Piers Morgan Uncensored - 'You Said You Were EDUCATED!' Victor Davis-Hanson vs Richard Wolff on Socialism

Episode Date: October 1, 2026

Are the Democratic Socialists of America reshaping U.S. politics, or are their economic policies a recipe for disaster? With insurgent socialists scoring major primary victories and high-profile figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani making waves, conservative critics warn of a chilling future- while supporters argue voters are hungry for change in an era of soaring inflation and billionaire dominance. Is socialism gaining real momentum in America, or are conservatives right to sound the alarm? Piers Morgan Uncensored is joined by legendary Marxist economist Prof. Richard Wolff and renowned historian and Hoover Institution senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson to discuss. (00:00:00) Introduction  (00:01:30) Democratic Socialists in the U.S. (00:05:03) Is global capitalism dying? (00:10:31) Youths gravitating towards the Socialist movement (00:20:10) Could socialism and Iran War spell the end for Trump? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Americans don't want capitalism anymore. So there's a lot of things that are going well right now. We're in the eye of the hurricane before the midterm. These very charismatic socialists like Mandani, El-Said, AOC. The problem is capitalism is an unequal monster of injustice. The American Empire is not in decline. They're wrong. You said you were an educated man.

You didn't say you were on coup. I didn't. I didn't. You made that up too. What is the point? Well, if you wouldn't interrupt, you would learn. I'll end, Omar. No, well, if you would say something, I wouldn't bother interrupting you. Whether the DNC leadership likes it or not, and most indications are that they don't.

A Democratic Socialist of America are having a moment. Insurgent Socialists have won many primaries against centrist opponents in this key election year, often defying big spending campaigns designed to keep them out. The leading lights include New York City Mayor, Zoram Mundani, and the popular Congresswoman Alexandric O'Oak. who may yet run for president.

Republicans like Senators to take Cruz and the president say their progress is chilling and that all Americans should fear what they call a burgeoning communist Islamist alliance. Campaign rhetoric aside is fair to say that most conservatives think their economic ideas are insane. But that doesn't mean they're not popular. Then a world of billionaires as bogey men stagnant wages and soaring inflation, voters may well be buying what they're sharing. My next two guests have very different views about why this is all going. Richard Wolfe is a popular Marxist economist, often cited by the DSA,

and Victor Davis-Hanssen is a leading history and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and also the counter-revolution, the fall and rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. Well, welcome to both of you. Victor, welcome back to Unsensored. I want to read you a clip from Donald Trump in 2024. He said, we are a nation in decline, a failing nation. we are a nation that has the highest inflation in 50 years where banks are collapsing. A pretty apocalyptic view of the United States.

Was he right? Well, in the Biden four years, the aggregate inflation had gone almost 21 percent, and it averaged 5.1 percent every year. But if you were to look at staples, vehicles, fuel, insurance, housing, health care had gone almost 30 percent. So he was right about that. His first year, he had about 2.6%. So he halved the annual rate of inflation. We'll see about this year.

About decline, I don't think that... I think what he was suggesting is that we were an exceptional preeminent country and that that was a reaction to prior presidents that said that we were not especially any more exceptional when, say, the United Kingdom or Greece. But if you look at right now very quickly, Most of the prognosis 15 years ago about the United States proved wrong.

They said China was going to eclipse our economy. They have four times a population, yet they have $10 trillion less GDP. I can remember in 2006 we were told the EU was a new socialist paradigm. They have 450 million people, 100 million more people than we do, and they have a $10 trillion smaller GDP. still. And you look at, say, eight or nine rubrics, space launches, satellites, bioengineering, digital media, software, AI. And you look at companies in the world that are measured either by market capitalization or usage downloads. And out of those top ten, almost in every category,

nine are American. Once in a while, there's a Chinese or a European country. So, You can use a lot of barometers, but the United States, I think, were in the eye of the hurricane before the midterm. But if you look at recent developments, we have the highest per family income. That was 2025 in history. We have the lowest crime rate in 70 years. We have the lowest poverty rate at about 10.2% of the population. We created 140,000 new jobs last year. There is worry because of the war about inflation and the price of oil, but we've increased oil production by about a million barrels and we're the largest producer of natural gas in history and exporter of it and the largest producer currently of oil.

So there's a lot of things that are going well right now, but we're in a political campaign and the war has clouded a lot of that news, I think. Richard Wolf, welcome to Unsensit. I think you broadly agree the American Empire is not what it was. what it was. I think you differ about why this is. You see that there's been a kind of inevitable death rattle of global capitalism. Explain why you feel that. Well, I take a historical view, and I don't cherry pick my statistics in the manner of Mr. Hansen, which is a remarkable exercise. But he has a problem, which is, as you opened the program, socialism is on the rise here in the United States faster and more broadly based than anyone, including Mr. Hansen, had foreseen or

expected. And there's good reason for that, unless you want to dismiss all of the people that are finding socialism attractive as being cloudy or uninformed and things like that. Here's the story about the empire, and I'm glad you brought it up. Empires were created. starting about four centuries ago, in your country, peers. England is where this began, because capitalism replaced feudalism. And when capitalism replaces feudalism, there's an internal urge to expand. The successful company is the one that makes a profit. The more successful company is the one that turns the profit back into the business to grow it, because with competition, growth is a condition of survival. So capitalism grows. If it starts in London, pretty soon it runs

out of the workers and the raw materials and the food needed in that area. And it expands. The history of the last four centuries is masses of rural, agrarian people being drawn as in a magnet into the urban industrial. And the capitalism created these new countries. Western Europe to begin with, spanning to North America and Japan, and they genuinely built a world economy. Marx was one of the early thinkers to point that out. They are generating a world economy. The problem is that the economy capitalism generated is an unequal monster of injustice, in which Asia,

Africa, Latin America, and much else are used to funnel wealth. You know, Belgium is a small country in northwest Europe, but if you give it the Congo, it becomes wealthy. But that's because it takes the wealth of the Congo and moves it to Brussels, so it looks pretty, as Brussels indeed does. And that is now the revolt of the Third World, the Global South, whatever you want it. The other feature, which goes most to your question, is that the culmination of European-led colonialism were the two worst world wars in human history.

When they ran out of the globe to take for each other, they began to intrude on each other. The British on the French, the French on the German, the Russians on the Japanese. You know the story. And World Wars 1 and 2 are the culmination. people don't understand is that when the colony, the colonializing countries destroyed one another in World Wars 1 and 2, they had an exception. Because air power and air technology weren't developed yet, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans protected the United States. So that it was the country having joined the colonizers that inherited the colonial

system from all the others. The second half of the 20th century is the century of the wealth of America because it became the Uni Empire, the collection of all the others. As the British lost India, the United States went in. As the French lost their colonies, U.S. corporations, U.S. government, U.S. military went in. We enjoyed being the one big empire. But given that the world was building up to an anti-imperial, anti-colonial era, which we're living through, it is now the time for the United States, the inheritor of all those empires to suffer the result they all did, which is, as every empire in human history, it was born, it evolved, and then it passed away. We are now passing away.

And nothing illustrates it better than this kind of war with Iran, where one of the empire's corners turns out to be able to fight back. Victor, you know, it's interesting because I'm sure there were lots of that you may have agreed with, a lot of it you don't agree with. What is inarguable right now is this very palpable rise of the democratic socialist. And there are these very charismatic socialists like Mamdani, El-Said, AOC, and others, all different, slightly different forms of socialism, but socialists at their heart, really. There is clearly a movement going on.

What do you put that down to? I mean, if you think that what they're espousing is disastrous, why are so many young people in particular gravitating to these younger dynamic socialists in the way they are? Well, before I answer that, I'll just say that if you take worldwide socialism and empires and American decline, if you look at the Western Hemisphere five years, six years ago, the left had used a word pink tight, that they felt that Brazil was a model, Venezuela was a model, Colombia was a model. So if those 32 nations that consist of south, central, and the Caribbean, there's only five now that are socialist. Brazil, Nicaragua, probably Mexico, and paraguages flip.

All of the rest are either capitalist or consensual governments, and most of them are pro-American. And if you look at where China is right now, which is, I don't know what. what we would call it, it's quasi-capitalist, quasi-socialist, surely totalitarian. It is an internal turmoil. It's just fired all of its general staff. It's got a 1.0 fertility rate. Its GDP has not increased, as everybody told, said it would. In some ways, you could look at it as one American produces 40%, 30% more GDP in goods and services

than his four Chinese counterparts. So the American Empire, if that's the term, and we were not a colonial empire, is not in decline. It's in ascendance relative to the EU, relative to our neighbors to the North, Canada, relative to Russia, relative to... I didn't cherry pick those statistics.

That's just the fact. Yes, you did. Mr. Woodstock, no, if you want to say that the GDP figures are wrong, you tell me. But as for here in America, Let me tell you. Let me tell you.

I didn't interrupt you, please. No, no. Look, I let you go. I let you say three or four things that were reasonable. You talked a lot longer than I did. You talked a lot. I have to answer the question. That's another cherry pick, you know.

It's not the length. It's really the substance that matters. You might learn that. Maybe if you were a little bit more educated, you'd learn it. I'm a professor of economics. I study economic history. One of the things we study is economic development. There is no country on earth in the history of our race that has developed its economy faster, further than the People's Republic of China.

Whatever you want to play games, that is the reality. For the last 40 years, the average growth of GDP in China has been between six and I didn't let let all, come on. Either you say it and you're talking, I'm talking, I'm, or you interrupt the correction. Those are the two options. The other options said, I'm not entitled to. I'm talking about today. I'm talking about today. It's stalling. Today, in the year 2006, using the numbers of the IMF, the economic growth of the GDP of the United States is anticipated to be 2.1 to 2.2%. Yeah. The same number for China is 5%. Now, even you can understand who's doing better.

I'm just telling you that for, 1.4 billion people produce about 30 to 40% GDP, as Americans do, given its population. And you were talking about American decline. I just quoted all of the statistics of major companies in the world that are dominating the new technologies. They're all, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not trying to interrupt you, but you let me answer his question, if you please.

I didn't, first of all, I didn't engage in ad homonym, and I didn't interrupt you when you were giving your oration. I'm just telling you that the socialist program in America is, there's two catalysts. Number one, the DSA's membership has been about 75 to 85% white, and it's mostly confined the nucleus into urban areas in blue, are purple states. And when you look at the profile of education, they, not only most of them have BAs, but most of them have advanced degrees. So you're talking about a very affluent group

of largely white people who feel that their educational certification, the letters after their name, have not brought them the level of affluence that they feel that they enjoy, and which that is in start. contrast to the people they associate in New York, in Denver, L.A., in San Francisco, in Boston. And they cannot afford, I mean, they don't have the money of doctors and other professionals, and the prices in those cities for housing, cost of living, food, are beyond their reach.

And that has made that elite group of people organize, and they vent their frustrations, and they are spreading that message. There is a second group. We have about 53 million people who were not born in the United States, about 17%. That's a record in percentage and actual numbers. A small minority of that group come as first or second generation from largely the Middle East.

And I'm talking about people like Rashida Talib, Ilyan Omar, Zoran Mondami, Hassan Piker, Abduel, Said. I'm just taking an example. Are you really? No, no, no, no, no. Are you really going to try once again

to pin socialists are dangerous immigrants? Are you really not? I'm not. I didn't. Mr. Trump's square end, that you repeat that? Wow. You can't do better than that?

My goodness. Here, this is the, You know why 75% of the people in the DSA may be why? I think you should let him make to finish his point. I don't think you heard him actually make his points. Let it be to finish the point. You said you were an educated man. You didn't say you were included.

No, I didn't. I didn't. You made that up too. Let me finish. Let me finish. And so I wasn't talking about their immigrant status per se. I were saying that we have an elite group of people. This is the second component.

This is the second component. of what makes up the socialist leadership. And what are they have in common? They're very, very wealthy people. Oh, the wealthy are the socialists. Yeah, some of me finish. I just said that there is an elite in the cities that are highly educated. They come from upper middle class.

They're largely white, and they're dissatisfied that their credentials did not result in the type of life they deserve. They think they deserve. As far as the immigrants, I'm saying that there is a path. pattern here. Zoran Mondami, you could argue, he's a dual citizen of Uganda. He came from what you would call a settler colonial 1% of India that owns 60% of the GDP of Uganda. He's very wealthy. His parents, one's a PhD, one's a filmmaker. Hassan Pikers, Turkish family, are multi-millionaires. He drives a $200,000 Porsche. He bought a $3 million home. Are you kidding? Are we having an analysis of socialism? on the personal property of two people? No, I'm not finished. I'm not finished.

I said I'll be able to file a sheet. What is the point? Well, if you wouldn't interrupt, you would learn. I'll, well, if you would say something, I wouldn't bother interrupting you. I'll only not. I don't think it's an accurate net worth statement as required by federal disclosures.

Abdu El-Said filed a tax return of $600,000. So what I'm getting at is when you, these two groups of people are the driving force in the socialist movement. And we don't know yet. They're not. You just made that up. You just made that. No, I didn't. They're not driving force of anything.

Yeah, they are. They are in the news. They're in the news. In American politics, one of the reasons we have socialism is that American politics is a game for rich people 99% of the time. That's what we have. If you look at the Senate and you look at the House, you'll see that the number of millionaires is overwhelming. What are you doing?

And the Democratic part, they're greater on the left than they are the right. That's true. That all nonsense, listen, we have a country dominated right now by billionaires. The people sitting on the platform behind Mr. Trump when he was inaugurated in January of last year are the billionaires of this country. If they were Russian, we'd call them oligarchs, but we don't. We leave that for them. We have billionaires, and everyone knows that they are the dominant.

Let me ask you a question. Isn't the big problem for Trump? As you've got this rise, a populist rise of the democratic socialist, you've also got the whole fallout from the Iran war, and in particular the impact it's had on cost of living, and in particular, say, on gas prices. So data released by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, gasoline was $3.8 a gallon in January 2025.

It's now $4.48. Diesel was at $363 per gallon in January 2025. Now $6.53. You know, Trump's Day of Reckoning for the Iran War may well be through the prism of gas prices come the ballot box in the midterms. I mean, isn't that a cold, hard reality of why you're seeing? Well, hang, I see for Victor first.

I'm asking Victor first. I will come to you, Richard. Why do you do that? Why do you interrupt all the time? But just on that point, Victor, do you not think? Let me ask Victor there. I'll come to you, Richard, in the moment. But is this not going to be one of the major determining factors

that Trump, far from reducing the cost of living as he campaigned on? and far from not going and attacking Middle Eastern countries, which he campaigned on, has done the complete reverse, and people may vote with the reality in their lives. We'll see it. It could be.

In 1992, gas prices out of the first Gulf War, I would argue, may George H.W. It must not be reelected. And he was not in a recession. It had ended 20 months earlier, but people felt the price of gas was high, and they believed that the Democrats, message, it was very well articulated by Bill Clinton that we were in the worst, I'm quoting literally,

the worst recession since the Great Depression. That 91 recession had been over for 20 months when he said that, but the price of gasoline had soared when the oil fields of Kuwait, as you remember, were torched. So yes, the price of gasoline is the most evident increase. Will the inflation rate get to 3%? It probably will, but it won't get to 5%, which was the average of the Biden administration, but that's not going to matter because it's the perception. And as far as the Iran war is unpopular, but it's a very different war. I mean, Iran is a country of 93 million people. It was considered the strongest country in the Middle East. We haven't had a ground war. We have only had about 38 days of kinetic activity. And then we've had negotiations, a brief interlude of back and forth

missile fire negotiations and negotiations over these seven months. So it's a very strange, we've tragically lost 19 people. But if you look at the entire seven-month war, the accident rate every day in the U.S. military is one fatality. We have had 11 times more fatality during the war than we'd lost in a... But the problem, I think the problem, and I'll bring Richard back in here, The problem with the Iran war is the asymmetric war that the Iranians have been waging by controlling the Strait of Hormuz, which has 20% of the world's energy flow through it. I interviewed the Prime Minister of Qatar the weekend in London, and the economic damage to Qatar alone from the liquid nitrogen, the liquid natural gas that goes to the Strait has been rendered almost to nothing, right, for seven months. But we're right in the middle of something. Yes, Trump should have said that he should.

should have explained exactly what he was doing on day one. And I think they were too optimistic based on the Maduro and the first term. I agree. I think they thought they could take the regime out. And it's not realistic. But we're running out of time. I want to leave Richard a chance just to have a final word just on this. Because it seems to me the rise of a democratic socialist, the rising gas prices, the rise

of cost of living, Trump's, you know, in a way, repudiation of his own campaigning with with what he's done with Iran and the impact on the economy, that this could be a day of reckoning in the midterms. What does that mean for America post-mid terms? Should he lose both the House and the Senate, do you think? Well, he would be right in the same position. Mr. Trump is in trouble. He's in trouble no matter what happens.

And the Republican Party is in trouble no matter what happens. And that's because of larger social issues. The reason I gave the history was to give a sense of the larger process. The United States at the end of World War II was less unequal than the European countries. Now it has outpaced all the European countries to become the most unequal at all. You know, it is an incredible study in capitalism's failure to generalize or to bring prosperity. Wherever capitalism settles, it creates such inequality that it eventually erupts. That's when the inequality is reduced until they can reestablish the capitalist system,

which then resumes the rush to inequality. That's what fuels socialism. That's why the whole... That's why the poverty rate is the lowest. That socialism isn't there. It doesn't work. It's like the old joke of Mark Twain. You know, the reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated.

Socialism is the governing party in Spain. Socialism is about to become the mayor of Berlin, not just the mayor of New York. There are reasons for that that have to do with internal transformations in those societies. That's what's going on. The mass of Americans don't want capitalism anymore. They don't know much about socialism. How could they? It's been banned since the Cold War began in 45.

What you're seeing is the expression of anti-capitalism as the appreciation of socialism. That would get you to understand where the support for it is coming. Okay. I'm going to leave in there. Fascinating debate. I'll just, I'll end with one statement. The poverty rate, as I speak, is the lowest it's ever been recorded. And that was...

No, that's not true. It's another one of your magic cherry-picked statistics. That's what I do for a living. You can yell at home and you brag about yourself and your predictions because you don't have an argument when you don't have an argument. The beauty of this show is that people can now scurry to their internet. They can Google it and work out what the truth is. And for the record, I love picking cherries.

Anyway, I'll leave you there. Gentlemen, thank you both very much. Piers Morgan Unscensored is proudly independent. The only boss around here is me. If you enjoy our show, we ask only one simple thing. Hit subscribe on YouTube and follow Pierce Morgan Unsensored on Spotify and Apple Podcast. And in return, we will continue our mission to inform, irritate and entertain. And we'll do it all for free.

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