The Traditionalist: Push Back

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

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

We are recording on Wednesday, October 20th.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, the star, the namesake is Victor Davis-Hansen, who's the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

The Wayne and Marsha Buskie, Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, and best-selling author of The Dying Citizen.

It's on the New York Times bestseller list, still doing very well wherever.

Be on the lookout, folks.

Early November, I think November 7th.

Why don't you check out Book TV, C-SPAN?

Victor and Megan Kelly are going to be on talking about the book.

We got a lot to talk about today.

Some generals, Colin Powell, the late Stanley McChrystal, author.

I will get to them and other subjects right after this important message.

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

The traditionalist show is the umbrella for the traditionalist, the classicist.

I have the honor to host them.

And then the great Sammy Wink hosts the culturalists.

Please consider listening to all three of Victor's podcasts.

So, Victor, let's start off by talking about General Colin Powell, who passed away the other day, age of 84.

He was at one time the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Secretary of State, thought of presidential candidate, kind of a bet noir for conservatives as he endorsed a Republican.

He was a Republican who endorsed Democratic presidential candidates, but a man who seemed to be held in high esteem by many Americans, if not most Americans.

Victor, I'm curious if you had any dealings with Colin Powell over the years.

Maybe you'd share them.

If not, why don't you, though, give us your views of how he mattered to America?

Well, I had just one or two.

I met him once, actually on the street of Washington.

He was very friendly and we talked.

And then he was at a club that I belonged to and I talked to him there a couple of times.

And I wrote something right after

9-11 that he wrote me about.

I don't know if you remember, but there was talk.

as we declared war in the Taliban and we invaded in October of 2001.

You remember he floated the idea as Secretary of State that there might be a coalition government within Afghanistan, including the Pakistanis and the Taliban and the minority tribes, a workable thing.

You didn't really want to rub their snout in it, so to speak.

As we went in, it was very

unsure.

But before we became very successful, there was a period of two weeks where people were

Masho-Sharif, and we didn't know whether we were going to be able to, these cities would fall.

And people were very critical of him, some people we know, and they wanted him to be, to resign.

I thought that was ridiculous.

Have Colin Powell resign over a suggestion.

So I had written that.

So he wrote me something.

Over the years, though, I think he was very distinguished, but I think looking back, he was very embittered that he became the point man

on the Iraq war in the sense I'm not sure that being

the architect, one of the architects of defense secretaries of the first Gulf War in 91,

I

think that he felt that the second Bush administration was implicitly criticizing their failure to remove Saddam when it would might have been an easier thing.

And he might have resented as well that the most controversial aspect of going into Iraq, the weapons of mass destruction, they appointed him as Secretary of State.

I'm not sure that's logically necessary to a Secretary of State to make the argument, which turned out to be disastrously wrong.

And I had written at the time, I thought it was a big mistake to put all of your eggs in the weapon, the WMBD basket, since the United Nations had mentioned a lot of other things, although they didn't authorize the war.

But the U.S.

Congress did in bipartisan fashion.

And remember, they had 23 writs calling for the removal of Saddam Hussein.

And they were things like harboring the architects of the first 93 attack on the World Trade Center.

Abu Nadal was still there, giving bounties for terrorists on the West Bank, genocide against the Kurds, gassing of the marsh Arabs, failing to follow the no-fly zone.

I mean, they were all there and they were voted by both parties.

So I never understood why.

he came out there under orders from the bush people that he focus on wmd when he could have said look there's all these other reasons that this guy in a post 9-11 world is dangerous.

And then out of that bitterness, I think that he felt he had been used, that his name was the more redolent of bipartisanship.

Then when the WMD was not found, we still don't know what happened, whether it existed, whether it went to Syria, etc.

But he then took the heat for that.

And that, I think, embittered him.

I say that, this is a windy lead-up, Jack, because he had said that he wanted to take the Republican Party in a different direction, i.e.

the old Rockefeller Party or the Party of Liberalism.

And so when 2008 rolled along, there had been these fights between the Tea Party conservatives or the proto-Tea Party conservatives and that wing that he liked.

Yet in 2008,

They nominated somebody that was tailor-made to Colin Powell's ideas, and that was John McCain, a very moderate Republican, a Romney Rockefeller Republican, a strong military experience, national hero.

And you would think and then logically that he would gravitate to him, but he didn't.

He endorsed Barack Obama.

And then we did the four years later, we tried it again.

We being the conservative movement, we tried it with Mitt Romney, who given his recent schisms with the Trump wing, you can see that he always reflected the Rockefeller wing.

So what I'm getting at is if you really doubted the viability of the Republican Party to reach people,

it would be very hard to say why you would oppose two people who in the history of the last 30 years most likely agreed with Colin Powell's diagnosis.

I can see why he opposed Trump, but I never understood.

I mean, maybe

the first African-American president was historic and iconic.

He wanted to support him.

And then the other thing, there was something,

you know, nisi bonum nihil dicade de mortui.

So I don't really believe you should speak ill of the dead when they pass.

So I'm not going to say anything critical.

But when the Scooter Libby matter happened and Scooter Libby was accused of leaking materials

that were supposedly classified and talking to Judith Miller and all of the things that led to him supposedly lying about who had disclosed, remember the Joe Wilson and all that stuff.

Right.

It was pretty clear that Colin Powell's aide at the State Department had been the person.

So Richard Armitage?

Yes, Richard Armitage.

And he had been the person that had disclosed that, the status of Joseph Wilson and his political machinations.

And that knowledge was known to Colin Powell.

And yet no one came forward when Scooter Libby was hung out to dry and said, wait a minute, he wasn't the first or he wasn't at all or he wasn't the only person that may have been in a confidential conversation with the journalist mentioned that Joseph Wilson, his wife worked for the CIA, et cetera, et cetera.

So that, I think, that bothered a lot of conservatives.

And I think over the Iraq war, Colin Powell became disenchanted with the Republican Party.

But

that's that's all I can add to it.

And I have a great admiration for his service, and I think he was the voice of reason.

And every time I saw him, he was polite to me.

I don't think he was particularly fond of anything I wrote, but he wasn't gratuitously rude at all.

And I admired him for that.

His high point, just to finish, was the First Gulf War when he was asked by some liberal journalists, what's your strategy?

And he says, we're going to cut it off and kill it, talking about the Republican Guard Army in the 91 War.

And that was sort of controversial, but also also resonated with American people.

Maybe someday, separately, we should take up the issue of reviewing that war and

let's end it at 100 hours or other things that maybe we have come to regret, or maybe it was right at the time.

But I think that would be an interesting topic someday for military-based discussion.

But we are going to continue to talk about things military, Victor, if you don't mind.

And this has to do with Stanley McChrystal and our mutual good friend Bing West has a review of a book General McChrystal has out.

Bing wrote this for National Review.

It's called A General Who Failed in War, Assesses Risk.

And risk is the name of the book by McChrystal, who's co-written by Anna Batrico, Risk a User's Guide.

And man, Bing really gives it to McChrystal because he talks about just risk.

What does risk mean and et cetera?

But let me just read one chunk of Bing's review.

General McChrystal was the prime leader in Afghanistan nation-building effort that resulted in America's catastrophic and total withdrawal.

As the commander of more than 100,000 American and NATO troops, he insisted upon a fantastical strategy.

American troops would, he wrote in his memoir, protect the people from insurgent and collateral U.S.

violence and from corruption and predation of Afghans' own government.

The people consisted of 8 million Pashtun tribesmen scattered in 10,000 remote villages, all hurtling headlong into the 9th century.

This is Bing.

As an embedded journalist, I found that our grunts on patrol were bewildered by what they were supposed to be accomplishing.

General McChrystal, however, was unfazed by that reality.

Quote, I was asking soldiers to believe in something their ground-level experience denied them, end quote, he wrote.

Victor, one last thing.

Bing has written a number of books, including books about the war in Afghanistan, Bing, I think 10, 11, 12 more times actually embedded there.

He himself, Marine, combat hero from Vietnam, was Under Secretary of Defense once upon a time.

So, Victor, what do you think of General McChrystal?

Does he have Gumption writing a book called Risk?

I think Ben, Bing, I read his review.

I remember he also got cholera.

I mean, he not only was embedded in some of the worst places, a man who was in his 60s and 70s, but he got a very serious disease.

Yeah, so

he's a tough dude.

He knows he is.

And

I think his argument is that two things,

and there's a subtext, and he's explicit in that review.

He's saying things that you and I have talked about, Jack, in this show, that we are creating generals who become personas and media figures and cultural icons.

And so what he's saying is that McChrystal was sort of, it boomeranged on him, but he wanted to be a hero in the Rolling Stone magazine.

He was the one that remember said the phone, somebody said, well, it's Joe bite me on the phone.

And I think he didn't stop that.

I think his aide said, it's Joe bite me.

And he laughed.

And that came out in Rolling Stone.

That led to his relief of his command.

But the point was,

why would a person trust somebody from Rolling Stone Magazine to hang out with and embed within

your officer staff if you're supposed to be an intelligence officer and you have to think about the Taliban and how sneaky and complicit they are and everything, and yet in your own way of living, you've brought in somebody who's

dubbedly going to attack you.

And that's what he did.

And the answer is that because he wanted himself to be a celebrity-like figure.

And so there were rumors that were left that he only had one meal a day, that he was an aesthetic, he jogged, he's a magnificent physical specimen.

And then when he came out, I had written a critical article of him.

And I mention that because I've been severely criticized by some for suggesting current retired officers not violate Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice that both active and retired shall not disparage the commander-in-chief.

He did disparage Barack Obama.

There's no doubt about it.

And he deserved to be relieved of command.

Okay.

And he came to see me and he was very polite, but he could see that it was kind of a tense conversation.

We had 30 minutes.

And then he went into the corporate world and the big corporate world as a security risk advisor, as a leadership counselor, kind of guy who goes into a bunch of CEOs and said, hey, you guys, shape up.

This is how you have to look at the world.

And this is what I did.

And da-da-da.

And he became very, very wealthy.

And so that's one side of it.

The other side is he became a very vocal critic of certain military and political figures.

So when Donald Trump was in his horriblis, Annas Harribles of 2020 and people were out of the military, retired, were calling him Mussolini and Hitler and building Auschwitz cages on the border and he should be removed sooner or later and we need the military to stage a coup.

He jumped in and basically said the president is not fit he's a liar which is a clear violation of code 88 i mean article 88 and then in addition there was a very

controversial article he wrote in atlantic that lisa jobs the widow of steve jobs magazine's very left wing and right during the charlottesville riots, demonstrations, and what became the beginning or I should say fuel the BLM movement, he came out in an Atlantic article and said, you know, I worship Robert E.

Lee and I had his picture right on my wall.

And when I saw what happened, I took that picture out and I threw it and it's in the dump right now.

So first of all, if you were really a student of the Civil War and you wanted to look at whether it was grand strategy of the Klaus Witzian direct approach, i.e.

the battles outside Richmond in the bloody summer of 1864, or you were an advocate of Liddell Hart and the indirect approach of cutting the roots out and letting the fruit die on the vine, which William Tecumseh Sherman was.

Whatever you wanted to say, I don't think Robert E.

Lee was in that category to worship all those years.

Right.

But he did.

And I mean, I worship William Tecumseh Sherman, but I don't have a picture on his wall, okay?

So this was an unusual adulation.

And by that, I'm saying it's very unusual to go from he's almost deified to he's satanic, and you time that because of a demonstration that it's attacking a statue of Lee.

And it gave the appearance then that a lot of military officers who were dependent on corporate largesse and money and business were suddenly reversing courses and saying, oh.

I didn't really realize what a racist Lee was.

Why was I doing this?

I threw his picture in the dump.

So basically, the subtext is: I'm woke.

And I have a great admiration for David Petraeus, but it was coincidental that during the iconoclasm and stock, you know, naming bases and the whole woke-Trotskyization, he came out and said, he had a good point: that why in the world do we have bases named after Confederate generals and their mediocrities?

And he mentioned in particular Ford Hood, John Bell Hood, who was a tragic figure.

He lost an arm and a leg, but he was a mediocrity.

And then Braxton Bragg, who was a stubborn, obstinate, unimaginative, failed commander.

But what he didn't say to us was there was a context why those bases are in the south.

And it was partly that

southern Democrats controlled the Congress and Northern Republicans and the Union at large after and before World War I wanted to rearm the United States.

They needed bases.

The South was depressed after the Civil War for, what, 75 years?

So there was a grand bargain made where Southern Democrats would support larger military budgets.

And in exchange for that, Northerners would allow those bases to be put in places in the Carolinas or Alabama or Texas.

And Southern Democrats then could name the bases.

But there's no mention of that in the article.

And then finally, these commanders, and he ends the article in in the case of Petraeus.

He has a good point why there's not a statue of Grant, but there is one of Lee at West Point, and why these bases were named.

And he's been there for 30 years.

But my only problem, Jack, is why didn't they say this 10 years earlier?

Why didn't, as soon as David Petraeus went to the CIA, he said, you know what?

We can stop a lot of tension in this country not to deify mediocre southern generals.

Maybe Lee, because he posed, at least he posed, as as he was a conciliator, but not these, but he didn't.

He didn't.

He didn't say a word.

And he was, you know, he was working with some of the most high-powered financial consortia in the world.

And why didn't Stanley McChrystal say, you know what?

When he was in Afghanistan, why didn't he just say, don't take Robert E.

Lee's picture?

I just don't believe that they were naive and they were suddenly woke.

So what I'm getting at is we're back to this syndrome where four-star generals do three things.

Number one, they come out of the Pentagon or high rank and they go into the corporate world.

Number two, they criticize anybody that seems to be not in the bipartisan international's foreign school like Donald Trump.

And then three,

they have amnesia.

They do it opportunely.

They suddenly become aware of what they were not aware of for 40 years,

all in the context that we're supposed to pay money for risk and hire him because he doesn't do that.

He says in the book, from what I can tell and from what he's advised corporate people that I know who have hired him, to look at the long range, look at the horizon, see what's out there, prepare for it.

Okay,

you're 40 years old.

You're a vulnerable colonel.

You should have said, you know what?

There's going to come a day in a racially polarized society that we should not have a picture in your office of Robert E.

Lee.

So I'm cynical about the whole thing.

Yeah, this is how two things.

This is how Bing ends the review.

He says, as commanding general, McChrystal could order a strategy his soldiers could not comprehend or execute.

And no senior official asked where that was leading.

It is discomforting to realize that ignoring

manifest risk prevailed throughout a 20-year war.

One message from McChrystal's book, Risk, is that a general personally risked nothing by losing a war.

Instead, he emerged as a lavishly paid consultant to corporations, coaching them on managing risk.

To judge from the book, he still does not recognize that he placed an enormously bad risk reward bet.

So, Richter, that just kind of gets to the points of things you had been saying.

And also, like, why would this guy, of all guys, to write a book on risk?

Lime McCrystal, right?

Well, what Bing West is saying is that he walked and he was a Marine in combat and he saw things like this in Vietnam and he walked the walk with them in Afghanistan and he got sick with them and he braved fire with them.

And these kids now

are either wounded or they have psychological problems or they don't, but they gave a lot and they're not millionaire corporate consultants.

And if the person who led them there for a while was not able to achieve strategic victory for all their sacrifices, how in the world would that person be an avatar of corporate strategy?

It doesn't make any sense.

So he's saying basically, Bing is that, you know, Grant and Sherman and Patton and LeMay and, you know, MacArthur, they could give advice because they went out on the battlefield and they came up with a bombing strategy over the Japanese cities, or they planned the Inshan invasion, or they, you know, from August 1st to September 5th, they ran ragged right through Europe and Third Army, or Grant, Vicksburg, Fort Donaldson, Fort Henry, or Sherman, the March to Georgia, and the Carolina, all of that.

But where's the beef?

Where is the Great McCrystal victory?

Is what Bing is saying.

Where are these victories?

And where are all the ribbons they wear?

Where is each ribbon, as we've said before?

What does that,

the bombing of Libya?

Yeah.

I don't know.

The successful nation building in Afghanistan.

So that's the criticism that Bing was making.

And he'll take a lot of heat from it.

But I think he's very logical.

Well, the victory's in the bank account, I think, at the end of the day, Victor.

So, well, let's move on.

We don't have a lot of time today.

A couple other issues to talk about, though.

You know, the last podcast, Victor, we did the traditionalist, we discussed David Chappelle, the comedian who has caused quite a stir with his Netflix special, where he came toe-to-toe, I guess, in a way.

Some people think he didn't do enough, but he took on his critics in the trans community with his sense of humor, but also, I think it was some interesting social commentary.

I watched it twice myself.

I found it really an interesting and often funny display.

Now, immediately after, of course, he was attacked by many people, including Netflix employees.

And surprisingly, at the outset, the president of Netflix, the head of it, said he wasn't backing down.

He wasn't like too bad.

Essentially, that's not the case anymore.

There is this going wobbly defense.

Actually, I think loss of defense.

Oh, I should have taken into account

how my response would have affected the employees, et cetera, et cetera.

So there's going to be some walkout at Netflix.

Some of these initial responses we've seen in this great woke war, and then then people go south pretty damn quickly.

Anything you want to say about this, Victor?

Well, I think we have to realize that the number of people who are woke is about 25% of the population.

And then the other 55 is most adamantly not woke.

And then we've got 20%,

you know, they're like San Francisco or Oakland Raider fans.

or whoever's going to win, they're going to be on their side.

I don't know how this affects Netflix, but these CEOs then, they have two constituencies.

They have the general public in their bottom line, and then they have their own woke employees in the tech industry or the Silicon Valley industry or the entertainment industry.

And these guys hold them for ransom.

And, you know, you'd like to say, why don't you just fire the SOBs?

They work for you.

They don't.

determine what you can say and do and what Dave Chappelle can say.

And, you know, it's happened in books.

Publishers' workforces are now telling people what they're going to work.

And it's happening in the labor short market.

So they have a lot of sway.

If this was a recession, and I think we're coming up on a recession next year, and we've got 7% or 8% unemployment and 8% or 9% inflation, I can guarantee you the Netflix people will not be so loud megaphones because they'll be lucky to eat.

especially if they're not getting $600 a week in supplemental funding money.

So Netflix was also, remember, the fellow who,

I think he gave 5 million.

He was one of the Silicon Valley grandees who fused in Gavin Newsom's campaign, almost $75 million.

So,

you know, to me, this is an in-house scrap between the employees, the Netflix CO and Dave Chappelle.

I'm not particularly fond of any of them, but I think, you know what?

The more that they cannibalize themselves, the more I applaud them.

And Dave Chappelle has said some things, you know, that I found racially offensive.

I found a lot, but I would never think that that's alien to comedy.

I mean, one of the authors I specialize in graduate school was reading was Aristophanes.

I've read all 11 plays in Greek, and I can tell you that they're as foul as anything Dave Chappelle has ever said, and they attack everybody.

And that's what comedy is supposed to do.

He's doing what comedy is supposed to do.

And nobody is sacrosanct.

You know, he has a little left-wing bent to it.

And so he's got the money that he doesn't have to worry.

And I think it's another, very quickly, it's another symptom, and we talked about this before, that when you look at Larry Summers attacking the Biden economy or Bill Maher's comments on critical race theory, or some of the Democratic people in the Congress attacking the Afghanistan skedaddle, you can start to see and that there are Barry Rice and a lot of pundits.

There's starting to be not just, you know, soccer moms that are going to burmes.

You're getting the impression that the Jacobins are just about, that have to be very careful because they have offended almost everybody and liberals included.

And there's a pushback going on.

It's going to gather as much steam as they did.

And I would gather in about a year from now, Professor Kendi is not going to be getting $20,000 for one hour of Zoom homilies.

He's just not.

Well, Victor, we'll talk about some of those pushbacks in a minute.

And, you know, folks, I do like to send Victor a list of things we should be talking about on the show.

Victor, I didn't put on a list this January 6th commission, but maybe we can end the show with if you have any thoughts on what's been transpiring in the last week or two.

I do want to let our listeners know that I'm right now looking at my screen.

I'm looking at Amazon's page for the dying citizen.

And guess what it says, Victor?

It says in stock.

Okay.

I cannot believe that.

It does.

So, ladies and gentlemen, why don't you go to victorhanson.com, the website which has a link to this page?

Jack, maybe one of these little techie sensors took some volume after his lunch and he fell asleep at the base.

Didn't he?

He didn't hit the sensor button or the out of stock button.

He's going to, he'll lose his job tomorrow.

Back on VictorHanson.com, you'll find a link to the book there.

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So, Victor, you mentioned that pushback, and we've had something's come up in the last couple of days.

If you just want to talk generally about pushback, you know, if you have anything more to say, we have Southwest Airlines, which indeed had all these cancellations a week and a half ago.

They were because of COVID.

And now it seems like Southwest Airline, unless some news has come out earlier today that I didn't see, it seems like the management there is caving.

They're not going to fire the pilots and others who work there.

Interesting thing in San Francisco, an in-and-out burger, great burger place, national chain, like, hey, we are not the vaccine police.

We're not doing this work for you.

Separately, it's not so much about vaccines, what's happening, of course, at school board now, public school board meetings.

You're finding people more particularly concerned about, obviously, CRT and teaching ideology to children.

But they're all of a sort of a pushback.

Cops saying, I will rather lose my job than take this vaccine.

And I have valid reasons for thinking that.

Victor, any thoughts about the emerging pushback?

Yeah, it isn't.

It's very ironic because so far we have a labor shortage and we have supply chain disruption because A lot of people who could participate in the labor force are not doing it.

And there's a lot of arguments whether they're afraid of COVID or whether they're subsidized too generously by their state and federal governments or both.

Okay.

And they're mostly, they're considered more the recipients of government largesse.

But what be it as it may, we are desperate for workers.

So at the very time you're desperate for workers, Joe Biden goes back on his word and says, you know, he said earlier there will be no mandates.

He didn't just say there's going to be mandates.

He took,

he made that flip-flop with religious fervor.

But

if we are short workers and he wants to go now and flip and have this mandate and he wants to lose a lot of airline workers or he wants to lose a lot of teachers or a lot, I'm talking 10%, 15% of these workforces, or he loses ER people or he loses federal workers, or you're really going to dishonorably discharge soldiers, then you're going to shut the country down.

The country will be shut down.

It's almost getting to that way.

It's almost the general systems collapse.

And remember, Joe Biden has said that these are fanatic, basically Trump anti-vaxxers.

That's what the

attack has been on.

The left has been on it.

But if you look at the percentage of African Americans, 54% have been vaccinated, Latinos, 58 or something.

And that's a huge community.

That's, you know, over 20% of the population.

And then in addition to that, you look at the 100 million people, not all who were double vax, who've had it,

then you're not having a majority of, you know, Jimmy Bob Wilson out there in rural Texas.

It's an anti-vaxxer that is the butt of every left-wing guy in Mineral Parks jokes.

You're talking about African Americans, you're talking about Latinos, and in addition, and including, you're talking about people that had COVID and they have antibodies.

And they have been told now that that is comparable to a vaccination.

And you're going to discharge a soldier that was sick for a week with a fever and has antibodies because he doesn't want to add to his antibody level by getting a vaccination?

You really think that's a very viable thing?

And have a very skilled person with, you know, tens of thousands of dollars of investment and training, and you're just going to kick him out?

It's insane.

And so we could have done this very easily by simply not racializing it in the way the left tried to, it really boomeranged on the left.

They tried to make it a racial issue.

These are these stupid white toothless Trump supporters.

And then lo and behold, the white so-called white population in general has a much higher rate of compliance with vaccination mandates or urgings than does the Latino and black community, number one.

And then number two,

they did this at a time when they have very low labor participation and they need workers.

And there's a lot of people of all persuasions, races, political leanings that just simply have had antibodies so if they had just said we're not going to racialize it and if you have a certain level of antibodies or the vaccination you pick either one get your test results i know that that's not the absolute barometer of immunity because there's t cells and all that we don't know but for now if you have an antibody certificate or vaccination you're fine and they would have taken the wind out of a lot of this protest victor two more issues on the few minutes we have left one is the Virginia governor race.

The most recent polls are repeating now that Youngin, the Republican, who seems to be drawing crowds and having some enthusiastic response, and folks, maybe not necessarily Republicans, drawing to him over some of these outrageous school board fights in Northern Virginia.

And one of them, I think we talked about in the last podcast in Loudoun County, that involves a mix of perversion of transgender bathroom rape, arrest the father at a school board meeting, suppress that news, move the kid around.

This is just insanity.

So anyway, it's tie race there.

Do you have any thoughts on how that's going to break and if Youngin wins, any kind of broader national political ramifications?

Well, anytime you have a purple state, and I think that's what this race between McAuliffe and Youngkin has turned out to be, and Virginia, I think, went plus nine for Biden.

And anytime the left-wing liberal candidate candidate was assured that he was going to win, he's outspent him.

He's got the entire Washington network.

He's got Silicon Valley.

He's got all of the levers of progressive influence.

Okay.

And now it's maybe within the margin of error.

And why is that?

It's there for one reason, that Joe Biden is an anchor.

And remember that all of these issues that he promulgated for the first nine months did not have 51%.

And that meant critical race theory, transgendered restrooms,

open border, Afghanistan, inflation, cutting back on oil production, you name it.

But he was polling 52, 53% because he was good old Joe Biden from scrambling.

And he was not Donald Trump.

And then the more people looked at him, they said, you know what?

He's cranky, get off my grass, septogenarian.

Joe Biden, who doesn't know where he is half the time, and he's mean-spirited and has his social

deflectors have been eroded he's the real essence of joe biden the nasty sob that we knew 30 years ago when he was a plagiarist and a convict you know a confessed liar and he wasn't a nice guy as we know from the bork hearing and other places and now that he's getting old and he doesn't disguise it he's a pure joe biden in his essence And that's one of the tragedies of old age.

It takes away our veneers and it scrapes them away.

And there he is.

And so his popularity has has plunged.

I don't know if it's 36%, as that young Zogby poll says, the younger Zogby's poll says, but it does.

That poll, by the way, did not inordinately ask Republicans.

I think it was these polls are asking 23 to 26 percent of their respondents are Republican Party members.

Yeah, there's a new poll out today, Victor, just so you know, and you may have seen this from the McLaughlin, John and Jim McLaughlin, a thousand likely voters.

Biden's job disapproval to approval is 54 to 45.

And by their records, this is in the last month, another net loss of four points over the previous month.

This is interesting.

Perhaps more concerning Biden's camp on reading the analysis is that the president's disapproval is also strong among important swing voters, among independents, 59%, suburban voters, 57%,

congressional undecided voters, 54%, women, 53, Hispanics, 48%, African Americans, 18, and Democrats, 16%.

And finally, one in five 2020 Biden voters, well, 18%, almost one in five, now disapprove of the job he's doing.

And that's the anchor I was getting at.

That's the anchor that Terry McCall.

So if you bring him in, he's going to lose your votes.

And so now what is he doing?

He's not an original thinker, and he thought that he could run on these critical race theory and left-wing, we're all kumbaya at the border and all that stuff.

But now,

because they were never, they were never pulling positively.

And now Joe Biden isn't.

So he can't turn to his left and say, well, I'll bring in AOC and I'll bring in the squad because of all these wonderful issues, the new Green Deal and open borders.

So then he says, well, I'll turn to Joe Biden, who's good old Joe Biden from Scranton, and he'll be the moderate adult in the room.

And he doesn't even know whether there's a room and he's not an adult anymore.

So there's nobody there except Terry McAuliffe.

And Terry McAuliffe has never been a sober and judicious politician.

He's wild, he's undisciplined.

You know, he says that, you know, don't tell the school boards what to do.

And he says it eight or nine times.

And then, when finally somebody whispers in his ear, hey, Terry,

you're digging too deep.

You better stop it.

You keep doubling down.

But there's a tradition in America that parents, you know, oversee and adjudicate and censor the public schools.

And then he says, I never did that, really.

That was taken out of context.

So he's an ash.

And if they win that, that will be pretty instructive about these midterms.

I think you're going to see a 1938, 2010, 1994 blowout in the House and maybe the Senate.

I can see them picking up six or seven, eight Senate seats.

I can see them taking 60 to 70 House seats because you see, we're not talking about politics, Jack, in Virginia, so much.

We are talking about a systems collapse.

The reason the independents are angry, and I'm stereotyping now, but when they pull up, and my daughter has one of those big Tahos, so I know what they're like.

When they pull up that big Tahoe and they put it in gas, $100 doesn't fill it up.

Right.

It's more like $150.

And when they go to the market and they see what the price of roast beef is, or they look at pasta or anything, it's high.

When the husband says to the wife, you know, I'm going to put that cabinet in the garage, he goes to Home Depot and he looks at plywood.

He says, I can't even afford that.

And then they say, you know, we're going to go to New York this weekend.

But they say, you know, we're not going to walk out in New York, whether it's safe or not, doesn't matter.

It's the perception.

We're not taking the subway if we go to Washington.

So they look around their entire world and they say, this is sort of like the Mycenae, and then they don't think of Mycenaeans or Romans, but it's a classic systems collapse.

And when they hear Pete Buttigick say, Well, you know, there's two types of shoppers.

There's a guy kind of

making fun of them that plan and shop ahead, and they're not going to get their Christmas present.

Then there's the kind of casual guys like me to go on Christmas Eve.

You know, you might have to wait till Christmas Eve.

And that's silly and inane.

Shinsaki says, you know, it's the people didn't get their pellet on, or this high class is the only people affected by inflation.

There's a tone deafness there that's a tone deafness.

And these are elite spoiled, spoiled professional beltway hacks.

And they're going to do, I think they're going to pay a big price because Youngton,

he sat down.

It's obvious what he did is he sat down and he said, I have one

goal and one agenda only.

I'm going to get all of those independents in on my side and I'm not going to lose the Trump base.

Now, how do I do that?

And that's what he's trying to do.

He's trying to thread the needle of not disrespecting Donald Trump and giving him his due.

And yet, he's focusing on issues like the school board and practical bread and butter issues for independence, like security, safety, school autonomy.

And we'll see if he pulls it off.

It would be an amazing achievement because all we've heard, Jack, ad nauseum for the last five years, Virginians know

it's got all these federal workers.

Northern Virginians poured in.

It's just a bunch of white Yahoos left in the old South in Virginia.

The old segregationist slave-owning class.

That's all there is left, but it's going to be a nice blue state.

We'll see.

That is about all the time we have for this traditionalist.

I do want to read one review.

Still, average of five stars, nearly 2,000 reviews on iTunes.

Thanks, folks.

I mean, if you do listen on iTunes to this podcast and the other VDH podcast, please consider leaving a five-star review, Victor, and leave a comment if you want.

We read them.

And here's one.

This is short and sweet.

And it's by Robster 7996.

And it's titled A Lifeboat in a Sea of Academic Sewerage Today.

And he just says about you, a classic academic with an undiseased mind.

That's a nice compliment.

I don't know if I'd want that on my tombstone, but it's really

a nice compliment.

So thank you, Robster7996.

Thanks, all of our listeners, for listening.

We really appreciate this.

Thank you, Victor, and we will be back again soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show, The Traditionalist.

Thank you.

Thank you, everybody, for listening in.

I'll see you next time.