The Cultural Impact of Charlie Kirk’s Assassination

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

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So we'd love to have everybody.

And we are,

this is our Friday news roundup, so we're going to be looking at all the news stories.

And of course, Charlie Kirk's assassination has topped the news this week as well.

So we'll start with him.

So stay with us and we'll be right back.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

So, Victor, there's lots of effort out there.

Charlie Kirk's death has had a huge cultural impact, not just in the United States, but world around.

And we've got lots of narratives from the West that that are trying to explain away his murder.

And I was wondering if you could talk about that a little.

Well, there were a lot of

factors that made him iconic and his death iconic.

And let me just name some of them.

It happened roughly a week after a video was released where Ukrainian immigrant Irania Tsarutska

was brutally murdered on a car to the indifference of everybody around by a career 14-time

felon who had been let out.

And that was a DEI train wreck, whether it was the mayor's insensitive remarks or the DEI judge who did not have, had not passed the bar, I could go on.

So

people were kind of seeing that.

and all the attacks on the ICE.

And there was another murder in Auburn University near there.

There was one in Queens where innocent people had been brutally killed, allegedly, by career criminals that had been let out.

And then he was on a campus, and he was not giving a fiery lecture.

He was trying to engage with people.

And he was

talking to a trans person the moment a pro-trans shooter who was engaged in a relationship with a trans person shot him and murdered him.

I said on UU at that day, I said, mark my words, by tonight, people are going to, and tomorrow are going to be ghoulish, and they were.

And then he was trying to engage people.

So

at that point, people realized that, was there anybody under 40

in either party, either persuasion, liberal or conservative, that had that much influence?

They just took it for granted that he was the person, and he was.

He probably won Donald Trump the election by increasing the 19 to 40 year old vote from 2020 by six points.

But in the swing states, he almost won, I mean, 49, 49 young people in Michigan.

He won Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania because of his voting registration.

So he was a very, very important, and he flew all over the world.

He was in Tokyo before he died.

He was at the Oxford Debating Society not long ago.

He was fearless.

So they took out somebody in a political assassination.

And then they compounded it, they being the forces of the left.

And then they compounded it with all of these

two things they did afterwards.

They spoke ill of the dead, which was a civilizational taboo, and they made fun of it.

And we had that African-American young student at Texas Tech where she started doing a song about killing him.

And then another African-American young guy

bent over like he was making fun of the way he'd been shot.

Then we had a lot of trans people going on, and then we had major actors and

military officers, everybody started to weigh in that he was an evil person and it was good that he died.

And so at that point, I think a lot of people said

half the country

said, I'm done with these people.

I'm done with elite education.

I'm done with Hollywood.

I'm done with the left.

I'm not going to put up with it anymore.

It's always, they always weaponize everything.

They run the institution.

I'm done with them.

And they started to make their voices heard.

And then independents, who had really never dealt with their quasi-allies on the left, started to look at the left.

And they said, oh my God, these people are soulless, heartless people.

Whatever you think of them, they're rejoicing in his death.

And then

the narrative started.

There's a lot of them.

So somewhere in La La Land of the left, there's a command central bunker.

And somebody does the day's talking points, right?

The narrative.

And

the politically correct version.

And then they issue it out to everybody.

DNC, ABC, CBS, NPR, PBS, MSNBC, CNN, Washington Post, New York Times, they all get it in PR.

So the first narrative.

Well, we don't know who did it.

There's no evidence that anybody did it.

Well, there was a lot of evidence.

The DA had already started to enunciate and outline all of the gist of the text messages.

They were quoting the parent.

One of the parents said he'd made a sharp move to the left.

They had this thing where he was quoted saying he hated Charlie Kirk.

Well, that collapsed.

as the evidence came out.

He said, you know, I'm planning to do this.

And Friday,

September 10th, was mentioned in his chat group coming up that they were going to get somebody.

So that collapsed.

And then it was, well, he's crazy.

He's just deranged.

Well, he may have been deranged, but

he had the potential to be an honor student.

He was in college for a semester.

And

he

wrote on the casings trans messages and anti-fascist, I mean by that, Antifa messages, and then cruel messages.

So he was premeditated.

And the roommate, for all of his puritanical, well, I'm in shock and he's cooperating.

Well, he wasn't quite, because from the moment the shot was fired, very soon afterwards, he learned it.

And in that textual correspondence, it was clear that he saw or knew that

Tyler Robinson was engraving bullets, and he didn't come forward.

We're going to find out a lot that the noble trans partner was not so noble.

But in any case, that second narrative that he was crazy collapsed.

Then there was the third one.

The gun did it.

It's the gun.

It just walked onto campus and shot him.

We have to outlaw all guns.

That was the AOC squad, but Jasmine Crockett.

Every time she

opines, she reveals a new element of her ignorance.

I had no idea how ignorant she is.

First thing she said was it was an assault weapon.

No, you know what an assault weapon is?

It's an automatic firing rifle where you put your finger on the trigger and you don't let up.

And it fires at a rate of anywhere from 200 to 500 bullets

a minute, depending on the type of

the type of gun and how big the magazine is.

But semi-automatic, you have to let up.

This was a hunting rifle.

Right up in my upstairs, I have one.

It's a spring field, but it's basically a 30-out 6 bold action, but without the scope.

So then she said, it was a 150-yard shot.

It was only MAGA people could do that because they're good.

Jasmine, anybody can take the 30-yard 6 as I have and with a peep sight, no scope, he had a scope.

go lay down in a prone position shooting downhill and you can shoot pretty easily a bottle at 150 yards.

It's not hard to do.

It doesn't fall that much.

It's not affected by the wind.

So that was crazy.

And then

you ask yourself, Jasmine,

what percent of murders are committed by rifles?

It's about 3%.

If you're really worried about gun violence, you would go to the inner city and you would insist that they enforce existing gun laws.

And then they would have stop and frisk.

And when they find a young person who has been a career felon and he has a 38 on his person that's not registered, you'd put him in jail for five years.

But of course, you would say that was racist.

There are 500,000, excuse me, sorry,

500 million guns in the United States.

500 million.

How does ANOC and Jasmine Crockett think they can get around the Second Amendment and round up 500 million guns?

But remember, 3%.

So the gun thing died.

So then the left said, well, he's not crazy.

And

we can't say there was no motive.

And then we have the next thing is the gun didn't do it.

I mean,

it's a hunting rifle.

How can you ban a hunting rifle?

So then they said, ah, I know what it was.

MAGA did it.

MAGA did it.

We heard about four versions of this.

It's a white supremacist gang hit.

Remember that?

Somebody said that.

Oh, it's a MAGA inner war.

And then, is it Jimmy Fallon?

No, it's.

What's it?

Jimmy Kimmel.

Sorry, Jimmy Fallon.

Take that back.

Jimmy Kimmel said,

just, I thought his Pinocchio nose was going to go out of the TV.

He just said, wow, this was a MAGA, and these MAGA people are trying to hide it.

And so then you thought, I thought to myself, how long is that little narrative going to last?

Narrative number four.

And

it lasted about five hours.

Because then the mother said we were worried about him.

He was going to the left.

And they said he'd come to a dinner.

And he hated Charlie Kirk.

And he hated his politics.

And then he was on a kind of trans furry, I guess that's the word, chat list, where they all hate everybody

that's a normie.

And then we looked at the messaging on the casing.

And it was clear that this was a left-wing person, just like Luigi Mangioni, and just like James Hodgkinson, who tried to kill Steve Scalise.

And he acted because A, he hated right-wing

conservative politics.

B, Charlie Kirk is very successful, and he made a big difference, and people listened to him, and he was growing more.

He was probably the most powerful man under 40 in the United States, as far as influence.

Yes.

And then three, he didn't think he was going to get caught.

He said to his trans boyfriend, girlfriend, excuse me, whatever, he said, when I'm an old man, no, you're not going to live to be an old man.

I'm sorry, but he thought he was.

And then he outlined all the things he did.

He was an amateur, but my gun's out there.

Very heartless.

He said that, dad's going to be mad that I lost grandpa's gun.

No, dad's going to be mad because you're a cold-blooded, stone-cold murderer.

So that idea that Trump did it, excuse me, MAGA did it, narrative number four, died.

There was so much.

And then they had

narrative number five.

Barack Obama flew out from

Colorama, Martha Svenier and Hollywood in his jet, jet, and he said, well, you know,

I deport all violence,

all violence.

But Trump did it.

It's rhetoric.

Barack, you weaponized the FBI and CIA.

You tried to destroy Donald Trump in a political election of 2016 to get Hillary elected.

Then when that failed, you tried to destroy his transition by weaponizing James Comey, Brennan, Clapper to fraudulently produce a false CIA estimate that he was a Russian asset.

And then you just tried to destroy the first years of his presidency.

And you almost did.

But I remember you, Brock.

I remember you.

You, when you were campaigning, was it Philadelphia that he went in and he said, get in their face.

Got to get in their face.

And then he said,

He quoted David Mammet and stole his line from the untouchables.

They have a gun, don't take a knife to a gun, take a gun to a knife fight.

What would that mean, Barack?

You use a gun to shoot somebody?

And then he called his, we never really had that much racial polarization in this country until he came.

And then he said his grandmother, who had raised him and had funded his education, why his not I think his destitute father, I shouldn't say that, wasn't very destitute.

He got a lot of grants and money, but this disgraceful father of his, I think he finally killed himself in an alcoholic car wreck, but he kind of dreamed about him, dreams of my father.

But then he said his grandmother was a typical white person.

Then he said the police always pull over black.

Remember the beer summit?

So then

the Trump did it didn't work.

It didn't work also because

Joe Biden, remember everybody, had called Trump supporters semi-fascist,

chumps, the dregs, and his favorite word garbage.

And then Joe Biden had said, I like to take Trump behind the gym when I was younger and beat him up.

Beat the hell out.

He said that twice, by the way.

And then three,

Joe Biden said, it's time we put a bullseye on Donald Trump, bullseye.

And then he said, we're going to lock him up.

So,

Barack, I think the, let's attack somebody, try to jail him, ruin him, get him off the ballot, put him under 93 indictments by, coordinated by the DOJ, local, state, and federal, threaten his person, threaten to beat him up,

you yourself talking about getting in people's faces, just stop it.

And Joe Biden was this.

And so then we're down to

narrative number six.

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So, Victor, you were continuing on on your narratives.

Your last one is?

Well, we have covered, we don't know who did it.

We've covered

he was crazy.

We have covered the MAGA people did it.

We've covered the gun did it.

We've done Trump did it.

Now we're into narrative six.

Narrative six was, it was an Ali McGraw-Ryan O'Neill love story.

And that came from this guy named Gunman.

He was an ABC

reporter.

And he said, I've been reading these texts and

they're so lovely.

And he said, my love, my love to his trans boyfriend, girlfriend.

And

he actually had to misquote them.

He added things that were not in the text.

Oh, this was that ABC correspondent, Matt Goodman.

Matt Goodman.

Yes.

So he made a complete fool of himself because he was saying that this creepy, horrible, satanic murder that blew apart Charlie Kirk.

We had to admire him because there was an other side in his relation

to his boyfriend, girlfriend, and he, in a text, but Mr.

Gutmann, you didn't read all the text.

He was telling them, I left my rifle out there, I engraved this.

It was full of hatred and planning to kill somebody.

But you said, because he said my love, as if he was some kind of Andrew Marvel poet, courtly love, you know,

I don't know, Christopher Smart, English Elizabethan poet.

That's a good idea, isn't it?

It's Tyler Robinson, the new Elizabethan poet, writing love letters.

So that was picked up by Montel Williams.

That was one of the most obscene narratives.

So then they went through narrative six.

And then

they couldn't pin it on Trump or MAGA or craziness or guns or

that he was just emotional.

It had nothing to do with politics.

He was just so much in love.

He killed Charlie Kirk for his lover.

And then they kind of just went honest.

They just said,

and that's where we are now, narrative seven, is,

yeah, I don't believe that you should.

Ah, I'm a leftist, I'm a socialist, I'm an Antifa, I'm a professor, I'm a renegade military officer, I'm a doctor, I'm a teacher, I'm an internet influencer, I'm in my basement watching the internet all day and doing nothing else.

I don't like killing people.

I don't like rejoice.

However,

I hated everything he stood for.

And

this is the key.

There's irony here.

It's kind of ironic.

I'm not saying anything.

It's kind of ironic that he was a big Second Amendment person.

And guess what?

He got killed by a gun.

And that was the nice sanitized version of Narrative 7.

The worst one was

what comes around goes around.

Karma's a BITC 8.

And so that's where they are now.

They're defiant.

And they're saying, you know what?

I don't approve of killing, but you know what?

It's kind of like the Brian Thompson CEO.

I don't like what Luigi Mangione did.

But that guy deserved it.

And that's pretty much where the left is right today.

Because when they asked for a moment of prayer in Congress, they had nothing to do with it.

And now they're getting defiant.

Congressman, the black squad, people like that are saying, I don't have to apologize.

I didn't like the guy.

And we're not going to commemorate him.

And so.

There's a couple of things I wanted to ask you about.

So the Utah police

in, I think it was in Otin or Olin, or the name of the city.

Anyways, the Utah police said that they wanted, they were happy they allowed for him to have a gentle surrender.

I never understood that.

I'm I'm sorry, I never understood.

This man was a premeditated murderer.

And he shot that, and it took, what, two and a half days to find him.

And it was pretty clear, if you read all of the text between him and his partner and the chat list, and the FBI hasn't released them all, that that partner knew.

either before or right after that he was the killer.

And he didn't, the partner did not contact the the FBI.

They contacted him.

And they said, oh, he's so helpful.

No, he wasn't.

If he was helpful, he would have said, oh my God, that guy looks like my boyfriend.

I'm going to call the FBI right now.

He didn't do it.

And then the parent,

I'm conflicted because,

you know, I'm a parent and you have to watch your children and everything.

But I don't get this, that when they immediately identified him,

they should have that second called the FBI.

There was a few hours where they didn't, you know, how do we handle this?

And then there was a law enforcement person on TV kind of bragging how we facilitated this because he was afraid he was going to be shot.

They don't extend that to other people.

If you're a murderer and you're on the lamb, they don't call your parents or your family and say, we're going to be very careful.

We don't want to

go into the neighborhoods.

I was bothered by that.

I wish they had have taken 50 SWAT teams, surrounded the house, and then given a bullhorn and said, You've got five seconds to get out.

And I guess they were afraid he might hurt himself or hurt his family, but I don't think there was much chance of that.

He said he wanted to live to old age.

Yeah.

There's one more thing because all of those people who were not on the left and celebrating, etc., there were a lot of people who were both citing the problem that was present with his situation.

Well, that was enough.

I have, but there was a

narrative

before.

I said there were seven narratives.

There's eight.

That was narrative eight.

There was a good Federalist article by Brianna Lyman, a YMAN, and she wrote,

this book citing the argument is crazy and that they, the long and the short of it is he's a murderer,

and there's a lot of other crimes by the left, and the government, the powers that be really need to go after those who have been financing.

Senator Eric Schmidt, Eric Schmidt, who's been on our program, is a really smart guy.

He just, in the Inquisition, that's what it was, of Cache Patel, he just started, remember he just read them off.

He read off the Scaleez trying to take out the Republicans.

He talked about the two Trump shootings.

He mentioned the ones that they tried to claim, like Josh Shapiro's attack, where the guy was a radical Palestinian supporter.

Then they said, well, there's the Minnesota killings.

Well, yeah, that guy was crazy, but he seemed to have some kind of relationship with Tim Waltz, who put him on a committee, right?

He wasn't a die-hard right-winger MAGA.

And then there were the people killed at the Jewish Museum in Washington that were killed by a fanatic

Palestinian who yelled out, you know, free Palestine after he riddled them with bullets.

We had the attack, remember, on Rand Paul, where

we had two of those attacks.

A crazy leftist at his neighbor broke his ribs, and then he was coming out of the White House, remember, and they tried to swarm him and his wife, not to mention the five months of Antifa rioting.

So he went through the whole thing, and we all know that that's what the left does.

And the left does it for two reasons.

One,

under their post-George Floyd, but even before that, they had pushed through the Sorrels Revolving Door prosecutor.

They had said that incarceration was racist.

They had decriminalized theft at $950 and below.

It was free, basically.

Defund the police, DEI mandates.

And so they really do believe that there are no consequences.

So if you shoot somebody, you're a young, impressionable kid, and you look around and you look at Luigi Mangioni, they just dropped a terrorist charge against him.

I mean, he'll probably be convicted, but I'm not even sure of that given a jury.

And then they look at de Carlos Brown, who killed Irina, and

14 times he had been convicted of a felon.

And they look at George Floyd.

George Floyd had committed eight crimes.

and was out.

So what they're saying is that A,

I might not be, I might, and then they're thinking, I might not be swiftly punished or severely punished under our current prosecutorial system.

And then they're thinking, I'll be in the pantheon of heroes.

That's what Luigi Mangioni is.

Look at him right now.

They have an opera after him.

They're going to have a ballot proposition.

They want a name after him.

Remember Mr.

Sarnoff?

He got his picture on Rolling Stone magazine.

They said

how handsome he was.

Remember Taylor Lorenz, that disgraced

Washington Post reporter, did a thing with Mangioni where she said he was so charismatic and good-looking.

I think somebody on the internet or one of the cables said, I don't think that

Robinson will quite be as effective as a popular icon.

He's not quite good-looking as Mangioni.

But they look at these people on the left that take violence, and sure enough, there's already people congratulating.

So he thought that.

He thought, you know what?

I'm going to live to an old age.

I'm going to be really famous.

I'm going to take out the evil transphobe Charlie Kirk, and then I either will get away with it because I'm so smart and I know every little wrinkle of video games, and I'm going to put the gun down my leg or hide it, and then I'm going to have my re-escape, and all you trans,

my trans chat thing people will protect me, and I'll get away with it.

That's what he thought.

And that's why he did it.

He did it because he wanted to be a famous leftist icon, and he thought he would not pay the price for killing Charlie Kirk.

And he thought people would cheer him on.

Of those three premises, two are absurd.

He will be punished.

And

I'm not sure that people publicly will make him an icon.

But

he's right about the third, that there'll be a lot of people who sympathize and already have with him.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit more about the media in this assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Victor is on X.

His handle is at BD Hansen and on Facebook at Hansen's Morning Cup.

And there's also the Victor Davis-Hansen Fan Club on Facebook, which we don't have any affiliation with, but they have lots of great stuff that they bring out in their posts,

old as well as new interviews and talks that Victor has given.

So I wanted to ask you, because there's been some fallout from things in people in the media have said.

So a Karen Attia has been fired from the Washington Post.

She made up a quote by Charlie.

She completely fabricated it, took it out of constext, and then doctored it to say that he was attacking all black women.

And they had told people at the Washington Post we're not going to have racial stereotyping.

She'd said white men

in a derogatory, typically derogatory way.

Yeah, and then also even

Jimmy Kimmel.

And his actually, I think, goes a little bit further than just his firing for a quote where he made up that it was a MAGA gang that was desperately trying to.

He was just deliberately at a time of

get a lot of people who were able to do it

on national T V and deliberately lied and created a false narrative.

And then he kind of you know he I remember when Tucker Carlson got let go at Fox.

He gloated.

He said he was horrible and

there's a I think everybody has to

understand,

I don't believe necessarily I believe there is such a thing called hate speech in the sense that you use words to

express virulent, violent hatred, but I don't believe it exists as a legal term because I think under the First Amendment you can be on your lawn and you can say anything you want and they can't arrest you.

You can say horrible things on your lawn.

But

there is hate speech with your employer.

whether it's private or public.

In other words, that is a privilege that you have, and the employer says things like, you can't come naked to work.

You just can't do it.

I'm sorry.

And if you dye your hair with chartreuse

and

you start screaming and yelling or going, we're not going to hire you.

And they can have a speech code and they can say, we do not want you either in the workplace

or in your private sphere

saying

things that bring disrepute by your association with with us.

So, I work at the Hoover Institution and I'm a tenured Stanford person.

I can guarantee you that if I said certain things on my private podcast, I would be fired.

And I should be fired if I said some very inflammatory or obscene things.

You know what I'm saying?

Yeah, sure.

It's in everybody's contract.

It's everybody's contract.

So Jimmy Fallon's contract says, don't try to inflame the public by lying.

Miss Attia says if you're a columnist you have to follow general rules of citation.

Don't make up quotes.

Don't stereotype whole people and denigrate them as white people or white men.

And that's why all these people are being canceled because their private contracts, whether it's Disney or Paramount, they're saying, you know what?

I have no problem with you.

Just go out and, you know, Joy Reed, You've been saying, white man, now, white men, why, why, why, why, why, why?

Just go on your podcast.

And then you can hate all you want.

She does.

She's even worse.

And she says things that are hateful, and she has no audience.

But that's

your privilege.

The other area is irony.

And that is during the Me Too, they canceled everybody.

Mark Halburn, they canceled.

Remember they said he was a sexual horror.

They canceled,

gosh,

every actor, every main person who said anything.

They went after,

remember Roseanne Barr?

Obama called up,

I think he called up the network and said, get her out of here.

So they did that all the time.

And at the time,

I thought, well,

you work for them.

If they want to be left-wing and have a left-wing brand, then go start your right-wing thing.

I think I had been canceled at Stanford.

I was brought before the faculty senate and they said, you can't, you were on Tucker Carlson's show after January 6th and he is an election denialist and you didn't deny him I said can you please I went through the transcripts I think I went through 40 days of appearances to see if there was one shred on Tucker Laura

Lou Dobbs, anybody where I said that the machines and I didn't but when I came back I thought well there is no free speech at Stanford but I work for them, right?

So if they don't want me and they want to make and say that I was an insurrectionist and they can prove it, they can't just make it up, which they did.

And they tried to fire Scott Atlas and they censored him.

They still haven't listed that censorship.

And I guess Scott's sin was he said, I don't think there's any scientific support for the six-foot social distancing, and I don't think that masks are really of much use except in an intimate closed enclosure.

And I'm not sure that the vaccines, which I urge everybody to get, will prevent you eventually from being infected or infectious as

any better than natural immunity.

That's what he said.

And Fauci said, when asked about that,

there was no support.

for social distancing.

We just made it up.

And I've said we should wear one mask, no mask.

He first said no mask, then one mask, then two masks.

So they went after Neil Ferguson, the historian, too.

So I understand that.

If you work for somebody, but they have to prove what their own standard is.

They just can't say, you can't be an election denialist at Stanford.

We don't want to hire election denialists.

But then you have to say, well, you were an election denialist.

But they don't.

They just throw it out there.

And then, of course, they allow you to do all sorts of other stuff.

like scream and yell at a federal judge Duncan and say you hope his daughter is raped if you're a trans law student and disrupt it.

And none of those students were suspended.

None.

So they have a, I think they have a

speech code that says, From time to time, we're going to accuse you without any evidence of being an election denialist.

And if we can't find any evidence, we're just going to make it hard on you.

But if you want to go call a federal judge names and disrupt him and physically bar him from coming to campus, it's okay.

That's pretty much.

Or you want to go tear down posters that Jewish kids put up commemorating the October 7th murder, that's okay.

You want to go out and camp out in the free speech area for more than 24 hours, like four months?

That's okay.

So, academia is a different, it's a special case.

They have zero credibility.

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So the Victor, to return to the people that have fallen out from this, there was a young woman on ABC this week who gave a tribute to Charlie Kirk at the end of her

show on ABC.

And she was really impacted by Charlie Kirk, which is why she gave the tribute.

And then she was

taken off ABC.

I'm not sure if she was fired at her show.

Oh, actually, take it back.

She was fired as an anchor on ABC.

I hadn't heard that story, but I think the network, two things happening with the networks, Disney,

remember the young actress that was in that Mandalorian, that Star Trek, they fired her.

She's back.

I think all of these networks are saying,

we're not Cronkite.

We're not John.

We have no audience.

And Fox, on some nights that you have to pay for it, can get up to 80% of our audience.

So they're kind of recalibrating and they're thinking, why did we do this?

Just appeal to this shrinking little audience.

And then I can see MSNBC, that's a plaything of Microsoft and NBC.

They're just basically saying, get every nut we can get and put them on there.

And then they've got a loyal, crazy thing, and they really aggravate the right and they influence people, but nobody watches it.

But I think what's happened now is what the left calls the oligarchic class,

they

met with the Biden people.

Remember, Mark Zuckerberg said in that testimony

in Congress, but also to Joe Rogan.

He said, those people called us up and they screamed and yelled at us to

suppress the laptop story.

And then they got them all together about artificial intelligence and they were thinking about you, you, not you.

Then they were the dumping ground.

They thought,

you're going to take this press secretary when she

retires.

This is the home pad, James Baker from the FBI.

He gets to go here to be Twitter.

So they were using these people.

And then finally, people like David Sachs and Mark Andreessen, I guess to a lesser extent, Bezos,

Shirley, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, they kind of said, wow,

these people are real socialists.

And they're going to kill us.

And they're sending these people that we don't trust into our own companies.

And they're causing terrible problems.

They're insubordinate.

They go to HR.

And as much as we don't like Donald Trump, he's going to defend us.

He's a nationalist, a populist, nationalist capitalist.

So he's going to defend us from the European Union that wants to expropriate our companies or censor our products, or the Chinese who steal from us.

So let's throw our ring in with Trump, even though we don't like him when we tried to destroy him.

In the case of Mark Zuckerberg, he gave $419 million in 2020 to destroy Trump's campaign.

But now, and that is filtering down.

So Meta Facebook is not censored like it was.

And then the Washington Post is in this,

I don't know what you would call it, metamorphosis.

Jimmy, it's really weird about Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel.

You look at their faces and they're like, I am a leftist icon.

People love me when I go to the airport.

I am famous.

And then

a little reality bite says, yes,

among a small slice of America.

Most people don't know who you are, but more importantly, you lose us $40 million a year.

We don't go to your house and take $40 million from you.

And I don't know how much Kimmel, but more than Colbert, because Colbert had a higher rating.

So they're trying to say

we're just not going to pay to have you insult everybody and turn off 90% of America.

So I think you're going to get a lot of firings.

And then the left's going to say this is a violation of free speech.

And then the right is just going to cite all the times where they gloated about cancel culture.

There was a great New York Post article that was talking about Jimmy Kimmel, but they were talking about, and this is what I was thinking from the beginning, like I don't think they fired Kimmel at ABC

because he said it was a MA guy

at some point in this investigation.

I think they're losing money.

And this article went all the way into all the affiliates of ABC, that these affiliates

that guy online.

Yeah.

I'm sure they are losing money.

If you're in Fresno or you're in Dayton, Ohio, and all of a sudden he comes on and

you're in a red area, maybe you're in a red area and they see that guy, they just turn it off or go to bed or switch the channel.

And they just said, we don't want this product anymore.

They don't have to buy it.

The article also said that the new chair of the FCC, because these are all FCCC.

He's a very good guy, Brandon Carr.

He's putting a lot of pressure on them as well.

So they're feeling the financial pressure and they're feeling the pressure from the FCC to do things in the police.

What's really funny is that the left is now,

all these people are saying cancel culture and then they get hit.

They went out and tried to destroy Molly and Hemi, the Federalists.

They went out and tried, they destroyed Roseanne Barr.

Garrison Keiller, remember him?

He was deplatformed, cancelled.

They went after all those Mark Hauptburn, everybody.

And yet they were riding high and they thought they were Jacobins and they had the guillotine out and there was never going to be a Thermidor reaction.

It was so funny.

It's just like the French Revolution that

Robespierre goes into the chambers and then one day he starts the mouth off and everybody starts to boo him and say,

How about you?

Indict him.

And then they arrest him and then the Thermidors go into his little Wolpespierre safe house, and he tries to blow, well, he blows off his jaw by mistake.

No, they arrested him and put him in the

patty wagon with a gun with one shot in it.

And he only blew off part of his jaws.

And they had him, they just guillotined him the way he did everybody else.

And it was so, and that was it.

And then all of a sudden, the Thermidor reaction and

some of the reforms stayed around under Napoleon, but eventually they got Napoleon.

And they did it in the way that he was executing justice, which was no justice at all.

And that was to give him a trial one day, to convict him the next, and to guillotine him.

The Robespierre, Robespierre.

And that's what's happening right now.

They're canceling culture, they cancel culture.

But only they're not weaponizing.

They're not weaponizing.

FBI, Cash Patel, answered all the things.

He's not weaponizing the FBI.

All right, Victor, so let's turn to

another news story this week, and that was on Arctic Frost, which was an operation by the FBI, and they were investigating Trump.

But it ends up that they expanded their powers to investigating 92 conservative institutions, including Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk.

He said that before he died.

I think he asked a couple of senators.

He said, I think I'm being investigated.

I think Josh Hawley said that.

Help me.

I'm being an investigator.

I know I am.

And so

I don't think anybody

yet

has any idea how

dangerous, awful the Biden administration was.

Because it was basically a waxen effigy,

a prop, put up by Jill Biden and Hunter, and then the Obama radicals who had never quite been able to have their radical agenda under Obama because he wanted to get re-elected and he wanted to be famous, but they didn't care about Biden.

They didn't care if their agenda ruined the country or disgraced Biden because he didn't know where he was.

So they used that effigy, and then they destroyed the border.

They imported 12 million people here illegally.

They destroyed the legal system with the post-George Floyd attorneys.

They tried to destroy fossil fuels.

They ran up $7

trillion

in budget deficits.

And basically their attitude was,

okay,

how long is it going to take you to fix this?

Because we're out of here.

But we did so much damage that you people are going to spend a generation.

And then they started protesting the correction.

So, well, it was moral to break the law and let in 10 to 12 million people, but it's amoral for you to send them home.

So we're going to try to stop you.

And that's what they're doing now.

Well, there was also this week a call, a sorry,

cops that were called to York County, Pennsylvania.

Three of them were killed, and

it was a domestic violence.

We don't know who did it yet, do we?

I don't think we know.

It's kind of strange that

48 hours that we're speaking after that happened, that no one wants to identify.

If I was a cynic and I'm not,

I would say that any time the press or their agencies do not identify a shooter, a lethal shooter, then that person is one of a protected category.

And you can fill in the blanks what that means.

But I may be wrong.

Okay, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break, our last last break, and then come back and talk a little bit about Trump's cases against various people.

But this time it's a case against the New York Times.

Stay with us, and we'll be right back.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hampson Center.

You can find Victor on YouTube, or these podcasts on YouTube, and on Rumble, and on Spotify.

And we'd like everybody to join us there if you like the video version.

So Victor Trump has various cases actually against different entities.

And in this case, they lied, smeared, and defamed Donald Trump.

And he's brought a case against the New York Times for that.

The amount being asked is $15 billion, I believe, which is extraordinary.

But there's cases that have succeeded.

Oh, he made Stephanopoulos

pay for lying that he had been, I think 11 times times on the air,

Stephanopoulos said that Trump had been convicted of rape, which he never had been.

And he was told, I think, on the air, not by one of his guests, that was not true.

They got 60 minutes for issuing a campaign

time.

campaign cycle interview with Camilla Harris in which they heavily censored it to present to the public something that did not occur.

She gave this word-solid interview, and they carefully selected it, and they hyped it, and everybody, right during the campaign, thought she was Cicero.

So, and they had to settle.

And so, I'm not sure.

Well, the New York Times doesn't have $15 billion.

So, we'll see

what they did.

I think it has,

he's also suing the Wall Street Journal for the Epstein.

That was the birthday birthday letter where she, Giselle Maxwell, had the collection of birthday greetings and they were supposed to be risque drawings from Bill Clinton,

you know, little notes to Jeffrey on his birthday.

And there's the one that Trump had, Trump has some that looks kind of embarrassing, but it's typed out and it doesn't seem to be it.

I would be the first one to say if it is Trump if it was all capitals or it was weird syntax, but it doesn't, it seemed like either somebody wrote it for him or just somebody forged it.

But if that, we'll see, the Wall Street Journal's standing behind it.

But, uh, and they're going to reverse, they did reverse the $500 million Letita James settlement.

That's in,

that's still to be adjudicated.

I think the Eugene Carroll is going to be reversed.

That's the worst of all of them.

That case was just completely bogus.

Another topic this week, or some interesting stuff I came across, were polls.

And this was from youv.com, and they were taking polls on the latest violence, political violence, and just in general politics,

asking people questions about them.

But there were some interesting things in this, and I'll read you the ones that are interesting.

71%

say political violence is more likely

of the population that they polled.

87%

say political violence is a problem, either big or very big, and 60% of those were the very big.

Is the U.S.

more or less divided over the last five years?

And this is the really interesting thing.

72% of Democrats say it's more divided, and only 52% of Republicans.

But the Democrats are responding to the five years.

Most of them were

Biden's five years.

So that's an interesting thing to me because they're saying Biden was more divisive as far as I can see.

Well, they're happy about that.

They're basically saying we like...

They're not happy about that.

Yeah, I think they're saying that we want it to be divisive.

That's why we got Biden and we used him to,

we don't like the other.

I mean, he called half the nation semi-fascist.

That didn't bother anybody on the left.

They loved it.

That phantom of the opera setting.

If you look at the Rutgers poll, there's about three other polls that when they ask, do you think

murder is ever justified as a political...

It's pretty scary when people say ultra-liberal or liberal.

It's about 50%.

And then when you poll specifically individuals like Elon Musk and Donald Trump,

if you look at the various categories,

want him dead, wouldn't be unhappy these dead, it gets up to near 40 or 50 percent.

So, this left-wing Democratic Party is not, it's not Hubert Humphrey, it's not JFK, it's not Bill Clinton.

They have been taken over by Jacobins, and they are hard-left revolutionaries, and they believe that they are so morally superior and so intellectually adroit and sophisticated that they have a God-given right to push climate change, DEI,

open borders, defund the police, and you don't have a right to stop them because they know better for you.

And

they're very dangerous people.

They're not Democrats as we once knew them.

So, well, I was surprised because I thought that the leadership of the Democrats is always trying to blame Republicans for the divisiveness.

But also, just for the last statistic that was interesting in very much the same way, political violence over the last 10 years is more.

73% of Democrats and 66% of Republicans.

And the Democrats are the ones that are doing it.

I still would like to see follow-up questions because I would think the Democrats would think that violence was necessary to force these jughead MAGA chumps and dregs and garbage to do the right thing.

Whereas Republicans would say no.

They don't want...

I mean...

They did have those questions, and the Republicans always

voted

much lower than the Democrats.

And after

Charlie Kirk was killed, I mean, there wasn't, nobody torched a police precinct, a federal courthouse, an iconic church.

There weren't 1,500 officers injured, 35 killed, 2 billion in damaged, five months.

Nobody, the vice president nominee, or say just take J.D.

Vance, he didn't get on Colbert and say, this is not going to stop, it shouldn't stop, it's going to happen.

Remember Camilla Harris?

As soon as she said all that, it was right after violence in Washington and all of the usual politi fact, snopes.

Oh,

there was, later she said she didn't approve of violence, and

all these right-wing people

don't have contacts.

No, we had contacts.

She was urging right in the middle of a violent cycle, she was urging it not to stop.

That was about as reckless.

I mean,

wasn't like she said, assemble peacefully and patriotically at the Capitol.

That's what Trump said.

And he was down for that, demonized.

Well, let's turn to movies.

And there's a great, and also just a shout-out to this publication.

It's called Hollywood in Toto.

And

the writer at the site is Christian Toto.

And he wrote on the Emmys that were just

took place.

And and he said that in this Emmys awards ceremony, they completely overlooked the Charlie Kirk assassination, even though there was plenty of days

for it to sink in.

And they, just like they overlooked October 7th.

But these

movie stars are never bereft of anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian displays.

And he did give a few exceptions, like Jerry Seinfeld, of course, came out against the Palestinian freedom idea and stuff like that.

But those were he said, but those exceptions are very few.

The rest of it, the Emmys, are as we kind of.

Academia is 90%.

I think most polls show that about 90 to 95% of professors in the humanities poll that they're left wing.

Hollywood's about like that.

And so it depends

so they all want roles and there's too many actors for too few good paying roles.

It's sort of like there's too few tenure track jobs and full professors for the PhDs.

So when you have a situation like that and you want to stay in the field, then you make the necessary adjustments.

So when Hollywood people do those

virtue signaling,

not in my name, or, you know, one woman said F Netanyahu or something.

They do that for roles.

They say, well, I hope a director sees that, that I'm more radical than my competitor actors for that role.

Same thing with PhDs.

They think all these young people that are up for tenure, they know who's on the tenure committee, the tenured full professor.

They know they're all left.

So they either keep quiet or they talk and very

hard left, but not too radical yet.

That's one of the things I noticed when I first walked as a professor.

I was a part-time teacher, and that was 1984,

and Reagan was just

entering his second term.

And I knew I was a part-time teacher.

I wasn't even an assistant professor, but I knew assistant professors that I met.

And then the next year I was a lecturer.

I was an assistant professor for my third year, but it was just so striking that they were all like,

actually, Victor, I think there's something that's Reagan is maybe he's not that bad, but don't tell anybody I said that.

And that's their attitude.

And it's too bad because it never,

it's, it's,

you're never going to change these systems.

And what Trump, this counter-revolution is about, it's just saying, in a sane world, wouldn't academia be 50-50?

And why do you keep banning conservative professors and not hiring them?

Why do you use ideology as a litmus test?

And I can tell you, I've been on committees where they do that, and I've been a victim of that in my past.

So, Trump is saying we're going to try to make, we're just going to try to have people be empirical and disinterested.

We're not going to let you do that anymore.

If you want federal money, now you can do it all you want, but you're not going, if you're Stanford University, you're not going to put on your website that 9% of the applicants that were accepted or were white males when they make up 34% of the demographic.

And

they won't release the test scores and the GPAs of the people who were admitted so that people could see

that,

you know, up to 200 points on the SAT, but it was optional.

But what I'm getting at is they know what they're doing.

And the only irony about it is it's like the

Colbert

Jimmy Kimmel.

If you let them go do what they want, they destroy their brand.

So they've destroyed late-night TV.

It doesn't exist.

There's no audience.

Greg Gutfeld, who you have to pay for to watch, has a bigger audience than all those people.

And he tapes it during the afternoon.

It's not even like live, you know what I mean?

So they've destroyed it.

And I think now the biggest thing I'm noticing about wealthy elites of all persuasions, they don't want their kids to go to Stanford or Yale or Harvard.

They're sending them to Vanderbilt, Clemson, Texas AM, University.

Southern universities or big Midwestern places, University of Michigan, you know

they're left-wing, but they don't feel they're crazy like Columbia or Harvard.

They don't beat up Jews or they don't

tear down stuff or they don't drive federal judges out of, you know, out of the law school.

They don't rough up people.

And

that brand now, when you're giving 80% A's at Yale, I think 75% at Stanford, and people know why you're doing it, because you've let in students that your own previous requirements would exclude.

So if you say, well, we're going to be DI, we're the University of Chicago, and our PhD program in English is not going to let anybody in unless they study black studies.

And that was what they said in 2021 and 2.

So when you do that, and then all of a sudden you've got these students, it's not because they're black, it's just that you, when you make that a criterion, and these universities did, and not GPAs or test scores, then the faculty says, well, wait a minute, I was all for that, but now these guys are in my class, and I'm going to be called a racist if I grade like the way I used to, because they come out of high school not as well prepared because they're test scores and GPAs that were, they're not as competitive.

And so what do I do?

Well, I watered them down.

I'm not going to die on the altar of diversity.

I don't have any principles.

I just give them A's.

And then you give them A's, and then they go out in the real world.

And then you start to see, I'm starting to see it right now when you talk to people.

Victor,

today's Stanford student is not Stanford student 10 years ago.

If we hire these people, they don't have good communication skills.

They do not speak well.

They do not know anything.

And they go right to HR and complain.

So we're not going to do it.

I heard that about a hundred times from employers.

Well, we'll see.

Maybe these problems will be rectified in the new age that Trump's.

Everything is self-correcting.

So

you know, Hillsdale's got 14,000 applicants.

And it's more, it's more it's harder to get into Hillsdale, I think it is than these elite schools now.

Because their parents think, well, I'm left-wing, but my kid will be an English major and he'll actually read Shakespeare and Ben Johnson and John Milton, and he won't just read Professor Kendi.

And when he comes home on Thanksgiving, he won't have pink hair and say that I'm a capitalist gutter snipe.

So I'd better put him in Hillsdale.

And he will, his bike won't be stolen, he won't be roughed up, he won't be called horrible names, there won't be segregated dorms, there won't be segregated graduation, And he will meet people who

that

actually think that marriage, good,

two to three children, good.

Buying a home before the age of 30, good.

And that's, for all my leftism, I think that's good.

That's what the parents think.

So

they're swarming these schools.

Well, Charlie Kirk certainly was a model for the NGN.

Oh, I mean,

if you think about Charlie Kirk, gosh,

he had so many skills.

He could speak, he could write, he could organize, he was magnetic, he was uncompromising, he could be stubborn and not sell out his viewpoints.

He was highly religious and devout.

He could go into any situation.

He was fearless.

Charlie, you can't go to the Oxford debating because you don't have a BA, Ph.D., MB, JD,

MBA.

You just dropped out of school.

These are Oxford's best.

And he goes in there, and that creepy guy that

now is the president, he beat.

And he did it better than they ever do it.

That's what it was so weird.

They've been playing that.

Yeah.

So then you start to think, well, what was so unique about Charlie

Kirk, besides all these skills, he had innate skills and he was organized.

He had a genius for organization.

He understood that if you could organize or train or contradict the higher education doctrine, that was the future of America.

So

he was really

telling students and successfully converting them to religion and empiricism and tradition.

And that's one of the reasons he was killed among them.

But the thing about him was he never went to college.

So he was never burdened with.

I talked to him a few times.

I mentioned I talked to him in late August for quite a while after our interview.

And it wasn't like,

well, I have a PhD, or I want to have a BA, or when I was at Stanford, or when I was at Yale.

That was just foreign to him.

And his way of thinking didn't matter.

He was taking Hillsdale online courses, like full of them.

You know what I mean?

He was a very successful autodidact.

But he didn't have the pretensions or the baggage that comes from that.

You have to unlearn that.

If you go to BA, you know, I was four years BA and four years

straight to graduate school.

So the time I was 25,

I had eight years of indoctrination.

And I don't just mean political at two leftist institutions.

I'm talking about cultural, social, this arrogance.

Oh my,

oh, Victor, I heard you went down to Prune for Christmas.

What was that like?

You know what I mean?

And, oh, we're going to the opera in San Francisco.

I didn't even know what an opera was.

But my point is that

that snobbishness, that insularity, that arrogance, that paranoia, that

mean-spirited pettiness in academia,

he didn't have to go through all that.

He grew up with the middle class.

He worked with working-class kids.

He went everywhere so he could relate to them.

Anybody that has a PhD cannot relate to people, by and large, because they've been, you know,

destroyed by.

It's like my dad told me that.

I came home when I was 25.

I think I said that.

And he said, well, how'd it go?

And I said, well, I didn't go to the graduation.

He said, well, I didn't either.

You got your PhD.

You had no gown?

I said, no, I didn't.

And he said, now what are you going to do?

And I said, I don't know.

Well, I know what you're going to do if you're going to stay here.

You're going to go down to that raisin dehydrator with Manuel Gonzalez, and you guys are going to rebuild the roof, and then you're going to rewire it, and you're going to put two raisin fans and heaters in there.

And I think, I said, Dad, it's only been 24 hours since I got my degree.

And he said, well, and I think I told you my older brother said, you're like a dog that dances on two legs.

It's impressive, but we don't know what it's for.

And Samuel Johnson said that, I think.

Well, Victor, we are on a very hard end here, so we're going to have to go.

But we'd like to thank you for all of your wisdom today.

It was a great discussion about Charlie Kirk in particular and all the fallout from this assassination that's going to continue and has really changed the

culture and it's changing the lives of people, I think.

Thank you.

I really like Charles Kirk.

I think it's one of the most horrific things that's happened in my lifetime.

Yeah, absolutely.

And we'd like to thank the audience for joining us here at the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Thank you very much for watching and listening.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hansen, and we're signing off.