← Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
Victor Davis Hanson: Why Newsom and Harris Are Pretending Biden Was Great
01:36:59
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- [00:00]
Sammy Wink
We know that Bari Weiss is becoming the lead at cbs, and I was wondering your thoughts on her in particular.
- [00:09]
Victor Davis Hanson
I think a lot of people in the Democratic Party, if they're black or they're gay like she is and married to a woman, they feel that the Democratic Party is going to treat them fairly. And they don't understand that as soon as you buck the Democratic Party, then their inner racism comes out and their inner homophobia comes out. That was a presidency in which for the first time since the New Deal, the Socialist left had an opening. They ran a moderate candidate who was losing because he was senile. In 2020, he lost the first three primaries in caucuses. And the weird thing about it, he knows now he's going to win. So if you look what he said in the last 72 hours, I thought I could heal the country. I couldn't. I thought I'd heal. I couldn't. It's just so anti Muslim. They hate Muslim. He's just nuts and he's warning the country. I am mad at you. You guys are running anti Mandami. I'm gonna win. And you better watch out.
- [01:18]
Sammy Wink
Hello and welcome to Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. We're happy to have everybody with our new show on our new platform with the Daily Signal. So welcome. And this is our Saturday edition. So we're going to do something a little bit different in the middle segment, and that will be to look at some historical. And today Victor's going to discuss the relationship between classical authors or classics and our Founding Fathers. So please stay with us for that second segment. Otherwise, we're going to start with some of the latest news and the Democratic people are on the agenda. Democratic leadership are on the agenda. So stay with us. And we'll be out back after these messages.
- [02:02]
Victor Davis Hanson
Right is still right, even if you stand by yourself. Mr. Chief justice, may I place the court? This is Hans von Spakowski, host of the Case in Point podcast, which looks at the hottest cases affecting politics, culture and everyone's daily lives. But we talk about them without confusing legal jargon. And we have interesting guests like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. And we end with reviews of classic Hollywood movies relevant to the topic. Case in Point, the podcast available everywhere, you won't want to miss.
- [02:45]
Sammy Wink
Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. So Victor, sorry, Victor is the Martin and Elia Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. You can find him at his website, victorhanson.com and the name of the website is the Blade of Perseus and it has all of his works there from articles and podcasts. Both audio and video are linked there and available. And he has his books are also linked there. And you can go ahead and find links to buy his various, what, 27 now, I think 28 books that he's written. So please come join us at the website. So, Victor, I wanted to start off Saturday with the weirdness of the Democratic Party and I'll just give you a few things that have come out this week and you can let us know your commentary on it. The first thing is that the Democrats are having a very hard time with news or interviewers that are asking questions about their own gerrymandering of districts. So they want to come out and say Trump is a dictator. Trump is gerrymandering things or trying to control as the Republicans do. Anyways, the GOP does control the Senate and the legislature. We've had Ruben Gallegos is one and then Hakeem Jeffries, just unable to answer. Interviewers who are asking about the gerrymandering done by the Democrats themselves.
- [04:26]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, it's very simple. You take the population of the United States and you divide it by 435 seats and that's according to Supreme Court rulings. One man, one vote under the Warren Court. It's not in Constitution how big constitutional districts have to be. So they're all about 750 or whatever it is, 770,000. And then you look at the national vote to see if they're gerrymandered or not, the national vote. And you can adjudicate that a lot of ways. You can say, let's take California. What did Trump Harris? It was 40, 60. She won 60. The Senate races are usually 40, 60. In Texas there are about 57% Republican, something like that. So then you ask yourself, does a state's seat represent the total tality, the totality of the state's congressional seats? Does that more or less reflect what the people are? So in California, if you have because of the census of 41 million people, would you ha. You have about 52 or 53 seats? I think we lost one. So would 40% of 52 or 53? Well, you would get 10% would be basically 5. And then 10 more would be 10. You should have about 20 of the 19 or 20 of the 52 seats. They have 9, 9. And that's not enough for them. They want to reapportion it down to five Massachusetts. I Think doesn't have any. Illinois has three. So what I'm getting at is Trump looked at this and he said, you know, if you look at the national vote the last few years and you look at the number of Democratic seats and they'd switch, we're under about 20 seats. So I want you red states that are underrepresented to catch up. So then the Democrats who gerrymandered this much better than the Republic, oh, you can't change it. It's a, it's going to be all you. Well, they have a right, but they don't. They never tell you about Illinois or Massachusetts, that they've already been gerrymandered. We've been gerrymandered to death. If you look at the new map, it looks like a, it looks, you know, like a stork's beak. It's like Madera county all the way to the Bay Area. That's one consideration. The other is the Supreme Court got this crazy idea of proportional representation. So if the population is 12% black, 12% black should be the House representative. So they gerrymandered black districts and Hispanic districts. But that assumes that you're going to judge people on just their color. How about their gender, how about their sexual orientation, how about their politics? And so all of these black districts are gerrymandered to have about 51% black voters with the expectation that they will vote solely on racial lines, which is racist. So the whole system is corrupt. Here in California when you only have nine Republicans and the state is voting 40% Republican and you have, you know, nine districts, you have about 20, 18 or something, 17%, you should have 40%. And that's what Gavin Newsom never tells anybody. And when he gets, it's even sicker when he says, and they're trying to destroy democracy. This was Arnold Schwarzenegger's Rhino plan second term. I think he was being leveraged by his wife, Ms. Kennedy. And the result was he created a bipartisan commission to take politics out of reapportionment. But California being California, 60% of the people are Democrat and 20% of the Republicans are RINOs. So it was all a liberal thing anyway. So that's why it's gerrymandered. But at least it had the veneer of the people and disinterested politics and non partisanship. And the Republicans can get 9 to 10 to 11 depending on the year. But that wasn't enough. So now Schwarzenegger is saying to who is a left wing Republican? Is saying to a Left wing radical. Newsom, you destroyed my legacy. And now you're. And now it's ahead in the polls by 10 to 15 points. And the people are going, they deserve it. What they get because that's a. They vote Newsom, they vote Pelosi, they vote crazy things like this. And they're going to vote for reparations or something. And that's why the state is 49th in highway safety. 49th. And highway construction. 42nd test scores. One third of the welfare recipients. Paradise is not so 40% of everybody on Medi Cal, 50% of the debt. The other thing that's really weird about Democrat, Republican. The Republicans now get angry if I say Democratic Party. You said Democratic Party. They say, I get these letters Victor. They're not Democratic. You should use the word Democrat Party. The noun. And then when you say, well, you're using the adjective Republican. So would you like to have Republic? And they said, yes, but Republic is a word that's fine with us. And I say, I say to them, republic is a word fine, but Democrat. There's no. You could say democracy party. But they're not a democracy. But their point is they're not Democratic. So they don't want to use the word Democratic Party. They don't want to use the word Democrat Democracy. They just want to use another adjective, not Democratic, but Democrat. That's who they are. They're Democrats with a capital T. They're just people that have nothing to do with democracy. They just use that name where Republicans are. The adjective Republicans, kun. And if you want to call them, if you just say, well, they're Republic people, that's fine with them too. So that's. You can really see a MAGA person because they'll never use the word Democratic Party. They'll always use the word Democrat Party. Yeah, they want to make the point that these are a special case. They're. They're not a democracy party and they are not Democratic when they pick Camila Harris, who won no delegates or backroom. But they are dim A. They are Democratic with a capital D. And that's who they are. Yeah, I mean, they're a capital D Democrat.
- [11:35]
Sammy Wink
It's funny that they have to make that distinction and they feel to make that argument. And it must be essentially because they feel like their leadership is failing, which is what all of this angst coming out, not being able to talk about gerrymandering to.
- [11:51]
Victor Davis Hanson
If you were going to be honest, you would call them the projectionist party. Because whatever they feel guilty about, they project it so they know they're gerrymandering. So they call people gerrymander. That's what they do. They know that they had a back backroom deal with the donors and the politicals, put Biden in there in 2020 and made everybody get out of the race. Bernie, Elizabeth, Sanders, Buttigieg. Then they hijacked that Don Campos waxing evici Biden and put through that left wing agenda. And then they kicked him out without he had 14 million primary votes. And then they just said now you're coronated so they know they're not Democratic, but then they say you're not Democratic, you guys are. But that's what they're not.
- [12:36]
Sammy Wink
You know, in addition to that, I was noticing that some of the interviewers are on cbs and we know that Bari Weiss is becoming the lead at cbs and I was wondering your thoughts on her in particular. Is she really a Democrat that had some Republican leanings based on Israel?
- [12:59]
Victor Davis Hanson
So she, she was a New York Times columnist. You could see that on almost every issue, say the Trump year, she was opposed to him. And then a light bulb went off in her head. She looked at the New Democratic Party and she found out they were anti Semitic. And then she looked at the newsroom, the editorial room, all the rooms in the New York Times and they were all staffed by young college graduates that were pro Hamas and pro Palestinian. And then they started attacking her and they started editing, editing her because that's their constituency now. And when there were letters, comments to the letter, if she took a fair stance on Israel, then she was a Zionist. So she quit and they were happy. And nobody in their right mind thought she would just go over and start something, you know, substack Free Press. Taking the name of a famous publisher, which I published seven books with the Free Press. But it took off. MEGA took off. And then she became kind of a rock star on talk shows, podcasts as a reasonable Democrat. But then I, the last two years, she's gravitated because the more venom that she's experienced, as happens to a lot of apostates now, she's, I think you would call her sinner, right? On many issues. I think a lot of people in the Democratic Party, if they're black or they're gay like she is and married to a woman, they feel that the Democratic Party is going to treat them fairly. And they don't understand that as soon as you buck the Democratic Party, then their inner racism comes out and their inner homophobia comes out. And that's because if you in Freudian terms. There's a lot of people in the Democratic Party who are racist and they act left wing and utopian and tolerant to suppress this inner uneasiness with the other. You can really see it with a Democratic. No sooner did Winsome Sears run for office than the Democratic left wing cartoon had her as a minstrel with thick lips. And another. I don't want to use the word K. Another K woman was outside and she said, you know, do you want to not have a. If you're not going to let trans people, maybe you shouldn't be able to use the water fountain. That was a real horrible, faubous George Wallace sign. That's who they are. That's who they are. They really are.
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Sammy Wink
I was listening to some commentary this morning, and they were talking about how the Democratic Party is a party now of angry women and we won't use the K word.
- [15:56]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, they got mad at Carol Levitt, Carolyn Levitt, when she said this was who their constituency are. But if you name six constituencies, radical, pro Hamas people, campus demonstrators, dei, racialist, angry women, anti Americanism, antifa sympathizer. You got a lot of that base. You got 20 or 30% of the party right there, and that's who's running them. Because they're afraid of them. Because if they offend, if they go hard left and say, we're going to have the new Green deal, we're going to let in 10,000 people a day across the border, then your old Fetterman Democrat kind of go, he holds his brow and oh, my gosh, what happened? But I always vote D, so I will, I'll stick with them. I don't know these guys, they worry me. But if you cross the other side, the base, and you say, you know, I think biological men should not be in women's sports, or you say, what is Israel supposed to do? These people came over and they slaughtered 1200 people and they had thousands of civilians who tagged along and raped and killed and looted. And then they all went back and the leadership went subterranean and they were under hospital schools and mosques and what's the IDF supposed to do? What would you do then? If you, you, you, you say that to the base, if you were a Democrat, then it's. And they're gonna get hate metal, you're gonna get death threats, you're gonna have people coming to your home. And so they know that. That's what Pelosi knows, Schumer knows, Warren does. So they're afraid of them.
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Sammy Wink
And that is a bad image to be the party of angry women. Karen's of sorts, the king.
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Victor Davis Hanson
Well, the angry. Yeah, there's. They're very angry. And the women are running the party. It's a gynocracy.
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Sammy Wink
Yeah.
- [17:58]
Victor Davis Hanson
You think about it. Who are the people running the. I think it's Elizabeth Warren, the old Nancy Pelosi, the people like on the View. These women podcasters were full of hate. So, yeah, that's what's happening. Helen Andrews wrote an article, very controversial recently. I thought it was pretty good. She said, it's a feminized party, feminism and these certain traits. There's a ying and a yang in constitutional government. And you have males and females. Males have certain ideas that are softened and mitigated by women, and women have soft or softer ideas that need a little bit more testosterone. That's what she was saying. Yeah, so she was saying, but when you have more women in the university, 55% are women, than you tend to say, oh, criminals, it wasn't their fault. I'm a caring, nurturing person. Let's let them out. Or, you know, let's not be exclusive. These people in Oaxaca and Chiapas, Michigan, why can't they have the same things? I have? That type of. And she's attributing that to a feminization of the Democratic Party. She can say that because she's a woman. If a man said that, he would be ostracized. No.
- [19:10]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, that's true. I like the title. I think she called that the Great Feminization, I think, or something to that effect. But further, since we're on that topic, and a lot of judges, of course, are women these days. And so the judicial system, an Illinois judge, Sarah Ellis, has required Chief Bovino, the ICE guy, to report to her every work day. And I think that they're fighting that in court. But she's trying to slow down.
- [19:38]
Victor Davis Hanson
She lost this morning, just as we're speaking, because you cannot have a lower court, federal judge say, I am no longer a judge. I am a part of the executive branch. I am the head of the border patrol. So you come in every morning and you report to me how you arrested people today, and I will either approve or dis. You can't do that. That would be like an ICE person. Say, before you do a ruling, I'm in the executive branch. So before you judge, before you, you. I'm going to come in every morning and I'm going to see whether you're rulings are fair to me or not fair to the executive branch. Anybody knows that. She knew it. So what is all this? These 800, 900 injunctions by these Obama, Biden judges. They've got a national Democratic team, Mark Elias, all these people, and they go down the list and they say, these are 10, 15 executive orders that Trump issued. And now we have a pool. What is the ruling of these 700 judges? Oh, and they're ranked. This guy gives us 98%. So then they file a suit in that particular court. It can be anywhere in the country to apply. The whole place that is so corrupt. We need to stop that. These are regional courts. You can't have somebody in one district rule for the entire United States. Or why have districts at all? And so they don't go by jurisdictions. And the idea with the districts was if there is a, an immediate problem in a particular place, only that judge. And then it would be done by random. And then they know they're going to be reversed. But the strategy is, huh, I'm going to do this. It'll take two or three weeks. It'll take a lot of effort, and that will slow them down. And why they're doing that. I'm going to go file a suit in Maine. I'm going to go file a suit in, I don't know, Oregon, and I'm just going to tie. And slowly, that's what they're doing. And the Supreme Court's got to step in and say, you know what, we're going to severely discipline judges who are ruling completely in a way that's not consistent, and we're going to speed up the appeal process. So if you're a district judge and you weaponize something and you become political and you excerpt the authority, we're going to fast track you. So it's going to go to a circuit appellate court immediately, and we're going to get a ruling against you or for you in 48 hours. And if that's not, and if we find that it's weaponized, we'll get a Supreme court ruling in 48 hours because it's, it's a delaying tactic. Yeah.
- [22:17]
Sammy Wink
Well, Victor, I'd like to welcome to our show the Hoover Institution as a sponsor. If you listen to bdh, in his own words, you care about where America's been, where we are now, and where we're headed, that's exactly what Freedom Frequency is all about. It's a new online publication, the Hoover Institution, where Victor is a senior fellow. It's designed to cut through the noise and bring clarity to the issues that shape our country's. Future. Each week, Freedom Frequency delivers serious, successful analysis grounded in research and guided by the American values of liberty, democracy, free enterprise and the rule of law. You'll hear from some of Hoover's most respected thinkers, people like Condoleezza Rice, General Jim Mattis, General H.R. mcMaster, economist John Cochran, and of course, Victor Davis Hansen himself, providing clear thinking and principled solutions for a complex world. As we approach the 250th anniversary of our nation, there's no better time to dig deeper into the ideas that built America and will determine its future. Subscribe now to Freedom Frequency on substack. That's the freedomfrequency.org and join the conversation that's lighting the way forward. That URL again is the freedom frequency.org and we'd like to thank the Hoover Institution for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hands.
- [23:44]
Victor Davis Hanson
I should remind everybody that the Hoover Institution. That's a wonderful ad. And it's, they've got wonderful people trying to get the message out. But we, we operate in a very, because I have all these calls and I'll say, victor, I saw somebody in the, the Hoover Institution, they were trashing Trump. And you have to see that we're not like the American Enterprise Institute or the Hudson Institute or the Heritage because of this reason. We're attached to a university and there's strengths and weaknesses of that. And we are an enclave, a beautiful enclave right in the center of campus that draws the envy of the faculty and students. And we have the best facilities. I think we can teach if we want, but we don't. We're, we're going to be adjudicated on our research and our communication with the general public about that research. But I get people saying, well, why don't you guys, you know, run this guy out on a rail or what? Well, we, we follow the laws of a university, so we have a tenure process, we have an evaluation. We just can't call up and say, gosh, that guy's a great conservative. I'm going to hire him, bring him into the and that's it. That's their advantage. And we can't do that because we are first and foremost Stanford employees. And a senior fellow has the rank of a full professor at Stanford, and you're accorded the same rights and responsibilities. So if you say something, you always have to be assuming that you're on a campus. And so if you're Scott Atlas and you're brave and you're one of the few people who are saying that the lockdown is going to really, you know what I mean? It's really going to destroy the economy. Then Stanford University's faculty is going to censor you. If you're me and you go on Tucker Carlson or Laura INGRAM during the January 6th and you say, I don't know what happened, but they changed the voting laws in March and April, then you're going to get brought up by the Faculty Senate. If you're neo for that's what they did the same thing with Neil. So my point is that we, you have to cut us a little slack because there are advantages. We have wonderful library facilities, we have archives. We're a unique institution. So. And we have some of the best. I think we have the best History department in the United States. I was thinking that the other day, because when you have Neil Ferguson, Andrew Roberts, Stephen Kotkin, Frank Decoter, HR McMaster, and I mean, you have all those people, Barry Strauss, Bruce Thornton, all these people, it's really a resource.
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Sammy Wink
But they don't teach students, so they're not passing it on the way to the do.
- [26:31]
Victor Davis Hanson
If you, you have the right to go to the department in which you're credentialed and tenured. In my case, it was the classic. I went. But my case was I got a PhD from Classics from Stanford. So the department that I knew has been changed. It's the, I think it's, I can say honestly, it's probably along with Prince in the most left wing department the United States. Its chairman said he wanted to destroy Classics. The chairman of the Classics Department, Stanford, said he wanted to destroy it and they wanted to not require Greek. So why would I want to teach there? So I chose. When I got to Hoover 22 years ago, I said, if I'm going to teach, I'll use my vacation time and go out in late August and teach at Hillsdale College. So I did that for 22 years. Or I'll come occasionally and teach a graduate seminar at Pepperdine. I'm giving lectures this week here in Malibu at Pepperdine. But I didn't want to teach there because why, if you were a classic professor, why would you want to teach in a department where the chairman wants to destroy classics as a Western, racist, homophobic entity? Life's too short, you know, to do that.
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Sammy Wink
That's insane, too. I don't know how that.
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Victor Davis Hanson
Well, I will. Anybody wants to read about it, you can go to New Criterion. And three years ago, I wrote Classical Patricide about destroying classics by classicists. This issue, I have one called Classical Phobias. It's a review of a professor who wants to destroy classics at Princeton. And I try to examine his writing. I can't. It's written in a language other, as I said, other than English. It's so the grammar, syntax, vocabulary is so awful. But I did read it and I found out, as I said earlier, about 175 pages, there's at least 200 references to 200, maybe more. White, white, white, white, black, black, black, black, blackness, blackness, blackness, whiteness, whiteness. And you can, every single time, white is disparaged and black is euphemistic. So if you just, we've. If you had changed that and that author had described his blackness and the way he described whiteness, the Princeton University would have never published it. And had they published it, they would have been sued because it was an. It would racist diatribe. But because it's a diatribe against whites, they champion it and they advertise it.
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Sammy Wink
Do you attribute all of this as starting back with Foucault and Derrida? The destruction of the university discourse like that is that all of that stuff comes out of that Foucault words are powerful.
- [29:28]
Victor Davis Hanson
What happened. Yes, but that was earlier, around 1963 to 1973, during the Vietnam War, there were all these protests and faculty and students said, society is racist. It was during the civil rights, the women's movement, the gay movement. And they said, we don't have to be disinterested and liberal in the classical sense because you people coming to us are 18. You are biased because of your awful conservative parents and your stupid bourgeoisie community and your far right intolerant religion. And we're going to make you into a new Soviet man here at our school, so we don't have to be disinterested. We can use our platform and our grading system to reward left wing people and punish right wing and indoctrinate you because all the other institutions are conservative except us. So we're doing balance. So they set the tone. That group of people that were my professors are now dead. I'm 72. When I was 18, they were about. They would be 92 or 95 now. Some of them are still alive, but the people they train. My age became what Roger Kimball wrote In a book 25 years ago, the tenured radicals. And the difference is, when I was a student at lunatic Santa Cruz, the students, if they wanted to protest the 1973 bombing of Cambodia, hey, everybody, they're killing. It's genocide. The United States, war criminals and the pigs. Let's march down. And they would march down to the county courthouse. We demand a moratorium. Or they go to the administration, the chancellor's residence, or where's the fascist in chief? Pig. Okay, so that's what it was. Is that way now? No, the difference is the people who were protesting are now inside the institutions. In 19, Norman Mailer wrote a book called Armies of the Night Marching on the Pentagon. And he was going after the generals and the Nixon people. Now Pete Hecseth is. He's trying to deal with the people inside the Pentagon. The radicals are running the universities. They are the establishment. I don't think people really appreciate Charlie Kirk's contribution to the conservative movement. What he said was, you youth are exuberant, you're kind of reckless, you're idealistic. But the people who are running your lives and determining whether you can afford a car, buy a house, go to college, they're not some corporate monster. They are left wing. They are the deans, they are the provosts, they are the corporate boardrooms, they are the anchor women. They are the. I am on pbs. Well, I'm on npr. That's the establishment. So use your youthful rebelliousness in the way that they did in the 60s, but the target is the 60s. People are traitors to their own revolutionary fervor. They're the establishment. And that was why they hated him. And so they started running the university in the 70s and 80s, and then they imported French postmodernism, or what the originally was post structural. Foucault, Derrida Lacan. And it basically. In those years of the Reagan period, there were 12 years, 12 years they had no political power. And Reagan ran a revolution, counter revolution, like Trump, not as successful as Trump. But in that period is when they got radicalized and they said, this is just horrible. Bill Bennett as Secretary of Education and Lyn Chaney, when she was conservative, is the head of the National Endowment for Humanities. Then there's George W. Bush. They had the little Clinton. But if you look at that period of Reagan, eight years, Bush four years, and then W another eight years, you're talking about 20 years. And so in that period, in their frustration, they imported into the class, well, all power is just. They said, you know what? We've got to get a new cause. We can't just. There's no war going on. Class never works in America because you can't be Marxist because you can get a guy who's poor and suddenly he's open to business and he's making money. It's too Fluid between the classes. There's not a permanent peasantry. And you can get a guy whose parents went to Harvard and he's loafing around and pretty soon he's living in a trailer and his kids are impoverished. There is fluidity. So they came across and said all of society is a construct and it's race, race, race. Why is it against the law to steal sneakers? Do wealthy white people need to steal sneakers? No. So they made a law to protect their interests. And saying that poor people who wanted steal sneakers, that's a crime. It's not a crime. So you go steal all the sneakers you want. How about, I don't know, how about normative behavior going to class on time? Well, what's the difference if you come five minutes or 10 minutes late? That's a culturally oppressive. That's a construct. A bunch of wealthy white people made an arbitrary law. There's no connection between laws and rules and natural law, which the right says there is. The right says no. Society doesn't function unless you can all start on time. That's a mark of a civilization. They say, no, that's racist. Certain cultures have different conceptions of time. They're all. So everything is a construct. It has no relation to a physical real world. And therefore now we're told that, that if you're white and you're going to wear dreadlocks, that's cultural appropriation. But there's no consistency. If you're black and you bly your dye your hair blonde, that's perfectly fine because you have to construct it on the sense of power. So then you get this. Now they're in crisis because while all this was going on, the United States economy was dynamic and there were civil rights statutes and the judiciary was enforcing the civil rights law. And so there were a lot of upward mobile minorities. People from India have the highest income of anybody, even though they're very dark in many cases. And whites are about eighth in economics. So then they said economics doesn't matter, that's just a construct because you're permanently black or you're permanently white. That is. So now you have this ridiculous situation where Jasmine Crockett's on TV the other day. This is a woman whose parents were upper middle class beneficiaries of DEI, went to prep school, 75,000 probably a year. And she had a. I would call it a white accent. Not that it's white or not, but she would call it a white. But then she gets in rants and raves about horrible white people with this inner City accent, that's fake. And she said the other day that Ku Klux Klan and these people just like, hey, you know, it's just a racist diatribe. And you want to say, well, you're privileged, you're so much wealthier and you've had so many more opportunities and you've used your race to such success. Look at the people in East Palestine, Ohio, where they have nothing compared to you. Oh, yes, but I'm black and I always be black and you'll always be racist. So it doesn't matter how. And that's the best example is Jean Corrine, Jean Pierre. Every time on this book tour she's out, she looks. And somebody asked her, well, you must have known about Joe Biden. You must have known. And she says, well, as the first black LGBTQ woman immigrant who was a press secretary, I resent that, or I was under enormous pressures that you can't imagine. No, I can imagine it. You came to the United States from a well off family, like probably Claudine Gay, and you were given every privilege and advantage as being a DEI candidate and you show no gratitude. And now you're just complaining and complaining when you were one of the most powerful women in the world. And you're saying that you don't have to answer a question empirically because you're the first black gay woman immigrant press secretary who cares. You know what I mean? It has nothing to do with whether you were one of the worst. She was one of the worst. I think Jen Psaki was worse, but she was bad. So that's what happened to the university and that. Where did they get this idea that you could construct that these things were constructs, laws or customs? It came from the French. Where did it come from? The French? If you want to go back to it, Mark Bloch wrote a great book called Strange Defeat. And that was about why the indomitable French army, the largest army in Europe before the German army mobilized, had absolutely stopped the German army at the Battle of The Marne in 1914, they lost a million soldiers. Verdun, they shall not Pass, and the British. And then they had socialism in the interim. And that same culture lost the war against Germany in six weeks. And that shocked. And then the Vichy came in and there were collaborators and they controlled all of France in the wartime period until 1944 with just 100,000 soldiers. And so. And at this time when the war was over, they lost all of their empire. Algeria. They were in a horrific war in Algeria. They just gave it up. Syria Lebanon, etc. Okay? So they were trying to explain how France went from this heroic nation and this world power to a humiliated country that had to be liberated by a bunch of yokels from America that they detested, who came in with better tanks, better equipment, better planes. And then when the French said, but we want to fight, we said, well, you fought once and lost, but here you can be the first French armor division, and we're going to give you our best Shermans and our best 120 millimeter and all this, and we're going to give you air support. We're even going to let you fly our P47s. And you're going to be attached to the best General George Patton and General Leclerc. And they were wonderful, but they still said, oh, my God, now we're pushing out the Germans because of the Americans. So you put all of that into the French mindset. And it's no accident that in the universities, people said, there are no facts. These are just constructs. You can say that we lost a war, won the war. That's just a matter of your interpretation based on your race and your economic position. That's what Foucault was saying. We didn't lose World War II. We chose that. We didn't want to support bourgeoisie economics here in France, so we didn't really care whether the. Not that kind of. That's why they started doing that.
- [41:58]
Sammy Wink
Wait, are you telling me that you're dating Foucault's genesis of Foucault's thought back to the inability of the French to win a war without American help in the 20th century.
- [42:09]
Victor Davis Hanson
I think in the 20th century, the collapse of French influence, the French language as a global language, the idea. They were still stuck on the idea in World War I that they were the successors of Napoleon. I mean, you got to admit that between, I don't know, 1792 and 1814, they ran Europe and they beat everybody. I mean, Napoleon kind of lied when he said he won 51 battles, but he did. And that. That was the French chauvinism. And then they looked at what happened in the. That was just collapsed. Everything collapsed for them. And, you know, the British Empire collapsed, but they won the war. And they. They were all alone in 1939 and 40, and they stopped Nazism before the Russians or we helped them. So they came out of that war confident even as they lost the empire, at least more confident than French. And then there was another big difference, one last one. There was an intellectual tradition In England, of empiricism, John Locke, the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume in France, Voltaire, Rousseau. And Rousseau was the noble savage. Human nature is malleable. It's not constant, it's constructed. So you think that that guy who has all paint all over his face and he's a cannibal out in the Caribbean, that's only because you don't. You've been taught that cannibalism is wrong. How do, how do you know it's wrong? Don't judge him. He's free of all your neuroses. That was Rousseau. Not that, you know, he didn't pre Freudian. So when the French looked back at that, they had a tradition of that that was very different from the Anglo world.
- [43:59]
Sammy Wink
Well, this is a very.
- [44:00]
Victor Davis Hanson
I want to say one last thing in defense of the French. It's. It's kind of like when you see a liberal who's turned conservative, and there's a lot of them, they are the best conservatives because they understand the pathologies. So when you see a French intellectual who's concerned, like Raymond Aran or what Camus later became, they were some of the brightest people in the world because they have to be. They have to be because they're combative. The whole society is against them. And so every time I met a French intellectual conservative, they're very impressive.
- [44:42]
Sammy Wink
Well, Victor, as I said, this is an interesting conversation that probably could go on, but we need to go to a break and then we'll come back and talk a little bit about classics and the Founding Fathers. Stay with us and we'll be right back. Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. So in our Saturday edition, we do a middle segment where Victor talks a little bit about history. I know we've had a little bit about history already, but today he's going to look at the influence of classical authors on the Founding Fathers. And I'll let you have it there, Victor.
- [45:15]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, why in the United States today, if you walk down the streets of Washington, D.C. do most of the government buildings that were built between 1860 and 1930, they all look like Greek temples. They have the Supreme Court building, the capital. Why do we have E pluribus uno from many one on our pennies? Why do we have annuit coeptis on our dollar bill? He nods. On our beginnings, that comes out of Virgil's fourth eclogue. Why do we have novo ordo seclorum, a new order of the ages? And the answer is that we were very fortunate that although we were agrarian, poor country at the Beginning we had an aristocracy of intellectuals and politicians. And they had been trained, either tutored or at the new universities in the colonial, in places like Yale or Harvard that were mostly divinity but classics. They had to know Greek and Latin. And they were wonderful classical scholars. And there were four or five of them that wrote the Constitution. Hamilton, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, just to take four. And they knew Greek and Latin very well. So when they wanted to create a system, they looked at where was the last time people had a constitutional government and revolted against tyrants and kings? Like, oh, it was Rome. We've read Livy, we've read Tacitus, we know Cicero, we knew Aristotle and Plato. So they just said, said, what type of government? Well, there was a Spartan constitution from Crete and guess what? They had an ex. Something called an executive. They had a legislature. The Spartans had the Garusia, which is a word in Greek for the old guys. And then they had the ecclesia, everybody, the lower house and the set. The Romans looked at Greek political history, the 1500 Steady States. They said, we don't like the Athenian model, which is like the French radical revolutionary model. It's just a bunch of demagogues. And yes, they can be very rich and powerful and have 50 great years and build the Parthenon, but they killed Socrates or they butchered the Melians, or they find Pericles, or they went to Sicily and tried. They butchered the Melian. There was no constitutional guardrails, no separation of powers. But there had been a little inkling in Crete and Sparta, which were much more stable. The Romans who came in contact with the Greeks of southern Italy said, you know what? This is where what we're going to do. So they created a Senate and tribunal, assemblies. That was a legislative blank. They had two consuls like that was their two presidents elected annually. And then they had a judiciary. So that's where the founders said, we want that same tripartite. We don't trust human nature. We don't. We. We're more Roman than we are Greek. We saw what the Greeks do when there's no guardrails. Men are basically as Adam said, if men were angels, we wouldn't need a constitution. But they're devils, so we have to separate powers. So they created this intricate system that the president can veto a law, but Congress can override it with a 2/3 majority. The Congress doesn't like the president. The president has to be elected every four years. Congress two years for the House, six years for the Senate. The House can impeach the president but they can't remove them unless The Senate votes 2/3. The President can pick people to be in his cabinet but they have to be confirmed by the Senate. The Supreme Court can declare a, a law on unconstitutional but a court judge can be impeached by the legislature or overridden by another judge. So there was, it was impossible for somebody to aggregate all that power. And that was the lesson of the Roman republic. The other thing that was very important, they believed that you could not have self government unless the citizen was virtuous. That comes from Aristotle and Cicero, later Cicero. And so in their way of thinking we've got the dynamism of classical authors and architecture and art and the idea of consensual government from the Greeks. But in our knowledge of the ancient world it was the Romans that made it work. So we have a Roman system of government. But we also understand that unlike the pagans, pagan in Latin just means country buffoon. But it's a term for people who have not been introduced to Christianity. But this won't work because when we look at Greece, the 1500 city states only lasted from 650 to 333 and Alexander destroyed them. They never had a word for nation, they could never unite. They looked at Rome and they said well they had a glorious history from 753 to Augustus. Probably you could say maybe the battle of Actium or 31 BC or maybe 14, the Augustan Principate when he died, whatever date you it was destroyed and you had an imperial. So how do we keep this going? And they said we're not going to have the articles of confederation. That's like the Greek city states. Everybody was bickering. So we need a strong constitution and we're going to write it down and we're going to have rules about how you admit states and what the congress can do, what the Supreme Court can do and what the president it's going to be written down. We're going to have the supremacy call. And then Jefferson said well we need a bill of rights so that you have just so you can speak up like you could in a Greek assembly. Or you have to have habeas corpus like the Romans. And they codified a bill of rights based on Justinian. Basically a lot of it was based on the Justinian law code. And so they were very worried that if you were going to be self governing you have, you had to have some moral bearing. And the moral bearing they had been trained on was Christianity. And so almost all the founders that's why we have things like in God we trust on our later currency. That's what all men, God has be out is bestowed, all men equal. And even people like Washington or maybe Jefferson who weren't maybe believers in the divine, the divinity of Jesus Christ, they were deists, that's just a word believing that they thought that a belief in a Christian God and the Sermon on the Mount was very necessary for this, even if they thought they were above that. And some of them were devout, some of them were semi devout, some of them were really devout but didn't go to church. But some of them said, I don't know whether it is a God or an afterlife, but I know it's important for people to think there is. So they inculcated. But they also looked at Europe. What I'm saying is that they looked at antiquity and say what was good and why didn't it work? Greek, certain states, great stuff in it, consensual government, art, literature. But they squabbled and they had no nationhood. We're not going to have 50 different countries in North America like there is in Europe or ancient Greece city states if we don't have a strong constitution and the Articles of Confederation persist. We're going to have the Republic of Pennsylvania fighting the Republic of Virginia fighting the Republic of Massachusetts every year, just like in Greece. So we have to have a strong executive and make it uniform. And then they said, and how about Rome? Why did it fall? Well, it fell because it got imperial and it got slaves and money during the Principate and it got too wealthy and it had no Christian guidance until the 4th century. Very different than Gibbon who said it fell because of Christianity. And so they thought it was very important for people to in their own private lives to have a Christian belief. But they were, they did not. They looked at the thirty Years War and they said, you know what? We're not going to have a state religion and have Catholics killing Protestants. We're a Protestant nation. But we don't really define an American by his race, by his appearance. And people will come here from all over the world, so. And they will have all these religions and we will hope that they will accept the dominant culture of English Protestantism, but if they don't, that they're protected under our Constitution. And so they were wholly dependent and that on the classical world. The problem they had was Greek is very hard to learn, especially if you're not an aristocrat with free time. So by from 1788, 89, when the Constitution was, or maybe even earlier 1776 with the Declaration of Independence. Finally you had a revolt. So you had Washington and Adams and Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, John Quincy Adam and then Andrew Jackson. And he had a Jacksonian revolution. And he said there was a lot of founders in that place, like Benjamin Rush that thought this is stupid to have to learn this silly Latin and Greek when we should be teaching mechanics and surveying and mathematics, ballistics and stuff. And so that influence waned. It's always, it's survived, but it has waned. But the point I'm making is it's sad that. So our 341 million people don't understand why our government is structured the way it is, who structured it and where did they get their ideas? Because there's no other system in the world. You go all over Europe, you cannot find the American system. And when we nation built in the Philippines, in Africa for a little bit, or Iraq or Afghanistan or Korea or Japan, did we say, you're going to have a Supreme Court, you're going to have a bicameral legislature, you're going to have an independent executive with cabinet seas, you're going to have election every four years and you're going to have a two party system. No. And you're going to have an electoral college. They said, man, this is too complex. You have to have two informed citizens. So they adopted the European Parliamentary system where you have multiple parties. You can call an election anytime you want after a particular time span. And if you don't like your president or your prime minister, like Margaret Thatcher, even though she's voted, you can get a bunch of people in her party and go into a back room and say, Margaret's lost it, I just think we should get rid of her. And then you can appoint a successor. And that successor has never been elected by the people. And he won't have to go up to election maybe for two or three years, and he'll only call an election when he thinks he can win. So we're the only system in the world, we're the only multiracial democracy that's large, that's worked because of this constitutional system. And the left has tried to destroy it. They hate this system because it's very hard to stage the revolution against it when you have a free market and you have a stable system of government.
- [57:28]
Sammy Wink
Yes. And that whole apparatus is set up to guarantee the individual the freedoms that the Americans have today. And I think that's the missing link there, that people just don't understand, that.
- [57:39]
Victor Davis Hanson
They don't Understand, this was never a democracy as defined in aristocracy, Aristotle or the. The Renaissance. This was a constitutional res publica. That's a Latin word. It comes from Rome, not Greece. Rome borrowed ideas from Democratia. But our founders did not want Democratia because they said it would end in a nightmare like the French Revolution, which it did later. And so people don't. Our average citizens don't understand why there is these checks. So you get these crazy Democratic socialists around and they say, well, the Electoral College, we got to get rid of it. Why would they ever put that in? The people spoke. No, the people spoke through their representatives, in other words, through their states. So the states then meet at the Electoral College. 85, 90% of the time, the electoral vote is the same as the populate. But there are instances when it isn't. And the reason there is, is that the founders wanted people to go all over the United States, go to Montana and get three electoral votes, go to Utah. Otherwise they were just going to go to la, Chicago, New York, where all the people, the two coast for the popular vote. And they thought it would be very hard to rig an election if you had all these different states having their own way of counting overseen by the federal government. There were a lot of arguments, but you get the left in. And they say, I want to get rid of the Electoral College. I don't want to follow the Constitution by having an amendment because we can never do it. So we'll have the National Voter Compact. We'll just say in all the blue legislatures, whoever wins the popular vote, we give our Electoral College vote, which is un Constitution. That's what they're trying. We don't have enough senators, so let's just let in Puerto Rico as a state in Washington D.C. and they look at the Constitution, they say, oh my God, you got to get three quarters of the state. We'll never get that. Let's just get a. Just do it with an executive order. While the filibuster has been here 180 years, it's not in the Constitution. But very soon after the founding, it was. Well, we want it when we're a majority so those stupid Republicans can't block us. Now when we're a minority, we want, we want it when we are a minority to block the majority Republicans. However, when we have that Senate, let's get rid of it so they don't block us. And I could go on, but same thing in the Supreme Court. It's not in the Constitution. How many justices. There's nothing about a district court by the way, or a circuit court. It just says there shall be a Supreme Court with a chief justice. So it was 4, 6, 5, 7, depending on who was in power. And finally after the Civil War, they said, no, this is crazy. Every administration packs the court. So it's going to be nine justices. But who always tries to pack that? FDR tried it. Elizabeth Warren wants to pack it. So they're always trying to change the rules. We have a border. We have federal. We're going to destroy the border and import a new demographic. We're going to destroy the Electoral College and get around the amendment process. We're going to warp the idea of new states and just try to appoint these people so we get four centers. And why do they do that? Because they feel they're morally and intellectually superior and in the ends are so much better than us Neanderthal conservatives that there's any means necessary to get them. And that's why they do that.
- [61:22]
Sammy Wink
Well, Victor, we're going to move on. So let's take a break and then we'll come back to talk a little bit about a little more news. Stay with us. And we'll be right back. Welcome back. This is Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. And you can find Victor on X. His handle is at VD Hansen and on Facebook at Hanson's Morning Cup. And I just like to say that there is a Facebook independent group not associated with us, but they're called the Victor Davis Hansen Fan Club. And they do a good job of bringing in new stuff, old stuff actually, that Victor has done that they've dug up. So I highly recommend that group. So, Victor, I I didn't quite finish with what I was going to talk about with Newsom and Harris and that is that they are recently coming out, both of them saying that Joe Biden was either the one of the best presidents in recent memory, I think that was Newsom, or with Kamala Harris where she's doesn't have any criticism of Joe. He was good, you know, he did a good job. What is that all about? I mean, he was obviously. But do they get a constituency from that? Is that what they're worried about? The Democratic Party has this vast constituency. So I'm going to say they're worried.
- [62:48]
Victor Davis Hanson
That they're worried about a the record which American people saw the Trump first term and they saw the Biden term and then they listened to what Trump said his second term was and they said we do not want the Biden agenda anymore. That was number one. Number two, they Removed him. They, the Democratic donors of Democratic politicos, the left wing media, they got in a room and said, Joe, get out. And he said, no, I don't want to get out. I got 14 mini and Jill said, we're not going to get rid of him. Good old Joe is as smart as a tack, sharp as a tack, but it took about a month and then they said, Joe said, wow, the donors aren't going to give me any money, the media is going to attack me. So they had a coup and they just took him off the ticket. And then they had no election, no primary and they put a person, they took a person who'd won 14 million primary votes in 2020 and they appointed his vice president, had never won a single delegate without any discussion. And then they ratified by a fake delegate vote at the convention. So they took him out and they took him out because it was a disaster. And now they look back and Trump is now quote Shakespeare, he does bestroth like a collapses over these non entities. So they're really angry. And they said, well we didn't remove him because he was bad. We didn't remove him because he was failing. We just thought that he needed a break. So now they're going back and saying the record was actually pretty good because he didn't do it. We did, we had a coup, basically, we ran the government. It was wonderful. But what Trump needs to do, he kind of said this in one of our Daily Signal short pieces. No more cartoons where he's in a jet spraying people with defecation, all that. You don't need to go back and fight back and forth, own their libs and all that stuff. Just look at the record. 10,000 people coming in a day someday illegally. Somewhere between if you count illegal entrants, probably 10 to 12 million and if you count actual people who stayed, probably 7 or 8 million 0 now 0. They're going to get 2 million deportations, whether coerced or self deported in a year. If you look at, we're pumping a million barrels more of oil already than Biden. Did he drain the petroleum served by 200 million barrels? Trump is already filling it right now as I speak. It's up to 406 barrels. He's got a plan to fill the whole thing. He's had seven ceasefire, he's flying all over the world. He stopped the killing in Gaza, he ended the nuclear threat in the near future. We had this conversation a year ago. We'd say, oh man, we can't stop the Hezbollah SS they're too tough. Iran is just crazy. They've got all together, these guys, Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, Iran. They've got over 2,200 thousand rockets. They're all inert now. They're all inert because Trump stood by Israel, gave him the supplies, no suspension, said go to it, then took out himself the nuclear plant. And then when you look at inflation, the average inflation was 5%, as we said, under Biden over that four year period, it's, it's going to be about 3% this year. He left office when it was 1.7 the first time. If you look at GDP, they saw GDP, it's going to be about three percent. If you look at the stock market, it set a record that this week it's never been higher. They said it was going to crash in March. If you look at trade revenue, you have one of these rare months in September where we had more money coming into the treasury than going out. The deficit, for all the big beautiful bill spending, the deficit is going to go down. Not a lot, but somewhat. So when you look at the, and then, you know, he, when he talked about dei, I would say he can't get rid of dei. These people are formidable. He just got rid of it. He got all of a sudden, why do you think that people who say that they're considering transitioning has dropped dramatically on campuses? Because it's no longer cool and there's no longer kind of a fad. Because he said for biological male. I don't care what you call me, a transphobe. You're not going to go and destroy female sports. And you're not going, we're not going to have laws that say that people who expose themselves to the opposite sex with their genitalia have to go to jail. And then we're going to let men go in and shower with preteen girls. We're not going to let that happen. And so he wrecked them. He talked, he, he went after. And it's really an astounding achievement if he would just talk about it.
- [68:08]
Sammy Wink
Yes. And you've convinced me why, if I were a Democrat, I wouldn't want to be a backer of Joe Biden or say really anything about him, at least not in a positive sense. So if I'm in an interview and I'm Kamala Harris, I'm going to say, well, Joe Biden did what he could do as best he could. However you say that, I don't care, but I have ideas of things that I, we could do better and Da, da, da. And start at least that. But why are these Democrats doubling, doubling down on a presidency that was a complete disaster? And because just as what you've just told me, there's no way it's been so drastically changed.
- [68:53]
Victor Davis Hanson
What I'm saying is that was a presidency in which for the first time since the New Deal, the socialist left had an opening. They ran a moderate candidate who was losing because he was senile. In 2020, he lost the first three primaries and caucuses. New Hampshire, Iowa, Nevada. Then Clyburn said, you know what? I don't want to vote for these white liberal socialists. And he went to Biden and said, I will deliver the black vote in South Carolina and you will win. But we have certain demands on you about appointments, black judges, black, this black vice president. And then the socialists came to him and said, we will get, we'll get Elizabeth out, Warren, we'll get Bernie out, we'll get Buttigieg, but you're going to open that border and you're going to get Soros das, and you're going to go through defund the police and you're going to go radical, green, New Deal. And they got everything they wanted. So then they got it and they destroyed the country and the people turned on them. So now what are they going to say? Are they going to say, well, we had a George McGovern and we, we corrected with Bill Clinton after 20 years? No. So that's what they have to say. We have Fetterman. He's basically said, we have a message that people do not want, so we need to correct. But they're not going to do that till they lose again. They have to lose at least once more in a national election. They have to lose the midterms, otherwise they'll keep at it.
- [70:31]
Sammy Wink
He seems to be, Fetterman, the Persona non grata in the Democratic Party right now. So he doesn't get any kudos for saying that kind of thing. Well, let's turn then, Victor, to Latin America. And several things happening in Latin America. I think one of the really exciting things is in Argentina, I always wonder, Milie's party won, I think it was 64 seats of the 128 seat Chamber of Deputies, and they got 60 more seats. And so Milei is doing really well in his party, apparently. I, I heard some earlier news on him that the economy wasn't going so well. But I was wondering, any thoughts?
- [71:13]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, he used shock treatment and that's going to be hard. He got the inflation rate from like 130. Down to 30. But he had to lay off a lot of people and the currency dive. So he came to Trump and said, I need a $20 billion guarantee and we're going to dollarize our economy so people will trust it and they won't hoard money and gold. And so he's. He might make it, but it's part of a world phenomenon that the left look at what. What's happening. You have Maloney in Italy, Orban and Hungary. You've got Wilders in Holland. You've got Nigel Farage, who's going. He's the most popular man in Britain now. Sturmer's the least popular. Something's going to happen in France. They can't even keep a prime minister. Macron is toast. They just elected the first conservative. And woman in Japan, she's the late Abby's protege. I mean, she was so Trumpism looks at the Europeans, look at Trumpism and they say, we can close our borders. He did it. We don't have to let 2 million people from the Middle east come in and take over our cities and trash our culture. He. He did it. He stopped it. We don't have to always beg the United States to protect us. He told us that if we armed ourselves to 2% and then 5, that he was going to protect us, but he was going to do it as a partner, not Daddy. And so we're going to arm and get confidence again. He's got rid of the wind and solar and he's pumping all this oil and gas, he's building nuclear plants and they're going to have so much. We better start doing that. So he's had enormous influence because he's common sense and it's working. And that's what the Democratic Party, when they saw him, he was. He was standing next to the new Prime Minister of Japan and he was bragging on Japan and she started jumping up as a ecstatic. And you. They cut on MSNBC and they showed the faces of Jeffries and Schumer and stuff, why we shut down the government. And he should be here whining with there. He's going around all over the world with the subtext was he's going all around the world, he's getting enormous responses, he's cementing alliances, he's getting enormous amounts of foreign investment in the United States and he's striding the world like a colossus and he's rallying and he's saying he's going to cut a deal with China. He cut a deal With South Korea, Japan, he's telling India, let's restore, just don't sell oil. He's pressuring Putin if he gets a peace in Ukraine, it will be unlike anything we've ever seen after what he's done. And the Democratic Party is just gnashing their teeth and they're like zombies in the air or something. Some kind of supernatural nocturnal creatures that have no materialism, they're just phantoms or banshees or something. It's pathetic. And shutting down the government, they don't understand how that works. As we said last time, you shut down the government, you're not going to get the people on your side if it goes on for a week or two.
- [74:50]
Sammy Wink
And so I think that the Democrats don't understand, or they do understand, because I've seen them come out and say, we've got to control this social media. But there's two things that the social media has done to damn the Democrats and that is it has shown that they're liars. Every time they tell a lie, it's so evident and it comes out in social media. And second, it allows them and their crazies to get out in front of their party, and that's destroying their party, too. So they really weirdly hate and love social media.
- [75:23]
Victor Davis Hanson
And I think everything they do, I don't understand them. You start with a premise that the out party in the first two years of a presidency always wins the House. And especially when it's close, the seven, they're not going to. I don't think they're going to do that. That's hard to do. But when you look at what they're saying. So they have motions. So the first motions, they've had nine or 10 of 12 of them, they always say, no, no, no. So now they're saying, we are not going to vote to fund first responders. We're not going to vote for giving the military. But people are starving without food stamps. So we want to have a special provision that we won't shut down food stamps. And I'm thinking, now what does the average American think? Would he rather see people who are going to fires or federal officers or people fighting for us overseas are flying an F35 or navigating a aircraft carrier and get paid? Or would he rather have everybody on welfare? I'm not saying that you can't do both, but they chose the latter over the former. That's a losing issue. It is a losing issue. And especially when people are on welfare, say, you know, if I don't get my money, I'm going to strike. I'm going to riot, I'm going to loot. And that. That. That's their constituency. So you don't ever win when you vote against federal law enforcement or FBI or CIA or the US Military. And that's what they're doing.
- [76:59]
Sammy Wink
Yeah.
- [76:59]
Victor Davis Hanson
I don't know who's running, but I do think that Hikem Jeffries has the greatest gift that Republicans have ever had. I don't know why he is the speaker of the House. He cannot finish the sentence. He has this very strange tick where he. He begins and then he ponders. And it's sort of like, I don't know why he is the speaker of the House. I don't know. But we're not going to put up with it. That's how he talks. He can't finish the syntax. And he's. You know, when you compare him with Johnson, who was like the fourth pick, he. He. It's pathetic. And then you see Schumer up there, and it's like, wow, used to be the guardian of anti Semitism. You lectured everybody about the dangers of anti Semitism as if it came from a bunch of guys with Viking horns up in Montana or something. Your whole party is imbued with it, and you can't say a word about it. And he looks. He just gets up at that podium and he just. It's just pathetic. Pathetic. And then there's Nancy Pelosi walking around. Anytime somebody says, how did you get 100 million bucks from inside trade? Get out of here.
- [78:30]
Sammy Wink
Yeah. She's becoming a cantankerous old woman.
- [78:32]
Victor Davis Hanson
She's 86 years old.
- [78:33]
Sammy Wink
I know. She should let it go, I think. Well, Victor, just. Just some thoughts since we were in Latin America on Donald Trump bringing the war to Latin America. He's got Gunboat and part of his navy hooked up in the Port of Spain in Tobago, Trinidad Island. And it seems like he's taking that war closer to Venezuela and Colombia. And we've had some responses, but any ideas on what's.
- [79:02]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, we have done this in the past. Reagan invaded Granada, Grenada, and Bush invaded Panama. I wouldn't want to do that with Venezuela or Colombia. They're run by leftists. They assassinated the President of Colombia, who was a conservative, just killed him. And the narco people did it. Venezuela is run by narco communists and Chinese money. But you don't want to go into those countries. So I think what he's doing is he's starting empirically. He says, how does a Guy like Maduro and earlier Chavez, how do they take control of the government? And his advisors said they gave a free pass to narcoism and they're importing vast amounts of fentanyl and opiates into the United States and they're. That is fueling that government. And they're billionaires and they're get. They're buying off the media, they're buying off the generals, the military. And so they said, if you start to destroy those shipments by sea and you cut them off by land and you build a wall on the border, we can stop all this. And that's what he's doing. He's ratcheting up the pressure and he wants to dry up the money. And then to make them nervous, he's going to put a big carrier right in the Caribbean and he's going to make them think, think, think. And then, you know, Trump, he's going to troll the left. So he's going to blow up three or four ships full of narcos and then they're going to say, how dare you take the. Take away the constitutional rights of narco terrorists that aren't even US citizens and are trying to poison and kill another 80,000Americans. They have a right to do that. That's basically. They get on that side of that argument. As long as he doesn't get in there. Because the MAGA credo says you do not get into an optional ground war anywhere because it will turn into a forever war and don't do it. So you shouldn't go on the ground in any of those places.
- [81:15]
Sammy Wink
All right, Victor, so just one comment at the end, and it's actually a question that has a lot to do with the things that we were talking about today. So I don't know if you have a short answer for this, but he says, please explain. And this comes from your website from somebody by the name of Anonymous. Please explain why in our system of nominating candidates, it comes down to Mamdani versus Cuomo. How is it our system has broken down to where we must choose only between a bad and worse candidate? And we need a system that guarantees good, viable candidates for elected office. Well, we have no solution.
- [81:56]
Victor Davis Hanson
When you ask a question like that, there are two sources of the answer. One is the demography of the people voting. Because the inference by the questioner, which I haven't seen before, is you used to have centrist center right, Giuliani, center left, Bloomberg, and now you have maniacs like de Blasio and Mondani, and then there's a peculiarity of the election itself. Okay, so in the 21st century, that 9 million person New York is not the 9 million person New York of 2022,000. Excuse me, in 25 years there's been about 1 million Jews who have left. Jewish Americans have left New York and they've mostly gone to places like Tennessee, but especially Florida because they felt that the world was changing, that it was unsafe, etc. You have about a million foreign born people who came from all over the world in New York. So the demography is much poorer and much more reliant on federal assistance. 65% of the people polled who say they were not born in the United States are for Mondani. And then given globalization and given the economy, right now you have upscale, mostly white and Asian kids and they are in their 30s, 40s and 50s kids. But mostly I'm talking late 20s and 30s, maybe early 40s, some. And it's Arrested Development. They can't get married, they can't have kids, they can't buy their home, they can't get their Beamer. And why can't they? Because New York is over regulated rent control. They're not building houses. There's no free market. But they don't see it that way. They see oppressed oppressor. The Wall street people did this to us. The rich did this. And they see all this wealth in New York, these beautiful brownstones and penthouses and they hear about Donald Trump and Trump Tower, all this. So they get very angry and they say, I have a degree from Swarthmore, I have a master's from Princeton, I have a degree from the Kennedy School of government. I owe $150,000 in student loans and I'm a senior editor at Alfred Knop. And you know what? I work for an NGO in Manhattan. I work for Alvin Bragg as an entry lawyer and I'm only making 80,000 a year and yet I have all this education, I'm so bright. But I pay my student loans and my apartment is $5,000 a month and that's rent control and I can't make it. Yes, I know that socialism will make it worse and that the reason that we're in here is so. But I don't care anymore. I just want to bring the whole temple down on me. That's the demography. Who's for this? Number two, this is not a presidential election every four years. This is not a midterm election. This is an off off year. So you're going to have to ask the registered voters of New York to go out and vote for just one person. There's no representatives, there's no senators, there's no president. So we know that it's going to be about 10 to 20%. And the second thing is in that jungle primary system, you don't have a Republican versus a Democrat. You have anybody who wants to run for anything, lots of Democrats and it's all jumbled up. There's not a separate Democratic primary, there's not a separate Republican. So the Republicans Never united behind one candidate. They have one Silwa and he's got 12% of the vote and they've got Cuomo and he's got about 33% and then they've got Mandami and he's got 43%. So Mont don't. If you have all of New York and say half of New York is registered to vote, 4 million people and he's got 20% turnout. 8, you know, 8 million. 8 million. 4 million. And then 10% of 4 million is a 400. So you have 800,000 or something. And he's going to get, maybe he's probably going to get 10% of the whole resident population and there's not any strategy. So what should have happened is under the older system, Republicans get together and they say look, we can't get a Reagan or a MAGA person and not in New York, but we got to get some kind of Romney type person or Bloomberg type person or maybe a Giuliani. We can sneak in and we have to unite about him. Then we got to go about appeal to the independence and sane and they could have won because if you add Silwa and Cuomo's together. But what did they do? They took the anti madame vote and then you had this complete failure. Eric Adams who had a history of racist. You know, I took on the crackers and I gave water to one day it was I'm giving bottled water a buses of illegal. Next thing he's trashing the hotels and hates Trump and then loves Trump. It was just a mess he stays in. People were sick of him. And that hurt because then the primary and then that split the vote and now a lot of his black supporters are not going to vote for anybody. And then you had Cuomo, probably the most unpopular politician who had to resign as governor for 12 sexual harassment accusations and he pretty much transferred people who had Covid into a pristine rest home population and killed 12,000, lied about it. So he was completely discredited and he's lost a Step. If he's on the stage and you see him debate, he's anemic, he's inert. He did a little better when he was shouting, but he doesn't have that old energy. He used to be. He used to be like his dad, really a good debater. He's gone wasted, spent. And then you have Silva, he's a perennial, kind of, you know, he runs every for every year. He's a nice guy, but nobody's gonna. And so they're splitting the anti socialist vote. They was, they, they went from splitting it three ways, now they're splitting it too. And the argument was, well, Silwood, nobody's. You can't win, but you'll stop Cuomo from winning. And Cuomo's bad, but he's better than a communist. And then, so his argument is, I don't think he is. He told everybody, if you against abortion, get out of New York. He's a crook. He's. He killed people. And maybe I can win. So it's fewer conservative. Half the conservatives are going to vote for. So half will vote for Cuomo, but 70% of the Democrats will vote for Mondoni.
- [89:37]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, well, since democracies are built on the pop constituent population, that was a wonderful analysis.
- [89:45]
Victor Davis Hanson
You can get. You could have if you had a bunch, if you had old Karl Rove in there. I know that a lot of the Republicans don't like him, but if you just said to the conservatives, bring in Rove and pay him, or if you're a Democrat that hates Mondami, get in. Mark Penn and Mark Halburn, those three people, they could get along. They could have solved the problem in two seconds about candidates, but they didn't do that. So you're going to get a communist. And the weird thing about it, he knows now he's going to win. So if you look what he said in the last 72 hours, I thought I could heal the country. I couldn't. I thought I'd heal. I couldn't. It's just so anti Muslim. They hate Muslim. He's just nuts and he's warning the country, I am mad at you. You guys are running anti Mandami. I'm going to win and you better watch out. And then you look at all the stuff that's coming out. You know, the stuff about my auntie who didn't exist in New York at that time, she had a bad look and it was on 9 11. She started weeping. But now I don't. You know, it was like, you don't care about 3000 people being butchered just a day earlier. You're worried about your aunt because people might think she was a radical Islamist and say, I don't like you. Well, I would have people come up to me and say, victor, I don't like you, rather than kill 3,000American. And then his mother found a quote that she had this particular Urdu word that it's kind of like, you know, odar and Armenian. Says the other. Don't worry everybody. We raised him as Ugandan and he is a certified person from India and he never bought into the American. The other. So that's going to be the mayor of the biggest financials. So the more that's coming out on the last, it's. It confirms the idea that he's not just as Cuomo says, an incompetent, spoiled Nepal baby with no experience except working for his mommy. He is an outright Islamicist and he hates Jews and he hates white people. Same thing. But non Jewish white people hates them. Said he was going to go after whiter neighborhoods and it's going to be wild.
- [92:01]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, we'll see what happens.
- [92:03]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, Victor, people say, would you like what he's going to do? No. Are you going to vote for him? Yes. And what is that logic? I just want to get back at the rich by just causing chaos and screw up everything. It's a nihilist vote.
- [92:18]
Sammy Wink
Yeah. Well, Victor, we are on a hard break. You have an interview coming up. So thank you very much for your calm commentary and your wisdom today. We appreciate it.
- [92:30]
Victor Davis Hanson
Thank you everybody for listening and viewing One last word. You can find us at the Daily Signal or VictorHansen.com or on XVD Hansen and we've got to stop this. I don't know what he is, this rival doppelganger, this person called Victor Davis Hansen. Show all 8 or 900 shows with ads that are appearing everywhere.
- [92:53]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, we'll have to do something about that.
- [92:55]
Victor Davis Hanson
I'm gonna get in the mirror and start cracking it.
- [92:59]
Sammy Wink
All right. And again, thanks to the audience for joining Victor Davis Hansen in his own words.
- [93:05]
Victor Davis Hanson
Thank you, everybody.
- [93:06]
Sammy Wink
Podcast with the Daily Signals. This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen and we're signing off.
- [93:13]
Victor Davis Hanson
Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal. Please like share and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website@victorhansen.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.