Victor Davis Hanson | Plague, Panic, and Protests—The Weird Election Year of 2020

wayne and marcia buskie distinguished fellow in history here at hillsdale college where he teaches a variety of classes every fall semester his hillsdale teaching has included courses on a wide variety of topics from the ancient world to the present he's taught courses on the second world war classical culture military history and leadership and this semester he's teaching a new course on the history of citizenship dr hanson is also the martin ellie anderson senior fellow in residence in classics and military history at the hoover institution of stanford university where he is also a faculty member and where years ago he earned the phd in classics a prolific author professor hanson is nationally syndicated and column nationally syndicated columnist and the author of hundreds of articles reviews papers essays editorials on topics that range from contemporary politics to ancient greek military history from foreign affairs to the practice and policy of agriculture but he doesn't just write about such things as farming dr hansen has spent years as a farmer living in california's central valley in the house his family has occupied for five generations he knows how to care for orchards and vineyards not just how to write about them yet he is known more for his writing than for his almonds and raisins he has written over two dozen books i will not read all their titles but a few of them the western way of war mexifornia a state of becoming carnage and culture the two world wars fields without dreams defending the agrarian idea his newest still unpublished book which i've been happily reading in a draft manuscript form that he shared with me is titled the dying citizen how americans are becoming something else in the time of plague panic and protest this evening recognizing that today marks the 75th anniversary of the end of the second world war yes 75 years ago today on the uss missouri the japanese surrendered that was a war that revealed the sacrifice and patriotism of so many american citizens it seems fitting therefore to consider what american citizens are becoming if they are indeed becoming something else so please join me in welcoming hillsdale's friend and most valued colleague victor davis hanson that's not a good start do i need that i don't think so um everybody says that each election is the most important in their history but i think this election is one of the four or five most important surely if lincoln had not been elected in 1860 we would have a different history had he not been re-elected they didn't have polls in 1864 but until sherman took atlanta on this day in 1864 i think george mcclellan would have won the election and he would have not had an unconditional surrender and there would have been a bifurcation of the united states i wasn't a big fan of franklin roosevelt but you could argue if he would had he not been elected in 1940 the vinson naval rearm and acts and a lot of the rearment that was very crucial within the next year or two might not have been as steady but this election i don't think any longer is about trump's tweet or biden senality it's not about progressivism versus conservatism it's about civilization versus anarchy and nobody nobody in their right mind ever thought a wheeler dealer manhattan raconteur would be all between you and what you see with the iconoclast and the statue toppling they're trying to remove now apparently washington monument renaming all these hallowed names in american history but that's what it is and so i'd like to just review what we could expect in the next 65 days the polls are all over the place but i think there are polls and there are polls and the best adjudicator of them is how they did in 2016. and the polls that have trump in terms of popularity down by 10 you know what i'm talking about reuters and politico they're never i mean he can win by a landslide in the poll the next day say well he he was down 20. it's just these are the people who gave us russian collusion so i don't think there are polls that were pretty good the zogby poll no fan of trump was pretty good in 2016. rasmussen is a daily a daily poll it's a little different they get a pre-selected audience and they stick with them day by day they don't get have to go out and sample each week the emerson poll is pretty good they all have trump in terms of favorability within one or two depending on the week and in terms of biden versus trump three to four they're in the margin of errors but they don't matter because we're not a direct election nation it's the electoral college that matters and if you go back and look at 2016 the polls were pre some of them were pretty accurate they said hillary would win the popular vote by three to five percent she won roughly by three percent but where they really were inaccurate with the state polls they had uh hillary winning all of the so-called blue wall states you look at those polls today and some of them even though they were maybe identified as conservative like the trafalgar poll shows trump within two points in minnesota and most of the pennsylvania michigan ohio north carolina florida polls are in those polls are pretty close if not in some cases trump ahead cnn pulled all of what they called were the 11 swing states and trump was within one point of biden so what's happening is this race is tightening up and as i mentioned to someone at dinner the way to look at this thing is if i could use a metaphor is trump is the captain the campaign is a ship the port is election day he's got to get there and the sales are his elect elections and campaigning strategy and he's had headwinds because the commander-in-chief is blamed for the greatest plague since 1918 in the united states he's blamed for the first quarantine that we've had on a national basis the recession the george floyd and then the winds are starting to change because it seems that in terms of the virus the lockdown the violence they're being recalibrated in the water's mind and so trump as the captain can't get up on the mast and take a knife and cut holes in his sail and let those tailwinds go through and that's a metaphor for what tweeting about joe scarborough or jeff sessions or that dirty dog hillary as he says so that's not wise if he and you can see that his team has been more disciplined though they're saying to him we're on a trajectory of insidious incremental change in people's attitudes given the violence and and these issues i'm going to go through them very quickly and you can't disrupt that tailwind and he's been pretty much far more disciplined people that are on his team that are the more disciplined and the more sober and judicious i'm talking about mike pompeo or attorney general barr or ben carson they're taking a greater role and it presents a more professional team than scaramucci or omarosa or all the rest of them and that's helped him and you can start to pick up little senses something's going on and you can look at sales of real estate in the in downtown major cities people are leaving you can see gun sales at a record level you can see the nba viewership is at a record low so you get the impression that people they're anxious and they're going to do something but they don't want to talk about it and what that something is i think i'd like to go through now if you look at the main issue of our our time it's covered 19 and it doesn't really matter you can go back and forth that trump had a travel ban biden criticize it trump said it was like a bad flu but then nancy pelosi invited people to come into chinatown right during the worst beginning of it you can go back and forth the fact is that if you look at the number of dead per million in the united states and you compare them with the uk spain italy uh we're about a little we're france is catching up again we were better than france and germany is an outlier it's pretty good but we're doing about what europe does a little better and we have a lot more challenges i think in some ways than europe does but my point is that doesn't matter the the commander in chief whether it's katrina or the iraq war whether it goes bad or good the person gets the blame as you know in recessions and depression and so everybody blamed trump and he was reduced to typhoid mary but we're in the second spike now and cases have gone down for 32 straight days we don't know this virus is like a you know it's like a torpedo that's that it's taken off on its own course you have no idea what's going to do at any given time but the point is that people are getting the impression that whatever happened in the past we're getting closer to a vaccine the treatments are getting better and maybe the virus itself is bumping into more people six million people have had it and people suggest maybe 60 million have had antibodies and don't even know it or they have t cells so we're getting not to hurt immunity but to areas where it's not going to be as and that will help the incumbent that's a tailwind in the next 60 days and the recession this is the first time i and my memory the united states has had a self-induced recession it's taken one of the most vibrant and dynamic economies in its history and it's deliberately shut it down for logical purposes but nevertheless it was self-induced that's important to remember because there was not a structural flaw in the economy there wasn't a run on the banks there wasn't a property bubble and that suggests that it can come back and it can even come back with a roar if people have pin-up demand and you're starting to see a little bit of that already and i think that will continue to get better so that's an issue that i think would help trump the lockdown obviously hurt him whether even though it was up to the individual states but the lockdown is starting to be recalibrated not whether we're going to stay in our house all day long but whether 50 million children can't go back to school 50 million children that have about 1 in 5 000 chances of being seriously ill from this virus unlike the rest of us which is probably about one to five and a hundred depending on our age and core morbidity but what i'm getting at is that a lot of parents feel that they're going crazy with their kids in the house and they can't really get back to work fully what they have to babysit and that issue favors the candidate that says let's go do it let's get back open the school that can change you could have another third wave plagues it seems don't have third waves in their first year but it could happen but that favors trump as well the big thing though the issue right now is the aftermath of the george floyd killing and if you look at the rating of blm after floyd's killing death however you want to characterize on the 25th of may by june 10th about 70 percent of americans were not really aware of the marxist origins of blm but they were favorable that's now below 50 percent it's taken a great dive in other words when people look at the million-dollar mile being looted or santa monica's downtown being trashed or people trying to roast policemen alive in their precinct in portland they don't see signs with george floyd we're doing this it's now a antifa blm riot and there's no sympathy and that's across the racial ethnic gender spectrum and it's just a question of how the president handles it seems to me that it's been pretty wise he's taken the lincoln approach of 1860-61 saying i'm not going to go down in the south and precipitate the civil war but i am going to protect fort sumner or federal armory or my property trump said something was really interesting you said gavin newsom doesn't run yosemite that's our federal property and we can tell you to go in to yosemite not him and that and being selective like that is very wise because it puts the onus on the local person for the the violence but yet it shows that he's concerned at the same time the attorney general is looking for federal indictments and you can see that there is a profile of the antifa to take one example protester this is not a revolutionary shay guevara wants to go up in the mountains with an ar-15 and attack you this is a high school teacher social worker or student who's scared to death to get a felony on his record because every time he gets arrested i'm being metaphorical or he's attacked he's he almost goes into a fetal position and starts crying stop there or when he's attacked by a counter protester where's the police so you get the the impression that this is a product of a lack of deterrence and when the ag starts to indict people with serious federal consequences and it won't be up to a local prosecutor to drop the charges i think that also will win approval and will be effective let me just pause for a minute and suggest that these are not my impressions these are impressions that we know in ways that even trump the narrowing in the polls remember pollsters like reuters or new york times they have political agendas and they can warp those polls by phrasing the question a particular way or choosing either registered voters or all residents or likely voters and that will that will leverage or warp the result and that's not counting the woke people who actually tabulated who knows what they do but there's some polls that can't be warped and those are the internal polls all of you if you if you've gone to a surgeon or oncologist you don't pay him good money for him to lie to you and say you don't have cancer when you do that's what a internal poster is you pay him money he gets in a quiet room he closes the door and he says look you are going to lose michigan if you don't and that's what's happening and that's reflected when nancy pelosi says i think we should cancel the debate hillary clinton says i think he should never concede if he loses don lemon on cnn says i think it's time to talk about the violence michelle obama and barack obama said you've got to vote gotta go vote vote everybody that shows you that they are reacting to an internal accurate poll they paid good money that shows the race is probably within the margin of error another is vegas better bettors don't have any ideology their ideology they worship money and if you looked at what it was three or four weeks ago 80 percent of the bets were on biden and uh biden not to use the better terminology but in layman's term was about a 60 40 preference of the bettors they thought that was going to happen now it's dead even and over 80 percent of the bets are going on trump and that shows you that people who are not uh political and they don't really care who wins but they want to give accurate information because they're getting paid to do it have seen something and it's these change in these issues another is the vp selection i don't can't think in my memory of vice president ever and a presidential candidate who was a certain nominee said in advance the gender of his select uh money mate he did and i think he thought it might be elizabeth warren but then he didn't anticipate the george floyd and pretty soon he was told that it would be african-american so then there's african-american women and there are no governors and there's only maybe two senators i think tammy duckworth has some african-american ancestry but but it was really kamala harris the rest of people had not been vetted we don't really get mayors as vice president it's very rare to have a house representative and camala harris had only got two percent of the vote and she was a very controversial upper middle class person whose parents were both phds masquerading as sort of an inner city child and she'd accused joel biden of being a racist and basically de facto and the race so she was an off-putting person and there was a reason why she exited the race at two percent popularity and those traits i think are already starting to resurface so that was not a wise uh selection then there's the biden paradox uh trump is not careful when he makes fun of the cognitive limitations of what he calls sleepy joe biden thing about these epithets i saw some of you laugh i'd always play a trick on my daughter who was very critical of trump and so i always say i hate these epithets too paulie i really hate little marco and crooked hillary and low energy jeb and i see her start laughing and when she starts laughing it hits some it hits a nerve because she's told me it's not nice to do that yet she's laughing and i think that was the key to the cunning of trump that he has ability to identify a weakness and to exploit it in a very cruel but often real way and the the problem with biden is that sticks he's not cognitively as a person it's not a matter of age there's people 90 95 that are far far more hailed than he is but what i'm getting at is what do you do when you know your candidate is not going to perform i've used a metaphor before but in when winston churchill was first lord of the admiralty he said a very funny thing they were boycotting the kaisers germany and running a sea embargo it was critical and they stopped any german ships from coming near britain and they were it was very important to supply the troops at the psalm in belgium and france from england and had the u-boats or german destroyers interrupted that they would have lost the war and admiral jelico and so somebody's mentioned jelico and churchill said he's the only man that can lose the war in the afternoon joe biden is the only candidate in u.s history that can lose the the election in five seconds if they let him out he can say at any given time he can say almost anything he says you ain't black one more time and that that poll today that said 25 of african-americans will soar he says to a african-american journalist be like me calling you a junkie or a cocaine addict he's going to lose the election you don't want i think he already has by alienating a large percentage of the african-american vote but nonetheless what do you do when a person has a cognitive impairment and yet because of an unforeseen series of circumstances the rise of bernie sanders again nobody thought he'd be a threat again you bring in michael bloomberg to save michael bloomberg was a billion-dollar dud and then you've got who left beto or kamel uh camilla or cory booker or butterjig so everybody said get them all out of the race immediately and we'll use biden and he'll be sort of a vessel but the problem with that is you you didn't and then the covet thing was very fortunate because it was a virtual campaign and he's been in his basement for night but what do you do now do you put joe biden out in a debate and he you risk him saying some things are pretty crazy like he did yesterday one time he was out and he was on the teleprompter and he said you know a hundred people have been killed 100 years have been killed this year nobody knew what he was talking about but if you don't put him in the debate you've got a sort of a clint eastwood 2012 convention where trump you know trump you'll go out there and talk to an empty chair if you if you put him out and say you know what trump is a madman the guy is out there he sleeps for he scarfs down a big mac and then he sleeps four hours and he's all over the country so we got to match him you got to have tarmac rallies you have to have unscripted interviews you have to have press conferences well you can't do that and yet if you don't do that he's just covering ground that you can't cover and so because of the nature of his candidate candidacy he hasn't he hasn't condemned the violence at all until recently and he contextualizes it he says well you know the police did this and police did this but looting is bad but but but sort of and the reason he can't is he made a devil's bargain faustian bargain with a hard left of his party and he said they basically said to him you're going to be the centrist prop that's going to get us elected and in exchange for that we're going to create a sense of chaos in these cities with the enabling of the blue state mayors and governors and that sense of anarchy will be blamed on the chief executive but in return for that once you're president you're going to have the new green deal the aoc sanders ticket that was sort of blackmailing all of us because when biden had said earlier well the violence will stop when i'm present i think it would because i think all these people said we'll stop now because he's going to give us this agenda so he can't criticize them and yet he has to criticize them and now people are getting angry and it's a negative for him and yet to do that breaks this unspoken bargain with blm so he's got he's got himself into a series of paradoxes he's a prisoner of paradox and i don't know how he squares that circle but it'll be interesting to see there's also a lot of known unknowns i didn't think that in october the democrats after all the stuff that came out about donald trump i didn't know they had a 10-year access hollywood to jump out on right before the debate did you hours before the debate the only miscalculation was that most people would have gone into a fetal position and said oh my gosh trump got up and smiled and said i'll have a good debate and he got steve bannon they brought in all of bill's former liaisons and they paraded him right in front of hillary and she kept looking like this so but that kind of thing and i think george bush would have won the popular vote in 2000 had they not sprung his dui he never told anybody about 48 hours before the election made him look duplicitous so that can happen there can be a very embarrassing something about either candidate or china who i think does not want donald trump it could it could go in and send a missile over taiwan or bump into a japanese ship or do something with australia very easy or putin we don't know where he is at any one time he could do something in belarus and that's happened before and so there's no we'll call them known unknowns and they'll be a predicator and that's a neutral thing that's not going to help either candidate we now it will eventually i think there's also something that we've talked about and that is a stealth voter i have a feeling it's just my impression that most of you will probably vote for trump but i also have a certainty that you're not going to be very vocal about it in fact i will bet you that in your circle of friends that once you were asked you either lied or you were quiet because you know that it's not worth the social opinion that people are going to demonize you that you're worried when you get a text and say will you answer a poll or a phone call you think i'm not going to answer that knowing what silicon valley does with data i might be on some list so there is a two to three to four percent people argue about it stealth trump vote and i think uh the democrats know that very well and they they if you talk to some of their handlers they will say if we're down in our polls two percent in michigan then trump's going to win uh excuse me if trump's down two he's going to win we have to have him down three to four to five that's an issue the uh this is our first if you notice this is our first virtual election we've ever had it's first virtual candidate in joe biden first virtual campaign i've never seen anything like it he's he hasn't campaigned at all nobody knows what he's for other than he says he's for the agenda and even the dnc did you know they never mentioned the agenda because they didn't want you to know what it was you don't want to tear down the wall nobody wants a wealth tax nobody wants 40 income tax nobody wants to ban coal or ban natural gas or fracking or horizontal drilling medicare for everybody free health care for illegal aliens that's an issue that never pulls 50 on any one of those items and so it's kind of virtual we don't hear about that and they were very fortunate they being the democrats that this lockdown came because it was tailor-made for joe biden and all he had to do was let trump take the blame both as the commander-in-chief as i mentioned and then trump's tweets it was a very good strategy we didn't even know who biden was we never saw him when we saw him it was a disaster so we saw him even less the next time and we never knew what the agenda was and he was eight nine points ahead the only problem as i said earlier is that eventually you have to have a real campaign it can be the last day but at some point the american people want to see what he was for and who he is and does he still exist and that hurt trump that virtual campaign and where we are now as far as a virtual campaign there's two items that are i think will help adjudicate the election and that is whether we will have debates or not nancy pelosi suddenly agreed with tom friedman we won't and joe biden i think said at one point yes we're going to have debates but we're going to have fact checkers that's sort of like the candy crawly remember that with mitt romney she's going to be the moderator and say stop mr trump that's a lie and joe that that was pretty much true but keep it up a little bit clean it up so that could be that but the most important thing is it's going to be a male mail-in ballot election if it's an absentee nobody cares it won't affect it either way with normal absentees but if polls in some of these states are not going to be open at all and the states remember under the constitution control the method in which the election is conducted that's going to be a big problem i'm speaking to somebody in the 21st congressional district in california when our three-term incumbent david valdeo won by 53 percent on election day and nearing christmas 30 days later he lost by 600 votes by something we call in california third party voting or third party vote gathering or you know it better and the colloquial is vote harvesting where state agencies get names sometimes of name in some cases in california if i'm victor hansen i go to the dmv and i say i'm victor d hanson i go the state disability i get i say i'm v d hanson another one i'm saying vic hansen and all the ballots come to the same address somebody shows up because it's public knowledge and says here's your registration forms give them to me i'll fill them out i'll take them and register and i'll be back in a week with the ballot the ballots will arrive i'll be back to pick them up and that was very effective and the republicans had no idea it was coming because they didn't do it in the primaries and so it was very effective and california has seven out of 53 congressional seats that are republican it destroyed the republican party and the congr congress in california and it has super majorities in both legislatures and it doesn't have one national statewide i should say candidate a office holder that's republican so it was very effective and that could be a an important criterion the most important though is what makes this different from the 1960s election 68 you saw that the democratic convention in chicago mayor daley except remember that some of us and there was all this turmoil but what was different was the democratic mayors of those cities tried to keep order they sent the police out they condemned the violence we've never seen a situation in my lifetime where the chief of police in some cases but surely the local district attorneys the mayors the state city council are actively on the side of the people perpetuating the violence and they're trying to excuse it and they're trying to contextualize it in league with the new york times the washington post pbs npr abc nbc cbs msnbc cnn it's a fusion and it's got enormous influence and we've never quite seen that before part of it is because of the hatred of trump but part of it is the democratic party is not the party that we used to remember the party of the middle class now the working class if you look at all the statistics you look at zip codes red blue by income it's the republican party it's the party of people who make forty five thousand to two hundred thousand there are wealthy people of course but the real big money in america now it's not from real estate necessarily it's not from mining or timber or agriculture or railroad it's from high tech finance wall street uh silicon valley and it's all left wing go look at the fortune 500 and look at the names on there and see what their political affiliations are if you know them it's predominantly left-wing so the democratic party has a very strange alliance from the very wealthy and the very poor the wealthy are always immune from the consequences of their own ideology they have the power the influence and the hypocrisy to want to tear down borders have no walls and then have the biggest wall you can imagine around the state of mark zuckerberg or nancy pelosi can tell everybody you better wear a mask trump is not wearing a mask and sneak into a salon as she did in san francisco without a mask and have a secret stealthy hairdo or gavin newsom can give us lectures about you've got to shut down all the wineries of course mine won't be shut down and that's sort of part and parcel of this new progressive ideology that our our aims are so noble and we want such perfect egalitarianism and equality that we are allowed to use any means necessary to achieve them because when we get them then we're going to be you know saints but we might have to break a few eggs on the way up and that allows a person to do some pretty terrible things so what i'm getting at is that we have a democratic party that has metamorphosized into a party of huge amounts of wealth and influence silicon valley hollywood new york tv programming the media the universities the foundation the celebrity culture professional sports it's it's a conglomerate and it includes everybody from mark zuckerberg to bill gates to lebron james think of it and that very wealthy class that influential celebrity group that's so popular in our culture is dedicated believe it or not to radically changing not just america but the structure of america so it doesn't it can't revert back to america now i want to finish by what do i mean if joe biden were to win and if he were to win i think he would take the u.s senate i don't think he'd take it by a lot i think he'd have 51 or 52 democrats the first thing they do would be eliminate the filibuster if they held the house and the president the second i think the first thing they do and they all 15 democratic candidates said they wanted to pack the supreme court it's not in the constitution the number it's been nine since 1867 but they could have 15 they said 15. they could vote that through the senate and the house and the biden would sign it and they would they would appoint six justices and they could be confirmed without a filibuster by 51 people in the senate no problem and i think that we'd see that i think the electoral college would be dead we'd never see it again you don't have everybody says well it's a it's in the constitution you have to amend it well in the same world you do but all you need is 270 votes of individual states who say and we've already got what 230 of electoral votes in these states these blue states that said whom whoever wins the national vote our state pledges that our electors shall not vote on the state tally but they'll reflect the national vote and when you get to 270 you only you only need about half the states and then the electoral college is dead and some of you are going to say well that's a compact between states that's unconstitutional well not if the supreme court is altered supreme court determines what's constitutional and not on unconstitutional if you read what they say they're attacking the very structure of having two u.s senators why does wyoming one senator represents 225 000. poor little victor hit my senator i have to share camilla harris and dianne feinstein would each each one is 20 million that's not fair i think that we should make senators redistrib distributed like house representatives so california should have what 30 and maybe wyoming zero or one and i think that if you look at the literature people are already talking about that so what i'm getting at is and i won't even get into immigration because we have taken the distinction between a u.s citizen and a resident it used to be crystal clear residents had these rights but they paled in comparison with citizens rights if you look at what they are now they're basically three rights that a resident doesn't have illegal or legal a resident supposedly cannot vote an election but they can now vote as they're doing in san francisco in cambridge and local school board election and you know what's going to follow from that they supposedly cannot hold office we've had people appointed to positions in california there are offices that are not here legally they're residents but illegal residents and they have to they cannot get a u.s passport but i'm not sure that we really care when a resident comes in and out of the country without a passport anymore and so what i'm getting at is that this election is not just about a democrat taking power and then a republican coming in and vice versa this is not a democratic versus a republican this is a progressive radical revolutionary effort to change the structure of a constitutional republic that was deliberately founded to protect the people with the bill of rights the amendments protect the people from the mob it wasn't an athenian style democracy that's what the founders they want that they do not want the american revolution they do not like jefferson or washington or madison they want their statute they like the french revolution and i'll end with that very eerie and that that sounds this guy's hysterical what you're saying what were the two symbols in the last two demonstrations a guillotine the guillotine the present symbology and so i think this is the one time a person could say without bombast or exaggeration this is one of the four or five most important elections in our history thank you very much i don't know if uh i spoke too long do we have quite time for questions if anybody has a question we have i don't hear all that well but go ahead did everybody hear the question could you comment on the african-american vote uh today there was a poll that came out that suggested that uh 25 of the black vote would go to uh donald trump that's important because he only got eight percent in 2016 and the way and it's a very important because this election is not going to be decided in my state it's not going to be incited in alabama it's not going to be cited in new york it's going to be decided here pennsylvania wisconsin minnesota arizona florida and the way that this dynamic has shifted is these big cities cleveland pittsburgh detroit philadelphia milwaukee madison columbus cleveland they are at odds with the suburbs but especially rural areas people like hillsdale county and the way it works is obama was able to get 95 of the african-american vote up to 97 percent and get record registration and record turnout the black vote in 2008 was the turnout was higher than the white vote but that's very important because each year since then the number of voters who call themselves middle class in general and white in particular that vote democratic has gone down so the reliance on the black vote goes up for a democrat and most people think the threshold is about 12 to 13 and with a latino vote somewhere between 35 and 40 percent when a republican gets to that level there's not going to be enough minority and that also suggests another thing that if people are pulling that way there's not going to be enthusiasm in general to vote for biden and maybe they won't come out but my point is that if that that poll were accurate and there'd been others like it then they don't have the nucleus or the calculus i should say are the analytics to balance the rural areas and the conservative areas of these purple states and i think that's why they're paranoid and i think that's why we hear trump's racist trumps a racist trump's a racist and why is that black vote there why is why is somebody that the bush family and the romney family and the mccain family is a racist getting three times higher black support than any of those candidates there has to be reason and one of course was the record it was record black unemployment 5.4 never seen anything like it trump took whatever your views are on sentencing and drug reductions for drug offenses he took and pardons he took the initiative when you looked at the rnc convention i never saw anything like it i thought isn't somebody going to say we need more millionaires like george bush said george h.w isn't somebody say that the whole election will hinge on the capital gain stack no they had all these middle class people up there that had these stories and if you looked at it analytically he turned the republican party into a class party so he was saying that we are the worker nationalist populist working people's party and we don't have the celebrities we don't have the silicon valley grandest like the dnc they had all these movie stars and the effect of that was to say to people that of all different races your class ties are more solidifying than your racial differences and that affected a lot of african-americans and i think the looting has had an adverse effect on joe biden in the minority community so what i'm getting at is i think that's very important and and you can i know it's important and you know it's important because you're going to hear in the next three weeks that donald trump is a klansman he's a racist he's and they're going to try to do anything they can to get that vote away yes historically is yeah i think i think that put it this way that rise in the stock market in an election has not always been an absolute indicator who's going to win but it has been a pretty accurate indicator of what people thought the economy would be like after the next president was elected and this rise in the stock market what i'm getting at there'll be people if we were to go to goldman sachs and poll a thousand goldman i think the majority were going to vote for biden if we were going to poll them and say what's your stock strategy from now until november they would adjudicate it based on trump in other words they will tell everybody that i think they're voting against trump but hoping he wins is what i'm getting at yes well everybody everybody here the question that under the constitution as i mentioned earlier the founders were very worried they were classical scholars they had read thucydides they had read plato they knew who executed socrates it was the democracy so and they looked at the roman tripartite model of judiciary executive legislative checks and they liked it and then that tradition had been prominent with montesquieu and in the french enlightenment but nevertheless what i'm getting at is that they put as you pointed out into the constitution checks on popular frenzies one of them was they let states predicate who could vote they had a property qualification in most states that was done with the senators were supposed to be selected by the legislature not the people that was overturned i think in 1916 or 415 was it on their progressive agenda and that's gone and you suggested maybe we should go back but the trajectory of all democratic experiments are and this is not my idea plato said if i can be so crass he said he has socrates saying at one point in a famous passage well gorgeous your democracy is going to let these people vote this and when do the dogs and the donkeys vote and he was being cruel and cynical but what he meant was the logic of egalitarianism has no end and so when i mention you say you're worried that we now popularly elect senators i'm worried that they're going to make at best senators proportioned on the uh population of the state and worse they're going to just take them away and not even give them one and so we're moving in that direction and if you look at a lot of things in the constitution there they're no longer there uh impeachment now no longer means high crimes and misdemeanors or bribery and treason i don't know about you but i don't i've never heard of anybody arrested pulled over by a highway patrolman and said you're guilty of abuse of power and obstructing the congress that's what he was impeached on it wasn't even a crime but my point is impeachment now is just what madison said in the federalist papers it's fatal that the out party will try to when they get a call hold of a majority in the house they will impeach the president for political reason and he outlined exactly what happened in 2019 and 20. so yeah you got a really good point yes yeah in the old days the guy who raised the most money often won although i think it was john conley had i don't know how he had one delegate in the nomination he spent millions of bills look at michael bloomberg 1 billion and what did it get him but that old way of you hire all of these consultants you come in you have these 60-second tv ads that has been changed and that's because we have sophisticated data in silicon valley i'll give you an example what i mean i won't mention any names but i was seated in september of 2016 at a dinner and one of the most renowned political figures in in our history was there with another very famous person for silicon valley and that person turned to me and said shame on you for voting for donald trump he has no idea how to run a campaign he's going to lose he doesn't understand data hillary's got robbie mook running his campaign he's got the tech wizards they're young they're hip they got facebook and this other person was listening to this and i i saw him scowl and so this very renowned gentleman turned him and said what are you scaling out he said you know where hillary is going to be she's going to be in georgia and arizona on a don quixote quest to get a landslide mandate she's never going to take those states and we are the proverbial fox in the hen house and we have data on every single person who did not vote in the 2008 or 2012 election there's four to six million of them and we're going to beat the romney we i thought wow he's silicon valley what's he mean by we but i was listening he said we're going to beat we're going to get 4 to 6 million you can call him what you want he said to this gentleman call him a parole voter call him a reagan democrat call them a deplorable i don't care but we're going to get them out they've checked out and we're going to get them out with china we're going to get them back out with border we're going to get them back out with reindustrializing the west no more afghanistan it went through the hall and this guy got kind of angry and he said how would you know i won't say his name because you'd all recognize it he said because i designed the system and i've got the most sophisticated people in silicon valley and they've contacted now five times those four to six million people and you wait till election day and i just i turned him and i said you're going to win michigan he said the question's not where they're going to win michigan it's whether we're going to win minnesota and as you know they came within two points of winning it so that's what the election is about now it's targeting people with electronic selectivity and repeated messaging and finding which many little groups this appeals to and the idea of trump the buffoon and sloppy doesn't belies the fact that he actually has very good as good as biden's analytics from silicon valley any other questions yeah right here i don't know the answer to that um the question was why wasn't candace owens invited to speak at the republican i think maybe that her former partnership with charlie cook kirk i don't know what happened but that dissipated but i don't think it hurt her because she's being louded to the skies when you see these poles of african-american and the brexit i mean the blacks that she said so she was kind of the architect of that but i don't know the inner politic politics of that she's a very effective spokeswoman for the republican party and i have a feeling she's going to play a prominent role in the campaign and he oh yeah well in the old days a republican would have said this when we had to lock down the covet and the unemployment he said listen damn it we already were running a trillion dollar death i would have said that we're already running a trillion dollar deficit now we're up to 26 trillion dollars almost we're broke and we're going to have what are we going to do have zero interest for the rest of our lives to service that debt that's taking money from people who have pass book accounts that work their whole life they've got a hundred thousand dollars and they lose money because inflation eats it up and they get zero or one percent with that's intolerable not trump this guy hates banks he's declared bankrupt his idea is somebody comes to him and says let's let's inflate the economy let's give people as much staying home to get through it we'll we'll get four million and then we'll get the economy roaring and we'll have arthur laffer and we'll pay it all back and then we'll get tough and cut i don't think that's going to happen but that was a republican who bought that and i will concede that it kept the economy liquid and so even though we've had a terrible recession we haven't had a recession in my hometown the biggest joke is you talk to people and they said i'll say you know amazon has signs hiring they have all these things yeah but i don't want to take a pay cut they're making as much staying home but that has greased the economy and it's added four trillion dollars of the debt and i think trump he's not i think people who have talked to him will tell you that he said the money is free for now so if you actually look at the percentage of the of the budget that has to service this huge debt once interest rates went to one or two percent it didn't really go up much as a percentage of the federal budget compared to where we had a much smaller national debt but we were paying seven and eight on t bills or even 10. so we know what's coming we're either going to have to debase the currency or we're going to have to have a terrible recession to address it and run surpluses or we're going to uh have quantitative easing and so increase the money supply or we're going to have rampant inflation it's going to be one of those 35 yes old never trump daughter who fancies herself using your i have nothing to tell you because uh i'm a twin brother of somebody who voted for bernie sanders so obviously i failed in that category and then i will go a step further in saying that of my immediate siblings i am the black sheep pariah i mean they they are much more persuasive with them than me but all i i try to say if that's any help that you could tell her that this isn't about trump's personality this is not about george bush versus al gore it's not even barack obama versus john mccain this is about a radical hijacking of the democratic party and this is telling people that we are going to take the first amendment as you know and it's not going to apply on campuses we're going to take the second amendment as the founders envision it's not going to apply anymore the supreme court is not going to look the same that statue in your park is going to be gone that 1776 date and your mind is going to be orwellian erased it's going to be 1619. we are going to change the statues when it's changed thought movie you think you want to watch turner classic movies and see gone with a win it's not going to be there when we get in there this is an effort to systematically in a trotskyite fashion erase our collective memory and our values and replace it with a totalitarian radical french revolutionary jacobin model and i have never seen anything like it and i lived through the 60s one more any final yes right there so what is behind the antifa blm model well we know the short term i mean i'm i'm trying to be fair to them i don't think they would have been as effective or frenzied had we not had the fear of the virus 90 days of lockdown recession let's add in 1.5 trillion dollars in student loans for degrees that were pretty much worthless and end up a lot of these people are looking at 80 000 at sixty six percent why they work as a barista with a sociology or environmental distillation degrees so they're angry they're angry because if you look at homeownership the age of marriage the age of childbearing the age of buying a first home it's all wacko so today's pajama boy in that commercial or life of julia is a ward of the state these are people who if they do get married they get married in their 30s if they do have a child it's one child when they're 40. when they do buy a home it's you know it's a little cottage that cost a thousand dollars a square foot in san francisco or something so they're not happy and i don't blame them for that reason that being said what what do they they've been i don't i think this didn't happen right now a lot of people at hillsdale especially have been warning what has been going on k-12 and what's been going on to college so i i was a professor and i'm in academia i can tell you that they have been indoctrinating people and saying the corporation your religion your community are all biased so we're going to be biased to balance them and we're going to turn you out as a woke deductive thinker and we're not and these people are very arrogant and they're very ignorant when they go and tear down a statue named lee and they congratulate themselves and it's not robert e lee it's jc lee of world war ii who was a logistician you know how stupid they are or they try to deface frederick douglass statue or they say they're anti-fascists and they attacked the world war ii monument for people who destroyed fascism so they're they're very ignorant they're very arrogant they're very young and they're very angry and they're jealous and envious and they're confused but most important you remember that line and dirty harry when dirty harry says the zodiac is going to kill again and that kind of bureaucratic ignoramus that's his bosses how do you know that harry and he said because he likes it and they like it they like going out there they're getting paid with this the support and they know that nothing's going to happen to them if one of them two of them three of them four of them find out they have a federal felony warrant out for their arrest if the police decide to crack down have you seen these youtubes when they crack down they they scream in this high nasal voice and then you you look at them and it's the washington post ran a photo op a chic vogue-like photo op a photojournalist story on them and they had an eight of them posing there like this here is my green bike helmet and my pads here's my leaf blower to blow aware tear gas oh here's my umbrella to stop a tear gas uh capsules and it was all sort of like the glorification of the good looking sarnath brother the boston marathon that vogue did and so this is kind of a chic thing for these young kids they think they look and what are they doing when they're going in and looting they're taking selfies on themselves they're posting things on the internet they don't think well when i get arrested i better damn well have the fifth amendment i better have habeas corpus i better have a right to a speedy trial i better have a right to counsel they don't think that that they're destroying that they don't think well i have a gun that guy one of the people had they have guns they said well i have a right to to carry a second they don't think that they're destroying the very system what they're going to be in need of when they're in extreme extremists so they're angry young confused people who have been indoctrinated for years and they feel there's no consequences for destroying the system and they're not even aware that the system that they're destroying that has been very good to them so they're in on grey in greats and ungrateful and the only thing you can do to snap them out of their mesmerized hypnosis is to eventually in a very selective careful way make them arrest arrest them when they break the law and charge them with federal not local crimes incarcerate them put it on their record and then get federal troops to come in when it's wise and sober and once you start doing that it will dissipate but they're not heroic people they're not shea guevara not that i like the guy but at least he went into bolivia with his machine gun and fought it out before they killed him these people are not going into rural utah and saying you know what i got to get into red hillsdale county i'm going to get my guys in there and we're going to storm jonesville they're going to go to jackson they're going to take hillsdale and fight it out with those roof they're not going to do that thank you you

Channel: Hillsdale College

Views: 878,320

Rating: 4.8592629 out of 5

Keywords: hillsdale, politics, constitution, equality, liberty, freedom, free speech, lecture, learn, america

Id: k6L5C0uLFjE

Length: 63min 19sec (3799 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 03 2020