November 1, 2024 • 35 mins
In this episode, Tudor speaks with historian Victor Davis Hanson about the unprecedented nature of the current election cycle, the rhetoric surrounding political violence, the cultural revolution affecting women's rights, and the backlash against progressive policies. They discuss the importance of government oversight and accountability, as well as the disparity in excitement levels between Trump and other Republican candidates. The Tudor Dixon Podcast is part of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Podcast Network. For more visit TudorDixonPodcast.com
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to the Tutor Dixon Podcast. I am excited we're
in the last final stretch before the campaign and before
the election, before this big answer finally comes to us.
And today we have Victor Davis Hanson with us. He
is a best selling historian and senior Fellow at the
Hoover Institution. He is also the author of the most
recent book, The End of Everything, How Wars to Send
(00:24):
into Annihilation. Victor, thank you so much for joining me.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Thank you for having me. Tutor.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Absolutely so. I'm looking at this campaign. It's been I
was actually talking to someone this morning and she was like,
this is just such an unprecedented election cycle. I'm like,
I mean, we can say nothing else other than that,
because we've never seen a candidate be installed. The media
go after the other side the way they have the
(00:50):
doj come and try to put the guy in jail.
I mean, when you look at this as a historian,
what do you say about what's gone on?
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Well, I always try to put everything in context, and
so the things that you outlined, I just say, have
we ever had a president impeached twice in two terms
that much less one know? Has he ever been tried
by a private as a private citizen in the Senate. No,
have we ever had five civil and criminal lawsuits that
(01:20):
would have never been brought against him had he just
not run, or maybe and he could say that they'd
never been brought previously against a private citizen in any circumstance.
Have we ever had sixteen states try to remove a
president from the ballot. I've never had two assassination attempts
in a single against a candidate in a single cycle.
So what explains all of this? And I think the
(01:43):
answer is that two things. One, this progressive experiment that
took off with Obama but gained speed after George Floyd, Riots, etc.
Doesn't appeal to people. They were willing to give it
sort of ants because of the wo hysteria deie. But
(02:04):
on the border, on crime, on foreign policy, on the economy,
people don't like it. And the left knows that now,
and so they're not going to talk about it, or
if they are going to talk about it, in the
case of Senate candidates and Harris herself, they're going to
claim portions of it as their own. And that should
tell it something. So then what are they going to
win on? They're going to win on the idea that
(02:26):
Donald Trump deserved all of what I just delineated, and
he's an existential threat, and they're morally superior to everybody else,
and alone see that threat, and therefore any means justified,
any means necessary to get rid of them, or justified.
And that's where we are.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
Well. And you talk about how we see even senators
with rhetoric we've never heard before where they say we've
just got to take him out. I mean, they have
essentially called for his assassination publicly on news media that
in the past, had someone said something like that, they
would be banned from the network, they would never be
(03:05):
allowed back. And yet they're kind of I mean, I
would say they're even cheering this on. Even what I'm
seeing just today with going over the Madison Square Garden,
it's like, oh my gosh, he has to be taken
off the ball, like you have to vote against him now.
They're so desperate to come up with a reason that
he is a terrible person and you can't vote for him.
(03:25):
And yet the candidate that they obviously would choose is
not saying anything about what she would do or who
she is.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
No, they're not. I think it was Dan the representative
Goldman said he should be eliminated. Another person said he
should be extinguished. I think that was mister Fluff, who
was now working for the Harris campaigns. So they and
Hillary of course says he's Hitler. The problem with all
this tutor is if there's a general perception that the
(03:55):
Secret Service, for whatever reason, is lacks and that an
amateur when you're old, defied all security, just basic security
precautions and got close enough to shoot several times in
the direction and hit the president, and just a few
weeks later, another would be assassin could have easily killed
(04:16):
him had he not been spotted, and the security was
again that lacks. And then you couple that with this
idea that he's Hitler, he's a fascist. And we have
these military officers, I mean, they come out and say
he's a liar, he's Mussolini, he's Hitler, he's the cages
on the border that he created, or like Auschwitz, and
I'm quoting them verbatim. When you get General Millie who
(04:41):
says he's a fascist and that I had to contact
my Chinese counterpart in the PLA because I've self diagnosed
Trump as a threat and I'm going to contact him first.
When you put all that together with a laxity, then
all of these nuts out there think, well, if he's Hitler,
I'll be very famous for taking out this sexisten threat
and it's going to be very possible that I could
(05:03):
get away with it given what the Secret Services reputation is.
And that's very dangerous. It's not just dangerous in the campaign,
it's dangerous for his life from now on.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
And yet they all the lives of anyone around him.
I mean, you think about we lost a man at
a rally, somewhat just a regular American who went there
to support his candidate, and two others who were shot
and how many times? And then we thought. The thing
that blows my mind is honestly, after that, I was like, Okay,
they're going to stop, because who would continue when you
(05:35):
lose an American citizen because of this and all of
their rhetoric about January sixth. January sixth, will wait a minute.
If that's the case, you are all responsible for this
man's death in Butler, Pennsylvania. So you must be at
the point where you say, we have to stop. We
can no longer say these types of things. But they don't.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
They don't. And I think it was a Rasmus and
poll Democrat rats, would it have been a good thing
if Donald Trump had been shot? Twenty five percent she
said yes. Twenty five percent said they didn't know. We
had a New York Times columns James mccorthy, who's a
very distinguished linguist, and he said, it's too bad that
Donald Trump was not killed. It would have been better
(06:17):
for everybody around. So they talk about it so casually
that they've lowered the bar of the unpermissible are the unthinkable,
And that's going to be very dangerous in the weeks ahead.
And we've got to remember all of this rhetoric is
not new. In twenty twenty, Rosa Brooks, it was a
Pentagon lawyer, wrote in the Foreign Policy magazine eleven days
(06:37):
after Trump was inaugurated, there's only three ways to get
rid of him. We can impeach him, but that would
take too long. We can invoke the twenty fifth Amendment,
but that would take too long. But maybe we could
have a military coup and officers could just say they
weren't going to follow orders and remove him. She wargame
that after that twenty twenty inauguration with the same thing
(06:59):
the downside to it. So I guess what I'm saying
is that if he were to win, it's going to
be a very dangerous period in that interregnum of ninety
days before he's inaugurated, and then they're going to be
mass riots of the inauguration and it's not going to stop.
And you think they look back and they said, you know,
(07:20):
there was no Russian collusion, there was no Russian disinformation
over the laptop, there was no Alpha being ping, there
was none of any of this. We've been completely discredited.
We better stop.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
They don't they find they don't. You know, it's interesting.
After the second assassination attempt, I was making breakfast for
my girls and I had Fox News on, and one
of my eleven year olds turned to me and she said,
do we just think it's normal now for the president
to be nearly assassinated? Without even realizing what she was saying,
(07:54):
because they were just talking about it so nonchalantly, And
I looked at her and I said, no, no, we don't.
But it was this moment of recognizing to her we
were hearing this regularly and they were just talking about it.
Happenstance like, Okay, well this is now the new normal. No,
it's not the new normal. And if it were the
other side, there would be outrage constantly. And I think
(08:15):
that's where the American people have started to wake up
and go, Okay, this is unheard of, even if it's
not my candidate. For the most part, hearing that we're
now normalizing assassination attempts makes me step back. And I
think that is part of the reason why Trump has
been able to garner so much more support than anybody
(08:38):
really expected, because I got to tell you, even the
elites on the Republican side were like, Eh, he can't
win again, he can't win again. But I think the
way this cycle has gone just even Kamala Harris coming
out and flip flopping on every position, but not even
flip flopping, just not having a position, never having to
explain why her position is in a no position at all?
(09:00):
Why she how does she really feel about fracking, How
does she really feel about the border? How does she
really feel about ev mandates? She has never asked, and
she never has to answer, even if she is slightly asked.
She doesn't answer. People see that they.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Do and it's kind of ironic, or it's a paradox
that the media thinks that they're shielding her and so
her incompetence can't be revealed to the electorate. But all
they're doing it's sort of like telling an athlete that
they can't train or lift weights. So she's never had
any of this, and then suddenly it didn't work. So
now they think, well, now she'll go out and do interviews.
(09:35):
But meanwhile Trump had done sixty or seventy of them.
He'll talk about anything anywhere with anybody, anytime, and she
has no experience with any of that. Not that she
wouldn't be inept anyway, but just a force multiplier. And
so the other thing that you made a good point
is that they don't feel shame and they're going to
(09:56):
continue after this the vice presidential debate. I think people
thought that the ABC moderators Mirror and Davis were completely discredited.
They fact checked only one side, They did it poorly
and wrongly, they asked follow ups only advance, and so
then CBS was coming on. Everybody said they surely you
(10:17):
won't do this again, and even CBS said no, we're
not going to fact check, and then once again they
did the same thing O'Donnell and Brennan, and it was
almost as if we know we shouldn't do this, we
know that it's on ethical, we know it'll lose us support,
we know that CBS is in trouble anyway, but it's
(10:38):
so important to destroy Donald Trump that we're going to
do it anyway. And then not happy with that, then
they started editing Speaker Johnson's transcript and then Kamala Harris's transcript,
and they just keep going because they feel that they
if they get Kamala Harris elected, is that's the only goal,
then they can go back and tell all of us, well,
(11:00):
we're we kind of went overboard, but it's we'll behave
now that she's present. And this time, I don't think
people are going to listen to them. I think they've
so discredited themselves and have been so partisan and competent
that no one has any respect for them permanently.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
Let's take a quick commercial break. We'll continue next on
the Tutor Dixon podcast. Let me ask you about this
latest cultural revolution, because I think this is something that
like my mom's generation, felt like things really changed fast.
When if you look at the Ruth Bader Ginsburg's of
(11:37):
the world who really changed women's rights, who changed laws
and looked at laws in a different way and said,
you know what, law needs to be interpreted differently now
because culture is different. And I think that that's what
we're seeing today. We see a lot of these radical
progressives saying we have to interpret law differently because culture
is different, and now men don't have to be men
(12:00):
and they can compete with women, so almost reversing what
we saw Ruth Bader Ginsburg do. And yet these are
the same people that would lift her up and say
she is the reason, for example, that I was able
to run for governor in the state of Michigan. I
would look back at what she was able to do
and say she opened doors for me that would never
have been opened. But now those doors are closing. And
(12:22):
yet the progressives don't see that this cultural revolution is
taking women's rights away. Is that playing well with the public.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
No, They're very similar to the French revolutionaries that hijack
that revolution because it had a legitimate when they over
threw the Bourbons, they had a legitimate agenda. They wanted
a constitutional republic. And then there were iterations that got
radical ratal, and finally the rose Pierre brothers Jackomans took over.
(12:55):
And it's very similar. They said, you know what, it's
not enough to have a political revolution. You can't. It
has to be holistic, as you said, cultural, social, economic, political.
So what did they do. They started destroying statues, they
started going after priests, they started changing the days of
the week, the year. And this what we're experiencing is
the same thing. It's holistic. They say, no, no, you didn't.
(13:18):
You didn't have a declaration of foundational principles in seventeen
seventy six. It was sixteen ninety. And by the way,
we can take statues down, even if they're places in
San Francisco, Act Golden Gate Park, Father Hunipio Sera or Galileo.
We're just going to erase the pass and we're going
to chart changing the names of streets and buildings. And
(13:41):
so what they're trying to do is fundamentally change every
aspect of our life and erase or past and then
imprint this revolutionary. So there are no longer two sexes,
there's three. There's no such thing as women's sports for
biologically born women. There is no thing as the electoral College.
(14:03):
There is no such thing soon as the Senate filibus.
There is no such thing as a nine person Supreme
Court that's been there for one hundred and seventy years.
They want to change almost everything possible, and I think
it's been so overwhelming there's going to be a backlash.
(14:24):
Why that backlash has not resulted in a larger, more
manifest lead for Trump or for Senate candidates is I
think they were very smart how they waged this revolution.
They started with the institutions very slowly, the corporate boardroom,
k through twelve, Academy, Hollywood, professional Sports, Silicon Valley, social media,
(14:45):
traditional media, and once they were in control, they were
able to wield a level of influence. It was never
commiserate with their actual numbers, and now it's very hard
to break through that. I mean, there's this podcast, like
this talk radio, but basically the influence, money and power,
the foundations, the universities, they're all in the hands of
(15:07):
the left. And that's why this minority that is a minority,
has been able to so far succeed with this revolution.
Let's hope that in next week we can stop it. Well.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
I sort of think that they felt that they could
continue it slower than they actually did, because I think
they thought with Hillary they would get Hillary in, they
would continue to push this through universities, and then they
would slowly overto they would have more time to get people.
It's kind of like the frog and the boiling water,
(15:40):
and they would have more time for people to really
not realize what was happening. And then Trump really stirred
things up for them. And I think that when you
look at the twenty twenty BLM Antifa riots and you
see how people were just a lot of as heroes
for this two billion dollars in damages, all these deaths
and sell these injuries. No one comes back and says,
(16:02):
my gosh, look at the rapes and the murders that
happened in that Chaz zone, you know whatever they decided
to ultimately call it. But look at Minneapolis, look at
what happened there. It all went so quickly at the
same time as them suddenly pushing these surgeries for children
and taking away trophies from little girls. And then in
(16:26):
the midst of that you have this movement for you know,
there's no personal responsibility, and we have to be able
to choose when we have kids by having abortions, and
all of this hit all at one time, and I really,
I really believe it was meant to be spread out
over more time. And the progressives got scared when Trump
(16:46):
won the first time, and then they said, Okay, when
we get back in control, we have to just push
this as far as we can. And the American people
kind of stepped back and said, well, wait a minute.
I'm not okay with you running into my pharmacy and
stealing all the mascara off the shelves. I'm not okay
with you running into Macy's and looting it. I'm not
(17:07):
okay with your son competing against my daughter. It's too much,
too fast. And I think that's why next week could
go Trump's way.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
Yeah, I do. I think their attitude also was we're
going to be so stealthy and we're going to not
tell people what we're actually doing. In other words, it's
almost Awellian. You're going to look at the border and
you're going to see ten thousand people crossing in a day,
and then mister Mayork is going to say it's absolutely secure,
and it's almost like you're an animal farm or nineteen
(17:38):
eighty four and the idea is just to deny all this,
but then to do things so radically that when they
go out of power it will take years. Even if
it's possible to a direct what are we going to
do with ten, twelve, fifteen million people? Because in their
way of thinking, there was nothing wrong with bringing these
swarms that disrupted destroyed commune. But if Donald Trump tries
(18:01):
to deport any of them that are here illegally, then
it's going to be an national outrage, not them coming illegally,
but legally asking them to go back, and that that's
across the line on everything. How are you, I mean,
how do you get back six trillion dollars? Build back
better inflation? They just went to special special concerns that
(18:26):
had ties of the progressives, They had no economic benefit. Basically,
they just spread all this money around. How do you
get back with the idea these district attorneys have now
legitimized here in California, if you drive through Oakland or
San Francisco, you shoplifting has been legitimate. I walk in
(18:48):
San Francisco and there's cars that say nothing here a
little placard and all the windows are down. So they
don't they can just come and take anything rather than
have their windows broken. But we've so institutional the chaos.
I think they think, well, maybe we were going to lose,
but we left a legacy. It's going to be really
hard to the chaos and anarchic we caused and the disruption.
(19:12):
And they're proud of that, they really are. And I
think it is going to take ten to twenty years
to address all things that have happened in the universities,
especially we institutionalized anti Semitism. It used to be ten
years ago if some kid was on a campus and
somebody walked over and pushed him, or a professor has
(19:32):
happened at my university at Stanford told the Jewish students
to leave their backpacks on this side of the room
and then go over there and be segregated, because then
they're going to feel like Palestinians who lost their property.
He would have been permanently dismissed, not just temporarily. Now
he's going to come back. But we've so normalized the
(19:52):
abnormal that I think they feel they did a lot
and they're quite satisfied with themselves even if they lose.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
You know, you brought up the infrastructure bill and I
want to talk about this because I think also the
idea of oversight of how our taxes are being used
has kind of fallen by the wayside when it goes
into especially blue states. I'll pick on my own state
in Michigan. We got all of this money from the
Infrastructure Bill, and that was supposed to go to rebuilding
roads and also getting internet access to these areas where
(20:23):
they weren't able to get online during the pandemic. There
was suddenly this realization that there are people that are
left out there behind, they can't actually function like the
rest of the country. Well, how do we know where
that money actually went? Because my community that has always
been online, that doesn't have any access issues over the summer,
(20:43):
suddenly we got fiber internet. And when we asked, why
are you digging up our yards? Why are you putting
this in? Oh, the infrastructure bill, your city got chosen
to get this, But why my city and what is
the contract? Suddenly there's a contract with this guy who's
not gonnected to the people who are putting the fiber
internet in. It's a government contract that comes from the
(21:05):
state who's watching to see why did these people get
this government contract? Why did this go into my neighborhood,
not northern Michigan, not the Upper Peninsula. Why am I
getting this? Who is watching the money? And I would
say the same thing when it comes to the massive
amount of taxpayer dollars that are going toward these ev mandates,
because we as Michiganders, are paying billions of dollars to
(21:26):
build new factories. But the factories are not going into Michigan.
So is there oversight there to see if those factories
are going into Mexico, are they going into to Tennessee?
You know, I think the American people have gotten to
the point where they're like, it's just more trillions. They're
just taking more money and boot but it's going to
benefit us. Well wait a minute, what if it's not.
Why do you trust? Who trusts the government? You have
(21:49):
to have oversight.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
Yeah, I think everybody's going to have I think they're
coming to the point where they're saying, I'm going to
speak my mind finally, And I don't really care if
you counsel or docks me or ostracize me, because what
the left does with all these things that you delineated,
they if you object to the border and you say
it's not normal to have twelve million people here without
background or health checks. You're a racist. That's why you're
(22:14):
saying that you believe in the great replacement theory. Or
if you question ev your climate denialist, or if you
want why don't we just go back and have one
day voting with IDs, Well, you're an election denialists. So
they have all of these preemptory deterrents that everybody's afraid of.
And you can see it with the African American male
(22:35):
community that they're just starting this movement. Now. They're saying,
I don't care what Opah says, I don't care what
the Bombas say, I don't care what Clinton say. I
understand that these cities that are run by left wing people,
even if they're black, they're a mess. And I want
to vote my conscious and be an independent person. And
here in the Central California there's a lot of Latino,
(22:58):
especially men, Mexican American men of my community. They're all
voting for Trump for the first time, and that's what
they will tell you. I don't really care anymore. I
don't want to pay double for gas. I don't want
to pay one one hundred and eighty dollars for a
spool of electrical wire when it used to be forty
nine dollars. I just don't want to do that anymore.
(23:20):
So that's kind of a breakaway. But before you can
vote independently or think independently, you just have to say
I don't care about the consequences. And that's what the
left's really frightened, because with all of this institutional control
and the control of the language and vocabulary, and that
you're trying to do it. You could see it at
(23:41):
Madison Square Garden fascist fascist Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, Nazi, Nazi's Nazi. Well,
it's when these people, this diverse group, at that arena,
when they say, I don't care what you say anymore.
You've said it so much it means nothing to me.
Once you're liberated like that, then you can do almost
any thing. And that's what the left is terrified that
(24:04):
their television, their radio, the media, Washington Posts, people are
going to resign, they're going to cancel because they didn't endorse.
But once you get over that, you think, you know what,
they're really a minority of the country. They're not very
nice people, these spokesmen, these elites, are not very talented.
All they have is threats and fear. And once you
(24:26):
say Joy Read or Rachel Matta, I don't care what
they say. I don't care what the New York Time
says about you. I don't care any of this. And
that's what's starting to happen. I think that's why I
think he's got a good chance to win. A lot
of people just don't care anymore.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
Stick around for more of my conversation with Victor Davis Hansen,
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Now more coming up with Victor Davis Hansen. After this,
I keep hearing politicians and news media anchors reporters come
(26:08):
out and say, the American people think that they have
experienced inflation because there's rhetoric around it. But if I
look at the numbers, you haven't experienced it. It's so
degrading to people because like, for example, I'm a family
of six. When Trump was in office, I would go
to the grocery store and my bill was always between
two hundred and fifty and three hundred dollars always. Now
(26:31):
every time, my bill is between four hundred and five
hundred dollars. There's no question. I know that I feel it.
It's painful. If it's painful for me, it's painful for
every single family. It's not different. I'm not buying different food.
They are not buying different food either, So to be
told you are not experiencing what you are experiencing. Same
(26:52):
with crime numbers. The American people aren't feeling crime because
the crime numbers are down. I mean you saw that
in the debate. You've got them saying no, no, no, wrong,
let me fact check you. The crime numbers are down.
And then afterward the FBI comes out and goes, oh,
actually we have to reassess the crime numbers. They're not down,
They're actually up four percent. Well, that means people are
feeling that you're being told on a regular basis you're
(27:13):
not actually living what you are actually living. At a
certain point, people just go to the other side. So
why don't the polls reflect that that he is overwhelmingly winning?
It feels like he should be. Are the polls accurate?
Should we go into this feeling like it's neck and neck?
Speaker 2 (27:31):
You know, I've been asking myself that, and there's all
of these issues that are involved. So everybody looks at
the twenty sixteen that was off and they said they're
going to correct it in twenty twenty, and then twenty
twenty in most cases was even more off undervalue. So
then people said, well, yes, but they got it right
(27:54):
in the twenty twenty two midterms, and they did. But
then people come back and say, well, Trump wasn't on
the ballot or otherwise they would have. So we're going into
this election. I think people the reason that Trump supporters
are worried. On the one hand, they're encouraged that if
Trump is even in the polls, then he's really because
(28:14):
the polls are not accurate, or they choose not to
poll in a way they knew no would be more accurate.
There may be two points under reporting, but they feel
at the same time that the mail in ballots and
the early voting can't be authenticated to the same degree
the same day, and that's where two points. So they
kind of say it's a draw. One thing that I
(28:35):
have noticed though, that it's kind of a disconnect. They
will tell you that the swing states where the election
is going to be decided or haven't moved, they're almost
dead even or Trump caught up and now maybe Harris
came back a little bit. But at the same time
they're telling us this, they're saying, there's phenomenal Trump rise
(29:02):
and he's got this on. We never expected this support
in places like New Hampshire and Virginia and Minnesota where
he was down eight and nine points and now he's
only gone by two or three. Well, those states are
right next to some of the states that are frozen
one to one. So you think, well, wait a minute,
why would these voters in these diverse states like Minnesota
(29:25):
and New Hampshire and Virginia all very diverse, but why
would they collectively be starting to move toward Trump? At
least maybe he won't win them, but they're going to
be much closer than anybody imagined a month. But that
same phenomenon is not happening in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and Michigan.
And I think it is. And I think there's a tendency,
(29:46):
a natural tendency by some of the posters that think
that they pull a little bit differently in Arizona and
Georgia and Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania than they do in New
hamp I'm sure in Virginia and Minnesota and State and
New Mexico. And by that, I mean in these blue
(30:07):
states where you see this national surge for Trump, they
don't really mind if their polls show it because they
have they have no expectation he'll win. So they just say, well,
we did this, and he's and then they're going to
tell then they're telling us at the same time. But
that national observe, that easily observed push for Trump does
(30:31):
not exist where it really counts in seven states, because
they seem to be static. And I just don't believe
that's possible. No.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
I know, it's when you're on the ground here. I
don't know what it's like out in California, But for Michigan,
which is a swing state, when you're on the ground here,
the ground, I mean even the signs, the signs are
are much more weighted toward Trump when you're driving. When
you're out there, you see more people willing to wear
(30:58):
Trump gear, willing to wear the MAGA hat, willing to
wear the T shirts. The excitement seems to be big.
The last thing I want to ask you is why
do you think there is a disparity between the excitement
for Trump and the excitement for Republican Senate candidates because
they all seem to be trailing him a bit, and
so I'm hearing on the ground in Michigan, well, Trump
has to win by three points for us to get
(31:19):
the Senate across the across the line, Why would that be?
Speaker 2 (31:25):
I think in one sense, she who's doing pretty well,
McCormick in Pennsylvania, Mike Rodgers in Michigan. They're all running
against incumbent, entrenched incumbents, and those incumbents have done better relatively.
(31:46):
I don't know. I'm not saying exactly or empirically as
far as their job, but they're perceived to have done
a better job than Kamala Harris auth And all of
those candidates, as incumbents, tend and I I've watched them
tend to conduct themselves better in interviews and are more retail,
better retail politicians than Kamala Harris. I think Kamala Harris
(32:09):
is a she has everything going for she has two
and a half times the money, she's an incumbent, she's young,
she's black, she's female, but she's a lousy politician. And
those other candidates are very well funded, but they're also
professional politicians and they are incumbents, and they are outspending
(32:33):
by a great margin, so they have all the advantages
that Kamala Harris are. But they're not bad candidates. I
think they're bad in the sense that I wouldn't want
to vote for him because of their ideology and their politics.
But as far as the retail skills, if you look
at Casey or Tester, they're much more skilled than Kamala Harris.
(32:53):
So it's much harder for the Senate to break through
that incumbency.
Speaker 1 (32:58):
I would say they're more skilled, and they're better at
trying to moderate without looking like they're lying, if that
makes sense anymore.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
Never as they were never as radical in the first
place as she was. They were never chanting no deportation
or fracking. Yeah, we'll banged. The problem with her is
every time she said something here in California, it was
to a sympathetic audience, so she doubled down. It wasn't
just I want to ban fracking or I'm for deportation,
but she was so emphatic. She yelled it out of course,
(33:31):
and that's hard to erase now for her, But the
other candidates would have never gotten themselves in such a ridiculous.
They're smarter than that, they're sneakier, they're more complex than that.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
It's also hard to run as the change candidate when
you are the incumbent and she's trying to say that
she's not I'm not Joe Biden. Okay, but how why
wouldn't change anything that he did? Well? When you are
Joe Biden, you know, it's like this is It really
has been a really ridiculous campaign season, but I think
very eye opening and a lot of people have asked me,
(34:03):
how do you think this could have happened? That he
didn't win after twenty twenty and now he's back and
he's gaining all this this steam, and I just think,
you know, all of this head to be exposed. There's
a bigger plan at play here. We had to see
exactly what the other side was going to do. So
we all wait for the next few days to see
what this election brings. But in the meantime, I think
(34:23):
that it's a game of who's going to get more
people out there and who's going to contact more people,
and that that's always what it is, So you can
run as many commercials as you want. I find that
we have the same commercials running over and over again,
and I think people more tired of that too. So
now it's just to get out the vote game. And
over the next few days you're going to see people
(34:45):
knocking doors and out there with their signs and calling people,
and that'll be what determines what happens in this election.
But I appreciate so much you coming on and sharing
your opinion. It's really very sightful, very different than what
we generally hear, but exactly what we needed to hear.
Victor Davis Hansen, thank you for coming on. Thank you,
(35:08):
and thank you all for joining us on the Tutor
Dixon Podcast. For this episode and others, go to Tutor
disonpodcast dot com. You can subscribe right there, or head
over to the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you
get your podcasts and join us next time. Have a
blessed ding
Welcome to the Tutor Dixon Podcast. I am excited we're
in the last final stretch before the campaign and before
the election, before this big answer finally comes to us.
And today we have Victor Davis Hanson with us. He
is a best selling historian and senior Fellow at the
Hoover Institution. He is also the author of the most
recent book, The End of Everything, How Wars to Send
(00:24):
into Annihilation. Victor, thank you so much for joining me.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Thank you for having me. Tutor.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
Absolutely so. I'm looking at this campaign. It's been I
was actually talking to someone this morning and she was like,
this is just such an unprecedented election cycle. I'm like,
I mean, we can say nothing else other than that,
because we've never seen a candidate be installed. The media
go after the other side the way they have the
(00:50):
doj come and try to put the guy in jail.
I mean, when you look at this as a historian,
what do you say about what's gone on?
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Well, I always try to put everything in context, and
so the things that you outlined, I just say, have
we ever had a president impeached twice in two terms
that much less one know? Has he ever been tried
by a private as a private citizen in the Senate. No,
have we ever had five civil and criminal lawsuits that
(01:20):
would have never been brought against him had he just
not run, or maybe and he could say that they'd
never been brought previously against a private citizen in any circumstance.
Have we ever had sixteen states try to remove a
president from the ballot. I've never had two assassination attempts
in a single against a candidate in a single cycle.
So what explains all of this? And I think the
(01:43):
answer is that two things. One, this progressive experiment that
took off with Obama but gained speed after George Floyd, Riots, etc.
Doesn't appeal to people. They were willing to give it
sort of ants because of the wo hysteria deie. But
(02:04):
on the border, on crime, on foreign policy, on the economy,
people don't like it. And the left knows that now,
and so they're not going to talk about it, or
if they are going to talk about it, in the
case of Senate candidates and Harris herself, they're going to
claim portions of it as their own. And that should
tell it something. So then what are they going to
win on? They're going to win on the idea that
(02:26):
Donald Trump deserved all of what I just delineated, and
he's an existential threat, and they're morally superior to everybody else,
and alone see that threat, and therefore any means justified,
any means necessary to get rid of them, or justified.
And that's where we are.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
Well. And you talk about how we see even senators
with rhetoric we've never heard before where they say we've
just got to take him out. I mean, they have
essentially called for his assassination publicly on news media that
in the past, had someone said something like that, they
would be banned from the network, they would never be
(03:05):
allowed back. And yet they're kind of I mean, I
would say they're even cheering this on. Even what I'm
seeing just today with going over the Madison Square Garden,
it's like, oh my gosh, he has to be taken
off the ball, like you have to vote against him now.
They're so desperate to come up with a reason that
he is a terrible person and you can't vote for him.
(03:25):
And yet the candidate that they obviously would choose is
not saying anything about what she would do or who
she is.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
No, they're not. I think it was Dan the representative
Goldman said he should be eliminated. Another person said he
should be extinguished. I think that was mister Fluff, who
was now working for the Harris campaigns. So they and
Hillary of course says he's Hitler. The problem with all
this tutor is if there's a general perception that the
(03:55):
Secret Service, for whatever reason, is lacks and that an
amateur when you're old, defied all security, just basic security
precautions and got close enough to shoot several times in
the direction and hit the president, and just a few
weeks later, another would be assassin could have easily killed
(04:16):
him had he not been spotted, and the security was
again that lacks. And then you couple that with this
idea that he's Hitler, he's a fascist. And we have
these military officers, I mean, they come out and say
he's a liar, he's Mussolini, he's Hitler, he's the cages
on the border that he created, or like Auschwitz, and
I'm quoting them verbatim. When you get General Millie who
(04:41):
says he's a fascist and that I had to contact
my Chinese counterpart in the PLA because I've self diagnosed
Trump as a threat and I'm going to contact him first.
When you put all that together with a laxity, then
all of these nuts out there think, well, if he's Hitler,
I'll be very famous for taking out this sexisten threat
and it's going to be very possible that I could
(05:03):
get away with it given what the Secret Services reputation is.
And that's very dangerous. It's not just dangerous in the campaign,
it's dangerous for his life from now on.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
And yet they all the lives of anyone around him.
I mean, you think about we lost a man at
a rally, somewhat just a regular American who went there
to support his candidate, and two others who were shot
and how many times? And then we thought. The thing
that blows my mind is honestly, after that, I was like, Okay,
they're going to stop, because who would continue when you
(05:35):
lose an American citizen because of this and all of
their rhetoric about January sixth. January sixth, will wait a minute.
If that's the case, you are all responsible for this
man's death in Butler, Pennsylvania. So you must be at
the point where you say, we have to stop. We
can no longer say these types of things. But they don't.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
They don't. And I think it was a Rasmus and
poll Democrat rats, would it have been a good thing
if Donald Trump had been shot? Twenty five percent she
said yes. Twenty five percent said they didn't know. We
had a New York Times columns James mccorthy, who's a
very distinguished linguist, and he said, it's too bad that
Donald Trump was not killed. It would have been better
(06:17):
for everybody around. So they talk about it so casually
that they've lowered the bar of the unpermissible are the unthinkable,
And that's going to be very dangerous in the weeks ahead.
And we've got to remember all of this rhetoric is
not new. In twenty twenty, Rosa Brooks, it was a
Pentagon lawyer, wrote in the Foreign Policy magazine eleven days
(06:37):
after Trump was inaugurated, there's only three ways to get
rid of him. We can impeach him, but that would
take too long. We can invoke the twenty fifth Amendment,
but that would take too long. But maybe we could
have a military coup and officers could just say they
weren't going to follow orders and remove him. She wargame
that after that twenty twenty inauguration with the same thing
(06:59):
the downside to it. So I guess what I'm saying
is that if he were to win, it's going to
be a very dangerous period in that interregnum of ninety
days before he's inaugurated, and then they're going to be
mass riots of the inauguration and it's not going to stop.
And you think they look back and they said, you know,
(07:20):
there was no Russian collusion, there was no Russian disinformation
over the laptop, there was no Alpha being ping, there
was none of any of this. We've been completely discredited.
We better stop.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
They don't they find they don't. You know, it's interesting.
After the second assassination attempt, I was making breakfast for
my girls and I had Fox News on, and one
of my eleven year olds turned to me and she said,
do we just think it's normal now for the president
to be nearly assassinated? Without even realizing what she was saying,
(07:54):
because they were just talking about it so nonchalantly, And
I looked at her and I said, no, no, we don't.
But it was this moment of recognizing to her we
were hearing this regularly and they were just talking about it.
Happenstance like, Okay, well this is now the new normal. No,
it's not the new normal. And if it were the
other side, there would be outrage constantly. And I think
(08:15):
that's where the American people have started to wake up
and go, Okay, this is unheard of, even if it's
not my candidate. For the most part, hearing that we're
now normalizing assassination attempts makes me step back. And I
think that is part of the reason why Trump has
been able to garner so much more support than anybody
(08:38):
really expected, because I got to tell you, even the
elites on the Republican side were like, Eh, he can't
win again, he can't win again. But I think the
way this cycle has gone just even Kamala Harris coming
out and flip flopping on every position, but not even
flip flopping, just not having a position, never having to
explain why her position is in a no position at all?
(09:00):
Why she how does she really feel about fracking, How
does she really feel about the border? How does she
really feel about ev mandates? She has never asked, and
she never has to answer, even if she is slightly asked.
She doesn't answer. People see that they.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Do and it's kind of ironic, or it's a paradox
that the media thinks that they're shielding her and so
her incompetence can't be revealed to the electorate. But all
they're doing it's sort of like telling an athlete that
they can't train or lift weights. So she's never had
any of this, and then suddenly it didn't work. So
now they think, well, now she'll go out and do interviews.
(09:35):
But meanwhile Trump had done sixty or seventy of them.
He'll talk about anything anywhere with anybody, anytime, and she
has no experience with any of that. Not that she
wouldn't be inept anyway, but just a force multiplier. And
so the other thing that you made a good point
is that they don't feel shame and they're going to
(09:56):
continue after this the vice presidential debate. I think people
thought that the ABC moderators Mirror and Davis were completely discredited.
They fact checked only one side, They did it poorly
and wrongly, they asked follow ups only advance, and so
then CBS was coming on. Everybody said they surely you
(10:17):
won't do this again, and even CBS said no, we're
not going to fact check, and then once again they
did the same thing O'Donnell and Brennan, and it was
almost as if we know we shouldn't do this, we
know that it's on ethical, we know it'll lose us support,
we know that CBS is in trouble anyway, but it's
(10:38):
so important to destroy Donald Trump that we're going to
do it anyway. And then not happy with that, then
they started editing Speaker Johnson's transcript and then Kamala Harris's transcript,
and they just keep going because they feel that they
if they get Kamala Harris elected, is that's the only goal,
then they can go back and tell all of us, well,
(11:00):
we're we kind of went overboard, but it's we'll behave
now that she's present. And this time, I don't think
people are going to listen to them. I think they've
so discredited themselves and have been so partisan and competent
that no one has any respect for them permanently.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
Let's take a quick commercial break. We'll continue next on
the Tutor Dixon podcast. Let me ask you about this
latest cultural revolution, because I think this is something that
like my mom's generation, felt like things really changed fast.
When if you look at the Ruth Bader Ginsburg's of
(11:37):
the world who really changed women's rights, who changed laws
and looked at laws in a different way and said,
you know what, law needs to be interpreted differently now
because culture is different. And I think that that's what
we're seeing today. We see a lot of these radical
progressives saying we have to interpret law differently because culture
is different, and now men don't have to be men
(12:00):
and they can compete with women, so almost reversing what
we saw Ruth Bader Ginsburg do. And yet these are
the same people that would lift her up and say
she is the reason, for example, that I was able
to run for governor in the state of Michigan. I
would look back at what she was able to do
and say she opened doors for me that would never
have been opened. But now those doors are closing. And
(12:22):
yet the progressives don't see that this cultural revolution is
taking women's rights away. Is that playing well with the public.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
No, They're very similar to the French revolutionaries that hijack
that revolution because it had a legitimate when they over
threw the Bourbons, they had a legitimate agenda. They wanted
a constitutional republic. And then there were iterations that got
radical ratal, and finally the rose Pierre brothers Jackomans took over.
(12:55):
And it's very similar. They said, you know what, it's
not enough to have a political revolution. You can't. It
has to be holistic, as you said, cultural, social, economic, political.
So what did they do. They started destroying statues, they
started going after priests, they started changing the days of
the week, the year. And this what we're experiencing is
the same thing. It's holistic. They say, no, no, you didn't.
(13:18):
You didn't have a declaration of foundational principles in seventeen
seventy six. It was sixteen ninety. And by the way,
we can take statues down, even if they're places in
San Francisco, Act Golden Gate Park, Father Hunipio Sera or Galileo.
We're just going to erase the pass and we're going
to chart changing the names of streets and buildings. And
(13:41):
so what they're trying to do is fundamentally change every
aspect of our life and erase or past and then
imprint this revolutionary. So there are no longer two sexes,
there's three. There's no such thing as women's sports for
biologically born women. There is no thing as the electoral College.
(14:03):
There is no such thing soon as the Senate filibus.
There is no such thing as a nine person Supreme
Court that's been there for one hundred and seventy years.
They want to change almost everything possible, and I think
it's been so overwhelming there's going to be a backlash.
(14:24):
Why that backlash has not resulted in a larger, more
manifest lead for Trump or for Senate candidates is I
think they were very smart how they waged this revolution.
They started with the institutions very slowly, the corporate boardroom,
k through twelve, Academy, Hollywood, professional Sports, Silicon Valley, social media,
(14:45):
traditional media, and once they were in control, they were
able to wield a level of influence. It was never
commiserate with their actual numbers, and now it's very hard
to break through that. I mean, there's this podcast, like
this talk radio, but basically the influence, money and power,
the foundations, the universities, they're all in the hands of
(15:07):
the left. And that's why this minority that is a minority,
has been able to so far succeed with this revolution.
Let's hope that in next week we can stop it. Well.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
I sort of think that they felt that they could
continue it slower than they actually did, because I think
they thought with Hillary they would get Hillary in, they
would continue to push this through universities, and then they
would slowly overto they would have more time to get people.
It's kind of like the frog and the boiling water,
(15:40):
and they would have more time for people to really
not realize what was happening. And then Trump really stirred
things up for them. And I think that when you
look at the twenty twenty BLM Antifa riots and you
see how people were just a lot of as heroes
for this two billion dollars in damages, all these deaths
and sell these injuries. No one comes back and says,
(16:02):
my gosh, look at the rapes and the murders that
happened in that Chaz zone, you know whatever they decided
to ultimately call it. But look at Minneapolis, look at
what happened there. It all went so quickly at the
same time as them suddenly pushing these surgeries for children
and taking away trophies from little girls. And then in
(16:26):
the midst of that you have this movement for you know,
there's no personal responsibility, and we have to be able
to choose when we have kids by having abortions, and
all of this hit all at one time, and I really,
I really believe it was meant to be spread out
over more time. And the progressives got scared when Trump
(16:46):
won the first time, and then they said, Okay, when
we get back in control, we have to just push
this as far as we can. And the American people
kind of stepped back and said, well, wait a minute.
I'm not okay with you running into my pharmacy and
stealing all the mascara off the shelves. I'm not okay
with you running into Macy's and looting it. I'm not
(17:07):
okay with your son competing against my daughter. It's too much,
too fast. And I think that's why next week could
go Trump's way.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
Yeah, I do. I think their attitude also was we're
going to be so stealthy and we're going to not
tell people what we're actually doing. In other words, it's
almost Awellian. You're going to look at the border and
you're going to see ten thousand people crossing in a day,
and then mister Mayork is going to say it's absolutely secure,
and it's almost like you're an animal farm or nineteen
(17:38):
eighty four and the idea is just to deny all this,
but then to do things so radically that when they
go out of power it will take years. Even if
it's possible to a direct what are we going to
do with ten, twelve, fifteen million people? Because in their
way of thinking, there was nothing wrong with bringing these
swarms that disrupted destroyed commune. But if Donald Trump tries
(18:01):
to deport any of them that are here illegally, then
it's going to be an national outrage, not them coming illegally,
but legally asking them to go back, and that that's
across the line on everything. How are you, I mean,
how do you get back six trillion dollars? Build back
better inflation? They just went to special special concerns that
(18:26):
had ties of the progressives, They had no economic benefit. Basically,
they just spread all this money around. How do you
get back with the idea these district attorneys have now
legitimized here in California, if you drive through Oakland or
San Francisco, you shoplifting has been legitimate. I walk in
(18:48):
San Francisco and there's cars that say nothing here a
little placard and all the windows are down. So they
don't they can just come and take anything rather than
have their windows broken. But we've so institutional the chaos.
I think they think, well, maybe we were going to lose,
but we left a legacy. It's going to be really
hard to the chaos and anarchic we caused and the disruption.
(19:12):
And they're proud of that, they really are. And I
think it is going to take ten to twenty years
to address all things that have happened in the universities,
especially we institutionalized anti Semitism. It used to be ten
years ago if some kid was on a campus and
somebody walked over and pushed him, or a professor has
(19:32):
happened at my university at Stanford told the Jewish students
to leave their backpacks on this side of the room
and then go over there and be segregated, because then
they're going to feel like Palestinians who lost their property.
He would have been permanently dismissed, not just temporarily. Now
he's going to come back. But we've so normalized the
(19:52):
abnormal that I think they feel they did a lot
and they're quite satisfied with themselves even if they lose.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
You know, you brought up the infrastructure bill and I
want to talk about this because I think also the
idea of oversight of how our taxes are being used
has kind of fallen by the wayside when it goes
into especially blue states. I'll pick on my own state
in Michigan. We got all of this money from the
Infrastructure Bill, and that was supposed to go to rebuilding
roads and also getting internet access to these areas where
(20:23):
they weren't able to get online during the pandemic. There
was suddenly this realization that there are people that are
left out there behind, they can't actually function like the
rest of the country. Well, how do we know where
that money actually went? Because my community that has always
been online, that doesn't have any access issues over the summer,
(20:43):
suddenly we got fiber internet. And when we asked, why
are you digging up our yards? Why are you putting
this in? Oh, the infrastructure bill, your city got chosen
to get this, But why my city and what is
the contract? Suddenly there's a contract with this guy who's
not gonnected to the people who are putting the fiber
internet in. It's a government contract that comes from the
(21:05):
state who's watching to see why did these people get
this government contract? Why did this go into my neighborhood,
not northern Michigan, not the Upper Peninsula. Why am I
getting this? Who is watching the money? And I would
say the same thing when it comes to the massive
amount of taxpayer dollars that are going toward these ev mandates,
because we as Michiganders, are paying billions of dollars to
(21:26):
build new factories. But the factories are not going into Michigan.
So is there oversight there to see if those factories
are going into Mexico, are they going into to Tennessee?
You know, I think the American people have gotten to
the point where they're like, it's just more trillions. They're
just taking more money and boot but it's going to
benefit us. Well wait a minute, what if it's not.
Why do you trust? Who trusts the government? You have
(21:49):
to have oversight.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
Yeah, I think everybody's going to have I think they're
coming to the point where they're saying, I'm going to
speak my mind finally, And I don't really care if
you counsel or docks me or ostracize me, because what
the left does with all these things that you delineated,
they if you object to the border and you say
it's not normal to have twelve million people here without
background or health checks. You're a racist. That's why you're
(22:14):
saying that you believe in the great replacement theory. Or
if you question ev your climate denialist, or if you
want why don't we just go back and have one
day voting with IDs, Well, you're an election denialists. So
they have all of these preemptory deterrents that everybody's afraid of.
And you can see it with the African American male
(22:35):
community that they're just starting this movement. Now. They're saying,
I don't care what Opah says, I don't care what
the Bombas say, I don't care what Clinton say. I
understand that these cities that are run by left wing people,
even if they're black, they're a mess. And I want
to vote my conscious and be an independent person. And
here in the Central California there's a lot of Latino,
(22:58):
especially men, Mexican American men of my community. They're all
voting for Trump for the first time, and that's what
they will tell you. I don't really care anymore. I
don't want to pay double for gas. I don't want
to pay one one hundred and eighty dollars for a
spool of electrical wire when it used to be forty
nine dollars. I just don't want to do that anymore.
(23:20):
So that's kind of a breakaway. But before you can
vote independently or think independently, you just have to say
I don't care about the consequences. And that's what the
left's really frightened, because with all of this institutional control
and the control of the language and vocabulary, and that
you're trying to do it. You could see it at
(23:41):
Madison Square Garden fascist fascist Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, Nazi, Nazi's Nazi. Well,
it's when these people, this diverse group, at that arena,
when they say, I don't care what you say anymore.
You've said it so much it means nothing to me.
Once you're liberated like that, then you can do almost
any thing. And that's what the left is terrified that
(24:04):
their television, their radio, the media, Washington Posts, people are
going to resign, they're going to cancel because they didn't endorse.
But once you get over that, you think, you know what,
they're really a minority of the country. They're not very
nice people, these spokesmen, these elites, are not very talented.
All they have is threats and fear. And once you
(24:26):
say Joy Read or Rachel Matta, I don't care what
they say. I don't care what the New York Time
says about you. I don't care any of this. And
that's what's starting to happen. I think that's why I
think he's got a good chance to win. A lot
of people just don't care anymore.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
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Now more coming up with Victor Davis Hansen. After this,
I keep hearing politicians and news media anchors reporters come
(26:08):
out and say, the American people think that they have
experienced inflation because there's rhetoric around it. But if I
look at the numbers, you haven't experienced it. It's so
degrading to people because like, for example, I'm a family
of six. When Trump was in office, I would go
to the grocery store and my bill was always between
two hundred and fifty and three hundred dollars always. Now
(26:31):
every time, my bill is between four hundred and five
hundred dollars. There's no question. I know that I feel it.
It's painful. If it's painful for me, it's painful for
every single family. It's not different. I'm not buying different food.
They are not buying different food either, So to be
told you are not experiencing what you are experiencing. Same
(26:52):
with crime numbers. The American people aren't feeling crime because
the crime numbers are down. I mean you saw that
in the debate. You've got them saying no, no, no, wrong,
let me fact check you. The crime numbers are down.
And then afterward the FBI comes out and goes, oh,
actually we have to reassess the crime numbers. They're not down,
They're actually up four percent. Well, that means people are
feeling that you're being told on a regular basis you're
(27:13):
not actually living what you are actually living. At a
certain point, people just go to the other side. So
why don't the polls reflect that that he is overwhelmingly winning?
It feels like he should be. Are the polls accurate?
Should we go into this feeling like it's neck and neck?
Speaker 2 (27:31):
You know, I've been asking myself that, and there's all
of these issues that are involved. So everybody looks at
the twenty sixteen that was off and they said they're
going to correct it in twenty twenty, and then twenty
twenty in most cases was even more off undervalue. So
then people said, well, yes, but they got it right
(27:54):
in the twenty twenty two midterms, and they did. But
then people come back and say, well, Trump wasn't on
the ballot or otherwise they would have. So we're going into
this election. I think people the reason that Trump supporters
are worried. On the one hand, they're encouraged that if
Trump is even in the polls, then he's really because
(28:14):
the polls are not accurate, or they choose not to
poll in a way they knew no would be more accurate.
There may be two points under reporting, but they feel
at the same time that the mail in ballots and
the early voting can't be authenticated to the same degree
the same day, and that's where two points. So they
kind of say it's a draw. One thing that I
(28:35):
have noticed though, that it's kind of a disconnect. They
will tell you that the swing states where the election
is going to be decided or haven't moved, they're almost
dead even or Trump caught up and now maybe Harris
came back a little bit. But at the same time
they're telling us this, they're saying, there's phenomenal Trump rise
(29:02):
and he's got this on. We never expected this support
in places like New Hampshire and Virginia and Minnesota where
he was down eight and nine points and now he's
only gone by two or three. Well, those states are
right next to some of the states that are frozen
one to one. So you think, well, wait a minute,
why would these voters in these diverse states like Minnesota
(29:25):
and New Hampshire and Virginia all very diverse, but why
would they collectively be starting to move toward Trump? At
least maybe he won't win them, but they're going to
be much closer than anybody imagined a month. But that
same phenomenon is not happening in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and Michigan.
And I think it is. And I think there's a tendency,
(29:46):
a natural tendency by some of the posters that think
that they pull a little bit differently in Arizona and
Georgia and Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania than they do in New
hamp I'm sure in Virginia and Minnesota and State and
New Mexico. And by that, I mean in these blue
(30:07):
states where you see this national surge for Trump, they
don't really mind if their polls show it because they
have they have no expectation he'll win. So they just say, well,
we did this, and he's and then they're going to
tell then they're telling us at the same time. But
that national observe, that easily observed push for Trump does
(30:31):
not exist where it really counts in seven states, because
they seem to be static. And I just don't believe
that's possible. No.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
I know, it's when you're on the ground here. I
don't know what it's like out in California, But for Michigan,
which is a swing state, when you're on the ground here,
the ground, I mean even the signs, the signs are
are much more weighted toward Trump when you're driving. When
you're out there, you see more people willing to wear
(30:58):
Trump gear, willing to wear the MAGA hat, willing to
wear the T shirts. The excitement seems to be big.
The last thing I want to ask you is why
do you think there is a disparity between the excitement
for Trump and the excitement for Republican Senate candidates because
they all seem to be trailing him a bit, and
so I'm hearing on the ground in Michigan, well, Trump
has to win by three points for us to get
(31:19):
the Senate across the across the line, Why would that be?
Speaker 2 (31:25):
I think in one sense, she who's doing pretty well,
McCormick in Pennsylvania, Mike Rodgers in Michigan. They're all running
against incumbent, entrenched incumbents, and those incumbents have done better relatively.
(31:46):
I don't know. I'm not saying exactly or empirically as
far as their job, but they're perceived to have done
a better job than Kamala Harris auth And all of
those candidates, as incumbents, tend and I I've watched them
tend to conduct themselves better in interviews and are more retail,
better retail politicians than Kamala Harris. I think Kamala Harris
(32:09):
is a she has everything going for she has two
and a half times the money, she's an incumbent, she's young,
she's black, she's female, but she's a lousy politician. And
those other candidates are very well funded, but they're also
professional politicians and they are incumbents, and they are outspending
(32:33):
by a great margin, so they have all the advantages
that Kamala Harris are. But they're not bad candidates. I
think they're bad in the sense that I wouldn't want
to vote for him because of their ideology and their politics.
But as far as the retail skills, if you look
at Casey or Tester, they're much more skilled than Kamala Harris.
(32:53):
So it's much harder for the Senate to break through
that incumbency.
Speaker 1 (32:58):
I would say they're more skilled, and they're better at
trying to moderate without looking like they're lying, if that
makes sense anymore.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
Never as they were never as radical in the first
place as she was. They were never chanting no deportation
or fracking. Yeah, we'll banged. The problem with her is
every time she said something here in California, it was
to a sympathetic audience, so she doubled down. It wasn't
just I want to ban fracking or I'm for deportation,
but she was so emphatic. She yelled it out of course,
(33:31):
and that's hard to erase now for her, But the
other candidates would have never gotten themselves in such a ridiculous.
They're smarter than that, they're sneakier, they're more complex than that.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
It's also hard to run as the change candidate when
you are the incumbent and she's trying to say that
she's not I'm not Joe Biden. Okay, but how why
wouldn't change anything that he did? Well? When you are
Joe Biden, you know, it's like this is It really
has been a really ridiculous campaign season, but I think
very eye opening and a lot of people have asked me,
(34:03):
how do you think this could have happened? That he
didn't win after twenty twenty and now he's back and
he's gaining all this this steam, and I just think,
you know, all of this head to be exposed. There's
a bigger plan at play here. We had to see
exactly what the other side was going to do. So
we all wait for the next few days to see
what this election brings. But in the meantime, I think
(34:23):
that it's a game of who's going to get more
people out there and who's going to contact more people,
and that that's always what it is, So you can
run as many commercials as you want. I find that
we have the same commercials running over and over again,
and I think people more tired of that too. So
now it's just to get out the vote game. And
over the next few days you're going to see people
(34:45):
knocking doors and out there with their signs and calling people,
and that'll be what determines what happens in this election.
But I appreciate so much you coming on and sharing
your opinion. It's really very sightful, very different than what
we generally hear, but exactly what we needed to hear.
Victor Davis Hansen, thank you for coming on. Thank you,
(35:08):
and thank you all for joining us on the Tutor
Dixon Podcast. For this episode and others, go to Tutor
disonpodcast dot com. You can subscribe right there, or head
over to the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you
get your podcasts and join us next time. Have a
blessed ding
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