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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, and we are recording on Sunday, I think it's the 24th of April in the year 2022.

Who cares about the host, the namesake, the star?

Victor Davis Hansen is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in History at the Hoover Institution, and he's also the Waynan Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He writes copious material, some of it original, at victorhanson.com.

We'll talk about that in a minute.

Victor, you know, two things quickly.

Would you just mind saying hello?

Hello, everybody.

Okay, thank you.

Because in one of the comments left on the show, it says, you know, we don't hear Victor's Victor's name until seven minutes given the commercial.

Yeah, yeah, that's right, Zach.

So we need to need to get your presence up there right in the first minute.

Second thing I want to say is that I listened to a great episode that you and Sammy Wink did over the weekend.

And Sammy began it with a poem.

And I want to apologize if that's the new policy here.

The only poem I know.

It talks about Nantucket.

And I don't even think that's a poem.

That's a limerick, but I'm not going to go there.

So anyway, all that said, Victor, Victor, we're going to start talking, or you're going to start talking about

some Elon Musk and Twitter and liberals'

new sense of that social media institution.

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

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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

We're recording on Sunday, the 24th, And this episode, I'm pretty sure, will be up on Tuesday, the 26th.

I hope I have my calendar right there, Victor.

I lost my glasses, so I can't see the fine print.

Hey, Victor, I know you have some thoughts about Twitter.

Elon Musk, we know, is in a fight to take over it.

A number of folks on the left are now starting to denigrate Twitter.

I guess it wasn't all that important anyway.

What's the strange new reality from the left about this really important media platform?

Well, there seems to be a correlation.

Every time Elon Musk says, no problem, I can raise the money, then a Jin Saki or the White House people or the left-wing media starts to say, well, Twitter has been unfortunately an elite enterprise.

It's mostly white.

Very few people in the country participate on it.

So you can see what's happening.

They think, well, this guy could take our little toy away and we're wealthy white people and we'd love to get on it.

And it's left wing.

And she says it's mostly one-sided liberals.

She said that.

She would have never said that before, Elon Musk.

I think there's that.

That tells me, Jack, that there's an expectation that he will raise the money and he will open it up as a form and it will no longer be a vehicle of the left to censor news, et cetera, and they want to destroy it or talk it down until they find a suitable replacement.

The problem they're having is that most of the alternatives, whether it's Truth social with the Trump Newness Project or Parlier, they're on the right.

And so, again, I think that's a sign they're throwing in the towel if Musk wants it.

I don't know why he does.

I think it's overvalued.

I think Saki is the one that said, well, it's mostly a particular age group of older.

That's true.

But we'll see.

But it tells me that it's a typical left-wing methodology.

As soon as things don't go well for them, they start saying things are racist or sexist or they're going to fail, et cetera, et cetera.

Remember Joe Biden?

He said that.

He said,

well, I'm going to get rid of, I'm going to end the quarantine and end the virus.

I'm going to do that.

And then he said, oh, presidents can't change inflation.

Come on.

Presidents have no power to deal with gas prices.

That's a myth.

So that's how they operate.

Isn't that older demographic, the demographic cover boss, the president?

All of a sudden, how's good?

I'm glad it has the cooties.

Okay, Victor, a couple of things.

We've got about hopefully four or five subjects or people we'll talk about today.

One of them is let's maybe we can bundle these two.

Now, let's just stick to one.

Let's first begin with Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader in the House.

There was news out this last week that he was caught on audio saying that at the time that Donald Trump should resign, this was after the January 6th riot at the Capitol.

Victor, everyone has an opinion about the integrity, or some say the lack of it, with Kevin McCarthy.

He's the man who will likely be speaker in January 2023.

I know you know Kevin McCarthy.

He's from your, I think he's in the neighborhood where you live.

He's one district.

Yeah, he's from Kern County, but it's got a huge district, so we're not that far from the borderline.

And Devin Nunes' district is between mine and his.

And I'm a mile from Devin's district, I'm a mile from David Valadeo's district.

And I'm in the Democrat Jim Costa's district.

What are your thoughts about this?

Let's call it a kerfuffle about Kevin McCarthy.

Yeah, right after January 6th, you know, when we were told that Officer Sicknick was murdered, remember that?

He was murdered by a Trump supporter, and the headlines flashed: five dead, five killed, even, killed even.

insurrectionist movement,

all of that stuff.

I mean, anybody who didn't criticize Trump, I mean, I said things

that were, I don't like people rioting, I don't like people telling, and so I criticized the actual rioting inside the Capitol, but I said, this is not an insurrection.

And I went on television and the next thing I knew, I was cited by the faculty senate of Stanford University for supporting an insurrection.

I had to go, you know, Zoom and I wrote a letter to the Stanford Daily to defend myself.

But

in that polarized climate, people were just nuts.

So a lot of politicians were dissing themselves from Trump.

And remember,

I don't know exactly what day he said that, but there was an anger.

The subtext of that is there was an anger at Trump because he was going to lose or had lost.

I don't know the particular date when McCarthy said these series of things, but I have a feeling as my memory that was right after also the Georgia special election.

It wasn't on January 5th.

I'll check that.

But my point is they were mad at Trump because he did not,

he went down to Georgia and he was telling people not to participate, essentially.

And or he not that, I don't mean that he was doing that explicitly, just so you can't trust the election process.

Yeah, he like their vote might not matter.

It was a suppression attitude, I think.

Yeah, and that

is.

Nobody in their right mind believed that georgia was going to elect to not democrats but socialists and they did and so trump was at his nadir and i think a lot of people in their anger were gnashing their teeth so i i haven't seen the tape we haven't seen the transcript we can assume that there's going to be three little dots in places.

That's the way the Democrats and the left operate.

But I'm perfectly willing to believe he said that.

And I think Trump understands that.

Trump's already been magnanimous and said they still are friends.

So I don't think much is going to come of it.

And it's another one of these sensational quotes from a sensational book.

But again, my attitude about all of that is:

why not just open the thing up?

The January 6th committee could have had any Democrat that Pelosi wanted, plus one, any, I mean, as a majority, any Republican that McCarthy, that's the way it works.

And instead, Pelosi forbid particular

Republicans from being that, they could have put all of those videos, 14, we hear 14 to 20,000 now and put them all out there.

We could have known that officer sicknick died of natural causes on January 7th instead.

And we could have found out what the charge those people with a crime or let them go.

So the whole thing, and then 30,000 policemen and barbed wire to sort of enhance and then putting officer sicknick in the state of you know line and state in the capital as if he's a murdered victim of the revolution it's just

it was disgusting what they did and especially when you contextualize that

and say it's minor when we had 120 days of rioting and deaths and 35 people killed 2 billion damage all of summer of 2020 so i think in the right after before there was information on, I'm sure that McCarthy said a lot of things.

You probably thought, oh, my God, we lost the Senate.

Now we're screwed.

Why did Trump harp and harp and harp on this election?

They loses Sen.

He should have been down there in Georgia.

He should have been getting everybody out to vote.

So they were angry at Trump.

Some of them had good cause to be, but I think that's the context.

I don't think it's going to go anywhere.

Victor, let's talk about Al Sharpton again.

We talked about him on a recent podcast.

And I think sometimes when people on the left go too far, whatever that might mean, they get taken to the woodshed or they need to prove again their bona fide.

So, remember, Sharpton recently was attacking Democrat politicians to the sense of did he not get it that inflation is strangling the black community, that crime is strangling the black community.

It's going to matter politically.

We've seen Bill Maher, we've seen Jon Stewart.

Remember, Jon Stewart was coming out to make attacking the, you know, of course, the virus from China.

You know, it was right

down the damn block.

So now, what's up with Al Sharpton?

So here's a headline, Victor, of a recent Daily Mail article.

We want his name, exclamation point.

Reverend Al Sharpton, all capitals, demands cops publicly identify Michigan officer who shot black man Patrick Loyoya.

I'm not sure if that's proper

pronunciation in the head during traffic stop at emotional funeral.

So Victor, it was just eight months after he shot and killed Ashley Babbitt in the U.S.

Capitol that the name of Capitol Police Lieutenant Michael Byrd was mentioned.

Personally, all for the immediate public information about the action.

It was worse than that, Jack.

It was worse than that.

They said that it would be racist to reveal that a black man shot an unarmed Ashley Babbitt as she was going through a window.

Right.

And remember, they weren't fighting.

The two of them were not fighting.

This particular suspect was pulled over, as I remember, because his license plate did not match the car description.

And so somebody had put a license plate on a car that they didn't sink.

And he was pulled over.

And he was, I mean, you're staying the car.

And he got out of the car.

And the policeman said, Would you please get back in the car?

He wouldn't get in the car.

And he stayed out and was argumentative.

And then they got in a tussle and they fought.

And he grabbed for the officer's taser and they rolled on.

I think the officer was on top of him and he pulled out a gun and shot him.

And I think he felt that any second, this suspect was going to grab his taser first and get his gun second and kill him.

But what Al Sharpen never addresses is, first of all, why would you ever drive a car that doesn't have the proper license plate if that were true?

And two, why would you ever get out of a car when a policeman's walking up toward you?

And three, if you did get out and he told you to get back in the car, why wouldn't you do that?

And then four, why would you ever put your hand on an officer who didn't do anything?

And why, five, when the officer kept yelling at you, stop, stop, stop, why wouldn't you stop?

And six,

why would you physically assault an officer and try to get his weapon?

And seven,

it's one chance too many.

So I don't know exactly what happened because we haven't had an investigation, but there were at least five or six steps that that could have been avoided.

And I don't know, I'm not going to tell the officer you don't shoot somebody in the back of the head when the guy is trying to kill you, maybe, and trying to grab your weapon.

And you pleaded with him to get back in the car, and you pleaded with him to stop, and you said, stop, stop, and he didn't listen.

And Al Sharpen knows out

and i think this is all in a context that if you look at some statistics black crime has soared but black accidents and deaths in traffic accidents per capita has been asymmetrical and part of the the exegesis is that when you pull police off and black some black drivers know that they're not going to be stopped because of these types of incidents, then they can injure people, pedestrians or other Black motorists.

So Black fatalities and traffic accidents

have climbed.

I know Pete Buttigig will say this is because of racist infrastructure, but it's not.

It's because of a lack of deterrence.

And, you know, I get a lot of communications from law enforcement officers.

And one of the texts, either people writing me or talking to me or emailing me and one of the or meeting with me and one of the text is subtext of their conversations are

there's certain situations that they won't go into because they feel they're lose lose lose and one of them is

if they pull over a particular marginalized person suspect

they feel it's lose, lose, lose, because the person will be likely to think that the policeman will not enforce the full force of the law.

And so, therefore, they think: well,

if I say that you get out of the car, you're not obeying the order, then there might be a situation like this.

The person might get violent.

And if I shoot them, my career is over with.

Or if I don't shoot them, they can shoot me.

Or

if I just get in a fight with them or I let them go, it's just it's not going to end well.

So I think what we're seeing is that law enforcement officers are de facto not enforcing the law as it pertains to particular individuals.

And that fact is known to the black community and people who in that community, a minority no doubt, of that community feel that they can be much more aggressive in their in their behavior.

And the victims of that are often the innocent African-American law-abiding citizen.

Well, Victor, we've got a number of other things to discuss on today's episode.

Again, we are recording on Sunday, April 24th, and this episode will be aired on Tuesday, the 26th.

I don't know if aired's the right word, you know, but it'll be on the

World Wide Web.

So, Victor, let's talk about Florida Governor DeSantis, and let's do that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor, I know you and Sammy Wink had a very good conversation and podcasts that you recorded over the last couple of days about

Governor Ron DeSantis, but I'd like to bring up a little more discussion on criticisms of him from the right.

You mentioned this briefly in one of the podcasts, our old stomping ground.

My old stomping ground, I was a publisher in National Review.

I worked in National Review for 30 plus years, but there was some very sharp criticism of Ron DeSantis.

This line somebody wrote about quote-unquote fight club conservatism.

This is a violation of the rule of law.

This legislation that was passed and is being signed that's taking away Disney's kind of sovereignty status, this weird status it has.

Someone said that it may be unique in America other than what Indian nations have, and they are essentially nations.

And Victor,

give me half a second here.

You know, and I mentioned this before.

I believe in the Bible.

I believe in Ecclesiastes to every season.

And I think we've, for quite a while, been in a different season than many quote-unquote thought leaders on the right have been.

You know, it's spring and they're still back in the fall politically.

You have mentioned before that maybe the new response has to be what we've endured in America in the last two or three years, actually much more culturally as ideology has marched through the institutions.

We need to to fight, fight back,

punch hard, punch back.

You know, they're not playing by the Marcus of Queensbury rules.

Why the hell should we?

Lessons need to be taught.

And especially with this company, this is not only about Disney and this, you know, let's call it a pushback to their corporate involvement in this law that was passed by the legislature about not talking about perversion with little kids in school.

But Disney has had a special status in America.

That's the point.

That's that.

So

there's two issues here.

One is Disney and one is the reaction of the never Trump right.

Remember, we're just going back to no prejudice, either for or against what DeSantis is doing.

He's just telling Disney, we don't believe anymore in Florida autonomous zones.

So this large area that we basically gave over to you, what, 55 years ago, 1967, in which you developed your law and your own around your park.

We did that because we thought that you would reflect the values of Walt Disney, and that was middle-class entertainment that was wholesome and was sort of a bulwark of some of the cultural trends that were appearing in the 60s.

And you didn't do that now.

You are part of this cultural attack on the nuclear family.

That's your business to do that.

You can do it.

We're just not going to pay you to do it with subsidizing and giving you this anymore.

We're going to treat you like other companies.

So, Disney got on its hind legs, and of course, it wasn't transparent what it was doing.

It kind of leaked out with videos and braggadachio from some of its executives.

But

what is Disney going to do,

Jack?

I mean, how many places in the United States have 20 million people in a state and they have year-round warm weather?

The only three that I can think of are California, i.e., ocean, and then Texas, maybe the Gulf, but that, you know, that's 20 million plus state and Florida.

And you already have Disneyland, and

Texas is not going to be any more conducive than Florida is.

So where are they going to go?

If they say, screw you, we're going to go to a state, we're going to go to Minnesota.

No, no, we're going to go to Vermont.

No, no, no, we're going to go to Nevada.

We're going to go to Oregon.

We're going to go to sunny Seattle for Disneyland.

It's not going to happen.

And DeSantis has all the cards.

And he's also got public opinion within Florida on his site.

All the polls show that.

And all Disney has to say is, we're not going to get political and we erred.

So we're not going to weigh in to pro or con on any political issue.

That's not what we do.

And they're not going to do that because they're part of the corporate.

culture and they fear the left more than the right.

What DeSantis is saying, okay,

you're afraid of

boycotts, you're afraid of cancel culture.

We get that, but you better be afraid of us because there's a whole new game in town.

And you guys have bragged for the last five years how corporations go after states.

Remember, Jack, when Georgia had the voting ID and Major League Baseball said, shame on you, we're leaving.

And then you remember, I think it was South Carolina said, we only have two bathrooms, male and female.

And all of California's institutions, public and private, said, we're not going to spend any money.

And then they said, ha, ha, ha, $3.7 billion, we hurt them.

And they kind of, and North Carolina caved.

And so that's what the left does.

They attack the state.

And sometimes other states attack the state and they say, our employees will not be reimbursed for official business in the Carolinas or Georgia.

And then private corporations.

So all DeSantis said, I'm tired of it.

You keep attacking us.

You keep using politics.

So we're going to do the same thing, only we're going to be a little bit higher-minded than you.

We're not going to be punitive like you are.

We're just not going to give you advantages anymore.

Most favored nation status.

Right.

It's corporate welfare too.

Why conservatives are opposed to a grossing of corporate welfare.

And then the other issue is never Trump.

So why would these writers at National Review do this?

Because

I think there's a lot of people in this Never Trump movement that feel their duty is to, original duty, original duty was to be the gatekeepers.

And they were going to be sober and judicious.

And they were going to have a line and said, we're over here and we represent the Buckley tradition, which is very ironic because.

I remember William Buckley as saying, I will rather vote, what, for the first 2,000 people in New York than a Boston phone book than a Harvard professor.

Or, you know, I'm a practical guy.

I just vote for the guy who could, the least, the most conservative who can win.

Or he wanted to go to blows with Gorbodahl on TV.

I mean, I don't see how they get that role that they've given themselves from the Buckley tradition, but that's another question.

But it brings up a larger question.

We have been told the last six years that these were the true conservatives, the true Republicans.

And all of the issues that conservatism embodied were going to be betrayed by Donald Trump.

The first never Trump argument was: he's pro-abortion, he hates Jews, he's going to be anti-Israel, he's going to have all this.

Well, he didn't do that.

And then the next fallback position was: well,

all you've got is judicial appointments.

Gorsuch, we're tired of Gorsuch.

So what?

He pointed Gorsuch, big blank deal.

And then that didn't work.

And then they started looking.

They thought, wow, border secure now?

Inflation doesn't exist.

Deregulation.

He's not an isolationist.

He has deterrent policies.

He goes after solar mania, just what John Bolton wanted.

He got rid of ISIS.

He did bomb them the crap.

He deterred North Korea.

He

got out of the Iran deal, Abram's Accord.

Jerusalem is now the capital of Israel in our eyes.

I've written all about all of those things.

So I've got to come up with a new reason.

And they couldn't come up with a new reason.

And then trump is gone so you think well they're going to join the republican party again because they're the person who they say hijacked their views that was their third

and these devolving positions they had this was the last incarnation or iteration was

okay

he wasn't a liberal and okay he did stuff that i have always agreed with more than judicial appointments but his personality was so bad, his tweets, he was a liar, unlike Biden and Clinton and the rest of them.

And so that's gone.

Trump's gone.

We've got Joe Biden, and they've either voted for him or they didn't vote for Trump and they empowered him.

And now what?

You'd think they would say, uh-oh,

border mess, they believe in critical immigration theory, crime spiking, critical crime or legal theory, uh-oh, inflation, new modern monetary theory, uh-oh,

utopianism abroad,

and they should be outrage.

Instead, if you read the bulwark or hear these people, all they do is attack people who criticize Biden and they give him talking points.

So this raises or begs a question, Jack, one of two things.

Either they are where they always wanted to be,

they're where they always wanted to be.

They always wanted to be moderates or liberals.

They might not want to be radical progressives, which are the Democratic Party, but they feel comfortable now.

Or two,

their lecture circuits, their book deals,

their Fox TV

paid appearances, all of that crash.

They blame Trump and they're so angry about that that they don't feel

that because of their past behavior, they're going to reclaim that.

And they feel they're orphaned.

That's possible.

And they're angry.

And the way they get back at people is to continue this as if Trump's ghost is carnate.

In other words, if they're not liberals from the get-go and they were only, you know, liberals in sheep's clothing, then they're angry that they have been orphaned by Donald Trump and they can't get back.

And that's hurt them, whether their sense of self or their money or whatever.

And the third now is, what are they?

If those two are not correct diagnoses of their problem, what are they now?

You tell me.

I mean, if you say, if you're trying to write and you say that Disney is the entire $300 million of market capitalization is behind telling K through third graders that they need rather explicit training in their gender and sexuality.

And you have people bragging about that at Disney.

And you think that they need a corporate welfare concession when they belie the tradition of Walt Disney and they still are doing that then what are they?

I think they're left-wing or they're angry right people that are so confused and mixed up nobody knows what they are but the point is we've been talking about them

the never Trump movement as if they're large or influential.

Maybe they had some role with the independent voter that was critical in 2020.

I don't know.

But 91% of Republicans voted for Donald Trump.

If their duty and the Lincoln project and all that was to diminish the Republic,

they didn't succeed.

If it was to diminish independent women for voting for Trump, maybe they had some influence.

But my point is, I don't think.

that going to be working for CNN, getting paid to go in CNN and be, quote, the voice of the right is either intellectually honest or is going to work.

Or I don't think given the Lincoln Project, the people who were in it and given their sordid personal life in the case of one person and who was that behavior was known by everybody and the way that they raised money, I don't think that.

And then I think if all of these conservative entities

across the nevertrump spectrum would just be transparent.

They just said, this is where my money comes.

This is the Silicon donor donor who gives me this money.

These are the Silicon Valley corporations who give me this money.

This is my.

And if they would do that, then people might find out that they are

unable fiscally to criticize the left.

Because if they do, there would be no money.

And if there was no money, there would be none to make it up from the conservative side for their conservative point of views.

So they're in a classic dilemma.

They talk about everybody not being intellectually honest and they're not being independent and they're not brave and they're not custodians of the conservative.

They aren't.

Because if they were, they would just say, screw you.

I get this money from Peter Amadaire or I get this from Google or Facebook and I'm proud of it.

They don't.

And let them do that.

Open the books and just tell us who their donors are.

Victor, I think there could be another motivation.

And you have talked a lot about, you know, class.

and I'm a conservative whatever that might mean who graduate from Harvard and I may actually be more comfortable in a world where I deal with leftists of Harvard than I am dealing with the

the kind of folks you saw you see regularly coming in and out of Home Depot in Selma yeah I think that's there's an aspect of that to the motivations of the never Trump right.

You can't understand the transformation in the Republican Party unless you get out and meet people who are not of the social economic elite, whether defined as advanced college degrees or income or zip codes.

You just can't understand people.

You'll have no empathy for them.

I went to my high school reunion and I would say last night and I talked to you know several Mexican-American kids that went to first grade with me.

I don't want to mention their names.

I don't want to give any description of who they are, but I can tell you, Jack, that 100% of them voted for Donald Trump.

And why did they vote for Donald Trump?

Was it because they loved his tweets?

No.

It was because the border was closed.

There was legal only immigration.

There was affordable gas.

There was no inflation.

America didn't look ridiculous abroad.

Crime.

There were no M13 people walking around saying, I just got out, ha ha.

So that's just what it is.

And you won't get any flavor of that.

And you have to ask yourself, who were they voting for before Donald Trump?

They were looking at Mitt Romney and they said, you know what?

That guy and his Bain Capital and those pictures with all the dollar bills and his, I can't ever appeal to 49 people that are getting entitlements.

That's not going to appeal to them.

And George H.W.

Bush, I thought, was a very decent fellow.

I like George W.

Bush, but that's no longer going to get the Republicans.

They have to be a party of the lower middle, the middle middle, and the middle class.

That's where the voters are.

And they were losing them.

And they had no appeal to the white working class.

And what's happened is class has started to nudge out race.

Race is the obsession of the bicosta elite, but class is uniting people of different races.

You're going to see in November historic percentages of African-American males, the Latino population in general, and the white working class vote against Democrats.

And

just the way it is.

And the Never Trump people can't understand that.

And how they fathom that is to sneer and to look down and say, it's our job to make sure that these yokels don't

produce.

And, you know, that is it, the woman from Georgia, Marjorie Tater, you know.

Green.

Green.

So

there are people at National Review and other Never Trump that don't want her to run.

And they're behind this idea that I want to be careful about that.

They don't want her to win.

I can see that.

But I don't want to say National Review.

I want to say other people in the Never Trump because I've read them.

They don't think that she should, she's too much of an extremist.

But think about that.

You can tell a person who can run.

for office or not that doesn't have a felony on their record just because of something they've said are we going to say to maxine Waters, you can't run for office again because you publicly with a bullhorn got on and said, follow people to their homes, to their businesses, to the gas station and harass them?

Okay, you're denied.

You cannot do that.

You cannot run for that.

Joe Biden, you cannot run for office.

You have a history of racist.

You were a candidate and you kept using that racist corn top riff.

And then you told an African-American journalist he was not black.

You ain't black.

You told another one, you call him a junkie.

You just can't do it.

Oh, and you know what, Joe Biden?

You can't run for office because you have a history of sexual, I don't know what we would call it, harassment.

I forget her name now, the woman in Terry.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He stuck his

fingers,

digitalizer to her.

Yeah, so that's my point.

You can't run for office.

Is that what?

So nobody who believes in free speech

and that people are innocent until they're convicted by a jury of their peers or a judge has any right telling people who can run if they're eligible, i.e.

if they're U.S.

citizens.

If they're U.S.

citizens and they're of the proper age for the office and they meet the residency requirement of the office.

And I think that means if you're running for the House in Georgia, you've got to live inside the state of Georgia, whatever district you live, it's irrelevant.

You'd be better to live in the district you represent, but the law says you can be named.

If you're a senator, senator, you have to be a resident of that state.

You have to be 30 years old.

Other than that, if you don't have a felony conviction, go ahead.

And yet, how can people even suggest that?

And so I don't think there is a never-Trump movement anymore, Jack.

I think that's an ossified, calcified term.

It really, I shouldn't use it.

They disappear.

They came for a moment.

They said their peace, and now they have joined the Democratic Party, left-wing party.

And you know what?

The left-wing party hates their guts and doesn't want them because they don't need them.

They feel they're just rivals.

I mean, the squad has said these people, remember the squad attacked the Lincoln Project as if they were siphoning off left-wing money?

Well, Victor, let's though, for the sake of hearing your wisdom, continue to say that, and there is a conservative critique of what DeSantis and what the Florida legislature did related to Disney.

And here's the point I'd like you to address.

Corporate America has become an enemy, much of corporate America has become an enemy of the right.

This is where the culture war is happening, and it needs to be fought in certain ways.

It needs to be fought, I think, by the population figuring out who they're going to buy their products from or not.

But I think this is a very legitimate way of what happened in the Florida legislature to respond to this onslaught from corporate America.

Now, where are the fronts in this war?

They're what happened to Parlor.

They are banks that will refuse to do business with certain other kinds of businesses.

If you make guns or knives, Wells Fargo refuses to do business with you.

Who doesn't believe that a year from now, let's say the Democrats maintain control and whatever, that people like you and people like me would find it very difficult to earn a living because of the things we say, the things we tweeted, whatever.

Banks will refuse to do, people will refuse to sell products amazon we oh you're that guy sorry we're not selling you this is the reality of what's happening

fracking look at fracking and horizontal drilling right what did the left do they went to hedge funds they went to pensions funds they went to banks and this crazy

you know environmental and social governments this esg what is it it's just a left-wing effort to harass particular corporations that don't fit fit their particular definition of utopian environmentalism and deny them funding or make sure that they have a particular board membership that pleases the left and so yeah this is long overdue because what DeSantis I think people are missing what and you're right what he's trying to do is I've had enough is what he's saying he said you you go after state after state after state and you boycott them you won't you hurt their tourist revenue for issues like abortion and transgenderism and et cetera.

And it's punitive.

I'm not punitive.

I'm just neutral.

I'm just saying from now on, if you are a corporation and we feel that you are taking an overtly political role within our state governments and you're loud and you are,

we feel, no longer a nonpartisan.

entity, then we're not going to give you a Florida concession.

We're going to say, we want you to stay, go to it, Disney World.

We're just not going to pay for it.

And the next thing they should do is everybody should look very carefully at Mickey Mouse's copyright.

Why in the world

does this corporation get exempt from patents and copyrights?

It's worse than that, Victor, if you allow me a second, because I engaged much

in my previous life in publishing.

material that was called public domain.

And that's anything published before 1921,

before 1922.

The old laws were, copyright laws, were you had a copyright for 27 years on your writing, the music, art, et cetera.

In the 26th year, you could apply for another 27-year renewal.

So you had 54 years in which to make profit or protect of a work.

And when year 54

of Mickey Mouse was approaching, Disney through the, I think it was through the cahoots of

Sonny Bono,

who was the congressman.

But they got the laws, the laws were changed to protect Disney.

And that law affected, I think, the copyright laws were a very principled thing.

You have a goodly amount of time in which to make a profit off of something you created, and then it becomes part of our culture and other people use it.

That worked for hundreds of years, except because of Mickey Mouse.

So Disney has run roughshod over American culture far beyond, you know, its corporate leadership trying to advocate for teaching kindergartners, you know, how to perform fellatio.

It's a company of great brazenness.

And why it's not considered something that needs to be punched in the nose by conservatives is beyond me.

Some conservatives.

Anyway, that's my spiel.

Yeah, I think you're absolutely right.

And one thing I'd like to do when we hang up is look and see what the attitude is toward Looney Tunes, right?

And I think, I don't know what the, is the domain 90?

It used to be 95 years.

No, it was

originally

27 and then another 27.

And then it was extended.

No, but it applied.

It was extended.

And then it was extended again.

Sonny Bono was the second bite at giving it gross, almost, it seems like infinite protection.

So, and it's beyond Disney, it applies to all things.

So, public domain laws have been ransacked thanks to Disney.

I don't think that they give the same leeway or exemptions to the Looney Tunes characters, you know, like Dappy Duck or Bugs Bunny, but I may be mistaken.

Maybe some of our listeners who are patent copyright lawyers might

educate us.

Yeah, I think they should open it up.

And people shouldn't go there if they're traditionalist and we understand that executives at Disney and people that have powers of influence at Disney are bragging that, you know, and their employees, that they're going to insist that kindergarten, third grade have that type of instruction or whether it's critical race theory that basically is racist.

And if they think that that...

corporate $300 million powerhouse should be political, then and people oppose that.

They should say, sorry, I'm I'm not going to do it.

You can have your left-wing part.

Just have it all left-wing and then go full blast.

That's how America works.

You know what I mean?

Just have, just have a big sign welcome transgenderism and then have a little, you know,

I don't know, a film where you're talking about transgenderism and have, I don't know, you can have Mickey Mouse over here

and you can have another Snow White over here and have them give lectures, animated lectures about how great transgenderism.

And that's what you should do.

Go to and get the whole transgender community.

That's what you're going to do.

But don't go half, so to speak, ass.

Just go ahead.

But this thing where you pose, this is a very big problem in the traditional conservative movement right now.

It's a schizophrenic problem.

And that is, on the one hand, these groups, these traditional institutions, and it goes to universities, it goes to think tanks, it goes to, they have a public veneer that is so-called traditionalist because they look at the polls and for admissions or financial support or whatever donors, they understand that an open border and a transgender restrooms and abortion on demand and this redistributionist economic policy, it doesn't have 51%.

So they are stealthy.

and they act as if they're just as traditional as ever.

And then they do things.

and when they get caught, they cry to high heaven.

And that's what's so dishonest about it.

I just wish they'd say, you know what, we're revolutionaries.

We want to change the fabric of America.

We're going to use every institution we can.

So we're going to go out there and we're not going to salute the flag and we're going to hold our fist up and we're going to have BLM to you're sick of it.

And you know what?

We don't need you.

So screw you.

We're the NFL.

We have the same thing.

We're not going to stand for your blank, blank flag, and we're happy about it get with it or get out

they never do that they kind of say oh well we'll kind of do this and we'll kind of do that and oh we're worried about this and

and

you know that's same thing and why doesn't oakla just say you know what i'm a partisan i'm proud of it i'm i'm just the opposite of sean hannity he says he is i am too they never do that they have this hollywood is the same way why don't these producers just say you know what look at the last 50 movies movies that Hollywood's released this year.

They're all about gay characters, or environmental crusaders, green characters, or transgender characters, or racial characters that are very explicit in their chauvinism about a particular race or not.

And we're happy about it.

And we don't want you to watch our films.

They never do that.

They never, never do that.

Speaking about the world of entertainment, Victor, we've got time for one more topic, but you are familiar with the Black Adder British series.

Have you watched that ever?

I just, I just, no, I never watched it.

Oh, well, then you won't know of that Black Adder and his henchman, Baldrick, always talked about having a cunning plan.

And today, Elizabeth Warren on one of the Sunday morning talk shows, again, we're recording on the April 24th, she has a cunning plan for how the Democrats can survive and even prevail in November 2022.

And we're going to talk about that right after this important message.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson show.

So Victor, yeah, Elizabeth Warren was on CNN this morning.

Sunday, the 24th, and she spent a lot of time attacking.

I read about it.

I didn't watch it, but I don't know if anyone watches CNN anymore, but she was

attacking Kevin McCarthy.

But after that, asked about, you know, how can how can Democrats, can Democrats prevail?

So absolutely, we have 200 days left and we have to do what we were sent here to do.

It's almost a doubling down.

And two of the things she talked about, if we do these things, we will win.

One, stop price gouging by authorizing the Federal Trade Commission to investigate and prosecute.

I don't know who.

Maybe they should Joe Biden.

I mean, that's the reason we have inflation, but I guess it's corporations or energy companies.

That's why.

And then the second thing was cancel student loan debt.

Across the board, the president has the power to do that.

If these things are done, we will prevail in November.

Victor,

you always say that what if, what if Trump had done that?

So, you know, how this latest incarnation of left, I give them, I hand it to them.

They are all about power.

power.

They don't care.

I mean, military, they've hated the military, but you give woke generals and they are pro-military because of the power.

Corporations, they've hated their entire lives.

You give corporations put that money behind these agendas.

They love corporations.

And that's the executive orders.

That was...

you know, autocratic.

You put an executive order, they're for it.

And that's how they function.

But

this idea that if everything she said were true about price gouging and all this, then why in the world, Jack, all of 2021,

even before Vladimir Putin started massing on the borders, they were telling us that inflation, inflation, inflation was transitory.

Or Jin Saki laughed and said, oh, people can't get, I guess it's a little pricey, or you get delayed on your exercise equipment, boohoo.

Or they were that harvard obama economist they were retweeting saying oh inflation just a matter of the elite and then they said you know it's donald trump did it so that was before putin's price hike quote unquote so

i guess what they're saying now is we were completely lying when we told you that inflation was here but it wasn't our fault and the war didn't really you know 70 of it was caused before the war so i can't understand what they're saying they're saying well yeah we were complaining that inflation was here, but it was being transitory.

But then we had a new talking point that said it was never here until the war started, but just get it straight.

And so nobody's going to believe that.

And they know what they did.

They printed this revenue act or rescue act, COVID, whatever it was.

They printed, they were getting a $2 trillion

Trump leftover stimulus that was too big anyway.

And then they just doubled it.

And then they were fighting for Build Back Better to get another $4 trillion.

And

they printed a lot of money.

And they told the Federal Reserve, and they were modern monetary theorists, to keep the interest rate low.

So when you look historically between the interest rate and inflation,

they've got to be about the same.

And if they're not, somebody on either side of that line is going to get killed.

And so when you get 6% inflation, you get 6%

interest rates.

Otherwise, you get killed if you're a lending agency.

But you look at now and they're way out of whack.

They're almost 8% annualized.

And if you look at the wholesale price index, it's up to 11%.

And even with these, these are just pathetic interest hikes.

I can remember, you know, thinking, wow, I can buy a car for 18%.

This was in the 1970s.

So we're going to get inflation.

It's not going to stop.

And the only argument, Jack, against this, against this idea that you need higher interest rates, because that's causing inflation, low interest rates and a lot of money and big deficits and 30 trillion in aggregate debt is well victor you're very wrong you're you're not an economist you don't understand that in insidious ways that i can't even describe to a moron like you there's new productivity there's technology there's communications there's zooming from home all of these in in their own way mean that each person is being so much more productive and it doesn't show up on traditional calcified notions of GDP, but we're actually a much more productive, efficient society.

So if we print money, we just are redistributing it.

We're not going to cause inflation.

I don't know what their talking point is, but Milton Friedman said, print money and don't create enough goods and services to supply the ensuing demand.

You're going to get inflation.

Simple.

And restrict the money supply and have inflation match the interest rate.

you're not going to get any inflation at all.

And Ronald Reagan proved that when he inherited Paul Volcker, and Paul Volcker broke the back.

What I'm worried about, Jack, is that this went on in the 70s during the Watergate impeachment in Nixon and then Jimmy Carter, and nobody addressed it.

And Reagan finally decided he had to go turn over, you know, basically Paul Volcker ran monetary policy and they broke it.

But it almost cost Reagan re-election because they didn't break it until late 83.

Right.

And it started growing in the 12-month period before the election from November of 83 to November of 84.

It grew.

The economy grew at 7%.

Inflation fell to about 3%.

So they broke it.

And then it was off to the races with huge economic growth.

But if you don't do it, it's going to have to be broken rather than tamed.

And I don't know.

People are going to be really hurt because there's still people going out there and now they're paying, what, 40% more per month, little meager, little 4% and 5%

mortgages that went up from 2.8.

But the prices are still going sky high.

They're going to keep borrowing and at some point somebody's going to say no more.

And they're going to break the inflation.

There's going to be a lot of people stuck in California and coastal committees with $1.7 million homes with a 5%

interest rate on it.

And they're not going to be able to afford it because the economy is going to slow down.

they're going to get laid off or they're going to get price frozen and the value in their home is going to decrease by 30 percent it's the worst time in the world to buy a house right now yeah a lot of people will be under underwater one other thing quickly victor we've talked about student loan stuff before but so many kids have significant debt because they made idiotic decisions to you know get a doctorate in in anthropology and they owe six figures and no way they're going to be able to repay it.

But why should the

people you met last night at your alumni, you know, your class reunion.

Why should they repay?

Why should I repay?

I paid my college tuition.

Why should half the country that went to work at 18 and that was 75% of my high school class, why should they pay if I borrowed money?

and I chose to go to college in the hopes of getting a better salary than they do.

Why should they pay for that?

And number two, why do the people, and I met a lot that got their bachelor's degrees last night at my reunion and got their teaching credentials and they did it in four years,

why should they pay for somebody who took a loan out to go to law school or medical school or business school, an advanced degree?

So there's a hierarchy here and it's elitist to the core.

And a large percentage of that $1.7 trillion debt is professional training at post-baccalaureate institutions by people who now are making a fantastic amount of money.

Why should they pay for it?

And why should we tell the universities,

you can keep raising the rate of inflation room and board.

You can raise their tuition room and board higher than their annual rate of inflation because there's the moral hazard is the federal government is backing your loan.

And so the student has no moral hazard and you have no more.

The moral hazard is with us, the taxpayer.

So I don't understand it.

Why don't they just tell the university, we're done, we're done now.

You have students that want to go to Harvard or Stanford or Yale or Duke or Michigan.

Here's what you do.

You've got $30 billion

tuition at Stanford.

You've got 50 billion or 60 at Harvard.

Just shut down all those little center for this and that and that that are funded out of the general university fund and start issuing your own money.

You tell a student that comes and says, you know what, we don't have enough to give you a scholarship, but we're going to loan you the money at 5%.

And then I guarantee you, you will not want to jack up the rate of tuition higher than the rate of inflation.

And I guarantee you that student may say, and then you say to that student, if you default, we're coming after you.

And so then as adults rather than children, then the student says, well, I got to ask you something.

So I'm going to borrow 200,000 from Yale, or I'm going to buy 200,000 from University of Pennsylvania.

I got to ask you something.

Can you give me a list of the 50 majors that you offer and what's the average salary five years after graduation?

I need to know that.

Just like a car dealer is going to have to tell you how much your monthly payment is.

And the university then would produce that.

And then the person would say, you know what?

You keep talking in all of your films and all of your advertisements and your recruitment about gender, gender, gender, race.

But I see here that these gender studies, minors and majors, these black studies, major,

they don't pay anything unless you're going to be a diversity, equity, and inclusion czar.

And there's only so many of those jobs.

I don't see how am I going to pay this loan back.

But this one over here, math major or this major over here, nursing, I will do that because I can pay your loan back.

And then you'd have adults.

But now it is, I'm just going to go to university and I've got a student loan.

I think it's just the same thing as a scholarship.

I'm 18 and I know all about finance.

I know about the whole world.

I call up mom and say, hey, mom and dad, I don't need your money.

The government's got back my loan.

And I'm going to do, I'm going to take six units here, nine units here.

I'll do this for six years.

Half of people don't graduate in six years that begin college.

And then I'll go get a job.

And I don't even care if my major has any earning potential at all.

I mean, my classics major, I was told, had no inner earning potential, but at least in those days, I didn't leave with a debt.

There was no tuition at the University of California.

I was very lucky.

But if there had been a tuition, I don't think I would have taken out a loan for a classics major.

I'm sorry, I wouldn't have.

In fact, when I applied to graduate school, I said to myself, if I don't get a graduate fellowship, I'm not going to go.

I'm not going to borrow money to do this.

And so that would be realistic, and people could make their own decisions.

But now it's like these prolonged adolescents, these people 20 and 23 and 25, they graduate, they have these sociology majors or psychology majors or these studies majors.

They have no earning potential vis-a-vis either bachelor's degree.

Many of them didn't go to schools that have a good cattle brand that were stamped with a name, you know, Harbor, Yale.

And so they're in debt.

This is why AOC was so radical.

She was a barista and she was angry because they sold her a bill of goods.

I mean, among other things, inter alia.

But my point I'm making is that this whole thing is just a bunch of adolescents that play these little games.

Get the federal government out of it.

Tell the universities.

After the first billion dollars, you're going to pay taxes on it because you don't use the money for non-political purposes.

You're very partisan.

Tell the students, this is the amount it's going to cost you each month in interest.

This is how much a unit that class you're taking costs you when we break down the tuition over the amount of units you take for the year.

Each class unit can be monetized.

So when you sit in that class and that professor goes off topic and says, this is a racist, horrible place.

And let me tell you about my heroic efforts when I was your age and you're thinking,

I just paid this woman three, I paid this guy, I paid this person $300 for that rant.

I don't have it.

I borrowed it at six percent.

And that would give you a little realism.

Well, Victor, we've got the usual end of the show business.

I'd like to encourage our listeners, and again, we keep getting significantly more listeners every week.

Once again, we're in the top 10 on the rankings of political podcasts in America, which is pretty good considering

you're in your bedroom and I'm in my little office.

And we're, you know, we're rigging this up.

We don't have professional studios, and we're happy very much to be at justthenews.com and the good people there.

But it's doing very well.

So, thanks to the new listeners.

I work at the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic.

You can check that out: center for civil society.com.

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Victor, everything Victor writes is at victorhanson.com.

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Victor's got a lot of original material there.

The most recent is a three-part series called Remembering the Old Breed.

Victor writes about his, I'll call them ancestors, but great-grandparents, grandparents, et cetera, in this series, the characters and the personalities of these people, plus many other topics that he writes about regularly.

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So that's VictorHanson.com.

Victor, he's on Facebook.

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That's on Facebook.

We have friends at Facebook, the Victor Davis Hanson Fan Club, not officially affiliated, but wonderful people.

If you're on Facebook, why don't you join that group?

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So check that out.

Victor, let me read two comments we've received in the last week on iTunes.

Listen wherever you like.

Thank you.

Stitcher, Google Play, et cetera.

But if you're on iTunes, you can leave comments there.

And please leave a five-star rating.

So here are two small comments.

One's entitled Free Education at the VDH Show.

When I first heard you on Megan Kelly's podcast, I said to myself, this man sounds like a professor.

Then I looked you up and had a duh moment.

Love hearing your commentary on history and current U.S.

and world affairs.

Thank you, Professor Vic.

I don't know if I've never called you Vic, but, you know,

I learned so much from you.

Please move closer to New York, L-O-L, daddy IVO.

So thank you, Daddy IVO.

And then the other comment, right-leaning intellectual, rare exclamation point.

That's what it's titled.

This is from Dusty Gator45.

Dr.

Hansen speaks with the authority gained through a lifetime of intellectual endeavor, plus the down-to-earth common sense learned through the hard work of farming life.

His topics of discussion are varied, and each one carries the weight of his knowledge to bear on the subject at hand.

This is what excellence in education looks like.

God bless you, sir.

Dusty Gator45.

Thanks, Dusty, and thanks all folks who listen.

Again, if you have some questions you want Victor to answer when we prepare these Victor's on vacation podcasts, which we'll be recording them soon, maybe you consider doing that in one of the comments on iTunes.

So, that's that, Victor.

Thanks for all the wisdom you shared today.

And we're going to be back with another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show in just a couple of days.

Thanks for listening, folks.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody.