← The Victor Davis Hanson Show
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- [00:00]
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- [01:25]
Jack Fowler
Hello ladies. Hello gentlemen. Welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. I'm Jack Fowler, the host. You're here to listen to the star namesake. That's Victor Davis Hansen, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. He's also the proprietor of a website, the Blade of Perseus. Its address is victorhansen.com I'll tell you why later in this episode. Well, I think you should be a subscriber to that great website we are recording on Saturday 28th December, but this episode will be up on Thursday, January 2nd, 2025. So we will say Happy New Year and we will begin the this. Hopefully it'll be a great year. I have a feeling Victor might be great for America and troubling for other countries as they come to grips with ideology, but we've got a lot of interesting things to talk about. Some of them are things from 2024 and 2023, of course. And I think we'll begin the show, Victor, by talking about UCLA and how it seems to have gotten off the hook from the Biden administration for its antics. Antics is the wrong word for it's the terrible way the administration at that school handled the riots, the anti Semitic riots from last year. We also have you know what tomorrow will be the 100th anniversary of an infamous speech by Benito Mussolini which drove him to power. And we should get your reflections as a military historian and a historian about Il Duce and plenty of other things we'll raise and we'll get to all of this Victor, when we come back from these very important messages.
- [03:21]
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- [05:03]
Jack Fowler
We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Happy New Year, my friend. I'd like to begin this with two getting your take on two related stories. If I could only find my paperwork. Here we go. You know, some people picked it up in some comments about my heavy breathing and my shuffling of papers.
- [05:24]
Victor Davis Hanson
Are you sure it's not me?
- [05:27]
Jack Fowler
No, I think it's me. I think it's me. I try to mute. I try to mute myself. Not enough. Hey, here's a Washington Free Beacon report. Biden Admin Lets use UC University of California off the Hook Settles Civil Rights Complaints Alleging Discrimination Against Jews President Joe Biden's Department of Education reached an agreement with the University of California system to settle civil rights complaints that alleged widespread discrimination against Jewish students. To do so, the university system agreed to develop voluntary campus, quote, unquote climate surveys and take other underwhelming measures. In the agreement released Friday that would have been December 27, university leaders made no admission of wrongdoing. Instead, they agreed to provide training to campus police officers and employees responsible for investigating complaints and other reports of discrimination. Almost done here. They also agreed to create a plan to work with respective campuses to develop climate surveys. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What a lot of crap.
- [06:39]
Victor Davis Hanson
Victor, your Thoughts they're going to be, that's not going to happen under the Trump administration. People that have been mentioned, I won't mention their names for the undersecretaries, the Department of Education, nea, neh, all of that stuff, they're not going to tolerate that. And remember what we do, Jack. No college president, when they see this antisemitic epidemic, ever says, ever says, we've got to be careful and stop this antisemitism. They say we have to stop hate and we're going to be very tough on antisemitism and Islamophobia. Even though when you look at federal hate crime statistics, it's half of them are directed at Jews. I guess what's happened on the campus is all of the leftist binaries, these Marxist binaries, victim, victimizer, oppress, oppressors, settler, imperialist, indigenous, they all work against Jewish people. So what the left does is they say settler people are colonial people and they're in places where they don't belong. Therefore Israel is a colonial. And we reject the 3,500 year history of the Jewish people. Longer in the Holy Land and in this mindset, if you are an indigenous Berber, let's say in Tunisia or Libya, and the influx of Arab Islamic peoples in the seventh and eighth century, that's okay. You're not, you know what I mean, you're an indigenous person. If you say that Arabs and Muslims did not come into what is now Israel until the collapse of Byzantine control of the Middle east and over a long period of the late 7th, 8th, 9th centuries. And that that was one of many waves. That doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because you see, Jewish people are wealthy, they're powerful. That's what they think. And they are unique in the Middle East. It's the weirdest thing in the world. You can say, as Edward said, you can jiggle supposed keys in your house in Jerusalem and say you're a refugee 50 years later. But don't dare do that if you're Jewish and say, I, I lost my 300 year home in old Cairo or Damascus or Amman, you had no right to be there as a Jew, that's an Arab country. But Arabs have a right to be in your country. Israel Jewish or you can't say. I once asked a person when I was walking across campus in October, I really wanted to engage in a conversation with one of the demonstrators. So I said, well, you know, there's 2 million Arab citizens. He said, well, they're second class citizens. I said, I don't want to debate that. I don't think they are. But can I ask you a question? If you were Jewish and you said that you sympathize with the, you know, the west bank and you want to become a citizen of the west bank and you and your family want to, you're not going to be settlers and enclaves, you want to just go buy property in downtown Amman, I don't mean Amman, but downtown Jericho or Gaza City, would you be fully. No, no, of course not. He was admitted. So nothing is ever reciprocal. And under this binary of white, bad and people of color, good Jews were resented because of the Holocaust and anti Semitism. And people said this isn't right. They, they're not victims, they're victimizer because they're white. They're victimizers. You can't. And then they got away with that because the people who were mostly showing this hatred toward Jews were in the same victimized category. So if you were Arab American, if you were Muslim, if you were Jesse Jackson that said Jaime Town, if you were Al Sharpton that said get your yarmock on, come over here. If you were Reverend Wright and said dim Jews, if you were Farrakhan and said it's a gutter religion, I could go on forever, that was okay because you're a victim yourself. So you would say as soon as you were caught and you're anti. As soon as you were caught chasing Jews into a library or roughing up Jews or claiming that you wanted another Holocaust or yelling, then you just said, I'm a victim, I'm Muslim, I'm a victim of Islamophobia. And because by nature a college president, not all of them. Some of the college presidents, Jack, are like French. When you see a conservative French intellectual or a conservative college president, they're the best of all people because they take on everybody and they live in a hostile climate and yet they don't compromise their views.
- [11:54]
Jack Fowler
Pierre Menant, for example.
- [11:56]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yes, yes. But most of college presidents are invertebrates and they feel that they just do the math and they think, you know what? The Jewish population is down to 7 or 8%. We lumped them in with white. We went into repertory admissions here at Stanford. We only let in 28% of the incoming class was whites. Jews are now only 7 or 8%. We're letting in a quarter million people from the Middle East. The Middle east governments are giving as much money now as Jewish philanthropists. I just don't think it's. I'm not going to go out on a limb and the whole third World left wing. We know all the left wing faculty are anti Semites. They hate Israel. And they can get away with it as long as they just say the college president's attitude is. The subtext is. I don't know if they communicate that. They wouldn't be so foolish to be explicit. But their message is to the faculty and the students, it's okay to hate Jews and it's okay to be anti Semitic, but you've got to understand something. You've got to have a victim card when you do that. You've got to say that we are suffering from Islamophobia. You can do that. Or you can say that you're really not hating Jews, but you only hate Israel. But it would be better for me as a college president if you just said Netanyahu. So when you're chasing Jews down and you're roughing them up and you're calling them names, you're tearing down pictures of the hostages, you're telling them to go to one side of the room, just say, it's all about Netanyahu, but don't mention Jewish. Don't say that. And then you're home free. And that's what the rule is.
- [13:44]
Jack Fowler
The colonialist tag on Jews, settlers. Yes, it is.
- [13:50]
Victor Davis Hanson
They're trying to evoke the white settler coming in out west and taking the Native Americans land. That's what they're trying to do.
- [13:57]
Jack Fowler
But it could. It could have a short shelf life. If you were a Jew, European Jew, who survived the Holocaust and went back to your apartment in Berlin or wherever, do you think you got your apartment back? No. Or possessions that governments took. David Price Jones, our friend.
- [14:17]
Victor Davis Hanson
No. They would say, sh. Something happens. Sorry.
- [14:21]
Jack Fowler
Right? And hey, that.
- [14:23]
Victor Davis Hanson
Especially if George Soros helped sell it. Especially if George Soros sold your family furniture when he was a young entrepreneur during the Holocaust.
- [14:33]
Jack Fowler
Yeah. You weren't getting it back. And geez, I had it five years ago, six years ago. Tough, tough noogies.
- [14:39]
Victor Davis Hanson
No, no, it's only on the Middle east because of the Jews. Because if you're a Cypriot and you say, you know what? You're never going to get back. Bella PIs. 20% of the Turkish population is now 35%. And that's gone. Just get over it. If you're a German, there is no such thing as Konasberg. It's Kalingrad forever. You understand that? It's never going to be Danzig. It's Gdask. That's Poland. We gave you a quarter of Germany. We gave it's gone. If you're a Jew and you say you want to go back and live in Beirut like you did in your great, great. No, no, no, it's not yours. There's no such thing. However, if your grandfather lived in quote unquote Palestine, then you have a right right now of return. And that's just crazy. And we do that because of terrorism. We used to do it because of the American president or American intellectual would just tick it off. Jockey, go. Population 500 million Muslims, Middle East Jews, 11 million. Money wise Jewish people are very successful if they don't have the petrol wealth of the Gulf, say ding. Terrorism. There's no Jewish terrorism. They're going to hijack, kill ambassadors, hijack planes, you know, paint graffiti all over a veterans cemetery, shut down the Manhattan Ridge, ding. And so that's what they did. And the college president was emblematic of that. I get to my office every morning, what do I not have to worry about? I do not have to worry about a bunch of Jewish students rushing in here and trashing it. I do not have to worry about a bunch of Jewish students disrupting class. I do not have to worry about terrorism. The Jewish students at Stanford or Harvard are not going to go out and shut down a bridge across unless they're doing it for Palestinian question. So I make the necessary adjustments and I will react to where my greatest exposure and worry about my own job are. I'm not calling for Jews, Jewish people to emulate the tactics. I'm just calling for a little bit of honesty on the part of the college president, our politicians, Joe Biden. It really wasn't, if you think about it until Bill Ackman and people like him said there's going to be no more money, no more money to subsidize people who hate me. I'm not going to do it anymore. And that, that was hard to do because most of the Jewish American philanthropy money was on the left. So at first they said, well, he's just a nut. All our left wing donors have the money. But now they're worried and so they're starting to mouth nostrums or to mouth that they're fair. But I don't know what it is, it just, you can't. I've had so many arguments. I'm 71 and I think I've had a hundred arguments with friends, family about Israel and the asymmetrical treatment that it's shown Netanyahu. There's been three great men this year. Donald Trump's comeback is the greatest comeback. In the history of politics, greater than Bill Clinton's primary comeback. Greater. I think it's greater than Harry Truman's comeback at 48, and greater than Richard Nixon from 1962, humiliation in California to be present in 68. And then there's Elon Musk and the idea that he went into Pennsylvania, helped registered voters, went out, campaigned, used his money, he kind of nullified or neutered Mark Zuckerberg's 2020 gift. And he, at the same time he was doing that, he had this brilliant X, this brilliant Tesla, this brilliant SpaceX that was. And the third person was Netanyahu. He said, everybody blames me for October 7th. There was an intelligence fault, but I was at fault, too. We should have been more vigilant. We should have had a more realistic appraisal. Just give me a chance, and I will wage war on our enemies. And do not believe Hezbollah is invulnerable. Do not believe that Iran. You can't treat Iran as an existential enemy. Do not believe that we can't reach the Houthis, even if we have to refuel and go all the way down, you know, across the Red, near the Red Sea. And do not think that Hamas can hide under hospitals, mosques, and schools and be exempt. I will do that. And he did. And he's changed forever the Middle East. If anybody had said a year ago, hey, Benjamin Netanyahu will not schedule an election right now. He's not going to step down. He's not a crook. He's going to do this in the next 2012 months. He is going to destroy Hezbollah as a terrorist operative. He is going to confiscate billions of dollars of weapons from Hezbollah. He is going to destroy Hamas as a military cadre. He is going to help remove the Assad dynasty and make sure it's gone zip. And he is going to destroy all of the air defenses of Iran, opening the way for any Western country, including Israel, who wants to take out its nuclear facilities to do so with impunity. He's going to do that all in a year. People would have said, that's crazy. You're delusional. That's what he did. Three great America, three great personalities, they all had comebacks. Elon, remember a year ago? Elon's an idiot. He paid $40 billion for X. It only has a market capitalization. Yes. And now he opened the entire social media world in a way that no one had ever imagined.
- [20:51]
Jack Fowler
Victor, I just want to take a moment before we continue on this to welcome back our relatively New sponsor Home Title Lock. If your title isn't being monitored, Dear listener, Scammers can transfer the title of your home into their name using a one page document they file at the county. Then they take out loans against it or even sell it behind your back. You won't find out until collection or even foreclosure notices start arriving in your mailbox. But by then the damage has been done and you're left with a financial and legal nightmare. The best way to protect your equity is with triple lock protection from our friends at Home Title Lock. Triple lock protection is 247 monitoring alerts of any changes and God forbid if the worst happens, restoration services at no out of pocket cost to you. So when was the last time you checked on your title? You can check on your home's title today and make sure you're not already a victim. You can get a free title history report and a 30 day free trial of triple lock protection today by going to hometitleblock.com using the promo code Victor or click on the link in the description. That's hometitlelock.com promo code victorhometitolock.com and we thank the good people from Home Title Lock for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Victor, I know those names you just mentioned. The three were comebacks. I want to add a fourth. Not a necessarily, it's not a comeback, but Milei, the President. Yes, Argentina has just done tremendous thing he's pulled off down there. So he deserves sort of a nod.
- [22:37]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, he does. He deserves it. I mean he deserves. What was it, 140% inflation or something crazy like that?
- [22:45]
Jack Fowler
Staggering. Yeah. Well, keeping on the topic of anti Semitism, Victor, the New York Post has an editorial on should there be a ban on masking. And we see what happens on these campuses. Columbia, from Columbia University in New York to ucla, California. These riots in the streets or demonstrations in the streets, all these folks have masks on. So here's from the editorial the Post. It's absurd for the civil liberties crowd to oppose this ban. No one has a first Amendment right to hide his identity while terrorizing others in an in person public speech. And those who insist that mask masking still has some public health purposes are in denial. No, next to no one does it anymore except some people alone in cars by themselves. I see that they've got Ivy League bumper stickers, but the plague hasn't remotely returned. The nation ended racist hood wearing mob violence against black Americans. It must do the same to masked anti Semitic mob violence. Victor, I have a feeling you might agree with that.
- [24:00]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, I mean the health argument breaks down if you were paranoid about the return of COVID or some type of virulent lethal virus. The masks are being worn are not in doctor's offices and nobody's talking about wearing a mask if you're the dentist. So in close quarters, in meetings, everybody knows if you want to wear a mask, go ahead. We're talking about in the public square and almost always outside. And they have just piggy banked on two things, Jack. They have looked at Antifa, these protesters that are pro Hamas, they look at Antifa and they saw that these kind of this uniform of Antifa, all black pants, black hoodie and then the mask shield them from identification. And what are we talking why? Because we live in a world where no one can get away from security cameras and the only way you can function as a criminal is to put a mask on. And we saw that with Mangione Luigi, remember that? We probably would have not ever found him if he hadn't pulled that mask down because he wanted to flirt with that young woman. And for a split second we saw his entire face at his hostel or wherever he was staying. And so we understand that Antifa knew that. So they bequest. Their bequest to all radical groups was wear a mask. And then the radical groups piggybacked on the second legacy. And that was of course Covid and the quarantine. So then they can say, well, we're just victims. So we're yelling from the, we're chasing Jews into the library and we're wearing masks because we don't want to get infected from them. That's why we're doing it. We're worried about COVID and we're saying to you, no, no, no, no, no. I think they should just make a rule at every campus to start off with. You cannot wear a mask in public. You can't, because you're not going to disguise your identity and we'll see what happens. But that's what it's all about. Everybody knows. Criminologists have told us for years that when a person wears a mask it emboldens his behavior and he's more likely to, you know, I mean, it creates anonymity and that means that you think you can get away with something. I never understood though the Middle east because when I would walk by and I'd see kids with mask on screaming, I never understood it because they were proud and they wanted to get in your face and they wanted to yell and they wanted to identify from the Middle east. So you'd think they would want to be identified. But apparently they wanted their bachelor's degree or their diploma more than they wanted to be a freedom fighter, I guess. I don't know. The only time I can see a mask if in public, as if you're some type of counter terrorism or counter cartel and they'll go after your family or something if you're law enforcement, other than that, there's no need for it. But boy, I've talked to, I know some of the bank tellers at one of the banks I go to and they don't like it. They really don't. Because when they see people come in, especially with a hoodie or some head covering and a mask, as one woman told me, she said just four years ago, I would have been terrified. And now I'm supposed to not be terrified, but it doesn't mean the same person. There's just more people that are not bank robbers. But that doesn't mean there's fewer bank robbers that are masked right?
- [27:48]
Jack Fowler
Well, it's not a sign of manliness to wear them either. Victor we're going to talk about the redefinition of manhood, the personages of Doug Emhoff and Tim Walls as we look back on 2024. And we'll get to that right after these important messages. We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show recording on December 28, but this episode is the first of the new year up on January 2nd. You can find the show on also now videotaped, even though there's no tape, I don't think recorded on Rumble. Look, you know, do go on Rumble and search for the Victor Davis Hansen show in case you're interested in checking it out that way. Also Victor's website, the Blade of Perseus. The web address is victorhansen.com I recommend you check it out if you haven't yet and to visit early and often as they vote in Chicago because you'll find links to everything Victor writes. His weekly essay at American Greatness, weekly syndicated column, links to his various appearances on numerous podcasts and other venues. The archives of these podcasts links to his books and the Ultra articles two or three times a week. Victor writes exclusively for the Blade of Perseus. And now weekly 1012 minute special video that's just for Ultra subscribers. 50 bucks a year, $5 a month. Do consider that if you're a fan of vdh and you're not, you are depriving yourself. So Victor, I saw so I can't find the link, but I saw some article towards the end of the year. I think, is this comical? But it was looking back at, you know, Doug Emhoff and Tim Walls were the, you know, the new poster boys. What manhood was supposed to have become in 2024. I would have thought that would have been settled by the election results in November. We have more important things to talk about, Victor, but I just wanted to check that off. Anything you want to say about.
- [30:02]
Victor Davis Hanson
I didn't understand it, so I'm trying to understand it. So as I understand the subtext is on the left that they are rejecting traditional he man masculinity on the right. So they don't like the Dana White, the Joe Rogan, the mixed martial arts, all of that group. They don't like bikers. They don't like Clint Eastwood. I'm from a different generation. That type of in your face masculinity. They don't like the Daniel Penny masculinity that if you see a punk who's threatening people, you step up to protect the weak. I don't know if they like the immigrant that just watched somebody and the people who just watch that. I don't want to prejudge him. He just might be a pyromaniac and he can't help it. I don't know what that means, but apparently they have an idea of a more sensitive, caring masculinity that when you look at these real men, they look endomorphic, like. Endomorphic is not a slur, Jack. It just means a body type where they're.
- [31:15]
Jack Fowler
Were they an invertebrate?
- [31:17]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, the posterior, yes. It doesn't seem like there's a strong backbone physically. And maybe the. What's the word? The lower half of the anatomy is of greater size than the shoulders or something. I don't know what it is an endomorph. But my point is Imhoff and Waltz, then they must push these buttons of. And I guess the buttons are partly. They are helpers to powerful women like Kamala Harris or his. Remember Waltz's wife kind of went nutty. And I think they took her off the trail. She'd get out and scream and yell. You got the impression that his leftward tilt, he ran as a congressional person, as a rural Clinton Democrat. And then this spouse kind of pushed him. So I guess one of the subtexts is that real masculine men cede authority or decision making to their female spouses because they're confident in their masculinity and they don't have to have props like guns and cars. That's part of it. The other thing must be that you have to. Real masculine men are entitled to certain sins because they're not in your face. So if you want to impregnate your nanny and arrange for her to have a child and then buy her a house and then cover it up for years, that's what a sensitive man does. Or if you want to lie about your military record serially, that's okay too, because you're a sensitive male. So one of the elements of sensitive masculinity is that while you may sin and those are traits of the toxic masculinity, and you're trying to overcome them. So you give a press conference and say, you caught me. I tried to suppress this, but did you have an abortion? Did you pay? I don't want to get into the personal details. That's a private matter and that's what they do. I guess what I'm saying is that they don't sin. All of their sins are washed away. It's kind of a substitute, a surrogate Christianity. And in the wokeness or sensitivity or feminism or whatever the ism is, it tells you that if you accept the tenets of belief in sensitive masculinity and you war your entire life with toxic masculinity, then as part of that penance, you're allowed these sins that are washed away. You seek cover, you seek penance from it. And you see that all over. Bill Clinton was a master of that guy was a complete serial womanizer and the most brutal. And, you know, I said the other day about what.
- [34:25]
Jack Fowler
So that woman, you better put. After he, I'll say, allegedly raped her.
- [34:29]
Victor Davis Hanson
Because he put some ice on him, bit her lip and a fit of masculine passion, of sensitive, masculine passion. He was a sensitive. And then, you know, if you're a sensitive man, if you're termed a sensitive man, there's also. I didn't. I'm sorry, audience. I didn't say the critical characteristic of a sensitive man and a new masculinity is you have to support feminist issues. Two of them. You have to be strong on trans chauvinism, and you have to be abortion to the moment of delivery. And if you push those two buttons, you're really, really sensitive. And that means that. And I don't know, there's a lot of people who have talked about. Elon Musk has talked about masculinity and fertility. Jordan Peterson has. But there's a lot of observers, I think, have made the point that if you Want to look at a profile that threatens the United States existentially? It would be the epidemic of lonely men who have prolonged adolescence that are still in their late 20s and early 30s, struggling with college debt. I'm talking about half the population that goes to college, but young men who are not doing what their grandfathers did, maybe some what their fathers did. But what I mean by that is they're not getting married in their twenties or early thirties. They're not having children in their twenties or early thirteties. They're not buying a house, and they're sort of in the cities. They're just sort of once in a while they meet a very. A nice woman they want to marry. And the woman says, why don't you get a life? I can't marry you. You've got to get going. 55% of bachelor's degrees go to women now. And yet we're told women are oppressed in the university and the PhDs. If you look at PhDs in particular, things like art history and English literature, it's getting 50, 50, if not more women. So the male, especially the white male, who's not eligible for any set aside under the old woke affirmative action, and is demonized as toxic masculinity, white privilege, prone to white rage, white supremacy. He's been told that since kindergarten now, this generation, and he's sort of like, did you ever watch Game of Thrones, Jack?
- [37:06]
Jack Fowler
No, I did not have.
- [37:07]
Victor Davis Hanson
There was a character called Theon, and he was castrated and he becomes. They call him Reek, they destroy him. But he's suffering under all these guilt things that he's done. So the white young male suffers under the idea that he is responsible for the internal combustion engine, carbon imprints, Western chauvinism, the destruction of Native American population, slave holding. He is singled out as the person who has to make amends for that. And in this generation, and women want him to be sensitive, that means he, you know, he shouldn't watch football, he shouldn't own a gun, he can't vote for Trump. And then he's not going. He's not supposed to grow up, he's not supposed to get a job, he's not supposed to buy a starter home and then on his weekends try to remodel it. He's not supposed to have a couple of kids and take one to Little League and the other one to volleyball. None of that. And the country as a whole looks at this fertility rate of 2.1 in 1998, and it's 1.6 and it's shrinking. And it's because there's a whole generation of these males. It's not just white males, it's males in general, but particularly white males. But males in general, let's say between 22 and 40, they're just not, they're not, what's the word? They're not part of the body politic. They don't believe they have a traditional role to play. If you said to one of them, hey, if you said as a father or grandfather, you said to them, you got to get going, son. Hey, you got to plug into the system, you got to go get a job, get a part time job, try to get a starter home. Try to if you can. But in their defense, it's very hard to buy a home. Student loans plague you for years and you're told that if you're an electrician or a master plumber or a Sheetrock installer, that that's less prestigious even though you'll make more money. I don't know. It's a whole range of toxicities that suffering. But we as a country, when we say we need illegal immigration at both ends to be highly skilled engineers, we talk about last podcast and we don't. I think George W. Bush said we can't build back from the hurricane unless we have illegal immigration. He said that. George W. We need the labor. Well, there's a lot of these young males that are not fully employed. Why couldn't they do it? And they're traumatized for some reason. I don't know what it is, but I see it among family, I see it among friends that, you know people and they were very bright young men and they got college degrees. And then it was like, okay, I did what I was supposed to do, now what? And then they kind of date. They date for six months a year. They live in, sometimes they have live ins, they break up, then they kind of drift for a while. But then when they get up close to the late 30s, they're kind of even done with dating. They're just sort of. And we need them, we need to encourage them and we're not going to get them back in until you have role models. And people say, you know what, you guys, there's nothing wrong with getting married. There's nothing wrong with having children. There's nothing wrong with buying a house. You're not in the rat race. You're taking control of your destiny. You're helping your country. We need people in the military. Join the military. We need coders. Get your engineering degree. But get on. We're. This is a new era. We can do this. Don't worry about isms and apologies.
- [41:11]
Jack Fowler
You mentioned college debt, Victor, and there are any number of factors here, but that is so powerful that you would graduate with a degree that may or may not give you much chance of decent employment and then you'd have the equivalent of a mortgage already.
- [41:32]
Victor Davis Hanson
I get so angry at that. I wrote about in the dime says the only thing that works in the huge college debt is the amnesty's for it because it's applied on equally. But my whole point is that these we always hear from professors, oh, we might be laid off. Oh, there's not a job for PhD. I know, I can tell you there wasn't when I got one. But my point is this. We never say we have any responsibility for having these young kids come in and telling them to major in particular areas and then not helping them get a job or not apprising them of the cost per hour of their education. I had a lot of minority students, in fact, almost all minority students, and poor people from my 20 years at Cal State. And we had a classics program. And if you're poor, poor or you're working class, I always had to explain to the student, you're going to spend seven to 900 hours to learn Greek or Latin, and it's incumbent upon me to help you. So we're going to try to use that new vocabulary and that diction and syntax to improve your written and oral language. And that will help you in any enterprise that you want to endeavor. And then I always would say, and if you do want to continue, I will help you get into a graduate school and get a job. And I will help you get, I will call everybody I can because I have an obligation because you, you know, you're, you're in a area where there's not a lot of marketability, supposedly, but there is a lot of marketability for people who can think analytically, write well, speak well. We're going to ensure you hit all of those requisites and then we just have to match you up with an employer who agrees with that. And that was about 30% of my time. In fact, I can tell you that I spend maybe two hours, two hours a week at least with emails from the last 30 years from somebody who says, remember me, I was a student, I'm up for this. I'm that, that, that, that. But if you're going to encourage somebody to take a lot of debt and go to this college, then, and the College is going to take no responsibility. No college is going to say, Mr. Smith, here's your financial package. We want you to come. We need students. We're short. We have faculty's ready to teach. What do you want to major in? I think I'd like to be a sociology. Okay, Sociology major. Here is the job market in four years. Here it is in six years. Here's the compensation. Here will be the disposable income. Here's what your loan will cost to service. Here's the anticipated year. You'll pay it off. Duh. Do you want to do it? We do that with cars, we do that with houses. The bank says that when you take out a loan, how are you going to pay for it? What's your discretionary impact? What are your expenses? We never do that with students. So they just go, duh. College is the. It's the key to success and open. That's what my professors tell me it is sometimes. Sometimes it's a pathway to prolonged adolescence into your 40s lifetime burden.
- [44:47]
Jack Fowler
Well, let's change up a little. Victor, talk about a great communicator, and that's Donald Trump and the fall issue of the Cloud, Claremont Review of Books. I want to recommend it now for four reasons. One is there's a great review of your book, the End of Everything in this particular issue, so just high fived you all along the way. It's not just book reviews in the Claremont Review book. There are essays, and this issue has three essays. William Vogli and Charles Kessler and Chris Caldwell. And they're Talking about the 2024 elections and Trump and what's happening with conservative movement. Anyway, I'd like to focus on Chris Caldwell's piece, and it's about Trump talking and how it's just how different he is. And I want to read this here, and you bear with me. And then, Victor, comment on it or your own thoughts on how Trump conveys thoughts. Here's what Chris Caldwell writes in this essay. Even when he is not telling an actual man bites dog story. Trump has a gift for making things vivid. His language has a strange, percussive beauty to it. People who love English often remark that it is a Germanic language with ever since the Norman Conquest, a vast store of words from the Romance languages. Crude, everyday objects have tended to keep their Germanic names, while ideas and ideologies and newfangled abstractions get introduced into the language in their romance form. A good English prose style is generally considered to be a matter of balancing the two. But Trump is not like that he has rightly been called materialistic in the sense that he cares about things. His speeches concern stuff. They are therefore full of blunt Germanic words. The only Latin word in his dialogue tribe about Springfield was people, and that's a pretty down to earth word. Trump didn't say the metropolitan area or the population or the community. No, he said the people that live there. Trump tends to use Latin words when he is mimicking or belittling technocrats, and he squeezes them into a nerdy, nasal poindexter voice, as when he imitated the Harris campaign spokesman who accused him of being a cognitively impaired. Trump talks in a raw kind of tempo that goes well with music. This is a fascinating article.
- [47:21]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, I read it.
- [47:24]
Jack Fowler
Anyway.
- [47:24]
Victor Davis Hanson
I'd always, you know, I taught English and composition a couple of times, but I taught every year at Latin composition and I would try to explain everybody the history of the English language. Anglo Saxon. It was a mixture of European Germanic languages and indigenous Anglo and Saxon languages in the British Isles. And then the hierarchy of the Latin conquest Latin. And so it developed a scientific, polite vocabulary that was polysyllabic and Latinate and then a crude English monosyllabic. And one of the examples, you know, is for terms that are embarrassing. So we have urination, which is a good la. And piss. Excuse me. And then we have intercourse and the F word. We have defecation and the sh word we have. For the sexual organs, we have phallus and we have another word, and we have vagina and another word. But the bad words are all Anglo Saxon. And the descriptive, technical, scientific is polysyllabic and Latinx. And if you use, I was trying to explain to students, if you use too many polysyllabic Latin words, you come off as pretentious. If you use too many of the Anglo Saxon, you don't say, I liked the Iliad. It was a big good story. So you want to have some? It was intriguing. It was problematic. But if you use too many, you get too, as you said, wishy washy. But Trump, what I like about Christopher Caldwell is he uses that Latinate vocabulary to actually vary his own vocabulary by attributing it to other people so he will quote them. And so there is a, there's a, what we call variatio in Latin, but it's not him using the polysyllabic, it's him quoting it. And you can see when somebody writes a speech is when he's talking about an issue. We're going to have a schedule of repayment for Student loans and obligations. And then he'll stop the teleprompter and he'll go, big idea. Got to pay the loans off. And we were going to continue and we can stagger these repayments and stagger the repayments. Big idea. And he interrupts himself. What I liked. You know, there was once when he first came on the scene, I wrote an article about his Twitter and a guy from CNN was writing about how horrible Trump's tweets were, and he actually showed up. I didn't want to talk to him, but he said he wanted to come to Fresno and talk to me. So I met him in a shopping center. I didn't want him to come to my house. I met him in a shopping center in Fresno and he said, give me an example. I said, okay. You ever notice when Trump would tweet, he'd say, hillary Clinton is a terrible crook and Bill is just. All he likes to do is blank other women. And then he write sad. Or he'd say, the crooked Joe Biden family has got away with murder. Terrible, awful. He'd just have one word at the end. And it was such a variation in sentence length grammar. It was really. He had a natural flair for that. And I don't know whether when he developed it, because I was curious, I went back, have you ever seen those interviews he's done, especially with Oakland people 25 years ago, when they asked him if he was going to run for president, it was amazing. It was like he was an encyclopedia of data. I saw an interview about, he must have been 50, you know, 20, 28 years ago. And they said, would you ever think of political office? And he'd say, we have very asymmetrical trade and we've got to get back to commerce. And it was just, it was authoritative. You know, he had authority, he had sobriety. He was full of chock full. And then he developed this other element of just, you know, as if he's talking to a cement crew on his building or something.
- [51:45]
Jack Fowler
Yeah.
- [51:45]
Victor Davis Hanson
And that article points that out, that he's able to. I like what he also says when he says, when he appoints somebody or he does something and he knows that people are going to criticize a Kimberly Garfield, he always uses the word highly respected. She's highly respected among her peers, Highly respected, widely esteemed. And he always says this. That's another classical rhetorical trope. It's a variation of what we call. It's not variatio, but it's deliberate hearsay. And you want to get something in that's inadmissible, but you can't say it yourself because it's outrageous. So you have to attribute it to somebody else and then you're not responsible for its veracity. So whenever Trump says a controversial thing, he says and he'll say something like, I don't know about Tim Waltz. They say it's widely reported that his military record was suspect or he has no respect among his fellow soldiers, or it was reported. Or they say. And that's a classical trope. Yeah, well, they are usually right. Yes, he's usually right. But he attributes the general consensus as if he's only reluctantly disclosing this information because it's widely known, widely reported.
- [53:28]
Jack Fowler
We're going to talk about someone else who is famous or talking bombastically anyway, in his case, and that's Benito Mussolini. I don't think we've ever talked about Mussolini here, despite my heritage. And we'll get to that. And also talk about Germany's invasion of Russia and their uniform. And that's how we will close out this episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show. And we're going to do that when we come back from these final important messages. We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Happy New Year to everybody. This particular episode comes out on January 2nd. Now on January 3rd, 1925, Benito Mussolini, a member of the parliament, socialist. Well, he had been a socialist, but he gave a somewhat infamous talk that kind of project propelled him into his status as Il Duce, the fascist leader of Italy, even though Italy still had.
- [54:40]
Victor Davis Hanson
A king Victor among the realm.
- [54:43]
Jack Fowler
Yeah. So Victor just generally about him, you know, because Mussolini comes off in our own culture here in movies, whatever, is kind of of a clown and mocked and a comical figure almost. But I don't think he was comical figure necessarily to Italians themselves or to people in Libya and Ethiopia and Somalia, which were tormented by Italy. So anyway, I'm curious about a lot of any general thoughts about him. But also.
- [55:16]
Victor Davis Hanson
You got to remember he was an editor. He was a newspaper guy, so he could write well and he did interviews and he met a variety of people and he emulated their style and he understood how people communicated with the public. And he was writing and he was a socialist communist on the left. He was actually, even though there was some question he might have evaded military service for a while, he was a wounded veteran of the Austrian front. So he had days as a combat veteran fighting on the Allied side in World War I. And then he realized by the early 20s that the problem with communism was, as Hitler did, because Hitler was surrounded by Nazis who were former communists. Even Alvin Rosenberg and Goebbels for a while had dallied with socialism. Communism, it was called the National Socialist Party. But fascism was. It squared that circle. It said that you could be a communitarian, but Italian. And so he understood that nationalism and collective pride in the country was a force multiplier of communitarianism. So he created this idea of fascism. The fascinating fasces were these rods that were bundled together that we're going to bundle all the ideologies and all of the ethnic and we're going to have an Italian movement and we're going to, as Hitler did, we are going to be the national union. There's no reason for unions anymore because we're going to be the bulwark of protect the common man. And we're going to take the oligarchs and business people and make them serve the people. Even though of course they were corrupt and Mussolini was corrupt. But the point was that he was going to have this nationalist movement and channel what the reason people didn't like communism in the commune turn was that there was no borders and that communism was going to be. It wasn't going to be nationalistic, chauvinistic, it was just going to be a worldwide globalist move. Most people didn't want that. So in the 20s he used his military service, the fact that he had been wounded, his journalism experience and this new idea that Rome will be the new center. It'll be Mar Nostrum again. The Mediterranean will be Italian and we will refound the Roman Empire. And we already half there. So we have Libya and we're our competitors in the late 30s are going to be the French. The French navy is predominant. We're going to build. He built, wow, 20, 30 cruisers, six big battleships. The Italian Navy was the second largest in the Mediterranean. Beautifully crafted ships. Beautifully crafted with no operational capacity. Because they had no radar. They were not able to fight at night, they were poorly commanded. But they were like all Italian craftsmanship, very impressive. Same thing with their airplanes. Some of them were in flight specifications and capabilities comparable to the Bf109 or the submarine Spitfire. But they were not built in quantity and they weren't built for easy maintenance, for example. But there was an Italian genius to them. So he thought that he. And then when the war broke in the 30s, he went down, as you know, to Ethiopia, Somalia and tried to East Africa is what basically the area. And he conquered it and he was very brutal he used poison gas, killed people. And then he looked at when the war started. He thought that the British would be occupied with Hitler and he would then make inroads into Egypt. So he started to go into Egypt and he didn't think under any circumstances that the British would, with this huge empire, would have enough resources to devote to North Africa. But they did. And by 1940, his reputation was ruined. He was in retreat. And of course, Rommel came in and saved him in February, March, April of 1941. But it was right on the verge of the invasion of Russia. So Hitler didn't devote enough resources for Rommel to win. But the Italians went down to defeat with Rommel and the Germans were wiped out. And then he invaded, foolishly, he invaded Albania and then on October 28th of 1940, invaded Greece. Oki. When he told the Greeks, you have to let me in. They said, oh, no, there's an ohi day in Greece today. But he got bogged down in Greece and couldn't handle the Greeks. Ferocious fighters, heroic fighters. They had natural terrain. It was in winter. It was stupid to invade on the verge of winter. And then Hitler had to bail him out, go into Yugoslavia, solidify his presence in Albania, then win the war in Greece. And he had to do it before he invaded Russia and he lost. If you look at the campaigns in France, the low countries, in 1940, then he had to go into Yugoslavia and he had to clean up Greece. And then the invasion of Crete. He lost a lot of very valuable equipment, air transport, soldiers. That really weakened him, even though he had this huge force to go into Russia. But Italy was always, I don't know what the word is. Hitler admired Mussolini because Hitler didn't come to power until 1936, excuse me, 33. And he didn't start to get ambitious until 36 with the Saarland and then Rhineland, Anschluss, that followed. But Mussolini was there 23, 24. So Hitler grew up with the idea that Mussolini had taken control and destroyed the democratic republican process and created this fascist nationalist movement that really worked and he admired him. And Mussolini was, I think, 10 years, eight years older than Hitler was. So he was Hitler's master. And then when the war started, the population and economy of Germany propelled Hitler into the preeminent position. And then from 1940 on, Hitler. Hitler looked at Mussolini as a kindred spirit, but a drag. So, yes, we have to bail him out of Greece. Yes, he's going to send some people to Russia, but not enough to make any difference. Yes, we'll have to have a. Save him when the revolution tried to overthrew him in 1943. Yes, we'll go down to Egypt because he started a war with the British and he's losing. So that was the German attitude.
- [62:23]
Jack Fowler
I think you've answered the question. But just to be clear on Italy under Mussolini. Militarily interesting designs, etc. But nothing is there anything admirable about the air force, the navy, the military. Did they ever win a war? Did they ever win a battle, I wonder against the.
- [62:45]
Victor Davis Hanson
You know, actually units fought. When we invaded sicily in july 43, some italians units fought very well. But even though they were already we had used actually the Mafia and the Mafia in places like Palermo to help us. But there were a lot of Italian. The Italian American exodus had made. There was a lot of goodwill toward America in Italy before the war started. So they supported Mussolini. But when the war started and America came in late, then they had a real problem with it. But they. They did. Some of them did fight well. They had a. I'm trying to remember his name. He was a commander. He was a. He was a fascist black shirt. But he was kind of an intellectual and he was the head of the air force Balbo I think his name was. And he was a brilliant commander. And if they had made him in command of the Egyptian forces instead of Graziani, they might have been able to win. He got killed in a mistaken identity where they shot him down, I think over to Brooke or somewhere near there killed him. But he was. He was destined to take over from Mussolini. Ciano was his son in law left these diaries and of course they executed him.
- [64:05]
Jack Fowler
Well, Victor, I have to correct you as an Italian American there is no such thing as the Mafia. Now.
- [64:14]
Victor Davis Hanson
That word is never used in any of the Godfather movies. That was part of the deal was not to use that word.
- [64:23]
Jack Fowler
They probably made a deal with some locals to make that the movie made. Victor, you mentioned, and I had mentioned earlier about the German army and unprepared for the brutal winter of 1941 in Russia. And as you just pointed out, of course it was delayed Beijing Barbara was delayed by needing to do things in Greece and Yugoslavia. But I've always been curious about the uniform of the German soldier, the winter uniform or the lack of their such. Had the Germans been prepared by just warmer clothing, would it have mattered really? Or was destiny never.
- [65:11]
Victor Davis Hanson
No, I don't think it would have got to remember that Hitler's success of the 11 victories from 1930-41 were predicated really on As I said, an asymmetry. So he invaded Poland, invaded it from three spots. From East Prussia, from occupied Czech territory, and from Germany. But even then he had the Soviet Union that came in 17 days to carve up. And the Poles fought ferociously for two weeks. He lost 20,000 dead. And then he waited a while and had that fake peace. But then he went into Denmark, three days. But he had problems in Norway. And had he not invaded France and diverted the British fleet, he would have had some problems. He lost a lot of destroyers and the British been more aggressive. It would have been really touch and go. So then he invaded a very weak Belgium and Netherlands and Luxembourg. And then he hit France, which was socialist, and the mighty French army. Everybody says it crumbled in six weeks, but it did. But the French soldier, they killed another 20,000 Germans. And then he took a pause. So that was seven countries. And then he went into Yugoslavia and Greece and he went into Crete. But my point in all of this is, with minor exceptions of the French, who had maybe some planes and tanks that were comparable but not operated well, he had never met a truly comparable, highly technological enemy. And when he first met them in Britain and Guring assured him that the BF109 and the Junkers and Heinkel bombers would destroy England like they had Warsaw and Amsterdam. And they came up against the Hurricane, but especially the Spitfire, and they took appalling losses, appalling losses. And then the submarine campaign was very successful for a year. And then they came up against sophisticated British destroyers, depth charges, sonar, you name it. The same thing happened when he went into the Soviet Union, but this time he got caught. This wasn't just Britain. This was a country that had a population of 240 million people. It was 30 times the area of Germany, and it was going to quickly receive 25% of its GDP, would be supplied by the United States and Britain. And more importantly, it had a history of munitions that were westernized and they were very sophisticated. So if you look at heavy artillery of say over 105 millimeters, and you look at tanks, the Stalin tank, especially the T34 tank, or you look at Katushka rockets, or you look at motorized divisions, we gave them 400,000 Studebike, 400,000 heavy duty trucks. So when Hitler went into Russia, he. They had a kill ratio the first two years of about 8 to 1. And they'd lost about a million men at the end of 1941 dead or wounded, but they had killed wounded probably 5 million. And yet when they counted Divisions. The word went up to OKW the number of divisions they identified. And they said, this is impossible. This is impossible. We have wiped out combat. Ineffective. At least 40 divisions, 16,000 men, maybe 100 divisions. They can't have more than another hundred or two. They said, no, they have four or five hundred total divisions. So that army started to really grow given the population base, especially in eastern and Asiatic Russia. And they weren't prepared for that. And they weren't prepared for Russian railroad. Different gauges, the roads were terrible. All of their fighting had been in European countries very close to Germany, Denmark, France, even Greece. And the Germans had pretty good weather. It was comparable to Germany. And the point I'm making is if you had a Mark 3 tank, you could get it serviced back in Germany, just put it on a rail, it would be there in a day. French railroad system is very sophisticated. If you went into Greece, there was a lot of food that you could steal. They had tomato canning factories, et cetera. But when they went into Russia, they had no idea that if they did not win that war in the first June, they only had 10 days in June, they had to win it by October 1st. And they had no idea how far away they were from their base of support. They had no idea how many men, and they had no idea the sophistication of the Russian military equipment. So by the end of December, they'd run out of gas. They were so far from their base, it was very cold. They'd always pride themselves that the German kit, everything about the German soldier's uniform, his mess, his knife, his handgun, his grenades were superior to British and Allied models. And really, when they met American soldiers, at the beginning they were too. But by 1944, Americans had more morphine, they had more sulfur powder in their kit, they had more food, and they were. The M1 carbine, you can make an argument, was better than any ordinary issued rifle the Germans had. I shouldn't say carbine, regular M1. So they kind of shot their ward. What I'm trying to get at is the German army was designed for intra European conquest of the sort of 1939-42 in which it performed brilliantly. But once it entered a global war with the United States and Russia in all of these wide theaters, on land, on sea, but in Russia. And once their economy was up against the United States States, they had no idea what they were getting into. So the United States basically won the war by putting 12 million people in uniform, but not having a very big army, only 3 or 4 million that 12 million were in support, auxiliary, the navy and the Army Air Force. So that meant that the United States had enormous logistical advantages. They had enormous advantages on ground support aircraft, tactical aircraft, strategic aircraft, and all that lessened casualties. So we came out of that war losing tragically, 450,000 dead. But Germany lost 5 million and Russia lost 20 million. And the British came out with about 420,000, much more per capita, but not in the same numbers, because they too were able to invest in a navy and an air force and auxiliaries, and they kept the actual fighting on land to a minimum. And we only had a year in Europe from 6-6-44 until 5-9-45, really. But the Germans, they fought on the Russian front, all of half of 41, all of 42, all of 43, all of 40, 44 and half of 45. And they had never seen. The temperatures were unusual that year at 41. But even the next winter was Stalingrad. And so what was cold in Berlin was not anything like Russia. It was colder. And the winter started earlier and ended later. And the Russians understood that, and they didn't. It was very embarrassing for them. You know, General Halder, the head of OKW, said after 11 days, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the German army has defeated Russia in 11 days. And that was because they had marked, they were a thousand miles from their embarkation. They had neutralized 4 million. They had people either killing them, capturing them or scattering them. There was no organized Russian defense. They had the largest encirclement in the history of warfare, the Kiev pocket. 650,000 Russians surrendered. They had the goodwill of people in the Baltics and the Ukraine. They thought, and they thought, it's warm weather all the way to November 1st or mid November. We're going to take Moscow. They were scheduled to take Moscow in August. So the Japanese were going to join because they thought it was time to join Germany and Russia was all through. And then they sputtered and they saw they were ill supplied and the Russian soldier was tenacious. And the Russian artillery and the Russian armor were better than Germany's, except for maybe the 88 millimeter artillery piece. And it was very embarrassing for Hitler because he had to tell the German people, the Russians are better equipped, they have better coats, they have better shoes than we do, and they have very good weapons. And they outnumber us five to one. And they're on their home base and we're outside Moscow and they're only 600 miles from and their factories and we're 1,200 miles from the German border. And more importantly, this is the key. We are fighting Russia, they are fighting us. This is all they're doing. They have allies that are conducting a strategic campaign of bombing us. They're not doing it. They have the two largest fleets in the world, the American and the British, on their behalf, we're not doing it. They have a submarine component. We don't. We just have a huge 12 million man army. And all we have to do is in the case of Russia, fight Germany. But Germany looked at this and they said, oh my God, these Russians are just fighting us. They're not fighting the Japanese, they're not fighting, fighting the Italians, they're not bogged down in the Pacific, they're not in the Mediterranean. The Americans and British have turned them loose on us and they're supplied. And they've told the Russians don't make four engine bombs. And look at us, we're trying to bomb Britain, we're trying to sink convoys all the way over there in Florida and New Jersey, we're fighting in Italy with our allies, we're fighting in North Africa. And yet we've got to fight these one dimensional Russians. And they have all the advantages. So it was really stupid. They fought. The idea was they thought they won the war. And as Hitler said, we can make, think of the logic. We can make Britain surrender by attacking the largest military in the world. That was so stupid. But they thought they would defeat Russia as quickly as they did France. And they said there is a calculus from World War I that it took us four years, we only got six, 70 miles into France and yet we knocked out Russia in World War I by November of 1917. Two and a half years, three and a half maybe. So that calculus means in World War II that if we knocked out France in six to seven weeks, which took us four years and we never did, then we can knock out Russia. Given the World War I calculus that Russia falls and France didn't and it falls in three years, France fell in six weeks so we can knock out Russia in three weeks, just like World War I.
- [77:47]
Jack Fowler
Well, that's quite a history lesson off of a question about a coat.
- [77:55]
Victor Davis Hanson
When I wrote the Second World War, I tried to avoid two stereotypes. I wasn't going to just accept up the narrative the French army was incompetent and the French military was only had gears in reverse as people said. And the Italians were incompetent. And it was tragic because the French soldier was indomitable in World War I and French battleships and they made the best destroyer in the world. The French did. You could argue in 1930 the best tank in the world was the Char B tank and the Dewante aircraft was just as good as the German. And yet it was not. It wasn't the French soldier or the French munitions industry. It was the ossified, calcified French command. And there had been socialism in the schools where you could not teach Verdun. You weren't even allowed to say Verdun very long. That was considered a disaster even though it was a brilliant victory that cost them 800,000. And the second thing was they had a hard right movement. They were sympathetic to right wing and they didn't understand what Germany was all about. But they did fight pretty well for six. And just to finish when we came in, everybody thought George Patton was a crude Trumpian figure. In many ways he was. But he was fluent in French, he spoke French. He had enormous admiration for the French. He did not hate as Montgomery did de Gaulle and Roosevelt hated de Gaulle. He formed the first. He had two armies, artillery divisions. He had people like Leclerc and Tessernay that were brilliant French commanders and he allowed them to take Paris and he worked so well with them. When the French had American weapons and they had American allies from basically August of 1944 till May of 45, the French soldier was wonderful and was a big help to the Allied cause. And when they went into Vietnam and Algeria, they lost both of them. But those were political losses. If you look at The World War II veterans who fought that war in Algeria and Vietnam, they were pretty tough people.
- [80:30]
Jack Fowler
You had recommended and I read it. A strange defeat by. So if anyone wants to get an understanding of the French mindset that led to the defeat, that's a recommended book from Victor and terrific book. Hey Victor, we've come to the end. Two things though. First, as usual, I want to thank folks that sign up for Civil Thoughts, the free weekly email newsletter I write for the center for Civil Society and It comes with 14 recommended readings of interesting articles I've come across the previous week. And if you want to get it recommend you do go to civil thoughts.com and sign up. And then there's the fact that people rate this show through Apple 0 to 5 stars. And practically everyone gives Victor 5 stars 4.9 plus average over thousands of people. Thank you very much those who take the time to do that. And then folks, other folks a few leaves comments and we read them all comments on Apple comments on Victor's website the Blade of Perseus. And here's one. It's. It's a little bit of a criticism, but it's interesting. So here's. It's called, it's titled Philosopher King and I think it's really interesting. So he writes or she need to get you to Detroit Downtown. It's a sex. Obviously we've talked about Detroit. It's disparaging.
- [81:59]
Victor Davis Hanson
I've been to Detroit, but I haven't been to the Renaissance Detroit in the last four or five years. I'd like to go.
- [82:04]
Jack Fowler
Well, here it is. It's a success story and one of the best downtowns in the country. Me and my squeeze walk around, go to shows and sports events, great dining. The whole town has been rebuilt as if a Roman emperor decreed it. There is a Roman reference in Campus Martius 2. Between Rocket Mortgage and its subsidiary Bedrock and the Ilyitch family, the place has been transformed. So when I hear your I'm sorry. Disparaging remarks about Detroit, I want to take you on a tour there. But visit next time you're at Hillsdale. It's not far. Of course you'd have to drive by that commie cesspool U of M and genuflect. I worked for Rocket and worked downtown and remember the place when it was a science fiction post war wasteland worthy of a movie set. As such, it's really incredible. Even more so given its liberal DNA. And this is signed by the Weekly Objectives.
- [83:01]
Victor Davis Hanson
Thank you. Weekly Objectives.
- [83:02]
Jack Fowler
Interesting.
- [83:03]
Victor Davis Hanson
So it's returning after World War II or. In 1944 it had the highest GDP rate of growth in the United States. Yeah, it supplied the war effort with every machine that had wheels.
- [83:17]
Jack Fowler
It came in second place for the 1968 Olympics which were held in Mexico City. So that's how, you know, how vibrant.
- [83:26]
Victor Davis Hanson
I think it really shrunk when they had that plan, you know, of 25% of the city was abandoned and they were having to send fire and, you know, police everywhere. So they began to just allow these abandoned blocks to go back to nature and shrunk the physical size of the city to reflect the population. So I think it's about 800,000 now. And it has far fewer racial. I think it's hard to imagine given its reputation, but it has far less racial problems. I think they even have a white mayor they had. You know, it's an ecumenical city. I admire. I think I appreciate that comment and I don't want to disparage Viva Detroit well, but it's a lot better. It's a lot safer to walk downtown and cleaner than San Francisco.
- [84:24]
Jack Fowler
Than San Francisco.
- [84:24]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah.
- [84:26]
Jack Fowler
Well, Victor, as ever, you've been wonderful. Thanks for the. All the reflections.
- [84:31]
Victor Davis Hanson
Thank you, everybody. Go east, young man.
- [84:35]
Jack Fowler
Hey, we'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Bye. Bye.
- [84:40]
Victor Davis Hanson
Thank you, everybody.