Transcription
He's a counterrevolutionary. He's doing what Reagan didn't do. Neither George HW or George W. did it. In other words, he's saying, "Okay, the country's culture is leftwing. We have a border that was wide open, was destroyed. We have 50 million people that were not born here. The Afghanistan thing is the worst thing in 50 years. We defunded the police. Now, we're going to address all the symptoms, but why did they happen? Why did they happen?" And the answer they came up with apparently is we had all the issues. Everybody doesn't want biological men in women's sport. They want a closed border. But how did they do that? How did they get away with what Biden did or [Music] Obama?
Thank you so much for tuning in to the Signal Sitdown. Before we get to the interview, we'd love it if you'd hit that like and subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you may be joining us. And please remember to give us a fivestar review because we love your feedback. Remember, it's your government and together we'll expose how it really works and how to affect real change. Without further ado, here's the interview.
Victor Davis Hansen, welcome to the Signal Sitdown.
Thank you for having me.
Of course, and it's a pleasure seeing uh you in Washington DC uh here with us at the Daily Signal. Um, we of course have been enjoying your content from afar.
Thank you.
Um, but here you are in Washington. Lots of stuff is happening. Big beautiful bill and Trump is undertaking this massive deportation effort.
Yes.
Um, but this is not just a Joe Biden problem. This is from decades of demographic change. Massive demographic change in the United States. In 1970, the foreignborn population of the United States was 5%. In January of 2025, it hit a new record of 15.8%. And that demographic change has been felt acutely in our home state of California.
It has.
Um this demographic change over time, uh what has it meant for the country and why are the stakes of this deportation effort so high?
Well, you know, no one can figure out the latest. So, we're up to 53 million people. Nobody can figure out the surge. Trump, everybody try is bewildered why Joe Biden or whoever was controlling him did this. And I think ostensibly we get back to a consortium of interest. You have the corporate people want, you know, they're not the driving force, but they like the cheap labor. Then you have the Mexican government. They're recipients of 63 billion dollars in remittances. Then you have the cartels that have a lot of contact. I think we really underestimate how uh ubiquitous they are in California, drugs and everything. And a lot of people that I know in the Hispanic community are very afraid of of the cartel people. And then of course you have the I guess you would call it the left. And I don't quite understand whether they think under the protocols of 2020 with the changing of the voting laws of mail and early balloting. They think that some can vote. Some obviously did. or do they think they're a future constituency or it's growing government because so many of them are need massive aid for parody but whatever it is it it's catastrophic where I live in the central valley is kind of ground zero where people come up for agriculture or hospitality industry and it's changed my life marketkedly where because your family has been there for generations.
Yes, since 1870. And when I fly in late to Fresno Air Terminal until the Trump came in, you would see these massive 737 flights from Mexico. And that's that uh immigration app, you know, where you can kind of avoid passport just 200 at a time. So the busiest time during the Biden administration for that air terminal was between 1 and 5 in the morning where you had four flights come in. And then where do you where do these people come when you're you're sending into California say a million people or more and they have to go somewhere. So, where I live out in the country, if a person had a one-bedroom house or something, why not bring in wnebos or or sheds and put some Romax, have a porta potty? And so I on my the street avenue I live on, there may be 40 or 50 people living in a single family zone residence. And it's very strange about California, as you know, it's the most regulated state in the country and it's the least regulated. So it has 20% of the population is at or below the poverty line. Onethird of people on public assistance live in California. 40% are on medical. 50% of all births are medical. And it's almost like California overregulates the upper middle class or the middle class to compensate for this 10 to 12 million people both u and 27% of California's resident population was not born in the US but they don't know how to handle this huge population and when I mean that it's do they te do they tax uh these swap meets on Saturday where you can go two miles from my house I can buy a bed. I can buy a lawnmower. I can buy anything without paying sales tax. I can get a whole meal on any corner. If I want to buy a shovel or a bike, I can buy. There's a huge black market economy. And then if I want solar panels on my house or to put a new mailbox, the inspection will be so you know what it is. But right across the street, if I tell the inspector, well, maybe my panel is 2 in off, but over there there's open ROMX, there's an open pit underneath that portaotty, it's an old outhouse. Could would you go over there? And their response is no, because where would I begin and where would I end? And what would be the political ramification? So, it's going to take a generation or more to deal with the the most recent surge. And I don't know why. I think I know, but I I'm not sure why it was allowed to happen, why serially and habitually deceived the American people. It was almost like a Monty Python where he said the border secure and then you'd see people coming ac it didn't make any sense. But it was the most dramatic event in my life affected my life. If I walk around my orchard at night, uh, I will find appliances, washers, dryers, just people don't have garbage pickup. They don't want to pay for it. They'll just come out at night and dump it. I'll see people with guns that are stripping out a semi. And it it's it's made it's it's kind of disheartening when your family's been there since 1870 and you're afraid to walk a quarter mile out of your house at night and at dusk because you don't know who's going to be there or what they're doing.
Well, and I I think the overregulation of the middle class and upper class versus the underregulation in a state like California, I think conservatives outside of California aren't really plugged into into that too much because it's such a transient transactional relationship that these people have to the state. And no surprise then whatsoever that you see them flying the Mexican flag. You see them trying to shut down roads uh in protest of the Trump deportation efforts.
Absolutely. And and the way I look at it is if the first thing you do when you enter the United States is break the law and the second thing you do is break the law when you reside here illegally and the third thing you do is get some type of identification. Then you and you know that the host allowed you to do that. Then you develop a contempt for the host and you feel that they must feel guilty or they feel they're not able or they're impotent, whatever. But you you develop a contempt for the American government, maybe Americans, too. And the only development that is new to all of this dynamic and the Democrats in the left didn't understand is that in the last 40 years there has been a radical um upward mobility of illegal aliens to legal residents and green card holders. some citizens, but they're members of especially in California, they are about 45% of the population and they staff most of the government jobs in say the Sanwalking Valley. If you go in town, the police chief, the fire chief, city building inspector and they have they're all stakeholders. So when they see this, the first thing they see is my grandmother's on medical and she can't get into her dialysis cuz these people from Waka have swarmed the system. My son is in high school. He doesn't speak Spanish. An M13 gang member has threatened him and I can't nobody will respond. Um my daughter was driving and a guy hit her and 50% of all of the uh accidents in rural central California, the driver leaves the scene of the accident. And so that all of that built up and it came to fruition or an acme during the Trump campaign. So we had these phenomenal numbers of 48% and then the Rasmusen just recently had 62% of Hispanics express confidence in the first 100 days. And I don't think the left had any idea that that would happen or would happen so quickly.
Yeah. And another thing that I think a lot of Eastern observers or southern observers of California politics in the conservative movement miss is um how underserved the conservative grassroots in California is by the state party, right? You know, Republicans aren't.
Yeah, exactly. Is there a state party? Republicans aren't going to win that state for a long time. It would be a massive massive investment to even um bring it close. But these people on the ground are not squishy country club Republican types. They have been the canaries in the coal mine on this immigration issue from day one. And it's interesting you laid out the different factions on the left. There's corporate factions or there's the true left-wing, you know, true believers. Um they often say, "Hey, look at the California economy. It's so dependent on migrant labor." They revert to the economic argument when folks and and they say that they're doing it on behalf of the people in California. But that's not the argument that uh most folks in California are making. They are more concerned about the massive amount of cultural change that they've seen. And that goes for my home county of Orange, Orange County, California. It goes for the Central Valley and it goes to historically black areas as well like Compton where uh even members of rival gangs, the Bloods and the Crips being the most famous, have met with members of the Compton government, local government to talk about the threats that cartel activity pose to the community of Compton.
Yeah. And so when the gang members are saying that uh MS-13 and these rival gangs constitute a threat to the way of life in Compton, uh you know, it's it's gotten pretty bad. Um but yeah, go ahead.
It is that we had a shootout six quarter mile. I have a brother who lives on what used to be our farm and they had the Nortenos and the Serenos shooting each other. He was in the middle of it. So So um they're everywhere in the Sanwalking Valley. the the the um gangs. And the other phenomenon that makes people very angry in the Hispanic community, if you go into any food store, rural Fresno County, just to take one example, people will come in that don't speak English. Of course, some of them won't speak Spanish. They'll have an indigenous dial, you know, from Chiapas or or Mishokan or Wajaka, but they're all on public. They'll have all these wick cards, electric bank transferred car, EBT cards, and the Hispanic population who's a generation from that gets very resentful that all these people came in illegally and and the welfare system is much more liberal than it was 20 years ago. and there's a sense of entitlement and they now are paying California tax rates and which hits you know you can get 10% pretty quickly at $70,000 and so they get very angry about that and and then they feel that the crime rate coming from Mexico tars their community or they'll say you know some of the most law and order people I've ever met are Hispanics and they are tough where this what the mystery of the enigma is, where how does that grassroots phenomenon translate into actual politics?
Mhm. Seems to me that we're waiting for uh a conservative Republican party staffed by building contractors, labor contractors, plumbers, you know, businessmen that that are Mexican-American that have constituencies and have a little bit different idea about the left. The problem with the Republican party such as it is in California, I guess they're so scared in the legislature, they're in they suffer from Democratic supermajorities that they don't really talk about Pacific Palisades or what they did to that and how that was preventable or they don't talk about I'm 5 miles from highspeed rail. You know, it's getting up to $20 billion. It's ruined the whole landscape around us. Not one foot of track. Who wants to go from Bur Bakersfield to Merrced? It's going to lose money if you gave it to you've gave it to the state free and completed. It still wouldn't be worth it, right? Elon could come in tomorrow and build it and who the heck is going for the most ever and this started off as a San Francisco to Los Angeles project. But I think I think they didn't want it up there.
Yeah. And how it translates to politics. You are a historian. You are a classicist. Um, when we look to antiquity, are there any examples of of nations or cities that have experienced this type of rapid demographic change and made it out on the other side? I mean, I think we focus a lot on the negative cases, of course, but are there ways there negative cases and positive cases of this?
There is. Um, if you look at what I'd call late republic, early imperial literature, it's graphic and there's about nine authors. You have juvenile satires. It was written somewhere around 6070 AD. You have Petronius Satiron, it's a novel about kind of a satire, but it's pretty scary. About 60 AD, you have Collus' poems about 50. You have horses. I could go on. You get some the lives of the 12 Caesars by and the impression you get is that that's very funny.
Yeah. You get the Italian agrarian mindset, protocol, morality and it's now globalized and it's diluted and the places where Rome has occupied are wealthier. They're more naturally wealthy in the east. they have more precious metals, silver, gold, better uh more fertile land in the Nile Delta, etc. And so there's a lot of money being made in this global system of trade that Rome created. And one of the things that's happened is Rome has now become from 300,000 to over a million. And the number of people who are Italian natives given you know 1 million slaves came in from Gaul alone and the number of people who are Italian or reflect that in the literature is considered dwindling eroding and you've got too many people from all over the world that are not on the same page as far as Latin knowledge. It's that famous rivers of blood speech that's in Virgil Zenia that we've got too many streams coming into the Roman River. But there is a sense at least that money, money, money, uh globalized monies, Trumalchio is the kind of the anti-hero of the Satiran. He's a buffoonish guy somewhere from the east with a Seemetic name. He and we don't know where he's from, but he's fabulously more wealthy than any Italian because he's a master of international trade shipping across the Mediterranean. But he's very gross and he they in the dinner is just uh everything that today we consider shocking or at least traditionalists do is in that novel. transgenderism, transveetism, polymorphous sex, uh fixations with bizarre food, dress, nudity for everything, everything has become a fetish. Yes, a fetish. And that is and the subtext of that written by an old Roman noble Petronius who's a brilliant sat satist is that Rome is now much more wealthy. It's much more advanced. It's more much more technologically the when you it's the novel takes place in the Bay of Naples. So the house is very sophisticated and it's it it bears a lot of resemblance to what we know from Herculanium and Pompei that have been excavated. So it's an accurate novel but at it comes at the price of morality. I mean there's there's pedophilia in it. There's everything and there's eastern Calis's poem, the Addis poem. It's all about somebody who conducts a transgendered surgery on himself in a eastern f beyond like unic castration. Well, well, he's cut his testicles off because he's under the sway of this sibily who's been introduced and he's in this ecstasy back in. And then he wakes up at the poem and he at the shore crying because he's now no longer a westerner. And so but but anyway, the literature from 40 BC to 100 AD talks about that transition. And when you say there's good and bad, it's it's very clear that it's much there's much more wealth, there's much more technology, there's much uh more leisure at least, but it's also there's there's no moral restraint. There's no Italian rural code. And that's the big elephant in the room. When you read Virgil's eklogs or that the Italian agrarian code that won the battles against Carthage or created the empire, they're all gone now and people are effeminite. It's this it is this era of of Roman decadence that it it to back up.
It's interesting that Mary Beard places the climax of Rome's greatness as the expansion of Roman citizenship essentially too. Um and and we're kind of talking about that time period and um though Cicero teaches us that what is experient expedient is also morally right. Um, from from my understanding and my reading of Roman history, it seems like that is much more about expedience and standardization and Roman statesmen dealing with how to actually manage such a large empire. And there's, I think, modern readers when they pick up SPQR, they they tend to read it as, oh, isn't this such a great thing? Rome was some sort of creedle nation that that had some liberal values or something like that and that that it wasn't the case at all.
Yeah. The empires broke and in 212 he didn't his declaration says everybody who's residing on Roman lands a citizen for tax purposes so he could tax them and unleash the tax collectors. But by then uh there was I guess the feeling is in in art and we have art and we have inscriptions graves inscriptions we have a lot of evidence from various sources is that whatever this conglomeration is it doesn't have a lot to do with third or second century Roman life and there's no republic anymore and the pro provinces especially in the east is where the money so when this thing splits apart in 470s it's no accident the Byzantines will live for a thousand years that's where the money is that's where the science is taking place but that's also where the Romans are saying they have this word lucis luxury and decadence and uh it's very similar to the United States in the sense of there was this kind of agrarian American code that you know you see in movies of the 1930s and 40s and now we're sort of a globalized powerful wealthier but people are less happy or they're they don't seem to reflect what the founders thought the country should be. It's the same dichotomy.
Yeah. And that that brings me to the next question which is um you might subscribe to some sort of cycle of regimes that was often a a focus of ancient writers whether that's Plato or Aristotle or um later Greeks like Plutarch who's living in the Roman era. Um, if we're likening that first 2nd century Roman Empire to what we see now in the United States, where do you think the United States is in this cycle of regimes? Is the empire is the age of the American Republic over and it's the age of American empire? Has the age of empire really even begun?
No, I think we're somewhere in the uh that period between the battle of Actim and the death of Octavian Augustus 31 to 14. We're in a transitional period where uh we are our globalization is the modern equivalent of an empire because it is if you think about it run by the United States as far as I looked at the top six uh corporations in the world. I think five of them are American, Google, Apple, Nvidia and and then everybody wears a suit and tie if they're a diplomat and jeans are everywhere. Everybody's got a cell phone. Silicon Valley is for all of its problems is still the cutting edge as far as world technology. Everybody emulates the United China. Every time I look at a Chinese airplane or Chinese uniform, I just think they stole it from us. So, it's kind of like what's happening. But there's still a sense inside the United States that we're still operating under Republican principles. But the it there's a doubt that the next these next generations uh are going to be able to to continue that America because of this there's no civic education and they've been brought up on globalism. You don't judge people. You don't it's this moral relativism and when you have there's no problem if you if you want 16% of your population foreign born then you have to have a immersion program of integration assimilation ad adaptation. We don't.
Yeah. And our and our our version of that is well, why don't we just take the public school and make everybody speak Spanish rather than having good English uh English tutors or English studies. Um I think it's it's interesting that you you mention a time of transition because as we look to the world, as we look to foreign affairs, there's a lot of talk about China of course rising. There's a lot of talk about uh multi-polarity. Um it's interesting that this transitional period uh has come with rising sentiments of nationalism in the United States and other countries in Europe. Um to be direct about it is the unit of the nation state fit for the challenges that the 21st century is going to pose? Because I think a lot of people think multipolarity, resurgence of nation states, resurgence of national sovereignty. I don't think that necessarily has to be the case. You could be dealing with five, six, seven different regional empires or regional hegeimons. That would still be defined as multipolar.
Yeah. I think we're in a race between westernization, which is really globalization, and whether that's going to make things uniformly in the west interest or whether it's going to empower them technologically, financially, culturally, but there's their their indigenous or innate systems are still going to be very hostile to us, but they're going to be very dangerous. So the Middle East or China will have weapons. They'll have and we saw that with CO, they'll have sophisticated technology that poses a threat to us. And we will think that because they have cell phones or they watch a podcast or they twerk or something that they're like us. And that's not necessarily uh the truth. I think it's been a a shock for um a lot of generations that don't know history that the left's idea that the more you give us a more people that come here, the more they like us. And we saw in 911 9/11 that people who had a familiarity with the West hated us. And when you see these students from the Middle East that come here, they're the furthest thing from their mind is, "Oh my gosh, I got out of Jordan or the West Bank or Syria and now I'm at Harvard or Stanford and this is such a free wonderful country and I like it and I'm so it's not. This is a horrible place. I want to try to convince everybody to destroy Israel. I don't like Jews." And I think the left has always thought that familiarity with the United States was going to create goodwill. And there's no historical support. I think of the Japanese militarist in the 30s. So Tojo took a train ride across the United States. Yamamoto was uh at the Naval War College for two years. And Msoka, one of the foreign ministers, was actually a foreign exchange. And when you look at what they told the Japanese when they got back, it was a two-fold message. enormous respect for the American industrialization and wealth, but they wear spats. They do the Charleston. They're decadent. We can beat them. Xin Ping, another exchange student. Same thing. It's And I think the same thing when you saw in Afghanistan, we pour all that money in. We have a gender studies. We have a pride flag. We have George Floyd murals. And that creates as much. The left doesn't think that when they try to imprint their cultural agenda abroad that people resent it. They think that they're so ecumenical or they're so leftwing or they're so equality of result everybody's going to like them. But actually a lot of the anti-Americanism comes from our because of our American left trying to impose all of these different ideas on the mistaken ability that because these countries use our technology or they communicate globally with us that they want a Super Bowl halftime show and they don't. Yeah, they really don't.
And the a a potential return to the Age of Empire in a multi-polar world. um the way things are going, the European Union would potentially be one of its own. Uh I think that's the biggest we're seeing in our life of all the we're getting I think closer to Australia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Philippines, and we can handle the existential threats, I think, of China and Russia. But what's very strange is I I was just some I did an interview and somebody said, "Well, how about the trade deal?" China is the thing that's going to hold us up. I said, "No, it's going to be the Europeans because they have a strong dislike of Trump in particular, but they also have a dislike of the United States and they still think they're Greek philosophers and we're sort of Roman soldiers that should follow their dictates and their economies. Germany's ruined their economy for the foreseeable future with they it's almost like they're committing collective suicide by denuclearizing their generators or uh not fracking. They have a lot of fracking they could do or open borders importing people from the Middle East. I don't know quite what the it's a suicidal impul fertility rates 1.4 Yeah, the the Europe is dying literally figuratively it's shrinking and I thought places in Eastern Europe and I lived in Greece almost 3 years but when I go to Greece even they've got one of the lowest birth rates and they have one of the biggest problems now with Muslim citizen the country was occupied for Turkey by 400 years and uh when I was living in Greece if I said that I went to Turkey and I liked it people would get angry at me.
Yeah. But so I just don't think Europe is it can't defend itself. Its economy when the EU started was about like ours. I think it's only 2/3 the size of ours now.
Mhm. It's just it's just in and that's going to make it more and they're going to get angrier and angrier at us at the poorer they get. And then because they always say that we're poor because we're more moral. We could be wealthy like you, but we're more moral. And that's I I just don't see that reconciliation. They love the American left. They see America as the American left. And when they don't have the American left, they get very angry. That's where they're that's where they are now.
Yeah. And it's there's a a State Department Substack. The State Department runs a Substack. And a new post there says uh the title of that piece is the need for civilizational allies in Europe. It's this weird dance where America is the leader and yet Europe seems to be uh the tip of the spear when it comes to suicide of the West type of dialogue.
Uh it does and the Trump administration likes to leave values out of foreign policy largely. We saw that with the Gulf the Gulf States trip. They're transactional mercantile more mercantile more transactional. the president is in an inquisitive mood. Um, and yet, uh, the one area where values have really been asserted in the Trump administration's foreign policy is towards Europe. You think of JD Vance's Munich speech. Um, you think of energy secretary Chris Wright really holding the Europeans feet to the fire on their denuclearization efforts or their uh green energy, green new scams that they're perpetrating on their population at home, uh relying on oil from terrible countries, etc., etc. Uh it seems like the Trump administration is emphasizing the common values here trying to shake Europe from this this slumber um because they see the existential threat to Western civilization.
Yeah. I I think under this transactional merkantile there is some element of practical morality not classical morality and Trump is a builder. So when you look at Ukraine to take one one example, I never heard a word out of Obama or Biden or Hillary Clinton about the the the horrific carnage that's going on there. But every time Trump talked, he was the only world leader. I didn't hear from the Europeans. He said, "This is horrible. This is a waste. This has got to stop. We're just killing everybody." In his way of thinking, maybe you would say, "Well, for a builder, it makes no sense to destroy all these nice stuff and kill all these people."
Mhm. And I think the net result is he does have a moral sense in a way that these other people for Biden it was always give it one all it takes give it everything they take we're going to win and the left is we're going to win but they never thought well you're creating a Stalenrad or Verdon right in Europe and Trump was the one that was talking and so I think what he feel whether it's Gaza his much character caricature plan for you know rebuilding in Gaza like Dubai or putting a rare earth middle corridor in Ukraine. It's the idea that money and deals and partnerships create peace and that's better than war and and that's what also gets a lot of people on the right angry because they say, you know, you can't deal with Iran. you got to just but in his way of thinking and well I think he would say well if we we get everybody on the same page and we have Gulf money and Israeli technology the whole thing is going to boom and then finally there'll be a revolution in Iran or they'll want to join or something it doesn't really I don't think it's going to work out like that but the point is there is kind of a moral sense in everything he does and that is peace is better than war economic prosperity is better than blowing stuff up. It's better to have people work together, hate each other, than kill each other. And that's kind of where we are now.
Yeah. If the interest to not destroy each other doesn't exist, well, it might be worth a shot creating those. He always said, "What was the alternative?" And he would look at all these wars that we did. We spent, I don't know, $2 trillion in Afghanistan. We ended up giving them billions of dollars of weapons. And so I think Trump would have probably said, "Well, we we should have gone in there like the Chinese and got some rare earth medals and built a couple of dams and cut a deal with them." And then I remember on the 2016 during the 2016 campaign, he was openly critical of obviously the wars on terror, but he he was in one interview and I forget who the interviewer was. It might have been like Barbara Walters or something and he looked he goes, "Barbara, we didn't even get the oil." You know, he was he was he was actually infuriated that Everybody was angry, but what he was really saying is if we'd gone in there and we had a big open pit mine and we hired ex-Taliban people and paid him a great wage and if you think he's crazy, they've just invited the Chinese in.
Yeah. And the funny thing is when they people do polls sometimes Chinese Chinese are more popular than we are, even though they're mercantile and they they conduct business in a way that we would never conduct business. we'd be much more equitable to our clients than they are. But it's something I think what it is, is there's a resentment for this cultural arrogance that we come in and it's mostly I think against the left. I I think they come in and they think this is LGBTQ, this is transgendered sports, this is this we're going to this is new green deal. You guys all got to get on the page. It's good for you. It's a talking down to people both here and abroad that gets people very angry. I think we have to be realistic about what is cap what is possible in the next four years. Um he's going to try to make America great again.
Yeah. Uh there's a lot of problems that need to be solved though and just getting the country on the right trajectory seems to be the principal aim of this administration. even if that means a lot of disruption for you. Last question in 2028. What will you be looking at to see if the country is on that right trajectory?
Well, I think he's solved a problem already on the border for all practical purposes. He's got another problem about deportation. But I think the big question for me is will will we be will we we be running $2 trillion annual budget as we are now. And will we have a trillion dollar trade deficit? I know the right economists say it doesn't matter. I think it does. And then will we have a 37 and growing trillion dollar national debt? And if we do, the problem with that is that the people will actually put up with Doge cutting and they'll put up with Trump doing all but they won't, if it doesn't reduce the debt that they're willing to say, okay, he lost his job. Maybe we're getting $10 trillion in foreign investment. You can go work for a foreign, but not if you don't show progress. The other thing very quickly is he he's a and I said this earlier, he's a counterrevolutionary. He's doing what Reagan didn't do. H George George neither George HW George W did it. I don't think if Bob Dole or John McCain or Mitt Romney were elected, they would have done it. In other words, he's saying his team is saying, "Okay, the country's culture is leftwing. We have a border that was wide open, was destroyed. We have 50 million people that were not born here. The Afghanistan thing is the worst thing in 50 years. We defunded the police. Now we're going to address all the symptom. But why did they happen? Why did they happen? And the answer they came up with apparently is they keep using this 8020. It's an 8020 issue. It's a 73030 7030. What they're saying is we had all the issues. Everybody doesn't want biological men in women's sport. They want to close border. They don't want to defund them. But how do they do that? How did they get away with what Biden did or Obama? And they've come up with answers. You may not like them. They're saying the universities are completely corrupt. The elite universities. They're not disinterested. And then they're saying the administrative state is corrupt. The FBI was corrupt. The IRS is corrupt. The DOJ was corrupt. And then they're saying the media is corrupt and they're saying K through 12, the education law. And they create this progressive project that has institutional power, the foundations, the universities, indoctrination power, but they don't appeal to the people when they but they manipulate. They they put they use lawfare against Trump. They changed the ballot laws in 2000. They have that ability, the legal system. So they're saying we're going to be the first administration that's going to address the root call. We're not just going to pull cut the top of the weed off. We're going to try to pull it out. And that's the problem because it I don't think we realize on the right we're in a major counter revolution. And so he is saying no, I'm not going to get a new anchor woman at NPR. There's no reason to fund the whole thing. Or I'm not just going to sue 60 Minutes. I'm going to just wage a verbal war, personal war against if Scott Piticize, I'm going to go after him. And they're saying the univer I don't care if it's Harvard or not. I don't have to explain uh whether I'm micromanaging anything. I just have to say they're private and we're public and Harvard is like a a person coming to the United States. They don't have to take the money. I don't have to give them the money. I don't have to let somebody in. I don't have to explain why Mr. Smith gets in and Mr. Jones doesn't. I don't have to explain why I want to give money to Harvard. Uh if I don't want to, it's my pleasure. But that's a radical idea. So, I'm going to tax um endowment income. I'm going to and 15% no more on search charges. Uh look at the student loan program. I think they're going to really do stuff with it. And so, they're trying to look at the symptoms that gave us the progressive project. I don't know if they're going to win that or not. I don't think I think sometimes they have no idea how ambitious this project is and how entrenched and powerful are their adversaries and we don't know how deep those roots actually go. We don't.
Victor Davis Hansen, thank you for coming on the signal sit down.
Thank you for having me.
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