Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. We’re in very troubled and chaotic times. We’ve got a theater-wide war in the Middle East with the Iranian theocracy on the ropes. We’ve had mass “No Kings” demonstrations in the United States. And we’ve had kind of a hysterical reaction to President Donald Trump’s deportation warrants.
But here’s my point. We’re not hearing alternative proposals from the opposition party. What I mean is, if you do not want the 12 million who entered the United States illegally under President Joe Biden, you might want to issue alternative proposals.
Maybe you could say to Donald Trump: “Well, wait a minute. If people have been here five years and they have no criminal record or they’re gainfully employed, they’re not on any public assistance, can we issue them a green card? Pay a fine?”
I’m not hearing any of that. Nothing. All we’re hearing from California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is that everything was peaceful and then Donald Trump nationalized the California National Guard, and the result is chaos.
But that’s not what we see. We see people spitting on police officers. We see people throwing concrete at them. We see people looting stores. We see stores boarded up. We see buildings defaced. We see people taking over the street. We see people stopping the 101 Freeway and major traffic. We see people waving the Mexican flag, of the country they don’t want to go back to, and spitting and burning the flag of the country they insist on staying in.
So, there’s chaos. And the more that Karen Bass assures us that everything is fine, the more that we know that she’s not telling the truth. And we’re back to the Palisades Fire, where, then, she was physically in Ghana. Now, she’s mentally or psychologically somewhere else. But she’s not the mayor, as we interpret the mayor.
So, we’re looking for positive suggestions from the opposition party.
All we hear about Iran is that Donald Trump wants to start a theater-wide world war. This is what we’re hearing from Democratic senators. No American president has said, “I am willing to negotiate,” more than Donald Trump with the theocracy.
When we look at the Democratic Party, what do we find? We had a North Carolina representative, she recently posted a media photograph of Donald Trump’s head decapitated next to a bloody guillotine with the idea that we need cuts. Think of that. This is an elected representative disseminating, basically, a call to behead the president of the United States, who had survived a year ago two targeted assassination attempts.
Then we had our own senator here in California, Alex Padilla. He deliberately did not wear his identification. In fact, nobody knows him. If I saw Alex Padilla on television, I wouldn’t know he was our senator. He’s never done anything. But nevertheless, he had no identification. He heard that Kristi Noem, secretary of homeland security, was gonna have a press conference. He barges in. He disrupts it. He tries to make a scene. And what happens? The Secret Service doesn’t know who he is either, so they restrain him. And then he becomes a folk hero with his street performance.
Unfortunately for Padilla, he thought it would be a Sen. Cory Booker moment. Remember Cory Booker—25 hours to filibuster nothing? There was no impending law. It was just “Donald Trump is evil” for 25 hours. He thought he would get the same media attention. But unfortunately, there was the “No Kings” parade and the war in Iran, and nobody really knew much about what he had done, other than he’d made a complete fool out of himself.
And then we had this No Kings parade. And it was really funded by multibillionaire left-wing donors, like Christy Walton, one of the heirs, by marriage, to the Walton fortune; #MeToo; all of these groups.
But what I don’t understand—maybe you can help me—is “No Kings”? Donald Trump has been subject to more lower court district injunctions in the first five months of his administration than President Barack Obama and Joe Biden combined throughout their whole 12-year tenures.
He has been the object of five civil and criminal suits when he was in the political wilderness. He was the subject of an effort to take him off the ballot. He was the only president ever in history to be impeached two times. King? He has had more judicial, executive, and congressional restraints placed upon him, which he has followed, than any president in history.
So, the whole basis of this No Kings demonstration was incoherent.
Let me just quote, in finishing, a few vital statistics. At the height of all of this paranoia and hysteria about illegal immigration, deportations, the people—the people, us—CBS took a poll, 54% supported Donald Trump to continue deporting people who had come here illegally. Illegally. And then we had a poll from Rasmussen—a weekly tracking poll—that, you know, sampled about 1,700 people: “Do you support what Donald Trump is doing as president?” And it was 53% positive.
But here was the really stunning statistic: 54% of African Americans expressed positive appraisals of Donald Trump. I think it was mostly because they support the deportation of illegal aliens. But 53% of Hispanics did too. This is at a time when Donald Trump is being smeared and slandered as a racist, a fascist, a dictator. Yet, minority groups, constituents polled higher—in the case of African Americans—than so-called whites. And Hispanics polled the same, 53% approval, as whites.
So, something is missing here. And I think I know what it is. If you do not have a coherent, positive message—and the Democrats don’t—and you keep haranguing and trying to smear and slander and talk about killing the president of the United States, then people are going to lose confidence here. And that’s what’s happened in California with Mayor Karen Bass, Gavin Newsom. And it’s happening on a national scene.
We’re getting incoherent chaos and nihilism when we need a two-party system and people to offer constructive suggestions. We’re not getting that and I don’t think we will.
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