The Echoes of History: From Ancient Wonders to 20th Century Events

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Speaker 3 Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. This is our Saturday edition where we do something a little bit different.

Speaker 3 We finished the seven great wonders of the ancient world and we're going to start on a new venture with the momentous events of the 20th century that brought historical change.

Speaker 3 So we'll be looking at that in the middle segment, but we'll do a little bit of news first and at the end. So stay with us and we'll be right back after these messages.

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Speaker 3 Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Speaker 3 Victor's the Martin and Nealey Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Speaker 3 You can find him at his website and I hope everybody comes and joins us. VictorHanson.com.
It's called The Blade of Perseus and we have a subscription fee of $650 a month or $65

Speaker 3 a year. So we hope you come join us.
We've got lots of new stuff and changes going on on the website probably for the next month or so.

Speaker 3 Come join us.

Speaker 3 Well, Victor, I was just curious, since it is the weekend and people go watch sports on the weekend, I was wondering if you watched the Super Bowl and your impressions on the Super Bowl, and then we'll get into an update on Hamas.

Speaker 2 Well, I don't want to offend our viewers because they're Eagles fans, but it was the worst

Speaker 2 Super Bowl. I mean, there was no drama from the first minute.

Speaker 2 The Chiefs didn't come out to play.

Speaker 2 The Eagles had a strategy to put maximum pressure on their quarterback, and that was it.

Speaker 2 They were ossified. They'd won two prior Super Bowls.
They hadn't made changes because they got complacent. The Eagles had made radical changes,

Speaker 2 so they reversed the verdict of two years earlier.

Speaker 2 I have to be very careful. The Super Bowl halftime show by Kendrick Lamar was utterly incoherent.
By that, what do I mean by that?

Speaker 2 I don't know what

Speaker 2 that I couldn't understand any of the first song's lyrics. They were incomprehensible.
They were just mumbled. I don't think anybody understood.
Everybody was right. It was like

Speaker 2 he's the great rapper, so you don't apply any standards to evaluating his performance. He's just him.

Speaker 2 Remember, Kendrick Malamar was the one that Barack Obama invited to the White House, and he did to Pimpa Butterfly, that was his name.

Speaker 2 And in it, and I wrote a column about this, he said, Got to kill Popo. He was talking about killing the police, and yet he was invited.

Speaker 2 That was when another rapper went with him and his ankle brace went off in the White House.

Speaker 2 So Obama thought he was really cool to appeal to young black men by worshiping Kendrick Lamar, even though he'd advocated killing the police. So then he gave this

Speaker 2 performance, and no one knew what the first song was about. The second one was

Speaker 2 the only redeeming feature was it didn't have a lot of repetitive choruses. It was just one long narrative.
And it was basically that my rival Drake, who half America doesn't know who he is,

Speaker 2 is a pedophile.

Speaker 2 And I'm going to hint that.

Speaker 2 And the rappers, you know, they have a feud. Well, the whole world doesn't want to know about their feud.
Who cares?

Speaker 2 So, yes, I'm an old white guy, and you're going to say Victor should have known that, and he had no business.

Speaker 2 But the point is, I'm an old white guy, and I'm not supposed to judge other genres of music, but

Speaker 2 I think I could get 10 people on the planet from all over the planet,

Speaker 2 and I could have a Beatles song, I could have a Mark Loffer song, I could have

Speaker 2 Creedon's Clearwater song, I could have even a Bob Dylan, and then I would play that, and they would say the latter is music.

Speaker 2 So it was not a good show. And

Speaker 2 I don't know what the

Speaker 2 they've recovered because they were headed toward NBA type

Speaker 2 hemorrhaging, but they got rid of Take the Knee and they got rid of the end racism.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it's one of these phenomenon where

Speaker 2 I think the view women said that Donald Trump hated it because they were all black people and the higher Afro, all of the chorus, you know, they tried to, I think, balance the fact they were not diverse.

Speaker 2 They were not diverse. There was no DEI.
It was all black. But they wore costumes that emulated the flag.
And then they had Samuel Jackson. And I think some people call him an Uncle Tom.

Speaker 2 I thought that was cruel, but he was an Uncle Sam.

Speaker 2 That was in the View, I think, or someone Gutfeld or something.

Speaker 3 No, yeah, that

Speaker 3 woman on The View that said that

Speaker 3 she had a whole bunch of followers on social media that apparently were very happy that it was all black. And then

Speaker 3 she said he was like an Uncle Sam, but he was dressed up as Uncle Sam.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so I don't know

Speaker 2 what the reaction was, but we have this

Speaker 2 you have to navigate this. It's so strange because

Speaker 2 African Americans are 12% of the population.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 so anywhere that that demographic is not represented in CEOs or in universities, then there has to be disproportion

Speaker 2 disparate impact. That's the theory the Supreme Court called it.
So then you have to make but there's exemptions.

Speaker 2 So 30 percent of the Postal Service is African American or 70 percent of the NBA or 68 percent of the NFL because they're merit-based and

Speaker 2 they put more emphases apparently than other groups and they excel in these and I think that's great.

Speaker 2 But when you say that Asians put Asians are not represented in the NFL, but they put their emphases, say, in engineering more so than typical white kids or African Americans.

Speaker 2 and therefore we have to have quotas to keep them from being overrepresented in the universities. And you could make the argument in our society that a ticket into the NFL

Speaker 2 is more lucrative and more influential for a person's life if they manage their money.

Speaker 2 All you got to do is last from 21 to 31.

Speaker 2 There's generous pensions. There's advertising.
It's more advantageous than going to Stanford. So I don't understand this whole thing.
I never have.

Speaker 2 I think we should just get rid of all of this fixations on race and just open the arena up and let people gravitate to the areas that they want to.

Speaker 2 And if they're overrepresented, then if somebody's upset about it, then say, you know what, we're going to have a concerted effort.

Speaker 2 If you're an African-American educator and you say there's not enough African Americans at Harvard or Yale under the new non-DI, then you say, we're going to open in Chicago, Los Angeles, Baltimore academies, and we're going to require Latin and calculus at an early age.

Speaker 2 We're going to have uniform. We're going to emulate what Asians do.
And we're going to, in a five-year plan, we're going to be as meritocratic. That's what Tom Soul said.

Speaker 2 And if you think Asians think that they're underrepresented in the NBA, then they should have basketball camps. Same thing with whites, but we don't need to have it engineered, is what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell,

Speaker 3 just in the interest of

Speaker 3 athletic excellence

Speaker 3 with the Super Bowl, it was fun to watch, and I don't have any preference for Chiefs or Eagles either. I just like to watch

Speaker 3 athletic excellence. And boy, that Eagles quarterback just floated so many passes into his receivers' hands.
That was just wonderful.

Speaker 2 His name is it. Yeah.
Jaylene Hurts. Jaleen Hurts.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 That was just wonderful to watch.

Speaker 2 He is an excellent athlete. He captured the imagination of everybody because he, unlike many quarterbacks,

Speaker 2 he was humble. When people in the past had tried to accentuate the fact that he was an African-American quarterback, he said he was a quarterback.
And people in Philadelphia are a pretty tough crowd.

Speaker 2 They like him. And it's because he was magnanimous in victory.
He didn't gloat. He didn't make fun of the opposition.
So he was a perfect gentleman and a good citizen.

Speaker 2 And he was a wonderful quarterback.

Speaker 3 All right, Victor. So let's turn now to the news and Hamas.

Speaker 3 So since we were talking yesterday, it appears that Hamas is trying to reneg on their hostages that they will give up on the weekend. Israel is mobilizing forces.

Speaker 3 They've killed two Hamas activists or whatever in the south of Israel who were bringing in drones. So they're active.

Speaker 3 And so the left is, of course, saying that they're being disingenuous because of these things. Rubio has said, well, it's a ceasefire.
It's not a stupid ceasefire. I do like that.

Speaker 3 And Donald Trump has said, well, if they're not going to give up all the hostages, then all hell should break loose on Saturday when they're supposed to give them up. Well,

Speaker 2 they understood. Everybody understands what they're doing.
They're prolonging it so they can reestablish Hamas control, not rebuild Gaza. They don't care about Gaza.

Speaker 2 All they do is steal the food and supplies that come in there, and then they say that Gazans are not getting enough calories.

Speaker 2 But to get the calories needed to survive one more day, you have to deal with Hamas.

Speaker 2 So the remnants of Hamas, most of them are dead, but they're recruiting again and they are using these hostage exchanges as performance art occasions where they get their camouflage uniform and they get their mask on.

Speaker 2 I mean, anybody who wears a mask does it for a reason.

Speaker 2 And they're either engaging in criminal activity or they're a coward. And so they don't want anybody to know who they are because the Israelis have an ability to go get them.

Speaker 2 So then they're going to parade out these hostages and they're going to show the crowds, get them all riled up, and the crowds are going to say, These are the people who destroyed my building.

Speaker 2 And they're going to try to spit on them, go out, and they're going to parade them, and then the Hamas people will protect them. And then they're going to get their choice terrorists back.

Speaker 2 And it's all performance arts, ceremony, carnival, menagerie.

Speaker 2 And the Israelis are looking at this and said, well, we had to get the hostages back, but there must be a reason why they're not doing this. They've obviously

Speaker 2 killed a lot of them, or a lot of them have died. Some of the hostages said they wanted them to fake their deaths or to be, you know, say you were killed by Israeli bombs.

Speaker 2 And I think what they're doing is they're pushing, pushing, pushing. And Hezbollah is pushing.
They don't understand what just happened to them.

Speaker 2 They're kind of like Democrats that don't understand the election.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 they are about this far away from being unloaded upon because there's a new president. And

Speaker 2 unlike Biden, he's not going to protect them. He's not going to go tell Israel, you have to be sober and judicious.
You have to moderate. You can't have 2,000-pound bombs.

Speaker 2 He's going to say, you've got to do what you do.

Speaker 2 And you've got four problems. You've got Hamas, the Houthis, Hezbollah, and Iran.
Now,

Speaker 2 if the Houthis want, and they're Braggadachio, they're saying, we're looking at this, if they want to send another missile, Israel's going to just say, you know what, we took out your port and we're going to take out your grid.

Speaker 2 If Hezbollah wants to attack, they said we can do better than the exploding phones and walkie-talkies. And Iran, there's reports circulating this week that Iran is targeted

Speaker 2 by Netanyahu. So what did Iran do after losing its air defenses and being humiliated, not being able to penetrate Israel's defenses with 500 projectiles

Speaker 2 and then having Hezbollah blown up and then all of their key people killed? They're starting to smuggle weapons and cash through the Lebanese airport again.

Speaker 2 And so Trump is, you just said, Saturday at noon, all bets are off. And you know what they're going to do? They're going to kind of sort of maybe

Speaker 2 let go one or two hostages and say, see?

Speaker 2 And then

Speaker 2 they want the Western world to go, oh, okay, we're back to the hostage release. I know we were supposed to release seven or eight, but they did give us one.

Speaker 2 And then just when the next one is, they're going to start and say, nope, you broke broke the deal. We'd better hold off again.

Speaker 2 It's a caricature of a Middle East business deal, and

Speaker 2 you can't abide by that. You just have to say, look, this is the deal.
If you don't do it, and I don't know how many Americans are still alive that are hostages, but Trump probably knows.

Speaker 2 And the only problem he's having, and you don't want to go in there to that hellhole with special forces to try to get American hostages back or to kill the Hamas people because they're pretty much it's a moonscape, right?

Speaker 2 It's a fallujah. And so I don't know what we can do.
We can do a lot to the Houthis and we can do a lot to Hezbollah and we can do a lot to Iran with airstrikes, but I don't know about this mess.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and there's been a lot on the, you know, on social media and in the news about the condition with which these hostages are being returned. They just look skinny and

Speaker 2 250 calories a day, and

Speaker 2 they had no sunlight, no vitamin D, they had no air, they were tortured, they were

Speaker 2 interrogated and beaten. It was horrible what they did to them.
And the world, Europeans don't care, and the Middle East doesn't care. And when they came out,

Speaker 2 if they had just, it was kind of like the game of phones walk, you know.

Speaker 2 They were being humiliated. People were throwing,

Speaker 2 they would have been killed. So

Speaker 2 I don't know.

Speaker 2 I don't think the people of Gaza

Speaker 2 know what the reaction is. Because just during this conference in Germany about AI, another Afghan refugee ran his car in again and injured 22 Germans.

Speaker 2 Is he on the payroll of the ADF, the alternative for Deutschland? Because he's really helping them.

Speaker 2 And I don't think people understand how they come across. The Gaza people think that they have all the support from International Criminal Court.
They have all the support from the Euro Council.

Speaker 2 They have all UN. They do.

Speaker 2 The media, yes, but they don't. People in the Western public have had it with them.
They've had it with a protest on campus, which have disappeared.

Speaker 2 And I just don't think that a Gazan person who says he wants to study at Stanford or Caltech or Virginia is going to get a student visa. I just don't think that's going to happen.

Speaker 2 I think there's going to be a travel ban. And I think Europe is going to make it very, very hard.
And I think you're going to see some expulsions throughout Europe. Sweden is paying people to go back.

Speaker 2 They're flying them back.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it's.

Speaker 3 Anybody who's civilized that sees the condition of those prisoners cannot possibly be able to do it.

Speaker 2 Well, they have this contempt for Western society. They say Western society is self-critical and it's free and it has free markets and it has a higher standing of living.
So we want to go there.

Speaker 2 But we do not want to integrate, intermarry, assimilate in the most part. Some do.
But for the most part, we do not want to do that.

Speaker 2 We want to form enclaves of Islamic thought and culture that's not assimilated, but we want to do it under the aegis of the West.

Speaker 2 So we have the trickle-down economic bounty, we have the freedom of thought, we have the legal, and we appeal to the sick side of the West that hates itself. And then we feed them with

Speaker 2 victimology.

Speaker 2 And that's how they operate. And it's all based on asymmetry.

Speaker 2 They all know that if anybody were to do what Islamic immigrants to the West, or illegal aliens, or whatever their statuses are, if they were to do that in Egypt or Syria or Jordan, or they would be killed.

Speaker 2 Or, I mean, try going to,

Speaker 2 I don't know, Iran or try going to Saudi Arabia and setting up a Mormon church and say, you know what,

Speaker 2 there's a beautiful mosque in Dearborn, Michigan, and we're going to do the same thing in downtown Istanbul or Cairo and see what happens to you.

Speaker 2 Or, you know what, we make fun of Christians all the time here, and you guys guys have a perfect right to go make fun of the prophet. Try it and see what happens to you.

Speaker 2 So that everybody's tired of the asymmetry.

Speaker 2 And that's what Trump is trying to do, is trying to

Speaker 2 say that we're a singular nation, and we're not going to play by

Speaker 2 two sets of rules.

Speaker 3 Yes. And we're going to play with the same thing.

Speaker 2 Whether it's trade or whether it's trade or whether it's military

Speaker 2 or whether it's social or cultural immigration. We're just going to play by one set of rules.
Whatever you do to us, we're going to do to you.

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Speaker 3 So, Victor, as I said, J.D. Vance went to Europe for his first trip, and he was at an AI conference.
And as you said, and in my notes, as I wrote, U.S. experts are

Speaker 2 U.S.

Speaker 3 expects to be treated fairly in the future. So they're no longer going to bankroll defense or have unequal tariff policy with the European Union.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I wish the Wall Street Journal would listen to that because almost every day they write an op-ed about the deleterious, suicidal, destructive terror policies of Donald Trump or how he's picking on countries.

Speaker 2 In other words, we have gone so far one way that the remedy is considered worse than the malady, the disease. But

Speaker 2 you saw the same idea in Canada where their former finance minister is now taking over for Trudeau

Speaker 2 and the Liberal Party. And she said, we're going to go full out against the United States.
We're going to start tariffing

Speaker 2 all of their dairy industry in Wisconsin, meaning it's a swing state.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Okay,

Speaker 2 but you should look at the comparative size of the U.S. economy.
I think it's 12 times larger than Canada. And everything that you export to us, from oil to cars, we can assemble here.

Speaker 2 And the reason that I'm saying that is not because I love Canadians, but the problem with Canada is they operated on the same principle that Mexico did, that the United States, when they have a left-wing government or even a rhino government, feels guilty, it feels

Speaker 2 arrogant. We're so powerful, we're so magnanimous, we're so wonderful that yes, you can have a symmetrical terror.
Oh, you have a $50 billion.

Speaker 2 Oh, you have an open border, and you're dumping illegal aliens on our north, and you're dumping them on our south, and you're sending drugs from the north, and you're sending drugs from the south.

Speaker 2 And Mexico's got $170 billion, and that's okay, because we're the USA. No,

Speaker 2 we are a nation in decline that's trying not to decline. We have $36 to $37 trillion in debt.
So what Trump is saying is, you can call it a tariff, but I just call it tit-for-tat.

Speaker 2 And then everybody said, but you're strong and wealthy. No, no, no, no.
China is on the rise. Canada is taking us to the cleaners.

Speaker 2 Mexico is not only doing that, but with the remittances and the cartels, they're making a fortune.

Speaker 2 So what he's saying is go into the inner city in Chicago, walk to downtown San Francisco, go to Venice Beach in Los Angeles, come out here to Southwestern.

Speaker 2 I can take you places. Laura Logan came out here from Fox Nation once, and I showed her, and she said she thought that the poverty was worse than Cairo and the gangs.
So,

Speaker 2 this is like Dickinsey in England, about 1850, when the British Empire was all over the world

Speaker 2 civilizing the colonies, supposedly in Africa and Asia,

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 why the interior of London was rotting with crime, stuff that we saw in

Speaker 2 David Copperfield, stuff like that, great expectations.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 we don't want that to happen. So that's what J.D.
Vance is trying to tell everybody.

Speaker 2 And that's what Pete Hexeth is trying to tell everybody. That,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 we're going to look at our own borders, and we've supplied Ukraine with, if you look at all the type of aid, it's probably $200 billion.

Speaker 2 And,

Speaker 2 you know, we're not, we want to help you have peace,

Speaker 2 but

Speaker 2 it was not the policy of Barack Obama, it was not the policy of Donald Trump his first term, it was not the policy of Joe Biden to give you enough weapons so that you could stage a counteroffensive and reclaim militarily the Donbass and the Crimea, which have been lost

Speaker 2 from you for 11 years under the Obama administration. Remember that, it was the Obama administration during that hot mic scene in Seoul, South Korea in 2012.

Speaker 2 Tell Vladimir that I'll be flexible if he gives me space. Well,

Speaker 2 he gave you space, and you were flexible, and he went into Donbass.

Speaker 2 So I guess what I'm trying to get at is it's a whole new world now. Everything is up

Speaker 2 for discussion. There's no constants.

Speaker 2 There's no orthodoxy that's written in stone. Everything's up for because it's not working.

Speaker 2 Anytime a society was preeminent and it's $37 billion in debt and it's got two theater wars and it was humiliated in Afghanistan and its education system is a joke and you have this ComoServe DI system, it's not working.

Speaker 2 And so you've got to systematically go through the whole thing. And that's what we're trying to do.
And people who have helped it not work are furious. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then we'll come back to look at one of the first great moments in 20th century history.

Speaker 3 And that's the Russo-Japanese war and the changes that it brought in the United States, brought to the world.

Speaker 3 And then after that, when we come back for our third segment, we'll turn back to the Ukraine since you've brought it up. So stay with us, and we'll be right back.

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Speaker 3 Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show. So the first and earliest in 1904 and 2005 is the fight between the Russians and the Japanese, and that had grave impact on world history.

Speaker 3 And so I'm excited about that.

Speaker 2 Well, yeah, we're going to look at 20 or so every three or four years throughout the 20th century, the decisions or turning points that affect us today.

Speaker 2 And we're going to talk next week, I think we'll probably talk about the Panama Canal night

Speaker 2 that was inaugurated about the same time, and and it's in the news. The income tax 1913,

Speaker 2 a nice Woodrow Wilson gift.

Speaker 2 So we're going to talk about that. But I want to start with the biggest shock of the century as it opened up was

Speaker 2 the February, March

Speaker 2 1904 to late autumn, 1905. It was about a year and a half war.
And it was a very serious war. There was about 170,000 dead and wounded, and almost matched on each side.

Speaker 2 And it it originated over the idea that Japan was now starting to become Europeanized, westernized. Under the Meiji Restoration

Speaker 2 and Revolution, it opened its gates to Western influences. And it

Speaker 2 by, say, 1870 to 1900, it had about a quarter of a million Japanese students in university studying engineering,

Speaker 2 the mechanics, physics in Germany, France, but especially Great Britain. And that came was under the radar.
And then they hired consultants from France and Britain to help them design.

Speaker 2 They had been doing this during the Tokagawa shogun ship where they started to make Western sail ships. But this really took off.

Speaker 2 And so when they got by

Speaker 2 1904, they were expansionist.

Speaker 2 They had steam-powered ships, and they thought that they deserved, like the Europeans who had taught them how to make sophisticated Western weapons, they wanted to emulate the Western colonial experience.

Speaker 2 So they said,

Speaker 2 well, just as Europe said Asia and Africa were not up to their technological standards or scientific excellence, so Korea is not, Manchuria is not, so we're going to do what they do.

Speaker 2 That was the logic. So they

Speaker 2 started to go into Korea and Manchuria, and they immediately butted up with

Speaker 2 the Tsars, Alexander and later Nicholas II. And they said, these are our domains, and we have a protectorate in China.
You're not going to Manchuria, and you're not going into Korea.

Speaker 2 We have a border with Korea, too. Well, they don't have a, they were an island, but this is our sphere of influence.
And by the way, you're Asians.

Speaker 2 And we were Westerners, and we were the biggest Western nation. So there was a lot of arrogance.
So

Speaker 2 Japan then declared war because of these skirmishes in Korea and Manchuria.

Speaker 2 And the first thing they did, the great international port at the time, Port Arthur, is named after, I think it was a British engineer who fortified it. They bottled in the Russian Pacific Fleet.

Speaker 2 They had about five battle uh we called them dreadnoughts in those days and cruisers, but the whole Pacific fleet.

Speaker 2 Russia always had three fleets, the Baltic fleet from its northern port summer ports, and then the Black Sea Fleet and then the Pacific Fleet.

Speaker 2 And they didn't really interact because Russia was so large. But the Pacific fleet was about the size of the Japanese fleet, and it was bottled up by the Japanese who mined the harbor of Port Hor.

Speaker 2 And they tried to break out. At the same time, they simultaneously attacked from all sides.
And everybody thought it would be a joke that

Speaker 2 Russian artillery, Russian ships would be superior. They had had ships built by Americans, by French.

Speaker 2 And while they were as good, or they were about comparable, Japan had also sent its people to copy the British Admiralty's code of conduct, protocol, strategies. Same thing with the French fleet.

Speaker 2 Less so with the Germans. The two first cousins, Wilhelm and Nicholas II, were inveterate racists.
They said these are inferior European people. And Germany was actually backing Russia.

Speaker 2 And what happened? They destroyed most of the Pacific fleet. Everybody was shocked.
How can these Japanese people do this to a Western power? Ah, it was a fluke. They used mines.

Speaker 2 They blocked the harbor with

Speaker 2 capsized ships. It was just a fluke.
fluke, but we will beat them in Korea. And so they had these mass wave attacks like they did in World War II.

Speaker 2 This is a precursor, but they had superior artillery, they had machine gun,

Speaker 2 and it was like a precursor of World War I. And the Japanese began to win at great cost.
Nevertheless, the Russians had never seen anybody fight like that. So then the idea was,

Speaker 2 how are we going to obtain naval superiority and blockade Japan? Because it is a sea power. And if we get our fleet,

Speaker 2 we can stop them from supplying any troops to Manchuria or China because they're an island.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 what fleet is there? It's the Baltic fleet. So

Speaker 2 they announced that this huge new, that was their pride and joy. It was built by the Germans and French and American expertise, the Russians.
And they had eight modern battleships, this huge fleet.

Speaker 2 So they announced we're going to go defeat the Japanese.

Speaker 2 But they were way up in the Baltic, so they had to go all the way around

Speaker 2 out the Baltic, down the western European coast.

Speaker 2 The smaller little torpedo ships and cruisers had just gone through the Suez Canal, but the big ships had to go all the way around the Cape of Good Hope. Meanwhile, the whole world was watching this.

Speaker 2 And the whole world's attitude was, well, Japan, you're going to come up as this huge Western freight. And then they would stop at Madagascar, and then they came in at Vladistoff.

Speaker 2 But to get up back to their home port, they went through the Sea of Japan, and they went through at night.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 they had hospital ships that were lit, and the Japanese fleet

Speaker 2 spotted them. And by this time, the Japanese had not only besieged Port Arthur, but taken them and defeated them on a land battle.
And so in early night, they finally arrived eight months later.

Speaker 2 It took them eight months.

Speaker 2 And before they knew what happened, the Japanese crossed the T. In other words, when

Speaker 2 a fleet is in line and you cross it like this, your ships broadside can all go on one side. And they can't use all of their, because they're in a straight line.

Speaker 2 They're coming like this, and you just come by like this, and you blast them from both sides. And it's a one-dimensional target.

Speaker 2 And in any case,

Speaker 2 they blew the Russian fleet out of the water. They sank almost every

Speaker 2 over half the ships. They blew up all the battle, these new battleships, the pride of the Tsar's fleet.

Speaker 2 And then Teddy Roosevelt

Speaker 2 wanted to get involved. He was a progressive, and they thought he'd be fair to the Japanese.
And he negotiated a peace deal. He won the Nobel Prize.
So they ended it in 1905.

Speaker 2 But basically, Russia had no fleet except this Black Seed fleet, and they'd lost about 70,000 dead, and Japan had defeat them. So under,

Speaker 2 this is a good reminder for Donald Trump, who's going to play Teddy Roosevelt with Ukraine and Russia, they thought that Roosevelt would acknowledge that Japan won, but he kind of didn't.

Speaker 2 He just said,

Speaker 2 no reparations, and no, you can't have the Sakhalin Islands that are off your coast that had been Russian.

Speaker 2 And they said, well, what do we get out of of it? Well, you kind of won, and we'll just separate the forces, and you should be happy. You

Speaker 2 blew apart the Russian, two Russian fleets, and you defeated the Russians. At least you did very well on ground.
Do we get all of Korea? No.

Speaker 2 You get the areas where you're in control of the battlefield. They would eventually get Korea.
Do you get all of Manchuria? Well, that's your business.

Speaker 2 So when they got home and they signed the deal, people started rioting, the Japanese.

Speaker 2 And they had their only, really only viable democracy. But they had been indoctrinating people for 30 years about

Speaker 2 Bushido and we're now not shoguns, we're not little warlords, we're the Japanese Yamato people, and they didn't realize they had created this fanatic youth group.

Speaker 2 And so the youth said, no, no, we won that war. You're a racist.

Speaker 2 And they had riots and they overthrew the government. And so

Speaker 2 then all of Europe went into shock. And they said, my gosh, when you look at the Japanese ships, they copied them better than the originals.

Speaker 2 And when you look out their uniforms and their discipline, they were so much more disciplined than the Russians.

Speaker 2 They made improvements in optics. They had better sighting on their battleships.
They had better strategies. But that's impossible because they're yellow people.

Speaker 2 And, you know, and I'm just quoting what the Kaiser and the Tsar were writing to each other. So what was the importance of all this? The importance was that they were taken seriously.

Speaker 2 So when World War I came apart, came in,

Speaker 2 then there was an effort of the Allies who had trained the Japanese. They said to them,

Speaker 2 you don't like the Germans.

Speaker 2 And they were always anti-Japanese, but we helped you build your fleet and educate. Would you please join the Allies? And they did.
But they didn't like the Russians.

Speaker 2 But the Russians were knocked out in 1917. So what did the Japanese fleet? It patrolled the Mediterranean for the Allies.

Speaker 2 So when the Allies won in 1918 at Versailles, they thought they were going to get a seat at the table. They thought, well, we're the biggest Asian power.
We blew apart the Russians.

Speaker 2 That was over a decade ago.

Speaker 2 Our fleet now is the fourth or fifth largest.

Speaker 2 And they said, no, no, no, no, no. There's Orlando, Italy, and there's Clemenceau, and there's David Lloyd George, and we'll let this renegade Woodrow Wilson come, the big four.

Speaker 2 And they're going to deal with

Speaker 2 whoever the government is in Germany, Hindenburg, Glutendorf were,

Speaker 2 you know, out, and

Speaker 2 Kaiser was going to Holland, so it was a provisional government, and the Communists were not there. The Communists had taken over, so there was no more tsardom.

Speaker 2 But they didn't get a seat in the table, so they were angry. So then in the 1920s, the effect of this was the Bushidu militant Japanese kept saying, these Western imperialists are racist.

Speaker 2 They take colonies. They don't let us do it.
They say we're cruel to Koreans. We're no more cruel to the Koreans than they are in Africa and Vietnam and everything.

Speaker 2 And we're going to have Asians for Asians.

Speaker 2 And that started the

Speaker 2 It was the foundation for the creation of the Great Japanese Pacific Fleet. They went on a crazy building program in the late 20s and 30s.

Speaker 2 And they said, we are going to have the preeminent fleet in the Pacific, and we're going to colonize it, and we're going to create a greater co-prosper

Speaker 2 East,

Speaker 2 we're going to have a greater co-prosperity Asian trading bloc. That was established in 1940.
So we're going to have Manchuria. We're going to have Korea.

Speaker 2 We're going to have the Philippines eventually, and we'll get Singapore. And then

Speaker 2 that was what their plan in World War II was. It grew out of their victories in 1904 and 2005 and the anger which they had that they were not accepted as an co-equal with the Allied powers,

Speaker 2 both

Speaker 2 getting the spoils of war in 1905, they didn't get them. And then they were not treated as an adult power in World War I, so they didn't get any of the spoils of the Allied victory.

Speaker 2 They didn't get any of the old German property, the Bismarck Islands or any of that. And so

Speaker 2 they said, we are preeminent. And it created a great variation.
And they just doubled down. They said, you know what?

Speaker 2 If we had eight battleships and the Russians had eight, we're going to have 20.

Speaker 2 If the Americans have three carriers, we're going to have eight. And we're going to...
And so that's what they did. They just completely rearmed all through the 1930s.

Speaker 2 And people still didn't take that lesson. So when Pearl Harbor happened, it was the same reaction as Port Arthur and the Battle of Tsushima.
Everybody in America said, how did they do this?

Speaker 2 They're Japanese. They sank eight battleships.
They have nine carriers and we only have three in the Pacific? What's going on? The Zero is better than the Wildcat? How did this happen? Well,

Speaker 3 I have a question. One's just a small thing.
You said that the Japanese were patrolling the Mediterranean. Did you mean the Pacific in World War I?

Speaker 2 No, there wasn't Pacific. And then they were in the Mediterranean patrolling? There was no real Pacific theater.
I mean, there were some skirmishes in

Speaker 2 Africa, but they asked the Japanese to relieve them of,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 patrolling for U-boats and things like that. Italy, remember, was an

Speaker 2 allied power in World War I, and France had a Mediterranean coast. Italy had a Mediterranean coast.
Greece

Speaker 2 was

Speaker 2 on the Allied side. So the idea was that they would help bulk up so that the Germans could not make inroads into them.
There wasn't much to do, but they exaggerated their contribution.

Speaker 2 But they wanted to be given deference and honor at Versailles. And they felt that they had been screwed over, if I could use that term, since 1905.
And the people did. And so everybody.

Speaker 2 When I was writing the World War II book, the common view until about 30 years ago was that the Japanese people were innately democratic and that these warlords occasionally

Speaker 2 hijacked their government. These radicals, they didn't want to settle World War II, you know, and the empire.
That was not true.

Speaker 2 The militarism and the zeal to fight and go to war was from the working classes and the students. They had been indoctrinated in the school that they were a superior race.

Speaker 2 It was very similar to Nazi ideology. And they felt that they were superior to all these other Asian peoples and that the colonial model was okay for somebody, but not for them.

Speaker 2 That was very important in World War II, the lessons, because

Speaker 2 there had been a big fight where they said

Speaker 2 they were wise enough not to attack Britain. and the United States at first.
They didn't do that until 1941.

Speaker 2 But when they looked at what Germany had done, and they were very suspicious of Germany in World War II,

Speaker 2 because they'd been against them in World War I, and they felt in 1904 and 2005, Germany had helped Russia, at least in insidious ways.

Speaker 2 We know now from the correspondence of the Kaiser and the Tsar that

Speaker 2 they wrote things like, Nikki, these people are subhuman, and it was really racist.

Speaker 2 So the point was when they got into 1939 and these colonial powers started to disappear, they were wiped off the map.

Speaker 2 The Netherlands was wiped off the map, France was wiped off the map as a state. And then what happened to their colonies?

Speaker 2 And some of them were the richest colonies in the world, especially Vietnam and the Mekong Delta, Rice Belt, or the Dutch East Indies.

Speaker 2 So there was a big argument. If they had just taken them,

Speaker 2 I don't think there would have been a war. They could have got everything they wanted.

Speaker 2 But they looked over at Europe and they said, ah, Germany's right outside the first subway station in Moscow on December 5th. They're going to take it any day.

Speaker 2 We're missing out. Wow, even Italy's doing well.
They're just about ready to take all of North Africa from the Vichy's.

Speaker 2 They looked at all Europe and they said every single European capital is under Axis control or pro-Axis neutrals, whether Sweden or Portugal. So we missed out on this.

Speaker 2 So we better go attack Pearl Harbor and we'll attack Singapore.

Speaker 2 And that way we can get Singapore and we got the Philippines. Yeah, they got there what they wanted, but they ensured their defeat in doing so.

Speaker 3 Well, the other question I had was you said that Russia was a Western power, and that is up to sort of speculation, at least to some extent.

Speaker 3 They were like the Japanese in the sense that 100 years earlier under Peter the Great, they'd made the decision to become like the Western powers that they knew because they wanted their military to be as well as good.

Speaker 3 And the Japanese did the same thing under the Meiji restoration. And so it's kind of interesting.

Speaker 3 I think this is more comment than anything, that the Japanese seem to have been a lot more successful at westernizing than the Russians were. And I was wondering your thoughts on that.

Speaker 2 They were. And

Speaker 2 that became a very racist trope because the Europeans who looked down on Russians felt that they could be westernized because they were white.

Speaker 2 And that was the idea. And all of the Western capitals

Speaker 2 saw that Russia could become a very valuable partner, especially to France, to box in Germany, because it was white. And it would industrial.

Speaker 2 And there was a ⁇ to be fair, I mean, Russia had brilliant people, it always had.

Speaker 2 but Japan was considered inferior racially. So they were upstarts.
And

Speaker 2 they would copy

Speaker 2 American and British and French designs, nautical engineering, but they wouldn't innovate the way

Speaker 2 the Russians sometimes did. You know, in World War II, where you look at Katushka rockets or the T-34 tank or some of the

Speaker 2 Yak and MiG fighters, they were wonderful. But it turned out that was wrong, that the Japanese were not just emulators.
They had started to emulate Western education.

Speaker 2 And they were creating scientific centers of learning and engineering that were as good, if not better, than Europe.

Speaker 2 So when you look at these battleships in 1904, 1905 that they created, they were better than the Russian Westernized.

Speaker 2 And by the 1930s, if you look at the quality of American carriers versus Japanese carriers, they're about the same. And you can make the argument that

Speaker 2 Japanese destroyers or Japanese torpedoes were superior to America.

Speaker 2 So they were very brilliant people.

Speaker 2 And it wasn't after their stage of just copying, they

Speaker 2 became what they are today.

Speaker 2 They're very innovative and they're very creative people.

Speaker 2 And they very much resented to be looked down upon. Remember the historian Thucydides,

Speaker 2 when

Speaker 2 there's an accusation that the Athenians are,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 they're too grasping.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 Pleon says that we keep our empire and we grasp, and we took it because we took it out of fear,

Speaker 2 Phobos, and honor, Timei,

Speaker 2 and self-interest, oh, fellows.

Speaker 2 That's kind of been an iconic sense that a country doesn't just go to war to get oil or minerals or anything, but they do it because they're afraid of other countries, and Japan was afraid, and they do it for the honor of the Japanese people, and they do it for their self-interest.

Speaker 3 Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit more about the Ukraine. So stay with us, and we'll be right back.

Speaker 5 This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game?

Speaker 5 Well, with a name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it at Progressive.com.

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Speaker 3 Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. You can find Victor on his social media X.
He is at VD D Hansen and on Facebook it's Hansen's Morning Cup. So come join him there.

Speaker 3 So Victor, the Ukraine, Donald Trump seems to be making a lot of inroads very quickly as is want of the rest of what he's doing.

Speaker 3 And he seems to be setting up meetings and conference for ending the war

Speaker 3 and to talk both with Putin and Zelensky about that. And another thing on this whole topic, the U.S.

Speaker 3 has

Speaker 3 demanded or suggested that they should have some rare earth mineral

Speaker 3 deals with the Ukraine just as compensation for their support.

Speaker 3 And also they've said, as probably most of our audience has heard, that the Ukraine will probably lose some of its territory in this deal, and they will not be part of NATO in this deal.

Speaker 2 Well, I would tell everybody not to fall for the liberal left-wing narrative, the stuff that's coming out of the, nor the neoconservative or the stuff that's coming out of the mouth of Bill Crystal or John Bolton.

Speaker 2 And that narrative goes like this. Donald Trump has a soft spot for Russia.
Remember

Speaker 2 CNN or MNMSC,

Speaker 2 Anderson Cooper?

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 therefore, he's giving away all of his negotiation points. He's already rolled off the table.
He and his idiots like Pete Hexef and Rubio,

Speaker 2 they've ruled out NATO membership, and they've ruled out that Ukraine might get back the Donbass and crime. They just ceded them, so there's nothing left.

Speaker 2 Do you really believe that when you're dealing with a psychopath like Putin and you say to Putin,

Speaker 2 well, we're going to be really tough, and here's something, we're going to put them in NATO. And Putin says, you're not going to do that.

Speaker 2 He knows there's no public support. If they were in NATO right now and they said, we were invaded in February 24th

Speaker 2 by Vladimir Putin, so

Speaker 2 we want Article III, everybody from NATO. Do you think some guy having Cappuccino in the Netherlands is going to go get his rifle and go there? No.

Speaker 2 Do you think the United States President Biden is going to say, well, as a NATO member, you're under the NATO nuclear shield? Vladimir, if you don't get out right now, we'll nuke you.

Speaker 2 No, that was never going to happen. That was a dream of the Obama.

Speaker 2 Bob Kagan, his wife, Victoria Newland, they all signaled them. And George H.W.
Bush early on had said, they're not going to be a NATO. You don't put them right at the border of Russia.

Speaker 2 It would be as if

Speaker 2 in 1962, right after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet Union said, we're going to make Castro part of the Warsaw Pact, Cuba,

Speaker 2 right in your area of influence.

Speaker 2 It wasn't going to work. So this next thing they're criticizing Trump is that he has hinted, and Hex has said, we're not going to go back to the pre-2014 borders.

Speaker 2 Remember, everybody, that under the Obama administration, Putin took the Donbass and Crimea, and he's held them for 11 years. But here's the problem.

Speaker 2 You think when you don't admit that, you're weak, you're going to go deal with Putin. Said, Putin, we're going to get back to Donbass.

Speaker 2 And he's going to say, well, you had your big offensive in 2023.

Speaker 2 It was all over your newspapers, and you went in, and you lost. You didn't get him back.

Speaker 2 And there is now about a million point seven dead, wounded, and we don't want it, and you don't want it, but don't threaten me with an empty threat.

Speaker 2 Was it the position of the Barack Obama administration to militarily retake the Donbass and Crimea? No.

Speaker 2 Was it the position of the Donald Trump administration from 2017 to 2021 to retake the Donbass and Crimea military? No. Was it the position of Joe Biden prior to 2022, February? No.

Speaker 2 So we don't believe you ever had the desire or will. And more importantly, study the issue.

Speaker 2 The issue was that Crimea has been ours since 1787.

Speaker 2 And when we fell and we were in disarray, it declared from 1992 to 1991 to 93, 92 to 94, it was the independent country of Crimea.

Speaker 2 So we wanted to steal it, and Ukraine wanted to steal it. And the majority were probably Russian speakers, but you stole it first.
So you destroyed their autonomy, and then you put it in.

Speaker 2 And then Donbass,

Speaker 2 we had all these plebiscites. Sometimes they voted to go and join you.
Sometimes they voted to be independent. Sometimes they wanted the federation.
And

Speaker 2 in 2014, you had a coup, you being the West. You supported

Speaker 2 the removal of

Speaker 2 Yukovich. He got rid of Yukanovich.
You got rid of him. And then they put in Kochenko and a pro-Western government.
Okay, that's great.

Speaker 2 And so Putin is looking at the breadbasket of Russia for the last 300 years, and he says, oh, it's westernizing. They threw out an elected government, and I know that they were behind it.

Speaker 2 They may or may not have been. So there's all this history that makes it very complex.
It's very similar to the Balkans. So what does this all mean?

Speaker 2 It means that Donald Trump is going to sit down with Putin, and they're going to go tell Zelensky, we're going to stop this.

Speaker 2 Because you have lost probably yourself 700,000 dead and wounded, and they've lost probably close to a million. This is worse than Stalingrad.

Speaker 2 And it's a blood-curdling disaster. And by the way, he is the only president who has ever talked about that.
Obama and Biden never talked about the human cost.

Speaker 2 For them, it was always a strategic mechanism of

Speaker 2 using the last Ukrainian to get an edge over Russia.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 so what I'm getting at is they're going to forge a deal, and everybody knows what the deal is, because everybody's talked about it. The deal will be this.

Speaker 2 Trump says, well, I'll let you go tell the Russian people that you screwed up, Vladimir. You should have never gone in.
It was a stupid thing to do. It was a mean thing to do.

Speaker 2 But you've got to have a bone for your public. So you tell them you went to war because they were going to take back Donbass and Crimea, and now they're not.
You institutionalize this.

Speaker 2 And you went to war so they could not join NATO, and they're not going to join NATO. But here's what they want.
You've got to go back to where you were on February 22nd.

Speaker 2 So you give up the areas of the Donbass that you tried to add on to. Just go back,

Speaker 2 excuse me, February 24th, 2022. Get back there, and we're going to arm the Ukrainians.
All of Europe, we're going to arm them, and we're going to help them rebuild.

Speaker 2 And we're going to have a demilitarized zone, just like Korea. And you're not going to go in there again.
And that's the nucleus of a deal. And I think both sides will take it.

Speaker 2 I know that because right after the spectacular, heroic

Speaker 2 saving salvation of Kiev, remember that? In February and March, everybody was ecstatic. So Ensky, Ukraine, they just made those Russian incompetence.

Speaker 2 Remember that big long train of tanks, they just blew them apart? They thought the war was over.

Speaker 2 And I thought to me, I wrote an article. I thought, no.

Speaker 2 Russia has two rules. When they go into other countries, they don't do very well.
They went into Finland in the Winter War of 1939. They lost 600,000.
However, I said they don't do very well.

Speaker 2 I didn't say they lost the war. So then, by 1940, the Finns said, we did wonderfully.
We beat you. We've killed almost a million Russians, dead, wounded, and missing.

Speaker 2 But you're going to take, you want 10% of our country? We'll do it. And they...
They surrendered, basically. And then the same thing in Poland.
They went in there in 21 and 23. They were a disaster.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 they regrouped and they took it in 39.

Speaker 2 Same thing with Afghanistan. They don't do well when they go into Afghanistan.
However, you fight on the borders of Russia

Speaker 2 and what looks like victory never is. Napoleon goes in in 1812, he wins the first three months.
And deeper you go in, and the more that people get angry, he lost.

Speaker 2 Hitler goes in, he claimed he was at the subway stations of Moscow. Remember the great German myth? They could see the spires of the Kremlin at sunlight

Speaker 2 glittering in the distance? That was as far as they got.

Speaker 2 And so when you fight on a Russian border like Donbass or Crimea, they will wear you down. They have 30 times the territory, four times the population, 10 times the GDP.

Speaker 2 And Ukraine had 41 million people. It was the size of California.
It's only got 28 million people. They've all left.
Not all, but a large part. So we all know what's going to happen.

Speaker 2 That type of settlement. I want to just finish by one thing.

Speaker 2 It's very, very important because we are rewriting history in a very false and dishonest fashion.

Speaker 2 Everybody should remember what the left is doing.

Speaker 2 In 2008, George Bush was a lame duck president. He had made a

Speaker 2 catastrophic mistake by saying he had looked into the eyes of Vladimir Putin and seen his soul, and he was a good man.

Speaker 2 And Putin looked at that and said

Speaker 2 Bush is bogged down in Iraq and he's bogged down in Afghanistan and he's a lame duck and he only has 35%

Speaker 2 approval. I'm going to go in there because he looked in my eyes and he did.
And he took Osatia and he went into Georgia. Okay.

Speaker 2 So then everybody got angry because Bush put sanctions on him and there was an estrangement. So Obama comes in.
I'm just Barack Obama. I mesmerize everybody in my charm.

Speaker 2 And I've got Hillary over there as my

Speaker 2 seasoned Secretary of State. We're going to go to Geneva and she's going to push a jacuzzi button and we're going to have a new,

Speaker 2 I don't know what we're going to call it. It's going to be detente.
That's what it's called. We'll call it Russian Reset, Vladimir.
And that's what he did.

Speaker 2 And Vladimir Putin looked at this guy and he goes, he is a total clown.

Speaker 2 He makes

Speaker 2 Bush look like Churchill.

Speaker 2 So I can take him to the cleaners, so I'm going to go make deals with him. And they made the hot and mite deal.

Speaker 2 Tell Vladimir, you know, tell McDavid, tell Vladimir to give me some space, and I'll give him flexibility. So then he

Speaker 2 got dismantled all that effort with the polls and the checks where Obama sold them out. And we stopped missile defense, which would come in very handily right now.

Speaker 2 And then we stopped all offensive weapons, all offensive weapons to Ukraine. Obama, it was not Trump, it was Obama.

Speaker 2 And then he repaid that magnanimity by going into Donbass and Crimea, and Obama did nothing. And then all of a sudden, they had our ambassador, Mike Faulkner.

Speaker 2 The whole point was that we were going to democratize Russia, that Putin will be so impressed with Obama's mesmerizing presence, he'll liberalize,

Speaker 2 it'll be like the old days.

Speaker 2 And right after the fall of the birdlead wall, and it's all going to be hunky-dory. And we're going to start lecturing Russia.
Mr. Putin, I think it's time you lost the election.

Speaker 2 You should step down for free and fair elections. And you have civil rights.

Speaker 2 All the great chess players of the world are on our side. It was this stupid thing.
And we're going to get rid of your little tinhorn president.

Speaker 2 He was elected, but we'll get rid of him in Ukraine and we'll put them in NATO.

Speaker 2 And they sized those guys up and they said,

Speaker 2 no way, you're just all talk, and now we're going to take advantage of you. And so they did, and that's when they invaded.
And what happened in 2014? They went crazy.

Speaker 2 Vladimir took advantage of it. These are evil people.
These are terrible people. They said, whose fault was that? It's Donald Trump.
It's 2015. It's his fault.
He likes Putin. He's an oligarch.

Speaker 2 And then all of a sudden, it was Russian collusion, Russian disinformation, the axial

Speaker 2 ping-ping, and they hated Putin.

Speaker 2 And then you look at Donald Trump when he was there four years, and you think, well, James Clapper. He's a Russian asset.
He's a Russian poodle.

Speaker 2 I drove down the 99, and I would see a picture of Devin Nunes, and it would say Russian

Speaker 2 asset, traitor.

Speaker 2 They were crazy because they were so humiliated that they had trusted Putin and they were so confident in their arrogant idea of nation building that they were going to turn Ukraine into a EU member, NATO member right on the doorstep, and then by osmosis, the liberal Ukraine Western country would make Russia flip.

Speaker 2 That was never going to happen. There's no evidence from the Tsars to the Soviets.
to the Russian Federation. There's any broad support that ever is able to be stable

Speaker 2 democratic government. It hasn't happened.
It may, I hope it does, but so far, the idea that Barack Obama and his team are going to mesmerize these people was crazy.

Speaker 2 So here we, that's very important because

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 out of that humiliation on the left, that created a hatred. And they pushed Ukraine, pushed Ukraine, pushed Ukraine.
We're going to put you in NATO. We're going to pay him back.

Speaker 2 And then collusion. He's Trump's partner.
And

Speaker 2 Mueller found no collusion. We know laptop disinformation was a fraud.
Did they learn anything? No. And then we look back, final thing in this rant.

Speaker 2 So George Bush was president for eight years. Barack Obama was president for eight years.

Speaker 2 And Joe Biden was president for four. 20-year period.
What did

Speaker 2 Barack Obama and Bush and Biden do to stop Trump in those 20 years?

Speaker 2 Excuse me, Putin compared to Trump. Nothing.
He went into Georgia. He went into Ossatia.
He went into the Donbass. He went into Crimea twice.
He went into Kiev, tried to take Kiev.

Speaker 2 And what happened during that 20-year period?

Speaker 2 There was a four-year addendum, so it's 24 years when Donald Trump was president. Did he go into the expand Ossatia? Did he invade Lithuania? No, no, no.

Speaker 2 Did he do any more invasions in Ukraine? No, no. He didn't do anything.
Why? Why?

Speaker 2 Remember that conversation that Trump supposedly said to Putin, don't go in there. And he said, why? And he said, because I can hit the Kremlin.

Speaker 2 And Putin said, you don't mean that, Donald. And he said, yes, I do.

Speaker 2 And so that's the background of this whole catastrophe, that the left was going to use Ukraine and make it into this beautiful democracy, and then it'll spill over and punish Putin for not appreciating their genius.

Speaker 2 And then when you actually look at Donald Trump, who was the person who first sold them offensive weapons, Obama? No.

Speaker 2 Was it George W. Bush? No.

Speaker 2 Was it Joe Biden? He stopped it when he came in in 2020. It was Donald Trump.
But you impeached him.

Speaker 2 Yes, you impeached him for doing just what Joe Biden did.

Speaker 2 Ukraine was so corrupt, he said, before I give you the congressionally approved money, I am going to insist that you're transparent about what Burisma is doing.

Speaker 2 Impeach him. He's trying to interfere.
Okay, and then Joe Biden had gone over in 2016 and said, SOB, you got an hour, six hours, and I'm going to go, and I'm going to impound, I'm going to impound.

Speaker 2 a billion dollars in congressional. And that was okay.
But he should have been impeached for that, if Trump was. So then, what did Trump do? He killed 300 to 400 people in the Wagner group in Syria.

Speaker 2 That was more than an entire Cold War of 80 years. He raised the sanctions.
He dumped cheap oil and bankrupt the Russian oil industry. He sold Ukraine weapons.
He got out of an asymmetrical deal.

Speaker 2 The Russians thought he was too tough on them. And all of a sudden, now Bolton and the whole crowd come out of the woodwork and say, he gave away negotiation points.
No, he didn't.

Speaker 2 He's just saying what everybody knows. You could have stopped this war three years ago.

Speaker 2 And you would be right where you are now.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And with that, Victor, we're going to change topic, but I would like to first take a moment for our sponsor, Hillsdale College.
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Speaker 2 I'm going to Hillsdale in three weeks for Mark Moyer and Jason Garrett.

Speaker 2 They have a military history program and I'm going to give a talk on World War II films. I think it's

Speaker 2 Tuesday, March 4th,

Speaker 2 and then I'm going to return. And on May 10th, I was asked to give the graduation commencement address.
I'm going to talk about what an exciting time it is to be a Hillsdale graduate. Can you imagine?

Speaker 2 You're going to be the tip of the spear of the counter-revolution, which is taking place before our very eyes. And then I go back for my regular eight-day billet.

Speaker 2 So I'll be there three times in the next

Speaker 2 seven months.

Speaker 3 Well, Victor, so let's just turn to one more topic today.

Speaker 3 The EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldon has found, this is just criminal, it feels like $20 billion of taxpayer money hidden in a financial institution.

Speaker 3 And he's hoping to they were hoping to use it in place of funds that they expected Trump would cut from far-left activist groups. That's just incredible, but part of the deep state, I suppose.

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, well, I mean, people that are examining

Speaker 2 this

Speaker 2 huge $37 trillion debt and how we got there, one of their complaints was that USAID, EPA, all of these agencies

Speaker 2 was spending not just money that was unnecessary,

Speaker 2 but Trump called it kickbacks. But what they were saying is that once you go into those agencies,

Speaker 2 after three or four years, you understand the mechanism from the inside, how it operates, how the USAID, how the NIH operates, how the Center for Allergies and Infectious Diseases operates, how the CDC operates, all of them,

Speaker 2 how the FBI operates. And then you go out and you form a non-government organization, and you are so

Speaker 2 moral, you're here to help humanity. And you go back to that agency for the people who used to work for you, and you say,

Speaker 2 hey, you go back to the EPA.

Speaker 2 I know how the EPA is. I work there, how you guys all used to work for me.
I need 20 million bucks for my wonderful new foundation and NGO, and then I'll disperse it to all these groups.

Speaker 2 And we've got to do it before Trump comes. He He will be so angry because we're going to promote EVs and ban natural gas stoves and more winter.
And that's what they did.

Speaker 2 It's very similar to what happens in the military when a four-star general has all these subordinates in procurement, and then he retires, and then all of a sudden he's in a bidding war that

Speaker 2 Raytheon, Lockheed, hey, you got to work for us. And then when they worked for us, you said, you got to sell this weapon system.
And he might say, okay,

Speaker 2 how do I do that? Well, call up all your subordinates that used to salute you and tell them. And that's what happens.

Speaker 2 And that's what he's trying to break up, is to reduce the size of these agencies and their budgets and get rid of their incestuous relationship by these NGOs and these outside

Speaker 2 quote-unquote nonprofits that either are manned by spouses or friends of people in the agencies or by former agency officials themselves.

Speaker 2 I think they called it, didn't they call it gold bars on the Titanic? They were throwing gold bars on the Titanic, meaning that Biden's ship was sinking, but they were throwing the gold bars out.

Speaker 2 It's utterly corrupt. I don't know how anybody, I just wish the left would be honest.

Speaker 2 I wish that Maisie, Mozzie Hirono, or Hakeem Jeffries, or Elizabeth Warren, or the squad or Maxine Waters would just say, you know what,

Speaker 2 all these programs are good. I want to give $40 million to the Wuhan Lab.
They made a mistake once, but maybe when they make their next virus, it will be wonderful.

Speaker 2 I want them to say, you know what, we have a quarter billion dollars. We're paying 7% interest.
That's not bad.

Speaker 2 We can borrow $250 million because they're going to train 6,000 journalists, reporters without borders. They're going to be global internationalists, and they're going to support us, leftists.

Speaker 2 So that's why we're doing it. Why don't you be honest and say that's what you want? But instead, they say, you know, everybody's going to die.
This is illegal. This is a constitutional.
It's not.

Speaker 2 I wrote an article today about mythologies about Elon Musk, and

Speaker 2 he's never said he had any authority to cut. He's an auditor.
He goes through with his team and he finds waste, fraud, and abuse.

Speaker 2 Then he turns the findings over to the cabinet heads and the heads of agencies. Then they call Donald Trump up and they say, these are what Elon found.
And Trump says, well,

Speaker 2 do you agree? And they say, yes. Well, then cut it.
They have statutory authority to cut, not Elon. They can accept or reject it.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 he doesn't know, and they say, he's not confirmed. He's not elected.
It's It's like me saying, well, Jake Sullivan was running foreign policy, never was elected, he was never confirmed by the Senate.

Speaker 2 That's wrong. They just make up these things as they go.
You know,

Speaker 2 this is a constitutional crisis. A judge said that the Treasury can withhold all information from their own secretary.

Speaker 2 So Donald Trump is appealing that. But what happened when the Supreme Court overruled Roe B.
Batewade? The same way AOC said, we don't have to, we should just ignore that.

Speaker 2 Or Joe Biden said about student loans, I'll get around it, just ignore it.

Speaker 2 Remember who these people are, they're Jacobins, they're not Democrats of old, they're revolutionaries, and the only and this counter-revolutionary movement of MAGA and Trump is scaring them because they're losing their hold on the media, on academia,

Speaker 2 and public opinion, and they can't nominate, they can't veto, they can't do anything.

Speaker 2 They don't have the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the White House, and they don't have the congressional committees. So they're impotent and they're angry, and their institutions

Speaker 2 are turning around. They say, well, call Zuckerberg up.
He gave us $419 million. Now he's on the other team.
Well, Bezos is the second.

Speaker 2 He joined Elon. Well, how about Andreessen and Horowitz? Well, they're gone too.
Well, how about Sam Bankman-Fried? Well, he's in jail. Well, how about Soros?

Speaker 2 Well, he's coming under a lot of suspicion for the stuff he's done. Well,

Speaker 2 you call up Stanford or Harvard or Yale. Well, they're facing 15 percent only surcharges.
They're losing millions of dollars on the racket they were doing for

Speaker 2 infrastructure charges that they raked off from federal grants. So they're very angry.
They've lost all their source of support.

Speaker 3 Well, Victor, we're at the end of the show, and I would like to read a viewer's

Speaker 3 listener, a reader's comment. It's Carol Furr, and she says, thank you for sharing the facts with a slice of wisdom on the side.
A community that is solely absent these days from journalists.

Speaker 3 Your gift of both intellect and understanding is a joy to read.

Speaker 3 Whoever

Speaker 3 would have thought that a government more efficient and effective would see so many protests? Well, maybe it's not so astonishing. Thank you for taking time to continue to write regularly.

Speaker 3 Love the hat, by the way.

Speaker 3 We watch classic movies, and I told my husband, just wish men would start wearing hats again this week. Most sincerely, Carol A.
Fur. So, take care of it.

Speaker 2 Both my grandfathers wore hats. Yeah.
I'm doing it because it's cold, and I've lost most of my hair, so it gets even colder.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I don't treat them very well, so it'll probably wear out.

Speaker 2 But that was a very nice letter.

Speaker 2 Very nice.

Speaker 2 Who would be against trying to balance the budget or stopping waste and fraud?

Speaker 2 And apparently there's a lot of federal employees, there's a lot of left-wing people who count on manipulating the government. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And I remember five years ago, Elon, I would walk through Menlo Park or Palo Alto,

Speaker 2 and Tesla was on everybody's lips. Everybody wanted Tesla.
He was their hero.

Speaker 2 So now they're saying he's an idiot, he's cruel, and you think, okay, so why don't you call up Ukraine and say, Elon, how dare you give them free internet service?

Speaker 2 Call up North Carolina and Pacific Palisades, USOB, you're giving them free Starlink.

Speaker 2 What's wrong with you? Or call up NASA and say, you see what he did? He sent that SpaceX and he caught it with an erector set arm. That is cheating.

Speaker 2 And then call him up and said, say, you know what he wants to do? He wants to take your place and rescue those trapped astronauts up on that station.

Speaker 2 And now the worst thing is he took X and he allows everybody to say what they want. There's no more censorship.
That's what they're saying, right? Aaron Powell, yes, absolutely.

Speaker 3 And that and more, that anybody normal would just astonish who would follow that party because they've got all the wrong positions and they seem to be doubling.

Speaker 2 It's a gift to the Republicans.

Speaker 2 Every time I see Maxine Waters start to use the F-word or foul language or she screams and yells, or they had that

Speaker 2 Representative Garza, he called

Speaker 2 Elon a DICK

Speaker 2 on national TV, and then

Speaker 2 Anderson Cooper called the

Speaker 2 governor of New Hampshire, Sununu. He called him a DICK on national TV.
They are losing it, man. They are losing it.
And then Trump is very much quieter.

Speaker 2 I mean, he still tweets provocatively, but he's tired. He looks tired sometimes.

Speaker 2 He's not screaming and yelling. He's just very determined, very methodical.
And that's what's driving them crazy.

Speaker 3 It is, and it's making us all happy.

Speaker 2 Yes, where's Letita James when you need? Oh, I'm sorry. She's in trouble.
She's being investigated. Where's Fannie Wills? Oh,

Speaker 2 she may be facing criminal penalties with Nathan Wade. Well, where's Jack Smith? Oh, he folded his tent.
Where's E. Jean Currow? Well, she's under appeal.
She may lose some of her settlement.

Speaker 2 Where's Alvin Bragg? He can't set foot in a federal courtroom.

Speaker 3 And some of those things Pam Bondi is doing, but we'll leave that for you and Jack to talk about. Pam Bondi suing the New York governors, if I could use the smaller.

Speaker 2 I can't believe she's 59. Is that right? 59.

Speaker 3 So you and Jack are going to have to give a good talk about all of that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, she's amazing.

Speaker 2 She's a powerhouse. Yeah.

Speaker 3 So, thank you, Victor, for all of the commentary today. I especially enjoyed the Russia-Russo-Japanese war.
That was great. And thanks to our listeners for joining us and taking so much time.

Speaker 2 Thank you, everybody.

Speaker 2 See you next time. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 3 This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hanson, and we're signing off.