Victor Davis Hanson: Europe’s Immigration Revolt Is Just Getting Started

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.

Jack Fowler: Victor, yesterday, big win for the—This is how the Associated Press calls it—the anti-mass migration Alternative for Germany party. There was an election in the state of, where the heck is it? Saxony something or other. Oh, Saxony-Anhalt. And they pulled 44% of the vote. Not a majority. 

The rest of the vote split between the Christian Democrats, the Union, which was the [Friedrich] Merz party. Their numbers from the prior election were down by half. So there’s question of how… Will a coalition be cobbled together that’ll allow AFD to govern? Of course, it’s policy for everyone that they will not allow this party to govern.  

But anyway, Victor, you’ve talked before about the people of Europe are saying, “We’re done. We’re done.” Your thoughts on this election? 

Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, I think they should look at the United States. And that was one of the things that I think people would like about the book. I tried to show step by step by step, the more you said Trump was Hitler, the more you tried to get him off the ballot, the more you waged five courtroom lawfares against him, the more you raided his home, the more people tried to kill him, at each increment, his popularity increased. 

And that’s what’s happening in Europe. Everybody is sick of this. And what is this? Open borders, illegal immigration, green energy, destroying the competitiveness of European businesses and corporations through expensive energy that’s not reliable.  

And I’ll say one of the things that the Alternative for Deutschland is doing is they want to get out of NATO. 

I mean, I don’t know if they want to get out of NATO yet, but they want to get out of the EU now, and that was a big issue. And because they feel it’s basically an unelected group of bureaucrats that’s running it for their own benefit.  

But the point is they’re gonna try to suppress this and suppress this and suppress this, and therefore it’s gonna get stronger and stronger. 

It’s gonna happen in France. I think [Emmanuel] Macron will be out, his party will be out, the British left will be out. This crazy Spanish prime minister, [Pedro] Sanchez, will be out. [Georgia] Meloni will probably survive because she was able to kind of have a war with Trump, but she’s still conservative. 

I don’t know what’ll happen. But it’s an existential question now. The people really do believe they will not survive as Europe unless they… And some people in the United States say, “Well, we have 16, 17% of the population immigrants, and we’re struggling with this, but some of these countries only have eight or nine.” 

Yes, but they don’t have any experience with our melting pot, with mass immigration that formed this country. And so this is a new experience for them, and it’s not a good experience. You know, I was watching a British mystery, “Endeavor.” It’s about the first years of Inspector Morris. 

It’s a series, and it was [set] in 1916 and ’17. And throughout the series, it went on for, I think, seven or eight years, maybe nine years, I can’t remember. But it talks about… And all of British TV is left center. So basically, one of the constant themes is how wonderful people are who were immigrants in, say, 1915. 

It takes place a little earlier. It was filmed in 2017, but it’s more about the 1960s and ’70s. That’s the locale. That’s the dramatic date. So that was when it first started. And you know what the attitude is? All of these white racists are terrible. They treat these noble Pakistanis and noble Ugandans, but there’s not very many of them. 

So it’s very easy to champion open borders, see? And that is how it started. But when that reached a critical mass, then people became emboldened and said, “Why do I have to hide what I feel about Islam? I don’t have to hide it anymore. We’re in the majority in certain cities in England. We’re gonna just say it.” 

It’s kind of like [Abdul] El-Sayed. We run Central Michigan.  

Jack Fowler: Right.  

Victor Davis Hanson: So I’m not gonna hide it anymore.  

The immigration today is different, and the Germans understand that it’s not intended to assimilate, acculturate, and integrate. It’s intended to create their own culture from their homelands and do it as a parasitical entity that takes the economic prosperity of free-market Western European or Eastern European capitalism and freedom and security, and within that embryo that it has an umbilical cord that gives it money, welfare, protection, you name it, then they can create a little Egypt or a little Saudi Arabia or a little Iraq or a little Syria. 

And then once they establish that, they can grow it a little bit bigger and then a little bit bigger and then a little bit bigger. Now, some of you are going to say, “Well, at some point, don’t they understand that if they don’t change and integrate, all they’re going to do is grow misery like they did in their home country?” 

Yes, but that doesn’t mean they’re gonna stop. Right. They will grow it to a point where the entire system falls down. Collapses. And look at Los Angeles. People said, “There’s only not that many homeless people. There’s not that many unassimilated immigrants. There’s not that many people who are booing the United States when they play soccer against Mexico.” 

Yes, but that group grew and grew and grew, and now it’s reached critical mass, and people left and left and left. And there is no umbilical cord that can save Los Angeles because the people who are running Los Angeles don’t want to integrate in many cases, or they’re so hard left they don’t like the United States. 

But there’s not enough people in California now to lift, to allow the whole LA Basin to be anathetical to America anymore.  

Jack Fowler: Yeah.  

Victor Davis Hanson: And you can see what’s happening. When you have tribal chauvinism and tribal racism, these tribes then turn on each other. And I think, Jack, you pointed out… 

Jack Fowler:  Well, like blacks and Latinos in LA, there’s a thing going on. 

Victor Davis Hanson: Yes. You would think that in a normal world, especially when 35% of the California population is white, that when Hispanics want to have an athletic event, a run, a half marathon, marathon, whatever, and it goes through or starts from an area heavily black, which is only 3% now of the state, 41 or 42% of the state is Hispanic. 

You would think they would say, the leaders of the black community, “Well, we’re going to try to integrate.” Your worst impression would say, and it would be based on evidence, “Well, they’re all anti-white, so this is an intersectionality harmony.”  

No, it’s not. And then your next impression would be, “Well, nobody would be stupid enough to kick out Hispanics from a black community and risk rising ethnic and racial tensions when that particular group is 15 times larger than my group. 

Jack Fowler: Mm-hmm. 

Victor Davis Hanson: No, they did it anyway. So the black community say, “Get out of here. This is our neighborhood. We don’t want to be gentrified by upscale Mexican-American people who buy our houses.”  

And that’s what’s happening because there’s nobody who says, “Hey, nobody identify by your tribe. You are Americans, and your tribe is irrelevant or incidental. Right. Not essential to who you are.” Not Karen Bass, not Rama, whatever her name is, [Nithya Raman] that’s running for mayor as a socialist alternative. None of them.  

Only Spencer Pratt, who mysteriously lost, I should say, because he was way ahead.  

Jack Fowler: It’s this ignorance, Victor, a lot of people have. And I don’t mean that people are ignorant. 

It’s just, there’s an assumption that blacks and Hispanics in America are all, you know, buddy-buddy, and they’re not. And I get a sense that the hostility from one to the other is more black hostility toward Hispanic than … 

Victor Davis Hanson: I don’t know about that. 

Jack Fowler: No?  

Victor Davis Hanson: I grew up, I mean, living in a Hispanic community. 

My parents were John F. Kennedy civil rights Democrats. And I think I mentioned when Martin Luther King came to Grace Cathedral, they drove us all the way up to San Francisco, and then we were on time, and then somebody called us when we got there and said a black family didn’t have a ride. 

So we went all the way over to Hunter’s Point, picked them up, came back, and by that time, we’d lost our place, and they just pushed me into the cathedral, and I heard him. I was the only one in my family.  

But my point is, they were big supporters, as they should have been, against racism. But when we came home from first, second, third, fourth, fifth grade, I went to school with maybe 90… 

At that particular K through third grade and fourth grade, another school, fourth to sixth, I would say it was 95% Hispanic. It was on the west side of Selma. And I was on the edge of town, so that’s where we went. We should have gone to a farm school, which was mostly ethnic, you know, Armenian, white, Japanese. 

But my parents thought it would be good for us to go to a predominantly Hispanic school because she thought, you know, you have to get along with people. And maybe out of that 300 or 400 kids at school, there were three or four blacks, and they were tormented endlessly. I won’t mention the words in Spanish that were called at them. 

And then I can remember going out on hot days, you know, in May before school got out, and we would play baseball. And a few Mexican American kids, or people, there were a lot of people who were illegal, they would say things like, “I gotta wear a long shirt.” I’d say, “Why? It’s so hot.” 

“My mom said I don’t want to look like a N-word.”  

I had some people work side by side building a concrete wall, and the person said to me, “I won’t work at 3:00 or 4:00 with a short sleeve. I gotta wear a long sleeve,” because he was really sweating. And I thought it was a theory of hydration or something, because my grandfather wore a long sleeve when he was by himself. 

He said, “I don’t wanna get dark like a N-word.”  

Jack Fowler: Yeah.  

Victor Davis Hanson: There was enormous prejudice in the… that was introduced, you know. The Spanish conquistadors had gradations of which indigenous people were dark and which were not so dark.  

And today you’ll see people who will… On the one hand, I’ve had friends, on the one hand, they’re associates, on the one hand they will buy into all of Mexico’s problems were caused by La Malinche and Cortes. 

All the Aztec or indigenous people who joined the awful conquistadors and destroyed the beautiful Aztec culture. And at the same time, they’ll tell me a day later, “You know, my family, the Rojas are my… You know, I’m an Alvarado. I come right from Pedro Alvarado, the red-haired conquistador. 

“And my family was pretty good. We always married people that were Spanish, not Mexican.”  

And, you know, there were 20% of the Mexican-American community, many from northern Mexico, you wouldn’t know the difference between an Irish guy with black hair and a person from Mexico with black hair. They were pure white. 

And they felt that they… And their parents would not let them, when I got to high school, they did not want them dating people who were dark. And so I don’t think it’s just coming from the African American community. 

Jack Fowler: Yeah. Well, you’re intimate with it, know best there, so. 

Victor Davis Hanson: Well, I also have in my extended [family], my brother’s stepchildren, two of them are Mexican American, and my other brother was married to someone who was Mexican American. She passed away.  

And then I grew up, I was kind of free range on the ranch by two people who worked for my grandfather who watched us. 

So we would go out and work, and they would be our supervisors. You know, we would… My grandfather, “Go out to the north 20 and sucker all those vines, and Joe will take you or Manuel will help you.” And they were, you know, kind of our tutors. 

 So we learned a lot about racial things and stuff, and they would, you know, they’d say, “You know, Victor, watch out for the Armenian neighbor. Watch out for that Okie over there. Watch out for the Japanese.” 

Only they didn’t quite use those terms. So you got a tutorial that Mexican American people had as many or as few prejudices as white people. 

The idea that this white supremacy is our problem, that’s not true. Yeah. It’s every single group.  

Jack Fowler: Right. 

Victor Davis Hanson: If they’re allowed to remain in a group and they’re unquestioned, they will have racial chauvinism just like any other group.  

Jack Fowler: But they will claim, especially, I think among the black community, that they are incapable of being racist, you know? 

And that the only people capable of being racist in America are whites, you know? 

Victor Davis Hanson: Well, I would… If you reject the European Renaissance and Enlightenment, and you reject the liberal white tradition, and you say it’s foreign to your culture, then it’s incumbent upon you to show that there are people in your culture that believe in ecumenicalism. 

And I don’t see that as an indigenous tradition myself in Native American or particularly Mexican culture. I don’t see it… The people in black culture, like Martin Luther King, in his early years at least, were an exception, not the rule. And he was losing influence to Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown and the Black Panthers, et cetera. 

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