Justices, Candidates, and Military Technology

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Hello, ladies, hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, Lucky Man Me.

You're lucky too, because you're here to get some wisdom from Victor Davis Hansen, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor has an official website, The Blade of Perseus.

VictorHanson.com is the web address.

I'll tell you a little more about it later in the episode.

He's got a best-selling book, The End of Everything.

You don't have it yet?

What's the matter?

Go get it.

It's brilliant.

New York Times bestseller.

He's got another book coming out.

It came out once upon a time, The Case or Trump.

Victor's got a new edition, and it's out August 7th, I think, Victor.

15,000, 20,000 new words.

It's essentially a new.

Yeah, I got the first copy.

It's bright red.

They did a beautiful job with a new cover.

And

I just signed a thousand book plates.

Dang.

That's when you have insomnia, you stay up at night.

I can't sleep, so I have to do something.

Sign book plates, way to go.

Well, Victor writes,

he writes syndicated column, writes American greatness.

He also writes a lot on X.

It used to be called Twitter.

And he's got a piece he wrote the other day on animal farm Democrats.

And we're going to get Victor's take on why he wrote that.

There's a new issue of Strategica out.

Strategica is the online journal that Victor edits.

and oversees for the Hoover Institution.

And then we've got British Elections.

And Victor's take on what the hell happened over there is something I'm very eager to hear.

We'll get to all these things right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

We are recording on Saturday, July 6th.

This particular episode, Victor, I believe, is going to be up.

Let's see, 13 minus 2 is, I think, July 11th.

I think Thursday the 11th.

This will be up.

So, Victor, you write these long pieces on X.

I still got

trouble not referring to it as Twitter, but Animal Farm Democrat leftists make up things as they go along.

That's the beginning of this piece.

Victor,

tell us about Animal Farm Democrats and what they do.

Well, most of these, as we've been saying,

when any discussion of the Biden, they're all self-inflicted.

And it's often because they don't tell the truth or they're doing something illegal and they're trying to warp democracy.

And then the more intricate and complex they try to outsmart it, the worse it gets.

And so then they start into the Orwellian

mode in which they have to recreate the rules.

So one day Joe Biden is a victim of cheap fakes.

The next day, he's got a problem.

The next day, he's demented.

And people are calling within the party for him to resign.

And

we went through all of these Orwellian things before.

One day there's Christopher Steele

and he's got proof that Donald Trump urinated in a bed in a hotel because Obama stood there and he went to the Miami.

And then the next day it's kind of

suspicious, it served its purpose.

And then the next day, well, whoever said it was,

whoever said it was that we believe believe that?

And no, it's in the memory hole, to quote Orwell.

And then there was

the pangolin, and then there was the bat, and then anybody who said it was the Wuhan lab,

level four biology lab run by the People's Liberated Army, recipient of Tony Fauci's circumvention of U.S.

law through Peter Dissect's Echo Health for gain of function.

Well, you can't say that.

You don't have an MD.

That's a conspiracy.

And then all of a sudden, well,

whoever said it was a pangolin, of course it came from the lab.

So I went through all of these,

I don't know, lies that the 51 intelligence

had all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.

So when you heard that, we were all supposed to think, wow, there's these little gremlins.

And they've got little hammers and saws, and they're making a fake laptop somewhere in the Kremlin.

And then they got these pictures somehow of Hunter.

And then they'd studied for years the Biden interaction.

So they faked text messages and emails from Ashley and Joe and Hunter.

And it was so realistic.

That's what they wanted us to believe until they didn't.

And then that went into the memory hole.

And

then they went berserk over Robert Hurr.

Remember that?

How dare Robert Hurr do that?

That wasn't, how dare he said that he would get sympathy from a jury that might

nullify the obvious guilt because he sympathized with an old man who lost his memory.

And then suddenly,

forget that.

That's no more operative.

You know, it's like

all

animals with two legs are bad, except some.

It's all the barnyard wall, if you read that little novelette, it always changes, just like the, it's what Marx does.

The party line changes depending, and you're supposed to forget that there was either a, another one.

And then, you know, I always thought, Jack, that the orange dermis was really bad.

Orange man bad.

Remember that?

Right.

Yes.

And all of a sudden, I look at Joe Biden after the debate, and he comes out and he's bright orange.

And I thought,

wow, orange man good.

So I guess it's a trend now that

if you're on the left, you can be orange.

And there's nothing wrong with being orange, especially if you've had a bad night.

You just redo it.

And then there was, gosh, there was Chuck Schumer, and he was lecturing about the Supreme Court.

Elizabeth, after the immunity ruling, Elizabeth Warren said, this is why I've been saying for years, we've got to pack the court and get up to 13 to 15 judges.

Yeah, we've heard it ad nauseum, Elizabeth.

And then

Chuck Schumer

says, this is just an outrageous behavior by the court.

And I'm thinking,

Chuck Schumer, were you the guy at March of 2020

who assembled a throng of radical pro-abortion protesters, an unruly mob, for which I thought, given what we did on January 6th and the way that we treated those people, that you were insurrectionary because you went to the very doors of the Supreme Court.

And I remember what you said.

You said,

I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price.

And here was the cherry on top, Jack.

He said, you won't know what hits you.

Is that an implied threat?

Or did you just lower the bar, Senator Schumer?

So then a few months later, people started showing up at the homes of Kavanaugh and Thomas

and Gorsuch.

And that was a felony to go in front of a justice's home and try to demonstrate to affect their decision, i.e., but not if it's about abortion, apparently.

And then all of a sudden, Merrick Garland thought there was nothing wrong with that.

He didn't charge any of these protesters that mobbed their homes.

And they did just what Chuck Schumer said when he said, you won't know what hit you, and you're going to pay the price.

And then an assassin, remember the assassin, the would-be assassin that showed up?

He was trying to kill Kavanaugh, but he called his sister and said, do I really want to kill Kavanaugh?

No, you don't.

And so turn yourself in.

And he did.

Now, we haven't heard much.

So this is the same guy, Schumer, now who's giving Orwellian lectures about

extremism on the part of the Supreme Court.

That's what they do.

I mean, they have no collective memory about what they say the day before, the day after.

Is anybody in the Democratic Party or the administration going to use this term cheap fake again, you think?

Well,

next time it serves their purpose, they will, right?

If it could serve a purpose, they'd use it.

Was George Stephanopoulos's interview cheap fake?

Was the debate a cheap fake?

I haven't heard.

What's the new party line?

Baghdad Bob.

What does Baghdad Bob have to say about it?

Anyway, that was what the tweet was about.

Yeah.

Hey, Victor, the tweet made me think about

Joe Biden and Clarence Thomas, and I want to raise something on that.

But first, I just want to take a minute for our good old, reliable sponsor, Hillsdale College, and particularly to our new listeners.

Did you know that Victor is one of the professors in three of the over 40 free online courses at Hillsdale College?

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And we thank the very good people at Hillsdale College for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen show.

Victor,

I go to Bongino Report a lot as a kind of a newer alternative to Once Upon a Time went to the Drudge Report and

it's gone kind of left there.

But they had a video up up uh on top of the page upper right and it was about it it's long story short it was a clip from the michael pack documentary about clarence thomas

and clarence thomas it showed us you know in a clip in the clip of of the uh hearings and joe biden um

interviewing interrogating supreme court nominee clarence thomas back in whenever it was 1991 92.

He is so unctuous, such a effing phony,

cocky, et cetera.

But

your piece was on lying liars that lie.

And of course, one of the greatest lies that we've experienced in our culture

the last 40 years has been the lie of Anita Hill against against Clarence Thomas.

And whose fingerprints were all over that?

Joe Biden, who was then the chairman of the sector of the House Judiciary Committee,

every time Clarence Thomas

and his ascendancy toward the court got a new job, Anita Hill wanted to follow him.

Remember,

it wasn't like that she felt that he had done anything wrong, or she wouldn't have kept trying to work for him.

Yeah, hitched her wagon.

That was, he was a bully.

It's, you know, there's something, I want to be very careful here, but there is something in the white upper-class liberal mind

that when they see, and I've seen it my entire life, when they see a brilliant black conservative like Tom Soule or Shelby Steele or Clarence Thomas, it sets them on fire.

And they say and act things that are so self-revelatory.

And that's, it's, this is this mediocrity, Joe Biden.

bullying Clarence Thomas.

And the subtext was it, and you could see what the subtext was because later when he said to Charlemagne Dagad,

you ain't black, you could see what he was saying to Clarence Thomas, you know, 30 years earlier, you're not black because you are an independent, strong-minded justice that doesn't kiss my rear end for what I have done for you.

And that's the attitude of the white liberal mind toward really brilliant black conservatives.

How can you be conservative when I do all this for you?

And

that was what was.

They were all Roland Fryer.

Yeah, same thing with Roland Fryer.

Same thing with Glenn

Lurie.

Same thing with all conservatives, any independent-minded, brilliant black thinker.

You get somewhere there is a white liberal, patronizing, sanctimonious critic who tries to attack them for not appreciating what this supposed white liberal has done.

And,

you know, it's just like French intellectuals that are conservative.

They have to be brilliant.

And because 90% of black intellectuals are part of the left-wing machine, it takes a very courageous mind and a very brilliant mind to be conservative, especially if you're black.

And when you see these people, they're absolutely stunning in their

creativity.

And Clarence Thomas is, and

the other thing about Clarence Thomas was

he didn't grow up like Barack Obama.

He didn't grow up like Michelle Obama.

He grew up under Jim Crow, dirt poor, just like Tom Sowell.

So often they have much more feides and authenticity about the black experience than the people who criticize them.

It just, it drives me crazy.

And one of the best things in my life of being at the Hoo Institution was that my, sincerely, my two best friends were Shelby Steele and R and Tom Soule.

He just turned 94, didn't he?

Yes.

One of the nicest things that was, you know, every once in a while, every two weeks, we'd go to downtown Palo Alto.

I'd meet Tom there.

Shelby would drive up from Monterey.

We'd all have lunch and just talk about things.

And, gosh,

that's why I really, yeah,

that's why Joe Biden is, he couldn't,

he's,

he's not even in nowhere near Clarence Thomas's mind or what Clarence Thomas has gone through or what Clarence Thomas does and the positive contributions he makes to the United States.

Come on.

Come on.

Clarence Thomas never got arrested going to visit Nelson Mandela.

It gets me really angry.

I mean, they go after because he knows Harlan Crowe, who, by the way, I've met and like.

Harlan Crowe is a wonderful person.

He's not a big Trump supporter, but

that's no big deal.

He's an independent thinker.

He's a wonderful guy.

He's very successful.

He's very honest.

And if he takes Clarence Thomas, and to think that they go after Clarence Thomas when you have this whole Biden consortia right under their nose, $25 million with

no

skills to sell, no business to create that income.

Where did the money come from?

And why did the money come from?

Why can they go on vacation at some billionaire's home on

a tenured?

Clarence Thomas can't have a friend.

I don't know.

Why could all of the liberal justices do that?

Right.

So they just and you tell me it's not racist that they pick up on they go after Clarence Thomas from the left.

Have you ever met him, by the way, Victor?

I have.

I have.

I've met him at a club I went to, and I met him a couple of times at Hillsdale College, and I met his wife three or four times.

and they're lovely people.

I really admire him.

He's genuine.

He's courageous.

And I hope he has a long and continued productive life.

And the same thing for his wife, Ginny.

Yeah, terrific.

I hope, just like Tom Soule and his wife, Mary, I hope they continue to go forever.

Well,

talking about age, when he was, you know, Tom Soule, when he was 90, wrote a book.

He just wrote a book.

He was 93 and wrote a book.

And I talked to him and email him, and he's sharp as a tack.

So, Joe, don't use age.

Nothing to do with age.

Well, Victor, speaking of writing, well, I didn't know why I said that.

Victor, you will oversee other great writers on occasion at Hoover.

through Strategica, the online journal that you are the editor-in-chief.

It's such a boss of.

And you just can't, there's a new issue out, issue number 92.

And

I want to get your take on that.

We'll do that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

So, Victor, there's a new issue of Strategica, issue 92, the future of U.S.

weapons production.

And there are three pieces

in this particular issue, Gordon Chang.

and Ralph Peters, who've written regularly for Strategica, and Bing West, who writes regularly.

And I love Bing.

He's just, he is a terrific guy.

His piece is called

Remembering the Wampanog.

And the Wampanoag

was a Union ship from the Civil War that was a coal ship.

And it's a symbol.

What's the symbol?

What is Bing getting at asking, urging us to remember the Wampanoag?

Well, the Navy.

It was kind of a,

what's the word, telltale sign that this coal-fired steamship named the Wampanog was the way of the future.

But when the future after the war ended, it took two decades because of, I guess you'd call it the sailing lobby, huh?

Kind of like the cavalry and tanks.

And what he's trying to say is that

we should be learning from the Ukrainian war.

And what we're learning is off-the-shelf drones, some of them $4,000 or $5,000, are wreaking havoc on the Russian Black Sea fleet.

The Russians are wreaking havoc on Ukrainians with their drones that are cheap Iranian knockoffs, probably from ours that crashed years ago that Obama didn't destroy.

And the point is that

these

cheap weapons are being guided in the field by soldiers with not a lot of expertise and they do what?

They're not an expensive 155 millimeter artillery shell that goes through a Russian tank.

They're not even an expensive javelin.

They just kind of land and they go right through an open hatch or they go onto the tank and they blow them up.

Or they're kind of like a little jet ski at night.

You just send a few of them out and they blow up a billion dollar Russian frigate.

you just send a whole squadron of them and they can actually, it's very sick almost.

When I see these clips, and I think you've seen them of these Ukrainian drones, and there's a young 18-year-old Russian recruit, and he's running through the trenches, and this drone is following him.

And then you see the picture where he blows the guy up.

Well, what Bing is saying, and his son Owen has written elsewhere about it, is

we are spending

$16,

$14 billion on the Gerald Ford aircraft carrier?

Do you really think if you park that big, if you take that big aircraft carrier and when Taiwan is threatened, it's somewhere in the South China Sea, that they won't send 10,000 drones at that carrier and sink it?

They will.

And there's nothing we can do to stop it unless we have some off limits.

Nobody knows about jamming system.

So what they're And we're spending $300 million for an F-22 Raptor.

We stopped the production line, but that's what the total cost is.

It's $110 million for an F-35.

And you know what the B-2 bomber is?

It's $1 billion for each one.

That would be the total cost of the program divided by the number of bombers we got.

So what Bing is saying is that

You need to have a lot of weapons, especially drones of all different types.

We're the technological masters of this.

Why are China and Russia and Iran doing this?

And when we do build a drone, they're multi-multi-million dollar platforms.

They're good, but there's not enough of them.

So what he's calling for is kind of a World War II production ability

to equip our soldiers in the field with millions of drones.

So that you get, you know, you have an army battalion and they've got a couple of big semis with off-road capability and you open them up and there's there's 10 different types of drones that can take out tanks or artillery platforms, and each soldier can put a backpack, you know, get under a tree, a symbol, bam, and send it right into, you know, the Israelis have things that supposedly are the size of your hand, almost like an insect.

that are anti-personnel drones.

So we're missing the drone revolution.

And there's a subtext here that we need to go back, I suppose, to a World War II mentality.

What won the war for the U.S.

Navy was not just 35 fleet carriers.

It was 150

carriers.

And that was possible because we turned out escort carriers and light carriers, 151 of them.

And

we didn't build a, we weren't like the Germans.

We didn't build 1,200 Tiger tanks, 700 Tiger II

tanks.

We built 55,000,000 Sherman tanks, good enough, and swarmed the battlefield with them.

We didn't just build very sophisticated

ME-262 jets

or

3,000 V-2 rockets, which was a very inefficient...

produced well we produced a b-24 bomber every hour at Willow Run, Michigan.

We produced 300,000 military aircraft in World War II.

That was the idea behind the military.

Why don't we do that again?

And I think, I hope Bing explores why we're not doing, but it has something to do with a monopoly of procurement.

We've got about five

companies,

and we all know who they are.

They're Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop, Lockheed,

McDonald.

Well, it's part of, I think, one of the things.

And then we have Boeing.

And

we crowded out.

We should have all these little contractors all over the United States that are coming up with ingenious ideas, and they should get a fair shot, and they can produce drones.

for a few thousand dollars rather than these big conglomerates.

So why do we have these five?

Because we have a system.

And I like retired generals.

I know I've been critical about violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice Article 88 when they attacked the Commander-in-Chief.

But I know a lot of them and they're very bright people.

But we cannot allow any admiral or general to go out of their position of influence and be hired on the board of Lockheed, Northrop, you name it, because they are being hired not just for their expertise, of which they have a lot, and

they can give advice, but they have hundreds of former subordinates still in the Pentagon in charge of procurement.

So that is why they're getting a huge salary.

It's not like they don't get a good pension.

It's over $200,000 for a four-star, I think.

So my point is:

if you're going to stop this,

then we need to just say anybody retiring

at the one, two, three, four-star level cannot be a lobbyist or a corporate board member on a military supplier to the Pentagon for five years, 10 years.

I don't know.

But you have to do that.

And we have to break up this monopoly.

And we've got to produce a lot of good weapons in abundance.

And

Bing is absolutely right, as he usually is about this.

And he's trying to wake us up.

Produce drones.

Look at the Ukraine war.

Go over there and talk to people.

Which drones work, which don't.

How much does this drone cost?

How much does that drone cost?

What's the Chinese capability of their drones?

Right.

And don't put all your eggs in one expensive basket.

You know, we have the best fighters in the world.

That's true, but we don't have enough of them.

And they're too expensive.

And we have the best bombers in the world.

But at a billion apiece,

one drone or one anti-aircraft missile can take out thousands of hours of labor and

millions of dollars of capital.

We need a lot of drone.

I would rather see us, you know, if you want to make bombers than make 100,000 drone bombers.

Right.

Victor, I'm curious.

This is unfair because I didn't share this ahead of time.

I'm wondering if there is anyone in

Congress,

or for your friendly types, either Tom Cotton, Cotton and Ted Cruz, etc.

Is anyone receptive to this?

Well, Tom Cotton is really,

and I've interviewed him before, and he's interviewed me.

He's very,

he's with it, he understands the problem.

And, you know,

this was a problem

years ago.

In 2000, I did a debate,

and it was sponsored by the Henry Guggenheim, Harry Guggenheim Foundation.

It was a wonderful project, and I debated two issues on procurement and the draft.

And you know, who was on the stage with me, who was very bright, and he was talking about this.

I know he was very liberal and everything, but he was a nice person, was Gary Hart.

Remember Gary Hart?

Sure.

Yeah.

And

he was calling for a huge fleet of of carriers in that debate.

He wanted carriers that had

10 to 25, the size of a French carrier, you know, a British carrier, not 105.

And he wanted a lot of them, like 40 or 50 of them.

He was for mass production and spread the risk.

That was 30 years ago, 25, 30 years ago.

He wrote a book about it, as I remember.

He sent it to me and he called me on the phone about it, talked about military history.

and he wanted, he just called me up one day and said, Victor, can you give me an example about he I don't know

why we didn't listen to him.

I guess it was so he got caught up in politics.

Yeah, monkey business or the scandal.

Right.

But he's still alive.

He's in his 80s.

He is.

He's 87.

Is he?

Yeah.

And

He was very well.

I mean, there was something about him I always liked and respected is what I'm trying to say, even though I disagreed with him on policy.

But on defense, on this area of defense, he was prescient in the visionary.

Yeah.

Well, Victor,

I encourage our listeners to visit the Hoover website.

You can even put

Strategica Hoover into your search engine, and the link will kick up.

And there's 92 issues.

I think many of these

issues of Strategica are evergreen, Victor.

So

go back and check out previous ones.

Oh, we've got a big topic to get your views on, Victor, and that's the British elections.

And I also wanted to ask you about

RFK and its relevancy.

And maybe we'll tackle that first and then get to the just utter beatdown of the Conservative Party over there.

And we'll do that after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show recording on Saturday,

July 6th.

This particular episode should be up on Thursday, July 11th.

Victor, on our previous

podcast, and a couple of podcasts ago, even I raised, you know, should RFK be on the debate stage when Trump and Biden debated?

But

I think

the

focus on Biden's stability, mental state, et cetera, has so

flooded the zone that

the issue of RFK being relevant to this election seems to be greatly decreasing.

I could be wrong.

Any quick thoughts on that?

Well, if you're suggesting that

because

he is the only other Democrat that has

been prominent and

there was a guy named Phillips, I guess, who was a good guy, too, from Minnesota, but

you're right.

It doesn't matter that he's been out there campaigning, that he's kind of unorthodox.

They're never going.

The Democratic Party despises him.

for a variety of reasons.

And I think you're right.

What this next stage of this surreal nightmare that we're all collectively experiencing will be is

because I do believe they're going to get rid of George Biden.

I just think,

I believe that not because of animus, just because

in my mind, I always try to

what the Greeks call pronoia, themist, the mystoclean foresight.

I try to copy that.

And I say to myself, when I look at these problems, what's going to be like in a week?

What's it going to be like in two weeks i just don't think that he can go out there

kind of like insomnia now that i've been experiencing it for the first time with this long covet once you don't sleep then you get anxious about it and you can't sleep even more you don't want to go to bed because you know what it's going to be later well once you have blown the debate and once the public knows you get self-conscious and that stephanopoulos was all set up it was pre-recorded and that was a disaster and there are going to be more disasters and more He said he was a black woman the other day.

Do you remember that?

I know that's funny.

He didn't mean it.

I know, but it just, it just, so it's going to continue, is what I'm saying.

And the next chapter is not going to be RFK.

It's going to be a Gretchen Whitmer, a Gavin Newsom, maybe a Josh Shapiro

confrontation with the black DEI

base of that party over Kamala Harris.

And that's what it's going to be.

And the donor class is probably going to tell

the DEI base, we are not going to give money for Kamala Harris because we think she will lose.

Not because they're racist, not because they don't like her.

They don't care about the quality of the candidate.

They want somebody to win.

If they give 20 million, they want an ambassadorship.

They want to go to Paris and be ambassador to France.

If they give 10 million,

they want special consideration for their company or a tax break, but they're not going to get anything with Camilla Harris.

That's the way it is.

So

that's what we're going to watch: how do they handle that?

They have a two-pronged, impossible mission, they being the democratic hierarchy.

How do you get Joe Biden out of the picture so he won't lose to Trump?

And how do you get Camilla Harris out of the picture so she won't lose to Trump when you have rigged the entire primary season and made it impossible for any other person to be on the ballot or to be a viable candidate.

And you just rush the whole thing.

You can say all you want about Republicans and Trump.

Trump ran a campaign.

He had a serious challenge from Ron DeSantis and a less effective, but nevertheless, a considerable challenge from Nikki Hady.

There were alternatives.

There were different positions.

Trump was attacked by both.

Okay, you had none of that, and now you're going to have it.

Right.

Quote, you know, paraphrasing Churchill, you thought you were going to get something easy and fixed and rigged.

You got neither.

Now you're going to get something that's not fixed.

And it's not rigged.

And it's going to be explosive.

And you thought you were cute going to Chicago and all that.

You're going to get your worst nightmare when you go to Chicago.

It's going to be 1968 on steroid.

So this is, that's the law of nemesis if they didn't know it.

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And we thank the good people at SolAir for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Well, Victor,

it's been several days now since the outcome of the elections in England.

Nobody was surprised by the outcome.

Disastrous day

for the Conservative Party.

Never seen so many self-inflicted wounds over such an extended period of time as they self-inflicted.

The last of the many prime ministers that England had, this Rishi Sunak, I think was an absolute disaster.

The Labour

Party has just an ultra-majority.

I get the impression, Victor, this is not so much the British people clamoring for socialism and Labour.

And don't forget Labour is also, a lot of the leadership is very anti-Semitic, but more so a rejection of the ineptness of,

I don't know, candy-ass kind of conservatives that

were ruling for a decade or so.

So that's, Victor.

We have this big beatdown of our America's best allies, best ally, the conservatives of our best allies.

Your thoughts, Victor, on what these elections do?

Yeah, I mean, there's been so many takes on it, and because

we don't really fully, a lot of us don't fully understand the intricacies of the parliamentary system, especially the British manifestation of it.

But it does look like

it's kind of applicable to the United States.

Whenever you have a candidate or candidates that are either wishy-washy or they're not good communicators or they're not,

they're more interested in themselves.

They move, they go, to get, to make up for that, they move to the center or to the left.

And they think that they can get votes by appealing to the Euro or the American administrative state institutional leftism.

And that's what the Conservative Party has been doing.

They haven't had a Margaret Thatcher anywhere and no one like her.

And they don't have people.

like a Roger Scruton who are articulating conservative positions.

And they don't have charismatic figures.

And so to make up for that, they become wishy-washy, kind of like what happened to the Republican Party under McCain and Romney.

Neither one of them was able to be a Reagan-esque type figure.

And so to make up for that shortfall, they went to the center.

And what that means is that they just, people say, why should I go out and vote for this person?

Because the whole civilization is falling apart and it's because of socialism, etc.

And yet this person won't stand up for me.

And that's what happened.

People got sick of them.

And then you had the reform, Neil Farage's party, and I guess it got almost 16%, 15% of the vote.

The thing about it was the

I haven't, you know, the Liberal, all these different parties now, all of a sudden in England, it's kind of like the Ural parties where it's not just Labor, Liberal, Conservative.

But if you add up the two conservative parties,

vote toll, it's not that much.

You know, I mean, I think Labor is only 32% of the electorate, but it was a well-placed electorate, and they won a lot of close races.

And I think a lot of people said, well, even though Farage and the Reform Party only got,

I don't, I've seen 13, 14, 16%, they probably cost the Conservatives 80 seats.

Because when you do the math in particular

districts, it really wiped them out.

It'll be good for them, but it'll be good for the conservatives because they can get rid of that inert, ossified, calcified generation.

It'll be very bad for Britain, and it'll be very bad for us because Britain has been a really good partner on things in the Middle East, and it's been to the right of us, and now it's going to be to the left of Biden.

And

it's not like this revolution that's going on in Europe.

Europe's going to be to the right of us.

Britain is going to be to the left of us.

And unfortunately, Britain has been a much closer ally than the rest of the European countries.

So it's bad news.

If Trump should be elected,

he's not going to be able to get along with the British leadership.

And they're going to, when they unleash what we can expect from the British left, the British left is every bit as raw and virulent and vindictive and mean-spirited, if not more so.

than the American left.

And when they go after, if Trump should be president, if they go after him, and they will,

it's going to be bad news for the British-American relationship.

Yeah.

Victor,

looking at headlines, I read the Daily Mail every day, so can't help but

keep up on British events and doings.

And under a quote-unquote conservative leadership,

you had a country that had begun to arrest

people for using the wrong pronoun,

contrived hate crimes, arresting women in silent prayer down the block from abortion clinics.

Meanwhile, you've still had all this grooming crap going on, the invasion of migrants.

What the hell does this party mean anymore?

Well, Starmer, the labor leader, has already announced they're going to put a suspension on deportations of illegal immigrants immediately.

So, on that vote, most of the migrant vote went to labor, of course, as it does here with the Democratic Party.

So

Britain, all the things that are ailing Britain, deficits, anemic economic, too many regulations, too much taxation,

illegal immigration, not enough civic education,

wokeness, that's going to increase.

It's going to increase.

It will cause a backlash, but that backlash will not be reified unless they get somebody with with Churchillian or Margaret Thatcher skills.

And we'll see.

Maybe a young person.

Boris Johnson did a lot of damage because he was very bright.

He was charismatic.

And he could have, if he had self-discipline and had been careful, he could have, if he had been a serious person with the discipline, he could have

given Britain six or seven years of good conservative leadership, but he failed in that task.

Yeah,

we've mentioned before, I have anyway, that Amazon Prime Show, Clarkson's Farm, it's quite funny, but also quite unsettling.

If you look at, now Clarkson is, guy's got a ton of money, and this farm is a very expensive lark,

but the regulatory state that rules Britain is

just shocking.

And it's that way under many years of conservative, quote, again, I put it quote unquote, conservative leadership.

I just can't imagine how.

It's a good point because

the old Democratic Party didn't have that class, I mean, a hatred, because we were never,

the big difference that saved us, we were a plutocratic, not a class-bound society.

So you could come from Mexico legally, favorably, and I've seen this happen, and you could cook tortillas in your kitchen.

And if you were able to Xerox that ability and they taste good and open a factory, you could be almost the biggest tortilla maker in the world.

And it's right over here in Dainuba, near me.

And when you're that, and you get that kind of money, in America, people want you on the UC board.

They want you to go on the charity.

They want you to be a big, they don't care what your background is.

Money is money.

In Britain, that's not true.

That's not true.

You're always going to be asked who your parents were, where your estate was,

how long have you been there, what class you are, what school at Oxford or Cambridge you went to, what public school, Harrow, or wherever you went to.

And when you go to Europe, that's true of Europe, but especially of Britain, people ask you questions that nobody ever asked me in the United States what my parents did.

I've never had that ask.

When I go over to Europe, they ask me that.

Or, you know, nobody's ever said, well, where did you go to school?

Well, when you go over there, they want to know where you went to school.

But in America, it's just, you know, if you make money, and it doesn't really matter what your background is, you can be Joe Biden's closest advisor.

You can be Donald Trump's closest advisor.

If you, you know, I don't mean political, but financial campaign advisor.

You can't do that in Britain to the same degree.

And so our American left, though, is

it's now, I think it's going to start looking more like the Labor Party.

I really do.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's not going to be an open,

let's all do well and we'll reward success.

Well, you know, there are a couple of trends, right?

Anti-Semitism is a mark of the left.

And there was a poll out

yesterday, or early July, of Democrats in America and patriotism.

And only one-third of Democrats consider themselves patriotic.

I think the same

issue in England of

love of country.

I know it.

And so you can't, no country can last long.

Each generation is a link in a chain going back to the origins and on to the future.

And if that generation does not believe that their country is exceptional, or at least it's better than the alternative, then there's no reason.

History comes in and said, there's no reason for you to continue.

If you don't believe you're exceptional and better than the alternative, then why should you be there?

And that's true of the United States left.

Fortunately, there's a lot of really patriotic people in America.

And

I'm straight.

I'm talking to one.

And they keep us going and they need to be nourished, but they need to teach the next generation.

The only criticism I have of the greatest generation, and they were the greatest, I've defended them and praised them, add

Astra to the stars.

And the only problem is that I don't think they came through such hell with the Depression and World War II that they had a tendency to make sure that us, the baby boomers, didn't have to go through what they did.

So they birthed the people who staged the cultural revolution of the 60s.

And

that generation then trained the next generation.

And so that's our problem.

Well,

Victor,

we have a positive way to end today's episode, and that's to talk about one of the ultra pieces you've written for your website.

And we'll get to that after this final important message.

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

Victor, I forget if I've made a pitch already for the website, The Blade of Perseus.

I don't think I have, but

that's,

if you're a fan of Victor's writing,

you've got to go there.

I have not missed, I think I missed one during this COVID, but otherwise, I've never missed

a posting.

So we post three times a week, 700 words on an original topic.

It's not...

It's not a tweet.

It's not something I redid.

It's not adapted from my syndicated column on Monday.

I mean, excuse me, on Thursday or my larger column for American Greatness on Monday.

Entirely new.

And it means that I write five columns a week,

three, 700 words on Tuesdays,

Wednesdays and Friday, and then 750 words on Thursdays, and then usually 1,600 or to 2,000 on.

But I take it very seriously that if somebody

takes the time and the money, it's $5 a month.

If they do show that commitment, I'll try to do my part and show my commitment.

Well, you, you do.

You are a machine, my friend.

Well, that's one of those pieces why one would subscribe is to read these exclusive pieces.

By the way, also, you'll also find Victor's American Greatness essays and syndicate columns, links to the podcasts, other appearances, etc.

But.

So, as Victor said, five bucks.

Go to victorhanson.com, The Blade of Perseus, and subscribe.

If you go right now, you'll see a piece, an ultra piece.

It's from a not angry reader, Mark Schipp.

And

you have an angry reader shtick, but you twisted it in a good way this time.

And it's a nice little piece, but your response to Mark Schipp, you tell a story about Mark Levin, and I think it's wonderful.

And I wish you would recount it here.

Yes.

Well,

I was talking about people

who are prominent that are nice to people who are not prominent.

Does that sound right?

And in this particular essay, I answered the question,

but then I kind of detoured and I mentioned that

my late daughter, Susanna,

who I think was of my children, the one that was most likely to do what I do.

She was writing and kept up with politics.

And she'd lived a year and a half in Chile, learned Spanish.

She graduated from UC Santa Cruz and she graduated from Pepperdine School Public Policy.

But

she was interning for a college one summer and it was right near the traffic corridor of conservative pundits and politicians.

And I talked to her every night.

She was kind of disorientated.

She grew up in this farm.

She worked very hard in the fields as a young girl.

So she's very practical.

And I said, well, what's it like?

She goes, well, I'm just a receptionist, but I see all these people and it's fascinating.

So she would give me the names of, you know, prominent people,

politicians.

And I said, so this is one day I just said to her, well, who do you find the most, the nicest?

And she didn't even hesitate.

She said, Mr.

Levine.

I didn't know who he was, Levin.

And I said, who's that?

Because there's a lot of Levins, right?

She said, his name's Mark.

I said, Mark Levin?

She said, yes, he stopped by and asked me and talked to me.

And he asked me who I was, and you had no idea.

And I finally broke down and mentioned I was related to you.

He was very friendly.

He was the sweetest guy in the world.

And

when she passed away, Mark was very friendly.

And I only bring that up because

there's this image that Mark yells and screams.

But if you, I've been on his show and I've talked to him and met him.

He's actually one of the most considerate, I don't have to say actually, he's one of the most considerate people I know.

And he's very kind to people.

He's very committed to saving the country.

But it was just an anecdote I wanted to express to the letter writer that there are people who treat people

with dignity no matter who they are.

In my case,

I had a daughter who was, you know,

she hadn't really been much out of California.

She was as a receptionist.

She didn't know much about the, right near the Heritage Foundation.

And all of this, all this.

And he came in one day, I guess, to do an interview or recording where she worked.

And he just turned over and started talking to her.

And then when he,

he was very friendly.

And when she passed away from leukemia, he sudden case, he wrote me.

And

I really treasure that friendship.

The other person I mentioned very quickly is she had a great job kind of preparing biographies and development at USC when she left Pepperdine.

And

she

came in contact with the president of USC, Max Nikias,

who was a Greek immigrant, Greek-speaking immigrant from Cyprus and had grown up in Belopais, which is a beautiful city.

I had been there in 1973 before the Turkish occupied, Turks occupied it.

And basically, as you know, they have got 45,000 troops in Cyprus.

They ethnically cleansed the island from the north, took the land, and drove a lot of Greeks out of their ancestral ancient homes, among them Max's family.

So he came here with nothing.

And then he had a brilliant career as an engineer, department chair,

dean, provo, assistant provo, and he became president.

And he was just absolutely

successful.

And of course,

he wasn't a doctrinaire woke president.

And so a lot of people got angry at him.

The woke movement came.

There was a person who

supposedly had been improper.

He set up a committee.

I don't want to get into it to investigate.

And they thought that wasn't enough.

And he turned out to be right about that decision.

But in a fit of Me Too hysteria, they asked him to resign and he took them up on it.

And

what I'm getting at is when I asked her that question, question, well, you're working now, who's and she said, Mr.

Nikkei.

I said, he's the president, Susanna.

I said, she says, I know, he knows who you are, but it doesn't matter.

He's the nicest person.

I watch him when he comes in to deal with anybody.

He's never rude.

He's nice.

He talks to everybody, no matter what their station in our little development section.

Every time I come with him, he doesn't ask about you.

He asks about me.

And

he's just a sweet person.

He doesn't have to be.

And that was, that, that made it.

And, and of course, I've known Max for a long time.

That's absolutely true.

So it's just a reminder I was trying to bring these up is that when people become well-known, it's very important they treat people with dignity.

And I mean, I think conservatives do that much better, to tell you the truth, than conservatives like humans and liberals like humanity in the abstract.

But they're not too friendly, as we see with all these.

And you mentioned that to me, Jack, about these unions having trouble

treating, I mean, bureaucracy, left-wing people.

Oh, the NEA staff,

right, suing

the union itself.

Same thing with the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Remember their staff result?

Right.

They said sexual harassment, racism, underpayment.

Yeah.

So anytime you have a leftist organization that feels they're exempt from scrutiny because they're such of a higher moral Abraham Kennedy.

Yes, he bankrupt his sinner.

Anytime you give anybody a pass, whether it's DI or anything else, they're going to take advantage of it.

Oh, that's human nature.

But anyway, hats off to Mark Levain and Max Nikias, wonderful people.

Well, there's a very

lovely piece that you can get

to.

Yeah.

And, you know,

Mark Levin has just hit his stride.

He's got two shows now, and he's got some of the most interesting people on there.

He has people who are political and it's a political, but then he has philosophy.

It's really an interesting show.

And he's and so he's reaching his pinnacle right now.

He's really doing a good job.

And I think if USC was smart, I'm just talking as an outsider because they've had it, you know, that after Max left, they have a disaster.

They have a funding problem.

The donors are not giving money.

They've got projects that are running out.

Just go look at what's happened to USC.

They would be very smart.

That board should meet and say, you know what?

We did a disservice to probably the greatest president we've had in the half century.

We need to get him back here for two years.

I wouldn't want him to do it

because

it would be terrible to go back there and have to deal with a mess that people would end up.

What is he doing?

Do you know?

Yeah, he's a professor at USC.

He had retreat riding.

And he was an engineer, but he's a Hellenist, too.

So he's teaching courses on literature.

He travels.

He's also a very accomplished engineer, so he's going to conferences all over the world.

He's indestructible.

I think you should have him on a show in the conversation.

I planned him.

He's writing a memoir, and I hope we had an encounter can publish it.

But he's writing a memoir of growing up with nothing and then working very hard, coming to the United States.

starting

and working his way up.

And boy, if I were the USC board, and I don't have much confidence in him because they should have never let him go, but I would hire him in a second and say, Max, we're not going to talk about the past.

Can you please come here for two, three years and just restore the trust, the fundraising, get this

morbid campus back on its feet?

Because when he left, it was, if you look at what USC was, Jack,

its entrance scores,

SAT scores, GPA, it was more selective selective than UCLA.

It's crosstown rivalry.

Always in the old days, it was OJ school and it was just a gentleman C sorority.

It didn't have a very big endowment.

UCLA, Berkeley, they were at Stanford.

But under him, it almost got to the point where it was harder to get into USC than Stanford or

much harder than I think than UCLA.

And he had attracted top rate departments.

And it was

if

so anyway, that was a pay on to those two people.

That's terrific.

Well, Victor, you've been wonderful as usual.

I want to, again, recommend folks visit Victor's website, Blade of Perseus, and do sign up.

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And some even leave comments and we appreciate that.

We read them.

And I'll read two.

Very short.

And one's titled Greece.

And it says, my wife and I are going to Greece for the first time in October.

I have been studying Greek a little.

Wow.

Love you, man.

This is from Peru.

So that's pretty

cool.

And then there's another one.

Always keen insights.

You shouldn't miss.

Make this podcast a habit.

You'll be thoroughly informed.

And that's from Claddest.

So thank you, Baru.

Thank you, Claddist.

Thank you, Victor, for everything you've done.

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Thanks for those who do that.

Victor, again, thank you for all your greatness.

I'm not going to be talking to you for a while now because this is our last podcast before you go off on the good ship lollipop.

So

it's not fun.

Maybe the jet lag will snap me back into a sleep melt.

Now, that's a strange theory, isn't it?

We'll find the patron saint of jet lag and we'll see if we can figure that out.

Well, thanks all.

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

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody.