Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of Thursday’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.
Jack Fowler: Everyone should notice, if you’re watching this on YouTube or Rumble, that over Victor’s right shoulder are the galleys of his forthcoming book, “The Counterrevolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement,” which will be out on Sept. 8. You can go to Amazon and preorder it now.
I always like the preorder. You order it and it’s pre-publication, but— And it’s the movement.
Victor Davis Hanson: [Donald Trump]‘s not a revolutionary. He’s a counterrevolutionary, Jack. He’s trying to upend the progressive project. The progressive revolution.
Jack Fowler: Well, it’s a—
Victor Davis Hanson: He’s a Thermidor trying to stop the Jacobins.
Jack Fowler: We won’t name names here, but to me, this has been the obvious fight, the size, the scope of the Left, the viciousness of it, the murderousness of it. And many on the Right have been involved in circular firing squads too often, while the main enemy is, of course, the Left. But, not to get off track.
Go ahead, Victor.
Victor Davis Hanson: No, you’re right. The thesis of this new book is that, for all of the criticisms of his methodology and style, language, tweeting, I can’t think of another Republican president—maybe you can—who walled the border, nor… And he will finish the wall at the current pace, nor took on the Iranian nuclear bomb project, nor took on the trans issue, nor took on DEI, nor took on the, I guess you would call it, sanctuary cities project.
I mean, it’s a real counterrevolutionary. I just talked today, Jack, with some House staffers about the Smithsonian. They’re going to be calling in the head of the Smithsonian. When I say they, I mean the Republican House leadership.
Jack Fowler: Mm-hmm.
And, yeah, people want to find out more about that, Victor.
On the White House website, there is a link to the full, it’s about a 160-page report on the Smithsonian.
Victor Davis Hanson: I looked at part of it, and, I mean, these people want to rewrite American history as if it was completely evil and there was no self-critique, there was no open discussion, there was no back-and-forth, which there always was.
There were no 700,000 people who died in a war over slavery. There was no women’s movement. There’s no reason they can explain why 12 million people broke through the border to get here from mostly third-world countries if it was so white and so evil. They can’t explain that.
They can’t explain why the United States is the only really long-lasting democracy, why it lasted so long.
They can’t explain anything. Why everybody wants to come here. We saw that with the World Cup.
And then we had Hasan Piker yesterday addressing democratic socialists in a Mao Zedong suit, and he was listing all of the evils of the United States, and you want to say, “Wait, Mr. Piker. You don’t know anything about this country. You may have been born here, but you spend a lot of your time in Turkey in a very anti-American climate. But you’re wearing a suit that is a replica of the greatest mass murderer in not U.S., not European, in all of history.
“Any historical framework you want to use, he killed 70 million people, and you’re trying to glorify him by emulation?”
It makes no sense at all. What are you doing? And he had them all captivated, the audience. And then he went down off the podium, Jack, and with his Mao suit, and then he went into his Porsche Targa, you know, and maybe he, I don’t know, maybe he saw Ro Khanna’s wife coming by in her Range Rover. I don’t know.
But these people are ridiculous. They’re not just evil, but they’re ridiculous. They’re absolutely absurd. These people enjoy every benefit, every fringe, every indulgence, every appetite of capitalism, and then they start this faculty lounge berating America, berating its economy while they emulate and brag about mass murderers.
Gavin Newsom was— we said the other day, you know, capitalism doesn’t work. It worked for you, Gavin. You got a $9 million home.
Jack Fowler: Right. Yeah.
Victor Davis Hanson: Why don’t you open it up to the dispossessed who are the victims of capitalism? You can’t. And your businesses, I guess they’re called PlumpJack.
To whom do they appeal? They appeal to capitalists of the upper class who can afford your fine wines and cheeses and your ambiance. And then you mock it? It’s all performance art. It’s a joke. It really is, these democratic socialists.
Jack Fowler: I think the revolution is more here than we think it is, Victor. Before we get to Iran and Kuwait, which we want to talk about, since you raised it, Daniel Greenfield has this article.
It’s titled 25 Million Communists in America. And let me just read a chunk here. “Despite the countless millions dead at the hands of communist regimes, a significant portion of the electorate has a positive view of communism as a political movement. A recent Cato poll shows that more members of Gen Z, those born between 1997 and 2012, have a positive view of communism than those who have a negative view, with around a third splitting each way.
“Some of this can be attributed to social media propaganda, the educational system, and popular culture, and helps explain the young activists flocking to the DSA. Forty-three percent of students rate communism favorably and only 29 rate it unfavorably, making it clear that the higher education system isn’t just broken, it’s actively recruiting the next generation into extremism, direct domestic terrorism, and totalitarian ideologies, et cetera.”
Twenty-five million is not a small number.
Victor Davis Hanson: I will say that the white population in the United States is controversial because of mixed marriages and everything, but it’s estimated to be somewhere between 68% and 70%. The DSA’s membership list shows that 85% of the DSA members are white.
So what we’re talking about is not the upper middle class. What we’re talking about is not a bunch of people in rural Texas or the Ozarks or Appalachia or here near Kings or Tulare County in the Central Valley of California. This is not a bottoms-up revolt of the masses over the inequities of capitalism.
This is a movement fueled by the educated, the mostly white, and the rest of the 15%, whose public faces are mostly immigrants and mostly from failed states, as we said earlier.
And it’s a frustration that they cannot have the consumer lifestyle and their appetites cannot be satisfied with the people they rub shoulders with every day in these environments in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Dallas, et cetera, Austin.
That’s what it’s about. And we’ll see if they win a statewide election as socialists. I’m not saying they can’t win if they do the waxen effigy Joe Biden, good old Joe Biden from Scranton. And maybe they can get their rogues’ gallery. They can get good old Graham Plattner from Maine, the hardworking oysterman.
They can get Tim Walz from Minnesota, the roly-poly change-my-own-oil-and-I’ll-figure-out-how-to-load-my-shotgun-in-a-year-from-now guy. And maybe James Talarico, the Bible-thumping evangelical, evangelicus from the lower white middle class.
You can see that effort to find the elusive unicorn white man of the middle, of the working class, shows you that the agenda does not appeal to anybody.
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