Europe's New Reality and Ukraine Peace Settlement

Speaker 1 Hello, ladies, hello, gentlemen, this is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Speaker 1 I am Jack Fowler, the man lucky enough to be the host to ask questions of the great Victor Davis Hanson, namesake of the show and star of it.

Speaker 1 He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College and the possessor of a website, The Blade of Perseus.

Speaker 1 Its address is victorhanson.com. Later in this episode, I will tell you why I believe you should be subscribing.

Speaker 1 We are recording on Sunday, the 16th of February, and this particular episode, Victor, will be up on the 18th.

Speaker 1 So much to talk about, and God only knows what will happen between today and when this podcast is up. But we're going to talk about some topics, some things that have come up in the last few days.

Speaker 1 J.D. Vance's speech in Europe and the reaction to that.
Victor, you wrote significant commentary on the snarky Europeans for X.

Speaker 1 The late, great Henry Hyde, my dear friend, his name is being taken off a courthouse in

Speaker 1 Illinois.

Speaker 1 Jamie Diamond, the head of

Speaker 1 what is he the head of Morgan Stanley?

Speaker 1 It's not Morgan Stanley.

Speaker 1 Oh, gosh.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, it's the great Jamie Diamond. I'm sorry, Victor.
I just go blank sometimes.

Speaker 1 I think he's of Greek diaspora descent.

Speaker 1 Well, well, that makes him even friendlier. But he unleashed a diatribe about work by Zoom,

Speaker 1 work from home Fridays, virtual work, et cetera, a real bracer.

Speaker 1 And maybe even we'll get to the Pope.

Speaker 1 And we'll do that when we come back from these important messages.

Speaker 1 We are back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show, again, recording on Sunday, February 16th. Victor, I like to, there's a lot of foreign policy stuff.

Speaker 1 I hate to act like let's get Henry Hyde out of the way, but let's bring him up first. If you don't mind, Henry Hyde was the great congressman from Illinois.

Speaker 1 He died about a decade ago.

Speaker 1 He is famous for the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding on abortion.

Speaker 1 But he was also a colossus when it came to the national security. He was the ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee in the House.
Probably the most respected member of

Speaker 1 Congress. When he got up to speak, it mattered.
People listened, changed votes. Was he in office when he died, or had he retired?

Speaker 1 He retired in.

Speaker 1 He did not run in the 2006.

Speaker 1 And he was in his 70s when he died. He was.

Speaker 1 He had been quite heavy, hadn't he? A little bit heavy.

Speaker 1 Very heavy and getting

Speaker 1 ill.

Speaker 1 But he lived a few years longer than that. Well, Victor, the reason we bring up Henry Hyde is that the DuPage County Courthouse,

Speaker 1 the county commissioners, voted to strip his name from the courthouse. Just another event in statute.

Speaker 1 On their professed grounds

Speaker 1 was

Speaker 1 he was a man who supported abortion,

Speaker 1 opposition to abortion.

Speaker 1 That was my point, that

Speaker 1 he hadn't done anything.

Speaker 1 I mean, they didn't want to replace him with anybody, did they? I don't, as I recall, they did. They just wanted to get rid of him.
Yeah. I don't, as a general rule, I don't support name-changing.

Speaker 1 The Romans called damnatio memoriae. That means

Speaker 1 whatever that was associated with a prior emperor was completely damned to memory.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 the Romans had a good way of doing it. They had statues where they just had to cut off the head and blew on a new one because the bodies were all supposedly iconic and the same.
But

Speaker 1 they don't know what they do when they do these things because what they do is they're destroying all precedents for tradition.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 the right then

Speaker 1 has an open

Speaker 1 field to do the same. So the Gulf of America.

Speaker 1 You can't change that. It's been a hollowed-name to awful Mexico for 400 years.
Well, apparently not. There is no traditions among among the left.
Same thing with Pete Hexeth.

Speaker 1 He just said, you know what?

Speaker 1 Generation after generation, five generations have grown up with Fort Bragg. Fort Liberty is colorless and it doesn't really have any.

Speaker 1 And I understand that Braxton Bragg was a non-entity, racist Confederate general, but I'll find a very heroic guy named Bragg. And he found a soldier named Bragg.
And he said, guess what?

Speaker 1 It's spelled the same. It'll have the same connotations of tradition, but it won't be honoring Braxton Bragg.
So I changed it back, is what he said.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 the left never, the thing about the left, Jack, is they never feel that they're going to be out of power.

Speaker 1 So they break all these precedents, you know, pack the let's pack the court, let's bring in new states, let's end the filibuster, let's do this.

Speaker 1 And then they think, if you do it, you know, Joe Biden says, I'll get around the Supreme Court, or I won't spend congressional funds.

Speaker 1 I don't care if they allotted them for the completion of the wall or not. I'm just not going to build it.
And then they think, okay,

Speaker 1 that's good. And then Trump comes in and said, well, I guess you don't have to worry about funds being impounded since Biden ignored it or, you know, he went around the courts.

Speaker 1 And then, how dare you do that? It's got the adolescent mind. The leftists degenerate into an adolescent mentality.

Speaker 1 Henry Hyde was a victim of iconoclasm and name-changing. But the only thing that would surprise me about this, we're on the tail end, the downside of the DEI revolution.

Speaker 1 We're full end of the counter-revolution. So all these relics, these ossified

Speaker 1 vestigial people who still think that they can ride the DEI way, they don't know what they're talking about. There's no mood for it.
The public is sick of it. Aaron Powell,

Speaker 1 the day the left

Speaker 1 is going out fighting. I hope they're going out, but

Speaker 1 we'll get more on that on our next episode. You've written a piece about

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 disintegration of the left for your website. So it'll be interesting to get your fuller thoughts on that.
But right now, Victor,

Speaker 1 before we continue, I just want to tell our listeners about what's really happening to their money, what economists politely call inflation, but what we've come to understand as government-approved counterfeiting.

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I have two root canals I just did, and they had to remove the prior filling jack. And

Speaker 1 they handed me a little plastic bag with the gold fillings, and they said they're worth $70 each. Well,

Speaker 1 I haven't. Remind you of gold raisins, Victor?

Speaker 1 Golden raisins, sulfur raisins.

Speaker 1 Victor,

Speaker 1 let's begin. We have a couple of topics

Speaker 1 related to Europe,

Speaker 1 and let's start off with J.D. Vance.
I know you talked a little with the great Sammy Wink about his speech in Europe the other day, but you've written a response to this for X.

Speaker 1 I strongly encourage our listeners, if they're on X, to follow Victor there at V D Hansen is his handle. It's titled Snarky Europeans Scowl at Truth Teller Vance.

Speaker 1 Victor, would you tell us what is in this wonderful piece?

Speaker 1 Well, he had been over in Europe with the Artificial Intelligence Conference when he lectured the Europeans not to censor it and to allow free speech and criticism and transparency.

Speaker 1 And then he went to the Munich Security Conference. That is an iconic city in Europe because it's supposed to remind you of the need for security because of the Munich sellout of 1938.

Speaker 1 And my point is that he shocked everybody.

Speaker 1 He came up there and he said, all of you in the audience,

Speaker 1 we expect us in the West to preserve free speech, free expression of dissent. But you people, more even than China and Russia, you're going after anti-abortion people.
You're going after people

Speaker 1 who want to close the borders. You're going after national populace.
And then he gave particular examples.

Speaker 1 He said, you canceled an election in Romania, and you said you would do the same thing in Germany if the alternative for Germany, the

Speaker 1 ADF,

Speaker 1 was to win this next election. And Schultz, of course, is very worried, the German chancellor, that they are going to to win the next election.
So they felt that he was interfering.

Speaker 1 And so they, instead of talking about security, then the German defense minister got up and said, this is unsustainable. How dare you?

Speaker 1 And then all of them, all hell broke loose. You're interfering in European private affairs.
So the whole thing

Speaker 1 reflected, I think, badly on Europe. The left here loved it because the Europeans and them.

Speaker 1 The left here feels more affinity for Europe than it does for the United States as globalists. But if you look at it very carefully, what he said,

Speaker 1 it was like Trump's comments at Davos. It was very constructive because it came through a whole week of discussions in which he was saying,

Speaker 1 essentially,

Speaker 1 we have 32 NATO countries.

Speaker 1 And after all that haranguing of Trump and the war in Ukraine, you would think that this measy little 2% investment of GDP on military expenditures would have resonated, but you still have nine countries that are freeloading, nine.

Speaker 1 And you talk about open borders, but Germany has a higher percentage of foreign-born than we do, and it's only 80, 80 million people.

Speaker 1 More importantly, its fertility rate is 1.4. Europe is even lower than our low.
And then he was saying,

Speaker 1 don't count on us defending you forever. And he said, we're going to, you know and so they got all angry.

Speaker 1 But then when you start to look at things, take a deep breath, as some of the wiser people who agreed with him in Europe privately thought, wow. Here was a subtext.

Speaker 1 Well, when they formed the EU, it had six about the same GDP as the United States. Now

Speaker 1 from 1999 till now, it is sixty percent

Speaker 1 one and a half times larger the United States' GDP is than Europe. Europe's fertility lo rate is lower.
Europe's energy costs in places like Germany are four times higher than ours.

Speaker 1 Europe is still unarmed. It will not spend more than 2%,

Speaker 1 even if it meets its NATO obligations. It has a war in Ukraine on its doorstep, and for some reason, they feel that it's more incumbent upon us way back.

Speaker 1 5,000 miles away to protect their border than they do to protect their own border. And so he was making all of these points.

Speaker 1 You You know, we're going to be in the position where we're going to try to convince the Israelis and the Cypriots and the Greeks, don't listen to the Biden prohibition, but finish the East-Med pipeline, give Europe natural gas.

Speaker 1 Biden stopped the natural gas terminals. Trump opened them up.
So we're going to be exporting

Speaker 1 very, very, very important liquefied natural gas, and we're going to try to encourage other Mediterranean countries to help out Europe.

Speaker 1 And if they need more gas, they're going to have to tell their hated benefactor, Vladimir Putin, we're sorry Ukrainians blew up the Nord Stream pipeline, but they did.

Speaker 1 And now we want more energy from you, you monster. And that's not a resonant, convincing message that your energy's short because you were dealing with a psychopath that you say is Satan.

Speaker 1 and you were enriching him, and then you have people you're trying to protect blew up your pipeline.

Speaker 1 So the whole thing is full of contradictions.

Speaker 1 Then we get to the final Tessera in this unfortunate mosaic, Jack, is that they're running about a two, it depends on how you score it, but they're running about a $230

Speaker 1 billion trade deficit. China is the biggest with $280 with us.
So they're right up there. And it's only because,

Speaker 1 as the Secretary of Treasury said,

Speaker 1 we're happy to get rid of all tariffs. We have a policy.
Any country that has no tariffs against American policy will have no tariffs here against their

Speaker 1 products, will have no tariffs. But Europe won't do that.
So here's what he was saying. It's an asymmetrical situation.
You have tariffs. You get rich off us on trade.
You don't trade reciprocally.

Speaker 1 You have to be subsidized by your defense. You make fun of us.
And yet you have

Speaker 1 a form of censorship

Speaker 1 and lack of transparency that's found nowhere else in the free world, especially not in the United States, especially now with the Trump.

Speaker 1 There was a final, I should say, there was another element to the indictment. The German minister said this was an egregious interference in the internal affairs of Europe, but let's review that.

Speaker 1 As I remember, Christopher Steele was a British subject.

Speaker 1 He was a spy who was sent over here to create a pack full of lies to sabotage the 2016 election, and then he ended up, through the Mueller investigation, blowing up 20 months of Donald Trump's tenure.

Speaker 1 As I remember, the Ukrainian ambassador to the United States interfered and wrote an op-ed telling American voters that you couldn't vote for Donald Trump. You'd have to vote for his friend Hillary.

Speaker 1 And then the embassy itself was feeding dirt to the dossier about Trump. I also remember that the British Labor

Speaker 1 Party, Jack, just a few months ago was inviting laborite supporters to go into key states in the 2024 election and volunteer their services, even though that's illegal because they were in the United States.

Speaker 1 I think several hundred did that, including members of parliament.

Speaker 1 And then the German government

Speaker 1 shut, what's his name, Mr.

Speaker 1 Thierry, the Frenchman, when

Speaker 1 Musk had an interview with the head of the woman who's the head of the alternative for

Speaker 1 the AFD, I should say, for Deutschland,

Speaker 1 he said that they were going to censor them and prevent that, or they could jail Musk. In other words, they were going to hold social media for.

Speaker 1 And the same thing about Donald Trump, by the way. When Donald Trump had an interview on X inside the United States, the EU head of social media said, we're going to

Speaker 1 cite Musk and censor that, or we're going to fine him. So Europe is saying to us, if you have a U.S.

Speaker 1 platform and you have an interview we don't like conducted in the United States, we're going to find you to the extent we can over in Europe.

Speaker 1 And of course, we had the police chief of London say that he was going to go after Americans who complained about DEI and et cetera. So they interfere with us all the time, all the time.

Speaker 1 And if they don't like like X and they don't like Google and they don't like Apple phones, they don't like Facebook, just make your own.

Speaker 1 Make your own. Victor Pokemon.
You're welcome to do that. They make good trucks, they make good cars, make your own phones, make your own everything.

Speaker 1 We don't need Europe. I mean, I hate to say that because I'm very fond of Europe, but I don't see what they give us militarily, economically.

Speaker 1 And when I look at all of the invective that comes from Europe and all the bad ideas that come,

Speaker 1 speaking as a classicist who for years

Speaker 1 saw the ideas of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida and Lacan, all that crappy French theory pollute classical studies. I don't, you know,

Speaker 1 conservative thinkers in France are some of the best in the world because they're in an adversorial climate. And the same thing is true of Germany and Britain.

Speaker 1 But as a general rule, their socialism didn't work. And they're much poorer in terms of GDP and per capita income than we are, and they're very bitter that we're much stronger.

Speaker 1 And the more nations that you added to the EU, and I think, as I said,

Speaker 1 I think there's 29 of them now,

Speaker 1 the further they lag behind America's GDP. We didn't add any new states.

Speaker 1 They added countries, but their GDP still fell down, even though they were getting more people and more services because they're socialist.

Speaker 1 And so that's what he was trying to say. And he became kind of a cult figure here.
Everybody liked it. Jonathan Turley, I couldn't believe it.
He said it was a Churchillian lecture.

Speaker 1 But they don't like to be told.

Speaker 1 They like to come over here and lecture us or interfere in our elections, but they don't like any American doing that. Except when they're,

Speaker 1 you know, when the Nazis have overrun France or the German spring offensive of 1918, just about ready to crush the Ally. Then they want us over there.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's true. I mean, I don't want to be an American chauvinist, but

Speaker 1 nothing could be

Speaker 1 buried in the cemetery in Normandy with a bullet through his head after Normandy. And

Speaker 1 my other cousin flew, I don't know what it was,

Speaker 1 missions. I had a first cousin, Dick Davis, who was in Patton's Third Army.
I've had a whole family that went over to Europe and the Pacific.

Speaker 1 And with all due respect, I haven't seen a lot of Europeans come over here and do much for us.

Speaker 1 There's also a deep self-loathing of a

Speaker 1 continent founded on Christianity that

Speaker 1 hates leadership anyway, hates Christianity. So it just seems

Speaker 1 suicide is

Speaker 1 a slow suicide.

Speaker 1 I don't know about Western culture. I went to a conference on the Stanford campus on anti-Semitism that my colleague organized.
He did a wonderful job

Speaker 1 trying to do it, but he brought,

Speaker 1 by the nature of the conference, it did not include IDF people, ambassadors, diplomatic people, captains of industry, but just academics and Jewish-American academics and British American.

Speaker 1 And I found myself in the Orwellian situation as attending, as a participant, that I was arguing

Speaker 1 against the unfair treatment of American Jews. and Israel, and the people arguing against me were American Jews.

Speaker 1 And they felt

Speaker 1 that I was unfairly suggesting that Donald Trump was an ally of theirs and that they had suffered a lot because people had improperly associated left-wing American Jewish academics with Donald Trump, and that was a burden they had to carry.

Speaker 1 And I just said, well, if that's true, I said to one person, why don't you just tell Trump to, I don't know, sanction Israel and

Speaker 1 not hurt Iran and let the kids on campus run wild. But the more that he issues an executive order, the more it's issued in the name of Israel and the Jewish people.

Speaker 1 So there is this, I don't know, it's self-criticism taken to the nth degree that becomes suicidal in the West.

Speaker 1 It's been there since the Greeks, but at certain times it becomes self-destructive, and it sure is now.

Speaker 1 Well, Victor, I'm going to ask you a little more about J.D. Vance

Speaker 1 and some other

Speaker 1 related news. Macron,

Speaker 1 calling for an emergency meeting of European heads to deal with Trump. And we'll get your thoughts on these and other matters when we come back from these important messages.

Speaker 1 We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show recording on the 16th of February. And this particular episode will be up on the 18th.

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The Blade of Perseus is, remember, the name denotes that we're using a sword to cut off the head of the Medusa.

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Speaker 1 Thank you. And we know who the Medusa is.

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Speaker 1 Hey,

Speaker 1 Victor,

Speaker 1 in line with what we were just. Well, let me ask you first about, we'll get back to the European reaction to Vance and Trump.
But

Speaker 1 on J.D. Vance himself,

Speaker 1 I'm heartened as a conservative, and I happen to be a Republican also long-term

Speaker 1 for his growth, his leadership abilities, his qualifications

Speaker 1 to run this country

Speaker 1 if need be.

Speaker 1 What are your thoughts about J.D. Vance? Anything? I've always liked him.

Speaker 1 I met him firsthand, as I said earlier,

Speaker 1 2015, and we had a polite debate about Donald Trump. He was on the other side of the issue than I was.

Speaker 1 At that time,

Speaker 1 he was enjoying enormous

Speaker 1 readership, record readership for Hillbilly Elegy. Hollywood is making a movie out of it with major stars.

Speaker 1 He was working very closely with the entrepreneur Steve Case

Speaker 1 to kind of raise money for development in underdeveloped places in the United States.

Speaker 1 He had experience. He was in,

Speaker 1 you know, he had been working in the Marines. People said, well, he wasn't in a combat zone.
I can tell you, being embedded twice, there was no such thing as not a combat zone.

Speaker 1 The closest I came to getting killed, the second in bed, was in a non-combat Camp Victory airport when a mortar went off at us or rocket. And so my point is that

Speaker 1 I've known him and

Speaker 1 he was the most pleasant, logical person, and I've talked to him once or twice on the phone. I don't think they understand who he is.
He's got this rare mixture of

Speaker 1 first-hand knowledge of the underclass of America and empathy for it. East Palestinians, the East Palestinian Americans

Speaker 1 America. And he's yet, he knows, he's seen the one other side of this one-eyed Ivy League Jack.
He's married a very bright, brilliant woman of Indian heritage. So he's a very unique personage.
And

Speaker 1 when he was picked, I had people write me or call me, said, this is a bad pick. Trump is a white male.
He's a white male. Trump is going to win Ohio no matter what.
He can do nothing for him in Ohio.

Speaker 1 And I would always say the same thing. Yeah, but I like Mike Pence.
I do. But Mike Pence was matter-of-fact, solid and judicious, sober, but he wasn't a great

Speaker 1 rhetorician or debater.

Speaker 1 As soon as they picked him, I said, oh my God,

Speaker 1 I feel sorry for these people. Because when I was talking to him about Trump, it was very hard to debate him.
I think I did pretty well, but it was very hard. He's got a photographic memory.

Speaker 1 He's very empathetic. He does not lose his temper.
He gets right to the point. He has a stiletto

Speaker 1 ability to cut through the quick. And so when they unleashed him on the campaign, he must have done 150 interviews.
And I think he totally humiliated about 20 people.

Speaker 1 And so when he went over to that conference, he was

Speaker 1 ready to go. And anything, they never said he's lying.
None of them ever said, that's not true. We didn't try to cancel the election in Romania.
That's true.

Speaker 1 Nobody ever said that we were going to cancel if the ADF, the AFDF won in Germany.

Speaker 1 We never, that's not true that we arrested anti-abortion people. That's not true.
We tried to censor big tech people.

Speaker 1 I mean, they knew everything he said was true.

Speaker 1 And when they said this is unacceptable, what was unacceptable about the truth? What's unacceptable is about the European. Europe's basically saying to us, hey, JD,

Speaker 1 we're going to have a lot of tariffs, and we're going to run up a $230 billion

Speaker 1 trade surplus with you. And by the way, screw you, we're not going to have 32 nations

Speaker 1 invest 2 percent of their GDP. And you know why we're not? Because Germany is the most powerful and the biggest European nation, and it's a model, and it only spends 1.5.

Speaker 1 So if it doesn't spend 2%, why why should the others? And then Germany is going to tell us it's not sustainable.

Speaker 1 You've got to come over here and spend billions and billions of dollars and protect our borders, while you won't protect your own borders, and you've got to run up $37 trillion in debt, and you've got to run up a $230 billion trade surplus.

Speaker 1 And now you're going to ship us natural gas that we hate. It's dirty.
It's awful. We have it under the ground.
We don't horizontal drill. We don't frack.
We don't drill offshore.

Speaker 1 But you can get your hands dirty like dirty Putin and send us your dirty fuel, and we may or may not use it. It's not sustainable.

Speaker 1 This idea that they're Greek philosophers and we're Roman centurions that are mindlessly enforcing the will of our bettors is just insane.

Speaker 1 And they don't know what to do with Donald Trump because he's not nursed in this bipartisan,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 this bipartisan Ivy League

Speaker 1 stew where you have to get - you

Speaker 1 adjudicate your effectiveness by your popularity among the global. He didn't care.

Speaker 1 If Trump is praised in foreign policy or

Speaker 1 he's

Speaker 1 praised at the Council from Foreign Relations, he could care less. So he's free as a bird to say and do what he wants, and that's what scares Europe.

Speaker 1 Don't you know Macron is Macron looked crossways at him.

Speaker 1 No, he was like, as we said before, like Shakespeare's Colossus in Julius Caesar, Act 1, Scene 2. He strove to like a Colossus among us, and we

Speaker 1 minor figures beneath his feet. You saw that at the Notre Dame Cathedral.
And then

Speaker 1 Macron said he was going to call a special session, Jack. Correct.

Speaker 1 He's the Gavin Newsom of France, isn't he?

Speaker 1 He wants to corral all the European leaders to discuss

Speaker 1 when Trump is not there.

Speaker 1 Yeah, when Trump is not around, then he's Newsom-Macron, and he organizes against him and makes fun of him. And then when he needs U.S.
help, federal help, then

Speaker 1 he kisses up to him like he did at the cathedral and like Newsom did when Trump arrived. But Macron is in trouble.
He'll probably not be. None of these people are going to be around.

Speaker 1 And did you see that quote from an unidentified aide? He said, what do we care what Schultz says about this? What do we care about Macron? They're not going to be around.

Speaker 1 They don't have majority party support. That's why they're doing all this.

Speaker 1 They're censoring and acting undemocratically because they have led in all these illegal immigrants that about every week, and there was one over the weekend, who kill people.

Speaker 1 And I think this was Austria, an Afghan refugee. They kill people, they rape people, they take control of whole boulevards.
They have no borders, and they don't do anything about it.

Speaker 1 And people in Europe are getting mad. The subtext, just to finish this rant, Jack, is

Speaker 1 they had it all wrong about his audience. They said, well, he's speaking to the MAGA true believers at home.
No, most mega believers are written off Europe. They don't care what he says to Europe.

Speaker 1 Or he says, well, he's trying to for constructive criticism to shock them. Maybe, maybe not.
What he's really talking to is the majority of people in Europe.

Speaker 1 He's saying to them, if you people get rid of these clowns in the audience that I'm looking at and get people who represent your real interests, you will not believe to quote,

Speaker 1 I don't know, Bogey and Rick in Casablanca to Claude Raines, Louis. This is going to be the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

Speaker 1 Let me

Speaker 1 tell you, Victor, I know you saw this, and

Speaker 1 many of our listeners haven't.

Speaker 1 I titled this British Bureaucrat Seeking to Destroy Rural England, and this was a

Speaker 1 post on X.

Speaker 1 A Cornwall hotel owner has told GB News why he turned down a considerable amount of money to house hundreds of migrants in his establishment. This guy's name is John Mappin.

Speaker 1 He's the owner of the Camelot Castle Hotel. He said he thought it was a joke when the Home Office contacted him, and he told him no.
And

Speaker 1 what this little story is, is

Speaker 1 I guess it's a well-known hotel over there that employs, it's central to the community and employment.

Speaker 1 The government wanted him to fire everybody except two people on staff and just house migrants. They would get meals on wheels, essentially, housekeeping once a week.
So

Speaker 1 the role of this institution in the local economy would have been killed.

Speaker 1 The locals who are employed at this hotel would have been unemployed. Why?

Speaker 1 Because the British government wanted to use their taxpayer dollars to house migrants. Of course, we've talked about this and see this in American cities, but

Speaker 1 this is an attempt to

Speaker 1 kill their country, kill rural England. So this is the

Speaker 1 these are the people I think J.D. Van is.
It's really strange.

Speaker 1 Because the elite Westerner gets this psychological

Speaker 1 thrill that he is performance art virtue signaling superior, morally superior by being empathetic to the Middle East or the Latin American immigrant.

Speaker 1 And then he kind of gets a dessert on top by saying he treats them better than Americans.

Speaker 1 We saw that in the recent exposure by Homeland Security that the Manhattan Hotels at Manhattan, they were charging double

Speaker 1 the government for illegal immigrants than they were for the rates for normal people.

Speaker 1 And they're making a fortune on it. But I had two interesting conversations that illustrate this.

Speaker 1 About three months ago in my proverbial supermarket, there was a Hispanic guy, and I went over to get a ribe-eye steak.

Speaker 1 It was about the size of my hand, and it cost, I think, $24 or $28.

Speaker 1 And this guy was going through them, and he was telling me that he should... buy them

Speaker 1 he could buy them once a month. And then he said, when you check out, you notice everybody checking out.
And we're ground zero of illegal immigration. He was saying that they separate everything.

Speaker 1 They have really nice products that their EBT cards cover. And then they bring in the Coke and the beer separate.
And they pull out wads of cash.

Speaker 1 And then he said to me, they treat illegal immigrants, he was Hispanic, better than they do us.

Speaker 1 And I said, yes. And then I've been walking recently around in my former family's property with this very scenic pond that I always go back to as a referent about the decline of civilization.

Speaker 1 I think it was five nights ago, I saw it's kind of become a local dump. So illegals come out here and they throw stuff.
And I don't mean stuff. I mean refrigerators and everything.

Speaker 1 So I was about a half mile away and I heard this huge explosion why some people in a pickup were unloading a washer, a dryer, and a freezer and just throwing them into the dry pond, which will fill up and then it'll have all this.

Speaker 1 And it looks, I can't even walk there anymore. I walked there when I was five or six years old every day, barefooted from my home.
It's been totally destroyed.

Speaker 1 And every time I walk by it, I look for evidence of some incriminating document. And they're all in Spanish, but nobody ever leaves their address there.

Speaker 1 So one time I found a phone number, but it was disconnected. But my point is this.

Speaker 1 If I did that and then two days ago I came and there were two huge boxer dogs in my yard that had been dumped here, beautiful dogs, just dumped on the side of the road.

Speaker 1 If I had done that and gone into somebody's house in town and drumped three pieces of appliances, they would have arrested me to s what I'm getting at is it's not that we don't enforce the laws with immigrants that are here illegally or in Europe.

Speaker 1 We give them preferences. Preferences.
We extend them laxity that we don't to our own citizen, and that's why people are so angry about it. Just treat us like you do illegal immigrants.

Speaker 1 Put us in a nice hotel. Let us have all these DBT cards so we can separate our food and get beer and buy steak.

Speaker 1 Don't make us pay, you know, I pay $100 now $160 a month for a small little bin to make sure that I have every single thing separated, cardboard, plastic, garbage, and it all goes to the proper landfill.

Speaker 1 And people apparently don't do that. So

Speaker 1 what happens in the West is we are hyper and hypo-legal.

Speaker 1 By that I mean because we have so many people within our borders that are renegades and don't follow the law, to make up for a simulacrum of civilization, we have to go after our own citizens.

Speaker 1 and watch them like a hawk and make sure they obey every letter of the law. Or if you don't, it would be

Speaker 1 out west, you know, lucha libre. It would just be a free-for-all.
So everybody, you have to have a majority of people in the society following the law so that a minority doesn't have to.

Speaker 1 And that's what's happened with the illegal immigration. They can do anything.
And that's what's so funny about the sick left, how they romanticize people.

Speaker 1 who break our laws and commit violence against our citizens and then expect us not to criticize them.

Speaker 1 But then they're shielded. They never have.
I wish these CNN anchors, or I wish these professors, I really do wish it now. I know I mean permissions.
I wish

Speaker 1 these migrant shelters are people who were put into a home in Manhattan or Boston. I wish they would just get

Speaker 1 all their junk and every once in a while go over to Elizabeth Warren's yard and dump it in it and go over to John Kerry's driveway and just put a couple of used refrigerators there and see what he says.

Speaker 1 Would he say that that was not green?

Speaker 1 It gets green eventually. Just because Victor,

Speaker 1 that was a big

Speaker 1 fossil fuel imprint that you left on my driveway.

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Speaker 1 Hey, Victor, before we move on to talk about, I didn't mention it at the beginning,

Speaker 1 Putin and Trump. One last thing about about some of the madness in some of the smaller countries in Europe.
I know we shouldn't call Sweden a small country, but the insanity in the streets there.

Speaker 1 Have you seen any of these videos lately of

Speaker 1 the rioting going on in the streets of Sweden and the major cities, all based on the illegal immigration? I mean, it's really

Speaker 1 living on a

Speaker 1 volcano. They know that the majority of their populations do not support the government position.

Speaker 1 And they know when they try to tell illegal immigrants to behave and don't conform to stereotypes that are unfairly portraying them as more prone to violence or radical Islam or anti-Western values, the more that they lecture them, the more the immigrant doubles down and proves the stereotype to be true, that they are inordinately violent.

Speaker 1 They don't want to assimilate, and they have some missionary idea that they're going to someday do by fertility and immigration what they can't do by arms, and that is to change the character of Europe for the first time in 2,500 years.

Speaker 1 Everybody knows it. And these governments, that's what J.D.
was trying to tell these governments. He said, listen to the people, your democracy.

Speaker 1 What he was basically saying, I think, if I could filter all this down, what you're talking about, he was saying, I see it at Stanford. The left believes this about democracy.

Speaker 1 They don't believe that democracy is a majority consensus as expressed by voting and that that majority consensus, whether it's reflected directly in referendum or through representatives in the Congress or the Presidency, then enact policies that the majority support.

Speaker 1 And when they don't support, they change them. They don't believe that.

Speaker 1 They define democracy as a few enlightened, left-wing, highly educated professionals that have to deal with a bunch of plunkheads and dummies like us.

Speaker 1 And from time to time, the dummies don't know what's good for them. So then they elect bad people.

Speaker 1 And when they do elect bad people, like in Romania or what the alternative for Deutschland is, or Donald Trump, then the left has every right to save democracy by destroying it.

Speaker 1 That's law affair, that's raiding Marlago, that's

Speaker 1 trying to impeach him twice, that's trying to shoot him. Same thing in Europe.
And that's how they define it.

Speaker 1 And in fact, if you talk to these left-wing academics seriously enough, they will say that, essentially, that you can't trust the people. They don't trust people.

Speaker 1 And that's why they're angry.

Speaker 1 As soon as it came out that the Hispanic vote was about 50-50, all of a sudden in social media you started seeing left-wing elites saying, hey, maybe we should close the borders.

Speaker 1 These people are ingrates. We are appointed to represent what Hispanics are supposed to feel like.
And

Speaker 1 when they don't pay us, they're not obsequious to us, screw them, we're going to cut them off.

Speaker 1 That's how they define democracy. They don't believe in democracy.
They believe in a plutocracy or an aristocracy.

Speaker 1 Bill Crystal is the best example of it. He really is.
He's always attacking people who... vote plebiscites or for Trump that get popular support.

Speaker 1 And in his little tiny, itty-bitty, tiny, ity-bitty, teeny-weeny world, people like him should be philosopher kings. Absolutely.

Speaker 1 And when you ask him, by virtue of what?

Speaker 1 Your substantial corpus of publications? No. Your original dynamic thought is expressed in your columns? No.

Speaker 1 Your brilliant commentary? No.

Speaker 1 Your stellar record in advancing conservative causes in the Republican Party? No.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 your zip code, your money, your parentage, your lineage, your nepotism? Yes. Yes.

Speaker 1 That's what qualifies you. Aaron Powell, Trevor Brearm.
Don't you know who I am is the calling card for people like him.

Speaker 1 It really hurts them because the Republicans are always under assault in foundations and schools, academia, and the media, and they hone their skills. But when you're pampered, you get soft.

Speaker 1 So, you know, when I go to Stanford every week, I think,

Speaker 1 what's going to happen today? Who's going to come up to me and start arguing? What am I going to read in the Stanford Daily? What am I going to read about somebody who wrote something about you?

Speaker 1 You're always

Speaker 1 thinking about how to advance an argument and to defend yourself. But what if you go there and you have the attitude, who should I attack today gratuitously?

Speaker 1 And whether it's true or not doesn't matter because the whole institution is behind me because I'm morally superior. That's the left's attitude.

Speaker 1 And that's why they have this impoverished group of people. So now when they lose power, it's

Speaker 1 have you noticed all this? This representative Garcia from California,

Speaker 1 he says that Elon

Speaker 1 Musk is a DICK. And then they say to him on CNN, Do you think that helps to call Elon Musk? He goes, He is a DIC.
And then all of these

Speaker 1 nobody Congressmen and women are out there saying the F-word, F. Musk, F.
Trump. And then you get

Speaker 1 the same old crowd of the black preacher. You get Al Green coming out from the house.
You get Maxine Waters. Got to wait for Al Sharptum.
And then they call him. He's a fascist.
He's horrible.

Speaker 1 He's a creep. He's a horrible person.
And then you think, next thing you know, at $37

Speaker 1 trillion in debt, they're going to ring out. one of the squad and she's going to tell you that even though she's five generations now, she's probably

Speaker 1 seven generations away from slavery and the people who held slaves are seven generations.

Speaker 1 But she thinks that a majority of people in a country that have never held slaves, none of them for seven generations, and

Speaker 1 70% of them, nobody in their lineage ever had slaves, they owe these people multi-billion dollars. So they're already calling for reparations right when we're trying to cut costs.

Speaker 1 So that party is completely on hinge and lunatic. And

Speaker 1 these

Speaker 1 press conferences or whatever rallies of it does look like the island of misfit toys. I don't see how they think this is doing anything but hurting them.

Speaker 1 That bald black Congresswoman from Massachusetts with

Speaker 1 10 tons of eyelashes on her.

Speaker 1 And one after another, they

Speaker 1 have

Speaker 1 always talking about everybody's jealous of her because she's a proud black woman who's smarter than everybody. Yeah.
And she's always fighting with Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Speaker 1 Well, they have a blueprint, and the blueprint to get back in power in 2026 is a mixture of what they did in 2017 and a mixture of what they tried to do against Trump from 2021 to, and it didn't work.

Speaker 1 But it worked in 2000. So what they're going to do is they have no alternative paradigm.

Speaker 1 When you look at Joe Biden, they can't say, well, we stopped inflation, we had a secure border, we had a great foreign policy, we really got prices down on energy. No, they had to fail.

Speaker 1 So, DEI and all that. So, what's their thing? It is just Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, fascist, fascist, racist, racist, racist.

Speaker 1 Trump is flooding the zone. They're going to flood the zone.
Then you get Spartacus yelling and screaming, We're going to weaponize, we're going to get out of the street. Elizabeth Warren,

Speaker 1 Mazzi Arono,

Speaker 1 women must be believed. All of that is going to to flood the zone and just keep wearing him down.

Speaker 1 So Trump is like a rock, and they are the tide or the waves that come in and just batter him for the next year.

Speaker 1 And then right before the midterms, they think they're going to get all this billionaire cash from left-wing Soros.

Speaker 1 And I don't think they are because they've lost a lot of it this time. But then they're going to defeat him in the midterm.
They're going to get a one- or two margin in the House.

Speaker 1 And then they're, because there's no apostates in the Democratic Party, they're going to impeach him, just like they did twice before. They're going to impeach him, and that will stop his progress.

Speaker 1 And then the last two years, he'll be a language. That is their policy.
Will it work?

Speaker 1 Well, a president usually loses, what is it, 12 seats or something like that historically in the first midterm.

Speaker 1 This is kind of his first midterm because of the interruption in his two administrations. I'm not sure it's going to work for a lot of really practical reasons.

Speaker 1 If these things start to work and we get 4% or 5% GDP and we have a reduction in the deficit, people will be amazed, number one. Number two,

Speaker 1 I don't think that Bill Ackman and Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos,

Speaker 1 I know Elon Musk and David Sachs and Mark Andreessen and Ben Horwitz and the people like them are going to pour in millions of dollars into these left-wing causes as they usually do during the midterm.

Speaker 1 I just don't think so. And I think the MAGA people realize that it's either do or die in 2026.

Speaker 1 So we'll see. But that's their plan, is what I'm getting at, is to just say so many outrageous things and scream and yell that finally people say, I can't take it anymore.

Speaker 1 I'm going to get in a fetal position. Just make it all go away.
Just don't.

Speaker 1 I like Trump. I sort of kind of wanted him, but he's chaos and he just makes me so uncomfortable because everybody's yelling at me and I can't take it.

Speaker 1 So just take a look at it. I'm going to take it.

Speaker 1 I love it.

Speaker 1 Hey, Victor,

Speaker 1 back to Europe and back to you mentioned Putin before, and we've yet to hear your thoughts, at least on this

Speaker 1 Victor Davis-Hanson show, on the Trump Putin

Speaker 1 call and forthcoming meeting. Would you give us your take? Puppet, asset, asset, Russian puppet, Russian asset, Ruptian asset.
I'm reading John Bolton, Munich-style negotiation, Bill Kristol.

Speaker 1 So he said what everybody said. He just outlined Pete Hagseth, Marco Rubio, they've all outlined what Trump has said and what everybody knows to be true.
And so what is that?

Speaker 1 It was not the position

Speaker 1 of

Speaker 1 Barack Obama once he let Putin steal the Donbass in

Speaker 1 Crimea. For

Speaker 1 the next three years, he did not say we have to arm them to militarily get them back. No, he said stuff happens.

Speaker 1 It was not the position of Donald Trump to say we have to arm the Ukrainians to get back the Donbass and Crimea. It was not the position of Joe Biden before February 24th invasion of Kiev.

Speaker 1 So my point is, it's now been 11 years.

Speaker 1 Some of these regions in the Donbass and Crimea have 70% Russian speakers. They've been Russian.

Speaker 1 And they're not going to get it back.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 I think they're going to have he's going to, Trump and Rubio and Mike Waltz and our special envoy will say to the Russians, you can go back and tell everybody you lost

Speaker 1 a million casualties, 700,000 dead, wounded, and killed because you institutionalize what you had stolen. Number one.
Number two.

Speaker 1 Now, we would like to say we're going to put Ukraine in NATO as Bill Kristol and John Bolton and all of the people in the Biden camp now want us to, as a negotiating point. But

Speaker 1 you know that we don't want them in NATO, and you don't want them in NATO

Speaker 1 because you don't want them in NATO, obviously, because you don't want NATO on your doorstep.

Speaker 1 But you know that we don't want them in because we don't want to go to war with nuclear weapons to protect an inner dispute between two former republics of the Soviet Union.

Speaker 1 So we're going to arm them. They're going to be NATO-like.

Speaker 1 And they did very well against you, Mr. Putin.
And we're going to give them enough weapons along with the Europeans. We have better tanks than you do, better drones, better everything.

Speaker 1 And we'll have a DMZ along where

Speaker 1 you go back to February 24th. You say, well, we got Crimea, we got the Donbass, and I went to war to keep them out of NATO.
And then Zelensky says, I saved Ukraine.

Speaker 1 They didn't take one inch of the stuff

Speaker 1 more than they already had when I came into office. We have a DMZ.
Now we're going to rebuild the country and we're armed to the teeth and we know how to beat them. And that's what it is.

Speaker 1 That's what it is. And so

Speaker 1 Putin will try to, in the weeks ahead, he'll try to kill more people. He'll try to send a drone in a shocking attack.
He'll try to assassinate. And

Speaker 1 the Ukrainians will try to enlarge or keep their pocket around curse that's been

Speaker 1 shrunken some.

Speaker 1 But they'll try to keep it and they'll both negotiate but that's what's going to happen that's going to be the settlement and trump

Speaker 1 he knows that and i think putin will go for it and zelensky will go for it because uh

Speaker 1 he knows the united states has given him more money than the europeans he knows that he canceled all the elections in a way that we'd never let net a wartime president like netanyahu do we know that he outlawed all of the hostile press in a way that we would never let Netanyahu do.

Speaker 1 We know that he suspended habeas corpus in a way that we've never let Netanyahu do. So he's a special case.
He's not a Democratic leader anymore.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 he's not.

Speaker 1 He also said a shocking thing. He said, we didn't get $200 billion.
Remember, he said that we only got $79 billion.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 you're either lying or you're not counting the aid

Speaker 1 that came to you in various manifestations, you know, food, institutional aid,

Speaker 1 subsidies for industries, reconstruction, and military aid, or you're just telling us that somebody stole it all in Hunter Biden fashion, in burisma fashion.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 I don't think he has a lot of support anymore.

Speaker 1 Zelensky.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he's a little bit. If I was Zelensky right now,

Speaker 1 I would hold an election.

Speaker 1 I say, these are the proposals. I want to put you before the proposals.

Speaker 1 I want to stand for election. I want to reopen the economy and reopen everything and see what happens.
I think he'd lose.

Speaker 1 By the way, Victor, related to the war,

Speaker 1 you've seen these articles about North Koreans being killed there and even some captured.

Speaker 1 Why, I'm just curious here. I'm an idiot.

Speaker 1 Why is North Korea sending troops to die

Speaker 1 in Ukraine?

Speaker 1 What's the upside for North Korea? I don't get it.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 North Korea has nothing that anybody wants. Nothing.
They don't produce anything. They're a parasite on the Chinese economy.
And they're a useful pit bull.

Speaker 1 So every time when China has a problem, they unleash North Korea. They'd send a missile over Japan or they threaten to nuk us and then they play this game, the Chinese, oh, you know, our little

Speaker 1 pit bull broke the leash. He's out running around your neighborhood.
We'll try to go kind of sort of maybe kind of find him and we'll leash him again. That's the only role they play.

Speaker 1 And so they need foreign currency and they don't care about human life. So they send 10,000 people who...

Speaker 1 Grrrr, were fanatic Koreans, and then they put them out in the battlefield with inadequate equipment, and they're facing some of the toughest warriors in the world.

Speaker 1 You know, battle-hardened Ukrainians have been fighting for three years, and they're slaughtered. And apparently,

Speaker 1 Putin thought that they would gain some territory, and then he's probably paying them with free oil. I know he is, free oil, and things like that.

Speaker 1 So, their only product they produce are people to be expended. Father, I don't care.
Yep, okay.

Speaker 1 Along with Iran, it's the most amoral government in the world. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But it's useful to China and Russia.

Speaker 1 We'll put Cuba in third place there.

Speaker 1 Cuba. Victor,

Speaker 1 we're going to get

Speaker 1 it. Don't do that.
You're going to get Karen Bass really angry.

Speaker 1 True. Los Angeles.
But Mahoney told me the other day that they are having five-day blackouts in Cuba. I don't know

Speaker 1 how much longer can these 1957 Bel Airs be kept on the road?

Speaker 1 This country seems so ripe for collaboration.

Speaker 1 The last generation that knew what it was to live a normal life was 1959.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 you're talking about

Speaker 1 65 years. You're talking three generations grew up with that poverty.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And they get enough foreign exchange from left-wing visitors to trickle down.

Speaker 1 But they say the same thing about Iran. The energy is shot.
People are protesting.

Speaker 1 I had a talk with an anonymous person, I won't name him, last week, an Iranian scholar.

Speaker 1 I kind of like him. I think he's very learned.
He's a colleague.

Speaker 1 And I was saying, I don't think we should necessarily bomb them right now. I don't think that we should let them off.

Speaker 1 I think we should, as Trump just did, reinstitute the maximum pressure, you know, oil embargoes, oil sanctions,

Speaker 1 no travel, go after their bank account, isolate them, take away

Speaker 1 $50 billion in revenue every year, 102 years, and see if we could break them and have a revolution. And he agreed with me.
He said, exactly what has to happen.

Speaker 1 Keep pressuring them and pressuring them. Don't try to get in the Rand deal.
Don't appease them. Just pressure, pressure, pressure, and see if at some golden moment the people finally,

Speaker 1 you know, after,

Speaker 1 what, 45 years, rise up. And if they don't, then you have a choice to take out their nuclear weapon.
It's going to take them another year to miniaturize the bomb, to put it on a missile.

Speaker 1 I mean, they might be able to build one the size of a Volkswagen and drive it into Israel, but I doubt it.

Speaker 1 Well, Victor, we're going to come,

Speaker 1 we are coming around the home stretch, and

Speaker 1 I think we should end

Speaker 1 this particular episode with your thoughts on Jamie Diamond's diatribe against lazy employees. And we will do that when we come back from these final important messages.

Speaker 1 We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Victor, I was checking out earlier when you said something about Jamie Diamond's

Speaker 1 heritage, and he is indeed. His parents were, he's the son of Theodore and Themis Diamond of Greek heritage, and he's from Jackson Heights in Queens.

Speaker 1 So 60. I think the family was from Asia Minor, maybe.

Speaker 1 Somebody told me that once. Originally,

Speaker 1 the great Byzantine Greeks.

Speaker 1 And I think he is the head of Morgan Stanley.

Speaker 1 CEO. He might have not said Chase.
Yep. He's kind of a strange guy.
I mean, he's got a street smart attitude. Everybody likes him.
He's very charismatic. He's very candid.

Speaker 1 And when Trump came in in 2017, he thought automatically that as a business person who understood, you know,

Speaker 1 deregulation and less taxation grows the economy, that he would be a natural ally.

Speaker 1 But what Trump didn't realize is that he is a fish that has to swim in Wall Street and high finance, which is all left-wing. So he was very critical.
He had to be of Donald Trump, I suppose.

Speaker 1 But now the mood of the country has changed and and he's more empirical.

Speaker 1 So every time they get him on TV and they think it's 2017 and they're going to get a money quote, I should say a money anti-Trump quote from Jamie Diamond, he doesn't give it to him.

Speaker 1 In fact, he says that, did you see that quote? It was right before the election. They said, well,

Speaker 1 Trump, and he said, well,

Speaker 1 GDP was up. What was wrong with that?

Speaker 1 Inflation was 1.3.

Speaker 1 What was wrong with that? Unemployment was down. Before COVID, everything was going great, wasn't it? What was wrong? And they just, wow, Jamie, you like Trump? No, no, I'm just telling you.

Speaker 1 And so that was very good. And now he's on this.

Speaker 1 The only thing I didn't understand about this latest outburst was it was intentional so they could release it to Simenez Folk Hero credentials as a straight shooter, or was it leaked?

Speaker 1 I don't know why.

Speaker 1 I'm glad that I'm not. Well, he got in the title.
Yeah, he said, I'm not going to have any more of this at-home stuff. You have no creativity.
You have no energy. You have no productivity.

Speaker 1 It's a con, all you generation, you don't know how to get up and get up,

Speaker 1 get up in the morning, go to work, and get dressed and be a person and a worker. Don't just sit around.

Speaker 1 It was really good. And he was absolutely right about productivity.

Speaker 1 I think the more I think about it, I'm coming to the point of view that the George Floyd riots, the resurgence of DEI, the crazy woke mania,

Speaker 1 the university Palestinian ante all of that

Speaker 1 was latent, always there, but something about the COVID paranoia wasn't a paranoia, it was a deadly illness, but that lockdown,

Speaker 1 keeping people for almost two years in their apartment and destroying the economy and small businesses, that did something to people.

Speaker 1 And when that George Floyd thing erupted, they came out and went nuts. and then when it was finally over and the supply chains were

Speaker 1 morbid, morbid, and they went out and

Speaker 1 bought like crazy on credit. It created a a ripple effect.
And I know people have had health problems that never got checked during the lockdown. There were things that weren't done.

Speaker 1 People went broke.

Speaker 1 Spousal abuse, substance abuse, child abuse, all of that increased. That was one of the worst things that ever happened to this country, that lockdown.

Speaker 1 And I kind of lived through it talking to Scott Atlas

Speaker 1 in the middle of it, and to a lesser extent, Jay.

Speaker 1 They all said this is horrific. It's going to be terrible.
And now we hear Burks in her latest comment, she's writing her memoirs, said that she had to lie to get the court.

Speaker 1 She had to go to Donald Trump and say it's going to be a partial lockdown, it's going to be temporary when she knew that it, that she had to coax him along to self-destruct.

Speaker 1 But if she just said we're going to lock down the whole country for a year and a half, he would have never gone for it. So it was always.

Speaker 1 And she's admitting that now. And they've really lost their reputations such as they were

Speaker 1 with this new USAID, $40 million sent to the Wuhan lab. Fauci knew about that.

Speaker 1 And he told everybody they only got $600,000.

Speaker 1 That was their argument, remember, Jack? Oh, you couldn't have done anything with $600,000. That's nothing.

Speaker 1 We had Stephen Quay on our podcast. He said there was a lot more than that.
It was instrumentation. It was consultation.
It was trips over there by American scientists.

Speaker 1 What he was essentially saying is, I can't prove it, but there must have been a lot of money to give them all that stuff, expertise. And he was right.
It was $40 million, we find out.

Speaker 1 Yeah, to the one group of people who are the deadliest to us, the Chinese military, right?

Speaker 1 I could see giving. Wait a minute.
Are you saying the Chinese military? I'm sorry.

Speaker 1 How could you say that when Chief of Staff, General Mark Milley, called him up and he got his counterpart and said, I want to warn you that if I get one of those crazy orders from our crazy president, I'm going to call you first, the PLA, because I need to warn you that I'm dealing with a madman.

Speaker 1 How's that?

Speaker 1 I hung Admiral Bing for less than that. I took care of charges to bring up against Admiral.

Speaker 1 No, no, no, no, no. He's been pardoned.
well i meant anthony fauci well he's been pardoned too yeah

Speaker 1 10 years pardon

Speaker 1 i had heard from a third party

Speaker 1 i won't mention his name but somebody politely told me that

Speaker 1 for me to knock off writing about mark melly

Speaker 1 that he was upset about it

Speaker 1 and i've had another person contact me a friend of mine from the military who said knock it off about the retired generals they're very angry at you when you suggest that they have no right to call Donald Trump a fascist, a liar, a Hitlerian-like an architect of Auschwitz, a fraud who should be removed sooner or later.

Speaker 1 We need a coup to get rid of him. You cannot criticize that.

Speaker 1 One thing we didn't talk about very quickly, Jack, as we ended some of the things that Pete Heckseth is talking about are absolutely revolutionary.

Speaker 1 It's not just he's going to end DEI, he's talking about a whole way of new procurement, about overhead like NEH reforms. The overhead that General Dynamics and Lockheed and Raytheon and Northrop

Speaker 1 charge the government is even higher sometimes than the NIH, you know, more than 30 or 40 percent.

Speaker 1 If you have an hour of engineering time for $1,000 in real cost, they will charge the government $3,000.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 he's going to do that. He's going to, I don't think he's going to waive the, like we have been with the prior two Secretary of Defenses that were

Speaker 1 uniformed officers. He's going to make them wait five or ten years before they have a civilian role in the Department of Defense once you come out of the military.

Speaker 1 He's going to enforce Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice that says that you cannot disparage the Commander-in-Chief if you're serving or retired, subject to recall.

Speaker 1 I think he's going to really shake up the Defense Department. I think he's going to find a lot of waste, too.
It's going to be very interesting. That's the big thing.

Speaker 1 That's the biggest place to look for waste.

Speaker 1 Right, right. Well, that interview with

Speaker 1 John, oh my gosh, the comedian on the left.

Speaker 1 Victor,

Speaker 1 I shouldn't raise a name unless I ever knew John Stewart. John Stewart, yeah, the interview with the

Speaker 1 finance lady from the Pentagon. Her arrogance was shocking.
How dare you ask us a question about where the taxpayers' money has gone gone and disappeared to into.

Speaker 1 There were so many things in the DI that had nothing to do with defense.

Speaker 1 And I saw that picture the other day of it was it the Eisenhower, the Jerry it was one of the big carriers and it had a wreck, you know, it it hit something, collided.

Speaker 1 All these things are colliding in the military, and they don't tell us why, but I I noticed the picture of it. It was all rusted, you know what I mean? This big carry it looked terrible.

Speaker 1 And you get the idea that they're spending a lot of money other than on maintenance and they're getting a lot of people that don't know how to navigate these big ships.

Speaker 1 And when I read the latest report about that tragic helicopter, today there's a report out that

Speaker 1 this was an annual blindfolded mission.

Speaker 1 So, in other words, the military before Hexeth got in had a policy that from time to time

Speaker 1 a pilot learning advanced techniques of navigation while blinded, and i.e., with

Speaker 1 night vision goggles, would be flying along the Potomac River into the most densely contested air quarter in the middle, but she would not, he, she, both would not be able to communicate with commercial aircraft, and they would depend on an air traffic control industry that had adopted DIEI standards, and then they were supposed to make a sharp right turn before they got in the actual.

Speaker 1 That is insane.

Speaker 1 That is insane.

Speaker 1 Who caught? Can't somebody said, A, we're not going to get anywhere near a congested corridor, especially at night.

Speaker 1 And if we even did get near them, you're never going to be allowed to wear night vision goggles in a corridor with civilian aircraft, and we're not going to do it. as a training mission.

Speaker 1 Maybe if we've got guys that have done it for 10 years, we'll let them do it at at night with night vision, but we'll do it over the Pacific.

Speaker 1 And somebody said, well, Victor, we're fighting in urban areas and we have to have real conditions, not at the expense of civilian airliners. You don't.
That was insane.

Speaker 1 And the more you realize you think of all those poor people that were killed for nothing. Right.

Speaker 1 Nothing, just because of these stupid Pentagon ideas. They need to really shake that place up, boy.
And it's going to be very interesting because the Pentagon always relies on conservative support.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 well, maybe some of the

Speaker 1 advisory boards will be totally conservatized. You saw the Trump piggybacking off what you said Pete Hagseth is doing.
We're just going to have advisory boards

Speaker 1 at the economy. It's just a question of time.

Speaker 1 Can they conduct the entire counter-revolution in four years?

Speaker 1 They're like the Thermidors that came in in 1792 when the Robespierre and the Jacobins hijacked the French Revolution. They killed Deton.
They killed all of the original revolutionaries.

Speaker 1 And then they went mad. And they made statues to the Supreme Being and Radio.
That was their new God.

Speaker 1 As a Catholic Jack, you know that they killed over 7,000 priests and nuns. They ransacked churches, monasteries.
They renamed the days of the week. They tore down statues.
It sounds pretty familiar.

Speaker 1 They did all of that. And then all of a sudden, the Thermidors said, we don't have much time to save everything.
So they went in and decapitated, put the guillotiners in the guillotine. Right.

Speaker 1 And the Robespierre brothers lost their heads. And then they had about a year and they couldn't quite stage the counter-revolution.

Speaker 1 And then we had the Directory, then the Consulship, and then Napoleon. So I hope that doesn't happen.
So they've got to really that's what I like what Trump is doing. They cannot stop.

Speaker 1 Don't look back, like Satchel Page said. Don't look back.

Speaker 1 Keep going. Flood the zone.
It's kind of like you're the armor, you're the third army tanks, you have air cover, you're ranging ahead of the infantry, you keep going, going, going.

Speaker 1 Listen to what George Patton said, la das, encore la das, toujour la das. Audacity, more audacity, always audacity.
And then they said, General Patton, but General Patton, the flanks, the flanks.

Speaker 1 He said, blank the flanks. I got air power.
Don't worry about the

Speaker 1 criticism from within or without the party. Don't worry.
Just have your follow-up infantry.

Speaker 1 These are the guys, the clerks, the accountants that come up and say: Donald Trump took that recommendation from Elon. He wants to cut $40 million.
Now he's moving on to the Defense Department.

Speaker 1 We're going to go to USID and we'll do the paperwork. Yeah.
Follow them up.

Speaker 1 I just had a thought, Victor, that Patton is to Trump as McClellan was to Bush. Right? Bush or Biden.

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 1 Not

Speaker 1 aggrandizing the size of your military and not doing anything with it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, or if you took a Civil War

Speaker 1 Trump is to Sherman who looked like they said he was crazy and they said he was unfit for military service. He was an authentic military genius.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And Biden is somewhere like Halleck or Pope or McClellan or

Speaker 1 Burnside, a mediocrity that came up to the ranch, and

Speaker 1 Sherman came out of nowhere.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I said, said crazy things like, General Sherman, how will the war end? And they said,

Speaker 1 they said, comp, they called him comp.

Speaker 1 Please don't tell the truth to this reporter. Well, the war will end when we kill 300,000 of these Confederate cavaliers.
And that's exactly what they did.

Speaker 1 And then they said, well, the reporters are saying things. The New York Herald, Tribune, New York, they're saying things that aren't true about the march to see.

Speaker 1 We'll just put them in jail and we'll hang them later.

Speaker 1 I want to say one thing in defense of Burnside, who's who ⁇ you know, I lived in Fredericksburg. I lived on top of Maurice Heights when Sharon and I were first married.

Speaker 1 You're not going to tell me that he won the Battle of Fredericksburg. If not, definitely not.
I'm not going to tell you that. But, you know, there were four

Speaker 1 charges, and he wanted, he knew it was so horrific what he had done.

Speaker 1 This is warped. He wanted to have a fifth charge that he was in front of the cloud.
It would kill him. He would die.

Speaker 1 And, of course, how many other men of the Irish Brigade would die at that point? But he knew he had done wrong.

Speaker 1 He was the John Bell Hood of the North. John Bell Hood, finally, he lost an arm and a leg, and they had to strap him on his horse.
He still wanted a charge-fixed position. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Talking about all of our forts were named after ⁇ a lot of them are named after Confederate mediocrities like Bragg and Hood.

Speaker 1 Well, Victor,

Speaker 1 we got off topic. Yeah,

Speaker 1 anything you have to say is on topic.

Speaker 1 We've come to the end, except we're going to do our usual end-of-the-show business. I have two things to read today.

Speaker 1 First of all, I want to thank everybody who takes the time and effort, especially on Apple, to rate the show zero to five stars. And Victor's still crushing it.

Speaker 1 4.9 plus of 7,500 people have voted in this way. and some people leave comments.
I'm going to read one comment in a minute.

Speaker 1 But then we're also, this show is, people can be watching this right now on Rumble. Most people listen to the show as a podcast, but we've been on Rumble for several weeks.

Speaker 1 This one, we have a comment from a guy, I assume it's a guy, Dead Gorillas

Speaker 1 is the name. And he says, he writes, V D H is goat is, I guess, greatest of all time.

Speaker 1 If his intelligence wasn't already scary enough, he's now adopted a cutting fedora reminiscent of Cosa Nostra in order to strike fear into all the opposition. So

Speaker 1 that's an interesting take on you. I was getting cold this year, and I remember that my Swedish grandfather, Frank Hansen, had a particular hat, and he wore it when he came to our house.

Speaker 1 And I looked at a picture, and I saw it, and I said, I'm going to get one just like my grandfather. And when I was six years old, I would take it and wear it in it.
And he was a square head like me.

Speaker 1 He had a huge head. And it would, and I could almost fit in it at six.
So that's why I do it. And my

Speaker 1 Welsh grandfather had a same kind. They all had those.

Speaker 1 I would sit there and grow up with these farmers that were very rough dressed.

Speaker 1 And then on Sundays or at a party, they would put on their nice suspenders and their white starch shirts and their fedora hats.

Speaker 1 And they would change their wire rim scratched-up glasses to plastic glasses, plastic frames. That was the height of sophistication.
Was it?

Speaker 1 They were FBI glasses. They had plastic up here and then here down.
And then they would sit there and I would say, let's open the presents, Grandpa Frank.

Speaker 1 Well, before we do, he's talked to my other grandfather, Rhys. Now, wasn't the Swanson girl, the second one, married to the Johnson boy? Or did they...

Speaker 1 No, no, you have it wrong, Frank. It was the third boy who was married to the second cousin of the Smith sister.
And

Speaker 1 that's how the Kingsburg and Selma families united. Well, wait a minute.
I remember an earlier Swanson boy. That's all they talked about.

Speaker 1 While eating butter cookies and drinking coffee, I'm sure. Butter cookies and

Speaker 1 crackers. They're so called cookies.
Right, crackers,

Speaker 1 and a lot of black coffee and a bunch of old wreck bobos, or not wreck, but you know, 90 horsepower, 544 ladybug Bobos. Yeah, I remember also.

Speaker 1 I have one more thing to read, and this is a comment left on Apple from Omaha Marty, which uh who writes, I've listened to a few of Victor's podcasts, and I am hooked.

Speaker 1 Victor has so much knowledge and really can explain complicated issues in such a simple way that anyone can understand what is being explained.

Speaker 1 He also has many personal stories to prove a point or two, and I really enjoy his life stories. And I'm usually looking up some ancient Greek person that he quotes.

Speaker 1 I also like the fact that he looks at current political screw-ups and good political decisions and tells us what is really going on and why. A very interesting fellow.

Speaker 1 I learned something new and interesting every day. Keep it up, Victor.
Thank you, Omaha, Marty, for that. Thanks, everyone else, who leaves comments on Victor's own website.

Speaker 1 We read them. I read them.
You know how I learned to talk about things in a very pedestrian fashion? How, Victor?

Speaker 1 I started to teach when I was 29 farm, but then I went up and I was teaching humanities, and I was teaching Plutarch one day.

Speaker 1 And I knew a lot about Plutarch's lives and morale, et cetera. But I wanted to talk about the sources of Plutarch's life, who wrote in about 100 A.D.

Speaker 1 So I was going through the lost sources of, you know,

Speaker 1 so I was talking talking about Callistenes and Ephorus, and I looked out at the audience at Fresno State,

Speaker 1 and they were all like either asleep.

Speaker 1 And one student said, Mr. Hansen, none of us were born in the United States,

Speaker 1 so we have no idea what you're talking about. I said, either was Plutarch.
So let's start over. So I had mostly Hmong and Mexican-American people from Mexico.
And so I said, now this is Plutarch.

Speaker 1 And these are called lives. And biography means to write a life.
So now we're going to start from the square.

Speaker 1 So he wrote lives, and one Roman for one Greek, and then he wrote a comparative live to show you that the Greeks in his time were just as impressive as a Roman. But

Speaker 1 he had authors that taught him this that are now dead. Does everybody understand? And they'd go, kind of, and then I would repeat the whole thing again.
Right.

Speaker 1 And so over the years, it was very, it was impossible to keep my job unless I could communicate classics to a broad audience.

Speaker 1 And it kind of harmed me as writing because when I started writing a lot of books, the editor said, hey, Victor, I think you already said this before.

Speaker 1 And then one guy.

Speaker 1 Yeah, one guy said, you're not, you're writing like you're teaching at Fresno State. And I got really angry because I was very protective at Fresno State.

Speaker 1 But he said, you're writing to an audience that doesn't need to be told the same thing in three different ways.

Speaker 1 Were the Hmong there because of the Vietnam War, or was there a community that they were here? No, no, there was no one here.

Speaker 1 We were a designated city, Fresno was, in 1975, and literally there were about four cities, and they chose cities that were warm in the South California.

Speaker 1 And there were about 80,000 Hmongs that were just

Speaker 1 airlifted without any knowledge of where they were going. And they were put into Southwest Fresno.

Speaker 1 You You know the town, Jack, because I know you've been to Fresno a lot, and it's right near the airport. That area was a Hmong enclave, and we didn't really do much to acculturate them.

Speaker 1 I only say this because my father was, there's a state center, community college district with Reedy College in Fresno City. So he opened, and it was his initiative.

Speaker 1 He thought that in response to this, they should have a vocational training center college where they teach people mechanics and

Speaker 1 automotive engineering, carpentry, wiring, plumbing. So he opened this.

Speaker 1 He went over to the west side of Fresno, found a factory that was abandoned, opened it up, got some money from the thing, quit his job as a regular administrator and became the director of the vocational training.

Speaker 1 It's still there, and they at one time they had 500 students. And I would go over there when I was in high school and college.
And the majority of them were Hmong or Hispanic.

Speaker 1 And my dad would, you know, he was a pretty good mechanic himself, but he was the administrator and he hired a lot of really great teachers.

Speaker 1 It was a very wonderful program, but I got to know a lot of people. And then when I was a professor, I got to know a lot of Hmong students.
I still keep in contact with a couple of them.

Speaker 1 And I got to know, they were wonderful kids, wonderful kids, and very bright. Same with my Hispanic students.
I still keep up with some of them. Same thing with my Armenian students.

Speaker 1 Same thing with my poor white students. Most of the white kids were not wealthy.

Speaker 1 And And

Speaker 1 when I started in 1984, I think the campus was 60%

Speaker 1 non-Hispanic or non-minority. When I finished, it was about 90%.

Speaker 1 So it was a challenge because most of these families were

Speaker 1 it was very I had to make the argument to parents that their kids that were working 30 hours a week should study Latin or Greek. And I would get very good questions from them.
Okay, Mr.

Speaker 1 Anson, one wants to be a classics, whatever that is. How many hours does it take to learn this stuff? And I said six or seven hundred hours a year for a rudimentary knowledge of Greek.

Speaker 1 And they said, well, he could make $7,000 or $8,000.

Speaker 1 I said, yes, but this will stay with him the rest of his life. Yes.
Perfect. Or so persuasive.
But they were very well educated, the students, when they left. Brilliant.
I had a lot of help.

Speaker 1 Boy, I have some great colleagues, Bruce Thornton and...

Speaker 1 and others. They were really good professors.

Speaker 1 Someday I'm going to ask you about the first day in the classroom, but not today. Not today.

Speaker 1 I have to wrap this up. Well, my second day, I'll just finish this by saying I walked to, I shouldn't say this, it's self-incriminating.

Speaker 1 I walked my second day to my old straight Dodge pickup with a six-cylinder, a straight six, I think it was, 1984. I was all filthy, dirty.

Speaker 1 I had been irrigating, and I had 30 people picking grapes, and I was irrigating an orchard, and I had to run up to teach. And the secretary was a German warbright,

Speaker 1 and she was about 70 or 60. And she goes, What are you doing?

Speaker 1 You got mud all over the department corporate.

Speaker 1 So then I went to the bathroom and got a paper towel. I was on my hands and knees cleaning.
And the chairman goes in and goes, Are you a janitor? I said, No,

Speaker 1 I'm your new Latin teacher. And, oh, you're this guy that's.

Speaker 1 Do you have a PhD from Stanford? I said, yes, I do. He said, could you bring into my office the certificate?

Speaker 1 So then I go out the second day to the parking lot, and I had got a temporary parking, and there is a cop out there.

Speaker 1 And he has a flashlight. It was about 6 o'clock in the evening.
It wasn't dark. It was dusk.
And he was looking at my pickup.

Speaker 1 And I had a 12-gauge pump shotgun in the back of the seat, which I had used sometimes on the tractor to shoot at coyotes. But I was also irrigating, and the neighbor had three deadly pit bulls.

Speaker 1 And I had a one-year-old son, and they went after us once. So I always carried a shotgun and shot over their heads.
I didn't want to shoot them. But I had forgotten about it, and I'd driven up there.

Speaker 1 The guy was looking to see if everybody had a park, and he saw this long barrel sticking up behind the.

Speaker 1 So he came up to me and said, You know, it's a felony to have a weapon

Speaker 1 on a CSU campus. And he says, Do you have

Speaker 1 ownership papers? And I said

Speaker 1 it was Cyrus Davis's shotgun, and he was born

Speaker 1 in 1864,

Speaker 1 and it's been in my family ever since then. And he said, well, I'd like to cite you, but could I take a look at it? I thought he was going to find me.
So he goes, oh, my God, I love shoe. This is it.

Speaker 1 He said, look, is there any? I said,

Speaker 1 there is nothing in the chamber. There wasn't 12-gauge.
So he said, put it down under the seat. Don't let anybody see it.
Consider yourself chastised and never ever come to school with a shotgun. Yes.

Speaker 1 I was freaked out. Day two.
Wow.

Speaker 1 Called my mom that day. She called me and she said, I almost needed you.
She was a judge, a pellet court judge. And I said, I almost got arrested for having a gun.
She goes, well,

Speaker 1 you know the law. You know the law.

Speaker 1 You should have taken that gun out. I said, I didn't even know I had it.
I was irrigating, and that dog was going to bite us.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 well, I'm sure

Speaker 1 that was my introduction to academia.

Speaker 1 Mom would have come to the rescue. All right, Victor, we are way over time.
I want to thank you for all the wisdom you shared. No, no, no, no, no.
Thanks for all the wisdom you shared.

Speaker 1 Thanks, folks, for listening. Thanks, folks, who subscribe to Civil Thoughts, the free weekly email newsletter I write with 14 recommended readings.

Speaker 1 And I do that every week for the Center for Civil Society. And if you want to see it, get it.
Go to civilthoughts.com, sign up. I am confident you will enjoy it.

Speaker 1 Thanks to our sponsors, Victor, again, you've been great. And, folks, we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.
Bye-bye.

Speaker 1 Thank you, everybody, for listening.