← Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
Victor Davis Hanson: Venezuela Is No Panama, and Trump Knows This
01:38:05
While many of the Left, and even some of the Right, believe the Trump administration’s decision to park the USS Gerald R. Ford off the cost of Venezuela is a precursor for war, Victor Davis Hanson argues that President Donald Trump’s America First base and recent U.S. history in the region may shine the light on an entirely different outcome on today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words.”
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- [00:01]
Victor Davis Hanson
It's okay not to be perfect with finances. Experian is your big financial friend and here to help. Did you know you can get matched with credit cards on the app? Some cards are labeled no Ding decline, which means if you're not approved, they won't hurt your credit scores. Download the Experian app for free today. Applying for no Ding Decline cards won't hurt your credit scores. If you aren't initially approved, initial approval will result in a hard inquiry which may impact your credit scores. Experian. Well, I was down on my last dollar Then I started saving cause the bank said fiscal restraint is what you're craving. So I put my earnings in a high yield account Let the savings compound.
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Sammy Wink
And the interest mount.
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Victor Davis Hanson
I'm optimizing cash flow putting debt in check now time is my friend and not a pain in the neck and we've got a little cash to rebuild the old debt. Boring money moves make kinda lame songs but they sound pretty sweet to your wallet. Brilliantly boring since 1865 it's very strange. We last seven days I've done maybe three or four interviews. You know, podcast interviews. I just did one with German TV. The German was really wild. They're very left wing. Every time they gave me an example, I gave them back what Biden had done. Lawfare, getting Trump off the ballot, raiding his home. They didn't seem to know any of that or they knew it. And they only got their talking points from American New York Times, political or whatever.
- [01:25]
Sammy Wink
Is Germany the weakest because they were so demilitarized? And.
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Victor Davis Hanson
Germany is in a suicidal trajectory with its energy policy. It's got negative or flat GDP. The military was a joke. I think they had 12 active tanks. But after Ukraine, they are rearming now. We fought them in two wars. I mean Germany is Germany is Germany. They want to rearm their Leopard tanks. Their most recent model is some of the best in the world.
- [01:51]
Sammy Wink
But I was wondering your thoughts on Venezuela.
- [01:54]
Victor Davis Hanson
I got that question. One of the German getting back to them was, well, what do you think of Donald Trump on the way to invading Venezuela without a congressional authorization? And I'm thinking, did Reagan have one to go into Grenada? Did Bush have 1 in 89 when he took out the drug lord Noriega in Panama? Remember how they got him out of his house? We, we abide by the Geneva Convention. But I was very ashamed that we did something that was contrary when he was in his house, as I remember, we played Barry Manilow music. Maybe it's because I like Barry Manilow.
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Sammy Wink
Even Barry White, y'.
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Victor Davis Hanson
All. I would rather be tortured than listen to Barry Manilow for 24 hours. That's what they did. Any way.
- [02:33]
Sammy Wink
Barry Manilow, I like his music.
- [02:35]
Victor Davis Hanson
I know I'm not picking up Barry, man, I'm sorry you Barry Manilow fans, but we did do stuff like that.
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Sammy Wink
Hello and welcome to Victor Davis Hansen in His Own Words. This is our Saturday edition where we do something a little bit different in our middle segment, and Victor's going to be looking at the choice to side with the US SSR and not with Hitler this middle segment. So stay with us for that. First, though, we'll look at a few stories. We're going to look at Europe and then Latin America first and news stories. So we'll be right back after these messages.
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Victor Davis Hanson
Right is still right, even if you stand by yourself. Chief Justice May I please record this is Hans von Spakovsky, host of the Case in Point podcast, which looks at the hottest cases affecting politics, culture and everyone's daily lives. But we talk about them without confusing legal jargon. And we have interesting guests like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. And we end with reviews of classic Hollywood movies relevant to the topic. Case in Point, the podcast available everywhere. You won't want to miss. Foreign.
- [04:03]
Sammy Wink
Welcome back to Victor Davis Hansen in His own Words. You can find him at his website, Victor Hansen.com the name of the website is the Blade of Perseus. He is also the Martin and Ellie Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. And so you can see him or contact him or he has affiliations with those two institutions. In fact, the Hoover Institution is his primary affiliation. So, Victor, I know that there's a lot going on in Europe and I wanted to talk a little bit about, you know, a couple of things. One is, is that Kier Starmer, who is the left wing PM at prime minister in England, has had calls from the Labor Party, which is his party, to step down. So we we've seen that. And then just this morning, and it is Wednesday, we hear that the NATO had to scramble some planes to defend the eastern border against a Russian invasion, which was one of the largest in the last few months. So I was wondering just some discussion of not just those things, but also our relations with Europe.
- [05:24]
Victor Davis Hanson
Storm is pulling 12%. He's the most unpopular prime minister since World War II. He was supposed to be the up and coming new left, sort of like the Mandami, very hard left, first gay Prime Minister, open borders, hushed up the grooming, rape of the pack by the Pakistani radicals with young girls. And people got sick of him because Britain went from about 3%, 4% to almost 10, 12% higher in some areas of illegal immigrants. And that party welcomed them in and he was the point man on that. And everything that he touched turned to dross. So he's not going to survive. It's just a question of does the Labor Party internally remove him? Remember, this is a parliamentary system, so you can do that. Unlike the United States, it's harder to do it. In the United States, they did it on the terms of getting rid of Joe Biden with a coup and then putting in Kamala Harris. But that was for the nomination. They didn't. You couldn't remove Joe Biden from power unless you went through the 25th Amendment process. And they. But in a parliamentary system, the party can remove him as the official head and then substitute somebody else, so. Or call a new election, I should say as well. So I don't think he's viable. And he's part of a phenomenon that I, I think in the last week, it's very strange, we last seven days, I've done maybe three or four interviews on email with Italian, French people. I've done oral with, you know, podcast interviews. I just did one with German tv, I just did one with Czech tv, British, the German was really wild. They're very left wing. They kept trying to tell me that Donald Trump was unconstitutional and an insurrectionist and a dictator. And I, every time they gave me an example, I gave them back what Biden had done. You know, lawfare, getting Trump off the ballot, rating his home. They didn't seem to know any of that, or they knew it and they only got their talking points from American New York Times, political or whatever. But Europe is in for, in general, a readjustment because that paradigm that they adopted in the last 20 years, and what was that paradigm? Everybody disarm so you don't spend. There were only six nations, I think three, and then Trump got it up to six or seven the first term that were willing to pay their 2%. And that did encourage Putin to go into Ukraine. So it was disarmament, open borders, millions of illegal immigrants, not from a Christian Latin American, but a radical Islamic, failed states in Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan and all that. So it was open borders and then it was green, green, green, shut down coal, don't build nuclear, don't tap all the natural gas that you could offshore or in France has a lot of it. They could tap and then pay double for electricity and make your industries not competitive. And then when people objected to all of this, then censor them and say you're making it. You're censoring people because of disinformation, misinformation. And that's what they've done and people are sick of that. So you see conservative movements now in Romania and the Czech Republic, Hungary with Victor Orban Melon in Italy. Macron is not destined to be very much longer in France. And then you see Neil Ferrars is pulling higher than either the Conservative or the Labour Party in Britain. And so the whole paradigm doesn't work. Talking to these Europeans this week, they don't get Donald Trump. They listen to what he says. So they're obsessed with Greenland. And you say to them, do you understand art of the deal? Well, he was going to take Greenland or he was going to force. No, he wasn't. Greenland is a colony. You people are anti colonialists. The colonial mother is Denmark. Denmark was controlling a colony which is in North America. And Greenland is closer to New York City than it is to Copenhagen, number one. Number two, the Chinese and Russians are making inroads into the Arctic Circle. So Trump comes along and his blood clustering fashion threatens this and threatens that. And the net result as we speak today, semi autonomous council now in Greenland. $1 billion of investment from the mother city into Greenland. More close relations with the United States military to help patrol it and keep the Chinese. And no more talk of taking Greenland. Ditto Canada as a 51st state, which nobody in their right mind would want. But it did force them to promise to spend 2% of GDP. They're discussing their 63 billion dollar surplus and they're on secure or insecure border with us. That's what he does. And the same thing with Europe. Now, I think there's 23 of the 31 have met the 2%. They've all, except Spain promised to go to 5%. The tariff wars didn't happen. We are basically symmetrical with most of Europe countries. They have a tariff on us. Trump has lowered it to 15 or whatever percent. That's symmetrical. They're fine with that. And to sweeten the deal, there's a lot of European investment. That's what all the Europe rhetoric was about. I will leave it to our listeners to adjudicate whether getting to there was worth the animosity because the Canadians hold grudges now. They're angry at us. The Greenlanders and the Danish don't like us. It's like we hit them over, we came in and we said, you're sick, you got to take this castor oil. And then we rammed it down their throat. And then they're better off, but they hate the person who forced them to do that. And that's the Trump style.
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Sammy Wink
What, what do you make of this new development of NATO planes scrambling to.
- [12:08]
Victor Davis Hanson
Defend against Putin is in a Stalingrad Verdun and he knows that he can't get enough territory to the west. He's only about 50 to 100 miles depending on that 600 mile border with Ukraine that he invaded. He couldn't take Kiev. It was already a done deal that Crimea and Donbass were going to remain Russian after he stole them. They didn't have the wherewithal, the Ukrainians to get them back. Nobody wanted them in NATO. I don't think the Europeans wanted them in NATO, etc. So basically he said that I, I invaded to institutionalize Crimea and Donbass, okay? I invaded to keep them out of NATO, okay, you take that bone back to the Kremlin. But he didn't invade to lose over a million dead Russians wounded and missing and destruction of most of their frontline military equipment and to be humiliated militarily on the world stage. And he's far west enough to go back to the military and oligarchic grandees. Now everybody says, well, victory is a dictator. All dictators report to somebody. They need money and they need the military and they need the media. So he's got to go back and say it was worth it because I am now 200 or 300, I am halfway to Kia. He's not going to get that. So what he's doing now is he's probing, sending drones over, flying Hungary, Poland, especially Poland. And he's trying to distract everybody so he can say, well, I'm in a, we're in a war with NATO or we have a crisis with NATO. It has nothing to do with Ukraine and I'm standing up to NATO and NATO. NATO and it's a distraction. And the problem he has is had he just left it alone. NATO was on a downward trajectory. It was at the end of history, naivete. It was not army they were going to get down to. Nobody was going to pay 2% except the countries right on the front line. And now what does he achieve? They've got the only two countries I think in the last 10 years that are really worth the deal and that is Finland, who has the best artillery per capita in the whole continent. And Fight like blank. If you see what they did in the winter war of 39 to 1940 and then more importantly the Swedes, and I'm chauvinistic here is Swedish. But they have one of the most effective and competent and state of the art industrial complexes. As far as military SAB fighters, they have armored vehicle. So they, and they're right on the front line in strategic territory and they want to be in NATO because they're scared to death. And so it he strengthened NATO. Putin.
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Sammy Wink
Yes. Who do you see as the weakest of the European. I guess the significant weakest meaning is Germany. The weakest because they were so demilitarized.
- [15:14]
Victor Davis Hanson
And German Germany is on a suicidal trajectory with its energy policy. It's got negative or flat GDP. The military was a joke. I think they had 12 active tanks. But after Ukraine, they are rearming now and we fought them in two wars. I mean Germany is Germany is Germany. They want to rearm their Leopard tanks. Their most recent model is some of the best in the world. They will be very adept. The worst as far as the government is the Spanish. They have already said they're not going to make the 5%. They don't want to. I don't think they're even at 2%. They've got a hard left government and they Western Europeans, unlike the Dutch and the French and the British are sort of stepping up because they're scared of Ukraine. And they know that Trump has called their bluff and basically said, you've got 500 million people, we have 350 and you're way over there and you want us to come all the way over there with 60% of your population and defend you at 17 or 18% of your budget. We're not going to do it. And that said, well, we need you. And I say we need you is that they have 2,000 top of the line fighter. But the difference with the United States is you get the whole kabang. You get the logistics, the tankers, the C17s, the C130s, you get all of the support network, you get the intellect, you get all of it. And if you divorce from NATO, they're going to be overrun by Putin. And they know that. And they, they also know something they do not want to admit. I can tell you from the interviews, I can tell you what it is. They understand that when Obama or Biden is there and they talk a great game and how they love Europe and they're sophisticated and the elites from Oxford, the Sorbonne, Heidelberg, Cambridge, mingle with our elites at Harvard Yale, Princeton, Stanford and BBC np, all that stuff doesn't mean anything when the rubber hits the road, it's whether a president will use its authority, his authority and the military to guarantee their sanctity. And that means if the Red Sea is shut down by the Houthis and nobody can get out to the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal to import oil, somebody's got to deal with the Houthis, somebody's got to deal with the Iranians because they know what the Iranians were up to. It wasn't just to give long range missiles to destroy Israel, it was to point at Europe. That's what the whole hot mic and so South Korea was about in 2014 that they. Putin wanted to disband missile defense, but the reason that the Bush administration had started out with a Czech Republic was for to save them from threats from Iran. Putin said, ah, well, that's just an excuse. No, it was an excuse. So Europe wanted somebody to deal with that. They knew that, that they were mice and they didn't want that cat to devour them. And they wanted somebody to put a bell around his neck. And that was Trump and he did that. And now they're relieved and now they're thinking, wow, he's giving $170 million even though his base hates him for that in Ukraine. Wow, there's no more Houthis disrupting our sea lanes. Wow, he didn't call the Saudis a pariah. He's. He's on their side and they're not gonna. And Iran is, is impotent now. And you can go in and get our oil at the Straits of Horrors without worries. And wow, he stood up to Putin. Wow, he's dealing with the Chinese that take us to the cleaners. And maybe, maybe we hate him because what he represents, but he's been done a lot more for us than Obama or Biden. They were never there when we needed them. So they're starting. When I was doing these interviews, it was sort of like when you pointed that out to them was sort of like, wow, Maybe it's. Or I like this. I don't know if I have all the accents, they're so varied, but I did five of them in the last six days. Yes, these are very interesting ideas. I had thought of some of them, but not all of them. Let me ponder them, let me digest them. Not that I agree with them, they're very controversial. I don't think they're reflective of all of America. But this is insightful, meaning this is the truth. And we can't make it. And don't talk about that because our buddies in America are all left wing and they hate Trump and so we have to, too. And I can't believe that Trump is in our interest, but that you made the case. I think he probably is secretly. I can't tell anybody that. So that's where they are.
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Sammy Wink
I liked your emasculated European voice, but Victor, let's.
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Victor Davis Hanson
I like Europeans. I actually do every time I've done an interview and I've done a lot with German media. This was Spiegel video or whatever. I did one with Stern once. That's something about German media. I just expect them to say, we want to. We find you a very interesting person we would like to interview. And then it's a hit ambush. All right, left wing. And that's not true of the Swiss, it's not true of the Austrians. I have some of the. If I deal with a Greek left wing newspaper or central, they're fair. I deal with the French. I've done interviews with them. Fair. Italians fair, British fair, not the Germans. I've never had an interview with a German media outlet that wasn't left wing. And trying to get me into position where I'll agree with some left wing thing. So they can take and a clip and say, this is an American who agrees with us. And I'm, I'm not trying to slur. They were very nice, but it was, the questions were like, well, you have written about checks and balances and the constitutional system. So what do you think about Donald Trump taking the FBI and the CIA and weaponizing it against his political enemies? And I said, I think you're a little late to the party. Have you ever heard of Andrew McCabe? Peter Strzok, Lisa Page? Huh? How about James Comey? How about working with Twitter and Facebook to censor the news about the laptop? How about keeping the laptop under wraps for a year and kind of winking that we don't know whether it's authentic or not. When you did know it was authentic. How about sabotaging Michael Flynn? How about lying under oath if you're Andrew McCabe or saying you have amnesia? I went on to them, they were like, okay, interesting.
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Sammy Wink
Yes. And how about all the recent news that shows that the administration is revealing all those things, whereas Lawfare, Yeah, they mentioned that.
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Victor Davis Hanson
Here's what they said. And here they were reading from an American left wing news account. And Donald Trump is reportedly having an ideological litmus test for all the people in the DOJ and the Intelligence enforcement. So they're going to fire anybody who is not politically correct. You. Do you agree with that? When have you stopped beating your wife? You know, it's just, it's crazy. They're not very. For all they're supposed. It's sophistication. They have no facts. It's like Bill Maher had that actor on Owen whatever his name is, Patton something.
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Sammy Wink
No, I think it was Oswalt. Patton, Oswalt, yeah.
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Victor Davis Hanson
And he just. Well, I didn't know that. I didn't know that. It was just, it was just simple stuff. Yeah, that's maybe Germans were. They just.
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Sammy Wink
It shows you though that the information that people can get can be very tailored to their own side of things. So they're completely ignorant.
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Victor Davis Hanson
I think we forget that where we have a vibrant conservative voice here, the one that goes overseas is New York Times, Washington, the old Washington Post, npr, pbs. That's what they did. They devour.
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Sammy Wink
Yeah, they don't know the new wave.
- [23:47]
Victor Davis Hanson
And they don't when they visit. When the European elite that make policy and media and influencers, they go to Washington or New York, they meet ex State Department people at the Brookings, they talk to people at CBS or NPR or Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi or they come out here west, they go to Stanford or. You know what I mean. They don't go to Dayton, Ohio, they don't go to Texas. They don't know anything about the interior of this country.
- [24:18]
Sammy Wink
No. They don't know the real America. Well, Victor, let's welcome back to the show our sponsor, Allegiant Gold. If you've studied enough history, you start to see a pattern. Nations don't lose their way overnight night they drift through debt and division until one day you realize the foundations you thought were permanent were never permanent at all. Today, America is spending at levels once reserved for wartime. We've normalized deficits that would have stunned earlier generations. And policymakers now debate whether the only path forward is more intervention, more printing, more distortion. But here's the historical truth. Every society that pushed its currency beyond discipline eventually paid a price. The wise never waited for the collapse. They prepared for correction. That's why so many thoughtful Americans, especially those nearing retirement or in retirement, are reallocating part of their wealth into something that has outlasted every paper experiment in human history. Physical gold not as speculation, but as insulation. Reputation matters. Which is why we're partnering with Allegiance Gold, a company distinguished by integrity, reliability and an A rating with the Better Business Bureau. For years they've guided Americans through transparent education and longstanding relationships built on trust. And right now, they're extending a special liberty offer for our listeners to help you get started with Real gold, whether your funds are in a retirement account or sitting in the bank, if you believe that the best time to reinforce your position is before the storm becomes obvious, call 844-790-9191. That's 844-790-9191 or visit protectwithvictor.com that's 844-790-91991. That's 844-790, 9191 or visit protectwithvictor.com History rewards those who take the long view. And we'd like to thank Allegiance Gold for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show. So, Victor, let's turn then to Venezuela and look at and this actually we read our left leaning newspapers and this comes from Politico. The whole idea here that Trump is there's been no evidence of this and Trump hasn't said it, but they think at Politico that Trump is about ready to topple Maduro, arrest him, either try him in the United States or send him in exile. If you ask me, that sounded a little bit extreme. I don't think Donald Trump was going to go that far. But I was wondering your thoughts on Venezuela.
- [27:16]
Victor Davis Hanson
I got that question. One of the German getting back to them was, well, what do you think of Donald Trump on the way to invade Venezuela without a congressional authorization? And I'm thinking, did Reagan have one to go into Grenada? Did Bush have 1 in 89 when he took out the drug lord Noriega in Panama? Did Reagan have one when he bombed Libya? No. Did Democrats have congressional authorizations to do some of the same thing? No. Maybe a big campaign like Iraq or Afghanistan, When's the last time we declared war? World War II. So it happens. The question is, if you look at the polls of the Venezuelan last election, Maduro had about 30% going into that election. So he stole it and he stays in power because he's a narco terrorist. What a what I mean by that is he kills his enemies and he threatens his neighbors. But more importantly, he is behind the smuggling of opiate drugs, Fentanyl included, into the United States. And with that money, he buys the support of the military class and the oligarchs. So the Trump administration is twofold. We are going to stop the importation by sea because we don't have a contiguous border anywhere toward North America. So if it's on the way to the Caribbean. If it's on the way to Mexico, it's on the way to our southern border or San Diego. We're going to blow these boats up. And that's what they're doing. And they're doing that because we have lost 600,000 people since 1990 from opiates. Not just people who wanted to commit suicide. Not just drug addict. We're talking about casual users who say, oh, I like that Ativan, give me two Valiums. Oh, give me that Benzedrine. And they're disguised deliberately as Fentanyl or deadly drugs, so people will not be afraid to use them. So they're doing that, and they're making hundreds of billions of dollars. So Trump's attitude is this, can I do what George W. Bush did? 1980? H.W. not W. H.W. bush, the first Bush, 1989. They said that Noriega was a human trafficker, a drug trafficker. So they were going to take him out. They warned him, they got a federal court to indict him. The French indicted him. And so in 1989, they invaded and they. They did that. But they did that for two reasons. One, unlike Venezuela, that was the Panama Canal. So they said, this is a strategic necessity, that we have a stable government. And this person is basically at war with the United States and making money off drugs, and Panama is the drug nexus. So they invaded and removed him. Remember how they got him out of his house? That was one of the. How do I put it? We. We abide by the Geneva Convention. But I was very ashamed that we did something that was contrary to the Geneva Convention, to get rid of Norieg. When he was in his house, as I remember, with. We played Barry Manilow music. And he was. That was so unfair. I mean, I would rather be tortured than to listen to Barry Manilow for 24 hours. That's what they did. And that was cruel. Cruel and unusual punishment.
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Sammy Wink
Anyway, Barry Manilow, I like his music.
- [31:05]
Victor Davis Hanson
I know. I'm not picking up. Barry, man, I'm sorry you Barry Manilow fans, but we did do stuff like that. So, anyway, what I'm getting at is, is Maduro, there's three differences between. And Grenada, too. That had Cuban people there and they were. That was an outpost. So they were going to spread communism throughout the Caribbean. So Reagan went in there. But this is the question. Venezuela has, in some ways, if you count their tar sands, more oil than any more reserves anywhere in the world. And it is a very big country. It's not Grenada. It's not Panama, number one. Number two, we don't have a strategic interest like the Panama Canal that would justify it. Right? We don't. Venezuela does not have the pen. They were going to build a canal under Nicaragua nearby, but we don't. So it's not a strategic asset like Panama. And it's big, so it wouldn't be a quickie like we did, you know, with Grenada or Panama. And number three, this isn't the Bushes. This isn't Romney. This isn't McCain. This is not a neoconservative interventionist administration. They have a MAGA base, America First. Trump has deviated from that already by bombing the Iranian nuclear plant and flipping on Ukraine helping Israel. He's a Jacksonian, right, but he still has to deal with the Marjorie Taylor Greene Tucker Carlson base, the Thomas Massie base. It's not just those three people. There's a lot of people that voted for him that they did not want what they called forever wars. So this is an optional war. So what he's doing, he's taking our biggest, newest, most powerful aircraft carrier, the Gerald Ford, the first of the Ford class. It's even better than the Nimitz. And he's parking it off the coast and it's like, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. He's putting the pressure on and he's cutting off the narco income from the United States. He thinks, and he thinks in another they all have a shaft. A nuclear carrier does not have to go to port for 20 years because it can create its own water and it can get food from other ships that unload it. But you can't keep people out there forever on that ship. So there's a shelf life. I don't know how many months, six months. So he's going to park this thing out there and he's going to fly F35 all around. I mean, excuse me, Hornets and super Hornets all around and buzz them and put the pressure and blow up ships. And at some point, he's saying he's going to run out of money and the opposition is going to get emboldened and people are going to see that the United States wants him gone and they think there'll be either a revolution or a coup and they'll have the elected president back in power. That's the idea. But I don't think that he's going to preemptively invade Venezuela, as my German host said today.
- [34:15]
Sammy Wink
All right, Victor, last thing before we go to a break and then go to World War Two is we recently had. We know that there are a lot of jihadists attacks against Christians in Nigeria, but this story is from the Congo. And we have a jihadist armed group that attacked a hospital that was actually a hospital for pregnant women. Women in part of the same Central African phenomenon. It's a Catholic hospital.
- [34:47]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yes.
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Sammy Wink
Yeah, it is. And they attacked it. They killed over 20 people. And the other thing that was interesting about this story is they talked about how they, they don't kill very young kids and babies and they take them and they train them to be these jihadist killers and they. The second thing is that, and how they attack. They send in their adults to attack and they bring in these young kids that they've trained to finish up.
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Victor Davis Hanson
Where do they get that idea?
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Sammy Wink
I don't know, but I have a feeling it was from the old Janissary.
- [35:23]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yes. They would go into Balkan villages, in Albania especially, but also in Greece, and they would go into a city and they would take. So they wouldn't have an open revolt. They usually limited it to the oldest son, but usually about 9 or 10. They liked the idea. They were blonde and blue eyed in many cases. And then they took them from that family. And they said, if you, not only are we going to kill you if you stop us, but your son is going to be one of the most illustrious people in the Ottoman Empire. And one day you might see him come by. And we have stories where they did see their kid they didn't recognize. Then they took that kid and they segregated him from Ottoman society in Istanbul, Constantinople at the time, until they changed it. And they created fanatic Islamic warriors. They did two things. They were subsidized by the government, by the Ottoman Sultanate, and they were indoctrinated on radical Islam and military training. And they picked people who were big as well. And so those were the shock troop, the Janissary. They were fanatic. Those were the ones that broke through on the third assault on the last day of Constantinople on May 29, 1453. And psychologically terrible. So they're doing the same thing. They're going into Christian villages, towns, places. They're getting Christian children of an age and they will indoctrinate them. And one day people will say, I knew that guy, or he was a Christian and now he's the most fanatic Islamicist there is. And that's a very powerful psychological tool. The other thing is the asymmetry. This is what a lot of people are very angry about. And that is all we hear from Mondami. And people in Dearborn is Islamophobia. Islamophobia. Islamophobia, Islamophobia. But when you look at the hate crime statistics, the one group that has the most recorded attacks on them for religious or minority or Jews, and it's about five times more likely. Even though the population is only. It's about 6 million. I think people who identify as Muslim are about three and a half or four million. But it's about five times. About 50% of all hate crimes are against Jews. But yet we're told Islamophobia. Islamophobia. So when you had Major Hasan and 2013 wound 30 people at Fort Hood and kill 13 and yell Allah Akbar when he shot the first person in the head, you had General Casey, the chief of staff, within a two or three days. Well, this was terrible. But it would be even a worse loss if we were to lose our diversity program and we would stereotype. So what I'm getting at is that Christians are not doing this. We're always told that Christians do this. They have to go back to the Crusades to find anything. And even the Crusades was not like this. So everywhere around the world, this is what got Samuel Huntington when he wrote a Collision of civilization book that he said somewhere in the world on a given day, if there's violence, Islamic forces are in play and nobody talks about it. Believe me, if there was a bunch of Christian nationalists in South Africa and they were going across the border or they were going into a black African country or within and they were killing people and trying to convert them to Christianity, the whole world would be outraged. But something about the anti Western, the anti Western propaganda that it just doesn't matter. The other thing that's, that's very strange is that the left doesn't seem to be worried. These are black people who are victims of radical Muslims. Not all of them are black. Some of them are of mixed heritage and Boko Haram and other places people. And yet all they talk about is Israel, Israel, Israel, Israel, Israel. Here is 2 million people have been ethnically cleansed or refugees. And there's about 160,000 that were murdered. You know, we're looking at the Gaza people right now. We know that the 60,000 was exaggerated. And all of a sudden I looked the other day and I really did the search. There's no famine. Now what happened? I thought everybody was starving. And now we even see people. Well, there was Victor, but the Israelis are setting up kitchens and trying to fatten everybody up really quickly. I've heard that as if they were, you know, Hansel and Gretel or something. So I don't know what to say. But if this were Christians doing what Muslims were doing, or even worse, if these were white people being butchered, then a lot of people would be much more concerned. And Donald Trump support the supposed racist. He's the one that's drawing attention to it. And people on the right are drawing attention to it.
- [40:40]
Sammy Wink
Yeah. I think in the news.
- [40:41]
Victor Davis Hanson
Are you in, Ambassador?
- [40:43]
Sammy Wink
I think in the news there's a debate whether Trump should get involved or not get involved in helping these people on the ground is I think what they're implying.
- [40:53]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah. Well, I mean, you can't very hard to go in Africa and get to tell a special forces person that you're going to go all the way around the world and get in the middle of a genocide and try to stop Muslims, which people in the United States will probably attack you as much as they do the. The perpetrators. So it's fraught with problems and the mega base doesn't want to do that. I'm not making fun of the mega base too. There's all of us have those concerns about optional military engagements post Iraq and post Afghanistan.
- [41:27]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, absolutely.
- [41:28]
Victor Davis Hanson
I don't mean one offs like taking out the nuclear facility. I'm talking about going on the ground. Every time we go in on the ground, it's except for maybe Panama and Grenada, it's very hard to get out.
- [41:41]
Sammy Wink
Yeah. Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then we'll come back and talk a little bit about World War II again and especially the decision to ally with Stalin rather than Hitler. Stay with us and we'll be right back.
- [41:58]
Victor Davis Hanson
This episode is brought to you by Rakuten. The holidays are here and that means it's the most wonderful time of the year. To save with Rakuten, use Rakuten to stack cash back at your favorite stores on top of holiday sales. That's savings on savings with with Rakuten, you can get cash back on gifts for everyone on your list, from toys for the kids to kitchen gear for the person who loves to cook, to electronics for everyone. You can even save on something for yourself. Cash back is automatically added to your account as you shop and you can get paid with gift cards, PayPal or check or eligible American Express card members can choose to earn membership rewards points, join for free today and get a new member bonus after minimum qualifying purchases. Just go to rakuten.com, download the app or install the browser extension. Terms and conditions. Conditions apply.
- [42:47]
Sammy Wink
Welcome back to Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. You can find Victor at his X account, D. Hansen, and on Facebook at Hansen's Morning Cup. So, Victor, I know that there's been so much in the news and so much misunderstanding about why we joined with Stalin instead of with the Germans. I know that our audience is going to think, well, the obvious moral reason was that the Germans were committing a holocaust. Even if Stalin had his own millions that he killed ultimately, so he wasn't a good guy. But. So how do we reconcile ourselves with either one of those people?
- [43:28]
Victor Davis Hanson
We get these questions and it's been in the news because Tucker Carlson had on Daryl Cooper, who basically said that we were at fault and by extension we allied with the Russians after we were declared war on December 11th of 1941. And therefore we not only helped Stalin, who had killed 20 million of his own people, more than Hitler, but we empowered them to absorb post war, all of Eastern Europe. So it was sort of futile. They say that World War II was like World War I. We didn't finish a job in World War I, so we had to go back in World War II because Germany came back in World War II. We empowered Russia. So then we had the Cold War. That's the argument. And they cite certain facts. Harry Truman, the senator, he was on an oversight committee about military procurement. Everybody should get the time. The war started on September 2, when Germany went into Poland. For all practical purposes, By July of 1940, all of Western Europe was occupied. There were problems in the Balkans with Yugoslavia and then Crete and North Africa. But pretty much what the EU is today was either occupied by Germany and Italy or allied to them willingly. Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and, or had it been conquered, Poland. Scandinavia, except for Sweden, was neutral. Finland was neutral, had been conquered by. It had been kept out. It would have been invaded by the Russians and Spain and. But all of the neutral and Portugal, but they were in Switzerland. They were pro German de facto. So the war was over. And Germany had been successful because on August 23rd of 1939, the reason they went into Poland is they did not want to be attacked in future battles by the Russians. So they cut the Molotov Ribbentrop deal. And it said, you invade Poland from the rear. And Russia said, well, we're busy with the Japanese in the Mongolian Theater. Zhukov is. But we'll come in later. Three weeks later, they carved up Poland. Poland at that time was Western Ukraine, basically, and parts of Poland. Today.
- [46:08]
Sammy Wink
There'S an earthquake that just passed through Here I think it felt like it.
- [46:12]
Victor Davis Hanson
We had one yesterday.
- [46:14]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, we did.
- [46:14]
Victor Davis Hanson
We're still broadcasting.
- [46:16]
Sammy Wink
Yes.
- [46:17]
Victor Davis Hanson
So in any case they carved up Poland and then from September, August 23 of 1939 to June 22, 1941 almost for two years Russia sat there and watched Germany destroy Western Europe and the democracies and aided they supplied wheat and they gave oil and they gave all sorts of fuels, coal to the Germans, oil especially. And they helped Germany bomb London during the blitz. In this coalition there was and they got an exchange military equipment, industrial products from Germany. Hitler did not, was not able to take Britain. He thought he could bomb it into submission. It did not work. So By August of 194041 in January of 41 his he went to his generals and said I cannot take Britain. Sea lions not working. They tried all 40 and it didn't work. So they said we're going to invade operation. I think it was called Operation East Otto King Otto but they change it to Barbarossa. Kind of dumb. Everybody know Barbarossa was the German crusader. So they said we're going to invade the Soviet Union on June 22 that they thought they were going to do it in May and they had to delay because of weather and, and Crete, Cretan campaign etc. Anyway at that point Hitler said I am going to attack the Soviet Union, my partner. And they did. And so we were not at war yet. We had watched all of 39 and all of 40. When they started to attack Russia a lot of Americans like Senator Harry Truman and future Vice president and President said I wish they'd kill each other off. Sort of like the Iran Iraq war. Stalin killed 20 million. He's a totalitarian Russian Germans have gone into Poland and destroyed people, shot Jews and they're going to kill more. Let them just kill each other and keep out World War I. That was the prevailing view and that so the problem was Halder, General Halder had said within that they would take Russia and the chief, the Ober command of the Vermark said in 11 days that that they'd won. By December 5th they could see the spires of the Kremlin. They were at the first subway station. Two days later we're attacked. What do we do? Well in October Roosevelt had got his advisors and talked to Churchill and they said October of 1940, 41 excuse me. And they said they're going to knock Russia out. They're on the way to Moscow. They've circled Kiev. It's the largest surrender of 660,000 Russians. Now they've done it again outside Moscow. They've just, they have killed 2 million and they've captured 2 million. Russia's going to fall unless we do something. We weren't in the war. Churchill said we've got to get. So we sat down and gave them Lend Lease, started in October, before we were in the war, that Lend Lease program. Once we were in the war, we didn't declare war on Germany, they declared war on us. And Churchill and Roosevelt decided they were the existential threat, not Japan, who attacked us. So theoretically they came up with a formula. 65% of our effort would be toward Europe. But in fact, if you look at how we actually did it, off the record, it was pretty much even. The fleet was in the Pacific for the most part. The Marines were in the Pacific, etc. So over this period we gave them about, in today's adjusted dollars, excuse me dollars at the time, about $14 billion. We gave them probably something equivalent of almost 11 to 14 billion. Four times the cost of the B29 program and the Manhattan Atomic put together. And I mean big time, 14,000 airplanes. And they were good airplanes, the P39 and the P63, Air Cobra and King Cobra. They were perfectly suited for what? The way they waged war. They were wonderful planes. We gave them about 12,000 Shermans and some of them were diesel Shermans, really good ones. And the Russians after the war said, well, you know, everybody made fun of your American tanks. So they didn't have the power of our T34 but they were reliable, they never broke down. They were wonderful for what we needed. And we gave them most of their aluminum and most of their aviation fluid. Most importantly, we gave them 400,000 Studebaker and GM trucks. So all of their divisions were mobilized and I mean mechanized, they could go fast. Guring said, we can't win in Russia because they're American automatons, they're quicker than we are. 70% of the German divisions were horse powered in Russia. So we made that decision in October when the war started. We increased that all the way up to what I just said. We were we aware of who they were. Yes. And people said, well, let's deal with Japan and let's deal with the Germans and either keep out of, don't fight the Soviets, but don't help them them. And that decision was adjudicated because when on December 7, nobody, no one thought they were going to survive. So they said let's rush this stuff to them and keep them in the war because there's 250 German divisions on the Eastern front. And they only have about, at that time, about 10 in the West. Someday we're going to have to fight. And they will kill Germans because they have a 12 million man army. 12 and a half million. They would grow. And if we supply them with airplanes and tanks and they can concentrate on what they do well, they make wonderful rocketry and heavy artillery and they make a great tank as well. And we will make them mechanized, mobile. We'll give them aluminum C rations, radios, and they will be more up to date and technological than the Germans. And that worked. And when the war was over, the Americans lost about, depending on how you adjudicate sickness versus fatalities for somewhere around 450,000, roughly. I had, I think I made a mistake last time. I said out of 12.2 million people in the military, that was point. I meant to say 3% and somebody reminded me, so I said point three. But it's 3% of all the people in America who joined the military. Now, not all went overseas, only half, but that was one of the lowest. It was even lower than Britain. And the British lost fewer total fatalities, but they had a higher percentage of all the people in the military. Now why did that happen? Because when we went into Italy and we were bogged down in Italy and the Germans only had three or four divisions, sometimes they only had two. But there were 250, 200 even in 44 and 45 that were tied down on the Eastern Front. When we went in D day, they did transfer, but every time they transferred troops to the west after June 6th of 1944, the Russians started to move because there were fewer Germans. And then they'd have to take them back and there were fewer Germans. It was a finite pie. So when the whole caboodle was over, the Russian Red army lost civilian and military that through the occupation and about 20 million people. And they killed, of the 5 million that were killed, they killed about 4 million of Germans. And they did other things. The, a lot of the top generals in the German army were on the Eastern front. And they, they felt until Maybe August of 19, after the falaise Gap, then they started bringing them to the west. But their most crack Panzer SS Waffen, they were on the Eastern Front. So they not only killed most of the Germans, they killed one of the most astute Germans. So then that was a strategy and it wasn't a good strategy because we knew what we were getting into. Yes, there were people in the FDR administration, whether it's Alger Hiss or Even Harry Hopkins that were either naive about communism or supported the communists but that wasn't the majority of people they said were cold blooded they said these sobs are no good. Before the war they went into Finland and they were kicked out of the UN and we supported the Finns. We don't like these people and after the war we probably won't like them. I know some of you naive people think that they're going to be friends they won't be every Patton said that from the beginning but they will kill and they've even had a non aggression pact with the Japanese. So we're fighting the Japanese, they attack us and ships going toward Vladostavik to supply the Russian military machine. The Japanese wave at them on the high seas and where they sink us but they let the Russians go by and we tell the Russians why don't you fight back? Oh no, no no, no. We're only fighting the Germans. So and they were treacherous. They always accuse us of not helping. Privately the Soviet argives show they could not have won the war without Lend Lease anywhere from they said only 20% is about 30% and more importantly as we looked at their economy and said this is what they can't do. They don't can't make aluminum like we do. They cannot make radios like we do. They cannot make ground support aircraft. We're going to do that and same thing with food. So even though they were occupied, all of western Russia was occupied over a million square miles. They won the war and they kept our casualties down. And then after the war we turned right around and rearmed and we were fighting a proxy war in Korea and we understood for the next 35 years we were until 198945 years we were in a cold war with and so then a revisionist came out and said well these were Kame sobs and we had communists in the State Department. True, we did. And therefore and the Jews always wanted us to get into the war and they forget that we were Germany declared war on us but the Marxist Jews and the Bolsheviks got us to help the Russians where if we had just been, you know, tolerable we could have told the Germans don't do those things and they were Christian and Western European. I'm simplifying things but in 2009, well before Darrell Cooper or Tucker or David Cullen Pat Buchanan wrote a book I think the title was Churchill Hitler and the unnecessary war and he made this argument and I think that year Peter Robinson and defining you can go look at on YouTube Christopher Hitchens and I critiqued that book and why it was a fallacious book. But the point is, put yourself back in December 15, 1941, and you're told that you're completely unprepared for war, that you've been attacked and they've destroyed your battleships at Pearl harbor and Plains, and you're not going to be able to do much for anything until you rearm for a year. And Germany is now declared war on you, and they're right outside Moscow and they're going to take it any minute, and yet that country has declared war on you. And they're going to take all of Russia and then they're going to turn around and they're going to eliminate Britain. And if you look at what Hitler said, he said, believe it or not, the reason he attacked the Soviet Union and broke that, I mean, there were Nazis that said, well, they were going to attack us. I don't think that's demonstrably true. They wanted to the Russians, but they weren't anywhere near. But you look at all the reasons. One of the weirdest is we cannot take Britain because we don't know what to do. The Royal Navy, the old First Lord of the Admiralty, and Napoleon. I don't know how they're going to get here, Napoleon, but you're not going to come here by sea. They had echoed that. I don't know how you're going to take us Germany, but you're not going to be able to do it by sea. They had no navy and they couldn't disrupt it. So Britain. So then Hitler said, if we go into Russia, surprise attack, quick, we will knock out Stalin, we'll get all the oil, much more than they were giving us under our treaty. We'll get all the food, we'll starve everybody. We have the east, the US Plan, and we're going to colonize the whole place. And they can blockade us all they want with the navy. We don't need any important food or oil with. That was why he went in there. And we knew that. So we said, don't let them fall. Let, or if they fall, Germany will have all this food, all this oil. They're already getting it. So you empower them and allow them to kill Germans, and we will deal with the next crisis after the war. And that's what we did. And so when people say we should have allied with Hitler after he declared war on us, and then you're going to say, well, he only declared war on us because you had started lind lease in October of 41. Yes. But he was going if you read Mein Kampf they had a four engine plane called the America bomber. They were already planning to attack the United States cities with a four engine bomber based somewhere in the Azores and.
- [61:15]
Sammy Wink
They had subs in the Atlantic.
- [61:17]
Victor Davis Hanson
That's why he said he declared war. Everybody said why would he be so stupid to declare war in the United States when we had no intention of declaring war on it? And they said people were interested on there's been a lot of scholarship. And they said well first of all he didn't think he was going to have a two front war, that England was basically inert, they had bombed it, it couldn't do anything. It was losing North Africa, it was going to lose. But more importantly they were right on in the suburbs of Moscow. So everybody in the world said it's just a matter of weeks. They went to Hitler and said you're going to take, you're going to take Moscow very, very quickly. Number two Hitler said where's Pearl Harbor? And they said the Japanese fleet in the Pacific is bigger than the United States. They are going to tie the United States down with a long. These are fanatical people. They have the same population as we do. They've got the second or third best navy in the world and if we declare war on the United States they're not going to be able to even come over here because they got their hands full with the Japanese. And more importantly if we declare war on them then we can unleash the subs. Well they only had about 12 but Hitler didn't know that. He just was given propaganda by Donitz. But the point was they were looking at American cargo ships in New Jersey, Virginia, New York and they were seeing the skyline lit up, no blackout and they couldn't do anything thing because we were neutral and they were taking oil and food and everything to Great Britain and they said we can knock. And they, you know what they almost did. We didn't believe Admiral King did not use convoys. He didn't listen to the British and they were sinking 50, 60% of Canadian and American ships going to Britain until we caught on and had convoys and Aztec with a British and sonar but, but Reed das boo. They were going, they were doing very well as you saw in that movie until sonar and American air power and British air power stopped this sub. But Hitler thought that he could starve Britain out by destroying the American and British Canadian convoys number one. And then Britain would surrender. They wouldn't be able to get anything from their Empire. And two, Russia was going to fall within a week. And number three, Japan was going to take care of us. And those were all logical decisions. Why he declared war then on us. But what he didn't realize is that the Russians were down but not out. And the United States could not be touched by Germany or Japan. And it was going to in three and a half years have a larger gross domestic product than all the belligerents in the war put together. And we could very easily fight a two front war in a way that he could not. And we were going to supply the Soviet Union with 25 to 30%. And within two years. The Red army was more sophisticated than the German army on the Eastern Front, largely because of Lind Lee's. I had an uncle, Bob Hansen, Robert Hansen, and he was a. I think he was a major in the, in the US army. And he was in charge of supplying army the Russians to stop Army Group South. So we were going through the north and Baltic Seas and that was treacherous to go through the German coast up into St. Petersburg, which was under siege. But then the Archangel. And sometimes we went over the Arctic Circle, you know, all the way down into Northern Russia. Or we tried to go through the Olusians, but that was dangerous because the Japanese. So then they came on the idea that why don't you overthrow the government? The British did, and get the young Shaw, not the older one who's pro Nazi perhaps, and make a nice freeway and then just ship the stuff, just drop it off at a port in Iran and drive it right in to the front, the southern front. And that's what we did. We gave. That's how we got most of the. A lot of the 400,000 trucks. And boy, we. I can remember my grandfather said to me that was about 1965. We were always embarrassed of my grandparents cars because we were like in sixth grade and we were playing sports and my parents were working so they had to pick us up at this rural school. And he had this 1946, 47 International truck. When this was like in the 60s and everybody had had, you know, El Caminos and Rancheros. And he came up there and he had this little horn. It didn't even have a horn yet. It had a little ball you squeeze like a bike. And he'd do it really loud. And then he had wire grass glasses with Bibble. They looked like out of a, you know, American Gothic painting. And my grandmother would sit there and how she'd call us the twenties, which we'd go with our Friends. Hi Grandma. How my little 20s doing? And then we got to get in this car and my grandfather's getting old. He said, Victor, can you push the starter? I had this big pedal, it had no, you know, automatic starter. So we pushed it. So we'd say why did you, why do you drive this? He said boys, I ordered this truck in 1939, 40 and I got it right after the war. I said, well, six years. He said we gave 400,000 of our best trucks to the Russians. We didn't have any trucks. So I waited and I waited and I got this truck and I, I, we said yeah, but that was 20 years ago. And he said, though we'll have it for another 20 years too. I wish we had kept it. But somebody took it, stole it, maybe.
- [67:10]
Sammy Wink
They would, maybe they redid it. I hope so.
- [67:12]
Victor Davis Hanson
And that's why I think Daryl Cooper and, and all these people oversimplify the idea that we were influenced maybe by the Jewish lobby or we didn't do something in our interest or we were allied with commie sobs who killed more people. Yes, yes, but it was an American self interested move and you have to at the time factor into the, the equation that we didn't. We thought we could save Russia and we did and that was successful. And we thought we could save Britain and we did. And we thought we could save American lives and we probably would have lost without the Red army we would have lost 2 million people. So those were all cold hearted, real politic, that had nothing to do with Jews or anything. Not that there weren't people in the government who were idealistic and humane and said, you know what, as bad as Stalin is, there is not going to be a death. Not that there were death camps quite like Auschwitz yet, but we knew what they were doing because we saw what the Einsen group, the first, first six months of the war they killed 500,000 Jews with portable gas chambers and just Baba Yar shooting them. So we knew who they were. And as bad as Stalin was, they were not quite that bad, we thought. So there was a lot of rational decisions and when you look back it was kind of what that generation said. We're going to use the Russians and we don't like them and we're going to kill a bunch of German and save a bunch of American lives and win the war, then finish off the Japanese and then we're going to turn around and we're going to probably have to fight the Russians. And that's what you do each, you always, you just Make. You don't have to be perfect. You just go from one crisis to the next. And we won the Cold War without getting into a shooting war.
- [69:09]
Sammy Wink
Yeah. So that's America from 1939 to 1989. So we did get take on the Russians eventually.
- [69:15]
Victor Davis Hanson
We destroyed all of our enemies. We destroyed Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan and all of their Eastern European allies. And we destroyed the Soviet Union. Took us a long time. And we freed all of Europe, west and east, at the cost Vietnam, all that of about 550,000 people. And that was unheard of given the 70 million that died in World War II.
- [69:47]
Sammy Wink
So I wish people a much better place because of it. And Germany's somewhat better place.
- [69:53]
Victor Davis Hanson
It's much better. Germany's a good. I, I'm. I don't want to be unfair to. I like Germany, I like Germans. I just feel that their media is so left wing and so anti American. And, you know, when I was about 22. No, I take that back. No, excuse me. I was 21, I went to the Frankfurt airport to go to Greece. First time I'd been out of the country. And I had a bad experience with Germans. They're really rude. You know, when I showed my passport. So I got to Greece and there was a lot of professors there. And there was one that I just loved, Colin Edmondson. He was wonderful archaeologist, classicist. So we were dealing with some German archaeologists and they had a really good dig at Olympic. Each. Each foreign country got three archaeological sites in Greece and they had Olympia, which was really something. And two of the archaeologists, we went to watch their excavations. They were very rude, you know, don't touch that. I said, why are all these people very rude? And somebody said, that's just the German trade. Or they don't mean to be. Or Americans are arrogant, imperial. And Colin Edmondson turned to me and said, well, they lost two wars to us. I thought, well, people don't think that way. And he said, what do you mean? People don't actually said. He said, that's exactly what they were humiliated by this cowboy country of a bunch of Mongols, they think, and they have this illustrious history and they lost two wars, so they don't like us. As I get older, I think that's so simplistic and silly and so accurate.
- [71:41]
Sammy Wink
Exactly. Victor, we need to take our last break and then come back and we'll talk a little bit about our university system.
- [71:47]
Victor Davis Hanson
Oh, my God. Mein Gotte. And Himmel, to use a German phrase.
- [71:53]
Sammy Wink
So stay with us and we'll be right back.
- [71:57]
Victor Davis Hanson
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- [72:26]
Sammy Wink
Welcome back to Victor Davis Hansen in His Own Words. So Victor, there was in the Chronicle for Higher Education a article by or sorry, an interview of a Harvard professor, Jill Lepore. And in that interview she basically said that she regrets that she didn't speak out in the midst of all the wokeism and that she does say this though she did privately and to individual instructors etc, but she was not an activist against all of the injustice of wokeism, the racism of wokeism, etc and she was also told when she wanted to give a speech that said that the MeToo movement had been an a a a stain on the justice system because of the injustice towards that and that that it was much like the sexual misconduct laws of the 1950s and 60s and how gays were persecuted by that. She said she was going to give a speech about that and somebody told her this will end your career if you give it a speech.
- [73:41]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, I mean I wasn't a big fan of Al Franken, but they had a picture where he put his a girl on a transport, a woman soldier I think it was. And he put his hand near her top of her uniform. That was crude, but it was kind of a joke, bad joke. He wasn't trying to feel her sexually. He had to resign from the Senate for that. No trial, nothing. They never charged him with anything. And they went after Garrison Keiller. They destroyed him. They wouldn't let his books even be sold at the PBS website anymore. Anymore. Or you know what I mean, npr, excuse me. So they went completely crazy. And it was almost every man in the world was thinking how many times have I had sex with a female? Is it something that she will now say that after it was over I forced her because you know, did I have an ex girlfriend? Did I have an ex wife? That was what the climate of fear was. And then the woke was the same thing. And after George Floyd it was University of Chicago says we're not taking one English admit admittance to our English PhD program because it's going to be all black studies, only black students. And we had the DEI os this German. To get back to that, this woman said to me, do. Don't you think it's McCarthyism? I said, yeah, it is. And she said, so you agree? I said, yes. You had to have to get a job in academia between 2001 and 2024. You had to write a loyalty DEI oath. What have you done for DEI? If you said that you hadn't done anything or you disagreed with racial preferences, you were out. That's not what I meant. So, yes, it was a terrible. My only point is that most people don't. I mean, there are zealots like myself, I suppose. I don't mean a negative sense, but most people on the left or the right, they're in the middle. Maybe that's better. They're empirical or they're just. They want to be on the majority. So when me too is sweeping the nation, they're all for it. It. And when the Wuhan lab, when the Wuhan virus was caused by a pangolin, according to Dr. Fauci, then anybody who says it's at the lab is a traitor. When somebody says, well, I'm not going to get the MRNA vaccination because I had, my son has had weird cardio problems with it or something. Oh, you're going to get, you have to leave. It was second of madness. The same thing with all of the WOKE stuff. So this, I'm very happy that she says, I look back at this, but I want to ask you, why didn't you say something when it was very unpopular to say it? It's like Scott Atlas, he was completely right. He said that the very early on the Trump administration got, came to their wisdom and said we were wrong with this absolute lockdown down and promoting it. And then Scott became the medical advisor against Berks and Fauci and they were starting to listen to him and he said things like, get the vaccination, but it will not stop you from being infected or infectious. That was a heresy. He was right. He said, the damage you're going to do by shutting down K through 12 when that demographic is not going to die from COVID is crazy. He's. He said the epidemic pandemic will end not when everybody has the MRNA vaccination, but when everybody has had, covet and survived. There will be something called natural immunity, herd immunity. And they said that's not true. They, the experts said something that was a canon of medicine was not true. And so then at the Hoover, I wrote a couple of op eds on his behalf and I won't mention names. But I said, would you write something? No, I think one or two other people. No, it wasn't that they were at the Hoover or not at the Hoover. It didn't matter. It was human nature. What I'm getting at is you walked with Scott across the Stanford campus. People would walk the other way. Friends that he'd known for his whole life. And he was right. And you wanted to say, he's right, he's right, he's right. Fauci's not a hero. Fauci is a bureaucratic octopus. It squeezes everybody with his millions or billions of dollars of grant money to get a consensus to agree with Fauci. Fauci was giving money through Echo Health to support gain of function research against the law in the United States, in China. In some ways, if you follow the money, you could argue that he was at the ground zero of this manufactured virus that was 30 times more infectious than anything in nature. And you. If you said that, you were destroyed. So they destroyed him. They destroyed Jay Bacharya Kulendorf. They destroyed. I don't mean destroyed permanently, but they made their life. And there was nobody to speak up against it. There was something in the school newspaper where I work, where Michael Levette, the Nobel Prize Stanford professor, said that this was a cooked up manufactured virus. He had a Nobel Prize. And there were things like a student said, I don't want to work with him anymore. It was horrible. And that's what people do. They. They're heard. They just go and sit. So, yes, I like her, and I'm glad that she spoke up. And maybe she. She's risking her reputation post facto, but it would have been much more valuable able to do it when these mobs, they've never seen a Western, have they? When they all get. They get liquored up in the saloon, and then they say, we're gonna go lynch that guy in the jail whether he's innocent or not. And then they all go out there, and then you need a Gary Cooper. John Wayne comes out and says, I don't know what's gonna happen, but I'll tell you one thing. You and you stirred this up, and I got a double barrel and a.45 and I'm going to kill you. And you and you. I'll get killed, but I want to take you first. Now what do you think of that? Well, I think we better go on home. That was the. That was a staple in every Western I grew up with, and that was so common.
- [80:23]
Sammy Wink
I don't think you're going to find that among academics. And to her point, I want to say she kind of is suggesting or implying, and these are my words, that a person's career was on the line if they had been activists against woke. And so I don't know whether that's good, bad, I don't know. I wish I had more people out there that would have said, hey, this is racist.
- [80:46]
Victor Davis Hanson
But I can tell you that 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, I lost maybe 20 friends, my closest friends. I wasn't just supporting Trump in 2016 or saying in 2015 he was going to win, but it was saying the lockdown. And I didn't say it because I was original. I, I trusted people's opinions that made the argument like Scott and Jay. And same thing with me too. I could see it. But she says her career well, I can tell you that I had people of my family have never spoken to me since and I've had people at Hoover think that I'm crazy and I had no friends and I had people who had known me my entire life that I called up to talk to and they wouldn't answer the phone. They still don't answer the phone. Some of my closest friends, two of my best friends don't talk to me. And it was because question me too. Question woke, question the Fauci party line, defend people like the pariah Scott, who was, it wasn't that I was, I felt that was an honor because he had a lot of integrity and so did Jay and so did those, all of those guys had integrity.
- [82:06]
Sammy Wink
They have more talent too than the average academic. So the average academic is not capable of what those guys are capable of, you know, so I.
- [82:18]
Victor Davis Hanson
I grew up when I was in graduate school as a young impressionable idiot thinking that the people in academia with PhDs and classical languages, Greek was very hard Latin matter. They were the most brilliant people in the world. And then I was sorely disappointed when I saw how they talked and how they thought and how they wrote. And then what saved me was at 25, with a PhD, I came back here for five years and farmed full time. And then the next 15 part. And I saw people who were smart and they were farming 200 acres of tree fruit or you know, had a pack little family packing house with 300 acres or they were pruning their own 40 acre vineyard. But they were, they knew how to do mechanics, they knew plant science, they knew, they were accountants, they were muscular, they were cerebral. They were, those guys were the most brilliant people I've ever met. And then I'd have a guy coming in from a truck, you know, a truck driver coming into the yard. And I'd say, you know, I got this massive 285 and it sounds. Oh, let me just jump out there and listen to it. And then bam, bam, bam, bam, fix it. You know what I mean? Or I'd have a pump with a bearing out and a guy would come out from the pump company. I said, I've got a bearing out in the submersible. Yeah, you do. I said, will it be a week? No, I'll have it out by tonight. And then you go at your sleep and you look out the window and there's a faint light. You get up at 2 in the morning and the guy's out there working. I got it done. I had that every day of my life. Those people, that's what made the country really good.
- [83:52]
Sammy Wink
Yeah.
- [83:52]
Victor Davis Hanson
And they were a lot more impressive academically, intellectually, physically than my colleagues. I'm not making fun of academia, I'm just saying it was true. Yeah. So they're not known as courageous people.
- [84:06]
Sammy Wink
No.
- [84:07]
Victor Davis Hanson
You get on the wrong side of an academic mob and I can tell you, I've been there four or five times, it's not a very good feeling, healing. They go after you?
- [84:14]
Sammy Wink
No. So let's go. We got the worst of the worst. So not very many of them are not very good. But in at the University of Maryland, they have the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, and it's come out that their president, one of their provosts and a DEI czar have been misappropriating grant funds from the federal government and looting state and federal funding. And that the whistleblowers are trying. They are trying to silence the whistleblowers.
- [84:49]
Victor Davis Hanson
That's Maryland campus. Correct me, because I haven't prepped with you all. We never do. It's all spontaneous. But it's a.
- [84:56]
Sammy Wink
Historically.
- [84:56]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yes, it's. That's my point. It's historically. So I don't. I think there's going to be an exemption made. Jeff Bezos first wife who was divorced, who got that huge settlement. Or maybe it's Bill Gates wife, one of the two. They each are worth billions of. I think one of them gave $900 million to black colleges. But they will be given exemption and they will go after, I think the fellow that I read, correct me if I'm wrong, he was African American, but he was also a. He went to Oxford on a road scholarship, I think, and they still went after him. And I think the problem is that we're now into the seventh decade of the civil rights movement. I know we have this historical legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, especially in the South. But at some point I think we're going to have to take these campus the not by. I think these campuses will have to evolve so that they're just campuses and they don't use the word black this or black that. You wouldn't have a Chicano campus. UC Santa Cruz used to sort of say Merrill College was the Chicano. It didn't work. And we're a post racial society. I would hope so. I think that we could give honor all of these, the service they did during the decades after the Civil War and Jim Crow and segregation and now we're 60 years beyond that, then we cannot get into a black or white or Asian or college. I just don't think it's. We're too tribal as it is. Yeah, it doesn't it. If you look at tribal societies, they don't end well.
- [86:54]
Sammy Wink
No. And we want a civic polity where people.
- [86:56]
Victor Davis Hanson
I don't want to live in Yugoslavia is what I'm trying to say. Or Rwanda.
- [87:01]
Sammy Wink
All right, Victor, let's turn to comments. We have some on your. An article you wrote on immigration on your website. Alec Pilt says the more I reflect on Biden and Mayorkas's ridiculous immigration crimes, the more I feel my blood pressure rising. My parents legally immigrated from Germany in 1958. They filled out and completed reams of forms, found a sponsor, provided proof that they could live without government financial assistance. And then they, dot, dot, dot, waited in line. DJT should, in addition to investigating Comey, Britain, Brennan and Clapper go after Mayorkas and make an example of him. So that's one. And the second one is Greg Blaylock 5560. And this is from yours and Jack's YouTube. On Tuesday, the IRS, when George Bush was in there, said we had 53 million questionable Social Security cards, meaning illegal aliens. Millions have come in since then. Where do they get the idea of only deporting 2 million? The numbers don't add up.
- [88:12]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, he's absolutely right. In 2019, the scholars at a not so conservative place called Yale University went back and looked at new types of data, W2 form, Social Security, income tax. And they modeled it. And they said we didn't have in 2019, 10, 15, we had over 20 million. You can argue about how many people came in under Biden. It's a question of do you count entries versus entrance? Because we don't know whether it's the same person coming in two or three times, but some people have suggested 10 to 12. So there probably could is right now because we've only deported or self deported 2 million, probably 30 million. We know 53 million were not born in the United States. We don't know what the other 20 million statuses were, legal or not. So it's the highest number a foreign born of any status in the history of the United States, both in numbers and percentage of 16%. It's a problem what gets people really angry. And I got a couple of emails about this. There was a picture two days ago of an illegal alien criminal who pursued that he fled after and the agents were in a forest running, chasing him. And all of these students and his activists were having phones and they were phoning and whistling and making noise to confuse. Did you see that? And a lot of them before and after were waving Mexican flags. And some of them were illegal themselves. That was the whole point. I think it was in Charlottesville. So here was the image that people come into our country illegally and they don't want to follow the rules and they are egging on a person who is engaged in a criminal act, fleeing American citizens, trying to apprehend them. And they're on the side of the criminal. And some of them before, after enduring, have waving or have Mexican insignias. And so the viewer looks at that and when he digests it he says this is insane. And he comes up with the following exegesis. You come into our country and you don't even respect us enough to do it legally. You just walk across once you're here, you sign up for all these entitlements and you under DEI get preferential treatment in many cases, especially in the university. And then when one of your comrades breaks the law, you put the life of American citizens in danger by trying to distract law enforcement who could be shot or anything by the perpetrator. And then you have the gumption to wear insignia or flags of the country under no circumstances that you will go back to. And often you burn the flag of the under no circumstances you want to leave. And this is insane. And that's why the public, for all the propaganda and all the threats against ICE and all of these things, cannot win over the American people. They may say they disagree with the methodology, but they do not disagree with the idea that if you're here illegally you should go home. And so they, they don't understand there's 500,000 criminals, but after that there's 30 million. Now, you can make the argument that a lot of them, 5 million have been here 10 years. They speak English, they're employed, they've never been on welfare. They've never committed a crime. They could get a green card and pay a full fine. Fine. But that's not the majority of them. So when they go after somebody and they apprehend them and they see somebody with them or in the general vicinity, and they say, can I see your ID and they have good reason to believe that person entered illegally is residing, they have an obligation to enforce the law. They really do. And then the left will say, well, you just arrested somebody who wasn't a criminal. Well, then why not let all 150 million people from Mexico come in? Because A poll about 20 years ago, the Pew poll, said that 55% of the people in Mexico would immigrate to the United States. I mentioned that poll in Mexifornia in 2003. It was the weirdest thing, but I never really understood what the poll meant. It was a Pew poll, and it said about 55% of Mexican nationals would go to the United States if it was possible. The next question is, do you think that the Southern United States, I. E. The Gadsden Purchase and the Mexican War, should return to Mexico? I was like, 65% said, yes. Think of that logic. I don't want to stay in my country. I want to go to the United States. But once I was there, I want them to give back the land so it could be in Mexico, so I could leave it. That's the logic. I don't want to live in those areas that are Mexican, but I want you to return those areas to Mexico. So if I happen to be there, I want to get out. And it was. I've told the story once, but I had a very good friend that I went to first grade with. I'll just make up a name. Raul. And Raul was at a baseball game, came with me, and I said, you. I thought you lived in this particular town. And he was on this kind of affluent town. He said, I moved over not because I like white people, because there's no crime and there is no this nonsense about la raza. And I want my kid to be educated. And then I said, well, what if. What if California becomes. I will move to Oregon. I said, what if Oregon. I will move to Washington. I will move to Canada. What he was trying to say was not racial. He was trying to say that I left Mexico to get away from the Mexican paradigm. Not the ethnicity of Mexico, but the paradigm, because it doesn't work. So why, when I came up here, would I want to wave the flag and adopt all of this insignia and rhetoric about a system that I didn't want. Want a part of and pumb. Well, he didn't. He did want a part. No, he didn't. He voted. He voted with his feet. So nobody gets that. And you know, I said to my grandfather once, I said, we have a, we have a Volvo and we have an Electrolux and we eat rye crackers. My dad. Yeah, yeah, but your dad doesn't speak Swedish like I do. Does. Busy. And your dad didn't talk to. He was, he was. His mother was pregnant in Sweden and he was delivered the moment they got through Ellis Island. Born in Chicago about a week later. So he said, you don't know what my father told me about Sweden. They were farming rocks. They were this. They treated terribly. But if you don't go through that or you don't know it, then you glorify your. You know what I mean? You're ethnic and, you know, non American. And that's. That's what it is.
- [95:50]
Sammy Wink
Yes. America is a paradise.
- [95:53]
Victor Davis Hanson
Teddy Roosevelt said, I do not like the hyphenated American, believe me. He was not talking about blacks or Hispanics. He was talking about German, Scandinavian and Italian that were hyphenating. And he said, this is not going to work. He's the one that coined the popular use, not the origin, but the popular use of melting.
- [96:13]
Sammy Wink
Yeah. All right, Victor. Well, thank you very much for all your wisdom today. Thanks to our audience. We appreciate you viewing us and listening to us.
- [96:21]
Victor Davis Hanson
I'm losing my voice. Sorry about that. Thank you very much and for joining.
- [96:26]
Sammy Wink
The Victor Davis Hanson.
- [96:28]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yes. Listening and viewing. Thank you.
- [96:30]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, we'll see everybody later. This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen and we're signing off.
- [96:36]
Victor Davis Hanson
Thank you for tuning in to the daily signature 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.