← The Victor Davis Hanson Show
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- [00:00]
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- [01:39]
Sammy Wink
Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Victor is the Martin and Neely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buschey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. You can find him at his website, victorhanson.com and it's called Perseus and prices have gone up so it is $6.50 by the month or $65 for an annual subscription. So please come join us there and we'll talk about that later for some reasons. Stay with us and we'll be right back after these messages.
- [02:17]
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- [03:33]
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How much of your personal data is out there on the Internet for anyone to see? More than you think. Your name, contact info, Social Security number and home address, even information about your family members, all being compiled by data brokers and sold online. I recently found a solution. It's a great service called Delete Me. Deleteme is a subscription service that removes your personal info from hundreds of data brokers. Delete Me isn't just a one time service. Deleteme is always working for you, constantly monitoring and removing the personal information you don't want on the Internet. Delete Me sends you regular personalized privacy reports showing what info they found, where they found it and what they removed. To put it simply, Delete Me does all the hard work of wiping your and your family's personal information from data broker websites. I just signed up. It couldn't have been easier. And as soon as I hit submit I felt what you'll feel. Relief and even a sense of justice. I've taken control of my data, take control of yours and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me now at a special discount for our listeners today. Get 20% off your delete me plan by texting Victor to 64000. Text Victor to 64000 that's Victor to 64000 message and data rates may apply. See terms for details.
- [05:12]
Sammy Wink
Welcome back. This is the Friday News roundup but as everybody knows, this week we had the inauguration and so Victor, I was one hoping to get some of your reflections on the inauguration speech and the affairs going on.
- [05:25]
Victor Davis Hansen
Before I do, I'll give you a piece of advice. You said prices have gone up.
- [05:29]
Sammy Wink
They have.
- [05:30]
Victor Davis Hansen
If you were Joe Biden, you said you inherited those high prices and they have not gone up. That's you inherited 9% increase and somebody else did it. So don't take credit for it. I'm just trying to lower them. I inherited it. That speech that Trump gave was unlike most presidential speeches, even his own, that are aspirational. In other words, they're idealistic, they're utopia we can do. There was elements of that, but it was more operational than aspirational. This is what we are going to do. We are going to have an executive order, we're going to lower prices on gas, we are going to unleash all of our natural resources, we are going to beef up the military, we are going to have a renaissance in crime reduction. We're going to get rid of dei. It was dun dun, dun dun. It was a complete refutation of the people who were sitting right in front of him. And he mentioned the Bidens by name. A lot of people got very angry at that. George Will, whom I know and I respect, said that that was the worst inauguration address he'd ever heard. And he said it was mean spirited. You know what's mean spirited? Not talking about the people who did that, but doing it. So here you're Donald Trump and you're looking out there and here on one eye you see Barack Obama and you know that he cooked up with James Comey and John Brennan and James Clapper with help Crossfire Hurricane to go after Donald Trump in 2016 and basically lie about him with a cooked up dossier. Then the other eye, he looks at Hillary Clinton and he thinks, well yeah, I ran against her and she through the DNC and Perkins Coey and Fusion GPS paid Steele to destroy me. And then they destroyed George Papadopoulos and Carter Page. But she destroyed classified subpoena documents, 30,000 emails. She destroyed the servers and she's sitting right there. She made my life miserable. She and Obama right there created the basically the basis for which ate up 20 months and $40 million to go after me under Robert Mueller. And then he sees Biden and he's thinking I might have won the 2020 election. Have you just let kept out of it? There was a laptop. Your son took it to a computer repair person, the computer prepare person looked at it and then he found out your son never picked it up. High on crack, no doubt. And he waited and he waited. And then according to the terms of the repair contractual arrangement, it was his. You forfeited it, you being Hunter Biden in exchange for not paying your bill. So then he opens it up and there's nudity, there's drug use, there's mention of Joe Biden as a recipient of 10% of all these ill gotten gains and Mr. Big Guy and getting his power bills and utilities paid by Hunter and it's all coming out. And the FBI has had this for a year and knows it's authentic. And you, Mr. Biden, you and your wife and all of the Biden family who have now been pardoned except for you and your wife. You knew that. You knew that it was authentic. But you got Anthony Blinken, Secretary of State, to call up Mike Morale, interim FBI and round up 51 intelligence authorities to lie in front of the American people, that it has all the hallmarks of a Russian information dash disinformation campaign. And we know afterwards that that affected a lot of voters because it made me look like an idiot when I was trying to debate Joe Biden and it was all cooked up for the debate. So every time I said, Joe, this computer is. Don't believe me? It's prima facie evidence that you're a crook. No, no, no. 51 intelligence authorities, independent thinkers. And. And so he's sitting there giving the speech and he sees Hillary and Obama and he sees what they did to him. And so then he starts to get a little angry and then all of a sudden it's not sober and judicious, according to George Will and others. This is terrible. You can't do that. No, it's not terrible. What's terrible is impeaching him twice and trying to get him off the ballot and 91 felony indictments and destroying the jurisprudence. So it was a good speech and it was a revolutionary speech. I call it Novus ordo seclorum, that great line from Virgil's Eclogues, fourth eclogue, the so called Messianic people had used that, you know, wrongly, that Virgil was given divine guidance pre Christian advice, pre Jesus Christ, that he knew there was going to be a resurrection and a new Christian age. That's not what it was about. It was about, I think the grandsons of Augustus were going to take over and have a new enlightened rule. After the end of Augustus, they both died. But later in the Christian period, but even before that, people said interpret that new order of the ages. And those are words that were in that line of Virgil that were cobbled together. And that was why Virgil was the guide in Dante's Inferno Purgatorio, because he was the one pagan who, who even though he wasn't given the salvation of his soul for not accepting Christianity, but it was the realization that he was given a divine message that Christ was coming. And as a pagan, he was selected according to the medieval church. And therefore he predicted with Novus ordo seclorum. And then our founders looked at that, who were much better educated than we were, and said, that's exactly what we're doing. It's a new order of the ages. And in the Aeneid, when they're Fighting. There's a line where it says, jupiter looks down favorably or nods. The word is nuo in Latin, anuit coeptis. He nods. On our undertakings, he favors it. And they put both of those Latin phrases, one from the Eclogues, one from the Great Seal, which is on our dollar bill. And that's what Trump, when he says golden age, New Order, it's the same spirit of 1776. And it's, you know, there's, it's an idea that anything is possible. That was at the speech, why everybody was so freaked out. I mean, you got Snoop Dogg, who cut a video how to kill Trump, and now he's telling people to vote for Trump and he's happy that Trump is here. And then you've got RFK over here and Tulsi Gabbard over here and Hulk Hogan. It's just too much to comprehend. But they all have one thing in common. It's like we woke up from this nightmare and there are really two sexes. There is a border. There is a thing called legal and illegal immigration. There is something called you don't leave Afghanistan and give $50 billion over to terrorists. There is something that if you go into a store and steal something, you don't get off scot free. If you beat up somebody or kill somebody in the subway, not in self defense, but you do it gratuitously, you're going to pay. All of that was the nightmare and now it's over and people are ecstatic.
- [13:34]
Sammy Wink
And apparently there's also something called the Gulf of America. I talked about that in his speech. I love it.
- [13:42]
Victor Davis Hansen
Yes. And he's again, as I said, he's saying, think about all of those things. It's kind of like Cooper Ross's four stages or five stages of death. You know, shock, anger, acceptance. Well, when you hear all Greenland and Canada, oh, yeah, look at Trump. He's James Polk. He thinks he's the 19th century imperialist, and then you think he must be art of a deal. Hmm, Greenland. Well, let me do my research. Didn't the British take over Iceland in World War II? And we kind of took over Greenland. And isn't it kind of a colony of these postmodern imperials called Denmark? And didn't they kind of panic and put all of a sudden Greenland's image on the world? And maybe global warming will make the Northwest Passage, and Russia and China are like birds of prey and Greenland's like a little fat pigeon to be, and maybe we can step in and facilitate. Yeah, it makes sense. And Isn't Greenland closer to New York than Copenhagen? Isn't it properly part of North America? Why are these European colonials coming into our contin. Etc. As far as Gulf of America, it took about two seconds for people to say, that's crazy. And then two more seconds. How long is the American coastline on the Gulf? What is 1700 miles long? Texas, Louisiana, Alabama. Well, how long is Mexico? What? 1700 mile? So we each have a shared claim. We have the northern part, they have the southern part. Maybe it's the Gulf of. I don't know, Northern America and Southern Mexico. I don't know. But I know one thing that they changed the world. Woodrow Wilson Center. They changed the Earl Ward and said, there is no more Bolt Hall. There is no more. My little address at Stanford is no longer Stanford, is no longer Junipio Serra Court. They do it all the time. So Trump says, I like that idea of year 0 French Revolutionary name changing the left top. A lesson. And we have good reason. So now it's the Gulf of America. You guys like to change names. I joined the club. And what's the message to Mexico? We're going to make a map and show you that we used to go ahead and own most of America, which Chine Bomb did. And the answer is yes, you can do all that. And we can say, no more Caravans, no more $63 billion in remittances. We can put tariffs on your asymmetrical trade patterns and we have all the leverage. They have none. Before it was like, well, you have a history of colonialism, you Yankee running dogs. And you've exploited people of color and you've been mean to Mexico and we remembered the Chuko Rayas and the. And now it's. That was then, this is now. We're just equal people. And you guys are taking advantage of us and you hate us for letting us take you advantage. So for us to get along better, you have to respect us. And you won't respect us unless we treat you the way you would treat us.
- [16:48]
Sammy Wink
Isn't he already looking at 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada?
- [16:52]
Victor Davis Hansen
Thing is, it sounds so ridiculous. And then you start to do a little digging and you realize the amount of military subsidies that we provide Canada, if they were to put themselves under a nuclear deterrent shield to protect their national security, if they were going to have a credible. And by the way, Canada was one of the most effective of our allies in World War II. They punched way above their weight class. You know, they had a whole beach in Normandy, they had the fourth largest navy in the world. So they can do it when they had a much smaller population and they could police. They know what they're doing. So they're only so Trudeau. What the Canadians basically said is, we've been taking the Americans for a ride. We call them all sorts of names because that kind of obfuscates the fact that we're taking advantage of them. And we always could because we're, you know, were just small population compared to their 330 million. And now they caught on. So Trudeau is just aggravating. And Trudeau being the world's worst politician, in the middle of this conundrum, what does he say? I think I want to give a speech about the sadness of Kamala Harris not winning the presidency as a first woman of color. That was really smart, you idiot. All you did was tell Trump that he I'm an idiot and I should go. And he did go. Exit stage left. And then Mr. Polyvar, is that his name? The one that ate the apple while he insulted the journalist. And now he's going to be in there and they're all going to him and saying, now look, you're a right wing guy and you believe in Trumpism and you are a nationalist. You can deal with Trump. And so they expect him now to go to Trump and say, look, let's split. I will patrol the border and I'll spend a little bit more in defense. Gets in our interest. But you have to help us out and buy our oil and build Keystone. I think they got the beginning of what Humphrey Bogart told Frenchie. It's the beginning of a beautiful relationship.
- [19:04]
Sammy Wink
I think so.
- [19:05]
Victor Davis Hansen
And that was the whole purpose in the beginning.
- [19:07]
Sammy Wink
Well, I have some more questions on the inauguration executive orders.
- [19:15]
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- [20:22]
Victor Davis Hansen
I can't believe it's not a psychodrama melodrama about an urban metrosexual who's unsure of his sexual ambiguity and he wants to date somebody, but he doesn't know which gender. I know that's. But this sounds like a great movie right out of, of the genre of the Great Escape or the Dirty Dozen or Operation Crossbow of missions in enemy territory. Yeah, like that. Yeah, I like the word valiant, too. We never hear that word valley.
- [20:50]
Sammy Wink
No, that's a, it sounds like a really interesting.
- [20:56]
Victor Davis Hansen
Yes, I'll see it. I will see it. We try to, to taste, example, use all of our products.
- [21:02]
Sammy Wink
Yeah. So, Victor, Donald Trump made or signed at the end of his gala affair, at least in the afternoon, a bunch of executive orders that were amounting to 76, I think was the total executive orders on everything from the border to immigration to cartels being considered foreign terrorists, to tariffs to China to energy to getting out of that Paris climate accord and dei. So Donald Trump is on the job. Moment one on the very first.
- [21:38]
Victor Davis Hansen
Yeah, the thing about all those, and I think there's an anticipated 300 of them, they are roughly can be divided into two groups, the ones that can be accomplished by fiat and the ones that require lawfulness and legality by subordinates to enact them. So if you want to get out of the piracy, bam, it's out. There's no problem there. No low level diplomat is going to say, hey, I'm going to keep us in. Trump won't know. He'll know it. So you can get out of that easy when you go to the other one. To take one example, getting rid of DEI that is so entrenched in all of those cabinets, what that requires is that he call in all 13 of his cabinet secretaries and the next level of things like NIH and FBI and everybody and get them in and said, look, I want you to go through everything and I do not want any more dei. I know they're going to sue us. Just get rid of it. Let them sue us. And then here's my DEI auditor czar and he's going to go back in about a month and he's going to examine every one of your cabinet seas and if you didn't do it, you're fired. And I'll get somebody who will do it. I'm Lincoln, trying to find a general in other words, that can fight. And I think he that it will be difficult to. It reminds me when I was younger and I was a professor in the California State University system. So we passed Proposition 209 in California and it said you cannot use race, religion or gender as the primary criteria to hire or to promote or to retain. In other words, you have to use merit. So everybody said, wow, affirmative action is over. And two things happened. I was on two hiring committees that year. So we're in a. I said, well, this candidate is not nearly as good and the affirmative action offer was still there. And she said to me, well, wait a minute, this is a woman. And I said, yes, but she doesn't have the same publication record or teaching evaluations as this guy does. But this is diversity. They didn't quite use that word yet. They said affirmative action. And so then I complained to the dean, I said, why are we even having Victor Federal law. Can you imagine a Californian saying this in the age of sanctuary city? California law is subordinate to federal law, which supersedes. So we can vote whatever you want, but I follow federal law. And so then the next somebody had told him that that wasn't accurate. So the next search that was almost simultaneously the same kind of conundrum came up. And so I called the dean, who's now passed away years ago. I was in my rambunctious 32 or 33. So I said, look, if I'm going to be chairman, I'm going to get the best candidate. And this guy, there was somebody who said he was Latino and he was pretty good, but not as good as this other person, but he was an Argentine, you know what I mean? And he had trilled his Rs and he had gone the whole, you know what I'm talking about, the whole, I am a self created affirmative action. And you know what he told me? I don't care what the law is. And I said, what do you mean you don't care what the law is? He goes, you're going to go into the meeting and you're going to hire that person and when the meeting is over, you're going to give me that name and I'm going to send it up. And I said, you're going to hire somebody that doesn't have nearly the teaching. So I went around his back as a young idiot and talked to the provost and told her what he was going to do and showed him the two files. And I said, I'm not going to show you the names, just look at this file, the publication. So she said, I'm on board. He called me up and said, I'll fire you if you keep this up. I'm going to call and you're going to sit here and listen to me talk to the provost. So I had to sit there, but I knew the provost was on my side. And she said, you're going to hire the hiring committee's choice. So I did that, and then I walked out and I said, what gives you the right as a bureaucrat to try to overturn the will of the people? The people have spoken. They don't want this. My point of all this excursus is that when Donald Trump says, dei, these people in the bureaucratic, administrative swamp state are lawless, and they feel that they've been so pampered that they are a law unto themselves, judge, jury and executioner. And they'll just say, yes, we do it, and they'll just ignore it. And you have to be tough with them. There's another problem with executive orders like dei. So when you're a dean, let's say in an academic, then you have a. If you're I'm dean of humanities at Stanford, I get fired. Well, then you're a tenured professor in a legitimate dis. If you're a dei, where do you go back to? There's not, you know, the economics of race maybe, but most of these people were created, they got their degrees in critical race theory or from, you know, gender studies. And those departments don't find that they want to use a billet to accommodate them. So when you're talking about getting rid of di, you're not talking about reassignment, you're talking about firing them. And we forget that these people are among the highest paid post George Floyd administrators, 300, 400,000. And so you're talking a massive amount of, on the one hand, savings and a massive amount of outcry, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia. We're going to hear it all. If he really tries this, I hope he does. By the way, I'm not trying to suggest he shouldn't.
- [27:44]
Sammy Wink
They'll have to buy some of them off. I bet that's what.
- [27:47]
Victor Davis Hansen
No, we can't. Because of Doge, we can't spend any money.
- [27:50]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, I'll see what happens with it all. It seems to me they'll buy off. Well, stay with us and we'll be back after these messages to talk a little bit more about the inauguration. Stay with us.
- [28:03]
Victor Davis Hansen
Foreign.
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Sammy Wink
Welcome back, Victor. This is the Victor Davis Hansen show. You can find Victor at his X at X and his handle is at VD Hansen and on Facebook at Hanson's Morning Cup. So, Victor, I was wondering just broadly, if you had some reflections on what will be new in this administration of Trump that will be maybe different from the last administration.
- [28:36]
Victor Davis Hansen
You mean compared to Biden?
- [28:39]
Sammy Wink
No, I mean compared to Trump's earlier administration.
- [28:43]
Victor Davis Hansen
Well, we know what, he won't take money from the Chinese like the Biden consortium. There's a lot of differences. When he came in in 2017, he said he'd only been to Washington D.C. 17 times in his life. He said he had no interest in politics prior to that. He didn't think. I don't think he thought, and this is speculation, but there is some accounts that support this exegesis. I don't think he thought he was going to win. The polls had him down eight points, seven points. So when he won, he only had 90 days to have a team. And the people around him didn't necessarily think they were going to win. It was a movement, it was like Tea Party. It was sort of, we're going to get close, but he won. So then all of these people in this uni party deep state collapsed on him. And they said, look, we are the experts. And so you've got Rex Tillerson and Jim Mattis and quote unquote anonymous. And they all offered their services, but they weren't on the same page. And a lot of them made the decision that Donald Trump is too uncouth for me. I'm going to suffer reputational harm because the deep state doesn't like him. And I was always accept by the deep state. So I'll kind of wink and nod and either try to obstruct them or at a cocktail party said, you don't know what I'm putting up with at State. If it wasn't for me, we would do all sorts of things. So I'm an, I'm kind of a resistant that had those people. And then there was the other people who said, well, I don't like what he's doing, but I'll use my skills to help him, kind of. But he didn't have this. These people that he could count on. In fact, they were obstructive. He wanted to build the wall. He said, I'll use the Pentagon. Pentagon said, I don't think so. So the doj, they were below Jeff Sessions and all of those political. And the left was brilliant. They say, you can't dare. They fire everybody who's Republican when they come in, but they say, how dare you fire a professional prosecutor? Well, they do it all the time. But Trump was inexperienced, so he had internal disloyalty, resistance and he did a lot of great things. But it was, they ate up 20 months of his administration and they went from collusion that was discredited to the first crazy impeachment, which was based on nothing. So this time I don't think we all appreciate it. He said, when we hit the ground, we only have four years and we're going to get everybody on the same page and we know what they're up to. They're going to use the courts, they're going to leak. So I want all of your employees to be loyal. I want you to fire people who are not on the same thing now. And so it's a different attitude. So before is I'm Donald Trump in 2017. Mr. Trump, Homesland Security does not want to build the wall. Mr. Trump, Secretary of State does not want to get out of the Iran deal. Mr. Trump, the Pentagon says you shouldn't use that language about threatening NATO to make the 2%. That was all day long. Now it's 2025. Mr. Trump, I got a better idea. I think I can get this MAGA thing quicker than you even you thought, oh good, go ahead. And it's a different climate and that's going to make an enormous difference. And the other thing is, I don't know how to say this without offending people or offending Trump. I don't mean to be, but I believe in kind of a divine province. The Indian culture calls it karma, Greeks call it nemesis. But there is a divine plan. And I had this idea, or I've been thinking about it, dreaming about it, that if you take away all the things Trump suffered in the interim, the 91 felony indictments, the two assassination attempts, getting them off the ballot, five different lawfare jurisdictional suits and indictment. There is something positive about what happened for two reasons. One, we flipped over that card, that Jack. One, it was a one eye Jack, not two. And we saw the other side. So we had four years and we were always thinking, well, they're kind of crazy. We saw how they were not crazy. They were meant. It wasn't a porous border. It was no border. It wasn't, well, we'll be a little permissive on crime. It was no crime. We're not going to charge anybody. We're not going to, we're going to go after the J6 people, but not the May, June July riot. It was crazy. And there is three genders and if you don't say something, we're going to get you, we're going to cancel you, we're going to shadow ban you, we're going to deplatform you, we're going to check you, all of that stuff. And we got a whole belly of it at the same time that was happening. Donald Trump, because he was so targeted, became an empathetic. People said that's not right, that's not right. They're just trying to get a mugshot, they're just trying to use the term convicted felon. Nobody. These crimes will never ever be charged about any other person but Donald Trump. And after they're over with, they will never use these laws again to anybody. And if Donald Trump had just said I don't want to run, I'm tired, they wouldn't have invited. This was the worst miscarry. So what I'm getting at is he became a very empathetic figure and he became much more experienced in that period and the left showed who they were and they were despised and all of that came together in this next term. He's much more experienced, he's much more knowledgeable about the nature of his enemies and opponents. He's got a lot more public interest empathy on his half and there is a much greater disgust with the squad, with the Obamas, with Elizabeth Warren. We just look at those confirmation hearings, that's who we have been run by the last four years. Those crazy people that were screaming and yelling and so it all worked out in the end, I think.
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Sammy Wink
Yeah. And he seems to be somehow, I mean maybe it was due to being shot at or nearly assassinated, but it does do a lot more circumspect and a lot more.
- [35:06]
Victor Davis Hansen
It does that to person. I can comparing a teeny weeny thing to a majestic thing. In 2007 I was in Benghazi and I had a little kind of sore abdomen and I, I'd had it for about a year and the doctor said it could be chronic appendicitis and I was way, way from Tripoli with my Gaddafi miners and I had a burst appendix in Libya and I had 105 temperature. But the thing is when you boost your appendix you feel good for about five hours. So I didn't take care of it. So by the time I got back to Tripoli, after lecturing on the mosaics, these Roman cities, it had been almost a day of a rupture and I had 105 temperature and they just dumped Me. They didn't even go into the clinic. They just drove up. It wasn't even a hospital. It was a Red Crescent. And I went in there and the guy said to me, he was an Iranian student studying in Libya. He said, you're going to die. I said, why am I going to die? He said, you have a ruptured appendix, I can tell you that right now. And he said, we have no surgeon. We don't even know how to take out appendixes. We can take them out, but we've never taken in this clinic. I said, well, how about the hospital? But I was incoherent, so you can't get in the hospital and you have to get an AIDS test. I said, well, where's the AIDS test? It's going to be not till tomorrow morning. And if you're positive, you're going to go, we're going to take you out to a camp and you'll have to die out there. And I said, okay. So I called my son. I think I'm going to die, but call this number. It's a long story. But my point is then when the surgeon showed up in his pajamas, like almost a day later, he was asleep. He'd been all up all night. He said, I can take it out, but I've never taken out a ruptured appendix. But I can do it. I know how to do it. But he said, I need an anesthesiologist. And I said, there's no anesthesiologist. He said, well, Gaddafi won't let us use opiates for painkiller either. So you're going to have to have ether and no painkiller.
- [37:06]
Sammy Wink
Oh, no.
- [37:07]
Victor Davis Hansen
So he gave me the ether. I woke up three times. They took out this appendix. It was jet black gangrene. He took out 8 inches of the intestine. He said, I don't know if you're infected or not. We don't have any antibiotics because your president put a blockade on pharmaceuticals. That was during the Iraq war. And then all of a sudden I thought, wow, I'm going to die. It was so stupid. Victor, of all the ways to die, who would want to die of a ruptured appendix in Libya under Gaddafi? And it was all your own fault because you neglected every simple warning sign. The weird thing about it, you said about it makes effect on people. You know, religion is very private. But this Pakistani nurse was interpreting because the surgeon didn't. There was only two people. There was a kitchen table, wood table basically, with a pillow on it and a Pakistani nurse who spoke a little English, and the Egyptian surgeon. And she said, do you have any? You should pray to Allah because it doesn't look good. And I said, it came out of nowhere. I said, I'll pray to Jesus Christ, my Lord and savior. And nothing ever happened to a good tried to a person who tries to be good. That was kind of from Socrates's apology. And she said, yes, he's a great prophet, Jesus. Although when I woke up, it was pitch black. They put me in a room with no lights. I thought I was in the inferno. I thought I died. And I was looking for, you know, a guy in a red union suit and horns and a fork tail or something. Fork hooves and a tail. Then the surgeon came in and he held it up and he goes, look, look, look, it's your appendix. It's black. It's all gone. And I said, it's kind of big. Oh, that's some of your intestine. But I had to take it out. You're going to be fine. Now all we need is antibiotics. And we've called Americans. There's some Americans, they're going to bring some, you know, and it was everything but that made a big impression. It still has made an impression on me every single day. We all have to realize it could be our last. So you have to live it to the fullest.
- [39:05]
Sammy Wink
Yeah.
- [39:05]
Victor Davis Hansen
And that's what Trump is trying to do.
- [39:07]
Sammy Wink
Yeah. He's starting a new age.
- [39:10]
Victor Davis Hansen
He's just thinking, if I had not turned my head, that crazy kid's bullet would have blown off my lower jaw and killed me. And he was. I would have probably got shot again as I fell down. And so he said, why did that not happen? And it would be very hard to be the same after that. And so I think he's much more philosophical and resolved. He understands why people hate him. It's not personal necessarily. It's just that he represents a revolutionary correction of madness. And he feels he's almost divinely appointed. I don't think he's messianic at all, but he feels no one was going to stand up to the transgendered people, the open borders people, the globalists, the Davos people, the critical legal theory, critical race theory. And I'm going to do it, and I don't really care what happens anymore. I've had a good life and God will do what he is wants to. That's a very powerful motive.
- [40:08]
Sammy Wink
Well, let's turn to great men. And one of them is, of course, Martin Luther King. And we know that we just had Martin Luther King Day, and you. And yeah, Jack talked about it, but there was a piece by Eli Steele, he has a substack called the man of Steel. And he writes all about. Not all, but he writes about racial issues and those types of things. He's the one of the producers of the documentary what Killed Michael Brown. And his father had a white mother and a black father in the age of Segregation in the 1950s, 1940s and 50s. And he told. He was writing a piece, and he said, I wouldn't. I don't. Didn't really feel like writing on Martin Luther King Day. But since everybody has it out there, I want to tell you about my father's reflections on having seen Martin Luther King. And he says this. My father thought it would be segregation to the end of his days, and that race would be dominant, the dominant power in his life. But that afternoon, when he saw Martin Luther King, the power of King to inspire conviction and certitude for a better America in such a profound, profoundly oppressed people made him, in my father's words, Christlike men like King come once every several hundred years. And I thought that was an interesting reflection on.
- [41:41]
Victor Davis Hansen
Well, Jack and I talked about Martin Luther King, and I mentioned that In March of 1965, my parents drove off the same farm that I'm sitting at and took us to Grace Cathedral where he spoke. And it was so crowded that we were unfortunately the first people to be shut out in a long line. Two thirds of the people didn't get into. The cathedral, was just packed. The line snaked almost a mile, I think. But she pushed me. I almost fell down. I was only, I think, 11. Maybe I was 12 at that time. No, I was 12, I guess. And I heard his whole speech and it made a profound impression on me, especially two messages. One, as I mentioned with Jack, that whatever station you are allotted in life, you do the best so that people admire you for your professionalism. So if you're a janitor, you're a tractor. And that really. I. When I got a PhD, I was just ready to turn 26. I was 25, and it was clear that I wasn't going to get a job. And I thought I'd done very well and got through the PhD program in four years. Plus, I'd been at the American School in Athens. I had a thesis that was going to be published, but I couldn't get a job. And rather than get bitter, I came back here and I started to remember what Martin Luther King had said. And I Kind of. My mother was very similar in the attitude. I said, I'm going to have to drive tractor and prune. And I tried. This is a confession I never mentioned. I went to some rural grammar schools and offered my services as a part time substitute teacher and could not be hired with a PhD in classical languages from Stanford because they said I was overqualified and I would want too much money. I said, I just want to be able to come, you know, make $40 a day. But my point is this. It was, do whatever you do. If you're going to drive a tractor, then drive it straight down the middle of the row so you don't take out a vine. And when you look at your job or when you're pruning, you want to look at that tree and say, that is a piece of art. And that was very, was a message. The other thing that was really important about his messaging that always, that, that I always took to heart was in a series of speeches. But he mentioned it at Grace the Keithville that unlike the 1619th project and unlike this hard left BLM movement, mostly very wealthy minorities or upscale minorities who dictate to everybody else the Joy Reeds of the world, right? She makes $2 million a year. But my point is that they damn America for its sins and they, you know, 1770, now it's 1619, that kind of stuff. But if you read what he wrote, and I remember what he said, it was an appeal to Americans to live up to the promise of these brilliant founders who were white, but said in the Dick Declaration, all men are created equal in the face of God. And there isn't anything in the Constitution about racial exclusion. There's that one passage about slavery, but not, you know, two fifths, three fifths, but not about race. And King was saying, all of you people, we were all blessed as Americans to be the inheritors of this great constitutional idealism and the Declaration, and yet we haven't lived up to it because there's people that you do not consider fully human and fully equal. And so I appeal to you and I'll be a partner with you. Let's reclaim the visions of the Founders and what they did. And in other expositions he was getting to the point where he said, and these were white men who could not even always live up to their own standards, like Thomas Jefferson, but they were aspirational and they thought one day everybody, everything in the Constitution and the Declaration will be reified. So it was always a call for an appeal, a Lincoln esque appeal to the better angels of our nature. It wasn't an angry. I know that later there was a change in King as the FBI surveillance mounted and as rumors leaked out of affairs or drinking and they were trying to destroy him and blackmailing him, he became very fatalistic. And he said, you know, I don't think that the forces that are opposed to me are going to let me live. So when he would give a speech, he said, we're going to get to the mountain, but I might not get there with you. So at the end of his life, it was very, it was kind of messianic that he had started this crusade. But either because of the forces of raid or his inability to always himself live up to a strict code, which would have been impossible given the pressures on him, but nevertheless, there were stories coming out about adultery, and I think that affected him and he understood that there might be a different role for him to play, but it wouldn't be there when the civil rights legislation was finally passed.
- [47:06]
Sammy Wink
Yeah. Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and come back and talk a little bit about Biden's preemptive pardons. Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. You can find Victor at his website, Victor Hansen dot com. It's called the Blade of Perseus. And again, we have new prices, $6 and 50 cents a month or $65 a year. So please come join us there. Well, Biden has given out his preemptive pardons. Is that first off, I would like to ask you just is that unusual for a president? And then to address all of the ones Fauci, Liz Cheney, Millie, preemptive pardon.
- [47:51]
Victor Davis Hansen
It's only been done one time. I don't know if you remember, but Trump said before all of the January six people were even pardoned, he thought about preemptively pardoning them. And you can go on and see on record what people said like Adam Schiff and other. Oh, you can't do that. Or Jamie Ratt that would be destroying the country. That's exactly what they did. There's only one person that ever did that, and that was Jerry Ford said that I pardon Richard Nixon for any crime that he has committed up to this point or will surface but not neutron times. Thing to remember about these preemptive pardons are three things. One, when they say I don't want to take it or I want to, they don't have a choice whether they. If they say I don't want, it doesn't matter. It's law. It's law. They're pardoned. Number two, they if they can't for any crime in which they are asked to give testimony, they cannot invoke the fifth amendment because they can't. There's no such thing as self incrimination jeopardy because they're part of. However, a preemptive pardon are for information that surfaces, that implies criminality or legal exposure after the original after but in association with the crimes before the pardon. So you don't get a pardon for things you do after. So what do I mean by that in practical terms? If somebody says I found out next, say next year somebody says, well you know what, it just came out. I found a check by Jim Biden and eight years ago he wrote a check to Joe Biden and he put Chinese disbursement on it. You can't charge him for that. However, if you ask him and they hear him now, a year from now, did you write that check? And he denies it and it can be proven he's guilty then he's guilty and they hear him now of perjury. So how do you, what does that distill down to the house and maybe prosecutors will look at other people who have not been pardoned or an investigation and they're going to bring in these people, the Bidens or maybe about the Wuhan lab, they'll bring in Fauci and they're going to ask them questions and they're not going to be able to say I refuse the testament to self incrimination. But if they don't tell the truth, they're committing a real time perjury and they will. And I think there's going to be a lot of legal exposure and I think it'll have the effect of wanting to investigate these people. And the other thing is these are not theoretical crimes. I mean there was $4 million in income that he was originally pardoned for. And you add it all up and we can trace almost $5 million that Hunter Biden didn't pay taxes on. And then if any of you go into Walmart or Target or Big 5 and buy a pistol and you lie on a federal affidavit and that comes to the attention of the they're going to go after you. It's not just everybody say, well they don't, they do, they do enforce that. And when you believe me, everybody, if you want to give $200,000 in income to your brother and you don't want to pay gift tax on it and you don't want him to pay income tax if it's not a gift or whatever. And you write disbursement. The IRS is not going to go for that. Just because you write it doesn't make it true. You've got to prove it. You have to have a formal loan application. I mean, a document that shows you that it is a loan and it's a loan repayment. But I shouldn't say disbursement, payback. So all of these people have really abused the law. They've committed felonies. And it's highly ironic that they kept calling Donald Trump a convicted felon. The other thing about the January 6th committee, Liz Cheney is now on the attack again. But Liz, with all due respect, you did call up a witness and you did call her up on the presumption that her lawyer was not in the room and you would be talking to her. And you did talk about methodologies of her testimony. And under most state jurisprudence, you were tampering with a witness. So if I'm a witness that saw a murder and the defense attorney calls up and say, victoria, is your lawyer there? No. Well, look, I'm going to call you as a witness and here's my strategy. Here's what I want you to be. You can't do that. And if you have all of the records, she said that it's all there. Well, if it's. I don't think it's all there. They found recordings that are not transcripts that are missing. And so she had criminal exposure. And so this preemptive pardoning, the only thing it did is it also made a sad present, as I wrote, sadder because he is a pathological liar. He said on six occasions, you're going to pardon. No, I wouldn't pardon Hunter. The first thing he said when he took office in 2021, they ask him, don't President Biden. And they always ask him in this fashion. You know that Donald Trump is thinking of preemptive pardons as he's in the last moment. I just don't think I am. Bad idea. You don't just go run out of the door and just preempt it. Wait on now, I wouldn't do that. Never do that. This administration's not going to be doing. That's exactly what they did, but they did it. If you look at a graph of all the presidential pardons from Harry Truman on and you add them all up, they don't equal Joe Biden's. He, he pardoned Peltier, the person who killed murdered two FBI agents. He killed a Virginia murderer who Killed a law enforcement officer. I don't understand the purpose of it. And I say he, he didn't. They just handed him. He has no idea what he's doing. But it really, it did a lot of things. I mean, now, you would think that by pardoning the January 6th people, they go hysterical. If you notice today when I'm speaking on it Tuesday, nobody's talking about that in the left. And the only people that are are people like Tim Kaine or some senators who say, well, you know, now that I kind of think about it, I can't really say that I'm angry about the preemptive pardons that Donald Trump is giving for the January 6th because Joe Biden set the precedent and he took my. Cut my legs right out from under me.
- [54:57]
Sammy Wink
And he just jailed those people the entire four years.
- [55:00]
Victor Davis Hansen
Some of them have never been tried. They've been in jail. You see the pictures of some of them, they're in boxer shorts laying on the cement floor. And then you have to juxtapose that with May, June, July, August, September, October 2020, 14,000 arrests, 99% let go, 35 people killed, murdered, 2 billion in damages, what, 1500 police officers attacked and injured. And then you have to juxtapose that. If that was really an armed insurrection, why did they not find anybody with a firearm in the Capitol? Why did they have to hide Officer Byrd's identity for lethally shooting an unarmed woman, which is a misdemeanor for entering a broken window? Why did Mr. Wray now just now tell us there were 23 affiliated informants or people attached to the FBI? Just what Matthew Rosenberg had said, the New York Times reporter, that, hey, everybody, what was the big deal? I saw all the FBI informants that I work with, you know, as a reporter, and so they didn't want to. Why did they, why did Nancy Pelosi have to lie and say there were five officers killed? Killed, killed, not died, killed, when four of them committed suicide for various causes, weeks, days, months afterwards? And why the only person who did die in direct association from the events, Officer Sicknick, died of natural causes, and yet they told everybody he was murdered. The only people who died were Trump supporters, with the exception of Officer Sicknick. The only person who died violently was a Trump person. Who had she been accorded the George Floyd treatment in the United States, that when a law and a law enforcement officer, and it was much more egregious than George Floyd, excuse me, because I know everybody's going to write me an email. Yes, you're Right. It was much more egregious. He shot an unarmed woman who other people who were armed in the room did not think pose an existential threat. She had no arms, she had no knife, nothing. And when George Floyd was killed, and we can argue about whether his neck was pressed or not, given the conflicting autopsies post facto. The point is that we had Officer Shelvin's picture in what, real time seconds and he was in mortal danger. We learned everything about all the officers. Officer Byrd, no, that's what the left does when Trump says fake news, fake news. He's got a point. He's actually right. And so they're going to. Some of these people were put in preventive detention. It was almost like the archipelago of Solzhenitsyn. It was just a gulag. And they just tried to punish him. And it was horrible what happened. It was the counterpart to what they did to Trump with these five. Gean Carroll, Fannie Willis, Alvin Bragg, Jack Smith, Atita James. Miscarriage of justice.
- [58:09]
Sammy Wink
On onto another subject. Did you see that Bishop, Episcopal Bishop Marianne Budet or Bud, I'm not sure how she pronounces her last name, but give her sermon while Trump and his family were sitting there and then turn to him personally and say he needs to have mercy because immigrants and transgendered and LGBT community and others are afraid of him. That there's a.
- [58:41]
Victor Davis Hansen
No. I would tell her, I would have said, if I was in the room. I said, shame, shame, shame on you. 80,000 people die. You don't care anything about Fentanyl. That's disguised as Valium. It's disguised as painkillers, codeine tablets deliberately sent into this country by the cartels. Across an open border, there are 300,000 unaccounted children that came in. We have no idea where they are. They were trafficked for the most part. You don't care about that at all. With an open border, there are 500,000 estimated felons, rapists, killers, thieves that were brought in from South America, Latin America, Mexico, and nobody has any idea where they, they are. And you don't care one wit that there are people in Hispanic communities and black communities and poor white communities that can't go to their dialysis appointment. They can't go to the urologist, they can't go to the. Because it's flooded with 12 million people who over tax all of the facilities that you, bishop, never have to use because you are of a social economic class that has access to health care. You should come into the San Joaquin Valley and try to go to a doctor when you have thousands of illegal aliens swamping the system. These people are really culpable people, and they're so. Even the Pope was very sanctimonious. You know, he was, everybody lectures Donald Trump. They didn't lecture Barack Obama when he had cages. They didn't lecture Joe Biden about the 300,000. They only, they're not primarily principled, moral people. They're political activists and they have an agenda. And if she didn't have an agenda, she would have said the same thing to Biden during the inauguration if she was there, but she wouldn't.
- [60:32]
Sammy Wink
The inaugural ball and festivities had all sorts of people that were dressed in absolutely stunning gowns and outfits, helicopter hat. And there was one person that was the most interesting of all the dressers in the inauguration itself, and that was Federman, who came in his gym shorts and sneakers and hoodie on as well. The audacity of the guy to show up.
- [61:00]
Victor Davis Hansen
I don't know why he does that. I mean, I, I can't really speak because I'm not well dressed, as my father once told me, as when I first got my job, I had no clothes. I was farming, I had Levi's, torn T shirts, I went up to teach, and he, he heard about it from somebody, and he arrived in my office with polyester suits. And I said, dad, I'm not on the Love Boat. But he gave me these ridiculous. Bruce Thornton, who was a colleague of mine, he said, this isn't the Brady's Bush, this isn't the Brady Bunch. Mr. So anyway, I can't talk, but I don't know the logic behind the shorts and the, Is it because he, he's kind of overweight and he wants to hide his girth? There's other ways to do it.
- [61:48]
Sammy Wink
Yeah.
- [61:48]
Victor Davis Hansen
Or is it just he's a natural slob, or is it because I think that's it, he just feels comfortable in it, or does he realize that, like Trump's comb hair and orange skin, that's his trademark now? And not to do that would be.
- [62:04]
Sammy Wink
But counterintuitive.
- [62:06]
Victor Davis Hansen
Oh, this is about the only country where nobody cares. You know what I mean? So, yes, I was in that mood for 20 years. When I was farming, I deliberately underdressed. When I went to school, I don't think I wore a tie. And then I started. As I got older, I remember my parents echoing my head, you treat people with respect, and one of the ways you show it is by the way you dress. So then that's true. Yeah, I hadn't thought of that. But I remember that warning and I wasn't a very good dresser. I don't think I've ever bought a suit that matched maybe one in my life. So I always a pretty well known politician said to me once when are you going to update from your Costco wardrobe Costco Hager pants on.
- [62:57]
Sammy Wink
Okay. We won't expect commentary on all the other dressers who were all very stunning looking. So it was a fascinating inaugural day, lots of festivities. So Victor, we we're at the end of our podcast and we are in our video cast and I have a observation made by a reader at your website and I thought it was interesting about nuclear weapons and your thoughts on this. He says tweeter is the name, the handle that he goes by. Hopefully Trump will realize the US has enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world a few times over. The country doesn't need new multi billion dollar weapons systems and 3 million plus man military to defend the country. The U. S was last invaded by Great Britain in 1812. I was wondering your thoughts.
- [63:51]
Victor Davis Hansen
Well, we have somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000 deliverable nuclear weapons. Not all of those are ready to be launched and we're roughly have parity with the Soviet Union. Former Soviet Union. They may have 7,000 and China is now billing them. They used to have about 300. I think they're up to 1500 and they want to get up to our level. So I thought that too for much of my life. And then at one point, this is interesting, very quickly I said Obama had said that we were going to reduce it to I think 1500 and then down to 500 deliverable weapon. And these range from the Hiroshima 18 to 20 kilotons to a megaton. Or more. The biggest bomb I think that was ever was the mother of all bombs dropped by the Russians. I think it was 50 megatons. It was inconceivable.
- [64:46]
Sammy Wink
Wow, that's amazing.
- [64:47]
Victor Davis Hansen
Thousands of 2,000 Hiroshimas at once. Scary. But here's my point. So I wrote something about how many nuclear weapons do we need? And it's not the number, it's deterrence. So I just forgot about. I gave a talk in Carmel, Carmel, California and it was on farming and there was a very strange person in the audience who had a very well dressed suit and he was from South Korea and he came up to me and he had a very lavish gift and he and so I went to have coffee with him after my talk and he was a member of the Korean armed forces Very high. And he said, you were writing things that are very dangerous to our interest. So he got a piece of paper and he pulled it out and he says, you have 1500 deliverable weapons. I said, yes. He said, now how many do you need to detour for the United States so Russia doesn't attack you? And he wrote down maybe 1000. In other words, if they know you can hit 1000 targets of their military bases and cities, they'll leave you alone. I said, what? He said, how many in China? I never thought of things in such a fashion. And he said, it's bigger than Russia. They have more cities, maybe a thousand. I said, yes, now how about Japan? And I said, I don't know, 50, 60 would deter people. And he said, how about Australia? And he went through all the European countries and then he said, how about Canada and how about Mexico? And I said, whose county? He said, everybody is counting. They know that North Korea knows exactly how many nuclear weapons the United States would put at the disposal. Not actual use, but pledge them to protect South Korea in a nuclear conflagration. If you want us to. If you don't want us to gain nuclear weapons, then you better have them pledged to the defense of South Korea. If you think about that, he's got a point. The other point is very quickly, I'm doing this extemporaneous because I didn't know what you were going to ask. But the history of military affairs is challenge, response, counter, response, counter, counter. And those are long periods of history. I'll give you one example. You have stonewalls in antiquity, somewhere around 340, there was the invention of not just catapults, but torsion catapults that were human hair twisted and then wound back. So you had power stored in the catapult and those projectiles could knock down a wall. And suddenly all of those impressive classical fortifications were rendered by Philip of Macedon and Alexander. Useful, useless. So when he went into Thebes in 335, he destroyed the city's walls in one day with torsion catapult. However, there was a response to it. And soon people began to make an outer wall stone face and then fill it with dirt maybe 8ft deep that would absorb the shock and then have an interior stone wall. So when the next generation of Hellenistic besiegers tried to use the torsion catapult and hit a city wall, it might make a hole in the stone facing and some dirt would come, but it could not penetrate. So my point is, it's never Static. So we think nuclear weapons, that's the end of all things. Beside the fact if nobody can use them because rich are afraid of nuclear escalation into the end of everything, it doesn't mean you're not going to have war. As we learn, more people have died after the invention of the atomic bomb than during World War II in conflicts because everybody says you can't use them or the other person will use them. The second thing though is as crazy as this sound, I don't think that the history of response, counter response, given it's predicated on human nature, is at the end of history. So what we're already talking about field grade lasers. We saw the whole dynamic changing as we saw with the 500 projectiles against Iran. Prior to those attacks on Israel from Iran, there was the idea that Israel had to be very careful because one nuclear weapon would wipe it out. And the chances of stopping a hypersonic missile were nil. Suddenly, with their multi layered iron dome facilities of low level, medium level, high level, augmented by the United States, they had a multi dimensional anti missile system. So 98% of those projectiles didn't get through. And you can see if those were improved faster than the rate of improvement on missiles, then you would get to a situation when augmented by lasers and artificial intelligence that maybe people would say, well, they have bombs but you can't deliver them because you can knock them down or blow them up in their face or you can tell the Iranians, I think there was a report out that about 10% of the projectiles never left the launching pad. They were defective or they were incompetently administered. So my point is nuclear weapons are not the end of us. Everything. We're going to find an anti nuclear weapon and then we're going to find an anti anti nuclear weapon and it's going to go on for history. So my point is that you want to have more offensive weapons than the enemy to create deterrence and you want to have a better defensive system than the enemy. So I know this sounds crazy because 400 nuclear weapons will destroy a nation, turn it back into the Stone age if it hit the right network and infrastructure. But the absurd idea that you have 800 rather than 400 will give you additional deterrence. It doesn't sound possible. But human nature is being what it is. It does, it really does.
- [71:03]
Sammy Wink
What about his second point on the numbers of personnel needed in a military? Is there any short answer to that or is that that long?
- [71:13]
Victor Davis Hansen
Well, he gauged the number of people in the military based on the protection of the homeland. And that is a tenet of the MAGA philosophy, that we avoid optional military engagements abroad and we just protect the homeland. But Donald Trump bombed ISIS because although he was a MAGA creator, he said that we need proactive defense of the homeland. And he couched that attack on ISIS by using US Air power based in Turkey, based in the Middle east, and based on Syrian airfields where there was 20 US installations. There's US installations in Jordan, I think planes. And his theory was after 9, 11, and when we saw the Taliban offering sanctuary to bin Laden and he took out the World Trade center and came killed 3,000Americans. And he did what the Japanese, the Germans, the Italians in World War II and nobody in world one had ever done, and nobody's ever done since, create a major attack on the continental United States. Only the Japan Japanese had done it in a Pearl harbor on the extra continental. But after that, Trump was saying, I have to destroy isis and I will take out Soleimani and I will take out Baghdadi and I will put maximum prime pressure. And to do just what I outlined, you need thousands of troops. And whether we like it or not, there's all these countries. Some of them are. I don't know what the word is. They're conniving and they're using us to defend the. Defend them. And they won't pay their 2% GDP for NATO, but not all of them. And they really do think that China or Russia would bully them with nuclear weapons unless they gave concessions. And wait till the Philip. The only reason that the Philippines and Australia and Taiwan and Japan and South Korea are free, independent, autonomous countries is not because China is afraid of their military forces. It's because they all have agreements with the United States that protects them, and they protect them under their nuclear shield. And that's a scary thought when you get down to the reductionists, that we pledge American cities to protect them, and we do it by conventional forces that are. You know, my father, we used to. I've never been to the Mariana Islands, but he always told me graphically what Tinian was like. And he was based there on a 7B 29313 wing. And lo and behold, somebody sent me a video the other day. Yes, in the United States.
- [73:58]
Sammy Wink
Wow, that's cool.
- [73:59]
Victor Davis Hansen
It is. The United States has now uncovered those jungle. I mean, they showed a picture of a guy with a machete, and he was going through there with a gps. Where are these airfields of crushed coral? And he found them. They found them, and they went in and cleared them all out. And all those B29 runways are reappearing on Tinian. Why? Because they realize that if we get in a war with China or we're forced to protect our friends from China, our aircraft carriers are going to last about an hour because of their huge numbers of shore to sea missiles. You know, how can you stop 5,000 missiles, you know, going 2 inches above the ocean at night aimed at a carrier? But they're taking these strategic assets and they're dispersing them over all these bases and one of them as Tinian. And that makes sense if you have 30 F35s here, 40 there, you don't have, you know, one big base in Japan or Okinawa or something. So it's never ending. And that that requires, I think I praise the writer because he's trying to say, isn't there an end to this? And that's what Trump's point is. He's trying to go from nation building, interventionist, imperialist, whatever you want to call it. And he doesn't want to be isolationist because he knows what happens in history when you're isolationist. But he wants to be Jacksonian. And that means don't screw around with the United States. We take care of our friends. We don't take care of the un we don't take care of the EU necessarily. We take care of our NATO partners and our friends in Asia and maybe some of north, and that's it. So don't screw with us because we have overwhelming power and we will hurt you if you try. And that keeps the peace.
- [75:53]
Sammy Wink
Yeah. So you see foresee in the future that the US Military will not change in size in terms of personnel.
- [76:02]
Victor Davis Hansen
Well, I think it's getting smaller. I think with the increase on reliance on robotics and drones and AI, you'll see fewer and fewer human people fighting. I think you'll have robotic submarine ships, ships, drones. You'll never eclipse the need for humans. Of course, you have to have them. But the idea we're going to have a million men on an infantry battlefield, I don't think it's going to happen. Well, I shouldn't say that. I just said that history never ends. We'll find uses of them. But I don't know if we're going to need 3 million people. But we should point out that, that after saying that the determinant factor right now in the Ukraine war, there's been 1.7 million dead, wounded and missing two years. We're coming up to February 24th, so that's all 22, all 23, all 24. Three years. And the determining factor on who's winning or losing is not just a dearth of armored vehicles, dearth of manpower. They've killed too many Ukrainians and they're running out of manpower. And the Russians are running at least out of 18 to 25 year old Russians that are willing to fight. So manpower counts. It really does.
- [77:28]
Sammy Wink
It does. It's a lost generation.
- [77:30]
Victor Davis Hansen
That's what worries me. I gave, I won't, I don't want to just to finish. I don't want to give it away. But I was at a conference in an undisclosed location and I made the statement that I was worried that we were 40,000 soldiers short. And I said I had trouble finding Pentagon data to find out where those shortages were most egregious in terms of recruitment. And I looked at and the military does have figures on diversity, not for diversity mandates. And it looks to me if you look at the data that African Americans are pretty much represented at 13 to 16%, that Hispanics the same and women are starting to get parity. I think there's a quarter million, not yet. But there is one group that is falling off. White males were over. They represent about 33% of the population and they are overrepresented in the military. But more importantly, contrary to the mythologies of Vietnam and everything from the left, they died, as I've often said at twice their numbers and the demographic. And so when you look at them, they're not there. They're not joining multi generational families. So I mentioned that and everybody kind of looked at me like you use the word white, you're not supposed to do that, you're supposed to say middle class. But. And I made the further suggestion to this undisclosed location and undisclosed group and unaffiliated to me, I was a guest that I thought in speculation the causes of that shortfall in this demographic were not what I was being told anecdotally by members of the highest echelons of the military. I had been told, well you're sorely mistaken, Victor. They are not joining because of a wide transracial that transcends race. They're too obese or they're tattooed or they're get gang members or they have criminal records or we're competing with the private sector and a 3.5% they're all legitimate. But that's not the reason because those are with been with us for years. Years they were. And so why now? And I said encounter and I said this again at the meeting, I would suggest it is when you deliberately cashier 8,500 people out of the military who had Covid natural immunity because they didn't want to get the vaccination, or they got it and refused to get a booster, and the majority of those were white male. Or you tell people in front of the nation, as General Milley did and General Austin did, that you were now going through the ranks, post George Floyd, to look for white rage, white privilege and white supremacy and rumors that there were cabals of such segregationist races, and you were recommending that people read, which I think is a total bankrupt piece of crap, but Professor Kendi's work. And then you implement that in reality dei and that governs promotion, retention and recruitment. And so if you're a young person who's a major or and they. You. You think you are under the impression, I'm not saying it's accurate, but if you're an artillery officer and you believe that you will be promoted not on the basis that your unit hitting the target, say in a GPS artillery platform again and again, but on the basis of how many women or minorities you had in your field, you're going to react in a certain way of discomfort. Especially if you were an excellent officer and your artillery unit had the best, best record of hitting the target of any comparable unit, but you didn't have the demographics to match what they wanted, and you're not going to get promoted. And that's going to filter through the ranks. All of those things then account for the shortfall. And you know what? I was met with derision that they met all the requirements. They met all the requirements, and they met all the requirements because they lowered the requirements. In other words, if you go look carefully, the numbers of people they felt were necessary to operate an efficient military mysteriously began to shrink to the actual numbers of people who signed up. Whereas before they had independently adjudicated how many people they needed and then they recruited to meet that goal, and they didn't meet that goal. So rather than a new year and year after failure, they began adjusting that goal downward to meet the actual numbers of people they had. So military. I don't know how to say it because I really admire military officers, especially captains to generals. And as I said, I was embedded a couple of times and I feel sometimes that HR McMaster I was embedded with one time with very protective and I owe a lot of my safety to him. But they are very sensitive. I don't mean him in particular, but military officers are very sensitive. To criticism. Very sensitive. They do not want to talk about it. And I don't know why that is, but. And they disparage people who bring it to their attention. And so I've had a kind of a revelation where I used to kind of idolize military officers, but I've had so many who confronted me in harsh language and stuff.
- [83:38]
Sammy Wink
Well, I mean, it probably might have an impact on their career.
- [83:42]
Victor Davis Hansen
So they get word you're in a possible position. I understand that, but it's not going to change unless you speak out. The thing I don't quite understand is, from what I've read and this people I've spoken to, the most unpopular person is Pete Hexseth. Among four star, not about. Not rank and file, but one to four stars, flag officers, admirals in general, they don't like him because he says they don't have dust on their boots or they're not in the front lines, or they're not, you know, Sherman or somebody riding to war with at the front of the vanguard or whatever. But there he's very unpopular, and I. I feel like I'd like to see him have a chance to reformulate the military. Get rid of dei, get rid of the political general, get rid. Get rid of the undue influence of Washington onto the Pentagon. And he's basically right that the left looks at the Pentagon. They used to hate it, and then they said about 10 years ago, wait a minute. It's not Democratic, it's chain of command. Wow. We don't have to go through Congress and pass legislation. We'll just get our president or we'll make some kind of ordinance and we'll tell them, you're going to have dei and then they can just jump right through the chain of command in dictatorial fashion. We like the military because of issues of transgender and DEI and EV vehicles and biofuels. We don't want to mess around with the general economy. We can go to the military and tell them, you know what, you want to get promoted. You want to have a life in the military. All good things happen when you do what we tell you. And because it's kind of a rah, rah, macho thing, it has to be. It's really difficult for a war fighter then to have to make those compromises to survive and be promoted. And out of that frustration, they get very sensitive. So if you suggest to an officer, you guys are completely inundated with dei, they get very angry, and I can understand their frustration.
- [85:48]
Sammy Wink
Yeah. Well, Victor, we are at the end of our video Cast podcast. We would like to thank our audience for coming and thank you for the discussion of the new era we've just entered.
- [85:59]
Victor Davis Hansen
Novus ordo ordo seclorum.
- [86:03]
Sammy Wink
Yes. And we have great hopes for it. I think everybody does. Everybody's been saying the. The air, it's palpable in the air.
- [86:10]
Victor Davis Hansen
And so yes, I almost did YMCA dance to the tv but. And there was nobody in the room, but I thought, no, not quite there yet, I might get there.
- [86:20]
Sammy Wink
All right, well, thanks to the audience. Thanks to you. This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hampson and we're signing off.
- [86:27]
Victor Davis Hansen
Thank you everybody for listening. It's much appreciated. Happy New Year.
- [86:36]
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