Late Night TV, R.I.P., Clint Eastwood, and the Sorry State of Freedom in the Anglosphere

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

Welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, lucky guy, get to ask Victor questions.

Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He's got a website, The Blade of Perseus.

VictorHanson.com is the address.

You should go there early, often.

Subscribe to later on in this episode, which I will tell you why you should.

Victor, plenty to talk about today.

I think today's episode is up on Thursday the 31st.

We're recording on Monday the 28th.

Topics to get your wisdom on are still Stephen Colbert,

New York Democrat mayoral candidate Mondami, and

some Democrats who are worrying very publicly about him.

Polls, pretty positive polls for Donald Trump and the midterm elections.

Clint Eastwood's 95.

I want to ask you about what your favorite Clint Eastwood movie is.

And maybe, oh, European Thought Police.

So that's a range of issues today to get Victor's take on.

And we will start on all of that when we come back from these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor, let's get started with your thoughts on Stephen Colbert.

A few things have gone on.

Well, rallies, supposed rallies to support him that were kind of flopperoos.

But the continuing appearance by David Letterman and others,

the comic world, that I don't think anyone gives a rat's patoot about them anymore.

Coming to his

audio.

I mean, what is

the audience is what, two or three million people?

Yeah.

And you can get it free, and Gutfield is three million, I think, and you have to pay for it.

And Gutfield is beating all of these guys.

So I don't know what his shtick is.

He goes on, apparently.

I don't I've never watched it, but from news accounts, he goes on every night and attacks his sponsors, right?

And

I mean, not

the network.

Yeah, the network.

The network, yeah.

Yeah.

So

he attacks you and me and the peop not us personally, but the people we see CBS, right?

He's mad about CBS.

Right.

And they gave him a year.

So I guess his shtick is I'm going to insult them and whine and feel sorry sorry for myself until they fire me, and I hope they fire me so then I can be a wounded, fawn, tragic hero.

And I guess the crazy people that were at the network felt, well, to mitigate the idea that he was a loser and we paid him $20 million a year and he cost us $41 million and we gave him a $100 million budget and he still couldn't break even.

We'll give him a year because he's a popular icon and an extension of the Democratic Party and we do business and the Democrats are nice to us because we subsidize these terrible losses so they can have a megaphone or a slot to air their grievances.

I get all that.

But at some point they must think he's kind of like, remember Howard Beale and Network, the Peter Finch character?

Yeah.

He said it was crazy and then finally he He did it so much he got boring and they had to kill him off.

They killed him.

Yeah.

Well,

I don't want to get into the killing metaphor, but my point is that I think he's going to get boring like Howard Beale because every night he seems to complain that they're mean to me and they did this to me and they did this.

And everybody's going, but you got 20 million.

He's like a teenager that his parents, you know, the teen says, oh, he got a firebird.

I mean, in high school, there was a witch kid, and he goes, oh, that other guy got a firebird, and I only got a Camaro.

And, you know, it's like, I don't care about my parents' income, where it comes, how hard.

I just want it.

And that's what he is.

Oh, these corporate people, they have all this money.

They can afford to pay me $20 million and lose $40 million.

No, they can't.

And

why whine about it?

When Tucker Carlson was let go,

he had the highest ratings at Fox.

You know, some nights he was getting on special events near 5 million, but usually 3 to 4 million.

And they let him go.

The Murdoch family did.

He was their top winner.

He wasn't like Colbert,

that he was not losing the money, not at all.

And

there were people mad at the Murdoch family, but I don't remember anybody.

This happened during the Biden administration.

I don't remember people saying it's Joe Biden and the left wing drove Tucker out.

This is horrible.

How did they take one of our...

They didn't do that.

And I don't remember Tucker complaining.

I remember him saying something to the effect, I work for corporate America.

I understand.

He didn't agree with it.

He didn't think it was fair, but he didn't, every, you know what I mean, whine.

Oh, my God.

He's like an adolescent crybaby.

Well, casting of this as a First Amendment issue is

kind of preposterous.

By the way, Victor, he's lost $40 million a year.

That means he's lost.

hundreds of millions of dollars for this company.

And he's lost it because, as Jay Lino said the other day, you can't alienate half the country.

When they asked Michael Jordan, well, why don't you be more left-wing?

He said Republicans buy shoes too.

And so it's stupid to destroy half your audience.

And that's what he did.

It goes with the genre, though.

I mean, other than Guttfeld, it's

the crybaby.

I don't like the crybaby.

Oh, poor me.

I only make 20 million.

I don't have a...

I'm going to insult people so they'll fire me and then I can be really a victim.

Who cares?

Once you grow up, man, get alive.

You know, I'm looking at the New York Post from Sunday, and it has an article titled Republicans Left Out.

And on these shows, it breaks down people from the left and people from the right who, over the years, appeared as guests.

And Stephen Colbert had 176 from the left and one from the right.

The Daily Show, 157 to 9.

Seth Meyers, 68-0.

Jimmy Kimmel, 58-2.

Jimmy Jimmy Fallon, 41-2.

This, the talk about boring,

this got boring a long time ago.

Not only boring what he's doing now, but everybody knew what it was.

It was a bunch of network corporate subsidiaries and their advertisers who made a conscientious decision to invest in the Democratic Party that would be in power half the time.

And they thought, you know what, this is very important

to vet, especially in the age of Trump.

And we get Elizabeth Warren on my, whoever, who would ever put Elizabeth Warren on anything to hear that scowling, whiny person?

But

she's angry because she can't go in Colbert anymore.

Same thing with all of them.

And that was what their role was.

It was just a business decision.

These corporate people got together and said, you know what?

Here's $200 million we lose a year from all of these mediocrities who've ruined late-night talk shows.

They're not Johnny Johnny Coston, they're not Jay Leno, they're not Jack Parr, they're not Dick Cabot.

They're just talentless.

And they whine and scream, but they put the left on, and it's a good investment to cover our bases.

It's like giving to both candidates.

That's what they did.

And at some point, somebody came in and said, you know what?

This guy is

costing us $40 million a year.

We can pay for 10 or Kimmel or Fallon or these other people, but but this guy, this guy is the guy that really eats up the money.

And we're not going to do it anymore.

And so why don't you just go ahead?

I didn't remember everybody said, you fired Bill O'Reilly.

Oh, my gosh.

You took away the biggest conservative voice.

This is terrible.

They just said, you know what?

That happens.

This is a crisis of the First Amendment.

Victor, I think

you were on of this genre, two shows.

You were on Guttfell once.

You were on Bill Maher once.

Is that correct?

Were you on any of these?

I was.

Bill Maher sabotaged me.

I had just come back from Libya.

I had a ruptured appendix.

I was on,

I was really, I had still traces of perintonitis.

And they called and said,

we can't get anybody to talk about the Iraq war.

Could you come on?

I said, I don't really think I should.

They said, no, no, you don't.

Bill likes you.

He wants you to have it open.

So he had a little thing in his ear where he was getting prompts from his director, right?

So I went on and Gandalf, remember that Ian McClellan, McLean or whatever his name was?

Oh, he's a hardcore listener.

Yeah, first thing he said is, they said, this is Professor Hansen from the Hoover.

He said, he's not a professor.

And they said, the war, Dick Cheney is a war criminal and all this.

And I basically said that I thought the surge was going to work.

That was 2007, I think.

And I said, the surge will probably work and whether we get a lasting piece, I don't know.

But the idea that it's not going to, and they went crazy, and it was a sabotage, and then the producer called up and said, we feel bad.

We didn't think we were going to do that.

But I said, I'll never, ever, under any circumstances, for the rest of my life, ever set foot on that show because you lied to me.

It was all a setup.

And I don't care.

I'm not mad at you.

I think I said something.

That's what scorpions do.

That's That's who you are.

So it was my fault for agreeing to be persuaded by it.

But you know what?

You're not going to miss me, and I'm not going to miss you.

I'll never set foot on your stage again.

And I don't have anything against Bill Maher, but the way that they did it was very unprofessional.

When I went on Gutfell, you know, it was,

I just happened to be in New York, and

everybody was very friendly.

Yeah, you were pretty good that night.

I enjoyed it.

Okay, well, Victor, we're going to get to, speaking of New York, we're going to talk about the mayoral race there.

Actually, we should talk about what has led to

this particular Democrat candidate.

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Victor, I'm looking, still, still, I love the New York Post, and Sunday's paper.

Michael Goodwin, who's a great guy, great columnist, won the Pulitzer Prize

once.

He used to be on Fox a little bit.

I haven't seen him much.

I've met him a few times.

A good guy.

He's got an article, a column.

New York Polls Must Condemn

Zoran Mamdami's anti-Semitism.

And the article is basically about

making note that

Jacques Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, and Rah Emmanuel, the former ambassador to Japan, the former congressman, the former mayor of Chicago, the former top aide to Obama, they have both come out publicly to attack Momdami.

Victor, you've talked any number of times already about Mondami, but to me, okay, good for you, Shapiro, good for you, Rahm Emmanuel, that you're doing this now.

But, you know, there is so much culpability with the leadership of the Democratic Party for years, which I think you would put Rahm Emmanuel in that category, for creating this party in a way that it would turn out, spit out, puke out someone like Amandami.

And

he's the future of this party.

Anyway, Victor, any thoughts on the culpability here?

Yeah, I think they...

They decided that their message was not appealing to people, whether it was a Green New Deal or open borders or defund the police or redistribution or their foreign policy apologetics.

So then they doubled down and they went the full racial, we're going to divide people by race, we're going to let in 12 million new constituents,

and we're going to go crazy over Donald Trump and call him, you know, Russian collusion, laptop disinformation, raid Mar-a-Lago, get him off the ballot, indict him, indict him, indict him.

And

the logical culmination is somebody like Mondami.

Not just that he's a socialist, but he's a complete fraud.

He grew up as an entitled Nepo baby.

His father was an endowed professor, a convenient leftist.

His mother is a multi-million dollar subsidized documentary maker.

He just had a big wedding festivity in Uganda that was fit for a king, not for a socialist.

He keeps saying he's going to look at affluent and whiter neighborhoods.

And Mr.

Mondami knows, of course, that when you rate Americans by their ethnic affiliation in terms of per capita income, the number one is Indian Americans from India.

So he's basically should say, as an Indian American who is from the most successful and affluent group, I'm going to look at richer and Indian American neighborhoods.

But he can't do that because he's a racialist.

And that was clear when he claimed that he was an African-American because he was born in Uganda and tried to get special preference under the corrupt affirmative action system, DEI.

Everything about him is crazy.

He's an anti-Semite.

He knows that.

He won't even say he can't.

He won't disown Globalize the Intrafado.

It's like saying, you're a racist.

That's a term I don't feel comfortable when people...

I don't feel comfortable.

I don't use Globalize the Infadada.

Would you reject it?

No,

He appeals to upscale professional

elite minorities and mostly white professionals who feel

that they are in the same intellectual and social category as the very wealthy you can afford in New York, but because their genius has been unrecognized and they're not compensated, they cannot buy a brownstone in the Upper West Side.

And they're angry about that.

And he comes around and says, I'm going to give you rent control.

I'm going to give you this.

I'm going to give you that.

I'm going to give you that.

And we'll see if he turns it into,

you know, what we expect blue cities are.

And

we'll see what he does.

But he's going to do a lot of damage.

But they voted for him, so they get what they deserve.

And we'll see what the Jewish population, it used to be 30 or 40 percent, I think it's down to 12 percent in New York now, what happens to those who are actually Orthodox or they identify as being Jewish American.

Because it would be stupid to live in that.

Already, of all the victims of hate crimes, they are the most disproportionate.

They compose about 3% of the population.

They make up about 40% of hate crimes.

And if he's there, it'll be open season.

Well, Victor, I'm sorry, once again, my headphones, same thing happened last show.

Something screwy here, but it happens to be with me.

But we're going to take a break in in a minute.

But before we do, I want to drop something on you.

I just, I know you've been a big fan of

Elon Musk as an inventor.

And as we go, as we were recording today, a story came out on, it's on the Daily Mail.

A paralyzed woman reveals shocking effect of Elon Musk's Neuralink.

brain chip.

And here's a woman who was paralyzed for 20 years.

And now this

thing this guy made, amongst the many things he's made, has profoundly affected her life positively.

This is just

a I just bought another Tesla, gave my Tesla, my wife's Tesla, to my son.

And I picked it up and I drove it home.

And it's a beautiful car.

It's even better than the model just two years ago.

It's an amazing car.

And the SpaceX is an amazing company.

X is an amazing company.

I'm speaking right now in rural California because of Starlink.

So he's done a lot.

I wish he wasn't going to start a third party.

And if he does, I hope it doesn't really

destroy the conservative movement and the way that Ross Perot sort of

got Democrats elected.

I hope he can heal his wound with Donald Trump so they at least have a modus operande.

They have a truce or something.

And I hope he continues to do what he does.

It's so funny, is that he was an icon of the left because of his EVs and his sustainable reputation, sustainable energy, etc.

Solar panels, batteries, all that stuff.

And then he was despised because he endorsed Donald Trump in 2024.

And now that he had a rupture with Donald Trump, guess what?

Nobody is destroying.

Tesla cars or dealerships.

It's like, well, we're going to destroy you and drive down your...

Tim Waltz is not...

Why isn't Tim Waltz talking about driving down the price of his stock?

Because he's no longer public enemy number one, because he's mad at Donald Trump.

Therefore, he's okay.

Therefore, we were not going to torch his dealership.

That's how the left thinks.

Well,

Morrison.

He's a very gifted, very gifted Renaissance person.

I'm very happy he's in the United States.

Yeah.

But this,

I have to believe every year we're going to read of some other discovery or some invention that he's created that's made a profound change in things.

I agree with you.

I hope he sticks to that and less to the third-party stuff.

Well, Victor, the Europeans have lots of problems, and what they also have is lots of thought police.

And we're going to get your thoughts on that.

And you've written an important piece on X, Confederacy of Fallacies, and we'll get your

share why you wrote that when we come back from these important messages.

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We are back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show, me and my stupid headphones.

So I apologize for my.

I got to get that Starlink, Victor.

that maybe will

it's very impressive I have I've tried use internet I've tried local internets out here in Fresno County and this is just

all you do is go up on your loop put it on the roof or somewhere out and take your app out and guide it to the best direction presto you have

high-speed internet very affordable I've tried everything else, Verizon, everything.

Nothing compares with it.

Well,

if you hang out on Ex a little bit every day,

there's no question you're going to see stories about Europe and the thought police, particularly Britain.

Britain is,

it could weep.

You know, you and I, we talk about war movies.

I love, love old British war movies and old Britain, frankly, even for an Irish guy, to see what this country has become is sad.

It's sad.

It's sad.

Yeah.

Here's a piece from someone named Darren Grimes.

He says, the Home Office is building,

actually,

excuse me, I think the Telegraph reported this.

The Home Office is building an elite social media police squad to monitor your posts for anti-migrant sentiment.

While asylum hotels fill,

protests grow, immigration hits record highs.

If you dare criticize the chaos, expect a knock at the door.

Instead of deporting criminals, Labor's policing priority is now policing your opinion.

You didn't vote for a surveillance state.

You voted for control of our borders.

Britain deserves real policing, not digital thought police.

Victor,

I don't get it.

Your thoughts.

I'm thinking that they've never had a Bill of Rights, and they don't really have a written constitution like we do.

But Bill of Rights, every day I get up and I look at Europe and I say, thank God for Thomas Jefferson and others, Hamilton, that gave us a Bill of Rights.

because they don't respect freedom of speech at all or freedom of expression.

Put it this way, there's about nine books with the title Suicide of the West.

There really is.

But if you were going to you, you said to Britain right after World War II, let's destroy this country in a way that Germans can never do.

The Blitz didn't work, the V2, V1

barrages didn't work, let's destroy Britain.

Let's just fast forward 50, 60, 70, 80 years from now.

And what would you like Britain to do if you want to destroy it?

And you would say, ah, I know what I'll do.

I will open the borders and I will import people from antithetical Islamic cultures that do not want to assimilate.

And I will make them 15 to 20% of the population.

And in major cities like Manchester or London, maybe 30 or 40%.

And then I will create a sense of guilt.

and shame about the British colonialism and British literature and British universities and everything.

And I will make them hate themselves, censor themselves to the point where they'll be impotent to do this.

And then I'll say, I will also ensure that they do not utilize their natural resources to the fullest and will go on to renewable energy like the rest of Europe.

This is true of Europe too.

And then I will try to demonize anybody who speaks out against radical non-assimilation immigration, and I will make them into public enemies, and I will put them in jail and threaten them, and I don't really care.

And then I will disinherit their whole 20th century and earlier legacy.

So, World War II, what they went through in World War II, when they were the only country from basically June 25th of 1940 to June 22nd of 1941, they were the only country to be against Italy and Germany, and they stood.

Just forget all that.

Forget about all that.

Don't mention it.

Lord Nelson is no good.

All the pantheon of heroes.

It's just amazing that how they're destroying their country.

And you think in World War II and afterward, they were the innovators of technology.

They were indomitable.

They created probably the greatest statesman of the modern world,

Winston Churchill.

I don't know why they're doing this.

I mean,

it's through the...

If you think Australia is something different than the surrounding New Guinea or something as far as humanity and the way people are treated in today's world, or you think that Canada, even under the left-wing regime, is a successful country,

or we are, it's because of them.

And yet, we're more pro-British than they are.

Than they are, right?

It's sad.

And we have all that affliction in the West.

Something about Western civilization that was remarked of since antiquity, when you combine market capitalism with

constitutional government, which is the only combination that works, you create such a level of affluence and freedom and leisure that's without bridals on your appetites, without family, tradition,

religion.

If you don't have that, then you just...

There's no moral bearings and you can do whatever you want.

And these people that are running Britain right now feel that they're going to make a big thought experiment on the middle class.

And I don't think it's going to work.

I think they're going to be a rebellion, I hope, against it.

But when you look at Europe, every sign from economic growth to energy to open borders

to fertility, it doesn't look good.

That's why Trump is always.

Trump is more pro-European than the Europeans.

Yeah, yeah.

Look, we should treat all tyranny and injustice the same, but

if some Asian country is being oppressive, I don't get as worked up as when Australia and

it seems to be diminishing

the rights of the Anglosphere.

There's something about that, but

you look at Britain, Canada, and Australia, and on us under Obama, like what was happening to the English-speaking world that was the center of civilization and progress?

You mentioned suicide of the West.

It seems to be something that's been embraced, and thankfully, Donald Trump seems to have broken it.

It's what he's trying to do.

He's trying to say to people, don't feel guilty about your legacy.

Don't change names.

You don't have to be perfect to be good.

Respect your traditions.

You're a singular civilization, da-da-da.

And people hate that.

They don't really hate it.

And if you look at their behavior,

if you look at the way that Left lives, or John Kerry or Al Gore,

they love the appurtenances of jets, they love the 5,000-foot homes, they love all that, but they feel that they can, in the abstract, critique all that in the negative.

Well, Neil.

Hey, Victor, on X,

you wrote a piece, The Confederacy of Fabulous.

Would you like to tell us about that and why you wrote it?

Well, you know, I try try to look at MSNBC, CNN, the network news to see what is on

what people are saying other than Fox or something sometimes.

And I was looking at MSNBC and CNN, and they brought on these characters,

and they were all in response to Tulsi Gabbard's release of these troves.

And by the way, there's a new one coming out of the classified section of the Durham Report.

which I think will be devastating, especially the whistleblower, second-tier intelligence officers that are going to give us a separate assessment of what Brennan and Clapper said.

So, anyway, I was looking at these people, and I just said to myself, liar, proven liar, proven liar, proven liar.

So, there was Susan Rice, and she was castigating Trump and Tulsi Gabber.

And I said, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Why should I believe you?

You lied about Benghazi and said it was a

just an impromptu anger, fit of anger over a video when it it was a pre-planned al-Qaeda-related terrorist operation that was due to your lack of security as national security advisor.

You lied about WMD.

You said we took care of it in Syria.

It's all gone.

No, they killed civilians after you said that.

You told us that Bo Bergendahl

acted honorably.

No, he was a traitor, a treasonist, deserter.

He endangered the lives of people in his unit.

You've lied about this.

You went on the talk shows and you lie, lie, lie.

Why should I believe you now?

Then the next person was James Comey.

And I thought, well, wait a minute.

The last time I saw you, you lied about just stumbling upon seashells on the,

well, gee, Jack, I just happened to see 86, 47 on the,

hmm.

I saw one about Harris not too long ago.

That was interesting.

I took a picture.

I didn't know what it meant.

That's James Comey.

245 times he said, I don't remember.

He looked at Donald Trump in the eye and he said, you are not the subject of a FBI collusion investigation when it was already full blast.

Why do I believe him now?

And then I thought, there's Andrew McCabe.

He's on there criticizing Tulsa.

Wait a minute, Andrew, you lied four times, according to Michael Horowitz.

Three times you lied under oath that you didn't leak.

You're a proven liar.

And I don't know why Bill Barr let you off, but he did, but that doesn't mean you didn't lie.

So why would we believe you now?

So then

Jeffrey Toobin's on there, and he says that Donald Trump is blah, blah, blah, and Telsi Glad, blah, blah, blah.

I thought, well, wait a minute, you were on Zoom, and you were self-abusing yourself, and you claimed that you didn't know that the camera was on.

You're the expert on Zoom, so you're not telling the truth.

And then there was Clapper, and I thought, wait a minute, why would we believe you?

You said that Donald Trump was a Russian puppet.

You were the one that said the NSA doesn't spy on.

And then there was Brennan.

I said, Brennan, you just lied and said you'd never looked at the steel dossier.

That's demonstrably untrue.

You lied and said you never spied on Senate staff or computers.

You lied when you said there was no collateral.

They were all liars, is what I'm saying.

And yet they put them on there and we're supposed to.

So I just said, why would we believe any of them?

And Brennan said, I'm confused.

This is the weaponization of the intelligence agent.

And Clapper said, well, I have to lawyer up.

Well, this is what you did to help people

for a decade.

And now it's coming home to Roos because there is a cosmic justice in the world.

And it's coming back to haunt you.

So all of them were liars.

I didn't even mention McCabe.

Remember, McCabe was going to work with Rod Rosenstein?

They were going to put a wire on, and they were going to go get Donald Trump to act crazy, and they were going to record it.

And then they were going to go to the cabinet member and said, see, we got a secret recording of Donald Trump.

He's He's unstable.

If you'll vote to remove him under the 25th Amendment, we can proceed.

That's what I'm saying.

And so they could work to elect a president who really was

mentally feeble.

And I haven't heard one of them say one word about Joe Biden and the cabal to hide his physical and mental decline.

I wonder, Victor, someday we should figure out, you should figure out, if there was a Mount Rushmore of all these

terrible people who who really hurt our country, like who would be the four that would be a good thing?

It's a hard call.

I thought of that, Jack.

I think Anthony Fauci would be up there because the problem with Anthony Fauci is not just he said one mask is good, two are better, you don't need masks, all that stuff.

If you look carefully at his correspondence with Francis Collins after the arrival of COVID, and you look at the budget and his relationship with Peter Desick and Echo Health, it's pretty clear that he knew it was against a lot of fun, gain of function research here, and he routed the money to the Wuhan lab that he knew was not a very good place to put money, and they were experimenting on coronaviruses, and more importantly, he allowed instrumentation and expertise to be sent over there.

Bottom line, he was really

not the major role, but he had a role in the creation of a virus that killed millions of people.

And as somebody who had long COVID for a year and six months twice,

I feel personally aggrieved by Anthony Fauci, what he did.

And then they made him,

he was pardoned.

So he's up there.

Mark Milley's up there too, Jack.

I've never heard of a Joint Chief of Staff that called his Chinese counterpart and said, you know, I think my president might be crazy.

And if we ever get into a DEF CON one or something like that, I'll call you first to warn you.

And then that's an advisory role.

You don't interrupt the chain of command.

Then he said, I called in the theater commanders and said, no order to you is going to be issued unless it goes through me.

That's insubordination.

It goes from the president to the department, secretary of defense to the theater commanders.

The joint chief is over here.

He advises.

He's not in the direct chain of command.

That was basically, if you could be dramatic, a coup.

So Millie and Fauci and Brennan and Clapper and Comey,

that's a pretty roguish bunch of people.

We could add the minor players, Lois Lerner, who corrupted the IRS before the 2012 election to deny conservative groups non-profit status.

She's up there.

Eric Barack.

Yeah, Eric Colder.

Barack.

And Hillary deserved to be on it also.

Well, yeah, they're elected, but Hillary, remember all the things?

Oh, I'm going to be, I'll okay the uranium-1 sale, so the North American uranium goes up.

Oh, my husband got 500,000 bucks from the mayor of Moscow.

How did that happen?

Oh, you mean

you're saying that I bleached my

communication?

You mean like with Clorox?

Is that what I did?

She had her assistant go out with a hammer and break them all up, and then she suddenly lost the 30,000

Donald Trump joked about and said, Maybe Putin can help us find it.

And the next thing, you know, he admitted to collusion.

Remember that?

Well, Victor,

we're going to be a little truncated today.

Yes.

That's life.

But we're going to take a break right now.

When we come back, we're going to talk about polls for the midterms, polls on Donald Trump.

And I think we should begin it by getting your views on your favorite Clint Eastwood movie.

I like Clint East Eastwood.

Yeah, he's just turned 95, so we'll do that when we come back from these, I think, our final important messages.

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So, yeah, Victor, Clint Eastwood, you love him?

I know you love him.

That's why I planned this.

If you had to pick one or two of your favorite movies,

three or four.

Sure, go ahead.

Oh,

I really like the good, bad, and the ugly.

Eli Wallach was brilliant in that movie, and Lee Van Cleef was too.

That established Clint Eastwood as his presence.

He didn't claim that he was Marlon Brando or Anthony Hopkins as far as acting, but he had a presence on the screen.

He knew when to be silent and everything about him.

He dominated the screen in the way John Wayne did.

And it was a great...

Sergio Leone was an authentic genius.

It's often unrecognized.

I think the more I watch his other movie, Once Upon a Time in the West, the more I think that was a that might have been the best Western of all.

That was the music and everything about Charles Bronson, Jason Robarts, Claudia.

It was a brilliant movie.

But I really liked

Good, Bad, and the Ugly.

I thought that

The Unforgiven was a great movie.

That was a revisionist Western.

But

gosh, Gene Hackman was brilliant in that movie as well.

But

Clint Eastwood spoke more than he usually did.

He was very good in that movie.

Gran Torino, I liked.

I thought that was a good movie.

Yeah,

that was a a great movie.

He did a movie a long, long time ago that was kind of different.

Outlaw Josie Wales, that was a good movie.

I liked everything he did.

I had dinner with him once.

A good friend at the Hoover Institution invited me.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

And I sat across from him.

And he's just exactly

in person what he is, you know.

That was a very, very.

I used to go to a good friend, Shelby Steele's house, actually.

He was one of my best friends.

Wonderful person.

And I think I told you I saw David Mammoth there for the first time, whom I really admire, and we've had on the show.

And I've mentioned this before, and

Obama had just been in Philadelphia and said,

you know, get in their faces.

You've got to take a gun down Ni-Fi.

I said, that's kind of provocative.

And David Mammoth says, especially when he stole the line from my screenplay of the untouchable.

I didn't know that.

That was funny.

But Clint Eastwood, I felt really embarrassed because I take supplements.

I was taking supplements.

I looked across the table, and unlike me, he had them on the table taking them.

There was a book a long time ago written by a couple.

I don't know if you ever remember.

They created something called Life Extension.

And then that drug company that's very good that makes Life Extension products.

I think it was sold to them or offshore.

Anyway, they always mentioned an unnamed movie store that they had advised about Life Extension.

he's 95.

I think it's working.

Yeah, they're antioxidants, anti-inflammatory, synalitics, all those things we thought were kind of crazy are probably true.

They extend life.

I love, by the way, back on Clint East with the Dirty Harry movies.

That's great, too.

Yeah, and spoke to a certain time and a certain moment,

just like Charles Bronson's movie.

I went with my dad to see Dirty Harry, and my mom was an appellate court judge.

She was very angry about that.

And my dad and I went and then we were talking about it.

And she came in and she goes, you know, he took the law in

his own hands.

And my dad goes, he wouldn't have to if the judges didn't let them out.

So it was really funny.

They had that great line.

You know, it wasn't just Make My Day punk and all that.

That one they said

about the, was it, what was his name?

The Zodiac Killer?

It wasn't Zodiac, it was something else.

And they said, he's going to do it again.

And they said, how do you know that?

And he says, because he likes it.

He likes it.

And that's absolutely true.

That was a great,

it's pretty amazing.

I remember him as Rowdy Yates on

Rawhide.

He used to sing some around the campfire.

I'm curious, at the dinner you were at, was this wasn't one of these big gala dinners.

It was a private dinner.

No, no, no, no.

Just four or five guests.

Oh, okay.

And I used to.

Shelby was a wonderful person.

He is a wonderful person.

My son, Eli, yeah.

And he,

everybody liked Shelby, and so he lived at that time in Carmel.

So he'd have local people that lived in the area come over for dinner.

And you never knew.

And he's the kind of person that would never tell you who's going to come to dinner.

Come to dinner, and Clint's going to be there.

You just go there, and all of a sudden, there's Clint Eastwood.

And

he's

he's...

I asked him, I had a little talk with him, and I was,

whenever you're around somebody, you never want to talk about yourself one iota because you're never going to get that chance again.

You want to talk about, so I ask him about people that he dealt with.

You know, he was very professional.

He never spoke ill about anybody, but it was very clear that he really liked Sergio Leone

and felt that he had made that transition from television to stardom with

a fistful of dollars for a few dollars more, so-called spaghetti western.

Well, what if he had stayed in America and hadn't made those movies?

You know, it was.

He made a weird movie.

You remember Hang Em High, where he's in there with

what's her name?

The Swedish actress, Swedish-American.

She died, I think she committed suicide tragically, the blonde woman.

Yeah.

I remember Inger Stevens.

Inger Stevens.

Yeah.

I always liked, I always, because of my father, he would always, every time

there'd be a Swedish-American actress, Inger Stevens or Anne-Margaret, he'd say, see to my mom, mom, see, Pauline, there's true Swedish beauty.

Funny, so that's why I would say, well, my mom would go, and I'm not Swedish and I'm not beautiful.

Your mother might have liked that movie because the judge was very much.

I said to my mom, because she,

I think we went to the movies together, and I was really angry at the judge, and I said, he's stopping Clint Eastwood from handing out justice.

He's trying to create law in a lawless territory.

And you always, the rule of law, my mom would, you know, every April 15th, have you paid your taxes?

Yes.

Did you take any deduction?

No, I didn't, mom.

You did not write off any business, I hope.

No.

Did you write off anything on the farm when you're not actively farmed?

No, I didn't.

I trust you on that.

I do not want you to do any.

It wasn't just because she was a judge reputation, but she just really hyper-legal.

She had a great respect for the law.

God bless her.

Even to this day, I can't even, you know, I get paranoid about driving 75 and a 73 or something.

Oh, really?

I don't have that problem.

I did it today, and I didn't have my license with me either.

So

I always feel my mom's looking down on me.

Don't break the law.

Don't break the law.

Well, let's get your take on, as we come to the home stretch here, about some polls.

The first one, this is,

let's see, I think it's from the Wall Street Journal.

It's a report on the Wall Street Journal, maybe it's from Newsmax.

Public swings massively in Trump's favor on economy since April.

A bipartisan poll shows a dramatic shift in public opinion on the state of the U.S.

economy with a net...

net 23-point swing toward optimism since April, an uptick that parallels renewed economic momentum under President Donald Trump's policy, according to officials at Market Data.

The Wall Street Journal survey conducted by Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio and Democrat partner firm Impact Research found that 47% of Americans now rate the economy as excellent or good, up from just 36% in April.

Meanwhile, those saying the economy is not so good or poor dropped from 63%

to 51%.

Victor, your

take on that.

I'm not saying that the unpopularity of the Democrats, there was also a poll by

Quinnipiac that

the Democratic Congress was polling

16%.

So when you see that 61% of people have a negative view of the Democratic Party and even much less the Democratic Congress, you think, well, Trump was going to get a landslide in the midterm.

Not necessarily, because

you've got to remember one thing about polls, it's never about what you think about a particular person or party.

It's what you think about a particular

person or party in comparison with the alternative.

And the alternative has always got to be there, because you'll be misled if you don't think that somebody

depends on that.

And I saw another poll with the, do you have a high regard for the Ivy League?

I think it was 20%.

And then another poll, do you have a high regard for higher education?

It just plummeted.

But again,

Donald Trump,

I was talking not too long ago with some Silicon Valley people, and I was asking about foreign investment.

And did they know the ratio of $1 trillion per jobs created?

And they quoted some impressive figures.

I mean, you're talking about 20 million jobs if you have $10 trillion in investment.

But one of the things, I said, why are all these people investing here?

Why are the Japanese, the Europeans?

Everybody's promising.

I said, well, they're afraid of Trump.

The trade, the tariffs did make them want to and simple things that will be tariff-free.

But another one said

it's this wouldn't have happened if Biden had said this, because they didn't trust him.

And they thought they would come in here and they would get regulated with climate change regulations and DEI regulations.

And they have put up with that in Europe and to a lesser extent in some Asian countries.

So they thought if they came here, they could put a plant, they could avoid tariffs, but they would not be hassled.

They would call up the government and they'd say, Your permit will be expedited.

We want you to be successful.

How can we help?

Whether

what's the percentage of your workforce?

Do you have

this?

Do you do this?

What type of energy?

All that stuff.

So

I think there's a multiplying effect with all this stuff.

The immigration feeds into the economy.

The economy feeds into lower crime rate.

We have the lowest crime rate in a long time.

I think it's 30 years in big cities.

It doesn't seem like it, but that's what the statistics say.

And a lot of that is deported.

Well, we've already deported, I think, 150,000 criminals, 100,000.

Somewhere on there, and there's 300 or 400,000 known criminals to go.

but and then I don't think there's any popular movement to say let's decriminalize stealing

like there was before.

So there's a backlash, there's a shift that people want accountability, they want the rule of law, they want to go back to normalcy.

Trump feeds into that.

We're not going to change any more names.

Change your there's nothing racist about the

you know, the Washington Redskins,

et cetera, et cetera.

We'll change the name of the Gulf of Mexico, but not other names.

By the way, this is a side story.

You know, we're trying to think of all these

big issues, big things happening,

tariff negotiations,

war that's trying to settle wars, and successfully bring about peace here and there.

I just read a piece yesterday that the Trump administration has stomped out these dark web

porn sites

that had like 150,000

users and millions and millions of

images.

Wow,

this is the kind of thing that

the angel Gabriel and myself.

It's very different than the first term.

It's very different than the first term.

If you come to Trump in the first term and you say that I'm a respected Republican grandee, I served with the Bush administration.

I was advisor to the Romney campaign.

They hired you.

And then you said, oh, not in my name.

I'm not a part of that tweet.

That executive order, I'm going to find a way to nullify or neuter.

And today it's, how can we help Donald Trump enact and promote and accelerate the mega agenda?

They have people like in energy and

interior.

They're just educated.

They're all doing a wonderful job, at least this counter-revolution.

The subtitle of the book that I'm almost finished that comes out from BASIC is The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and his MAGA counter-revolution.

And I'm trying to think of the - there's all sorts of suggestions for the title, Comeback, American Phoenix, etc.

I've got to decide on that.

What you just said sounds like

it should be the title.

Is that your idea?

Yeah, mine was

the fall and rise of Donald Trump and his MAGA agenda.

I like that.

Yeah, that's what it was.

I could not believe his polls after January 6th.

They were rock-bottom.

And I quote all the people people who said he was done.

Mitch McConnell said after January 6th

he took a gun and we gave him a gun.

He shot himself.

Basically, he committed suicide and we're so happy he did.

And I didn't realize all the people who voted, I thought

there were 10 senators or no, there were seven or no that voted against to convict him as a private citizen.

As an ex-president?

Gosh.

So you mean Susan?

Republicans.

Yeah,

Not just impeached him during his term, but after he was out of office.

No, it wasn't just Mitt Romney.

It was people like Susan Collins, Ben South,

Lisa Murkowski, that Senator Burr, Richard Burr.

And

he was just written off.

Everybody, I quote pundits.

And then the left did what they always do.

They thought, you know what, it's not enough.

We've destroyed him politically.

We want to destroy him financially, psychologically, physically, everything.

So they started in on the Mar-lago raid, the indictments, the get him off the ballot.

And each time they did that, we're going to have a mug shot.

Every time they did that, he went up one or two points.

Yeah.

Mugshot was a great thing for him.

Hey, Victor.

Sticking to polls, and you mentioned the midterms here, is indeed a Newsmax headline in the beginning of an article.

President Trump sets stage for midterm victory.

Our latest and and this is Newsmax, our latest national survey of 1,000 likely voters was conducted from July 9th to the 14th, reveals strong public support for President Trump in the wake of his reforms.

His job approval rating remains solid.

Republicans lead in the generic congressional ballot, and optimism about the direction of the country is at its highest levels.

level since before the pandemic.

A large majority supports key Trump policy stances, including the deportation of criminal legal immigrants and preemptive strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities.

By the way, that generic congressional ballot numbers were

Republicans 47%,

Democrats 42%.

And as we know, Democrats still are foundering or floundering, or maybe it's both of them for a leader.

I don't know who their leader is.

So I don't know.

If I was betting today on the midterms.

Well, I mean, it's the only I think it's only happened twice in the last hundred years or 100 years or so.

FDR

was elected in 1932, and I think he picked up seats in 30 seats.

He did.

And I think George W.

Bush picked up in 2002 because of 9-11.

He picked up three or maybe four or five seats, and it was unheard of.

Everybody else, Obama lost over 60 seats, I think, in 2010.

And Donald Trump lost the House in 2018.

So the expectation is he's going to lose the midterms.

I'm not sure he is,

especially

he's got to, if the economy kicks in.

If you think of all the things that are going on, it's sort of like

on the one hand, the economy is rapidly developing with AI.

You know, two years ago when you went on Google, you didn't see AI at all.

I even you I don't know how to use it, but I use it and grog and AI and it really there's some things there

you know the other day I wanted to test it so I just did to Grok I think it was what are the main classical sources for the life of a Pamanondas bam Plutarch bam Diodorus bam

it had apocrypha from Plutarch's Moralia so That's making a big change in the economy.

Everybody's using it and it's saving time and it's efficient.

The reductions in the bureaucracy, there's all these things going on, that the borders close,

and you don't have as many people on public assistance when you deport them.

The crime rate is going down.

You call to account DEI.

It's like DEI is basically the people in DEI said, I didn't think you'd let us get away with this this long.

And yeah, we're culpable.

And

we have no argument for it.

Yeah, it is racist, but it's good racist.

That's all they can say.

And the military, oh, we're up 45.

We had this conversation five years ago.

It was systemic, Victor.

There's just no way you can get that level of recruit.

And today's, now it's like, okay,

no problem.

10,000 people volunteered today.

And

it's almost eerie what's going on.

And the more that it happens, the angrier the left gets.

They have no Congress, they have no Supreme Court, they have no White House, they have no 55% margin on the issues.

They just have Donald Trump.

They hate him.

So the idea is, we call him Hitler and fashion.

We call him Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo, Stalin this week, and it didn't work.

And they don't say, well, maybe you shouldn't do that.

So now we're going to call him super Hitler and hyper,

it just doubled down on losing.

And that's why these polls, that's why the polls are the way they are.

People are so tired of Hikem Jeffrey with his baseball bat or screaming and yelling about,

you know, it's just, they're tired about Nancy Pelosi and her insider multi-million-dollar career from insider truck stock trading, her mansions, and yelling and screaming about everything.

And it's just, they're just tired of it, I think.

And so, my point is, I think he could do pretty well in the midterm.

Yeah.

I saw your old friend Chris Matthews.

Oh, he maybe he's my old friend because he too went to Holy Cross like me.

Everybody seems to.

Yeah, I saw one of them.

Yeah, he saw some praiseworthy.

once.

Yeah.

And I don't think,

well, I won't comment on it.

Don't comment on it, right?

Yeah, I'll be.

You beat him.

You beat him.

That's

at a private gathering.

So at least he said the truth that the country was

swinging toward Trumpism.

And nobody else will admit that, but

all Trumpism is common sense.

It really is.

Do you want an open border or not?

Do you want to punish criminals or not?

Do you want to have deterrence abroad or not?

Do you want to try to address the debt or not?

Do you want to have free trade or fair trade?

Take your pick.

It's pretty common.

70, 30 issues, yeah.

And it ha the only way that it's working and it didn't work under the Romney candidacy or the McCain candidacy or the Dole candidacy or the Bush presidency or the George H.W.

and the second term of Reagan, it didn't work, is that they became captive what George Patton once called, do not be captive of your fears.

They were worried that the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Georgetown, they didn't like them.

People were mad at them.

They thought, you know, we're going to give Janet Napolitano the National Humanities Award.

Remember that?

Stuff like that?

We're going to do this, and they'll like us.

No, they're going to hate you.

So Donald Trump doesn't care.

Call him a fascist or Hitler.

It's like water off a duck.

He doesn't really care.

He doesn't.

You know, he'll just say your fake news.

And then Rosie O'Donnell will say something.

He's a fascist.

Somebody shows it to him.

She's a loser.

And somebody will whisper, you shouldn't lower yourself as president to respond.

I don't care.

He was in Scotland.

He is now as I speak.

And I was just amazed that the reporters just walk up to, what do you think about Epstein?

What do you think about Putin?

What do you think about the he just, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.

He didn't care.

He just.

He answers more questions in one day day than Biden did in his whole damn presidency.

There's not a bunch of.

The difference with Biden is he always had these grima-worm tongue.

Remember that character in the Tokyan,

the writers of Roham?

He was a pretty good actor that played that, but he'd always whisper in the ear of the demented Theodine, who was like a Joe Biden character.

And you always had people around Biden that were pointing where he's supposed to walk, or when he went off into the Amazon rainforest, they'd grab him by the elbow and bring him back, or they'd whisper.

With Trump, you you get the impression that nobody dares whisper in his ear.

You don't do that with Donald Trump.

You don't go up and say, Don't, don't, don't say that.

Please don't say that.

I look at Carolyn Levitt's face sometimes when she's standing next to him and he says things that are just outrageous.

And instead of going like this, she goes,

You know what I mean?

And then I look at her, and it's like, oh my God, she pushes every button.

They go in there and she's just so upbeat upbeat and da-da-da-da-da-da-da.

And she's very attractive.

She's very young.

She's very energetic.

And they go, ah!

You know.

Think about how she performs in that environment now.

And I'm not knocking Sean Spicer, but went out of the box of the first administration, how the chaos of QA in the White House.

And she is, she's handsome.

There's something about youth.

When you're that age, I think she's 27 or 28.

You just

get up and you have so much energy, and you're so da-da-da-da.

Let's get the job done.

And when you get older, you get nuanced and ambiguous, and that's not what you want for that job.

And

she learned a lot from Kaylee McElhaney, too, I think, with her books.

You know, she doesn't have the books like Kaylee did, but the idea that she was going to go mono-to-mano with the journalist, and she preps a lot, she's very bright on her toes.

And I think Trump would say she has good optics.

She does.

Everybody, I mean, I've seen these people.

I thought, I'd always said to myself, if you.

I used to end up speaking a couple of times with Harmette Dillon.

I thought, wow, if that woman was ever in a position of authority, she'd be wonderful, right?

And I remember in the primary, Doug Bergham, everybody thought he was kind of weird, but every time he said stuff, it was really wise, you know what I mean?

And he was earnest and honest.

I thought, if that guy is ever something he'll do.

He looked though like some and does look like there's something Old Testament prophety about him.

He does.

Yeah, he does.

He does.

All of these people are, we'll see,

it all is hinged on a couple of things, and that's the health of Donald Trump and safety of Donald Trump because

he is, you know,

he's getting to an age where you've got to be very careful, and he's got a lot of enemies.

So,

hopefully, Victor, speaking safe and healthy.

Hopefully, you and I, two senior citizens, can get to that age.

Now, we're at the end, and I just want to thank everyone

who takes the time to comment.

One YouTube video episode the other day had like 900 comments on it, Victor.

But you do elicit opinions from people, you and the great Sammy Wink.

But here are a few, two.

One from Cattle Company, Cattle with a K and Company with a K.

BDH's shows, podcasts, interviews, anything, Victor, actually, is what I look for when I pick up my phone.

Very cool.

And then Jeffrey

Strater, 3191, writes: Victor, I've listened to you for two years now, and every day I get to work, I put on my earbuds, and tune into your words of wisdom and enjoy hearing about battles, wars, planes, tanks, and things I have never known.

You know, Jeff, I'm going to do this when we finish the wars of the 20th century.

We started with the 1906 war, and we're up to Vietnam.

We'll do first Gulf War, then Iraq.

We're going to do great weapons of the 20th century.

Oh, that's cool.

Yeah.

Or maybe a Western civilization, we'll see.

I got to go back.

Did you ever,

we have to shut down here, but did you ever do, you and Sammy talk about those wars in like 1910, 11, 12, Italy versus Greece versus

the first, second, and third

Greco-Bulgarian war.

Yeah, that's very interesting.

It's cool to unwind those

Gulf wars.

Okay.

I didn't talk about the 1956 Suez War, Suez Crisis, but I mentioned it in passing.

But we're going to talk about the

first,

we went, we did Korea, Vietnam, and I'm going to talk about the

the first Gulf War.

Okay.

Victor, you've been terrific.

I want to thank people who

write me, lots of people do, about Civil Thoughts.

That's the free weekly email newsletter I write for the Center for Civil Society.

Civil Thoughts comes out every Friday.

14 recommended readings, articles, great articles, interesting articles I've come across the previous week.

I know you're going to like it.

How do you get it?

Go to civilthoughts.com, sign up.

It's free.

Not selling your name you're you will you will like it trust me victor's a website the blade of perseus very quickly victor's on

on x at vd hansen vdh's morning cup is on facebook and there's a great group of friends on uh

Facebook,

the Victor Davis Hanson Fan Club.

It's not an official entity, but they're really good people.

By the way, Joe,

who's one of the leaders of that group, wrote me, now I don't have it in front of me, but I said the other day that

Mitt Romney's nickname was Carlos Danger, and it wasn't.

That was

Anthony Wiener.

Wiener, yeah.

His was something different.

Oh, delecto.

Yes.

Delecto, something.

Yeah.

But

they were both kind of criticized for being insulting to Latinate people by using this,

as

Jewish or Anglo-Saxons using the Latinate vocabulary as disparate, you know, but yes, I'm glad that you said that.

It wasn't Carlos Danger.

That was the self-exposing Anthony Wiener, who, by the way, is running, isn't he running for council or something?

I think he, yeah, he wants, I don't know if he wants to and he lost a primary or what, but he was, yeah, he was out there in it.

But don't these people just like go away, get a freaking job somewhere, do something.

I kind of enjoyed him because he always had mental breakdowns in front of you on the camera.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, his ex is married to soros's i know son now yeah yeah we saw that the whole thing is

these people to serve each other well victor i i'm an anglo-saxon guy anglo-saxon slash let

um a warm-blooded southern european but i'm gonna say

asta luega and adios thank you victor you've been terrific thanks folks for listening thanks for watching we'll be back soon with another episode of the victor davis hansen show bye-bye Thank you, everybody, for listening and watching, and via Condios.