Fighting in World War I, in Ukraine, and for the Future

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Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show. This is our weekend edition when we do something a little bit different.
And Victor will have a middle section where he'll talk a little bit about a historical topic. We've got lots on the agenda before that.
There's been so much news out, Biden and the Ukrainian war situation. So we'll talk about those things first and stay with us.
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I have to apologize, my voice is not quite yet. You've had the Victor Hansen flu.
I guess we have had a hiatus from our interviews. I think I probably gave it to you on the last interview.
But it's been eight days, everybody, and it's the death flu, I guess I'd call it. Yeah, definitely did a job on my voice.
So, anyway, we are on this weekend edition. We wanted to start out with some discussion of Biden.
It appears that they massaged the numbers at the border and that they were recording those captured, but they were not recording what was being released. At least they weren't correlating those two numbers.
So it would look like there were more captured people at the border than it might well. And I was wondering, Victor, your thoughts on that.
Well, if you do the math, and there were recorded somewhere between 10 and 12 million people crossed illegally in the United States during the Biden four-year tenure.

So you're talking about 3 million people perhaps by each year.

And when you do the monthly arithmetic, you're getting up to 10,000 people a day.

A day.

That's the size of a community in my environs.

And so the question was, the larger question is,

is they kept saying they couldn't stop it,

or they needed comprehensive immigration reform,

or they needed bipartisan support.

That was all untrue.

It was a deliberate, we know it was deliberate, a deliberate policy for two reasons. Number one, they inherited a secure border.
And that bothered them. So the first thing that Joe Biden did was stop completion of the new section of the wall.
Reintroduce, catch and release. Allow people to apply for refugee status once they were here, and give them these strange apps where they could just, without any diplomatic audit or passports or anything, they could just push a button, get on a flight, and end up in Fresno, California at 2 in the morning.
It was crazy. And now the administration, the Trump administration, is trying to rectify that.
They've almost sealed the border. But how do you get rid of 12 million people? That's 12 San Francisco's that we instantly created without...
What gets me so angry is the Biden administration, not Mr. Mayorkas, not Mr.
Blinken, not any of them said, we let in 12 million people and so we have built 12 million housing units or we have hired another 10,000 doctors. They didn't.
They just unleashed these people in the inner city, in rural communities, in Hispanic burials, and they were always exempt from the consequences of their own ideology. You think Mr.
Blinken ever had to go to an emergency room and wait five hours while people came in who didn't speak English, who had never been in the United States, with an array of maladies they'd never seen a Western doctor in their life. That was the policy.
So now the cleanup is going to take years. It's going to take years.
And they're finding that the Majorca's Homeland Security Administration lied about how many people they apprehended. And think about this.
Why didn't they just say this?

We're not going to lie. This is intentional.
We want people from the poorest sections of the world to come into the United States. That's the plan, because we want to give them parity.
And the more people who come in without audit, without English, without money, without skills, the larger our government must grow to offer them health, education, food, housing subsidies. And that means higher taxes, which are redistributed.
So we're going to redistribute wealth. We're going to grow government.
We're going to even out the playing field by bringing in importing poor people. We understand our message is static and inert.
It does not appeal in elections anymore, but we're going to bring in a new demography, and under the auspices of our new 70% early in mail-in balloting rather than 70% on election day of balloting, we feel that this will be an election boom very quickly. That's what it was all about.
Anything less was just a lie. And that's what they're doing.
They're still lying. Joe Biden had no idea other than somebody used an auto pin and signed something.
And he would have been for it anyway if they had explained what was going on to him. Well, apparently in California, the illegal aliens have caused a bloat of the Medicare system and we're just finding out that Gavin Newsom didn't have enough money to pay for all the Medicare programs and all the Medicare assistance and has borrowed upwards of $3.4 billion on the state budget, which is incredible for a state to do that.
I was wondering your thoughts about your own state. Well, what is he going to do? He has 13.3% top rate.
If you make over a million dollars, you can get up to 16%. He's got the highest gas taxes in the country.
He's got the highest kilowatt charges in the country. He's got among the highest sales tax.
The appraisal of property is such that even though there's supposedly a one to two percent limit on property taxes, we have among the highest property taxes in the country. And so what do we find out? He started with a $76 billion annual deficit, and then he said he had balanced it.
And now he has no money, and he says that Medi-Cal is exhausted. Newsom doesn't understand what he created because he and the architects of this disastrous state policies, they're completely immune.
He lives in a $9 million home. All of these people, Nancy Pelosi, she's got a palazzo up in Napa Valley, a mansion in San Francisco.
Jerry Brown is a son of his family estate in Grass Valley. Barbara Boxer is down in the Palm Springs area in a quiet and affluent retirement.
None of these people. You think Camilla Harris is going to experience any of this? you should go to the local emergency room,

which I did two years ago. I think I was the only person there that spoke English.
You should go to the grocery store, which I did yesterday. I think I was the only person there whose native language was English.
When you bring in 12 million people and you concentrate them in certain loci, you put an enormous burden on local communities, most of whom are minority and poor, and they don't care.

This was one of the worst things that's ever happened to this country, the destruction of borders and the demagoguing by the left, who made any but one who had legitimate objections, humane objections to it as a racist, xenophobe, etc. And I don't know how long it's going to take, but it's going to take years, years, because California has an enormous drag.
And that drag is, how do you offer parity to millions of Californians that cannot compete in the marketplace given their lack of education, linguistic fluency? So, Victor, I want to go ahead and talk then about the Ukraine war this week, lots of developments on it. But first, I would like to welcome a sponsor, the Field of Greens.
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So, Victor, to the Ukraine,

it seems that a sponsor of the Victor Davis Hanson show. So, Victor, to the Ukraine, it seems that a lot of developments have been happening, of course, this week, and it seems that Putin has finally come to the negotiating table with the various groups.
But there was something very interesting that happened this week that I thought showed something about Putin's war effort, and that is that he captured 438 fighters at Kursd. And when he first captured them, he said he was going to treat them like terrorists.
I have a feeling that might have been a little bit of bluster. And Trump, he's really sticking to his guns, and he's bringing Putin, I think, to the negotiating table.
At least he's got him talking right now. And I was wondering your thoughts on the latest on the Ukraine war.
I was on Putin because the first narrative was that the Biden policy of whatever it takes, meaning an unlimited supply of multibillion dollars in aid and weapons to Ukraine without an accompanying strategy of victory was going nowhere. It led to 1.5 million dead, wounded, missing on both sides.
So then they pressured Ukraine. And Ukraine very wisely, very wisely reversed face and did not, Mr.
Zelensky stopped the rudeness and back and forth arguing with Vance and Trump and said, okay, but I need security. And they said yes yes.
So then it was up to Putin and Putin and his foreign minister had given signals that they like this new appreciation of their point of view. They feel that Ukraine is still part of the Soviet Union.
And Soviet Union, even though it's defunct, was the forerunner of Russia. Therefore, Russia has rights on all of Ukraine.
That's not going to happen, that absorption. So where are we? I think right now they're pouring over a map, and they're trying to see which areas are 60% to 70% Russian-speaking, what's their value, what's their minerals, what's their natural resources, who is occupying them, who is fighting over them, and can they make a line on a map that's a DMZ analogous to the 38th parallel in North-South Korea? And then can they put Western investment and American investment to rebuild Ukraine and then to tell Putin, ultimately the United States will not have troops there, but it will be the ultimate guarantor.
And it will tell Putin, if you try this again, you're going to be killing Americans. And we look at the status

of your military right now, with all due respect, it's not good. You have 140 million people.
The United States now is twice the size of Russia. And even in its debilitated state, if you look at the number of

deployable jet aircraft,

fighter aircraft,

of non-American NATO European powers, they've got 2,000. Russia's got about 400.
If you look at tanks, if you look at artillery platforms, if you look at manpower, the Europeans themselves, without any help from the United States, they have a population of 500 million people. So, in theory, Putin is not in a good situation.
His military is exhausted. It has no offensive capabilities.
And he hasn't even touched the surface of European reserves. So if the Europeans match their rhetoric and begin to rearm and use their existing resources to deter Putin with an ultimate guarantee of U.S.
intelligence, strategic nuclear shield, etc., then Putin will probably find some type of agreement. And if Trump does that, the question then becomes, would anybody else be able to do it? Let me just answer that question.
Would the Europeans, Mr. Macron, Mr.
Stormer, the NATO Supreme Commander, would any of them have been able to meet between Zelensky and Putin and get an agreement? They had four years, three years, they did not. Would Joe Biden have been able to do that? Anthony Blinken, Jake Sullivan? No, they didn't even make the attempt.
Did Mr. Zelensky freelance? Did he have the wherewithal? Remember the string offensive of 2022-23? Was he able to pressure the Russians? He took some Russian territory, but was he able to force an agreement? Was Mr.
Putin able to gobble up enough territory that he'd satisfy the reason to be of the original aggression and then call it off?

No. There was only one party, only one party, and that was the United States that had the military power and reputation to stop the fighting.
And that's where we are. And if he pulls this off, and I'm not sure he can, but if Donald Trump pulls this off, and if at the end of the year there is a projection that in one more year we will have a balanced budget, and you collate all of that with what mainstream pundits were saying, and I'm not just talking about left-wing New York Times, go back and read the Wall Street Journal's official op-eds about the Trump economic policy and his Ukraine policies.
And it's essentially that it's a failure, it's chaos, it will never work. But if Donald Trump balances the budget and finds peace, then he is going to be one of the most successful presidents in the last 50 years.
Yeah, let's hope that it all works out well. It did look to me, I guess what I was looking at today in the news was that Putin was making gains in his war, but yet he was coming to the negotiating table, which is good.
Last thing before we go to a break and then we come back to look at your historical topic, which you haven't let on to me what it is this week, but that's okay. Is the really current thing today on Friday, Democrats did threaten to shut down the continuance bill for spending so that they could keep the government open.
But they have given in this week, and I was wondering if you had any thoughts on what the Democrats were up to. Well, the Democrats, remember when they were issuing these $1.7 trillion deficits each year, and they were nearing $7 trillion in aggregate deficits over the Biden four-year tenure, and we were getting up to $35 trillion.
And by the way, that's $3 billion in interest per day, larger than the defense budget and aggregate for the year. When they were doing all of this, the Republicans said, this is unsustainable.
We're not going to sign on to the continuing resolution. And they said, that would be the worst thing in the world.
There'll be plane crashes. There'll be federal.
You're going to stop Social Security. This is horrible.
Nobody would ever do that. So they said, okay, we won't do it.
We'll have to wait till we win the election to try to bring fiscal discipline. And now the shoe's on the other foot.
They're in the minority, and they don't want to sign on to the continuing resolution, and they want to stop it. and that would mean filibuster or something in the Senate.
And that was going to be a losing argument

because if you shut down the government, they're going to get the blame. But more importantly, all the doge people have to say is, wow, nobody's getting paid, and the government's still working pretty well.
So I suggest A, B, and C, don't go back to work. How's that? Because you walked off the job, you didn't want to work, or your party, who is your bulwark, said, you know, you could walk out, or there was no money, whatever the particular reason is, and we function pretty well.
And so then Chuck Schumer, who is really, you know, he's really melted down as a leader, whether a minority or majority Senate leader.

He was screaming and yelling that he was never going to sign on to the Doge and the Trump people.

And then he just melted and said, oh, basically, forget everything I just said.

Now I don't want to help Doge.

So I'll sign on the continuing resolution.

but he and said, oh, basically, forget everything I just said. Now I don't want to help Doge, so I'll sign on the continuing resolution.
But he just said that he couldn't do that. So now he's got AOC who's threatening to primary him.
Good luck. She's lost a lot of her luster because her stick was always, I'm the most radical, crazy person in the Democratic Party.
And once you have people like Bowman letting off fire alarms, as he did, lost his election, but he did do that. And then you have people like Al Green with his cane.
And then you have the new AOC, Jasmine Crockett, who can't finish a word without talking about mediocre white boys. Then she doesn't, she seems kind of passe all of a sudden.
And she's settling into early middle age, maybe. I don't know what it is, but she's not the firebrand that she thought she was.
And Chuck Schumer, I don't know, he used to be, if you see clips from 2008, 2009, 2010, he was giving lectures on waste, fraud, and abuse and Social Security and Medicare and the need for the Obama administration. We forget in 2010 with the Tea Party movement, the reaction to the Tea Party movement by the incumbent administration and the Democrats in Congress is, well, we're not going to let them steal our thunder.

We're going to cut.

And, of course, they didn't.

There's a famous little riff where Barack Obama says,

you know, it doesn't mean we're mean that we're cutting,

but we're going to turn old Joe Biden loose.

And you know you don't fool with old Joe Biden. Well, you do fool with him because he has his hand in the cookie jar.

Good old Joe Biden just left office with a $20 billion slush fund for his left-wing NGO friends. So, I don't know.
The Democratic Party has been the greatest gift for Donald Trump. I mean, if you look at the theatrics, they won't stand for somebody with a brain tumor.
They did that Ninja Turtle, whatever that was, video where the women were in kickboxing outfits and they were gyrating. You've had Al Green, as I said, screaming and yelling.
You have Maxine Waters, who's predicting a civil war. You have Jasmine Crockett, who never got the Jory Reid message that it's a losing proposition to call 65, 70 percent of the country mediocre white boys.

And yet they continue to do it.

You know, I have a question about that, and I was going to save this for later. But the Democrats seem to be wanting to think that they can use a tactic of just sowing chaos,

and then they can create a chaotic atmosphere and maybe, guess win the midterm elections via that path but it doesn't seem to be working it seems to be destroying their image more than anything well it's like they have a genie in a bottle and the genie is called chaos and they said here's my wish go and released it. Or they released the Kraken, so to speak.
And it went out. But they have no way of controlling it.

So sometimes the Kraken manifests itself with these insane takeovers of Trump Tower or these clips that were on TikTok and videos today of foreign students with their faces masked going up to random drivers who were stopped because of their demonstration and calling them blank, blank, blank, you blank, blank, and yes, I love Hamas, blank, blank. And that doesn't go over well.
The idea that we're inviting all of these people into this country to study.

And when you got the president of Bernard College, who says that the apartheid group on campus, the so-called Columbia Divestment Apartheid, were the prime drivers of violence and caused $30,000 in damage. And she's really talking about Mahmoud Khalil's group, who, by the way, was openly and overtly handing out flyers triumphantly about October 7th.
That's a bad look to be protecting those people and say they have a right to come into this country, chase Jews, intimidate people, spark anti-Semitism, and glorify killing of 1,200 innocent Jewish civilians for the most part. And more importantly, Hamas is a group that still holds five American hostages, and these people are not American citizens for the most part.
So that was one thing. And then, as I said, these congressional antics, they don't look good at all.
Swarming Trump Tower and wearing the red shirts when it's all staged and somebody's funded does not look good. So there is no constructive agenda.
No one is saying, this is the democratic contract for America. We believe that we can cut in a better fashion than Donald Trump.
We believe that we have a better tax policy. This is a better plan for strategic resolution in Ukraine.
We feel that we will make our streets safer. Here is the problem on the border.
Here is our new... There's nothing.
They have no answers. All they have is the disaster that Biden left them.
And what they don't understand, people are saying to them, okay, you don't like Donald Trump. You don't like what he's doing.
What is the alternative? Just tell us.

So we're $37 trillion in debt, and we're borrowing $3 billion a day just for the interest.

What do you want to do about it?

Tell us.

We already have a 38% federal tax with Medicare, Social Security, payroll.

It can get up to 40%, 42%.

People are in states with 10%, 12% income tax. Tell us how much money you want to raise with income tax.
Is that what you want to do? How do you solve the Ukraine? Just tell us how many billion dollars do you want to give? Another hundred? Just say, well, if we give another $300 billion to Ukraine, they will win and it's worth it. Okay, tell us that.
What do you want to do on the border? You want to build, finish the wall? No. Catch and release? Yes.
Refugee status only in Mexico or here? Just tell us. What do you want to do about the cartel? They have no answers at all.
So when they have no answers, they just say, well, we do have an agenda. It's called Donald Trump is now not Hitler, he's Mussolini.
And we have another agenda, and that is Elon Musk has to be depersonalized. And we're going to try to destroy all of his Tesla dealerships.
We're going to smash his cars. We're going to fund groups that commit arson against him.
And we're going to teach any multibillionaire that's an apostate that goes from our side, a Mark Zuckerberg, a Bill Ackman, anybody who jumps over to Jeff Bezos to the right, they're going to pay a terrible price. That is their agenda.
I think that social media has made their lack of an agenda very evident to the voters and stuff. And I think I have to praise social media for that.
I was always kind of ambiguous about its ability to obfuscate things, but I think it's made more and more clear that Democrats don't have an agenda that's viable in the United States. So, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and you will talk about your history topic.
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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show. And in all of this illness I have, everybody ever got to tell you that Victor is the Martin and Neely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and Wayne and Marsha Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.
You can find him at his website, victorhanson.com. It's called The Blade of Perseus.
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Well, Victor, I'm going to hand it over to you because you've been so secretive this time about what you're going to talk in U.S. history, historical moments that have really impacted our country.
Well, we said we're going to do 30 or 40 great events of the 20th century. The first was the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War, which indirectly shocked the world, directly shocked the world, I should say, with a Japanese overwhelming victory, but then indirectly insidiously led to two unforeseen events.
The eventual collapse of the Russian government, basically not more than 10 to 12 years later with the Bolshevik Revolution.

That was partly the disgrace of the Tsarist Navy.

And then the overthrow of the Japanese elected government,

because it had not not at the bargaining table

got victories that were commiserate with its battlefield successes.

And we talked about the Panama Canal and the great effort that finished the canal in 1914. and then 12, 13, 14, and the conquering of yellow fever, malaria, the lock system, did something that even the architects of the Suez Canal had failed to do.
Mr. Lesseps, they could not build a canal across the Isthmus of Panama.
And then we talked about one of the main driving forces in our own lives today, and that's the Federal Income Tax, 1913 Act in 1916. In that period, we institutionalized the idea that every American was going to pay.
First, it was very small, 1.5%, but you knew it was going to get larger and larger. Nobody, I think, ever thought that you were going to pay 40% or percent.
But the whole point was that that marked a big change in American life because most, not all, but most of the income of the federal government was from tariffs, taxes on imported goods. And most people did what they wanted with their money.
I think you're going to say, well, Victor, they still do. 50% of all Americans don't pay any federal income tax.
And I can tell you if I get in the car in five minutes and drive, oh, in a 10-mile circumference around my farm, I'll probably see about $30 or $40 million in commercial transactions at a swap meet and corner stores and canteens. It's all not taxed, not just sales tax absent, but income tax.
But the fourth, of course, is the entrance, I shouldn't say the entrance of the United States, but the outbreak in August of 1914 of World War I. And there's been a lot of revisionism.

My colleague at Hoover... in August of 1914 of World War I.

And there's been a lot of revisionism. My colleague at Hoover, Neil Ferguson, wrote a book, The Pity of War.
I think it was his dissertation where he argued that it was completely unnecessary. And had Britain not made a pact with France, Remember, after the 1871 Bismarckian solution to the Franco-Prussian War, people were terrified of Germany.
The unification of Germany, 1871, had created this largest country in Europe, centrally located, with the most sophisticated rail system and armaments industry in Europe. And the largest population, almost 75 million people, 70 million people, much larger than France or Britain.
So the only way to detour that was to have an alliance. and remember that most of eastern europe under the auspices of the Austro-Hungarian, Hungary, Austria-Hungary Empire was on the side of the Kaiser of Germany.
William I. So when the Allies looked at this, they thought there's no stopping a unified Germany.
And it did invade France. It was maybe prompted to.
But nevertheless, at the end of that two-year war, it was in control of the Alsace-Lorraine. It had expanded its borders.
It had a kind of Germanic-speaking, pan-Germanic sway, if you count both Austria-Hungria, that empire, with the new German empire. And it was very angry, because it said to itself, from 1871 to 1914, where is the benefits for us? We're the strongest, newest, most powerful country in Europe.
We want a smashing war over the Napoleonic traditions in France. And we don't have an empire.
We have a few colonies, maybe in the Pacific or in Africa. But why does the French, who are far weaker and were defeated, why do they have a colony? Why does Britain? We want a concession in Morocco, we want one in the Bismarck Island, we want all, so there were these demands for a rightful place at the table.
And furthermore, they looked at the status of Europe and say, we are the great land power of Europe now, especially with our rail system that we can transfer two or three hundred divisions within two days from the east to west. But we don't have a navy, and naval power is essential for imperial dominance.
So starting around 1912, 13, they began a massive shipbuilding program, Dreadnoughts, the proto-battleships. And Jackie Fisher in Britain, Bruce Lord of the Admiralty tried to match it.
So there was an arms race. And Germany said to itself, we're not going to be shut in the Baltic Sea with only a big port at Bremen or something, and we're iced in.
It's not fair. So they had drawn up a plan called the September Program.
Professor Reisling had said that we will have a Schlieffen plan, and we will invade France and make a huge cartwheel around Paris and knock it out, but more importantly, separate it from the British expeditionary forces that are coming across the Channel to fulfill their part of the alliance. And once we do that, and we will eliminate Belgium as a separate country, and we will take the French ports and annex them, and then make France into a subsidiary client state of Germany, and we will have ports on the Atlantic Ocean.
This is what they did in World War II, and they succeeded it. People forget that the World War II agenda was simply a continuation of what they almost pulled off but failed to in World War I.
So you could see the tensions building. And the only way to stop Germany traditionally had been for the democracies, France and Britain, to make an alliance over the top of their heads with Tsarist Russia.
And that's what they did. And that supposedly kept the peace.
But when you had the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, and you had this upheaval in Austria-Hungary, and you had Russia claiming that Slavic peoples were being oppressed by these nationalist groups that were allied to German-speaking Austria, then that became the, I don't know, the powder keg of Europe. And once it blew up, then each side began mobilizing.
And mobilization meant that you either had to use it or demobilize very quickly. And national pride took hold.
And Germany felt that given its performance in 1870 and 71, it would end the war very quickly. It would pivot into France, knock it out, separate it from the British.
The British would sue for peace. The Russians then, it would pivot back, send its divisions, and easily deal with the primitive forces of the Tsar, even though they were much larger in numbers.
And the United States had no army, its navy had been in decline.

Woodrow Wilson was a utopian visionary who didn't believe in war. So they felt they had a blank slate.
So we'll stop there, but the next time will be part two and explain what happened to the German dream of continental dominance, why they failed? And what was the result of World War I? It was the destruction, basically, of the German Empire, the Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the rise of the United States. I think you could argue it was the beginning of the end for the British Empire that lost so many of its best soldiers at the Somme and Passchendaele.
And it was a rise of the American juggernaut, even though we disarmed during the Depression subsequently. But we'll continue.
In France, they called it the lost generation too. So many French young men died.
I think you could argue if you were, I used to teach history of Western Civ and especially art and literature. You could argue that the whole modernist movement, that is the idea that you're going to represent impressionistic, which is earlier than World War I, but had taken off during and afterwards.
But surrealism, Dadaism, Cubism, that is, representational art that doesn't capture what the eye sees. You see a painting, you say, that's not looked like what my eye is looking at.
It's impressionistic or it's representational or it's abstract Picasso. So for the idea in poetry, there will be no more rhyming, there will be no more meter, no hexameters, no dactylic pentameters, no poetic vocabulary, just arbitration, arbitrarily break each sentence into, you know, I saw a clown, Sentence break., sentence break.
Laughed loudly, sentence break. What's the logic behind that? But that's a poem now.
And then, of course, in fiction, when you look at post-World War I novels, Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Steinbeck.
There is, I don't want to say a nihilism, but an anti-hero. There is no clear-cut heroes anymore.
And that is a reflection of 17 million Europeans that were wiped out in World War I without a lasting peace. In other words, as General Fauch said, this is not a Versailles, this is not an armistice, this is just a parenthesis of 20 years, Germany starts it again.
So it really had a crushing, depressing, nihilistic streak in European letters. When you want to look at the idea of real anti-Westernism,

um,

um, nihilistic streak in European letters. When you want to look at the idea of real anti-Westernism or anti- I don't know what, anti-establishment.
It started during the period right after World War II, World War I in Europe, and it also was a rise of a nationalism, a Nietzschean resurgence in Germany. The failure of the Weimar and the idea that the myth, the stab in the back myth that Hitler capitalized on, that the German army never was defeated.
It was defeated, but the Germans said it surrendered 70, 80 miles in Belgium and France on the offensive until it was sold out. That was a very powerful propaganda.
So I don't think Europe ever really recovered after World War I. I think it was the whole West, though, really, since it did so impact culturally, as you've just demonstrated so deeply culturally.
So, well, Victor. I was just going to say, I was going to say something when Zelensky had the blow up with Vance and Trump and he went back and then the Europeans just exploded in anger and the German defense minister started sounding off.
The head of NATO was very sober and judicious. But Macron, they all started trashing the United States.
I thought to myself, why are you angry at us? We bailed you out two times. World War I, Germany would have won that war.
You had the greatest sacrifices, we understood that. But if we had not sent two million Americans over from scratch, we sent a million within a year.
And I was thinking my own family, my Swedish grandfather, he wasn't hurting anybody. He was 27 years old.
He was just on a small 40-acre farm. And he had very impoverished raking horses.

The next thing he knew, he was in Fort Lewis, Washington. The next thing he knew, he was on the battlefield of France.
The next thing he knew, his lungs and stomach were eaten out by phosphine and mustard gas, and he was a cripple for the rest of his life. And his adopted son, his brother's son, whose brother had one child, his mother died in childbirth, and his father was blinded, so my grandfather helped raise them.
Victor Hansen, he wasn't bothering anybody. He was the first person in his family to go to school.
He went to the University of the Pacific with my father, who was his adopted brother, but first cousin, really. And they went to the University of the Pacific and played football under Alonzo Stagg.
And then all of a sudden, the next thing they know, one is on Okinawa getting killed, and the other one's flying 40 missions as part of the World War II United States contribution. And I could go on to the same thing with families in Vietnam and Korea, but my point is this, is that it's very arrogant of the Europeans, even generations ago, to say to the United States, you owe us, you do this, you do this.
when two times in our lives they have ruined thousands and millions of families in America by having us go over there and clean up their mess, which could have been prevented had they armed themselves and deterred Germany in World War I and armed themselves and deterred Germany in World War II and now armed themselves and deterred Russia to prevent what happened. But at each course, they did not do that.
And that meant that the only country that was willing and able to help them was the United States. And that meant a lot of people who had no idea where Europe was or what was going on in the Pacific had to go over there and die for them.
And for them to get that attitude, I think it really gets Americans angry. As well it should.
Victor, so let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit more about some of the recent news that's come out this week. Stay with us and we'll be right back.
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That's B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash Wondery and use code Wondery at checkout. Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson show.
So, Victor, this week also we found out that a democratic pact and fundraising platform by the name of ActBlue was getting. Yeah, it was.
Yeah, it was getting donations from places like Russia, China, and Venezuela. So they were using foreign funds as far as the allegation.
They were named as donors who had no idea. They just took random names and slugged them.
This first came up because people noticed that once the Trump administration was ratified and in power, suddenly the marquee lawyers in Washington that ran this huge, and by the way, it was the largest pack, Republican or Democrat, it was huge. And if you talk to a Republican Congress person, they would just shake their head and say, you can't beat Act Blue.
They were just bringing in. Now we think, we're not sure, that there is some evidence that it was laundering money from both very wealthy people and maybe foreign influences.

You should remember that Barack Obama was fined $310,000, somewhere around that number, as I remember, for his presidential campaign where he illegally and improperly raised money, some of it from foreign donors, and didn't identify them. So it's not new.
The other accusation, unproven, I think Elon Musk has made it, that there were sources associated with ActBlue donors and other foundations, Rockefeller Foundation,

that have been supporting groups that are systematically trying to destroy Tesla,

either attacking charging stations or dealers or individual cars. And the idea is they want to create a deterrence that says,

don't buy a Tesla because if you do, we're going to go destroy it. You should look at the clips that you probably have of Schumer, Obama, Biden, circa 2014, 2013 about Elon Musk, or Brian Williams.
Man is the next Thomas Alva Edison. He's brilliant.
He's a da Vinci. They all loved him.
And the same was true of Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. And John Fetterman said a really astute thing the other day.
He was talking about oligarchs. He said, don't use that word.
Nobody really knows what they mean. And if you're demonizing oligarchs, well, that used to be our guys.
And they were great when Zuckerberg and all these people were giving hundreds of millions of dollars in their packs to us. I don't know what his agenda or strategy is.
I think it's to win a Senate seat in a rapidly red, turning red Pennsylvania. And he may be right.
He may win. I have a question then about Elon Musk.
He seems to be up against it as the head of Doge. But he seems, it seems to me this.
if you want to get rid of waste and fraud in government, which all the Democrats have always said, then you need Elon Musk because they've had all sorts of time to get rid of that waste and fraud and they didn't do it. So we've got Elon out there doing that and he's doing a great job.
But I also noticed does things like call mark kelly a traitor and i thought that he's not doing himself any favors or is he just trying to imitate donald trump it's angry he gets frustrated he's lost half his wealth his attitude is they used to love me and i what have i done wrong i say kicked the FBI out of Twitter. I stopped using social media to influence elections which they were doing.
I opened up Twitter renamed it X. I give Starlink free internet service for people in the impoverished world but especially the Ukrain, they wouldn't be able to fight if they didn't have internet.

And yet I don't even charge them. I recreated, I recalibrated, rebooted NASA with SpaceX.
Without me, we wouldn't have all of these satellites being successfully launched every week. And then I reinvented the car industry.
And as owner a Tesla I mean I think the Tesla that I have has 21,000 miles there hasn't been one thing gone wrong with it not one and it has more power than a gas engine if you you don't travel, you know, 300 miles, it'll go 320 miles, but very few people do that, and you charge it at home. It's been a wonderful car, and I think I'm going to give it to my son, who likes it, and buy another one to help Elon.
In fact, I urge other people to do the same thing.

I'd never have endorsed that as a political cause,

not that he's poor, but I really don't like bullies that turn on him.

When I used to walk through Menlo Park or Powhat,

though anybody that had a Tesla 10 years ago was kind of very prestigious

and they were very proud. Or if I had colleagues, they would tell me they have a Tesla.
And now they're ashamed of it. Isn't that weird? And I don't think the car's changed, has it? Did the car suddenly turn color? No, it's still an excellent car.
Elon, it's an excellent car. Don't worry about it.
Maybe one of the last topics here.

Did you notice that the Congress brought in mayors from Boston and Chicago and New York and was grilling them? And we didn't get a chance to talk about that. And I was wondering, do you think Congress has, what has it achieved by bringing these mayors in? And I just want to say they seem to dance around the word sanctuary.
So I felt like, well, it was just a semantic struggle. But did we achieve anything by talking to these sanctuary cities? They're trying to tell the American people that these mayors are part of a resistance movement that's illiberal and illegal.
There are 600 towns, cities, counties, entire states that have been bragging their sanctuary jurisdictions. What does that mean? That means that if they arrest somebody who's a rapist, killer, thief, and he's here illegally and they put him in jail, the normal procedure is to notify ICE.
They will not do that. They will not allow ICE to come into their cities, at least if they have any knowledge of it, or for joint operations.
And so they're basically saying, as South Carolina did in 1832, the federal government's law does not supersede our law. We are George Wallace at the gates of 1963 and the University of Alabama.
And we say to you, not segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation, but illegal immigration today, illegal immigration tomorrow, illegal immigration forever. We're not going to obey.
And the hypocrisy, and these senators were trying to pin them down is that they don't really believe in sanctuary jurisdictions for everybody other than themselves. So Fresno County, where I'm speaking, says tomorrow, Victor, you know, we don't like the federal gun registration requirements.
So if you want to go get a Sig Sauer pistol, just go in there, buy one, and take it home with you. Because California has a sanctuary gun law.
Or, you know what, A developer says, you know what? I've got a hundred homes. And they're claiming that the three-spotted nose rat is holding up.
They found one burrow. And they say he's an endangered species.
But you know what? We're a sanctuary EPA state. We have no endangered list of rarefied endangered species.
So I'm just going to bulldoze the SOB over with because my state law supersedes the federal law. And they would go crazy if anybody did the same thing.
and that's what they were trying to show but I'm a little worried

picking up on your point

that

the And that's what they were trying to show. But I'm a little worried, picking up on your point, that they need explanations.
And they have to articulate far better what their agenda is. All right.
And then the last topic here today, I was wondering your thoughts on that new leader in Syria who was a former al-Qaeda, at least his group was associated with it Ahmed Al Shara and I was wondering your thoughts on what's going on in Syria I know I'm springing this on you well yeah I mean this was what happened in Libya so the left along. Remember Barack Obama said that the Gaddafi's got to go Arab Spring.
And the Alawites were a minority of the Syrian population, maybe 20%. That's a sect of Shia Islam.
The majority of people in Syria are Sunni Muslims.

There's a large, was a large at one time, 15% Christian.

It's almost down to nothing.

There was some Jews.

They're down to almost nothing.

But the point I'm making is that this horrific Assad dynasty,

to maintain power with only a 20% ethnic base,

Thank you. The point I'm making is that this horrific Assad dynasty, to maintain power with only a 20% ethnic base, was able to tell people that we protect religious minorities, especially Orthodox Christians.
And that was one of the reasons that Putin claimed that he was an ally of the Hafez al-Assad and Bashar al-Assad, that they protected Christians in the way that Saddam Hussein had done. Remember, his foreign minister was a Christian.
So then, no, but they don't represent this radical democracy movement, then, that the left always fumigates. And remember, they attacked Tulsi Gabbard because she had said they didn't care that Nancy Pelosi had gone over and kissed up to the Assads.
She did that right during the Iraq War. Nobody said a word.
In fact, she criticized George W. Bush to them.
But the left in this universal democratization movement thinks that democracy is always the best form in these, to tell you the truth, tribal pre-civilizational societies. So they got rid of the Assads, and then you've got now Kurds, Turkish-orientated Sunni Muslim groups, Al-Qaeda Sunni Muslim groups, Alawite minorities, and the majority is just wiping them out.
It's getting rid of the Alawites, it's persecuting the Christians, it's driving what few Jews out, and that's exactly what's going to happen to it. And so the left just can't come to the conclusion that there is no perfect answer.
It's always a trade-off, 51% versus 49 in that part of the world. But they go in there with this imperial hubris and arrogance, and they say, you know what? We're going to get rid of the Ukrainian government, and we're going to get a Eurocentric government that protects gay rights and LGBTQ and Green New Deal, and we're going to make it like Europe.
And that, what's the alternative? And they never think about a traditional Orthodox Russian-speaking area of Ukraine. And everything, they just, they go into everywhere.
and they try to... They're very...
I mean to they're not even like British imperialists, at least they got rid of Suti, you know the idea that a widow has to jump on the pyre because they were strong but look at us, we go into Afghanistan and we have George Floyd posters and a pride flag on the embassy and a gender studies, and we're weak. So their attitude is, these cultural imperials come into our society and start to make these radical changes on sexuality, gender, the economy, etc.
And then they can't even enforce it. They're weak.
So they're loud and weak when it would be much better to be very strong, like the British were, if you're going to go into those places and don't broadcast what you're going to do. But speaking softly with a club is much better than loudly with a twig.
And that's when I get back to Elon Musk and Trump. I think they have to reverse the paradigm.
And when they're criticized, they say, what is your view? What is the alternative? So instead of calling Senator Kelly a traitor, all he has to do is say to himself, would you please give us an alternate strategy that will save lives and resolve the Ukrainian war? If you think that we're cutting too many people, how will you solve the problem of borrowing $3 billion? Do you want to borrow $4 billion? $5 billion? Do you want to print more money? What's the solution to a $37 trillion debt and a $1.7 trillion deficit? I'm here with open ears and just put the onus on them.

But when you do this, he's cut, what, $100 billion already? I mean, that's one-tenth of a trillion dollars, and we have 1.7, so we're like one-seventeenth. It's nothing.
Nothing. We've got so much more to cut.
We've got to get the interest rates down so that that $3 billion interest payment on the debt gets down to a billion and a half. If it was down to 2% or 3%, we could manage to have a window.
The other thing very quickly is I don't know why Trump at this point is talking about all these tax cuts or refunds. He shouldn't.
He should say there will be plenty of time to talk about changes in the income tax, our tips and all that. We understand that we're going to do that.
But right now, we don't have any money. We're trying to cut, cut, cut, cut, cut.
And we've got to get a balanced budget before we do anything and experiment with the tax code. I mean, we're going to have the tax cuts renewed, and that'll be wonderful, but they've got to pay down this debt and this deficit.
Well, Victor, this is the end of our show, and I'd like to read something from one of your readers at the website, and a comment that was made by Peter. The Democratic Party and its voters seem driven by irrationality and a thirst for destruction.
Their defiance of reality is an expression of the madness of our world. President Trump has exceeded expectations and has done more to confront and address societal insanity than I thought possible.
His boldness and actions appeal to those who have not been overtaken by the cultural virus. But I am dubious that there is a quick fix for what ails us.
Definitely, Trump's agenda needs to be successful, and Republicans need to win more elections for more lasting change. May God continue to be merciful to our nation and give us time to address the underlying problems.
And I like that last sentiment there. So thank you, Peter.
Very correct. And we're going to, this is going to be a very tricky period to get through.
It sure is. Well, thank you, Victor, for all your wisdom today.
I know you're still not feeling too well, and I know that my voice doesn't need to be on here any longer than is necessary. We would like to thank our audience for choosing to join us this afternoon or morning or whenever it is that you've joined us.
Thank you, everybody, for listening. It's much appreciated.
This is Sammy Wink. I'm Victor Davis Hans water, and things like missions and evangelical outreach.
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