The Traditionalist: Who Can Be Trusted?

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

Victor Davis-Hanson, the namesake, is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

He's also the Wayne and Marsha Busk Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

I'm Jack Fowler, the former publisher of National Review, the co-host.

Victor is a best-selling author.

I'd urge our listeners, Victor, to go to your website, victorhanson.com, because you find a ton of original material there.

But there will also be a link there for your big new book coming out in October, The Dying Citizen.

It could be pre-ordered through the website.

Victor, I'm telling you what you are, right?

You're the best-selling author, farmer, classicist, military historian, essayist at American Greatness.

For folks who want to find out more about Victor or follow him

by other means on Twitter, it's at

VD Hansen.

And on Facebook, I suggest folks check out VDH's Morning Cup.

Victor, we're talking today on the traditionalists.

We're going to talk about

current politics and some of the things you've written for American greatness.

So today, we're going to be talking about the Israel

conflict, your pieces for American greatness.

Mitt Romney gets a Profile and Courage Award.

We have the January 6th commission vote in the Senate today.

It went down to defeat.

Hey, Joe Biden, as vice president, maybe indeed did meet with some of Hunter Biden's sketchy

Russian and Ukrainian business.

uh partners and joe biden also has given the russians a green light on their Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

That's the same Joe Biden that killed the Keystone pipeline.

So, Victor, let's uh let's talk first about uh Israel.

And if I could just share a little bit here about um Anthony Blinken, uh, the uh U.S.

Secretary of State.

This is from a news report today on Yahoo News.

It says here that Secretary of State Anthony Blinken told Axios that he warned Israeli leaders: future evictions of Palestinians from East

Jerusalem

could exacerbate tensions and catalyze further conflicts in the region.

Quote, we raise the concerns that we have on all sides with actions that in the first instance could spark tension, conflict, and war, and also ultimately undermine even further the difficult prospects for two states, Blinken said.

Quote, the ceasefire was not an end in itself, as important as it was, but also a means to have some space to start building something a little more positive.

Victor, I thought we had something a little more positive in the Middle East, thanks to four years of Donald Trump and a few years there of Mike Pompeo.

What are your thoughts, Victor, on what the Biden administration is doing

right now as it relates to this conflict?

And I know you have some analysis from friends and others in in or related to Israel and maybe give us

a better view of how the Israelis are looking at this situation.

Yeah, I think what we wanted from the Biden administration in general and our Secretary of State in particular was please don't take $700 million that we were renewing in aid, I think $400 million in the preliminary.

budget appropriation.

Please don't use that for tunneling and buying more rockets to replenish your 12,000 rocket arsenal to send into Israeli cities when you disagree with a policy or when you have a civil conflict with the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank and they cancel elections.

So why did they send rockets in?

They said it was quote unquote evictions.

That's a long history of private property going back to 1947.

Who owned those properties?

And if the owners go to court in a legal matter in a democratic society and they get a court order that the people who are in the houses don't have legal title, then that is a civil matter and it would be resolved as such.

And the same thing

about all of these domestic disputes within Israel.

Well, what Hamas has done this time is they have expanded their agenda to include

we are going now speaking as an Hamas leader we are going to expand beyond Gaza.

The Palestinian Authority is corrupt.

It would lose an election.

That's why they canceled one.

We are going to carry the banner for people on the West Bank as well.

Number one.

Number two, we're not done with that.

We are the legitimate representatives of 20%

of the population.

of Israel itself, nearly, you know, a million and a half, two million Arabs in Arab

Israelis, inside Israel.

We are your voice.

You participate in

participatory democracy.

You don't want to live or migrate on the other side of the wall to the Palestinian Authority or to Gaza.

We understand that, but you can carry on the struggle from within Israel, politically, in the streets, whatever manner.

And indeed, they did.

And then more importantly, this their message to the world was, we are George Floyd.

We are the marginalized.

We are the colonialized.

We are the victims of imperialism.

We are the victims of white privilege.

The Israelis are the Minneapolis Police Department.

So their strategy was to ideologically and politically expand, use this conflict to expand their influence among Palestinians, among the Arabs, and among the world at large in a way that would do what?

It would...

trump or outweigh their clear military defeat.

So what they're saying is every time that we send a rocket and to Israel and you retaliate, we lose in that exchange.

And we understand that you took out our leadership, you took out our tunnels, you took out our launch pads.

It will take us two years to fix everything or three years.

But we're never going to give up trying to destroy Israel.

And we're looking at the long view that you think you're mowing the lawn, but every time you're mowing the lawn, the lawn's going faster than your mower can be repaired.

And so this is our strategy to get world opinion against you, to get the American left against you, to get people within your own society against you, to unite the West Bank, to make it almost impossible for any more Arab countries to recognize you or to have normalized relations with you.

And by the way, it cost us $800 to send.

a rocket

into Israel and it's $80,000 for you to send one to knock it down from the iron dome and we can afford that better than you can, that 100 to 1 disparity.

So that's their strategy.

And what's baffling, to get to your question, Jack, is I don't understand why the Biden administration doesn't know that.

And of course, they do know that, but they can't say that.

And they can't say that because they're afraid that their

base, the AOC, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, hard-left progressive base, is now not the base, it's the entire party.

And the Jewish American democratic lobby is now gone the way of the Greek American lobby that was secularized, intermarried, assimilated long ago.

And if it had enormous clout to weigh in on the 67 coup in Greece, US policy, or the 73, 74, 73 crisis in Greece, or the 74

Turkish invasion, it doesn't have that clout now to represent an advanced Greek interest.

And the same thing is happening to Jewish Americans.

Those under 40

are mostly secularized, mostly on the left, Jewish Americans, not all, but mostly.

And they don't have a strong affinity with Israel.

And those over 40 in areas of influence or politics that usually had a voice or a seat at the Democratic table, they don't anymore.

And so they're basically confronted with the dilemma of, well, don't talk too loud about Israel or AOC is going to galvanize the entire party or Elizabeth War against you.

And so they've muted their voices.

And the result is that Israel for the first time is both liberated by its newfound popular support that's not based on a Jewish-American spearhead, so to speak, but just on average people who...

always tend to favor constitutional government and human rights and free elections over their antithesis.

Well, Victor, along those lines, by the way, there's a story out today.

You may have seen it, that the

Chancellor at Rutgers had attacked some of these anti-Semitic attacks in the streets of New York and LA and elsewhere in America, and now has apologized for criticizing those attacks because whatever the usual jargon is, didn't make enough room or wasn't sensitive enough to the feelings of Palestinians in America.

Yeah, I guess the Democratic Party is the party of

the Palestinians.

Yeah, it is.

And, you know, critical race theory, remember what critical race theory was.

It was a relativist postmodern argument that the law as it is written does not exist and should not have any authority or

applicability.

Critical race theory said you have to look at the larger social, economic, and cultural picture, and the underrepresented, the marginalized, the oppressed, the victims, then deserve that

consideration of their status, their lowly status, vis-a-vis the victimizers, the oppressors, the establishment.

And therefore, if there's a law that says, you know, if you break into a car and you

commit $500 worth of damage, that's a felony you go to prison.

They'll say, you know, that was a construct.

That was created by people with property to protect their vested interests.

And that argument is used everywhere.

Well, now we have something called critical

foreign policy theory.

Critical foreign policy theory in the mind of the left says that all foreign policy issues will not be adjudicated on traditional diplomatic methodologies of who was an aggressor, who was not, what was the original nature of the dispute, what is in U.S.

interest, what's the balance of power.

No, it's going to be

on the

assumption that there has to be a victimizer, victimizer, and that's going to be the power that has less money, less success,

less stability, and they're going to be oppressed by the victimizer, which is more in practical terms, we're talking about Western versus non-Western.

And we're going to go as Obama did with his apology tour and his numerous resets.

We're going to look at the entire world.

And in every single dispute, whether it's in Latin America or whether it's

in Asia or Africa, we're going to side with what we consider the more victimized and the more woke,

with a couple of exceptions.

If we get into places like Eastern Europe, vis-a-vis Russia, or something, and if we feel that a Victor Orban or somebody is illiberal, or the Argentine government or the Brazilian government, whatever, if they're illiberal, then we'll suspend that critical foreign policy theory.

But mostly

we're going to say that normal diplomacy no longer matters.

Right.

Well, that's why we have Black Lives Matter flags flying over American embassies this week, Victor, kind of symbolic of what you just stated.

Let's move on, Victor, to your pieces in American greatness.

You have a usual, you're kind of your column, and then you have a larger essay.

The column is

titled, Will the 2020 Madness Last?

And of course, madness here is a collective term because there were several kinds of madnesses occurring in 2020 and

leeching into 2021.

Victor, would you talk about what some of those madnesses were and collectively or

independently,

which of them do you think at some point in the near future will really be in America's rearview mirror?

Or will these things just be part and parcel of what the United States is from here on in?

Well, I should preface that article in this discussion with the idea, I'm not excusing the madness just because of the lockdown, but what I'm saying is that ideas or theories or policies which would have been laughed out of polite company as absurd or crazy or nihilistic somehow gained resonance during the pandemic, the national quarantine, the self-induced recession, the George Floyd subsequent 100 days of rioting, looting, protesting, arson, the contested election, and the Trump derangement syndrome.

You add all of that, those perfect storm conditions together and you get craziness.

I think I compared it to the great June bug craze of 1962 or the tulip mania.

in the

16th and 17th centuries in Holland.

But what were those madnesses?

Well, you know, I grew up as a teacher and a professor with the idea that administrators were always overrepresented.

They administrated, but they didn't teach.

And so the body fluid of education was the classroom, not the people who adjudicated those who were in the classroom.

So every teacher said we need fewer administrators and more teachers.

And everybody understood that when you got tired of teaching or you were burned out, you wanted to go into administration because you sort of didn't have to put up with the kids or you didn't have to keep current or you didn't have to stay on your feet for six or seven hours.

That was just, everybody knew that.

That was the union.

Now, all of a sudden, in this pandemic year,

we have hired literally thousands of

diversity, equity, and inclusion facilitators, provosts,

deans, assistant deans, and they're not going to teach at all.

What they're going to do is largely three things.

They're going to go to the professor and say, I'm going to monitor your curriculum to make sure it's approved, as in the style of a Soviet Commissar.

They're going to go to the admissions department of a university and say, I want to make sure that you exceed the racial proportions of the marginalized as part of repertory.

uh efforts in other words if blacks are 12 percent after george floyd they're going to be 18 percent of admissions if latinos were nine percent they're going to be twenty percent And we have to cut back then on Asians and whites.

That's what their job is going to be.

And then finally, they're going to scour the workplace every morning and say, Did somebody say something in a private conversation?

Did somebody have a bad thought?

And let's bring them up on diversity, equity, inclusion charges.

That's what they're going to do.

And I don't care what they say they're going to do, make a more perfect society or bring social justice or end systemic white privilege.

But

my confusion is: why are all of the unions and the left-wing teachers groups for that?

Because it's basically a con job to get a bunch of administrators, high-paying jobs, at the expense of funding, and to pay for them at a time when a lot of private liberal arts colleges are going broke, they're going to have to cut teaching position.

Fewer students,

fewer teachers, and more administrators to teach to administer and overseer, fewer students, and fewer teachers.

So,

when this thing ends, are we going to put up with that?

And you know, we in normal times, everybody saw through the juicy smollett hoax, the Covington kids, the Duke lacrosse.

But during this pandemic, we had a lot of really crazy things that happened that people expected

that they just suspended their, I guess to quote Hillary Clinton, they suspended their disbelief and they swallowed them whole hog.

Do we really believe that when you have a Wuhan lab that is about a mile or two from supposed ground zero in a wet market and it is engaged in gain of function research, clouded with a aura of secrecy and probably run or in association with the Chinese communist military and has had leaks in the past and was cited for being sloppy in its security measures, that that had nothing to do with a very virulent virus that, unlike other viruses, the swine flu or others have swept in the last 50 years, have swept the globe.

And it had nothing to do with a human agency at all.

We're not talking about accident or on purpose or anything.

We're just asking a legitimate query.

And that was considered, no, no, you can't talk about that.

The Chinese, I think Fauci's argument was the Chinese have assured me, and it's on their website, that they were doing all they can.

And the investigation by Peter Dasnik and his lancet people proved that you're unscientific even to suggest that now we don't we don't even ask in this crazy time whether whether he's a head of eco health and right involved in channeling money to the chinese right gain of function research on the direction i suppose who gave him the grant anthony fauci right well what do you think on that particular point victor because part of your article here at the end is but as as americans sober up will they institutionalize or reject the frenzy?

Will Americans swallow, take it lying down if it's true that Anthony Fauci

helped fund

this

lab and then

BS'd about its role in things?

And lately, in the last week or so, we have these admissions, but Americans really going to, do you think they'll tolerate this or will they demonstrate that?

I think he's sort of through

i think he's

he's all through i really do i think he gave all the problem with anthony fauci is that when he makes a statement you simply cannot believe that he believes it so when he tells you that the virus is probably not going to get to the united states

he either thinks it will or it will if he says that masks of no utility then they are of utility and he knows it are

they are of utility yes i said when he says herd immunity is 60, then assume 70.

If he says 90, assume 60.

When he says that you can trust the Chinese, they've done nothing that suggests that they're hiding anything, then you should assume they are.

When he says that it's absolutely absurd that his agency would ever have approved a grant to

conduct gain of function research, which has banned the United States, and give this huge grant to Echo Health under the knowledge that they would in turn give some of of it, 600,000 at least, to Chinese scientists.

And he denies that to Ron Paul under oath, and you should assume he's lying.

And if you make those assumptions, you'll pretty much come out right.

When he says, the worst thing about science is politics, you just can't politic, and then you know that that's what he's doing.

And when he goes before

a woke graduation office, he'll tell you that COVID

was basically the efforts to control the COVID pandemic suffered from racism.

When he's working for Donald Trump, he'll go on Fox and talk about we don't have politics.

When Donald Trump's gone, he'll go on CNN and say Donald Trump was, you know, Lucifer incarnate.

So that's how he operates.

But at 80, it's catching up to him.

He has no credibility left.

And he's part of these groups of people that have alphabetic titles, you know, PhD, MD, BS, MS.

And they are in these bicoastal

universities, affiliations, or they work for the federal government.

And we're supposed to believe that they know everything.

So if they're involved in vaccination research, they'll say to you, and they're Moderna or Pfizer, we're a private company, we can make all the money we want.

And just don't

consider that the government helped fund some of our research or gave us legal exemptions from lawsuits or helped with the logistics.

We are a private company.

We can make what we want.

We've now vaccinated $1.3 billion.

Nine of us have made

$20 billion.

We've got another 85% of the planet to go.

And oh, by the way, if you have COVID and you have antibodies, or T cells and memory cells and all that stuff, you still have to get vaccinated.

You got to buy one of our vaccinations.

And you know what our next project is?

Even though 12-year-olds and below don't really get the disease or spread the disease, they're going to get vaccinations too.

And if you dare suggest that the nine CEOs of these companies had any

career enhancement in the term or financial enhancement incentives that made them $20 billion, then shame on you.

You're a deplorable and a nut.

And how dare you?

And we saved the planet.

That's where we are right now.

Right.

Well, Victor, your other essay, well, this is an essay for American Greatness published last week is called Feet of Clay Icons.

The subhead is, Our most important and cherished institutions, the military, science, and the law, are losing the trust of the American people.

Victor, one of the sections is on the law, excuse me, on the military.

We've talked about it before, but America's military,

as you pointed out, the leadership has become quite woke.

There's a section here in the essay called Protect or Proselytize.

Let me just read the first sentence here.

And then if you would elaborate on the point about the military and whatever else you want to about this very important essay.

You write, the Pentagon seems to have lost its way.

It has transmogrified into a cultural engine of change from a defensive force devoted to battlefield supremacy.

The department, the Defense Department, is chasing its tail, supposedly on the scent of white supremacists of the armed insurrectionist sort who stormed the Capitol.

Victor, would you talk about our military and our legal system and our science community and how it

really has lost the trust?

It's very important that institutions that are intelligence institutions, investigatory institutions, and military institutions for our collective national security are revere.

And usually that that respect is centered and focused from the conservative base.

The left has always said we don't really, that the military industrial complex is threatening our civil liberties, at least until recently they did.

And we can't trust, you know, Frank Church said we can't trust the CIA under any circumstances.

And then we all remember J.

Edgar Hoover and the FBI.

So the conservative base or establishment said, well, yes, there have been abuses, but these are essential institutions.

But now what has happened,

these institutions have lost all support of non-conservative, and not for partisan reasons.

It's just simply they can't be trusted.

So when you have retired generals and admirals who are subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice that says they can't disparage, attack, dishonor their commander-in-chief, and when they go out and politic, I don't mean politic in the sense of, I want you all to vote for Biden.

Okay, so what?

Maybe they shouldn't, but they do, or don't vote for Trump.

But I'm talking about Trump is a Nazi, Trump is Mussolini, Trump's got Auschwitz-like cages, Trump should be removed sooner than later, This kind of stuff.

Why are they doing that?

Why are they doing that?

And why would all of these intelligence and military professionals come out and swear that Hunter Biden's laptop is Russian disinformation when they know it wasn't?

And they did.

And so the answer is that they're politicized.

And there's a lot of explanations that would account for their politicalization.

If you were giving them the benefit of the doubt, you'd say, you know, they're evolving.

They, as David Petraeus wrote, you know, I was, I just woke up one day and I realized that Fort Hood represented John Bell Hood and I had gone there a lot.

And then I walked one day by, you know,

Robert E.

Lee's statue and I just realized it was a horror.

I'm general's retired and now corporate advisor and leadership advisor with a very financially

lucrative business, Stanley McChrystal, and you can say, you know, I just kind of got rid of those pictures of Lee and Southern generals.

I just was bothersome.

It just happened to me, just suddenly.

And so you could believe all that, or you could believe that there's a lot of personal agendas, and a lot of them at some time in their career will be stationed in Washington, at the Pentagon, at the National Security Council, as liaisons with Congress.

And they will come into contact with politicians, and they will come in contact

with Defense Board contractors.

and they will understand that whereas the conservative supporters of defense budgets or FBI budgets or CI budgets are kind of live and let live, but the left is not.

They will say to them, you know, how many women are now combat pilots and what is the ethnic breakdown of your unit or

do you have transgender surgeries subsidized by your health care system?

And if you don't, we're going to put a hold on that, you know, that advancement.

Oh, by the way, now I'm at living, but by the way, when you come out of your one-star, two-star, but especially three or four-star billet, if you want to go work for Lockheed or General Dynamics or Raytheon, as the current defense secretary does,

or

any of these defense contractors, we're going to drop our old systematic, knee-jerk, Pavlovin response that that's bad.

So you can become a multi-millionaire as long as you're woke.

So they have both positive and negative incentives, and that it becomes Washington-centric.

And that group that runs the military is at odds with the people, you know, that I would make a rough guess, captain and below,

or maybe major and below.

And the result of it is that they're at war with each other.

And now the defense secretary is telling us that his generals, and they will be ready to brag about how many alt-right people they found, found are conducting

a thorough review of their ranks and to see who ideologically is dangerous to the United States.

And believe me, if they find people who are Antifa members or BLM members who, even if they've committed violence, they will not

be brought to the attention of authorities.

It's completely one way.

We saw this before, Jacqueline Ford Hood, along, you know, I think it was 2013.

And we've discussed that when I think it was General Casey, chief of staff of the Army, said

his real regret about Major Hassan's shooting of 13 lethally,

a major, I don't want to misquote him, a major regret was he was worried that the backlash would hurt his diversity program.

And then the Pentagon

termed that workplace violence, as if he had no ideological

spurn.

Believe me, if there is found a white alt supremacist nut and he does something crazy, nobody is going to say that's workplace violence.

They're going to say he was ideologically driven and he was an architect of revolution.

But if you were the colonel, the psychiatric colonel, Muslim guy down in Texas, that was, and who brought a gun to work and killed a bunch of your fellow

soldiers, that was workplace violence.

Yes.

Victor, let's, you mentioned before the, I had mentioned earlier, but you brought up again the infamous laptop of Hunter Biden.

Well, it wasn't a Russian hoax.

It's a real thing.

And as it's been,

people have been going into its reams and reams of information contained there.

There seems to be pretty strong evidence that despite what Joe Biden said, he knew nothing about these claims.

Of course, it was a Russian hoax anyway, but that in fact

he did meet with, and excuse me, the laptop is providing evidence of this in some emails, that he did indeed meet as vice president with some of hunter biden's schemy sketchy um

ukrainian and or um

russian business partners um

any thought on that victor i mean is anyone giving a rat's patoot about that no they don't american media

They no more care that Joe Biden flat out lied about his knowledge of his son's likely illegal activities and playing off his status of vice presidents at the time and then using the funds that accrued from that scheme to funnel back to Joe Biden the big 10% guy I think they've turned him

they no more care about that than don't than

Joe Biden lied and said that when he came into office, there was no vaccinations being given at all, even though we have pictures on December 21st of him being vaccinated.

And why and what are they, how do they square that circle?

Well, it's Joe biden joe's confused joe's lost his memory so they've really been very adroit about the cognitive challenges to joe biden and by that i mean when

he stumbles or he gets in a mental fog and can't complete a sentence or read from the teleprompter it is oh my god don't be ageist how dare you suggest this and forget about the fact that they said that donald trump was so mentally impaired that they got a yale psychiatrist to testify before Congress.

Rod Rosenstein, supposedly with Andrew McCabe, were considering wearing wires to find proof that Donald Trump was nuts.

And finally, an exasperated Trump took the Montreal cognitive assessment test and aced it.

And I don't think we'll see Joe Biden getting near that test.

So the point is that when you suggest it,

it's somehow an ism or an oligarchy when they suggest it.

Joe's tired, you know, Joe's 78, and sometimes he gets a little confused.

Don't worry about it, it's just a minor discrepancy.

And so it really helps them because people, it means that he can say anything

crazy, and you're crazy to think he's crazy.

And he can say anything that's a lie,

and you can't judge him because he was a little confused that time.

Yeah, despite the fact he's been lying for 60 years, so

Well, he doesn't have a good record of telling the truth, that's for sure.

Right.

Victor, let's talk about two more items quickly in the time we have

left on today's podcast.

And they both sort of, well, Mitt Romney

connects the dots.

The first item is that he...

He received the John F.

Kennedy Library Foundation's Profile and Courage Award.

You know who will never get a Profile and Courage Award from this institution is someone like

Congressman Lipinski, the pro-life Democrat who was bounced out in Illinois.

Or even a Joe Manchin, I would assume, would never get

that distinction.

But Mitt Romney got it because of his, I'm sure, because of his votes on impeachment.

And he went and accepted it earlier this week.

The headline of the Boston Globe is Mitt Romney reminisces about Ted Kennedy as he accepts Profile Encourage Award.

I don't know know how you can reminisce about a guy that killed a woman at Chappaquitik, but Mitt did.

Any thoughts about

the mitster?

Well,

a lot of thoughts.

The first one is I go back to 2012

when Mitt Romney ran as a decent guy who was pretty successful.

And the next thing we heard from the left that now has adopted him as a pet, that he had an elevator elevator in his home in La Jolla.

And the second thing was that his wife was decked out in equestrian clothes.

And the third thing was bogus that horse riding really helped her MS.

In fact, it was just an obsession of the rich.

And the fourth thing we heard was that when he was, I don't know, 16, he hazed somebody.

And then the fifth thing I heard that he tortured his dogs in cages on his car.

And the seventh thing I heard is that his poor garbage man, every time he picked up his garbage, Mitt didn't even even go out.

And he hadn't, you know, he didn't get out of his elevator and go see his garbage.

That's this kind of stuff we heard about him.

Right.

And then we had Paul Ryan, you know, the same thing about Paul Ryan.

We heard all about that.

And then

now he's not the target, but he's the one targeting.

So he really believes all this stuff as it's leveled against the alt-right or the Trump supporter, the deplorables, but he doesn't have a very good memory.

So the corollary of that, Jack, is he's asking everybody to take him seriously who defended him in 2012.

Right.

And they're thinking, you know what?

You're a chimillian.

You just change, change, change depending on the prevailing winds.

And there's such a thing called gratitude.

And you don't, you're a very moral man and a self-described moral man.

But you, when you were in 2012, a lot of us remember you going up as a suppliant.

to Donald Trump asking for his blessing unless you think Donald Trump's a different person than he was in 2012.

So it didn't bother you then.

When you ran for Utah, senator, you hadn't been really a resident of Utah in the traditional sense.

You could have said, I don't want that

endorsement of Donald Trump, but you gladly took it.

So they want it both ways.

And the second thing is

the left always does this.

This is kind of a platitude now.

Ronald Reagan is Satan when he leaves.

why couldn't,

Jesus, why couldn't George H.W.

Bush be the nice guy?

Why did he have to unleash Lee Outwater on us?

And then Bush is gone and then there's W.

And then they say, you know, why isn't W bipartisan like his dad?

He was an aristocratic, fair King Marcus of Queensbury guy.

W has got this Texas twang.

He's a Iraq war criminal.

And then.

W's out and all of a sudden people say of Trump, you know, W's a painter.

He hasn't criticized Obama.

He's a moderate.

He won't vote just on party.

He was a really good president for a Republican.

Why doesn't?

And that's how they do that.

And that puts an enormous temptation, apparently, on a lot of these people who say to themselves,

I will be nicely treated in the New York Times.

The Georgetown Party Circuit will indict me.

I'll have a reputation

among historians as

a

bridger rather than a divider, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

I guess that makes a lot of temptation.

That is the good interpretation.

The bad interpretation, of course, is

I cooked my goose.

I Liz Cheney.

I Mitt Romney.

I Jeff Flake.

I the Lincoln Project.

I thought that I was writing a crest of anti-Trump revulsion.

And what I didn't realize is that this movement that I have ridiculed is beyond and transcends Donald Trump.

And that most Americans, and I think almost all conservatives, really do want to get tough on China in a way that we never thought we should, if you were Mitt Romney.

And most Americans don't want to write off the Middle West.

Most Americans don't think that 48% will never be reachable because they're on the dole.

Most Americans want a closed border.

Most Americans feel like an optional military engagement in the Middle East is questionable in a cost-benefit analysis, especially when you're energy independent and there is a natural alliance between Israel and the Arabs vis-a-vis Iran.

So Romney keeps saying it's Trump, Trump, Trump, and I am his moral superior.

But what he's really saying is

I offended a lot of people and for all my virtue, I bet on the wrong horse and I'm kind of embittered now.

And now, the left's going to honor me because they consider me a useful idiot.

And that's true, not just of Romney, I'm not trying to single out, it's true of most of the never-Trumpers.

They're very angry, bitter people.

And

in deference to them, I will give them credit that in the last 2020 election,

they were as relevant as they were irrelevant in 2016.

By that, I mean, even though Donald Trump got a greater percentage of the Republican vote and a greater popular vote, that election in the Electoral College was decided by about 45,000 votes.

And from what we learn,

the deplorables did their part.

Everybody turned out in waves as they had in 2016.

But your suburban...

voter, your independent voter, your Republican moderate voter in the suburbs, they turned on Trump with a vengeance for a variety of reasons, you know, his personal comportment, his tweets, whatever.

But they were influenced by my former colleagues at the National Review or Mitt Romney or the Lincoln Project.

I think they felt that these people were the voice of sanity.

And although they had very small numbers, 45,000 is a small number, but in 2020, it was a very big number.

Right.

Well, and add to that the folks who were afraid to see their cities burn as a perverse way of voting.

Yeah, clearly the

difference.

Victor, we have a few minutes, just a few minutes left.

So here's the other dot for Mitt Romney.

Today, the Senate voted, a majority voted, but not enough.

60 votes were needed.

54 votes came in for the January 6th Commission.

So that commission will not happen.

There were seven, six Republican votes, Romney being one of them,

Murkowski, Ben Sasse, Rob Portman of Ohio, Cassidy of Louisiana, and Sue Collins of Maine.

Victor, any last-minute thought here on

this commission?

And

I expect its demise, although maybe they'll find some way to try and revive it.

I think there was a lot of Democrats that were relieved.

I really do.

And I think when they looked at what they would see under cross-examination, somebody would play a video of all the people who said officer sicknick was murdered all the senators

and representatives and then they would learn that he was not murdered and died of natural causes they would hear of all the the charges of armed insurrection and then they would learn that nobody owned nobody in the capitol possessed much less used an arm they would hear all of the charges of a conspiracy and then they would look at the charges formally filed so far about all these people that are some of them in solitary confinement.

There's not one charge of treason or sedition or conspiracy.

And then they would

learn of all of the deaths, and you could play all five deaths, and they would learn that four of them were Trump supporters.

And Officer Sicknick died of natural causes, but more importantly, one of them, the only other one that died.

The only one probably that died what we would call person-to-person violently was Ashley Babbitt, who was unarmed, probably committing a felony.

She ended the Capitol.

maybe, maybe not, but she didn't get the benefit of the doubt.

She was shot unarmed.

And we know from May 29th onward of 2020, if you're a policeman and you shoot somebody in a confrontation who turns out to be unarmed, and then it's about three seconds and your pictures on the evening news, your race is bannered about,

your age, your sex, your doxed, your family goes into hiding and seclusion.

And we don't know any of that.

So I don't think they all wanted that to come out like that because

there were Republicans who were saying, you know, when we take the house, I think they will take the house.

We want investigations of why there's these no-go zones in Minneapolis and Portland, Seattle that nobody can go into and that, you know, business owners and...

homeowners have had terrible losses and physical losses that people have been ill and can't get ambulance or police protection because of these takeovers, these sanctuary inner cities

that criminals have taken over.

So there was a lot of exposure on the left and I think that they're not going to cry too loudly about it.

Victor, that's about all the time we have.

Although we take a little minute here,

would you like to share with the listeners who are listening to the, now it's called the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

We're in a new platform and I was hoping to assume a permanent platform.

Anything you'd like to share about that?

Yes, I've had a lot of emails and some texts from people, and I want to apologize because what happened was that I had done a podcast, The Classicist,

for about six years, and it was part of my Hoover Institution duties.

And it appeared maybe once every three weeks.

I enjoyed it.

It was with Troy Sinek, a wonderful host, and it was produced by Scott Immerga.

And what happened is increasingly

there there were demands that it come out more frequently and more importantly, that the content had to be reviewed.

And I found that that would limit the free expression and the versatility.

So I took that off of the official Hoover platform and then put it in a private platform.

And that's been fluid because it's taken a while.

uh to find a new platform and i think we can say that within about a week that will be available on apps again and it will be widely uh publicized and with links but it's taken it's taken a while and the same applies to our podcast jack i was affiliated with the national review for 20 years since september 11th 2001 and in the final two years jack and i did a podcast, sometimes weekly, sometimes bi-weekly, but that when I left National Review, then that podcast, there were some contractual obligations, and that podcast could not get off that platform and follow me in a private manner.

And that now has.

So now we have the old classicist and the old National Review, and they're both owned by me and they're independent.

And so, what we're going to do is call them the Victor Hansen Podcast Show or the Victor Hansen Show Dash.

One will be the classicist

one will be the traditionalist.

The classicists will have more

historical, cultural, social issues, many of them from the website.

The traditional will be more as we're doing the reactions to the local news.

And we hope to have a third one, I hope, soon.

But we'll talk about that later.

I don't want to promise anything we can't deliver.

But I really appreciate all of you who put up with this dislocation.

You know, in three weeks, it was just, you could go,

I should say, three weeks, four weeks ago, you could go the classes, you knew where it was and how to get it.

And then until January, the same with the NROO, and we're in this long period of adjustment.

It's very hard to get a new podcast with Apple apps and things like that, or at least harder than I imagine.

Wow.

I'm glad we're someplace, Victor, and I'm sure it's going to prove a successful, despite the co-host.

So, Victor, thanks.

We're going to remember Memorial Day.

I hope you have, because you'll be listening to this afterwards.

But I hope folks will have spent the day remembering those who paid the ultimate sacrifice for our freedoms.

Thanks, Victor.

And we'll be back later this week with

another episode of the new Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Thanks.

Thank you.