The Daily Signal - Victor Davis Hanson: Why Trump is the Only Leader Left Standing for Israel

Episode Date: May 12, 2026

Antisemitism is on the rise not just global but also here in the United States. Why? DEI instruction, open borders, and a less democratic Democrat Party. All told, President Donald Trump remains the final bulwark against a rising tide of globalist and anti-Western sentiment, argues Victor Davis Hanson on today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In a Few Words.” 👉 The Daily Signal cannot continue to tell stories, like this one, without the support of our viewers: http://dailysignal.com/donate 👉Don’t miss out on Victor’s latest short videos by subscribing to The Daily Signal today. You’ll be notified every time a new piece of content drops: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/dailysignal?sub_confirmation=1⁠  Also on Spotify: https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL9753340027  👉Want more VDH? Watch Victor’s weekly, hour-long podcast, “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” now! Subscribe to his YouTube channel, and enable notifications:  https://www.youtube.com/@victordavishanson7273?sub_confirmation=1👉More exclusive content is available on Victor’s website: https://victorhanson.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, this is Victor Davis-Hansson for the Daily Signal. Recently, I say in the last two years, but especially the last three months, there's been an increasing demonization of Israel, and by association Jews who support it, we've seen these campus protests on American universities where they have these signs from the river to the sea. That's an eliminationist slogan that Israel, would be wiped off the map from the Jordan River all the way into the Mediterranean seas and I guess dumped into it.

And of course we've had anti-Semitic incidents of students chasing Jewish students into a library and trapping them there, roughing them up on campus demonstrations where they get quite violent and they're overtly and proudly anti-Semitic. And the point is what's behind all this? Why in America now? Because after all, there are more Jewish citizens, or at least roughly comparable in the United States than there are in Israel, which has about two and a half or two million Arabs and a number of Christians as well. So why in the so-called bastion of Jewishness in the West here in the United States, which has avoided the anti-Semitism of Europe and the Middle East, why is it starting to come out now? What's behind this? And from people that you wouldn't expect it from.

Well, the first is DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion divided the nation into a 70-30 binary. It was dreamed up by Obama because he felt he didn't have enough traction with the old binary of 12% blacks being victimized, which was true they were by the 88% whites. Due to immigration, the country was no longer 90% white. bundled a new group and said, it doesn't matter how wealthy you are, it doesn't matter what your class is, if you're not white, you are a victimized, oppressed person with legitimate grievances. What that did is it allowed people exemptions, so you didn't question somebody's performance on the job or how somebody was hired if it was race-based because that would be

insulting or racist. But it also did another thing. It meant that people could express themselves in racist, biased fashion, but if they were from that protected binary, you couldn't say anything. Now, that had been true of the black community, unfortunately, for a long time. I can't think of a major black leader other than Martin Luther King

that didn't voice anti-Semitic tropes. I mean, Jesse Jackson said, Heimmytown, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, said, dim Jews won't let me see Obama. Remember Farrakhan called Jews termites in a gutter religion. Al Sharpton said, I'll put on my Yarmacca, and you come over here, and he had all this about diamond merchants. Pretty bad stuff. No need to get into Kenya West. What he said, Malcolm X said a lot of very anti-Semitic things. So it was there, and that was based on you don't dare call a black leader an anti-Semite or being biased, given his protected status as a victim.

So DEI allowed people to express overt anti-Semitism, sometimes cloaked as anti-Israelism, without repercussions. The second is demography. There had traditionally been about, oh, six to seven percent of the population was Jewish, and maybe one percent was Muslim, and that has radically changed now, mostly through immigration and The Muslim birth rate in the United States is about 2.6, and the all other ethnic groups, white, black, it's about 1.7. And that population is about 5 million, and it's projected to increase to a number higher than the Jewish population. But you can see the trends already, and then you have to factor into that it's very hard for a Muslim to be secular, agnostic, atheistic, atheistic Christian but in the case of Jews are more and more being secularized or intermarrying much more and their support of Israel is not contingent on their being

Jewish more importantly we were getting billions of dollars the UAE Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are among the top five donate donors to universities in America and they found middle East they have founded Middle East Studies programs. And those are not Middle East Studies programs. They're indoctrination center for the entire student body. So demography means that people feel that in states like Michigan, the future will be you have to say something critical of Israel. And remember El-Said, the candidate in the Democratic primary, said he didn't want to really criticize anything about Iran. And if he said anything positive about the United States taking out or Israel taking out this atrocious

leader, Cominé, the Supreme Leader, then his constituency in Michigan would be upset. That was kind of an admission that there's a growing minority in America that hates Israel, and they have a lot of money and they're gaining political quality, and that's going to increase. What we see in the university is going to be mainstreaming to society at large. The third is the Democratic Party is not Democratic anymore, as I've said before. It has a Jacobin agenda, a French Revolutionary Party agenda. It's not just that they want to tear down statues and rename buildings and change the foundational date to 16, 19. Those were all Jacobin trademarks.

But they have a holistic socialist agenda. Open borders, illegal immigration mainstream, mass amnesty. no cash bail, critical legal theory, DEI, and massive cuts in defense, raising taxes, and more entitlements, of course, in the New Green Deal. But embedded in that agenda is anti-Israelism and indifference to anti-Semitism. I say embedded because that's a non-negotiable agenda. If you want to be nominated for an office in the Democratic Party, you can't come out for pipelines or more drilling, drill baby drill. You can't say we need tougher criminal prosecutions.

You can't say, I love the wall. It's a good idea. You can't say anything. And by that same reasoning, you cannot say you support wholeheartedly Israel. Anybody who does so in the Democratic Party, like John Federman, the senior. senator from Pennsylvania becomes persona non grata in his own party. Finally, there is a sense that the institutions in the United States that bequeath laurels and mainstreaming and adulation, they're all left wing.

All the awards are left wing. All the book reviews, the major venues are left wing, the major media is left wing. And a lot of people feel that they've been in the wilderness. They've been pelted with this left-wing hail storm, and at some point they get tired, and they want to come out of the storm. And so we've seen people at the bulwark, for example, who have flipped over,

and now they receive adulation. So when Tucker Carlson said he was going to interview a number of really strident anti-Semites and anti-Israelis, and he wants to have Graham Platner, the notorious nominee, would-be nominee. He is the nominee now from Maine who had a Totenkov Deathheads Nazi tattoo on him. Then there were people. He immediately won a New York Times interview.

The New Yorker wants to interview him. Atlanta writes about him. They would not have touched Tucker Carl's in two years. So there's a sense that in this growing momentum, a lot of people want to piggyback on it, whether for clicks, especially foreign audiences. We're starting to learn that a lot of our people on the left that hate Israel and a lot of the people on the right that do get enormous audiences overseas, mostly from the Middle East.

So you add this all together, and for many people without strong convictions, they look at the ledger and they say, well, the DEI community is anti-Israel, and probably many of them think they can be anti-Semitic without consequences. The demography is there, the money is there, the whole left-wing agenda is a parcel so you can't really defect from it.

You have to embrace it if you're a Democrat. And there's some money to be made or there's some power to be gained or there's some approval to be had. You add it all up and we're going to see a lot more anti-Semitism. The final irony, the so-called bigot Donald Trump, the so-called racist Donald Trump,

he has admitted he's probably going to be the last president that wholeheartedly supports Israel. For now, he is the last dam holding back this deluge. Thank you very much. This is Victor Davis-Hansson from The Daily Signal. Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal. Please like, share, and subscribe to be notified for more content like this.

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