Lindsay Clancy Wants a PARDON, Plus Violent Leftists as Charlie Kirk Anniversary Approaches, and the Future of MAGA, with Victor Davis Hanson | Ep. 1393

Welcome to The Megan Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM channel 111 every weekday at NEAST. Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly, welcome to The Megan Kelly Show, and happy Tuesday. Hope everyone had a great Labor Day weekend, Victor Davis Hanson will be here in a few moments to discuss his new book and more in the world of politics and culture. But first, I want to get you updated on the latest fallout in the Lindsey Clancy case. We were all together Friday when the judge finally declared a mistrial after the jury could not come to a unanimous decision after seven days of deliberations and two months of trial. Clancy's attorney Kevin Reddington spent the six week trial in Plymouth, Massachusetts, making the case that Clancy was not criminally responsible for killing her three children due to postpartum psychosis. Well he appeared on ABC's Good Morning America this morning for his first sit-down interview where he bizarrely asked President Trump for a pardon for his client. Watch. What's next for Lindsey? I'd like to say that perhaps Donald Trump, who felt compelled to speak out about this case, made very well Mr. President. I would hope that you would consider this young lady the type of person she is, what she's been through and consider a pardon. Thanks for coming in this morning. My pleasure. Well it would have been nice if George Stephanopoulos would have asked him one follow-up question which is, why would you be asking for a pardon when your client is charged with a state crime, something for which the president cannot pardon her? What if this fucking couple dumbass is sitting, I'm sorry, but like, what, George Stephanopoulos has been an anchor for a long time, I think most people understand this. Why wouldn't he follow up with a pardon, what do you mean a pardon? Your client's been charged under state laws, President Trump can't pardon that. Just like one quick, and honestly, like this is probably, I would like to give him the benefit of the doubt and say this is the function of network mourning news where you, everything is three minutes long. It's like they had seven minutes with a guy, it was an eternity. And God forbid, you know, you blow a break, or you actually just take the time that's necessary to clarify what in God's name your guest is talking about instead you just leave everyone confused. Well we have sent an email to Reddington's office asking, what the hell is talking about? What do you mean you want President Trump to pardon her? We are waiting to hear back. We've all heard those radio ads about owing money to the IRS, they try to scare you and push you into calling out a fear, but tax relief advocates takes a different approach. If you owe the IRS $5,000, $50,000 or even $500,000, TRA has real solutions to fix your tax problem. Don't lose hope. TRA can often reduce or completely eliminate what you owe. Their focus is taxes and helping people and businesses resolve IRS problems. They have more than 1,000 five star Google reviews and an A plus rating from the better business bureau. You no longer have to fear the IRS. Generous relief programs exist right now that can give you a clean slate. So act today, go to TRA.com. That's TRA.com or call 875-6845. Okay, again, that's 800-575-6845, tax relief advocates, real solutions for real people. There is another way to avoid a second trial, and that is a plea deal with prosecutors. Reddington made news this morning when he said he was hopeful that there could be an agreement between his side and the district attorney, Tim Cruz, watch. They have a decision to make now, they could seek a retrial, they could seek a plea agreement. What are you expecting? What are you willing to do? I'm willing to listen to Tim, I've known Tim for 30 years, he's a very hard-tracking prosecutor, conservative gentleman. I hope, however, after sitting through this trial and seeing the evidence that was presented from the government as well as from the defense that he would revisit that issue and hopefully would be able to work something out that would be acceptable to both sides. I mean, yes, that would be a much better result than having to go through this whole thing again. We had a statement over the weekend from Lindsay Clancy's now ex-husband, and he's about had it. This poor guy, Patrick Clancy, who they're still accusing of having killed his children, even though she's admitted she did it, put out a new statement this weekend through his attorney, Howard Cooper, saying the campaign against Patrick Clancy has not slowed since Friday's mistrial. It's actually gotten worse. This campaign he writes now fueled by insatiable media coverage remains at a fever pitch and has resulted in real life threats to Patrick's reputation, livelihood, and life. He said legal actions could action could be taken against those responsible for these claims. Quote enough is enough. This spread of blatant and false lists, baseless falsehoods must stop. Those responsible should understand that there will be consequences and every appropriate measure will be pursued to hold them accountable, including legally law enforcement has been notified. People are sick. Get it together, people. He did not kill his children. His now ex-wife killed the children, which she admits, I can't deal with these freaking conspiratorial nut cases. If you think Patrick Clancy killed his kids, you need help. Seek help. Reddington also spoke out in this interview on ABC about the one hold out juror who was really the cause of the mistrial. This person we understand was not ready to vote, not guilty by reason of insanity. That's what we think the guilt, the vote was going to come down and you'll hear it here. And Kevin Reddington went after this guy. We know it was one of the three men went after him last week. I mean, it was beyond. He got out there in open court and suggested this juror had committed a felony, openly saying he thought the juror had lied to the judge under oath. Did George Stephanopoulos ask about that? Let's check in. The final split was 11 to 1. Was that in favor as far as you know of not guilty by reason of insanity? I believe so, yeah. And what do you make of the one juror who was holding out? You know, again, at the end of the case, statements to the effect that I was upset and the reason I was upset, I would defend that individual's right to be a hold out for forever. It's a petavide judicial system, and I respect that, and I would certainly defend his right to do that. What I was upset about was after that lengthy trial and the work that everyone put into this case, including these jurors that spent literally almost two months away from their home, their job, their family, where a gentleman had an opinion, not that he was sticking like, you know, the movie, 12 angry men, but in fact, he had agreed, according to the note, from the full lady, that he had doubt, but he would not apply the law of reasonable doubt as presented by the judge. That's not right, and that's why I was upset. I'm glad you explained that. I look forward to the follow-up question from George Stephanopoulos asking you how dare you accuse this citizen servant who went in there and took two months out of his life to sit on your jury of a felony. How dare you? Truly, like there's upset, and then there's baseless accusations against an innocent civilian who was dragged into court through no fault of his own who you chose to sit on your jury and who did so, and by all accounts, according to his principles. No one was accusing this juror of holding out or not following the reasonable doubt standard before the judge kept calling the jury in three times over saying, please come to a verdict. Then finally, it seems clear the other jurors turned on him and said, well, that guy said he had to doubt, but he won't apply it to reasonable doubt. In other words, his doubt didn't rise in his mind to a reasonable doubt, and they were pissed off because they wanted to go home. So I tried to find another way of ending this thing, which was to potentially bounce this guy, and the judge to his credit, Judge Sullivan, wasn't persuaded, and he understood exactly what they were doing and didn't fall for the nonsense, notwithstanding Reddington's theatrics. But again, wouldn't it have been nice if we had a competent journalist sitting across from Reddington to say, how dare you accuse a civilian juror of committing a felony when he's not there to defend himself and based on nothing other than an ambiguous four-person note, shame on you. Reddington was asked about his client, Lindsey Clancy's alleged postpartum psychosis, and whether it was simply an excuse to avoid a murder conviction. Watch. And what do you say to those critics who say this is a rationalization? what we're talking about here is just plain evil. - Oh, please, it's not evil. These people don't understand. They don't know what she went through. They didn't see her text messages. They didn't see her journal. They didn't see the notes that she wrote. They didn't see the text she sent her mother on October. Saying, "Mommy, can you please come to here? I am sick, something's wrong." And it was a result of the medications. They don't know about the number of times that she reached out. She went to the woman in infants. She went to the suicide hotlines. She reached out to everybody and anybody would listen to her and kept saying, "I am not good. I am not well." And it was ignored. - A lot of people who commit crimes are not well. Most of them, in fact, especially crimes like this. They're not well. They, some of them have had a mental break. Some of them are just incredibly depressed, suicidal, homicidal. They're having serious mentally. We don't excuse them from murder. It's not the way our law works. We have been lured into a bunch of nonsense by these very, very diehard, Lindsey Clancy supporters. I'm not talking about the people who were genuinely persuaded that she didn't know right from wrong. Okay, there is that group and that's a real thing. But there are just nut cases who think, if you get super depressed and you kill your kids, it's not your fault. That's not true. Mental illness does not excuse you from criminal behavior. It has to rise to the level of legal insanity, which is a nearly impossible standard. It is extremely high for good reason in the law. So it's just, I'm sorry for Lindsey Clancy. I'm really sorry for her children and for her now ex-husband. But this, she had ordered behavior pre-planning and she had her wits about her when this thing went down. To me, the most telling part is the fact that she took the phone call from her husband, Clancy, in the middle of the murders, was cool as a cucumber, 14 seconds, they chatted about whether he could get the generic form of the medicine at CVS. She kept it together. She wanted to make sure he didn't come home. This was not some crazy psychotic person. She knew exactly what she was doing, whatever. He wants to say people who think she should be convicted of murder, they don't understand. No, we understand. We do understand. A lot of us really got up to speed on this case and understand exactly what your defense says. We just rejected it. And you know, it good for you, Kevin Reddington, 'cause you apparently convinced 11 members of your jury to go along with your excuses, but not 12. And that's what you need in order for a not guilty by reason of insanity. You didn't get it. You almost did, but you didn't. Sorry, that's the way it goes. So now you have to live with it. And yeah, a deal would be great, but that deal, I think, is gonna have to involve a guilty plea by your client to at least voluntary manslaughter. I could live with that. It's not my preference. I could live with it though, but I just don't think I'm not guilty by reason of insanity sentence, which would be indefinite commitment to a mental facility is going to be agreed to by the DA Tim Cruz. Maybe I'm wrong, but he did not sound like a guy ready to do that at his press or on Friday. Sadly, whether the Clancy case would influence other mothers, no longer appears to be a theoretical question. The story is so disturbing. We brought it to you on AM update today. 40-year-old Corey Walsh of Frankfurt, Illinois, is now facing first degree murder charges for killing her two-year-old son. Last Tuesday, Walsh allegedly hanged her own child in the basement before allegedly attempting to kill herself. I'm sorry, but once again, it doesn't look like she actually tried to kill herself. It doesn't. An autopsy confirming that her two-year-old boy, Barrett, died due to asphyxiation, that'll do it. I mean, that'll happen when you hang him from a rafter in the basement. Walsh reportedly telling law enforcement that she killed her son because he was, quote, the devil, and, quote, the anti-Christ. Witnesses say, Walsh followed the Lindsay Clancy trial closely and that she was texting her friends about the case, just hours before she allegedly killed her own son. According to Walsh's attorney, she was suffering from a, quote, "psychotic episode" at the time of the killing. So I've got a question for the people who are ready to excuse Lindsay Clancy. Do we excuse all the mothers if they just throw out that word psychosis? Like, how far does it, like, what, the people who want to let Lindsay Clancy off, what do they have to show in order to convince you that they're just a regular murderer and not somebody who deserves to take advantage of this not guilty by reason of mental defect? Do they have to have doctors like Lindsay Clancy did who tried to prescribe medications that don't really have a good effect on the person? Do they, do they have to call a suicide hotline and be told there's nothing really we can do for you if you don't have a plan? These are some of the things that happen to Lindsay Clancy that upset people. I'm feeling like a trend has been started here and people who were in support of blessing this behavior in a way are going to rule the day in sending any sort of a message to the mothers of America that there is a get out of jail free card potentially awaiting you if you kill your annoying toddler. I like that woman in Illinois had three other kids who thank God were left alive. But for some reason her two year old really got under her skin to the point where she was calling him the antichrist. And I don't even wanna think about what that child went to as she strung him up. It's too dark to even go there. And I ask you, do you think that child will be alive today if Lindsay Clancy hadn't done what she did and this case hadn't received the coverage it has? I think he would be alive. I don't think this mother would have even considered that as an option. You know, I mentioned this last week, when you cover deaths by suicide, you have to be careful as a news person. In fact, a lot of news organizations won't discuss the specific way a person does it now because it is suggestive and it is a little contagious. And there tends to be when there's a very famous person who dies by suicide, there tends to be another one and then possibly another one in the days and weeks thereafter. I mean, I've been at this for 25 years now and that is how it goes. And as a result, news organizations are now more reluctant to publish the details of how somebody dies by suicide these days. Well, I feel like this is a similar problem. The more we talk about this kind of murder, in a way that has anything other than abject contempt for the perpetrator, the more we encourage it, the more we bless it as an option. Like, you could consider this as a solution and you might actually get away with it. It's a very sick, this is it like extremely sick. And we are becoming sick as a society with this. I mean, I really, this should be a no-brainer that we cannot be doing this, cannot be sending this kind of messaging, giving you a little bit more detail here on this Corey Walsh, this woman accused in this latest case out of Illinois. They say a neighbor came over. This is the prosecution, they've been at it for a week 'cause this happened, as I said last Tuesday. The prosecution filed a petition to try to keep this woman from being released pending trial. And they alleged that a neighbor came over and found Walsh lying in a tub fully dressed, surrounded by bloody water. The neighbor told police she had taken a knife from Walsh and tried to help her by holding a towel on her left inner thigh. Walsh had cuts on her wrists and thighs that they do not believe were life threatening. The neighbor told police that Walsh asked the neighbor why she was taking the knife away from her and she said that Walsh told her she was trying to kill herself and that bear, which is what she called her son, was in the basement. Again, the injuries were not considered life threatening though she was taken to the hospital after police saw that she was allegedly attempting to harm herself. Then the neighbor found Barrett in the basement and you already have heard enough about that. Three other children was still at home or returned home around the time that Barrett was discovered and infant was present unharmed to school-aged children returned home around the time of the discovery. They were not physically injured. The husband who lives at the home was out of state at the time of the incident, flew home Tuesday evening. I mean, your heart goes out to this guy. I'm sure that you're right. more to the story. And this business of Walsh becoming obsessed or very interested in the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy is of course very interesting. I want to know how she was in some group text message thread with her friends and was discussing this case as recently as 12.30 pm last Tuesday. That's roughly three and a half hours before her son was discovered dead at her hand and allegedly. And I imagine this moms out there. I mean who among us does not have a text thread with our girlfriends. I you'd like to think you'd know if somebody in your text thread was a psychotic mother planning on murdering her two year old sometime that afternoon. I mean each one of those moms is going to be a witness and that text thread is probably going to become public at some point very soon. And I can't wait to see what it says. I mean what were the signs? I just you know I keep coming back to the same proposition. You have to be somewhat nuts to kill your child to kill in almost all circumstances unless you know it's like when someone harms a child and that child's father or sometimes mother murders the person who harmed their kid. That's not crazy to me. That's not crazy. It's you know it's reckless and it's illegal but that's not crazy. But the vast majority of murders I would say are crazy things to do and in most of those cases like literally insane. These gang bangers on South Side of Chicago. That's a lifestyle. But like if you pick up a gun and you go and assassinate somebody a school shooting God for bed a mass shooting you know these crazed people we see on this subway. There's something very seriously wrong with them but keep in mind medical insanity and legal insanity are not the same. The bar for legal insanity is much higher. It's much higher because those people can get back out and they can kill again and they do. We talked about the case of Constance Fisher last week. The woman in Maine she drowned her three children. She went to the mental institution. She got let out. She had three more children with the same husband. She had the first three with and she drowned them too. I mean this is deadly serious what we're dealing with here. And it is our job as a society to protect kids. The most vulnerable among us from the Lindsey clansies of the world, from the Cory Walsh's of the world. But we're not doing so well. We aren't and telling them implicitly or otherwise that this is I don't want to say okay it's not exactly that we're saying it's okay but understandable and we'll be quickly forgiven is dangerous stuff. All right I want to bring in my guest Victor Davis Hanson. We're going to take a break first. He's going to come back on the other side and he's actually got some thoughts on this whole business that we open the show with today and much much more. Our sponsor the electronic payments coalition says Washington politicians are always getting in your wallet and that now they're messing with your credit card. They say your credit card and the security it offers are under attack and that senators Dick Durbin and Roger Marshall want to change the nation's payment system to benefit corporate megastores like Walmart and Target at the expense of everyday Americans. Credit cards can keep your payments secure and provide rewards that families use to help make everyday purchases more affordable. The electronic payments coalition says the Durbin Marshall mandates would let corporate megastores cut corners on credit card processing routing transactions over cheaper untested networks with weaker security and fewer protections. Find out more at guardyourcard.com and consider telling Congress to guard your card. Joining me now are pal Victor Davis Hanson. He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of so many great books including a new one that's out today and it's a barn burner. It's called the counter revolution. The fall and rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. What a great topic for you in particular VDH. Go and buy it right now. Welcome back to the show. We will get into this book in just a minute but thank you so much for being here. Great to see you. Thank you for having me Megan. So let's just pick it up on the how we open the show. You know, this Lindsey Clancy case. Her bizarre request for a presidential pardon, which isn't going to happen. And now what appears to be a copycat in Illinois, Victor, as another mother kills her own child and claims psychosis. Yeah, I think in this therapeutic culture that we have, we don't realize that human nature is on changing and people are actually rational. So if people believe there's no deterrence, that's really the only thing that stops people from doing bad things, whether it's social, a program or shame or law. But if you main, if you channel that this is acceptable, then anybody who feels that the burdens of child wearing or they get depressed one day, then there's a message that they can do some dastardly horrific act and not pay the the price for it. And that's just that that that transcends almost everything. We for the last century, we we've recognized that people can plead insanity. But that's a very that's a very careful narrow definition. The other thing is this is part of a I don't know how to say this politely, but this is part of a war on and we're seeing the effects on men in the sense that if you're, we know right now that men, especially the white working class or having problems, they're underrepresented and universities, they don't get to 56% of degrees bachelors go to women. They're not, they have a prolonged adolescence, they're tired of being told they're toxic. But then you add this, the message of her supporters, Lindsey Clancy is that child wearing is entirely in the domain and child procreation of the mother. The father has no say at all, even though he's half of the equation scientifically. And when you want to date, what would a young man who's working and he meets a woman and she's starting to champion what this happened and not champion in the sense of glorifying the death, but saying that women who have postpartum depression should be given exemption if they do something. Would you want to marry someone like that? Would you want to have children with someone like that who thinks the children or her exclusive domain and can determine their fate? The other thing is there's been a lot of this throughout history, but this is very gruesome. Even the worst example we can think, the horrific garbles, the monster of history and his wife who killed their five children on his orders. But she at least took sleeping pills and did it in their sleep, which was horrific, but she didn't look them in the eye and you think, what were they thinking in those last moments? As this mother, their source of comfort and nurture was strangling them. And then this whole thing about suicide, as you pointed out, there's a lot of discrepancies whether it was really intended as suicide. So this isn't a class all by itself and it comes at a time in our society. I mean, if you were a male, I was thinking when you were talking Megan about Chris Kyle, the American sniper, he befriended this guy named, I think his name was Ruth or something. And he said he had post-traumatic stress and so on. And then he turned the gun at the gun range and killed this American iconic cure. But I didn't hear a lot of people rallying to his cause and say poor man, he was obviously more deranged than I think had prior evidence of more derangement than in this case. But there was absolute fear about that. And people said that's no excuse to kill somebody like this, murder somebody that befriended you. And so the whole context was this was not warranted. But it didn't apply in this case that mothers have a particular role to be nurturing and protect children from people who would hurt them. And when they turn out to be the culprit for their demise, it's almost medieval. And then when you see these feminists or whatever they call themselves cheering this on and trying to make a movement out of it, the message I think if that were to take hold would be to young males who are already confused in this weird era of ours. You better be very careful who you date because you may that this catches on in the fashion of the Luigi Mangione. You may, and I think there's a lot of parallels that we see. You may meet somebody who doesn't really believe that your partner are responsible or have a say in the raising of your children. And if she were to become depressed out after birth, you better be careful, because the society at large is going to give her an exemption if she were to do something to the children. I think that's the message from it, whether it's, yeah, I think that is. - Sadly, yes, and this won't be the last, I'm sorry to say it, but this woman in Illinois, she won't be the last. It's like this new idea of how to manage a challenging child has been introduced by this sick case of Lindsay Clancy. And mothers out there who were struggling, who before wouldn't have even considered this, have now added it to the menu of coping. It's just very, very dark, and we're going down a dark path. And so that Tim Cruz, the DA in Massachusetts, handling the Lindsay Clancy case, really does need to be careful. He needs to be careful of not setting the wrong precedent here, because he is not an activist on the street. He's an elected official who we, the Massachusetts residents, hired to do a job, which is to put criminals behind bars and keep the citizenry safe. And that includes the youngest and most vulnerable citizens in his jurisdiction. You know, the children who are absolutely helpless, it's not too far afield from this growing blessing of violence that we are seeing on the left. And as we, you know, it's today's September 8th, and in two days, it's going to be the one-year mark of Charlie Kirk's assassination. It's so hard to believe that it's almost a year, Victor. You know, I was sitting right in this set when we got the news and so much has happened over the 12 months has been extremely emotional, I think, for all of us who knew Charlie, and a lot of people who just felt that they knew him anyway. As we head into this week, you've got these vile ghouls. I really hate to give them airtime, but they should be publicly shamed. Vile ghouls already celebrating. Forgive me, they're calling it the Kirk of Versailles. And I'll give you one example here. This woman's name is Heather, and she's got a song she's putting out here in celebration of this one-year mark. It's not 23. ♪ Say I'm a man without conviction ♪ ♪ I'm a man who doesn't know how to stand up ♪ ♪ A contradiction you come and go ♪ ♪ You come and go ♪ ♪ Come and go, come and go, come and go ♪ ♪ You come and go, you come and go ♪ Okay, so this woman has 18,000 followers. That post has 1.2 million likes, and for the listening audience, what she posts on it is. She's getting her. Sure, it's getting my playlist of songs that remind me of Charlie ready for the Kirk of Versailles party, and the words are, "I'm a man without conviction. "A man who doesn't know how to sell a contradiction. "You come and go." And then in the middle of the video, she pretends to shoot to get shot in the neck, as we've seen some disgusting characters do. And we could be here for a while if I played all the ones, Victor. Well, Hassan Piker, you remember, he led his audience in a song celebrating Charlie Kirk's death, and then he's been mainstreamed, but at least until recently, by democratic candidates. And it comes, as you say, it's Luigi Mangione phenomenon. Donald Trump is the first president in U.S. history that the secret service had to return fire at a potential assassin on four different occasions. And I went back when I was writing the book and looked at the reaction to each one of those, and it was glee. It was glee that the attempt was made, but it was disappointment that it wasn't completed. And it wasn't just fringe people. There were a lot of people on the hard left that came forward, celebrities and everybody. And it's lowering the bar on the acceptable. And what's so strange about Megan is, when Barack Obama was president, if you remember this, I know, there was a clown in the Missouri State Fair, and he put on an Obama mask. And he had done that with other presidents, Nixon mask, Clinton mask, but the left got so enraged. And they said, "This threatens Barack Obama's life." And they banned him, not just from that fair, but they banned him for life. They banned him for life. And there were editorials everywhere that America's a sick society because, but he didn't even approach ever threatening violence to Obama. And it's so one-sided and asymmetrical that I don't even know that the left is even aware of, but they've mainstreamed it so much. It's on college campuses. It's deeply embedded in the Democratic Socialists. And I don't really don't think the Democratic Socialists for that matter are absorbing the Democratic Party as much as being invited in and just adopting what was their prior agenda anyway. I don't think there's much difference. They keep saying there's a big difference. But most of the agenda of the Democratic Socialists was already enacted or would try to be enacted or was promoted by mainstream Democrats. So this is not necessarily a fringe anymore. It's getting more and more mainstream. And in Massachusetts, with this other case, I think most of the people at the time believe Bill Clinton that he said the abortion should be legal but rare. And he had limits on it. But when Massachusetts just signed that abortion law that said, in theory, but there will be actual cases despite the gauslin experience that you can abort a baby in the birth canal, people were cheering. You know, this wasn't, there's no restriction on the life of the mother. I mean, if a person decides at the last moment when the baby can see life out the birth canal and you're gonna kill that baby, at least you would think-- - It's a very good point. - Yeah, you would think that it was cheering it. Was this mangy, ony, clancy mentality? That there's something-- - Yeah, is there such a difference between killing as you point out, basically, in the birth canal versus killing when you have an eight-month there, like little calendar, clancy? - I don't think so. - Not really. - No, I don't think so. And then you think of this six-society where we spend billions of dollars to refine the science of saving babies at 23, 25 weeks now. And we put all that investment in it to save a little baby that can be saved at premature that nobody ever thought would be possible at five months. And then that same society allows you to kill a fully-formed, viable baby at the last moment and nobody objects in this state. They're all cheering. And it's a sickness that I think we're missing and it's infected the left and it's getting worse and worse and worse. And it's a death call. So they really do. We saw it first and when I wrote the book about Trump, most of it's about the fall of him, what they did. And I could not believe I went over. I went through all the people in the military who just said things that were horrific that he was the same as people in Auschwitz. And that he was Mussolini, that he was Hitler. And then all of this, how to shoot him. Robert De Niro, let's beat him up, stoop down. Let's shoot him. Kathy Grim, let's behead him. Let's light millennium fire, Peter von Itt. It was so Madonna, let's blow up the White House. There was no weapon, and everybody thought it was neat. And now that is orthodoxy that you really want to kill somebody you disagree with. Especially if they're effective and they want to undo the progressive project like Charlie Kirk. And they're very smart. The problem they had with Charlie was that he was a real visionary and he understood that youth are naturally rebellious. And he said to them, I want to channel that rebelliousness into reminding you who is the orthodox establishment. It's the left. They control the universities, the media, the corporate boardroom, popular culture. They are the ones that are making things hard for us. So you can be a revolutionary or you can be a dissident and you can be conservative because they are the establishment. And that was something that left it never really experience that they were old Fuddy-Duddy reactionaries, which they are in some sense. And that's why I think all of these have a political motive. And we kind of forget that. We think they're crazy or Luigi Manjioni, but when you take a deep breath and you think, well, Charlie Kirk's gone. And then those two or three states in the 2024 election, you can make the argument that his get out of the boat and registering young people made the difference in places like Michigan. He was a very heroic figure. And he's gone now and he's not going to be replaced. I don't see anybody on the horizon that has that talent. At least not yet. and so nobody talks about it. about that that that killing really made a difference in for for I think for years in the political landscape. If he was there right now and the midterms that are coming up, he would be the one person that was be saying let's not be pessimistic. We I know these are socialists but let's talk about what we're doing right and he would go out and blanket these these key races and he's not there and there's nobody that can take up that slack and that's it's true. It's one of the reasons why people who are more conspiratorial don't think Tyler Robinson killed him because Charlie was just so valuable to the Republican party to mag out to Trump that it would be natural to think who else benefits you know who else would benefit from silencing that voice because he was so powerful but he also I think we also we don't we're afraid or we don't want to talk about this whole trans phenomenon which historically if you look at sexologists of the 19th century they they coined the word gender dysphoria. There's common examples and antiquity in Catullus for example of Patronia is a satiric on a people who cross dress and think they belong to the other sex but it's always considered very very rare and this idea that's ten percent of the population and then when you inject drugs and all of these things that we talk about hormone these dangerous drugs that usually the left says are too dangerous and physicians are overreaching now they have the opposite view and then you look at the percentage of trans shooters and mass shootings it's way overrepresented. And then you can't talk about it you can't talk about it you can't say. I'm I'm I'm done using the term trans done I I will say someone is gender-confused sometimes they genuinely are sometimes they're faking it but there's no such thing as trans that's not a thing you can't transition your gender. We've been engaging in this fiction for too long we've been playing their game by using that word that's a made-up word to describe something that is a mental illness for which people deserve compassion and empathy and support not to transition themselves but to get comfortable with their own natural God-given body and biological sex but I think the proper term is just that person's gender-confused it's a man who's gender confused that's it that there's no more trans that's I'm not using that word anymore it's made up but I agree with every word you said and that that too the anger in that community the violence in that community has been unleashed on too many unsuspecting Americans already children and adults and national treasures like Charlie and easily explains the violence that we saw nearly one year ago today. I just don't think we we know we appreciate that we've been in a cultural a real revolution and when you look at some of these democratic salt what they've been saying about I just got you to your country and the only thing that's going to save you we're going to have to have mandatory reparations or we have to fundamentally change the United States or we're going to you don't know what you're doing and we're going to get rid of your electoral college we've never seen anything like that of first and second generation immigrants from failed societies coming over here and reciprocating our magnuminity with contempt for the structure and the like Elon Omar yes absolutely and then we say door yeah they're completely asymmetrical so we don't go home yeah stop like you love Somalia so much go back there but no one here wants to make the United States more like Somalia but you say things and I've been a lot of criticism I said to him on about mandami he used the word settler colonialist I said okay if you want to make that argument but what are you you're from the 1% in India that controls 65% of the GDP and you were a child of privilege with a state on as a non-indigenous person on Lake Victoria and the child of two PhDs and then you went to South Africa your parents did define opportunity but you you don't have roots in a particular and if you used your own vocabulary you would condemn yourself as ex-appropriate disproportionately expropriating wealth in Uganda or what's Hassan Park Piker a multi-millionaire or what's you mentioned Illian Omar we don't even we're not even allowed to say that Saeed Barry murdered 200,000 of his own people in that civil war between Somalia and Somali land and her father was a colonel in that army and that the reason that we have so many Somalis in Minnesota and elsewhere is that when that genocidal and that was a genocidal dictatorship fell most of its adherence got out and they got out either to Europe but a lot of them in the United States and we're not even we're not even allowed to talk about it we shouldn't when she starts accusing our country of all these sins nobody says to her well we accepted you because your father and your family were tied into a government that killed over 200,000 people butchered them so you should be very careful I mean we used to take let mehrman grints in and then in the 1950s and 60s we found some of them were prison guards or had Nazi associations or when desquads and we strict her citizenship and deported them we did that dozens of times so that that's what I mean that's like that's really all these foreign foreign foreigners who are here like at our universities after 10/7 celebrating the mass murder we saw in Israel accelerating the murder of babies and the elderly and Marco Rubio said you need to go home now that's you you you celebrating murder is not consistent with our foreign policy or our views here in America in a way that's going to keep fellow American safe and that to me still makes sense like why would we allow foreigners whether they're in Congress or elsewhere people have come who have come here from other countries but have serious roots in a foreign country to try to change America to be more like these other countries and their values that's that be the same as telling me or my daughter we can't wear a tank top when we walk down the street because it's going to offend some radical Muslim man go home if you don't want to see that you should move back to Saudi Arabia or you a wherever go go back to where that actually is a standard I think I think a bit more modern but whatever I think a lot of our problems we're having with Europe and Canada are not we're shovonistic or we we defend them we subsidize their defense we run up huge trades for pluses we're trying to help them but they are not as competitive are they're not the countries we used to know and one of the reasons is in Canada 45% of the Canadian population was either not born the United States or their parents were not born and they have their centennial initiative they brag about that they want to get a hundred million people in the next 15 years so that they are 20 years through immigration so they can challenge the United States and be a big power and the same thing with Europe they're open borders 16% of the and the problem is that they are bringing in people from Latin America, Africa, and Asia with enormous needs for healthcare, food, shelter, education, legal and their socialist economies that are completely unarmed and they can't they won't honor their defense promises for the most part until recently Canada may or may not have done it for the first time last year they can't do it because they have a socialist green new green deal energy policy a socialist blows economy and they want us they want us to subsidize it by running up huge deficits with them on trade with spending in the last 15 years if you look at the aggregate budget of defense spending in Europe versus the United States it's a seven trillion dollar difference that we invested and a lot of that went to protecting the West so I you know and then and by the way when when you know with the prime minister of Canada tries to play tough with us now because of this tariff or there's no gratitude there's no like you know what thanks for it's like there's just bitterness and anger that we've now decided it needs to be more fair wait Victor I got to put a positive I do want to talk about this but I have to go to break well of more with the VDX before we go let me mention his new book the counter revolution the fallen rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement get it now when it comes to supplements there are two things that matter that it works and that you can trust it rather than just tell you about relief factor we often bring you what their real customers have to say one customer Jim said he ran out of relief factor twice and that both times his aches stiffness and pain came back once he restarted it he says he felt better again as Jim puts it quote you know something's working when you run out of it they make it easy to find out if you will be the next person telling relief factor about how much it helps you tackle your daily aches and pain three weeks for just seventeen dollars and seventy six cents simply go to relief factor dot com or call one eight hundred four relief you will connect with their friendly local team and they will do everything they can to help and maybe you will be sharing your story with them soon to imagine this You're surrounded by fellow fans, sharing wings, sharing drinks, high-fiving random strangers. Everyone remembers the game, and no one remembers the guy coughing behind you until a few days later at 2am when you wake up with a fever and your throats on fire. Now what? Urgent care? Closed? ER? Hell no. Telehealth? Maybe, but the pharmacy's closed. That's where a medical emergency kit from the wellness company could come in. These are not first aid kits. They contain essential prescriptions, used for over 30 common conditions, sinus and ear-off infections, UTIs, stomach bugs, travelers diarrhea, and more, on hand, before you need them. Use your doctor-developed guidebook to select the right prescription or call their telemed doctor standing by. It's like an urgent care and drugstore at home. When you're sick, traveling, or stranded, you could have used a medical emergency kit, order online in minutes, and it is shipped to your door, and save 45 bucks with our promo code MK at urgentcarekit.com/MK. That's promo code MK at urgentcarekit.com/MK. We have an update from a story in our first hour. Lindsay Clancy's attorney, Kevin Reddington, sat down for another interview after his ABC interview with Stefanopoulos. This time was with CBS Boston's Christina Rex, and she did ask the question that Stefanopoulos failed to ask about the fact that a U.S. president, even this one, cannot issue a pardon for a state crime. So why is her lawyer asking President Trump for a pardon? Watch, here's the exchange. As you noted, the president took note of your case, and on Good Morning America this morning, you asked him for a pardon. But Lindsay's facing state charges. So a presidential pardon isn't an option here. So what's the goal there? The goal is pretty simple. It's to seek help from Trump. I mean, if President Trump feels that this is a case that warrants that type of intervention from the executive branch, if you will, even though legally, it's not a federal case, he certainly has an awful lot of clout. And I'm sure that, you know, where he hypothetically to reach out to Tim Cruz, you know, they're both Republicans, you know, I don't know. Maybe that will be something that Tim would listen to and consider. I think any type of help that we can get is helpful. Okay, so he's been informed between the Stephanopoulos interview and this one, that Trump can't issue a pardon for a state crime. I don't think you knew. I'm going to be honest. I think he genuinely just learned that today. I think he was today years old when he learned that. I don't know because now it's changed. Do I just want his clout? Why wouldn't you have just asked for that? Why wouldn't you just said, President Trump, I see you've weighed in on this, sure would be grateful if you'd reached out to Tim Cruz and suggest to him that we should go easy on Lindsay or that we should put her in a mental facility as opposed to behind bars. Why wouldn't you say that? Why would you ask for a legal remedy that is completely inapped and unavailable to you? It's very strange. I think he had some sort of a mental freeze. I don't know what it was, but that answer there does not, does not clear anything up. It's basically an admission that he understood he was wrong in what he was asking for. He's not that's not available to him, but very strange. Not exactly sure what's going on there. We are back now with Victor Davis Hansen. He is the author of the new book called The Counter Revolution, The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the Maga movement. I love that. It's not the rise and fall. It's the fall and rise because of course that's what we have seen with Trump. I just want to say like in reading part of the book, this is so good, Victor, because you're exactly the person to write this book. You do not have Trump's arrangement syndrome. You're fair. You understand the Republican party, like the factions of it. And you write the following in this book. He's the only ex-president to have been the target of some 91, 91 local state and federal criminal charges. The only ex-president to have his home rated by the FBI. The only ex-president to have been targeted for ballot removal by some 25 states. The only ex-president to have been impeached twice. And the only ex-president to have been tried in the Senate as a private citizen. Yet only Trump could have avoided the vast majority of convictions and escaped all jail time, overcome four years of daily political obituaries, and as an elderly septid jeanarian, out campaigned and outworked presidents and candidates 30 years younger. No Republican has ever been so caught up in melodramas and so successfully survived them and turned them to his political advantage. That is the enigma of Trump. And yet you wrestle in this book with even conceding all that, what's the future of MAGA without Trump in office? And this is something both his detractors and his most ardent supporters would love to see answered. Yeah, well, I think you could start. And I say that. I don't see us going back to the old Republican party. And I supported it. You did too, probably, of the bushes and John McCain and Mitt Romney. Because they were more political, but their idea was we have to slow down the progressive project. The universities are lost, so we'll try to deal with them. We know that media is biased. But if you had said to any of those people, no, these people want to destroy the United States as you know it. And NPR is a joke and PBS. I'm going to try to defund it. Or I'm going to try to say these universities are ripping off for 50% 40% church charges on federal grants. They're going to go down to 15. I'm going to tax their endowment. I'm going to make sure that people have first amendment, fourth amendment, fifth amendment, six minute riots on campuses. And I'm going to go after these people who defund the police. We're going to have police in Washington. I'm going to even try to fix the monuments and fix the White House veneer. I'm going to try to do all. I'm going to close the border. I'm not just going to close the border. I'm going to try to deport three million people. If you anybody had said that, they thought he was crazy. So I think he saw that the Republican party either through bad policies or just emphasis on tax and regulations and not the middle class. It was the victims of globalization that muscular classes, especially of all races. That wasn't their constituency. They were voting for Obama. And 8 million or 9 million middle class conservatives did not vote in 2008, 2012. So that was his message. And I think that's now orthodox. That if anybody comes along and says, well, we're going to go back to George HW Bush free trade. No worries about it. It's going to make us more competitive or trade surpluses on their behalf are not sustainable. So let's, I don't think that's going to be viable. I don't think it's going to be viable to any of that stuff. So the question then is, you know, Trump trolls people, but he knows he's not going to run for a third. He can't constitutionally. He knows that. So it's going to be vances that the head runner. He's a brilliant rhetorician. I think people said when he was appointed vice president, what are you doing? He's a white male like Trump. He's from an Ohio red state that's Trump's anyway. What's the, the bargain? And everybody in the Trump camp said, wait till he deals with the media. You won't believe what he does. And he did that. Well, the other thing about Vance was he makes Trump assassination proof because he's just like Trump on virtually all the issues. So it's like if you can't, you can't give Trump's assassins hope that if they get rid of the top dog, they're going to get something dramatically different in the number two position. And I tried to point that out in the book. And I said, this is one of the few vice presidencies that is a force multiplier of the president. So when Reagan ran, people thought he was too radical. So we're going to get a kinder, gentler George H. W. Bush. And the only thing that was comparable is Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. They were kind of alike. But usually that was yeah, that's way scarier. Yeah. Yeah. And so usually you try to balance the people a little bit. But not with Vance is going, he is a mega person. So and Rubio has magnanimous and Trump chose him within a couple of days of getting shot in the ear. He did. It was like that at that point, I really, I know that Trump, one of the main arguments was, you can't pick somebody who to your, to your detractors would make them feel like if we can just assassinate Trump, we'll do better with this other guy. It has to be somebody who they believe will enact your agenda with or without you. And then Rubio has said that if Vance runs, he will not run if I think that's still operative. But both of them had fiercely opposed, I'd had a talk with JD Vance right in 2016 when he wrote that op-ed comparing Trump to Hitler. And I remember Marco Rubio in the debate with Trump. You remember little Marco exchange and all of that. So they both, they both, I was there. Yeah, you were there. So that you can't say either one of them as a Johnny cum lady or you know, that's there. And I think that Rhonda Santos is a great candidate and all that. But right now, I think there'll be a rivalry and we'll see what happens. The only thing and this will be controversial, there is a growing split. It's not like the democratic split. And there's nothing like the anti-Semitism of the left. But there is a growing split in the Republican ranks. And JD is trying to finesse that. And Rubio is quiet about it because I think he disagrees with it. And I don't know to what degree that is going to blossom. But at some point, he's going to have to, well, I mean, it's Rubio's more popular with the Neocons, but he doesn't want to lose the support of the more non-interventionalist wins. And it's. And JD's more popular with a non-interventionalist, but he doesn't want to lose the support of the Neocons. I mean, no, no Republican, whatever, you can get the nomination by just having one or the other, but you can't get the presidency with a divided Republican party. Yes. You have to have all the Republican party. And then some in order to win. And the problem is that for JD, as I see it, who has made, you know, he said, I don't, I can't, I don't want to be told who I can talk to whom I can talk to find. But some of the people like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Thomas Massier, sometimes Tucker, they say things when you say you want to impeach Trump or he's satanic or Marjorie Taylor Greene is said, she prefer, or you prefer El Sayed, they say things that are almost as if I'm not saying they are, but they're almost designed to put JD into a dilemma. In other words, they keep. Well, I think that faction, that faction that you just mentioned sees JD as in a dilemma that they're not trying to put him in one, they genuinely think some faction of them that he should have resigned after the war and a race like that he shouldn't have stayed. And that's going to come back to haunt him when we get into Republican primaries. Well, it depends on the denouement. So if you had, I mean, I don't know what's going to happen. Nobody, the problem with Iran is nobody knows what's going on inside because the first war we've had no international media on the ground. We've had no ground troops. We've had no embedded reporters. All we know about is cell phone people who are calling out. And when they call out, they're rounded up. And there's been thousands killed after the 45,000 every day. So we don't know. But if there were to be a popular dissent and they go out on the street again and this new strategy, which I don't know why it wasn't implemented on day one. I know, the economic pressure seems to be a great, yeah, it's really a great tactic versus what we were doing. The anaconda strategy is that I mean, we've never done this with secondary boycotts before. So we're telling nations. Just I think the audience knows this, but just in case you don't know this, we've, you know, the Iranians continue to try to tempt Trump back into fighting. They really would like the war to escalate. They realize how bad that is for the world for America, for Trump's political chances. And Trump has gotten smart on this and has realized, this isn't a good idea. And there's no winning a war against Iran unless we go full boots on the ground for which there is zero appetite in America, maybe 2% of the public. So he's ratcheting up the economic sanctions on them now. And by all reports, even amongst the far left haters, it's working. It's working a lot better. And the Iranians are feeling the pain that the, you know, the, the Mullahs, the IRGC crowd. And they're going to try a noctober surprise, probably a week before the election and have a whole volley of missiles that are carried. They'll do that, obviously, because they want a reaction as you point out. But if they can squeeze them, and there is widespread support, and there is, I think people realize the people are on our side. And if there should be another demonstration that, but this time successful. And I remember when the Berlin of Wall fell, two years it took the Soviet Union in six months for most of Eastern Europe. That could change everything. Because for all the talk about forever wars, that he will be criticized and endless wars. And all the misadventures in Afghanistan, 20 years in the combined dead in Iraq and Afghanistan of 70, 400 dead. And over 50,000 wounded. We've only had, we've had about 300 people wounded and 17 dead. And we spent about 75 billion, 18, 18, 18. Yeah, 18 said the president yesterday. Well, we, yeah, I didn't see that yesterday. But so in terms of, if you can note that, that country with 93 million people in its size, and its scientific traditions, it was the main problem with the Middle East. It doesn't forget Israel or anything. Terrorism in Europe, its missiles could hit all, they were going to blackmail Europe and us. And if that stopped and flipped to a pro-Western government like we're seeing in Latin America, that would really change things. And you can see it in Latin America. People did not like the Madural thing. I think that's why Trump, that's what Trump believed for some time over the past year. I don't think he believes that anymore. I think he understands he's dealing with some tough M efforts who want nothing more than just to make us suffer. I think he realizes now. And we engaged with them in a way that has allowed that to happen, unfortunately, with these oil prices and their control over the state of Hormuz. And look, Trump, every president has to learn things for himself. It's kind of like just being a human. Sometimes there are things you have to learn for yourself. And even if somebody else tells you, can't trust these guys, they're not going to negotiate in good faith. These are not good people who will respond to the normal stimuli the way other world actors will, even like a Kim Jong-Un has. I think Trump believes in himself so much that he thinks he can overcome any obstacle or any douchebag on the opposite side, which is both his superpower. And in this particular instance, you can't talk with these people. You can't talk with them. They're incapable of telling the different kettle of fish. Yes, there are theocratic zealotry and you can't talk them, but you can squeeze them into poverty. And that's what that's what we're doing. And we should have done it on day one. But I think they were afraid to have a secondary boycott and all that or they thought it would be quicker. But when you look at Latin America, there were 32 nations in the Caribbean, Central America, Latin America. And when Trump came into office, or the last year about, I think 75% of more anti-American and non-democratic. And now there's only six. There's just six countries. You know, it's Colombia, Venezuela, Salvador, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Peru. They've all flipped. And they only will have our Nicaragua and Cuba are the only real ones that are probably in Paraguay, maybe in Mexico. That's not going so well down in Cuba. No, I mean, that's a radical revolution. And it means that we're not the bad Yankee imperialists that these are grassroots consensual because they saw the United States was, was not going to let Canada take over the Panama Canal. And they were not going to let Maduro keep sending drugs and two million illegal aliens in the United States, which he did many of them. Yeah, yeah. And they were acting on China's behalf. So if that, that could flip the Middle East. It's a very, I mean, he took a enormous risk before the midterms. But we don't know about that. But getting back to JD at some point, so he's going to have to have a strategy that can reconcile these two groups because if Republicans have a very thin, I got to be honest, I'm not looking forward to this. I'm looking forward to what's going to happen on team Dem to watch their infighting and see like, who's going to emerge? Because it's a true mystery over on that side who's going to be the next nominee. I really hope that Trump just hands it to JD or Marco. I'd either one of those, whatever, but like that he makes it clear he doesn't really want a bruising primary in that he passes the baton. And because the Republican party is not in good shape right now. It is divided. Even Trump's own coalition is less supportive of him than it was a year ago. We just pulled the numbers that he's down 14% amongst Republicans versus last August of 2025. He's way down with independence. And we just like team red cannot afford a bruising extended primary fight. It would be much better even though it's an open election year if they could somehow find a way around that by having the current big dog. endorse the next person, and I think he will do that. I'm not too soon 'cause he, you know, this is the apprentice host, but I think he'll do eventually. - I think the short term is maybe bleak. In the sense that 39 out of the last 41 midterms, the end party loses seats, and when they have less than, I think it's 20 or 15 seats, they lose the house. They are less than four margin, they lose the Senate. So the statistics are, and maybe redistricting or maybe, but they're gonna be in a tough fight for the midterms. But they were given a great gift by the overt so democratic socialists of America. All of these people coming out of the woodwork and really telling people what they're for. - Oh, let me ask you a question, although, let me ask you a question on that. I agree with you, these people are radical. But my, I just wanna talk about whether you are right. I don't know the answer that they've been, that the Republicans have gotten a big gift by them becoming the nominees like El Sayed and Michigan and so on, because they're pulling up, like El Sayed is up over Mike Rogers. That guy, Tony Jackson and Maine, he's up over Susan Collins right now. He's, I think he doesn't officially associate with DSA, but there's an affiliation. But my point is simply, they seem to motivate the faction of voters that might not otherwise get to the polls. There's been like a general disgust with the establishment Democrat Party and I'm not defending any one of their radical polls. I know, I know. I'm just talking about sheer politics now. You know, whether that's a net plus for Democrats or a net negative. - But you have to put it in context. I did an interview when a person got very angry 'cause I said El Sayed was gonna have a close race in the primary and he was up, I was quoted nine, 10, 11 point lead. And the same thing, if you look at the last two elections of Susan Collins, she's down from four to six points on election eve. And so what I'm getting at is we know now that the Democratic Party does the following. Their pollsters and their most of them are all liberal, a couple of one or two exceptions. Harvard Harris had Donald Trump beyond the margin of error losing by four points on election night, any one by a point and a half. The Des Moines Register, the gold standard, had him down three points, any one by 12. So Sayed was up by 10 and he won by one. And so I'm not sure that the Democratic parties look at polling different than we do. They look at it as to create momentum and donor contributions up until about the last two weeks. And then they get panicky and they say we can't lie anymore 'cause we're gonna be totally disgraced. So we're going to make it close. We'll say it's three or four points. So I don't put much, but I do, I don't think they'll keep the Senate. I'm not sure about the House, but they were given-- - Do you see that news today? There's just news today about the Senate, which is not great, we don't, I mean this, whatever. It's only September 8th, but I will say just today, Decision Desk HQ, which is an aggregator of polls, posted this on X, the Decision Desk HQ forecast now has the U.S. Senate as a pure toss-up for the first time since early June. The average seat outcome across 1 million simulations remains a 50/50 tie, which would be a narrow win for Republicans because JD Vance would cast the tie breaking vote. But the modal outcomes for the Senate are now about equivalently 50/50 tie and 51/49 dem. Cook Political Report has these same six states as toss-ups and then they go through. And Maine, they've got, these are all toss-ups under Cook, but the dems win according to these projections. Maine, 52%, the dem Troy Jackson wins over Collins, Texas, 53%, Tallarica over Paxton, I just threw up in my mouth. Ohio, 54%, the dem shared Brown over incumbent John Houston for Vance's old seat. Alaska, 58% dem, this Mary Peltola over incumbent Dan Sullivan, who, among other things, is dealing with two other Republicans on the ballot against him, one of whom is also named Dan Sullivan, so there could be a splitting. And then toss-ups, but GOP win, they've got Iowa going that way. And lean dem, they've got Michigan, I'll say, at over microaggers for now. So that's-- Well, I'm just settling, but it's still kind of, it's just got a couple more months. I mean, if you look at wire trumps, popularity is now. It's not that different than Obama, Clinton, and George Bush at this time. So historically, he's got-- - Or Biden, Biden was in popularity. - Biden was more on popular at this time. And Clinton had a disastrous midterm. And Obama had the second worst after Roosevelt's check in '38. So historically, all the odds are against the Republicans. They have a little bit of edge with redistricting, not as much as they thought, and maybe the Supreme Court might give them one racial gerrymandering, one seat. So it's going to be very close. And the tragedy of it is that if you look at the long term with the foreign investment, and I wasn't looking at the short term, but I mean, even this 160,000 jobs were created. Most of them were not government jobs. They were in the private sector, but I think the deregulation and Scott Besant is right. And when the war is over, there's going to be a surplus of oil coming out of Russia and Venezuela and us. And the price will go down, and the foreign investment is there, maybe not what Trump says, 15 trillion, but maybe 10. And more importantly, I was looking the other day, Megan, at software companies, digital media companies, satellite launches, space investment, and military defense companies, and software. Yeah, worldwide, 10 top based on either market capitalization or downloads or usage, depending on-- and bioengineering. In every single category, the America, American companies with 9 of the top 10 are 8 of the top 10. And then when you look at GDP, I went back and looked at what people said 15 years ago that by 2020 to 25, China would have a larger GDP than we did. China has four times the population. It's $10 trillion smaller, still. We're 31 trillion, they're 21. The EU has 100 million more people than we do. They're 21 trillion. And so this country is really on the right track. It's just, I think, partly they neglected the midterms. They're not talking about that the crime is at historical low, or they close the border, or they've deported 3 million people, or any of that, or they talk about-- but even inflation, Biden at average 5.2% over inflation. And then I was listening. I thought, wow, this is really bad. Trump is going to get almost 3% inflation. Then I looked at 1.9, the first year, probably 3% this year. They say lower, but it'll probably be at least 3. But that's a lot lower than 5.1 and almost 21 over the aggregate. You know what it is, Victor? I think they're worried about talking about that because they don't want to sound out of touch. Like, you're fine. Things are great when they know people don't feel that. And part of the problem is-- and I didn't realize this myself until I sat down with a couple of very smart financial people who were explaining that inflation that jacked up those prices is here to stay. Yeah, I think that was-- Once. Biden jacked it up. 21. Those prices went up. It's impossible then to turn it. You can turn down the rate of inflation, which Trump has done. But that inflation that was baked into the prices under Joe Biden is baked in, and they're-- That was handled badly, though. That was handled. That was handled badly. Yeah, well, it's in part the Republicans' own fault because they promised that they would fix it. I mean, they did promise that they'd-- And they should have defined what-- So that's what people wanted. They should have defined what fixing meant. It said, we're going to lower the rate radically. But there's no way we can undo 20%. And when you looked at housing, rent, insurance, staple foods, cars, it was 30% and power. So they said, we're going to come in and we're going to fix the inflation. What they should have said, we're going to have inflation. And that would have been a notable. It's the same thing with Joe Biden. Yes, and to say, look, it's kind of like what Javier Malay did in Argentina, where he said, I'm going to have to do the following 10 things. It's going to cause this amount of pain. Please bear with me. And he did. But Trump could have said that. Like, there are some things I can control and some things I can-- I mean, this doesn't sound like Trump. Right. He's a salesman. He's like, he likes puffery. He likes big, big promise. He doesn't like the measure. Like, well, that I can't do. But I think that they could have-- and they still have time. So I got an argument that they're pretty-- so we can't buy a house under Trump. So I thought, well, OK, I'm going to look at this. So I picked up my phone and I said, what is the percentage of home ownership under Trump versus Biden and Obama? 62% is the historical average. It's 63%. So it hasn't changed much. It still is good or bad as it was under Biden or under Trump. It just stays there at 62, 63%. So in the same thing with inflation, and then I asked myself, "Well, crime is a historical low, and labor participation is a little up, actually, it's about 65%, 64%. So that's good, and we have this jobs report. And when you look at RGDP compared to Europe's per capita GDP or Canada, it's not even close. So why aren't they talking about this? I don't mean raw, raw, talking about it, just say, take a close look at these are what we've done, and this is what these people want to do. They want to bring back the whole Biden agenda, but on steroids. But they're not. That caused this problem to begin with. And they're not getting that out. And they don't even say, instead of Hexeth getting in these fights with the Chief of Staff of the Army or whatever, and it's always misinterpreted or deliberately confused in the media, he should say, we came in and our military was to funk, we were short 46,000 soldiers. We have completely, and one year we've got 50,000 people out of the woodwork that are now enrolled. We have no equipment problem. We have a problem that we have Hexeth soldiers. This was the biggest revolution in military equipment in our history. But nobody says that. In other words, they just keep. I understand why it's a counter-revolution, they're keep hammering, but they need to take a deep pause and consolidate and say, this is what our agenda has achieved. And yes, they need to talk about the socials, but they need to talk about what they've done. And not in a rabbi, everything is great, and there's no one to play to just say, this is what we were confronted with, and this is what we did, and this is what's going to we think happened. The only person that sort of does that in an analytical, confident way is the Secretary of the Treasury, Basant. He's pretty good. He's got Basant. Yeah, he's very good. He's very good, and they need to do that. Part of the problem when I wrote about the first half of the book about the fall, I didn't realize what the extent to what the left was doing, and one of the things that Trump will be remembered for is radically changing the Democratic Party. This is not, and I grew up in a family of Democrats. My siblings are all Democrats, but this is not Bill Clinton's Democrats, not much less Harry Trump. This is something new that we haven't experienced in a long, long time. Maybe in the roles of about 32. These people, they were socialists, and when you look at the Democratic agenda, it's so crazy to say that the socials are trying to take over. If you look at the socialists' agenda at what they said, almost everything except defunding the Pentagon and getting rid of the Senate has been already enacted by -- who gave them the idea of destroying the border, mass amnesties, packing the court, getting rid of the electoral college, bringing in two new states, getting rid of the filibuster, defunding the police, endorsing Black Lives Matter in 2015. He was Keith Ellison that held up the Antifa handbook when he was deputy of the Democratic Party, Heikam Jeffries. He already -- he didn't even endorse Andrew Cuomo, he endorsed Montgomery. The Democratic Party had gone socialists, and Biden's agenda was pretty much the same as what the DSA want with some minor differences. This is a very hard left Democratic Party, it's not -- you really can't deal with it, and they want to do things with immigration and crime and criminal justice, and the universities that will make this country unrecognizable, it is almost now, and I'm speaking from being in the university. The university that I work out has bears no resemblance whatsoever with the university that I went there to get a Ph.D., it's just a foreign climate, and my faculty were all, the faculty that I had, they were mostly European philologist, but they were all left wing, and you never knew it. They were all professional, disinterested, wonderful scholars, and the students were left liberal, but they didn't bring in politics, and they were tolerant, and that's completely gone, and the scholarship is completely mediocre. And can I just say something, one of the things you hear from any academic about Charlie Kirk is they hated turning points, Professor Watch. They had a Professor Watch section on their website for this purpose. Charlie wasn't doing that when it was just normal liberal professor teaching a normal class, but happens to have a different worldview than Charlie Kirk. That's not why that was born, it was born because of these radical professors who mean to take your child and turn him into a Marxist who hates you. Bill Atman was on this show, and he told us about his daughter having that happen to her at Harvard. I'm not making this up. This is actually happened to happen to another set of parents I know who we ski with. This, like, that's why Professor Watch was born. It's not like, oh, you're a lefty who pushes leftist dogma. It's actual indoctrination, radicalization of kids who are there just to get an education. Like, they've gone so far that he had to respond. And I talked to him 10 days before he was killed. I did his show, and he called me back. We talked about an hour, and his whole point was that he was being attacked because he never went to college, and yet he was at a college. And he made the argument to me, I wouldn't be able to do very well at the Oxford debate, which he did wonderfully. And I wouldn't be able to go on campus and debate these PhDs if they had been from the old school. And I said, you're absolutely right. You've got to remember that Stanford Yale now give 80% A's, Charlie, and they have remedial math. So you go and get a brand on your body that says B.A. it means nothing. And you're an auto-di-doc, so you take the Hillsdale courses, Prager stuff. He was really a self-discipline. He read, he would call me and say, what do you think about Spingler's decline in the West? He was reading. And I said, you are better educated than I see most undergraduates with B.A.'s from good schools. So you can go out, and you can debate, and you're better educated than some of the professors. And that's what he understood. And so I get to the point now that if you think, where does all this stuff start? It starts in the university for half the population. We're not having a problem with the working muscular class. I live in an area that's 95% Hispanic. There's no socialist here. Maybe their kids might at the go of the university, but they're all working independent contractors are hard working. They're all legal that I know. They're assimilating. And they don't have those neurosis of this 85% of the DSA or white, urban, upper middle class, but downwindly mobile people with non-marketable sociology, psychology, public policy degree. With advanced degrees? Yes. And they rub shoulders with very wealthy people, and bolder, and the upper west side. And they think, I'm as glib as that guy. I know as much as that investor, that doctor, that lawyer, I should have the same compensation and they're angry. But the university has been a toll, I think $1.7 trillion in debt so they could raise the rate of tuition twice the annual, they could raise the tuition twice the rate of inflation. What I'm getting at, I guess, Megan is that there were all these problems. And I thought that Romney or George W. Bush or McCain would address them. And they kept getting worse and worse and worse, and nobody talked about them, the university reform. Maybe Reagan was the last person that did. But you've got to give Trump credit that he came in and he said the border was ruined. It wasn't open, it was ruined. And we're going to deport people, not going to just give them amnesty. We're going to try to, we're not going to, we're going to go after the criminal justice system. We're going to go after the universities, we're going to go after the media, we're going to go after traditional architecture, we're going to try to, we're going to go after the Smithsonian, which was an atrocity for every time I went there, it was disgusting. So it was a mul- The Kennedy Center. Did you say that? That's another one. Yeah, absolutely. And everybody said he's crazy. It's in perfect condition. The ceiling started to fall the other day. So I'm getting- And it was so, it was an institution for leftists. Now they're like, oh, Trump and Rick Grinnell tried to make it, you know, the Trump, you know what, Trump was trying to tell the right half of the country. You are welcome here too. Yeah, I was walking across the last time I was in campus, a person who's very learned from the left said to me, I can't stand Trump because he's changing the name of the golf of Mexico. I said, well, he had the same amount of coastline as Mexico does, but I said, I walk to work at the Hoover Institution Tower, the iconic tower, I have an office at the top. I was gone one week and I came back and I thought it was weird. I didn't see the street signs and it was always Hunipios Serra Plaza. And all of a sudden, it said Stanford Plaza. And I thought, what happened? happened." And one of my assistants said, "Well, Hunipio Sarah, in the 18th century, whipped Native Americans." So the students got very angry in the faculty and we changed the name. I said, "We changed the name. There's no more Earl Warren Legal Center at UC Bolt Hall." And he said, "What do you mean, Bolt Hall? It hasn't been Bolt Hall in years." He was a racist. And so they were the ones that, what I'm getting at is they did all of these things. They used law fairs. They tore down statues. They changed names. And in that process, they destroyed all the norms and protocols. And then Trump came in and said, "I'm going to wage a counter revolution. And thank you for destroying the protocols because now I can do that in reverse." And then they said, "Only we can do that. You can't do that. We can take that." That's what happened. And I think what he's doing is he's winning the counter revolution. But he really needs a better media team. I really do to accentuate what he's trying to do and what the agenda is and what the logic is behind it. In kind of a tragic sense rather than just to combat it and just say, "I didn't want to do this. I don't want to play this role. But if I don't do it, nobody else will." And we won't have a country. We have 50-- It's a very good point because Trump himself is not. He's not out quite as much as he used to be. When he was on the campaign trail by necessity, he was everywhere. Now that he's president, he's busy. He's got other things he's doing. And we don't see as much of him. And we don't see another proxy of his-- They need a proxy. To the extent we used to see Trump. By the way, did you see Trump as brown here now? It's actually-- I was amazed. Trump said, "He's brown." I don't know what that was. And whatever you say about him, you notice that Trump never-- He never-- All these socialists are wiping through their social media accounts, wiping them out, L.C.I., I didn't say that. And what Trump-- All of his embarrassing things he said, he doesn't ever say, "I didn't say that. I didn't mean that." I don't think there is anything embarrassing. No. I don't think the president gets embarrassed. No, he's authentic. Whatever you say about him. But wait, what do you think of the brown hair? I must know. I got to say it. I kind of like it. I did too. He commented on it. Didn't he? He was making fun of his own hair the other day. He said, "It blew off." And he said, "You got-- I don't know. I saw that." And I was like, "Is that actually Trump?" And then the next I saw him, he was wearing a baseball cap. So I was like, "Oh, maybe he doesn't like it." But I like it. Yeah, he mentioned it. He said, "Everybody thinks I'm bald, but the wind blew." And there was still hair here. It wasn't-- It's not a wind. I am here to tell you. I put my fingers into Trump's hair. It was 2010 or 11, I want to say. I was interviewing him. And I asked him if it was a comb over. And he said, "It's not really a comb over, but it is real." And he invited me to stick my hands right in there. And I did. And I kind of pulled it a little. It's definitely Trump's hair. It's in his scalp, for sure. It's not a toupee. Yeah, I-- Just to-- I just think we don't realize that of the extent of this counter-revolution that he is trying to undo 50 years of political, economical, economic, social, cultural, military, progressivism. And he's in the middle and 360 degrees are calling him, you know, Nazi, everything. They're trying to kill him some people. But he's actually making progress. You can't see it right now, but he is making progress when-- Oh, no, I see it. I can see it at Stanford University. I can see the-- the new president is completely different than the last president. And that's happening around. And the students, they only-- Megan, they only let 8% white males in the last four years when they junk these. That is so-- I know. That is so offensive. That is even worse about it. It's the United States of America. I know. And the worst thing about it was if you were a white male kid, let's say, from East Palestine, Ohio, and you worked really hard and you had a perfect SAT, you were not going to get in because there was only enough slots at 8% to let in wealthy people and athletes. And so when you walked across campus, you didn't see any males really from the working classes. They were very wealthy minorities or wealthy, entitled white kids that had pool. And now they reintroduced the SAT. They promised that they would not use race as a criterion. We'll see with this next year. But they only did that because Trump threatened them. And the same thing with the researchers. I talked to people off the record. Did you really need 45% overhead? No, we didn't. We said we did, but could you get by with 15 or 20%? Yes, we could get by, but don't talk about it. So he-- it's a-- I don't know. It's kind of like the reaction against the Jacobins. It's a counter-revolution that we've never seen. I can't think of it in Sep-Ragan. Reagan tried to do the same, but even in a more limited fashion. I hope you're right. And I hope it stays that way as I have three kids who are going to go off to college in the next, you know, depends on the child, but let's say two to ten years. And-- Never what you have to tell on Megan. I think they've been adequately inoculated against this. I don't think my kids are going to come back of Marxist to me, but I don't want them to have to deal with it. I'd love for them to just let their minds flourish and not be on guard against professors. Send them to Hillsdale College. Yeah, or I'll just send them to you. You can they can sit at the Hoover Institution and you and I on. And Neil Ferguson, you guys can help that. I've tutored a lot of kids, the parents that did that. Wonderful people. Just remember to tell your children, I don't-- I said to mine when they went to college, if you come home in Thanksgiving and you're unrecognizable, please don't come home, because I've not seen it. You won't be going back. No, you won't be. You're going to pay for it. You're going to pay for your own torture. So you go, yeah, that's-- it's in doctoration. It's scary, too. Yeah, no, one of my friends said when their kid came home, you may think that you're now a limousine liberal, but you're not going to be a limousine. It's you can just be a liberal. That's it, because we're not paying and supporting that. One thing is that 34% of the people now have confidence in higher education. It used to be 65. So what they don't understand is that I think this is really valuable. Going to Harvard or Yale or Princeton or Stanford doesn't mean anything anymore. I don't think it does. Are teaching there being affiliated, not in the way they used to be so snobby, because they have delivered-- We can I tell you that a stat I just saw. The average-- the average Harvard graduate 10 years out is earning $85,000 a year. The average plumber in America is making between $63 and $70,000 a year. So if you're in a nicer community, let's call it 70. So that's a $15,000 difference. You don't become a Marxist. You don't have to spend a million dollars on a degree that probably won't do much for you. You don't have to wait those four years to start a family or start putting down roots. When it's that close, when the numbers are that close, college has rendered itself irrelevant. And that's a Harvard grad. I'm sure the numbers are a lot closer when you go down to regular schools that don't have the I.V. crawling out. I don't think people realize that revolution that you tell. I have had-- I have live in a 170-year-old house, 160. So I had a guy come over to do gutters, Mexican-American guy. And he had a company, but he was the only employee. And he had a machine that he actually made his own gutters. And he's self-taught. He's been in the business for 20 years. He's probably 40-something. So I was watching him. He was like a surgeon the way he did it. So I just said to him afterwards we had lunch. And I said, could I ask you a question? How much do you make at your growth? You know what he told me? So I had a bad year. I only made 240,000. That was after his materials. So and then I know all of these formal students I've had at various colleges that will call me and they have very impressive degrees. And they're making 50,000, 60,000 in high-cost states like California. Those are al-said voters. Yeah, especially with student loans. So the university is really the core of it. Well, like you said, I think let's hope it's getting back to the way it used to be because truly, I hope we can get back to the point where we respect Harvard and Princeton. I do too. They're very essential, especially in the STEM. Just get back to teaching. Don't indoctrinate. Yes, I think so. One last footnote, Megan, when you mentioned Karni in gratitude. Karni's too, he says all this anti-American elbows out, blew the national anthem. We're going to general pan-Canadianism so the Quebecies, Quebec people and all that in Alberta. He 95% of his investments are in America and his two of his four children were Harvard and Yale graduates and live in the United States. This is a guy that had-- Oh, wow. Yeah. And he had three passports in Chile. He would come Irish, British, and Canadian. And he lived in the United States for a while. So he's trying to gen up this hatred of the United States when he himself is a total hypocrite. And the people are going to really suffer when this gets going because we haven't known you. you and I, everybody doesn't know Canada, but so what? But once they gin up that hatred, and it gets into the American media, people are starting to get angry about it. And when they read that he won't disclose the details, and he's closing it up to this murderous, Maoist government in China, it's gonna be bad, bad, bad, economically. - It's a bad decision by him. - It's terrible. - Listen, all of you can and should read more about all of this. This is basically the theme that we've been discussing here today in Victor's The Counter Revolution, the fall and rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. Get it now and support VDH. Great to see you, my friend. Thank you for being here and we will see you all tomorrow. Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show, no BS, no agenda, and no fear.