The Traditionalist: The Left Talks the Talk

When empires debase their currency, citizens who hold gold survive the transition.

That's not opinion, it's documented fact.

Trump's economic warning isn't speculation, it's pattern recognition.

The same signals that preceded every major currency crisis are flashing now.

Unsustainable debt, foreign nations dumping our bonds, and central banks hoarding gold.

But Trump's also revealing the solution.

The IRS strategy he's used for decades is available to every American.

It's how the wealthy preserve their fortunes when paper currencies fail.

American Alternative Assets has documented this strategy in their free 2025 wealth protection guide.

It shows exactly how to position yourself before the turbulence Trump's warning about arrives.

Call 888-615-8047 for your free guide.

That's 888-615-8047 or visit victorlovesgold.com.

The patterns are clear.

Make sure you're on the right side of them.

Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

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

We are recording on Monday, August 2nd in the year 2021.

I'm the host, Jack Fowler, the director of the Center for Civil Society at AmericanPhilanthropic.com, also the author of its new weekly newsletter, email newsletter, civil thoughts.

But as my wife and kids say, Dad, nobody cares about you.

We care about the namesake of this show.

Victor Davis-Hanson, the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoo Institution, the Wayne and Marsha Busk Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

If you want one-stop shopping for Victor Davis Hansen, where you can find links to Twitter, Facebook, Parlor, links to where you can buy his forthcoming book, The Dying Citizen, new original pieces that you can only find on this place, it is Victor Hanson, S-O-N,

VictorHanson.com.

Go there early and often.

Victor's, several times a week, has original stuff.

Again, you're not going to find it anywhere else.

My good friend, I hope you are well.

I'm excited to be talking with you again.

I'm good.

And I think you need to listen to your wife and children more.

Oh, I've got a choice.

Victor, the comedian, I can't wait for you to be on Gutfeld sometime.

So, Victor, today we're going to talk about a few subjects.

Optimism for how COVID is going is plummeting.

That's a Gallup poll.

Another Gallup poll shows American attitudes on race are not looking good for racial harmony, but I think personally, I think they conflict with reality.

We have a massive infrastructure and budget bills coming up before Congress.

There's a new study out on what motivates people who are in favor of election reform.

It's not about race, and it's not about Donald Trump, by the way.

And finally, Newt Gingrich has a piece out today on foxnews.com about Nancy Pelosi.

And we're going to start this show talking about that, Victor.

But first, we got to listen to this important message.

Like you, when I bought my last pair of shoes, I looked for stylish comfort and beautiful engineering.

And that might make you think Italian, but if you're buying sheets, it should make you think bowl and branch.

The colors, the fabric, the design.

Bowl and branch sheets are made with long-lasting quality, offering extraordinary softness to start and getting softer and softer for years to come.

Bowl and branch sheets are made with the finest 100% organic cotton in a soft, breathable, durable weave.

Their products have a quality you can feel immediately and become even softer with every wash.

Plus, Bowl and Branch comes with a 30-night worry-free guarantee.

I've been sleeping like a baby in my bowl and branch sheets, which keep me cool on those hot summer nights, and they're the perfect place for sunrise and morning coffee.

So join me.

Feel the difference an extraordinary night's sleep can make with Bowl and Branch.

Get 15% off plus free shipping on your first set of sheets at bullandbranch.com/slash Victor.

That's Bowl and Branch.

B-O-L-L-A-N-D-B-R-A-N-C-H dot com slash Victor to save 15% off and unlock free shipping.

Exclusions may apply.

And we'd like to thank Bolin Branch for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

We are back, Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler.

Victor, as I just mentioned before, that nice little message, Anuk Gingrich has a piece out on Fox News.

Nancy Pelosi is the greatest threat to constitutional liberty in our lifetime.

That's the headline of the piece.

You know, Newt is given to superlatives.

That's his way of making points and getting attention, but he compares Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, which was Gingrich's position also, as behaving as a dictator, more like Fidel Castro, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, or Nicholas Maduro.

And in this piece, Gingrich goes down a list of, let's call it, dictatorial ways that Nancy Pelosi has ruled over this Congress.

And remember, in her position, it's a very narrow majority that she has.

Gingrich attacks this as arrogant and destructive to the ways where America has conducted its formal legislative business.

And he believes that there is a path to stopping Nancy Pelosi.

And he writes in this piece, the key path to stopping Pelosi runs through Democrat districts that are not rabidly radical.

There are probably 100 Democrats who represent districts wherein prostituting themselves for a Pelosi dictatorship would be politically expensive if people back home understood what was happening and why it mattered.

Victor, what are your thoughts about Nancy Pelosi?

And does she have dictatorial tendencies?

Well, she's been around a long time.

I agree with New.

I just wish that in the early 2000s, he didn't make those commercials where they remember when they sat on a park bench and talked about green fuels and stuff together.

Oh, yeah.

But

she's always been that way.

The biggest con in California is when we had Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House, Diane Feinstein as senior U.S.

Senator, who she still is there, and Barbara Boxer.

as junior senator.

And they all lived within about 50 miles of each other.

They all came from the same socioeconomic class.

They were all wealthy.

And then they passed themselves off as diversity representatives of the most diverse state in the United States, of which they had no contact with its Black, Asian, and Latino populations, at least in their own immediate lives.

So, this is a woman, remember, who thought she could connect with Americans and Californians in particular during the lockdown by showing us her $25,000 refrigerator and her $10 a pint ice cream that was delivered to her door.

And then she has threatened, as I understand it, members of Congress, and I wrote back on a plane right next to one telling me this, threatening them with severe penalties and fines, even arrest if they didn't wear masks.

And yet we remember that, Jack, we remember that really candid camera shot of her taking off her mask to have her hair done at an establishment that was otherwise closed and not open for the public to be served.

And when you add that into Gavin Newsom's French Laundry Escapades or the mayor of San Francisco went to the French Laundry as well, you start to see that these people are aristocratic and titled people and they don't represent their constituents anymore and they don't have lives outside of government.

What would Nancy Paluski do if she was not in government and speaker or representative from California?

Nothing.

And so same thing with Gavin Newsom.

And they all come from that old boy, old girl network of very wealthy, interconnected Bay Area grandees and magnificos.

They're about as diverse in this diverse state as my tennis shoes are.

Well, Victor, we know what she'd do.

She would enjoy the millions of dollars her husband made in business deals with Red China, right?

I wonder how he knew about that.

I think that couldn't we just have a little role for Diane Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi?

One, your chauffeurs shall not be employed by the Chinese government as spies.

Two, your husband shall, while you're in office and you're on the intelligence committees or you're conducting house business with access to sensitive intelligence about the Chinese government and its fusion corporations, your husband shall not do business, oh, let's just say in amounts exceeding $10 million in China and see what they say.

Because after all, these are women of the people and they do things for the people and they're one with the people.

And I'm getting really tired of this aristocratic left, bicultural elite that talk this talk,

this diversity, inclusion, equity talk, and then they live like aristocrats at Versailles.

It's a means to power.

Well, Victor, let's move on.

There are two polls we could talk about.

Both are Gallup, and let's look at them separately.

The first is out today.

Americans' optimism about COVID-19 dashed as cases surge.

So the numbers are this.

In June, 89% of Americans polled said that the coronavirus situation was getting better.

Now, that number in a month or six weeks or thereabouts has plummeted.

Only 40% say that.

45% of Americans say it's getting worse.

I think there's some truth.

I mean, the numbers are getting worse with the people.

who are infected by this new Delta variant.

But Victor, what do you think might this kind of of polling data, what its ramifications might be in the hands of policymakers?

Well,

here in California, Gavin Newsom is running on three talking points.

One is other than I'm not Trump and that Trump is behind his recall, which is ridiculous.

One is I solved the COVID problem.

And we're going to open it up and my policies stopped infection.

I don't think that's going to be a viable talking point.

The other is

that this California economy, the fifth biggest in the world, is doing great.

And when you look at the unemployment rate or the inflation rate in California compared to other states, it's not so impressive.

And then it was immigration.

You know, we are a state of diversity and inclusion and equity, and we have to have our open borders.

And now we see a large number of Hispanic people are very worried, not just about letting in thousands of people into their communities who are unvaxxed and untested for COVID, but belong to gangs and tend to pick on second and third generation Mexican Americans who are in their communities.

And more importantly, as one person pointed out to me not too long ago, the people coming across the border are no longer Latinos necessarily.

And so now it's a question not of ethnic pride, but of what's in the interest of the entire United States.

So his talking points are evaporating.

And I don't know, you know, quite what he's doing.

As far as the vaccinations, very quickly, the whole thing had been weaponized from the beginning.

When Donald Trump said, I'm going to get a vaccination in 10 months, he said that in February and March when the pandemic set, Anthony Fauci didn't know whether he could do that or not, but he just went out and said, no, you can't do that.

Don't count on that.

And then as we started to see news emerge that these RNA vaccinations were working, we had Joe Biden say, well, you know, anything that Trump's doing won't really work.

And I want to get back the war production board type of model.

I'm thinking, you idiot, that's exactly what he's doing.

He's calling in private enterprise, Pfizer, Johnson, Johnson, Moderna, and he's saying to them, go make a profit, but I want you to compete with each other.

And I want certain guidelines, and I'll give you certain guarantees and subsidies, just like, you know, William Knudsen at GM or Henry Kaiser, Henry Ford during World War II.

And the result was, yes, we did have a vaccination, of which Kamala Harris said about it, I won't get vaccinated.

And so then, when it did appear, we learned very quickly that the alternatives that had been praised, the four Chinese vaccinations,

the Russian vaccination, the Azteca vaccinations of the wonderful EU, they were not as safe or efficient.

And then we were told, everybody has to get vaccinated so you don't have to wear a mask and you don't have to social business.

The quarantine's off.

And why didn't they just say, like the flu vaccination or other vaccinations, you have a greater likelihood that if you do get the illness, it won't put you in the hospital and it won't kill you.

And therefore, it's a wise thing to do.

Or if you do have antibodies, some naturally acquired immunity, you probably don't need a vaccination right away.

We need to get people vaccinated who haven't had it.

But they didn't do any of that.

And then when they found a variant came and you could get it in theory, they panicked and they went back and said, now,

just as we said, masks are originally no good, not necessary.

One mask is okay, good.

Two masks are better.

Now,

and vaccinations excuse you from masks.

Now, vaccinations don't excuse you from masks.

All of this coming out of the WHO, the CDC, the NIH, the NIA

IDs.

So they have lost all credibility.

on vaccinations, on who should get them and who shouldn't, and the efficacies of them.

And we're left with a simple truth.

If you are vaccinated, there is a greater likelihood that if you do get a variant you will not get as sick and you will not die and therefore it's advantageous for people if they don't have comorbidities that would endanger their lives or they haven't just had a recent case of COVID and they would have a super level of antibodies or if they're under 12, it would make sense to be vaccinated and then we would sort of mitigate it.

But they can't do that.

It's this paranoid, oh, we're all going to die.

We're all going to be free.

We're all going to be free of vaccinations.

We're all going to have immunity.

It's 97, 96%

to, oh my God, this is just the beginning of a whole strain of mutants.

We better just get in the fetal position and our homes shut the door.

We can't deal with it.

There's something endemic among the left about this psychology.

I don't know what it is, but it's a brain dysfunction that makes certain types of people more readily hyper-paranoid or whatever term we want to use.

Well, Victor, you mentioned about Biden and Harris's comments during the election cycle a year ago.

The numbers prior to that undercutting of support for the vaccine was over 80% of Americans.

And why shouldn't they have been supportive and enthused that these lockdowns are going to end and this is that Operation Warp Speed really was starting.

at warp power.

Part of that blame for why there is insufficient numbers having been vaccinated, the answer to that is in the mirrors at the White House

and the vice president's mansion.

Nobody wants to talk about that, Jack, but it was always politicized.

When Fauci came out and said, oh, I don't think we'll ever get a vaccination until late 2021,

when Moderna was already giving many press releases that they were making great progress.

And then Pfizer, remember, remember Pfizer, they had said in July, we're going to have a major, major announcement in October, i.e., we're going to say it works and it's going to be ready.

And then people on that board and people who knew about that announcement communicated, I think, with the Biden administration.

That's what we were told.

They did not make that correction to the media at large.

And then they said, oh, guess what?

We were a little premature.

There is no vaccination, i.e.

the election is going to come up in four or five days.

And then right after the election, four or five days, oh, we forgot there was a vaccination.

And it's here.

And then we had Joe Biden saying, you know, not only did he not want to have any vaccination with Trump's fingerprints, not quite as bad as Kamala Harris saying, I will not get a vaccination.

That was a really good message to send to people facing death if they were over 75 with comorbidities.

But he said, you know what?

We're not going to have any of this COVID because when I'm president, we will have vaccinations because we didn't have anybody vaccinated.

I'm thinking, okay,

where's the media?

This man has a picture of him on December 21st being vaccinated.

And there were 17 million people that we know were vaccinated when he took office on January 20th.

And we know they were some days getting a million vaccinations a day.

And so this whole question was weaponized vaccination.

And the Biden administration came in with 400,000 people dead, and they had blamed that 11-month tally on Donald Trump.

And they said he killed them.

That was the narrative.

Well, it's now been seven months, and we have lost about 250,000 under the Biden watch.

I don't think Joe Biden or anyone around him is responsible for it.

I do know that Joe Biden doesn't think that because he's on record that the commander-in-chief is responsible for every single death.

And that's one of the slurs and smears they used against Donald Trump and Scott Atlas.

So according to their own logic, Joe Biden has killed more people from COVID per day than Donald Trump did per day in this, in a commiserate period.

But I don't really believe that, but that's what they're saying.

So what I'm getting at, Jack, is this was always a way of saying, Donald Trump is killing you and you shouldn't be re-elected, and I'm going to deliver you.

Donald Trump was the plague and I'm the cure.

And you live by what you sow what you read.

And once you start politicizing science, whether you're at all these different alphabetical soup bureaucracies, and nobody believes you anymore.

And I can remember when Dr.

Fauci almost said on television, you've got to get vaccinated because then you're sort of oblivious to whatever anybody else wants to do.

You get vaccinated, they have free choice.

Say you're in an elevator with some anti-vaxxer or some minority member, a member of a minority community that has historical reasons not to trust the government, or a recent immigrant that says, you know, when I was in Hungary or Uganda, I didn't trust the government.

Okay.

Or somebody who has an immune problem.

It doesn't matter because, according to Dr.

Fauci, you're protected.

They can shoot all the vaccinated, all the viral bullets they want at you.

Now we're told no.

And so, what worries me to finish is that we're going to get a lot of mutants before this thing is stamped out.

And each mutant will probably be more infectious and less lethal.

That seems to be the Delta variety.

If you look at deaths right now in California, 40 million people.

A week ago, three dead, four dead, five dead.

I think it was 28 yesterday.

40.

It's not killing a lot of people.

And that's largely because older people over 60 have been vaccinated.

And it's not as deadly, but it's far more infectious.

And that's what we're told viruses do when they mutate.

They learn their lessons.

Don't kill people, jump on them, suck their life out of them, make them sick, then jump on another guy, but don't kill them.

Sounds like relatives.

Yeah, it does.

Well, Victor, let's talk about another poll that came out this weekend, another Gallup poll.

And this is, to me, disconcerting.

The headline is called Americans' Confidence in Racial Fairness Waning.

And the first small paragraph here of this analysis is, Americans are less certain today than in the recent past that equality of economic opportunity exists for Black Americans.

This is seen in slimmer majorities perceiving there to be equality equality for black people in employment or housing in their own communities.

Also, less than half of Americans believe racial minorities generally have the same job opportunities as white people in the U.S.

And six in 10 now favor affirmative action programs for racial minorities.

It's not specified what kind, but they favor up from less than half a decade ago.

So, Victor, you know, we've we're experiencing this onslaught through much of the media about critical race theory, systemic racism, et cetera.

But this is a continuum of riots from last summer, which is a continuum from five, six, seven, however many years ago from when Ferguson was on fire because of Michael Brown's death.

We have been saturated in talk of racism.

And my quick look at this poll and these kind of numbers show a year and a half ago, the numbers for black employment were historically exceptional.

How could these numbers here be true in the face of that reality, but for the indoctrination from the left?

It's only the indoctrination.

A racist society doesn't have 17 ethnic minorities who make more per capita or by year.

than so-called whites.

Asian American families, whether they're from India or from China or from from Japan, on average make $20,000 more per year.

How did that happen when in World War II, Japanese Americans were put in camps or there were Chinese exclusionary laws?

If we're still a racist country, a racist country does not elect a black president in which he received more white votes in 2008 than the white candidate John Kerry received in 2004.

A racist country does not elect a ticket with Camilla Harris, another black person as vice president.

A racist country doesn't have a race

in North Carolina where both candidates running for lieutenant governor are black in the Republican and the Democratic Party.

In other words, the electorate, largely white and part of the original Confederacy way, way back when, makes a deliberate decision that there will be no white people in the general election and then elects a black man who beats out another black.

I could go on, but this is ridiculous.

This is, and what are we doing?

Why is this here?

Because we're watching day after day after day, a Megan Markle, $14 million estate talking to Oprah, $90 million estate.

A LeBron James worth a billion dollars, whining, whining, whining.

We just saw Van Jones given $100 million by Jeff Bezos.

And why?

Because we were said that Van Jones, the CNN analyst, represents civility and unity.

This is a guy, remember, Jack, who was fired as Obama's greens are for what?

For saying that Americans who were Republican were assholes, for signing a, what, a truther petition saying George Bush planned 9-11,

and for saying that white kids commit mass murders.

And he's the example of a paragon of $100 million

virtue and civility.

So this whole thing is a concocted anger of mostly black elites jostling with white elites for the CNN's six o'clock slot, for the diversity, inclusion, and equity job, for two slots on the Coca-Cola board.

But what it is not about

is

7,000 African Americans killing each other in our major cities per year and innocent bystanders.

It's not about 80 to 90 percent of Asians who were brutally attacked are attacked by African American males.

And it's not about a spiking homicide, rape, violent assault where African Americans who make up 13% of the population, in the case of males, about six,

are overrepresented by a magnitude of eight or nine.

And so nobody wants to talk about that.

Nobody wants to talk about that because there are no answers.

And there are no answers because the answers are unpalatable.

Assimilation, integration, mastery of English, intact families,

skepticism of abortion on demand, skepticism of illegitimacy, emphasis not so much on sports, but on science and math.

And I think it was Richard Pryor, or maybe it was Jesse Jackson, I'm sorry our listeners can correct me, who said something that was quite illiberal, but to the effect that that every minority who feels that they're not doing well should just follow with a Polaroid every day an Asian American and take pictures of what he does.

And they really resented that.

And the Asian American youth feels, oh, I don't want to be the ideal minority.

That's not cool.

But it's time to stop the tribalism.

Tribalism leads nowhere.

The trajectory ends up in Rwanda and Yugoslavia.

Because if you continue all day long saying, I can't make it when we're so short workers and wages are at a historical high and entitlements are discouraging people to work, I can't make it, there's no job opportunities.

And that was in that poll.

And you can convince yourself, the man won't let me do it.

The man doesn't do it.

Well, finally, people who are not the man

who grew up in lower middle class circumstances or poverty who are not black get very angry about being accused of having privilege.

Whiteness, whiteness, whiteness, whiteness, whiteness.

If there is a whiteness, then there is a blackness.

If there is a whiteness, there is a brownness.

If there is a whiteness, there is a yellowness.

If you stereotype whites as collectively, without exception, engaging in whiteness behavior, then the same applies to every group.

And if you go down that road, believe me, you don't want to go where it ends.

It's not a very pretty picture because it's something like the former Yugoslavia.

And yet we have very sophisticated people in the New York Times, Stanford University, Washington Post, CNN, who night after night, memo after memo, day after day, pound, pound, pound, pound, race, race, race, race, race.

And I don't know why they do it, but it seems to me in their daily lives, they're not comfortable with people who don't look like themselves.

Because if they did, and they went out and actually met people and integrated with them and put their kids in the school with them and talked to them, they'd see that they were like anybody else.

And they're so afraid of that, they construct this this monstrous edifice of projection and guilt and fob off onto others their own insecurities.

Yeah, no,

life's about projection.

And that's what we get from our enemies on the left.

Victor, hopefully we have time to talk about two more items.

And this one just came to mind.

We'll talk about this on another podcast,

the classicist.

But at that point, we're not going to talk about the Olympics today.

We've talked about them before, but the concept of courage has come up with some of the athletes who've pulled out.

And I'd love to hear you talk about courage, what it really means to have courage, what is courage as relates to the use of that concept today.

But in the time we have left, let's maybe briefly, I don't know what to say other than this, other than this is insanity.

We have two major pieces of legislation percolating through Congress, the infrastructure bill and reconciliation.

The combined price tags for these two pieces are roughly $5 trillion.

There is a study by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says this is BS.

This is the cost of these bills over 10 years is going to be dramatically more, trillions of dollars.

Victor, I'd like you to talk maybe about the complicity of Republicans.

in this take just the infrastructure bill this is a tag team effort and the republicans are part of the tag team It's a good advertisement against the Republican establishment.

I'll say something that might be controversial.

Donald Trump lost a good opportunity that when he had a booming economy in 2017-18, he could have reconstituted maybe the Simpson-Bowles Committee or something like that to show some physical discipline.

But they didn't do it because they were worried about a recession or something.

And all parties are worried about recession, so they put it off.

Finally, the adult party says, your kids got the credit card.

they've got to yank them in and pay it off.

And whoever does that is going to get a recession.

So nobody does it.

High interest rates, recession.

Reagan was almost destroyed from 81 to 83 when he did it.

And so that's what needs to be done.

Everybody knows the cat eats mice, the mice have to be warned, but no mouse wants to put the bell around the cat's neck.

Nobody wants to deal with inflation.

They all know it.

It's coming, can't print money forever.

My only, just finishing very briefly, Jack, I don't know the left's position, this $5 trillion they're going to borrow on top of 30 trillion we owe.

It's one of two things.

They think

by

giving all of these unemployment supplements, flooding the country with printed money, they are going to win constituents who pay them back with votes for their entitlements.

They think maybe the more devious ones feel that when the tap comes due, they'll get credit and popularity popularity for spending the money and the people who have to pay it back will be considered, you know, Grinches, maybe, or maybe they feel that the wealthy have too much money and the more money you print, the less their wealth is valuable.

But we all know that all of the wage gains from this crazy economy in the last six months have been eaten up by inflation.

It's not just annualizing by annualized rates increasing you know 1% per month almost, but at 1.2 then 1.3, it's geometric.

And we could end up with 10% inflation at the end of the year.

Or the other alternative is simply that they're anarchists and they just want to destroy the whole system.

So they're going to print money, they're going to open the borders, they're going to turn us into a tribal Yugoslavia of

bellum omnium contra omnes, a war of everybody against everybody.

That's what it is, then we're done for.

Yeah.

Victor, did your seatmate on this flight, wherever you were, have

to say about this kind of fiscal situation and the likelihood of this stuff passing?

The person, the congressman that we were talking to was very pessimistic, not only about Nancy Pelosi's leadership, but about some of the senior Republicans who were going to go along with this infrastructure bill.

Put it this way, short-term, very pessimistic, but surprisingly for a realist like him, very optimistic that this is creating a huge backlash, a backlash against open borders, a backlash against inflation, a backlash against printing money, a backlash against racial animosity and critical racial theory.

And we're going to see a 2010 correction as we did against Obamacare.

I think he's right.

We're going to see that.

And I think you're going to be surprised that the number of, let's say, Mexican-Americans who...

are not going to vote Democratic could be as high as 40%.

And the number of blacks could be as high as 15 or 16%.

The only good that came out of this horrific seven months is we're starting to realize that class is more important than race.

People in the interior of the country that are not part of the bi-coastal, globalized, professional, high-tech, legal, insurance, financial elite, they have more in common with each other than they do with people of their own particular tribe that are part of that bi-coastal elite.

I don't think any African-American person that I know really feels, I'm going to really

feel like I'm part of the Oprah experience or the LeBron experience.

I just don't think it's, I don't think any of the Mexican American people that I meet say, you know, Mr.

Becerra at HHS is somebody I'm very proud of when he goes door to door to make sure he's going to rouse out a non-vaccinated person.

Well, Victor, let's talk about one more item today, and it's self-serving, I have to admit, but I occasionally write.

I wrote a piece today published on National Review.

It's called Why Purple State Voters Want Election Reforms.

I happen to be on the board of the Frontier Center, which is this wonderful small little entity that provides marketing analysis for various issues and topics.

It's not about polling.

It's not about metrics or measurements, but it gets to the heart of why do people believe this?

What motivates them to do that?

Big businesses use this methodology all the time.

Should we change our, you know, the flavor from this to this?

They use this method.

It's called laddering.

Anyway, Ann Siegel, who runs the center, was looking at some numbers out of Wisconsin, Purple State.

And in Wisconsin, as in the case of many other states, there is significant voter support for election reform legislation.

Of course, we know this kind of bills, laws are castigated as racist and Jim Crow, et cetera.

But if 66% of Wisconsin voters polled in, I believe it was April, say, we want auditing of elections.

We want to make sure that the election results are accurate, which makes sense, doesn't it?

66% is two-thirds of the voter.

That says something significant about the reasonableness of election reform.

Now, Anne took this technique and interviewed 30 voters, right of center, most Republican, some right-leaning moderates, and two Independents.

Why do you support election reform was kind of the the point.

And it's interesting, it has nothing to do with Donald Trump.

Conservatives in Wisconsin are not trying to re-litigate the 2020 election, ask for a do-over, et cetera.

What is motivating them is, I think, a theme, not I think, I know a theme that you've talked about and likely to be a significant theme of your forthcoming book, The Dying Citizen, is that people see in election integrity a link to their own definition of what it means to be an American and a definition of what America is.

Because if you don't have election integrity, if someone's putting their finger on the scale in some way or other, how are you part of this whole consent of the governed?

And what does America mean as a republic if this consent of the governed isn't a real thing, is an illusion, has been tainted by voter fraud?

So I think it's a small study.

It's in one state.

I think it says a lot about some of the themes you have talked about.

And And there's a sense of urgency from these reform activists.

And there's also a sense of warning for Republicans, like we just talked about on these major bills.

If you sit on the sidelines and watch this and think, oh, this is bad news for Democrats.

You know, there's widespread support for election reform, but you don't do anything about it as a legislator.

What's going to happen is the Republican brand will be diminished.

And then folks might just say, screw it.

I'm staying at home.

I'm not voting.

So your base may dissipate.

So anyway, that's my spiel.

And that's exactly what happened in Georgia when the Trump base stayed home and allowed two socialists to be re-elected because they had no confidence in the integrity of the voting.

The Democrats have no position.

On this issue, they're not ideologues.

They do want as many people that would vote for them to vote.

without any exceptions of citizenship or legality.

In 2016, Hillary loses the election as thrown.

Then they say it's racist, it's Russians, and then they win the 2018.

Now you can see what happens when we reach out to people.

And then 2016, et cetera, et cetera.

So here where I work at Stanford University, right before the 2020 election, they issued a report.

This is a very left, left, left, left-wing group in the Stanford Law School that said, based on the

ability to certify mail-in ballots and early voting, if you have an election during COVID where that is the primary means of electing a local, state, or federal, you're going to have problems.

And so we had 102 ballots that were not cast on Election Day.

And the

certification rejection rate went down by a magnitude of 10 from about 4% to 0.4%.

You know, that's about

4 to 5 million people who voted who would not have been allowed because they didn't write their name correctly or they had no address or they mailed it in way too late.

And here in California, in our congressional district and in the neighboring congressional district, it's just sort of a sigh.

When the election is over with, we always say to ourselves, the Republican will probably lose unless 25%

of his votes are still out there.

And they're never out there because the Democratic candidate will all of a sudden, each day you'll see these votes pour in from nowhere nowhere because of third-party voting harvesting, SEIU Roundup, fake ballots, everything.

Everybody knows that.

So they've lost faith in the integrity of an election.

And it's really funny what's happened with people who try to demonize this issue.

Remember the Delta CEO, Mr.

Bastian, all $17 million a year of him.

And Mr.

Powers, the American airline executive, all I think $15 million a year of him.

When this came up, that we're not going to change the Constitution and allow the federal government to nationalize all elections, which is not really the intent of the Constitution.

If you read it, when it talks about the state's responsibility with the help of the federal government on occasion to ensure safe elections, people got angry when these CEOs said, oh, Georgia, Delta may not have to do business because Georgia is racist.

Oh, Texas is racist, American.

And then people said, you know what?

Why don't you shut the blank up?

Why don't you just make sure that you don't have to get in an American airline and go 180 degrees in the wrong direction like I did this week so you can find gas because there's no gas in your tank when you tank take off.

Or if you're a Delta CEO, rather than weighing in on election integrity, why don't you just say, you know what, all you Delta customers, you don't have to call anymore seven hours is what my assistant called to find a correction and find out what was going on.

We'll make sure that when you get on our Delta hookups, you can only wait two hours.

But what's happening is the American people feel so deeply about this issue that all of the people who are demagoguing and calling them racists are losing that issue.

It's a winning issue for Republicans.

They should just say, I don't care what you call me.

Mr.

Bastion, you can call me a racist all you want, but you and I know that when I want to get on one of your second-rate Delta flights, I have to show an ID to get anywhere near your boarding area.

Same holds true for Mr.

Coca-Cola, CEO.

If I want to go into your corporate boardroom and vote at a meeting, they will check my ID in the door.

So that's just ridiculous.

And now, as you saw today in the New York Times, as I said,

there is an op-ed saying that illegal aliens should be given the same rights as residents should, as U.S.

citizens to vote.

And you can see what they're doing.

What's going on, Jack?

Just in finishing,

view January 20th to August 2nd as a mad madness, a rush, a high.

And they said, you know what?

We're going to flood the zone.

We're going to do things that the American people have never seen.

We're going to destroy the border.

We're going to reduce fracking by 25%.

We're going to stop new oil and gas leasing.

We're going to shut down Anwar.

We're going to shut down Keystone.

We're going to indoctrinate people from K through 12 to graduate school with this North Korean-style race, critical race theory.

We're going to racialize everything.

We are going to have a new Green Deal push.

We're going to get back with the Iranian.

All this stuff they know has no popular support.

So they think the only way we could ever get this through is we're going to get rid of the filibuster.

We're going to get rid of the Electoral College.

We're going to nationalize federal law.

We're going to let in two more states.

And we're going to let illegal aliens vote.

They're not going to be able, obviously, but that's what this is all about.

Rush and get it done before the American people wake up from their Salmonex tablet and say, you know what?

I know they're not Donald Trump and I know they don't tweet like Donald Trump, but these people are blank, blank crazy.

And they're nuts.

And if they stay in there one more day after their term, we're all screwed.

And I think there's going to be a tsunami backlash we've never seen before.

And I think they're paranoid.

So that's why they're not trying trying to just push initiatives by executive orders and reconciliation.

They're trying to change the system so they can do things that they'll never ever have a chance to do again.

Victor, one final thought and then we'll close on election.

You mentioned ballots.

Can you imagine?

It's okay to accept a ballot that has any number of mistakes on it and no proper identification.

That's what government is telling us.

Can you imagine going to the same government and their office of the DMV and you have one box checked wrong on the form or dealing with the building department, or dealing with the zoning, and you have, you missed the wrong paper, you have the wrong date, and how they screw your took us to the wall if you do that.

But this is the same government that's going to bully you in those regards.

It's the same ideology.

It's the same ideology.

Both of those, I have an iPhone.

It's kind of smeared a little bit.

It's got cracks in it.

So when I went.

to both a Delta and American Flight, it didn't read it very well.

And yet I showed it to them.

In the case of the Delta, I showed them my name and I had my ID,

and the government wouldn't let me go in until my wife had to show that she had both of our boarding passes.

I'm thinking, okay, you won't even let me go into this airport and you have my boarding pass and you have my ID, but because they don't quite sync electronically, and yet you're going to let somebody go in and vote without an ID and are cast a mail-in ballot that doesn't have their first or last name or not their proper address or comes in 12 days days after the deadline?

Come on.

And so we know what they're doing.

And this is all based on collective inferiority, a sense that as elites, we have no confidence in making the case for utopia to the American people.

We know that, we accept that.

So we're going to change the system and ram this through because ultimately we know what's good for these idiots.

And we want power because only us are educated and of superior morality to know how to exercise it for the proper trajectory.

That's what it's all about.

And it's an old story throughout history.

These people are about as predictable as turning on your faucet.

Come on.

We know what they're about.

We saw them in Russia.

We saw them all through the 19th and 20th centuries.

The moment they get power, they try to strangle the goose that lays their golden eggs.

Well, Victor, that's about all the time we have, except for a few notes.

I want to remind people to visit victorhanson.com.

You'll find a link there for The Dying Citizen, How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America.

That book will be out in the first week of October.

Order it now, and it will arrive at your house that first week.

So that's victorhanson.com.

We have asked people to please review this podcast on iTunes, and many have.

There are over 1,200 rankings and ratings in, but for a few, they're five stars.

I read, and I know you do, Victor, also some of the reviews.

Let me just voice a few of them.

Paul Davis, 2551, wrote this the other day.

What a relief.

Absolutely fascinating.

Such a relief from the day-to-day garbage call news left and right.

It's impossible not to be mesmerized by these podcasts.

Thank you, Paul, in Ohio.

I like the name Davis.

Oh, yeah, that's true, right?

I forgot about that.

It's probably a relative.

And then

94 note, that's the name.

And the title of this is, I wish I had listened, dot, dot, dot.

For years, I heard Rush Limbaugh often reference Victor Davis Hansen and his commentary, yet I never pursued his writings.

And utter brilliance certainly was my loss.

But I'm making up for it now.

Your podcast, all of them, and your frequent appearances on various shows are a national treasure.

So grateful to know V D H.

And the final one, Don Georgia.

I don't know if that's Don Corleone's cousin, but Don Georgia wrote last week, so good.

I wish I had found VDH sooner.

He is so insightful and grounded.

We need more like him.

Gives me hope for America.

To those and all the others who do leave reviews, who do leave ratings, we thank you very much.

We have three podcasts a week.

That may actually, I hear, may increase to four.

We have the traditionalists, the classicists.

I do those, and the great Sammy Wink does the culturalists.

They're all under the umbrella of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

We appreciate your listening to this, and we're going to be back in a couple of days with either another traditionalist or the classicist of whatever.

This is a cornucopia of podcasts.

Thanks all for listening, and we'll be with you again on the Victor Davis Hansen Show.