More WWII ‘Revisionist’ History & the Vulgarity of a Kennedy Scion

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen, and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

And he's a man with the website, The Blade of Perseus.

VictorHanson.com is the address.

You should be checking it out early and often.

And you should be subscribing too.

We are talking on Saturday, the 23rd of August.

Our schedules are a little screwy this week.

So this episode's up on Thursday.

I know it's way out from when we are talking, but

Victor's wisdom is evergreen.

So what are we going to talk about today?

Well, let's begin the show, Victor.

Two topics.

One is this interview that Tucker Carlson has had with a...

I don't even call him a faux historian, but an alleged historian, David Cullum.

We have the grandson of John F.

Kennedy acting like a lunatic, I think, in public.

And then we have a topic I wanted to get to on the previous show about India and its relations with the U.S.,

language, the left's trying to rewrite the language book.

It's also great news, the 100th issue of Strategica has come out.

We'll get to that towards the end of the show.

We'll start off with Tucker when we come back from these important messages.

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We are back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

By the way, I'm Jack Fowler.

I'm a man blessed, lucky, fortunate to be able to ask Victor twice a week his thoughts on a variety of topics.

So, Victor, let's get to the first topic: Tucker Carlson and David Cullum.

David Cullum is a professor at,

oh my gosh, it's up in Ithaca, New York.

Cornelly.

New Cornelly.

Yeah, yeah.

Organic chemistry professor there.

And I only saw a clip of this on

X, but he was talking about World War II.

And this is not the first time Tucker has had some controversial person talking about World War II.

And Cullum said, one can make the argument we should have sided with Hitler and fought Stalin.

Patton said that.

He didn't say that.

And maybe there wouldn't have been a Holocaust, other things that were kind of

more than revisionist history.

Victor, we've been down this road before with another.

Gerald Cooper, yeah.

Yeah.

So your thoughts on this.

Well, you know, I don't care that he doesn't have a PhD in history or languages or anything.

I just,

I just evaluate, and I only saw the short clip that Tucker put on.

And in it, almost everything he said was untrue.

He said, for example,

we should have sided with Hitler against Stalin.

Now, he didn't say what a lot of neo-isolationists and Charles Lindbergh had said at the time, that we should stay out of the war and not help the Soviet Union.

So when Hitler invaded

the Soviet Union on June 22nd, 1941,

we had not had Pearl Harbor yet, so the isolationists were anti-communists said,

as bad as Hitler is,

he's no worse than Stalin.

Stalin has killed 20 million of his own people, so let them fight each other.

And

that was the attitude that Stalin had had when he himself conducted the Molotov-Ribbon

Pact of non-aggression in August 23rd of 1939, which started World War II

just a week later.

And Stalin's attitude was, we're going to stay out of it and give money to Hitler and support and oil and hope that Hitler and France and Britain kill each other off and then we'll just take over.

So there was cynicism on all of these things.

But he didn't say that.

He didn't say that I think that it's kind of like Henry Kissinger said of the Iran-Iraq war.

Is it possible that both of them could lose?

He didn't say that.

He said that we should have sided with Hitler.

And then as an afterthought, he said maybe the Holocaust would have been avoided.

The Holocaust, the imprint, the Genesis, read Mein Kamp

and look at the hunger plan that was created before he went in to the Soviet Union.

It was a plan to denude occupied Ukraine of its food.

And there was a commissar order and there was an

communications among the Wehrmacht at the highest levels of OKW that when they went in in June 22nd, they had not gone in yet, that they were going to starve millions of people and take the food of occupied Ukraine and send it back to Germany and kill two birds with one stone, they thought.

Second, they were not going to

allow commissars to live.

They were going to execute them upon capture.

And number two, it wasn't that they didn't have facilities for the 1.5 million Russian prisoners.

They didn't care.

They wanted them to die.

And the Einzen Gruppen, the people who killed Jews, had been active since the first day of the war in Poland.

On September 1st, 1939, when they went in, there was probably, in that three and a half long week, there were seven or eight thousand Jews that were murdered.

So what he's saying is there wouldn't have been a Holocaust, but

the forerunners of the Holocaust, he'd already killed,

by the time he went into the Soviet Union, he had been at war

for about a year and a half, over a year, about almost

two years,

from September 1st of 39 to June 22nd of 41.

He had already killed thousands of Jews.

He had killed thousands of people in the occupied, not so much in France, but in Poland and the East.

And it was by deliberate intention.

So the idea that we were going to partner with this madman and then we were going to use our influence with the SS or with Goebbels or

with Himmler and persuade them not to kill more Jews.

It was intrinsic in Nazi ideology to kill Jews for Lebensraum, to open up the East, kill Russians and Slavic peoples and Jews.

It's all, it's in Mein Kalm.

So that's number one.

Then he said something that even Patton said would agree with him essentially by saying we should have allied.

He did not say that.

He said a lot of very controversial and unhinged things,

but he said something to the effect in a variety of circumstances that after he was pro-consul

of Bavaria and in charge of getting the water, the sewage, the electricity for the whole Munich area and larger, Patton said, and was reprimanded by Ike because he allowed people who were Nazi Party members, former, who were in the bureaucracy to maintain their jobs of recreating the infrastructure.

And then he went further when he saw what the Soviet Union was doing.

And that is,

their occupied zone was administered very differently than the French, British, and America.

You could not go in there.

They were demanding that

Russians who had been fighting for Germany and were captured and knew they were going to be executed when they were sent back.

They were demanding that

the Allies send them back.

And he said at one point, we've got the people over here.

They're not our friends.

We're going to end up fighting them.

Let's do it now and get it over with.

We basically went to war to free Eastern Europe from the Nazis, and now we have to free them from our allies, the Soviets.

And I'll even get former German soldiers.

That's a little different.

It's kind of bad and naive, but it's a...

And contrary to the rehabilitation of the German nation to use former German officers to fight Soviet Union.

But there was a logic to it.

The Soviet Union was going to take over all of Western Europe and they didn't have enough people to stop them.

So they were going to use former German troops.

But he did not say that he wanted to ally with Hitler during World War II, to my knowledge.

Then there was a third thing that he said that I think is demonstrably untrue.

He said there were 15 to 20,000 Americans who disappeared.

in Soviet occupation that were held by the Soviets.

I think what he was trying to refer to, but in all fairness to him, I haven't heard the whole thing.

I'm not going to listen to it.

Just the clips, which I think were deliberately selected to be insightful, incendiary, I should say, not insightful.

They were designed to incite and to be incendiary.

But

he said 15,000 to 20,000.

Well, what he was referring to is that when the Germans came into East Pomerania and East Prussia, they discovered POW camps once they crossed into Germany.

And in these camps were largely American flyers, but also people from the recent battles at the Bulge

or in

the Ardennes and fighting General Moldov in the Hurtgen forests.

Okay.

And so the Soviets had those.

They had orders of what to do with third-party nationals.

If they were wounded and had evidence of fighting against the Russians, then they were treated pretty badly.

If the people in the camps were Eastern Europeans, they were treated not so well.

If they were American and British,

the Soviets promised to return them, take them from the conquered Germans, and return them to

the other allied power.

There was some discussion that if they were to do that,

then the Allies who had captured Russians, who had fought for Germany, should be sent back to Russia.

So Stalin said, We have Americans that the Germans have, and we want to send them back to you, and you have Russians that the Germans captured, that you liberated, and we want you to send them back.

And then the Americans said, but wait a minute.

We want our Americans back as heroes and to be repatriated back to America.

And you want to take these Russians and execute them or put them in Siberia and work them to death.

Because, and then the Russians said, yes, because your Americans fought with us, so we're going to return them under good circumstances.

But the Russians that you have are not like the Americans we have.

They were traitors and they helped kill you and me, so we're going to punish them.

And that was the conundrum that had to be worked out.

In the end, most of those Russians were returned and most were killed or worked to death.

There were some countries that tried to hide them and but and then in exchange, most of the Americans, almost all of them, were exchanged.

There's no 20,000 missing Americans.

It was hidden that the Soviets kept them too long and there were some that were missing, but not 15,000 to 20,000, not at all.

If the chemistry professor from Cornell wants to make the argument, maybe he does in the longer clip, you could argue that the Roosevelt administration went to great lengths to protect the Soviet Pact

because they wanted Russians to kill Germans.

And three out of four soldiers of the German army, three million of them, died in Russia.

And the FDR attitude was, from George Marshall on down,

Every time they're fighting the Russians, it's one less German.

It's killing us.

And these are incredible fighters.

Even when they got on the mainland in June of 1944,

and that 11 months it took them to get to Germany, the Americans had air supremacy.

They had superior artillery.

They outnumbered the one and a half million Germans.

They had three million at one point British and American troops.

They still,

it took 1.7 Americans to kill one German.

They were on the defensive, they had the advantage, but still they were very deadly troops.

So the Roosevelt administration says anything we can do to arm the Soviets and we gave them 25%,

along with the British, of their wherewithal.

We fed their war machine.

We gave them air cobas, P-39s, we gave them ponchos, we gave them sea rations, we gave them radios, we gave them aluminum, we gave them Sherman tanks,

we gave them Spitfires, we gave them anything to kill Germans.

And so, out of that, then after the war ended, there were four occupation zones: French, British, American, and they combined eventually to be West Germany.

But the Germans broke every agreement they had agreed to at Yalta and the July-August Potsdam Treaty.

They did not allow free and fair elections in occupied Eastern Europe.

And they had at the end of the war, Jack, 500 divisions.

Probably 300 of them were in europe and we automat almost immediately were this were demobilizing and getting british and american troops back home across the the seas so the idea was how do you stop these

the the russians have betrayed us they're as we just defeated the germans we do not want to get into another world war patton may be right in the abstract that we have to fight them eventually we should do it but we don't have the wherewithal to do it They won't give back Poland that they occupied.

They've created Western Ukraine out of it.

We've got to go

get Pomerania and Prussia and give it to the Poles.

There's 13 million Germans that are walking.

It was a mess walking back to Germany.

In any case, the idea that we allied ourselves with a monstrous Stalin was just typical cynical real politic that those right we'd rather have 20 million Russians die than half a million Americans.

And we only we went through these four years of war and we lost about 450,000.

That was tragic, but that was a low number compared to 20 million Chinese, 20 million Russians, 6 million Germans, 3 million

Japanese, 400,000 the same, probably Italians, 400,000 British.

So

it was a brilliant way of using a third party to nullify the Wehrmacht, but it was not some conspiracy.

He said one other thing very quickly.

He said, and we all know the story of Pearl Harbor.

And I don't know his story of Pearl Harbor.

I know that there was an experimental radar crew on a hilltop above Honolulu that had pictures on their screen of incoming planes, but they thought they were B-17s.

And they just thought this was,

they didn't react in time for it.

I do know that FDR ordered in May of 1940

Admiral Richardson, the head of the 7th Fleet, to move

the base in San Diego all the way to Pearl Harbor.

And he said, I'm putting my head in a noose.

The 7th Fleet is not able to detour the Japanese Imperial Fleet in the Pacific.

If you put me way out in the middle of nowhere in Hawaii, I will not have the infrastructure, the air support that I would have in San Diego.

And he kept complaining and they relieved him.

Then Admiral Kimmel took over

and

he was relieved of command, I think, three weeks afterwards.

He was the fall guy.

And out of that came a conspiracy that Roosevelt was doing anything he could to provoke the Japanese with sanctions, putting us out very vulnerable so we would be attacked.

There may be some truth to that, but the idea that there's a big untold story of Pearl Harbor is not true.

We pretty much know that Roosevelt wanted to get in the war sooner or later.

He felt that Europe would fall.

And

he didn't really, he underestimated the ability of the Japanese to harm

the U.S.

Navy, but

he didn't plan to have Pearl Harbor attacked.

I don't know what the.

I'll ask you, Jack, or maybe our listeners.

I really like Tucker.

I always have.

He was very kind to me.

He put me on his show for five years on Monday nights, right after his monologue.

He's very intelligent.

He probably forgets this, but I've probably known him for 20 years.

He used to come out to the Hoover Institution once or twice.

I had a long

discussion with him about the Iraq War, I think in 2005 when he came one time.

He's a very gifted person.

He's a very good writer.

I think he was unfairly let go by Fox.

And I tell you, it's very, everybody thinks Fox is no big deal, but everybody who leaves Fox,

I mean, Tucker's been the most successful, but when Bill O'Reilly left Fox and Tucker left Fox

and Megan Kelly, I mean, they've all rebounded with their own very successful podcasts and stuff, but it's still hard to get that type of exposure.

And so it was kind of unfair to him.

But all of that said, if I look at, is there any theme that these guests that come on have,

is there any theme going to Russia and talking, going to a Russian supermarket and saying it's better?

Is there any theme going to Bethlehem and talking to a Muslim cleric who says

that Israel is driving all the Christians out of Bethlehem on the West Bank, which is not true.

Is there any theme about Darrell Cooper essentially saying that there wasn't really a plan of Germans to kill Jews and everybody in Russia?

Is there any plan to this guy about these conspiracy?

And I hate to say it, but there is.

It's kind of

the Jews are at the problem of all these things.

Yeah.

That's kind of the theme.

And then when you, the Jews did not get

Christians out of Bethlehem.

To the degree there's, I think you're confusing cause and effect.

There are a lot of Christians in Israel who fled Bethlehem because they were terrified of Muslim aggression and they felt the only country in the world with a Judeo-Christian heritage was the Holy Land.

So they went to Israel to be protected.

That's why they're there.

They weren't pushed out.

And

I don't know what else to say.

The same thing about World War II when you're trying to get a guy on there that's rehabilitating

making excuses for what the Nazis did.

Babayar, they killed 30,000.

That wasn't the end of it in Ukraine.

They killed over 100,000 Jews, lined them up, and shooted them.

It wasn't by accident.

It wasn't something that they were surprised about.

They went in there for that particular reason, to kill Jews and to starve Ukrainians and take over the breadbasket of the Soviet Union.

That was one of their pre-invasion agendas.

Yeah.

Well, it's troubling, Victor, but first, I have one more history follow-up to ask you.

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Victor, we have a couple other topics to get to, but Before we go to our next break, I'm just curious, following up on, as a historian, and you are, do you feel a need?

You have to correct things.

You see things out there,

there are theories, et cetera, that you may agree with or disagree with.

I'll call it policing.

That may be the wrong word.

But do you see an increased need for policing in history today versus, I don't know, 20 years ago when you first started writing?

Is there more stuff out there that's in need of correction?

Well, there's two different types of abuse of history.

There was the traditional one of the modern university.

So

put it this way,

if I wrote a book that was championing the agrarian city-state and the other Greeks, the reviews were pretty good.

Warfare and Agriculture pretty good.

If I wrote another book on classics, say A War Like No Other,

about how the Peloponnesian War was actually fought, and I had previously written a book criticizing classics,

both the left theorist and the right rigid pedants, and I had also been writing conservative commentary, then the reviews of A War Like No Other were not as good as the reviews of books that were either apolitical, had not been so overtly political.

Not anything to do with the books.

There was no politics in any of the books.

But the fact that I was in the academy and I was considered an overt conservative meant meant that people volunteered to review a New Warlike Noah.

There's a person in,

I think he was in the New Yorker that just, he just lied about it.

Another person who I became a friend of, I won't mention his name, said that I was a neocon Donald Kagan trying to warp the...

So

that was the prejudice of the Academy.

The problem with the non-Academy historians is that

when you get a PhD in historical subjects or philology that works with history, there are certain rules and regulations.

You understand sources, you learn how to use them, you learn how to footnote, you know how to evaluate certain things.

So

if you were going to write something like 20,000 prisoners,

write an article, there will be a lot of scholars who will go to the archives and try to argue that that's not true.

And they'll present evidence.

If you say that we should have aligned with Hitler, there will be people who will show that the roots

are the origins of the Holocaust did not start in 1942.

There were premonitions of what was going to happen.

And there were people selected in the German hierarchy who knew what they wanted to do.

It wasn't just desperate.

Pap Buchanan was the first to do this.

He suggested that if the Americans had not entered the war, then

Hitler might not have been so extreme or da-da-da, and he wouldn't have killed all these Jews.

So it's not a new conspiracy theory.

But

on the other hand, there's a different type of corrective.

It's called the internet.

So there are millions of people out there.

Some are historians with PhDs, some are amateurs, of various talents and backgrounds.

But I do believe they form a consensus.

And here's what I mean.

If I have a question, let's say that I want to spell a word and it has two different spellings, I don't know which is the preferred spelling, and I put both on the internet with Google searches, I can find out what 51% of the people think.

And it's usually right.

When this historian, this chemist historian puts these things out, I have confidence that the majority of the people who comment on that interview with Tucker will be critical,

whatever their background.

Because there's so many people and the internet is kind of like a Roman arena with fingers up or down.

It doesn't mean they're kind, but they are empirical.

And it doesn't mean, by the way, that just because you don't have a PhD,

you're biased, because I can tell you some of the most biased people in the world are PhDs and academics.

And we saw that with the medical research in Lancent, that's all these experts with PhDs that Peter Dasik rounded up just to lie and say that the Wuan virus was a pangolin bat origin.

And then, of course, we had the 51 intelligence authorities that had all these degrees that lied about the laptop.

And then you and I have talked about the expert diplomats and the expert

economists that lied and said there would be no hyperinflation under Biden,

contrary to what Larry Summers predicted.

So just because you have a PhD in a university birth billet doesn't mean you're going to be any better than an amateur historian.

But

there is evidence that you will learn to a greater degree how to use the evidence and how to compare it.

And so

when I see a passage from Thucydides versus Herodotus, I can say, does this reflect an aristocratic bias on the part of Thucydides?

Because he was the son of Olorus, he was a Thracian,

he was an aristocrat up in northern Greece, he was unfairly relieved by the Athenians.

Does this show bias in that?

He has a hundred and I don't know, 32, 100 and more than that, 133 or 4 speeches.

To what degree do they reflect reality?

What degree

did he make them up?

And to what degree are they literal?

And that depends on where he was at a particular.

So you learn all of that, and then you can compare him to Herodotus and Xenophon.

You know what their biases are, where they were, their technique.

You can't really get that as an amateur historian.

But that doesn't mean that when you're writing a history of the Peloponnesian War and you're a left-wing academic and you have somebody who takes a different view, you will not attack them for their ideology.

That's inevitable.

Whereas on the internet, the mob,

I think the mob will be more, they'll be eager to put their points of view or to find fault and then post stuff.

And some of them will be Daryl Cooper conspiracists, but there'll be more that will be empirical.

Yeah, we find, remember, and we'll go to a break.

We remember the great Scott Johnson of Powerline and his team kneecapping the Dan Rather

attacks on Bush.

There are people out there with information and a means of getting it in front of people.

Well, so, Victor,

we're going to talk about JFK Juniors.

JFK, not juniors, JFK's grandson, and what else, language.

And we'll do do that when we come back from these important messages.

We are back with the Victor Davis-Hanson show recording on Saturday the 23rd.

This episode is up on Thursday, the 28th.

I think it's going to be the 28th.

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So, Victor, about JFK's grandson.

Two stories.

One is this is Jack Schlossberg,

who's the son of Caroline Schlossberg, the daughter of John F.

Kennedy, the only son.

So he picked up a little infamy the other, not infamy, notoriety the other day.

By the way, he's picked up notoriety for the last year.

He seems like quite the online lunatic foul mouth.

He was mocking Melania Trump because she had

any thoughts on that?

And then we can talk about him being appointed to the America 250 Commission by Chuck Schumer.

Well,

he's now known as a boar, a very obnoxious, entitled, spoiled brat.

And before I answer that, there's a larger question.

You know, RFK, when he broke with the Kennedy Klan and endorsed Trump, and then he became NHS,

They signed letters, they did videos.

Caroline was one of the most prominent critics.

They had some good points.

They said that he was a drug user, he had been an addict, he had been married three times, and one of his wives killed herself, he broke up families,

then all those stories were leaked, I think, by family members about he killed an animal and dumped it in Central Park.

Was it a bear?

A bear.

It was a bear.

So it made him look really awful.

But then I always believe in the parable of the prodigal son.

So then he comes into the national limelight.

I know that people object to his ideas about vaccinations, but at least with the MRNA vaccination, he has some validity.

But the point is,

he's the paragon of health.

He looks very healthy.

He practices what he preaches.

He tries to get certain toxic elements out of that are non-essential additives or colorings.

So some of the stuff he does is really good.

Then when you look at the Kennedy family who's been attacking it, remember when Carolyn Kennedy was going to run for Senate and they asked her some basic questions about the Senate?

She didn't know anything.

And then Obama, I think he appointed her, what, ambassador to Japan or something?

Japan, and for some reason, I, well, maybe it was one of her aunts, it was Ireland.

No, she was Japan, definitely Japan.

She didn't know anything.

She was just, and so then her son comes along.

He's vulgar, he's crude.

And so now he puts on a wig and he practices a

Slavic or Slovak

accent, Slovenian accent to make fun of Melania.

But what is he trying to make fun of?

He's trying to make fun of the fact that she

wrote a public letter trying to remind everybody of all these children who have been kidnapped and reprogrammed as Russians, and that this is important that they be returned.

So that was a wonderful thing she did.

So why would you make fun of her for that?

And

make fun of her accent, make fun of her hair, make fun of her looks.

And so

he's spoiled, he's entitled, he's not very talented, and he's unhinged.

And this isn't just a tip, we could go on for hours of what he has done.

But let's ask

what he has done other than become an internet mosquito.

Has he created a great business?

Has he written a book?

Is he a professor?

Is he known as an adroit diplomat?

Is he followed in his family's tradition as an energetic politician?

No.

I can't think of anything he's done other than

being given a name and a lot of money.

And

so

I don't see why he has any credibility.

And it's just tarnishing the Kennedy name.

And it's so ironic because the person who

has

They claim has tarnished the Kennedy name,

Robert Kennedy Jr.

has actually rebranded the Kennedy brand with half of the nation.

It's conservative.

Now, you can be split in the conservative movement.

You think he's doing a lot of damage to vaccination programs of diphtheria, tetanus, etc.

Maybe not, but he's won over a lot of people because he is interested in holistic food, lack of chemicals, organic farming, etc.

Well, his cousin, the grandson of the president, was of the

330 million Americans was one tapped by Chuck Schumer to be one of the commissioners for America 250, which, by the way,

the 250th anniversary is 10 months away, and that's its own story, how chaotic and unprepared, et cetera, this commission

has been.

Bill McClay's on it, our good friend, and he's even talked,

he's not attacking the commission like I might.

But nevertheless, here's a headline: Chuck Schumer taps him, Schlossberg, for that.

U.S.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer tapped Kennedy Air Jack Schlossberg, known for his attention-seeking social media tirades, to sit on the committee prepping America's 250 birthday bash.

Schlossberg will get one of the seats slotted for private citizens on the America 250 Commission.

Schumer claimed, quote, there's no better person, end quote, to go toe-to-toe with President Trump and his supporters on the panel.

Why am I putting Jack there?

We know that Donald Trump will try to aggrandize the whole thing and make it part of him and his ego, said Schumer.

There's no better person, no better person to push back on that than you, Jack.

What the AH?

I guess if you want to get an inner,

I guess you could put Laura Loomer in there to balance him, or Candace Owens, another conservative.

Would anybody do that?

I don't think so.

So they know that he doesn't care, that he's protected by his name and his money,

and he's a loose cannon, and he will say outrageous things and get all this attention and disrupt the commission and attack Trump.

And you know, Schumer is very similar.

He's very smooth, but he was the one that got out in front of the Supreme Court building while it was in session and called out Gorsuch at Kavanaugh by name and then threatened them.

And he said that they had sowed the wind, they were going to reap the whirlwind, and then those iconic words, and they don't know what's going to hit them.

You don't know what's going to hit you.

And he never apologized.

Well, he did, after they threatened to censor him, he did kind of withdraw it.

But then, of course, he unleashed, he took his finger out of the dike by doing that.

And then they started showing up at the justices' homes, threatening him.

A would-be assassin showed up in the vicinity of Kavanaugh's home.

Yeah.

So he's a very, of course.

Schumer is a very reckless, unethical politician.

Yeah, he may be a dead man walking politically to a professional.

It couldn't happen to a nicer person if AOC primaries.

Yeah.

Well,

I don't know if let us pray, but

okay, Victor,

we have a message for our

listeners, and we're going to take up another topic of language.

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Victor, I know you've touched on this.

I think you spoke about it a little on, maybe it was with Jesse Waters or somebody else on Fox the other night, but I think our listeners and viewers are interested in your take on how the lefties are now thinking they can talk their way out of their political troubles by retrofitting or

deep sixing their rhetoric.

So there's this memo that's gone out.

It's titled, Was It Something I Said?

And they have different categories, but here's one section: it's called Seminar Room Language.

And these are lefties writing to other lefties.

This language says, I'm smarter and more concerned

about important issues than you.

Your kitchen table concerns are small.

So here are the terms they don't want to be used anymore: subverting norms, systems of oppression, critical theory, cultural appropriation, postmodernism, Overton window, heuristic,

existential threat.

When we use these words, people don't understand.

Studies show that the part of their brain that signals distrust becomes more active, undermining our ability to reach them.

Victor, your take on this.

How can the party of the people not know what the people know?

So I've written poems about this for a long time.

What they're basically saying is since the millennium, as I said earlier on an earlier broadcast, they're out of touch, wealthy media people, university people, lawyers, corporate people, tech people, very affluent, very liberal, very left-wing, very secluded from reality.

They're the peat buttigigs of the world.

They look down on people, they talk in weird vocabulary, they're self-righteous, sanctimonious.

And so now they think that they're losing because people turn off on their Latinx type of vocabulary.

There's an element of truth to that, of course.

But they also are turned off from the other end as well.

The American people do not want

to listen to a congresswoman say F you, F this, on F the country.

They do not want to hear from Jasmine Crocker that Donald Trump is a piece of SH blank.

They don't like that.

And yet they are cutting videos.

Eric Swall,

all they do is use this vocabulary of

disparagement that is

obscene.

And I've never seen anything like it.

So they think that that appeals to it.

So you have two things going on.

These are elitists, and they use this elite vocabulary that nobody understands and resents.

And then to the degree that they react to it, they use language that your average steel worker doesn't go into the office of his boss and say, S-H-I-T-F-U.

So they have this condescending idea of the white working class.

And I grew up with a white working class in the San Joaquin Valley, and I see them in Michigan all the time each year.

And they are some of the most polite people in the world.

They may swear on the workplace, but they have rules of decorum that the left doesn't have.

They're not the Antifa BLM trash mouth.

They're really not.

And so,

I don't know.

It just just shows you how out of touch.

They're kind of like a cracker barrel, aren't they?

They're just seeking for some little gimmick that will get them back in power.

And there's only one thing that will get them back into power.

And that's to

delegitimize the squad and all those crazy people like Mondami and say, I'm going to give you a budget.

Here's a five-year plan to balance the budget.

Here's a five-year plan to

end trade deficits and budget deficits.

Here's a five-year plan to reduce crime, and not by changing the statistics, but by making people feel inherently safe in our cities.

Here's a five-year plan to get rid of homeless.

And just try not to talk about the LGBTQ plus XY

Exclamation Park community.

Try not talking about you have to have a God-given right to terminate a fetus in the ninth month of a pregnancy.

Try not to talk about that you're going to make,

Stephen Chu said, gas go up to $8 a gallon at European levels.

Try to say

that you're not going to say anything like AOC, you're not bringing children in the world because the planet's going to be blown up in eight years from heat.

Just something like that.

And

then don't be so, don't have all of your

iconic figures as grifters.

Look at Obama.

All he did was talk about, well, that's why I'm here.

Spread the money.

Share the wealth.

Yeah, you know.

And then Calorama, Martha's Vineyard,

Hawaii Mansion, Chicago, upscale, beautiful home, four homes, two of them right on the ocean, which he said would be impossible because global warming is going to wash them away by now.

Or the Clintons.

Oh, we're working people.

And then, you know, $500,000 from the mayor of Moscow why his wife is seeding over uranium one to Russian interest

all the grifting all the grifting Hillary listing all the things for her new house that she wants corporate people to buy her now they're

probably worth a hundred million Obama's probably worth a hundred million and then you get the Biden and they're the crassest of all I mean he has it two homes he's got a wife he's got all this money that he didn't earn

his son was a quid quid pro quo grifter and sold his vice presidential father's name.

And so that doesn't comport well with the party of principle.

Democracy dies in darkness.

We're working class.

And

I just don't think they don't think they can change if they want because they represent this wealthy, entitled, arrogant class that all they care about is they don't care about some guy in Fowler, California that wants to buy a house and he can't afford it because it's $600,000.

They care about what

do you use granite or do you use marble or

what do you use

for your kitchen makeover?

Do you use cedar or teak flooring now?

What is it?

Do you use stainless steel appliances?

That's all they worry about.

And is Range Rover SUV better than, I don't know, Audi or Mercedes or BMW?

And they don't, and then that's the world they live in.

And then they feel bad that they're so wealthy and privileged.

And so every once in a while,

I'm going to go out and protest against J.D.

Vance and scream and yell at him.

Or I'm going to go out and say that, you know,

I'm going to give these illegal aliens in Martha's Vineyard a quilted coat.

Coat.

And then Sia wouldn't want to be you.

Well, Victor,

we are going to head to a break.

And after that,

we'll talk a little about India, and we'll celebrate the 100th anniversary.

Not 100th anniversary, the 100th edition of a very important publication.

We'll do all that when we come back from these final important messages.

We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson show.

Victor, by the way, I went to mass once in Fowler.

I was heading down to you to have lunch with you last year.

Nice little church there.

And it's a nice little town, but $600,000

house price there?

I'm a little surprised, but it is what it is.

Let me ask you, let's start off with India, okay?

Get my notes here, Victor.

I think this is a troubling headline.

This is from Fox News the other day.

India turns to Moscow and Beijing amidst spat with U.S.

over tariffs.

Here's the first two paragraphs.

For more than two decades, Washington and New Delhi built a strategic partnership that was hailed as one of the greatest success stories of post-Cold War diplomacy.

Today, that relationship is facing its most serious test in years, and India is signaling it has other options.

We're in a situation in the U.S.-India relationship where the premises and assumptions of the last 25 years that everyone worked very hard to build, including the president in his first term, have just completely unraveled.

I lost the end of the quote of who said that, but this is a Fox News story.

Victor, that India is even seeking to improve its ties with China, that it's constantly shooting at each other on their border and other border problems.

I'm concerned about this, are you?

Or are your thoughts?

Yes, I am.

And

what brought it to a four are two things.

First, and most importantly,

India and China, who represent almost 3 billion or about 45% of the world's population, need oil.

They're not independent in oil, and they are buying Russian oil.

So we are mad at them and are considering a secondary boycott against them, which would be devastating, would hurt us, but be devastating to both China and India.

But India is making the argument that I don't know why you would give a secondary boycott.

We don't have enough oil.

Where are we supposed to get it?

That's too expensive.

The Russians are right near us, and we can buy it from them.

And

why would you secondary boycott one of your allies?

And by the way, we don't understand your tariff policy because you're leveling tariffs on countries like Israel and Australia and the UK and us that run trade deficits with you.

India has a trade, as I'm pretty sure they have a trade deficit with us.

So that's and then the counter Trump argument is to them

India, this is a dictatorship.

They have killed 300,000 Ukrainians.

They're trying to take over this country.

There's no other way to stop them.

We don't want a secondary, but you are aiding and abetting them by sending them foreign exchange.

Can't you just slack off for a little bit, and we'll work around maybe finding you replacement oil.

And now you're in league with China, an existential enemy, I'm not supposed to say existential, but an existential enemy of the West.

So

the other thing is India is very vulnerable to the United States

because the United States has been very, very liberal and open to Indian immigration.

The Indian American population has increased by tenfold every year, it seems.

There are millions of people from India.

When I was growing up, I knew one Indian American farmer.

And I would say the vast majority of the farmers that I deal with and talk to are Indian American, mostly Sikhs from the Punjab.

And California's largest Sikh temple is about a mile and a half from my house.

So that didn't happen before, but that was a result of immigration policies of the United States.

So do they really want to get in a fight with Donald Trump after the truck driver and stuff say, you know what, we're just going to have a secession of Indian immigration?

Because he could do it.

And that's one of the greatest transfers of American technology that

H-1Vs is that these Indian graduates come over to the United States and they work for Silicon Valley and they work very hard and they're very talented and they become either resident aliens or U.S.

citizens and reach the highest, as in Google for example, the highest levels of high-tech.

And they go back and forth with India and they, these expatriates, have created a whole technology industry in India.

So

India has problems with China and

it's a very difficult position.

It's kind of ironic because the left is the one that's always telling us to make better relations with India, but at the same time, they have attacked Trump for being soft on Putin because he wouldn't level secondary boycotts, even though that's...

The other problem, as I said, is tariffs.

I think it's confusing on the tariffs because they're all challenged in court.

I was talking to a legal scholar this week, and he says...

And he's not a liberal.

He said he thinks that many of these tariffs are going to be overturned because there's no real category.

Each of them has to make an argument according to a legislative act, a law.

But I don't know what the tariffs,

in some cases, they're for revenue, $300 billion that allow us to have tax cuts or something.

Some cases

they're reciprocal to punish countries that have taxes on us, such as China.

and

to a lesser degree, Europe.

And some of them are just flat, 10%,

to bar entrance into the U.S.

economy to protect U.S.

industries.

But

what is the Israeli tariff for?

They're our ally.

They run a deficit with us.

We're not going to make that much money on a tariff with Israel.

And it seems to me that our closest allies, Britain, and Australia should get a break because they're not running up huge surpluses like Canada, as I understand it.

And they are trying to rearm.

So I think we've got to be really clear what the tariff is for.

And there's three reasons traditionally for a tariff to protect a domestic industry.

We're putting tariffs on some countries that we don't have any competing industry with.

You know what I mean?

It's not like we have whiskey.

We're tariffing their whiskey to protect our whiskey.

They don't have anything that we make.

I mean, they have everything that we don't make.

and so we're putting tariffs on things that are essential.

I can understand drugs.

They don't pay for the whole R ⁇ D cost so maybe and they maybe we should put it some tariff on a generic drug because otherwise how are the drug companies going to make up the money to to reinvest in new medicines and protocols.

But I think we need to be clear.

I think when we put a tariff we're saying we're putting this tariff on because they're not symmetrical.

Their tariffs are higher than us.

We're putting this tariff on on because their exports are hurting this particular American business.

We're putting this tariffs on because

we're broke and we want money.

Just be candid, or all three or two of three.

But we're not getting a lot.

And in the case of India, I think that has aggravated them.

But all that being said, they should not be helping feed the Russian war machine.

They should be very grateful that the United States gives them a blank check to export as many people as they want to come in here.

And

we've been very liberal about that.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, thanks, Victor.

Let's conclude today's show with your take on the publication you oversee at Hoover, Strategica, which just published its 100th issue.

Congratulations.

And there's some article or two about post the post-heroic era.

So do you want to tell us about anything with this particular issue and take a bow?

Yeah, it's the 100th issue, and I wrote about a 1,600-word essay.

We call that the background, or then we have different essays.

And in it, I try to explain the history.

In 2012, the then director of the Huber Institution called me and said, Victor, you need to start a program.

You're a military historian, classicist, but

don't you remember that the

motto of the Huber Institution is War, Revolution, and Peace.

We do not have things in war.

So I want you to create a military history task force, and you and I are going to crisscross the country.

It was a wonderful man, John Raceyan, and we're going to raise money for it.

And we did that for two years.

We went 10 to 15 times a year, all over the United States.

And when we had sufficient money, we

invited 30 of the 40 of the top military historians, diplomats, generals, admirals,

except soldiers.

And so we got together people like the historians Andrew Roberts, Neil Ferguson,

generals, admirals like H.R.

McMaster, Jim Mattis.

We got

people with different,

the late Angela Coteville, Edward Ludwac, top people in the country.

And that required us to pay them well to write

and not to short out, short them on travel.

So we have a very big annual meeting.

We all get together.

It's not released to the public what people say.

I draw up an agenda as a chairman and

they all go at it in a free-for-all.

And out of that, then we ask them to write a brief paper and then we publish those in Strategica.

The name that I coined from it just means it's a Greek word for general-like things, the things that generals or leaders do, Strategica.

We get strategy from the same word strategos for general in Greek.

So

we also have this publication online every three to five weeks.

And we usually don't miss an issue.

And this is the hundredth anniversary.

And you have a backgrounder essay about the question, should

will nuclear weapons be used?

Backgrounder, yes, this is the history of nuclear weapons.

And one person says, no, they're not going to be used.

One says, Man, I think they might be.

And they explain, and then we have a poll.

It takes readers' opinions, and then we have some study questions, and then all of the essays that are contributed during the year, we attach them to certain issues, seven or eight little ones.

And it's been very successful.

In addition, we have spin-offs.

We have history in the news, where one scholar writes for the Hoover website and strategic website, each week that this hurricane reminds them of the past hurricane or this nuclear meltdown poses the same threat as.

So they try to locate a current event in a historical context from the past.

And then we have classics of military history.

You can go on there.

If you want to know who Vegetas was or

Aeneas Tacticus or Klauswitz, you go on there and there is a brief bio and analysis of their work.

And all of this has been going on for, well, 13 years.

And

anyway, it's been a very good thing.

Bruce Thornton is one of the editors.

David Berkey is a managing editor that does the actual collection of the essays.

I'm the general editor.

Megan Ring is the person, the staffer, who coordinates everything.

She's the one that

sets up the conferences primarily and and pays people.

It's a very difficult job.

Victor, could you tell us quickly about the Edward Lewac?

Yes, his essay.

His essay was that

everybody's talking about putting ground troops in Ukraine or the use of ground troops, but historically when societies have low birth rates, like 1.4 in the European, then...

There's a different attitude about mass formations and land warfare and casualties.

And so it's one thing for the Israelis to fight on the ground as a Western power because they have a birth rate of about 2.3 or 4.

Maybe it's higher.

But he's very skeptical about socialist systems with low fertility rates, beating their chest that they're going to send all these troops to Ukraine.

And so

You can be heroic on the battlefield and people can make personal sacrifices and get medals of honor, so to speak, and the larger society can welcome and honor that sacrifice, but it's very difficult when you're a nation of one child, and that's it, and you don't have a lot of people in that age cohort.

So, that was one of the themes of it.

Okay.

Well,

our listeners and viewers can go to the Hoover

website and

Peter Montserrat has an essay too about the innovative Ohio State Military History Program.

Before we go ahead, if you have anything else.

Well, the field is growing.

It's kind of ironic.

If you go to a bookstore, online, or a real bookstore, and you go to the shelves and you write LGBTQ studies versus military history, military history is much bigger.

People want to read about World War II.

They want to read about the Civil War.

They want to read about antiquity in a military context.

And so

yet when you go to a university bookstore and you look for classes, they're almost non-existent.

But that's starting to change.

So there's 10 to 15 major programs now.

Hillsdale College has started a new military program.

So we're trying to encourage that at the Hoover Institution as well.

You mentioned Hillsdale College, and I want to tell you that Hillsdale College has come in as number two,

number two on the Princeton Review's just published list of the top conservative colleges and universities in America.

I'm sure you're curious what number one is.

Yeah, I think I know.

It's Thomas Aquinas College.

And then I'll just read the rest of the 10.

Grove City, College of the Ozarks, which is a terrific college, really.

Yeah, it is.

It is.

Taylor University in Upland, Indiana.

Hampton, Sydney, University of Dallas.

I was a little surprised here, place where you taught, Victor, Naval Academy.

Then High Point College in North Carolina.

Carolina, and number 10 is Baylor University.

I don't understand that Naval Academy because of the three military academies, West Point, the Air Force Academy

in Colorado, and

Annapolis, the Naval Academy.

And I have spoken at all of them or visited them a lot at the Air Force, and I was there for a whole year as a visiting professor at the Navy.

The Naval Academy is by far the most liberal.

It's the only of the three that's patterned after a civilian university where 60 or 70 percent of the faculty are tenured civilians and 30 percent come in and rotate as military.

Most of them have a much higher degree of military officers.

I can say without

fear or anger that I have been a visiting professor at Hillsdale.

I've been a visiting professor at Pepperdine.

I've been a scholar in residence at UC Berkeley.

I have taught at the Naval Academy.

I've been a visiting professor at Stanford.

Of all the places I just mentioned, the history department, the year that I was at, was the most left-wing.

Yeah.

Well,

no idea what the grounds were for qualifying on the list, but I want to congratulate our friends at Thomas Aquinas.

It's a beautiful campus.

It's such a beautiful campus.

I don't know how they're going to.

I think

they're getting so much publicity.

How are they going to...

They have a very small student body.

How are they going to accommodate all the applicants?

Well, they have a second campus in New England that was land and actually an old school given to them courtesy of the hobby lobby.

Have you seen it at all?

Yeah, I've been there several times.

Is it as beautiful as the California campus?

Well, it's beautiful in a New England way.

This striking difference,

very, very different.

It's wet and

moldy and moist and cloudy and cold.

The buildings there are over 100 years old, so it would say, you know, it has that very classical education feel.

I'm just kidding.

I'm glad.

I really liked them.

I spoke there.

Yeah.

And I had a really great time at St.

Thomas Aquinas.

Nobody has to, people have to shovel in the New England campus.

They don't have to shovel it in California.

They have to do all their gardening and they keep the flower beds trimmed.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, that's part of the success to a lot of these schools is that the students

roll up their sleeves and get work done.

Well, Victor, you've been terrific.

And at the end of the show here, we thank our listeners and viewers and always try to read a comment or two.

And here's one comment.

It's from YouTube, and it's from Mr.

Awesome94, who writes,

thanks, BDH.

You've made a big difference in my life.

I'm 32 years old.

I didn't do well in high school, but did the necessary study after to get into university to study modern history.

Been doing it online, but with a full-time job and being the father of three children and a volunteer at my church.

It is taking me a long time to finish, nearly 10 years by the time I finish.

I'm nearly finished, but almost quit because I thought I couldn't be a historian without being woke in today's society.

You've given me the hope that I can stand up for my principles and still be a student of history, regardless.

All the best wishes and prayers for you from Australia.

That's Mr.

Awesome.

Mr.

Awesome.

Yeah, 94 years.

Yeah, terrific.

I want to thank the folks who subscribe to Civil Thoughts.

I write Civil Thoughts.

It's the free weekly email newsletter I do for the Center for Civil Society.

It comes out every Friday, and it's a list of 14 recommended readings, great articles I've come across the previous week that I think people will enjoy, like, be inspired by.

How do you get it?

You go to civilthoughts.com.

Sign up.

Easy peasy, free, and we're not selling your name.

I do it out of the kindness of my heart.

I think you will like it.

So, that said, subscribe to Victor at Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus, and follow Victor on X at VD Hansen.

If you're on Facebook, there's the Victor Davis-Hansen Fan Club, VDH's Morning Cup.

And I think that's about it.

Victor, you've been terrific.

Thanks, everyone, for watching.

Thanks for listening.

We'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening and watching.

And we're back live during a flex alert.

Dialed in on the thermostat.

Oh, we're pre-cooling before 4 p.m., folks.

And that's the end of the third.

Time to set it back to 78 from 4 to 9 p.m.

Clutch move by the home team.

What's the game plan from here on out?

Laundry?

Not today.

Dishwasher?

Sidelined.

What a performance by Team California.

The power truly is ours.

During a flex alert, pre-cool, power down, and let's beat the heat together.