← The Victor Davis Hanson Show
The Victor Davis Hanson Show
Post-Election Analysis: the Rewards of Authenticity and Hard Work
01:25:57
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- [00:00]
Victor Davis Hansen
Time is our most precious commodity and we've heard from so many listeners who have asked for advice about how they can spend it wisely to improve themselves and the people around them. That's why we're so excited that Hillsdale College is offering more than 40 free online courses in the most important and enduring subjects. You can learn about the works of C.S. lewis, the stories in the Book of Genesis, the meaning of the US Constitution, the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, or the history of the ancient Christian Church with Hillsdale College's online courses, all available for free. That's right, for free. We recommend you sign up for Athens and Sparta. In this course you'll hear from Victor Davis Hansen and Paul A. Rey, distinguished professors of history, as they discuss the history, culture and government of each city, the ill fated Peloponnesian War and its consequences, and examine what is necessary in order for a democracy to flourish and endure, how best to form free and self governing citizens, and how to resist tyranny from without and from within. Start your free course, Athens and Sparta today. Go right now to Hillsdale Edu VDH to enroll. There's no cost and it's easy to get started. That's Hillsdale Edu Sl VDH to register Hillsdale Edu VDH.
- [01:43]
Jack Fowler
Hello ladies. Hello, gentlemen. This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show. I am a very happy Jack Fowler. I am talking to the great Victor Davis Hansen. We are recording on Wednesday, November 6th. This is the day after Election Day. Something happened yesterday, Victor. Something dang important. And we'll get to your thoughts on this soon. But I just do want to say that Victor Davis Hansen, the namesake of this show, is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. And he has a website, it's called the Blade of Perseus. Its address is Victor Hansen dot com. You should be going there regularly and you should be subscribing. And at the end of this podcast I will tell you why. Victor, I think we might want to begin talking about last night by reminiscing a little about some other important years and maybe starting with 1980. And we'll get to that and so many other things about the election and your thoughts on what happened. Winners, losers, etc. Chumps. When we come back from these important messages.
- [03:03]
Victor Davis Hansen
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- [05:25]
Jack Fowler
We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen show. Victor, my friend, I'm elated. I hope you are too. Whether you are or not, Victor did last night Donald Trump's victory, a Trump Vance victory. Did it remind you in any way of 1980?
- [05:45]
Victor Davis Hansen
Well, I've been kind of beating that dead horse. You know, on October 11th, a couple of people wrote me kind of nasty notes, but I called it the Scent of Harris Panic in the air. And I don't know if you remember that one, but I said it was like 2000, excuse me, 1980 when remember Carter was ahead in mid October by eight points, three points in the last poll. And then people just kind of got sick of everything. And just quietly, they just said, you know, I'm done with the hostages, I'm done with the lectures. And I think that was the same thing you could feel at the very end. And I know that they tried everything. They tried, they destroyed the reputation of Saturday Night Live, such as it was. They tried to lie about the Cheney going, you know, the bullet trying to assassinate them, the fake news. They did everything. But it was too late. And people had decided, I'm done, I'm done, I'm done. And I think he's probably going to get 53 seats, maybe 54. He's going to retain the House and he's going to, he's going to win the popular vote. They haven't won that since 2004. And he probably has a shot at getting 51%. No Republican has done that since 1988. And this is the guy that they, we were told we can't win. He can't win. He can't win. He's a loser. George Will wrote that. Every column. He's got one out today, basically. I can't write about the Democratic Republican Party. It's too far gone. Too far gone. The greatest victory in 100 years.
- [07:29]
Jack Fowler
Yeah.
- [07:30]
Victor Davis Hansen
And trash is the Democrats. So it's, it's just amazing. You know, and I, I'm at the Stanford campus. I was there yesterday and I was sort of, you know, a couple people came out. I, I said I was optimistic, but. And I wrote a column yesterday on the way on the ultra saying, hold on, keep, keep calm. This is all momentum crap. That crazy Iowa poll, that was all to drive up momentum, driver. Voter turnout, last minute fundraising. The whole thing about Donald Trump wanted to kill Liz Cheney, he wanted to kill the media. That was the same thing. They were all doing it. They brought out the Obamas. Oh, my God. Nobody is. All that proved is one thing. That mystical Michelle OB candidacy with her memoir bestseller I wish we had have got her instead of, she would have been worse. She, all she did was just whine and yell, call people racist. Same old 19, 2008. Oh, they raised the bar on me. Never been proud of my country. This downright mean. It was just redux. And then Barack came out. I don't know what, what mansion he flew out of, whether it was, he jetted out of Hawaii, Kalama, the Chicago, the Martha's Vineyard. But the first time we see him in a while, he's Talking down to African American men. You people are suffer from, you know, false consciousness. You're probably sexist. You don't know what's in your interest. Let me tell you what your interest is. Yeah. And he's thinking, you know what? I'm so clever. I've been pulling the puppet streams for four years. This has been my third. I need a fourth term. And you know. Right, just get out, get out. Be done with you. We've had it with you. I think they're, they're, they're done.
- [09:26]
Jack Fowler
That's across the board that we've had.
- [09:28]
Victor Davis Hansen
It is. It is. And there's no such thing as the never Trumper now. There never was, but for 10 years they played that fake. I'm a Republican. I'm Nicole Wallace. I'm Bill Crystal. I'm David from. I'm the bull. No, you're not. You're all. You're right where you always wanted to be. You're left everything. You told us that he was going to get killed, that he couldn't win, that he destroyed the Republican Party. You joined a party that is in full destruction. Yeah, people said. Yeah, people said, I don't like these people. I don't like our border destroyed. I don't like to pay $150 for a spool of Romax or $90 per plywood. I'm done with the hyperinflation. I don't like to be fleeing Afghanistan in shame with people falling off planes and a Pride flag at the embassy where we. 50 billion to terrorists. I'm sick of Hamas. I'm sick of the United Nations, US funding to the Palestinian radicals. I'm sick of it. I am sick of turning our downtown into moonscapes. I'm sick of destroying women's sports. I'm sick of EV mandates. You know what's really funny, Jack? There were so many. And I tried to write that on the Ultra before the election. You know, just be calm and look at the indicators. And the indicators were there if you wanted to see them. There was Atlas intel, there was Trafalgar, there was Rasmussen. All you had to do was go to Nate Silver and he rated them not by picking winners, but more importantly by the margin of error. And they were much better than anybody else in 2020 and 2016. And that Rick Barris guy, he's. I didn't mention him, but he was very good.
- [11:19]
Jack Fowler
People's pundit.
- [11:21]
Victor Davis Hansen
Yes, he was very under recognized. I'm going to mention him. I didn't mention him in that.
- [11:26]
Jack Fowler
He's on. Yeah, he's on X at People's Pundit.
- [11:28]
Victor Davis Hansen
Yes. And I didn't mention him in my ultra on the election before the vote came in. But they were there. You could see it. You could see that the auto workers were defecting over the EV in Michigan. You could see the Amish were going to vote. You could see the Jewish vote was eroding. It wasn't going to be 70%. You could see the black male vote was eroding. You could see the Latino vote was eroding. You could see the betting people, you know, they wanted. They. Every once in a while, they'd panic and go back, but they were pretty much sure putting their money on Trump. You could see it with the 600,000 increased voters in Pennsylvania, that Laura Trump did a wonderful job. All those people did. And then you could see the early and mail and ballot margins were almost better. The same, if not better, in. There were so many things. And then this is all. Besides that inert campaign. I mean, it was. She can't say that she's the continuation of Biden. She can't attack him. She can't support him. She can't say she's against the crime bill in California because it's, you know, it hasn't happened. The vote hasn't happened yet. That's like saying, I can't tell you that I'm going to vote for Kamala because she's not on the ballot. I mean, we're not. We're not voting today. It's just so faux. Everything about her was phony so you could all see it. And yet what did they do? New York Times, Washington Post, Quinnipac. All of them the same people.
- [13:07]
Jack Fowler
It's.
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Victor Davis Hansen
It's dead even. Bernie Moreno's down by six. Iowa is going to flip this. Ms. Seltzer's got a great record. She's got Iowa up by three.
- [13:18]
Jack Fowler
Right.
- [13:20]
Victor Davis Hansen
Ted Cruz is. Ted Cruz is done. Our latest poll Show he's only three ahead.
- [13:25]
Jack Fowler
He won by 10. He won by 10 points.
- [13:27]
Victor Davis Hansen
I know.
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Jack Fowler
Texas is going blue.
- [13:29]
Victor Davis Hansen
Yeah. Tim, she's lied about a wound. He's now down to four over Tester. And there's nobody's gonna vote for a Mercedes salesman over Sherrod Brown, a populist. And then McCormick. Oh, he's over with. He is done for. He cannot beat Casey. He doesn't beat an incumbent. We have down three. It was all lies. It really was. And we talked about it. We. You can't. You can't have a surge in those Virginia like they did in New Mexico. We said they weren't going to take them, but that surge showed you that it was across the border in Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania and North Carolina and probably in Arizona. And they didn't want to say that, so they just said there's not much changing in the swing states. Camilla's come back in the last week. She's dead. Or even beyond within the margin of error, which could be a big night. And she would say, oh, we have the moment. No, it never did. It was just all hype.
- [14:32]
Jack Fowler
You had sent me some document about the end of the early voting period and the registration that were terrific numbers. But still, those numbers have known by you, even, I'll put it this way, known by me were certainly known.
- [14:48]
Victor Davis Hansen
No, they were known by everybody. They were known by everybody.
- [14:50]
Jack Fowler
In the face of that, you had, you had people say, ah, well, the, the crushing numbers coming in now from Philadelphia are early indications are that the women are out in force and they're like 12 to 1. I don't like.
- [15:03]
Victor Davis Hansen
No, they didn't even get. That was a come from. Oh, you can look at the, the data the day, the day of the election on the gender gap. They always said, oh, you know, women are voting 52% and they're 16 gap. And the men are only. No, it was just the opposite. Men had about 16% gap and women was 9 or 10. And that, that wasn't enough, even if they voted at 52% to run up the margins they needed because they had offended the Jewish vote, which was about 45, 40 to Trump. They had a. The Mexican male and I, we'd been talking about that. I had not met one Mexican American male over the age of 40 that I talked to that was not going to vote for Trump. And I had not.
- [15:50]
Jack Fowler
I have to say I have a note here. The first subject. Your Latino neighbors were not b. Missing you.
- [15:56]
Victor Davis Hansen
No, no, they weren't. They weren't. And the thing that I caught on really early is they were starting to get bold about it. They weren't even hiding it. Six months ago, they'd come up to me, victor, I'm voting for El Jefe. I can't tell anybody. I said, okay. And then they, last month over. I'm not saying that the Mexican American female vote our young people went for, and obviously they make up 45% of the population of California. And they haven't really flexed their muscles yet, although they, they have on certain ballot propositions, but it was all there. And what happened is we have A debase bastardized media. And I can tell you I suffered so that some people wouldn't. I suffered for an hour and a half watching msnbc. It was like Cooper Ross. Denial, you know, this can't be. And then anger and then acceptance and then resignation. But not quite. I mean, it was. First there's a pathway. It doesn't mean that.
- [17:04]
Jack Fowler
Right.
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Victor Davis Hansen
We can't take the blue wall. There's some big urban votes, our traditional strength. And then the poor guys that had to lie to the panel, they would go, well, maybe, kind of, sort of, maybe it might be difficult. And then after that, and they got angry. I don't know who these people are. They know what's in our interest. Why would they do this? Who are these people? And then chumps.
- [17:26]
Jack Fowler
What do you expect of them?
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Victor Davis Hansen
Yes. And then it was the ridicule. Oh my God, all our friends in Europe are going to be laughing at it. The world is going to get very dangerous. You know, you have almost two theater nuclear wars in Ukraine and Israel that were both quiet until this tenure came in of Harris Biden. And they're talking about what Trump might could have sort of do abroad when it was peace and there was no wars. And then finally they were blaming, blaming. And they don't know who to blame yet, Jack. They think, well, you know, maybe it was Joe Biden. He was selfish, he was an egotistical. If he'd gotten off, he truncated the campaign season for Kamala. Poor thing, she only had 105 days because of Joe Biden. He hung. Yeah, maybe you could have pulled off your coup later, but maybe you shouldn't pull off your cool because he had an excuse for being cognitive decline naked say, well, he's senile, he's demented, so we're going to put him in the basement. And it worked in 2020. What was her excuse? That she was cognitively. That was innate. That was no excuse. So maybe that, maybe that was a worse choice. Who knows? But they're blaming each other now. And one thing they haven't said is, wow, we turned our cities into moonscapes. We let in 12 million people without help or background checks. There is no border. We are bankrupting the bud and the social services of our own citizens and big cities and in the country. Oh my God, the world is aflame because of us. Oh my God. EV is. The whole EV mandate is destroying the auto industry. We should. We have jawbone natural gas down, nuclear power down. Oil. That was a mistake. You know what? We should have never gone down the transgendered and tried to normalize biological males and things like women's boxing, wrestling, volleyball. And we did that. Wow. Hyperinflation. We should have never borrowed 6 trillion when the supply chains were still interrupted and consumer demand was just about ready to explode after Covid. That was dumb. No, they're not going to do any of that. And you're going to have to have some Bill Clinton figure come in like Josh Shapiro girl, maybe just like Clinton did in 92. And he said to himself, well, I think that, that, you know, I think the George McGovern and Jimmy Carter went a little bit to the left. So we're going to have school uniform and midnight basketball and balance the budget and 100,000 soldier.
- [20:15]
Jack Fowler
Yeah.
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Victor Davis Hansen
And we're going to get Dick Morrison here tell us how to triangulate. We're going to have. Now I'm not sincere, but we're going to be the. We're going to get Al Gore. He's not nuts yet. He's still Al Gore. Right. That worked. And then they got, they, they got complacent. And who do they brought in? Obama. He's really the fall guy today. He was the one that recalibrated the old Clinton mainstream Democratic party. Destroyed, destroyed it and brought in all of these nuts. And so they're gonna, they're gonna have to do that.
- [20:53]
Jack Fowler
They were ideologues.
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Victor Davis Hansen
They were ideologues they didn't care about.
- [20:57]
Jack Fowler
Yeah. You can, you can be, you can be a non nut ideologue. And that's a very dangerous.
- [21:01]
Victor Davis Hansen
I've had about five conversations where I work with these people.
- [21:06]
Jack Fowler
Yeah.
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Victor Davis Hansen
And you tell them what you are doing means that Jose Lopez's mother has to wait in line for her dialysis. Now because you've got people from all over world, right. At these clinics that you try to go to a specialist in Fresno and you will sit in a waiting room. Why people who are here illegally are ahead of you. You try to tell them that half the wrecks in Fresno county, the driver who caused it leaves the scene of the accident. You try to be an electrician when you were paying the last two years $150 for 122 Romax or $85. Because I had everybod building on my property roof. You're paying. I was paying $140 for three quarter inch plywood for a time. And you go fill up. I just filled up on the way home from Stanford. 545 jack a gallon crazy by and I saw about six poor people and they pull out their wallet. They put 20s and 30s. They went in. I thought, oh, you know what? I don't have enough gas to get over Pacheco. I better go in and put some more cash in. That's what they do to people. That's what the people in Atherton, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Montecito, Malibu. That's what they do to people. And they don't care. But these people finally said, you know what, I'm not your servant anymore. I'm not going to mouth your platitudes because you give me some welfare or something. I want to be middle class and I want to be upwardly mobile.
- [22:44]
Jack Fowler
They burdened themselves of what has been right.
- [22:48]
Victor Davis Hansen
That's what they did. That's what they did.
- [22:52]
Jack Fowler
Hey, Victor, I want to drill down a little more on some of the things you've raised. But first I just, I have to take a minute and I want to take a minute for our sponsor, Quince. Quince offers affordable, high quality essentials for any wardrobe. And that includes seasonal must haves like Mongolian cashmere sweaters from only $60 and comfortable pants for any occasion. Quince only works with factories that use safe, ethical and responsible manufacturing practices along with with premium fabrics and finishes. And they partner with them directly, cutting out the cost of the middleman and passing on the savings to you. Dear listener, that means Quint Items are priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. So you can update your look without breaking the bank. Upgrade your wardrobe with pieces made to last with Quince. Go to quince.comVictor for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Quince Q U I N C E.comVictor to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.comVictor and we thank the good people from Quince for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Victor, a couple of things. I just want to mention a little point here and then I want to talk a little more about Bill Crystal, Patrick Graffini. I saw you just put out a thing about white suburban women and they voted 5147 for Trump. I thought they were, they, they were supposedly going to be.
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Victor Davis Hansen
I asked my wife, do you feel, do you feel shamed, neutered because Donald Trump said he would like to protect you.
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Jack Fowler
Yeah.
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Victor Davis Hansen
And she said no. Because what he meant was that when I drive, get to my car at night in the remote parking lot, he would believe that if anybody tried to attack me, that person should go to jail. And then that would deter other people from Trying and that. That even. You know what? That was even stupid, funny people said anything. He says it doesn't matter. That's what they didn't understand. Didn't matter what Donald Trump said at the end. He could have said anything because they were going to lie about everything he said.
- [25:04]
Jack Fowler
Right.
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Victor Davis Hansen
And that's all they had. Well, they. And at the end, somebody said to her, you know what? You got about one point bomb, but you are so obnoxious. Calling him a fascist and a Nazi. Can you now just go back to your other fake Persona and talk about unity? And then she said, I'm for unity. I love America. We're all together. That's what she did.
- [25:27]
Jack Fowler
How do they come back from that, Victor? How do they. With this, you know, morning. Oh, you know, we could all get together, be one country. How do you get together with the other side that you have called a fascist?
- [25:38]
Victor Davis Hansen
And it's called, you beat Johnson. You have to beat them. And they did beat them. And then they're going to have to tell them, you're not going to get any power this time around. They don't understand that. 2016, Trump himself said, I'd only been to Washington 15 times in my life. He didn't know what he was doing. All of these people came out of the swamp with moss on them and algae, and they said, I'm here. I'll be your secretary. I'll be this, I'll be that. And he had no choice. And then 2020, they had so much money, and it was Covid. He would have been reelected easily without Covid. And the lockdown and the riots, they did that. That riot just was so weird because the more that he begged to use the National Guard, the more they said he was a fascist, and the more that he did not use a National Guard, the more that he said he couldn't control the mobile. And whatever he did, he had Millie, he had all those generals lying about. It was just. And even then, he came very, very close. If they hadn't changed the voting laws, he would have won. He would have won. Yeah, it's kind of good. I. I said that on Fox Theater night. A lot. People wrote me about it, but I think it in a very tragic way because it really hurt him and caused the law firm. But we got to see these people in the Raw for three, four years, and everybody saw who. That this one Eyed Jack, we flipped that card over, over and saw the other face. Once they had power, they were lying. We knew they were going to lie when they ran on unity. As soon as they came in, they stopped that border. She said the other day, ah, she was for the border. She called it a medieval, medieval idea and stopped it and they let it rot out there and rust and you know, who's going to be. I was reading all the foreign responses to this today, Jeff back. They said, well, I was listening to msnbc. Oh, the Europeans are. No, they don't. You don't get it. The Europeans want to get back on board. They can say all they want, but they realize that he made them defend, spend more money on defense. And he's not in isolation. He's a Jacksonian. No better friend, no worse enemy. We don't want to get involved in places where we lose. We're not going to go into the streets of Fallujah. We're not going to go do search and destroy missions in Helmand province. But you screw with the United States and we will bomb the shit out of isis. Yeah, we'll kill Soleimani or we'll tell Rocket man that our button is bigger. That's what he did. And he will look at Ukraine and he's a businessman and he will tell Putin, you go back to where you were before you invaded in 2020. And you know what? I never thought we could get the Donbass and Crimea back. Obama never thought he could. Biden never didn't. Zinsky never did. Now we've got a million three dead, wounded and missing to prove that point. So you can go back and tell the Russians that you won Dombas or you can lie to them about. It'll be Russian, it always was anyway and. But you're going to have to get back where you were. We're going to make a DMZ across that border. We'll arm the Ukrainians elite. They won't be in NATO, but they will be in the eu. How's that that. And you can. Zinsky can say he saved his country and you can say that you had to go to war to get Crimea and Crimea and Donbass institutionalized, established as Russian. And then all the neocons, ah went so as a loss. We wanted to fight. We thought we. We passed the Psalm in Burdon, right. We were on our way to 5 million dead and wounded and missed, missing. No, it's not. It's got to stop. And he will stop it, but he won't stop it as they say he will by pulling out. He'll do it as a business. Art of the deal. And the same thing with Israel. He called Netanyahu I know what he said. He told Netanyahu, look, Iran on no optional wars in the Middle East. We are not going to preempt and bomb Iran. But if they try to attack you, we will give you even more stuff than Biden did. And if you want to go out there and now that you've taken their defenses, the ball's in their court. You do what you need to do to protect Israel, and we're not going to object. In fact, we will give you the wherewithal. And he's going to put a terrorist ban back on the Houthis. He's going to cut off Hamas again, as he did before. He's going to put an embargo on Iran and sanctuary. And. And he's. The Saudis, the happiest people right now are in the Gulf.
- [30:30]
Jack Fowler
Right?
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Victor Davis Hansen
Yeah, absolutely. You know, God, we've.
- [30:34]
Jack Fowler
We have so not dodged, but not only dodged a bullet, but dodged a nuclear bomb.
- [30:38]
Victor Davis Hansen
Yeah. I was talking to a very wealthy person today, and I said, there's no wealth tax now. There's no. The exemption for inherit. For inheritance is not going to go down to 2 million. A little cottage and, you know, well, Morro Bay, California, will now cost your kid 40% to inherit it. And there's not going to cancel the tax reductions of 2017. There's not going to be price controls. That's why Tesla stocks skyrocket.
- [31:13]
Jack Fowler
Dow Jones is up today 3.18%. That's what.
- [31:17]
Victor Davis Hansen
And look at the crowd they've got. On one side, you had the glitterati. You had Bruce Springsteen and Oprah, and you had the Obamas and the View. On the other side, you had the Renaissance Hulk Hogan, but the Renaissance man. Dana White, Joe Rogan. Yeah. Gosh. And you had the man. The man. Elon Musk or Renaissance da Vinci. And then you had rfk, and he. He's got. They're gonna have to find a place where his gadfly efforts can be properly channeled. You know what I mean?
- [31:55]
Jack Fowler
Yeah. Let's have him. A special committee to ferret out everything Anthony Fauci has done.
- [32:01]
Victor Davis Hansen
I hope they have Tulsi Gabbard as VA Director. That'll be good. And, you know, I never mentioned my son, but I'm very close to him and he's very quiet and shy. He's a high school teacher.
- [32:17]
Jack Fowler
Don't say where.
- [32:18]
Victor Davis Hansen
Go. No, I can't say where. But he's. He's. He was. He never knew what I did. He had no idea what he did that I wrote columns or did podcast. He just was in his own world. And about two years ago, without any prompt for me, he started getting very political. And you know what? He. Yes, everybody, he fits that. What's that word? Lost generation of men.
- [32:40]
Jack Fowler
Yeah.
- [32:41]
Victor Davis Hansen
He's married, has two kids, very happy, owns a house. But, but he started listening to the regular, you know, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan.
- [32:49]
Jack Fowler
Joe Rogan, yeah.
- [32:50]
Victor Davis Hansen
And he called me on the day of the election. He was so happy because Joe Rogan had the day before endorsed Trump and Advance was on there and he liked Dana White and all of them. And then he, he sent me those mems, you know, where that, that crazy woman on campus is screaming her head off. And they. And then the Hitler in the map, you know, in the basement.
- [33:16]
Jack Fowler
Yeah, the bunker.
- [33:16]
Victor Davis Hansen
Yeah, yeah, I was really. I mean, well, your son probably is.
- [33:20]
Jack Fowler
Like a lot of they. And then we should get to this a little later in the podcast if we have time. Is about the death of the, the legacy media. Media is getting information from something with your eyes and your ears and those who think they own that the prerogative to do that, that they had a bad. Well, that's a bad morning for them. But Victor, let's, let's maybe we'll try to get to that and a few other things, but we, we've got to do it after these important messages.
- [33:53]
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- [34:59]
Jack Fowler
We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show again, recording on November 6, the day after the elections. Victor, I do Want to get a thing or two here specifically in about Kamala Harrison and if you're okay with it, I mentioned Bill Kristol before and focus a little on the never Trumpers or alleged Republicans and what it means the elections mean for them. But Kamala was, as of right now, Allah, Hillary Clinton on election night in, in 2016, ungracious. And I think in, in defeat. I don't know that that's a, you know, the world's most important. They are, but it's kind of.
- [35:44]
Victor Davis Hansen
She hasn't conceded yet, has she? As I'm speaking at 9:30 Pacific. I don't think she's conceded yet.
- [35:51]
Jack Fowler
She's supposedly going to talk to the nation tonight. But, you know, there's their traditions and, and concede.
- [36:00]
Victor Davis Hansen
I wonder what they're going to do. I wonder. I, you know, I'm in California and we passed the National Voters Compact. Remember what that is? Everybody, Remember everybody. What this was, this was the left, the left's idea that the blue wall is, is gone. And it's because the Electoral College was, should have been gone. It was great when we had it and we loved it because you could never, you started off with losing all the votes of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois and California. Now we've lost it and it's such a relic. It's a racist relic. So we're going to try to get around them. You have to amend it, you guys. You ha. It's in the Constitution. You've got to get 2/3 of both Congresses to vote and then you've got to give it to the states where they have to have three court. Oh, no, we don't. No, we don't. We're just going to get around that. We're going to go to our state legislators and get it passed that they will not, not recognize their own state tallies, but they will pledge their electors to the national vote. Well, Trump's going to win the national vote. So I hope California, California electors will not reflect the California win. Remember?
- [37:17]
Jack Fowler
Yeah. Maryland, like Raskin.
- [37:19]
Victor Davis Hansen
Yes.
- [37:19]
Jack Fowler
Lead his political allies there.
- [37:22]
Victor Davis Hansen
Absolutely. California has to give all of their votes, like Illinois and New York to Trump. Trump. That's what you said. And then I saw the filibuster. I think maybe you guys are right. You were saying it's a racist relic. Yeah. You're going to have about, you could have as few as 46 seats. You might need the filibuster, but you want to get rid of it. Get rid of it, then go over the side of the aisle and Tell the Republicans. We. We. You know what? We tried. We did. And we want that filibuster gone. It's just such a relic. You guys won fair and square. We don't need it. No, they're not going to do that either. They're not going to bring in. Maybe the Republicans should say, maybe we should bring in two states. Maybe we'll chop up Oregon and Washington. We'll make east Washington and east Oregon and four new Senate seats. You know, they're all so juvenile. Whatever they're for is just never based on principle. It's just power.
- [38:27]
Jack Fowler
Amen. It is. Let me get two acts of juvenility, if there is such a word, and wrap up here. At least me with Kamala asking you questions. Two things that happened at the very end of the campaign, I just want to bring up. You saw that she interviewed with a Muslim guy who was a relatively popular podcast, and she starts talking about her love of bacon and a guy who didn't.
- [38:54]
Victor Davis Hansen
I can't believe that she's got a law degree from Hastings Law School. She's a. She's an intellectual. She's surrounded with the bright people. She would know that the Muslim faith has reservations, as does the Jewish, about the consumption of pork products.
- [39:11]
Jack Fowler
Can you believe that? Like the. Just the total brain deaden. And then the other thing that was so phony amongst the, you know, a whole lifetime of phoniness was this door knocking in Pennsylvania where they had the. Oh, wait a minute. Go back in the house and take 2 cut and we'll redo it as authentic. Oh, yeah. They come out again to hug and like. It's this.
- [39:37]
Victor Davis Hansen
She was the same old thing. Remember the school? The little kids were actors about her space Zardom and she wanted to get the Doritos. She had. Take one, take two. And then there was that story that when she went to salons in Georgetown with the. The best and brightest, she had to find out who was there and coach herself on what to say. She's. Well, I mean, that was kind of gonna do. I know we. I don't want to be vulgar, but when Doug Imhoff in Freudian fashion gave it all away and said, now it's time for Camilla to put her head down and get to work. What was. I think that they had all that during that campaign. I wonder if that was a sly little anger at her. One of. Somebody sent me and somebody sent me. Seriously. In criticism, Arnold Schwarzenegger's endorsement. Look at that. You're. And I just wrote back, I think the Point of that was to show that Kamala Harris had the fornicate with the nanny and pay her off vote both.
- [40:44]
Jack Fowler
Right.
- [40:44]
Victor Davis Hansen
Yes.
- [40:44]
Jack Fowler
Well, well, let's talk more about about maybe the Arnold types of the world. We've talked before about you mentioned George Will. We talk about Bill Kristol one thing a little about Crystal. That is so I don't know that anything he does cannot be annoying. But yesterday he was tweeting like you know, the first votes in from precincts in Indiana are showing that there may be a groundswell here of like just shut up. Just go away.
- [41:13]
Victor Davis Hansen
Get. You know I, I never had a and dislike of Bill Kristo. I've met him. I thought he was pleasant. My criticism of him was on this topic. He was a PhD for just a bit. He was a professor and he was supposed to be an intellectual and he was supposed to be the brain trust of Dan Quayle and all these people. Right. But he never wrote very much. He never wrote a book. He never did any scholarship. If you go on, what did he ever write?
- [41:46]
Jack Fowler
He had a column the New York Times, 45 minutes, I think.
- [41:50]
Victor Davis Hansen
Yeah. I mean he never, he never really was a writer and he always, if you look at what he writes now, it's always co written and it's just, it's just banal. And so I this idea I never, I mean I thought he was a nice guy, but. Yeah, but he, you know there was a.
- [42:11]
Jack Fowler
He's very pro right now. You know the bulwark is extremely pro abortion and I have to say the Weekly Standard when he was the editor of it, well, he has to pro life publication. But they flipped on everything.
- [42:22]
Victor Davis Hansen
They get on the phone and they say to their billionaire Pierre Amador and the other people can what can we write today? What can we write today? What would you please, would you let us off our leash for something else? That's what they write. And well Victor, let's talk a little.
- [42:39]
Jack Fowler
More about the broader they. Okay. You mentioned George Will before and we had this the 100 or so Republicans who were basically members of both Bush administrations. You had a couple of Congress, former congressmen like Barbara Comstock and endorsers of, of Kamala Harris. We don't want to vote for Donald Trump. We want to endorse this woman. And Romney campaign officials, part of all this cabal of what was the center of the Republican Party had a very bad day yesterday. And I think there they're over with. They may not go quietly into the night because that's part of what you Said George Will. We're not going to talk about. Why are you not going to talk about it? Because I hate these people. Why? Because they don't listen to me. Well, you're not worth listening to. You know, we don't believe you. But these people assume they have the prerogative of power, and they don't anymore.
- [43:45]
Victor Davis Hansen
No, I mean, very hard night for them. The worst of them was, remember that he's kind of on hinge. Rick Wilson, oh, my gosh. He endorsed Trump. Trump, like 24 hours before the election. I couldn't believe it. I. Unless it's fake. Yeah, I got about five people sent it to me. He was at least ahead of the curve as an opportunist. They're where they always wanted to be. They really were. And what was the big. What they never understood was this. They kept preaching and lecturing and sermonizing that the Republican Party had left them and it was changed. And then they never really showed where that was true. If, if you want to go after Iran. He did more to isolate Iran and the Houthis than any other prior president without getting involved. And bogged down in Iraq. He got rid of isis, he got rid of Soleimani. He didn't get into a quagmire in Afghanistan like the earlier presence or leave like Biden did. He raised. He cut taxes and he cut regulation. He had better and more conservative judicial nominations than the Bushes did. You know what I mean? He didn't try to nominate a Harriet Myers or he didn't try a David Souter. He really didn't. So he would, on almost every item, policy that they had been for their entire lives, he was there 90% of the time. The reason that they did not like him, they found him crude, they found him obnoxious, they found him without political experience. But most importantly, they found him oblivious to influence and to affect and to channel and to massage. There was no way in the world that Bill Kristol or David Frommer, Jonah Goldberg or Elliot Cohen or George Will, any of these people were going, mona, chair, and we're going to call up Don Trump and say, you know what? You don't really know much about Washington, so you come to our salon and we're going to. We're going to instruct you with some PowerPoints or something. No, he was not going to do that. And he was going to embarrass them because he was going to look orange and his tie was too long and his hair was weird and he talked like he came right out of Queens and he hung around with people and professional wrestling and mixed martial arts and all. They didn't want any part of that. And so that they then created this whole fabulous, fabulous idea that he is, he had tariffs. He's a protection. No, he had reciprocal tariffs. And he was no different than Reagan or Bush, who slapped tariffs on, often before an election, on people who slapped tariffs on us.
- [46:36]
Jack Fowler
Well, you, you lived, you tried to live through that as a, as a farmer.
- [46:40]
Victor Davis Hansen
Yeah, I did.
- [46:41]
Jack Fowler
Repercussions of Republican trade policies.
- [46:45]
Victor Davis Hansen
I did, I did. I, I really did. I talked to a Reagan official and he came out and said, this is great. I said, you're, you're just letting these people dump raisins from the EU with 5 to 600 subsidies and you're destroying the California rate. Well, there's only 5,000 of you. And this is good for you, Victor, because I'll tell you what, I was only 26. I didn't know anything, but I knew more than he did. I said, if you do this, you're going to make people go broke because you cannot make it. The price is 800 minimum, and they're only going to get 400. And they haven't been doing that well anyway. And he said, well, some of them will get angry, but we're going to create, we're going to get creative destruction, get the chaff from the wheat and then bought. The price will go. I said, it will not go down. The store some made as a corrosion, corrupt, inefficient co op. It's broke. $27 million on the whole, it lied to its own growers. It said it was competitive and it wasn't. And so for them to stay in that mediocre co op, they had to lie about what they would return by borrowing it against the capital retained. And so the price will stay up. And it did stay up. And then you said, well, it'll make you a better farmer. And I said, nobody can make a profit at 400. And it was just like, screw you. And as I said before, you know, I start. I, I said that in an alter column. I, I just took a drive about six months ago and I just drove back into my memory, but in a geographical, concrete way all around this area. And I said, I look at that house. I said, he hung himself, he shot himself. He put the carbon monoxide in and he OD'd and he did a creative destruction. And there was the other. There was the ditch where the guy shot himself right on the bank. And there is where that whole family lived and they're gone. So Don jump gone. And there is that beautiful vineyard and look at it. And they just wiped out a whole generation of farmers. And I said they're going to have. The land was beautiful, the water was beautiful, the built, the homes were beautiful. And now they're all aggregated into corporate put 10,000, 5,000, 3,000. I don't have any problem with that because the people were often very capable. But you wiped out a whole generation. And so don't give me any talks about the beauty of free trade when our opponents don't believe in it. I love free trade as long as they free trade. So anyway, I'm getting is that Trump was a traditional Republican in many ways he was different. That he cared about the middle class and they didn't and they didn't see that. And the funny thing was they allied themselves with Democrats and that's where the change was. Not the Republican Party, it was a Democratic party. They went from Harry Truman, JFK slowly into Carterism and then into Obamaism and Clinton. Clinton had a little bit, you know, balance the budget with nuke in rates. But they went into a tax and spend old habit. But more importantly, they tried to defy the country racially. We had to hear Trayvon Martin. And then it went to Juicy Smollett, Covington Kids, Joy Reed, all of that stuff. Then affirmative action went into Woke and then conservation went into the New Green Deal extremism, protecting the rights of gays became transgender. In your face. Mandates on bathrooms. Worrying about abortion became. If you question having abortion a week before birth and you don't, you're horrible. It just, it just turned into a mess. And that was so funny because the Republican party had not changed that much except it was open to middle class people and people who were not white aristocrats in a way that had never been before. And they abandoned that, that and joined up with the other side. That was in the most radical transformation of any political party in 100 years and ended up right now, the most radical party in the western world. It's more radical than people in Europe. A lot more. At least they believe in IDs and same day voting. They don't believe what we do.
- [51:26]
Jack Fowler
Right.
- [51:26]
Victor Davis Hansen
And it's really weird what they do.
- [51:28]
Jack Fowler
We exported WOKE to much of the world.
- [51:31]
Victor Davis Hansen
I know and boy I used to. There was a generation and everybody makes fun of neocons but the original generation of they were really good, smart people. The Irving Crystal, the right, the Donald, the Norman poets. They were, they were brilliant mind.
- [51:53]
Jack Fowler
I mean, they loved America.
- [51:55]
Victor Davis Hansen
They did. And they wrote. They were prolific, prolific. And their point was the Democratic party had gone crazy and they didn't believe in defense and they moved over. But they wouldn't have moved back. Right?
- [52:15]
Jack Fowler
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- [52:56]
Victor Davis Hansen
Game.
- [52:57]
Jack Fowler
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- [53:52]
Victor Davis Hansen
Have you seen this? Awful. It's. I don't like AI, but somebody sent it to me and it's Joe Biden talking about AI and it looks authentic. And it's sort of saying, well, now you see that she's. She's a greater idiot than I was. As I warned you. You should have kept me around. I could have, you know, puttered around the basement. Yeah. And gosh, it was.
- [54:19]
Jack Fowler
Well, I have. I have one more recrimination thing to ask you about, and that's. Do you think I was reminded of west side Story? Sharks and jets and I think the white dudes for Harris lost to the Latinos for Trump. Oh, too, too sweet.
- [54:38]
Victor Davis Hansen
Too. I, you know, we. Everybody knew that was a disaster. They knew Tim Waltz was. Tim Waltz was at the end reduced to calling JD Elon Musk Gay. Think about that, right? This guy that people had rumored had all sorts of ambiguities in his life was now calling Elon Musk gay. He was a total buffoon. He was herky jerky from the moment he came on. Animated, clueless. He lost it. JD Vance eviscerated him and then went on to each weekend to eviscerate the media. JD Vance took on all the best and brightest the media and revealed him to be stupid. He won every single debate with him. He was courageous. He was smart. That was the best thing Trump ever did. There were some people on our side that said that was a bad movie. It wasn't.
- [55:33]
Jack Fowler
Oh, my gosh.
- [55:33]
Victor Davis Hansen
Trump knew exactly. He said that in his victory speech. He said, what a mind. What a mind. And he picked him for one reason. He thought to himself, I can go out and rally people up, and if I say this or that and they start bringing narratives, I'm going to unleash JD and he is a lawyer's lawyer. His wife is brilliant. And he will go on those shows and he will win. He will tear apart. And he did. And that had a lot of. That shows you. Trump had a lot of, I don't know, security to have a guy. But she didn't. She picked a guy who was a force multiplier of her own inanity. She really did. He. He was a disaster. He was a liar. He couldn't tell the truth. He had weird Chinese relationships with weird. He even lied about that. He said he'd been to Tiananmen Square. He hadn't. Yeah. On the day of the revolt, he said he'd been to China 30 time. Everything he said he had to correct. And all she did was remind people how she got into politics, that she was the consort of Willie Brown, who placed her on committee commission after commission, and then got his bundlers in the Bay Area to create a career for her even. Then again, she wouldn't. And then they got her into the Senate. She was a mediocre senator. And then George Floyd came. That's how she got there. But in that odyssey, she never learned how to speak. She never. She was intellectually lazy. She didn't have facts at her command. And at some point, someone was going to call her bluff. And she. And that's what happened in this.
- [57:24]
Jack Fowler
Well, maybe what. What. What happened last night.
- [57:26]
Victor Davis Hansen
Night.
- [57:28]
Jack Fowler
Has to do with Joe Biden's decision of picking her when. Which he. He boxed himself into a corner with that.
- [57:35]
Victor Davis Hansen
I don't know if they would have won with Josh Shapiro. But they might have won Pennsylvania. And then if they had done that right now, we would be waiting for Arizona and Nevada and if it was still close in Michigan, which it is, is, but you know, everybody should take, be very careful because these people are not going to stop. Yeah, I don't think they're going to win the House, but if they win the house in two years, they will impeach Donald Trump just like they did last time. And Jack Smith is going to indict him again with more indictments and get him in front of a jury. And Alvin Bragg at the end of the month may try to put him in jail. I really do that, Judge Michon, because he, everybody said, well he wouldn't do that, Victor, what's the point? Now he wants to be famous. And the judge who says I put an elected president in jail will be famous in the, in the colonnades of leftist ideology. Right. And, and, and I'm even worried about his physical safety.
- [58:41]
Jack Fowler
Well, let's, let's get to that, Victor, because that's really, really important and we have to do we, we have to take a break here quickly. So we'll come back to that right after these important, final important messages.
- [58:57]
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- [59:56]
Victor Davis Hansen
My dad works in B2B marketing. He came by my school for career day and said he was a big roas man.
- [60:03]
Jack Fowler
Then he told everyone how much he.
- [60:05]
Victor Davis Hansen
Loved calculating his return on ad spend. My friends still laugh at me to this day.
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- [60:30]
Jack Fowler
We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Victor's got a website. I mentioned it at the outset. The blade of Perseus, VictorHansen.com go there and you will find the links to Victor's weekly pieces for American Greatness, his weekly syndicated column, him links to his various appearances, for example, on Megyn Kelly's podcast or other podcasts, to his books, the archives of these podcasts themselves. And then Victor mentioned before Ultra articles. What are they? Two or three times a week, Victor writes a piece, an article exclusively for the Blade of Percy.
- [61:07]
Victor Davis Hansen
We got the one on election day up right now. The one I wrote before the election. It's still up. The latest. All right, drop.
- [61:13]
Jack Fowler
There you go. You want to read it, folks, go ahead, but do subscribe. 5 bucks a month or discounted $50 for the full year.
- [61:22]
Victor Davis Hansen
It was the one that said, cal, we're going to win the election. Don't get brainwashed by these people who are desperate.
- [61:29]
Jack Fowler
Well, I should have read it because I, I must say, Victor, I was, I got a lot of moment last night.
- [61:35]
Victor Davis Hansen
I did, too. But I just, every time I did, I said, calm down, Victoria. Go look at the new, the registrations, the early voting, what Laura Trump and the RNC have been doing. Look at the Jewish vote, look at the black mail vote. Look at the Hispanic mail vote. Compare it to 2020 and 2016. Look at the record of all of these pollsters who are telling us it's dead even or she's ahead compared with what they told us in the past. Look at, only look at the polls that had a good record of accuracy in the past. And I did that. And then I got, I went to sleep. I said, he's going to win.
- [62:11]
Jack Fowler
Then you. But, but then, not to nitpick these things, but you know, maybe we, people like me, where we spend too much time on Twitter and then Tim Alberta is writing a piece for the Atlantic and say all these Trump. The people deep in the Trump campaign are pulling their hair out. It's going badly.
- [62:32]
Victor Davis Hansen
Why would anybody, with all due respect, I'd not ad hominine him, but Tim Alberta, he used to write for the National Review and he had a complete gymnastic flip flop. Yeah, right. So why would I, why would you listen to him? He's never had any record of being accurate. None. Zero. Zilch. Well, he writes for the Atlantic and there's a prerequisite if you write for the Atlantic. That's where Stanley McChrystal wrote when he said he threw away his picture of Robert E. Lee and stepped on it and didn't know. He didn't know he had slaves. And then he was back again saying, remember he did cut him a commercial for Herods. And so those guys. The Atlantic is a total. That was Jeffrey Goldberg where he did an October surprise and said, right, General Kelly has said some more things and that Suckers and losers was accurate. No, it wasn't said. It was Victor Spelling.
- [63:31]
Jack Fowler
Before we go back to concerns about Donald Trump personal, maybe this is a good point. Talk about this and then Trump again is that this is the legacy media. Is there going to be a funeral? If there is dance on a grave, they are.
- [63:49]
Victor Davis Hansen
You know what? It's not just that they're biased, but they're stupid. You know, they have all those people, they had a few on there last night on mnc. You know the guy that used to do to Meet the Press and they kicked him off.
- [64:05]
Jack Fowler
Oh, I can't remember his name.
- [64:07]
Victor Davis Hansen
Anyway, he was, yeah, he was his hair copper. Yeah. He said something to the effect, well, this shows you that the Democratic Party may have gone a little bit too much, you know, with a Latin. I just, I just was with a lot of people. I just shouted on top of my voice. You did it, right? You did it. It's people like you in the media that use Latinx. You were the people that were pushing the Democr party to the left. You people. And who were you people? Had you ever run a 7:11? Had you ever built a house? Did you ever have it were a long trunk truck, a long haul trucker? No. You went right out of your journalism school, right into your network of friends and influencers and your spouse and your sibling. And we're supposed to think you know anything about the world. You people did that. And the other people who do real things said, you know what? I am sick of you. I'm tired of you. I'm not going to riot. I don't get violent like you do, but I'm not going to listen to you. And we're not voting for this coup that you pulled off and we're not going to do it. You know what the funny thing was? After pulling off a coup and nullifying the wishes of 14 million primary voters, plus they were on MSE BE last night. You know what they were doing? This was so unfair because she started so late. She only had about 110 days to get to know the American people, introduce herself to them. It was just unfair. Donald Trump had been campaigning for two years well, she campaigned in 2020 and she didn't even enter a primary. So she never won a primary, she never entered it. And if you'd wanted to get to know people, you could have got rid of Biden in March and like a lot of people told you to do, and then you could have had an open convention even late. Don't you remember poor old Joe Manchin? When they got rid of Biden, he goes, oh, gee whiz, they wouldn't have a coup, would they? I'll just go on TV and say, I'm going to be a candidate that lasted about one nanosecond.
- [66:15]
Jack Fowler
Right. I know how Trump was campaigning from a courtroom for weeks.
- [66:20]
Victor Davis Hansen
Yeah, he was. He was, was he? He was.
- [66:23]
Jack Fowler
And all these lovers of democracy that tried to keep him off balance.
- [66:27]
Victor Davis Hansen
Everything they've done. Think of all the things they did. The laptop, the disinformation. They were talking about Russian collusion last night on, on msnbc. Again, the new chapter of it. And then the alpha being ping thing. And then the SWAT raid on his house, the two impeachments, the triumph as a private citizen. Sixteen states trying to get him off the ballot. Fanny Wills, Letitia James, Jack Smith, Alvin Bragg, Eugene Carroll, the 2s, 2 assassination attempts. Think about it. You know, it was, it was, it, it was just nuts. And yet in a Nietzschean sense, the more they tried to destroy him, the stronger he got.
- [67:12]
Jack Fowler
Yeah.
- [67:13]
Victor Davis Hansen
And it was, it was really.
- [67:16]
Jack Fowler
I mean, what could be more strong than a micro meter from getting his head blown off?
- [67:24]
Victor Davis Hansen
Oh, I know. And then, you know what the weird.
- [67:26]
Jack Fowler
Things like fight, fight, fight.
- [67:28]
Victor Davis Hansen
The weird thing was that. The weird thing was that he was in the last two weeks. She's almost 20 years younger, maybe 20, 19 years younger.
- [67:41]
Jack Fowler
Right.
- [67:41]
Victor Davis Hansen
He was out doing. He was working 20 hour days. Days. And she was taking a day off. They showed her pictures where she was sleeping on her airplane. He was playing loud music on his. With his Big Mac. He was, I mean, he, he outworked her. He really did. He outworks everybody.
- [67:58]
Jack Fowler
Yeah.
- [67:59]
Victor Davis Hansen
And nobody. Nobody. And they never, they. Even if you didn't like him, you never. You have to concede that about him. He's a force of nature and he's indestructible.
- [68:10]
Jack Fowler
Yeah.
- [68:10]
Victor Davis Hansen
Yeah.
- [68:12]
Jack Fowler
Certainly proves it.
- [68:13]
Victor Davis Hansen
Yeah. And you know, and I, I think it really. Yeah. To answer your question, I think it really hurt the media. I don't think that the even. You know what? I was driving. I'll be. I shouldn't say anything about Fox, but I was driving this weekend back and forth. I had to go give some lectures in the Sierras and I had to go to work. Work. I was in the car for about 8 hours, 9 hours, 10 hours. And I was listening to Neil Cabuto's guest, you know. Yeah. And I was listening to Ethel Nevin's guest. They were pretty much left wing and they were all trashing Trump and not all of them, but basically she was going to win. This was from Fox. And yeah, I mean, it wasn't the Fox lineup, to be fair to Fox, but it was all based on the idea that somehow Donald Trump was so crude and he'd said things that nobody else had said. And, and I got that a lot at work this last week. People person came in, said, how can you dare? Don't do what about them? You know, I mean, it just. What, what do they not see? Didn't they understand the President United States called half the country garbage.
- [69:25]
Jack Fowler
Right.
- [69:26]
Victor Davis Hansen
They don't. They see what they said about. They called him a dictator, they call him a fascist, they. Tim Waltz called him Hitler as if he's killed 6 million people.
- [69:35]
Jack Fowler
Right.
- [69:36]
Victor Davis Hansen
And it was just oblivious to what that did. That had no effect on him. But it did get people to have. Think less of them.
- [69:46]
Jack Fowler
Well, you, you did a piece on 16 years of vilification.
- [69:50]
Victor Davis Hansen
I did right before the day. That was the two days before the election that people were sick of it. They didn't want to hear it anymore. Deplorables, irredeemables, clingers, chomps, drags, garbage, hobbits, crazies. We heard it already. You know, another thing was when they had, when they had their celebrities on there, Oprah, sufferable, Will Ferrell, they all had something called Will Ferrell said, you know, don't think you fu. They were yelling Obama. They were yelling at people, talking down to them. When he had his Hulk, Hulk Hogan and Elon and he had Tulsi and rfk, they were not doing that. They were saying, get out and vote. We can win.
- [70:42]
Jack Fowler
Right.
- [70:43]
Victor Davis Hansen
Uplifting.
- [70:44]
Jack Fowler
Yeah.
- [70:45]
Victor Davis Hansen
Do you see when the, the worst moment of their campaign was when Liz Cheney was doing that interview with Harris and she was just sitting there and she had that scowl on her face. And it's like I have, I have been reduced to listening to this idiot Harris. You can't form a sentence. And I have a smile because I am so brilliant and I was third ranking and I blew it. And all I had to do is keep my mouth shut and politely say that January 6th was a buffoonish riot and politely criticize Trump and then go back and make my peace with him as everybody else did. Right. You could have taken a playbook out of our Congressman David Valado. He voted to impeach Trump and then he never mentioned it again. And he had back feelers and made it clear that he was, you know, privately. He didn't publicly renounce it, but he made it clear to the Trump people that was a mistake. Trump never campaigned against him. He got it. They threw him out because, because of that, lost his support. He ran again. One and a plus nine. He won yesterday, too.
- [71:57]
Jack Fowler
He did. I saw he was up, but yeah.
- [71:59]
Victor Davis Hansen
Yeah, I think, I don't know that for sure, but he's up enough that he's probably going to win. That's all Liz Cheney had to do. And she'd be, she voted with him 95% of the time when he was president, so. And Dick Cheney was one of the few Bush people came out for Trump in 2020. So. And if she really thinks that insurrection is a disqualifying, and all she had to do was say, you know what, I'm sitting next to somebody called Kamala Harris and she posted that she was going to help you bail out violent arsonists, rioters, assaulters in June of 2020. And then she watched this for 120, 20 days. They burned a precinct, they burned a federal courthouse, they burned an iconic church, they tried to storm the White House grounds and get it Trump. They did 2 billion in damage, they committed arson, they injured 1500. And what did she do? She said, this is not going to stop. It's not going to stop. It should not stop. It's great. This is a movement. It's going to go on, make no mistake. It's going to go beyond. And, and she sat there with a person that said that all she had to do was say, you know what? I was against storming the Capitol, but I was also against trying to storm the White House and I was also against trying to burn down St. John's Episcopal Church and precincts with cops in it. And you tried to bail those people out and you egged them on and you made sure you and your people made sure those 14,000 arrest tested did not face any consequences. And the fact that you put people at the Capitol that were non violent and you put them in solitary confinement and they were still awaiting trial, indefinite suspense, you know, indefinitely. They were confined. She. And so I think all that was going on her mind, you know, wow, I got myself into this place. I'm sitting next to a Total and EP person. I've renounced all my values and I have to give a scowl on my face and not directly look at her but be used as if I have some authority after I lost my congressional seat by 40 points.
- [74:17]
Jack Fowler
Right.
- [74:18]
Victor Davis Hansen
What used to be Cheney country in Wyoming and now what the hell am I going to do?
- [74:26]
Jack Fowler
Maybe she could have a road show with. With her and Hillary and you know, another Persona. Harris doesn't have a job now. She.
- [74:34]
Victor Davis Hansen
There were a lot. Did you happen to look at Larry Saboto's crystal ball? I was.
- [74:40]
Jack Fowler
I was watching the criticism of people.
- [74:43]
Victor Davis Hansen
That guy, that guy used to be a liberal academic that had some.
- [74:47]
Jack Fowler
Sober. Yeah, yeah.
- [74:48]
Victor Davis Hansen
Remember, he had some degree of credibility because he would try to.
- [74:52]
Jack Fowler
Yeah.
- [74:52]
Victor Davis Hansen
He lean left but he was trying to be empirical and then he just flipped out over Trump and he completely lo. Was wrong. All his prognostations are wrong. Yeah.
- [75:02]
Jack Fowler
Did you know him at all? I knew.
- [75:04]
Victor Davis Hansen
I met him once. I met him a little bit.
- [75:06]
Jack Fowler
Nice guy and whatever.
- [75:08]
Victor Davis Hansen
Yeah.
- [75:08]
Jack Fowler
I have just total back crap crazy.
- [75:12]
Victor Davis Hansen
Yeah, they all were. It was like. It was like some of those. Douglas Brinkley and the other guy, the presidential historian.
- [75:22]
Jack Fowler
Me.
- [75:23]
Victor Davis Hansen
Yeah. John Mecham and the other guy that's.
- [75:25]
Jack Fowler
Oh, yeah, I know the other guy. Yeah. Yes.
- [75:27]
Victor Davis Hansen
He wrote me a note I had. He was the one that said Barack Obama was the smartest president we'd ever seen. Yeah. I'll remember his name. And he was.
- [75:35]
Jack Fowler
You could see his hair going back.
- [75:38]
Victor Davis Hansen
Yeah. He was on m. He wrote me an email once that I had been unfair to him because I met. But all of them, all of them destroyed their reputation. They all did. And all they had to do was keep quiet. Write their book books. Get on TV once in a while. Express sober and judicious concern about Trump. Maybe explore the dilemma they were in. They were solid independents or conservative Democrats, traditional Republicans. And there was a. On the one hand. On the other. No, they couldn't even make any new. They just went out and said anybody that voucher hand and. And attack the vote older. And I, I'm only saying this because, you know, it's not about. I don't want to. Well, I try to write columns. I don't use the word. I. I really don't. I try never to use it maybe once every six column.
- [76:33]
Jack Fowler
Right.
- [76:34]
Victor Davis Hansen
I just don't. It comes from classical training. You don't use the first person singular. Maybe we once in a while.
- [76:40]
Jack Fowler
You talked about that before. I think it's a. It is a great thing that you do and it embarrassing to see so many writers. The first word of their column will be I.
- [76:51]
Victor Davis Hansen
Well, one of our former colleagues at national, he has 10 personal pronouns in the singular every paragraph. And nobody wants to hear about it. But, you know, I try not to do that and I try to be fair in a sense. But I had editors for years at Commentary magazine. They were really good. And then that bulwark all of a sudden they say, I was a Nazi. I was a guru to the Hitler person. I was no different than people like Alfred Rosenberg. I had people that I used to, that were editors. Wall Street Journal, Commentary. It just completely flipped out and vicious, vicious this. And I, I, I thought, wow, this is weird. I think they've kind of gone off the deep end. But I'm not going to go deliberately, you know. Yeah, I used to know Max Boot really well. I thought some of his books were excellent. I didn't all of a sudden say, he's a terrible historian. I thought he said, I think he's a pretty good historian. I don't agree with him. I haven't looked at the new Reagan book in depth. I don't agree with it. But, but for them it was, I don't know what it was. It's very hard to calibrate. It's over now. So I shouldn't even waste time in the sense that their era is over. There is no never Trump. There is only former Republicans who went crazy and now are either inert and, you know, irrelevant or they're solid Democrats and the Democrats don't like them. They don't like change. They're thinking, oh my God, we wanted to get Republicans to go over. You guys gave it this. Was this a cruel joke or what? You just gave us your detritus. We don't want these people. They're not even effective, useful idiots. We'll get one of our tech guys to give them a few million dollars to keep them busy. But we're not going to talk to them. We're not going to draw on their quote unquote wisdom. Look at you guys. These were the guys that ensured you never won the popular vote or 51% since 1988. So why in the hell would we want them? Well, and then when Harris kept saying, you know, this the last time, they had a little gambit, what they thought was cute, they wanted to call him Hitler and a fascist. So they would say to her, do you believe he's a fascist? Well, I just agree what General Kelly said, oh, he called him a fascist. But that means you don't have to call him a fascist yourself. You just say you agree with General Kelly or General Miller. Millie, what do you think though? The fact. What do you think the generals have done to the reputation of the military? Think about what McChrystal has said, what McRaven has said, what Millie has said, what Kelly has said, what Hayden. I could go on.
- [79:43]
Jack Fowler
Yeah.
- [79:44]
Victor Davis Hansen
I mean, and then juxtapose all that with some wonderful essays that are being written that are frightening about the misappropriation of American defense dollars and buying multi million dollar platforms that cannot be used because they only give you scarce weaponry. $170 million F22s, $50 million F35, $5 million Patriot missile. 1 million to 5 million. Right. $100,000 javelin shells. And when we look at the war in the Middle east and these people are making tens of thousands of deadly drones for $500, $1,000 each. And why are we doing this?
- [80:34]
Jack Fowler
And the answer, Somebody's, somebody's getting a nice salary.
- [80:37]
Victor Davis Hansen
Somebody has, believes in the revolving door.
- [80:40]
Jack Fowler
Yeah.
- [80:41]
Victor Davis Hansen
Whether it's Raytheon or Lockheed or General Dynamics, Arden Arthur Rope. It's, it's, it's got to stop. It gotta stop. We're gonna have to.
- [80:51]
Jack Fowler
I, I have a family member works for a defense contractor and you could have the most important and useful and reasonable weaponry or whatever. And unless you have some former admiral or two star general as your consultant, it ain't going any.
- [81:08]
Victor Davis Hansen
And I, I confess to My Listener 2017, when they appointed Mattis for the defense and he had to get a, a waiver, remember, to be Defense Secretary. Right. And then they appointed Kelly and Homeland Security and Flynn and McMaster. Everybody was saying there were too many. The left, left was saying don't give him a waiver. There's too many generals. And I wrote two call columns saying that these were all fine men. There's no problem with it. I knew, I think Flynn was an exemplary person and I have a high respect. I was embedded with HR McMaster. I think he's a very courageous person. But you know, I don't, I now, I think it's very problematic to give a waiver to a general or admiral who wants to be a cabinet member, especially Defense Defense Secretary, you got to have a five year waiting period. I think they should tell the military, if you come out of the military, go ahead and go on a philanthropic board, go into a silicon, but do not go into a defense contractor board. There's too much conflict of interest. There's the aura, the perception, even if it's not true that a whole network of former subordinates in procurement will be giving giving you undue attention because of your status, likability, wonderful record and that might influence the objectivity of which weapons platform helps the American people in a cost of benefit analysis that's going to be changed. One fast thing really quick to finish Jack and we can talk about this. What do you think he's going to do when he says he has a little secret with this secret? Did you hear him say that? Who don't don't Trump. He said Speaker Johnson, I have a.
- [83:04]
Jack Fowler
Little secret and oh, it's to maybe move things around.
- [83:08]
Victor Davis Hansen
Yes, yes, yes. And I think something that we've been talking about this for ages, you know and I've been, I think I wrote six columns about it. Move the FBI to Kansas City. Move the Department of Agriculture. I would like to see it in Fresno myself self, it's the richest egg. Move the Department of Energy to Houston. Get rid of the Department of Education, maybe Energy. Get rid of the Department of Education. Take the elements of the FBI and break them up and move the headquarters out. Take the CIA and break up. We have all these defense National Director of National Intelligence, CIA Defense Intelligence. Why not just don't consolidate them, just break make them small to check and counter check each other but stop these conglomerates right in the middle of Washington that draw people from Harvard, Yale, Princeton and other bureaucracies and then they're married to people in these bureaucracies and then their siblings are in the media and it's all predicated on we're the uniparty and we like kind of sort of left wing, kind of sort of right wing person. The James Comey's, the Anthony Fauci's, the John Brennan's, the James clappers, the McChrystal. Why do we need all these people? Why not just break up these and get some real talent. There must be brilliant people in the interior. I met them, they would be ideal, loyal, patriotic FBI agents made let them go into work in Kansas, cheap, cheaper living too Y the doj. Maybe take the DOJ out of Washington. Yeah, because all they're doing is basically a guy goes to work in Washington and they bump up against one of these Washington DOJ persons and the person of the opposite party said you know what? You better be careful what you say because I have the power and money of the federal government and I'm a federal prosecutor and I can get you. I may not get you indicted. I may not get you indicted. I will surely not convict you. But if I don't like you and my party doesn't like you, I'm going to start investigating you. And that's going to mean you're going to have to get a lawyer to deal with me. And that's going to cost you a thousand dollars to 2,000 an hour. Me, I'm, I'm free. I'll break. Break you. And that's how they think.
- [85:37]
Jack Fowler
Yeah.
- [85:38]
Victor Davis Hansen
And they've got to break that up. And that's what Donald Trump, he really needs to examine. He needs to talk to people like Steve Hayward and look at Hayward's books on Reagan. If you read them very carefully, Reagan, he's a big supporter and he's, he's a very astute supporter of Reagan. But one of his lamentations was there wasn't enough structural change.
- [85:59]
Jack Fowler
Absolutely.
- [85:59]
Victor Davis Hansen
You know what I mean? It was transitory. They had good people doing good things and then they had bad people following them doing bad things. But they didn't change the structure. They didn't. And Trump didn't either in the first term.
- [86:12]
Jack Fowler
He didn't. I mean, that Sally Yates was still the head of the Justice Department.
- [86:17]
Victor Davis Hansen
I couldn't believe it. Yeah, I wrote about day one as a commissioner. Right. Oh, man. I was on the non political American Battlefield Monuments Commission because I was a military historian and you know, my namesake had been killed in Okinawa. So I was really eager to be on that commission and make sure that, you know, our overseas cemeteries were treated with the respect and kept up. And the people, the staff was wonderful. And when I went the first couple of meetings, it was apolitical. There were people on those committees from different administrations. And then Obama gets. Two things happened when Obama got elected. The first thing was I got immediately a resignation letter and I had. They gave you a diplomatic passport. But you know what? Every time I inspected a cemetery, whether it was in France or Belgium, it was always when I was visiting. I never charged the government a penny. I never said, I need to go look at Tunisia or Italy, at this cemetery. When I went to those places, I did it on my own dime. I never sent anything. And I was very loyal to that. And I got a letter saying, get it, turn in your passport. And by the way, you know, I did right away and you're off the committee. And they didn't fill my position for almost two years. You know what? The second thing happened almost right away after Obama came, man, what? About six weeks later, I got an A letter from the IRS and says that we feel feel that you have not been turning in accurate reports of your income and you're assessed at a point and a half of interest. I called my accountant. I said, I spoke at Place abcde. He said, yes, you did. We aggregated it on your wife's speaking company and we reported full. And I said, and I said, remember I told you I do not want to write off my office. I do not want to write off my transportation. I don't care If I pay 58% state, federal, local. I do not want to be targeted by the IRS because I don't trust these people. He said, I know it. You pay more than you should. You don't even write off your office at home. You don't write off anything. Okay. You don't even. I put. If I have a barn that's falling apart and I put some money on a roof so that you can park the tractors in there, I do not then take those shingles and put them on my house, the extras. So I was shocked by it. And my accountant said, this is ridiculous. What they're asking you to do is pay. You pay taxes on 10 lectures you gave that were aggregated it into one big. You know, this is the total sum by your wife's company, her lecture company. She reported all of your income and now they want you to go back and pay individually for each one. So if you made $5,000 speaking. They want you to report 10. 1,5000 for the company and one for your personal income. This is insane. Any idiot could see this.
- [89:30]
Jack Fowler
Right?
- [89:31]
Victor Davis Hansen
And we've never done it before. And so I said, well, how much? Well, it costs money. Of course. My poor accountant was put on hold all the time. It took about three or four months. And you know what the letter said? Please disregard this letter number something, something. You are no longer, you no longer are required to pay interest. And then it was come little refund about. You know what I mean?
- [89:55]
Jack Fowler
Yeah.
- [89:56]
Victor Davis Hansen
And, and I talked to. I don't know if it was on National Review or Hillsdale Cruz, but I talked to some pundits and I said, have you guys had IRS problems with the Obama. Yes. Yes. And so that's, that's a scary thing. They should take the IRS out of Washington. Right. And I mean there's.
- [90:17]
Jack Fowler
That was to say also the guy who ran the IRS under Obama kept on under the Trump administration.
- [90:23]
Victor Davis Hansen
Yeah. Remember that Lois Lerner?
- [90:25]
Jack Fowler
Well, yeah, she took. Hey, Victor, we. I know you have a hard stop here. We're recording. So we're going to have to. I, I did want to ask and I'll ask on the next recording. I wanted to draw some comparisons that you talked earlier about, you know, the, the personal safety of Donald Trump. And, and there I wanted to reflect back on 1865. We'll do that when we talk another time. Thanks. For folks who go to civil thoughts.com and sign up to get the free weekly email newsletter I write for the center for Civil Society, civil thoughts again, civil thoughts.com sign up. Victor, you were terrific today. You've been terrific always. And I know I speak for a lot of people that you a I hate to use the word bulwark since it's something that Bill Kristal has abused, but you have been a bulwark of honesty and integrity and inspiration for many of our listeners. I know I'm speaking for them always, but especially throughout this election season. So thank you.
- [91:32]
Victor Davis Hansen
Well, thank you. And you people are not crazy. All of you knew that Donald Trump, for all of his foibles, had a good chance of winning. You knew he was going to win. They tried to brainwash you. You stood firm. You went out and voted. You saved the country from this disaster we were facing. And you all, you all were indomitable. You didn't panic. You knew that Trump was going to win. You knew your vote would matter. And you voted. And the result is on the TV today. So congratulations.
- [92:01]
Jack Fowler
Hansen 2028. Okay, Victor, thank you, my friend. Thanks all.
- [92:06]
Victor Davis Hansen
Thank you.
- [92:07]
Jack Fowler
Everybody listening. We'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Bye.