1920s Idealistic Diplomacy, Cabinet Meetings, and Budget Bills

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Speaker 2 Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Speaker 2 Victor is the Martin A'Neal Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Speaker 2 This is our Saturday edition, and we have Victor talking about

Speaker 2 what were you going to talk about this middle section.

Speaker 3 I think I'm going to talk about it. I hadn't really thought seriously about the order, but

Speaker 3 after we finished the Great Depression, and I want to talk about legislation in the 20s, international treaties, the Kellogg-Breon Pact,

Speaker 3 the Washington Arms Limitation Agreement, and the Rapollo Treaty that tried to deal with the

Speaker 3 either anticipated the Great Depression, but mostly tried to deal with the fallout of World War II and then later the Depression.

Speaker 3 Some of them, like the Washington Arms Treaty, went on into the 30s with CEQA law. So we'll talk about international efforts to ward off another World War I and depression.

Speaker 2 All right. And before that, we'll look at some more news.
Obviously, there's been lots of changes in the tariff war for Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 And he also had a cabinet meeting that was made available to the press. So we are all able to watch his cabinet meeting.
So we'll talk about it.

Speaker 3 Watch the whole thing.

Speaker 2 We'll talk about those two things first. Stay with us, and we'll be right back from these messages.

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Speaker 2 Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Don't forget that you can find Victor at his website, VictorHanson.com.
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So, Victor, there's been a couple of things.

Speaker 2 Donald Trump, since we talked last, put a stay of 90 days on most tariffs, but not China. And I think that's a good question.

Speaker 3 I think he still has, and for negotiating purposes, it's still de facto 10% on everybody, and that's going to be negotiated, collected at the end if they can't reach an agreement.

Speaker 3 Sort of Damocles.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 everybody went crazy. The stock market had historic losses,

Speaker 3 10, 12%, and then it had the largest gain on Wednesday, April 9th, since 2008, 17 years.

Speaker 3 And today, as I'm speaking, I don't know what it is, but it has gone gyrated

Speaker 3 as people are trying to figure out

Speaker 3 what the trade situation is.

Speaker 3 Everybody, if you look at the left-wing media, it says Donald Trump pivots, Donald Trump falls, Donald Trump

Speaker 3 collapses, concedes. If you look at the conservative media, Donald Trump pivots, or Donald Trump's art of the deal.
Somewhere in between, I suppose, but is what he was doing.

Speaker 3 But Donald Trump doesn't sit down and he writes out steps one to ten

Speaker 3 because he's not going to be shackled by that.

Speaker 3 He says, I'm going to notify all these trade cheaters that are running up, helping a trillion dollars in trade deficits, especially China, which is responsible for 40% of it, 35 to 40 percent.

Speaker 3 And we'll see how it goes. We'll look at the market, we'll see this.
And then he did that,

Speaker 3 And he thought

Speaker 3 that because they all shrieked a high heaven and they all threatened him with reciprocal tariffs, the market might hold off a little bit and see what he was going to do.

Speaker 3 But the market went crazy at that news. And then he tried to get the message out during that on Monday.

Speaker 3 Tried to get the message out. And, you know, the worst day was Friday, but he tried to get the message out that he was negotiating.
And 70 of these countries wanted to cut a deal.

Speaker 3 And they were under threat of a 10%

Speaker 3 tariff, but they were negotiating. And the market, everybody went crazy.

Speaker 3 And then

Speaker 3 step three is he said they don't have anything

Speaker 3 in common with China.

Speaker 3 People crazy said they're going to have a new bloc, China, Japan. Remember, we talked about it.
I said, that's not going to happen. So where we are right now is

Speaker 3 he's got 70 countries that know they have been raising inordinate tariffs. Privately, they know the jig is up.
They just amount. It's just a question of how much can they give up.

Speaker 3 And he's going to select, I imagine I'm just pontificating here, but I think he'll pick two or three big ones: Germany, France, EU, and total Japan,

Speaker 3 South Korea, and he will say to them, let's cut a deal. It won't be what he wants completely, but it will reduce their deficits, our deficits with them sizably.
At that point,

Speaker 3 I think the plan is the other states will fall in line, and they'll all look at China and they'll say, as Panama is today, we didn't want a deal with Panama, but we looked at Joe Biden and he was decrepit.

Speaker 3 And we remember

Speaker 3 the Obama years, and then we looked at what they did to you, and we didn't think you were going to be around. So the Americans were going to be asleep at the wheel.
So we cut a deal with China.

Speaker 3 But if you want your Panama Canal back in its old mode, pro-American mode, then you've got to kick them out for us. We can't do it.
So

Speaker 3 get BlackRock down here to seal the deal on the entry and exit ports and

Speaker 3 send in a big warship so the Chinese understand you're serious, and we'll be your partner. And he's saying that that's what the Europeans are saying.

Speaker 3 If you look at German jobs and manufacturing, they've gone down about 20% because of China. Everybody says,

Speaker 3 well, it's just paranoid about China. No, it's the whole world because when you look at their $4 or $5 trillion investment, they're creating products for which

Speaker 3 they don't really have a domestic market for. It's all predicated on dumping it cheaper than

Speaker 3 domestic production in Europe, in Japan, in Korea. And what Trump is now trying to do is saying, if we all stick together, we're about 70% of the trade, not them.
We're much bigger than they are.

Speaker 3 And as far as we are, we only have 11%

Speaker 3 of our economies based on exports.

Speaker 3 But China is very, very vulnerable. So what he's trying to do is cut deals with all these countries, mitigate the damage, just like he did with NATO.

Speaker 3 He said, you know what, someday they're going to invade you guys, or you can't trust the Russians. They laughed at him.

Speaker 3 I mean, literally laughed at him at that meeting when he said, don't trust the Russians on natural gas. And then they didn't listen to him.
And then finally he said, I might get out of NATO.

Speaker 3 I might do this. And then when he left office, 20,

Speaker 3 almost, I think it was 18 out of the 32 had agreed. And now it's all but eight.

Speaker 3 nine, eight or nine. Same art of the deal.
So what he's, they'll cut a deal, and then he's going to try to redirect all this to China. And China's not acting very rational.

Speaker 3 I mean, their Secretary of State put up a film of Mao Zedong,

Speaker 3 Korean War vintage, when he was,

Speaker 3 they had sent Chinese troops across the Yallo River that overran the Americans in November, December of 1950. And then

Speaker 3 Eisenhower was thinking of running. Truman was president.
And then Ike came in in early 53, and within six months, they had a ceasefire.

Speaker 3 But in that process of negotiating that ceasefire, Mao Zedong said, we don't listen to Eisenhower. We do what we want.
We're Chinese. And they thought that was going to gain them worldwide respect.

Speaker 3 In other words, they were saying, we're going to put on a mass murderer who killed more people than anybody in the world, including Hitler and Stalin

Speaker 3 combined. And he's going to threaten everybody on this tape.
And you're all going to think that's great. And you're going to be afraid of us.
No, everybody's going to despise you for doing that.

Speaker 3 As I said last time, I just want to know what China's cards are.

Speaker 3 What are their cards that they're playing? And this is what this,

Speaker 3 the big winner, all this is Scott Bassant.

Speaker 3 Yeah, about China, furthermore, is

Speaker 3 everybody looks at their 6% GDP and they look at taking over with Belt and Road, but they're very vulnerable. It's all predicated on nobody's going to react to them in concert.

Speaker 3 Their attitude is: if Europe, if Japan, if South Korea, if Australia, if the UK, if the United States tries to push back, then we'll go to the other countries and help turn them against them.

Speaker 3 But if everybody sticks together and Trump is trying to be amicable with our trade partners that haven't really stuck together with us because they've had asymmetrical tariffs, but

Speaker 3 they've got 300,000 students here.

Speaker 3 They They want every one of them. Every single weapon system, whether an airplane or a tank or a rocket or a missile, is copied from us.
And where did that technology come from?

Speaker 3 It came from either forcing companies that are doing business in China to turn over their expertise or stealing it under the guise of green card holders and students. Everybody knows that.

Speaker 3 So I'd ask our audience this. Just imagine something right now.
When this is all over

Speaker 3 and we have a same tariff that China does,

Speaker 3 we put one on them what they do, and that will cut their

Speaker 3 surplus probably 150, 200 billion.

Speaker 3 And we just tell them, you know what?

Speaker 3 We don't really need your students anymore. We've got all kinds of students that want to come here.
We got students from Europe. They're underrepresented.
We've got people from India.

Speaker 3 We got people from Japan. Why don't we have 100,000 Japanese students? Why don't we have 50,000 Germans? You know what I mean? We don't need your students.

Speaker 3 All they do is pay extra premiums, and they're here as a force

Speaker 3 of the universities to make money, a force multiplier. So we don't need them.
And we don't want you to buy any more farmland. And you know what?

Speaker 3 I think I don't know where you're going to get your technology, but you're not going to get it from us anymore. Go get it from Vietnam.

Speaker 3 That would be a much more stable world. So that's what he's aiming at.
And Qi's going to wake up one morning and say, you know what?

Speaker 3 We're trapped because if we go into Taiwan, everybody's going to put trade junctions on us. And right now, they're planning to decouple.

Speaker 3 So the United States and Europe suddenly got wise to us, and they're going to start building their own pharmaceutical protective equipment. for COVID-type epidemics.

Speaker 3 They're going to get their own parts. They're not going to need us anymore.
And if they don't need us anymore, then we're going to be in big trouble. So I think he's going to get a lot of support.

Speaker 3 Right now, if you, I don't understand American capitalists. I really don't.
I mean, they're all up there as if they're so smart, so moral. Donald Trump is doing this.

Speaker 3 Why don't you just get out of China? Whoever said that was the smart thing to do?

Speaker 3 Why do you go over to China and give them our expertise and open a company when you know that in a matter of years, they're going to copy the layout of the plant, they're going to copy the operation, they're going to copy the

Speaker 3 managerial architecture, and they're going to copy your product and your technology.

Speaker 3 And then they're going to tell you after you've outlived your utility, see you, wouldn't want to be you, and then you're going to go, well, I'll sue you in a Chinese court. Good luck with that.

Speaker 3 Just get that blank out of that country. And that would be the best thing you can do.
It is a sinister, Maoist, Stalinist country. And it bodes no.
We should have learned that with COVID.

Speaker 3 And we will learn that with Taiwan. We already learned it with Tibet and the Uyghurs.
Just get out of that country. Do not expose your country's technology to theft.
And if you need it,

Speaker 3 it's not like... Mark Zuckerberg or Bezos or all these people are multi.
Look what they did to Uber. Uber went over there, we're going to bring Uber to China, we're going to have 1.4 billion.

Speaker 3 And they looked at how it worked, and they saw how all the ads were, and they said,

Speaker 3 line up, Chinese entrepreneurs, who wants to get Uber?

Speaker 3 Well, we and the government will give you all the money, just go make Chinese, call it Uda or something, just like it.

Speaker 3 And then we will pass laws to make sure that you're favored and we control, and we will bankrupt Uber. And that's what happened.
They left.

Speaker 2 So hopefully, American companies will come back to and build in America and produce in America. That's what I'm hoping for.
We'll see how it pans out.

Speaker 3 I think they'll get 10 million jobs if they get $5 trillion.

Speaker 3 Yeah. They will.

Speaker 3 Victor,

Speaker 3 there's one other aspect to this.

Speaker 3 Donald Trump is pretty smart. This war on DEI

Speaker 3 and the universities that are wasting all this federal money, how much GDP, half a point, has been wasted on all of these tens of thousands at high school, community college, four-year college, state colleges, public, DEI commissars, and all these bogus, worthless gender studies, P studies, black studies, Asian studies, environmental studies.

Speaker 3 What we need right now,

Speaker 3 we need trade schools, and we really need people who can weld, people who can fabricate,

Speaker 3 people who can assemble, people who are electricians, people who are plumbers, skilled, high-paid.

Speaker 3 That's what the economy needs right now. So if any good comes out of the DEI,

Speaker 3 the anti-woke, it's to tell these universities.

Speaker 3 Half the people in the United States go to your university and all they do is take six years on average to get a degree and 50% never graduate.

Speaker 3 And those that graduate are stuck with 150 plus thousand in debt, and you guys have run up 1.7 trillion in student debt, a quarter of which are non-performing on the interest, just get rid of it all.

Speaker 3 We just want you, don't take half the country. And didn't work on K through 12 to get people educated, and then let half the country, 70%, go to a trade school.

Speaker 3 And I learned more farming in 10 years as far as how to do practical things and be productive, maybe than I did in eight in academia.

Speaker 3 As my dad said when I came home from Stanford, and he said, did you go to your graduation? I said, no, I didn't. Well, did you graduate? I said, yeah.

Speaker 3 And what do you do? I said, you know, I passed my Greek composition.

Speaker 3 So what is that? Oh, I can write in Greek. My other brother said, oh, it's like a dog that's on two legs.
It's impressive, but what use is it that can dance?

Speaker 3 And then my dad said, okay, we're going to build a little raisin dehydrator. Can you go down there and help this guy wire it? I said, wire it? I don't know anything.

Speaker 3 Don't you know anything about Romex? Where have you been doing all these years?

Speaker 3 I said, I'll learn. That's what I did.

Speaker 2 Good point, Dad.

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Speaker 2 So, Victor, the next topic is the cabinet meeting of Donald Trump. And I know you have lots of reflections on that.
So go ahead.

Speaker 3 I don't think any president's ever had the entire cabinet there live without a script. And some of you are going to say on the left, well, it was scripted.
It was obsequious.

Speaker 3 They all, yes, but it was not scripted. I mean, people knew what they were going to say, but in a cabinet meeting that's live with reporters in the room, we know what Biden would think of that.

Speaker 3 They even had footprints for him stuck on the ground where to walk and

Speaker 3 little stickies everywhere, turn left, turn right, stop, pause.

Speaker 3 And even when he read his script, you remember it said pause, stop, and he would read, I think we really got to reduce inflation, pause, stop.

Speaker 3 So, my point is that anything can happen those meetings. And I was thinking when I was watching that, they have a great cabinet.
Marco Rubio, this Scott Bassan, has become kind of a folk hero.

Speaker 3 He's really articulate. He's really loyal to Trump.

Speaker 3 He knows Wall Street.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 I couldn't imagine the first Trump cabinet like that. Can you imagine Trump sitting there and there's Rick Tillerson, who's called Trump

Speaker 3 a moron or an idiot? And then there's Mattis next to him

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 my good friend H.R., who had some disagreements. But let's not get H.R.
into the, let's just put John Bolton there instead.

Speaker 3 And you put all that array, Bill Barr or Jeff Session, I just don't see it happening, do you? But these guys were like a symphony. They were all on the same page.

Speaker 3 And that's they're getting stuff done that's just amazing.

Speaker 2 You know, one of the things that your audience might call obsequious, what they kept saying, but I think was true, was they kept saying it was by your directive, Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 So they want everybody to see that they're all on the same page and they're taking directive from Trump. Yeah.
That was the point. That was part of the point.

Speaker 3 They've got

Speaker 3 There was a subtext to that who wasn't there. I know there were senior advisors, but they did not have Peter Navarro there.

Speaker 3 Because Peter Navarro has been going on television and freelancing.

Speaker 3 And when the markets were gyrating radically and he was on television, especially with Laura, Ingram looked kind of surprised, like, what are you saying?

Speaker 3 Because he was saying things like, well, we're not going to cut a deal. They cheat.

Speaker 3 Well, yeah, they do.

Speaker 3 They manipulate their currencies. They have excise taxes.
They have phony health concerns. But the markets are going crazy.

Speaker 3 And all they want to hear is that you're going to cut a deal and have reciprocal tariffs. And you've just said that's not enough.
So this is going to go on forever. And the bond market is in debt.

Speaker 3 So that was.

Speaker 3 He wasn't there, is what I'm saying. And he plays a valuable role, but

Speaker 3 Basant is a much smoother operator. And then I can get onto my other rant of the Wall Street Journal.

Speaker 2 Wait, before you go, I wanted to talk about Bassant because he has hired on two senior advisors that were those whistleblowers, Shapley and Ziegler.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So that's been a wonderful story, those whistleblowers on Hunter.

Speaker 3 The shall be first, and the first shall be last.

Speaker 3 And the alpha shall be the Omega, and the Omega should be the alpha. And so they were discredited unfairly.
They were trashed.

Speaker 3 All of their obsequious advisors tried to railroad them. All they wanted to do was investigate.
And the only reason they were, one guy was working on pornographic income that wasn't reported. And

Speaker 3 somehow he found reference to these pictures. And then he started investigating.

Speaker 3 the laptop and he found out that Hunter hadn't even filed a 1040

Speaker 3 and it was by by accident. And then the Biden people went over.
I love this because

Speaker 3 on the left-wing media, they're always, Trump is trying to use the government to weaponize law firms.

Speaker 3 Whatever he does, he's never going to catch up with what they did. They did every single agency, IRS, CIA, FBI, DOJ,

Speaker 3 DOD.

Speaker 3 They weaponized everything.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 I thought that was kind of funny that

Speaker 3 he was a lot of IRS people. But that was thematic, though, of all of Trump's appointments.

Speaker 3 HHS during COVID said that Bob Kennedy, Bobby, was a nut. He's running it.
Jay Bachario was persona non grata. Fauci the other day said, well, I just disagreed with him.
I didn't try to destroy him.

Speaker 3 And then he has those emails that say, how do we neutralize him and stuff? Now he runs HHS.

Speaker 3 Cash Batel was targeted. He runs FBI.

Speaker 3 Tulsi Gabber was put on an O-fly list. She's director of national.
And that's not by accident.

Speaker 3 He thinks the people who would be the most zealous to cut and reform had been victimized by the agencies in which they're now running things.

Speaker 2 Since you mentioned Cash Patel, another thing, he recently hired on, and this was actually, I was going to talk about it later.

Speaker 2 He recently hired on a new guy. Oh, I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Steve Jensen, who had, in fact, been, I think, a lead, if not, you know, the lead in the investigation of January 6th, parents who were at school board meetings, angry, Catholic schools, et cetera.

Speaker 2 So why do you think Cash put him at the head of the

Speaker 2 field operations in TS?

Speaker 3 Cash. Okay, I'm Cash.
I'm now the FBI director, and I've got thousands of employees. Let's just say hundreds in the Washington office.

Speaker 3 And I know that most of those SOBs have no ideology, the most, not all, because they just do whatever Comey or McCabe

Speaker 3 or Christopher Wray wanted. And some of them did bad things, some of them did quasi-bad things, some people kept quiet when the FBI was

Speaker 3 not telling people the authentic laptop. It was not Russian disinformation, or when the FBI under James Baker was freelancing with Twitter to suppress the news, news, that kind of stuff.

Speaker 3 So he knows, so he knows the really bad guys and he's getting rid of them. But then he sees people who,

Speaker 3 what's the word, were opportunistic.

Speaker 3 And he doesn't, what do you do with them? They're very skilled.

Speaker 3 If you fire all of them at the beginning, I mean, maybe he's got a plan to ease them out when he gets other people, but he's got to have gradations.

Speaker 3 It's sort of like when you go in, de Gaulle goes in and they say, you've got Vichy French people working for him. Well, yeah, there was not very many people in England

Speaker 3 with me when we left. And then the Makis are either commies or we don't know anything about them.
So I have to use some of them, right?

Speaker 2 They also say that about Trotsky, that he didn't get rid of the high command of the Russian army when he took it over as the Red Army.

Speaker 3 Solan did it. Not all of them.
Eventually.

Speaker 2 Yeah, eventually they got it, but not everyone.

Speaker 3 Who do you use?

Speaker 3 And so you can't, I think everybody, you just can't go. And then given civil service and things, these are political pointees, many of them, but you can't just fire that person and said, you work.

Speaker 3 And they're doing a lot of it. Right now, their problem is not

Speaker 3 getting rid of

Speaker 3 Biden, people who broke the law.

Speaker 3 They're doing a great job on that. But there's people in this gray area that you may want to

Speaker 3 use.

Speaker 3 Or there could be an alternate explanation. Cash calls him in and says,

Speaker 3 I've never worked for the FBI. And most of the guys that know how this corrupt organization worked, I fired.
But you, you know, every little where every corpse is buried.

Speaker 3 So I'll tell you what I'll do. You stick around

Speaker 3 and I'll give you your title and everything, but you better start telling me where the keys are that unlock this sordid mess. I think that's very possible.

Speaker 2 And Cash is very smart, Absolutely.

Speaker 3 He's a very smart guy. Don't ever, I've known him a long time.
Do not ever underestimate his intelligence. Yeah.

Speaker 2 All right. So Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and we'll talk about diplomacy in the 1920s and the treaties made by the United States.
Stay with us and we'll be right back.

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Speaker 2 Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show. So in our moments in U.S.
history that were very significant, we have now the 1920s.

Speaker 2 The United States is doing very well after World War I, and they're also very involved in the

Speaker 2 international diplomacy and trying to negotiate

Speaker 2 treaties rather than going to war with other people. I think that was the

Speaker 2 general reason behind it.

Speaker 3 So go ahead, Victor. There were two driving forces.
One was we're not going to repeat the arms race.

Speaker 3 They felt, I think wrongly so, that World War I was an accident caused by automatic mobilization with a further catalyst of the dreadnought race and the arms race before the war, when it really was German aggression.

Speaker 3 That was the cause of the war. But nevertheless, they felt in this Wilsonian League of Nations, League of Nations is now operating under the auspices or after the result of the Versailles Treaty.

Speaker 3 They had all of this idealism. We're never going to kill 17 million people again.
It was very enviable. So we're going to make a series of pacts.

Speaker 3 We don't have time to go in the Dawes plan, but that was how to give money to Germany so Germany wouldn't print any more fake money to pay back France

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 England what they owed them under reparations of the Versailles Treaty, so then those two could pay us what they Welshed on. And they finally, that was one thing.

Speaker 3 The Treaty of Rapalo, I was in the hotel at Rapollo where

Speaker 3 that idea was we're going to get rid of all the troublesome places that caused World War I. It was over borders.
Borders. Most wars are, by the way, with contiguous states over borders.

Speaker 3 But I once wrote an article about that in history of Greek warfare, what caused Greek warfare, battles, Argos and Sparta. It was always borderland.
It It was always worthless too.

Speaker 3 But it was very important as objects of prestige, national will. But anyway, the Rhineland, for example, take one example.
The Rhineland shall remain demilitarized.

Speaker 3 That's the area west of the Rhine River that traditionally, after Napoleon, went to Germany.

Speaker 3 How are you going to enforce that? So that was, and, and so everybody was excited. They were going to go look at all the borders.
And,

Speaker 3 of course, Germany, and when Hitler came in in 33, when he got power, 34, 35,

Speaker 3 he just went in and put the German army and violated the Apollo Treaty. Nobody cared.
A couple of other ones were

Speaker 3 the Washington Arms Limitation Act in the late 20s, and then they had successors in the 30s. And they thought

Speaker 3 we're going to get a supernatural body and stop. The most expensive weapons are always ships.
And Jackie Fisher and the Dreadnought race that had led, they felt,

Speaker 3 helped bankrupt the countries that France and Britain and Germany, they were trying to outbill each other with battleships, the new battleships. So they said,

Speaker 3 we're going to have a five to five to three ratio. That is, whatever tonnage the British, I think it was something like 400,000 collective shipping tons.

Speaker 3 The British and Americans get to have the same, but Japanese get to have three.

Speaker 3 The ratio 5, 5, 3. and France and Germany you know there Germany was out of it and France kind of finagled around later came in

Speaker 3 and the Japanese got really angry but Yamamoto who was now ascending in the ranks of naval told Nagumo and others just be quiet we're not able to build five five five we'll do that later but what we need to do all we can get close to them with our capacity steel and shipbuilding is three so actually they've done us a great favor.

Speaker 3 They've said five for Britain, ratio five for the United States and only three for poor Japan. But we couldn't even get near three

Speaker 3 until another four or five years. But we can play the noble victim that was screwed over, if I can use it.
Use it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, do you think the United States and Britain knew they couldn't get there and that was part of the...

Speaker 3 Well, the United States was... They were very haughty.
They just said, you know what, you're not a superpower.

Speaker 3 And Japan said, oh, please, we were very good in World War War I and then they looked at their industrial capacity and they thought you know what we have to steal the rubber of Malaysia we got to steal the oil of the Dutch East Indies we've got to steal the breadbasket in Southeast Asia and we can do that in a few years

Speaker 3 but we'll build three and that'll get us close then they started violating it very quickly and it was really a weird thing that it was for battle the first iteration was battleships and cruisers.

Speaker 3 So we had these big, beautiful cruisers. They were going to be like 35,000 tons.
The biggest, they were going to be like the HMS Hood.

Speaker 3 And then you couldn't build them because they were 35,000. So they were almost half done.
So then they got the United States to put a little exception.

Speaker 3 Well, you can put them as carriers because nobody really knew what carriers, whether they're going to be good or not. But they did say they're going to be 27,000.
So they put a little clause in there.

Speaker 3 If you've already built it when the treaty went through, so the result was they took these two huge hulls that were half done, and they had a very sophisticated electric motor, not steam-driven.

Speaker 3 The steam drew,

Speaker 3 you know, your fuel oil, heated the water, that created the steam, and then that was used for pistons and to run the propellers.

Speaker 3 But they figured out you could use that steam to spin electric generators and then get electric motors to turn the

Speaker 3 propellers and then you could modulate the speed much better and and control it. And so they created these two battlecruisers and they renamed them the Lexington and the Saratoga.

Speaker 3 And they became the largest aircraft carriers in the world.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 they were never really replicated. When the war broke out, we only had, I think, three other, the WASP and the Hornet, the Yorktown, and Enterprise Four.
And they were all 22,000.

Speaker 3 These were monsters, 35. And they were very, they were kind of awkward, but they were very powerful.
They had 80-inch guns. One was sunk.
The Lexington was sunk at Coral Sea, 1942 in May.

Speaker 3 But the Saratoga lasted the entire war, and then they were replaced. That was an effort.
But the most famous, very quickly of these,

Speaker 3 I don't want to say naive, when I was a college student, I took one, History of International Diplomacy.

Speaker 3 And it was actually taught by

Speaker 3 a very brilliant guy, Carl Lamb, who was a professor at Santa Cruz. And he went to the Naval Academy.
And

Speaker 3 I didn't realize there had been a whole scholarship how wonderful the Kellogg-Briand Act is. It still exists.
Remember, the Secretary of State, Frank Kellogg, and his French foreign minister, Mr.

Speaker 3 Briand, got people together.

Speaker 3 It was mostly Japan, the United States, France, and England. And they said war is not an acceptable, very short little clauses, not an

Speaker 3 acceptable means of adjudicating conflict.

Speaker 3 That's like saying to your neighbor, I just moved in, and we don't, the property line is

Speaker 3 a little vague about the tree you have, its limbs come over, but whatever we do, I promise you that we will not get in an argument over this.

Speaker 3 And then the neighbor goes, okay, but what if you do get in an argument? There's nobody to stop you, right? So there was nobody to enforce it. The League of Nations, you know, can't do anything.

Speaker 3 So they renounced war, and it was a joke. And then the Japanese in 33 went into Manchuria.
And then in 1935, the Italians went into, you know, Ethiopia.

Speaker 3 And then they were off to the races with Spain, Spanish Civil War, and everybody was fueling that. And so Hitler went into the Rhineland.
So these were all naive efforts.

Speaker 3 But if you go into some of the text, I'll say this was a very, very sophisticated utopian, maybe, but war was less common afterwards.

Speaker 3 No, it was less common afterwards, you people, in the late 40s and 50s, not because of the fumes of the stupid Kellogg-Briand Act, because of nuclear weapons and the fear that could escalate into Armageddon.

Speaker 2 So the renouncing of war was in the Kellogg-Briand Act. Okay.

Speaker 2 So they all signed on, or at least the big powers signed on, to a renunciation of resorting to war.

Speaker 3 And then Italy broke it, and then

Speaker 3 Germany broke it.

Speaker 3 Russia, nobody wanted it in.

Speaker 3 Well, Russia was in the League of Nations till it invaded Finland in November of 1939, but they were always a rogue power

Speaker 3 after the revolution, the Bolsheviks.

Speaker 3 So anyway, we've started with the Russo-Japanese War. We've gone through the income tax.
We've gone through World War I. We've gone through the Depression.
We had a lot of others.

Speaker 3 I think this is our 10th or 8th or 9th, 10th. So next time we're reaching the rise of fascism in Germany, Italy, and Japan,

Speaker 3 how come they went fascist

Speaker 3 and Britain, France, and the United States did not?

Speaker 2 I didn't realize you were done, so I want to ask you a question.

Speaker 3 Go ahead.

Speaker 2 Don't you think that they realize that an

Speaker 2 international agreements made and the avoidance of war really doesn't work very well because of the 19th century Congresses? They had tons of Congresses to solve war in Spain, to solve war in Italy.

Speaker 2 I know they all came after the Congress of Vienna, which solved the Napoleonic thing to some extent.

Speaker 2 But surely they would have realized that they just really couldn't come to agreements on no, they were guided by two principles.

Speaker 3 Number one,

Speaker 3 they had never seen a war like World War I.

Speaker 3 Never. And they called it the Great War.
As I said earlier, the word

Speaker 3 First World War in the Anglo-speaking world and what ours with the Roman numeral, we call it World War I.

Speaker 3 That

Speaker 3 word was very rare in 1939. I mean, it was still in currency in 1939, 1940.
That word, word, Great War, disappeared in 1941 with two events.

Speaker 3 The Soviet invasion, the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22nd, 1941, and Pearl Harbor.

Speaker 3 At that point, it was a whole World War, and they said, oh, my God, World War I is nothing compared to this. This is the whole world.
So they started calling, I should say, Great War is nothing.

Speaker 3 So they said, no more Great War, World War I.

Speaker 3 Now we'll call this World War II. So my point is, they were captives of the Great War.
They had never seen anything like it. And they said, we can't have this happen again.
It will ruin Europe.

Speaker 3 So they were

Speaker 3 intent on finding a solution. And they looked at what had caused World War I.
And they used the word merchants of death, that all these people were making profits.

Speaker 3 They thought the United States could have helped if we'd been involved. So they were trying to get us in the League of Nations.

Speaker 3 This is why they had Kellogg, American Secretary of State. I think he'd been a senator from Montana.

Speaker 3 They wanted America in because they thought that when it came in in World War I in 1917 in April, it won the war within a year and a half.

Speaker 3 And it had been there at the beginning, Germany, if there had been 300 or 400,000 American troops, Germany would not have invaded Belgium. That's what they thought.

Speaker 3 The other thing is they looked at the Congress of Vienna.

Speaker 3 And they said from the Battle of Waterloo's aftermath to World War I, with minor exceptions, which were on the periphery, like the Crimean War, there was general peace in Europe, and they were able to craft a century-long

Speaker 3 Kissinger wrote about that.

Speaker 3 And so they looked back and said, we can do the same thing that they did. Well,

Speaker 3 the world was very different in 1928 than it was in 1815.

Speaker 2 Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break, and then we'll come back to talk about a few more news stories this week. Stay with us and we'll be right back.

Speaker 2 Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. You can catch Victor on X.
His handle is at V D Hansen and on Facebook at Hansen's Morning Cup.

Speaker 2 And I should mention that there is a Victor Davis Hansen fan club on Facebook as well that is not affiliated with us, so we don't have any, but they do dredge up up all sorts of interesting things that Victor has done in the past.

Speaker 3 They're different too than these not-to-be-named people who I

Speaker 3 said this. I wrote you a note, Sam.

Speaker 3 Did you see that note I sent you to post on our website?

Speaker 2 No, but I will look for it.

Speaker 3 You should have something that says this is not an authorized.

Speaker 3 Because what I do sometimes,

Speaker 3 I do longer interviews. Well, in this guy's case, they were always longer than he

Speaker 3 agreed upon. And then they just slice them into one minute,

Speaker 3 you know, vignettes. And then they put lavish videos.
In this case, he was using AI.

Speaker 3 And then people write me and say, I didn't know you had a daily interview series. I don't.

Speaker 3 And it's not just him, but so in other words, I don't,

Speaker 3 if you do 80 minutes, and you should never do 80 minutes,

Speaker 3 but I did. I wanted to help the fellow because he was starting.
I thought he was still on the ascendance.

Speaker 3 But if you do all those one minute and then they lavish them with videos and AI and all that, and they make them into three minutes,

Speaker 3 then you can do 80 of them. And that's what's happened.
You've got all these things that appear, and then people write me and say, You just did another little series. You've got a new video.

Speaker 3 And I say, No, that was done six months ago. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And I have no idea who's doing it.

Speaker 3 So.

Speaker 2 Well, it's worse than you think, Victor, because there are people I've seen some of these short videos that they have somehow recorded, probably on their phone or something, a video of you talking.

Speaker 2 And then they take that recording off of their phone and use it to. So I've seen it.

Speaker 3 I know, and they get this. And I get, I must get five to six emails a day, and this is not even to the website.
And they'll say things like, did you know this person's

Speaker 3 having you swap wasp

Speaker 3 weren't you stung by a bee did you know this person every week you come out with a minute and a half I thought you were doing this only for the daily signal which is authorized yeah and so it's a wide open frontier out a wild west and it would take me years just to monitor it all yeah and I don't have the resources to you know get lawyers and all that we try to do this at the website and we still are obviously working.

Speaker 2 The website is a living thing for everybody who's listening

Speaker 3 to a lot of loyal listeners because when I said sinus the other day,

Speaker 3 all of a sudden, all these wonderful people said, Have you tried homopathic?

Speaker 3 Have you tried salt sprays? Have you done this? And they were all great ideas.

Speaker 3 I'm trying them right now. One person said, Are you trying to digest

Speaker 3 stop mucus or something? Mucus stop enzyme. Because I have this chronic sinus effect.

Speaker 3 Dogacillusillin was dogacillin.

Speaker 3 I was speaking, I think I told you that,

Speaker 3 at a local event, and one of the persons said, why are you taking someone? It's not intended for dogs, but that's a dog medicine.

Speaker 3 I felt like a dog when I was on it. I thought I was going to die, and I still have joint and muscle pain from it.

Speaker 3 And apparently it's a well-known safe drug, but for me, it just was worse than the sinus infection.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, also, I wanted to remind everybody that you can find Victor on speaking of where the legitimate. He has a YouTube channel that is,

Speaker 2 you can get the Victor Davis Hansen podcast, is what it's called, and you'll see all of these podcasts there, as well as on Rumble. So, Victor is legitimately on that.

Speaker 2 And I should mention, too, that we're a subsidiary of Just the News, which is run by John Solomon, who is one of the best investigative reporters in DC.

Speaker 2 So, we like to promote his work as well.

Speaker 2 So Victor, let's go ahead and move on to, I was going to talk a little bit about the end of DEI.

Speaker 2 It seems to be failing, but there were stories that came out that either illustrate it or don't, kind of.

Speaker 2 Carolyn Levitt has announced that the press secretary of Donald Trump, that she is not going to be responding to emails that have pronouns.

Speaker 2 And Anderson Cooper got checked by one one of his audience members who was asking a question of his guest, and he called her she, and she said, no, I'm they, them.

Speaker 2 So poor old left-wing Anderson Cooper.

Speaker 3 They did that with Bernie Sanders, too. Did you see him?

Speaker 2 I saw that.

Speaker 3 Baffle, like,

Speaker 3 what is this?

Speaker 2 So your thoughts on the, is DEI ending or has it isn't?

Speaker 3 Carolyn said she wasn't going to take inquiries and pronoun multipliers.

Speaker 3 It was unfair to her because they said she's just exercising censorship or something. But as a person in a university,

Speaker 3 when you get those administrative, your administrative superiors from Stanford and they all have, I don't know, even they have they, they,

Speaker 3 I don't even know what they are.

Speaker 3 They're trying to enforce a code. and telling you that this is the way we're going to do it from now on.
But anybody who has been one

Speaker 3 footprint outside a university knows that these people are limmings.

Speaker 3 And so when I saw them, I just thought this fad will last about a year and a half, and then there won't be one of these people who will do it until the next fad.

Speaker 3 And so

Speaker 3 all of the DEI

Speaker 3 stuff that we've been reading about, I just look at it in economic terms. We're in a race with the Chinese for survival.
We have to get a fair trade. We're

Speaker 3 a trillion dollars deficit, 37 trillion national debt, 2 trillion. I thought it was 1.7, but I looked, it's 2 trillion, the annual budget deficit.
So, we have to be a lot more efficient.

Speaker 3 It can't be like California, high-speed rail, blowing up dams, all that stuff. We don't have a margin of error.

Speaker 3 And so, why would we institute an entire Soviet commissar system that would check people's work and then modulate it or censor it based on ideology that had nothing to do with efficiency.

Speaker 3 So now we've got all these people that are all they do is they thought, well, I make two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, I'm the dean of equity, inclusion in the physics department or something, and I've got to find some racism.

Speaker 3 Oh, I'm going to call up that Nobel Prize winner. You know what, I'd looked at your syllabus and I think you should be more inclusive.

Speaker 3 Then you take his time up and you slow him down so you can be justified and magnify that by millions of incidents. And it's a drag on the economy and it's racist.

Speaker 3 and it's contrary to all of the spirit and the letter of the civil rights laws. Somebody's going to write in, yes, but there was a district judge in Kansas that said it was

Speaker 3 perfectly okay under the 1965 civil rights. No, it wasn't.
That's just a district judge.

Speaker 3 Most people realize that as the Supreme Court has recently ruled, that is contrary to civil rights affirmative action. They got rid of it.
And that's just, that's what DEI is.

Speaker 3 And when you add DEI and you add the new Green Deal and you add ESG,

Speaker 3 I guess you'd call it the break or the limitations on investment that they use for the stock market. It has to be used for environmental purposes.

Speaker 3 So my point is that Trump is trying to get out of all that. So there's a lot of economic things that are going on right now that we're not getting we're not they're going to be long term.

Speaker 3 If you close the border and you get rid of 500,000 criminals and you get rid of 2 million people that have already been given their deportation orders, you cut down on the social welfare

Speaker 3 cost, the crime, the paperwork, if at the same time you get rid of the Green New Deal and you tell a guy that's got a a flatbed truck it's not that much different or somebody who's got a natural gas generator,

Speaker 3 you can make these transformations slow rather than just get a commissar and order people. So he is getting rid of a lot of drags on the economy is what I'm trying to say.
And that's going to show up.

Speaker 3 It will show up eventually that we're not doing those things. Because they're really called regulations, aren't they? That's all they are, is DI is a regulation.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I know somebody's going to say, well, how long does it take you? Well, it takes me three hours a year to do the DEI video.

Speaker 3 And I fall asleep and I can't sleep. It's just inane.

Speaker 3 You know, it's just a complete waste of time. It makes somebody a lot of money who makes the video.

Speaker 2 And those videos have figured out how to force you to pay attention.

Speaker 3 You can't speed up and you can't miss them.

Speaker 3 And if you think, if you're listening, all of you, I know you've seen one or had to participate when a guy comes in and he pats a girl on the shoulder. Stop.

Speaker 3 Question A.

Speaker 3 George was just trying to show his affection. It's perfectly all right.

Speaker 3 Alternative B,

Speaker 3 the old boy network looked good. He has a perfect right to show his affection to an attractive woman.
C,

Speaker 3 this is a problematic interaction. Each side has a legitimate argument.
D,

Speaker 3 this is always wrong, and people who witness this should go to your diversity, equity, and inclusion advisor.

Speaker 3 And all you have to do is look for that phrase and not watch any of the video, and you'll get 100% on all those questions.

Speaker 3 But you can't, because they won't let you speed it up.

Speaker 3 Because they know you hate your guts.

Speaker 3 They know that they're stupid and they're wasting your time and that you hate their guts. And so they expect you to be completely nauseated by what they do.

Speaker 3 And even liberal, conservative, doesn't matter because they're nags. Yeah,

Speaker 2 exactly. And even if you're on their side, you're like, this is a boring thing.

Speaker 3 I've been at the video and you said, okay, why don't you be, if you're a DEI person or consultant and you're in the economics field, why don't you write a paper on economics about an intricacy of tariffs?

Speaker 3 Oh, you're a literature person. Could you, I don't know, give us a new insight on Don Quixote? No, they can't do any of that.

Speaker 2 Because they're paying attention to videos that nobody would listen to, not even people on their side.

Speaker 3 That's far.

Speaker 3 NPR has a captive.

Speaker 3 I don't know what the status of NPR and PBS is. I do know we give them a half a billion dollars, and then they claim it's only 1%.

Speaker 3 And we've talked about that before, but the money goes to the regional stations so they can buy these things at

Speaker 3 NPR and PBS, motherships, and Washington peddle. So then they can say we're only getting money from our

Speaker 3 subordinate stations. We don't get very much, it's only 1%.

Speaker 3 But the subordinate stations that are paying your 90% or whatever for 40%, 50% plus donations get their money from the government.

Speaker 2 Well, Victor, let me go ahead and

Speaker 2 welcome back, a sponsor,

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Speaker 2 So Victor,

Speaker 2 there is a professor, not a professor, sorry, a Palestinian billionaire by the name of Bashar Masri, who was part of the Dean's Council at Harvard's school, Kennedy School of Government.

Speaker 2 And he stepped down.

Speaker 3 Was he an overseer board of something?

Speaker 2 Usually,

Speaker 2 he was a dean on the council.

Speaker 3 I know.

Speaker 3 But I mean, that's a council. Oh, okay.
I doubt he was actually paid by Harvard. Oh, no, probably not.
It was an outside board of overseers type stuff. Yeah, that's bad or not.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and

Speaker 2 he was being sued by about 200 people who were victims of the October 7th.

Speaker 2 And now he's stepped down from his position. So good news, but I was wondering your thoughts on Palestinian.

Speaker 3 The name of the guy,

Speaker 3 right?

Speaker 3 I'm trying to remember where I remembered it, but it was right after Trump said that Gaza was going to be sort of like

Speaker 3 southern France, you know what I mean, on the beach. His name came up.
He was designing, he said, a utopian city that was going to be perfect. And of course, when I saw this article about him

Speaker 3 as an entrepreneur that was going to go and rebuild Gaza and make it non-denominational and democratic, I knew that was a complete lie because Hamas is there.

Speaker 3 So he must have some concession to even be allowed to say that.

Speaker 3 And the next thing I thought, USAID, USAID, USAID. And of course, USAAID was giving him money.
But he was a tunnel builder, right?

Speaker 3 He had the expertise to allow Hamas under the guise of rebuilding or whatever all these years. He was building these very well-crafted and constructed tunnels.

Speaker 3 When you looked at those tunnels, when the Israelis showed them, it didn't look like a bunch of guys with wheelbarrows. They had sophisticated tunneling machines.
They had rebar.

Speaker 3 They had vaulted ceilings. They had all sorts of internet, heating, cooling, electrical cable.

Speaker 3 It was a whole underground city. That's what he meant.
I'm building a utopian killing city so I can design it to kill Jews. That's basically what he did.
And

Speaker 3 I don't know what is, but we're having a reckoning right now. And where I work at Stanford, they've already given notices that they're going to pull some of the visas of students.

Speaker 3 But the way to look at all this is

Speaker 3 not that you go after all these people that are

Speaker 3 helping the so-called enemy, and I define radical Islamic terrorist groups like Hamas and an enemy. But what's the purpose of what they're doing? I don't know his citizenship status.

Speaker 2 They say that he is a Palestinian American, so he must have been a private person.

Speaker 3 And then he has a perfect right to say what he wants, and he has a perfect right to be sued.

Speaker 3 But in the case of all the other people that are visiting here on green cards or temporary visas or student visas, The question is,

Speaker 3 what is the plus that they bring to this country when you see all of the demonstrations and all of the hatred and all of the disruption? I don't see any advantage to it.

Speaker 3 So that's what Marco Rubio's position is. I'm not going to get into what they're saying.

Speaker 3 I don't care. I just want to know: are they actual students who are studying something? And they don't seem to be.

Speaker 3 They seem to be threatening Jews and going into classrooms and disrupting classes if they're taught by Israelis or Jews.

Speaker 3 And I have no problem with them. I just don't think we need that.
So we don't want that pay, we don't want to have that extra problem, overhead.

Speaker 3 It's kind of like in a business and you say, you know what, I have a guy come in every day and he says he's going to clean the floors and wash the windows. And he has a

Speaker 3 All he does is he just sort of polishes the granite. I don't need the granite polished.
So I just don't, I just tell them, you know, know, it's nothing personal, but I don't need you.

Speaker 3 And that's what they do. They do things that do not enhance the interest of the United States.
And that's what a country should do when it issues a visa.

Speaker 3 And this is a multi-I mean, gosh, this is cultural, social, economic, political, military counter-revolution. He's addressing everything at once.

Speaker 3 And all of it, you know, higher education doesn't get it. The Columbia president that just said, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, we want that 400 million you cut.

Speaker 3 And yes, we won't have masks and we will. And then she goes to the faculty and just lies her head off and says, basically, don't listen to them.
And now Cornell is looking at

Speaker 3 a huge amount of money that could be cut. Is it a billion dollars?

Speaker 3 These are fantastic stumps.

Speaker 3 Why are these private universities with these huge endowments, 15, 16, 20, 30, 40, 50 billion dollars?

Speaker 3 Why do they get any federal money other than grants to individual scholars, mostly in science or health? But even then, with their endowments, you think they could

Speaker 3 fund them. 40 years ago, when we talked about these universities, we were talking like $1 billion endowment, $2 billion, nothing like we see now.
So they have so much exposure. And

Speaker 3 again, it's not a question of anybody persecuting. It's just Donald Trump saying,

Speaker 3 this was okay when Bill Clinton was president. We owed $5

Speaker 3 trillion,

Speaker 3 and the national debt was 0.3% of GDP, but now it's 6%.

Speaker 3 I mean, the annual budget deficit. The budget deficit is 6%

Speaker 3 of GDP. It's 20 times greater than the budget deficit that he finally balanced.
So we don't have the money to do it. We're sorry.
We'd like to help you.

Speaker 3 But we give you the money and you go out and hire a bunch of DEI people. Then you tell us, but he's curing cancer in the biology department or genetics department or something.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but it's all fungible. You just use those arguments to disguise the money you waste.
And we're tired of it.

Speaker 3 And I think they would get really lean and mean and better if they didn't have any federal. Because I've watched Hillsdale for 50 years.

Speaker 3 And the fact that they don't take money, they're better funded than any other small, almost any other college. They're more efficient.
They watch the bottom line.

Speaker 3 And they don't rely on the government. They're completely immune from government

Speaker 3 waffling or capriciousness. It's really good.

Speaker 2 And they can't afford to have employees that aren't functioning, aren't producing for them. And so they probably keep a pretty lean.

Speaker 3 They have no DEI, that's for sure.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I'm going to give the May 10th

Speaker 3 graduation address. And I think I'm going to model it after three little events that happened to me.
The first day I went there, I started teaching there in 2004. I'd only visited once or twice.

Speaker 3 The first thing I did is I went to my apartment. I had requested a bicycle and I had this kind of older bike and I rode it around

Speaker 3 and then I got the first day of class so I

Speaker 3 left it. I went home.
I thought, oh my God. I came back 24 hours later.
It was really crowded. There it was, untouched, as if nobody even saw it.

Speaker 3 If that had been at Stanford, that wheels would have been off or it had been gone.

Speaker 3 And then I walked over just seconds after that to the bookstore. And I thought, this is going to be the same thing as a Stanford bookstore.

Speaker 3 Leisure Studies, Environmental Studies, Asian Studies, no studies. I looked at the books that were being ordered.
C.S. Lewis books, Tolkien books, Shakespeare.
Could not believe it.

Speaker 3 Modern novel, Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Where are the studies? Racist, racist, racist, racist, racist, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, homophobic, homophobic.

Speaker 3 Nothing.

Speaker 3 And then I noticed the third thing the first day. I started walking around campus.

Speaker 3 Nobody knew who I was. And people said, hi, how are you?

Speaker 3 And I thought, well, at Cal State, a little bit of that, but I had just gone to work at Stanford. And everybody walked around like they were carrying the burdens of the world on their shoulders.

Speaker 3 You know, they were grimacing.

Speaker 3 I'm fighting abortion,

Speaker 3 yeah,

Speaker 3 19 years old,

Speaker 3 and I've been a victim. It's horrible what they've done to me.

Speaker 3 I'm here at somebody had to pay, I don't know, a quarter million dollars for me to come to this awful place where it's 70 degrees all year round, and

Speaker 3 everybody caters my every whim. And I'm just mad because they don't understand what's going on in Dafer.
They don't understand what's going on in, I don't know, Kenya. And it's horrible.

Speaker 3 And people are, and they're so rude. And you know, you see them, and then you go to Hills.
Hi, how are you? What are you doing?

Speaker 3 I remember our first day I was there, a guy came up to me and said, Hello, do I know you? I said, No, I'm a visitor. Well, can I help you show you the buildings?

Speaker 3 I said, Well, I'm trying to go to this class. Well, let me show you.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 it was just so different. And I go to Stanford and gosh, everybody walks by by Krabby Appleton.

Speaker 3 And at Hillsdale, it's like everybody looks like

Speaker 3 Carolyn, the press secretary. You know what I mean? I just love her when she goes on there.

Speaker 3 And I'm just like thinking, do you have any idea how you affect that Krabby Appleton press corps or the left-wing people who are watching you? First of all, you're beautiful.

Speaker 3 Second of all, you're always happy. Third of all, you've got a lot of confidence.
Fourth, you don't have to say any nuancing stuff on the one hand. On the other hand, this is very complex.

Speaker 3 You just say it and you're confident and you're sincere.

Speaker 3 And then when they hit you, it's like you have a little invisible force field between you and them and all their little barbs are like, oh, okay. Yeah.
No.

Speaker 3 And she just drives them crazy. You know what I mean? I look at Jen Saki.
She never says, I'm going to circle back on that. I'm going to sake back on that.

Speaker 2 Her binder is in her head, Victor.

Speaker 3 No binder, nothing.

Speaker 3 She's kind of like Kayla McInlaney, was kind of that way, but she's so young. She's 27.

Speaker 3 I know me. I remember when I was 27.

Speaker 2 She's amazing. That's true.

Speaker 3 She is. She's so confident.
And it's a Manichean world about Trump versus the enemy. And that's what is kind of unusual.
And she's,

Speaker 3 I know she has self-doubt. I know she's got a young child.
She's got a family. But boy, she radiates confidence and happiness.

Speaker 3 And that's something these rare days.

Speaker 2 Well, Victor, let's turn to the last topic, and that is the House passed

Speaker 2 a budget reconciliation bill.

Speaker 2 And I just want to mention two things that I found surprising in it. They raised the deficit ceiling by $5 trillion

Speaker 2 when we're trying to cut it. And they have a mandatory cut on spending of $1.5 trillion, which I think is great.

Speaker 2 I just wonder, boy, with Doge and what they're trying to do, it's going to be very difficult to cut that much.

Speaker 3 Because

Speaker 3 the budget is $7 trillion almost. And when you look at

Speaker 3 optional areas to cut that are not mandated, Social Security, Medicare, unless you slash the defense budget, and Trump's not going to do that.

Speaker 3 He's going to try to find savings so he can build sophisticated weapons, not just

Speaker 3 but

Speaker 3 maybe they can cut a half of

Speaker 3 if they can cut a half a trillion dollars, 500 billion,

Speaker 3 and they can

Speaker 3 get increased revenue, whether a little bit from tariffs, a little bit from his gold card, a little bit from deregulation, whatever, you know what I mean?

Speaker 3 And he cuts $700 billion, That is an amazing accomplishment. I think the goal is to get to zero at the end of

Speaker 3 four years. But when they raise the debt to $5 trillion, that doesn't mean they're going to go to $5 trillion.
It just so they have the option to go that high.

Speaker 3 But you've got to remember that

Speaker 3 we only had

Speaker 3 in the last half century? No, yeah, last half century, we've only had four balanced budgets: 98, 99, 2000, 2001. Those were brought about when Bill Clinton made a deal with Newt Ginreach.

Speaker 3 And Newt Ginrich said, if we can get

Speaker 3 half of the expenditures will be cuts.

Speaker 3 And Clinton said, okay, I will make those cuts that you suggest, but then you have to pass my tax increase. And that's how they did it.
But again,

Speaker 3 what they were doing is they inherited a

Speaker 3 0.3%

Speaker 3 deficit of the annual deficit was 0.3% of GDP. This annual deficit is 20 times larger in adjusted dollars, 20 times.
And that time they had a $5 trillion

Speaker 3 national debt, not $37 trillion with $3 billion,

Speaker 3 $3 billion in interest a day.

Speaker 3 So it's almost impossible to do.

Speaker 3 And that's why Trump is acting and the idea that it went up $7 trillion.

Speaker 3 If everybody would just take this phrase, modern monetary theory, put it in quotation and Google it, you will see it pop up from 21 to 24 in all different manifestations.

Speaker 3 But there'll be one characteristic. It'll all be from left-wing venues and it'll all be wonderful.
A new wave has been looking at money.

Speaker 3 It's a construct because the government can print whatever it wants. It can say whatever it is.
So we can just say this and that. And that was infectious.

Speaker 2 Well, Victor, I wanted to read one of our readers' comments. This is at the website, and it's on the article you wrote, The Poverty of Criticism of Trump's Agenda.

Speaker 2 And Jim Reynolds says, I never thought anybody in our lifetime would seriously challenge our out-of-control spending. Everybody else has just kicked the can down the street.

Speaker 2 Every one of them, and I think he's referring to Trump's the one who hasn't.

Speaker 2 If you do the math, then you know that the lion's share of our budget is off-limits entitlements. We could double our taxes,

Speaker 2 cut the, excuse me for this word, crap out of discretionary spending and still never touch the national debt. I had never considered the tariff idea.
Few others have either.

Speaker 2 Do we have any other options than to get others to help us pay down the debt, meaning outsiders through tariffs. If we go under,

Speaker 2 so will all of them. Trump is trying to keep our economy from driving off a cliff or into a brick wall.
Choose your metaphor.

Speaker 2 You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality. Hello, reality.
And thank you, Jim Reynolds.

Speaker 3 Thank you, but there are subtle ways it'll help.

Speaker 3 When you have the Fed raising interest rates, and now now we're paying, what, 4.5 to almost 5% on government bonds, and we've got more and more bonds on the market because of deficit, then that is $3 billion.

Speaker 3 But when we were paying $1.5 billion,

Speaker 3 if we were paying $1.5% and $2, we would only be paying a billion, we would save almost a third of a trillion dollars on the budget. So we can do that.

Speaker 3 We can really try to get the economy going and inflation low, like this, it was 2.6 annualized.

Speaker 3 That should send a message to the Fed that inflation is not a problem, even though the economy is growing because we had 100,000 new jobs. So, Powell,

Speaker 3 he should lower it by a quarter point, half point immediately. He did that for Biden during the campaign cycle.
And that would save maybe a billion dollars a day.

Speaker 3 Revenues until 1916 were really the only revenue that the country had before the income tax. And

Speaker 3 we still get about $300 billion with our low tariffs. And if they were going to go up, if he can get it parity,

Speaker 3 we might get another $300 or $400 billion there. I don't know how much is gold card.

Speaker 3 I don't believe that the number of people are going to pay $5 million to fast-track citizenship when they have a net worth of the required amount.

Speaker 3 I think one of the cabinet people said it could be a billion dollars. It could be a trillion dollars.
I don't think so. But there'll be a little bit of money there,

Speaker 3 and there'll be a lot of money if he can deregulate and get rid of the Green New Deal stuff and keep the tax cuts and stimulate the economy and it can grow.

Speaker 3 So that's what he's trying to do but you've got to limit spending. You've got to limit spending.
And you know

Speaker 3 everybody should take a deep breath because

Speaker 3 Trump today was saying that they're building ships 200 times more than we are and that the Chinese fleet and number of ships, not quite in tonnage I think, is larger than ours now.

Speaker 3 An aircraft carrier, I don't know how many more you want to build in the age of hypersonic missiles and drones, but let's just say we have, I think, 11 of them, and they're all nuclear.

Speaker 3 They cost now the new ones, the Gerald Ford class, I think they're about 13 billion.

Speaker 3 But think for a minute. We gave

Speaker 3 We gave

Speaker 3 roughly 200 billion, depending on how you negotiate. They might say 80, but when you get economic and USAID and all the military stuff and the service, we had U.S.

Speaker 3 servicemen over there far more than we thought. New York Times says that.

Speaker 3 Let's just say 150,

Speaker 3 and you could have built

Speaker 3 10

Speaker 3 Gerald Ford aircraft carriers for what we gave Ukraine, 10.

Speaker 3 And if you look at what

Speaker 3 Elon Elon Musk says he's cut, that's 10 aircraft carriers. Wouldn't everybody listening, wouldn't you like to have 10 Gerald Ford aircraft carriers?

Speaker 3 Or maybe you say 100 million for the most sophisticated F-22, well, we don't make them anymore, but an F-35 is at least 50 million.

Speaker 3 So if you got two for $100 million, and then you got you could get $20 for every billion dollars. So I would, you could,

Speaker 3 I mean, you could, for $100 billion, you could get 200 more of the most sophisticated planes in the world.

Speaker 3 So there's a lot to,

Speaker 3 we're just wasting money is what I'm trying to say, and we're not, we're falling behind the Chinese, but there's no need to do that, especially when we cut off their technological pipeline of theft from us.

Speaker 2 Well, since that letter was about how to cut the budget, and I forgot this story, Doge has found millions of unemployment going to fake claims of people that are not even born yet.

Speaker 3 So, I'm going to ask you a question. Why do you think when that story came out, along with people who were 150 years old,

Speaker 3 getting

Speaker 3 Social Security,

Speaker 3 what was the mentality of the left not to cover those stories or to downplay them? Because they were not in the New York Times, Chicago, Tribune, PBS, NPR.

Speaker 2 Because the left is large government, so they don't want this Doge going around and showing all the inefficiencies and fraud.

Speaker 3 Because

Speaker 2 they don't care, and they think that it's only, you know, millions. So

Speaker 3 no big deal. It went to somebody.
So somebody will say, well, he had four kids, and we don't think that we give them enough welfare.

Speaker 3 So if he, you know, he created a false identity and a non-existent person, that's pretty good.

Speaker 3 And why would we want to report that when it would only get people angry at the system and then help Donald Trump? So that's how we don't know these things.

Speaker 3 They don't care as long as

Speaker 3 they think that it helps the administrative state, the beast, I don't know what you call it, but they don't care about the waste or the fraud.

Speaker 2 No, they don't. That's just crazy.
Well, Victor, this is the end of our show. So thank you for all of your wisdom today.

Speaker 2 And thanks to our audience for choosing to join us here at the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Speaker 3 Thank Thank you, everybody, for both listening and viewing, and we'll see you next time. We have David Mammet coming up.
I don't know if I've told you that. We're going to interview him.

Speaker 3 He's a good friend, and he wrote me a note, and I don't know if I've written him back yet, but we're going to have him on.

Speaker 2 Awesome. Well, thanks again, and this is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hanson, and we're signing off.
Thank you, everyone.