The Eric Metaxas Show - Victor Davis Hanson "Unfiltered Rhetoric and Lax Justice Led to the Assassination of Charlie Kirk"

Episode Date: September 18, 2025

Historian and bestselling author Victor Davis Hanson joins Eric Metaxas for a hard-hitting conversation on the dangerous consequences of unchecked rhetoric and a justice system that fails to uphold equal accountability. Hanson argues that these failures directly contributed to the tragic political assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Welcome to the Eric Metaxis show. Did you ever see the movie The Blobs starring Steve McQueen? The blood-curdling threat of The Blob. Well, way back when, Eric had a small part in that film, but they had to cut his scene because The Blob was supposed to eat him. But he kept spitting him out. Oh, the whole thing was just a disaster. Anyway, here's the guy who's not always that easy to digest.

Eric the Texas! Hey there, folks. Welcome. It's Tuesday, September 16th. A lot of stuff. Okay, first of all, today in hour one, I'm going to be talking to Victor Davis-Hanson. It's always a big deal to get him as a guest. If you don't know who he is, let me tell you, he's a big deal. He's an amazing, amazing mind in this generation. every time we get him, I considered a big deal that we got him, just because his voice, there's nobody like him.

So we're going to be talking to him, Victor Davis Hansen, just a few minutes. In hour two, I have a few more minutes of my conversation with Lucas Miles, who runs TPSA Faith. And then after that, my friend, David Englehart, David Englehart. David Englehart is the pastor of King's Church in New York City. He's on the board of TPSA, a good friend of Charlie's, a very close friend of mine. So we're going to be talking about Charlie and other things in hour two. Along those lines, I have to say, well, there's a number of things to say.

First of all, I want to say the film Letter to the American Church, based on my book letter to the American Church. We made that film with Charlie Kirk and TPSA. They helped us to produce that film. Charlie is prominently featured in that film. I think I probably am featured a little bit more. I don't know. But he is as prominently featured as anybody in the film. And he wanted more than anything.

It's why he wanted to produce the film with us to push that film out as much as possible. I'm bringing it up now because the film is available, letter to the American church.com. The book is available, of course. But the film was available. And the reason I'm bringing this up is because many, many, many churches refused to screen the film. We offered it free to churches. That's the main point. We offered it free to churches.

Letter to the American church, film free. If you want to screen it for your congregation, we're offering it free. Zero, right? And I bring it up now because it's my opinion that those churches that decided to be so apolitical that they would not screen a film like this, it was because of their silence that Charlie Kirk sticks out like a sore thumb and people think, oh, he's so radical. And that's why he becomes the focal point for murderous rage. And so if everybody would speak up, if everybody would be bolder, it takes the pressure off of the few, of which I am one, not anywhere near the level of Charlie. But the point is that we all have to use our voices. We all have to be involved in speaking out.

And if your church did not screen the film letter to the American church, I would say you shouldn't go to that church. Or give them another chance. they can screen it for free or they can pay the $10, do whatever they want. But Charlie is prominently featured. If you want to know what was important to him, the film was tremendously important to him. They would not have gotten involved with us in making the film if it weren't important to him. And so if you're going to a church that is saying, well, we don't want to take sides. I will say it for the thousandth time.

Get out of that church. Take God's money and tithe to somebody who understands. the prophetic moment in which we live. It's not 1985. We have forces of demonic hatred trying to murder those with whom they disagree. Nobody was more reasonable than Charlie. You know, find me all of his hate-filled statements. There are no hate-filled statements. He was just kind, reasonable, and he spoke truth, which people call hate if they don't like it, which is idiotic. And so we have to push against that. So letter of the American Church.com. is the website. And if your church didn't screen it, say, hey, listen, in honor of Charlie Kirk,

let's screen this film. Let's see what he had to say. It was important to him. If you want to know what was important to him, that was really important to him. I remember he told me personally, we want to push this as hard as we can, Eric. We want to get this out as hard as much as possible. I was thrilled that he felt that way. But unless pastors and churches understand that and help get the message out, then it's all in vain. So the website is letter to the American church.com, and I really mean it. We're at a point now. If your church isn't interested in this, I have to ask you why you're interested in that church. I really do. I don't get it. Very important. All right. Well, so before we get to Victor Davis Hansen, Lucas Miles, and David Englehart, I just have to say I was,

Yesterday, Pastor Alan Jackson contacted me. They're doing a conference this weekend in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. It's in the Nashville area. And Charlie Kirk was going to headline Friday night this Friday. Obviously, that's not happening. So Pastor Alan Jackson asked me if I was free to step in. Pretty humbling to be asked to do that. So if you're a praying person, please pray for me that God would say exactly what he wants me to say in the way that he wants me to say it.

That's Friday night, Christ in culture, or maybe it's Christianity in culture, I forget. But it is in Murfreesboro. That's again, Pastor Alan Jackson. World Outreach Church, if you can get there, please get there because I know there are so many wonderful people. It's a great time of community. And after that, I'm flying to Phoenix to be at the Charlie Kirk Memorial in Phoenix. That'll be on Sunday. I'm sure we'll see a lot of friends there, including David Englehart, who will be my guest in hour two today.

Also want to mention, we have a big matching grant. Socrates in the city, which exists to get truth out, to get people talking. It's similar to what Charlie was doing, I guess, in many ways. It's different but similar. To talk about the big questions, to dare to ask the big questions and to talk about the big questions with people that I think have something to say. I may not agree with every one of them on everything, but valuable conversations. Socrates and the city.com is the website. Socratesin the city.com is where you can sign up for the newsletter because we are sending out weekly stuff at this point.

it's kind of amazing that we have weekly stuff that we're putting out. We're doing these things, Socrates conversations, which is I'm not involved in the conversation. It's, I think on Friday we're going to air a conversation with my friend Louis Marcos, who is at Houston Baptist University. Boy, do I love him. Lewis Marcos is brilliant on CS Lewis, the classics, ancient Greek philosophy. He really, he's just wonderful. Lewis Marcos talking to Holly Ordway. I've had both of them for Socrates in the studio, but they're going to be speaking to each other.

Holly is an expert on J.R.R. Tolkien. Anyway, so that's coming up. It's pretty cool, these conversations that are happening. It's sort of like if you could invite interesting people to a dinner party, who would you invite? And these are the kinds of people that are amazing. And it's kind of a dream team of folks that are insightful and, you know, spark these really interesting conversations. And by the way, the match link is. Socrates and the city.com slash match.

So if people want to go there. Yeah. Yeah, I don't even know if I mentioned that yet, but that's what I was just going to say, was we have a match going on right now trying to raise funds. Now, when we raise funds for Socrates and the city, it helps us to get this stuff out. And people are telling me they're coming to faith through watching these videos.

Okay, we've had millions and millions of views. It's very exciting. We're really pushing it out there. But if you can help us out, go to Socratesandcity. com slash match. And you can probably see when you go to the page, Socratesandcity.com, how to give to the match.

But it's a big match. And so we're hoping for people to step up. Also, I've got to say, December 2nd is our Christmas gala in New York City. That's a big deal. Tickets are now on sale. It will sell out. You've got to go to Socratesandcity.com.

It's December 2nd in New York City. There's rooms available at the Union League Club if you want. But you've got to jump on this. December 2nd, tickets are on sale. We'll be right back. with the great Victor Davis Hanson. A major retail chain just canceled a massive order, leaving My Pillow with an overstock of the classic My Pillows, and this is your gain, because for a limited time, my Pillows

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grab your standard, my pillow for only 1798, only while supplies last. Folks, welcome back. As I just mentioned, my guest in this hour is Victor Davis Hansen, who's done so many things that I will tell you about none of them, except perhaps the most recent. There's an updated paperback edition of his book, The End of Everything. Victor, welcome back. There's so much to talk about. I want to talk to you, of course, about the murder of Charlie Kirk and the enemies of free speech and where we are in the culture.

So what are your opening thoughts on this difficult subject? Well, I think everybody understood it was a political assassination. He was the most gifted political activist, probably media figure organizer of either party, either persuasion under 40. and this was an effort to take him out. And I think we've all discussed that when you have rhetoric, I'm a firm believer in free speech, but when you have Nazi, Nazi, Nazi, Nazi, Nazi, racist, racist, transphobe everywhere all the time,

24-7, 360 degrees, coupled with the idea that when you commit violent crimes, we have a revolving door justice system, and we saw that with Dick Carlos Brown. and 14 times felon, then that permeates the culture or the atmosphere of the United States, and people come out of the woodwork and they conclude, A, if they do a heinous act, they may not be fully and swiftly punished, and two, there's a large segment of the population they feel that will put them in the pantheon of leftist heroes. And that together is a very dangerous

mixture, and that's what we saw. Well, it seems to me that we're living at a time right now when, you know, it's the proverbial tipping point. It's a watershed moment because it's one thing for there to be hate in the culture, but when it manifests itself in this way, your average American understands we cannot go on this way. We have to speak out against it. So it's been very clarifying, I think, to.

to see not just the murderous act itself, but the extraordinary foolishness of people coming out celebrating it, as if they don't have the barest modicum of appreciation of what it is to be an American, to say murder is wrong, free speech is good. For people to be that explicitly foolish, That is absolutely extraordinary to me. I mean, I've never to actually see that somehow is clarifying. Yeah, I think so.

It was sort of a putrid scab. And then when it was torn off, what was the wound beneath was revealing to people. They didn't realize how sick people are. And we've had these various polls that show that people who identify as progressive up to 30 to 40 percent approve of killing of political enemies. You've seen that in the Redkers pole and otherwise. I do think when you say watershed moment, I think people collectively just said after the horrible murder of Iranian Zarautska on the light rail, and there was one in Auburn, there was one in Queens. I think collectively they're just saying, I'm done with it. I'm done.

I'm not going to put it up with it anymore. I'm not going to put up with the left anymore. I'm not afraid to say that there are two sexes. I'm not afraid to say that we're giving dangerous drugs to and antidepressants to people who shouldn't be examined in the trans community. I don't think it's okay if you happen to be black and your Joy Reed or somebody. And day after day you say white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, and you collectivize an entire demographic. So I think all these things that the left has been doing, people now, because of these events the last month, have concluded or symptomatic, and it can't go on.

And so people, I think, I think what's going to happen is there's going to be a big tidal wave of repulsion. And you might see, for the first time in our lifetime, a sitting president in his first, I mean, as an administration win the midterms. because I think people are really angry, and they're going to go out and vote, and they're going to vote against anybody that's democratic, whether that's fair or not. I mean, I think that another way to put it is we're seeing in our lifetimes now happening. It's the reducteo ad absurdum of those values, that at some point it goes far enough that everybody says, aha, I now see it can't work. So you can live in this bad faith for a while, but then eventually you see the fruit, you eat the fruit, you get sick, you throw up, you say, ah, you know what, now I see. And I think that's kind of where we are in the nation, that people are disgusted with the New York Times, with Harvard and Yale. They really are saying, you know what, we allowed you to promote this stuff in good faith in a way. We said, we don't agree with you, but we, But we now see where you have taken it. We now see the logical extension of what you have said you believed, and it is horrific.

Yeah, I think so. I think people are saying the nuclear family, the two-parent household, two to three children that reproduce the species, this is a normative phenomenon throughout the history of Western civilization. We're very tolerant for people who believe in single-parent families or gays or trans, whatever. But we're not going to back down that this is. society and the civilization has to have a normative middle, and we're going to defend that. And the same thing we're going to say in a multiracial society, we're going to say that race has to be incidental, not essential to who you are. And anybody who identifies by their tribe as a tribalist,

and they are destructive to the idea of a multiracial democracy. And so 65 years after the civil rights movement began, we're not going to keep going backwards. And with, reparations and identifying that I'm this hyphenated person, I think that's over. I think we're going to say we're sympathetic to gender dysphoria, and we like people to get proper medical attention for it, but we're not going to back down that biological men are not going to dress in front of young girls, and they are not going to compete in female sports, period. And so I think it's just more of a reassertion of common sense, but what's different after these

horrific events is there's no worry it's not going to be apologetic or what will they think of me or will my book be trashed by the New York Review of books will my son not get into Stanford nobody cares anymore right because all of these institutions and and half the country i think maybe more have been utterly discredited well that that's the hope there are always going to be utter cowards who do care about all of these things but i think that increasingly enough people don't care and are willing to call those other people cowards. Because, I mean, when you think of it, one moment, you know, you talk about watershed moments, I remember the repulsion I felt when someone showed me the cover of Vanity Fair with Bruce Jenner, this hulking athlete dressed as a woman.

And of course, Vanity Fair, like the New York Times, they are pushing an agenda. And, you know, they're hiring the best of the best, quote unquote, the horrible activist pseudo photographer, the Lenny Riefenstahl of our time, Annie Liebivetz, to make Bruce Jenner sort of look like a woman to tell the world, no, no, no, really, really, it is a woman. And they've pushed and pushed and pushed. And we're now at a point where all of the sad people who have bought the transgender lies are starting to crack up. I mean, I think that's what part of this is, the young man who murdered those two children in the Catholic school, that, again, we're seeing the crack up. But the liberal or the leftist cultural elites have pushed this so hard. And I think they are themselves stymied by this moment. I think they kind of realize we have nothing, we have nowhere to go.

Well, they don't. And that's literal. They don't have any political power. as defined by the House, the Supreme Court, the presidency. There's 70, 30 on the wrong end of most of the issues. That is interesting you said about the magazine. For me, there were three similar events. One was the New Republic picture of Trump as Hitler,

and then their editorial of why they wanted to Photoshop Trump during the campaign as Hitler on their cover. Another one, you remember the Rolling Stone where the Sarnoff brother, the mass murder, was photogenic, and people were gaga about how handsome he was. was on Rolling Stone. And then the third, of course, was that Taylor Wrens interview with Luigi Mangione, the assassin of a man who worked himself up from the lower middle class, ran a big health care, offered health care. I think I happen to have a United Health Care Plan at a four

old price. And then they made him into some kind of folk 19th century anarchist hero. And all of those reflect the bankruptcy of what has happened to the Democratic Party. It's been taken over by a revolutionary, neilist, culturally suicidal faction, and they're afraid of them. And they're going to bring them down. They're going, because I think the average people think we're not going to emulate their methods, but we're going to make sure that these people do not destroy the republic. Folks, we'll be right back. I'm talking to Victor Davis Hansen.

Our website is ericmetaxis.com or Socrates in the city.com. We'll be right back. more. Live alone in a paradise that makes me think of true. Love lost such a cause. Hey, get rhythm. When you get the blues, come on get rhythm. When you get the blues, get a rock and roll feeling in your bones. But that's on your toes and get gone, get rhythm. Welcome back. I'm talking to Victor Davis Hansen. his recent book, The End of Everything is out in an updated paperback edition, The End of Everything. Victor, we're talking about how the cultural elites have pushed an agenda. And I think it's only logical that at some point, it takes a while, it took the Soviet Union 70 years before it fell apart.

But you can only push a lie so far, and then it fractures and it falls apart. And I think the cultural elites, as evidenced by the Emmys the other night, they are really, they know that they have lost touch dramatically with Middle America. They know that. And I don't think that they know what to do about it except maybe to huddle together and pretend it's not true. Yeah, I think they don't understand. They think it's 1950 and people like Clark Gable and Gary Cooper have the nation's attention. partly it's technological. There's so many different stations and platforms,

but all of those people that get these awards, nobody knows who they are. They really don't. They're not, you know, Natalie Wood. They're not Robert Frederick for anymore. Nobody knows. And the same thing is true about all of these, the Emmys, the Grammys, the Tony,

nobody cares. And nobody really follows any of these people. So it's not Walter Cronkite with half the country listening to him every night. the network news that you get free. Some days have no greater audience in Fox News that you pay for. So I think they're in a time capsule in Amber, and they don't realize that the more,

and their reaction to their irrelevance is to double down. We're Harvard, we're Harvard, we're Stanford, we're Stanford. But if you're Stanford, and I'm speaking from the Stanford campus where I work, and for four years, you deliberately only let in 9% white males, and you broadcast that on your website, and you trash Jewish students that are protesting Hamas, and you break the rules and let Hamas people camp out and take over the student union for four months and then trash the president's office. Then people start to say, well, it's not the same Stanford.

It doesn't mean anything anymore. You graduated from Stanford, and you were admitted with no SAT score during this four years. year period. And you talk to faculty and they say, well, yeah, we're like, yeah, we give 70 or 80% A's and we either have to lower the grading standards or we have to lower the required work or we have to create new gut courses. And that's what's happening across the higher education. And they're on the fumes of their reputation. And I think that's true of the network news. It's true of the book industry. It's true of all of these marquee things like both. If you say, Vogue magazine, I don't think anybody knows who it is anymore. They don't care.

And thank God that people no longer care. I'm thinking just now of this pinheaded undergraduate at Oxford recently dressed like a slob, obviously intentionally, because he thinks that's cool, somehow celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk. And I thought, I debated at the Oxford Union, I don't know if it's 18 or something years ago. And I was already depressed by what had become of Oxford, what I saw that passed for undergraduate thinking. I'm used to that in our own universities at Yale and Harvard. But it is a fascinating thing to see those institutions really in free fall.

I have to believe, as you just said, that most people realize that they are, you know, factories of Marxist madness. at this point. And there are some people who just, you know, they want that degree. That's all they care about. But it seems that there are people waking up to this, that what we once thought was something has no clothes. Yeah, I think in that case, I used to follow it very carefully. Usually those were the top students at Oxford University, even though it was an independent institution. They were AAA in that British system. He wasn't. He was admitted to Oxford with less than sterling credentials. And you would think that a person that was given that magnanimity would have

doubled down and said, you know what, this was a great opportunity that I didn't quite have traditional credentials to get in, so I'm going to impress everybody. But he didn't. He played the role that got him in, that I'm going to be the anarchist, weird-looking, trash-talking person, and I'm completely exempt from any criticism because that I identify tribally by my superficial appearance. And I just don't think that works anymore. And I think they're going to destroy that. They've already destroyed it to a lot of people, that institution. It's just a question of at what point does the left feel the people who are doing this that they're no longer exempt from the consequences of their ideology. In other words, if you're one of these people who are doing all this influential,

and you say, my kid goes to Harvard and somebody says, so what? Harvard doesn't mean anything anymore. Or somebody says, well, I live in the nicest part of Cambridge Mass, or I'm out in Malibu, but my security patrol no longer protects me. Or I walked downtown Los Angeles or San Francisco, and I stepped in feces. So I think this was all predicated on an idea that everybody was a lab rat, and the left was going to experiment with all these ideas, and they were the chosen moral superiors on the bi-coastal globalized, the people who made out like bandits,

and all the deplorables were going to be experimented on with no fracking and high crime and critical race theory, critical legal theory. And they were just going to, like the maestro orchestrate the entire opera. And then now I think people are saying to them, we're not going to play it anymore, and you're not going to be exempt from the madness you created. There's nothing that can protect you from what you did.

And I think that's going to make a big, that's going to be a big change. I think they're starting to see, I can't ride the subway anymore. I can't walk at night in Chicago on the million dollar mile. My kids at the University of Chicago and he got in and it's very prestigious

but he's not safe there. And I'm hearing that a lot from these people. When we come back, folks, we'll continue talking with Victor Davis Hansen. Welcome back talking to Victor Davis Hansen. We're talking about consequences. So you were just talking about how many people are waking up and seeing there are actual consequences, but there are certain other people who have to be forced to see consequences.

And thank God, President Trump is suing the New York Times. They have been a purveyor of leftist lunacy for a long time. But in 2016, they really jumped the proverbial shark. and he is suing them, I think, to the tune of can it be $15 billion? I don't know how that number can be right. But it's a wonderful thing that we have a president who is willing to do this, willing to scare these folks and say, listen, you can do what you want, but there will be consequences.

And I'm crazy enough actually to believe that there ought to be consequences. There's something really delicious in that. And I think most Americans are just cheering him on and saying, thank you, because you're suing them on behalf of the nation, not just on behalf of what they've written about you. Yeah, and there's irony, too, because it was the left who used the court system to break people. Southern Poverty Law Center always would sue people they knew were not racist

just so they wouldn't have the ability to defend themselves. Not that Trump is doing that, but the right never really used the court system, but they have inherited that technique from the left. What we're seeing also is a boomerang, The left set all of these precedents, especially during the Obama and particularly due the Biden years. And they set norms of behavior. And the right comes in and says, I don't really like using the courts.

I don't really like suing people what they say about me. But that's what you people have been doing again and again and again, cancel, Cutchell, deep platforming, etc. So the right is saying, well, in normal times, we have latitude under the First Amendment for ogres and ghouls to celebrate Charlie Kirk, and we do now. But since you've canceled everybody during MeToo and everything, if you happen to work for a place, we're going to demand that that place release you from your employment. And you can say whatever you want, but that's a business decision that that institution is going to make, that you're now a liability because people like us are not going to put up with it, not, you know, read your material or participate. And the left said, this is unfair. But the left taught the right all of these, these methodologies.

And now they've come, what Reverend Wright once said, the chickens have come home to roost. I don't think he coined that phrase, but I do remember him saying that. You know, what we're talking about, though, the difference, because, you know, we can all be against, quote, unquote, cancel culture. but we have to define what do we mean by cancel culture. And in the case of, I mean, first of all, we believe in the free market. So if some company is stupid enough as Target was, as Disney has been, as the LA Dodgers have been, to promote really vile things, I think people owe it to them to make them pay a price. People owe it to Bud Light and Anheiser Bush to say, listen, you've crossed some lines.

We don't know who you think you are, but we're the ones that used to buy your product. and now we're going to make you pay. I think that's really appropriate. But in the case of mocking the murder of someone, that's different. In other words, it's one thing for somebody to represent something that I don't like. It's another thing to mock the murder of a young man. And so it is fascinating, really, to me, that a lot of these folks have been just shocked that they could say something so particularly vile, that almost anybody would agree is vile.

and think that there would be no consequences. That's interesting to me. Yeah, it is. And they all fleed to what they call the protection, the First Amendment, but they're perfectly willing to be crude and evil and satanic and saying that. But all people are saying is that we're going to identify you for saying that, and we're going to put the proverbial ball in the court of your employer. And if your employer condones what you say and you speak evilly of,

the recently departed, then we're not going to participate, buy, read that product. We're just done with you, and we're going to socially ostracize you. But we're not going to try to go to court and sue that you be dismissed because you have the right to be as evil as you want, but we don't have we have a right not to patronize that. And I think that's what people are saying. And that it's been very effective. I've been very shocked about how quick these people. This is new because this has happened before, but this was so outrageous. It's very, almost all of the people who have been on record, maybe not in England, but here, have been dismissed because people think, you know what, I'm a person, I'm a liberal employer, but this person has gone beyond the decency of what a humane society expects.

Well, and that's the thing. It's one thing to say while he's alive, I hate Charlie Kirk. I think he's a Okay, you can say that. That's one level. But when someone has been murdered, that's what's fascinating to me, that people wouldn't understand that you've crossed a line, dramatically crossed a line, that in any kind of civil society, we don't cross that line. And by the way, we're not going to put you in jail for saying this vile, despicable thing. But, you know, the Constitution doesn't give you the right to that job in case you thought you had some constitutional right to keep a job. job, which some people seem to. So when they talk about free speech, I think, what does it have to do with your job? Your employer can say, I don't like the cut of your jib goodbye. And that's, that's, that's appropriate. So I think there's something, there's like a healthy correction going on. And I'm grateful for that. I wanted to bring up, there are people who say things. I'm fascinated because of the misinformation, because of the New York Times and all these other. quote-unquote institutions pervaying lies more and more and more and more.

I almost have something like a sympathy for people who genuinely believe Donald Trump is Hitler. They really, obviously they're wrong, but it's interesting to me that they genuinely believe this, that they have been led to believe that this is true. And that's part of the conversation, the guilt of the media in that. It wasn't just the media, though. If you take his first term, you had General Hayden, who had been the head of the CIA, and he compared Donald Trump to the jailers at Auschwitz. We had General McCaffrey, who was a hero of the first Gulf War.

He said he was Mussolini. We had General McChrystal, who was an icon. He said that he was a pathological liar. After he left office, General Kelly said he was a fascist. Mark Millie said he was a dangerous fascist. all of them were subject to Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice that says you cannot disparage the commander-in-chief at the time. And they were completely exempt. But what you see now is very fascinating.

I don't see any retired general, any of those people coming out now and saying that Donald Trump is a fascist. And it's not because they change their opinion. It's because they feel that we're in a new age of accountability. and they do not want to be on the front pages of the Wall Street Journal subject to Article 88. We'll be right back with Victor Davis Hansen. Welcome back, folks. I'm talking to Victor Davis Hansen. And we're talking about the extraordinary hyperbole, preposterous statements made by what we would have thought were important figures, former vice president Dick Cheney and former president Joe Biden denouncing Trump as a fascist, proving, of course, they're just frightening ignorance that they do not know what a fascist is.

They do not know. But they know the word. And so they use the word. The ignorance from figures the other day, Stephen King, the novelist, denounced Charlie Kirk as having said that gays should be stoned to death, which of course Charlie Kirk never said and never would say and would denounce those who would say it. But it's fascinating to me that we live in a world where somebody like a Stephen King, he's in such a bubble along with so many others, that they earnestly believe these things.

It's almost unbelievable that they could believe that. Rosie O'Donnell, I think, a couple days later, echoed it as though they knew that Charlie Kirk approved of stoning gay. It's just so extraordinary. How exquisitely out of touch these cultural figures could be. Yeah, I think also they speak from either financial or what they feel career security. And they're completely immune from any consequences. and they just want to outdo the next person in that liberal cadre. We had this Washington Post columnist, Atea, Karen Artea. She just was fired. And she had said that Charlie Kirk had disparaged black women. And he had commented on Conjid Brown and DEI. But what she did was she put what he did not say in quotation marks.

And they fired her. I could not believe that. She was been there for years. And then she's now on a crusade to say that her speech was suppressed, but she actually used quotation marks for a quote that didn't exist, which in publishing or writing is a syndicated columns, I know that's a fireable offense. And I was surprised the Washington Post did it. But the idea is that we're all in this little cadre,

and we run corporations, we run higher education, we run popular culture, we run the media, we run the Ivy League and in our circle we're the smart people who run the country and that person called him a fashion I got to get in there and say he's a Nazi. Well he said he's a Nazi. I'm going to say he's Hitler.

Well he said he's Hitler. I'm going to say he's killing more people than the Holocaust. That's what they do and then there's no consequences for it. And then somebody like a Robinson or somebody an ignoramus or a mentally deranged person or maybe just somebody who agrees with him

wants approval and he says I'm going to come out of the woodwork and I'm going to take Charlie Kirk out and I'm going to be popular and I'll get a lawyer and I'll be like Luigi Mangione and I'll be a cult figure and then the only thing that's going to stop it

I think, Eric, is that we have swift, sure, and severe punishment for people who use violence and two that we have, as we talked earlier, social ostracism for people who engage in that language no matter of their station.

Well, I do think we're at that point, and I'm thrilled to think that we might be, that people have had enough. And I'm mystified in a way that the Washington Post still has enough standards to fire somebody for doing that. That's a hopeful sign. It seems to me, at least for the Washington Post. But I think that CBS and others, there are a handful of sane people in some of these organizations. organizations who may tack, you know, toward the truth, the rest of them. I hope it all goes down in flames, not literally. Victor Davis-Hanson, always a privilege to have you on. Thanks so much for your time. Thank you.