← Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
Victor Davis Hanson: Trump Calls Out Europe in New National Security Strategy
01:22:50
On this episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” Victor Davis Hanson and Jack Fowler dive into how President Donald Trump’s newly revealed national security strategy statement takes Europe to task. They also ask the question, "Will Western Civilization in Europe be around in 100 years?"
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- [00:00]
Victor Davis Hanson
The subtext, Jack, was everything that we outline that's wrong with Europe is known to Europeans. And there's probably a majority of Europeans in the 30 EU nations that now, I mean the NATO nations, 31, who say to themselves, we know what the problem is, we don't produce energy. We could, we're spending too much on electricity. Our businesses are not competitive. We can't assimilate these people. And that group is probably 53 or 54%. And the people who run the institutions and the government say we're not going to let them. They're Nazis, they're racists. And so Europe knows now what it has to do. It's just a question of how obstructive will be this post war left wing utopian order. And they're, and they're going to do anything. They're going to find Elon Musk, what was it, $170 million?
- [00:48]
Jack
Yeah, I think 140.
- [00:50]
Victor Davis Hanson
140. Just because he won't censor speech, they're going to delay elections, they're going to do anything they can. And what Trump is saying is if you do all that, we're not going to be your friend anymore.
- [01:12]
Jack
Well, hello ladies and hello, gentlemen. Welcome to Victor Davis Hanson in his own Words. We are recording on Saturday, December 6th, and this episode is up on Thursday, December 11th. Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. And, and he is a senior contributor at the Daily Signal, which is the happy home of this podcast. Victor's got a website, the Blade of Perseus. You'll find it@VictorHansen.com, you should subscribe. I will tell you why later in this episode that you should do that. Victor. We're going to talk today a bunch of eclectic matters, but we should start off with Donald Trump's recent National Security Strategy statement that really levels a cultural shot at, at Europe. And then we have some ongoing madness in the United Kingdom under the leadership now of Prime Minister Keir Starmer. England, the home of the trial by jury now wants to get rid of such amongst many other cultural revolutionary things the labor government is trying to do there. Trump derangement syndrome. Very interesting piece in the New York Post on that. Mondami, the forthcoming mayor of New York, is promising to essentially bring back homeless encampments. And we have other topics too. We'll get to all of these when we return from these important messages.
- [02:44]
Hans von Spakowski
Right is still right, even if you stand by yourself.
- [02:49]
Jack
Mr. Chief justice, may I place the court?
- [02:52]
Hans von Spakowski
This is Hans von Spakowski host of.
- [02:54]
Jack
The Case in Point podcast, which looks at the hottest cases affecting politics, culture and everyone's daily lives.
- [03:01]
Hans von Spakowski
But we talk about them without confusing legal jargon. And we have interesting guests like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. And we end with reviews of classic.
- [03:10]
Victor Davis Hanson
Hollywood movies relevant to the topic.
- [03:13]
Hans von Spakowski
Case in Point, the podcast available everywhere.
- [03:16]
Jack
You won't want to miss. Hey, folks, we're back with Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. So I guess we'll begin the show, Victor, with a little let's go on the other side of the pond there. We'll talk about Europe and we'll start off with Donald Trump's latest national security strategy statement. I'm looking at today's New York Post, which has an article on it, and here's what the statement says. We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self confidence and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation, reads the Trump signed document that was posted online yesterday. From the day we're speaking, we will oppose elite driven anti democratic restrictions on core liberties in Europe, the Anglosphere and the rest of the democratic world, especially among our allies. The report says, quote, we reject the disastrous climate change and net zero ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threaten the United States and subsidize our adversaries. Much more to this report. Victor, what are your thoughts on this?
- [04:36]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, I read the report and everybody's angry about it because it didn't have the usual boilerplate. The United States is going to partner with our European allies and strengthen they owe our role of the UN Is essential. We need to increase our foreign aid to get the message of about democracy abroad to our brothers in Africa and Asia and we're working with our partners and that kind of stuff. There were essentially three things. Four things it said, number one, here at home, we're going to open up, deregulate, lower, tax the economy and get it booming foreign investment, more energy. And therefore the United States will be better able to help its friends, hurt its enemies and defend itself. It'll have more money. Number two, we're going to concentrate on the Western hemisphere. It makes no sense to go spend 2, 3, 400 billion in Ukraine or the Middle east and go to war in Afghanistan or when right in our backyard you have Chinese coming into Panama, Chinese and Russians coming into Venezuela, 8 million Venezuelans leaving the country, 75,000Americans getting killed every year from Venezuelan or Mexican cartel drugs. So we're going to look, we're going to reestablish the Monroe Doctrine and we're going to keep. The most controversial was a third, and that is we're going to predicate our associations on shared mercantile interest. In other words, we're not just going to give money to a country. We're going to say to them, if you adopt capitalist practices and we will come in and develop your ore or your rare earth minerals or your oil in a very. We'll have our private companies and we'll be better than the Chinese that are ripping you off. That's basically the subtext. So we're going to compete with the Silken Road, the Belt Road, whatever you want to call it, Chinese investment. But we're going to do it more equitably and then the most and then where I had some criticism. I don't think it, it said that China and Russia were threats, but there are, there are three main threats. Iran, China, Russia. And I don't think it targeted them in that fashion. It already talked about how much weaker Iran was, but Iran is already talking to the Europeans about a new Iranian deal. And Europeans think they're going to take over the negotiations because they're not threatened anymore. But the way they'll do it, they'll allow them to get close to a bomb again. China, we shouldn't be putting in 600,000 students here from China. We should expel the 300,000 that are already here because 10% of them are engaged in espionage. And then the Russians, it's. They're right about. We need to partner with Russia and have a detente. But. And we need to, you know, not isolate Russia. But you've got to. Russia has certain. It has three strengths that are antithetical, that are not in our interest. It has a lot of oil and it has two oil, three oil hungry partners next to it, China, India and Europe. And it can go forever with foreign exchange. And now it has so much natural gas and then two, it expends money. Money. It expends money and I, I should say blood and treasure in war, it doesn't really matter to them how much money they spend or how many people they get killed. Once the Russian army, whether it's in 1918 or 19, 1944, they will spend what it is for their strategic objective. Even in Afghanistan, where they lost, they lost a terrible amount of people. So they don't. So they're dangerous. Number two, they have oil. They're dangerous and they have three, they have 6,000 nukes. The thing about Europe, the last one was the most controversial because we were lecturing Europe, they said well, we. Now they're letting us just go our own way. No, they didn't. They said, we just can't offend you anymore because we just pay the bulk. We're the most generous of the NATO allies and we're the most distant from where the problems are. And we keep telling you that your GDP is declining radically as a percentage of the world's economy. Your fertility rate's down to 1.4. Your aging, you've got millions of these antithetical immigrants coming in that hate your culture. They're going to be dominant majorities in 30 or 40 years and you have to rearm. But we just can't beg you anymore. You don't do it. So we're trying to suggest you follow our model because we made the same mistakes that you do. Get back to natural gas and oil and nuclear and hydro development and get competitive. Open up your economies. You're capitalists, not socialists. Close your borders. Encourage family formation and two or three children and rearm. Rearm. And if you can do that, we would like you to be an equal partner, not a hire lien or a client. And that's got everybody angry. But that was the message. It was more of a message that I read it, that they wanted to be a partner with a strong Europe and they were tired of being the patron and, and they were the client and that's why they're angry now. Suddenly the subtext, Jack, was everything that we outline that's wrong with Europe is known to Europeans. And there's probably a majority of Europeans in the 30 EU nations that now, I mean the NATO nations, 31, who say to themselves, we know what the problem is, we don't produce energy. We could, we're spending too much on electricity. Our businesses are not competitive. We can't assimilate these people. They hate us, they hate Christianity. And we're over regulated and socialized and we've got to get people more independent and we got to spend more in defense. And that group is probably 53 or 54%. And the people who run the institutions and the government say, we're not going to let them speak.
- [11:20]
Jack
Right.
- [11:21]
Victor Davis Hanson
They're Nazis, they're racists. We're going to. In England, you said they're counseling trial by jury. In many cases they're also out. They, they delayed the local elections. They just changed. They said, no, we're not going to have local elections because they know that the Labor Party will be wiped out. And in Germany, the alternative for Deutschland has some radicals, it has some extremists but it represents 40% of the people. And if you keep demonizing it as Nazis, you're only going to make it bigger. France Macron has no popular support. He's gonna. And Spain is a lunatic country. Now the government, but most of the others are starting to become more conservative and the ones I mentioned have conservative oppositions that are growing in strength. And so Europe knows now what it has to do. It's just a question of how obstructive will be this post war left wing utopian order. And they're gonna do anything. They're gonna find Elon Musk, what was it, $170 million?
- [12:21]
Jack
Yeah, I think 140.
- [12:22]
Victor Davis Hanson
140. Just because he won't censor speech, they're going to delay elections, they're going to do anything they can to sustain. And what Trump is saying is if you do all that, we're not going to be your friend anymore. So let's hope they do.
- [12:36]
Jack
One of the end games for Europe, Victor, the assimilation. Let's say you're Germany and you had the moxie somehow to take all the Syrians and other illegals who came in thanks to Angela Merkel and throw them out of the country, get rid of them. You still have a country where the fertility rate is. So it's just a death wish, it's a death spiral. So I certainly advocate personally you're getting rid of people that will not assimilate into Western civilization. But the larger issue is, is there going to be a Western civilization 100 years if people just have an inability or refusal to reproduce?
- [13:20]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, there's just two, there's just three choices. Can people who were born in Europe have 2.1 children? Better to have three. And number two, will the 50, 60, 70 million people that are in there, will they acculturate and become European? And right now it looks like answer number one is no. They're not going to harm their lifestyle when they have full benefits for everything by having to stay up night with little babies and change diapers. And number two, the Islamic community feels that they say this all the time. They can do with the womb what they couldn't do with arms. So they're going to keep having three or four children and they're not going to assimilate. And given that three, what is the plan? What is the plan? And the plan is Europe is going to go Back to what, 1100, 1200 A.D. when you have independent fiefdoms, or you're going to have an Islamic El Andalus in Spain, a whole enclave and a Dearborn, Michigan, the size of a country. I don't know. But I'll tell you one thing. Listening to Ilhan Omar when she says Somaliland, only for Somalis. There's one big difference between Islam and Christianity. And the historian Tom Holland mentioned that a lot in his writings. He's a great historian. In the Christian world, you can be an apostate, you can be an atheist, you can be agnostic, you can be a deist. You don't have to be. And Christianity is tolerant for that. They try to save your soul, but they understand there will be a kingdom outside of Christianity as long as Christianity is not threatened by it. That's a free choice. That's why the founders did not require a national relation. That's not true of an Islamic country. You have a Muslim dominant population. If you say, I am a Pakistani, I am a Saudi Arabia, I am a Syrian, I'm an Iraqi, I am a Gazan, and I don't like Islam, I'm not going to be a Muslim. You're not going to have an easy life. That's not going to be tolerated. Just not. Maybe in Egypt, you can say you're a Coptic, but even there the Copts are shrinking and leaving. You can say, I'm a Christian in Bethlehem, but you're mostly going to Israel or Europe. The United States survive.
- [15:57]
Jack
Yeah. Well, if you convert to Christianity in Bangladesh or Pakistan, you're going to become a martyr. It's just these things are just not tolerated. Where am I going to go to mass in Saudi Arabia? Where's the Catholicism?
- [16:14]
Victor Davis Hanson
And the weirdest thing is the alliance between the left and Islam. So the left will say Christian fanatics are destroying the country. And then they'll look at fanatic Islamics and they'll say, don't engage in Islamophobia because they. They feel that they share a hatred of the West. The left hates the West. So does Islam. And then, then you get into the Orwellian situations when they start to bond and you see them. And I could see gay students at Stanford protesting for Hamas next to radical Islamist students, and it didn't look very congenial, believe me. Yeah. If anybody with pink hair and a nose ring and a pride shirt thinks that they're going to go to Gaza and help out, good luck. You'll be hanging from a crane.
- [17:04]
Jack
Give it a shot, folks. Hey, Victor. You know, college is broken. Activist professors, seminars that feel like struggle sessions. $80,000 a year to hear Hamas chants on the quad while Being told America is evil in class. So what's the alternative? There's a new university in Texas that's, that's doing the opposite. It's called University of Austin, or uatx. Here's what really sets UATX apart and why students are turning down UChicago and transferring from Columbia to attend. At UATX, students are in small seminars taught by great professors. They read the great books of Western civilization to learn from them, not tear them down. They build actual companies on campus with mentorship from a vast network of top entrepreneurs and investors. You can be openly Christian or Jewish without apology. And when you walk into the main atrium, there's a giant American flag. UATX admits students based purely on test scores, so the applications take just five minutes. Oh, and another thing. Tuition is completely free forever. It's funded by American patriots who want to create the Navy Seals of the mind, not another generation of credentialed activists. To apply to the University of Austin, visit youaustin.org that's u a u s t I n.org uaustin.org and we thank the good people from UATX for sponsoring Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. I know they just received a hundred million dollar grant from. I forget his first name. Yass. I'm gonna say David Yass. It's Richard Yass out of Pennsylvania. Billionaire hedge fund guy. They are, they are. They have made tuition free and I think they're going to get a few more grants like that and make it free, permanent.
- [19:04]
Victor Davis Hanson
So I think it's a great place. My friend Neil Ferguson's on the board. I think Ayan Hersey Ali's on it, connected with it. It's wonderful. It's like Hillsdale. It's like Prageru, which is not a campus per se. It's like Thomas Aquinas. All these schools are little oases in a sea of madness, but they're all worth supporting. Hillsdale is. People should give to Hillsdale. University of Austin. We're doing our best at the Hoover Institution, Heritage Institution. All these places are trying to say, stop, this is killing us. Don't do it.
- [19:42]
Jack
Yeah, well, you know, we'll get to a little later about the state of education because no matter how much Hamas, madness or ideology is on college campuses, kids are coming in there de facto dopes. But we'll talk about that in a little bit. Right now, Victor, sticking with Europe. We mentioned before Keir Starmer, who's the prime minister, Labour prime minister of Britain, and he's actually Going around now saying he's a centrist, he's the only man that can save Britain politically. But here are the things that his reign of error, terror has included.
- [20:23]
Victor Davis Hanson
Just.
- [20:23]
Jack
I think it's not even two years that he's been Prime Minister. Mandatory digital IDs, as you mentioned before, the scrapping of jury trials, the postponement of elections, record tax burden, a lying about government finances, a surveillance culture. I mean, you not go anywhere. I, I even assume the bathroom in, in the, in the UK without there being some camera there, facial recognition. And then this. Of course you, you probably feel that this pain punishing pensioners, farmers and the disabled, they really make. I do not know how anyone can run a farm in, in England.
- [21:00]
Victor Davis Hanson
They love illegal immigrants from the third world and they hate their own farmers.
- [21:03]
Jack
Yeah. And here, Victor, I, I've got the wrong algorithm. So maybe the right algorithms on various social media things. But I, I've seen so many videos of, of three cops, seven cops going to someone, taking someone out of their home, arresting them because they posted something on Facebook or they said, yeah, I don't. I, I think Islam is diff. Is is hurting England. And you are going.
- [21:28]
Victor Davis Hanson
Britain does not have a written constitution. It doesn't have a Bill of Rights. It never did. Well, not like us. So all that saves America is the constitution, the Bill of Rights. Even then it's iffy when lower court judges try to undermine it. But he's a disaster. All he talks about is being the first gay Prime Minister. He's a hard leftist, he has about 12% popularity and he's in a parliamentary system that he can call the election and they try to wait in that system until the end party has a good shot and they call elections within a specific time limit.
- [22:09]
Jack
But I don't think it's till. There might not be elections there till 2029.
- [22:14]
Victor Davis Hanson
Possibly. Yeah, I think he can be there for a long, long time. And the people elected him, they get what they deserve.
- [22:20]
Jack
Yeah.
- [22:21]
Victor Davis Hanson
People in Minnesota want to reelect Tim Waltz. Then you'll have another Somali fraud bigger. Because then they'll think, wow, we stole a billion dollars. They only got a few of us, we'll steal five and see how. So they elected Mondami. They. They will have to.
- [22:39]
Jack
Yeah, well, we'll talk about him a little, a little later too, actually. Let's just. While you mentioned. Let's just pick it up now because he. There's a, There's a piece in today's New York Post, it's an op ed. Everyone will suffer from Mondami's foolish decision to end homeless camp sweep. So it's just this line or two from this piece. Mayor Alex Zorami on Thursday said he will end the clearance of homeless encampments in New York City. The inevitable result of this decision will be more crime and disorder on the streets and more deaths among the homeless themselves. Mondami claims the encampment clearances are cruel because they aren't, quote, connecting homeless New Yorkers to the housing they so desperately need, end quote. Victor, A lot of the homeless are people who are there from drug related or mental problems, et cetera. Why they want to stay on the streets is beyond me. I will say New York has not had what I've seen myself. In San Francisco, you don't walk down 42nd and you're at 42nd and 5th and this, that big New York Public Library with lines and sea, the steps are strewn with homeless like you would see in downtown San Francisco. But I think that's coming to New York. Yeah, it is.
- [23:59]
Victor Davis Hanson
Eric Adams actually did, finally was forced in. Remember he, he has those homeless shelters so that they bus people out and they have parking lots with tents and services. And that's what Mondami feels is unfair. In other words, if you don't have a source of income or you're not working and you're living on the streets, you defecate, you urinate, you inject on the streets. In the old days, it was humane, Eric Adams did, to put you in a tent city that had security and then you could live in your tent and you would have access to a meal and health care. And he says that that's unfair. They should be allowed to defecate and urinate right on the street in front of everybody, which they do in San Francisco and Los Angeles and Fresno for parts, although Fresno's been very good, cleaning up the homeless problem. But I don't know what the attitude, what his purpose is, what Mondani's purpose is with the homeless. Is it to tell wealthy people that we're going to unleash them on you? I don't know. I don't understand why anybody would not be against public health and cleanliness and keeping the street free of drugs and urination and defecation and, and helping get, allowing these people to have daily access to medical care. I don't, I don't understand it at all. What he's trying to do is. Unless he's just a nihilist.
- [25:31]
Jack
Well, yeah, a nihilist. A la, you know, the left which many on the left in various ways, who, who like to torment people and see and are thrilled with the destruction of things. Joe Biden was thrilled, was a destructive man. He's thrilled to destruction. You look in your state, Victor, where dams are being torn down and people are denied water, and that is something that gives a thrill up the leg to bureaucrats. Mondami polluting the streets of New York is an intentional thing. The left thrills to this.
- [26:09]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah. I don't know what it is. It's Karen Bass being in Uganda and then having no water in the hydrants and no water in the reserve lakes for the purposes of fire prevention and fighting and then not letting people clear hillsides of fuel. It's some kind of sick. Well, you live in Pacific Palisades and you think you're better than everybody with that big, nice home, well, we're just going to let you fend for yourself, is that it? I don't know. They just want to cause or they, they live, you know, they live in such nice homes themselves. They think the whole state's like that. They've never been around poor people or they've never been around gangs or they've never been around criminals. I don't know what it is, but they, they're not in the real world.
- [26:54]
Jack
I have to. I'm springing this on you. What are the roots in Greek philosophy slash drama, et cetera? What are the roots of chaos? I assume chaos is a Greek word, is it?
- [27:07]
Victor Davis Hanson
It's a goddess. Yeah. It's the void.
- [27:10]
Jack
Yeah. Oh, so it's a. Chaos is a God?
- [27:13]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yes. Oh, okay. Well, it's a pre God, pre Olympic. It's just the big vacuum, the nothingness.
- [27:19]
Jack
The tohu wabohu of the Bible. Okay.
- [27:22]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah.
- [27:22]
Jack
All right. Well, Victor, when we come back from the break, we're going to talk about Trump Derangement Syndrome. And we'll do that right after these important messages.
- [27:33]
Hans von Spakowski
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- [28:05]
Jack
We are back with Victor Davis Hansen In His Own words recording on Saturday, December 2nd, 6th. This episode is up on Thursday the 11th. Victor's website, the Blade of Perseus can be found@victorhansen.com and you'll find links galore to everything Victor writes. His weekly syndicated column, his weekly essay for American greatness, various appearances, his books, his many books. And then there are ultra articles. You see this little black box and how do you click on it? You're going to try to read and you can't. Why? You have to subscribe and you'll want to subscribe. You enjoy your thrill to Victor's wisdom. So it's 6:50amonth or discounted for the full year. $65. That's the blade of Perseus. Victorhansen.com Victor to further torment our listeners and viewers of the sound of my Bronx accent, I want to read a little something here and get your thoughts. And this has to do with Trump Derangement Syndrome. And this is a New York Post op ed by Jonathan Alpert. And he writes, trump Derangement Syndrome is real. These hysterical threats prove it. So his piece begins that he had written a piece on this, an op ed for the Wall Street Journal, which he said he expected to spark lively debate. I didn't anticipate a live demonstration of the very pathology I described. My column outlined a pattern I see in my psychotherapy practice every week. It's called obsessive political preoccupation, a presentation that resemble an obsessive compulsive pattern in which one political figure becomes the center of intrusive thoughts, heightened arousal and compulsive monitoring that takes over a person's mental bandwidth. Trump Durangeman Syndrome is not an actual diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and I made that clear in my article. But patients tell me about political thoughts that hijack their day, sleepless nights, irritability, anger and anxiety that spills into work and relationship. And finally, I just want to say, he writes that his op ed warned that emotional reasoning dominates much of our political culture. Disagreement is treated as cruelty, discomfort is treated as danger, et cetera. This is, you know, their outrage. When people come outraged, that is their evidence and their feelings become the argument. This is a really good piece, Victor.
- [30:39]
Victor Davis Hanson
It is Charles Krautheimer, the late Charles Kuttheimer. I knew him a little bit. I liked him a lot. Very magnanimous, kind person. But he was the one that invented Bush Derangement Syndrome during the Iraq war where people, no matter what it was, they despised George Bush. He also others had done it, but he kind of mainstreamed the idea that as soon as a Republican president who is called Hitler or the Prince of Darkness, recedes after his tenure into the ranch or the retirement. The Reagan ranch, the Bush ranch. Mar Lago. Not. No, excuse me, not Mar Lago. But all of a sudden, the left then says, it's no longer useful to hate this person and call him a Nazi. So we'll use him as the model of the current president, as an antithesis. If so, it works like George. George Bush is a Nazi. He's a Nazi guy. I'm quoting literally, John McCain said, that's the old brown shirts. Al Gore called Bush a digital brown shirt. I think even Garrison Keeler called him something to that effect. There was an official in Germany, called him Hitler. And then they started saying if he would just be like Reagan. Reagan met with Pat. Neil Reagan was a Grant. They said the worst things and that he was going to blow up the world. And then Bush faded off. And then during Trump's thing, Trump could just be like George W. Bush or his dad, George H.W. when George H.W. bush was president, they said he was a fake war hero. He bailed out. He left people to die in his plane. He was a wimp. The wimp factor. Remember all that? And then when he left, they said, if George W. Could just be like his dad. And then when George W. Was a Nazi and then he left, they said if Trump could just be like the Bushes or just a kind old guy. And I don't know if they're going to do it with Trump, but I bet they do for the next Republican. But they could just, you know, we didn't like Trump now that he's 95 or something. He's in Mar Lago, but at least you could reason with him.
- [32:52]
Jack
Yeah.
- [32:53]
Victor Davis Hanson
Unlike Marco Rubio or President Vance.
- [32:58]
Jack
Yes. What will Rubio derangement syndrome be? Yeah.
- [33:03]
Victor Davis Hanson
The ones that are really freaking out are this. Senator Kelly, Senator Warner. What they're saying about the drug intercepts are just insane. You know, it's like Pete Hexess is going to have to be tried for killing people. And it's never. Well, we've been here before. Barack Obama killed 538 people with Predator drone assassination, including an American citizen and maybe another American citizen. And he joked about it. He said that his White House correspondent centered, hey, you guys want to date my daughter? It's called Predator P R E D A T O R. And he's looking at you right now. And then he, when he left, they said, wow, you killed more people? And he said, yeah, I didn't know killing suited me. He said that.
- [33:52]
Jack
Yeah.
- [33:53]
Victor Davis Hanson
But Obama was quoted as saying that. And no one said a word on the left. No one said, and then Trump hasn't killed nearly as many drug dealers as Obama killed suspected terrorists. And then they said, they're not terrorists, they're not narco terrorists. They're just narcos and they're not doing anything wrong. One of the. They're just. How do you know where they're going? How do you know where they're going? Well, the boat is pointed in this direction, north, and we're the big market for drugs and they're making drugs. And then one person said, well, they didn't have enough gas. I think it was Warner or Kelly. They didn't have enough gas to get the United States. You can't with that type of boat. And then somebody said, well, do you think that they stopped off on the Caribbean being and got another boat to come in? Maybe. But it was, it's such an effort to cast Trump as a war criminal. And they don't have. They don't care a darn about the Americans are killed or they overd OD'd on drugs at all. It's only Trump.
- [34:57]
Jack
Well, there are critics too, on, you know, across the board, Victor, this mindset of we're going to treat everything we do as essentially like police action, like we're rounding up the Mafia, so that requires FBI and cops as opposed to military action. I don't see the application of police mindset to a true threat to the country that kills hundreds of thousands of people.
- [35:30]
Victor Davis Hanson
I don't understand because for everything they say, there's a Democratic peril. You can't use a National Guard to go into City. George H.W. did it. JFK did it. A lot of presidents have done it. Eight or nine presidents have used the National Guard or federal troops to do it. You can't kill people without a. On the high seas or Obama kill, as I said, more than any other president. You can't, you can't do anything to Venezuela without official writ of war. Well, Bill Clinton bombed Serbia into smithereens in some cases, so they know that, but it's just. I don't know how to explain it. They're just so obsessed to see that everything he does is wrong and that they end up looking ridiculous. There's. These are narcos. These aren't narco terrorists. You don't know that. Well, yeah, they have a. They're working for Madera Maderos in a political sense. They want to further a political agenda by funding his regime through drug sales that also kill Americans. So it's a duality, but they don't, I don't know, they just seem so. Like Mark Kelly was saying, this language can really inflame. He was talking about Trump, and I thought, wow, when Gabby Giffords got shot, you were one of the people who blamed Sarah Palin for talking about putting bullseyes on a map. Remember that? Yeah. So I don't know what happened to Mark Kelly. He was kind of. He passed himself off for years as the conservative. Not conservative, but kind of the John McCain moderate military man in Arizona. That's how he got elected. But lately he's. He so embarrassed himself with that Seditious Six video, and he violated the Uniform Code of Military justice, and he's subject to recall and to face that. And he just flipped out. It was like it broke him. And now he's on there every day about trying to explain how soldiers can refuse orders or how illegal it is to hit these boats. And then they outline a, a type of warfare. We only get one chance, you know?
- [37:52]
Jack
Yeah.
- [37:53]
Victor Davis Hanson
So you're, I don't know, you're at the Battle of Midway and you're in a dauntless dive bomber and you zero down and you hit your first, you hit your first bomb on the Hiryu air aircraft carrier, Japanese. And then you circle around, you don't have another bomb, but your rear gunner has a lot of.50 caliber. And you say, you know what? We're going to buzz the deck and shoot these people in the. Well, wait a minute. You had your hit. You don't get a second tap. How do you know that they don't want to surrender? Now you're shooting individuals. Well, they're part of the boat and the boat's not sunk. And they're trying to continue the mission. Yes, but maybe they might want to surrender. That's the attitude they have about this boat. So if you hit a drug boat and blow half of it three quarters off or a quarter off, and there are people climbing back on, you don't get a second chance.
- [38:51]
Jack
Isn't there part of that, though, in the military culture? I'm totally ignorant, but you hear stories from a decade or so ago. We're waiting. We have the. What we think is the enemy in sight here, but we have to. We're waiting for a call back from the lawyer from, from the. To give us the green light, whether we can do it or not do it. It sounds.
- [39:13]
Victor Davis Hanson
That was in Afghanistan especially. And remember, the International Criminal Court said that they were going to investigate and try to indict US Officers who used artillery strikes to. That killed innocent children, supposedly. So the whole point of that seditious 6 was that if you listen to the, the tape and what they said about the tape was they wanted to tell people, if you follow normal orders and when we come back in power, we're going to go after you because we're going to say that you followed illegal orders. And it all gets back to that whole corpus of hysteria. Eleven days after Donald Trump was inaugurated in 2017, Rosa Brooks, an Obama era lawyer, published in Foreign Policy and essay, said, we got to get rid of this guy. You know, he's just, he's dangerous. You know, we have constitutional means, but impeachment, gosh, it, it'll never get through the Senate trial. Takes too long. 25th amendment, you got to get all the cabinet members. You haven't. It's not going to work. Although Rod Rosenstein and McCabe were going to wear wires and trap Trump and say that he was incompetent. But I know what the military can just say, no, we're not going to. That was kind of a call for military insubordination by a former Pentagon lawyer. And that really struck a chord because as I said earlier, two lieutenant colonels, Lieutenant Nagel, who's a very decorated combat veteran, basically said the 82nd was going to fight the little green men. Sammy and I talked about that. And then in addition to that, we had McCabe, as I said, and Rod Rosenstein, the active attorney general, a deputy attorney general. And they were going to wire themselves up. One of them was. And then trap Trump. And then you had Mark Milley, we all know, talking to his Chinese counterpart. And then you had the retired generals calling him Mussolini, Hitler, equivalent of Auschwitz, liar. That military was getting to the point where. And it is. And then that it was almost insurrectionary. So everybody's angry at Pete Hegseth now, but what he's doing, he's going back and he's looking at all the people in the military who he felt were politicized and acting in a way that was threatening the constitutionality. And he's forcing them to retire. And everybody's angry. He's another person that is not getting the media bandwidth that he should. He should be talking. I don't know why they don't do that. Every time he says something should. We were short 45,000 recruits. Now we have more recruits than we ever dreamed of. Why is that then? Explain, explain, explain. We always relied on just a three or four defense consortia. Now we have have all sorts of startup companies. We're buying drones, we're buying hypersonic. We're just entrepreneurial, off the shelf stuff. We're going to try to cut costs. It's going to be World War II, quantity over, you know, just quality. We're going to really flood the zone. He doesn't talk about that. He should. He's doing a great job, everybody. They're getting such a. I don't know who their PR people are, but they need, they need a rapid response team.
- [42:45]
Jack
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- [44:24]
Victor Davis Hanson
Livers. The liver is the key to your health. I've had all these scans, you know, and I had this kind of weird one where they'd light up if you have possibility. They absorb if they're malignant. And every time I've had one of these, they always say, you have liver cyst. I think I have five of them. And so they didn't light up. So they said, these are. So I was just curious when I was talking to somebody there and I said, did I have a bunch of liver cyst? And he said, yeah. I said, can you answer me a question? How many people over the 80 have benign liver cystic. And he said, well, you can answer that question two ways. Through autopsies or just average. Average out CTs and stuff. I don't have the answer, but I have a good guess. I said, how many? 50%? Yeah, 50%. So anything that would help your liver would be very valuable, because liver cyst is a reaction to an inflammation that forms, you know, over. So I have full of cysts. Every time I got this MRI back, it said, you have a cyst in your pancreas. Benign. You have a cyst in your liver. You have a cyst in your prostate. It was just like, I'm all full of cyst. Cysto. You call me Cysto instead of Cisco.
- [45:43]
Jack
The Sisto Kid was a friend of mine. Well, you live in an environment of relentless dust. Never mind. God only knows how much DDT or.
- [45:56]
Victor Davis Hanson
Whatever, you know, we had our almonds shaking this year. Our house is in the middle of 40 acres of almonds. And they were all, you know, shaking the tree. And then it falls, and then it's very dry, 105, and they. They're sweeping it. And it reminded me of one of those. We ever see that. You know those old World War II movies about the desert rats? Or that one with Sahara where they had that.
- [46:20]
Jack
Yeah.
- [46:21]
Victor Davis Hanson
I could not see more than 10ft. And I petted my dog and I looked at my hand and it was, like, filthy dirty. And then the cars were covered. And then I thought, wow, this is valley fever spores in the ground. This is 50 years of chemical herbicide in this soil. And then you're just kicking it up, and we breathe that. And then I would try to go put a filter in the air conditioner. It would last like four days, and it was. And that's every year. And so when I had this little problem, the guy first said, do you live in a dusty area? And I said, yes. And he said, we've had a lot of. This was at the center. He said, we have a lot of San Joaquin Valley, Central Valley people. A lot of them. My cousin said. She went to her doctor and he said, people in the San Joaquin Valley get more pollution in one year than most people do in their lives.
- [47:26]
Jack
Yeah, I remember being with you one time. We were doing a little tour of things, and we stayed at John Harris's. Harris in Coalinga. And it was at this time of year, the peak season. And I'd say for a guy from Connecticut or the Bronx, there was a sweetness, and, you know, the smell was different, et cetera. But I Thought, oh my gosh, this is. If you lived in this every day, if this is where you were from, this has got to be rough on your system.
- [47:54]
Victor Davis Hanson
So it is rough. And I never thought it was rough, but I've had some, you know, breathing lung stuff. So I can tell you that it's, it's cumulative. And people have mentioned that. The first thing they say when you, you've got a potential problem is where do you live and do you have anybody in your family that had this type stuff? Yeah, and I, I always think about that because I have 150 years of six generation who live here and I can draw a line when about 1946, when organophosphates and organochlorides were introduced as pesticides. Parathion and then dimethylate and all that. Arsenic. Well, in the old days they used nicotine. My grandfather would get nicotine powder and they'd spray dust for vine hopper. Or they had arsenic that's killed weeds, it turned them white. But those were organic, you know what I mean? They were, they weren't, they weren't manufactured, they weren't Zygon, Zycon B. That's where these things came from.
- [49:04]
Jack
From German IG Farben did not make the.
- [49:07]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yes, they were IB Farbin derivatives. Patented. And after that I was just thinking, wow, my mom died of cancer at 65 or something. My aunt died at 49. My other aunt died at 60. My daughter died at 26. My sister in law who lived here died at 48. My grandmother, who had been very good health, had bowel cancer at 61. She survived. And then you just think, well, wait a minute, how about the people before them? Oh, Allie Johnson, my grandmother's mother, she died at 93. Oh, my grandfather, he died at almost 87. How about his father? He was 81. You know what I mean? You can start to see that the same genetic lines but prior to 1940 and somebody's going to say rightly, well, Victor, they didn't fly, they didn't have stress, they didn't go to town. They had a regimen that started at sunrise and ended at sunset. Every day the same. There were stresses, but they were predictable. They had a very strong family. That's all true. So I can't adjudicate what caused it, but I can tell you that this area became far less healthy than it was in its first century.
- [50:27]
Jack
Yeah. Well, on a downward trajectory theme of health. Now let's layer that over education in America. I mentioned, I think earlier to say, Victor, about the Decreasing knowledge of our student base here. So no matter what's going on on college campuses, what's coming into college is itself a matter of, I think should be of great concern. Here's a headline from the New York Post the other day. The shocking rise of Gen Z College freshmen who Can't Even do middle Math. The number of Gen Z college freshmen who are entering universities without high school math. School skills are skyrocketing as SAT scores are plummeting. A stunning new report found. Even more shocking, many of the students can't even do middle level math, meaning their skills are fifth grade or below. Experts say this phenomenon combined with steadily rising high school graduation rates show that the country is suffering a massive grade inflation problem. Maybe it is. I think there are worse problems than the massive grade inflation, Victor. It's, you know, well, if you're a.
- [51:41]
Victor Davis Hanson
Faculty member, think about it. And I know a lot of faculty members at Stanford, say, take Yale or Stanford and you've told the world for the last 50 years that you are a prestige university and you only let in 3% of your applicants. And they have to have perfect test scores de facto. And they have, you know, they build a violin when they were five, or they went to Kenya and created a sanitation program when they were 7, or they have 4.5. Some of the AP, the GPAs are like 5. You know, they're all advanced placement. And because of that, you had a class, German literature and Translation and it had like 10, you know, Hegel or Nietzsche or you know, the great authors of German literature. And then you would say to the employer, the reason that we're so highly ranked is that we are so specific in getting the top talent in the world. And then we train them in these classes that no other. The reason that we have these admission requirements, because nobody else could do these classes. And I can tell you that I, When I was 22, Jack, I taught, I had a, I was a TA in intensive Greek at 22 and my teacher got pregnant and had a difficult pregnancy. So she said, take over the class four days a week. And I, you know, I was saying things like I was correcting Greek and Latin and I did Latin also with 18, 19 year olds. And I was 22. But I was asking them to do things that graduate students like myself were doing and they did it. They were so good. I mean, I wasn't that much better than they were. I was only 22 and a lot of them were 21. None of the people today could do that. And so what I'm getting is if you told the world that your standards were so high because you needed the top students, because the curriculum is so high, and then all of a sudden you said, nah, here's what we're going to do. We're going to destroy all of that. In fact, if we're Stanford, we're going to let out a press release that we turn down 70% of all the people who have perfect SAT scores, that'll even make us look even more egalitarian DEI and woke. But if you then destroy all that and you let people in for four or five years without the sat, which they did, but what are you going to do when you let in people from non traditional backgrounds that don't have the GPA from a recognized competitive high school and they didn't take the SAT? I can tell you what you do. You have three choices. You give everybody A's. I think Stanford gave 75% A's these years, Yale did 80, or you can lower the standards of the class. So if you're teaching humanities of the Western world, you don't go Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, Herodotus, Thucydides, Tacitus, Livy. You don't. You just have two authors or you introduce new classes like the aesthetics of the modern comic book, the cocaine and sex, you know, paradox of sensuality, something like that. Everybody gets an A. And then you can do that for three or four or five years. And then the graduates who went through the whole four years of that start to go out on the job market and they've been taught nothing, but they have been taught that their DEI is their gospel and they have to complain and complain. And so then you get this exasperated Silicon Valley person and you talk privately with them. I got one guy called me up once, why don't you write a column on this? You had a column on everything once. You had a column on the outline. Basically what he said is, I'm tired of these arrogant kids. They come out, they don't know anything, they can't compute, they can't do math, they don't speak well, they can't write. And they think that I'm supposed to bow in honor of them because they have a Stanford B.A. i'd rather have a guy from Texas Tech in two seconds. And it's worse than that. When I tell them something, they go to HR and complain that I'm racist, sexist transphobes and we don't want them. And then all of a sudden the whole thing cracked up. All the alumni who wanted their kids in stopped giving the same level of support. The faculty who was on the left wing and wanted to give A's, but then all of a sudden their kids couldn't get in. Because if you have 1900 students and you're only going to let in 9% white males just to take one. Yeah, there's not. You get football players, you get multi millionaires, zillionaires that give a billion. There's no room for them. And then what was funny about it, I would always talk to the Stanford Review kids come to see me in the conservative newspaper or I have assistants who are kind of conservative. And I would ask them about what you're talking about and they would laugh. Some of them. You know what they'd say?
- [57:05]
Jack
What?
- [57:10]
Victor Davis Hanson
Victor? They. The math class that they have to offer is remedial high school math. Yeah. So what I do, I sit it way in the back and I read the my phone and then I just show up and ace the test. I said, what do you mean? He said, I had this the first year of prep school. School, this class, it's a joke. And nobody knows math anymore. So when they offer the class that you have to have for general education, I can go to the beach that day. You know what I mean? That's the point that there were still some merocratic people let in. And the curriculum has been. And now they're trying to, in Stanford's defense and at Yale, Harvard, they're all thinking, wow, we went the whole Claudine Gay. We went the whole woke. We went all of this. And now the money's drying up. The students don't have any honor reputation anymore. We, our schools aren't that good. We're flooding them with foreign students to get money. This is not working.
- [58:12]
Jack
Yeah. Well, I think some people might read this article and think, well, okay, obviously these kids are not good enough to go to college. They should do something else. They should become some plumbers or welders. But I don't. The underlying story here is kids are not being educated in elementary school.
- [58:32]
Victor Davis Hanson
No, they're not.
- [58:33]
Jack
And we don't want. Do you want a plumber that can't do math?
- [58:37]
Victor Davis Hanson
But you know when you say that, I always ask this question. When you say students are not being educated, but they arrive for their first class, let's say at 8am and they leave at 3, then what are they not doing? What are they doing? Rather than not doing what are they doing? What are they doing in the math class? What are they doing in the English class. What are they doing in the history? I think I know. I think they're being told that you have to be sure that you have free abortion, that there's a right wing cabal, that this is a racist country and let's get up and play act racism. We're going to have trigger warnings on this author.
- [59:21]
Jack
So social emotional learning is in every nook and cranny of elementary, even pre K education. Yeah.
- [59:30]
Victor Davis Hanson
In America today.
- [59:31]
Jack
Well, Victor, we're getting close to the end of our time limit. We're going to take a quick break and then we're going to come back and you're going to give us a little talk about the new issue of strategica. And we'll do that after these final important messages. We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen in its Own Words podcasts which you will find on the Daily Signal and only go to it on the Daily Signal or Victor's own YouTube channel. Accept no imitations. No fraudsters. Don't give them the time of day. Actually maybe go on one of their and go on and comment on their YouTube frauds and tell them that they're frauds and liars. Anyway, Victor, Strategica is the week, not weekly is the occasion.
- [60:20]
Hans von Spakowski
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- [60:51]
Jack
Three three weeks five weeks online journal at Hoover the Hoover Institution which you are the overseer of. You are the mastermind of Strategica and issue number 102 came out a couple of weeks ago and it's on AI and warfare. And the lead essay was by Brad Boyd and it's the application of artificial intelligence to modern weaponry. And again, if our listeners will be so tolerant and purgatorial of me reading this, this is the conclusion of his essay. It says the promise of AI enabled systems in war is so promising though that no military will forego developing these systems. So what is to be done? The US military has initiated a policy that lethal autonomous systems powered by AI must reflect appropriate levels of human judgment. The international community insists that AI enabled weapons must be under meaningful human control. But what is meaningful control? And when does meaningful control sacrifice Meaningful autonomy to the point where having the system is no longer useful. When must judgment or control be applied continuously or only when conducting a strike? When the system is being manufactured? There are no clear answers to these questions. And it is likely that militaries will be forced to make hard choices based on the severity of their security situation. In the meantime, the machines are learning and war is growing faster and even more frightening. Terrific piece, Victor. Yeah, please tell us about this.
- [62:37]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, all three of those essays, they resonate, they're all by experts and they all resonate that theme because it's advancing so quickly. I'll give you an example. I had an exam and I came back with certain results and a good friend of mine put it into the advanced grok, you know, and it printed out a whole diagnosis and it was based on I don't know, three or four hundred articles on that topic. So let's say that you Jack, have the flu. And you say what are the chances of flu developing a pneumonia of a 60 something year person. And it takes one second for the readout and it's a compilation of 200 stories, maybe not accurately all and that's applied to the military. What's the chances of this artillery? Which is the best caliber for this gun? Which is. Yes, that's, that's, that's what's happening with it. But at the end, I think I mentioned that at the end of, in end of everything, my last book I was talking about dangers were we would get existential destruction, the Ukraine war, miscommunication or another Covid. I went through all of the possible scenarios and there was a Pentagon report and I think I told you Jack, that they programmed a missile into self survivability and they thought of all the different ways that it could survive. And then they programmed it to take these criteria and search the literature immediately and then come up with a self survival mechanism. You know when you have a missile you go left or right in evasive action, how fast you do. And so they did it on a computer funny. And everything worked well. And so after as it was evading all these hypothetical anti defense missile defense system, they hit the kill button button and the kill button activated it to come right back at him on a. On a trajectory that if you want to make us think a missile that can survive and somebody hits the kill button then you. That's the prime directive and it will override anything you say that you shouldn't ever attack your creator. And that's. And they stopped the, they stopped the study and that's what's scary about it. And then the other fact. Who's making that? It all comes out of Silicon Valley initially. And the people who were trained by Silicon Valley and the people who are trained in the universities and these are the same people. When you say riot, violent May to September 2020. George Floyd, the first 20 come up January 6th. You know what I mean? Some law algorithm has said override any type of political. Just have the word riot and that'll always go here first. And then you get. And everybody knows when you go to Google search, you have to wade through. And so these are the people who are going to be. That they're going to be programming these things and their prejudices and ideology are going to be baked into these directives. And I'm really worried about it, I think. And then when it's so fast, if you. We.
- [66:06]
Jack
You.
- [66:06]
Victor Davis Hanson
A year ago, you and I and our audience, we were not talking about a fake Victor Hansen with the same clothes, same thing. And then somebody taking that puppet. I felt like I was Joe Biden watching them and then feeding in and actually it's kind of more articulate than I am, you know. And then I talk for an hour. I don't get tired because I stand straight and I do this. And then. And then they have a headline, you know, f this or Victor tells you why J.D. vance is going to attack all this crazy stuff to get hits. And then you look at the subscribers and. And you look at the views 100,000. So you're competing against a chimera. I mean a chimera, it. It's just. Just a mythical monster. And who's doing it? I don't know. I don't know who's doing it. But it's all of these articles, they all have one common theme. Somebody has to. There has to be some regulation over it and maybe an international body to sort of like the Geneva Convention. Not that people follow that, but.
- [67:18]
Jack
Right.
- [67:19]
Victor Davis Hanson
And then when you think the Chinese are doing it, oh my God, it's. You got Terminator man. It's Terminator World here, boy.
- [67:27]
Jack
If folks want to read this art or the articles this issue of Strategica, go to the Hoover Institution's website and type in Strategica and it'll take you there. And there are 102 prior. 101 prior issues and they're very evergreen. So I hardly recommend. Recommend it. I wonder, Victor, you think AI as you plan these annual conferences. I know they're off the record and. But is AI something that is. You think of broader interests of the military folks around.
- [68:02]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, I think this next year we're going to do that. It's going to be all on AI and weapons and find out. We've had one on Ukraine and one on the Iranians and one on the Middle east. But. But I think we've had one on civilian oversight of the military and in the Age of Trump. But I think we're going to do this one on AI.
- [68:27]
Jack
Okay.
- [68:28]
Victor Davis Hanson
I hope so. We'll see.
- [68:30]
Jack
Well, we're kind of at the end and we do the things we do at the end and that's to read viewer and listener comments. And here are some. I've got four here. One is from Solitude Silent Groove. I could listen to a whole episode of Victor telling stories of corrupt academics. When the highly educated commit crimes, it's far more infuriating than a poor man holding up a liquor store because there's no excuse of desperation and because we entrust them to important positions. Then there's Michael Walenczyk, 2591, who writes, thank you Professor Hanson. This podcast is my favorite. Look forward to it every day. Professor. I learn more every time I hear another podcast. I really enjoy the 10 minute or so podcasts you give on the Daily Signal on current events, especially like the interviews. Thank you for your hard work and keeping us informed. 4 Fuzzy Bear writes, thank you Jesus for Victor, his wisdom, his insight, his values, and his ability to surpass with kindness any of his peers today and yesterday. Amen. If there is ever a VDH museum, build it next to the EIB of Rush Limbaugh. And put that $300 check which you talked about previous episode. Put that $300 check still in the sealed envelope as exhibit one. You make us all a better us. And finally, Dawg Dawg 85 writes, Victor, when your plane shudders from improper fuel is good cause to pull out your Bible and praise the Holy Trinity. Your adventures are amazing. From your farm to rigid universities to world travels. What a wonderful life. Sincerely, this is Joe Smith. Joseph Boyer so there are thousands of comments every week. We I try to go through them. The great Sammy Wink also does. We thank the folks that take the time to do that. I want to thank the folks who subscribe to Civil Thoughts. That's the free weekly email newsletter I write every comes out every Friday. Go to civilthoughts.com sign up. You're going to like it.
- [70:34]
Victor Davis Hanson
Hey Jack, I've got a series, Calamities Calamities and Close calls around the World. And my first this is for Ultra Readers. The first One is that 18, and it's in Connecticut. And I was. I'd never been in a fl. I had never flown before. I'd never been out of state. I was 18, and I wanted to become a classics major, but I didn't do it the first year. And my professor said, you need to take intensive Greek. I never had Latin. I never had anything. And there was a graduate program for Yale graduate students to learn Greek in eight or nine weeks. Can you imagine competing with them in their 20s and 30s?
- [71:13]
Jack
So you're 18, and what do you think the next youngest person was like 23, 25.
- [71:19]
Victor Davis Hanson
There was one kid who was a. He was a genius. He was in the United Nations School and he was going to Cambridge at 17 or something. And there was me. He was my age. So I flew it on a little prop plane from New York to New Haven. And I went in. There was nobody in the dorm. I did. And I thought, I'm indestructible. I'm not going to buy the ale. Help plan the ale, food plan. Anything I didn't have. My mom said, I'll give you. I don't know what it was. $3 a day for your meals. And I bought the ticket. I paid for the tuition. And then I ate at this hamburger, this Greek hamburger pizza joint across from Yale. Every day, greasy food. And I didn't know my high school. I didn't know. I mean, I knew what a direct object was and an indirect, but this was dative, accusative. I didn't know. After week one, we had already done the conjugation. I didn't know what that word meant. Of the Greek verb. 360 forms to memorize by week two, the declensions of all three cases of all three groups of nouns, feminine, masculine, irregular and neuter. And irregular. And then we were into sophisticated. And by week four, we were reading the Bible. You can imagine me with no training. I'd been in a foreign place. And I started getting a sore throat. I was going. Getting up at six, cramming, going to school eight to one, going over to the greasy spoon, eating a hamburger and a Coke, coming, running back, studying all afternoon, staying up till 12 to do my homework for the after. And I got. I said, I've had a sore throat. And it went on and on. And five days later, I couldn't eat, I couldn't breathe. So I walked all the way. You know New Haven very well.
- [73:11]
Jack
I was just there the other night talking about you with people.
- [73:15]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, I went down that street, I think it was the Dominican Hospital or something. So I went in there and I write about this. And they said, my God, you can't breathe. So they put a tube down my throat and they said, you have strep throat and we think rheumatic fever. So they gave me this huge infusion of antibiotics and steroids. And they said, oh, you, you've. Why did you come here? And I said, well, I didn't join the Yale health plan. They said, why? And I said, because I never get sick and I got to get back. And so anyway, he said, you got to stay in the hospital. I said, I can't. I gotta. I gotta have one more week of this. So I walked back, I got out of the hospital and I got assaulted, mugged by. Only Victor could come up. There was about 15 to 20 assaultants, a gang of African American youth and they were all women.
- [74:06]
Jack
Oh my. Seriously?
- [74:07]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yes. They started kicking me and I said, stop, I'm infected, I'm infected. You're all gonna die. So they just, it was like they got stunned. And I said, I had a little bell on your. Yeah, I had a little backpack with my clothes because I thought I might have to stay in the hospital. I was really ill. I was really.
- [74:31]
Jack
Oh my gosh.
- [74:33]
Victor Davis Hanson
And so anyway, two of them stayed and they said, oh, give us $9, give us $10. I had $9. I gave him $9. It was 55 years ago. So then they left and I walked back and the next week I was so sick I got a B in the class. I don't know how he did that. There was a wonderful teacher, John Madden, he was a saint. And I stayed an extra week to get well. And I came home, I was 6:1 and weighed 127 pounds. And my parents were just. What happened to you? You look like a skeleton. And I did not get. I couldn't get. I wasn't normal until. I don't know. But anyway, I'm mentioning this because I got this center and I had an ekg and they said, scarring, a possible past myocardial infarction, you know what I mean? Like a little. And that was, I think, from the romantic. But anyway, my point was that's my episode one and they escalate to near death experiences. But the theme of them, they're all self imposed stupidy. The guy in the ER said, this is very treatable. All you had to do when you got up to 100 is come in and give a shot of penicillin. I said, I know, but I've never been out of state and I don't have any health plan. I didn't have any money, I didn't know where I should go, so I didn't.
- [75:58]
Jack
Let me just ask you this because I cannot wait to read this in detail, but is there anyone from that class that you remember that later is memorable that became a classics professor?
- [76:12]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yes. Yeah, there was. He was a very nice guy. He was from an old family. I'm forgetting his name. He'll know if he's listening. He became the president of. He became the president of a very prestigious eastern liberal college prep school.
- [76:36]
Jack
What prep school? Amherst.
- [76:38]
Victor Davis Hanson
Amherst.
- [76:39]
Jack
Amherst.
- [76:39]
Victor Davis Hanson
He was the president of Amherst for four or five years. And he came from, I think the financial community, but he was in it. And then there was an Afghan.
- [76:49]
Jack
30.
- [76:49]
Victor Davis Hanson
Years old who was. He knew Greek like. And then there was a guy named Chuck who was a philosophy graduate student. It was his seventh language. And then there was this guy that I knew, this young kid, 8, 17, he knew it very well. And then there was a very beautiful girl from Wellesley and she just dogged it. She had been trained since she probably got an A, but she didn't study at all. And then there was a couple of other guys that were graduate students. Undergraduate one was under, but they were mostly graduate students. But someone said when I got back to Santa Cruz, why would you at 18 go in a accelerated Greek program that was designed mostly for graduate students to pick up Greek in a summer in non classics program? I said, I don't know, I thought it would be good to go to catch up and get my classics BA when four years of Latin and Greek and Latin and you know, it was weird. I did not feel well after that. And then I went in and got to the UC Santa Cruz clinic and they said you have post viral fatigue and this is immune problem. And I've always had that ever since. Every time I get a viral illness it takes me months to get back. But it was all good. Until that point I had never been sick in my life. I'm not kidding you. I mean I was kind of nerdy and I'd get cold, but I had never had a serious disease. And after that it was just. And it was all self inflicted.
- [78:26]
Jack
Well, I'm going to see if there is a still existing Greek diner near Yale.
- [78:33]
Victor Davis Hanson
Right across put a plaque. If you looked out, I saw that green in front, it was to the right of the green. And the guy, I talked to him about Greece. I was so stupid. I said this is one of the nicest Italian hamburger places I've ever. This is not Italian. We're Greek. You think we all look alike? Where do you come from?
- [78:58]
Jack
I smell garlic here. All right.
- [79:01]
Victor Davis Hanson
Anyway.
- [79:02]
Jack
Anyway, you've been.
- [79:03]
Victor Davis Hanson
It was a 1972 presidential campaign was going on. I watched that night I got. It was about 11 o' clock. And I went to the Yale. I don't know what. And watched Thomas Eagleton say he had to step out because he'd had shock treatments and all these. And I just said to somebody, my God, they put electricity in his head. Why was he even. And what are you talking about? You don't know anything about mental disturbance. All of us, we've all had therapy. And I said, you mean you've had electricity put in your head. I was really a buffoon.
- [79:40]
Jack
I don't know, Victor. You've come a long way from buffoonery then.
- [79:43]
Victor Davis Hanson
So I wish I could redo things and I would be a lot happier.
- [79:46]
Jack
Oh, Maron. Oh, come on. All right.
- [79:50]
Victor Davis Hanson
It's all made clear in the end.
- [79:53]
Jack
Yes. Okay. You've been terrific. Okay, folks, thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. We'll be back with another episode of Victor Davis Hansen in His Own Words. Bye. Bye.
- [80:04]
Victor Davis Hanson
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 website@victorhansen.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.