Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
This is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.
Have you noticed this phenomenon of the Democrat-socialist party trying to create fake or false or pseudo middle-class candidates?
We saw it in the 2024 campaign when they put Tim Walz in that position. I mean, we were told that he changes his own oil, that he was in the National Guard.
Of course, they didn’t really do a background check because they thought, “Why would we have to? He’s a middle-class, duck-hunting man of the people in Minnesota.”
And then, of course, all of that fell apart when he was an elitist, he was a radical leftist, he lied about his military service, his time in Red China, etc., etc.
We’re watching a little bit of that with [James] Talarico. They were so desperate to take a Senate seat in Texas that the Left thought, you know, Beto [O’Rourke] came off a little too elitist from a wealthy family. We got now Talarico, and he’s a Christian evangelical man of the people.
So, they leaped at him, and they thought, this guy, not Jasmine Crockett. She’s too extreme, we understand that. But he can get through a socialist agenda because he’s a Texan, and he’s Christian, and he’s an evangelical.
No sooner did they get this pseudo middle-class hero than we started to learn that he was obsessed with trans issues, gay issues. He really didn’t tell us much about his past. He said he had a girlfriend. He said he didn’t. We didn’t really know what he was talking about.
Then his social media accounts were opened up, and he had disparaged white people, he had disparaged meat-eating in Texas, etc., etc.
Again, another effort to have a middle-class candidate, who is not middle-class or is not a conservative populist.
The locus classicus was Graham Platner. Two very wealthy, nepo-babies, trust-fund kids in the Democratic Party said, “We’re going to find a working-class hero, and he’s Platner. He’s an oysterman. He’s a veteran. He talks like a regular person. He’s not a nasal-tone person like ourselves. He doesn’t sound like he’s on NPR. He will win. He will win the middle class. We don’t even have to vet him.”
And what do we find out? That he had a Nazi tattoo. He’s a misogynist. He had a history of violence and, perhaps, rape against women. He was antisemitic. He was a disaster, and his whole candidacy collapsed.
Remember Kamala Harris? She told us in 2024 that she wasn’t gonna talk about her prior opposition to deportation or her support of open borders or banning fracking. No, no, no. We had to hear that she worked at McDonald‘s. Where she worked and when, she couldn’t tell us.
She said she had a Glock. Where she bought it, when she bought it, she couldn’t tell us.
What is all this about?
Well, it’s all about that the Democratic, now socialist, Party has a left-wing agenda that does not appeal to 51% of the people. They don’t want it. They don’t want open borders. They do not want biological males in female sports or dressing with teenage girls in locker rooms. They don’t want critical legal theory. They don’t want critical race theory. They don’t want the Green New Deal. They don’t want any of it.
And so, they have to disguise that agenda because they won’t change. And so, they either have to resurrect Joe Biden, the good old Joe Biden from Scranton, Delaware, and use him as a waxen effigy, as a veneer for their leftist agenda, or they have to create a middle-class persona when there is no middle-class persona because they have lost the white working class.
Another problem they have is they talk about billionaires and oligarchs, and they’re for the middle class, but they are the billionaire and oligarchic class.
And usually when you look at where the vast amounts of money are coming, they’re coming from billionaires. Often, they’re divorcees of billionaires, Melinda Gates, or widows like Lisa Jobs or Jeff Bezos’ first wife, who pour hundreds of millions of dollars for leftist causes.
Sometimes they’re in China, like Neville Singham. Sometimes they’re in jail, like Sam Bankman-Fried. Sometimes they should be in jail.
I mean, George Soros was kicked out of France for violating some financial laws. He tried to break the—he did break the Bank of England.
So, they are manipulative capitalist billionaires, and they don’t want to talk about that. They want to disguise it with middle-class candidacies.
And their new socialist veneer is not helping.
[Zohran] Mamdani is a settler-colonialist family in Uganda with an estate on Lake Victoria. He grew up in privilege. Platner grew up in privilege, went to a prep school. His mom is his only client for his $5,000-a-year oyster business.
All of these socialists who’ve come recently from different countries are Ph.D.s, law degrees, upper urban metrosexual elites.
So, here’s the point, though. It’s not class that will solve the left-wing problem.
The problem is that they’re not for the middle class. They’re not for affordable fossil-fuel energy. They’re not for secure borders. They’re not for legal-only immigration. They’re not for voter IDs. They’re not for stopping abortion in the last trimester. They’re not for supporting the military.
They’re not, and what I just said does not win them votes.
And when they want to win votes by acting as if they are one with the middle class, they can’t because they’re not authentic.
Donald Trump is a billionaire, and he was a very, very happy, unapologetic billionaire. But he was authentic in what he did. He always wore a blue suit, a red tie, mostly wingtips. It didn’t matter if he was with poor people, wealthy people, urban, rural people. He didn’t change his voice like Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or Joe Biden.
He is what he is. He is and was, will be what he is.
So, people understand that he was authentic and constant, and he did like and was empathetic to unions in New York and to the middle class.
He wanted to stop China from wiping out the industrial center of the United States. He wanted to use tariffs to protect the middle class. He wanted tax cuts. He wanted deregulation. He wanted energy development for the middle class.
But if you’re not for the middle class and you don’t feel comfortable with the middle class and you use disparagement like clingers, deplorables, irredeemables, garbage, chumps—just quoting from Biden and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama—then you have to create an imaginary aborigine white male working person, a Platner, a Talarico, a Gavin Newsom, a Kamala [Harris].
It doesn’t work. Doesn’t work.
Watch out for this November election. You’re gonna see a lot of hardcore elite socialists that are masquerading as men and women of the people, and it will be as obvious as Platner’s and Tim Walz’s failed efforts.
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