Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.
Jack Fowler: All right, here’s the headline, Victor. Kamala Harris torched for progressive wish list.
Here’s the first few paragraphs of this article: Harris said during a Wednesday night livestream on the “Win With Black Women” podcast that Democrats need, quote, “an expanded playbook and need to consider radical positions ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, including abolishing the electoral college, packing the Supreme Court.
“Look,” she says, “this is a moment where there are no bad ideas. A no bad idea brainstorm is what I’d like to call it,” Harris said in the video, which quickly went viral on social media.
I know Kamala Harris and the word brain in the same sentence are –
Victor Davis Hanson: It’s an oxymoron.
Fowler: Yeah, yeah. So, Puerto Rico statehood, neutralizing red states. She says they’re cheating on the maps, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Victor, your take.
Hanson: Yeah, I mean, she goes through these metamorphoses depending … she has no real ideology. I know she’s a black woman, half Asian black, and she uses that, but she has no deep-seated beliefs.
In the ’80s and ’90s and at the millennium and after, there was this sort of Bill Clinton democratism, and so she tried to distinguish herself as a tough prosecutor. She would prosecute parents whose kids were tardy to class or truant. She would go after marijuana possessors. She was the consort of Willie Brown, and she was trying to be the moderate voice.
And then when the Obama years came, she radicalized, and then her bathos point was when we had that five months of 2020 looting, killing, arson, and she got on CBS News and she said it’s not going to end. It shouldn’t end. I think it was with [Stephen] Colbert. It’s gonna go on, and it’s gonna go on to the election.
And then it was very funny because all the Left was trying to get Trump, Jack Smith, on insurrection because he had, you know, supposedly egged on the crowd, but he did say assemble peacefully and patriotically. She didn’t even have that out. And yet they all said, “Well, she wasn’t mentioning…” And that day in Washington, of course, they had tried to storm the White House, and Trump went into his bunker, and The New York Times said he was kind of a coward for doing that.
I suppose they wanted him to go out and fight with the protesters. But the point I’m making is they all said it was just nothing.
And then she reincarnated herself again under Biden as vice president as open borders, borders are all this left-wing. And then she ran and remember she said that she didn’t really know whether she was for deportations or not.
She had that clip came out where she was going, No deportation, no deportation. And so she tried to tack to the center. She wasn’t even…
Remember, she had said she’d eliminate fracking, but now she wasn’t sure. Pennsylvania was important. So now she’s going to go hard left because that’s where the Jacobin Party is.
And then if she gets the nomination, which I pray that she does, then she will go back to left-of-center. She doesn’t believe in anything.
As I said, I didn’t want to be cruel, but it is true that when she starts talking and the word feelings, empathy, any metaphysical term, time, being, come up, her eyes start to go like this, you know, like “Twilight Zone” music.
And then she starts to babble. And then when she sees that nobody is, everybody’s going, “Is this person sane?” Then she starts cackling. And that’s, she knows she can’t do that and yet she can’t resist or maybe it’s some affectation, but it’s sad. It really is.
Fowler: Well, she knew enough as a candidate, a forced-on America candidate, to not talk to the press for, what was it, like 35 days or something?
She didn’t answer a question.
Hanson: Yeah, she didn’t do it the first … I want to ask the Democrats, you had power for eight years with Bill Clinton. You had power with eight years with Barack Obama, and you had the Congress at the beginning. Why didn’t you get rid of the Electoral College then? Why didn’t you bring in two states then?
Why didn’t you pack the court and get your, I don’t know, your six liberal judges then? Why didn’t you end the Senate filibuster? Barack Obama tried to filibuster Sam Alito.
And the answer is that as long as they have power, they put those things off. Then, when they get out of power, the system’s not fair.
The system’s fair that got them power. Right. And then when they’re enjoying … They’re like little adolescents, you know what I mean? 13-year-olds. If everything is my way, then the whole world is wonderful. And when I don’t get my way, I throw a tantrum and are mad at my parents. And the parents in this case are the Constitution and 250 years of tradition.
Yeah. You didn’t get me my power. You didn’t get me elected, so I’m mad at you. I’m gonna get in two states. I’m gonna get rid of the filibuster. I’m gonna get rid of the Electoral College. That’s what I’m gonna do, and I’m gonna … It’s like, well, look … it’s childlike.
Fowler: Yeah, along those lines, Victor, we didn’t talk about it, the Virginia Supreme Court ruling and rollout, but between the rejection from the state Supreme Court and then the bungled application to the U.S.
Supreme Court that had misspelled Virginia—even misspelled the word Senate and other things, misspelled Virginia, there was talk of an effort to remove all the Supreme Court justices from the Virginia court. I saw that. By the age of 53. Yeah. So right. Yeah. They don’t get their, “Well, we’re gonna do whatever we can to, to shoehorn in” —
Hanson: And I think a lot of this is when you’re looking at even the left-wing analysis, you know, Nate Silver or Cook or whatever report.
Fowler: Yeah, that’s Charles Cook, yeah.
Hanson: You start to look at it, and they’re gonna pick up about 10 to 14 seats probably, the Republicans are, in this redistricting war, and they’re gonna pick up maybe four or five in the racial gerrymandering wars, and that’s not counting this, as I said earlier, this census.
It’ll be long term. But when you look at the actual seats that are up that are contested, there’s only about 25, if you don’t count leaning left or leaning right, and it’s about 50/50 in those 25, 11. So I would say that the Republicans have, right now, a 30% to 45% chance of holding the House.
And it’s gonna be contingent on … There’s such little adolescents on the left. They really do believe that the war is lost. In fact, the president of Iran came out today, Jack, and he said, “It doesn’t do any good, essentially, for us to lie to the Iranians,” said, “We haven’t hurt … We’re not hurting. We’ve suffered a lot of damage.”
He is more accurate than the Left is. They’ve said that, you know, Iran is winning. And my point is whether it’s, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I have an instinctual gut feeling that sometime Tuesday night to Friday, we’re going to go back into kinetic operations and it’s going to be quick and there’s going to be a, you know, a tumult and prices will up, but I don’t think it’s going to last.
I think it’s going to solve the problem. They’re going to open the Gulf and there’s going to be a lot of speculators with high priced oil that want to unload it.
We said last time there’s 250 freighters out in the seas full anywhere from a half a million to 2 million barrels, and they’re going to be unloading it.
And if Trump can by June or July get back on the economy, the indicators are all strong. And I think the Left knows that. And then when they look at the redistricting, it’s not, it’s not a done deal for them. And they like, also like little kids, they just get in these temper tantrums or wild enthusiasm.
Here in California, when they redistrict, they were just wild. Like, “Well, we did. It’s gonna be … ” And then when Virginia did, “Oh, that’s the icing on the … Oh, and then we’re gonna impeach these people.” They go from like this, this, this. And I don’t, I don’t know. Yeah. This is not a democratic party.
It isn’t. These people are really weird. They’re full of anger and hate. And I don’t, I don’t know. It’s a weird mixture of Islamicism and socialism, communism, and then DEI. It’s got all of these in, these clouds that make a perfect storm.
Fowler: And grifting. Yes. Stalin and the boys all needed their dachas, and these people—
Hanson: Well, there’s a good article today in The Wall Street Journal about champagne socialist and about all, like Bernie Sanders’ lifestyle that he leads and a lot of these billionaires, the Soros people, and all the nice things that accrue to all.
Hasan Piker and his $200,000 Porsche. Yeah. They surely don’t live the life they advocate for others.
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