From Modern Youth to Ukraine to Trump's EO

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Hello, ladies. Hello, gentlemen.
This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show. I am Jack Fowler, the lucky host.
Our star namesake is Victor Davis Hanson, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, and the man behind the website, the Blade of Perseus, the address there is victorhanson.com. You should check it out, and I'll tell you why later.
You should be subscribing. We are recording on Sunday, March 30th, and this episode will be up on Thursday, April 3rd, and on Friday, April 4th, Victor, I am going to be walking my daughter Elizabeth down the aisle.
So I'm going to be gaining a son-in-law. Ben, awfully nice guy.
Pray for them, folks, please. Good people.
Remember one thing, daughters are always the most loyal of all children to their fathers. Yeah, two daughters and i yeah i think they would uh i think they may beat me up but i think they would kill anyone who tried to beat me up so yeah mixed i love my girl i love all my kids they're just one by five they all love each other it's terrific okay victor speaking of young people we have uh topics on the vote.
We have young people who are engaging in activism by shoplifting at Whole Foods to give Jeff Bezos the middle finger. There's a new issue of Strategica out, and Victor is the editor and guru of Strategica, which is the Hoover Institution's online journal.
97, issue 97. I miss all of them still pretty folks go there and delve into the archives because it's quite interesting and to some degree permanent stuff.
And, Victor, there's a ton of really important Donald Trump executive orders and executive actions that he's taken that deserve your commentary. So we're going to get started on the youth vote.
And we'll do that when we come back from these important messages. If you're like me, you have a lot of product on your bathroom counter.
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Hello again. We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.
Victor from The Daily Caller, if I can pull these papers up in front of me, there's a headline here, huge concern, in quotes, top youth pollster fears Dems losing a grip on key generation of voters. So here's the story.
Harvard Kennedy School's Institute of Politics,

polling... losing a grip on key generation of voters.
So here's the story. Harvard Kennedy School's Institute of Politics polling director.
That's a mouthful. Jonathan De La Volpe expressed worry during a podcast that Democrats may be losing ground with younger voters.
This was on the Fast Politics with the infamous Molly Young Fast or Jung Fast. He said he fears the Democrat Party missed an extraordinary chance to solidify its influence with young Americans in recent years.
Bear with me here, folks. We'll get Victor's wisdom.
The concern I have for Democrats is just a handful of years ago, just a handful, I would say that every day for every thousand young people who turn 18, 700 of them, six or 700 of them have values aligned with the Democrat Party. It was like this incredible opportunity for Democrats that cement kind of their values with an emerging generation.
They didn't communicate that very well. And now we're living, you know, in what I think is the beginning of a post-ideological era with young people, where because of the concerns about economics, they're voting in what they would say is a much more pragmatic way than they did, you know, in maybe 16, 18, or 20.
So that's a concern. If younger people agree with Democrats on most issues, but they're not voting in the numbers that they voted with Democrats in the past.
That's a huge concern because my generation is just getting more conservative. Well, the statistics bear that out.
I mean, I think nationwide Kamala Harris, we usually call the youth vote 18 to 30. She may have won 53, 47, but the key thing is maybe a little 54.
But when you look at the individual states that matter, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, he won. Donald Trump, post-polls, won the youth vote in Michigan, and he came close to winning it in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
And why is that? Part of it is he appealed to the working-class youth of the country. And when you get Hulk Hogan or Kid Rock or Joe Rogan or Dana White, there was a direct appeal to working-class people.
And when you have Tim Walsh lecturing the youth about what a man is and what masculinity is, that is a counterproductive message. The other thing is people are rebellious.
I was, you were. So the idea that you're going to go to these indoctrination universities and you're going to sit there in your required ethnic studies class and the professor, some $140,000 a year gender, say a person starts to lecture you and says, well, you know, the history of the United States has been one of rampant sexism, racism,

and all of you need to have reparations in mind

and body.

Nobody wants to listen to that.

Nobody wants to listen to that

when you're young.

And so you react against that,

and they're reacting against

that liberal establishment

they come in contact with.

The other thing is,

the third leg of that stool is

Thank you. And they're reacting against that liberal establishment they come in contact with.
The other thing is, the third leg of that stool is, you know, I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about. When I was 18, 17, well, I'll preface it this way.
One of the most expensive places in the United States per square foot is the Monterey Bay area in general and Santa Cruz in particular. Okay.
They had a new university that opened. My parents, we went, I had two brothers there and a cousin living in Santa Cruz who wasn't attending the university.
So my dad, we were all paying the dorms. So one day we all got in the station wagon during our summer vacation.
He said, I'm just curious, what if all three of you guys lived in a house and you charged rent? And he said he had $6,000. That's what he had inherited his grandfather my grandfather so we were driving along and there was a model home that had the whole thing had gone under that the and it was not too far from the campus but it was 1100 square feet and three three little tiny bedrooms two baths not very big yard but it was.
No yard. And so he stopped and they, you know what they wanted, Jack? $23,000 at 7%.
And my dad got out, you know, he said, well, you know, tool shed now. Exactly.
And he said, if you guys put two or three people in there in the living room and everybody shared bedrooms, you could make the mortgage payment. A mortgage payment was $158 a month.
The taxes were about $500 a year. This is California on the coast in 1971.
And we did all the landscaping and we lived there for my whole time. When my father passed away, I traded my brother for farmland and I got that little house and remodeled it.
And my daughter lived there for 15 years. But I won't tell you what it's worth now, but it's gone up in value.
I don't even want to think about it. Just a philosophy.
Exactly. So the point was, in 1971, if you were a working-class kid, were making seven or eight dollars an hour as a union welder somewhere and you could make $30,000, you could make annually 20 or 30,000, which was the price of the house annually.
If that house is over a million dollars right now, nobody in the working makes a million dollars.

And so they understand that their generation got proverbially screwed, if I could use that profanity, excuse me, but they did. And there's no way they can buy houses on middle class wages, at least in a lot of the states.
And so they look at this thing, and if you can't buy a house,

then you're not going to get married at 23. And the age of first marriage has gone from 23, and I think it's up to 28 now.
And the age of, I wrote this in The Dying Citizen, and the age of your first child has gone from 27. I think it's to 33.
home ownership has gone from 26, or excuse me,

29, it's up to about 38,

37. So it has terrible consequences for the demographics.
And what we should be doing is telling all of these grandees, these very wealthy people that have these beautiful homes, that if you want this country to work,

and maybe it's going to level out.

The statistics I see where 345 people,

if we control immigration,

it will level out about 360, 370,

and start to decline at 1.6.

But the point I'm meaning,

we have such territory and such expanses.

We should be building houses

and letting these young people buy a home

Thank you. But the point I'm meaning, we have such territory and such expanses.
We should be building houses and letting these young people buy a home, and it would change their entire lives. And it's very important to do that.
And that's what this is all about. So we have these youth that are, what's the word for them? They're just a lost generation.
You go to campus, you roll up $200,000 and you get a worthless degree, your life is over. You know what I mean? It's not going to work.
And you need people to say to them, if you go to that university, do not listen to that counselor. Do not listen to those professors.
Just do the math. This is how much it's going to cost.
This is how much the interest is. And this is what this particular major will guarantee you.
And this is how many years it will take to pay back. And if you don't do that, you're going to end up thinking that you can go into Whole Foods and steal, right? Well, let's talk about that.
But I do want to add to what you just said. I graduated in 1982 from college, and I paid my way.
It was a close call. But I don't think anyone that graduated from 1983 or after could pay for school just by working hard.
There was no tuition at the University of California, Jack. No tuition.
Oh, none? I don't know. We only paid room and board in what they called quarterly fees.
I think they were $200. No tuition, and the tax rate was much less.
So then Gavin should tell us why the University of California used to have no tuition and it was affordable. Was it because of 10 million illegal aliens and half the people on Medi-Cal? Is that part of the expense? Or was it we overstaffed the university? We have unions, union, union, union.
I don't know what it was. Or was it too many administrators? They grew at about 200% over 20 years at the CSU and UCs.
But whatever it was, there was a golden age in California and elsewhere. And this generation, I feel really bad for them because they're not very well educated.
They didn't get good education. They got a weaponized, ideological, bastardized training, and they can't buy a home, and they're not getting married, and they're not having children and then we'll lead to our next this story about people justifying going in and stealing from yeah well i'm not justifying it but why do they why do they hate billionaires all of a sudden they surely didn't five to eight years ago obama and clinton created the democraticaire Alliance.
So the top 10 billionaires were all liberal. Every one of them.
Maybe Larry Ellison turned early, but when you look at all of them, there were things in common. Mike Bloomberg, I think, is number 10.
He has the all-time record of $1 billion he put into his own campaign.

George Soros, I saw that George Soros, from the moment he started giving, and he's not even in the top 10, he's given $27 billion to leftist causes. Sam Bankman Freed in the 2020 midterms alone gave $70 million.
Million. Mark Zuckerberg gave $419 million to absorb the work of registrars on the 2020 election.
Think of that. And they were all lined up.
Jeff Bezos, he gave the Bezos Award $100 million to Van Jones. He was beloved.
so then what happened well the billionaire class started to think and they realized that the left nothing is for free with the left and you know as mark andreason has said they called them in and said this is the the AI winner, this company, this company, this isn't.

We need this amount of money to do this, and you're going to do this,

and you're going to do that, and we'll allow you to do this,

or we're going to have the courts go after you.

And they said, these people are scary.

And the alternate message from Donald Trump was, you do what you want.

All I ask you is make a lot of money for the United States.

You make a lot of money for the United States, and I will protect you from the European censors, and I will protect you. That was the message.
So they all started to defect. Jeff Bezos did not endorse anybody at the Washington Post, so he went from beloved to enemy number one, just by being neutral.
Is it Dr. Song, the head of the L.A.
Times? He's worth $7 or $8 billion. He was a leptist, and now they hate him because he didn't endorse anybody in the election.
They hate Andreessen because he flipped. They hate David Sachs because he flipped.
They always hated Peter Till. They hate Zuckerberg now, you know that? Because he's neutral.
And they hate, of course, Elon Musk. I admit, Victor, at the inauguration, it was really weird to see that cast of characters standing behind Donald Trump that were four years or eight years earlier on the other political side.
Basically, the message among the left is we were a medieval party of the billionaire and the professional classes. And we lost the middle class and we had a huge subsidized poor.
And then these guys bolted. So all of a sudden, we love billionaires.
I get so sick of listening to Bernie Sanders and AOC talk about oligarchs.

Who do you think funded the Democratic Party?

And by the way, Bernie, I want to ask this question to you.

Who raised more money from July 27th when Joe Biden dropped out until the election. Donald Trump or Kamala Harris?

Kamala Harris raised $1 billion in that period, and Trump raised $340 million. If you combined all the money that Biden and Harris and Trump

raised, $4.7 billion,

$4.7 billion, 3.7, 4.7 billion, $1 billion more for Harris Biden than for Trump. $1 billion.
Where do you think that money came from? It came from Wall Street. It came from Silicon Valley.
It came from Hollywood. And so my point is that when Bernie Sanders and AOC get up on the stage and they mouth off about oligarchs, they are the party of oligarchs and billionaires, and they were happy with that as long as that money went to these crazy issues like WOGE, DI, ESG, New Green Deal.
But the moment those guys bolted, then all of a sudden this party was populist, and we don't like these people anymore because they don't give us all this money. Remember when Sam Bankman-Fried went broke after 2022, and they said, let's just go back, because he robbed people of about $8 to $10 billion.
Can we have the money back, Maxine Waters? And they went to all of them they said no no no no no that money was given to us by that felon we want it we're going to keep it they love billionaires they yeah they love billionaires as long as they're submissive they They love unprotected items in supermarkets.

We're going to get to that again in one second.

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What we were talking about a little bit ago, not beating around a bush, but dancing around, we'll get right to the heart of it. Here's a headline from a New York Post article yesterday.
Again, we're recording on March 30th. Shoplifters target Whole Foods, claiming they are liberating items from Lex Luthor boss Jeff Bezos.
Let me just quote one of these characters, Jesse. One of nearly a dozen Whole Foods thieves interviewed by the outlet said he would often steal entire bags of groceries, including expensive steaks, from the store with his roommates.
Quote, he just profits, he being basis. He just profits so much taking advantage of the little people.
So if we as little people can bite back a little bit, and that's me taking $100 maybe out of revenue for him, that's a little bit of a middle finger. There are other weirdos and not juvenile delinquents speaking along the same lines.
He's got it coming to them. This is the punishment he deserves.
Wasn't one person saying that he thought he had a right to take steaks? Yeah, that's the aforementioned Jesse. $33 rib steak because you're a working class person.
Yeah. Yeah.
I go to a supermarket, and I went there two days ago, and it was like the people were gawking at the ribeyes, you know what I mean, like touching them as if they could never afford them. Soylent green.
Yeah, so, I, this is anarchy. It'll unwind civilization when you rationalize theft and you rationalize selfishness and narcissism.
And Jeff Bezos, he's kind of like Elon Musk. I mean, I try to go in town and support local businesses, but I tell you, I have to drive all over town to find different items, or I just sit there with an Amazon Prime account and go ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, and then it says, you're an Amazon Prime account, this will be delivered tomorrow at your house.
And they are. I don't know how they do it.
I have no idea how they can do that with regional warehouses and all these different millions of items, and I don't know how they do it. But somebody is a genius to be able to do that.
And that has revolutionized, for good or bad, the entire idea of shopping worldwide. So he's not just, they're making fun of his head, Lex Luthor, bald-headed villain of Superman.
I understand that. But it's so funny about the left.
They worship money, they worship status, and then when the status and the money doesn't go completely in their direction, then they turn on them and they try to destroy them. I wish these people would understand who they're dealing with.
They're dealing with anarchists. And why is it January 6th, January 6th, January 6th and no one ever talks about May, June, July, August, September, October 2020 or they don't talk about Tesla.
But most of the violence, whether it's the assassination attempts or the

Scalise shooting, all of that,

are these...

They mostly come from left-wing

people now. How long has Antifa been

allowed to run amok in America?

It's decades now. Oh, I can remember

the Seattle

World Bank

or whatever it was. They went wild.

Yeah.

There was that famous video. Do you remember during

the George Floyd riots where these

Thank you. World Bank, or whatever it was.
They went wild. Yeah.

It was that famous video, do you remember during the George Floyd riots where these

spaghetti-armed Antifa guys pull up

at a sewer station and there's all the local

people start to walk toward them.

And they just are terrified

and get back in and drive out.

Yeah.

The hatred of

the quote-unquote rich,

I just saw this headline

earlier this morning that

Thank you. the hatred of the quote-unquote rich victor i didn't i just saw this headline earlier this morning that california members of the legislature are working with activists to put a referendum on the ballot i think they're calling it after mangione you know yeah they are luigi mangione bill yeah this is this and you read the bill, it's pretty frightening.
It says that nobody who, unless they have an MD, can evaluate whether a medical procedure is justified. Could I just give a suggestion to you people who are glorifying a murderer, a cold-blooded killer? First of all, you are discrediting your whole cause because most Americans think you're insane and to justify premeditated murder.
So you had a spoiled heir to a multi-million dollar inheritance who goes out and shoots a lower middle class kid that worked his way up to be a health executive and i'm in united health it does a great service to people there's times when it hasn't covered things that i've done and i've been you know upset about it but basically the insurance companies operating in california can't make a profit because there's so. If they pass that bill, they're going to do exactly what the homeowners.
So I just got a letter today saying that the people who helped me do the landscaping, that's not landscaping, our yard, have to raise their prices. And justifiably so.
Insurance got up. I got one about my house.
I got one about my liability insurance. They're all going sky high.
Why? Because of things like this. That California only thinks on one end.
They always think, if we pass a law, we can have utopia and heaven on earth. We're just going to pass a law.
Whatever medical service you need, you're going to get. But you're $8 billion.
So just think away for a minute, the private insurance companies. Just think, well, what if we had a public insurance where nobody was profiting? We do.
It's called Medi-Cal. And it insures one out of every two Californians.
And guess what? It's $8 billion in the annual hole. It can't afford 40% of its births.
40% of everybody born in California is paid for by the state, by Medi-Cal. And it is broke.
That's your socialist alternative. You are driving out all of the insurance companies by making mandates that they have to meet, but with no avenue to get the revenue to meet them.
And you really do believe, this is how they think, that there's this huge pot of gold in every company, and they have an obligation, Jack, to lose 8% to 10% every year because somewhere there's a big pot of gold in their basement that they stole from us, and they have to lose money. We don't care about how they make money because they have it.
They just have it. It grows on their trees.
That's how they believe. That's why they don't want to work for non-profits.
Where do the profits come? Where did this idea come from? Where does Mangione become a hero? Where does the idea you make mandates on all these insurance companies without worrying where they're going to get the revenue to meet them? I'll tell you where it comes from. It comes from the university.
The idea that you're going to pay these people good money to work nine months out of the year and have lifetime employment and hire only left-wing people who are not responsible for the consequences of the ideas they promulgate. They mostly are bourgeois people.
I know where they live. Every time I've gone to a university, I've gone to what they call the faculty ghetto.
It's a very nice place. It's a tree-lined suburb with comfortable people with elbow-patched jackets, and some guys have a pipe, and books and hardwood floors, and it's so so tasteful and they're tenured and they're always yelling and screaming about the car mechanic, the plumber, the electrician,

even though they, them in the abstract, they don't want to be around them in the concrete.

Victor, someday I want you to come on this, on this show in a tweed jacket and just a pipe. You don't just smoke it.
I know you don't smoke, but just... I was the only male.
I used to get teased for it. I have two siblings and a first cousin that grew up with us and my father, and I was the only one that never smoked or drank.
I drank a little bit, but I haven't drunk anything in 10 years. You're a good boy.
No, I just can't do it. Wow, wash some of those pills.
Donald Trump said that not too long ago. They asked him, you remember, and he said, no drugs, no tobacco, no alcohol.
Right. And I guess that means you...
Imagine if I did drink. I don't do...
I've never done any of that. And if you do that, I suppose he's saying you can have Big Macs.
Although RFK Jr. the other day said that...
Didn't he say that... I think he said that sugar was worse than heroin or cocaine.
Yeah, I mean, you look at these breakfast cereals, you think you'll lick in a sugar bowl. I'm enjoying all of these cabinet members and all of this counter-revolution because it's controlled chaos, and it's really fun to watch.
Yeah, that's the best term for it, and it is. Okay, Victor, we are going to get a little heady here with Strategica, the online journal you oversee, and it's got a new issue out about the Ukraine.
And we'll get to that when we come back from these important messages. we are back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show, recording on Sunday, the 30th of March.
Today's episode is up on Thursday, April 4th. Victor's got a website, TheBladeOfPerseus, VictorHanson.com.
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If you're a Victor addict, he's everywhere. Okay, Victor.
Now, new strategic issue number 97 has a lead essay by Jacob Greigel. You will pronounce it correctly for me.

The Strategic and Military Pathways to a Peaceful Ukrainian Settlement.

And this is one of several pieces in this edition.

And he says in brief, the likely scenario, I'm quoting him here,

the likely scenario is that the war will simply be interrupted

rather than reaching a long-term settlement, removing the initial causes of the conflict. That, I guess, seems pretty obvious of what Russia wants.
You know what, it's just very common sense, well-written, well-argued. He's a very big supporter of Ukraine.
It's sort of like we just saw some other people write from Harvard, the guy that I'll think of his name in a second. But it's basically it would be nice to take back Crimea and Donbass that were absorbed by Putin.
That's not going to happen. They don't have the wherewithal to do it.
Putin wants the 7 or 8 million Russian speakers incorporated. It would be nice for Ukraine they think to be in NATO.
That's not going to happen. And most NATO countries privately don't want it to happen because they're terrified of Article 5 coming.
And Russia doesn't want it. The United States doesn't want it.
That's not going to happen. And are they going to get back all their territory that is being now fought over from the February 24, 2022 embarkation point when Putin started? No.
Would it be good if they did? Yes. But they've lost 12 million people that have fled the country.
The country's in ruins. And the old Joe Biden strategy, we're just going to go as long, as long as it takes.
So the Europeans, this mindless, poor and Jacob Greibel is basically saying that's not going to be a strategy whether we like it or not and he probably doesn't like it there has to be kind of a deal and the deal is you arm Ukraine to the teeth you get western money to rebuild it you have an economic zone a corridor near the front like a South Korea, North Korea, DMZ, ball or barbed wire.

And then... an economic zone, a corridor near the front like a South Korea, North Korea DMZ ball or barbed wire and then you are internally vigilant the way Finland was for 70 years with the Soviet Union and you tell Putin and his successors we will fight you like we did before and you will not take Kiev like you did not and And that's the ceasefire.
And I don't understand the left. They really do want to arm them in a fashion that 28 million people are going to defeat 144 million people.
That's not going to happen with 10 times the GDP. And Europe talks all this great stuff.
They stormed out. Trump, you know, and he temporarily suspended aid, and they got together.
I did a daily, I guess it was, I don't know if it was a London Times interview, and the guy was ranting and raving, one of the guests, the host, this is a good, this is a turning point, and France and Britain are going to spearhead, boots on the ground, and this is going to going to happen. You know, and I politely said, well, you're disarmed, but even if he's disarmed, you have more wherewithal Putin.
So just put 1,000 of your 2,000 jets, I don't know, 2,000 of your 3,000 tanks, got more than anything, just put them over there. Well, you know, we need backup.
Well, why do you need backup? You don't like us. So, he's outlining what everybody knows.
So, now it's just a question of incentives. And the only thing, Trump's got to be careful.
He's pushed Zelensky pretty hard, but Putin knows that. So Putin thinks that while he talks about a ceasefire, he can push more and more and more and more westward because he thinks Ukraine is...
So Donald Trump is going to be in a very awkward position of having to bolster Ukraine to stop that push while they border, the demarcation point is fluid.

So that's going to be a tough thing.

But it's a very good article.

In the same issue, there's one by Ralph Peters.

And we try in Strategica, in the military history,

I try to get people across the political spectrum.

Ralph's a great guy.

He was a commentator, as you remember, on Fox.

He was a lieutenant colonel.

I mean, he's a fiery guy, fiery guy. He's a fiery guy, but he's also very well, he's very learned.
He was on Fox for years. I always enjoyed his commentary.
He doesn't like Donald Trump, and he's critical of him. But basically his argument in that essay is

Donald Trump, I mean, whether you like Donald Trump or not,

and I don't, I being Ralph Peters now,

Russia can no longer take all of you.

Ukraine will survive.

Western money will be in there.

Trump, whom I don't like, Peter's saying we'll invest money and that will be a tripwire. And 40 years from now, Ukraine will remain independent.
And Jacob Greibel says it's kind of like in World War I. It's in a bad place between Europe and Russia.
But it has to be internally vigilant and armed. And then there's a third essay by my new colleague, Barry Strauss, who was a tenured professor at Cornell, classical history.
And he's written pretty much independently. He resonates these two different views as well, that you've got to arm Ukraine to protect what's left of Ukraine, which is most of the country.
They're not going to get back what was stolen during the Obama administration, but they can deter him with their own weaponry, and you need to have domestic arms. We're starting to get to a consensus, I think, on everybody's side.
And all of the bluster and the braggadocio from Europe, we're going to do this, you're not going to do anything. Promises, promises.
You're not going to go into your EU parliament or your Italian parliament or your Dutch parliament and say, hey, everybody, we've got to spend 4% GDP and arm us to the teeth.

And that means no more free tuition at the universities.

No, they won't do that.

Right.

Not on.

They'll talk about it, and then they'll blast us for not.

Attack America.

Not as Americans.

That Trump.

They're just illiterate savages. They won't go over there and do what they're supposed to do and protect us from the Russians so we can be Greek philosophers and tell those Roman legionnaires how to fight.
Everybody's sick of it. That's why they're so mad at J.D.
Vance that every time, whether it's overt or covert, it's like a hammer and a nail. know don't bail out europe europe europe europe europe

they're facing a 12-year trump advance potential trump advance reign you think they would try to accommodate to the these potential realities soon i don't know i don't underestimate the left I never do.

The left, every time a person has said that,

it's Water that, it's

Watergate, or

it's Iran-Contra,

or

Iraq, George W. Bush

is a Nazi, or

George W. Bush caused the 2008

meltdown. It had nothing to do with

Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and all

guaranteed subprime loan.

No, no, no. There'll be something like

that.

I wish I wasn't

Thank you. do with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and all are guaranteed subprime loan.
No, no, no. There'll be something like that.
I wish I wasn't so pessimistic, but the left is very creative. It just can't govern.
I just ate an apple. I thought I was playing Pierre Polybad.
What does it mean? Yeah, what's... I forget.
You made a reference to... Just off the topic, did you see that Trump...
Two things happened in the Canadian tiff with us. One is Mr.
Carney, and I had said Carrie, and I'm so glad somebody corrected me, but Mr. Carney, the liberal technocrat who spent a lot of time in England, he was just caught in Claudine Gay fashion that he allegedly, I want to make sure I say allegedly, plagiarized his thesis.
But then Pulev Ebb, Pulev, Pulev, Pulev, Pulev. He had criticized Trump, and Trump took that personally.
And so then Trump, I don't know the game with Trump's playing.

It's either three-dimensional or just tit for tat. So he said that he gets along with Carney really well and he had a great conversation with.
Carney had just said that the association is over with. Right.
And he's up for election. You have to say that you don't like Americans right now in Canada to get elected.
So so i don't know if trump is trying to help the conservative mr pierre by saying that he and carney get along and that's the kiss of death to the liberals or that he really likes a liberal guy because pierre made fun of him but it was nice to him yeah yeah it's hard to know we've talked about this before, but the injection of a U.S. president so overtly into a...
I mean, I don't know from the other... We're America.
There's only one America, so we have a different role with other nations. But when Obama talked about Brexit and you guys better vote for Brexit, you knew at that very moment that Brexit was going to win because he injected himself.
Same thing with Netanyahu. He sent his campaign team over there to overthrow the Netanyahu.
Same thing with Biden. They tried to overthrow the Netanyahu government.
If it had been any right-wing person doing that to a left-wing government, they would have said that was an attempted coup. I just worry if there's a similar thing with Trump and Canada on that.
I don't think we should get involved with Canada. I think there's zero support that Americans want anything to do with Canadian sovereignty.
I've never met an American yet who says, oh, I would like to absorb Canada. I like Canada.
I love Canadians. They're nice people.
But they have a different tradition than we do. On the scale of left to right, their conservative party is sort of like Obama.
And the left is off the charts. So we don't want to absorb that country.
We want to be friends with it. All we ask is two things.
Just please meet your 2% investments in military expenditures so that you can help us protect the North American and European continents. And number two, there's no reason to run up a $63 billion surplus against your own friends.
Just scale it down to $10 or $20 billion. I think that's what Trump is saying to them when he said he had a great call.
I think this whole thing, kind of impose a 25% tariff, what he's saying to everybody is until we get our own house in order, you can run up surpluses, but you can't do what you're doing now. So Mexico,

you've got to get down from $175,

$177 down to $30 or $40 pretty quick. Canada, you get

down to $20 billion.

And I think if they say no,

they're going to be in trouble.

I'd love to...

I'll do this after

the show's over. I've got to see what Conrad Black

is saying about all this, our favorite Canadian.

I love Conrad. Con Conrad, he's been working on his multi-volume History of Western Civilization.
It's very good. I just read the chapters in the 13th to 15th century.
Oh, wow. And blurbed them.
The Ancient was very good. He's a beautiful writer.
He's a beautiful prose writer.

One paragraph he could be talking about Pope Clement and then the French Revolution and disco. I don't know.
He has this ability to weave all these different things together. His whole life was hijacked by Patrick Fitzgerald.
My high school class. Yeah, a first prosecutor who went to extraordinary lengths to bankrupt him and to destroy him.
All these special prosecutors did. Same thing with Scooby Libby.
Also Pat Fitzgerald. Well, they have to come out with a scalp.
That's the goal. Jack Smith was the only one to stop it.
Think about it. Yeah, remember, go way back.
Lawrence Walsh, right? Yeah. Four days, was it five days before the election? He kneecapped George Washington.
Yeah, he tried to ruin Weinberger. And Donald Trump, his opponents can say all they want, but I'm writing this book called How Trump Returned, The Return of Trump.
And I've been going back over what people were saying, Jack, between January 6th of 2021 and the midterms of 2022. And I looked at the polls.
It is the most amazing comeback in political history. I cannot, every single pundit said the following, he has no chance of ever being nominated.
I'm talking about Republican conservatives too. He will be in jail.
He will be bankrupt. His family will probably be in jail.
He's ruined. And every time, without exception, that there was an indictment announced,

the following happened.

He went to polls two or three points, and then he went up three or four points.

And they had no idea of what they were dealing with.

And he never gave up.

And they kept saying, he's brought it on himself. And then they would issue a gag order.
And then they would do this. And they could not, he was Nietzschean.
They could not destroy him. But they tried.
They did everything in the world. That Mar-a-Lago raid, I've been reading about it in detail.
Gosh. 14,000 documents, 102.007 were classified.
They came with little labels prepared to scatter the thing all over the floor and then label it classified. It was disgusting.
Anyway, that's off topic. Well, I want to bring up a topic, then we're going to go to a break, then we have two more topics.
What's the ballpark date of publication of that book you're working on? The deadline is September 1st. It has eight chapters.
Chapter one is the nadir, the descent. Part one is the descent, and part 2, there's four chapters called the descent and four chapters called the ascendance.
In the descent, it is the election of 2020, January 6, and the opposition to Trump from within his party and then the media, and he was just persona non grata. Then chapter 2 is a hiatus, and I say this is what people did.
This is why they feared Trump. This was his agenda.
This is who he was. And then chapter 3 is these are who his enemies are.
This is the antithesis Trump what's the left wing project the Biden, the extremism and then chapter 4 is the lawfare and I go through every single case of the Mar-a-Lago raid and that chapter is called Nietzsche and Trump and I finished that one as well and the rough draft and that is about how they tried to do everything. I go through the E.
Jean Carroll, I go through the Alvin Bragg, the Latita James, the Fanny Willis, the Jack Smith they try to get him off the ballot, the Marlock, and how he endured and triumphed.

I just finished chapter 5. These are rough drafts with footnotes.
I'm going to go back and read about 100 or 200 books I have on the list to get more information in detail. But the chapter 5 is the campaigns of 2024.

You remember that, Jack?

Right from a moment after the spectacular win by Ron DeSantis,

which was really incredible, one million vote margin.

And the polls had him up eight to ten points over Donald Trump.

And then I go through the primaries, and that primary was over by the New Hampshire. I mean, DeSantis pulled out after Iowa, and Nikki Haley had lost New Hampshire, and then she lost Carolinas, and she was out by March.
There was no primary. He just clobbered everybody.
And nobody thought that was going to be possible. There were so many people who said, if he is indicted, one, Nikki Haley said, if he gets convicted of one indictment, he's all through.
So, you know, that didn't happen. 31 indictments by a crazy Allen Bragg.
So then, anyway, I do that, Nietzsche, and then this one was on the campaign and how he beat Biden-Harris, why he beat the assassination attempts, the garbage comment, MacDonald. So then I only have two chapters left.
One is the Trump administration at home and the Trump administration abroad, and then a short epilogue, MAGA after Trump, if there's going to be, you know, what happens to Trump's agenda when he's termed out. So I think I've got almost 75,000.
I've been writing every day when the flu. I try to write 3,000 to 4,000 words a day and do 10 footnotes.
You're just nuts. But anyway, it'll be...
I don't know anyone with your capacity to produce so much content. Anyway, I plan to turn it in a month earlier, but I have a research assistant, and she's right now going over all my footnotes to make sure they're accurate, and she's putting my chapters together.
And then I'm going to try to write these next two chapters in two months. It's hard to do the last quarter of the book because how do you write about where's the arbitrary cutoff point? Because, I mean, the signal thing, all this stuff happens.
So it's such a turbulent time, it's hard to know what's going on. I did say, anyway, I'm really happy.
I've learned a lot about it, and it just seems, gosh, when I looked at that January, I have a whole chapter on that thing. And when you look at what people were writing, what Liz Cheney was saying, and he was never going to do this.

They were going to do this to him. They were going to bar him.
He was a private

citizen. They were going to try

him. They were going to sue him.
They were

going to do all of this. They didn't

understand a simple

point.

The ends never justify

the means. So if you postulate

that he's evil and you're perfect, and you have every right to do things that are illegal, and that's what they did to him. All of those lawfare things, they all had things in common, but three of them were they never would have charged anybody else but Trump.
Number two, they would have never charged Trump if he just said, I'm not going to run again. And number three, they never had, in a disinterested fashion, one chance of convincing the public that he was guilty of any of those charges.
Right. Well, 12 jurors maybe, but they're...
Not the people, though. They cherry-picked judges and they cherry-picked juries.
And every single one of those people blew up. Fannie Willis blew up with Nathan Wade.
And Jack Smith blew up with his own ethical problems. And N.
Goran had ethical... And Mershon had ethical problems, and Kaplan had ethical problems.
The weirdest thing is that on November 18th of 2022, three things happened within a 24-hour period. Number one, and remember, three days earlier, on November 15th of 2022, Donald Trump declared his candidacy.
One week before he declared his candidacy, Joe Biden complained that Merrick Garland had not done enough to indict Donald Trump. He said that.
Then he declared his candidacy. Three days later, on one day, Jack, the following three things happen.
The third-ranking prosecutor in Merrick Garland's DOJ had come from the Latina James New York State Attorney's Court. After he got that huge fine, $400 million plus, and the preliminary fine, he went to work for Merrick Garland.
On November 18th, he resigned and he popped up just a few days later as the federal prosecutor in charge of the state, I should say the municipal New York City Alvin Bragg suit. In other words, he came in there because he knew it was a federal offense that they had changed into a state offense.

It would be a job demotion. Michael Colangelo.
Michael Colangelo. And he was running the Alvin Bragg.
That same day that he quit to go join Alvin Bragg. And he kind of, he quit.
And then he, you know, three or four days later, he went to work. The same day Nathan Wade was in the White House counsel's office

charging the Biden administration as he was briefing them about the course of the Fannie Will. The same day, Joe Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith Special Counsel to go after Trump.
All three happened. I thought there was no collusion.
Yeah, no collusion. Yeah.
Gosh. You know who found that out? Jim Jordan's committee.
Jim Jordan, I read the transcript of Jim Jordan's, it was actually very well done, that committee. If he hadn't have been in charge of that oversight and weaponization of the government committee, it was really good what he did.
Victor, what you were saying before about what happened after January 6th, it kind of reminded me a little of Thomas Beckett, who will not rid me of this priest. But if you're going to rid the priest, you've got to kill him.
You know, it's funny you said that. I said that in the book.
I said exactly that. Biden was wandering around the halls of the White House.
Who will not relieve me? And everybody knew it. He was really angry at Merrick Garland.
Merrick Garland weaponized the DOJ. But when he left office, he gave an interview in December, remember? And he said he regretted appointing Merrick Garland.
Think of this, everyone. He'd been too hard on Hunter.
Remember, Merrick Garland had got his own prosecutors to overrule the IRS auditors. And if they had not been for that judge, Hunter would have been out scot-free.
He was anyway with Joe Biden's pardon, which he promised he'd never do. And then he said he was too hard on Hunter and he was too soft on Trump, even though he spent millions of dollars on Jack Smith.
So it's... Amazing.
Anyway, I think it'll be out in January or February, I hope, of 2026. Oh, wow.
Okay. Relatively...
I was going full blast and I got this creepy influenza, but I'm sorry. Indestructible.
All right. We, you know what? We're going to end this today's episode with your thoughts on a couple of really big, I think Donald Trump executive orders, which on the Smithsonian, on the culture, on election integrity, and we'll do all that, Victor, when we come back from these final important messages.
We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show. This episode is out on Thursday, April 3rd.
Donald Trump last week, so probably by now when you're listening to this, maybe 10 days ago, issued, as he has been doing from the beginning, just a string of like pow, kazam, executive orders that, gosh, there's so, the writing in them, by the way, Victor, aside from the technical stuff. They're very well written.
Oh, my gosh, yeah, like taking them down. Actually, a third one that I didn't mention was making the District of Columbia safe and beautiful.
But he has one,

Trump executive order, restoring truth and sanity to American history, which part of that, I, let me encourage our listeners to visit whitehouse.gov and click on the executive of actions and read these things for yourself.

But, for example, this one goes after the Smithsonian and how it has injected everything it does with race and DEI. It also on the side mentions Restore Independence Hall in time for the demisesquicentennial or whatever the technical term is, July 4th, 2026.
We have a truly important executive order, preserving and protecting the integrity of American elections. And these things all came out like one day after another, after another.
And it's like, wow, he said he was going to do this, and he is doing it. Any thoughts on any of these actions? They're all...
They're not... I mean, they're counter-revolutionary in the sense their reaction to the madness of the last 20 years, but they're pretty much consistent with the history and the traditions of the country.
He's just saying, this generation hijacked our country, and they took it, and they didn't have support for what they're doing. And they renamed everything.
They tore down statues. They defaced our monuments.
They corrupted our institution. We're going to go back to what they were.
He's not trying to say I'm making them right-wing conservative. He's just saying that we're going to look at classical beauty and architecture, and we're going to promote museums that honor the people who died in Okinawa or iwo jima or d-day and we're not going to keep fixating on world war ii was more than the japanese internment and the dropping of the atomic bombs and segregated soldiers but what he's saying is that the left just goes into this totality of the American experience, culture, architecture, history,

and they fixate on its pathologies,

and they apply their own postmodern standards,

and they retroactively apply them back in history,

and then they condemn people as wanting or inferior to us.

But they never ask the sensual question.

There's two questions they never ask. Number one, Mr.
Antifa, Mr. Professor, Mr.
Student, Mr. Thief at Whole Foods, if somebody gave you an M1 and they put you on Iwo Jima, do you think you'd do a better job than the people that died there? I don't think so.
Mr. Spaghetti Arms Antifa, would you think you could get on a B-17 and fly 40 missions without fighter escorts in daylight bombing over occupied France? I don't think so.
And if you're going to say, well, I wouldn't want to do that. Well, that was important so that you can do what you're doing today.
That's another thing they never ask. And then the second question they never ask is, you were judging your predecessors.
Do you think that your successors will judge you and apply their new standards? If they do so, do you think there'll be a time ever when people will look back at 2025 and say, oh my God, those people had a million people defecating, injecting, fornicating, urinating on the streets of the major cities like they were medieval, I don't know, Paris or London. Even Dickens doesn't describe things like that or Or even Dumas doesn't.
Or Victor Hugo doesn't. My God, what do they do? Or they're going to say, Wait a minute, these people talked about truth and beauty and they were selling body parts of aborted fetuses and using them in animal experiments? And oh my God, they had a million abortions per year and about 15,000 were late term where the fetus was killed in the birth canal.
These people did that? Who were they? What kind of people were they? Wait, they had 75,000 people OD because the Chinese sent fentanyl to the cartels and this administration opened the border and let 12 million people come in and enough fentanyl to kill more people than died in Korea and Vietnam combined in a year. They never think people are going to ask that.
Never think they're going to ask that. They will ask that.
And so... This disdain for people who look at Mount Rushmore and the Statue of Liberty and get a lump in their throat instead of looking at some blank canvas, you know, the schmear.
Obviously, they look down on us, but there is resentment there too,

Victor, that they,

some significant

percentage of

them have to look at the plumber

and the steel worker and be jealous

that they can do that.

I found something out in that.

I think I've mentioned that so many times.

I was given a great gift that I commuted

from this farm to go as an undergraduate, and I came home every three weeks, clunker car. And then I did the same thing at Stanford.
I came home every three weeks and worked on the farm. And then I was here all summer, and then I was a professor at behavioral science at Stanford for two years, and then I was at Hoover for the last, gosh, 22 years.
So I go back and forth, and you really get a snapshot of a postmodern society on the California, northern California liberal enclave and a traditional society in agrarian central California. And I've come to the conclusion that, you know what they hate the most, the left? They hate people who believe.
They think that if you get up every morning and you're working very hard and you're married and you have family and you're trying to follow the law, that you're a fool and you don't know of any alternative. They never think that the farmer or

the plumber or the electrician is aware of all the alternatives to his existence. But he has systematically said, I reject them because they lead to racism.
And I would rather lead an unromantic, unknown life as part of my duty for the country and the society, not break the law, produce children, buy a home, improve the community, work hard, leave an inheritance, and I don't have anything to apologize. That's what made this country.
And they think these people are just clueless. They don't know anything, Jack, about the planet is doomed and you can't have children as AOC taught us because you're bringing them into a hot world.
They don't know anything about the history of racism. Yeah, they know all of that.
And their attitude is we're better than the alternative. You don't have to be perfect to be good and press on.
And that's what they hate. They hate people who just press on and don't just stop and get paralyzed and ossified and trash their society trash their

government side with the anarchists defend trend say that mahoub khalil is a hero all of that that's what they don't like i i just learned something here i did not know you were you taught behavioral science?

In 1991,

I was a

visiting professor of

classical You taught behavioral science? In 1991, I was a visiting professor of classics at Stanford University,

and I was supposed to be there for two years, but let's just say,

and I was being considered for a senior appointment,

but let's just say politely that I was considered too conservative or too agrarian.

I had written two books.

I was only 37.

And let me just contextualize.

I was offered that appointment in 1989 by the chairman.

And he actually wrote a letter offering me tenure.

But I couldn't go because my mother had a meningioma brain tumor and so i was i stayed for two years and then i got a terrible case of mononucleosis and i kept working i got kind of really ill with complications anyway that lasted for years yeah i did four and five years yeah they wouldn't get over it. I got over it.
And anyway, by the time I went up there, that department had radically changed. It was the beginning of a gender gay emphasis.
I wasn't opposed to it, but I didn't think that was traditional. So let me just say that I wasn't quiet about it.
So when they saw me come, that year was explosive. I was also unfortunately named the outstanding teacher of Greek and Latin that year when that was not good at a research institution, believe it or not.
If you were, because I had built this classics, because that was meant that you were a popularizer. And the book that I had written, The Western Way of War, had sold a lot of copies.
And that was so, I was set, it was Alfred Knapp's book. So they said, he's a popularizer, and he's just a showboating class and got this award, and he's an agrarian military historian, and he's not sensitive to gender issues.
So what happened is they boycotted my, I've never talked talked about it, but I had 16 people signed up, undergraduate and graduate. They boycotted.
I had three. And then they said, you can't get students.
Every time I taught a course in Aristophanes, the students went back and told the left-wing faculty that I was too pedestrian. I wasn't acquainted with Lacan and Derrida, and Foucault.
So anyway, after a year, they decided to vote, and they brought in all the part-time and visitings that they could vote, and it was still deadlocked. And so I met the dean.
I won't mention who he was, because I know him today, but he had dinner with me, and he said that I was an affirmative action candidate because I came from Cal State

Fresno and they never hired state inferior professors. And I asked him if he'd read my file and he said, no, I don't have to.
I just saw the word Fresno State. So I knew you weren't qualified.
So I said something I shouldn't have done. I said, you can go F yourself and take your effing department and I'm done.
And then they had a problem because I had a two-year contract. So I called up Cal State Fresno and said, you know, I'm sick of these people commuting.
I don't feel all that great. I want to come back.
And they said, well, your replacement doesn't have my two-year replacement at Cal State.

So I called her up and I said, you need it? She goes, no, I'm broke. I need to replace you next year.
So then I went back to Stanford and I said, look, I had a two-year. So that year, I don't know how it happened.
I know the person later, I met him, but they only had one or two national endowment. I won a national endowment to write a book

The Other Greeks

about the agrarian creation of the city-state and then the powers that be at Stanford to get rid of me because I had this letter it was very funny one of the people who was engineering this I said you don't realize this is the letter you wrote offering me this position with tenure. And they said, well, what would it take for you to go away and never come back? I said, I could go.
I have a national endowment, but it's only for, I think it was $15,000 or something. So I have three kids.
And they said, well, you can go to this Center for Behavioral Studies. And it was wonderful because everything works out well.
Everything will come to a person, just wait. You know who the visiting classicist was there? Donald Kagan.
And you know whose office was right next to mine? Donald Kagan. So I got there and every day at lunch, he knocked on the door and said, you're working too hard.
You've been here since 6 in the morning. It's time for you and I to have lunch.
And then he'd knock on the door at 4 o'clock, and he said, you're quitting right now, and you and I are going to go have tea. And I did that every day, and I got to know him.
Did you know him at Yale when you started? I didn't know him very well at all. I had reviewed his book.
I must confess, I have never met a classicist that I admired more than him. There's something about him.
He grew up in Brooklyn, and he was hard-nosed, but he was practical, and he was underestimated. He had a knack for understanding Greek politics and history, four-volume history.
I really liked him. I wasn't one of the students.
I knew all of the students very well, Williamson Murray, Paul Ray, Barry Strauss. They were all excellent students.
He was very famous for training excellent graduate students and doing everything in his possibility to ensure they got a job. Unfortunately, my thesis advisor basically wrote me a note and it said, you will turn in your thesis on a Monday of every month, each chapter.
I will write a one or two sentence, and then you will leave. And I did.
I never, he despised me at the end. Later he became, he kind of apologized and became cordial.
But as I said, somebody said, called me when I applied for like 20 jobs in 1980. I was farming.
I was only 26. I had a PhD.
But the weird thing was, this is about academia, and the guy says, hello, I'm from the university. I won't mention the university.
And you are not going to get a job. And I really liked you.
And I thought you were really, your thesis was great, but you're not going to get a job because you don't know what's in your file. And you better request it.
So I had, you know, I had a, we sent to a business on Hanson Farm. and I read it and oh my God, this person looked at graduate school.
Your thesis advisor? Yes. It was just the most underwhelming thing you could imagine.
And the chairman was the same thing. He, he, he looked at all the, I got done at that time, the quickest, I did the whole program in two and a half years.
I went to American school for a year. I wrote my thesis in a year.
But it was like he is not an intellectual. He does not speak, doesn't understand the intellectual world that's offered to him.
Never he had all A's on his exam except one or he finished quick. It was none of that.
It was he would be this and and he would be, it was like two lines. So I was, but you know what happens when you're in that system and you speak up, you get pounded down, but there's always somebody else.
There's like a guy like Don Kagan, or I went to American school, there's a guy like Colin Edens. They always look for people who need help, and that's the way Don Kagan was.
Well, that's the way you've been. Well, he taught me.
All those people did. My parents did that, too.
They were always trying to help people. But he was a wonderful person.
I wasn't as close. I liked his two sons, Bob and Fred.
They kind of drifted politically, but I liked them both. But I really like Donald Kagan and his wife, Myrna.

And he was a wonderful...

I was very lucky to spend that year because I was a lost soul.

I didn't know what I was going to do.

I had a $15,000 grant and no job.

Well, here you are.

And here we must end because...

We've got to go. I went too long.

No, no, no. Victor, you're terrific.
More than terrific. People rate the show on Apple.
Thank you for doing that. There are so many comments now because this show is on so many platforms.
I saw a standard YouTube episode may have like 400 comments. A rumble has many.
It's just staggering. So thanks for folks that take the time.
I know I do, Victor. I'm sure Sammy, great Sammy Wink, try to listen or read what you're saying.
And pick out every once in a while, pick out some. Here's one I found on Rumble, a comment about the show, from Oleen, O-L-E-N-E, Oleen, who wrote, I totally enjoy these podcasts with Victor Davis Hanson.
I moved to Kentucky from rural Fresno to be with my daughter because I needed to help her in my waning years. So it is so hard to give up the beautiful weather in California, even though Kentucky is so beautiful, but agree totally with the awful leadership there.
Your review of our country and issues of today is fantastic, and I listen every chance I get. Thank you, all capitalists.
Thank you to B.D. Hansen for being one of the few people I listen to in California.
Sure hope California can return to the super state I grew up in. It was safe.
I went to a great school district and loved my young years in raising my children there. Thanks again, Mr.
Davis Hanson. Another lost Californian we needed, but I don't blame her one bit.
Not one bit. Well, Victor, I write Civil Thoughts, the free weekly email newsletter for the Center for Civil Society that attempts to strengthen civil society.

If you'd like to get it, and I know you will like to get it, and I know you will like it when you get it, go to civiltoughts.com.

Sign up every Friday.

We'll send you an email with 14 recommended readings.

It's totally free.

I'm not selling you names.

No monkey business.

So thank you for that.

Go to Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus.

Subscribe there.

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