The American Diet: Capitalism, Truth, and the GOP

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Hello, and welcome to the listeners of the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Victor Hansen is the namesake of the show, and he is the Martin and Nealey Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor has a

probably, I think, 30 books. Victor, how many books do you have? 26 or 30? I think I'm working on 27, if I can ever finish.
I just started.

I think part of my problem was I had a four-book contract with BASIC. And after the Second World Wars and the Trump book and the dying citizen, I think I did that in four years.

I'm kind of 68 years old. You're kind of burnt.

Well, we're doing a podcast. And

I had a little accident in my attic with some charred joist.

And

as I said, that was a nuclear chain reaction where

the knob and tube led to the insulation, led to the new roof, led to the plumbing, led to the septic, led to the conduits. And I'm kind of in the middle of the chain reaction.

Okay, so Victor has 26 books and he will have 27 after he struggles through the renovation of his very old house. How old is it exactly, Victor? It's hard to know.

Well, there was a shack here in the early 1870s where my great great grandmother lived and then they enlarged the shack and moved it up and then they enlarged the shack and put a new 1900 upstairs and downstairs and then everybody enlarged it you know what it's really interesting because i trained a little bit in the american school of classical studies it was part of a classical phd in those days to learn archaeology So I went to Greece for two separate years, but I feel like I'm an archaeologist now.

It's kind of exciting. I go up in the attic and I see people, you know, like 1910 and pencil.
They're writing little notes about where to put the wiring or you go and look at the insulation.

You see little bits of old newspapers or you go under the house. It's a dirt, you know, the crawl space and you bump into square nails or you bump into horseshoes.

I found a horseshoe under there the other day. And it's kind of like.
uncovering the last 150 years of your ancestors.

And one thing, the message is, my gosh, we are all so lucky because those people had nothing. And this is really starting to bother me because I think about all their pictures on the wall.

I see them and they're all dressed in rags and they look so tired. And I'm thinking, gosh, how dare our generation go back and disparage them and libel them? You sexist, you racist, you colonial.

They weren't. They were wanting to survive one more day.
They have no idea what pre-industrial life was like. I look at the wagon, you know, and the implements they had.
They're out

out in my barnyard and around the buildings. I think, could I sit on one of those hay rakes? Could I drive that wagon? They haven't changed since Hesiod's time, 2,700 years ago.

So, really, nothing really changed in this country until about 1870.

Yeah. And boy, it's really a good reminder.
Yeah, it sure is. Hold on to those thoughts and let's come back after these messages.

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Welcome back. And Victor, thank you for that.
It sounds like your old house is a bit of a headache, but it's as much fun as it is a headache to you. Is that true?

You know, it's a hate-love relationship

because when I was a little kid, my grandfather, I would follow him around, and not that my brothers didn't do that as well, they did as well.

But he had this huge home, and he wasn't, you know, he was a guy out of the 19th century, so he

wasn't a carper thing. And my dad was, he knew how to fix anything.
But we were always coming down here.

My grandfather would say, now, you know, when I'm gone, somebody's going to take care of this house, and your mother's going to do it, and then you do. And it was never, well, you have free will.

And so I was in graduate school. I think also we make excuses.
I was tired of academia. I had been four years undergraduate and four years graduate student.
I got a PhD. I was 25.
I was burned out.

There weren't jobs for white males.

There wasn't none, really. And then, so when I got a call from my mother and said, you know, your grandfather's dead, your aunt is dead.

grandmother is living alone in that big house and it's falling apart. Would you come down for summer and help out on the farm?

I say, oh, wow, I had to go back to the farm. But actually, it was a sanctuary for the state of mind I was in.
It was really great. And so I became a custodian.

And now over the years, as I said earlier, I remodeled in the reverse order of what I should. I didn't have enough money, so I would do little rooms at a time.

I would do a really good job, but they always plugged into the existing roof, the existing plumbing, the existing wiring, the existing foundation.

So it's kind of like having plastic surgery or or tummy tucks or breast augmentation or something when you've got a bad heart or kidney failure. And that's what this house had.

And all of a sudden, this year,

when the roof started leaking and then they took the roof off and the joists were not, I mean, it's all redwood. It's built out of solid wood, but everything is redwood.
Walls are solid redwood.

So it's a wonderful house to preserve, but it needed a complete makeover.

So I decided over the last few years that things you can't see from the naked eye, new foundation, new roof, new plywood, and then a 50-year roof, and then new insulation and all new OMAX wiring, no more knob and tube and good water pressure and a direct two-inch lines from the well and new septic system, new leech line, da-da-da-da, insulation.

You won't be able to see the new paint out sighting in.

And so I'm working very hard this year. And it's going to take my entire salary to pay for it all.
But then maybe my son or daughter will want to live here or at least keep it in the family because

they won't have to put out so much money. Yeah, that's a good idea.
All right. Well, let's start into our agenda for today, which is the first thing is corporate America.

And I was looking at some polls that revealed that in 2002,

50%

of those polled said they were satisfied with the influence of major corporations in the United States. In 2021, only 26% of people said that.

And yet when asked about capitalism itself, the views were 84%

positive and 97%

positive of small business. So it's not businesses per se, but the corporations that are losing

support, the respect of the people in the United States. What do you see as

going on? Go ahead. I don't even see it as corporations.
I think it's some corporations.

If you ask those people, you know, it used to be that the bad, evil people were the oil industry, the car industry. But if you say to people, do you hate Toyota? Do you hate GM? Do you hate Ford?

They'd say no. Do you hate Occidental Petroleum? I don't think they say they hate.
I think a lot of the anger are directed at the largest corporations.

And these are now Google and Apple and Facebook and entities like that that have enormous control over our lives. Whatever you say about GM of the old days, GM couldn't monitor how you shop.

It couldn't send you a message that was kind of creepy, that knew more about you than you knew about yourself. It didn't data mine your private communications.

When I grew up, the only problem with privacy is we had a couple people on our farm line that liked to listen in and then they click and you could hear them because they were, you know, desperate for information about anything.

And wasn't that a party party? They called those party lines. Yeah, we had one.

You know what? It was Vineyard Wire on Redwood. My grandfather put it up and it hooked in.
I used it when I got here in 1980 and finally took it down.

But my point is that that's what these people, they're not like the old-fashioned Snoop. These Silicon Valley people are something else.

When they get on television or you see them in the public, they're socially inept. They're arrogant.
They're fantastically privileged. And they represent a new corporate America.

And they're kind of phony. So when you see the head of Apple Cook, or they all think they're Steve Jobs.
They get out in that black, you know, Elizabeth Holmes. Remember her there on Osmo?

They get in that black get up.

And then they get that, what is that, that little mic or something that goes around their, out to their face, portable battery outgrade mac and they walk up and down the stage as if they're you know

robots alla alla the magician or somebody the great swami or they're going to tell us about you know they pick up some gadget and they turn it and presto i'm one of the avengers or i'm one of the x-men or something it's pathetic and then when they go into hollywood they make a movie and it's just all special computer effects and i think people are that's what they don't like they don't like that and they don't like the what i think they don't like corporations because they're woke.

And so they're rebelling. Look at CNN.
It used to be a wonderful global. It was the idea of crazy, nutty Ted Turner, but it was a brilliant idea.
And I used to watch it. But

now,

look at CNN Plus, CNN Plus, CNN Cable News Network Plus.

Do they really think it was going to get like, I don't know, 40 or 50 million people?

It's destroyed. They paid Chris Walls $9 million.
He's got zero audience. It's dead.
And look at Netflix. Oh, Netflix.

Well, Netflix had a really good idea of making quality movies on television, on things people, but now it's transgendered and race, race, race, and Latino this and black this and female this and evil Russian oligarch villains this and white guys from Dayton, Ohio that want to destroy you, all that kind of stuff.

And people are sick of it. They lost 200,000 customers.
Then look at Disney. Oh, we're going to be really cute.

We're kind of running Disney at the mid-level when we're going to kind of get on TikTok or YouTube and brag about how we fooled Joe Blow and his dumb wife from Grand Rapids who come down here to Disney World and we're giving them subtle, you know, subliminal messages about gayness and transgenderism and this and this, ha ha ha.

And that's how they are. And now people are saying,

don't need it. Sorry.
So these corporations are losing appeal. I think

also things are becoming more democratized. For example, you mentioned news.
I mean, people can find news on social media. They've got this whole genre now of podcasts, which we're doing.

And so it's really spread out the influence, I think, from the corporations.

Absolutely right. That's absolutely right.
When I write a book now,

30 years ago, if I was going somewhere and anybody knew me, it was very few, they would say, oh, I saw you on C-SPAN Book Talk. Wow, that was really nice.
They let you on. Or, hey,

you know, I go to give a talk and I saw that review of your book in the New York Times Book of You. Does anybody care? No, it's podcast, podcast, podcast.

That's what they listen to, podcast, podcast, or cable news or something, Fox News. And it's just, it's revolutionized, decentralized and fragmented the delivery of news.

And it's like the arena in Rome. There's no law in the arena.
So that's why the left hates it, because it's 51% thumbs up or thumbs down.

There's no prerequisite. Any guy with a laptop and a garage can say, oh, Victor, I get these calls all the time.
It's like, hi, I'm Hemney Smith, and I'm a very, very impressive podcast.

Would you come on my podcast? And then you understand the guy has just got a card table and a laptop in his garage.

But that's how decentralized and unorganized and unregulated. And that's why I kind of like it.
I like that part.

But if I then turn to movies and I looked at the democratizing of the ability to make movies, like anybody can put their own home movie on and try to publish it, right?

But it really seems like I was going to ask you while you were talking about corporations, they're just not capable of making a great movie anymore.

I know that the skill of the actors is really dropped.

Like you watch a movie these days and they just are not richard burton or you know what i mean they just don't have that they're not modern i mean we have some brilliant modern actors anthony hopkins or denzel washington that's true or they're out there they're john malkovich they're brilliant actors but they're they're kind of oddballs still i mean they're very successful but

But they're not producing good movies for

it's ideological. It's like asking me, what were the great movies in Germany in 1935?

What did you like most about the Italian film industry in 27?

What was the best Soviet movie you saw in 1955? Or don't you really like those 1962 Chinese movies? No, because it's all art is. in subservience to ideology.

So when you look at the commercials, it's 65% African American.

Not because the actors are good or bad, but because that's what they think they must do to ingratiate themselves with the powers that be. Same thing about, we know what the movie things are now.

They're one of two types. They're either a bunch of young, good-looking people with tights on that have extraordinary powers.

And it's kind of like not just extraordinary X-Men, Captain America, Justice League powers.

It's what if we were all good-looking like I am, and we had all these powers and we look really good in tights, but we would use this power to instantly do good things.

So it's all about the environment, racial, and then there's the other side. And it's always the single woman, the brave black guy.
And who are the evil people?

They're all these conniving corporations that are desecrating the environment or they're spreading hatred.

Or they've got a bunch of bucktooth, missing tooth Russian oligarchs covered with orthodox tattoos. So you can just write the script.
There's no complexity.

there's no nuance, there's no bad choice and a worse choice. There's no good, sort of good, but a better choice.
It's all black and white, perfect evil. And there's no tragedy.

It's just cheap melodrama. And that's why nobody watches that stuff anymore.
They don't go to the film. They just, it's just blood and guts, blah, blah, blah, blah.

They don't even know what a good movie is anymore. I mean, if you look at those old directors, William Wyler, gosh, or John Ford, or

any of those guys. They were brilliant people.
And some of the movies they made, even the ones that weren't successful, were better than the ones that we see today. It's like academic books.

It's, you know, the books are unreadable today. They're either in such specialized lingo or they're so woke that nobody's going to read them.

It's like somebody said, hey, Victor, we need a new book on how many telephone poles are on Mountain View Avenue in Selma. Can you write them?

I said, not before I give you a whole excursion on the history of the telephone pole and the nature of wood. Then I'll get to it.
I'll have to have a special vocabulary.

That's what it is. And so that's why there's such a yearning.
And that's why you see people that are not academics fulfilling it and writing these good books. Or you see

some streaming things, you know, like Yellowstone or something like everybody wants something. They want meaning.
They want transcendence. They want heroism.
They're tired and sick and tired of some

academic or media person whining, well, you were a racist, sexist bigot, and you came from bigots, and you stole all this land. You're no good.
But you know what? I want to live.

I got to live on the Upper West Side, and I got to get my Tesla, and I got to have my latte without any connection where that wealth came from.

From some poor dead person that lived about 50 years and worked himself to death and created a little bit more wealth than he inherited. That's what gets me the ingratitude of this.
Yeah, that is the

sad crisis of the modern elite. It is.

And gratitude, gratitude is one of the most, you know, Aristotle talked about courage being the most essential of the of the positive traits of a person, but gratitude is very important.

If some, if somebody has done you something,

and you know, willful goodwill to it, you owe that person. I don't mean in a quid pro

formal arrangement, payback or any of that i'm talking about you want to help that person because they went out of their way to help i've had so many people help me gosh john keegan the military historian out of the blue he said i saw your thesis my thesis it was published by an italian weird university of pisa press and if you ever need anything i'd like to write an introduction i thought no he doesn't mean that so two years later i wrote the western way of war and i wrote him a little note dear john keegan and he wrote i promised you and i will write, I'll not only write the introduction, I'll make sure it's a good publisher.

He didn't have to do that. I've been the beneficiary of so many selfless acts, and you try to reciprocate and hope you can help other people.

And that's why, boy, I get a lot of letters. And because of the nature of hiring and admissions, it's not very easy to be a young person this year, and you want to help people.
Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's take a moment for some messages and then we'll move to the issue of climate change, which we really haven't talked about very much but we have a lot of discussion about the drought going on in California but we'll take a few minutes first and then be right back

okay welcome back Victor I was looking around for ideas today and I saw this

very strange thing. I'm not sure why it didn't get more press, but a man self-immolated in front of the Supreme Court on the 22nd.
So last week, I believe it was Friday. And he did it as a

protest or as a symbolic of his concern for climate change. And I was looking around then.

I thought, okay, let's probe a little deeper on climate change and what some, at least some studies are finding.

And I found this really interesting study, a study of whether the ice caps are shrinking or not in the Arctic and Antarctic. And this particular study was on the Antarctic.

And they said, well, first off, the shrinking of these ice caps started 20,000 years ago. So it's not a new phenomenon.
But it then said that 10,000 years ago, the shrinkage of the ice caps was 200

kilometers greater than it is today, which meant that the ice refroze up to 200 kilometers in the Antarctica. And so the whole idea of the changing of the climate took on new meaning for me.

Like it's been changed. I mean, we always knew it's always been changing, but...

you know in those terms this warming of the planet has been going on for 20 000 years and it was even warmer it was even warmer 10,000 years ago than it is today. Well, it's cyclical.

We had 1971 when I was a senior at a very rural high school. We had our

environmental day, you know,

and Green Day, Environmental Day, Ecology Day, Earth Day.

And that was the year, I think, when we had the newsweek cover of the ice, you know, the Earth and Ice and said the new cold age. And

we had a good science teacher, and he was warning us that our challenge would be global cooling.

And so the Earth fluctuates in short cycles and long cycles, and it gets hotter and warmer.

And I perfectly welcome to the empirical notion that if you put 7 billion people on a planet rather than 500 million and they use internal combustion engines, it could get warmer.

But the key point is twofold.

Does it get warmer statistically when we don't have more than about 150 years of accurate record keeping, that

it invokes a long-term climate human-induced phenomenon that can be corrected by massive restructuring of the economy in the hands of mostly undemocratic people.

I don't think, I'm not convinced of that. So, you know, I'm sitting here and we've had five years and three of them have been below

rainfall. This year it was dry, but it was very cold.
It was colder than usual. I can remember 1976 and 7, that was some of the worst droughts we've ever experienced until recently.

And then it got, I can remember being completely wiped out in 1980 by torrential rains in September. And the same thing happened in

80 and earlier in 76, right before the drought.

There's fluctuations and we don't have enough knowledge.

And I have no problem with saying, you know what, we're going to let the market adjudicate with some incentives and we're going to do it very gradually.

And we want to eventually go to electric cars in 50 years if we have the electricity to do it, which means we're going to have to have nuclear fusion or something. And it's clean.

But, you know, the problem with the left is it's, I live in Hillsborough. I live in Pacific Palisades.
I live on the Upper West Side. I live in Cambridge, Mass.
And I know better than you.

And I walk to work and I ride a bike. And I've got this this

Al Gore, John Kerry infrastructure plan. And I have a regimentation that you're going to fit in.
And you just are not going to have that suburban home. I am, but you're not.

And you're going to get on that mass transit and you're going to go into a big city and you're going to go up

nine stories and live in that.

apartment building and then you'll have a little green space that you share with all these other people and your old ranch house out in the suburbs is just not going to cut it. It's not going to work.

You'll have a revolution if you try to force people down their throats. So we should be allowing all the American minds.

We have such brilliant people here, just unleash them and say, go to it, find the cleanest, most efficient fuel you can.

And let's see if it can make it in the market.

And I think we'd be a lot better off than we are now, rather than this hectoring and screaming and yelling and this complex censorship of anybody that has a dissenting voice.

And, you know, you've got to remember it was climate, it was global warming. And then suddenly it became climate change because

a lot of statistics in particular places didn't show heating.

And then it was climate chaos for a while because they wanted to include tsunamis and hurricanes and droughts and floods.

So the left never says, we have a, says to themselves, we got a problem we have a phenomenon that we're trying to

tell people about and it's changing weather and it's going to warm the planet is warming because of industrial use carbon releases and it manifests itself with

too much water too little water too much ice in some place too little ice too much disruptive disruptive weather too much and that's hard for the public to accept victor i i've just to encourage you a little little bit, I have seen that there's a company, just your minds that just set the American mind to work.

I think some of them are set to work.

There is, I saw a company that was producing steam from the deep down inside the earth, and they were using that to generate power and create this power plant above.

And I thought that was a very interesting, clean way of producing energy. But they sounded like they had good prospects for that particular thing.

Just to encourage you that there are people out there looking for things.

They are, but the problem is that when you look at the two sources of power generation and locomotion, boy, you get a very well-designed internal combustion engine.

And the amount of power that it produces for vis-a-vis

the fuel that uses is getting to the point that it's enormously efficient.

And when you look at power production, the idea that you could safely create nuclear power without releasing heat and clean energy without pollutants.

And yet, those are the two things that we can't really discuss. So, here in California, and some of these light engines, you know, subcompacts are getting 45 miles a gallon.

And when they're hybrids, they're getting sometimes more. But then you're shutting down Diablo Canyon, a nuclear power plant that produces very clean, ample, affordable energy.

So ideology is the enemy of progress, and

we've suffered from this green ideology.

And again, the subtext to all of these problems are the people who are making policy in the universities, in politics, and government, and foundations, and think tanks, they have to live with people unlike themselves.

If they would live with the middle and working and muscular classes, they'd have some empathy of the impact their theories have on people unlike themselves.

But you isolate them and you put them all on the Stanford campus, or you put them all in Princeton, New Jersey, and you have a recipe for Mandarism or the 5,000 who, you know, were permanent residents of Versailles.

Yeah, yeah, okay. Victor, let's take a moment for some more messages and then we'll come back and talk about the Republican Party.
So we'll be right back.

Welcome back. Victor, the Republican Party has been subject to some criticisms recently in the presses.

One criticism is that the Republican Party is supporting Trump candidates who will overthrow the election in 2024.

And another criticism is that truth doesn't matter to the GOP.

And this particular article brought up Kevin McCarthy and said that he was going to call Trump to ask him to resign after January 6th, but he didn't do it.

And then that was their entire lie and non-truth of the Republican Party. So Kevin McCarthy gets caught up for a day or two with a hysteria that this was a conspiracy.

And he turns on all the network news. He hears all this.
He gets all these calls. He hears that Officer Sicknick is shot, that five people died violently.

And in the rage, he flies off the handle and tells Liz Chain and other people, oh, he's got to resign. Okay.

And then he's embarrassed about it and he tries to tell them, well, I sort of didn't say that. And then they got a tape of somebody,

okay, he lied.

But is that systematically lying? And think about what I'm saying.

So we have, if the Republicans are going to be elected, and I'm not a registered Republican, but if they're going to be elected, we're told that end of democracy.

So let me ask you rhetorically what they might do.

So maybe they're going to concoct an idea that Joe Biden is communicating with the Alpha Bank, that there's little pings in his office, and it shows you that Joe Biden is owned by the Russians.

I've got to be careful because some of it's true, actually, but this hypothetical. Or maybe if the Republicans are going to lie, maybe

who knows, Tom Cotton, Mike Pompeo, they should say to the Republican candidate, if you lose, don't concede under no circumstances except that election. Who said that?

Hillary Clinton did to Joe Biden. Or if you lose the election, the Electoral College, why don't you get your surrogate, Jill Stein, to sue about the election?

Or maybe yet, get a bunch of C-ranked Hollywood actors and try to, you know, tell people that are electors not to follow their constitutional duties and don't accept the popular vote in their own states.

Maybe that would be a good idea.

Or better yet, why don't you get James Comey in a room with John Brennan and James Clapper and see if you can get a two-bit out-of-work retired British spook that the FBI is paying and get all of these lies and then seed it throughout the government.

So when they talk about disinformation, I don't know what they're talking about. They're experts at it.
And they talk about lying.

Do they really believe that Donald Trump was controlled by the Russians? Robert Mueller didn't say so 22 months and $40 million later.

Do they really believe that we were told by these people that that Hunter Biden's laptop is Russian disinformation?

Not these people, 50 former quote-unquote experts and former intelligence officers right before the election, as they suppressed the story.

We were told by a thousand quote-unquote healthcare professionals that, you know, if you were black or you were an Antifa, you should go out and riot or protest or demonstrate at least, and you could violate masks in quarantine because you might suffer greater psychological damage.

Forget about special needs kids that had to wear masks or their classes were canceled. They didn't care about them.

They did care about an Antifa person being able to protest for their own political gain. They have zero credibility when they talk about disinformation or the Republicans are going to steal elections.

This is a party that... Yeah, this is a party that had $419 million infused by Mark Zuckerberg.
That's called dark money. They never said dark money.

And, you know, when you start to look at the changing of the ballot laws in March and April of 2021, so that the usual error rate running from 3% to 5% in most states for mail-in ballots went down to 0.3 to 0.6.

Why did that happen? Because if the address wasn't quite right, if the signature wasn't quite there, if the full name wasn't quite matching, those were not thrown out. And that's a magnitude of 10.

I'm not talking about a conspiracy. I'm just saying that that's the stuff they do.
And then they talk about stealing elections or lying. What did Joe Biden say the other day?

He said for the nth time, no, I never met with any of Hunter's associates. Are you crazy? And of course, there's pictures of him with him.
There's stuff on a laptop with communication.

So lying, lying, lying. Yeah.
All politicians lie.

Do you think that they're trying to prime the pump and afraid that Donald Donald Trump's going to be running and they want to get all of this stuff in the minds of Americans so that they can also

start with that premise? You're a Democratic operative and you're trying to stop the disaster in November and the bigger one in 2024.

So you're calling your cronies and you say, okay, what are the issues we're going to run on?

Border, race, wonderful race relations, crimes down, homeless problems solved. Afghanistan was sure a good way, logistical brilliance, to get out.

We're great at fleeing places, get those pride flags, you know, flying from every embassy in the world. Is that what they're going to run on? No, they're not going to run on that.

So what are they going to run on? These people, you know, are they going to run on, hey, you Latinos, we're going to take you for granted.

We're going to open the borders and we're going to flood so we can get more people that are constituents, even if it damages your communities. They're going to run on that, Open borders?

No, they don't have anything to run on except whatever we do, we're not as bad as Donald Trump and he's going to steal the election.

That's all they have. But they don't have all that.

They have Facebook and Google and Apple and Wall Street and Goldman Sachs and they've got Disney and they've got American Airlines and they've got Pepsi-Cola and they've got the LA Lakers and they've got Hollywood and they've got Princeton and Harvard and Yale and Stanford and Berkeley and they've got the Tides Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ford Foundation.

And that's how they create these narratives.

Yeah, it's very powerful because even though you might think those corporations and those big names are falling on their sword for the Democratic Party, they're really not because I don't see them losing their corporate entities or their big names.

No, they're brilliantly Machiavellian. Their idea is to make as much money any way you can with as little loyalty to the United States as possible.

So outsource and offshore, compromise your integrity, your nationality, your patriotism with China, no problem. But to pull that off, you've got to have 75% of a particular race in your commercials.

And you've got to have a gay pride day or transgender commercial. And your CEOs have to be on TV TV and sound like they're woke.

And then, if you do that, that gives you a veneer that acts like you're a robber baron right out of, you know, a Frank Norris novel. Yeah, sure.

And cultivates your features with the Democratic Party, who you hope wins. But what if they don't win?

They're not going to win in November, and they're deluding themselves. They think that it's going to be a mild correction.
We're starting with an equal Senate.

We're starting with five or six seats difference in the House. You lose 40, 50 seats, that's 100 margin, right?

And you start with, you lose five Senate seats, six Senate seats. All of a sudden, you're 55, 45,

56, 44. So it could be really big.

And I don't think there's one state in the United States, maybe Hawaii,

maybe Vermont, I don't know, that's so-called safe for a congressional or senatorial candidate. Everything's up in the air.

My final question is, though, what do you think that the losses to the Democratic Party in the 2022 and 2024 will do to these corporations and to these big name people? They don't have any ideology.

They have no ideology. So they'll just be right in there with the Republicans? Absolutely.
All of a sudden, you're going to see African Americans on commercial go down to their

basically where they were before. There'll be about 20%, which is more than 12% of the population.
And you'll have gay people in commercials that are about, I don't know, 4 or 5% of the population.

This is what the left wanted. This used to be called proportional representation, not repertory representation.
And they will,

you know, they'll talk about green stuff and they'll kind of sort of act like they mean it. That's what they'll do, given that's where the power is, because they don't think it's over yet.

They don't know where this anger is leading because it's a different kind of anger. They've said it's white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white.

They should come to Fresno County and talk to people. I go into my hometown.
I go to my high school reunion the other night. I go

get coffee with people. I don't see any white people, not very many.

But I do see a lot of people that don't like Joe Biden and they don't like this. I'm not saying it's going to be a majority because most of them are older than younger.
But this is new.

I never saw this before. I never saw.
I saw a little bit in 2016.

I saw a little bit in 2020, but this is people have had it. You can't insult somebody and not, you know, expect them to live with this inflation or this gas or this

crazy border. You just can't, you can't do it.
And you can't have people that'll come up to you and say, my kids' school was overrun by M13 gang members that

two days ago were in Guatemala or something.

They can't, it doesn't work. They don't like it.
They're angry. And there's going to be a reckoning.

I keep saying that, and maybe I'll be wrong, and I will admit it, but I think there's going to be a big change.

The only $64,000 question is, is the Republican Party a new populist, middle-class, conservative, traditionals party? Or is it still run by the Bush family, whom I, and I like George W. Bush?

Is it still run by

the Jeb Bushes and the Mitt Romneys and the George Wills and the Bill Crystals. I don't know.
But if it is, it'll get about 46 at the most percent in a good year of the vote. That's what it can do.

And it will appeal to a very narrow group of people. And it will talk all about privatizing this and trimming Social Security that

or how to get a sober and judicious talking head.

Look at Mitt Romney. I mean, that guy, anything comes in his head,

one day he was talking about switchgrass and alternate fuels the next day he was out protesting with blm he doesn't have an identity no identity he's just a product of his upbringing his affluence and his respectability he's a good person he has good morality i admire him and his family but that said

the corporate mind never goes beyond that they play the odds 51

doesn't mean they're going to be right but when he saw donald trump He just said to himself, gross, crude, not my kind of guy. I wouldn't let him on my golf course.
Wouldn't want him as my client.

Don't want anything to do with him. And it was never, why in the world does that guy appeal to people?

Why do the poor people that did not participate in the 2012 election, which I lost and could have won had they come out to vote, why are they voting for him rather than me?

Oh, because they're crude? Well, that's how they think. Yeah.

And he didn't even defend himself.

You know, everybody says Donald Trump was crude, but, you know, it's kind of like george bush in 2007 and eight when they got him you know that people like john glenn were calling him basically hitler and gore was calling him a brown shirt and i guess it was the marcus of queensbury rules but he wouldn't reply to his critics and it was like mitt romney when they said he was a frat hazer and he tortured dogs on the top of his car he lived in a I don't know, he had an automatic garage.

Remember that elevator for his car and his house?

His wife was an equestrian he didn't talk to his african-american garbage picker upper yeah they were they were harsh to pierre delecto yeah they were and he didn't fight back so he outsourced the fighting and john mccain was sort of the same way they said he was basically he couldn't remember how many houses before anybody starts saying it's cruel to talk about joe biden's senality no it wasn't in 2008 they turned john mccain from a former maverick that they admired into a senile, greedy old white guy that had 11 houses, if he could remember them.

But those people didn't fight back. They never fought back.
Last person to fight back for the Republicans was Lee Atwater in 1988. And, you know, he went to George H.W.

Bush and said, you know, you're coasting on the fumes of Ronald Reagan and

as vice president and people want to change. And Mike Dukakis is a hardcore leftist.
He's a socialist. He's an academic.
He doesn't have a good record, but he sounds sober and judicious.

And now, do you want to win, George?

Or do you want to be a 47% good loser? You want to be continue the Reagan Revolution for four more years?

If you do, let me add him because I will make an ad about the Boston Harbor that shows you that he's a hypocrite. I'll put Willie Horton all over that shows you he lets out criminal.

I'll put that SOB with a helmet on and a tank to show you how ridiculous it is when suddenly he gets the religion of national defense.

And if you don't want me to do that, then you can lose nobly. But if you want to unleash me, I'll take, as he said, the bark.
And they won.

Of course, he got a brain tumor later and apologized because, you know, he had a renaissance with a higher being. But my point is that that's what the Democrats do.

They reduce people to their essence. And it's not kids' stuff.
And Donald Trump came along and he basically won because he said, this is a new Republican Party. It's a working people's party.

And you know what? I ain't going to take it off those people. So if I say something and they say something, I'm going to hit them back.
He didn't do it scientifically. He didn't do it rationally.

He didn't do it in his own interest. He flew off the handle.
He was crude and coarse, but he fought back. And so he said to America, I am your pit bull.

And they have been throwing mocks at you and making fun. And you cut the leash and I will be unleashed.
And it won't be nice.

And people, you you know, they, that's why they voted for him and that's why he was successful. And after four years, they thought, you know what? Everything's going good now.
Gas is cheap.

No more ISIS.

North Korea is in their little corral. Iran is behaving.
No more solomani, no more inflation, coming out of COVID. We don't need that guy anymore.
You know, he's. the gunslinger and Magnificent Seven.

He's Shane. Get rid of him.
Let him go off.

And I can understand that. That's what happened.
There was election issues, but but essentially he was a victim of his own success. And then people looked at the methodology rather than the results.

He had the results. So I'm like a gunfighter and says, where's the cattle barons? Let me add them.
And this is the stuff of great westerns, George Stevens or John Ford.

He got all the cattle barons. He got rid of them.
And then the sodbuster said, oh, my God,

he's wearing a six-gun still. Oh, my God.

You spit tobacco on our floor. I don't like it.
We don't and got rid of him. Yeah.
Well, Victor, we're going to have to call it quits for today.

Thank you very much for talking to us on the American corporation situation, climate change, and the sort of the state of the Republican Party. I like all of our digressions on that.
But thank you.

Thank you for having me, Sammy, and thank everybody for listening.

And I hope we have a little format.

We're going to try to speak a little bit more concisely, a little bit more focused, and maybe 35, 40 minutes, maybe an extra episode a week that way rather than an hour and 10 minutes.

Yeah, we've been getting some complaints that they're too long. So me, it's probably a little shorter.
Yeah, I'm low hard.

No, you're not. Well, thank you very much.
All right. This is Victor Davis Hanson and Sammy Week and we're signing off.
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