Real Fascism of the 1930s and the Federal Reserve Trumped

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And we'd like to thank Vibrance for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
This is our Saturday edition where we look at something a little bit different in the middle segment, usually historical, and we're on important moments in both world and U.S. history in the 20th century.
and today Victor's going to be talking about fascism. But before that, we've got lots of news stories.

We'd like to look at a little bit more on the polls as we looked at yesterday

and Jerome Powell has been criticized. He's the Federal Reserve head, and he's been criticized by Donald Trump.
And then finally, Christine Noem and Megyn Kelly have had a back and forth that we'll look at. So stay with us, and we'll be right back.
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N-A-N-I-T, nanit.com. Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
So Victor, I know that you wanted to say a little bit more on those polls since the Rasmussen report came out yesterday, and showed that Donald Trump had a 50% approval and 48% disapproval, which was a significantly lower from the polls the day before, which put him at 57% approval.

So I was wondering. It's amazing that he's waging this counter-revolution on the border, on immigration, on the universities, on trade, on Doge, and he's getting in the mainstream media, legacy media, NPR, PBS, Washington Post, New York Times, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Network News, Cable News, except for Fox, Newsmax, completely negative coverage.
And yet he's still, I can't believe it, he's still 50%, 51% in different polls, approval waiting. And why is that? It's because there's, one, people appreciate the fact that he said he's doing what he said he was going to do.
Most people don't do that. They don't do that at all.
Number two, they think government is too big and that it's wasteful. Number three, it filters down to the public that whatever debt, deficit, whatever it is, they may not know the actual numbers of a $37 trillion national debt or a $2 trillion annual budget deficit or a $1.1 trillion trade, they know that it's unsustainable.
And they know that the left has said it was unsustainable. But again, it's Trump's, he didn't have to do any of this.
He could have just said, I didn't spend any more than Biden did and keep going and we get up to about 140% GDP. And whoever, when the music stopped, whoever was in the presidency and musical chairs, he would be doomed.
Because a lot of bondholders would not buy any more U.S. debt or they would want to sell their U.S.
debt. And so we'll see what happens, but he's still got a lot of support.
And then there's one other thing, a third influence that explains his popularity. There is no alternative.
The Democratic Party, I could just take a little detour. It's into what I would call crime porn.
It is fascinated with unsavory individuals. Take Carmelo Anthony, the young black American, 17-year-old, goes to the wrong side of a track mate, gets on a beef, says, touch me and see what happens, stabs a person in the heart, kills him, runs, murder, maybe it's second degree murder.
And all of a sudden, the judge lets him out, $250,000 bond, GoFundMe explodes, $400,000. The parents go into into a gated, wealthy community at $3,500, buy a $400,000 home.
And then he is now a folk hero. And this is supposed to be another George Floyd or Trayvon Martin.
But the case, they say, it's like Rittenhouse, Rittenhouse, Rittenhouse. He was white and he

got off. No, he didn't get off.
He went to trial. He paid a $2 million bond.
He was in prison for 80, what, 85 days. And he was running away from people.
They were charging him and trying to kill him. So, I mean, it would be as if the deceased was chasing this person on the street and he turned around and stabbed him.
And then even before stabbing them, he would be in jail for $2 million. So, he's kind of now a folk hero.
So is Mr. Garcia, the...
Abrego. And Mangioni, too.
Yes, I'll get to him, but he's a hero. And the left doesn't understand that they just, anything that Trump touches, they go into this Pavlovian response that this is an issue, this is an issue that we can, so a senator from Maryland goes down, it's going to be the big issue because he was married and he was a Maryland man.
No, he was an illegal alien. And he came here and he was facing deportation in 2019.
The judge, the district judge, the appellate, they looked at it. He was outside a Home Depot years ago with marijuana in his pocket, with cash, and with a Chicago Bulls.
As somebody who lives in gang-infested territory, I can tell you that not too far in Mendota, California, we had M13 take over. The Chicago Bulls insignia for a person who doesn't live in Chicago is an indication of gang activity.
Informants in that gang said that he was a gang member,

and then we were told he was a fine family man. Then it was disclosed that his girlfriend at the

time, and whom he married, had filed two spousal abuse restraining orders against him.

Hit her in the eye, punched her in the eye, slapped her, tore her clothes off.

So the point is, the left wants to romanticize this person, make him a cause celeb, but do

you really want to bring in somebody from another country illegally?

He came illegally.

So forget everything else.

He's residing illegally.

And he's resisted deportation orders.

You just ignored them. So if he had done nothing else, he should have been deported.
But he did do something else. He hit his girlfriend and beat her up basically twice.
And he was affiliated with a gang member. He drugs on him he had cash on him he had gang insignia on him why do you want somebody in the country illegally doing that so maybe the trump administration shouldn't have put him in the prison but he said and then he said he if he went gangs would threaten him.
Well, why would they threaten him any more than anybody else threatened him unless they thought he was in a gang, is my point. So, there were all these reasons not to say that, oh, he's guilty and he's committed a crime.
It's just that we have a choice, and we don't like people coming in illegally, period. They should go back and try it again legally.
But especially we don't like spousal abusers, and we don't like gang members, and we don't like people selling or possessing drugs. And if they do that, go back home.
Then we come to Luigi Mangione. He was basically a very skilled assassin.
He scouted out everything. He went off the Internet.
He got his little disguise. He ambushed a health executive and blew him apart, killed him, a man that had children and who had worked his way up from nothing to be a health.
And then we have Taylor Lorenz and these other people defending him. And he's now a cause celeb.
In fact, the youth of the Democratic Party love him. And so then we go into Mahmoud Khalil.
Mahmoud Khalil came here on a student visa to Columbia University as a graduate student. And he got a degree.
And then he transmogrified into a green card, even though he was associated. I don't know what he was still doing in his late 20s, 30 years old at Columbia.
But he was the official representative or communications director. He's the person Columbia talked to about Columbia University apartheid divest.
If you look at that literature, what they had put out, they called, they praised Hamas. They said October 7th was justified by any means necessary.
They had people in there that said they wanted to kill Israelis. They did all of that.
They illegally broke into a hall at Columbia. He wasn't one of the people, but he defended it, and he was their advocate.
And at one time, they had suspended him. They issued a suspension order for a day, and then they got scared and withdrew it.
So the point was, again, is he guilty of a felony? No. But the point is, you don't have to let him in.
If you look at the statute passed in the 50s that Marco Rubio keeps quoting, it just says that anybody who is engaged in terrorist or promotes or engages in terrorist activity are other people who do. That's exactly what he does.
He is promoting people who are advocating more of what happened on October 7th. So all Marco Rubio, as the Secretary of State, is saying, I don't want to even talk about him.
I'm just saying that I have the right to deport anybody under a statute who promotes or associates with people who promote terrorism. It's just an option.
And if he had just said, I'm Mamhu Khalil, and I worked, and he didn't. I worked for United Nations Relief Organization, ANRA, which was, we know, had Hamas people working for it.
And I worked in the Beirut embassy, and I am coming here to the United States to study, but I also want to be engaged in pro-Hamas demonstrations. They would have never issued him a visa.
They wouldn't have said, well, we don't want to restrict your right of expression. They just said, we have an option.

We don't have to let you in.

We don't have to let you in at all. And they do that all the time.
When I was in high school or college, almost every year there would be some 65-year-old person. Sometimes they were citizens.
and it it news erupted that they were guards at auschwitz or belson belson or they had been part of the ss in ukraine and they lied they lied about the circumstances they got here some of them were not even on green cards they had been natural we deported them we deported people in their 80s and why because when they went to court and, I didn't know, I just had to, I had no choice. I wasn't a criminal.
I was just part of this government. We said, no, we have a choice.
And if you had said what you did, we would not have let you in and you lied about it. So you're out.
So if we did that with naturalized citizens, we can, you know, I mean, it's just so add it all up. You have this Carmelo Anthony and you have Mahmoud Khalil and then you've got Luigi Mangione and then you've got Mr.
Garcia, Abrago Garcia. And what is the left doing? They're romanticizing each one of these people, but they're all unsavory characters.
All of them. They haven't been adjudicated in the system of law yet, but they are not your poster children or poster boys or poster whatever people to advocate a anti-Trump movement.
I mean, it's not going to resonate with people. And then finally, there's the flip side.
They don't talk about the victim of Kamala Anthony. He was just 17.
All he did was say, you're on the wrong side of this stadium, and your team is on that side, and you were yelling or something, so please leave. And he didn't leave.
And he got up and he said, please leave. You're disturbing it and you're in the wrong place.
He brought a knife, but we don't care about the fate of that person. He's gone.
And we don't care about all the people who were wiped out on October 7th, which started this whole Middle East. And Mr.
Khalil has advocated sympathy with these killers that, what, fried a baby, raped women, decapitated. We don't think about them.
We don't think about the people that come over here illegally in gangs and drugs and the damage they do to people. And we don't think about the poor UnitedHealthcare executive who got his body blown apart by bullets from this coward who was a wealthy, wealthy person.
And it's just really disturbing that these people on the left keep championing this. And then when you say, Victor, that's unfair.
Well, then you look at the Rutgers poll and people who identify as left, 50 percent of them or over half can defend the idea of killing Donald Trump. And you look at Mangione and some of these polls and he's like 45, 55 percent.
And that pathetic Taylor Lorenz went on fox the other night with hannity and she she tried to play this old wink and nod game where she said he you know when she said he was handsome and he's dynamic and idealistic what and she's i was just saying why he attracts other people and then he kept trying to press and said, is that what attracts you?

Well, these UnitedHealth people were doing all these terrible things. So basically what she was implying, because she didn't want to be explicit because she would have been thrown out of the segment advocating murder, but basically she was saying that any time a person determines that an organization or its management is detrimental to the public good, you have a right to kill them.
You have a right to kill them. And UnitedHealth, whatever you think about it, it provides health care for a lot of people.
A lot of people would argue that I'm a UnitedHealthcare coverage. When I have a sinus infection or I go for eye treatment, I get a complete printout of what they paid and my premium.
And I have no complaints against them. I think somebody should do it, and they do a good job.
But these people, the left, I don't know whether they weren't educated or they're ignorant. They've completely lost their marbles.
And the idea that Bernie Sanders and AOC and the squad are now the face of this party, whether it's, you know, they have no problem with destroying Teslas or terrorism with Teslas or any of this stuff. And it's going to escalate.
it's going to escalate, unfortunately, until somebody gets up and said, Josh Shapiro did, but he only did

when they attacked the governors. He wasn't loud at all about what they were doing to Jews on campus.
He said some things, but not like he did. He didn't say, it wasn't as animate when they tried to kill Trump twice.
He wasn't animate about the Tesla firebombing, but now he is because he understands these people are anti-Semitic.

They're pro-Palestinian.

They're capable of anything.

Why we want them here, I don't know.

It's our choice to let people in.

Why would you want people coming from this violent Middle East in Gaza that are completely nursed from day one to hate Jews and kill them in places like Gaza. I have nothing against Palestinians.
Just say, you know what, for right now until this problem is over and your education system is different, I don't think you should come to the United States. If you're Palestinian, you're Arab, and you're an Israeli citizen, then come.
We have no problem with that. But not this educational system where you're nursed on venom and toxic hatred.
And a lot of lies as well. So, Victor, I would like to take a moment for our sponsor, Wired to Fish Coffee.
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And we'd like to thank Wired2Fish for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show. So, Victor, let's turn to Donald Trump.
And I have a little bit to read, so if you'll humor me for a second, because it's a Donald Trump tweet, so I'm sure you'll enjoy it. He is criticizing the Federal Reserve head, Jerome Powell, because we all need interest rates to go down.
But Jerome Powell is resisting it, according to him, until Trump clarifies his trade policies. But this is what Trump writes, and he's talking about the European Central Bank here.
The European Central Bank is expected to cut interest rates for the seventh time, and yet too late Jerome Powell of the Fed, who is always too late and wrong, yesterday issued a report, which was another and typical complete mess. Oil prices are down, groceries are down, and the USA is getting rich on tariffs.
Too late should have lowered interest rates, like the European Central Bank, long ago. But he should certainly lower them now.
So I don't know if Donald Trump is going to achieve his ends by that kind of – Probably not, but he has a point because the inflation rate came back in March and it was low. It was 2.4 annualized.
That's pretty good. 2.6 maybe.
And there was good job growth. Oil prices were down.
And consumer confidence, people are still not going crazy, but we're not in a recession. We're not in a hyperinflation.
That's the point that he's making.

And these interest rates that are so high came late to Biden. They let him go for a long time.
When we hit 9% annualized inflation in 2022, then they acted. And what Trump is getting at is the debt at 1.1, the annual deficit at 1.9 adds to the debt that's 37 trillion, and that has to be financed every day.
And it's $3 billion. If you cut just, if he was able to cut 20%, it would save hundreds of billions.
I mean, you could save three or four hundred billion dollars. Excuse me, million dollars out of that three billion dollars a year.
So that's what he's thinking. He said, we're cutting all this and we're doing all this, but we're paying three billion dollars a day in interest.
And this is crazy. The other thing about it, it's very unique, is if you collate everything in the Wall Street Journal, what they say.
I mean, it's all negative. 99% negative Trump.
Every single day. Karl Rove has another blistering column.
The economists have blistering column. Trump can do no good.
And I think, you know, I like the Wall Street Journal. But I'm an irrelevant person in Selma, California, but I would make a polite suggestion.
If they continue this negative drumbeat, 90% negative, they're going to go the way of national review. And somebody's going to say that's impossible because they're not really popular on the left.
They would rather read the New York Times leftist. But half their readership, or maybe 55%, supports what's going on.
But if they completely don't have the opposite view, and they don't, then, and that was what I watched it firsthand at the National Review, I would politely suggest to people, do you really believe that Hillary Clinton

is better than the agenda of Donald Trump or Joe Biden will be better than Donald Trump's agenda?

And why don't you just say 51% is good enough for me? Even if you disagree with his antics or his

tweets, what he's doing, closing the border, legal only immigration, no wars abroad, deterrence, moving the embassy, Abraham Accord, all of that. Why can't you just digest that and say on the ledger in a Manichean world where you don't have to be perfect to be good, this agenda is preferable.

And more importantly, on 85% of things that we used to before, we were getting under it,

but they couldn't.

And I would politely tell people, and they got very angry at me, but I would say, if

you continue to do this, you're going to lose subscribers, and then you're going and you're going – and that's what's going to happen to the Wall Street Journal if they continue to do it. They cannot say anything positive about what's going on.
And there are positive things that are going on. But if you keep saying recession, recession, recession – Jamin Diamond said recession today.
The Wall Street Journal said, you know, a majority of economists think recession, recession, recession. Well, then why isn't Powell saying, oh, my God, all of the blue chip economists, the Wall Street Journal, they're predicting a recession.
I've got to stop that by lowering interest rates. You only raise interest rates or keep them high if you're worried about Biden hyperinflation.
But you don't have hyperinflation. Now, the second question is, is Trump smart doing this? Yes and no.
Because if he now lowers interest rates, then everybody goes after Powell and says, you caved, you're supposed to be independent. But if he doesn't say anything, he thinks there's no downside in doing something which I think is politicized.
I think everybody does. So I think Trump's strategy is you say it now, and then you shut up for a while, and then you hope he waits a month so nobody says he's reacting to the Trump criticism.
But it's just my own feeling. Well, I think before we go to break and then to fascism in Europe in the 1930s, there was a little spat that occurred between Megan Kelly, who said, Christine Noem should not be out there all the time showboating herself for PR for what's getting done by, by the Homeland Security.
And Noam shot back that she's, or sorry, Noam shot back that she has a lot of things to do. So sometimes she's out there with all different 26 different divisions, I guess, she feels like she has.
So they are in a little bit of an argument.

And Megan Kelly says, I love everything she's doing, but she's trying to make a spectacle of herself, theater of what's going on. I'm a little prejudiced because I go on Megan's once a month.
And there's another backstory to that. But a long time ago, that was the only person I was on Fox occasionally until I was, I had a little, some people called me up and said, you wrote something that we don't like and you're never going to be on Fox again.
That was the Ailes regime whom I liked a lot. I had his son, Zach, wonderful.
I met, love his wife, but they, maybe they had a legitimate, I had written a column critical of a Bill O'Reilly, and I like Bill O'Reilly. I like him a lot.
And I like Roger Ailes, but they felt that I had been on Fair. And Mr.
Ailes said, I shouldn't expect to get back on. And I wasn't, but I had been on Megan.
And then when she left, Laura brought me on. I owe a lot to Laura and Tucker.
I like both of them.

So I'm kind of prejudiced here about Megan.

But her point really wasn't that critical because I went back and looked at what she said.

She likes the idea that if you're going to intercept by sea drug smuggling, you're driving the boat. If you're trying to tell people about what the problem is in El Salvador, you actually go down there.
Or if you want to look at the fence, you have firsthand knowledge. So that was all right.
She was absolutely right. You just don't – Moni Orcus never did any of that.
But her point was, as I understand it, you don't wear a $60,000, if that's true, Rolex. You don't wear hair extensions.
You don't wear tight-fitting outfits, especially if you're a grandmother. And as Christy Nolmes has reminded me, I'm a grandmother.
I'm married. I have kids.
So what she is saying, when you go out there, just wear a baggy camouflage jacket and work boots and tie your hair back with a baseball cap and nobody will stare at you. And you don't need to look glamorous.
You don't need makeup. You don't need, I think she said, fake eyelashes.
She was really against the glam factor and nothing else. She was very honest.
She said, look at me right now. I dress like that.
I have it, you know, but I'm in a TV show. But when I go out, you know, Laura Ingram does that a lot.
She goes out on location. Remember, she's done actually kickboxing or, but she doesn't do, she doesn't make herself up like that.
She just wears clothes that are characteristics of the people that she's with when she goes to the border.

So she's right.

Megan is right.

And I don't know why, Christy, I mean. She's a grandma having a renaissance.
Give her some slack. She's a very attractive woman, and she feels she'll be even more attractive and get attention because she's so unusually attractive for someone that age.
And that's a narcotic. But I think Megan's criticism was constructive.
She's saying that the left is going after you all the time. What do they call her? Ice Barbie or something? Yeah, I think that was.
Yeah. So just protect yourself and protect the agency by looking like the guys you're with, with no makeup.
And I think because she is a naturally attractive person. So if she didn't wear any makeup or fake eyelashes or Rolex watches, she just had a baggy T-shirt and baggy pants, she'd actually look more attractive.

And people wouldn't resent that, I think.

Megan was saying people were starting to – that was in the leftist press, too.

All right, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break, and then we'll come back to talk about fascism in Europe in the 1930s. Stay with us and we'll be right back.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson show.

For everybody who's new, Victor is 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 X account.

His handle is at VD Hanson, and you can find him on Facebook at Hanson's Morning Cup. So please come join us there.
Victor, so we've been hearing so much as you've termed fascist porn or fascism porn from the left about Donald Trump. So this is an exciting thing.
I would like to hear about real fascists and what they do. So take it away.
Yeah, real fascists. I was just as an experiment.
About five minutes ago, I said fascism 1930s. And Wikipedia came up.
I didn't want to read it. I'm not a fan of Wikipedia, but I could see skimming a little bit.
And then the BBC came up.

Which two pictures on an article of fascism in the 1930s you think they had on there? Donald Trump. Yes, Donald Trump.
And they always do this. People say, they say that he, they had Le Pen too.
But modern fascism

It comes from this Latin word fasces, and those are the rods that Roman tribunes or legates carried as a sign of their authority, and they were bound. So the idea is that the fascist party originated in the 1920s in Italy under Mussolini.
Mussolini was a communist, socialist. He was actually wounded in World War.
He was sick and wounded on the Austrian front and the Alps. And that was another characteristic of all of these people.
They were military people. Franco came to power in 36 during the spanish revolution and he had been not the top ranking there were two or three officers ahead of him that were engineering and they all mysteriously died he was accused of in plain crowd he didn't have anything to do with but that was one of the accusations.
But he had been a very effective

military officer in Spanish Morocco. And Mussolini had actually been a low ranking, but actually very brave.
And Hitler was kind of exact, but he was a messenger in the front lines, and he was gassed for a while.

And there were people in Japan that had been in the Manchurian front. So they came out of the military.
And why did they gain power? They gained power for a number of reasons. One was after the Great World War I and the Great Depression, it was a one-two punch in Europe.
And the problem with the World War I wasn't that it was barbaric and it was horrific, but it wasn't nearly as horrific as World War II. And World War II didn't lead to fascism.
Fascism died mostly with World War II. And the reason was there was not an unconditional surrender.
There wasn't a clear verdict. So the defeated powers and the victorious powers had complaints that no one had won or lost.
So the French General Fauch said, this is only a 20-year repeat. The Italians said we fought for the Allies against the Austrians and we lost 500,000 dead and we didn't even get territorial acquisitions that were in dispute to all these areas.
And the British said we lost all of these men over there and France is socialist.

And so Oswald Mosley and there was a fascist movement in Britain that was restrained because Britain and France had far stronger constitutional reputations, dependability, transparency than these other countries did. But there was a Japanese coup that got rid of the Japanese constitutional government and in the late 20s and 30s took over.
Okay. So they were reacting.
The army said that in the conundrum of World War I, they made the argument in a nationalist sense. Italy didn't get what it should have got.
Germany, we were treated unfairly by the Versailles Treaty. Japan, we helped patrol the Mediterranean for the allies, and yet they didn't give us any of the spoils.
We didn't get the Mariana Islands. We didn't get any of the Bismarck.
They didn't get any of this, they said. And then in Spain, it was the communists and socialists are taking over during the Depression.
So there was the second thing, the Depression. And in all of these countries, there was a socialist communist reaction, basically parallel to it.
The funny thing was that national socialism was socialist. And there were elements, Mussolini was a socialist, his fascist party.
When I say socialist, there were crony capitalism. They controlled the private sector.
They had government ownership of the utilities. They had very generous social welfare programs and they were nationalist.
And they, but the two, one-two punch that fueled them was the anger over Versailles.

Either they got, they felt treated too harshly or they didn't get enough out of the war given the sacrifices. And then the Depression hit.
And one of the strange things about it, classical economics, when the Depression hit, did not react. And so in the United States, Hoover actually raised taxes to try to balance the budget.
And the point I'm making is he did not expand the money supply when people were hoarding. So when you have a depression, everybody says, I've got $150 in gold coins or silver, or I'm going to put them under my mattress, and it doesn't circulate.
And then prices are affected, jobs are affected, people can't borrow, there's people who don't go to a bank, so the banks don't have any money, so they can't lend money, and they fail. Okay, so the classical Keynesian nostrum is for a temporary period to expand the money plot.
George Bush did it in 2008. Donald Trump did it in 2020.
And that was supposed to be a temporary deficit. Of course, their successors just said, well, if the Republicans did it, if Bush did it, I'm Obama.

I'm not going to be like Clinton and try to sacrifice. I'm just going to spend more than Bush did because he did it and he's a Republican.
And then Biden said, well, Trump ran a deficit. Yeah, but it was right during the height of COVID.
And Bush was trying to save the financial system. But in the democracies, they didn't do that.
And so in the fascist countries, they started rearming early and public works, the autobahns and the Italian train system. And what happened was people in New York and the salons in Paris, they said, wow, they have something.
They're patriotic. They're trying to, except for Hitler, they're trying to bring back traditional religion.
They're fighting communism and they're building up militaries. And they survived the Depression better than France or Britain, but especially better than the United States.
Because we didn't, we had tight money. And then really, if you look at what Roosevelt did, he overregulated and he brought in all these high taxes and he did not let people naturally rebound from it.
So we did a whole – from Hoover to Roosevelt, that – it was probably about a 12-year period. So by 1938, we had 19% unemployment still in the second recession, our second depression.
And only the wild spending of World War II got us out of it. So my point is that fascism got a good reputation among the populace because they survived the depression better than the alternative.
and they addressed the anger in Italy and Germany and Spain and Japan over the First World War. And then third, you could make the argument that there was not an existing confidence in the republican system of government.
France had been a republic much sooner than Germany had. And the Weimar Republic was a joke.
And Japan had really had dabbled with constitutional government, but it was new in the 20s. And the same thing in the Spanish Republic, whereas the United States and Britain and France had a much stronger and longer going back to the 18th century.
And in Britain, parliamentary constitutional government was even earlier. So they were able to withstand much better these fascist movements that said, we can restore the economy more quickly.
We will bring back national dignity. We will stamp out communism.

We'll bring back traditional religion. We will stop the sex and wildness of the Weimar type of lifestyle.
And that's why they got into power. And once they got into power, 22 in Italy, Spain, 1936, 33, basically 33.

Hitler was in power by 33-34. And the Japanese were in power by the mid-30s, the militarists.
Then they just started to liquidate people. And Mussolini was the most successful in hiding the black shirts that went around and beat up and even killed people.

But Franco and the nationals got rid of a lot of people. He was in power for 36 years.
Most of these fascist movements disappeared after World War II because they were on the losing side. But Franco was very smart.
And what he did during World War II, Hitler came to him in 1940 after France had fallen. And he said to him, there's only Britain.
Russia's our partner. The United States is isolationist.
You're missing out, General Franco. And we can take Gibraltar.
If we take Gibraltar, we'll control the entire Mediterranean. We'll put a sub-base there, a naval base, the Italian Navy, and we won't let anybody in, and Britain will be cut off from easy access to the Suez Canal.
And we have most of the – if you look at the periphery of the Mediterranean, Greece was occupied. Italy was a fascist country.
France was occupied. Spain was pro-fascist.
You go on the other side of the Mediterranean, it was all the way to Egypt, either occupied by the Vichy French or the Italians in Libya. Only a little bit from Tobruk to Suez was British.
And you look at the Middle East, it was mostly pro-Nazi, where Palestine is today, for example. So there was a British presence in Iraq, but the Vichys controlled Syria and Lebanon.
But my point is this, then. They went to Franco in 1940 and Hitler said, we want you to allow us to go in and attack Gibraltar from the land.
There's no way. Nobody's ever taken Gibraltar except the British from sea.
And they did that centuries ago. But we will have a combined Italian Navy from sea and you can join us.
And Franco said, what do I get out of it? And they said, what do you want? And he said, well, there is no more France. There's Vichy France.
And so we want Spanish Morocco and Algeria. And Hitler said they negotiated for nine hours.
He said he'd rather have a root canal than talk to Franco again. It was the worst time of his life.
And Franco basically said, we lost a million people in the Civil War. Our country is devastated.
And for us to get into a world war against the democracies, where there wasn't only one democracy, we want all this territory. And Hitler basically said to him, I've only got about 80,000 people in France.
I don't need any more because of the Vichys. They are keeping a tab on things.
If I go in there and steal all of France's imperial holdings in North Africa and Algeria and Morocco and give it to you, the Vichys may defect and then I'll have a hostile Vichy and I've got to put a half a million men in. So they never cut a deal.
And the reason after that, Franco said, well, I'll tell you what I'll do. We'll sell you titanium and we'll pay the transportation.
So they did. And then about 1944, Funko looked around and he thought, they're going to lose.
And just like the Swedes, the Swedes said, well, we'll send you iron ore, but you pay for no more credit. You pay in gold and you have to pay transportation.
And that happened for about six months. And then as the year ended, the Swedes said, no, no, no, no, no.
You're going to lose. And they cut Hitler off.
That's in his private papers and table talk. He was really angry about it, of course.
And then the Spanish cut him off. And then they made feelers to the Americans and the British.
So when the war ended,

Franco had transmogrified from a pro-Nazi fascist into an anti-communist at the very moment the Soviet Union went back to its original nature. It was gobbling up Eastern Europe and Churchill.
Well, Churchill was out of power, but a series of British prime ministers and a series of American presidents, Truman, they looked at everything and they said to themselves, we can't fight the Soviets in Eastern Europe if we've got a hostile power in Spain and Portugal, Salazar and Franco. So we won't put them in NATO quite yet, but we're going to let them be because they'll put a lid on communism.
So we don't want a communist – we don't want them hostile to us, and we don't want them overthrown, or we'll have commies at our rear and commies at our front. So we cut a bad deal, but better than the alternative, I suppose.
For 36 years, you had fascism in Portugal and Spain and to a lesser degree at times in Greece. And we supported that as bulwarks against communism.
They all said that this would never change, but as soon as the Cold War started to peter out,

then these countries reasserted themselves. In Greece, by 1974, and in Spain and Portugal,

roughly in the 70s, they got back to constitutional government.

So the Depression and World War I

and the lack of constitutional strength and legacies

in these four countries explained the rise of fascism.

We're going to go to the next episode. So the Depression and World War I and the lack of constitutional strength and legacies in these four countries explain the rise of fascism.

So that was the big deal in the late 20s and middle 20s and 30s.

We're talking about great events. We started with the Russo-Japanese War, Panama Canal, and we're going each week.

I think we've done 10 of these now.

And so we're going to talk about why World War II broke out on the eve of it next time. So I would like to ask a question.
Given our current left rhetoric about Donald Trump is a fascist and democracy is in danger, do you have any commentary on how these fascist governments gained that kind of power before, obviously, before they became fascist governments? Like, for example, how does Hitler come to power? How does Mussolini get that kind of consolidation? There's two thoughts, there's answer. There's the grand strategy that made them popular.
They were very popular. And then there is the dark side, the actual machinations, mechanics, modalities that eliminated the opposition and the constitution.
And they're all a little bit different. But in the case of Hitler, Hindenburg ran as chancellor.
He was in his mid-80s. So when he died, Hitler was made from vice chancellor to chancellor.
And then incrementally, he began to cancel freedom of expression, the jurisprudence under the prior Weimar. And he began the night of the long lives.
He wiped out all of the brown shirt rivals to the SS. And they started wiping out people.
And that was when Dachau opened up. It wasn't a death camp at that time.
It really was more of a prisoner of war camp, although they had ovens and gas. So they started sending people there.
And he was very careful to keep that quiet.

And when they started before World War II, murdering people who were mentally problematic or disabled, they didn't tell anybody. That got out.
And when they got out, they stopped. Then they went after the church, Lutheran and Catholic church.
But they were very incremental. and so what they were doing is the whole time they were doing this, they were saying, have you ever seen a chancery like this? Have you ever seen trains like this? Have you ever seen an autobahn like this? Have you ever seen paid vacations like this? Have you ever seen nature walks through the black forest? They were environmentalists.
And the same thing in Italy. Italy was a mess after World War I.
So Mussolini, you know, that was the thing. At least in the 70s, my parents had a lot of Italian friends.
There was a very well-known judge and his father. The judge was about 50.
His father was about 80, and he would come to our house for Christmas.

And I was like a smart aleck, big mouth, high school kid in world history.

And I said, what did you think of that awful Mussolini?

Well, Victor, he made the trains.

Have you ever sat in Naples for two hours?

Once a Mussolini, all I know is that the train, it was perfect.

Perfecto. It just ran.
And the buildings, they were beautiful. And I was, and he said, they were excavating.
They were excavating the archaeology, the university. He was spending, they were picking up the trash in Naples.
And that was what they was saying still. So that was two-pronged.
Eliminate the opposition and keep it quiet and just say, I don't know what the brown shirts or the black shirts are doing. They're beating up Crystal Night.
They're doing this and buying them off, buying all the industrials off, buying the generals off. Hitler was really brilliant.
You look at every one of those von, von Manstein, von Kleist, whatever they were, they got big estates in Pomerania and East Prussia, even Gwadarian. I mean, when they kicked him out and they were afraid that he was going to mouth off to the other generals, they gave him a big estate in what is now Poland and parts of Belarus.
So they bought people off. They liquidated them.
And then they had this nationalist that we have restored your pride after World War I. We've restored the economy after World War I.
And because they were socialists, it was very hard to say they were far right because they were national socialists. So they had all of these social welfare programs and they were pretty much more generous than the democracies.
But they were running up huge debt as far. People have argued that if Hitler had not gone into World War II and that if he had just stayed peacefully, he wasn't able to sustain that level of rearmament.
And he was very proud. I mean, of all the leaders of the opposition, I shouldn't say opposition, of all of his enemies, Churchill, Roosevelt, Truman, or Stalin, he admired Stalin the most.
And he said, if I had won World War II, I would have got rid of Churchill and Roosevelt. But I would have put Stalin in a nice place and let him do what he wants because I really admire all the people he killed and his ironclad role over the economy.
And he was my type of leader. He's a communist.
Yeah. Given all that, then what do you think of this current bantering around of this person and that person is a fascist in our current culture.
You know, because you've said things that I could draw parallels with things the Democrats have been doing, i.e. lawfare.
The popularity of Trump could be compared to the popularity of a Hitler or Mussolini. But is there, what do you make of the rhetoric or what's your commentary on this current rhetoric? Anytime you have an argument, the reductio ad Hitlerum, you start mentioning Hitler, just give it up.
Because Hitler's sui generis. He killed 6 million in death camps.
He caused a war that caused 65 million. So when I say fascism, then I would look for telltale traits.
Number one, do they increase the military and are they aggrandizing? Are they using it to preempt our optional wars? Donald Trump doesn't want a war. He just told the Israelis he didn't want Obama ran preemptively.
People say, well, he's going to invade Panama. No, he wasn't.
That was the art of the deal. And the result of it is BlackRock has a good chance of buying the entry and the exit to the Panama Canal.
And the Panamanians will be closer than they ever are. He's not going to invade Panama.
He's just telling to get the Chinese out. And the same thing with Greenland.
It's got an extra billion and a half dollars from Denmark. It's had an election.
It's autonomous. We have a base there.
And it was just somebody do something because the Chinese and the Russian are, I'm going to do that kind of talk. And he's not going to make Canada a 51st state, anything.
He's trying to tell them that you can't continue to run 65 to $100 billion in trade surpluses with us while you spend $1.3 something on defense and we defend you. It's an insult to us.
You're our close friend. You can argue with that, but so he doesn't fit the idea of a fascist.
And then is he internally going after people? That's an interesting question because does anybody listening believe if Donald Trump had said, I'm not going to run for 2024, I'm done.

I am not running. or if he had not been in the Republican primary,

does anybody believe that Fannie Willis, Alvin Bragg, Latita James, or Jack Smith would have either gone after anybody or even the Republican? No. All of those charges were cooked up.
Does anybody believe if Donald Trump was not running, that Christopher Steele would have been hired as an informant by the FBI with that dossier, or Hillary would have been paying him through three secret paywalls. And we're now going to see new information from the struck Lisa Page corpus of text that's going to show you how the FBI was involved in trying.
Do you think the FBI would be working with Facebook and Twitter to suppress knowledge of the laptop? So they have waged an extra legal war against Trump. So then the question rises, what if you're Trump people, you'd go tit for tat to stop it? Or if you do that, will the next one, the next one will just be endless? Or do you just let them go and say, you know what? That was an aberration.
We'll just stop it. And you have to find some medium.
And so if there is actual wrongdoing, so Latita James, well, it's pretty clear. I was kind of disappointed by a Fox commentator who said, well, they must have been really looking her uh because some of the stuff is 20 years old yeah maybe but 2023 she was the attorney general of new york she's supposed to have lived in new york for five years she listed her principal residence elsewhere in a different state she also listed her father as her spouse so she committed that same type of fraud that she accused Trump of.
So you want to make an example of her. And then you can say, let a court and jury decide.
And this is hubris, isn't it? And if he was really wanting to be tit for tat, he would move to have a prosecutor do it in South Carolina, just like she chose New York. And I doubt a South Carolina jury would be very sympathetic to her.
And the same thing with Jack Smith. He was holier than thou, but if he doesn't want to report on the IRS 180,000 in free legal services, maybe you can, do you not investigate it? And Fannie Willis, that's not, Trump's not involved with those investigations.
That's Georgia State oversight. And then you look at Stacey Abrams, who was so loud, and now all of a sudden she's worth several million dollars.
She had over a billion and a half dollars in funding from the Biden administration for PACs, for nonpartisan NGOs. And she skimmed off the top.
She's got a big, beautiful home. She was flat broke.
So if all of these are local investigations, fine, there might be some federal ones. But when they say that Trump is a fascist and he's going and manipulating the law, so far, it's been all one way.
It has been all one way. You think that Joe Biden, that Hunter Biden, he didn't pay income tax on $4 million.
He hasn't today. The Biden family got about $31 million over the life of his vice presidency and senatorial career.
I don't think they've ever paid much tax on that.

So the law has been manipulated, and now it's up to the Trump administration to selectively, if it comes in the federal domain, Pam Bondi, if she gets criminal referrals, there's clear evidence, and yes, prosecute them to the full extent. But I don't think you should go pull up Adam Schiff's dossier, even though he lied, probably lied under oath, and he was censored by the House.
I don't think you should pull up the dossier of Nancy Pelosi and ask how he and her husband, while she was in Congress, became worth $250 million on stock deal. I'm sure there was impropriety somewhere there, but you don't want to do that.
I don't think he's done that. Trump talks louder than he actually acts.
And that's part of the art of the deal, to intimidate people. But that's what fascism does.
It uses the mechanism of government to destroy enemies in an anti-constitutional. It's kind of what Biden did.
And then second of all, it has a nationalistic, aggressive foreign policy that starts wars, invades countries. And Mussolini did.
They went into East Africa and Japanese went into Manchuria and Hitler went into the Saar land. He militized the Rhineland.
He went into the Anschluss in Austria well before World War II. And Franco was part of the nationalist movement to create a greater Spanish empire in North Africa before the Spanish Civil War.

That's what they do. He hasn't done that.
He's been accused of it. When they say he's a Nazi fascist, I just want to know what he's doing.
Another thing they do is they have a propaganda arm, and they hide things. So I wish everybody would listen.

Who, Biden or Trump, is more transparent, has more press conferences, more private interviews with hostile audiences, televises his cabinet meetings, answers questions, anybody comes up, or Biden. and which presidency has a cabal around him and not telling the people who's actually in control? Does anybody think that Donald Trump is as

demented as Joe Biden and they're hiding him around? He wouldn't even allow that.

He has a confidence. Maybe if you don't like him, you can say he's egocentric or narcissistic,

but he likes to be out there and bandy about with the reporter. Hitler didn't do that.
Mussolini didn't do that. He was a journalist.
He didn't do that. So it doesn't fit any of the – they call George Bush – I mean John Glenn said that it was the old Nazi thing about Bush.
Merkel said that he was acting like a Nazi. Al Gore called him a digital brown shirt, I think.
Garrison Keillor called him that. He wasn't.
George Bush was no, he was a good person. He didn't use, he didn't weaponize the government about anybody, but that's what they do.
What the left always does is this. Whatever Republican president is in power,

whether it's Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W.
Bush, Donald Trump, Donald Trump 2.0,

they call them a Nazi when they're in office. And then when they're out of office,

they call them a Nazi if there's a Democratic successor during the Clinton and Obama years.

However, when – And then when they're out of office, they call them a Nazi if there's a Democratic successor during the Clinton and Obama years.

However, when George Bush, if they are succeeded by a Republican like George H.W. Bush, then they call Reagan a Nazi.
I mean, excuse me, they call George H.W. Bush and they said Reagan was not that bad.
It was kind of a nice guy compared to George H.W. And then they George H.W.
was president, and then when he was out of office, they didn't say anything about him.

And then when George W. Bush came in, they said if he just could be the gentleman that his father was.

His father reached across.

He said there had to be 100 points of light.

He said he wants a kinder. He didn't have this Texas drawl.
He was an awful guy. He's a Nazi fascist.
And then when he went out of office, he faded away during the Obama. When Trump came in, well, why couldn't he be like Cheney and Bush? They saw the dangers and they don't like Trump and they weren't that bad.
And that's what they always do. I don't think they'll do it with Trump.
I think they'll hate him forever because he was a counter-revolutionary, much more so than Reagan. And he's somebody, either Trump or his advisors said it doesn't do any good just to fight the left on a political front because the country for the last 50 years has gone hard left.
The government's got bigger. The debt has got bigger.
The borders have been more porous. We're weaker abroad.
The economy has got unsustainable fault lines and the general culture has gone to proverbial hell. You know, nuclear – so what they said is we can either just do the political timidity or we can just wage war on the universities, what they've done to the country.
We can do wage wars on the huge government. I don't mean wars in a nasty sense, but reform.
We can institute reform on foreign policy, on visas, and that's what they're doing. And I've never seen a Republican administration dare do that.
Well, Victor, we better get back to our news for the day. So let's take a break and come back and we'll talk a little bit more about news stories.
And Harvard is looking at potentially being its tax exempt status taken away from it. So stay with us.
We'll be right back. Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson show.
Victor's website is victorhansen.com. The name of it is The Blade of Perseus, and you can come join us there for all the free stuff.
It's got loads of Victor's work, his articles from American Greatness, and other outlets that publish him. And he's got all of his books there.
And you can join for $6.50 a month or $65 a year as an ultra subscriber and get two articles on current events and a podcast. I have a cast for you, Sammy.
Yes. So in my 50 years of writing in obscurity i've noticed now something's happening i've seen things that i don't even know i wrote and interviews i don't even know i gave from years ago and people are going on the internet and getting an interview i did like six years ago or 10 years and they're chopping it up and then they're illustrating it under their name, and they're producing it, or articles that I wrote.
Suddenly, you can get an e-book. Even my institution, the Hoover and somebody, everybody calls me and said, you wrote a book on populism.
I didn't know it. I said, I didn't know it either.
And they said, you wrote one on socialism. I said, no, I didn said yes you did and there's ads and so i don't know but i don't know what's going on it's really weird that people call me and say you did this you did that i said no i didn't cyberspace is an insidious thing making it that much more insidious.
The only thing about it is somebody wrote me about a week ago. Somebody dug up a talk I gave at UC Berkeley right before I went to Libya.
That's when I had a ruptured appendix. I was really in pain that day, but it was in 2006.
I had hair. I lost all my hair within three months in 2014 when my daughter died.
I was really stressed out. And I know that people say, that's impossible.
It was thinning, but I just remember combing it. Big gobs would come out for that year.
But my point is that I gave an interview, and the only thing is the guy said, why do you look so bad? I just saw an interview you did at Berkeley. So I wanted to write him back.
I don't write back. That was, hey, that was almost 20 years ago.
I was 52. Come on, 53.
Give me a break. Oh, no.
Well, Victor, let's talk a little bit about Harvard. Apparently, Trump is proposing that their tax-exempt status be taken away from them because they are violating the law and exercising discrimination.
And so he's going that far now. I know this sounds stereotypical, but there are two issues here.

There's the immediate and the long term. Harvard has $53 million endowment.
They have a great investment team because they're getting almost 10% for almost $5 billion a year. And they get $2.2 billion from the federal government.
I think up to $9 billion in auxiliary grants to Harvard-affiliated institutions, hospitals. Some of it's good because it's health care.
Boston General Hospital or women. That's a good investment.
But my point is this. Donald Trump has a task force.
It's not Trump. It's an anti-Semitism task force.
And they're looking at about 70 universities where they saw during the Biden Jews that were harassed, roughed up, trapped in libraries, called we want to kill you, anti-Israel things where they praised, you know, October 7th, and they were not given the types of protection that other groups were. I know that Barack Obama said that he's ham-handed,

but as I said on an earlier podcast, if African-American students at Harvard were in a class

listening to a black studies professor and a bunch of, let's say, white people came in with scarves over their face or hoodies, and they started screaming and yelling to break up that and say, you're anti-American, or you're doing all this. And they roughed up.
Obama would not say what he's doing. He would say the federal government has got to do this.
So this task force is saying these people should not be wearing masks. It's giving them an admittity to do this stuff.
They can't be there and they get a whole range. And all Trump said is you want the money, then you comply.
And they said this is against freedom of expression. Well, there's a couple of things there.
They didn't say you can't do it. They just said you can't do it on the public's dime.
And if you want to keep letting Middle East, if you want to have Middle East students run wild and go to rallies and push a Jewish guy and try to surround him, I guess that's's okay if you want to do that, but you're not going to do it on our money. And they added a little insult to injury.
You know, it's basically, and you are discriminating. We know you're still doing it.
We know that SAT scores and GPAs and everything of people who are Asian and white have to be higher than people that are not. And the Supreme Court, you got sued, Harvard, and you lost.
And you are not following the court in its entirety. And they also, you know, they're all, spokespeople say, and you lost $150 million in your donors because they see what you're doing.

Everybody sees what you're doing.

So Harvard then says, this is a matter of free speech.

Everybody says, issue number two, why are we giving any money?

What if you were just perfect?

Why would we give you any money?

We've got a lot of universities that we've got.

We have the University of Nebraska.

That's a public university.

Maybe we should help the state of Nebraska.

Maybe we'll help the state of Nebraska. Maybe we should help the state of Kansas.
Maybe we should help University of Georgia. Maybe the UC campus needs help.
But these are public institutions. You're not.
You're private. So maybe we can say we'll help private institutions if they have less than $2 billion endowment.

But why Stanford $30 billion endowment?

Why you, 53?

Why do you need our help?

And that's the issue.

And so, then the third thing is people said, I wrote a column today, well, maybe you should just go full Hillsdale. Hillsdale said under its former president, George Roche, and then Larry Arndt emphasized and fortified that idea.
We don't take any money. So if we don't take any money, we don't want you to come on our campus and say that beautiful stairway has to have a certain type of disability access.
We can take care of disability, but don't tell us to do this. Or you have to have X percentage proportional representation of this type minority.
And they said, you can't do that. And they went to court and they've won.
And finally they got so angry, the Obama men, they tried to say if you have – and they were successful. If you have a VA scholarship or you're in the military and you want to go to Hillsdale, you can't use that federal funds, even at Hillsdale, because they refuse to take them.
And Hillsdale argue, well, that comes with a student, not us. I said, no.
And as I said earlier, when Obama was making lists for federal guidelines of where you should go to school, what's the GPA, what's the admissions, what's the job outlook, how many of their – they just left Grover City and Christian schools and Hillsdale off. They were so petty.
The other thing is when Harvard says, well, you can't intervene because you disagree with our admissions. They did.
In 1970, they went after Bob Jones University. They had a statute that said, we don't encourage white people and non-white people to date or marry.
And the federal government said, no, no, no, no, no, no. You cannot discriminate.
And they sued them. And Bob – and so that's a statute and that's a court case.
And so that's what they're doing. Only they dress it up not in illiberality, which it was with Bob Jones.
They dress it up in diversity, equity, and equity. But it isn't.

It's illiberal.

So there's a lot of precedent that Harvard can't take federal money without federal guidelines.

There's one final issue, and that is Hillsdale is – and I'm prejudiced because for 20 years I visit there and teach. But Hillsdale is principled.
Harvard is not. If the Bush administration or the Trump administration said, you know what, we really like you.
So we want to help you with federal funding. They wouldn't take it because they would say we don't trust the federal government.
Sorry, we like you guys, but we don't trust you because the federal government doesn't follow the Constitution. It's on the side of racial and gender discrimination.
So we just want to follow the Constitution as we feel best. And we can't do it given the nature of the federal government's power.
But Harvard's different. It's not principled.
It's saying the Trump administration cannot tell a private institution how to run its campus. But it never said to earlier administrations they can't tell Bob Jones College how to run its campus.
They agreed with that. And when they went out to harass, and they do harass Hillsdale all the time, Harvard never said, quit harassing Hillsdale.
You can't interfere with them. And think about it.
Hillsdale didn't take any money. Harvard's saying you can't interfere with us why we take money.
Hillsdale said I don't take any money. And still, when the federal government went after Hillsdale, Harvard didn't say a word.
They liked that.

In other words, Harvard likes an activist Obama or Biden government to go into universities and say, what's that LGBTQ?

Do you have transgendered? You have to let transgender people play under Title IX.

You have, oh, I don't see as many African Americans as demographically or repertory is necessary. That's what they do.
And Harvard loves that. But they don't like it when other people do it.
And they're not willing to just say, screw you. We have $53 billion.
dollars. We have five billion dollars in annual income.
We'll tighten our belts. We don't trust

the Trump administration. We don't trust the Biden administration.
We don't trust any of you. We're Harvard.
They won't even do that. Little Hillsdale with $1 billion and Dalmat will do that.
So they're despicable. And when people look at this, they think they're going to win, that they're poor little.

No, they're an elitist, rich, establishmentarian group. So is Yale.
So is Stanford. And when the universities, these private multi-bill, this isn't 1960 when they have a few million dollars in their endowment.
When the public learns that these universities have all this money and they're getting all this overhead surcharges, 50%, 60% on individual grants from NIH or Department of Energy or whatever, and they see all that, they're not going to be sympathetic. So Harvard, if I was Harvard, I would cut a deal as quickly as possible, and then I would sugarcoat it and say, we like the recommendations because we don't allow anti-Semitism.
And I would do this. I'd say, wow, I don't want these crazy people with masks.
It's kind of like the Ku Klux Klan, and they're getting out of hand. So I'll just say, Trump made us do it.
You can't wear a mask. You know, you could hide behind Trump.
But instead, if you fight that and you say that you have a God-given right to get $2 billion a year when you're already getting $5 billion off your endowment, it's a losing argument. And I think if they keep pushing it and these kids keep storming halls and going after Jewish students and 500 Harvard students shutting down streets and disrupting.
And then they said, we've addressed that. No, they just went into the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
They just went into Princeton. And Natalia Bennett, the former prime minister, they tried to shout him down.
They're still doing it. If they keep doing that, they're going to lose, lose, lose.
Yeah, let's hope so. So, Trump, more power to you.
Keep at him. So, Victor, I have a comment by a reader of your website.
Yes, on your, I think it was like 25 ideas. I'd have to go way back up to get the title of the article.
I don't have to leave my answer. No, but he has a series of questions, and we can stop whenever you want to, that are a little challenging.
But don't do them all in a row, whatever they are. Just do the question, I'll answer briefly.
We'll do it that way. Or the criticism you sound like.
Yeah, he's a little bit critical, but I thought the answers to these would be interesting for our audience. Let's see if I game show.
Yes. Perfect.
I haven't seen them. Just go ahead.
So just a little prelude that he gives. This is from Jaroslav Martin Junk.
And he says, Dear Professor, I respect you as a historian, but an economist you are not. Your seeming support for Trump's tariffs has been thoroughly refuted by the folks at the Wall Street Journal.
So that's a lightning answer. I never said I was an economist.
I said that I had enormous respect for Milton Friedman and other economists. But I don't believe that you, and I've been criticized by economists where I work.
Stay in your lane. But I'll give you an example.
Very quickly, I'm a classicist. I wrote the introduction to landmark Thucydides.
I've written esoteric articles that nobody reads on the language of Thucydides. Even how he used to use numerals in Greek.
Okay. When Graham Allison wrote the Thucydides trap about, he took the corpus of Thucydides and he said that the ascending power makes the established power fearful and that causes war.
So Athens was ascending, so Sparta preempted. He doesn't know Greek.
He doesn't know there were existing fault lines, Ionic, Doric, a whole history of prior, a first Peloponnesian war, apparently. He doesn't know one was cosmopolitan, one was rural, one had chattel slavery, one had helot serfdom, one was in land power, One was, I mean, there were a lot of reasons to go to war without ascending.
But do you think I would ever criticize? I thought it was an interesting theory. And I never said, I never wrote anything and said, stay in your lane.
You're writing about the UCITEDES. So I don't like that argument.
No, it's not very good. Okay, number two.
All right. So that was just his pre prelude so let's get to his questions um number one does it because this is on the tariffs trump's tariffs does it make sense to remedy a one trillion dollar trade deficit by obliterating 10 trillion in stock market value well if he's frozen in time so what he's doing he's taking the lowest point of the stock market and saying $10 trillion.
It's already starting to recover some of its value. And so, yes, at this point, we've lost.
At one point, we lost. But it's already going back up.
And we don't know what will be the effect. Does he really think in six months if Trump is successful and he gets seven to $10 trillion in foreign investment, and he cuts deals with all these countries, and he reduces the trade deficit from $1.1 trillion down to, say, $400 billion, does he think the stock market's not going to react, given that he's going to pass a big tax cut, deregulation, oil development.

So that's lame.

He's just taking one little glimpse in time at the lowest mark or the panic of two weeks ago and saying, see?

And that's not a valid argument.

Let's just wait and see to the full effect.

I will agree with him in three months or six months.

When we're all done with tariffs and trade.

If we lost it, I have a feeling that will be worth 12 trillion. Perfect.
So second question was, does it make sense to threaten your friends and allies, allies you may need to confront China? I think you must be referring to Europe. Well, no, but Trump is not threatening them.
But he's going back on a prior press and he told the NATO countries, you are ripping us off. There's 32 NATO members.
This was in 2017, 18, 19. And there's only six of you that kept your 2014 promise to spend 2% of GDP.
And if you keep doing that and you get in a jam, I'm not going to be necessarily here to help you because you know what you're using us. And that's dangerous.
And you shouldn't do the Norse. Okay.
And what happened? When he left office, I think 19 of them were going to do it. Now it's all but nine.
So that is the art of the deal. He says, you guys are ripping us off, da-da-da-da-da.
Is that smart? I wouldn't do it, but is it going to be successful? I have a feeling that it is, and that's why I would be unsuccessful because I would say I don't really want to yell at them the way. But here's the other thing.
I would ask him, do you think the Allies treat their patron that went over there twice to save Europe from itself and a third time risk cities like New York and San Francisco and a nuclear game of poker with the Soviet Union to preserve the European integrity. In other words, our doctrine in the Cold War was if the Soviet army invades Europe and NATO cannot hold them and it probably couldn't, then we're going to tell them get back or we're going to use nuclear weapons.
And they would go after us, not Europe. So we did all of that.
And what was our reward for that? They're running a $200 billion mercantile high tariff against us. That's not very nice to do that.
No, that isn't. So here is number three.
As a historian, this is a little bit surly.

As a historian, you should know how the Smoot-Hawley tariffs choked the Japanese economy in the 1930s and eventually led to Pearl Harbor. Trump's draconian tariffs on China could have a similar unintended consequence.
It didn't choke. the Smoot-Harley Act of

32 didn't choke. The Smoot-Harley Act of 32 didn't get enacted until 33.
Fascism was already full blast in Japan. But more importantly, it was irrelevant to the depression.
The oppression was not caused by the Smoot-Harley Act. It was a stupid thing to do because we were running a surplus.
It was caused by a panic of the stock market and then a over-regulation and not letting the free market act on its own to recover by the New Deal that prolonged it. Japan, the reason that they had Pearl Harbor is very clear,

and I kind of resent as a historian. As a non-historian, let me teach you something.
Japan attacked Pearl Harbor for three reasons. Number one, it understood that the United States was rebuilding its navy.

And in late 1941, the Japanese government knew that the United States was rebuilding its Navy. In late 1941, the Japanese government knew that the United States was making North Carolina class and soon Iowa class battleships.
They were designing them. Their intelligence said that.
They knew about 27—they said, and Yamamoto reportedly said, I can give them hell for six months. They really thought that if they waited, they were going to lose.
And why were they angry, number two? They were angry because they felt that the British and the United States had no business in Asia. Because after World War I, they said they had no imperial enclave like the British or the French.

And they looked at that situation in 1940 and they said, oh, my God, there is no more French Indochina, the Vichys.

France was defeated and the rice basket is ours.

And they took it.

And then they said, oh, my gosh, the Dutch East Indies with all that oil, modern Indian. Oh, man, that's what we and they went to take it.
And they said to themselves, the only thing that's stopping us from making this whole thing is this paltry little force in Pearl Harbor. And they moved the Seventh Fleet from San Diego in January.
It was stupid. And they only have these nine ancient battleships from World War I.
And three carriers are – maybe they're there, maybe they're not. They weren't there.
And then we've got Singapore. And it's not going to be able.
So they decided on December 7th and 8th to preempt and knock out Pearl Harbor and Singapore and then tell the British, we have all of the rubber of Malaysia and to tell the Americans, we're going to have Midway Wake and now the United States. And we want a deal.
That's what they thought. We want, this is our empire.
That was number two. And then number three, they were very angry that right before Pearl Harbor in the prior year and a half, the Roosevelt administration stopped all export of recycled steel, iron, junk stuff, all the stuff that we used to send them for their steel industry, raw materials and oil.
It had nothing to do with a Smoot-Harley Act. We cut off oil and they thought that that was.
And then number four, could I ask the economists what was happening on December 7th and what were the Japanese talking about and why did they pick that date? Where was the German army on December 7th? It was

about at the first subway station of Moscow. And supposedly Army Group Center could see the gold dome on the Kremlin.
And they looked at Europe. Can this economist ask me what city in Europe was non-fascist.

Maybe Lisbon? No.

Spain? Madrid? No.

Paris? No. Amsterdam?

No. Madrid? No.
Paris? No. Amsterdam? No.
Berlin? No. Copenhagen? No.
I don't know. Oslo? No.
Stockholm? No. Athens? No.
Rome? No. Oh, I know.
Warsaw, no. There's not a single one.
So the Japanese looked at this and they said, oh my gosh, that's the future of the world. They won.
There's only Britain left. And if we go into, and the Soviet Union is kaput.
and we have interest in the Soviet Union's eastern coast and there's nothing there stopping us

and Britain's all by itself

we just And we have interest in the Soviet Union's eastern coast.

And there's nothing there stopping us.

And Britain's all by itself.

And the United States' isolation is disarmed.

And now we can do it before they rearm.

So that was why they did it.

It had nothing to do with some tariff.

Jesus.

Exactly.

Well, let's go ahead.

We are.

We want one more?

Okay, one more. I'm enjoying this.
I thought you were going to give me a difficult question. I'm getting very arrogant.
Yes. The fourth one, he quotes Gordon Chang and suggests it's Gordon Chang's argument.
So I'd rather go to the fifth one, which I think is going to be very easy. I like Gordon.
I know him well. He's a very bright guy.
Why was Russia excluded from tariffs? That's his most bizarrely, he says. Russia was excluded.
Is that a serious question? Could I ask him how much trade we're doing with Russia right now? Does he understand that the United States has banned all importation of Russian oil and the Trump administration is in a tense negotiation with Putin right now. And he has said that if Putin does not cooperate or go halfway, he's going to extend the oil embargo by embargoing any country that buys embargoed Russian oil.
So India, China, Iran, anybody who buys it will have an embargo on their products, and that's going to force. So would he please tell me how much stuff is coming in from Russia? None almost, none.
So why would you just insult your trade partner? And we're going to put 150% when there's nothing there to do it. And why would you want to do that when the Europeans, which he says that we're bullying,

are right now, as I speak, are secretly, or maybe not so secret, importing Russian oil and gas.

And if you want to put a tariff on that, we could do it to our Europeans, too.

So, I mean, that's, I don't know. Stay in this lane.
Very good. Don't dare talk about history.
Oh, I know. You're not.
Thank you for that non-economist answers to those things. I hate that term, stay in your lane.
Yeah. Mr.
Martin Nuuk, thank you nonetheless for this because perhaps there are other readers out there that are… I'm not out of it, Martin. I enjoy his questions.
But he shouldn't say, you know, you're not an economist. You can't talk about the economy.
Maybe I should start doing… I just read an oracle where a person wrote an essay on classical Athens, but I did not see a PhD in classics or ancient history. Who wants to do that? Yeah, exactly.
Sometimes. I put up with that for 30 years in academia.
Yeah. It's just tiny thinking.
And we can also attest to the problem of academia leading to less knowledge anyway. I'll just say one last Parthian shot to Martin.
In some ways, who were the three, I just thought of, who were the three greatest contributors to classical languages, thought, and culture? Do they have PhDs in? No. Heinrich Schliemann, a German banker of the late 19th century who said, you know, all the classicists are wrong.

The Homeric poems were not mythology.

There was actually a city in Troy and a city in Mycenae.

And then after the end of the Mycenaean age and the dark ages, that was exaggerated and it turned into myth.

But the actual event was mythicized. It happened, and I'll go excavate.
How about the classicists? Well, the Iliad was written down, and it repeats. 30% of the Iliad are epithets, are type scenes, and they're just rosy-fingered on, rosy-fingered on, rosy-fingered on.
He fell in his armor, clad upon him. But who was the person who said, ah, Milman Perry, kind of a renegade, kind of an academia, but they hated his guts.
And he said, it was oral. And I'm going to go to Serbo, Croatia, and talk to bards and see if they can memorize poems as long as the Iliad.
And when he did, he found out, write me a poem about me coming to see you. And 30% was repeated.
That's how you do it. And so he proved that the Iliad and the Odyssey were mostly, I mean, there meant some refinements that maybe he had notes because he was synonymous with the beginning of writing in the Greek world.
But anyway, the point is he proved it was an oral. I'll just finish this rant with Mycenaean.
It doesn't have alpha, beta, gamma, Phoecian-derived letters. Linear B, hmm.
It was a Semitic people, like Linear A. So the Mycenaeans and the people of Athens and Pylos, they were all non-Greeks.
That's what they had, those big lion gates, these big citadels. They weren't Greeks.
So these foreigners came into Greece and ruled it, and then they collapsed. And then during the dark ages, the Dorians came, and there was for the first time Greeks, and they had Phoenicians.
And then this architect and cryptographer, cryptologist, I should say, in World War II, Michael Ventress came in and said, let me look at this very carefully. And using the arts of cryptology, he said, this is a vowel.
This is a consonant. This is a word.
This is a case ending. And he began to plug it in.
And it was Greek. They were all Greek.
The only difference was that they didn't have a sophisticated alphabet yet. And they had borrowed pictographs from the Egyptians, from people in Asia Minor, and created this linear B script.
And then they were wiped out for various reasons. And their remnants in the Dark Ages made myths about how great they were.
That's what we call Greek mythology, Ajax, Zeus, the whole bit, Hercules. And then in the city-state, when it came around 720, 750, borrowing from the Phoenician alphabet and adding vowels, they took that language and they did not use the dead script that they didn't really know about.
They'd forgotten. They didn't know it.
It was all destroyed. They'd seen little, every time a farmer would go around, Mycenae or Tyrens, he might fall into a shaft grave and see these tablets.
In the Iliad, there's mention of little writing, probably not Phoenician letters. It was probably linear B.
But anyway, then they created their, and they were all Greeks the whole time, probably from the fourth millennium. So my point is, Martin, some of the best things I've ever done in my field have been done by people that were not in our lane.
All right. Well, Victor, thank you.
That was absolutely fascinating on the linear B and the academics that dominate the field of ancient Greece. I wrote a book about it called The Other Greeks.
Absolutely fascinating. Well, thank you very much for your discussion today.
Really loved it on fascism and really clarifying some of the things that we hear in our rhetoric today calling each other fascists. So I hope that people appreciate it.
I want to thank everybody who's been sending me cures for chronic sinitis. And I'm reading everything you wrote, and I'm trying them.
I just went to the NT. I do not want another operation.
So I'm trying to. But they were so nice, all these people.
Amazing. They were lots of cures.
It's just incredible. All right.
Well, thank you. And thanks to the audience for joining us, choosing to join us on this weekend episode.
Thank you everybody for watching and listening. This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hanson, and we're signing off.
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