← The Victor Davis Hanson Show
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- [00:00]
Victor Davis Hanson
Running a business means checking a lot of boxes.
- [00:03]
Sponsor Voice
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- [00:05]
Sammy Wink
Inventory check. Insurance.
- [00:07]
Victor Davis Hanson
Ah, good thing Simply Business makes getting small business insurance fast and easy. Check insurance off your list@simplybusiness.com hello and.
- [00:17]
Sammy Wink
Welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show. This is our Saturday edition where we do something a little bit different in the middle segment. And this week we're looking at the outbreak of the Vietnam War. So we look forward to that. Before that, we'll do a little bit of news. And we had Hulk Hogan died yesterday, I believe, or this morning early. And we're recording on Thursday at the age of 71. And so we'll take a moment to discuss him and then some information on Hillary from our Russian spies and the trade deal that Donald Trump struck with Japan. So stay with us for those news stories and we'll be right back.
- [01:02]
Sponsor Voice
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- [01:07]
Victor Davis Hanson
Stage and the site is live that.
- [01:10]
Sponsor Voice
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- [01:16]
Victor Davis Hanson
Stage this one's going to Thailand and.
- [01:19]
Sponsor Voice
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- [01:35]
Sammy Wink
Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Victor is the Martin and Ellie Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. You can find him at his website, victorhanson.com and the name of the website is the Blade of Perseus. So please come join us there for lots of free stuff. A lot his articles that go out and are syndicated elsewhere, his podcast, both the audio and video version of it. And for our Ultra subscribers, if you want to subscribe at 650amonth or $65 a year, you can get two articles, a video at the end of the week and then also you have access to to ad free podcasts as well. So there's lots of advantages to being a VDH subscriber. So Victor, sad news. Hulk Hogan, who was a big supporter of President Trump, died today, this morning, I think, or in the early morning hours at the age of 71. He was very young and as everybody knows better than I do, very famous for his wrestling career. And so I was wondering if you had.
- [02:49]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, he was very big and actually in his 40s in the 1980s. I don't know how he did was pretty amazing that when he was in his late 30s and early 40s, 30 years ago, he was, you know, at the end of the night in the 90s and his late 30s, in the 80s and 90s, he was beat up and he took a lot of punishment. He had a lot of. I think he had just had another neck surgery. Everybody thinks that pro wrestling is sort of performance art rather than just free for all like college wrestling. But it takes an enormous toll on people's bodies. Those body slams, any normal person, they have to be trained how to do it. It's very hard to do. And he took a lot of punishment and he kept going into his 50s and even 60s. I don't know how he did it. I guess he had a heart attack or he had problems after surgery. I think when you get to be 70 and you have surgery, you better be very. It takes a lot longer. And he had plenty of surgeries and he came out. He was part of that weird Trump menagerie. I mentioned it before, of people like Joe Rogan, Dana White, Hulk Hogan, Robert Kennedy, Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk. For a while, he really represented all these different segments of middle class appeal and even independents and Democrats. So anyway, it was sad. Everybody liked him. He was sort of like Ozzy Osbourne just died and Ozzy Osbourne, for all of his drug use, philandering rock lifestyle, it was very hard to find somebody who didn't like him. Same thing with Kris Kristofferson we've talked about. He was kind of a hero of mine. I really liked him. He was a renaissance man, but everybody liked him.
- [04:45]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, it sounded like that. I was listening to a lot of news about Hulk Hogan today, and he's all close family, from close family to friends to his colleagues and peers. Yeah, he just helped him out all the time.
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Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, he was a good person. And, you know, he was at a point in his career where he could come out politically and endorse Trump.
- [05:08]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, I was listening to Tyrus as you know, from Greg Gutfeld, and he's obviously a wrestler, too. And he said he was basically talking about how that lifestyle or the work that a big time wrestler does is very hard on the body. And that they're not always as healthy as they should be with food and other things. And so the problem is they have to be bulky to die at 71.
- [05:33]
Victor Davis Hanson
They have to be bulky. So they have to. It's because it's a performance arts sport. They have to be tan they have to be sculpted, and you can do that in your 20s and 30s, but you have to lift. And some of them took steroids. I don't know if he did or not, but they have to lift weights all the time. And once you get into your 50s or 40s, even 30s, late, that's hard on your joints. And, you know, last year the dog here knocked me down four flights of steps. That was nothing compared to one slam. And I had the tailbone injured, you know, and that took me like four months ago. I was thinking of that. How do. When they throw somebody down, they land flat on their back. I don't know how they. I just don't know how they have to be trained how to do that. So he really did something for the sport and he legitimized it in a way that we really hadn't seen before. When I was growing up, there was always Pepper Gomez, Floody Balassi, Ray Stevens. I watched big. We call it big time wrestling. And here in the San Joaquin Valley, it was called Luce Libre Freestyle fighting, you know, but it wasn't as. It wasn't. I think in one occasion, Hulk Hogan had the largest televised sporting event in the 80s.
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Sammy Wink
Yeah, even a pure novice like me knew his name, so. And it wasn't exactly my sport.
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Victor Davis Hanson
I forgot his last name too, or something.
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Sammy Wink
Yeah. Anyway. All right, so on to Hillary. And with Tulsi Gabbard and the records coming out, apparently the Russian spies had identified or reported to back to Russia, the home country, that Hillary was on heavy tranquilizers and their words were psycho emotional.
- [07:27]
Victor Davis Hanson
So, yeah, the problem with that is that the left always confuses the matter and says the right is trying to bring make a mountain out of a molehill. But it's just a taken that the Chinese and the Russians will go online with this information. They'll try to hack things that's normal. And in this case, as we remember, when you're John Podesta and you write password for your password, they got into his and they got into Hillary's emails, and then we had WikiLeaks and all that. And so Trump was kidding. One time in the 2000s, he says, maybe we can ask the Russians to help us with Hillary's. He. And then that just that joke became a narrative. But there was never any. There was never any evidence that Donald Trump had anything to do with the Russians. There were people in his campaign and both campaigns. And you got to remember that from 2009, it was Hillary Clinton who pushed the Jacuzzi button in Geneva and said, we're going to reset with Russia. It was Barack Obama in 2012 that said to Medeva, tell Vladimir that this is my last election. I'm almost quoting literally. And if he. I'll be. If he's, if he's flexible and gives me space, I'll be, you can. I'll be flexible on missile defense. And what's forgotten about that hot micro, they both kept their promise. Putin did not invade for two years after he waited till Obama was reelected. And Obama did dismantle missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic. But my point is, if you look at the 2016 election, there was no Russian collusion. There was just a Russian attack on Hillary's emails or somebody related perhaps to Russia. And that became a whole narrative. The other problem with it is, as this latest trove came out, of the 18 intelligence authorities, they can't find more than five who said that they would find Russian Trump collusion. And when you look at the evidence of those five, there's no evidence. There's a Steele dossier, there's an email. And so there was no evidence. There was no reason for Clapper or Brennan or in the case of the FBI to tell Barack Obama there is signs of Russian collusion. So James Clapper gave the yesterday and I'm speaking on a Thursday, he gave the game away. He gave a long time ago. They've been airing this old clip that he said he was praising Barack Obama and said, you know, we would have never known about Russian collusion unless Barack Obama in that meeting, and he's referring to the December 9 meeting, unless he had insisted that we find it, meaning that the original intelligence synopsis presented him didn't find it at all. So Obama, this is after the election and in that room, Clapper, Comey Brennan, John Kerry, Susan Rice, Victoria Nuland and what followed all of those people helped disseminate that false narrative. And so if you think about it, it is worse than Watergate because the president of the United States knew that he didn't have the intelligence to suggest that Donald Trump was a Russian asset. And he thought that narrative would have worked in the election. It didn't. Donald Trump, I think surprised to himself, was elected. So here you have a lame duck president and he's trying to destroy the incoming president. He essentially did. There was 22 months and as I said earlier, their other problem they have is they talk too much. Comey was on Twitter nonstop. Brennan was on Twitter nonstop. Brennan was. They were MSNBC and CNN authorities, where they still had their clearances almost every day. They were saying that Trump was guilty of collusion, he was a puppet, he was an asset. And they had all lied. They had one thing in common. They had all lied under oath. Along with Andrew McCabe, he had lied. Brennan had lied twice to the Senate under oath. Clapper had lied under oath. Comey had feigned amnesia 245 times before the House. They all have a lot of vulnerabilities, exposure. So if this continues, they're going to have no popular. They don't have a good reputation is what I'm saying. They, they were political activists, and if you had said while they were in office, you're, you're weaponizing it. All they did is when they got out of office, they confirmed that because they went right to work attacking the president.
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Sammy Wink
Yeah, and they are also committed to the lie. That's what's extraordinary to me. I mean, is that just the evidence that they are pure evil incarnate or something? Because how could you be so committed to that absolute lying?
- [12:37]
Victor Davis Hanson
They know right now. They know, along with Mike Morale, Leon Panetta and others, they know that Anthony Blinken was a political operative in the 2020 campaign. He was the foreign policy campaign guy for Biden. He called up the former interim head of the CIA, Mike Morale, and said, mike, Joe's coming up here for a debate. The laptop is killing us. It's just been released. I don't know whether he said or not, but it was known to him that the FBI had it in their possession and they had authenticated it. So then what did he do? He said, can you round up the old guy, the old bunch? He got 51 people to sign an affidavit. If you look at that affidavit, it's very carefully worded so to avoid perjury, it says it has all the earmarks on of a Russian information operation, but it meant the same thing. And then Joe Biden, if you look at the tape of that debate, went in there and Donald Trump said, well, you're all over the laptop. Mr. 10%. It's all there. And he said, that is a lie. How dare you say that? I've got 51 authorities. We have 51 authorities that just said that this is part of your work. You and Putin did this. And there was a poll taken by an albake conservative group, I think it was called Telemetrica, that said, had you known that this was a lie, and that the 51 intelligence authorities, former intelligence authorities, which was also a lie, a number of them were still secretly contractors for the CIA. But if they had known, that would have affected and 70 over 70%. Yeah, it would have affected my vote if I had known they were lying to me about the laptop and that everything was there. And then we had Hunter with that embarrassing. Was it two or three hour rant interview with that Andrew Callahan and they asked him about it. I mean, he said a lot of crazy things. He said cocaine was not as bad as alcohol and he used the F bomb word maybe every other word. He also had that whiny little nasal voice. I had never really heard him at length, you know, it was kind of a whiny, wimpy little voice. But then he said, laptop, laptop. Anybody's laptop would be embarrassed. No, you can look at my laptop. I can guarantee you, Hunter, there is no F words. There's no nudity, there's no secret drug dealing, there's no selfies. The only selfie you'll find is the text messages when I had long Covid and I sent to a doctor my tongue to see if it was still yellow. That's about as risque as I got.
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Sammy Wink
Yeah, I don't think anybody wants that computer, Victor.
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Victor Davis Hanson
The point is, it would be most people that are listening to this if somebody said, can I, I'm going to go look at your computer. You might have said something about somebody that you would have in confidence. You, you went to a party and said that guy's a jerk or something. So he, he knows. So what. What I'm getting at is everybody knew it was authentic. Everybody knew they were covering up. Everybody knew they were lying. Everybody knew that Brandon Clapper had already lied and apologized for lying. Everybody knew there was no consequences. They never were facing perjury charges. Every. Everybody knew Andrew McCabe had lied three to four times, according to the Inspector General. Everybody knew that Bill Barr did not prosecute Andrew McCabe. He should have. If Bill Barr had a prosecuted Andrew McCabe, and I think it was still within the statute of limitations, Clapper and Brennan, we wouldn't have had this problem right now. They would have put the fear of God into these administrative state people. And I, like, I'm not one who hates Bill Barr. I think he tried to do his best, but he should have really prosecuted Andrew McCabe.
- [16:23]
Sammy Wink
And just so we get it in, Joe Rogan apparently said that after he watched the interview that Hunter did, he thought that he was a really bright guy and he might be a presidential candidate in the 2028 election. I don't know. I just read about it. I didn't see him actually say that.
- [16:40]
Victor Davis Hanson
I saw about an hour of it and he was totally unhinged. And the guy that was interviewing him was kind of egging him on, but just thought, keep coming, keep coming. This is great. And then he was talking about grifting and all the people that use their political relationships to make money. And I'm thinking, where is your art now? If you were an artist, what's the market for Hunter Biden blow paint on the canvas painting? Zero.
- [17:08]
Sammy Wink
All right, let's go ahead and welcome back. A sponsor to this show, Quince. It's one of the places, in fact, this jacket that I'm wearing right now came from Quince. It's the kind of stuff you'll actually wear on repeat, like breathable flow knit polos, crisp cotton shirts, and comfortable lightweight pants that somehow work for both weekend hangs and dress up dinners. The best part, everything with Quince is half the cost of similar brands. By working directly with top artisans and cutting out the middlemen, Quince gives you luxury pieces without the markups. And Quince only works with factories that use safe, ethical and responsible manufacturing practices and premium fabrics and finishes. Stick to the staples that last with elevated essentials from Quince. Go to Quince.comVictor for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q-U I N C E.comVictor to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.comVictor and we'd like to thank Quince for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show. So, Victor, we're anxious to hear we're on to Vietnam. I think as far as US History goes, the only thing that has more lore and more interest to Americans than Vietnam is the Civil War, Maybe World War II, but Vietnam's the 20 year war.
- [18:44]
Victor Davis Hanson
The first segment was 1950, was essentially 19. It ended in 1975. It started in 1955. 54. And the French, since World War II had been trying to control their colonial possession. We talked about that last time. It was a French colonial war. By 1954, Din Bin Few they were done for from 55 to 61 or two. For five years, the Diem government in South Vietnam was pretty much stable. And There was the 17th parallel and there was a DMZ. Okay, so it was stable. But the problem with Vietnam, if you look at the geography, it's got China is right there. So when China went communist in 47, 48 and the Soviet Union, it's not that far away. It was inevitable. And the China was on the northern side, of course, of Vietnam, the northern. So it was infiltrating, supplying. And that broke out basically in 61. The United States, once JFK had been elected, Eisenhower did not want to go there. And they used the same phrase they did of Korea in 1953 when Omar Bradley was asked, why didn't Matthew Ridgway, when he had destroyed all North Korean forces in the south, why didn't they go back into the north and take the entire Peninsula, as MacArthur had tried in 1950? And he said, this is the wrong place and the wrong. At the wrong time. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong people to fight. What he was saying, it's too far away. It's a type of fighting we don't do well. And these people have nuclear weapons. In the case of Russia. And the main emphasis at that time was Europe. So why in 61 you had a new president elected, John F. Kennedy. Why did he send four or five hundred advisors and then before he was killed, he sent 16,000 and we started to have air bases there. And the answer was he thought United States. In 1962, three had never lost a war. They had never lost an intervention. Every time they had intervened and they had not intervened like the Europeans. During the suez crisis of 56, Eisenhower forced the British, the Israelis and the French to get out of Egypt. So there was this sense that it was a new frontier, we can do anything we want. He had run on the missile gap, which didn't exist. He said that Eisenhower had allowed us to let down our offenses. So Kennedy came in and before he was killed, there were 16,000 people. But worse, there was a coup and they assassinated Diem, who had been there for a number of years. And they thought he wasn't muscular enough. He was religious. He had ties with Buddhists, Christians, and we claimed we didn't know the coup would kill him. Madame Nu was his brother. And that was a mistake because we lost somebody who knew the country well, moderate. So then Kennedy gets killed and it heats up. And the South Vietnamese are dealing with what they call the Viet Cong. The Viet Cong were North Vietnamese operatives who were play acting or simulating that they were an indigenous South Vietnam opposition to the elected government. After Diem was assassinated, you had General Key and then two T H E I U. So then the escalator was LBJ. And so he began 1000-001500-00200, 300, 400, I think by end of 1965, we had 550,000. And the Europeans were saying, what are you doing? You're putting all these people. But again, the model was Korea. They said, you know, we did this in Korea. And it worked well. Korea was a very different. It wasn't a jungle. It was very. It was cold, it was barren. And we were in a much better place in Korea vis a vis China and Russia than we were a decade later. And we weren't in the middle of a cultural revolution. By 1964 we had just had the beginning of, the very beginning of come to San Francisco, the cultural movement. And by 1965 we had 66. We had no strategy. It was Mark Moyer who's written a three volume history. He's on volume two. It's a revisionist history. He tries to defend, maybe sometimes successfully, the search and destroy mission where Westmoreland and people, when I was in high school, they were still calling him waste more land. He was a good man. But the idea was you take helicopter troops, you drop them down into a Viet Cong held part of South Vietnam. The enemy sees it sort of like the Mel Gibson moon when we were soldiers or young when we were. And then that draws out the North Vietnamese back Viet Cong. And then you have superior air power and you call in airstrikes at napalm and you keep doing that. It didn't work. And finally the CIA came in with something called the Phoenix program that worked, but it was very controversial. They just simply got the names of all the Viet Cong leaders that were trying to overthrow the government in South Vietnam and they took them out. They were targeted assassinations. And so then the Tet offensive happened in 68. The North Vietnamese came up with the idea that at the New Year's they were going to surprise the Americans and send 100,000 troops. The Viet Cong would rise up and this time they would go into the American bases themselves, but especially attack the embassy at Saigon. And we had a base way up near the DMZ at Khe Sanh. And they were going to attack Khe Sanh. And of course, this was an election year and LBJ would shortly say in March of 68, he was not going to run because of Vietnam. And they were now negotiating in Paris, but the Viet Cong on orders from the Chinese. The Viet Cong was synonymous with the North Vietnamese. They were not going to make a peace deal because they thought they could win. And the Russians and the Chinese liked this idea that we were tied down. So in this election year, they staged the Tet offensive that shook all of the campuses because there was at the battle of Hu, at the Battle of Khe Sanh, they had pictures of North Viet Cong at the US Embassy, and Marines are firing from the embassy ground. And so everybody in America thought, you can't win if the Viet Cong are right in the American Embassy in Saigon or if they're attacking away. But the fact is, nobody really looked at the actual what was actually happening. What they did at Khe Sanh was a base up by, as I said, the dmz. They made it into sectors. This is the first time they kind of made computer sectors like a checkerboard. Then they brought in B52s and they systematically obliterated every living thing in that sector. And they completely wiped out the North Vietnamese. We didn't know it at the time, and then they gave it up. It was isolated. Everybody said, it's like Dien Bien Phu. They were isolated. But the airstrikes destroyed everybody around them they could have. And when they went in there, everybody said, okay, now we still have the base. And they said, no, we're going to pull out. That was just kind of, why did we do all that? And saved this big, huge air base. And then we pulled out. So there was not a consistent strategy. By after Tet, we had a change in tactics with Creighton Abrams. He'd been a very, very famous one star. I think he was, or maybe he was a colonel in World War II as an armored commander. I think he was in the Third Army. Anyway, he changed the tactics from search and destroy to hold. He would go in and hold areas. He was kind of the forerunner of the surge that we saw in Iraq. But by 1971, a couple of things had happened. Richard Nixon had been president for 69, 70. He had a new strategy called Vietnamization. In other words, he would say, we're going to turn over to the Vietnamese this sector, this sector. We're going to arm them. And then he did another smart thing. He changed. I think it was in 71 or 72. He ended the draft. You got a lottery number. There was a draft, but you got a lottery. My number was 245 when I turned 18. But the war was over as far as Americans on the ground by 72. They went into Cambodia in 73. But there were very few ground troops in Vietnam itself. And it was mostly an air campaign. You could make the argument he had two air Operation Linebacker and Rolling Thunder. And Mark Moyers argued that they were both successful. But they said, bring the home. The left was saying, bring the war home here, meaning attack us on the camp. They did, you know, there were 50, 60,000 people in the street almost every weekend. There was the Weatherman underground. All these bombings, it was crazy. But at first they used B52s rather than just Phantom jets or F1 hundreds. And they were doing a lot of damage. But the second time around, what they called the Christmas bombing, that was very, very controversial, and that was first generation laser bombing. And they had the names of the North Vietnamese generals and politicians that were ordering them. And they began taking them out systematically. And that finally brought them to Sirius Kissinger. And we had a peace accord and they won the Nobel Prize for it. Ladak Tu Tao and Henry Kissinger. Kissinger accepted it, the Vietnamese didn't. But the point I'm making is at that point, we had Watergate. And so by 1974, January, February, we had the election of 72. It was a big landslide, but already all during 73, it was Watergate, Watergate, Watergate. And Nixon's popularity went from 65% down to 25. And by 1974, he was finished and he would resign. And the problem was then, on 17 occasions, 18, the US Senate cut off all aid to Vietnam. And it was tragic because we went through that whole decade from 65 to 75, and they finally had something like South Korea. And we cut off aid. And what won, the Viet Cong didn't win the war. It wasn't in the jungles. It wasn't an uprising. The North Vietnamese with Soviet armor, they just plowed down Highway 1 right into Saigon because they had no armaments and they had no air support. You can argue, well, Victor, if we gave them stuff for 10 years and the Chinese gave their stuff for 10 years, why didn't they win? Well, that's another story. But the Chinese, we now know that the Russians were operating most of their air defenses. There were Russian pilots, there were Chinese operatives. But when the whole thing ended in 1975, we had the oil embargo where you couldn't buy gas. In 1973, you had Watergate, you had the still, the demonstrations, the, the invasion of Cambodia. And then in 74, it got worse. And then we just simply. Gerry Ford came into power and Kissinger said to him, we got to get aid to Vietnam or they're going to lose. And he wouldn't do it because he knew there was no political support. And then we had something like Afghanistan that 1975, all the Vietnamese went to all the officials. Everybody was on the rooftop of the US Embassy in Saigon. They were flying people out to the carriers. And to make room, they were just pushing these planes, you know, not like today 170, but, you know, eight or nine million dollar planes just off the edge to make room for helicopters to bring people out. Then you had everybody in the United States. So I was at UC Santa Cruz. I was living in Greece in 73 and 4. When I got back, everybody that I knew who was in that meant everybody I knew was insane on that campus. They were saying that this is wonderful, that you're going to have a democratic government. That's what the North Vietnamese. What did I know? But I just said, no, they're all commies. They're going to kill everybody. Oh, no, no, no. And of course they killed all of the South Vietnamese hierarchy. They put the rest in re education camps. And they had about a million people flee Vietnam and about a quarter million took the boat people. They just went out in little rafts or rowboats out in the middle of the ocean. There were a number of cities that were designated refugee centers. Fresno was one. We brought in 70,000 people, especially the Montagnards, Hmong, that had fought very heroically on the side of the United States. But that was after that. You would think that people would say, we're never going to do that again, but. And we didn't do it again. And then we had the 91 war and we'll get into that. But George H.W. bush said, this gets rid of the Vietnam stigma from 75 to 91. For that 16 years, the United States felt that it couldn't intervene anywhere. And Reagan, as you remember, he had bombed Libya. And that was just, oh, it's not going to work. And Carter had had a rescue mission, had failed. There was just a sense of doom and gloom after that. But that was not a military defeat. It was a political defeat. The military made a lot of mistakes, but finally they had defeated the North Vietnamese. And if we had supplied the South Vietnamese.
- [33:46]
Sammy Wink
Well, if I could take you back to LBJ and ask you. So he stepped down. He was the incumbent for the Democrats. And yet he very quickly just said, I. What? I have no answer. Why did he.
- [34:01]
Victor Davis Hanson
No, he said. He said, well, he was not going to win the New Hampshire primary loss that Eugene McCarthy was running. Oh, and he was a very handsome, idealistic man, about 55, and he. The youth vote. And once he won New Hampshire, the first primary against an incumbent President, LBJ quickly got out. And then Bobby Kennedy kind of opportunistically said, ah, well, I have a better name and I'm younger than McCarthy. So he came in to take away the McCarthy boat. It was split. And then right in summer, Bobby Kendi was assassinated by Siran Saron. And so there was really no Democratic person. So George McGovern then came forward and said, I'm going to take the Kennedy vote. But meanwhile, Hubert Humphrey was vice president and he was in an impossible situation because if he criticized LBJ, who was about 30%, then he was disloyal and he was helping the Republicans. If he stood by LBJ, people said, it's not working. We don't want another LBJ. So finally, in August, September, October of 1968, Humphrey then started to go more conservative than LBJ. And he said he was still an old fashioned Minnesota farmer labor liberal. But he started to catch up to Richard Nixon. People were still calling Nixon Tricky Dicky. You know, he lost the 62 governor race in California, can't win. And he, he only beat Humphrey by. It was one of the closest elections. The Democrats, sort of like Kamala Harris, they made the wrong decision after that. They said that Humphrey lost because he didn't separate himself. He had moved to the center. He should have gone hard left and been anti war. And that's why they. McGovern three years later took over the party and they had the third largest landslide loss in history against Richard Nixon. 1972.
- [36:09]
Sammy Wink
Did Humphrey.
- [36:10]
Victor Davis Hanson
Nixon's the one. That was the thing. Nixon's the one. They always had these posters on UC Santa Cruz and elsewhere of a pregnant woman pointing to her stomach and saying, nixon's the one.
- [36:23]
Sammy Wink
Well, I was just thinking, did Humphrey win the primary then?
- [36:29]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yes, he took it away from the governor, Bobby Kennedy. Eugene McCarthy faded and Kennedy soared. But Kennedy, I wouldn't say he defeated. He was, he was ahead of Kennedy, but we didn't know what was going to happen. But Kennedy was assassinated in the summer.
- [36:47]
Sammy Wink
Do you think that had anything to do with.
- [36:49]
Victor Davis Hanson
Oh, yeah. I mean it was. Martin Luther King was assassinated. Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. There were bombings almost every day. If I was In Selma in 68, I would see bumper stickers and they would. About Vietnam. It would say USA love it or leave it. And if I, when I got time, I got to Santa Cruz three years later, it would say usc. It would say change it or lose it. But usually they had the F word. F it or lose it. And when I got to Santa Cruz By September of 71, everybody was drafted. The big protests. And then when they announced the lottery, and they announced the lottery actually in 71, I think. And they got numbers. There were still people who were Even though there were not going to be ground troops. By that time they were mostly gone. But 72, I think they ended the draft. You know what happened? I could not believe it. There was a little protest about the Cambodian bombing and the invasion of Cambodia, but it was not like when I first got there. You got the impression that most of the student protest, Nixon was really cynical and sly. He knew that if you got rid of the draft, these people wouldn't care. And then they got that narrative that I wrote a chapter in Carnage and Culture about the Tet Offensive, that Queen's Clear Water wrote that song, Favorite Son, I think it was, it's about, it was kind of a corrupt system where people that were wealthy got 2s deferments, they got into going to the National Guard. There was a myth that said that this was a white man's war and a black man's death. But when you actually looked at the deaths, you look at the participation in Vietnam, it was broken down. And when you looked at the death, I looked at the statistics when I wrote that chapter in Carnage and Culture. It's the same old story as Afghanistan and Iraq. The white rural non college kids died at twice their numbers in the demographic. And we never quite they don't understand that, that the people who were getting wiped out first by globalization, the 1990s and then people, especially at the millennium, were also the people who had been dying disproportionately in Vietnam. They've been dying in Afghanistan, later they've been dying in Iraq. And finally that Buchanan message that we're not going to have an empire where a bunch of poor people, their cities are going to be rust belted out and yet they're going to be asked to go over for some utopian nation building, you know, dream in Vietnam or that really finally took hold with the Trump MAGA movement.
- [39:45]
Sammy Wink
All right, Victor, so let's go ahead and take a break and then we'll come back and talk a little bit more about the news. Stay with us. And we'll be right back. Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. You can find Victor on X. His handle is at VD Hansen and on Facebook at Hanson's Morning Cup. So please come join him there if those are your social media outlets. So Victor Trump is working his way through all the countries in the world and making trade deals. And this week the big trade deal was made with Japan. I think he settled on 15% tariff.
- [40:24]
Victor Davis Hanson
You thought it was B25 and it wasn't.
- [40:26]
Sammy Wink
And what that meant though, that was Hard for the American automakers is that they were buying their partially made cars out of Mexico, but with a 25% tariff on it. And so they're worried that the Japanese automobile makers are going to have an.
- [40:46]
Victor Davis Hanson
Advantage over them since it's aimed in part at Mexico. They don't. Trump wants all of everything made in the United States and they don't want to get around tariffs by assembling. Mexico is running $171 billion surplus and it's going to be good for California farmers because the tariffs are going to go way down on American rice, which is really a good product. It's much easier, I mean, it's much easier to grow here at scale. It's cheaper. It's just a reordering of the whole world order. And again, we get back to this thing I've mentioned. Everybody was saying, gloom doom, gloom doom, trade war, trade war, stock market collapse. We don't know what the Japanese were making with asymmetrical tariffs. And Trump is betting that at some point, around 10 to 15%, they will be willing to pay that and they'll still swallow that. They'll still make a profit and they won't raise their prices too much. And the economists, especially where I work, they think that's crazy. Even the Wall Street Journal today said, well, we were kind of wrong, but it will be right in the long term. I keep hammering on that. I don't want to be a broken record, but it's really astonishing that with the Wall Street Journal in February, March, not the op ed, the news section, trade war, recession, tariffs, reduced gdp, either inflation or stagflation, drop in real income, disaster, nothing. Record high stock market in May, there were more revenues than there were expenditures. GDP is strong, job growth is good. Million less foreign jobs, 2 million more. I think last month since Trump came in, 2 million more American job. So we'll see. This is, this is very important because we get caught up in the Epstein files in Clapper and Brennan, but ultimately, Donald Trump is either going to win the midterms or hold that tiny lead in the House on the basis of the economy. If he does not win that, they will impeach him the first day. Not that they're going to convict him in the Senate, but that will eat up the second half of his last term in office.
- [43:11]
Sammy Wink
Yeah. So it seems like things are going well for Donald Trump right now, and there's a lot to praise.
- [43:17]
Victor Davis Hanson
Very well. But he's got to keep his eye on the proverbial prize. The prize is not Epstein, the prize is not Brennan Clapper or indicting Obama. The prize is 15 trillion in foreign investment, new energy, spectacular new energy development, deregulation, lower tax. It's the economy. He's got to keep pounding that into people.
- [43:43]
Sammy Wink
Yes, and I'm sure he will. So we haven't really talked too much about the wars in Ukraine or in Israel and apparently the Russians are starting to use experimental bombs on civilian centers. They have a new glide bomb which apparently is a refab of an older but they have used it on civilian centers that are of no military. There's no military advantage to attacking those centers. Just recently and such were the accusations in a publication I was reading that was called. Oh, I forgot the name of it.
- [44:26]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, they're using glide bombs and it shows you that the idea that they were going to have a meat grinder and grind down the Ukrainians. 12 million Ukrainians have left the country. The average age in their military is about 33 and they were 70 or 80 miles westward from the Donbass and Crimea. And everybody thought the Ukrainians, especially the United States was angry. But what's happened now is there are way above probably a million Russian dead, wounded or missing. There's a lot of dissension. Trump is threatening a secondary boycott that would say that India, Iran, China, anybody who buy Germany, anybody who buys their oil is going to be subject to sanctions by us. I don't know. That would cause a huge worldwide disruption. The point I'm making is they've shifted tactics now. They took Iranian drones and they re engineered them and they have their huge, they're building thousands of them a month. And so their tactic now is to send glide bombs, drones, missiles. They really don't use air support like they use air strikes because they're vulnerable to SAM missiles. But the point I'm making is they're trying to create a terror. It's kind of like the V1 and V2 bombings of London which diverted attention from, from the British and American war effort. They went after the sites just like Saddam Hussein used Scuds to attack Israel. We stopped going after his troops for a couple of weeks and look for Scuds in the desert. So they're trying to do this and then to deflect troop deployments to or the energy of the Ukrainians. Now the Ukrainians are starting to send drones deep into Russia. I think they hit an oil refinery and they have a different tactic. They're sending swarms of them, long range drones, you know, hundreds of them to go into refineries petrochemical and destroy them. So I think now that Trump is getting tough with Putin, they're going to have a deal within six or five or six months. We'll see.
- [46:38]
Sammy Wink
We'll see. Yeah, that's very optimistic. A further thing in Europe was that that a very strange thing happened in Spain where young Jewish children were on their way home from summer camp with their counselor and they were on an airplane apparently, and they were just singing a song in Hebrew and they got expelled for. I, I think it meant from the plane. But anyways, expelled. And then a counselor was beaten because they had been singing. And so the point of the story, which was on a publication called Blacklisted, was this is the treatment that Jews get in Spain. So I think it's the long history of the Reconquista and the Inquisition.
- [47:24]
Victor Davis Hanson
Very ironic because Netanyahu's father wrote a history of the Jews and the Inquisition, a huge book. Yeah, they have a bad record with going after Jews during the Inquisition. And that's where most of the Jews in the Mediterranean came from. Jews in Greece, Jews Alexandria, Jews in Turkey, they fled from Spain. There was a lot of Jews before the Inquisition. Something's wrong with Spain. It has this hard left government and it's destroying its electrical generation. They had that solar, I don't know what you call blackout, where they tried to run an experiment to see if they could just kind of like Gabanussum here. It was a disaster. They have just announced they are not going to make the 5%. Basically. They said the blank with you. We're not even going to try. They haven't made the 2%. They said they may or may not.
- [48:20]
Sammy Wink
Do that to NATO. They're paying us to NATO.
- [48:22]
Victor Davis Hanson
NATO. So they are. They've gone on this left wing trajectory at the same time that the right is gaining straight. Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Romania, Germany, maybe France. We see Neil Farage, or Farage, he's doing well in Great Britain. So it's a problematic country and it's very anti American. I was there last summer and it's booming with tourists. It looks very affluent. I first went to Spain in 1974 and it's just unrecognizable. It's so much more affluent. But long and the short of it is it's a hard left government, socialist government and it's drifting away from the currents abroad. The currents are moving to the right and Spain is moving to the left. It's not working, I don't think.
- [49:21]
Sammy Wink
No, I don't think so.
- [49:22]
Victor Davis Hanson
But the Other thing is, I don't understand that. I did an interview with Piers Morgan yesterday. He was asking about genocide. People that commit genocide do not have rules of engagement where they don't, you know, they have to get permission to hit something and they back off from hospitals or mosque when they know that Hamas is underneath it. I know there's a big body count, but if Hamas would just leave the country, there would be no genocide. Genocide means you want to wipe out a race. The Israelis do not want to wipe out a Hamas. They're trying to get to, excuse me, the Gazans. They're trying to get to Hamas. So my point is that if you look at the world today, so Spain is going after these Jewish students because of Gaza, supposedly. I don't believe that. I believe it's anti Semitism. Why do I believe that? Because as we speak, Cyprus has been illegally occupied. It's under occupation by the Turks. They killed thousands of Cypriots. I don't hear anybody on campus say free northern Cyprus. It's been honor occupation. These are refugees. Help the Greek refugees. They lost their homes in Bela Pais. I don't hear that. I don't hear anybody on campus say, help the Armenians, a quarter million of them had been living for 400 years in Azerbaijan or Turkish language areas of the old. So they've been ethnically cleansed. They've all been forced out. They have no home. I haven't heard any of that. I haven't heard anybody said. There's a slaughter in Rwanda and Congo. Please help these people. Haven't heard any of that. If you're talking about refugees, I haven't heard anybody said. There were 5 to 6 million Poles who were ethnically cleansed from what is now Western Ukraine by the Soviet Union. They have no home. Where are, where are the Volga Germans? Stalin put them in camps. They had never got their land back. How about the Germans that were. Maybe they didn't like Hitler, but they walked back from East Prussia and Pomerania. So they were. There were 13 million, 15 million Germans that were displaced from Prussia. Two million of them died. I didn't hear any. I don't hear anybody say, oh, I'm wiggling the keys. Like Edward said would always wiggle the keys of his home. He thought in the west bank that was lost, even though I use probably an Egyptian. But my point is that I don't see any today. Germans wiggling the keys of my home in Danzig that is now gdask, you know. So what I'm getting at, it's very selective That's. I get a little upset. I was walking across campus in October of 2024, last October, and at Stanford, there were still protesters. The camps were gone. They had been there for months after October 7th of2023. But this young Palestinian looking. I mean, they had the scarf on, was yelling about something. And I said, are you talking about displaced people? She said, yes, all the ethnically cleansed. I said, you mean the million Jews that were ethnically cleansed after the 56, 67, 73 wars? From Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, Oman. They had been living there for five and since the Inquisition, 500 years. What are you talking about? I said, do you know that Israel accepted almost a million Jewish refugees? That the Arab world, once Israel was created, just forcibly either killed or forced out? No. My point is it's all selective. So if it's selective, you have to ask yourself why. Why aren't people protesting against the Turkish government? The Turkish government's been killing Kurds for 50 years. The Turkish government is responsible for two Armenian genocides. Those were genocides. And the Turkish government fought a horrific war in 2122 with Greece. Turkey occupied Greece for nearly 400, from basically 1400 to 1821 for over 400 years. And as I said, it just displaced Greek Cypriots. Why don't they protest against them? Well, Victor, that's nothing recent. Yeah. Erdogan just said that the Athenians would wake up one morning and look in the skies and there'd be a rain of Turkish missiles killing them. Said the same thing about the Israelis. So it's selective, and it's selective because they're Jews and it's selected because they're Westerners. And they think if we call them genocide, genocidal murderers, they'll listen to us. If you call Iran, why isn't there a protest on campus about the Iranians hanging homosexuals? I guess it's because they think that we're too close to Israel and they can affect it or something, I don't know. But the person I was arguing with last October knew nothing about that. She had no idea. They don't know anything, these students. I have an apartment, and to get to my office on campus, I have to walk across the free speech area. So when they come up, I usually talk to them very politely, quietly. I've come to the conclusion that Stanford students who are protesting are ignorant. They know nothing about history or anything. They just mouth all these platitudes.
- [55:02]
Sammy Wink
So, Victor, the Bidens, or Joe Biden, is trying to sell his memoirs, but apparently he's only getting 10 million for them. The Obamas together got 60 million and Clinton back in the day got 15 million. So not a lot of excitement about those Biden, those Biden memoirs.
- [55:23]
Victor Davis Hanson
There's not a lot of excitement because if Joe Biden really, I don't want to be cruel, but if he couldn't finish the sentence, they know he's not going to write it. He's already had a biography. Remember that we came up with Robert Hur's investigation where his ghostwriter of his biography was given access to classified information and then destroyed the tapes. Robert Hirsch would have indicted him like he would have done any of our listeners. Robert Hirsch said, well, he said that he destroyed them because he was worried about hacking. That was a lie. It was like he always emailed stuff like that that people get very angry about. So he's done, I don't know, two other biographies. What does anybody want to know about Joe Biden's presidency? I mean there's nothing. He didn't know what was going on for the most part. So it has no value. And then when they compare it to Obama, Obama's memoirs have no, I mean her memoirs sold a lot more than his. But I don't know if he made back the 60 million. I don't think maybe they both did, I don't know. But it was just, they had star power from the left and the left soured on Joe Biden. And I can tell you with very few exceptions in the New York publishing. I've written 26 books. I've dealt with Doubleday, Alfred Knopp, Simon Schuster, Basic, all of them. Basic is center, but all the rest of them are left wing. So when the left wing doesn't want to give an ex left wing president money, it's just because there's no market value there. Like Hunter. Hunter was making four or five million dollars a year selling his father's office to the Ukrainians, to the Chinese, to everybody, Romanians. And he was selling these drug laden paintings. He wasn't paying taxes on it. So it was all clear. And I think he knows he has to pay income taxes on his meager income. What is Hunter's income now? He has no income because they can't. That's what I'm trying to say. It was all predicated on what Joe Biden could do for people.
- [57:32]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, it sure was.
- [57:33]
Victor Davis Hanson
But he doesn't know where he is.
- [57:35]
Sammy Wink
No, he doesn't.
- [57:36]
Victor Davis Hanson
And, but I think the biggest mystery is how did he leave office? And then in May announced that he had metastasized prostate cancer.
- [57:46]
Sammy Wink
Stage four, I think it is.
- [57:48]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah. I mean, he's President of the United States. That is Rahm Emanuel's brother, who's a doctor, who's very left wing, who's the architect of Obamacare. He said that is impossible for him to have that advanced. So what that means is that when he went into office, he probably had prostate cancer, maybe a very high psa. They didn't tell anybody. And then they watched it. You can't tell me that they didn't take a PSA when a man has that age and he's president. They didn't take one every three months. So they must have known that that was progressing and they didn't want to treat it with radiation or chemo or hormonal therapy. And then he just announced that. I mean, it's in his bones now. It's really sad. If the President of the United States can't get adequate urology, who could?
- [58:39]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, that's for sure. I'm sure he had adequate urology. I think they probably thought it was slow growing and therefore, right when you're older and it's slow growing, they just let it go.
- [58:51]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yes, but they can monitor. Not that the PSA is always accurate, but they could do. They could give him a PSA every month if he's president United States. Very cheap to do that.
- [59:01]
Sammy Wink
All right. And then finally, our, one of our rabbit hole subjects, Colbert, is assailing Trump for a very small phallus, I guess you would say, but he used a different, different words for that. And do you think Colbert will even survive the year? Like, I don't understand this cbs. I think he's on saying, okay, we're going to keep you on for another year, but then your show's dead after that. I don't think he's going to survive.
- [59:31]
Victor Davis Hanson
They did that because they settled with Trump on the 60 Minutes they had edited right before the election to make that Harris transcript, which was fraudulent, and they were worried about the exposure. So they settled for what, 16 million? Not a lot for them. But Colbert had been criticizing them, so they thought, you know, what if we fire him right now, it looks really bad. Like we're just mad at him. Punitive. I know they fired Tucker. Fox did after the Dominion suit. So it's no big deal. They do that. But they wanted to act like it was not politics or Trump. But he ruined, you know, the Jay Leno, Dick Cabot, as I said earlier, Johnny Carson tradition. I don't know why he did it. Was so stupid because Those guys had 15, 20 million people listening. I know that the genre has changed with streaming and everything, but, you know, if you. It's like a podcast. If you want to just say the F word, unless you're Joe Rogan, you're going to offend a lot of people. That's not a good reason not to use it. You shouldn't use it because it's wrong. But we try to be honest and criticize Trump sometimes and conservatives, but if you just go, da, da, da, da, da, da, you're going to lose a lot of people. And so they lost half of America by all he did. He wasn't really a talk show host. He was just a organ of the Democratic Party. And I only watched him a couple of times. He wasn't even funny. He was supposed to be making fun of a Bill O'Reilly kind of guy. He played in character like he was right. It was just stupid and he was so, you know, it's. I don't know what to say. $20 million for him to lose. They lost 40 million a year and they gave him a budget of 100 million. That's hard to do. If somebody says, we're going to give you $100 million to get the best staff, the best bookers, the best guests, and we're going to pay you 20 million, how could you lose 40 million a year? So what he's basically saying is he's getting up on stage every night and whining that I have a right to lose $40 million of other people's money. No, you don't.
- [61:42]
Sammy Wink
No, you don't. Economics don't work like that.
- [61:44]
Victor Davis Hanson
It's very funny about the left. I mean, every time one of these stories emerges, we learn about Rachel Maddow making $20 million or coming in one day a week, you know, or Colbert making $20 million, or one of these actors making 30 million per picture. And they're all left wing, social.
- [62:03]
Sammy Wink
That must. I know they are. And, and so in that sense, they shouldn't have been doing it, but they must have at one point been worth it, or else the business, the company, CBS wouldn't have calculated it in but the time.
- [62:18]
Victor Davis Hanson
No, I don't think he ever made. I don't think he ever made.
- [62:20]
Sammy Wink
I don't think he ever made.
- [62:22]
Victor Davis Hanson
He was on John's Stewart. Jon Stewart made money for a while. He had a low budget and the Daily show and they put him on there and he was a phenomenon. He was kind of neat for about a year and Then they thought, you know what, this is just a write off expenditure for the Democratic Party. They just, they just eat certain things that don't make any sense.
- [62:41]
Sammy Wink
So you think they just did it at a loss the whole time with Colbert because they thought he was a.
- [62:47]
Victor Davis Hanson
Cultural icon and they had, that was a place the Democratic Party could. And you know why I know that's true? Because when he was kicked off, who complained? Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, the squad, aoc and what they were basically saying, this is our show, we got to go on it. And what they're basically saying is, okay, Democrat. They were saying basically to the Democrats, cbs, we put your people on here, we give you all this free publicity and we take a loss. So we want favorable treatment from you. Under the Biden administration, Obama, it was.
- [63:23]
Sammy Wink
An investment and it's not working out that way anymore. All right, Victor, I know you have a hard break here and things to do, so we're calling at the end of the show and we'd like to thank our viewers for coming to join us this weekend. We hope you enjoyed our historical moment and the news of the week and Victor's wisdom on all those things. Thank you, Victor.
- [63:44]
Victor Davis Hanson
Thank you, everybody, for listening.
- [63:45]
Sammy Wink
All right, this is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen and we're signing off.
- [63:53]
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