Sovereignty and the Face of Deterrence

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Speaker 2 Hello, ladies. Hello, gentlemen.
This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show. I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

Speaker 2 You're here to listen to the star and namesake Victor Davis Hansen, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

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We are recording on Sunday, the 19th of January.

Speaker 2 Here I am in Milford, Connecticut. The skies are great.
It's going to start snowing here. Victor, we're going to get about five inches.
You're out there in sunny California. Yes.

Speaker 2 And far from a lot of people worried. Is Victor safe? I mean, Victor is Victor's not safe from the tax collectors and the garbage dumpers.

Speaker 3 You're right.

Speaker 2 Safe from the Palisades fires, but otherwise tormented like every other resident of that great state is.

Speaker 2 This particular episode will be up on January 23rd. So America will be in the process of being made great again.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 he may be Secretary of State now by the time we're speaking.

Speaker 2 I don't know when the confirmation vote is going to happen, but Marco Rubio, whose opening statement in his confirmation hearing, I think, was pretty important.

Speaker 2 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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Speaker 2 We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Victor, I'm going to do what so many of our listeners like

Speaker 2 talk.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 a free half out of chaos without blowing the whole process without blowing the whole to pieces in the process.

Speaker 2 Rubio continues, at the end of World War II, the United States was, in the words of then Secretary Acheson,

Speaker 2 I just read that,

Speaker 2 in the decades that followed, the global order they created served us well.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And ultimately, a wall in Berlin came down, and with it, an evil empire.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 This wasn't just a fantasy, it was a dangerous delusion. So says Marco Rubio.
Victor, what are your thoughts on Marco Rubio and

Speaker 2 the Rubio doctrine? Maybe there isn't a Rubio doctrine yet. Sounds like there should be one.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And it's expressed or reified, as everybody knows, with the International Criminal Court, with the Paris Climate Accord.

Speaker 3 And the idea is that the collective body of nations has interest and wisdom that supersede ours.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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 Philis Hunter's laptop was

Speaker 3 watching this information and what was it, Jack? 100

Speaker 3 State Department officials just wrote and said Twump was gamed. It's this idea that you give up your personal freedom and constitutional rights to a world body of experts.

Speaker 3 And the problem with it, to be frank, is that these people are not experts.

Speaker 3 They're only degreed. They're certified, but they're not experts.
And we've seen what people from the IV League have done in the last four years. And then, number two,

Speaker 3 these people are anti-American in the sense that they don't have a constitution like ours. We got to remember that we're a multiracial democracy.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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 to come back to Japan because they define a citizen as someone who looks Japanese.

Speaker 3 Most countries in the world do.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 a year.

Speaker 3 people make the next false step that we're already connected, so why don't we have a world body of experts?

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 post-Cold War product that all of the existential problems are over with.

Speaker 3 And so

Speaker 3 we all agree that I guess we would call consumer market capitalist

Speaker 3 governments or the norm. I don't think everybody believes that at all.
I think there there are

Speaker 3 180 nations, I think, in the UN or something along that. Only half of them claim to be democratic anymore.

Speaker 3 Democratic governments are losing the resident.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 companion Calvary to Persian women.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 we were going to make a new Hellenistic world.

Speaker 3 That didn't last very long.

Speaker 3 And then after World War I, we had, we know who they come from, Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations, the Versailles Treaty, Wilson Francis in after the war in January 1919.

Speaker 3 I won the war by deciding with my

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And then we have the League of Nations, you know how that went with

Speaker 3 everybody. And then we did it again with the League of Nations, FDR.

Speaker 3 And it just keeps going. And then now we have Davos.

Speaker 3 So I don't think Trump's going to go to Davos if he ever did.

Speaker 2 Davos may come to Mar-a-Lago.

Speaker 2 The rest of the

Speaker 3 very dangerous concept to give up any thread of U.S. sovereignty.
Paris climate accords, we got out, Biden put us right back in. And

Speaker 3 what do they do?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And yet they're scared to death. of ever telling qi that you you know you're a polluter they will and they

Speaker 3 And they're worse than that. Now they're telling the underdeveloped countries, oh, please like us.

Speaker 3 Oh, you want five trillion dollars in transfers because we had the industrial revolution and we've been polluting longer than you do, did. And so that's what they're doing now.

Speaker 3 And you want to say back to them, okay,

Speaker 3 there's more carbon emissions here in California or

Speaker 3 New York than there is, I don't know, in Mozambique, but you people in Mozambique use stuff that is created elsewhere, and we don't, basically.

Speaker 3 It's from the westernized world that builds radios and computers and cars and tires and chemicals and the westernized world. And that requires more energy.

Speaker 3 So if we all want to be pastoral, like the Morgenthau plan after World War II, go to it.

Speaker 2 Well, it's dangerous.

Speaker 3 I'm really, Rubio was really

Speaker 3 gradually but sincerely

Speaker 3 transformed from a Trump 2016 primary opponent where they each filleried each other

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 We will pick the time and occasion. I think people should just finally, if you go back when Charles Kruttheimer,

Speaker 3 it 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.

Speaker 3 And he wrote kind of a manifesto, if you remember it, but it was a long essay where he said, the United States is not neoconserved nation building. It's not isolationist.
It shall pick and choose.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Sometimes we didn't listen to that, but that's, I think, what Trump's foreign policy is going to be.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I love that Rubio is

Speaker 2 a foe,

Speaker 2 I think it's fair to be a foe, of China and has been for quite a while and vocalism.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 They've declared him for solo non grata.

Speaker 2 I'm glad you mentioned essentially the 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

Speaker 2 tweeted about, if we can still use tweeted as a verb.

Speaker 2 The Republicans,

Speaker 2 Liz Cheney and others,

Speaker 2 I forget how many there were, about 100 who back in

Speaker 2 October or September, came out and endorsed Kamala Harris. And many of these people were foreign policy types.

Speaker 2 What did they expect a Harris foreign policy

Speaker 2 was going to be? How did these self-described conservative Republicans think the world was going to,

Speaker 2 how did they envision the world under her leadership?

Speaker 3 It's

Speaker 3 still warped.

Speaker 3 They believe that

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 So that's our idea.

Speaker 3 So that type of worldview gets 13 people killed for no reason in 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.

Speaker 3 and thinks they'll get away with it, Hezbollah. And then you have a Chinese balloon, a Chinese dressing down, Lincoln and Sullivan, and Anchorage, Alaska.

Speaker 3 So I wish it wasn't that way, but human nature is unchanging.

Speaker 3 And when you get progressives in power, and they feel the world works like the academic lounge, you know what I mean, or academic faculty meeting.

Speaker 3 And by the way, I've been to about a thousand academic faculty meetings, and never have so much anger been expressed and such ruthlessness over

Speaker 3 such small stakes.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 that's how they envision the world.

Speaker 3 And the antithesis to it is Teddy Roosevelt, keep quiet, carry a big stick, get a Vegetas, the great Roman military writer, anybody, prepare for war to ensure peace.

Speaker 3 If you want peace, prepare for war. And that was Ronald Reagan, peace through strength.

Speaker 3 deterrence. I would just

Speaker 3 give credit to a very brilliant guy, Jack. His name is Jeffrey Blaney.
And he's a, I think he's in his 90s now.

Speaker 3 I met him when I was toured Australia once, but he wrote a very underappreciated but brilliant book called The Causes of War.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 War is like a laboratory experiment that finishes. So when you look at all these different

Speaker 3 players in the world, it's very important that you have information about the relative strength and intention of each one.

Speaker 3 And if you do, then you can deter them or make the necessary adjustments with alliances. However,

Speaker 3 if you're not candid about your real strength or weakness, then you can be misled.

Speaker 3 So, in World War II, to take his example and give you a concrete example, looking back,

Speaker 3 when I finished the Second World War, one of the things I kept thinking was, what was Hitler thinking about? What was Mussolini thinking about? What was Japan thinking about?

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 Well, what were they 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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 manpower

Speaker 3 material to destroy you very quickly. So, what Blaney 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.

Speaker 3 We're producing a plane an hour.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 We don't want to, so don't. But we didn't give that message.
So they made an ignorant decision.

Speaker 3 So it's very important right now to take that thesis and say to China, yes, we had Biden, and yes, Lee was a bumbling fool,

Speaker 3 and yes, we were disgraced in Afghanistan, but those are aberrations. We have this amount of nuclear weapons.
We have hypersonic.

Speaker 3 We, we, we, and we have to to do that so they don't do something stupid. And the same thing with the Soviet, with Russia and Ukraine.
If we are much more powerful than Putin, but if you tell Putin,

Speaker 3 oh, you can go into,

Speaker 3 oh, you went into a seisha 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.

Speaker 3 Oh, you had cyber attacks on us. So Joe told you, knock that off, Vladimir.
Oh, you suspended offensive weapons.

Speaker 3 So he got the impression out of ignorance that the United States was weak and wouldn't do anything.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And if you're spending money on DEI

Speaker 3 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 Biden.

Speaker 2 well victor um before we go on to talk about elites i just want to let our listeners listeners know that i have a great movie for you the new heart-pounding military thriller valiant one has everything you need in a movie with tensions high between north and south korea a u.s military helicopter crashes deep in north korean territory with the platoon leader dead and no rescue coming young sergeant edward brockman must find a way to get the survivors back to safety He must rise to the challenge to lead his team on a daring escape through treacherous and hostile territory with enemy soldiers in hot pursuit.

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Speaker 2 And we thank the good people from Valiant One for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Victor, I do like these Trapped Behind Enemy Line movies.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It's one of the Pressburger, one of the original Archers movies, and I'll send you a link to it. Folks,

Speaker 3 remember 30 Seconds Over Tokyo when they crash land and they have to get back?

Speaker 2 Yeah, with Van Heflin and Van Johnson, I mean.

Speaker 2 Van Heflin. Yeah, great movie.
Oh, my gosh, that's a terrific movie. Hey,

Speaker 2 what were we going to talk about? Oh, the elites. Yes, elites.
So, Victor,

Speaker 2 gosh, I want to ask you a million

Speaker 2 World War II questions after what you just raised. But let me ask you one before we get

Speaker 2 to the elites. I mean, France was

Speaker 2 the more powerful army than Germany, France, England combined. So there is something to Hitler in moving ahead

Speaker 2 based on the lack of courage. But maybe if he had just stopped there, right? And maybe the additional stupidity was...

Speaker 3 France had never allowed the Germans more than 80 miles into French territory in World War I.

Speaker 3 So they had a reputation for deterrence. And then

Speaker 3 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 off.

Speaker 3 But they built the Maginal line, which, by the way, the Germans really didn't go through.

Speaker 3 They did have Army Group C or D, I mean, south, that went through it, but that was only after the north had fallen.

Speaker 3 But my point point is this: they had a three-million-person army in 1940 that they went to De Went, I think it's called

Speaker 3 DeWant.

Speaker 3 Aircraft fighter was better than the 109. Even the Shar V tank was much better than the Mark II or III German tanks.

Speaker 3 They had a bigger army, and Germany had lost almost 20,000 soldiers dead, another 30,000 wounded, taking Poland.

Speaker 3 But my point is this:

Speaker 3 they had been part of the effort to appease Hitler at Munich. And Hitler had said of Chamberlain, after Chamberlain gave him Czechoslovakia, and he had said nothing about the Anschluss,

Speaker 3 the Rhineland militarization. He said, I saw them at Munich and they are warms.
I'd like to take that stupid little umbrella and beat him with it.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Germany had conveyed the message, even though we were the losers, that was an aberration. We wanted to rectify that decision.

Speaker 3 So what that meant in actuality is although France had a huge army, they were all deployed with a defensive mentality, whether in the Magnal line or the majority of them up near the Belgian border.

Speaker 3 They were told, we are reactive, we do not

Speaker 3 conduct offensive operations. When Germany went into Poland on September 1st of 1939, they went in it from East Prussia, Germany, and the Subetin land, occupied Czech state, and they were naked.

Speaker 3 They had almost nobody. And here he had this huge French army and they invaded.
They went into the Saarland and there was nobody there.

Speaker 3 They could have gone on the way to Berlin, but they went in about 20 miles. They took a couple of prisoners, oh my God, we're in Germany.
That would be kind of provocative. Let's get out.

Speaker 3 And so if you don't want to fight and you convey that

Speaker 3 Tom Sowell if you look at some of his books he 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

Speaker 3 slogan or motto of Verdun

Speaker 3 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 frigate.

Speaker 2 Really?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 So he, yes, he was successful. He had invasion.
He invaded nine countries, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Belgium, Belgium, France, Greece, Yugoslavia.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 He didn't understand the British people. He didn't understand strategic bombing.
And

Speaker 3 it was downhill from him. He could not defeat Britain, even though all of the present European Union by that time

Speaker 3 was in his hands.

Speaker 3 So had Britain and France just made it clear that they had the capability to stop Hitler? He would have never started.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 I call him We Willie Bill Crystal, but on X, he posted something referring to a podcast or piece in the Bulwark,

Speaker 2 the TDS website of

Speaker 2 Never Really Were Conservatives,

Speaker 2 Crystal 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.

Speaker 2 Of course, they think they're the elites. Maybe they are by,

Speaker 2 so was Anthony Fauci. But

Speaker 2 Crystal's quote, every era, he's quoting, excuse me, Last and whoever he was on the show with, did the elites really really fail us?

Speaker 2 Every era has both good and bad, but I'd say that the elites of the last 50 years

Speaker 2 shepherded us through an era that was at least as good and maybe substantially better than anything we've seen for almost two centuries.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But any thought on that, the elites loving the elites?

Speaker 3 Well, I mean, they have not been able to

Speaker 3 turn the operational brilliance of the rank-and-file American soldier into strategic resolution.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 It was the best and brightest, as David Halbertson, one of them, even admitted and wrote a book about it.

Speaker 3 We did not

Speaker 3 win in Afghanistan or Iraq. Maybe Iraq we did some better, but whether and the cost of benefit, and looking back, perhaps it wasn't why.
I don't know what we did in Syria and Libya,

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 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 IV League degree, very impressive in repartee talking.

Speaker 3 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 IV League degrees, their European universities in some cases.

Speaker 3 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 of the 50 years,

Speaker 3 where do they see

Speaker 3 leadership as exercised by traditional elites as as successful Anthony Fauci,

Speaker 3 Francis Collins at NIH, maybe Peter Desik, who was just barred for five years from Echo Health, from having, for lying and create helping to create this virus that killed 50 million people.

Speaker 3 The Pentagon,

Speaker 3 do we have,

Speaker 3 I don't think we're deterring anybody.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 policy and the deal with Obama. Obama himself, he's got, he and Michelle,

Speaker 3 they've got Ivy League creds.

Speaker 3 And where is it? So I don't think it's the elite who's... The good life that we have for the most part is

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And so I don't know where they get that idea that they're so self-congratulatory.

Speaker 3 Did they craft SpaceX?

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 Well, I use Amazon a lot.

Speaker 3 I don't think that Jeff Bezos represents the elite, the multi-generational, credentialed bicosto elite.

Speaker 3 Elon Musk, I use X.

Speaker 3 I don't know. My wife has a Tesla.

Speaker 2 Did that Starlink?

Speaker 2 Yeah, Starlink.

Speaker 3 I'm doing right now on Starlink out in the middle of the country. The other...

Speaker 3 access I had to the internet was slow. I couldn't do this without Starlink.

Speaker 3 So I'm just trying to think.

Speaker 3 I got two bouts, one for a year and one for four months of long COVID. That was due to an elite

Speaker 3 that cooked that up, gain of function research and the expertise and money and instrumentation we sent to the Wuhan mob.

Speaker 3 Peter Dosek was helpful with that. So was Anthony Fauci.
So was Francis Collins. When I look at high-speed radio, that was an elite concept.
I don't think it's very successful.

Speaker 3 And on the other hand, when I go out the door and I walk over an almond orchard that has gone

Speaker 3 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 Encampos who did that.

Speaker 3 When I

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 ranch and hotel and

Speaker 3 farming operation. I just don't see it.
I don't know what on grounds what they're talking about. Is it in our,

Speaker 3 I think Bill Crystal is in his early 70s, maybe 70. What does he look around right now that is the product of the elite?

Speaker 3 Can he think of a great elite novel that somebody wrote? A great elite

Speaker 3 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,

Speaker 3 but

Speaker 3 you know, when you look at Gene Hackman or Michael Caine and all these people, they were not elites.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And the things that they have given us, Jack, that are exclusively the product of elites,

Speaker 3 the modern university, Stanford, Ivy League, I've seen it. It's a disaster.
It practices institutionalized racism. It's mediocre.

Speaker 3 80% of the people at Yale or Stanford get AIDS.

Speaker 3 When I look at

Speaker 3 the government, HHS, so

Speaker 3 I don't know, I don't see a lot of brilliant people lending the government.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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,

Speaker 3 Henry

Speaker 3 Huntington or

Speaker 3 Stanford,

Speaker 3 etc.,

Speaker 3 Crocker, they were not, they were started from very meager circumstances.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 But once they saw that he had broad experience and yet he knew them because he went to Yale Law School and he knew tech, they hated him.

Speaker 3 But the reason that he was slaying all of these media dragons all summer long wasn't because he went to Yale Law School.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 I remember talking to two or three elites where I work and they said, oh man,

Speaker 3 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 from Ohio. There's no advantage there.
Point taken, point taken.

Speaker 3 And all I said was, well, I've talked to him a couple of times. He's a master debater.
He's got a photographic memory.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And he's got a brilliant wife with a wall. 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.

Speaker 3 And the people in the media are going to hate him, and he's going to make them look stupid.

Speaker 3 And it did happen, though.

Speaker 2 He did. He did indeed.

Speaker 3 So I'm not impressed. I'm not, you know, I was taught by

Speaker 3 it's funny, all the great classicists that I know,

Speaker 3 personally,

Speaker 3 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, or they were widely experienced.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 I can just name three.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 There really was a Troy, there was a Mycenae.

Speaker 3 And then

Speaker 3 you look at somebody like Michael Vintras, who did show you that Linear B was Greek.

Speaker 3 and was the language of

Speaker 3 the

Speaker 3 Mycenaean citadels and the alphabet had changed during the Dark Ages. When it was invented, it was a Phoenician alphabet, but it was used for a Greek pre-existing language.

Speaker 3 So a linear B script, an alpha to omega alphabet are the same language. Everybody thought that was crazy.
And he brought, you know, he was a cryptologist in World War II.

Speaker 2 You could even...

Speaker 3 Millman Perry was an academic, but he was an apostate. People hated him when he said that the Iliad and and the Odyssey were composed orally by memory through the techniques of memorization and

Speaker 3 epithets, type scenes. Everybody thought he was crazy.
So I think that's true of every few. They really do.

Speaker 3 The people who really do things are not part of the elite consensus.

Speaker 3 Because the elite consensus, by definition,

Speaker 3 focuses on

Speaker 3 certificates,

Speaker 3 certification, not branding performance, branding.

Speaker 3 And that's why it's dangerous.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And you've written a piece about war for Mosaic that addresses Israel and Gaza and Hamas.

Speaker 2 And I think we'll have we'll also get to some culture war matters, and we'll do all that when we come back from these important messages.

Speaker 2 And we are back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Again, we're recording on Sunday, the 19th,

Speaker 2 and this actual episode will be up on the 23rd, day two or three of

Speaker 2 America Being Made Great Again by

Speaker 2 Trump 47.

Speaker 2 And Victor and the great Sammy Wink will be discussing the first days of this presidency,

Speaker 2 round two,

Speaker 2 on tomorrow's Victor Davis Hansen Show podcast. So

Speaker 2 Victor,

Speaker 2 what was I going to tell you? Oh, yeah, yeah,

Speaker 2 on Gen Z. Here's a poll.
Oh, my gosh.

Speaker 3 I'm not going to believe this, but go ahead.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 can cry about strict workplace mores 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.

Speaker 2 The ability to do basic practical tasks is being lost amongst the

Speaker 2 younger generations, warned Andy Tuberfield of Halfords, a UK-based motoring and cycling retailer.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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 ziers on average spend over fifteen hundred dollars a year hiring professionals to knock out basic household chores victor i know a lot of people don't even don't well they know how to turn on a light switch uh but they don't know how to start a lawnmower or they or which end of a chainsaw to hold, which is a lot more difficult than changing a light bulb.

Speaker 2 Victor, your thoughts on this

Speaker 2 very troubling trend, I think. It is.

Speaker 3 It explains certain things, though.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 the world, I felt that they had been shorted.

Speaker 3 We didn't, I didn't teach them how to, I mean, they were not taught by my brother how to weld, or they were not taught,

Speaker 3 but they did did everything else. So chainsaw,

Speaker 3 even the, you know, engines, operating tractors, discs, spring tooth, spray rigs, spraying roundup. They understood all that.

Speaker 3 So, but they left out knowing less than I did.

Speaker 3 And I knew less than my father did.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 when they went out in the world, people were just astounded. I've had so many people say, wow, your son can do anything.

Speaker 3 And I said, Really? They said, Yes,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And so we're getting, and then this risk aversion. I don't know where risk aversion historically originates in societies

Speaker 3 that only have one child, for example.

Speaker 3 People, they dote on one child, and if you lose your child, I know people have done research that shows that as the fertility rate declines, nations become less adventurous.

Speaker 3 Maybe this will happen to China, that they won't be so bellicose because they're a nation of one

Speaker 3 child.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 the end of days collapse. And you can see,

Speaker 3 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 right

Speaker 3 the just

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 What I would like to see is instead of camp sat camps, you know, know, take your kid goes to sat camp, why don't they have a survival camp where a young boy, let's say he's 10 years old, he goes up in a nice camp, but instead of learning how to,

Speaker 3 you know, do

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Why not just do that with our children so they're aware of the real world?

Speaker 3 And it's also very important sociologically because when you have the

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 you 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.

Speaker 3 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 but they don't understand and they pay an arm and a leg.

Speaker 3 Some of the cost is just three or four times higher than it is here.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 expertise. where the average German youth did not take apart a car.

Speaker 3 And so when, and they design, that affects designers as well. So

Speaker 3 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 German tank's engine went out,

Speaker 3 a truck drove up with another one, and half the people in the tank crew of five knew how to change an engine. They grew up taking apart cars in the Depression.
And the same thing with weapons.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 with fixing things and they could fix anything so when they got to

Speaker 3 normandy especially norm uh omaha beach more than all the other beach they had not anticipated the elite had not that there was the Boccage or the hedgerows, even though they had known about World War I.

Speaker 3 And they went into it and they started taking enormous casualties until a sergeant and others who 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 German tank?

Speaker 3 And instead of going over the top and exposing the unarmored belly to panzer fouls, we could just scoop right through the hill that separated these one acre and just not only

Speaker 3 go go through the hedgerows, but dumped that dirt on Germans who are in foxholes waiting to shoot up at us as we go over.

Speaker 3 And that was repeated hundreds of times over on things.

Speaker 3 That the Allies, but especially the American soldier, was very pragmatic and practical.

Speaker 3 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 firearms.

Speaker 3 Same thing was true in World War I.

Speaker 2 Victor, that reminded me of

Speaker 2 the Apollo movie where they had to,

Speaker 2 I forget which one, you know,

Speaker 2 how do we rig up the oxygen system with the sock and these parts? And they figured it out.

Speaker 2 I wonder if that can be done today.

Speaker 3 I don't think it can.

Speaker 3 I don't know. I'm kind of worried about that because

Speaker 3 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 over the night, and the instrumentation panel changes.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 So I'm at the mercy of a simple bork somewhere that issues, you know. And even today,

Speaker 3 my RAM pickup, I drove a RAM pickup in 2000.

Speaker 3 I had a six-cylinder slant six. I think I could fix,

Speaker 3 I mean, I took the generator out once and fixed the brushes, and I could do basic things.

Speaker 3 When I pick up that hood, it looks like spaghetti underneath. I don't think I could fix anything.
It's so sophisticated in the computer and all of that.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 2 And I think,

Speaker 3 I mean, I still have my great-grandfather and grandfather's horse collars here,

Speaker 3 and there's some old horseshoes and some reins, but I have no idea.

Speaker 3 When I grew up, my grandfather, he tried to teach us how to, we learned how to saddle horses and drive them, but he had an old little wagon and how to do that, my Swedish grandfather.

Speaker 3 But I couldn't do that now.

Speaker 2 You know, the National Geographic Cable Network has these shows life under zero about folks living you know up in alaska

Speaker 2 and how they are great improvisers i find it greatly appealing for the reasons you know you're discussing that they 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 you know model one and then the bearings would go out i would just go get another one of the use.

Speaker 3 You know, there's a place in Fresno you could buy it used, and I would just go in there and ask for a motor. And then, if the belt broke,

Speaker 3 I was looking at the dryer the other day. I couldn't do that today.
It's too sophisticated. Yeah.

Speaker 3 It's all done by microchips and everything.

Speaker 2 Well, hey, folks, we're going to

Speaker 2 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, The Blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.
Why?

Speaker 2 Because, well, if you enjoy what Victor writes and the wisdom he shares,

Speaker 2 you need to go there. So what are you going to find there?

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 video. So two times a week, Victor writes articles exclusively for the Blade of Perseus, and he does a video that's exclusive there.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 The Blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com is the address. And while we're giving out addresses, Victor on X is his handle is at

Speaker 2 V D Hansen. And Victor often writes a long piece,

Speaker 2 I'm going to say once a week, but practically, on

Speaker 2 X and on Facebook. If you're on Facebook, there's VDH's Morning Cup.
And what else? Oh, there's the Victor Davis Hansen Fan Club. Great group of people, about 60,000 people or so.
So join it.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 shared the link to this article you wrote. It's titled, What We Have Forgotten About War.
And this was in response to,

Speaker 2 I'm just going to call a guy named Ran Baratz, 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 book?

Speaker 3 Well, he wrote a very mosaic is the

Speaker 3 magazine that's put out under the auspices of the Heritop Foundation. And our mutual friend Neil Kazadoy was the editor for years.

Speaker 3 I think Jonathan Silver is now.

Speaker 3 But it's kind of like tablet magazine.

Speaker 3 They emphasize their focus on issues of concern about Israel or Jewish Americans or Judaism worldwide.

Speaker 3 And he wrote this essay, of which they're asking a number of historians to comment, because it's very controversial.

Speaker 3 And he said, basically, to sum it up in a minute, says, don't get too ibulent and don't get too excited.

Speaker 3 Yes, the IDF was brilliant in decapitating the hierarchy of the Hamas and Hezbollah and getting rid of Iranian surrogates. And yes, they're much better off.
But

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 tactical or operational

Speaker 3 brilliance into final strategic resolutions, such as why hasn't Iran or Hezbollah just said, we give up, we're done, you win.

Speaker 3 And he gives a number of reasons.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 So, what are just not to attribute to the Indian, but why

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 Or we can't translate what our brilliant soldiers do at Benghazi into anything remote like a victory in Libya.

Speaker 3 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 bomb, then

Speaker 3 there was no worry about blowing up the world. But once the Soviet Union got a bomb, and then China got a bomb,

Speaker 3 France got a bomb, Britain got a bomb,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 That's a typical.

Speaker 3 Mr.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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 art.
Another is that in the West, in this therapeutic, materially

Speaker 3 comfortable, leisured society, people are becoming more and more divorced from the elements of life, food, hunger,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 The people,

Speaker 3 it's just misunderstood.

Speaker 3 Would 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.

Speaker 3 That's one reason, another reason. Another is that

Speaker 3 societies themselves in the West are so sophisticated

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 so therapeutic,

Speaker 3 they believe that they're not capable of exercising force that kills people, and that people,

Speaker 3 as we see with Alvin Bragg or Chessee Boudin, or George Scott, people are really not culpable. Just as people say,

Speaker 3 well, critical legal theory postulates in California, if a guy goes in and steals sneakers and they trash a sneaker store,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 So they made a law that said, thou shalt not steal sneakers, because they don't have to. That's critical legal theory character, but there's something to that character.
So in this way of thinking,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And then associated with that is,

Speaker 3 well,

Speaker 3 The people of Gaza didn't do this on October 7th. They're not.

Speaker 3 The people in the hospital had no idea there was a headquarters of Hamas underneath it.

Speaker 3 The mosque had no idea that they were storing

Speaker 3 RPGs in one of their basements. The school teacher didn't have any idea that Hamas commandants were meeting down the hall from him.

Speaker 3 Or, well, there might have been one or two tag-alongs on October 7th, but the people of Gaza didn't support that.

Speaker 3 Or when they brought the bodies back and crowds tried to dismember or spit on corpses. Well, that was just a few.

Speaker 3 And therefore, if you have that idea that there is no such thing as collective culpability, which war is about,

Speaker 3 then

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 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...

Speaker 3 you know, Douglas MacArthur or Patton, there is no substitute for victory. And what was the classical antithesis to that?

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 h-o-w-l-

Speaker 3 and then you

Speaker 3 make them sign terms that change the political structure so they don't do that, i.e. the Confederacy, i.e., Germany, Japan, Italy.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 So you put the proverbial cart before the board. So that's what the essay was about.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 What if there were not these limitations? I also said fertility, which I mentioned earlier.

Speaker 3 If you have one child or you're with a declining birth rate, you're worried about losing your only child in a war.

Speaker 3 So, and without a draft, there's fewer people in a war, too. So people can't

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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,

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 3 What would it look like today? Okay, let's start with Hamas.

Speaker 3 Hamas did this. They go back in immediately, not three weeks later, and they use overwhelming force.
Somebody's going to say, well, how much more overwhelming could they be?

Speaker 3 Well, if somebody goes into a hospital and they're killing people from a hospital, then

Speaker 3 you warn them like we did with leaflets, and then you go to it. There is no Philadelphia corridor.
You go through the whole country.

Speaker 3 And then you occupy the country and you say, this is the way it's going to be.

Speaker 3 And you pick leaders who are anti-Hamas 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

Speaker 3 and then you rebuild it only after you defeated it okay how about Iran

Speaker 3 well Iran has attacked you with 500 projectiles so when the United States said we don't we don't really want you to reply, but kind of sort of if you did

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And that would take you about two weeks, 300 planes day after day after day.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 But then you go in and you go after the entire enclave of Hezbollah

Speaker 3 and you kill them or get them out of the country.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And therefore you have strategic resolution and you don't have a war like

Speaker 3 we haven't had a war in 70 years with Germany or Italy.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's what he's talking about.

Speaker 3 But there are danger. I'm not going to say this is the correct, I'm just in the essay,

Speaker 3 it has to assume that somebody won't nuke you, that Iran won't say,

Speaker 3 if you hit our nuclear facilities, China or Russia is going to stand in here, or we have two nuclear weapons that we hid, and we're going to hit Israel with. Or

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 you can see how, anyway, that's what the essay and my response were about.

Speaker 2 Well, thanks, Victor. We have time for one more topic, and

Speaker 2 I'd like to get your take on

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show recording on Sunday, the 19th of January. This episode is up on Thursday, January 23rd.

Speaker 2 The mothership for the Victor Davis Hansen Show

Speaker 2 podcast is John Solomon's Just the News. Go to justthenews.com.
And the podcast is now also being recorded on video. And if you are interested in that, you can go to Rumble.

Speaker 2 And the address is too long.

Speaker 2 The Victor Davis-Hanson show

Speaker 2 is now on Rumble. So, Victor,

Speaker 2 I had I sent you a note ahead of the show. If Canada becomes the 51st state, can we name it Cavorkia?

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 has had at least 15,000 people die in 2023 with the last data set.

Speaker 2 But if you some

Speaker 2 provinces did not report the data, so if you extrapolate for the whole population, it's over 28,000 Canadians died waiting for healthcare. And this is Canada's vaunted healthcare system.

Speaker 2 We should be replicating Canada's health care, shouldn't we? So 28,000 people died waiting for

Speaker 2 heart surgery, et cetera. Meanwhile, 15,000 people died from euthanasia, which is a growing crazy.
And many of those people who died from euthanasia

Speaker 2 decided to

Speaker 2 have themselves killed because they couldn't get the heart surgery they needed, so they might as well off themselves.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 They have now been defunded by the government, which is obsessed with the culture of death. So

Speaker 2 this is Canada. Canadians are nice, Victor, but Canada, I don't think, is nice.

Speaker 2 Any thoughts about this as we head into the home stretch?

Speaker 3 Well, be careful. I just said that the people and its leadership are connected in war.

Speaker 3 So, I mean, that's like saying,

Speaker 3 well, it's 1945 and I crossed the Rhine. And every German family, I haven't found one picture of Hitler yet.
And

Speaker 3 they're such nice people, and not one of them has any idea what went on at Auschwitz.

Speaker 3 No.

Speaker 3 And they're very different than they were in 1939 when I saw those newsreels where they were celebrating the destruction of Poland.

Speaker 3 So,

Speaker 3 euthanasia,

Speaker 3 talking about philology, you, you know, you took

Speaker 3 you means good in Greek. And by the way, utopia doesn't mean you, good place, it's ook, not you, it's no place.

Speaker 3 But a eu thanatos

Speaker 3 is the word for death, so a good, 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

Speaker 3 breathing, the ventilators and

Speaker 3 IV infusions where people

Speaker 3 who were critically ill and there was made a prognosis that they wouldn't live,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 But out of that, that turned out to be kind of a small small percentage. So then the good death movement said, well, everybody has a right because it's their own person to commit suicide.

Speaker 3 And they can commit suicide when they think that there's no hope of living.

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 I think I probably know at least four people that were told they have no hope of living, and they're still alive.

Speaker 3 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 as

Speaker 3 when you're sick to begin with, you might not be as clear-minded. And then, number three,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 I can't imagine it.

Speaker 3 I'm 71, and when my dear mother was in perfect health, she got something called a meningioma brain tumor.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And a year later, it was everywhere in her body.

Speaker 3 Another suffer, I mean, another softball-sized brain tumor, lungs, breasts,

Speaker 3 spine.

Speaker 3 So she wasn't going to live, but she could talk. So then the question was, what was going to happen?

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 kept the and the hospice, the hospice people were wonderful they said your your mother will not suffer if you

Speaker 3 keep the nutrition going the 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

Speaker 3 And I think she enjoyed it.

Speaker 3 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?

Speaker 2 Be practical. Yeah.

Speaker 3 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,

Speaker 3 your daughter's had a massive stroke.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 you will put her on a ventilator and

Speaker 3 what do you want to do?

Speaker 3 Well it wasn't

Speaker 3 I just said after about a day or two I just said let's just take off the ventilator, but make her comfortable. Maybe she'll snap out of it.
Do you know what I mean?

Speaker 3 And or she didn't, but there was no idea that I was going to try to end that, or she would, because after the operation, until the second stroke, she was cognizant.

Speaker 3 And she said, you know, they said that she only could, she might be permanently paralyzed. They didn't know it was cancer, they thought it might have been energy at first.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 3 So she was up beat.

Speaker 3 But my point is that it's very dangerous for humans to play God.

Speaker 3 And this is never a static phenomenon. It always accelerates, and it always accelerates in one direction.
That if you start killing people

Speaker 3 for maybe understandable grounds, at the beginning, cost family,

Speaker 3 and don't dismiss the idea that people don't have the money sometimes, or there's in our dispersed family, there's no one to care for them.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And you get to the Orwellian situation where the state steps in and will not fund a hospice that won't allow that decision to be made.

Speaker 3 And so,

Speaker 3 and then there's the other thing is as well. I mean,

Speaker 3 if you really do believe that, if you're a pro-euthanasia people, then

Speaker 3 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, it's called a firearm or something to do it.

Speaker 3 But it's a private, I don't think the state wants to get into it, especially a state

Speaker 3 that is facilitating this

Speaker 3 when you do have

Speaker 2 viable fetuses.

Speaker 3 They're not even fetuses, excuse me, I'm sorry to people, they're babies.

Speaker 3 And there is about 10,000 of them a year that are terminated in the birth canal or even before that, that's last trimester, that would have lived outside the womb with no problem.

Speaker 3 And you allow that? Are you

Speaker 3 allow that killing of a fetus, but then you also say that life is so sacred that this man, like Joe Biden,

Speaker 3 he just commuted the death sentence of somebody who just barbarically butchered a police officer?

Speaker 3 And I don't understand the consistency or the continuity of these people that are making these decisions on the left. Euthanasia, good.

Speaker 3 Radical abortion to the moment of birth,

Speaker 3 good.

Speaker 3 Capital punishment, bad.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And I want somebody who is ill to be killed before their natural death sequence.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 Victor, it's that. There's also

Speaker 3 one thing, there's also a big difference. There's a big difference between people.

Speaker 3 This is what so I had a father who had a heart attack and a stroke, and it was very clear to me that

Speaker 3 although he'd been fine the day before, when he went in the hospital, we took him in the ambulance. He was

Speaker 3 in

Speaker 3 four hours he was comatose. I didn't know how long he was going to live,

Speaker 3 but I knew he was not going to wake up but the point I'm making is he died within 48 hours so

Speaker 3 if there's a very poor family and somebody is brain dead and has 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 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.

Speaker 3 And then they think about that,

Speaker 3 but

Speaker 3 they don't know what life would be like the last month or two or three.

Speaker 3 And you can see where it's leading in dystopian novels. An Orwell or

Speaker 3 an Atlas Huxley novel where people voluntarily say, you know,

Speaker 3 we have,

Speaker 3 well, maybe you can, is this so hard to think of, Jack? Our society or global village says, you know, there's seven billion people on the planet.

Speaker 3 We have figured out how much consumption you do each year, and there's not enough resources for you people from 74 to 85.

Speaker 3 You're consuming more than you produce, and you're taking too many people to take care of you.

Speaker 3 So we suggest that when you hit the critical mark of all of your talents versus what you take out of the society, you should kill yourself. I think

Speaker 3 that's the ultimate.

Speaker 2 Something between Logan's Run and Soil and Green, you know, and

Speaker 2 just let's look at China, which is an upside-down pyramid of demography and

Speaker 2 euthanasia

Speaker 2 is going to be

Speaker 2 a massive way of some societies dealing

Speaker 2 with their elderly.

Speaker 3 It's so funny if they, I mean, if you think somebody is going to live and take too many miscellaneous, that's what that is.

Speaker 2 Useless eaters.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you can have robotics, right? I mean robotics are doing that in Japan.

Speaker 3 I think it's an individual choice and the state should keep out of it. I really do.

Speaker 3 I mean I know religion has a I had another member of my family, I won't describe them very much.

Speaker 3 I disagree. He got a

Speaker 3 very close, and I have to be very careful because it's I don't want to embarrass people who might be listening who,

Speaker 3 but it was an uncle of my family and he had emphysema, very bad. He was a heavy smoker.
He was 78,

Speaker 3 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,

Speaker 3 and they said the neighbor called me. He lived about three miles from me, and he said, You have to come here immediately.
Something's terrible. He happened to your uncle.

Speaker 3 And I went in, and he had shot himself with a shotgun.

Speaker 2 Oh, gosh.

Speaker 3 And I identified and called the ambulance. But

Speaker 3 that was his decision to make. You know what I mean? I disagreed with it.
I thought that people around him enjoyed his presence, his wit.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 all of his hard, all of the family's money if he was in the long term. And he wanted to make sure that his two children would have an inheritance.
So he,

Speaker 3 yeah.

Speaker 2 But my point is, I didn't,

Speaker 3 that's a little different

Speaker 3 than you can condemn that, or you can understand it, but it's not the state, is what I'm getting from

Speaker 3 the state's got to keep out of it.

Speaker 2 State's a matter of virtue.

Speaker 3 It's a matter of a person's individual decision and their

Speaker 3 religious doctrine and what they believe in. We all have a soul.
We came in.

Speaker 3 It's a Socratic idea that that you all have a soul as Socrates says and you don't want to damage it

Speaker 3 Because the soul is like a song and it comes alive with the body. That's just because

Speaker 3 you destroy a violin or you destroy a piano doesn't mean the song they played vanishes. It only comes alive when it has a

Speaker 3 musical instrument, but that doesn't mean that the song doesn't exist.

Speaker 3 We come alive, our souls do, when we have have a physical body. But when the physical body is gone, it doesn't mean there was nothing there to animate us.

Speaker 2 I think my soul, in that case, may be a kazoo or a ukulele.

Speaker 3 Mine is a very, very broken down plummet or something.

Speaker 2 No, it's not. No, it's not.
Vicky,

Speaker 2 you've been terrific.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 No risk. We're not selling your name.
What do you get when you open it up or your inbox?

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 go to civilthoughts.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

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 High five for Victor Davis Hansen. Some people take the time to write comments.
Here's one.

Speaker 2 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-hosts, Sammy and Jack, are brilliant. I don't know about that.

Speaker 2 But Sammy, yes. I try and make a point to listen to every episode as I'm always learning something new.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Thank you, Crystal Pistol 17. I agree with you totally.
Victor was a comedian in his previous life.

Speaker 3 I've just come out of an academic conference, and there was a person next to me. Not next, I won't identify the location, but Jack.

Speaker 3 Wow, you know, it was my seminal work. Maybe you're unaware, but I just detour, and then they always do this with their hands.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 like, these are little birds.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And 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, but by finishing in the middle.

Speaker 3 I don't know, man.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 we will be...

Speaker 2 I can never get that right. I got to find a new way to end it.
We will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Thank you, and goodbye.

Speaker 3 Thanks, everyone.