← The Victor Davis Hanson Show
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- [00:00]
Victor Davis Hanson
Question. Ever wonder how much of your personal data is out there on the Internet for anyone to see? More than you think. Your name, contact info, Social Security number and home address, even information about your family members, all being compiled by data brokers and sold online. I recently found a solution. It's a great service called Delete Me. Delete Me is a subscription service that that removes your personal info from hundreds of data brokers. Deleteme isn't just a one time service. Deleteme is always working for you, constantly monitoring and removing the personal information you don't want on the Internet. Delete Me sends you regular personalized privacy reports showing what info they found, where they found it and what they removed. To put it simply, Delete Me does all the hard work of wiping your and your family's personal information from data broker websites. I just signed up. It couldn't have been easier. And as soon as I hit submit I felt what you'll feel. Relief and even a sense of justice. I've taken control of my data. Take control of yours and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me now at a special discount for our listeners today. Get 20% off your delete me plan by texting Victor to 64000. Text Victor to 64000. That's Victor to 64000. Message and data rates may apply. See terms for details.
- [01:39]
Sami Wink
Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show. This is our Saturday edition where we look at something historical in the middle of the show in the second segment and today Victor's going to be talking about the Lighthouse at Alexandria, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. But before that we have lots of news on our agenda. We've got Trump sent a video to Davos with his vision of the United States and the international order. And Victor has some more words to say about Bishop Boude I believe is her name is. So stay with us for that and we'll be right back after these messages.
- [02:20]
Victor Davis Hanson
Question Ever wonder how much of your personal data is out there on the Internet for anyone to see? More than you think. Your name, contact info, Social Security number and home address, even information about your family members, all being compiled by data brokers and sold online. I recently found a solution. It's a great service called Deleteme. Delete Me is a subscription service that removes your personal info from hundreds of data brokers. Deleteme isn't just a one time service. Deleteme is always working for you, constantly monitoring and removing the personal information you don't want on the Internet. DeleteMe sends you regular personalized privacy reports showing what info they found, where they found it, and what they removed. To put it simply, Delete Me does all the hard work of wiping your and your family's personal information from data broker websites. I just signed up. It couldn't have been easier. And as soon as I hit submit, I felt what you'll feel relief and even a sense of justice. I've taken control of my data, take control of yours, and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me now at a special discount for our listeners today. Get 20% off your delete me plan by texting Victor to 64000. Text Victor to 64000 that's Victor to 64000 message and data rates may apply. See terms for details.
- [03:57]
Unknown
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- [05:15]
Sami Wink
Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Victor is the Martin and Neely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. You can find him at his website, victorhanson.com the name of the website is the Blade of Perseus. It's going through lots of changes right now, so come check it out. If you haven't been there in a while, it is to join the website. It's $6.50 a month or $65 a year for a subscription. So please come join us there. Well, Victor, I know that you wanted to say a few things about Trump's recent video that he sent to Davos and our international community. So I'll just say you Go ahead and take it.
- [06:04]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, he's Trump today and I'm speaking on Thursday of the first week of the Trump administration. He sent a video and then he had questions and answers and I thought their heads would explode when I listened to it because he said things like beautiful liquid gold, as for oil and that crappy new green deal, which was a joke, and that's kind of a biblical canon among Davos people that we're all going to transition to immediately to so called renewable fuels. So almost everything he was saying was what heresy. Because he was talking about how we had been ripped off. We run about a 300, excuse me, we run about $135 billion deficit with the EU. A lot of that is because of tariffs. They don't call them tariffs, but they are. We run about a $50 billion year with Canada. We run 100 billion. And by the way, a lot of that 100 billion deficit with Mexico comes from remittances. So the point that he was making is that we were being screwed over. But he did then kind of fixate on the Ukraine war. But what he did was very interesting. I mean, it was art of the deal and millions of being killed. I think there's. We don't know how many people, 1.7 million but wounded dead. So he was on the right track there. But the point I'm making is it was really a humanitarian speech because he just kept saying, this is terrible. It's a flat country. The bullets are just going back and forth. They're killing. It's not an insurrection, it's not hill country, it's just a World War II battlefield. And he was really sincerely lamenting the cost. I think the Europeans were very shocked to hear that. And then he talked about Russia and China. But here's my point. I thought after that, when it was me and talking about my. If you were listening to Trump, he talked about how great is, you know, art of the deal he won and he just made shredded the EU approach to the economy with tariffs and open borders. And he mentioned that the Biden administration had kind of emulated the eu And I thought they were going to tear him up. But when you look at the questions, they were all international bankers and financiers. And I can't characterize them all because they had their differences. But there was one theme. Are you serious? You're going to promise us that you're going to ensure liquid national gas, liquid natural gas exports to Europe, even though your predecessor shut these plants, you're gonna get them built I did it already. I've already done it. They're open. I've greenlighted the permits. We're gonna build, build, build. Well, what about what happens if the price goes up in your country and then it becomes an issue that you're exporting it to us? Can we lie on you? When I make a deal, I follow the deal. That's what Trump said. And then some of the bankers said, well, what do we do about all this? Well, we're going to have to un. Deregulate. And that's what we're going to do in the United States. Cheap, cheap, cheap fuel, deregulate, lower taxes. And the International Finance Committee ate it up. Everybody was trying to. I think, as I said, their heads were exploding. I thought because of his heresies about dei, esg, neosocialism, green New Deal. They weren't. It was like, okay, he's speaking and now it's okay to make money and to have profits and get the entire world's GDP going again. So I thought it was very successful. But I was shocked at the questions and the reception that he got, at least from the little bit I heard. But I read the entire transcript and it was. Are you serious? You're really going to do this? This is great.
- [10:15]
Sami Wink
All right, to turn to a less successful topic, I know that we talked about the Bishop Bude, sorry on Friday, but I know that she's been raked over the coal since then and there's more that you wanted to say address about her particular dressing down of Trump in her sermon on a day when it seemed very inappropriate to most.
- [10:45]
Victor Davis Hanson
She's the Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C. so I guess, I don't know why she has spoken before and they should have been warned about that, but I guess she slipped through the cracks. So she was waiting till the end. So nobody would walk out, apparently. But she gave sort of a touchy feely, therapeutic Christianity. And again, she's not worried from the speech. She's not worried about 80,000Americans killed by imported fentanyl across an open border. She's not worried about mayhem, rape, assault, murder by illegal aliens, 500,000 criminals in that category. She's not worried about our social services tax. She's not worried about 63 billion in remittances. It was all about show some kindness. And you, it was almost, how dare that you deport people. They have a perfect right to break your laws and come in here and break your laws again by residing here. But what was fascinating that she didn't care about the toll the People who suffer. But she was more worried about the transgendered and the illegal alien than she was the people who have to pay for this huge illegal immigration problem. The funny thing was almost immediately it surfaced that after all those lectures about the nobility of the poor and let's have mercy and don't be so sure, well, I thought she would lived in a hut and she was, you know, I don't know what, Albert Schweitzer or somebody.
- [12:20]
Sami Wink
Mother Teresa maybe.
- [12:22]
Victor Davis Hanson
Mother Teresa, Gandhi. That's how she sounded. Well, then it was within a nanosecond they said, wait a minute, she lives in one of the toniest neighborhoods in Washington D.C. and she has a six bedroom, two million dollar plus house with five and a half baths. Who needs six bedrooms? Why would a woman of the cloth think that she should live like Caesar and then preach that she's blessed are the meek? Sermon on the mount. Blessed are the poor. It's easier for a camel to get through an eye of a needle than a rich man to get to heaven. That's where she came off. It was so redundant, redolent of Barack Obama. Martha's Vineyard, $14 million estate, 2,000 gallons worth of propane tanks right on the coast, lecturing everybody about rising seas are going to inundate beach houses. And then he has one in Hawaii that's on the beach, so he doesn't believe that. And then all the nobility of the poor. And you look at that aerial view of Martha's Vineyard and you think, well, you could put tents up there, you could put a thousand people there. And then when you any inkling of the consequences of the ideology of these people actually reified, actually coming in a concrete manifestation to their doorstep. And we remember when Ron Desantis in a very brilliant move started busing illegal aliens up to Martha's Vineyard and they were, this is so good. We're going to get, everybody's going to come and we're going to have the city center. What time, how long are you going to stay here? Couple of hours. Well, we're going to show. Hey, everybody got national news. Here's our puff jackets and our, our stocking caps and our heavy duty gloves and food. How long is it now? Oh, we're going to have buses for you. We're going to bus you to Chicago and then New York so you can go where you belong in the inner city. Because the inner city doesn't have what we have. And it won't be that big of a problem for them. They're poor downtown inner city Chicago The Bronx, the Queens, Harlem, that's where these people belong. And she, she just was the same everybody. That soul, I don't like to use the terms of it, that's so gone, that's so old, that's so yesterday that we get a very, very wealthy, white, white bicoastal elite who lives in the upper, upper, upper, upper, upper 1% of the country as adjudicated by their clothes, their lifestyle and their home. And then they use a pulpit to try to insult a conservative as if they're greedy and insensitive. And then of course, if she was really a woman on the cloth and people ask her, she would have said, I, I can't go on the view, I, I can't go on the map. I, I, I was just giving a sermon and I'm not trying to commercialize it. I'm not trying to, you know, I'm the omega, I'm not the alpha, I shall be last. That was my message. I don't want to go on TV and get all this fame and merchandise and, or whatever it is. I refuse to do that. But she didn't do that. So once again we're back to the central problem of leftism, that it's an elitism, it's a party of and for the well off. And they feel guilty. And unfortunately, we're not in the Middle Ages where you could write a little check and say, I am an usurer, I am very wealthy, I don't want to go to hell. So here is a thousand gold florins so that I can go to heaven and you can use it for the dome of St. Peter. So we don't have penances and we don't have contractual deals to get into heaven. We just feel guilty. And how do we express that guilt? If you're the bishop, you try to embarrass the president on global TV and then you retreat back to your mansion and that's it.
- [16:38]
Sami Wink
Yeah, sure, if she had been honest and was really going to do that in the middle of her sermon, she would have at least said, we understand you're trying to take care of a border problem that has brought across all at least, but she shouldn't have done it at all. Well, let's move on to another elite group, the techies. And there's usually, I wouldn't say anything for the New York Times, for our audience, but they have a interview by, what was his name? Ross Douthra. Yeah. And of Marc Andreessen, and he is at, who is a Silicon Valley techie. And he's trying to ask him what happened to the Silicon Valley techies? Why did they turn to Trump? And it's a fascinating interview, but I would like to hear your reflections.
- [17:31]
Victor Davis Hanson
Very interesting if you were to boil that interview down. We all know that techies and everybody in Northern California is liberal on social issues. And they're not going over to Trump because of the tax cuts that helps encourage investment. They're not going over to Donald Trump because he's ending welfare or he's cutting back on the size of the gun. They're going over to Trump because they enlisted with the left and they saw glimpses under Obama. But Biden pull apart. I shouldn't say Biden. Biden's not, didn't know what he was doing. It is the obamas and their second incarnation, Obama 2.0, that wing of the Democratic Party. And as Andreessen said, they were going to say loud, listen, this is artificial intelligence. We're going to control it. It's going to be six or seven big corporations. There's going to be no startups. We don't want to, we want to lit on this thing. We're going to control it. Social media, just like partnerships. And they thought, wow, I'm a artist and I have to be creative. And I, whether it's an Apple phone or a Google search or a Netscape product, my forte is expressing myself and making money and making new products. They really do believe that. And I don't mind when they take something from me with taxes and I don't mind when they make me fork up. That's the cost of doing business. But I do mind when they don't allow, allow me to express myself and make a profit. When they start telling me you are going to do this with your investment. And these, these are the people who can play in your game. And these are the ones I don't like that. That's not America. The second thing I don't like is when we get killed overseas by Europe and Asia and we go to Biden or we go to Obama and they don't help us. Case in point, the EU has a much higher corporate tax depending on the country than we do. So if a country, a company like Google or Apple go over to the EU and they're making money, the EU says, Ah, what's your tax? 15%, 20%. Ours over here is 30%. So we're going to tax you, whatever your tax is the difference from our tax. So Andreessen and these people, they have, they're brilliant Business people and they're paying the tax here. And then they go over to Europe and the Europeans want to hit them so that they're. It's an equality result. Oh, Mercedes pays 30% to the EU, the countries, and your companies only pay 12. So we're going to take 28, we're going to take 18% for us. And when they complained, and he's not really getting into this in the interview, I'm trying to give background why a person like that's angry. When they complained to the Biden people, the Biden people took the side of the EU on this logic, well, how do we do this? Oh, I know. If Mr. Andreessen's company comes over here and he has to pay the difference from our corporate rate and the EU's, he's angry. But we'll just raise our tax up to the EU level so we get the money. And so he's saying, you're on their side. You're using their exorbitant tax rate to steal money from my company and you should be on our side. So then when Trump comes in, of course he gets the Googles and the Apples, Tim Cook and the investors and Netscape, the X Net and the. And Peter. And he says to him, they are screwing us over. And he says this in the interview. And I want to make you rich. And I want you to make me rich. I want you to make America rich. I want you to make the middle class rich. I want to be preeminent. Here's the deal. Cyber, cyber. Preeminent. Artificial intelligence preeminent. Biotechnology. Preeminent. Artificial intelligence preeminent. I want all of those things to be here and I'm going to turn you loose and you're going to pay the lowest corporate taxes in the world, and we're going to bring all this money and you're going to have capital and you're going to have the government behind you. And any country that tries to screw with you, my fellow Americans, I'm going to screw with them.
- [22:18]
Sami Wink
That's Trump's position.
- [22:20]
Victor Davis Hanson
That's Trump's position. And they, as he said, Trump wants us. Trump called them in and he says this during the end, basically, he called us in and said, I know you guys don't like me, you haven't been with me, but we're on the same team, basically. And you can make the middle class the ma. You can make everybody more prosperous if we just unleash you. So, and if they, I consider you my fellow Americans, and they're not going to screw around with you. Well, that's a very different message from the globalist message or the left wing progressive or the European neo socialist. So basically Trump was telling Andreessen, Biden, Obama, all those people, they're like the Europeans, the Europeans are your enemies. The enemy of your enemy, me is your friend. And they thought that was. And then when he added other things and he said some very startling things in passing, he got onto dei. It's a very good interview. Ross Duthock did a very good job. But he said, well, what caused you to be skeptical of diversity, equity, inclusion? And he basically said, we're a merit based, competitive organization and we have to have people. We don't care what they look like, we don't care what their sexual orientation, we don't care. But they have to be the top. But we were bringing people in from these universities with this di esg woke new Green deal and they were attacking us. And then one of my colleagues, I'm quoting Andreessen, basically came in and said, what's going on? And he said, they want to destroy us. Our own employees want to destroy us. So this is a revolutionary idea that Donald Trump is going to enlist his people. And on an earlier broadcast, it's so similar to the in reverse fashion. Not the conservative enlisting the leftist, but the leftist FDR enlisting the conservatives to win World War II. When the war first started, or we started to rearm in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland, we knew we were going to be in that war and we were not prepared. Our army was smaller than Portugal's. We had no, we had, I think three carriers. And everybody got together and some people said, well, let's do the new National Recovery act deal stuff. We'll get all, everything into control. And the government and FDR said, no, it won't work. 1938 had been 18% unemployment. So the New Deal, everybody says it worked. It never worked. What worked was the war. So what he did was he said, William Knudsen, you go redo the car industry. I need vehicles, I need tanks, I need trucks, I need six wheel trucks, I need mobile artillery. And then he said to Kaiser Himnick, Kaiser, I need Liberty ships, I need cargo ships. I need to get all this stuff over to Europe. We're not going to be fighting a war here. It's going to be all the way in the Pacific and all the way to Europe. We don't have any ships. And he basically said, give me the tools and I will have a Liberty ship every four or Five days. Then he said to his arch enemy who hated his guts, Henry Ford, can you have the same principles that made the Model A, the Model T and the Ford Motor Company, and can you apply it to bombers? He said, I can make a bomber an hour. And he did in Willow Run, biggest plant in the world at the time.
- [25:54]
Sami Wink
Yeah, that's amazing production.
- [25:55]
Victor Davis Hanson
He turned it over to Dupont. He turned it over to General Electric, Charles Wilson, and that's what Trump is doing. And you can argue, do you trust these guys? I mean, Steve Bannon has made the argument he hates Elon Musk and everything, but I think he's not making missing the point. It's actually. It's not antithetical to maga. It's actually parallel to it or even enhancing because it's a very Jacksonian, nationalistic idea that these people who were so wealthy in their sector have never been turned loose to make all of us wealthy. And we're in a war with China and we're in the war with the EU economically and Japan and South Korea, and these guys can win it. So they're going to be turned loose. I'm going to watch them. But they're going to make huge profits. They're going to get the best products on all these developing fields and they're going to bring investment here. And that was the message. It was very similar to World War II.
- [26:55]
Sami Wink
Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about the Lighthouse at Alexandria, one of the ancient world's wonders. Stay with us and we'll be right back.
- [27:10]
Unknown
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- [27:44]
Sami Wink
Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen show. You can catch Victor at his social media outlets. X his handle is Dhanson and on Facebook where he has Hanson's morning cup. So please come join him there. So, Victor, I'm excited to hear. Since the lighthouse at Alexandria ended up under the Mediterranean Sea today, you can't really go to its foundations as far as I know. And so I'm very curious about that.
- [28:16]
Victor Davis Hanson
You can see where it was. Well, remember everybody, we're looking at the seven wonders of the world. They're easy to remember. It's just two in Greece, two in Egypt, two in Turkey, one in Iraq. So we have done the two Greek seven Wonders. The majestic statue of Zeus at the temple of Zeus at Olympia. Gigantic, beautiful statue. We don't have any of it of course, but we have descriptions of it. And then we had the Colossus of Road, that 300 foot with the base, huge. Helios statue, talked about that. Then we went into Turkey and talked about the mausoleum, the temple, I should say the vault or the cenotaph. It wasn't a cenotaph. The burial chamber of Mausolus. That's where we get mausoleum, one of the biggest buildings in Asia Minor at the time. And we also talked about the temple of Artemis at ephesus, this huge 380 foot long temple that had been rebuilt from Greek times in Hellenistic and then again in Roman. It was considered the most impressive temple in the world. And now we have three left. We're going to talk today very quickly about the lighthouse at Alexandria. Next week we'll talk about the two, the second of two the Pharaoh's pyramids at Giza. I went there and tried to climb. I went there in 1974. You could climb up on them. And then we'll finish with the hanging, so called hanging gardens of Babylon, which is about 20 miles outside Baghdad. When I went there, they didn't look very hanging. But the thing about Pharaoh, these were all, most of them, some of them are earlier, like the Giza. This was this great cosmopolitan bustling age at Alexander. Remember Alexander invaded in 334, he invaded the Persian Empire and in less than 11 years he broke it apart. Four monumental battles crushed the Persian army. But here's what was important. They had huge amounts of capital capital in the ancient world or gold and silver coinage in their treasuries at Susa, at Persepolis, at Sardis. And he opened them up, he confiscated them and then he brought in Greek expertise, engineers, generals, architects, city planners. And all that money that had not been used was open into a free market economy. And out of that came these monumental idiosyncratic buildings, monuments, graves, etc. And in Alexandria that Alexander founded after his death, Ptolemy, one of his generals, he might have been also his secretary. He wrote a history. It's not extant anymore, but we can see pieces of it in surviving historians of Alexander the Great. It Makes its way into Plutarch. It makes its way into Arrian. Curtius has a little bit, as does Diodorus, but he built this, the Ptolemaic dynasty, Ptolemy and his son built this monumental lighthouse on the island of Pharaoh. So if you're going into Alexandria and remember Alexandria is at the mouth of the Nile River. So you're going to go up the Nile river, or I think you call it down the Nile. If you look at a map, if you go up the Nile river, everything that comes down or up has to originate from the coast. So it became a very beautiful city. We know about the great library there. They had over a hundred thousand papyrus rolls. So this was a renaissance of the Ptolemaic. It ended with Cleopatra, who was a Ptolemy Greek. I know that a lot of people are going to be upset. No, no, Victor, she was African American African. No, she wasn't. She was Greek. The point I'm making is that they built this huge tower and it was about 300, it was about 350 to 400ft high. People disagree because we have descriptions of the ancient world and it survived from about 300 B.C. all the way into the 9th, somewhere around 950 or a thousand. So it was there and it was massively built out of limestone blocks and it was tapered, so the first story was broader. And then the second element was like a three stage rocket, but they were tapered. And at the top they had an interior corridor and they had a stairwell to get through it so people could see and, and maintain it. And tourist attraction. That's one of the reasons that's in the seven where all of these were tourist attractions. But they had a dumbbell and a system of pulleys. They could bring up fuel all the way up. And they had all night, every night they would have a fire going. And then they made a huge mirror, probably some type of tin or metal, and they shot, you know, very highly polished. And during the evening they could reflect that light and rotate it out to sea. And then during the day when the fire wasn't there, they could just use that. If it was the fire would be lit if it was a foggy day or rainy. But usually during the day they use it to reflect the sun. This was important because people, it's a very narrow harbor and this island of pharaohs P H A R O sat right at the mouth. Today there's a quay because it's silted up and you can walk out there. I walked out there in 1974. I hate to say how long ago that was. And in antiquity people said that you could see the beam 100 miles out in the Mediterranean. So it became very famous that. Let's go to Alexandria, let's do business in Alexandria. You'll never get lost along the coast of Africa. It's hard to know where each port was and whether it's foggy or raining, you'll be able to see where to go. It'll guide you. And it was very lucrative in comparison to other ports at Ephesus or Constantinople later. And in any case, it became famous. And then as the Ptolemaic dynasty started to deteriorate Rome, as everybody knows, after the battle of Actium in 31 BC, they appropriated Egypt. It was an imperial province of the Caesars and it was well kept. So we hear a lot about it in Roman literature. And as I said for another 850, 900 years, when the Islamic Muslim acquisition entailed they occupied Egypt, it became a Muslim country. The Byzantine Empire lost control in the seventh century, eighth century of it. It still was maintained. And then it suffered a series of major. Maybe 8.0 on the Richter scale, people have just estimated. And it began to crumble and it wasn't repaired after. And finally it just fell. There were some rumors that people in Constantinople, the Byzantines were jealous of it because it got too much attention or I think this is made up, but it's a prevalent myth so that they said there was treasure in the foundations that you could dig. So they hope people just came on their own and dug and then undermined it. But I think actually it fell. The Egyptian government has found most a lot of it. And they are going to make a maritime museum where you can. Skydivers can go down and actually see it. And then some of the pieces will be taken up the island. I don't know. There's a. Etymologically, a lot of philologists go back and forth where the name Pharos came from. Does it come P, H, A, R, O, S? Does that represent Paros without the A? Was it an aspirated P? Was it not? Does it represent pharaoh and Egyptian? Or does it refer to Phios in Greek, which means light or flame. And so there's an argument over why they called the island. The island's not there anymore. It's part of the harbor. But you can imagine to be on a trireme or a Roman, later a Roman galley. And to be the Mediterranean at this point is about 300 miles long. And all of a sudden you're sailing for two or three days and you look out and you see this big beacon, 350ft high. I've often thought, I mean, why don't we have these things today? We have. I know we've talked about the arch at St. Louis, we've talked about the natural, you know, the Grand Canyon, but we have all these billionaires. I was thinking the other day, between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, maybe Phil Bloomberg and a few others, Apple people, Google people. You probably have a trillion dollars. Why don't one of them just say, we know what we're going to do? The same thing here. We'll take a billion dollars and we'll make a colossus of Rhodes at New York harbor. Or we'll make a lighthouse or something like that. That would be a model or an inspiration for people to see that.
- [38:08]
Sami Wink
Is that what you think the lighthouse was intended to be by the Egyptians?
- [38:13]
Victor Davis Hanson
That was going to say, we are the greatest harbor in the world and we are a beacon on the Mediterranean and we welcome you in here. Just like the Rhodians said. You might not wanted to go to Rhodes, but you sure do want to sail by the great legs of the Colossus. And just as the Greeks said, Athens may be famous, it's becoming famous. You all hear of Thebes or Sparta, but no one has a statue like zeus. It's huge, 100ft. And the same was true of the temple of Artemis at Ephesus. People need to build things. That's why Donald Trump today, we're getting back to that speech. He says, I'm a builder. I am a builder. We got to build, build. We got to build pipelines, we got to build ports and liquefied natural gas. And he was even mentioning Los Angeles. I want to build Los Angeles again. It's going to cost us a lot of money. All I ask of Los Angeles is I can't get the government and all the taxpayers to rebuild Los Angeles if you're going to periodically let it burn down by not harvesting trees or clean up the forest or clean up the chaparral, or not letting sheep and cattle graze or having driving out your insurance companies by prescribing how much they can charge and how much they can't, or letting water go out sea of the delta or having a DEI situation where you're not getting meritocratic people. I can't do that. We're not going to ask that. But I know you have the Olympics and we only have three years. And so he's making kind of a colossus of Rhodes, Alexander, let's do something really big. And that's why people are very excited, because people forget that these are inspirational things. People need to identify with things. They need to feel that they're expressions of national greatness. And when you had Obama and all those years saying, well, Mr. Obama, don't you think that we're exceptional? Well, you know, we're exceptional in the sense that the British and the Greeks think they're exceptional, but they're not the same, Mr. Obama. They're not, they're not as big, they're not as powerful. Well, everybody has that sense about themselves. That's, that was the whole attitude, you know, not that he talked like that. It was more or less, it was crueler. It was, well, I just want to tell you Greeks, and America's not going to just get following that trap, you know, chauvinism, et cetera. So this is very different, this mood. This is, hey, we are Americans and we looked around the world. They don't know what they're doing. We do. And we thought we didn't. We can be more powerful than China. We can be more powerful as we are than China and Russia and the EU put together because of our system. It's a very exciting time, I think.
- [41:10]
Sami Wink
Yeah, maybe one of those colossal buildings could be put in San Diego. I think San Diego is also becoming a tech center for new developments and.
- [41:19]
Victor Davis Hanson
Military roads where you go under his feet and given earthquake proof technology, maybe Elon. Elon is worth 400 billion on paper with a Tesla and the private SpaceX. And why Elon, if you're listening, just take $1 billion and build some aspirational huge eighth wonder of the world. I shouldn't be endorsing things that was like, oh, I want to say one other thing before we leave this topic. I've noticed something that all the ambassadorships are taken except Cyprus. And I mentioned our friend of this program, Max Nikias, the wonderful, spectacular president of usc who was unfairly treated by dei, but he's an expert in the eastern Mediterranean and talking about building. One thing Trump's going to do is allow the Israelis to partner with the Cypriots and the Greeks to build that East Med pipeline. Remember Biden canceled that? He canceled it right when they needed all that natural gas because of the Ukrainian war and the shut off by Putin. So you need somebody who knows the languages and knows the area. And I'm making a final plea. Let's all get together and do the right thing and appoint Max Nikias as ambassador to Cyprus would make all of us very happy.
- [42:41]
Sami Wink
If you're listening, Donald Trump, and if you're listening on Victor Davis Hansen's trying to spend your money for you.
- [42:47]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yes, I am. Two things that make me very happy. I know that you have to reward donors by ambassadorships and there's all these people. But the ambassador to Cyprus, if I'm not mistaken, was a State Department bureaucrat under Biden and stayed in there. And so this would be a great appointment because what Trump would be telling the world, I want somebody that knows the area. I want to know somebody. If I go to Cyprus, this person's going to say, Mr. Trump, how can I get that pipeline built? What can we do about investment from Russia here in Cyprus? What do I need? And then he can converse in Greek and you know what I mean? Everybody knows him and they're all proud of it. It would be great. But he's a hyper patriot. George Shultz once said. I didn't talk to him very much, but he related the thing that he related to everybody when he talked to the ambassador, he always said, well, you may have affinities for that country, but remember, you represent us first. And there's nobody that's more MAGA than Max Nikias.
- [43:48]
Sami Wink
Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and come back to talk a little bit about Fauci and John Brennan and we'll find out what they have in common when we get back. Stay with us.
- [44:01]
Victor Davis Hanson
Foreign.
- [44:05]
Sami Wink
Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. So, Victor, George Bush, I was going to say Biden has given Fauci a preemptive pardon and John Brennan has had his security clearance taken from him. And I was wondering, I don't understand.
- [44:26]
Victor Davis Hanson
How shameless these people are. So Fauci was asked about that. Why? You know, and by the way, to set the record straight, as we said on the earlier broadcast, when you're given a pardon, you can say all you want, but it has no effect on it. If somebody calls me up, Victor, we're going to pardon you for anything you did the last 10 years. I said, I'm not going to take that. It would reflect badly on me, as if I needed it. It doesn't matter. The person who gives the pardon makes the decision. And then accordingly, you may say, I'm not going to use it, but if you get charged for something, you will be pardoned. And so my point is that there were three of these. I know the Biden family and the J6. I just want to look at three, because the left has been hammering Trump on the J6 protesters. But those were not preemptive pardons in the sense that everything they did the last 10 years, they're exempt. They're only exempt for the something on that day. So if they committed something, you know, they find out that six years ago they cheated on their end, they're liable these people for anything that they have turns up that they did in the last 10 years, they're okay. So take Fauci. He went before Rand Paul's committee and he said that the United States did not give money for gain and function research. Rand Paul brought in evidence of emails with Francis Collins and Fauci and communications with Peter Dasak at Echo that they were helping the Wuhan lab with gain and function. Robert Redford at the CDC said that he was no friend of Trump. So what did he do? He's now and then, of course, he's. This is all part of a record. It's public knowledge. So when people had freedom of information, he stonewalled that. He tried to cover up the fact. If you think about it, everybody, Victor, why are you getting so upset? Because if you think about it rationally, it starts to dawn on you that this might have been the greatest scandal in the history of the world. That a lab, Wild West Lab, with no real security precautions that were necessary for that level of intricate research, created a virus a hundred times more infectious than any known virus, and they were probably under the auspices of the People's Liberation Army. I'll leave it up to conspiracy theorists or rationalists to tell us whether it was designed as a bioweapon or it got out intentionally, or my own version is it was just a bunch of stupid people and it got out accidentally. But I'm not, at this point in my life, I'm not going to rule out anybody who said, no, Victor, it was a bioweapon and they probably wanted to destroy the Trump people and they let it out. Okay, I don't believe it, but I'm open minded. But my point is, if you think about it, this man, the head of the Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, took the money as we had Stephen Quay on here, the great geneticist, biologist, everything he pointed out. It wasn't just the money, Victor. He allowed people to lend their expertise to expedite that research in China through communications, et cetera, and instrumentation. If they needed supplies, they shipped it over there. They were not capable of doing that. And then when it broke Out. He almost immediately went into a panic and started emailing two or three people and said, oh my God, they might think, well, they do think that. And then he almost immediately did not only deny a gang in function origin, he cooked up this Pangolin bat story that the Communist Chinese did. And he stuck. He didn't just stick to it. He demonized anybody who objected. And then they ran a phony Lancet investigation where they took a bunch of toadies and went over to I could go on, but he's pardoned. Mark Milley did three things. Three things. He went out and had a photo op just like Colin Powell did with George H.W. bush. Donald Trump said, this thing is getting out of hand. The 120 days of writing in 2020, just like George H.W. bush said. 19. The LA Rodney King riots are crazy. Just like Calvin Powell said, you need 5,000 Marines, Mr. President. I got them good. Send the Marines in and keep order. That's what happened. Mark Milley goes, I was used. Why? Because all the left started attacking him. I didn't want to have a photo op with Don that doesn't have. That's not my job to be a military. To confuse my. And he was just guilty because he was awed by all this left wing megaphone and he really was ahistorical. We've had a lot of use of federal troops to restore order. We've had a lot of joint chairman of the Joint Chiefs that take pictures of the President, but he deliberately tried to destroy Trump on that second thing. This chairman, the Joint Chiefs represent each branch of the service and then another person from that branch is the chairman. It came up during World War II. Okay. And the idea was that you have the theater commander, Centcom, Africom, you name it, Asiacom, they report to the secretary of defense. So the Centcom guy says, I need another 20,000 troops. So then Lloyd Austin or Don Rumsfeld, whoever, said, well, I'll take it to the President. That's the chain of command. At times a president calls the chairman of the Joint Chiefs or the Defense Secretary calls, says, look, I know you have no problem, but you're an advisor. You're my brain trust. What do you think of this? What did Milley do? He plunged in, took a big chainsaw and cut that in half, that chain. And then he said, he called them all in and said, you report to me. If we get in a crisis, you're not going to go. You go to me. You don't go to the President's representative in the Pentagon, that's disloyal. That's probably against the law. Third, then the worst is he Dr. Milley, now with a MD and PhD in psychiatry and psychology, decided, well, if I diagnose the. Because there was all this Donald Trump is crazy. Donald Trump is crazy. We got. She came in and said he was crazy, the Yale psychologist. And then Rod Rosenstein was going to wear a watch, remember that hysteria. And then he finally had to take the Montreal assessment to show that he was perfect. So anyway, and that furor, he said, I'm. If I diagnose, I'm paraphrase. If I diagnose the President's order in an existential crisis and I think it's dangerous and it might lead to a nuclear weapon. I'm going to call Mr. General T or whatever his name was at the People's Liberation. He did that twice. Twice. He did it right before the election of 2020. So here you got a guy freelancing as a psychiatrist who diagnoses his own commander in chief and is more worried about the Chinese to be apprised than he is the President in any other administration, in any other normal, that would be a treasonable act. So there's a fourth thing he did.
- [52:16]
Sami Wink
After the Douglas, wait, can I ask you something? And so now he's just fine with Donald Trump as the commander in chief. And we don't hear anything from Millie if he really thought he was.
- [52:26]
Victor Davis Hanson
Oh, no, no, hold on. Fourth, after Douglas MacArthur systematically, serially, chronically said that Harry Truman was an idiot because he wouldn't let MacArthur go back up with nuclear weapons, etc and win the war. Trump, I mean, Truman fired him. He fired him in late 1950 and he put in Matthew Ridgeway who saved it. Matthew ridgeway came in December 1950 and by the spring they had retaken Seoul. And by the late summer they were back up to the dividing line at the dmz. Okay? So the Congress got together and said, can't do this. This is crazy. These military commanders cannot insult the president because MacArthur was giving lectures and he was going to run for president. So they passed something called the Uniform Code of Military justice. And it tells you this is the behavior of everybody because the army has one, the Marine had one, the airplane force, and they were kind of in rivals sometimes. They said, come and join the Air Force, not the Marines, because we have a better deal for you. It's systematic. But in Article 88, it says that no officer can publicly disparage the commander in chief as well as the Cabinet. And they have actually invoked that against lower ranking officers who made, I'll give you one example. General McChrystal was, I don't know, foolishly allowing a left wing Rolling Stone reporter to be embedded with him when he was CENTCOM commander. And during that conversation, he was in the room and Joe Biden was on the phone and somebody said, it's Joe. Bite me again, meaning he was a blowhard. And McChrystal either agreed or didn't stop it. So they brought him back and they said, you know, you allowed the President of the United States to be publicly disparaged, the Vice President, so you're going to have to quit. And by the way, if you're a retired officer, there is a clause in the Uniform Code it says if you are retired general, subject to recall a national, and they all are, then you can be court martialed. So what did Milley do then? He. Trump leaves office, out of office. This. He gives all these interviews to Bill Kristol. I mean to, you know, what's his name? Bob Woodward. Excuse me, everybody, Bob Woodward. And he trashes Trump, Trump. And he says that he is the biggest disaster in the history. And he's a fascist. He's a fascist. So now Milley is thinking, this is before the pardon. Oh, my God. I have exposure for breaking the chain of command. I have exposure for calling my Chinese counterpart. And now I'm subject to court martial because even though I'm retired now, I called the President of the United States a fascist. And we know that the other generals had done that and we know that there were people in the Trump administration that said if we ever come back, we are going to make the statutes of the Uniform Code of Military justice alive. They're not dead. We're going to really treat them seriously. So, Millie, then you may have, when you said that, well, he's now, now he just kind of back. I didn't, I didn't mean it. I didn't mean it. But he was angling for a pardon. And then third. So we had Fauci and we had Millie, high profile. And we had Liz Cheney. And Liz Cheney said, I don't need one. Well, Liz, as we said earlier, you're a lawyer and you should have asked yourself as the ranking Republican on the committee, why it was that for the first time in the history of the House of Representatives 235 years that the House Minority leader was not allowed to select the Republican members of that committee. And they selected Adam Kissinger and you and Nancy Pelosi put a lid on it wasn't a bipartisan committee, it was a rig committee. And why did she pick you and Adam? It's because you had two things in common. You were inert. He was not going to ever run for office again because he was going to be defeated. And you knew that when you ran you were going to be wiped out. She lost by 40 points in the primary. And second, you both voted to impeach. Just days ago you voted to impeach Donald Trump. So that's why we like you because you'll just rubber stamp what we will. And then of course, there are missing documents from that committee. We know the names of people who testified and apparently we know some of the parameters of the things they testified and we can't find them them all. I don't, it's not quite accurate. Said they destroyed everything, but they, there's things that are missing. Sort of like Robert her's transcript of Joe Biden. Remember that when he said he sounds like an old man and he would be empathetic and everybody, let's hear the transcript. Yeah. And it was kind of, oh, it's gone, it's gone. And so the third thing that she did is remember when I was growing up, my mother worked for the appellate court in central California as a researcher and a lawyer. And she'd always bring games about the law called Verdict 2, where, you know, board games and you had, and she was teaching me. I was kind of a nerd. My brothers were very athletic, outgoing and I was like thick glasses, left handed, kind of underweight, kind of sickly. But I'd always read nonstop. So she would, we were very close and she'd say so I was not that I was my dad. I, you know, I had work on the farm. I, I liked my dad equally well. But she would always play these games. So I always kind of got a legal education. And then she became a superior court and a state appellate court. So I listened to this and she'd always tell me things and I'd say something and she says, now remember, if you're ever in trouble and you have a lawyer, the prosecutor cannot call you directly and ask you certain questions outside the courtroom when your lawyer is not present. You could stop that right there. You just tell them your law, your legal counsel is not there. That is called witness tamper. I remember that. And so Liz Cheney called Ms. Cassie Hendrickson or whatever her name was or something and she asked her questions about her future testimony and apparently might have given suggestions that would have been more convincing for the case she was trying to and her lawyer wasn't there and she had criminal exposure as well. So they're all very self righteous about a bunch of poor people that went out there. And some of them did get too violent, the January Sixers. But when you start to read about the pardons very carefully, there's not a lot of people that club the guy over the head or sprayed Mason. There's some, but they're talking about somebody who was in a rush of things and he pressed up against a cop. But the vast majority didn't do anything. And they were, then some of them were there for four years. Some of them were in boxer shorts laying in the cells. Some of them were pardoned and they wouldn't let them out for 24 hours. So this was the. And you compare that with the May 20th. As I've said so many times before, I'm glad that he pardoned them, I really am.
- [60:19]
Sami Wink
Well, what about this John Brennan and his security clearance being revoked?
- [60:24]
Victor Davis Hanson
He's back. He's like a. You know what he reminds me of?
- [60:28]
Sami Wink
A worm?
- [60:29]
Victor Davis Hanson
No. He reminds me of an old moldy catfish that you catch and you pull this despicable thing out and then you look at it and you throw him back and you think, I'm done with him. And then you fish again and he gets on your hook and you bring him back and he won't leave. So John Brennan, as I've said so many times with his partner that John Brennan was a CIA agent, everybody, he was under Obama and he was under George bush. He was Mr. Conservative after 9 11. 9 11. We got to go out there and get them all at Guantanamo. We gotta be tough. Is that what Bush wants? I'll be even tougher. Is that what, what do you think? George W. Yes. You think I get. And then Obama came in and they said, no, no, we don't want him. He was Mr. Guantanamo. And he said, well, you know, I was always objecting to Guantanamo and Bush people got me and I'm a very left wing people. And by the way, I was a Muslim secret. And I, I voted for Gus hall when I was a young. I was a communist voter. Oh, you were. You're pro Islam. And it's true that you might be a secret Muslim and you voted for Gus Hill. You voted for Communist. Oh, you're hired. That's a great, that's the best thing we ever heard. So that's what he does. So then when Obama was there, he joined eagerly. The whole Trump, Russian collusion and all that. Well, in that process, he went on television with using his security clearance after he retired. But let me just back up. Before he retired, as I said earlier, he swore under Otakon. I have never tapped into your staffers computers. I resent that. Two weeks later, evidence. I kind of sort of. I'm so sorry. Perjury charges? No. January 6th person, they would. They would have put him in jail forever. And then the next time he came in, they thought, this guy is a liar, pathological liar. So we're going to ask him what is going on with Obama's assassination drones? Because we're getting these reports from the Pakistani government. They're killing a lot of people. Mr. Brennan, are those CIA drone assassinations? Are they. There is not any collateral damage. You sure? Yes, I am under oath. Yes. That was a lie. And he was a knowing he knew he was lying. Was there a penalty? No. No. So that's who he is. So now Trump is president, he's out. There's a new CIA director, Mike Pompeo, and he has his national security clearance, as they all do when they leave. And he goes on cnn, I think, or maybe it's msb, msme, msnbc, I think it is. And he uses that, whether he's actually getting actual knowledge. But he goes on there and he says things like this for four years. Well, Donald Trump has. He. He's obviously subservient to. As Mr. Clapper said, he's a Russian asset and he's obviously subservient to vote. I don't know what's going on, but something. And my sources tell me, as I have been told, I can't. I can't relate the source of that information. As you know, I was former CIA director, meaning, hey, everybody, subtext. I have a national clearance. There is raw intelligence, quote, unquote, that says Donald Trump is a Russian. There is no such thing. And that's what he did and he weaponized it. So now Trump comes in and says, you know what? No more for you, no more for Clapper, no more for any of those 50. Leon Panetta, the senior statesman, he went on and said, I'm happy I did it. Happy. Basically, I lied. I said that it had all the hallmarks of Russian information. When that thing came out, I wrote an article and said, this is very clever what they're doing. They're saying this has all the hallmarks. It didn't say it was, but all the hallmarks. And they didn't use disinformation, they said, of Russian information. And everybody thought, and this is what happened. Joe Biden said, 51 intelligence experts. It was all cooked up by Anthony Blinken and the CIA interim director, Mike Morrell. Mike Morrell testified for that under oath. Mr. Morale, who gave you the idea to do Anthony Blinken? And what was his role? He was a foreign policy advisor working for the Biden campaign. And why did you consent? Well, I wanted Donald Trump to lose. I wanted to help. And he got his wish. So they came in there and Trump said, you should read. I went back and looked at that debate. It was really good that it's just, it's just full of self. There's things I can't even talk about. Pictures, pictures. Mr. 10%, big guy. He was just raving and Biden didn't look at him. He turns to the crowd and the cameras, he's lying. 51 esteemed intelligence have just refuted everything people polled in one poll was taken by conservatives, but one poll suggested that that one change of fact influenced their voting. And now Mr. Brennan is saying, why are you taking my clearance? You're saying it's Russian disinformation. I didn't make that allegiance. I said it was Russian information. So, Mr. Brennan, you're saying the Russians offered all of this information that we know as a Steele dossier sources and it wasn't to disinform or it wasn't to obfuscate or it wasn't to use Christopher Steele. It was just to give them accurate and what information was accurate then? So what you're doing, Mr. Brennan, is when Russia tries to give stuff that's inexact or wrong or misleading to idiots like Steele, and that is disinformation. You're calling it information because you know you're lying and someday in the future somebody's going to catch you on it. So you and Brennan and Panetta cooked up two things. Don't call it disinformation. Call it information and say all the hallmarks rather than it is. But the public didn't know that. People said, oh wow, all the Trump and Trump. I thought he was innocent with Robert Mueller, he was with Russian inclusion. But I guess I was wrong. Now we understand that he was working with the Russians to cook up this laptop. I guess they took the laptop and they must have had a picture or something, what it looked like and they replicated it in Moscow and they must have known all the pictures and the sex stories and then they made it up and then they probably gave it to an agent in a suitcase and he flew over here and then he went to this repair guys thing and he handed it to him and said, I'm Hunter Biden. Well, you have to be a total idiot to believe that. But that's what he said. I'm kind of exaggerating, but that's what it was. So I'm glad he lost his. His national security. Not that he needs it, because even if he. If he had some expertise, it would be worthless because he's weaponized. He's not disinterested. Clapper's weaponized. Leon Panetta, all of them are weaponized.
- [67:56]
Sami Wink
I think we're all going to be leery of these CIA, FBI saying to us, it seems like it appears like it has all the hallmarks of. In the future, we're just going to say either is or it isn't. And we don't want to hear your words.
- [68:11]
Victor Davis Hanson
We don't care whether you call it disinformation or information. Just say it. Just say the Russians were dumping stuff. They weren't, but just say it. And now don't go on CNN and MSNBC and make 250, $300,000 a year by winking and nodding and lying to us because we think that you have a security clearance and you're drawing on classified materials anyway.
- [68:36]
Sami Wink
Well, Victor, I noticed you're looking at your watch and we are hard ending here, so.
- [68:42]
Victor Davis Hanson
No.
- [68:43]
Sami Wink
All right, so we'll calm down.
- [68:44]
Victor Davis Hanson
I was very excited today.
- [68:46]
Sami Wink
We'll thank our audience for listening to us.
- [68:49]
Victor Davis Hanson
I had. I met with about 25 of my high school friends.
- [68:54]
Sami Wink
Ah.
- [68:55]
Victor Davis Hanson
Topic with a man is we've all shrunk. We were all six one or so, and now we're shrinking, but we're all 71. They were a great bunch of people.
- [69:05]
Sami Wink
Yeah.
- [69:05]
Victor Davis Hanson
See them?
- [69:06]
Sami Wink
Yeah, we're all shrinking after about 35, I think maybe 40. So beware anybody who's not 35 or 40. So thanks to the audience for joining us today and choosing to spend some time with us. And thank you, Victor, for all of that insight into the government in particular and the lighthouse at Alexandria, all of you.
- [69:29]
Victor Davis Hanson
If you're going to go see a 7:1 of the world, I think the only one that's there are the pyramids at Giza, which we're going to talk about next time. Thank you, everybody for listening. We wouldn't be here if it wasn't for your loyalty. We deeply appreciate it and try to do the best we can each week.
- [69:46]
Sami Wink
This is Sami Wink and Victor Davis Hanson, and we are signing off.
- [69:54]
Unknown
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