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: Victor, before we get to Mark Kelly, I did want to mention this news. There are too many names here, but these—Michigan had a Democrat convention yesterday, on Sunday.
Victor Davis Hanson: Yes. I saw that.
Fowler: And Amir Makled, who is a lawyer, a guy from Dearborn, and a Hezbollah praiser. He defeated—Democrats have the right to appoint a regent to the University of Michigan board. And the incumbent was Jordan Acker, who is, I’m assuming, Jewish because his house and his car were vandalized with antisemitic graffiti. But the Democrats of Michigan nominated this radical guy to sit on the board of the University of Michigan. So this party that was the party of Dan Rostenkowski and Tip O’Neill and even Bill Clinton—this is dead and over.
Hanson: Yeah, I think they’re captive of a very small but apparently very influential group of people who are Islamic, and they vote a straight ticket, apparently. Because—I say that because the—is it El-Sayed, the candidate in the same state for the Senate?
Fowler: Right.
Hanson: He had a hot mic on where he said that he had to be careful about expressing any opinion about the death of Khamenei, this cruel, horrible dictator in Iran who had butchered 40,000 of his own people. Because it might not go well with his constituency. Meaning they were pro-Hezbollah.
Fowler: Yeah.
Hanson: And we had that person that tried to ram the synagogue, and he was an active—his family were active Hezbollah terrorists.
So I don’t know what’s happened to the Democratic Party, but one of the worst things that historically happens to a party or a group or a nation when they spiral down into suicidal hatred, tribalism, is antisemitism is one of the first—it’s kind of like, you know, a sore throat when you know you’re getting very ill. And when you see it everywhere—and I see it everywhere—and it has so many manifestations.
In Tucker’s case, it’s just the sheer volume. If he were to do one show every five or every ten on Bibi, or one in every eight on Israel, then you could argue that he’s just critical of Israel and the support that it garners. But it’s about 70% of his shows. And they’re all negative. And he had never done that before.
And then when you see these random attacks on Jews, and you have nothing happening, you get the impression that either the majority of the Democratic Party agree, or they’re afraid to express opposition or objection because they’re going to be, themselves, targeted. So they wanted to cut off aid. Most of the Democrats, with few exceptions, wanted to cut off aid to Israel right when it’s in its existential war with Iran.
I think that Europe is pro-Hezbollah. It’s pretty clear they are. France was, until they lost a French soldier. Now, all of a sudden, they’re worried.
But if this doesn’t stop, this momentum—and I never thought I would say that about the United States—you’re going to see Jews that are targeted. Just everyday Jews. And they’re going to be—it’s going to be like, at the elite level, it’ll be like Gentleman’s Agreement, the Gregory Peck movie about that you politely don’t hire Jews or you don’t recruit them.
Fowler: We don’t have a reservation at the restaurant or at the hotel, yeah.
Hanson: And given Jewish meritocracy that dominated the Ivy League—30 or 40% in some years—after the antisemitic restrictions were removed. And then we went to the SAT meritocratic equality-of-opportunity admissions. It’s down to about—I think the Jewish numbers are way, way down by almost—they’ve decreased by two-thirds. And, so I don’t see a new young generation of Jews emerging from this country without having to be targeted by mostly people who are Islamic and the people who aid and abet them.
And it’s going to be—I predict, unless somebody comes out and stops it—it’s going to get worse and worse and worse. All we can do as people is—each person, according to your station—is to demand that you treat people as an individual and not a collective. And you don’t pander and you don’t criticize, but when you hear people attacking Jews, you speak up against it.
If you don’t, then you’re part of the problem.
Fowler: There’s a great piece on that, if I just may make a note, Victor, to our, our, viewers and listeners who are very intelligent people. There’s a great online magazine called Tablet Magazine, and it
Hanson: It is—it’s excellent. I saw that article. Are you referring to the woman who was a Ph.D.? She’s a veteran and—
Fowler: Yes. Meghan Mobbs, and she—
Hanson: What to Die For?
Fowler: The Things Worth Dying For, yeah.
Hanson: That was a wonderful article. It was so rare to see somebody that was so brave and so persuasive.
Right. And she’s also a Catholic, and it was an interesting thing about this journal. You know, they’re—I don’t want to say eclectic—but it’s that they allow these other kinds of voices to write for them.
Yeah. I think that’s one—I remember, I think I told you once I was at my graduation and there was a person at this—I had won this award, and the awardees were at the table with the provost. And this woman was attacking the United States in World War II.
And she kept going, going, going, and saying we were war criminals. And my father and my mom watched him drink one glass, two glasses, three glasses. And then I said to my mom, hey Mom, I think the fuse is lit. And then he got up and said, I didn’t fly 40 missions over Tokyo and my first cousin didn’t get killed in Okinawa for me to sit and hear this. Now you’re going to hear something. And then he let loose. So I feel that way about all the people who fought. That’s what her point was in the article. They didn’t fight and die and risk everything that so the University of Michigan could select somebody whose principal qualification was that he hated Jews. And he was pro-ISIS and Hezbollah and the whole bunch and was not shy about it.
And so why I always think that, given our ethos, that a person who comes from a different country, if he qualifies for citizenship—he or she—and he’s a citizen, then they have as much right as somebody that I’ve been here on my mother’s side from the 18—I don’t know—20s. My father’s from 1870, ’80.
But my point is they are just as much American. But that being said, if you do come over here and then when you arrive and you go full Ilhan Omar and you call it a trashy country and a dictatorship, then that allows people who have been living here to say to them: We didn’t die on Iwo Jima. We didn’t die at Belleau Wood. We didn’t die at Gettysburg for you to come over here and tell us that we’re no good. And we’re not going to take it. I’m sorry. And we need that attitude a lot more. So the immigrant has really changed.
When we had Max Nikias, he was the ideal immigrant. He’s the ideal immigrant. He loves the country. He contributed so much to it. And yet that profile that he and millions represent—had once represented—is under attack now. I think it’s because of the indoctrination in the university. And the DEI component, that if you’re a DEI qualifier, you feel that you’re exempt from criticism and you have a right or a duty to trash your host country as white, racist, heterosexual, a whole bit. You know?
And I think it will continue until people say, You know what? You’re absurd. We’re not going to listen to you anymore. If everybody would say that, no matter what your particular background is, I think it would stop very quickly.
Fowler: Someone was mentioning at the Philadelphia Society meeting, which I was at in Tampa this past weekend, about Peter Schramm, who I think you must have known Peter.
Hanson: I met—yeah, I knew him a lot. I spoke in Ohio. Was it Ohio he was at?
Fowler: He was at the Ashbrook Center. Yeah. He ran that. And Peter was born in Hungary and his family escaped during the ’56 revolution. But he asked his father, Why here? And essentially the father said, We were always Americans. We just weren’t born there. And I do think there are a lot of people that think like that and feel like that and are pat—but there are many, many more like Ilhan Omar and others who are still Somalians and still Pakistanis and Afghanis and whatever the heck. And do not like this place, yet they are big welfare recipients.
Hanson: I don’t know. I’m really upset, though, because I was looking at some of the—Steve Hilton now claims, by the way, that the fraud in California has gone up to 400 billion. Billion.
I mean, that would almost cut 25% of the deficit. And when you look at that and you look at the names that are coming in, a lot of them are naturalized citizens or they’re here as green card hold—I don’t know. But the reason I mention that is the immigrant has a special onus on him that his host was generous and allowed him to come in—just like a guest into somebody’s home. In that, you have to behave extraordinarily well. So when these people say, Well, he only had a DUI, why deport?
You shouldn’t have any crime. You should be exemplary because this country bent over backwards to allow you to be a guest. And then when you come in here as the Somali community did, in many cases, and you defrauded the country, then you should be deported. Get a fair trial, adjudicate the evidence, and get out. Because you’ve abused the hospitality. And you rewarded our magnanimity with contempt.
And so I’m getting really sick of all of this. And, you know—oh, immigrants, immi—immigration has been the backbone of the country. But there was a demonstration that said immigrants built the country. Well, they did in the sense that we only had a small population and we were immigrating here from 1820, 1810, even before.
But that’s not what the sign meant. It meant that only people who were illegal had built the country. And that’s not true. It’s not true.
