The Counter Revolution
A TikTok Video by Victor Davis Hanson
Transcribed with Commentary by Dwight A. Moody
August 20, 2025
We are watching the greatest counter revolution in some 90 years. We have not seen any president try to radically change the political calculous and the nature of government since FDR did it from the Left during the New Deal of the mid-1930s.
Hanson may be right, that the last cultural and political crisis with the seriousness of the current one was the Great Depression. That decade long event was triggered by unhinged and unregulated financial practices; it plunged the nation into years of poverty, despair, and death. In response, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt led the country to create the Social Security Administration, the Public Works Program, Tennessee Valley Authority, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Security and Exchange Commission, National Labor Relations Act, Fair Labor Standards Act, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, and the Civilian Conservation Corps. These programs addressing employment, fairness, wages, and security have been the cornerstones of our country for 80 years.
Trump and his Counter Revolution is, yes, seeking to undermine much of the philosophy of government that created these programs—that government is here to serve and help the people. But his Counter Revolution is also undoing the progress of a second, perhaps less extensive transformation of American life, namely, the Human Rights movements, beginning in the 1950s, that brought new freedoms and opportunities to black people, women, gays, and other minorities. In fact, the current political and cultural movement (of which Trump is the current leader) is that mass of white men, especially, who have rejected the freedoms and opportunities granted to blacks, women, and gays. It is noteworthy that Hanson does not mention any of this more recent history, as I am sure he does not want his Counter Revolution to be connected to the long-standing resistance to civil and human rights. But we all know better: Trump’s anti DEI campaign is just that, a powerful pushback against freedom and opportunity for blacks, women, and gays.
What I mean by that is Donald Trump closed the border; nobody thought it could be done. He closed it. He has now deported over 100 thousand criminal illegal aliens. And another one million of all statuses who were here illegally have self-deported.
This, of course, is both deceitful and fundamentally damaging to our national well-being. Of the current deportation craze, the majority of people deported are not “criminal illegal aliens.” They are hard-working, tax-paying residents, many of whom are in the long process of obtaining legal status, green cards, and even citizenship. Plus, the Trump administration is violating the very basic rule of American life: due process. Again, it is instructive that Hanson never mentions these things. We need a revised immigration process to help many more people stay here and flourish and help our country. Hanson is fundamentally duplicitous in making these claims.
Trump has basically declared war on DEI, and he is winning that argument. He has barred biological males from competing in women’s sports. He has full public support for doing that and is making enormous inroads. The universities are rushing and competing with each other to cut a deal with Donald Trump and to agree to not to gouge the federal government on federal grants through their sur-charges of way over 40% or 50% and to follow Civil Rights legislation of the Supreme Court to not discrimination on race or gender as they do in admissions, hiring, promotion, and tenure, and to be disinterested and to be fair to follow free speech and the Bill of Rights on campus.
This paragraph is full of errors and mis-statement of facts. Yes, Trump has declared war of what he calls DEI, by which he, Hanson, and the MAGA faithful mean the human and civil rights of blacks, women, and gays. They are determined to roll back these hard-fought rights related to voting, housing, employment, enrollment, and military service. One only needs to look at a picture of the MAGA representatives in Congress to see that their party is not hospitable to blacks, women, and gays. They don’t want to embrace these people, and they don’t want you and I to embrace these people.
The Supreme Court, of course, supports their MAGA agenda; the Republican appointees to the Court were carefully chosen to rule in this way (even though they refused to own up to this in their Senate hearings). This politicalization of the Court is a serious danger to our country, and it will take decades to strip it of its MAGA agenda.
What am I getting at? Donald Trump is winning on all these social and cultural issues.
This is a lie. The two big issues are abortion and gay marriage. Hanson, Trump, and MAGA are against them both, but by a 2-1 majority, the American people support abortion rights and gay rights. In fact, after the overturning of abortion rights, three red states held public referendums on abortion, and all three states enshrined abortion rights in the state constitution: Ohio, Kansas, and Missouri. The same would happen in every state if they were allowed to vote.
Abroad, we see that Iran no longer poses a nuclear threat for the immediate future, that Israel’s enemies, whether Hezbollah, Hamas, or Houthis are in disarray, or severely [???], that Iran is no longer a threat to the gulf states or to Israel, at least for the immediate future. And we see some progress with the Ukrainian war.
Isn’t it odd that Hanson fails to mention Gaza? Why? He fails to mention the Palestinians. Why? It may be true that the region is more safe now that Iran has been struck, but US meddling in the Middle East has a way of backfiring. I doubt that anything there is nailed down for long, and the indifference to the suffering of the Palestinian people is our own wickedness.
People are angry about this counter revolution for two reasons.
First, it is succeeding, and it is succeeding beyond anybody’s wildest expectation. Naysayers, like the Wall Street Journal newspaper which said that we would be in a recession now, that tariffs would cause a trade war, that we would see the stock market collapse, but the opposite has happened. Fifteen trillion dollars of foreign investment has been promised, and 300 billion dollars in tariff revenue is anticipated. We don’t know the eventual effects of these new tariffs, but for now all of the economists who predicted doom and gloom were wrong. All of our cultural critics who said the universities would be destroyed by Donald Trump, that he would arrest innocent people who just happened to forget to get a visa, he wouldn’t go after criminals: they are wrong, too. So, people are angry about this counter revolution because it is working.
It is too early to tell whether this Revolution is succeeding. The Revolutionaries spent fifty years building a coalition for this crusade: mobilizing churches, creating organizations, clarifying agendas, and grooming leaders. The opposition is just now taking the MAGA threat seriously and just now organizing, mobilizing, and operating. If we have elections in 2026 and 2028, it is highly likely these MAGA warriors will be thrown out of office.
It is true that there has been no economic crisis, yet. It might be too early. We shall see in another six months.
But there is another reason why they are angry. It is not addressing [just] the symptoms, as he did in the first administration. He doesn’t have people around him as he did in the first administration—Rex Tillerson, Bill Barr, (a good man, but Bill Barr was not on the MAGA agenda), Jim Mattis, people like Anonymous Miles Taylor. All of these people who thought that they knew better than Donald Trump and t2hey would either stop what he was trying to do or reinterpret what he was trying to do. In other words, he [now] has a team that is devoted to his counter revolution, more importantly to the symptoms of the progressive project.
This is the first true paragraph in Hanson’s speech. Yes, Trump has put in place an extensive cohort of leaders, people who lead with a crude and mean spirit, unelected comrades who are merely trying to make money off of this movement (think, Musk!), and squadrons of masked men who have become comfortable with a level of cruelty not seen in the United States since southern segregation and lynching.
The symptoms of the progressive project are not just the Democrats exercising power in Congress or in the White House. It is how they get that power, and they get that power through PBS and NPR, now defunded. Cable news and slanted networks now under assault when they lie and face court ramification. The universities that indoctrinate people now facing large fines, taxes on their endowments, and new attention toward student loans (a 1.7 trillion dollar program), surcharges, as I said, and segregation on campus in dorms and graduation ceremonies. The Universities are now under scrutiny. We are seeing the department of education itself being questioned.
Cable news is slanted, he says, and here he forgets just how much money his own news organization—Fox—has been forced to pay because of their inaccuracies and defamation. Universities indoctrinate people, he says, and here he ignores the glory of American higher education, drawing millions of students from around the world who want to learn at our universities and research in their labs. Hanson, of course, apparently wants all American higher education to resemble that little white school in Michigan, Hillsdale College.
As I mentioned before, in addition to education and the media, Donald Trump is attacking the very idea that residency is synonymous with citizenship. That if you came here illegally, if you reside illegally, then you are eventually going to face a deportation, even if you have not been a violent criminal, even if you have not been served with deportation papers.
The war against immigrants is very unpopular. Yes, we do not like open borders, but Americans appreciate immigrants and want a simpler and quicker way for them to become legalized as residents and citizens. We do not like the concentration camps around our country and around the world. They represent the failure of our democracy rather than the success of our justice system. We want due process and a path to citizenship for all persons.
What Trump is trying to do is tell the American people that the Left exercises power even when they do not control government, any branch of government, they exercise power even though on most of the issues, if not all of them, their constituency is only 40%. The majority of the American people oppose their agenda, and they do this through the bureaucracies, through the media, through the universities, and through popular culture. These are the very sources that Donald Trump is asking them to reform. The government is going to shrink, the government is going to get out of the media business, the government is going to take a hard look to see who wants to obtain federal funds.
Yes, that part of government that provides services to people is shrinking, but that part of government that tracks down people, arrests them, and throws them into jail is expanding. Is this what we want? I don’t think so, and it is this double direction that is pulling down support for the MAGA revolution. There is no part of the MAGA agenda now in full mode that can be considered helpful to citizens, that can provide services to people, that can make our air and water cleaner, our food and medicine safer, our people happier and more content. Trump and his MAGA people have brought to our public life a crudeness and cruelty, and corruption and incompetence we have not seen in generations. The Resistance is just now taking shape.
We are going to see the Counter Revolution I think succeed, with one caveat. We are going to see in the next year a frenzy, a frantic almost out of mind from the Left because they know that if this counter revolution succeeds it will be very difficult for them to push an unpopular agenda down the throat of the American people.
So, brace yourself. We are looking at the resistance coming up to the Counter Revolution, and it is going to be fearless and unhinged.
Here, finally, Hanson is right. The Resistance is going to be fearless and frenzy. It is going to mobilize more people and more dollars that Trump and his MAGA people imagine, and I am glad to be a part of this powerful movement. Bring it on!
The Counter Revolution
A TikTok Video by Victor Davis Hanson
Transcribed with Commentary by Dwight A. Moody
August 20, 2025
We are watching the greatest counter revolution in some 90 years. We have not seen any president try to radically change the political calculous and the nature of government since FDR did it from the Left during the New Deal of the mid-1930s.
Hanson may be right, that the last cultural and political crisis with the seriousness of the current one was the Great Depression. That decade long event was triggered by unhinged and unregulated financial practices; it plunged the nation into years of poverty, despair, and death. In response, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt led the country to create the Social Security Administration, the Public Works Program, Tennessee Valley Authority, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Security and Exchange Commission, National Labor Relations Act, Fair Labor Standards Act, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, and the Civilian Conservation Corps. These programs addressing employment, fairness, wages, and security have been the cornerstones of our country for 80 years.
Trump and his Counter Revolution is, yes, seeking to undermine much of the philosophy of government that created these programs—that government is here to serve and help the people. But his Counter Revolution is also undoing the progress of a second, perhaps less extensive transformation of American life, namely, the Human Rights movements, beginning in the 1950s, that brought new freedoms and opportunities to black people, women, gays, and other minorities. In fact, the current political and cultural movement (of which Trump is the current leader) is that mass of white men, especially, who have rejected the freedoms and opportunities granted to blacks, women, and gays. It is noteworthy that Hanson does not mention any of this more recent history, as I am sure he does not want his Counter Revolution to be connected to the long-standing resistance to civil and human rights. But we all know better: Trump’s anti DEI campaign is just that, a powerful pushback against freedom and opportunity for blacks, women, and gays.
What I mean by that is Donald Trump closed the border; nobody thought it could be done. He closed it. He has now deported over 100 thousand criminal illegal aliens. And another one million of all statuses who were here illegally have self-deported.
This, of course, is both deceitful and fundamentally damaging to our national well-being. Of the current deportation craze, the majority of people deported are not “criminal illegal aliens.” They are hard-working, tax-paying residents, many of whom are in the long process of obtaining legal status, green cards, and even citizenship. Plus, the Trump administration is violating the very basic rule of American life: due process. Again, it is instructive that Hanson never mentions these things. We need a revised immigration process to help many more people stay here and flourish and help our country. Hanson is fundamentally duplicitous in making these claims.
Trump has basically declared war on DEI, and he is winning that argument. He has barred biological males from competing in women’s sports. He has full public support for doing that and is making enormous inroads. The universities are rushing and competing with each other to cut a deal with Donald Trump and to agree to not to gouge the federal government on federal grants through their sur-charges of way over 40% or 50% and to follow Civil Rights legislation of the Supreme Court to not discrimination on race or gender as they do in admissions, hiring, promotion, and tenure, and to be disinterested and to be fair to follow free speech and the Bill of Rights on campus.
This paragraph is full of errors and mis-statement of facts. Yes, Trump has declared war of what he calls DEI, by which he, Hanson, and the MAGA faithful mean the human and civil rights of blacks, women, and gays. They are determined to roll back these hard-fought rights related to voting, housing, employment, enrollment, and military service. One only needs to look at a picture of the MAGA representatives in Congress to see that their party is not hospitable to blacks, women, and gays. They don’t want to embrace these people, and they don’t want you and I to embrace these people.
The Supreme Court, of course, supports their MAGA agenda; the Republican appointees to the Court were carefully chosen to rule in this way (even though they refused to own up to this in their Senate hearings). This politicalization of the Court is a serious danger to our country, and it will take decades to strip it of its MAGA agenda.
What am I getting at? Donald Trump is winning on all these social and cultural issues.
This is a lie. The two big issues are abortion and gay marriage. Hanson, Trump, and MAGA are against them both, but by a 2-1 majority, the American people support abortion rights and gay rights. In fact, after the overturning of abortion rights, three red states held public referendums on abortion, and all three states enshrined abortion rights in the state constitution: Ohio, Kansas, and Missouri. The same would happen in every state if they were allowed to vote.
Abroad, we see that Iran no longer poses a nuclear threat for the immediate future, that Israel’s enemies, whether Hezbollah, Hamas, or Houthis are in disarray, or severely [???], that Iran is no longer a threat to the gulf states or to Israel, at least for the immediate future. And we see some progress with the Ukrainian war.
Isn’t it odd that Hanson fails to mention Gaza? Why? He fails to mention the Palestinians. Why? It may be true that the region is more safe now that Iran has been struck, but US meddling in the Middle East has a way of backfiring. I doubt that anything there is nailed down for long, and the indifference to the suffering of the Palestinian people is our own wickedness.
People are angry about this counter revolution for two reasons.
First, it is succeeding, and it is succeeding beyond anybody’s wildest expectation. Naysayers, like the Wall Street Journal newspaper which said that we would be in a recession now, that tariffs would cause a trade war, that we would see the stock market collapse, but the opposite has happened. Fifteen trillion dollars of foreign investment has been promised, and 300 billion dollars in tariff revenue is anticipated. We don’t know the eventual effects of these new tariffs, but for now all of the economists who predicted doom and gloom were wrong. All of our cultural critics who said the universities would be destroyed by Donald Trump, that he would arrest innocent people who just happened to forget to get a visa, he wouldn’t go after criminals: they are wrong, too. So, people are angry about this counter revolution because it is working.
It is too early to tell whether this Revolution is succeeding. The Revolutionaries spent fifty years building a coalition for this crusade: mobilizing churches, creating organizations, clarifying agendas, and grooming leaders. The opposition is just now taking the MAGA threat seriously and just now organizing, mobilizing, and operating. If we have elections in 2026 and 2028, it is highly likely these MAGA warriors will be thrown out of office.
It is true that there has been no economic crisis, yet. It might be too early. We shall see in another six months.
But there is another reason why they are angry. It is not addressing [just] the symptoms, as he did in the first administration. He doesn’t have people around him as he did in the first administration—Rex Tillerson, Bill Barr, (a good man, but Bill Barr was not on the MAGA agenda), Jim Mattis, people like Anonymous Miles Taylor. All of these people who thought that they knew better than Donald Trump and t2hey would either stop what he was trying to do or reinterpret what he was trying to do. In other words, he [now] has a team that is devoted to his counter revolution, more importantly to the symptoms of the progressive project.
This is the first true paragraph in Hanson’s speech. Yes, Trump has put in place an extensive cohort of leaders, people who lead with a crude and mean spirit, unelected comrades who are merely trying to make money off of this movement (think, Musk!), and squadrons of masked men who have become comfortable with a level of cruelty not seen in the United States since southern segregation and lynching.
The symptoms of the progressive project are not just the Democrats exercising power in Congress or in the White House. It is how they get that power, and they get that power through PBS and NPR, now defunded. Cable news and slanted networks now under assault when they lie and face court ramification. The universities that indoctrinate people now facing large fines, taxes on their endowments, and new attention toward student loans (a 1.7 trillion dollar program), surcharges, as I said, and segregation on campus in dorms and graduation ceremonies. The Universities are now under scrutiny. We are seeing the department of education itself being questioned.
Cable news is slanted, he says, and here he forgets just how much money his own news organization—Fox—has been forced to pay because of their inaccuracies and defamation. Universities indoctrinate people, he says, and here he ignores the glory of American higher education, drawing millions of students from around the world who want to learn at our universities and research in their labs. Hanson, of course, apparently wants all American higher education to resemble that little white school in Michigan, Hillsdale College.
As I mentioned before, in addition to education and the media, Donald Trump is attacking the very idea that residency is synonymous with citizenship. That if you came here illegally, if you reside illegally, then you are eventually going to face a deportation, even if you have not been a violent criminal, even if you have not been served with deportation papers.
The war against immigrants is very unpopular. Yes, we do not like open borders, but Americans appreciate immigrants and want a simpler and quicker way for them to become legalized as residents and citizens. We do not like the concentration camps around our country and around the world. They represent the failure of our democracy rather than the success of our justice system. We want due process and a path to citizenship for all persons.
What Trump is trying to do is tell the American people that the Left exercises power even when they do not control government, any branch of government, they exercise power even though on most of the issues, if not all of them, their constituency is only 40%. The majority of the American people oppose their agenda, and they do this through the bureaucracies, through the media, through the universities, and through popular culture. These are the very sources that Donald Trump is asking them to reform. The government is going to shrink, the government is going to get out of the media business, the government is going to take a hard look to see who wants to obtain federal funds.
Yes, that part of government that provides services to people is shrinking, but that part of government that tracks down people, arrests them, and throws them into jail is expanding. Is this what we want? I don’t think so, and it is this double direction that is pulling down support for the MAGA revolution. There is no part of the MAGA agenda now in full mode that can be considered helpful to citizens, that can provide services to people, that can make our air and water cleaner, our food and medicine safer, our people happier and more content. Trump and his MAGA people have brought to our public life a crudeness and cruelty, and corruption and incompetence we have not seen in generations. The Resistance is just now taking shape.
We are going to see the Counter Revolution I think succeed, with one caveat. We are going to see in the next year a frenzy, a frantic almost out of mind from the Left because they know that if this counter revolution succeeds it will be very difficult for them to push an unpopular agenda down the throat of the American people.
So, brace yourself. We are looking at the resistance coming up to the Counter Revolution, and it is going to be fearless and unhinged.
Here, finally, Hanson is right. The Resistance is going to be fearless and frenzy. It is going to mobilize more people and more dollars that Trump and his MAGA people imagine, and I am glad to be a part of this powerful movement. Bring it on!
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