The Lost Appeal: From Democratic Party to Their Representatives and Policies

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Hello ladies, hello gentlemen. This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
I'm Jack Fowler, the man lucky enough to be the host to ask Victor questions. I like to ask the questions I think you'd like to ask.
Victor, by the way, is that guy over there slurping. That's Victor Davis Hanson.
He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. We are recording this episode on Saturday, April 12th.
Passover blessings to our brothers and sisters in Abraham. Today's episode will be up on Thursday, April 17th.
That is Holy Thursday for us Christians. I'm not sure if the Orthodox, for my Orthodox friends, sometimes we're a week off.
Depends on where the moon, when the moon, whether there's a full moon or not. You know, Victor, a lot of things can be happening between when we're recording, when this is up.
I'm sure a lot's going to happen. And that's why stay tuned for when Victor talks to the great Sammy Wink for the Friday and Saturday episodes, where Victor will talk about what has transpired this week.
Now, we've got so much to talk about, Victor, and I think the first topic that will be of interest is your take on a new CNN poll that says, you know, Democrats are just not the party of the people anymore. And we will get to your thoughts on that.
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Victor, I forgot another topic we want to talk about is all the media types. I know it was so sad when I saw him so decrepit, but I didn't have the courage to say anything about it at the time but we'll get to that a little later first topic today victor if i could find my paper oh here it is cnn poll i forget this guy's first name enton but he's he's the guy that's on cnn yeah i was on there he's the one that sort of drives everybody crazy on cnn right well he's showing the numbers and they don't like Shocking shot.
And here's one of the shocks. Shocking data shows Americans believe Republicans care more

about people. Democrats are the party of the people know more.
And here's, I won't read this

whole thing that I had cut out, but Democrats always, they always had a lead on this question.

Back in 2017, before the 2018 midterms, Democrats had a 13-point lead on the question again is, who cares more about the needs for people like you? Okay. In 2005, Democrats had a 23-point lead over Republicans.
And in 1994, which was a big Republican year, Democrats had a 19-point lead. Now, all of a sudden, a tie.
All of a sudden, the Democrats, who were the party of the people, no more, no more. We get a tie on this question on a question that has traditionally, overwhelmingly been a Democratic advantage, people for party, which party cares more, Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Okay. That's just, that was a transcript.
So it's a little, I just do want to make one additional point on this poll. Currently though, Democrats, do you care more for me? Democrats have an 18 point advantage among those with college degrees.
That's the same number as it had in 2017. But in 2017, among non-college graduates, Democrats had a seven-point advantage.
Right now, Republicans have a nine-point advantage. Victor, your thoughts on this? I wonder why this is happening.
I wonder why. It's really shocking to Democrats because there's two things going on.
The more that there's reality and then there's the abyss between the rhetoric and the reality. So you've got on the one hand, Bernie Sanders, the squad, AOC, Schumer, Pelosi talking about oligarchs and plutocrats and aristocrats.
And it's the old boilerplate. But then when you look at their actual positions, does anybody believe that when you look at those old clips that the Trump administration and Fox News have been focusing on of Nancy Pelosi giving this eloquent? She was really good.
She was in her mid 50s about why China was cheating. We had to clamp down or Schumer.
I forgot that. Anyway, does anybody believe she would ever give that talk again? No, no.
So it's not perception. It's the Democratic Party moved to the party of the wealthy.

Now, why was that?

That was because from about 1990 to 2025, something called Silicon Valley went from a bunch of kind of little nerdy people in their garages or Steve Jobs off the wall to $9 trillion in market capitalization, partnering with the FBI to suppress news, Mark Zuckerberg giving $419 million to warp the work of the registrars in the 2020 election, etc. So they became not a counterculture, but the culture, and it was as big or bigger than anybody on Wall Street, the big fortunes.
And they were left wing. And the Democratic Party lapped that up like a puppy to milk.
They loved it. That's where anybody who went out of the Obama administration got a high paying job in Silicon Valley.
At the same time, they adopted this globalist, ecumenical, pro-Europe, transatlantic, we-are-the-world type of attitude about trade, communications. And this was the period in which USAID grew up to 50 billion, and basically foreign aid, Voice of America,

all served one purpose,

to blanket and persuade the world in the left-wing ideology.

But it was an elite ideology.

So, that's, and then the Republican Party

was like a deer in the headlights,

and this is Romneyism, McCainism, Bushism.

Hey, we give capital gains cuts. Hey, we want to privatize social security we play golf why aren't the rich people for us because you weren't hip you didn't get the professional classes the lawyers the doctors the professors the reporter all the the professional classes are want to be hip and wealthy you want to be straight and stayed and wealthy and that's only a few people in the corporate elite anymore so they captured the wealthy classes and they changed their message for their donor class so suddenly it was not about protecting union jobs and lunch bucket blue collar people it was invest in china and don't ever say anything about china that's racist oh you said it had a bio lab that's unfair it was a virology lab all that stuff so they got into dei and that was a really weird thing too because dei replaced class sudden they want they like to be around rich people and entitled people but then people said

well i thought you were for color and they thought we are we're for eric holder and oprah and the obamas and everybody who's because they're well their class is no longer synonymous with race and so they got rid of class they used to say race class gender race then it was just race and gender They didn't care about class.

So in other words, they create this warp policy that kamala harris was an oppressed victim and somebody in east palestine who makes 20 000 bucks is her oppressor her victimizer and it was just it was just a complete metamorphosis so yeah it is the party of the very wealthy and the subsidized poor. And that is sort of condescending, well, we'll take care of you people and give you a bunch of welfare, but don't be like those Hispanics in the valley, San Joaquin Valley or the Rio Glen, and think you can get on your hind legs and tell us that you're going to vote against a Democratic candidate.
Or do not be like, what's her name, Leah, the Democratic bundler who was Asian, and she's on TV a lot, and then they turned on her. Yeah, I forgot her.
She's wonderful. But you may be a minority, but don't ever question us.
Don't ever question us. So that's what happened.
And everybody understands that. And especially you can really see it now.
It's really strange. I mean, I don't like the divide Main Street and Wall Street.
I think Trump has helped Wall Street just as much as he has Main Street. But the point I'm making is that a lot of this hysteria.
I was reading Business Insider. I think it's not just 87.
It's 93 percent of the stock market is held by 10 of the market capitalization, not the number of stock, but the value in dollars is held by 10 percent of the country. And part of the reason the Democratic Party is so outraged is that its spokesmen are so heavily invested in stocks.
Nancy Pelosi, they're worth $200 million. I don't know how she made that.
She should investigate herself rather than to see if Donald Trump was inside her training by saying, go out and buy stocks. But my point is, it's the party of elite privilege.
It's geographical. It's the big cities.
The big cities are the encapsulation of the Democratic Party. You know, if you go to San Francisco, it's Hunter's Point and Presidio Heights.
If you go to Los Angeles, it's South Central and Watts and Pacific Palisades in Malibu. But it's not out in Oxnard or something.
It's not middle class. And it's the same thing in Washington, D.C.
It's the poor people who are in the ghetto, so to speak, and then the elite, the media elite and all the people in politics and academia. That's the Democratic Party.
And they have a whole vocabulary they've developed for everybody in between. Chumps, dregs, garbage now, Obama.
I mean, Biden said, garbage. They're just garbage.
They're the real garbage. Irredeemables, deplorables.
Obama started it when he said they just cling to their guns.

They're just out there. I can't win.
They're just cling to their guns and religion, the clingers. So they have a – and then remember Peter Stroke and Lisa Page? I could smell them at Walmart in their text exchange.
So they really hate – I got in a little tiff right after the 2016 election. There was a Silicon Valley miner grandee.
And I think she was in B&B or Bradford, whatever you call renting your house out. She had a company.
And she wrote a – Airbnb. Yeah.
Did you remember that she wrote a posting? It came kind of infamous. And I wrote a column about it.
And she said, these people are basically trash. And this election was a bunch of losers.
And they have no education. And their cities are crappy.
And I said, if you actually want to look at crappy cities, look at the roads in Palo Alto or, you know, or anyway, I was doing that. And she got really angry and tried to enrope about me.
But it's that type of elite person that's in the Democratic Party, cultural elite. And they're very privileged.
And then they feel so bad about the distant poor, not the immediate poor, the distant poor. And then they hate the middle class.
The middle class lacks the sympathy of the noble suffering of the poor, and they don't have the culture of the upper classes. So they just hate them.
These are the people that go to Olive Garden, and they can't stand them. You know, Victor, I would love to see this question asked again three months from now because there's movement here.
And I think the mindset of the person answering the question, the average American who cares more about you, is influenced, how can it not be, by the street theater we see from the left left and we've always had protests in the country but it seems like this is now the official hobby of of you know residents of major cities in america and so this is what this party is about it's about these are you suggesting who are protest protesting there's the weirdos But have you noticed when you see, have you seen that, you know, I don't understand people who are keen and attacking Teslas when they've got a 360 degree photographic shield around them. Right.
But you see them and they kind of try to be stealthy. They walk up and turn their back and then they're secretly keen it it or there one guy was smearing excrement on it but it's all there but when you look profile maybe i'm not i know everybody this is stereotyping and it's not data driven but everyone i've seen almost there's a white woman or guy around my age 70s and i almost always get this picture of the people, as I said earlier,

that you see Santa Cruz in those turbulent years of 70s.

And I saw them, and they were all very wealthy, and they were all loudmouths, and they were all selling drugs and promiscuous and all this stuff.

And it's almost like these people are just ossified in amber.

They're the same people.

And they just arrested, I think I mentioned a guy right near me, near Fresno. And he was just a normal person, an upper class.
You know what I mean? Why are they doing this? Is it they're going back to their college days? But they're privileged people. And they get really angry when you talk to them that Trump won overwhelmingly the Hispanic male vote, or the black male vote went up to 26%, or Hispanics was almost 50-50.
And their attitude, have you noticed they don't even hide at these elites. They think like, well, after all we've done for them.
Or they'll talk about people picking grapes even jasmine crockett i thought this is so weird she's a she went to prep school she may be that fake black patois and you all but she went to a finishing school where the tuition was thirty thousand dollars a year my kids went to public schools and pretty rough schools and i don't think i could have afforded tuition at that time that cost a thousand dollars a year but my point is this is that she was talking about immigrants and that's how she got into the whole cotton picking we don't pick them cock it we're not gonna when there's no plantation no more you're not gonna pick in cotton how many of you got uh and but we'll let the mexican do it. We'll let all the Mexican people do it.
It's their job. I know probably 200 Mexican-American people very well and probably 50 illegals, I imagine, and not one of them is in agricultural labor, I can guarantee you.
They're doctors. They're patrolmen.
They're architects. They're contractors.
They're painters. But there's almost nobody.
I think the percentage of people. She said, well, who's going to pick our crops? I think Schumer and Pelosi said that.
When you actually look at illegal aliens and you look at the percentage in agriculture, it's down to about 20%. Somebody said, well, how can that be possible? Well, I'm looking out the window right now at 40 acres of almonds,

and I spent a summer with a mallet and gunny sacks and canvases once,

not on my place, but I was hired out as an almond harvester, and you went over there, and it was like my dad would come and check on us.

And he said, well, you like to play baseball? Swing away. So you take this mallet and hit the trunk.
You know what I mean? Really hard. And it had a rubber.
It was huge. It was really heavy.
And then you hit the main laterals going up. And then you had this heavy-duty canvas.
It was so heavy. And you dragged it on both sides.
And then you did it. And then you rolled rolled it up and you kind of siphoned it into a big gunny sack.
And that took per tree. There was 114 trees per acre, but that took about 20 minutes, 30 minutes to do a good 20 minutes.
Yes. And that's how they harvested them.
And they hired my brothers and cousins to do, I think it was 20 acres. We spent the whole summer doing it.
I look out the window and the guy comes in and I'm having coffee in the morning. And I look around, I hear this horrible noise.
And I think, wow, I won't be able to do an interview today, one day out of the year. And then like two hours later, he's gone.
And there's a neat row down every almond row of right in the middle of the row. There's a row of almonds and that sits there for two days to dry out.
And then the next thing, a big sweeper comes in, you know, to pick them up. And I think, well, this will be, oh, man, 48.
And then about, it's gone. And then it goes into a bunch of bins, and then they fork them on.
And I think harvest is over. One guy.
Someday. Yes, they don't need people like me with mallets and teenagers.
Well, that's someday, Victor, when you're away, and we're going to prerecrecord. I think I'd love to hear a show.
Don't answer this now because we have other. But Victor's pickings, like everything.
Victor, how you dealt with persimmons, how you dealt with plums. Yes, I had picked persimmons.
I had picked pleaches, plums, nectarines, grapes, fresh. And for raisins, I have worked in almonds.
My mother would get very mad at my grandfather because we had about a hundred walnut trees he he was a very great guy he put walnut trees on all these little alleyways this 135 should have been perfectly flat but it had all these beautiful hills and he wouldn't level it the pond it looked like hobbiton in the lord of the rings it really did it was beautiful but he he lined every little row i mean there'd be an acre here and two acres and the the construction federal land bank would come out and say what is this this is so inefficient and my grandfather said well i've got wilson wonder walnuts here but they were beautiful and we had to go pick them and he get my mom would if those boys pick those one you know pick like a big machine would shake them and then we would have to pick them up on the ground and she'd say they have to wear cotton gloves dad because those boys the teachers are getting mad because they came to school with their whole hands were walnut stained and it looks very very dirty. And people were saying they weren't unkept.
So, we had to wear these little. So, I did walnuts.
I've done everything, I think. Wilson Wonder Walnuts.
I love that. Yes.
Wilson Wonders, Hartnells. I've done all of them.
And I did, I picked, oh, the worst were boysenberries. I've done a boysenberry patch.
Yeah, I did it all. And it's pretty hard.
I always had great respect for farm workers. I really did.
Well, you are one. You were one.
So, I deserve it. Now, listen.
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And we thank All Family Pharmacy for sponsoring the victor davis hansen show well victor i wonder i wonder if sleepy joe biden ever picked anything uh besides fights with uh wait a minute what do you mean he's uh old joe biden from scranton and he's i went down that i went down to that basement i said uh measure me and me six foot of chain. Then I went out there and I said, Corn Pop, you come on.
Let's get it out. We'll get it over with.
Corn Pop said no. And then I went back in my lifeguard and I was tan.
And all these African-American kids looked at those blonde hairs on my tan leg. And so I had a lot of relationships with the black community.
Remember that? Most racist thing in the world. Well, he went to black church every Sunday.
He was the most Puerto Rican guy in the world, too. I think he was the most Jewish guy.
Yes, yes. And he was also a tough guy because he said, you know, I don't know why people got this idea.
I went once in there to the lunch counter and I said, did you make fun of my sister? I just took his head and I slammed it down on that counter. Remember that? And then Donald Trump.
I'll tell you what I like to do with Donald Trump. I like to take him behind the gym and beat the hell out.
Excuse my language. Beat the hell out.
He had all of that. It was so funny.
He had that insecurity. And he would always brag about beating people up.
And never was in any little vignette. He was weak or the victim or naive.
He was always dominant and tough. Yeah.
He was a pathetic human being.

Except when he was put in jail in South Africa with another Walter Mitty thing. Well, let me, Victor.
Wait a minute. You're conflating the uncle who was eaten by cannibals, right? No.
It happens on every generation of the Biden family. So two things.
one is

well we've been just overloaded the last

week or two with these retrospectives

from of the Biden family. So two things.
One is, well, we've been just overloaded the last week or two with these retrospectives from Democrat insiders about coming clean now when they should have come clean weeks ago with what our lying eyes didn't believe or whatever. Two things.
One is Daily Mail article about AIDS reveal how Biden was out of it and needed fluorescent

tape on the floor to guide him.

And he thought in his preparation for this now infamous debate with Donald Trump, he

thought he was president of NATO rather than president of the United States.

Why are we doing all this now?

Well, that's why just George Stephanopoulos, who who this another Daily Mail story where he comes. I think this is quoted in this book by Chris Whipple, Uncharted, how Trump beat Biden, Harris and the odds, etc.
Yeah, George interviewed Biden right after the disastrous debate and softballed him questions but came away from it privately and personally saying privately yeah yes i mean he would all of these people that kane ron kane that's chief of all of them deprecated joe scarborough he was giving insinuations that he knew he was the one that said he's fit I've never seen a stronger, more coherent Joe Biden. I wrote a lot of columns, and I got a lot of nasty letters.
I was mentioned on TV by somebody to be careful about suggesting that he may be non-Compos Mentes. Everybody knew he was.
We've talked about it. He read the prompt, stop know he read it he'd say now as the negotiations in the middle stop and they had remember he would pull out those little cards of all the people you could read them they showed them of who to call on and what their background was this was the biggest cover-up it would made water look like a joke.
We put into the White House someone who did not know where he was on given days or what he was doing, and he was controlled by a cabal of people whom we don't even know who they were exactly, other than our guesses that they were a coalition of the obama people obama michelle and barack plus the squad elizabeth warren bernie sanders wing and then with some input from the orthodox leftist nancy pelosi and chuck schumer and they were doing all the appointments everything they. No one else knew what was going on.
He didn't know. And then Jill Biden, she was the conduit that they called, and Hunter, Hunter and Jill would translate that and do the auto pin probably.
No idea where he was. Very tragic.
He lived by the coup and he died by the coup. He was put in by a coup of sorts when they looked at that field and they said, Joe didn't win New Hampshire.
He did not win Nevada caucus. He had not won Iowa.
He's going nowhere. We've got a bunch of nuts.
We've got Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth. This is not going to work.
So you get rid of those people. Give them a cabinet position.
Give them this. Give them that.
Give Bernie another house on a lake or something. But do not let these people.
And all of a sudden, after South Carolina, they all disappeared. Joe was anointed within 30 days.
And the cover-up went. And then every once in a a while they'd say we got a big trouble give him tell him that the laptop was russian disinformation we'll round up some flunkies that and get old james a baker from the fbi and put him over there and twitter and make sure he censors the news call up zuckerberg and tell him to put in four 400 million that was how they ran the whole thing.
And then when he was a useful wax and effigy, and they had that, then they said, you know what? He's got fluorescent tape on. He doesn't know where he is.
Well, I know what we'll do. We'll have a classic never done before debate.
We'll have a debate before he's even nominated, before the conventions have ever met. Can you imagine that? Well, Trump wouldn't do that.
He's ahead in the poll. No, no, no, no.
We'll bait him. Trump is very vulnerable to macho baiting.
So just put Biden on for a minute and make him act like he's Clint Eastwood. Make my day, Trump.
Make my day. I'm ready for you anytime.
And we had that June 27th debate, and he just looked there like he was, and I don't know where he was. He wasn't there, but then they decided, we'll just take the coup in reverse.
We'll just get him out of here. They had a little problem with Jill.ill hunter was worried that he'd go to jail of his dad but they promised him that he would be pardoned and that's how we got it and then they were going to have an open convention this is the party of the people transparency and all of a sudden the obama uh the obamas got rid of biden and they didn't understand that camilla had it sewed up.
And then a billion dollars later, she was the nominee.

Well, we should talk about that.

I'm going to spring this on you when we come back from these important messages,

but it's about James Clyburn, who figures largely into all these things.

And, as he aforementioned, coming back from these important messages. We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show recording on Saturday, April 12th.
This episode is up on Thursday, the 17th, two days before the 218th of April. That's Paul Revere's ride, Lexington and Concord next day.
So, 250th anniversary of the Shot Heard Round the World is coming up. Maybe Victor and the great Sammy Wink will talk about that when they record the next two episodes.
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He's there with Megyn Kelly and he's on many other shows. I like Megyn a lot.
Yeah. She'd only get rid of the cursing.
Everybody has their – you have to have the exceptions for everyone. You know, it's real weird.
You said I write a lot. I've had this sinus infection.
So I wrote a column. And at the time I was writing it, I was trying to think of things.
And so I was reading this column for the proofread to send it in. And I had written Sinaitis in the middle of a sentence.
So I was like, my head's on top. And I typed in Sinaitis as I was going along.
And I thought, wow, trade war Sinaitis. Well, first of all, it could have been Mount Sinai you were thinking of.
Who knows? But, you know, Victor, you just. That sounds like a Joe Biden handler.
I mean, you write actually a book a year now, I think. But if you took all the other content you wrote for all the other essays or new criteria in other places, I think you'd have.
I have a life. Three books.
I've never had a normal life. I need to develop one before it's too late.
I'm socially inept and backward. Oh, mamma mia.
Anyway. Socially inept.
I do two columns a week and I do two ultra columns and then I try to do one essay a week and I'm working on this book on how Donald Trump came back. But that's hard to write because you know what I mean? You're right in, as we say in Latin, in medius rebus, right in the middle of things.
And it's hard to know how it's going to end up. Well, and then, yeah, when the actual publication date comes, will the rebus be even rebusier, I guess.
But, hey, Victor, let me just get this Clyburn thing out of the way. Yes.
Because he is the instigator of saving Biden or creating Biden in 2016. But then some of these recent articles I've seen, he is the one that snookered Obama.
He did. And forced the immediate recognition by Biden of Kamala Harris.
He did. Obama called him up because Obama engineered the removal and he thought he was going to have some kind of fake little convention where they appointed, and they did a call-in, and they were going to nominate, I don't know, Gavin or Josh Shapiro or Amy Kobachar or Gretchen Whitmer or somebody.
You know, someone that was a governor or something. And he called up Clyburn and said, you know, I think he thought, you know, I'm Barack Obama.
Jim, I thought about it. We got rid of Biden a few minutes ago.
We're going to open it. No, you're not.
It's Kamala. And they said the phone call lasted like, what, a minute or so? And that was it.

It was the most non-transparent, Tammany Hall, back room, insider, smoke-filled room type of nomination from the party of transparency. It really was.
It was no more than 24 hours that everybody said, what's going to happen now? and there was even

remember it was

there was one or two people

what's going to happen now? And there was even, remember it was, there was one or two people, what's his name from, Joe Manchin. Remember he thought he was going to be a candidate for about two hours? He's going to be an independent.
Oh, he was, but when they opened, he thought he might even get the Democratic nomination for about, he went on TV. And he said, hey, maybe I might be considered.
And that thing was just, it was about it. She called up Biden and said, I need your endorsement.
She called up. It was done.
And then all of a sudden the money poured in and then she was about hope and courage. And Biden went, the Democrats went down from about four down in the polls with Biden to these phony new polls that said she was ahead by two or three.
I don't think they were, she was ever ahead, but that was what they said. Yeah.
Well, James Clyburn deserves to be on the cover of some conservative publication as the guy who really needs to own what has happened to the Democrat Party. By the way victor it was a dei party yeah even bill maher he was he's been on he had dinner with donald trump and he said just today that he got a lot of criticism he said he was very friendly to me he talked to me in a way that obama or clinton would have you know not had me um or or Biden into the White House.
I wanted to say it's worse than that, Bill. He's of the opposite party.
So the proper metaphor or simile is not you talking to Biden, but somebody like Charlie Kirk being called in to shoot the breeze with Joe Biden. That's our Michael Savage or somebody.
And that's not going to ever happen. And so, but anyway, all that he was fair.
I will tell you about the one time I went on Bill Marsh here. I know you mentioned you were on it and kind of a setup, but go ahead.
I had just come back from Libya and I'd had a ruptured appendix and i was home the first day and their producer called and said this wait wait wait wait wait can i say you almost died in libya well they told me i was gonna die they got yeah okay so this is just like two weeks after near death all right no it was about eight days and i was on painkiller and i was pretty sick and they they said, this producer called and said, would you like, I was pure. My face had no color in it.
I had peritonitis still. I was taking Flagyl, Aucmentin, and Cipro, three of them at the same time.
I think that's why I'm allergic to my antibiotics now. But anyway, point was they called and said, nobody wants to talk about the surge.
Would you talk about it and explain why they're doing it?

And I said, I don't want to go and deal more.

And he said, no, no, no, no, no.

We're going to have an open debate.

And I swear, they put me on there.

And he introduced me as Cheney's war guru.

And then that guy that played Gandalf, Ian McClellan, he said he's not even an academic. He's not even a – I've never heard a – and they just attacked, attacked, attacked.
And then the producer called up and said, this was wonderful. And I said, I will never, ever, ever, ever go back on this crazy show.
This was all an ambush. And they were just talking into Bill Maher's ear.
He he had a earpiece that's what he did yeah that said i you know he i'm glad he went and talked to trump and he felt that he'll still trash trump but uh he said that it was a decent but he's going to learn that the people who hate him the most are not people like you or me we We don't hate Bill Maher. We disagree with a lot of stuff he is, but we're open to anything he says.
It's going to be the left because he's going to be an apostate. Yeah, he will be a traitor.
Yeah, and he'll be called a white male, aging, 70-something, 60-something, out-of-touch person. Yeah.
Well, Victor, let's talk about some out-of-touch people. This is an obnoxious admiral who just got the boot.
Navy Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield. I forget what department she was.
Maybe SpaceX? And she... No, no, I think she's just a regular...
Just regular? Okay. She wasn't going to put the new president's, Trump's picture on the wall or the new secretary of defense.
We'll wait four years, she boasted, and she's out of a job now. I don't know where they get the moxie, but...
I can tell you what's going on. And then there's...
It was kind of replicated when J of replicated when jd vance and his wife went to greenland they kind of gave a speech to the space uh base that's what you were referring to of which we have a base in northern greenland of course for monitoring space satellites etc both defense and exploration i suppose and jd gave one of his MAGA speeches, basically saying, you know, Greenland is huge and it's strategically important. It's a North American, huge space.
And Denmark, until we brought it up, had not been adequately, A, ensuring its security, and B, giving it money for internal development.

And we would like to see that change, basically.

He didn't say he was going to invade it.

He didn't say it was.

And Colonel Susanna, I know it because she spells the name of my late daughter the same

way with an H on it, Myers.

Susanna Myers is a colonel, and she was in charge of the base. And she something like i know that i'm not versed in politics i'm not interested but meaning i'm going to say the exact opposite of what my disclaimer was i don't agree with anything and that's not going to be basically what we do in this space based on what she heard and she was fired.
She should go back and read the Article 88 of Uniform Code of Military Justice, and it says that no serving are retired. It doesn't say retired, but it says subject to recall, and people have interpreted it as retired, and it is, shall disparage the president, the vice president or the chief cabinet officers publicly.

publicly. But by basically saying that Vance is an idiot and I'm going to disobey or I'm not,

and he was reflecting the command of the chief and I'm going to disobey that on this base,

she was in some way violating the spirit, if not the letter of Article 88. Of course, we haven't heard much.
Just to finish this topic, Jack, we haven't heard much. Have you noticed that we don't have Mark Milley talking about a fascist suddenly? He did that during the Biden administration, and now the most dangerous man.
General McCaffrey and all the others. I haven't heard any Mussolini slurs.
I haven't heard General McChrystal saying he's a liar. I haven't heard General Hayden saying that he's got Auschwitz-like pins on the border.
I haven't heard any of it. I haven't heard Admiral McRaven say that he's basically should be removed sooner than later.
And why is that? I think it's because during the first administration, it was chaotic and the cabinet and the appointees reflected the organized resistance to Donald Trump.

You know, Rex Tillerson at State or John Bolton. But this time around, I think the general feeling is among the retired one to four stars is if I call him Hitler and I clearly violate Article 88, they're going to court-martial me or they're going

to bring me up on charges.

So we haven't heard a word.

If that would be true, it would be a good deterrent for whether you're Republican or

a Democrat.

And I wrote a column saying that Stanley McChrystal was very lax in having an aide say in front

of all his assembled officers, Joe bite me about the vice president and the Rolling Stone reporter that did that. And they we called.
Remember, he was a very good officer and he was a whole Afghan project. Superior officer in charge of Afghanistan.
Obama, we called him to Washington, basically said, you had a reporter here. and they were making fun of the vice president of the United States and called him Joe Biden in your presence, and you didn't reprimand him or something, and they removed him of command.
Boy, it would go crazy when Trump, he removed the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, just, he couldn't point any. It wasn't that he fired him for anything.

He just wanted somebody else.

Kind of like General McCurron that Obama had removed before McChrystal.

He hadn't done anything wrong.

He just wanted McChrystal there.

And then McChrystal, they felt, had violated, I guess, Article 88.

But if Trump ever did that, they'd go nuts. You have talked about Article 88 and these characters for quite a while.
You're talking about facts here with the article. And you're not well loved by many generals.
I have the greatest respect for the military. And I know a lot of generals and I like them.
But there was a period in 2020 when the cities were burning and they tried to burn the St. John's iconic Episcopal Church.
And they were trying to storm. Remember the White House and Donald Trump was taken to the bunker? The New York Times said he was a coward for doing that.
I remember they said that. He had no courage.
And then there was a photo op with Mark Milley, which all commanders do with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and all of the things came out, and they started, gosh, it was, we had two colonels that came out and said that

they that the chairman of the joint chiefs who has no he's not in the chain of command it's an advisory you know prestigious but advisory billet they are they argued that they should have an intervention and remove trump forcibly i think it was colonel lieutenant colonel nagel and another person.

It was really crazy. They were

calling for,that was the period when Donald Trump earlier had been inaugurated. Rosa Brooks wrote in Foreign Policy on Day 11 that he should be either impeached or 25th Amendmented or there should be a military coup to consider refusing to let him enact his policy.
It was a crazy time. But I mentioned some generals who had said things like Mussolini, and I think that was, and I have to be very careful, that was General McCaffrey said he was Mussolini.
Chris Matthews just said that as well, but he's not an officer. And I mentioned a person who's a colleague who said that on d-day the people on the other side of the beach we know who those were were anyway i don't want to get into it but it was a suggestion that he was more like the enemy on the other side of the beach than he was the american and it was it was just non-stop amazing so then i people should remember that Article 88 came from the Uniform Code of Military Justice 1951 because for two reasons.
That is, the Marine Corps had the Army, the Marine Corps, the newly independent Air Force. They all had their different regulations and protocols.
So they wanted to uniformly create a code of behavior, especially for officers. And they did.
And the second thing, it was based on Douglas MacArthur had been pro-consul in Japan. He had been the chief head of all U.S.
military operations in Korea. And he had kept, after he did that brilliant Incheon landing in September and surprised the communists, expelled them from South Korea, went up 350, 400 miles to North Korea, said everybody was going to be home by Thanksgiving.
And they said, are you worried? Your lines are thin. The peninsula is widening.
Widening. It's getting cold.
They don't have winter equipment. and they were going north, and the peninsula widened, and they were warned there would be a million Chinese communist troops that would cross the Yalu River, and they did.
It was the longest retreat in U.S. military history.
And MacArthur said there's no substitute for victory. So even though he had been embarrassed and was naive, and he said air support, B-29s, we'll just wipe them out if they cross the Yala.
But he didn't realize the MiG-15 was at that time much better than the F-80. And we wouldn't get air parity to the F-86 came, the Sabre 2.
But anyway, my point is this, that he started mouthing off about Truman and saying this is his commander-in-chief. So when they removed him, he became an iconic hero for maybe six months.
And he was actually nominated in the 52 Republican Convention, but with very little support. My only point was at that point, they said, we've got to make sure that this does not happen again.
Then an active or even a retired. He was retired as well.
When he retired, he kept it up. So they said, we're not going to have a retired or active general admiral attacking the commander-in-chief, and they expanded it to the cabinet.
And that's where it came from. The weird thing about it, Jack, is they have enforced it, but not for the very top echelon, but for middle-ranking officers.
And I think they should just follow the law. Even if it's, you know, I would have no problem if a conservative general attacked Joe Biden or Barack Obama.
I would have no problem with seeing him disciplined. And if you read it, they say they're subject to court-martial.
But anyway, my point is that there are groups of people within the military. These cases were two women, but they really do believe they represent the new military.
This is the DEI military. This is the inclusive military.
And when they hear Pete Hexeth talk about, I don't really care whether you're male or female, you're going to have to meet the same standards for combat troops. or they hear donald trump saying we're going to you know toughen up or it's going to be military military efficacy and combat readiness and not dei and all that they don't like it and they don't like their left wing and they feel that they were promoted as part of the biden my vision that the military would be more socially, culturally inclusive.
And by the way, the left went from opposing the military from the Vietnam era opposition to it, to loving it, because in their way of thinking, there's a chain of command. And if you have a DI initiative, a trans initiative, whatever it is, you can just go bring those generals into Congress and scream and yell at them.
Like Milley, remember that about Professor Kendi said he wanted to read and understand Professor Kendi. And they will enact change like that.
It'll just be an order. And you can really green light social revolutionary change.
So all of these people got used to that and then trump and hexath come in and they think you know what i'm just going to make everybody know that i don't like that sob i'm not going to put his picture on i'm just vance is out of green now i'm just going to tell her basically in tell everybody base hey everybody i'm a folk hero And you don't have to listen to a thing that Vance said, or much less what is. That's what she was basically saying, what the commander in chief wants.
And they said, you know what? Out. I like that.
Yeah. And they're not they're not persecuted.
Folk hero. That's a great way of how they probably do think of themselves.
No, they do. And they're not, remember everybody, they're not putting them up on cart marshal.
They're not even charging them. They're not doing anything.
They're just saying, I prefer you not have your present billet and you'll be reassigned. That's all.
You'll be walking a beat in the Bronx. Something like that.
I don't think so. Ah, well.
Maybe you'll be in ahead of the National Guard in Fresno or something. Maybe.
Which I think is a very prestigious post, but they wouldn't. Every time I land at Fresno and I see those 15s or 16s, or maybe they're 18s, I can't tell.
I feel really proud of Fresno. Oh, yeah.
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And we thank the good people at Field of Greens for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Victor, I'm going to ask you a quickie, a quick question here.
Then we're going to take a break as we head into the turn, the home stretch, or wherever we head into. And let's see, the quickie is, oh yeah, this is a cultural question, Victor.
You know, earlier, the last podcast you mentioned, our friend David Bonson, it was an investor. I had wanted to raise this because there's another big investing company, Edward Jones, right? Everything's Edward Jones.
That's got a little, you know, there's a storefront downtown in every town in America. But they're really a DEI and woke driven company.
So there's an article about how they're really a DEI-driven company.

So there's this article about how they're, in February, as part of Black History Month,

and this is in our rearview mirror now, but the firm's internal DEI website highlighted

a page on inclusive language about race and ethnicity.

That instruction guide from Edward Jones' Washington office provided examples of racially or ethnically biased language. You know what is racially and ethnically biased language, Victor? It's the term brown bag.
Now, if I would say I'm going to brown bag lunch, it means I'm going to make my lunch at home and bring... Do you know that's a racist term? You know, you're not allowed to use.
Yes, I did. You know how I do that? I have a very good friend who's very well known.
I almost worshipped him who's African-American. And he once told me I mentioned a another African-American grandee.
He's not a grandee, he's a very wonderful person.

And he mentioned that, anyway, in connection with this other person, he mentioned that when he was in college, people of the elite in Washington would, if he wanted to go to a sorority, they would have a paper bag and they would look at your skin tone if you were african american this was the lighter group of people and he that was part of an intro to a larger discourse about within the african american community fixations on skin color and it was white racially driven obviously but and after I started, you know, he mentioned that people who were the most radical of all blacks tended to be people who he felt had been beneficiaries of the brown bag rule. In other words, they were fixated on that.
Were they lighter skinned if we're going on that yeah like a reverend writer a ewe newton that that uh and there's been a lot of after there's been a lot of literature written about that that the some of the more radical 60s figures were either of mixed heritage or rap brown they were lighter skinned lighter skinned. That came up during the Clarence Thomas hearings.
You remember when they had a lot of very elite African-Americans, but especially the white liberal Joe Biden. Remember they went after Clarence Thomas? And there were people suggesting that there had been racism not only in the white community against darker-toned and southern blacks, but also the elite of the African-American community.

And people, both black and white, had written about that, deploring it.

But it was very interesting that when Clarence Thomas went up, there was a great deal of hostility, and it almost bordered on well, it didn't know. It was racist a lot from white liberals, the way that they attacked him.
And it was, anyway. Well, I learned something new every day.
So, Victor, we're going to end the show today by talking about a foreign influence at our colleges and one nation that doesn't get as much attention as it deserves.

We talked on numerous podcasts about the amount of Chinese nationals who are students in America, etc.

But it's the nation of Qatar.

And it's really troubling some of the numbers we're seeing.

So we're going to get your thoughts about that when we come back from these final messages. We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson show.
April 12th, Saturday, we are recording. Happy Passover to my brothers and sisters in Abraham.
Today's episode is up on Thursday the 17th. Keep watching for tomorrow on Friday, which will be Good Friday, the 18th, and then Saturday the 19th when the great Sammy Wink will be talking to Victor about surely the tremendous amount of events that will be happening in the forthcoming week from when

we're talking. Victor, if I could get my act together here.
Yeah, this is, I saw this Instagram post. And it has to do with, instigated by Texas A&M, Cornell, Columbia University.
What do they have in common is that this guy is giving a Dr. Charles Asher Small is testifying before the U.S.
Senate Help Committee. That must be health education.
I don't know what the LP is for. He laid out a troubling map of foreign influence and radicalization.
Texas A&M, over $1 billion in Qatari funding, more than 500 research projects, including sensitive work with potential military application. Qatari proxies were contractually granted ownership of the intellectual property.
Cornell received nearly, this is staggering, $10 billion from Qatar, making it the university's largest direct foreign donor, 30 times more than its next target. And then Colombia took at least $7.17 million.
None of it disclosed to the U.S. Department of Education in violation of federal law.
There's lots more here. I'll just say one last thing.
K-12, as it relates to K-12, there's a program called Choices Program used in over 8,000 U.S. schools.
There's been uncovered foreign-funded curricula that distort history and promote anti-Israel bias, reaches over 1 million students. Again, thanks to Qatari money.
Victor, this is really troubling. Your thoughts? Yeah, it is.
When you look at the amount of foreign gifting, there's two things that come up. It's increased geometrically each year almost.
And Qatar is the leading contributor. but most of the money not all but most of the money comes from two sources either from the gulf states and it's designed to inculcate a whole generation at the elite campuses because these are where the policymakers the future state department diplomats are going to be, the political party grandees and magnificos.

All of those people will come out of these elite 10 or 20 universities. And that's what they center on.
And then China. China had the Confucius Institutes and stuff like that.
But they have for the same reason, so that if you ever objected to saying that it was not a pangolin or a bat, but the COVID-19 virus came out of the Wuhan lab, then somebody would write and say, you're an idiot who got a degree from a group. And he got a minor in Asian studies, got the real dope from the great professor.
But the point is, if you do the math, the way these endowed professorships work is, say they pay a guy $250,000 a year, a professor of $300,000, I don't know if that's that high, and then they have to take a couple percentage to keep up with inflation on the gift, but you're talking about $7 bucks, 6 to 8 million to endow a professor. And so for, you know, a thousand, get 150 professors per billion dollars.
And you get a Middle East program and you salt that with eight or nine of these people. You could do this 10, you know what I mean? 10, 15 departments.
A billion dollars goes a long way in academia to endow professors and fund these Middle East programs. And that's what they're trying to do, to tell the elite, and they have been very successful.
Very successful. Just think how successful they are when this administration came in and they said they were going to highlight anti-Semitism in general, in particular at Columbia, where it was completely out of control.
And they threatened to cut off 400. I guess it is still suspended.
And the interim president resigned. And now we have this Jay Carney, Obama's former press secretary's wife, is the president of Columbia.
Is it? I forgot her name. But she's true.
Yeah. Anyway, I don't want to know her name.
But the point is, they just had a big Columbia. Did you see that? Another demonstration.
Yeah. And they were disrupting Natalia Bennett, the guest speaker, and they wouldn't let him speak so think about that what gives those students and what gives that university this confidence that even though you're under suspension for 400 million dollars even though the world's attention is focused on you for harassing jewish students and interrupting speakers and even though one of your godheads, Mr.
Khalil, is under adjudication to be deported, you're still doing it. You're still disrupting a speaker that wants to give the other side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and you won't let him speak.
And you are calling Jews names. And the answer, you know, and this was reported on today.
And the answer is that all of these students have had this constant indoctrination from faculty members who, I don't know, if it paid better, they'd be fascist. They're very susceptible to money because there's not a lot of money in a faculty member's salary.

At least I think there is, but they think that because they're brilliant and geniuses, they should be played like corporate lawyers or corporate CEOs because nobody appreciates their genius like they do. But in any case, my point is that money is very influential.
And when you start giving $10 billion, you're talking about a thousand professorships in theory. You can really change things.
And that's what the Qataris have done. And that's what the Chinese are doing.
And I think they should really look at that. I don't think the universities want to get in a fight with Donald Trump because they're the proverbial mossy rock.
And when you turn it over, there are slugs and all sorts of debris underneath that's gross. And when you start looking at that university and you see all the money that came that was not reported as mandated from outside the United States to the Department of Education.

I'm speaking from experience that Stanford was fined millions of dollars in the first Trump administration for not reporting Chinese donations. We had, I think, five or six years ago, a member of the People's Liberation Army as a neuroscientist visiting professor.

Can you imagine that?

At Stanford.

And she was suspended and sent home when the media got a hold of it. But my point is that when you start looking at these universities and you start seeing the amount of foreign money that is coming in, you start looking at the overcharging or the surcharges on individual faculty grants from, say, NIH or Department of Energy, et cetera, and how the university snatches 50, 60 percent of it.
When you start looking at racially segregated dorms, graduations, safe spaces, when you start looking at institutionalized violations of the First Amendment, when you start looking at the actual curriculum and how biased it is, when you start looking especially at the admissions policies and seeing how race and gender are used systematically in violation of all the civil rights statutes and court rulings, mostly against white males, but generally Asians and whites in general. I don't think they want people to look at that.
And when you look at the size of the endowments and the money that is coming in and what's down the pipeline, because the more they resist and the more they get self-righteous, the more they're going to look at a re-examination of the student loan program. And maybe they have to put some, we'll change the dynamic of moral hazard.
And they'll have to start guaranteeing a large portfolio of loans. And then in addition, maybe we can get a fair ratio of how many dollars in the endowment per student.
And if you have over $500,000 or a million, we'll start taxing that endowment at 15%. Some people want higher.
And if they don't, as I say, the Bill of Rights on campus. So they have a lot of exposure is what I'm trying to say.
And they don't get it yet. They have all of these memos by these presidents and deans and provosts that they keep reassuring the fact.
Basically, they're reassuring the fact, well, we're an independent, we're autonomous, and we don't just rely. Well, they don't know what's coming down the pipeline.
Yeah. Well, I think their boards, too, trustees tend to be echo are.
I saw Cornell, even though that president, I forget her name now, last year retired two months after her board voted unanimously. There's no dissent within these institutions.
But they have a lot of exposure. They're not like the universities of the 50s and early 60s at all.
Well, you join a board in order to burnish your own image. I'm on the board.
You know what would be wonderful? You know, if all of these donors, instead of saying, I want the Victor Davis Hanson Endowed Professor of Humanistic Studies, I would would rather if it was me and i had that money i would rather say i have a victor hansen tradesman award for a welder or electrician and really fund these trade schools and get people really we we should be just as i would rather have the world'sians, plumbers, carpenters, drywall painters than I would ethnic studies, leisure studies, environmental studies. Why don't we just put – everybody's upset at the university.
Just redirect your giving and get a name chair at a trade school. I'm serious.
For every five men, women leaving the trades, retiring, only two are joining. So you're right, the focus is quite dire.
You can't find people that really know what they're doing. And we need to do it fast.
And we used to have the best tradespeople in the world. I grew up with people, my gosh, they could do anything.
Well, Victor, before we end, could you just take one minute and tell us, we've rarely mentioned that you were on the board of the Bradley Foundation, and every year the Bradley Foundation announces the prizes. There's three winners of the prize, conservatives.
Sometimes when you look back at who got it, you realize they used to be conservatives. Oh, you mean Bill Kristol.
Oh, I didn't want to say that. But the prizes have been announced.
There's a ceremony for them in Washington in late May. But you've had to, I just think it would be a nice opportunity to to our listeners know who've been recognized.
And I particularly want to say that you, I saw the news the other day that Jimmy Lai, the great hero who's in prison in China, has received an honorary Bradley Prize. But tell us about Jimmy and the others who have gotten this this year.
Well, we give three, and we've never done this before, have an honorific, because we only have one requirement of the recipient, and that is they have to be there to accept the award. And that be there means in Washington, D.C.
And when I was a recipient, I was on the roof digging snow from a leak, and the director of the Bradley, I wasn't on the board, and the director said, well, you've won the Bradley. And I didn't really know what it was, but he said, you've won $250,000.
I almost fell off the roof. I really did.
I was slipping. And I couldn't believe it.
I thought, oh, my gosh. But then I realized I lived in California, so my actual was $120,000.
But that was still so generous. But now it's $300,000.
So the committee was discussing. I can't get into it.
This is confidential. But anyway, the long and the short of it is how do you honor this brave person? Because he's incarcerated.
I mean, he can't come and we can't communicate. So for the first time that Bradley created an honorific one that did not.
And because he had means, it was honorific. But there wasn't a stipend.
He's not have to. So there's going to be at the May ceremony, there's going to be a special segment to honor Jimmy Lai.
And I think it'll be quite moving. And then, in addition, this used to give four, but now we give three.
I don't know why. The logic must be that because of longevity and the conservative movement, this has gone on, I think, since 2005 or 2006.
Used to give four or so. For 20 years, there's 80 people, and they feel that maybe you don't have the same Tom Sowell type of caliber people.
I don't know why, but we have, or maybe it's not so much the money, but anyway, we increased it to 300, but there's only three now that are given.

And this year, they were very good.

It's been announced, so I can say it.

Chris Ruffo, who was the, I don't know, he really led the anti-DI counterrevolution in

academia.

And he's fearless, works for the Manhattan Institute, among other billets. Manhattan Institute, City Journal.
City Journal. He's very brave.
He's very talented. And then one of my favorite people, James Pearson, and he was the head of the Olin Foundation.
And he's a writer. He's a PhD.
He's been a faculty member, but he's an essayist, but he's really an unspoken hero. He's been involved with a lot of initiatives in the conservative movement the last 50 years, and the nice thing about the awards are they're not just for past, you can't just give someone and expect that they're not going to do anything.

In other words, they're active right now and that the ward not only recognized past contributions, but it's an incentive to keep on doing it. And in these two cases, they're both still very active.
Then the third was for Barry Strauss. He was a professor.
He was a professor at Cornell.

And on that very left-wing campus, he was a center-right, not that the ideology mattered, but he spoke up on behalf of Western civilization, culture, and the history department. And he was even put in charge of the peace studies department, just kind of straighten it out.
And then he's written about 20 books or 18 books. But he was a scholar.
I knew him as early as 1978. He and a scholar named Josh Ober and I were all writing on the attic countryside for our Ph.D.
thesis. American School of Classical Studies is where people go to get archaeological experience for a year in Athens.
So I was writing about agricultural devastation during the Peloponnesian War. He was writing about the after effects economically of the Peloponnesian War on Attica.
And Josiah Obert was writing about the fortifications of Attica. So the three of us would walk out and look at walls, fortifications, archaeological sites each week for almost a year.
But anyway, he's now at the Hoover Institution, and he writes about the ancient world and its lessons for the modern world. And he's a public, kind of like an Andrew Roberts public intellectual.
And that's the idea of the awards. You want somebody who is a scholar.
We've given it to Martin Gilbert, Andrew Roberts, that type of – Alan Guelzo. Yeah.
Yeah. He's a wonderful civil war historian.
And then we've given it to what we call an institutionalist of this conservative or traditionalist movement that tries to make change by serving in institutions and improving them. That's what Jim Pearson is doing, even though that's not fair to him because he's a very effective essayist and writer.
He's written some great articles. New Criterion, you'll find a lot of his essays.
Yeah, and he's written some good books. And then we also go to more of just an activist, an activist in every sense of the word, a public intellectual, in other words, that tries to affect change through essays, through serving in academia, in the corporate world, but somebody who is more of a grassroots type.

So we have a tripartite system of adjudication.

It's a great trio plus the caboose of Jimmy.

Yeah, that's great. Yeah, it is.

And it'll be in late May at the Daughters of American Revolution in Washington.

It's kind of the big festivity of the conservative or traditional movement in Washington every year. It's kind of lavish.
The board is a wonderful board of 10 people. And I've been on it, I think, for 12 or 13 years.
It's very hard for me now as I'm older because I have to fly. I have to drive up from my farm, get to Fresno Airport at a 5 or 6 o'clock flight and hope I can make an hour connection to Milwaukee.
And then usually I think— That's where Bradley's located, right? Yeah, and then most of the time it's because of weather or something, I'll fly to Chicago and then take— and sometimes it takes me a day, and I've been doing this for 12 years years so i don't know how long you'll be able to do it well i have a couple notes er yeah well it uh our great sponsor of podcasts back in the day at national review shiraga kawiyar who's who's loves you he asked me to at least he didn't mention your actual age 71 he said please tell victor to stop mentioning that he's 71 i said i had somebody wrote that too you know what it's funny i had an old friend and she was a professor with me a wonderful person i'll just say miss drake professor drake i won't tell your whole whole name and embarrass her. But she wrote basically in saying, you've got to Jets in the baseball cap.
When I knew her, I had a full head of hair. And she was part of a group of professors that we once a month went to, guess where, the Olive Garden for lunch.
It wasn't hooters yeah good and she was this southern she was from the south so she had a very distinctive accent it was very rare in california but she wrote me and kind of out of the blue and said she's a very talented professor and she said you've got a jets in the hat and the fedora i I like your big, beautiful, bald head. I like your bald head.
Beautiful. No, it's not.
It's just, you know, I'd say this. It's better than the ones that called me Freddy Gray.
Freddy, what's the guy? Kruger. And then Skeletor.
And I looked up Skeletor Comics. Gosh, I did look like Skeletor.
And then somebody sent me a copy of a illustration i showed my wife and she said that well i don't know every i don't know i mean i have these things right here were from a bicycle stitches you are indestructible as i've said before and your brain there's no hair up there because your brain's so big there's no room for for follicles okay i have to read a comment sweetie squat square it's a big pineapple head there's a comment from from youtube watcher and thanks we have so many new new followers of the podcast victor this is from hammer and tongue picture your way of distilling these issues to the what would an individual do if is most effective? Asking why families have locks on their doors or fences around their homes, or why is it disastrous when you pay your bills with your credit card, et cetera, applied to the larger national or global narratives. These illustrations of reductive personal level reason makes more sense to Americans trying to navigate the hurricane.
Common sense. Thank you, BDH.
I have two other quick ones from Tosh Feratu, who writes, it's a great day when you get an Obama impression from Dr. Hansen, and we got multiple today.
My hero, Rushler Ball, was a master of it. And then another one, Republicans Forever 25 wrote, discovered this brilliant American recently.
What a historian and writer. I am hooked.
So we thank all those folks. I try to read many of the comments.
I want to mention again, Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus. I can catch my fingers together.
The Blade of Perseus, victorhanson.com. Do subscribe.
$65 a year discounted from $6.50 a month and two original exclusive pieces every week and one exclusive video every week. If you're on Twitter, excuse me, X, at VD Hanson is Victor's handle.

If you're on Facebook, VDH is Morning Cup.

Also, there's a great friendly group called the Victor Davis Hanson Fan Club.

I'm Jack Fowler for me.

As for me, I write...

Go ahead.

I'm sorry.

Well, I'll just get my commercial in.

No, you got it.

Okay.

I was going to actually remind you to do that. Oh, thank you very much.
I appreciate it. Go to civalthoughts.com.
Sign up. Why? Because when you do that every Friday in your email inbox, you will get Civil Thoughts, which is the weekly newsletter I write.
What's in it? 14 recommended readings. I think great articles you will find of interest.
So we're not free. I'm not charging anything.
And we're not selling your name. I do that for the Center for Civil Society, which is part of my gig.
And we are trying to strengthen civil society. I think that's a noble thing to do.
So anyway, that's my spiel, Victor. Do you have any last words you want to share? Yes, I do.
You know, I was in the airport and somebody came up to me and said, when you do your podcast, you have a very funny wedding ring on. And it's this thing.
And it's not a wedding ring. And it's.
It's your cousin's, isn't it? Yes. It's a Roman legionnaire.
It's kind of interesting because, as I said earlier, this is very strange, but you remember I wrote about it. And my father's first cousin, his mother died in birth, and his father was blind, so they raised him as my father's brother.
And they both went to the University of Pacific and won for tight ends, and they got scholarships under Alonzo Stagg was the coach. And then they both joined the Marine Corps.
And a family lore won't tell you which one hit. and they got in a fight in a bar room and everybody was swinging and one of them had hit an officer or a sergeant i think excuse me and they brought them both up and said one of you stupid big swedes they were six four two hundred pounds is going to take the rap so my father volunteered and they said we're to fix you.
There's an experimental B-29 program in Nebraska, and they all crash. So you're going to go over there, and that'll do you.
And the other one gets to stay in the new 6th Marine Division, which was created, and you're going to go to Guadalcanal, which was American-held. It had been pacified for a year.
And we're going to train you in the Super 6th Marine Division. And we'll get some of the old breed, you know, the old breed that went in earlier had a terrible time in Pelelu.
Anyway, we're going to get them and we're going to train you guys and we're going to get a lot of kids from college and we're going to make a super, learn all of the errors we did. And we're going to use you.
And that was what they did when they landed on April 1st of 1945 on Okinawa. And so for the first 30 days, the Japanese had a new strategy.
They did not contest the beach. They just used firepower.
And they brought them in. and the southern part of Okinawa was lightly held, and they took the 1st Marine Division was there and the 6th Marine.
There were Army divisions there, but the 6th Marine went down, pacified it, and then they brought up, and then all proverbial hell broke loose because there were over 100,000 Japanese troops buried deep in the coral, reinforced concrete. They've been doing it for a year.
There was another 100,000 impressed Okinawa civilians that were working with them or fighting with them. And there was something called the Shuri Line, which was a belt across entrance to the north of the island.
And being Marine, I don't want to make fun of Simon Bolivar Buckner, the son of the famous Confederate general. But they decided the Army was in trouble, and so they brought the 6th Marine Division up, and they decided not to use maritime amphibious landings, which was a Marine specialty, behind lines.
So the Marine Corps said, we will go around the Shuri line. They said, no, go right through it.
Well, they didn't know I have anything. So my uncle, Dash, first cousin, we moved, but basically my uncle, because he grew up as my dad's father.
He father. Victor was in the 29th Regiment, and they fought like head-on.
On the last day, on the worst place, Sugarloaf Hill, he was shot in the thigh. And all night long, they couldn't go get him, and he bled to death.
And they brought him down two days later. And this is not known to my family.
They didn't know how he died. My grandfather would never mention it.
My father named me after him and told me he came in when I was eight years old and gave me his Louisville Sluggers pad, his UOP briefcase, and said, you've got to live up to this. And he told me about it.
And that was all he ever mentioned, period. And then, anyway, I was writing about Okinawa for Ripples of Battle, and I mentioned this, and all of a sudden, his commanding officer wrote me wrote me who was 96 and had written a letter to my grandfather in 1945 about the death of Victor and he still had a copy of it and he sent it to me and then he said there was another person who was very close to him who helped with the body and he will write you.
This was in 2003. This was all everybody who knew him was dead, except his high school girlfriend who used to come and visit me.
She was in her 80s and happily married, wonderful person. But anyway, the long wrote and said, and he described his last hour.
He said he was a big kid and he protected a small Italian kid that was picked on. And when he was wounded, this young Italian soldier who was very slight, quick, ran out to try to help him, and he was killed.
And it was very moving. And then I went out went out into the barn i found all of these letters i had never really opened them about victor asking his uh grandfather to go buy him a 45 because he was going to go to a tough battle and he wanted a 1911 for and the swedish grandfather was trying to get it it was exchanges to send to him on guadalcanal before he went in to what would be Okinawa.
But anyway, the whole point was this person wrote me and said, I have his ring that we cut off the body. And it's been in my bookcase for 55, 60 years.
Would you like it? And I will send it it to you I didn't know what to make of it and so I didn't know what it was so he sent it to me and I was a classic professor and it's a picture of a Roman legionnaire I had no idea so he sent it to me and then I had it I just had it welded and I've been wearing it ever since. So it's a very strange thing.
Do you know what day your uncle died? The actual day? May 19th, 1945. The last day, the letter had a point and it said they had vicious, horrific fighting getting up to the summit of Sugarloaf Hill which was was the breaking point of the Shuri line.
And he said he died in the last hours of the last day of the conquest. And after that, they were able to make motion.
They could go northward. But the thing is, that battle was not declared.
They thought it was declared secure in July. I'm doing this by memory, July 11th, but I don't think it was till actually July 2nd.
When I wrote about it, the battle and ripples of battle, about all the things that happened, E.B. Sledge's great memoir, everybody should read it with the old read.
It's about the 1st Marine Division, how horrific that battle was. And anyway, to get a long story short, Simon Bolivar Buckner, I think the third, was the highest ranking, after Leslie McNair, he was the highest ranking Pacific officer.
And the battle was, the island was declared secure. They had to go back and sweep through because there was a lot of Japanese soldiers that were dug down deeply.
And then a freak one person came up, and I think it was a mortar artillery. They had missed him.
The island was secure. It hit a granite rock, and it sent a sliver that went through about four people standing around him and didn't hit any of them and went right through his heart and killed him.
And he was the commander. And his son wrote me a very, I had been critical of him because he's usually considered somewhat culpable for the strategy of head-on and did not serve the Marine Corps well.
But I felt bad because his son wrote me a very moving, who was

in his 70s, a very moving letter about what a wonderful father he was. And I lamented that, that I had criticized him.
I didn't do it out of personal animus, just that after reading a whole corpus of literature about the battle, I think there were ways to avoid it. And the weird thing was is that, see, this was in July of 1945, and the war was over on September 2nd.
So my point is this was the most costly of all the island hopping, of Pelelu, of Tarawa, of Iwo Jima. This was 50,000 Marines, Army, and Naval.
There were 5,000 Naval people were killed by kamikazes, 12,000 dead, and almost 40,000 wounded, seriously. And they didn't know.
So everybody talks about dropping the bomb. Nothing made a greater impression on that decision than this blood battle right before the end of the war.
And people said, well, I thought we had mastered amphibious operations. I thought the first marine divisions were expert at it.
I thought we had the biggest fleet in the world and they had bombarded. And then they said, but the closer you get to Japan, the more fanatical the resistance, the more time they've had to pour reinforced concrete and they're burrowed down.
And Okinawa is just a small indication of what's coming. Taste of what's to come.
And that accelerated the napalm of, so in May, June, July, people, they were bombing. And my father was kind of ironic because he was at the same time in a B-29 and was supposed to be killed in the sense that they thought the B-29 would be much more dangerous than being in the 6th Marine Division because it would be, they thought the worst of island hopping was over.
And he lived 40 missions, got crashed twice and forced down in Iwo Jima twice. But the weird thing about it all was that, and I mentioned this, but just to finish this harangue, they took Okinawa, and Curtis LeMay immediately went there, and he said, you know, I'll keep the 2200 B-29s on the Marianas at Tinian Guam.
And they're going to continue to fly eight or nine hours over the target, eight or nine hours back, 1600 miles each. However, I can do three missions a day because this is 350 miles off the coast of Tokyo.
So they had the blueprints. They were already starting the runways, and he had another 2,000 B-29s on order to deploy there.
But more importantly, there were 10,000 idle B-24s, B-17s, and especially the superb heavy Lancaster British bomber. And there were plans to transfer a lot of them, thousands of them, to Okinawa.
So you can imagine with napalm what that would have ensued had they not dropped the atomic bomb. It took months to get going, but they were just about ready to open up Okinawa and just burn Tokyo and the major cities to the ground that were still standing.
So in a weird way, the Okinawa disaster fueled the decision not to invade the mainland and either to bomb them with conventional napalm or the atomic bomb. But they didn't really have the planes transferred over there yet.
So in a weird way, the atomic bomb saved millions of Japanese lives because they would have just burned the whole country to the ground. They were so furious of the screw-up and the tragedy of what Okinawa was.
And the Navy took a terrible beating on Okinawa. It's just terrible from kamikazes.
People forget that if you have a kamikaze, the human brain is a more sophisticated cruise missile than a computer. And if you say, well, the Zero only had a range of 400, it doesn't need a range.
It has a radius now. So if it's not going to come back, its ability, its range is double.
So you put a pilot in and you have him go a foot above the water, the radar can't see him, and a couple of others at 25,000 feet and coordinated in tactics, and the brain can react to targeting, and he's got a 500-pound bomb. Boy, they were unstoppable.
And they sunk 17 ships. That was a whole nightmare.
And so anyway, that family never got over that. That Swedish family never got over it.
It was kind of weird. So anyway, it's kind of a weird thing because everybody would always, my father would always tell him, you've got to live up to this person.

You've got to do this, this, this, this, this, this.

Well, Victor, you said it was a harangue. It was anything but a harangue.
It was a beautiful, thoughtful remembrance of. But some person came up in the airport and asked me about this because he said he saw it.
Yeah. Well, they notice everything.
I do want to, I hope and pray your uncle, cousin is with our good Lord. This episode ends on Holy, this appears on Holy Thursday.
And the next time you and I are going to appear on the World Wide Web will be after Easter. So I want to wish all of our brothers and sisters a happy Easter.
And those who've gone before us, I hope they are in the good arms of the Lord. I think they will be.
Everything will be known to all of us at one point. Yeah, yeah.
Well, you've been terrific, my friend. Thanks so much.
We'll be back with another episode of The Victor Davis Hanson Show. God bless and bye-bye.
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