Sovereignty and the Face of Deterrence

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Safeguard your wealth, protect your future while there's still time. Hello, ladies.
Hello, gentlemen. This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
I'm Jack Fowler, the host. You're here to listen to the star and namesake, Victor Davis Hanson, who 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.
He's got a website, thebladeofperseus. Victorhanson.com is the address.
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We are recording on Sunday, the 19th of January. Here I am in Milford, Connecticut.
The sky's a gray. It's going to start snowing here, Victor.
We're going to get about five inches. You're out there in sunny California.
And far from a lot of people worried. Is Victor safe? I mean, Victor's not safe from the tax collectors and the garbage dumpers.
No one's safe in California. Right.
Safe from the Palisades fires, but otherwise tormented like every other resident of that great state is. This particular episode will be up on January 23rd.
So America will be in the process of being made great again. I know Victor and the great Sammy Wink will be discussing tomorrow.
Their podcast will air tomorrow. The openings of Donald Trump's first days, his inaugural speech, hopefully a slew of executive orders he might be issuing out of the box.
So hang around till tomorrow to get Victor's take on that. But today we've got plenty of interesting things to talk about.
I think we should begin, Victor, with looking at, he may be Secretary of State now by the time we're speaking, I don't know when the confirmation vote's going to happen, but Marco Rubio, whose opening statement in his confirmation hearing I think was pretty important, and we'll get your take on that, Victor, and on, oh, I don't know, whatever else do we have here? Canada's preoccupation with euthanasia, culture wars, a piece you've written for Mosaic magazine, and a website. And we'll get to all that when we come back from these important messages.
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Victor, I'm going to do what so many of our listeners like, talk, me talk. No, they don't.
But folks, just hear this out. And Victor, then you have at it.
This is Marco Rubio's statement at his confirmation hearing, and I think it was pretty important. at the end of World War II, the United States was, in the words of then-Secretary Acheson, tasked with creating a world order, a free half out of chaos without blowing the whole process, without blowing the whole to pieces in the process.
Rubio continues, at the end of World War II, the United States was,

in the words of then-Secretary Acheson, I just read that, in the decades that followed, the global order they created served us well. For Americans, incomes rose, communities flourished, alliance emerged in Indo-Pacific and Europe that led to the emergence of stability, democracy, and prosperity in those

regions, and prevented a cataclysmic Third World War, and ultimately a wall in Berlin came down, and with it an evil empire. Out of the triumphalism of the end of the long Cold War emerged a bipartisan consensus that we had reached the end of history, that all the nations of the earth would become members of the democratic,

western-led community, that a foreign policy

that served the national interest could now be replaced by one that served the liberal world order, and that all mankind was now destined to abandon national identity, and we would become one human family and citizens of the world. This wasn't just a fantasy.
It was a dangerous delusion. So says Marco Rubio.
Victor, what are your thoughts on Marco Rubio and the Rubio Doctrine? Maybe there isn't a Rubio Doctrine yet. Sounds like there should be one.
Well, I mean, two years ago, Jack, in the last chapter of The Dying Citizen, I have a chapter on globalism that resonates that same theme. And it's expressed or reified, as everybody knows, with the International Criminal Court, with the Ferris Climate Accord.
and the idea is that the collective body of nations has interest and wisdom

that supersede ours. And therefore, if a soldier's in Afghanistan, he calls in an airstrike.
He's subject to evaluation by the International Criminal Court. So the subtext, it isn't even the subtext, the primary mission is to get rid of sovereignty and turn over each nation's decision-making to a panel of experts, sort of like the 51 intelligent experts that Phyllis Hunter's laptop was watching this information.
or what was it, Jack? A hundred State Department officials just wrote and said,

Plunk was dangerous.

It's this idea that you give up your personal freedom

and constitutional rights to a world body of experts. And the problem with it, to be frank, is that these people are not experts.
They're only degreed. They're certified, but they're not experts.
And we've seen what people from the Ivy League have done the last four years. And then number two, these people are anti-American in the sense that they don't have a constitution like ours.
We've got to remember that we're a multiracial democracy. There's only of our size Brazil and India, and they don't do very well.
So we're unique, and they are not unique. And they're mostly blood and soil countries.
And even our allies, I mean, I love Japan, but Japan's having a fertility crisis, so they're looking to find Japanese expatriate communities, say, in South America to come back to Japan, because they define a citizen as someone who looks Japanese. Most countries in the world do.
So he's absolutely right. And as the world gets more coordinated, so I can call here from this farm, somebody in Nigeria in a second, or what somebody does in Wuhan will give me long COVID within a year, people make the next false step that we're already connected.
So why don't we have a world body of experts? And it's usually from the left, and it's partly a pedigree of Marxism and collectivism, progressivism, but it's also very, it's a Cold War, Cold War, post-Cold War product that all of the existential problems are over with. And so we all agree that, I guess we would call consumer market capitalist governments are the norm.
I don't think everybody believes that at all. I think there are 180 nations, I think, in the UN or something along that.
Only half of them claim to be democratic anymore. Democratic governments are losing the residence.
So it doesn't work. It's never worked.
And it's not new, everybody. It was Alexander the Great had something called the Brotherhood of Man, where he was going to forcibly marry Macedonian companion, Calvary, to Persian women.
And we were going to make a new Hellenistic world. That didn't last very long.
And then after World War I, we know who they come from. Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations, the Versailles Treaty.
Wilson pranced in after the war in January 1919. I won the war by deciding with my unsurpassed humanity to enter the war.
We broke the... And I have the right to dictate to all of you people that fought it.
And this is what it's going to be. And then we have the League of Nations.

You know how that went. And then we did it again with the League of Nations.
FDR. And it just keeps going.
And then now we have Davos. So I don't think Trump's going to go to Davos if he ever did.
Davos may come to Mar-a-Lago. with the rest of the

visitors. So it's a very dangerous

concept to give up any shred of U.S. sovereignty.
Paris Climate Accords, we got out. Biden put us right back in.
And what do they do? They allow China, who builds two dirty coal plants a month, and we're supposed to outlaw here in California clean-burning diesel engines that won't make a bit of difference given what China does to the atmosphere. And yet they're scared to death of ever telling Xi that you're a polluter.
And they're worse than that. Now they're telling the underdeveloped countries,

well, please like us. Oh, you want $5 trillion in transfers because we had the industrial

revolution and we've been polluting longer than you did. And so that's what they're doing now.

And you want to say back to them, okay's more carbon emissions here in california or new york than there is i don't know in mozambique but right you people in mozambique use stuff that is created elsewhere and we don't basically it's from the westernized world that builds radios and computers and cars and tires and chemicals. The westernized world, that requires more energy.
So if we all want to be pastoral like the Morgenthau plan after World War II, go to it. It's dangerous.
Rubio was really gradually but sincerely

transformed but it's dangerous. Rubio was really gradually but sincerely transformed from a Trump 2016 primary opponent where they each pillared each other into a MAGA adherent.
And I think it's sincere. I don't say MAGA on foreign policy, but a Jacksonian.
No better friend, no worse enemy of the United States. Don't tread on me.
We will pick the time and occasion.

I think people should just finally, if you go back when Charles Krutheimer, who was very good, but when he was at his best, he wrote after the Iraq war, they were saying that we were trying to intervene.

And he wrote kind of a manifesto, if you remember, but it was a long essay where he said, the United States is not neoconservative nation building. It's not isolationist.
It shall pick and choose where it intervenes based on whether it can win or what it can do in a realistic fashion. And it will fight a type of war that plays to its strengths and not to its weakness.
Sometimes we didn't listen to that, but that's I think what Trump's foreign policy is going to be. Yeah.
I love that Rubio is a, a foe. I think it's fair to be a foe of China and has been fora non grata, he can't set foot in the country.
Yeah. They've declared him persona non grata.
I'm glad you mentioned essentially the elites, Victor, because this was another topic I wanted to raise with you. And I'm thinking, before I get to it, it was something Bill Crystal tweeted about, if we can still use tweeted as a verb, the Republicans, Liz Cheney and others, I forget how many there were, about 100, back in October or September, came out and endorsed Kamala Harris.
And many of these people were foreign policy types. What did they expect a Harris foreign policy was going to be? How did these self-described conservative Republicans think the world was going to, how did they envision the world under her leadership? It's still warped.
they believe that they're going to be kinder and gentler than anybody in the world, and that magnanimity is going to be reciprocated by even greater gratitude, not by scorn and exploited as weakness to be taken advantage of, rather than to be reciprocated. So that's their idea.
So that type of worldview gets 13 people killed for no reason in Afghanistan Afghanistan the way we got out. Or it weakens Israel to such a degree, and we have daylight between us that Hamas tries something stupid and thinks they'll get away with it and has the law.
And then you have a Chinese balloon and Chinese dressing down Lincoln and Sullivan in Anchorage, Alaska.

So I wish it wasn't that way, but human nature is unchanging.

And when you get progressives empowered and they feel the world works like the academic lounge, you know what I mean?

Or academic faculty meeting.

And by the way, I've been to about a thousand academic faculty meetings and never have so much anger been expressed in such ruthless and sober soul, such small stakes.

But that's how they envision the world. And the antithesis to it is Teddy Roosevelt, keep quiet, carry a big stick, get a vegetist, the great Roman military rider, anybody, prepare for war to ensure peace.
If you want peace, prepare for war. And that was Ronald Reagan, peace through strength.
So deterrence. I would just give credit to a very brilliant guy, Jack.
His name is Jeffrey Blaney. And he is a, I think he's in his 90s now.
I met him when I was toured Australia once, but he wrote a very underappreciated but brilliant book called The Causes of War. And he said, he looked at all of these wars that Quincy Wright and others had looked at, and they all had these therapeutic explanations.
He said, you know what?

War is like a laboratory experiment that finishes. So when you look at all these different players in the world, it's very important that you have information about the relative strength and intention of each one.
And if you do, then you can deter them or make the necessary adjustments with alliances. However, if you're not candid about your real strength or weakness, then you can be misled.
So in World War II, to take his example and give you a concrete example, looking back, when I finished the Second World Wars, one of the things I kept thinking was, what was Hitler thinking about? What was Mussolini thinking about? What was Japan thinking about? There was 400 million people in the Soviet Union, the United States and Britain.

The United States had a bigger GDP than all of the Axis put together when the war started. What were they thinking? Well, what they were thinking is they were thinking, well, the United States may be big and it won World War I, but they're weak now and they're socialists and they are disarmed.
They'll never come in. Oh, Britain, they won World War I too, but they're appeasing.
The United States is isolationist, and Britain is appeasing. And oh, the Soviet Union, oh, they're collaborating.
And no one said to Hitler or Mussolini, yes, they are. But if you get on the wrong side, or you're stupid enough to attack them, they have the economic, military, and material to destroy you very quickly.
So what Blady would say in all of these cases, had they each of those three allied powers said to Hitler and Tojo, don't do something stupid. We're producing a plane an hour.
We're going to build, we can build 150 light and escort carriers in two years and destroy you. We can build a B-29 bomber that will fly 1,600 miles and reduce Tokyo to ashes.
We don't want to. So don't, but we didn't give that message.
So they made an ignorant decision. So it's very important right now to take that thesis and say to China, yes, we had Biden, and yes, he was a bumbling fool.
And yes, we were disgraced in Afghanistan. But those are aberrations.
We have this amount of nuclear weapons. We have hypersonic.
We, we, we. And we have to do that so they don't do something stupid.
And the same thing with Russia and Ukraine. We are much more powerful than Putin, but if you tell Putin you can go into oh, you went into a seish under Bush.
Okay. Oh, you took the Donbass and Kwanaya under Obama.
Oh, it depends on whether it's a major or minor invasion, whether they're going to react to it. Oh, you had cyber attacks on us.
So Joe told you, knock that off, Vladimir. Oh, you suspended offensive weapons.
So he got the impression out of ignorance that the United States was weak and wouldn't do anything. And now we have, you know, 101.6 million dead wounded in a war that could have been prevented had we been able to deter him.
Right. So it's very important to be, to get the information on the relative strength and intention of every possible belligerent and make the necessary calculations.
And we must inform China and Russia that this is our military strength and this is what we will do and then follow it through. But we have to have the military strength to do that.
And if you're spending money on DEI or you're spending money on green electric tanks or something, you're not going to be able to do that.

And that's what we've been doing over by.

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One of the great ones, this old British movie, One of Our Aircraft is Missing. I don't know if you've ever seen that.
It's one of the Pressburger, one of the original Archers movies. I'll send you a link to it.
Folks, remember 30 Seconds Over Tokyo when they crash land and they have to get back? Yeah, with Van Heflin and Van Johnson, I mean. Yeah.
Great movie. Oh my gosh, that's a terrific movie.
Hey, what were we going to talk? Oh, the elites. Yes, elites.
So, Victor, gosh, I want to ask you a million World War II questions after what you just raised. Well, let me ask you one before we get to the elites.
I mean, France was the more powerful army than Germany, France, England combined.

So there is something to Hitler and moving ahead based on the lack of courage. But maybe if he had just stopped there, right? And maybe the additional stupidity was...
France had never allowed the Germans more than 80 miles into French territory. Right.
So they had a reputation for deterrence, and then they transmogrified in going all the way to the Swiss border, and then they didn't go, unfortunately, to the Atlantic, because the Belgians didn't want to be walled up, but they built the Maginot line, which, by the way, the Germans really didn't go through. They did have Army Group C or D, I mean, South that went through it, but that was only after the North had fallen.
But my point is this, they had a three million person army in 1940, the Deweint, I think it's called, Deweint. Aircraft fighter was better than the 109.
Even the Char V tank was much better than the Mark II or three German tanks. They had a bigger army, and Germany had lost almost 20,000 soldiers dead, another 30,000 wounded, taking Poland.
But my point is this. They had been part of the effort to appease Hitler at Munich.
And Hitler had said of Chamberlain, Chamberlain gave him Czechoslovakia. And he had said nothing about the Anschluss, the Rhineland militarization.
He said, I saw them at Munich and they were worms. I'd like to take that stupid little umbrella and beat him with it.
But what I'm getting at is France had conveyed the message that although we are the winners of World War I, we never want to fight again. Germany had conveyed the message, even though we were losers, that was an aberration.
We want to rectify that decision. So what that meant in actuality is, although France had a huge army, they were all deployed with a defensive mentality, whether in the Maginot Line or the majority of them up near the Belgian border.
They were told, we are reactive, we do not conduct offensive operations. When Germany went into Poland on September 1st of 1939, They went in it from East Prussia,

Germany, and the Sudetenland,

an occupied Czech state,

and they were naked.

They had almost nobody.

And here you have this huge French army

and they invaded.

They went into the Saarland and there was

nobody there. They could have gone

on the way to Berlin, but they went

in about 20 miles. They took a couple of prisoners and said, oh my God, we're in Germany.
That would be kind of provocative. Let's get out.
And so if you don't want to fight and you convey that, Tom Sowell, if you look at some of his books, he made a good point that in the 1930s, it was not allowed in a French textbook to mention the word Verdun or that famous they shall not pass slogan or motto of Verdun.

And as I said earlier in the broadcast, the Dutch were trying to come up with a word other than destroyer in Dutch for their frigates.

Really?

Yes, because they thought all of this would be too

provocative and for Hitler it just

showed signs of weaknesses

and he didn't get an accurate

portrayal of the

ability of Britain and France.

So yes, he was successful.

He had an invasion. He invaded nine

countries. Poland,

Denmark, Norway,

Luxembourg, Belgium,

France, Greece, Yugoslavia.

But

Thank you. countries, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Belgium, France, Greece, Yugoslavia.
But he could not bomb Britain. And that was because he had no four-engine bombers.
He had no idea about the capability of the Spitfire or the hurricane at high altitude dives. He didn't understand the British people.
He didn't understand strategic bombing. And it was downhill from him.
He could not defeat Britain, even though all of the present European Union by that time was in his hands. So, and Britain and France just made it clear that they had the capability to stop Hitler.
He would have never started with Hitler. Well, when he occupied the Rhineland, I think they gave him a green light.
So, Victor, about elites, kind of related to back what we were talking about before this, I call him Wee Willie Bill Kristol, but on X, he posted something referring to a podcast or piece in The Bulwark, the TDS website of never really were conservatives, Kristol and others. but Jonathan Last has some podcasts there, and obviously I didn't listen to it, but I just saw this tweet where they're focusing on the elites.

Of course, they think they're the elites maybe they are by so was so was anthony fauci but he crystal's quote every era he's quoting excuse me last and and whoever he was on the show with did the elites really fail us every era both good and bad, but I'd say that the elites of the last 50 years shepherded us through an era that was at least as good and maybe substantially better than anything we've seen for almost two centuries. Victor, they just love themselves, and they will always love themselves.
I don't know that they will get the message that the voters sent in this recent election.

Any thought on that, the elites loving the elites?

Well, I mean, they have not been able to turn the operational brilliance of the rank-and-file American soldier into strategic resolution.

So maybe you can say Korea was a victory. It was.
We saved South Korea, but we didn't take the North. We lost Vietnam.
That was not because of the fighting man. It was the best and brightest, as David Halbertson, one of them, even admitted and wrote a book about it.
We did not win in Afghanistan or Iraq. Maybe Iraq we did some better, but it cost the benefit.
And when it came back, perhaps it wasn't why. I don't know what we did in Syria and Libya.
And I am not sure what's going to happen in Ukraine. But all of these were ideas that were cooked up by people in the civilian sector who were mostly Ivy League degree, very impressive in repartee, talking.
I just came from a conference where there were the same type of very impressive people. You look at their resumes, they wow you, their Ivy League degrees, their European universities in some cases.
But I don't think they do have a good record. So if you look at where we are right now and what they say in the 50 years, where do they see leadership as exercised by traditional elites as successful? Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins at NIH, maybe Peter Bittesic, who was just barred for five years from Echo Health, from having, for lying and helping to create this virus that killed 50 million people.
The Pentagon, do we have, I don't think we're deterring anybody. Well, maybe the state department, guys like Blinken and Jake Sullivan.

They've got the right degrees.

Maybe Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security advisor who dreamed up the Iran policy.

And the deal with Obama.

Obama himself, he and Michelle,

they've got Ivy League creds.

And where is it?

So I don't think it's the elite who is...

The good life that we have, for the most part,

is the degree to which people exercise common sense.

And I'm not...

You know, I met a lot of smart people at Stanford, but I met a lot smarter people farming. And so I don't know where they get that idea that they're so self-congratulatory.
Did they craft SpaceX? Are they Jeff Bezos who made Amazon? I mean, if I look at my life and I just get empirical and I say, right now, what is good and what is bad?

Well, I use Amazon a lot.

I don't think that Jeff Bezos represents the elite, the multi-generational, credentialed, bicultural elite.

Elon Musk, I use X. I don't know.
My wife has a Tesla. Did that come out? Yeah, Starlink.
I'm doing right now on Starlink out in the middle of the country. The other access I had to the internet was slow.
I couldn't do this without Starlink. So I'm just trying to think.
I got two bouts, one for a year and one for four months of long COVID. That was due to an elite that cooked that up, gain-of-function research and the expertise and money and instrumentation we sent to the Wulham Lab.
Peter Daszak was helpful with that. So was Anthony Fauci.

So was Francis Collins.

When I look at high-speed rail, that was an elite concept.

I don't think it's very successful.

And on the other hand, when I go out the door and I walk over an almond orchard that has gone from 1,200 pounds an acre to 3,200 pounds.

I don't see anybody from Harvard, Princeton, Yale who did that.

I see a guy who's a second-generation Basque immigrant from Encompos who did that.

When I used to go and talk to Carolyn Harris and John Harris,

I don't think that was an Ivy League elite who built the Harris ranch and hotel and farming operation. I just don't see it.
I don't know what they're talking about. I think Bill Crystal is in his early 70s, maybe 70s.
What does he look around right now that is the product of Lee Lee? Can he think of a great elite novel that somebody wrote? A great elite somebody picture, a motion picture that somebody directed who was an elite? An actor who came out of the aristocratic tradition? I know there's some that did. But, you know, when you look at Gene Hackman or Michael Caine and all these people, they were not elites.
So I don't think they have much common sense. I don't think they've been in the real world.
And I think that they recreate in their own mind a fantasy world that doesn't exist of their success. And the things that they have given us, Jack, that are exclusively the product of elites, the modern university, Stanford, Ivy League, I've seen it.
It's a disaster. It practices institutionalized racism.
It's mediocre. 80% of the people at Yale are stand for get AIDS.
When I look at the government, HHS, I don't know. I don't see a lot of brilliant people running the government.
Where do they? I don't get it. I know that they're everywhere, but I don't see the talent.
I don't see the results of it. I see that we have a very prosperous, materially successful society, but it's because of the successors to Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell and the Wright brothers.
And to the degree they were masters of capital, like here in California, the people who designed the California Water Project or the Central Valley Project or the Big Four, Henry Huntington or Stanford, et cetera, Crocker, they were not, they were started from very meager circumstances. So what I'm getting at is there's nothing wrong with being an aristocrat and going to prep school and being packed off to Harvard and then going to Yale Law School.
That's great, yes, yes. But it's much better to have, I think, a wide diversity.
I think that's why J.D. Vance, and you can really see it with his career,

that they hated him. They hated him, partly because they felt they could control him when he first came to the national prominence, and he was, you know, kind of critical of where he had come from.
But once they saw that he had broad experience, and yet he knew them because he went Yale Law School and he knew Terry. They hated him.
But the reason that he had broad experience, and yet he knew them because he went to Yale Law School. And he knew tech.
They hated him. But the reason that he was slaying all of these media dragons all summer long wasn't because he went to Yale Law School.
It was because he understood people, and he had dealt with all different types of people from different strata of society, and he demolished them. And that's why they didn't anticipate it.
I remember talking to two or three elites where I work, and they said, oh, man, Trump's going to have to recall him. He's a white guy, so he gets no friction, no traction there.
My God, he's in Ohio. There's no advantage there.
Point taken, point taken. And all I said was,, I've talked to him a couple of times.
He's a master debater. He's got a photographic memory.
He's a great, everything he's done has been successful. He was a rookie and he went right in and became a U.S.
senator. And he understood finance.
And he's got a brilliant wife. He was a great writer.
So he's going to go on there and defend the MAGA

record in ways that no one can even imagine.

And the people in the media are going to hate

him, and he's going to make them look

stupid. And it did

happen, though. He did.
He did,

indeed. So I'm not impressed.

I'm not, you know, I was

taught by...

It's funny. All the great classicists that I know not, you know, I was taught by, it's funny, all the great classicists that I know personally, the worst were the children of academics and wealthy people and the best.
Almost all the ones that I found were very good came from very modest circumstances or middle class circumstances where they were widely experienced. When I look at my field of classics and ancient history and archaeology, if you look at the great developments that changed the way of thinking, they didn't come from Oxford dons or Harvard professors.
I can just name three. Heinrich Schliemann was a German banker, and he was the first one to suggest and prove at Mycenae and Troy that there was a physical reality to the Homeric poems, and they were not just hooked up in a poet's head.
There really was a Troy. There was a Mycenae.
And then you look at somebody like Michael Ventress, who did show you that linear B was Greek and was the language of the Mycenaean citadels. And the alphabet had changed during the Dark Ages.
When it was invented, it was a Phoenician album, but it was used for a Greek pre-existing language. So a linear B script, an alpha to omega alphabet, or the same language.
Everybody thought that was crazy. And he thought, you know, he was a cryptologist in world of two.
You could even, Millman Perry was an academic, but he was an apostate. People hated him.
When he said that the Ili and the Odyssey were composed orally by memory, through the techniques of memorization and epithets and type scenes. Everybody thought he was crazy.
So I think that's true of every field. I really do.
The people who really do things are not part of the elite consensus. Because the elite consensus, by definition, focuses on certification, not branding.
Branding. Branding.
And that's why it's dangerous. Yeah.
Well, Victor, I'm glad you mentioned Thomas Edison because there's a poll out there about the ability of American youth to change a

light bulb. And we'll get your take on that.
And you've written a piece about war for Mosaic that

addresses Israel and Gaza and Hamas. And I think we'll also get to some culture war

matters. And we'll do all that when we come back from these important messages.
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That's code Victor20 at TakeLean.com. And we are back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
Again, we're recording on Sunday the 19th and this actual episode will be up on the 23rd, day two or three of America being made great again by Trump 47.

And Victor and the great Sammy Wink will be discussing the first days of this presidency,

round two, on tomorrow's Victor Davis Hanson Show podcast.

So, Victor, what was I going to tell? Oh, yeah, yeah. on on gen z here's a poll oh my gosh i don't i'm not gonna believe this but go ahead yeah the kids aren't all right gen z admits they don't know how to change light bulbs so here's from the new york post the adult babies of gen z cannot cry about strict uh can cry about strict workplace moors and whine over the anxiety inducing stress of making a phone call, but they can't even change a light bulb per new data on the youngsters incapacity to tackle everyday do-it-yourself duties.
The ability to do basic practical tasks is being lost amongst the younger generation, younger generations, warned Andy Tuberfield of Halfords, a UK-based motoring and cycling retailer. The investigators found that nearly 25% of Gen Zers have no idea, that's a quarter of these kids, have no idea how to change a light bulb in a ceiling lamp, with many claiming that climbing a ladder is quote-unquote too dangerous.
Only one in five worry also, excuse me, one in five also worry that the light bulb might be too hot. Finally, analysts with Halfords found that Zers on average spend over $1,500 a year hiring professionals to knock out basic household chores.
Victor, I know a lot of people don't even, well, they know how to turn on a light switch, but they don't know how to start a lawnmower or which end of a chainsaw to hold, which is a lot more difficult than changing a light bulb. Victor, your thoughts on this very troubling trend, I think.
It is. It explains certain things, though.
My kids, since they were three or four years, had to work on the farm, and they learned these things. But when they got out in the world, I felt that they had been shorted, that I didn't teach them how to, I mean, they were not taught by my brother how to weld.

Or they were not taught, but they did everything else.

So chainsaw, you know, engines, operating tractors, just spring tooth, spray rigs, spraying roundup.

They understood all that. So, but they left out knowing less than I did.
And I knew less than my father did. So when they went out in the world, people were just astounded.
I've had so many people say, wow, your son can do anything. And I said, really? They said, yes, he can fix He can fix anything.
He's mechanical. And he is, but he doesn't know as much as maybe I did at that age, but I knew a lot less than my father did.
And so we're getting, and then this risk aversion, I don't know where risk aversion historically originates in societies that only have one child, for example.

People, they dote on one child if you lose your child.

I know people have done research that shows that as the fertility rate declines,

nations become less adventurous.

Maybe this will happen in China, that they won't be so bellicose

because they're a nation of one child.

But it's kind of disturbing because these

skills are very important, not just to function in the real world and not just to function if we have the end of days collapse. And you can see when everybody looks at Los Angeles right now, there's 250,000 people without homes, and there's no sewer or water or telephone or power in large areas.
What skills do they think would be valuable? Just some kind of rhetorical flurries? It's not going to help you. You need to have real skills.
So that can happen on a wide scale.

So I think what I would like to see is instead of camp, sat camps, you know,

take your kid goes to sat camp.

Why don't they have a survival camp or a young boy, let's say, he's 10 years old.

He goes up in a nice camp, but instead of learning how to, you know, do sail or hike, that they have like one week. Here's a chainsaw.
Here's small gas engines. Here's basic carpentry.
Here's basic electricity. Just enough to get him to know how to flip off a circuit breaker, why a circuit breaker goes off or something, or plumbing.
Here's the difference between hot, cold, sewage. Why not just do that with our children so they're aware of the real world? And it's also very important sociologically, because when you have the working muscular classes know that, and yet they're not compensated as much as the Cerebral.
There's a lot of friction in between as the one dictates to the other. But you can really see it where I work in Palo Alto because there is a shortage of muscularity and expertise and yet there's an excess of capital.
So you have all these people that want to build beautiful homes, remodel them, and yet they're dealing with people whom they usually don't associate with, and they don't understand, and they pay an arm and a leg. Some of the cost is just three or four times higher than it is here.
But a society that doesn't have common sense or practicality is in big trouble.

I'm just thinking of that.

One of the reasons foreign observers in World War II thought that the United States won

is because of mechanics.

And there were a lot of Germans who said, you know,

we are a society of ranked expertise where the average German youth did not take apart a car.

And so when... of ranked expertise where the average German youth did not take apart a car.
And that affects designers as well. So when a Tiger or Panther tank was disabled, say the transmission blew out, they took that and put it on a rail car back to the factory.
And they had precise specs. When a Sherman tank's engine went out, a truck drove up with another one, and half the people in the tank rule of five knew how to change an engine.
They grew up taking apart cars in the Depression. And the same thing with weapons.
So one of the reasons that the American army was so good is that we had this huge body of young men who in the Depression had made do with fixing things and they could fix anything. So when they got to Normandy, especially Omaha Beach, more than all the other beach, they had not anticipated, the elite had not, that there was the bocage or the hedgerows, even though they had known about World War I.
And they went into it, and they started taking enormous casualties until a sergeant and others knew how to weld, said, look, all those obstacles on Omaha Beach, that asparagus, the sharp pieces of metal, why don't we cut them up into spikes and weld them to a Sherman tank, and instead of going over the top and exposing the unarmored belly to a Panzerfowl's, we could just scoop right through the hill that separated these one acre and just not only go through the hedgerows, but dump that dirt on Germans who are in foxholes waiting to shoot up at us as we go over. And that was repeated hundreds of times over on things.
That the Allies, but especially the American soldier, was very pragmatic and practical. Many of them had grown up on farms or they had worked in factories and they knew about mechanics.

They knew about guns.

They all had grown up with philons.

Same thing was true in World War I.

That reminded me of the Apollo movie where they had to,

I forget which one, you know,

how do we rig up the oxygen system with the sock and, you know, these parts, and they figured it out? I wonder if that could be done today. I don't think it can.
I don't know. I'm kind of worried about that because when I had driven my wife's Tesla, I'll go out there one morning and I'll have a software update, you know, automatically that overnight and that the instrumentation panel changes.
And I don't know the first thing about it. I don't even think you can change the tire because there's no spare tires.
So I'm at mercy of a simple Borg somewhere that issues, you know. And even today, my Ram pickup,

I drove a Ram pickup in 2000.

I had a six-cylinder slant six.

I think I could fix, I mean,

I took the generator out once and fixed the brushes

and I could do basic things.

When I pick up that hood,

it looks like spaghetti underneath. I don't think I could fix anything things.
When I pick up that hood, it looks like spaghetti underneath.

I don't think I could fix anything. It's so sophisticated.
And the computer and all of that. And I think that's happening to all of us in every aspect of our lives.
The complexity for minimal improvement. But the complexity of machines means that we're helpless.
I think, I mean, I still have my great-grandfather and grandfather's horse collars here. And there's some old horseshoes and some reins, but I have no idea.
When I grew up, my grandfather, he tried to teach us how to, we learned how to saddle horses and ride them, but he had an old little wagon on how to do that.

My Swedish grandfather.

But I couldn't do that.

You know, the National Geographic Cable Network has these shows, Life Under Zero, about folks living, you know, up in Alaska and how they are great improvisers. I find it greatly appealing for the reasons you're discussing, that they're able to take the few things they have and fix things and make things go and make them work and survive.
When I hadn't known, literally, we had dryers, and I would always buy a Kenmore Simple Dryer, Model 1, and the bearings would go out. I would just go get another one and a use.
There's a place in a place in Fresno you could buy a use and I would just go in there and ask for a motor and then if the belt broke. I was looking at the dryer the other day.
I couldn't do that today. It's too sophisticated.
Yeah, yeah. It's in it.
It's all done by microchips and everything. Well, hey folks, we're going to talk about, or Victor's going to talk about, something he's written.
But before that, I want you to consider checking out Victor's website, TheBladeOfPerseus, VictorHanson.com. Why? Because, well, if you enjoy what Victor writes and the wisdom he shares, you need to go there.
So what are you going to find there? His weekly essay for American Greatness, his weekly syndicated column, links to his books, links to his various appearances on other podcasts and shows, the archives of these podcasts, ultra articles, and the ultra video. So two times a week, Victor writes articles exclusively for The Blade of Perseus, and he does a video that's exclusive there.
To access them, to read them, to watch them, you need to subscribe. So it's $6.50 a month, and that's discounted for $65 for the full year.
Check it out. The Blade of Perseus, victorhanson.com is the address.
And while we're giving out addresses, Victor on X is, his handle is at VD Hanson. And Victor often writes a long piece.
I'm going to say once a week, but practically on X and on Facebook. If you're on Facebook, there's VDH's Morning Cup.
And what else? Oh, there's the Victor Davis Hanson Fan Club. Great group of people, about 60,000 people or so.
So join it. Victor, you've written a piece for Mosaic.
I never heard of Mosaic until I saw this the other day. You actually, on X, you reposted or shared the link to this article you wrote.
It's titled, What We Have Forgotten About War. And this was in response to, I'm just going to call a guy named Ran Barat, who was sharply critical of Israel's actions against Hamas, can you tell us what did he say and what did you say in response in your piece? Well, he wrote a very – Mosaic is the – it's a magazine that's put out under the auspices of the Heretok Foundation.
And our mutual friend, Neil Cazadoy, was the editor for years. Okay.
I think Jonathan Silver is known. But it's kind of like tablet magazines.
They emphasize or focus on issues of concern about Israel or Jewish Americans or Judaism worldwide. And he wrote this essay, of which they're asking a number of historians to comment because it's very controversial.

And he said, basically, to sum it up in a minute,

it says, don't get too invulant and don't get too excited.

Yes, the IDF was brilliant in decapitizing the hierarchy

of the Hamas and Hezbollah

and getting rid of Iranian surrogates.

And yes, they're much better off.

But why were they surprised on October 7th? Why was that barrier so flimsy? Why did they have to wait weeks until they had a viable operational plan?

Why have they not been able to translate tactical or operational brilliance into final strategic resolutions, such as why hasn't Iran or Hezbollah just said, we give up, we're done, you win. And he gives a number of reasons.
And I'm not as critical as the idea, but I agree with it. I think it's a brilliant essay that he wrote.
And some of it is new, and some of it is just... So what are just...
Not to attribute to them, but why is Afghanistan not working? Why didn't it work? Or why did we win World War II, but we couldn't win Korea? Or we couldn't win Vietnam? Or we can't translate what our brilliant soldiers do at Benghazi into anything remote like a victory in Libya. Why did everybody run from Afghanistan? And, of course, people will say it's nuclear weapons before 1945 or between 1945 and 1949 when America alone had the nuclear weapons.
Before 1945, or between 1945 and 1949, when America alone had the nuclear bomb, then there was no worry about blowing up the world. But once the Soviet Union got a bomb, and then China got a bomb, France got a bomb, Britain got a bomb, China, India has a bomb, There's too many, North Korea, and any particular war that involves a client of a superpower can descend into a nuclear standoff.
That's the typical. Mr.
Ron says, no, no, no, no, you're too paranoid about that. Very rarely is there really a credible threat that somebody would risk deterrence.
And in most of the cases that we've seen in the last 70 years, that hasn't even come close. That was one of his odds.
Another is that in the West, in this therapeutic, materially comfortable, leisured society, people are becoming more and more divorced from the elements of life. Food, hunger, scarcity, and more, as we talked about, utopian.
And they do believe that war is an ossified concept that belongs in our past. We don't need to study it.
We're going to eliminate it. Human nature, in other words, is malleable.
With enough money or education, we can change who we are. And so when we see wars, we think, oh, Hamas isn't really that bad.
The people, it's just misunderstood. Or if we let the Gulf states come in and pour money in there, or why would we let Israel defeat them and kill people and go tell them, you're going to have to give up or else? That is so yesterday.
That's one reason. Another reason.
Another is that societies themselves in the West are so sophisticated and so therapeutic, they believe that they're not capable of exercising force that kills people and that people, as we see with Alvin Bragg or Chessia Boudin or George Scott, people are really not culpable. Just as people say, well, critical legal theory postulates in California, if a guy goes in and steals sneakers and they trash a sneaker store and there's a law against it and you want to put him in prison for it, it's only because the people who are millionaires don't steal sneakers.
So they made a law that said, thou shalt not steal sneakers because they don't have to. That's critical legal theory of character, but there's something to that character.
So in this way of thinking, we don't really have to fight wars. It's just something that we're beyond that.
And we don't want to apply force

because it would reflect badly on us, not in our name, not in our name, not in our name. And then

associated with that is, well, the people of Gaza didn't do this on October 7th. They're not.

The people in the hospital had no idea there was a headquarters of a mosque underneath it.

The mosque had no idea that they were storing RPGs in one of their basements. The school teacher didn't have any idea that Hamas commandants were meeting down the hall from him.
Or, well, there might have been one or two tag-alongs on October 7th, but the people of Gaza didn't support that. Or when they brought the bodies back and crowds tried to dismember or spit on corpses.
Well, that was just a few. And therefore, if you have that idea that there is no such thing as collective culpability, which war is about, then you try to fight war in that context.
Well, maybe if we made predators and we just went out and took out individuals, you just take out the people responsible, not the people of the society at large. So if you're going to go into Gaza, you need to go target people with drone strikes, and that will stop it.
That will stop it, because the people didn't do it. And these are the misconceptions about war that lead to it actually being kind of amoral, because it never ends.
It just keeps going on and on and on, whereas, you know, Douglas MacArthur or Patton, there is no substitute for victory. And what was the classical antithesis to that? When you're in a war, to the extent you can, you try to defeat the enemy as quickly and as overwhelmingly and as disproportionately as possible.
You try to humiliate its leadership, civilian and military, and you make its population concede, or what Sherman said, we make Georgia how? H-O-W-L. And then you make them sign terms that change the political structure so they don't do that, i.e.
the Confederacy, i.e. Germany, Japan, Italy.
But you don't go into Iraq and try to rebuild it and make it a democracy when the people and the culture are not defeated. They have no sense that you're going to defeat them.
So you put the proverbial cart before the board. So that's what the essay was about.
My only criticism in it was, well, what was the alternative? I needed to hear an alternative. So you're an Israeli and you say, you know what? What was the alternative? What if there were not these limitations? I also said fertility, which I mentioned earlier.
If you have one child or you're with a declining birth rate, you're worried about losing your only child in a war. And without a draft, there's fewer people in a war, too.
So people can... They're disconnected of what's actually going on.
But let's say that he was right, and you did everything he wanted. So everybody listening, this is what he would do.
He doesn't really explicitly say that. I wish he did, but it's clear enough, and he's intellectually honest enough, that if you read this critique of the IDF and the Netanyahu government, and by the way, he's also saying the United States is constraining Israel and preventing strategic resolution.
And that's true. But what if Israel did everything he wanted? What would it look like today? Okay, let's start with Hamas.
Hamas did this. They go back in immediately, not three weeks later, and they use overwhelming force.
Somebody says, how much more overwhelming could they be? Well, if somebody goes into a hospital and they're killing people from a hospital, then you bomb, you warn them like we did with leaflets, and then you go to it. There is no Philadelphia court, or you go through the whole country.
And then you occupy the country and you say, this is the way it's going to be. And you pick leaders who are anti-Hammals.
And you're there long enough, like we were in Japan or Italy or Germany, that when the Hamas people try to kill the people who don't, then you kill Hamas. And then you rebuild it only after you defeated it.
Okay, how about Iran? Well, Iran has attacked you with 500 projectiles. So the United States said, we don't really want you to reply, but kind of, sort of, if you did.
Think about it this way, Israel. Of the 500 cruise missiles and drones and hypersonic, I don't know, only 10 hit you.
So you have to reward their incompetence, not their intention. The results, they weren't that bad.
I know they wanted to wipe you off the face of the earth, but you can't go down to their level. He says, yes, you do.
So what you do is you hit back and you take out all the nuclear facilities, all of their military bases, and you bomb Karg Island so they don't get any, and that would take you about two weeks, 300 planes day after day after day, and then you hold public opinion and you say what you're going to do. Same thing with Hezbollah.
You have the walkie-talkies, you have the pagers, you went in and destroyed their ability, but then you go in and you go after the entire enclave of Hezbollah and you kill them or get them out of the country. And then you tell the Lebanese government, if they come back, we are holding you collectively responsible, just like we did in Japan and just like we did in Hamburg and Dresden, if you want to go down that route.
And therefore, you have strategic resolution and you don't have a war like we haven't had a war in 70 years with Germany or Italy. Yeah, that's what he's talking about.
But there are danger. I'm not going to say this is the correct.
I'm just in the essay. It has to assume that somebody won't nuke you, that Iran won't say if you if you hit our nuclear facilities, China or Russia is going to stand in here.
We have two nuclear weapons that we hit and we're going to hit Israel. Or you think you can do that? CNN and MSNBC, when you hit a hospital where a bunch of Hamas people were underneath and a heart patient gets blown up, we're going to broadcast that.
So you can see how, anyway, that's what the essay and my response were about. Well, thanks, Victor.
We have time for one more topic and I'd like to get your take on mercy-killing euthanasia craze in Canada. It's just what a crazy-ass place, and we'll get to that when we come back from these final important messages.
We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show, recording on Sunday, the 19th of January. This episode is up on Thursday, January 23rd.
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So, Victor, I sent you a note ahead of the show. If Canada becomes the 51st state, can we name it Kevorkia? Wesley Smith, who's been just a terrific writer, he's been covering euthanasia as an issue for years and other topics.
And he reports on that. This is, What a country.
Canada has had at least 15,000 people die in 2023 with the last data set. But if you, some provinces did not report the data.
So if you extrapolate for the whole population, it's over 28,000 Canadians died waiting for health care. And this is Canada's vaunted health care system.
We should be replicating Canada's health care, shouldn't we? So 28,000 people died waiting for heart surgery, et cetera. Meanwhile, 15,000 people died from euthanasia, which is a growing craze.
And many of those people who died from euthanasia, they decided to have themselves killed because they couldn't get the heart surgery they needed, so they might as well off themselves. And the last thing is hospices in Canada that resist allowing lethal injections on site because they want to focus exclusively on proper care.
And I would say that would be like a Catholic hospice. They have now been defunded by the government, which is obsessed with the culture of death.
So this is Canada. Canadians are nice, Victor, but Canada, I don't think is nice.
Any thoughts about this as we head into the homestretch? Well, be careful. I just said that the people and its leadership are connected and bored.
So, I mean, that's like saying, well, it's 1945 and I crossed the Rhine and every German family, I haven't found one picture of Hitler yet, and they're such nice people and not one of them has any idea what went on at Altruz. I don't know.
And they're very different than they were in 1939 when I saw those newsreels where they were celebrating the destruction of Poland. So, euthanasia, talking about philology, you, you know, you means good in Greek.
And by the way, utopia doesn't mean you, good place. It's uc, not you.
It's no place. But euthanatos is the word for death.
So, supposedly good death. And it grew up.
This whole movement was a post-war movement. Largely, you can trace it, Jack, almost entirely to the advent of breathing, the ventilators and IV infusions were people who were critically ill, and there was made a prognosis that they wouldn't live, could be kept alive through the use of technology.
And then people saw their loved ones wither away. And so I'm trying to be fair-minded.
But out of that, that turned out to be kind of a small percentage. So then the good death movement said, well, everybody has a right because it's their own person to commit suicide.
And they can commit suicide when they think that there's no hope of living. Well, I think I probably know at least four people that were told they have no hope of living, and they're still alive and doing quite well.
So that's one thing. And number two, when you're told you have no hope of living, you're not as going to be as clear.
When you're sick to begin with, you might not be as clear-minded. And then number three, it's very ironic that the state that outlaws capital punishment for horrific murderers allows late-term abortion and euthanasia, which is a form of killing a human being, and not only allows it, but facilitates it.
I can't imagine it. You know, I'm 71, and when my dear mother was in perfect health, she got something called a meningioma brain tumor.
And they took it out, and they swore that it was benign, as 90% of them are. But it was one of the 10% that transformed into a malignant meningioma.
And a year later, it was everywhere in her body. Another soccer, I mean, another softball-sized brain tumor, lungs, breasts, spine.
So she wasn't going to live, but she could talk. So then the question was, what was going to happen? We didn't want her to die in a hospital, but so we brought her out to where she was born on the farm.
And then we took everybody and we divided up hours and everybody kept the, and the hospice people were wonderful. They said, your mother will not suffer if you keep the nutrition going, the IV going.

And they gave us opiates to stop the pain.

And there was a point when she couldn't talk anymore, but we kept a vigil.

I don't think that three-week period of my life was at all onerous. And I think she enjoyed it.
I don't think she suffered. But I couldn't imagine just saying, well, mom, you're not going to live, so why don't you just kill yourself? Be practical.
Yeah. Be practical.
And the same thing happened with my grandfather at Congestive Heart. I was there when he died.
The same thing happened with my daughter. I mean, they came to me and said, your daughter's had a massive stroke.
We thought we had no choice but to operate, to take this blood clot out. She cannot have blood thinner.
And it was caused by a very rare form of a virulent leukemia that came out of nowhere. And you will put her on a ventilator.
And what do you want to do? Well, it wasn't, I just said, after about a day or two, I just said, let's just take her off the ventilator, but make her comfortable. Maybe she'll snap out of it.
You know what I mean? And, or she didn't, but there was no idea that I was going to try to end that. Because after the operation, until the second stroke, she was cognizant.
And she said, you know, they said that she might be permanently paralyzed. They didn't know it was cancer.
They thought it might have been an energy at first. Right.
So she was upbeat. But my point is that it's very dangerous for humans to play God.
And this is never a static phenomenon. It always accelerates and it always accelerates in one direction.
That if you start killing people for maybe understandable grounds at the beginning, cost, family. And don't dismiss the idea that people don't have the money sometimes.
Or in our dispersed family, there's no one to care for them right and the

hospices are crowded they really are but when you start thinking like that then you allow it to go on quicker and quicker and then you do it and now that's what's happening and you get to the or willing situation where the state steps in and will not fund a hospice that won't allow that decision to be made.

And so, and then there's

the other thing as well.

I mean, if you really do believe that, if you're a pro-euthanasia people, then maybe you should just let people do that if they want to do that. If they're home and they're ill, there's mechanisms that's called a firearm or something to do it.
But it's a private But I don't think the state wants to get into it, especially a state that is facilitating this when you do have viable fetuses. They're not even fetuses.
Excuse me, I'm sorry to people. They're babies.
And there is about 10,000 of them a year that are terminated in the birth canal, or even before that, this last trimester, that would have lived outside the womb with no problem. And you allow that, or you allow that killing of a fetus, but then you also say that life is so sacred that this man, like Joe Biden, he just commuted the death sentence of somebody who just barbarically butchered a police officer.
And I don't understand the consistency or the continuity of these people that are making these decisions on the left. Euthanasia, good.
Radical abortion to the moment of birth, good. Capital punishment, bad.
I want to save the life of someone who's murdered barbarically someone, but I want to kill an innocent baby, allow that to happen, and I want somebody who is ill to be killed before their natural death sequence. Well, Victor, it's...
There's also a big difference. There's a big difference between people.
This is what... So I had a father who had a heart attack and a stroke.
And it was very clear to me that although he'd been fine the day before, when he went in the hospital, we took him in the ambulance. He was in four hours, he was comical.
I didn't know how long he was going to live, but I knew he was not going to wake up. But the point I'm making is he died within 48 hours.
So if there's a very poor family and somebody is brain dead and is shriveling before their eyes and they've been on this vigil month after month, that's one thing, but that's not the course. We have so lowered the bar.
We're making people who get a diagnosis of a fatal, you have pancreatic cancer. And then they think about that, but they don't know what life would be like the last month or two or three.
And you can see where it's leading in dystopian novels. an Orwell or an Atlas Huxley novel where people voluntarily say, you know, we have, well, maybe you can, is this so hard to think of, Jack? our society, our global village says, you know, there's 7 billion people on the planet and we

have figured out how much

consumption you do each year

and there's not enough resources

for you people from 74 to 85. You're consuming more than you produce.
And you're taking too many people to take care of you. So we suggest that when you hit the critical mark of all of your talents versus what you take out of a society you should

kill yourself i think that's the ultimate something between logan's run and uh soylent green you know and and um just let's look at china which is an upside down pyramid of demography and and euthanasia is going to be a a massive way of some societies dealing uh with their elderly it's so funny if they i mean if you think somebody is not is going to live and take too many of you so that's what you still cedars yeah you can have robotics right i I mean, what banks are doing that in Japan in Japan. I think it's an individual choice, and the state should keep out of it.
I really do. I know religion has a...
I had another member of my family. I won't describe them very much.
I disagreed. He got a very close, and I have to be very careful because I don't want to embarrass people who might be listening.
But it was an awful in my family, and he had emphysema. Very bad.
He was a heavy smoker. He was 78.
And for about a year, he was struggling with it. but he was not near the point of death.
And they called me. I was the only person.

And the neighbor called me.

He lived about three miles from me.

And he said, you have to come here immediately. Something's terribly happened to your uncle.
And I went in and he had shot himself with a shotgun. Oh, gosh.
And I identified and called the ambulance. But that was his decision to make.
You know what I mean? I disagree with it. I thought that people around him enjoyed his presence, his wit.
But I didn't understand what he was coping with, the pain, financial. I think in his case, he was afraid that he would consume all of his heart, all of the family's money if he was in the long term he wanted to make sure that his two children would have an inheritance so he my point is I didn't that's a little different than you can condemn that or you can understand it but it's not the state is what I'm getting at.
Right, right. The state's got to keep out of it.
State's making it a virtue. It's a matter of a person's individual decision and their religious doctrine and what they believe in.
We all have a soul. We came in.
It's a Socratic idea that you all have a soul, as Socrates says, and you don't want to damage it.

Because the soul is like a song and it comes alive with the body.

Just because you destroy a violin or you destroy a piano doesn't mean the song they play vanishes.

It only comes alive when it has a musical instrument. but that doesn't mean that the song doesn't exist.
We come alive, our souls do, when we have a physical body. But when the physical body is gone, it doesn't mean there was nothing there to animate it.
I think my soul, in that case, may be a kazoo or a ukulele. Mine is a very, very broken down trumpet or something.
No, it's not. No, it's not.
Vicki, you've been terrific. Hey, two things.
I write Civil Thoughts, the free weekly email newsletter for the Center for Civil Society, which is determined to strengthen civil society. It comes out every Friday.
It's free. It's free.
No risk. We're not selling your name.
What do you get when you open it up or your inbox? Well, there's 14 recommended readings of great articles I've come across, interesting articles the previous week. I'm going to have Victor's Mosaic piece in the next one.
So go to civiltoughts.com and sign up for that. Many people have, and they do enjoy it.
So thanks for that. And thanks to the folks who on Apple follow this show and take the time to rate the show, zero to five stars.
7,000 plus people have done that. The rating average is 4.9.
High five for Victor Davis Hanson. Some people take the time to write comments.
Here's one. We read them all, by the way.
Crystal Pistol 17 writes, hooray for Victor. I'll begin by sharing my sentiments that Victor and his co-host Sammy and Jack are brilliant.
I don't know about that. Sammy, yes.
I try and make a point to listen to every episode as I'm always learning something new. As simple as this may sound, I thoroughly enjoy the impressions and silly voices.
Victor sometimes does. Makes me giggle every time.
Sometimes it's the simple things that can brighten someone's day. Thank you, pistol 17 i agree with you totally victor was a comedian uh in his previous life i just come out of an academic conference and there was a person next to you not next i won't identify the location but wow you know is my seminal work maybe you're unaware but I just detour, and I always do this with their hands.
And these are little verbs. These are quotes.
And this word resolution was thoroughly discussed in an earlier paper that I wrote when I was on a sabbatical at Oxford. But that followed from my seminal year at Princeton with this idea.
You're thinking, man, got five minutes. This is going to go on and on and on.
And wow, I would just like to continue before I began by finishing in the middle. I don't know.
Lots of drips. Lots of drips in academia.
Yep. Well, Victor, you've been terrific.
thanks for all the wisdom you shared today thank you folks for listening and we will be I can never get that right I gotta find a new way to end it we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show thank you and goodbye thanks everyone are you a yo-yo dieter? You diet, lose weight, but gain it all back plus a few extra pounds. Then later you lose it and regain it again and again.
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