Victor Davis Hanson Tells Tucker Carlson Why He Left the National Review (and Was Happy to Leave)

National Review continues running Hanson's syndicated column. Many believe they do this cynically, to suggest that Victor Davis Hanson is still with National Review, when in fact he left them, and for ideological reasons, not financial ones.

The syndicated column, anyone can run that, if they pay the subscription for it.

But he's not with them any more. He left that organization.

Video at RCP; excerpts from their transcription below.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: As far as your other question, yeah, I lost all those friends.

TUCKER CARLSON: Really?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I left the National Review this year after 20 years and I think they were happy to see me leave too.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why did you leave National Review?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Because there were certain issues that would pop up occasionally, and I could predict what the answer was going to be. The Covington kids. I just sensed that before we knew anything, people would come and condemn them. Or the Access Hollywood tape--

TUCKER CARLSON: People at National Review condemned the Covington kids?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I think there were certain people in the Republican movement, or establishment, who felt it is their duty to internally police their own, and that's kind of a virtue signal to the left.

We are just part of your class, we share the same values as you do, and we keep our crazies. And they are not empirical.

You saw it on January 6. We all condemn that baffoonish riot. But within two weeks, I said to myself Ashli Babbitt was shot unarmed and we don't know anything about the policeman, we don't know anything about the report. When a policeman shoots somebody unarmed, there are pictures everywhere.

TUCKER CARLSON: No warning, by the way.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: They're having Officer Sicknik lie in state, but I want to know where is the evidence is that he was killed? He wasn't killed, he died of a stroke --

TUCKER CARLSON: National Review wasn't on that?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: No. No. An "armed insurrection." There were no weapons found on the people they arrested.

They are not even being charged and tried with dispatch. There are sitting in purgatory.

So these issues, I would get angry about, and I would try to convey that anger, but I think ... a lot of them felt it was their duty as Republican establishmentarians to tell the world they didn't approve of Donald Trump's tweets or his crudity.

My message was always: But, it's good for the middle class.

He's kind of like a Shane or Magnificent Seven or High Noon, he's a gunslinger we hired and we are the townspeople that are impotent and he came in with certain skills. And he started to have success and now we have the luxury of saying we don't like the fact that he has a six-gun. But he has to ride off into the sunset.

But they didn't -- there were other issues I think they felt were more important, so I think it was a good parting for both of us.

TUCKER CARLSON: What issues did they think were important?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I don't know, I think there's an image that a lot of Republicans have, both in politics and they sort of represent a sober and judicious way of looking at the world, and we are the adults in the room.

And it's more about a culture than it is an ideology.

The original Republican conservative movement, I thought, was going to go back and look at the Constitution, when Jefferson said it won't work if you pile up everybody in the cities because they will be subject to mass hysteria. Or de Tocqueville, and you look at certain ideas, I thought that's what we were.

I thought they would be champions of the middle class, but I don't think they were. I don't think they wanted to be.

Dave Reaboi had an observation: National Review was founded not to persuade the general citizenry, but to persuade a specific microscopic subset of it: New York City based liberal intellectuals and the monied class generally.

And, I would add, as New York City based liberal intellectuals and the monied class moved further and further left -- particularly on issues of culture, including immigration -- National Review moved left to keep within a stone's throw of them. After all, you cannot hope to persuade anyone you are diametrically opposed to on every issue.

When the New York City Liberal Intellectuals and the monied class they are embedded with (and sometimes literally in bed with) decided, for example, that deporting illegal aliens and building a border wall was "racist," National Review changed its views to align with this New York City Liberal Intellectual consensus.

National Review now finds itself as the proponent of a brand of watered-down, socially-liberal "conservatism" that is officially Safe for New York City Liberal Intellectuals (TM).

This, quite obviously, is not conservatism at all. And thus, their greatly reduced readership and vanishing influence with actual conservatives.

But I wish them all good luck in their future careers.

posted by Ace at 03:56 PM

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