Victor Davis Hanson: Charlie Kirk Was MAGA’s Secret Weapon—and the Midterms Proved It

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 Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

Jack Fowler: Victor, yesterday, as I sent you last night, a topic. It was an article by Christopher Rufo in City Journal, and it had some thoughts about Charlie Kirk and that he feels that Charlie Kirk’s murder and his death marked, I’m quoting him here, “the shattering of the American right.” 

I’m just gonna read this a little. “The immediate consequence of his murder was an epistemological collapse. Charlie Kirk was a political operator and never shy about using provocation, spectacle, and controversy as part of his method, but he was always tethered to political reality and oriented toward political success. 

He was sensitive to public opinion and kept in touch with an unbelievable number of people in the world. At his best, he tried to discipline elements of the right, steer them away from delusion and conspiracy theories, and focus them on winning.” 

Chris has said much more on this. But now also, and I’ll shut up in a second, coincidentally, last night, Dave Chappelle, the very, very popular comedian, was giving a performance at Madison Square Garden in New York City, and he said, “Ever since that Charlie Kirk got murdered, and I shouldn’t say this publicly, but I feel better.” 

And this is Dave Chappelle, who was himself rushed at on the stage and threatened. So anyway, there’s a lot of Charlie Kirk talk. I wonder what your take is on the consequences of his death, your thoughts on what Chris Rufo said, and any commentary you want to make about Dave Chappelle. 

Victor Davis Hanson: I think everybody’s sick of it. I really do. One thing about Charlie Kirk: He would go on these campuses, and his whole mission in life… And he didn’t—he was an autodidact. He tried to learn and speak, and he did two things that people keep forgetting. He said, I’m going—I don’t believe that higher education is worth the money as it’s presently constructed, and I’m going to listen to Hillsdale videos, or I’m gonna take online courses. I’m gonna educate myself. 

He called me a couple times and asked, “What should I be reading?” And he was very sincere. And then he said, “I will go into places like the Oxford Debate Society, where we supposedly have the smartest people in the world, and I’ll go head-to-head with the president of the Oxford Debating Society.” 

If you watch that debate, he wiped them off the floor. And he would debate anybody. He didn’t care about the degree. He was trying to tell people that education is education. It doesn’t have to be synonymous with an ideologically tainted universe. And if it is, that ideologically tainted universe needs to be reformed. 

So he tried to reform it. And number two, he told young people your anger at college and the way you’re being indoctrinated, your anger at the way the New Green Deal and all of the open borders stifle economic prosperity, that is okay. You are it. The conservatives are not old fuddy-duddies. They are the counter-revolution party. 

Just like your grandparents in the ’60s thought it was hip and cool to question the establishment, so now it is hip and cool for you to question the establishment because the establishment is Hollywood, entertainment, professional sports, the media, the administrative state, K-through-12, academia. That is the establishment. 

So you are completely right to be a youthful critic of that. And that was a new message, and it had enormous effect.  

And he just wasn’t an abstract podcaster like I am or a philosopher like some people think they are. He was a pragmatic person. I think if you take him away from the swing states and the voter registration and get out the vote, then you get something like the midterms. 

I think his loss was not completely responsible, but it had an effect in this election. And he was talking about affordability before the Left was, about housing and debt and things like that to young people. So they thought that he was an existential threat. 

And we talked last time that I guess it’s that podcasting duo of Jennifer Welts and Anne Sullivan who said that they wanted to dig up the remains of Charlie Kirk and shoot him again, or that they praised somebody who said that. 

And then Dave Chappelle said, you know what? You just said he felt better when he was dead. That’s who—when you look at the midterms, that’s what is in control of this country. And the worst thing about it is, those two podcasters then say they’re socialist and they’re radicals, but they’re capitalist. 

And they make a lot of money from their advertisers. So their advertisers, who are left-wing, said to them, We’re gonna get a hit from this, so we want you to retract it. So then they wrote this pathetic I’m sorry, just like that Brazilian. Remember her? Isis something. She came here with her parents, very wealthy. 

She goes to a Turning Point, I guess it was a Charlie Kirk, post-Charlie Kirk’s life event, and she reads a poem where she says, “This is the Kirkiversary, and we’re all celebrating his death.” And then she makes reference to the wound in his neck. Then she tells the host, “You’re very brave to be here without a neck protection brace,” meaning you’re worthy of being killed, too. 

And then, just like these two reprehensible podcasters, she’s worried that she has violated the terms of her visa that say visa holders are not supposed to publicly advocate violence, and she did. And so when word came that the State Department might question her visa, what did she do? She wasn’t all made up and tan-looking and confident and arrogant and brash. 

She was weepy, shaken, and then she gave this pseudo-apology that her lawyer wrote, obviously. But these people are insincere, and that’s who the Left is dealing with. And if you don’t think that we’re dealing with these people, [Abdul] El-Sayed is now the senator from Michigan. He said yesterday that Dearborn is the capital of Arab America. 

What is Arab America? I don’t know what that—I’ve never heard that term. I don’t know any of my Hispanic friends who say Fresno is the capital of Mexico America or Mexican America. What do you mean? What do you mean by that? I’ve heard terms like Irish town and Chinatown for neighborhoods, but what is Arab America? 

And [Hasan Piker’s uncle] was the creator of that ad that said that the Jews, who make up 1% of foreign aid and 1/20th of 1% of the budget, were responsible—Israel, Zionists, da-da-da, our aid to Israel and the people who support it—for the price of eggs and bananas. 

And when you do that, you then lead to what was happening now, as I speak on the 8th of November, a Kristallnacht celebration, the worst episode in the history of the West and the Western trajectory up to World War II in Germany. 

What I mean by that is, you read “Mein Kampf”, or what Hitler said he was going to do to the Jews, and it was more abstract. But on Nov. 10 and 11 of 1938, as we said last time, they became concrete, and they killed hundreds of Jews. They locked—they imprisoned thousands. They destroyed their property. And it’s always seen as the first big step of openly, with the SS and the SA saying, “We don’t care what people think. We’re going to go after Jews.”  

And from Kristallnacht to the doors of Auschwitz was not that long. It was about five years, six years. And then the camps were… 

So now we have people who look at that date, and they’re celebrating it by going into Philadelphia. They have no idea whether the Jewish restaurants and stores that they’re going to target for something—to protest or to ostracize or to stop their bike ride and insult them—they have no idea whether they support Israel or not. 

They’re just picked out for one reason: They’re Jewish. And we don’t hear anybody. Where’s Hakeem Jeffries? He always talks about morality. He’s the new Speaker of the House-elect. What did he say the other day? He used a very unfortunate metaphor because he’s ignorant and he doesn’t know any history. 

I take that back, Jack. His uncle was Lionel Jeffries, and when young Hakeem was in college, he wrote letters endorsing Hakeem Jeffries’ views, which were that white people are genetically inferior and they’re ice people, and sun people have melanin in their skin and they’re morally superior. 

And I don’t blame anybody for their youthful indiscretions, but he should be very careful about his language given his uncle’s pernicious role in race relations in this country. And what did he say? That Stephen Miller, before he’s even opened his mouth as the new chief of staff—and the chief of staff, remember, is the president’s prerogative. 

So he says, and the chief of staff will be working with Congress, he says that he’s a tumor, what, to be excised or to be removed? A tumor. Who said—where do we get the idea that a particular group of people were a cancer that had to be removed from the body politic? Which movement gave—along with rats and insects and things—but who said they were cancer and tumors? 

Couldn’t be the Third Reich, could it? So here you have Kristallnacht reenactment basically coming up, and here you have all of this anti-Semitism and an ad which nobody really in the party has opposed who meant anything, who had any authority. And what does the new speaker of the Democratic House say? 

He uses a Third Reich image of cancer that has to be removed about an individual who hasn’t even done one thing yet as chief of staff. So hold on, everybody, get your seat belts, ’cause this is what we voted for. Not we, us, but these people voted for. They didn’t just vote for affordability. They voted for this stuff, and it’s gonna get pretty, pretty strange. 

Jack Fowler: Yeah. Back on Charlie Kirk, Victor, along the same lines, you see these various social media photographs and videos, the T-shirts now with the blood running down, and groups of teachers taking… Feeling so confident that as teachers at a school X, they can have a group photo glorifying his murder. 

It’s a very, very— 

Victor Davis Hanson: I saw white women, 65 years old, Jack, teachers who were protesting with that T-shirt. It’s not some crazy young person. And you know— 

Jack Fowler: Can you imagine, Victor, if you were wearing a T-shirt glorifying the death of Michael Brown or George Floyd, what would happen? 

Victor Davis Hanson: You’d be killed. 

Jack Fowler: Yeah. 

Victor Davis Hanson: You’d be killed. And this is growing, everyone, because we saw it with Luigi Mangione. They made a little mini symphony or opera or something in San Francisco glorifying him. We had that terrible interview with the ex-Washington Post reporter who said he was good-looking and handsome. 

And he became a star because he murdered a middle-class kid who worked himself up to be the CEO of UnitedHealth, and he’s now a folk hero.  

And so there is something deeply wrong in this socialist leftist movement. It reminds me of the Robespierre brothers who hijacked the anti-monarchist parties in France in 1792, and then from their rhetoric to the guillotine was about five months. 

And so when you see people like Sen. [Elissa] Slotkin say you’re going to go after people who are going to work for Trump, who are going to work in Congress or work in the administration, or Susan Rice saying we’re going to go after CEOs, or today in, I think it was The Wall Street Journal, it was reported that there are people who are going to go after the Trump—or maybe it was another venue I just read this morning. 

They’re going to go after the Trump family, which, if they’ve done anything wrong, they need to be held accountable, but as a way of going after CEOs. And you can see what already happened. The governor of Texas was warning Elon [Musk]  that she’s going to take measures that are going to make it very hard for him to do business. 

And then the Europeans said today that they’re going to be taxing him huge fines. And he said, “Fine, then I’m canceling all of the rocketry data that’s needed that you use from my satellites.” 

And basically, then they said, “We’re going to do this and this to you.” And then he said, “Try sending a five-ton package into space from Europe with your capability.” 

And of course, what he was saying was, “My SpaceX launched more satellites last year than the entire world put together, and it was about 10 to one.” And so, we’re headed for some very strange things.  

When they say we’re going to go after these people, they mean it. They really do. 

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