Introduction

John Anderson: [00:00:00] Well, today I’m joined again by historian on public intellectual Victor Davis Hansen. Uh, we’ve spoken before and there was, uh, enormous interest in what he had to say. Interestingly, for me, across your own country, Victor, as well as, uh, here in Australia, and I appreciated that hugely.

Why are Trump Supporters Disillusioned?

John Anderson: Um, so to go straight to it, uh, the, the eyes of the world have been on the American election.

Uh, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that to some extent it’s a sort of gridlock. It’s certainly not, uh, what the poll said would happen. Can you give us a feel for how you are seeing this momentous event?

Victor Davis Hanson: Well, very briefly, I think there’s three things that your countryman to understand, if I could help enlighten them.

I don’t know if I can or not, but Donald Trump was supposed to be wiped out, um, in individual states. On the eve of the election, he was supposed to be 17 down in states that are dead. Even. He was supposed to lose the national vote. In CNN’s Poll by 12, he’s down by one 380,000, uh, 380, uh, electoral College landslide for Joe Biden.

That’s gonna be very close to two 70 or two 80 victory if he wins. So the polls are confounded. The problem we’re having is that there’s anomalies that no one can explain. So why is the Nevada vote still going on when Nextdoor, Utah? We had him, a clear winner was over election night. Why is Michigan going on when its neighbor to the south?

Ohio finished with a Trump victory election night. Why is Wisconsin’s vote just settled? But it took two days, whereas, uh, Iowa next door. Why is Georgia going on, but Alabama’s not, and the, the reason his supporters are angry and all of the states that I’m mentioning that are out Nevada, North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Arizona, they all, uh, had Trump leads or he was dead, even in Nevada.

And they’re taking a long time to tally the votes in a way that no other states are doing. And his lead keeps going down, down, down. And we’re talking about 400,000 vote lead in Pennsylvania, 200,000 in Wisconsin. And they’re all blue states and the votes are all coming in from big cities to overwhelm the rural small town pro-Trump.

So people are suggesting. Why is it in the year 2020 that we have record turnouts of 90, 88% of registered voters? We’ve never had that in the history of the United States. And why are they all in these cities and why are these cities all delaying their vote, voting of their states? And so that’s where we are as far as the official, the way our system works, each secretary of state of the 50 states has to certify that the vote is valid and therefore those validations then, uh, instruct electors from their state to meet in about 60 days to vote in the electoral college.

And they have to represent the plurality of votes. Uh, in their state. And there’s about five lawsuits based on the premise that the US Constitution says how people vote in an individual state is determined by the state legislatures. But in all of these states that are under contention, in the last 20 days, state governors, uh, electoral boards or registrars have added to or subtracted to the law.

They felt that covid meant that they could extend the days that you were eligible, eligible to vote, or they said it doesn’t have to be postmarked in extremist the way that law. And so the Trump forces are arguing that any state that went beyond what their legislature had prescribed, those, all those val ballots are invalid.

That I think is legally cogent. But to invalidate. That many votes would overturn the election as it’s going now. And then finally, the reason that people are upset, I think, is that they are bombarded with a series of events that they can’t process. In 2020 years [00:05:00] ago, there was one state Florida that was held up and people said, this shall never happen again.

Now we have five Floridas. 2016 they said the pollsters are not pollsters. Their vote suppression is they come out with these wild leads that they won’t show us the data by which they read. And I’m talking about Reuters, Politico, a, B, C, uh, Monmouth, and they cannot be right. Then when election day came around, they were all discredited at the state levels way off.

And Trump won. And people said to them, you were trying to suppress the Trump donations vote. Uh, get out the vote operations and you probably succeeded. And that’s a gift to the Hillary Clinton campaign. And they said, we’re never gonna do this again. We’ve learned to that we won’t do this. We’ll spot the reluctant.

And they did it again. And people are very angry. And then they said, you people called votes too early in states that were going Trump, and you called them for CL Hillary. And they said, we’ll never do it again on the media. But on election night, they called Arizona when it was very clear that it was tight and it was very clear that Florida and Texas were strong.

Trump states, and they wouldn’t, even though they were traject, their trajectories were Trump. They wouldn’t call ’em until very late. So people said, Then the narrative went out that Trump’s base, Barry Goldwaters, ar Arizona has forsaken him. And so what’s the use of challenging a vote? Because if you can’t win Arizona, he’s not gonna win.

And that narrative went out all night long that Trump was not going to be called, uh, for North Carolina or Arizona. But he would, uh, but he would be, uh, uh, he would be called negatively in those states. And that suppressed. So I, when you add up all of this stuff and then you, you see that there are record numbers of actual voters in a way that no one feels is possible.

The Trump supporters are very angry, disillusioned, that, and their way of thinking. I talked to some of ’em today. They said things along the following, we don’t care about Jack Dorsey and the ring in the nose, bearded guy. We don’t care about him. We don’t care that Facebook. De platformed us and censored ads.

We don’t care that Google massaged. We don’t care if the pollsters work as voter suppression, as we don’t care what happened in Florida in 2000. We don’t care about 2000 because we live in the United States and the one thing we know is we’re not a third world country and we have open, transparent, and on election day we’re gonna rock the world.

And they came out in massive rallies. And Joe Biden had almost no attendance. Trump worked 19 hours a day. Joe Biden didn’t do anything. He was in his basement. And yet now when they feel they had won the election, they lost the election. And so we feel tonight if you voted for Donald Trump, that we’re living in a third world country.

John Anderson: Yeah, so it’s certainly, uh, the, the feelings run very deeply. Can I focus on this aspect of, um, uh, a lot of commentary in Australia saying this yet again proves that the pollsters have, have smashed their own industry. They get it wrong. You are painting a picture of them actually being part of the problem in terms of their own ambitions and their own behavior.

But there’s another aspect of this that I’d really like your views on that goes to the heart of the culture wars and the so-called cancel culture. If you think of the way in which the polls have misread a lot of things recently, Brexit, here in Australia, they misread the last election, uh, twice now in America.

You yourself, uh, the last time we talked made reference to, um, a man you knew in your local area who told a pollster that he was gonna to vote Biden, but indicated to you that he only did so because he felt that if he ran against. What he was expected to say, his name would end up on a list. Isn’t there a real issue here?

There’s a terrible reflection on where our culture’s gone to and the viciousness now of the way in which many technocrats, if I can use that word, behave. Uh, the people who think the, uh, democracy’s bad because the people get it wrong. People are not just self-centering. They’re saying things they don’t believe.

Surely that should be deeply concerning that in free cultures, people no longer feel they can speak their mind. It’s, in other words, this is a problem that goes well beyond the pollsters.

Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, I think in the English speaking. World. There are these similarities where on their coastal elite corridors, there were a lot of people who made a fantastic amount of [00:10:00] money, um, in global trade, finance, media, entertainment, insurance, law, and the muscular classes within the interior, their jobs or their industries that could be replaced.

Agriculture, mining, timber, steel were replaced and they didn’t do as well. And these pollsters are products of these elite classes. And in our country, they’re, they’re situated between San Diego and Seattle, and Boston, and Washington. And they claim that they, as they did with Brexit, that it was an inadvertent error after 2016 in America, they said, We didn’t understand the Red State voter.

We didn’t go to Youngstown, Ohio. We never went to Bakersfield, California, teach us. But now we’re learning that that only lasted enough six weeks just to deflect the criticism against them and the criticism against them. They ignored from the right, but they did take seriously the left, the left said to them, you gave us hope.

You got, we didn’t even, we didn’t even worry about the election. Hillary was ahead in every state by seven or eight. And what they basically said was, you didn’t prepare us so that we could take ma uh, preparation. So we gave them a pass. And the, the narrative was here, I think in Brexit too. Maybe in your country it was.

Well, the pollsters just are in an echo chamber. They’re blinker. They don’t know how to go out to a guy in Perth and talk to him. They don’t know how to guy go out and. Rural, uh, England and, and a small hamlet and say, what, what, what, what are you feeling about mass immigration or globalization? We want to get your views.

We wanna know how to count you. And so we took ’em at the word, and now we’re seeing in this election, they had plenty of warning about the stealth Trump voter. We had, uh, the, the Democracy Institute, the Inside Advantage Poll, the Trafalgar Poll. They all pretty much called the election just as it was neck and neck with worries about massive voting fraud.

In fact, they said that and everybody said, you know, this isn’t the New York Times. Come on, this isn’t Washington Post. They have no cachet. So we were giving them one chance. And now what’s happened is people are suggesting that if you have a pollster and they tell you Bre Brexit, It’s gonna lose. There’s just no way.

Or your prime Minister can’t win reelection or our president can’t, and they continue to do that. There is a large number of people that that affects. So if I’m a, a rural, Store owner in Wisconsin and I pick up the a, b, C news that night, or I read Washington Post and says, Donald Trump’s gonna lose by 17 points.

I say to myself, oh my God, I thought we had a chance. Maybe I shouldn’t write that a hundred dollars check to the campaign. Does it really matter if I have to go out and vote? I was gonna vote in person. I don’t think I can. It’s kind of too late now. I was gonna sign up at the local Republican party and, and take people to the poll.

I don’t think it’s worth it. And that’s what poll pollsters have become. They’re agents of the media and they suppress the vote. And it’s very ironic because we’re always lectured on the evils of voter suppression.

Why the Media Doesn't Understand Trump

Victor Davis Hanson: But, uh, that, and then the media telling you every single day. That Hunter Biden did nothing wrong that the Biden family has never made a penny off China. When you’re then you say this laptop, these emails, these participants in these texts, they’ve all said the opposite, don’t listen to them. And if you put them on your platform, we’re gonna censor it. If you have an account in Facebook, it’s gonna be frozen. So there was a, an effort by big tech and big media and big pollsters to massage a result that they felt would reflect more in the globalized international communities agenda.

And they didn’t have the numbers to perpetuate that goal. They didn’t. It was clear that when you looked at rallies, when you looked at signs, when you looked at levels of enthusiasm, when you looked at more disinterested polls, they just couldn’t do it. And so I think the Trump people. We’re a little arrogant and a little complacent.

They said, do your best to us, and we’re gonna do, do your worst to us, and we’re gonna do our best. And you’re gonna come up short, just like you did last time. So there was a sense in the Trump community that we were invincible. You didn’t have to worry about cheating because we would have such huge, you know, how can you cheat when [00:15:00] you have a 400,000 vote advantage, uh, in Pennsylvania with only a million or two out?

How can you lose a 250,000 vote with 90% of the votes in, in, in Wisconsin? So that kind of attitude, uh, I think really hurt the Trump cause it was a reversal of 2016 when the Trumps people were really eager and desperate to show that they had the majority and Hillary was complacent. And this time, I think the left learned their lessons and they said, you know, We’re gonna outspend them two to one.

Michael Bloomberg spent $150 million on Senate races. We’re gonna use all of big tech and we’re gonna not apologize for it. And they don’t. And we’re gonna use these pollsters in a new and inventive, innovative way as suppression is. And then we’re in places like Milwaukee and Detroit and, uh, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and Phoenix.

We’re going to make staff these procedures and protocols with bureaucrats who are not gonna follow the state law. And we dare them to, we’re gonna present them with a fate of accompli. And then after a week, people will be so used to President Biden, they’ll be demoralized and they won’t pursue this as whiners in a Supreme Court, um, writ or something.

I think that’s a long, windy answer, John, to where we are.

John Anderson: Well, the,given all of what you’ve said, the extraordinary thing is that, uh, despite that, This is hardly a thumping endorsement of Biden and the Democrats. It seems to me, uh, despite all, and we’ll talk a bit about the challenges confronting, uh, non-liberal forces in a moment, but I’d just be interested in, in teasing out this issue.

Despite all of that, the reality is that the American people, perhaps just enough of them have said, uh, you know, the president’s just a bit too crude. He’s a bit embarrassing the way he behaves, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We’re worried about his personal style and Covid hasn’t helped despite all of that, it seems to me that there’s been this massive turnout.

If I think, if my maths is right, Biden looks as though you’ll have the highest number of presidential votes ever, uh, in an, in a presidential race, and Trump will have the second reflecting the extraordinary turnout. So Americans have been in engaged and they have seen, a lot of Americans have seen what is happening.

And to an outsider, it looks a bit like what they’ve done is to say, okay, well we need somebody who’s a little less controversial, uh, and maybe, uh, uh, a different style in the White House, but we don’t want his policies. So they’ve actually, they’ve, they’ve cut the Democrats numbers in the Senate and it looks like in the, in the house.

And that looks as though, and again, I’d be interested in your views. Um, they’ve, um, uh, uh, you know, uh, uh, there must have been Americans who actually voted for Biden but voted for a Republican senator.

Victor Davis Hanson: That’s absolutely true. And so when you look at, if one were to go back to election day and look at C n N as I did, and Ms.

N B C and A B C N B C and p B s and N P R and read the Washington, there was a gid us. Uh, a jubilation that they were going to take the Senate and then not only take the Senate, but they might not even have to get rid of the filibuster cause they were gonna have a super majority. They were gonna add 10 to 15 seats in the house.

And, uh, Joe Biden was gonna have this record landslide and with it a mandate. And you know, they believe that because they went down into Texas of all places, which was never going to flip. And they spent about 150 million on Biden and another a hundred million to get rid of John Corn. All for, not Texas was Trump by six.

But it shows you the mindset. And so what happened was the American people said, You’re not gonna get rid of Susan Collins or Lindsey Graham or John Corny or Mitch McConnell. So the, the Senate will stay in Republican hands. They picked up anywhere from 11. We don’t know yet till 16 seats on the house.

Nancy Pelosi has a very thin majority. They put the fear of God into a lot of house races that barely survived. And the candidates today are saying, why in the world are we saying defund the police, or were a O C and Bernie Sanders Socialist agendas, we that’s gonna kill us? They’re panicky because a record number of black voters, 15 16% went with Donald Trump, the supposed racist and maybe as high as 35% Latinos and much higher in terms of male Latino and black voters.

But more importantly, to your point, There’s no alternate agenda that was raised in the Biden election. No one [00:20:00] said, we’re being too hard on China. Let’s go back to the Obama appeasement. No one said, well, wait a minute. Let’s get into that Iran deal and get the embassy back in Tel Aviv, and let’s give the Golden Heights.

Make sure the Assad dynasty gets it and put the Palestinians back in the center of things with 700 million a year and tell the Emirates, don’t recognize Israel. No one is saying that. No one is saying, uh, we’re really overspending on the Pentagon. And why is Donald Trump so pro Japanese pro South Korean pro Taiwanese, proa Australian, and he’s encircling China, and he is saber rattling, and this is Prova.

They’re not saying that. In other words, they have no Trump. Reversed a lot of American foreign policy initiatives and he so did it, that there’s really no alternative to it. So I think Donald, uh, I think Joe Biden, where he to be elected is going to say, we’ve gotta get back on that Iran deal, but he won’t.

Or we’ve gotta be, we out to China. But he’s not gonna be able to, there’s no public support, or he is gonna say, we really need to stop fracking And, uh, horizontal drilling. And people are saying, you know what? We like the income. We like the idea that we’re completely independent from Middle East Oil. We like the idea, we help our allies with energy.

And, uh, we like the idea there’s never gonna be an Arab boycott again of anybody in the western world. And we like the idea of crashing prices for Russia and Iran. So that’s gonna be an, an dead on arrival. And so to finish, he’s left. What this election has left us with is senators. House members on his side are reluctant to go back to that primary leftist agenda because they think they’ll be wiped out if they do it in two years.

And Joe Biden himself to the degree he’s cognitively facile, he, he’s very worried about coming out against the elements of the so-called Trump agenda. We saw that with a Covid policy. He, he rattled all of these things wrong with it, but he offered nothing other than what Trump’s did. And he couldn’t explain why we have high numbers of death.

Because to do so was to focus on four or five Democratic states like New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, conne, Connecticut, that fatally put people with the virus into rest homes and account for almost 40% of the dead, despite 11% of the population. So when you see there’s no alternative to agenda, to Trumpism, uh, You can see that he hit on something.

But the $64,000 question is though, do you have an emissary of Trumpism without Trump? And by that I mean it’s easy to say among swing voters. We like the Trump agenda. We just didn’t like the tweets. But when you lose the tweets and the brashness, does a Marco Rubio or Nikki Haley, or any of these other alternatives, do they have the guts to say, I’m going to appoint a Supreme Court judges, whether they like it or not, right before the election, a strict con.

And then do they have the guts that say, it’s not gonna be a David Suter or an Anthony Kennedy, it’s gonna be a rock solid, originalist conservative. Do they have the guts to say, We are a Western country, and whether you like it or not, our legacy is from the Western in particular, the English speaking world.

And those are our friends. Foremost. Does anybody, they just had a poll and you can see the difference that America, who do you like the best? Well, Australians were number one. You said that to me. I was very cheered by that. I was 76 and then then British and then Canadians. Well that was part of the Trump transformation from Obama.

We were told that we were going against our roots. It was a multiracial cultural, we we should be identifying with Asia and Africa and no. And people didn’t think that was right and not just so-called white people, everybody. And so what I’m getting at is that there was something to. The idea that Trump was chemotherapy and chemotherapy makes you sick, but it’s a medicine strong enough to kill a cancer.

And do you want somebody that believes there is a cancer? But for a variety of reasons is so I vested or complicit or leveraged by this system that he is not able or willing to do the necessary things. And um, I, when you talk to people, they say, you know, we, we, we have to restore the First Amendment on campus [00:25:00] and they can’t continue to deny free speech to speakers or deny people accused of so-called sexual harassment due process.

And people will say to you, when we brought up this up to senators and to the Bush administration, they say, oh my God, let’s not go there. And they said, then when they went into Trump, he said, what do you want me to do? You’re right. Just tell me what you want me to do. Speeches, senate executive order. I’m with it.

Or when they said, you know what? The border fence is a joke. We’ve got a million illegal aliens coming to in the country. It’s, it’s destroying the idea of the melting pot. He said, what do you want me to do? How high? How wide? When can I do it? So I’m not sure that the people who agree with the agenda, that is a popular agenda, would a, be able to implement it to the degree he has, uh, and would win the popular support of the people necessary to further that agenda.

Now the alternate view is, yes, they would, because he wouldn’t offend people by tweeting, but I’m not sure at all. Um, and we’ll see.

The Misrepresentation of American Citizens

John Anderson: So, um, look, uh, you, you did send me that, uh, research that showed that Americans, uh, regard Australians as their best friends. It was very interesting research and thank you for, it also showed, and I found this interesting and it’s germane to my next question, that Americans still, um, uh, they’re still deeply committed to their country as I understood it, and love it very much.

They’re concerned for it, but they’re still committed to it. Whereas you would think from the extreme liberal perspective that plays out so strongly in this day and age that Americans actually think they’re the world’s worst. They’re the world’s most racist. Uh, that they are illiberal, that they are, uh, somehow are grossly immoral people.

But there is a gulf there isn’t there? And it’s shown up in this election. There is a clear repudiation. Of what might be loosely bracketed together now under the sort of new religious heading or heading of the new religion, the, uh, social Justice Warriors with a capital S, capital J, capital W. This election surely has shown that middle America still packs, punch and rejects extremes, if I can put it that way.

Despite the way we’ve been led to believe Americans feel about themselves and their future.

Victor Davis Hanson: Absolutely. I think what Americans are saying to the world is the American that you see that travels overseas, the international corporate business person, the America you see on your Hollywood movie or your New York sitcom, the America you see with a massage, Google search or a Facebook, uh, sort of ad the America, you see when an NBA player, editorializes.

The America you see on our, uh, international C Nnn TV shows, the America you read when you read the International Herald Tribune, that’s not America. That is a very influential, powerful 30% of country, and they misrepresent what America’s America is, what the people feel. And you, you’re never gonna really understand America unless people come to America and meet those people because they don’t have access to explain America.

They don’t own the media. They don’t own Silicon Valley. They don’t, uh, they don’t have the, they’re not the big banks. They’re not Wall Street, they’re not corporations, but they’re in the majority and they’re very good people, and they’re very proud of their heritage. And they’re not racist. They’re men.

The families are interracial, they’re intermarrying at a record rate, but they do believe. That if you come to America from Mexico or Asia, you came for a reason that you wanted something better than the alternative, which was your homeland. And they’re will perfectly willing and able and eager to assimilate you, to intermarry with you and to integrate with you.

But they do not want you to form a identity politics, uh, Balkan, Rwanda, Iraq model of tribalism. And they don’t want you coming here and attacking the traditions, the protocols, the icons, the statuary, the names of a tradition and a country that has no apologies for its past. That’s not to mean it’s not cognizant of our shortcomings, but no apologies.

And so that’s, that’s the message and I’m. I didn’t want to depress your listeners at the beginning because as I was telling my wife, I was astonished how close the election was because I kept saying, these people are gonna really cheat, and they’ve got pollsters that are [00:30:00] not disinterested. And the media has gone crazy and social media has gone crazy.

And the internet moguls are openly telling Congress, we can do what we want. We don’t have to be fair. And they made Donald Trump into a monster. And yet, as you say, 50% of the country voted for him. But more importantly, on the down ballots, all of his, all of the candidates basically won that could win.

And they’re in a position now. I think that if the Democratic Party wants to pursue this agenda, it will, it will really lose power in two years. It’ll be inert. And right now I, if Don, if Joe Biden is president, he will get no legislation through because the Senate will not approve any of it. He will get no justices through because the Senate will not approve it.

He has no popular support. The country’s bitter at the way he was elected. I think he’s at a, in a cognitive and physical state where many of the Trump people said he will be shortly relieved of his duties by the socialist Kamala Harris. I think that may be true within a year or two, and that will be a disaster for the Democratic Party because she articulated positions that have zero public support.

She didn’t get one delegate, not one in the Democratic primary.

John Anderson: That seems to me to be highly significant, uh, because even here in Australia, you’ve had, uh, what you would call the liberal media almost salivating at the thought, uh, of the vice President becoming the president. You can, you can feel it.

Because they want those values up. But, but they would be a disaster, wouldn’t they? They would absolutely guarantee that there was a change Next time round the, the results show it, the American people are not up for embracing the extreme left to use that term agenda. They’re not gonna wear it. It’s, it’s very clear to me as a former politician that they’ve said, look, Donald’s just a bit too rough for us.

He’s too crude, he’s too divisive. The tweets are too much as you put it. Um, but, um, they have not reputed yet at the, the disruption, if you like, and the reset, the major reset. And to ignore that, I guess it seems to me, uh, it would be politically fatal for the Democrats.

Victor Davis Hanson: Well, I think that if I could articulate.

The American mindset, and by extension suggests maybe in some parts of it, reflect the Australian or the British mindset. It’s something like this. The Left is giving us a choice between join, uh, joining them and cultural suicide. In other words, they’re telling us that the entire premise of Western free market, capitalism, private property, constitutional government rationalism, religious tolerance, multi racialism instead of multiculturalism, all of that was flawed at the beginning.

And you have to be perfect in our perfect eyes to be good. And we’re gonna use the standards of 2020 to go back into the past and not see it as tragedy when it disappoints us. But as melodrama, we’re gonna pick our winners and losers and yours are gonna be losers, and we’re gonna erase it in the fashion of Trotsky Asian.

And I think most people say, you know what? I kind of had it with that. I don’t want a lot of people who don’t live in the real world and who seem to enjoy the benefits of our system, our advanced medical care, our great material wealth, our homes, our streets, our security. They all seem to be beneficiaries of it, especially immigrants that wanna join it and understand the difference.

And yet they deprecate the very forces that create it and sustain it. And so they’re almost like court gestures. They live at the court and they make fun of the court, but they’re products of the court. And so that’s a choice that, that people are, are being given then I think if they keep pushing it, Uh, and I can tell you, uh, John, that there’s other fishers that you can look through this wall outside of polls and election, and you get a glimpse of what you’re talking about.

The Democrats and US Cultural Change

Victor Davis Hanson: I’m sitting in the most liberal left-wing state in the United States. If you want to go buy a firearm today, you’re gonna have to wait nine months. Not because the state is making it difficult to buy is because very liberal people supposedly have rushed to the gun stores and fright at what they see with a defunding, and they’ve ordered.

If you want to go buy nine millimeter, 32, caliber 30, you cannot buy it. It doesn’t exist that people have decided that the Second Amendment is a good thing. [00:35:00] If you look at the NBA’s. Ratings it’s at of record low. Nobody’s watching. Nobody even knew there was a World Series. They’re, they’ve tuned out of it.

If you look at Hollywood movies, they have to rely on Chinese markets, as does the nba. There’s no, people have just said, you know, I’m living in a monastery of the mind. Uh, I’m gonna be armed. I’m gonna speak my mind, but I’m not gonna participate in this socialist dominated culture. I’m not going to watch the N B A.

I’m not going to a movie. Uh, I’m gonna not gonna watch network news. And so all of these institutions that had a monopoly of the cultural, political, economic and social landscape of the United States are very worried because they got their wish, but. They’re sort of like the Midas touch. They thought that it would be wonderful to turn everything to gold, and it turned out to be dross.

In other words, you can’t eat gold and everything. They turn and touch, it turns to dross, and they know that now, and they’re in a dilemma, but don’t ever underestimate them because cultural life and public opinion is often massaged by what we see on television, what we read in the newspapers, what we hear on the radio, what we see on the internet, how we communicate.

Those are very powerful tools in their toolbox. But for now, They, they got rid of Donald Trump, who as I think last time I said, is kind of a tragic hero. He is a John Ford. We’re right out of a John Ford Western. Maybe the searchers of some of your viewers watched it with John Wayne or High Noon with Gary Cooper, or maybe the Magnificent seven with Steve McQueen, where we call in one of these guys who has some aspects that we find, I don’t know, bothersome at best and maybe uncouth at worst.

And we say to them, we, we don’t have the resources. We don’t know how to fight these cattle barons or the bandi. What do we do? And he said, I’ll take care of it. And he takes care of it. And the more, the better way, the better he does, the happier we are and the more relieved that he’s gonna ride off into the sunset.

So in that famous Johns Ford scene and the searchers, when he brings back Natalie Wood, but he’s been so tough and foul mouth about the processes in which he operated. He hands, he hands her to the family, they celebrate, and then he turns around and walks out that door and you see the shadow walk. And nobody says, thank you.

Ethan Edwards, just like Gary Cooper, throws down the, uh, the badge and nobody says, thank you Marshall Kane. You, you, you got rid of all of our problems. Thank you. And he, and that’s kind of where we are. You want judges, he gave you judges. You want deregulation. He gave you deregulation. You want record low.

Minority unemployment. He gave you that you want record high Republican participation by more minorities. He gave that you want a new Middle East. He gave you that. You want to defang Iran. He’s doing that. You want to confront China. He did it. You want to, uh, change the tax code and, and, and favor investment.

He did it, but he did it in such a fashion that now that it’s happened, a lot of the people on the independent did not come out and support him. And they think, you know what? It’s time for him to go, but there’s always a sequel. You never know. People may say it’s getting bad again. Where did that gunslinger go?

What town is the in? Somebody come and get him back for another term.

John Anderson: That’s an interesting point. I’ll come back to that in a moment. But, but before we do, see, as I said, these, uh, election outcomes actually mean both. Political parties in America face a massive reset. We’ve talked a bit about the Democrats.

We’ll come to the Republicans in a moment, but there’s another aspect that, that, that affects both of them. I mean, the ultimate charge of, uh, against, uh, anybody you disagree with now in Western culture is to call ’em a racist. Now, of course, uh, Trump was seen as a very embodiment of racism. A white male supremacist, uh, couldn’t be worse.

But that doesn’t seem to be the way that many colored people in America saw him at all. I would’ve thought this blows an enormous hole in the intellectual case, uh, for a lot of the nonsense that’s passed, uh, for, uh, the race debate, uh, right across the western world in recent times. As, uh, just looking at this, um, I understand he won probably the highest share of non-white voters of any Republican presidential campaign since candidate since 1960.

Um, 26% of the people who voted for him, uh, at this election were not white. In Florida, [00:40:00] about half the Latinos voted for Trump, uh, and the nation at large, 18% of black men voted for Trump. Uh, and the female black vote for Trump was also up. So what do the Democrats do with this repudiation of the, um, the line that they’ve not, you know, been very willing to run against him?

Victor Davis Hanson:  Uh, well there’s Democrats and then there’s Democrats aren’t there. So if you’re part of the Democratic intelligentsia, I can tell you in the last 48 hours, they have a canned exo Jesus, and it runs something like this. We have to ferret out the naive and the traitor in our midst because they bought into this fable of white supremacy and they wanna be white, they wanna be middle class, they wanna be heterosexual, they want to be familial.

And Donald Trump fooled them. And so that’s what some of them, but then we had a representative who was almost beat and she’s beaten and she said, I don’t want to hear the word socialism again. I don’t want to hear a o c again. I just want to go back to what we used to be, which was an A, you know, a party of the middle class and social net and all what the Democratic party of what they think FDR was.

And so those voices of reason, insanity, I think are in the minority and the Nancy Pelosi’s and the Chuck Schumers who have gone over to the hard left. Nothing is going to disabuse them of that until these numbers are such that, uh, they lose. And, and why you brought that up is because we’re a country about 67% white now, and the Democratic mantra had been anybody who is not white will be dependent on big government to a greater degree and therefore on us.

So we want unlimited and even indeed, illegal immigration because we flip California, it’s now never gonna vote in our electoral system Republican, we flip Nevada. We have flipped New Mexico, we have flipped Colorado. We’re just about to flip. And we probably did Arizona, we only got one big state left and if we flip Texas, they can never win again.

But then the Republicans have discovered that. Well, maybe we can refl them with the people who are you supposedly going to flip us. And so if you’re a county down on the border and you’re a Mexican community and it’s illegal, what happens? It means that somebody comes in from Oaxaca state into your community with tattoos, and he starts calling all of your children who are there two generations gringos because they don’t speak good Spanish.

Or you go across the border into Mexico and somebody’s squatting on your home and saying, get out. Or your school district where I live, 95% Mexican-American. All of a sudden you work so hard to get advanced placement courses so your Mexican-American children can be competitive and go to places like.

Pepperdine or Stanford, or u uc, Berkeley. And guess what? You have to drop them because you’re flooded in with people who don’t speak very good Spanish. They speak mix of a mix of teca, Baja, that’s an indigenous language. So that group is starting to wake up and say, I don’t like these wealthy white liberals and these various, uh, elite minorities because they’re always exempt from the consequences of their own ideology.

And it’s just starting now. And that’s why they’re so scared of this, because if Donald Trump can do it, who doesn’t mince words? They’re afraid. Somebody, even more effective a communicator might be able to be even more effective. And so when you get those numbers up to, it’s disputed, was it 15 or 20% of blacks?

Was it 28? Excuse me, 30 to almost 40% of Hispanics. But you go another three points, another four points, and you hit a. Calculus that the Democrats can never win because they have so alienated the white working class that white males are voting about 65% anti-democratic and women about 54%, and they have so turned off the white middle class that you don’t need 50% black and Browns and Asian.

You just need to get up to the forties and they’re done. And so that’s where we are. They’re frightened. And the irony of it is that they invested so much money and rhetoric and time in into Donald Trump, the racist Donald Trump at Charlottesville, [00:45:00] Donald Trump, who said that Haiti was a shithole country, that they didn’t realize that most people tuned that out and they said, I got a job.

I’m Mexican-American. So for the first time in my life, I’m hammering up on this. Roof, or I’m out picking peaches or I’m plumbing on a, a new construction site and somebody comes over to me and says, you’re making $18 an hour, but I can pay you 20. Another guy comes by and said, I’ll pay you 21. We’re short labor.

We can’t get cheap labor from across the border anymore. Trump shut down the illegal aliens and we need your labor. And the attitude of the worker, if you talk to him is, I have dignity the first time in my life. The employer is begging for me. I’m not begging for him. And then Trump did that, that reversal of mindset and it started to show up for the first time in my lifetime in the polls.

So that’s what scares the left, that somebody who was a droid as he would, could, could develop that further.

The Trouble with Elites

John Anderson: That’s interesting. You used that word dignity because the last four years, again, I don’t, I’d hate anything I said. To sound patronizing about America. I don’t, I don’t want to sound that way at all.

It’s a Western problem. We have it here in Australia. But these elites, these technocrats have not learnt the lesson of a little humility and the need to recognize that people out there may not have college educations or whatever, but they can think and they can understand. So what they’re picking up is that they’re not respected.

Their dignity is not respected. They’re seen as people who couldn’t know their own best interests. And this seems to me to be a massive problem. It’s surely part of what gave rise to the whole Trump disruption, this patronage, this um, uh, condescension. This, you couldn’t possibly know what’s best for you attitude.

I think, um, as I see it, that was never gonna change unless people were staring defeat in the face. And that’s what this LEC election has shown, is that Americans are. Are going to stand up or enough of them are going to stand up to force something of a reset.

Victor Davis Hanson: I think so. And though you almost word for word articulated the Cannes speech to tell you the truth of Donald Trump.

He said, you people lost out in China and somebody else benefited. And these are the people who outsourced and offshored and profiteer. And that’s not gonna happen anymore. And because you’re valuable people and you’ve got a lot of things going for you, you got the cheapest energy in the world. You got a good infrastructure, you don’t have any transportation costs for the Amer and you’re skilled.

And we’re gonna do the same things, uh, here that they said we couldn’t do and we had to go to China. But it, I think it opens a larger question, uh, to your point about this conc and this elitism and throughout classical and western culture, there was this tradition of what the Greeks called. Toon mess.

The golden mean mind and body that you had to be a thinker, but you had to be muscular. You had to use your muscles and your brain, and you had to check your theory and your abstraction by concrete reality. And to tell you the truth, the embodiment in classical literature, and he did, or Virgil, was the farmer because he was using all of his mind as the independent yeoman.

He had to know the markets, he had to know how to graft. He had to know, uh, profit and loss, but he had to do the physical labor. And so that matrix, what we’ve created is a drone class. We’ve created a bunch of millions of highly sophisticated people. They don’t know anything about which way the wind blows or what season we’re in, or any where their food comes from or why you can’t stop fracking or whether granite counter comes under a mountain.

The granite, they have no idea what a stainless steel is for their refrigerators. They love hardwood floors, but they don’t want to cut down a tree, and they’re very, they’re almost, uh, infantile, prolonged as adolescents. And during this lockdown, we had a hundred million people that grew food. They transported it, they created fuel.

They b they served us. They waited on us. So you could stay where I am in here and I could order something on Amazon and somebody out there. Put a mask on and they drove the truck to deliver it, or they sorted it at a plant or they made it at a plant, or they grew it in their farm or they mine it onto the ground.

And we said to them, you have to have your mask on 24. Oh, I saw a picture of [00:50:00] you and the, and you were driving your truck and your mask was off. Or you know what? We looked at you and you came in and delivered my washing machine. You didn’t use hand sanitizers. And so that class of nervous Nellie’s, they’re almost anal lieutenant.

They run the country, so to speak, but nobody has any respect for them, and they’re entirely dependent on the muscular classes. They told us that we had to have our computer, their computers and their finance and their investment and their entertainment and the lockdown showed us that. You know what we can get by for a while without the N B A.

We don’t really need to go on to, uh, social media, but you have to eat and you have to have somebody give you gas and you have, when your thermostat goes out and you’re in your New York apartment and some guy, you deprecates gotta go up there and take it apart and fix it. And so that, that’s what, what a lot Trump the last three weeks of the campaign, quite brilliantly.

That was the theme of his campaign. I took risks just like you did. I know that everybody makes fun, that I got covid, but I’m not gonna sit in the basement. I’m gonna go out and see you. You’re gonna see me. Some of us are gonna get covid, some of us are gonna get sick. Those that have comorbidities may die.

And you know what? I was really ill. I took a experimental drug. They said, don’t take another one. You can’t mix it to. We don’t know the consequences. Then they said, if you take a steroid and the Regeneron and the antiviral, who knows? And I took ’em all. Why? Because I’m your president. And that turned out to be in a very effective.

Churchillian message, you know, and people said, you know, it’s like Churchill saying, Mr. Prime Minister, you can’t get in to a Halifax bomber and fly over North Africa when you have a slight case of pneumonia. And he said, I’m Prime minister of her Majesty government. I’ll do damn well, would I? Please, I can be replaced.

But the idea of an active prime minister can never be replaced. And so that was a very good, that was a reminder that this coastal elite, uh, why they’re so influential. It is funny. Most people are not fond of them. And we see them on the streets with the Antifa R rallies. They spit in the police face, they scream and yell, they burn.

And then when they’re arrested, they go into a fetal position with a sort of this nasal voice, please stop. You don’t know who I am. I have a resume. I can’t go to jail. I just can’t get it on my record. And then when you start reading the list of the arrested, It’s a, it hits a perfect pattern. Mr. Joe Smith, Mr.

Jane, Mrs. Jane Doe, ba uh, master’s degree, two years of college, and then they have massive student debt. They majored in environmental studies or race studies or sociology. And you get the, you get the image that there’s a lot of disaffected people with 1.6 trillion in debt that are highly educated, pretty ignorant about the world, but they feel the world did not appreciate their genius.

They didn’t get hired at Google at the highest level. So history’s most dangerous people are people who feel they’re educated in the system. Whether they’re, they come suicide bombers or jacobins or Bolsheviks, the system didn’t appreciate their training and their intellectual prowess and didn’t rerate them accordingly, and they wanna burn it down.

And so we’re run by those people, but we’re also endangered by them because when they think they don’t get their just desserts, they go out and try to destroy the system in revenge.

Why Big Tech is Anti-Democratic

John Anderson: To come back, if I could just backtrack for a moment. You, you talked about Democrats saying we can flip the sea, uh, the state or that state or whatever.

There’s been a lot of flipping going on. You now have the extraordinary situation where, as I understand it, the three or four wealthiest states in America are, uh, massively pro democrat and the poorest states in America are in fact Republican. So going forward, It’s a segue into just considering for a moment if you could, um, the realities of the enormous challenges that now confront, uh, the Democrats, but then you come to the Republicans, uh, the wealth, the media, the much of the academy and big tech form, a very, very wealthy and a very influential, uh, a block in America.

Uh, and they are of, there’s no other way to put it. It’s certainly true in my case. They are so often essentially not interested in democracy cuz they know better, uh, and they think it’s all right to sense of views. They don’t like, they think it’s all right to manipulate the process if they get an opportunity.

Uh, and ordinary people deeply resent that, and you get this [00:55:00] exacerbation of the polarization. So there’s two issues in there. I just appreciate your views on this as we come to, uh, to time out recognizing that you have a great deal to do. Uh, one is, um, uh, that this question of the, the power and the wealth now that stands behind an illiberal anti-democratic view.

Extraordinary as it is. The very people who benefited most from what we have are the ones who are now, now launching the biggest attack on it. The second issue is how do the Republicans ensure that they can go forward? And what role might Donald Trump himself play in that he is now free to ha if he, he, it’s not beyond, I would’ve thought comprehension that he’d say, well, I’ll continue to disrupt, uh, going forward.

I could have another go now. Uh, there’s no two term limit on me. I could have another go in 2024.

Victor Davis Hanson: Well remember, whatever he is, he’s four year, he’s always gonna be four years younger than Joe Biden.

John Anderson: Yeah. He may be quite older than the president by the time of the next election now.

Victor Davis Hanson: But if Joe Biden wants to run at 82, he’ll be four years younger.

He’ll be younger than Joe Biden is right now in four years. So who knows about him? Uh, I think what you’re saying is very evident, uh, here in America. It used to be that the Democrats were very strong on First Amendment and they had the American Civil Liberties Union. And now the American Civil Liberties Union is devoted to suppressing free speech on campus or changing the vocabulary.

And the reason they are is that they, if you look at United States by county and income or zip code or income or congressional district, it’s quite amazing that. Blue, if that represents left wing, all the money is in the blue states or the blue counties or the blue zip codes. So the Democratic Party is a party of very, very well-heeled professionals and billionaires.

And all of our, as I we said earlier, big tech, media investment insurance law are all democratic controlled. And they’re, they have global markets now. They adapted best and could adapt best to globalization. And they don’t feel anymore that democracy gives them the desired result. They feel that, well, we have an equality result, uh, quality of opportunity society.

That’s what we fought for our parents. Did. We have the eight hour workday, the 40 hour work week disability, quality of opportunity, insured civil rights, but we didn’t get what we wanted. What we wanted was a quality of result mandated. And that’s by DA natured anti-democratic. Cuz if somebody opposes you on the road to utopia, you get rid of them.

So now what a Michael Bloomberg says, I don’t wanna cooperate with the Democrats. I wanna spend 50 million in Ohio to show everybody that I flipped Ohio wasted. I wanna spend a hundred million in Florida to warp that election and show my power. I’m Mark Zuckerberg. I want to tell everybody that I de platform the president.

I’m, uh, the head of Twitter. And so they don’t believe in democracy because they feel that now. The businesses and that they operate in are so influential in opinion making or in providing informational services. And their fortunes are not. When I was growing up to be on the Fortune 400, you had to be worth about a hundred million in today’s dollars and now it’s six or 7 billion probably.

They have so much money that they feel that they’re sort of like platonic guardians and they can tell everybody the way the world is gonna work at Davos and we’ve, this is the way it’s gonna work and it’s not gonna apply to us because we have to be healthy and have jets and estates and compounds and multiple, but it’s gonna be, we know best for you.

And they have nothing but disdain and hatred for the middle class. As one of them once told me when I was arguing with ’em, you are the guys that have snowmobiles and jet skis. And tell me why you need a snowmobile or a jet ski. That’s what he said. They have nothing. They think that the middle class lacks the culture and the sophistication and the taste of the wealthy, but it also lacks the romance of the distant poor.

So they, they hate it. They just hate the middle class. And, uh, they’re very dangerous people because they’re also not nationalists. So if I meet somebody of this class who’s Australian or American or British, they don’t believe they’re British or Australian American. They believe that they belong to an international, uh, elite.

That if somebody I meet from Australia is [01:00:00] in this group in Sydney, then he feels that he knows New York better than he does, uh, a rural town in Australia. If I meet one at Palo Alto, he’s never been to Fresno, but he can tell me every street in Shanghai. And that’s how their mind works. They’re international globalist, which is fine, but.

They have no empathy for their own countrymen. They have no empathy for their own national traditions. They have no empathy for their middle classes. And, uh, there are people like them in history and they’re usually post-industrial revolution Marxists that believe that their affinities transcend national borders.

So they hate nationalism with a passion. They hate patriotism with a passion. And, uh, I, I find them not just offputting, but especially after this election, very dangerous people because, uh, it’s very easy to see a right wing, greedy guy who says, you know what? Survival of the fittest. Darwinism, I won the lottery.

I’ve got more brains and I’m gonna get all the money and keep it. Okay. I don’t think that’s a caricature, but you know where they’re coming from. But when you see somebody who has the same mindset, A Zuckerberg or Mark, uh, or Mike Bloomberg. But I’m doing all of this for you. I’m using all my money. I have to get more money, I have to have more privilege, I have to more control, but I’m doing it for you as I define you that that’s very dangerous.

That’s sort of, or Wells Animal Farm or 1984 all over again.

John Anderson: Well, thank you very much indeed for your insights. I’ve been invaluable. Can I, can I ask you one last question? Uh, do you feel more or less positive about America’s future and, and frankly therefore, you know, the, some sort of restoration of the global liberal order, uh, as a result of what I would call the capacity of the American people to see through the bull dust.

In this election. Alright. Um, you know, they did flip presidents, but only just one has the impression That was almost reluctant on the part of a lot of people, but they’ve made certain he can’t implement the things that are really dangerous.

Victor Davis Hanson: I feel that they weighed in and on elections in which the media didn’t, was, didn’t have the resources, and those were the Senate and house and state legislatures.

They showed overwhelmingly their common sense and practicality and I truly believe had there been. A fair vote count, and I don’t wanna say this as a partisan, but a fair vote count according to the rules established by the state legislature, Donald Trump won that election. I don’t think he’s going to be president because I think the forces are raided right now or against him, but I’m in a much better mood than I was prior to 2016 about, uh, the fate of America and more importantly, involves Australia as well, because prior to the Obama years, there was a sense in America that there were certain countries in the world that were at the forefront of the Western experiment, that they had courageous people, they were daring people.

They were devoted to constitutional government and free markets and private property, but they had traditions, religion, the Judeo-Christian traditions of humanity. They had great literature. They understood their flaws, but they were self-correcting. They were self-critical. They were self analytical and they, they had enriched the planet as no other culture had.

And I thought that there were people throughout the western world who understood that. The last 10 years, the self-critical went into the self-hatred. We had something, I guess we call oco phobia, hating your own country. But I think we’re coming out of that. I think we’ve seen the alternative as something like Seattle and Portland, and we don’t want to go there.

And there’s enough people that’ll stand up and say, you know, Just like 1930, uh, 1940. There were people in Britain that said, we are not going to roll over like the French did. We’re just not gonna do it. You can bomb us. You can try to invade us, but we’re not going to be the French army that crumbled in six weeks.

So I think it’s something to look forward, and I think there’s a lot of people throughout the world that that share that confidence.

Conclusion

John Anderson: Thank you very much indeed. I really appreciate your time.

Victor Davis Hanson: Thank you again, John. Good to see you and hear from you.