Romans Meet Germans and the Brain Drain of Latin America

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I am Jack Fowler.

I'm the host.

You're here to listen to Victor Davis-Hanson, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor is many things classicist, farmer, historian, and best-selling author.

Right now,

his book, his most recent book, The End of Everything, is a bestseller, amongst many others.

He wrote a few years ago, The Case for Trump, a bestseller, which will be coming out in a new edition.

in August.

And that too will, I predict, be a bestseller.

You can find out about so much of what Victor does and these books and other things at his official website, The Blade of Perseus.

VictorHanson.com is the address.

Today's episode, which we're recording in late June, is one of several which we're pre-recording for the period when Victor will be away on the Hillsdale Cruise.

Many listeners, thank you very much.

sending questions.

And we've got three or four questions that I'm going to pose to Victor today.

And the first, well, the first two will be military related

about the Battle of Tuderberg Forest.

That will be our first question.

And we'll get to that right after these important messages.

Hey, folks, we're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

So, Victor, I have a question from Chaka,

who is down in Atlanta, who says, I've been following VDH since 2016.

I would love to hear VDH discuss the battle of Tuderberg Forest.

I believe the battle was significant for Germany and Europe as a whole, even into the 20th century.

Victor, can you tell us about the battle, when it was, who were the combatants, and what are the lasting over-the-millennia consequences?

You know, it's very funny.

If you go to the Rhine River,

and I guess it's in Westphalia, you see it

a

on the near the wall, the forest, you see the

statue for

Arminius.

And Arminius was the German

national hero who organized a massive ambush in 9 AD in the Turtenberg forest.

And of course, if you're a classicist, you believe that he was a traitor because he had been taken hostage as a young man in the early Germanic wars.

And then the Germans did this, I mean, the Romans did this all.

And then he was raised as a Roman and he advanced through the ranks.

with his expertise on Germany, and he was attached to the staff of various and various, I think, had the 17th, 18th, and 19th legions and was in charge of pacifying the periodic outbreaks in Germany.

Remember what the Romans decided

during the reign of Augustus.

Now, this is 9 AD, so Augustus came into power

in 31, and he's going to die in 14.

He's only got five more years.

But they had decided that these Germans were too fierce, the country too rugged, too cold, unlike Gaul or

the Iberian provinces, that it wasn't, in a cost-benefit analysis, worth it.

So they had decided not to go beyond the Rhine and Danube.

And that would be, that will explain a lot of things in later history why German is not a romance language or why you have this strange tradition,

and we've talked about it before, of Hegel and Nietzsche and Spingler that fed into, maybe misused, but it fed into National Socialism, that they were a blood and soil nation, Germany was.

And part of, if you look at these early philosophers of the 19th century, they went back and read Tacitus's Germania, which is kind of an encomium to the German.

It's an ethnographic

account written by Tacitus, whose father-in-law, Agricola,

had been posted near

Germany.

And it's kind of a, these people are not corrupted like we are.

They bathe in cold water.

They're big.

They're tough.

And anyway, that fed into this tradition that Germany was never conquered.

It was never assimilated.

It was never,

it's...

virgin blood and soil were never mingled into the decadent Western paradigm of

Western and especially southern Europe.

Okay, so the Germans didn't go, the Germans kept people out, but they began to go as early as the first century across the Rhine and Danube.

So from time to time, the Romans, starting with Caesar, they bridged the Rhine and they went in there.

And in nine, after a series of ambushes

and border skirmishes, Verus took three legions.

In theory, they were 6,000, but usually they were about 4,500.

And maybe you could make up with camp followers, but somewhere around 25,000 men.

And he went in there for the summer, and he was advised by Arminius,

who was a Roman citizen and a leading officer.

But at the same time, he was advising Verus,

he was

canvassing the Rhineland and then all the way into what would be now

the old border, the old eastern borders of West Europe, near the the Elbe River.

And he was creating, foaming

secretly, dissension and rebellion, and planning ambushes.

So, this legion, then, as it was leaving winter quarters, leaving the summer to go to winter quarters that would be outside of Germany, he advised them to go through the forest rather than the more defended path.

And he said, if you go through the forest, I recall the story: if you go through the forest, you can

put down insurrectionary

native tribesmen, and it's quicker to get to winter courts.

Okay.

So

that's what he did.

And in a series of ambushes, Jack, do you remember the Last of the Mohicans?

I do.

You remember the ambush there where the British men are in that long

and then

the native troops that are working for the French

attack them and then they go back and they attack them and they just and no one at the from the tail or at the head of the call and that was a true story that Finn and Cooper wrote about but nobody really knows what's going on and they are sort of cumbersome and the native people Wes Studio remember he was the he was a great actor he was the leader

and in any case of the attack and it was something like that only the Roman with its baggage train was apparently 10 or 12 miles long.

And so out of the forest, these Germanic hit teams came over a series of days.

And

they cut off the entire retreat.

They didn't know the territory.

Verus had been relying on Arminias.

He found out that he had been warned by his father-in-law that he was a traitor, as I recall.

But he didn't believe it.

In any case, they surrounded.

There was no exit.

There was no advance.

And they built a camp and they were surrounded and they were pelted.

And there was no way out.

There was no way to communicate.

A lot of the Romans committed suicide, I think Verus did, and they were completely wiped out, all 25,000

in this dark German forest.

And they never reconciled the 17th, 18th, and 19th.

Legion.

There's that famous scene in Suetonius' biography, I think it's Suetonius, of Augustus, where Augustus, supposedly in his insomnia abouts walks the halls of the imperial palace at Rome and hits the wall and says, Verus, give me back my allegiance.

Very of course was killed himself and then beheaded and then his head was circulated by Vera, by Arminius to all the tribal chieftains.

End of story, but not quite.

Tiberius's stepson,

Germanicus,

and he was a brother, I think, of Drusus.

He went back into Germany much later

and in a series of decisive battles destroyed the resistance, at least within 200 miles of the Danube and the Rhine, killed far more people than the Romans lost.

And then it became kind of a top-oss in Roman historiography that from time to time,

if a Roman

up-and-coming legate really wanted to make a name for himself, he got a legion and went in and very carefully conducted a punitive expedition and very successful.

And you have these accounts, I think it's later in Tassus or maybe it's in Diodorus, where they find prisoners that had been there.

It's sort of like the prisoners of Stalingrad, you know, that built the Moscow subway that I think it was Conrad Adenhauer didn't get back until, what, 1956?

They'd been prisoners for 12 or 13 years, what was left of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad.

And the same thing was true.

They butchered a lot of Roman soldiers.

Archaeologically, they found the spot and they've seen it.

But it was the same idea of indigenous troops without armor.

These were big Germans, much bigger than Italians, coming out of the forest, coming back in,

and just wearing them down and then wiping them out.

And then

they did engage as the Aztecs in human sacrifice.

So they sacrificed some, tortured some, enslaved some, and some were still alive.

I think it was 35 years later when Romans reconquered the area.

But the aftermath to the Tutenberg Forest massacre was the Romans took a very heavy price from Germany and killed probably three or four times more than they had lost by mopping up all the resistance.

And then they made a strategic decision that

Germany to the Romans is kind of like Afghanistan is to the modern world.

It's a very rugged area.

It's in a very strategically important place, but it's just not worth it to go in there.

Just keep, if you're Russians or American, whoever you are, British, keep the hell out of there.

You might be able to occupy the flat land for a while, but eventually you're dealing with a quarrellous, warlike people.

And that's what the Germans were.

So it's very funny that National Socialism flipped this on its head.

given the

primacy of classical scholarship that basically started in Germany, but when Hitler came along, it was, wait a minute, we're not the inheritors of the Romans and the Greeks, we're the inheritors of a pure racial tradition, an Aryan tradition that was never corrupted by these southern Europeans.

It gave him a little difficulty with Mussolini, of course, when he visited Rome.

But

that

in that narrative, that mythology, the Arminius is a national hero on the Tutenberg Wall was an act of defiant resistance.

For me, as a classicist, it was just a barbarian tribe that

outsmarted a foolish

Roman general.

You said, Victor, some were

obviously

tortured, some enslaved, but

I'm curious.

The rule was not to take prisoners

in ancient times.

Never mind, I'm in

Germany

in 9 AD, but earlier times or even later,

it doesn't seem like prisoners were ⁇ there were no prisoners of war or

there was a lot of prisoners of war, but

the vast, vast majority came from conquered cities, and that women and children.

because they didn't pose an immediate threat of resistance.

They weren't like Spartacus,

the slave roles under Spartacus.

Those were

gladiators and farmhands that joined that resistance.

But what I'm getting at is when you took Carthage,

there were 500,000, you killed 450,000, but you did enslave 50,000 of the survivors.

So when you took a city, they were confined and you could do it methodically.

In other words, you would give them terms, they would drop their weapons,

all the noncombatants, they would walk out and you could chain them up and then sell them.

I have slave sellers sell them to various groups.

But when you're in a battle,

it's so chaotic and people, you know, the defeated try to run away or you don't, you know, you're

some guy's been stabbing and killing everybody next to you, and then suddenly they're losing.

You say, oh, it's the battle's over.

I want to be taken prisoner.

And that's rarer.

They did take some prisoners and enslave them after a battle, but for the most part,

if you look at Caesar's Gallic Wars, what he wrote about his decade-long experience, according to Plutarch, he took a million, he killed a million Frenchmen or Gauls, and he took a million

slaves and probably wrecked the Roman economy by doing so.

But going into Gaul, the slaves he took, he would go into entire villages.

and surround them and then give them terms.

And if they didn't take the terms, then he won and he always won.

They would kill all of the males,

maybe

allow people up to the age 16 to live.

They would kill, or if there were certain skills, they found out.

But that was a much more common source of slaves that were the capitulations in cities and town.

Well, Victor, since we're talking about ferocious warriors, let's keep on that and get your views on military forces over the millennia.

And we have a question on that and we'll get to that right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

So Victor,

here's a question from

From Sparta to Vietnam, just to use a continuum, factoring in existent technology.

Who are the most ferocious, the most to be feared soldiers?

I'm looking at an article where it lists five, the Mongols, Gurkhas, the Comanche, Teutonic warriors, and the Sikh.

There's another piece that would

include the Visigoths, Samurai.

the Janissaries, who I think were Muslim,

and the Landsnechts which I think were more modern Germanic fighters.

Anyway, Victor, you're forming an army, right?

What kind of warriors do you want fighting for you?

And who would you be afraid to see on the other side of the battlefield?

Well, I think you have to divide that.

into an arbitrary demarcation between warriors and soldiers.

Soldiers are people

who obtain,

they're organized by a recognized state, recognized military, there's rank, there's discipline, and anything that originates out of the Western, in the West, the hoplite and legionnaire tradition.

And, you know, there's other traditions as well.

But warriors...

They don't fight in unison as much.

They don't share military discipline.

They get rewards for how many kills they get.

If you're a Roman legionnaire or a Greek hoplite, you don't keep count of the individual people you kill.

You don't range out as a berserker and go try to kill people.

Your

efficacy depends on staying formation and mowing people down as a collective.

So then we have to do...

So if you look at the warrior tradition,

then you can find warrior armies and warrior tribes that were very ferocious.

and we know who they are.

The Mongols were very ferocious.

Attila and the Huns were

overwhelmed traditional armies.

The Vikings were

among the most fierce of all warriors, as we know.

But they didn't fight in formalized

command structures,

different subordinate officers, commanding officers, signals to advance, retreat.

So I would say the Vikings, the Mongols, Tamerlane

soldiers, the Native Americans, especially the Comanche and Sioux and Apache,

the Zulus were very fierce warriors.

They had some efforts at

systemizing

their military into Orns, they called them.

When you look at traditional armies, you start off with the Spartans, and I think

for 50 to 100 years they were indomitable.

I would say their peak was

oh Thermopylae and the first

second invasion in the Persian War at the Battle of Plataea

and then throughout the Peloponnesian War they and then until the Battle of Leuctra in 371.

So for

over a hundred years they

because of their training as an interior Gestapo or police force to, you know, there was only 20 or 30,000 Spartans and perioric or semi-Spartan citizens, and they had to control a quarter million hellots.

So they were training for wars and internal police and then found that those skills allowed them to have this strategic advantage in wars of conquest.

So I would say the Spartans especially and

The Teutonic Knights were

fierce, the Knights of Malta.

These were forces that were very disciplined and had tactics and strategy and command structures, discipline, and overwhelmed their enemies.

The more you read about the Venetian fleet of the 16th,

not just at the Battle of El Panto in 1571, but the 16th century, it was pretty predominant given their small numbers.

I mean, they had outposts all over the Mediterranean.

They had mastered galley warfare.

They had mastered

metallurgy and and ballistics.

And so they were pretty fierce.

They were much more adept than was their main rival, the Ottomans.

You have to get, I think it was the misfortune, as I wrote in the end of everything, that the Aztecs had to meet the Spaniards of the 16th century.

Because if you talk about land troops and the later 16th century with the Tercio, that was kind of like a modern, a 16th century phalanx.

They had been fighting Islam.

They had been fighting the Reconquista.

They had been fighting the Italians.

So they were pretty fierce warriors, the ones that Cortez brought to the new world with him.

The Swiss were, you know, Swiss guard.

The Swiss phalanx was

for 200 years was unstoppable.

The landneck

civilian militias with long pikes and very

exact.

orders and strategy and tactics.

For a while, the Macedonians were unstoppable, especially under Alexander, but even under the successors, by means unstoppable, every one of Alexander's fights, he was outnumbered three, five, ten to one.

But the Macedonian phalanx, given its discipline, the length of its pikes, its ability to march in orders.

When you get into more modern times,

I think you would say the British Navy from about 1600 to, I don't know, 1940 was unstoppable because of its discipline, military traditions, rank, order, logistics, shipbuilding.

When you look at land armies, there's something about East Germany or Prussia, that military tradition.

I think I've remarked on it before, but in World War I,

I think we forget that the German army, Austria and Hungary,

was almost collapsed.

And yet, by February 1918,

the Imperial German Army had done what the Wehrmacht could not do in World War II.

They had conquered most of Western Russia, and they had annexed almost all the way to Leningrad and Kiev.

And it was a tactical blunder or strategic blunder, excuse me, that

In 1918, before the Americans had fully mobilized in Europe, we'd sent almost a million soldiers from April 1917 to February of 19, from

April of 1917 to February of 1918.

But had the German army pulled back a little bit and not been so greedy in annexing these large swaths of defeated Russia, Of course, it was in this revolution, so that explained part of it, but they didn't send the entire Eastern Army under Ludendorff westward, is what I'm saying.

they sent about half a million men, but they could have sent up to a million and a half, and they might have been able to break the French and British before the Americans came in in full force.

So the Prussians have always been,

I think, the preeminent modern military after Napoleon.

The Napoleonic Wars from 17.

I mean, you look at the Battle of Jena or Austerlitz.

I just came back from, you know, I went into the Hall of Mirrors and you see the great battles, I think on the floor above, of all of Napoleon's so-called 54 battles.

I don't think the French have had success since then to that magnitude, but for 10 years from 1798 to the Battle of Waterloo, he was unstoppable, basically, until he went in, maybe until he went into Russia.

And that was because of the system that the Napoleonic merucratic advancement of the marshals of France were based large part on merit to be.

And then each army was self-contained.

They had their own logistics, their own cannon, their own

cavalry, and then they could conglomerate or they can unify in a very sophisticated fashion, then break apart.

So it was a very mobile, highly organized system.

But when you look at year after year, I think the Prussian military, and that

goes for World War II, Germany

lost about five and a half million people.

many of them were civilians, but it was a lethal machine that killed over 20 million Russians, maybe 10 million

Russian soldiers, and then the rest through starvation or collateral damage or just wanton murder.

On the Western front, from the day the United States and Britain landed in Normandy on June 6th,

Within 30 days, they had almost a million men.

And that army, Anglo Army under Montgomery and Bradley with Eisenhower's overall Supreme Commander,

Patton and Hodges

and Patch later were all under

Bradley.

That army

by

August of 1944 was probably out, especially after the Falaise Gap.

disaster for the Germans.

I don't think there were more than 400,000 German troops that were viable west of the Rhine.

And there was about a million and a half Anglo-Americans.

And yet,

partly because of stupid commands

by some of the Allied commanders, the failure to take Antwerp, the market garden fiasco, the diversion of resources away from Pat and the entrance

into

the fore, near Aachen, the heavy fighting near Aachen in the forest by the First Army got bogged down.

But my point is this, is that in that period where the

Germans had no air cover and we had not just superiority, but air supremacy, probably, and we were bombing the homeland at the same time.

We had tactical air supremacy.

The German army was outnumbered probably three to one.

They killed 1.7 Americans

for every German we killed.

And that shows you just how,

and that was an army that had been, at that point, had already lost 3 million people, 3.5 million,

mostly on the Eastern Front.

So I would say the German army from World War I to World War II was probably of an organized military.

You could argue that as far as organization and control

and discipline, imaginative,

that Army of the West of Sherman from

August, say, or July 1864 to April 1865, that was an amazing army.

60,000 men left Tennessee, went south, cut their supply lines, destroyed John Bill Hood and Joe Johnson's resistance.

took Atlanta, burned most of it, and then marched 160 miles, I guess, to Savannah, Georgia.

They only lost about 50 soldiers.

They freed 40,000 slaves.

And then mid-winter, they corduroyed the roads and went up to the Carolinas and

pulled in right behind

Robert E.

Lee, who Grant could not dislodge from around Richmond.

That was why the war ended.

It was Sherman's Army of the West.

And those were mostly, almost all those regiments were from Michigan, Wisconsin.

Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota.

And they were Westerners.

There's a good description, if anybody's interested, in Sherman's memoirs, where the German attaché who's marching, who is watching the victory parade, he sees the Army of the Potomac walk by.

They had new uniforms.

They were mostly, no offense, Jack, Irish

immigrants,

German immigrants.

It was a

revolving door army.

They'd lost 100,000 casualties.

But the Army of the West came in, and he wouldn't give them new uniforms.

So they came in in tatters.

They were all suntan.

They were Western farmers.

They had all these black pioneers that they had hired after freeing them that made the roads.

And the German attaché said, this is the most scary army I've ever seen.

Oh, you never know.

Americans fought.

I mean, they were,

if you give the American army a good cause, and it's not in a war of conquest or an expedition.

If it's something that they feel they have been attacked, there's no better army in the world.

Our problem is when we get involved in optional military engagements on the ground in places like Afghanistan, the Middle East, Vietnam,

where we can't bring the full effect of firepower, the public is not behind the war, we have limitations on the use of force, we don't believe in unconditional surrender, it's a nuclear age, our enemies have nuclear patrons, it's just a bad idea.

Bad, bad idea.

This has been terrific, Victor.

Just one thing to clarify, and you're forgiven for your digot,

my Irish forebears, which you have some also.

You said 60,000.

Sherman left, Sherman had 60,000.

And by the time he gets to

Virginia or through

Savannah.

South of Richmond.

How many troops did he lose?

He didn't lose very many.

He lost about 100 or maybe less than 100.

That's amazing.

And

he got resupplied when he got to Savannah.

And if you count the black slaves that he freed in Georgia, some of them got killed tragically.

But

I know that people look back and say he used racist language, but there was no better friend of the slave or African Americans than Sherman because when he got to,

he started giving them islands off the Carolinas, you know.

He just said they're yours.

And

he didn't have authority to do that, but he felt so beholden because they had played such an integral role.

A lot of people thought he didn't like him.

So Stanton and others had gone down to

Savannah and interviewed black leaders of the freed black community in the South.

They wanted to say, Didn't Sherman allow people to get killed?

Didn't he have some Southerners that were in the Northern Army that were pro-South?

They said, no, no, nobody's done more to

free us and give us land than William to come to Sherman.

So he wonder if where Clarence Thomas grew up, that was part of that

land given.

Yes, there was a lot of land offshore given, and it was contested after the war.

I think some black families still, some of the listeners know much more about it than I do.

But look into that.

Sherman was chastised for exceeding his orders by giving freed slaves

vast swaths of land, but

he had a special dislike for what he called the cavalier class.

He liked southerners.

He'd been at Louisiana, what became Louisiana State University as a commandant when it was a military academy and its origins.

But

he liked southerners a lot.

but he did not like the plantation cavalier class.

Those were the 300,000 out of maybe 11 million people who

had vast, and then the

1 to 2% that had slaves.

So he didn't.

His

bete noir was Wade Hampton, the Carolinian, who had a huge plantation, was a great cavalry commander.

He had respect for William

for Nathan Bedford Forrest because he was from the lower classes.

Nathan Bedford Forrest was a very fierce guy.

He was a former former slave trader,

probably the nominal head of the first coach plan.

And then he kind of, as he got older, I don't know if he had liver cancer or what, but he mellowed and he kind of,

you know, he told people not to have armed resistance.

And then later

he had some testimonies before Congress that were pretty, if you read the transcripts, you know, he said,

I don't have anything with African Americans,

but I suggest that all of you liberals, we'll just put them on trains and you can teach them and integrate them far better than we can.

And he wanted to do that en masse, something like what happened with the diaspora of the black community during World War I and World War II when factory, well-paying jobs opened up in the North.

But he was, anyway, Sherman did not like the southern patrician class.

And that's why he targeted, you know,

plantations.

This has all been

incredibly fascinating.

Wow.

Well, we have one more question to ask, Victor.

We have some limited time here, and we'll get to that.

And it's going to be about immigration and its consequences.

We'll do that right after these final important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Davis-Hansen show.

So,

hey, Victor, one last question here from Robert.

And

here it is.

No one is publicly discussing, exposing the flip side of the immigration coin.

In Latin Central America, you cannot find an HVAC contractor or roofer in Panama City.

You can't find a CPA, a CDL driver, a waitress, an apprentice in Valencia, Venezuela.

They're all gone.

Anyone with ingenuity, assets, a desire for self-improvement, or a thief, they're all gone.

And the local economies have been eviscerated.

Devastation.

Victor, they have to go back and continue to build those local economies, not come here as indigents, et cetera.

No one is talking about how this mess is destroying Latin America's already fragile economies.

None of the media want to discuss this.

Victor, do you want to discuss this?

Yeah, I mean, I talked about this

23 years ago in Mexico,

and I mentioned that

almost half the males in

the state of Oaxaca had left.

And that had there been a lot of studies that that had left

local communities devastated of available manpower.

And you would have whole families where the male of the family was supposedly an expatriate or a guest worker or an illegal lady in the United States sending back remittances, and that happened.

But whole villages were dependent on foreign currency coming in, but with absent male.

But the problem was that in so many cases, the males were not,

no more you're in a different country and you're systematized into that country.

They were marrying or had girlfriends or different wives, but they were not.

they were not coming back and nor were they not and it was difficult to bring their entire families.

So it really had socioeconomic, cultural devastations for these rural communities and large cities in Chiapas,

Oaxaca, Michokan.

And the same thing was true in Central America.

Another thing that people forget is that the beginnings of illegal immigration started because of the asymmetry between the fertility rates.

So in the post-war era, even during the baby boomer, we were up to 2.6, 2.7, maybe three, and now we're down to 1.6.

And Mexico was up to 5, 4.

And if you look at it now, Mexico's, and I think most Central American countries are about 2, 2.5.

So that's partly because of the emancipation of women in Latin America, access to birth control, et cetera.

But the idea that all these

countries are just brimming with excess manhood to come up here is starting to be incorrect.

And that's why this is very important because when Donald Trump makes these wild accusations that they're not sending our best, for which he was chastised when he said that coming down the escalator in 2015, but he said it in the debate the other night.

There's something to that about mental institutions because a lot of these governments are

really trying to keep healthy, law-abiding male citizens, especially home.

They don't see it

as they used to, that executes population they couldn't feed, so they got to get rid of them, send them to the United States.

They'll become more loyal to Mexico than they ever have been.

The longer they're away from it, they'll send back.

That still happens because there's 60 billion going to Mexico and 60 billion going to Central America.

But

these governments are starting to worry that they're losing,

as the writer suggests, people who are their workforce, their blue-collar workforce.

And as a result of that, it is true, especially in Venezuela, that the government, which is hostile to us, somewhat places like Nicaragua,

El Salvador has got a problem.

That's a special case, as is Nicaragua.

But they're starting to encourage people in jail or mental institutions, anything that costs the government money to go up here and not to have other people come up here.

And of course, when you say that, people say that to Mallorcas or the Bay, oh, you're a racist.

Oh, that's not true.

Oh,

my biggest complaint is.

There's a study out that says that illegal aliens commit crime in a lower late than U.S.

How do you know that?

Do you sample, how many people have come across the border?

10 million?

Nine?

It's an academic with a PhD say, oh, I did a sample because there was 7.8 million who came across and I have that sub.

No, they don't know any of that.

They just say stuff like that.

And of course, the crimes committed by illegal aliens are far more likely not to be reported, especially when you calibrate things like almost half the accidents in L.A.

County, the person who's culpable leaves the scene of the accident because of their status.

And I can tell you where I live, it's pretty common knowledge that if you are on a rural road and you get hit by somebody, and it's happened to me once,

the driver who hit you will not stay there.

And as far as I have

fished out of my vineyard, one, two, three, five cars over the last 40 years.

Five.

And a dead, and a dead body, too.

And well, that was a dead body of another person in my vineyard, but five cars who did probably an aggregate of $50,000 damage.

And

at least in four of them, there were either

open beer cans or hard liquor or marijuana cigarettes all in the car.

But my point is,

they were usually somebody on a Sunday afternoon, drunk, intoxicated, swerving, overcorrected, went into a vineyard or orchard, destroyed trees and vines because of the

cushioning effect of going, you know, 90 miles an hour and you hit a vineyard and the wire hits your bumper and it slows you.

The next row, the next row, it's kind of like going through a series of rubber bands.

And then they take off.

And I can tell you, in every case, they never found the perpetrator.

I was never compensated, and the highway patrol never allowed me to impound the car and sell it for damages.

And in every case, the car was impounded.

And when I followed up on the first two or three, the perpetrator showed up and got the car back.

And he was not charged.

And every time I told the officer, well, the guy may be injured or he may be right out there in the, they said,

they said something to the equivalent, not always verbatim.

So the last thing I want to do on a Sunday afternoon is crawl under a bunch of vines and look for somebody who left, did this.

He's gone.

One case has happened.

They went and

my son said, hey, dad, there's somebody there by

the shed.

And it was at night.

And

the car had been, I guess he had jumped out before it crashed or whatever.

But

here was this person who was here illegally hiding behind a tree next to the shed at 11 o'clock.

And the police had actually been after that car in a hot pursuit and then had quit the pursuit and didn't know that it, that it had gone into my driveway.

One person had jumped out and I think the car had either wrecked or was disappeared.

And then later it was found.

And

that particular one that it was found on my neighbor's, it did damage my neighbor, but the person who jumped out was on my property.

So I had to, I didn't know who he was.

And

so I called the police and they came out.

I held him at gunpoint, but he was a very nice person.

My son gave him a Coke.

We talked to him.

And

I didn't point the gun at him.

I just pointed it down at the ground.

I said, please stay right where you are.

And police came.

And of course, they body slammed him, put it in great takedown, high-fived each other.

So it was kind of weird.

That happens still.

That happens still.

I think the last five years, we've had two or three people show up.

outside our house at night.

And they're usually the same thing.

Somebody's been drinking,

either a car stalled and they abandon it, or the boyfriend or whoever gave their woman,

often a woman they just threw out the side of the car, and she's either intoxicated or she has no phone or she has no way to get home.

It's pretty depressing.

Yeah,

these are the things that...

Mad Max.

Yeah, these are the things that Mr.

Alejandro Mayorkas never deals with,

Washington Perch, never deals with, doesn't care about it, doesn't care about any of these poor people who are killed or maimed or

impacted.

He is

such a willful liar.

He is.

He is.

It's so weird.

It was like he's a character right out of an animal farm.

He says, the border is secure, the border is secure, the border is secure, the border secure.

It's like Baghdad Bob, and then every night you see thousands rushing.

And the only time he gets animated is, and we're whipping people people from horses.

We're investigating.

And then the border's secure, then all of a sudden he gets an order from Comintern, Moscow Central, and it says, drop that narrative.

The poll says 60% want to deport all illegal aliens.

This is an election year killing us.

New narrative, new narrative, new narrative, new narrative.

Wait instructions.

New narrative.

Republicans didn't join us and bipartisan.

They're responsible for all the people we let in.

Now you say border insecure, border insecure.

So then he says, well, we couldn't do anything.

We didn't have the legislation.

The Republicans wouldn't

help us.

Then when that doesn't work,

then it's back to border secure, border secure, border secure.

He also

creepy guy.

He was pretty good, too.

On the Joe Biden is the sharpest, smartest.

Yeah.

With it guy in every meeting.

And that other guy, too, that Representative Goldman, I think he's the heir to Goldman Sachs, one of the family members of that fortune.

He said the same thing.

I just walked out with

a meeting with Joe Biden.

They all say the same thing.

Just walked out with a meeting.

Boy, it's just like, it's just like 1984,

the left here, same type of left.

They just get this narrative.

Cheat fake, cheek fake, cheek fake, Dr.

Lang, Joe's sharpest attack.

I can't keep up with his energy.

Oh, narrative changes after the debate.

We all have bad debates.

I've had a bad debate.

Barack Obama, but bad bait,

pending, pending, holding, holding, holding.

We have to wait, wait, wait, wait.

What is the narrative?

Is he going to get, do we say he's leaving or is he staying?

We got to know.

So we changed the narrative.

So that's what we're waiting right now.

Right after the debate, the narrative was

don't say that he's hail and energetic.

Just pause and say

everybody's had a bad night.

That was the Clinton-Obama

narrative.

And now if they get rid of him, it is, what a heroic decision.

Never has a president willfully stepped down for the good of the country.

Joe is a hero.

He's an American hero.

That will be the narrative.

And if he doesn't,

it depends on where the power is.

It's kind of like Trotsky versus Stalin.

Who's going to end up?

Is it going to be the Clinton Obama

wing that supposedly wants him to stay because they're controlling him, I suppose, and he's useful.

Or is it going to be the more pragmatic people that want a Newsom or a Shapiro or Whitmer or something?

But whatever the narrative is, they all adapt it very soon.

And it has nothing to do with reality, the narrative.

Yeah, well, truth.

Did you see that just off the top?

Did you see that clip of Joe Biden in 2019 versus the one

this week?

It was amazing.

It's been circulating.

I mean, he wasn't, I mean,

I remember Corey Booker went after him forgetting things in 2019 during the primaries, but it's not even the same person.

Well, but right, but

he ran a basement campaign because he was that bad then, right?

Yes.

Yes, he did.

I mean,

you look at him, the face is contorted.

There's no blood in his face.

It's ashen white, a power,

and he has this hoarseness.

I don't know if that's from reflux or postnatal drip or congestive heart failure, but his voice is just almost

and he's incoherent.

And

it's shocking and what they're doing to the American people.

They're basically saying to us, Jack,

we have decided that

If you want to be president and be commander-in-chief with sole possession of the nuclear codes,

it's okay if you don't qualify for any other job in America, but that.

In other words, we would never hire you to be an Uber driver.

We would never hire you to be a television commentator.

We'd never

hire you to be greeting people at Walmart.

We'd never hire you to, I don't know,

Just stand on the corner with a sign and wave it.

But have the nuclear codes?

Anybody can do that.

That's your problem.

And that's where we are.

Well, Donald Trump said, and I know it's a cliche, but he's a Trojan horse, but he was a Trojan horse.

A Trojan horse is made out of wood.

It's inadamate, but he's.

We'll see.

I think if he does step down, he'll exact a high price, probably a pardon for Hunter.

and a pardon in advance for the whole Biden family.

Yeah.

Well,

we shall see.

Victor, you've been terrific.

We've come to the end of this particular episode.

I want to thank you for all the wisdom you shared, Victor.

I want to thank our listeners who submitted questions that we use in this episode and we're using in other episodes

for this

Victor's Hillsdale Cruise Sojourn period.

We refuse to let any

time, we refuse to miss a show.

So this is why we're pre-recording.

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Victor, you've been terrific.

We will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody.