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 all talk about waste, fraud and abuse, or corruption in politics. It’s kind of a boilerplate accusation, but I think here we are in 2026, and almost any day you look at the news or social media, there’s some investigation, some of them warranted, some of them not, but corruption is on everybody’s mind.
Exit polls, when voters were asked after our Tuesday midterm elections, “What concerned you the most?” We concentrated on affordability, the Iran war, gas prices, illegal immigration, both pro and con, but a lot of people listed very highly corruption. And I take corruption in the widest sense of the word, financial corruption, but also unethical behavior and personal invective that’s kind of coarsened our whole society.
And I don’t understand in the midterms how Ilhan Omar, who has … There’s pretty credible evidence that she abused her immigration laws, and her sister and other people under her purview were involved in one of the most massive fraudulent schemes that we could see with entitlement funds. She was reelected by 70% of the vote.
Now, we’ve all heard about Hunter Biden. We looked at the laptop. We remember his references to Mr. Big, Mr. 10%. We knew what the prosecutor in Ukraine had said about him. It was pretty clear that he was an embezzler and part of the Biden family consortia that grifted off of our money, and he got a pardon.
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It’s pretty clear also that Nancy Pelosi, when she entered Congress in the 1980s, was not a rich person at all, even though her husband was sort of a wheeler-dealer, real estate investor, stock investor. But over her 30-year-plus career in Congress, she had a 16,000-plus percentage rise in her stock portfolio.
She went from less than a million dollars to over $120 million. How can you do that when you’re a full-time politician? And we know how you can do that because people in Congress, especially at the highest levels of leadership in Congress and on committees, meet with all sorts of financial people.
They draft laws. They know which legislation is going to be on the docket, whether it will pass months before it actually does, and they act accordingly. Is that illegal? It should be. We have a Pelosi bill, but that’s just another example.
But we, as conservatives, can’t just say it’s Hunter or Pelosi or Ilhan Omar because Alina Habba, who I had a high regard for, allegedly was obtaining pardons from the Trump administration for people who had been convicted of serious crimes and were given clemency or pardons.
In some cases, there was a quid pro quo alleged deal for over $50 million. Steve Bannon, whom I’ve met and I like personally, but you remember just a few years ago, he pleaded guilty to the charge that he had been raising funds from conservatives who really wanted the wall finished, and they thought maybe if they used their own funds, they could, private effort, they could override the Biden opposition.
And yet there was an admission on his part that those funds were diverted to other uses without the donors’ notice.
I think you’ve all seen, as well, the news that Susie Wiles, whom I had a lot of respect for as the chief of staff of the Trump administration, has now been transferred to the political side of the administration.
Fine. But there were also allegations, not proven, that her daughter, who is a well-known lobbyist, may have been charging people or asking for, quote, “donations” to steer them to the right people to either get legislation moderated, introduced, canceled, or people who wanted appointments within the administration.
She was the go-to person, Susie Wiles’ daughter, to get immediate action. That’s unethical. I don’t know if it’s illegal or not, but it’s unethical.
Besides the corruption, very quickly, there’s also kind of a lunatic, a lunatic element in our society now, and all sides do it, where the F-word, the S-H-I-(Blank) word, foul-mouthed, but more importantly, even macabre, really ruthless medieval threats and kind of, I don’t know how to put it, a vampire-ish delight in people’s gruesome deaths.
And they’re in the public square. We had the two leftist podcasters, Jennifer Welch and Angie Sullivan. They’re hardcore Democrats. You could call them neo-socialists. And they actually said on air to thousands, if not millions of people, that they wanted to dig up Charlie Kirk’s corpse so that somebody could shoot him again.
Think about that. And when they talk like that, if you walk across college campuses or you investigate what protesters are doing, people are wearing white T-shirts with paint-stained marks that emanate from their neck. In other words, they’re glorified in the gruesome death of Charlie Kirk.
And what was his crime?
He tried to mobilize young people who were Christian and conservatives to get active politically, and he did so on the college campus. And he was a free speech advocate. He wanted to debate anybody, anytime, anywhere about anything.
But that’s not even isolated. Dave Chappelle, the well-known famous comedian, said the other day on stage to a, I don’t know, a sold-out audience that he felt a lot better after Charlie Kirk was murdered.
We had a Brazilian immigrant, Isa, I think her name was, [Casahuga], and she went to a Turning Point USA event, read a poem, and she referred to the Kirkiversary.
In other words, it was a point, a calendar date, the anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s gruesome murder that they were celebrating.
And then when she was asked what she meant, she told the master of ceremonies who was holding the event that he should wear a neck brace, i.e., he was taking a risk coming on a college campus because he should be murdered.
All of these people then make these immediate apologies, but only when they’re called on. In the case of Isa, she was worried that she was going to be deported to Brazil. She was on a student visa.
In the case of Jennifer Welch and Angie Sullivan, they may be socialists, but capitalists fund their program, so they gave a pro forma and insincere apology.
I don’t know what Dave Chappelle will do. He probably won’t do anything. He has a particular insularity from criticism. So, we’re starting to see not just massive corruption among the Somali community in Minnesota, not just massive corruption in California, but we’re starting to see unethical behavior at the highest levels.
Some of us have been very worried about the Trump administration, that there are members associated with some of the Trump family that are very active in the Middle East investing and helping people who are investors in the Middle East find receptive avenues in the United States that they might not otherwise find, given that they don’t have contacts at the highest level of government, and vice versa.
They are steering people from the United States who want to invest in the Middle East. I don’t know if that’s illegal, but it seems highly unethical. And the point I’m making, part of the MAGA movement, as was the Tea Party predecessor, was a reaction against the aristocratic classes and the corruption at the highest levels of government.
And conservatives can’t criticize Hunter Biden and Nancy Pelosi and all of these other people and their language and the F-word and, and gruesome and less gruesome metaphors and delight in people’s personal death, injury, misfortunes, unless they have the moral high ground.
And so, I think, as we try to digest the midterm elections, people on the conservative side said, “This party, these, us, we will not engage in corruption.
“We’re gonna be beyond suspicion of corruption.” And maybe Donald Trump can go to the Congress and say, “I wanna beef up the Pelosi bill so Congress people don’t invest as insiders during their tenures, and I will have an executive order in the executive branch matching step for step what you do in Congress.”
It’s time to clean up the language, clean up the behavior, stop the hate speech, and stop the graft and obvious corruption.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.
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