Biden's Unpopularity and the Filibuster

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

We have a special Friday edition for you.

We're going to be looking at Biden's unpopularity and the Democratic strategy to address that.

We'll also be looking at the voting rights bill and the filibuster, and then a Rouse Musson poll that finds Democrats are willing to take extraordinary measures for those who have not been vaccinated for COVID.

So we'll look at all three of those things in a moment when we return.

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Welcome back, and we'd like to say hello to Victor.

How are you doing, Victor, today?

Very good.

Very good, Sammy.

Yeah.

Is the future looking bright, do you think?

Don't laugh.

The future looking bright.

I saw parts of Joe Biden's press conference.

So it's not looking bright for him.

It's looking bright for some Americans who feel that his demise, tragic as it is, offers hope that the socialist project will end sooner than we think.

Yeah.

Okay, but first I would like to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin and Ily Anderson Senior Fellow in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

And as I said before the break, we are going to look at Biden's unpopularity.

And I just want to state a few statistics here as to what is so unpopular and a few statistics on crime, economy, inflation.

So if we look at it, his disapproval ratings for his policies on crime is at 61%.

His disapproval rating for the economy is 62%.

Inflation, 70% disapproval, and immigration at 64%

disapproval.

So Biden's approval ratings are in the tank.

And I can't believe he's not at this point the worst president in American history.

Can I ask you a question?

I don't understand.

Who are the 36% who think the border is a great thing?

I have no idea.

They must not be watching this.

They're saying, wow, we let in 2 million people in a time of plague with no vaccinations and no tests.

And they just walked across the border.

And that's, we've got to get more of that.

Okay.

So, but first, let me ask you a couple of questions and I'll let you go.

First off, we want to know what Biden and the Democratic team are planning on doing for 2024, given those first year disapproval ratings.

And then the second thing is, though, the number of people people who are identifying themselves as Democratic or leaning Democratic has dropped in the last year.

So at the beginning of the year, those who saw themselves as Democratic or leaning was 49%.

It's dropped all the way at the end of 2021 to 42%, that seven-point drop.

And those who saw themselves as Republican at the beginning of 2021 was 40%, and it went all the way up to 47%.

That's Republican or Republican.

So crazy.

My question is only, are we on a period in U.S.

history that there's a drastic change of party?

I think it's more than just dissatisfaction with the woke Bidenites.

That's a 14% switch.

And most importantly, there's no indication that it's going to decelerate.

And it reflects not just Afghanistan, not just the border, not just economic policy, not just energy policy, not just racial disunion, all of that stuff, but all of them at once in a time of a pandemic.

So I think a lot of people are saying, you know what?

When I look at these DAs that are letting people off with serious crimes, and then they go out and prey on people, whether wealthy or suburbanized or people of the inner city, or I see this transgender movement now really destroying women's sports, when I see empty shelves, the whole bit, it's like a system, you know, we'll get to that, a systems collapse.

But they only can blame one person.

I mean, all

Biden had to do was just go to sleep and say, you know what?

I built the wall.

You know what?

I got a great policy to

protect Bagram and the cities in Afghanistan, but no more than 3,500 people.

You know what?

I got some three great vaccinations.

I created them basically, and they're great.

And now I'm turning to therapies.

And all he had to do was just coast because everything was going pretty well.

And he couldn't do it because he created a Faustian bargain with his hard left.

Yeah, instead, he went to sleep and he instituted our worst nightmare, I think.

He did.

And it's really hurt a lot of people.

This woke idea, everybody thinks, wow, woke is just a bunch of Marxists or the naive or the power-hungry.

It is a very cruel ideology.

It says to inner-city residents: we white liberal elites are going to run a laboratory experiment on you.

We're going to let out all the people who carjack and smash and grab and murder and their assault.

They're going to be back on the street.

Maybe not immediately if they murder or they have aggregated souls, but within a few years, if not months.

And they're going to be unleashed upon you people.

And then we're going to tell all of you people who played by the rules and you got a 4.4 and you were, you took advanced placement test and you had high test scores sorry you're the wrong racial complexion you you're not going to go to your dream of princeton or harvard or cornell or stamp just the way it is we wealthy white people have decided what's good for you and it's really when you think about it whether you destroy as i said women's sports or you make people unsafe or just think of the thousands of people right now who sent away for COVID test.

Or let's say some person

couldn't get a part, so he's sent away for a part, and it's all sitting in the trash along the LA tracks because the LA County District Attorney will not enforce the law.

That looks like an 1890s train robbery out there.

So

it's a very cruel thing to tell little children as well that this person is good, this person is bad, because it's okay in the present to be racist to combat racism that was bad in the past.

So good racism, okay.

Now, bad racism, we're trying to discuss by being racist in the present.

And it's very pernicious idea.

And we're never going to get rid of it if people just keep thinking these are a bunch of politically correct people or race, class, and gender or diversity, equity, inclusion.

No, this is a hardcore, racist, mean-spirited, callous movement that does not care about individual lives and how they're affected and hurt and damaged.

And boy, if this boomerangs on the people who envision this idea, it will stop.

But it won't stop until the people who live in walled estates, people start climbing over their walls, or their Mercedes or Carjack.

Or I don't want that to happen.

Let me be clear about that.

But it's not going to stop until they cannot find gas, or

the 18% proposed income tax starts to affect them in California.

And then they will,

you know, they'll be woke themselves.

They'll be anti-woke.

Yeah.

You know, I was wondering, though, given all of that,

what you foresee for the strategy of the Democrats.

Well, that's a very, very interesting question, Sammy, because given the polls that you quoted, and one of them is 33% as of today, another one is 35, That's not a sustainable level for a Democratic candidate this November to win.

And there could be as many as anywhere from 30 to 70.

And so they're going to have to have a reset.

It seems to me they have three choices.

Let's examine choice one.

Joe Biden, he had a pathetic press conference, but he does, tries to do what Bill Clinton did after he was completely clobbered in the 1994 midterms, after Hillary got her wish and went hardcore socialist with single payer health care.

So Biden says, you know what?

We're going to do piecemeal.

We're not going to have a comprehensive Build Back Better or voter registration.

We're going to have a bipartisan and let's work together where we can.

There's no way you can because these people are extreme, but he'll say that.

And then he'll say, let's compromise and we'll build in these hotspots along the border, we'll finish the wall.

We'll build 30 miles, 50 miles, and we'll stop catch and release.

Okay.

And I'm having a task force to find a strategy.

We're going to work together in the Senate to deal with Putin and give recommendations.

We've got to deal with the debt, the debt, the debt, the deficits, the debt.

Both parties are responsible.

We're going to get Al's symptoms and Erskine Bowles back, and we're going to have a redux of the Simpson Bowles Commission.

And we've got to stop this out-of-control spending.

He could do things like that.

And he could stop the get off my grass, angry, unhinged person.

So he wouldn't call anybody, you know, Jefferson Davis or Confederate racist or something.

Now, that's a strategy that Bill Clinton used.

He really did.

He brought in Dick Morris to the back door.

He started talking about school uniforms, 100,000 police officers, all of that stuff.

And

it worked because he was re-elected in 96.

And so that's something he could do.

He's not going to do that.

He's not capable of.

He doesn't have Bill Clinton skills.

He doesn't have Bill Clint's slipperiness and fluidity.

He's not, he doesn't have Bill Clinton's brains.

Bill Clinton had to deal with his wife and her party.

They were progressives.

We're beyond progressives.

These people are Marxists and socialists.

So he's riding a tiger that he can't get off.

Okay, so there's option number two.

Now, I know you're going to say, well, well, Kamala Harris and previous polls had polled worse than Joe Biden.

And to see Kamala Harris and to listen to her is not to like her.

This is a woman who, remember, in the summer of 2020, said the riots are not going to end, the violence.

They're not going to end.

They're not going to end.

They should not end.

Put those words in Donald Trump's mouth and he would have been indicted.

And then when she staged this phony, impromptu, quote-unquote, talk with young kids who are actually professional actors.

She's never been to the border, really.

So there's no redeeming features that recommend her to do anything, but she's not Joe Biden.

And that's something.

So what she could do is, and some people have discussed this, you can say, you know, under the original idea of the Constitution,

I was elected by the people.

I wasn't just Joe Biden's running mate.

They voted for me.

I'm an independent person.

There's nothing that says I've got to parrot what he does.

So I'm going to have independent initiatives.

And maybe he can strip her of her powers, but she's going to try to find a way to divorce herself from this train wreck and sort of, you know, virtue signal and performance art her way around him.

I don't see that happening.

She's not skillful enough to do that.

Maybe some people that are listening can, but I just don't think that is going to happen.

I don't even see that.

I don't think she's clever enough to do that kind of thing.

No.

So if he's not going to reset, Joe Biden is not, successfully, and he's not going to be divorced by Kamala Harris and have an independent...

The reason I said that, by the way, is that she's going to run in 2024.

She can't run with any association with this guy, even if she's just as culpable.

The third thing is they say, damn it, put the pedal to the metal.

Let's just keep going because

something's got to give.

We're playing musical chairs with the economy.

We're printing money like crazy, three, four, five trillion dollars.

There's no reason to believe the whole thing is going to blow up before the midterms.

It's going to inflate things.

We'll keep going.

And let's just keep January 6th, January 6th.

Things have to change because maybe COVID, we won't get a pie variant.

It will just stop for a while at Omicron.

And maybe we'll get these.

big farmer to give us some pills.

It'll work.

And just keep going.

And And I think that's much more likely.

And then

they try to go to Manchin and send them and put all this pressure on them.

The only problem with this is, is Joe Manson was polling about 53% in his home state that went 70% for Trump.

He's polling 60% now.

A lot of people don't like him because he's associated with left-wing Democrats in West Virginia.

But he was not that popular 53 to 54.

He's popular now at 60.

And that's because he's not in bed with all these creepy people.

So when Bernie Sanders says, oh, we're going to primary him, or they call him a racist, his popularity goes up.

So I don't know what they're going to do.

If they're going to reset and pivot, or Kamala Harris is going to freelance, or they're going to double down.

Wait a second.

What about Hillary?

Will Hillary be?

We haven't got to that.

That's option number four.

I'm sorry.

I should have jumped in there because now we've got DEF CON four.

Everybody's nightmare.

Hillary's going around and she's saying, hmm,

let me think.

I kind of got that file and collusion and I didn't get too damaged.

I had the firewall with the DNC, Perkins Coe and Glen Simpson.

I got out of that okay.

And my health is not that good, but compared to Joe Biden, I'm Cleopatra.

You know, I'm young and vigorous.

So, you know, the Clintons are addicted to power and adulation.

They're junkies and they need a new injection.

They haven't had one for a quarter century.

So yes, she's ready herself.

She's got some problems.

We don't know where this final revelations of Jeffrey Epstein, she could announce her candidacy and right in the middle of it, we get some lurid account by a 40-year-old woman who has pictures of Bill Clinton because he was obviously doing something on that jet and those enclaves with underage girls.

That's wait a second.

Wait a second.

She's not guilty of her husband's crimes, is she?

Do you think people want to vote for a candidate and have him in the White House when he was a sexual predator?

I don't think so.

I hope you're right.

I hope you're right.

It's not just that, though.

Everybody's praying for that on the conservative side because this is a woman who went to West Virginia.

I don't know why she went to West Virginia.

There wasn't a chance in blank that she was ever going to win that state and told people that she was going to shut down the main industry of the state, coal.

And then she turned around and said, you know, half of Donald Trump's supporters, which are 25% of the country, right?

So half of them,

you know, 80 million people in the United States are a basket of deplorables and irredeemables and homophobic sexist races.

And there was no reason to say that.

So she just wrote off all of those people, just like she did, you know, when she said she didn't stay home and bake cookies and wrote off all the independent moms and stuff.

So she's a terrible candidate.

She cackles

and she's going to try to pivot a little bit to the center.

But that's a fourth Democratic point.

But I think the real story is there's a fundamental shift.

And

in a weird way, the never-trumpers have done the Republican Party a great favor.

Because when you looked at the Bill Crystals

and you looked at the David Froms, the Mona Charons, the George Will, I like all of them.

I have nothing personal against them, but they represented a media image of I'm tut-tut, oh, tis-tisk.

They reminded people that this was an East Coast aristocratic party.

And when you look at all of these CEOs that were doing it, they're not on board anymore.

This is a populist workers movement.

And that can expand because there's a lot more of them than Jamie Dimons.

And so who cares about Jamie Dimon or Warren Buffett or what Bill Gates says or Mark Cuban?

Screw them.

Nobody needs them.

And they're not going to be for you anyway.

And they don't have the money that Silicon Valley does.

So the Republican Party is divorced from the Chamber of Commerce in a sense.

If they want to vote for a better alternative, that's their business.

But it's not the heart and soul of the Republican Party anymore.

And it's not going to be tied down by all of these conflicts of interest with China.

Just think of it, man.

It's ubiquitous.

Mark Milley, PLO counterpart call, Bill Gates praising the Chinese reaction to the virus.

Mike Bloomberg telling us that China is not really a non-consensual society as he has billions in that economy trying to jumpstart communist countries.

So I guess what I'm saying is that this can be expanded because it says to the lower middle, the middle and the upper middle class, we're not just the party of golfers.

If you want to golf and you want to be an aristocrat, that's fine with us.

Join us.

But that's not the main driving force.

And that means that people from all different walks of life, all different backgrounds, racial, ethnic, can join.

When I was growing up in a Democratic household, whether it was fair or not, everybody made fun of Republicans.

All the people in the San Joaquin Valley, the Oklahoma diaspora, the Mexican-Americans, the small farmers, they always said, you know, there's about 10 Republicans and they run the

funeral parlor, their city attorney, the car dealership.

Their kids are really wealthy.

And

that was the unfair caricature.

Reagan did a lot to destroy that.

So Barry Goldwater, in a way, but that was the caricature.

That doesn't even exist anymore.

Those people do not like this Republican Party, their successor.

So I say more never Trump, the better.

When I heard the other day, did you see the other day that there's a group of, I guess, former Trump appointees, people, and I'll just give our audience three names that were mentioned.

The Mooch, Scaramucci.

quote-unquote anonymous, the guy who said he was trying to subvert the government, that minor official, I think he was in Homeland Security, and then John Bolton, three of the most unpopular people in the conservative-new Republican Party, and they're supposed to be, what, on the front line stopping Trump from running again?

I mean, gosh, promises, promises.

He's just probably, you know, hoping there's more of these people.

But that party's over with.

The old Republican Party is over with.

I think it is.

I had a question about that.

How much do you think the internet played in in the transformation of the Republican Party as you've just outlined?

Transformation of everything.

And it's good and bad.

I'll give you an example.

When I started to be an author, there were all these hierarchies.

When I would send an article to a magazine, there was no internet.

Then they would ask, well, what's your educational background?

Do you know this?

There were all these requisites.

And when you wanted to get a book published, you know, you had to go to New York and do an interview and do an interview.

and that still exists to some extent.

Or when you wanted to watch the news, there was basically NBC, ABC, CBS.

They ran the country.

And the same thing with Time Magazine or Atlantic.

Not that they don't exist, but Joe Rogan from mixed martial arts sets up his own, I guess, podcast stuff.

And he's got, what, 15, 14 million listeners?

He's got more listeners

than Fox News, CNN, MSNBC,

and

probably ABC put together.

And

when I read something today, a guy can go on Substack.

He can be anybody.

And by the sheer power of the argument, eventually they're going to break through and people are going to hear them or these TikTok stars.

So there are no requisites.

And that means we don't screen out stark raving mad people.

But at the same time, it's much more egalitarian.

There's people coming in.

It's meritorious.

It's merocratic.

The old boy network does not exist.

And I think that's part of the never Trump problem.

They said, wait a minute, who is this orange-skinned comb-over boar from New York?

Reality TV, the apprentice.

He didn't ask us.

He didn't come out to the Will residence and interview.

We don't know these people.

Who in the hell are they?

And they just thought they were going to put a damper on him but you know what they just went around him and how did he go around him he went around him with 70 million people on twitter and facebook and so it's been interesting it reminds me of the roman mob at a at a gladiatorial contest they they control the temple and you know some of the stuff you read is just crazy but eventually it gets kind of silenced and the old idea that you had to get a mentor and a patron and go through all these hoops so that you would be properly prepped before you were allowed to express your view.

It doesn't exist anymore.

People can self-publish on Amazon.

I mean, there are other places.

They can make movies.

They can do little videos and nobody can stop them.

I mean, when I wrote books, when I first started in the late 80s, people said to me, and I did it, there's three things that'll make and break your book.

If you get something, a long essay in the New Yorker, and there was one by Jane Smiley, I did for Fuels Out Dreams.

They said, you've got to get into C-SPAN book talk.

I really love C-SPAN, and I got on all those books.

That was the thing to do.

And the third was: could you possibly get on PBS with David Gergen for 10 minutes?

That doesn't exist anymore.

You know what?

If you can get when Rush was aware, if Rush mentioned your book, or if Joe Rogan interviews you, or,

you know, Mark Levin, or some website that's huge.

There are no gatekeepers.

And it's, you know, every man, woman for themselves.

Yeah.

So it's really led to a complete cultural, political, social transformation in all sorts of ways, shape.

It has.

There's no such thing as there's six Republican handlers and they get to decide what's going to happen.

And it's kind of.

I won't mention the person's name, but a very prominent Republican pundit said to me, I went to a Trump debate.

This guy is never going to make it.

And I said, I think he's going to win.

This is about the third debate, fifth debate.

I can't remember.

I said, I said, that's impossible.

And I said, why do you think that's impossible?

Because I always go out.

They invite me on the stage in the hour before the debate.

And I went to all the major contenders.

He mentioned Scott Walker and I met their handlers and their PR people.

And they had their prep books.

And I looked at their prep books and I got a measure of the person.

I said, yes.

yes and then i said then i went over to donald trump and he was on a stool by himself

with his cell phone surfing the net there was nobody there there was no flak there was no prep there was no book i i didn't i saw no poll i said well that's good he's just going to wing it as he gets on there and he said no that's bad it shows you how sloppy and unprepared he is and so that's the mindset that people had so i keep you overusing that metaphor but it was like that 1984 Apple where you run in and you throw that ball and chain and it breaks the Big Brother screen.

And that's what's happened.

And we're in a period of chaos now because we don't know what the protocols are.

We don't know what the rules are.

But it's kind of liberating that people can.

It's liberating, but it's unpredictable.

It's scary.

It's scary.

It's scary.

People can say stuff and there's no consequences.

They can make up complete lies about you.

You know, I don't like the idea that one day somebody calls me up and says, hey, a guy in the bulwark, they used to, wasn't he your editor?

He says you're a Nazi because

you don't like Jews and Trump's anti-Semitic.

What?

You know, and that's, and you have to reply to that crap.

But it's a free country.

And so.

Finally, the truth wins, you take some hits, but the truth went out.

It's much better, though, you know, much better than the old system.

Well, I'm going to talk to somebody.

And he says he has an N with this magazine and and they're going to re-recommend your name not that that doesn't happen but there are ways to circumvent that by just on the basis of pure energy ambition and talent and i hear i see people all the time that do it all right so can we change topics then and look at our sammy you can do it you can

you can change the title if you want go ahead okay so i know you're always getting on me for the presentation mechanism which tends to be more passive than assertive but here it is is.

Let's go.

Go, girl.

All right, here it is.

So, the voting rights bill in the Senate would expand early voting, mail-in voting, Election Day as a national holiday.

So, lots of other things in it, too.

And I'm not sure you can tell us whether you expect it to pass or not, but there is the whole question of the filibuster.

And if I could remind everybody what the filibuster is, I know a lot of you out there already know it, but three-fifths of a vote, it requires three-fifths of a vote to bring debate to a close.

And otherwise, debate can keep going on and on and on and on.

I think they changed it the Senate time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Waste the Senate time.

So that's why everybody, we always get, well, if they're going to threaten filibuster, we need 60% to get something passed.

And that's sort of the issue here.

So back to you, Victor.

Well, everybody realizes we got it, we've got to start at the basic.

So the Constitution was a little bit ambiguous because on the one hand, it said, you know, where you vote and how you vote for senators and representatives, and i.e.

national elections,

that's the domain of each state legislature.

They can say, you know, come at six and go at nine or do whatever you want, you know what I mean?

Or have curtains or not curtains or machines or hand.

That's up to them in a national election.

That seems to be clear.

But then, remember, the Constitution added this little fill up.

And they said, you know, but the Congress in time to time can, you know, any time they can make or alter their regulations, such, such, I think the word is regulations.

And what does that mean?

That means, you know what,

Georgia can't say in 1870 that blacks can't vote.

Or we're going to have all women vote.

By 19 the 20s, we're going to have women vote, even though some states have not allowed them to vote.

Or we're going to have an 18-year-old national voting law.

Okay.

But the point that the Republicans are making is, yes,

but it says Congress can do that, but they wouldn't have mentioned the primary responsibility of the legislators if it wasn't the primary responsibility.

So that's pretty clear.

Okay.

So what are the Democratic Party doing?

Well, they're not saying, oh my God, in 2016 and 2020s, marginalized people, blacks,

didn't vote.

They were robbed.

Their percentages went down.

No, they went out.

They came out more than ever after a little dip after the Obama years.

And so when you look at the voter registration, voter participation, they went out.

They're not saying, oh my gosh,

not any states have voter IDs.

Joe Biden's state has voter IDs.

So what is it about?

And what it's about is, just follow this, Sammy.

They looked at 2020 and they won the popular vote.

And they did so with a formula that they ambushed a Republican.

They had 102 male in or early ballots.

64%.

We've never had anything approximating that.

It was about 45.

And more importantly, they sued in the state courts in places like Arizona and Georgia and Pennsylvania and Michigan, etc.

States that mattered.

And they altered the voting laws.

They gave more time for early ballots.

They

said, you know, that if your name is approximately correct, if your address is kind of right, if you mail it in, you know, one day, five days, eight days.

So they changed it.

And the result of that was a 3% to 5% on average state rejection rate with 30 to 40 million or 50 million went down to 0.3 or 0.2 or 0.4 with 104 million.

And the result of that was millions of ballots that would otherwise likely have been thrown out under existing state laws were not.

So for listeners, it just means think of this.

Millions more ballots are swarming in on election day in 2020, but the rate of rejection is going down by a magnitude of almost 10 in most places.

And they love that.

They love the idea that Mark Zuckerberg poured $419 million

to basically absorb state ballot workers and put his own people in place to train them or to put up drop-in boxes or to go door-to-door, et cetera.

Okay.

So they want that because it worked for them.

So they have to nationalize that because under the electoral college system,

there are some states that have voted now, but also before this happened to prevent that.

They don't, you can't third-party voter harvest.

You can't register to vote and vote the same day.

You can't do some of this stuff.

And they feel that that's an obstacle.

to this agenda.

So what they're doing is they've introduced a bill that sort of I think is unconstitutional because it gives the states zero right, not just in one aspect of age, like 18, not just in one aspect of race, that African Americans must be able in every single state to vote, not just in gender, then women should vote, but in every aspect of the voting.

They want to take control, and that's not what the Constitution says.

They can intervene on specific things, but they can't just abolish the state's role.

And that's what they're doing.

And then we get to the final step of this process.

And why are they doing this?

Why didn't they do it in 2016?

Why didn't they do it in 2000?

Well, one, COVID gave them an opportunity to use a crisis and not let it go to waste.

And second, they don't have an agenda.

They're not going to say, I'm Joe Biden.

I want to replicate Afghanistan all over the Middle East.

I'm Joe Biden.

I stop that damn wall and you can see how great things are.

We've got so many people who want to come to America.

It's just another advertisement of how great we are.

Come on in.

2 million, 4 million.

We welcome you.

We've got a lot of open spaces.

We've got a lot of money.

You don't need a value.

He's not going to run on that.

He's not going to run on, you know what?

You've got to tell a young little white kid five years old that he's a racist.

Otherwise, you're never going to end racism.

And Oprah and LeBron are never going to be treated fairly unless that five-year-old is told to

hate people that look like it.

I'm going to run on that.

Or he's going to say, you know what, Stephen Chu, Stephen Chu, years ago, brilliant Stephen Chu, Energy Secretary, remember, 2009 for Barack Obama, said that we want to get gasoline prices up to European levels, which were then about $10 a gallon.

And we're halfway there.

And this is great.

We have less carbon emissions than we'll ever have.

Is he going to run on that?

I don't think so.

So if somebody could tell me what agenda he's going to run on, that I don't see it.

So what they're going to do is change the system.

And one of the ways you change the system, we're going through this, Sam.

We have one more step in this simile.

And that is one of the ways that you change the system is you nationalize the voting law.

So you can basically replicate 2020 every four years.

There's another way you can do it.

You can change the system,

the system,

the way that you make laws and vote.

And I mean on a national level, you can get rid of the Electoral College without a constitutional amendment, just going to each state legislature and saying whatever the vote is nationally that's the one you pick your electors not what the constitution says and if you get 270 electoral votes you know enough states you can get rid of it that's what they're doing you can get rid of the filibuster i don't know how they're going to do that if two big but if cinema tomorrow or mansion has come to god moment and they change their mind and kamala harris i don't know if she's an official member of the senate i guess she is she can cast the deciding vote, and then there's no more filibuster after 180 years.

Then everything is up for grabs.

The 60-year, 50, 60-year-old tradition of 50 states, bring in Puerto Rico, bring in D.C., four more senators.

Or, hey, you're tired of Gorsuch.

You're tired of Kavanaugh.

You're tired of Comey Barrett.

You're tired of all those people, Alito, Clarence Thomas, just get go from nine to 15 justices.

Put in six more.

You can do that.

Okay, hold on, though.

What do you think?

Yeah, I know.

What do you think the chances of that kind of legislation getting through?

I don't think that even some of the Democrats.

If they got rid of the filibuster, they would get 50 votes.

Oh, wow.

Because

if Manchin voted against it, they're two votes shy.

That's why they're so angry.

They came so close for a major revolution in this country.

They hate cinema.

Today they're calling her a racist.

They're calling Joe Manchin a white supremacist.

They're demonizing them.

And why are they tearing out their hair?

They're saying, we got 48 senators and we were that close to eliminating the filibuster.

That was the key.

It opened the door.

Once the door was opened, Electoral College gone.

National voting, you know, or absurding state voting ballot laws, gone.

That's there too.

Nine person Supreme Court gone.

We got 15.

They had everything.

So they could change the system and the way we vote.

And the system, and the third is they can change the demography.

And everybody should realize that if you're laying in 1.7, and people suggested in the fiscal year, it might be 2 million, and you do that four times, that's 8 million, 8 million people.

And you've got 20 to 22 million who are here illegal already, and their children are legal.

And you've got a party who's saying you owe us fealty at the polls because we gave you education supplements and we gave you entitlements for housing and food and shelter.

And you're a Democratic loyalist and every immigrant owes us.

And so you can see that in eight years,

you know, and under the Electoral College, and by the way, I'm not.

quite sure why they want to change it since some of these states are so close and they're flooding illegal aliens into certain states.

And remember,

800,000 of them in New York are going to be able to vote.

It's all because, as we said earlier, they don't have an agenda that 50% of the people like.

And so change the voting laws, change the system, change the voter.

And that's what they're doing.

Very simple.

It sounds like from what you're saying, that this all hinges on whether it does

all the filibuster.

Unless, as I was being sarcastic, Sammy, but maybe,

I mean, anybody who voted for Joe Biden, I'm confused about, I know that Donald Trump could be crude and he was off-putting, but Joe Biden was non-compos mentes.

And you knew that Bernie and Joe Biden, his wife and Elizabeth Warren and the squad and the Obamas were going to be running stuff.

And they knew that what was coming during and the aftermath of George Flory, we knew what was coming.

It was a full-blown socialist agenda.

And that's what we got.

And so maybe the only other alternative is the Senate is up.

One-third of the senators, right?

33, 34 of them up for reelection.

Maybe they can get this message and say, you know what?

The polls are misrepresenting.

Fox News is too powerful.

People love this.

And we're going to pick up another two or three senators and then we're going to make Mansion and Cinema irrelevant.

I don't see that happening.

If they were really interested in the agenda and they really do believe that it had appeal to everybody, then that's what they would do but they're very cynical they're basically saying we're hardcore neo-marxists and we don't give a damn about people and we're going to be like the jacobins and the bolsheviks and ram it down their throat like the shavistas or the castroites and we're going to do anything we can because you know what we know what's better for you peasants and that's their attitude yeah can i say something in defense of donald trump being off-putting and i just want to say that the way donald trump's presence and his demeanor and everything was not so off-putting as the cranky old man, Joe Biden.

No, it wasn't.

That's what's so funny about that.

I don't mean off-putting for me necessarily, but I do recognize that he lost the election,

not on the issues or his record of achievement, which was impressive.

He lost the election because Joe Biden posed as old Joe Biden from Scranton, the uniter, which he never was.

He was always a scoundrel and polarizing figure and incompetent.

And then Donald Trump in that first debate when, you know, he interrupted and he was sort of like the sausage seller in Aristophanes

nights, screaming and yelling.

And a lot of independent women didn't like that.

But you don't have to convince me of that paradox in history.

One of the sober and judicious figures in American history was Omar Bradley, the so-called GI general.

And he was the under Eisenhower, he was in command of all U.S.

forces in France from D-Day all the way into Germany.

And he was a very

careful and deliberate, never made a, you know, a gaffe.

And he was an incompetent, incompetent.

At the Flaze Gap, he didn't close it.

He got a lot of people killed.

He did not allow Patton to go all the way to the,

the...

market garden, he did not oppose forcefully.

George Patton was uncouth.

He was rude.

He swore.

He was volatile.

He may well have been sleeping with his stepniece, but he was an authentic military genius.

He's probably the greatest tactical charger type of general we've ever produced.

He was a brilliant strategist.

He saved thousands of lives by that July 28th all the way to, you know, till he ran out of gas in mid-September.

So that's a paradox.

Everybody would like to be a Lincoln with natural genius and

sober and judicious temperament and kindly.

But unfortunately, we don't get that.

Reagan was that way.

Sometimes we have to make a choice.

And I think there's parameters.

And how do we make that choice?

We say to ourselves, this is Trump's agenda.

Let's evaluate it.

And then we say, and this is his ability by force of personality to persuade people, plus, plus.

And then this is the detraction.

Scaramucci, Amoroso, you know, Anthony Fauci throws a ball like a girl, unnecessary things that, while they don't offend the base, they offend independent.

And let's weigh all that together by standards of the past.

And nobody did that.

Nobody said, you know,

partly because we didn't know.

We know everything there is about Trump.

We knew about the access Hollywood 12 years earlier.

We knew the psychodramas of his first divorce.

We knew the whole

stormy sordid tale.

Everything came out.

But we still don't know a lot of stuff about FDR.

We don't know a lot of the really dark stories of JFK.

My God.

And so we don't know the whole thing about Bill Clinton and its entirety.

But what we do know is shocking.

We can say one thing about Trump in finishing.

If you look at Trump's behavior in the White House and you compare it to past presidents, and I'll just pick, I don't know, let's pick three, LBJ, Bill Clinton, and JFK and go down the rules.

Was he a crook trying to

do businesses and use his office to become very wealthy like LBJ?

No.

Did he expose himself to his cabinet like LBJ did?

You know, does Ho Chi Minh have anything like this did he have sex with a staffer in millenia in his bed no did he have sex and uh sort of sex i didn't have sex with that woman but it was sort of sex oral sex he didn't do any of that stuff while he was president and so i'm not excusing his behavior but as long as we're human and we're not gods summus homines non-dei, as Petronius said, you got to work with what you have.

And he had a brilliant agenda.

And And nobody in that stage understood what an existential threat China was except him.

And no one understood that you don't write off the interior of your country when you've got brilliant people that are working there and you've got infrastructure, you can get cheap energy.

You just have to have the will to do it.

And no one quite understand what the danger was posed by a completely open border and failure to assimilate and integrate immigrants, which can only occur when immigration is legal, measured, diverse, and meritocratic.

And we weren't doing that.

And nobody understood that you bombed Qaddafi out of power and you've got chaos.

And the moment he was reforming, we go into Iraq.

I supported the Iraq war, but the idea we were going to stay there and turn Iraq into,

you know, Carmel, it wasn't going to work and ditto to the nth degree, Afghan.

And he didn't do that.

And it was a don't tread on me, Andrew Jacksonian policy of let's bomb the crap out of ISIS, but don't try to make them into Democrats.

And let's kill Soleimani, but let's not go into a war with Iran.

And let's bomb the crap out of Baghdadi, but let's not do what Joe Biden did, trisect Iraq.

So that was all inspired.

And he had natural instincts.

The question that we're all at collectively, the listeners, about half the people out there.

say,

and we've discussed this, Sammy, they say, you know what?

You guys can talk all you want about his crudity crudity and his erratic nature but who has fire in the belly in this moment of decision to go after the left the way they've gone after conservative no one fights like he will fight and you can count on him the other half say you don't have to convince me i will vote for him but i'm exhausted and he goes down dead ends and cul-de-sacs that you don't need to go down he didn't need this week to say you know that governor don't have guts or get into a psychodrama with DeSantis.

The other side will say it was pretty brilliant.

He came out on top.

But my point is that there's a legitimate point to be made on both sides.

And half the people are exhausted and said, DeSantis will not bring them out of the woodwork.

And he won't bring the big silicon box because they don't really hate him.

He has the ability to...

without giving up his principles to mollify people.

The other half said, Victor, you're an idiot.

They called George Bush a Nazi.

They said that Jick Cheney was hit.

They're going to do what to Santa Stanley did to Trump.

The difference is, Trump is a brawler.

He's actually been in a wrestling ring.

He likes it.

Okay.

And with that, let's take a minute to have a word from our sponsor, and then we'll come back and have a look at two more of your books in our discussion of the writing of 26 books in your career.

So let's hear from our sponsor.

Welcome back.

And I would like to remind everybody that Victor has a website, victorhanson.com.

And please come.

He was mentioning earlier the critiques that if you're a pundit and you are subject to a lot of critique out there and you have to answer it, one of the things he does is write an angry reader from time to time.

And those are very interesting and entertaining to see his responses to his critics in that fashion.

Now, Victor, we've been talking about your books, books, and I would like to continue with two more.

The Autumn of War is the next chronologically, and then Carnage and Culture, which I know had a wide readership.

So, first, the Autumn of War.

You know, that was a very funny book because I was at the Naval Academy, and it was right during the first weeks

of the Iraq War and the lead up to the Iraq.

I shouldn't say the Iraq War.

It was the period from September of 2002 to March,

that autumn when we were building up to war.

And the publisher of Random House was a very distinguished editor, very liberal, Robert Loomis, a very sweet guy.

And he said to me, I don't agree with the essays you're writing about the inevitability of taking Saddam out, but I like the argument.

and I'd like to collect them.

So he collected them and it sold very well.

Usually that's not a winning idea to take things that have appeared in National Review or City Journal and then republish them.

A lot of people do that.

And I've done it, as you'll see with another one between war and peace about that interlude.

But it did well.

And the thrust of the essay is there were a couple of points very quickly that I think were important.

Number one,

the U.S.

Senate voted for 23 reasons to go to war.

Elements that involved weapons of mass destruction were maybe three.

You could argue 10.

There were other reasons.

And one of them was the extension of the Marsh Arabs.

Another one was

those responsible for the first World Trade Center bombing in 93 were still there in Iraq with shelter.

Another was people like

Abu Nadal

wanted terrorists, were being housed by Saddam Hussein.

Another was he violated all of the terms of the first Gulf War, no-fly zone, all of that stuff.

Another was he was giving suicide money to suicide bombers to go in and blow up people.

So there were a lot of reasons.

There was about 20 of them that they list and they had broad bipartisan support.

The problem was that that was not what was emphasized.

I think the Bush administration made a critical error by thinking that's not enough.

They're too abstract.

We've got to make sure people are afraid that they might be nuked.

So we're going to go and say he's got the elements for a bomb.

He was on his way, but we know now that in the early 80s, the Israelis took out their reactor and did a much better job at destroying it than we had thought.

Or alternatively, he let some materials go into Syria before the war started.

But the point I'm making, had they just said there's a lot of humanitarian, strategic, tactical, practical reasons to take this guy out.

And we're not going to stay and try to rebuild Iraq, but that didn't happen.

And that was what the book was about.

Moving on, Sammy, because I was too windy.

Yeah, Carnage and Culture.

Very great book for anybody.

One of, I think, Victor's best.

So go ahead.

Yeah, that was a lucky thing, lucky in a sad way.

And that was it happened.

I mean, I was a guy teaching at Fresno State.

I was in my late 40s.

And I wanted to show that the Western military tradition was more than just technology, and it wasn't just a recent phenomenon of the Enlightenment.

In other words, it went back to a tradition that did not die in the dark ages of the Middle Ages.

And that tradition was in a lot of aspects, whether it was military organization and discipline, or whether it was the added incentive of human dignity and freedom and the ability to make decisions, or it was a scientific method of rationalism, or whether it was the idea of open dissent that gave Western armies and navies advantages.

It did not say they were predetermined to win.

We know what happened at Ishlawanda in the Zulu War.

We know what happened in Custer's last stand.

So there were many occasions.

We know what happened in many of the battles of the Crusades.

But what I'm getting at is that all things being equal,

And it allowed Westerners, and one of them was capitalism, but it allowed Westerners to project force well beyond their homeland.

And if they were up against a Hannibal or they were up against a Muslim commander at Lepanto that was very skilled or they were outnumbered, they could overcome in some cases those innate advantages or the weather or distance because of the system.

And what got controversial was I said things that you're not supposed to say.

I said things that Tenochtitlan was an empire of 4 million people, the Aztec empire, and it was sophisticated in terms of astronomical calculations, et cetera, et cetera, architecture, massive pyramidal building.

But the idea that they were going to build transatlantic craft, sea craft, and

send people equipped with Spanish steel blades and cavalry and gunpowder and take Barcelona was absolutely preposterous.

Not that they wouldn't have done it if they could.

Or the idea that Xerxes was going to with all of these men was going to take over all of Greece and absorb it

wasn't going to happen.

Not when there were people in these decentralized city-states that were flexible and they loved their freedom.

They were rowing at Salamis, saying, you know, Eleutheria, Eleutheria, according to Aeschylus.

So I went and took 10 iconic battles to represent aspects of the Western military tradition that gave them an edge, not that it guaranteed victory, but in ambiguous situations, the system could withstand a stupid commander like a custard at Little Bighorn, or it could allow a massive screw-up in.

the Third Crusade, or it could make up for stupidity, lack of troops, bad weather, et cetera, et cetera.

And when people said in the reviews, some of them said, well, there were the Ottomans.

Yes.

And

they almost went to Vienna.

But that was a time when, remember, the West was trisected by Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Protestantism.

They had these devastating wars.

But more or less, the story was that whether it was Alexander the Great or the Crusaders or Cortez,

it was usually the West colonized and projected power outside of the

interior of Europe and that Europe was pretty much sacrosanct, that the New World was going to be colonized.

It was going to be by people using this tradition rather than the Chinese or Indian or Asian or African traditions.

And that, I guess, it came across to some as Eurocentric, but it wasn't a moral argument.

It was an argument of dynamism.

I wasn't trying to say that that Cortez was the moral superior of Montezuma.

I think he was, but marginally so maybe.

But

I'm being tongue-in-cheek, but he had a system behind him.

So that I'll just finish with this thought, Sammy.

In the immediate environs of ancient Mexico City, Tenochtland, there were all the ingredients that you needed to make.

gunpowder, saltpeter, carbon, et cetera, charcoal.

You could make it.

The Aztecs had no idea about it.

There were the elements of copper and tin to make copper cannon.

So when Cortez was there, they were casting cannon and making gunpowder out of local material.

And so really the Aztecs were sitting on all sorts of on-tap advantages that they didn't fully utilize because they had a very different scientific, religious, economic, social, cultural tradition.

Had they wanted to kill people

and have, you know, a Western way of war of annihilation and shock battle and use steel rather than obsidian and not tried to take prisoners so they could offer them as human sacrifices at the top of their pyramids, then they might have done better.

Yeah.

And I just want to clarify that you said that had they not wanted to kill people on the battlefield, I think you mean, and they did want to kill people for their gods as human sacrifices.

They had a very very strange system, though, where the local commander would have his staff with a banner on it.

And then people would try to tackle the conquistadors and wrap them with leather thongs on their feet and hands, knock them down, and then drag them, tie them on a big rope, and then drag them over to a central collection point.

That's a very inefficient way to win a war.

And the Spanish were brought up in the classical tradition is you see the enemy, you charge them, you have armor, you have edged weapons of superior technology, you try to slice and kill a person as quickly and then go on to the next.

And then you break the morale.

And that settles the political question by other means, but that's a very different view than from what the Aztecs were doing.

And we have time for the last one very quickly.

Oh, yes, sure.

Why don't we go ahead and between war and peace?

That was the same thing as an autumn of war, but it was the period after the Afghanistan war

between

the two wars and trying to compare Iraq to Afghanistan.

One of the things that came up, remember, was that Afghanistan was quote-unquote the good war and quote unquote Iraq was the bad war.

Now, why they were different, I suppose, was

people had a good argument that

Afghanistan was the origins of the 9-11 hijackers.

They were being sheltered by the Taliban.

So they had attacked us and the Taliban would not give them up.

So by association, they were culpable.

And we were going to go into Afghanistan and get bin Laden.

We didn't do that.

But then we were going to get rid of the Taliban.

We didn't, we did that, but in a way that was

for a variety of reasons we can't get into, led to this 20-year project of, you know, everything from, it ended up with George Floyd.

murals and pride flags from the U.S.

Embassy.

But that was the good war.

And everybody said Iraq was the optional war.

Saddam, and they were basically saying that Iraq was the optional because we weren't winning.

And for a while, they were so lopsided in the human sacrifice, I mean, the blood and treasure, that Iraq was so much more expensive.

Nobody in their right mind ever thought

that today,

as bad as things are in Iraq, it's got more potential than Afghanistan.

Or nobody ever thought that Iraq that had a seaport and a flat terrain and U.S.

bases in Turkey, et cetera, was a more viable project than going all the way up to Afghanistan with hilly country and mountainous, even more tribalism, no seaport, landlocked, you know, Iran, Russia, and nuclear Pakistan.

So when I was writing these, I was trying to tell people.

There is no good or bad war.

There's just war, you either win or lose.

But the problem is that Afghanistan is a lot more difficult than Iraq.

And that didn't go over very well.

Yeah.

Well, thank you, Victor.

We better call that the end of this episode.

I'd like to remind everybody that Victor does do two podcasts with Jack Fowler.

So you can listen to those on Apple Podcast or your chosen site for podcast dispersal.

And thank you very much, Victor.

Thank you for having me.

And thank everybody for listening again.

Yeah, and you make me want to go out and read it, given all the information that you've talked about in your books.

So, thank you, Gary.

This is Victor Davis Hansen and Sammy Wink, and we're signing off.