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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

I am am a very happy Jack Fowler.

I am talking to the great Victor Davis-Hanson.

We are recording on Wednesday, November 6th.

This is the day after Election Day.

Something happened yesterday, Victor.

Something dang important.

And we'll get to your thoughts on this soon.

But I just do want to say that Victor Davis Hanson, the namesake of this show, is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

And he has a website.

It's called The Blade of Perseus.

Its address is victorhanson.com.

You should be going there regularly and you should be subscribing.

And at the end of this podcast, I will tell you why.

Victor, I think we might want to begin

talking about last night by reminiscing a little about some other important years and

maybe starting with 1980.

And we'll get to that and so many other things about the election and your thoughts on what happened, winners, losers, et cetera, chumps

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We are back with the Victor Davis-Hanson show.

Victor, my friend, I'm elated.

I hope you are too, whether you are or not.

Victor, did last night Donald Trump's victory, the Trump Vance victory, did it remind you in any way of 1980?

Well, I've been kind of beating that dead horse.

You know, on October 11th, a couple of people wrote me kind of nasty notes, but I called it the scent of Harris Panic in the air.

And I don't know if you remember that one, but I said

it was like 2000, excuse me,

1980 when, remember, Carter was ahead in mid-October by eight points,

three points in the last poll.

And then people just kind of got sick of everything.

And just quietly, they just said, you know, I'm done with the hostages.

I'm done with the lectures.

And I think that was the very same thing.

You could feel at the very end.

And I know that they tried everything.

They destroyed the reputation of Saturday Night Life, such as it was.

They tried to lie about the Cheney going, you know, the bullet, trying to assassinate them, the fake news.

They did everything, but it was too late.

And people had decided, I'm done.

I'm done.

I'm done.

And I think he's probably going to get 53 seats, maybe 54.

He's going to retain the house.

And

he's going to win the popular vote.

They haven't won that since 2004.

And he probably has a shot at getting 51%.

No Republican has done that since 1988.

And this is the guy that we were told, we can't win, he can't win, he can't win.

He's a loser.

George Will wrote that every column.

He's got one out today, basically.

I can't write about the Democrat, Republican Party.

It's too far gone.

Too far gone.

The greatest victory in 100 years.

Yeah.

And

trashes the Democrats.

So

it's just amazing.

And I'm at the Stanford campus.

I was there yesterday and I was sort of.

A couple of people came up.

I said I was optimistic, and I wrote a column yesterday on the ultra saying, hold on,

keep calm.

This is all momentum crap.

That crazy Iowa poll, that was all to drive up momentum,

voter turnout, last-minute fundraising, the whole thing about

Donald Trump wanted to kill Liz Cheney.

He wanted to kill the media.

That was the same thing.

They were all doing it.

They brought out the Obamas.

Oh, my God.

Nobody is.

All that proved is one thing.

That mystical Michelle Obama candidacy with her memoir, bestseller, I wish we had got her instead of,

she would have been worse.

All she did was just whine and yell, call people racist.

Same old

2008, oh, they raised the bar on me.

Never been proud of my country.

This downright mean country.

It was just redux.

And then Barack came out.

I don't know what.

mansion he flew out of, whether it was he jetted out of Hawaii, Kalaoma, the Chicago, the Martha's Vineyard.

But the first time we see him in a while, he's talking down to African-American men.

You people suffer from false consciousness.

You're probably sexist.

You don't know what's in your interest.

Let me tell you what your interest is.

Yeah.

And he's thinking, you know what?

I'm so clever.

I've been pulling the puppet streams for four years.

This has been my third.

I need a fourth term.

And, you know,

just get out, get out, be done with you.

We've had it with you.

I think

they're done.

That's across the board.

We've had it.

No, it is.

It is.

And there's no such thing as the never Trump or no.

There never was, but for 10 years, they played that fake, I'm a Republican.

I'm Nicole Wallace.

I'm Bill Crystal.

I'm David Fromm.

I'm the ball.

No, you're not.

You're right where you always wanted to be.

You're a leftist.

Everything you told us that he was going to get killed, that he couldn't win, that he destroyed the Republican Party, you joined a party that is in full destruction.

Yeah.

People said, yeah, people said, I don't like these people.

I don't like our border destroyed.

I don't like to pay $150 for a spool of Romax or $90 per plywood.

I'm done with the hyperinflation.

I don't like to be fleeing Afghanistan in shame with people falling off planes and a pride flag at the embassy while we turn over 50 billion to terrorists.

I'm sick of Hamas.

I'm sick of the United Nations U.S.

funding to the Palestinian radicals.

I'm sick of it.

I am sick of turning our downtown into moonscapes.

I'm sick of destroying women's sports.

I'm sick of EV mandates.

You know what's really funny, Jack?

There were so many,

and I tried to write that on the ultra before the election.

You know, just be calm and look at the indicators.

And the indicators were there if you wanted to see them.

There was Atlas Intel.

There was Trafalgar.

There was

Rasmussen.

All you had to do was go to Nate Silver, and he rated them, not by picking winners, but more importantly, by the margin of error.

And they were much better than anybody else in 2020 and 2016.

And that Rick Barris guy, I didn't mention him, but he was very good.

People's pundit.

Yes, he was very under-recognized.

recognized i'm going to mention him i didn't mention him in the in that he's on yeah he's on x at people's pundit yes and i i i did i didn't mention him in my uh ultra on the uh on the election before the vote came in but they were there you could see it you could see that the auto workers were defecting over the ev you in michigan you could see the amys were going to vote you could see the jewish vote was eroding it wasn't going to be 70 percent you could see the black male vote was eroding you could see the latino vote was eroding.

You could see the betting people,

you know, they wanted,

every once in a while they'd panic and go back, but they were pretty much, sure, putting their money on Trump.

You could see it with the 600,000 increased voters in Pennsylvania that Laura Trump did a wonderful job.

All those people did.

And then you could see the early...

and mail and ballot margins were almost better, the same, if not better.

There were so many things.

And then you, this is all besides

that

inert campaign.

I mean, it was, she can't say that she's the continuation of Biden.

She can't attack him.

She can't support him.

She can't say she's against the crime

bill in California because it's, you know, it hasn't happened.

The vote hasn't happened yet.

That's like saying, I can't tell you that I'm going to vote for Kamala because she's not on the ballot.

I mean, we're not voting today.

It's just so faux.

Everything about her was phony.

So you could all see it.

And yet, what did they do?

New York Times, Washington Post,

Quinnipec, all of them, the same people.

It's dead even.

Bernie Moreno's down by six.

Iowa is going to flip.

Ms.

Seltzer got a great record.

She's got Iowa up by three.

Right.

Ted Cruz is done.

Ted Cruz is done.

Our latest polls show he's only three ahead.

He won by 10.

He won by 10 points.

I know it.

Texas is going blue.

Yeah.

Tim Shoes lied about a wound.

He's now down to four over Tester.

And

nobody's going to vote for a Mercedes salesman over Sherrod Brown, a populist.

And then McCormick, oh, he's over with.

He is done for.

He cannot beat Casey.

He doesn't beat an incumbent.

We have him down three.

It was all lies.

It really was.

And we talked about it.

You can't have a surge in those

Virginia like they did in New Mexico.

We said they weren't going to take them, but that surge showed you that it was across the border in Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania and North Carolina and probably in Arizona.

And they didn't want to say that.

So they just said, there's not much changing in the swing states.

Camel has come back in the last week.

She's dead or even now

within the margin of error, which could be a big night.

And she would say, oh, we have the momentum.

No, it never did.

It was just all hype.

You had sent me

some document about

the end of the early voting period and the registration that were terrific numbers, but still, those numbers, if known by you, even, I'll put it this way, known by me, were certainly known.

No, they were known by everybody.

They were known by everybody.

In the face of that,

you had people say, ah, well, the crushing numbers coming in now from Philadelphia are early indications are that the women are out in force and they're like 12 to 1.

No, they didn't even get that.

That was come from.

Oh, you can look at the data the day.

the day of the election on the gender gap.

They always said, oh, you know, women are voting 52% and they're 16% gap and the men are only.

No, it was just the opposite.

Men had about 16% gap and women was down to 9 or 10.

And that wasn't enough, even if they voted at 52% to run up the margins they needed because they had offended the Jewish vote, which was about 45, 40 to Trump.

They had the Mexican male, and we've been talking about that.

I had not met one Mexican-American male over the age of 40 that I talked to that was not going to vote for Trump.

I have to say, I have a note here for a subject.

Your Latino neighbors were not BSing you.

No, no, they weren't.

They weren't.

And the thing that I caught on really early is they were starting to get bold about it.

They weren't even hiding it.

Six months ago, they'd come up to me, Victor,

I'm voting for El Jefe.

I can't tell anybody.

I said, okay.

And then they

last month,

over, I'm not saying that the Mexican-American female vote or young people went for, and obviously they make up 45% of the population of California, and they haven't really flexed their muscles yet, although they have on certain ballot propositions.

But it was all there, and what happened is we have a debased, bastardized

media.

And I can tell you, I suffered so that some people wouldn't.

I suffered for an hour and a half watching MSNBC.

It was like Cuba Ross, denial, you know, this can't be, and then anger, and then

acceptance, and then resignation, but not quite.

I mean, it was first.

There's a pathway.

It doesn't mean that

we can't take the blue wall.

There's some big urban votes, our traditional strength.

And then the poor guys that had to lie to the panel, they would go, well, maybe kind of, sort of, maybe it might be difficult.

And then after that, then they got angry.

I don't know who these people are.

They don't know what's in their interest.

Why would they do this?

Who are these people?

And then

yes.

And then it was the ridicule.

Oh, my God.

All our friends in Europe are going to be laughing at it.

The world is going to get very dangerous.

You know, you have almost two theater nuclear wars in Ukraine and Israel that were both quiet until this tenure came in of Harris Biden.

And they're talking about what Trump might could sort of do abroad when it was peace and there was no wars.

And then finally,

they were blaming, blaming.

And they don't know who to blame yet, Jack.

They think, well, you know, maybe

it was Joe Biden.

He was selfie.

She was egotistical if he'd gotten off.

He truncated the campaign season for Kamala Arrow.

Poor thing.

She only had 105 days because of Joe Biden.

He hung.

Yeah, maybe.

You could have pulled off your coup later, but maybe you shouldn't pull off your coup because he had an excuse for being cognitive declined.

They could say, well, he's senile, he's demented, so we're going to put him in the basement.

And it worked in 2020.

What was her excuse that she was cognitively?

That was innate.

That was no excuse.

So maybe that, maybe that was a worse choice.

Who knows?

But they're blaming each other now.

And one thing they haven't said is,

Wow, we turned our cities into moonscapes.

We let in 12 million people without help or background checks.

There is no border.

We are bankrupting the budgets and the social services of our own citizens and big cities and in the country.

Oh my God, the world is aflame because of us.

Oh my God, EV is the whole EV mandate is destroying the auto industry.

We should, we have jawboned natural gas down, nuclear power down, oil down.

That was a mistake.

You know what?

We should have never gone down the transgendered and tried to normalize biological males in things like women's boxing, wrestling, volleyball.

And we did that.

Wow, hyperinflation.

We should have never borrowed $6 trillion when the supply chains were still interrupted and consumer demand was just about ready to explode after COVID.

That was dumb.

No, they're not going to do any of that.

And you're going to have to have some Bill Clinton figure come come in, like Josh Shapiro, maybe, just like Clinton did in 92.

And he said to himself, well, I think that,

you know, I think that George McGovern and Jimmy Carter went a little bit to the left.

So we're going to have school uniform and midnight basketball and balance the budget and 100,000

soldier.

Yeah.

And we're going to get Dick Morrison here to tell us how to triangulate.

We're going to have, now I'm not sincere, but we're going to be the, we're going to get Al Gore.

He's not nuts yet.

He's still Al Gore.

Right.

And that worked.

And then

they got complacent.

And then who do they, they,

they brought in Obama.

He's really the fall guy today.

He was the one that recalibrated the old Clinton mainstream Democratic Party,

destroyed it.

And brought in all of these nuts.

And so

they're going to have to do that.

They were ideologues.

They were ideologues.

They didn't care about.

You can be a non-nut ideologue, and that's a very dangerous.

I've had about five conversations where I work with these people.

And you tell them what you are doing means that Jose Lopez's mother has to wait in line for her dialysis now because you've got people from all over the world at these clinics.

That you try to go to a specialist in Fresno, and you will sit in a waiting room while people who are here illegally are ahead of you.

You try to tell them that half the wrecks in Fresno County, the driver who caused it, leaves the scene of the action.

You try to be an electrician when you were paying the last two years $150 for 12-2 Romax or $85, because I had every building on my property roofed.

You're paying, I was paying $140 for three-quarter-inch plywood for a time.

And you go fill up.

I just filled up on the way home from Stanford.

$5.45, Jack, a gallon.

It's crazy.

And I saw about six poor people, and they pull out their wallet.

They put 20s and 30s.

They went in.

I thought, oh, you know what?

I don't have enough gas to get over Pacheco.

I better go in and put some more cash in.

That's what they do to people.

That's what the people people in Atherton, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Montecito, Malibu, that's what they do to people.

And they don't care.

But these people finally said, you know what?

I'm not your servant anymore.

I'm not going to mouth your platitudes because you give me some welfare or something.

I want to be middle class and I want to be upwardly mobile.

And they burden themselves of what has been, right?

That's what they did.

That's what they did.

Hey, Victor, I want to drill down a little more on some of the things you've raised.

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Victor, a couple of things I just want to mention, a little point here, and then I want to talk a little more about Bill Crystal.

Patrick Raffini, I saw you just put out a thing about white suburban women.

They voted 5147 for Trump.

I thought

they were supposedly going to be.

I asked my wife,

do you feel shamed,

neutered, because Donald Trump said he would like to protect you?

And she said no, because what he meant was that when I drive, get to my car at night in the remote parking lot,

he would believe that if anybody tried to attack me, that person should go to jail.

And then that fact would deter other people from trying.

And

that even, you know what?

That was even stupid.

Funny people said anything he says, it doesn't matter.

That's what they didn't understand.

It didn't matter what Donald Trump said at the end.

He could have said anything because they were going to lie about everything he said.

And that's all they had.

And then at the end, somebody said to her, you know what?

You got about one point bump, but you are so obnoxious calling him a fascist and a Nazi.

Can you now just go back to your other fake persona and talk about unity?

And then she said, I'm for unity.

I love America.

We're all together.

That's what she did.

How do they come back from that, Victor?

How do they, with this, you know, morning air, oh, you know, we could all get together, be one country.

How do you get together with the other side that you have called a fascist?

And it's called you beat them.

You have to beat them.

And they did beat them.

And then they're going to have to tell them.

You're not going to get any power.

This time around, they don't understand that 2016, Trump himself said, I'd only been to Washington 15 times in my life.

He didn't know what he was doing.

All of these people came out of the swamp with moss on them and algae, and they said, I'm here.

I'll be your secretary.

I'll be this.

I'll be that.

And he had no choice.

And then 2020,

They had so much money and it was COVID.

He would have been re-elected easy without COVID and the lockdown and the riots.

They did that.

That riot just was so weird because the more that he begged to use the National Guard, the more they said he was a fascist.

And the more that he did not use the National Guard, the more that he said he couldn't control the mobs.

And whatever he did, he had Millie, he had all those generals lying about.

It was just...

And even then, he came very, very close.

And if they hadn't changed the voting laws, he would have won.

He would have won.

And it's kind of good.

I said that on Fox Theater night.

People wrote me about it, but I think it in a very tragic way, because it really hurt him and caused the lawfare.

But we got to see these people in the raw for three, four years, and everybody saw who this one-eyed jack.

We flipped that card over and saw the other face once they had power.

They were lying.

We knew they were going to lie when they ran on Unity.

As soon as they came in, they stopped that border.

She said the other day,

she was for the border.

She called it a medieval, medieval idea and stopped it.

And they let it rot out there and rust.

And you know who's going to be,

I was reading all the foreign responses to this today, Jack.

They said, well, I was listening to MSNB and say, oh, the Europeans are.

No,

you don't get it.

The Europeans want to get back on board.

They can say all they want, but they realize that he made them

spend more money on defense.

And he's not an isolation.

He's a Jacksonian.

No better friend, no worse enemy.

We don't want to get involved in places where we lose.

We're not going to go into the streets of Fallujah.

We're not going to go do search and destroy missions in Hellman province.

But you screw with the United States and we will bomb the SHIT out of ISIS.

We'll kill Salome

or we'll tell Rocketman that our button is bigger.

That's what he did.

And he will look at Ukraine, and he's a businessman, and he will tell Putin, you go back to where you were before you invaded in 2020.

And you know what?

I never thought we could get the Donbass and Crimea back.

Obama never thought he could.

Biden never didn't.

Zelensky never did.

Now we've got a million point three dead, wounded, and missing to prove that point.

So you can go back and tell the Russians that you won Donbass, or you can lie to them about,

it'll be Russian.

It always was anyway.

But you're going to have to get back where you were.

We're going to make a DMZ across that border.

We'll arm the Ukrainians elite.

They won't be in NATO, but they will be in the EU.

How's that?

And you can, Zelensky can say he saved his country, and you can say that you had to go to war to get Crimea and

Crimea and Donbass institutionalized, established as Russian.

And then all the neocons will, ah, that's a loss.

We wanted to fight.

We thought we passed the Psalm in Verdun.

We were on our way to 5 million dead and wounded and missing.

No,

it's got to stop, and he will stop it, but he won't stop it as they say he will by pulling out.

He'll do it as a business art of the deal.

And the same thing with Israel.

He called Netanyahu.

I know what he said.

He told Netanyahu,

look, I ran on no optional wars in the Middle East.

We are not going to preempt and bomb Iran.

But if they try to attack you, we will give you even more stuff than Biden did.

And if you want to go out there, and now that you've taken their defenses, the ball's in their court, you do what you need to do to protect Israel.

And we're not going to object.

In fact, we will give you the wherewithal.

And he's going to put a terrorist ban back on the Houthis.

He's going to cut off Hamas

again

as he did before.

He's going to put an embargo on Iran and sanctions.

And he's the Saudis, the happiest people right now are in the Gulf.

Right.

Yeah, absolutely.

We have so not dodged a, not only dodged a bullet, but dodged a nuclear bomb.

I was talking to a very wealthy person today.

And I said, there's no wealth tax now.

There's no, the

exemption for

inheritance is not going to go down to two million.

A little cottage in

Morrow Bay, California will now cost your kid 40% to inherit it.

And there's not going to cancel the tax reductions of 2017.

There's not going to be price controls.

That's why Tesla stocks skyrocket.

Dow Jones is up today 3.18%.

That's what Tesla said.

And look at the crowd.

They've got on one side, you had the Glitterotti, you had Bruce Springsteen and Oprah,

and you had the Obamas and the View.

On the other side, you had the Renaissance,

all Cogan, but the Renaissance man, Dana White, Joe Rogan.

Yeah.

Gosh, and you had

the man, the man, Elon Musk, a Renaissance da Vinci, and then you had RFK.

And

they're going to have to find a place where his gadfly efforts can be properly channeled.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, let's

have him a special committee to ferret out everything Anthony Pauci has done.

I hope they have Tulsi Gabbard as VA

director.

That'll be good.

And,

you know, I never mentioned my son, but I'm very close to him.

And he's very quiet and shy.

He's a high school teacher.

Don't say where.

Go ahead.

No, I won't say where.

But

he never knew what I did.

He had no idea what I did, that I wrote columns or did podcasts.

He just was in his own world.

And about two years ago, without any prompt from me, he started getting very political.

And you know what?

Yes, everybody, he fits that, what's that word, lost generation of men.

Yeah.

He's married, has two kids, very happy, owns a house.

But he started listening to the regular, you know, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan.

Joe Rogan, yeah.

And he called me on the day of the election.

He was so happy because Joe Rogan had the day before endorsed Trump and Vance was on there and he liked Dana White and all of them.

And then he sent me those memes, you know, where that crazy woman on campus is screaming her head off.

And then the Hitler and the map, you know.

In the basement, yeah, in the bunker.

Yeah.

I was really, I mean.

Well, your son probably is like a lot of they, and we should get to this a little later in the podcast if we have time, is about

the death of the legacy media.

Media is getting information from something with your eyes and your ears.

And those who think they own, have the prerogative to do that, they had a bad,

well, it's a bad morning for them.

But Victor, let's

maybe, we'll try to get to that and a few other things, but we've got to do it.

after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Again, we're recording on November 6th, the day after the elections.

Victor, I do want to get a thing or two here specifically in about Kamala Harrison.

And if you're okay with it, I mentioned Bill Crystal before and focus a little on the never Trumpers or alleged Republicans and what it means, the elections mean for them.

But Kamala was, as of right now, a la Hillary Clinton on election night in 2016.

Ungracious and I think in defeat.

I don't know that that's

the world's most important

matter.

But she's kind of...

She hasn't conceded yet, has she?

I'm speaking at 9.30 Pacific.

I don't think she's conceded.

I think she's supposedly going to talk to the nation tonight.

But, you know,

there are traditions and conceding

should have been.

I wonder what they're going to do.

I wonder, you know, I'm in California and we...

passed the National Voters Compact.

Remember what that is, everybody?

Remember, everybody, what this was?

This This was

the left's idea that the blue wall is

gone, and it's because the Electoral College should have been gone.

It was great when we had it, and we loved it, because you can never, you started off with losing all the votes of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois, and California.

Now we've lost it.

And it's such a relic.

It's a racist relic.

So we're going to try to get around the, you have to admit it, you guys.

It's in the Constitution.

You've got to get two-thirds of both Congresses to vote, and then you've got to give it to the states where they have to have three-quarters.

Oh, no, we don't.

No, we don't.

We're just going to get around that.

We're going to go to our state legislators and get it passed, that they will not recognize their own state tallies, but they will pledge their electors to the national vote.

Well, Trump's going to win the national vote.

So I hope

California electors

will not reflect the california win remember

yeah maryland like raskin yes leave his political you're going to allies there absolutely california has to give all of their votes like illinois and new york to trump that's what you said and then i saw the filibuster

i think maybe you guys are right you were saying it's a racist relic yeah you're going to have about you could have as few as 46 seats.

You might need the filibuster, but you want to get rid of it?

Get rid of it then.

Go over to the side of the aisle and tell the Republicans,

you know what?

We tried.

We want that filibuster gone.

It's just such a relic.

You guys won fair and square.

We don't need it.

No, they're not going to do that either.

They're not going to bring in.

Maybe the Republicans should say, maybe we should bring in two states.

Maybe we'll chop up Oregon and Washington and we'll make East Washington and East Oregon and four new Senate seats.

You know, they're all so juvenile.

Whatever they're for is just never based on principle.

It's just power.

Amen.

It is.

Let me get two acts of juvenility, if there is such a word, and wrap up here, at least me with Kamala asking you questions.

Two things that happened at the very end of the campaign.

I just want to bring out, you saw saw that she interviewed with a

Muslim guy who is a relatively popular podcast, and she starts talking about her love of bacon.

And a guy wouldn't.

I can't believe that.

She's got a larger group

from Hastings Law School.

She's an intellectual.

She's surrounded with the bright people.

She would know that the Muslim faith has reservations, as does the Jewish, about the consumption of pork products.

Can you believe that?

Like just the total brain-deadedness.

And then the other thing that was so phony amongst the, you know,

a whole lifetime of phoniness was this door knocking in Pennsylvania where they had the, oh, wait a minute, go back in the house and we'll take two, cut, and then we'll redo it as authentic.

Oh,

you know, they come out again to hug.

And like,

this is just.

It's the same old thing.

Remember the school, the little kids were actors about her space tsardom,

and she wanted to get the Doritos.

She had take one, take two.

And then there was that story that when she went to salons in

Georgetown with the best and brightest, she had to find out who was there and coach herself on what to say.

She's

kind of a...

I know

I don't want to be vulgar, but when Deg Imhoff in Freudian fashion gave it all away and he said, now it's time for Camilla to put her head down and get to work.

Get to work.

What was that?

I think that

they had all that during that campaign.

I wonder if that was a sly little anger at her.

One of

somebody sent me seriously

in criticism Arnold Schwarzenegger's endorsement.

Look at that.

And I just wrote back, I think the point of that was to show that Camilla Harris had the fornicate with the nanny and pay her off vote.

Vote, right?

Yes.

Well, let's talk more about maybe the Arnold types of the world.

We've talked before about, you mentioned George Will, we've talked about Bill Crystal.

One thing about Crystal that is so,

I don't know that anything he does cannot be annoying, but yesterday he was tweeting like, you know, the first votes in from precincts in Indiana are showing that there may be a groundswell here of like, just shut up.

Just go away.

I never had a dislike of Bill Crystal.

I've met him.

I thought he was pleasant.

My criticism of him

was

on this topic.

He was a PhD, and for just a bit, he was a professor, and he was supposed to be an intellectual, and he was supposed to be the brain trust of Dan Quayle and all these people.

Right.

But he never wrote very much.

He never wrote a book.

He never did any scholarship.

If you go and, what did he ever write?

He had a column of the New York Times for like 45 minutes, I think.

Yeah, I mean,

he never really was a writer.

And he always, if you look at what he writes now, it's always co-written.

And it's just, it's just banal.

And so I,

this idea, I never, I mean, I thought he was a nice guy, but

he,

you know, there was a

he's very pro right now, you know, the bulwark is uh uh extremely pro-abortion.

And I have to say, the weekly standard, when he was the editor of it, well, he has to be a pro-life publication, but they have to clipped on everything.

They get on the phone and they say to their billionaire, Pierre Amador and the other people, what can we write today?

What can we write today?

What would you please, would you let us off our leash for something else?

That's what they write.

And

well, Victor, let's talk a little more about the broader they, okay?

You mentioned George Will before, and we had this

100 or so Republicans

who were

basically members of

both Bush administrations.

You had a couple of Congress,

former Congresswoman like Barbara Comstock,

and

endorsers of Kamala Harris.

We don't want to vote for Donald Trump.

We want to endorse this woman.

And

Romney campaign officials, part of all this.

This cabal of what was the

center of the Republican Party had a very bad day

yesterday, and I think they're

over with.

They may not go quietly into the night because that's part of what you said.

George Will, we're not going to talk about it.

Why are you not going to talk about it?

Because I hate these people.

Why?

Because they don't listen to me.

Well, you're not worth listening to.

You know, we don't believe you.

But these people assume they have the prerogative of power and they don't anymore.

No, I mean,

the worst of them was, remember that he's kind of on hinge, Rick Wilson.

Oh, my gosh.

He endorsed Trump like 24 hours before the election.

I couldn't believe it.

Unless it's fake.

Yeah.

I got about five people sent it to me.

He was at least ahead of the curve as an opportunist.

They're where they always wanted to be.

They really were.

And what was the big, what they never understood was this.

They kept preaching and lecturing and sermonizing that the Republican Party had left them and it was changed.

And then they never really showed where that was true.

If you want to go after Iran, he did more to isolate Iran and the Houthis than any other prior president without getting involved and bogged down in Iraq.

He got rid of ISIS.

He got rid of Soleimani.

He didn't get into a quagmire in Afghanistan like the earlier presidents or leave like Biden did.

He raised,

he cut taxes and he cut regulations.

He had better and more conservative judicial nominations than the Bushes did.

You know what I mean?

He didn't try to nominate a Harriet Myers or he didn't try a David Souter.

He really didn't.

So

on almost every item, policy that they had been for their entire lives, he was there 90% of the time.

The reason that they did not like him, they found him crude, they found him obnoxious, they found him without political experience, but most importantly, they found him oblivious to influence and to affect and to channel and to massage.

There was no way in the world that Bill Kristol or David Fromm or Jonah Goldberg or Elliott Cohen or George Will, any of these people were going, Monacharon were going to call up Donald Trump and say, you know what, you don't really know much about Washington.

So you come to our salon and

we're going to instruct you with some PowerPoints or something.

No, he was not going to do that.

And he was going to embarrass them because he was going to look orange and his tie was too long and his hair was weird and he talked like he came right out of Queens and he hung around with people in professional wrestling and mixed martial arts and all.

They didn't want any part of that.

And so they then created this whole

fabulous idea that he is

tariffs.

He's a protection.

No, he had reciprocal tariffs, and he was no different than Reagan or Bush, who slapped tariffs on, often before an election, on people who slapped tariffs on us.

Well,

you tried to live through that as a farmer.

Yeah, I did.

Repercussions of

Republican trade policies.

I did.

I did.

I really did.

I talked to a Reagan official, and he came out and said,

this is great.

I said, you're just letting these people dump raisins from the EU with $500 to $600

subsidies, and you're destroying the California raid.

Well, there's only 500,000 of you.

And this is good for you, Victor, because I'll tell you what.

I was only 26.

I didn't know anything, but I knew more than than he did.

I said, if you do this, you're going to make people go broke because you cannot make it.

The price is 800 minimum, and they're only going to get 400.

And they haven't been doing that well anyway.

And he said, well, some of them will get angry, but

we're going to get creative destruction, get the chaff from the wheat, and then the price will go.

I said, it will not go down the story.

Somemate is a corrupt, inefficient co-op it's broke 27 million dollars on the whole it lied to its own growers it said it was competitive and it wasn't and so for them to stay in that mediocre co-op they had to lie about what they would return by borrowing it against the capital retain and so the price will stay up and it did stay up and then You said, well, it'll make you a better farmer.

And I said, nobody can make a profit at $400.

And it was just like, screw you.

And as I said before, you know, I start,

I said that in an ultra column.

I just took a drive about six months ago, and I just drove back into my memory, but in a geographical concrete way, all around this area.

And I said, I look at that house.

I said, he hung himself.

He shot himself.

He put the carbon monoxide in, and he OD'd.

And he did.

Creative destruction.

And there was the other, there was the ditch where the guy shot himself right on the bank.

And there is where that whole family lived and they're gone.

South, gone, jump, gone.

And there is that beautiful vineyard.

And look at it.

And they just wiped out a whole generation of farmers.

And I said, they're going to have...

The land was beautiful, the water was beautiful,

the homes were beautiful, and now they're all aggregated into corporate 10,000, 5,000, 3,000.

And I don't have any any problem with that because the people were often very capable, but you wiped out a whole generation.

And so don't give me any talks about the beauty of free trade when our opponents don't believe in it.

I love free trade as long as they free trade.

So anyway, I'm getting is that Trump was a traditional Republican in many ways.

He was different that he cared about the middle class and they didn't.

And they didn't see that.

And the funny thing was they allied themselves with Democrats, and that's where the change was, not the Republican Party.

It was the Democratic Party.

They went from Harry Truman, JFK,

slowly into Carterism, and then into Obamaism.

And Clinton, Clinton had a little bit, you know, balance the budget with Newton Rich, but they went into a tax and spin, old habit.

But more importantly,

They tried to divide the country racially.

We had to hear Trayvon Martin, and then it went to Juicy Smollett, Covington Kids, Jory Reed, all of that stuff.

Then affirmative action went into woke, and then conservation went into the New Green Deal extremism.

Protecting the rights of gays became transgender in your face mandates on bathrooms.

Worrying about

abortion became, if you question having abortion a week before birth, then you don't, you're horrible.

It just turned into a mess.

And

that was so funny because the Republican Party had not changed that much, except it was open to middle-class people and people who were not white aristocrats in a way that had never been before.

And they abandoned that and joined up with the other side that was in the most radical transformation of any political party in 100 years and ended up, right now the most radical party

in the Western world.

It's more radical than people in Europe, a lot more.

At least they believe in IDs and same-day voting.

They don't believe what we do.

Right.

And it's really weird what they believe.

We exported woke to much of the world.

I know.

And,

boy, I used to.

There was a generation, and everybody makes fun of neoconk, but the original generation

of, they were really good, smart people.

The Irving Crystal,

the Donald Prime Minister,

the Norman Porgaritz,

they were brilliant minds.

They loved America.

They did.

And they wrote.

They were prolific, prolific.

And their point was the Democratic Party had gone crazy.

And they didn't believe in defense.

And they moved over, but

they wouldn't have moved back.

Right.

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Victor,

I do want to mention about Joe Biden.

You know, he's still the president of the United States.

I was watching Fox this morning.

Peter Ducey said, well, no statement yet or whatever from Biden.

By the way, he's got nothing scheduled for the rest of the week.

Have you seen this awful?

I don't like AI, but somebody sent it to me and it's Joe Biden talking, well, AI.

And it looks authentic.

And it's sort of saying,

well, now you see that

she's a greater idiot than I was, as I warned you.

You should have kept me around.

I could have, you know, puttered around the basement.

And

gosh, it was.

Well, I have one more recrimination thing to ask you about.

And that's,

do you think I was reminded of Westside's story, Sharks and Jets, and I think the white dudes for Harris lost to

the Latinos for Trump.

Oh, too, too sweet.

You know,

everybody knew that was a disaster.

They knew Tim Waltz was.

Tim Waltz was at the end reduced to calling

Elon Musk gay.

Think about that.

This guy that people had rumored had all sorts of ambiguities in his life was now calling Elon Musk gay.

He was a total buffoon.

He was herky jerky from the moment he came on, animated,

clueless.

He lost it.

J.D.

Vance eviscerated him and then went on each weekend to eviscerate the media.

J.D.

Vance took on all the best and brightest in the media and revealed them to be stupid.

He won every single debate with them.

He was courageous.

He was smart.

That was the best thing Trump ever did.

There were some people on our side that said that was a bad movie.

It wasn't.

Oh, my gosh.

Trump knew exactly.

He said that in his victory speech.

He said, what a mind, what a mind.

And he picked him for one reason.

He thought to himself, I can go out and rally people up.

And if I say this or that, and they start bringing narratives, I'm going to unleash JD.

And he is a lawyer's lawyer.

His wife is brilliant.

And he will go on those shows and he will win.

He will tear apart.

And he did.

And that had a lot of, that shows you Trump had a lot of,

I don't know, security to have a guy, but she didn't.

She picked a guy who was a force multiplier of her own inanity.

She really did.

He was a disaster.

He was a liar.

He couldn't tell the truth.

He had weird Chinese relationships.

He even lied about that.

He said he'd been to Teneman Square.

He hadn't

on the day of the revolt.

He said he'd been to China 30 times.

Everything he said, he had to correct.

And

all she did

was remind people how she got into politics, that she was the consort of Willie Brown, who placed her on

commission after commission, and then got his bundlers in the Bay Area to create a career for her.

Even then, she wouldn't.

And then they got her into the Senate.

She was a mediocre senator, and then George Floyd came.

That's how she got there.

But in that odyssey, she never learned how to speak.

She never, she was intellectually lazy.

She didn't have facts at her command.

And at some point, someone was going to call her bluff.

And that's what happened in this.

Well, maybe

what happened last night has to do with Joe Biden's decision of picking her went when, which he boxed himself into a corner with that.

I don't know if they would have won with Josh Shapiro, but they might have won Pennsylvania.

And then if they had done that, right now we would be waiting for Arizona and

Nevada if it was still close in Michigan, which it is.

But, you know, everybody should take, be very careful because these people are not going to stop.

Yeah.

I don't think they're going to win the House, but if they win the House in two years, they will impeach Donald Trump.

just like they did last time.

And Jack Smith is going to indict him again with more indictments and get him in front of a jury.

And Alvin Bragg, at the end of the month, may try to put him in jail.

I really do that.

Judge Michon, because everybody said, well, he wouldn't do that, Victor.

What's the point now?

He wants to be famous.

And the judge who says, I put an elected president in jail will be famous in

the

colonnades of leftist ideology.

Right.

And

I'm even worried about his physical safety.

Well, let's get to that, Victor, because that's really, really important.

And

we have to take a break here quickly.

So we'll come back to that right after these final important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor's got a website.

I've mentioned it at the outset, the Blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.

Go there,

and you will find the links to Victor's weekly pieces for American Greatness, his weekly syndicated column, links to his various appearances, for example, on Megan Kelly's podcast or other podcasts, to his books,

the archives of these podcasts himself.

And then, Victor mentioned before, ultra articles.

What are they?

Two or three times a week, Victor writes a piece, an article exclusively for The Blade of Perseus.

We got the one on Election Day up right now.

The one I wrote before the election, it's still up.

The latest.

There you go.

You want to read it, folks?

Go ahead.

But do subscribe.

Five bucks a month or discounted $50 for the full year.

It was the one that said, come on, we're going to win the election.

Don't get brainwashed by these people who are desperate.

Well, I should have read it because I must say, Victor, I was

an anxiety last night.

I did too, but I just, every time I did, I'd said, calm down, Victor.

Go look at the registrations, the early voting,

what Laura Trump and the RNC have been doing.

Look at the Jewish vote.

Look at the black mail vote.

Look at the Hispanic mail vote.

Compare it to 2020 and 2016.

Look at the record of all of these pollsters who are telling us it's dead even or she's ahead compared with what they told us in the past.

Look at the only look at the polls that had a good record of accuracy in the past.

And I did that and then I got I went to sleep.

I said, he's going to win.

But then

not to nitpick these things, but maybe we read people like me who

spend too much time on Twitter.

And then Tim Alberta is writing a piece for the Atlantic.

And it's like, all these Trump, the people deep in the Trump campaign are pulling their hair out.

It's going badly.

Why would anybody, with all due respect, I'd not ad hominy him,

but Tim Alberta, he used to write for the National Review and he had a complete gymnastic flip-flop.

Yeah.

So

why would you listen to him?

He's never had any record of being accurate.

None.

Zero.

Zilch.

Well,

he writes for the Atlantic, and there's a prerequisite if you write for the Atlantic.

That's where Stanley McChrystal wrote when he said he threw away his picture of Robert Ely and stepped on it and

didn't know he had slaves.

And then he was back again saying,

remember, he did

cut a commercial for Herritz.

and so those guys the atlantic is a total that was jeffrey goldberg where he did an october surprise and said right

general kelly has has said some more things and that uh suckers and losers was accurate no it wasn't well golden said it wasn't Victor Spell before we go back to concerns about Donald Trump personal, maybe this is a good point.

Talk about this and then Trump again is the this is the legacy media uh

is there going to be a funeral if there is i want i want

to go dance on a grave they are you know what it's not just that they're biased

but they're stupid

you know they have all those people they had a few on there last night on mnc you know the guy that used to do meet um the press and they kicked him off oh i can't remember his name anyway he was short yeah he was colors his hair copper

Yeah, he said something to the effect, well, this shows you that

the Democratic Party may have gone a little bit too much, you know, with a Latinx.

I just was with a lot of people.

I just shouted at the top of my voice.

You did it.

Right.

You did it.

It's people like you in the media that use Latinx.

You were the people that were pushing the Democratic Party to the left.

You people, and who were you people?

Had you ever run a 7-Eleven?

Had you ever built a house?

Did you ever have it

long-haul trucker?

No.

You went right out of your journalism school, right into your network of friends and influencers and your spouse and your sibling.

And we're supposed to think you know anything about the world.

You people did that.

And the other people who do real things said, you know what?

I'm sick of you.

I'm tired of you.

I'm not going to riot.

I don't get violent like you do, but I'm not going to listen to you.

And we're not voting for this coup that you pulled off and we're not going to do it.

You know what the funny thing was after pulling off a coup and nullifying the wishes of 14 million primary voters plus they were on MSE last night.

You know what they were doing?

This was so unfair because she started so late.

She only had about 110 days to get to know the American people and introduce herself to them.

It was just unfair.

Donald Trump had been campaigning for two years.

Well, she campaigned in 2020 and she didn't even enter a primary.

So she never won a primary.

She never entered it.

And if you'd wanted to get to know people, you could have got rid of Biden in March,

like a lot of people told you to do.

And then you could have had an open convention even late.

Don't you remember poor old Joe Manchin when they got rid of Biden?

He goes, oh, gee whiz, they wouldn't have a coup, would they?

I'll I'll just go on TV and say I'm going to be a candidate.

That lasted about one nanosecond.

Right.

I know how Trump was campaigning from a courtroom for weeks.

Yeah, he was.

He was.

He was.

And all these lovers of democracy that tried to keep him off balance.

Everything they've done.

Think of all the things they did.

The laptop,

the disinformation.

They were talking about Russian collusion last night

on MSNBC again, the new chapter of it.

And then the alpha

ping thing, and then the SWAT raid on his house, the two impeachments, the triumph as a private citizen, 16 states trying to get him off the ballot, Fannie Willis, Letita James, Jack Smith, Alvin Bragg, Eugene Carroll,

the

two assassination attempts.

Think about it.

It was just nuts.

And yet, in a Nietzschean sense, the more they tried to destroy him, the stronger he got.

Yeah.

And it was, it was really...

I mean, what could be more strong

than a micrometer from getting his head blown off?

Oh, I know.

And then you know what the weird thing is.

He's like, fight, fight, fight.

The weird thing was that

the weird thing was that

he was in the last two weeks, she's almost 20 years younger, maybe 20, 19 years younger.

He was out doing, he was working 20-hour days, and she was taking a day off.

They showed her pictures where she was sleeping on her airplane.

He was playing loud music with his Big Mac.

I mean, he outworked her.

He really did.

He outworks everybody.

Yeah.

And nobody, and they never,

even if you didn't like him, you never, you have to concede that about him.

He's a force of nature and he's indestructible.

Yeah.

And

certainly proves it.

Yeah.

And,

you know, and

I think it really, to answer your question, I think it really hurt the media.

I don't think that the

even, you know what, I was driving.

I'll be, I shouldn't say anything about Fox, but I was

driving this weekend back and forth.

I had to go give some lectures in the Sierras and I had to go to work where I was in the car for about eight hours, nine hours, 10 hours.

And I was listening to Neil Cabuto's guest, you know,

and I was listening to Aritho Nevin's guest.

They were pretty much left-wing.

And they were all trashing Trump and not all of them, but basically she was going to win.

This was from Fox.

I mean, it wasn't the Fox lineup, to be fair to Fox, but

it was all based on the idea that somehow Donald Trump was so crude and he'd said things that nobody else had said.

And I got that a lot at work this last week.

People, a person came in and said, How can you dare?

Don't do what about them?

You know, I mean, it just,

what, what do they not see?

Didn't they understand the president of the United States called half the country garbage?

Don't they see what they said about?

They call him a dictator.

They call him a fascist.

Tim Waltz called him Hitler as if he's killed six million people.

And

it was just oblivious to what that did.

That had no effect on him, but it did get people to think less of them.

Well, you did a piece on 16 years of vilification.

I did.

That was two days before the election.

People were sick of it.

They didn't want to hear it anymore.

Deplorables, irredeemables,

clingers, chomps, dregs, garbage.

Hobbits, crazies.

We heard it already.

You know, another thing was when they had

when they had their celebrities on there, Oprah,

Dory Farrell, Will Farrell, they all had something called, Will Farrell said, you know, don't think you, F you.

They were yelling at people.

Obama, they were yelling at people, talking down to them.

When he had his Hulk, Hulk Holgan and Elon, and he had Tulsi and RFK, they were not doing that.

They were saying, get out and vote.

We can win.

Right.

Uplifting.

Did you see when

the worst moment of their campaign was when Liz Cheney was doing that interview with

Harris, and she was just sitting there, and she had that scowl on her face.

And it's like,

I have been reduced to listening to this idiot Harris.

You can't form a sentence.

And I have to smile because I am so brilliant.

And I was third ranking, and I blew it and all I had to do is keep my mouth shut and politely say that January 6th was a buffoonish riot and politely criticize Trump and then go back and make my peace with him as everybody else did.

You could have taken a playbook out of our congressman David Valadeo.

He voted to impeach Trump and then he never mentioned it again.

And he had backfeelers and made it clear that he

was, you know, privately, he didn't publicly renounce it but he made it clear to the trump people he that was a mistake trump never campaigned against him he got it they threw him out because of that lost his support he ran again won in a plus nine he won yesterday too he did i saw he was up but yeah yeah i think i don't know that for sure but he's up enough that he's probably going to win.

That's all Liz Cheney had to do.

And she'd be, she voted with him 95% of the time when he was president.

So

and Dick Cheney was one of the few Bush people who came out for Trump in 2020.

So

if she really thinks that insurrection is a disqualifying, then all she had to do was say, you know what?

I'm sitting next to somebody called Kamala Harris.

And she posted that she was going to help you bail out violent arsonists, rioters, assaulters in June of 2020.

And then she watched this for 120 days.

They burned a precinct.

They burned a federal courthouse.

They burned an iconic church.

They tried to storm the White House grounds and get it Trump.

They did $2 billion in damage.

They committed arson.

They injured 1,500.

And what did she do?

She said, this is not going to stop.

It's not going to stop.

It should not stop.

This is a movement.

It's going to go on.

Make no mistake.

It's going to go beyond.

And she sat there with a person that said that.

All she had to do was say, you know what, I was against

storming the Capitol, but I was also against trying to storm the White House.

And I was also against trying to burn down St.

John's Episcopal Church and precincts with cops in it.

And you tried to bail those people out, and you egged them on.

And you made sure you and your people, made sure those 14,000 arrested did not face any consequences.

And the fact that you put people at the Capitol that were nonviolent and you put them in solitary confinement and they were still awaiting trial, indefinite suspension, you know,

indefinitely they were confined.

And so I think all that was going on in her mind, you know, wow, I got myself into this place.

I'm sitting next to a total inept person.

I've renounced all my values, and I have to give a scowl on my face and not directly look at her, but be used as if I have some authority after I lost my congressional seat by 40 points in what used to be Cheney Country in Wyoming.

And now, what the hell am I going to do?

Maybe she could have a road show with her and Hillary.

And

you know, another person.

Harris doesn't have a job now.

Did you happen to look at Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball?

I was watching the crystal.

Man,

that guy used to be a liberal academic that had some.

Sober.

Remember, he had some degree of credibility because he would try to

lean left, but he was trying to be empirical.

And then he just flipped out over Trump and he completely

was wrong.

All of his prognostations are wrong.

Did you know him at all?

I knew him.

I met him once.

I met him once.

A little bit.

Nice guy and whatever.

Yeah, I had a lot of fun.

And then just total back back crap crazy.

Yeah, they all were.

It was like

some of those

Douglas Brinkley and the other guy, the presidential historian.

John Meekum.

Yeah, John Meekum and the other guy that's.

Oh, yeah, I know the other guy.

He wrote me a note.

He was the one that said Barack Obama was the smartest president we'd ever seen.

Yeah.

I'll remember his name in him.

You could see his pair

back.

Yeah, he was on MSC.

He wrote me an email once that I had been unfair to him.

But all of them, all of them destroyed their reputation.

They all did.

And all they had to do was keep quiet, write their books, get on TV once in a while, express sober and judicious concern about Trump,

maybe explore the dilemma they were in.

They were solid independents or conservative Democrats, traditional Republicans.

And there was a, on the one hand, on the other, no, they couldn't even make any new, they just went out and said, anybody that votes for hand,

and attacked the voter.

And

I'm only saying this because, you know,

it's not about,

I don't want to, well, I try to write columns.

I don't use the word I.

I really don't.

I try never to use it, maybe once every six columns.

Right.

I just don't.

It comes from classical training.

You don't use a first person singular, maybe we once in a while.

You've talked about that before.

I think it is a great thing that you do, and it's embarrassing to see so many writers, the first word of their column will be I.

Well, one of our former colleagues at National Read Can't, he has 10 personal pronouns in the singular every paragraph, and nobody wants to hear about it.

But, you know,

I try not to do that, and

I try to be fair in a sense, but I had editors for years at Commentary Magazine.

They were really good.

And then that bulwark, all of a sudden they'd say, I was a Nazi.

I was a guru to the Hitler person.

I was no different than people like Alfred Rosenberg.

I had people that I used to, that were editors, Wall Street Journal, Commentary.

It just completely flipped out and vicious, vicious.

And

I thought, wow, this is weird.

I think they've kind of gone off the deep end, but I'm not going to go deliberately, you know.

I used to know Max Boot really well.

I thought some of his books were excellent.

I didn't all of a sudden say he's a terrible historian.

I think he's a pretty good historian.

I don't agree with him.

I haven't looked at the new Reagan book in depth.

I don't agree with it.

But

for them, it was, I don't know what it was.

It's very hard to calibrate.

It's over now, so I shouldn't even waste time in the sense that their era is is over.

There is no never Trump.

There is only former Republicans who went crazy and now are either inert,

irrelevant, or they're solid Democrats.

And the Democrats don't like them.

They don't like Cheney.

They're thinking, oh my God, we wanted to get Republicans to go over.

You guys gave us this.

Was this a cruel joke or what?

You just gave us your detritus?

We don't want these people.

They're not even effective, useful useful idiots.

We'll get one of our tech guys to give them a few million dollars to keep them busy, but we're not going to talk to them.

We're not going to draw on their quote-unquote wisdom.

Look at you guys.

These were the guys that ensured you never won the popular vote or 51% since 1988.

So why in the hell would we want them?

And then when Harris kept saying, you know, it's the last time, they had a little gambit that they thought was cute.

They wanted to call him Hitler and a fascist.

So they would say to her, Do you believe he's a fascist?

Well, I just agree what General Kelly said.

Oh, he called him a fascist, but that means you don't have to call him a fascist yourself.

You just say you agree with General Kelly or General

Milley.

What do you think the generals have done to the reputation of the military?

Think about what McChrystal has said, what McGraven has said, what

Milley has said, what Kelly has said, what Hayden, I could go on.

I mean,

and then

juxtapose all that with some wonderful essays that are being written that are frightening about the misappropriation of American defense dollars in buying multi-million dollar platforms that cannot be used because they only give you scarce weaponry.

$170 million F-22s, $50 million F-35s, $5 million

Patriot missile, $1 million to $5 million,

$100,000 javelin shells.

And when we look at the war in the Middle East and these people are making tens of thousands of deadly drones for $500, $1,000 each.

And why are we doing this?

And the answer is...

Because somebody's gotten a nice salary.

Somebody has believes in the revolving door,

Whether it's Raytheon or Lockheed or General Dynamics or Northrop,

it's got to stop.

It's got to stop.

We're going to have to sell it.

I have a family member who works for a defense contractor.

And you can have the most important and useful and reasonable weaponry or whatever.

And unless you have some

former admiral or two-star general as your consultant, it ain't going to let anyone.

And I confess to my listeners in

2017

when they appointed Mattis for the defense, and he had to get a waiver, remember, to be defense secretary.

Right.

And then they appointed Kelly in Homeland Security and Flynn and McMaster.

Everybody was.

Saying there were too many, the left, left was saying, don't give them a waiver.

There's too many generals.

And I wrote two columns saying that these were all fine men.

There's no problem with it.

I knew I think Flynn was an exemplary person, and I have a high respect.

I was embedded with H.R.

McMaster.

I think he's a very courageous person.

But

now I think it's very problematic to give a waiver to a general or admiral who wants to be a cabinet member, especially Defense Secretary.

You've got to have a five-year waiting period.

I think they should tell the military, if you come out of the military,

go ahead and go on a philanthropic board, go into a silicone, but do not go into a defense contractor board.

There's too much conflict of interest.

There's the aura, the perception, even if it's not true, that a whole network of former subordinates in procurement will be giving you undue attention because of your status, likability, wonderful record,

and that might influence the objectivity of which weapons platform helps the American people in a cost-to-benefit analysis.

That's going to be changed.

One fast thing really quick to finish, Jack, and we can talk about this.

What do you think he's going to do when he says he has a little secret with a secret?

Did you hear him say that?

Who?

Donald Trump.

He said, Speaker Johnson, I have a little secret.

Oh, it's to maybe move things around.

Yes, yes, yes.

And I think something that we've been talking about this for ages, you know,

and

I've been, I think I wrote six columns about it.

Move the FBI to Kansas City.

Move the Department of Agriculture.

I would like to see it in Fresno myself.

It's the richest ag

move the Department of Energy to Houston.

Get rid of the Department of Education.

Maybe energy.

Get rid of the Department of Education.

Take the elements of the FBI and break them up and move the headquarters out.

Take the CIA and break up.

We have all these defense national, the Director of National Intelligence, CIA, Defense Intelligence.

Why not just don't consolidate them, just make them small to check and countercheck each other, but stop these conglomerates right in the middle of Washington that draw people from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and other bureaucracies, and then they're married to people in these bureaucracies, and then their siblings are in the media, and it's all predicated on we're the uniparty, and we like kind of sort of

left-wing, kinda sort of right-wing person, the James Comeys, the Anthony Fauci's, the

John Brennans, the James Clappers,

the McChrystal.

Why do we need all these people?

Why not just break up these and get some real talent?

There must be brilliant people in the interior.

I met them.

They would be ideal, loyal, patriotic FBI agents.

Let them go into work in Kansas.

Cheaper living, too.

Yes.

Take the DOJ.

Maybe take the DOJ out of Washington.

Because all they're doing is...

Basically, a guy goes to work in Washington and they bump up against one of these Washington DOJ persons and the person of the opposite party said, you know what?

You better be careful what you say because I have the power and money of the federal government, and I'm a federal prosecutor, and I can get you.

I may not get you indicted.

I may not get you indicted.

I will surely not convict you.

But if I don't like you and my party doesn't like you, I'm going to start investigating you.

And that's going to mean you're going to have to get a lawyer to deal with me.

And that's going to cost you $1,000 to $2,000 an hour.

Me?

I'm free.

I'll break you.

And that's how they think.

And they've got to break that up.

And that's what Donald Trump he really needs to examine.

He needs to talk to people like Steve Hayward and look at Hayward's books on Reagan.

If you read them very carefully, Reagan, he's a big supporter and he's a very astute supporter of Reagan.

But one of his lamentations was there wasn't enough structural change.

Absolutely.

You know what I mean?

It was transitory.

They had good people doing good things, and then they had bad people following them doing bad things.

But they didn't change the structure.

They didn't.

And Trump didn't either in the first term.

He didn't.

I mean, Sally Yates was still the head of the Justice Department.

I couldn't believe it.

Yeah, I wrote about that.

I started day one as a commissioner, right?

Oh, man, I was on the non-political

American Battlefield Monuments Commission because I was a military historian.

And, you know, my namesake had been killed in Okinawa.

So I was really eager to be on that commission and make sure that, you know, our our overseas cemeteries were treated with respect and kept up.

And the people, the staff was wonderful.

And when I went to the first couple of meetings, it was apolitical.

There were people on those committees from different administrations.

And then Obama gets...

Two things happened when Obama got elected.

The first thing was I got immediately a resignation letter, and they gave you a diplomatic passport.

But you know what?

Every time I inspected a

cemetery, whether it was in France or Belgium,

it was always when I was visiting.

I never charged the government a penny.

I never said, I need to go look at Tunisia or Italy at this cemetery.

When I went to those places, I did it on my own dime.

I never sent anything.

And I was very loyal to that.

And I got a letter saying, turn in your passport.

And by the way, you know,

I did right away, and you're off the committee, and they didn't fill my position for almost two years.

You know what the second thing happened almost right away after Obama came in?

About six weeks later, I got a letter from the IRS and says that we feel that you have not been turning in accurate reports of your income and you're assessed at a point and a half of interest.

I called my accountant.

I said, I spoke at place A, B, C, D, E.

He said, yes, you did.

We aggregated it on your wife's speaking company, and we reported it in full.

And I said, remember, I told you I do not want to write off my office.

I do not want to write off my transportation.

I don't care if I pay 58% state, federal, local.

I do not want to be targeted by the IRS because I don't trust these people.

He said, I know it.

You pay more than you should.

You don't even write off your office at home.

You don't write off anything.

Okay, you don't even, I put, if I have a barn that's falling apart and I put

some money on a roof so that we can park the tractors in there, I do not then take those shingles and put them on my house, the extras.

So I was shocked by it.

And my accountant said, this is ridiculous.

What they're asking you to do is pay, you pay taxes on 10 lectures you gave that were aggregated into one big, you know, this is the total sum by your wife's company, her lecture company.

She reported all of your income.

And now they want you to go back and pay individually for each one.

So if you made $5,000 speaking, they want you to report 10,

one, $5,000 for the company and one for your personal income.

This is insane.

Any idiot could see this.

Right.

And we've never done it before.

And so I said, well, how much?

Well, it costs money, of course.

My poor accountant was put on hold all the time.

It took about three or four months.

And you know what the letter said?

Please disregard this letter number something, something.

You are no longer,

you no longer are required to pay interest.

And then it was come little refund about, you know what I mean?

Yeah.

And I talked to, I don't know if it was on National Review or Hillsdale Cruise, but I talked to some pundits and I said, have you guys had IRS problems with the Obama?

Yes, yes.

And so that's,

that's a a scary thing.

They should take the IRS out of Washington.

Right.

And

I mean, there's weird.

That was to say, also, the guy who ran the IRS under Obama kept on under the Trump administration.

Yeah, remember that?

Lois Lerner?

Well, yeah.

Hey,

Victor,

I know you have a hard stop here.

We're recording, so we're going to have to.

I did want to ask, and I'll ask on the next recording.

I wanted to draw some comparisons.

You talked earlier about

the personal safety of Donald Trump, and I wanted to reflect back on 1865.

We'll do that when we talk another time.

Thanks for folks who

go to civilthoughts.com and sign up to get the free weekly email newsletter I write for the Center for Civil Society, CivilThoughts.

Again, civilthoughts.com, sign up.

Victor,

you are terrific today.

You've been terrific always.

And I know I speak for a lot of people that

you were a,

I hate to use the word bulwark.

It's something that Bill Christel have used, but you have been a bulwark.

of honesty and integrity and inspiration for many of our listeners.

I know I'm speaking for them always, but especially throughout this election season.

So thank you.

Well, thank you.

And you people are not crazy.

All of you knew that Donald Trump, for all of his foibles, had a good chance of winning.

You knew he he was going to win.

They tried to brainwash you.

You stood firm.

You went out and voted.

You saved the country from this disaster we were facing.

And

you all were indomitable.

You didn't panic.

You knew that Trump was going to win.

You knew your vote would matter, and you voted.

And the result is on the TV today.

So congratulations.

Hansen 2028.

Okay, Victor.

Thank you, my friend.

Thanks all.

Thank you, everybody.

Thank you for listening.

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

Bye-bye.