The Traditionalist: A Reckoning Is Coming

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Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show, The Traditionalist.

We are recording on Saturday, November 20th, 2021.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

I am the editor and author and writer of Civil Thoughts, the weekly newsletter.

You can find it at civilthoughts.com.

More importantly, though, is the star and the namesake of the show, Victor Davis Hanson, who's the Martin and Ely Anderson Sr.

Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He's also the author of the best-selling new book, The Dying Citizen.

More about that later and more about his great website, victorhanson.com.

We have a lot to talk about today, which is the day following the jury verdict on Kyle Rittenhouse.

We'll get to that right after this important message.

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

There are three weekly podcasts.

This is one, the classicist is another.

I'm blessed to do that.

And then the great Sammy Wink does the culturalists with Victor.

Please listen to them all.

Victor, the verdict came in yesterday afternoon.

There's just a ton of things to talk about.

on this case, the verdict itself, how the trial was conducted, how the media conducted itself before the trial, during the jury deliberation, and now afterwards.

Victor, what are your broad thoughts about this,

I think, travesty?

The verdict's not a travesty.

The fact that there even was a case is a travesty.

But how about it, my friend?

Well, given the lies that were central to the media narrative and to the prosecution narrative and to the left-wing narrative, it kind of is a watershed moment because remember, Jack, we're talking in the context of Michael Brown Hands Up, Don't Shoot, the white Hispanic George Zimmerman, who attacked the innocent Trayvon without cause,

and the Jesse Smollett, and the horrible Nicholas Sandman, who pursued and got in the face of a combat vet and a Native American combat vet.

All that was lies and was exposed as lies, and yet they're back again with shamelessness because they're kind of Trotskyites.

They believe that the lie is okay.

Because the ultimate truth is true.

That is that

the victims deserve leeway from the victimizers.

And so that's the narrative and they make that fit.

So we had heard,

and I saw that article on Substack by Barry Weiss, and she said, oh, I was deceived all

last August, I was told, and she goes through the narrative, and I'm thinking, well, why would you ever believe the narrative?

Just because you wrote for for the New York Times?

I mean, come on.

Did he cross state lines, Jack?

Plural?

Since when is there more than one state line between Wisconsin and Illinois?

And then he went out of state 20 miles and he went to a town with no connection to him where his father and his family live.

And he carried a gun.

No, the gun was there.

And he bought a gun illegally.

No, he didn't.

The gun was neither illegal nor did he buy it.

And then we went off to the races from there.

And then he was, you know, attacked by three noble citizens.

One convicted numerous times, pedophile, among other felonies.

Another was a felony, assault, threats.

You know, I'm going to gut you like a pig to a family member.

And then the third person who pointed a gun at him

had an arrest record.

So we had three criminals who chased him.

One tried to beat him's brains in with a

skateboard.

The other was going, had threatened to kill him and said, you know, the N-word.

And he was just released from a mental hospital, I think that day after a suicide attempt.

And then we had the third person who was the star witness, Jack, for the prosecution, who admitted that Kyle really didn't point a gun at him until he pointed a gun at him.

That just crushed their case.

And then we had the jumper man.

I don't know who he was, but the prosecution knew who he was.

This is the youth that came in, another felon.

So we had four, three felons and one with an arrest record, jumped on it, tried to jump on his head and did, I think, and then took off.

And then we never knew who he was, we were told, but the prosecution, of course, knew who he was all the time.

So then we went into the trial and we had the prosecution in the aftermath of Alec Baldwin pointing a gun at the jury.

We had one of the prosecutors saying, you know, you need to take a beating that you have a mob chasing you wants to kill you.

Just take a beating.

And he was a coward that he didn't fight with his fist.

And then we went into the video that they released a grainy version to the defense.

It wasn't there.

It wasn't the quality that they had at their access.

They brought up, tried to impugn

Rittenhouse by Fifth Amendment insinuations that the judge ruled out of order.

I could go on.

And the judge himself was obviously worried about the crowd, kept threatening that the prosecution might have been out of hand, but never he was hated and he was scared that he was hated in the media by the left, even though he was a Democrat and quite liberal.

He wanted to give me that.

And then we had the jury and I thought this would be, you know, two hours.

Courtesy, Jack, two hours, but it was almost four days.

So what do we glean from all it?

Still, I think I have a kind of a aberrant view of this.

I think the prosecution, even in their infamy, understood that this was not a case that was triable, that it was a clear case of self-defense.

And the only way they could make it look good was to lie and lie and lie and be so outrageous that they could try this guy on three or four counts.

A, he's white.

They lied and said he was a white supremacist, as did Joe Biden and almost everybody else.

He had no evidence that he was.

But that was one thing.

And then he was using an assault weapon, automatic weapon, you know, short barrel, all lies.

And he just went over there to kill all that.

But really demands the question: were they thinking that, you know, we don't want this, so we're just going to act outrageous and not play to the jury or the judge so much as to the public.

And we can always say, look, we not only tried this case, we were crazy.

We were unprofessional.

We violated every ethical and judicial canon in existence on your behalf.

Then they fobbed it over on the judge, hoping that the judge some point would say, mistrial.

And then they could say, well, we didn't lose the case.

The judge being, you know, a right-wing white supremacist himself cut us off.

Well, then it was on the judge, and the judge should have called a mistrial right away.

As soon as they found out that they were offering deals with the other companion that had a gun so that he might not be able to testify or they were looking at him, I think they were charging him with arson so that he couldn't couldn't come in without testifying against himself.

And the two videos, all of this was on professional.

He should have called a mistrial, but he didn't want to do that.

So then he fobbed the responsibility onto the jury.

And I know the juries, I remember in this context, we had an MSNBC reporter surveying who the jurors were, following them, running a red light to follow them.

We had protesters outside who the judge seemed to be very rattled by.

The prosecutors were playing to the community.

There were people in the community, et cetera, et cetera.

Well, then they kind of fought it off for four days.

Like, and everybody's saying, even distinguished jurisprudent scholars as Andy McCarthy said, wow.

You know, Andy had some reason to say that.

He just said, this thing is really kind of an open and shut, innocent case, but it's there for four days.

Maybe it's going to be a hung jury.

Maybe they keep wanting to have video.

He had reason to say that because he was surprised.

But I think the real reason may have been they wanted to go through the motion.

They should have just said, you know what, this is a farce and exonerated.

So each person along that chain, each entity

from

the prosecuting attorneys to the judge, the jury was terrified that the mob was going to come after them.

And they followed responsibilities onto the next entity that should have caught, at some point, this thing should have been called off.

And all of them had it in their power.

The prosecuting attorney said, this is a joke.

The judge should have said, You have violated deliberately so many candidates.

This is a mistrial.

The jurors said, This, we watched this, we're sickened.

We're going to look at the evidence.

We've looked at it.

It's about a three-hour decision.

And that should have been it.

This was as bad as the OJ trial in the sense that he was as innocent, Rittenhouse was as innocent as OJ was as guilty.

Victor, this clearly, the prosecution itself was a

political act.

And we've seen this before, this widespread prosecutorial abuse over the years.

Remember, Senator, oh, the Alaska Senator

Stevens, evidence was withheld.

We have had some of the special prosecutors over the years who just file, you know, a thousand.

Well, actually, I think against Elliot Abrams, he was facing dozens of charges.

And you just take your time.

Conrad Black was at Conrad Black.

Yeah, well, Conrad, right?

They filed.

Well, they filed

everything in the kitchen sink against Conrad.

And you're right, the whole strategy was, okay, we'll drop this one, but then you do the, okay, well, and they just whittle it down and they wear out the person, they wear out their financial resources, they wear out their psyches, and then they hope all along that line of, you know,

dropping unnecessary or gratuitous charge at some point the defendant will be broken down and right and plead.

And so in this case, you're right.

I mean, mean, he was charged with a weapons charge.

And this is really weird, Jack, because they didn't even know what Wisconsin law says.

They said he was a 17-year-old that had purchased an illegal weapon, both because of the age and the weapon.

And of course, it wasn't a short-barrel semi-automatic rifle.

It was a long barrel, which was legal for a 17-year-old to carry.

And he didn't buy it.

His friend bought it.

And apparently he didn't take it across state lines, plural.

It was in Kenosha.

So they knew all that when they went in there, and yet they had that charge standing until they dropped it.

Victor, it seems to me that for a couple of our cable networks and many of our politicians, that civil unrest in America is an important thing, is a tool, is a good thing because of what it brings about.

My friend, he may be yours too.

I don't know how well you know Rod Dreher.

I think Rod's a great guy.

He tweeted either today or yesterday.

So there was some image of Kyle Rittenhouse.

Someone had some doctored image of him holding a champagne glass.

And then there was also a picture of the poor kid from Covington High School, who, as we know, sued some media outlets.

Rod is responding.

He says, go, Kyle, go.

The media will only learn if they are forced to pay a price.

And I don't know if that's true.

I mean, they didn't learn because of Covington.

Remember the guy from the Atlanta Olympics?

I think they're gained to take whatever financial hit because,

I don't know, maybe in the calculus, having civil unrest keeps eyeballs and brings money into that.

It does.

And you can see the same thing.

CNN just wrote an article yesterday about: yes, the steel dossier was a complete hoax.

Yes, the Russian hoax.

Yes, there was a Russian hoax.

But A, Russians were interested, as they always are.

They were interested in 2016, 2014.

Devin Nunes came up to the Hoover Institution five years, seven years ago, well before Trump even was on the political scene, and gave a very couldn't be very candid because of confidentiality, but he was telling a bipartisan group of Democrats and Republicans there who

applauded him that we needed to be very careful about Russians interfering in elections.

Okay.

And we all know that

Russia is an entity.

And I mean, look at Hillary Clinton and Uranium One.

And look at Bill Clinton going over to moscow on the eve of that deal and getting a half a million dollars so everybody knows that people go back and forth with russia and we know that hillary clinton i think his name was dolan she had an entity that worked for her that was in moscow okay so what what does cnn do They say, well, we were kind of full.

So yeah, the thing was a mess, but Russia was trying to interfere.

And there were people like Manafort that were talking to Russia.

Therefore, we were wrong evidence, but right in the long, you know, we were, we want to apologize that we hyped a lie, but it was a noble lie because it reflected the truth.

That's about as much as you got out of them.

Nobody said Adam Schiff, Adam Schiff, like Clapper and Brennan, were telling everybody publicly that they had all this information that Russia had polluted and then privately under oath or in the House Intelligence Committee, according to published leaks, they were saying just the opposite.

So, no, they don't learn, Jack.

They see it, as you said, as a cost of doing business.

And

remember, they're not just faceless corporations.

These are people.

These are people.

And they live in the Washington, New York Nexus.

And they associate with people.

And the people they associate are with from a particular class, education, pedigreed, credentialed milieu.

And in their way of thinking, the corporation will make up the losses.

And I know them, and I'm married to this person, and my brother works at this news outlet.

And I used to be married to this woman, and et cetera, et cetera.

And they're all incestuous, and they are in an echo chamber.

They have no idea that people are just.

turning them out.

They have no idea that they're despised by the majority of the American people.

And they have no idea they have zero credibility.

I think all of us now on the conservative side, when somebody calls you up from the Washington post the new york time cnn msnbc and they still do occasionally you very politely say no i can't talk to you because you know what they're going to do they're going to a lie about you and then they're going to say conservative person and they're going to put words in your mouth that you criticize other conservative that's all they do and so they have zero credibility and and they never learn and they never will learn the only thing it's going to teach them is one thing

and that is

if the republicans and conservatives can pull off a midterm victory, I'm not talking 20, 30, I mean it has to be 70 seats, epic, and then they have to take the senate back and they have to send a message that the school board protests are going to continue and they have to pay a price for awokeness.

And if they do that, then somebody who wants a job in Congress to keep their job is going to turn around and say, listen, if you guys keep it up, we're done for, and then bolt.

But that will take a huge tsunami because it's all about power.

And they feel that they have a demographic future, that young people have been indoctrinated in the university, that they've got them in K through 12.

So this is a long-term investment.

And it's like Jory Reed said when she started clapping on the era essentially when she said, oh, the new stories say that the so-called white population, forget about intermarriage and the idea that increasingly class is becoming as important as race to most of the middle class.

But she was clapping that the so-called white population, she said, was shrinking, i.e., dying out.

So that's, she gave away what her thinking was, and that's what the left is.

Right.

Well, Victor, one last thing related to the media, and I'm going to give a garbled history lesson, but we have a media and it does what it does because there is a thing called freedom of the press.

And what we've just gone through with this trial is this is a political case it was a political prosecution and okay our right to free speech and right to free press is legally enshrined in the constitution but it it emanates from you know a very famous case in the 1730s in new york which once upon a time we used to be taught in elementary school about john peter zenger and he had a newspaper in new york and he criticized the royal governor who didn't like being criticized and he demanded that John Peter Zenger be tried for libel.

And a grand jury of citizens said no.

And then the colonial governor forced the colonial attorney general to file charges anyway.

And Zenger was exonerated within 10 minutes by the jury.

But that's where the right of freedom of the press in our society emanates from.

Yeah.

I can remember in my grammar school, there was a famous watercolor called Burning of the Papers or something that, you know, that they were wasn't he he was critical of the governor or something of the governor yeah he was a yeah

over a salary yeah and people were trying to burn his journals and stuff his newspaper but you know here today they would kill him right yeah well i mean here's the media that gets its rights because of a case of person of political you know political prosecution and now calling for it it's it's uh it's well i just read an article in the washington post an op-ed by max boot this is a guy who said that the Hunter, he called the Mueller team the Hunter-Killer team, and that we were always on the verge.

And then he quoted chapter and verse of the dossier,

and he was surveying the political climate.

And he, in this op-ed, sensed that the Biden agenda was polarizing people.

And that if he did not change, they were going to lose big time within a year and then big, big time within three years in the presidential election.

And then he had gone to Berkeley to talk to his friends who were liberal, and they warned him that even though they were liberal, that the mass mandate for people even who had COVID or the critical race theory or the cancel culture was turning them off the left.

And this column was therefore

a call for the Democrats to be liberal liberal and not hardcore progressive.

And what was the point of it?

The point of all of this was to say that they may lose the election, then Donald Trump, the evil orange man, was going to destroy democracy.

Think of the logic of that.

It's a guy who pushes the steel dossier that was bought by Hillary Clinton,

paid for through the pay wall, I guess, or firewall of the Perkins, the DNC A, Perkins-Coey Rolfram B, Fusion GPS C.

And we were told that this was professional, that it was the guy had not been to Russia since 2009 at best, and maybe earlier.

He might have lied about that earlier.

He had not been there.

And he was relying on his sources from a guy that worked for Hillwich

and recycled it from Dunchinko, who was at the Brookings Institute.

He was a left-wing guy, and he did no research.

And we were, after promulgating that whole thing in columns, the left doesn't even say, oh my God, we were duped.

They just say there were things that were wrong with it, but the general central truth is

it was rushing.

Things haven't been disproven.

Yeah, that's a line.

And the point is, the truth of the narrative for all these people is Donald Trump is bad.

And therefore, any means necessary to prove that he's bad and keep him out are noble.

And so, and I think what's happened is we don't know how large it is.

Everybody says the universities have zero reputation.

The media has zero reputation.

The network news has zero reputation.

People used to listen to NPR and PBS.

I did.

I don't do that anymore.

No, people don't do that.

I've never done that.

And yeah, they've lost everything with half the country, and they don't even know it.

They can see it on the bottom line that CNN has a minuscule audience or that Tucker has a a bigger audience than CNN and MSNBC combined, even though the conservative cable news has been fragmented with Newsmax and AON.

And the difference is it's still bigger.

Fox is still bigger than those two entities combined, and they still don't get it.

And they'll never get it until finally they'll get so

isolated or estranged or ostracized, it'll start to affect them monetarily.

Yeah.

But I think a lot of people are saying, wait a minute,

I don't really care anymore that my kid has a Yale BA or I don't want to send my kid to Berkeley.

Why does it matter if they're going to go there and be indoctrinated and come home for Christmas and tell me I'm a racist, slave-owning,

heterosexual Christian?

I don't want to pay for those people.

I do not want to pay for that.

So I will send them to another school

or vocational school.

Let the bicoastal elite go to these little places and then hire each other and then talk about how wonderful they are, but just everybody else should forget about them.

I just would hope and pray, Victor, we've mentioned this before, but the conservatives who attended some of these elite institutions who were thrilled to have gotten a hickey under the grandstand of the homecoming game in 1964 will not write big checks or bequests or whatever to these same places that are turning their grandchildren into communists there's a there's a role of culpability for conservatives here oh there is too and they got to get over it i spend most of my waking hours when i talk to such people to say send your child to sain thomas aquinas if you want to send send them to hillsdale college send them to evergreen send them anywhere right send them to a state college and get a vocational skill but do not send them to those places these people who run those places are simply not truthful And we saw that case with the Yale Law School, that psychodrama going out where they tried to get a confession out of a Native American student because he, you know, he said, used a word they didn't think was appropriate.

And they went after the Federalist Society.

They went after Amy Chu.

And they've gone, Princeton's gone after Joshua Katz.

It's the same story.

We don't like free speech, but it's really about power.

We have decided we are judge, jury, and executioner, and you cannot touch us.

And if you are willing to bow to us and sign a confession or let us write your confession, then you will be able, we'll watch you.

And as I said,

it happened to Neil Ferguson and Scott Allison myself at the Stanford Faculty Senate, which, by the way, the other day tabled their investigation, I suppose, that was centered on a,

I wish they could continue.

Oh, really?

Yeah, I wish they'd continue it.

You remember the chairman of the English department, who in the past had helped lead a demonstration out in the San Mateo Bridge in number,

dozens of Stanford students were arrested.

He was an Antifa guy, right?

He said he was

kind of sort of.

He said, I'm the Stanford anti-fascist, but I'm not Antifa.

Oh, okay.

But it was the acronym was the same.

Right.

We don't know whether you have affiliations.

You know, there were car crashes and Stanford students got arrested.

And if you went to his website, there were materials on there that you could interpret as anti-Semitic literature.

And this person is the chief prosecutor.

And no one says, wait a minute,

you have taken impressionable students as a mentor and taken them out in the past and broken the law and endangered the public and got them arrested.

And

you have made false accusations against people.

And you have associated yourself kind of within an organization that endorses violence.

Right.

So we're not going to listen to you because everybody's afraid.

Everybody's afraid.

Everybody's afraid.

I'd like to, we've got a couple of things to talk about.

We'd like to hope and think that Hoover, I'm not trying to put you in mind here, but Hoover has a role here in this investigation.

I like to think they might say, hey, no, come on, do it.

Don't do it.

They're entitled to.

But I mean, when they went after Scott Atlas, we'll talk about that maybe sometime or right away.

But I mean, there was a medical professional counseling the president of the United States.

And we know now that most

everything that he advised, i.e.,

focus on elderly people over 60 and 65.

Do not put people with COVID into rest homes.

Do not even let the rest home people go back and forth from home.

Have them secured.

Get traitors so they can stay overnight.

Vaccinate as many people over 18 as you can.

But that being said, look at the data.

The data is that people without comorbidities who are under 60, especially, you know, K through 12, you're going to do a lot more damage by denying the opportunity to come to school, not to mention to their parents.

And,

you know, he said masks are very valuable in closed environments, you know, inside in certain times of the year and everything, but when you're outside, you don't need a mask.

And then vaccinations, he urged everybody to be vaccinated, but he did say in some cases we have to investigate what the degree of immunity is that's offered by previous cases of COVID infection and what we need to start looking at, the COVID antibiotic titer to see if any efficacy is achieved by having ibites.

And if it is, then we need to consider whether that can be substituted for the vaccination.

Right here, yeah.

He says the United States is uniquely off the rails on that very point.

We are the only country that disregards

the facts.

He said we should not put all our eggs in one basket.

While he supported Operation Warp Speed, and he advised Trump of that, he said we have to have a parallel track with therapeutics.

And as we know now, that was correct.

We have the new Merck and Pfizer pill that apparently you take and it can give you 85% protection or can stop the virus in the first 48 hours.

That's what he was arguing.

And who was he drawing his information on?

Not that he needed to, but he was reading daily.

I know him.

I've known him for

15 years.

All he does is study academic papers.

He's an academic.

He's a medical professional who uses academic expertise gained from medical school and years as the chairman of the radiology department, et cetera, et cetera, to make scientific assessments.

And that's what he was doing.

But the problem was that it hit a political agenda.

And the political agenda was people were trying to destroy the Donald Trump administration.

And Fauci and Burks were part of that effort.

They didn't admit to it, but they were.

And they were giving advice that was political in nature.

And it was contradictory.

And it was, you know, wear one mask, wear two masks.

And Scott didn't do that.

And so they kind of destroyed him.

And the irony, the final irony of this whole melodrama was

who were Scott's associates when Stanford professors wrote petitions trying to censor him or the faculty summit demonized him?

Who were the people that had been his colleagues for years and he knew and were giving him advice about immunology and public pandemics?

Pandemics, I shouldn't say public.

It was Jay Battaria, one of the great immunologists, public health experts of infectious diseases around epidemiologists.

And then we had John Yannides, another stellar world-famous epidemiologist.

And we had Michael Lebette, a Nobel Prize winner.

So that was what the irony was, that Stanford was basically saying, Scott Atlas has embarrassed us, but he was drawing on three people who are stellar superstars in the field that surrounds aspects of the COVID pandemic.

But we will isolate or we'll not treat them, but publicly, we will not say a word about them because they are taboo.

You cannot touch them because of their stellar reputations.

reputations but scott works at the hoover institution and therefore he's vulnerable right went after him and they tried to destroy him and a lot of us you know

were very angry about that right he's victor he's got a book coming out it's called a plague upon our house i was traveling yesterday but long drive and i listened to Megan Kelly's podcast and she interviewed him.

It was really illuminating.

I think he's also doing one of those long interviews with Tucker Carlson that'll be playing on Fox News.

But that he was, this is kind of crazy.

Like, that was one man.

He was the guy, not only looking at the COVID and studies on COVID, but the comprehensive

exactly.

That was a great contribution.

That was because he was a voice in the wilderness.

He was saying, listen, in my aspects, previous to being a public health expert and a public policy maker i was a radiologist and i know what happens when people who have cancer don't have periodic scanning and do not or may have cancer don't come in for appointments and so he was saying if you shut this entire country down

there's going to be people who are going to miss prostate cancer.

They're going to miss mammograms.

They're not going to have chemotherapy and radiology for treatment of malignancies.

And this is in addition to, we're going to see a spike in substance abuse.

We're going to see a spike in alcoholism.

We're going to see a spike in spousal and family abuse.

We're going to see a spike in suicides.

We're going to see, this is all in addition to the economic damage.

And he was absolutely right.

And he said that this is going to approximate or outnumber the number of deaths from COVID.

He's probably right about that too.

And then he finally said something that was just an anathema.

He said, we want to get to a situation where the vast majority, and this is the H-word that nobody was allowed to use, herd immunity, either have a vaccination or they've had a case of COVID or both.

And while they may get COVID again, they will not get a serious,

you know, serious malady.

And then therefore we can start to get back to normal and say this is something that will be like the flu.

And therefore, as we get our skills sharpened, we'll live with it without destroying the economy in a lockdown.

And what did they do?

They just said, you know, Trump advisor from Hoover Institution says COVID no different than the flu.

He didn't say that.

He said, we want to get, and so they just tried to destroy him.

And,

you know,

He

didn't get paid.

He was just, he didn't get paid by that.

He just went there on the beckon and call of the president because he had written a number of papers about these ideas.

And then he advised the president.

And then the COVID task force that had been co-chaired by Fauci and Burks got very angry.

Well, who's this guy?

We're the guys.

And, you know, we're the guys.

Because they had, because they were bureaucrats.

They were like heart bureaucrats.

They had never been,

they had never really in years

been

a scholar.

They had not been doing recently active research.

They had not been teaching.

They had not been in the private sector.

But they understood the bureaucracy maybe better than Scott did.

Scott was always outspoken and

he was tough and he was candid.

And he didn't care.

He was just going to, he did care about the American people.

I mean, what they did to him, i.e.

the press and the medical community and the academic community, is right up there with the Covington kids and with all these other people.

Right.

Well,

the consequences of mocking him is really not following his advice is calculable in deaths.

It's crazy.

What's even worse is that people were on social media in the Palo Alto Stanford community saying that he was responsible for death.

And he was exactly trying to save, and he probably did save thousands of lives by convincing the Trump administration to gradually ease out of a complete lockdown.

Right.

And you can see it today.

And I we're in California and I look at the death toll every day from COVID and it's pretty flat.

It goes from about 50 to 120 and we're opening up now.

I just got back.

20 minutes ago from Walmart, 30 minutes ago, and it's open.

There's no mask.

All the some of the areas that were locked off, the main entrance is not the only entrance.

So my point is that we're not losing as many people as people had predicted.

And the reason is that we are getting a lot more people.

75% of the population has had a vaccination.

And then we've got millions of people that have had COVID.

And between those two realities, we're getting to the point where people are getting COVID every day and they're all panicking about the COVID infection rate.

and they're sick for a day or two, if they've been vaccinated, and if they've had a case of COVID.

And we're getting down now to the 25% either for whatever reason has not had COVID or will not get vaccinated.

And that's why for all of the highly infectious nature of the Delta variant, we haven't seen these cases explode.

Now, we may see them when we're all cooped up in January in rooms and you're getting so much vival load that finally it overwhelms these fading vaccinations, but that hasn't happened yet.

Well, Victor, I do want to recommend to our listeners, if they try to catch that episode of Megan Kelly's podcast, with one thing that had particularly frosted me, and I had just come back from a couple of flights, and I know

you have been on way too many crazy-ass flights in the last few months.

But

Atlas said that of the two places that really don't need masks, one is, of course, a school that we're torturing these kindergartners and making them wear masks.

And the other thing is airplanes.

This is like the cleanest, it's almost a pristine environment to, well, pristine to repel viruses.

It just says it's not, it is not a place where anyone's going to get COVID.

And yet we have to mask up.

And if you, you know, Megan was making a point about she got nagged by some flight attendant because, you know, you eat one of your cookies and if you leave the mask down, they come and put the mask back up.

They do.

And people,

just less than a week ago, I flew and when I got in the guy driving me, he had a mask on in a car.

And I said, I've been vaccinated.

He said, it was policy to wear a mask.

So I wore a mask.

And at five o'clock, bam, I got to Fort Lauderdale Dale at 6.15.

I had to wear a mask.

Go through everything, wear a mask.

Late boarding, wear a mask.

Fly to Dallas, late flight, wear a mask.

Wait in the airport, wear a mask.

Another three and a half hour flight, wear a mask, land in Pheasant.

And when you add it up,

you're talking about 14 with a delay, 14 or 15 hours.

And I'm the lucky one because I was doing that one out of it in this long trip I had, and one out of every three or four days.

Those poor people that are attendants and pilots that have to go in and stay in the airports and then fly out of them.

And the people who work there and the same thing in other places that cannot be good for you to breathe through that mask all day long.

Fibers and lack of

necessary oxygen,

well aside from the fact they're not going outdoors.

And so it's just.

It's based on no science.

Zero.

It's based on no science.

And you know it isn't because Fauci said, even if you've had boosters, you have to wear a mask.

And Joe Biden can't do it anymore.

So he's out all the time without a mask.

And we know people that are 78 years old have a very iffy response to a vaccination.

That is, a large minority of them don't get an adequate immune response and very great immune protection.

And so Joe Biden's had two.

Now he got a third.

But he's out there even rubbing his mucus on his hand.

And so no one says a word because he knows that.

And when you see those politicians that are yelling about masks, it's kind of a sport now for journalists to say this person, this person, this person was out seen

not wearing a mask.

And so

this was an avenue to express power and by expressing power, to gain more power.

And

not just for political reasons or financial reasons, but also to humiliate people.

And so when you say to them, why are you doing this?

We're doing this because we can.

And you'll have to listen.

Right.

It reminds me of that line in the million dialogues, I think,

we are stronger than you, and we do as we must, and you will obey as you can.

Right.

That's just the way it is.

Yeah.

It's

twisted.

It's just, you're right.

It's not necessarily about money or it's just about the means of projecting on other people.

Well, we're actually going to talk about leftist projecting on another another podcast that we're going to record later today.

But Victor, we've got a little time left.

We've got one other thing to talk about, and that's going to be the aforementioned president.

And we'll talk about the vice president also, but right after this important message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hanson show, the traditionalists.

We're recording on Saturday, November 20th.

Victor, let's wrap up the program today by looking at the polls.

Joe Biden's numbers continue to plummet, but he's got one

thing he can look at and with maybe smile a little bit, and that's the terrible, even more terrible numbers numbers that Kamala Harris has.

Now, of this week, her top communications person left.

A lot of bad press over the last 10 days or so.

She doesn't get along with the president.

Her staff is in chaos.

She's doing a terrible job, et cetera.

I don't know why all of a sudden this has become such an issue because to me, it's like the sun rises in the east, as if that's some new story.

She was a terrible presidential candidate surely should be no surprise her numbers are in a free fall but by the way scott rass mussen friend just did a poll i mean 92 percent of americans 92 percent it's almost north korean kind of numbers think inflation is very serious matter so why there should be a surprise in these low numbers is beyond me victor anything you want to say about the uh status of the president and the vice president well we're 10 months into it now and he's down to about 36 percent and he's given a great gift to the republicans a terrible gift to us americans but the republicans their generic popularity has gone up by 10 that's up to up 10 points so what that means in their political world is that the 435 house members Those that are Democrats, and there's a lot of them in swing districts where maybe Trump is plus three or minus three Trump in the last election.

They're making these decisions.

Will I go down with a ship or do I take a short-term hit and buck this crazy agenda?

Or do I go with it that everybody hates?

But either way, I'm going to lose.

Because if I buck Nancy Pelosi so that I don't lose this election coming up, then they're going to cut me off from campaign funds and I'm not going to get assignments.

So they're trying to thread that needle or square that circle and you can't.

So there's a reckoning coming and you can see it.

It's going across the society.

When you have Bill Maher or Dave Chappelle or Larry Summers weighing in, that this is ridiculous.

Heck, you even had Barack Obama say the border is not sustainable.

And then you have these people not only supporting and continuing these policies of inflation and energy restriction and this crazy foreign policy with its signature disaster in Afghanistan and these huge budget numbers, deficits, and the national debt getting close to 30.

I can go on and on, but the point I'm making is that when confronted with these polls that show a clear distaste or anger about the American people, they double down.

And they either say it's racism, racism, racism, or it's Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump.

And the Russians are under every bed.

They still say that.

And then they even insult the people.

It's your treadmill.

Ha, ha ha, they didn't come.

That's why you're mad.

Oh, Pete Budget.

Oh, you're a procrastinator like me.

It's just a matter of us who want to to wait till Christmas Eve.

We won't get our gifts.

Or, you know, it's Ron Klein.

Ha, ha,

inflation's a high-class thing.

Or,

you know, it's Majorca, oh, the border is secure.

You know, it's no more, no less secure than it ever has been.

Or it's, you know, Afghan joint chief people who are saying, well, the logistics was a success, i.e., we've mastered the art of defeat.

When we go overseas and we lose, we're very good at it now because we can get the hell out very quickly.

And so it's ridiculous.

And so it's going to go down lower.

And the only thing that we don't know is, given the hardcore left, we don't know how large it is because of all the institutional support.

By that, Jack, I mean when you have Silicon Valley and K through 12 and Academia and Corporate Boardroom and the banks and Wall Street and, you know, everybody from the NBA to a Hollywood actor, so Rockefeller Foundation, Storos Foundation, Tais Foundation.

We don't know how big the actual numbers are that these people are reaching and supporting and amplifying.

But I think we're getting pretty close to see that when you get down to 36%, 35%,

that's about the only base they've got left.

And I think it gets down, I think it's going to get down to about 30%.

or 28%, because those are the people.

And remember, these are polls that except for a couple of them are more or less prone, prone, as we've known, to favor the left.

So it's not like they're exaggerated.

In fact, they're probably understating his unpopularity.

And so the $64,000 question specifically about Biden and Harris is when he said in advance that he was going to pick an African-American woman.

And remember who got mad about that, the Cuomo brothers did, because they thought that Andrew would be Emmy winner and all that, who later became the internet, was going to be vice president.

Now he was eliminated.

So they're pretty absurd people to begin with, their taste.

But my point is, when he did that, he narrowed it down basically to Stacey Abrams,

the person who insists she's still governor of Georgia, even though she lost by 50,000 votes two and a half years ago.

But my point is three years ago.

But the point is that

I can't figure out, maybe our listeners can, what was the point in picking somebody

who

got zero delegates, crashed and burned, had a lot of Silicon Valley money in the presidential race of 2020,

and has turned off everybody and then sort of was manipulative with the Willie Brown Paramore connection, the Montel Williams.

It was kind of every time she was at a juncture in her ascendant career, she found a celebrity or a person that had political power to bestow upon her.

So there was nothing there there.

And yet she was the vice president.

So the only question is, why did he do it?

Was it a panic during the George Floyd phenomenon?

No, because, I mean, there were other options.

You know, the convention of 2020 followed the George Floyd killing.

But my point is this, death, I should say, my point is this is if she wasn't vice president, and let's say that there was some centrist Republican that had a long record of achievement, Joe Biden would be in real trouble right now because this is the Agnos syndrome.

People would be saying, wow, you've got this wonderful vice president.

He's got a record of state governance or something like this.

Why don't they just say Joe is tired and we can get the person in and then prep him or her for the 2024 run?

So my point is, this is the age-old question with the left and Biden.

Are they just incompetent?

Are they trying to think it out to cause chaos?

In this case, did Joe Biden say to himself, well, I've got some health issues and I say crazy things.

So his advisors say, yeah, appoint somebody like Camilla Harris.

She's so bad that she likes Spiro Agnew.

As long as Agnew was around and hadn't been indicted, Nixon, no one said to Nixon, you got to resign.

Right.

Because they would get Agnew.

And then he got Jerry Ford, which sober, judicious, good old Jerry was a mistake politically because people said, ah, Jerry Ford would be great.

The left loved him because they said he wasn't a crook and they could probably beat him, but everybody agreed he was a nice guy.

And

Biden didn't do that.

And now what is saving him from himself is Kamala Harris.

Right.

And you can see they hate each other because every time he says to do something, go to the border, go over to Europe.

go over to Asia, whatever it is, she doesn't do it or she does it very poorly.

Extremely poorly.

And then he leaks what his guys leak how terrible she is.

And you know what?

I really do believe that there is something there.

When I'm not saying she's not inept, but when she says it's racist and sexist,

there's something about Joe Biden.

I don't know what it is.

And I'm very reluctant to say anyone's a racist that I don't know, but I do know his record.

And during this whole trial with Rittenhouse and this racial climate, when he says that, uses the word Negro, and that's an ossified word that people take in a particular way, Negro.

And then he said about in August, he said to one of his stalwart staffers, not a staffer, a head of an agency, said, hey, boy, I got a boy down here, boy.

And this follows, you know, hey, are you a junkie or you ain't black?

And then going back, put you all in chains.

Remember, put you on change was not addressed to a bunch of people on parole.

It was a highly distinguished, highly competent group of black professionals that he said that to.

Then we add in those crazy racist corn pop stories, and we go back to the donut shop, Barack Obama is the first articulate black, and it's just everywhere, everywhere.

The guy cannot finish a month without saying something that's racist.

And so when she says that, you know, I always, when somebody accuses anybody of racism, I say, well, let's see the evidence.

But the evidence is that he's saying, I mean, think about the left.

They're worried about a white male, 17 years old, shooting three criminals.

former criminals with arrest records who were trying to kill him.

And they're angry about it because they think it has something to do with race and it's a proof of racism.

Where at the same time, the president of the United States has just gone into a riff about Negro

and they don't say a word.

So

I think Camilla Harris has a point.

I think he's not, I don't know what it is with him, but he can't treat people as people.

And it's always Joe Biden is the superior person.

Think of all the things in those stories.

I'm going to tell you that they're going to put you in chains.

I'm going to tell you about these crazy corn pop people.

I'm going to tell you, junkie, that you ain't black.

I tell you what the rules are.

It's always him talking down to somebody.

Yeah.

I would love to see someday some psychiatrist do a real analysis of this dude because he is.

I would go mad.

Maybe.

Maybe.

All right.

Hey, Victor, we've got a little business here to attend to.

So first, I'd like to encourage our listeners to visit VictorHanson.com.

You'll find a link for The Dying Citizen.

If you haven't gotten it yet, all I can ask is, what's the matter with you?

Go ahead, get it.

A bestseller, terrific book.

Just got a very strong review in the Wall Street Journal from Barton Swain.

While you're there, also do consider subscribing to victorhanson.com.

There is a plethora of original material.

Victor writes like a machine.

There's a lot of content on there.

It's exclusive to the website.

Five bucks.

a month, $50 for a year.

Do the $5 option if you want to test it out.

You're going to enjoy it tremendously, I assure you.

I do want to thank our listeners who go to iTunes and leave ratings.

Once again, five stars across the board, probably the only heavily reviewed podcast out there that has that ranking.

And Victor, we have some lovely reviews.

Here's one from Medley C.

Medley C.

It's titled VDH Fangirl.

It's a silly title, but I'm a 59-year-old fan.

I've been listening to Victor Davis Hansen for years.

I love the fact that he understands the working man and is still so deeply intellectual and thoughtful about every topic that comes his way.

I've read many of his books and find such insight that his books will always remain on the shelf.

The Dying Citizen is providing both an insightful and utterly depressing read.

Still, the truth is just that way sometimes.

So thanks, Medley C.

Thanks to

our listeners who go to iTunes.

Thanks to those who have visited civilthoughts.com, where I hang my hat.

And you can subscribe or also visit Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic.

We are recording this the Saturday before Thanksgiving.

I'm going to say have a happy Thanksgiving to our listeners.

I hope this comes out beforehand.

And

have a happy, unfortunately, a happy, expensive Thanksgiving.

But we always end our broadcast with there's a patch of blue somewhere.

Yeah.

And help is is coming or deliverance is coming for.

Yeah,

God bless all.

Thanks, thank you.