The Classicist: Words Matter

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Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show, The Classicist.

We are recording on Friday, June 18th, 2021.

The namesake of this show is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busk Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor Davis Hansen is a best-selling author.

He's a farmer, a classicist, a military historian.

You can find him a couple of weekly pieces, including always a great essay that he does for American Greatness.

And he's the editor-in-chief, the editorial guru of the Hoover Institution's very important online journal, Strategica.

I want to tell you more about Victor and where you can find some great material that he does weekly, daily.

And we'll be right back after this.

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Welcome back, folks.

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

Listen, before we get into our topics today, and that will be, geez, we're going to talk about lots of woke stuff, critical race theory, birthing person, Juneteenth.

I think that's a lot to chew on, Victor.

I want to encourage our listeners to go to victorhanson.com.

That's private papers.

That's Victor's website, where there's a ton of original material every practically every day.

I say four or five times a week at least, Victor's writing original material that you're only going to find there.

You can also follow Victor on Twitter at VD Hansen.

There's a Facebook page of VDH's Morning Cup.

There is an email newsletter, weekly newsletter, The Week in in Review.

There's also a great fan club on Facebook, the Victor Davis-Hanson Fan Club, appropriately named.

Victor, my friend, oh yeah, I'm Jack Fowler.

I am the director of the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic, and I'm the former publisher of National Review.

Man, lucky enough to be talking with Victor about anything, including things we'll talk about today.

So, Victor, let's begin with Juneteenth, if you don't mind.

Today is the 18th.

That's when we're recording.

Yesterday, Joe Biden, President Biden, signed into law a new federal holiday.

It was approved, I believe, by unanimous consent in the Senate and in the House of Representatives.

Again, I believe 14, maybe 11, 11 to 14 Republicans voted against this.

America now, if you're a government worker, federal worker, you will now have 44 days off.

43 wasn't enough.

Victor, very quickly, I mean, I never knew or heard of Juneteenth

when I was growing up later in life.

Yes, not in any way mocking it, denying its virtue to folks.

but did it merit being a federal holiday?

What's your take on it?

Oh, I don't think so.

I mean, there's a lot of landmark events in American history when women got the vote, when the Civil War was over with.

And the question I have is, is this going to make any difference?

Is this going to reduce the murder rate in Chicago?

Is this going to result in black crime proportionally or demographically being about the same as any other minority group's crime?

Is it going to stop the atrocious level of abortions in the Black community that per capita is higher than any other community?

Is this going to get the Black single parent ratio down and the married couple ratio up and commiserately with others that don't have a great record either?

But is it going to do all of those things?

Is it going to be part of that project?

I don't think so.

It's something in the aftermath of the black capitalizing the word black and the post-George Floyd period.

And these are iconic moments.

They're virtue signaling performance things, but they're not going to change anything.

What's going to change something was when a large number of African Americans say, we don't really need white people to tell us what we're going to do, and we especially don't need wealthy white liberals that don't live next to us, that don't put their kids in the public schools next to us, that don't have us over for dinner to tell us who's black and who's not black in the fashion that Joe Biden did.

And we're going to think for ourselves, and we're going to be individuals, and we're going to stress in our children's lives, capitalism, performance in schools and not matching the efficiencies and academic achievements of whites or asians or hispanics but exceeding them and once they have that attitude they being the black community leadership then we won't have a problem with race but this is not going to help it it's going to be another sign that says you can't make it because your great great great grandfather was racist the other problem is that we act as if there is no american history there was no 700 000 people killed to end slavery We act as if it's Tulsa race riots right now.

We don't realize that the Civil Rights Act was, it's about 56 years old.

And what that means is there are two generations that are born into America, not just under the Civil Rights Act, but under affirmative action.

And so when we talk about whiteness and all these repertory things we're going to do, we're telling about a third of the country who is white or Hispanic or Asian.

And some of you didn't get affirmative action.

And you of the lower working classes, if if you may be white and you grew up in southern Illinois or you grew up, you know, in Boise, Idaho, or you were in Florida and you were three generations of white poverty and you wanted to go to college, you didn't get a affirmative action boost.

You didn't get your SAT scores lowered.

down to be admitted or your GPA.

And so that's the problem.

And what I mean by the problem, it's a bunch of people who may have known about racism in the black community in their 60s, 70s, and 80s of the institutional sort, and a lot of people that were white that may have practiced it before the civil rights movement.

But they are adjudicating the whole racial dynamic for people who were of a whole different generation, are not culpable.

The more I hear about a university president talk about our underm privilege or some black, elite, multi-millionaire intellectual like Kendi talk about whiteness, I say to myself, go to Bakersfield and go to a garage that got a mechanic on his back eight hours a day who happens to be white, chain smoking with no money, and tell him how his kids just have a leg up on the Eric Colder family or Oprah or anybody.

It's just not there.

So it doesn't talk about class at all.

It's just another, you know, another virtue signal at somebody else's expense.

It also, just to finish very quickly, it suggests that this new mentality, borrow money, you never have to pay it back.

Give holidays, you never have to pay it off.

Just stay home for COVID.

There's no consequences.

And what we're doing is we're creating a psychological climate, a mentality among Americans that the government owes them something.

And your virtue is calibrated and how much time you can get off and how you can calibrate or game the system by getting cash money from an employer, staying home, getting enhanced benefits.

But it's not productivity.

And we're going to pay for it.

And in fact, I think we already are.

Anybody who flies lately and you wonder why your flight is canceled or why your plane goes back on the tarmac.

or why the connections are all screwed up or why people do not behave and follow the rules when you're in the plane.

It may be because there's no sense of meritocracy, and everybody knows that you can't fire people now.

And people know that who should be fired.

And that's permeating our entire society very rapidly, very rapidly, through the schools, the bureaucracies, the government, and the corporations.

Victor, what's also permeating our society rapidly is the renaming of obvious things.

And one of them is mother, which is now being called birthing person, including in positions taken formally by the Biden administration.

There was some kerfuffle in a congressional hearing this week about that.

Victor, we've talked about these things before.

It doesn't hurt to talk about them again, but from pronouns to the you know the most basic word, the word that comes out of the mouth of many men when they're dying on a battlefield is mother, mom.

And now this word seems to be increasingly verboten.

Any thoughts on this?

Well, it's an ancient word.

It's from Greek mater and Latin mater, madre in Spanish, etc., etc.

So it's an ancient word and that should tell us something.

The problem with all this name changing is that it reflects two signs of arrogance.

Number one, it feels that suddenly we all wake up in the year 2020 or 2021, we think, wow, we are so smart.

We just figured out something that these idiots like, I don't know, Aristotle, Kant, I don't know, Newton, they didn't even think of this, but we did because we're their moral superiors because we have Facebook and smartphones.

That's the kind of attitude that drives this stuff.

So we're going to start renaming things because their names are racist or sexist.

Okay, number one, they're distinctive.

All language tries to do is match something in the physical world that you see or hear, taste through your sensory perception, or you think, maybe through a fifth sense, with a word that tries to capture that reality.

So a rose, you have rose.

You can call a rose a cactus if you want, but people are going to get a different image in their head.

And so words have to be descriptive at least as commonly understood so birthing person is not descriptive because when we get up in the morning we're not going to see a lot of people with male genitalia having children and we have a very small small small small small fraction of a percent of people who have female genitalia who say they're male not that they're homosexual not that that they say they are male and they will be capable of having and this is what we're going to change 2500 years of western vocabulary for and then we always of course say okay what are you replacing it with in this case you have to have two words for one that should tell you something in the in the beginning because there is no other word because there's no way to conceptualize that except kind of a hospodge phraseology it's the same thing as when we tear down these statues have you noticed san francisco said well you know we're going to tear down all these statues we're going to rename all these schools and everybody's tapped their foot okay we're waiting we're waiting we're waiting you set the standards of what you can't have.

You can't have a sexist, you can't have a racist.

So who is it?

Malcolm X?

Well, he's an ex-felon and he did these things that were unkind to women and he did these things that were unkind and to he made fun of gays.

Okay, we'll have Caesar Chave.

Oh, wow, he went down to the border and tried to club people who were entering the state illegally.

Oh, he joined that nutty cult synonym and tried to threaten and intimidate.

Oh, his Robert F.

Kennedy medical fund was rife with corruption.

Okay, well, let's go to Martin Luther King.

I'm going to name everybody Martin Luther King.

Great man.

Wait a minute.

He plagiarizes PhD thesis.

He used physical violence against women, according to his most acknowledged

scholarly biographer.

So that's the problem.

Once you say that we have to be perfect to be good, and they are when they

rename things, then the question is: okay, your turn, you give us up.

Salinas named a public school after a horse thief who was executed in the 19th century as a Hispanic hero.

That's the logical trajectory of rejecting all of these names.

Or you can do what the Soviet Union or what New York does, what?

Public school number one, two, three, five, ten.

Right.

P.S.

19.

Hero of the Revolution number 72, something like that.

Well, Victor, we're going to talk about two other issues on today's episode of the classicist.

One's going to be the age of woke.

And you've written a couple of great pieces on this.

But first, before we get to that, let's talk a little about critical race theory so there's a piece that came out on june 16th in the washington examiner by a reporter zachary uh i hope i'm saying this right faria or faria it's titled the left is trying to redefine critical race theory because it's losing and here's a short passage from this piece liberals are now asking that you pay no attention to the curriculum behind the curtain.

They have taken to insisting that critical race theory isn't actually being taught in K through through 12 schools, even though there are clear examples that show that it is.

The New York Times even wrote in July 2020 about the quote, anti-racism, end quote, programs being brought to parents and staff in various school districts.

Another New York Times piece published just two weeks ago noted that critical race theory is a, quote, framework that has found its way into K through 12 public education, end quote.

Victor, I do subscribe to the man behind the curtain theory here.

Pay no attention.

What do you make of how liberals are now trying to spin critical race theory?

Well, it's kind of a bait and swish argument because remember 40 years ago, critical theory, which had a, you know, really came into vogue in Europe after World War I, it basically said we're going to be critical of society because its norms are arbitrarily constructed based on wealth and power.

Okay, Marxist idea.

So if you're shoplifting, that's not a crime because that's only the people with capital have said it's a crime.

They steal from you insidious ways that we don't prosecute.

But if you take a cami bar, you're going to go to jail.

That's where it started.

And then it was adopted to race.

And they said, you know, the SAT score, performance, GPA, the idea you have to wear your belt around your waist, the way you can't wear sneakers without all this stuff, these are arbitrary norms.

I think people were willing to go along with that to a certain extent.

They understood from the ancients that there was such a thing called called relativism and absolutism, and they were blurred sometimes.

But that's not what the new critical race theory, it's not Mr.

Duke Indi is talking about.

If you read what they have said in the past, and if you read what they themselves write, critical race theory says in this majority white, flawed, evil, white-founded society, it is, was, and always will be racist.

The only way you can combat it is to be racist.

And it's not racist, it's called anti-racist.

So proportional representation and disparate impact, the logical ramifications, I guess, of Martin Luther King, the way he was twisted and interpreted, that if there's 12% African Americans, the population, damn it, there should be 12% teachers, there should be 12% African American lawyers in every firm and every government.

Of course, if you're in the NBA or the NFL or the post office, that doesn't apply when they're over, quote, overrepresented.

So we got these terms called over and underrepresented.

And disparate impact said it didn't matter if there was prejudice or bias that was discernible.

It was just if it's asymmetrical, if Stanford University is not letting in 12% of their freshman class who's African-American, we don't need to cite any cases of racism.

It's racism.

But that's passe, Jack.

Critical racial theory says, no, there's reparations, reparatory, remedial racism.

So that means that Stanford University or Princeton University should let in, I don't know, 15, 18, 20% of their class as African American to make up for all those years when they didn't.

So they have this little calculator in their heads, the critical race theorists, where they say at some magical year, if we get this now and we call you racist and you have to give us all this fact, 60, 100, 250 years will be even, even though they and this generation haven't suffered.

So that's what's behind it.

And when you look at the corpus of what the vocabulary says, and that's starting to get out now when people say that whites are not human.

And I'll give you an example of why there's a pushback.

Professor Philippe at Barnard University wrote a novel, and he talked about it widely, where he referenced his dream of gassing in Auschwitz-style white people.

There were no consequences.

Mr.

Young at The Root magazine, who writes for the New York Times, said, every major pathology, whether it's disease or climate change or you name it, poverty, there's a white person involved there.

I could go on, but Mr.

Elie Mazzell, I think his name is the Harvard Lawyer, said, very influential guy, apparently in critical legal theory circles, said, you know, when this lockdown is over, I'm just not going to be around white people.

I'm tired of them.

I'm just sick of them.

And the vocabulary they used were words like exposed to, I don't want to be exposed to, I don't want to be infested by.

And where did we hear that pathogen vocabulary?

And where did we hear whiteness, a similar term?

It was called Jewishness.

And Jewishness in the 30s in Germany said, oh, you don't have to say that the Jew next to you who's a doctor got up at two in the the morning to save your daughter's life.

And he's a good person, but there's something called Jewishness.

He can't help it.

That's who he is.

And he's always going to be evil.

And you don't want to be infected by him or exposed to him.

And so this is not good.

It's all based on this idea that a white person in the year 2021, even if unknowingly and insidiously, treats black people bad all the time.

Every white person and every black person is free of racism and is a victim and therefore cannot compete.

And that's not what's going on at all.

I say that as somebody who spent 21 years teaching mostly minority students.

And once you have a student of any race and you tell them that their future is in their hands, and once minority students understand that if they perform at a particular level, they are going to get special consideration, you can get very motivated students to compete at levels where race is incidental.

Everybody knows that.

Well, Victor, you mentioned meritocracy and sticking to schools and who gets in and who doesn't.

If there is reparations to be made, why is it the deserving, let's call it a white student who's not going to get in because of the make do

of something that happened to somebody else 75 years ago?

You know, it's just a preposterous.

Yeah, I think a good thing to remember for the audience is that for the last 50 years, the people who crafted this policy were white liberals and mostly academics and lawyers and politicians and they were of the ruling oligarchy and they had the means the influence the money the old boy networks to ensure that the consequences of their advocacy never fell on their own children i can tell you when i went to college i met some really wealthy kids at the new uc santa cruz campus which is very hard to get in and stanford university that should not have been there but they were there because of networking and they got around affirmative action.

And then they crafted this next scenario that the people who affirmative action was aimed at was Joe Deplorable and Bill Irredeemable and Tommy Klinger and

Billy Chump and Nick the Neanderthal.

And they all lived in places like Tulare, California, or somewhere out in God knows where in Nevada or Utah.

That was the paradigm.

And they were fine to do that.

Affirmative action was great.

They got people who were one half Punjabi, one quarter Mexican-American, three quarters this, sometimes 100%.

It didn't matter.

But they were mostly of the same class, not always, but most.

And now guess what happened?

Wokeism came in.

And wokeism, as we just discussed, under the tenets of critical racial theory, said, nope,

no more proportional representation, Princeton.

You better, you won't ever admit it, but you better let in not 12, but 15, 16, 17% African American or Stanford or Harvard or Yale.

You do the same.

And these admissions officers are terrified because they have these little calculators in their head and say, well, we do, if we have proportional representation for every group and for women, we're already disproportionately, say in California, Asians are overrepresented under their little calculators.

Women are way overrepresented, 56% of them in some places.

And legacies are over.

You give $10 million to Harborgale or Sanford, your child will get in.

And athletes, and then they look at the remnants and they said, oh my God, if we go up to the black BLM demand of 16, 17, 8% African-American, what are we going to do with Joe Whiteboy?

Well, we're already down below the 67% of the white population as far as admissions are down to about 62.

And then you take 55% of them are women.

Are we only going to let in 30% whites, white males, 20% white males, 10 to 18% white males?

And that's happening, Jack.

So we're having people for the first time of that liberal bicostal culture saying, wait a minute, why did I send Tommy to Satcat camp in Manhattan that summer?

Why did I take Doris and send her over to do a community service project in Kenya?

Why did my daughter take 10 years of violin?

I even sent, you know, I sent Sebastian over there to be a Boy Scout.

I did all of this because that's what I was told to do, to get into Smith or Brown,

you name it, Yale, and it didn't work.

And so this is the first time in my life that this thing has boomeranged on the class who created it.

It's going to to be very interesting to watch how these universities react.

Are they going to let in more students?

Are they just going to be blatantly corrupt and say, Yeah, if you want your white male kid to get in, this is a price tag: 10 million gets you this, 11 million gets you this, 12 million gets you this.

Sort of like political contributions and ambassadorships.

That's where we are now, but it's never been disclosed so you know, so easily.

Well, Victor, of course, you've been discussing woke and critical race theory.

They're part of the same blob, but But if we can talk a little about woke separately, if only because you've written a significant essay in American Greatness this week called Anatomy of the Woke Madness.

The subtitle for this piece is, How Did Such Collective Madness Infect a Once Pragmatic and Commonsensical America?

And as usual, in these essays, you have a number of sections.

We just talk about elites versus elites, performance virtue signaling.

There's one that's called When Individuals Disappear.

And let me read just a little section here.

Again, folks, I encourage our listeners to visit American Greatness, the website where Victor publishes at least twice weekly.

You wrote here, Victor, wokeism destroys individualism.

We cease being persons and instead become categorized peoples.

What does it matter that Al Sharpton was a racist demagogue, that Jesse Jackson, a skilled shakedown artist of corporate America, that Bayard Rustin, in contrast, a brilliant civil rights activist, or that Martin Luther King Jr.

was an ecumenical believer in the inherent goodness of a flawed America of his time.

Once they are all to be reduced to being just black and therefore just equally victims.

In the same manner, did Robert Kennedy, Lester Maddox, Hubert Humphrey, and Bull Connor equally suffer from whiteness?

Wokeism then is a nonstop tribal warfare that reduces everyone on one side into uniform victims, despite their naturally varying morality, and on the other into cookie-cutter victimizers, although some were and most were not.

Victor, if you want to talk at all about this particular aspect at any greater length or any of the other things you wrote about in this piece, and before you do, you did write another piece on your on victorhanson.com in the historian's corner, and it's called Assessing America in the Age of Woke.

And there's some overlap between these pieces.

And here,

when you finish talking about the essay, maybe we can get into a little bit what you touch on in the other piece about what political consequences there might be in the next congressional elections if when America if America can't stomach this anymore and is fed up.

Remember, wokeism is

a form of Marxism, and Marxism says that people don't count.

It's class struggle and the masses that count.

It's Stalinism.

It says, you know, one death is a tragedy, a million is a mere statistic.

And so that's what they're talking about.

They don't want us to know individualism because individualism means that race was secondary.

But I think most Americans are not going to accept that.

I look at my own family and I remember my grandfather, who was born in the room,

house that I'm sitting in in 1890 and died in 1976 and mortgaged his little 120-acre farm to send three girls to Stanford University.

One was crippled and couldn't go.

He had polio her whole life and lived in the living room.

His two other daughters got, you know, they got their undergraduate, graduate degrees.

And I just don't believe that he was a sexist because he was a male.

I don't believe that he was a racist because he was white.

He was the kindest person to people of all different colors, and they were all different colors that lived that time in the San Joaquin Valley.

It wasn't a boutique, a multiracial society.

It was a concrete one.

I think all of us, when we look at our lives, we don't want to say this.

I went to school, as I said earlier, with mostly Mexican-American, and they had about the same ratios as absolute monsters and absolute heroes as white people did at that time, from my memory.

And I don't want to think these were all Mexicans or these were all whites.

I can remember being in fights with Mexican-Americans and white kids bailing me now.

I can remember a person who was white trying to jump me when I was in junior high, and then two Mexican-American friends of mine saying, if he knocks you out, don't worry, he will be knocked out one second later.

So, that's the point I'm making.

And we're reducing all of this to just Marxist statistics.

I don't believe that every Western was always an evil white person killing a noble Native American.

When I look at Westerns, I just think of them.

John Wayne was portrayed as a racist in the searchers that was not good until he redeems himself.

Ombre is about racism.

The Magnificent Seven is a multiracial seven at the end.

And they go into a noble Mexican-American village where the people there are morally their equivalents or superior.

So that was, it was always a sophisticated tension in America.

That's why nearly 700,000 people died in the Civil War.

I just don't think they're all statistics.

I don't.

I don't think that every Southern general, because he was white and fought for the Confederacy, was evil.

I thought they fought for perhaps the wrong cause, an evil cause, but James Longstreet was not Nathan Bedford Forrest.

He was very conflicted about he's a tragic hero.

I just, I don't think General Model is the same as General Rommel.

Not that Rommel was the saint by no means.

Or Stauffenberg is the same as von Kleist or somebody.

so they're individuals and they have ranges of culpability or not culpability except it's sophisticated tragedy history it's not melodrama these people cheapened it and they make it into a tv script just right out of hollywood and these are the good people and these are the bad people and it used to be in the 1930s 1940s that before we we started dealing with this thing sophisticated in a sophisticated matter there was step and fetch it and there were caricatured black people and then there were always superior white people and now we're going right back to the other other thing.

When you look at a commercial today or a sitcom, it's usually the black person who has to instruct the white person on the proper moral, ethical, scientific pathway.

This democracy, which I support, can't just take a deep breath and be sober and be empirical.

They have to go from one extreme to the other.

And that's what frightens people all over the world, that we can go from being very sober about the border or very sober about gas and oil, then all of a sudden four years later, a year, 90 days later, say that, you know, we're going to ban all fracking or we're going to have the most open border in the world.

And people are saying, wait a minute, I just dealt with you.

I'm the president of Mexico.

I'm the president of Guatemala.

We went and gave you these concessions.

We closed the down border.

And now you're saying that we're the enemy, we got to open it.

Well, that's what's scary about democracy in general, but particularly the United States, the mercurialness of it.

Victor, you did write in your piece from VictorHanson.com, Historian's Corner, Assessing America in the Age Age of Woke.

You write at the end.

Well, you ask a question and you answer it.

So will Biden get a strong rebuke in 2020, as do most presidents in their first midterms?

I think he will, is what you say.

Why do you think he will?

Well,

except for George Bush in 2002, when we had the 9-11 the year before, most presidents do.

And you know why they do, is because everybody lies in a campaign and they do a cookie-cutter caricature.

My guy is perfect, your guy is Satan.

And they elect my guy, the guy that gets elected, and then he's not God.

He's human.

And they say, oh, my God.

And the guy who is angry because they called his guy Satan, then he really hammers them and then that evens out.

And then it's 50-50 four years later.

But the first midterm is a chance for everybody to say, I was robbed.

I was deceived.

And so I think everybody will say, first of all, Donald Trump did not lie like you told us.

We know now that the Capital VI thing

assault, as bad as it was, was not an armed insurrection.

There were no weapons.

Brian Sicknick was not murdered, as Joe Biden lied at the summit the other day about.

We do know that these people are in solitary confinement.

We know there were a few FBI informants among those who were arrested, and we're not getting the story.

We do know that Donald Trump was not nuts when he said there was a connection between the Wuhan lab and COVID, as you told us during the election, Joe Biden.

And we know that Joe, that Donald Trump did not sick on the military to gas people with tear gas, as some of our most esteemed generals told us on June 2nd last year, just so he could have a photo op with a suddenly embarrassed chairman of the Joint Chiefs who then trashed Donald Trump and said, I shouldn't have done that.

That was a lie.

And we know there was no Russian collusion.

We know that Hunter Biden's laptop was Hunter Biden's laptop, not Russian disinformation.

So all of that is part of what's going to go on, that people feel they were had.

And then we're going to look at the actual record and we're going to look at the issues.

And I think Joe Biden has collapsed now by about eight points.

With the exception of maybe one or two polls and the real clear polling averages, I think it's fair to assume that they are between two and five points biased in favor of the left-wing person they always are.

And then they try to get a little closer on election day so they don't lose all of their credibility.

And so, right now, in a couple of polls, Biden doesn't have 50% and it's going to drop further.

And why is it going to drop further?

Because of the chaos on the border that does not poll well.

Why?

Because people want to frack.

They like $2.50 gas.

They do not like $4.50 here in California.

They want horizontal drilling.

They want clean burning natural gas to generate electricity.

They can't count on solar and wind yet.

They don't like critical race theory.

They don't like tribalism.

They don't like people saying, well, we're going to change the Constitution.

We're going to get lived with Electrical College.

we're going to let in two more states we're going to pack the court they don't like that get rid of the 180 year filibuster and so all of the issues that the left has rammed down their throats under the pretense in 2020 that you will never get to you'll never suffer another tweet from donald trump and he's tweeting and he made fun of the way anthony fauci threw a base

and that's where we are and now they're kind of waking up and saying wait a minute they lied i don't lie most of them say i don't like Trump, but you know what?

I'm thinking now, they lied about him.

He didn't do such a bad thing.

And so it's not me saying this, Jack, or you.

It's looking at what these House candidates are saying now in about, I don't know, 75 to 100 of the 435 races.

They're saying, wait a minute, I got to get a call into Joe Manchin.

Please do not get rid of the filibuster, Joe, because if you do, I can't win.

this district.

Or they're calling people in the DNC, just hold off on this race stuff because it's really hurting you.

That's why I think there's going to be, I don't know if it's going to be as great as Obama's rebuke.

It was, I don't know, 60-some seats or FDRs in 1938, but I think it's going to be considerable, even though there's going to be irregularities in the voting, because when you make Election Day a construct and the majority of ballots are done through early balloting or mail-in balloting, the level of authenticity kind of decreases, we know statistically.

Well, Victor, thanks again for sharing your wisdom and insights on this episode of The Culturalist.

This is one of the three shows that live under the umbrella of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

The other is The Traditionalist, and then the other other is The Culturalist.

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Come back.

Victor, thank you.

Thank you.

We will be back next week with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show, The Classicist.

Thanks a lot.

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