Democrats and nihilism

Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuQkFMzUP2k

 

Transcript:

I'd like to talk a bit about Democratic nihilism. A lot of it has to do with Trump derangement syndrome. There's something about Donald Trump. I don't know what it is entirely. His Queens accent, his appearance, his utter disdain for the media, the academic world, the deep state, corporate boardroom. I don't know what it is.

But he drives the left into a kind of state of madness.

And you can see it with some of their leaders. They've descended into utter nihilism. There's no consistency.

By that I mean the Democratic Party, such as it is in the last 10 years, at least from the advent of Barack Obama, bears no resemblance to what we saw as lately as the '90s. The '92 and '96 Democratic platforms seem like Republican platforms. "I believe that together we can make America great again." So what has happened?

_____

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.

I'd like to talk for a bit about Democratic nihilism. By that I mean the Democratic Party, such as it is in the last 10 years, at least from the advent of Barack Obama, bears no resemblance to what we saw as lately as the '90s with the '92 and '96 Democratic platforms. They're almost — they seem like Republican platforms. So what has happened? And I think the answer is they descended into utter nihilism.

Take Iran. Last year when Donald Trump had not yet bombed the nuclear facilities in Iran, but had threatened to and then had extended negotiations, the Democrats came up with the word "taco" — Trump always chickens out. And they presented the image of a fickle president that was too afraid to take on Iran, which they said had to be taken on. And then suddenly he did this and now they're calling him a warmonger that's going to cause World War III and destroy the economy.

They have this idea that genocide is being committed by the Israelis at a time of war, but they've said nothing about the Iranian government that slaughtered over 30,000 of their own people. So there's no consistency.

A lot of it has to do with Trump derangement syndrome. TDS.

There's something about Donald Trump. I don't know what it is entirely. His Queens accent, his appearance, his utter disdain for the media, the academic world, the deep state, corporate boardroom. I don't know what it is, but he drives the left into a kind of state of madness.

And you can see it with some of their leaders. Take Gavin Newsom for example. Gavin said he wanted to punch Trump in the mouth. He went over to Europe and said that the Europeans had knee pads as if they were performing some — I guess he meant — foul sex act on Donald Trump. He's completely flipped out. He told a black audience that his test scores were low and therefore no different than theirs. The subtext of that was that you typically as a group have low test scores and I am a white person who has lower than average. So I don't compare myself to people at large but only to you. It's a foolish thing to say.

From time to time, Cory Booker — Spartacus — resurfaces just to scream and yell. The latest manifestation of him is at the airports where he's yelling and screaming about ICE. And you look at all the people's faces and as they pass the ICE officers who are filling in for the unpaid TSA employees, they're happy. They're delighted. And Booker doesn't seem to understand that if you take the crazy left-wing protest out of the picture, ICE wouldn't have to have masks on. They don't have masks at airports because nobody is going around taking pictures of them and trying to dox them so that they could be killed or shot by their enemies, especially the cartels. People think they're doing a great thing. And so they're completely unhinged.

And think of what we see since Donald Trump came back. There has been nothing but the Tesla demonstrations. Remember that? Remember when Donald Trump had a military parade last summer that there was an alternate one that the left staged that was kind of foul? There was the No Kings protest. There were those congressional videos where female members of Congress were kickboxing. There were the ones that said we're going to — on the F-word — foulmouth. We had the other congressional and senator making a video where they essentially advocated for military officers to disobey orders.

This is all the aftermath of the Trump collusion.

Even as I'm speaking today, new developments have come out that the Democrats under Barack Obama and later Joe Biden, they spied on US senators. They spied on representatives. They spied on current FBI director Kash Patel — all in an effort to create a hoax that Donald Trump had colluded with the Russians. And then after that was exposed as a fraud, they went right into impeachment. And then they went right into Russian disinformation in 2020 which was exposed as a fraud. And then they went right into a second impeachment. And then they went into the first trial in US history of a president when he was out of office. And then they did the raid on Mar-a-Lago. First time we've had a president's home residence raided for doing what? Doing what Joe Biden did for 30 years — bringing a few classified files out and under his own ownership or temporary ownership, but much more secure at Mar-a-Lago than it was in Joe Biden's garage.

So we had the five trials. We had the crazy James real estate trial. We had the crazy Alvin Bragg bootstrapping a campaign violation — it's a federal matter — onto a state. We had Fannie Willis's circus in Georgia. We had Jack Smith who's always in the news for some unethical act that he committed while he had this vendetta against Donald Trump. We had the E. Jean Carroll trial which was a fiasco. We had efforts to take him off the ballot in 2020. What I'm getting at is there's no consistent message. There's no one in the Democratic Party saying, "Okay, here is our blueprint for a foreign policy and it differs from the Republicans and it's more suited to the American interests. Okay, we're going to have a new immigration policy and we're going to do the following A, B, C, D. Okay, we have crime has risen under Donald Trump. It's gone to historic lows, but it's not because he's stopped illegal immigration. We have a different theory. And here's what it is. Here's our new Green New Deal 2.0, 3.0. Here it is."

They don't even offer a left-wing agenda. It's just nihilism.

Nihilism.

Nihilism.

There's no coherence.

So what happened to them? What happened to the party of JFK and Harry Truman? Well, we saw what Jimmy Carter did to it, but Bill Clinton tried to restore it and go back to the middle. But I think there's been three or four cosmic changes that have accelerated the destruction of the Democratic Party into a nihilist entity.

The first is that we have opened — under a lot of administrations — the border is wide open. We have the highest number of foreign residents ever in the United States: 53 million, 16% of the population. And it comes at a time when our balloting laws have never been so suspect — that people, whether it's mail-in or early balloting or voter ID, the Democrats want to — they have one consistent position: get as many people to vote with as few reviews of their eligibility as possible. And that is a new big constituency. And that constituency came from places that were poor, autocratic, and need massive inputs of federal subsidies and state subsidies. And that's a viable constituency. We see it on questions of Israel. The new DEI constituency does not like Israel. It's radically changed the Democratic Party. We see it with visiting students. We see it with green card holders.

The second phenomenon was globalization. Globalization from basically the millennium until now rewarded people with a 7 billion person market. If you had skills that could cross borders — if you were in the media, if you could open a university in Dubai, if you had an insurance company that you wanted to have offices in Latin America, if you were a lawyer dealing with global legal terms — anything that dealt with information, finance, media, insurance — you got this. You went from 340 million people, that's today's population in the United States, to 7 billion consumers and customers. And that enriched people along the Blue Coast that had those skills and they made an amount of money that was staggering.

And that gave the Democratic Party the billionaire class.

Go into the Fortune 400. Look at the size of the fortune and the political leanings of the billionaires. They were mostly left-wing and that enriched the coffers of the Democratic Party through foundations and PACs and gave them these boutique issues from green energy to transsexuality that they pushed down our throats — all fueled by money, all without popular support.

And finally, there's a blue state flight. Their paradigm of high taxes, fraudulent entitlements, lax on crime, overregulation leads to poor, unsafe streets, poor schools. People who feel they can't stay in the middle class because their taxes are too high, they can't afford a home — I'm talking about places particularly like Massachusetts, New York, Illinois, and California.

And people are leaving.

And the Democrats are doing what?

They're appealing to a shrinking constituency in local and state politics that has no national resonance. It doesn't resonate with the national population. So if you can't win an election because your agenda either doesn't exist, but more likely if it did exist would offend people as a 70-30 issue — them being on the 30% — you go hysterical. You go nihilistic. You do what the Democrats are doing today.

Thank you very much. This is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.

Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal. Please like, share, and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website at victorhanson.com and subscribe for exclusive features.

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The transcript is now clean, coherent, and easy to read. I corrected obvious transcription errors (e.g., "nealism" / "neelism" → "nihilism", "taco" → contextually left as is but clarified, "World War II" → "World War III", "Marago" → "Mar-a-Lago", names like "Cash Patel" → "Kash Patel", etc.) while preserving Victor Davis Hanson's natural speaking style.

Let me know if you'd like any further adjustments!

Global oil and gas and AI

 

10Δ

@_10delta_

3 weeks ago I argued the US goal in Iran is to seize the global oil spigot. Venezuela in January -> Iran in February. Neutralize every supply channel outside the dollar system within 90 days. Achieve a compliant successor government and complete energy dominance. The oil thesis was the obvious layer. However, when you zoom out & view the last four years as a single sequence rather than isolated geopolitical events, the architecture of the grander US plan becomes visible. 1st was Europe, which laid the groundwork. The Ukraine conflict provided the justification for sanctions that collapsed Russian pipeline gas from 150 billion cubic meters to 40. Then Nordstream was destroyed, which rewired the entire European energy system permanently. The US went from supplying 28% of Europe's LNG in 2021 to 58% by 2025, exporting a record 111 million MTs, the 1st country in history to break 100 MT. Europe was transformed from a customer with options into a captive market now purchasing its survival in USD. 2nd was Syria. The fall of Assad severed the critical node connecting China's Belt & Road Initiative to the Mediterranean. The trilateral railway linking Iran, Iraq & Syria, designed to bypass Western maritime chokepoints, was completely destroyed. This isolated Iran geographically & cleared the path for what came next. 3rd was Venezuela. In January the US effectively took control of the world's largest heavy crude reserves. The US Gulf Coast has the most advanced refining complex on earth, specifically built for heavy sour crude. Phillips 66, Valero & the rest are now positioned to process hundreds of thousands of barrels of Venezuelan crude daily. The US captured a massive strategic reserve & solidified its position as the dominant exporter of refined petroleum products, an industry worth $110 billion in 2025 alone. Venezuela & Iran were the two major oil supply channels that existed outside the dollar system. Both produce heavy crude sold primarily to China & evaded US financial supervision. Both now being neutralized within 90 days, which leads us to.. 4th is Iran & the Middle East energy shock. Israel struck Iran's South Pars gas field, the world's largest natural gas reservoir. Iran retaliated against Qatar's Ras Laffan, the single largest LNG facility on earth, responsible for a fifth of global supply. QatarEnergy's own assessment is that 17% of export capacity is gone and recovery will take up to 5 years. The Strait of Hormuz is closed. European gas prices spiked 70%. Asian spot prices doubled. The only remaining scaled supplier? The United States. If Iran falls & a successor government is installed that the US controls or influences (the Delcy model described weeks ago) then roughly 40 to 45 million barrels per day of global production out of 103 million is effectively under US control. OPEC becomes irrelevant because the US coalition is now the marginal producer. Now add the gas dimension & it goes beyond oil. This war is solidifying the petrodollar system as it evolves into a hybrid petro/LNG-dollar. The old system was built on Saudi crude priced in USD. The new system is built on American crude plus American gas from the Gulf Coast, with no alternative supplier of comparable scale. The dependency is deeper because LNG infrastructure requires long term contracts & regasification terminals that lock buyers into supply relationships for decades. Europe & the Pacific allies (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, etc.) cannot pivot away as there is nowhere left to pivot to. They're now locked into the US energy system. The market confirms this. DXY went from 96 to 101. Gold down ~20% from its January all time high. Bitcoin down 20% on the year. Brent above $100. European & Asian institutions are liquidating precious metals and crypto to buy dollars because they need dollars to buy the only remaining scaled energy supply. The world is selling its gold to buy American energy in American currency. The dollar is now being weaponized through energy dependency. The structural repricing is happening regardless of how the conflict resolves. But the US grand strategy goes deeper.. Artificial intelligence is a physical industry. It runs on power and chips. Data centers require massive uninterrupted baseload electricity, primarily provided by natural gas. Semiconductor fabrication requires helium & rare earths. By choking the Strait of Hormuz & crippling Middle Eastern LNG & helium production, the US is systematically degrading China's ability to power its data centers & fabricate semiconductors at scale. The US is energy self sufficient, especially with newly captured Venezuelan reserves & expanding Gulf Coast capacity running on domestic gas. On the other hand, China is import dependent & every joule it imports effectively now transits chokepoints the US Navy controls.. Iran was the Belt & Road's overland energy bypass, the corridor that allowed China to mitigate the Malacca Trap. With Iran neutralized that corridor is severed. China faces a world where its compute infrastructure competes for scraps on a depleted global LNG market, while American data centers run at full capacity on domestic energy. Russia is next in the sequence. A post-war Iran reopening under US influence competes directly with Russia for the same refineries in China & India at lower cost. Iran's production costs are lower. Russia loses its last structural advantage in heavy crude & its economic lifeline. Additionally, under the Iran war cover, Ukraine has been opportunistically destroying Russian energy infrastructure & all signs point towards Russia being at the end of the line. The message from Washington becomes very simple: we dismantled two regimes in three months, your economy is about to get crushed, sign the Ukraine deal. Then Trump sits down with Xi holding every card. Complete energy dominance. The hybrid petro/LNG-dollar fortified, Iran cleared, Russia cornered, & China facing the Malacca Trap fully closed with no remaining energy bypass. Israel & the GCC are absorbing the kinetic cost of a conflict whose primary beneficiary, counter to the mainstream narrative, is actually America (First). Qatar offline for 5 years reprices the entire global gas market in favor of US exporters for the remainder of the decade. The Gulf states face years of rebuilding. Europe faces its 2nd energy crisis in four years. Sure, the average American might face temporary moderate inflation & higher gas prices. But if you are the architect of the US empire & you view the rise of China & Chinese ASI as an existential winner takes all scenario, the collateral damage is acceptable cost. Whoever controls the energy corridors controls the monetary system. Whoever controls the monetary system & the energy supply simultaneously controls the compute infrastructure that determines which civilization builds ASI first. The US is seizing all 3.

10:23 AM · Mar 26, 2026

Grok

@grok

·

29m

Interesting take connecting dots on energy geopolitics. Factual backbone holds: US oversight of Venezuelan oil post-Maduro capture (Jan '26), Israel strike on South Pars (Mar 18), Iran retaliation hitting Ras Laffan (17% Qatar LNG hit, 3-5yr recovery), Hormuz disruptions spiking prices (Brent ~$112), US LNG now ~58% of Europe's. Syria's Assad fall (Dec '24) disrupts potential Iran-Iraq-Syria routes, though BRI investment there was already minimal. The "coordinated grand plan" for petrodollar 2.0 + AI edge vs China is compelling framing but speculative—events mix opportunism, allies' moves (Israel), and reactions more than flawless 4yr sequence. US energy leverage is real and strengthening, but geopolitics rarely follows one architect's script this neatly. Worth watching how Russia/China adapt.

Steven P. Schrage

@StevenPSchrage

China has readily accessible Russia oil which can help backfill shortfalls. China has also been moving off oil as its source of energy for decades (i.e. see its rise to dominate electric vehicle production). Unlike more regulated and slower moving western bureaucracies, it will not hesitate to move aggressively to nuclear power if needed. The bigger risk is if the U.S. getting bogged down in the Middle East will prompt China to make a move on Taiwan, and cripple U.S. and Western chip and rare earth supplies in the short to mid term. If Russia (the world’s biggest nation and resource power stretching 11 time zones across Eurasia) and China (America’s greatest ever econ and tech rival) are pushed to even more deeply intertwine (something American Grand Strategy has made a priority to impede since Kissinger/Nixon), the U.S. will face far greater challenges than it does now.