Last Thoughts on Election Day

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

I am Jack Fowler, the host.

you are here to listen to and get wisdom from victor davis hansen who is the martin and ely anderson senior fellow at the hoover institution and the wayne and marsha busky distinguished fellow in history at hillsdale college victor is the author of many best-selling books he is a historian, a classicist, a syndicated columnist.

You'll find his writings and links to books and links to these podcasts, the archives, at his official website, which is The Blade of Perseus.

I'll tell you more about it later in this podcast and why you should be subscribing.

This is being recorded, Victor, on Sunday,

November 3rd.

And this particular episode will be up on Election Day, November 5th.

Although

by that time,

even by right now, Victor, I thought I saw some report that's implied over 40%

of voters had already cast votes for the presidential elections um

but even the polls are still open i guess as as people are listening to this as it first comes out and polls the late the last batch of polls uh

publicized about the election are worth your discussion and and getting your wisdom and from on

on and about so let's uh begin the show with that and then we'll get into

Chuck Schumer, who's a think.

It's a technical term.

And some of the last,

oh, I don't know,

Never Trump anecdotes of

the election, which involved Liz Cheney and allegations that Donald Trump wanted to put her before a firing squad.

We'll get to all that.

and more when we come back from these important messages.

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We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor,

you want to talk about polls, and there are some important ones that have come out, the final release, polls that have

had some credibility.

Not all polls have credibility, but you want to talk about a few that do indeed and reflect on what they're saying now and relative to what they also said in 2020.

Have actually, my friend.

Well, you know, the old Nate Silver site, 538 rates polls predicated on their performance in 2020 when Trump was on the ballot, and then 2022 during the midterms.

And it turns out, you know, that all the ones that people are quoting,

Susaquana, Marius,

Coiniac,

New York Times, Washington Post, all of those, They don't have the

top three out of five are Atlas intelligence is number one, both.

And I was looking how their methodology, they hold jack anywhere, depending on the particular state, one to five percent more women.

And they try to reflect the likely, and they do likely voters.

And the other

of these five top ones past record is Trafalgar.

It only was off within the margin of error.

Everybody kind of criticized it because it had Trump close.

But if you go back and look at 2020, it was some of these polls were seven and eight points off, as you remember, 17 points off that Trump was going to lose Wisconsin in one poll.

But the point is, if you look at, just forget the other polls and look at the Atlas intelligence

intel and the Trafalgar and and Rassmussen, the old Rassmussen, because I think Scott Rassmussen sold it.

Then,

for example, today or the latest one, yesterday, Nevada,

Harris

46, Trump, 52.

Okay.

If you look, and then of course the New York Times has Trump behind by three.

If you go and look at something like North Carolina Atlas Intel, again, the one with the best record in the last two elections, both presidential and midterm, Trump 51, Harris 47.

If you look at

Pennsylvania, Atlas Intel,

and the same pattern holds up with Trafalgar to a lesser extent, and not quite as wide,

and Restmount, Trump 50 to 48.

Pennsylvania.

Yes.

And if you look at Wisconsin, Trump 50-49 and 49-48, depending on one, they did it over two polls, on November 1st and November 2nd.

If you look at Michigan,

Trump 50, Harris 48, Trump 49, Harris 48.

If you go to

Georgia,

50-48.

And the poll before was 49-47, Trump.

If you go to Arizona, Trump 52, I don't understand this.

Harris 46.

That's a six-point lead.

Trump is ahead in all of these.

Every single.

Yeah, my point is this.

I could go on and on, but

when you see a poll that has Trump down 10 points in Iowa, I think that was the Des Moines registry,

that's not accurate.

All we can do is we can't trust polls because they all have different agendas and the agendas are manifested in the manner in which they poll.

They have about 50 or 60 different decisions to make.

Should they have registered voters?

Should they ask the registered voter if they are going to vote, a likely voter?

Should they just ask everybody with the idea that people don't tell the truth about whether they're registered or likely to vote?

If women participate more than men, should you Do you know that's true state by state?

Do you have more women than men?

Do you reflect the party registration and ask more Democrats than Republicans?

So all of those decisions have to be made.

And also, it's very expensive.

The more people you poll, the greater you get.

But all of those factors in consideration, two or three polls, as I said, Trafalgar, Rasmussen, and Atlas Intel, in the last two.

The presidential is the one we look at more than the midterm because Trump was on the ballot.

I just don't think that the left gets,

there's just not a hatred among the left, and a lot of the left are pollsters.

So I think

the other thing is, and I'm speaking again

on Sunday, and you and I have talked about that, but when you look at these polls by these same reputable pollsters, gosh, Jack,

they're within the margin of error.

in Virginia.

They're close in New Hampshire.

They're close in New Mexico, a little bit off in Minnesota.

I think Trump is in Virginia today, actually.

Yes, he is.

And when you look at that surge over the last six weeks, it's about three or four points.

And we've talked about that, but the other polls they do, they pick up a surge.

And because if you look at where they polled, and I spent about a couple of hours looking at where they pulled three, four, six weeks, the surge that these more reputable polls illustrate

is across the country, especially in states that are near each other.

So Virginia, I know Virginia is more liberal than North Carolina, but not that much given the triangle, research triangle and all that in North Carolina.

But Arizona, New Mexico, I understand Taos and Santa Fe, it's not, they don't have anything quite like that in

Arizona.

And I understand my ancestors in Minnesota are more numerous and therefore more leftist than Wisconsin.

But

these polls do show that Trump is ahead in the seven

swing states, and they show

not quite the same, but they show the same momentum in these other blue states where Trump is closing the gap.

I don't think he will win.

all four of them.

I don't even know if he'll win one of them, but I think he will come close.

And that should have been reflected in these other polls in these swing states, and they won't reflect it.

So I don't know what they're trying to do, but after spending 50 years, 50 years in academia and 50 years dealing with the media, I can tell you that almost a day doesn't go past when I have to encounter some ideologue on the left, and

they feel any mechanism that

they can use for a higher moral plane is legitimized.

And I think most of the polls feel out there.

So this, you mentioned Iowa, and there's a woman in Selzer who is reportedly, you know, a good pollster.

And she's the one, Victor, this news came out yesterday

that

implied Harris has a chance of winning Iowa.

And

it's given a lot of consternation to people.

And I think it's affected these betting odds, which are, as we go into the, you know, two days out, Trump is about 53, 47.

So that has narrowed.

But Iowa, if you look at 2020, the voter registration, it was Republicans had an advantage of 1%.

And then in the ensuing four years, now the advantage is 10%

over Democrat registration.

So you're right.

You know, ideology has marched through all of our institutions.

Why shouldn't it march through the institution of poll-taking?

Well, if you look at the swing states today on the Real Clear Politics average, you know,

Trump is ahead in five of seven.

And

the weird thing is that Real Clear Politics has like Sherrod Brown only up by one, and they average polls, even weighted those bias posts.

I even seen in the

Atlas Intel has Kerry Lake really closing the gap.

I could not believe that.

That's accurate.

And

so

my point is that

I think there's a lot of pessimistic.

I'm getting a lot of emails from people that are pessimistic and they're saying, Victor, Trump is crested.

And I think that's intended.

I think a lot of these people, not all, but some of these polls, they do one of two things.

I think Nate Silver talked about it.

They show Trump more,

they have him two or three points ahead.

So then they, what I think Nate Silver called hurting, they don't want to be an outlier, but they want to help Harris.

So they just put it around

half a point either way.

And I think it's much closer.

It's much more clearly Trump in the swing states.

And as,

you know, today in

she's only up 0.3 in Wisconsin.

And she's, you know, only up 0.6 in Michigan.

He's up 0.3 in Pennsylvania.

But even the real clear policy, I'm almost three in Arizona.

Over one in one and a half in North Carolina, one in Nevada, 2.3 in Georgia.

So

there is this,

I think everybody gets depressed.

Because I get these, one poll comes out, and I don't, I think they should go back and look at the polls in 2020 and 2016 when he was on the ballot.

There was a little edge in the polls.

They overpolled the Democrats a little bit, but they were really accurate in the 2022

midterms.

That caught people by surprise.

According to the left's logic, we learned our lesson in 2016 and 2020, so we did it in 2022.

No, you quite, you didn't.

You were off on 2016 and you didn't learn your lesson.

You were way off

on 2022.

And a skeptic would say, okay, you tried to skewer the polls for Hillary in 2016.

You got utterly humiliated.

Your reputation was near nothing.

And then you went back and doubled that in 2020 to help Joe Biden.

And then you got so self-satisfied because that was an effective talk tactic that you were going to do it again.

But in 2022, Trump wasn't on the ballot.

And so you more or less were kind of accurate because the poll really showed that the red wave was not as strong as it was.

It could have been because, as we've talked about, the leaked abortion memo, et cetera, et cetera, on Roe versus Wade and the student loan giveaway right before,

getting the price of gas down right before by draining the reserve, stuff like that.

Okay, so now we're in 2024, and I don't think they've learned anything because Trump is on the ballot.

So that's my point.

We'll see what happens.

Everything's anecdotal, right?

Until the votes are counted.

So,

you know, when we talk, we'll talk about these things.

I don't know what we call them.

They're not October surprises.

They're 11th hour November surprises.

Yeah.

And we can talk about all of them and whether they're going to, there's four or five of them.

Yeah.

Well,

let's get to one of them here in a minute.

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Yeah, Victor, one of those surprises of

just kind of

absurdity is Donald Trump's commentary about Liz Cheney, where he was essentially calling her a chicken hawk.

And

it was turned quickly into

Donald Trump wants

Liz Cheney killed, executed by a firing squad.

And this was a mantra to go into the weekend and show the violence and the violent rhetoric and the violent thoughts to Donald Trump.

And of course, this plays in line with everything else, all these other BS lines.

Oh, he wants to put us in jail.

He's going to come after us, et cetera, et cetera.

Victor, we have two things to talk about with Liz Cheney, but this is just what you were referring to, October, November surprise.

Well, yeah.

Well, I mean, the problem with what Liz Cheney said was that he had an important qualifier.

If she had a gun, if she had a gun and they, in other words, if she was an armed soldier and she had to go over there and that was the whole point, if you read the whole paragraph, if she had a gun and she was a soldier and she went over there and everybody was pointing guns at her face, then and her life was on the line, then she would be a little bit more circumspect about wanting to intervene all over the world because she was very critical about, as Trump said,

when he wanted to lessen our profile in Afghanistan or Iraq or Afghanistan, whatever.

But the point

is that

just imagine this.

It's 2012.

Trump's not a candidate, but he mouthed off all the time and everybody paid court to him.

Remember 2008, McCain went up to his towers.

2012, he went up to this tower for the endorsements.

He went to Hilly invited him

to Chelsea's wedding.

Everybody wanted to listen to him as Mr.

New York businessman.

And he was very critical.

He was very popular among the left.

Remember, he said that George W.

Bush should be impeached for the Iraq fiasco?

And so let's just say it's 2012 and Donald Trump says,

he just says, Liz Cheney,

because he's, again, I'm setting

the scene

that he was against, well, he first was for taking Saddam out, and then he switched and said, we should not be there.

He switched pretty early.

So then he says, Liz Cheney is a war hawk.

The Cheneys,

she'd have a different attitude if she took a gun over there and then they pointed guns back at her.

What would the left have said?

They would have loved Donald Trump.

They would have said, yes, you're right, Trump.

Can you believe Donald Trump finally gets it, that she's a chicken hawk?

And so I was really surprised that I could...

that he was so candid.

You know, Joey Jones, the

Fox commentator who was an Afghan veteran and lost his legs.

Did you see what he said about it?

And he just said,

he really went, he said, you're Halliburton, this, and you're Halliburton that, and you're Halliburton that, and you're a Halliburton that, and I have your Halliburton legs, basically, he said.

And he was, and he was really, it was really tough.

But

if.

What I'm getting at is that if Donald Trump was not running for president this year, and he had said that, and Lynn Cheney was the Lynn Cheney of her entire life, save the last year,

they would have been delighted with that quote.

They would have loved it.

Donald Trump says a 78-year-old businessman.

He really put Lynn Cheney down.

Let's say if, I don't know, DeSantis or Jeb Bush or somebody like that, Cheney would have probably, you know, been on the team and she would have been, you know, talking about this.

And Trump might have been an outsider and said, you know what, you wouldn't have that attitude.

So it was all staged.

And even people like Bill Maher

saw that out.

I don't know if Jake Cowper did, but some of them like that did.

Mark Halpburn.

Everybody understood that

you're not threatening to kill somebody.

You don't want somebody to go be shot and then tell them to go over to a war zone with a rifle as if they're a soldier.

And

the other thing that was weird about, usually Republicans and people on the right don't adopt the chicken hawk argument.

That's a left-wing troll.

So that was very odd for the left to be very angry when someone was adopting their own ideological rhetoric.

That was another thing.

So

I don't think that worked very well.

The other ones,

remember the garbage one

It had two results.

One, it stopped that unfortunate comic who said that Puerto Rico was garbage.

And the problem with that was he was a third party.

It was unwise.

Anytime you have a trash comedian at the next generation, two generations beyond Don Rickles,

you're going to be in trouble.

If you're in a political, nobody should ever put a trash-talking comedian.

Some of them are funny.

The guy can be funny, but you don't put him in a national stage at the last days of the race.

So that was a strategic error, but he's the third party and trump didn't even know him but of course they connected him so when joe bart biden said that about garbage it did two things first it made him it made

the left look really bad because it was consistent with clingers with deplorables with irredeemables with chumps, with dregs, with semi-fascists, with ultra-may, all of that, with Peter Strokes, oh, they smell in Walmart, all of that stuff.

And more importantly, it stopped the whole hysterical machine of the left to gin up the comedians' remarks about Puerto Rico.

And then we had Joe Biden yesterday.

Great, tough guy.

And he always does that.

He tries to act like he's so insecure.

And if you think I'm exaggerating, I'm just doing this on the top of my head, but remember he said the following.

He said, I'd like to take Trump behind

the gym and beat him up.

And then about a year later, he said, you know, when I was in high school, we used to take guys like Trump behind the gym.

He said it twice and beat him up.

Then he said, you know, part of his, and when he was doing the corn pop saga, I just went down that basement and had that guy cut me, what was it, six feet of chain.

And I said, I'm going to go take on corn pop.

And then it was slammed the guy.

Remember the guy made, I always went to the local diner where I grew up and the guy made fun of my sister.

And I went over there and I took his head and I slammed it on the bar.

It's so tiring to see those.

I'm going to jam my rosary beads down your throat.

That's from the 90s.

Yes, such a little wimp.

He is.

He's so insecure and he's so

off the scale.

So for you have the all these people talk about, well, I can't vote for Trump because there's no decorum.

He's not sober and judicious.

He's not in the tradition of McCain and Romney.

It's not in my name.

And then you think, well, you're voting for this ticket where the president, and you voted for Biden, and the president of the United States yesterday just said,

you know, ah, these guys, you know,

I just want to,

what did he say, kick their ass?

Or he said, smash something or ass.

And his face was contorted.

It looked terrible.

So you have the president basically saying, I'd like to, you know, beat up a guy who just

has escaped two assassination attempts and whom he has called you know we have to put a bullet a bullseye on donald trump bullseye on donald trump and he's called him he and his supporters garbage so it that hurt uh a little that hurt and i don't know if it's going to have ripples uh just three days before the election but it confirmed it this this crazy narrative that they had with these october October surprises.

The other October surprise was Mark Cuban, and he was on the view.

He's kind of flipped out.

He used to be kind of not apolitical, but kind of entertainingly, obnoxiously.

But now he's just, his eyes get beady and he gets serious.

And, you know, and he says there's not one smart woman.

The thing about that is that

Trump was known in New York for promoting women

at an earlier time when other people didn't do it to run his companies.

And when you look at Kellyanne Conway,

what's

Sanders, Susan Wiles that runs his campaign.

She's the head of the campaign.

Kaylee McAhenney is her press secretary.

So

he's promoted all sorts of women, and he talks to women all the time.

And so

that was another mistake.

If Trump doesn't reply, so it's now Sunday, he shouldn't not get,

these people are melting down in their hysterias.

He just should not get into any more psychodramas.

And he said that about Lynn Cheney because Tucker was asking him, and Tucker's kind of made fun of her.

And then he kind of trumped Tucker's question with his answer.

And there wasn't really a, he could have just said, you know what?

I'm so tired of her.

His point was that she was a warmonger.

All he had to say is, I'm so tired of that line of thinking of what she represents and the old Republican Party that we always have to go there, we always have to intervene, and we never can achieve anything other than stalemate or humiliation.

Let's just not do it.

It's not isolationist.

It's just we're going to pick and choose in a Jacksonian fashion when we use force.

No better friend, no worse enemy.

And he didn't do that.

He got into back and forth.

And that's

what they do is they dissect, they use a magnifying glass at every single word.

Right.

And it's just the opposite of what the media does to Joe Biden.

Joe Biden can say garbage, and the

actual presidential

text that they release will be at odds with the National Archive.

And they don't care.

The apostrophe police police comes.

Yes.

It's like Orwellian.

We're going to change history by altering an archive that's released

from our White House official records.

I think they're just,

you know, they're getting J-Lo.

Who's running this campaign?

It's LeBron and J-Lo.

And

almost immediately the counter people to Trump start flashing pictures of Diddy with his arm arm around J-Lo and Diddy and LeBon partying it up.

I mean, all these friends, these people are not the type of people that are going to make people in Pennsylvania vote for Trump.

Right.

I vote against Trump.

They're not.

Well, that's,

I think the politics of

endorsement is a strange thing.

And maybe we should.

Maybe we should come back to that.

Victor, get your thoughts.

Keep on with Cheney, and we'll do that when we come back from these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

We are recording on Sunday, November 3rd.

This particular episode will be up on Election Day, November 5th.

Victor, about endorsements.

Liz Cheney,

and I think she even dragged her dad into this,

urging George W.

Bush to endorse Kamala Harris.

Bush, the former president, has

last time around and this time has sat out the endorsement game, even though his wife has not, I believe.

I think she endorsed Kamala Harris, and I know one of the daughters has.

Yeah, that's not.

I don't think that's going to work

because

they did not leave on necessarily good terms.

Because, George, if you remember

about the Valerie Plom

episode or in Broglio, Scooter Libby, and I'll be very fair to Dick Chain,

Scooter Libby did nothing wrong.

We know that because Colin Powell's personal aide,

Lieutenant Colonel, you'll remember his name, he was the one.

Was it Armitage?

Armitage.

Richard Armitage had mentioned to people that Valley Plom was a CIA agent.

And it was very disputable whether she was actually undercover dash covert or not.

But she claimed she was.

And then

Judith Miller and that whole thing, but no one ever proved that Scooter Libby,

because he didn't, was the first person to expose Valley Plan for political purposes.

It was common knowledge all over Washington.

I was at the Naval Academy and I was on a Fox News at about that time and Joe Wilson was in the studio and he was bragging about his blonde wife and worked for the CIA.

He did.

I don't know if that was after this whole thing, but everybody knew she worked for the CIA.

I don't know if they thought she was covert or not.

But the point was they ruined school

Robert Fitzgerald, the

Patrick Fitzgerald.

A classmate in high school.

No offense, Jack, but

we're starting to see a profile here

of these overzealous

Catholic

Catholic New York City.

Anthony Fauci, Anthony Fauci.

And Robert Mueller fit that or not?

We'll leave him out of it.

Patrick Fitzgerald

went after Conrad Black.

He did.

In

just a fanatically unfair way.

And my point is that

Bush wouldn't, when they went after him,

And they convicted him, he lost his

law license.

He was pilloried in the press.

What it was really about was that he was a very effective chief of staff for Dick Cheney in this sense.

If you wrote a negative story about Dick Cheney, Scooter Liberty would get on the phone and he'd try to give Dick Cheney's point of view.

And he was kind of like J.D.

Vance.

He was that effective.

And they wanted to take him out, and they did.

And then when it was all over

and there was no political price to pay, George Bush was, he would not, he wouldn't pardon him.

He commuted, I think, that he didn't have to go to prison, but he didn't pardon him.

Right.

And Dick Cheney and Bush, this is my wendy explanation, got in a big argument.

Remember, we don't leave our dad on the battlefield.

Right.

So the idea that Liz Cheney might solicit her father to ask George Bush, and they haven't been in communication,

what would Bush have to gain?

What would he have to gain?

I mean, think about it.

Does he really think that that's, if Jeb ever wanted to run again, that's going to help Jeb Bush?

Michael Bloomberg came out today and said he was for Harris.

I was looking at all the things he said.

They were just lunatic why he was going to vote for Harris.

One of them was

Donald Trump is going to deport.

millions of people and we uh we need these people as workers.

I'm thinking 12 million came in illegally.

There's over 300,000 violent felons.

And you don't want to deport any of them?

What is wrong with you?

You're back to drop a seed in the ground and any idiot can farm?

Is that what that destroyed your billion-dollar campaign?

So my point is when all of this

Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney, Lynn Cheney, get the bushes.

And then our former colleague at National Review, we don't want to be ad hominem, but Jonah Goldberg admittedly

screwed up.

It was kind of like a juicy smoke, rushed to judgment.

He heard

the alleged thing that Donald Trump did.

Talking about the firing squad.

Yeah, and then he went in, he used the emphatics on equivocally, or clearly, this was a threat to her life.

And this is, why is he doing it?

And then he got bombarded on social media, media, nuked.

And then he kind of apologized because he looked and saw that left-wing people were embarrassed.

And then he more or less said,

I apologize with

a footnote.

That's what Donald Trump does to people like me.

You know what I mean?

Blaming Donald Trump for the original rather than just saying.

Who is it?

Flip Wilson.

Remember, the devil made me do it.

The devil made me do it.

Donald Trump, Lucifer's henchman, made me do it.

And that's why I did it.

So

all of these endorsements are not going to make any

difference.

And this poses a question that we haven't really talked about, Jack, is

win or lose, Donald Trump will either be gone as a political

person

in November or he will be gone in January of 2029.

What do these people think is going to happen to them?

And they all talk about the Republican Party.

What are they going to do?

What are they going to do?

The next generation of the Bushes are going to come in.

I mean, they're coming of age.

Michael Bloomberg, he's going to be too old, probably.

But what do all these people think they're going to do?

That's the key question.

It is.

It's about them.

That's not the thing.

So,

what does somebody like Jonah Goldberg or Bill Kristol or David Fromm

or

you name them, Liz Cheney do?

Do they go completely left-wing because they're working for institutions, outfits that have some large funding from people on the left?

Or do they have this idea, well, the MIGA people are over and Trump lost two out of three elections, and we're going to go back and reclaim the

Republican Party and let's just dismantle all the things that Trump did.

And what would that be?

Reciprocal tariffs against China, deregulation, tax cut, energy promotion, tough on crime?

You know what I mean?

And then

they would get a Romney-like character, Nikki Haley, maybe, huh?

And Nikki Haley, then there's a big fight in the Republican Party, and Nikki Haley goes to Pennsylvania, she goes to Ohio, goes to Iowa, she goes to Indiana, she goes to Wisconsin, says, you know what, I'm for the working working person.

And she comes to, you know, Arizona, New Mexico, and I'm for all the La Raza, Mexican, Hispanic, Latino.

I am going to win.

You think she's going to win that type of vote from working-class whites, working-class Latinos, working-class blacks?

She's going to go into the inner city.

She's going to go to McDonald's.

She's going to drive a garbage truck.

And all these MAGA people, which have now been

redefined as a multiracial middle-class coalition.

I just don't think it's going to happen.

I don't.

I think the Republican Party thinks

they can revert back and they can just talk about capital gains,

privatizing Social Security, capital gains cuts,

laissez-faire.

I have no open borders.

You know,

I don't agree with...

I don't disagree with all of them, but it's just not going to work.

You're not going to get those people back.

I mean, the social fabric of America is being torn by, ripped, shredded by leftism.

They don't care.

They do not care about women's sports and the transgender movement.

They do not care about abortion on demand in the ninth month, because that's what they, they don't care about mandatory confiscation of guns, which Kamala Harris said that she's, she even said she'd inspect people's homes.

uh to get rid of AR 15s.

They don't care about that.

That was those were lifelong pillars we were told of the Republican Party.

So it's incoherent.

And

by the way,

we'll see what happens in a few nights, but I have a feeling Donald Trump will win.

Yeah, on a practical level, excuse me, with the please George W.

endorse,

I don't see what it would

matter.

I really

am at a loss to understand

the value of endorsements,

that they really matter.

I could see Robert F.

Kennedy's endorsement here.

You mean you're not affected?

Tom Hanks and George Clinton.

Believe it or not.

I thought I was going to vote for Trump, and then J-Lo said I can't.

Oh, my God.

And then LeBron, you know, I thought, wow.

LeBron, I can't vote for Trump because LeBron said so.

And he took O'Neill and wouldn't salute the flag of the United States before.

That's why he's my man, and I'm voting in Paris.

Thank God I waited to listen for that.

By the way, there's nothing new in endorsements.

Did you see Tim Walls calling Elon Musk gay?

That's what you get to.

That's what you're left with.

What about projection?

Holy mackerel.

You know, it's so funny.

You get...

Here you get the end of all things.

That's a line kind of right out of Tolkien's at the very end when they throw the ring gollom throws the ring and they say here we are at the end of all things well here we are at the end of all things in this economy and we're told that donald trump is

crude profane

reckless and here what do we have at the end of all and that she's going to talk about the issues and we hear that uh

The various people, Tim Waltz now is calling a man that has how many children?

11 or 12.

11.

11 children, various liaisons, all-female marriages, has been pilloried in attack for being

what would be the word Randy with women, and now he's gay.

This comes from a person who maybe unfairly, I think unfairly, but people have implied that he was gay.

Let's say Fae.

He is definitely Faye.

Yes, they've said that.

And then we get the President of the United States in the space of five days, finishes the campaign.

Good old Joe Biden will bring decency and moderation and unite the country.

That's what we were told we had to vote for him in 2020.

And he says that the Trump supporters are garbage and he gets to kick, smash, smash or spank or smash the ass of Donald Trump.

And then we have Camilla Harris.

Do you think she?

Yes, she's a fascist.

Fascist.

And then all these sober and judicious and humanitarian liberals are at the end of the day, I don't hate that expression, but the end of the campaign, all they're left with is just personal slurs and smears.

And it's just so typical.

Out of the playbook of unity, I think.

Yes,

and it hurts.

I mean, irredeemables and deplorables.

They really did hurt Hillary Clinton.

And when they released those text messages of Lisa Page and Peter Stroke, and you had that exchange about the smelly people, all capitalized smell, S-M-E-L-L-Y in Walmart.

Then we had that CNN guy, Caputo, I think his name was.

He said, I'm at a Trump rally, and I've got more teeth than everybody put together.

And that stuff, people don't forgive them for that.

And even John McCain lost completely.

He lost the middle class when he

people got very angry at him at the end when he started talking about the crazies and the hobbits that

crazy birds.

Yeah.

yeah, yeah.

I mean, you just, it's just a rule of

cardinal rule of politics: you do not insult the voters, you really don't.

Well, you know,

he did it again with his false, conscious

Marxist narrative to young black men who look at their facial expressions, they're like, what the hell?

He's telling me I don't know what's in my interest.

This guy who lives in Martha's Vineyard in Hawaii when gas is $4 a gallon and I can't afford anything.

And he tells me that I'm sexist because I don't want to vote for the co-owner of this disastrous economic record.

I have to think also, you know, the black guys who are black, black in a barbershop are thinking,

this guy is half white telling me, you know, I know that kind of dynamic comes into play.

Why he thinks doing that would have motivated as opposed to boomeranging is beyond me.

Lots of things are beyond me, Victor.

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Victor, a couple of other topics on our agenda today.

Let's talk about, I won't talk about Chuck Schumer.

We'll wait on that.

Boy, one of your favorite, the Hansonian

solution to America's problems, one of the planks in that platform is bust up Washington, get some of the bureaucrats, move, if you said specifically, like move the FBI to Oklahoma.

So Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House,

he announced the other day that he wants to deport bureaucrats from Washington.

He had an interview with John Solomon of Just the News.

By the way, Just the News is the mothership of this podcast, the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

House Speaker Mike Johnson says Republicans have an ambitious plan to reshape and shrink federal government if they win the election.

That vision includes a plan to deport tens of thousands of federal bureaucrats from Washington and relocate them to middle America.

Sorry about that, Middle America.

But anyway, Victor, your thoughts on

Mike Johnson wants to do it.

The problem is

we're talking about a culture, a culture where

Ben Rhodes, the assistant national security advisor for Barack Obama, will give a lecture about how these people know nothing and I created an echo chamber, haha, to get the Iran.

Remember that?

And then his brother will be president.

in this of CBS, and they're in the same Washington nexus.

If you start looking at people on Republican and Democratic side, you start looking at the people who work for NBC, CBS,

you know, Andrew McCabe is investigating people and his wife is right next there in the Virginia corridor running for Congress.

It's media, it's politics,

it's the permanent administrative state.

They're all connected and they're all within these radiuses of each other.

And

there's so many conflict of interest and there's so much distraction.

They all want to get on TV.

They all want hype.

It's just, there's all these predatory lawyers.

It's just a bad scene.

So why not take

bureaus, not because you want to be punitive, although that would be a side benefit, and break up the administrative state.

That wouldn't be the only rationale.

That wouldn't be the prime rationale.

But the prime rationale, why wouldn't you put people in bureaucracies that better fit the new demography of the United States?

This is not 1787.

So why wouldn't you say take the FBI and put it in Kansas City?

It's a law and order

place.

There was no big media centers there.

FBI agents, spouses, their husbands wouldn't be reporters working for national news.

Their wives wouldn't be working for NPR.

They wouldn't have conflicts of interest.

They wouldn't have contact with all these revolving doors.

You know, you go from the Pentagon, you go right into Northrop or Lockheed or all of these places there.

You wouldn't do that.

So put,

and you would be centrally located.

So

when James Comey got on his private FBI jet and he wanted to go look at somewhere, he could just zoom, zoom left, right,

east, west, north, south, right in the center of the country.

Visit all the district FBI and not have to go all the way to one side of the country or another.

And then why not have people who are actually farming where the Department of Agriculture is?

Why not put it in Texas?

Why not put it in Rapid City?

Why not put it in Fresno, California, richest agricultural county in the United States?

And you would have farmers there.

The people could have on-hands expertise.

We're in the age of Zoom now, Jack.

So if you say, well, Victor, there's a nexus, well, just get on your Zoom screen, get a 58-inch Zoom screen in your office.

And from time to time, you'll go Zoom into a White House cabinet meeting.

Or maybe the Secretary can fly back there rather than flying all over the country.

on the other side of the country.

But again, it will break up these marriages, these liaisons, these siblings, all of this incestuous culture.

And if you don't, you think that's too radical, then just take the FBI and outsource it.

It's counterfeit, I don't know, if it's anti-terrorism here,

investigating overseas problems there,

gang.

task forces there.

Just outsource them to DOJ or Homeland Security or Treasury.

And I think it would be very salutary.

It really would.

It would also be much safer because a lot of these people wouldn't have to live in Washington, D.C., that has one of the highest crime rates in the United States.

It really would.

And it would change the, it would be good for Washington to just loosen it up a little bit.

And it would disperse federal dollars

so the rest of the country got some patronage

with good paying jobs.

You can think of all this Department of Energy, why not put it in Houston?

You know what I mean?

Or somewhere like, if you're going to, I would get rid of it.

I would get rid of education too.

But if you're, and maybe they will.

But you've got to break it up.

And I think the Trump administration is starting to see that last time

was very, last their first term was very redolent of Ronald Reagan.

He was going to come in and change, shrink government and do all that.

He did a good job in many areas.

But basically,

when George H.W.

Bush took over, it was, and even in the last term Iran-Contra, the swamp absorbed everything because he didn't make fundamental changes that will outlast particular appointments.

If Trump comes in and gets a lot of die-hard MAGA people and they're really good, and there's no anonymous, and there's no, you know, people in the DOJ trying to destroy him, or there's no people at defense that won't follow his directives, whatever,

it's still only going to be four years.

But you make fundamental change.

I'm not talking about constitutional changes, which I don't agree with.

I'm talking about bureaucratic changes and geography.

And I think that would be the greatest remedy or anecdote to the mess we have today.

It was done a little too close to home, but Robert Byrd, who was the senator from

West Virginia and the majority leader, he did move a number of agencies to West Virginia before.

but you know, so what?

I once drove through, I ran in a car and drove through West Virginia, and I didn't see anything that didn't have his name on it.

Victor before.

Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

He was, yeah, at one time.

One of the grand wizards, or one of the, I don't know if he was the grand wizard.

He wasn't the, but he was a wizard or kliegel or whatever.

Kliegel.

Kleon.

Kliegel, I think, is something.

Grand Kliegel, maybe.

Women's exercise.

That's a good Greek word, you know, kuklos.

It means circle.

Oh.

The circle clown.

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for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson show.

And Victor, every time I read that, it reminded me like the one one tailgate I ever went to was at Yale, which is nearby where I live.

And Yale was playing Columbia, and our old friend, my old friend, Dick Morris, was

a Columbia grad and his family.

It was a lovely family.

They used to come on national review cruises.

And we just had just the most wonderful time.

I like that.

Yeah, I do too.

It's funny you said that.

I spoke 20 years ago somewhere.

I was in Miami and he was the top Bill, and I was the second bill.

And,

you know, it was one of those venues where

it's not quite advertised what you have to do.

You know, that's add-on, add-on, add-on, add-on.

So we were there, and

we were going to have dinner, and we were asked just to give, he was going to give a big speech, and I was going to give a shorter speech.

And then people said, would you guys speak earlier or something?

And he just kind of, and it was on this big boat in the harbor.

And he said, you know,

I'm going up on the private deck that you can't get, anybody can't get up.

And if you don't go up there, you're going to get round.

So I went up there.

And then he sat down and he explained the entire way that he wrote books.

And

he signed them and he had special order.

And he was very helpful.

He said, you know what, in this business, the traditional way of relying on, you know, you write a book and you go on a network news, you don't, you can bypass that was very prescient.

You know, and he was trying to say that it was kind of pre-podcast, pre-self-published on Amazon, kind of that stuff.

Right.

And he was, he was actually very helpful and I very entrepreneurial, too.

Oh, I was going to say that.

Yeah, Dick was definitely, definitely

a great marketer.

Remember, he wrote that book in, I don't know when it was,

2007 or 8 called Hillary versus Condi, where

that was his idea of what the next race should be?

Well.

And it was kind of like Condi was going to beat Hillary, I think.

Yeah.

But I mean, the point was that he got disillusioned after they destroyed him, the Democrats, the left wing destroyed him.

Yeah.

Well,

he's a complex, complex man,

but I've spent a lot of enjoyable time with him and his wife's family.

Hey, let's talk about another.

Well, he's a New York, Dick was a New York Democrat, and so was Chuck Schumer.

And the news came out last week about

Schumer.

Here's a headline.

Best strategy is to keep heads down.

Schumer advised Colombia's leaders to ignore anti-Semitism backlash, saying their problems are really only among Republicans.

So here's Chuck Schumer.

You know, he's Jewish,

majority leader, tremendous power in New York State, of course, never mind the country,

great defender of Israel,

and the most egregious

anti-Semitic, well, I don't think they were the most egregious.

They were, let's say, Harvard and Columbia sort of were running neck and neck for whose students were doing most outlandish things at the time year after October 7th.

But you would have thought

Chuck Schumer would be out there giving the leadership

of Columbia a kick

in the shins and other places, Manu Shafiq, the then president.

But he was counseling him

off the record to keep your head down.

And by the way, this is all just about a bunch of Republicans upset.

Are you surprised by this?

No, I'm not.

I mean, this is a man who's a lawyer and he got out in front of the Supreme Court in 2020 and he said, Gorsch,

Kavanaugh,

you sowed the whirlwind.

You're going to reap the wind.

Pause.

You're not going to know what's going to hit you.

That's a direct threat by name to the Supreme Court justice.

At that time, he was Senate Minority Leader.

a legal mind supposedly and he was ahead of a throng of anti-abortion

protesters and he was screaming at the doors of the Supreme Court.

And you could argue that that precedent made it much easier for what followed in the next two years, where you had people showing up at the justice's house, illegally trying to yell and scream and threaten them to affect their decisions with Merrick Garland didn't do a thing.

And more importantly, we had an assassin show up, as you remember.

And if he hadn't called his sister, he probably would have tried to shoot Kavanaugh.

And he took no, I mean, they forced an apology out of him.

The Republicans condemned him as such.

But yeah,

I believe it.

I don't think he's just an operational senator.

Whatever he thinks is in the interest of his political career, he'll say.

But,

you know, one thing we haven't talked about, when you look at these campuses, everybody had predicted that when these students came back to school, they were going to erupt.

There's been some demonstrations, but where I work, there is no Hamas tent city there, Jack.

And they haven't rushed to the new president's office like they did the prior one.

And they haven't

spray painted the colonnade.

And guess what?

The 13 people who trashed and vandalized the president's office, the prior president, are still being investigated and indicted by the Santa Clara DA, and they were suspended.

Some of them didn't graduate.

And I think there's not been one tent that violated university policy.

You could not camp out 24 hours in a public square.

And I think the message went out to everybody that if you engage in violence and you violate university policy, two things are going to happen.

If you're a student, and you're found to violate, you're going to be suspended pending an hearing.

And if you're here on a student visa, you're going to be suspended.

And that means by law that they have to report to the Homeland Security that your student visa has expired.

And therefore, you'll get your wish to go back to the utopia of Gaza or Jordan or Egypt.

And that's a powerful deterrent.

It really is.

Well, some places the nastiness remains percolating.

And I want to recommend to our listeners to check out out the Commentary Magazine, the new issue, has a piece by a woman, Irina Velitskaya, who's a student at Berkeley.

And if you're there, the anti-Semitism there is still very palpable.

Well, it's there.

That's two.

No, no, I don't mean there isn't.

There's two different questions.

One is violent manifestations of it.

Right.

Two, insidious.

anti-Semitism.

We just had a 900-page report compiled by faculty, some people at the Hoover Institution, I think one or two participated, and they found overwhelming incidents, and these were people of the left, of almost institutionalized anti-Semitism in a sense of

asymmetrical treatment of people who say things, especially.

And I think

one of the reasons that you haven't seen as much anti-Semitism on campus is under the new repertory admissions when you go like Stanford and you let in 9% of your student body are white males or 20, 21% white in general, or Yale, or Harvard, or Princeton, or Cornell, then you have a lot less Jewish students.

And it's gone from anywhere from 20 to 30% in the 1970s down to 9 and 10%

Jewish students.

And then at the same time, you've got a quarter million students coming from the Middle East, foreign students.

And the other thing is, after what happened the last year when people chased Jewish students into the library or the MIT president said, basically, I can't protect you.

And so be careful where you walk.

Or we saw the Harvard Review guy attack a Jewish student.

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He came from Stanford.

A lot of Jewish students are just not, they're not identifying as Jewish.

Right.

And they are quiet and they're circumspect.

And that's what, that's tragic because the university didn't intervene to protect them.

And one of the reasons there is less violence is that there's fewer Jews on campus and they don't visibly identify as Jews.

And they're not in places where they might be attacked as Jews.

Right.

So,

so

deeply discouraging.

Well, I can tell you that I live in a town that is 95% Mexican-American and people,

you know, undocumented, so to speak, immigrants.

And I don't care what the official statistics are, it's pretty well known.

That's a pretty accurate 90 to 95 percent.

And I can guarantee you, if you were Jewish and you had a Star of David around your neck and you walked into the local

supermarket, no one would attack you.

No one would come up and insult you.

No one would try to harass you.

If you did the same at liberal, enlightened Stanford University, where I work,

that would be very questionable.

Provocative act.

If you walked across the Stanford campus and you had a star of David visibly from your neck, somebody would say something or somebody would do that.

And yet right where I live, no one would say anything.

And you should think about that because that really brings in this enlightenment question.

What is the liberal, enlightened, intellectual, utopian landscape creating but medievalism and hatred.

And what are people who don't have access to higher education?

They're innately not anti-Semitic.

And so

it really is.

I think the last two or three years have really made people question the Enlightenment.

I really do.

I've devoted my entire life to the Enlightenment, but the Enlightenment has become Orwellian.

It really has.

Well, the absurdity of the elites, Victor, is on

display in many ways.

And maybe we'll talk about that as we come into the home stretch of this episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Let's talk about California housing.

I'm glad you mentioned Hoover, and we'll get to all that.

Not housing.

I just got my property tax yesterday.

Oh, well,

I'm only going to talk about tiny houses.

We'll get to that right after these final important messages.

We are back with the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Again, this show is up on Election Day, but it's being recorded on Sunday the 3rd.

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The web address is victorhanson.com.

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So that's VictorHanson.com, The Blade of Perseus.

I just need to make one note, Victor, by the way.

A good friend John from

Milford,

where I live,

wanted to let me know that something I said when we talked last episode about Penny, who was

the Marine.

He could not, because this is a state court,

if he is convicted,

the president cannot pardon.

If it was a federal case.

And who knows, you know,

if the people of New York do not convict them, and as a Democrat administration, I'm sure they're not going to let that go and they'll find some federal reason to prosecute.

But anyway, all that said, thanks, John, for the correction.

Victor, I'm glad you mentioned Hoover before.

And Hoover, as

on the website, as you have Strategica, there are a couple of major efforts that Hoover

promotes.

One is, again, Euro

Strategica.

Another is called California On Your Mind, and that's overseen by, is it Bill Whalen and Leo Hanian?

Those are two of our best fellows.

They really are.

They're very good.

So Lee, yeah, they write terrific stuff.

So Lee has a piece on

sheltering California's homeless is insanely expensive.

And let me just bear with me here quickly.

There's been a, you know, of course,

the state legislature has passed some law on housing, and this has to do with tiny homes.

It's not just the delay that is the problem with the tiny homes plan.

It's also the cost.

San Jose, one of the four locations chosen for this project, this has to do with reducing homelessness.

will be spending $30 million for tiny homes that will add 144 beds to an existing tiny homes site in the city, consisting of 72 single-occupancy single

room units, which do not have plumbing, and 36 double-occupancy units, which have a bathroom, but no kitchen.

The standard sizes of these units are about 70 square and 120 square feet, respectively.

This works out to about $208,000 per bed and about $278

per unit.

And he goes on to,

at some of the per foot cost,

this is the equivalent to the most expensive mansions you could find in America.

I know it.

It's, I mean, we go from one extreme to the other.

So we say, here's all these people that are injecting, fornicating, urinating, defecating on the street.

And it's sort of like,

I don't know, London in 1840.

And that's the nicest place in the world at that time.

And so we're going to clean it up.

So we're going to make little modules that are going to have every little thing that costs $200,000 rather than why don't, what would be better than being out in the cold?

Why not just have tents

and

every fifth tent have a public restroom with stalls and maybe a group kitchen and maybe use

a big parking lot, anything to give them warmth, protection from the elements, clean showers and toilet facilities, and then control the

inflow of drugs.

Why do you always have to go from the worst to the most expensive remedy?

And I think the answer is that you've got government and you've got people who know how government works and they have relationships with people in private enterprise and somebody says, I can do that.

And then there's no transparency and we do something stupid like, we're going to solve a person laying on the cement this winter

with urine, poles of urine and feces around him and his head next to a bunch of needles.

And the solution for that is to build a $210,000 70-foot cubicle

rather than we can do better.

We can't be perfect, but we can give him a tent and maybe a space heater.

and a group shower where he and five tents can share.

We'll have stalls, et cetera.

Maybe we can even have a nurse practitioner on the city.

We could do that, but we just don't,

we never do that because of the regulation.

Somebody says, well, you'll be sued.

The tent has, it only reduces the temperature by 20 degrees.

Something like that, you know.

And that's what's wrong with the whole country.

We have to be perfect, which we can't be, so we never are, we never even try, rather than good or better than the alternative.

And that's a weird mindset.

I always found by

paralysis.

This is this projection of this tiny house thing.

And if there are listeners who live in a tiny house, God bless, you know, but you see some of them like we got a kid, a big dog, and there's this, there's something culturally,

I don't know, it's cool to be doing this.

It's

kind of a middle finger to the McMansions, which I don't know that our society needed McMansions built through the, you know, the 90s, but it's weird to take this

cool thing.

I don't consider it cool, but that's the solution to

this problem where there are, as you just mentioned, so many more

reasonable ways to.

It gets back to that, what I've called, when you can't address the felony, you charge them with a misdemeanor.

So

when there are existential problems, we've talked about the

Michael Bloomberg factor, when you can't get the snow off the street, I've got to call him about that, when you can't get any snow off in a huge turn of drink, then you talk about supersized drinks to be relevant.

And that's what this is.

That's the problem.

The big gulp is the problem,

not the mountain of snow.

Yeah, anytime

it's true.

And

I see that where I live all the time.

There's,

you know,

I had an inspector come out and he started to lecture me about

the panel and the solar panels and

where this label they have to have a label here.

And I just said, you know, can I just say it?

That's one thing.

We're talking about writing labels on a circuit breaker that is in code.

It's new.

And

the panels are new.

And the company that installed them did the coding code, but we didn't write which particular circuit.

And you're here.

If you turn around and walk

I don't know a third of a mile down that street you will see about 50 people

living in one house and its yard there will be about four Winnebagos three Lean Twos that you can see Romex that's not professionally wired going out of the circuit breaker to each home you will see porta potties

I guess with a hole because nobody's going to service them And then you will see every type of animal known to existence.

It looks like Noah's Ark.

You will see ducks.

You will see chickens.

You will see dogs.

You will see horses.

You will see cows.

You will see pigs.

You will see sheep.

You will see goats all running around amok.

And you will probably have 5,000 violations.

Right.

And he said, well,

what do you mean?

I said, why don't you go over there and try to deal with the felony?

Well, I can't do that.

I don't want to go over there.

They wouldn't want me to go over there.

I say, exactly.

I need it all.

You don't have a clue to deal with the problems of that.

So to make yourself useful and important,

you will come over here and I will nod yes, yes, yes.

No, no, I do not want to find.

Tell me exactly what you want me to do.

Yes, I will go get a felt pen right now.

And well, I'll go get some tape.

Will the tape be regulation tape?

Is a felt pen, or I need blue ink or black ink?

And that's what my conversation was like.

And over there, that place is just a moonscape and no one would even get near it.

Because what would you do when you went over there?

You'd say, this is a violation.

This person is illegal.

Here's drugs.

Here's this.

Here's that.

And that would be the first 10 seconds.

And then somebody would call up and say, I'm from the poverty rights legal.

How did you know?

How dare you do this?

And so they know all that.

And so we're into into a paralysis.

Yeah.

That's what the elections, and just to rant one second longer, that's partly what this election is about.

This election on Tuesday is about a particular mindset that lectures people and says, you can't do this, you can't do that, you're not doing this, you're not, and then

that mindset says,

and we're going to keep doing this to you.

And the people who, it's the people who lecture versus the people being lectured to.

And the people who lecture says, I don't want to hear your gospel anymore.

I'm sick of it.

You have all sorts of problems.

You go into inner cities.

See, people are shooting themselves.

They're killing themselves.

You can't even walk in San Francisco.

Go deal with that first before you tell me that I said an incorrect pronoun.

But you go after a pronoun while your whole society is turning into.

Afghanistan or something.

And that's because you can't deal with it because you're scared.

But you're a bully.

You're a bully.

And

that's what's so weird about Joe Biden.

I'm going to take Trump behind.

I'm going to spank.

Well, if you really want to go after someone who says terrible things

and is disrupting, why don't you just go after Louis Farrakhan?

Just say, you know what, you're an anti-Semite racist or go after somebody in your own party.

Al Sharpton, Al Sharpton.

And just say, I'm going to go.

There's a nice, Michael Pack did a wonderful documentary about Crown Knights.

i just saw it and i'm not going to have al sharpton in my white house why don't you just do that before you start getting on your pulpit yeah

by the way you mentioned all this talk of drugs and other things uh i don't

spring this on you but i did i did see uh steve bannon you know he got out of jail and he talked about

He was talking about Biden, and not in a malicious way, I thought.

He said, there's so much drugs in the federal jail.

And he was in what used to be called club,

the lowest level.

And he did not think Hunter Biden would be able to survive.

I saw that quote.

Did he mean that Hunter would not be able to survive?

Because A, there would be too many drugs that would tempt him, or B,

the inmates would be

violent.

No, I got the impression it was the near occasion of send of the drugs and that

his father should pardon him for that.

Yeah, I mean

it wasn't

political, it wasn't malicious.

That's so funny.

Why doesn't Lynn Cheney, because she's always saying that democracy will be destroyed by Trump, why doesn't she just ask herself one question?

Why did you put two high-ranking at one-time Trump officials, Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro, into jail, prison,

I don't mean her personally, but why did the system

do that, which you didn't object to, to put them in for the crime of not complying with a congressional subpoena when

Merrick Garland and Eric Kohler themselves didn't?

on much more fundamental questions.

Why didn't you, and why did you, when you ran that committee,

why don't we have all the records?

Why weren't why did some disappear?

And the ones that are very critical, why don't you have all of them released?

Why didn't they do that?

And why did you deny members of your own party who were nominated by your speaker that they could not participate?

And why were there only two Republicans?

Yes.

And the only two things that you had in common, you two Republicans, were two things.

A,

A,

you would not be running for office.

and B,

you voted to impeach Donald Trump.

And those were the only two people that I guess they could find.

I guess the Democrats said, Pelosi said, I want to run a rigged investigation on January 6th, but I'm going to be the first time in congressional history we're going to refuse the nomination of the opposition party.

the House Minority Leader, Kevin McCarthy's nominations.

But you know what?

We've got to be careful because we only want Republicans.

Can you find any Republicans that both voted to impeach Trump and then they have no political future?

They're either not running or they have no chance to winning.

Because if you can, we can get some bodies.

And that's what they did.

And we're supposed to think that she was representative of her party or the country or anything.

It's a joke.

Well, Victor, that will have to be the final word of wisdom here.

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And it's titled Best Podcast.

Hey, Victor,

longtime listener from Canada, I listen to every episode.

Why don't you ever

give Sparta?

We should bring this up as a topic for another podcast.

Why don't you ever give Sparta the proper credit it deserves for winning two wars against Athens and leading the Greek world?

If Athens is so great, is not Sparta the greater for beating her twice and setting the governmental example of republicanism and constitutionalism.

Wait, wait, wait.

I'm being accused of being a Spartophile.

I mean, a Spartan,

miso-Spartan.

I've been very critical.

I have been very critical.

I will redirect our dear reader to this issue of the new criterion.

Yes.

And it's called American Athenian Democracy.

And it is a very critical look at trends in America to emulate what

the manner in which Athenian democracy, 51% mobocracy, or what the Greeks called

oklos, the oklos, the mob oklocracy.

And if he read

the other Greeks, that is a 250,000 word defense of what we would call the middle constitution or

what the Greeks called polite

a,

EIA at the end, and best exemplified by Thebes, in which you had

a upper chamber, a lower chamber legislative, you had outside judicial watch, whether the Ephers are Spartan or the Cretae at Thebes, and then you had an elected executive officer.

In fact, this is ironic.

I just came yesterday

from a

mountain retreat held by the

Intercollegiate Students Institute.

It's an institute, isn't it?

Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

Yes, Intercollegiate Studies.

ISI.ISI.

And

John Bertha was very cordial, very professionally run.

And what were the topics?

The topics were Cicero's Deophicius on duty, Xenophon's Cyropadia, Washington's farewell address.

And

in the course of the question and answer, I made it very clear that our model in the West of a tripartite judicial, legislative, and executive checks and balances can be traced from the American Constitution back to Montesquieu and the Enlightened, back to the Roman Republic, and ultimately back not to Athenian democracy, but to the Spartan and Cretan constitutions in which there was two kings, executives, the ephorate, a judicial overseer,

and the gerusia, the senate, and the ecclesia, or the homoioi, all the citizens in a mass assembly.

And one was checking the other.

And that was the most stable form of government, not in my view, but in the view of people like Aristotle.

Look at this fourth book of the politics.

I have been a big critic of Mass Maubrel and Athens.

I mean,

oh, another thing I could suggest, I'm sounding kind of pompous, I have to be careful.

No, no, wait, wait, wait, wait.

I just read the New Criterion essay, so I want to make that emphatic to all listeners.

The New Criterion, it's Victor's one of four parts series there, but Victor kicks Athens in the wherever Joe Biden says and I think you could also

go on the Hillsdale website and Paul Ray and I have a online course on the Peloponnesian War right and

I think in addition

if you were to read my book on the Peloponnesian War I'm very critical of Athens And why would I be that?

For exactly what I said.

There were no constitutional guardrails on the expression of the ecclesia.

So if they want to go to,

I don't know, Sicily on one day and things go bad, then they want to, we call Alcibiades for convincing them to do what they wanted to do.

And then

Nicias says,

well, it's kind of a bad idea, and I'll try to give, I'll be so outrageous in my demands that even these stupid people wouldn't go for it.

And the more outrageous he is, and we need this and this and this and this, i.e.

it'll bankrupt yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

or I talk in that book about going into the island of Milos and murdering all the males over the age of 16 or we can go to the third book going into Mytilene the capital of Lesbos

and this is typical Athenian let's go kill all the males over 16 okay oh I went home and talked to my family that's kind of a bad idea let's go back and vote not to kill all the males of 16 Well, what do we do?

The trireme already left 180 miles to Lesbot.

Well, let's give them free food and water and make them eat so they don't take any breaks and they can catch the first trireme.

And Thucydides dryly says.

And so when they had everybody lined up to have their throat cut, the second one says, no, no, no, just the bad guys, not the innocent.

Or how about executing all the generals

after the great battle of Argonusai, that tremendous, stupendous, incredible victory over the Spartan fleet.

And the winners were the admirals who crafted that brilliant comeback.

Well, let's execute them all because they didn't pick up every survivor in the water.

Or how about Socrates, 70 years old?

Let's have an Athenian popular court.

And let's just say he introduced new gods and he corrupted the youth.

So let's vote to execute him.

But then he'll propose the sentence.

And maybe he'll propose, propose, you know, like five days

exile or something.

That'll be fine.

We'll let him do that.

Oh, he proposed that we feed him free?

That's an insult.

Let's execute him.

And that's what Athenian democracy did.

Wow.

And so I've been a big critic.

Chicago sounds better.

Yeah, it had a lot of good.

I'm not suggesting that democracy per se is bad.

It's not.

It just has to

function within a constitutional system.

And the Greeks knew that, and they called it politeia.

All right.

Well, you've been terrific today, Victor, with all the wisdom you shared.

We thank you for that.

Thank folks for listening.

Again, this is Election Day.

If you haven't voted yet, go vote.

Go vote.

Go vote.

And we will be back soon with the post-election edition of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.