Europe's New Reality and Ukraine Peace Settlement

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the Victor Davis Hanson show.

hello ladies hello gentlemen this is the vict Victor Davis Hanson Show. I am Jack Fowler, the man lucky enough to be the host to ask questions of the great Victor Davis Hanson, the namesake of the show and star of it.
He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, and the possessor of a website, The Blade of Perseus. Its address is victorhanson.com.
Later in this episode, I will tell you why I believe you should be subscribing. We are recording on Sunday, the 16th of February, and this particular episode, Victor, will be up on the 18th.
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 of things that have come up in the last few days. J.D.
Vance's speech in Europe and the reaction to that. Victor, you wrote Sign significant commentary on the snarky Europeans for X.
The late, great Henry Hyde, my dear friend, his name is being taken off a courthouse in Illinois. Jamie Dimon, the head of...
Why is he the head of Morgan Stanley? It's not Morgan Stanley. Oh, gosh.
Yeah, it's a great Jamie Diamond. I'm sorry, Victor.
I just go blank sometimes. I think he's of Greek diaspora descent.
Well, that makes him even friendlier. But he unleashed a diatribe about work by Zoom, work from home Fridays, virtual work, etc., a real bracer.
And maybe even we'll get to the Pope. And we'll do that when we come back from these important messages.
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Victor, I like to, there's a lot of foreign policy stuff. 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. He died about a decade ago.
He is famous for the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding on abortion. 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 Congress.
When he got up to speak, it mattered. People listened to change votes.
Was he in office when he died or had he retired he retired in in um he did not run in the 2006 um and he was uh he was in his 70s when he died he was he was he had been quite heavy hadn't he a little bit heavy very heavy and getting um uh getting ill um and he but he he lived a few years longer than that. Well, Victor, the reason we bring up Henry

Hyde is that the DuPage County Courthouse, the county commissioners voted to strip his name from the courthouse. Just another event in statute.
And their professed grounds. was he was a man who supported abortion, opposition to abortion.
That was my point that he hadn't done anything. I mean, they didn't want to replace him with anybody, did they? I don't, as I recall, they just wanted to get rid of him.
Yeah. I don't, as a general rule, I don't support name changing what the romans called damn natio memoriae that means the whatever that was associated with the prior emperor was completely damned to memory and 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 they don't know what they do when they do these things, because what they do is they're destroying all precedents for tradition. And the right then has an open field to do the same so the gulf of america

you can't change that it's been a hollowed name gulf of mexico for 400 years well

apparently not there is no traditions among the left same thing with pete hexath he just said you

know what generation after generation five generations have grown up with fort bragg

fort liberty is colorless and it doesn't really have any i understand that braxton bragg was a

Thank you. Generation after generation, five generations have grown up with Fort Bragg.
Fort Liberty is colorless and it doesn't really have any. 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? 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.
And the thing about the left, Jack, is they never feel that they're going to be out of power. So they break all these precedents, you know, let's pack the court, let's bring in new states, let's end the filibuster, let's do this.
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. 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, OK, 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. And then how dare you do that? It's got the adolescent mind left to degenerate into an adolescent mentality.
Henry Hyde was a victim of iconoclism 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.
We're full end of the counter revolution. So all these relics, these ossified 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.
Well, they, the left, is going out fighting. I hope they're going out, but we'll get more on that on our next episode.
You've written a piece about the disintegration of the left for your website, so it'll be interesting to get your fuller thoughts on that. But right now, Victor, before we continue, I just want to tell our listeners about what's really happening to their money, what economists politely call inflation.
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I have two root canals I just did, and they had to remove the prior filling, Jack, and they handed me a little plastic bag with the gold fillings, and they said they were $70 each. Well, I haven't.
Remind you of gold raisins, Victor? Golden raisins, sulfur raisins. Victor's uh let's begin we have a couple of topics related to europe and and let's start off with jd vance i know you talked um a little with uh the great sammy wink about his speech in europe the other day but you've written a response to this for X.
I strongly encourage our listeners, if they're on X, to follow Victor there. At VD Hansen is his handle.

It's titled, Snarky Europeans Scowl a Truth Teller Vance. Victor, would you tell us

what is in this wonderful piece? 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. 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. And my point is that he shocked everybody.
He came up there and he said, all of you in the audience, 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 who want to close the borders.
You're going after national populace. And then he gave particular examples.
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 ADF, was to win this next election. And Scholz, of course, is very worried, the German chancellor, that they are going to win the next election.
So they felt that he was interfering. And so they, instead of talking about security, then the German defense minister got up and said, this is unsustainable.
How dare you? And then all of them all held well close. You're interfering in European private affairs.
So the whole thing reflected, I think, badly on Europe. The left here loved it because the Europeans and them.
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, 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.
essentially

we have 32 NATO countries

and after all that haranguing of trump and the war in ukraine you would think that this measly little two percent investment of gdp on military expenditures would have resonated but you still have nine countries that are freeloading nine and you talk about open borders but but Germany has a higher percentage of foreign born than we do. And it's only 80 million people.
More importantly, its fertility rate is 1.4. Europe is even lower than our low.
And then he was saying, don't it count on us defending you forever? And he said, we're going to, you know, and so they got all angry. 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.
Well, when they formed the EU, it had six, about the same GDP as the United States. Now, from 1999 till now, it is 60%,

one and a half times larger the United States' GDP is than Europe. Europe's fertility rate is

lower. Europe's energy costs in places like Germany are four times higher than ours.
Europe

is still unarmed. It will not spend more than 2%, 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 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. 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.
Biden stopped the natural gas terminals. Trump opened them up.
So we're going to be exporting very, very, very important liquefied natural gas. And we're going to try to encourage other Mediterranean countries to help out Europe.
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. 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 and you were enriching him. And then you have people you're trying to protect blew up your pipeline.
So the whole thing is full of contradictions. Then we get to the final Tessera and 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 billion trade deficit.
China's the biggest with $280 with us. So they're right up there.
And it's only because, as the Secretary of Treasury said, 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 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.
You have to be subsurvised by your defense. You make fun of us.
And yet you have a form of censorship and lack of transparency that's found nowhere else in the free world, especially not in the United States, especially now with Trump. There was a final, I should say there was another element to the indictment.
The German minister said this was a egregious interference in the internal affairs of Europe. But let's review that.
As I remember, Christopher Steele was a British subject. 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. 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.
And then the embassy itself was feeding dirt to the dossier about Trump. I also remember that the British Labour Party, Jack, just a few months ago was inviting Labourite supporters to go into key states in the 2024 election and volunteer their services, even though that's illegal, because they were being paid by somebody.
I think several hundred did that, including members of parliament. Yes.
Yep. And then the German government shut, what's his name, Mr.
Thierry, the Frenchman, when Musk had an interview with the woman who's the head of the alternative for the AFD, I should say, for Deutschland, 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...
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 cite Musk and censor that, or we're going to fine him.
So Europe is saying to us, if you have a U.S. platform and you have an interview we don't like conducted in the United States, we're going to fine you to the extent we can over in Europe.
Of course, we had the police chief of London saying that he was going to go after Americans who complained about DEI and etc. So they interfere with us all the time, all the time.
And if they don't like X and they don't like Google and they don't like Apple phones, they don't like Facebook, just make your own. Make your own.
Victor, what do you ask? You're welcome to do that. They make good trucks.
They make good cars. Make your own phones.
Make your own everything.

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.
And when I look at all of the invective that comes from Europe and all the bad ideas that come, speaking as a classicist who for years saw the ideas of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida and Lacan, all that crappy French theory pollute classical studies. I don't, you know, conservative thinkers in France are some of the best in the world because they're in an adversarial climate.
And same thing is true of Germany and Britain. But as a general rule, their socialism didn't work.
And they're much poor in terms of GDP and per capita income than we are. And they're very bitter that we're much stronger.
And the more nations that you added to the EU, and I think as I said I think there's 29 of them now the

further they lag behind

America's GDP, we didn't add any new states. They added countries, but their GDP still fell down,

even though they were getting more people and more services, because they're socialist.

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. But they don't like to be told.
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 the Nazis have overrun France or the German Spring Offensive 1918, just about ready to crush the ally.
Then they want us over there.

Thank you. You know, when the Nazis overrun France or the German Spring Offensive of 1918, just about ready to crush the ally, then they want us over there.

It's, yeah, it's true. I mean, I don't want to be an American chauvinist, but nothing could be.

My first cousin was buried in the cemetery in Normandy with a bullet to his head after Normandy.

And my other cousin flew, I don't know what it was, 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. And with all due respect, I haven't seen a lot of Europeans come over here and do much for us.
Yeah. It's also a deep self-loathing of a continent founded on Christianity that hates leadership anyway, hates Christianity.
So, it just seems suicide is a slow suicide. 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 trying to, but he brought, 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.

And I found myself in the Orwellian situation as attending as a participant that I was arguing against the unfair treatment of American Jews and Israel and the people arguing against me were American Jews.

And they felt, you know,

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. 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 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. So there is this, I don't know, it's self-criticism taken to the nth degree that becomes suicidal in the West.
It's been there since the Greeks, but at certain times it becomes self-destructive and sure is now. Well, Victor, I'm going to ask you a little more about J.D.
Vance and some other related news, Macron 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.
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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show, recording on the 16th of February. And this particular episode will be up on the 18th.
Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus, can be found at VictorHanson.com.

It's $6.50 a month to subscribe,

discounted to $65 for a full year. Why would you subscribe? Because Victor does exclusive things for The Blade of Perseus.
He writes two pieces a week, plus a video a week. And you can also find the archives of these podcasts and Victor's writings for the weekly essay for American Greatness, weekly syndicated column.

There's other appearances.

So if you're a fan of VDH and you're not on the Blade of Perseus, you got to correct that.

So the Blade of Perseus is, remember, the name denotes that we're using a sword to cut off the head of the Medusa. Okay.
Thank you. And we know who the Medusa is.
It's got a great graphic on the website. Hey, Victor, in line with what we were...
Well, let me ask you first about... We'll get back to the European reaction to Vance and Trump.
But on J.D. Vance himself, I'm heartened as a conservative, and I happen to be a Republican also, long-term, for his growth, his leadership abilities, as qualifications to run this country, if need be.

What are your thoughts about J.D. Vance? Anything? I've always liked him.
I met him firsthand, as I said earlier, 2015, and we had a polite debate about Donald Trump. He was on the other side of the issue than I was.
at that time he was enjoying enormous, a huge readership, record readership for Hillbilly Elegy. Hollywood is making a movie out of it with major stars.
He was working very closely with the entrepreneur Steve Case to kind of raise money for development in underdeveloped places in the United States. He had experience.
He was in, you know, he had been working in the Marines. People said, well, he wasn't in a combat zone.
I can tell you that being embedded twice, there was no such thing as not a combat zone. The closest I came to getting killed, the second embed was in a non-combat Camp Victory airport when a mortar went off at us, or a rocket.
And so my point is that I've known him, and 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 first-hand knowledge of the underclass of America and empathy for it. East Palestinians, the East Palestinian Americans of 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 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. 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

rhetorician or debater. As soon as they picked him, I said, oh my God,

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.
He's very empathetic. He does not lose his temper.
He gets right to the point. He has a stiletto 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. And so when he went over to that conference, he was ready to go.
And 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.
Nobody ever said that we were going to cancel if the AFD won in Germany. That's not true that we arrested anti-abortion people.
That's not true we tried to censor. I mean, they knew everything he said was true.
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, we're going to have a lot of tariffs and we're going to run up a $230 billion trade surplus with you.
And by the way, screw you. We're not going to have 32 nations invest 2% 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.
So if it doesn't spend two, why should the others? And then Germany is going to tell us it's not sustainable. 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, and now you're going to ship this

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, 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.
This idea that they're Greek philosophers and we're Roman

centurions that are mindlessly enforcing the will of our betters is just insane. And they don't know what to do with Donald Trump because he's not nursed in this bipartisan, you know, this bipartisan uh,

Ivy League

stew

where you have to get

you,

you,

you, you adjudicate your effectiveness or your by your popularity among the global. He didn't care.
Trump, that means if Trump is praised in foreign policy or these plays that praise 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.
Don't you know Macron looked crossways at him? No, he was like, as we said before, like Shakespeare's Colossus and Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene II, he stroked like a colossus among us, and we minor figures beneath his feet. You saw that at the Notre Dame Cathedral.
And then Macron said he was going to call a special session, Jack. Correct.
He's the Gavin Newsom of France, isn't he? He wants to corral all the European leaders to discuss what to do with this thing called Trump. 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 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. 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.
They don't have majority party support. That's why they're doing all this.
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. 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 know anything about it.
And people in Europe are getting mad. The subtext, just to finish this rant, Jack, is they had it all wrong about his audience.
They said, well, he's speaking to the MAGA true believers at home. No, most MAGA believers are written off Europe.
They don't care what he says to Europe. Or he says, well, he's trying to for constructive criticism to shock him.
Maybe, maybe not. What he's really talking to is the majority of people in Europe.
He's saying to the number, 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. I don't know, Bogie and Rick in Casablanca to Claude, Louis.
This is going to be the beginning of a beautiful relationship. Let me tell you, Victor, I know you saw this, and our listeners haven't.
I titled this British bureaucrat seeking to destroy rural England, and this was a post on X. 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. 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 what this little story is, I guess it's a well-known hotel over there that employs, it's central to the community and employment.
The government wanted him to fire everybody except two people on staff and just house migrants. They would get meals on wheels, essentially, a housekeeping once a week.
So the role of this institution in the local economy would have been killed. The locals who are employed at this hotel would have been unemployed.
Why? 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 this is an attempt to kill their country, kill rural England.
So these are the people I think J.D. Vance are talking to.
This is really strange because the elite Westerner gets this psychological thrill that he is performance art, virtue signaling, superior, morally superior by being empathetic to the Middle East or the Latin American immigrant. And then he kind of gets a

dessert on top by saying he treats them better than Americans. We saw that in a recent exposure

by Homeland Security that the Manhattan Hotel is at Manhattan. They were charging double

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

And they're making a fortune on it. But I had two interesting conversations that illustrate this.
About three months ago in my proverbial supermarket, there was a Hispanic guy and I went over to get a ribeye steak and buy it. It was about the size of my hand and it cost, I think, $24 or $28.
And this guy was going through them, and he was telling me that he could buy them once a month. And then he said, when you check out, you notice everybody checking out.
We're ground zero of illegal immigration. He was saying that they separate everything.
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. And then he said to me, they treat illegal immigrants, but he was Hispanic, better than they do us.
And I said, yes. And then I've been walking and are my former family's property with this very scenic pond that i always go back to as a referent about the decline of civilization uh i think it was five nights ago i saw it's kind of become a local dump so we legals come out here and they throw stuff and i don't mean stuff I mean refrigerators and everything.
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 they'll have all this. 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.
And every time I walked by it, I looked for evidence of some incriminating document and they're all in Spanish, but nobody ever leaves their address there. So one time I found a phone number, but it was disconnected.
But my point is this,

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. If I had done that and gone into somebody's house in town and dumped three pieces of appliances, they would have arrested me to...
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. 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 immigrant. Put us in a nice hotel.
Let us have all these EBT cards so we can separate our food and get beer and buy steak. Don't make us pay, you know, I pay a hundred 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.
And people apparently don't do that. So what happens in the West is we are hyper and hypo-legal.
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 and watch them like a hawk and make sure they obey every letter of the law. Or if you don't, it would be out west, you know, luce 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.
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 who break our laws and commit violence against our citizens and then expect us not to criticize them. They're shielded.
They never have. I wish these CNN anchors or I wish these professors, I really do wish it now.
I don't mean permissives. I wish it's these migrant shelters or people who were put into a home in Manhattan or Boston.
I wish they would just get 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.

Would he say that that was not green?

It got green eventually.

That was a big fossil fuel imprint that you left on my driveway. Corbin.
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And we thank the good people of Solaire for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson show. Hey, Victor, before we move on to talk about I didn't mention it at the beginning, Putin and Trump.
One last thing 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.
Have you seen any of these videos lately of the rioting going on in the streets of Sweden and the major cities, all based on the illegal immigration.

I mean, it's really troubling.

They're living on a volcano. They know that the majority of their populations do not support the government position.
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. they don't want to assimilate and they have some missionary idea that they're going to someday

do by to be true, that they are inordinately violent. 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. Everybody knows it.
And that's what J.D. was trying to tell these governments.
He said,

listen to the people, your democracy. What he was basically saying, I think, if I could

Thank you. And that's what J.D.
was trying to tell these governments. He said, listen to the people, your democracy.

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.

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. And when they don't support, they change them.
They don't believe that. 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.
And from time to time, the dummies don't know what's good for them. So then they elect bad people.
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. That's lawfare.
That's raiding Mar-a-Lago. That's trying to impeach him twice.
That's trying to shoot him. Same thing in Europe.
And that's how they define it. 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. And that's why they're angry.
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. These people are in grades.
We're appointed to represent what Hispanics are supposed to feel like. And when they don't pay us, they're not obsequious to us, screw them.
We're going to cut them off. That's how they define democracy.
They don't believe in democracy. They believe in a plutocracy or an aristocracy.
Bill Kristol is the best example of it. He really is.
He's always attacking people who vote plebiscites or for Trump that get popular support. And in his little tiny, itty-bitty, tiny, itty-bitty, teeny-weeny world, people like him should be philosopher kings.
Absolutely. And when you ask him by virtue of what?

Your substantial corpus of publications?

No.

Your original dynamic thought as expressed in your columns?

No.

Your brilliant commentary?

No.

Your stellar record in advancing conservative causes in the Republican Party?

No.

But your zip code, your money, your parentage, your lineage, your nepotism? Yes. Yes.
That's what qualifies you. Don't you know who I am is the calling card for people like him.
It really hurts them because the Republicans are always under assault in foundations, in schools, academia, and the media, and they hone their skills. But when you're pampered, you get soft.
So, you know, when I go to Stanford every week, I think, 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 wrote something about? You're always 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? 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. And that's why they have this impoverished group of people.
So now when they lose power, it's, have you noticed all this, this, this representative Garcia from California called, he brings, he says that Elon Musk is a D-I-C-K. And then they say to him on CNN, do you think that helps to call Elon Musk? because he is a DIC.
And then all of these nobody, congressmen and women are out there saying the F word, F Musk, F Trump. And then you get 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 Sharpton. And then they call him, he's a fascist, he's horrible, he's a creep, he's a horrible person.
And then you think, next thing you know, with $37 trillion in debt, they're going to bring out one of the squad, and she's going to tell you that even though she's five generations now, she's probably seven generations away from slavery, and the people who held slaves are seven generations. But she thinks that a majority of people in a country that have never held slaves, none of them for seven generations, and 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.
But that party is completely on hinge and lunatic. And these press conferences or whatever, rallies, it does look like the Island of Misfit Toys.
I don't see how they think this is doing anything but hurting them that ball they have a black congresswoman from massachusetts you know 10 tons of eyelashes on her and and one after another they how about representative crockett she's always talking about everybody's jealous of her because she's a proud black woman who's smarter than everybody yes and. And she's always fighting with Marjorie Taylor Greene.

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 until, and it didn't work. But it worked in 2000.
So what they're going to do is they have no alternative paradigm. 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 the energy. No, they had to fail.
So DEI and all that. So what's their thing? It is just Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, fascist, fascist, racist, racist, racist, just flood.
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 on the street, Elizabeth Warren. or, ah, Mazi or Rono, women must be believed.

All of that is going to flood the zone and just keep wearing him down.

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. And then right before the midterms, they think they're going to get all this billionaire cash from left-wing Soros, 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.
And then 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.
And then the last two years, he'll be a language. That is their policy.
Will it work? Well, a president usually loses, what is it, 12 seats or something like that historically in the first midterm. 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. If these things start to work and we get, you know, four or five percent GDP and we have a reduction in the deficit, people will be amazed.

number one. Number two, I don't think that Bill Ackman and Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos,

I know Elon Musk and David Sachs and Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz 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. I just don't think so.
And I think the MAGA people realize that it's either do or die in 2026. Yeah.
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. I'm going to get in a fetal position.
Just make it all go away. Just don't.
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.

I'm going to take it.

I love it.

Hey, Victor, back to Europe and back to, you mentioned Putin before, and we've yet to hear your thoughts, at least on this Victor Davis Hanson show, on the Trump-Putin call and forthcoming meeting.

Would you give us your take?

Puppet, asset, Russian puppet, Russian asset, Russian asset.

I'm reading John Bolton, Munich-style negotiation, Bill Kristol.

So he said what everybody said.

He just outlined Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio.

They've all outlined what Trump has said and what everybody knows to be true. And so what is that? It was not the position of Barack Obama once he let Putin steal the Donbass and Crimea.
For the next three years, he did not say we have to arm them to militarily get them back. No, he said stuff happens.
It was not the position of Donald Trump to say we have to arm the Ukrainians to get back to Donbass and Crimea. It was not the position of Joe Biden before February 24th invasion of Kiev.
So my point is, it's now been 11 years. Some of these regions in the Donbass and Crimea have 70% Russian speakers.
They've been Russian and they're not going to get it back. So I think they're 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 a million casualties, 700,000 dead, wounded, and killed because you institutionalized what you had stolen, number one.
Number two, 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 you know that we don't want them in NATO and you don't want them in NATO because you don't want them in NATO, obviously, because you don't want NATO on your doorstep.
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. So we're going to arm them.
They're going to be NATO-like, 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. And we'll have a DMZ along where 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. They didn't take one inch of the stuff 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. That's what it is.
And so 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 the Ukrainians will try to enlarge or keep their pocket around Kurs. It's shrunken some, 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, he knows that, and I think Putin will go for it. And Zelensky will go for it because 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 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.
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. And so he's not...
He also said a shocking thing. He said, we didn't get $200 billion.
Remember he said that we only got $79 billion. Whoa.
You're either lying or you're not counting the aid that came to you in various manifestations, you know, food, institutional aid, 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. Yeah.
So, I don't think he has a lot of support anymore, Zelensky. Yeah.
He's a little bit- If I was Zelensky right now, I would hold an election. I say, these are the proposals.
I want to put you before the proposals. We don't need to get...
I want to stand for election. I want to reopen the economy and reopen everything and see what happens.
I think he'd lose. Yeah.
By the way, Victor, related to the war, you've seen these articles about North Koreans being killed there and even some captured.

Why? I'm just curious here. I'm an idiot.

Why is North Korea sending troops to die in Ukraine?

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

Well, 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. So every time when China has a problem, they unleash North Korea.
They send a missile over Japan or they threaten a nuke us and then they play this game that China, oh, you know, our little 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.
And so they need foreign currency and they don't care about human life. So they send 10,000 people who 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.
You know, battle-hardened Ukrainians have been fighting for three years and they're slaughtered. And apparently,

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.

So their only product they produce are people

to be expended.

They don't care.

Yeah, okay.

Along with Iran,

it's the most amoral government in the world.

Yeah. But it's the most amoral government in the world.
Yeah.

But it's useful to China and Russia. We'll put Cuba in third place there.
Cuba. Victor, we're going to- Don't do that.
You're going to get Karen Bass really angry. Oh, true.
Mayor of Los Angeles. But Mahoney told me the other day that they are having like five-day blackouts in Cuba.
I don't know how much longer can these 1957 Bel Airs be kept on the road. This country seems so ripe for collapse.
Well, they don't have any. The last generation that knew what it was to live a normal life was 1959.
So, you know, you're talking about 65 years. You're talking three generations grew up with that poverty.
Yeah. And they get enough foreign exchange from left-wing visitors to trickle down.
But they say the same thing about Iran. The energy is shot.
People are protesting. Yeah.
I had a talk with an anonymous person. I won't name him last week, an Iranian scholar.
I kind of like him. I think he's very learned.
He's a colleague. 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. I think we should, as Trump just did, reinstitute the maximum pressure, you know, oil embargoes, oil sanctions, no travel, go after their bank account, isolate them, take away $100 billion, $50 billion in revenue every year, 102 years, and see if we could break them and have a revolution.
And he agreed with me, said exactly what has to happen. 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, you know, after 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. I mean, they might be able to build one the size of a Volkswagen and drive it into Israel, but I doubt it.
Okay. Well, Victor, we're going to come, we are coming around the homestretch, and I think we should end this particular episode with your thoughts on Jamie Dimon's diatribe against lazy employees.
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Victor, I was checking out earlier when you said something about Jamie Dimon's heritage, and he is indeed. His parents were...
He's the son of Theodore and Themis Dimon of Greek heritage, and he's from Jackson Heights in Queens. So 68 years...
I think the family was some Asia Minor, maybe. Somebody told me that once.
Originally, the great Byzks well and uh i think he is the head of morgan stanley it's uh yeah jp morgan he's ceo i 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 and when trump in in 2017, he thought automatically that as a business person understood deregulation and less taxation grows the economy, that he would be a natural ally. 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.
But now the mood of the country has changed and he's more empirical. 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 Dimon, he doesn't give it to them.
In fact, he says that, did you see that quote? It was right before the election. They said, well, Trump, and he said, well, GDP was up.
What was wrong with that? Inflation was 1.3. 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. And so that was very good.
And now he's on this. The only thing I didn't understand about this latest outburst was it was intentional so they could release it to Semenes' folk hero credentials as a straight shooter.
Or was it leaked? I don't know why. he got an entire yeah he said i'm not gonna have any more of this at home stuff you'd have no creativity you have no energy you have no productivity it's a con all you generation you don't know how to get up and get up get up in the morning go to work and get dressed and be a person and a worker.
Don't just sit around. It was really good.
And he was absolutely right about productivity. 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, the university Palestinian, all of that was latent, always there.
But something about the COVID paranoia, it wasn't a paranoia, it was a deadly illness, but that lockdown, keeping people for almost two years in their apartment and destroying the economy and small businesses, that did something to people. And when that George Floyd thing erupted, they came out, went nuts, and then when it was finally over and the supply chains were morbid, and they went out and bought like crazy on credit, it created 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.
People went broke. 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. And I kind of lived through it talking to Scott Atlas in the middle of it.
And to a lesser extent, Jay, 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 memoir, said that she had to lie to get the court. She had to go to Donald Trump and say it it's going to be a partial lockdown.
It's going to be temporary when she knew that she had to coax him along to self-destruct. 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, and she's admitting that now. And they've really lost their reputations such as they were with this new USAID, $40 million sent to the Wuhan lab.
Fauci knew about that when he told everybody they only got 600,000. That was their argument, remember, Jack? Oh, they couldn't have done anything with 600,000.
That's nothing. 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.
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. Yeah.
To the one group of people who are the deadliest to us, the Chinese military, right? I could see giving it to the French. Wait a minute.
Are you saying the Chinese military? I'm sorry. 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.
How's that? They hung Admiral Bing for less than that. I encourage the others to bring up against...
No, no, no, no, no. He's been pardoned.
Well, I meant Anthony Fauci. Well, he's been pardoned too.
Yeah. Ten years of pardon.
I had heard from a third party. I won't mention his name, but somebody politely told me that for me to knock off writing about Mark Milley.
Really? That he was upset about it. 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, Hitlerian like a architect of Auschwitz, a fraud who should be removed sooner or later. We need a coup to get rid of them.
You cannot criticize that. One thing we didn't talk about very quickly, Jack, as we ended, some of the things that Pete Hexeth is talking about are absolutely revolutionary.
It's not just he's going to NDI. 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 charge the government is even higher sometimes than the NIH, you know, more than 30 or 40%.
If you have an hour of engineering time for $1,000 in real cost, they will charge the government $3,000. So 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 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 defenses that were uniformed officers.
He's going to make them wait five or 10 years before they have a civilian role in the Department of Defense. Once you come out of the military, 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.
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.
That's the biggest place to look for waste. Right, right.
Well, that interview with John, oh my gosh, the comedian on the left. I can't, Victor.
I shouldn't raise a name. You, John Stewart? John Stewart, yeah.
The interview with the finance lady from the Pentagon. Her arrogance was shocking.
How you ask us a question about where where the taxpayers money has gone and disappeared to into but there's so many things in the di that had nothing to do with defense and i saw that picture the other day of it was the eisenhower the jerry it was one of the big carriers and it had a wreck you know it hit something, collided. All these things are colliding in the military and they don't tell us why.
But I noticed the picture of it. It was all rusted.
You know what I mean? This little carrier. It looked terrible.
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.
And when I read the latest report about that tragic helicopter, today there's a report out that this was an annual blindfolded mission. So, in other words, the military, before Hexeth got in, had a policy that from time to time, a pilot learning advanced techniques of navigation while blinded, and i.e.
with night vision goggles, would be flying along the Potamic 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 adopted DIEI standards, and then they were supposed to make a sharp right turn before they got in the actual. That is insane.
That is insane. Well, who caught, can't somebody said, hey, we're not going to get anywhere near a congested corridor, especially at night.
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.
Maybe if we've got guys that have done it for 10 years, we'll let them do it at night with night vision, but we'll do it over the Pacific. 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.
And the more you realize, you think of all those poor people that were killed for nothing right oh nothing just because of these stupid pentagon ideas they need to really shake that place up or and it's going to be very interesting because the pentagon always relies on conservative support but well maybe maybe some of these advisory boards will be totally conservatized you saw the Trump piggybacking off what you said Pete Hegseth is doing advisory boards at the just a question of time can they conduct the entire counter revolution in four years they're like the Thermadors 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. And then they went mad.
And they made statues to the supreme deep being and radio. That was their new god.
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. They did all of that.
And then all of a sudden, the Thermidor said, we don't have much time to save everything. So they went in and put the guillotiners in the guillotine.
And the Robespierre brothers lost their heads. And then they had about a year and they couldn't quite stage the counterrevolution.
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 why I like what Trump is doing. They cannot stop.
Don't look back like Satchel Paige said. Don't look back.
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. Listen to what George Patton said.
La audacity, more audacity, always audacity. And then they said, General Patton, but General Patton, the flanks, the flanks.
He said, blank the flanks. I got air power.
Don't worry about the criticism from within or without the party. Don't worry.
Just have your follow-up infantry. 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.
We're going to go to USAID and we'll do the paperwork. Follow them up.
I just had a thought, Victor, that Patton is to Trump as McClellan was to Bush, right? Bush or Biden? I don't know. I just not aggrandizing the size of your military and not doing anything with it.
Yeah, or if you took a civil war, Trump is this 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. And Biden is somewhere like Halleck or Pope or McClellan or Burnside, a mediocrity that came up to the ranch and Sherman came out of nowhere.
Yeah. I said, you know.
Said crazy things like, General Sherman, how will the war end? And they said, they said, Kump. They called him Kump.
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. Yeah.
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 the sea.
We'll just put them in jail and we'll hang them later. I want to say one thing in defense of Burnside, who, you know, I lived in Fredericksburg.
I lived on on top of Maurice Heights. Sharon and I were first married.
You're not going to tell me that he won the Battle of Fredericksburg. I'm not definitely not going to tell you that.
But, you know, there were four charges and he wanted he knew it was so horrific what he had done. This is this is warped.
He wanted to have a fifth charge that he was in front of that. It It would kill him.
He would die. And of course, how many other men of the Irish Brigade would die at that point? But he knew he had done wrong.
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 all of our forts were named after a lot of them are named after confederate mediocrities like bragg and hood well victor we we anyway we got on topic yeah so there's anything you have to say it's on topic um 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 first of all i want to thank everybody who takes the time and effort uh especially on apple to rate the show zero to five stars and victor's still you know crushing it 4.9 plus of seven and a half thousand people have voted in this way and some people uh leave comments i'm going to read one comment in a minute. 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. This one, we have a comment from, is a guy, I assume it's a guy, Dead Gorillas is the name.
And he says, he writes, VDH is goated, I guess greatest of all time. 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 that's an interesting take. 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.
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.
And he was a square head like me. He had a huge head, and I could almost fit in it at six.
So that's why I do it.

Cool. It's cool.

My Welsh grandfather had a same kind.

They all had those.

I would sit there and grow up with these farmers that were very rough dressed. And then on Sundays or at a party, they would put on their nice suspenders and their white

starch shirts and their fedora hats.

And they would change their wire rim scratched up glasses to plastic glasses, plastic frames. That was the height of sophistication.
Was it? FBI. 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.
Well, before we do, he's talking to my other grandfather, Reese. Now, wasn't the Swanson girl, the second one, married to the Johnson boy? Or did they? No, no, you have it wrong, Frank.
It was the third boy who was married to the second cousin of the Smith sister. And 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. While eating butter cookies and drinking coffee, I'mackers.
Crackers and a lot of black coffee and a bunch of old wrecked bobos. Or not wrecked, but, you know, 90 horsepower, 544 ladybug bobos.
Yeah. I remember all of them.
I have one more thing to read, and this is a comment left on Apple from Omaha Marty, who writes, I've listened to a few of Victor's podcasts, and I am hooked. Victor has so much knowledge, and really can explain complicated issues in such a simple way that anyone can understand what is being explained.
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, but 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.
I learn 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. We read them.
I read them. You know how I learned to talk about things in a very pedestrian fashion? How, Victor? 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.
And I knew a lot about Plutarch's lives in Moralia, et cetera, but I wanted to talk about the sources of Plutarch's life who wrote in about a hundred AD. So I was going through the lost sources of, you know, so I was talking about Callisthenes and Ephraim and I looked out at the audience at Fresno State, and they were all like either asleep or...

And one student said, Mr. Hansen, none of us were born in the United States, 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.
And these are called lives. And biography means to write a life.
So now we're going to start from the square. 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 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. And so over the years, it was impossible to keep my job unless I could communicate classics to a broad audience.
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. And then one guy, yeah, one guy said, you're not, you're writing like you're teaching at Fresno State.
I got really angry because I was very protective at Fresno State. But he said, you're writing to an audience that doesn't need to be told the same thing in three different ways.
Can I, were the Haman there because of the Vietnam War or was there a community that pre-did it? No, no, there was no one here. 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. And there were about 80,000 Hmongs that were just airlifted without any knowledge of where they were going.
And they were put into Southwest Fresno. 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.

I only say this because my father was, there's a state-centered community college district with Reedley College in Fresno City. So he opened, and it was his initiative, he thought that in response to this, they should have a vocational training center college where they teach people mechanics and automotive engineering, carpentry, wiring, plumbing.
So he opened this. 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. 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. 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. It was a

very wonderful program, but I got to know a lot of people. And then when I was a pretty good mechanic himself, but he was the administrator and he hired a lot of really great teachers.
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.

And 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. Same thing with my poor white students.
Most of the white kids were not wealthy. And when I started in 1984, I think the campus was 60% non-Hispanic or non-minority.
When I finished, it was about 90%. So it was a challenge because most of these families were, it was very, I had to make the argument to parents that their kids that were working, you know, 30 hours a week should study Latin or Greek.
And I would get very good questions from them. Okay, Mr.
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 700 hours a year for rudimentary knowledge of Greek. And he said, well, he could make seven or $8,000.
I said, yes, but this will stay with him the rest of his life. Yes.
Or any stuff like that. But they were very well educated, the students, when they left.
Brilliant. I had a lot of help.
Boy, I had some great colleagues, Bruce Thornton and others. They were really good professors.
Someday I'm going to ask you about the first day in the classroom, but not today. Not today.
My first day? Because we 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.
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.
I had been irrigating, and I had 30 people picking grapes, and I was irrigating in an orchard, and I had to run up to teach. And the secretary was a German Warbrite, and she was about 70 or 60, and she was, What are you doing? you got mud all over the department corporate so then i went to the bathroom and got a paper towel it was on my hands and knees cleaning and the chairman goes in and goes are you a janitor i said no i'm your new lat i'm your new latin teacher and oh you're this guy this's, do you have a PhD from Stanford?

I said, yes, I do. He said, could you bring into my office the certificate? 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, 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. And I had a 12-gauge pump shotgun in the back of the sea, 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. And I had a one-year-old son, and they went after us once.
So I always carried the 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, and the guy was looking to see if everybody had a park, and he saw this long barrel sticking up behind the... So he came up to me and said, you know, it's a felony to have a weapon on a CSU campus.
And he says, do you have ownership papers? And it was Cyrus Davis's shotgun. And he was born in 1864.
And it's been in my family ever since then. And he said, well, I'd like to cite you, but can I take a look at it? I thought he was going to find me.
So, he, oh my God, I love shooting. This is it.
He said, look, is there any, I said, there is no, 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. I was freaked out.
Day two. Wow.
Called my mom that day. She called me and she said, I almost needed you.
She was a judge, appellate court judge. And I said, I almost got arrested for having a gun.
She goes, well, you know the law. You know the law.
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.
So, that was my introduction to academia. 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.
Thanks for all the wisdom you shared. Thanks, folks, for listening.
Thanks, folks, who subscribe to Sybil Thoughts, the free weekly email newsletter I write with 14 recommended readings. And I do that every week for the Center for Sybil Society.
And if you want to see it, get it. Go to SybilThoughts.com, sign up.
I am confident you will enjoy it. Thanks to our sponsors, Victor.
Again, you've been great. And folks, we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
Bye-bye. Thank you, everybody, for listening.
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