← Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
Victor Davis Hanson: The Obamas Have Nothing to Complain About
01:32:44
On today’s episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” Victor Davis Hanson and Sami Winc react to Michelle Obama’s book tour for her new book “The Look.”
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- [00:00]
Sammy Wink
Michelle Obama, of course, is on her whining tour.
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Victor Davis Hansen
Who was treated more unfairly? Donald Trump and Melania Trump by the media. I'm talking now. Npr, pbs, NBC, cbs, abc, New York Times, Washington Post. I could go on or you. You were always given either equitable treatment or exemplary treatment. And if you want to go Google and say, make fun of first lady, see how many things come up under Melania versus you.
- [00:26]
Sammy Wink
Recently, Dick Cheney just died, and I know that you knew him a little bit.
- [00:32]
Victor Davis Hansen
He called me and I went in and talked to him and I went to dinner at his house. He was very pleasant. I remember being there. I won't mention the names of very prominent people. And they were saying that they didn't need to get UN Authorization to go into Iraq. We were walking out and he said, stay here. I want to toss you something. What'd you think of all those guys? I said I would try to get the UN not because it matters, but that you try. All these people here in this room, they will turn on you. They're fixtures in washing. Years later, he wrote me a little email and he said, everybody at that dinner turned on me. Sun Tzu says, if you want to take a city, basically you got to know about the Yang and the Yang and the hot and the cold and all these philosophical and you read Neith's Tacticus. To take his Greek city, you must go over, under or through. And here's how you do it. There's no religion, there's no philosophy. It's just this is the empirical problem, here's the solution. And that's a very amoral, but very amoral in the sense it's not connected necessarily with extraneous ideas other than to get the job done.
- [01:46]
Sammy Wink
Hello and welcome to Victor Davis Hansen in His Own Words. This is his Saturday edition where he does something a little bit different in the middle segment. And today he's going to be talking about something that he's particularly a specialist at, I opulent warfare. So stay with us for that. We'll start with some news stories first after these messages.
- [02:08]
Victor Davis Hansen
Right is still right, even if you stand by yourself. Mr. Chief Justice May have placed the card. This is Hans von Spakovsky, host of the Case in Point podcast, which looks at the hottest cases affecting politics, culture and everyone's daily lives. But we talk about them without confusing legal jargons, and we have interesting guests like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. And we end with reviews of classic Hollywood movies relevant to the topic. Case in Point, the podcast, available everywhere. You won't want to miss.
- [02:50]
Sammy Wink
Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Victor's the Martin and Ellie Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Martin Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. You can find him at his website, Victor Hansen dot com. The name of the website is the Blade of Perseus. So please come join us there. Well, Victor, we have usually a little segment on the crazy left because they say so many crazy things. I know that we've been trying to explain it a little bit on Friday's show, but for this Saturday, I'd like to take into consideration Whoopi Goldberg and Michelle Obama things they said this week. Whoopi Goldberg has said that Donald Trump signed his pardons, or at least one of them with an auto pin. And she was referring to the signing of the crypto investor who got a pardon. I think he was in jail for four months. And she tore up a legal correction for having said that, which was very strange because you would think somebody on a show like that would be interested in the truth. And the second thing, Michelle Obama, of course, is on her whining tour. I guess we could say that. And she said that while she was in that White House, she was under a particularly white hot glare and those were her words that they were so stressful in the White House to be watched by everybody. I thought wondering your thoughts on either of those two.
- [04:23]
Victor Davis Hansen
I'll start with the second. First Michelle, who was on the COVID of Vogue repeatedly and who wasn't as first lady. Oh, you were on the COVID and Melania never was. Melania was a professional international model. I know Barack Obama said yesterday you were fine. But I think most people would say that Malenia is as pretty or prettier than you are and more elegantly dressed as not reflection on you. Just that's what models are. But she wasn't on once. And let me ask you another question. Who was treated more unfairly Donald Trump and Melania Trump by the media. I'm talking now, npr, pbs, NBC, cbs, abc, New York Times, Washington Post. I could go on or you.
- [05:18]
Sammy Wink
You.
- [05:19]
Victor Davis Hansen
When Donald Trump made the COVID of a magazine like the New Republic, he had a Hitler mustache. When you Barack on it, he was dressed like FDR and said social the new socialism is back. You were bit everybody bent over backwards to accommodate you. I know there were people on the fringe, right, that had sort of a Candace Owen Proto, you were a transsexual, all that crazy, crazy stuff. But by and large, in the midstream of the country. You, your memoir was a best selling book. You were treated with kid gloves. So when you said you'd never been proud of the country, you said, until Barack was a figure, you said it was a downright mean country. You said, they always raised the bar on people like us. You were given a pass. You were given a pass and your whole life was. You came out of Harvard Law School and you were in a Chicago law firm. You wanted a sneaker account right away. And then when he was elected senator, they gave you a non job for what, a third of the million dollars basically, at the University of Chicago Medical School to direct people away from the medical school who couldn't pay. You were always given either equitable treatment or exemplary treatment. And if you want to go Google and say, make fun of first lady, see how many things come up under Melania versus you and it will be much more. And nobody put a gun to your head and said you have to run for president. You use that bully pulpit to push all of your issues. As far as altering the White House, you made a special little kind of nice organic garden. You did whatever you wanted, and yet now you. And now you're worth probably over $100 million. And no offense, but I don't think that you and Barack had any reputation, history, CV resume of being particularly accomplished Netflix content thinkers, creators. That's what they gave you, what, $20 million? So you walked out of the White House. Remember Brock had said, I'm not going to run a president. I'm going to do it to transform the country. I'm not going to do it just to cash in. That's what you did. So can't you just say, this is an amazing country, that a black man and woman were elected president with the majority with a greater white vote than the previous white candidate. And we were. But that didn't happen almost immediately. When you came in, you gave the typical Michelle chip on your shoulder. Well, I was in a Target and a shorter woman wanted me to reach and didn't know who I was, so I had to reach for a package to give to her. It happens to all of us, Michelle. Happens to all of us all the time. And I was in local supermarket two weeks ago and I pulled out a shopping cart and the woman next to me pulled out a shopping cart. She didn't speak English and it was full of what many of them are trash, right? And then she said to me in Spanish, can I have your shopping cart? I felt so offended just because I'm White and I speak English. You think you can just take my shopping cart when I didn't put trash in it? And you don't want to clean it because you don't want to touch the trash. But I gave it to her. And I have never mentioned that incident until today. I didn't digest it and get angry that who is this person who's probably here illegally and doesn't speak Spanish? And she comes up to me, trego melo, you know, bring this over to me. Things happen in life and you can't think that way. And life is so hard on you because you have a beach estate in Hawaii that you built contrary to many environmental regulations. You have a abode on Martha's Vineyard on the seashore cliff. I think it's 20 acres. I think you have 2,000 gallons worth of propane on that. I only have 150. I have a 3 acre little house yard. We only have 150 gallons of propane and you get 2,000. It's not fair. And my family at one time was bigger than yours. And then you've got your Kalorama mansion. You still have your Chicago nice thing in your Tony Resco acquired big yard. And yet that's not enough. All you do, we had to pay for food. We had to pay for food when we were in the White House. Well, most America, I really doubt that they sent you a bill for a ham sandwich. No offense, but it's all complaint. And she grew up with middle class parents and then she's now onto the dei. And you know, Barack said the other day, he's trying to whip up the racial sentiment. He said, and you know, they just confused, they just see a black eye and they say you got the job of DII. Well, get rid of DII and you won't think that. And in your case, Barack, you came with a mediocre record after two years from what we can ascertain from anecdotal evidence, since you wouldn't release your student records and you went to Columbia and then you didn't release your Colombian grades and then somebody got you into the Harvard Law School. Would you please release your Harvard Law School admissions, LSAT and GPA from Columbia and then we will know whether you got in on DEI or not, because you didn't really cut a wide swath as an impressive law student when you graduated and you were going to be a constitutional lawyer and you were going to work on contractual law for a year. And from what people tell us in anecdotal information, when you were given a year with no teaching abilities and a fellowship to write a book on what contractual or constitutional law you wrote about yourself. If you did write about yourself, there was accusations that Bill Ayers wrote it, and there were certain things in his memoir, anecdotes that were strikingly similar to yours. But let's not judge you. It was a best seller and you were on your way to the races. So both of you have nothing to complain about. There are millions of people in America, Indian, Hispanic, black, white, who would die to have the opportunities that you have. But you can never let it alone. Till the moment you go to the grave, you're going to be complaining about this country. And, you know, it's. You know, it would be like me saying, wow, my mom was a very strong Democrat. My dad was a very strong Democrat. They had to go to an Oakland conference once, and my mom was shocked because they pulled into a parking lot at a judicial conference and five large black males surrounded them and threatened them. And then my father, who's very big, was willing to. But, you know, they were probably armed, so he pulled out his wallet and gave him a couple of $20, said, Please, my wife is a judge, and I'm not going to let you do this. Gosh, is that what black people do? I've never gotten over that trauma. I've never gotten over it, Michelle. And when I was at Stanford University at the time, my wife worked at the va, and we were walking down the street and she had a mental patient who saw her, and her job was to take mental patients on bus tour. And she saw one of her favorite people who actually had down syndrome. And he. She was attending to him and an African American, two males, came up, got right in her face and started emulating the way that that patient was talking, making fun of them. And I said, don't do that to these two nice people. And the next thing they knew, they were pushing me and everything went downhill. And I have never thought of that until right now, but I am obsessed with it, what happened to me. So, you know, go to East Palestine, Ohio, and live there for a year and then tell me that you're the only oppressed person in the world. I get so tired of that. Of all of these elite people of any, any race that keep complaining about how bad they've had it. You know what I mean? Oh, it's been so bad. I could do that, too. Oh, I had a snother sinus operation. It wasn't fair. I've had nine operations in my Life. Now that I'm looking out a beautiful little studio, I'm looking at an orchard, I think I'm blessed beyond comprehension. I have these wonderful people listening to me. But it's so unfair that my operation didn't work. Well, that's what we get. I don't know why she does it. Same thing with Whoopi Goldberg. She gets her new name. She gets all of this. She was a good actor. And Ghost, and she was in the Color Purple. She takes off. Ted Danson was her boyfriend. She was. And then she got it. Barbara Walters created the View. She had certain rules of decorum. It was very popular. There was. If there were politics, there were two sides. It boomed. She died. The next generation took over and wrecked it. And everybody has been sued for lying for the first time. And some judges now consider that libel. So when somebody hands you a paper from your producer who's paying you millions of dollars, and you spout off on anything that comes into your mind, and they say, don't say that Donald Trump used the auto pin unless you have evidence. And she had none. And she said, well, it was just a jo. Well, people get sued for that. I don't know if he would sue them. I doubt it. But he has sued George Stephanopoulos for lying that he was a rapist 11 times when he was never convicted of that. And the same thing with the doctrine, the Camilla Harris. So there is a lot of executives that are saying about the View. You guys are really controversial. You're not. Got very good audience share anymore, and you've got a lot of criticism, and we're all under scrutiny, so just be very careful. Instead, she tears it up and. And then, you know, and she said so many crazy things about the Holocaust and Jews, and it just. It's all these people. I don't know what. What it is. They're all in privilege. They're all millionaires, and they all whine, wine, wine, wine.
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Sammy Wink
Yeah, I think that's what your audience thinks, too. They listen to their complaints. And the audience and I both probably think, you know, human life is like that. There are ups and there are downs, and we've all suffered not under dei.
- [16:44]
Victor Davis Hansen
That's why it's such a pernicious ideology, because you can translate any personal unhappiness into a cosmic ism or ology against you. That on this Marxist binary, you're on the 30% victims, you know, and the 70. The problem is everybody. There's not enough victimizers for all the victims. So you have to say it's. Well, I can't find racism, but it's systemic. It's everywhere. It's insidious. You need a radon racist detector in your foundation, of your home to find it. It's in everywhere. So then of course you can't see it, you can't smell it, but it's deadly. But only me, Professor Kendi, can find it. If you buy my book.
- [17:30]
Sammy Wink
Yes. Well, Victor, let's go ahead and welcome back to Hoover Institution. If you listen to VDH in his own words, you care about where America has been, where we are now and where we're headed. That's exactly what Freedom Frequency is all about. It's a new online publication from the Hoover Institution where Victor is a senior fellow. It does. It's designed to cut through the noise and bring clarity to the issues that show shape our country's future. Each week Freedom Frequency delivers serious, accessible analysis grounded in research and guided by the American values of liberty, democracy, free enterprise and the rule of law. You'll hear from some of Hoover's most respected thinkers like Condoleezza Rice, General Jim Mattis, General H.R. mcMaster, economists John Cochran, and of course, Victor Davis Hansen himself. It provides clear thinking and principled solutions for a complex world. As we approach the 250th anniversary of our nation, there's no better time to dig deeper into the ideas that built America and will determine its future. Subscribe now to Freedom Frequency. On substack the URL is the freedomfrequency.org and join the conversation that's lighting the way forward. That URL again is the freedom frequency.org and we'd like to thank the Hoover Institution for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen show. So Victor, let's turn to another Democrat who is a marginalized person I think by now, and his name is John Federman. And a couple of things that he did this week that have the Democrats in a tizzy. He said that on a Show in on CNN's State of the Union with Jake Tapper that the democr need to own the shutdown. And he also said that New York City is not a model for the future or of the Democratic Party. So when Zoran Mondami wins, that's not what is what the Democratic Party is in the future.
- [19:42]
Victor Davis Hansen
He's a very astute politician. I'm not saying he's not sincere, but he knows that thanks to Elon Musk and Charlie Kirk that the Republican registrations in Pennsylvania skyrocketed. And they skyrocketed to such a degree that the non Philadelphia, non Pittsburgh precincts can get a Republican elected like Mr. McCormick. So there's a Democratic and a Republican senator and the governor, Josh Shapiro, who probably might have made the difference if he's very liberal. But he, he has a reputation, I think unearned of being a moderate. But he might have won for Kamala Harris had he not been Jewish because they didn't put him on that ticket. If he, if his name had been Bill Smith, he would have been on the ticket. But I saw, my point is, I think he feels that while his ratings among the Democrats in the state are about 40%, his ratings among Republicans are about 60% percent. And you add the two together and he has a fairly good margin to be re elected, depending on what he says. So if he were to say that he was going to endorse Mondami, he would not be elected because he would lose those Republican votes and he wouldn't get back the Democratics that he lost. So he's very astute. I don't know what happened to him. He had a terrible stroke. And remember that debate with Dr. Oz? He was unable, it was like Joe Biden. And he made a miraculous recovery. And in that recovery, some new neurons were reignited. They were reconnected. And the result was he changed from kind of a hard leftist to a centrist. He, you know, Michelle, if you think of people who've been really through a lot, he has, he's had a terrible stroke. He struggles with his weight. He was caricatured but pressed. I mean, everybody made fun of his appearance, the, his, the way he dresses and everything. So his only problem is going to be that if he can get nominated again because the, the forces of the Democratic Party, George Soros and everything, they're not, they would rather lose and be left than win and be moderate. And they look at that Senate seat and they said, well, on the one hand he votes 95% with us. On the other hand he doesn't vote 99.999 and we don't like any apostates. So we're going to primary him. If they primary him, he'll lose. Even though he'd win the general election. The Democrat. I think what the Republican strategy is is to put him on Fox News and praise him to the skies. Kind of like we have tar and we touch him. You can't get the tar off. And so that he seems reasonable. I don't do that. I like him. I'm sincere about that. But they're going to welcome into the fold. And then other Republicans are going to say, but he votes against us. And they said, no, no, no, no, no. Just wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Our endorsements of him and friendships with him means he will not lend the primary. He's too centrist. So they're going to get a nut, a mandami point 2.0, and they're going to run him and he's going to win and beat Fetterman. And in the general election, we can beat that guy. And I think that's the strategy, which I feel bad about because I like Fetterman.
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Sammy Wink
Yeah, he seems.
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Victor Davis Hansen
Remember when he was on this Very.
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Sammy Wink
Sort of endearing in his own way.
- [23:34]
Victor Davis Hansen
When he got it. Well, if you get over the first shock of his beard and size when he was on that, I. I just couldn't believe when there were protests and he climbed up on his roof and he had an Israeli flag. That was so weird.
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Sammy Wink
All right, so let's turn to Recently, Dick Cheney just died. And I know that you knew him a little bit. He was 84 years old. He had a heart condition from his 50s. I think it was congenital.
- [24:05]
Victor Davis Hansen
Well, I'm happy He lived 84 when I, he. I had written book Carnage and Culture about the innate dynamism of Western military weaponry and history and tactics, strategy. And I'd said in the book, doesn't mean you're going to guarantee victory, but when you're in disadvantageous places, like far from home or outnumbered or against a Hannibal, you still have a chance because you have innate advantages of superior technology, order, certain attitudes towards strategic victory. And he liked that. And all of us, I was at the Naval Academy. That book had sold about 10,000 copies. And he held it up and said, I really like this book. And that was right after 9, 11. I went to the Naval Academy in the fall of 2002. And he had just said that. And the next thing I knew, it had sold 50, 60, 70,000. It was on the New York Times bestseller list. And then he called me and I went in and talked to him and I went to dinner at his house. He was very pleasant. I remember being there. I won't mention the names of very prominent people. And they were saying that they didn't need to get UN Authorization to go into Iraq. Was. And. And they were rah rah. And the more I heard them, the more I didn't agree with them. So we were walking out and he said, stay here, I want to toss you something. What'd you think of all those guys? I Said I, I would try to get the U in, not because it matters, but you. That you try. They, they won't give you the authorization, but try to get it so you can say you made the nine yards. And I said, you're going to have to take him out very quickly. It's going to have to be like the first Gulf War, because all these people here in this room, they will turn on you. They're fixtures in Washington. I don't care. I, I think it's a good thing to get rid of this existential threat. So I agree with you. And if it goes bad, I'll, I'll, I still will say it was worth it, but I live in Selma, California. And the latest, I think it was in the Washington Post, or maybe it was. It said that I was a California raisin farmer that taught at Fresno State and had no business advising Dick Cheney. No, I'm serious. That was by a Bee reporter, by the way. So he just said, I think you're right. And then years later, he wrote me a little email and he said, everybody at that dinner turned on me. Also, there was another thing people didn't realize about him. He had a brilliant chief of police staff, Scooter Libby. Lewis Libby. And he knew the, the media and he was very loyal. And he was a New York lawyer. And when they called him the Prince of Darkness or the Halberton Crook, they said all he. Because he made a lot of money out of office after he worked for the first Bush. His pinnacle was the 1991 Gulf War, when he was Secretary of State. Colin Powell was Chairman of the joint chiefs, George H.W. bush was the president. And all of them together crafted that brilliant alliance that took out Saddam in four days. When they finally had the ground campaign, then he went into private enterprise and Halbert and made a fortune. So he was criticized for that. But he wrote me a little note and said, everybody you mentioned at that dinner has been attacking me. And then he, he, unlike George W. Bush, he endorsed Donald Trump in 2016. Correct me if I'm wrong, everybody, and you can. I don't have the, the confirmation at my fingertips, but I think he voted for Donald Trump in 2020, as did his daughter, and she had voted 93%. Liz, for, for the Trump ticket.
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Sammy Wink
I'm sorry, did you mean 2016?
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Victor Davis Hansen
Yes, and 2020, because they did not really break for him until after the election when Donald Trump questioned the sanctity of the voting. Then the press was so furious. Liz made a calculated decision. She was the third highest Representative and I've met her, she's very impressive, great mom. Her mother was chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities or Arts Humanities, I think, under George H.W. bush. And in any case, after the whole January 6th, they turned on it and Liz said it was an insurrection and this and they got. And then Donald Trump attacked them and then she attacked them and then Chinese attacked Trump and then Trump attacked Cheney. And at that point everybody had forgotten that Cheney had, I think voted endorsed him once and I think twice or at least didn't vote against him in 2020. He did vote against him in 2024. And Liz thought that that was the end. Mitch McConnell said, I'm so happy that that SOB talking about Trump, we didn't have to do it. He did it to himself and committed suicide after January 6th. So everybody thought he was done. So then it was a race to who was going to reconstruct the Bush, Cheney, Bob Dole, McCain, Romney party. And nobody understood Donald Trump, the gunslinger who rode back down the hill and said, I'm not done yet. And so then Liz Cheney thought that obviously she was going to be speaker of the house within two or three years. Kevin McCarthy was in a very difficult position. You know, waited aside, but he kind of sometimes, I don't know what waffle back and forth. So then when Trump was at his nadir, she came out damned Trump. I don't mean that as a swear word. And his, the parents and they flip. And then of course, his resurrection happened. And as that happened, she, everybody warned her, you're gonna. And then she was the. To get on the January 6th investigative committee that summer, you had to have two requisites as far as Nancy Pelosi was on. McCarthy gave her a list of Democratic people and they, I mean Republican appointees, they always accept the minority opinion. That's the way that the House works. For the first time I think in history, she said, no, I'm not going to pick your republic, I pick your Republicans. And I have two requisites. Basically they have to have impeached Donald Trump and they have to be politically inert. Nobody likes them, and then they'll be free. So they put her as the vice chair and what's his name? Kinzinger. And they went to the. They just, she was more unfair, I think to some of the people that were accused and they were missing records and it was just a mess, a train wreck at that point. They dug down and then she was primaried in Wyoming and she lost by the largest margin in Wyoming history. Of an incumbent congressperson, I think by 40% it wasn't just a loss, it was a complete humility. And that shocked everybody. And then they doubled down and down and he got more and more angry. But I don't try to. I try not to think of all that stuff when I think of him. I, I think he really did believe after 9 11, it was his duty to find ways to neuter radical Islam. And you had that. Saddam Hussein, you know, had Abul Nadal. He had 1993 people who had been involved in the first terrorist bombing. He was committing genocide against the Kurds. He'd violated the no fly zones. He did all this stuff. 23 writs according to the US Congress. So that's what the WMD is, what really hurt him. They put all their eggs in the WMD basket. When George Tennant said it's a slam dunk, it wasn't then they said that they had transferred, transformed all the WMD to, on trucks to Syria. I don't know if that was true or not, but somehow the Assads had WMD because Kamala Harris said they destroyed it all. Which, I mean, Susan Rice, excuse me, Susan Rice said they destroyed it all. They didn't. They got it from somewhere. But it, that was a, A fatal mistake. You should have just said we're. We went to war because the US Congress in a bipartisan fashion authorized 22 or 23 writs and that was good enough. And then they should have said we took out Saddam Hussein, we got rid of him and there are people in Iraq that will step forward. And if it's a dictator or an autocrat, that's their business. But it, It'll. It won't be as bad as Saddam. But instead we said we're going to recreate it in our image. And that was. We were off to the purgatory. We were down to purgatory, trying to implant democracy there. Although Iraq is. Afghanistan was supposed to be the good war and Iraq was supposed to be the bad war. Afghanistan got UN approval, all the allies, and guess what? It was a. It ended up an ungodly disaster with terrorists there armed with 50 billion. In US and Iraq, the bad war still got elections. They just elected a prime minister who. What did he say? Our country is calm and we really like the United States and the United States is really a good thing. I could not believe it. So who knows how things work out? That's a very different. Everybody listening. That's a very different question. And a cost of benefit analysis whether that was worth 4,500 lives and all the people who were maimed. I was embedded twice and went over there, and that's what really shocked me.
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Sammy Wink
So there were a lot of controversial issues that Dick Cheney was a participant in. And I was wondering, what do you think will be if you had to distill it all the way down, what is his legacy?
- [34:36]
Victor Davis Hansen
He was very astute because he was the most hated Republican in the Bush administration, more than Rumsfeld, or they would call him the Prince of Darkness, Darth Vader, because he was unapologetic. He had the lowest approval ratings of anybody. So had he died in 2009, first year of the Obama administration. 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19. They hated him. He was down. And then when he flipped, Liz Cheney toured with Kamala Harris and he endorsed Kamala Harris. So then the left, as the left always is, rehabilitated him and said they liked him. So when he died now, and you look at the headlines, Dick Cheney, 84, dies powerful President Dick Cheney died unusually influential Vice President. Yes, Dick Cheney. Oh, Dick Cheney. History is most dynamic. Vice President Dick Cheney, the real power during the Bush administration. So they just say that he was powerful. They don't attack him because they found him useful as a way of neutering Donald Trump. I really like Lewis Libby. I think he was very good. And there's another thing, a final asterisk. The left knew that Lewis Scooter Libby was one of the best chief of staff you could have, and they wanted to get rid of him to hurt Cheney. And so they cooked up that he had disclosed the classified status of Valerie Plumb Plame. And Richard Armitage, who worked for Colin Powell, Secretary of State had actually first done that. And the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, knew that, that it wasn't Scooter Libby that had disclosed, and yet he ignored that and went after Libby. And then we had Judith Miller and the whole process of put her in jail. And they tried to ruin Scooter Libby's life, but. And they did for a while. They took away his law license and everything, and then he was commuted. I never understood why George W. Bush didn't commute his sentence after leaving. He wouldn't do it. But that was a political hit piece by Patrick Fitzgerald, who also went after Conrad Black in a very unfair fashion. So, anyway, my. My point is, when he was removed, Cheney never had a chief of staff of that talent again. And that's when his problem started.
- [37:31]
Sammy Wink
Well, Victor, we're at the middle of the show, so we will take a break and then come back and learn a little bit about hoplite warfare. Stay with us and we'll be right back. Join TikTok today and get your $20.
- [37:44]
Victor Davis Hansen
No minimum spend voucher.
- [37:46]
Sammy Wink
Just download TikTok and search for get tick G E T T I K. Redeem your voucher and start shopping now. Only for new user. Welcome back to Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. You can find him at X, his handle is at VD Hansen and at Facebook on Hanson's Morning Cup. Come to his website for links to these podcasts, to both audio and video on YouTube, on rumble, on Spotify, and even Iheart has a link on the website as well if that's where you find like to listen to Victor Davis Hansen's podcast. So Victor, you're we're. We're interested to learn I know you're one of the probably one of the world's experts on hopperlite warfare. So take it away.
- [38:36]
Victor Davis Hansen
Yeah, I wrote a a book about it called the Western Way of War the Greek Battle Experience, 1989. And then I edited a book that was for Alfred Knopf. It was really a kind of a sold very well. John Keegan, the historian, wrote the introduction. And then I wrote, I edited a book called Hoplite. So I got I think eight scholars to contribute. And then I had a book called the Other Greeks the Agrarian Origins of Western Civ. And I had a whole section on war hoplites. And then there was a lot of back and forth criticism, especially when I started writing public commentary. People who had been very friendly started attacking me, but also my views of hoplite warfare. So then I defended them in a series of articles. One was a Yale volume, another one was I think edited by Josh Ober and others. But I wrote about nine scholarly refereed articles about it. And essentially hoplite warfare means the ancient Greek infantryman had a hoplon. And that can either be a shield in the singular or hop law in the neuter mean he was heavily armed. So everybody thought this was quite queer. Strange that in 700 when the city state emerged what had been dark age warfare that was on horses or light armed troops skirmishing started to look very different that the citizens who were voters, small farmers, they outfitted themselves in heavy armor. It made no sense. 110 degrees. Some places in Greece in the summer you fought in the summer when the harvest was over, you the ground was dry. But these little five, six Greeks were weighing anywhere from 30 to 50 pounds. They had shin guards, nemides in Greek they had A skirt, terugas, those little kind of flaps, you know, that protect their groin. And they had a bronze breastplate thorax. They had the Aspis, the big shield. I mean, it's huge. It weighs about 18 pounds. I had students recreate all this at Fresno State in the sun. And the best athletes tired after 10 minutes. Then they had a helmet, and so they were almost indestructible. And then they formed in a phalanx. Phalanx, this is an agricultural term for rows of wheat or corn, corn meaning the European term for wheat. And we started to see city states, 1500 city states, no nation, but these little quarrels mostly over, I don't know, bad rocky ground on the borderlands. Then they would get the fairest and most level field, Herodotus says, and they would line up and they would sacrifice to the particular God. And then the general would be on the right side, they would be on the right. Each right side of these columns, usually eight deep. And they would walk and then about 50 or 60 yards away, they would run and bam. Shield and eight foot spear. And they had a secondary sword when the spear broke. Spear had a steru gex, a barb on this backside, so they could flip it over and use it stab if they had to. They could bash with his shield. And this thing lasted for 30 or minutes or 40 minutes. And then one side collapsed, the other pursued. And they made a trophy. Trophy means turning Tropez, the Tropea, the place where the enemy turned. They built a trophy and said, we won. And then it didn't. Both sides shake hands, but they agreed to honor the result of the battlefield. So it solved disputes over property and other things without forever wars. It was almost ritualistic in some fashion. And that's why they wore this heavy armor. And then after this horrific crash and hand to hand fighting and pushing, there's a big debate whether they could actually push people, because why would you have eight ranks deep? The Thebans had 50. When you're taking men out of battle, and I think it was for the Authismos, the push greater. There's a big controversy whether that push could be calibrated all the way through the ranks. But in any case, this was the predominant warfare from say 700 B.C. down to the Peloponnesian War. And you can see that as long as you were in the system, it stopped mass death, the executions. Not that there weren't light arm ratings and horses, but basically this was the. The domain of the middle class. Shock warfare. And only about 10 or 15 people got 15% got killed on the losing side and maybe only 5%. So it was a way of settling things without losing. Kind of like the Aztec ritual warfare. And then it broke down. The city state began to be commercial. They began to have people other than the agrarian class. They had capital. They started to create catapults, sieges, composite bows, sophisticated archers, javelin throwers, horsemen. And by the time Alexander came, he said, we need mercenaries. We can fight year round. We are going to lengthen the spear from 8 to 12ft, 15ft, 16, so that the first six, five or six rows can reach the enemy in their initial crash, not just to three. They increased the killing zone by 40%. And warfare was unshackled from this parochial system of which what. It's kind of like nuclear warfare, where everybody was armed nuclear, but they figured out a system where you wouldn't use nuclear weapons. That was the primary way that we defended ourselves with nuclear deterrence. But that meant that you'd have other little peripheral. And sometimes a peripheral was a lot. But. But after the system broke down in the 4th century BC then Alexander the Great and Philip, his father, picked and choose what they liked. They liked the decisive battle. They wanted to link in the spears, they wanted to armor the cavalry and make them shock troops, the Companion cavalry, they wanted slingers, they wanted archers. So they had a symphony of forces and it lost its primacy. But it was the beginning of the Western idea that we have today under dispute, that we believe in hitting the enemy head on. There's an alternate tradition that Liddell, Hart, Sherman, going to the rear. But nevertheless, it's decisive warfare using firepower technology, generalship, strategy to destroy the cloud, Switzerland idea. You destroy the enemy on the battlefield and not just, you know, you don't just attack a village and quit or you don't just anyway. And one of the ways you can get the person to fight who doesn't want to fight. That was my first book, Warfare in Agriculture. You can burn their grain at harvest time or cut down some of their trees or vines to force them because they're farmers, the hoplites, to get angry. And then the name hoplite again comes from the people's shield or their equipment. So I wrote a lot of that. The only thing it was I found kind of discerning when I made the general, because I was writing for a general audience in Alfred Knopf. I mean, Alfred Knopp does not publish books called Hoplite warfare, but they do Western way of War. So they wanted me to show that this was the beginning. But then I, in another book, Carnage and Culture amplified that. I didn't say the Western warfare was always going to be victimized, victorious. It just gave you greater options. It meant that Cortez could go to Mexico City, the Aztecs couldn't go to Barcelona. It meant when the British went into Zulu land, they had a machine gun and the Zulus didn't. Didn't mean they wouldn't lose at Osloanda Isla Wanda. So. But after I got more into political commentary and especially Trump, a lot of people, I would say 90% of academics are left wing. And so I've noticed over the years that things that were footnoted and approved, they became very controversial and people began to attack me and go back and say, well, he was wrong on hoplite warfare. Or then they did. I've experienced two types of criticism. One is, well, we were too kind to you and you didn't know what you were doing. We didn't know you were political. And so. And we're left wing and you're right, it was pretty obvious. The other was one person wrote me kind of a thesis about it and said, I used to read about hoplite warfare. I was a classicist. Then I threw your books against the wall. And I didn't do it because you were a right wing nut, although you are. I did it because you destroyed your career. You'd done so many nice things in hoplite warfare and the types of weaponry and tactics and strategy and its connection with agriculture and the other Greeks. You had all these 7,000 footnote and then you just threw it away and became a cheap political commentator. But I still write about it. I wrote the end of everything about war. So I still write books and scholarly articles about it. I try to write a scholarly article every couple of years. But it was kind of weird that anything written about the articles I wrote and books about hoplites, I would say after 2000, is pretty negative. Anything before is pretty positive.
- [49:05]
Sammy Wink
I just have one question about this. The whole idea, or the taboo, or the idea that it's immoral to kill somebody who is unarmed or the innocent, like women and children, does that start with the Greek warfare or is that something that's added with middle age?
- [49:24]
Victor Davis Hansen
No, it's always chivalry of the Middle ages. Got to remember all. It's like the 65 mile speed limit. When I talked about hoplite rules, people said, oh, well, they broke them. Look at here, they killed all the melen. Yes. And I just drove down the 99 and it says, 65 is the speed limit and only half of them are doing it, the rest are. So they tried to create protocols that were understood that you did not. That you did not use calvary or light armed like the Thracians to go into Michalis and butcher everybody. Thucydides looked at the Peloponnesian War and it was 27 and a half years long. And he says the system broke down. Basically, they did sieges, they killed people, they executed prisoners at Corcyra, they went tit for tat. It was horrible. The people, they went into a schoolhouse and meet callouses and butchered people, kids. So the system broke down. But the system originally, as Demosthenes says, there were certain protocols about. In the old days, people used to settle their accounts. Everybody would dress up in heavy armor, they would form the phalanx, they would collide, and after battle they would abide by this decision. That was the ideal, but doesn't mean the ideal was followed. And after Alexander the Great, he said, I like this system of heavy infantry. Just add heavy cavalry, lengthen the spears and we will take it all over the world. Because nobody has infantry like the Greeks. He killed more Greek infantry than the Greeks did that fought against him and Isis and Granicus. Probably mercenaries. But anyway, I haven't kept up the last five years. There's been all sorts of books and things about it.
- [51:14]
Sammy Wink
But still to my question, and the reason I'm asking it is because when we look at modern warfare or the history of it and the what was right and what was wrong, of course, the atomic bomb on the Japanese, the way that it's presented as wrong and immoral is that it killed civilians. And that tradition comes out of the West.
- [51:37]
Victor Davis Hansen
No, it doesn't.
- [51:40]
Sammy Wink
It doesn't come with the Greeks. It's not a Middle Ages to kill civilians, not to kill.
- [51:44]
Victor Davis Hansen
Yes, it is more prevalent and part of that is Christianity. So in 1453 and May 29, in the last hours of Christendom and Constantinople, what were the priests doing on the walls of Constantinople? There's only 7,000 defenders left, they were saying, giving them. They were absolving them of a mortal sin if they killed the attackers. Right. In other words, if you kill the attackers that are coming up here, you can still go to heaven. And what were the people, the 200,000 Muslims below getting? You're going to get X number of virgins in paradise if you kill one of those Christians. So it was very different. It didn't mean that the people in the walls were not vicious. They were and they did kill prisoners that they took. But the west has tried to have more rules and regulations. So it's no accident that the Versailles Treaty outline poison gas or Grotius, the I think he's the Dutch philosopher, wrote a handbook of what would be the laws of war or in classical times you can see in various philosophical illusions you don't kill innocent people, but doesn't mean they didn't do it all the time. But part of the problem of the scholarly world is they have no perspective. So you write something like that and you can say that 70% of the examples show you there was a code. And then somebody writes an article and says well look at this, they didn't do that, you're wrong. Mr. Mr. Professor, this. And they don't have any, you know what I mean? If you say that Alexander expanded, Alexander expanded hoplite warfare and he divorced it from morality and he used it year round just to destroy things or destroy the Persians or whatever. And there was no code. He didn't necessarily sacrifice in front of battle. He didn't fight. Yes, and then there'll be somebody said but, but after he died there was a hoplite battle between city states, therefore you're wrong. Whatever. I mean there things happen. The system slowly eroded. But it was very controversial when I wrote the West, Carnage and Culture and it came out right before I didn't know there's gonna be an Iraq war. And so some people would say to me, well, what do you think's gonna happen in Iraq? And I would say things, well, I don't think Iraq has the ability to come over the United States and invade us because they don't. They're not an incubator of technology. If you were making a lighthouse in Istanbul, I don't know in 1750 somebody was going to tell you that challenges the supremacy of Allah, the all knowing God. You have no right to do that. So there was greater restraints on research and knowledge in the non western world. If somebody said that canon needs more iron and less bronze, there was no outside king to say don't do that. It was all utilitarian. And that's partly capitalism, the free market. So there were a lot of different things that allowed the west to be more dynamic. And then people said, well, Viktor Hansen wrote a book and said the Western way of war, the Carnesian culture, they always win because they're western. And I found out, look at Vietnam. Yes, look at Vietnam. That was an impossible wrong headed intervention. We went all the way across the world. We fought, we fought and we just decided it wasn't worth it. But if you look at the technology that the North Vietnamese, I think the AK47 came from automatic rifle 1947 out of the Soviet Union and Western trained engineers who had a lot of cross fertilization with German automatic semi automatic weapons. And if you look at The jets, the MiG jets, they came out of Germany. So you can, there's a Western embryo for all of that and the fact and that dynamism and China, to the degree that it's going to challenge us, look at their uniforms, look at their medals, look at their, their naval and military academies, look at their aircraft carriers, look at, look at their tanks, look at their personal weapons, look at their armor. It's all derived from the West.
- [56:25]
Sammy Wink
You mean it's not following Sun Tzu.
- [56:28]
Victor Davis Hansen
Sung Tzu had a very different. Well, it's, I'm glad that you mentioned that because he wrote the Art of War and he wrote it just about the time. Well, it's debated because it's embedded. But there was a Western author, Aeneas Tacticus, on the siege craft. They had nothing to do with each other, but one wrote in Greece and one wrote in Chinese, completely separate and you can see the difference. Sun Tzu says if you want to take a city, basically you've got to know about the Yang and the Yang and the hot and the cold and all these philosophical and you read neost tactic it's to take a Greek city you must go over, under or through. And here's how you do it. There's no religion, there's no philosophy. It's just this is the empirical problem, here's the solution. Here are the alternative exegesis here, how we adjudicate each one period. And that's a very amoral but very amoral in the sense that's not connected necessarily with extraneous ideas other than get to get the job done. So.
- [57:41]
Sammy Wink
So Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about China and Iran. Stay with us and we'll be right back. Welcome back to Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. You can find these podcasts on Rumble, YouTube and on Spotify and the audio is on Spotify and Apple podcasts. So please join us in whatever your forum is. And I do have to say I admire the audio people. I, I find myself liking it better to listen to the audio. So Victor, let's start with China, since we were right there. Anyway, the recent word or news out there is that or actually it's a question is China going to. What's the United States going to do if China tries to invade Taiwan? And I was wondering if you had any thoughts on that.
- [58:39]
Victor Davis Hansen
First of all, in this rivalry, each side has leverage, okay? To get a. China has. Let me rephrase that. China has been operating at the expense of us on a flawed George H.W. bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama thesis. The more you allow them to cheat, steal patents, copyrights, manipulate the currency, dump product at below market cost to get market share, make a mercantile belt and road and imperialism. The more they'll be affluent. The more affluent they'll get, the more leisure they'll get. The more leisure to get, the more they want freedom and they will democratize. They didn't. All they did is use that chickenry to get very wealthy. And they're still communist, but they have a sort of free market to get more communism in a weird paradoxical way. So they each. We're trying to stop that and restore our own industrial base and make the world trade fairly. And we have to. We have certain leverages. One is tariffs. One is their 300,000 students. One is our allies that surround them like Japan, Australia, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan. I could go on, but that's enough. And they have leverage over us. One is sending fentanyl to Mexico to kill 70,000Americans a day to work and then launder the cartel profits for them. One is to use the students to steal technology. One of them is to violate the Monroe Doctrine and put pro Chinese people in Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia to surround us like we are doing to them. And one of them is to threaten to invade Taiwan so to make us take troops away from various areas and make sure they cannot react. So what are we going to do if they actually invade? I don't know if they think invading is their first choice. The first choice is to use cyber war, boycotts, espionage and then maybe second phase would be embargoes or blockades. They want us to make them first move because they're looking at Ukraine and Ukraine was not decapitated by that Soviet Russian, excuse me, attempt to take Kiev and now it's Stalingrad. They do not want that and they know the world is angry at Russia and it's poor. So they're saying in their Potterboro that we're not going to do that. It's going to be swift. It's not. It's going to be so our commitment to Taiwan. I got in trouble at the Hoover for saying this. Some people wrote me and very angry at Hoover. But it depends on whether Taiwan that are Chinese spend enough money that we think they're going to actively resist. So they're spending less than 3% GDP. That's kind of like NATO was before Trump made them. They need to be spending 5% to send the message to us, we are rearming. We will fight on the beaches, we will fight in the air, we will fight at sea. We're desperate. We need your help. And if they do that, then we will help them. But if they don't, and they don't rearm fully and they don't say we're going to die trying to save Taiwan, then we're not going to send some guy from Fresno all the way over there to die unless we know they're committed. They say they're committed, but we're wait. I think that commitment has to be reified by at least 5% GDP. They have the biggest chip factory in the world in Taiwan, supplies most of the world's sophisticated chips. And we wanted them to move it here. They're doing that now, but they didn't want to because they thought that was a reason why China wouldn't invade. If they destroyed it, you know, the world wouldn't have. So we'll see what happens. I said that and people said, no, that's not a reason. We have to just give them an iron clad. Why would we do that? We gave it. South Korea is armed. That's why that we still have 23,000 troops there. If they decided they were going to be like Spain and spend 1% of GDP, and even though they have a declining birth rate and they're backsliding, they're still armed. Japan is rearming like crazy. It's kind of impressive. I mean, the aircraft carriers they're buying, I think they have more F35 jets than any NATO power. So if they want to fight and they're willing to die for the independence and autonomy of of Taiwan, it's likely United States is going to help them. If we feel they're backsliding or they're doing secret deals or there's people in Taiwan that just want to be like Hong Kong, kind of a protectorate of communist, then why would we do it?
- [64:07]
Sammy Wink
Trump seems to be trying what he did with Putin, which is to flatter G a little. He said he's a formidable man and he's a great negotiator. So he was give him a little bit of flattery and then he said, but we'll do what we need to do, basically.
- [64:25]
Victor Davis Hansen
To the reporter, yeah, I'm writing that sequel to the Trump book. I'm doing the edits for the publisher. So I've just been reading the manuscript again, which I submitted in August. Read Art of the Deal, Art of the comeback. There's 11 of them, I think, and Joe Biden violated every one of them. You don't say Putin is a killer before you're going to negotiate with him. You say, he's a formidable, I have a lot of respect for his power. And then you negotiate and you go and you demand 80% of a deal and he brokers you down to 55. And then you say, oh, my God, you took me to the cleaners. And then you get the advantage and you go back out and the press goes, what do you think of Putin? I don't know. What do you think of him? But he's a sharp negotiator. So Chi, if you're reading Art of the Deal, we're going to have 180% tear off, tear off. We're going to get our own rare minerals where he said all that. And then what do you think about Chi? Well, you know, he's a smart cookie. You got to be careful with him. He's, I've been in the room. I have a very good relationship. But we're going to get 180. And then you go in there and 175, 65, 55, 45. And you make a deal. And then you say he, gosh, you tell everybody, don't tell anybody that we got advantage. Tell them that was close because we had to make a deal. And if you humiliate him, he'll want to come back and renegotiate. So we praise him and that's what all it was. Just read the book and everything makes sense.
- [66:00]
Sammy Wink
All right, let's turn to Iran. We haven't heard much about Iran lately, but I was, I followed a link from powerline.powerlineblog.com just so everybody give them a little, a little good press. And it was on Iran. And the basic argument of the article was that Iran is showing signs of confidence despite having their nuclear facilities taken out. And they want to, to, of course, rebuild their nuclear facilities and they plan to be aggressive in the future and that the United States diplomacy should take that into consideration in shaping what they are going to do. And I thought that was an interesting article because nobody's talking about, I mean, we always think Iran now is the wounded dog, but it was arguing that, no, don't look at it that way.
- [66:59]
Victor Davis Hansen
Well, it's the wounded dog. It is. It has no nuclear active facilities that I think anybody knows of. It's expended or had destroyed most of their missiles and drones. Its clientele and surrogates, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis are licking their wounds. However, they don't see it that way. They see it this way. It was so controversial for the United States to go in there and it took so long for them to do it, they'll probably never do it again. Number one, even if they want to do it again, there's a 50, 50 chance we'll get a Biden and Obama and they'll beg us to get in the Iran deal and they will lift the terrorist designation of all of our surrogates and they will beg us and most importantly, lift the sanctions off and we will get billions like we did under Biden in oil revenues and we will hit their people in Syria 130 times. And then they didn't do one thing. That was their surrogates. So that's what they're thinking. So what we'll do is we'll just do the old charm offensive. We'll have the president of Iran, he doesn't have any power, but he'll just go talk to Tucker and say we want to be peaceful, we're responsible, very nice people. And we'll get some Iranian Americans that are not quite pro American and we'll have them talk and about how everything is changing. And then we'll just wait and we'll get the Chinese and the Russian. The Russians are bogged down. They got kicked out of the Middle east and Syria. But the Chinese, we were their surrogate and they were humiliated because our surrogate, if you look at that in real politic terms, was Israel and it destroyed Iran, so to SPE speak. So China will want to get us back up to parity. So as we speak, China is sending them its air defense systems, missiles, North Korea's their surrogate and in probably five years they'll be back to where they were. So then the question is, and is Israel and the US going to be static during those years? In other words, will we keep supplying Israel with sophisticated weapons? Will we keep the embargo on? It depends. If Mandami is present, we'll be on Iran's side. If Nick Fuentes is present, we'll be on Iran side. So it depends on whether you have a conservative deterrent president who's willing to keep the embargoes on till the government is gone in around.
- [69:45]
Sammy Wink
What if you have mamdani as a vice president with Gavin Newsom, which is probably something more likely that the Democrats are.
- [69:57]
Victor Davis Hansen
There would be a lot of Iranian money to trace to their campaign because that's what they want.
- [70:02]
Sammy Wink
True. Yeah. Well, let's turn then to Mexico because very sad thing happened. The mayor, Carlos Manzo in I think it was the western part of Mexico, was assassinated by. Pretty sure it's by the cartels, although the investigation hasn't finished yet. And he was a. He fought the cartels and he was very critical of Shine bomb on her failure to fight the cartels. So he was one of those rare mayors and political voices in Mexico that was trying to put more force to curtail what cartels.
- [70:44]
Victor Davis Hansen
Very tragic because he knew he was going to be shot. And he had tried to get his security detail and he tried to see if he could authenticate the loyalty of each one of them. He was shot at public at a Day of the Dead festival. Somebody must have got. Gotten to his security detail, knew where he was and how it reacted to be able to get that close and shoot him. He was killed. The assassin. I bet they will find he had cartel or government connections. The cartels run Mexico. The area Micho Khan, Oaxaca, Chiapa. That area of southern Mexico toward Guatemala is the most indigenous. Nahutul, the original language of the Aztecs and indigenous people is still known to be spoken in places. Part of the phenomenon of illegal immigration is that the original diaspora from Mexico came from northern Mexico. And these were people who were not as poor. They had greater experience with the English language. Many. Most came legally and they were, I guess you would say they had a lot of Spanish descent. The last 30 years, the caravans and all of that have come from deep in Mexico. And they haven't been just ad hoc like northern Mexico. They were organized and they are indigenous people. And many of them, you know, I. I have gone to the bank in my local town and someone did not speak Spanish very well who was from Mexico and that the teller had problems understanding him. And I just said, I think he. He speaks an indigenous dialogue, you know, dialect. And I've seen people in our community that come from that area. Not all, but they are very identifiable. I think everybody has to understand that the whole illegal immigration process has certain things that we don't fathom that have a lot to do with Mexico and very little to do with us. So if I go to the supermarket or the bank, I see two types of people who have recently immigrated from Mexico. Once in a while I see somebody from northern Mexico. And if you said to me that person is Italian or Greek, you would not know. Or if you said that person is Irish. Half of my family was Irish, my mother's side, and Welsh. And they used to laugh about black Irish. And that was a word for people with black hair and black eyebrows. And I saw a person. When I see people from Mexico who are illegal and don't say, speak English, I can. I try to listen to their Spanish, and I can understand more of it. And more importantly, they look indistinguishable there. Some of them are whiter than I am. When people come from deep Mexico, they tend to be looking more like indigenous people. They're shorter, they're darker, they have more indigenous features. And they have been subject to institutionalized racism in Mexico. In Mexico, and it's much more violent. It's more Central America than North America. And so these gangs and cartels get their strength from that area, mostly. And the people who are coming in this diaspora the last 30 years are coming from that area. So when I was in grammar school, when we had a new arrival then, our first grade class from Mexico, I can remember a guy named Asario and Johnny. They didn't look any different than anybody else. They spoke English pretty well. Their parents were green card holders. And I'd say I went to first grade with them. And I would say by eighth grade, they didn't speak Spanish at all. They've forgotten it. And today they're all industry. But when you see people from Michokan, it's a very different process of assimilation, acculturation, integration. It's much harder. And people don't understand that. When you bring in millions of people en masse that don't know English, they don't have skills, they're here illegally, and they're from an impoverished indigenous culture. It's much harder to deal with that than the sporadic episodic immigration of people from northern Mexico who had more money, more skills than they knew English. I had a great. In 1984, I had a contractor who was picking or raising grapes. I will. I know his name, but I will use another name. I'll say it was Juanito. It wasn't, but I would talk to him all the time. He had blue eyes and blond hair, and he'd said, under Korea, I guess, the economy was collapsed. And then one day, two women came out with him, and I thought they were his wife. One had blonde hair and went blonde, you know, white, and spoke perfect English. But when she spoke Spanish, that sounded like my high school Spanish teacher, perfectly grammatically correct. And I said is that your wife? He said no, those are my two sisters. And I said well, where did you come from? She goes we dropped out of the university because Mexico's a mess. I said yeah, but what are you doing? Well, we're involved in labor contracting but I'm getting my nursing degree. So I mean that, that's, it's just a whole different phenomenon than what we're seeing during the Biden administration with these caravans. And I think people don't here don't understand that. And that's why some of the Hispanic vote was against illegal immigration because a lot of people were third, fourth, second generation and they had fully assimilated and they came legally and they have relatives that come legally and they saw a different type of immigration and they didn't approve of it. Okay, Victor, so sorry I'm getting hoarse.
- [77:31]
Sammy Wink
We do. I know so as, as I do at the end of the show and so does Jack Read the comments. The comments are generally speaking love Victors, common sense, love Victor's knowledge. Thank you for sharing it with us. And here are two that say something a little bit different. One's a little bit longer, so be patient with me. Elizabeth Glickman, 2725 writes. Oh Victor, always adore your program. This touched me deeply and this was you and Jack on Tuesday, your story about your first encounter with drip irrigation 1970. A kid out of the university I find found myself working in a peach orchard in the Gaza envelope a kibbutz called urine lights three pails on my arms going up ladders and mid afternoon mud fights. Drip irrigation. I'm not sure what that means. I guess they all they could get was a little bit of mud from under each one of the drip but anyways Urim the caboots was supposed to be attacked on October 7th. It was a miracle it escaped P S Moving to Jerusalem this winter. It's too scary in the northeast. Come visit. My future husband is a general and also a military historian and as good as you. And this is from James Knowles66665 thank you VDH for pointing out that pointing that out. Netanyahu broke up the kibbutz system of control over commerce and thus freedom. No wonder Netanyahu is hated by the leftists. And finally Gracie 289. Thank you Victor and Jack, I can always count on you for being bringing us the quote rest of the story from all the other news. No one else can do what you do in the way you do it you are the best. I thought that was good because everybody compliments you on bringing the news to, to them and, and wisdom and truth. But she said, the rest of you.
- [79:37]
Victor Davis Hansen
Know when we put in the first 20 acres in 1980 of drip and there was an Israeli supplier and they had an American engineer, he was from Holland, brilliant guy. And he put it in. And then he took me to the side and said, they said you went to Stanford University. I said, yes. He said, you can figure all this out. I got these big accounts. I don't really want to come over here for small ones, but you can figure it out. And he gave me a little manual and I said my degree was in classics. He said, well, you have to know math to figure out Greek. He was a Dutch. Dutch means they know Latin and everything. So he connected me with the Israeli representative, Netafilm or whatever it was. So he came out. So he says, where do you want to put it? And I said, this. 20 acres. How long are the roads? I said, 600ft. How many? What's the gallon per minute of your pump? What's the filtration rate you want? What kind of. What do you expect? And then he said, we'll get a half a gallon. And I'm saying, wait, wait, you're an educated person. You have more education, emotional. And he had it all in his head. I said, I'm not a physicist. You sound like a nuclear physicist. He had it all in his head. So then he said, sit down. So he just wrote out, these are the emitters, these are the length of the runs. This is the type of filter system. Here is this, this, this here is our catalog. Call me and you'll order. And we did. But I mean he was the most brilliant guy, the Israeli. Well, the Dutch guy was too. I was like an ignoramus. But we put it in. We put in 50 acres. I put in myself. It's still out there. I mean, oh, excuse me. Our renner tore it all out and put a new system in when I put almonds in. But very brilliant people in Israel and in Europe.
- [81:49]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, I had a brother in law who sold packing equipment for a company and he was an engine. He engineered it to his electrician. Well, he went. So he. His favorite places to go. And these were the. Almost the only ones he ever went to were Israel and South Africa. And that's where they sold that.
- [82:07]
Victor Davis Hansen
It's incredible. That's what. Another thing I don't understand all these anti. You know, we're got on Nick Fuentes today And Israel's not on our. You should go over to Israel and talk to people. And they're. I don't like to stereotype countries, but there is no more inquisitive, highly educated, empirical people in the world. Their only problem is there's only 11 million of them in Israel. But my gosh, it's terms of GDP and discoveries and Nobel Prize winners, even though they're prejudiced against the Israelis, that it's a very. You know, the one thing about agriculture, everybody does it all over the world, and the brightest people want to come to California. It's got the best soils and it's got the best climate and it's got a huge population of consumers. So when I meet farmers, I can tell you person that rents from mine, Furman Compost is a Basque immigrant. His father came with nothing. Nothing. He owns thousands of acres. And I have a neighbor who's from India. They came with a little bit, but they were really brilliant. I had another neighbor who was Armenian. They came not only with nothing, but they were all. All wiped out in the two Turkish genocides. I have another neighbor who for years came from Mexico. He had nothing. But there's something about a natural diversity. And you can't bs if I could use that term your way. It's either you produce the crop or you go broke. And I. Whether you like it or not, you're competing with other farmers. It's just a fact. When prices go low, as one guy said that we have to eat each other's shorts. And one guy, really, I'll leave with this. I was. Raisins went from 1400 to 400. And we were. We lost 180,000. Sun made, went broke. We lost our capital, retained 70,000. We had too many people working 180 acres. I went and started teaching, but one of the people from India came over and I was. I had no money and I was painting this old. I. I made myself an old hoist. Hoist. I put ropes on me and I threw it over the top of the top story. And then I tied it to the back of the truck. And one time somebody's person didn't know that and got in the truck and started to go. And I was being pulled up the side of the house. But anyway, I was. Every day after work, about. I had an hour, I would chip paint off and paint because the house was falling apart. I had no money. And this guy comes in. He was from India. Yes. Yes. Victor, I like you, what you're doing. I said, what am I doing? He said, you're painting my palace. I said, no, I'm painting my house. No, no, no, you're painting my house. I said, how can you say that? He goes, you went to the university. Did you ever take Read Van Mises? Milton Friedman? I said, yes. He goes, it's competition. The price is $500 a ton. I see you boys, you don't know what you're doing. You need $800 a ton. You must be losing three or four hundred dollars. You have no outside capital. I have my money from India. I pay my workers less than you do. They work harder. You're later. He said this. The two people that work for you are obese. I see them. They are all sweaty. They're diabetic. How can you get work out of them? And he went on and on. He gave me a whole exegesis of our whole farming plan. So I said, well, what is the bottom line? The bottom line is you are painting my house because you will go broke. And I have sufficient capital. And I like your acreage. I like the location. It's close to me. So I will make you an offer in a year or two. I thought, this guy is an outer space. I never heard of such an attitude. And then all of a sudden, I went to the land bank and we were losing $200,000 and missed the. This old cranky Swede said, I don't know what you're doing, but seems to me, Mr. Hansen, that you got some education and your brother. I think you're paying $10 an hour for the joy of driving a tractor. I said, what do you mean? I think you. $3,000, 10,000. $10 an hour. Maybe it's 20. You're paying 60, $70,000 each of you to lose money so you can drive a tractor. Now, wouldn't you rather go up and get a clean suit of clothes? It was very sad. I wrote a book called Fields Without Dream that's out in paperback this week, a new edition. But I was very sad because that guy who died, the person who said we were going to go broke and he was going to buy, he said, 30 years from now, you'll all be broke. Well, he died, but his family's still there. And then the person who was the land bank said, and you're all going to put people. Yeah, he's change accent. He said, I think you're all going to be broke. You'll split it up, be nothing left. I said, I resent that. Well, you may resent it, Mr. Hansen, but for Right or wrong, you got an education. If you were there, you go up and teach high school, anything you can get. And then you take half your salary and you put it in that money losing hole called the raisin industry. And if you do that, you might last five more years. I know, it was really terrible. I. I would like to say to the ghost of both. It's 2005 and it had. I'm 72 and that's been 42 years ago. And I have my little 40 acres paid for and I have my house all fixed up and I'm here and you're not.
- [87:54]
Sammy Wink
Because you worked outside of the farm?
- [87:56]
Victor Davis Hansen
Because I not. No, no, no, no. But I worked out of the side of the farm. And when I told both those people, they said, well, Victor, you need to get some outside income. And I said, well, I went to the university. Oh, yes. But they said, you know the Greek language or you speak Greek, who cares about that? And the other guy said, well, you get a high school. I said, well, I have a PhD in Stanford. Well, what's it in? I said, it's in classical language. But the irony was, classical languages gave me everything because I was able to learn how to read and write and grammar and syntax and literature and history. So my poor mother who died, I'd come home in 25. I said, I really blew my life. I spent four years undergraduate, I lived in Greece almost two and a half years. I got a PhD in four years. And it's all for nothing. I'm pruning. She. It's not all for nothing. It's not all for nothing. You never know when those skills will pop out of your head. So I.
- [88:54]
Sammy Wink
Good job, mom.
- [88:54]
Victor Davis Hansen
Yeah, my mom. I have nothing but reverence from her. I'll see her someday.
- [89:00]
Sammy Wink
We're on a hard break.
- [89:01]
Victor Davis Hansen
Yes, we are.
- [89:02]
Sammy Wink
So we gotta get going. We'd like to thank our audience for joining us and thank Victor, too, for his wisdom this afternoon.
- [89:09]
Victor Davis Hansen
Thank you, everybody.
- [89:10]
Sammy Wink
This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen and we're signing off.
- [89:13]
Victor Davis Hansen
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 website@victorhansen.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.