The Ricochet Podcast - A Revolution of Common Sense

Episode Date: January 24, 2025

Trump's back in the White House and off to the races! To celebrate the return to popular sovereignty, Victor Davis Hanson returns to explain the most extraordinary political comeback in the nation's history. He identifies the agenda items Trump would do well to prioritize; he makes sense of the quick dissipation of the last decade's progressive lunacies; and, perhaps most importantly, he offers suggestions of what to look out for when the radicals attempt their comeback. Plus, Charlie, James and Steve pick through a couple of the noteworthy executive orders and cringe collectively at the reaction to Elon spreading some love at the Capital One Arena.Special thanks to this week's sponsor, BambooHR! Sound clip from this week's open: This week’s opening sound: Donald Trump is sworn in for the second time and AOC goes nuclear over Elon Musk

I got a 10-second outtake that you could use or not use, and James, you may want to add to it, but I can't resist. And it goes like this. Segway juice. James, did you really just say Segway juice? I think it's an instant classic. Okay. All right. Drop that in if you please.

Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Stephen Hayward and Charles C.W. Cook. I'm James Lylex. Today we talk to our old friend Victor Davis Hanson. So let's have ourselves a podcast. The golden age of America begins right now. You're going to do a Sig Hail?

You're going to do a Hail Hitler? Or their rebrand, a Roman Salute? From behind the presidential seal of the United States of America? It's on. It's on. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast number 725. I'm James Lilacs in Minneapolis, where it's not 32 below, you know, for a change, which is nice. And I'm speaking with Charles C.W. Cook, who is in Florida, and Stephen Hayward, who I assume is in California. Correct me if I'm wrong. Yes, correct. Good.

Going through the list of executive orders here, finding there's a lot to like. I mean, number 198, for example, decrees that Starbucks shall in the future use small, medium, and large for their sizing nomenclature. I like that. I think it's overdue. This one surprised me.

Number 154 stated that it shall be the policy of the united states government going forward that all sherlock holmes reboots shall be set in 1880s london which i again applaud now a lot of people are looking at these things and they're they're they're horrified by all this but then you you look and you say well wait a minute here i thought i thought bold persistent experimentation was the uh was the hallmark of a political genius and a great leader we used to talk about a hundred days i think in the future they're going to be talking about 100 minutes yeah so how's it going so far for you guys it's going great i mean i i can't i can't i sort of can't believe the speed and the depth and the reach.

Also, the care, I have to say. A lot of these, James, I mean, I have my own jokes, such as the executive order I want to see firing Kathleen Kennedy from overseeing Star Wars and removing the prequels and sequels from the canon. But aside from that, a lot of these have clauses in there to try and make them bulletproof from legal challenge, and some of them will fail at that, but they really put the care into them unlike the first ones you know four years ago when i guess it was eight years ago now when trump was so they didn't quite know what

they were doing and things fell apart really fast in some cases uh so no it's been breathtaking to watch and i mean a lot to say i'll just add as a general observation that, you know, you use the old Roosevelt phrase, James, bold, persistent experimentation, and you've seen the buildup of executive power over the years, which is something the Democratic Party and liberals favored. So now they're getting a taste of their own favorite medicine, and I hope they get it good and hard. Charles, I know that you, like me, probably share the opinion that the issue of how much pressure is in your showerhead should not be a matter for the president to address. That a lot of these things that we're talking about, we wish were legislative in nature so that they couldn't be overturned and that they would also express the will of the people and the government and system that we have to enact them. That said, how do you feel about all of this? Feeling, of course, being the most important thing of our era.

Well, the vast majority of the orders are in areas that Congress has delegated. Now, it shouldn't have delegated in as many areas as it has. I wish we had a system that were different. But it is not a problem for presidents to come in and set policy in cases where congress has said the secretary shah all the department shall or the president charl and when we're talking about the ev mandate or shower pressure or dei or the paris climateords, or most of this, the Congress has given too much power to the executive. So you can't do what I've seen on the left, which is to say, well, I thought you guys

didn't like executive orders. Well, we don't. But the problem with executive orders is when they usurp congressional power. This is not. The instability that it creates is a problem, but that's on Congress's head, not on the president's head. I have an issue with two of the executive orders because they don't fall into that category. One is the TikTok order, which I think is flatly illegal. The president does not have the power to delay for 75 days. It's 90 and not on the grounds that he's delayed. He can only delay when there is a buyer

under contract with a written agreement that needs a little more time to be finalized that's not the case and i think that the executive order redefining the meaning of the 14th amendment when it comes to birthright citizenship is just going to be struck down, and in my view, probably should be. But other than that, these have been good because they have stayed within the law and they are solid on the merits. And one of the most interesting things about this is probably the lack of pushback from the left instead they've been talking about elon

musk's supposed nazi salute because if you look at the substance of almost everything trump has done here it's popular it's 70 30. these are not esoteric aims these are not representative of overreach. This is not what happened to Joe Biden, where he became president narrowly. Then John Meacham told him he was FDR, and all of a sudden he's talking about reconstituting the entire country and spending six to ten trillion dollars. These are common sense moves that should have been done a long time ago. So I'm very happy with the couple of exceptions that I mentioned, and I'm excluding from this discussion pardons, which is a separate topic. Right. Well, you know, I think I maybe dissent from Charles. Maybe, I'm not sure we disagree on the issue, but on the legal status of the birthright citizenship business. Let me put it

in this terms. As we know, Trump once again put Andrew Jackson's picture up in the cabinet room, and he's our other Jack, Trump's our other great Jacksonian president. It's worth reading, and it's something I teach the students, Jackson's veto message of the Second National Bank of the United States, which he wrote himself. It's very compelling. Lincoln liked a quote from it, and Jackson said essentially, I don't care if the Supreme Court has said the National Bank of the United States is constitutional. I think it's unconstitutional. And I have a say with a veto, which is a little different legally true than what Trump's doing here. But then Jackson added a very good sentence that I think now we should bear in mind. He says, Supreme Court opinions should only be given the respect that the force of their logic and reasoning compels us to recognize.

In other words, he's saying is, if their reasoning is not plausible, I think the other branches of government, me and Congress, ought to contest them for it. So, you know, we only have that one case on the birthright citizenship question from the 1890s, the, what is it, the Wong, Ark Wong, Wong-Ark case, and we'll go into the details of it now. But the last clause of the 14th Amendment says Congress shall, what does it say, Congress shall enforce this amendment with appropriate legislation. So maybe Congress can pass a law saying we believe birthright citizenship should be done legally in the U.S., just like it's done in almost all of our peer countries in Europe, where at least one parent has to be a legal resident. Now maybe the Supreme Court would strike it down, but I don't think it's the end of

the story. So, I think that there is some room for legitimate argument and maybe a change in the legal regime short of a constitutional amendment. End of mini-lecture. Yeah, well, I would just push back on a couple things. First off, the Andrew Jackson quote is an interesting one, I agree, but there is a slight difference between the supreme court saying the federal government may do this constitutionally and saying it has to and jackson was vetoing a law that would have created a bank that the federal government was allowed to create but he didn't have to create it congress didn't have to generate that bank the difference here is that under existing supreme court precedent i take your point about it perhaps being less clear-cut than people say the supreme court has ruled that the 14th amendment mandates that's the argument

at least that it mandates this birthright citizenship um the second thing is i'm open to the notion that congress could do this given given that text within the 14th Amendment. I've heard that from some others, but it didn't. And I still think that's the issue with the executive order, is that this isn't an act of Congress. This is trying to change that understanding via edict. So I think this is likely to get struck down. Even if the congressional option you mentioned is a possibility, that's not what the courts are being asked to examine. Well, gentlemen, all I know is that I don't think 10 years ago we would have been looking

at executive orders that said, okay, there are two sexes, and you have to go to the office to work. But here we are, where it's quite extraordinary and people are having great arguments and complaints about the fact that there are two sexes and you have to go to the office to work ah but you know a lot of these people are going to quit supposedly told that they have to go back i can't do that they're going to just quit which leaves a lot of hr managers wondering exactly how they're going to fill those jobs question for all you business owners have you ever felt totally lost when it comes to HR? Anybody who's been there and knows how it can be difficult, well, it's okay. That's not what we do best, right? This is wrong. I'm speaking in the first person. I shouldn't.

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hr dot com slash free demo and we thank bamboo hr for sponsoring this the ricochet podcast and now we welcome back to the podcast victor davis hansen the martin and eli anderson senior fellow the author of many books but perhaps the most pertinent might be uh the dying citizen how progressive elites tribalism and globalization are destroying the idea of america and also the case for trump victor welcome back thank you for having me the idea of america we've seen a change over our lifetimes everybody has of course in this country it does but there are still elemental core portions that we do not wish to lose or we become a different place. What's the progress now?

Have we just bought some time here, or have we accelerated the transmutation of America into something else, or will the empire strike back? I think we're seeing over the last four years this manifestation of what the left's dreams were on a variety of front and they've failed. So it's not just Trump has the corrective, he thinks, but people were starting to come to a consensus that not only it didn't work, the leftist project, but they were no longer immune from the consequences of their own ideology. And I'm just referencing here in California the fire, the breakdown in fire prevention, timber management, forest management, chaparral management, insurance management, DEI, etc. And then when Trump gave that talk yesterday to Davos, I thought their heads were going to explode when he called, you know, fuel liquid gold, and he said

that it was a new green scam. And if you look at the transcript of the questions by all these bankers, it was amazing. Instead of getting angry at them, it was are you sure you're going to do this? You're really going to give us natural, we can count on you to green light liquid national

gas? You really want to lower interest rates? You want to deregulate? It was almost as if he was talking to the tech people here in the United States, and it was the same thing. He basically told the tech people, look, I don't know what your views are in redistribution i don't know what they are in taxes but i do know you don't like people regulating you to death and telling you what to do and i can use you to make us all money i mean there's dangers in that, but he's basically telling Andreessen and Musk and Bezos,

go to AI, cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, bioengineering, and be the best. And we're going to be benefited of that. And if Europe tries to screw you over and says, well, your tax rates are too low, so we're going to make up the difference and take the revenue, then unlike Biden, who approved of that because he wanted to make up the difference and take the revenue then unlike biden who approved of that because he wanted to make up the revenue over here and increase to 30 trump said try it and see what happens to you so he's actually and so i think a lot of people look at the last four biden years as a train wreck and they had their in a weird strange way it was almost fated or better than trump

sat out those four years because he he he honed his message he got a great deal of empathy from the lawfare all the stuff he went through but most importantly we got to see in the raw a full-fledged left-wing jacobin agenda and it terrified people on the border, on crime, on hyperinflation, on Afghanistan, the Middle East, two wars. So I think for a while, at least, that effort is almost over with. And I think the Europeans who had almost the same GDP as we did 25 years ago, and now we're almost double they know it and when Trump gave that that talk it was almost as if well we knew this but we had to go along with Biden because you're

the leader and now we don't have to go along with him anymore this is great we don't like you but maybe we can all make money and survive the Chinese. Victor, it's Steve Hayward just over the coastal mountains from you. Hi. Say, my mind runs back to your terrific book from, was it 2018, called The Case for Trump? Yeah. And, you know, one of the analogies you used or images you used in that book and in your talks back then was, you compared Trump to one of the rough heroes of, say, the old John Ford movies,

who the villagers want to go clean out the crooks because he's got the will and the strength to do it. But then, once he's done, he's a dangerous guy to have around, and you sort of shove him out of town and so forth. I'm wondering, two-part question. Well, actually, yeah, two and a half. I'm astounded at Trump's comeback.

I'm stupefied by it i can't think of a and you know more ancient history than i do i mean it's way beyond the magnitude of nixon's comeback in the 60s which was very impressive uh and so here we are with trump who now is the highest approval ratings he's ever had his issue positions are popular uh and so i'm wondering uh are we going to need a sequel from you called The Triumph of Trump? And what do you make of this comeback? Well, you're very prescient because this week I signed a contract with Basic Books for Trump. Phoenix Trump, Trump Rebooted. They're going to come up with a title.

But I have to write 120,000 words in four months. So I'm working on it and i i agree with you i've been looking at comebacks both american come there's nothing like it in american history and the other comebacks don't do you know the hundred days of napoleon or churchill's closest i think he he he was completely an outsider and had no future until 1940. But I'm kind of worried because every remake, Shane 2 and all those didn't go very well because once the tragic hero has saved the sodbusters or whoever they are and then he rides off wounded into the sunset, they don't really want him to come back. But in this case, go ahead.

Can I interrupt for just a second, Victor? I mean, I'm more of a political scientist and historian, and the typical cycle of presidents is their second terms are bad. I think Trump, like everything else that's turned out on his head, I think he already had a second term. I think his first term was sort of some larger metaphysical sense. And this feels like a first term to me, doesn't it? It feels a lot more like Reagan in 81, right? I think part of it is we're kind of bewildered.

We've never seen this in the modern era. We read about Wilbur Cleveland, whose second comeback was, I think, better than his first, or at least as good, but we've never seen this before, And it sounds like, to me, this is kind of his first term, as you've said, and with the advantage that he's been there before. Everybody you talk to that knew anything about the campaign, as you know, Steve, they were all saying the same thing. We're not going to make the same mistake. We're not going to bring in Rick Tillerson.

We're not going to bring in John Bolton. We're not going to have an anonymous. tillerson we're not going to bring in john bolton we're not going to have an anonymous and we're going to do what obama did we're going to get die hard loyalists and we're going to hit the ground running and so far with some missteps they have pretty well so we'll see but there's also this intensity now that he didn't have the first term, that he only has four years, that's it. And he's got to do something before the forces, the media and the left are sort of like a wounded animal and they're licking their wounds in their cave. And they haven't come back out yet, but they will. And they have to hurry up, I think. Hi, Victor, it's Charles Cook. That's a good segue into my question, which is,

if you look at most presidencies, they achieve two or three big things. Trump has a couple of years until the Republicans might lose the House. We've seen a flurry of executive orders that we just discussed. They're all over the place in their content. But going forward, there are so many challenges that the country faces. What do you think the two or three things that Trump should focus on hardest should be? If you could come out of the Trump presidency in four years saying he got this done, what should it be? If he did three things, and one was he closed the border and we had legal, meritocratic immigration and people have talked about maybe we should even give, say if a person knows English and they have skills and they pay $10,000 and it's diverse from all over the world.

We get people from Europe, Australia, Japan, so that would be an accomplishment to end next of kin immigration, even anchor baby, that would be something. And then number two, he's got a problem because if you total up tax cuts on tips, tax cuts on first responders, military people, so that's almost a trillion dollars. Darrell Bock Yeah. Richard Averbeck And so he's gambling that all of this deregulation will give you 4% GDP. It might, but it's not going to work unless they cut a trillion dollars. And I don't think they can cut two, but my point is if he can get into a bull simpson trajectory that we are

significantly reducing annual debt so that the time he leaves we're not adding to the national debt in four years that's something and that would set a trend so the finances is very important and then number three he has another The MAGA base doesn't believe in optional military engagements, but he showed last time that if people interpret that as neo-isolationist, then you've got to go in and knock some heads, kill Soleimani, kill Baghdadi, bomb ISIS, maximum pressure on Iran. And so this time he's entering office with two theater-wide wars. And he's already got some contradictions about the Hamas hostages, etc., in Ukraine. But he's got to re-establish U.S. deterrence and re-reboot and refashion the military. The military

is spending billions of dollars on platforms that while they're necessary, if you look at what's happening in these two wars, we don't have enough shells, we don't have enough drones, we don't have enough platforms, we're concentrating everything in too few platforms and it's nice to have an 180 million dollar F-22 but we i would rather have 10 000 drones and so he's got to reboot the military the military has been very disingenuous there are 40 000 recruits short and every time you discuss it with them they just simply lower down the amount they think they need so they say how dare you say that? We've met our recruitment staff. And then you look at the actual numbers and they haven't. And part of that is DEI and they have a problem

because when you look at their recruitment and they have figures on race, class, gender, sexual orientation, everything. But it's very hard to find out who's not joining, but you can find that Owen West has written a really important paper on that. It's mostly white males from the middle class that are completely turned off both by the losses in Afghanistan, but also by this constant hectoring and ad campaign of DEI, and they're not joining, and they die at Dumble, their numbers in afghanistan and iraq and the demographics so we've got to get the military and uh rebooted and we've got to re-establish deterrence we've got to get a physical sanity back and we've got to get a we have to get rid of this idea of a borderless america so victor let me stay with dei for a minute then I want to ask you a couple of Silicon Valley

questions. One of the things that's comical to watch right now is all the DEI offices and initiatives changing their name and changing the job titles. And yeah, I mean, that will need to be rooted out and chased after, but I think it's not going to work for a really simple reason. You know, I've always been saying for a while that DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion, I'm sure you've noticed this. Whenever you see a message from a university, they all sound the same, like they were written, and in some cases, they were written by artificial intelligence, in the case of a Vanderbilt message a few years ago. It's the holy trinity of the identitarian left. Well, the problem is, you can change the name to all kinds of different things, and I'm looking at one place here that changed their DEI office to the Division of Inclusive Excellence, Community,

and Belonging. But my point is, they're not going to know what to say. This whole racket depends on common cliches and a common vocabulary, and they're going to have to fracture the vocabulary to avoid the attention of Trump and people who are sick of this, and it's going to make it incoherent. This is kind of the Tower of Babel scattering of the languages in academia. So, I don't know, are you optimistic that we're going to succeed in rooting this out? I mean, I know I also share your view that the left has dug in and will fight hard, but right now I'm thinking that just the fact that they have to run away from the name is going to cause them huge problems you know it's funny you mentioned i i share your optimism

i have got maybe eight emails from people in the last two weeks that i would call white male leftist and it's to the extent you think he's really going to do it and at the hoover institution i've talked to a couple of people. In other words, it's kind of like the same thing with the Hispanic community and open borders. Here, I live in a 95% Mexican. They will come up to you and say, you really think he's going to deport? We've got Nortenos. We've got M13.

So there are these constituencies on the left that they think the cat has to have a bell around its neck because they've been devouring the mice but they don't want to put the bell. The old Aesop's fable. So actually I think there's going to be a lot of covert support for it. When Trump is very smartly starting out with the first iteration of these horrific criminals, nobody can and if he can glide into a broader deportation it'll work. And the same thing about DEI, there's a lot of of these horrific criminals. Nobody can, and if he can glide into a broader deportation, it'll work. And the same thing about DEI, there's a lot of white males at places like Stanford, for example, who have been passed over for deanship, passed over for awards, passed over, their kids can't get in, they only

let in 9% of the student body were white males. For the last four years, it's been 20% whites in general. There's not enough in that comes, you know, athletes, legacies, there's just not enough space for people with perfect SAT scores, perfect GPAs, and you know, all these extracurricular activities, they've all been turned down. So you talk to these parents or these Silicon Valley people. So yeah, what Andreessen, that really remarkable interview he gave with Ross. Oh, Ross Douthat. I was going to bring that up. Yeah, keep going.

There was one statement that just jumped out when he was being asked by Ross what were some of the motivations or causations that made you change he said well at one point my top guy came in and he said Mark I think these people want to destroy us and what he was saying is they hired all of these marquee university coders and everybody and they were all D they were either DI or they were sympathetic to it and they were trying to undermine uh the corp what his corporation was from the inside another i talked to another silicon valley person and he he essentially said that he said we don't like to hire stanford people anymore because the last four years they don't know computer engineering like they used to

they don't speak as well they don't write as well but they do go to hr the first day and cause us trouble and then texas a&m or georgia tech guy or cal state pomona they don't do that yeah well that that tees up my next question victor perfectly for listeners who don't know what you're referring to uh and maybe we can put it in the show notes uh staff uh is that mark andreason essentially said remember he he gave us netscape that's who mark andreason was 30 years ago he was all in for the clinton gore world they supported obama they started souring on things under obama and then were shocked with the biden administration uh and so one of the big stories of this last election cycle was so much of Silicon Valley breaking from the Democrats. And there you saw

Zuckerberg and the CEO of Microsoft and all the rest at Google at Trump's inauguration. So my question, Victor, is, you know, I've been with you about sour about California's prospects under one party rule. but now that Silicon Valley has figured out the perils of identitarianism, as well as saying, yeah, we're over-regulated in so many ways, and they want to kill crypto, do you think that might translate to California? In other words, Victor, do you think there's a chance that Silicon Valley may turn around and help kill? Do you want your turn around? I do. I've even heard rumors at Stanford that they're debating whether to throw 30 or 40, 50 million to recall Newsom again after the fire.

So, especially when you look at, the first thing that came to my mind when I had been at Pepperdine teaching, and I went down there every fourth week or fifth, and I had just driven over Pacific Palisades over the top of the mountain oh yeah and that was one of the most beautiful drives I've ever I hadn't realized in a long time been there in 20 years what a beautiful neighborhood that was the homes everything and they're all gone and it's first thing that I said to myself if they get the chance Karen Bass and the whole LA City Council will try to go in there and get affordable housing. And sure enough, today the news accounts say that Caruso is going to try to stop that, that they want to rebuild it with these government Obama era mandates.

And that will cause a revolution because those people are furious they are so angry I've got about five or six emails and I did a fundraiser in Pacific Palisades and I've been talking to people they're just really angry they it's a total systems collapse and at their expense and they voted for it and they have no one to get angry at but themselves so I think all and then when you look and they voted for it, and they have no one to get angry at but themselves. So I think all, and then when you look at the Hispanic community, it's, I never thought Fresno County would ever again be red, but he flipped four or five counties. We flipped red, our whole county did. It was amazing, and it was all because of Mexican-American males over the age of 40. They went about 60% for Trump.

And they ended up giving about a 45% to 48% overall Hispanic vote. And I think that can increase it. I think it all depends, finally, if they can galvanize around a charismatic Reagan-like leader or a competent guy like Pete Wilson. Those were all very good leaders. I have a crazy idea for you, Victor. It's partly tongue-in-cheek, but not entirely. Did you catch Bill Maher's rant about the fires on his show a week ago?

I did. So my thought is, you know, Bill Maher should run for governor. It would cause mayhem in the party right okay if they wanted if they want to remake pacific palisades into their vision of what a neighborhood should be opposition to what in the past would have been shut down with a series of terms that delegitimized anybody's objections but now instantly very quickly we have a a diminution of cultural and political power behind those words in other words they suddenly seem unmasked and revealed as as as poisonous at worst and meaningless at best does it feel somehow as if we've ripped up the new speak dictionary yeah i think it's kind of

like that scene in the wizard of oz you know when you have that scary face that everybody's scared of and then all of a sudden the toto pulls away the curtain you see this little tiny guy with gears and levers that's what dei is they had scared and terrified people after george floyd coming out of that crazy lockdown that they were the majority and they had institutions and they introduced all these new things like shadow banning, deplatforming, cancelling and everybody was afraid. I saw it where I worked, there were people when Scott Atlas was being hounded, I said we've got to write op-eds and you couldn't get anybody to do it. They were terrified but now they're starting to see that those people were always a loud minority,

and they didn't have broad public support. They had institutional support. And Trump found a way to outfox the institutional support. And so now I think you're right that people are saying, you know what, I'm not going to do this anymore. These four years were an average. When everybody said that they're so happy, it's like a new golden age, that's not just because of MAGA, it's because

I think even some never-Trumpers are feeling that, that quietly they think this was an aberration. The three genders, the open border, the Soros crime, critical legal theory, critical racial, all of that. The admissions at the universities, the crazy radical Palestinians, you know, defacing with impunity monuments, the name changing. And so, iconoclasm. I just think that people feel we were kind of on hinge. This was me too on steroids literally iconoclasm i mean the statues that we toppled the but you know and when people go back and look over this they will say well joe biden was the president how much of biden was responsible how much of biden was in

this and you know more and more people are coming to the conclusion that there was very little of biden in it at all he's always been a weathervane he's never a man of any particular convictions and it does make you wonder who exactly in the white house was was driving the last four years and it's not a it's not a small sort of shrug your shoulders who knows interesting if we ever find out but on we go i think it's something that you know i don't want to screech to a halt what we're doing but it does bear some some some yeah i think jill biden was playing edith wilson she was the receptacle or the funnel and she was drawing stuff at a time from the radicalized nancy pelosi and chuck schumer and they were sort of the people who translated to Jill Biden what the squad wanted, what Elizabeth Warren wanted, what Bernie Sanders, but especially what the Obamas wanted. And that

was channeled through Pelosi and Schumer to Jill Biden. And then when I mean translate, that means this is the judge you should appoint, this is the third in command at the National Institute of Health. This is the person in the DOD. And we got a crazy period, you know. But it wasn't because Pelosi and Schumer themselves deeply believed this. They were optimists who were making a deal and channeling the popularis because they wanted the power to result in it. Yes. They thought that thought that well they did

make a strategic mistake they thought that by channeling this hard left ideology to jill biden and then having it reified that it was going to win majority support i don't think in their right mind i think they thought man this is crazy Because if you look at the 1996 Democratic platform that was written by Mark Penn and Doug Schoen, I looked at that thing. It is incredible. There shall be only legal immigration. A youthful offender is no excuse from punishment. It was farther right than MAGA. And Nancy Pelosi gave a really loud speech about the necessity to protect unions and American workers, deportation. So I don't think they have any ideology, Schumer and she, they just want power and they thought that's

where the power was and then that got amplified and then Jill Biden doesn't know what she's doing either and those people had kind of an internal coup. It goes back to how he was selected. He lost the first three caucuses and primaries. He was going nowhere until Clyburn got him in South Carolina and the deal was made that within 30 days Buttigieg was out, Warren was out, Bernie Sanders was out, he was coronated and I think they basically said to Jill, he's going to be a waxen effigy and just play up old Joe Biden from Scranton and we're going to be in control and you get all the credit and that celebrity but we're going to be in control and he lived by the coup and he died by

that and then that same group removed him when he couldn't even perform that veneer role. You are right though, you are really right though that someone is going to write a book about this and get the people who did this on record and it is going to be almost, it is going to be shocking because it is almost a coup like that he was never fit when you add the irony that they used to get uh bandy lee from yale the psychiatrist to testify that donald trump needed an intervention and should be straight jacketed and rod rosenstein the deputy attorney general and the interim fbi director andrew mccabe were going to wear a wire to prove that Donald Trump was crazy

and then under pressure he took the Montreal cognitive assessment I remember when he said I aced it and I can tell the difference between a dromedary and a camel so that's where we got but that standard and that concern never, if you, I said on Fox once, I won't repeat the person, that very early I said I think he feels, I said I don't want to be cruel but he has moments of blankness where his jaw drops and he's ashen with no color, you know, and it's almost like he's reptilian. And the host said, you said, I can't believe you said that. That's just impermissible on my show. And I didn't go on that show for two months.

But that was the climate in 2021 that you couldn't, that was ageist. It was a cheap fake. You could not talk about that. It was almost like you can't dare mention the Wuhan origins of COVID. Victor, you are writing, as you said, a second book on Trump. I wonder how much of the dynamic that you just described do you think is because of Trump, and how much do you think he's a symptom of it? In other words, if you take Trump out...

I think it's 50-50. 50-50, okay. Yes. Put it this way. If Donald Trump was not the standard bearer, and it was some other person that's very good, Marco Rubio maybe, I don't think it would have worked quite like it is. But on the other hand,

if Joe Biden had an administration like Bill Clinton, or maybe even the Obama, I don't know. I don't, I don't, I'm not sure that Trump would have made it. But it was the combination that Trump had this, this, I don't know what you would call it, superhuman energy. And the more they tried to destroy him with these five indictment civil criminal suits, the more they impeached him twice, the more they tried to kill him, the more that they tried to take him, the stronger he got. And then he almost metamorphosized into something he hadn't been before with the garbage stunt and the McDonald's. And every once in a while, he'd say these weird things that that Indian American guy said you know we're just ordinary he was at the window and Trump said you're not

ordinary you're not ordinary and then his wife said you took a bullet for us and he kind of paused and said yeah you know what I guess I did I did and there were that was he was he was kind of being fueled by the the torment he was under and that was a he was a empathetic person for the first time people actually were empathetic that had not supported him but on the other hand i don't think that we have ever had a train wreck like we had this last four years this was the hard left completely unbound and i mean whether it was the transgender thing or the border we've had a porous border, we've never had no border.

And you know, it was just again and again and again, draining the petroleum reserve right before the midterms, illegally giving amnesty for student loan, any, it was just lawless, the whole thing. And then the Hunter Biden laptop, the 51 authorities not paying, you know, owing 1.5 million in taxes, and then the whole Biden crime syndicate. I don't think we've ever seen anything like it. And that, so I guess that's a wishy-washy answer, but I think's 50 50 and you know you talk to trump supporters that have access to him and they will say it would made much easier by the fact that we waited four years because we're it was easier for us to do it we knew what we were doing he was different

but more importantly these people they were kind of like the people who the way i look at it we're the people who were the larger version of the la fires and a lot of people voted for biden and we got scorched and the people who voted for biden have no one to blame but themselves and so that's i think that's part of it i know we have to let you go but i wanted to get in one last question yeah again it calls on your historical imagination and political knowledge. Thinking back to more than 30 years ago when the Soviet Union collapsed, we were told it was the end of history. Socialism was discredited. The left was routed and went to ground, as we can now see in retrospect.

I remember thinking at the time, I wonder if we're too triumphant. They're surely going to come back because the urges behind the left are irrepressible and what they came back as as we now know it was the whole ideology of wokery and all the rest of that so with that background i think you'd probably agree with that that cycle it took them 10 years at least to regroup but what do you think we should be looking for are Are there any markers? Do you have any hunches about how they're going to try to come back and what we have to be on guard for? Yeah. I mean, we went through this with the McGovern disaster, and it took them from 72 all the way to, well, I don't think we can call carter anything it really went from 72 to 92 it was that what saved them was a combination of ross perot and bill clinton's uh democratic

council and all that crap dick morris but the point is what what was their message their message was we're going to go back to the middle class and concerns. We're not going to fixate on race. So they know what they have to do. They really do know that they have to go back to the center left. They have to talk about the middle class. They have to talk about this. James Carville is railing and railing and railing about it. But what's different though is

we have now 32 percent of the population are what you would call non-white and here in California it's 27 percent of the population is foreign born and we have the highest number. And so the key is, are they going to alienate those people like they started to? Are they going to bring them in in the way that Trump was picking them off? That's the biggest question that I see, that you've got their base and you've got Trump's base and the white working class and minorities are up for grabs. And the way to get them is not to be too extreme and to appeal to their self-interest and make class Trump race.

And if they can do that, I think they will be viable. But we only have four years, and I'm looking at that field. Everybody said, well, you know, Josh Shapiro, look what he's done. He's not that centrist. He's pretty left-wing. So I don't see any centrist yet that's caught on. But that's where they have to go to win, and they know it. I don't know if there's anybody that has the courage to do that.

Well, as Rob Long says, you have to appeal to the, that's where the votes are. That's where the votes are. Whether or not the Democrats have the ability to go there, and I mean, if they keep making the same mistakes and assume that people, because of the color of their skin or the shape of their eyes or whatever, the color of their hair, necessarily then must believe in a certain set of economic precepts is ridiculous yeah um but that's accelerating too yeah we however will not make the mistake of keeping you past your appointed time oh thank you we appreciate appreciate the time that we always have with you we look forward to talking with you again thank you guys for having me again i enjoyed it too bang out that hundred bang out that 140 000 and get back to us, and we'll... Victor Davis Hanson. Okay.

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, thanks, Victor. You know, when he was talking about the 1996 platform and how it is markedly different, shall we say, than some of the animating ideas of life today, you guys are going to laugh when you say this, or maybe you'll just roll your eyes or hold me in pity and contempt.

But as an experiment for a project that I'm writing, which will get me no money, I have been going back and watching the Dragnet television show from the very first season, 1967. This was not a very good piece of television at all. Jack Webb was not a particularly good director. He had a great idea. The radio show was groundbreaking and actually changed the medium a lot. The television show less so. It's cheap. It's over lit. It's stilted. But it is an interesting time capsule. Part of the show that's kind of confounding when you look back on it is that every episode ends with essentially a travelogue for LA. This is the

city where he tells you all the wonderful cultural institutions that you cannot imagine joe friday ever going to or how great their schools and their hospitals are and it's just wonderful look at the golden state at its prime but but there there there's a serpent in the garden and that serpent is that is is the countercultural and the changes that are coming. And it's portrayed with as ham-fisted as a nature as you can possibly imagine. It's got the smirking hoodlums that you just want to slap. Even though they look like the most upright citizens, there's a kid who begs them not to call his mother. Begs them because he changed clothes at the gas station. And if he

could just change back into the clothes that he you know left the house in his mother wouldn't wouldn't freak out but if she sees him dressed like he is she's gonna have a fit the guy is wearing a purple shirt with a black vest pressed trousers with a crease boots yes and his hair is neatly parted on the side and he's terrified that what his father later calls a ridiculous pirate outfit uh will be seen by his parents so while drag that 67 exactly is not a documentary and while it is in its own way a little bit ridiculous you can see exactly how far everything has been dragged in the other direction since then and i don't think we're the better necessarily for it going nowhere with that you

guys can speak i'm sure you're i'm sure i thought that was just the most elaborate segue ever but that is um but it is james that is you know i am capable of a few more things than just segue juicings i just have to you know yank your yank your channel that that uh those dragnet shows i watched that's the los angeles of my early childhood and because i would recognize some of the places where the various plots were set and so forth so the travelogue aspect of it i do remember that very clearly well it's funny because one of them starts uh thinking about how they've built things and how they have these new facilities and the camera says the the the new music center is built where adobe huts once clustered and it pulls out in

this building and it's it's the water company utility headquarters it's right right i mean it's it's next it's next to the channeler but it's basically the water company anyway so charles when you were growing when you were growing up in the uk what was the vision of the united states that you got from the television shows that you saw? Well, I was overwhelmingly positive. As I say, I grew up loving America in an apolitical sense. And it was, I suppose, split in that there were these big cultural centers that you would see. And the three that were most commonly depicted were New York City, Californiaifornia in general usually los angeles and then washington dc washington dc would always be

in movies about aliens or wherever the pentagon was necessary that would right and it was stately it was stately it was a stately place yeah absolutely the new york that i saw in movies was strange because on the one hand, you had Friends and Seinfeld and that sort of show, which made New York look great. But the undercurrent of all the TV shows or the hint, the implication was that New York was very dangerous. In fact, when I moved to New York in 2011, when I moved to the United States, my parents kept saying to me, just be careful.

And I had to explain. Now, this isn't the case now, unfortunately, but back in 2011, 2012, New York was for a while safer than London. I had to explain this. Yeah. This is the safest big city in the world because they grew up watching TV in the late 70s, 80s, 90s. When New York was depicted.

Right, right. Or even if you watch Home Alone 2 from 1992 he goes into the park and it's depicted as hell but the part of America that I was always the most seduced by was California and Los Angeles in particular and there's two reasons for that one is TV you asked about TV it was where most things were set this was before things began to be filmed in georgia or in canada in the 90s i think that's fair to say most movies and tv shows were still filmed in southern california and the other reason was we had friends who lived in southern california that we would visit quite often southern california and phoenix arizona big heated, blue-skied places with mountains, and all of the things that a kid like me wanted.

Disneyland and bowling alleys and restaurants, and I just absolutely loved it. So I was more drawn to sunny places with palm trees. And, of course, I ended up in Florida, which is not too far removed from that. One of the interesting things about the Dragnet show that I just mentioned is that in the very same speech where they're decrying how the younger generation is losing its morals, they have a mother complains that they've been here for two years and that the city is an alien

place where nobody knows anybody else because everybody is coming and going. And it's a stark indictment, actually, of this sort of promise. It's the other side of the promise that California held out. So it's not like people weren't talking about these things. It's not like people weren't worrying. But I never really was interested in L.A. based on, as a kid, at all. I wasn't.

It just seemed like a place I couldn't get my hands around. New York, I could, and I loved it for its architecture, and I loved it for its Gotham nature, but I never ever really wanted to live there. D.C. was, to me and I, just a place where the camera pulled back. Because every shot of everything in D.C. is always the camera pulling back on the White House or the Capitol or the Pentagon or something. And I never wanted, of course, that's where I ended up. But where I really wanted to go was Minneapolis, because according to the Mary Tyler Moore show, it was an absolutely wonderful place to live with good people. And close to where you grew up, right?

It was four hours down the highway. It was the cities. It's where you went. Of course, to my parents, it was an act of complete rejection of all the truths and values and glories of Fargo, which was repaid to me later when my daughter left Minneapolis for Boston, the exact same maneuver. Well, let's see what else we got here before we have to go, and we do have to go. Is the Elon Musk is a Nazi thing burned out? I don't think so yet, because Reddit is busy.

Every single subreddit is banning links to twitter x uh it's been the most remarkable campaign i've ever seen is i mean and we're not talking political subreddits we're talking subreddits that are that are devoted to collecting 1960s lego sets it is so unremittingly stupid that i almost wonder if must didn't do it on purpose to distract the left. I mean, they're trying to figure out what and how, what of Trump's moves to oppose and how, and instead they're just going to yell Nazi, because that's the easiest, lowest common denominator for them. It's almost like he did it on purpose. Oh, I don't need to stipulate how stupid it is for us and our listeners, I don't think.

You know, I want to add to the stupidity argument. Obviously, the idea that he did that is stupid, and the people who are repeating it are stupid. But they're also suffering through an opportunity cost in that they're making an argument that is self-evidently stupid, doesn't advance the ball, instead of making arguments that would help them. And we just talked with Victor about what the Democrats can do to recover. And then we talked a bit about the Democrats' history.

It is not the case that everyone in the United States has suddenly become a Republican on every topic. There are angles that the Democrats can take that will be popular. They are not a dead party. They're not a rump party. And instead of making those arguments, including in televised hearings of Trump's nominees, they're bringing this up. It absolutely astonished me the other day to see Chris Murphy murphy doing this to elise stefani he may as well have said to her elise let me tee you up so you can batter me around for the cameras instead of asking about something where he could have got an angle in or at least satisfied the democratic base or those who are on the fence he asked what what she thought of Elon Musk's Hitler salute, and that is catnip

for her. She's so good at this. So, she sort of made him look stupid, and it's particularly amazing given the election that they just lost and the arguments that were made on each side. That's why they lost. That's why they lost, is this sort of stupidity. She's sitting talking about anti-Semitism and the dangerous world and the stupidity she's sitting talking about anti-semitism and the dangerous world and the job that she's gonna do in reducing bureaucracy and actually getting things done and he sits there as this what about elon musk's Hitler salute and you could just tell him almost going oh my god you are the problem it it's it's so dumb for them as well as for the rest of us yeah my favorite Babylon Bee headline lately

is the one that says, Left stops yelling death to Israel long enough to call Musk a Nazi. Yeah. But, you know, as we were saying before, when you lose the cultural and the political power that keeps these absurd balloons aloft, what do these people,

the people who have been able to just repeat words and tropes and what is being pumped out of the echo chamber when that's no longer has any currency what do they fall back on i mean what what what what is is there anything foundational there that they can that they can you know as they realize they can come back to earth and say what they feel what they mean what do they actually mean And does anybody want to believe them after years of having them spout the nonsense? Because those words just don't work anymore. They don't have purchase. They're laughable.

A whole portion of the nation decided to look at the language of the left from the last four years and do a Nelson Muntz from The Simpsons and go, you know, ha ha. And what was this? I was listening to a podcast the other day, and the host admitted that he'd never seen a single episode of The Simpsons, which does brand well. How is that possible? Well, he's British, which is… No, that's impossible even for a Brit.

When I was younger, The Simpsons was on BBC2 every single day at five o'clock it's dominic sandbrook was dominic sandbrook who's a you can't even avoid it if you tried i used to watch it religiously i suppose that was a golden age too i think but it was on you there were only four channels how could you five o'clock how could you not see one of them well i understand that i mean i i blanch and uh quaver at the thought that there are more that there are more unwatched simpson episodes for me than there are watched ones that uh you know i fell away from the show about the time a lot of people did yeah uh just just because it just happened we just drifted away we never stopped loving it we never stopped quoting it but at the same time it just seemed to go on in a way that that was outside of our can or interest and uh you know maybe when i retire

i'll sit down and watch the other 7482 episodes of the simpsons that i've missed you however they're in the listening audience having listened to the podcast number 725 if you haven't listened to them all they're all available of course Podcasts, I don't know, iTunes Podcasts, Spotify, all these podcast sources. Ricochet.com is your source for all things Ricochet, though, of course. And you ought to go there, and you want to sign up, because if you're tired of the idiocies of Facebook and the rest of these places, you will find a sane, civil, center-right community waiting for you at Ricochet. In the member feed, that is.

Yeah, you've got to pay a couple of shekels to get there, but it's worth it. Give us a good review with your friends and family at AppleTunes, you know, iTunes, if they still call it that. You know, all the usual stuff I say at the end of the episode, except that I will also say thank you to Bamboo HR for sponsoring

us. They're new, and we love them. Thank you, Stephen. Thank you, Charlie. Thanks to our guest, Victor. Thanks to everybody who listened, and we'll see you all in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week, guys. Next week. Ricochet. Join the conversation.