Victor Davis Hanson: The Left Is Rebranding Ahead of the Midterms

Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words

Victor Davis Hanson and Sammy Wink discuss the strategic rebranding of Democratic candidates ahead of upcoming midterms to avoid 'woke' labe

Key takeaways

Democratic candidates like Talarico and El-Sayed are attempting to pivot away from overt 'woke' rhetoric to capture more voters.
Hanson critiques the UN General Assembly walkout during Netanyahu's speech as a display of international hypocrisy.
California is experiencing an exodus of middle and upper classes due to high taxes and expanding social welfare costs.
The expansion of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) in universities is described as a productivity drag on the economy.
Historical analysis shows Harry Truman's decisive leadership during the Korean War despite significant political pressure.

Main topics

UN General Assembly walkout
California demographic shifts
DEI in academia

Notable quotes

The agenda hasn't retreated. It has retrenched just enough to survive and recapture power.

Conclusion

The episode offers a conservative critique of modern political shifts

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:11) Hello and welcome. This is Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. This is our Saturday edition, so welcome everyone. I hope you're having a good weekend. We have still lots of news on the agenda. More on the UN General Assembly with walkout on Netanyahu's talk and Mele put a pretty fiery talk up on the podium. So we want to look at those first and then we're going to talk a little bit about... Democrats woke and some of their campaigns. So stay with us for those stories and we'll be right back. Many Americans are going to have a big wake up call. Speaker 3 (0:44) We have never seen net migration as high as it has been in the last few years. Speaker 2 (0:48) This year there have been Speaker 1 (0:50) more people coming to the UK in small boats than ever before. You did an extreme thing to the country. Britain is facing a migrant crime epidemic. We Speaker 3 (0:59) don't actually know where they're coming from, who they are, how old they are. Speaker 1 (1:03) Why would you let in millions of people who are undead if not to change the country from within? Speaker 3 (1:09) There is no other word for it. Demographic replacement. Speaker 3 (1:14) England's a blueprint for America. It's coming. It's just a blueprint. Speaker 1 (1:18) Thousands of daily migrant crossings. A Speaker 2 (1:21) political earthquake threatens Speaker 3 (1:22) to reshape America. We are Speaker 1 (1:24) showing there is a new path for politics in our country. Not all cultures are the same. You Speaker 3 (1:28) cannot ban Sharia. America is a nation of immigrants. We Speaker 2 (1:31) are Speaker 3 (1:31) a nation Speaker 1 (1:32) of immigrants. We Speaker 3 (1:32) are Speaker 1 (1:32) a nation of immigrants. We are a Speaker 3 (1:34) nation of immigrants. We're a nation of immigrants. Speaker 3 (1:37) The Immigration Crisis. Watch now on the Heritage Foundation's YouTube channel. Speaker 1 (1:41) Welcome back. Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. Victor's the Martin A. Neely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. You can find him at his website, victorhansen.com. The name of the website is The Blade of Perseus. And we'd love to have everybody here. So, Victor, lots on the agenda, but I understand you were at a political event last night with Steve Hilton. I don't know if you had any few things to say about that first. He Speaker 2 (2:14) was in Fresno, and I was asked to introduce him and then have a Q &A with him. He's the best qualified Republican nominee in the last 20 years. He's a polymath. He had his own tech company. He ran restaurants in London. He was the political advisor. Speaker 2 (2:35) to the British Prime Minister, David Cameron. He had the next revolution, seven years as a foxhole, so he's done it all. And he's mastered... California issues. So I asked him a series of questions on what do you do with high-speed rail? If you cancel it, what do you do with this Stonehenge infrastructure? What do you do with the left stopping the California water project completion? What do you do with the decrepit? What do you do with California? He had a lot of good answers. There was a lot of people there. Speaker 2 (3:16) It's going to be very difficult. Javier Becerra's attitude is two things. One, the Democrats outnumber the Republicans in registration almost three to one. And the Hispanic vote is 45 % of the population. I don't know how many actually are registered and vote according to that demographic. Maybe not as highly turnout, not as high as turnout as other groups, but they are angry at the ICE and they tend to be very left wing, most of them. And they're turned off on Donald Trump. So Becerra's strategy is threefold. I'm going to stay in my basement, and I'm not going to campaign. I think there's going to be a debate tonight, Friday night. I'm not going to campaign. Stay in my basement. Number two, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. Trump is at 39%. He's endorsed Hilton. Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. And three, I don't want to say a word about the multibillion-dollar fraud in California. I was attorney general at one time when there was a lot of fraud that was starting. I was the head of HHS when the federal government's funds were being misused. My chief of staff, and Gavin Newsom's chief of staff have dipped into campaign funds in an improper way. I don't want to talk any about that. So I'm not going to discuss anything about my allegations of corruption or incompetence. I'm not going to debate Steve Hilton's issues. I'm going to rely on the fact that, as Karen Bass just said, the election is over because he's a Republican. All people are going to do, she said, are look at the name and after D, check it off. And that was a very cynical thing to say. She said that he's already through, it's not even close. She may be right, but... If he loses after Spencer Pratt loses and the billionaire tax passes, there's going to be a lot more people leave the state. And what's happening in this state is the population is staying steady because the upper middle class and the wealthy classes are leaving. But people are coming here because of our rich welfare, social welfare cost. And people who have come here, 27 % of the California population was not born in the United States. And about 40 % either were not born in the United States or their parents were not born in California. And they have birth rates much higher than the indigenous population. And they have greater, on average, greater social welfare needs. And 50 % of all California residents are on Medi-Cal, and 40 % of all births are on Medi-Cal. So you can see what's happening. The people who have the higher incomes are leaving because they're taxed to death. The people who have the lower incomes and who are recent immigrants or their parents are demanding more social welfare services and think that the original population should pay for it. Speaker 2 (6:37) and they're going to run out of victimizers because they see themselves as victims of a system. I don't know why a person would come from India or China or Latin America and come here and then have all these grievances against the existing California establishment, but they do, and it's just not going to work. It's a medieval. It's a medieval state with very wealthy people and very poor people. The middle class and the upper middle class are leaving. Speaker 1 (7:09) All right. So let's go ahead and turn to the U.N. And what did you think of all of that walkout on Bibi Netanyahu and how he handled it? Speaker 2 (7:22) Well, it was very funny that the Iranian government just slaughtered 30,000 to 40,000 of their own people and continues to kill them. And not as many people walked out when the Iranians spoke as when Netanyahu spoke. There were a lot of Europeans that walked out, and he addressed that with Britain and France. It was really amazing. Speaker 2 (7:45) You know, he said, you call us settler colonialism. Our language is unchanged. Our people are unchanged since the third millennium B.C. And who we're talking, the French, who were the great colonizers of the Middle East, along with the British. We inherited a British colony who had taken over and was not indigenous to the Middle East. He had a good point. He talked about Mondami trying to arrest him. You know, he said, why doesn't he arrest other people? But he won't ever touch people from China or Iran. It basically was a diatribe, and I don't mean that in a negative sense, against... Speaker 2 (8:31) hypocrisy. And then Malay and a lot of this, it was what was interesting, a lot of people from South America, a lot of presidents with this new conservative wave that Trump gets no credit for. But as I said earlier, of the 32 nations in South Central America and the Caribbean, there were only about eight, seven or eight pro-American democracies. And now there's only, I think, five that are. anti-American and socialist communists. They're all conservative. The Paraguay president who was newly inaugurated, he lambasted the walkout. So did Millie. He gave a great talk. He said that the UN were parasitical. Something just creepy, just to finish, just looking at that delegation and reading about it. You have 170 nations. The majority now are not democratic. They come over to this rich, bustling city. They cannot be prosecuted for any crimes. They're on budgets. And then they talk about democracy and they vote. usually to condemn the United States, the host, or Israel, but they never vote in their own home country. So they act like they're defenders of democracy, and then they trot back and their dictator pats them on the head because they walked out during Israel or Trump's talk. I'm getting really tired of it. I think most Americans are. It's okay just to vent, but we could just take it out of here, and it doesn't really contribute that much to New York. Speaker 2 (10:08) New York's not going to sink or swim, depending on whether the U.N. is there. I think it would be a lot better for it just to move to a neutral location. Why don't you put it in, I don't know, the Mariana Islands or Tahiti or something, neutral place. Or Speaker 1 (10:28) Iceland. Speaker 2 (10:28) Iceland. No, they would never do that. What they want in New York is left-wing media exposure. and then nice restaurants and big expense accounts. And a lot of them are to be, I don't know how to use, they're pretty degenerate people. So they indulge in drugs, alcohol, sex, and it's all legal. I mean, you can't prosecute them. They all get parked at that famous pictures they have of all of their cars with hundreds of parking tickets on them. They're just immune. And they're mostly from the third world, so they hate the United States. Speaker 1 (11:08) It's all hush-hush. Speaker 2 (11:11) Netanyahu was really good, and he addressed all the charges. Speaker 2 (11:17) I would have reminded him that genocide is impossible. They say they commit genocide against the Arab people, and the Arab people inside Israel are now 20 % of the population. When Israel was formed, they were, I think, 12. You don't have genocide. Hitler, if you say Hitler committed genocide, he did. What if you said Hitler committed genocide, but the Jewish population doubled in the Third Reich? You see what I mean? He wiped out Jews. And that's what they do. Tucker Carlson had a big rant about all this. And he went on Israel, Israeli TV, and he said that Israel was not a democracy because certain people don't vote. And I wanted to say to him, like, who doesn't vote? Israel, every citizen, Arab, Christian, or otherwise over 18 can vote. Do people in the West Bank and Gaza vote? No, they're not citizens. Do they vote for the Palestinian Authority? Yes, that has semi-autonomy. And do they vote in Gaza? They did it one time. One time, they voted for Hamas. Speaker 2 (12:25) Tucker, there are about 30 million illegal aliens in the United States, and they're here, some of them a long time. Are you saying we're not a democracy because they don't vote? They're not citizens. We have a greater percentage of the population inside our borders that are not citizens, about 16%, 17%, 15 % than does Israel. But he counts the West Bank and Gaza as Israelis citizens who are denied the right to vote. That's absurd. Speaker 2 (13:01) And the more and more he talks, it's really strange because he's getting, it's just almost, I was listening to a rant and it's all conspiracy theories. And it's basically, the more he says he doesn't do anything, the more that's an indication that he has said or done that. That's what's strange. Speaker 1 (13:20) Yeah. Well, Victor, let's welcome back our Saturday sponsor. Pure Health Research. If you want to drop extra pounds, boost energy levels, or reduce swelling in your legs and feet, 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 on the way. First is Liver Health Formula. 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 takes care of all that. It supports thriving liver health with special nutrients like artichoke extract and milk thistle. This is one of the easiest ways to slim down and revitalize your energy. Next is lymph system support. If you struggle with fluid buildup or swelling in your legs, ankles, or feet, this one's for you. The natural ingredients of lymph