Couldn't, Shouldn't Be President

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Hello, everyone.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show, and this is the weekend edition.

We do things a little bit different on the weekend edition.

We look at a little bit of history, and we have some in store for you today.

But since we have the agenda of different, I have a poem for you before we begin our discussion with Victor Davis Hansen.

So here it is.

When I compare what I have lost with what I've gained, what I've missed with what I've attained, little room do I find for pride.

I am aware how many days have been idly spent, how like an arrow the good intent has fallen short or been turned aside.

But who shall dare to measure loss and gain in this wise?

Defeat may be victory in disguise.

The lowest ebb is the turn of the tide.

That is Loss and Gain by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

And I thought it set a good tone for what I wanted to do today, which is look at some historical characters that did not quite make it to the presidency, though they seem to have those ambitions.

And that would be Aaron Burr, Henry Clay, and William Jennings Bryan.

And we will do that

a short moment after these messages.

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Welcome back.

This is, of course, the Victor Davis-Hanson Show, and I would like to remind everyone that Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution, and the Wayne and Marcia Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Well, Victor, we have an interesting day, or at least for me.

I know I want to let everybody know that Victor gave me a little bit of heck because he doesn't like to talk about losers, but these were not complete losers in American history.

They did a lot, whether for good or for bad, but in all cases, they didn't quite become the leaders that they aspired to be.

So that's what I find

interesting.

Okay.

But so let's go ahead.

Well, wait a minute.

You read a poem and I didn't quite hear the part.

The point of the poem is you're you've done the last part but you're on your unconquerable no that you've done a lot of things that were perhaps a little bit of waste of time but you never know because of the last two lines defeat may be victory in disguise the lowest ebb is the turn of the tide too i would prefer that for the better you know i had a a rural education where you had to memorize poems yep And I remember this one by Henley, and I'm just thinking of it.

And it's famous in Wictus, unconquerable.

Remember that?

I am the master of my fate.

I am the captain of my soul.

I prefer that.

Or if you're interested in whether you wasted time or not, Malcolm Muggeridge is that British intellectual, sort of like many British intellectuals who found Catholicism late in life and he became a Christian apologist.

He wrote a memoir called Chronicles of Law.

He was a big friend of William F.

Buckley, but Chronicles of Wasted Time, it's kind of, it just shows you he was a bon vivant.

I mean, he lived, he lived it up, and then he, as he got older and his appetites dimmed, became less.

And then he went back and looked back and said, until I found God, this was pretty much a waste of time.

Wow.

That's a much more dramatic poem than the one I chose.

Mine's a little bit lighter than that.

So, but I do think it does characterize what Aaron Burr and Henry Clay and William Jennings Bryan must have been like in their character to some extent, always looking to the future as a turn to something.

So I would like to start with Aaron Burr and talk a little bit and remind everybody before we hear your thoughts on Aaron Burr that Aaron Burr probably, the most famous thing he did was to fight a duel with Alexander Hamilton and kill him.

So, you know, that, of course, was sort of a tragedy in Aaron Burr's life.

But I wanted to remind everybody of the three schemes he had to gain power.

The first one was when he applied for money from the state of New York to start a water.

company for Manhattan.

And he actually wanted to build a bank with it.

And so he schemed.

So his schemes are always a little bit devious.

And he did build the.

and the second one is the election the more famous one which is the election of 1800 when he the 73 votes went to him and thomas jefferson and he should have given thomas jefferson's fame just taken second well he it was forced into second but he tried to negotiate because the house of representatives had to decide who should be president and he didn't even succeed that's the thing there's all the discussion of his backroom negotiations to become president over Thomas Jefferson.

And then finally is the attempt with General James Wilkinson to secure part of the Louisiana, Texas region so that they could start a whole separate country with Spanish support.

So those are the three schemes that are in.

They're all slightly devious.

The last one, he was tried in the U.S.

Supreme Court for treason on and was acquitted, just so we know what happened there.

But Victor, what were you going to say?

He was always a captive of his appetites.

I mean, he, I I think, as I remember, he tried to seduce a 14-year-old and trust it to his custodianship during the Revolutionary War.

He was always a person who was whining that his talents were not appreciated.

And he didn't get commiserate rank and influence according to his supposed talents.

He tried to seduce a married woman.

He married that widow right before he died.

And I mean, basically, she had all this money.

and then he just confessed that he was a land speculator.

I don't know what happened with Hamilton.

You know, that I remember in seventh grade, and a rural, another rural teacher I had, very good teacher.

The greatest crime in history was the killing of Alexander Hamilton by that rogue, Aaron Burr.

Imagine telling you that to seventh-grade poor farm kids and Hispanic kids.

None of us knew much.

And just an eloquent lecture by Mr.

Claggett.

And he went went through the entire,

I can remember it very carefully.

You know, he said he shot him in the hip.

He shot the man in the hip.

Burr shot Hamilton after he had deliberately missed.

I think that's under contention, but

that was, he wasn't prosecuted for that.

He was vice president.

It would be sort of like Camilla Harris going out right now and, you know, shooting.

Hillary Clinton.

Or Donald Trump or somebody, one of our critics.

But I mean, this has been a wild country.

We got to remember that.

We think it's bad now, but it was pretty wild.

I don't know about the treason charges.

He always had ideas, speculator.

When you opened up all that federal land and there were too few people, then the idea was to concoct some type of con, you know, sort of like late 19th century, the background of the Johnson County Wars or Lincoln County, Johnson County Wars and Shane and all those movies when

they got all of those poor people from the East Coast to tell them that Montana and Wyoming were these paradises with temperate climates to come out and get all this free land.

The railroads did that.

And they got out there in the coldest winter in history and they all died for 10 or 20 years.

But that's what happened in 19th century America.

And I know that I'm a product of that because my grandfather told me my great-grandmother was in Missouri and Iowa and that area after the Civil War and it was really, you know, unstable.

the vendettas were played out after the war between northern and southerners, and they were northerners.

And they saw these handbills that said, go to California, $4 an acre paradise.

So she got on the train with her kids and she came out to San Francisco on the Intercontinental Railroad and then rented a buckboard and came down and found a pond.

And here I am.

But anyway, Aaron Burr, you know, he ran for president various times.

Yeah,

you know, 1800, I guess 1796.

Yeah, 1796 too.

Yeah.

But he's an enormously talented person, but he was completely reckless.

He had no self-control.

One of the best, I think the best novel that I'm not a big fan of Gourvidal, but he did write that novel, Burr.

And I remember reading it.

I think it's a flashback where he's in the mansion dying

after he's kind of conned this widow to take over his debts.

And he talks to this journalist about his life.

And it's, you know, it's Scorvidal.

So it's full of his seductions, his sex, his scoundrel behavior, but all presented in kind of a

positive light.

This guy's very exciting.

He was talented and powers at B, didn't appreciate him.

Scorbidal was a good novelist in many ways.

I do say that was that was his best-selling novel, Burr.

Aaron Burr had eight children and probably more.

So he was pretty out there.

Yeah, I mean, he had children.

And when he was in, I think he was in France for five or six years, he had children

who was made or he had them all over.

They were, maybe he had seven or eight legitimate and maybe four or five illegitimate.

Some of one of them or two of them became kind of well known.

The one thing about him, though, was I think One of his liaisons was someone from India, and then he was a staunch anti, inherited slaves, I think, but he was a staunch anti-slavery person.

He tried to get it into the plank of the party with Jefferson.

So he was an abolitionist right at the founding of the

Republic.

That's sometimes something we forget.

And that's one of the two things I sort of noticed about Aaron Burr is that one, that whole slave controversy is just so evident at the beginning and founding of the republic.

And we don't often hear that.

You just think people all of a sudden, at the Civil War, decide this is an inappropriate thing.

But you can see that they were arguing.

I mentioned that with Jack the other day because the 1619 project and the narrative that this country was flawed at the beginning, and Burr was a good example.

There were a lot of people in the colonial period that wanted to extend abolition that grew out of New England and was going into the mid-Atlantic states all the way to the south.

And it was gaining steam.

And most of the south, remember, it was not a big cotton producer.

It was a tobacco producer and a rice producer.

But with the late 18th century invention of Eli Whitney and these new strains of cotton that could live in urban areas without rotting and were not subject to the same type of mold and viruses and things, it just took off, especially with the Industrial Revolution of milling and spooling in Britain.

My point is that

then it became that moment, say, between 1776 and 1800, when there were people thinking that they could force the South to accept abolition.

They lost clout because of the money.

They were the richest class in the history of civilization until Silicon Valley, the plantation class, especially as they moved into

further, further south and these strains of cotton allowed it to grow.

in areas that they thought had been too humid or wet before.

But my only point is that it's just a myth that there wasn't this discussion 73 years before the Civil War started.

There was, and they came into a conundrum, and that was the British don't want, we just defeated the British, but they're not gone.

And they, and actually they'd come back in 1812.

And how can we have fight a civil war after we just fought in the Revolutionary War?

So we have to have compromise where we either hang together or hang separately.

So let's hang together.

And

so they suppressed debate on it, but it came came up immediately and all the time.

So it was always the great crisis of the American Republic that slavery was considered by two-thirds of the country to be antithetical to the explicit language of the Declaration of Independence and by implication, the Constitution, which didn't mention slavery, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

But the second thing I noticed about him was he represents that the growth of the United States was not just a natural process, that there were a lot of questions about, you know, when he's trying to take over Louisiana, Texas for his own little kingdom, right?

There were a lot of, you know, fits and starts and threats to the growth of the United States as we know today.

And again, we often get that presented as the inevitable adding of states and then, of course, the conflict between slavery and the free states.

But

it wasn't inevitable.

No, there were for 50%.

Manifest Destiny was not supported by everybody.

They felt that the type of people who went westward were not quite, they were the dregs of Eastern establishment.

And did you really want that voice to have

an equal say in the Constitution,

given the aristocratic Virginia plantation class?

It was kind of the lower classes that went out.

through the Cumberland Gap, they went out and later into Ohio and Tennessee and Kentucky, et cetera, et cetera.

And then there were freelancers that wanted to go down to Mexico, like Burr, and there were freelancers that wanted to go into British Columbia and Canada.

But the main idea was that again and again, the founders and if you look at some of the early literature that people wrote surrounding the creation of the United States, they were terrified because of the Napoleonic wars that had started and the French Revolution and all of this infighting on the continent of Europe.

And they would look at Britain and they'd say, it's been the unification of Britain with Scotland and Ireland and Wales and England had created some type of peace.

This is before the great Irish immigration to the United States.

And the continent never found that unification.

So it was always squabbling.

And they did not want North America.

They thought Mexico, Canada, United States was enough.

But if everybody started freelancing and making these pro-slavery republics or pro-Mexican or pro-Canadian or you know different types of government they would inevitably end up fighting and it's been tough you know we they ended up fighting anyway in the civil war and you know we're at each other's throat again now yeah exactly who's next who's next to my losers yeah my losers well you actually ran right into him because henry clay was the author, if I can call him that, of the American system.

So that whole idea of westward expansion, manifest destiny, and the nationalism that went along with it.

And so he, as we know, is probably most famous for the 1824 election when he lost of the four leading candidates.

He was the last one, and the other three were competing for his votes to obviously become president.

And he did not like the Crawford, who was a little bit elderly and perhaps a little bit senile.

And he did not like Jackson for all sorts of populist reasons.

And so he, as the Speaker of the House, had ultimate influence in the decision, which once again would be made in the House of Representatives.

And it's said that backroom dealings made it so that Clay's votes went to John Quincy Adams, and John Quincy Adams made him Secretary of State.

And that was the corrupt bargain, as it's sometimes called.

And so Clay Clay really, who knows whether he was willing and dealing there.

He may well have just not liked the other two candidates and then so supported John Quincy Adams in that.

But I think he's probably more well known for his negotiating compromises, both the Missouri Compromise, which made the decision to have both a free state in Maine and a slave state, Missouri, added to the United States.

And then also the 1850 compromise, which again decided slave issues in the parts of the country that had been taken by the Mexican-American War.

So those are his bigger accomplishments.

But then, of course, he ran for presidency three different times, 1824, 32, and 44.

So he couldn't quite get there despite his accomplishments.

So he was a master of the House and Senate, kind of like a Mitch McConnell, only a much better speaker, of course.

He was very eloquent.

He was part of that great troika, Daniel Webster.

I guess he was his ally more than not.

And then John J.

Calhoun.

But he was kind of ubiquitous, like Hubert Humphrey ran for president, what, twice or three times?

Humphrey.

And Humphrey was a master of the Senate.

And he was a very, I mean, he had a certain speaking style.

I don't think I remember it was eloquent, but people at the time did.

And he was kind of like Henry Clay.

He was the mayor of Minneapolis, a strong civil rights person, senator, and he was a great compromiser as well.

And of course, McGovern had rejected him and destroyed him in 72.

And that was a big mistake because remember, Humphrey almost won the election of 1968.

Another month or two weeks longer, he would have beat Nixon.

So, but Henry Clay was that great compromiser.

He had the mastery of the rules and regulations, Senate.

The compromise essentially was not, his idea of compromise was not going to work

because the North, he was a Kentucky man, and he didn't, and he inherited slaves, as I remember himself.

I think he owned slave, but he was against slavery, even though he was a man of the more to the South than of the North.

But my point is that that was not going to work, that type of you get your slave state, we get our free state, you get your slave state, because the states were not equal in size or population.

So there was always going to be,

whether it was the Great Compromise of 1850 or the Missouri Compromise, there was always going to be this idea that,

well, these states want to be in and they're more than these states, or this state's not as big as that state, or this state's more populous.

And just giving them two centers each was not going to, it just prolonged the agony.

And prolonging the agony meant that weaponry, population,

industry, and the ability to kill people increased.

And so they were prolonging it.

The The only compromise that people had floated

was

emancipation and buy them out.

And there were people in the South and people in the North that wanted to do that.

Buy them out, meaning purchase Africa.

But people in the North said, you know, I'm not going to stain my hands with giving money to wicked slave owners.

And wicked slave owners said,

I'm not going to be bought off and the money they will give me will not fully represent the value of my commodity, my human commodity.

And that came up even in the Civil War.

I mean, the South,

after that terrible summer of 1864, there were negotiations that brought that up again, that maybe we could just stop this war if you'll be willing to emancipate all of the slaves and we will compensate you.

And I think again, the South was not interested in that.

And so he was doomed for those compromises.

I guess he came closest in 1844.

He was, I don't know what you'd call him, a 1950s Republican, maybe, a moderate Republican, sort of like the isolationist movement and the Republican Party.

He was an internationalist in the sense that he thought America's values would sweep the world, but he didn't, he was against the Mexican War and things like that.

He died fortunately for himself before the Civil War.

I think historians until recently have until the woke movement have thought that the election of 1844 was fortuitous in getting Polk as president

because he was one of the few people who just said, I want to be president for four years and that's it.

And he expanded the United States.

He was a pretty efficient, he was a manifest destiny guy.

And he pretty much said, these are what people want.

This is the fluid situation.

I'm going to institutionalize it and leave that as a legacy.

And then I'm going to get out of here.

And he was a good president, probably better than Henry Clay would have been.

Yeah, definitely.

Is there another loser?

Is there another another loser you have?

There is, but I just want to ask you one more thing because he did help to author and pass the force bill, which was against South Carolina's nullification because of tariffs.

So he didn't really appreciate the whole idea of nullifying federal law at all.

Oh, he didn't.

Yeah, but I remember either did Andrew Jackson.

In fact, as I remember.

I remember, I want to be very careful here.

He didn't like Jackson.

He had worked for Jackson and he opposed him.

And they both agreed that although they were men of the South and they understood that these Northern mercantile traders and industrialists wanted no tariff so they could protect their industries from Europe, they wanted high tariffs.

Those high tariffs hurt the South because the South had to import all of their industrial goods, such as they were at that time, and products that finished cloth cloth and stuff like that at the time.

And the North either wanted them to buy them from the North

or

restrict European trade and make them, you know, make them pay.

So the South in a weird way had a liberal idea of trade.

They wanted no tariffs.

And then when South Carolina said, you know what, we're just going to ignore the federal government.

Clay tried to reason with him.

But it was Jackson, also a man of the South, that said, nope, they're either going to follow the law, I'm going to send troops down there to force them to.

And that was weird because Clay thought that was extreme.

That was partly his nature of always compromising.

But on that particular issue, Andrew Jackson was more the Federalist than Clay, as I remember.

Yeah, he was.

I don't think that

You know, John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay and all those guys understood that when you unleashed the Constitution and the system of government and you unleashed all this land.

And you opened, unlike the Spanish colonization of the New World, where you had to be Catholic, you had to be Spanish, or you couldn't get into Latin America or South America or Mexico or the Caribbean.

In some cases, the French had concessions there.

But when you opened it up to everybody, and they did, the Americans did, then wow, you were going to get this rambunctious,

very volatile group of populist sentiments.

People are going to come from Germany.

They were going to come from Scotland.

They were going to come from Ireland.

They were poor.

They had nothing going for them.

And soon they would come from Eastern Europe.

They'd come from Asia.

They had nothing.

And they came here and they needed a government to acknowledge that.

And this idea of an aristocratic East Coast, fourth, fifth generation North American political class that were going to be sober and judicious and reflect this sort of backroom dealing, the corrupt bargain, you know, and it's going to reappear too.

Remember 1876, Benjamin Harrison got

elected by buying the electoral votes in exchange for Indian Reconstruction.

But my point is that Hemney Clay was a man of the past and

a good man of the past, but Andrew Jackson and he founded the Democratic Party.

Jackson did.

Yeah.

All right, Victor.

Well, let's, I do have another loser, but let's come back after some messages and we'll talk about William Jennings Bryan.

So we'll be right back.

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All right, Victor, my third loser is William Jennings Bryan, and he was known mostly for his cross of gold speech and really as an orator, and then also for like Henry Clay having run for the presidency three different times and having lost.

So once again, another character who has a strident, interesting aspect to him.

He's definitely a supporter of populists.

He's considered the purveyor of modern liberalism from this early 19th century.

He had the interests of the South and the West.

And if you don't mind, I'll read an interesting thing.

So he's a Democratic Party candidate.

And he says in his cross of gold, upon which side will the Democratic Party fight?

Upon the side of the idle holders of idle capital or upon the side of the struggling masses?

That is the question which the party must answer first.

And then it must be answered by each individual hereafter.

The sympathies of the Democratic Party, as shown by the platform, are on the side of the struggling masses who have ever been the foundation of the Democratic Party.

I find that interesting because it doesn't seem that the Democratic Party, it seems like the Democratic Party today is that of the idle holder of idle capital to some extent, at least.

No, that's what the Democratic Party was.

My grandfather, you know, was a member or a charter member of the Sun-Made Raisin Cooperative.

He was a member of the Grange.

They had nothing, but they were hard with farming.

So this was the idea that these idle capitalists back east had gold and there was too little currency in circulation.

And so there was too much product, i.e.

farm product, in their cases, dried apricots or raisins.

And the railroads and everybody was charging farms too much.

And they wanted silver, silver coinage, and they wanted it minted.

It's pretty ironic that today silver is considered a hard currency and that even our silver coins aren't silver.

They're just silver veneer.

And paper was considered, you know, greenbacks were even more radical.

But the point was that you had to have a lot of currency.

in circulation and moderate inflation rather than deflation.

So the guys that had the money increased its value every year and the people that didn't couldn't get a hold of it for their products.

And so I grew up in this family because I was very close to my maternal grandparents.

And my grandmother was a very strange person, Georgia Way

Johnston with a T, who they claimed that they were distant relatives of Albert Sidney Johnson.

They came from New Mexico, but her mother had come from Alabama.

Very quiet whether anybody fought in the Civil War and the side of the South, but she did have, my grandmother did have a southern accent.

And she came to, it's a long story, but her brother was 12 years old, Marvel Johnson, who was shot in the head cleaning out a saloon in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

Their father then chased the perpetrator for two years and bankrupt the family's cattle ranch.

So they took the train.

They ended up in Selma, California.

And my grandmother went to cut peaches on my great-grandfather's farm.

And she met my grandfather.

But the point I'm making is she brought that agrarian southern populism.

And my grandfathers had been here already three generations.

They were the same way.

So when I was a little boy, she had been very successful, never went to college, but she was a women's Christian temperance speaker.

And she had won the Jubilee Diamond Contest.

She had a big diamond on her ring.

She'd won it.

But she would come up to us and

she was kind of a weird woman, and she'd get right in your face.

And she'd say, You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns.

You shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold and i always thought what the heck are you doing grandma william james bryant and then one day we were in the living room and the saturday we were all working we came in and there's that movie inherit the wind if you remember it clarence darrow the chicago smart lawyer is played by everybody's hero spencer tracy and frederick marshes i remember gave a great he looked like William James Bryant.

But Hollywood made it.

So it's a caricature of him because he's this Bible-thumping religious extremist, not the sophisticated evolutionist Darwinist, Darwinist.

And so my mom, you know, had gone to college, and we all thought that when it came on, and then my grandmother said, look at him, look at that hero, look at, look at William Jennings Bryan, what a wonderful man trying to respect the Bible and creation.

And that was the Democratic Party in those days.

And he had run for president in 1896 and 1900.

She was small then, but by 1908, she was 18 and she had been speaking on his behalf.

And then I remember my grandfather would get kind of, okay, mother, let's just calm it down, tone it down.

And she'd come up to us and she'd say, who said this?

And I said, what, grandma?

Who said, tear down your cities and the America will rearise if the country and the farm will produce it?

Tear down your farms and the cities will wither away.

I'm not quoting it, I'm just doing it by memory, but I grew up with that and it had a profound influence.

You know, I wrote Fields Without Dreams, sort of in that spirit.

And while I have contempt for the modern democratic progressive movement, there was something in the populism that in a weird way, I admired.

And then Trump, when he went out and started saying, our farmers, our soldiers, our workers, our, our, our, and he appealed to people in the forgotten rust belt.

It was a very William Jennings Bryan strain to him.

And that was what nobody ever figured out about Trump, that they thought he's just a wheeler dealer, which he was, New York Manhattan elite, which he was, that sort of had scoundrel tendencies, which he may or may not have had, and uncouth.

But what they didn't understand is he had real affinity for the working person.

And he was trying to, I mean, he hated banks.

Trump did.

And one of the weaknesses of Trump was he was always complaining about the Fed when it had almost zero interest rates as if they were too high.

And yet he kept inflation down because, you know, this old democratic sense, he was trying to create supply.

Pump more oil, pump more natural gas, produce more food.

What do we need to go out there and get more water?

Let's get America going.

And the idea was you're going to flood it with supply so you could keep interest rates low because the money would not inflate because there was so much supply that demand couldn't keep up with it.

Very different than Job the Modern Party, you know.

Pay people not to work, supply chains interruption, discourage productivity, and then

foster high inflation.

Yes, and expand the money supply at the same time.

So

that's very ironic because I don't think the Never Trumpers ever understood that about maybe they did and that's why they hated him because of his orange hair and his comb over and his mile-long tie and the Queen's accent just offended their sense of propriety in the New York-Washington nexus.

But he was a typical William Jennings Bryant Democrat in a lot of ways.

But, you know, it's one of those, I guess that's the right word, lost cause.

Because, I mean,

he ran again, what, in 1908, the third time.

And

then Wilson made him his Secretary of State, and he broke with Wilson over the Lusitania, you know, the going to

clearly that he was not in favor of, I guess we would say, what did Trump call them?

Optional wars in the Middle East, losing war, losers' wars, all of those things.

So he was a very Trumpian figure.

And I think that's, I always copied a word I've used two or three times

because I heard that, learned that from my grandmother, and that was bourbon, bourbon Democrat, the bourbon Democrats.

Those remember the party split apart.

And the Grover Cleveland wing was sort of, I think when, and I'm not remembering this right, but Grover Cleveland was sort of like a never-Trumper.

And so when Bryan ran, Cleveland opposed him as a Democrat.

And a lot of the Democratic establishment opposed that, especially his last and most feudal effort.

And

the Bryant people called them bourbon Democrats, that they were the entrenched

class, sort of like Romney was a, I think I use the word bourbon Republican.

You know, the idea of Romney and the McCain wing and the Bushes, you know, I like, but my God, they were bourbons in the sense that we're going to be very

sober and judicious.

If we get 48%, 49% of the vote, we have some members in Congress, the Bob Michael kind of Marcus of Quinsbury rules, House of Representatives, and then we can kind of slow abortion down a little bit, slow, maybe kind of make the border a little less porous.

We'll have a little bit more growth, but not a lot of federal growth and regulation.

We believe in cap and trade.

We'll just kind of, that was what bourbons were until this maniac came in

with his cross of gold populism.

That's what Trump was.

Yeah, that's true.

That's very clear picture.

It is.

It is.

You know, I just want to correct something.

In his latter years, after he had his political career and after he broke with Wilson over American, what was called American imperialism.

But as I always say, we weren't very good at it if we were imperialists, right?

But his latter years, he became an anti-evolutionist activist and he opposed Darwinism too.

So he did have that to defend Hollywood.

He did have that, maybe not Bible thumping, but he had that side to him.

Let's not be too hasty.

There are listeners out there that will say, Sammy, Sammy, Sammy.

They're not creationists either.

They will say there have been flaws in the Darwinian paradigm that do not explain sort of

evolutionary practice in the animal kingdom.

And more importantly, there are elements in our general experience that science can't completely explain.

So there has to be an avenue for faith.

And I mentioned this before.

I mean, if I leave this house, after talking to you and I get in my car and I get killed, you can say,

well, you know, you fell asleep and went off the road or a drunk driver ran the thing, but you can't tell me why it was me at that point.

There's no explanation for it other than there's just random occurrences.

And so people in that void of science, they've turned to faith.

And

that's important because there can be a tyranny of science.

We saw it with the COVID.

People of faith said, you know,

this pandemic has been here for centuries, the idea of a pandemic.

And science says it mutates.

And

we have to press on and

we have to take care of our families and our older people.

But this idea, no, no, science dictates.

Science is rational.

It says

you don't need masks.

No, you do need mass.

No, you need two masks.

No, you're going to have herd immunity at 60.

No, you're going to have seven.

It's like stomach ulcers.

Remember when I grew up?

Don't get too stressed out.

Take tums because you'll get ulcers.

And then they said, ulcers are caused by stress, too much gastric acid.

So then they gave you,

and then science came and said, we can stop all ulcers with Zantec or Tagamat.

It'll be pressure.

And they help.

But then if you said, no, it's caused by E.

pylori, a type of bacterial strain that eats away at the stomach in some people.

They'd say, you're nuts.

Science doesn't say that.

And science did say that.

Now I think we're beyond H.

pylori.

And they said it doesn't account for all ulcers.

So that's what I'm pointing.

Science is fluid.

And I'm not, I believe in evolution, but I don't believe that evolution has the answers for every in the way that that movie does.

And that movie, and to be fair to it, I think Stanley Kramer, who was a great British director of epic films,

Spencer Tracy was a great actor.

The only thing I can't remember, I think Harry Morgan

was the

judge.

But anyway, and that, I like harry morgan but he had an odd presence on the screen but in any case frederick marsh is one of my favorite actors he was so good in uh hombre do you remember yeah but it doesn't harry morgan plays a really good truman like character right kind of very staid and and not very emotional that's right but he has a weird voice and he He works in certain roles, yeah.

But Frederick Marsh is one of the great actors of all time.

I thought in that movie, he sort of stole it from a Spencer Tracy character, if I remember correctly.

And, you know, it's, he lost the case, William Jones Bryan, and I think it kind of did him in because he had a stroke right after that.

I don't know if it was his pulmonary artery or something.

He just died.

He wasn't that heavy, but he was the first person that created really the modern idea of a campaign.

Yeah.

I mean, Joe Biden campaign, like a pre-1896 candidate where they sat on their log, they went and found a log cabin

minute or what, and they stayed on the porch and they had all the reporters come in and write dispatches on telegraphs and they didn't do anything.

And then this crazy 36 or 37 year old, however old he was, Bryant went out and barnstormed the country, you know, like Wilson did to get the League of Nations.

That was new.

Biden brought us back, remember, to the 19th century where he said, nope, I'm not campaigning.

I'm not going to be a William James Bryant.

I'm going to stay in my basement or have 10 or 12 cars in a parking lot that honk when I speak from my car or whatever he did.

And look at the results.

This is what we got.

This talk today is kind of inspired by Biden because I was thinking, well, he had this.

super long career like these guys and he should have just gone off into never never land not ever having been president but it's so weird he ended up as president and i feel like he's the president that shouldn't have been.

Well, he wasn't, he is a president.

He's not a president.

He's a puppet.

And so he's being, other people are the president, but he would have never been president in a normal nomination process.

But the Democratic Party, partly because of COVID, but partly because of its takeover by the hard left has was insane.

So when you say,

I mean, would you want President Corey Booker, President Beto Arourke, President Bernie Sanders, President Elizabeth Warren, President Julian Castro, President Pete Budigig, compared to that crowd, the majority of Democrats, even though they'd moved left, they said, you know what?

We are going to be destroyed by Donald Trump in the election unless we get a veneer of a normal person.

So old Joe Biden, who was out making money from burisma and all of the stuff, they said, Joe, you've got to run.

And he didn't know where he didn't know where he was then.

And so he did.

And then Clyburn

got him the minority vote.

And they had reasons, they being marginalized people, quote unquote, had reason to doubt Biden because he'd had a racialist twinge in his entire career that came out pretty clearly during that campaign with junkie and you ain't black and all that stuff.

So that's how he got here.

And nobody thought.

he would get here.

And he got here.

And of course, the media was against Trump and Biden had

outraised him three to one.

And now we know that Zuckbucks or Zuckbucks or whatever it was, Mark Zuckerberg, Zuckerberg's $419 million,

changing the voting laws, all of that had an effect.

So that's how we got Biden, somebody who was non-compos mentes.

And that's what we're stuck with.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, then I just have one more person that I'm curious about, because I've heard you mention him, but you haven't really talked extensively about George McGovern and his landside loss in 1972 against Richard Nixon.

I mean, he is interesting, I think, because he was a World War II pilot over Germany for two years.

So pretty extraordinary career without having become president.

Yeah, my father was a very conservative Democrat.

But when McGovern came, we came home from UC Santa Cruz as know-nothing students.

And I think

there was a campaign, believe it or not, in 1972 at UC Santa Cruz, because everybody knew Nixon had done a pretty good job and was going to win.

Remember, Nixon really wasn't a conservative.

He founded the EPA, he had wage and price control.

But it was, if every Santa Cruz student will go tell their parents to vote Democratic, we did that nationwide, we'd win.

As if any parent would listen to an idiot from UC Santa Cruz kid, they'd probably say, shut the blank up.

I'm paying your tuition.

Well, if there was tuition.

Anyway, my point is that he was a B-24.

I don't know how many missions he flew, 30 or 40, but he was from Italy, you know, and he flew from Italy, which is often, boy, they had some of the worst missions because they tried to fly up into southern Europe.

That was the idea of the whole Italian bombing campaign, that they could reach areas of Eastern Europe, the oil fields in Romania, more accessibly than they could from Britain.

He was a war veteran, and my father thought, well, that guy's a bomber pilot, and my B-29 experience says I got to vote for him, although he didn't really agree with a lot of the stuff he did.

But

then he had a very, as I, I'm just talking from memory, so excuse me, but I just remember that after trying to get a socialist agenda, he was our first serious Bernie Sanders.

He hijacked the 1972 party.

Remember, he had kind of come in at the last moment in 68, said, I knew Robert Kennedy.

He's been killed.

If you want to vote for Kennedy instead of the mainstream, you vote for me.

And it didn't work.

But after he hijacked the party and he was destroyed, I mean, he destroyed the Democratic Party from 72.

It would have been destroyed forever if it hadn't been for Watergate.

But it was only resurrected by Jimmy Carter, who passed himself off as a southern accented moderate, which he wasn't.

But anyway, he lived to be what, in his 90s.

And he went back and I think he bought a bed and breakfast with his wife.

And he always had health problems.

He was always ill, but he worked himself to exhaustion.

He got kind of conservative in a really weird way.

He couldn't believe that all of these things he had supported his entire life, regulations, regulations, regulations.

Then he was on the other end of it and thought, wow, you're out.

You're regulating people to death.

So he had a come to Jesus moment for a minute.

And I remember him and Stephen Ambrose, I think one of the last, if not the last book he wrote, The Wild Blue, which he plagiarized and which sadly destroyed his career and then which opened a can of worms that we went back and looked at his Eisenhower biography and his source material could not be verified there.

So that's a whole nother rant.

But in that, George McGovern is a central figure as a B-24 pilot, as I remember.

There's about six pages that are verbatim.

And, you know, unlike other plagiarists, Doris kearns she addressed it and sort well my research aid did it i didn't realize i confused them they usually try to find some impossible explanation but an explanation they try to find he didn't even try

i don't care what you say i think fred barnes exposed him in the weekly standards i remember but he didn't ambrose didn't even make the attempt i met him once you know when i was a graduate student he came to stanford as i remember he was a professor i don't know if it was in new mexico and he came in and they had this, he was writing a book on Custer Red Cloud and, you know, the crazy horse.

And it was the weirdest thing in the world.

It was in the early 75, maybe.

And this guy came in with buckskin fringe, like tassels on his coat, with hair down to his shoulders, like a hippie.

Sounds like Ward Churchill.

He looked like, well, he did.

He did.

And he was chain smoking.

And he gave this talk on his book at Stanford.

And I think he had been until Bruce Franklin, I think he had actually been the only,

one of the only, maybe with Bruce Franklin at Stanford, the Maoists, but he was a fired tenured professor for his radical campus disruptions of an attack on Nixons, I remember.

And then all of a sudden, the D-Day book and all of that, Band of Brothers, he had a whole backlog of books on war and World War II, especially.

And they had sold moderately well.

But suddenly he became,

with the documentary films, he became a hero.

And all of his backlisting books then were reissued and he made a fortune.

And then he cut his hair and everybody thought he was this very gruff, conservative senior statesman.

And our military historian Poir X Alonz.

One of his books had George McGovern in it, though.

Yeah,

that's the one I'm talking about.

The Wild Blue.

Yeah.

It did.

I don't know to the degree he had plagiarized that section.

Boy, I had used the Eisenhower book, and he has end notes that are long descriptions of actual transcriptions where he supposedly talked to Eisenhower.

And as I remember, those dates of those interviews do not jive with the Eisenhower calendar, that Eisenhower was not available at the times he said he actually talked to him.

So he made up stuff essentially.

He never replied to his critic.

Plagiarism is one of the worst things you can do.

I mean, I've written 25 books, and I've never been accused of it.

It's you're stealing somebody's intellectual content.

I can see that if you're quoting somebody and you leave out a quotation mark, then you've got to address that and apologize.

But, you know, it's a little harder to do.

I mean, it's done by lazy people.

And

we've had some very famous plagiarizers that really, if they're on the left end of the spectrum, they had sort of an immunity from scrutiny.

Who's a plagiarizer now?

It's Joe Biden?

Everybody's been a plagiarizer.

Martin Luther King plagiarized large sections of his

thesis.

His doctoral thesis.

Nobody cared.

Yeah.

Yeah, I guess.

And that's what they're banking on.

Their name has fame and they don't have to worry about their methods of getting there.

Well, Victor, let's take a second for some messages and come right back to talk about the Democrats before the election of 2022.

We're back.

And Victor, I know that you wanted to talk about the Democratic panic as we reached the midterms.

And so why don't I let you shoot from here?

You know, it's very funny as the polls get, they start to crystallize that they're going to lose the House.

Now the Democrats are saying, we can save the Senate.

If you go back and look at what they said six weeks ago, the Senate's untouchable.

So they understand

that they got what they wanted.

They got the House.

They got the Senate.

The courts were liberal.

They had all the institutions that create influence and

public opinion, Hollywood, media, social media, new media, old media, academic life, 12 through K, K through 12,

corporate boardroom, you name it, they've got it.

And they got what they wanted.

And they pushed through an agenda that destroyed the border, destroyed energy independence, destroyed moderate inflation.

Basically, it didn't exist.

They destroyed everything, foreign policy with Afghanistan, you name it, critical race theory.

They tore the country apart over race, and they know it.

And so now they're thinking, well, wait a minute.

Joe Biden came in.

We had demonized Trump.

We had created the January 6th idea that this was a full-blown insurrection and revolution.

And what happened?

Well, what happened is you guys got your chance and you showed us us, the American people, who you were.

So, what do you do now when you're going to take them all out?

You're going to ruin that whole anti-Trump movement and you're going to lose.

And they're going to lose in November and they're going to lose the House, which means their legislative agenda is over with.

If they lose the Senate, and I think they will, it's really over with.

If they only end up with 40 seats, which is mathematically possible, then they've lost all power.

And essentially, the House and the Senate will rule the government.

They will just make laws.

Biden will veto them and they will overturn them.

Because Biden and the new left are lawless, they will govern now after November through executive order.

One thing that I think we're going to watch is that Democrats set certain precedents.

Remember that in their arrogance and hubris when they thought they had the power or even when they were in the opposite, the first president, when you're a president and the opposition power takes control of the house, they are going to impeach you.

That's just what they told us.

And there will be no special prosecutor's report.

There will be no cross-examination.

There will be no formal hearings.

They're just going to impeach you.

That's what they did to Trump over the phone call.

There was no special prosecutor.

Now we know that almost everything that Trump alleged about the corrupt Biden family in Ukraine is true.

And we know that Barack Obama did stop javelin missiles and Trump did okay them and javelin missiles turned out to be very important.

Nevertheless, they impeach.

Are they going to do that?

We now know that they created a precedent.

You tear up the state of the union if you don't like it on national TV.

Is Kevin McCarthy going to do that, like Nancy Pelosi?

tear up Joe Biden's state of the union.

Maybe they're going to say, you know what, we fought to preserve the filibuster.

If they get 59 Senate seats, 58.

But you guys were right.

That filibuster is an archaic institution and we're going to deny it to you.

Just the way Obama flipped and flopped on it when he was a senator.

And remember, he just said at the McCain funeral, no, the filibuster was racist.

What if the Republicans, Mitch McConnell says, you know what, you're right, Barack?

It's racist.

We're going to get rid of it.

And we're just, we'll won the Senate with a 51 vote like you thought you could if it had not been for cinema and manchin, they would have gotten rid of it.

And maybe they're going to say, you know what, we need a national voting law and we're going to pass it over the protestations of the states.

And it's going to say that every single state must have this percentage of actual election day votes.

And you must present an ID, you people in Minnesota.

And they want to do that.

And so that's something.

that we're going to watch that's really coming up.

And they can't explain this.

They can't explain the hypocrisy of what of them doing to the democrats what the democrats did to the republicans or trump but more importantly they can't explain their failure because they're idolal but why don't they have the guts to say i'd like that damn border i let in two million people i'm gonna let in another two million that's the only way to change the demography and get away from you horrible conservative traditionalists or why don't they say we're going to have more critical race theory.

We're going to have more transgender stuff.

Or we lost 80 billion in Afghanistan, more more power to it taliban's not that bad but they never do that they do all this stuff and they say

vladimir putin did it he caused inflation he caught even though it was roaring when the war he caused the energy or donald trump did it or it's not that bad but it's going to go away yeah they never

they never give a defense of it yeah they think in their souls or in their minds is that the people don't know what's good for them.

I mean, that's got to be there.

They don't know what's good for them.

We know we're losing, but we got to do these things and it's good for everybody.

But that's why populism is so bad for these people.

It's very funny because that used to be the complaint against the golf club caring, silk-stocking Republican, that sober and judicious captains of industry and government.

sixth generation blue-blood Ivy League, Wall Street brokers, they were men of sophistication and knowledge, and they just have to tell us the unwashed.

And the Democratic Party was, no, no, the unwashed know they need an eight-hour workday and a 40-hour work week.

And now it's just flipped that the Democratic Party hates the people and they don't like Americans and they got their agenda and they want to extend it to a utopian socialist nightmare.

And they're a party of the very, very wealthy and the very poor.

And the Republican Party now is a party of the lower and middle middle classes and upper middle classes, just the way it is.

And they trust the people and the Democratic.

You can see it with the Twitter wars.

They are so paranoid that this iconoclastic Elon Musk might take over their billion-dollar, multi-billion dollar company and make it open and free.

And you just couldn't have some guy tweeting right before the election that I think that Elon Musk's Twitter is going to give me the right to say whatever I want.

And one of the things I'm going to say is Hunter Biden's laptop was real.

Just can't have that.

Can't have a guy getting on Twitter and saying, you know, I read this article, peer-reviewed article in Scotland, and it says that masks have very little efficacy.

Can't do that.

So that's what they're scared of.

Yeah, they are.

Finally, they say Biden says,

President has no control over energy, has no control over the border.

He has no control over war.

He has no control over the economy.

He has no control over inflation why are you blaming biden when before he when he was running as a candidate he said i will end the virus i won't you know i won't have lockdowns i will end the virus i will bring respect back to the presidency i will get the economy moving it was moving i will make sure that america is respected and work with our allies again not leave them hanging in afghanistan as you depart the back door.

So he said he could do all these things and now he did them and they blew up.

And he said, I never had any power to do anything.

Why are you people mad at me?

That's the latest talking point.

Yeah.

Well, I think you're putting your hopes on that there's enough people in the Democratic Party to see that their policies are the wrong policies, even if the leadership can't change their wicked ways.

I hope you're right about that once again.

I don't know if the

constituency can figure them out.

The most recent poll went through every rubric of democratic support hispanic hispanics they've had like a 25 point shift african americans about 15 point

hispanics latinos whatever term we use are about 51 or 52 percent going to vote for the a republican candidate

and african-american males are getting close to that and biden's popularity has plunged white college educated democrats male, are now anti-Biden.

And the only group that is still loyal to the Democratic agenda is white college educated women.

That's the only one.

And those are mostly, you know, women who are working in the workplace.

And a lot of them are not married.

A lot of them are younger.

But they're losing that too.

They're still, so he's lost all of his constituencies.

As I said, I think to Jack the other day,

I think a lot of Democrats who bought into this Biden is the uniter, Trump was evil incarnate, they're going to quietly go into their mail-in ballot or their early ballot, and they'll just turn their head away, put their hands over their eyes and vote for Trump, vote Trump mega agenda for the candidates.

And then they're going to say,

I don't know who I voted for, or I didn't vote for them, or they go to a cocktail party, they go to work, and somebody says, wow, this was a wipeout.

And they said, yeah,

it's really disturbing.

I wouldn't, and they're going to deny it.

Yeah, I suppose.

But with your

reasons, yeah, understood.

But with your statistics, then you must expect some sort of change in California voting and California government, maybe with the transformation of this Hispanic vote.

25%,

you don't think?

Well, it had some glimmers of hope when they rejected the resurrection of affirmative action and quotas and so the people themselves rejected that by 10 points and some of the ballot propositions from the hard left bay area legislators failed so that was good but the recall election the republicans were all divided they didn't they didn't have many money and that was a very poorly conducted recall campaign.

But here in California, we have a rendezvous with a lot of problems because if you want to build a house or buy a house or any house from La Jolla to Berkeley, it's $1,000 a square foot almost.

If you want to remodel, it's $500.

If you want to fill up at the tank, it's $620 or $6.30 or $6.50 a gallon.

If you've got a diesel pickup, it's $7 a gallon.

If you want to do anything, now it's a 32-hour work week.

And we have created an entire resistance economy.

So if I drive from bakersfield california to sacramento california and i veer off the 99 i will see in corners people selling not just clothes not just tools but drinks food canteen there's no tax being collected as i said i i go to home depot out in the parking lot of guys selling fruit strawberries other people you walk out with romex i'll buy that from you the idea is they didn't have to pay taxes on it you know i said to the person i walked out the other day with Romex, and he said, I'll buy that from you.

And I said, I just paid, you know, 10% on top of the price that you want to pay me.

So

we're in a resistance now in the Latino community to the extent that it's still

not being integrated and assimilated.

And it is, I think, is saying, I can't afford gas.

I can't afford housing.

I can't afford electricity.

Who thought up these stupid ideas?

All these people over there.

I went along with you as long as you gave me open borders and entitlements.

But now I'm middle class.

I'm sick of you people talking down to me about transgendered athletes that are men or transsexuals going into prison or aborting everybody up until a few days before.

I don't like that anymore.

And I think that's happening.

The old idea was in California, when you objected, you said we pay the highest

basket of gas or income or sales tax.

The idea of the Bay Area establishment was there's the door.

And the quicker you get out of here and go to Texas, the less we have to see of your ilk.

And we're importing a lot of better people from Oaxaca, Mexico, or from India or whatever, and we don't want you anymore.

So leave.

And it wasn't just white people, it was everybody leave that's middle class and entrepreneurial and owns a McDonald's or 7-Eleven or tire store.

And so there's a lot of people that have left, but they're still, people are people.

Socially.

California seems to limp along, though.

Its cities seem to still attract tourists and lots of people.

I mean, has San Francisco lost population?

Has Los Angeles lost population?

Yes, they have, actually.

They have.

Yes.

And they're crime ridden, and you cannot go to them without.

I mean, when you have the sheriff of Los Angeles County and the chief of police, saying, if you come to our city, we can't guarantee your safety.

If you go to San Francisco,

a corporation just shut down the other day on Market Street in San Francisco because its employees were being attacked in and out on their way to work.

On their way to work, on their way out.

They're dysfunctional societies.

The only reason that California continues is it's got the greatest concentration of wealth in the history of civilization.

Between San Francisco and San Jose,

they've got about $5 trillion of market capitalization.

Not that they have that, everybody has that, but that's what that stock is worth.

And it's enormously, it's got millionaires everywhere, and they are the nexus of the world.

I think that's going to end because it's being diffused as we speak, but that dominates everything.

And then you've got natural weather, and you've got this, it's the richest agricultural state by either any definition, the value of its crops or the variety of its crops.

And so it's got everything going for it.

It's got the best universities in the world.

They're always rated.

I mean, no state has Stanford University, UC Berkeley, UCLA, USC, Caltech, all in one state.

But that was all given to us by a better, you know, bipartisan

generation.

Yeah.

We were wasteful.

Yeah.

As the poet Horace said, we who were worse than our fathers have brought forth a generation worse than us.

Well, maybe we're seeing the ebb of the tide, Victor.

Maybe defeat will turn to victory, as Longfellow tells us.

Who knows?

Well, this is where we have to bring an end to this.

Thank you so much for your thoughts on these lesser politicians in history and also on the current democratic conundrum of what they're going to do about the 2022 elections if they're not to lose them.

And I have a feeling they're just going to lose them.

I hope that you're right on that.

But thank you very much, Victor Davis-Hansen.

Thank you for listening, everybody.

All right, this is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hansen, and we're signing off.