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

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Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 That is Holy Thursday for us Christians. I'm not sure if

Speaker 3 for my Orthodox friends, sometimes we're a week off.

Speaker 3 Depends on

Speaker 3 whether there's a full moon or not.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 this week. Now,

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 And we will get to your thoughts on that. A lot of military leadership

Speaker 3 issues,

Speaker 3 Qatari, Qatar,

Speaker 3 and its

Speaker 3 massive expenditures at U.S. colleges, California homelessness.

Speaker 3 an obnoxious admiral. Maybe there's more things.
We'll do all that when we come back from these important messages.

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Speaker 3 We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show, Victor. I forgot another topic we want to talk about is

Speaker 3 all the media types. Joe, why no, 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.

Speaker 3 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 the guy that's on CNN that's on there.

Speaker 2 He's the one that sort of drives everybody crazy on CNN. Right.

Speaker 3 Well, he's showing the numbers and they don't like the numbers. Shocking shot.
And here's one of the shocks. Shocking data shows Americans believe Republicans care more about people.

Speaker 3 Democrats of the party of the people know more. And here's...

Speaker 3 I won't read this whole thing that I had cut out, but Democrats always

Speaker 3 had a lead on this question. Back in 2017, before the 2018 midterms, Democrats had a 13-point lead.

Speaker 3 The question, again, is

Speaker 3 who cares more about the needs for people like you?

Speaker 3 In 2005, Democrats had a 23-point lead over Republicans. And in 1994, which was a big Republican year,

Speaker 3 Democrats had a 19-point lead. Now, all of a sudden, a tie.

Speaker 3 All of a sudden, the Democrats, who are the party of the people, no more, no more we get a tie on this question on a we get this 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 etc etc etc okay that's just that was a transcript so it's a little bumbling i just do want to make one additional point on this poll

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 But in 2017, among non-college graduates, Democrats had a seven-point advantage. Right now, Republicans have a nine-point advantage.
Victor,

Speaker 3 your thoughts on

Speaker 2 I wonder why.

Speaker 2 It's really shocking to Democrats because

Speaker 2 there's two things going on. The more that there's reality, and then there's the abyss between the rhetoric and the reality.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 She was really good. She was in her mid-50s about why China was cheating.
We had to clamp down or Schumer.

Speaker 3 I forgot that.

Speaker 2 Anyway,

Speaker 2 does anybody believe she would ever give that talk again? No.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 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, et cetera.

Speaker 2 So they became not a counterculture, but the culture. And it was as big or bigger than anybody in Wall Street, the big fortunes.
And they were left-wing.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 Silicon Valley. At the same time,

Speaker 2 they adopted this globalist, economical, pro-Europe, transatlantic,

Speaker 2 we we are the world type of attitude about trade, communications.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 we give capital gains cuts. Hey, we want to privatize Social Security.
We play golf. Why aren't there rich people for us? Because you weren't hip.

Speaker 2 You didn't get the professional classes, the lawyers, the doctors, the professors, the reporter, all the professional classes want to be hip and wealthy.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So suddenly it was not about protecting union jobs and lunch mucket 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 biolab.

Speaker 2 That's unfair. It was a biology lab.
All that stuff. So they got into DEI, and that was a really weird thing, too, because DEI replaced class.

Speaker 2 Suddenly, they'd 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.

Speaker 2 We're for Eric Colder and Oprah and the Obamas and everybody who's because they're wealthy. Class is no longer synonymous with race.
And so they got rid of class.

Speaker 2 They used to say race, class, gender, race,

Speaker 2 then it was just race and gender. They didn't care about class.
So in other words, they create this warp policy that

Speaker 2 Kamala Harris was an oppressed victim, and somebody in East Palestine who makes $20,000 is her oppressor, her victimizer. And it was just a complete metamorphosis.
So, yeah, it is the

Speaker 2 party of the very wealthy and the subsidized very poor.

Speaker 2 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 Glan, and think you can get on your hind legs and tell us that you're going to vote against a Democratic candidate.

Speaker 2 Or do not be like, what's her name, Leah, the

Speaker 2 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. Thank you.
But you may be a minority, but don't ever question us.

Speaker 2 Don't ever question us. So that's what happened, and everybody understands that.

Speaker 2 And especially, you can really see it now. It's really strange.
I mean,

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 and I was reading Business Insider, I think it's not just 87, it's 93% of

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 stock market is held by 10% of the market capitalization, not the number of stock, but the value in dollars, is held by 10% of the country.

Speaker 2 And part of the reason the Democratic Party is so outraged is that its spokesmen are so heavily invested in stocks.

Speaker 2 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 is inside her training by saying, go out and buy stocks.

Speaker 2 But my point is, it's the party of elite privilege. It's geographical.
It's the big cities.

Speaker 2 The big cities are the encapsulization of the Democratic Party.

Speaker 2 If you go to San Francisco, it's Hunters 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

Speaker 2 Oxnard or something. It's not middle class.
And it's the same thing in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And they have a whole vocabulary they've developed for everybody in between. Chumps, dregs,

Speaker 2 garbage now,

Speaker 2 Obama. I mean, Biden said, garbage.
They're just garbage. They're the real garbage.

Speaker 3 Irredeemables,

Speaker 2 deplorables. Obama started it when he said they just cling to their guns.
They just I can't win. They just cling to their guns and religion.

Speaker 2 The clingers, so they have a and then remember Peter Strok and Lisa Page? I could smell them at Walmart in their text exchange. So they really hate.

Speaker 2 I got in a little tiff right after the 2016 election. There was a Silicon Valley minor grandee, and I think she was in

Speaker 2 A and B, you know,

Speaker 2 B and B or Bredford, whatever you call renting your house out. She had a company, and she wrote a

Speaker 2 Airbnb.

Speaker 2 Yeah, did you remember that she wrote a posting? It came kind of infamous, and I wrote a column about it. And she said,

Speaker 2 these people are basically trash, and this election was a bunch of losers, and they have no education, and their cities are crappy.

Speaker 2 And I said, if you actually want to look at crappy cities, look at the roads in Palo Alto.

Speaker 2 Anyway, I was doing that. And she got really angry and tried to wrote about me.

Speaker 2 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, but not the immediate poor, the distant poor.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 These are the people that go to Olive Garden, and they can't stand them.

Speaker 3 You know, Victor, I would love to see this question asked again three months from now, because there's movement here.

Speaker 3 And I think the mindset of

Speaker 3 the person answering the question, the average American who cares more about you, is influenced. How can it not be by the street theater?

Speaker 3 we see from the left. And we've always had protests in the country, but it seems like this is now the official hobby of

Speaker 3 residents of major cities in America. And it's, this is what this party is about.
It's about these weirdos who are protesting.

Speaker 2 There's the weirdos, but have you noticed when you see

Speaker 2 have you seen the, 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.

Speaker 2 But you see them, and they kind of try to be stealthy. They walk up and turn their back, and and then they're secretly keying it.
Or one guy was smearing excretement on it. But it's all there.

Speaker 2 But when you look at the profile, maybe

Speaker 2 I know everybody. This is stereotyped and it's not data-driven.
But everyone I've seen almost, there's a white woman or guy around my age, 70s.

Speaker 2 And I almost always get this picture of the people, as I said earlier, that I would at UC Santa Cruz in those turbulent years of 70.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 it's almost like these people are just ossified in amber. They're the same people.

Speaker 2 And they just arrested, I think I mentioned a guy right near me, near Fresno. And

Speaker 2 he was just a normal person, upper class. You know what I mean? Why are they doing this? Is it they're going back to their college days?

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 3 And their attitude,

Speaker 2 have you noticed they don't even hide it these elites? They think, like,

Speaker 3 after all we've done for them,

Speaker 2 or they'll talk about people picking grapes. Even Jasmine Crockett, I thought, this is so weird.

Speaker 2 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 $30,000 a year.

Speaker 2 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 $1,000 a year.
But my point is this, is that

Speaker 2 she was talking about immigrants, and that's how she got into the cold cotton picking. We don't pick them cocketting.

Speaker 2 We're not going to, when there's no plantation no more, we're not going to pick in cotton. How many of you got?

Speaker 2 far?

Speaker 2 But we'll let the Mexican people do it.

Speaker 2 We'll let all the Mexican people do it. It's their job.
I know

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 They're doctors, they're patrolmen, they're architects, they're contractors, they're painters,

Speaker 2 but

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 When you actually look at illegal aliens and you look at the percentage in agriculture, it's down to about 20%.

Speaker 2 Somebody said, well, how can that be possible?

Speaker 2 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 you were, my dad would come and check on us and he said well you like to play baseball swing away so you take this melon 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 it up and you kind of siphoned it into a big gunny sack.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah, 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.

Speaker 2 And then,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And then it goes into a bunch of bins, and then they fork them on. And I think harvest is over.
It's over.

Speaker 2 One guy. Someday.
Yes,

Speaker 2 they don't need people like me with mallets and teenagers.

Speaker 3 Well, that's someday, Victor, when you're away and we're going to pre-record. I think I'd love to hear a show.
Don't answer this now because we have other. But Victor's pickings, like everything.

Speaker 3 Victor, how you dealt with persimmons? How you dealt with plums?

Speaker 2 Yes, I have picked persimmons. I have picked pleaches, plums, nectarines, grapes, fresh and for raisins.
I I have worked in

Speaker 2 almonds. My mother would get very mad at my grandfather because we had about a hundred walnut trees.
He was a very great guy. He put walnut trees on all these little alleyways.

Speaker 2 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 and the Lord of the Rings.
It really did. It was beautiful.

Speaker 2 But he lined every little row. I mean, there'd be an acre here and two acres, and the

Speaker 2 federal land bank would come out and say, what is this? This is so inefficient. And my grandpa would say, well, I've got Wilson Wonder walnuts here, but they were beautiful.

Speaker 2 And we had to go pick them. And my mom would say, if

Speaker 2 those boys pick those walnuts,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Dad, because those boys, the teachers are getting mad because they came to school where their whole hands were walnut stained and it looks very dirty. And people were saying they weren't unkept.

Speaker 2 So we had to wear these little.

Speaker 2 So I did walnuts. I've done everything, I think.

Speaker 3 Wilson Wonder Walnuts. I love

Speaker 2 it. Wilson Wonders, Arnels.
I've done all of them. And I did,

Speaker 2 I picked, oh, the worst were Boysenberries.

Speaker 2 I've done a Boysenberry Patch. Yeah, I did it all.

Speaker 2 And it's pretty hard. I always had great respect for farm workers.
I really do.

Speaker 2 Well, you are one.

Speaker 3 You were one, so to deserve it. Now, listen, but

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Speaker 3 Well, Victor,

Speaker 3 I wonder if Sleepy Joe Biden ever picked anything besides fights with.

Speaker 3 Wait a minute.

Speaker 2 What do you mean? He's old Joe Biden from Scranton, and he's trucks.

Speaker 2 I went down to that basement. I said, measure me and cut me six foot a chain.
Then I went out there and I said, Cornpop,

Speaker 2 you come on. Let's get it out.
We'll get it over with. Cornpop said, no.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Remember that? The most

Speaker 2 racist thing in the world.

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 he went to black church every Sunday.

Speaker 3 He was the most Puerto Rican guy in the world, too. I think he was a really Jewish guy.

Speaker 2 He was also a tough guy because he said, you know,

Speaker 2 I don't know why people got this idea.

Speaker 2 I went once in there to the lunch counter and I said, did you

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I like to take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him. Excuse my language.
Beat the hell out of him.

Speaker 3 He had all of that.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he was a pathetic human being.

Speaker 3 Except when he was put in jail in South Africa with another Walter Mitte thing. Well, let me, Victor.
Wait a minute.

Speaker 2 You're conflating the uncle who was eaten by cannibals, right? No, no.

Speaker 3 It happens on every generation of the Biden family. So, two things.

Speaker 3 One is what we've been just overloaded the last week or two with these retrospectives from

Speaker 3 Democrat insiders about

Speaker 3 coming clean now when they should have come clean weeks ago with what our lying eyes

Speaker 2 didn't believe or whatever.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 2 Why in another?

Speaker 3 Why don't you ask George Stephanophoulos, who

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Yeah, George interviewed Biden right after the disastrous debate and softballed him questions, but came away from it privately and personally. He's like, oh, it's situation.

Speaker 2 Yes, I mean, he would, all of these people, that Kane, Ron Kane, that's the chief of all of them deprecated. Joe Scarborough, he was giving

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I was mentioned on TV by somebody to be careful about suggesting that he may be non-compos mentes.

Speaker 2 Everybody knew he

Speaker 2 we've talked about, he read the prompt, stop.

Speaker 2 He read it. He'd say, now as the negotiations in the middle, stop.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 This was the biggest cover-up. It made water look like a joke.

Speaker 2 We put into

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 our guesses that they were a coalition of the Obama people, Obama, Michelle, and Barack, plus

Speaker 2 the squad, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, wing,

Speaker 2 and then with some input from the Orthodox leftist Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, and they were doing all the appointments, everything.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 No idea where he was. Very tragic.
He should have.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 He had not won Iowa. He's going nowhere.
We've got a bunch of nuts. We've got Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigig and Elizabeth.
This is not going to work. So you get rid of those people.

Speaker 2 Give them a cabinet position. Give them this.
Give them that.

Speaker 2 Give Bernie another house on a lake or something. but do not

Speaker 2 let these people. And all of a sudden, after South Carolina, they all disappeared.
Joe was anointed within 30 days,

Speaker 2 and the cover-up went. And then every once in a while, they'd say, we got a big troll.
Give him, tell him that the laptop was Russian disinformation. We'll round up some flunkies

Speaker 2 and get old James A. Baker from the FBI and put him over there on Twitter and make sure he censors the news.
Call up Zuckerberg and tell him to put in 400 million.

Speaker 2 That was how they ran the whole thing. And then when they were, he was a useful waxen effigy and they had that, then they said, you know what? He's got fluorescent tape on.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 we had that June, was it June 27th debate? And he just looked there like he was,

Speaker 2 I don't know where he was. He wasn't there, but then they decided,

Speaker 2 we'll just take the coup in reverse. We'll just get him out of of here.
They had a little problem with Jill.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 This is the party of the people, transparency. And all of a sudden,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 3 Well, we should talk about that.

Speaker 3 I'm going to spring this on you when we come back from from these important messages, but it's about James Clyburn,

Speaker 3 who figures largely into all these things. And as he aforementioned, coming back from these important messages.

Speaker 3 We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen 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.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 the next two episodes. Victor's got a website, The Blade of Perseus.
You'll find it at VictorHanson.com. Why would you go there? Well, you're a fan of Victor's.

Speaker 3 And Victor doesn't only appear on videos and podcasts, audio, video, but he also writes a ton. He's a machine.
He writes two pieces exclusively for The Blade of Perseus every week.

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Speaker 3 weekly syndicated column, the links to the archives to these podcasts, links to Victor's books and other appearances.

Speaker 3 Every month month he's there with Megan Kelly, and he's on many other

Speaker 3 get rid of the cursing.

Speaker 3 Everybody has their surgeons.

Speaker 2 You have to have the exceptions for everybody.

Speaker 2 You know, it's weird. You said I write a lot.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And I had written sinitis in the middle of a sentence. So I was like,

Speaker 2 oh, my head's on top. And I got sign, and I typed in sinitis as I was going along.
And I thought, wow, trade war sinitis.

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 first of all, it could have been Mount Sinai you were thinking of. Who knows? But

Speaker 3 Victor, you just...

Speaker 2 That sounds like a Joe Biden handler.

Speaker 3 I mean,

Speaker 3 you write actually a book a year now, I think, but if you took all the other content you wrote for all

Speaker 3 the other essays or new criteria in other places, I think you'd have

Speaker 3 the blame. I've never

Speaker 2 had

Speaker 2 three books.

Speaker 2 I've never had a normal life. I need to develop one before it's too late.

Speaker 2 I'm socially inept and backward.

Speaker 3 Oh, Mama Mia.

Speaker 3 Anyway, socially inept.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 3 Well, and then, yeah, and when the actual publication date comes, will the rabus be even rebusier, I guess. But hey, Victor, let me just get this Clyburn thing out of the way.

Speaker 3 Because he is the instigator of saving Biden or

Speaker 3 creating Biden in 2016. But then some of these recent articles I've seen, he is the one that snookered Obama.
He did.

Speaker 3 And forced the immediate recognition by Biden of Kamala Harris.

Speaker 2 He did. Obama called him up because

Speaker 2 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 Kobuchar or Gretchen Whitmer or somebody,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 someone

Speaker 2 that was a governor or something. And he called up Clyburn and said, you know,

Speaker 2 I think he thought, you know, I'm Barack Obama, Jim,

Speaker 2 I thought about it. We got rid of Biden a few minutes ago.
We're going to open it up. No, you're not.
It's Kamala.

Speaker 2 And they said the phone call lasted like, what, a minute or so? And that was it. It was the most non-transparent

Speaker 2 Tamathy Hall, backroom, insider, smoke-filled room type of nomination from the Party of Transparency. It really was.

Speaker 2 It was no more than 24 hours that she, everybody said, what's going to happen now?

Speaker 2 And there was even,

Speaker 2 remember it was, there was one or two people, what's his name from

Speaker 2 Joe Manchin. Remember, he thought he was going to be a candidate for about two hours?

Speaker 3 He could be an independent.

Speaker 2 Oh, he was, but when they opened, he thought he might even get the Democratic nomination for about it. He went on TV and he was like, hey, maybe I might be considered.

Speaker 2 And that thing was just,

Speaker 2 it was about it. She called up Biden and said, I need your endorsement.
She called up the old.

Speaker 2 It was done. And then all of a sudden the money poured in, and then she was about hope and courage.
And

Speaker 2 Biden went, the Democrats went down from about four down on the polls with Biden to these phony new polls that said she was ahead by two or three.

Speaker 2 I don't think she was ever ahead, but that was what they said.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 By the way, Victor Williams got his wish.

Speaker 2 It was a DEI party.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Even Bill Maher,

Speaker 2 he's been on,

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 not had me or Biden into the White House. I wanted to say it's worse than that, Bill.

Speaker 2 He's of the opposite party. So the proper

Speaker 2 metaphor or simile is not you talking to Biden, but somebody like Charlie Kirk being being called in to shoot the breeze with Joe Biden. That's our Michael Savage or somebody.

Speaker 2 And that's not going to ever happen.

Speaker 2 But anyway,

Speaker 2 he was fair. I ever tell you about the one time I went on Bill Mauer's share.

Speaker 3 I know you mentioned you were on it, and the product was

Speaker 2 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 is...

Speaker 3 Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Can I say you almost died in IBM?

Speaker 2 Well, they told me I was going to die. They got to die.
Yeah, okay.

Speaker 3 So, this is just like two weeks after near death.

Speaker 2 All right. No, it was about eight days.
And I was on painkiller, and I was pretty sick. And they said, this producer called and said, Would you like to.
I was pure, my face had no color in it.

Speaker 2 I had perientinitis still. I was taking flagell, ocmintin, and ciprol, three of them at the same time.
I think that's why I'm allergic to my antibiotics now.

Speaker 2 But anyway, point was they called and said, nobody wants to talk about the surge.

Speaker 2 Would you talk about it? And

Speaker 2 explain why they're doing it. And I said, I don't want to go and deal Maher.
And said, no, no, no, no, no. We're going to have an open debate.

Speaker 2 And I swear, they put me on there, and he introduced me as Cheney's war guru.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And they were just talking into Bill Maher's ear. You know, he had an earpiece.
That's what he did.

Speaker 2 That said,

Speaker 2 I'm glad he went and talked to Trump. And he felt that he'll still trash Trump, but

Speaker 2 he said that it was a decent.

Speaker 2 But he's going to learn that the people who hate him the most are not people like you or me. We don't hate Bill Maher.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 3 Yeah, he will be a traitor.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he'll be called a white male, aging, 70-something, 60-something, out-of-touch

Speaker 3 person.

Speaker 3 Well, Victor,

Speaker 3 let's talk about some out-of-touch people. There's an obnoxious admiral who just got the the boot, Navy Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield.

Speaker 3 I forget what department she was. Maybe she was SpaceX, and she...

Speaker 2 No, no, I think she's just a regular.

Speaker 3 Okay. Oh, she wasn't going to put the new President Trump's picture on the wall or the new Secretary of Defense.
We'll wait four years, she boasted.

Speaker 3 She's out of a job now.

Speaker 3 I don't know where they get the moxie, but.

Speaker 2 I can tell you what's going on. And then it was kind of replicated when J.D.

Speaker 2 Vance and his wife went to Greenland, they kind of gave a speech to the space base, that's what you were referring to, of which we have a base in northern Greenland, of course, for monitoring space, satellites, et cetera, both defense and exploration, I suppose.

Speaker 2 And J.D. Vance gave one of his MAGA speeches, basically saying,

Speaker 2 you know, Greenland is huge and it's strategically important.

Speaker 2 It's a North American,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Basically, he didn't say he was going to invade it. He didn't say he was going to...

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 Colonel Susannah.

Speaker 2 I know it because she spells the name of my late daughter the same way with an H on it. Myers.

Speaker 2 Susannah Myers is a colonel, and she was in charge of the base, and she said something like, I know that I'm not versed in politics, or I'm not interested, but,

Speaker 2 meaning I'm going to say the exact opposite of what my disclaimer was,

Speaker 2 I don't agree with anything, and that's not going to be basically what we do in this base, based on what she heard.

Speaker 2 And then she was fired. She should go back and read the Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and it says that no serving or

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 the chief cabinet officers publicly. But by

Speaker 2 basically saying that Vance is an idiot, and I'm going to disobey or I'm not, and he was reflecting the command-in-chief, and I'm going to disobey that on this base.

Speaker 2 She was in some way violating the spirit, if not the letter, of Article 88. Of course,

Speaker 2 we haven't heard much.

Speaker 2 Just to finish this topic, Jack, we haven't

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 most dangerous man.

Speaker 3 General McCaffrey and all the other.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 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 at Rex Tillertson at state or John Bolton.

Speaker 2 But this time around, I think the general

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And I wrote a column saying that Stanley McChrystal was very

Speaker 2 lax in having an aide say in front of all of his assembled officers, Joe, bite me about the vice president and

Speaker 2 the Rolling Stone reporter that did that. And we called, remember, he was a very good officer and he was a whole Afghan project.

Speaker 2 Superior officer in charge of Afghanistan.

Speaker 2 Obama, we called him to Washington and basically said, you had a reporter here, and they were making fun of the Vice President of the United States and called him Joe Bitney in your presence, and you didn't reprimand him or something.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 we removed him of command.

Speaker 2 Boy, it would go crazy when Trump removed the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

Speaker 2 He can point any. It wasn't that he fired him for anything.
He just wanted somebody else. Kind of like General McKieran that Obama had removed before

Speaker 2 McChrystal.

Speaker 2 He hadn't done anything wrong. They 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.

Speaker 3 Aaron Powell, you have talked about Article 88 and these characters for quite a while.

Speaker 3 You're talking about facts here

Speaker 3 with the article.

Speaker 3 You're not well loved by

Speaker 3 any generals.

Speaker 2 I have the greatest respect for the military. And

Speaker 2 I know a lot of generals, and I like them. But

Speaker 2 there was a period in 2020

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And then there was a photo op with Mark Milley, which all commanders do with the chairman of the joint. And all of the

Speaker 2 came out, and they started. Gosh, it was, we had two colonels that came out and said that

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 they argued

Speaker 2 that they should have an intervention and remove Trump forcibly. I think it was

Speaker 2 Lieutenant Colonel Nagel and another person.

Speaker 2 It was really crazy. They were calling for, that was the period when Donald Trump earlier had been inaugurated.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 refusing to let him enact his policy. It was a crazy time, but I mentioned some generals who had said things like

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 were

Speaker 2 anyway, I don't want to get into it, but it was a suggestion that

Speaker 2 he was more like the enemy on the other side of the beach than he was the American. And it was just non-stop amazing.

Speaker 2 So then 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,

Speaker 2 the newly independent Air Force,

Speaker 2 they all had their different regulations and protocols. So they wanted to uniformly create a code of behavior, especially for officers.

Speaker 2 And they did. And the second thing, it was based on Douglas MacArthur, had been pro-consul in Japan.
He had been the chief

Speaker 2 head of all U.S. military operations in Korea.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And they were going north, and the peninsula widened, and they were warned there'd be a million Chinese communist troops that would cross the Yalu River. And they did.

Speaker 2 It was the longest retreat in U.S. military history.

Speaker 2 And MacArthur said

Speaker 2 there's no substitute for victory.

Speaker 2 So even though he had been embarrassed and was naive and he said air support B-29s will cut, we'll just wipe them out out if they cross the Aloe but he didn't realize the MiG-15 was at that time much better than the F-80 and we wouldn't get air parody to the F-86 came the Sabre II but anyway my point is this that he started mouthing off about Truman and saying this is

Speaker 2 his commander-in-chief so when

Speaker 2 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 point was at that point they said,

Speaker 2 we've got to make sure that this does not happen again. Then an active or even a retired was retired as well.
When he retired, he kept it up.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Even if it's, you know, I would have no problem if

Speaker 2 a conservative general

Speaker 3 attacked

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 court-martial. But anyway, my point is that

Speaker 2 there are groups of people within the military.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Or they hear about Donald Trump saying we're going to

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And they don't like their left wing, and they feel that they were promoted as part of the Biden

Speaker 2 vision that the military would be more socially, culturally inclusive.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And if you have a DEI initiative, a trans initiative, gay, whatever it is, you can just go bring those generals into Congress and scream and yell at them.

Speaker 2 Like Millie, remember that about Professor Kendi, said he wanted to read and understand Professor Kendi.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 they will enact change like that. It'll just be an order, and you can really greenlight social revolutionary change.

Speaker 2 So all of these people got used to that. And then Trump and Hexeth come in and they think, you know what?

Speaker 2 I'm just going to make everybody know that I don't like that SOB. I'm not going to put his picture on.

Speaker 2 Vance is out of Greenland now. I'm just going to

Speaker 2 basically

Speaker 2 tell everybody

Speaker 2 base, hey, everybody, I'm a folk hero, and you don't have to listen to a thing that Vance said, or much less, that's what she was basically saying, what the commander-in-chief wants.

Speaker 2 And they said, you know what?

Speaker 2 Out.

Speaker 3 I like that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and they're not personal. They're a folk hero.

Speaker 3 That's a great way of how they probably do think of themselves.

Speaker 2 No, they do. And they're not.

Speaker 2 Remember, everybody, they're not putting them up on court-martial. They're not even charging them.
They're not doing anything.

Speaker 2 They're just saying, I prefer you not have your present billet, and you will be reassigned.

Speaker 3 That's all. Give me walking a beat in the Bronx.
Something like that. I don't think so.
Ah, well.

Speaker 3 Maybe

Speaker 2 you'll be in the head of the National Guard in Fresno or something.

Speaker 3 Maybe.

Speaker 2 I think it's a very prestigious point, but they wouldn't, a post, but they wouldn't.

Speaker 2 Every time I land at Fresno and I see those F-15s or 16s, or maybe they're 18s. I can't tell.
I feel really proud of Fresno.

Speaker 3 Yeah, proud of Fresno. Hey, I want to take a moment for our sponsor, Field of Greens.
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Speaker 3 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, wherever we head into.

Speaker 3 And let's see. The quickie is going to, oh, yeah, this is a cultural question, Victor.
You know, earlier, the last podcast you mentioned, our friend David Bonson, it was an investor.

Speaker 3 I wanted to raise this because there's another big investing company, Edward Jones, right?

Speaker 3 Everyone thinks Edward Jones, that's that's they got a little, you know, there's a storefront downtown in every town in America.

Speaker 3 But they're a really

Speaker 3 DEI and woke-driven company. So there's this article about how they're

Speaker 3 in February as part of a Black History Month, 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.

Speaker 3 That instruction guide from the Edward Jones Washington office provided examples of racially or ethnically biased language. You know

Speaker 3 what is racially and ethnically biased language, Victor? It's the term brown bag.

Speaker 3 Now, if I would say I'm going to brown bag lunch, it means I'm going 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 that bag. Yes, I did.

Speaker 2 You know how I do that? I have a very good friend who's very well known.

Speaker 2 I almost worshiped him, who's African-American.

Speaker 2 And he once told me, I mentioned

Speaker 2 another African-American grandee. He's not a grandee, he's a very wonderful person.
And he mentioned that,

Speaker 2 anyway, in connection with this other person, he mentioned that when he was in college,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 This was the lighter group of people.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 that was part of an intro to a larger discourse about

Speaker 2 within the African-American community, fixations on skin color. It was white, racially driven, obviously.

Speaker 2 And after that, I started, you know, he mentioned that people who were the most radical of all blacks tended to be people who

Speaker 2 he felt had been beneficiaries of the brown bag rule. In other words, they were fixated on that.

Speaker 3 Were they lighter-skinned, if we're going down that?

Speaker 2 Yeah, like a Reverend Wright or a Ewey Newton.

Speaker 2 And there's been a lot of after

Speaker 2 there's been a lot of literature written about that, that the

Speaker 2 some of the more radical 60s figures were either of mixed heritage or rap brown, they were lighter-skinned. And there had been that came up during the Clarence Thomas hearings.

Speaker 2 You remember when the they had a lot of very elite African Americans, but especially the white liberal Joe Biden.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And people, both black and white, had written about that, deploring it. But it was very interesting that when

Speaker 2 Clarence Thomas went up, there was a great deal of hostility, and it almost bordered on ⁇ well, it didn't. It was racist a lot from white liberals, the way that they attacked him.
And it was

Speaker 2 anyway.

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 you learn something new every day. So, Victor, we're going to end the

Speaker 3 show today by talking about foreign influence at our colleges and one nation that doesn't get as much attention as it deserves.

Speaker 3 We talked on numerous podcasts about the amount of Chinese nationals who are students in America, etc.

Speaker 3 But it's the nation of Qatar. And that'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.

Speaker 3 We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen 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.

Speaker 3 Keep watching for tomorrow on Friday,

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 events that will be happening in the forthcoming week from when we're talking.

Speaker 3 Victor, if I could

Speaker 3 get my act together here. Yeah, this is, I saw this Instagram post.
It has to do with, instigated by Texas A ⁇ M, Cornell, Columbia University. What do they have in common?

Speaker 3 Dr. Charles Asher Small is testifying before the U.S.
Senate Help Committee.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 Texas A ⁇ M, over $1 billion in Qatari funding, more than 500 research projects, including sensitive work with potential military application.

Speaker 3 Qatari proxies were contractually granted ownership of the intellectual property.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 $7.17 million, none of it disclosed to the U.S. Department of Education in violation of federal law.

Speaker 3 There's lots more here. I'll just say one last thing.
K through 12, as it relates to K through 12, there's a program called Choices Program used in over 8,000 U.S. schools.

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 really troubling. Your thoughts?

Speaker 2 Yeah, it is.

Speaker 2 When you look at the amount of foreign gifting, there's two things that come up.

Speaker 2 It's increased geometrically each year almost. And

Speaker 2 Qatar is the leading contributor, but most of the money, not all, but most of the money comes from two sources.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 to

Speaker 2 saying that

Speaker 2 it was not a pangolin or a bat, that the COVID-19 virus came out of

Speaker 2 the Wuhan lab, then somebody would write and say, you're an idiot who got a degree from a group and he

Speaker 2 got a minor in Asian studies, got the real dope from the great professor.

Speaker 3 But the point is, if you do the math,

Speaker 2 the way these endowed professorships work is,

Speaker 2 say they pay a guy $250,000 a year, professor, $300,000, I don't know if that's that high, and then

Speaker 2 they have to take a couple percentage to keep up with inflation on the gift, but you're talking about $7 million,

Speaker 2 $6 to $8 million to endow a professor.

Speaker 2 And so for

Speaker 2 $1,000,

Speaker 3 get

Speaker 2 $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

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And that's what they're trying to do, to create, tell the elite, and they have been very successful. Very successful.

Speaker 2 Just think how successful they are when this administration came in and they said they were going to highlight anti-Semitism in general, and particularly at Columbia, where it was completely out of control.

Speaker 2 And they threatened to cut off 400, I guess it is still suspended. And the interim president

Speaker 2 resigned, and now we have this Jay Carney, Obama's former press secretary's wife, is the president of Columbia.

Speaker 2 I forgot her name, but she's too.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And they were disrupting Natalie Bennett, the guest speaker, and they wouldn't let him speak. So think about that.

Speaker 2 What gives those students and what gives that university this confidence that even though you're under suspension for $400 million,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Khalil, is under adjudication to be deported, you're still doing it.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And the answer, you know, and this was reported on today,

Speaker 2 and the answer is that all of these students have had this constant indoctrination from faculty members who,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 because nobody appreciates their

Speaker 2 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 1,000 professorships in theory.

Speaker 2 You can really change things. And that's what the Qataris have done.
And that's what the Chinese are doing.

Speaker 2 And I think they should really look at that. I think the part of I don't think the universities want to get in a fight with Donald Trump because they're the proverbial mossy rock.

Speaker 2 And when you turn it over, there are slugs and all sorts of debris under there that's gross.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I'm speaking from experience that Stanford was fined millions of dollars in the first Trump administration for not reporting Chinese donations.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And she was suspended and sent home when the media got a hold of it.

Speaker 2 But my point is that when you start looking at these universities and you start seeing the amount of thorn 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% 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

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 mostly against white males, but generally Asians and whites in general. I don't think they want people to look at that.

Speaker 2 And when you look at the size of the endowments and the money that's coming in and what's down the pipeline.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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%.

Speaker 2 Some people want higher. And if they don't, as I see 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.

Speaker 2 They have all of these memos by these presidents and deans and provosts that they keep reassuring the fact.

Speaker 2 Basically, they're reassuring the fact, well, we're an independent and we're autonomous and we don't

Speaker 2 just relax. Well, they don't know what's coming down the pipeline.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Well, I think their boards too, trustees tend to be echo chambers. They saw Cornell,

Speaker 3 even though that president, I forget her name now, last year retired two months after the board voted unanimously to, you know,

Speaker 3 there's no dissent within these institutions. So

Speaker 2 there's a lot of exposure. They're not like the universities of the 50s and early 60s at all.

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 you join a board in order to burnish your own image. I'm on the board.

Speaker 2 You know, it would be wonderful.

Speaker 2 You know,

Speaker 2 if all of these donors, instead of saying, I want the Victor Davis Hansen endowed professor of humanistic studies,

Speaker 2 I would rather, if it was me and I had that money, I would rather say I have a Victor Hansen

Speaker 2 Tradesman Award for a welder or electrician and really fund these trade schools and get people really

Speaker 2 we should be just as I would rather have the world's best electricians 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 two for every five

Speaker 3 people men, women leaving the trades, retiring, only two

Speaker 3 are joining.

Speaker 3 So you're right, the focus is quite dire.

Speaker 2 You can't find people that really know what they're doing. And we need to do it fast.

Speaker 2 And we used to have the best tradespeople in the world. I grew up with people, my gosh, they could do anything.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 There's three winners of the prize,

Speaker 3 conservatives. Sometimes, when you look back at who got it, you realize they used to be conservatives.

Speaker 2 Oh, you mean Bill Crystal?

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 But you've had a ⁇ I just think it would be a nice opportunity to let our listeners know who've been recognized. And I particularly want to

Speaker 3 say that 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.

Speaker 3 But tell us about Jimmy and the others who have gotten this this year.

Speaker 2 Well, we give three, and we've never done this before, have an honorific,

Speaker 2 because we only have one requirement of the recipient, and that is they have to

Speaker 2 they have to be there to accept the award. And that be there means in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 2 And when I was a recipient,

Speaker 2 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 but we have, so we,

Speaker 2 the committee was discussing. I can't get into, this is confidential, but anyway, the long and the short of it is: how do you honor this brave person?

Speaker 2 Because he's incarcerated. I mean, he can't come and we can't communicate.

Speaker 2 So for the first time, the 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 go.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 in addition

Speaker 2 this

Speaker 2 used to give four but now we give three I don't know why the logic I must be

Speaker 3 that

Speaker 2 because of longevity in the conservative movement, this has gone on, I think, since 2005 or 6, used to give four. So for 20 years, there's 80 people, and they feel that

Speaker 2 maybe you don't have the same Tom Soul type of caliber people.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It's been announced, I can say it.

Speaker 2 Chris Ruffo,

Speaker 2 who

Speaker 2 was the, I don't know, he really led the anti-DI counter-revolution in academia. And he's fearless, works for the Manhattan Institute, among other billions.

Speaker 3 Manhattan Institute, City Journal.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And he's a writer. He's a Ph.D..
He's been a faculty member, but he's an essayist. But he's really an unspoken hero.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 you can't just give someone and expect that they're not going to do anything. In other words,

Speaker 2 they're active right now and that the award not only recognizes past

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 was for Barry Strauss. He was a professor.
He was a professor at Cornell.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 the history department. And he was even put in charge of the peace studies department to kind of straighten it out.
And then he's written about 20 books or 18 books. But he was a scholar.

Speaker 2 I knew him as early as

Speaker 2 1978.

Speaker 2 He and a scholar named Josh Ober and I were all writing on the Attic countryside for our PhD thesis.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 He was writing about the after effects economically of the Peloponnesian War on Attica. And Josiah Obert was writing about the fortifications of Attica.

Speaker 2 So the three of us would walk out and look at walls, fortifications, archaeological sites each week, you know, for almost a year. But anyway,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So there was a, and that's the idea of the awards. You want somebody who is a scholar.

Speaker 2 We've given it to Martin Gilbert, Andrew Roberts, that type of

Speaker 3 Alan Rosso.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he's a wonderful Civil War historian.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 3 New criterion here you'll find a lot of his essays.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and he's written some good books. And then we also

Speaker 2 to more of a

Speaker 2 just

Speaker 2 an activist, an activist in every sense of the word, a public intellectual, in other words, that tries to affect change

Speaker 2 through essays, through serving in academia.

Speaker 2 corporate world, but somebody who is more of a grassroots type. So we have a tripartite

Speaker 2 system of adjudication.

Speaker 3 It's a great trio plus the caboose of Jimmy.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's the one that's going to be. Yeah, it is.
And it'll be in late May at the Daughters of American Revolution in Washington.

Speaker 2 It's kind of the big festivity of the conservative or traditional movement in Washington every year. It's kind of lavish.

Speaker 2 The board is a wonderful board of 10 people. And I've been on it, I think, for 12 or 13 years.

Speaker 2 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, and at the five or six o'clock fly, hope I can make an hour connection to Milwaukee.

Speaker 3 And then usually that's where Bradley's located.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and then

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And I've been doing this for 12 years, so I don't know how long I won't be able to do it.

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 I haven't a smoke ER.

Speaker 3 Yeah, well,

Speaker 3 our great

Speaker 3 sponsor of podcasts back in the day at National Review, Shraga Kawiar, who

Speaker 3 loves you, he asked me to,

Speaker 3 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 was.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I'll just say Miss Drake, Professor Drake. I won't tell your whole name and embarrass her, but she wrote basically insane:

Speaker 2 you've got a jets in the baseball cap.

Speaker 2 When I knew her, I had a full head of hair.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 she was part of a group of professors that we, once a month, went to, guess where, the Olive Garden for lunch.

Speaker 3 It wasn't Hooters, okay.

Speaker 2 And she was

Speaker 2 southern. She was from the South, so she had a very distinctive accent.
It was very rare in California.

Speaker 2 But she wrote me in kind of out of the blue and said she was a very talented professor, and she said, You've got a jets in the hat and the fedora. I like your big, beautiful, bald head.

Speaker 2 I like your bald head. Beautiful.

Speaker 3 That's not

Speaker 2 better than the ones that called me Freddie Gray, Freddie, what's the guy? Kruger.

Speaker 2 And then Skeletor. And I looked up Skeletor Comics.
Gosh, I did look like Skeletor. And then somebody

Speaker 2 sent me a copy of an illustration I showed my wife. And she said that, well,

Speaker 2 I don't know. Every,

Speaker 2 I don't know. I mean, I had these things right here were from a bicycle stitches.

Speaker 3 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 follicles.
Okay, I'd have to read a comment.

Speaker 3 It's a sweetie square head. It's a big pineapple head.

Speaker 3 There's a comment from YouTube,

Speaker 3 Watcher, and thanks. We have so many

Speaker 3 new followers of the podcast.

Speaker 3 Victor, this is from Hammer and Tongue.

Speaker 3 Victor, 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

Speaker 3 is it disastrous when you pay your bills with your credit card, et cetera, applied to the larger national or or global narratives.

Speaker 3 These illustrations of reductive personal level reason makes more sense to Americans trying to navigate the hurricane. Common sense, thank you, BDH.

Speaker 3 I have two other quick ones from Tosh Ferratu, who writes, it's a great day when you get an Obama impression from Dr. Hansen.
And we got multiple today.

Speaker 2 My hero Russian ball was a master of it.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 I try to read many of the comments. I want to mention again, Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus.
If I can catch my fingers together, the Blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com, do subscribe.

Speaker 3 $65 a year discounted from $6.50 a month and

Speaker 3 two original exclusive pieces every week.

Speaker 3 And one exclusive video every week. If you're on Twitter, excuse me, X at V D Hansen, that's Victor's Handle.
If you're on Facebook, BDH is Morning Cup.

Speaker 3 Also, there's a great friendly group call, the Victor Davis Hansen Fan Club. I'm Jack Fowler for me.

Speaker 3 I have

Speaker 2 a go ahead. I'm sorry.

Speaker 3 Well, I'll just get my commercial and civil thoughts.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 2 I was going to actually remind you to do that.

Speaker 3 Oh, thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Speaker 3 Go to civilthoughts.com, sign up.

Speaker 2 Why?

Speaker 3 Because when you do that, every Friday, in your email

Speaker 3 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, it's free.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 3 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 say?

Speaker 2 Yes, I do. You know,

Speaker 2 I was

Speaker 2 in the airport, and somebody came up to me and said, when you do your podcasts, you have a very funny wedding ring on. And it's this thing.
And it's not a wedding ring.

Speaker 2 It's

Speaker 3 your cousin's, isn't it?

Speaker 2 Yes, it's a Roman legionnaire.

Speaker 2 It's kind of interesting because, as I said earlier, this is very strange, but you remember I wrote about,

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 my father's first cousin, his mother died in birth, and his father was blind, so they raised him as my father's brother.

Speaker 2 And they both went to the University of Pacific and won for tight ends, and they got scholarships under Alonzo Stagg was the coach.

Speaker 2 And then they both joined the Marine Corps. And the family lore won't tell you which one hit.

Speaker 2 They got in a fight in a barroom, and everybody was swinging, and one of them had hit an officer or a sergeant, excuse me.

Speaker 2 And they brought them both up and said, one of you stupid big Swedes, they were 64, 200 pounds, is going to take the wrap. So my father volunteered, and they said, we're going to fix you.

Speaker 2 There's an experimental B-29 program in Nebraska, and they all crash. So you're going to go over there,

Speaker 2 and that'll do you. And the other one gets to stay in the new 6th Marine Division, which was created.
You're going to go to Guadalcanal, which was American-held.

Speaker 2 It had been pacified for a year.

Speaker 2 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...
had a terrible time in Pelelu.

Speaker 2 Anyway, we're going to get them and we're going to train you guys.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 They'd been doing it for a year. There was another 100,000 impressed Okinawa civilians that were working with them or fighting with them.

Speaker 2 And there was something called the Shuri Line, which was a belt across entrance to the north of the island. And being Marine,

Speaker 2 I don't want to make fun of Simon Bolivar Buckner, the grandfather son of the famous Confederate general.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 my uncle, Dash, first cousin,

Speaker 2 we moved, but basically my uncle, because he grew up as my dad's father,

Speaker 2 Victor was in the 29th Regiment, and they fought like

Speaker 2 head-on.

Speaker 2 On the last day, on the worst place, Sugarloaf Hill, he was shot in the thigh

Speaker 2 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, didn't know how he died.

Speaker 2 My grandfather would never mention it.

Speaker 2 And my father named me after him and told me, he came in when I was eight years old and gave me his Louis Villa Sluggers bad, his UOP briefcase, and said, You've got to live up to this.

Speaker 2 And he told me about him. That was all he ever mentioned, period.
And then,

Speaker 2 anyway,

Speaker 2 I was writing

Speaker 2 about

Speaker 2 Okinawa for

Speaker 2 Ripples of Battle, and I mentioned this, and all of a sudden his commanding officer wrote me, who was 96,

Speaker 2 and had written a letter to my grandfather in 1945

Speaker 2 about the death of Victor.

Speaker 2 And he still had a copy of it, and he sent it to me.

Speaker 2 And then he there was another person who was very close to him who helped with the body and

Speaker 2 he will write you. This was in 2003.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But anyway, the law 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And then I started going, I went out into the barn and I found all of these letters. I had never really opened them about Victor asking his

Speaker 2 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 to get it.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 I have his ring that we cut off the body and it's been in my bookcase for

Speaker 2 55 years, 60 years. And would you like it? and I will send it to you.
I didn't know what to make of it.

Speaker 2 And so he said, I didn't know what it was. So he sent sent it to me, and I was a classics professor, and it's a picture of a Roman legionnaire.

Speaker 2 And I had no idea. So he sent it to me, and then I had it re,

Speaker 2 I just had it welded, and I've been wearing it ever since. So it's a very strange thing.

Speaker 3 Do you know what day your

Speaker 3 uncle died, the actual day?

Speaker 2 May 19th, 19th.

Speaker 3 May 19th,

Speaker 2 last day.

Speaker 2 The letter had a point, and he said they had vicious, horrific fighting getting up to the summit of Sugarloaf Hill, which was the breaking point of the Shuri Line.

Speaker 2 And he said he died in the last hours of the last day

Speaker 2 of the conquest.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 July 11th, but I don't think it was until actually July 2nd. When I wrote about it, the battle and ripples of battle, about all the things that happened, E.
B.

Speaker 2 Sledge's great memoir, everybody should read it with the old greed. It's about the 1st Marine Division, how horrific that battle was.

Speaker 2 And anyway, to get a long story short, Simon Bolivar Buckner, I think the 3rd, was the highest-ranking, after Leslie McNair, he was the highest-ranking Pacific officer.

Speaker 2 And the battle was declared, the island was declared secure. They had to go back and sweep through because there was a lot of Japanese soldiers that were dug dug down deeply.
And then

Speaker 2 a freak,

Speaker 2 one person came up, and I think it was a mortar or artillery. They had missed him.
The island was secure.

Speaker 2 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. It went right through his heart and killed him.

Speaker 2 And he was the commander. And

Speaker 2 his son wrote me a very, I had been critical of him because

Speaker 2 he's usually considered somewhat culpable for the strategy of not head-on and did not serve the Marine Corps well.

Speaker 2 But I felt b 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.

Speaker 2 I didn't do it out of personal animus, just that

Speaker 2 after reading a whole corpus of literature about the battle, I think there were ways to avoid it.

Speaker 2 And the weird thing was, is that, see, this was in July of 1945, and the war was over on September 2nd.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 my point is, this was the most costly of all the island hopping of Pelelu, of Taro, of Iwo Jima. This was 50,000

Speaker 2 Marines, Army, and Naval.

Speaker 2 5,000 naval people were killed by kamikazes. 12,000 dead, and

Speaker 2 almost 40,000 wounded, seriously. And they didn't know, so everybody talks about dropping the bomb.

Speaker 2 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 1st and

Speaker 2 Marine Divisions were expert at it. I thought we had the biggest fleet in the world and they had bombarded.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And Okinawa is just a small indication of what's coming.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 that accelerated the napalm of

Speaker 2 so in May, June, July, people, they were bombing.

Speaker 2 My father was kind of ironic because he was at the same time in a B-29 and was supposed to be killed in in the sense that they thought the B-29 would be much more dangerous than being in the 6th Marine Division because they thought the worst of island hopping was over.

Speaker 2 And he lived 40 missions, got crashed twice and forced down in Ibojima twice. But the weird thing about it all was that,

Speaker 2 and I've mentioned this, but just to finish this harangue,

Speaker 2 They took Okinawa, and Curtis LeMay immediately went there and he said, you know, I'll keep the

Speaker 2 2,200 B-29s on the Marianas at Tinyan Guam and they're going to continue to fly eight or nine hours over the target, eight or nine hours back, 1,600 miles each.

Speaker 2 However, I can do three missions a day because this is 350 miles off the coast of Tokyo. So they had the blueprints.

Speaker 2 They were already starting the runways, and he had another 2,000 B-29s on order to deploy there.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So you can imagine with Napalm what that would have ensued had they not dropped the atomic bomb.

Speaker 2 It took months to get going, but they were just about ready to open up Okinawa and just burn Tokyo and the major major cities to the ground that were still standing.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But they didn't really have the planes transferred over there yet. So, in a weird way, the atomic bomb saved

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And the Navy took a terrible beating on Okinawa. It's just terrible from kamikazes.
People forget that you have a kamikaze, the human brain is a more sophisticated cruise missile than a computer.

Speaker 2 And if you say, well, the zero only had a range of 400, it need a range. It has a radius now.
So if it's not going to come back, its ability,

Speaker 2 its range is double.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And he's got a 500-pound bomb. Boy, they were unstoppable.
And they sunk 17 ships. And that was a whole nightmare.
And so anyway, that family never got over that.

Speaker 2 That Swedish family never.

Speaker 2 It was kind of weird. So anyway, it's kind of a weird thing because everybody would always, my father would always tell him,

Speaker 2 you've got to live up to this person. You've got to do this, this, this, this, this, this.

Speaker 3 Well, Victor, you said it was a harangue. It was anything but a harangue.
It was a beautiful,

Speaker 3 thoughtful remembrance of.

Speaker 2 But some person came up in the airport and asked me about this because he said he saw it. Yes.

Speaker 3 Well, they notice everything.

Speaker 3 I do want to, I hope and pray your uncle, cousin, is

Speaker 3 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

Speaker 3 brothers and sisters a happy Easter.

Speaker 3 Those who've gone before us, I hope they are in the good arms of the Lord.

Speaker 2 I think they will be.

Speaker 2 Everything will be known to all of us at one point.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah. Well, you've been terrific, my friend.
Thanks so much. We'll be back with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.
God bless and bye-bye.

Speaker 2 Thank you, everybody, for listening.