B (3:22)

Well, I grew up on a 130 acre orchard and vineyard farm that my great great grandmother had founded. And we had to work pretty hard. My grandfather was a very weird guy. He had three daughters. One was severely crippled, but he believed that no one would take over the farm, so they had to be educated. That was in the 1930s. So he sent his daughters to Stanford university in the 30s and one got a JD, one got an MA. But then they came back here and raised families. And then, so I grew up in a kind of a weird situation where nobody had been to college except my mother and father. And my mother was a housewife here on the farm in a little tiny house I'm sitting today in my grandparents, great, great grandparents home. But, but I didn't move in here until I was 25. And then my mother became a, you know, she got back into the law. She became a first superior court judge that was a woman. And then she was the first state appellate court judge woman. So I had a kind of a schizophrenic existence of people saying, you gotta go to college. But then my grandparents. And anyway, when I went to UC Santa Cruz, I think that was a mistake. It had just opened as kind of an experimental college. And my father, being a very practical guy, said, you, your twin brother and your brother are all going to go there. You rent a house, you'll save money. So we did. And then I went to Greece for a year, a junior year abroad, and I went to Stanford University and got a full fellowship in classical languages and a PhD program. But when I finished, I was 25 and my grandfather had died and my parents were working in town. So I came home and that time I had my paternal grandfather's little farm. So I farmed with my twin brother who was in a PhD program and he quit. I finished and then the two of us and my cousin ran this, and I did that for five years. And then I'd never been to Cal State, Fresno. I drove up about 35 miles, asked them if I can get a job, and they said no. They had no Latin or Greek program. But finally I weaseled my way into one class and after three more years, I started a classical language program and I did that for 21 years. We had to teach five classes a semester and I hired four when I was 50. I was kind of burned out. I had been teaching nine to 10 semester classes for 20 years. So then John Racian called me up at the out of the blue and he wanted offer me a job at the Hoover. So I've been there for the last 22 years, but I've never moved to Powell. So I have apartment in Palo Alto, but I stay here in the farm. And my siblings moved away, so the farm is all broken up. But the original homestead, that Luciana Davis Homestead in 1870, I have that. The house in 40 acres. It's kind of been an anchor because. And an anchor and a weight because my children, I have two surviving children and they don't really want to come back here. It's a very different landscape than when I grew up. So I don't know what's going to be the future. But I have 40 acres of almonds now. And a few years ago I rented it out. I couldn't keep up with everything.

A (6:53)

So is this the farm you have today? It's a direct lineage from the farm your ancestors got in 1870 as part of the Homestead act, is that correct?

B (7:02)

Yes. Luciana Davis and her husband. My great grandfather, great, great grandfather came out from Missouri right after the Civil War. And they had been on the northern side. And the family lore was that there was a fight after the war and he had, I don't know, been culpable for manslaughter. I shouldn't say that they kept it quiet. So they told him that he had to get the. The northern judge and you know, was the Missouri was a very conflicted state. So the northerners, he fled to California with his wife and then they homesteaded here in the San Joaquin Valley near Fresno. They came out on a wagon and the railroad was selling land for $4 an acre and they bought 130 acres. And then she. He died. They had three children. My great grandfather, Cyrus Davis farmed it until I think about 1910. Then he died suddenly. Then my grandfather, Reese Davis took over. And then I knew him really well. He was a wonderful man. He died in his sleep at 86 in the room that I'm. That I sleep in with my wife. And they had three daughters. So it's direct and I don't know what's going to happen because the city limits are very close now, but were ground zero with illegal immigration. So When I grew up, all the surrounding farms were maybe 30 to 60 acres. They were Greek American, Armenian American, Japanese American. We had an African American tractor mechanic, the Thompson family, that were really close, and we had a lot of people from India had just come, and now it's all been rented out to corporate farms. So I went out to a very wonderful guy, Furman Campos. But he owns 10,000 acres and the families are all gone. And then illegal immigration came in. So most of the houses where I grew up with their families and kids, they are people from Mexico that live there, and they're mostly undocumented.

A (9:16)

So it's very rare that you get a writer, intellectual, that's also a farmer. I think you're the only one that I actually know in the space and the circles that we kind of run in. I'm curious, how has being a farmer impacted your view of government and public policy?

B (9:34)

Well, it was very valuable for me because I grew up thinking my mom would always stress education. My father, he was a World War II veteran. He actually went to University of Pacific and got a master's degree. And then he was in World War II, had a really rough time. So they were telling me, you've got to go to college. But I'd always say, well, you came back here. Why did you come back here? And they didn't want to really answer that question. So when I was 18, I thought, I want to get out of here. I'm tired of doing farm work. I'm tired of this little tiny town. And then I went into this world of the left wing UC Santa Cruz professors, you know, the whole six 70s, late 60s, and then Stanford. And that was very intense. Philological. Mostly my professors were European, but I came back every two weeks. So I had kind of a schizophrenic existence. I think I counted one day that I had come back and forth a 400 mile drive about 50 times a year maybe, and 40 to 50 for 40 years. So I got back and forth like a yo, yo. I couldn't. They were just. They weren't different. They were just antithetical because here everybody had not gone to college. It was muscular. They were tough people. You had to know how to. Well, if you were, you know, if I drove down the vineyard row and one of my neighbors saw me make the turn, he said, ah, you know, you've got it in the wrong gear. Your RPMs are too. Man, it's too dusty. You don't know what the hell you're doing. Then I'd go back and you know, it was. Can you. Can you conjugate the optative mood? And Greek, it was just too much. And then culturally, it took me a long time, and for five years, I didn't. I was just. I didn't go anywhere. I just farmed full time. So when I was 25 to 30. But I guess what I'm. I guess to answer your thing more concisely, I didn't develop. I developed a suspicion of intellectuals, is what I'm trying to say, and their lifestyle, their view that they were not connected with the physical world enough. And I'm not saying that they should have been truck drivers or 7 11, but I got a greater respect from this perspective of the people I grew up with. And I decided that if I saw someone farming 180 acres, as we did, and you have to cover insurance, workforce, theft, security, the weather, soil, you have to know all of these different things. Physical, mental, a lot. And then you compare to being. When I went to Fresno and I heard all these professors saying, oh, I have to teach two classes this semester. Oh, it's so terrible. I just couldn't connect with them. I think the first week I got there at Fresno State, I walked out to my pickup and it was surrounded by campus police. I said, what are you doing? And they said, you have a shotgun in your back of your seat. And we do it because when you're. You know, there's a lot of coyotes and stuff, when you're out irrigating and pit bulls and stuff. But it wasn't loaded, thank God. But they said it was a felony to bring in a loaded weapon on the CSU campus. But that was a big shock. I didn't even think about it, and things like that. I didn't really fit for about five or six years. I don't think I do today. But nevertheless, it's been a schizophrenic life.

A (13:08)

Okay, I want to get into some of the myths and lies that have been abounding about World War II. You. You wrote a book about World War II. I'm not sure how many years ago it was.

B (13:21)

2018, I think.

A (13:22)

2018. Okay. And you know, what's happened in the past year or two is you've got people like Daryl Cooper who have been amplified by Tucker Carlson and others that are basically telling the following story. They're telling the story that World War II isn't quite what you thought it was. We've been sold this meme that we, America, and together with Britain, were the good guys that we won World War II, we defeated a great moral evil.

B (14:02)

And.

A (14:05)

Not only is that not true, what's actually true is that there's basically probably a moral equivalence between the two sides. At best or at worst, we were actually the bad guys. What really happened is that Hitler.

B (14:22)

Had.

A (14:22)

Legitimate grievances around the mistreatment of Germany after World War I, the. The taking of German land and after World War I. And what he really wanted was a local war just around Germany to. To sort of to take back lands where ethnic Germans lived. And perhaps at most, he wanted a war with the East. He wanted a war with Russia. He didn't want a war with France. He didn't want a war with Britain. He certainly had no beef with the United States. And if Britain had just, you know, if Churchill had just stayed out of it, the, you know, World War II wouldn't have really happened. It would have been a small regional war. Far fewer people would have died. The Holocaust wouldn't have happened, and the world in some way would be better for it. So maybe you can just take that chunk by chunk and tell me what's wrong with that.

B (15:20)

Well, what you said is a very good description of the phenomenon of World War II revisionism. The question is, why did this first? Why do. Why do people say these things when the evidence is overwhelmingly antithetical, that position? And I think part of the problem was that we had backed Joseph Stalin. That was a decision that was made. If you look at the discussions, and they were intense in June 22, 1941, we were not in the war. Abruptly, Hitler turned on his partner under the Molotov ribbentrop Pact of August 23, 1939, and he invaded the Soviet Union. People in the United States said, let's keep out of it. This is kind of good. Kind of like what Donald Rumsfeld said about Iraq and Kissinger. Iraq, Iran, war, we hope they both lose. Stalin, we knew, had killed 20 million or so in the great famines and the collectivization. And then Hitler invaded, and then Churchill was trying to persuade us to help Britain get further in the lore. And for that six months we were arguing what our stance should be. And then Pearl harbor abruptly ceased those discussions. And we made the decision to provide a lot of stuff for Joseph Stalin, but not on what the revisionists say. The discussion was that the red army had 400 divisions, and while they probably would lose, they would attrite the German army, and that would be in our interest. After all, they declared war on us right after Pearl Harbor. We didn't declare War on them. And that's exactly what happened. We provided along with Britain 30% of the wherewithal, the Red army, especially ground attack aircraft, radios, C rations. There's certain types of armament they really liked. They like certain brands of Sherman tanks, Air Cobra. Anyway, it was very successful and then the war was over and we discovered that Stalin broke all of the agreements about free elections on occupied Eastern Europe. He did not give back Poland, which was then, which is now Western Ukraine. He did not give it back to Poland. He took it and more importantly he kept all of the agreements with our enemies. He had tried to keep the agreement with Germany, they turned on him. He had a non aggression pact with Japan. He kept that until the last two year weeks of the war. But with the allies that had saved him and all, he, he was not, he was not honest and didn't keep his word. So there was this horrible reaction. People were furious what he had done. Harry Truman said the. That son of a bitch lied to me. And that by 1946 and then what would become the Berlin aircraft. So 50 years of cold War and that period that gestation was. We made a mistake and it was that then carried on after the Cold War where paleo conservatives like Pat Buchanan said well we have all these problems with the border and all this. It was pre Trumpian and we're an empire. And that was all because of World War II, got us tangled up. So it had a long pedigree. Ron Paul was another revisionist. So then Daryl Cooper and a Tucker also had on David Coleman, he's a chemist at Cornell and he had essentially the same message. Why now though? And I think what, what brought revisionism back in these cyclical periods is they believe that they see things like World War II. They think that Israel is drawing us in. I should say there was a subtext Coleman, that when we did back the Soviet Union the argument at the time was the Jews are getting us into this. Because Bolshevik Judaism is the juggernaut behind the Red Arm. Even though Stalin was an anti Semite and even though they had gone after Trotsky, they believe that Jews because of Germany were trying to use the United States to help the communist Soviet Union to destroy Nazi Germany. And Roosevelt's advisor Bernard Baruch and others had been unduly successful. If you look at a movie, the Best Years of Our Lives by William Wyler, 1946, there's an incident in there where the crippled veteran gets in a fist, gets in a fight with Dana Andrews and one of the guys said we, you were taken. You were hat. It's almost coming right out of the mouth of Daryl Cooper. So now this narrative resurfaces to say the Israelis, they do all of these things. They manipulated 9, 11, they manipulated the death of Charlie Kirk. And one of the things they did, they drew us in. We have no problem with the Arab world. So that's the context. And to show you that this is not new, they say we did the same thing happen in World War II, but they won't let us. The Jews did the same thing. They don't tell us and so then they have to fabricate. So when they say Churchill is a terrorist, they mean that he firebombed Hamburg and Dresden. They don't realize Dresden was a military target. It was a long discussion whether they should do that. The first firebombing of Hamburg was in retaliation for the initial. Who introduced firebombing was the Germans. They firebombed Rotterdam in 1940. They had bomb Coventry firebomb. They killed 50,000 British subjects with incendiary raids. And so called Arthur Harris. Bomber Harris had warned them, he said, you have sowed the wind and you're going to reap the whirlwind. And of course the myth started because the United States came in late in April 1942 and said, we know what to do. We're going to do high level bombing. We have the Norden bomb site, we have the B17. You don't know what you're doing. And the British said, look, we've been doing this for over two years. You cannot fly into Germany from Britain in the day. The Norden bomb site is not accurate. You have no fighter escort yet. You're going to be slaughtered. We tried it and we were slaughtered. So what I'm getting at, it was a last ditch effort to use area bombing. And that's one of the, the, one of the fallacies of that whole narrative. The other big fallacy is that, well, Germany preempted in July 22 because they knew the Soviet Union was going to break the agreement and hit them. So they hit them first. And that's based on a couple of letters and communications that people thought about in the Soviet Union. But there was never, it was a win win situation for both. The Soviet Union got a lot of industrial machinery, know how optics and plan, even got plans for German battleships. And in exchange they supplied the Third Reich with oil, grain, etc. So when they broke that agreement they went into Ukraine. They knew they were going into the breadbasket of Europe and they were going to starve the entire area and send that food back to the. To Germany because they did not want to lower the standard. They were still selling coffee, silk stockings. They did not want to fully mobilize that economy as they would have to later. And so when Darrell Cooper said, well, yeah, maybe a million and a half Russian prisoners, Jews and Ukrainians died, but they were just. They had no idea they'd be so successful. What were they going to do? Well, there's actually something called the hunger plan by a German professor who turned general, Mr. Beck, and they had planned to the letter how many tons of wheat would go to Germany and what would be the effect. And German generals in their diaries wrote, you know, we. We weren't really ready for this, but the higher command says, don't worry about. They're going to die anyway. And, and so that's a selective use. As far as the Holocaust, there was. It's in. There are allusions to it in Mein Kampf. And within seven days of getting into Poland, they were slaughtering Jews. And within, I don't know, 15 or 16 days of getting into the Balkans in 19 early 41, they were slaughtering Jews. And one of the reasons that they attacked the Soviet Union and they don't really, I mean, there was no reason to do it. The only opponent they had was Britain, and it was surrounded. They said they were attacking Russia to put pressure on Britain, which was kind of lunatic. But Hitler said as well, they're going to attack us. But he also said that's where most of the Jewry in the world is. It's not in Western Europe. And the other problem they had very quickly is in Western Europe, most Jews were assimilated and they had a problem because they had members of the Wehrmacht who had Jewish relatives. And there was always this exemption. Guring himself was sort of. They were. Hitler himself, they were alleged had Jewish relatives. And the whole thing was kind of bankrupt because they said, Jewish people are intermission, but they have to wear a yellow star because we can't otherwise identify them in the west, but in the east, they were unassimilated, mostly Orthodox Jews. And they felt that this would be a much easier. They were more ostracized, they were not integrated, and they could go in there and wipe out most of European jewelry. I don't know if that was the primary. There was discussion where that was a primary, but that was surely one reason to do it when the war was over. In table talk, Hitler said, I know that going into Russia cost us the war, but it was worth it because years from now they'll say that we got rich. This is where the 6 million Jews mostly came from. I think there was only 3 or 400,000 from Western Europe.

A (25:40)

Yeah. So you wrote an article for the Free Press recently about Tucker Carlson. I think that by the time this episode comes out, that article will be out. What has gone wrong with Tucker and why is he platforming and glad handing people that are pushing conspiracy theorists and the bad kind of revisionist history as opposed to the good?

B (26:04)

I don't know. That's the question seems because I, I was a very good friend. He was, oh, seven or eight years ago he asked me to come on Fox and we had a good relationship. And I usually went on every Monday night after the monologue. There were things that were a little eccentric like UFW, you know, UFOs and some topics that he was interested in, but more or less there were parameters or guardrails that he operated within. And he, I would call him a MAGA conservative, but more libertarian than maga. And then I think it was kind of abrupt and probably unfair the way he was fired. And there's a long story backstory to that, but he came, he was on a Friday night, and all of a sudden they fired him. And he had the largest audience really in Fox News history, larger than Bill O'Reilly's even. And then he got his own platform. And I don't think there were people saying to him, this is too far. And there, I think the people around him were encouraging him to be more edgy. And when you're autonomous and entrepreneurial like that, the more controversial, the more clicks or whatever we call it happen. That's just one exegesis, but I. There soon developed a pattern when he introduced a pastor from Bethlehem. And we all know that the Christian population of Bethlehem on the west bank went from 80% Christian to 10%. And that happened mostly under West Bank Palestinian authority. And where did they go? They went to Europe, they went to the United states, but about 150,000 went to Israel and there's about 180,000 Christians. So when Tucker interviewed this person who has to say something that his Islamic Palestinian overseers approve, Tucker just took it as gospel that the Israelis had ethnically cleansed the Christians out of Bethlehem and that the Christian Zionists should look at that. And, and yet these Christians were living with more freedom anywhere in the Middle east, in Israel, many of them. And Israel's Christian population has steadily grown while the population of Christians in Gaza and West bank has steadily declined. That's just one example that I don't know why or when he had the eulogy of Charlie Kirk. You remember Coleman, he said something that it's sort of like a bunch of people from the Middle east, you know, in a room with eating hummus, talking about crisis. And I guess you, the obvious simile was that Charlie Kirk was Christ and the Pharisee, the modern Pharisees in a room had engineered his death. So and then when he had Candace on and he had Nick Fuentes on, he had David Cullum, the revisionist, he had Darrell Ickman became a pattern, I should say at this point, very quickly, and I'll stop, there's nothing wrong if you want to have an edgy out of, out of the ballpark figure, if you're willing to cross examine him. William F. Buckley had his, his brand. And those firing line episodes was to have people like the convicted rapist Eldridge Cleaver, like the, like the known segregationist, George Wallace with a K, eugenicists, William Shockley to have Huey Newton. But if you look at those episodes, he cross examined them. He tried to tell the world that these people are out of the ordinary and they're trying to persuade you, but I'm going to cross. So if he really wanted to take the risk, and I don't think he should have because you're giving him a platform he didn't deserve, like Fuentes, but Candace maybe is a different story or Marjorie Taylor Greene all. If you give them a platform and their views are out of the mainstream, you have an obligation as a journalist to cross examine them. And especially when you bring on your former close friend and colleague in the conservative movement, Ted Cruz, and you just eviscerate him and ambush. I saw that interview. Tucker is a very bright and sophisticated interviewer. So I just said to myself, why would you, if you're a conservative, why would you and Ted Streams and the conservative mainstream, why would you humiliate him on screen? But then you wouldn't use those same techniques when you could have done the public service with Fuentes?

A (30:47)

No, it's a great, it's, it's a great point. I mean like, why would he absolutely dig into Ted Cruz for not knowing off the top of his head the population of Iran, which I admit he should, he should have known. Yeah, but why would he absolutely humiliate Ted Cruz for saying that? And then when Nick Fuentes comes on and says I love Joseph Stalin, he just says, okay, let's put a pin in that and come back to it very politely. Right. So it's clear he's using one set of tactics on people that are pretty well within the American mainstream and I think broadly mean well. And putting on kid gloves, essentially, for conspiracy theorists and crazy people. I mean, the Stalin one is. I mean, something's going on here. Where I remember there is a blog post. Can't remember what it was. It was kind of a joking blog post. Defending the empire in Star Wars.

B (31:44)

Right.

A (31:45)

And it was actually very funny. It was a funny exercise in how you could make that case. But something's going on on the Internet and on social media where it just will get eyeballs and clicks to just defend all of the actual villains in history. And if more and more people believe this stuff, then it just. It turns out there are actually no bad people that have ever existed on Earth. Hitler was great. Stalin was great. Mao was great. I mean, the left has been making that case for a long time, actually. Everyone you thought was bad from history that killed and slaughtered millions of people for bad reasons, they were all actually great. And there's, you know, when someone comes in and gives that take, it shocks the senses in a way. It's like adding hot sauce to your podcast. And it gets eyeballs. It gets a lot more eyeballs than a boring recitation of the facts we know are true about history. And it's worrisome for our information landscape that that's what's going on right now.

B (32:56)

It is. And I think there's another. There's another catalyst. It's not the main one. What you said about clicks and a way of getting attention by being controversial or even beyond controversial is I think when you interview a Nick Fuentes or Candace Owens, you know that if you criticize them, they're going to go right out and start a jihad against you, if I could use that term. But when you. When you, you know, you tear apart Ted Cruz, he's in the mainstream, he's a senator, he has certain standards of behavior. He's not going to go out like Nick Fuentes had tracked, attacked Tucker all the time. You know, he'd call him a sellout, a fed, a traitor. He'd attack Trump. He. So I think there's a tendency when you get these extremist. Even though when I look back at some of the interviews that Buckley did with Eldridge Cleaver versus other controversial people like Saul Alinsky, he was a little bit more careful because he thought Eldridge Cleveland. Same thing with George Wallace. He thought, you know what? These people are a little out there and you never know what they're going to say or do or to get obsessed with me. So I think that's, that can be a. I think that's one of the causes. The other, the dark cause is that somehow he feels that he was done a disservice at Fox, that there were certain cosmic forces in the Dominion suit, that he was the scapegoat, that he was sort of a paleo con. And one of the, there's two groups that he on the air in the last days, as you remember, Colin, that he had a fixation on and felt that they were, in fact, he said one group, I hate them more than any other people in the world. And they were Christian Zionists, he said, and neoconservative. Both of those are synonyms for Jewish interests, whether you, whether we like it or not. And he was always saying the neocons got us into the war, they've got it. They all. And why did we get in Iraq and we got in Iraq for Israel. And then he would say you can be against. Which is true, you can be against the Israeli government and not Jews. But when you keep talking about Israel in a conspiratorial fashion and why we're supporting him, why is that? And ultimately the subtext is there's powerful Jewish forces and then the neoconservatives fit that bill. So those are the two groups that he is angriest at because he felt that they put us in a multi trillion dollar war, as if there was no, you know, the Don Rumsfeld or Condoleezza Rice or Dick Cheney, as if they are not free thinkers and they're subject to Jewish influence, like a Paul Wolfowitz or Richard Pearl. It didn't really make sense. And the same thing was true about Christian Zionists. And he mentioned John Bolton. I don't really consider him a staunch Christian, but Mike Huckabee, as if Mike Huckabee, who is very religious and very pro Israel. But I don't think he has a lot of influence with Marco Rubio, for example, or others in the Trump administration.

A (36:29)

Yeah, I mean, I think I told you this when we were at a conference recently, but I had Dave Smith on my podcast for three and a half hours and I think we spent like a good hour just on this topic of who are the neoconservatives. Did they in fact get us into Iraq? Hint. They. Well, they, they were into Iraq, but not for any reason having to do with Israel.

B (36:51)

Right.

A (36:51)

So he believes Israel got us into Iraq. Actually the opposite of the truth. The Prime Minister of Israel told us not to go into Iraq, that it was a stupid, stupid idea. Not only that, the more the neoconservatives, these supposedly evil people, come out and talk in public, the more it's just clear that they're American patriots that had foreign policy, legitimate foreign policy based reasons to have their opinions. Like David Wormser, for example, who is the author of the now infamous Clean Break Memo. He came out on a podcast recently. I think this was after my Dave Smith episode, so I hadn't seen it, but he came out and sort of explained not only himself but also the Clean Break Memo. He served in the Navy for like 10 years. He's an American patriot. His mother, this was an astonishing fact. David Wormser's mother was apparently the head of the underground resistance to communism in the Czech Republic and fled to America escaping the Soviets after World War II. And she had also fought the Nazis. So he grew up in a context where America was the haven for freedom and under a mother that deeply hated communism. That was his DNA going into being Dick Cheney's advisor. Nothing to do with Israel, nothing to do even with Judaism.

B (38:23)

And remember, there was a group, remember, I think it was formed in 98 because they felt that Bill Clinton had been lax on enforcing the no fly zones from the 91 War and the.

A (38:38)

Project for a New American Century.

B (38:39)

Yeah, it was Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan, but there were a lot of people in there. Francis Fukuyama, I think, was in it. Don Rumsfeld was in it, Dick Cheney was in it. And they had advocated a preemptory strike on Iraq, but there was no support for it in the Clinton administration. There was no support for it before 9 11. In the bush administration. George W. Bush ran. I went back and looked at that because I had remembered and I wasn't. I thought it was a fantasy of my imagination. But he had said repeatedly he didn't believe in nation building, that Bill Clinton was too involved in the Balkans. And we, you know what I mean? We're not going to go in there and solve the problems of the Balkans. The military is there. And Colin Powell had already said, it's a Pottery Barn theory. If you go in and break something, you own it. So you got to be careful. So they didn't. What I'm getting at is whatever there was, whatever neoconservative influencer was, it was pretty inert until 9 11. And after 911 people said, we've tried to deal with Saddam. He breaks all the rules. The Taliban have been out of control. All of these people represent a, you know, a general coalition of radical Islamicists. And then, you know, nobody. They always talk about wmd, but if you look at the United nations resolutions, I think there was 21 of them authorizing con. Excuse me, the U.S. congress and then later the United nations for Afghanistan. But in the case of Iraq, the U.S. congress, 21 of them. They. And I looked at them the other day and I remember them very clearly. We got to save the Marsh Arabs. The architects of the 98 First World Trade center bombing. Nadal was there. Abu Nadbal was being in sanctuary from Saddam Hussein. They have violated the no fly zones. They have liquidated the Kurds and tried to exterminate them. They had a lot of reasons other than just wmd, which I think were only so. I think it may have been wrong or right. But the idea that David Frum and Max Boot and Richard Peru and Bill Kristol all conspired Elliot Cohen to get us into a war against our interests. And you're right, Israel strongly disapproved. They thought it was a misdirection of Western resources.

A (41:13)

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B (43:11)

I wrote it. I wrote it the first year in 2016. 17, I think it came out in 2018. But I was writing two columns a week for National Review and at first I didn't really talk about it. I think I wrote a critical one of all that they didn't have good candidates. But, but the more that I started talking about talking to people in my area, farmers and other people, I started to sense that this was not Ron Paul, this was not Pat Buchanan, this was not just some, it was going to be a lot more serious and that he had something about him that was, you know, it was off putting and crude, but he was authentic. He didn't change his accent, he didn't change his type of dress he wore and people were. And then he was talking about class more than he was race. He had weird eccentric views that I found to be quite logical that the Hispanic community would come around to closing the border because they were the people who suffered the most from illegal aggression in their schools and the emergency room. So there was all these contrary to fact things that the establishment was, was saying. And it was very hard for me because I was writing at National Review and as you know, they had a whole issue on Never Trump. And each week there would be, you know, Jonah Goldberg, David French, Ramash Pomaroo, Kevin Williamson. Just this guy is Satan incarnate. And this was the genesis of the Never Trump movement. And I was the columnist writing, you know, he's better than the alternative of Hurley. It's always that type of choice. He's a tragic hero. He has certain skills. You know, he's sort of like a chain or Clint Eastwood in these movies that comes in, solves a problem, then repulses us that we had to call on such an outsider. But it finally led by 2020. I had to leave National Review after 20, 20 years. But and I'm at Hoover and I think I was very unpopular there in 2016, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21. And maybe there's some more. But the Republican establishment was very critical, as you know, in the mainstream. Bush, the Bob Dole Canacy, the John McCain, the Mitt Romney, the two Bushes. That was sort of where most people were. And I would have voted for any of them over a liberal, but they were not willing to do the opposite. That's what I found kind of disturbing.

A (45:56)

Okay, so what do you do with the, what seemed to me the most legitimate arguments against Trump the person and Trump the president? Yeah, one. So one line of evidence would just be everything that's going on around his instinct for vindictiveness and revenge against anyone he believes is his political enemy. And, and so you can, I guess you can make some case that, you know, as you quoted earlier, if you send a wind out there and the whirlwind comes back, that's sort of the way of things. So if Letitia James tried to bankrupt him on a kind of BS lawsuit, well, now he's doing the exact same thing to her. And neither one of them was good for the Republic, neither one of them was justified. But it sort of is a slingshot. But then what do you do with the fact that he seems to just be vindictive towards everyone, regardless of whether they've done anything specific against him? I mean, he passes executive orders banning law firms from entering federal buildings, which is really just meant to bankrupt them. And it wasn't even something I knew was possible to file a lawsuit against the pollster for releasing a poll he doesn't like, even though he won the election in question like this. It's behavior that I can't actually put myself in the shoes in. And so that's like one line. And then the, well, I'll get to the second line. Why don't you just address that first?

B (47:36)

I understand, but I separate rhetoric and intent from actuality. So Donald Trump rages and screams and then we look at what actually happens. Now think about the law firms. I'll give you an example. Where did that come from? That came from after January 6th. Fannie Willis on the direction. After all, Nathan Wade met on November 18th with White House counsel, the same day Jack Smith was appointed special counsel, the same day that Michael Colangelo stepped down from the third spot at the DOD after coming in from Letita James prosecution to go back to Alvin Bragg's, all three days after Donald Trump on November 15th of 2022 announced his reelection campaign. So there was a coordination there. But what did they do? I mean, they went after almost every lawyer that had had anything to do with Donald Trump. So there was a very colleague of mine, just to take one example, on the Bradley board. Cleta Mitch was conservative, well known lawyer, big law firm, very well compensated, very effective. Her expertise was not in politics. It was on 413Cs. What happens? She's down in Georgia. Donald Trump calls. He did not say to the registrar at Georgia, get me votes. He said, I know they're out there, find them. 10,000. Well, I've talked to a lot of candidates and I said, when you have a close race, do you ever call up? Yeah, we call up all the time. We say, you're not counting this district. Can you recount?

A (49:16)

Everybody does it.

B (49:19)

Anybody who was on that phone call, they hounded. They either tried to indict them or more importantly, they pressured their law firm. So she came back and the first thing she knew, she was fired from her law firm. They didn't do it crudely like Donald Trump did. They did it much. They used a stiletto, not a, you know, an ax. And then more importantly, then of course, the January 6th congressional committee met and you knew what that was going to be like. They were going to subpoena these people. And when it was all said and done, she was unemployed at 73 years old and she owed a quarter million dollars. And that was repeated again and again. And that was sort of a simile for what happened. So you can look at this two different directions. The way I interpreted it, Donald Trump came along and they felt that he was an existential threat to the bipartisan, not in a conspiratorial fashion, but to the bipartisan post war consensus domestically. And they felt that he was also crude enough that he would be buffoonish if they went after him. So what did that happen? From the very get go, Hillary Clinton broke the law by hiring a foreign national in a federal campaign. She hit it through the dnc, the Perkins Coey and Fusion gps. And then he concocted this silly dossier that was completely bankrupt. James Comey hired him as a contractor and we're off to the races. Barack Obama says, I want this even after the election to be used. They say, there's nothing there our subordinates can't find. Go ahead and do it, blah, blah, blah. Carter, page fisa. And you get into, you get to this surreal situation where finally, you know, Rob rosenstein and Andrew McCabe are wearing a wire to try to entrap Donald Trump. Or you have this Yale psychiatrist, Bandy Lee, who says that she thinks he's the 25th amendment idiot and The Congress is listening to him and they want to, you know, see if he can be removed. And then we, this just never stopped. And let's just take people who are in the news today, just randomly, James Comey, 245 times he said he couldn't remember under oath. If you or I did that, we'd be in jail. John Bolton, he's angry because Donald Trump doesn't like his interventionist policy, fires him. He wants to write a tell all book, allegedly takes notes, sends it to his wife and daughter. And the book is going to be timed for what purposes to come out during the campaign. A federal judge on an injunction says, I can't stop it, it's too late. But you are sacrificing national security and you're going to be exposed to civil and criminal liability at some point if you keep doing this, doesn't matter. So Andrew McCabe lies four times at oath, interim FBI, nothing. Just like Bolton, the Biden administrator, nothing. And then we get Comey, nothing. John Brennan lies twice under oath to a congressional committee, nothing. James Clapper lies under oath, nothing. You have all of that. So then your question is, when he comes in and we see what Letita James and Alvin Bragg and there was E. Jean Carroll and Jack Smith who surveilled all of this stuff was coordinated. Well then what is the real transgression that you know, that these prior people had committed perjury, allegedly or they had broken the law in a variety of ways and you just let it go. And which is the greater transgression? Trying to enforce the law retroactively with a political purpose as an addition or using a political purpose not to enforce the law? Because if Biden had not been president, I think these people would have all been charged with perjury and they weren't. And so now some of them, and then when you start looking at the judges and the juries and where they were charged, where they are indicted, there's another factor. For Donald Trump, I think you're right, he wants retribution and revenge. But for him to reify that, it's very different than the people who went after him. He's going to have to work in the Washington, New York corridor and he's already got, I don't know how he did get a grand jury of disinterested citizens to indict Bolton. I don't know how they did it and to indict Comey, but he's going to have to do that with all of them and then he's going to have to go before a Judge Marshon, a judge in Goron, a Judge Kaplan. And they're going to be mostly east coast liberal judges. So the bar for him to do anything is going to be much higher than to get him on 91 indictments because they knew that they were going to be operating in atmospheres where there were liberal juries, liberal judges, liberal prosecutors, and liberal media. And so I think you're right that that worries. I would have just dropped it. But there's part of me that also says, and you drop it. And then James Comey and Clapper and McCabe and Brennan and Bolton think they can break the law with impunity because of a higher moral standard to get Donald Trump. And then that's the legal thing. And then you have on the periphery, did Donald Trump ever order anybody to go after Barack Obama when he had a kind of a minor disagreement with the archives? Did he ever go after Hillary Clinton when she was clearly guilty of a felony by using an unsecure server to Transmit, I think, 35 classified files? No. Did he go after Joe Biden? No, they went after him. They not only went after him, they took 14,000 files out of his home and they found what, 102 classified. They tried to take him off the ballot of 25 states. That didn't succeed either. 91 indictments. So what I'm getting at is in the great cycle of things, what they did to him was overwhelming. And what he crudely and against this whole liberal juror is going to try to do to him. I'm not talking about his intent. I agree with you. He's furious at what they did to him. But that doesn't mean that these people weren't culpable. And it doesn't mean they were given exemptions and impunities because of their ideology and their devil's bargain with the Biden and Obama people that they were going to go after Trump and therefore they needed space to operate in. And so, yeah, I wish he wouldn't do it. But I also know another thing, that he's transparent about it. He transparent in a counterproductive fashion. When they say, what do you think about John Bolt and Obama or Clinton or Biden would have done, even Biden would have said, no comment, I cannot talk about this. And then he would have said to his aide, how are we doing in getting this son of a bitch? How are we doing? What does Trump do? He goes, oh, he's a bad man. He's a bad man. And then headlines. Trump prejudices the indictment Already convicts. So, yeah, he shouldn't do that. But what he is is sort of an anecdote. And that's why people, you know, when you look at, you know, the thing about the. Just. I'll finish. When you look at the classified documents. So they go after Trump. They go. They debank. They had debanked him earlier, and they find. They go into Barron and First Lady's underwear drawer. They come there, they're so intent to find something. They bring little stickers, classified. They go through the 14,000 documents, they take them out, they spread them on the ground, which they weren't spread. They put little stickers on them and take pictures that this was a sloppy way, it was all set up. And then you look at the media and it says, unlike Joe Biden, who notified authorities on his own volition, no, he didn't. He only notified Merrick Garland that he had culpability because somebody said to him, my God, you picked a special counsel to go after Trump. Have you had any exposure? He said, yeah, for 30 years, I took out classified documents, and it wasn't one place. I had them in four places. And they were a hell of a lot less secured than Mar A Lago. And then he was advised, well, you better come forward, and then the media will go from there. So he went forward and they said, joe Biden, unlike Donald Trump, volunteer, he didn't. He was smart. And then he. He tells Robert Her. Robert her goes through all the evidence and he says, this man is culpable. And then he comes up with this ridiculous exegesis. He says, but he's so non compos mentes that no jury would convict him. They'd feel empathy for him. And you think, so he's not fit to stand trial, but he's fit to run the United States. And then finally, the desert of the whole thing is he talks to his speechwriter, who has no classified clearance, and he admits that he has been talking and using these files to transmit classified information, and the speechwriter knows it. And then they subpoena the tapes and he destroys them them. And he says, oh, I destroyed them under subpoena because I felt somebody might hack them. You know, they were downloaded. And then Robert Hearst says, okay, you didn't charge them with anything. So there was a sim. There was an asymmetry with two different things were going on. And that really bothered me. And believe me, I can tell you that I've had this conversation with people at Stanford Law School, people at the Hoover Institution, people on interviews, and they can see Donald Trump's crudeness, but they cannot see how subtle and sophisticated and establishment were the efforts to sort of make him into a buffoon. But you know who did see it were the underclass. So when I was listening to all these people at Stanford give me all these legal and analytics about what Trump was prejudicing a jury by talking about it, then I'd go to dinner with a Hispanic highway patrolman and a sheriff and they said, you know Victor, they just don't like the sob that's all it is. I can tell, I see it all the time. They're just going to quite a railroad. And that was what was so ironic. Every time they thought they were going to, they didn't needlessly try to humiliate them like the mug shots. The next thing I knew, everybody said in Fresno county that looks like my son in law. He has the same expression. They did the same thing to him. He had one container, that's all. They let all the guys that are wealthy off. So they didn't know it's like the garbage stunt and the McDonald's. So they. Anyway, that's a long rant.

A (60:50)

But no, I don't, I don't disagree with you, Victor. I mean you could have added more to that story. I mean you, you just actually trying to explain what he did wrong in the state level prosecutions in plain English without any legalese. So you're saying he paid a porn star that was extorting him for a relationship they had over a decade ago. He paid her with his own money.

B (61:14)

And he kept the part of the bargain and she didn't.

A (61:16)

Right, so you're going to find a novel legal theory that you cannot find any precedent for on the Internet or in the archives and somehow connect a federal election law to a local law and charge each piece of paper as a separate felony. Like again, if you boil this down to plain English, it's very hard to see how that could possibly be a felony worthy crime.

B (61:43)

Similarly with, they fined Barack Obama $300,000, the greatest fine in history for campaign violations in 2008. And they fined Hillary over 30,000 DOL for the Christopher Steele dossier. And paying for that money and not reporting that as a campaign expense because she had those three paywalls. So yeah, that was it. And then the engorm was even, I mean the Letitia James was even more egregious. Basically the Deutsche bank said, you don't know what you're talking about. We know this is what we do. That mar a Lago is worth a lot more than 17 million. We know Trump. Trump probably deliberately got it down valued for tax purposes or something, but we know that thing is worth a fortune. So we loaned him all of this money. He paid us back. He paid the interest on time, he paid it off in full. And we want to loan. And most of that testimony by experts was not allowed. And so then he gets 500 billion in the first fine before it's reduced. $500 million for. For the bank. There was no victim. And Fanny Wills was, you know, that was kind of a circus. And then Eugene Carroll. Oh, my gosh. This is a woman who is. Can't remember what happened 30 years ago and says that I can remember only the dress that I wore. And then people point out the dress didn't exist when you said this happened. And then she says, it happens in a bathroom where he forcibly sexually assaulted me. But yes, it's exactly the same as a 2012 law and order test episode that I happen to watch. I might have been influenced, where a person who's very funny, very famous goes into a bathroom in the same department store and sexually assaults. And that's the storyline. Oh, by the way, since then I've talked about rape being a fantasy. I made a app, how to break up a. A game I put on my phone, tried to sell it. How do you break up a marriage by falsely accusing someone of adultery? Goes on and on and on. And then you find out, well, wasn't this the statute of limitations? Oh, well, the state legislature of New York passed a special law that said for one year only, anybody charged with sexual assault, there will be no statute of limitations. That's outlawed in the Constitution. It's a bill of attainder. So each of these, and then you get into Jack Smith and, you know, insurrection. Nobody had ever been charged with that. Please. You know, that's like saying he says all these crazy things and at one point he says, please assemble peacefully and patriotically at the Capitol. And then Kamala Harris in June, right in the height of the riot, looting, says, this is not going to stop. It should not stop. This is going to go on. And everybody says, fact. Oh, she didn't mean violence. So all of these things were very dangerous. I thought they were lawfare and they were manipulation of the legal system. And I think everybody knew it. Robert Mueller got testified. He didn't know what the dossier was and he didn't know what Fusion gps. Those were the two catalysts that made him appointed. Oh, I have no idea what it Is, you know, so I hope they all are held culpable for what they did. And I agree with you. I think Donald Trump, if somebody could just say, donald, don't comment on any of these things. But on the other hand, every time he's been outrageous and everything, it brings people's attention to it. So that's his strategy.

A (65:30)

Okay, final question. Do you think that after this Trump term, American politics will revert back to the relative normalcy that we remember, where people aren't getting public figures, aren't getting prosecuted every two months? And there's, you know, when you hear of a husband and wife that are Democrat and Republican, you don't, the first comment isn't, oh, my God, how does their marriage work? It's, yeah, sure, that's normal. Happens all the time. I mean, is there any prospect of a return to the normalcy pre, say, 2012 normalcy that those of us my age and older would remember?

B (66:13)

I hope so. But the reason that we're having this chaotic period is really, if you think about it, that the Republicans had lost six out of the last seven elections. They hadn't won the popular vote since 2004. I don't think they'd won 51%, not that Donald Trump almost did, but they hadn't won 51%, going all the way back to Mike Dukakis. So there was a sense that they needed to appeal to the people that were not interested in them. There were people in the United States that didn't care about capital gains. They didn't want to privatize Social Security. They were worried about China. They didn't think China was going to democratize if you gave them more stuff. So they wanted a closed border. They thought it lowered their wages. So this guy comes along, he could have been a Democrat or Republican. Trump had been both. And he says this stuff. And the aristocratic wing of the Republican Party is just shocked by him. And then they start looking at him and he said, this guy wants to entirely overthrow the post war order and foreign policy. Not that he really did, but he'd use a certain technique to make NATO pay, or he wanted to shock us about China, et cetera, et cetera. And then people started looking domestically. He speaks nice of the Teamster. And what they were basically saying is that this guy has changed the Republican Party into a workers nationalist populist party. And people, the white working class, black working class, Hispanic working class, are going to have more in common with each other than each does with their own elites. And that was kind of a Frightening thing to the establishment. And you can see why they walked. But I started to see it when you saw that 26%, I think, of black males voted for them. 55% of Hispanic males. Oh, I think it was 60 of white males, 62. It kind of worked. And I could see where it was going because when I go to the university on the week and I listen to black intellectuals or black politicians, our Hispanic population elites, they have nothing in common with people. I see out here no more in common than farmers have with professors or so are intellectuals. So he, he saw that and he forged a new way of politics. And he had certain mannerisms. I'm not trying to deprecate or be condescending to the middle class, the working class. But what intellectuals found off putting, they found authentic. And so he revolutionized party. And that, that caused a lot. The Never Trumpers really went, if you look at the rhetoric, I mean, Bill Kristol just said he was going to, he would vote for Mondanami if he was in New York. So he really made their head explode. And people who had told us they were conservative their whole life suddenly said, I renounce everything I've done because of him. And then it had even a greater effect on the Democratic Party. They basically said, this guy came in and he robbed us of the middle class. And he's exposed us of a party of technocrats, big donors, financial people, global people that were making a ton of money on the two coast and the subsidized poor. So that were the catalysts that stopped this. So to finish, I think we're going to be in, let's hope that we don't have this furor in terms of personality and comportment. I agree with you, but. But I think whether it's Marco Ruby or J.D. vance or someone over, they will not be able to return to dualism, Bushism, McCainism, Romneyism, because this was working for them. And I think people want them. And I think the Democratic Party, Trump's legacy, I think his main legacy will be he destroyed the Democratic Party as we knew it. He really did. And he made them take positions that are so unpopular and so extreme based on they had to be opposite of what he was for. And so we're kind of like, we had the French Revolution, we got rid of the Bourbons and we had the constitutional monarchy. Then that didn't work. And Danton, all those people were out. And then we had the Robespierre brothers, and then we had the Thermidor reaction. Let's hope we don't have Napoleon on directory, but I think we're coming out. This is the counter revolutionary phase. The Obama Biden years with a revolutionary phase changed the country. This is the counter revolutionary phase. And I hope we can get back to a normality without authoritarianism. But it's more than just people being mean to each other. And of course, you pointed out, and you're right, there are other outside catalysts and factors like the Internet now and instant expression on social media that can fire people up. Being anonymous is something that's terrible. Somebody you know, 3,000 miles away, I pick up my email and he said, yeah, I get an email. I'd like to kill you, Victor, for your. I never heard of that before. So there's certain extraneous trends that we have no control over. But I agree with you that it would be nice to be able. I have a twin brother, hasn't spoken to me in five years. I have an older brother who won't speak to me. And I have two first cousins that we adopted as my sister and brother. They haven't spoken. They all grew up and it's a shame. Yeah, we all grew up in a Democratic family and they, they, as long as I was, you know, I was an independent, but as long as I voted or I said I disagreed with him, I voted for Bush or, or somebody like that, they were fine with that. But when Trump came along, it was, how dare you do that? So I haven't, they haven't spoken to me and they won't as long as Trump is around. And that, I don't know how you get over that. Yeah.

A (72:42)

Okay. Victor Davis Hansen, thank you so much for coming on my show. I highly recommend your podcast, the Victor Davis Hansen Show. If there's anything else you want to plug, now's a good time.

B (72:54)

Yeah, we, we went to a new platform, everybody. It's a Victor. The Daily Signal changed the title. We had to leave our prior one. So it's a Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. You can find it@Victor Hansen.com or XVD Hansen or at the Daily Signal.

A (73:11)

All right. Thank you, Victor.

B (73:12)

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