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Life Liberty and Levin (Full Episode) | October 18' 2025
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00:00Hello, America. I'm Mark Levin, and this is Life, Liberty, and Levin Saturday. Welcome.
00:20We're going to do something special tonight. One guest after my monologue. I used to do this,
00:25so we're going to do it more often. And a special guest, Victor Davis Hanson. He's worth talking to
00:31for a long time. But before I get there, before I get to my monologue, you're going to be noticing
00:38this eye the entire night, so I might as well deal with it in a very, very short way. Some retina
00:44problems in both eyes. It requires a needle from time to time. I got my needle. I got my red eye.
00:51It's that simple. I'm not on drugs. Nobody punched me in the eye. I'm not drunk. I don't drink. I don't
00:57do drugs. And I don't get into fistfights. Now, I am sick and tired of the constant drumbeat
01:05that somehow Donald Trump is authoritarian. And you bring these guys on, this conga line of Democrats
01:11and some, you know, Republicans, and they go on there and they talk about, it's not going to be
01:17authoritarian. It is authoritarian. Or we've lost our democracy. What are we going to do? He's
01:23militarizing our cities. I'm so sick of this. These are people who are ignoramusists. They don't know
01:31American history. And the funny thing is, the shoe is really on the other foot. The Democrat Party is
01:35about sabotage, subterfuge, usurpation. That's what they're about. This is a Democrat Party, as a matter of
01:43fact, that wanted to pack the Supreme Court. They've packed the lower courts. Oh, that's very
01:48Democratic. This is a Democrat Party that wants to eliminate the Electoral College. So all but the
01:54most populous states with the biggest cities, they're the only ones that have a say in our
01:59government. The incredible lawfare against the President of the United States when he was a
02:03private citizen, president, candidate, president again. We've been into that. The 1619 Project,
02:10which is a complete repudiation of our founding. All Democrat, D-E-I-C-R-T, a complete repudiation of
02:18our country. Groups like CARE. This group, CARE, is tied to Hamas. And there are other groups like
02:24that. They find a home in the Democrat Party. They work with the Democrat Party. They're supported by
02:29the Democrat Party. Economic socialism. That's the new banner of the Democrat Party and their friends in
02:34the Democratic Socialist Movement, aka Marxist Islamist Movement. What else? They keep changing
02:41our election laws to ensure that they win. What do you think of that? They want to add Puerto Rico as
02:47a state and the District of Columbia as a state so they can pack the Senate with four more Democrats.
02:52Very democratic, you know. Lawless sanctuary cities, which go back to really a notion in the
02:58confederacy. That is, nullification of our federal immigration laws. So the open borders are open in
03:04violation of federal law. Now they don't want to deport people in violation of federal law. Why?
03:09Because they want to use illegal aliens to create more Democrat congressional seats. Very democratic.
03:15They have monopoly control of our universities and faculty. They have monopoly control of our
03:21teachers' unions, K through 9. They have a massive bureaucracy that really belongs to them.
03:26Let's be honest about that. They don't much like the Constitution's separation of power. They're
03:31always pushing for the centralization of power. They don't like the Bill of Rights, the First
03:35Amendment, the Second, the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth. They're not very happy with the
03:4014th Amendment either. Folks, they're the authoritarians. They're not fighting for democracy. They wouldn't
03:48know democracy if they'd hit them in the face. That's why I don't call them the Democratic Party.
03:53It's the Democrat Party. And then you have sites like the Drudge Report, where Matt Drudge
03:59apparently banged his head and has never recovered. It's endless with this hideous propaganda.
04:06And you have sites like MediaEye run by Dan Abrams. Endless, endless propaganda trying to create the
04:14impression that Donald Trump is a one-off, that this guy's a dictator. He's an authoritarian. He's doing
04:19things that are so out of the norm. Let's have a little chat, shall we? I'd like to go down history
04:26lane here because if I don't, who will? Let's take a look at this, shall we? Let's look at abuses of
04:34power, authoritarianism, and some of our greatest presidents. John Adams, we've discussed this,
04:41the Sedition Act. He imprisoned several citizens, including two dozen, four of whom were journalists.
04:48under his Sedition Act. We have Abraham Lincoln, considered the best president or the second best
04:55president by many, many people. Well, he shut down 200 pro-peace newspapers or papers he thought were
05:01sympathetic to the Confederacy during the Civil War. That seems to be a big issue. He suspended
05:07habeas corpus. Only Congress can do that. Well, that seems to be a big issue. He also confiscated
05:14printing materials. He sometimes imprisoned reporters, editors, and publishers. He gave his
05:21secretary of war, Stanton, enormous powers. Stanton sought the power, and he gave them to do what?
05:26To monitor the telegraph, to interfere with telegraph messages, the whole system, in order to influence
05:32the outcome. I could go on and on, but I don't have enough time. I've got to get to the next president.
05:38Let's go to Woodrow Wilson, a favorite of the Democrats. He was a racist and a bigot. He believed in
05:42eugenics. But that aside for the moment, he also passed a new Espionage Act in 1917 and Sedition Act
05:51in 1918. So opponents of Wilson were charged and imprisoned on a scale never seen in American
05:58history. He charged 2,000 people and imprisoned about 1,200, including the candidate on the Socialist
06:04Party for president of the United States, who ran for president from prison. Wow, what else did he do?
06:10He created an elaborate domestic spy network to see which citizens he should charge. When you would go see
06:17a movie, at the beginning of the movie, there'd be a little clip brought to you by Woodrow Wilson,
06:22more propaganda by the government. I mean, it was incredible what he did. He did other things, too. He created
06:27the Committee for Public Information. What did they do? 175,000 people were trained to influence the outcome
06:35of newspaper reports and to push agendas and propaganda, government information into the media.
06:43That's a lot. What about Franklin Roosevelt? Franklin Roosevelt had a war against the press.
06:50He established the FCC in 1934. Remember our FCC chairman? Oh, my God, we've ever seen anything
06:56like this before. Oh, we've seen that. We've seen a lot worse. What did he do? Well, it used to be that
07:04if you got a radio license, and radio was a big deal then, as it is, I think, a big deal today.
07:10But it was really big because there wasn't television and so forth, podcasters. In any event,
07:15they had radio licenses. They were for three years. What did Roosevelt do? He reduced them to six months.
07:21He put one of his political hacks in charge. And they made sure that NBC, CBS, other radio companies
07:28and networks, that they would abide by the policies of the government, or they didn't get their licenses.
07:34And NBC and CBS said as much. We're not going to report as much, you know, disagreement with the
07:39administration policies now. FDR appointed a political confidant to run the IRS. He would order this director
07:47to conduct audits of political opponents and newspaper publishers. Gannett, Annenberg, many, many others
07:54who were considered Republican. He went after Andrew Mellon, the Treasury Secretary under President
08:00Coolidge. He went after Huey Long, who he feared would defeat him in a primary. He also ordered the
08:06IRS to lay off a loyal young congressman they were investigating. You may have heard of this guy from
08:11Texas. His name was Lyndon Johnson. At FDR's direction, Senate Democrats subpoenaed tens of thousands
08:18of telegrams from Western Union because they didn't like what Western Union was doing. They thought it was run
08:24by a Republican, but they also wanted to see all the communications of citizens, tens of thousands.
08:30Oh, it gets worse, but I got to move on. John Kennedy, he also appointed a loyalist to be the
08:36IRS commissioner, and he would routinely read tax filings of political opponents, people he had
08:42questions about, people who were wealthy, some cases for the fun of it. Some cases he would leak to
08:48somebody named Ben Bradley, who at the time was the big gun over at Newsweek, who would eventually go
08:54to the Washington Post. But John Paul Getty is a perfect example. And John Kennedy would go after
09:00conservative groups. Lyndon Johnson, boy, he was the biggest of the big. He used the IRS, the FBI. He used
09:07the CIA. He actually outdid John Kennedy. And he went after his political opponents, businesses,
09:15publishers. He spied on the Goldwater campaign. He had bugs by the FBI placed in the Goldwater
09:22headquarters. Goldwater figured it out because he was putting out releases, that is the Johnson campaign,
09:28before they even made public statements. And of course, they went after a senior official working
09:33for the Goldwater campaign, who was gay, in order to destroy that man's reputation.
09:38They leaked information left. What else did Johnson do? Well, he directed the FBI to surveil the 1964
09:45Democrat convention in Atlantic City. You see, he didn't trust the Kennedys. He also didn't trust
09:50Martin Luther King and other black civil rights leaders. He had their phones bugged, their hotel
09:57rooms bugged. Democracy, right, Democrats? Oh, yes. Then Barack Obama. I affectionately call him
10:03Barack Milhouse Benito Obama, but that for another day. The Department of Justice secretly subpoenaed
10:09and seized from phone companies records for 20 Associated Press phone lines used by 100 reporters,
10:19telephone calls, emails between New York Times reporters and government officials, communications
10:25between Fox News' James Rosen at the time and the State Department, and communications between reporters
10:32and the CIA. We hadn't seen that since Lyndon Johnson, anything like it before. Obama said,
10:39I was never involved in scandals. You were dripping in scandal. They tracked James Rosen's whereabouts,
10:46his movements. James Risen of the New York Times. They subpoenaed him. They sought his phone and
10:52company records. They tried to compel his testimony under the Expionage Act. They threatened to imprison him.
10:59Obama used the Espionage Act again on him and others. They went. Obama also spearheaded the assault on
11:08Donald Trump, the 2016 campaign, his first presidency, and of course, somehow Donald Trump's taxes were
11:15released by the IRS. How? Democracy. You know, these Democrats are for democracy. They don't want anything
11:22to do with authoritarianism, you know. Then we have Joe Biden, FBI, IRS, CIA, NDI, all the government,
11:32all the government was directed, colluded, conspired to take out Donald Trump and his people when he was
11:39a citizen, when he was a candidate, during the transition, the first presidency, and after.
11:45They were crushing Donald Trump's civil liberties, crushing them. They had a war on social media.
11:51Federal judges have written about it. They were appalling. They haven't seen anything like this
11:54since the other Democrat, Woodrow Wilson. Whether it came to vaccines and the pandemic,
11:59whether it came to the laptop, Hunter's laptop, the Biden regime had its hands in all of it,
12:07trying to censor, trying to plant, even wanted to set up a special committee like Woodrow Wilson,
12:13a misinformation, disinformation committee, while they're spewing misinformation and
12:17disinformation. Oh, yeah. But here's the latest, of course, the Insurrection Act. We have these
12:25lightweight Democrat governors and mayors who hate the cops, who hate federal law enforcement,
12:33who hate law and order, and they are special pleaders for illegal aliens. And the more violent
12:39and felonious the conduct of the illegal aliens, the more they defend them. And of course, they have
12:44their federal judges, more democracy, who were stuffed into our judicial system by Biden and by
12:52Schumer, who keep, you know, letting these people go and letting these people go and interfering with
12:58the power of the president to do something about it. The Insurrection Act. Can you imagine? It sounds
13:03so ominous. Who would ever use the Insurrection Act? Only Donald Trump. Because you see, he's militaristic.
13:09He uses the military. These cities are being militarized. He doesn't need to do any of this.
13:15Well, who else used the Insurrection Act? The Insurrection Act was passed in 1807.
13:21It's been used 28 times since by presidents of the United States, starting with Thomas Jefferson in
13:281808. But even before Thomas Jefferson, even before there was an Insurrection Act, George Washington,
13:34you may have heard of him. He used the military in 1794. You may have heard of John Adams. He was our
13:41second president. He used the military in 1799. Now, these were men who were actually involved in what?
13:48The Constitutional Convention. Wow. They didn't view it as authoritarian. Quite the contrary. They
13:55believe they were defending America and the Constitution. As Donald Trump would be today, should he choose to
14:01use the Insurrection Act to put down an insurrection of the Democrat Party? Always the Democrat Party.
14:08Slavery, segregation, eugenics, Jim Crow, blocking little black kids from going into school with white
14:14kids, blocking buses. That's the Democrats. This is who they are. And the Insurrection Act has had to be
14:21used against them. You know, the Ku Klux Klan. That's right. Let's go through who used the Insurrection
14:27Act. We have Thomas Jefferson used the Insurrection Act. Andrew Jackson used it. And some of them used
14:32it multiple times. Like Ulysses S. Grant used it multiple times, including to put down the Ku Klux
14:39Klan. You know, he was putting down the Ku Klux Klan. He sent the United States Army into the South. He
14:44was doing a great job of blowing out the Ku Klux Klan. The last vestiges of the Democrat Party's
14:50resistance to humanity and ending slavery. And then the Democrats won the House of Representatives.
14:57And you know what they did? They cut off funding for the army to be used to take out the Ku Klux
15:02Klan. And so the remnants of the Ku Klux Klan are even around today. Democrats. But they favor
15:09democracy. What else do we have? I mentioned Grant. Rutherford B. Hayes. He used it more than once.
15:16Chester Allen Arthur. He used it. Grover Cleveland used it more than once. Hold on. I'm not done.
15:22The long list. Who else used it? Woodrow Wilson. Another great Democrat. Racist segregationist.
15:30Warren Harding used it. Who else? Herbert Hoover. Franklin Roosevelt. Dwight Eisenhower.
15:37John Kennedy. John Kennedy on multiple occasions. Lyndon Johnson on multiple occasions. Ronald Reagan.
15:45George H.W. Bush on multiple occasions. 28 times. Wow. Were they all authoritarians? You see,
15:54this junk that we are fed by the media, which regurgitates what they're told to do by the
16:00Democrats. When you watch Meet the Press or Face the Nation or these shows, or if you dare to watch
16:07their network program or some of these other cable channels, you're going to hear this stuff about
16:11Trump the authoritarian over and over and over again. And the Democrats, the little d Democrats,
16:17you know, they're trying to defend the country from an authoritarian.
16:23The Democrats are authoritarian. They've always been authoritarian. They reject the Constitution and
16:29separation of powers. They're the ones who reject the outcome of elections, like they're rejecting the
16:34outcome of the last election with their judges, who are interfering in every single aspect of the
16:40presidency. That's right. They're the ones who seek to change the citizenry of the country because they
16:45don't much like the way that we vote. And that way they can pick up more congressional seats. They hope
16:50they'll have birthright citizenship. And the Democrat Party can only win. And if they can't, let's get rid of
16:57the electoral college. So only the 11 or 12 most populous states, almost all of which are Democrat,
17:02not all, but most of which, they'll control the country. And we'll call it democracy. I have an idea.
17:08Let's load up the Supreme Court. Let's add more seats. That way we can get our ideologues on the
17:13Supreme Court, create really a Democrat Politburo, and then clothe it in democracy. You know, Bernie Sanders,
17:20a Marxist. He's a little de-Democrat socialist. Mondami, a little de-Democrat socialist. All for the
17:28centralization of power and disenfranchising the voter. Oh, you'll go through the voting process,
17:35but all the decisions will be made without you. Tomorrow night, I want to dig in further on this
17:41immigration issue. I want to dig in further on ICE. I want to dig in further what these Democrat city
17:47mayors and Democrat governors are doing, because ladies in general, what they are doing is not
17:52only akin to the old Confederacy in the South, which I've discussed here multiple times, what they are
17:57doing is destroying the country and ripping it apart. Some of them want to be president of the
18:03United States. Some of them are more qualified to be president of the old Confederacy because they're
18:08using their tactics and principles to a different end, but the same means. When we come back,
18:14Victor Davis Hanson.
18:23Welcome back, America, where we're with a man who I call America's wise man, Victor Davis Hanson.
18:28We're good friends. I really appreciate everything Victor writes and says. It's so important.
18:34So, Victor Davis Hanson, my question to you is this.
18:37You're familiar with the long list of presidents that we've had, the great ones, sort of the average
18:45ones, and the worst. At this time, in his second term of his presidency, where would you put Donald
18:52Trump? Well, I think he's in the top five because he's waging, he's not waging a revolution as he's
18:59accused. He's waging a counter-revolution. He's trying to, it's just not politics, Mark. It's the
19:06border. It's the economy. It's the culture. It's the Smithsonian. It's PBS. It's NPR. It's the
19:13university. I don't think we've ever had a president that looked at 360 degrees and said the country needs
19:21to be brought back radically to the middle or it's going to be destroyed. And he's done that in the
19:28first 10 months in an extraordinary way. Part of it is he learned from his first term that as he didn't
19:36look at the resumes, he said himself, he came to Washington. He wasn't familiar with it. He was
19:41given a lot of illustrious names and many people in his administration thwarted him. He had four years
19:48to ponder that, why he was a victim of this lawfare and other things. And this time he said,
19:54I have to have people who are force multipliers. So he's consciously, deliberately, carefully trying
20:01to redirect almost everything about American life that the progressives had altered radically the last
20:0730 years. And the thing about it, no other Republican tried it. The Bushes didn't do it.
20:14And John McCain wouldn't have done it. Mitt Romney wouldn't have done it. Bob Dole wouldn't have done
20:19it. I can't think of any other major Republican candidate or president who would have taken on
20:24that task to say that we have gone way beyond what the founders envisioned and we're a neo-socialist
20:31state. And Republicans said, well, we can alter it. We can slow down the progressive project. But
20:37no one said that we can stop it. He did. I think that's so important what you're saying.
20:43And isn't that why the resistance is more aggressive than anything we might otherwise imagine? That is
20:48the fight over deportation. The Democrats thought they had that nailed down, could create more
20:55congressional seats, can get birthright citizenship and be the really a one party system pretty much
21:02for the rest of time, like they've done to California. They've done to Illinois and they've done to other
21:06states. And he put his foot down and said, no, you look at across the board, how he's pushed back.
21:12But he's, as you point out, he's gone into the culture. He's gone into the society itself where
21:18the Democrats are, where the Democrats play, almost with monopoly authority. He's going into the
21:22bureaucracy, which he never would do. They own the bureaucracy. He is, it's not that he's turning
21:27things upside down and inside out. He's pushing things back, as you say, through a counter-revolution
21:33for normalcy. Right? Yeah. He's saying that it's not enough just to address the political
21:39revolution that the Democrats and the left wage, he asked a more fundamental question.
21:44Where do they get this power to do this? Because the issues that they're running on
21:48and they champion do not have public support. Open borders don't have public support.
21:54transgenderism doesn't have in male sport, females, sports doesn't. How did they get this power? And he
22:01said, I know how they got this power. They got it with the indoctrination of K through 12, higher
22:07education, as you said, changing the demography with an open border, weaponizing the bureaucracy,
22:15FBI, CIA, or IRS. So he said, it doesn't do any good to deal with the effects unless you go to the
22:21causes. And that's why the left went crazy. They said, well, we don't have any power in the House,
22:26the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the White House, but we have all this other power that will
22:30regenerate that political power as soon as, you know, when we kick in in two years. And now all
22:36of a sudden they said, oh my gosh, Donald Trump is addressing how we form propaganda, how we create
22:43bias, how we create all these dogmas that the people don't want. And we push it down their throat
22:48to these institutions. He's addressing the root causes. And that's why I don't blame them,
22:54because they understand that if he's successful, they're going to be neutered for a long time.
22:58So that's why they're furious about him. So we have Donald Trump on the one hand,
23:02who really is historic and iconic in so many ways, as you're discussing. Then we have the
23:08Democrat Party that has moved further left, faster than really any time in that party's history,
23:15adopting foreign and alien ideologies, whether it's Marxism, Islamism, all these isms, and trying
23:23to impose them on the nation, city council by city council, mayoral race by mayoral race,
23:30and even at the national level. And so the Democrat Party is fundamentally,
23:36in many respects, anti-American. I mean, their propaganda about the founding and the founders
23:42and the 1619 Project and all the rest is hostile to the very establishment of this country. So my
23:48question to you when we come back, Victor Davis Hanson, this is not a very pretty situation,
23:54where you have a president of the United States who is very muscular in his promotion of Americanism
23:59and a Democrat Party that is really feckless, but still is focused on promoting these alien
24:07ideologies that undermine Americanism. That's my question to you when we come back, how is this
24:13going to work through? We'll be right back.
24:24Welcome back, America. We're here with Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution,
24:29Victor Davis Hanson. So we have a president who is really historic in the way he's pushing for
24:36Americanism, constitutionalism, American traditions and customs, the American culture. He's trying
24:43to defend them all. He's trying to promote them all. He's confronting this Democrat Party and this
24:49other alien ideology every step of the way. But this Democrat Party and this alien ideology,
24:56it's imported into the United States, this idea of Marxism and Islamism and economic socialism
25:01and everything else. Where are they headed with this? And are they going to drag our country into
25:07this? You know, Donald Trump's not going to be president forever. Yeah, I think, you know,
25:11to be fair, if you look at 92 and 96, 1996, the Clinton, I wasn't supportive of it, but it was pretty
25:19much a traditional democratic agenda, closed borders, legal only immigration, balanced budget. And then
25:27something happened. And I think that something happened was Barack Obama. And he came in and
25:32he said, you know what, in terms of historical racial problems, it's no longer affirmative action
25:37and the black experience and white America, it's now going to be called diversity. And we're going to
25:42make, they're going to divide the country in two. And 30% who say they're not white are going to be
25:49victims. And the other 70% are going to be victimizers. And there's going to be tension.
25:54And then he ginned up this racial animosity. And then he opened the borders. And now we have,
26:02you know, we have 16% of the people in the United States and 55 million that were not born here,
26:08which is okay, if they come legally with skills and English, and you assimilate and acculturate,
26:13and you use a melting pot. But if you have this so called salad bowl, and separatism, then you create
26:19all of these divisions, and the left gins it up. Because to be frank, their agenda doesn't appeal
26:25to people. And so under Obama, it was, we're going to indict this part of the country. And they came,
26:31they created a vocabulary mark, clingers, deplorables, irredeemables, chumps, dregs,
26:37semi-fascists, garbage. And they really wanted to divide the country in half, create chaos,
26:45and then come in and say, you know, we're going to solve everything and create equality. And we're
26:50going to mandate equality and redistribution. And that had never worked in the United States,
26:55because we're such a upwardly mobile society in terms of class. But they used race. And they said,
27:01race is permanent. If you're Oprah, you're the women on the view, or you're Jasmine Crockett,
27:06you are a victim. No matter how much money you make, how much privilege you went,
27:11even if you were Jasmine Crockett, you went to prep school, you are a victim. And society owes you,
27:16and we're going to refashion it. And Trump came across and said, no, we're not going to do that.
27:23If you're a Hispanic truck driver, or a white electrician, or a black sheet rocker, you all
27:30have things in common. We're going to try to make the middle class empower the middle class. And they
27:36really went crazy about that. Because they said, no, no, no, no, the race card and the open border
27:42are only avenues to ensure we have control over institutions and political power. And that's what
27:48happened. And the Democratic Party then is headed in the way it was in 1972 under McGovern. And it took
27:55them 20 years to get back, you know, really, they had a little abbreviated rule with Jimmy Carter, but it
28:02took 20 years for them to come to the center. And I think the same thing is going to happen to them.
28:06They're going to implode. And they're going to do a lot of damage to America in the process,
28:11as they have been doing. But it's not sustainable for them. The country is not a socialist,
28:17redistributive, racial binary the way they envision it.
28:29Welcome back, America. We're here with Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution. So Victor,
28:34really, perhaps there are others, but at least one of two lanes the Democrat Party can go.
28:39Perhaps it recalibrates, whoever they are, recalibrates. Or this radicalized party, and I
28:46mean radicalized party that's now embracing Marxism and Islamism and all the other isms,
28:50but rejecting Americanism and capitalism, that much we see and we know, gets a foothold and is
28:58not going to relent, and then uses liberty and the institutions of a republic against itself.
29:04We've seen these sorts of things before. Maybe we just don't know which direction they're going
29:10to go. And what do you think?
29:11Well, I agree with you. We don't yet. And there's a big struggle. But the difference between Trump is,
29:16as we said earlier, he's trying to address how they get that power without popular support.
29:22And that's going to, I think, that's what enrages them. But more importantly,
29:27a lot of the people in the Democratic Party, to be frank, they don't have any ideology. If we looked
29:33at Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer, what they were saying in 92 and 96, it wasn't that much different
29:39from Donald Trump on the border or on, you know, illegal immigration or crime. That was the Clinton
29:46position, not because necessarily they believed it, because they thought that would win. And then they
29:51changed over with Obama. They thought, well, you know, Obama shouldn't have won. He's so radical.
29:56But he was the first black president. He was charismatic. And he did win. So maybe it was his ideology.
30:02And they bought into it. They lost, of course, with they lost to Donald Trump twice now. But that's
30:10not yet enough for them. They have to lose big time one more time or two more times or lose the
30:15legislatures. And so that's what they're afraid of, that they feel if they lose the New Jersey
30:21and these races in Virginia, they're going to be in big trouble because they should pick those up
30:26in purple or blue states. So that's going to stop what this drift is. They have to have a
30:33substantial political defeat. And they have to have the popular culture turn on them. And it's
30:39already starting. And that's why people like Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump really terrified them,
30:46because they were addressing who they are and how to deal with them. And they were doing it
30:51nonviolently by the power of persuasion and popular support. And that's not what they wanted.
30:58But I'm optimistic that this radical fringe, this Jacobin fringe, it's not the fringe anymore.
31:05You're right. It is the Democratic Party will implode. And when it does, they're going to take a lot of
31:10people down with them. And some of us are going to be hurt by them, the damage they've done already.
31:15But ultimately, they're not going to succeed. And they didn't succeed in 72. And anytime they've
31:21gone hard left, finally, the American people say, I know you, you're a one eye jack. I see the other
31:26side. And they wise up, but not always in time to prevent damage. Let me just ask you in further
31:33into this point, just fine tune it a little bit. But this is a party, the Democrat Party that wants
31:41to fundamentally alter what the framers put in place to protect us from these wild swings.
31:51And they want to alter them. The Electoral College, the Supreme Court, they want to add more Democrats
31:57to this. I mean, they want to make fundamental and permanent changes that could make it difficult,
32:04particularly in the unelected parts of our government, that could make it difficult
32:07to just swing back like after the McGovern era. This is what I'm struggling with from an
32:14intellectual perspective. What do you think about that?
32:16Well, you put your finger on it. It's no accident that Barack Obama and the hard left
32:21years ago said they wanted to let Puerto Rico in and make Washington the state to get four new
32:27senators on the left. They wanted to get rid of the 170 year old filibuster only, of course,
32:34only when they had the majority in the Senate. They wanted, as you said, to abolish the Electoral
32:39College. They had this national voter compact. They're pushing through to do it unconstitutionally.
32:46They've even talked, you know, they talk in their journals about turning the Senate into a house
32:51and make senators proportionally represented. They don't like the Senate. They feel that it's not
32:57radical enough. So they're always straining to open the border, change the demography, change the
33:02constitution, change the laws because the system they ultimately don't like because it is not a
33:08radical. Fifty one percent gets their view anyway. There's no they don't want guardrails. They don't
33:14want any of that. They don't believe in Republican constitutional government and they're trying to
33:19destroy it. But even then, so far, they haven't gotten rid of the filibuster. They haven't gotten
33:24rid of the Electoral College. They're trying, but they haven't succeeded. And that's why they're so fanatic.
33:30Now, this may seem like an easy question, but still, I want to pursue it because there are a lot of very
33:35poor presidents in our past. Who is the worst president in American history when we return?
33:50Welcome back, America. I don't know if my question to Victor Davis Hanson is a slow pitch down the middle
33:57of the plate or not, but I know he knows history better than most, American and ancient history.
34:05So Victor Davis Hanson, Joe Biden, the worst president in American history. I mean, there have
34:11been some very bad ones. James Buchanan, we can go down the list. How do you rate him?
34:17I put him in the bottom three, Millard Fillmore, James Buchanan, and Joe Biden.
34:21But I have a little asterisk there because I don't think he really was a president in the way that we
34:28had all the other presidents, except for Wilson was incapacitated for over a year. But I don't think
34:34he really was intellectually or cognitively aware of his surroundings. And I think there were a cabal of
34:42former Obama people and his staff, his wife, his family that were running the country. And I think
34:47that's going to become clearer and clearer as we get as we get more information. So he was a special
34:54case. He was sort of a wax and effigy. And they put an agenda under the veneer that he was old Joe
35:00Biden from Scranton. We all knew him. He was sort of a moderate Democrat. And he was a useful tool.
35:06And that's why in 2020, they used him to stop the radical front. You know, they didn't want
35:12Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders or Cory Booker or any of those people, or Kamala Harris. But they
35:20wanted Joe Biden not as a moderate, but as a veneer of a moderate. And so they could push an even more
35:26radical agenda. And that worked for them. And so he's a special case. And I mean that in a negative
35:32fashion. So I would put him with the bottom three. But I don't know how to judge him historically,
35:38because I don't think he really knew what he was doing or where he was a great deal at the time.
35:44But the people around him did. And they used him. And they used us. So I think in some ways,
35:50he was the worst president, if he was a president. I think he was a president that never was.
35:55That's a good book. Victor Davis Hanson, you look at New York City, and you've got this guy,
36:01Zorhan Mandami. To me, he's repulsive in every respect. The things that he has said in the past,
36:10his attempt to sort of soft edge some of it, his hostility for the entire society that is New York,
36:18law enforcement. You would have thought after 9-11, after all those brave cops and firefighters died,
36:25that there would be unique respect for the NYPD and the FDNY. He doesn't seem to have that.
36:33Or for really the center of capitalism and industry, such a magnificent, prosperous country has been
36:40built. He has no respect for that. He has no respect for anything that's come before, that's been built
36:47before. And he's running around talking about affordability. Affordability. Do you know any
36:53Marxist regime that is affordable? I mean, maybe it's affordable because everybody's poor and there's
36:57nothing to sell them. But beyond that, what do you make of him and what he's spewing?
37:04Well, I think he feels that he's a creature of a off-year, low-turnout election in New York,
37:09number one. And number two, the demography of New York has changed when people after COVID fled it.
37:16So there's a million or a million and a half fewer conservative voters. And then he's going to run on
37:21this Obama-like charismatic smile and he's not going to be dangerous. He doesn't scream and yell
37:28like Elizabeth Warren. And that fools a lot of people. But he appeals to the upper, upper middle
37:33class who feels that their intellectual abilities or their degrees entitles them to a certain lifestyle
37:40and they don't have it in New York. So it's really, we're really talking about the upper,
37:46upper middle class in a low turnout election with a divided ticket with Cuomo and Silva.
37:53And he thinks he can sneak in. And I think he's right. He probably will. But there could have been
37:58a united front against him with a center-right candidate. And that would have been, you know,
38:04even a Bloomberg would have won if he had somebody like that or better a Giuliani. But they didn't have
38:09that. And so they're going to get what they don't, I don't think they expect what he'll do. But he is
38:17so charismatic and he's so arrogant and he's so privileged. His parents came here. They're
38:22multimillionaire, professor, filmmaker. He grew up with advantages and he seems to hate the very
38:28system that empowered his entire family. But, and he's a very dangerous person because he is
38:34charismatic and he smiles a lot and he lies. And, you know, he said he wouldn't, he wants to disarm
38:42everybody in New York. He wants to outlaw guns, but he doesn't want to disarm Hamas. It makes no
38:46sense. But it does make sense if he's a radical Marxist, which he is. Victor, it's always a great
38:52pleasure. I could talk to you for 10 hours. That's how intriguing I find you and informative I find you.
38:58And I want to thank you very much for everything you do. God bless you, my friend.
39:01Thank you, Mark, for having me. We'll be right back.
39:11Welcome back, America. That was fun and informative. We love our Victor Davis Hanson.
39:17Tomorrow night, we have Ben Dominic and Brett Baer. Very, very special. I hope you'll watch us
39:23set your DVR. Don't forget. I want to put out a little message to Hamas. Oh, I haven't forgotten
39:29them. You know, Hamas, you bloodthirsty mass murderers who are now killing Palestinians.
39:37There's a phase three to the Trump plan. Maybe nobody told you. You know what that is?
39:43If phase two doesn't work, you get blown off the face of the earth. That's phase three.
39:49I'll see you tomorrow night on Life, Liberty, and Levin.
39:52I'll see you tomorrow night on Life, Liberty, and Levin.
39:56I'll see you tomorrow night on Life, Liberty, and Levin.
39:58I'll see you tomorrow night on Life, Liberty, and Levin.
39:59I'll see you tomorrow night on Life, Liberty, and Levin.
40:00I'll see you tomorrow night on Life, Liberty, and Levin.
40:01I'll see you tomorrow night on Life, Liberty, and Levin.
40:02I'll see you tomorrow night on Life, Liberty, and Levin.
40:03I'll see you tomorrow night on Life, Liberty, and Levin.
40:04I'll see you tomorrow night on Life, Liberty, and Levin.
40:05I'll see you tomorrow night on Life, Liberty, and Levin.
40:06I'll see you tomorrow night on Life, Liberty, and Levin.
40:07I'll see you tomorrow night on Life, Liberty, and Levin.
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