Preeminent historian and great American think Victor Davis Hanson on Trump’s counterrevolution.
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Victor Davis Hanson: Trump’s Counterrevolution in Washington, D.C.
Victor Davis Hanson discusses the misleading information about the first 30 days of the Trump administration’s actions, comparing it to FDR’s first hundred days. On this episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,”
Hanson describes the current period as a “Trump restoration” rather than a revolution, emphasizing it as a counterrevolution against the changes brought by the Obama administration. “ We don’t really appreciate what we’ve been through with eight years of the Obama revolution and the four-year, more radical third term of Obama using or employing the wax effigy of Joe Biden. A revolution that we’ve experienced was a cultural, economic, political, social revolution.
It was very similar to the French Revolution under the Robespierre brothers. You should remember what they tried to do. They changed the days of the week. They renamed things. They tore down statues. They went after the churches. Does this sound familiar? … “ So this was a revolutionary movement. Movies were different. Sports were different. Take a knee.
And Donald Trump came in and it was not sufficient to say we’re going to stop the madness of $37 billion. … It’s a return to normalcy. It’s a return to common sense.
It only looks revolutionary to revolutionaries. But to the rest of the people, it is a counterrevolution to restore normalcy and bring the country from the far-left fringes back home again.”
00:00 Addressing Misinformation 00:53 The Trump Counterrevolution 01:48 Comparing Revolutions: Then and Now 02:05 Radical Changes in Society 03:08 Political Shifts and Proposals 04:49 Trump’s Vision for Restoration 06:05 Conclusion
Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Victor Davis Hanson explained on Friday how Democratic senators’ attacks on President Donald Trump’s nominees during confirmation hearings are backfiring politically because of conservatives’ current ability to push their messages more effectively online.
Many Democratic senators have taken adversarial approaches to Trump’s cabinet nominees, including screaming at them, interrupting them and hurling accusations against them. Hanson, on “Victor Davis Hanson Show,” said that Trump’s nominees have all excelled at their hearings as they have come under fire from Democrats.
WATCH:
“The funny thing about all these nominees that some of the RINOs [Republicans in name only] in the party deprecated: Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, man when they go before those people— Sean Duffy — they have all of the answers,” Hanson said. “They’re really impressive people and they go head-to-head. It’s kind of they have a wink and a nod, and I think their logic, I’m just suggesting this, I don’t have any confirmation, but their attitude — they go in very confident.”
“So, their attitude is basically, ‘I have 53 senator votes and you have none to stop me. You can’t stop me. Now you think you’re going to get [Republican senators Lisa] Murkowski and [Susan] Collins and maybe Mitch [McConnel]? I can still get confirmed,’” he continued. “‘So, I’m not going to kiss up to you in any way possible. In fact, the only thing I worry about is not getting 50 senators. And the only way I would not get 50 senators is to sell out Donald Trump, and I’m not going to do that. I’m not stupid, and I don’t want to anyway.’ And that gives them a lot of confidence.”
McConnell, Murkowski and Collins all voted against Hegseth’s confirmation to be secretary of defense, but Vice President J.D. Vance broke the tie to confirm him on Jan. 24. His confirmation followed a hearing that included Democratic Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine accusing him of infidelity and Democratic New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand lecturing him for eight minutes about women serving in the military.
“And then you get these people frustrated, like [Democratic Massachusetts Sen.] Elizabeth Warren. She’s come off as completely unhinged. And then they don’t understand the media that the left — polling right now — 37% — and I guess it was the latest Emerson poll, 37% said they approve of the Democratic Party,” Hanson added. “Do they understand how they drive that down when somebody like Elizabeth Warren just cuts off [Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] RFK, won’t let him answer a question, screams and yells.”
Hanson referenced how Warren pressed Kennedy to “commit” to not accepting compensation for any lawsuits against drug companies during his potential tenure at HHS and for four years after, which prompted a heated exchange. He asserted that immediately after the clash, “the right-wing blogosphere” noted that Warren and Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders were the two senators who raised the most money in pharmaceutical contributions.
Senators on both sides of the aisle who critically questioned Kennedy at his Wednesday and Thursday hearings found their contributions from the healthcare industry and their personal investments in the pharmaceutical industry and companies that make highly processed food being highlighted on X, receiving millions of views.
The Democratic Party’s approval rating plunged to 31% among registered voters, according to Quinnipiac polling released Wednesday.
Sanders exploded at Kennedy during his Thursday confirmation hearing after the nominee accused him of corruption for accepting pharmaceutical industry donations. Hanson suggested Warren and Sanders are examples of “hypocrites that are defending big pharma against RFK,” saying “that doesn’t work” because of conservatives’ ability to push their agenda in part because of how billionaire Elon Musk has run social media platform X.
Hanson also said Democrats wrongly assumed attorney general nominee Pam Bondi was “just a blonde bimbo” and that they could “tear her apart.” He said that she instead “t[ore] them apart.” He similarly said they underestimated Hegseth.
“And then they see Pete Hegseth. And they go, ‘This guy is weird. He’s got the Jerusalem cross, you know, and he’s been married three times. And we’re just going to slice him up because I’m Senator Sanders and I’m Senator [Chuck] Schumer, I’m Senator Warren, I’m Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.’ And then he just destroys them,” Hanson said.
He also said Kennedy “destroyed” the Democratic senators while FBI Director nominee Kash Patel dealt with them “like carving a Christmas turkey.”
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http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Daily Callerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Daily Caller2025-02-01 14:39:472025-02-01 14:44:11‘Completely Unhinged’: Victor Davis Hanson Says Dems’ Fury Against Trump Nominees During Hearings Is Political Misstep
Hoover Institute senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson detailed issues Monday on Fox News with the media’s out-of-context coverage of former President Donald Trump’s “bloodbath” remarks.
Hanson appeared on “The Ingraham Angle” to discuss the coverage of Trump’s remarks made over the weekend that it would be a “bloodbath for the country” if Biden was reelected in reference to the threat he believes the Biden Administration poses to the auto industry. Fox host Laura Ingraham asked Hanson about the “seriousness” of the issues, adding that the media has continuously taken the former president’s words out of context and claimed that he was escalating violence.
“It’s serious because it shows you that these people are in free fall,” Hanson said. “They are almost unhinged because they have tried to destroy Donald Trump through lawfare and indictments are not working. They tried to get him off the ballot. They tried to bankrupt him and ruin him psychologically, physically, and financially – that hasn’t worked. They look at the issues that are important to all of us, Laura, the border, crime, inflation, what happened in Afghanistan, two wars that broke out on the Biden watch, energy, and they can’t run on any of them because they have been an ungodly disaster.”
“Then they look at the candidate themselves, and he is not able to function as a normal 21st-century candidate,” he added. “They look at the vice president. So this frustration builds up. And they just lash out and they – they make it worse. They are like an addict – they don’t understand that the fixation is destroying them and destroying their popularity, their theme, and message. But they can’t stop, they’re so obsessed. I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
Following Trump’s remarks on Saturday at an Ohio campaign rally, coverage of the former president’s “bloodbath” line circulated online. Alongside the corporate media’s coverage, Biden’s campaign team posted a nine-second clip of the remark without providing context to viewers that the former president was referring to the auto industry.
Trump took to social media Monday to hit back against the backlash he received, clarifying the context of the comment.
“I was simply referring to imports allowed by Crooked Joe Biden, which are killing the automobile industry,” Trump wrote. “The United Auto Workers, but not their leadership, fully understand what I mean.”
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Daily Callerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Daily Caller2024-03-19 14:31:342024-03-19 14:33:55‘Almost Unhinged’: Victor Davis Hanson Lays Out Issues With Media’s Coverage On Out-Of-Context ‘Bloodbath’ Remarks
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: They look at Trump as a vampire and they put a stake in his heart but they’re afraid that that stake could come out any time. That he’s undying and they’re afraid of him. They are terrified of him.
But deep down inside they know that if the right ever did that to Barack Obama or Joe Biden, they could have really made something out of the fact that Barack Obama had a hot mic expose where he told the president of Russia, “You tell Vladimir that I will be flexible on missile defense.” That’s the security of the United States of America. “If he gives me space in my last election.” Putin did do that. That’s an impeachable offense if a phone call to Ukraine is. So they understand that, the right could have done that to them, and they understand now the right probably will do that to them for their own survival, and they are scared.
They’re saying that if a MAGA candidate wins, and they win the House and Senate, they’re cooked because they’re going to get special prosecutors and go after the Biden family like they’ve never gone after anybody. And they’re going to find stuff because we know Joe is crooked. And then they’re going to go after [Attorney General] Merrick Garland and [Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro ] Mayorkas. And they’re not going to stop. And that’s why they’re scared.
Everybody thinks the danger passed, they got what they wanted. No, no, no, you’re never going to see anything like what they’re going to do in 2024. All of this could have been reconciled, all they had to do was say Donald Trump should not be president if that’s what they believe, and we’re not going to do any lawfare or try to change the voting laws or pack the court, we’re not going to let in two states, we’re not going to try to abolish the Senate filibuster, we’re not going to try to change the voting ID laws, we’re just going to play under the rules we have, we don’t need $419 million by Mark Zuckerberg infused, we don’t need Sam Bankman-Fried, the crook, giving us $100 million, we’re not going to go under the radar with George Soros, we’re just going to show you, the American people how we think Donald Trump should not be president and we’ll have a fair election. They can’t do that, and they don’t trust themselves.
They think anybody in his right mind would close that border right now. Anybody in his right mind would recall all of those DAs that have destroyed these major cities. Anybody in his right mind would not beg the Saudis or the Venezuelans or the Russians or the Iranians to pump oil on the eve of a midterm, or pump the strategic petroleum reserve when you have so much natural gas in the U.S. Nobody in their right mind would do that. Nobody in their right mind would ever just pull out of Afghanistan without warning just so Joe Biden can say that on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 or the original October invasion of Afghanistan, “I am the president that got us out.” Nobody would do that. And nobody would print $6 trillion when there’s pent-up demand post-Covid lockdown and there’s a supply chain disruption, and all that money without an audit or examination of who got it and why and how it was spent, but to inflate the economy and ruin it. Nobody would do that! So they know that and they know that they cant take that record to the American people.
They have a deductive mind because their ideologues, so they start with a premise that we’re for social justice and equity of result, so we’re morally superior and smarter than anybody else. And therefore we’re entitled to do things other people don’t do. So if, under the cover of Covid, and frightening people about Covid, we can change all the voting laws so that 30%, instead of voting absentee and early voting shall become 70% in most states, with very little audit of the level necessary to authenticate most ballots.
They just do all this stuff because they start with the deductive principle that, “We are better, this is the vision and thereof the following must happen.” And if things don’t fit the narrative, they go after the person, they censor. That’s how they work. And if you keep that in mind, than everybody makes sense.
What I’m saying is they go on from one lie to the next.
So everybody now knows that Donald Trump was impeached for things that Joe Biden got away with. OK. Everybody knows the laptop was authentic. Everybody knows that now. Everybody knows it would have made a big difference in that debate when Donald Trump said it was and Joe Biden said, “Oh, no, no, 51 authorities.” Everybody knows that Christopher Steele was a fraud, and especially Glenn Simpson. And that Hillary Clinton took over an old Never-Trump file and inflated it with a million bucks, got the FBI on it to hire Christopher Steele as a consultant-informant, hid her so-called legal expenses when she was fined and cited for that violation, through Perkins-Coie, Fusion GPS, and the DNC, and that file was fraudulent. It was made up! I said that the first time I saw it, everything in it was false. And yet we wasted 22 months and $40 million to know what was obvious. No apology, not only no apology but they got Pulitzer Prizes, some of these reporters.
Every time they give these monstrous lies, there’s no apology, and why should they? They’re just narratives, the’re post-modern Foucauldian, Lacan, Derrida narratives. They were useful. That’s what they look at. They were useful at the time, because when we went through the Mueller investigation, we crippled Donald Trump and therefore we were able to stop him. We had Anonymous, he was burrowed deep into the Homeland Security. He was a minor official, but we said he was one of the major operatives in the Trump administration, we lied. And then we printed his op-ed because it did what it was supposed to do, it weakened the right-wing agenda, so they think. And we got Admiral McRaven to come in and write an op-ed and said Trump should leave, the sooner the better. And then we got all of the four-star generals, McCaffrey, McCrystal, all of them, to say that Trump was Hitler, that he was Mussolini, that he was a liar, he was dangerous. We got Mark Milley to call the Chinese. We did all of this.
Yes, we do not want this to be done to us. If right now, a retired four-star general said Joe Biden is senile or dangerous of the Afghan thing is a disaster and he should be removed sooner or later, or his weaponization of the DOJ or FBI is Mussolini-like, or his hounding of individual people at school boards, or the way he conducted the Mar-a-Lago raid is Nazi-like — and I’m just quoting from what they’ve said — you know what’s going to happen to those people? You’re going to get [Attorney General] Merrick Garland to call up the Pentagon and they’re all going to be slapped with a Code 88, uniform code of military justice and court-martialed for disparaging the commander-in-chief. Trust me, they would in two seconds. And that’s not going to happen. They’re not going to say anything because they’re not equally going to apply their standards of correct behavior. And second, they’re going to say things about Donald Trump because they know the media and the Pentagon are not going to do anything to them. Now? They would destroy them if they ever criticized the commander-in-chief. They would go after them like you would not believe. And they know that.
We’re talking about, to sum up and end this, they understand deterrence. They are saying to the American people, “We are SOBs, we’re capable of everything and anything. Which side do you want to be on? Because if you’re on our side, you can do what Hunter Biden is, there are no consequences. If you want to say the voting machines are crooked like Jill Stein, go ahead, she said that in 2016. If you want to be Barbara Boxer and 32 Democrats and say you’re not going to certify the Ohio count and hold up the whole election, don’t worry, they did it in 2004. If you’re Al Gore and the attorney general says the votes have been counted and certified in Florida. Oh no, we’re going to sue and hold up the entire election for a month. And so, you can do all of that — as long as you’re on our side. But if you don’t do that, and you want to go on the other side, you’re in big trouble.”
That’s the message they’re trying to send, that’s what we’re really getting down to. Join the winning side. It’s sort of like in the Soviet Union, if you’re part of the nomenclature and you join the party, you’re exempt; if you’re not, well, you’re on your own.
People say to me: “You’re an academic and you spent your whole life, how did you deal with the 94% of all academics who are left-wing? … Why are they so left-wing? Do they have tenure? They’re exempt from worrying about losing their job? … Are they idealistic because they deal with words?”
I say, “No, they understand that if you want to get tenure and be promoted and liked, you parrot the majority. If it paid better, they’d be fascists.”
Joe Biden lied repeatedly when he claimed he knew nothing of his son Hunter’s influence-peddling businesses.
The president further prevaricated that he had no involvement in Hunter’s various shake down schemes.
Yet, the media continued to misinform by serially ignoring these facts.
Had journalists just been honest and independent, then-candidate Joe Biden might have lost a presidential debate and even the 2020 election. The public would have learned that Hunter’s business associates and his laptop proved Joe was deeply involved in his son’s illicit businesses.
Later, as the evidence from IRS whistleblowers mounted, the White House stonewalled subpoenaed efforts and sought to craft an outrageous plea deal reduction in Hunter’s legal exposure.
Reporters ignored the Ukrainians who claimed Joe Biden himself talked to them about quid pro quo arrangements.
They again discounted Hunter’s laptop that explicitly demonstrated that Hunter was whining that he had handed over large percentages of his income to his father Joe — variously referred to as the Big Guy and a “ten percent” recipient on many deals.
They played dumb about Joe Biden’s use of pseudonyms and alias email accounts to hide thousands of his communications to Hunter and associates.
They attacked the former Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who now claims Biden was likely bribed by Ukrainians.
Yet the media can no longer hide the reality that the president of the United States likely took bribes to influence or alter U.S. policy to suit his payers. Those two crimes — bribery and treason — are specifically delineated in the Constitution as impeachable offenses.
In denial, the media has instead pivoted with hysterical glee over various weaponized prosecutions of former President Donald Trump.
But now, to use a progressive catchphrase, the proverbial “walls are closing in” on Joe Biden.
So will we at last expect the media finally to confront the truth?
Answer — only if Joe Biden’s cognitive and physical health continues to deteriorate geometrically to the point that he can no longer finish his term or run for reelection — and thus becomes expendable.
Such a cynical view of the media is justified given their record of both incompetence and unapologetic deceit.
From 2015 to 2019, we were suffocated 24/7 with lies like “Russian collusion,” “Putin’s puppet,” “election rigging” and the “Steele dossier.”
When all such “evidence” was proven to be a complete fraud cooked up through Hillary Clinton’s stealthy hiring of and collusion with a discredited ex-British spy, a Russian fabulist at the Brookings Institution and a Clinton toady in Moscow, did the media apologize for their untruth?
Was there any media confessional that perhaps Robert Mueller and his left wing legal team (the giddy media-dubbed “all-stars,” “dream team” and “hunter killers”) proved a colossal waste of time?
Not at all.
Instead, the media went next right on to “the phone call” and “impeachment.”
The country then wasted another year.
The same biased reporters now claimed that the heroic Alexander Vindman had caught Trump fabricating lies about the Bidens — given Joe Biden was a possible 2020 opponent — to force Ukraine to investigate them or lose American foreign aid.
On that accusation Trump was impeached.
Then the truth emerged that unlike Joe Biden, Trump never threatened to cancel aid, but merely to delay it.
Trump was right that the Bidens were knee deep in Ukrainian bribes and influence peddling.
And that the whistleblower had no first-hand knowledge of the Trump call but was spoon fed a script cooked up by the gadfly Vindman and California Rep. Adam Schiff.
The result was journalistic glee that we impeached a president for crimes that he did not commit but exempted another president, Biden, who had likely committed them.
Then came the next hoax of the Russian fabricated facsimile of Hunter’s laptop.
The 2020 Biden campaign along with an ex-CIA head rounded up “51 intelligence authorities” to mislead the country into believing that Russian gremlins in the Kremlin had fabricated a fake laptop.
Ponder that absurd fantasy: Moscow supposedly had created fake nude pictures, fake photos of Hunter’s drug use and fake email and text messages from Hunter to the other Bidens.
The media preposterously convinced the country that the Russians and by extension Trump had once again sandbagged the Biden campaign.
No apologies followed when the FBI later admitted it had kept the laptop under wraps for more than a year, knew it was authentic and yet said nothing as the media and former spooks misled the country and warped an election.
Now we are enmeshed in at least four court trials on cooked-up charges that could as easily apply to a host of Democrats as to Trump.
For the last eight years, a discredited media has never expressed remorse for any of the damage they did to the country. And they will not again, when their latest mythological indictments are eventually exposed.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,” from Basic Books. You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Daily Callerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Daily Caller2023-09-01 12:14:362023-09-02 03:25:19VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: From One Unapologetic Media Hoax To The Next
