Victor Davis Hanson: Socialism Sounds Great Until You Run Out of Other People’s Money

The blue states are broke, and they don't understand human initiative. If somebody feels he's going to go out and work a 15-hour day with a brilliant idea, and the government's going to come in and take 70% of the fruits of his labor, he's not going to do it. If you raise taxes so high, you're going to drive the economy underground. You're going to get no money. I don't think the left understands that if you squeeze the neck of a goose, you're going to break its neck. It's not going to lay any eggs. Hello, and welcome to Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. This is our Saturday edition. We're going to look at Gerald Ford and William Henry Harrison in the middle segment. The two presidents, Victor, will be talking about. But before that, we will look at some news, a little bit of an update on the elections. There were a couple of, I mean, like primaries. There were a couple of things points that we didn't talk about, so we'll do that. And then Victor's going to give us an update on the around situation. So stay with us for that, and we'll be right back. I'm Brendan Steinhauser, CEO of the Alliance for Secure AI. We're working every day to make sure that AI is safe, secure, and aligned with American values. Welcome back, Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. Victor's the Martin and Neil Anderson senior fellow in military history and classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. He has a website, victorhanson.com. The name of the website is the blade of Perseus. So please come join us there for everything Victor articles, podcasts, and links to purchases books. So Victor, before we go to Iran, there were just one topic in particular that I didn't, we didn't discuss and I had on my agenda. It was the polls on Hong, Francesca Hong, that were had her 20 points ahead in some cases. And I know that it was a very thin 4,000-ish vote that the other guy won by. But nonetheless, the polls couldn't have been more wrong in your thoughts on that. Well, these were regional polls, although the national polls have to be more careful because they have big contracts and they have some reputation, even though they're crooked too. But it follows El Sayed. He was ahead by 10 points in most of the Michigan polls. And the regional polls always say that they know the state better than the now, you know, than Emerson or Harvard, Harris, Gallup. So he wasn't, he won by one percent. Hong was up 10 in 11, another 12 in 1, 20 in 1. So it's supposed to be a blowout. The guy had really a quality had kind of stopped pulled out. And his name was still on the ballot, but he didn't put any money into it. She had a lot of money. And he won. We don't know exactly the votes were not quite tabulated, but it might be by one and a half percent. He won. I mean, she lost, Crowley won. And so the question is, why are they doing this? And we have to go back to the 2024 election when Donald Trump, 48 hours before the polls closed, Harvard, Harris said he was going to lose beyond the, the allowable measurable measure of error. And what does that mean? It meant four points. Three is usually the measure of error, tolerance for error. And so Harris was very happy. That was a shared NPR poll, too. And Donald Trump won by one and a half. So it was five and a half points off. Everybody was shocked the last week, the Des Moines Register, and they were supposed to be the best poll. And Indiana came out and said that Kamela Harris and this red, red, red, red state, the reddest of all those metals. It's, it's redder than Iowa. It's redder than Ohio. It's better than any of them in that area. And guess what? He said that Kamela was going to win by three. I think she lost by 12, 15 points off. So we have to ask herself, if they're so far off, what are they doing? And they're always going in one direction. See if it was, well, there was a poll that had the Republican guy 10 ahead or the moderate Democrat 10 ahead. It never works that way. So what our pollsters are doing is they are either deliberately selecting people, they don't tell us about to get a pre-anticipated result. Or they get the data and they just, they throw stuff away and add stuff. It doesn't mean anything then. And why are they doing it? It's to get momentum, and attention, and money. And so nobody ever heard of Hong. And then all these polls came out that, oh my god, this crazy socialist is going to be the next governor of Wisconsin because the democratic primary votes all tabulated together much more than the Republicans. And she's 10, 15, 20 ahead in the polls. I better write her a check. I better go do it at door four. I better give her a call and see if you'll help my business. That's what has aimed at. It's totally corrupt. And they'll keep doing it until they embarrass themselves so much that nobody will take them seriously. And they're getting near that right now. Yeah, they sure are. Just one, another quick thing that L. Syed, he's got a very strange campaign going on. He has a tele-tubby, almost video out on how to vote and what to do voting on Instagram. And it looks just perill if that's how you. He's an adolescent. He wears a cowboy hat. He kind of looks like the village people. He does suggestive dancing. He always tries to show his biceps. He always tries to got a cowboy hat on. He had made fun of football and said it was toxic masculinity. So now he's challenged mic Rogers to a football game, one-on-one football game with him. I guess he played football at some college or maybe in high school, but he's cutting all these videos that make him look like every man, a Michigan person. And then he's dealing at the same time with this whole trove of social media postings that are coming out. That he is an observant, Shia Muslim, and then he follows Sharia law, which if you read the principles of Sharia law, it has things like taking off a hand for theft or stoning women for adultery. And it allows polygamy, for example. So that's what he believes in. And then if anybody questions him, they're supposedly Islamophobic. And then he supports this Hassan Piker. He said, well, he just said a few things and he's kind of apologized. No, they weren't just a few things. He said he that we deserved 9/11. The 3000 Americans could be killed. He didn't just say 9/11 was owed to us for our sins, but he said that we have to go out in the streets and pour blood and kill the wealthy people. That's what Lenin and Stalin said. When are the wealthy people going to get a clue? In fact, they do. Sergey Brunsworth, I guess, is about $300 billion and he's going to spend $100 million, maybe a billion here in California to stop this millionaire or billionaire tax that's going to tax them to death. He could lose $10 billion. His way of thinking, if I spend $5 billion and I win, I made $5 billion. That's how much they want from him. And what would they use it for? Would they balance the budget? Would they finish high speed rail? No, they all talk about the same thing. We're going to have universal Medicare for everybody. Medicare is broke. We're going to be $40 trillion in debt within two years. And nobody says how they're going to pay for it. People on the right don't, people on the left don't, but then the people on the right are not, they're worried about it and they're not proposing these vast new programs. And why are they need these vast new programs? Because they said that we didn't need borders. So now we have 54 million people who came in and that's 16, 17, percent of the population. And they haven't, they don't have English facility, they don't have capital, they don't have professional skills. Many of them came illegally, they don't know English, and they just crossed the border and they dumped them into the social service system. So then they go to a doctor and the doctor says, have you ever been to a dentist? You've got four rotten teeth. No, I just took your eye pressure. Have you ever been to an ophthalmologist? No, well, you need to go there too, because you've got possible pre-glocoma. Then they give them a digital exam. Have you ever had your PSA, well, you have a swollen prostate. So let me write this out now. Referral to urologists, we referral to ophthalmologists, we referral to cardiologists. Oh, I hear a little arrhythmia. But many of these people never been to a doctor. And then the left gets very excited. And then they said, well, we're an all-service thing. You need a public house. So we're going to get you a rent controlled apartment. And then your children, that child looks like he has a tension deficit disorder. He can get social security disability. And you have counsel. You need, you know, food stamps. So it's a multi-service. And we spend billions of dollars on it. And all they want is to blame us for being not generous enough. Let's let in more people. So we spend more money that we don't have in borrow. Yeah, you're right. And every time you watch these democratic socialists out on the campaign trail, they're never talking about how they're going to pay for all their giveaways. And so that's really disturbing. They just say, we're going to go after oligarchs. And I'm sure that mandami could do what Jeff Bezos did. He could take over Amazon and deliver anything, you know, millions of different commodities to your doorstep all over the nation. Very quickly, you get on Amazon. If you're a primary, you order something that says it'll be here in three hours sometimes. And then a person shows up in the middle of nowhere with your package very professionally. And, you know, they're going to replicate that. Or we should say to them, why doesn't the department NASA take over starlink? That would be good. How about NASA taking over the X rockets, too? That would be good. And we can have, I don't know, a government company take over Tesla, it would surely run better. That's how they think. And they hate the people who create preeminence for the United States. It's just a very bad sort of envy, the bad envy, the heziotic envy. I didn't get what I deserve. That's what runs socialists. And I'm going to make somebody else suffer for it. Yeah. And they get whipped up. So throughout history, they say we're going to take that villa. We're going to take that farm. We're going to take that shop. And then they do. And then he's a nansect of the people. He's a praise on it. And then they end up in violence. And that's what they're doing. They've already done it with Jews. They've done it with Israel. They've done it with very wealthy people. They've so demonized them that they're public enemies now. And when we're watching this Luigi Manjioni trial, it's an open-shot case. We know there's-- he's on video for about a week. Carefully planning this murder. And he's shown shooting Brian Thompson, the United Hell CEO, what's the mystery? But we're going to drag this out so that we're going to get two leftist-- I guess we're going to get two leftist East Coast jurors who are going to be jury nullificationers. And he's going to get off, I bet, or he gets a light sentence. Because he's become a cult figure. He gives interviews to the Washington Post. They name an opera after him. They love him because he was a pseudo-revolutionary that killed somebody from the middle class. Yeah, back to the theme of Friday, the violence of the left. All right, Victor, let's go ahead and do an update on Iran. I know you had things you wanted to talk about, so go ahead. We're down to about 82 days. And some of you were saying, well, Victor, you said in February, say, don't worry, we have five months, four months, three months, two months. Yes. And the kinetic operations have ceased for about three weeks. We had about 160 days, and of that 160 days, we only had about 55 of an actual war. And now Trump is trying to transmogrify this whole war into something like last year he hit the Houthis. Remember, they were in the Red Sea when he came in, and they were basically stopping all traffic. And he came in and bombed them and sent missiles. And kind of mold the grass. So now we have warships that go through the Red Sea. And every once in a while, we bombed them. That's the model, I think. The only problem is Iran has 93 million people on the size of Texas and Arkansas. So if you're going to try to filter what he says, because he's all over them out, number one, it is true that they have destroyed their nuclear military industrial complex. It is true that they're not selling oil. It is true they're not receiving very many if any imported goods. It is true they cannot trade overland by rail to China or Russia. And the United States Navy is blocking almost all the traffic into Iran and out. We don't know the extent they can even fly in supplies from the other countries that are sympathetic in the Middle East. But so he destroyed a half trillion dollars and a half century worth of military investment. But this crazy group says that they're not going to listen to him and they're going to keep this trade open. And they won. And so Trump is basically saying, OK, you say what you want. I'm your banker. I have a blockade. I have you completely debanked. I have all your checking accounts frozen, your savings account. I'm going after all your foreign assets that you have. You have no money coming in. I'm destroying 500 million a day. You have a rest of population. And I'm just going to continue it. I don't need many people to do that because you don't have much to stop it. And then it's very similar to-- when the war broke out, April of 1861, they needed a strategy. William Winfield Scott was a septiginarian. He was very heavy. He'd been the hero of the Mexican War, but that was 20 years earlier. And he came up with a plan. He was the architect of the Anaconda plan, named after a Python-like snake. And so the idea was they were going to go around all of the ports, Charleston, Savannah, then go a mobile bay, New Orleans, et cetera, and cut off all of their exports of cotton. So they would have no revenue. They only had three ships when the Civil War broke out. So the rest were scattered everywhere, but it finally became very effective. And so I think that's-- we could call his plan Anaconda too. I'm going to squeeze these people. So hard, we're not going to have-- we're not going to fight him. We're not going to lose people. They don't have very many missiles. If they do send follies of missiles out and attack our bases, then I'll hit them even harder. But for now, I'm just going to squeeze them, and it's going to be kind of off the radar. And the price of oil will be about $70, not too bad. And we're going to pump more oil and natural gas. And within a year, the whole thing will disappear year and a half because the Saudis, the Gatari, the Umani's, they're all racing to create new non-straight of Hormuz pipelines. So they've got pipelines already to the Gulf of Hormon. They're going to double that capacity. They've got a huge one all the way from the Saudi or oil fields to the Red Sea. They're going to double that one. The Turkey is working with Syria to have a pipeline through Syria to the Mediterranean. People are suggesting that Israel could work with Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and allow a pipeline to go off through its country out to the Mediterranean so that nobody would even need to go into the strait of Hormuz unless these countries wanted to trade or they wanted imported goods or whatever. And so that's his attitude. He has the advantage. And I think there's something to be said to that. I know Jack Keen and a lot of people are saying, "We've got to hit him really hard." Well, you might have to hit them because I do think they'll have an October surprise right before the election as if things are simmering down. They will try to send their last volley or something to get our attention. And then Trump will have to hit them hard and then you'll have the present day voting that being present and voting on Election Day, and that will look to them bad. They did say something that was quite strange. And I don't know what the Democrats are going to do about it. They said that their strategy was rope adult just to wait it out. And they said, "Trump won't be here in two and a half years." And we'll get a different administration. Think of what that said. In other words, they were just saying the Democrats have appeased us all the time when we get away with murder. So they'll come back in once we win the midterms and disgrace the Republicans, win them by causing all those problems in Middle East. And then they'll let us get a bomb or they'll let us do whatever we want. It'll be Obamacare, Obamarandio all over again. Joe Biden all over again. Victor, let's welcome back a sponsor bar and I notice you have their watch on today. We tend to, yeah, it's beautiful. We tend to forget that civilizations are relentless by their politics than by what they made. The tools, the objects, the things built well enough to outlast the people built them. 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VAER watches.com/V.D.H. That's again VAER watches.com/V.D.H. and get yourself a var watch today. And we'd like to thank our watch for sponsoring Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. So Victor, you while you were talking, you reminded me that L. Syed also is trying to present himself as the America first candidate and that is almost laughable, but such as it is. But I wanted to go on to Russia. Russia apparently has taken off the ballot the only piece party that they have. It's called Yabloku. And they are they're not they're going to be off the ballot. They they did it for suspicious reasons, which are they violated copyright on a song. You know, you would think somebody would be fine or something, but they pulled them completely off the ballot. Listen to what he said, Putin, there was a brief tape of him discussing this. And he said, Ukraine doesn't really exist. It's always been Russian. This was an aberration of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and it will be corrected. And he said basically that the whole post-war order in Eastern Europe shouldn't exist. There was no Poland for, you know, until the Versailles Treaty, and then it disappeared during World War II, then it reappeared. It's kind of funny because he's at his nadir of military and economic power, but he's talking as if he's more aggressive and more grandiose than ever, but I don't know how he's got the money or the manpower to fulfill all of these objectives. He's getting very desperate RFK's son by his first wife was actually fighting for Ukraine. He was a volunteer and Putin put out a, you know, a bounty on him. And so he's kind of scrambling. And Ukraine has done so much damage to Russia. They just had a big oil refining bat way way into deep into Russia. Russia had no way of stopping it. And if they start producing patriot missiles, then they will be pretty much protected. I don't know what his ultimate strategy is other than he's ill and he's old, but it's going to be a deadlock. And somebody's going to come in and say, wherever the battlefield is now, we'll negotiate 30 miles on either side. And then he'll go back and say, I took 50, I adjusted the border by 50 miles or something. And I have Russian dead he'll try to claim that nobody will be buying it. But it's, it's very strange about the Ukraine war that and the Israeli war. People were on the right and Americans were split over Ukraine and aid. We've given almost $200 billion now. And now they're starting to warm up to Ukraine because it's self-confident and it's autonomous and it's making progress. But at the same time, they're fighting were, were since the Ukraine war started on February 24, 25th of 2022, we've given them almost 200 billion. And that period, both before and after October 7th of 2023, we've given Israel about 30 billion. So almost nine times, you know, and yet everybody is saying that Tucker is saying that Israel is running US foreign policy. That's what the, and that's what the left is saying. All support for Israel has collapsed. So I haven't seen anything like this since Jerry Ford in 1974. He still had Henry Kissinger. He inherited from Nixon. But the Yom Kippur War, it was similar that the Arabs attacked Israel first and caught him off guard just like October 7th. And then they, for the first three or four days, they killed about 6,000 Israelis. They were on the move. And then Israel kicked in Nixon insisted. They be supplied in October of 73. They had trapped the entire Egyptian, Egyptian Third Army. They had about a quarter million Egyptians out in the Sinai desert. And they had no way of eating or drinking water. And then we saved them. The Americans did, we told Israel to back off. And then again, as like October 7th, the October 7th Arab terrorist started this. Yom Kippur War 50 years earlier, they started it. That was a preemptive war that they fought to get back to Sinai. They had lost in the 67 war. What they understand is, we public opinion then was on the side of Israel. Public opinion is not on the side of Israel anymore. It's about 60%. But almost 80% of Democrats hate Israel. And why do we still support Ukraine? I do. But why does others not show that same support for Israel given that we used to support Israel and given they were attacked first and given we've already given nine times more aid to Ukraine than we have the Israel and Israel has been the target of 30,000 drones, missiles, rockets. It's from Iran and it's three terrorist entities. So it's one of the most remarkable things I've ever seen because the last time we saw this was in 73, Jerry Ford came in after the resignation of Nixon in 74. He got he wrote a letter to the Israeli government and said, you're going to be hearing from me. We don't want to support you anymore. And you are being disruptive. And so they were supposed to conclude a peace agreement from the 73 war. But they but beggin didn't want to at first. And beggin was graph. He was snarly. And Amar Sadat was. You know, he was, hi, Henry to Kissinger. Henry, how are you? And then to Jerry, Jerry Ford. Yeah. So he's a very good guy. And beggin was kind of. And I don't know. We that was a that was the lowest point in Israeli American relations was 1974, 75 and 76. And it didn't get better with Jimmy Carter. I didn't get better until Reagan. But. And then we remember there had been low points. And now it's even worse with our relations with Israel, not the Trump administration. But I'm talking about the public support for Israel. I've written an article on our website behind the paywall. Why is this happening? I'm running one today, and it's immigration, 53 million people from the former third world who hated Israel. Many of them from Muslim countries, China. In addition to that, it's Israel is no longer small, and weak, it's 10 million people. It's got a huge GDP, it's the most sophisticated country in the Middle East. It's the only democracy, and it's got a superb military, and they're very envious of it. Hate it. Hate it with a passion. And then we have whipped up on the left a little bit on the right, although I would make a difference. No one that's running for office will appear with Marjorie Tater, Green, Thomas Massey, Candace Owens, or Tucker. Apparently, a lot of people want Hassan Parker right there by him, for office. In contrast on the left, right, so the right doesn't entertain anti-Semitism. No, they haven't tolerated anti-Semitism like the left has welcomed it. But it's a very disturbing time. Yeah, sure is. Well, Victor, before we go to another break, just shortly, I wonder if you have any thoughts on Carolyn Levit, who is leaving her role as press secretary at the end of this month, I believe it is. But she's decided to go be a mom. Well, when you look back, I was mentioned Jerry Ford, Ron Nesson was an NBC reporter, and you look back at all of those reporters. They were all kind of-- they all fit the stereotype of, you know, they had little sleeve supporters, and they wore sunglasses, and they smoked a cigar. And they knew all the press guys. They had drinks with them. And then it was kind of a collegial deal. But that's it. That's ended. Now you're having a lot of women. We had Jean Pierre. She was terrible, because she couldn't tell the truth. Caley McEnany, I think. Caley was set the model for Carolyn, because she came with her books of data. Carolyn's kind of memorizes it. Caley gets onto a role, and then she just June. She's got a target, and then it's like cock, pullback, shoot. Caley was a little bit more nuanced and talked and argued with them. But I think the attitude now is these people hate Trump so much, and all the questions from them are so loaded. Don't give them any respect, and Carolyn hasn't. And she's pretty good. But she's very attractive. She's photogenic, and she handled them very well. But she didn't get into an analytics with them. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. No. And it was Caroline that you were describing as at target practice. Yeah. It is. She was. Yeah. And it's become a feminine position with Jen, circle back, Saki, Saki. I have. Yeah. That's a good question. I'll just circle back. She never answered, though. And then Caley, and then Jean Pierre, she didn't, I felt bad for her. She didn't know anything. They didn't inform her or anything, or she couldn't, she couldn't. She kept insisting Joe Biden was vigorous and robust. And I don't know if there was any pressure for her to leave, I doubt it. It's very hard to have two little tiny children, husbands in his sixties, I think, and to have that type of job, but travel all over the world, you can't do it. You can't do it. No. It would be very difficult. I'm sure that it was clear the demands on her were much. We'll probably get somebody from Fox. Yeah. Another blonde coming in, that'll be great. All right, Victor, let's welcome back. Our sponsor, Pure Health Research. If you want to drop extra pounds, boost energy levels are reduced swelling in your legs and feet, then this message is for you. Pure Health Research is on a mission to make America healthy again. And two of their best-selling health supplements are leading the way. First is liver health formula. Over 100 million Americans have a sluggish liver riddled with fatty deposits. This can kill your metabolism, pile on the pounds, and make you feel tired. Liver health formula, it takes care of all that. It supports thriving liver health with special ingredients like artichek extract and milk thistle. This is one of the easiest ways to slim down and be volatile as your energy levels. Next is limb system support. 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In the 19th century, they called it enteric fever. I think they did until recently. It's a waterborne disease, kind of like a severe form of, it's, I think it's a bacterium, but it's, the symptoms are it can dehydrate you and kind of like cholera, you know what I mean, it makes it, and it's, it's in cities of the 19th century, they didn't have sewage system. So a city upriver would dump it sewage in, it would go down river in the next city, would use it for their drinking water. But he had been, you know, he, he was an old man for 19th century norms at 68 when he was elected, and he had been a Virginia aristocrat and slave owner. He was pro-South pro-Confederate, but he was seen kind of as a moderate. He was famous because of, to come to the famous, he was probably along with Pontiac. He was probably of the pre-Western Native Americans, you know, like a, like Geronimo and the rest of them, Cochise, Sitting Bull, but the earlier tribes on the east side of the Mississippi River, he, he and Pontiac were probably the best known, and he had this idea of a conglomeration of tribes and to unite, and then to be stationary, they had a little town called Profit Town, and people were really scared of them because they were starting to get western arms, they were starting to understand how, you know, to supply an army, and so they, in a series of war that culminated in the war of 1812 because they joined the Canadian, the Canadians used it, and at Tippie Canoe, the Battle of Tippie Canoe, William Henry Harrison, won the battle and to come so it was killed. But that was 30 years before he became president, he was well known, but there were so many people ahead of him, like Jackson and Martin Van Buren, and so he, he was a late-comer. He didn't really do anything in 31 days, I guess all you could say was that his son, I think, was John Tyler, and I think John Tyler was the only, the only man in America whose father was a president, and his son was a president, because Benjamin Harrison was the grandson of William Henry Harrison. So there's not much to talk about him, William Henry Harrison. He had pretty much all of the agendas of a moderate slave owning, if I could use that oxymoron southerner. In other words, he was against Tara, Tara, he was a moderate, he wasn't for disunion, but he felt that there was going to be an inevitable clash because the interest of the north and the mid-Atlantic states and now the new upper Midwest were antithetical to Virginia and the South. But he's in this ambiguous position because he's from Virginia and Virginia gave land along with Maryland to carve out Washington, D.C. where the government of the Yankees was. That was always the paradox of the Civil War. It was everybody said, "Well, the North doesn't have to invade the South. All the South has to do is stay independent and fight on them. They defense it. They should have told Lee that. But on the other flip side is the Northern capital was in the South. You know, and that made it very vulnerable. So we don't know much about him. If you go to Jerry Ford, everybody liked Jerry Ford. He had been Speaker of the House. I think he was a Republican from Michigan, football player. He had no desire. I think he was the first president that had not been unelected. He had not been elected. He was the first president who had not been elected president, nor had he been elected vice president. Remember how he came? Nixon had Spiro Agne, who the left hated, and they felt was utterly incompetent. And he had some rumors that he had been less than honest and business dealing. And he was touring the country with, you know, nattering nabobs of negativity. William Sapphire wrote his speeches, but it was his insurance policy. It was kind of like Kamala Harris. You were not going to remove Joe Biden early in his term, what you should have done, because you would have had her and she would have destroyed the country. So they did not want Spiro Agne. And so right before the whole water gate reached the climax, they went and dug up all charges that as Maryland governor, he had sold contracts for favors. And he had famously played Nolo Contendere. I choose not to contest. It's not quite a guilty plea. And he got off and then they, everybody said, who's he's going to point? He kind of blew it. He said, I'm going to point good old Jerry Brown. I mean, Jerry Ford, everybody loved Jerry Ford. They kind of made fun of him because he was a great University of Michigan football player. And he said, he was kind of like Kamala Harris. He had word salads. And he fell down a couple of times and he was a Saturday nightly with Chevy Chase was always falling down doing his own stunts. And then as people said, he got hit in the head. And he was a moderate Republican and he appointed in place of Spiro Agne. He moved up from vice president to president without an election to finish Nixon's term. And then he moved, he got, there was an opening vice president. So he selected Nelson Rockefeller who was even more liberal than he was. He wasn't a liberal, he was an old fashioned moderate Republican. You can see where this is all going because you're going to have a Reagan counter revolution against this. And he had Henry Kissinger kept him on Secretary of State, which the right said was too soft on communism, et cetera, et cetera. And so then he was, what is he known for? The bad things, he had these little buttons. We have them. I saw them when I was a graduate student. There was a Republican booth at the Stanford campus and they would come by get your win button. They were red and they had WIP inflation now. You're all supposed to wear this because inflation was 12 and a half percent. And we were importing a lot of oil and gas, there had been embargoes. And then the other thing he did that really sunk him, they were very idealistic. And he gave Nixon a pardon. So when he came in, everybody said, this is the worst, this is worse than the cricket bargain. This is worth the John Quincy Adams Henry Clay deal. This is worse than the election of 1876. This is cricket because Nixon deliberately picked the only person who would have pardoned him. People said, everybody liked him because they were cutting, reporters were cutting news clips of him getting up in the morning at five in the morning and he was making the butter sandwiches by himself and on TV and he was cooking in the White House. And then he had no protocol. I said, New York Times, it's good to see every man, he's every man, every man. And then they turned on him, of course, when Jimmy Carter ran and he had to get a more conservative so he dumped in '76, he dumped Nelson Rockefeller, the billionaire and got Bob Dole. It's kind of a mistake. I like Bob Dole, but in the vice president debate, he was, you know, it was Walter Mondale, Walter Mondale was younger and happier and Bob Dole, Jimmy Carter, you know, how he started was. Well, one was Wilson, World War II was, you know, Roosevelt and then you had Harry Trillin in Korea and then you had Johnson in Kennedy in Vietnam. It was all true, but then people were thinking, yeah, but don't you think we should have fought but we're two. What are you saying? He had been a wounded Bob Dole, but he was cranky and it didn't go and they loved Mondale and hated Bob Dole. And so the second thing he did to lose support, he gave a blanket amnesty to anybody who had skipped out on the draft and gone to Canada or was it, was in jail for refusing to enlist. And that was several thousand, tens of thousands of people and it was probably necessary for everybody to forget about it. But man, everybody got angry and so those two things plus inflation, plus his vice president pick kind of doomed him. So he was only president from seven or 75 to January of 76 and he didn't really, he tried to save us and Vietnam, you know, Kissinger and he said to the Democrats, we have a Paris Peace Corps. It's all settled. There is an autonomous selfie at norm. I know we've lost 50,000. There's no troops there on the ground, but we just have to give it air support. Give it money and it can protect it from the north. No, they cut off all the aid and then you saw what happened. The whole country just collapsed and the North Vietnamese just kind of like a Sunday drive it drove down highway one and there was no opposition and the South Vietnamese crumbled. Then we had, I can remember Jerry Ford for two reasons. One is he led in hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asians and in those days it was unheard of of selecting one little place and putting everybody there. They were things like the shellfish industry fishing near New Orleans, the Louisiana coast and Fresno, California was one. I think we had 80,000 mong and Southeast Asians and it was a disaster to the boat people. It was horrible, that picture on the U.S. Embassy of everybody climbing and trying dangling from ropes to get up there and helicopters and then they were going out to U.S. aircraft carriers and they were pushing jets or good health off the side to make room for the refugee landings. It was just terrible. He lost and because the Roosevelt, I excuse me, I mean the Rockefeller, Jerry Ford, wing was over with. George H. W. Bush had very much wanted to be his chosen vice president after he was elevated to the presidency to take Jerry's place to be his vice president once Ford was president and they tabled that and they thought he was too conservative. That shows where the Republican Party was. George H. W. Bush was too conservative and so this was the era of lose nobly. They did not want to win ugly, they wanted to lose nobly. It wasn't really until Reagan came in and he ran a tough campaign and then George H. W. Bush ran a tougher one against Ducaccus. That was Lee Greenwater, excuse me, Lee Outwater that he just destroyed Ducaccus and after that was he said, "Well, you don't want to win that way, I win. It's too dirty to win that way. But we want to lose nobly and that ushered in the Bob Dole campaign of '96 and the George. W. Bush of 2000 and then the George W. Bush, they kind of got a little tough there with John Kerry, but then it was John McCain and Mitt Romney. I mean, those campaign, Obama ran a really dirty, mean campaign and they didn't do much about it. That's all chain, that's what brought, they created Trump because Trump said I'm going to win ugly anyway. I'm tired of losing no blame. I'm Marquis of Queensbury rules. He had nothing to lose though because the Democrats were already going to try to make him look ugly, whether he did it in a ugly way or not. He did and his whole idea was I have nothing, I have no reputation. I was always an ostracized in New York. I hung around with that. You know, just reputable people. I, you know, grade B movie stars and boxing people and boxers that do obvious reputations and I don't care what you say about me. He won. Yeah. All right, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about Tucker interviewing Hunter Biden and a little bit more about the Taylor Swift Act tax in Rhode Island. You've said a few things about these wealth taxes, but I just want to bring things to the fore. Stay with us and we'll be right back. Every state is home to significant historic sites that tell the American story, but not every site is telling that story honestly and fairly. That's why the Heritage Foundation created the Heritage Guide to Historic Sites. This interactive guide equips American citizens with the tools they need to enjoy the sites that depict some of the greatest moments in our nation's history, analyzing them for historical accuracy and provides resources for families or educators planning a visit from Mount Vernon to Independence Hall to Gettysburg and more Americans deserve transparency and sites that steward our history faithfully deserve our gratitude. The Heritage Guide to Historic Sites invites every American to rediscover the places and stories that define our nation whether it's across the country or in your backyard. Visit historic sites dot heritage dot org to start your adventure today. Welcome back. Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. You can find Victor on social media. He's on X. His handle is @vdhanson and on Facebook @hansonsmorningcub. So join him there if social media is your news outlet. So Victor maybe first the Taylor Swift Tax in Rhode Island. I know we've said a few things about how the left plans to pay for things. But just to bring it to the attention of your audience there. These blue states are planning wealth taxes, mansion taxes, and second home taxes. And so the Rhode Island has this Taylor Swift Tax. I believe it's a second home tax that they are implementing. They're following California Los Angeles's real estate tax. So that if your property I think it's worth more than 10 million. There's a surcharge on it. Well, they're broke. They're broke. I mean, there's an article today where at 32 trillion that we're going to have 40 trillion coming up. And the blue states are broke. Their pensions are on they're unsustainable. California's per system's unsustainable. The unions demands are unsustainable. The federal government can't and see that when you have 37, 38% tax rate. And then you're living a blue state with another 10 or 12. And then you have your payroll taxes. And then you have Medicare or Obamacare and Medicare. It's 55 or 60%. And it's not like the old days, I saw El Saeed say, well, we're going to go back to the 80 or 90% Roosevelt rate when we attacks people. Yeah, you don't know anything about American history, Mr. El Saeed. There were so many write-offs that Reagan got rid of when he just had basically three categories. When he got down to 30%, 28%. You couldn't write off all that stuff. The depreciation was very, maybe they creeped back in. But it was pretty tough. And the effective rate was just probably as high as during the Roosevelt period because nobody paid that 80 or 90%. I was at a group of, speaking to a group of very, very wealthy people in their 70s, CEOs about five years ago. And I said something to the effect, what was it like when you guys were doing business in the 50s and 60s when the tax schedules were 80 and 90% on the top brackets? And they said actually it was a lot better than it is now. You could write off everything. You said we wrote off everything. We didn't really have to pay much taxes. Nobody paid that rate of the very wealthy. And so I don't know if that's sustainable to have almost no write-offs and then to have these high tax rates, we've never quite done that before. I don't think the left understands that if you squeeze something, if you squeeze the neck of a goose, you're going to break its neck. And they keep doing it and doing it and both rhetorically and with these millionaire, billionaire taxes. And they don't understand human initiative. If somebody feels that he's going to go out and work a 15-hour day with a brilliant idea and the government, state, local, federal is going to come and take 70% of the fruits of his labor. He's not going to do it. And you can see it here in California. They should all come to California. We have a 13.2 income tax. And I think, and nobody wants to talk about it, it's a taboo subject, but we have the biggest black market, I think, of all the 50 states and probably of bigger than many nations' black market. Because when you go to that, when I go to local banks in this tri-county area, you see people taking cash out all the time. And you see people depositing cash. And then you see you talk to people, and they have safes. They work for cash on the weekend, and then they buy things in cash. And I can remember going, I won't mention the name of a reputable car dealer, and I bought a ram truck. And he said, "Now, how are we going to pay for this? You want to finance it?" I said, "No, I have the money in my savings account. Well, you want to pay cash?" I said, "Do you mean cash all at once? Yeah. Because I've been saving up." And he said, "No, I mean cash." I said, "Do you mean $70,000? Where would I have, how can I get $70,000?" I don't even have $1,000 in cash. So people do it all the time. And so you get the impression that if you raise taxes, what I'm trying to say, so high, you're going to drive the economy underground. But these people are economically illiterate. They really are. So Mondami and all of the people like him, Mondami had a really bad week. You didn't ask me about that, but he cooked up the idea that is American-born wife who is of Syrian background wanted to go to the two most dangerous places in the Middle East, Syria, and Lebanon, that are active combat zones. I don't know why. He said he wanted her husband said that the police were racist and homophobic and he'd like to defund them at one incarnation. Then they wanted in what he did to go escort her and some John. She'd just come back from some little touchy feeling Islamic therapy. I didn't think they had that in Islam, where she went to Mediterranean Island, where you get a spa, then you talk a cycle bottle. Only it's about Islam. So he had that happen. Then they went to court and said, you can't do this. You can't make allegations that people have two homes and presume them guilty and give 21 days. Then when everybody's on summer vacation and then your website's crash and they can't. So he had to back off under a court order on that. Then in addition to that, so he had that disaster and then he went to a police kind of a banquet or outdoor event and they started booing him. Then he said that he's not- he put his head in the news. He's not very bright. He just has that social smile and he said, well, he was asked, how are you going to stop people just saying you know, they're going to drive in from New Jersey or Pennsylvania. They'll drive in on just to get a pickup and lower up all this groceries at 30% less, according to you, do they have to show that they're a resident? And he said, "Oh, yeah, yeah, they have to be residents and they have to be poor." And they said, "Well, how are you going to prove it?" And he says, "She's going to tell you." And she said, "Well, we're going to have a special ID. Well, how you get a special ID? You have to have some kind of ID to get an ID." And so, and this is all coming in the background, you know, the federal government passed a law of real ID to fly and a lot of millions haven't done it yet and to get a real ID, you need a passport to be certificate. We'll see what happens because I just don't expect them to turn away. I got mine like the first week and it was like during COVID, I think it was right before COVID, they said, "You only have one year and then it was COVID three years and four years, but he can't even answer that." Or, you know, and then he had this, he wanted to snow volunteers, not volunteer, but people come out and dig snow during that snow storm. He was overwhelmed and then he had what, three IDs to sign up to show that you were a New York resident to get paid. It's people, he's just an app. He sure is. He's really sad sad. Well, let's turn to another sad sack Hunter Biden and he was interviewed recently by Tucker and Tucker suggested that the laptop, Hunter Biden's laptop, that story was pushed to him by Israel and he was trying to suggest that it was a conspiracy of Israel. Yes. Yeah. And Hunter kind of deferred, didn't he? This, Hunter's all over everywhere. He's everywhere. I don't quite get it. I get what he's doing. He looks at that pathetic field and he sees that Gavin Newsom has destroyed California and has his finger in the wind on every issue. And then Kamela, when she's on, and there's been about four clips of her, she's either intoxicated or she has lost the ability to speak because it's just, you know, the ID for the voting is going to be required because they want an ID because they don't want you to vote because if you have to show an ID, you'd have to get something to get an ID and then you wouldn't vote and that's what they want to do. She takes one idea and so they're not going to be the nominee and that's open it up to AOC and all these people. And Hunter looks at this and says, I'm young. I'm 50 something and I got the Biden name. Hunter, your problem is too full. The Biden name is worth nothing. He was one of the worst presents we've ever had. Every aspect, two wars broke out on his watch. He destroyed the US border. 10 11 million people poured in. You remember that? They tried to defund the police, the crime rate, the first two years. The inflation rate over four years was 20.5. It got up to 9.1. When you talk about affordability and blame Trump, it started with you. He left office for your dad with 1.9 inflation that year. So there's no record of a Biden doing anything but destroying things. People don't have a good memory of Biden and then they look at him and you know there was a really nice guy. He published annotated the laptop and he sent it to pundits and I got one day in the mail. This thing came in the mail and it was all every printed page of the laptop and I went and looked at I couldn't believe it. I mean it was raw pornography. He had full frontal nudity. The girls were nude. They showed him in every aspect of disgusting sexual and drug activity and then they had the transcripts and he essentially said that he was getting no credit as the bag man because Mr. 10% Mr. Big his dad was raking off money and then he was paying the electrical bill for his homes for his dad and he was really angry and then he was talking to I think it was his cousin or niece and he was trying to have her solicit prostitutes for him and he said no Asians. She said oh no, no Asians. So he was an abject racist and that's all going to come out and what is he ever done? He's been married two or three times. He can't he can't they find his crack crack pipe in a rented car he leaves. He leaves a I don't know. A loaded revolver is wife of the time. He's cheating on and throws it in to a bin. His brother dies and the first thing he does is try to seduce the widow of his own brother which he does successfully and not happy with coercer and into at a traumatic time in our life coercing sexual favors then he hooks her on dangerous drugs. There's nothing about that guy that's positive. He's just a zero failure and he's everywhere and Tucker you know it's very funny and I like Tucker so I'm not trying to be nicked pity but he's always talking about elites and the elites run the country but he lived in Washington and he knew Tucker I mean he knew Hunter for a long time and there's correspondence that he asked Hunter to use the Biden name to intervene to get his kid into I think it was Georgetown so wait a minute if you're a populist nationalist and you're saying this system is corrupt why would you go to the most corrupt person in American politics Hunter Biden I mean he was the bag man for the whole Biden consortium to shake down China Eastern European Ukraine do we remember that Tucker when he came in Joe looked his watch oh SOB I'm leaving in 30 minutes unless I get you to call you off Hunter you know that was basically and so I mean that was the other sidebar of that whole thing when they were talking they're good friends and it's just the epitome of what Tucker doesn't like one wealthy elite talking to another named family to get an extra edge for his own child to get into a school he might not other have gotten otherwise gotten into I have no people do that all the time but Hunter Biden it's it's I don't know strange choice by Tucker I guess America likes second and third chances and you know Trump was embarrassed with stormy Daniels and eging care all the rumors and all that I get that and I access Hollywood but he never used drugs he never drank he I don't think we ever have any evidence he paid for prostitutes this guy was a debouch he was down in the sewer and I guess his attitude is what are you gonna do what are you gonna do Republicans you're gonna tell me that I was a drug yeah if I was I enjoyed every minute you tell me I took all my money and I'm $20 million broke because all that money I skimmed off the top from foreign interest I spent on prostitutes I did I loved every minute of it all are you gonna tell me that I'm a stupid crackhead that I leave a laptop or crack pipe anywhere yes I do that's his attitude yeah and he thinks because he got away from it all that you got American population will vote for him and that's what everybody kind of feels sorry for some reason but the more you hear him the more disgusting he sounds I mean he starts out with I owe $5 million and then well you were pardoned you should be in prison you didn't even pay your taxes air all of us have to pay our taxes we paid millions of dollars a year or the American people billions and you didn't and yet you got a pardon from your own dad when he said he would never pardon you and now you're lamenting but because you're not in jail and you didn't have to pay your income taxes that you spent 20 million on legal fees which I don't believe that's true Victor let's turn to a last subject and you know good and bad decisions by large companies Jason R.D.'s R.D.'s biography has been published by Simon Simon and Schuster and they went through with it on August 11th was the date it came out they did not pull that book and that seems like a terrible decision. - Yeah, they bummed it out, is it? They had about three problems. They had the 45 page prospectus for the book that he was gonna write. And then when he turned it in, it wasn't what he wrote. I mean, he said he had brain cancer that turned into cancer of the testicle. And I could go on, but it's beyond human ability to run those marathons. What was it? Six, how many marathons was it? - 30 marathons and 30 days or something. It was average. - 33 days or something. And then he said he had this condition where he didn't know. He couldn't move his body. He was trapped in his body. And the bottom line was just simply, when I looked at that, I said he's a pathological liar. Number two, he has never written one thing of no academic work, scholarship, research of his own. And then I went and looked at what they said about him that I think she was an American dean that came with charge. He said, oh, this I'm so happy. This is one of the best. This is the premier appointment at Cambridge. Cambridge? When I was young, I mean, it's still true. The Regis Professor of Ancient History and the Regis Professor of Greek and the Regis Professor of Latin and Greek and Roman history were considered not just in the English-speaking world, but were considered as the best scholars in the world. And so I grew up with looking at those Regis Professors. And the idea that that university let that guy in, that was a told charlatan and has any credentials left, just like Harvard, hiring, clotting, gay. And Simon and Schuster then they, everybody should remember what happened. They got the book proposal and they thought it was crazy, I guess, but they thought it would sell. And then they wrote, had him write the book. And then they had a co-author or an editor who's credited and she went through and said, this stuff's lunatic and took some out. And then all this stuff came out where he admitted and resigned and he's totally disgraced. And then they put their finger in the wind and said, on the one hand, we will disgrace ourselves because it will come out unless it's going to be called a fantasy or a novel. But on the other hand, we could make a lot of money on this because a lot of people would want to read it as satire. 30 marathon, this camp, I gotta read this, this is, you know. And so they disgraced themselves. The whole, I don't know what to say 'cause I'm a big champion of Western civilization but sometimes it sounds like we're at the end of Western civilization. When you have Cambridge University hiring that faker and then praising him to the skies as one of the great scholars of his age and then you have one of the hallmark publishers in New York, Simon Schuster, publishing that bag of lies. And then it's just, what will you not do? There are no rules or are no norms, there's none. And then you have Hunter Biden being considered or thinks he's gonna run for president. And then you've got Candace over here saying that the Mossad killed Charlie Kirk or that Miss McCrone has male genitalia. It's just, and then you, when you get depressed you can always look at these statistics that say 10% of the LA school district or New York public school can read at grade level. - Okay, thank you, Victor. Well, let's turn to the end of the show and some comments from people that have either written to you or in this case somebody stopped by and shoved this in your mailbox. - It was very nice and I wanna say something before you start very quickly. I've had about a hundred letters come. And I feel really bad because they're very sweet and nice but they'll leave it check in and say, I would like sign books, but I don't have all my books. And for me to sign them, I have to go buy them and then sign them and then do the tabulation and then go in and I live in a smaller town to go into town and mail it FedEx or something. So it's very hard for me to do that. - It would be very time-consuming. - Yes, and the other thing is a lot of people, I got maybe this week six books, six books and they said, would you please read this and blurb it and would you review it? I can't do it, I don't have time. I mean, I spend most of my time at seams at Stanford Med now. So I feel really bad about it. But this was a very interesting-- - This letter was very interesting and I'm not sure about the name because the writing's a little bit different because this guy's from Japan, but he says, dear Victor, I am Oristian and living in Japan. - My family and I came here in the hope of meeting you and he stuck this in your mailbox. Unfortunately, you were not here. It would have been a great pleasure to meet you as I am a great fan of yours. I hope and pray for your recovery and hope one day you may come to Japan to visit. We currently live in Kyoto. Take care and look forward to hearing from you. - Christian, Martini, Gerstiebly. I'm not sure what it is. - I'm sure I got the name well. - I get about one person every two weeks to stop by. If I walk around my house, I'm trying to walk 10,000 steps. So I do half of them. It's a little hard now and it's hot. But I talk to people that can't stop by a lot. - All right, and then. All right, and then I have one and I'm reading this so you can correct 'cause I don't think he has you right, Victor, he says that in a podcast you aired, you had a shocking reaction when Sammy revealed that the subject of the comment had 10, the person had 10 children. In my opinion, you should be affirming large families unless there are naked, if it's going through any circumstances. - Yeah, but hold on, you can correct this. But on several occasions, you have lamented the fact that our society is below replacement levels of child-bearing, discouraging large families does not seem consistent with your past comments. My wife of 51 years, and I listen to your podcast on YouTube every day. We have been blessed with 12 children and 35 grandchildren. - I admire you both because you took a hit in your lifestyle, perhaps, to raise children. - Yeah, we really appreciate you. - And I can tell you one thing, when all of these children are young and I had three and you feel like you're getting frazzled in the work, when you get older, I don't know one person who doesn't think that was one of the nicest periods in their life and I've never had, I've never met anybody who said I had too many children. I've always met people who said I had two few children. So when I go to Hillsdale, one of the nicest things that happens to me is I go to the history department or a thing and every, if you have five children, you're a professor at Hillsdale, you're considered infertile. I'm just teasing, but I mean 10, 9, 8, 12, and it's just like the 19th century when you, I say I'm so curious, what do you do? Well, Bob over here, he washes the cars. We get up at four in the morning and Sue has the muffins made and he's talking about seven and eight and nine and Mary's doing all the beds and then I said, well, how do you go places? Well, we have a mini bus with seats 15 and then you meet the wives if the wives are not the professors and you think this person looks, will look like she's pioneer woman, right? And they don't. They're beautiful. They're in great shape and it's like a super race there. You know what I mean, that does that, but it's amazing. I mean, there's a lot of people that shouldn't have children. I'm not going to get into eugenics. I don't believe all that, but when you want to have children and you can support them, we need children. Yeah, that was from Robert Hutchins, USNA, which branch of the military isn't it? In the United States Navy. Navy. And Eric Henson says, Dr. Henson, I listen to your podcast regularly and appreciate your factual down to earth representation of the situation. I also listen to the dispatch podcast with Jonah Goldberg and others. I do not listen to them for their content, but because my daughter does. And I want to hear who. is influencing her on the August 7th episode. You were mentioned a couple of times and the second time they mentioned that you, that it sounded like you give President Trump positive remarks in the media because you get positive feedback from them. I do believe that is true. Just wanted to wanted you to view this. Thank you very much for everything you do. Bless you. So what all I can say is Trump tweets things that people write, right? Yeah. So he's tweeted thing, retweeted them. Yeah. But I don't do that for that purpose. You don't do that for the purpose of getting chanting. Oh, and I don't, I, confidentially, I have been invited a lot of times. I don't, I don't go not because I want to be rude, just because I live out here in Selma. You know what I mean? I, I feel out of place in Washington, but I will say that National Review, Jonah was at National Review, and I had a rule. I have it at Hoover, too. And that was one of the things I liked about John Racian, our director and Condoleezza Rice, I think follows in that tradition that you don't publicly go after someone. You don't even mean publicly. So when I, when Trump came along, almost the entire National Review, Kevin Williamson, Jay Norlinger, Jonah Gober, David French, well, mesh Palmer, almost all of them did. I think the only two were probably Jack Fowler myself. For me, it was always what's the alternative? But you know, I didn't want Hillary Clinton running the country. So, but I was attacked by those people, some of them, not all of them. I mean, one of them went to the Atlantic and he wrote and said, I can't believe they're letting Victor Hansen write something. And I said, I wrote back to that. And I said, you will find, I said, here, you can say anything. And I'm not objecting. I didn't. But when you go to your new masters at the Atlantic, believe me, they're not going to let you say anything that's not approved. So don't talk about how free speed and sure enough, they fired him that day. Not because anything I wrote, but I wrote four hours before they fired him. So I had run-ins with almost every one of those people and it was always, how could you vote for Trump? Trump's an idiot. I had a, I would, part of your job as a national review writer was to go on cruisers. I went on the cruise that he won, 2016, 2016, right after. So there was a panel. I can't remember if Clita Mitchell was there. I think she was. We were the only person there. And it was just, I thought, well, and I said something, well, you want an open border? Because that's what you had with Obama. And that was what you're going to get. He's going to close the border as much as he can. And do you want this just starting DI stuff? Do you want that? And do you want all of these left-wing crime policies? Do you want the Green New Deal? I went on with all of it. Now characters can, characters, according, classical Greek philosopher. And I just got sick. So I, I didn't know Jack all that well. I liked him, but I walked up to him. He was the director of the cruise. And I said, I'm getting off it. I gave my talk and I'm getting, I'm not going to put up with this. So I got off at Key West, big mistake. They dumped me off. And then I had to find a flight and they were all booked because they had no, and I had to get back to Miami. And it was a point, rainstorms. I spent all day calling every airline. And I made it, but it was one of the most unpleasant situations that I have. And they've never, all these people have never, so there's ranges of never trumpers. They were the moderate, uh, never trumpers. I don't think any embroidered for Trump. But if you were conservative all those years, and they always, they always, uh, quoted William up Buckley chapter of verse, except one thing. He said, I will always vote for the more, more conservative candidate, not the purest, but they never mentioned that. So when you in 2016, 2020, and look out 2020 turned out. And then 2024, Trump embodied 80% of what they wrote about their whole life. And Hillary and Joe Biden and Kamala zero. And yet they by not voting for Trump are in many cases, like Bill Crystal and the other people at the bullwork voted for the Democrat. They empowered in an agenda that they had sworn to ex, to reveal is bankrupt, unworkable, terrible, the left-wing socialist agenda. And here they are then angry that Donald Trump was craft. So he had arranged this and his thing and he said this and said that and said this. I remember I got a call. I won't mention I'll just finish this. Somebody from National Review called me and said, Donald Trump's access Hollywood tape came out today. And he said he was grabs, grab, they just want to grab you by that, just go ahead and grab. It was pretty foul. And we're all going to write a letter calling him to withdraw. I said, what? What? You think they'd ever do that? You think Bill Clinton would, and I said, Trump talks, talks like that. Bill Clinton does it, right? You know, it's a difference. But so then I said, well, you don't think they're going to react to this? He's not going to take this lying down. I said to the person, person, I won't mention his name. This happened about eight or nine years earlier. It was a private conversation with Billy Bush, who was an entertainer. There was two guys and they were just trying to impress each other with how much all the girls liked them. And CNN stealthily taped it. There wasn't part of the interview. It was the pre-interview. And then they banked it. They banked it. And then they knew about it. And they released it right before the debate with Hillary. So I said, if any of you people said stupid things on private conversations that were overheard, that was why I said it was kind of tragic with Fauci. I don't mean I hated all the hypocrisy that he was lying and saying one thing. But when he said silly things about himself, you know, my bottle heads and stuff, I didn't care about that. I just thought, you know, if everybody's emails are exposed, people can look stupid. But I said to them, well, I'm not going to sign that. Why would I want to why would I want Hillary Clinton to be president? I don't want those people to be president. And then he said, well, they're going to lose. I said, are you serious? Do you have any idea who Steve Bannon is? I know Steve Bannon. I've met him. I talked to him. They're not going to take this one. And so they all called for him to get out. And they got a couple of senators too. And then they come in. And at the key moment comes Kathleen Willie, who was sexually harassed by Bill Clinton, remember? And then she said they killed her cat and all that stuff. And then there was what's her name? What? Jennifer Flowers came in and she had been, remember she had said she was forcibly raped. And then he bit her lip and said, here's some ice. And then there was Paula Jones. Is that her name? Paula Jones. But did he have an ongoing relationship with Jennifer Flowers? He did. Paula Jones went up and she testified that she could identify him by his genitalia. And then there was that other poor girl who had been raped. And Hillary had defended the rapist. And then when they talked about it later, she was laughing about, I got her. I got him. Remember that? And here, that victim was there. And they all came in. They wouldn't let him sit in the closed section closed. But you should have seen Hillary's eyes when she saw them. I mean, that was a master stroke of Lee Outwood type politicking. And then, you know, I wrote something that people, I said he's going to win. And everybody there said he couldn't win. And at that point, I thought, cyanor, a bit. was there 20 years. But it was just like in a hostile workplace. And you couldn't talk to them. I gave a talk there once in New York. I was there and Jack will dispute this, but I walked in. I felt like I had kryptonite on. Everybody just kind of, oh, so it was. And finally, I didn't, I didn't believe that you're the arbiter of what conservative is. You determine what is conservatism and what is not. That was what they were doing. William F. Buckley, he drove out the burchers. He did. And the anti-Semites. Good. He did. And then, but I said, don't hold him up as an icon. I mean, he also was against the Civil Rights Act. He's human. But there was this worship of William F. Buckley and what he did. And they were going to be just like William F. Buckley. They were going to drive out the nutty wing. I thought the nutty wing, 80 million people who were victims of globalization that got bypassed because of the bicostal economy and globalization. And then they were insult to injury as deporables, irredeemables, clingers. And they don't have a voice. You know, that's what I, for me, it was always populism. The populist voice of the underclass that had been ridiculed and made fun of. And here all these guys were in New York telling me, you know, that how dare you vote for this guy. That's a long rant. But I don't think I've ever mentioned Jonah's name on a podcast, have I? Well, today we did. I didn't attack him personally. No, that was in a comment. So thank you Victor for everything. We love your rounds. And thanks to the audience for choosing to spend some time with us this weekend. Thank you everybody for listening and watching. This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hanson. And we're signing off. Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal. Please like, share and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website at victorhanson.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.