Victor Davis Hanson: France’s Left Learns Rioters Don’t Check Voting Records

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a segment from today’s edition 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, two things I came across today, and I don’t know if it’s apocryphal, one of these made-up sayings, but I’d never seen it before. But Charles de Gaulle, in 1959, talking about Muslims in France, compared it to a salad dressing, the oil and vinegar, and you could take it and shake it up, and it’s mixed, but eventually, the oil and vinegar separate. And that was his view of what France would become: an unassimilable Muslim population. Not that he did anything about it.

Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, he was actually—he allowed a million Muslims from Algeria to come into the country.

Fowler: Right.

Hanson: And after the collapse of the Pied-noirs in Algeria. And he didn’t even have a—at least Spain had a coastal enclave so that they could monitor immigration, although the current prime minister is destroying it. But he just pulled everybody out and then brought a million people with him.

Fowler: Yeah.

Hanson: And that gave a signal. It’s a very strange—I think everybody that’s listening is as confused as I am.

It’s a very, very strange mindset that somebody comes to the United States from a place where there’s no security, there’s no freedom, and there’s no prosperity, and suddenly this host gives them lavish health, educational, food, and housing subsidies, and almost immediately they—and I’m generalizing, I understand, but it seems like it’s the majority now—they enlist in the Left, and they start lecturing the Indigenous population about everything that’s wrong with your country.

It’s the worst country, said [Rep.] Ilhan Omar. I hate—God knows I hate the United States, says Hasan Piker. [New York City Mayor] Zohran Mamdani, you know, giving us lectures about everything that’s wrong with our immigration laws.

You’d think they’d have a little humility and gratitude, like most of the traditional immigrants. I hope—we have 53, 55 million that weren’t born in the United States. I hope the majority, and I think they are—I know so many wonderful immigrants.

But it’s very hard for people to come from a particular region en masse and then create a ghetto or an enclave and claim it as their little toll inside America and say to America: We want your economic prosperity. We are going to have freedom for ourselves as protected by your Constitution, and we, of course, have security, so we won’t have tribal warfare. The next village or town won’t kill us, or a dictator won’t. But that said, we’re not gonna assimilate. We’re just going to expand, expand, and make our little home country inside America, recreate it.

Fowler: Yeah.

Hanson: And it’s—

Fowler: And not only enjoy these expensive benefits, Victor, but then … [commit] fraud. Engage in these hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud, all these various autism daycare centers. … Birth—we’re gonna talk about birth tourism later.

Yeah. I mean, the immigrant communities of Somalia and others are, they’re just unfathomable, what they’re doing here and their contempt for America.

Hanson: I know it. And I was listening to the woman running in Colorado and Upstate New York. One is from Ethiopia, and I think one is—I don’t know where she’s from. But they can’t finish a sentence without “white, white, white,” or, like Mamdani, “I’m gonna go after white neighborhoods.”

So, when I was collating all these things, I asked myself, I guess they have statistics that show that the host white population and their resentment is committing all these crimes. But when I looked at the fraud, and I looked at hate crimes, and I looked at interracial crimes, it turns out that the so-called Indigenous white population is overrepresented as victims, underrepresented as victimizers, underrepresented as crime perpetrators, overrepresented as victims of crime, with one exception.

In the black community, most black violent crime is committed against other blacks. But in interracial crime, it’s committed overwhelmingly against whites, about 7 to 1, depending on the—

And so, what I’m getting at is there’s this hatred of the Indigenous population, if I can use that term, or what they call “white, white, white,” that they’re so obsessed with, but they don’t produce data that show that this particular targeted population is doing all these bad things to them, other than the Left.

I mean, the Left is giving them the proverbial caricature of a Karen, a very, very wealthy, liberal, affluent woman who feels terrible about the plight of the world and votes a strict left-wing ticket no matter what. And I guess she’s white and she’s exempted, but there’s a racial element of hatred, and I don’t quite get it.

And the hatred, that’s why there’s no assimilation. And I think it’s the wages, Jack, of—it’s almost like all of these things we’ve just been putting fuel on. We’ve been making a big bonfire—wood, fuel, gasoline—and it got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger with the DEI, the separate graduations, the separate dorms, the hyphenated names, the cultural appropriation.

And we just—it was just insidious. We just said: OK, that’s kind of silly. Safe spaces, yeah, we understand. OK, if you’re blonde, you can’t have cornrows. We get that.

And then it just exploded. The match, it just exploded now, and it’s exploding in Europe. It’s exploding, as we see in this election cycle.

And I’m not exempting the socialists. The socialists are the people who are the puppet masters in Europe. And I think here too. Big money, big money—the Soroses and the Singhams and all those people.

Fowler: Yeah. We’ll get into that in a second, Victor, but just to pick up on your Karen, lefty Karen line of an American, but I’m sure the one outside of pure fires, videos of fires of the Limoges town hall, etc., there’s that one video going around of the woman, the shopkeeper—

Attractive middle-aged woman who is saying, “Please, no, stop. But I’m one of, you know, I supported you.”

And she thought, as you’ve talked about many times, the lefties think that they are immune by voting to let this madness into the country, by voting Left. Somehow they’ll be exempt. Somehow they bought insurance.

But it’s come to bite them in the hiney,

Hanson: It reminds me of Danton or St. Just or some of the early revolutionaries trying to reason with the Jacobins. But I’m one of you. But I agree with you. No, put your head down. We’re chopping it off.

These revolutions get more—they always eat their own as they get more and more radicalized until they’re so incoherent they blow up, and we’re getting to that point where they’re gonna blow up.

I think this is gonna affect the midterms, I really do, because I think if the word gets out, and you can see it on—I know today I went on the internet and looked at some of the coverage. You can really see that CBS, ABC, AP, CNN—they don’t want to cover this. And to the extent they do cover it, they talk about students not having enough books.

Did you see the looting of the Louis Vuitton store, the handbags that were all coming out? I think somebody had a little meme that said, these are—France didn’t give their students tote bags, so they were forced to go into Louis Vuitton and get bags for their books.

Fowler: And now they’re being sold on some of these secondhand online luxury item resellers.

Hanson: There’s also a racial element and a religious element. There was a—I can’t verify it, so I hesitate because it hasn’t been—but it’s all over social media about Marseille and other places where they’re targeting non-Muslim stores and shops, especially Jewish shops, like Kristallnacht in Germany, but not Muslim shops.

So, if you were to identify your shop or store as Islamic, you would not be touched.

Fowler: Yeah, there is a video that—not here. This is one of our sisters, and then they go off. They’re not—because it’s owned by a Muslim woman.

Hanson: If that’s true, it’s sort of like Germany and Kristallnacht, where they just targeted shops that were Jewish. We’re going really backward.

I do blame also, I’ll be very candid, everybody, I do blame certain—not just the people on the left, but certain people on the right that traffic in all of this antisemitic, Jewish, Jew, Jew, Jew, Jew, Jew.

And if you’re not careful, you’re gonna unleash the animal spirits that are always suppressed, the anti-Semitic violence that occurs if you keep trying to target Jews, Jews, Jews.

Because it’s not like you’re in America in 1950 and you’re targeting Jews, Jews, Jews in the antisemitic tropes. It’s not like “Gentleman’s Agreement” or something like that, the Hollywood film that dealt with it.

We have a large population, minority population, maybe 5 to 7 million, who hate Israel and they hate Jews, and they’re from the Middle East, and they’re pro-Hezbollah and pro-Hamas.

So, when you say the Jews did it and Israel’s evil, it’s not just crazy Americans who are going to get incited. You’re inciting a group of people who are much more serious than you are. And they really do hate Israel, and they hate the West.

When you saw at Limoges the cupola fall, or you saw that—I’ve seen it in Marseille, that very famous statue of Marianne, I think, Marianne. She’s the symbol of the revolution or the republic, excuse me, the French Republic.

And you see the Duomo in Italy, where there’s fire, you know, not very far from that famous Gothic cathedral. You can see that they really do hate this civilization, Western civilization.

And you ask yourself, all of these iconic buildings, it’s like all these Europeans are living in an ancient treasure house, and they’re kind of like museum guards, but they haven’t created—maybe high-speed rail or the Chunnel or something—but what have they created?

They can’t defend themselves. Their economy is shot. Their gas is $9 a gallon, and they have these welfare programs that are not sustainable. Their higher education is not competitive in a global sense.

And the Russians despise—the Russians hate them with a passion because they lecture the Russians, and the Russians think they’re weak.

And the only thing really, to tell you, that’s stopping Russia from going into Europe are two things, three things.

What’s left of the Ukrainian army is down to 28 million people, or 27 million. Thirteen million have left, but they’re fighting heroically.

And France and Britain, for now, they have about, together, about 300 or 400 nuclear weapons, and the United States.

Take those three things away, and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin would just walk through that continent.

And some of the Scandinavians, the Finns and the Swedes, they have very sophisticated arms. But other than that, it’s—

And that really characterizes why they’re so paranoid about Putin and the United States, [Russian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy, all of these melodramas.

They all have a central text that they have destroyed their economies, they’re ashamed of their culture, they have this rioting in their streets, they have this unsustainable immigration, open borders problem, and they can’t deal with it.

Because to deal with it would refute their entire postwar, postmodern leftist dogma, and they’re just paralyzed.

Fowler: Yeah.

Hanson: And that’s what—and if you don’t believe me, go play what Jack just mentioned. I’ve watched it twice, [French President Emmanuel] Macron’s speech, and it’s on the one hand, on the other hand; yes, but; of course, maybe.

And it’s just gibberish. It’s gibberish. He thinks that because he’s kind of good-looking, like [California Gov.] Gavin Newsom, and he has his hand gestures, like Gavin, or vice versa, that we’re gonna be convinced?

Fowler: Yeah.

Hanson: Or like [Canadian Prime Minister] Carney—they remind me of, like, the Three Stooges: Carney, Gavin, and Macron. They’re all a lot. You think about it, they all think they’re technocrats.

They’re all empty suits. They all have that sort of, I’m dignified in my really nice, natty suit, but I’m also hip.

And they’re completely incompetent, and they have the Midas touch. Everything they touch turns to dross.

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