with the United States with such military preparedness and such a record of not achieving strategic victory or resolution after tactical success, after success in Libya, in Syria, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, that somebody might just suggest that it is time. And the person, Mr. McConnell, who is suggesting this is the only person out of the last 24 years that somebody in Russia did not invade somebody else outside of Russia, that was Donald Trump, not George W. Bush, not Barack Obama. To suggest that this person is like a Neville Chamberlain or a sleep at the wheel Roosevelt in 1939 is just ignoramus what he's trying to say is that we have spent $150 billion in Ukraine, and that was good, maybe, and we saved it from being absorbed. But it's time to negotiate an end to a killing field that is larger than World War II Stalingrad. And to suggest that somehow he's a 1939 appeaser when the United States was disarmed and, you know, Europe, Poland was invaded, all of Poland was absorbed is not very historically accurate. Donald Trump did more to ensure the military preparedness. After he cajoled and lectured and screamed at NATO, they spent another $100 billion collectively. That wasn't enough, but they did do that. And they went from two countries in the alliance to spending their promised 2% of GDP invested in military readiness to about half the alliance, 40% of the alliance now. So it doesn't wash that he is suggesting that the MAGA people are isolation. There are people that are isolationists, but they're not optional interventionists either. And I don't know what he's talking about. I really don't. Donald Trump said, do not. Do not hit our ships in the Red sea. He said, Mr. McConnell, that if there's a drone and he can't identify it and it's in a military installation and he knows it, he wants it shot down. He wants it shot down. What more do you want him to say? That you want to supply the Ukrainian military that is racked with dissension and a country that's lost a fourth of its population is decimated, to do what? Invade Moscow? Go to Moscow? Use the hypersonic missiles that maybe that we're giving them to hit targets deep inside Russia that has 6,500 nuclear weapons as well. Just say what you want. Don't just make fun of maga. That's a cheap shot. Just say what you want us to do. He just say it. How many billion dollars do you want to give? You say we give them $160 billion. I'm Mitch McConnell. They cannot protect themselves from an aggressive Russia now armed with up to maybe 100,000 North Koreans. And we should give them a borrow. We owe $37 trillion, but I want to borrow, I don't know, $200 billion more to give them. Screw the people in the Carolinas and Georgia. They're living in tents. Screw the people in East Palestine. I don't care. I screw the people around the border. The border. We're getting cheap labor. It's no problem. 12 million illegal. I'm worried most about Ukraine. Just say it and then make the intellectual defense of it. But don't demagogue it by saying it's 1939. And I got that metaphor. I read in Wall Street Journal and I picked it up. I know nothing about 1939. I have no historical knowledge about the military readiness of the United States in 1939 vis a vis what it is we were appeasing because we did not have a military and people understood that. And when we did have a military, we began not to be appeasing and we didn't have a military because people mostly in the Republican Party, to tell you the truth, and the Democratic Party, they thought the Depression was such that it was politically unpacked, palatable to build battleships and carriers when people were starving. And the person who did it was not a Republican. He was Carl Vinson. He was an old style segregationist Southern Democrat. And from 1934 to 1939 he had something called the Carl Vinson Naval Act. And it was only because of him that when we went to war in 41, we had by end of 42 carriers and battleships and cruisers and submarines. So I wish he would read a little history and then be moderate in his remarks. But he's so bitter about, and I understand he has reason to. He was the punching bag of MAGA people. He was the symbol of. He's married to someone who's a billionaire who has strong Republic mainland Chinese ties. She has a shipping company, her family does. They've been making a ton of money.
Jack Fowler
Peter Schweitzer has written about them.
Victor Davis Hanson
Yes, Peter Schweitzer's written a link. He's very sensitive to that fact. He'll go down in Republican history for doing one great thing and that was no one mastered better the laws of the Senate as they pertain to judicial appointments. And he was able to navigate at very difficult times the confirmation of Kavanaugh and Gorsuch. And I guess I don't know if he was Comey Brown, Vera. I don't know if he did much there. She was kind of a shoe at that point. But the Kavanaugh and the Gorsuch were due to his mastery of Senate rules, protocols and red. And he should be congratulated for that.
Jack Fowler
Yeah. Kind of reminds me before we talk, well, we'll talk about Democrats, but I want to get your broad views on where you think the party stands now. But speaking of nominations, two outgoing departing senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema gave the finger as they exit to a Biden re nominee to run the national labor relations board. So that went down in flames. And sometimes there's a good thing that comes out of some Democrats. Victor, it's six weeks now or so after the election. So what is your take on the Democrat Party right now? Are they in a panic? Were they ever in a panic mode? Are they still in a panic mode? Is there any thoughtfulness coming out of anyone there? How we should, I don't know, change. Change for the sake of good as opposed to change for the sake of inflicting our ideology in a better way. Anyway, what's your take on the party now? This.
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, there's some people who don't want to lie anymore and they don't buy in anymore to the lies that we just enumerated. They don't believe that you can tell American people anymore the economy is great and inflation's in your head and Biden nomics is beautiful. They don't think that's possible anymore. So they do say that you can't just print money and infuse it and not expect to have 27% rise in staple goods over three years. There are people who say the border was open and there was 12 million people who came in and that's too much. And they usually, they don't say that because they're for border security. They say that because Governor Abbott and Ron DeSantis, which the left just admitted were brilliant in bussing people up to the jurisdictions of the people who wanted open borders and they had to live with the results. So they understand that. They understand Afghanistan was a humiliation. But are they willing to correct those things? And that is marginalize the squad, marginalize the Bernie Sanders kami socialist group, silence the power of the Pelosi Schumer ossified geriatric wing and get young middle of the road. I know that it's an overused metaphor, Josh Shapiro, but people like that and promote them and do what the Democratic party did from 1972 to 1992. Remember everybody George McGovern did what happened with the Harris, they hijacked the party in 72, partly because of Vietnam, partly because of Richard Nixon. And they went hard left. Most of the DEI stuff, the radical green New Deal, the appeasement abroad, the big spending, that was all McGovern ideas. He wanted to cut the US budget in half for defense. He wanted to have only half our carriers. He wanted to give everybody a check. And he lost by, I think it's the largest landslide still in US history by Richard Nixon in 1972. And so they cooked up how to Change. Now they got like this Democratic Party. They were looking for fast solutions and not fundamental redirection. So they came up, I think it's fair to say, with Watergate, two bit burglary. And they manufactured that, you know, Deep Throat. We now know it was this felt guy who was jealous about being passed over at the FBI. And Nixon, you know, dug his own grave, but it didn't, it didn't reach the crescendo of scandal and everything we see today. I don't think it did. I don't think anybody was saying that Nixon was using the FBI to suppress the news or that he was rounding up former CIA people to lie on the evil election, or they were forging documents or that he had the head of the CIA or Director of National Intelligence or the FBI lying blatantly to federal investigators. But nevertheless, that gave them a little respite. And so they impeached Nixon or they, excuse me, they threatened to impeach him. He resigned. And then we had the election of an anemic Jerry Ford caretaker government versus Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter was a hard leftist, but he was exactly like Biden in that he had a Southern accent. And he. Not that Biden does, but he had the same facade as a moderate. And by the way, the rule was in those days that after McGovern, you could not get elected if you were a Democrat unless you had a Southern accent. And 1976, Jimmy Carter got elected because he had a Southern accent. And that reassured people that he was a conservative. He was not. 1980 people caught on. 1984, the Democratic Party did not change. And they, they nominated something without somebody, without a Southern accent. Walter Mondale, he got creamed in 1984, 1988, they came right back with somebody from a northern liberal like Mondale. No Southern accent, no fake conservatism, no facade. And he got creamed. Ta da. 20 years later, after George McGovern, they got what they wanted. They got a guy with a Southern accent, and he nominated another white guy with a Southern, Southern accent. Bill Clinton and Al Gore. And that was not the Al Gore today. He kept his craziness under wraps. And those two got on a bus and they toured the company and they said, it's not about politics, it's about competency. Just like Dukakis had tried. But they got away with it. And they said they wanted 100,000 police officers. 100,000. We want school uniforms, too. It's time to bring decency back. And sister soldier, you don't talk about race anymore. You're dividing them. That was Bill Clinton, remember that sister soldier moment? And they were very successful. And so they took the Democratic Party and they enjoyed power from 92 to 96 and to all the way to 2000. Now, some of you are going to say no, no, no, no, though Victor, they were the beneficiaries of Ross Perot. Because without Ross Perot in 1992, who took, I don't know, 20% of the vote, George H.W. bush would have won. And in 96, Bill Clinton did not win 50%. Even a diminished Ross Perot took about 10 or 11%. And if you had given all those votes to Bob Dole, who was a terrible candidate, they might have won. But my point is it took them 20 years to reform. And then George Bush ran and it was a whole new era. And so they went into full Obama just like they went into the left wing with Carter or McGovern. And they got away with it. Why did they get away with it? Because he was the first black presidential candidate. And more importantly, I know this is going to offend Republicans and conservative. He was a fluent rhetorician, open changey was crazy. It was stupid, it was juvenile, it was fraudulent. But it sounded great. And he said, it's not about race. There's no blue, there's no blue America. There's no blue, there's no red America. There's no conservative. It's all one America. Remember that speech he gave at the convention? I think he gave that in 2004 at the convention. He introduced himself. He's not a black radical. He's not a Democratic radical. He's a conservative Democrat. That's what people actually said in the Republican Party and Bush. The Iraq war was a political disaster and the economy melted down. And you take away the 2008 meltdown, I'm not sure even with that they would have won. But nonetheless, they won for eight years on that. Then they got it in their head that it was a new Republican left wing party and they lost for that reason. People went back and said, I don't trust anybody. I should have never voted for Obama. And they voted for Trump, at least close enough that he won. And then did they change? No. They said they always look for fixes. So the COVID we have to have a national lockdown. Yes. Remember Hillary Clinton said this was fortuitous. It's our chance to get under the guise of COVID we can get one party, government, health care. Gavin Newsom said, hey man, this is a great chance. We're going to take advantage of this we're going to have a more progressive capitalism. They all said that. And they then, you know, it was January 6th, January 6th, January 6th on. And finally people said, you know, they haven't reformed. And so are they going to do what Bill Clinton did? No, they're not going to do that. You think they're going to close the border? No. You think most of their constituencies want that? Their tradition? Yes. They're not going to listen to it. You know what, I know that's true because Jonathan did you know him, he was a never trumpet, Jonathan last at.
Jack Fowler
The bulk ward of him, but I don't think I've ever met.
Victor Davis Hanson
I think he was at the Weekly State. He just wrote that. He's basically said to the Mexican American, screw them. If they're going to vote for Trump, then we're going to deport them. And he didn't mean that because they were going to change policy. He just thought that he didn't want, he was so angry at them because they had not towed the left wing line. And if it meant deporting them for a little bit to get them back into open borders, that's what they needed to do. But he didn't say help them. They don't want open borders, so we don't want open borders so we can gain back the Hispanic constituency. He said, no, we want open borders and screw them. And if they're not going to be part of our subordinate class, then we'll just let, we'll just deport some of their friends and see how they like it. That's their attitude as a. In other words, they're not going to change. They think they can have a fix. Right now, as we speak, they're thinking how? Well, you know, it was a close election. We only lost by 2 percentage points in the national vote. We came pretty close in some of the swing states. We spent two and a half billion to his billion. Maybe if we had three billion, maybe if we had 99% favorable media, then just 95%, maybe if we'd gone on Joe Rogan for 10 minutes rather than just say none at all, maybe we could have won. And that's what the problem was. That's basically what Tim Waltz said. He said, you know, I don't have any money and I'm kind of a working class guy. I thought everybody would just vote for me because of that. No, you were a buffoon and they didn't like you. But no, no, no, they're not going to change. And any fundamental capacity that would reflect the wishes of their constituencies. And it's just a question of they're just looking at Trump to see if they can get him on something. I guarantee you that if he loses the midterm in 2026, they will try to impeach him. He really will. I don't know what it will be for, but they don't care what it will be for. And they will try to find a scandal. And, you know, if you think about it, what party is saying to us, let's remove him from 16 state ballots? What party is saying, let's indict him? E. Jean Carroll, Alvin Bragg, Tita James, Jack Smith, Fanny Wills. What party is calling him a Nazi to such a degree that some assassins come out of the woods and try to kill him twice? So that's the kind of climate they use to damage the opposition party rather than to make fundamental change with a little asterisk that they also, when they lose, they want to change the process. The process. So the blue wall is wonderful. The Electoral College is wonderful. You lose in 2016, it's a racist relic. The Senate filibuster is absolutely essential. If you're Barack Obama and you want to stop the Alito judicial, you filibuster when you get the majority, then it's a racist RELIC. We need two more states and the two are going to be D.C. and Puerto Rico force. And that's why we want to enlarge it. We want to get rid of the Electoral College. So that's what they do. They try to change. Let's have mail in ballots, let's go to 70% and catch the Republicans snapping for one election at least. And we'll have same day registration, we'll have ballot curing, ballot harvesting. They won't know what hit them. And when the Republicans mastered it, they will say, well, we got to go back to something else. So it's either that they try to find a scandal or gin up some kind of incident trauma, or they try to change the system, but they do not want to make fundamental changes because this isn't the Democratic Party party of Harry Truman or jfk. Not that they weren't left wing, but this is not left wing. This is nutty.
Jack Fowler
As we were talking, Victor, Daily Mail put up a story. It's a top story right now. We get more. On Saturday, the 14th, insiders reveal how the Democrat Party is locked in a nasty knife fight as top politicians seek revenge for Kamala's 1.5 billion circus of lies. The battle lines are now drawn between west coast liberals, Bernie Sanders, socialists and modern technocrats in the Midwest who insist the party has completely lost touch with the average American voter. I guess we should just sit back and watch for a while.
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, I mean this is a, we're in a cultural revolution. This is a Maoist, Jacobin, French, Chinese Cultural Revolutionary Party. And I mean that by its holistic 360 degrees. This is a party that wants to change names of buildings to reflect that. They don't like the United States history. They want to change the foundational date from 1776 to 1619. They want to topple statues just like medieval iconoclasts. They want to create a third sex. They really do want to do that. Just if nothing else for sure. They want to ensure that women have a right to kill a baby as it passes through the birth canal. They want to ensure that you can register voters and have them vote without any identification, without any audit, whether they're actually registered or they're US citizens. They don't believe in a border, they want to destroy it. And they want to bring in 50, 60, 70 million people who are completely poor, without skills, without language facilities, that need massive government Democratic sponsored support. That's a revolutionary party. They want to, they are the people who want appease abroad. They're not Jacksonian Trumpers. No better friend, no enemy, don't tread on me. They are appeasers, as we saw with Biden. So it's a revolutionary experience and I think everybody got sick of it. And it entails everything from the Bud commercials to take a knee to that Jaguar commercial, whatever that thing was. It's a totality they're trying to change. It's the stuff your kids are seeing in schools, what they're telling you about the United States. They don't talk about Okinawa or iwo Jima or B17. They don't like any of that stuff. It's a bunch of white people that were racist, that were fighting the poor Japanese, that were victims. They don't believe that. The only thing they believe about World War II is they teach people that the atomic bomb was genocide and it was all about the Japanese internment and racial segregation. That's it. There was no brave people at Iwo Jima. There was no brilliant command at the Bastogne. There was no Jimmy Doolittle. These were all white oppressors. That's what they want you to believe. And the only way you defeat a cultural revolution is you discredit it from top to bottom. And to do that you need a disruptor and the disruptor needs disruptor lets and Donald Trump is the disruptor. And the disruptor are people like Cash Patel and Pete Hegseth and Pam Bondi, even rfk. And he's not going, I'm sorry you guys, you know, you're sober and judicious Romneyites. He is not going to bring in General Kelly and General Mattis and he's not going to bring in Rex Tillerson. He's not going to bring back John Bolton. He's not going to bring back all of the labeled sober and judicious uniparty establishment. Just not going to do it. He's not even going to bring back a guy that I like, Bill Barr. I mean I don't agree with him a lot, but there's not going to bring a guy like that back. He's going to bring back people who are disruptors and they're going to try to dismantle a lot of the abuses of the last Obama Biden administration.
Jack Fowler
Yeah. And probably we'll have, well, let's hope has sufficient popular support for such. Victor, we have a few.
Victor Davis Hanson
I'll just say in finishing if you're suffering from a cultural revolution, then you need the thermidors to get rid of Robespierre. And by that I mean you need a cultural counter revolution. So you need people that come into Madison Square Garden with Kid Rock and Dana White and Hulk Hogan and Tulsi Gabbard and RFK and Joe Rogan.
Jack Fowler
Yeah.
Victor Davis Hanson
And you don't. You've got to get people that mirror. You've got to go to East Palestine, you've got to work at McDonald's, you've got to get in the garbage truck. You've got to raise your fist when they shoot you and say, you know, fight, fight, fight. That is a cultural revolution and you've got to wage it across the board. So you've got to your education secretary, your NEH Secretary, your Department of Interior, they have to be in the same page because the revolutionaries were. And you have to undo the revolution and the restoration. These are restorationists. I shouldn't say they're just counter revolutionists. They're trying to bring back sanity and stop the madness.
Jack Fowler
Sign me up. Victor, we have a little time left and we'll talk about, let's see, Secret Service and daylight savings and we'll do that when we come back from these final important messages.
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Jack Fowler
We'Re back with the Victor Davis Hansen show. Victor, quickly on, on the Secret Service, which has been the subject of special House hearings and what happened at Butler, Pennsylvania. You just mentioned the President Trump being shot there and then the second assassination attempt at Mar A Lago Loon Ryan Routh. Who guy with more cell phones and guns and other. You still don't really know much all about him, but the other day it was reported that he was, he, he was seen there. Obviously we know he was seen, but he was seen pretty up close. And a Secret Service agent shot at Routh, who was in the bushes with his, with his gun six times and missed him all six times. So close. Okay. It's like horseshoes. I don't know.
Victor Davis Hanson
I mean he didn't completely miss him. He got within two feet. He deterred him. He scared him. What do you want to do? I mean, you can't always hit the target. You miss a few times, you mush up your hair. So what? That's the attitude of the Secret Studio.
Jack Fowler
It's really just. Yeah. I mean, what's the proficiency level that we expect?
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, they let a guy good enough for government work just came in with a distance finder. Right. They saw him. You know, he had the best shot at Trump. Better than the FBI, assassins, assassination, counter assassination, shooters. He came in and they found that he had a range finder on his person. They let him in and they had no drones. They had no coordination. He had encrypted files. We still don't know what he was doing with that, with his communications that may have been with people abroad. And then we had the head of the Secret Service, the woman that was Jill's DEI appointment, that I don't know what she was doing. She knew nothing about Secret Service. This is from a party. Remember that? Tell us that decorated Bronze Star Pete Hegseth cannot be defense Secretary because they have high standards that brought that person in to run the Secret Service. And then we had the replacement. Have you noticed the replacement is, is his name Ro? He's got this idea, he has that tester senator haircut, flap top and he's got the Andrew McCabe FBI glasses. You know where they have just. That was. And Then he's got that scowl.
Jack Fowler
How dare you.
Victor Davis Hanson
Don't run, okay? You're yelling, you're screaming, you're tough. You look like you're an FBI guy of the old school. But you know what? We don't care. You're running an incompetent and dangerously mediocre units that are supposed to have the highest responsibility of anybody in the government. Protect the president. You can't do it. And that's what's scary about it. They apparently can't shoot. They can't surveil. You remember under Obama that he went to, was it Chile or South America? And they got all of those agents for partying with prostitutes, and one of them lost their badge and stuff. There's something wrong with the Secret Service and they don't want to address it. I don't know what it is. I don't know. It's a lack of accountability at the top. I don't know if it's dei. I don't know if it was Donald Trump and they secretly did not like him and they didn't take it. I think that was a lot of it. They didn't take it seriously. Not that they were out to hurt him, but they just thought, you know, everybody hates this guy and he's going to go do one of those crazy Nutty MAGA rallies again. He does them so many, and we got to go out there and protect him. So nobody's going to shoot him. Don't worry about it. Don't get the drones. Just take it. Relax. Don't coordinate. We don't have to have local yokel police. Who cares? That's their attitude. Phone it in. It wasn't that way with Obama, but it was with Trump.
Jack Fowler
Well, Victor, one final topic here. And we started to record these podcasts, videotape them, and I know the great Sammy Wink will be finding a way to put this out.
Victor Davis Hanson
This is a bad one because I have a head cold, so I've been, well, that's bloodshot eyes. In that case, antihistamines.
Jack Fowler
It will always be a bad one because I have my face.
Victor Davis Hanson
But for those who are seeing this, you're not Skeletor.
Jack Fowler
All right, for those who are seeing this, not more than listening. The sun here in the northeast right now, it's 2:38. But see, the sun is creeping, creeping, starting to creep across me. And I know this has something to do with daylight savings, but, Victor, Donald Trump has come out and said he wants to take on and get rid of daylight savings. This has been the Kind of topic that's bandied around for years, like, why do we have the penny anymore? Why do we have daylight savings?
Victor Davis Hanson
But I'm curious system.
Jack Fowler
I think that was the think metric. As a farmer, does it matter?
Victor Davis Hanson
I grew up on those lectures. Yeah, it started sometime right after World War I. My grandfather used to tell me daylight's favorite. You know, boys, it's terrible. It's 6:00 in the morning, it's still dark. We can't work. We should have been out here at daylight. Daylight came and it's not. They won't let us work 8 hour day. And then it would be 5 o'clock and it would be scorching hot, you know, and it's just, we got to send everybody home. It's hot, it's got four more hours. It's not going to get. What happened to our daylight. The, you know, the dew comes on and, you know, it's. The real natural world doesn't match the clock. So farmers hated it because they felt like they couldn't hire people when they had all this daylight. And then when it was time to get to work at 6 in the morning and hire their. They get out, it was dark, they couldn't see anything. Right. So they hated daylight. I grew up hating daylight savings time. I still do. Okay, well, I never. But I understand. It was supposed to create what people were going to get home from work at 5:00. It was a reflection of a new suburban society that was emerging in the 20th century. So you're working at the office all day, you drive all the way home at 6 o'clock and you know, instead of having the spring, you know, 30 minutes, you got a whole hour and a half. You can go to baseball practice, you go to Little League, you can barbecue, it's so nice. And then, you know, you get up in the morning, you commute to work. Why do you care if you don't really care whether it's light or dark? So it was not timed to the natural world where we lived in. And we thought it was a construct of the Wilsonian progressivism.
Jack Fowler
That's what happened. Maybe it was absolutely.
Victor Davis Hanson
It was unnatural and it's so ingrained that it would be good to get rid of it. He'll probably get rid of the. It's a counter revolution. We just said that. So he's going to get rid of the penny, going to get rid of daylight savings time, maybe stamp out any vestiges of the metric system and reflect what people want. And he's probably going to say, McDonald's, you can have all the fat content you want. That was the subtext of Poro. RFK was in that. That's what Trump does. He was in that plane and they had that big, fat Big Mac, remember? Right. And it was like, oh, my God, I'm Superman and this is kryptonite. What am I going to do? They got a picture of it now and they're saying, sorry, Bobby, you go, it's quid pro quo. We like your votes and we're going to give you a cabinet. But every once in a while, you've got to kill the MAGA Big Mac line. Gosh, there's something about him that. He has an animal cunning that I have never seen before. I know he gets excellent. But he does things. Whatever the narrative is, he's able to. You know, when Joe Biden says garbage, who in the world would think because Joe Biden, Trump is suffering because a comedian he has nothing to do with is called Puerto Ricans garbage. And in traditional Democratic thinking, they are oppressed minority, not people who are upwardly mobile and mad about immigrants. But they're going to be a victimized. And you're going to demagogue and break Trump, and he brings it in, too. Then Biden says, garbage people. He's not. They're not garbage Puerto Ricans. That's the MAGA people. Okay, I'll get in the garbage truck tomorrow and get $100 million of free publicity to remind people what he said about you. Same thing with McDonald's. I worked at McDonald's. No, you didn't. There's no record ever that you worked at. Yes, I did. I can't remember which one it was. Trump's going to go work at McDonald's.
Jack Fowler
I'd love him. You've been with him. I mean, he's a funny guy.
Victor Davis Hanson
You know, he's got a natural talent. Yeah, he does. He just. I don't know. He said things to me that were funny. Where the hell do you live? When are you going to get in the big league? Something like that. It was funny. He's funny and he's affable and he has no social barriers. He doesn't look at people's race and class. He's kind of like Rush Limbaugh. Rush Limbaugh came across as a conservative and dye in the wool. But when you met Rush Limbaugh, Rush was really funny. He said to me once, if you're speaking, I'm going to. So he called me up and said, I hear you're speaking. And I said, yeah. And said, I'm going to get a car for you. Just look out for a Limbaugh guy. You know, he's kind of. I said, well, who do I look out for? You know, it's a Limbaugh guy. So I'm sitting out there and this guy pulls up in this huge black Mercedes limo type and he had hair down to his shoulders and he looked like a Colombian drug dealer. So I was looking around and he looks at me and he says, you Mr. Hanson? I said, yeah. And he said, get in. I said, get in. He said, yeah, Russ sent me. And then he's, you know, I get to the studio and there's not one white person there. And there are people from all over all walks of life. And the guy tells me that he used to cut trees for Rush and then Rush encouraged him to start a business. And then when Rush had his brand new car, he rotated them out to his friends. And his friends were all working class minorities. And he didn't mean minorities, working class white people. So he was one of those guys that felt much more familiar and at home with working people. And Trump may be a billionaire and he maybe talks about prestige and very important people and great reputation, but when it gets down to it, he is comfortable with people from all walks of life. And you never hear Donald Trump unless he's making fun of someone. Go to an audience and drop that obnoxious queen's accent. No offense, Jack.
Jack Fowler
I'm an obnoxious Bronx one.
Victor Davis Hanson
I know, but my point is he won't go. I'm so tired. We didn't come all this way. I'm so tired. Or Camilla or Barack Obama. I just wait, I'm Barack Obama from the inner city. That kind of. He doesn't do that. It's that no matter what audience it is, he has that mile long red tie and that black coat, sometimes blue, that comb over and everybody's made fun of it. He doesn't care. He doesn't care. He'll go anywhere and talk. And that's why people like him and they don't. Everybody said they don't like him. They didn't like some of the things he tweeted. They didn't like. Like his, you know, he gets into spats with Rosie O'Donnell or stuff, but there's something about him that is innocent and in. Accessible. Accessible. When you walk in a room with Donald Trump or he call, you're on the phone, you just feel that you don't have to act in a certain way or you don't have to be careful what you say, or he's just going to get. He's going to be blunt, he's going to talk. And there's nothing. There's none of this. Well, let me thank Victor on the one hand. But on the other hand, one could argue, one might say it's just the antithesis to the academic parlance or the media parlance or the politician's part. Sometimes he gets in trouble for it. Yeah.
Jack Fowler
I assume in person he must also engage with you as opposed to being the kind of person that looking past you.
Victor Davis Hanson
I have him one time. I've only met him one time, but I was with him a long time that one time. But I have talked to him on the phone. I haven't done it lately. I think if you're an independent journalist. And I will say that I have never called. I have never called to meet him. I have never called or invited myself. I've always been asked if somebody's called me or invited me to come. But I just mean that I don't. That's important. I don't seek him out. I didn't. And he didn't call me for anything to write favorably. It was just. I'm not going to repeat what he said, but I will say that the tone of it was refreshing. And I admired him because he's funny. And when I saw him, he was funny. And at the time, they were trying to destroy him, these prosecutors were trying to destroy him psychologically, financially, materially, spiritually, politically, socially, everything. And he. Every time they tried to destroy him, he got stronger. He was a Nietzschean figure. That's what they didn't understand. That mugshot, that East Palestine appearance, as we just said, the McDonald's appearance, the garbage truck, the bodegas, or whatever he was doing after those barbershops. Yeah, barbershops, you name it. He was able to radiate confidence in. He was indomitable, that he was accessible, that he liked Americans, he liked our country. You didn't get the impression that he was going to nominate somebody in a dress that was going to steal female luggage. You didn't get the impression that you were going to go to an Easter egg concert and somebody who was trans was going to pull up their. Oh, I forgot about that artificial breast. Yes. You don't get that impression that he was going to have people like that. Somebody's going to say, well, he appointed Mike Flynn. Yeah. Mike Flynn was one of the most decorated, honorable, courageous officers in Counterintelligence in combat zones. We had. So that was what was unusual about him. He wasn't an insurrectionist. He wasn't a criminal. He's guilty of a lot of things. One of the things he's guilty of, apparently, is he didn't claim that. He claimed that Mar Lago was worth more than $17 million on a real estate loan that he paid back with full interest. That's what he was guilty of. Apparently. He was guilty of calling up. Not that he was. I'm saying he was guilty, but he called up Fannie Willis and said, I know there's 12,000, 10,000 votes. Can you find them? Oh, that's a felony. We're going to go after you and E. Jean Carroll. I've got. He did exactly to me. What an episode of Law and Order. Like in the same store, in the same thing. And I'll just use that. And I know the dress. I remember the one I had on when he was assaulted, even though it hadn't been invented yet. Crazy. So, yeah, he's a unique person and he's going to. We'll see. We'll see if this conversation a year from now, if they're able either nature with age or the amount of pressure he's under or the hatred that they have for him. But I don't think so. I think he's going to be successful. I really do.
Jack Fowler
Yeah. Well, Victor, you've been terrific and we thank our listeners who listen. That's what they do. Some now will even be able to watch. We have a lot of new listeners, so welcome aboard. I've told you about Victor's website, the Blade of Perseus. Please check it out. It's for me. I want to thank folks who have written to me to say they appreciate getting civil thoughts. The free weekly email newsletter I write for the center for Civil society. Go to civilthoughts.com you can sign up for there. And what you get Every Friday is 14 recommended readings. Some folks leave comments on the Apple itunes. Lots of people rate the show. Give Victor five stars. I have two comments here, Victor. I want to read quickly. One is just the headline is an emoji. It's a thumbs up and it says so good. I am 10 years old and I like it. This is signed by a Rodriguez 11. And that's really coolio. And then there's another one. It's just Titled thank you. Dr. Hansen is a treasure for both good times and bad, when so many commentators are ego strokers who give off noise and no light this podcast is an oasis. And that's from Nate Ers. So thanks, Nate. Thanks A. Rodriguez. Thank you, Victor. And to our show sponsors. We thank them and we will be back. I wish I could speak English, Victor. I know I spoke French earlier. We will be back.
Victor Davis Hanson
You're speaking Bronx, New Hectonia Hall.
Jack Fowler
We will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Bye. Bye.
Victor Davis Hanson
Thank you everybody for listening.
Summary of "Immigration Outlook and Cultural Counter-Revolution" Episode of The Victor Davis Hanson Show
Release Date: December 19, 2024
Hosts: Victor Davis Hanson and Jack Fowler
Episode Title: Immigration Outlook and Cultural Counter-Revolution
The episode opens with Jack Fowler introducing the show and its primary focus areas. He highlights upcoming topics, including immigration, political shifts, and cultural trends, setting the stage for an in-depth discussion with Victor Davis Hanson.
Timestamp: 06:07 - 11:18
Jack Fowler initiates the conversation by addressing recent headlines from the New York Times about the border crisis, emphasizing the late media coverage post-election.
Notable Quote:
"There was a border crisis. There were a lot of illegals coming through and now we're talking about it."
— Jack Fowler (06:07)
Victor Davis Hanson critiques the media's delayed reporting, arguing that the influx of immigrants was significant and previously dismissed as a MAGA conspiracy. He underscores the historical context by noting, "We have more foreign born in the United States at any time in history. 15.5% over near 55 million people." Hanson also touches upon misinformation surrounding COVID-19 origins, linking it to broader governmental and media failures.
Notable Quote:
"We just discovered it after the election that we didn't know it, we had no idea..."
— Victor Davis Hanson (06:39)
Timestamp: 10:07 - 12:20
The discussion shifts to Vice President Kamala Harris, with Hanson expressing disappointment over her failure to deliver on campaign promises related to fracking and border security.
Notable Quote:
"Why doesn't she tell the oil industry, drill, baby, drill... build that wall."
— Victor Davis Hanson (10:13)
Hanson argues that Harris has reverted to her progressive roots, undermining the trust of her supporters by not following through on her initial commitments.
Timestamp: 11:18 - 15:37
Jack Fowler brings up Tom Homan's plans to intensify ICE operations in Chicago, targeting criminal immigrants amidst resistance from local authorities.
Notable Quote:
"We're going to slap a 25% tariff on all imported Mexican goods... declare cartels a terrorist organization."
— Victor Davis Hanson (12:20)
Hanson criticizes Homan's strategy as a punitive measure aimed at setting a precedent by targeting Chicago's mayor, whom he describes as "the most obnoxious, the most crazy."
Timestamp: 32:01 - 61:07
Victor Davis Hanson provides a comprehensive analysis of the Democratic Party's current state, portraying it as entrenched in a cultural revolution detrimental to its alignment with average American voters. He argues that the party's focus on identity politics and progressive ideals has alienated its broader base.
Notable Quotes:
"This is a cultural revolution... They want to change names of buildings to reflect that."
— Victor Davis Hanson (56:06)
"They don't believe in a border, they want to destroy it. And they want to bring in 50, 60, 70 million people..."
— Victor Davis Hanson (56:10)
Hanson traces the party's ideological shift back to the 1970s, suggesting that historical missteps have led to its current predicament. He emphasizes the need for a "cultural counter-revolution" to restore traditional values and policies.
Timestamp: 31:08 - 40:37
Jack Fowler references Mitch McConnell's statement equating the "America First" slogan to those used in the 1930s before World War II. Hanson rebuts McConnell's historical comparison by highlighting the vast differences in military strength and geopolitical context between the two eras.
Notable Quote:
"In 1939, the U.S. army was smaller than Portugal... today we spend more on defense than China."
— Victor Davis Hanson (32:01)
Hanson argues that the current U.S. military posture is far more robust and that McConnell's analogy is historically inaccurate and reckless.
Timestamp: 62:01 - 75:24**
The conversation turns to recent failures of the Secret Service in protecting former President Trump, particularly during incidents in Butler, Pennsylvania, and Mar-a-Lago. Hanson criticizes the agency's competence and accountability.
Notable Quote:
"They didn't completely miss him. He got within two feet. He deterred him."
— Victor Davis Hanson (63:02)
Hanson suggests that the Secret Service's laxity may stem from internal mismanagement, lack of training, or possibly ideological biases undermining their protective duties.
Timestamp: 67:18 - 73:48**
Jack Fowler and Hanson discuss the ongoing debate over abolishing Daylight Savings Time. Hanson shares his personal disdain for the practice, rooted in historical context related to farming inefficiencies and societal shifts.
Notable Quote:
"I grew up hating daylight savings time. I still do."
— Victor Davis Hanson (67:18)
Hanson attributes the origin of Daylight Savings to Wilsonian progressivism and criticizes its misalignment with natural daylight cycles, calling for its abolishment as part of a broader desire to reject unnatural societal constructs.
Timestamp: 75:17 - 80:36
As the episode wraps up, Hanson advocates for a cultural counter-revolution to combat what he views as the Democratic Party's destructive cultural agenda. He emphasizes the need for widespread mobilization to restore traditional American values and policies.
Notable Quote:
"You need a cultural counter revolution... you have to wage it across the board."
— Victor Davis Hanson (59:55)
Jack Fowler thanks the listeners, highlights positive feedback, and encourages audience engagement through ratings and subscriptions. The episode concludes with acknowledgments of sponsors and a brief mention of upcoming topics, including daylight savings and Secret Service issues.
Immigration: Hanson criticizes delayed media coverage and government misinformation regarding the border crisis, emphasizing the historical significance of the immigration surge.
Political Leadership: There is significant criticism of Vice President Harris for not fulfilling campaign promises and of Mitch McConnell for his misguided historical comparisons.
Democratic Party: The party is portrayed as being entrenched in a harmful cultural revolution, out of touch with average voters, and plagued by ideological rigidity.
Security Concerns: Failures within the Secret Service are scrutinized, highlighting the need for greater accountability and effectiveness.
Cultural Practices: Hanson opposes Daylight Savings Time, linking it to broader themes of rejecting unnatural societal constructs.
Final Note:
This episode showcases Victor Davis Hanson's unflinching critique of current political and cultural trends in the United States, calling for a return to traditional values and effective governance. The discussion is rich with historical references, personal anecdotes, and pointed criticisms aimed at both political parties and governmental institutions.