Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist, military historian, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and fellow at Hillsdale College. He is an author and podcaster on the Victor Davis Hanson Show. He has been a regular contributor to the New York Times, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal, and is a regular guest host on The Daily Show with Bill Maher.
00:00:00.120Hello, everybody. I'm Lou Dobbs, and we're delighted to have you with us for today's episode of the Great America Show.
00:00:07.180There was a lot of talk during the midterm election campaigns about disinformation, psyops, misinformation, and propaganda campaigns, and rightly so.
00:00:17.440Our government, the Marxist Dems, and the Deep State, all are primary originators of the negative noise and false messaging aimed straight at the American people.
00:00:27.760And all of that noise obfuscating what should be in clear view, that we have a national crisis of reliable information.
00:00:37.380Where are the facts? It seems we can't even get answers to what should be basic, simple questions.
00:04:26.140They don't know anything about vote harvesting or vote curing or third-party harvesting.
00:04:30.980And so that has really been a striking development.
00:04:36.420But they are trying, they being the left, wants to refashion the past, whether that's statue toppling or name-changing or institution-destroying.
00:04:48.620And then in the present, by changing the past, they want to control the future.
00:04:54.760And they want to convince us that America has always been a bad place.
00:05:35.960And this was a particularly inept administration with a terrible record, and yet we weren't able to capitalize on it.
00:05:42.860And now the first thing that happens is the RNC chair, Ronna McDaniel, seeks a re-election.
00:05:49.460Kevin McCarthy, who is the last—I can't imagine what label would have fit him less well than conservative, wants to be Speaker of the House.
00:06:00.800And it seems that the electorate, having sent in the largest popular vote in some time in a midterm election, are going to be disappointed because the people they elected are going to choose a liberal Republican to be a leader if all things unfold as it appears now.
00:06:57.460Kevin McCarthy, I think, reacts to the environment around him.
00:07:03.220And at this late date, I don't know how you'd get another speaker other than him because there are no viable other candidates.
00:07:11.020But he will become more conservative if there's other conservative people, and he feels that that's the trend.
00:07:17.320And so if you get a very conservative RNC chairman—and, you know, Mitch McConnell is not conservative, and he's got a lot of vulnerabilities, and I think he missed historic opportunities.
00:07:32.300He allotted funds basically on the principle, well, this candidate, if this candidate should win, will he support my leadership role?
00:07:40.840If he doesn't, then I'm either going to delay funding to the last minute or not fund him at all.
00:07:45.760And that was intolerable in a close and important race like this.
00:07:50.560So I think—and yet I don't see any viable means right now in the Senate.
00:07:55.900They only have about 11 or 12 votes to remove him as party leader.
00:07:59.320And so until we get a radical new leadership, I don't think you're going to have the type of energy and organization that the Democrats have.
00:08:15.740The candidates, whether it's Fetterman or Biden or Harris, and that's why you alluded to they lose in the aggregate number of votes.
00:08:23.000But boy, when you put Silicon Valley money into preselected precincts and you change the very mechanism in which we vote to an unaudited, uncertified mail-in procedure, and you outspend three to one, and the opposition has no answer to that.
00:08:42.980I thought that after 2018 and 2020, the Republicans would have an answer, either to join them and vote harvest or mail-in or to outlaw it in key states, but they didn't either.
00:08:59.720And so I think we're in this situation.
00:09:02.640And it's not unusual, Lou, that the Jacobins in France or the Bolsheviks are the hardcore Maoists after World War II and those Chinese civil wars.
00:09:14.200The minority party that's more disciplined and more zealous and more ruthless often is able to take power over the majority that doesn't believe it can happen here.
00:09:40.180Or they have the attitude of, surely if you hit somebody over the head with an axe or something and you're going to stay in jail for many years.
00:10:04.160And I believe at the local level, you see greater response than at the national.
00:10:11.300That is, school boards are suddenly aware of the impetus for parental rights.
00:10:16.960And parents are reasserting themselves in our public school systems, which is, to me at least, reassuring that there's still enough energy in the communities, the local communities, to care about public schools, which I believe are the great equalizer in our society and has been throughout our history, I believe.
00:13:32.020And part of it's the left because I think a lot of the people in Washington react to this demonization campaign from the left-wing media that suggests any of our truly conservative leaders are insurrectionists or racists or et cetera, et cetera.
00:13:46.880And then our party leadership then reacts to that, said, oh, no, no, no, don't worry.
00:14:05.260And the effect is Kevin McCarthy becomes speaker.
00:14:10.800The effect is Mitch McConnell retains power.
00:14:14.240And Jim Jordan, James Comer, who could be extraordinary, I think, have the capacity to be extraordinary conservative leaders,
00:14:22.460are they have a secondary role, which is important, the chairman of the judiciary, chairman of oversight.
00:14:33.960But I'm afraid we're going to see a replication of 2018 when we saw the conservatives and the Republicans talk big about election investigations.
00:14:44.820But then we watched as it turned out to be nothing more than political performance art and theater without any accomplishment,
00:14:54.640whether it be the Benghazi hearings, whether it be Jason Chavitz at oversight as a successor.
00:15:00.940It goes on and on and nothing happens.
00:15:03.960Yeah, it's really a tragedy because, as you know, the Senate has a little bit more subpoena power.
00:15:11.920And had we had we taken the Senate, at least in a couple of cases, Rand Paul, for example, would have really, I think,
00:15:21.020exposed Anthony Fauci and had those redacted emails and a lot of information would have been known.
00:15:27.820And I think they could have gone in and had Christopher Wray in executive session tell us how many FBI informants and what they were doing on January 6th, things like that.
00:15:38.420And I'm not sure the House can do that with the leadership they have.
00:15:43.100But we'll see. I think it was Kevin McCarthy did a very good thing the other day when he said, you know what?
00:15:48.420Historically, the minority party nominations to committee memberships are always respected by the Speaker.
00:15:56.480But since Nancy Pelosi violated that age old canon, I'm going to do the same thing.
00:16:02.400And we're not going to have Adam Schiff or Swalwell or some of the squad on particular members.
00:16:09.300And he stuck to that. But he needs to do more of that, because unfortunately, the left feels that we play by the mark as the Queensbury rules.
00:17:17.740And they had enormous she rule, even with a seven or six or seven to eight, depending on the vacancies margin, as if she had 40 seats in the House.
00:17:28.280She got almost everything she wanted and much more effective than the Democratic Senate in a way.
00:19:02.940We know what happens when you don't do that.
00:19:05.180And energy self-sufficiency is a corrective to draining in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and tough on crime and getting tough with China.
00:19:14.580Yeah. All of it. And fair trade rather than just free trade.
00:19:20.940Maybe we need more fiscal discipline that we didn't have under Trump.
00:19:24.340But that was during Pop Pop, partly because of the he was convinced because of the covid mess to sort of open up the cash spigots.
00:19:33.100But nevertheless, that MAGA agenda is stronger and more resonant than ever.
00:19:38.160I think the problem is, though, that Donald Trump, being an outsider and being almost a revolutionary, counter-revolutionary, had no margin of error.
00:19:49.800We saw that with the Mueller investigation, the two impeachments, impeach him as a private citizen, the Mor-a-Lago raid.
00:20:14.000You know, that's a fair play, but not right before the midterms.
00:20:18.160And maybe, you know, if you're Barack Obama and you take a picture with Farrakhan, they're going to suppress it in 2005 so it doesn't resurface until 2017.
00:20:31.140If you're Donald Trump, you should know in advance that if you have a dinner anywhere near Mr. Fuentes, that is lethal.
00:20:39.280And that's going to offend the five to eight percent independence that you need in addition to the MAGA Bay.
00:20:44.820So what I'm getting at is his agenda was what saved the Republican Party in 2016.
00:20:51.580And I think it had some four of the best years of governance in my lifetime, even perhaps better than Reagan.
00:20:58.660But Trump, because of his controversial nature, has to have absolute discipline, given the forces arrayed against him.
00:21:07.720And at times, he either doesn't understand that or he has advisors that don't advise him.
00:21:14.100I don't know what it is, but the left is just waiting to pounce on everything he says.
00:21:19.680And unfairly so, but that doesn't change the reality that when they make these arguments against him, he gives them a slight opening and they exploit it.
00:21:27.380But you look at the polls and you don't get that independent voter that's necessary to get up to 50, 51 percent.
00:21:36.200Because the MAGA base is rock solid, but it's about 40 to 45 percent of the voting public.
00:21:42.440And for him to win, and he's got to win because he's got to exercise more discipline.
00:21:48.260And I don't know where he gets that extra 5 percent.
00:21:51.580He's doing very well with Mexican-Americans.
00:21:54.320If he could get up to 50, 55 percent, and same with blacks, up to 20 percent, it's out there somewhere.
00:22:02.400But he's got to find it and he's got to exercise discipline so they don't exploit what he says.
00:22:08.540And I know they're going to try to do it anyway, but he can't give them any opening at this late date.
00:22:49.140And, you know, I love President Trump.
00:22:53.840But I have to say, having Fuentes and Ye down for dinner at Mar-a-Lago, his advisers, who ever permitted that, really, I would have them removed immediately.
00:23:11.360He should come out with a much stronger statement and say that he wants to apologize.
00:23:16.480And even though he didn't understand of the situation he was getting in, he should have understood because Fuentes is an out-and-out anti-Semite and white supremacist.
00:23:29.340And I think you're right about DeSantis and Trump.
00:23:32.380DeSantis, the mystery about him was not his competency, governance, not his conservatism, but just two issues.
00:23:40.040One was, would he have the fire in the belly that Trump had?
00:23:44.880We knew he didn't have the charisma to get on, but when he took on Disney and he busts the illegal immigrants and he really took on the school boards,
00:23:54.920I think he showed everybody that he was not going to be a Romney-like figure, that he was a combative conservative, which we needed.
00:24:02.560The only other issue that I see remaining with him is that, I don't know if you've noticed that, but a lot of the never-Trumper large donors especially see DeSantis, not DeSantis himself,
00:24:17.560but they see him as entree back into the party as an alternative to Trump.
00:24:23.200And that's a little worrisome because I think they feel that they can influence DeSantis to tack back to the center and become a Bush,
00:24:32.500and then they can rejoin the party and control it.
00:24:34.980And I think he has to be aware of, and that's a difficult position because they have so much money and they control the establishment on the conservative side,
00:24:52.300And I welcome you to support me, but I'm not going to change positions so that you're going to get a Jeb Bush.
00:25:00.600And I think if he can reassure people, then I think it's going to be a very close race between him and Trump.
00:25:07.220I think you're right, and it's going to be the challenge for both men as they seek the nomination.
00:25:13.580The money is more complicated this time without question.
00:25:19.080I want to turn to, because you're talking about China.
00:25:22.300At the outset of this discussion, I see a collision that we are all witnessing, this collision between Elon Musk and the donor class, if you will,
00:25:33.640the corporatists and the globalist elites over the issue of free speech.
00:25:41.500And here we are with both Elon Musk dependent, all three of his companies are dependent in some way on China.
00:25:53.880And Tim Cook of Apple, he's almost entirely dependent on China for the production of his company's products.
00:26:03.520They're colliding over the issue of free speech.
00:26:08.280Musk has certainly staked out the ground of free speech for himself over Twitter.