Victor Davis Hanson: The Left’s Race Narrative Is Driving Americans Apart

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript 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.

Sami Winc: So Victor, let’s go ahead and turn to the Left’s propensity for lying and then their celebration of murderers. And this week we had the big lie on the internet this week was that there were black lynchings in the last five or six years. And you looked at every single one of them, and they were ruled as suicides with the exception of one that was murdered by her own husband. 

And so that lie is out there, and they just keep sending it out and perpetuating it. And then I wanted to just add to that for a picture that this week and last week, the Left was celebrating Kirk’s assassination. They were defending Luigi Mangione and Lindsay Clancy.  

Victor Davis Hanson: The death cult.  

Sami Winc: And, yeah. And they weren’t commemorating those who died on 9/11. 

In fact, just if I could add one thing, I had a friend from a college I used to work at. He wrote and said there was not one commemoration or anything about 9/11 or on 9/11.  

Victor Davis Hanson: And then you have to add the [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran] Mamdani laughing during the most solemn parts of the commemoration. This is not the Democratic Party. 

This is an Islamic socialist party. And it’s not just these young, dissatisfied, downwardly mobile urban people that supposedly hijacked the Democratic Party.  

The Democratic Party was socialist before these people came in. Almost everything the socialists are now advocating, pack the court, end the filibuster, end the electoral college, bring in new states, defund the police, recognize BLM, DEI, biological men in female sports, ban fracking. 

That was the Democratic Party. They had gone socialist.  

All that’s different is these people, the Abdul El-Sayeds, the Hasan Pikers. They were young, they were glib, they were photogenic, and they said, “You got the great message, but you are… Nobody wants to listen to Nancy Pelosi. Nobody wants to listen to Chuck Schumer. 

Nobody wants the buffoonish Hakeem Jeffries. We are slick. We can take that message that we both share, and we go to town. And that’s what they did. And they don’t like the United States. They really do not like it, this socialist Democratic Party. They don’t believe, that, 9/11 is… And if you think I’m exaggerating, Hasan Piker said that we deserved it. 

And Ilhan Omar said, “Well, something happened to somebody on that day. Something happened.” So I’m being literal about it. And they believe that any means are necessary to achieve their morally superior end.  

So if it means to take a middle-class kid that worked himself up for UnitedHealth to provide healthcare for millions of people, you lay in wait, and you shoot him in the back, and you become a hero, even though you’re a trust fund, spoiled rotten nepo baby. 

Or you murder your three children, and you don’t say one word, that they were strangled one after another as two of the children saw each sibling murdered in front of them by their mother that was supposed to be nurturing. And then you say, you don’t just feel sympathy for the mother. You make that a cause celeb, and you don’t ever mention the children. 

Or in the case of Charlie Kirk, you cut videos where you put your finger to your neck as if you’re shooting him on his commemoration.  

And as far as the hoaxes go, we’ve got to remember now that it’s getting late in the game. We went through the Duke lacrosse [scandal].  

A person of color was a Vietnam veteran and a Native American who was cruelly mocked by a bunch of spoiled white kids. 

Turned out they were middle-class kids, and this guy was a complete faker. He wasn’t a Vietnam veteran. That stunt, he started the entire thing to get in their face.

And then we were told these horrible white lacrosse players are so entitled, they bring a poor, struggling black woman, and then they rape her. 

She was supposed to do a dance for them. It just, it’s like slavery again. No, she was a murderer. She later murdered her boyfriend. She is in prison. She admitted that she made the entire thing up.  

And this is going on from Tawana Brawley and Al Sharpton. That’s how we got to know Al Sharpton. He said that Tawana Brawley, that the district attorney of New York was involved in smearing feces on her, and that was completely made up. 

Then we had Jussie Smollett. He defied the laws of chemistry. He threw bleach at 30 degrees actual weather temperature with, you know, frigid winds, and it didn’t freeze because he was Jussie Smollett. 

And then he did something like Spider-Man. He held his sandwich in one hand, and he held his cell phone in the other, and he was able to kickbox, I guess, two white guys with Make America Great red hats on that always inhabit the most liberal areas of Chicago at 2:30 in the morning. 

That’s what he wanted us to believe, and Nancy Pelosi said this was horrific, and Kamala Harris said this was a modern lynching. And then the whole thing blew up, and they went silent. Never apologized.  

At Stanford, we had a rope hanging on a tree, and we were told that somebody, a Stanford student, that was… 

We had the NASCAR. Remember the rope on the garage door? That was made up. In other words, what does it indicate? I could go on with 100 more. It indicates that there are too many victims for the small pool of victimizers, number one. So there’s not enough victimizers, so you have to make up psychodramas. 

Number two, it shows you that a lot of people on the 30% DEI ledger feel that if they can continue to pass this lie about white rage, white supremacy, white privilege, they will get a continuance of the gravy train. 30 to 31 trillion, 23, I think it is, trillion dollars in redistribution since the start of the Great Society. 

Affirmative action, DEI, we want this to continue. We are oppressed. We bring in people. They do it in two ways. They bring in people that have no experience with the United States from Latin America, Africa. They set one inch in the United States and they say, “I’m a victim of white supremacy.” And you say, “Well, you grew up in Uganda, you grew up in Kenya, you grew up in Oaxaca. How did you get hurt?”  

“I am now in the United States. I can feel the white supremacist prejudice invisible rays. It’s like air. It’s everywhere, but you can’t see it. But only I can see it because I have racist detectors. I was trained to see it.” And people are tired of it. 

I did an hour yesterday with Adam Carolla, who I always thought was a great entertainer and thinker, and he was talking about this topic. 

And people are fatigued. They’re tired of it. And what’s going to happen is it’s exacerbated race relationships at a time. And who started all this? [Barack] Obama. He was the one that cooked up DEI and 30% are all victims regardless of how wealthy. Oprah’s a victim, Beyoncé’s a victim, Jay-Z’s a victim, Kanye West is a victim. 

Doesn’t matter how much money you have. Spartacus is a victim. You just have to be non-white. That replaced affirmative action and gave him a victimized class of not 11%, but 30%. People from India are victims. You can be the wealthiest ethnic group in the United States like Mamdani and [Ro Khanna], and you’re a victim because you’re a person of color. 

And the white population. This is another thing that’s not remarked about. These victims in the DEI side of the equation, they hang around with white, a certain type of guilt-ridden white upper mobile college-educated but angry socialist. That’s who their colleagues are at the news desk. 

That’s who their colleagues are in the university. That’s who their colleagues are in the broadcast booth. That’s who their colleagues are in foundations. But that’s not who the average American white person is. So they play this game that I’m a victim and you’re horrible on these white people who are very left go, “Yes, we are. I’m so sorry.”  

And so, you have [James] Talarico, “I have to get rid of my whiteness. How do I get rid of my whiteness?” Whiteness, whiteness, whiteness, whiteness. Everybody’s saying, “Oh man, I’m not white. maybe they’ll like me if I’ll say ‘you all.’” So all of a sudden it becomes among the white elite with a little nasal NPR voice, “Wow, you all, I’m with you. You all.” It’s sad.  

And then so they misinterpret that as the majority of white people who will not, but what they understand is 70% don’t agree with that, and they’re getting angry, and they represent 50% of the population, and they’ve had it because they get constantly called lynchers, racists, rapists, all these horrible things that are collectively. 

And the pièce de résistance was George Floyd And now the more you learn about George Floyd, the stranger and stranger it gets. We were not really told that he was a lifelong felon, a prison intern, that he was with a group of home invaders that put a knife to a pregnant woman’s belly. We were not told that he was trying to pass counterfeit currency at a store owned by people of color who did call the police to help them out because they were afraid of the size of George Floyd. 

And they didn’t tell us that he was recovering from COVID, that he was on a multiplicity of drugs, and that he was actively resisting arrest. Those were felonies.  

And then when he fell down, they could not deal with him. He couldn’t breathe. And then Derek Chauvin put an approved… He was trained to do that, to put a knee, not smashing his windpipe, just so he couldn’t get up against his knee. 

But the photogenics and the expression on his face were such that it went around the world. There was a white man with no empathy for a man who says, “I can’t breathe.” And out of that, we did the most crazy—it was like this AI craze or Me Too craze or population bomb craze or Al Gore’s the planet’s gonna end craze or the hula hoop craze or the Duncan yo-yo craze on steroids. 

And suddenly there was no SAT scores at our universities that were required. Suddenly these fakers came out of the woodwork, the BLM people who were complete con artists and got big lavish homes out of it, couldn’t account for millions of dollars that they shook down corporations. The Antifa people came out, and all of a sudden, you know, in my field, the University of Chicago said, “We’re not taking any white people for English PhD program, only black people.” 

And suddenly the admissions were completely changed, 9% of white males at Stanford. And that’s where we are. And then when you saw East Palestine, a typical white working class, and you have a toxic spill… You had all the ingredients for national outrage. You had a derelict railroad company trying to cut corners. 

You had an inept rail oversight federal bureaucracy. You had a profit-seeking corporation. You had a poor indigenous community. You had a toxic environmental disaster there. And you would think that it would have the same resonance as George. And what happened? Nobody cared. Nobody cared about those people. 

[Joe] Biden and Kamala Harris were afraid to go there. And [Pete] Buttigieg finally came up, and he looked like a complete buffoon with his little hard hat and his smug, sanctimonious demeanor. And people just collectively… And I feel really bad because some of my best friends that use that colloquialism are black. 

And it’s not the black community. It’s a percentage of the race hustlers at the top and a dysfunctional inner-city black culture in which 2.5% of the American population is creating and conducting about half of the violent crime. And what’s happening is, it’s a tragedy because what’s happening, you’re seeing a lot of white people disconnecting. 

You know what I mean? If I drive up in the California foothills from, oh, above Bakersfield all the way to above Sacramento, it’s almost 90% white. And whites make up 35% of the population. And it’s not Joe Hillbilly that hates everybody and has 20 cars. There’s some of that, that caricature, but they are Left-wing San Jose, Bay Area, San Francisco people, LA, and they’re saying, “I want out. I want to go back to what I remember as a child.”  

They’re not racist. They’re not white supremacists. They just want to go somewhere where they don’t get broken into, where they don’t have to step over feces, where there’s not syringes in the park, where there’s Little League and people are normal. 

Even though they’re leftist, I see them when I go to those places. The subtext is, “We’re out. We don’t want to deal with it. We can’t deal. We don’t know how to deal with it. We just don’t want it. We don’t want to get near it,” that crime-ridden attitude, the victimization.  

And so, like, you have a professor this week at Carnegie Mellon, a black woman, and she is saying, you know, that she wants white people to die. Anybody else would have been fired. 

She’s had a whole history of that. She’s at one of the premier research institutions in the world, universities, and she has been doing this for years, and no one– Finally, it got so egregious that she went on voluntary leave. But anybody else would have been … And so, a lot of people are saying anybody else but Claudine Gay would have been fired for plagiarism. 

She would have never made Harvard. And anybody else who treated Roland Fryer, a black scholar, the way she did, if that person was white and did that to him, she would be fired. So the exemption that it’s accorded, it’s… And race, race, because we want to get back to the Martin Luther King view of race is incidental. 

It’s not essential. But it is the Left and the 30% of this binary that keeps driving home, “I am a victim.”  

And some of them, when you look at the latest generation of victims in the Democratic Socialist Islamicist Party, go down the list. Hasan Piker, millionaire parents. He drives a $200,000 Porsche, lives in a multimillion-dollar West Hollywood. 

Check.  

Zohran Mamdani, he comes from the settler colonialist 1% of Uganda. He is a child of two PhDs. Kamala Harris, she’s a child of two PhDs. She grew up, she says she was born in Oakland for a short time. She grew up in the wealthier areas of some of the wealthiest cities in the world, Montreal and Berkeley, and she now lives in Brentwood. 

And if you look at Mr. Abdul El-Sayed, he and his wife just filed a tax return for over $600,000 in annual income. And he was the chief medical officer of Detroit without a medical license. He got a degree in medicine, but he wasn’t even a practicing physician. Usually you don’t get that. And when you look at Talarico and the same, he thinks he’s a victim, and he’s completely… 

What’s the word? He was a nobody, mama’s boy, and he said all of these outrageous things to get attention as if he was an honorary… He hated white people. He said, “I wanna get rid of my whiteness.” And white people respond. And now he’s scrambling to disown everything that he created. Is he lying now, then, both? 

I don’t know. So what I’m getting at is there’s no consideration of class as far as victimhood, and it never ends.  

Now we’re in the lynching mode. Next week it’ll be a new one, and the new one, and the new one. And I think it accelerated after, and we had … What did Barack Obama do? He said after the Henry Louis Gates psychodrama, where a guy had locked himself out and he was trying to break into his own house, and the police didn’t know who he was, and I guess the police are supposed to know every single owner of every single house in Cambridge by recognition. 

And the next thing we knew, he was a cause celeb, and the policeman had to go to a beer summit, and Obama said, “We all know that the police profile black people,” which was a complete lie. There’s no more unarmed black men shot than white men … and less percentage of white men, given their interactions with the police, than black men. 

And so, I just think that it’s reached critical mass, and people are having two reactions. They’re either getting very angry in Europe and the United States, or they’re checking out. They’re just saying, “I’m not gonna deal with it. It’s a lose-lose situation.” 

Just what I said today, I will have to report to somebody. Believe me, I will get a call from where I work. “What did you say?” You know what I’m saying?  

Yes, I do know what you’re saying. What I just said was a traditional liberal democratic position that we don’t emphasize race, and we try to integrate, and race is incidental. 

That’s what the Democratic Party said, and equal opportunity, and that’s not what they believe. Now it equality of opportunity is out the window. It is a mandated equality of result, and your race and your tribal affiliations define who you are forever. 

End of rant.  

And I think as far as social media goes, the net effect of it is to expose the lies that the Democrats are telling, even if it does help to amplify those lies. And so I feel kind of encouraged because when they amplify their lie, there’s so many people that come out and say, “That is not true at all.” 

For example, the lynching. How about the race?  

And then, did you see that in York, Pennsylvania, near York College, where… And it’s hard to know what happens because it’s all over the internet. And it’s all over the internet because the perpetrators were proud of it.  

And so you have a typical, as Barack Obama said, typical white person, but he said it in a derogatory fashion about his own grandmother who had scrimped and saved to send him to prep school. 

She earns typical white person from him. But there was an average white girl on the porch of a house in York, Pennsylvania. I guess she was at York College or something because the campus police had jurisdiction, the regular police. And a black girl came up and there were words exchanged. 

And the next thing you knew, a whole pack of black young women came up, and they dragged her by the hair and they pulled her out and they knocked her unconscious twice and almost killed her. 

And she or the people with her called five times to 911. No one showed up. And they called the campus police. That’s the allegations. We’ll see if that’s confirmed. But the reason we know about it was the people were not ashamed of what they did, but they were so proud of it, they took photographs. And that went around the entire United States. 

It had a huge view. And so, if that had been the roles of a diverse, it would have been like a George Floyd. So there was a black person manning their own business and a pack of white people rush up at the thing, and then drag him down and beat him. I mean, that caused the whole civil rights  

But apparently they think that’s cute and it’s not going to have a reaction. It is going to have a reaction. And the reaction is what I talked about. It’s either anger and direct confrontation or it’s resignation and isolation. 

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