From Military Decisions to Campaign Rhetoric

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

You are here to get the wisdom from Victor Davis-Hanson, star namesake.

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

He's the man behind the website, The Blade of Perseus.

Its address is Victor Hansen.

It's a place you should be visiting regularly and subscribing to.

I'll tell you why later in the podcast, why you should do that.

We are recording on Sunday, the 25th.

The DNC is

in the rearview mirror now, Victor.

The abortion machines, I guess, have gone home and dispensed with all the

detritus and death that it

had outside the convention.

The protesters are gone.

The sycophantic media has gone back home after lavishing her.

We'll get your final thoughts, Victor, on.

now you've talked a lot about that with

Sammy,

but the post-convention bounce, like what happened to it,

Robert F.

Kennedy Jr., Neek Apput.

We have attacks, Israel counter-attacking.

Today, what else do we want to talk about?

Saving the university

and settler colonialism.

So we'll get to all that.

Yeah.

Okay.

You ready?

Yeah, absolutely.

All right.

Strap yourself in, in, folks.

We're going to get to all this right after these important messages.

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We are back with the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Victor, let's start off.

I knew you and Sammy were talking about, didn't have the time to talk about, but said we would talk about Israel and Israel's

defense and taking some preemptive measures

in its

multi-fronted enemies.

Your thoughts, Victor.

Tell us what's happened and your thoughts about Israel's actions.

Well, they had intelligence that at five o'clock in the morning of yesterday, Hezbollah was going to send this huge barrage.

Because, I mean, after all,

all is braggadachio from Hezbollah in Iran.

It's been several weeks since they said from these assassinations of

these terrorists in Beirut, in Damascus, in Tehran.

And we were told that it was going to be immediately and overwhelmingly responded to, and it didn't happen.

And you and I talked about that scene in the wild bunch about that strategic pause where the gunslingers don't know what's going on, and that's where we were.

And then Hezbollah decided to break

the impasse and was going to send, and they did send.

They say they hit 10 targets, but it was apparently a massive preemptive.

So Israel beat them to the punch and sent 100 jets and took out.

40 sites, but in those sites, supposedly were hundreds of launchers.

And Hezbollah, of course, then said, well, we responded, we hit 10 military.

You can't believe anything they say.

Can't believe anything that any of those people, I mean, everybody criticizes the IDF, but it's the only one that has any credibility compared to Hezbollah and Hamas and the Houthis, especially Iran.

So then

They apparently said they were going to hit Tel Aviv, bad idea, because the head of the defense forces,

the IDF, said, if you do that, we're going to be merciless toward Beirut.

And Beirut, remember, 50% of it is Shia,

and it's entrenched, fortified, the repository of missiles.

And in 2006, Israel did that and left it like what we see in Gaza.

And

the economics minister of Lebanon said, it's taken 20 years to get back.

And then there was that infamous quote, as you remember, from Nasrallah, that supposedly he said, if I had known what the retaliatory response would have been, I would have never okayed in 2006 the kidnapping of three Israeli soldiers.

So

I would be very surprised if after this

devastating preemptive strike that Hezbollah says, okay, that was nothing.

We're going to hit you.

We're going to hit Tel Aviv.

They have the ability to hit Tel Aviv if they send their entire arsenal at once, you know, 100,000 rockets or something.

But whatever they do, whether it's 10 rockets that get through or 100 rockets, Israel's going to come down hard on Beirut.

And I don't think they're going to do it

because Israel has 100 jets they send out.

That's more than we've, I think we haven't had 100 jets in the air for years.

And so you can see they have the ability to really do a lot of damage.

And,

you know, the election here is, I mean,

Harris had to bend over backwards to say, you know, on one hand, on the other hand, we support Israel, but, you know, we're upset about what's happening in Gaza and all that.

But the bottom line is

they know, Hezbollah, that if Trump were to be elected, and we're going to talk about that after the convention, then it's not going to be good for them because Trump's attitude toward Israel vis-a-vis its enemies was

do what you have to do to take care of business, none of our business.

We'll supply you because you're an ally, and we will make sure that Iran does not attack you.

Otherwise,

it's between you and Hamas, it's between you and Hezbollah, it's between you and the Houthis.

And when that happens, they don't want to do anything because they will lose.

Well, I think it's fair to say I agree with everything you just said, but trump's broader view is not so libertarian uh because he and his and his son-in-law and his administration was very proactive yes i know that alliances that's a good point i don't mean they were just hands-off yeah we're only hands-off in the question of are we going to restrain israel to retaliate and they're not they are libertarian in that sense if you guys want to you know

respond go ahead it's none of our business we will corral iran And then at the same time, as I should have pointed out, what you pointed out, they were working non-stop to get the Saudis and they had, you know, get the North African countries in on the Abrams Accord.

Right.

Abrams Accord, excuse me.

And

it was working.

Everything was working until Joe Biden came in.

And the idea was anything that has Trump's fingerprints on it, we don't care whether it's Sawal or stopping catch and release or refugee status, or Saudis, the Saudis, the Kuwaitis,

all of them sorting to have a non-aggression pact with this.

It doesn't care.

We're going to overthrow it.

And that's what they did.

So it's a high, what that's what makes everything so silly when she starts attacking Trump as if he's an incumbent and they haven't been in power when

all they did was undo everything Trump did, and it turned out to be a disaster.

And now they're blaming Trump for having his policies undone, which they did.

It doesn't make any sense.

We'll talk about that, but it's yeah, I have another

little on Beirut.

I don't know if it's a point or it's a question, but

that devastate, what was like three or four years ago now, that massive explosion in the port there.

Yeah, the flour, supposedly, it was a big food warehouse that blew up.

I think it was nitrogen fertilizer, wasn't it?

Yeah.

But I mean, that city must

take more decades to recover, if at all.

I was always, you know, ammonium nitrate is a lot more expensive than ammonium sulfate.

And I used both when I was farming.

But when every time, if I had ordered 100 sacks for the year, you know, of ammonium nitrate, we put it, I was always afraid to close a door on the shed

because, you know, it's a oh, really?

Oh, okay.

Not that it can spontaneously combust, but

if you get it, it is nitrate, you know, it's it's a explosive.

And I don't think they let, I think they monitor it now after the Oklahoma City bombing.

That's what they used, ammonium nitrate.

I know.

It's much more fast acting.

You get the nitrate makes it more fast acting than ammonium sulfate.

Yeah.

Farming is, we've mocked, just stick your finger in the ground, put a seed in it.

It's more dangerous and

risky than Mr.

Bloomberg would have us believe.

Victor, one other, just a curiosity for me of the, let's say, the military crowd, which you hang with, and you, in part,

oversee through Strategica, you have at Hoover, you have this military working group.

So it's not only military types, but also historians, et cetera.

But I'm wondering, in general,

do you think they have a similar view to you or to Trump

related to Israel?

A laissez-faire, let Israel do what it has to do?

Is there some.

Well, we have about 50 people

that are coming, and officially 25 are members, and then 25 are by invitations.

And actually,

we had 90 people in March, and we're going to have another March meeting coming up.

On Israel, I would say it's

75%

favoring U.S.

policy,

and then maybe 25% not critical of Israel per se, but just critical of any entangling alliance.

When you get to Ukraine, I would say it's 60-40.

60% favors the administration, and then the other 40% either thinks,

like Robert F.

Kennedy, that it was the U.S.

got us into into it.

I mean, Ukraine and the U.S.

under Obama got us into this, or

kind of like me, that

no matter what happens each cycle, that neither side has enough wherewithal.

i.e., Ukraine does not have the wherewithal to stop the Russians and make them lose, and Russia does not have the wherewithal to take any more than the Donbas

and Crimea, and you've got Somme or Verdun

and you're getting up to a million.

And it's time when Ukraine gets in a more advantageous position and they're getting that way, maybe with curse for a while, to negotiate.

And we've talked about that negotiation, what it would entail.

Everybody talks the same thing.

Donbas, Crimea will be institutionalized, Russia.

Russia pulls back to where it was prior to February 2022.

And then you arm Ukraine to the teeth.

I guess the sticking point is whether it's going to be in NATO.

I think most people think if you put it in NATO, it's a mistake.

But the establishment thinks it should be.

But in that group, that's,

I would say, that it's split much more than Israel.

And

we have, I mean,

I try to get intellectual, political, ideological differences.

So we have people

like H.R.

McMaster, who's, I guess, an engagement interventionist in the sense that he feels that U.S.

should display strong power and maybe even preempt if necessary.

And then somebody like David Goldman, who's very reluctant, and somewhere in the middle, Edward Lutwack.

And Bing, and then we have a lot of military people.

Yeah.

People ex-military, like we have General Manis, we have some of the admirals, we have retired Bing West.

And then we also have

people, historians, Barry Strauss, Andrew Roberts, Neil Ferguson, people like that.

So I tried to get us

actually across the political spectrum.

In fact, when I created the group, I actually invited people that had attacked me in print.

And I didn't really care about that, but I wanted to get a wide variety.

The only thing I can say is in the 12-year

evolution of the group,

in the beginning, I asked people that

I didn't always agree with, but I had no, no, you know, I liked them.

So there was Max Boot and Fred Kagan and Kim Kagan and

people in Hoover, and they've all resigned or dropped out.

So I say anybody who was anywhere near the neoconservative has dropped out.

But it wasn't over ideology, it was over Trump.

Yeah.

Anybody who was against Trump felt

it's a mortal sin.

Yeah,

the group should have come out officially and said Trump is an anathema and I wasn't going to do that right

of course and then we still get there's still arguments about that topic Trump you know the arguments are always well Trump said he wants to do it's always what Trump said and what Trump did

so one side might say well he said he was gonna he's really undermined NATO by all of this rhetoric and then the other side will say

no that's art of the deal talking points he made NATO uparm by $100 million.

So it's the old argument back and forth.

We never talked about Max Boot and his spy, alleged spy wife and this whole scandal.

Yeah,

I haven't wanted to.

I don't understand that.

I mean, I know that

when I knew Max, he was married.

I think he had three children, very stable guy.

And then he got a divorce, and he had this South Korean American, formerly of the CIA.

And then they started to co-author op-eds with each other about South Korea.

And of course,

now we know allegedly that the CIA or the FBI or who the CIA asked her to leave and then the FBI investigated her and apparently She was guilty.

The FBI alleges, it's not proven, it's going to go to trial, I guess, that she was a foreign, like, sort of like Paul Manafort,

but more so, I think, that was receiving gifts from South Korea to write favorable things.

And then the question is, he was co-authoring some of them.

And was he aware in the household in which he lived with her, there were manifest gifts apparent and he was aware of that or not?

I don't know.

And if so, did that have an effect on him?

And the Washington Post says no.

So he still writes for the Washington Post.

But when he was a member of the group, I've reviewed his books.

And the ones, I mean, they're not, I know people will be shocked.

They weren't political.

They were on,

you know, a history of

what would you call non-conventional warfare and

counterinsurgency.

And they were pretty good.

And I've reviewed them favorably.

Yeah.

But

I think he felt,

maybe just put it this way,

I think he felt that he had to say things at the group meetings that would establish

that

he really thought, you know, during, that he was woke and that the Trump MAGA project was bad and that people should know how he felt.

And I felt that just people should not

be exclusionary in their political opinions because after all, I mean, and then I just think it was a mutual parting of the ways.

Yeah.

Well, some people live the life of, you know, they have to have the lawn signs out there just to show you that they're who they are and that they're not you.

I hate you.

I'm not one of those people.

Yeah, I mean,

I'm always reactive if

the bulwark attacks me.

Yeah.

You know, what's his name?

Gabe Schoenfield.

He was my editor at National Commentary for years.

I had no problem with he was a good editor.

And then all of a sudden he writes 25, 15 and 1800 word attack and compares me to a Nazi propagandist because I wrote the book on Trump.

He really didn't read it because it was kind of a disinterested examination of how Trump won

and why his

MAGA agenda resonated.

But I replied,

I think it's always a good attitude that you don't pick fights with people.

When I review things, I don't think

there's some exceptions.

I reviewed in the latest new criteria in the book on white rage because it was just a travesty.

It was just made up, basically.

But usually you don't, even then I didn't attack them personally.

I didn't call them

names.

But if you do, if people do that, and John Heath and I had a lot during Who Killed Homer, I mean, they were really vicious.

You go on some websites.

Somebody sent me one the other day.

I should read it on the air, but I won't.

And it was talking about military history, and somebody says, Victor Hansen's still alive.

And the person's blog, he writes, and he said, unfortunately, he is.

And

classicists hate his guts and da-da-da.

And it was really unfortunately still alive.

I'll send it to you.

Yeah, and I'll identify the author.

I thought that was pretty bad.

It It was a couple of years ago.

I had forgotten about it.

But generally, the people who want to

pick a fight are the never-Trumpers.

They're the ones that

say that this guy

is a Nazi or he's Hitler or he's...

Right.

There's a big fight today that Rick Wilson, remember him?

That kind of

unhinged.

He came into currency.

He was just a guy who volunteered to drive his truck around and help Romney.

Remember that?

And then

he got very vicious in the way he uses every type of

horrible language and vectors.

He's infamous for that mocking Southern voters.

I think he was on MSNBC.

Like, who, you know, like, yeah, I mean, he's widely despised.

And then he got very angry because somebody

who shouldn't shouldn't have had mocked Tim Waltz's son, or at least had said that Tim Waltz is, there was that controversial picture when he goes out to

the podium with his family.

His son is autism.

And it's kind of like my granddaughter who has Smith McGinnis, only

not as severe as Smith McGinnis.

Ms.

McGinnis is, I think, more severe than Down syndrome.

Down syndrome.

Yeah,

you're missing entire

genes.

So anyway,

he grabbed him by the arm and there was a

and anybody who's been around somebody with that meltdown problem.

I can see why he did it, but people who were defending him just said, well, he was afraid he was going to walk into the teleprompter.

But critics said, well, look at him.

He's just yanking.

And out of that,

this Rick Wilson starts saying, how dare you make fun of a candidate?

And then

that like blew up the dam and the floodwaters of fact and veracity just poured out and everybody reminded that rick wilt that is his forte making fun of trig palin i remember that yeah he could he trafficked in every conspiracy he made fun of that kid and he made fun of um

uh Trump's youngest son.

Right.

Remember they were

saying that Baron was autistic.

Autistic, right?

Yeah.

And that's all he does is traffic in it.

So

anyway.

That Trigg Palin stuff, and we're going to move on here, Victor, but I never understood how Andrew Sullivan,

who claimed that was really,

wasn't he?

He was claiming it was Sarah Palin's daughter's child.

It was some.

Yeah, so he claimed that she faked the pregnancy.

Yeah.

And

there was evidence that she didn't.

Of course she didn't.

I I don't want to say evidence that she didn't.

That was absurd.

There was no evidence to back that up.

Yeah.

And he just, people reminded him,

she was in the hospital, and he didn't stop.

And then he was this,

he was Mr.

Neoconservative and pushed the Iraq war.

And then he flipped.

He was like the first version of the Never Trumpers.

Then he flipped not just to libertarianism, but he went fanatically pro-Obama.

And then as a foreign national on a visa, he was caught smoking dope, you remember?

Yeah.

And the Obama administration didn't do anything to him.

And so he was a man of the left, and then

he got, he was very vehement anti-Trump, and now he got what he wanted with the hard left.

And now you see him, he's back backpeddling a little bit.

Yeah, well,

I never understand how some of these folks on the left don't get a there's never a knockout punch.

It just doesn't No, I don't understand some of the people on the right.

I can see that they, given their sense of culture and civilization and elitism, I can see why they think Trump is crude or he's a brawler or he's beyond the pale.

But when you look at his MAGAgenda,

I

He is more liberal than some of them on abortion.

He wants to let the states do what they want.

He doesn't want a national ban.

But when you look at what David Frumm is writing, or Bill Kristol, or George Will or Jonah Goldberg, it's like, well, this guy is 90%.

He's for 90% of the positions I used to tirelessly pound.

And now I've refuted them all because his fingerprints are on them.

Maybe not Jonah Goldberg completely, but Bill Kristol, really,

and George Will, too.

I mean, they would rather have

Camilla Harris in there.

I don't understand David French, too.

I can't figure that out.

I mean, he.

Let's have a special show on that.

Yeah, I mean,

that guy lectured everybody about abortion, abortion.

He lectures everybody about everything.

I know, but now he's basically for abortion.

You know, it's really weird.

They say, well, it's very rare.

There was over a million abortions.

I looked it up last year.

And

there was somewhere between 10 and 15,000, what we would call partial birth abortion or late-term abortion.

Correct.

That's a lot.

So they keep saying they're almost a very small percentage.

They are, but the pool is so large now.

The abortions are going up.

They are.

They are.

People don't forget that.

And so

I don't see how he can vote for a party that would allow that, but he is because of the hatred of Donald Trump as such.

Yeah.

Well, we've talked about Bill Crystal as

the, you know, he had another really bad tweet somebody sent me the other day.

It wasn't just, we talked about Elon Musk being mediocre.

That's what he said.

Oh, I know what it was.

He said that Robert Kennedy

and

Donald Trump's reconciliation

was

on the anniversary, 80th anniversary of the Molotov

Ribbentrop Ribbentrop Pact.

And that was perfect.

In other words,

that

I'm sure he was so proud of himself typing that.

Yeah, pseudo-historian who's never written a single book under his own name.

He lectures everybody on history, and he's comparing two people in the political process to a communist mass murderer who killed 20 million people in the Great Famine and afterward, and

the architect of the Holocaust.

So here you have an historian who wants to impress people that he remembers an event, but he compares two politicians working within a democratic process who were brought together

because they both objected to the anti-democratic methodology of Camilla Harris being anointed and a backroom group of donors and politicos removing the President of the United States re-election bid and then furthermore putting a clamper on Camilla Harris and she will not in democratic fashion meet with the media.

And he's comparing the two people who vehemently objected to that as the two greatest mass murders in history.

That's where he's descended to.

He's one of the more,

if not the most, excuse me, disappointing.

person to have emerged on the right in the last

30 years.

The only thing is, as somebody who watched him from a distance, and I've met him a few times, this is the person who made his whole life career trying to galvanize the country to support issues that if you look at the Republican candidate, they're about 90%,

whether it's deregulation or health care or taxes or

Jacksonian military preparedness, you name it, crime.

Maybe, I don't know where he was on the border, but even

Romney ran on a tough border

policy.

So

to tell everybody, hey, for the last 40 years, I asked you to give money, I raised money,

I did all this stuff, and now everything I said, just forget about it and reboot.

I got a whole different agenda that's antithetical to that.

I guess that's evolution.

That's what Donald Trump does to people.

He's able,

whether you like him or not, he's able to bring things out in people that are

deeply didactic.

Yeah, well,

Bill wants to dictate our positions, and he's not in a position to do that.

And he resents that.

And it's probably something to do with him being five foot two also.

But

we'll talk about that another time.

Victor, we...

We will get to Kennedy, though, and maybe even Gavin Newsome.

We'll do that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Again, we're recording on Sunday, the 25th, and this particular episode should be up on Tuesday, the 27th of August.

So, Victor, I know you and Sammy had a great

analyses

of the Democratic Convention, but here we are, two or three days out from it.

And

I haven't,

despite all the joy and all the sound of joy, there doesn't seem to be much of a bump.

Maybe we'll see polls tomorrow.

And in fact, it seems like whatever

great sense and feeling that there was supposed to be

was kneecapped by

Robert Kennedy's announcement of supporting Trump and his appearance at a Trump rally

in

Arizona, which I watched part of it.

I thought it went very well.

I have two things, Victor.

One is just to make note of how his siblings

tweeted or Xed or put out a comment, Kathleen Kennedy, Courtney, Kerry, Chris, and Rory Kennedy all attacking their brother for his

decision.

They're all attacking him.

I guess he did something that embarrassed the family, like driving off a bridge with a young girl and not saving her.

And I don't remember any of them complaining about that.

Yeah.

Oh, stupid anything that he could get his hands on.

So that's that's one thing about Kennedy.

But the other, and then

we should talk about Gavin Newsome after Kennedy.

Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster who's been polling for 30-plus years, put out

a memo

on the impact of Kennedy's exit and endorsement.

And if you'll bear with me a second,

he looked at some of the key swing states.

So in Arizona, for example, Kennedy was polling at 5%.

And the analysis of where these voters will go,

53% of that 5% are Trump.

Only 28%

are pro-Harris, and the rest are undecided.

So there's a net of 25%.

Now, there's several states.

I'll just do one more state, Georgia.

Only 3% of

Georgia voters were supportive of Kennedy.

The breakdown is Trump 47, Harris 34, undecided 18, and it's a net for Trump of 13.

So this is how, so what does this mean possibly,

you know, for votes?

So Fabrizio said, to put these numbers into perspective, the net vote gained in a state like Arizona, based on just the 2020 turnout model,

would be over 41,000 votes, nearly four times Biden's winning margin, or in Georgia, the net gain, and that's net gain for Trump, would be over 19,000 votes, nearly twice Biden's margin.

Victor, who knows what the 2024 turnout model will be, but

it seems pretty positive news for the Trump campaign.

Yeah, publicly,

remember

publicly, people

on the left were saying it would hurt Trump more.

the Kennedy, but that's not what they believe privately, because one of the reasons that they went to such efforts to destroy the Kennedy candidacy, because they had internal polling.

Everybody should remember internal polling, everybody thinks it's propagandistic.

It's not.

It's more accurate than media polling because you pay for it.

And it doesn't do you any good to pay hard-earned money to somebody to lie to you when that lie won't help you.

So when you get an internal pollster, you tell him, I need the truth so I can react accordingly.

And their internal polling, that told them that Kennedy was a real problem for them.

And that's why they did all of these extraordinary things, which he outlined.

It was very hard to believe some of them, that they not only unleashed a team of lawyers to get him off the ballot, they were going to sue him, but they even

got spies on his campaign that were then

informing, I guess, the DNC interested parties about what he was doing.

I thought that was a little strange.

And then Jill Stein came out the other day and said, You know, I don't like Kennedy and I don't like Trump.

But that's exactly what they did to me.

They tried to get me off the ballot, and then they tried to tie me up in court.

And then they had people associated with my campaign that were spies.

And

so, what I'm getting at is,

and as Mr.

Fabrizio, is that how you pronounce it?

I'm sorry, Fabrizio, Tony Fabrizio.

Fabrizio.

And I remember what he's trying to say is, and

what he's trying to say, and he does it very well, is that

something happened with this Kennedy

containment, and it boomeranged.

In other words,

had they just lived and let live and let him go ahead,

he probably would have split the difference or might have even hurt Trump more.

But they were so paranoid that some of the internal polls were neutral or maybe even on some of them, hurt them, that they had to destroy him.

And the same thing, and that boomerangs.

And

I totally didn't see that coming, Victor.

You get my family together at the White House to trash me.

I'm 15% of the polls and you don't have Secret Service protection for me.

It's something about, you know, it's,

I'm not going to mention members of my own family, but I have the same,

comparing big things and important to minor, irrelevant things.

I have people come to me all the time and tell me this person, this person, this person, this person,

you know,

in a solid, in solidarity, can't, you know,

they have the same feeling that the Kennedys do to

to Robert Kennedy, they do to me.

These are very close relatives, so I can understand why,

but I don't think his animus was ever directed at the other Kennedys.

I don't think he ever said he called up Rory Kennedy and said, listen, you've got to go out and vote for Trump.

I don't think he cared.

That's the difference: that there's this live and let live.

If you want to vote for Trump, go ahead.

But the other side can't stomach it.

They have to attack you or

criticize you or try to destroy you.

And

that's something, as I said earlier, about

Trump does that.

I mean, most people,

if you read the bulwark, it's not just live and let live.

It's just attacking anybody who's for Trump.

Right.

And you and I know from you longer, but for the 20 years I was at the National Review, almost 20 years at National Review, there were certain writers there that just couldn't leave it alone.

And I had a policy, I'd never attack another National Review writer.

And I think four four attacked me.

And they couldn't leave it alone.

And even people, you know,

they can't, it does something to them.

I just was reading Charles Cook, who's a very reasonable guy, and he's got a column in National Review.

I hate them all.

I hate Harris.

I hate Trump.

I hate, you know what I mean?

Hate.

And there's no reason for that.

It's just hate, hate, hate.

He uses the word hate.

Maybe it's rhetorical, but

that doesn't appeal to people.

And

it doesn't help the magazine.

And when you had that in that cycle, when you had four or five people doing that, hate, hate, hate, it boomerangs.

And that's what happened at National Review.

And that is what's happening with the Kennedys.

They don't understand that when they do that,

it shows that

Far from being crazy, that he seems to be more reasonable because when he got up on the podium, I I mean, everybody says they don't agree with a lot of stuff.

I don't agree with a lot of stuff that he says.

But

when he said,

they picked a candidate who had never run in a primary and who in the election cycle has never had an unscripted interview and has never won a single delegate through an election process, and they removed the other candidate without any public discussion.

And they did not welcome or allow, whether it was Phillips or him or Cornell West or Jill Stein, it wasn't that they didn't allow other candidates.

They went out to destroy them and worked with the media to deny them.

He was only interviewed two times.

Joe Biden didn't even extend him.

Secret Service protection in his family history.

That was crazy.

So it boomeranged.

And then, so that helped.

When you mentioned those polls, that helped Trump.

But there were a couple of other things that helped him.

And they were kind of

off the wall.

They floated

rumors the last 48 hours that Beyonce and maybe Taylor Swift, remember that, were going to come.

So you turned it on.

I turned on Fox.

I turned on MSNBC.

And they were interviewing people.

Right.

Peter Doocy went up to someone.

What do you you think?

Who's going to be the secret guest to end everything?

Oh, Beyonce, Beyonce, the B-Woman.

They ginned it up because they wanted people to stay.

They wanted the optics of the crowd

occupying every seat in the arena, waiting not for Kamala Harris, but for Beyonce or Taylor Swift.

Taylor Swift was a little bit less.

trafficked, but that's what they did.

They had venues that repeated that lie, so they don't understand that when you do that, just as you did that with Kennedy, it'll boomerang.

And it boomeranged.

People got really angry about that.

You know, oh, I was in promise,

just like they get angry when a big star cancels a concert, even if it's legitimate, they get angry.

And so

that hurt them.

The other thing that hurt them was

the Republicans finally established a widely disseminated narrative that she either can't or won't meet a reporter in an unscripted interview.

She will not do a non-teleprompted speech.

She will not do a spontaneous

give-and-take QA town hall.

She won't even do an ambush when somebody comes up and said, I have a question,

basically.

And she said, I have a question when are you going to have an interview?

And she said, I'll answer that.

And then that's the answer.

And so that is starting, that narrative now permeates everything.

And they don't know how to deal with it because they have made a cost-to-benefit analysis that the damage they're getting from avoiding her.

And by damage, they don't understand that they are offending the most narcissistic, sanctimonious, self-referential, egotistical people in the world.

And that is the left-wing anchor media.

They have such a high opinion, and half of them are intermarried with DNC people.

They're power couples, and they're saying, I want to be on national TV with five, eight million people, and I want to throw softballs to her and make her look good.

And you're denying me this chance.

How dare you do that?

And they're mad.

And so they feed into that narrative.

I think a lot of people are thinking,

well, that speech was well delivered in a way, but it was sappy.

and she just took the MAGA position, and she really had no specifics, and

there was nothing to it, and she's not going to give an interview, and everybody's talking about it.

And all these little things, you know, as I said, the lie about Beyoncé, the inability or unwillingness to talk spontaneously, the Robert Kennedy, they're all starting to,

I don't know if I should say chip away at her lead because she had such a massive multi-billion dollar value media

blitz, pre, by the way,

worth billions of dollars.

But

they arrested

her progress, her bubble.

And the thing is, when you look at internal polls, and I would expect if this is true, the next two or three weeks, they will want more than they're stonewalling the last two debates.

They only want one.

But if that's true, they will want another, one one or two more debates.

Yeah.

Or I think they will.

They might, especially if she does 50-50.

But if she's down by two or three points, and many of these swing states she is, then she will want more debates.

And I think they are going.

And then internal polls, as I said.

So, and betting.

So when you look at the things that really matter, it's not everybody knows Harvard Harris or Zogby or all these polls have an intrinsic, they can't help the bias.

They have all these rationalizations about who they poll and how they poll the question.

But basically, they all start out with a few exceptions that we want to help the left-wing candidate or the candidate that is more left-wing than the other.

And they can't help themselves.

So there's only two correctives, and that is to watch how a campaign reacts to the polls.

And I don't mean their polls, their own polls.

And by that I mean how do you know, do they have the candidate go out there and talk?

Do they have the candidate be willing to debate?

Which states are they in?

And when you total that up, you can tell what the candidate is coasting or behind or equal.

And then of course the betting.

And the betting, when you look at the betting,

it was Right on the eve of the convention, many of the betting sites had her suddenly surge ahead of Trump, who had been ahead.

And now you look at the betting and they're either even or Trump is ahead.

And again,

in the key states, Trump.

Again, it's the self-interested motive that makes them valuable.

People who run internal polls have to be honest.

That's what they get paid for.

If they keep deceiving the candidate and the candidate acts on that faulty, good news, happy time,

but fraudulent data, they'll be fired and they'll never be hired.

And bettors bettors don't just make a bet because they're left or right-wing.

They have no ideology.

They bet on what they think will give them money, payoff.

And so those are things to look for.

Well, you're right that Trump took a horrible beating at that convention in the sense of Michelle Obama saying he's a racist and people calling him a criminal.

And then the worst was Kamala Harris said that he ordered an armed mob to the Capitol.

There was never anybody arrested in the Capitol that had a weapon.

And she just completely lied about it in the way that Nancy Pelosi said that five people were killed.

There was nobody killed violently that we know of except Ashley Babbitt, maybe one other demonstrator, but there was no one killed by anybody

on the Trump side, if that's the word, Trump, the demonstrators.

They were the ones that suffered the majority of the Officer Sicknick, we know from that that lie that was promulgated for six weeks that he did not.

We know that that was utterly refuted.

He died of natural causes.

You can make the argument they were stress-related, and they make that argument about people who later committed suicide, but that's not an argument that the demonstrators physically or violently killed someone.

Anyway, I think all of this is kind of unexpected and thought that Trump would be down four or five years.

By the way, Victor, it doesn't sit well with,

to some degree, with Gavin Newsome.

We're going to get your thoughts on that in a second.

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Victor,

we're going to get onto a headier, more university related subject here

shortly, but first so we can write out the politics.

Gavin Newsom

interviewed at the end of the convention, here's a headline: Newsome mocks process of Kamala Harris ascending past Biden on Democratic ticket.

Looks like the governor of your great state is smarting from the events of the past few weeks and probably feels he should have been the guy up on the podium.

Ah, well, Gavin has got his Abercrombie and Fitch vest on and his gap clothes, and he's picking up trash along the aqueduct, and he's outraged.

and he's told people six years into his term, he has a road to Damascus moment and he says, you know what,

you're not going to get aid unless you clean up that homeless problem.

So each community now,

when I drive to Fresno,

I see that there are less visible homeless people.

They have them put in a different place.

And so he's trying to do that.

And part of the problem in driving in California is that there's a massive reconstruction problem of all the freeways.

Doesn't mean they're expansion.

Some of them are maybe one lane, but they're trying to fix things.

And

he's been talking about

no taxes.

He didn't want to go up to 16%.

That doesn't make him a conservative.

He didn't want to go from 13.3% to up.

But my point is this.

He got shut out of this process, and he was the slickest of all the Democratic potential rivals to Kamala Harris and R.

Joe Biden.

And everybody thought if it wasn't Biden, it was going to be Newsom.

He was young.

He was from a big state.

And he was

kind of confident in

his repertoire of banter, Q ⁇ A.

He goes on with Sean Hannity,

mono to mano.

She couldn't do that.

Debated DeSantis.

Yeah, and of course the fact he debated DeSantis was kind of an advertisement.

If Biden gets removed, here I am.

I think he did very well the first 15 minutes.

He was flashy, and then he exhausted his cue card

memorized line.

And

he reminded me of the Russian front in 1941.

He was the blitzkrieg that went almost to Moscow, and then he was ground down the last two-thirds by DeSantis, who just stood there, systematically peppered him with facts and questions and correction, and then Newsom's.

He wasn't as slick anymore because he can't, I mean,

he's very slick, but he doesn't really, he's not deep, is what I'm trying to say.

So, anyway, he felt that he was going to be considered.

And then, when Joe Biden, you know, was that month when they were trying to depose him and threaten him with 25th Amendment, or there were rumors even that he might not get legal amnesties for the entire consortium, Biden consortia,

he was waiting in the wings, and he had some great photo ops of a can-do, big steak, kind of a Josh Shapiro,

kind of like Mike Dukakis ran.

It's all about competence.

I'm not left-wing.

And it just was for nothing.

They just shut him out.

They just went in the back room and she got her team and the Obamas said, you know what?

We're going to have Camilla.

That's the way it is.

Took him four days because they put their finger in the wind to see, and, you know, Joe Manchin, get out of here, Joe.

We don't want you.

And all you guys don't dare do it.

Pelosi and Schumer,

they knew that if they tried to depose Kamala, they would lose,

they were always, already in danger of losing their Jewish American base, but they'd lose a lot of their African-American women, all of them, if they deposed her.

So he was shut out.

He's kind of a little bitter, so he kind of snarked about that, that he was, so you know, that he was dealt, they did a Robert Kennedy on him.

And so now what is his strategy?

I think he's going to continue to have these photo ops.

And since the convention, he's still out there.

And they're not ideological photo ops.

He's not going to be seen with the reparations committee that he authorized.

He's going to be fighting fires.

He's going to be cleaning up trash.

He's going to be on the side of a road with Caltrans, Mr.

Candue, because his strategy is he thinks there's a good chance that she's going to blow up that party party and lose.

And then there's going to be a lot of anti-woke, anti-back deal

anger at what they did.

And he might even, you know, make a peep or two.

Oh, you removed Biden.

That wasn't quite transparent.

So the point I'm making is that he thinks she's going to lose, and he's going to be prepared because Trump has got only one term.

And he looks at the Republican field.

He sees J.D.

Vance is getting a lot of criticism.

He's a young guy, and he's he's going to,

right now, he's campaigning for four years from now.

Right.

The worst thing that can happen to him is Camilla Harris wins.

Yes.

Four years of her.

How old will Gavin be?

Well, at least he'll have all that money.

He can buy a nice lunch at the French laundry or wherever else he hangs out.

Hey, Victor, we're going to take a break, and then we're going to talk about saving the university.

And we'll get to that right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

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So Victor,

I came across an interesting piece in Commentary Magazine by Yuval Levin.

It's called Saving the University.

I love Yuval.

He's just a wonderful man.

And if you'll bear with me here.

folks, and then Victor, get your thoughts, because you have,

I think you have some true similarities here, and then maybe some disagreements.

But here's part of what Yuval wrote.

He wrote, the university was not destroyed, but rather transformed by the revolution of the past half century.

It has kept its trappings, but replaced its

ethos.

The titles, the modes of governance, the deans and faculty senates, the tenor, the tenure, the graduation gowns and the ivy-covered buildings are all still there.

But they are now mostly populated by men and women with very different understanding of the goals of the institution from that of their predecessors a few generations ago.

It is crucial to grasp this character of the revolution if the modern-day champions of the traditional academic vision are going to fight back effectively.

Because fighting back effectively will need to mean re-inhabiting, that's the word, re-inhabiting the university, populating regions of its faculty and administration with traditional academics again.

In a sense, it will demand that academic traditionalists do some of what the revolutionaries did, act on a critique of the institution, not by burning it down, but by finding ways to occupy it and then to transform it from within.

Almost done, folks.

The cost of failing to understand this character of the

challenge would be grave.

It would cause today's traditionalists to fight against the university rather than to fight for the university, to risk destroying what they love in the very effort to save it.

Victor, I raised this and wanted to get your thoughts on this because in the past, you know, you have been, I think, what a lot of conservatives view is like, this is hopeless.

Screw it.

Let's create our own colleges parallel.

How many more Hillsdales can we create?

Essentially, abandoning these great institutions and once great institutions.

And you have said, no, no, these are not, these are owned in part by, owned, quote, you know, not an actual word, but in a sense, by

the alumni and the people who have gone before and they need to be fought for.

So I think there's some commonality here.

But your thoughts on the piece and any differences you might have?

Well, he didn't really give,

and that's not a criticism.

It was a very insightful critique of what the left has done to the universities but he the article was not intended to say these are 10 things that you must do he had one thing that you must do and that is you've got to realize that these people are not liberals from the 1950s that they have an agenda and they feel as marxist that you go to the children and they're doing it in K through 12, but you've got to go to the university because they are indoctrinating people.

They are not inductive Socratic thinkers.

These courses that they're teaching are deductive.

So if there's something called sexuality, you can imagine they're going to suggest this transgendered is a genuine third sex.

And then, you know, once you transition, you're no different than a biological male or something.

Or climate change.

The world is heating up.

We're all doomed unless we take radical restructuring or globalism.

You've got to listen to the Davos.

Whatever the topic is, it starts with that premise.

And then the required reading and the class and the grading follows that theme.

And if you're a student, you

students are 18, 19, 20, 21, and they understand for their grade and the big loans they take out or their parents' income, whatever

whatever method or financial obligation they're invested in, you're not going to cross that faculty.

And they're 95%, we know, from donations, they donate to leftist candidates.

So they're left-wing.

And he's saying that you've got to understand that, and you've got to counter that.

And then he gives a couple of examples.

One is we at the Bradley Fund and others do too.

Robert George, the

PhD, JD,

lawyer, but also political philosopher at Princeton, who has a number of conservative initiatives.

There's the University of Texas at, you know, at Austin that's got a new conservative civics program.

There is the University of Austin that people, and then there's traditional, Hillsdale is the Marquis undergraduate institution, University of Dallas, St.

Thomas Aquinas.

There's all of these resistance areas, both new ones,

traditional, antithetical to what's the politicalization of the university or college, and then within these colleges, and then at Stanford we have the Hoover Institution.

And they're all under always pressure because the left hates them.

And what he's saying is you need to expand this.

I think so, but I would go a little further because I think the left has taken is

They were able to do this not just because they were ideologically prepared and the right wasn't, but because the institutions

of the university were amenable to their agendas.

That meant the university was always left-wing.

And the reason that is, is that it's detached from society, and it's the only profession in America where, after six years of examination, and if you look at the tenure rates outside the elite schools, it's about 95%.

And you give somebody a lifetime contract unless they commit a felony or some egregious offense or they don't come to class or they're alcoholic, they are going to be there the rest of their life.

And that does not encourage accountability and it does not encourage to be disinterested.

And

so that's one problem.

The other problem, there's no accountability that they impart knowledge.

No one says to

we want to know what the grade rate at Yale is and Stanford undergraduate grade.

And if it's 80% A's or 70% A's, no dean says this is too high.

I'm sorry.

We're going to have to stop this

because it's ruining our credibility.

No, they don't do that.

Harvey Mansfield kind of at Harvard said, I'll give you two grades, the official one that's inflated so you don't get angry that

I hurt your trajectory or curses an orum, but the real one you earned, which won't be recorded, but it'll tell you what you really did.

And so they don't have that type of accountability.

There is no exit test.

And these are things that I would argue.

I mean, there is an exit test for law school because you got to,

in a way, there is with a bar exam.

And I think, you know, Camilla flunked it, her first chance

out of Hastings Law School.

And I think the mayor of Los Angeles, the former mayor, flunked it five times.

So there is that degree of accountability.

What did you learn in law school?

What do you learn?

How about a BA?

How about the SAT?

I mean, they're going to bring it back now because the woke non-SAT admissions didn't work.

But if you have the premise that the SAT was necessary because you could not trust the idiosyncratic

GPA of tens of thousands of high schools.

And you were saying somebody from Selma High School with an 4.0 is not the same as someone from Palo Alto with a 4.0,

then you must say that

maybe Stanford's not the same as Hillsdale.

Maybe it's all reputation.

So why don't we have an exit?

The same way.

You get your BA, you take the SAT, you've got to have a minimum score.

I would bet you that the Hillsdale graduate gets a much higher score than the average Stanford graduate.

And so there's things that you can do.

And the big problem is the School of Education.

Why do we have to have this teaching credential to teach high school when you don't have to have it for JC, community college, technical college, or PhDs?

I mean, We don't have to have credentials.

We use the terminal degree.

But only in the high school, why don't you just say, okay, you get your BA, you want to go teach high school history, you go get an MA or go get a credential.

We don't care.

But you can substitute a master's in an academic subject to refine your skills

rather than learn how to, you know, gender equity and all that crap.

And you would see a big stampede to the MA program.

It would really revive the MA and it would really hurt what should be hurt, the credentialing industry of the School of Education.

Oh my gosh.

And then again, you should also,

if you tax the endowment, say anything over $2 billion, you could have a ratio of money in the endowment per student enrolled.

And once you started to tax that, so you have a, you know, if you have a university like Stanford with, I don't know, almost $40 billion

and $6 or $7 billion

in operating budget, and you tax that and you said,

okay, you're going to to pay, guess what I pay or you pay, Jack?

You know, you're going to pay 30%

or 40% federal, maybe state too.

They might have to pay $3 billion a year in taxes.

I can guarantee you, if they paid $3 billion a year in taxes, they would not have more administrative staff than they do students.

It's almost equal right now at about 15 to 16,000 students, graduate and undergraduate, and 15,000 administrative staff.

And they wouldn't do that.

They couldn't afford it.

And then finally, you know, as I said earlier, you get rid of tenure and give somebody a five-year contract,

then

they're accountable.

And what I'm talking about is they wouldn't have this time to do all this.

And people that were a faculty member would take seriously, they have to have office hours, they have to turn their grades on time, they have to continue to be active in a scholarly sense.

They

They have to be inductive.

They have to make sure that their students, when they leave the class, have acquired skills and reasoning because

they're going to be tested when they leave.

Any accountability, but what we have now is

no accountability.

So market forces are in play now, and they don't understand that because they're Marxists.

They don't understand the free market, which still exists.

And the free market says right now:

your price is way too high.

These students can't afford it.

This federal government is broke.

It's $1.7 trillion.

They're giving amnesties because nobody can pay them back.

The first time you get a conservative free market administration, they're going to stop this.

And your demographic, because you have sold students,

they're in a large part responsible.

for damning the nuclear family, damning the idea of fertility, damning the idea that a very talented woman can't express herself with

running a very sophisticated household and child raising at least for part of her life.

They've damned all that.

And the result is there's no students.

We're at 1.6 fertility and there's too many expensive schools for the number of potential 18 year olds.

And then after COVID, everybody decided, wow, I'm home all day and

those plumbers are valuable people and those electricians are really knowledgeable and I don't know anything

and they're paying them 50 60 70 dollars an hour.

So a lot of kids are saying why take $200,000 loan out when I can go out and make $100,000 when I'm 19.

My nephew's becoming a plumber.

I said you're going to be the richest man in New York City.

Absolutely.

And

so all of these are conspiracy conspiring to put pressure on them, and yet they're not adjusting.

And it's going to hit them like a tidal wave because

the the first thing they're going to fall are liberal non-prestigious four-year colleges they're going to really take it because they they

they offer the same price and they don't offer the prestige but it will hit the the

prestigious universities too

and

they could save it right now and this is all subsidiary to the real issue and that is the opinion of professors and higher education.

If you look at polls, it is really dropped.

It's down to almost, I like used car salesmen, so I won't,

but it's down to that level in the public's mind.

And so

the point is

they are doing this to themselves, and the only thing that's going to save them is what

Yuval is saying, that they have to, that somebody has to come in there and convince the public that they should spend this type of money

and they're going to get a great bargain.

They're going to get an inductive Socratic student who leaves that has certain reference skills.

He knows what

analytical geometry is.

He knows what political science is.

He's read a Conrad novel.

He knows what the Iliad is.

He knows what the Inferno, all of that stuff

without...

without weaponizing it.

And he knows something more than, oh, well, you know, there's the settler, it's a settler culture, neocolonialism, or trans this and race that.

And

so that, that has to come from them.

And the only way you can do it is make them

make them responsible for their consequences that they've created and make them responsible.

You said, you know,

hitting in the pocketbooks in some way, shape, or form, whether, you know, taxes on the endowment or other things.

I actually think, Victor,

why giving a donor

a tax credit

for giving a million dollars, say, to Harvard, which doesn't need another million dollars.

No, they should stop it.

They should stop it.

I mean, after a certain point, it's ridiculous.

They will.

And the biggest...

The biggest liability that all these universities have is whether it's the University of California system, the CSU system, but especially these liberal arts private colleges.

You know what's not a good deal is someone, you know, 55 years old in a public university making $150,000, but in a private university making $250,000 or $300,000

and maybe teaching two or three classes a year and kind of fossilizing the scholarship or her scholarship or politicized.

It's kind of...

I've said that before, you know,

in classical studies,

when you want to look at German scholarship and you start to see anything published in Germany from, say, 1925, 30, maybe 32, all the way to 46,

it's not very valuable because it's on race or

the Spartan super-rays.

It's not good.

People just ignore it.

And that's what's going to happen for this 15 years of gender studies and race studies, critical race studies.

When you read that stuff,

nobody's going to want to read it.

And you're subsidizing that in a fantastic compensation, and you get very little in return.

And then you have this hell-ot class of young PhDs that can't get a job.

Or they're driving around to community colleges and doing part-time for $30,000 a year.

Or they're starting an assistant professor at a quarter of the salary, and they teach more.

And it's very

It just doesn't, anything that can't go on won't go on.

So the idea that they're very liberal and they're Marxist and they're equity, and then you have these grandees at the top, the administrative class and the full professor class, and they treat the assistant professor and the lecture class as, you know, to be exploited, it doesn't work.

It's kind of like the DNC.

One thing, just in finishing, we didn't talk about, I should have.

I mentioned kind of the con of promising Beyonce.

And I mentioned that people got tired of

they wouldn't be, they got tired, it was too long and it was sloppy and then the Robert Kennedy factor there was

there was a another factor too you know what that was Jack that what people aren't stupid when they listen to Michelle and she said

and she was typical so I'm not just

I'm not just fixating on her when she said

you know my parents taught me that you only need you don't need any more than you need.

You don't need stuff to go get stuff.

And then people they know that they have four mansions.

They have a six-bedroom Chicago.

I guess it's worth $2 million.

They didn't need to really build, according to her own logic, this estate on the beach at Hawaii.

Then they've got the Martha's Vineyard.

They didn't need 40 acres in that big mansion for two people.

They surely didn't need two people.

could got a condo in Washington, according to her lot.

They didn't need the fourth Calorama mansion.

And then I think somebody pointed out her shoes were $1,100 and her outfit was $3,500.

And then when Tim Waltz said that J.D.

Vance was a Yale lawyer, you know, he's not a man, and you look at Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton

and all of it, there was, I think, seven of them that were up there with Yale law degrees.

So the point I'm making is that, and then Oprah whining that she's, you know, about, she's all for equity and she's been on the other end of capitalism.

This is a $2 billion

mega-rich person with estate.

I think people just said, you know what?

And I think Jon Stewart and Bill Maher have been really hitting that issue.

These people are real hypocrites.

Well, the vanguard of the proletariat deserves their dockers, don't they?

Yeah, I mean, if

you see a guy like Mitt Romney, you make fun of him.

He never said he was, when he was running in 2012, they showed him with all money in his coat pocket and he was out of touch.

Well, he never said he was a man of the people.

That's what he does.

And the Bush family was happy to be capitalists.

But when you preach that

socialism and mandatory equality and yet you don't fit it, and then you hang out and you

smooze, snooze with all of the smooth.

Smooth.

It's okay.

All the pronunciations work.

Good.

Yeah, whatever it is,

sleep with them or cultivate them in Silicon Valley and Wall Street, and then you're just an utter hypocrite.

And that's what's hurting, I think, the Democratic Party.

And they put that on, they didn't try to hide that.

They're celebrity obsessed, they're money-obsessed, they're

tech-obsessed, they're Wall Street-obsessed.

They're

Disney tea people and

just Netflix and

Facebook and Google.

They're the cool kids.

And, you know,

they sit in the cool kids section of the cafeteria, and you're not allowed near them.

So what I'm saying is they thought because everybody said, joy, joy, this is about joy.

And

it's not hope and change.

It's joy and vibe, joy and vibe.

And we're going to sell you Camilla, even though you don't know anything about her, just like we sold Barack.

Barack was running after George Bush and the Iraq War.

And the 2000, you know, there was,

that was 2008 meltdown.

And, and they're, they're running after them.

So it's a little bit harder, but they think they can pull that off.

And they were all this self-congratulating, it was, but for the outside viewer, the rank hypocrisy of worshiping mammum while you're trashing it and trashing capitalism while you're the ultra capitalist and then deceiving the people by promulgating this rumor that their pop hero Beyonce is going to be there for them.

And that was just a whole deception.

And then what you did to Kennedy, and he reminded everybody, as did Jill Stein lately, it doesn't, all that is a perfect storm, and it's not sudden, but it's just incrementally building up.

And when you superimpose that on the fact that she will not meet with anybody, The American response is, oh, shucks, what does she have to hide?

Just let her go out there.

And that's a very American idea, you know, fair play.

Everybody go out there and get in the arena, but she won't.

And I think it's starting to add up.

And it's all predicated on one thing.

We can do anything we want.

We can break any precedent.

We can use any underhanded mean because Donald Trump is Satan and he is a threat to our whole lives and our existence.

And therefore, every single mean is justified by the end of getting rid of him.

Because Trump.

Right.

And all Trump has to do, when he said the other day, they tell me I can't make fun of people.

I'm supposed to stick to the issues.

And yet they didn't stick to the issues.

They called me a dictator.

They called me a racist.

And he was right about that.

Absolutely.

But he didn't think about what was in his self-interest.

There's two things he didn't, I think, point out.

Number one, when he talks in an animated way about the issues, and he can say she's a socialist because he is, he's very good at it.

He's much better with his voice and intonation.

He's happier than when he calls them names.

And number two, when he doesn't call them names, they get angry.

because they don't have a soundbite.

And when they don't have a soundbite and they get angry at him, they start calling him names.

Anytime he becomes ecumenical, he gets Robert Kennedy out there, he's got Kemp, he's going to get DeSantis out there, Haley was with him, they hate that.

They hate it.

They cannot stand.

Anytime he talks about the issues, anytime he's philosophical,

anytime he's self-deprecating about himself, they hate it.

They want him to say that he doesn't know what race she is.

She's a lunatic, and then they use those as soundbacks.

And that's not the best side of him.

The best side of him is he's very good on the issues and he can contrast.

That's what he does.

He's an expert entertainer.

He's very entertaining when he shows her record versus his.

And he tries to bring everybody into his tent.

And he's calm and witty and he's funny.

And they hate it.

And they start calling him names.

And when they call him names, it destroys their image that they're the party of

sobriety and calmness and joy and vibes.

It makes them look nasty and low.

And that's what he's got to do.

He's got 70 days to bring them out.

And the way to bring them out is not to call them names.

Stick to the issue and let them call him names.

And then say, you know what?

They called me this the other day.

I'm not a dictator.

He can defend himself, but he doesn't need to go back.

That's what they want him to do.

Anything they want him to do, don't do.

Someday

he's going to give you a nickname, Victor.

Be like, Victor the Genius.

I know this one forthcoming.

I'm like, I know that we've been hammering on this podcast to be ecumenical.

One of the things we've really been hammering, ad nauseum, was to reach out to Brian Kemp.

And he did.

A lot of people have been doing that.

And DeSantis and Nikki Haley has been very good.

And the more he can get, the better.

He needs to do that.

And

he's...

Everybody's talking, not just us.

Everybody's talking about him getting on the issues.

He said that.

and I think

that explains a little bit why he's he didn't suffer a huge at least, he hasn't yet.

Yeah, I'm uh, you asked last week, I am depressed, and I must say I'm more upbeat now than I was a week ago.

But Victor, we

yeah, well, they should be.

We've got to wrap this up, we've got to do that, we'll do that right after these final important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

So Victor, two things.

One, I've got this great comment I want to read from

a listener.

And then I have to, I know people don't like that.

I have lots of friends.

I have lots of friends.

When I mentioned a few months ago, you were giving it to Joe Scarborough.

And I said, yeah, well, I just went, Joe's a friend.

He has been for a long time.

I know he's,

I don't believe,

I don't follow his political beliefs because God knows what what happened to him, but still friends are friends.

And it got, oh my gosh, you should have seen that.

The Victor Davis Hansen fan club on Facebook took a lot of arrows for that, but that's where I said.

Anyway, Charles C.W.

Cook talked about earlier here, a dear friend.

Actually, he's a...

phenomenal writer and some of the most savage takedown attacks on on the left have come from him.

So he's not above, nobody's above criticism, but I have to say he's a friend.

He married my dear, dear assistant, Kate, and their first child.

You know what they named it?

They named it Jack after me.

Wow.

Yeah, so

I got to say that.

That's one thing.

Okay.

Second thing is

thank you folks for especially those on Apple or iTunes rate the show

and

others that take the time to leave comments.

They also folks leave comments on Victor's website.

I read them all.

I know Victor and Sammy read them.

So, here's one from

it's titled South Africa Fan.

And I thought you'd find this interesting, Victor.

Dear Professor Hansen, greetings from a kindred spirit all the way down in South Africa.

As an academic and owner of a small farm, I can only but chuckle at the similarities we face in terms of our trials and tribulations, high fuel costs, expensive building materials, temperamental pickup trucks, and university bureaucracy to name a few.

Listening to your comments on the state of California regarding high taxes, failing infrastructure, and corrupt politicians reminds me very much of some of our issues at home, not to mention your struggles with Mount Trashmore.

It seems the world is the same all over.

Highly appreciative of your wonderful insights.

Your podcast.

is our daily dose of sanity.

Come the end of the day.

Thank you also for coming up for South Africans ever so often on the show.

You are welcome anytime, and we would love to have you over.

Kindest regards your South African fan base.

And this is signed by Prof S.A.

Fan.

And Victor, I think it's a wonderful comment.

And also, he didn't mention

the numbers of...

I'm making an assumption here that he's white, which I shouldn't make.

But the murder of farmers, white farmers in South Africa, it's like, it's shocking.

I don't even know

how a guy like him stays there.

Well, he stays there because that's where he's from.

It's where I'm from.

But

I think it's a lot more dangerous to be a farmer in South Africa than it may be.

It is.

It is.

But there is comparing small things to existential things,

being here in the San Joaquin Valley and remembering what it was like when no one had a key to their home.

Yeah.

And

everybody got along, and the average size of a farm that was viable was about 100 acres.

And to see all these guys out there pruning with their families and

have a strong big middle class, and now to have just thousand acre, multi-thousand lattifundia, and there are no viable middle farms.

They don't exist.

And then to have, have,

you know, millions of people here

who are impoverished, they're below the poverty line.

One out of every three people in the United States

on public assistance, excuse me, one out of every six in the United States on public assistance is here.

One out of every three

has some form of assistance in California or below the poverty line.

It's one out of every,

I think it's three now.

It was four

who goes in the hospital for any reason has pre-diabetes or diabetes.

It's most homeless.

They took paradise and made it into purgatorio.

They really did.

It's really sad to be here and watch it.

And I never imagined in my right mind it would ever end up like this.

I thought when I was 40 or 30, that's going to be so nice to be, you know, grow old in California.

And it's just

to end.

I had a nice meeting with some people I went to high school with last week they're all 70 like me and we were all talking and then I noticed something they were about the only people here out of a class of 240

most people left that I always that had not happened you know what I mean I don't mean they left when they graduated but they're not here So this was a group of people that I wanted to meet that's still in this Central Valley area, but

the people I went to high school with, a lot of them were just driven out of California.

They left.

And they were very talented people.

And that's part of the story of California: that you've got about 10 million people that were very talented and very high earning.

And they, in the last 30 years, have basically since Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom, but even earlier with the legislature and stuff, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, they just left.

Gone.

And that's the story of California.

There's no courtesy of big government.

Wow.

Well, Victor,

you've been terrific.

Yeah.

Thanks for all the wisdom you shared.

I want to thank folks who go to civilthoughts.com and sign up for the

email newsletter I write every week, Civil Thoughts.

And I've gotten a few just wonderful emails this week from folks who are fans of it, but it's totally free, 14 recommended readings.

Again, civilthoughts.com.

Go there, sign up.

I do that for the Center for Civil Society, where we are trying to strengthen civil society.

Once again,

victorhanson.com is the web address for the Blade of Perseus.

If you're on Twitter or X,

Victor's handle is at VD Hanson.

And the aforementioned Victor Davis Hanson Fan Club, you'll find that.

on Facebook.

Good people there.

So thanks everyone for listening.

Thanks again, Victor, for your wisdom.

And we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.