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

Episode Date: September 20, 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, folks. We're going to do something today that I think you'll really like. In 2020, five years ago, I had a wonderful conversation with our friend Charlie Kirk about his book that came out called The Maga Doctrine. It was such a wonderful conversation. I thought, I want to play that. So we're going to play that today for you. We're going to play it right now from 2020.

Here it is. The ideas in this book are very important. And the way you frame these ideas is important. Because, look, I've been saying this for years. I think Andrew Breitbart stole from me, you know, that the politics is downstream of culture. I'm only half joking. Because people have said this for many years, long before Andrew Breitbart, it's a fact. So when evangelical Christians around 1980 got involved in politics, they got all excited about politics.

And I always say, that's great. But we're supposed to bring the gospel and our faith into every sphere, not just, politics. That's correct. We've got to be involved in politics, but we ought to be involved in the culture. Sitcoms, talk shows, movies, every single part of the culture should be confused with the reality of the God of the Bible. It's not just like we're going to do theology and politics. And you've touched on that because this president seems to have an innate sense of this. Yeah, and so I have a theory and I see it happening in real time. So what we do at Turning Point USA is secular. I'm a Christian. It's the most important thing in my

my life. But Turning Point USA is a secular organization. However, we're bringing people to Christ because of what Galatians 3 says. The law is a school teacher to Christ. So when people start to see organized thinking, they see people with organized lives, they see people with direction, people that are outside of chaos, all of a sudden, they're going to find Christ. And I think Galatians 3 is going to be the new revival in America. It's exactly the opposite of what the church has been pointing us to in the last 30 years, which is... And what is Galatians 3? Well, Galatians 3 basically is Paul's letter to the Galatians, and he talks about in it is that the law is a school teacher to Christ, is that if we embrace the teachings of the Torah, which of course we should not turn our back on, that's going to lead more people to Christ. I use it more from governmental standpoint and more civic standpoint and a more.

So for example, when I tell somebody, can you go a month without drinking on a college campus? And they say, I don't know. I'll say, you have no sovereignty over your being. and they say do it for one month and tell me how you feel and all of a sudden they say yeah that was great well i'll say can do you want to know what's deeper than that surrendering your entire self to something that's higher than you all of a sudden it's a school teacher it's a gateway to jesus christ which is the ultimate answer and i think that what we're seeing right now is people say charlie they come up to me in record numbers and i get thousands of messages a week and a month again i'm a secular organization

writing a secular book but a christian writing both and i and i see myself leading people to christian and see people go into church attendance in record numbers. And it's completely contrary to what some missionaries, not all, and some people in Christiandom would say, because they'd say you have to stay out of civics, you have to stay out of politics, you have to stay out of this fight. It's dirty, it's nasty, only focus on rebirth, revival, gospel, four books, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, don't get outside of it.

And I say, you have something wrong. And Jordan Peterson taught me this. Jordan Peterson brought people out of the wilderness up to the gate of Christ. And now people are able to walk through, because Jordan Peterson said, here's 12 very simple things. Guess what? Every single 12 of those rules for life is biblical.

Every single one of them. Listen, truth, I mean, I talk about this all the time. Truth is truth. If Jesus is the truth, if the Bible is true and the God of the scripture is the God of all reality, there is nothing that doesn't touch him. That's exactly right. All truth will lead to him. So it doesn't matter where you begin.

I actually find it very funny. When I was at Dennis Prager was doing a big thing for Prager University, and I spoke at it. They're wonderful. And Dennis Prager is not a Christian, but Prager You is inadvertently, because it talks about all kinds of truth, leading people... That's Ghalations 3, right there. That's right. Leading people to Jesus.

And I find this, it's just, I mean, you have to understand it's kind of funny. Well, it's kind of funny. It's awfully ironic because I would make an argument, and I mean this in no way to castigate or to demean the type of person I'm talking about. But the Christian famous Instagram celebrity is not going to bring his... many people to Christ in this culture as Dennis Prager and Jordan Peterson will. What? Jordan Peterson, secular clinical psychologist from Canada. Dennis Prager, Orthodox Jew from Manhattan, went to Brooklyn College and I lives in Los Angeles, who talks about living a better life. But when Dennis Prager says something as important as God cares about what you do and how you do it, and if you live a good life,

you're going to be happier. That message right there, when Dennis Prager says, you should care much more about self-controlled than self-esteem. All of a sudden, a student who's been living in a self-indulgent, chaotic left-wing culture is going to use that as a gateway, as a schoolteacher, as an upward-looking light towards Jesus Christ, which is the ultimate truth, the way, the truth in the life. And I see this happening, and I think Christianity can learn a lot. And I think there's so much to be said about the cowardice of the pastors in this country. Oh, look, Charlie, I just want to say what you just said. Think of the irony and the hilarious. I say the hilarity. No, it's true. I find it.

Orthodox Jews are bringing people to Jesus. And the joy. But here's the key is that if you don't understand that God is over everything, you will participate in the secular lefts war on real faith. And what they want to do and what Christians have participated in is putting ourselves in this little religious corner and saying that if I talk about anything. outside of theology and salvation, I'm beyond what God. God just doesn't want me to focus on politics. He wants me to focus on it. And I would say to that, not only is that wrong. It's anti-Bibal. It's anti-God. It's not just an impression that I have that it's wrong. It's fundamentally antithetical to what the scripture says. Think of the irony. Well, Jesus had a day job. And he did. Jesus was a carpenter. I mean, and isn't that before he became Christian? He repented of that, right?

I'm pretty sure you repented of that. But the point being is that you should be a Christian in all things that you do. And there's this growing sense in Christianity. And I want to stifle it wherever I come across that Christianity should be some sort of monk monastery in the hills where we're correct about everything, but we don't talk to anybody else. Look, people who didn't vote in the election. Let's just go there for a second. People said, I am too holy to vote for that man. Right?

In other words, their worldview is so parochial, so pinched. That's the right word for it. That they are unable to understand things really with any, how do I put it? It's not a three-dimensional understanding of the world. It's a very pinched understanding of the world. Yeah, I don't mean interrupt. There's people out there. I don't want to single them out, but there are leading evangelicals out there that still are so pathologically against Donald Trump.

Not a lot of them, but there's a fair amount. And you could say the names, I'm not going to give them the platform, but you know exactly who I'm talking about. I won't say the names, but no, it looks, it makes me sad because it's not like I don't understand their points. They make really wonderful points, but the conclusion is fundamentally wrong. That's correct. It's that simple. Well, and so I look at, God cares about everything you do. And so I come at it from this perspective, and some people in Protestantism don't agree with this completely.

But, theoretically, I think God cares about how you dress. I think God cares about how you eat. God cares about how you speak. God cares about your thoughts. And I think it cares about all of it. And that includes God cares about how you vote. Well, okay, just because I can hear people thinking this right now, so I have to respond to it. When you say those things or when you say what Dennis Prager says, there are lots of people that it would immediately leap up and say, ah, that's works, right?

We have to stop doing this. When you're talking about behavior, you don't always have to be talking along these salvific lines, meaning that we're saying do this and this and this because you will get saved. I never said that. That's exactly right. And neither did I. And neither even is Dennis Prager, because I've talked to him about this. The point is just because I tell my daughter do this and don't do that, that is nothing to do with how you get to heaven.

That's correct. Frankly, you could already be a Christian. And this is how you worship God. You worship God by doing all of these things. You thank him. You express your gratitude to what he's already done on the cross by saving you. You thank him in your behavior. And you don't, and this is the best way to describe it is you don't do good works.

To get saved, you do good works because you are saved. So you're reborn in Christ. You have a new life. Your worldview is hopefully correctly oriented. You should be worshiping in every single thing that you do. And so maybe that means removing swearing for your life. Maybe that means freeing yourself from an alcohol addiction or hopefully voting correctly, voting for life, voting for sovereignty of the individual voting for sovereignty of borders.

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Premium pillows at unbeatable prices and bonus gifts to top it off. Don't wait. Head to MyPillow.com today or call 800-978-3057. Now. Don't forget to use promo code Eric to grab your standard MyPillow 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 charge. 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 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 it's been very clarifying, I think, 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% approve of killing of political enemies. We've seen that in the Redkers poll and otherwise. I do think when you say watershed moment, I think people collectively just said after the the horrible murder of Arenia Zereutska 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. should be examined in the trans community.

I don't think it's okay if you happen to be black and your joy read or somebody. And day after day you say 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 if 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 that we're seeing in our lifetime. now happening. It's the reductio 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, 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 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 the 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. Because all of these institutions in half the country, I think maybe more, have been utterly discredited. Well, 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 Leibovitz, to make Bruce Jenner sort of look like a woman to tell the world, no, no, no, really, really, no, 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 was 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 on Rolling Stone. And then the third, of course, was that Taylor Wren's 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 Healthcare Planet at a floral 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,

neolist, 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. We'll be right back. Live alone in a paradise that makes me think of true. Cost such a cost. 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 tap 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 it's so. 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, they're not, you know, Natalie Wood, they're not Robert Fredford 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 them 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-year period.

And you talk to faculty and they say, well, yeah, we're like Yale. We give 70 or 80 percent 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 Bo.

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, you know, 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 freefall. 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-Hansson. Welcome back talking to Victor Davis-Hanson. 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 as 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, et cetera. 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 Me Too 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 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 I'm 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. 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 flee to what they call the protection, the First Amendment, but they're perfectly willing to be crude and evil. 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 jerk. 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, 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 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 purveying 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's 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 Hanson. 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 kanjid 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 as a syndicated column, so I know that's a fireable offense. And I was surprised, Prize 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 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 standard. 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

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. Hey!