The New Middle East, Trumpian Lingo, and Manhood Redefined

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Safeguard your wealth, protect your future while there's still time. Hello, ladies.
Hello, gentlemen. Welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
I'm Jack Fowler, the host. You're here to listen to the star namesake.
That's Victor Davis Hanson, who is the Martin and Healy Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. He's also the proprietor of a website, The Blade of Perseus.
Its address is victorhanson.com. I'll tell you why later in this episode.
Well, I think you should be a subscriber to that great website. We are recording on Saturday, the 28th of December, but this episode will be up on Thursday, January 2nd, 2025.
So we will say Happy New Year, and we will begin this. Hopefully it will be a great year.
I have a feeling, Victor, it might be great for America and troubling for other countries as they come to grips with ideology. But we've got a lot of interesting things to talk about.
Some of them are things from 2024 and 2023, of course, and I think we'll begin the show, Victor, by talking about UCLA and how it seems to have gotten off the hook from the Biden administration for its antics, antics is the wrong word, for the terrible way the administration at that school handled the riots, the anti-Semitic riots from last year. We've also have, you know what, tomorrow will be the 100th anniversary of an infamous speech by Benito Mussolini, which drove him to power, and we should get your reflections as a military historian and a historian about Il Duce and plenty of other things we'll raise.
And we'll get to all of this, Victor, when we come back from these very important messages. We'll be back to our show in just a moment.
But first, an important message for anyone concerned about their financial future. Have you seen the headlines? The Department of Government Efficiency has uncovered a staggering $115 billion in government fraud with investigators suggesting this is just the tip of the iceberg.
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Protect what you've earned before the fraud economy collapses completely. we're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
Happy New Year,

my friend. I'd like to begin this with two, getting your take on two related stories,

if I could only find my paperwork. Here we go.
You know, some people, Victor, there have been

some comments about my heavy breathing and my shuffling of papers. You're sure it's not me? No, I think it's me.
I think it's me. I try to mute myself.
Not enough. Hey, here's a Washington Free Beacon report.
Biden admin lets UC, the University of California, off the hook. Settles civil rights complaints alleging discrimination against Jews.
President Joe Biden's Department of Education reached an agreement with the University of California system to settle civil rights complaints that alleged widespread discrimination against Jewish students. To do so, the university system agreed to develop voluntary campus quote-unquote climate surveys and take other underwhelming measures in the agreement released Friday, that would have been December 27th.
University leaders made no admission of wrongdoing. Instead, they agreed to provide training to campus police officers and employees responsible for investigating complaints and other reports of discrimination.
Almost done here. They also agreed to create a plan to work with respective campuses to develop climate surveys, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
What a lot of crap, Victor. Your thoughts? They're going to be, that's not going to happen under the Trump administration.
The people that have been mentioned, I won't mention their names for the undersecretaries, the Department of Education, NEA, NEH, all of that stuff. They're not going to tolerate that.
And remember what we do, Jack.

No college president, when they see this anti-Semitic epidemic, ever says, ever says, we've got to be careful and stop this anti-Semitism. They say, we have to stop hate, and we're going to be very tough on anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.
Even though when you look at federal hate crime statistics, half of them are directed at Jews. I guess what's happened on the campus is all of the leftist binaries, these Marxist binaries, victim, victimizer, oppress, oppressors, settler, imperialist, indigenous, they all work against Jewish people.
So what the left does is they say settler people are colonial people, and they're in places where they don't belong. Therefore, Israel is a colonial.
And we reject the 3,500-year history of the Jewish people longer in the Holy Land. And in this mindset, if you are an indigenous Berber, let's say, in Tunisia or Libya,

and the influx of Arab Islamic peoples in the 7th and 8th century, that's okay. You're not, you know what I mean, you're an indigenous person.
If you say that Arabs and Muslims did not come into what is now Israel until the collapse of Byzantine control of the Middle East over a long period of the late 7th, 8th, 9th centuries, and that that was one of many waves. That doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter because, you see, Jewish people are wealthy, they're powerful, that's what they think, and they are unique in the Middle East. It's the weirdest thing in the world.
You can say, as Edward Said did, you can jiggle supposed keys in your house in Jerusalem and say you're a refugee 50 years later. But don't dare do that if you're Jewish and say, I lost my 300-year home in old Cairo or Damascus or Amman.
You had no right to be there as a Jew. That's an Arab country, but Arabs have a right to be in your country, Israel, Jews.
Or you can't say, I went to ask a person when I was walking across campus in October, I really wanted to engage in a conversation with one of the demonstrators. So I said, well, you know, there's two million Arab citizens.
He said, well, they're second class citizens. I said, I don't want to debate that.
I don't think they are. But can I ask you a question? If you were Jewish and you said that you sympathize with the, you know, the West Bank and you want to become a citizen of the West Bank and your family want to, you're not going to be settlers and enclaves, you want to just go buy property in downtown Amman.
I don't mean Amman, but downtown Jericho or Gaza City. Would you be fully, no, no, of course not.
I mean, he was admitted then. So nothing is ever reciprocal.
And under this binary of white, bad, and people of color, good, Jews were resented because of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism. And people said, this isn't right.
They're not victims. They're victimizers because they're white.

They're victimizers.

And then they got away with that

because the people who were mostly showing this hatred toward Jews

were in the same victimized category.

So if you were Arab American, if you were Muslim,

if you were Jesse Jackson and said, hi, me, town,

if you were Al Sharpton and said, get your Yarmouk on and come over here. If you were Reverend Wright and said, Dim Jews.
If you were Farrakhan and said, It's a gutter religion. I could go on forever.
That was okay because you're a victim yourself. So you would say, as soon as you were caught chasing Jews into a library or roughing up Jews or claiming that you wanted another Holocaust or yelling, then you just said, I'm a victim.
I'm Muslim. I'm a victim of Islamophobia.
And because by nature a college president, not all of them, some of the college presidents, Jack, are like French. When you see a conservative French intellectual or a conservative college president, they're the best of all people because they take on everybody and they live in a hostile climate and yet they don't compromise their views.
Pierre Menard, for example. Yes.
Yes. So, but most of college presidents are invertebrates and they feel they just do the math, and they think, you know what? The Jewish population is down to 7 or 8 percent.
We lump them in with white. We went into repertory admissions here at Stanford.
We only let in 28 percent of the incoming class was whites. Jews are now only 7 or 8 percent.
We're letting in a quarter million people from the Middle East. The Middle East governments are giving as much money now as Jewish philanthropists.
I just don't think it's a, I'm not going to go out on a limb. And the whole third world, left-wing, we know all the left-wing faculty are anti-Semites.
They hate Israel. And they can get away with it.
As long as they just say, the college president's attitude is, the subtext is, I don't know if they communicate that. They wouldn't be so foolish to be explicit, but their message is to the faculty and the students.
It's okay to hate Jews, and it's okay to be anti-Semitic, but you've got to understand something. You've got to have a victim card.
When you do that, you've got to say that we are suffering from Islamophobia. You can do that.
Or you can say that you're really not hating Jews, but you only hate Israel. But it would be better for me as a college president if you just said Netanyahu.
So when you're chasing

Jews down but you only hate Israel. But it would be better for me as a college president if you just said Netanyahu.
So when you're chasing Jews down and you're roughing them up and you're calling them names, you're tearing down pictures of the hostages, you're telling them to go to one side of the room, just say it's all about Netanyahu. But don't mention Jewish.
Don't say that. And then you're home free.
And that's what the rule is. The colonialist tag on Jews.
Settlers. They're trying to evoke the white settler coming in out west and taking the Native Americans land.
That's what they're trying to do. But it could have a short shelf life.
You were a Jew, a European Jew who survived the Holocaust and went back to your apartment in Berlin or wherever, do you think you got your apartment back? No. Or possessions that governments took.
David Price Jones, our friend. No.
They would say, S.H., something happens. Sorry.
Right. Especially if George Soros sold your family furniture when he was a young entrepreneur during the Holocaust.
Yeah, you weren't getting it back. But, geez, I had it five years ago, six years ago.
Tough noogies. No, it's only on the Middle East because of the Jews, because if you're a Cypriot and you say, you know what, you're never going to get back Bela Pais.
20% of the Turkish population is now 35%, and that's gone. Just get over it.
If you're a German, there is no such thing as Konigsberg. It's Kalengrad forever.
You understand that? It's never going to be Danzig. It's Gdansk.
That's Poland. We gave you a quarter of Germany.
It's gone. If you're a Jew and you say you want to go back and live in Beirut like you did in your great, great, great, no, no, no.
It's not yours. There's no such thing.
However, if your grandfather lived in quote, unquote, Palestine, then you have a right right now of return. And that's just crazy.
And we do that because of terrorism. We used to do it because of the American president or American intellectual would just tick it off, Jackie, go.
Population, 500 million Muslims, Middle East Jews, 11 million. Money-wise, Jewish people are very successful.
If they don't have the petrol wealth of the Gulf, say, ding. Terrorism, there's no Jewish terrorism they're going to hijack, kill ambassadors, hijack planes, you know, paint graffiti all over a veterans cemetery, shut down the Manhattan Ridge, ding! And so that's what they did.
And the college president was emblematic of that. I get to my office every morning, what do I not have to worry about? I do not have to worry about a bunch of Jewish students rushing in here and thrashing it.
I do not have to worry about a bunch of Jewish students disrupting class. I do not have to worry about terrorism.
The Jewish students at Stanford or Harvard are not going to go out and shut down a bridge unless they're doing it for a Palestinian question. So I make the necessary adjustments, and I will react to where my greatest exposure and worry about my own job are.
I'm not calling for Jewish people to emulate the tactics. because I'm just calling for a little bit of honesty on the part of the college president, our politicians, Joe Biden.
It really wasn't, if you think about it, until Bill Ackman and people like him said, there's going to be no more money, no more money to subsidize people who hate me. I'm not going to do it anymore.
And that was hard to do because most of the Jewish American philanthropy money was on the left. So at first they said, well, he's just a nut.
All our left-wing donors have the money. But now they're worried.
And so they're starting to mouth nostrums or mouth that they're fair. But I don't know what it is.
It just, you can't, I've had so many arguments. I'm 71 and I think I've had 100 arguments with friends, family about Israel and the asymmetrical treatment that it's shown in Netanyahu.
There's been three great men this year.

Donald Trump's comeback is the greatest comeback in the history of politics,

greater than Bill Clinton's primary comeback,

greater, I think it's greater than Harry Truman's comeback in 1948,

and greater than Richard Nixon, you know, from 1962, humiliation in California to be president in 1968. And then there's Elon Musk.
And the idea that he went into Pennsylvania, helped registered voters, went out, campaigned, used his money. He kind of nullified or neutered Mark Zuckerberg's 2020 gift.
And at the same time he was doing that, he had this brilliant X, this brilliant Tesla, this brilliant SpaceX. And the third person was Netanyahu.
He said, everybody blames me for October 7th. There was an intelligence fault, but I was at fault too.
We should have been more vigilant. We should have had a more realistic appraisal.
Just give me a chance, and I will wage war on our enemies. And do not believe that Hezbollah is invulnerable.
Do not believe that Iran, you can't treat Iran as an existential enemy. Do not believe that we can't reach the Houthis, even if we have to refuel and go all the way down, you know, across the near the Red Sea.
And do not think that Hamas can hide under hospitals, mosques and schools and be exempt. I will do.
And he did. And he's changed forever the Middle East.
If anybody had said a year ago, hey, Benjamin Netanyahu will not schedule an election right now. He's not going to step down.
He's not a crook. He's going to do this in the next 12 months.
He is going to destroy Hezbollah as a terrorist operative. He is going to confiscate billions of dollars of weapons from Hezbollah.
He is going to destroy Hamas as a military cadre. He is going to help remove the Assad dynasty and make sure it's gone zip.
And he is going to destroy all of the air defenses of Iran, opening the way for any Western country, including Israel, who wants to take out its nuclear facilities to do so with impunity. He's going to do that all in a year.
People would have said, that's crazy. You're delusional.
That's what he did. Three great personalities, they all had comebacks.
Elon, remember a year ago, Elon's an idiot. He paid $40 billion for X.
It only has a market capitalization. Yes, and now he opened the entire social media world in a way that no one had ever imagined.
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I want to add a fourth, not necessarily.

It's not a comeback, but Malay, the president of Argentina has just done.

What a tremendous thing he's pulled off down there.

So he deserves sort of a nod.

Yeah, he does.

He deserves it.

I mean, he deserves, what was it? 140% inflation or something crazy like that? Staggering. Yeah.
Well, keeping on the topic of anti-Semitism, Victor, the New York Post has an editorial on should there be a ban on masking? And we see what happens on these campuses. Columbia, from Columbia University in New York to UCLA, California.
These riots in the streets or demonstrations in the streets. All these folks have masks on.
So here's from the editorial, the Post. It's absurd for the civil liberties crowd to oppose this ban.
No one has a First Amendment right to hide his identity while terrorizing others in an in-person public speech. And those who insist that mask masking still has some public health purposes are in denial.
Next to no one does it anymore, except some people alone in cars by themselves. I see that.
They've got Ivy League bumper stickers. But the plague hasn't remotely returned.
The nation ended racist, hood-wearing mob violence against black Americans. It must do the same to masked anti-Semitic mob violence.
Victor, I have a feeling you might agree with that. Well, I mean, the health argument breaks down.
If you were paranoid about the return of COVID or some type of virulent lethal virus, the masks are being worn are not in doctor's offices. And nobody's talking about wearing a mask if you're the dentist.
So in close quarters, in meetings, everybody knows if you want to wear a mask, go ahead.

We're talking about in the public square and almost always outside. And they have just piggy banked on two things, Jack.
They have looked at Antifa, these protesters that are pro-Hamas. They look at Antifa and they saw that these kind of this uniform of Antifa, all black pants, black hoodie, and then the mask shield them from identification.
And what are we talking about? Why? Because we live in a world where no one can get away from security cameras. And the only way you can function as a criminal is to put a mask on.
And we saw that with Mangione, Luigi. Remember that we probably would have not ever found him if he hadn't pulled that mask down because he wanted to flirt with that young woman.
And for a split second, we saw his entire face at his hostel or wherever he was staying. And so we understand that Antifa knew that.
And so their bequest to all radical groups was wear a mask. And then the radical groups piggybacked on the second legacy, and that was, of course, COVID and the quarantine.
So then they can say, well, we're just victims. So we're yelling from the, we're chasing Jews into the library and we're wearing masks because we don't want to get infected from them.
That's why we're doing it. We're worried about COVID.
And we're saying to you, no, no, no, no, no. I think they should just make a rule at every campus to start off with.
You cannot wear a mask in public. You can't.
Because you're not going to disguise your identity. And we'll see what happens.
But that's what it's all about. Everybody knows, criminologists have told us for years, that when a person wears a mask, it emboldens his behavior and he's more likely to, you know, I mean, it creates anonymity and that means that you think you can get away with something.
I never understood, though, the Middle East because when I would walk by and I'd see kids with masks on screaming, I never understood it because they were proud and they wanted to get in your face and they wanted to yell and they wanted to identify from the Middle East so you'd think they would want to be identified. But apparently they wanted their bachelor's degree or their diploma more than they wanted to be a freedom fighter, I guess.
I don't know. The only time I can see a mask in public is if you're some type of counterterrorism or countercartel and they'll go after your family or something, if you're law enforcement.
Other than that, there's no need for it. But boy, I've talked to, I know some of the bank tellers at one of the banks I go to, and they don't like it.

They really don't.

Because when they see people come in,

especially with a hoodie or some head covering and a mask,

as one woman told me, she said,

just four years ago I would have been terrified.

Right.

And now I'm supposed to not be terrified.

But it doesn't mean the same person.

There's just more people that are not bank robbers,

but that doesn't mean there's fewer bank robbers that are masked.

Right.

Well, it's not a sign of manliness to wear them either, Victor.

We're going to talk about the redefinition of manhood

in the personages of Doug Emhoff and Tim Walz as we look back on 2024. And we'll get to that right after these important messages.
We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show recording on December 28th. But this episode is the first of the new year up on January 2nd.
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I recommend you check it out if you haven't yet and to visit early and often as they vote in Chicago because you'll find links to everything Victor writes, his weekly essay at American Greatness, a weekly syndicated column, links to his various appearances on numerous podcasts and other venues, the archives of these podcasts, links to his books. And the Ultra articles, two or three times a week, Victor writes exclusively for The Blade of Perseus.
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So, Victor, I saw some, I can't find the link, but I saw some article towards the end of the year. I think, is this comical? But it was looking back at Doug Emhoff and Tim Walls were the new poster boys, what manhood was supposed to have become in 2024.
I would have thought that would have been settled by the election results in November. We have more important things to talk about, Victor, but I just wanted to check that off.
Anything you want to say about that? I didn't understand it, so I'm trying to understand it. So, as I understand, the subtext is on the left that they are rejecting traditional key man masculinity on the right.
So they don't like the Dana White, the Joe Rogan, the mixed martial arts, all of that group. They don't like bikers.
They don't like Clint Eastwood. I'm from a different generation.
That type of in-your-face masculinity. They don't like the Daniel Penny masculinity.
If you see a punk who's threatening people, you step up to protect

the weak. I don't know if they like the immigrant that just watched somebody and the people who just watched that.
I don't want to prejudge him. He just might be a pyromaniac and he can't help it.
I don't know what that means, but apparently they have an idea of a more sensitive, caring masculinity that

when you look at these real men

they look endomorphic. Endomorphic is not a slur, Jack.
It just means a body type. What, the invertebrate? Well, the posterior, yes.
It doesn't seem like there's a strong backbone physically. And maybe the, what's the word, the lower half of the anatomy is of greater size than the shoulders or something.
I don't know what, an endomorph. But my point is, Emhoff and Waltz, then they must push these buttons of, And I guess the buttons are partly they are helpers to powerful women like Kamala Harris.
Remember Waltz's wife, kind of nutty, and I think they took her off the trail. She'd get out and scream and yell.
And you got the impression that his leftward tilt, he ran as a congressional person, as a rural Clinton Democrat, and then this spouse kind of pushed him. So I guess one of the subtexts is that real masculine men cede authority or decision-making to their female spouses because they're confident in their masculinity and they don't have to have props like guns and cars.
That's part of it. The other thing must be that you have to, real masculine men are entitled to certain sins because they're not in your face.
So if you want to impregnate your nanny and arrange for her to have a child and then buy her a house and then cover it up for years, that's what a sensitive man does. Or if you want to lie about your military record serially, that's okay too because you're a sensitive male.
So one of the elements of sensitive masculinity is that while you may sin, and those are traits of the toxic masculinity, and you're trying to overcome them. So you give a press conference and say, you caught me, I tried to suppress this, but did you have an abortion? I don't want to get into the personal details.
That's a private matter. And that's what they do.
I guess what I'm saying is that they don't sin. All of their sins are washed away.
It's kind of a substitute, a surrogate Christianity, in that wokeness or sensitivity or feminism or whatever the ism is, it tells you that if you accept the tenets of belief in sensitive masculinity and you war your entire life with toxic masculinity, then as part of that penance, you're allowed these sins that are washed away. You seek cover.
You seek penance from it. And you see that all over.
Bill Clinton was a master of that. The guy was a complete serial womanizer and the most brutal and...
I said that the other day. You what so that woman you better put after you i'll say allegedly raped her because he put that was put some ice on a bitter lip in a fit of masculine passion of sensitive masculine passion he was a sensitive and then you know that if you're a sensitive man, if you're termed a sensitive man,

there's also, I'm sorry, audience, I didn't say the critical characteristic

of a sensitive man and a new masculinity is you have to support feminist issues.

Two of them, you have to be strong on trans chauvinism,

and you have to be abortion to the moment of delivery. And if you push those two buttons, you're really, really sensitive.
And that means that... And I don't know, there's a lot of people who have talked about, Elon Musk has talked about masculinity and fertility, Jordan Peterson has, but there's a lot of observers, I think, have made the point that if you want to look at a profile that threatens the United States existentially, it would be the epidemic of lonely men who have prolonged adolescence that are still in their late 20s and early 30s struggling with college debt.

I'm talking about half the population that goes to college.

But young men who are not doing what their grandfathers did, maybe some what their fathers did.

But what I mean by that is they're not getting married in their 20s or early 30s.

They're not having children in their 20s or early 30s. They're not buying a house.
And they're sort of in the cities. They're just sort of...
Once in a while they meet a very nice woman they want to marry. And the woman says, why don't you get a life? I can't marry you.
You've got to get going. 55% of bachelor's degrees go to women now, and yet we're told women are oppressed in the university.
And the PhDs, if you look at PhDs in particular things like art, history, and English literature, it's getting 50-50, if not more women. So the male, especially the white male who's not eligible for any set-aside under the old woke affirmative action and is demonized, this toxic masculinity, white privilege, prone to white rage, white supremacy.
He's been told that since kindergarten now, this generation. And he's sort of like...
Did you ever watch Game of Thrones, Jack? No, I did not. There was a character called Theon, and he was castrated.
And he becomes, they call him Reek, they destroy him. But he's suffering under all these things that he's done.
So the white young male suffers under the idea

that he is

responsible for

the internal combustion engine,

carbon imprints,

western chauvinism,

the

destruction of Native American

populations, slaveholding.

He is singled out as the person who has to make amends for that. And in this generation, and women want him to be sensitive, that means he shouldn't watch football, he shouldn't own a gun, he can't vote for Trump.
And then he's not supposed to grow up. He's not supposed to get a job.
He's not supposed to buy a starter home and then on his weekends try to remodel it. He's not supposed to have a couple of kids and take one to Little League and the other one to volleyball.
None of that. And the country as a whole looks at this fertility rate of 2.1 in 1998, and it's 1.6.
And it's shrinking. And it's because there's a whole generation of these males.
And it's not just white males, it's males in general, but particularly white males, but males in general, let's say between 22 and 40, they're just not, they're not, what's the word? They're not part of the body politic. They don't believe they have a traditional role to play.
Yeah. If you said to one of them, hey, if you said as a father or grandfather, you said to them, you got to get going, son.
Hey, you've got to plug into the system.

You've got to go get a job, get a part-time job.

Try to get a starter home.

Try to, if you can, but in their defense, it's very hard to buy a home.

Student loans plague you for years,

and you're told that if you're an electrician or a master plumber or a sheetrock installer, that that's less prestigious, even though you'll make more money. I don't know.
It's a whole range of toxicities and suffering. But we as a country, when we say we need illegal immigration at both ends to be highly skilled engineers, as we talked in the last podcast, and we don't, I think George W.
Bush said, we can't build back from the hurricane unless we have illegal immigration. He said that, George W.
We need the labor. Well, there's a lot of these young males that are not fully employed.
Why couldn't they do it? And they're traumatized for some reason. I don't know what it is.
But I see it among family. I see it among friends.
You know people, and they were very bright young men. And they got college degrees, and then it was like, okay, I did what I was supposed to do, now what? And then they kind of date.
They date for six months, a year. Sometimes they have live-ins, they break up.
Then they kind of drift for a while. But then when they get up close to the late 30s, they're kind of even done with dating.
They're just sort of, and we need them. We need to encourage them.
And we're not going to get them back in until you have role models and people say, you know what, you guys, there's nothing wrong with getting married. There's nothing wrong with having children.
There's nothing wrong with buying a house. You're not in the rat race.
You're taking control of your destiny. You're helping your country.
We need people in the military. Join the military.
We need coders.ers get your engineering degree but get on this is a new era we can do this don't worry about isms and colleges yeah you mentioned college debt victor and there are any number of factors here but that is so powerful that you would graduate with a degree that may or may not give you much chance of decent employment, and then you'd have the equivalent of a mortgage already, $120,000. I get so angry about that.
I wrote about it in the Dimes. The only thing worse than the huge college debt is the amnesties for it, because it's applied on equally.
But my whole point is that we always hear from professors, oh, we might be laid off. Ooh, there's not a job for Ph.D.
I know, I can tell you there wasn't when I got one. But my point is this.
We never say we have any responsibility for having these young kids come in and telling them to major in particular areas and then not helping them get a job or not apprising them of the cost per hour of their education. I had a lot of minority students, in fact almost all minority students, and poor people for my 20 years at Cal State.
And we had a classics program. And if you're poor or you're working class, I always had to explain to the student, you're going to spend 700 to 900 hours to learn Greek or Latin.
And it's incumbent upon me to help you. So we're going to try to use that new vocabulary and that diction and syntax to improve your written and oral language.
And that will help you in any enterprise that you want to endeavor. And then I always would say, and if you do want to continue, I will help you get into a graduate school and get a job.
And I will help you get, I will call everybody I can because I have an obligation because you, you know, you're in an area where there's not a lot of markability, supposedly. But there is a lot of markability for people who can think analytically, write well, speak well, and we're going to ensure you hit all of those requisites.
And then we just have to match you up with an employer who agrees with that. And that was about 30% of my time.
In fact, I can tell you that I spend maybe two hours a week at least with emails from the last 30 years from somebody who says, remember me, I was a student, I'm up for this, I'm that, that, that, that. But if you're going to encourage somebody to take a lot of debt and go to this college, and the college is going to take no responsibility, no college is going to say, Mr.
Smith, here's your financial package. We want you to come.
We need students. We're short.
We have faculties ready to teach. What do you want to major in? I think I'd like to be a sociologist.
Okay, sociology major. Here is the job market in four years.
Here it is in six years. Here's the compensation.
Here will be the disposable income. Here's what your loan will cost to service.
Here's the anticipated year you'll pay it off. Da, you want to do it.
We do that with cars. We do that with houses.
The bank says that when you take out a loan. How are you going to pay for it? What's your discretionary impact? What are your expenses? We never do that with students.
So they just go, da, college is the key to success. That's what my professors tell me.
It is sometimes. Sometimes it's a pathway

to prolonged adolescence into your

40s. Yeah, lifetime burden.

Well, let's change up a little

Victor, talk about a great communicator.

And that's

Donald Trump.

The fall issue of the

Claremont Review of Books,

I want to recommend it now for

four reasons. One is there's a great review of your book, The Review of Books.
I want to recommend it now for four reasons. One is

there's a great review of your

book, The End of Everything,

in this particular issue.

So,

he just high-fived

you all along the way.

It's not just book

reviews in the Claremont Review of Books.

There are essays, and this

issue has three essays, William Vogel, Charles Kessler, and Chris Caldwell. And they're talking about the 2024 elections and Trump and what's happening with the conservative movement.
Anyway, I'd like to focus on Chris Caldwell's piece, and it's about Trump talking and how different he is. I want to read this here.
You bear with me and then, Victor, comment on it or your own thoughts on how Trump conveys thoughts. Here's what Chris Caldwell writes in this essay.
Even when he is not telling an actual man-bites-dog story, Trump has a gift for making things vivid. His language has a strange, percussive beauty to it.
People who love English often remark that it is a Germanic language with, ever since the Norman Conquest, a vast store of words from the Romance languages. Crude, everyday objects have tended to keep their Germanic names, while ideas and ideologies and newfangled abstractions get introduced into the language in their romance form.
A good English prose style is generally considered to be a matter of balancing the two, but Trump is not like that. He has rightly been called materialistic in the sense that he cares about things.
His speeches concern stuff. They are therefore full of blunt Germanic words.
The only Latin word in his diatribe about Springfield was people. And that's a pretty down-to-earth word.
Trump didn't say the metropolitan area or the population or the community. No, he said the people that live there.
Trump tends to use Latin words when he is mimicking or belittling technocrats and he squeezes them into a nerdy nasal poindexter voice as when he imitated the Harris campaign spokesman who accused him of being cognitively impaired. Trump talks in a raw kind of tempo that goes well with music.
This is a fascinating article. Yeah, I read it.
It is. Anyway, your thoughts? I taught English and composition a couple of times, but I taught every year Latin composition.
And I would try to explain everybody the history of the English language, Anglo-Saxon. It was a mixture of European, Germanic languages and indigenous Anglo and Saxon languages in the British Isles.
And then the hierarchy of the Latin conquest, Latin. And so it developed a scientific, polite vocabulary that was polysyllabic and Latinate, and then a crude English monosyllabic.
And one of the examples you know is for terms that are embarrassing. So we have urination, which is a good Latin word, and piss, excuse me.
And then we have intercourse and the F word. We have defecation and the SH word.
We have, for the sexual organs, we have phallus and we have another word. And we have vagina and another word.
But the bad words are all Anglo-Saxon. And the descriptive, technical, scientific is polysyllabic and Latin.
And if you use, I was trying to explain to students, if you use too many polysyllabic Latin words, you come off as pretentious. If you use too many of the Anglo-Saxon, you don't say, I liked the Iliad.
It was a big, good story. So you want to have some, it was intriguing, it was problematic.
But if you use too many, you get too, as you said, wishy-washy.

But Trump, what I like about Christopher Caldwell is he uses that Latinate vocabulary

to actually vary his own vocabulary by attributing it to other people.

So he will quote them.

And so there is a, there's what we call variatio in Latin. But it's not him using the polysyllabic, it's him quoting it.
And you can see when somebody writes a speech, when he's talking about an issue, we're going to have a schedule of repayment for student loans and obligations. And then he'll stop the teleprompter and he'll go, big idea, got to pay the loans off.
And we were going to continue, and we can stagger these repayments. And stagger the repayments, big idea.
And he interrupts himself. What I liked, you know, there was once when he first came on the scene, I wrote an article about his tweeting.
And a guy from CNN was writing about how horrible Trump's tweets were.

And he actually showed up. I didn't want to talk to him, but he said he wanted to come to Fresno and talk to me.
So I met him in a shopping center. I didn't want him to come to my house.
I met him in a shopping center in Fresno. And he said, give me an example.
I said, okay. You ever notice when Trump would tweet, he'd say, Hillary Clinton

is a terrible crook

and Bill is just, all he likes to do is blank other women. And then he'd write, sad.
Or he'd say, the crooked Joe Biden family has got away with murder. Terrible.
Awful. He'd just have one word at the end.
And it was such a variation in sentence-linked grammar. It was really, he had a natural flair for that.
And I don't know when he developed it, because I was curious. I went back.
Have you ever seen those interviews he's done, especially with open people,

25 years ago when they asked him if he was going to run for president?

It was amazing.

It was like he was an encyclopedia of data.

I saw an interview about, he must have been 50, you know, 28 years ago.

And they said, would you ever think of political office? And he'd say, we have very asymmetrical trade, and we've got to get back to commerce. And it was just, it was authoritative.
He had authority, he had sobriety, he was full of chock full. And then he developed this other element of just, you know, as if he's talking to a cement crew on his building or something.
Yeah. And that article points that out, that he's able to...
I like what he also says when he appoints somebody or he does something and he knows that people are going to criticize a Kimberly Garfield. He always used the word highly respected.
She's highly respected among her peers. Highly respected.
Widely esteemed. And he always says this.
That's another classical rhetorical trope. It's a variation of what we call it's not variatio but it's deliberate hearsay.
And you want to get something in that's inadmissible but you can't say it yourself because it's outrageous so you have to to attribute it to somebody else, and then you're not responsible for its veracity. So whenever Trump says a controversial thing, he says, and he'll say something like, I don't know about Tim Walz.
They say it's widely reported that his military record was

suspect.

He has no respect among

his fellow

soldiers. It was

reported.

That's a classical trope.

Well, they are usually right.

Yes, he's usually right, but he attributes

the general consensus as

if he's only reluctantly disclosing this information because it's widely known, widely reported. We're going to talk about someone else who is famous for talking, bombastically anyway, in his case, and that's Benito Mussolini.
I don't think we've ever talked about Mussolini here, despite my heritage.

And we'll get to that and also talk about Germany's invasion of Russia and their uniform.

And that's how we will close out this episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

And we're going to do that when we come back from these final important messages. We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
Happy New Year to everybody. This particular episode comes out on January 2nd.
Now, on January 3rd, 1925, Benito Mussolini, a member of the Parliament, a socialist, well, he had been a socialist, but he gave a somewhat infamous talk that kind of propelled him into his status as Il Duce, the fascist leader of Italy, even though Italy still had a king. Victor Emmanuel.
Yeah. So Victor, just generally about him, you know, because Mussolini comes off in our own culture here in movies, whatever, as kind of a clown and, you know, mocked and a comical figure almost.
But I don't think he was a comical figure necessarily to Italians themselves or to the people in Libya and Ethiopia and Somalia, which were tormented by Italy. So anyway, I'm curious about a lot of any general thoughts about him.
But also as a military leader. You've got to remember, he was an editor.
He was a newspaper guy. So he could write well.
And he did interviews. And he met a variety of people, and he emulated their style, and he understood how people communicated with the public, and he was writing.
And he was a socialist communist on the left. He was actually, even though there was some question he might have evaded military service for a while, he was a wounded veteran of the Austrian Front.
So he had three days as a combat veteran fighting on the Allied side in World War I. And then he realized by the early 20s that the problem with communism was, as Hitler did, because Hitler was surrounded by Nazis who were former communists.

Even Alvin Rosenberg and Goebbels for a while had dallied with socialism, communism. It was called the National Socialist Party.
But fascism was, it squared that circle. It said that you could be a communitarian but Italian.
And so he understood that nationalism and collective pride in the country was a force multiplier of communitarianism. So he created this idea of fascism.
The fascis were these rods that were bundled together, that we're going to bundle all the ideologies and all of the ethnic, and we're going to have an Italian movement. And we're going to, as Hitler did, we're going to be the national union.
There's no reason for unions anymore, because we're going to be the bulwark or protect the common man and we're going to take the oligarchs and business people and make them serve the people, even though, of course, they were corrupt and Mussolini was corrupt. But the point was that he was going to have this nationalist movement and channel what the reason people didn't like communism and the commutern was that there was no borders and that communism was going to be it wasn't going to be nationalistic chauvinistic it was just going to be a worldwide globalist movement most people didn't want that so he in the 20s he used his military service the fact that he had been wounded his journalism experience and this new idea that Rome

will be the new center. It will be Mar Nostrum again.
The Mediterranean will be Italian. And we will re-found the Roman Empire.
And we are already half there. So we have Libya.
And we are competitors in the late 30s who are going to be the French. The French Navy is predominant.
We're going to build, he built, wow, 20, 30 cruisers, six big battleships. The Italian Navy was the second largest in the Mediterranean.
Beautifully crafted ships, beautifully crafted with no operational capacity because they had no radar. They were not able to fight at night.
They were poorly commanded, but they were like all Italian craftsmanship, very impressive. Same thing with their airplanes.
Some of them were in flight specifications and capabilities comparable to the BF-109 or the submarine Spitfire, but they were not built in quantity, and they weren't built for easy maintenance, for example. But there was an Italian genius to them.
So he thought that he, and then when the war broke, in the 30s, he went down, as you know, to Ethiopia, Somalia, and tried to— it was East Africa is basically the area, and he conquered it. And he was very brutal.
He used poison gas, killed people. And then he looked at when the war started, he thought that the British would be occupied with Hitler, and he didn't make inroads into Egypt, so he started to go into Egypt, and he didn't think under any circumstances that the British, with this huge empire, would have enough resources to devote to North Africa.
But they did. And by 1940, his reputation was ruined.
He was in retreat, and of course, Rommel came in and saved him in February, March, April of 1941, but it was right on the verge of the invasion of Russia, so Hitler didn't devote enough resources for Rommel to win. But the Italians went down to defeat with Rommel, and the Germans were wiped out.
And then he invaded, foolishly, he invaded Albania, and then on October 28th of 1940 he invaded Greece. When he told the Greeks, you have to let me in, they said, Oki, no.
There's an Oki day in Greece today. But he got bogged down in Greece and couldn't handle the Greeks.
Ferocious fighters, heroic fighters. They had natural terrain.
It was in winter. It was stupid to invade on the verge of winter.
And then Hitler had to bail him out, go into Yugoslavia, solidify his presence in Albania, then win the war in Greece. And he had to do it before he invaded Russia.
And he lost with, if you look at the campaigns in France and the low countries in 1940, then he had to go into into Yugoslavia, and he had to clean up Greece, and then the invasion of Crete. He lost a lot of very valuable equipment, air transport, soldiers that really weakened him, even though he had this huge force to go into Russia.
But Italy was always, I don't know what the word is. Hitler admired Mussolini because Hitler didn't come to power until 1936, excuse me, in 1933, and he didn't start to get ambitious until 1936 with the Saarland and then the Rhineland Anschluss that followed.
But Mussolini was there at 23, 24. So Hitler grew up with the idea that Mussolini had taken control and destroyed the democratic-republican process and created this fascist nationalist movement that really worked, and he admired him.
And Mussolini was, I think, 10 years, 8 years older than Hitler was. So he was Hitler's master.
And then when the war started, the population and economy of Germany propelled Hitler into the preeminent position. And then from 1940 on, Hitler looked at Mussolini as a kindred spirit but a drag.
So, yes, we have to bail him out of. Yes, he's going to send some people to Russia, but not enough to make any difference.
Yes, we'll have to have a save him when the revolution tried to overthrow him in 1943. Yes, we'll go down to Egypt because he started a war with the British and he's losing.
So that was the German attitude. I think you've answered the question, but just to be clear, on Italy under Mussolini, militarily, interesting designs, etc., but nothing, is there anything admirable about the Air Force, the Navy, the military? Did they ever win a war? did they ever win a battle i i wonder against a they fought you know actually units fought when we invaded sicily in july of 43 some italians uh fought units fought very well but even though they were all already we had used actually the mafia and the mafia in places like Palermo to help us.
But there were a lot of Italian, the Italian-American exodus had made, there was a lot of goodwill toward America in Italy before the war started. So they supported Mussolini, but when the war started and America came in late, then they had a real problem with it.
But some of them did fight well. I'm trying to remember his name.
He was a commander. He was a fascist blackshirt, but he was kind of an intellectual, and he was the head of the Air Force, Balbo, I think his name was.
And he was a brilliant commander, and if they had made him in command of the Egyptian forces instead of Graziani, they might have been able to win. He got killed in a mistaken identity where they shot him down, I think, over Tobruk or somewhere near there.
Killed him. But he was destined to take over from Mussolini.
Chiano was his son-in-law left his diaries, and of course they executed him. Well, Victor, I have to correct you.
There's an Italian market. There is no such thing as the mafia.
That word is never used in any of the Godfather movies. No, no.
That was part of the deal. It was not to use that word.
They probably made a deal with some locals to make the movie made. Victor, you mentioned and I mentioned earlier about the German army and unprepared for the brutal winter of 1941 in Russia and as you just pointed out of course course, it was delayed.
Invasion in Barbarossa

was delayed by needing to do things in Greece and Yugoslavia. But I've always been curious about the uniform of the German soldier, the winter uniform, or the lack of their such.
Had the Sherman's been prepared by just warmer clothing.

Would it have mattered, really?

Or... Had the Germans been prepared by just warmer clothing, would it have mattered, really?

Or was destiny never... No, I don't think it would have.
You've got to remember that Hitler's success of the 11 victories from 1930 to 41

were predicated really on, as I said, an asymmetry. So he invaded Poland.
He invaded it from three spots, from East Prussia, from occupied Czech territory, and from Germany. But even then he had the Soviet Union that came in 17 days to carve up,

and the Poles fought ferociously for two weeks.

He lost 20,000 dead.

And then he waited a while and had that fake peace,

but then he went into Denmark three days.

But he had problems in Norway,

and had he not invaded France and diverted the British fleet,

he would have had some problems. He lost a lot of destroyers, and had the British been more aggressive, it would have been really touch and go.
So then he invaded a very weak Belgium and Netherlands and Luxembourg. And then he hit France, which was socialist, and the mighty French army.
Everybody says it crumbled in six weeks, but it did. But the French soldier, they killed another 20,000 Germans.
And then he took a pause. So that was seven countries.
And then he went into Yugoslavia and Greece, and he went into Crete. But my point in all of this is, with minor exceptions of the French, who had maybe some planes and tanks that were comparable but not operated well, he had never met a truly comparable, highly technological enemy.
And when he first met them in Britain, And, Goering assured him that the BF-109 and the Junkers and Heinkel bombers would destroy England like they had Warsaw and Amsterdam. And they came up against the hurricane, but especially the Spitfire.
And they took appalling losses, appalling losses. And then the submarine campaign, the UPE was very successful for a year, and then they came up against sophisticated British destroyers, step charges, sonar, you name it.
The same thing happened when they went into the Soviet Union. But this time, he got caught.
This wasn't just Britain. This was a country that had a population of 240 million people.
It was 30 times the area of Germany, and it was going to quickly receive 25% of its GDP would be supplied by the United States and Britain. And more importantly, it had a history of munitions that were westernized, and they were very sophisticated.
So if you look at heavy artillery of, say, over 105 millimeters, and you look at tanks, the Stalin tank, or especially the T-34 tank, or you look at Katushka rockets, or you look at motorized divisions, we gave them 400,000 heavy-duty trucks. So when Hitler went into Russia, they had a kill ratio the first two years of about 8 to 1.
And they'd lost about a million men at the end of 1941 dead or wounded. But they had killed, wounded, probably 5 million.
And yet when they counted divisions, the word went up to OKW, the number of divisions they identified. And they said, this is impossible.
This is impossible. We have wiped out combat ineffective at least 40 divisions, 16,000 men, maybe 100 divisions.
They can't have more than another 100 or two. They said, no, they have 400 or 500 total divisions.
So that army started to really grow given the population base, especially in Eastern and Asiatic Russia. And they weren't prepared for that.
And they weren't prepared for Russian railroad, different gauges. The roads were terrible.

All of their fighting had been in European countries, very close to Germany, Denmark,

France, even Greece. And the Germans had pretty good weather.
It was comparable to Germany.

And the point I'm making is if you had a Mark III tank, you could get it serviced back in Germany,

just put it on a rail, and it would be there in a day. French railroad system is very sophisticated.
If you went into Greece, there was a lot of food that you could steal. They had tomato canning factories, etc.
But when they went into Russia, they had no idea that if they did not win that war in the first June, they only had 10 days in June, and they had to win it by October 1st. And they had no idea how far away they were from their base of support.
They had no idea how many men, and they had no idea the sophistication of the Russian military equipment. So by the end of December, they'd run out of gas.
They were so far from their base. It was very cold.
They'd always pride themselves that the German kit, everything about the German soldiers' uniform, his mess, his knife, his handgun, his grenades were superior to British and Allied models. And really, when they met American soldiers at the the beginning they were too, but by 1944, Americans had more morphine, they had more sulfa powder in their kit, they had more food, and they were, the M1 carbine, you can make an argument that it was better than any ordinary issued rifle the Germans had.
I shouldn't say carbine, regular M1. So they kind of shot their war.
What I'm trying to get at is the German army was designed for intra-European conquest of the sort of 1939 to 1942, in which it performed brilliantly. Once it entered a global war with the United States and Russia in all of these wide theaters, on land, on sea, but in Russia, and once their economy was up against the United States, they had no idea what they were getting into.
So the United States basically won the war by putting 12 million people in uniform, but not having a very big army, only 3 or 4 million. That 12 million were in support, auxiliary, the Navy, and the Army Air Force.
So that meant that the United States had enormous logistical advantages. They had enormous advantages on ground support aircraft, tactical aircraft, strategic aircraft, and all that lessened casualties.
So we came out of that war losing, tragically, 450,000 dead, but Germany lost 5 million, and Russia lost 20 million, and the British came out with about 420,000, much more per capita, but not in the same numbers, because

they too were able to invest in a Navy and Air Force and auxiliaries, and they kept the actual fighting on land to a minimum. And we only had a year in Europe, from June 6, 1944 until May 9, 1945.
But the Germans, they fought on the Russian front, half of 1941, all of 1942, all of 1943, all of 1944, and half of 1945. And they had never seen, the temperatures were unusual that year at 1941, but even the next winter was Stalingrad.
And so what was cold in Berlin was not anything like Russia. It was colder, and the winter started earlier and ended later.
And the Russians understood that. And they didn't.
It was very embarrassing for them. You know, General Halder, the head of OKW, said after 11 days, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the German army has defeated Russia in 11 days.
And that was because they were 1,000 miles from their embarkation. They had neutralized 4 million.
They had people either killing them, capturing them, or scattering them. There was no organized Russian defense.
They had the largest encirclement in the history of warfare, the Kiev pocket. 650,000 Russians surrendered.
They had the goodwill of people in the Baltics and the Ukraine, they thought, it's warm weather all the way to November 1st or mid-November. We're going to take Moscow.
They were scheduled to take Moscow in August. So the Japanese were going to join because they thought it was time to join Germany and Russia was all through.
And then they sped, and they saw they were ill-supplied, and the Russian soldier was tenacious, and the Russian artillery and the Russian armor were better than Germany's, except for maybe the 88-millimeter artillery piece. And that was very embarrassing for Hitler, because he had to tell the German people, the Russians are better equipped, they have better coats, they have better shoes than we do, and they have very good weapons, and they outnumber us five to one.
And they're on their home base, and we're outside Moscow, and they're only 600 miles from their factories, and we're 1,200 miles from the German border. And more importantly, this is the key, we are fighting Russia.
They are fighting us. This is all they're doing.
They have allies that are conducting a strategic campaign of bombing us. They're not doing it.
They have the two largest fleets in the world, the American and the British, on their behalf. We're not doing it.
They have a submarine component. We don't.
We just have a huge 12-million-man army, and all we have to do is, in the case of Russia, fight Germany. But Germany looked at this and they said, oh my God, these Russians are just fighting us.
They're not fighting the Japanese. They're not fighting the Italians.
They're not bogged down in the Pacific. They're not in the Mediterranean.
The Americans and British have turned them loose on us. And they're supplied.
And they've told the Russians, don't make four engine bombs. And look at us.
We're trying to bomb Britain. We're trying to sink convoys all the way over there in Florida and New Jersey.
We're fighting in Italy with our allies. We're fighting in North Africa.
And yet we've got to fight these one-dimensional Russians. And they have all the advantages.
So it was really stupid. They fought.
The idea was they thought they won the war. And as Hitler said, we can make, think of the logic, we can make Britain surrender by attacking the largest military in the world.
That was so stupid. But they thought they would defeat Russia as quickly as they did France.
And they said there is a calculus from World War I. It took us four years.
We only got 70 miles into France. And yet we knocked out Russia in World War I by November of 1917, two and a half years, three and a half maybe.
So that calculus means in World War II that if we knocked out France

in six to seven weeks, which took us four years and we never did,

then we can knock out Russia, given the World War I calculus

that Russia falls and France didn't, and it falls in three years.

France fell in six weeks, so we can knock out Russia in three weeks, just like World War I. Well, that's quite a history lesson off of a question about a coat.
When I wrote The Second World War, I tried to avoid two stereotypes. I wasn't going to just accept the narrative that the French army was incompetent and the French military only had gears in reverse as people said.
And the Italians were incompetent. It was tragic because the French soldier was indomitable in World War I.
And French battleships, they made the best destroyer in the world, the French did. You could argue in 1940 the best tank in the world was the Char B tank.
And the Duante aircraft was just as good as the German. And yet it was not, it wasn't the French soldier or the French munitions industry.
It was the ossified, calcified French command. And there had been socialism in the schools where you could not teach Verdun.
You weren't even allowed to save Verdun very often. That was considered a disaster, even though it was a brilliant victory that cost them $800,000.
And the second thing was they had a hard right patane movement. They were sympathetic to right wing, and they didn't understand what Germany was all about.
But they did fight pretty well for six. And just to finish, when we came in, everybody thought George Patton was a crude Trumpian figure.
In many ways he was, but he was fluent in French. He spoke French.
He had enormous admiration for the French. He did not hate, as Montgomery did, de Gaulle.
Roosevelt hated de Gaulle. He formed the first French.
He did not hate, as Montgomery did, de Gaulle, and Roosevelt hated de Gaulle. He formed the first, he had two artillery divisions.
He had people like Leclerc and Tessarnay that were brilliant French commanders, and he allowed them to take Paris, and he worked so well with them. And when the French had American weapons

and they had American allies

from basically August of 1944 to May of 1945,

the French soldier was wonderful

and was a big help to the allied cause.

And when they went into Vietnam and Algeria,

they lost both of them, but those were political losses. If you look at the World War II veterans who fought that Vietnam and Algeria, they lost both of them.
But those were political losses.

If you look at the World War II veterans who fought that war in Algeria and Vietnam,

they were pretty tough people.

You had recommended, and I read it, A Strange Defeat by Mark Glatt.

So if anyone wants to get an understanding of the French mindset that led to the defeat, that's a recommended book from Victor, a terrific book. Hey, Victor, we've come to the end.
Two things, though. First, as usual, I want to thank folks that sign up for Civil Thoughts, the free weekly email newsletter I write for the Center for Civil Society.
And it comes with 14 recommended readings of interesting articles I've come across the previous week. And if you want to get it, and I recommend you do, go to sybillthoughts.com and sign up.
And then there's the fact that people rate this show through Apple, zero to five stars, and practically everyone gives, if you're five stars, 4.9 plus average, over thousands of people. Thank you very much for those who take the time to do that.
And then folks, other folks, a few, leave comments. And we read them all.
Comments on Apple, comments on Victor's website, the Blade of Perseus. And here's one.
It's a little bit of a criticism, but it's interesting. So it's titled Philosopher King.
And I think it's really interesting. So he writes, or she, need to get you to Detroit downtown.
Obviously, we've talked about Detroit. I've been to Detroit, but I haven't been to the Renaissance Detroit in the last four or five years, I'd like to go.
Well, here it is. It's a success story in one of the best downtowns in the country.
Me and my squeeze walk around, go to shows and sports events. Great dining.
The whole town has been rebuilt as if a Roman emperor decreed it. There is a Roman reference in Campus Martius II.
Between Rocket Mortgage and its subsidiary Bedrock and the Illich family, the place has been transformed. So when I hear your disparaging remarks about Detroit, I want to take you on a tour there.
But visit next time you're at Hillsdale. It's not far.
Of course, you'd have to drive by that commie cesspool U of M and Genuflect. I worked for Rocket and worked downtown and remember the place when it was a science fiction post-war wasteland worthy of a movie set as such.
It's really incredible, even more so given its liberal DNA. And this is signed by the Weekly Objective.
Thank you, Weekly Objective.

Interesting.

So it's returning after World War II.

In 1944, it had the highest GDP rate of growth in the United States.

Yeah.

It supplied the war effort with every machine that had wheels.

It came in second place for the 1968 Olympics, which were held in Mexico City.

So that's how vibrant it was.

Thank you. It came in second place for the 1968 Olympics, which were held in Mexico City.

So that's how, you know, how vibrant. I think it really shrunk when they had that plan, you know, of 25% of the city was abandoned.
And they were having to send fire and, you know, police everywhere. So they began to just allow these abandoned blocks to go back to nature and shrunk the physical size of the city to reflect the population.
So I think it's about 800,000 now. And it has far fewer racial, I think it's hard to imagine given its reputation, but it has far less racial problems.
I think they even have a white mayor. It's an ecumenical city.
I admire, I appreciate that comment. And I don't want to disparage the effort.
Viva Detroit. Well, but it's a lot better, it's a lot safer to walk downtown and cleaner than San Francisco.
Than San Francisco, yeah. Well, Victor, as ever, you've been wonderful.
Thanks for all the reflections. Thank you, everybody.
Go East, young man. Hey, we'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
Bye-bye. Thank you, everybody.
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