A Prelude to World War II and Our Crazy Judicial World

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This is our weekend segment. And this weekend for the middle segment, we will be doing the prelude to World War Two.
So all of the events leading up to are the significant ones to World War Two. But before that, we'll be looking at some court cases and activities in our courts in the United States.
And it looks a little grim, but maybe there's some hope and light at the end of the tunnel. So stay with us, and we'll be right back for that.
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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Victor's the Martin and Neely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution,

and the Wayne and Marsha Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. You can find him at his website, victorhansen.com, and the name of the website is The Blade of Perseus.
It's got lots of material on it for you, all sorts of podcasts and articles that he writes for other places, and then special articles for subscribers to the website called VDH Ultra Material. Twice a week, he writes articles, and then he does a special video once a week on Fridays.
So please come join us there for $65 a year or try it for a month at $650 for the month. So, Victor, there's lots of court action going on in the court, some of the court cases, but I wanted to start with the most extraordinary.
Oh, I'm sorry. Before we actually go into it, there was some optimistic news for our viewers, and that is that the stock market for two days in a row has been improving, I think 1,000 points yesterday and 500 so far today, and it's Wednesday.
Yeah, we're back to maybe where it was in August during the campaign, close to 40,000. People don't look at it that way.
I mean, it's supposedly a collapse, but nobody was saying anything in August when it was 40,000. It got44,000.
There's two ways to interpret it. The left said, well, Trump is caving.
He's begging everybody. He's trying to negotiate.
And the right, I think more correctly, the conservatives say the stock market is going up because the art of the deal is now in phase two. In other words, the sky-high tariffs that he was basically the trade or tariff version of Canada, 51st state, invade Panama, absorb Greenland, 130, 40, 25%, 40, whatever, tariffs have now come down.
And the fact they're coming down means the left thinks Trump is capitulating. I don't think so.
I'm not suggesting that he plays 10-dimensional chess, but if he gets a big deal with India, as I said earlier, and maybe Japan or South Korea, then China will look at this and say, you know, I was not able to force these countries to align with me. And we were making a trillion dollars a year anyway.
So what if we made, I don't know, 700 billion and we cut our trade surplus with the United States from roughly $300 billion to $150 billion, that would be an amazing contribution Donald

Trump would have made to the history of U.S. trade parity.

And if he can get some symmetry and get that trillion, our trillion dollar deficit down to 500 billion, it'll make a difference. We'll get more foreign investment, we'll get more jobs, and it will be worth it.
But it's high stakes poker and the bond market, the stock market, all of these people are kind of neurotic. They're hypersensitive.
And so he's got to stop. He had to stop talking about firing Powell, the head of the Federal Reserve.
He can't do that because it frightens everybody. He's got to give a larger policy and public presence from Scott because he's trusted by Wall Street and he's doing that.
So it's the same thing with the budget cuts. Elon Musk said he was going to cut a trillion dollars out of a six or seven trillion dollar budget.
Nobody thought you could do that. But if he's already identified $160 billion where you can, that's a contributor to fiscal sanity.

So it looks pretty good today on Wednesday, and we're happy with that. So let's talk a little bit about different things that have been going on with judges in the court system.
And we'll do the first one is that Minnesota DA that allowed a vandal of a Tesla, a state employee, to walk free as though he had done nothing. With associations with Tim Walton.
Oh, is that right? I'm sorry. I did not know that.
So that's a grim case. The message was, we adjudicate crime in blue states on the basis of your ideology.
So if you want to go out and vandalize a Tesla, it's okay. Go ahead and do it.
But if he had done that to a Democratic iconic monument, let's say there was a BLM safe space and somebody had poured paint over it, they would have put that guy in prison for five years. So it's an ace.
The left is so weird. They're so asymmetrical.
Look at January 6th sentencing. Do you think if anybody on January 6th, as he walked into the Capitol, had pulled out a can of spray paint, God forbid, and sprayed graffiti on an iconic column at the Capitol, would they have treated him differently than this? Yes.
Would they have treated him differently than somebody arrested at Columbia doing that? Or how about the students that spray painted columns at Stanford that were sandstone and the paint had to be hand-p out of the stone. Nobody ever did anything to them, essentially.
So it's getting kind of old and tired that there's two sets of justices. And given our district that you can cherry pick a justice, a federal justice, and a district court, or you're in a blue state, you can do pretty much what you want.
I think there's a bill in the Senate by Senator Grassley that's going to prohibit, if they can pass it without a filibuster, litigants from cherry-picking judges in regional courts and having that ruling apply to the entire United States. Wow, I hope they can do that.
Well, that's bad enough, but there's an even scarier case in New Mexico where a judge, Jose Cano, was banned by the New Mexico Supreme Court from doing his job because he had a Trenda Aragui gang member arrested in his own home.

That's really frightening, I think.

That's a crime to have to – it's actually a crime to harbor an illegal alien, knowingly.

I think it was the governor, was it of New Jersey, was bragging that he was going to have an illegal alien live above his garage.

And then he kind of backed down and he said, be careful, that's against the law.

I hope they charge him with something, especially a judge.

But it shows you that the democratic ideology is that if you come into the country illegally,

then you have the same rights and responsibilities as a citizen.

Not, excuse me, not responsibilities, but you have the same rights as a citizen. Citizenship's not singular anymore.
I can't think of one thing a citizen can do that a non-citizen can't accept. Well, hold office, but you can hold office in school board elections.
They can even vote in school board elections. But we've really diminished citizenship, And the attitude of the left is we broke the law to bring in 10 to 12 million people.
And we will warp the law and slow it down so that Donald Trump cannot deport one person. If it's legal to deport somebody here illegally, then that's wrong.
If it is illegal to let somebody come in,

that's right. That's the topsy-turvy world they live in.
It's absolutely a crazy judicial world. Well, the last thing is a Supreme Court of the United States case, and that case is Mahmood v.
Taylor, and it's the parents who are concerned about the nature of LGBTQ plus literature in their schools because they tend to have some very explicit stuff for elementary grade children.

We're talking first, second, and third grade.

There's two dissimulations about this.

This trans stuff.

It's a freedom of speech.

This is like Catcher in the Right.

No, it's not.

I went online and looked at some of that stuff. It's a freedom of speech.
This is like Catcher on the Right. No, it's not.
I went online and looked at some of that stuff. It's graphic, graphic references and illustrations in some cases to things like masturbation, passive sexuality, the mechanics of coitus.
It's filthy in the sense that no child should look at that. And they know that.
But then they put on the cover when they talk about the books and the literature, there's a guy and another guy and they're holding hands and they're so innocent. If that's true and that's your message, why do you put that other stuff in there? Is it to titillate children? I don't know why you would do that.
So it's not about freedom of speech. It's about pornography.
And the other thing is, and I've mentioned this before, if you go back and you look at sexologists of the 19th and early 20th century, like Havelock Ellis and others, they had postulated that gender dysphoria, people who were born into a body that did not match their cognitive awareness, was less than 1%. And later studies have showed it was probably 0.05 or something.
So I want everybody to explain how at some campuses 20% of the people feel they might want to transition. So it's a fad.
It's like when I was a kid, everybody went about a Duncan yo-yo. And before that, it was a hula hoop.
And then when I was in graduate school, it was a pet rock. And that's what this is.
It's a fad.

It's a cult.

And we're supposed to think that this is a massive biological fact. And it's not.
And we're supposed to think that there's very few males, biological males that transition that really take away things from women. If it was one, it would be bad enough.
But there's a lot. The other thing is we're supposed to say, to assume these lies that once you transition to a woman, you're no different than a woman.
And therefore, there is no advantage because they are now women and they're just competing in women's sports. And the retort to that is, okay, you're a man and now you say you're a woman.
You might have reconstructive surgery, might have hormonal treatment.

You might have anything you want to transition to the male sex.

But if you try to compete in the NFL or the NBA or track meet, you're going to lose every time.

So that kind of puts the whole idea into fantasy that you can transition and be completely identical to the sex that you have chosen.

It doesn't happen.

They know that. So what I'm getting at is they don't want to talk.
They never talk about that. I'm kind of disappointed in conservatives.
when I hear this stuff on TV, I would just wish one person would say, okay, let's just forget

the argument for a second that males who become females have no advantages.

But why don't males, women that become males, why don't they win male sports contests and events?

Just ask them that.

And we know why.

Well, Victor, I'd like to take a moment for our sponsor.

Oh, wait. We'll hold off on that.
One other cola. Why don't men, and the only exception I know is Bruce Jenner, but he's not of athletic age anymore, of men that are of athletic age that want to compete, Why don't men that win gold medals or whatever, first, second, or third, why don't they transition? We never hear it.
It's always somebody that was rated 450th in swimming nationwide or he was the 28th ranked pole vaulter in kinetic, and then all of a sudden they transition and they're number one. So it's an additional psychological element that these are mediocre male athletes with pretensions and ambitions to be number one.
And they transition and find that that can only happen when there are so-called women. When they're competing against women.
All right. So let's go back, I'd like to take a moment for our sponsor, Field of Greens.
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And we like to thank Field of Greens for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show. So, Victor, let's turn then to the task force for anti-Christian bias.
So, Donald Trump is active on that, and I'm glad to see it. He's got lots of good people heading it.
I think Pam Bondi is the top person on this task force. And do you think it will be of any benefit? It's the reaction to specific egregious acts of the Biden administration.
And the most egregious was that anti-abortion protester who was peaceful and somebody pushed his daughter and he pushed back. And the next thing he had, an FBI swat raided his his house and everybody knows the last four years if you were peacefully and calmly outside an abortion clinic you were going to probably be not only arrested but on some type of FBI list and if you went in and attacked and a pro-life office they weren't going to do anything to you and then when they asked Merrick Gardland.
Remember his answer, what he said? Oh, yes, but because the people on the

left... pro-life office, they're not going to do anything to you.
And then when they asked Merrick Garland that, you remember his answer, what he said? Oh, yes, because the people on the left who attack pro-life do it at night, so we don't know who they are. We don't have any security cameras.
People can't see at night anymore. There's no night vision gallicles.
We haven't invented all these things yet. But during the day, these stupid right-wing people, they're dumb

enough to go and we can identify them, go in front of a clinic. And that's what they did.
And Trump is always an 80-20 guy on issues. And when you look at religiosity, you can see that That cohort, 18 to 30, there are more now converts from apostates or agnostics or atheists to believers, Orthodox believers, I mean Protestant Orthodox Christian, than any other cohort.
So, I think he's saying that to younger people who voted for him, that we're going to try to protect you from harassment. And harassment's very common.
I mean, sometimes it's the satanic people that come in. I mean, what I mean is that I don't have any problem with freedom of expression, even freedom to be obnoxious.
But when you have the sisters ofual, you know, the gay guys that dress up as nuns, and you have people who dress up as Jesus, and they do all that stuff in the Bay Area or coastal California. That is, they mock Christianity and their pornography, and they even simulate sex between nuns.

They do all that performance art stuff.

I don't know if that's what the rules are under the Constitution, that it's freedom of expression. It wasn't before because that was called a public obscenity, but we got rid of those.
But if anybody did that about gay people and made fun of them, or let's say two heterosexuals made fun of gay sex or gay icons? I'll just give you an example. What if somebody took Harvey Milk, the supervisor, first gay supervisor, nice guy, but what if they said, Harvey Milk, you were at a Christian or conservative group, and they took somebody that dressed up like Harvey Milk, and they made him engage in an embarrassing sex act the way that these people do with nuns.
Well, what would happen to that person if they were in a blue state? They would throw the book at them, or they would cry. They would get so angry.
And so what I'm getting at is it's all this asymmetry, and it's all based on the idea that the left thinks they're morally superior

and they can engage in any means necessary to achieve their noble ends. But it's so hypocritical.
It sure is. Maybe a little bigger issue before we go to a break.
And I was reading in a column, I'm sorry, I don't remember where it was, but they were talking about how the Supreme Court now has so many more cases. And I was thinking, well, not only that, but other courts obviously are getting overwhelmed with cases.
And the Democrats are pushing this, you know, with Abrego Garcia, that all these immigrants are going to need to have a court case or a court hearing. And it just seems to me, and maybe to our audience, too, that the left is just trying to overwhelm the court system.
And I really don't know what they're going to do with these 12 million people. They need a Senate bill or a House bill.
And I think there's one, as I said, under Senator Grassley, that a regional court does not have national jurisdiction. They'll still use it for, say, California and the West Coast, but it won't apply to anybody elsewhere.
You can do that. But really, talking about the Supreme Court, they've got to intervene and say that these lower district court rulings do not apply to the whole country.
And then they have to reestablish the regionality of these courts. In other words, if you have a case that involves a particular state, then you are confined to that district court jurisdiction.
And you can't just chair. The Republicans tried to do it during Obamacare.
I remember that. They tried to go to conservative, and they went crazy, the Obama administration.
And so they have filed more injunctions to stop Trump in the first 90 days than the right did the entire four years against Biden. And it's a symptom that they don't, they're lawless.
And we saw that with Latina James and Jack Smith and the lawfare, get him off the ballot, Margo, all those things that happened, they got inured to the idea that there were no consequences for harassment or fake indictments and all that. That's one reason.
The other reason, they have no power,

if you think about it. No power at all.
There's no public opinion. They're on the wrong side of

every issue, 70-30 maybe, 80-20. They don't control the House, the Senate, the Court,

the White House, and they don't control public opinion. And so they have to come up with these

either performance art, pornographic, SHIT videos, or they have to use the courts to slow everything down. They think they're going to win the midterms and then get the House and they're going to impeach him symbolically.
But they think if they get the Senate, they'd be able to draw it out anymore and try him. But I'm not sure that's going to happen.
Everything is in flux right now, and it can go either way. If he gets a Ukraine deal, as I said before, there's some movement about nuclear Iran.
If we get a modest decrease in the trade deficit, and you get these deals with our trading part, and you get the reconciliation bill in the Senate through, and you've got border security, $175 billion on border security. You've got cuts in the budget, 2%, something like that.
And deregulation and tax, the extension of the tax. The economy will go crazy.
Because these people in Wall Street are, as I said, neurotic and volatile and they that works both ways they can react to those they want to make money and they think if we've got budgetary interest in cutting and we've got deregulation deregulations cost about a trillion dollars a year on a drag on the the 30 trillion dollar economy maybe $2 trillion. So any of these things are incentives, and a person will think they can make money by investing in the stock market.
Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break, and then we'll come back and talk a little bit about the prelude to World War II. Stay with us, and we'll be right back.
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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson show. You can find Victor on YouTube, his Victor Davis Hanson podcast, and on Rumble, the same thing.
It's the Victor Davis Hanson podcast. Unfortunately, on Spotify, I had to call it the Victor Davis Hanson podcast on Spotify to put it on there because his name was taken up.
I did one of my five-minute videos for the Daily Signal, and I'm so worried about the five-minute time constraint that sometimes I'd leave out words. So I said, and then there's the $1.7 trillion that you got to deal, but I didn't say the $1.7 trillion in student debt.
And I do that a lot when I'm under the gun. Yeah, well, that's hard to and talking, yeah, especially with your signage.
I sound like I'm underwater and scuba diving. Well, on to something that you know a lot about.
You might want to look at Victor's Second World Wars, which he published, I think, about five or six years ago. 2017.
Okay, so eight years ago. But it has lots of new things, lots of new, I want to say theories, but ideas on what happened in World War II.
So it's definitely a great read. Please, and now, Victor, we'd like to hear Prelude 2.
Well, everybody wanted to know why after Versailles, exactly 20 years later, 1939, you had a Second World War, and the war to end all wars, the Great War, disappeared and came back as World War I, because now there was a greater war. 70 million people killed.
How did that happen? Didn't they learn from World War I? Generally, when you look at what caused World War II, there's three things on the Allied side, and then there's the problem of aggression. But we can conflate these two causations.
Why did Germany, Italy, and Japan think they could go to war? Now, that's a good question because when you look at pre-war and wartime GDP, what became the allies, Russia, Soviet Union, Germany, I mean, excuse me, the United States and the UK, I shouldn't say the UK, the British Empire, they had about four to five times the size of the GDP. They had four times the population.
And you could argue that scientifically they had greater research and development investments. Germany was pretty advanced in pharmaceuticals, rocketry.
But the point I'm making, why would they go to war in such a one-sided affair? Well, the answer is they didn't think they were. So there were three things that caused the war.
Russian collaboration, British and French imperialism, and American isolationism. Take them in the order.
Hitler would have never invaded Poland because he would have felt he was going to invade Poland on August 23rd of 1939, and he stopped for a week, or I should say August 20th, at or near that date, because he was afraid that if he went into the east, two things would happen. The French army would invade from the west and the Soviet Union would attack him.
But once he did the Molotov-Ribbentrop August 23rd non-aggression pact, it was very brilliant what Hitler did. He took the map of Eastern Europe and he said, I'm going to give you the Baltic states, Stalin, and we'll cut off Poland in two.
Cut it in two. But you have to give me an area of influence in Eastern Europe where you keep out, and I have to have the western part of Poland, and we'll both invade.
Soviet Union was a little late. I don't think they invaded until September 17th.

But once that happened, it was clear that Hitler thought he could do whatever he wanted because the Soviet Union was not only not going to attack him, but supplying him enormous amounts of wheat, fodder, oil, gas, additional coal, and rare minerals for high tensile, high strength steel, etc. The second thing was the British and the French had, from the 1930s, whether they knew it or not, they had established in the Axis mind a sense that they wouldn't do anything if they were aggressive.
So what do I mean? When Italy decided that it wanted to take over East Africa under Mussolini and recreate the Roman Empire, the only way they could do that was sail through the Suez. They got kicked out of the League of Nations.
They were sanctioned. And the British Empire, ship for ship, its Mediterranean and French fleet.
The French fleet was the third largest fleet in the world at the beginning of World War II. All the French fleet and the British, they could have blown the Italians out of the water.
And not only did they not do that, they opened the Suez Canal. So they could go straight into Africa and bring troops, transports, and take over.
And then in 36 to 39, there was a Spanish Civil War. And Franco was the nationalist fascist versus the socialist communist republic.
The Soviet Union intervened on the Republican side. And there was an Abraham Lincoln division of people, brigade, people who came in, 20,000 from all over the West.
Okay. But when you actually look at the numbers and the technology, it was mostly fascist in the sense that Mussolini sent 70,000 soldiers, and he sent about 800 planes, And the British sent the Condor Legion and very sophisticated air support.
They gave armor. Mark I tanks weren't very good, but they were better than, as good as anything else at that time.
The point I'm making is when the Nationalists won, the world looked at that and said, Italy and Germany want to win, and they have the technology to do it, and they're going to intervene. And they didn't stop them.
And the Soviet Union was not reliable. And it would, as I said, join them.
The other thing, after the Italian-Somali crisis and the Spanish Civil War, there was a series of German aggressions. They were not supposed under the Versailles Treaty to militarize the Rhineland.
That's the area to the west of the Rhine River that was considered traditionally part of Germany, and they did in 1936. Hitler said, you know, if they come in with one division, I'm done for.
People have this myth that the German Army was so strong. In 1936 or 37, their Mark

won 10. division I'm done for.
People have this myth that the German army was so strong. In 1936 or 37, their Mark I tank had a machine gun, didn't even have a cannon on it.
And the Mark II was no good. The Mark I was like 10 tons, and they had the Char B tank, would have blown it out to smithereens.
The French had a 75-millimeter gun. There were French airplanes that were better than German fighters at that time.
So they let them militarize the Rhineland. They had the Saar plebiscite that was kind of rigged, but they probably would have won anyway.
And then in 1938, they annexed the Anschluss, and that was illegal under the Versailles Treaty.

They took all of Austria and absorbed it. At that point, the Allies then started to get worried.
France, the Allies are just France and Britain. The Western European other Allies were not important.
And so they cut a deal at Munich in September of 1938 and said, okay, you can take all the German speakers in the Sudetenland and take them back. And that was tragedy because that was a mountainous, defensible area.
And the Czechs had the largest arm of the Skoda Arms Works in Europe. And they wanted to fight.
And had they gone to the frontier in the mountains and fortified the passes, they could have held off the Germans. But at Munich, Chamberlain said, you know, we have peace for our time.
And he signed away. Hurtle was mad because he wanted to take all of Czechoslovakia.
He finally would. But that was in September.
And a year later, he was going to invade. And when they said to him, the general said to him, the French and British army are larger than ours.
They have better armor and comparable airplanes. And he said, I saw them at Munich.
They're worms. They won't fight.
And so there was that appeasement. Then we come to the final part of this triad, the United States.
The United States at the end of the war, as I've said before, had a larger GDP than all of the other belligerents, Allied and Axis combined, and a larger fleet than all the fleets, Japanese, British, Russian, Italian, put together. So you can see what the United States was able to do in just four years.
They were in the Depression. There was a Great Recession in 1938, 18% unemployment.
We talked about that. And it was poor little southern segregationist Representative Carl Vinson.
And he had a series of naval acts in the 30s that laid the foundation for the new American fleet that appeared in 1940. Had he not done that, the war would have gone on a lot longer.
But my point is the United States felt after World War I they lost 120,000 dead, 300,000 wounded. And they said to themselves, the British are back at it.
The French are back at it.

The Germans are back at it. And last time we went over and saved the Allies, we just got a bunch of debt, and they haven't paid us back.
And there's war again. It didn't solve anything.
So we're not going to go to war. And they would know if Japan had not attacked.
And so the point I'm making is that we lost deterrence with Europe

because Hitler said they don't have an army.

Hitler was a war. if Japan had not attacked.
And so the point I'm making is that we lost deterrence with Europe because Hitler said they don't have an army. Hitler really was kind of scared of the United States because they really did believe what they'd seen in World War I.
By 19 and 18, they knew that we were producing, just to take an example, more artillery shells in France and Germany combined that had been doing it. And they knew that we had transferred a million soldiers in 1917 and early 1918 without losing one all the way across.
The U-boats couldn't do anything. And they knew we were capable of doing that again.
And he also had a sick idea that the American soldier was good because the largest minority in the United States was German, German-Americans. He said, we're getting killed by our own people.
He said that. They're big, big German soldiers, German-Americans.
So American isolationism, and I'll give you just to finish, the same thing was true of Japan. They saw that the United States was bellicose but did not have the wherewithal in the Pacific to deter them.
So we moved the 7th Fleet from San Diego and put it in Honolulu in January of 1941. But we only had three carriers and actually two when we did it.
And these battleships were World War I vintage and the Japanese had been building like crazy and they had bigger battleships and newer ones. And I think they had eight fleet carriers in the Pacific and their way of thinking, United States isn't going to do anything because in 1940, the Vichys in France had ceased to exist by June 28th, and the Vichy collaborators just gave us Vietnam, and we got the rice belt of the Mekong Delta.
And then the Dutch ceased to exist in May and June of 1940, and we got the Dutch East Indies, Indonesia. We were already plotting against it.
And so in their way of thinking, we can get the rubber of Malaysia and Singapore, and we'll attack the Philippines, the United States, and nobody will do anything. They really did believe the United States would say, okay, we cut off your oil, and we cut off your steel scrap in exports and we're sorry and you kind of hit us on the forehead and we're sorry and let's just call it even they believe that while you were just talking i was thinking we always read in the history books that the americans mobilized after Japan invaded Pearl Harbor.

But were they mobilizing at all before that?

Were they expanding their military capability from when?

Yes, they had started to do two or three things.

They had started to really build up the fleet, not so much for the European War,

because you see, before they knew it, the wars broke out on September 1st-2nd of 1939, and for all practical purposes, it was over in Europe by June, just nine months later, and all the European capitals were in the hands of Axis sympathizers, or the Germans or the Italians. But they looked looked at Japan and they were worried that would happen in the Pacific.
And they had been worried earlier. So they had the ingredients of a big fleet, not as big as it got, but say the North Carolina class battleship, the new Essex carrier class, the new Gato submarine class.
They were all on the drawing boards. But then, and the army had gone from about 130,000 up to 400,000.
It's going to go up to 12.3 million. But the mechanism was there.
But Roosevelt was terrified that in the recession of 1938, he didn't know what this vast borrowing would do. He didn't realize that it actually would stimulate the economy.
So we went up to, at one point, 140% of GDP. And that's where, right now, we're at 126% in peacetime peacetime.
So, everybody thought after the war we were going to go broke. But just for our time, we are the largest military in the world today.
So, we do have a lot of resources that we pour into our military. So, we're a little bit different than isolationist America prior to World War II, which, of course, had a much smaller military.
We're spending a billion dollars, basically, I mean, a trillion dollars on defense. And our problem with defense right now is a large part is in salaries and pensions, which is good, and health care and social programs, but we don't have enough for munitions.
But during the Reagan buildup and what followed, we're coasting on those fumes. We, at one time, we were, you know, 600 ships, 700 ships, we're down to, I don't know, 250.
But we still have 11 fleet carriers, the Gerald Ford class and the Nimitz class. These are 105,000 tons.
They're all nuclear now. And they have 80 of the most deadly planes, you know, the Hornet, Super Hornet.
And then the F-35, I think we're going to get up to 3,000. That's the plan.
And the F-22, what I'm getting at is, if you look at the trajectory, here is where we're going, and here's where China's going. Trajectory.
But that's a misleading trajectory. Here we are, and here's China, and we're flattening off, and they're catching it.
So we have, say, nuclear, about 6,500 nuclear weapons in storage and deliverable, and they have about 500 or 600. They're doing five a month.
They want to get up to 1,000 by 2030. And they have more submarines, but not very many nuclear, and they don't really know how to do the carrier battle group yet.
And their fighters are not fourth or fifth generation like ours. So we're ahead of them.
And what they're worried about, and I think this is why Trump may win this war, is they rely on technological transfers. The virology lab was cooked up in Europe and the United States.
All the people there were trained abroad or trained by people who were trained abroad. So they need the 300,000 students to come back or to steal stuff or both.
And if they don't have that technological transfer, if they can't have American companies invest and then appropriate them after 10 years. They're native science because they're not a free country and they don't attract people from all over the world and they don't allow certain areas of research.
They'll never be competitive with us, at least if we turn to meritocracy and we don't adopt a DEI commissar system as we have.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and come back and talk a little bit about RFK Jr.'s banning of dyes and Elon is talking about the end of his tenure on Doge. Stay with us and we'll be right back.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show. If you are on social media, please catch Victor at X, and his handle is at VD Hanson.
And on Facebook, he has Hanson's Morning Cup, so come join him there. Victor, so RFK is is working very diligently as all donald trump's cabinet are to um stop the stop the use of various dyes in our food that are toxic and and you know what i thought was surprising that i didn't know before i started looking at this was that some of those dyes are made from petroleum.
Yes, like eating Vaseline, maybe. I think as long as he keeps on these periphery issues and does it gradual, he's going to be fine.
But he doesn't want to start with vaccines because measles you know three people die of measles they're going to blame bobby kennedy or he doesn't want to sound off on you know the preservatives and vaccination and autism yeah he can do that later and make that argument and have an open debate about it but when he gets to these issues first he's very effective because the world, I mean, if your tricks don't only have one color and it's a natural color or you take some bunch of cranberries and smash them and use a natural extract and, you know, dye them, I don't think people are going to worry. They're not going to say, oh, my gosh, my tricks only have one or my M&Ms only have one color.

They don't care.

And Europe has done it for much longer than we are. I don't hate to praise the Europeans, but they've done it and there's no catastrophic effects.

No.

So I think that's a winning issue for them and they'll get that done pretty quickly.

Yeah.

Well, what did you think about Elon?

I think he was always planning on, but he sounds ready to get out and get back to Tesla. It's kind of sad in a way because I went back and looked at what he was saying in November and December.
The Tesla price was, what, $450 or something? It was just astronomical. And he's lost probably over $100 billion.
And Tesla was the best-selling car. It still sells well, but it's down 13% or 14%.
The Europeans loved it because it had longer range than their cars. And he was on cloud nine.
The SpaceX had that erector arm for a while, was catching the rocket on television and then it was so much superior to nasa or the bezos alternative and he was riding high and then this the of course the starlink and the x and they were started the left was trying to get angry at him but then when when he came in, he looked at this budget of $7 trillion, and he said to himself, I can cut 10% of anything. I cut 20% of Twitter.
So he just thought that the federal budget was like Twitter. And he was going to go get on stage with Melee with a chainsaw, and he was going to sound off like he did on Twitter.
but he didn't own the federal government as he owned Twitter. So 10% would have been $700 billion, and he wanted to go beyond that.
And so when he started this, the first thought that came into my mind was when Arnold Schwarzenegger was reelected, he said that he was going to do the same thing, that he was going to cut California and run up surpluses and go after these municipal SEIU government employees. And I thought, you're going to be a lame duck.
He was a lame duck, but you're going to be a lame duck in a week. And the next thing I knew, they had these commercials blanketing the air that showed him with a big, long cigar.
Arnold Schwarzenegger and his friends fly in a private jet. And then they go down to have beer and cigarettes in L.A.
while you're out of a job. You know, people are dying.
That's what the left does. You have to, in other words, you have to understand that when you cut these sacred cows, you have to understand what the left is doing.
The left uses the universities, the foundations, the popular culture, the media, K-12. That is the way they spread their message.
Just because you have alternate media doesn't mean you have the foundations and you have the universe. And these are very powerful conduits of information and propaganda.
So when he went in there, they all swarmed on Elon. And I don't think he expected that.
I thought he thought, you know, his idea was, I just saved a bunch of astronauts and I saved the reputation of NASA, of the United States. And don't you remember the old Twitter? It was working with, I got everybody, you know, I've got Barry Weiss and everybody to come in here and look at the books.
And hey, you guys, the FBI was working on Twitter. Can you believe that? And that's how he was so excited and idealistic, and he'd done all these great

things. It was like, but you always wanted an EV car that would go 330 miles and was so beautiful and worked and reliable, and I gave you Tesla.
So he really thought that he had a reservoir of goodwill, but once he crossed the left, there's no forgiving. You cross the Rubicon, you can't go back.

And

that's what happened. The die was

cast and then It cost the Rubicon. You can't go back.
And that's what happened. The die was cast.
And then he looked at that federal government. And you can't make one mistake.
He had some guys, you know, what was the person who was called? Big Ball, the guy that they were after. Excuse my language.
Oh, yeah. One of the guys on his team.
Yes. And they just fixate on things on the chainsaw, and then he had another illegitimate, and they just tore him to pieces.
Yeah. And they tried to drive down, and then they went into the Tesla terrorism.
They knew nobody would do that because they weaponized the law. And so now we hear him, and he says, basically, well, I only had a temporary mandate, and July 4th of next year, the doge is out.
And I did get $160 billion in recommendation. They still have to be enacted, reified.
So when I looked at what he was saying in November and now, it's sad that the left went out and almost destroyed you. He's a very resilient person.
And I think he'll come back and Tesla will restore. I got in a Tesla two days ago that we own.
And I know people have them. But when you get into it, it's kind of an amazing experience.
The doors don't rattle. There's no rattles.
And you hit the thing, you're like you're in a, you hit the accelerator. It's like a golf cart, but you're in a rocket.
And when you take your foot off the accelerator, you don't have to brake because it just winds down. And then when you look at, I know that's not quite what it's advertised, 330 miles.
You're probably the way people drive. It's 280 or something.

But, you know, when I was growing up, I had a nine-gallon Volvo 544,

and it got 25 of the gallons.

If I got 200 miles, I could make it to the coast.

And so it has range better than the other cars.

Everything about it is beautiful.

The interior is beautiful.

It's well-engineered, and he's going to get better

and better. And it just outclasses all the competition.
And why anybody would want to destroy that beautiful automobile or that EV or the ecological implications that the left liked him for? It's American. It's like an American tragedy.
It really is. But he has done so much for this country in terms of communications, social media, internet, rocketry, space exploration, EVs.
And he's going to be known as somebody who took on a task, and a lot of this cuts. If he has a staff of 300 people in place, and they've got another nine months,

over a year, excuse me, another, I don't know, 13 or 14 months, and they can make these cuts before the midterm under reconciliation and things. If they cut two to five to six percent of the budget, it would be helpful.
I don't understand why Wall Street, every time I read The Wall Street Journal, I should use past tense, preterite tense.

Every time I read the Wall Street Journal I should use past tense, preterite tense Every time I've read the Wall Street Journal in the past There's an implication that the United States can't make it Unless they cut the budget And they get some physical sobriety And they deregulate And yet that's what he's trying yet, nobody says, thank you. How did you cut $160 billion? That's amazing.
I don't think Elon was ready for that. But in the way that is amazing that Donald Trump is so resilient against all that, I don't know how he does that.
I know you're writing a book about him right now. Are you going to even take one little small chapter to interview him and ask him, how is it you put up with all of this rhetoric? I have a chapter.
I have a rough draft. It's supposed to be 100,000 words until I got this little sinus problem.
I was on track. I think I have 80,000 written.
But there's a chapter three called Nietzsche and Trump. Anything that doesn't kill me makes me stronger.
And I go through all the things they did to him. The January 6th distortions, the second impeachment, Senate trial when he was a private citizen, the 25 states that tried to de-ballot him, the crazy Mar-a-Lago raid, the lawfare, four courtroom indictments, 93 particular indictments.
And then there was the E. Jean Carroll farce, and then the two assassination attempts.
I go through it all. And I don't want to, I mean, I've met him, and I like him, and I've talked to him, but it's not an insider like the Biden books where they interview people.

I'm trying to be distant as a historian and just analyze what we're at.

We're in a counterrevolution and he didn't make the choice.

One of the theme of the books is he didn't do a – he didn't even do a Reagan or a George H.W. Bush or George W.
Bush incrementalism. Reagan did a lot with tax cuts.
But the second, he didn't do what he did the first. He said the country is at a precipice and there is no border and we have a revolution with 30 million illegal aliens and there is a raging war with a nuclear power,

and we're arming a proxy in Ukraine. And after October 7, the Middle East is blown up,

and we're $37 trillion in debt. We're borrowing $3 billion in interest a day, and we have a $2 trillion deficit, and we have a $2 trillion trade deficit.
And our allies

are not really our allies in some ways. We're spending an inordinate amount defending them,

in the last hundred years has the Republicans controlled the House, the Senate and the presidency. And he did it the first term for two years.
Now he has a second chance. But I thought, you know, a lot of people thought he played musical chairs.
Hi, everybody, I'm Donald Trump. I extended the tax cuts.
I'm deregulating. But he wouldn't go after Harvard, or he wouldn't go after transgendered athletes, or he wouldn't try to expel 500,000 criminal illegal alien because the music would cut off and you don't have a seat in musical chairs and it's

dangerous. So he just wanted to stay.
Usually a Republican president stays right next to that

seat and they're walking around and there's not enough seats and you grab it and you just survive

because they have this formidable cultural apparat. As I said, the media, but he just said,

And enough seas and you grab it and you just survive because they have this formidable cultural apparat as i said the media universe but he just said he's kind of coy he said during the campaign i'm going to do this and do this but then he's just in the first hundred days it was like napoleon's return to you know from elba the hundred days it was like okay we're going to wage war and cut government. We're going to deal with DEI, woke transgendered guys and girls sports.
We'll close the border. We'll find the illegal aliens.
We'll solve the Ukraine war. We'll denuclearize Iran.
We'll make sure that Panama knows that that canal and us and them are a bundle and China's not going to interfere. We're going to look at Greenland and get that place armed and secure.
And we're going to deal with our buddies, the Canadians. And oh my gosh.
And this is in addition to deregulate tax cuts, this normal stuff. So it was a counter revolution that we've never, ever seen before.
And when you have every counter-revolutionary trying to stamp out Jacobinism, they're kind of like the Thermadors. You know, people sound off.
They're not on the same page. And every time, any little slip, it was, oh, my gosh, Donald Trump did this or that.
The price of eggs was up.

We're dead.

We can't afford Easter eggs.

That kind of hysteria.

And there was no counter effort, counter reform.

I mean, it wasn't like, okay, we're the Democratic Party.

I'm Dick Durbin, and I'm Chuck Schumer, and I'm Nancy Pelosi,

and we're kind of a shadow government.

And we suggest that we have an alternative called Comprehensive Information. Here it is,

points one, two, three. As far as cutting, we did it under Bill Clinton very successfully.

Our party was the only one to balance the budget for four years and 40 years. So here's what we're

going to do, point A, B, C, D. And as far as Ukraine war, Biden was kind of, I don't know, lax.
But here we have a five-point plan to end it. They didn't do any of that.
Instead, it was kickboxing and Spartacus, 25 hours of Spartacus. And Carmelo Anthony is a victim.
He's a folk hero. He's our next George Floyd.
Go fund him. And Luigi Mangione is a noble assassin who's shooting at Hitler-like people.
And Mahmoud Khalil, he's not the October 7th cheerleader. He's a wonderful guy.
We've got poor Gazans that are being terrorized. And then Mr.
Obrego Garcia, he might be a little wife beating here and there.

Must his hair up a little bit. Trafficking, kind of got carried away with those tattoos on his fingers.
That crap happens. And made a mistake on that picture with his short-sleeved shirt and showed all of his gang-related tattoos.
And, course, every once in a while, you slap around your spouse. Everybody does that.
You get a little carried away. But he's a folk hero.
So that's who they're doing. They're taking the most reprehensible people, and they're making them into heroes.
And they're not winning. So they have a new plan, Victor.
It's called Dark Woke. They're not winning, but what's happening is everybody should – a word of warning.
The Democratic Party has gone from a historic low of 29% approval to a historic low of 27% to 23% in one poll. And everybody says, well, they can't win the midterms if it's 23.
Yes, they can. Because that's the party generic poll.
But if they drive Donald Trump, Donald Trump is still in reliable polls, about 51%. Maybe the real clarity is below that, but that's because of the inflated left-wing poll.
If they get him down to 40%, you're going to see people next September during the break, they're going to distance themselves from Trump. And that can't happen.
So that's their strategy to just scream and yell and throw stuff like a tantrum and be anarchist and just make so much chaos that the American people is a proverbial. What was the guy's name in True Romance that said that he, I can't take this.
Elliot. Yeah.
In the elevator. He just puts his hands on, I can't take this anymore.
I can't take this anymore and get into a fetal position. Yeah.
Let me out of this. I didn't mean it.
And we don't want that to happen. So you've got to be careful.
Don't underestimate what the capabilities are.

And I can't believe it.

I mean, when Jeremy Raskin, the representative of the House of Representatives, tells foreign governments,

beware, you're working with Donald Trump and we're going to come back in power.

That's almost treasonous.

I mean, gosh, if a Republican said that during the Biden, or they went over and said, hey, if you work with Obama, when we're going to get in, you're going to be punished.

Can't do that. But that's what they're doing.
They're doing anything. I've never imagined this party would ever do that.
I grew up in a Democratic Party. They're making a lot of mistakes.
But I was going to get to the one that this week they're making, which is they call it dark woke, that they are going to cultivate this new attitude that's provocative and towing the line of being offensive.

And I think they're just trying to keep their young base.

I can't see anything else that they're trying to do.

The problem is that they're conflating two issues, and one is youth and charisma and policy.

So they're trying to do. The problem is that they're conflating two issues, and one is youth and charisma and policy.
So they're saying that AOC and – Jasmine Crockett, I was driving today, and she was bragging about you have to be spontaneous and not talk about policy. And even when you say stupid things like Trump's an M13 or something, it gets attention.
That's true. And they are sort of funny and entertainers, but they're on a 2080 side of the issues.
Donald Trump won not just because he did the hamburger stunt in the garbage truck stuff and he was charismatic. But he wouldn't have won unless he had 70% margins on fiscal discipline, restoration of deterrence, stop crime, close the border, deport, right? Everybody was behind transgender.
He just looked at those issues. I can just imagine him.
He's at Mar-a--Lago, and he said, I got to get a bunch of issues for my next rally. He says to Susie Wiles, Susie, come back in an hour and tell me what the polls are in all these, because this is what I believe.
And she comes back and says, you're very lucky. You sincerely believe this, and you're polling 80%, 70%.
And I'm sure there were some things that were closer, but that's what they're making the mistake. They think that this young group, because they're qua young, they're going to appeal to people.
And they're charismatic because AOC can hop around in her jeans on the stage. And it's not going to work unless – and they can't.
A couple of last thoughts. Kamala Harris lost the presidency not because she moved, she tried to move to the center.
Remember she said she's no longer a fracker, and she didn't like males in women's sports. That's, nobody believed her.
She couldn't, she tried, but she couldn't feign that she was an independent thinker and could appeal to independents and conservative Democrats. They think she lost because she wasn't screaming and yelling about reparations and the new green.
As she had done that, she would have lost by 10 points. And so they don't get that.
And then there's a final thing that's very controversial. I want to be very careful how I state it.
But given what we saw with Josh Shapiro when he was, if he had run as vice president, I'm not a big fan of Josh Shapiro, everybody, so I'm not trying to laud him or anything. But my point is this.
Had he run as vice president, he might have won Pennsylvania. I think they would have.
And they could have got closer. I don't know if they would have won the election, but they would have got closer.
But they didn't pick him because he was Jewish, and they knew that that would offend the hardcore Jasmine Crockett, Tlaib group of, and AOC. And then the second thing, he was pro-Israel, and you can't be pro-Israel in the new Democratic Party.
But here's my point. For a quarter century, the Dorians of the Democratic Party were sort of the Jewish liberals that came out of the 60s and 70s.
And they had good relations with independents, sometimes with Republicans. I'm talking about Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin.
Dick Durbin just announced he's not going to run again from Illinois as senator. And now why is that? Because that David Hogg probably is, and all these crazy people are going to have somebody run against him in Illinois, which is probably to the left of him even.
And Chuck Schumer is not going to be senator next time. He's probably going to bow out because he'll be humiliated in the primary, unless he can really run a nasty, dirty campaign, which is justifiable because she can be a nasty, dirty person.
And we'll see if he does that. But I doubt he's up to it.
Who is he running against? AOC. So my point is that what we saw with the Democratic Party was there was an element of Jewish intellectuals and lawyers, and some of them, like Jeremy Raskin, are trying to, I don't know, consort with the hard left.
But this is an anti-Semitic party, and they hate Israel. And there's no place for any of those people in that party.
And I think the three or four million Jewish Americans are going to realize that. It's kind of a nasty little streak that they're not little.
And I just can't imagine when I see Tlaib and the squad and the type of people that are in the news on the left, David Hogg, I just can't imagine them ever allowing a leadership position in their party to be held by a liberal pro-Israel Jewish person.

I really can't.

And that's the subtext that nobody wants to talk about.

But it is an anti-Semitic party.

The only one who seems to know that is Fetterman in that party.

Yeah, he seems the one that was... Dianne Feinstein, I don't think would be...
She was elected in California, but she had been an older brand, but she was very pro-Israel. But I can't imagine a Jewish liberal being elected in California, not with these crazy people.
Well, since you spoke of David Hogg, he is a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, and he is apparently got, has an organization called Leaders We Deserve. He's a very young kid.
He's 24, 25 or something, I don't know't know very young and he's going to try to primary people against democrats and in many of the incumbents and he's threatened that recently in this week this last week against them and so he's who is he though i mean what what is this he's a survivor not a survivor i mean was one person that was at this big shootout. In Florida or something? Yes, in Florida.
Out of school. And he became an anti-gun spokesman.
He was only 17 or 18. And then he went on to Fox News.
I mean, he's kind of erratic. He said he was going to put Mike Lindell out of business.
Remember, he was going to have an alternate pillow company. Poor Mike Lindell is out of business anyway, almost.
So he has an ability to raise money, but he's in this little tit for tat with James Carville. Because James Carville is an old cynic.
I'm not a big fan of his. But he looked at the Republican Party to take one example.
And he said, you know what, after the Tea Party, they thought the Tea Party was going to win. And they started a primary people.
And they got the most extreme candidate. And they didn't take the Senate in 2010.
And they didn't really get the Senate back until they got candidates that were both charismatic on the right side of all the issues, percentage-wise. And he's saying that any time a party gets into this puritanical streak, that you have to be absolutely pure on all the issues and extreme, you don't win.
And the worst thing you can do historically is to primary an old ossified stalwart that gets elected every year in a purple district. The better strategy is to say, this guy is with us 70% of the time, but he's an opportunist because he has to be because he won't get elected.
Republicans, you know, Murkowski in Alaska or somebody like that, or in states like Maine,

they make allowances.

They just say,

these people are in a purple state because Alaska can be purple

or they have that rank voting.

And we just sort of let them be renegades

on 30 or 40%.

Democrats don't do that.

No.

They'll primary them

and they will get a crazy squad-like candidate. I hope they do because they'll lose.
So Al Gore, did you see Al Gore came back in the news? Yes, I did, in a big way that was ugly, as Al Gore always is.

What I liked about it was he gave a little preamble before he called Trump Hitler.

It was like this pseudo-intellectual thing that the ad hitlerium reductionism is always bad. It's kind of bad.

I'm not accustomed to calling people Hitler, and it's of bad, but you know, he is. And I thought, not accustomed, you? No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
In the 2000 election when you lost and you were so embittered because you won the popular vote, as soon as George Bush became controversial in the Iraq war, what did you do? You called him a digital brown shirt. You said that he was basically a fascist.
You and John Glenn, you. So all you're doing, Al Gore, is this returning to form.
You did that with Bush. And we know what you guys do on the left.
Every time, as I've said, and everybody's pointed this out, when there's a Republican president, he's Hitler. And then when the next guy takes over, the old Hitler becomes Churchill, because the new guy is the new Hitler.
And so George W. Bush was hated as Hitler.
And now when Trump took over, then he was Churchill, and he was painting, and he was nice, and he was an independent, and now Trump is Hitler. And that was the same thing with Reagan.
Reagan was Hitler, then George H.W. came in, and they said, wow, we hate George H.W.
He's a wimp, he's whiny, he's got that crazy Lee Atwater working for him, that Willie Horton ad. Reagan was he was statesman-like.
He was a senior statesman. And then George H.W.
Bush was Hitler, and it worked. And we got rid of Hitler, and now we've got W.
Oh my gosh, I wish we had George H.W. Bush.
He was a nonpartisan. He was senior.
He was calm. He didn't have that grating Southern accent.
He's a World War II hero, shot down in the Pacific, heroic guy. And W, he's a Christian, fanatic, digital branch.
And now George Bush is sober and judicious. So patently obvious and hypocritical.
It sure is.

Can I say one more hypocrisy before I end? Have you noticed that there's an irony that the people who warped the law now are respecting the Constitution? The people who went to the doors of the Supreme Court and threatened them, as we mentioned, Schumer, or they thronged their homes. That's ironic that they're saying that we have to respect the Supreme Court has ruled against Donald Trump when they said he should facilitate his return.
But there's another one that's really strange, and I think I mentioned that. They always talk about imperialism and colonialism.
So they go now They're crapsing down to El Salvador Like Yankees

Spelled Q-U-I in the end. Yankee, 19th century, gunboat diplomacy, steal the Panama, whatever they think they're doing.
And they go to this El Salvadorian country and they say, we're now Americanos. Give us your man, Americanclay.
And we tell you, Mr. El Salvadorians, that we are on your soil and you're a protector of the United States.
So this is what you are going to do on your soil with your citizens according to your law. We want him back.
You send him. And they said, but he's our citizen.
He's not yours. We don't send people.
And we have rules about gang activities and associations. And before he even left, we thought he was associated with gangs.
And now we know he is. And he's got proof all over his body.
So according to our statutes, we're going to put him in our prison. You can't do that, you little tin-horned dictator.
We're the United States of America. Bully us.
It's so funny to see these little weakling Democrats go down there and act like 19th century imperialists and start ordering the Salvadorians all around. I feel sorry for the Salvadorians.
That's why they kind of snuck those margaritas in there in that picture. That's an ugly American.
Isn't it funny? They're all ugly American. They get on TV and brag they went down to El Salvador.
I thought, yeah, you went down there and ordered a sovereign nation to do what you want to do to one of their citizens who's not one of your citizens, and you wanted them to violate their laws and their protocols. And then you thought because you were a Yankee that they would listen to you? They just criticized Donald Trump for being imperialist, for telling the Panamanians, get the Chinese out of the entry and the exit of the Panama.
I'd rather die on that altar of saving the Panama Canal from the Chinese than freeing Abrego Garcia, the wife-beater, trafficker, and M13 gang member. I should say partner abuser.
Wasn't married when he sucked the crap out of his now wife. Yeah.
Well, I think it was more just a PR stunt anyway, but the congressman going down to El Salvador to make spectacle of Abrego Garcia.

You are, though. I'm down here in El Salvador telling the El Sorderns what they have to do according to my laws, not theirs.
I'm on their soil, and I'm trying to bring back or force them to give up a domestic abuser, a trafficker, a guy who was speeding at high speed, broke our laws illegally in the United States, and gang member. As long as they don't get the wrong press to make that message for the people, if they just get this, well, it's due process.
And that's what they kept saying. It's all about due process.
You're driving and some people do hear podcasts. They hear Fox.
They walk down in New York. They see the New York Post headline.
They get the message that they're supporting these creepy people. Well, Victor, we're at the end and I'd like to read a couple of comments, and these are from YouTube.
They're very short, and one's very nice, and the other one is just a statement on nothing to do with you. But the first one says, I'm a senior economist at my company.
Don't sell yourself short, VDH. You're more intelligent than most economists and absolutely way more intelligent than any commenter.
And that was from Thomas. Thank you, Thomas.
I appreciate that. I study economics.
I used to read a lot about classical economics. Almost every 19th century book written about tariffs in ancient Greece.
They have a word for it, telos. And I think the other word I remember is amoibe exchange.
So they had about a 10% tariff at the port of Piraeus on all imported goods to the Athenian Empire. And I think they had a 10% at the Dardanelles, the Hellespont, for all ships leaving the grain-bearing regions of the Black Sea.
All right, and this one is from Hay Liam, and I think that means Hay Liam. Anyways, I think the knife, he's talking about the Anthony killing of the other young kid.
I think the knife was concealed while the killer was taunting and challenging for a confrontation. The killer was the only one who knew a knife would be used.
That's a premeditated murder plan of a random victim. But I did say that.
I said, I'm not sure that they would be able to convince a jury of that. But the fact that he brought a knife in and he concealed it and he went over to an environment where he knew there would be confrontation and he knew and had preplanned to bring that knife out because he said, he said, don't touch me, you won't like it, or something to that effect.

So he was going to bring that knife out.

And that's another losing proposition.

I feel that the Anthony family, in their efforts to melt the public sympathy and get money, and I guess it's up to $500,000 or $600,000, buy a new home, renegated community, and get this shyster as their spokesman. I don't think they understand what the mechanics are in this country, because that shyster is just spewing hatred and racism all the time and trying to turn this murder alleged murder but i don't even have to say alleged he said he killed him he said he he killed him and he stabbed him in the heart so maybe we will find out to what degree murder he was but But my point is it's just backfiring.

And I guess what I'm trying to say in conclusion to today, if I identified as a white person, I don't think I really do. I couldn't if I wanted to.
I live in a 90% Hispanic community. But I wouldn't.
But if I did, and I saw a bunch of people trafficking in white supremacy all the time, white this and white that, I would get very angry that they were speaking in my name because they were a minority. So what's happening to the African-American community are two things.
On the grassroots level, when these grassroots groups in Chicago, they want to get rid of these illegal aliens that are tormenting them and crowding over their social service, they are getting more conservative. And black men are thinking independently of the Democratic Party to 23 or 20%.
So there is a liberalization of the black community politically. At the same time this is happening, the left-wing elite is going crazy.
Maybe in reaction to that, but I'm talking about what Jasmine Crockett says. I'm talking about Latita James says.
I'm talking about Fannie Willis says. I'm talking about what the Anthony spokesman says.
I'm talking about Juicy Smollett says. It's hatred.
And it's white this, white this, Professor Kendi. And it's Ta-Nehisi Coates, you know, I didn't feel much on 9-11,-11 all that stuff so it's tragic because i would get really angry because all they're doing is polarizing people and they're not the official face of black america but they think they are and somebody in the black community i think a lot of black democrats conservatives especially are saying these people don't speak to anybody but themselves.
But they always talk about race, race, race, race. Crockett always tries to bait people.
And so did the squad and the guy that pulled the fire alarm. He lost, thank God.
Bowman. Bowman, yeah.
Yeah, he was a racial bigot. And these people make Al Sharpton look kind of normal.
I mean, Al Sharpton was a racist bigot in my 20s and 30s when I would listen to him. But these people are crazy.
And the reparations movement and everything, I just feel like it's so sad. I mean, they got all these brilliant people like Tom Sowell.

Think about, I was at the Hoover Institution, and I think that for the first 15 years, the only people I kind of talked to were black. They were Chiron Skinner and Shelby Steele and Tom Sowell, and there was Condi Rice.
She's our director. But the point is that if you were to say who were the stellar, the stars at the Hoover Institution, you would kind of name those names.
And they had no special help or anything. I mean, they were all meritocratic and they competed on their, they were all confident, empowered people that were very educated.
And they read, widely read. And they were kind of like the vanguard of the black intellectual or leadership community.
And I don't see that younger generation emulating their example, at least the people in the Democratic Party. Maybe in the Republican Party I do.
I mean, Tim Scott and because... Byron Donald.
Yeah. Donaldson.
Oh, yeah. He's really smart.
He's well-spoken. And the funny thing is that when he goes out now, he's running for governor, he starts to encounter the, could I use this derogatory term, the Karens, the white neurotic liberals who basically cannot stop from saying, but i am liberal and i did so much for you and you're not grateful to me and my liberality and you don't make me feel better than you and you can't be get on your hind legs and talk to me that way because i'm a liberal that supports black reparation that's very good fingernails on the chalkboard, Victor.

We're all cringing.

That's who they are.

I mean, that's who they are.

I've dealt with them my entire life.

All right, Victor.

Thank you very much for everything today.

It was wonderful.

And thanks to our audience for listening.

Thank you, everybody.

We went from World War II to Karen.

Thank you.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hanson, and we're signing off. If you've been with us at all over the last six months or so, you are probably familiar with one of our favorite new brews, Wired to Fish Coffee.
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