← Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
Victor Davis Hanson: Trump’s Leverage Over Xi Jinping EXPLAINED
01:14:57
The narrative that America is in terminal decline while China is an unstoppable juggernaut is a completely historically illiterate trope.
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- [00:00]
Victor Davis Hanson
Foreign.
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Sammy Wink
Hello and welcome. This is our weekend show where Victor looks at something different in the middle segment or one of the middle segments. And today he's going to talk about the God Dionysus. So stay with us for that. But we'll look at some news stories first. Victor's going to give us an update on the visit to China, which is now completed. We're recording on Friday at just before noon, and some update on the Iran war as well. And then we'll start to look at our CIA director going down to Cuba. So stay with us for those stories and we'll be right back from these messages.
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Bradley Deflin
Hey, I'm Bradley Deflin and just like you, I'm a huge fan of Victor Davis Hansen, whether it's his long form podcast, victor Davis Hansen in his own words or his short form content for the Daily Signal. Victor Davis Hansen in a few words. I always leave an episode learning something new.
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Victor Davis Hanson
I think they forgot the 19th 1982 Falklands War.
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Bradley Deflin
And in the age of clickbait and rage bait. That's a really good feeling right?
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Victor Davis Hanson
The media. Thank you. You can leave now.
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Bradley Deflin
And if you agree, you might like my show, the Daily Signals long form interview podcast called the Signal. Sit down. Every week we take you behind the scenes of the biggest battles in Washington, D.C. as they happen, with some of the biggest names in politics. We explore big ideas and we analyze the policymaking process from an unabashedly and unapologetically conservative perspective. And that's important now more than ever, especially with the Trump admin administration back in office. Because in 2024 you sent Washington a message it couldn't ignore. It's your government and together we're taking it back. So check us out on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you enjoy. Victor Davis Hansen, we're there too. And drop me a follow on X radleydevlin to stay updated with what's happening on the Signal. Sit down.
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Sammy Wink
Welcome back. For those who are new and for Victor's affiliations, he is the Martin and Eli Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskey distinguished fello on his day at Hillsdale College. You can find him at his website, VictorHanson.com is the address and it's called the Blade of Perseus. So please come join us there. Everything that Victor does is posted there in one form or another. So Victor, I know that Donald Trump has just has returned already from China, but I was wondering. All day yesterday the news seemed to be China, China, China, and if you had any reflections on his visit.
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Victor Davis Hanson
Well, the key thing is, will they meet their commitments or promises? They never do. They were supposed to reduce fentanyl and they never did. And they were supposed to cut back on dumping and currency, and they never did. But he has a number of levers that they don't have. I think everybody should realize that. He could just say, I believe in equity parity. So you have 300,000 students here, and they appropriate our technology, and that's their pipeline to parody with us. So we're going to. We only have 10,000 in your country, and we don't want anymore, so we'll just make it even. You have 10, we have 10. We don't own any property next to your bases, so you shouldn't own any next doors. In fact, we don't own any acreage at all. You shouldn't either. They could just go. He could do that. And that would. He doesn't have to do it. He just have to raise it. Then the other thing is this myth that China is all powerful. And I think everybody should realize that this is a mem. A trope in the American psyche, that we always do the. The best thing or the necessary thing lasts. And we just kind of get complacent. Then we get paranoid. If we were having this conversation in 1936, we'd say, oh, my God, we're still in depression. We've been in depression for seven years. Unemployment is 20. Have you seen what Mussolini is doing? He's got a vast rail project. The trains are running on time. Have you seen the new German airplanes? Charles Lindbergh says, we can't. We'll never catch up. That was the wave of the future. Maybe fascism is a wave of the future. And then wouldn't want to be you. Then after the war, oh, my gosh, the Soviet Union has taken over all of Asia. It's got. China has flipped. They're in Africa. They've got nuclear weapons in 1949, they've got 240 million people. Khrushchev said he's going to bury us. You can't. Maybe this command system is better because they went to the. They're ahead of us in the space race. There's a missile gap. It's the wave of the. And then the Berlin Wall come. And then we take a deep breath. And I thought, what's this going to be next? Japan incorporated. The Japanese have mixed capitalism with government. They target strategic industries. They work harder. Our cars are no good. Everybody wants their Toyota. They bought why? They bought pebble beach, they bought Rockefeller center, now they're buying Columbia Pictures. Sony's going to run the world. And then boom, they have the worst deflation in history. They're, they're shrinking, they're aging, they're a closed society. Well, we took a deep breath and then at the millennium we said, well, we did that one. It's the EU. They've got a new paradigm. All these countries together, 450 million people. The new euro citizen. We started out at €90 to a dollar and now it's 2006. That's a dollar six just to buy ones. A dollar sixty cents, dollar and a half to get a euro. They're just leaving us in the dust. They've got a new, it's so much better. They don't waste. They've got green energy, they have open borders. They're not caught up with Christianity, they're not wasting their money on defense. And then all of a sudden, oh wow, they're shrinking. They're overrun with Islamic hordes that hate their guts. They dismantled all of their nuclear in Germany plants and coal. And now Germany can compete and Britain is just in a mess. So then we took a deep breath. Well, who's the next one that's going to bear? Oh, it's China. China is just. Oh my, you don't know. And then I was looking at some on the Internet the other day, articles from 2005. They all said in 20, 20, 25 they were going to surpass our GDP. Our GDP is $31 trillion. Theirs is 20. They have 1.4 billion people. We have 340. I'm not saying everybody works, but if you wanted to just do back of your hand little calculation, you could say that four Chinese produce 60% of what one American does and they're going to bury us. And then look at anything. Top 50 STEM universities in the world, about 40 of them in the United States. Three are China. If you look at top 10 corporations on market capitalization, one is Chinese. Eight, maybe nine depending on the rankings. Or American. If you look at Elon Musk launched more satellites than all of Europe put together. Elon Musk. So if you look at the Chinese military's air defenses, they sold to Iran, they were just a joke. The United States and Israel destroyed them in one day. And so we have 11 carrier groups, they have three, two and a half. And we've been doing it for 100 years. The Langley, USS Langley were masters at. You can't make a carrier group in 10 years. They haven't had. They've been doing it for 12 years. I could go on, but this idea that they're going to bury us. No.
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Sammy Wink
Oh, okay. But what sort of a challenge does China present for us then?
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Victor Davis Hanson
I mean, it's our challenge, our laxity. If you allow them to dump product and run up big trade surpluses like we've been doing, if you allow them to buy sanctioned oil all over the world that's supposed to be embargoed, they get on a discount. Venezuelan, Iranian. If you let 300,000 students come over here and say 3,001%. But it's more than that. Steal all our technology if you don't arm yourself. Yeah, they're dangerous, but they're completely at our mercy. If we don't let them do that because we have an open capitalist, free market, constitutional federal system, they don't. And the other thing that gets me a little upset, Che quoted the Thucydides trap. That was a reference to Graham Allison. He's a great political scientist, but he's not a classicist. So he came up with this idea, it's an old one that in the first and second books of Thucydides he's talking about the rise of Athenian power, the great 50 years. And then at one point he says that it was the fear of Athens that made Sparta preempt and invade the countryside in 431. Allison seized upon that, said this is a paradigm that's universal across time and space. When you have an ascending power, the status quo power can strike out. And we are the status quo power and they are the ascending. Now that was the first wrong mistake. We are the ascending power and they are now the status quo power in decline on fertility. They import 65% of their oil and gas. We were the greatest oil and gas producer in the history of civilization. They were self sufficient in food. But as they got more affluent, they now import 30% of their food. So they thought they had us around the neck, boot on our neck with rare earth materials. But now, now the output possible from the Wyoming and the California and the Utah new mines and some are existing and Greenland franchise, we can produce more than we need. We're very flexible, innovative people. They're not. They're very good at taking technology and then standardizing it on scale. Absolutely. So you have to be very careful. But the other thing about the Thucydides trap is it's not based on a close reading of the text of Thucydides. I taught it for 20 years in Greek Thucydides. And I wrote a book on the Peloponnesian War. So I'm not bragging, but I will tell you that a Thucydidean scholar knows that he didn't go back and revise that text. He wrote it serially. And then at some point, whether it was four oral one or 390, he died and he left it and 411 incomplete. Okay, so there was contradictions. I'll give you one example. He said during the five invasions of Attica, he said the Spartans ravaged the countryside. And at one point he said they ravaged the entire countryside. And then when he's talking later, much later about the Decalan, he said this was the worst attack on because the prior invasions hadn't done much damage. It was complete contradiction because he hadn't revised it. So when Allison says that there's this line in Thucydides, he says that he's afraid that Spartan fear Phobos, that they were afraid of the rise of Athens. They had fought a war with. They already had something called the first Peloponnesian War. And the Spartans had even tried to invade. They had a falling out in 480. It wasn't that Athens was rising in 431. They had the biggest fleet at Salamis. Themistocles had the biggest fleet. He went down and tricked the Spartans to build the walls around Athens. So they had parity earlier and more importantly they didn't fall out because Athens was strong and Sparta was paranoid. They fell out because they had completely antithetical societies. Every aspect. Athens was a sea power, Sparta was a land power. Athens was Ionic by tribe, they were Doric. Athens was a commercial big metropolis. Sparta was an out of the way hamlet. Athens had a chattel slave system. Sparta had helots, indentured servants. I could go on, but the antithesis were so great that they were always going to be at each other's throats. And they were sometimes they had a lot alliances of convenience. But the idea that suddenly they look at Periclean Athens and they see the Acropolis and the Parthenon and the Athenian empire with 170 tribute allies all over. And then oh, we can't defeat them. That wasn't why they invaded. They invaded it because they felt that the differences that had existed for a long time had not been resolved by an earlier war. And so we are not in decline and China's not going to attack us, we're not going to attack China. Before it gets to a point where we can't. If anything, they are in decline. If there is such a thing as a Thucydides trap and there isn't, then the power to watch would be China getting desperate and say, well, the United States is getting too strong. It's got all the oil, it's got gas, it's ahead in biotech now. It's, it's giving everyone for our money. And AI, all the companies are American. They're popular cultures all over the world. Their military spends three times as much as we do. We better take Taiwan now. I could see that.
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Sammy Wink
Yeah.
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Victor Davis Hanson
But that's sort of what Hitler did.
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Sammy Wink
Yeah.
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Victor Davis Hanson
He said, I can't take England for, you know, it's, it's like the First Sea Lord during the Napoleonic. When they ask him, sir, can Napoleon invade Britain? He said, I don't know, but I know he won't do it by sea. And that's what the British said in World War II when Chamberlain. Actually, it was Churchill. After he came to power on May 10, they asked him, will Operation Sea lion work? And he said, they won't come by sea because the British Navy was the second largest in the world and they were actually, it was still the largest in the world and so there was no way in the world that was going to happen. But in any case, when he couldn't take Britain, why would he turn on Russia, who was supplying him with 30% of his grain oil lubricants and had no demonstrable idea that he would pre. I know that Daryl Cooper and all these people said that Hitler attacked because Russia was about ready to attack them. That was a Nazi canard. There was no evidence that the Soviet Union was going to do that. Their idea was to fuel Germany and sit back and watch Germany and England kill each other off and then walk through Europe and take it. But they were not going to turn on Germany until they had destroyed England. So why did he attack Russia? Because he said why he did. He said, there's no way we can take England, but if we take Russia, we're going to control everything from the Pacific to the English Channel. And we'll have all the resources of the continent and we'll have all of the wheat and we'll have everything oil. And Britain will concede and America then won't ever come in.
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Sammy Wink
Well, Victor, I have a few questions about that. But first let's welcome back a sponsor, Pure Health Research. If you want to drop extra pounds, boost energy levels or reduce swelling in your legs and feet, this message is for you. Pure Health Research is on a mission to make America healthy again. And two of their best selling health supplements are leading the way. First is Liver health formula. Over 100 million Americans have a sluggish liver riddled with fatty deposits. This can kill your metabolism, pile up on the pounds and make you feel tired. Liver Health Formula takes care of all that. It supports thriving liver health with special nutrients like artichoke extract and milk thistle. This is one of the easiest ways to slim down and revitalize your energy levels. Next is lymph system support. If you struggle with fluid buildup in your legs, ankles or feet, this is for you. The natural ingredients in lymph system support help gently flush extra fluids and toxins from your body. And right now, for a limited time, you can get 35% off liver health Formula and lymph system support along with all 50 plus health supplements pure Health Research has to offer. Head over to PureHealthResearch.com that's PureHealthResearch.com and use coupon code Victor at the checkout. That's PureHealthResearch.com with coupon code Victor to save 35% on your order today. And we'd like to thank Pure Health Research for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson in his own Word show. Sorry. So I wanted because Sean Hannity interviewed Trump for an entire hour yesterday. And on that interview he addressed the students in America, which I think a lot of us are worried about. 300,000 here. Now, Trump has said they can have up to 600,000 and this is what he said. To tell China that its students were not welcome here would be a big insult to them. They are some of the best students in the system and it would destroy a lot of the smaller colleges that rely on the money of having these students in. And I was wondering, do you want to address what Trump says? I know you maybe not.
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Victor Davis Hanson
I politely disagree. The students are at the main big universities. If I go to Hillsdale College, there's not a lot of Chinese students and they tend to be Stanford, I think, has the graduate students are probably about a quarter of them from China. The problem is that when you have 300,000 and the Chinese Communist Party interviews every one of them when they come back, it only takes 1 or 2% to give you 3 or 4000 active people that are appropriating technology. We had the mayor of an Orange county city just yesterday convicted or she pled guilty to being a conduit for Chinese propaganda. We had a visiting lecture in neuroscience at Stanford University that was a major in the People's Liberation army and the Stanford faculty. We had the Stanford Review running a whole series of articles about people, Chinese and non Chinese at Stanford who criticized the government and they were targeted. And there was little Victor who wrote a very critical thing of China. And the next thing I know, somebody called Fang Fang called me. So you have incorrect. I'm not being racist when I said that, but I'm only doing this for a purpose. You have incorrect views about China. I'm coming to see you. I said, no, you're not. And she was outside my front door. And then when she came up, I have to correct you. And then all of a sudden, hey man, it's like you guys are losers. She went into a valley girl like a Cal State, I guess Hayward or somewhere. I can't remember where she said she was. And that's when I said that Eric Swalwell must be a. That was before all things came out, that he was an idiot. But gosh. Any case, Trump should limit the number of students here because they are. When you. I was looking at a tape of their aircraft carrier. They even have copied the insignias and the colors, color coded guys on the deck and the Americans that do all of the messaging to the pilots and conduct traffic on the, on the, the deck flat top. They're even doing that. And their, their planes look like ours, Their tanks look like ours. I know it's a sec. It's emulation. It's not. But they innovate too.
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Sammy Wink
But it's the best form of flattery, isn't it? Imitation.
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Victor Davis Hanson
I wish Trump was were right. His theory is the more that they're acculturated, the more they want to stay here and then that undermines the system or they go back. But we've been told that for 40 years that if you just don't press the violations of the World Trade Organization, just let them dump, let them manipulate currency, let them conduct copyright and patent theft. They will become affluent when they come be affluent, they'll be middle class consumers. When they're middle class consumers, they'll be democratic and they'll vote. That didn't happen.
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Sammy Wink
Yes, but he said also that, you know, they spy on us, we spy on them. So that part of the equation is equal.
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Victor Davis Hanson
We do spy on them, but we don't have 300. I wish we had 300,000American students over there, but no, I don't. American student would probably turn and Heath
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Sammy Wink
feels like not all of them are going to become westernized, but enough of them Will to maybe the Chinese would see it this way, to put the their population in a state of, you know, threat because they've got these subversives within China who would rather be Western perhaps. I don't know.
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Victor Davis Hanson
He has to be very careful because he's an excellent deal maker and he values personal one on one relationships. And the Chinese Communists have studied that and they have, they know chapter and verse about him. So one of their strategy is to magnify his importance, to brag on him, to give him a fantastic, tremendous pageant when he arrives and then say, you're so powerful you could allow this to happen and, you know, cut a deal. So he's got to be careful.
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Sammy Wink
Yeah. And Donald Trump returns the favor on all of that complementary stuff.
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Victor Davis Hanson
I mean, ultimately they're the inheritors of the most genocidal government in the world, Mao Zedong's Communist Party.
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Sammy Wink
Yeah. So let's turn to Iran. And it seems to be devolving down to the Straits of Hoarmuze recently with attacks or some firing on ships that have tried to break Blake, break the blockade. And the firing is coming from the US Military, but that's the most recent news. But do you have any reflections on Iran this, this morning?
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Victor Davis Hanson
Tactically, it's clear they have no military to speak of in a conventional or a strategic sense. They can't hurt us. So what's going on? We had 42 days of destroying their military with the help of the Israeli Air Force. Now we've had 30 days of merchandising. We'll do it. No, we won't do it. We'll have to with them. And they have wasted a month of our time and we're five months out of the midterm or less. And that's important. And that's why they did it. So their argument is this. Donald Trump counter revolution will fail if he loses the midterms in the House and Senate. The left in America is already saying that our survival is victory just to survive. They're on our side. His midterms are coming up. The price of gas has gone from a low of 188in Iowa up to almost $4. That is because we put our little Mosquito fleet out there and harassed and harassed ships and made it dangerous. And we have some missiles we sent and we terrified the Gulf states because we have our little caches here and there of subterranean missiles and drones.
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Sammy Wink
Yes, Iran has done that. Not our.
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Victor Davis Hanson
Yes. And we're threatening the Gulf. We'll take out. And all of that tension has spiked World price of oil. And we're getting to the point where we think it won't come down in time. So we're going to keep doing this. And Trump is saying we debank them. We cut off their oil revenues. I know they're cheating with China land routes, railroads through the Caspian Sea. But more or less, they're bankrupt. They have no military to speak of. They've got a bunch of mosquito boats and some hidden missiles and drones places, and they don't pose a military threat. And I'm running out of time and I'm getting pressure from the Europeans and the Japanese to get the strait settled. That's where we are. It's not a military question anymore, militarily, whatever his choice is very quickly. Choice A, he can say, I'm tired of this. I waited and waited and waited and I'm not going to send any ground because ground troops in the Middle east are a maga taboo. I don't want a misadventure like Afghanistan or Iraq. No Helmand province, no Ramadi, Fallujah stuff. I'm going to do the following. I'm going to take out all the dockworks, all the piers, all the port facilities, but not the oil pipelines or storage on Carg Island. So if our friends in the Iranian resistance ever rise up, they can refurbish it and they'll have an oil, but they will not be able to ever unload oil and sell it, at least for a year or two. And I'm going to take out the key bridges that have dual use, and I'm going to take out generators that we know operate in areas where the military is dependent on it. And I'm going to do all that. And then I'm going to order our fleet of Warthogs and Apaches, tactical aircraft to blow up every Mosquito boat in the entire Strait. And then I'm going to get our strategic aircraft, the B52 everything, and bomb a corridor all along their coast. And then I'm going to declare victory and I'm going to tell the Europeans and Japanese I would like to lead an armada to enforce what I've done and keep the straight open, but I don't need it. If you don't want it, fine, but I'm going to go home. That's one thing. Two, he can keep negotiating and negotiating and hitting there, and he will run out of time and there won't be enough time.
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Sammy Wink
It's not likely that Donald Trump will do that. I don't see.
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Victor Davis Hanson
Or three, he can do what I said with choice one and stay there with a carrier, one carrier group, in other words, he can do a lot more damage to their dual use assets and oil. And then he can keep one carrier group to make sure that they don't try, or their friends or anybody tries to close the strait. And the thing about oil futures, they keep saying it's too late, the price, but there's so much speculation, they thought it was going to go up to 150, and they still think it might. So you got all these oil speculators that want to make a killing and they're willing to pay high prices because they think they'll have a monopoly on a tanker with a million barrels in it, you know, and they can sell it for 200. The point is, if he can increase US production by a half million barrels, if Russia's oil is now unsanctioned, de facto coming on the market, if he can get Venezuela to pump another two or three hundred thousand barrels and he can get the Gulf states to ramp up. So I give you an example. UAE just left opec. It's going to ramp up by a million barrels, maybe a million and a half. And he gets the straight open. He can collapse that price and the price will go down very quickly because people will want to unload what they bought at a high price before it gets lower. You know what I mean? As it starts to go down. It's a stampede mentality. And if you can get, if he can say to the American people, by October 15th, the price of gas is $2.50 a gallon or $3 nationwide or even $2.50. And I eliminated the Chinese and Russian footprint in our Western hemisphere. They don't threaten the Panama Canal anymore. Maduro's government is pro American. We're going through a transition to a consensual government. There we are overseeing their oil. So it's not from the Venezuelan people. And I've done the same with Iran. It's no longer a nuclear or a conventional threat to its neighbors. And Cuba is about ready to do a Venezuela deal where they're going to agree to a transitional strongman, maybe, but it won't be the Castro brothers, Communist. If he can do all that, and there's a good chance he could. And the economy then is receiving daily more foreign investment. The tax cuts are what, $175 billion in tax that was remitted to the people. The stock market's at a record high. Unemployment claims are going down. The job market is strong. It's under. I think it's 4.3% unemployment. All he has to do is just one thing is inflation. And he can't say, I inherited 3.2% inflation. I didn't realize. I only rose it because of the war, because he said he was going to end inflation. So he has to honor that so he can win the midterms. That's still possible. And when you add in the wild card that once they got into this redistricting wars, just as a sidelight hikem Jeffries, everybody said he was Eugenias. I remember George Will wrote about the future of the Democratic Party. He is really a limited person because he keeps this bluster. They're going to win this and win this. All he has to do is count the legislatures and see if they're red or blue. And once you start with that language and what you saw in Virginia and California, the red states are scrambling now to redistrict and he's going to lose about eight seats, eight to 10. And then if Kanji Brown stops delaying and the appellate court and district start are delaying, but they implement the Supreme Court's majority rule on racial gerrymandering, they could get another eight to 10 seats. And then of course, long term with the census, they could get another 10 seats. So they could get another 15 seats maybe right now before the midterms. And who knows if they can solve the problem in Iran. And the economy is probably ready to boom. It really is. It's just oil and the availability of oil and the residual inflation. But GDP's good, unemployment's good, foreign investment's great, stock market's historically high. It's all good.
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Sammy Wink
You know, I was going to ask you why you think that is, given that typically when we go into a war and there's uncertainty in that war of its outcome, et cetera, and the price of energy goes up, then the market, the stock market and the economic indicators usually start to take a dip. And I was wondering if you had any thoughts, I know you're not an analyst or anything on why that is, that it hasn't taken a dip.
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Victor Davis Hanson
There's a couple of reasons. One is it's never absolute. It's relative. So what does the American stock market compare to the Chinese or European? And you look at their GDP, etc. Etc. And it's good. Number two is are there crisis in the world that are going to blow up in the next six months? There's not going to be a Venezuela crisis, there's not going to be a Cuba crisis. There's not Going to be what you think in Panama. The Greenland thing was a big nothing burger. Iran doesn't have the ability to cause a big war. The Gulf states are now secretly having Israel go away and help them. Doesn't look like Hamas and the Houthis and Hezbollah are going to have much left when they get their money cut off from Iran. So the investor surveys the world to see and then they look third, what is the long term viability of the Americans? Well, they're the largest gas and oil. It's not 2007. We're importing 6 million 8 million barrels a day. We're exporting. We're the biggest exporter, not just producer, but exporter of gas and oil. That's going to really help the economy. We forget we hate paying $100 a barrel, but we're getting $100 a barrel. So the economy collectively is getting rich and that trickles down, to use a leftist term. And then when you look at at food, we're the biggest agricultural producer in the world by value. As I said earlier, the companies, Apple, Google, Nvidia, all of them are, you know, they run that whole thing. 85% of movie and streaming revenues are American worldwide. So they look at all those things and they don't see a decline anywhere. They don't. They say to themselves, what are the essentials of civilization? Food, excellent. Fuel, excellent. Defense, excellent. STEM education, not K12, excellent. And they think that for the time being that the left does not control the House, it does not control the Senate, it does not control the White House, it does not control the Supreme Court. So there's a 50, 50 chance that you're not going to get socialism rammed down your throat from Mondami and AOC or it's going to be localized. So they look at all the long term and they say, you know what, compared to the Europeans or the Japanese or the Chinese, it's better to invest here and it's safer. And the economy is going to boom. If he can solve the Iran, Iran can be a big, big liability, but can also be a big plus if he should solve it. And there's always the wild car. In two months there could be a revolution. So you never know. Everybody thinks they know exactly what's going to happen, but they don't.
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Sammy Wink
So, Victor, before we go to break, I need to make a note because we did talk about the Pope giving an award to the Iranian ambassador. And on Instapundit today, there was Sarah Hoyt, who is one of their posters.
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Victor Davis Hanson
She's a Portuguese American.
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Sammy Wink
Yeah. And she's Catholic. And she explained that that award was pro forma for years, served. I was wondering, and so we should apologize for criticizing the Pope for that. But I was wondering, this sounds to me like apologetics for awarding a murderous, threatening, bloodthirsty, intolerant regime. Shouldn't they hold it off?
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Victor Davis Hanson
Yes.
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Sammy Wink
Yes.
- [36:30]
Victor Davis Hanson
It would be like you're a little league coach and everybody gets a participation trophy. But one of your students is a town bully and he just beat up four people and you just say, I'm not going to give you your pro forma trophy. So I don't take anything back. The Pope should know that that government, of which the Vatican ambassador is a member, just killed 40,000 people. Murdered them. Now that would be one thing. He could say that that's not my political purview. But he has weighed in on politics, on the Iran war and other times very critically so. He has basically said to America, I, as a divine person, near divine person, Jades with, you know, I'm appointed to represent Jesus Christ as Catholic Church and St. Paul and Peter, and I think it's my duty to speak about politics. So once he does that, that's what I mentioned three weeks ago. He shouldn't do that because he's not responsible for all that. But once he says he is and he can make political judgments, then he should make political judgments. And it's a no brainer that you don't give even a pro forma award to somebody from a genocidal government unless he's Nobel Peace Prize material and he's a dissident like Sarkov or somebody.
- [38:00]
Sammy Wink
Yeah. It seems to me that you've made your award, even if it's pro forma, completely valueless if you allow such things to go on.
- [38:08]
Victor Davis Hanson
You gotta be very, very careful on all these matters because the things that are most dear to people are religion. And you don't want to get in weighed into Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism. But in this particular case, he waded out of the realm and became an editorialist on contemporary political matters.
- [38:28]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, and the second thing before we go to our break, I don't know if you have more to say on Cuba, but our CIA director, John Radcliffe has gone down there to meet with his counterpart who is actually the grandson of Fidel Castro, his name, Raul Castro, who is one of their security men down there. And I was. I know you've said a few things already about it, but I don't know if you have anything more. Is this a significant meeting?
- [38:54]
Victor Davis Hanson
Venezuela option? He's saying your grandfather and his cronies are the Maduros of Cuba. So here's the deal. We're squeezing you to the point you're going to pop. But if you get rid of these people or we take them and you don't contest it, then you can be transitional figure. Just be a strong man and keep order so there's not rioting and killing in the streets and we will pour in US aid and investment and then you can be a transitional figure. Now if you're a right wing or I mean, excuse me, if you're a left wing thug and you start killing, we'll get rid of you. But if you want to transition, then maybe in a couple years there'll be a constitutional system. You can run for office. Even Maduro's son, he has one son. Did you hear what he said the other day?
- [39:52]
Sammy Wink
No, I did not.
- [39:53]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, kind of sort of looking back, we kind of blew it. We were kind of a little bit too mean.
- [40:01]
Sammy Wink
Sounds like mayorkas.
- [40:03]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, we kind of didn't tell people what we were trying to do. So we can kind of understand. But yet we leftists are still in power. So you got to. It was kind of revealing. So I think that's what. It's a Maduro plan for Cuba.
- [40:19]
Sammy Wink
All right.
- [40:20]
Victor Davis Hanson
Which would be a big achievement.
- [40:22]
Sammy Wink
Yes.
- [40:22]
Victor Davis Hanson
Because you know what would happen if they cut a deal and said there's a transitional government, caretaker government for two years, but it's not communist and it's going to protect foreign investment. You would have 5,000 multimillionaires from Miami to go in there and buy up all the beachfront and factories and everything. And that place would look like that
- [40:47]
Sammy Wink
isn't already owned by the Castros. Apparently they call this guy the yacht official or something because he's got a lot of money for.
- [40:54]
Victor Davis Hanson
I think they would find out that he expropriated it and I think it would look like Singapore or Hong Kong.
- [41:00]
Sammy Wink
His brother has a nightclub and other
- [41:04]
Victor Davis Hanson
things in every communist is communism for them. But not for me.
- [41:09]
Sammy Wink
I know. A capitalist in the hiding, huh?
- [41:12]
Victor Davis Hanson
Just like dei. Every time I saw DEI in my years. DEI for all you junior faculty, but for us white males, why would you ever think that we would have to give up our slots for someone who doesn't have my unqualified perfect acumen and publications? I mean, I've had people tell me that. I said, you're not going to hire this guy. You've stopped him five times in a row. He's a white male. Why don't you just, you've been here, you're 70 years old once you retire. But I, I've done so much. I'm so invaluable. I said, no, you're not. You can replace you in two seconds. But they, they're like the Soviet apparat. They always think that they're, they don't have to live by their ideology. They impose on others.
- [41:59]
Sammy Wink
No. All right, Victor, let's take a break and then we'll come back and talk a little bit about the God Dionysius, the party God. Stay with us and we'll be back.
- [42:08]
Bradley Deflin
If you enjoy Victor Davis Hansen, you might enjoy the Daily Signals flagship show, the Tony Kenneth cast, the same common sense perspectives you love. Weekdays at 7pm Eastern. And unlike some of the other evening shows, we work up until showtime to bring you the latest breaking news, analysis and good old American sarcasm. Thom Tillis I'm pretty sure might have been useful at one time as a doorstop. Find the Tony Kenneth cast on YouTube, X radio, TV or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [42:38]
Sammy Wink
Welcome back. This is Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. If you want to watch Victor and contact him on social media, he his ex. I wanted to call it Twitter for a second there. His X account is @vd hansen and his facebook handle is hanson's morning cup. So please come join us there. So, Victor, I'm excited to hear about Dionysus, the God of party and fun and your thoughts on him.
- [43:12]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, like all the other gods, he is known in Mycenaean Linear B tablets. So what I mean by that is that period from 1800 BC to 1100 BC with you associate with Mycenae and Palatial. He was a Greek God for that Greek speaking people. Then they were destroyed. The memory of that magnificent civilization was exaggerated over five generations oral culture. Then the city state came and that's when the period of mythology in that period they lost the idea that he had been a God all the time in Greece. But he came from Thrace, from the east. And he's portrayed sometimes with breast, sometimes he's portrayed like Pan with little horns and hooves, beard, tail. Sometimes he's effeminate, sometimes he's male. But he's a foreign God that comes in and the locus Classicus is the playwright Euripides, great play, the Bacchae. He's known in Rome as Bacchus, Bacchanalia. And that comes from the word Bach, Bach, Bach, Bach that you shout in ecstasy and in Greek religious observance. He doesn't have A lot of temples of Dionysus. It's more cults, but he is the God of relieving pain, relieving of enjoyment, especially. We associate them primarily with wine, with resurrection from the, you know, the dead, that your soul will live on in the underworld, mad ecstasy. In Euripides, Bacchae, he comes in and he represents liberation. And then women called maenads go up into the mountains. They chase cows. They reportedly are naked. They have a thersis. A thersis that's kind of a stick, like a green evergreen limb. And they shake it and they chant music, they dance in frenzy. They drink wine, supposedly, although they deny it in the Bacchae. And they go through a rite of passage. So he is, in mythology, the giver of pain relief through alcohol. So the Greeks don't know the chemistry of alcohol, what it does to the brain. But they do know that empirically, it makes people lose their inhibitions. And therefore they do things they otherwise would not. They make fun of people, they commit crimes, or they have sex where they otherwise wouldn't. So they try to control that period and say that at certain times during the Great and Lesser Dionysia, were going to allow people collectively to let their hair down, drank. And in Athens, they had three plays, three tragedies and a comedy during the Greater Dionysia. So there were festivals honoring Dionysus. And they actually believed that when you drank wine, he was present in the volume of the wine. So you drank him, drank Dionysus, and then he came into your brain and liberated it. So if you had a severe cut on your leg, you drank unmixed red wine or some type of distilled liquor, and you lost the pain, Dionysus, to that you prayed. I had a tooth implant yesterday that was very hard to do because I had waited too long because of my lung surgery. So they had to, after six months, really drill through the bone. And I didn't have Dionysus, but they gave me a painkiller. And that was like a God. I don't know what God he was, but I took him and swallowed him. And I didn't act funny, but it did give me four hours of sleep. But that's the idea. And it's caricatured in the Bacchae that old stodgy men are always suspicious that bad things are going on. And Dionysus says that there's an element in the human experience. For me, ritual frenzy dancing, music, hitting a drum, frolicking in the mountains, getting away from the city, kind of like what's the festival down in? Is it Coachilla, down by Palm Springs? Fireman or whatever it is?
- [47:51]
Sammy Wink
Oh, yeah, I guess. Iron Man. I don't know.
- [47:55]
Victor Davis Hanson
So all these wealthy people and people go out there and then they take drugs or they just relax or they have sex. I don't know what goes on. And it's a release of tension through music and alcohol and drugs.
- [48:11]
Sammy Wink
It's a Bacchanalia.
- [48:12]
Victor Davis Hanson
A Bacchanalia. And the same thing in Rome where he's known, as I said, in Bacchus. And then he's kind of contrasted with Athena and Apollo that are part of the rational side. It's what Nietzsche said. Is that the way to contrast rational, the need for rational and irrational? Er, Dodds wrote a great book years ago called the Greeks and the Irrational, that they had understood there were elements of the human experience that were prone to irrational behavior, but it would be better if they were controlled. So this is the time we do it. This is where we do it. This is how we do it. Go up, get drunk, run around. But there will be limits on. It's a tragedy because, you know, Pentheus is. So. He's supposed to be the uptight paranoid that they're all up having sex and then he tries to insult Dionysus and then he appears to his mother as if he's a cow and she cuts his head off in a frenzy. And then that famous line where Cadmus says to Dionysus, gods are supposed to be better than men. Like, shame on you. You're not supposed to be like us. And so he's an Eastern God, supposedly, who sweeps in with a new product for Greece, wine and alcohol, and says to the Greeks, you're uptight and you have to worship me. If you worship me and you give me honor, I will bring pain relief and joy to your world through wine. So he's often, when you see statuary, he has vine leaves and clusters of grapes. And because the Greeks were so paranoid about female sexuality, he's sexually ambiguous. And the Bacchae, they're almost talking about his little curled hair, like he's gay or something in some moments. But sometimes he looks effeminate, but he is worshiped by women who are usually confined to the house. Married children stayed, but they're given an opportunity at certain festivities, periods in that calendar year to worship him and let their hair down and sing and yell and dance and act out of the ordinary, but apparently not to be completely sexually promiscuous, as is alleged in the Bacchae. Dionysus says that's not what we do. But apparently in Rome especially, they did that. So who knows? But he's the son of Zeus. Anytime you see the word Dio, Dios, it's the genitive in Greek of the word were, Zeus. So Nisos, he was from the island, the mountain of Nyssa. I don't know where that is actually. I don't know if they were ever found. It must be in Thrace. So there is also a word Nuos in Greek for offspring. It's either the offspring of Zeus or from the mountain of Zeus. But he's sometimes the daughter, a son of Persephone and Zeus, sometimes just Zeus, who stitched him in his leg, kind of like the head of Zeus with Athena jumping out. But he has a conduit. He's a powerful God because he's the son of Zeus, like so many gods.
- [51:26]
Sammy Wink
You know, you mentioned that he's got medicinal purposes. And I know that we don't have planned for this. The God Asclepius, which if you go to a lot of those saint. I'm sorry. So, yeah, could you say a little bit about Asclepius, since he. Just for the people, he's a steward.
- [51:48]
Victor Davis Hanson
Sometimes he's son of Apollo, but he is a sonic God. So that symbol of American medical situation with a staff, with a snake. Snakes come out of the ground. And he has a temple at Epidaurus, for example, the Asclepian. And there's one, I think, a big one at Samos. Yeah. So the idea is that there's certain supernatural powers that come out of the ground. So you go into the temple of Asclepius and whatever your problem is. So I've had lung cancer, so I get a plastic piece of my lung clay, and I'd hang up the little thing on a wall. Or I'd go to a little merchant and say, I have lung problems. Can you give me a lung? And then you hang it up and you sacrifice. And maybe I buy a little lamb, cut its throat, pour the blood in the ground for Asclepius, maybe eat all the good stuff and give the bones to Asclepius and burn them. Then I go into the temple and I'm in kind of a hospital with other people. And then apparently the Asclepius comes up from the ground. So they may have some tricks and things where snakes come out of the foundation, because there's little vents that come out and then vapors come up and they burn certain types of incense or mushrooms or people Theorize what was the narcotic they use. And then people go into a trance. Sometimes it's alcohol aided. And then they pray to the priest of Asclepius for cure.
- [53:33]
Sammy Wink
I was at Pergamum, and down below that site there is a medicinal site. And they had, I believe, hot baths as well in there.
- [53:45]
Victor Davis Hanson
They do. And remember, this is separate from the Greek rational tradition. This is the folk medicine. At the same time this is going on, there's the Hippocratic corpus of all these medical students where you can go today and look at it still. And then the Roman version, Galen, and you look at it and it says, if you have a sore throat in five days, if you see white, this is this, and you're going to die. And it's very up to date. They knew things like rabies and everything, but this was separate from the common folk. This is a religious. This is sort of, oh, when my son was on the baseball team, a couple guys had sore arms, and I think I took him to an orthopedic surgeon, but one of the parents said, take him to a brewho. And I said, abuja. It's Spanish for witch, but not really witch healer. And they said, yeah, if you go to this town, I won't mention the name of it. She can recite incantations and burn incense and then put on miraculous gels and sobs and give a prayer. And so that's that Dionysus aspect. Going to an orthopedic surgeon is what people in the fifth century often did, the educated people, perhaps.
- [55:12]
Sammy Wink
And so these hospitals had both elements to it that were by these, and they mix.
- [55:18]
Victor Davis Hanson
So finally, if you were at an Asclepion when you prayed for deliverance, say, from tuberculosis, there would be a person maybe who was actually rational and come out out as a priest of Asclepius, give prayer. But then he would treat you with things that might work.
- [55:37]
Sammy Wink
All right, Victor, so let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and we'll talk a little bit about California nonsense. Stay with us and we'll be right back.
- [55:47]
Victor Davis Hanson
Since the founding of America 250 years ago, many things have changed, but some things never do. The commitment of husband and wife, the importance of passing along our values to our children, the faithfulness of God. Some wonder how we can ensure America will continue to thrive as long as we keep first things first. We've only just begun. America the Beautiful.
- [56:16]
Sammy Wink
Welcome back. This is Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. So, Victor, the Governor Newsom strikes again, apparently, and he and I Know again and again, and I know that you wrote an article on it, but the latest thing is he's giving tablets or replacing the tablets that prisoners already have in California and they're using them for things like porn. And I was wondering that. And then in your article where you talked about Newsom, you said that he's been in there for 32 years. That is incriminating. And been in the California government for 32 years. 32 years, yeah.
- [56:55]
Victor Davis Hanson
Supervisor, mayor, lieutenant governor, governor. But think about it. $240 billion price tag for high speed rail. 20 billion already wasted. 90% of our snowmelt let out to the ocean. Two big refineries leave California. 300,000 people leaving a year. 21% of the people living below the poverty line. 40% of the people on Medi Cal, 50% of the births on Medi Cal, 25% are not paying their power bill. Highest gas prices and taxes, Highest electricity, about 5th highest sales tax when you add all local and regional add ons and highest income tax tax. And yet the biggest deficit. And with all that, he's saying to himself, I've got to find a solution for California. Now a couple years ago I thought 500 million for illegal alien health care would solve all these problems. But I got a better idea. I think all of our inmates, especially those on death row, need iPads. I can get them for eight or nine hundred bucks each. And then they can just look at pornography all day. Day. That would be a good thing to do. That would save California. That's how he thinks.
- [58:17]
Sammy Wink
That's so crazy.
- [58:19]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, he is.
- [58:20]
Sammy Wink
Let's.
- [58:21]
Victor Davis Hanson
California is one of these places where if you came in 1965 or 70 and you saw all these state of the art freeways and this California water project and Central Valley project just established these brilliantly engineered aqueducts, 40 reservoirs. You went into San Francisco, it was immaculate. Went to Los Angeles, Hollywood was booming. 90% of the world's all these sports, great sports arenas. People were well dressed, polite. And then you said, how would I ruin this? How could I destroy it? So it would just be chaos. I think I would elect somebody in various capacities for 32 years and I would raise taxes and then take the money. Engage in the biggest welfare scandals in history. And I'd call it spread the Wealth. And then I'd get a bunch of homeless. I would shut down all the mental hospitals and put them all on the street. Then I wouldn't enforce any hygiene or laws about fornicating or injecting or defecating on the street. Then I think I would hire everybody by their race or gender and not marriage merit. I'd make sure that all the government offices were unionized and DMV and everybody so that the unions had power. Hospitals. I think I would just say we don't need any more freeways. So I'm going to double the population from 17 to 40 and we're still going to use the old two lanes in each direction. I5 for most of the state and maybe 99 should have the law, but just two lanes in one direction.
- [60:05]
Sammy Wink
You also said in that article that 99 is the deadliest freeway in America.
- [60:10]
Victor Davis Hanson
It is.
- [60:11]
Sammy Wink
It is.
- [60:12]
Victor Davis Hanson
For the amount of miles driven, especially in that corridor between Tulare and Delano. That is really scary when you add 20 ton trucks being driven with people who did not pass a driver's license in English, it gets even scarier.
- [60:34]
Sammy Wink
Well, let's turn then since we're in California, to the governor race and the LA Mayor race and get your reflections in California on the governor's race. An Emerson College poll shows that Xavier Becerra is ahead for the democrats now at 19%. So he's. Since Swalwell has gone out. And then I was just wondering your thoughts on it seems like Spencer Pratt is really giving Karen Bass a run for her money. She won't even participate in the next debate.
- [61:07]
Victor Davis Hanson
I hate to say it, but I like both Chad Bianco and Steve Hilton. But whoever is polling the highest, and I think that's Steve Hilton, the other should drop out and consolidate that vote because if they don't, somebody like Tom Steyer or somebody's going to sneak in there or. And they're going to not. Neither Republican's going to win. Win. Becerra's a joke. I mean, he gave an interview the other day and he basically told the interviewer, you can't ask mean questions. It was pathetic. He was a disaster. I think he was HHS secretary. It was a complete disaster. And he would be worse than. No, he wouldn't be worse than. He would be as bad as Newsom. Hilton would be good. I mean he's. Everything he said is exactly what you need to do. The only problem he would have is he has super majorities in the legislature and he's got a bunch of left wing judges that everything he would do they would declare unconstitutional. But it would be a start. As far as the mayor, Karen Bass can't debate, so she's not going to debate. And she basically said to Spencer Pratt, I have all the seie unions. And I have all the teachers union money and I have all the Hollywood money, movie money. And they don't care what LA is like. They just want to get a big salary that's guaranteed income. And the Hollywood people are wealthy anyway, so they don't care. They like to hear good things, that I'm helping the homeless and I'm helping this group and that. So that's her whole. I'm just going to see it. Don't want to be until election day. And he's got a difficulty because he's trying to say he has to be careful what he says. So he looks at the Palisades and he can't quite figure out. He can figure out, he's a very bright guy, that they burned it down. I mean, they let it burn and they knew it was going to burn because they had these high Santa Ana January dry wings and they had a nuts that were trying to imitate Luigi Mangione. And the creed of LA in California is, if somebody's wealthy, let's just kill them or destroy it. And these are the most beautiful homes in the state. And it was dry. So if you really wanted to burn down the Palisades, you would say the following. I'm going to make it illegal to clean your brush next to your house when the winds get really, really high. And it's been not yet very much water. I want to make sure the mayor goes to Uganda for a wedding and she's not around. Now, the vice mayor, I want him to phone in a bomb threat so he's not around. Of course he did. And they only gave him. They gave him no jail time at all. He was dei, black guy. And then I want the water and power director, I think her name was Quiones, who came from pge, who now is trying to help the grid in Puerto rico. Pay her $700,000 and just say, we hired the first Latina CEO of our water and power and we're not going to check to see if the reservoirs are empty or the hydrants don't work. And then I will hire the fire chief and I want to make sure that she's dei. So she's going to be lgbtq and she's going to cut videos with everybody about its LGDQ quest. And she's not going to worry that there's not all the hydrants working or that Karen Bass cut the fire by budget. And so when the fire hits, I'm going to have people that are running the fire department that are running the water supply that are running the municipal government and the mayor either not be there in residence at the fire hazard peak of the season or they were hired for reasons other than what they're supposed to be doing, doing. And that's what she did. That's what happened. And they voted for that. People forget that DEI is one of the most pernicious tribal pre civilizational protocols there is. You're hiring people on their superficial appearance or their gender or their sexual orientation and you're hiring them over people that often are according to their own standards of testing or education or whatever the criteria are better qualified. And you're doing that for some utopian idea of fairness that's not really going to apply to you. And once you do that and give somebody that exemption, that's not the beginning. That's the beginning, it's not the end. Because then you are telling them you were hired for your race or your nationality or your gender or your sexual orientation. And because you were given that job over someone who was better qualified, we're going to continue to protect you against people who are better qualified. So if you don't have water in the reservoir or the hydrants don't work or the brush is being burned down because of you, anybody who says that's a bigot, sorry. Although they did. Finally they started ending up fighting among themselves. So Karen Bass thought she could save her candidacy by firing the fire chief who was better than Karen Bass, but terrible. And then they thought they could save the water and power by farming her off to Puerto Rico. I guess maybe she can do for Puerto Rico what she did for la, I guess.
- [67:09]
Sammy Wink
Well, Victor, we're at the end of our show and we have some comments from your viewers, viewers of Jack and your podcast. And here's what they say. Short ones are CUNY BROUGHTON9318 says absolutely. Love both of you finishing the session, honoring your mothers so beautifully and respectfully. Blessings to Jack and Victor and Gran3241 says, I was a Democrat 40 year for 40 years, I'm sorry to admit. And the biggest difference between them and Republicans, Republicans have no problem challenging ideas and leaders if we don't agree with them. That is healthy for a republic. And then finally, Lynette Polka 2775 and this is a little longer, she says, Victor, your Piers Morgan experience reminds me of the great Douglas Murray being ambushed by Joe Rogan when Douglas was surprised to find he shared the show with Dave Smith. It doesn't matter how correct you are, how wise or well spoken when your opposition won't think or listen, there's not much you can do. So much love and gratitude for your dedication to the truth and for sharing it with us. That was very nice.
- [68:25]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, that's very well written. It's so true. When somebody is debating you and he says bombing. We've done all this illegal bombing and you know, one third of the German people were resisting Hitler till we bombed them. I thought, wow, this guy is really ignorant. We bombed in April of 1942. We started. And the only reason people ever resisted Hitler was because he was losing. And they didn't even do it actively. There was no, you know, 100,000 troops in France stopped the whole French resistance. So there was never any widespread. The only resistance was Operation Valkyrie and a few officers, maybe four or five thousand sympathizers in a nation of eighty men million. So that was the most ignorant thing I'd ever heard, that the resistance was crushed in Germany because we started bombing and everybody became empathetic. I don't know, but that was what the whole interview was like. So anyway. Oh, but be sure to take a look at the counter revolution. The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump.
- [69:36]
Sammy Wink
Of Donald Trump. Victor's new book will be out in September, I believe, September 8th.
- [69:41]
Victor Davis Hanson
And you can it now. I want to apologize today. I had a tooth implant yesterday and you put. When you extract the tooth, you put the bovine or other types of grafts and then you're supposed to do it in three or four months where it's still flexible. But I was operated on. I couldn't do anything for three months. So it was six and a half months and it was hard as a rock. So the dentist was quite skilled, but he had to kind of jackhammer a hole in. So the reason I'm kind of sore today with my jaw okay. And I'm hoarse.
- [70:16]
Sammy Wink
I will forgive you on that. And then just one more thing, though. In addition to your new book on Trump, you talked a lot about Thucydides. And I know you've. You're obviously you're researching. Do you have any place where you have done a series of lectures that would help people who would want to read the book the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, because it reads like a chronicle. So it's very hard to.
- [70:38]
Victor Davis Hanson
If you buy by the. It's called the landmark Thucydides and it's the best selling translation of Thucydides. I wrote the introduction to it and I explained about how he wrote it, why he wrote it what are the problems in understanding it, how it compares to Herodotus? So I wrote the introduction 25 years years ago.
- [71:06]
Sammy Wink
Yeah. And that helps with the reading of it.
- [71:08]
Victor Davis Hanson
And I helped the editor find the Free Press and my agent helped, so I was instrumental. And I also wrote one of the endnotes. There's kind of an appendices about certain aspects of military affairs, political. I wrote one of those.
- [71:27]
Sammy Wink
I'm surprised Hillsdale has a. I also
- [71:29]
Victor Davis Hanson
wrote a book called A War like no Other, a book on the Peloponnesian War in which I talk briefly about Thucydides. If you're really interested in something that's really boring. If you go to classical antiquity. About 35 years ago, I wrote an article on how Thucydides uses numbers in Greek. And that was a best selling article. No, actually I think two people read it.
- [71:57]
Sammy Wink
Yes. But also, just so your audience knows Thucydides, Peloponnesian War has been a long time curiosity of this big war between Athens, Sparta. Even Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century translated it. So it's been something that military historians in particular have been.
- [72:17]
Victor Davis Hanson
Because it's not just a history, it's a philosophy. He doesn't just say the Spartans invaded in 431. He says why they invaded and how they invaded and whether it was smart or stupid. So he has the Melian dialogue where he talks about whether right makes might makes right, is that right? Or the Corcyran stasis where people go into collective hysteria and kill people and destroy institutions, things like that. Or the Sicilian expedition, a misadventure that destroys Athens. Ability to win the war, probably.
- [72:57]
Sammy Wink
All right, well, thanks everybody for joining us on this weekend and thank you, Victor, for all the wisdom. This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen and we're signing off.
- [73:11]
Victor Davis Hanson
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.