Victor Davis Hanson & The Spotlight On The Middle Class
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All right, boys and girls, we are back with another edition of the Ben Domenech podcast brought to you by Fox News. You can check out all the Fox News podcasts at foxnewspodcasts.com. I hope you'll rate, review and subscribe to this one and share it with your friends to listen.

Today, my guest on the podcast is Victor Davis Hanson, someone who I'm sure you're familiar with. If you're a regular Fox viewer, he typically comes on during the weeks that I host. At the 7 p.m. hour, he's also a frequent guest on both Tucker Carlson's show and Laura Ingraham's show. And he has a new book, The Dying Citizen, How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America.

It's an interesting book for a number of reasons and comes at a time in which I think a lot of Americans are reevaluating their attitude towards citizenship, understanding perhaps that they're going to have to take a more active role in their communities if they're to make a difference.

We talked about this and we talked about a number of other things as well, including the shifts within conservative media in reaction to Donald Trump and the degradation of the class of military leadership, which so many Americans have trusted for so long. Victor Davis Hanson coming up next.

Reporting live from under my blanket, I'm Susan Curtis with Duncan at Home. Breaking news, pumpkin spice iced and hot coffees are back. I'll pass it to Mr. Curtis with his blanket for the full story. That is so right, Susan. You know, it's never too early to get in a spicy mood. I'm talking cinnamony goodness that's so tasty, people don't want to leave their blankets either. Back to you. No, back to you. All you.

The home with Dunkin' Pumpkin Spice is where you want to be. Dr. Davis Hanson, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. Thank you for having me. I want to talk about your book, The Dying Citizen, and I want to in particular highlight the fact that you are one of the few authors to have deployed one of my favorite Tocqueville quotes, which you do on page 42 and 43, about the idea of an authority that

that seeks to keep people in perpetual childhood.

It is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing for their happiness. Such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness. It provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances.

what remains but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living. That is such an excellent description, I feel, of the moment we inhabit today when there is this lure of handing over

all of our authority, not just to the elected government, but to the unelected as well, and to the bigs, the big tech, the big corporate, the big woke industries of the moment. How do we resist that lure, given that it clearly is something that has an appeal to a lot of Americans?

Yeah, I think we have to just assume that a government, and that's not just our elected officials, but mostly the two million federal employees that are combining in their own offices, legislative, executive, and judicial power, that they want people to be dependent upon them because then they will support the expansion of that class and the greater remuneration and pensioning and power and influence.

ego of that, reputation of that class. And it's almost like the call of the sirens in the Odyssey. They come to us and say, aren't you tired of being sort of working your whole life and being independent? You know, I'm now quoting almost literally from the life of Julia, the Obama administration, or the portrait of Pajama Boy. And we can take care of you. We can give you this program and that program. And there's always a government solution to everything.

a private enterprise problem. And it's very alluring to people. And Tocqueville saw that and he said, you know, the only bulwark against it is a system of independent, in that case, it was yeomanry with small farms that were economically self-sufficient in terms of food and fuel, et cetera. But he really emphasizes, I think our founders did with this federal system, that you have to have independent and often a lot of rural people

who have to be independent to be skeptical of government that sort of buys off the fealty of the poor or the very wealthy that uses its influence and capital to influence government. And so it was this idea of somebody in between that had to be the largest class and didn't have the envy of the poor or the sort of

arrogance of the rich that was the basis of this country. And yet it seems to be, according to a lot of data, when we look at credit card debt or student loan debt or the age in which people are marrying or having their first child or buying a home, it seems to be what Pope Will warned us about, a prolonged adolescence of people in the middle class that just

either they can't do it or they won't do it, but they're not taking charge of their destinies in a way that was true of past generations. One of the little anecdotes about Richard Nixon that I always liked was that

you know, that the place that he came from, the town that he came from, rejected some of the government funding, the federal funding offered under the New Deal because they viewed it as socialist in nature to accept that type of welfare from the federal government. Today, we have a giant mass of people who have been

drummed into welfare against their will, meaning that the government shut down their businesses, shut down the small businesses where they work, shut down the restaurants, shut down their ability to make a wage, and then funded them in a way that essentially demolished the work ethic that had been the drive that forced them to get out of the house and actually go back to work and is now apparently stunned by

that there are so many people who are willing to just sit on that largesse and not go back to work. I walked here, I was doing a walk right before I interviewed you, and I just counted sign after sign after sign on small businesses along the main drag of the town where I live that just say, help wanted, hiring now, over and over and over again.

And those signs have been up there for weeks and months, and they don't seem to have any indication of going away anytime soon. What will it take to spur Americans to actually get back to work in the wake of a pandemic that the left has exploited to essentially advance this permanent adolescence that you talk about?

Well, short of a recession, it has to be public opinion. And we have to let us hope we get to a situation that's not a crisis. But I think what we're worried about, you and I and most people, is that we understand the left didn't agree with the logic that if you're going to make more money not working, then you will going out and working, then people are not going to work.

And they didn't quite calibrate that. But what they really get angry is that they inculcated, because they found out, they inculcated a psychological condition. When you're not working every day,

for whatever economic reason, then it becomes habitual and you just don't want to go out anymore. You get xenophobic, agoraphobic, and I think that's part of the Zoom, the elite Zoom class is the same idea. They don't want to go to work. They can do it here. They want to, you know, hang out in their own casual. It's a very, it's a siren song attraction. And so,

What can we do is, I think we're going to have to say to government and the middle classes, and I think you'll see that said in the midterms, not that it will be, if we don't have control of all of the government, it won't be successful, but you cannot subsidize people not to work anymore. And then we have to have a popular culture that says,

I don't know, I don't mean a shame culture necessarily, but a popular culture that says to your nephew or your daughter or your son or your brother, why don't you go out and work? That's not a preferable thing to do what you're doing. Or we have to say to the left, not working is not just value neutral. It's an amoral condition because there's people right now that depend on

drugs. They depend on medicines. They depend on certain foodstuffs and they're not getting them, whether it's out in Savannah or Port of Los Angeles with these container ships or shortage of long haul truckers or the inability of higher forklift drivers. And you think this is neat, but it's not. And it's a crisis. And you can see that the left believes this deep down inside because when Larry Summers says it's not working,

Obama says the borders on sustainable as it is, or senators look at Afghanistan and they say, who dreamed this up? Or Bill Maher says identity politics leads to perdition, basically. They know that it's not working now. And I think now that they had the faculty lounge ideas, they had it for nine months, they implement it and it's blown up in their face.

And now we're kind of into theater where Joe Biden is begging Saudi Arabia or begging users he threatened with higher taxes and regulations and less federal leases to pump more gas and oil because he knows that a lot of people are very angry at him. And if I I think it was two nights ago here in the San Joaquin Valley, I couldn't find diesel fuel. And when I did find it, there's a hundred dollar limit.

And when you get, you know, $5 a gallon and you get 20 gallons, you see all of these people and they talk to you at the gas pumps. Most of them are very poor and they're saying, you know, I drive for a living or I've got to go out to Mendota and I have to get gas.

You know, I wish I could get the $100. I don't have it. And I said, well, how many times you fill up? He said, well, I fill up three or four or five times a week because I'm always thinking the price might go down. And why buy $100 of gas all at once? And all these people have trucks that have 25 gallons and stuff. Well, he's affecting the very people that he romanticizes from a distance. And that's an elite thing.

trait now that the elite that run this country, they romanticize the distant poor and they despise the middle class for a supposed lack of culture. You know, you were kind enough to join me during Fox News primetime last week

And I cited your chapter on the unelected, which I think is, look, this book is an important book, but I think this is something that I think everyone should read because it is.

a clear danger, I think, to the future of the republic, particularly as it relates to the nation's generals. Now, I understand that many conservatives are used to holding generals in high esteem, and certainly they've had

you know, instances where that was deserved. But we have an unelected class of generals and you run through them, chapter and verse of the things that they were saying over the past several years, weighing in on politics in a way that I find disturbing. And I think that generals past and certainly much of the of the men and women in uniform today find disturbing. There is a class now of politician general who

who seems to have more in common with, with being essentially an unelected Senator than actually, you know, being in the business of, of winning wars of winning in combat as they ought to be. And I don't know the way the path through this fundamental problem, because it seems to me they have installed themselves as our, our nation's font of civic virtue and,

And that is something that is very dangerous in a nation constructed the way that ours is.

And I'm I don't necessarily know how to solve that problem or to get rid of these people, because the problem extends far beyond Mark Milley. It is an entire class, it seems to me, of people who are unequipped for their jobs and who use the politics of the moment to posture and to essentially engage in PR campaigns to further their own interests.

That's a disturbing thing for me as an American. Do you have a solution for this? I think I could. I don't think nobody. I mean, it's in human nature. If these politicians now feel that their national constituents are left wing citizens.

public officials that in return for fast tracking, you know, women in combat or pregnant pilots or transgenderism in the military in a way that avoids the messy give and take of the legislature. And then in exchange for that, they can go right out to Northrop or Lockheed and the left won't say anything. I think what we have to do is break up that culture

And one of the ways I think we really have to say that if you're a top brass and you leave the military, you're not going to go on a corporate defense contractor board for five years. Just forget it. So that's not going to be an avenue of remuneration for you. And if you don't like it, don't go into the military's top officer corps. I think we also really have to either junk the code of military, the uniform code of military justice or abide by it. Article 88 is very clear.

that retired four stars, three stars, two stars are just as required. They're required just as much as active top officers not to disparage or deprecate the president, the vice president, the cabinet officer. So when you have these four stars and they are comparing their commander in chief, as Michael Hayden did to Auschwitz camps, or he retweets something about sending Trump supporters to Afghanistan if they're not vaccinated,

Or you have General, as I said, McCaffrey talking about Mussolini as the president. Or we had others saying that he was a Nazi, essentially a Nazi. And then we had a very distinguished admiral saying he should be gone sooner or later as if elections wouldn't be quick enough.

So when you have that type of activity, then we have to enforce it. And we have to say, you know what, you're going to be cited and you're going to be your doctor, your pension, or you're going to be subject to criminal penalties because that's the uniform code of military justice. And we're not enforcing. We don't enforce the law with these people.

We don't say to them, if you're General Milley and you know the 47 or the 53 or the 1986 statute about the purview of the Joint Chiefs and you interrupted the chain of command by recalibrating the nuclear procedures from an order from the president to commanders in the field, then you broke the law. And you're going to pay for that. You've got to resign or we're going to have to

to tell retired generals, if you are of a certain rank, you're accorded a security clearance, but you're not going to use that security clearance to go on cable TV and wink and nod that you have privileged information. And Donald Trump, just to take one example, is a Russian quote-unquote asset. Why you brag or you monetize that security clearance, you're not that important to us anymore. You're not going to get it. And I think if we started just enforcing the statutes that we had,

they would come, there'd be a big sea change. But the problem they're facing right now is that the traditional, and I think that's suicidal, I don't know what got into their mind, but they had this devil's pact with the left, but...

My gosh, I know that when they leave the military, they love that culture in Washington and New York and the university and think tanks. But my gosh, their traditional source of support were traditional Americans. They supported the CIA. They supported the FBI, the DIA, the NSA, the Pentagon. And you talk to people who are conservative, they've had it. They've had it with James Comey. They've had it with Andrew McCabe. They've had it with John Brennan. They've had it with James Clapper. They've had it with Robert Mueller.

They've had it with Lois Lerner. And they said, you know what, these people do not tell the truth and there's no consequences. So when James Clapper lied and said he gave the under oath the least untruthful answer, John Brennan admitted he lied twice under oath.

about CIA activity, or Robert Mueller claimed he had no idea what the dossier was, using GPS, the foundation was very, or James Comey had amnesia and 240 times under oath, then they've got to be held responsible for that. And so we have the laws on the books, but we don't have the will. And I don't know what happened, but I think things are going to change because I think

In a year or two, there's going to be a radical change in the government, legislative branch first and executive likely. And these generals are going to be shocked.

when they see that they don't have a constituency anymore. And the left never liked them and never supported them. They just found that they were useful idiots for a while. And I think that they're going to be, what they have done to traditional America is shocking. When you have the Secretary of Defense say that there was a, you know, basically an epidemic of white supremacy in the ranks, or when you have General Milley saying that he's investigating white rage,

And when you are losing Afghanistan, a war in which 74% of the deaths on the battlefield were white males of the middle class, you're basically saying to those families who that particular rubric, and I don't believe that we should think about race in the military, but they do. And by their own standards and protocols, they're basically telling people, well,

We believe in proportional representation. We're very skeptical of white males who are prone to white supremacies. And oh, by the way, that doesn't apply to you guys that die in twice your numbers in the general population when we go to combat. That's not a very successful formula to ensure battlefield efficacy. This podcast is supported by FX's English Teacher, a new comedy from executive producers of What We Do in the Shadows and Baskets. English Teacher follows Evan.

a teacher in Austin, Texas, who learns if it's really possible to be your full self at your job while often finding himself at the intersection of the personal, professional, and political aspects of working at a high school. FX's English Teacher premieres September 2nd on FX. Stream on Hulu.

More of my interview with Victor Davis Hanson right after this. Victor, I think you know that I come from an army family, you know, in terms of my siblings and my ancestors, and I am married into a Navy family in terms of my wife's siblings and her chain of ancestors. And the thing that is most interesting about me

you know, siblings and siblings-in-law in terms of what they tell me about this is how damaging this entire period has been to the morale of people who are serving further down the chain. And to me, their concern is essentially, you know, it's not...

It's not that they can turn into Ashley Babbitt. It's that they know a half a dozen or a dozen or two dozen people who could turn into Ashley Babbitt, who could serve this country, lose complete faith in the veracity and the trustworthiness of the government and authority and turn to more radical ideas out of desperation and out of a feeling that this is the only way to be heard.

And to me, that is extremely concerning and not something that, you know, for as much as they, you know, blather about white supremacy and the like, the actual concern should be we are living in a moment in which the faith that we have in one of the few remaining institutions that had retained it.

in the American military is being rapidly degraded. And that to me is a cultural problem. I know you had that great comment in that interview years ago where you were talking with Peter Robinson, I believe, who talked about the class of Americans who have a tragic view of life, who believe that you can be good without being perfect.

which I think is such a beautiful sentiment and how they had essentially been the spine of America that had saved us in so many wars and conflicts over the years of our existence. And that to me is the core element of this that is being damaged, that is being damaged by the comments from Mark Milley, from the Secretary of Defense and from others. And

And feeling completely degraded by the idea of of saying when they when they say that there's a white supremacist problem, they're talking about me, you know, or feeling that way, a feeling that they're attacked and undermined as opposed to being supported.

That is such a fundamental problem, and I don't know how to turn it around. Yeah, and remember, it was just 15 years ago that Hillary Clinton said to the highest ranking officer in Iraq, right in the midst of a successful surge, David Petraeus, that his testimony required a suspension of disbelief. And the New York Times called him that day. I think they ran an ad that said, General, betray us.

So we know that there's no constituency for the military among the hard left that's running the Democratic Party now and why they would just for temporary advantage

appease them in a way that alienates their constituents. I'm not saying that there should be constituents. We all support the military. But whether we like it or not, there are particular families in America that generation, generation, generation send people to the military and send them by intent to combat units and say to those people, you're under a cloud of suspicion and you're illiberal.

or that they're so patently political. So when Donald Trump goes over after the burning of the St. Episcopal Church, at least the set of fire, and there's Lafayette crowds in Lafayette Square that are spilling perhaps close to the White House,

And General Milley apologizes for having a photo op with the president, which they all do. And then he says that, you know, he unleashes this retired corps to come out and say, we're not going to use tear gas. And how dare you politicize it? We're never going to use federal troops. And you think,

We used federal troops 10 or 15 times. Colin Powell offered 5,000 Marines to George H.W. Bush during the Rodney King riots, and they were deployed. And then you find that the Inspector General of the Interior Department says there was no tear gas, and Donald Trump didn't order Lafayette Square to be cleared by federal troops. And then that...

Keep that in mind. And then we have this, you know, rabble of protesters on January 6th that prompts the militarization with federal troops, 25,000, barbed wire, and not one of these federal, one of these officers that are retired or active say, my God,

When you look at January 6th, nobody's been charged with insurrection. And it's debatable whether anybody went into the Capitol with a firearm, but surely nobody was arrested with one. And as lamentable as that mob was, the five people who died, four were Trump supporters, and only one died intentionally by violence, and that was by somebody who shot her when she was unarmed, maybe justifiably or not, but...

the facts do not justify a militarization of the Capitol and you are on record of saying that you object of all militarizations of police force and you haven't said a word. And so that's a message that the enlisted person thinks, you know, I have no respect for these officers. And when you factor in

Raytheon and General Dynamics and Lockheed. And these are not board members, memberships of the 1950s or 60s where you make 25 and today's equivalent of 25 or 50,000. These are, you know, 250, $300,000 stipends, but these IPOs and these stock options that can create a multimillionaire in a space of a couple of years. So it's, it's really a,

And then to hide behind their uniform and lecture people about patriotism and duty when they're violating their own uniform code of military justice, they're cashing in. And I think that sets, unfortunately, when Milley says that about wokeism, then that sets the example, doesn't it? That a lieutenant colonel or a major says, you know what?

It's not going to help me to make sure that my brigade or battalion and artillery hits the target 90% of the time on these field exercises. It's more important that I have this percentage of this gender or race or that I have made a big statement about, you know, transgenderism or hypertrophy. That will get me promoted.

And it's kind of like the Soviet commissar system, to be honest, that we have people looking over our shoulders in terms other than military efficacy. And that's what almost destroyed the Soviet Union.

in World War II before they got rid of them. And by 1943 and 4, they said, you know what, just we can't, as much as we love these guys, as much as we love executing generals that were not politically correct, it's not working. I have to ask you about the comments that you made in your lengthy interview with Tucker Carlson about National Review. And I asked this as someone who

contributed to their, uh, against Trump cover. I still would defend it only because I think that the, the position that I took was, was quite different from the position that a lot of other people took in the sense that most of my piece was actually about why we should listen to Trump voters more than we listened to Trump. And that my concern with him was that he would ignore the constitution and just run afoul of it. Um,

I think that he spent his presidency proving me wrong in a lot of different ways. I certainly never expected him to become the most successful pro-life president of my lifetime, which I think is unquestionably true. And the situation, though, with NAR is clearly one that involves a lot of controversy. It remains the flagship, you know, old guard conservative publication,

And and clearly, though, they seem to be to become uncomfortable with you at the same time that they continue to run your your syndicated column, which was something that I certainly noticed. I wonder what your thoughts are on conservative media and on the National Review experience in terms of of how conservatives have gone in separate ways, perhaps in their analysis of the last four years or so.

Well, you know, I did an hour as a lot of people do with Tucker. And that was one question. What, why did you leave? And I hadn't been expected. So I answered it. I always try to give an answer to ask. And then a lot of media said that I had authored that. And the reason I'm saying that is, but when I left after 20 years, I

I had said to Rich Lowry, the editor, I'm not going to argue about you or criticize you. You guys were very friendly to me for a long time. And so it wasn't that I deliberately attacked them. All I said was that it got to the point where I felt

And I had been attacked at least by six or seven people in National Review over the last eight or nine years. But it was always on... It was thematically the same. And it was that they felt that it was their duty to uphold the Buckley legacy to be the guardians or the stewards of what was acceptable political discourse on the right. And so...

you know, if Rush Limbaugh dies and he's, and you have some kind of sense that you don't speak ill of the dead, then somebody from national view suggests he was a baleful influence perhaps. Can I interrupt you for just a moment? I took that one personally because I wrote a column the same day in the New York post about,

lauding Rush Limbaugh and talking about how he made so many people conservative. And I particularly disliked that one. I felt the same way. I wrote about him too. And he was a good friend. And I think he was a wonderful person. And then when you have people who would say, I mean, there's ways of criticizing Donald Trump without saying that he's a monkey in a helicopter or

And that just, what was the point of that? Or when you, there were columns that were published there that were deprecating the middle class, the working middle class, as if they were hopelessly pathological or they deserved their fate. I didn't think that was wise.

During the Covington kids controversy, I think a lot of people jumped the gun, reflecting the themes I'm just speaking about. They wanted to be out on the barricade showing people that we can police our own, that these are snotty little white kids and they're, you know, mobbing a poor kid.

And, you know, I looked at it and I said, wow, he says he's in combat in 1973. There are no combat soldiers in Vietnam. And so I... Little problems. Little problems like that. And so in the Access Hollywood, in discussions, I said, I don't think that we need to ask a person...

to step down after the voters in a series of primaries have given him by far the most votes. His party has nominated him. And this was a private conversation, regrettable as it was over 10 years or so ago. Why would we ask him? So there were these disputes. And I think finally, I couldn't be candid without saying

criticizing people. I don't think that's wise to criticize. And I had a certain rule that I had communicated to the editor when this started. I said, I will never, ever preempt criticism of any other national view writer. But I want to guarantee you, if somebody does that to me, I will respond. And I did on six or seven occasions.

There was a couple of heated podcasts, but I don't have any acrimony. But, you know, I think I guess my worry was that National Review, I think, genuinely believed that Donald Trump, A, his personal comportment was like no other president that we had.

That he, you know, he was capable of exposing himself like, you know, LBJ did to the cabinet or betting a 18 year old staffer as JFK did in the presidential bet and no need to mention Bill Clinton or he might conduct an affair in the White House with the agency of his own daughter the way FDR did. But there was a sense that he was just different.

And that Joe Biden was really Joe Biden from Scranton, Illinois. And he was a centrist. And so I thought that that was naive. And so after the election, I thought there were other people, I think, that shared. I think Conrad Black probably shared views. I think Jack Fowler shared views. I wouldn't want to speak to them. I don't have any acrimony. But then just very quickly to finish the larger Never Trump. I think their problem is this, that...

Once you have this personal fixation on Trump and once his, as you said, his policies have brought prosperity and security to Americans and to the United States in general, whether home or abroad. And once those policies, you know, for the most part, 90 percent, maybe tariffs or something like that is an exception. But you supported your entire life.

then you've got to explain, and that's very difficult to do, why you reject policies that you had told people were essential your whole life. And suddenly they're not essential, they're toxic because somebody's fingerprints are on them. And I think they weren't able to do that successfully, and they're not now. And then when you add into the equation that

Donald Trump got, you know, pretty much somewhere between 89 and 93 percent of the Republican Party, pretty much what every Republican candidate gets from his own party. And so that this never Trump megaphone in the journals and a lot of the think tanks was not very successful politically. So, you know, it was everywhere. And I think in my case.

Whether it was at the Hoover Institution, where I think the majority of people who were on the conservative side, which is not as much as it used to be, but they were never Trumpers. I would say where I was writing at the National Review, that was true. I would say in a lot of circles that I had, you know, I had used to know, I knew all those never Trumpers pretty well. So, yeah.

And I always had an idea of reply in kind but never preempt. So when I remember the book came out and

You know, the editor wanted to, I had a title, How Trump Won. She said it wasn't effective and she was right. So, you know, the case for Trump. But boy, I got, I got, I think it's 1700 words in the bulwark saying I was basically a Nazi spokesman and I was an anti-Semite. And that came out the day that I was at the Hudson Institute arguing that Donald Trump had been the most pro-Israeli president.

president in recent memory. Which I also think is unquestionable. Yeah, I do. And this was from a former editor of mine at Commentary. And then other people I'd had dinner with that would say, write things that were just lunatic. And some of these people I knew really, really well for 20 years, and I just couldn't believe it. And their hatred came such that now that a lot of them

whether it's Jennifer Rubin or Max Boot or Bill Kristol, they've actually left the conservative movement. And then that begs a question or poses a question, I should say, are they where they always wanted to be? Yeah, and I think that that's a good question. And I think the answer is yes. But I mean, just part of my own perspective on this is,

I worked for George W. Bush. I was I was an intern in this and then a researcher in the speechwriting office and then, you know, worked as a speechwriter for Tommy Thompson over at HHS. I had multiple interactions with him. I think he's probably one of the most morally upright men in the modern era to ever occupy the office of the presidency. And he was a terrible president.

And I and I say that without reservation, he made bad decision after bad decision, you know, and, you know, particularly when it when it came to foreign policy. But also, I would say people forget how terrible his domestic policy was, particularly the the no child left behind policies and everything that was related to that. And, you know, I think that John Roberts was a huge mistake. And so the you know, in terms of my attitude towards him,

you know, a very good man can make a very poor president. And I think that we ought to have the perspective on politicians that basically says, you know, if a bad person like Bill Clinton can also be a very effective president, then perhaps we shouldn't put our politicians on pedestals. That's right. I mean, I agree entirely. I mean,

No one could have held the coalition better together than Dwight Eisenhower. And yet we know he's having an affair with Kay Summersbee, whose fiance was going to be killed in combat. We know George Patton saved thousands of lives. We also know he had an affair with his step-niece. So, and I won't even get into Douglas MacArthur and the marriage moment he brought from the Philippines. So, and these were in Victorian times, so to speak. So I think that,

This new, what I'm trying to say is I think a lot of the Never Trumpers didn't realize that this had happened in the past and the new technology and the new media things surfaced that never would have been considered public information.

Nobody, everybody who covered Roosevelt knew that he and Lucy Mercer were having an affair. Nobody thought that it would be valuable to disclose that when we were at war. Everybody knew about Lyndon Johnson's crudity. Everybody knew about Bill Clinton. Everybody knew about JFK was the most promiscuous president in office we've ever had and never will have. Everybody knew that.

And I just didn't think that, you know, character is always king. And as you say, bad people can do good things and wonderful people like Jimmy Carter and Jerry Ford can be dismal presidents. You know, the thing that you say about the sort of way this this never Trump movement, by which I mean people who are still to this day, to this moment,

obsessed with him, you know, advocating for the destruction of the Republican coalition because of their animosity towards him and towards the way that he changed it. It seems to me that that is the most foolhardy and pointless exercise in the sense that should we not recognize that the people that make up the Republican coalition are

may have very different priorities from those who have attempted to lead it, to ride the tiger, to try to direct it in certain ways. And that reasserting those priorities in a way that is consistent with the electorate

It's actually a good and healthy thing. I think, for instance, of critical race theory and the animosity toward it, which is clearly an organic development that is expanding the Republican coalition into the Hispanic middle and working class that is, you know, animating parents across the country who are fed up with these teachers unions and everything that they are doing to public education.

That to me is exactly the kind of thing that every conservative and really every Republican should be excited about and leaning into, as we see happening here in Virginia with Glenn Youngkin, you know, who is a very benign Romney-esque, I would even say, kind of figure. And I don't mean that as a pejorative, just, you know, a businessman, Carlisle group, et cetera. And clearly he is understanding enough that this is a culture war that

Parents care about I must speak to it. And that's given him, you know, essentially a huge boost to to his prospects. What why is it that Republicans or at least some of them, certainly Mitch McConnell, I would include in this list.

want to just pretend like the Trump phenomenon is an anomaly, that it was just about Twitter or about reality TV or about all these kind of surface level elements, as opposed to actually being a very significant ideological break with the priority list of the Chamber of Commerce and typical Republican, let's talk more about capital gains taxes and opportunity zones types. I think that

partly is that the pundocracy and the voices of Republican orthodoxy tend to be in the New York-Washington corridor, and they feel that they're in a brotherhood. I'm talking about the political class and the commentariat, and while they disagree vehemently with the left, they feel they have a lot of common zip code affinities, and they're both suspicious of people that they don't know anything about, and so...

If you would try to tell a Republican that if you want to have private Social Security accounts, as George Bush, I think, wasted his social his capital after the 2004 election. There's a lot of very conservative people that only have Social Security through no fault of their own. And this was right before the 2008 meltdown. So don't do that.

that's going to alienate a lot of people. And you just mentioned capital gains tax. And a lot of people say, you know, I pay 25, 35%. Why doesn't somebody who sells something pay a little bit more whose only income is coming from capital gains buying and selling? So that didn't register to this elite and market.

you would think that they would be delighted now that it has to the party because look what's happening. You have Mexican-American people along the border who are electing conservative city councilmen and mayors that strong American values that you just don't walk across the border illegally. Trump, just as a side, Trump's performance along the border is astounding. I mean, this is essentially it is an indictment of not just the autopsy, but basically everything we've been told about border policy.

It has for decades. Absolutely. And what the big artifact was that what some of us have been saying for years that the Mexican-American community supported border security. Oh, you don't know what you're talking about. Illegal immigration is an act of love, as Jeff Bush said. No. And now we know that people who are Hispanic or Latino, whatever term, they're no different as far as border security than anybody else.

That's a constituency that the Republican Party has made enormous inroads and will continue to do. And the working class missing 8 million voters that sat out –

During the 2008 and 2012 election and those key swing states that created the blue wall for the Democrats there they can they can participate. And then I think a lot of people are saying, you know, the independent voter who may or may not have abandoned Trump. Nonetheless, when they're looking at this first nine months or in retrospect, you think, wow, boy.

border security, we're not going to fight optional wars in the Middle East, but we're still going to have deterrence and they're not incompatible. And we've got to recalibrate with China and we're not going to write off the industrial interior of the country. And there's nothing wrong with being opposed to abortion. And we're going to be strong Second Amendment that can appeal to people who are independent.

And so I think it's been very strange in my lifetime that this Republican Party, of which I've never been a member, I'm an independent, all of a sudden is a populist, upper middle class, middle middle class, lower middle class party. It's inclusive. It's trumped racial considerations with common class affinities.

And its opponents are these very, very wealthy people, if you buy zip code or congressional district or whatever metric we use, and very, very poor people.

And this is in the middle. And you'd think that all of these pundits and these think tankers would say, oh, my gosh, you've got for the first time a chance to have a majority 51 percent election, which you have not had since 1988. And yet they're not excited about it and they're opposed to it. And they're voicing or echoing the same social snobbery and criticisms of the lower middle classes that the left does. And so.

And they bought into the idea that this was an armed insurrection and the greatest threat to democracy in the history of the Republic on January 16th, rather than a criminal riot whose transgressors should be prosecuted or found guilty. But they, and that's getting back to the Covington kids. So they all want to

exert their influence to show people of like kind that they are very suspicious of Catholic white kids in Washington. They're very suspicious of Trump protesters. They're very suspicious of guys, you know, they're buffoonish or crude with a Queen's accent like Donald Trump.

And so, yeah, I think that I like a lot of the never Trumpers. I still do. I just wish that they could, for a moment, step out of their orbit and see that they're hurting themselves. Because, you know, when I read the National Review today and I just blank out all of the acrimony that I had there over the last four years and I just block out the word Trump and I just look at the issues and.

Yeah, 90% of them, they're pretty good. They're very good on abortion. They're pretty good on gun rights. They're pretty good on physical responsibility. They're pretty good on getting tough with China. And it's strange. It's exactly antithetical to Joe Biden, but without the confession that

you know, by not voting or voting for Joe Biden, that antithetical agenda is now going to be institutionalized for a while. Let's go out on this. You have a chapter in your book, which I cannot do justice to in short terms on tribalism and the dangers of it. It seems to me that this this whole critical race theory push that people woke up to during the pandemic is

that has been true for a long time, but that, you know, parents basically got exposed to is about the left really investing a lot in the permanence of tribalism in essentially saying, especially to Hispanic voters, you must think of yourselves as a permanent outgroup.

You cannot have the aspiration of having your sons and daughters live on the McMansion cul-de-sac between a Smith and a Jones and have no one care that their last name is Gonzalez. It is designed essentially to be an anti-aspirational tribal phenomenon that

And to me, that that is both it's both its power in the sense of what it could potentially do to wreck our American experiment as a multi-ethnic republic. But it is also its weakness in the sense that its appeal requires that you view existence as a zero sum game.

Where you, you know, if they're getting ahead, then my kid is losing. You know, if the white kids are performing well, then that means something bad for my child.

And to me, that's something that runs completely afoul of the natural tendencies of thought of these same communities who absolutely tend to be aspirational and want to be part of this country and want to be part of the phenomenon as opposed to an outgroup, you know, making sort of grievance claims against those in power. Yeah, I think...

I think if we were to read what Hillary Clinton or Bill Clinton said in 92 and 96 at the Democratic Convention or what Schumer said or Nancy Pelosi, it would pretty much dovetail with what you just said in the sense that they believed in firm borders, secure borders, assimilation, and they were arguing that

that they were the defenders of civil rights for minorities. And there was some truth to that and that racist people should not exercise power over minorities and there was going to be the melting pot. And then something happened. And that happened was they weren't winning. And so they decided to recalibrate race. And they basically said, you know, the country is working. And as you say, people are becoming upwardly mobile. So class...

we're not going to talk about class anymore. We're going to fixate on race because with this immigration and 50 million people who were not born in the United States now, and a million coming in legally and another million illegally,

And this new term that Obama kind of popularized, diversity, where it's not just you have to show that your group has had historical oppression, but you're just non-white. And if you're non-white, you're not 12% or 20, you're 30%. So they looked at that and they said, you know, in particular states, this is a winning combination, and we're going to fixate on race because it's immutable. It never changes. And so now that we're asked to believe that perfectionism

Professor Kendi is on the barricades at $20,000 a zoo. Or Oprah from her $90 million mansion lecturing Meghan Markle or comparing stories about racism from her Montecito nearby $14 million. Or the Obamas from their $25 million Martha Vineyard estate who comment on the unfairness of the filibuster. So we've got this ridiculous situation now where LeBron James is worth a billion dollars and he's lecturing us on how racist our Colin Kaepernick is.

or John Kerry. And what it is, it's an emulation of this new Democratic Party of a John Kerry saying, I have to fight climate change. I got to fly in a private jet. Well, now it's to fight racism. I just have to be a billionaire. And so it's a complete...

erasure of class considerations, especially since race and class are no longer remotely synonymous. And it's really racist because it's telling people who are Punjabi who are very successful, they're telling Arab Americans, they're telling anybody, you know, Southeast Asians, you have one common affinity, and that is you are non-white and you are oppressed and we're going to represent you.

regardless of what your income and regardless of whether you can ever document that you yourself have been impressed because of all these little adjectives. Anytime anybody puts adjectives in front of a noun, you know the noun has lost its currency. So it's not just, you know, spaces. It's safe spaces. It's not just racism. It's systemic racism. It's not just aggressions. It's microaggressions. In other words, you can't see it. You can't smell it. You can't hear it. But we, as in our expert association,

analysis can tell you that it's there and therefore anything that doesn't happen well in your life is due to somebody else being racist or sexist or transphobic and we're here to give you reparatory compensation through affirmative action or diversity exclusion what all this stuff is equity inclusion and diversity so it's very cynical that a lot of people feel that it's that they can have

promised careerist trajectories by embracing it. And the general public is just scared of it. And they think, you know what? I put my finger up in the air and I thought, who's going to cancel me or deny me a promotion or fire me for the wrong word. And it ain't those Republicans that are worried about their family, their community, their church.

who kind of, you know, live and let live as these never cease lidless eye Democrats, 360 degrees, 24 seven, who will go after you. And I'm going to make peace with them and make the necessary adjustments. And so that's why it's spread. I think it's like a balloon though. I think,

All you need to do is one person pop it. And when Larry Summers says that new monetary theory won't work and Bill Maher says identity politics won't work and Barack Obama says the border is not sustainable and senators say Afghanistan is a mess from the left.

then you get the impression people are saying, oh my God, what we hitched ourselves with this helium balloon is going to blow up and we're going to lose our jobs or reputations or credibility. I think it is going to blow up too, sooner than later.

I think you're right. Victor Davis Hanson, thank you so much for being so generous with your time. Thank you for having me, Ben. So I want to talk about something that's a very different topic than what I talked about with Victor today, and that's comedy specials. I'm sure that you've seen by now the kind of backlash that comedian Dave Chappelle got for his latest Netflix special,

From my perspective, it's not actually some of his best work. He is usually someone who I certainly like. I think he's one of the best stand-up comedians performing today. But this special was much more of a storytelling conversation with the audience than it was filled with the kinds of jokes that Chappelle has been known for over the years.

You can understand kind of why he did that because he clearly wanted to get a lot off of his chest and a lot of messages across that he wanted to spend some time on. He didn't want to just shoot from the hip because he clearly has taken to heart some of the criticism that he's gotten from the left. One of the things that I think is kind of odd about the backlash that he's received from both the left and the trans community and their quote unquote allies is

is that it's clear that Chappelle is of their ilk in the sense that he is clearly a leftist, a liberal. He's not someone who's been red-pilled. He's not a conservative. He's not someone who shares the conservative leanings, let's say, or the retro leanings of some of his fellow comedians.

And yet this is some this is clearly a situation where he is sensitive to the critiques that he's received, but doesn't want to bow to them in the same way that they would really like him to. Certainly, there has been backlash within Netflix where a number of trans employees and and others have said that they plan a virtual walkout. There's been criticism there.

quote unquote comedian Hannah Gadsby, who I think is one of the most, uh, ignorant and irritating, uh, people in comedy, uh, today, um, who has just, you know, gone after Netflix openly. Others have said that they'll no longer work with the company, but the company is currently standing by it. And obviously there's a profit motive here. Uh,

The internal memo that was released from the CEO of Netflix pointed out that Chappelle's previous special, Sticks and Stones, is the most successful comedy special in the history of Netflix. And obviously, this is one where they've paid him a ridiculous amount of money on the order of $20 million.

To to put this special out there. So, of course, they're not going to back off when it comes to a name as big as that one wonders what the reaction would be if, let's say, they were dealing with a smaller but but no less talented comedian putting a similar special out there.

One of the things, though, that I think is interesting about all this is that the reaction to Chappelle shows you why the reaction to comedy these days, particularly late night comedy and the kinds of shows like The Daily Show and Samantha Bee and others of that ilk, is just so stunted and ridiculous. I mean, the SNL is routinely enjoying some of the lowest ratings.

that it's received in its history. It is no longer a cultural phenomenon and really it lost so much of its truck over the Trump years.

You also have an element of repetition that goes from Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel to Jimmy Fallon to Seth Meyers to James Corden and all of the other late night hosts. That is just it's very obvious and ridiculous that they can't. The reason that they don't work as well.

late night humorous is that, you know, basically they're trying to make a comedy work with both hands tied behind their back now because they can't necessarily, they can't be accused of, of punching down as Chappelle openly talks about in his, in his special and they can't engage in the naturally transgressive act of

of making fun of anything that could potentially make their work controversial or lead to corporate sponsors and the like pulling their support. That brings me to a piece that I would recommend to you from The Atlantic, and it's pretty rare that I recommend pieces at The Atlantic, an interview by Emma O'Green with Kyle Mann, the editor-in-chief of The Babylon Bee,

And it's really an incredibly painfully awkward interview because repeatedly Green is trying to understand or is asking questions about jokes that man is being forced to explain what they mean when the explanation is right there in the joke.

Just to consider this portion of the interview. Green, you guys wrote an article in January 2020 that was shared roughly three million times claiming that Democrats called for the American flag to be flown at half staff when the Iranian General Qasem Soleimani was killed in an American strike. What makes this funny? I know that's the worst question to ask somebody who writes jokes. Man, it's funny because General Soleimani died and then they called for flags to be flown at half mast. Get it?

Green. But that's what I'm saying. Besides just saying the joke again, what makes it funny? Man, do you want me to explain the joke to you? Because the joke is that General Soleimani died and Democrats were sad. If you don't know why that's funny, then you're not the audience for the joke. The funniest part is that it got fact-checked because it was so believable that Democrats would do that. That's a real honor.

It sounds like this is a Supreme Court and pornography thing. You know it when you see it. You either laugh or you don't. And if you're in the don't category, we can't help you. The lack of humor on the left is becoming a very clear and present danger to the world of comedy. And I don't think it's going away anytime soon. This humorlessness is just everywhere. And the inability to take a joke...

is just so amusing. The truth is that if you made these types of jokes about American Christians, you might hear some murmurs here and there, but you would never experience the kind of corporate backlash that you will if you offend the wrong community. And obviously this is a joke that is in Chappelle's set itself, where he makes the note,

that rapper DaBaby got in trouble for comments that offended a lot of gay people, but that he also pointed out that there were no ramifications for DaBaby when he shot and killed a man in a Walmart, which gives you some perspective on which is the more dangerous thing to do in America today. I'm Ben Domenech. You've been listening to another edition of the Ben Domenech podcast. We'll be back soon with more. Until then, be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray.

This is Jimmy Fallon inviting you to join me for Fox Across America, where we'll discuss every single one of the Democrats' dumb ideas. Just kidding. It's only a three-hour show. Listen live at noon Eastern or get the podcast at foxacrossamerica.com.