The Traditionalist: Narratives and False Narratives

At a time when Americans are more divided than ever, Connecting America is a place where everyone can gather and express their opinions with no disrespect.

And what better place than a Jersey diner to host this show?

Because where else but a diner can you find a buffet of opinions, ideas, and real connections?

Connecting America, a brand new national program that aims to truly connect everyday people and is dedicated to showcasing ideas and embracing civil conversation.

We'll also include amazing ways to improve your fitness, health, and nutrition, revive your spiritual self, and give your home a makeover.

Connecting America streams live every weekday from 7 a.m.

to 9 a.m.

Eastern Time.

Our program is led by a group of award-winning journalists, including me, Jim Rosenfield, plus Allison Camerata and Dave Briggs.

We'll also hear from America's psychologist Dr.

Jeff Gardier and former Fox News senior foreign affairs correspondent, Amy Kellogg.

Join us wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

We are recording on Thursday, July 2nd, a few days before the 245th birthday of these United States of America.

This is the traditionalist.

There's also the culturalist and the classicist.

Listen to all of them.

The namesake of this show is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and he's also the Wayne and Marcia Busk Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor Davis Hansen is a best-selling author.

I'd like folks, ladies and gentlemen, to visit his website, victorhanson.com.

He calls it private papers, but that's the website, victorhanson.com.

And when you go there, do two things.

One, find the link for his forthcoming book, The Dying Citizen.

Here's the subtitle, by the way.

How progressive elites, tribalism, and globalization are destroying the idea of america.

Maybe we're going to talk about that last line on this program.

Also, you'll find at VictorHanson.com a link for the weekend review, Victor's very important weekly email.

I'm going to tell you a few things more about Victor in a second.

I'd like you to listen to this first, though.

Cooler temperatures are rolling in and as always Quince is where I turn for false staples that actually last.

From cashmere to denim to boots.

The quality holds up and the price still blows me away.

Quince has the kind of false staples you'll wear non-stop, like Supersoft 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters starting at just $60.

Their denim is durable and fits right, and their real leather jackets bring that clean classic edge without the elevated price tag.

What makes Quince different?

They partner directly with ethical factories and skip the middlemen.

So you get top-tier fabrics and craftsmanship at half the price of similar brands.

When the weather cools down, my Quint sweaters are a go-to.

My cashmere short sleeve that works under any jacket, formal or casual, or my thick, long-sleeve, go-everywhere, do-everything sweater that pairs with any pant or jogger.

Quint's products are my favorites, which is why I went to Quintz to buy my recent very beautiful purse that leaves the house every time I do.

Keep it classic and cool this fall with long-lasting staples from Quince.

Go to quince.com slash Victor for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns.

That's q-u-in-ce-e

dot com slash victor for free shipping and 365 day returns.

Quince.com slash Victor.

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

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

I'm Jack Fowler, the former publisher of National Review, but more importantly, right now, I am the director of the Center for Civil Society at Americanphilanthropic.com.

Honored to be the co-host of The Traditionalist and one of Victor's two other podcasts.

That's the classicist.

I do that.

The great Sammy Wink does the culturalist.

Okay, Victor is also a farmer, classicist, military historian, essayist in American greatness.

He's the editor-in-chief of Hoover Institution's very important online journal, Strategica.

Today, on the traditionalist, Victor is going to be sharing some views on a bunch of important topics.

One of them, attacks on critical race theory foes.

We've got two pieces by Victor on American from American Greatness that he's written this week.

Hey, Hunter Biden's laptop has tossed up some pretty important info that seems like much of the media is not interested in, but damn, it's important.

We'll ask Victor to give up his political assessment of Donald Trump as we are in the first days of July.

And then finally, let's talk a little about July 4th, because that 1776 commission that Victor was on, the White House commission that Donald Trump appointed, the report is out in book form.

And I think this could lead us into a little thing or two to talk about.

But anyway, Victor, let's get started about these attacks on critical race theory.

You may have followed it.

I'm sure you have.

Christopher Ruffo, who is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, got into it with Joy Reed.

He is an expert on critical race theory.

But Joy Reed and others, including Ibram Kendi, have taken this two approaches to my mind, probably more, to defend critical race theory.

One is to say there is no critical race theory.

There's no there there.

Or it's this is a thing that has been conjured up by white people to fill with any kind of a grievance they might have to the push for equity.

So that's one aspect of it.

And Kendi also, he was on Joy Reed's show this week, her CNBC show, and saying, I'm no expert on critical race theory.

If you have to be an expert on it, you have to be a legal scholar.

I've gone to law school and I didn't go to law school, so I don't know what the critics are talking about.

Victor, as you know, there's been a lot of pushback on this.

It has trickled down to parents who are approaching school boards saying, what the hell are you teaching our kids?

Why are you teaching my kid that he's a racist?

And there's clearly backpedaling among progressives.

Would you talk about the attacks on critical race theory foes?

Yes, in particular, critical race theory, remember, took the word critical in theory and it goes back to the Frankfurt School and probably Gramsci in Italy.

And the idea was that you're going to be critical of the established norms of a society and you're going to then postulate or create a whole system of

criticism.

It can be legal education, race relations,

and it's going to explain supposedly why people are not equal or what we now call on the back end equality of result or equity.

And people have been promulgating this for years, but especially after the death of George Floyd.

And basically it says, as your listeners know, that

because

society was created essentially as racist, that the only way you can dismantle it is to call out it's racist and then to attack the people on the basis of their race.

That is, racism against racism is okay.

And that's why critical race theory has spawned these weird things like the Bernard professor, Mr.

Philippe, who said that he wrote that he fantasized about killing whites in gas chambers, or the psychiatrist who spoke at Yale and said she fantasized about taking a revolver and shooting whites and they were neurotic, or Damon Young and The Root, root, who said that whites are the cause of all of this.

So that is okay.

And so a lot of people born either during or after the civil rights movement who know their children, if they go to college, will not

be given affirmative action, but in fact will be discriminated against to allow others who are so-called non-white to enter.

And then the working white class, I think we've had nine unarmed white males shot by by the police so far this year.

Nobody said a word, not a word.

We just had one the other day.

Person got out and he pulled over.

His partner, a friend, said he was trying to stop the car from rolling.

He put a block onto the back wheel.

The transmission was out and the policeman shot him.

Okay, there was no rioting, nothing.

So what I'm getting at is we have a whole generation that grew up.

with not just legal equality, but affirmative action.

And now they're told that that's not enough and they're racist and their schools are going to start to teach their children at a very young age to institutionalize this.

And now they're denying it and they're calling the people who are advocating a racially blind system racist.

Okay.

And this dovetails Jack with the general leftist playbook.

So

the border is going to let in 2 million people this year illegally.

First thing they're going to do is break the law entering.

Second thing they're going to do is break the law and residing here illegally.

Third thing they'll do is likely get false identification to pull it all off.

Okay.

So people are angry.

And so the left says, well, you guys are racist.

And then they look at the polls.

And the polls are about 70%

to close the border.

And then they say, you're racist.

And then they get Donald Trump did it.

And Joe Biden inherited a mess.

And this is true of almost everything, gasoline prices, inflation, vaccinations.

In other words, they postulate some ridiculous position and people are stunned by it that anybody would take the old white supremacist argument that race is what matters and we identify essentially by how we look and that some races are better than the others or that some races have obligations to other races.

And

this is coming from critical race theorists.

And they're thinking, wow, these people are anti-Martin Luther King and I'm arguing for Martin Luther King's color.

And they're calling me a racist.

And so that's what the left does.

And now they're in full panic mode, as they are, as I said, on the border, as they are on inflation, as they are with the lockdown ending.

And they're blaming, blaming, blaming.

But history is abstract.

It's disinterested.

It just 30 years from now, 20 years from now, a year from now, people are just going to say, who was arguing that race is essential to who you are?

And who is arguing that it's not?

And these parents are saying it should not be.

And critical race theorists said you're racist because, even though you say it shouldn't be, and even though you act like it shouldn't be, you don't know that you're a cog and a racist wheel.

But we are so well-trained and more brilliant than you are.

So we figured it out.

And there's where we are, and it's not a tenable position.

Joe Biden doesn't know.

If you said critical, he wouldn't know what it is.

If you said theory, he wouldn't know what it is.

If you said race, he's going to tell you a corn pop story or something, you know, about you you ain't black 7-eleven yeah right yeah or put you all in chains or something well victor the pushback from moms and dads and i'll call them i'll dare to call them normal people is coming let's go into one of your american greatness pieces has the military lost america so while while there is this anger growing anger about the accusation that you know i'm a racist my kids are racist my five-year-old child's a racist crazy the military of the United States is embracing this and embracing it publicly and defending it publicly.

Now, one of our more recent podcasts, we did talk about General Milley and his performance before a House committee.

You write about that and related things in this new piece for American Greatness.

It's called Has The Military Lost Middle America.

By the way, I do want to encourage listeners to go to amgreatness.com.

That's the website for American Greatness, and you'll find Victor's writings there.

Here's just one little paragraph, Victor, and if you would elaborate on this piece, deliberately alienating middle America could not arrive at a worse time.

And you're talking about the military alienating America.

China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea watching glee as our self-created discord that now threatens to tear apart the most lethal military in the world.

All because of, I guess, social justice.

They're supposed to be warriors, but seem to be more preoccupied with being social justice warriors.

Victor, would you talk about this new piece you've written?

Yes.

Well, the military has traditionally, as in the case of the FBI and the CIA, found most of its support from Middle America.

Middle America means the area between the two coasts or the people that are neither the subsidized poor or the very rich.

Many of them are white, not all, but many.

And so if we look at the statistics, for example, in Afghanistan and Iraq are dead, dead, combat dead, in a military that's racially integrated, male and female.

It's about, and remember, white males make up about 33% of the population.

Their death is about 72 to 74%,

and sometimes higher.

And that's been pretty much true of wars in the last 30 years.

So let's get this straight.

Because of the January 6th Capitol riot, the military is in now full mode to say that white supremacy is everywhere and they're going after people who are white and they're going to examine whether they have social media they find inappropriate.

And they're essentially targeting a rubric, multi-generational families that go into the military disproportionately and die disproportionately, and they're saying you're the problem.

That's not a tenable situation.

Then second, when a general gets in trouble, when when Sammy McChrystal gets fired for the Joe Bite Me comment that his aide and apparently he allowed to

laughed or he thought he didn't discipline the person, or General McCaffrey in the first Gulf War

comes under suspicion, or Jim Mattis has angry about the Ranos

when he's up for confirmation or he needs to get an exemption because he's not been out of the military long enough.

Or Michael Hayden is accused during the Bush administration of hiding information on terror.

That could go on and on.

It's conservative America that defends them.

When Elizabeth Warren goes on her jihad about the revolving door and that all of these people like Secretary Austin come out of Raytheon, where they have used their accumulated expertise in the Pentagon to get it rich, and then they go into a Secretary of Defense position, and then no doubt he'll go back to Raytheon and General Dynamics, Hockey, you name it.

All of these grandees do that.

It's Middle America says, you know what, it's a free country.

And even though the level, the magnitude of enrichment now compared to 30 years is just a joke.

Maybe you've got a quarter million dollars or $100,000.

Now you're talking about several million dollars per year in stock options of these very lucrative companies.

And it was Middle of America that said, okay, do that.

And I could go on.

And so they're deliberately attacking with this race theory by calling this group of people racist.

And then it's not just what they say, Jack.

It's the asymmetrical treatment.

And so the average million American who's been so pro-military is now where he

is about the CIA and the FBI after Mueller and Comey and Klein Smith and McCabe and Stroke and Page or John Brennan and the CIA.

And it's not just what they say, though.

Millie went up there and said,

well, I got used by this photo op and I'm not going to do that again.

I'm not going to politicize.

And people are saying, Well, what do you mean?

He said, Well, you know, that Trump was going to send in federal troops, and we don't, we're not going, I'm not going to stand by that way.

We pick sides.

And it was this self-righteous for about a day or two.

I even got a call from one of his aides, and then I wrote something about it.

He said, You know, I said, How did you get my private cell phone?

Ha ha.

But my point is, we've had about 20 incidences in our history of presidents who called in troops.

When George H.W.

Bush was worried in 1992 about Rodney King, he called, he wanted to make sure Colin Powell would give him troops.

And Colin Powell is on record saying they're here when you want them, i.e., 4,000 to 5,000 Marines, which were sent.

Nobody said that Colin Powell

should apologize for having a photo op later with George H.W.

Bush.

They all have photo ops.

They all use troops.

Okay.

So even if you don't believe that, then you can say to Amely, okay, then then you believe that across the board well the answer is no because after the january 6th riot milley didn't say a damn word when joe biden ordered 25 000 federal troops to occupy washington dc in the greatest show of military force since jubal early threatened to take the capitol in 1864 ringed it with barbed wire ringed it with fence and then gave us a narrative.

Officer Sicknick was killed.

Armed insurrectionists.

Kingpins plotting to take over the government.

Hand ties they brought with them to kidnap politicians.

Ashley Babbitt, felon, breaking in, charging, threatening.

All of that was false.

She was going through a window.

She was shot perpendicularly, unarmed.

There were riot police waiting.

Had she gone through successfully?

We didn't hear a word about who the shooter was.

There were no arms found by the so-called insurrectionists, no kingpins.

The ties belonged to the Capitol Police themselves, and the officers sicknicked, according to the autopsy report, died of natural causes.

Okay.

And then what would Millie say?

Why did he come out last June and attack Trump for the photo op?

Because he said he was going to send troops and then they cleared Lafayette Square and the White House grounds.

So he was using federal troops, i.e.

the military by extension.

just for his photo op.

Now we have the IG report of the Department of Interior.

Big lie.

So basically what I'm saying is that he has based this white supremacy, Donald Trump, photo op, Capital VI riot.

That's why we're doing this with Secretary Austin, all on false data.

And he's doing it asymmetrically.

By that, I can say, has he institutionalized a policy that says we will not have photo ops with presidents?

No, because Barack Obama loved to get next to the Joint Chiefs, as all presidents do.

Has he said to anyone,

we are having a policy about when the military shall comply with an order of their commander-in-chief no

instead four former chairs of the joint chief came out right after he disowned the photo op and then also bought into this false narrative that trump had you know cleared the area with federal troops so he can have a photo op so his information is not is not accurate.

It's not symmetrical.

His attention is not symmetrical.

He's not telling us that Iran, he said at one point, well, I tend to look at Iran or China or Russia, but that's not what he says publicly to people.

And the idea that a mythical white supremacist plot in the age of critical race theory and this massive woke movement is threatening the meritocracy or the efficacy of the U.S.

military is ludicrous.

And finally, who supports their budget?

Is it Schumer, Chuck Schumer?

Is it Nancy Pelosi?

Is it the squad?

Is it the Black Caucus?

No, it's always Middle America.

And they're saying, you know what?

I don't know if I like this big expensive plane, but damn it, I want to be safe.

I don't want to be ill-prepared like we were in World War II at the beginning or at the beginning of the Korean War.

I want to be prepared, I believe, in deterrent.

And so to sum up, he is deliberately attacking the people of Middle America.

And he's deliberately attacking the ideology and the conservative traditionalism that has been the foundational cornerstone of the military and he's doing it in a way that is relying on false narratives that are not voracious and they're not symmetrical he's picking and choosing his topics of ire and i think it's going to be absolutely devastating because when he's done he's not going to get for all the commercials are running jack he's not going to get a huge a huge influx of gay people or transgender people they're not going to do it right And he's not going to have Liz Warren suddenly say, wow, you guys are great people.

I like your chain of command.

You don't really screw around with deliberative politics.

You just do it.

And now you're in our service.

And I'm going to say you can go to any board you want.

I don't think so.

I think they're still going to go after them for this conflict of interest board membership stuff.

And I'm not just picking on General Milley.

I mean, we had this chairman of the

chief of naval operations.

And in some ways,

he was a lot ruder than, I think his name was Jill Day.

He was a lot ruder than Millie.

He came in and just sort of took off on everybody.

And they were performance art, Virtue Signal.

Right.

And so I think Middle America is, and I'm scared because if Middle America says, you know what?

This the military has gone the way of the NBA or the NFL or Hollywood or the corporate boardroom, and I'm just going to not participate.

And I think they've already done it with the FBI.

They said, you know what, just let the Comeys and the McCabes and the Stokes and the Pages and the Muellers, let them go do their stuff.

But

I don't want to be part of it.

And there's a question about funding the FBI.

I don't want my guy voting for it.

And the same thing with the CIA.

I'm tired of John Brennan.

I'm tired of the CIA trying to take down a president.

I'm done with them.

And boy, when you...

When you lose the conservative traditional support for the military-industrial intelligence complex, you're in big trouble.

Well, Victor,

that is a depressing, but I think accurate commentary.

Why don't we stick with American Greatness, your other piece that you wrote for the website this week?

You tend to write a smaller piece and then a larger essay.

And this is the larger essay.

And it's called The Cruel Progressive Creed Undoing Civilization, which probably pick up some of the themes of what we were just talking about.

You start the piece with a quick laundry list of some of the lousy things that have been happening across the fruited plains, and then you write this very simple but effective sentence.

In just five months, Joe Biden created a desert and called it progress.

What's the desert he created, Victor?

Well, when he entered office, California gas prices were about $2.80 or over $4 or getting to $4.50.

And that's true.

That increase is true across the country.

Why is that?

I think think it's probably because he sent a message to producers that they have a time limit on their viability.

So we're not getting the full fracking.

We're not getting the full horizontal drilling.

He canceled pipelines.

He canceled Anwar.

He canceled Newton Leeson.

And that didn't really mobilize people to borrow money and take entrepreneurial risk to meet up this pin-up demand.

And so we're seeing.

spiking.

He inherited a con, he can say whatever he want, but there were very few people coming across the border.

Remember when Trump became president, it was kind of another performance art where a lot of people encouraged immigration, the caravans, the cages to make him look bad.

That word cage, remember, only had an existence of four years.

Before they were detention facilities that Obama created, then afterwards they were overcrowded detention facilities.

But only during Trump did they become eventually empty cages.

But the point I'm making is that the border did not have 2 million people scheduled to come in a 12-month period right now.

And that was deliberate, Jack.

And that was very strange because Trump had sort of defanged the Chamber of Commerce, so they were not so bold saying they wanted cheap labor.

And the Mexican government and the Central American governments, at least half of them, they wanted that $60 billion in remittances, but they also thought, we have flat fertility now.

Do we really want to get rid of some of our best students?

M13, yeah.

And the elderly and the criminal, maybe.

Yeah, they cost money, but not our young men.

And so they were willing to work with Trump.

So the only constituency left for open borders was the Democratic Party that wanted to flip Georgia or Texas or Arizona in the way they had Nevada or New Mexico or California.

And then the ethnic tribal lobbies who thought that this changing demography would enrich the power of quote unquote diversity.

And so that's a mess now.

And so it was energy, it was the border, and then we had a natural pent-up demand.

Donald Trump was kind of reckless in borrowing money.

He had about a trillion plus stimulus package.

And we were going into the Biden administration, $28 trillion in national debt.

But we were also coming out of the COVID

pandemic.

When he came in, we'd already had 17 million people vaccinated.

We'd had Biden vaccinated.

It was scheduled, 600 million doses had been pre.

purchased.

And so it was pretty clear that by June, we were going to get June and July, we were going to get near 40 to 50% vaccinated with another 20%

that had natural immunity.

And we were going to see dramatic, here in California, I'm talking about 700 or 800 dead a day down to 30.

And so the obviously thing was just let people lose.

And he didn't do that.

What did he do?

He started.

giving more stimulus, more money to stay home.

So you can get about $50,000 not to work.

He depressed labor participation as natural demand peaked.

And then he told the producers, I'm going to raise your corporate tax.

I'm going to raise your capital gain.

I'm going to raise your income tax.

I'm going to raise your estate tax.

The states are going to have to raise their sales taxes.

And he depressed production.

And so we've got a lot of people with printed cash with a $2 trillion deficit, $30 trillion debt.

They've got a lot of cash.

There's not a lot of people who want to work.

We're labor short, and there's producers can't keep up with demand, and they don't have the labor, and they don't want to risk borrowing a lot of money when they think maybe demand will flatten out and we're going to go into a stagflation.

He did that.

That was artificially created.

I could go on.

And then racial relations before George Floyd were killed were pretty good.

Blacks had record, record,

never before.

low unemployment in the low fives.

Hispanics were down, I think it was 3.8.

It was almost a full employment economy.

There wasn't a lot of animosity, as we see, and George Floyd was a tragic death.

But that year, the last year we had statistics, we've talked about this before, that far fewer blacks were killed than whites.

Maybe they were overrepresented in terms of their percentages of the population.

Maybe they were underrepresented.

If you use a different rubric, that is the 11 million people who were arrested year, and juxtapose that with the number of blacks arrested versus the number killed while on arm by the police versus other groups.

And so there wasn't a data or a statistical argument to me made of a police force that was systematically or systemically racist, and yet that's what we were told.

And the result is Joe Biden jumped on that bandwagon, said right to the cameras that he supported defunding police.

Defunding police doesn't mean, as the left says, oh, there's still a police force.

You didn't defund it.

No, what it means is that you create a hostile work environment and you blame police non-stop and then people retire and you don't fund that position.

I can tell you in academia that I saw a lot of departments defund it.

They didn't go in there and chop heads and fire everybody.

They just let it be known that when you retire, your tenure track position will not be filled.

And that's what they're doing.

And we're getting resignations, transfers, retirements, and the police force is shrinking per capita up in comparison to the population.

And we got what you'd expect.

When you lose deterrence, that cost-benefit analysis that each criminal makes, I'm going to go break into a car.

I'm going to shoot somebody I don't like.

I'm going to attack this woman.

And what are the chances that I'll be arrested, prosecuted successfully, convicted, and incarcerated versus I won't even be arrested?

And they've decided that it's the odds are in their favor and we have to reverse them.

But to reverse them is, you know, things that stopping frisk, community policing, walking the beat.

That's not going to happen.

Yeah, Victor, you know, in New York and any number of states where you can retire at half pay after 20 years on the job with a lot of police and fire, you'd be a 43-year-old guy who could also think, you know what, right now I'm working, but I'm really only working for half pay.

You know, if you keep working, because the opportunity cost is in the retirement.

But let's say you're that 43-year-old cop in New York.

Like, why wouldn't I retire?

I can get half of my pay.

No, you're absolutely right.

And who needs it?

Who needs this

ajuda?

It's crazy.

Well, you're a policeman.

Let's say you're

not a policeman of color, and there's a call come in, there's a domestic abuse, and someone is getting their brains beaten out in a queen's apartment.

And the first thing you say to yourself is, given the current climate, I don't think I want to go over there.

I'm not considered part of the community.

I'm going to be considered an outcast.

So I would like my fellow officers who are people of color that are trusted.

And then the first thing they're going to say, no, no, you're racist.

You're sending officers into high crime areas where you get to go to, you know, the Upper West Side or something.

No, no, no, that's racist.

And then you say, okay, I'll go.

And you go.

And the first thing you think is,

If I'm a little late, maybe it'll resolve.

Then you're racist for not intervening and allow marginalized people to be hurt.

So then you say, I will use force to save the innocent if necessary.

That's going to work out very badly because any use of force, there's going to be people in the community and the larger legal community and the larger culture that are going to say you overreacted and we're going to prosecute you or fire you or put you on suspension.

Or then you're going to say, I'm not going, okay, I'll go and I won't use force and I'll try to just politely break them up and then the policeman's going to say, I might get shot in the head.

And more importantly, if I got shot in the head, I'm not going to be in the paper.

Half the people are going to say that SOB policeman deserved what he got.

And it's too bad, but you know, George Floyd died, so maybe this is tit for tap.

So he thinks of all those four different scenarios, and he said, you know what?

It's not worth it.

Yeah.

Victor, there's another part of this article.

I'll bring it up in one of the other podcasts.

This is the cruel progressive creed, undoing civilization, on American greatness.

You talk about transgenderism and progressivism, but we'll save that for maybe the classicists.

It's a love to hear your thoughts on feminism and transgenderism.

But we've got a few other topics to talk about on today's episode of the traditionalist in the time we have left.

And one of them, let's talk about the infamous Hunter Biden laptop.

And by the way, on this, I find it hard to believe that the information that is now coming out was accessible.

to the Trump political campaign and how these, maybe there's just so much info in this laptop.

It just was, people weren't getting to it till now.

But the this is that Miranda Devine of the New York Post, who broke these stories about the laptop back in October.

You remember those were the stories that were shut down by Twitter.

You couldn't retweet it.

The New York Post was essentially silenced nationally.

She, here's how her story from earlier this week begins.

At some point, the Biden White House will have to confront evidence of the president's involvement in his son Hunter's shady overseas business dealings.

Joe Biden insists he never knew a thing about Hunter's lucrative deals in countries where he wielded influence as vice president, but evidence abounds on Hunter's abandoned laptop of Joe's involvement.

For instance, Joe invited Hunter's foreign associates to breakfast meetings at his vice presidential residence and to his office in the White House.

The laptop shows he took his son on Air Force II to countries where Hunter was doing deals and and on at least one occasion, including one of Hunter's business partners.

on the trip.

Victor, this article goes on to talk about dealings with

famous Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim that Hunter was trying to work on some deals with.

All sorts of pictures taken with the vice president.

Slim emails Hunter's associate, hey, we need a picture of

the beep with Slim.

He wants it.

Wow.

I don't know that CNN's talking about this this this morning or CNBC, but Victor, it's kind of more of the same, but it's alarming.

Your thoughts?

Yeah, I would just imagine Don Jr.

in the place of Hunter and Donald Trump Sr.

in the place of Joe Biden.

There'd be a third impeachment right now.

There's a lot of things I don't think people are talking about so that

the Republicans win the House and so that they're going to inherit a tradition of impeachment.

I don't think it's a very good tradition that even though you're probably not going to get a conviction in the Senate, you're going to go ahead and peach anyway because of the performance and the visuals and the optics that will hurt an incumbent president, especially coming up on an election.

That's something that may happen because if you look at this

and just tune out politics, what we're basically seeing is the president of the United States looked the America in the eye and said, I have never.

discussed business with Hunter Biden, while there's pictures coming out that he is side by side Hunter's Kazakh or Russian or Ukrainian or Mexican business associates.

And then I have never used my office to help my son when he apparently got on an Air Force II.

And that's going to be very bad.

And we'll see during the transition or during his own presidency if people subpoenaed the communications between Hunter and Joe, whether that continued.

And the other thing is the media, I don't think they're ever going to cover it.

When this story came out this morning, I think it was in the New York Post and maybe a foreign Daily Mail.

But other than that, nobody reported on it because they can't report on it because they said that it was Russian disinformation.

They not only said that, Jack, they got over 220 retired intelligence officers and military to sign a petition for Joe Biden during the last weeks of the campaign saying that this was likely the work of Russian disinformation.

This was after, remember, that the whole collusion hoax and Robert Mueller's witch hunt had completely been exposed.

And yet our intelligence and military community still said that this Hunter Biden laptop is Russian disinformation, despite the fact.

And I want to be very careful here, I do not think there is any evidence that Hunter Biden or Joe Biden has ever said, this is not my laptop, those communications.

They may have said it was Russian disinformation or that, but they've never once denied that belonged to Hunter or the contents were not accurate.

And so

everybody in the network and cable news, with a few exceptions, was wrong on this, lied to the American people for political reasons, and they're not going to apologize because this laptop is what you'd expect from somebody who left a crack pipe in a rental car.

or took pictures of his own genitalia and was stupid enough to send them across cyberspace to people.

And it's just typical of what this guy is.

And it's typical of Joe Biden to completely lie about his family's involvement and to lecture the country on the N-word or anti-Asian discrimination why this character is in these communications saying the N-word or no Asians, et cetera, et cetera.

And his niece as well.

So this family is a toxic, dysfunctional family.

And we were told that this was unique to the Trumps.

Compared to Vanka or Don Jr., they looked like saints compared to Hunter.

Sure, yeah, it's not only Hunter, it's brother Jimmy also.

Jimmy and his

Biden's niece, she's the one that said to Hunter, remember, oh, and she's a model and says, I don't like, I don't, I'm not going to, no way I'm going to bring in Asian models for your Hunter.

She's basically a procurist trying to find women to hook up with Hunter, apparently from, probably for some type of compensation.

And then she says, I don't know what your propensities are, but I'm not bringing Asians.

And then he answers back, no yellow, you know, no yellow, and I don't want that.

It's pretty despicable, and it's despicable about this bankrupt media that for short-term political gains, they destroyed their credibility.

And just finish by saying, as you saw that recent poll of major countries in the world, the United States polls, i.e.

the American people poll, the least confidence in their media of any other major country.

This is something like this as well.

Yeah, this story is just another reason why.

Victor, we've got a few minutes left, so let's talk about two things.

One is Trump's political standing today, and then also as July 4th comes, I have a thing or two I'd like to ask you about.

So as for Donald Trump, there's a new poll out.

John McLaughlin, who was Donald Trump's pollster, at least in 2016.

I'm not sure if John also did.

I assume he did in 2020.

By the way, Victor John, another one of those Irish Romanists, he grew up around the corner in the Bronx.

Great guy.

But he has got a piece in News, Max.

I don't know if he can be trusted then this week, a new poll of 1,000 voters.

So

lots of questions in here, but let's look at his questions about Donald Trump.

So here are some numbers.

72% of all Republicans want to see Donald Trump run for president in 2024.

80% of Republican primary voters would support President Trump for the nomination if he ran again in 2024.

If the primary becomes a crowded field with 15 candidates, Trump obliterates the field with 55% of all votes.

No one else gets double digits.

DeSantis at nine, Pence eight, Cruz

at four, and some others.

And then the final thing here is he says if Trump, so this is not about Trump, but this is a post-Trump.

If President Trump decides not to run in 2024, very different race, DeSantis at this point is the

leader, 24% of the vote, Pence 19.

Donald Trump Jr., 15%.

Kind of surprised by that.

Trump, six, Romney, five, Haley, four,

et cetera, et cetera.

So, you know, Donald Trump remains in very good standing.

I will say that the article was titled, Slipping, Trump Remains Strong, 80% of GOP Primary Vote Support.

I think he had had 90%

support, but within, let's say, maybe as of three months ago, two months ago, 80% is still pretty damn significant.

So, you know, those are the numbers.

That's a poll.

What's your assessment of the political strength of Donald Trump here at the beginning of July of 2021?

Well, it's very strong among his party.

And the key is, will he be able to recapture that soccer mom, swing voter, suburbanite that he lost in a way that he hadn't lost them to the same degree in 2016?

to get 48, 49, 50, 51% that would be necessary to win.

And that depends on a lot of things.

One of them is that why did he lose them when his record was pretty good on oil production, the economy, the border, foreign relations?

He lost them because of partly a hostile media, a hostile boardroom, a hostile popular culture, but also because of his tweeting and social media.

He can't do that now.

He may not be able to ever do it.

It's ironically been to his benefit.

The other thing is he's not going to run in isolation, Jack.

He's going to run against Joe Biden.

And Joe Biden has deliberately focused on Trump because he doesn't want to talk about his own record.

But we don't know what the Joe Biden record will be in two years.

I don't think it's going to get much better than it is now, and it's getting worse.

So I think we'll have higher inflation.

I don't know how he's going to restore calm and the border.

This critical race theory will either go one way or the other.

I mean, it's right at Jacobin levels now.

So I guess when Republicans are summed up, they say, you know what?

If Trump were president right now, we wouldn't have this mess.

But

can he win the majority of votes when he got rhinos or never Trumpers or Blue Dog Democrat, the people we need?

And are they going to be in, and can he pick up minority voters, working class whites to even greater degree to make up what he might lose?

And then that's all.

calibrated in all of these candidates Nikki Haley was the outlier and that didn't last long but all of these candidates have expropriated the Trump mega agenda on China, on trade, on the border, on optional military engagements, on reindustrializing the Middle West.

So they're Trump populist nationalist tickets.

And so a lot of people, I think, are saying, I'm just going to sit back and watch the ebb and flow of the next two years.

I remember Scott Walker in 2016 was the ideal candidate.

He had been a great executive.

He was fearless.

Everybody thought he was going to be the guy, or maybe

ked cruise and they bombed they bombed right now i think de santis's popularity is a little bit higher the media seems the conservative main really likes him they think wow right he has all of the trump agenda he has trump's feistiness he doesn't take crap he fights back but he doesn't alienate the suburban voter therefore he might be trump a younger trump rather than trump who'll be 78 in his first year if he were to be elected and who gratuitously gets people angry then people take a big pause and say well

could this could anybody dissentist go out and get 40 000 people at a rally and could he get that type of base participation or would people if you reject trump would his base do what they did in 2008 and 2012 sit home so i guess it's it's all in flux but the main thing to remember is the trump agenda and the Trump record are looking better all the time.

And now it's just a question of do Trump's strengths outweigh his weaknesses?

And will those strengths and weaknesses be constant or will they be recalibrated by Trump or by history as it looks at the last two years of Joe Biden?

I think right now there's a half the Republican electorate says, I like what Trump did, but I don't want to go through this again.

with all of these melodramas every single day because the media will never be fair to him.

They'll try to destroy him.

And then half say, well, that's the point.

You've got to go to war with these people.

And I don't know how that's going to work out.

It could be very nasty in the primaries.

We'll see.

If Trump really wanted to be beloved, he could say, I created this agenda, but you know what?

I saw Joe Biden at 78.

I'm not going to run and be 78.

And I'm going to go make sure that we win the House and the Senate in 2022.

And I'm going to work with the best candidate.

And he could be a senior statesman.

And he would probably,

it would be in his interest to do that if he got somebody as a successor who followed his agenda.

Yeah, that's very plausible.

One thing before we move on, I just want to say in this same poll that half of the Democrats polled said they did not think Joe Biden would be the presidential candidate in 2024 because they expect that Kamala Harris will already have assumed the presidency by then.

So,

Victor, let's move on.

The final things we

want to remind our listeners that we are recording on July 2nd, and a lot of people at this time are looking forward to the celebrations of July 4th.

I've always been a big July 4th nut.

I love my country.

Not a 16, 19 nut.

Want to throw a little shout out to my mother who will be 88 on the 4th of July.

God bless her.

She has a birthday with Calvin Coolidge.

Victor, also about July 4th, there is the 1776 report has been published as a book by Encounter.

You are one of the members of the Presidential Commission.

I know you also are close to Encounter Books, so I just want to recommend folks check that out at encounterbooks.com.

But maybe wrap this up by getting your thoughts on this great holiday, the 245th birthday of America, with the very end title of your forthcoming book, The Dying Citizen, where you're writing about

the, you call it destroying the idea of America.

So this will be a grim spin on the 4th of July, but is the idea of America that is being destroyed?

Well, the idea of America was an idea that it was going to always

evolve, not in the sense of changing its core principles as outlined in the Declaration of the Constitution, but becoming more wealthier, safer, prosperous, more ethical.

It was this idea of human improvement.

adhering to the basic laws of human nature.

And more importantly,

it's implicit in our founding documents that it would be a multiracial society.

So when all of these people say they're racist, they're racial, they have to ask themselves why this country is a multiracial democracy in a way that China's not or Japan's not or Mexico's not or Germany's not, most of Europe is not.

And the answer is that the documents that they feel are racist, if they really were racist, we wouldn't end up like we are now.

And I remember Alexander Stevens, the head of the Confederacy, is

vice president of the Confederacy, I should say, he had a famous statement about the Constitution.

He said, you know, the founders were wrong.

They never made race explicit.

And they should have said to people that this country was founded on white principles and the white race.

And that's why we've succeeded, because it wasn't.

And so there's a lot of evidence.

of the traditional view of the founding that they were white males largely from Britain or the British Isles and they created an enlightened idea of constitutional republicanism whose logical trajectory was to allow people first who were coming from Ireland who were poor or Western Europe who were poor then Eastern Europe and Asia Asia all the time and south of the border.

Now, because they were human and not gods, they obviously, to the degree a person looked or came from a culture that was more distant from the founders, obviously they were going to encounter initial prejudice and there was a lot of racism and prejudice, which is innate to humans, but there was a system that could self-correct.

So now the idea of America is what it always was, that you're an American by the ideas that you adhere to, constitutional government, self-critique, rationalism,

the idea that you're a unique place within two borders.

You're not tribal.

You do not identify by your race.

Primarily, that's incidental to who you are.

The law is symmetrical.

It doesn't favor one person over another.

It's not inequally applied.

It doesn't say that you get to have a sanctuary zone in a place in Utah where you don't have to follow federal laws on registering handguns.

It doesn't say that you get a sanctuary city for illegal aliens.

It says that people of both sexes have equal opportunity.

It says that everybody has equal opportunity, but we're not going to get into the Marxist idea that we're going to create a huge government and and engineer a quality of result.

I could go on, but all of those are under assault by the left now.

They want a tribal society where

we identify by our race.

We want residency, just come across the border illegally, and that should be the same as citizenship.

You can vote, you can hold office, you can do anything, get entitlements.

They like the idea there's really not a middle class anymore.

It's a bunch of wealthy people that are in the Democratic Party and a bunch of very poor people.

And the middle class seems to be the deplorables, the dregs, the chumps, the irredeemables, and the clingers.

And then on the on the elite end, just to finish, there's this idea that a permanent administrative state of unelected people, as we saw during the Russian collusion hoax or Lois Lunar and the IRS or the DOJ under the Obama administration, that this group of Versailles-like bureaucrats, apparat,

they should have the power of of the judiciary, the executive, and the legislative.

They can make a law in the EPA, they can enforce it, and then they can decide whether you have any appeal or not.

And they like that because they feel it creates more equity.

And then we also have these evolutionists.

These are the people who want to get rid of what, the Electoral College, they want to pack the court, they want to have this disaster in New York, this rank voting that they all talk about fairness.

They want to add more state, they want to change the traditions, but even the Constitution Constitution with a national voting law.

And finally, there's a lot of globalists.

Obama was one when he said, you know, America is not that much more exceptional than Britain.

Or John Kerry and the Davos Kraut,

Paris Climate Accord, these

Iran nuclear deal, the idea that the U.S.

Senate has no power to ratify a treaty because, as the Obama press secretary said, why would we go to the Senate on the Paris Accord?

They don't know anything about climate change.

That wouldn't be right.

They're ignorant.

So there's a lot of globalism.

So we're attacking citizenship from the undercurrent and the overcurrent, the masses that are sort of being insidious, and then the deliberate elites.

I'm worried about it, but on this 4th of July, I'm not going to worry about it.

I'm going to worry about being American, happy I'm not somewhere else.

The alternatives are pretty bleak if you're not in America.

Victor, I just want to remind our voters, our listeners, that the last words that were in the Declaration before these men signed it was this.

With firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortune, and our sacred honor.

I wonder how many of our current elites would sign a document with such a commitment.

Victor, this is about all the time we have for today's show, except I do want to thank our listeners.

Do subscribe to whatever platform that you're comfortable with.

If you're on iTunes, please consider leaving a five-star review for Victor.

And if you wish, also a comment.

There are a lot of comments.

Victor, I just have to read two quickly.

This

one person named Shez Wingert who calls you the flamingo in a flock of pigeons.

And I think that's a pretty cool description.

And then another review by Bronx Bum.

It could be, could have been me.

I just, I might have written it.

Uh, what an abs, what an American treasure Professor Hansen is for us.

Political, historical, and cultural junkies.

He is my go-to podcast when I need to be enlightened about the reality of America's exceptional past and present.

Thanks, Bronx Bum.

Thanks, Shez Wingert.

Thanks, everyone else who's left reviews and stars.

And thank you, Victor.

I know this is before the 4th.

People will be listening to this podcast after it.

I hope you, and I hope everyone else will have enjoyed a wonderful celebration of America's 245th birthday.

So God bless all.

And we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show, The Traditionalist.

Thank you.

And thank everybody for listening.

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.