← The Victor Davis Hanson Show
The Victor Davis Hanson Show
The Armenian-Azeri Peace Treaty and ‘Shifty’ Schiff on the Hot Seat
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Sammy Wink
Customers hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. This is our Friday news roundup and we'll look at the news of the week. On the docket are some things Trump this week so DC deployment of National Guard and Azerbaijan and Armenia have signed a peace agreement. So stay with us for those stories and we'll be right back.
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Victor Davis Hanson
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Victor Davis Hanson
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Sammy Wink
Welcome back 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 Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. You can find him at his website, victorhanson.com the name of the website is the Blade of Perseus. So please come join us there for everything Victor Hanson, his writings, his podcasts, video and audio are found there and lots of other things, links to his his books. So please come join us there. So Victor, Azerbaijan and Armenia signed a peace agreement in the White House today. And everybody's talking about a Nobel Priest Peace Prize because of the so many things including Azerbaijan and Armenia. But I thought what was interesting about the story was that Donald Trump hopes to diversify energy in the region away from Russia. And they think that Russia will lose 10 to 20 billion, I think, and that also this will open up a trade nexus, ending their conflict with each other. That will improve trade in the region by 50 to 100 billion, they think according to the World bank, that last statistic.
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Victor Davis Hanson
There's a number of things going on. Donald Trump has realized that while it was true, Putin did not invade during his four year tenure in a way that he had during George W. Bush and Barack Obama's and Biden, his neighbors, remember Georgia, Osatia, Crimea, Donbass, accepted attempt on Kiev. That didn't mean that you didn't need leverage on Putin. And the only leverage we have had is massive arms and economic aid. And that is becoming untenable to the mega Beys. But what Donald Trump is trying to do is search for ways to pressure Putin. Part of the deal style, one of them was, I don't know if that's going to work, a secondary oil boycott. I remember the days of Cesar Chavez here in California when he issued one against grocery stores. It didn't work all that well. It got people very angry. But the problem was he's pushing one of our allies, Modi India. And I'm not sure that's wise. In other words, we're not going to trade with India if you buy any Russian oil. But you can't do that with China. You don't want to get 3 billion people. Modi, India and China, you know, you can't just cut them out of the entire economy to pressure a state of 146 million. Russia. So he's trying to look at other reasons. This is another lever. He thinks that, well, there's this former Soviet province, it's got all this energy, Caspian Sea energy, and they have this historic Turkic, Armenian hatred. And if I can adjudicate this settlement and bring them more into the west, that will hurt Putin because he won't be able to do business or have the energy corridor. So that's the second thing. The third thing that's going on is these are ancient. He's intervening with Congo, Rwanda. Those are ancient tribal differences. Kosovo and Serbia. Those are ancient tribal differences. In this case, religion. He's tried to adjudicate India, Pakistan. Those are ancient differences. Muslim, Hindu. So he's Ukraine and Russia. But the problem with all of these things, these are fundamentally existential hatreds. They've been there forever. So you just don't say, I'm Donald Trump and click your fingers and stop fighting. You can say, we're going to put tariffs on you, but we're not going to put tariffs on you, or we're going to let your students come in. There are elements of leverage and pressure he has, but when you go all around the globe, you just can't, by fiat, say peace. You know, it's sort of like, I touch you, you are now free, you are peaceful. And Walter Russell Mead had a very good article that Trump has to be careful that he doesn't become a Napoleon, in a sense, that he intervenes everywhere. But it is good that he's getting ceasefires, as long as they're not overhyped, that these are peace. I'll give you an example. It's very similar to at the end of World War II. There were a Communist resistance in Greece to the Nazis and there was a monarchical, centrist, conservative resistance. And the Communists were committing acts of terror against the Nazis to stop them. But they were up in the hills and often they would retaliate on the cities. And the people told the Communists, don't do that because they take us out and shoot us. Whereas the conservative people said, well, we're going to resist in different ways, but not to incur retaliation. And the Communists said, well, you're selling out, etc. Etc. So Churchill flew in to Athens to try to adjudicate this fight and save Greece, and he did. For a while. They almost blew him up in the Grand Battania Hotel. Or maybe they were going to kill him. The communists were, but they stopped the fighting in Athens. And that was what Churchill did. But it didn't last. Then you had a million people killed in the Civil War. Roosevelt kind of did that. He got a Nobel Prize. Teddy Roosevelt won the Russo Japanese War. He went over there and he tried to adjudicate it. So there's a history of presidents doing that. Woodrow Wilson tried to do the same thing in World War I with the 14 points and the Versailles. Remember what Clemens told. Who does he think he is? God? God only had 10 commandments, not 14. So it's a tricky thing to do. So Trump's got to focus on, you know, you just can't spread yourself thin. And the fourth thing to remember about this is the degree to which people are going to listen to you or take your advice or be coerced. Depends on your domestic popularity. Churchill on May 9, was a colossus that strode the world. He had been the only leader on the Allies to survive on September 1, 1939. Britain would be the only company, by the way, that would fight the first day of World War II and the last day, September 2, 1945. All the others either came in late or they were joining the Axis powers. But my point is this, is that he was thrown out by an election in July. Churchill was so here. He was the most important man that Britain had produced in 500 years. And he was flying all over, you know, he was with Roosevelt. He was working on the Yalta conference. He had been adjudicating, as I said, Greece. He was the one that drew a little map and said, we want Turkey and Greece on our side in the Cold War. Basically wasn't called. He told Stalin that keep out. You broke all your promises. You did not allow elections in Hungary, Czechs, Czechoslovakia, Poland. But we're gonna save Greece, mother cradle of western, and we're gonna save Turkey. And we'll agree with you that Finland and Austria will not be part of NATO or whatever comes out. At that time, there was no NATO, but they'll be neutral. So he was doing all these things, and what he didn't realize is the socialists back in the Socialist Labor Party were saying there's no social health care, that trains are too expensive, coal is too expensive. And they wanted to nationalize everything, and they did. So here you had this weird thing with the most powerful British man in cosmic terms, in half a millennium, lost the election. So Trump is kind of like that. He's all over the world, but his source of Power rests on his ability to get legislation through, like the big beautiful bill and get the economy sound. And this month, I guess the Wall Street Journal was in mourning because I think the inflation rate was still only 2.6 or 7. And they kept telling us, and I think Jerome Powell must be hitting his head against a wall. Oh, I want it so much to raise interest rates because of inflation. There's no inflation. And now I'll have to lower them. I can't do that. Donald Trump will look like he beat me. Trump will probably tweet that anyway. So bottom line, I'm glad that he's doing all these things. If there is a peace prize for such a thing, he deserves it. But you just don't. You just. I hope people don't conclude that just because there's a temporary ceasefire that these hatreds that go back millennia are going to be over with. And to the degree that he can exercise that influence, it depends ultimately here at home. And he's got to make sure the economy works. He's got to make sure that the Doge stuff, all of the stuff, all of his initiatives, the border, that is what gives him the power.
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Sammy Wink
And one of his other initiatives has been to take over D.C. and to deploy the National Guard, which he has done. What's interesting this week about that deployment of the National Guard and Donald Trump is that the disintegrating left is revealing themselves once again. We have Dana Bash getting in and saying, well, January 6th was the worst, most violent moment in Recent history in D.C. and Hakeem Jeffries trying to convince everybody that crime is at a 32 year low. But on the other hand, an ABC News anchor, Kyra Phillips, said confirmed, confessed that she had been jumped by a vagrant some weeks ago. So the left can't quite get.
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Victor Davis Hanson
I saw that clip and she said somebody was murdered out here. Somebody was this. So that's a, that's a 30, 70 issue crime. I don't know why the left does it. The border is a 37 issue. The trans biological men competing female Sports is a 37, maybe 40, 60, but it doesn't matter. They're on the losing end. So they're going to make an argument that the official FBI crime rates show that there is a drop off. There's only 174 murders. Well, that's a lot. And more importantly, we all know two things, that the police union in Washington is complaining that they are doctoring crime statistics to make it look lower so they don't have to hire police. And that's not accurate. Number two, for the last five years, if you go online, anybody, and you want to find the FBI murder rate for 20, 25, 24, 23, good luck. It's so far behind, I think it's 21 or 20. They're years behind. And it's inaccurate because most of these blue cities will not report crime statistics to the FBI clearinghouse because they don't want to give the impression that, that their cities are dangerous or that there's an inordinate black crime rate or something like that. So the statistics in most cases are worthless. So we don't know what the crime rate is, but it's empirically or firsthand or anecdotally. A lot of people think it's a very dangerous place. So all they had to do, again, the left, all they had to do was say, well, Mr. President, let's work together to make sure there's a, there's not a crime spree. We're going to clamp the city. I don't if you disagree with them, they could have said, we don't think you need to nationalize for a month or two the police force. Let's find other ways. They can't do that. They have to scream and yell hikem. Jeffries, what's your alternative? Hikem. Are you gonna say that there's no crime, it's just going down? If that's true? Speaker not any longer. Minority leaders Jeffreys do you walk around which neighborhoods do you walk around Washington at night? I've walked around in the last three or four years. It's not very safe. I was in a major hotel, I won't give you the name, but I would say it was in a three minute walk or five minute walk of the White House. And I had maybe, I think it was three years ago, a flight at five in the morning from six in the morning from Reagan. So I got up, packed, went down. I thought, you know, I'll just go out there early. So at 5:30 I got my little suitcase to go out and they have those double doors in the east coast, you know, there's the first door and then there's the cold. It's kind of like a, to keep the temperature down. And then the outdoor. And in that door there was two people fighting. One person was trying to rob the other person and they weren't people in the hotel, they were two people fighting outside where it was too cold. And they took their fight right in there and I was standing right there and then I went over because it was Too early and the person was not around the desk. So I went and yelled and they called the police and she kind of shrugged and said they're not going to come here. And that was Washington D.C. and it's not a safe place. Everybody knows it's not a safe place. So why would you think that's a winning issue? How dare he try to stop crime in Washington. He's a Nazi. No, you just give us an alternative. Once again, give us an alternative. What he needs to do is follow up. So he says, I'm coming in for 30 or 40 days. I will beef up the police as a force multiplier to free them to do their other work. I'll have the guys patrol the streets. And this is part of a long term solution. So I am going to help federal funds. It's run by the federal government, the District, and we will hire, you know, 500 more policemen. But it still won't work. If you have a federal attorney, which you do, that lets people out under federal. Because every. It's run by the feds. Well, I mean they do have home rule, but ultimately the Federal government runs D.C. but they need prosecutors that will prosecute.
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Sammy Wink
They sure do. Well, Victor, I'd like to take a moment for our sponsor, OpenPhone. OpenPhone is the number one business phone system that streamlines and scales your customer communications. It works through an app on your phone or computer. So no more carrying two phones or using a landline. With OpenPhone your team can share one number and collaborate on customer calls and texts like a shared inbox. So whether you're a one person operation drowning in calls and texts or have a large team that needs better collaboration tools, OpenPhone is a no brainer. See why over 60,000 businesses trust OpenPhone. OpenPhone is offering listeners 20% off your first six months at openphone.com Victor. That's O P E N P H O N E dot com Victor. And if you have existing numbers with another service, OpenPhone will port them over at no extra charge. Open Phone, no missed calls, no missed customers. Thank you Open Phone for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show. So. So Victor, Kash Patel's at work and he has been releasing evidence of Shifty Schiff and the recent evidence. This is copious evidence that he is the source of a lot of leaks about the Russian collusion to fuel it and keep it going as we kind of suspected. But now we have the evidence of that.
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Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, everybody thought that he was, but. But these were not criminal offenses because he did the following. They would Catch him in the hallway during the Russian collusion hoax, they being either CNN or msnbc. And they would say something like, representative Schiff, as the Minority Leader on the House Select Intelligence Committee, are you worried about Russian collusion? Is there any evidence? Chairman Nunes has not found any. And he'd say he'd go like this, Well, I can't disclose it because I'm bound by rules over the House. But let me tell you, what I'm seeing is scaring me. And he would go on TV that I can't talk about it. I cannot talk about it. But believe me, if you could see what I could see. And he did that. So I always thought he'd get away with it because he wasn't under oath. But apparently he. There's evidence that he violated criminal classified statutes. The other thing they got him on is that for years, apparently he claimed that his primary residence was in Maryland and he had a place in Los Angeles that he did the same with.
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Sammy Wink
Sounds like Latita James.
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Victor Davis Hanson
You did it in Virginia, didn't you? You. You said that you lived in a condo in Virginia, so you should get a reduction in your property taxes and your mortgage rate. But you also cannot do that if you are a New York elected official. And you knew that because you also declared your residence was in New York. But the other thing they got him on is he was asked point blank, did you or did you notice not meet with Alexander Vindman, who prompted, remember the first impeachment or the whistleblower, Eric Saromela? Oh, no, I haven't. And we know that was a complete lie. In other words, the catalyst for the Trump impeachment came from Vindman, who was born in Ukraine. I think he's a dual citizen, not that that matters, but I only mention that because he's been involved in middlemen, schemes of arms transfers to Ukraine. And he was on the call and he said that Trump said this and this and it was inappropriate. So then he called somebody, Mr. Serramala, who was not on the call, and told him that. And then Mr. Salamara blew the whistle by going to whom? Adam Schiff. And Adam Schiff said that was not true, that he had not met with them and he had. So he's got a lot of levels of exposure and he keeps talking. That's the thing about all these people, clapper, Brennan, Schiff, McCabe. They go on TV, they keep talking, and they don't know from day one to day two what they said on day four or five ago. So they just keep Lying. They keep contradicting themselves. Clapper goes on, what are they doing? Me, I never, I never said anything about the Russian. I never saw the dossier. And then there's this stuff coming out when he said, what do you think of the dossier? And the guy said, it doesn't seem. Well, it could be true. So he's on record, and yet he keeps contradicting himself. So whether they're indictable, I mean, you don't really put in jail US Senators like. But you don't. Menendez, it was hard to do and shift. It's going to be very interesting to see if these people have to pay a price for the whole thing. They did that.
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Sammy Wink
Menendez, he. His stick was a lot of monetary. Gold bar. I know gold bars in his house.
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Victor Davis Hanson
And bundles of money and in his sport jacket. Yeah, but he'd been doing stuff like that, that for a long time. You know what caught him? You know what got him?
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Sammy Wink
Did they finally get him on?
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Victor Davis Hanson
Why did they go after him then? He'd been doing that for years. They all knew that.
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Sammy Wink
Yeah. And it was under Biden. Right. So he was.
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Victor Davis Hanson
Well, Obama went out, didn't. They started looking at him during the open.
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Sammy Wink
During the.
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Victor Davis Hanson
During. Because he was skeptical. He was a big supporter of Israel because he had a large Jewish American constituency in New Jersey. So he wasn't on board for the Iran deal. And they basically stopped his wrist and said, listen, get back on board. And the same thing was true with Biden when he was trying to beg to get back in the Iran deal. Menendez seemed skeptical for political reasons. Not that he cared. I mean, he's not a man of principle. But as soon as you did that, bam. The next thing you knew, their federal attorney said that he had been taking money. People forget that about Biden. He weaponized the FBI, weaponized the CIA, weaponized the doj, weaponized the irs, as you saw with Hunter Biden. And he always did the Murder in the Cathedral, you know, the T.S. eliot murder in Cathedral play. Will somebody not relieve me of this man? Why is Donald Trump not indicted? I didn't say anything. Why is. And then his little minions would run back like little mice to Merrick Garland. Joe Biden wants him indicted. You better get a special counsel right now. It's November 18th. He just declared that he was going to run for president three days ago. And you know what? Fannie Will's boyfriend is meeting in the White House right now. And. And Michael Coa, Angelo is all. Just left the doj. He's Going to go work for Alvin Brad. What are we going to do? Well, I'll name Jack Smith. That'll do my part. That's how it worked. Well, same day. Same day, yeah.
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Sammy Wink
We'll talk a little bit about people being indicted for political reasons or at least feeling like they might be after these messages. Stay with us and we'll be right back. Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. You can find Victor on social media at X. His handle is Edhan. And on Facebook at Hanson's Morning Cup. And we also like to invite everybody to join something unaffiliated with us on Facebook, the Victor Davis Hanson Fan club, which we are not in control of, but they do a great job getting new stuff and old stuff of Victor's that they post. So speaking of people being afraid of being indicted for political reasons, Drew Barrymore, the queen of the left, most famous for bending the knee to Dylan Mulvaney or calling Kamala Mamala, has.
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Victor Davis Hanson
That's sad, by the way, because she's from such a. Lionel Barrymore.
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Sammy Wink
I was gonna ask you about that. She's a granddaughter, right. Of Lionel Berry is a great granddaughter.
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Victor Davis Hanson
He was so great in It's a Wonderful Life. Potter.
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Sammy Wink
Yeah.
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Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah.
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Sammy Wink
He had a long, long career that I've seen him in a lot of movies.
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Victor Davis Hanson
Suffered from arthritis.
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Sammy Wink
Yeah. Anyways, she was on Bill Mayor recently and said that she really admired Bill Mayor. She's always kissing up to the person that's next to her. But anyways, a lot for all of his bravado about what he thinks is the truth himself. So that was. That's a quote from Drew Barrymore and that he was still doing this in when it was so dangerous to do this. Speak his truth, I guess is what she's trying to say. But doesn't she remember all the stuff they did to Donald Trump? Why would she consider the Trump Times more dangerous?
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Victor Davis Hanson
Because she's a leftist and because he's a leftist.
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Sammy Wink
She was trying to obfuscate that and pretend like, well, she was maybe somewhere.
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Victor Davis Hanson
They'Re both leftists and there's two types of cancel culture. That's true. Colbert got canceled and these other night show people are going to be canceled and I think the View will be canceled. But this type of cancel is not political, it's economic. And so basically late night talk like Colbert loses money, in his case, 40 million. And so does Kimmel and Jimmy Fowler. They all lose money and the View is a complete disaster. But they were willing to subsidize it. Sort of like the big Corporations subsidized book publishing because they get ideas out and they were on the left. So this was important, you know, for. They understood everybody was going to get mad if they. You canceled Colbert because you couldn't go on there if you were Adam Schiff or Schumer. There was like 180 guests the last couple of years and there was no one Republican, Liz Cheney. So the point is they were willing to subsidize that. And then the mood of the countries changed. In other words, the left is in disarray and the Democratic Party is at an all time low and they're losing money. Then somebody came along, a new management said, am I missing something? These people are not talented. They're just hacks. And their cause is not popular right now. And I'm spending all this money and they're attacking me, the owner, you know, Disney, I'm not going to do it anymore. So they're starting to cancel it. But the other cancellation methodology is not economic. It comes from the left. And what Bill, I don't know whether he believes he's going to be canceled because he's not making any money for HBO or whether the left will go after him because if he keeps talking about he doesn't believe in trans biological men and sport, women's sports, or there is high crime, or he's going to get in trouble. But not with the right. With the left. They are going to start going after them and they cancel people and they debunk people. As we saw with Trump, they have all sorts of methodologies. I mean, if you ask yourself who in America right now is swatting people? The left. Who's canceling, cancel culture. And they say an incorrect thing. Their Persona non grata. The left. And so who says that comedians can't say certain things? The left. Who says that you can't use certain references? The left. And they know that. Look at John Fetterman. He's canceled. He's been ostracized.
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Sammy Wink
You think? So we won't hear from him again.
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Victor Davis Hanson
Because he, well, I mean, he's, they just turned on him. He just, you know, I mean, they do that. All parties do that. But he's, he's not asked to go in the corner. Colbert show.
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Sammy Wink
Yeah. Speaking of that, Jimmy Kimmel apparently has become an Italian citizen because like Barry Barrymore, he thinks he might have to leave.
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Victor Davis Hanson
George Clooney. George Clooney, yes, they all say that. And so what they do is they say, I'm leaving because I'm Donald Trump. It's not Safe. It's Nazi Germany. And then they make a performance art, like, trip to England. Like, didn't Ellen DeGeneres do that? And then. And then they go over there and nobody knows who they are. And it's like, I don't like the climate, I don't like this culture, but how can I crawl back without anybody finding me out? They all come back. And most of them don't go anyway, unfortunately. And so he has a place in Italy and it sounds really dramatic. He's such a man of principle. He might just leave the country. No, he'll go there for a couple of weeks and say he's leaving. He'll come back. They all do.
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Sammy Wink
They all do.
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Victor Davis Hanson
I wish they would. Or they don't come back because if somebody says they hate. It's like that representative from Illinois said her first allegiance was as a Guatemalan. Remember her? She said that in Spanish and Mexico. Well, then why don't you leave? That would be wonderful. No animus intended. You'd be much happier in Guatemala. You could enjoy the advantages of Guatemala.
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Sammy Wink
She won't leave, though. We know.
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Victor Davis Hanson
They never do. They never do. All right, Victor, so this is a very wealthy country. People can say all they want about is someone. I think I've been almost every country in the Middle east, except Iran, maybe a couple of the Gulf states. Trust me, this is the place you want to live.
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Sammy Wink
Yeah, it's much nicer here. And they.
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Victor Davis Hanson
Everything is nicer. Everything works. At least not as well as it used to, but it still works. You can still do what we're doing right now without having a government person knock at the door for a while.
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Sammy Wink
Well, let's talk about somebody else who's got free speech rights, and that's Candace Owen. Apparently, as our audience knows, she has said that the French president, Macron's wife started out life as a male yada, yada. And so she's talked about that narrative and even actually started a series called. What was that series called? One Second, I'll Find it for you. Becoming Bridget. So she's doubled and tripled down. And now Macron has a private eye researching her background. And so that that conflict is escalating.
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Victor Davis Hanson
I don't quite understand. That's not a matter of opinion. That's a matter of ascertaining a knowable fact. So France has birth certificates, France has surgery records. So if she really does believe that McCrone's wife was a male and assumed the gender of a sister or something, then all they have to do is go investigate the birth records or they just look at and they can find out if they're covered up or something. And then it would be known. There would be people all over France that would know there'd be a doctor. I mean, she's not that old.
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Sammy Wink
So you're suggesting that Macron could just let this information out instead of starting a fight?
- [33:56]
Victor Davis Hanson
I think he already has released her birth certificate and I think he's already dared Candace to find medical records to substantiate her accusation. I don't understand why she doesn't just let it alone. It is damaging to him because he does have this reputation of being a dandy and there have been rumors that he might have other tendencies and then to suggest that he was married. But it was the same thing about Michelle when some of the hard rights said that she was a, what they call her, they had a term that she was trans and she was a male and they measured her digits on her fingers and everything. But she had. All you'd have to do is, you know, say that the two birth certificates were forged of her daughters or, you know what I'm saying, These are not hard facts to find out. Or you could even, I mean, so Macron is getting hurt by this. He thinks so. He's going to go after Candace. What's he going to find? Candace? Parents, I think, came from the Caribbean. I think they were divorced. She might have had a typical middle class upbringing. She, as young African American students are. She had a flirtation with the left. I think she was an Obama voter the first time. And then for a variety of reasons, she became conservative. And then she was very articulate, very well spoken. And I think Charlie Kirk kind of brought her into the fold. She was with him, his organization, I should say, and very successful. I'd met her, had been dinner with her. She's very nice. But there is a point and I don't. And she was a big advocate of Kanye west, remember? And. But there was a point, I don't know the exact date where some people on the right went over. I don't know what that was. So people like Candace or Steve Bannon, I want to be careful because I don't know what Steve has said on everything, but Candace, I mean, Candace said that the Nagasaki bombing, if I'm not mistaken, was targeted because there were Christian Japanese there. It was a secondary target, cannons. They didn't know they were going to bomb it until, I don't know, an hour before they bombed it. I think a lot of it has to do with October 7th. I think at that point when Israel had no choice but retaliate, a lot of people felt that was wrong. And then the Trump bombing of Iran. And so a lot of the maga. Tucker Carlson was the same. He was very critical of Trump, said it was going to be World War three. Very critical. He's had people on his broadcast that have questioned whether Israel's committing our war criminals, what they're doing in Gaza. Remember we had G. Darrell Cooper, the blogger who went on and said Churchill was a terrorist. World War II was preventable if the British had been able to negotiate with Hitler after the fall of France. Except I don't know what triggered all this.
- [37:10]
Sammy Wink
Stalwart MAGA commentators and influencers is what they went over the line. Some line or some.
- [37:21]
Victor Davis Hanson
I think that there was a criticism of them, that they were. I like Pat Buchanan, he seems a very pleasant person. But they were Buchananites in which they question whether we should have even fought World War II because of our alliance with the Soviet Union and what happened after World War II. And they are, they're anti Israel and, and they suggest that the Jewish lobby inordinately pressures them. Or Tucker went to Bethlehem and suggested that Christians were being persecuted and occupied west bank by Jews when if you talk to the Christians themselves who have left Bethlehem, I've been to Bethlehem in 2006, I think. But most will tell you that they have been persecuted by Palestinian Muslims, not Jews, and they have fled to Israel. So I don't know what are these catalysts, but they feel that Donald Trump is being contextualized or pulled in directions. He's now bombed Iran and we're not supposed to do that. We're not supposed to have any foreign military action. He still hasn't cut off Ukraine. He hasn't rounded up everybody yet and deported them. He's doing a pretty good job by the way. But it's kind of ultra maga, what Biden called ultra Maga. And there's no leeway that he's not the president of the MAGA party, he's the President United States. And he has to deal with a very thin majority in the House. He's got RINO senators in the Senate, he's got an unpredictable conservative majority in the Supreme Court. He's got a lunatic district court liberal block of cherry picked judges. So he doesn't have absolute power. So Trump can't be Trump the way he necessarily. But given that he's been, he's about as counter revolutionary revolutionary as they come. And the subtext of all is Candace, what's the alternative? What's the alternative to Trump Biden? You have to be perfect to be good in your way. So what I'm getting at, they get frustrated and then they go on these tangents. Tucker brought on Darrell Cooper, said he was the best world he, not a world war. He's never published a single book on World War II. And a lot of the things he said. I wrote an article in the Free Press were completely factually incorrect. And I have no animus toward him. I don't know him. But he's not. I mean, there's some great World War II historians, right? He's not one of them. And I don't know the same thing with Candace. Why would you want to say that the first lady of France was born a man? What's the evidence for it? And why did you fixate on that? And once you fixated on that and it was disputable, I'm being generous. It was probably factually easy to deny that. Why would you keep pushing it and pushing it in some ways I say, victor, you idiot. Clicks money she gets. After she did that, she got another 2 million followers. She's huge.
- [40:57]
Sammy Wink
But that's a sellout really, to use a fabricated. Fabricated nothing. A lie.
- [41:04]
Victor Davis Hanson
I've got a lot of bad things said about me and I, I just try not to do that. I, you know this. We had Dr. Wood at Sac State and I did a little video. Video and I went back and I corrected him. I said he'd been there about a year and he said he'd been there two years as president. So what? And I went through each one of his criticisms. I think half of them were bogus. Maybe all but one or two. But you've got it. You have to be very careful what you say about people.
- [41:33]
Sammy Wink
Well, Victor, let's go ahead and welcome back another sponsor, Native Path. And I do use their products, especially their collagen and some top times their melatonin products. And Native Path is packed with only type 1 and 3 collagen fibers, the ones your body needs most for healthy joints, skin, bone, hair, nails and gut. Plus, it's third party tested for purity with no fillers, no additives and no artificial junk. Just two scoops a day of native path delivers 18 grams of protein. Mix it into your coffee, tea or any drink. It's completely flavorless and easy to use. Right now, get a special bundle deal at a fraction of the retail price plus free shipping available@getnativepath.com Victor with over 4 million jars sold, thousands of 5 star reviews and a 365 day money back guarantee. This is your moment to take control of of aging before symptoms get worse. Go to getnativepath.com Victor now supplies are limited and demand is surging. And we'd like to thank Native Path for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen show. So Victor, let's turn to another strange and wonderful thing. This week the one of the Bravo stars, Jennifer Welch was being interviewed and she these are her reflections on, as she called them, white people. She said white people that triple trumped. That triple trumped. And I guess she means they were three issues.
- [43:22]
Victor Davis Hanson
The border trans, another one that have.
- [43:26]
Sammy Wink
The nerve and audacity to walk into a Mexican restaurant, a Chinese restaurant, an Indian restaurant or go to any gay hairdresser. I don't think you should be able to enjoy anything but Cracker Barrel, which I don't know what that is, but it sounds like a barbecue spot.
- [43:43]
Victor Davis Hanson
But anyway, I think she singled that restaurant out because of the word cracker, which is a derogatory term for white people.
- [43:52]
Sammy Wink
Anyway, I was listening to the interview and she was very proud about being a Karen. She and her co host wanted to say that being a Karen has a lot of its virtues. And they started talking about how they either have yelled at a waitress or have felt like they wanted to yell at a waitress.
- [44:08]
Victor Davis Hanson
And I thought, yeah, I listened to it and she was making fun of them. She said they were pink and fat. The only reason I mention that is she, she went in detail how unattractive she said white people were that were Trump supporters. And so then I looked at her very carefully on television and I thought one thing we don't do in America, if you're not attractive, you don't make fun of them because what happens, it just boomerangs back at you. She's a very unattractive person. She's very homely and inside and outside her voice is grating. She lost her temperature. You were very, very calm when you read it. But she was screaming, you know, and then it was kind of racist when she said I don't want you to go into the Chinese or Mexican or they. I mean, they're not different. Ms. Hollywood wannabe real TV star. I mean they're just like you or me. Actually, they're Americans and they just happen to have a different, different ethnic hyphen than Swedish Americans. But they're not in a different world. I can tell you that if you live where I do and the only people you see are Mexican Americans you don't even know if they're Mexican Americans. You don't care. They're just people. Just like white people are just people. But for you, in your rarefied world, you think, is it some kind of largesse? She thinks I'm white and I care and I'm worried and therefore I will make fun of these white people. That was what was so weird about the 2016 election. I quoted in the Trump book a Silicon Valley wannabe tech lord, a woman who said that after Trump got elected, these people in the middle of the state remember the country. You know, they were awful people and they had terrible schools and they were ugly people. And then remember they exchanged between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok. I think Peter Strzok said he went to a Walmart and he could smell them. There was a guy named Caputo. I'm sorry if anybody with that name is the wrong person, but he was a CNN person. He said he went to a Trump rally and he had more teeth than everybody at the rally. And then you look at how East Palestine was neglected by the Biden administration. If that thing had been anywhere else, either in a very wealthy left wing Malibu, Biden and Pete Buttigieg would have been out there on day one, or if it had been a black or Hispanic. But just because it was East Palestine, that toxic cloud made no effect on them. Then you go through the entire vocabulary of disparagement. Started with Barack Obama, the clingers, and then Hillary added irredeemables and deplorables. And then John mcainiff said hobbits and crazies for Trump people. And then Biden called them chumps and dregs and ultra mega and fascists, I think. And there's a hatred of the lower middle class white people. And the reason there is, is this wealthy bi coastal elite that's been the beneficiaries of globalization, media, law, academia, corporate world. They have all these supposed refined Karen taste and yet these other white people embarrass them because they're conservative and they don't believe in a lot of what they believe in and they think they tarnish the name of white people. It's very analogous to a lot of Jewish liberals that I know. They hate the Israelis because they feel they're retrograde Jews and they still believe in violence and they're, you know what I mean? I love Israel when I go there precisely because they remind me, as I said before, people at Gondor or Rohan, they're on the front lines, you know what I mean, and they're unapologetic about who they, they are and they're very capable people. But American Jews feel like, oh my gosh, AOC would like me and Jasmine Crockett would like me and the squad would like me, but I'm stuck with this Jewish albatross around my neck called Netanyahu and Zionism in Israel. And I just have to performance art really attack them. Well, that's what these bi coastal. I'm white, but I'm the good white people. These other white people, the weird thing about their whole convention and artifice is they are actually the people who are uncomfortable with the non white. The average white person who's a working. He meets them in the factory, he meets them selling stuff. He meets them as a truck driver. He meets. He doesn't care. But the white privileged elite, they're the type of people who say, I really care about Hispanics. I gave Rosalinda my extra clothes and my husband had a pickup. It only had 200,000 miles on. And we gave it to Rosie. That's how they look at it, very condescending, very. They're not comfortable and they're not comfortable with people outside their economic and racial ethnic group. And so to square that circle of being liberal but being retrograde, I don't know, biased, they create or construct this idea of the horrible white people. And then they want to go out and tell everybody how much they hate these white. And when she got going, he looked at her face. It was incredible, the amount of hatred that poured out. And it was all the same. I am not like these people. I am liberal and I am white. And I feel so guilty. And I want you to know that. But I live. But they live. If you look, you just say, calm down, where do you live? Who do you see? Who do you hang out with? I think we know why you're doing this.
- [50:15]
Sammy Wink
Apparently, apparently they had a book coming out that was all about how terrible it was in the United States. I forget the name of it. It doesn't matter. It was just really, you know, thing.
- [50:26]
Victor Davis Hanson
Is so weird, weird about these people because I've been in academia for 50 years and I've been on the Stanford campus since I was a student there. So from 1975 and 80, I saw these people and then I saw them from 2003 for 22 years, 23 years now. And they all think they're educated. But when you take that curriculum and you dumb it down and you make it therapeutic and you bring in all this stuff in science ESG and dei, it's like a commissar state. And if you actually look what they're teaching and everybody gets 70 to 80% of students, they're not very well educated. They are not very well educated. I used to know that when I had two daughters that went to UC campuses and I had a son that went to csu. And when I would look at, they were all history majors. When I look at one of my daughter's classes at UC Santa Cruz or UC Santa Barbara and I compared it to Fresno State, it was really amazing because the essay questions were all ideological and when she would turn in an essay, they wouldn't really correct the grammar or anything. It was just like, okay, you sounded like you were left wing. But I looked at my son and it was something I never did. I never believed in multiple choice tests. But he would go to Fresno State and he'd take like a 10 page final with multiple Scantron. But at least it said what year was the Declaration of Independence? Who was William Tecumseh Sherman? Can you please tell me what the Gadsden Purchase was? You know, abc. And it was, sounded like it was simplistic, but it actually was factually based where the other was just logaria. You know, just say whatever you want as long as it's left with. My point is that these people who think they're so educated, they don't know they're not very well educated at all. So when I walk across the Stanford campus right after October 7th and somebody says river to the sea, just assume they do not know where the river or the sea is. When they talk about the Zionist. I talked to a young woman at Stanford who was yelling, she was actually writing something in chalk on the ground. I said, what is a Zionist? Well, there are people, there are people that are in Israel. I said, maybe there's some people in Israel who don't believe in Zionism. What is Zionism? What is Zion? She couldn't tell me. She could not tell me.
- [52:52]
Sammy Wink
You're so cruel, Victor. Expecting her to know things like that when she's running.
- [52:56]
Victor Davis Hanson
No, but I mean, like this woman. They think they're so much better than people because they went to universal universities or schools or zip codes. But they're not very impressive people. They're not very impressive people.
- [53:08]
Sammy Wink
I like the contrast with the Israelis because they live, as you say, on the front line. So they have to be very serious about security. So when it comes to October 7th, they're all on board, almost 100%, regardless of their other Political differences in the United States, you get this petty, as you're describing it, criticism of the world that they live in, as though it's a hellhole, but it's really not. It's the best place in the entire world.
- [53:36]
Victor Davis Hanson
First time I went to Iraq, I was in Blackhawks for two or three days. And there was a guy that sits out there with a.50 caliber machine gun. He was 18 years old. He was on the same. And I talked to him when we got on the thing and then he would. We got off the plane, the copter. But his attitude was, these people are trying to kill us. I don't care why I'm here, I don't care why you're here. These people are trying to kill us. And they're not. As he said to me, I said, wow, you're looking. You just scanned the landscape as we went to Fallujah or Taji or whatever. And he was 18 years old, some poor white kid, but he was really, really bright. And he was telling me how he could see different color contrast and what to expect in this place. And he just said matter of factly, just remember one thing, they're going to have to kill me before they kill you guys. And they're not going to kill me, but they want to kill me. But it's that type of realism when you're right in the cauldron. And that's why Israel is so different than most Western countries. They don't have the luxury of dreaming. They're always one day away from October 7th, you know what I mean? Or worse. And that makes them attached to the ground, to reality, they're grounded. But here in America, you're so distant from all these things and you've got money and affluence like the Satyricon, you know, the novel of Roman decadence. It's not the world of the Battle of Cana or the Battle of tra, Simone and Petronius, the Satyricon. It's a Neronian culture. And that's what's. So somebody's going to say, well, Victor, are you saying that affluence and leisure just ruins people because human nature has fallen? Yes. So what saves. I think it's a shame culture because you can't say, I'm not going to take that five dollar bill because I would feel guilty about it. Maybe, but it's better. I'm not going to take that five dollar bill because somebody's going to arrest me or I'll get caught and I'll shame my entire family. That is a much stronger deterrent.
- [55:57]
Sammy Wink
It sure is.
- [55:58]
Victor Davis Hanson
And poverty is a deterrent. And, and so these people are all creatures of affluence and leisure and they have the luxury of mouthing off and making fun of people. She lived in. If she went over to East Palestine and tried to live like working class people did, I wish she would go to Bakersfield or where we live out here. I mean we're out here right now and I wish you'd see so called white people. I don't see a lot of white, wealthy, luxurious white people here. I see them basically in the same economic class as lower middle class Hispanic people or black people.
- [56:38]
Sammy Wink
Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about the criticism of Pete Higseth and the Teamsters and a little shift in their interests. Stay with us and we'll be right back.
- [56:55]
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- [58:02]
Sammy Wink
Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen show. Victor is now on YouTube, Rumble and Spotify with these podcasts so you can find him there. And I know that we've got lots of viewers of the podcast on those venues, so we thank all of our audience for joining us. So Victor Hegseth apparently was criticized and they thought that he wouldn't get very many female recruits, but I understand that he got more than was over 70,000. Yeah. So he's doing well.
- [58:33]
Victor Davis Hanson
It's common sense. And in other words, if you say that the military is going to treat everybody the same and it's kind of counterintuitive if you have a Flight suit that's specially outfitted for a woman who's pregnant. And then you have cartoon ads that join the military and it's kind of trans gay. You think you're going to recruit women that way or you're going to tell women you're going to be a partner with everybody, you're going to be treated the same. If you can't lift weights, you won't go into combat unit. But maybe you can operate a drone better than a man can. Right? And it's. That attracts people. But more importantly, does the left ever think that people are not men or women, they're just people and they're Americans and they want to protect their country. So a younger woman who's thinking about going to the military and she's told the military is going to be beefed up, it's going to be more emphasis on combat and it's not going to put you in a place like Afghanistan and leave you there. Thirteen marines that get killed. And it's not going to take gruff from anybody. And it's going to give you the best equipment it can. And it's not going to hurt or help you because of your gender. You're an American. That appeals to a lot of people and regardless of their gender or race.
- [59:57]
Sammy Wink
That's what I was thinking when I was reading that about that story. I was thinking, well, it just shows you that women want an excellent military too. And excellence is what I know. Exactly.
- [60:08]
Victor Davis Hanson
Especially when there's millions of women. You know, it's funny, I had a talk with a general, I won't mention his name, and I was very worried a couple years ago about the fall off in military recruitment. And he was telling me I had nothing to do with politics, had nothing to do with ads, gangs, tattoos, competition with private enterprise. I just felt there was a barrier that he felt it was politically impossible to tell the truth on this particular matter. But I said something to him. I had given about four talks to groups and some of them were on contemporary politics and the Pentagon. I must have had, in that three year period, about six or seven people asked questions in the Q and A. And it was always, there was a theme there that would be a woman about 55 to 60 and maybe younger, and she'd say, Mr. Hansen, you mentioned the Pentagon and Lloyd Austin or General Milley and your critique. I'm not sending my grand. I'm not sending my son. He's not going to enlist. I said, why would that be? Well, you know, my dad fought in Vietnam and my husband fought in Gulf War one and he's. They're going to put him in Afghanistan and he's. And they're going to leave him there. I don't know why we're over in Iraq. And then the next thing is he will never get promoted. They just hate they and it was usually a white woman from the lower or middle classes. And I thought to myself when you go up in front of the country General Milley and you say read for Professor Kendi or your Lloyd Austin and said you're going to run an investigation to see about white rage, white supremacy, white privilege and you have no evidence to spark that investigation and you start doing that and then these commercials have nothing to do with combat efficacy but this group and that group you're going to tell this group they don't want you and if this group is double the number of their Dimitri demographic in combat units which they are and that the fatality rates tragically show that they're not going to join and they didn't join. And I was trying to tell this very high commanding officer that and he got very short with me because you.
- [62:23]
Sammy Wink
Were getting in the way of his keeping his position and or moving.
- [62:27]
Victor Davis Hanson
I don't know what it was but they would not there would they didn't. I must have talk to 20 different people in the military. They would not talk about it. They just would not say that the US military under Biden and earlier under Obama whether it was kicking out 8,500 people for not getting vaccinated when the vast majority had natural immunity from having a prior case of COVID and you would try to show them. You would, you would tell them look at this commercial. Remember this commercial. Look at what Austin said. I can tell you what the testimony of this. Look at this, look at the message you're sending. Why would anybody from this particular group who's judged guilty without a trial basically that he's a racist. Why would he want to join the DEI military when he wants to be rewarded on the ability of his combat efficacy. So they didn't and now all of a sudden you get a new president and Hexa said no Di get rid of these commercials. Put the old ones be all you can be back. We're not going to. If a woman can't do as many push ups as a man she's not going to be in special forces on the combat. And all of a sudden the recruitment goes up and then they try to do what the left always well wasn't really doing that these, these tendencies were There under Biden. No, they weren't. No, no, no.
- [63:55]
Sammy Wink
I think it's a return to emphasizing excellence, whether it's in the military or hopefully the education system will start too.
- [64:03]
Victor Davis Hanson
I hope we do it everybody. Because DEI was a lethal toxic cancer. Because it was a sin of commission and a sin of omission. The C mission was while you were spending all that time to butcher literature and history and science as white this and western this, you were not teaching people real stuff. You were not teaching them how to read and write and think and compute. There's only so many days. And there was a sin of commission. You were instilling doubt and lies into that this was a bad country or that there was endemic racism everywhere or you needed to promote somebody on the basis of the superficial appearance. It was like this. I want to pick on him, Luke Wood, the two year president of Cal State Sacramento. But when he replied to his critics, he said look what I said. And he addressed everybody to an X site and it was the weirdest defense I've ever seen of his saying I'd like to eliminate whiteness and he couldn't. And he said, well this was said when I was a professor and I wrote all these books and I was quoting a well known theory in academia and I wrote all these books. I guess he was trying to say I wasn't president of everybody. So then I abandoned in my racist views and now maybe a vestigial things. But he never defended it, he never tried to say why. And what I'm getting at is that it's so imbued that they just, these DI people just assume that they should get special preferences for their gender or their ethnic background or their race or their sexual orientation on the left that anybody who questioned it, they just couldn't understand that. But they didn't understand that they were wasting enormous resources to create these unicorns to chase that didn't exist as well as wasting time that we didn't do the real thing. So we need to be merocratic. You know why? For it not just to create human curiosity and make people curious about the world around them and history and things science. But more importantly, we're in an existential struggle with China and they are producing thousands of engineers. They have 1.4 billion people, we only have 340 million. They do want to destroy the United States as it's composed. And if you don't have educated people in science and literature and confident people, people that think that we're better than the alternative, there's no reason for you to exist. I mean, they will just. And so the biggest supporters of DEI are the Chinese Communists. They love it. It's like, oh, wow, we had a commissar system. And how did that work out for us in the Korean War? Yeah, how did that work out? Us on our Mao, we lost 70 million people. People we beat up people for their wearing sun eyeglasses. We took all our intellectuals and ridicule them and make them hold weeds. How'd that work?
- [67:26]
Sammy Wink
And they killed some of them. 70 million are still suffering from that, I think, because they've got a culture that doesn't tend to think freely, which is why we usually talk about how.
- [67:37]
Victor Davis Hanson
They'Re stealing our biggest lever that Donald Trump has against China, because. Because they are a parasitic society and they're always going to be a day late and dollar short, even when they appropriate science, even when they get their PhDs from Caltech to go back, they're still not going to be able to think and argue openly as scientists must. And there's always going to be a Fauci. There's going to be a whole world of Fauci's, but there's not going to be any Scott Atlases or Jay Bacharias or John Ioannidis or Michael Levett to question them. And that's why Donald Trump's got a lot of leverage. He can say, you know what? I just woke up this morning and China's doing this and this and this and this and this and spying and think. I just think we only need 100,000 students here from China, not 300. I think that would be good.
- [68:32]
Sammy Wink
Sounds like too many to me, Victor. All right, so we'll leave the Teamsters story for Saturday, Ed. So come join us then for that. I would like to, as we do at the end, read a couple of comments. And actually, I have two questions, but I'll do the comment first. These come from Victor's website, the Blade of Perseus. This one is a comment on. There were lots of comments on this article for American greatness. That was disinformation and the dropping of the atomic bomb, and there were lots of stories. I encourage people to go read the comments about people's grandfathers or fathers in World War II. But this one I thought was interesting. He said, working in New York City back in the 80s, I met a Japanese man who had survived Hiroshima as a child. He still had visible scars, and my colleagues expressed sadness that we had dropped those bombs. But my future father was a Marine on a ship off the coast of Japan waiting for the invasion that probably would have killed him. I was born in 1948, and if not for the bombs, I might never have been born. War is ugly. And thank you to Pat Warnke. So interesting comment. And now I have a couple of questions for you. Gordon Butler. And again, this is from the website said. In the discussion of the decision of dropping the atomic bomb, VDH refers to Oppenheimer as being in favor of dropping the bomb. My question is, what part did General Leslie Groves play in the decision to drop the bomb since he was in charge of the Manhattan Project and Oppenheimer's superior?
- [70:22]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, Oppenheimer was assigned as a committee chairman. He was in charge of the scientific team. Leslie Groves was in charge of the entire project, the financing, the building of the facilities, and ultimately the creation of a special composite B29 group to drop the. He made all those decisions and he cut out the superior commander on Kenyon, on the whole Marianas campaign, Curtis LeMay. He was not told. That's why he was so angry. But yeah, he was. I mean, he. He formed a committee. What are we going to do with this stuff? Where do we bought. Where do we drop it? When do we drop it? How do we drop it? Because as I said, it was. They'd only had one test. It was on a tower. They had never dropped a bomb from an air. They had dropped facsimiles, but not the same. They didn't know exactly. They had speculation. I had a lot of questions about what I wrote. Some person said, well, they really didn't believe that the whole sky. I said, Beth said, so he's a guard asking what was going to happen. He said, I don't know. Maybe the whole sky will burn up. There were people who believed that. There were people. I think Oppenheimer thought it was only going to be one or two kilotons. It was 18 at Hiroshima, I think 16 or 17 at Nagasaki. So, yes, Groves was the over director and Oppenheimer was the director of the scientific team.
- [71:52]
Sammy Wink
So Groves made this serious.
- [71:54]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yes, I had another person wrote me and said, there's a whole school of thought, Dynowest. They all said the Japanese approached the Americans in early 45 and wanted to cut a deal. They did want to cut a deal, but their cutting the deal was to keep the government intact. It's like Hamas, and we weren't going to do that. We had already announced at Casablanca that we were going to have an unconditional surrender, and we did that because of World War I. We said in World War I, Wilson stupidly allowed there to be an armistice, not a surrender, no unconditional surrender. So Germany went back on the 11th of November from 60 to 70 miles inside Belgium in some places. And France occupied France and went back and said, the only reason that we went back is because a bunch of communists and socialists and unionists and Jews were on strike and they embargoed food shipments because we were winning. If you don't believe us, we were in their country. They were not in our country. Well, they were about as Pershing and Foch said. They were about a month from collapsing. The whole German army was going to collapse and they could have walked into Berlin and occupied it like they did World War II. So they said, Churchill, veteran of World War I, said Roosevelt, we're not going to do this again because we'll bet we'll be back in another 20 years just like we were from 18 to 39. So it's going to be an unconditional. So when the Japanese heard that, yeah, it's easy to say, well, we're going to have a peace. And they didn't want it. No, they didn't want to surrender unconditionally. But that was non negotiable. And one other thing came up in some letters people wrote me and said, well, Curtis LeMay said the bomb was unnecessary and therefore it shouldn't have been dropped if he said it was. No, he said it was unnecessary for two reasons. Number one, they expropriated his command and carved out a whole squadron of B29s under his nose and wouldn't let him get to tell him what they wanted. And number two, as I said on the podcast and the article, he had 2000 plus B29s on order. He had over a thousand B29s in the Marianas bombing 1600 miles seven weeks earlier, before the drop, Okinawa had been declared secure. They were building 7,000 runways. He was going to put 2,000 B29s there. It's only about out about 40% of the distance from the Marianas. So instead of three or four times a week, you could probably do every day. And the British were going to bring over their Lancasters, some of them Operation Tiger Force. And the Americans had idle about 2,000 B17s and B24s. And Curtis LeMay thought, you know what, we didn't need the bomb. I didn't get credit. I had burned down 75% of the cities and they still wouldn't surrender, by the way. They still wouldn't surrender. And I had mined all our harbors with B29 and they still wouldn't. And the navy subs had sunk all of their merchant fleet, so to speak, and they still wouldn't surrender. But I wasn't going to play around. In just a few weeks, I was going to have enough napalm and four times the number of bombers and I was going to go after the other 15% of the urban corps. And by the way, there were 11 cities that they wouldn't let me bomb because they thought they might be potential atomic bombs. So had they not dropped the bomb, I could have hit all those cities and wiped them out. So basically what he was saying was I could have solved the problem without the bomb. I would have either burned the whole country down to ashes or I would have made him surrender. And he was right, he could have, but he would have killed a lot more people. Come on. He would have killed a million people.
- [76:12]
Sammy Wink
And that would have served his career.
- [76:14]
Victor Davis Hanson
He was a good man. I don't think he wanted to. I just think he was saying we took a lot of flack for dropping the bomb. They did, and the Russians stole it. And later he said this later, but also kind of quickly after the war. And he just said the B29 guys were doing the whole thing. We wouldn't have had. Because they kept saying, well, you had to invade Japan and that's a million people based on the losses at Okinawa, Iwo Jima and the Philippines. And he said, no, you don't have to invade Japan. I could have burned down the whole country because I had all these planes coming and you just let me do it now. He would have, but the argument against lamay was the bomb saved lives. It stopped it immediately because it shocked the Japanese into horror.
- [77:04]
Sammy Wink
Alright, Victor. And then the last one might be a little bit shorter. Please recommend your favorite translation of the Aeneid.
- [77:11]
Victor Davis Hanson
Of the Aeneid. Well, Robert Fitzgerald has a very good translation. My first translation, I'm doing this. I haven't prepared this, so I have to think Rolf Humphreys wrote one. It wasn't a literal translation, but it was pretty good. What's his name? Did too. Not Fitzgerald. He did, but I'll remember his name starts with an F. He did too. The translator of the Iliad, he wrote it too. And I don't think that Richmond Lattimore did. He did the Iliad. That's my favorite translation of the Odyssey and the Iliad. Still. Richmond Lattimore University, Chicago But Rol Pumpy's wrote kind of a literary translation. There's another one that's very famous. I'll get my Aeneid's. I have about five of them, and they're all marked up. And I'll remember.
- [78:04]
Sammy Wink
We'll do it for the Saturday.
- [78:05]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yes, I'll do that.
- [78:07]
Sammy Wink
Okay. And thank you very much for your wisdom today. And thanks to the audience for choosing to join the Victor Davis Hand Hansen Show.
- [78:14]
Victor Davis Hanson
Thank you for listening and viewing, everyone. We'll see you next time, or talk to you next time.
- [78:18]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, this is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen. And we're signing off.