Victor Davis Hanson: California Water Wars: Environmentalist Dam Removal Could Leave 600,000 People Without Water

Summary

Podcast Summary

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Episode Overview

Title: California Water Wars: Environmentalist Dam Removal Could Leave 600,000 People Without Water
Date: December 30, 2025
Host: Jack Fowler
Guest: Victor Davis Hanson

In this episode, Victor Davis Hanson, a historian and classicist, delivers a trenchant historical and cultural analysis on the California water crisis — specifically, the consequences of environmentalist-driven dam removals and evolving tribal land rights. Drawing on both historical perspective and current legal conflicts, Hanson argues that recent efforts to halt or dismantle rural California water infrastructure, driven by environmental groups and tribal claims, could deprive up to 600,000 people of their water supply. The discussion also pivots to broader themes of American victimhood culture, the crisis of state governance, European-American relations, assimilation, and historical memory, notably regarding Pearl Harbor.

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Key Topics and Insights

1. The California Water War: Environmentalist Dam Removal and Its Consequences

[04:00–19:28]

• Background:

  • Recent coverage on “unwon.com” highlights a dispute in rural California over dam removals affecting water diversions in Sonoma and Mendocino counties.
  • The Round Valley Indian Tribe's attorney asserts a halt to longstanding water diversions that supply both farms and communities.
  • Environmental groups, state bureaucrats, nonprofit organizations, and utilities (notably PG&E) are aligning to remove existing dams, facing pressure over environmental and indigenous land claims.

• Victor’s Core Arguments:

  • California’s water system was engineered by visionary builders, providing a “margin of error” that new generations now erode instead of stewarding.
  • Victor challenges the basis for revoking century-old water contracts, highlighting that actual water diversions from the Eel River are minor (“only about 2 or 3%...honoring pretty old water contracts” [07:14]).
  • He criticizes the ideal of reverting entirely to pre-colonial land use, highlighting the complex and often violent history of indigenous land acquisition pre-dating American settlement.

• Notable Quotes:

  • “The environmentalist lawyers are saying that existing contracts ... can be vitiated, invalidated because of ancestral hunting grounds.” – Victor [07:14]
  • “No indigenous people ... fought with each other constantly. If you want to talk about an imperialist project, look at the history of the Comanches or the Lakota Sioux...” – Victor [09:10]
  • “We want all of [modern civilization] but I want an enclave. So I pick and choose. I pick and choose when I want the post-indigenous world and when I don’t.” – Victor [13:18]

• Consequences:

  • Up to 600,000 rural Californians face potential water loss—a population larger than some U.S. cities.
  • This policy, Victor argues, is more of a symbolic act aimed at “punishing civilization,” not one that meaningfully restores or benefits indigenous culture or the environment.
  • The broader effect, he warns, accelerates California's population exodus and state financial crisis.

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2. The Problem of Victimhood, Identity Politics, and State Governance

[17:30–23:15]

• Identity Politics and Victimhood:

  • Hanson connects the California water dispute to a broader societal trend where identity-based claims (tribal, ethnic, etc.) are used to challenge longstanding legal and social arrangements.
  • “Everybody can find and really kind of milk or juice victimhoods ... and that’s not a healthy thing to do, that to look at yourself as a victim.” – Victor [18:57]

• Failures of Governance:

  • The current system allows government and certain privileged groups to act with impunity, drawing a comparison to Soviet immunity (Chernobyl analogy [23:15]).
  • California’s financial mismanagement (deficits, failed infrastructure projects, and high costs) compounds its inability to address basic needs like water, he argues.
  • “They’re going to destroy what’s left of California, because people are leaving paradise, former paradise, because they made it into purgatory. And this is why.” – Victor [24:36]

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3. Listener Questions Segment

A. Historical Events Victor Would Witness
[28:04–29:25]

• Gettysburg Address by Lincoln
• Pericles’ Funeral Oration in Ancient Athens
• V-E Day in New York City
• Liberation of Paris in WWII

B. Advising World Leaders
[29:28–37:48]

• Victor's message would be to the EU Parliament, warning of demographic decline, weak defense, and problematic dual-identity (NATO vs. EU) politics.
• Emphasizes the failure of assimilation and risk of “civilizational erasure”:
  • “You’re on a trajectory that will make us impossible to be equals because you have adopted policies that ensure your fertility rate is 1.4 and it’s going down.” – Victor [30:50]
  • “You play bad cop and good cop... the NATO countries slobber all over Donald Trump and call him Daddy, at least to his face... and then you flip over the same countries ... and then you sue Elon Musk...” – Victor [34:20]

C. Assimilation: U.S. vs. Europe
[38:16–40:12]

• Observes that America, despite challenges, assimilates immigrants more successfully than Europe—who, he says, “can’t handle that much [immigration].”
• Attributes this to America’s lack of class titles or old hierarchies and its tradition of rewarding talent.

D. Western Civilization's Roots and Modern Defenders
[40:27–42:29]

• “It is Judeo-Christian tradition, classical Greece, Rome. It’s the trifecta of Jerusalem, Athens and Rome.” – Victor
• Warns that suppressing pride in this heritage will provoke resistance from within.

E. On Ingratitude Among Some Immigrant Politicians
[41:40–42:29]

• “There’s nothing worse than ingratitude... one of the most important of all virtues to show gratitude for benefaction. And they don’t, they really don’t.” – Victor

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4. Pearl Harbor — Historical Significance and Memory

[42:52–56:30]

• Pearl Harbor Reflections:
  • Describes the context: a surprise attack by Japan in 1941, after years of U.S. warnings and attempts to restrain Japanese expansion in China and Southeast Asia.
  • Disputes revisionist accounts suggesting mutual provocation; insists, “we had done nothing to provoke that attack” [43:54].
  • Analyzes Japanese strategic errors at Pearl Harbor: failure to destroy U.S. carriers or oil facilities, limiting their initial tactical gains.
  • Recounts how Japanese brutality exceeded that of the Germans by some measures, referencing their massacre of civilians and POWs throughout Asia.
• On Japanese American Experience:
  • Acknowledges the injustice and hardship endured by Japanese Americans forced into internment camps.
  • Notes the loyalty and heroism of Japanese-American soldiers, notably the “Go For Broke” 442nd Regimental Combat Team in Italy during WWII.
• Memorable Story:
  • “He would come over to my place when I was farming and tell me he was Japanese American, how horrible it was in the camps at Manzanar ... Most of them, 99.9 were very loyal and enlisted when they ... to fight in Italy.” – Victor [52:26]

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Notable Quotes (with Timestamps)

• “The environmentalist lawyers are saying that existing contracts ... can be vitiated, invalidated because of ancestral hunting grounds.” – Victor [07:14]
• “If you want to talk about an imperialist project, look at the history of the Comanches or the Lakota Sioux ...” – Victor [09:10]
• “We want all of [modern civilization] but I want an enclave. So I pick and choose. I pick and choose when I want the post-indigenous world and when I don’t.” – Victor [13:18]
• “Everybody can find and really kind of milk or juice victimhoods ... and that’s not a healthy thing to do, that to look at yourself as a victim.” – Victor [18:57]
• “They’re going to destroy what’s left of California, because people are leaving paradise, former paradise, because they made it into purgatory. And this is why.” – Victor [24:36]
• “You’re on a trajectory that will make us impossible to be equals because you have adopted policies that ensure your fertility rate is 1.4 and it’s going down.” – Victor [30:50]
• “There’s nothing worse than ingratitude... one of the most important of all virtues to show gratitude for benefaction.” – Victor [41:40]
• “It’s the trifecta of Jerusalem, Athens and Rome.” – Victor [40:27]
• “We had done nothing to provoke that attack. Had Japan not attacked, we would have never attacked them.” – Victor [43:54]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [04:00] Begin discussion of California water crisis, dam removals, and environmental/legal battles
• [07:14] Historical analysis of water law, land rights, and indigenous claims
• [13:18] Critique of selective use of modern civilization versus indigenous identity
• [17:30–19:28] Broader analysis: victimhood, identity politics, and society
• [23:15] Governmental immunity and California’s policy and financial failures
• [28:04] Listener questions: historical events Hanson would like to witness
• [29:28] Advice to world leaders (focus: EU and Europe’s future)
• [38:16] Discussion of assimilation in US vs. Europe
• [40:27] Western civilization’s roots and necessity of defense
• [42:29] Reflections on citizenship and recent immigrants’ attitudes
• [42:52] Pearl Harbor historical overview and Hanson’s critique of revisionism
• [52:26] Japanese American experience and heroism in WWII

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Takeaways

• Victor Davis Hanson issues a powerful critique of the current direction of California’s water policy and broader governance, warning that ideological and identity-based policymaking is unraveling the infrastructure and civic culture built by previous generations.
• He ties the water dispute to deep cultural currents: an overemphasis on grievance and identity, declines in assimilation, and loss of gratitude for the achievements and opportunities of American civilization.
• The episode closes with a sobering historical reflection, urging listeners to understand history’s complexities, value social cohesion, and protect both physical and civic infrastructure for future generations.

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For listeners seeking sharp historical perspective on contemporary policy debates and the dangers of ideological overreach, this episode is densely packed with argument, memorable anecdotes, and warnings for the future.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

Well, hello ladies and hello gentlemen. Welcome to Victor Davis Hansen in His Own Words. I'm Jack Pfow, the host. You're here to get some wisdom from Victor Davis Hansen, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and he's a senior contributor at the Daily Signal, which is the happy home of Victor Davis Hansen In His Own Words. And not only do we do this podcast four times a week, but Victor also does four short seven minute videos every week called Victor Davis Hansen in a Few Words. And that also you will find on the Daily Signal. And we have to repeat because of this flood of AI imitations, except no imitations of Victor Davis Hansen. If you're going to watch this, watch it through the Daily Signal. So we are recording in early December and this is one of three special podcasts we're doing. The date they show up, we're not certain yet, but Victor's going to be taking a little time off to handle a few matters. So we reached out to our friends at the Victor Davis Hansen Fan Club on Facebook and said, hey, want to ask Victor some questions for these special podcasts? Send them my way. And a number of people did, and we're gonna ask those questions, but first we're gonna talk about an issue that just has been breaking over the last few days. And it's a rural water California issue. You wanna pull your hair out? You wanna scream at what's going on? We're gonna get Victor's take on that and more when we come back from these initial important messages.

[C]

Hey folks, it's Tony Kennett, national correspondent for the Daily Signal and host of the Tony Kennett Cast I need to share something with you. Our goal at the Daily Signal is simple. To cut through the no facts. You need to stay informed as engaged citizens. Unlike so many liberal media outlets, we're honest about our conservative views and report the news with a commitment to telling you the truth. But I'll be straight with you. Running an independent news operation isn't easy. While big media companies have corporate sponsors and massive bloated budgets, we operate differently. We answer to you, our audience and supporters. That independence is exactly what allows us to tackle the stories others won't touch and ask the tough questions and others often avoid. But our independence comes with a challenge. We need your help to ensure the Daily Signal can continue to counter the liberal media's lies with the truth. Every deep dive investigation, every exclusive interview, every fact check we publish requires time and investment if you've found value in what we do. If the Daily Signal has helped you stay informed or given you insights you couldn't find elsewhere, would you consider supporting our work with a donation today? Even a small monthly contribution makes a real difference in our ability to bring you the journalism you deserve and accept. You can support our work by visiting daily signal.com donate. That's dailysignal.com donate. Every dollar goes directly into making sure we can continue serving you with the reporting you've come to count on. Please go to dailysignal.com donate and give your gift today.

[B]

We're back with Victor Davis Hansen. In his own words, I forgot to mention, Victor, you have a website, the Blade of Perseus. Folks can find [e-mail] they can subscribe. It's $65 a year or 650amonth if you just want to stick your toe in the water. And what are you getting for what you're paying? You're able twice a week to get an exclusive article. Victor writes exclusive twice a week for the Blade of Perseus and he does an exclusive video. They're called Ultra Articles and Videos. Plus their links galore to everything else Victor does. So go to VictorHansen.com and check that out. Okay, Victor, I'm going to be a little garbled because that's just the way I roll. But there's a terrific or disturbing article, I should say, on this website. Unwon. Unwon. We've talked about once or twice in the past about some articles they've done, but they have been covering things that happened to rural America. And there is this story. We've talked about water and dams in the past, but I think this is worth knowing because even if you don't live there, Victor, there are people who rely on rural California dams and the water it produces that goes to farms that we eat the product of all across America and all across the world. So this is story, I suggest people check it out. It's titled Round Valley Indian Tribes Attorney says Two Basin Solution Water Diversions to Sonoma and Mendocino Will Stop. What does that mean? That's a mouthful of a headline. When it comes down to the continuing desire, and not only desire, but the actuality of California bureaucrats blowing up dams. The PG&E, the power company out there, which has some rights with these dams, wanting them blown up because they're tired of being sued by, you know, trouts are people too. Nonprofits and other kind of wacko left entities. So folks still need the water. And there's some talk, well, you know, we're going to blow up these dams, but they'll still be able to get this water source that goes through this Round Valley Indian Tribe land. Now, at a recent hearing, the Round Valley Indian Tribe lawyer says that's not gonna happen. So at some point, if all these things go forward, Victor, 600,000 people, that's a huge amount of people. 600,000 people are gonna be without water because of bureaucrats in California who get a thrill out of sticking it to rural America. That's my take anyway. Victor, I think this is worth your commentary on.

[D]

Yeah, I didn't vote for them. Nobody voted for. The larger picture is that California has been so rich, naturally, and so rich with its legacy of very brilliant people that were here that built Los Angeles, built the California water project, built the dams, built the infrastructure, the aqueduct, that it had a margin of error. And so our generation, I'm a baby boomer born in. We haven't contributed very much. We're parasitical. So we sue, we take land out of production, we do all of this and then we don't ever ask ourselves, well, who's going to pay for all this? So the actual diversions from the Eel river, except in the winter, are only about 2 or 3%. So it's not like they're taking water from indigenous people. They're honoring pretty old water contracts. And so the environmentalist lawyers are saying that existing contracts and California does not have a very long lineage. It's not Massachusetts. Basically, people didn't come here until about 1840s, you know, Jedediah Smith people before that. And then the gold rush in 1849 started that. And then there was statehood early in 51, I think. And then you had a whole corpus of water law. And they're saying that they can vitiate that, invalidate it because of ancestral hunting grounds. And they did that with a climate, four dams. They blew up and said that they obstructed salmon runs. And I understand that we want to have social justice, but the whole indigenous land is such a volatile issue. And anybody who challenges this idea that this land belongs to indigenous people is called a racist or a white race. It's hard to talk about. But the fact of the matter is land changes all the time. The Americans came, they fought indigenous people. Indigenous people before they came, had fought the Mexican government in California. The Mexican government came after fighting the Spanish government, the Spanish government came after fighting indigenous people. The indigenous people fought with each other constantly. If you want to talk about an imperialist project, look at the history of the Comanches or the Lakota Sioux or the black. I mean, they were merciless to other indigenous people and they created empires by taking lands and hunting grounds. So that's the human side of things. The other thing very quickly, Jack, is that these reservations and everything, these lawyers, they don't live in a vacuum. So when they're saying we have rights to go back pre civilizationally and have our ancestral land free of the so called settlers who came in and made these dams and water diversions and made The Napa, Napa Valley is very dry. Anybody who goes up and drives from Heidelsburg to Napa or Santa Rosa or any of those, it's a paradise. It looks like, you know, it looks like a valley in Italy, Provence or something in France. It's just beautiful. And they did that by their own skill and they created the world's most lucrative, successful and best wine place in the world. And they came after there had been cattle ranchers, apple growers in the 19th century. But my point is, if you look at the cities, and that's why everybody wants to go there, Everybody that in California, if you wake up on a Saturday morning or Sunday morning and you happen to unfortunately be on 101 going north from San Francisco, it's a bottleneck. And I've done that. And that's because all of these San Francisco and South Bay people, their idea of a beautiful Saturday afternoo, go drive up to the wine country. And they drive up and they drive around and they see these beautiful terraced hills. There's Lombardy poplars, there's cypress tree driveways. It's just sculpted. It looks like A picture of Tuscany. And then you see these beautiful wineries, these beautiful restaurants. And all of that came from water. Not very much. They were very good about water. But the Eel river was one, Russian River's another. They had some diversions and then further north to cattle and stuff. But my point is this. No indigenous people. And it's very hard to find somebody who was entirely indigenous. My former mother in law had a name, Tawana. They were from Oklahoma. They had Cherokee. And I once asked her and she said almost everybody that they knew had Cherokee heritage. But we ended up with the 1 16th rule in the United States. So that if you wanted to go to a reservation, you were 1 16th or 1 8th or something. But it was very hard to find people who, you know that you could define someone with a Cherokee name or an indigenous name that had not been assimilated. And then we tried to make up for that with the reservation system. Fraught with corruption. Yes, but still the reservations in total coto are larger than many states, their land. And then more importantly, then we went into the gaming. And some of these tribes are fabulously wealthy. But the point I'm making is this. So this environmental law firm says we're going to stop the diversions of 2 or 3%. It's not going to hurt. It's not going to get a lot of water back to the indigenous. It's a symbolic act to punish civilization and hurt people. 600,000 people in this case. But my point again is this. Do these people live in a vacuum? Do they use telephones? Do they use cell phones? Do they use computers on the reservation? If they do, it's a product of the civilization that does things like aqueducts and dams and infrastructure, without which you wouldn't have anything. So if you're an indigenous person and you say, I don't want any of the post indigenous civilization encroaching on the reserv. Okay, so then you have a health problem like I've had, and then you say, well, I'm going to have traditional medicine. I don't want modern medicine. No CAT scans, no PET scans, no x rays, no MRIs, no UC Med center, no Stanford Med. No, no, no, no, no. That is all settler people. I'm going to. I want my indigenous rivers to flow just like they did in 1820. I don't want your dams, I don't want your PG and E. I don't want anything from you. I want to be left alone on the reservation. And that includes, I don't want your cell phones. I Don't want your modern medicine. I don't want anything that came from your Europeanized industrial revolution Silicon Valley tech. But they don't. They say, I want all of that, but I want an enclave. So I pick and choose. I pick and choose when I want the post indigenous world and when I don't. And I carve out a sanctuary away from it. But then I allow to intrude on it certain things. Like people to come and lose a million dollars on a weekend at Table Mountain Casino. That's okay, but not a dam or not a river or not a tapped river which makes that possible. If you go to Table Mountain or Chikansky gaming where I live, you see some of the most sophisticated architecture. It's the epitome of high tech gambling, parking, food, restaurant. And it's all because of gaming revenues. And yet no one there would say, I don't want any. Take, you know, take that stupid white man's stuff and get back. I'm going back to my ancestral roots. Because everybody could do that. If you really wanted to, you could just say, I don't want anybody coming into the reservation and I don't want any Western contamination. I don't want the language, I don't want the science, I don't want the medicine, I don't want the light bulb. I don't want anything. I want to live like I did and my great great great grandparents did in 1830. I can remember when I was here, my grandfather said to me, our world changed when I was a little boy. He was born in 1890 when the windmills came out and we were able to pump water up to the tower and store it. Salesmen came by, we built a tower and then we had a pressured water system. And at that point, I think it was about 1910 or 15, we had water running in for a toilet. Can you imagine that? And we dug a cesspool and we didn't have to use the outhouse. And then he said, we, we hired a man from the General Power Corporation who. I had the system in my house, Jack, until we had a fire three years ago. But knob and tube wiring, you know, the two separate. And the wires were all frayed. They had rubber insulation on. It was really dangerous. And. But the point is, that was a radical change in lifestyle to have. You didn't have to use candles, you didn't have to. All of that came from the development of resources. Yes, sometimes it was unwise and there was pollution, et cetera, et cetera. But largely people are living longer and healthier and more safely. And so you can do this up to a point, but when you start telling 600,000 people that you're going to diminish their water supply because you want a 90% summer flow to 98% or something, or 95%, then you're really pushing it. And this is in a larger climate of this tribal identity. I don't mean an indigenous sense, but everybody is self identifying, not as an American first, but that incidentally, I'm Latino, I'm black, I'm gay, I'm this, I'm that. And you can see where it's going. You're going to see already people start to say I'm a European American, I'm a European American, that'll be a euphemism for what they think is white. And once it's like nuclear proliferation, once you start getting a bomb, every country nearby will want to get a bomb. Once you start to say that if I have a tribal identification, then I'm going to be exempt, I can overthrow laws, I can get into a university with some advantage. If I steal a bunch of money in Minnesota, I can plead that I'm a victim because I'm Somali. If I hit somebody on the road and I'm an illegal alien with a fraudulent driver license, I can say, well, I was an immigrant, a non white immigrant. If I'm on campus and I push a Jew down, I say I'm a Middle east student. And everybody will, that's what's happened. But the problem is that the victimizer class is too small for the pool of victims. And that's the problem. But the victimizer class will at some point say I'm a victim too and I have claims against society. And they'll start to say things like, oh, I can say, oh, well, you know, I grew up with stories of my crippled grandfather who never had a real life because they pulled him off of a farm when he was 27, just minding his own business and he was gassed and they argonne and lost his lungs and he was crippled. Oh, my family never recovered because Victor Hansen was just minding his own business to the Japanese bomb Pearl harbor. And then he joined the Marines and was killed on Okinawa. Oh, my father never drank, never smoked, and he went over and he flew 40 missions and he was a wreck when he came back over in a B29 when half the planes that were lost blew up for mechanical problems. You know, everybody can find and really kind of milk or juice victimhoods, you can, I can. Everybody can. And that's not a healthy thing to do, that to look at yourself as a victim.

[B]

Well, a little more on this, Victor, when we come back from these important messages.

[E]

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[B]

We are back with Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. We're recording in early December. This is the first of three listener viewer question shows. Although we're obviously beginning with a current topic, I want to remind folks again, un1unwon. It's a terrific website. Check it out. This is where this story emanates from. And Victor, before we get to one of the listener questions, two things. One is back on the specific project plot. There were so many bad players here. Bureaucrats, the Indian tribes, their attorneys, the pge, the power company, and these nonprofit environmental groups are just this big band of them who are their evil stars are aligning to screw over again, not only the people who are going to not have the water at some point, but those of us elsewhere Far, far afield who are dependent in some way about, not only about the injustice that will happen, but we actually derive the produce that is grown in these farms that are now going to be deprived water anyway. That was one thing. But the other thing is coming to a city near us, a town near us, soon is maybe we saw what happened up in British Columbia, that town, I think it's the town of Richmond, the city of Richmond, yes. Where their tribal people own houses. And all of a sudden you don't own it anymore, sucker. You got till next day to get out because this is reverting back to whatever original tribe, who knows what original.

[D]

Tribe, and they're exempt. So when you blow up the Klamath river dams and you say it's going to be this whitewater and what happens immediately is a mud mess and it kills thousands of wildlife, bears and deer and wolves. Everything is trapped in this muck. Then there's nobody to sue, is there? Nobody can say, hmm, you're a greedy polluter. You destroyed the natural habitat of the Klamath River. No, no, I'm the government. I'm exempt. It's like the Soviet Union. Oh, we screwed up with Chernobyl, sorry. And that's what happens when government gets too powerful. They're exempt from the, from the type of system they impose on other people. If this, you know, you can't sue these people. The government, when they do something. And the government is behind this by granting this. And it's. And there's going to be a lot of damaged people. There's going to be. That Eel River Basin is beautiful and it's part of the best part of California. And there's, you know, like a half a million people up there. And it's not like California can afford to drive any more people out. 1% of the popular of the households pay 50% of the taxes and they're leaving in droves, you know, 300,000 a year. And this is why if they all 600,000 leave and we keep going, we're $17 billion billion dollars deficit this year. We owe 250 billion billion that we can't pay. It's unfunded liabilities and we're driving the refineries out. We're spending 30 billion this year or next additional on this high speed rail fiasco. We just had a $2 billion stupid solar plant that is being dismantled. We have a $500 million battery plant for nocturnal storage that blew up twice in Monterey and doesn't work. And we have the Pacific Palisades One house, they're bragging, was built by a developer after a year. And this, these people are crazy. They're going to destroy what's left of California because people are leaving paradise, former paradise, because they made it into purgatory. And this is why. And these tribal people who are suing, they think these people have so much money and they have all these resources. No. 600,000 people can't. Even. 1/4 of the people don't pay their power bill. One quarter. And so who pays it? The other people do, with increased rates. It's the highest electricity rates in the United States on top of the highest gas prices. So they're squeezing people. And then these other people think, well, I'll just squeeze because I'm a victim. It's never, well, this was a tragedy and it's in the past. And we're going to try to make do the best we can. And if we have to give these 600,000 people 2 or 3% of the summer flows of the Eel river, it's a price we pay for. When we get colon cancer or lung cancer or brain cancer, we can go into the Santa Rosa hospital or somewhere and get an MRI and get treated rather than a folk medicine approach of our ancestors.

[E]

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[B]

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[E]

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[B]

Well, Victor, thanks for all Your analysis there. Let's get to a question here. And Terry Clark sent this interesting question. Series of questions, but here's one. What one event in biblical world American history would you like to see in person or if you'd prefer, from a bird's eye view?

[D]

Well, I think because I studied philology, I would have liked to be in the audience at Gettysburg, not with the bodies and the horrible. Listening to the Gettysburg Address by Lincoln. I think that would have been really something. Or I would have liked to be in Athens and right before the plague, of course, when Pericles gave that great, you know, about. Look at. Cast your eyes at Athens and fill yourself with love. And the boundaries of our empire are marked by that. It's something that Napoleon said. It's kind of an imperialistic speech, but it was beautiful. Or, you know, it would have been nice to see. Be in New York City on VE Day. Huh.

[B]

Kissing a nurse.

[D]

Yes. Those pictures of girls kissing everybody. Or coming into Paris in August of 1940 and liberating it. Those are great events.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

So any of those.

[B]

Okay. Terry also asks if you could speak truth to one corporate, military, or governmental leader anywhere in the world, who would it be and what would you say?

[D]

Let me ask you about the tone of that question. Do you think that that is somebody I would like to talk in admiration of or suggestion. Critical suggestions to.

[B]

I think our listeners and viewers find you as a man of great advice. So I could see. I'm not telling you this is the answer, but you could go Zelensky and Ukraine and say, hey, Bachu, you got to do this or that. So I think it's an advisory.

[D]

I think what I would do if I had that opportunity, I would talk to the eu. I like to go to the EU Congress. Yeah. And say to them, and this is not original, and I'm quoting now, the recent United States Strategic strategy paper that came out that everybody's angry at.

[B]

Right.

[D]

And I would say to them, we, we like you. We inherited our culture and civilization from you.

[B]

But.

[D]

You'Re on a trajectory that will make us impossible to be equals because you have adopted policies that ensure your fertility rate is 1.4 and it's going down. You have unlimited borders where large enclaves of your urban areas are controlled by Islamicists. You have no effective defense to defend you. If tomorrow Putin defeats Ukraine and he decides to go westward, the only thing that will stop him are your small deterrence in France and Britain. They're nuclear, and you'll have no choice but to go nuclear unless we step in you have plenty of energy. There's a lot of natural gas, for example, in France, there's a lot more oil offshore of Scandinavia and Britain. You could get your power down. You could be competitive. Your GDP as a world percentage has been shrinking. And finally, I would say to them, you've got the 31 NATO countries and you got the 23 or 24 EU countries, and they're almost the same countries, but you better stop what you're doing because you play bad cop and good cop. The NATO countries slobber all over Donald Trump and call him Daddy, at least to his face. And they insist on two things, that we pay 16 to 17% of the entire budget, even though we're nowhere near where the danger is. And then more importantly, we are the bad guys that say we got to pay 2% now, payout, you got to get up to 5%. All that. So you don't like that. But my point is, you people in the NATO, half of your face, the One Eyed Jack, that side, that face you kiss up to us and then you flip over the same countries, Germany, France, Spain. Then you're the EU face. And then you sue Elon Musk for $140 million because you want to censor it. Or then you start attacking us for being illiberal. Or then you send your people over here during elections to work in Pennsylvania for one particular political party. Or then you start outlawing this rising anger in places like the Netherlands, Scotland, Germany, France, you start to suppress them and the subtext is that you don't like us, the eu, and you have unfair trade. And then when we start to get angry, you flip back over and say, oh, that was my EU side of my personality. My NATO side is please help us and it doesn't work anymore. And you're skating on thin ice because if you continue in 30 years when we're dead, but our, our children are going to have to deal with a Europe that's going to run like an American university. Your presidents, your prime ministers are going to be like Claudine Gay. They're going to have uncontrollable campuses, just like today. Stanford, Yale, Harvard. The college president is terrified of the Middle east student studies program and Middle east students and Chinese students. They need the Chinese and Indian students to pay their tuition as they gouge them 110%. They don't want the Middle Eastern students chasing Jews into the library or camping out at Stanford for four months or crashing the president's office. So they give them whatever they want and that is the, our American university is the paradigm for the eu. That's where you're headed if you're not there already. That's what I would tell them. And I would say it, and not in that kind of tone, but what that strategic assessment said, it said we don't want civilizational erasure. You know, the thing about arming, we had the Manhattan Project, we built the B29. We built, I think the best fighters of World War II, Thunderbolt, especially the Mustang, along the British. But you know, when you look at the technology of war in World War II, whether it was for evil or good, the Supermarine Spitfire, the English radar system, the Stamp Sten machine gun, the cryptology and the ultra secret or the ultra factor, the mosquito plane, the chaff that the British invented to confuse radar on the German side, the snorkel jet engines, the most deadly machine guns ever made, the fog woof. My point is not to glorify or detract, just to say in terms of military expertise, Europe is up where we are. And you look at certain things, they're making the Swedish planes, the British Typhoon, the Leopard tank, it's top, it's the best in the world. They just don't, they just, they don't value that. That's incidental. But my point is they could very easily, if they cut off immigration and just made it diverse legal and less and cut that huge bloated welfare budget and used it for defense. They would employ people actively and they would not, they would not have this passive aggressive feeling toward us. You know, it's kind of like a teenager and his parent. I'm, I'm independent, don't tell me what to do. And then the parent says, well then pay for your car insurance. Oh, I can't believe you're saying that to me. That's so mean. And that's how we are with Europe. And it's not healthy, so. And yet they have all this brilliant talent. Every time. I just, you know, it's funny, Jack, I, I did an interview with a French online interview. I just did an interview with a Swiss guy. I did an online British interview. I did an online Japanese interview. These, these people are the most sophisticated people in the world. They're so intelligent. They know exactly what's going on and how. They can't run that continent the way it used to be run. I'm not talking about World War I and World War II, but in the post war era it had a boom in the 60s and 70s and it's a tragedy. It really is. Tony Blair has a lot to answer for in Britain and the. Angela Merkel. Tony Blair and Angela Merkel did more damage to Europe than anybody.

[B]

It's like such a sense of contributory negligence there. Victor. By the way, the Trump administration's critique of not wanting to see Western civilization collapse, well, that has to do a large part with assimilation. It's not going to happen. I think globally, we all have to get wise to assimilation is, is not a thing.

[D]

They, they don't assimilate that. They're not used to it. This is new for them post World War II. It's not new for us. We were the melting pot. Right. When I, When I. In this area, I'll give you an example of America. I talked to a person that I rent my property to. He had nothing, his father, nothing. When they got here. They're multi, multi and they're most sophisticated people. I went over a year ago and looked at Fowler packing. They asked me to go in. I could not believe it. It is the most sophisticated factory, all environmentally sound up to date of cutie mandarin oranges. And it's the process of picking them and getting them to the store is almost all computerized. And it. And this sort. It's brilliant. And they came with nothing. And in America, when you do that, then you get prestige. Nobody says to them, you're not. I'm not going to put you on the hospital. You're not Vaughn somebody or sir somebody. There's no titles, there's no vons, there's no vans, there's no prefixes. It's just talent. And I know that they say we're crass because we, we get prestige based on money, but money is blind.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

And so what I'm getting at is we can acculturate and assimilate much, much better than Europe and Europe's. So we can handle. We're at 16% foreign born and 54 million out of 340 million. That's the highest we've ever been. We've got to stop. We've got to take a breathing space, legal student, illegal, everything, and start assimilating people and end the salad bowl hyphenation. But Europe can't handle that much. They really can't. And it's starting to fragment. It's getting really scary.

[B]

Yeah, well, even. We'll get on to another question after a break. But even if they could handle assimilation, they also reject their roots of Western civilization, which you know is religious. I'm not here to be an apostle or.

[D]

No, it is Judeo, Christian tradition, classical Greece, Rome. It's the trifecta of Jerusalem, Athens and Rome. And I think you're going to see a lot when you push, push, push, you'll see there's more. Not all of these people who are the defenders of civilization are confined to Hillsdale College or Pepperdine or Dennis Prager. There's a lot more people out there from these strongholds that are fed up and they're going to defend their civilization and their culture and it's not a matter of race. They're just going to say, you know what, this country is so sophisticated, it's so prosperous and we're not going to let you destroy it by saying that it's evil or racist or homophobic. We are self correcting, but we're not going to give up the tenets of our civilization. Sorry, it's not going to happen. Yeah. And that's when Donald Trump is the crude expression of that he shouldn't say things that he does. But when he says if you don't like it in Somalia, go back home, your country's a hellhole, that's accurate. It is a hellhole. And it's very ungracious to come over here and get 60, 70% of the people here on public support from Somaliland and about 50%, according to Homeland Security have fraudulent welfare or one third maybe didn't get proper visas to become here in the first place. You have all of that and people say there's nothing worse than ingratitude. That's kind of an ancient idea. When you say ingratitude. Oh, that's so old fashioned. What is ingratitude? And one of the most important of all virtues to show gratitude for benefaction. And they don't, they really don't. They don't express their love for America. Every time Ilyan Omar opens her mouth, it is some criticism of this country.

[B]

And they've made a mockery of our oath of citizenship. They cannot stand this country even, but they love the payout. Hey, Victor, I'm not cutting you up, but we have a reduced time today. And we've got one more we got.

[D]

To talk about our next section, Pearl harbor today.

[B]

Do you want to do that?

[D]

I could do that and we'll do that.

[E]

All right.

[B]

Well, we'll come back. We'll do that when we come back from these messages. And we are back with our final segment of this special, first of three episodes of Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. I think Victor tipped it off the day we were talking is actually December 7th and this is a Memorial Day. I hate to use the word anniversary in this sense, memorial. I would like to think most Americans know that December 7th means Pearl Harbor Day. But gosh, Victor, I wonder if you asked any high school graduate in America what the date means to them. They probably would give you a blank stare anyway. Would you like to say anything about.

[D]

84 years ago? We were attacked. It's a Sunday morning, as I'm speaking at 7:00 in the morning, and we had none, done nothing. And I want to say that again, we had did nothing to provoke that attack. Had Japan not attacked, we would have never attacked them. And that was a long line of provocations. They had gone into Manchuria in 31 and carved out a whole area. They had gone into in the Second Sino War and 37 into China. And by Pearl harbor they had about 40% of China. And they gave us. And we said, stop it, stop it. We had long special ties with China because of the fact that we had not been a colonial power. We had not carved out an area of influence and exploitation, opium wars, but we had missionaries and we were very idealistic about China and protective of it. And of course, Chiang Kai Shek was very effective. His wife spoke perfect English. And they were very effective in winning American support. But my point is this. There was nothing that could not be resolved. There were three issues. We said, if you continue to occupy South Korea, if you continue to occupy China. And remember, the Dutch East Indies had just fallen with the collapse of the Netherlands in 1940, in May. So all of what is now Indonesia's oil fields, the Japanese were in the process of taking, just like they had taken Vietnam, Cambodia from the French. There were no European colonization governments anymore. The French had been taken over by the Japanese because France didn't exist as a former free country and the Netherlands did not exist as a former free country. So we saw what was going on and we said to Japan, we're cutting our oil exports to you until you get out of China and you don't take all of Indonesia. And the Japanese said to us, we'll negotiate this, but we have an empire and we need strategic materials. And we said to them, buy them on the open market and you can buy our oil. You can. And they said, yes. And then they had rearmed. And what the problem was, we had gone through the Great Depression and we had done, I guess you would say FDR's plan was a disaster. The unemployment in 1938 was 20%. That's almost nine years after it started, Japan, Italy and Germany had been rearming and had an expansionary liquidity, and they didn't have the same problem. So we were told that they had not just the same number of battleships, but better battleships. So they were building the Mushasa, the Yamato. They were better than the ships that were sunk at Pearl harbor. They were all 1914 to 1920. And then myth number two, not just that they were culpable and not us, but General Yamamoto was not a nice guy. He was not this poet, and he did haiku, and he was just, oh, I can make them run for six months, but I can't guarantee anything. I've woken the dragon. No, no. He said to them, I want to attack Pearl harbor, and if you don't let me to what had become the Tojo government, I will resign. So they were planning this. Why? They were negotiating. They set up a whole little tiny Pearl harbor in Yokohama, and they were practicing. And then they took six carriers with complete radio silence in the choppy waters and parked them off Hawaii. Why? They were telling us that they were going to be peaceful, and then they bomb were. They made two fatal errors. When they bombed Pearl harbor, there were three carriers, the Saratoga, the Lexington and the Enterprise. And they weren't there. They were resupplying the Philippines or coming back from the United States, or they were on the way to Wake Island. And so they didn't get our carriers, but they sunk four battleships, and four of them were destroyed. Four could be refloated, eight of them. But had those battleships gone out to attack the carriers, they would have all been sunk. They were World War I vintage, and everybody would have died out on sea, probably. So the 2400 was a tragic, terrible loss, but it could have been 10,000, and then they only had two sorties. So they went out and they surprise attacked us. They came back, refueled 300 more planes. They lost about 70 planes. But what was important were the entire machine shops, the electrical grid, the year supply of Navy and aviation fuel. They didn't touch it. They were afraid to do a third sortie. And then they skedaddled. And the result was, for the next five months, they won every battle. They sank every American ship. They killed 5,000Americans, and then they had their Waterloo in May at the Battle of Coral Sea off Australia, where they lost a carrier and most of the carrier pilots on their two big ships that had been at Pearl Harbor. And we lost the Yorktown, but not the Yorktown was heavily damaged, and we repaired it we lost the Lexington and then a month later at Midway, we destroyed four carriers and lost the Yorktown, which was. But my point is, then we went to Guadalcanal and five naval battles. They were horrible battles, we lost a lot of men. But at the end of five naval battles and the land battle, then it was all downhill for Japan. So remembering that, you got to remember that they had been planning for war against us. They had a better carrier system, they had a better fighter, the Zero Mitsubishi Zero type fighter. They had more sophisticated. The Yamato and the Musashi could blow up a American battleship at 20 miles away. 18 inch guns, they were very sophisticated. What I'm getting at is thanks to Carl Vinson, an old Southern segregationist representative, he'd had three naval acts and the Japanese got wind of it. And that was what Yamamoto said. He said, we need to destroy them now and then they'll sue for peace because they've got the Iowa class battleships coming, four of them, and they were better than anything in the world. 16 inch guns, fast. They've got the Essex carrier, 25 of these things, each one is better than our carriers. And they've got planes. And of course, we had the Corsair and the Hellcat, the best planes in the Pacific. The P38 was already almost as good. And then we had the B29 coming and Napal. And so it was, that was their idea that they were going to shock us at Pearl Harbor. And we were going, oh, I'm so sorry we were so mean to you. We cut off your oil. And I know you people are poets and you're haiku people and we were just crass capitalists and we're greedy and so we're sorry. And yeah, you did some damage and musked our hair up, but we'll be friends with you now. Just go take all of China, that's okay with us. And you can have the Dutch East Indies and take over your Greater Co Asia Prosperity, your Greater East Asia Co Prosperity Sphere. And you can take it all and we'll be friends with you winners. And that's. But I think because we made some horrific mistakes here with the Japanese internment, we got this. You know, I had a very good friend, I won't mention him, he was a farmer, he's passed away. But he would come over to my place when I was farming and tell me he was Japanese American, how horrible it was in the camps at Manzanar. And I was, And I was in complete. You know, when Reagan said he were going to give him $20,000. That was. That wasn't reparations. That was money that was taken from Japanese families by coerced foreclosures on their farms. Anyway, but he. Then he got it into World War II and we started it and I just about blew my stack. And I reminded him that one of the most decorated combat units in Italy were Japanese American.

[B]

Right.

[D]

And they fought like crazy and that he was in the minority view of Japanese. Most of them, 99.9 were very loyal and enlisted when they, they enlisted out of the camps to fight in Italy.

[B]

Yeah. What was the. There was a Van Johnson movie.

[D]

Yeah, there was 4 42nd or something.

[B]

Yeah. But they called the. They called something like Coconut Heads or there was some. I'll figure it out. Between the show and the next show.

[D]

Were also a lot of Japanese Americans that were very helpful in the Pacific and translating Japanese codes and everything. But my, my point is that the other thing to remember very quickly, everybody, is that if you people have done a lot of scholarly work, but if you look at the size of militaries, ours was 12.2 million. The Russians is the largest, 12.4. The Japanese was about 5 million. Germans, 5, 5, 5, 6. But if you look at the number of people lost versus killed, I think there was about two and a half million Japanese civilians and soldiers killed. And you look at the number of the Japanese killed, I'm talking about 16 to 18 million in China, 4 million in the Pacific and Asia, and probably a couple of hundred thousand or 250,000 British and Americans. And then you compare the way they treated them in POW camps compared to how we treated when we captured Japanese, which was rare, but they were the most lethal killing machine of the war. They killed more people. They probably killed more people than the German army, but at less cost. And that's after their homeland was obliterated, including them. So it's not like we went out and were vindictive. They were a killing, brutal machine that butchered Chinese. They butchered Filipinos, they butchered Indonesians, they butchered Southeast Asians, they butchered British, they butchered Australians, they butchered America. They butchered everybody they saw.

[B]

Yeah. Even towards the Battle of Manila. What a bloodbath for the Filipinos who were still there.

[D]

That was horrible. That was a horrible battle. House to house. 40, 40 or 50,000 Filipino civilians. More than that, 100,000 were killed brutally.

[B]

Hey, Victor, we're up against the closeout time. I just want to say we are so sorry that we cut off oil Japan. So we sue for Peace. That's a haiku, by the way. Other than that, the movie was Go for Broke. That was the movie with Van Johnson about.

[D]

That was a good. That was Go for Broke was their motto.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[D]

I think they were on Mont Cassino. They were. It was horrible what they went through in Italy. They were.

[B]

Daniel. Daniel, in a way, the former.

[D]

Yes. He was wounded, lost an arm.

[B]

Lost his arm there. Yeah.

[D]

So that was. You remember, right. During the Watergate, he was a big critic of Nixon and there was a lawyer for Nixon, an old kind of heavyset guy, and he'd call him a fat Jap. Remember that? It was horrible.

[B]

Really. Oh, my God.

[D]

Yeah, he did.

[B]

And he did. The Ali north one.

[D]

Yeah. And the whole country, to its credit went berserk. They said, how dare you make fun of this guy. He fought, you know, you didn't.

[B]

Yeah, it was.

[D]

That really hurt Nixon when his lawyer.

[B]

Said that he was also. Remember, he chaired that Ali. The Iran Contra Committee hearing. And that's where Brendan Sullivan, the lawyer for Ali north, said, I'm not a potted plant, you know. And he spoke up during the hearing. Well, anyway, Victor, you've been.

[D]

By the way, just as a final. I, you know, I wasn't a big. I'm not a big fan of lawyers, but that Brendan Sullivan was kind of brilliant. He really was. He saved Ollie North. He just sliced and diced. He was so much more adept than the interrogators on the.

[E]

Yeah.

[B]

He came to fight and he did. Yeah. All right. Well, Victor, you've been terrific. Thanks for all the wisdom you shared. Thanks, folks, for watching, for listening. And we'll be back soon with another epis of Victor Davis Hansen in his own words on the Daily Signal. Bye. Bye.

[D]

Thank you. Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal. Please, like share and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own [e-mail] and subscribe for exclusive features in addition. And Doug, here we have the Limu emu in its natural habitat, helping people.

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[E]

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[D]

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