The Traditionalist: The New Theater of the Absurd

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show, the traditionalist.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, and we are recording on Tuesday, December 14th, 2021.

The namesake and star is Victor Davis-Hanson, the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Wayne and Marcia Busky, Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, author of numerous bestsellers,

including the most recent, The Dying Citizen, and Hey, Christmas is Coming Up.

Get that, get the Second World Wars.

You'll find that on Victor's website, VictorHanson.com.

Victor, there's a number of things we're going to talk about on this episode.

One of them is particularly juicy, and we'll get to that right after this important message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show, The Traditionalists.

Victor, I don't have much of a setup for this question except, you know, you say Juicy, I say Jussie, but Jussie, Jussie, Juicy, Smollett, the verdict came down from the last time we recorded podcasts, the verdict was rendered.

Is it Smollett, like Lamon?

I think it is.

I'm kidding.

Yeah,

I just, I got an accent.

Victor, there's so much here to talk about.

So what reflect on, if you will, what happened,

what should be happening, because actually I will ruminate a little.

You know, he did

committing perjury on the stand.

There could be other cases that come out of this.

I was listening to Megan Kelly's podcast the other day.

Even that letter,

remember,

he got some letter with chopped up, you know, like a hostage-y kind of letter that he clearly sent himself, used the U.S.

mail.

You know, so there are other, there are other prosecutions

for this character.

The MAGA incident was the response that the letter didn't get.

Right.

So, this was step two after the letter that he was being threatened.

I mean, I get angry letters.

I'm working on one right now that are kind of threatening, but at least I have the email.

If somebody asks me, I could show it to them.

And I will show it to him if anybody asks.

But he didn't get the response.

So he cooked up this other thing with his two Nigerian American, I guess they were gophers or attendants or trainers.

But it was kind of funny because he's so diminutive and he wanted to be sort of the Achilles attacking Hector, as I said earlier.

But he picks these two huge guys and nobody would believe from the outset that that little wimpy guy could beat up these two weightlifters.

But because on the tape, they look big in their hoodies.

The other thing that before I say anything is if the premise was that America is full of white racists and they're everywhere, so much so that he

bumped into one at two in the morning, why didn't he just go hire some?

You know, it's just like a little ad, Jesse Smollett, we need two white races.

Or if you're being more seriously, couldn't he use his Chicago savvy to go, can you guys go get me a couple of Irishmen or Italians that hate blacks and they're everywhere and I just need to.

I'll pay them well.

But he couldn't, I guess.

So the premise was,

And I think this is fair to him, that on any given moment in liberal areas of very left-wing Chicago, there are large white MAGA hat wearing vigilantes,

and they go out in the evening equipped with tools of the trade.

And that includes a noose rope or enough rope to put around a poor African-American neck, bleach to I don't know quite what the bleach was about.

I guess it was to dye somebody white, maybe,

or to injure them.

And the crime scene.

They do this in subpolar 40 below weather at two in the morning, better to find more victims and targets.

And they're especially, these types of people are on the lookout for one of their favorite shows, The Mostly Black Casted Empire, which they watched religiously.

And they hate one of the gay black actors in it.

Okay.

So one day he's just happening, you know, he just says, I'm kind of hungry.

It's two in the morning.

We're in a polar vortex cold cycle.

I'll just put on a coat and just meander down to the local 2 a.m.

subway sandwich.

He gets his sandwich.

He got his cell phone.

He's just kind of going back home, juicy,

bothering no one.

And these two MAGA people come in.

who are on patrol, apparently, just a happenstance encounter.

And they finally found a target, apparently.

And

they yelled the N-word.

They called him the F-word for a homosexual.

They were especially mad at Empire because they were religious watchers, as all white MAGA people are.

They follow every detail of that show.

So then they encountered him and there was an assault.

Now, these two huge, big, muscular people

were beaten off by Juicy, Jussie.

They were not only beaten off,

but he was able to beat them off when they put a rope around his neck.

And he had his Subway sandwich in one hand, and I guess he had his cell phone in the other, which he had been communicating with.

And then after

excuse me, Victor, remember, he was on the phone also with his agent, which you always call somebody at two in the morning.

You always call your agent.

And then

he drove them off, kicked their ass.

I think.

He said, I whopped them or I kicked their ass, something like that.

And then he just started, you know, walked home with his noose around his neck and called the police and said, hey, by the way, Mr.

Cop, see this noose?

And I think Dave Chappelle had a pretty good version of it, you know, playing the white cop if he were white.

Something said, no, let me get this straight.

You were attacked by MAGA people at two in the morning.

And this noose is still around, and et cetera.

And they did, oh, I left out an important detail.

They threw bleach on him.

And I'm told bleach freezes around seven or eight degrees.

So I guess they took an ice pick or a cigarette law and got it on thawed and then threw it at him.

And it was on thawed enough where it didn't freeze in Medius Rebus.

So he got bleached and he got back and but he still had his hamburger, his sandwich, he had his cell phone, he had his noose and he had the victory over the MAGA demons.

And so his whole point was that he very brilliantly thought, I have an agenda.

America, half of America hates Donald Trump.

They want to be told and told and told that his supporters are white racist.

They want to be told, told, told, told that black people that are gay are victims.

And

I got to get a bigger salary at Empire and give it some buzz.

And that's what he did.

And nobody in his right mind fell for it except

the woke people.

You know, these were the celebrities, the Kamala Harris that said this is a modern lynching.

And we're with you, Juicy, the Joe Biden candidate, I guess, at the time, Joe Biden.

And so the woke people who thought they could get some currency out of it or were afraid that if they either didn't say anything or said, this is preposterous, they would get woke demerits.

And so they all lied, just as they did in the Covington Kids, just as they did in the Duke La Crosse, just as they do in all of these hoaxes.

And nobody in their right mind.

And then it just fell apart because the two Nigerian Americans that he had hired, he actually wrote a check to them.

He actually paid them with a check.

And they went in and they bought the MAGA hats and they bought the hoodie and they bought the bleach and they bought the rope.

And some of it was recorded.

of these two awkward looking Nigerians buying these accoutrements of the hoax.

And then they had the text messages where Juicy's afraid he's going to be late for his trial run.

I think he went around there two or three times and scouted it out.

He still didn't get quite the good camera angle that you'd expect from a sophisticated actor.

So when this was all exposed, Jack, did he fall in his sword and say, oh, I'm so sorry?

No.

He recalibrated in a very brilliant but amateurishly

stupid fashion.

He just said, okay, yes, they bought all that stuff.

And yes, they did get a check on me.

But They were the ones doing it, just like the camera shows.

And then you said that that you saw them, they were white.

Well, they might have had makeup on underneath their hoods.

And I think I should have said pale because I don't like to, you know, stereotype anybody.

So they were pale, meaning they could have been what non-dark African Americans.

I don't know, but they were very dark African Americans or Nigerian African Americans.

They were black, right?

They were black.

And so then he kept lying and lying and lying about all of his statements to the police.

The more lies, the more lies you have to deal with.

So it was like he was a little camel and he kept putting these straws on his back.

And he went in and thought, I'm Juicy Smollett.

And everybody loves me because I'm gay and black.

And I'm on empire.

And of course, nobody knows what empire is.

Very few people in America know it.

They don't know who he is.

He thinks

he's a legend in his own mind they got some old chicago lawyer that you know probably grew up with richard daly's family or something and the guy was an old tough ombre and he just went in there and ripped him apart and with the truth and juicy thought i can handle this guy i'll do my greatest empire episode and it didn't work so now we're into the next phase it's not over yet and that is is he going to be sentenced for these i guess four felony convictions?

Wasting time?

He's got all this money that he makes per episode.

Does he ever pay back the Chicago PD between $100,000 and $130,000 of wasted time for this complete hoax?

And then we've got, what, Beyonce's mother now weighing in and saying, you know, please be merciful.

He's like Rittenhouse.

No, he's not.

And we've got BLMs.

Gosh, I just read the official BLM statement about the case.

And

we stand with a proud black man.

We know that

the trial was rigged and it's the death knell of BLM.

I mean, it's just, if anybody thought that BLM was a nonviolent, sober, judicious civil rights group, they should read their statement about this complete fraud about Juicy Smalla and the racist overtones that are in it.

because it's basically saying we don't really care what the truth is.

The guy is black, so he's one of us, and we're going to use him to call anybody that we want a racist.

That's basically what the statement was.

It's right out of bonfire of the humanities.

And there are media accomplices here, too.

So again, listening to Megan Kelly's podcast, I didn't see it, but I knew she was playing video also, but she did play much of Robin Roberts' infamous.

Yeah, and in Heinz, as this is being replayed, I mean, she just comes off as an epic stooge.

And how are you healing?

You know, these kind of questions in the face of the most preposterous evidence.

And also the night of the verdict,

none of these shows on MSNBC or CNN mentioned anything about the verdict coming down because they had been so all in from the get-go.

What's really funny is that All of Robin Roberts Beyonce's mom and Joe Biden, Camilla Harris, the whole subtext of their commentaries was that we were a racist country and we stand by a victim of racism.

Okay, in the year 2020, the year of Oprah and Megan Markle and Obama's on Martha's Vineyard.

Okay.

But what it really said was

we are going to stereotype a certain type of person that we despise.

These are the clingers that Obama dubbed.

These are the deplorables and the irredeemables of Hillary Clinton.

These are the dregs and the chumps of Joe Biden.

These are the crazies of John McCain.

And we can say anything we want about the 50 to 60 million of them because they're scum.

So we're just going to make up the idea and maybe start a race war.

We can, that these people are out on the streets of Chicago in homophobic racist fashion.

And we're going to smear and libel them because of historic sins committed by their great-great-grandfathers against us, or whatever it is.

And nobody has ever atoned for that.

Nobody's ever said, I'm sorry, I made it up.

He's never going to say that.

None of his supporters are going to say, Joe Biden has not said anything.

Nobody has said, this was a teachable moment.

They love that phrase.

Camilla Harris backslid a little bit, not much.

And Robin Roberts, maybe I haven't heard, as she retracted her interview.

Would it been too hard of her as a proud Black woman to say to Jossie,

could you just explain the bleach bit again to me?

Because I didn't follow.

What is the freezing point of bleach?

Or how did you hold this sandwich in one hand and beat off these two guys in the other?

Or what's the value of $150,000 in police work and how many black Chicago residents were harmed because of that opportunity cost?

How many people in the United States were harmed by just ratcheting up racial tensions again?

People forget that there is racism.

It exists since time immoral, and that's a horrible thing.

But calling somebody a racist is equivalent to calling somebody a child molester.

When you keep calling people racist and you don't adduce evidence or data to support those charges or those allegations, you do your own part as an arsonist to destroy the fabric and unity of a country.

And there has to be consequences to that.

This is one of the reasons that Joe Biden is such a despicable figure on matters of race.

This is a person, remember, who put you all in change, not just addressed to any audience, addressed to an accomplished group of black professionals.

I, Joe Biden, the white guy, will tell you that I can interpret Mitt Romney as putting you very successful people back in chattel slavery again.

Delaware is a slave state.

First clean black.

Donut shop.

You can't find anybody, you know, that's not Indian American.

Let me tell you one of my corn pop stories, how I took on black gang members with my specially outfitted chain.

Oh, hey, you know, I didn't like that question, junkie.

You ain't black.

Hey, Satchel Page.

Yeah, he was a Negro in the old days.

Oh, here's a subordinate about this in Louisiana.

Hey, boy.

And so he does that all the time.

He's fixated on racist things.

And where Jack is BLM?

Where's Robin Roberts?

Where is is Beyonce?

Where are the Obamas?

Does anybody say, Joe, you have a history of racial insensitivity?

And it's not just once or twice, it's serial.

So before you comment on the Smollett case, you better just explain why you keep doing this again and again and again.

And so when they don't do that, we understand what race is.

BLM gave him a complete pass

because they felt that they had some kind of Faustian bargain with Biden.

You

he'll give us a black chauvinistic agenda, and we'll taper down on the radical protest stuff for a while.

Let's stick with BLM.

And there's a piece published by the Washington Examiner this week.

It's titled, What Black Lives Matter has Accomplished.

And bear with me here.

It talks that, well, it's been successful by its own terms for changing criminal justice policies around the country, of course, to fund the police efforts.

Figure here is that arrests plunged 24%

between 2019 and 2020.

Those are the years for which data is most recently available.

But homicides up.

Homicides rose at the fastest rate in U.S.

history in 2020.

We talked on another podcast, Victor, about more than a dozen cities are setting homicide records this year.

Now, take a bow, Black Lives Matter, but let's look at actual Black lives.

And let me just read this quickly from the piece.

Even though they make up just over 12% of the population, the 7,777 Black people killed in 2019 made up 53.5% of all homicide victims that year.

But that number jumped dramatically in 2020 when 9,941 black people were killed, accounting for 55.8% of all homicide victims.

That is an additional 2,000 black lives lost last year.

That number will most likely be worse in 2021.

And this piece concludes with this sentence.

The goal of the Black Lives Matter movement was to stop Black people in America from getting killed, and they have failed spectacularly.

Victor, your thoughts.

Well, the only objection I have to that article is that was never the objective of BLM.

That was the...

rhetorical objective, but the objective was to leverage human suffering and death, and then to see if a leadership could capitalize on it.

And so Ms.

Quellars and Ms.

Guarza and the rest, three of them, female black activists, did pretty well, Jack.

She's got four homes.

She lives in

toxic whiteness neighborhood, Toponga Canyon.

The first thing she did was put in a $35,000 security fence.

After all, if you're going to defund the police, you got to protect yourself.

And her neighbors will be white, and she's got over what?

Was BLM's 2020 total 90 million plus in corporate repertory funds?

Kind of like bribe money, I suppose.

This is an updated version of Operation Push and the Jesse Jackson or the Al Sharp United to Save Him, all that stuff of the 90s, when they'd go to Toyota or some big corporation and say, we're going to file a lawsuit that you're racist unless you pay me.

And that's what it was.

It was always a shakedown operation.

It wasn't about ameliorating the condition of the black community.

If it was, it would have said, look, we've got a problem.

50%

of violent crime, i.e.

homicides, assault, manslaughters, violent burglaries, theft, are committed by 13% of the population.

And that is a reflection.

of certain assumptions in the inner city, such as a single parent household, a fatherless child, a lack of charter schools or parochial schools to put some pressure on these mediocre public schools, a lack of community policing,

whatever the reason is, we've got to address that so we're going to be competitive because we do have now a climate of equality of opportunity, but we want to make sure if we want an equality result, that we do as other organizations and

other minorities have done.

And once you say that, you're racist, of course.

So nobody ever challenged them because you can't mention Asians.

That's the so-called good minority.

Asians will get angry if you say that they're very successful or Punjabis or Greeks or Arab Americans or whatever the particular group is.

So that was the problem and that was the solution and nobody wanted to go there.

So everybody doesn't talk about it.

If you say what I just did, and I'm going to get a lot of criticism that I'm a racist, of course I'm not.

And I did this for 21 years as a professor in a state college and of mostly minority students.

And my objective was I'm going to teach English grammar, history, diction,

composition, facility with written and spoken English to mostly minority students.

Not because I'm targeting minorities, because that's the profile of the student body, and teach them to be better educated than people in prep school with Greek and Latin and ancient history.

history and architecture.

So that was, and if you do that, then you see wondrous results because all of a sudden people get confidence and that they can compete in a very ruthless society.

And when you don't do that, then you create a sense of inferiority and anger at the system.

But they don't want to do that, they being the liberal community.

They just don't want to do that.

So they put all these statistics off limits.

You cannot say that 13%

of people in the country commit 50% of the violent, most violent crimes.

And if they did not do that, then there would be a very different avenue for achieving parity.

And that's what the subtext of the whole, and BLM doesn't want to get near that.

It will never mention those statistics.

The whole purpose, remember how it started, Jack?

It started with Trayvon Martin,

hashtag, you know, BLM.

And its first theme was that Trayvon Martin had been murdered by a racist George Zimmerman, and then he was

a white Hispanic.

So then everybody, BLM threatened everybody and everybody, mean the white liberal community felt so bad, they did the following.

They created a new word, white Hispanic.

That meant if your mother was Peruvian and your name had not been Jorge Mesa, her maiden name, but George Zimmerman, that sounded sort of like you were German or something, then you could call him a white Hispanic, meaning it would not be brown-on-black violence.

It's being like you, you know, somebody said in the right-wing community, Barack Obama is a white African-American because his mother was white.

Nobody wouldn't, or white black.

Nobody would ever dare do that.

But that's what they did.

And then they photoshopped, they being the media, they photoshopped his picture so he'd have fewer scars from the encounter and the pounding that Trayvon gave him.

And then they edited the 9-11 tape.

Remember that?

So that he sounded like a racist on the tape.

And with all that, he was acquitted.

And he wasn't just acquitted.

Then there was a local investigation.

There was a grand jury.

There was a Eric Holder federal investigations of civil rights violation.

And guess what?

He was exonerated.

So that was the truth.

And out of that lie, then they started to gain momentum and started threatening boycott a whole bit.

And then we had the next one.

the Ferguson matter.

And in Ferguson, the 2014 killing of Michael Brown, Michael Brown, remember, remember, had gone into a store.

He had stole cigarettes.

He had rough strong-armed the clerk.

He had walked down the middle of the street high.

Officer Darren Wilson had seen him.

He said, what are you doing?

He lunged inside the car at Officer Wilson.

They struggled.

The gun went off at least once.

Then he took off and ran.

And Officer Wilson pursued him.

He turned around and he charged the officer who shot him.

And out of that became hands up, don't shoot, which he never said.

We know that.

I know that because there was a police investigation.

There was a St.

Louis County grand jury investigation.

I think there were 5,000 pages of testimonies.

And then

there was Eric Colder, and he outdid Trayvon Martin.

He got every branch of the government, and they still found the shooting was justified.

Those were the twin pillars of BLM.

They were based on a lie.

And another thing people don't realize, these three principals who founded it were described as self-described as cultural Marxist.

And they said their original agenda was LBQT issues.

I think two of them were gay.

And I think you can even go online and find articles that said the real mission of Black Lives Matter were gay issues.

Well, once it got out into the major community, the media community in popular culture, that was sort of dropped because I think originally they were going to be self-critical of the Black community.

And I think they had some reason to be critical, given that Pete Budijik used to run focus groups of why he was going to lose in South Carolina because Black voters had responded in a couple of the small focus groups that they felt uncomfortable with an overt homosexual as the leader of their party.

So he was worried about that.

But that was forgotten.

And then it sort of just stayed ossified until George Floyd.

And then it rushed into that.

And the next thing we knew, everybody had taken this corrupt organization that was absolutely untruthful about Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown and deified it and the next thing we knew its version of black-white relationship with help from Professor Kendi and Tom Mahisi Coates and the usual suspects became canonized and the white community then went into a full panic.

I'm not even going to get into the George Floyd case, you know, but it was that grin, I don't know if it was a grin, that smirk on Officer Chalvin's face as he held down George Floyd that went around the world that was really the signature of that whole thing, whether the knee was on the neck or whether he should have given him artificial.

I don't want to get into all that, but it was the smirk and the fact that George Floyd died under, forget the circumstances.

Okay, so that empowered it.

And the rest is history.

Look what we've had since then.

I mean, it used to be people on the left.

I taught, you know, as I said, over two decades in the CSU system that had about a 200% increase in administrators and about a 3%

increase in faculty tenured positions over, I think it was a 10-year period in the early 2000s.

Okay.

All I heard in the so-called faculty lounge was, oh, those damn administrators.

That provost.

Oh, look at that guy.

He's an assistant, assistant to assistant.

And these guys don't get in the trenches with faculty.

And how can they tell us what?

Oh, he's got an EDD.

What a joke degree.

That's how faculty sounded.

That's how teachers sound about principle.

There's been an age-old anger of faculty at people who administer and don't teach.

Okay, so what do we do?

The first thing we did was we hired hundreds of six-figure diversity, equity, and inclusion deans, provosts, officers.

And the left said nothing.

Oh, we're going to bring all these people in.

They're not going to teach medieval literature.

They're not even going to to teach two classes of physics.

They're not going to teach climate change, not at all.

They're just going to monitor your syllabus.

They're going to monitor your email, your public lectures to find out if you fail on, and they're going to have a lot of workshop.

I just took one, a two-hour workshop as part of my job.

And what I'm getting at is that because it was BLM and this climate, they did a lot of things that people were shocked about.

And then I think people will be, if they do a little investigation, they look at the admittance rate of entering freshmen in 2000 in the fall of 2020, they will see that in a lot of major Tony exclusive universities, either the SAT ACT test requirement was dropped or that the old canon of proportional representation, that is that these universities under the canons of affirmative action would admit people according to their percentages in the population, 12% African American, 8% Latino, Latino, 6 or 8%

Asian, minimum, and then 60 or 70, no more, white, were changed so that there were double as repertory admissions.

And I think that's happening all over the country, and it has.

So, there were these fundamental changes, and we saw that with the critical race theory in Virginia, we saw that with separate dorms.

I think we've had theme houses that spread.

I think it was one of the Claremont Colleges where people in the dorms were now allowed to pick the race in advance of their future roommate.

We have more separated graduations.

We have separated racial spaces on campus.

And I think I wrote an article about the new Blue Confederacy.

If you came out of a time,

you know, time pod and you woke up right now and you were from Alabama in 1860, you'd say.

about California, for example, hey, this isn't a bad place.

You got segregation, you get separate housing that's based on race, you get separate ceremonies where you just get to be around your own race.

I like this.

That's how we've come full circle.

And it's racist.

And to say it's not racist is to accept Kendi and these other people's bogus definitions that people who are white can't escape from being a charge of being racist and blacks can't be racist because they're oppressed people as if, you know, Megan Markle, as I keep getting back to,

can never be a racist or Obama can never be a racist.

Victor, I do want to recommend to our listeners, we've talked about this before, previous podcasts, and long ago we had Shelby Steele on, but the documentary that he and his son made, What Killed Michael Brown, is not only on point about some of the things you're discussing, but also the role of race as a cudgel of the elites.

And I do want to tell you that Larry Elder, right?

There is,

right, Obama would never be called a white black, but Larry Elder was almost called white black.

So it depends on your

he doesn't have a white mother or white father like Obama did.

Yeah, they call him almost a white supremacist.

But you can really see something too,

speaking as someone who knows Tom Soule pretty well and Shelby Steele,

black and other black conservatives, the people who are the most critical of black conservatives are not other blacks, even left-wing blacks.

It's white liberals and it's wealthy white liberals.

And their attitude is: I virtue signal so much, and I performance art so much my feet, and you don't appreciate what I did for you.

You're an ingrate.

I hate you because you suggest I'm doing it out of cheap guilt.

In other words, I don't feel comfortable around people who don't look like me.

So, therefore, I compensate by virtue signaling how liberal I am as long as somebody doesn't marry my daughter or move in next to me, or my kid mow his lawn rather than he mows my lawn.

And that's what really terrifies them.

And that's why they have such animosity for African-American conservatives.

Well, Victor, let's get a little political now and talk about Donald Trump.

And as you've mentioned on other podcasts, you know, I concoct the questions to ask you.

But in the last few days, it's come out the former president attacked B.B.

Netanyahu, the former leader in Israel, who, when Joe Biden was elected as the leader of Israel, congratulated him, which prompted from President Trump either F him or F you.

It's such a really, really, I found it kind of really,

the president has said many, many things that are hard, but I thought, wow, I mean, Netanyahu I admire greatly, you may too.

Anyway, I think that it's that kind of, whether, if it's true, it's that kind of rhetoric, and maybe it's a question of self-control, that is a conflict for any number of people who maybe had wanted to vote for Donald Trump in 2020 didn't, and he might likely be the candidate again in 2024.

So you can tell me Jack Pounce all go

not talk about it, but I do want to get your thoughts about the wisdom of that kind of rhetoric for somebody who may want to be president again.

Yeah, I don't know if it wasn't the degree to which it was an off-the-record comment, but he said it to enough people

that it was widely reported.

So when you say F Netanyahu and Netanyahu is considered the doyen of Israeli conservatism, which has strong ties with American conservatism, and you're a conservative president, then it requires some explanation.

And he didn't give a very good one.

He said, Donald Trump did, that he congratulated Joe Biden or was one of the first.

Well, of course, if you're the president of tiny Israel and the United States is your your greatest military supplier of other nations or foreign aid supplier and guarantor de facto of your existence, then you cannot, by needs, make your foreign policy predicated by who is in the White House every four or eight years.

They found that out with Obama, who punished Israel without mercy.

because they were perceived to be unfavorable to Obama's so-called peace plan.

So Trump should know that, that Netanyahu didn't have a choice.

As a head of state, he has to congratulate another head of state.

Number two, there had been a lot of animosity, as you know, from the Abram Accords.

The background was simply that Donald Trump kind of on his own, I think he didn't really have the support.

I know he didn't of the bipartisan foreign policy establishment, which is probably good that he didn't, but not even within his own administration.

So he did a series of sort of singular initiatives.

He moved the American embassy to Jerusalem, which was said to be a no-no.

He shut down basically all aid to the radical Palestinians or the Palestinian Authority, and he cut off Hamas via the UN.

He did something that no other president has ever done.

He basically said the Golan Heights are going to be Israelis.

They're going to be Israel's.

And then there was a peace plan, and the peace plan was sort of that Israel would, as it always is,

would get aggregate territory that was more or less similar to the 1967

truce line, the green, so-called green line, and there would be swapping back and forth.

And then the Palestinians would have their, I don't know if it would be a state, it wouldn't be quite a militarized autonomous state next to Israel by any means, but it would have some kind of independence.

And that's what everybody was working with.

And everybody understood that it was asymmetrical.

And Israel, to go through with that, would have to have the wall, which it has, but it would have to have a lot of military guarantees.

And the eventual hope was that the common enemy was Iran, and therefore Iran's surrogates in the region, i.e., Syria, Hezbollah, and Palestinian Hamas,

would need to be countered by the Arab world, especially conservative Gulf Arab world.

So therefore, as part of this give and take, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, or perhaps one day Kuwait or some of the North African Arab countries were going to recognize Israel as the enemy of my enemy.

Iran is my friend.

And that was doing pretty well.

But Trump felt that in that process, Netanyahu was going to annex certain areas of so-called Palestine that would make that process almost impossible to complete or not come to complete fulfillment.

So what I'm getting at is there was a lot of tension there prior to the election.

And Donald Trump is not on Facebook.

He's not on Twitter, but he's still being quoted.

And he should, I think, and I don't think he wants my advice, but my advice to him would be this.

The more that Joe Biden fails,

And he's failing, and it's not going to stop because I don't see any way out of the inflation, the energy crisis, the border mess, the loss of deterrence, the racial polarization without a complete reboot.

And Joe Biden's not going to do that.

And so they're going to get worse.

His alternate view, as we saw for four years, is going to be enhanced.

And he's going to continue to run ahead of Joe Biden in the polls.

And he's going to continue to be the so-called front runner in all of these primary polls and on the Republican side.

And all it takes from Trump is just to say, you know what, there's certain things that are going to be out of bounds.

I'm not going to use the F word.

Victor's talking because he said something in a podcast, but I think it was with Sammy that I apologize.

I have to apologize because I said that word.

I thought it was going to be edited.

And it was not.

But my point is, he can't say that.

He can't.

disparage a head of state.

He can't turn on his own base, Jack, because the evangelicals, while they're not as powerful as they were 30 years ago, they are an important element of his mega base, and they worship the Netanyahu government.

They worshiped it, and they worship, they feel they have an evangelical biblical commonality of the Old Testament, and they're natural ideological partners.

And for him to attack Netanyahu

is not wise politically.

So that was a mistake.

But more importantly, it's either going to be a mistake he learns from now that he's back in politics, apparently, or he's going to be in big trouble because, well, we're going to get right back to where we were, where he's going to have an excellent agenda and it's going to bring real dividends, but people are going to be worn out by the tweeting or the extraneous commentary or

the exclamations or the profanity or whatever, and it's going to hurt Trump.

And so I think whoever his advisors are are going to have to say, speak more softly, Mr.

President, and refer more to your record.

And let's get a contract for America, too.20.

Let's not talk about Netanyahu.

Let's not talk about Biden and let's not talk about all these people.

Let's just say, if I were to run,

this is my program to become energy independent again.

This is how we're going to help Europe by being the biggest natural gas exporter in the world.

This is how we're going to restore deterrence.

This is how we're going to bring the country together.

This is how we're going to whip inflation.

I excuse the Jerry Ford terminology.

This is how we're going to

reduce the deficit.

This is how we're going to reduce the national debt.

This is how we're going to

start bringing jobs back to America and be independent of China.

This is how we're going to defeat China in this mercantile race we're having.

And do that specifically and stick to that contract.

Said, if you vote for me, this is what you're going to get.

It's going to be better than 2020.

And this is the alternative.

And then be magnanimous, go around the country and help this candidate and help that Senate candidate and this House person.

But don't get in and discuss.

I would have a rule if I was Donald Trump.

I would not discuss the 2020 election except in one instance.

And that is positive recommendations for the future.

I would say, now, I know I'm a broken record, and I know I think that I won the election, but you know that state legislature's rules on balloting and national elections were unconstitutionally changed through court decisions or bureaucratic edicts.

And you can't do that in a democracy, though.

We want to restore election day.

We don't want to restore the 2020 vote.

We want to have election day so we don't have just 40, I don't know what it was, it was 42 percent, 45 percent of the election electorate voting on election day.

We want to get it back up to what it was in 2016, when it's at least 60%,

or maybe 2012, when it was 75%, so that we can have people come out and actually vote and see them as real people and cast ballots, show an ID.

That's what we want.

And that's the extent that he talks about voting only as a way of ensuring that in 2024, we don't go through the 2016, 2020 mess.

But if he goes back and says, you know, I was rigged, I was cheated, I really won, then we're not going to get a chance to hear the new agenda.

So that's where everybody is, Jack.

Yeah.

And I, for this book tour, you know, whether it was I was in Seattle or Palm Springs or Palm Beach or New York or Fresno or Tulare or Powell, it was always the same.

I loved his agenda, the crowd said, or the question and answer session voiced, but I didn't like the tweets.

But,

and then the person said either one of two things, but I swallowed the tweets and voted for them and glad I did, or the tweets bothered me so much that I didn't vote for them.

And now I wish I had because I got Biden.

But nevertheless, that mentality will occur again.

You'll have people who will say they're going to vote for Trump.

When we say people, all we're talking about is 2% or 3% of the electorate.

Right.

You know, but that's going to be the tipping point in these swing precincts.

He's going to be up against Mark Zuckerberg and the Google people, all that on steroids.

They have a winning formula how to warp the election, and that is to pour literally hundreds of millions of dollars into select precincts and pretty much overwhelm the existing registrar and replace them with private dash quasi-public employees answerable to Facebook people.

And that's what they're going to do.

But Donald Trump doesn't have a margin of error, and he should get prepared for that.

But this is just a

cultural

waste of people.

The local registrar office in most towns, I'll pick on my town.

They're good people, but it's kind of like Mayberry, you know, with Andy.

It always is.

It is.

And to have this

flood come at you, it's hard to stop.

Victor, great wisdom there, Sheridan, because I agree with you.

We're in a blank show.

I'm not going to curse like you.

We need a way.

We need a way.

I'm doing pennants.

I had an allergy test today, so they stuck 50 pins in my back.

Well, that's, yeah, I'm suffering.

You probably got a few people out of purgatory also for that.

Hey, we got one more thing to talk about, and it's about Omicron, but we're going to talk about it right after this important message.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show, The Traditionalist.

I'm Jack Fowler.

It It is Tuesday, December 14th.

Christmas is coming up.

Wonder what this Christmas going to be like?

Are you going to be shuddering in fear?

So, Victor, Omicrom,

I'm right now at 6.30 p.m.

Eastern Time on the 14th.

I'm looking at the page of the Daily Mail.

Here are just a couple of headlines.

Omicrom shuts Cornell.

Ivy League College moves to Red Alert after 214 new COVID cases were confirmed on Monday and moves to remote study.

Another article: Omicron and Delta may strike people at the same time and combine to create an even worse COVID variant in the coming weeks.

Moderna boss warns, and finally, White House warns, Omicron explosion is imminent and will lead to surge in hospitalizations, but it will be fast and not as severe as Delta.

U.S.

infections triple with strain accounting for 3% of all cases.

I hate to say blah, blah, blah, but Victor, we have endured now a year and a half of

experts telling us with certitude, facts and predictions, not so much predictions, certainties that have not worn out.

There's expert fatigue.

The experts are winging it.

They're making this up as they go along.

And they've never had the decency to say, We don't have all the info.

This is what we think.

There's always been a tremendous amount of certitude baked into this cake.

And then, meanwhile, what the one person I think has done great work here, we've talked about before in the podcast, Scott Atlas, who's trying to look at, let's look at the real consequences of what we're doing.

And nobody wants to hear that.

Nobody in officialdom.

So, Victor, Omicron is here, it's coming, but I think it's coming upon a people and a populace that is worn out by expertise.

What are you saying?

I think people have moved on, Jack.

They understand now that

this virus is a little different than other viruses and it's going to be with us it's going to mutate but the omicron probably is going to be as most of these mutations are more infectious and less serious and while they don't want to get sick every

every variant mutant every month they understand that They're not going to probably die from it.

They're not going to get horribly sick if they're vaccinated or they've had a prior case.

And there is going to be therapeutic drugs on the market pretty soon that we're told will prevent them from being seriously ill.

And therefore, they're weighing that cost to the benefit of getting back and being productive.

And Scott Atlas in an op-ed and in his book I just finished has listed in detail the costs of all these lockdowns and mandates.

I mean, it's pretty staggering.

500,000 cancer patients that were not fully treated, missed checks and screenings, higher rates of morbidity from prostate breast cancer, substance abuse, family abuse, child abuse, suicide,

you name it, locking people up.

There's even other statistics that said that locking kids up, putting a mask on them, maybe have retarded their ability to acquire enhanced natural immunities.

All of us haven't really been out.

And so we have paid a terrible price.

The difference why I think it's going to crumble is not just the Delta and the Omicron variant, but because Joe Biden is in the White House.

And so what's happening is we're decoupling COVID from the political agenda of destroying a administration.

Under Trump, it was let's flatten the curve became let's destroy Donald Trump by destroying his economic miracle and keeping people under wraps.

Remember, I'm quoting now almost literally Jane Fonda that said COVID was the greatest gift that the Democrats had had because it was the only way to get rid of Trump.

And so now I think there are people in the highest echelons of the Democratic Party, the Biden administration, and in Congress who are saying, well, wait a minute.

Why we're paranoid and we're terrified of this virus and we don't like these freedom-loving Republicans who seem to ignore our control and our power and our effort to define every aspect of their lives.

This thing is going to hurt us because there's people who are angry.

If they've had COVID and they had a bad case of COVID, they don't want to get vaccinated right away.

They feel they'll get a big reaction.

They feel they have better immunity than COVID.

And there's millions of those people.

And if there's these young kids and they're not getting very ill, a lot of people are saying, if you're under 18, here's the danger of having a bad reaction to this RNA vaccination and here's the chance of getting a bad case of COVID.

And they don't see based on some scientific data much difference in the risk.

And so all of these people are potential critics of the Biden administration and they know that.

And so I think what's happening is you're always going to get some blue states, New York, Illinois, California.

But more and more people are going to simply follow the Florida model and say, you know what, we're Americans and we're going to take our chances and we hope that we finally develop immunity to this thing, either through vaccinations or prior cases.

And I'm not just laughing at all.

If I had the two Moderna shots, and boy, I had a reaction to that second Moderna shot like I haven't had since I took a yellow fever, typhoid, and typhus in the same day, I remember, and plague.

I had a fever about 102.

I was sick for two or three days.

And then at the beginning of this fall, I got very, very ill.

And for, but for 24 hours, high fever, same thing.

And I think it was COVID.

I say that because I took an antibody test and it was off the charts of antibodies.

And the doctor said, you either had had a third shot or you've had COVID.

You would not have this high antibodies 10 months after your shot.

And so I didn't like getting sick, but Now the idea is, am I going to have to get a third shot?

Because I've had two Moderna shots and I've had covid and i've got a reading that's 2500 essentially as far as antibodies i don't want to get a third one i'm told i have to just like i was told that masks were not necessary one mask then two just like i was told that don't worry her dominion is going to be a dividend of the shot just like i was told that no commander in chief who's had 280 000 people die under his watch deserves to be president like joe biden said just like when joe biden said not one person has been vaccinated, even though 17 million had when he entered office.

Just as I heard that Peter Dasick has to believe in his investigation, there's no connection between the Wuhan Virology Lab and the origins of COVID-19.

So again and again and again, they've lost all credibility and they keep losing.

I know that's a grammatical imprecision or impossibility.

You can't lose everything again and again, but you know what I mean.

Yeah.

And so I think we're getting to a point now where, yes, if you're in a situation where you feel confident about getting the vaccination, by all means, get it.

If you've had COVID, then

we should respect your decision whether or whether or not to get the vaccination.

And if you decide that you have not been vaccinated and you haven't had COVID,

there will be therapeutics, there will be lifestyle changes, there will be things that you can make your choices to protect you and your family.

And we have two pills coming out by the drug companies we're told that almost have a 90%

ability to prevent you from having to go to the hospital.

So you can deal with it at home if you should get it.

But this is something we're going to live with.

And I think it's going to have the opposite effect, too, that China thinks we've all forgotten about it because it's faded.

I think the more that this is accepted as a chronic condition, it's sort of like what radical Islam anti-Americanism did to the travel industry by making people go through all of that checking.

And people got very angry and are very angry at radical Islamism and terrorism because of that.

And I think a lot of people are starting to say, you know what?

The Chinese have not been candid about their contribution to a problem that's affecting my life.

And so there's not just going to be blame at these authorities.

Anthony Fauci, finally, Jack,

he's been there for four or five decades.

He hasn't been out in the research arena lately.

He's a bureaucrat.

Why doesn't he just, when he starts saying that we're all going to get boosters, we're going to get a fourth booster, maybe?

We're going to, you know, you've got to be tested, have your friends tested for Christmas.

He doesn't have that level of expertise or knowledge to start dictating to what 330 million Americans are doing.

Victor, he's science.

The state is me.

Louis XIV.

The state is me.

I am science.

I am science.

If that's science, then the odd thing is that maybe he is science in the sense that science is always, I mean, they have certain core principles.

The elements never change, but certain procedures change.

He changes all the time.

So maybe he's saying, you know, I was medieval when I started.

Now I'm at the Renaissance and I'm getting to the 19th century level of scientific proficiency.

But but he's been bad news and Joe Biden, all Joe Biden can say is get vaccinated, wear a mask.

Get vaccinated, wear a mask.

And

he doesn't wear a mask all the time.

Democratic governors and mayors don't wear a mask.

And it's really been,

I was talking to a person.

I'll just say that I'll call them not white.

He was trying to be very careful what he said to me.

And he said, what is with all these wealthy white people or all these white people that keep yelling at you?

And I think he had been to an area where

he was, I don't know whether, what he was doing, but he was providing a service to a wealthy white.

I got the impression liberal family.

He was Karened, right?

Yes, he was Karened, exactly.

And he wanted to know what was why they treated people and yelled that way.

And I think that's, I'm just going to finish with this observation.

There is a poll.

I think it was the Wall Street Journal Commission that Latinos are, what, 45, 44 now leaning toward Republicans.

Now, I don't know if that's accurate, and I don't know if that will translate into votes for the Republican nominee at that ratio.

I kind of doubt it.

But if it were to be accurate, I can understand that now Mexican Americans, Cubans are solidly upper, middle, and middle class.

They don't like taxes.

They do not like open borders.

They do not like public facilities, titlements abused by people.

They don't like their children attacked by gang members, et cetera.

So they are becoming conservative.

They don't like abortion.

They're more religious than our native-born Americans.

Okay.

But you know what's a missing element out of that?

Is what this person was telling me.

They have been talked down to,

and they're talked down to by professors.

They're talked down by college administrators.

They're talked down by politicians.

They're talked down by the media people.

That kind of nasal neurotic white super couple.

I'm a lawyer, he's a doctor, he's a stockbroker, I'm a chemist, or whatever.

This rat race, we're professional couples, we have all these letters after a name.

You know, Buffy's going to Stanford and I don't know who what, what the other guy's name, Justin is going to Harvard, and they're going to have super trajectories, and we're going to make sure that we don't allow one person to interrupt our success and our affluence and our leisure and our utopia.

So if we see in the corner of our eye, somebody walking on the street without a mask, we're going to pull over and yell at them.

And we're going to tell that guy who's pruning our tree, you wear a mask up there.

And that type of attitude from this white, upper, bicoastal, elite, professional class.

And it's not just they talk down to so-called marginalized people, minority, they talk down to working class whites too.

And there's something about that.

You can see it in Jen Saki.

You can see it in the people around Biden.

You can see it in Jake Salt.

You can see all of those people.

You can see it on those pathetic press conferences, those various press secretaries for all the State Department, the Penny, all of these people.

They really feel that they are an exclusive class that have the moral right and obligation to talk down to people.

And when it hits people who are not used to that, because I grew up with it, but the person I was talking to is an immigrant and he was curious because he doesn't like it.

You know, who do they think they are?

Who do they think they are?

Who do they think?

I said that about 20 times.

Right.

And I said, I can tell you who they think they are.

They think they're a lot better than you because you didn't go to college and you don't have their degrees and you don't buy this type of car and you don't live in the zip code and you don't know this person and your child didn't graduate from that school.

That's why they're better than you.

They're the vanguard of the proletariat and they're the torturers of the proletariat.

I think that's really going to hurt them.

I think it's hurting them right now.

I think a lot of people, we know it turned off the white working class that voted for Obama.

We know that six to eight million people voted for Donald Trump that either had not voted before or had not voted for a Republican.

And we know that it's beginning to turn off a lot of Mexican-American men and, to a lesser degree, African-American male voters.

Right.

And they can't stop it because that's who they are.

I'm talking about the white liberal elite.

Just to listen to them, even their intonation and the way that they talk, it's always talking down.

You just, every once in a while, just go into a CNN or MSNBC panel and listen to, you know, the Jeffrey Toobins of the world, the way they talk.

And it's just aggravating.

Well, I wish all he did was talk.

So Victor,

what do you want me to say, John?

Just watch the way he exposes himself in master base on television, on Zoom.

I mean, come on.

Well, this is about all the title in that.

And I said I would clean up my one transaction.

No, but you didn't curse.

You didn't curse.

You stated you stated a sin.

You didn't curse.

Victor, first, I don't know if I said this earlier in the podcast, but I would like to recommend to our listeners to visit your website, victorhanson.com.

Treat yourself to a subscription for Christmas, $5 a month or $50 for a year.

I'm looking at a piece right now.

I am not.

reading from it.

I'm just going to mention this is from the section you write called A Child's Garden of Animals, where you've written some beautiful pieces about your life on the farm, essentially, over the years.

It's called Generations Upon Generations of Red Tail Hawks.

It's really a wonderful piece, among many exclusive pieces, exclusive to this website.

As you know, I was a magazine publisher.

I know how much content fills a magazine and the amount of copy content and brilliant content that Victor writes in a month would more than fill the kind of magazine you'd pay, you know, seven, eight bucks, nine dollars on a newsstand.

So do get it.

You can't read much of what Victor writes unless you do subscribe.

So that's victorhanson.com.

And also there are links there to The Dying Citizen, some other books that would make for wonderful, I believe wonderful Christmas presents.

I write, I write on occasion.

I write a weekly newsletter called Civil Thoughts.

I do that for American Philanthropic, where I work.

I run the Center for Civil Society there, and we are really keen on strengthening civil society.

Check that out, centerforcivilsociety.com, civilthoughts.com.

Subscribe, free, no obligations.

This is the part of the podcast where we read a review.

So many people continue to leave five-star reviews on iTunes.

We thank you very much.

So here's a comment left by T Laps or TLAPS.

It's all one word.

And it's called Addicted Listener.

I feel so lucky to have found the Victor Davis-Hansen podcast several months ago.

I look forward eagerly to each episode.

Victor's knowledge and wisdom remind me of my scout master and mentor when I was a Boy Scout in the 1950s, although my scout master had much less historical knowledge.

Like Victor, I was raised in the Central Valley, but in the suburbs, not on a farm.

The dads in the neighborhood all seem to have that physical knowledge Victor talks about, getting things done with their own hands.

I find it fascinating when Victor comments on current events.

There was deep knowledge of history.

I went on to earn a PhD in engineering from Berkeley.

But after listening to Victor, I wish I had learned more about the classics.

By the way, I stopped donating to the Cal system years ago.

Not that it matters for a small donor like me.

Thank you, T-Laps.

Thanks, all who listen, all who leave reviews, all who write comments.

We greatly appreciate it.

And we're going to be back in a few more days with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

It may be a traditionalist, it may be a classicist, or it may be a culturalist, which is hosted by the great Sammy Wink.

Thanks all for listening.

We'll see you again soon.