Bolton’s and Comey’s Troubles and Cracker Barrel’s Own Goal

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

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

And he's got a website, The Blade of Perseus.

Its address is victorhanson.com.

It is the place you should be going regularly and even subscribing to.

And later in this episode, I think this is an episode.

I'm having an episode.

I will tell you why I believe you should be subscribing.

We are recording on Saturday the 23rd.

This particular episode will be up on Tuesday the 26th, by which time people will have a long desire to get Victor's take on the John Bolton House investigation.

And we're going to get Victor's take on that as we begin the program.

We're also going to get his take on this cracker barrel situation, what's happening with U.S.-India relations.

James Comey back in the news being a bad boy.

Is he ever a good boy?

Hey, Marco Rubio cuts visas for truckers.

So, and maybe we'll have another topic or two to bring up.

And we'll do that when we come back from these important messages.

We are back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

Victor,

I guess I should just start off by saying,

John Bolton, what do you think?

Well,

the Trump administration

it was kind of counterintuitive.

So Trump, you would think, should not comment on it.

But he did say something that was unique.

He said, you know, he's a low life.

He's not a smart person.

He always wanted to go to war.

But then he's suffering from Trump derangement syndrome.

But then so are a lot of people.

And I don't nobody goes after them.

So I think he got that out.

And now the left and the never Trumpers are saying, well, this is tit for tat retribution.

And that might be true if

during the 2020 campaign, he was fired in 2019 as National Security Advisor who, according to Scuttlebutton Washington, had

finagled to engineer in the shadows the ouster of H.R.

McMaster.

Then he came in and he was tickled to death because he didn't have to be confirmed by the Senate for that position.

And nobody on the left, he was despised as much as he's canonized now by the left.

And so he came in and then, of course, he was an interventionist optional war guy and he immediately crossed swords with Donald Trump.

So he was out

in a little over a year.

But the point I'm making is then he took his notes.

He was a prodigious note taker.

And he had access allegedly to classified information.

And he wanted to get this

I Was in the Room book

out during the 2020 election to hurt Donald Trump.

Now, he didn't like Joe Biden, but apparently he wanted to hurt Trump more than he did Biden.

The Trump administration sued to stop it, as you remember, and the judge was very strange.

She said that Bolton was not doing his country any good,

that he

that he was releasing information based on classified files via his notes that was not in the interest of the United States, but he didn't have an injunction at that point.

The election happened, Trump lost, the Biden administration came in and dropped the investigation.

So now the question is,

is Pam Bondi and Cash Patel rebooting that old investigation

and to suggest that they were on the verge of showing he was using classified information as notes.

If that's the case, then there's this little bit of stronger argument of retribution because it's been four years.

Or, as some sources have leaked, he took out information whether actual files are his version of files as embodied by his notes, handbooks and notes, and he was using that information

to

either hurt Donald Trump or to if he was in fact lobbying for foreign entities.

And I don't know whether he's registered as a foreign agent or not.

And that's what some of the Trump people apparently have leaked, that this is new information.

But what's really damning for him is

there's a whole corpus of things he said in 2022 that are surfacing all over the internet and all over conservative news, but even mainstream news, because they don't like him.

I mean, they like him more than they do Trump, and they find him useful, but they still don't like him.

And in these clips about Morlago, you know, he kind of laughs and said, Donald Trump doesn't care about classified information.

Anything that came across his desk, he just, you know, consumed.

It was classified information, he treated like French fries.

You just ate it, he did this, and

this is what he deserves.

And almost everything he said now is applicable to his own situation.

So it's very ironic.

It's an existential question.

I know our listeners are kind of confused as I am about it because you have clear criminal exposure with Clapper, McCabe, Brennan,

and Comey.

Even Anthony Fauci, there's evidence today that he was deliberately suppressing news.

of what Peter Dosick was up to, and Francis Collins and he was up to in facilitating the transference of instrumentation, expertise, and in some cases money to the Wuhan Lab.

And that was just a taboo topic, and they went after people.

So, what do you do with all these people that

under the Biden-Waxon effigy just went wild and weaponized these bureaucracies?

One of the chief themes was to hurt Trump, whether his message or his administration are Trump the person.

And so, the question is: if you don't do anything, they'll do it again.

And there's no deterrence.

If you do do something, it looks like

you're engaging in revenge politics.

So, what you have to be very careful is you have to find evidence that shows their culpability.

Then, if you can show their culpability, then the way is clear because you can show that these people broke the law.

There's evidence they broke the law, and they were given a free hand, a de facto clemency amnesty during the Biden four years because they, the Bidens, weaponized the government and found Clapper and Brennan and Comey and McCabe and Fauci and

all of these people very useful for their anti-Trump narratives, and they never were accounted.

So they were the ones that were enjoying special preference.

If you can make that argument, then he'll get public opinion behind him.

That he's a corrective to a misapplication of justice, and that these people were beneficiaries of political bias.

And now there's no bias, and their exposure will be re-examined.

If he can do that, I think it'll be fine if he finds new things they've done, especially new evidence of things they've done.

Yeah.

If I can say a few things personal, Victor, I mean, I've served on two boards with John Bolton.

I like John.

I don't call him a friend, you know, but we're friendly, were.

I haven't talked to him in any number of years.

He was on any number of national review cruises also, which I used to run.

So I had a

lot of interaction with him, and I considered him

heroic at one point when I was on the board of Gatestone Institute, which you know of.

And I hope I assume many of our listeners check out Gatstone.

And John was honorary chairman, but he was so tough

against the Obama administration.

Iran policy.

So he was kind of a hero in that sense.

And then putting the stink on everything was the service in the White House.

And that post-2020, you think, was

what was he doing?

Was he working?

What part of his job was work, and what part of it was research for the book that he was intending on writing as soon as he got out in order to kneecap Donald Trump's re-election chances?

And that really,

you know, the guy's smart.

I like him.

Who cares what I think, like or not?

But

he really diminished his stock with a lot of people with his intentionality.

He did.

He didn't have to do that.

He could have politely disagreed with Donald Trump and said,

I am more of an interventionist.

You are a more Jacksonian,

reluctant to use force to affect change in America's interest.

I can't serve you anymore because I don't agree with your policies.

And then nobly resign and then more or less become somebody like Bob Gates, you know what I mean?

That he worked for Obama.

He wrote a book, it was critical of Obama, but I reviewed it, I think, for National Review.

But

by and large, he was professional about it.

H.R.

McMaster wrote a book.

It was critical of Donald Trump.

Donald Trump didn't like it.

But if you read the entire book, there is a theme to it, that he tried to transmogrify Trump's idea.

When Trump had an idea that he disagreed with, he said, I will implement it.

I know the institutional mechanisms to do that.

I'm not going to block it.

So

he could have done all that, but instead he he really did think after January 6th that Donald Trump was through.

And he felt that he had contributed to that downfall by

the argument and litigation that he had gotten into with Trump during the campaign.

And he leaked that this book was going to be a bombshell and a revelation of Trump's sloppy style and illegality.

And then after January 6th, I really think that he had delusions of Bill Crystal grandeur, that he was going to be one of the old Bush, Romney, McCain guard that people would look to.

And therefore, he doubled down.

And when Trump had the 93 indictments, 25 states got him off the ballot, the Mar-Lago raid, he weighed in on these things.

And he felt that this was the nail in the Trump coffin.

But what he didn't understand is that he had no constituency, that he had never, ever been able to get Senate confirmation for any high post in a Republican administration.

George W.

Bush tried, he could not do it.

He had to make a year recess appointment.

He was mentioned prominently to Donald Trump when he came in, and people said, you've got to appoint Bolton, but he cannot be confirmed.

You can only appoint him to either a sub-cabinet position that does not require confirmation or the national security advisor that doesn't.

But otherwise, he's toxic.

And he was a denizen of

the Sunday and Sunday talk shows.

He was everywhere.

And then he made this case that Donald Trump was dangerous, reckless, and he just wouldn't stop.

And it was obsessions.

And he really did believe that after 2020 defeat, after the January's, prior

the subsequent January 6 demonstration riot, all of these indictments, Trump was through.

Anybody who knew Trump knew that he was a Nietzschean figure, that the more they tried to destroy him, the stronger he would get.

So he was another person like,

I don't know.

You know, you look at all these people.

You look at Bill Crystal, you look at

John Caseich, you look at Mitt Romney, you look at all these people who went after Trump, and then you ask yourself, where are they now?

Yeah.

I think John Bolton also had presidential ambitions himself once upon a time.

So why am I serving this idiot?

You know, it's probably.

He had a huge pack.

He raised, I don't know what it was, $10 million, $7 million

to give to preselected congressional candidates for the most part.

I think that thing is defunct now.

I was told by some donors that there was no way in blank they were going to give him money anymore.

And he's very unpopular.

If you mention his name among not just MAGA people, but now doctrinaire Republicans, they're very negative toward him.

I don't understand why he did all of this.

It's ego.

He didn't have to do all these things.

Well, he's proof of the enemy of my enemy is my friends, and the friends of my enemy is my enemy.

So we're going to get to that theme with Cracker Barrel, I think.

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And we thank our friends from Solair for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor, about Cracker Barrel, which I kind of like Cracker Barrel.

I've probably eaten there 20, 30 times over the years.

Something homey, kitschy,

you know, fun in its way about it.

But this, it's proof of this, the angst, not the angst, no,

the anger of

typical Americans who've been treated by major companies as if we don't like you, Budweiser, Target, et cetera.

And

whether it's malicious, whether the folks at Cracker Barrel were really trying to do some Dylan Mulvaney kind of ploy to attract a new audience and

give the finger to

their true customer base, that's how it's perceived.

And I think it's more evidence that middle America is just done fed up with being treated as second and third class citizens.

Your thoughts?

Well, they lost, what, 200 billion in stock.

That's hard to do if you're a CO.

The problem is that these people are insular.

So at the same time this was happening, there were these democratic strategists that issued these lists of words you couldn't use, birthing person,

all of this stuff, safe spaces, trigger warnings.

And what they were trying to say to the Democrats, their fellow Democrats, was: we're in an academic media administrative state bubble.

And we're a bicoastal elite, and we don't like the people in the middle.

And we think they were the losers of globalization.

They didn't code, as Joe Biden said, or they didn't understand.

They were going to be shut down in their coal plants like Kilwita.

You know, the Klingers, Deplorables, the whole chumps, garbage vocabulary.

And they are the majority, basically, or they're just half the country, I should say.

And they, so they're a huge constituency.

And then Cracker Barrel, remember that, was it an influencer, or was she that woman that they had all over the internet that said

after the sweeps in L.A., I think she was a streaming,

a very low-level actress.

And she said, oh,

none of you people should go into a restaurant because Mexican nationals are cooking and you should just get over there at a cracker barrel.

And I think that had an influence on the CEOs.

They thought, oh my gosh.

And well, who are the CEOs?

They're in a bubble too.

Most of them are MBAs from these elite places.

I don't know if the Cracker Barrel people are, but that's who the corporate elite are.

So they thought, you know,

we're going to be really sly.

We're not going to offend our constituency.

We'll just get this

kind of white nationalist barrel out and these white supremacist old man with overall and just get them out and we'll just have a who can object to a logo they they really do think people are stupid so the average cracker barrel constituent says well they're they're moving removing that because they don't like me and they think that that resonates that I am a white working class person rural and I go to these places and that's true I do but they're they don't want to admit that because they're embarrassed because the DEI apparat.

So they're and I'm not going to go there anymore.

That's what, I mean, that's basically what it is.

And so I predict that they'll probably have to do something, put a barrel without a guy on or something.

But it's part of this thing that I don't, I have to be very careful, but we had a show where the Sacramento State President Luke Wood was angry because I had mentioned, and you and I mentioned, that he had said that he was going to eliminate whiteness, I think, a few years before he was appointed.

And he didn't really retract it.

He just tried to say, I was a professor at the time, and this was type of language.

And then we had Doreen St.

Felize at the New Yorker saying that white people were smelly, they caused plague, she hated them, she couldn't imagine marrying a person.

And then we had Jasmine Crockett, white this, white that, white, you know, everything.

We had Ellie Mostels.

And I don't, I think what happened is they didn't realize that 67%

of the country

identify as white.

And

they don't like that.

It's racist.

And they keep doing it.

And they attack, you know, the whole subtext of the clingers of Obama and the irredeemables and deplorables of Hillary and then Joe Biden's chumps, dregs, and garbage was the white working class.

And that was the whole subtext.

And they have been demonized, demonized, demonized.

And the more that it doesn't work, the more that the left doubles down.

And now I think they're so explicit that they have created a permanent backlash.

And people are sick of it.

They're sick of it.

And if they don't stop it, Jesse Waters, I think a week ago, when

He was quoting Joy Reed, and she said, what have whites ever done with music?

And what have whites ever given the world?

And they're stupid, they can't think.

You know, if you had reversed that, and somebody said that their career would be over, they wouldn't even have a private podcast.

People would just, there would be no sponsors, there would be no ad nothing.

But, you know, Jesse Waters said on national T V, Well, I can list a lot of things white people.

In other words, he was saying, You don't want to get into that.

I guess the subtext of that was Chopin, Mozart, Beethoven were a little bit

more adept at music than Diddy

or Kenya West.

But why get into that racial chalvinism essentialism?

And that's what they're asking for.

Because when you start stereotyping a whole group, and then you say that they're stupid, or they're smelly, or they start plagues, or you wouldn't want to be around them, or Ellie Mostel said, after I came out of COVID, I didn't want to see any white people.

And you keep doing that, and there's no pushback.

You get energized.

You said, I can keep doing even more of that.

Well, there's a breaking point, and I think the country has reached it.

And I don't know what follows, but I think there's going to be a big, and you can see this with the Cracker Barrel.

You saw it, as you said, with Bud Light and Target.

People are just sick of it.

They're sick to death of it.

The music stuff is not only a rewriting of history, but then it's also an accusation of thievery.

You know,

you didn't do this, you, whoever you is, we did it, and you then stole our.

Yeah,

Jory Reed comes from the Caribbean.

Her parents did.

I think one of them came from the Congo, one from the Caribbean, and she was always talking about cultural appropriation.

So then she comes on with a blonde.

wig, you know, or she dyed her hair blonde.

I mean, she had been critical of white people who had dreadlocks, and I think she wore them once, and she said, I'm going to be, you know, I'm going to shock people by being indigenous and all of this.

But if you really, I just went to the store last week, and I think I saw maybe, I don't know, 20 Hispanic women with dyed blonde hair.

I thought it was great.

But

if I walked in with a sombrero, they probably would have said, you're culturally appropriating.

What I'm getting at is always one way, and it's all predicated on the idea that we are victims and you're victimizers and then there's all these rational

exegesis why it's so crazy.

Everybody wants to come to the United States.

It was founded by these old white men, Madison, Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, who was probably half white.

But

Why would you want to come to a country like that?

What was it about the country that attracted you to come if it was not tolerance and making race incidental, not essential.

Why would you come to this country and try to change it into something that you would want to live in?

And so they can't answer that question.

And then when they get into this group did this, and this group did this, and this group did this, it's all predicated on the idea you won't say, well, who were the people who died on Omaha Beach?

Who were the people who went into Guadalcanal and were slaughtered?

Who were the people who flew the 8th Air Force, 40,000 of them dropped out of the sky?

Who were those people?

Because Because if you want to play that game, then everybody's going to play that game.

So don't play that game because the other side doesn't want to play it.

I mean, I don't want to play it.

But if they continue to do that out of insecurity, it's not going to go anywhere.

It just makes people angrier and angrier.

And not just so-called white people.

When you see 25% of black males voted for Trump and 55% of Hispanic males, part of that was they were saying, We're sick and tired of being black or Hispanic or white.

We just want to be people and we want to get affordable gas, affordable food, affordable electricity, safe streets, be able to buy a house.

And you, people, all you do, our leaders, is talk about race.

Yeah.

Well, we're going to talk a little more about cultural obtuseness and about James Comey.

We're going to get Victor's take on those things when we come back from these important messages.

We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

We are recording on Saturday, August 23rd.

This episode is up on the 26th.

I'm Jack Fowler.

I'm in sunny day.

It's a beautiful day here in Milford, Connecticut.

And Victor, I hope it's sunny and not too hot.

It's only 107 yesterday.

Oh, well, okay.

It got so hot, the capacitator on the house pump went out, and then the pressure switch.

So we changed the pressure switch, switch, it went on for a day, changed the capacitor for four days,

and now the

bearing and the pump went out, submersible went out.

So

the crew is out there pulling the well, the pump.

I'm going to have to build a little tiny, I used to have a little shed, you know, that covered it

so it doesn't get too hot because when it gets really hot and the pump goes on, it starts to stress out and throw a bearing.

Okay, well, sunny California has its brutality there.

So Victor,

let's talk about

a little, maybe, or as long as you want, or if at all, about this NFL

male cheerleaders.

And, you know, we've talked about the NFL before.

It's sort of, I think you and I are on the same page of fans, but not really anymore.

Just tired of so much of the wokeification.

Also, the change in the nature of the game.

Especially, Victor, do you ever watch these old YouTube videos of this week in the NFL and 1971, week three?

And it's

such a yeah, it's a different game.

And guys, you know, they score a touchdown, they flip the football to the ref.

They're not beating their chest or doing all this insanity.

So that's kind of made it.

I was just looking at a video where they had a 1966 playground, and a guy had a...

Did you see that video?

No.

And all these kids were on all this jungle gym and going up slides and they were like completely out of control and nobody was hurt, but they were all confident kids and they were running around and the parents were like smoking cigarettes and watching them.

And I thought, no Karen's here, no leash on the kids' neck.

And that's the way I

can remember when my mom went to a PTA meeting.

And we were all out in the playground in the evening at the school, and I was doing chin-ups, and some guy came behind me and grabbed my legs,

so I couldn't do the chin-up.

And I, this tooth right here, I chipped, and it still chipped.

And

every time they try to put, every time they grind it down a little bit and put a cap, it falls apart.

But the point is, my mom said, I told you about that.

That's going to mar your appearance for the rest of your life because you were not careful.

And then that was it.

Wow.

And then

it's held you back.

What are your thoughts about the NFL with these male cheerleaders?

I think 12 teams.

When I have these questions, I always ask

when the people make these new policies and initiatives: who is the constituency?

Who is the constituency at Cracker Barrel for getting rid of the old guy in the barrel?

Who is the constituency for male cheerleaders?

So I try to do it analytically rather than emotionally.

So

you can make the argument that 70% of the fanatic, loyal NFL fans are male.

30%, let's say, women.

I'm just being arbitrary.

Maybe it's 60-40, who knows?

So when they go there full of testosterone and levved up with a couple of beers, they love to see Dallas cheerleader types.

It's kind of like burlesque.

It's kind of like Vegas, right?

It's a nice break, and you have all these guys pumped up on the field, hyper-masculine, then you get these hyper-feminine women, right?

And that's part of the tradition.

So then you say, well, we're going to put men there,

and that's going to appeal to whom?

The 30% of women?

If that were true, then you would see

like guys 6'6 and solid muscle, and they would come out and they would be making pyramids, you know, with 20 high, and then they would be throwing,

tossing guys to each other in mid-air, or they would be going, they would look like Hulk Hulgan or something.

The Chippendale dancers

type, too.

Well, Chippendales, but not, but instead,

they have these guys with long hair, the ones that I saw, and they're feminized.

They're tan, and they resonate a gayness to them.

So

I don't think the women are going to be attracted to that, and I don't see how the male athlete is going to be attracted.

I mean, the male audience would prefer them to females.

So then I asked themselves, well, what is the idea?

Are you going to try to tell everybody that you're cutting age woke or your equity, diversity, inclusion?

Because it's not a market-centered proposition.

It's not going to work as far as building attendance or having people promote the NFL.

It's just not.

It's not a fan-generated phenomenon.

It's a top-down PC cracker barrel solution.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, changing topics totally, we'll get to James Comey in a little bit before our big break.

Donald Trump has been out on the streets, streets of Washington, D.C.

I'm interested in two things, your thoughts on that, and also the fact that the police union chief in the District of Columbia is backing Donald Trump's, the federal government's intervention.

He says it's not a long-term solution.

It's terrific that there is this intervention.

Crime has gone down because of it.

So Trump's getting support from the police in Washington, D.C.

And Trump was out on Thursday night out in the district.

Any thoughts on that?

The opposition to it is very strange.

The black community is kind of quiet, but

kind of in ambush interviews on the street, they find support for it.

But it's mostly a white professional opposition, a a Chevy Chase, Alexandria type suburban or Georgetown type of person that's against it.

And then you get the feeling that those who are in the safest neighborhoods or the best zip codes or have private security, for them it's an abstract constitutional question that they want to show their feeds and their moral superiority.

But for people who live right on the battle zones, they're for it, of course.

And then I don't think we've ever had eight or nine days without a murder in Washington.

So then the left says, well, it's just because 30 days.

Well, wait a minute, you said that he was going to be there forever.

He was a fascist.

He's taken over Washington.

So you admit it's going to be over 30 days?

And what would happen

when you say it's only going to be for 30 days, then what do you expect will happen when Donald Trump can no longer put the guard there for 30 days?

But do you think, oh, you said there was no crime, remember?

So you're saying now, we hate Donald Trump for intervening.

Now we hate him for he's only going to be there 30 days.

It was just a performance art stunt.

There's no crime, but when he pulls out for 30 days, we admit crime's going to explode.

Is that what they're saying?

So they're completely incoherent in their opposition to him.

It just, it's a Pavlovian

response.

It's, if Donald Trump wants to close the borders, we're for illegal immigration.

If Donald Trump wants to stop crime in Washington, we're pro-crime.

If

Donald Trump

wants to

build a wall, then we want to tear it down.

Whatever he says he's going to do is never adjudicated by the left on whether it helps the left or the right or the country at large.

It's just, we are the opposite of what he wants.

The problem with that is he's not dumb.

He selects issues that are 40-60 issues.

The border is a 70-30 issue.

Deportation is a 55-45 now, despite

the hysteria.

Deporting criminals is a 70-30 position.

Going in and fighting crime is probably a 55-45 with the National Guard or the troops.

And so when they get all of this automatic response, they always find themselves on the bad side of the polls.

And that's why that and their arrogance, I call it Pete

Buttagigism.

It's this appearance of sanctimonious scolding, talking down, self-righteousness,

my pronouns are they, them, Z, Zay, or whatever.

No one wants that.

It's like Gavin Newsom when he's trying to

put on his exoskin and be a conservative with Charlie Kirk.

He says, I don't know.

You guys just make up this little Latinx stuff as a clobber swim.

Nobody says that.

I've never heard it once.

And then, bam!

Hey, Gavin, you're an idiot.

Don't you understand the internet has no amnesia?

In like a nanosecond, he's on there talking about his Latinx, you know, Latinx community.

So they know what they're doing.

They can't help it.

They're an addict that's fixated.

They know that the diversity, equity, inclusion, PC, affirmative action, racial obsessions are killing them, and they can't stop.

And Donald Trump comes in and basically appeals to the black community over the heads of their left-wing, Trump-deranged leaders, and they don't want to buck their leaders, but privately, they're very happy that there hasn't been murders for as long as the troops have been there.

Victor.

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Victor, one more prelude before we get to James Comey is that you mentioned that line about the bad side of polls.

And I really

get the New York Post every day.

I am in dreadful...

I am in fear that New York City is,

which is not the greatest city in the world as is, but is going to go down the crapper with Mandami elected.

They still have not unified against one person to take him on.

And when that happens,

if that happens, more likely when that happens, I think the intensification of being on the bad side of polls is going to happen because New York City, what happens there, is going to be reflective in so many of these other issues that it is going to just harden problems for the Democrats.

Do you think New York City is going to make those bad sides worse?

Yeah,

you start with the idea that in the primary votes, Eric Adams, Curtis Silwa, and Andrew Cuomo together had about 50% of the vote.

And I think he had, what, 27 or something?

I don't know what it was, but it was more than each of the three.

So the problem was easily solvable had they rallied around one candidate.

And that proved impossible because Eric Adams was a very unpopular mayor.

Andrew Cuomo ended up in disgrace as he left office as governor.

Curtis Silwa was sort of a

perennial candidate.

And so they didn't have a strong unifying candidate.

So that's going to get him elected.

And then the things that he said that outraged the country, I'm going to go after affluent, whiter communities,

we need to gain the

the means of production, that resonated with two groups, the subsidized poor who thought they're going to get more free stuff,

and the white upscale professional class that makes maybe $100,000 to $150,000, childless, single, living with someone maybe, but doesn't have the money to buy the type of house and purchase the type of lifestyle that they think they deserve given their brilliance, education, credentials, moral smugness.

So that's who his constituency is, and it doesn't exist in a very great number nationwide.

You saw

Fatah, the person running for the mayor of Minneapolis, he had a rally the other day.

He didn't speak English.

There were no American flags.

It was mostly Somalians and immigrants and Palestinian wear and emblematic Palestinian stuff.

And he's going to run for mayor.

And I guess he's saying that guilty white professionals, the Karen class, loves this.

Please hit me some more, Fatah.

But I don't know.

I don't know if it's going to work.

And

I saw the Democrats delegitimized his primary.

They did something.

They did.

They thought, you know what, this is an embarrassment.

And so

what's happening is that

I guess the larger existential question is, how did the Democrats go crazy?

Because this I wasn't a big fan of Bill Clinton, but I keep hearkening back to the 92 and 96 Democratic Convention platforms that Mark Penn

and Doug Schoen wrote.

And you go back and look at them.

Juveniles who commit murder, violent crime, try them as adults.

100,000 police officers.

Shut the border.

Deportation.

Legal-only immigration.

Energy development.

Balance the budget.

That's pretty conservative today,

and yet they went,

they won, they won with the help of Ross Perot in 92 and 96, or Clinton wouldn't have won.

But after the Bush interlude, then they had Obama, and it started on Obama.

He moved the party far to the left, and then Biden doesn't know who he is or what he was, and

his body was hijacked by other minds that inhabited it.

But what caused this?

Why?

They keep saying the Democrats.

They all project.

So they say, Republicans were hijacked by MAGA.

No, you look at the MAGA agenda.

It's got 95% of doctrinaire Republicanism.

You know, low taxes, deregulation, conservative judges, full energy development.

It's different on the border.

It's different on foreign policy.

But it's got a lot more of the traditional Republican than the current Democratic Party has Clintonism.

So I asked myself, why did they go crazy, Jack?

And I think I came up with some answers number one the bi-coastal elite made out like bandits under globalization and and that was in you know academia media law corporate investment big tech

and the muscular classes didn't do as well they were outsourced offshore their wages were stagnant their factories closed down agriculture mining timber had low commodity prices as globalization brought these other natural resources and commodities onto the world et cetera.

So then the Democratic Party had money, and I'm talking about $419 million from Mark Zuckerberg in the 2020 election.

$300 million from George Soros over a variety of rectors.

Reed Hoffman funded the whole

E.

Jean Carroll lawsuit.

Elon Musk, before he was a Trumper, he was a Clintonite and a Bidenite in 2020.

Lisa Jobs, the Atlantic, all of these people, Mike Bloomberg, a billion dollars.

And he used, after he blew his own candidate, he gave him another 300 million or so to stop Trump.

So the Democratic Party said, we don't need the middle class.

We are the wealthy people, but we're the good wealthy people.

And the professional classes that benefited, it wasn't just the billionaires and multimillionaires, the next echelon on the coastal university classes, credential letters, they were very affluent.

They could buy homes, they could buy nice imported cars, they sent their kids to prep.

That group said, we have solved the existential problems of the world.

We don't worry about food, shelter.

We don't worry about the price of steak or roast beef.

We don't worry about the cost of electricity.

We want a perfect world.

It's so stupid clingers and deplorables and chomps and drags and garbage and

irredeemables.

Those people do because they're losers.

They didn't, as Biden said, well, you didn't learn how to code.

Or Hilley said, well, you all, I'm going to close down all the coal plants in West Virginia.

They were labeled dummies.

And they didn't know what was good for them.

Because what was good for them was transgendism, open borders, illegal immigration, your carbon footprint, new Green Deal, the United Nations, USAID, this utopian agenda.

And they did not ever talk about how do I buy a house?

How do I buy a car?

How do I buy food?

How do I pay for electricity?

They didn't care because they were wealthy.

And then the poor, they said, we feel, we're not selfish.

We feel guilty that we made out like bandits.

We feel the universities were saying, you know, we got a million people here from foreign countries.

And we're charging them, overcharging them, and we got all these billion-dollar endowments.

So we're going to have radical DEI admissions, full freight for people that are not white.

So they said to the subsidized poor, we're your ally.

There was no middle class in this movement.

The universities then became global universities.

And their whole point was we're going to train the new administrative state class, the diplomats, the lawyers, the administrators, the clerks.

the media people, the lawyers.

And they're all going to be indoctoring.

They're all going to be left.

They're all going to be part of the progressive project.

That's what we have.

We have the universities.

We don't need public opinion.

We do not need the middle class.

We can influence.

We'll stock all the newsrooms with left-wing journalists, graduates, we'll stock all of NPR, 86 left-wing people in the editorial.

That was the role of the universities.

That changed.

When I was in the university, it was left-wing, but it was liberal left-wing.

It wasn't North Korean left-wing like it is now.

And so that was a big change.

And then in addition to globalization and the disparagement of the middle class and the takeover of the university, then they came up with the idea that

they were going to change the demography.

And that was going to be tricky because that was race-based.

But Ted Kennedy had pretty much made it impossible for Europeans or people from Japan, affluent people to come.

He wanted

family reconciliation across the southern border.

And he authored an open borders bill.

And Reagan in 86, they can talk about all they want about Simpson-Missouli, but it opened the border as well.

They took the Border Patrol off the border, and it was the duty of the employer to look at I-9 forms, which were a joke and forged.

So anyway, the left

opened the borders.

They brought in 50 million people who are not born in the United States right now.

It's an all-time high, somewhere around 15 to 16% of the population.

30 million of them are here illegal.

And they said to themselves, this is our new constituency.

Now, when Tucker Carlson mentioned it and said, wow, they're changing, they said, oh, you're part of the sick great replacement theory.

But they had written books called Demography as Destiny and the New Democratic Majority.

They were triumphalists.

The only thing that put a little hole in their balloon is they found out that second generation Mexican Americans

and

more Asians than they expected were voting conservative.

Finally, in 2024.

But otherwise, they felt they could change the demography.

So they started talking not about affirmative action, black, white, 88, 12% binary.

It was diversity.

If you're not white,

You may be the richest ethnic group in the United States.

You may be from India that's the highest, I think it's $125,000 a year per capita income.

You may be

Korean American.

You may be Arab American and have a higher income than so-called white, but you are not

privileged.

You are a victim.

You are an oppressed.

And the white guy in East Palestine,

Ohio, who has nothing, he's actually oppressing a dentist from India who makes $250,000 a year.

That's what they sold us.

And that's how crazy they went.

So, when they were all done, they said, you know what, we're not going to worry about the middle class because we're worried about climate change, we're worried about all these boutique issues that nobody cared about.

And then we're going to pander to race because we're trying to change the demography, but we can't do it with affirmative action.

We've got to make a new group called the non-white.

And to make the non-white, we really have to bore down on white racists, call them racists.

We've got to call them names.

They're garbage.

And we'll tell our black leaders to just go out.

Just, you know, don't talk about reconciliation content of our character.

Just level both barrels and just say these white people are horrible.

You can say whatever you want.

You can say they're filthy, they're dirty, they cause.

That's what they did.

And that's what the Democratic Party is.

It's a result of massive new wealth that was asymmetrically located in the United States after the millennium from globalization.

And it was the takeover of the universities to indoctrinate generation after generation in this Marxist dialogue of the wealthy people in the country.

It was to subsidize the poor, a large underclass, and tell them that they were oppressed.

And then it was to open the borders and change the demography.

Put all of that together, and you get an Ilyan Omar, you get a Rashid Talib, you get a Mandami,

you get Bernie Sanders, you get these university crazy pro-Hamas demonstrators, you get 300,000 Chinese students, you get 30 million illegal aliens.

And that's where we are.

That's the Democratic Party.

It was by intent.

The only thing they did not anticipate is that it would boomerang on them, that it would offend Mexican Americans, black males, an increasing number of young people.

I think Trump won the 18 to 29 rubric by two points.

He picked up two points from women from 2020.

He picked up points from the Independent.

So it offended people.

Everybody.

Yeah.

And

well, that was.

I'm not going to call it a rant, Victor.

You call these things rants, but that was pretty darn good.

Well, that pushes us into a break, and the promised, the promised James Comey topic will come up when we return from these final important messages.

We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

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Excuse me, Victor.

So here's a headline from just the news.

Exclusive.

Prosecutors secured evidence.

Comey authorized classified leaks but declined...

declined charges.

Let me just read the first two paragraphs of this article.

Federal prosecutors gathered evidence from James Comey's top lieutenants lieutenants that he authorized the leak, authorized the leak of classified information to reporters just before the 2016 election, but declined to bring criminal charges according to recently declassified memos that call into question the former FBI director's testimony to Congress.

The bombshell revelations involving ex-FBI general counsel James Baker and ex-Comey Chief of Staff James Rybicki were memorialized in documents that FBI Director Cash Battelle discovered earlier this year, but the passages were originally redacted by the Justice Department in versions sent to Congress earlier this month.

Attorney General Pam Bondi intervened, eliminated the redactions, dispatching new versions of the memos this week to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees.

Officials told just the news.

I know he's your favorite person, Victor.

What do you have to say about this?

I don't think he ever gave any testimony.

He testified to the House Oversight Committee, but he said he couldn't remember.

He didn't know 245 times, I remember.

Or was it to the House Intelligence, one of the two committees?

So, yes, he testified, but he never,

he lied

by saying, basically, he did a kind of a plead the Fifth Amendment by saying, I don't know without pleading the Fifth Amendment.

But he's another person that thought he fooled Liz Cheney, and he thought he was going to tackle Trump and destroy him.

And you look at after he left, he was completely shattered.

And he is today.

As we said last time, he's reduced to seashell collections on the beach.

Or he takes pictures of a forest and quotes Nietzsche or something on his social media.

Or he says it's unfair that his daughter was fired from the DOH.

May have been unfair.

I don't know.

He's a completely broken person.

He was an iconic figure to the law enforcement community.

He had been a prosecutor.

He had hogged the limelight during the 2016 election.

And now it looks like the only thing that may save him is the degree to which these transgressions that are being uncovered and had been suppressed by the Biden administration, the degree to which the statute of limitation still applies.

I don't know to what degree they do, if they're racketeering or conspiracy.

I think his biggest problem is they'll bring him in and ask him to testify, and then he'll have a choice.

He'll either have to contradict what the written statements are that he made, I'm not sure he'll know them all, unless he has copies, and he'll perjure himself for a fresh offense,

or he will stick with what he said,

and then he will be lying when he said, I don't remember, I don't know.

when he did remember and did know, but it's past the statute of limitations.

So then he'll just be hurt publicly, but he's already down in the depths of public opinion.

He's one of the most unpopular people around.

So

maybe Taylor Swift will come to his aid.

What's so weird is that these people don't stop.

So you get Andrew McCabe weighing in on

the Bolton raid.

And you look at him and you say, Mr.

McCabe,

you were mentioned in the Paid Stroke correspondence as saying that there's going to be an insurance policy that don't worry,

we're not going to let Trump be president.

You lied on four occasions to federal investigators, three times under oath.

So you are a proven liar.

It was only Bill Barr's naivete or magnanimity or whatever that allowed you not to be prosecuted for perjury, which any other American citizen would have been.

And now you're on there taking the high moral ground?

Same thing with Comey, same thing with Clappers.

I don't know what it is.

Is it Liars Club?

Why do they all lie?

Why does Comey lie by not answering 245 times and feigning ignorance?

Why does McCabe have to lie four times to Fedel and Guskers they never leaked?

Why does Clapper have to lie and say that his national security agent doesn't spy on people when he did?

Why does Brennan have to lie that he's not tapping into Senate staff computer?

They're all liars.

Fauci's a liar.

Why does Fauci have to lie that the Wuhan lab had nothing to do with the creation of the Wuhan COVID virus?

Well, because he helped birth it through transfers of expertise and money.

But what do you do with these liars?

That's the question.

I think that Bondi and Patel and Bonjin, what do you do with them?

Because if you go after them, then it's retribution.

If you let them go, then they're higher than the law.

I guess what you do, you bring them back in and say, you said this, you wrote this,

here's a transcript, do you abide by what you said?

And they either say yes or no.

They either say, you know what,

I was wrong and I apologize, I didn't mean that, or yes, I was right.

And

that's about all you can do.

Well, there's no sense of shame and no sense of profumo from back in Britain in the 60s.

Their whole principle is that Donald Trump is orange and he has a Queen's accent, a comb all her hair, and he has crude speech, and he says things like low-life and dirty cops and fake news, and we're sober and judicious, and we use proper vocabulary.

But believe me, anybody who's listening, what is the true morality?

Somebody who's silver-tongued and

repeatedly breaks the law as a federal official or someone who's trying to uncover it, who can be crude.

Well,

they feel they're entitled to

the situation that they're in.

They're not going to leave their jobs and go sell real estate or work at Walmart.

Anyway, Victor, before we, and I do, I want to get to something Marco Rubio did.

But before that, I was just curious.

you mentioned before Simpson Mazzoli, and I know you were friends with Alan Simpson.

Did he ever talk to you about that bill in any way?

Yeah, he did.

There was a polite group of people

that asked us to discuss it.

Maybe in 2015 or 2016.

It was during the Trump campaign.

A private group of people wanted me to debate him.

So we did.

I liked him.

We had a polite debate

among 30 people about Simpson Mazzoli.

And

I very politely said, pulling the Border Patrol off the border and turning over enforcement to employers that had to check I-9 forms.

And I can tell you when you checked, when you had an I-9 form and you sent back the Social Security address,

they were all fake.

I can remember my brother having about 50 of them from the year I-9s, and they'd all come back.

That the person's name was false,

the ID license that they gave was false,

the address was false, the name was false, so it didn't work.

And

it was basically

there was no border enforcement anymore.

It was like, we're not going to be able to hire illegal aliens, and so all the employers of the United States are going to be the Border Patrol, and it didn't work.

And then they offered amnesties.

And only 30% of the people who were offered amnesties took citizenship pathways because they thought, you know what?

There's no difference in America between being a resident alien and a citizen.

You can do almost everything that a citizen, citizen's been citizenship, has been so diminished, there's no delineation between just kind of being there.

Okay.

Well, curious.

He was a wonderful guy.

He was very funny, and I knew him very well for 20 years.

Yeah.

Kazoo.

Oh, kazoo.

Whatever that was.

Up the kazoo.

Yeah, that was considered just

what that was almost considered like profanity.

Remember when he said that?

Yeah, people got very angry and then now you hear the F bomb and the S bomb.

It's really shocking about the decline.

I was thinking that the other day.

If you think what you see, that menagerie you see on planes with people dressed in yoga pants and half a tops and bare feet and sloppy clothes and eating chili boats,

there's no decorum.

And then you see all of these politicians saying the F word, the S word, and then

it's like

you've torn off the veneer of manners.

It all started in the 60s with the left.

You know, they wanted to get back to Vasoe and natural savage.

I think, you know what, I think a lot of people kind of have ticks like I do now as I get older.

Like when I go to the store to get my shopping cart,

the store that I go to always people leave trash in it, you know what I mean?

So I always pick the shopping cart with the most trash.

And then I very carefully put it in the wastebasket.

And then I buy my food.

And even if it's a long walk, I make sure that I put park because the place I go, you should see the parking lots full of trash.

And the parking the shopping carts look like they're scattered all over.

So I always go and walk all the way and park it, not because I think I'm moral, but because if everybody would do that, we could restore a veneer of decorum and rules and not litter, not throw the shopping cart anywhere.

Try not to get, you know, everybody can do their part to restore a civilization because we have

we're kind of like a Rousseau and we tore the veneer off and then we said oh we don't have to do any of these things anymore it was like I went to UC Santa Cruz in 1971 and I went to the seminar and everybody was sitting on the ground in the dorm lounge that's where it was held the professor said call me John and no titles and

Three people there, one girl had petulli oil.

Remember petulli oil?

It was this weird scent, and she

had not shaved her legs or underarms, and she had one of those wife-beater old men t-shirts on with no bra.

And it was very strong.

She sneaked.

I was like,

I had just turned 18, and she turned to me and she said, You think I stink, don't you?

I said, Well, what is that smell?

She goes, That's a natural body oil.

And then another guy, about an hour later, passed wind in a very loud laugh.

And the professor laughed and then said something to the effect: well, we don't really care about all these conventions.

We don't need to shake hands.

We don't need to worry about whether you have to pass wind.

You don't have to worry about shaving your legs.

These are all natural.

And

it got to the point where

I was taking showers in the morning at lunch and in the evening, shampooing my hair three times a day and trying to wear cologne, anything to distance myself.

I felt that I was, these were savages, you know what I mean?

But they were all natural, going back to nature.

And that 60s legacy is what was institutionalized.

Because I get the UC Santa Cruz alumni, and I just look every once in a while, magazine or newsletter, and these people are all in my class 71 now, and you wouldn't believe what they are.

They're politicians, they're corporate lawyers, they're big tech grandees, they're investors, they're hedge funds.

And so that culture is in the top echelon of America today.

And that's the problem.

Well, Victor,

let's close out by getting your take on another story.

Here's the headline.

Finally, shutting the barn door, Marco Rubio freezes all visas.

For truck drivers.

This is from Red State.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has ordered a freeze on all work visas for commercial truck drivers this follows an august 12th pileup on a florida highway caused by an 18-wheeler driven by an illegal immigrant attempting an illegal u-turn along across a median strip and a message on x rubio said quote effective immediately we are pausing all issuance of worker visas for commercial truck drivers the increasing number of foreign drivers operating large tractor trailer trucks on u.s roads is endangering american lives and undercutting the livelihoods of American truckers.

Victor, I know you got a thing about truckers.

Well,

you like truckers, but you know, I like truckers.

I just think that I like

especially the old breed of truckers, but the new breed, and I just drove yesterday the 220 miles home, and I was on I-5,

and I thought these people I was going, the speed limit is 70,

and ahead of me were three trucks.

I was the number two car behind.

They were going 75 miles an hour, passing trucks that were going 65 miles an hour.

The speed limit was 55, and I looked behind me.

There was about 25 cars in the left.

There's only two lanes in California on freeways for the most part.

And every time I passed one going 65 in the right lane that the three trucks ahead of me were passing first,

they were looking at their cell phones.

Three out of four were.

So it's kind of, like I said, road war.

I just talked, it's very funny, I just talked to a good friend of mine who's Indian American.

He's very successful, very wonderful guy.

And he was telling me that the trucking industry in California, first of all, people who are undocumented, whether Mexican-American or from India, are not getting in the cabs right now.

That was one effect.

But more importantly, those people who are green card holders or legal citizens,

whether they're white, Indian, Hispanic, doesn't matter, they're afraid to go to Florida because when they see the California plates on a semi, they feel that they're going to be pulled over and examined.

And you can see why after what happened.

And so I don't know how long that's going to last, but the other thing really quickly is why did this make such a splash?

That it was two things.

It wasn't just a trucker.

I was driving to Pepperdine in the winter, I think I told you, and I was going in the dense fog, 10 feet visibility, and a guy passed me in a semi.

I was in the right lane going 40, and that was probably his max.

And a guy ahead of me was going 40.

I could barely see his red tail, zero visibility, totally fog in Toleria of all plays.

This car, this truck went around me, he went about 70 miles an hour, and I thought, uh-oh.

And sure enough, in about 30 seconds, and I always put the window down so I can hear as well, see in the fog, and he hit a car ahead of him and jackknife.

And the car ahead of me almost hit his block the whole way.

We both pulled over, and we couldn't do anything.

We just got as far away as we could, and the next eight cars hit.

And then we wanted to get out of there.

And no one was hurt, apparently.

But they were all hitting each other.

And and he was standing out there without any emotion and then we had to go around on the shoulder.

So we walked about 200 yards to make sure there were no road signs and then we went around his at like one mile an hour, the two of us, and we got back on the road.

And no one else could get around him.

But it was the same thing.

Like somebody going very, very fast and he was not acquainted.

He was Indian American.

He was not acquainted with road signs.

He was just walking around bewildered.

And so what I'm getting at is when you, what got people mad

was three things.

Gavin Newsom's California knew that he could not read or speak English.

They knew he was here illegally.

So they gave him a license.

And then people said to themselves, if I was not an illegal alien, and I was not from a foreign country,

I would not be able to get a professional driver's license.

It's hard to get if I did not pass the test.

That was number one.

People are outraged at Gavin Newsom.

Number two,

nobody in their right mind going on a thoroughfare freeway suddenly decides he wants to go in the other direction and just tries to cut across the median and go backwards.

That is insane.

Nobody has, I've never seen that happen.

And yet he did that.

It was just a prescription of arrogant, dangerous behavior.

Number three,

once he did that, he heard somebody hit his second semi.

And he has a camera.

And he and his brother or whoever the person was in the cab with him, it was like this, Jack.

Somebody hit my cab.

Just, they were dead.

He didn't get out, he didn't rush, and then there's a later clip where he's on the side of the road.

It's like,

now maybe he doesn't know the language, maybe he's bewildered, maybe he felt bad, but the point I'm making, he made no effort to go out there and see if he could render first aid or anything.

He was, he was just like,

things happen.

I just cut across the medium without warning, and cars hit me, and I guess they died.

So

that's got people enraged.

And we get back to the original thing we talked about.

I think we talked about with Sammy.

California is a dangerous place.

It's not just dangerous for California.

When you have the most illegal aliens in the United States and you have the most sanctuary jurisdictions

and you allow people

to commit crimes and to be exempt from ICE deportation, they don't just stay in California.

They go everywhere.

And when they go everywhere and there's no background audits, they can cause a lot of damage.

And that's what happens in California.

When you look at the California budget and look at, I have this little bad habit of looking at the little pie graphs of the 1970 budget,

55 years later, the new budget, and they have infrastructure, maintenance, medi-cal,

health, education.

It's just, it's mostly education and medi-cal.

And when you look at that, we're in the bottom 10 of test scores, I don't mean education as in excellence.

I'm talking about remedial education.

So

California is just,

it's a very dangerous place to live.

It's a very heartless place.

It's a very callous place to live.

Nobody cares about you here.

They don't care.

Gavin Newsom, if you went to Gavin Newsom and said your system allowed an illegal alien to get a license and he only recognized one traffic sign out of 12.

And somebody had been indoctrinated in your system to give him a pass because he was not a toxic white male, wager, privilege, etc.,

and now he killed three people, they would say, racist, racist.

That's their attitude.

You're a racist for bringing it up.

I'm not a racist for giving somebody special privileges on the basis of their race.

Well, Viva

Secretary of State Rubio for what he did.

He's very

like Trump said, when I have a problem, I have Marco do it, solve it, and it gets done.

He's hitting everything out of the park.

Well, Victor, we've come to the end, except for a few duties, and one of those duties is to read from the many comments we get, hundreds of comments now on Apple, Rumble, YouTube, Victor's website.

And here are two.

This is from Richard Gray 802.

That Mr.

Hansen is a genius goes without saying, but what really needs to be said is that the courage he has to say what he says is to me inspiring.

Thank you, Mr.

Hansen.

We are out here, and we love you for being you.

Keep it coming.

And then there's a comment from Robert Graham5619, who writes, with sad tears in my eyes, at the end of this installment,

I'm longing for more.

Victor, you are a national treasure.

Very grateful to you and your heritage, which had the integrity to raise a child such as yourself.

I am so very impressed with your uncanny ability to consistently remember the truth, names, and dates from recent to ancient history.

What a treasure, giving us the education we needed in our public and often private education.

So that's Robert Graham.

Thank you, Richard Gray.

Thank you.

I want to thank the people who write me about Civil Thoughts.

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

If you want to get it, and you should, go to civilthoughts.com.

Sign up every Friday, you'll get my email, which has 14 recommended readings.

It's totally free.

We are not selling your name.

I know you're going to like it.

Also, a reminder again, Victor's website, theblade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.

And if you're on X, Victor's Handle is at VD Hansen.

And if you're on Facebook, check out the Victor Davis Hansen Fan Club and VDH's Morning Cup.

Victor, you've been terrific as ever.

And thanks for all the wisdom you shared.

Thanks, folks, for watching and listening.

We'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Thank you, everybody.

I much appreciate it.