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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

This is our Saturday edition where we look at some things cultural.

This week we're going to take another chapter of Victor's recent book in our middle section.

But first, we're going to look at a few news stories that we didn't finish up on for the Friday news roundup, and that would be Russian ships off the Florida coast and Pelosi saying that the GOP is a cult of thugs.

So stay with us, and we'll be right back for those stories.

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Welcome back.

I would like to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin and Ily Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He has a website, victorhanson.com.

Come join us there.

It's called The Blade of Perseus, and you can get a $5 a month subscription for the VDH ultra material and $50 a year.

So please join us.

So, Victor, we didn't get a chance on Friday to talk about the

ships.

I think there's four of them, Russian ships, off of the Florida coast and trying to, I think, arm Cuba with a thing or two.

So, what are your

thoughts?

I don't know what they're doing.

I think they're trying to remind everybody of 1962

when

remember what the situation was in the Cuban Missile Crisis of October of that year.

Khrushchev had felt that after meeting Kennedy in a summit, I guess it was in Geneva, that he was weak and he could be tested.

So the idea was to

place nuclear-tip missiles in Cuba, and that was 90 miles from the mainland, and they would be able to hit the major U.S.

cities, at least of the eastern half of the United States, and that would give the Soviet Union greater deterrence.

And there was sort of a tit for tat because we had sort of archaic, ossified, but nevertheless deliverable nuclear missiles in Turkey, for example, near the Russian border.

And they were telling us

we're going to use a proxy.

And Kennedy said, no, we're not going to allow a third party to have weapons aimed at our mainland, and you broke the rules of the Cold War.

And so they blockaded the island, and the Soviets supposedly backed down, but we learned later there was a secret agreement to dismantle American nuclear deterrence in Turkey, etc.

So I think what he's doing,

Putin is saying, we had a certain understanding that we don't attack the mainland when we get into our proxy war.

So I'm in a proxy war, I invaded Ukraine, I'm the aggressor, and that's your proxy.

But under the rules, you're not supposed to arm that proxy with weapons that can hit my mainland, even though I'm hitting their mainland.

And of course,

we say no, and Biden up for re-election, so he's decided to allow weapons that we've given Ukraine to have offensive utility inside Russia.

So I think what he's reminding us, he's sending a flotilla over to us and saying, see,

would you like me to arm the Cubans?

And then the way you're arming the Ukrainians, and would you like them to attack Florida?

And of course, it's kind of absurd because he has no reach compared to our Navy and our home waters.

But we'll see.

He's got an advantage that he's dealing with Joe Biden.

Yeah.

And Joe Biden

is, you know, he was the one that said to Vladimir Putin, if you're going to hack, please don't hack hospitals.

And then he said, if Putin invades Ukraine, it depends, our reaction will hinge on whether it's a minor or major invasion.

And then the first week he said to Mr.

Zelensky, we can get you out of there quickly.

And then the Kabul thing before, and you add up this formation in

Vladimir Putin's mind that he's weak and he can be taken advantage of.

And he's largely right.

Yeah.

Well, what do you think of Pelosi and her recent statements about the GOP being a cult of a thug?

I think your listeners and I feel like the left seems to be

getting more extreme in its rhetoric.

Yeah, I wish you would just, when she says that, let's just go through what the Republicans have stood for,

and that is support for Israel.

Yes, there's still support for Israel.

Lower taxes, lower taxes.

Deregulation, deregulation.

Conservative justices, conservative justices.

I could go on, but what is so different about the Trump MAGA wrinkle?

There's two differences that I see it.

It appeals to the working classes and minorities because it doesn't want to tamper with Social Security.

You can argue that Social Security needs to be reformed, but Trump's not going to do it.

That's a change.

But that's not the change that Pelosi is thinking about.

And then the other changes on foreign trade, they believe in reciprocal tariffs.

If China doesn't play fair with us, we won't play fair with them.

Whereas the old idea was free and unfettered trade and

let the market adjudicate.

That was Milton Friedman and the Republican Party's dogma.

But the question is then, who has changed more?

When you look at her party, it used to be the party of the middle class.

It's lost the middle class.

She should explain to the country why middle class voters are not voting Democratic.

It's a party of the subsidized poor and the bi-coastal upper-class elite.

And we know that it is for cancellation of student loans of elites, but it left it up to Trump to suggest that tips shouldn't be taxed of the working class.

And we know that it's for open borders, for cheap labor, for wealthy people, and constituents for people like Pelosi.

And so it's anti-Israel.

We know that.

The whole party is now.

It's controlled by the base.

But then

the other,

I get really tired of this image that, well, she's a little left, but she's not like the squad.

No, no, she's worse.

She is unhinged when she says that the Trump family needs an intervention, that he is on, he's a call.

I mean, what does she think the Biden family did?

The Biden family made over $25 million leveraging foreign interests to subordinate national concerns to their own greediness.

And look at Hunter Biden right now.

He's facing, he didn't pay the tax.

His dad is going around the country saying, pay your fair share why his son is a tax cheat.

His dad's going around talking about

the

overability or the promiscuity in which you can get guns when his son is a gun felon.

What does she call that?

And what does she call his mental incapacity?

What does she call the squad?

This is a woman during the, they destroyed the Columbus statue during 2020 and they threw it in the harbor at Baltimore.

Remember that?

And she, when she was asked about it, she said, well, they can do what they want.

You know, people will do what, people got to do what they got to do.

Yeah, that's right, Nancy.

That's what you, that's your

creed.

So

if you need your hair done, people are going to have to get their hair done.

And if you were for quarantines and you don't want waitresses in restaurants getting their hair done during COVID, then you put them in jail.

But you?

People got to do what they got to do.

So I have no respect for her whatsoever.

I'm getting really tired of this establishment of which I participate sometimes in the Bay Area.

I come across people who of the conservative persuasion say, well, Nancy Pelosi, I've known the Pelosis.

I've been over at their house.

They're great people.

And then she talks about privilege.

Look at her husband gets in an auto accident and leaves somebody, the passenger in his car leaves the scene of the accident and he gets preferential treatment her whole purpose is insider knowledge that gravitated toward her husband they he's worth over a hundred and fifty million dollars they have this palatial estate and she plays acts as if she's a woman of the people She's a mean, nasty person is what she is.

And I give her some leeway because as she ages, she's getting more and more unhinged.

So

that's a COVID rant, seven days of COVID, and I'm still fighting it.

And that's a COVID rant.

So if some of you say, Victor, that's uncharacteristic of you.

I said, well, I blame it on the COVID.

Yeah, but did you see that article about Nancy's daughter was furious at Trump because he said

that she had said in another time

Nancy and Trump might have been good partners or something to that effect.

Did you see that?

And she got really mad at Trump for saying that about it.

And And Nancy Pelosi.

It's hard to know to what degree Trump is just

wild when he says stuff or he's deliberately doing it to bait people.

Like when he says it, we shouldn't lock Hillary up.

There's just no way we should lock Hillary up.

There's just no, no way.

Maybe we should not.

I think it's reflective of his nature.

Trump is just being Trump.

He just says what he wants.

It's very funny, though, when you look at this criticism of Trump by Pelosi.

I just did a thought experiment in my delirium today.

I went and looked at former hardcore conservative outlets.

Go to the Drudge Report.

Whatever that thing is, it is completely on the vanguard of hard left.

I mean, it's got things in there that Trump is going to die,

that the Supreme Court should be neutralized, all these wild rumors that Biden is a sure winner in the election.

I mean, it has refuted every single.

And this all, for me, it draws into question who he was forever.

You know what I mean?

Because he's just given that site over to hardcore leftists.

I don't think people,

I haven't looked at it, but I did today.

And then you look at the bulwark.

That was the Weekly Standard remnant.

And you go and look at those people, and you correlate what they're writing now, what they used to write.

about small government, abortion is bad, family values.

I mean, it's just unrecognizable their hatred of Donald Trump and their hatred of the new Republican Party.

And yet, 95%

of what Trump is running on right now is what they made money on and they pledged their careers to advocate for their whole lives.

There's no difference.

His views on abortion, his views on the border, his views on inflation, his views on foreign policy, his views on deregulation, his views on conservation.

They're exactly what they told us we're going to save the country.

And now they're saying.

No.

And then you get this pathetic little

squeak from a guy like William Crystal.

But

the Democrats have to be for law and order.

You know, if we're going to beat Trump, I mean,

what he's saying is,

what's happened to my new party?

Why are they chasing Jews in subway cars?

They're not for law and order, aren't they?

What'd you think?

Yeah.

You know?

They're going to be for law and order for about five months.

John Bolton giving lectures that Donald Trump's going to take retribution.

What was he going to do, John?

Let's just think what he might do.

I know what he'll do.

He'll get the FBI and call him up and say, you know what?

Work with Elon Musk over there at X and suppress stories that are negative to me in this election.

He could do that if he were president.

Or he could do this.

He could say, you know what?

I'm going to hire a foreign national, even though it's illegal, to create a dirty dossier about Biden.

And I'm going to get the FBI to say that it's valid, and then I'm going to spread it.

And you know what else I'm going to do?

If any information that comes up about my family or myself, I'm going to get 51 CIA and FBI people to swear that the Russians created it.

That's what I'm going to do.

Oh, and by the way, I'm going to weaponize the DOJ.

And I'm going to try to get Joe Biden in as many

federal, local, and county courts.

Now, if I don't have jurisdiction in a county court against one of the Bidens, I will loan a prosecutor from the DOJ at the federal level.

He'll take a big pay cut, but he'll get famous.

I'll send him down to, I don't know, some right-wing place that needs help to get a Biden in court.

Is that what you're talking about, John Bolton?

That's what Donald Trump might do?

He might go after people the way that you have been happy with.

You haven't said a word about what they're doing to him or what they're doing to the country or trying to remove people's names from ballots or trying to tie them up in lawfare so it's so weird these conservatives so-called conservatives come out now

and they are further to the left than the left yeah

did you see that recent um

spiel by Foni Willis at the church

she what is she doesn't she realize that she's on trial for serious things she just keeps saying you know it's racism but it's not i watched that and i counted that i said to myself she's in front of a was she in front of a black church again yeah i think i said let me count

one

two

three

four racism i didn't make it to ten

And there is racism and she uses it all the time because if there was a fair,

non-racial, non-DEI judicial system, she would have been taken off that case, disbarred for unprofessional behavior, and now facing a perjury charge for lying under oath about cash being paid with no receipts, no evidence that it was paid, and how she selected Nathan Wade and when and how their relationship began.

Instead, she goes in there.

The funny thing was,

she goes in there and because she has one N, she doesn't spell her name F-A-N-N-Y, Fanny.

She always wants to be a little exotic, you know, French, maybe.

And she put one N and an I, so it was Fonnie, which that's how she wants to.

Like a little deer, Fawnee.

And then she says, and they make, they act as if they're talking about a woman's rear.

Is that what she said of Fanny?

And I thought, wow, why do people do this?

Jesse Smollett, remember?

It was

Smallette.

Remember that?

Yeah.

I'm Jesse Smallette.

Yes.

I'm Don LeMon.

I'm Foni.

It's just this pathetic effort to find some type of aristocratic sound or something which is completely contrary and antithetical to their pretense that they're women and men of the people.

And so, you know, Letita James used the race card, Alvin Bragg used the race card, Fannie Willis used the race card, Nathan Wade used the race card, Fannie Willis's father used the race card in testimony and said black people, you have to give them a pass because they deal in cash.

So at some point it raises the question about DEI.

And I saw something about Joy Reed when she's saying DEI, attack on DEI is like using the N-word.

These people who are in the race industry have a great deal of insecurity.

They're not Tom Soule, they're not Shelby Steele's, they're not Ben Carsons, they're not people who say, say, I want an open

field with no prejudicial end of reason.

I just want equal opportunity because I'm so confident in my ability.

They're not a Michael Jordan of the sports world, right?

They're not even people that I disagree with that don't need that, you know what I mean?

What they're saying is, I need

to keep saying race, race, race, so I get preference because I don't have confidence in my own ability.

And that's what's sad about it.

And they will never stop.

They will never stop until people say to themselves,

it's going to make no difference what you say.

We're going to go back to an equality of opportunity.

And if we have 100 Asian ophthalmologists, and we have 100 black

football players, and there's not a white player or an Asian on the football team, and there's not a white guy among the top 100 ophthalmologists, and if we have 100

Hindi or Pakistani or Sikh doctors but we don't have cardiologists but we don't have two who are Latino or if we have ten Latino roofing companies that monopolize the Fresno market but we don't have one white I don't care I don't think anybody cares everybody do what they do best and concentrate and let the let the chips fall where they are and when you are but it will not stop until people say call me anything you want, but racist has zero, zero, zero.

And just treat people as if they color was color, skin, it was just tribal affiliation, was just incidental.

And it would stop.

Yeah.

Did you hear that coach for one of the NBA teams, I guess, in the finals?

This long question.

Well, you both, both the coaches are black, and do you think that this is a historic moment or something to that effect?

And the coach just sat up there and he goes, how many of these coaches do you think were Christian?

And he just stopped the whole thing right there.

Like, I'm not even going to entertain that stupid question.

I know.

It's, you know,

it's just so sad.

We were told,

I was just thinking the other day, I turned on to listen to what Joy Reed was screaming.

She has completely dyed straight hair, which is fine.

You know what I mean?

Everybody wears wigs.

Roman aristocratic matrons, they were fascinated by the Gaul look, right?

In the ancient world, blonde hair was considered savage.

And so you were kind of slumming.

Yeah.

You were a dark-haired Italian woman.

You wore a

you cut off a French Gallic slave's hair and made a wig, and you had white bond hair, and you put lead makeup, and you had white skin, and that was considered sort of like tattoos, right?

And it was, and it's okay, so I have no problem.

But what I don't like is people like her,

she gave a rant not too long ago where she said she was going to go natural.

You remember that?

She was just going to let her hair be African and she was going to show, and this was going to shock people, but this was going to show how rape, and she did.

And no one said a word.

But her point was that she didn't believe in cultural appropriation.

Believe me, right now, if

I don't know who, Laura Ingram went on television with Dreadlocks or Cornrowse or whatever, people would call her a cultural appropriator.

So it has to be either irrelevant or symmetrical.

And, you know, it gets back to that.

I think I mentioned years ago, I was at a

basketball game.

And my ancestors, Nels Hansen, was one of the founders of Kingsburg, California.

They came from Loon Sweden, and his wife, Cecilia, organized the Kingsburgh Cemetery, and she organized the Wrought Irons Fence.

It's still there.

He's buried there.

They helped build the Lutheran church, etc.

They gave their land to the city.

City Park in Kingsburg

was their house.

Okay.

So I had pretty long roots with this Kingsburg Swedish town.

As a little boy, I went to the Bank of America with my grandfather, Frank Hans, and I heard people conduct business in Swedish.

Okay.

So I go to this is about 30 years ago.

My son is from a predominantly Mexican-American town.

I go over there

and

it was too crowded on the Salma side.

So I go to the Kingsburg side, my ancestral home, which I don't live in.

I'm a Salman.

And this woman, who's Mexican-American, comes over and says, excuse me, could you please leave?

You're one of those Salma people.

And the thing that got me was she had a green sweatshirt and it said Kingsburgh Vikings and she had dyed blonde hair.

She said, you don't belong here, you're one of the Selmans.

And I said, well, you're culturally appropriating my heritage.

And she said, what do you mean?

I said,

you know, I honor Cinco de Mayo.

I have no problem with that.

That's great.

But don't we get one little date, like a little Swedish honor day or something?

And here you've taken my Swedish Viking ancestry and you've cheapened it on a sweatshirt and then you've dyed your hair hair blonde to look like a Nordic god.

It doesn't seem fair.

I was kidding to show you the hypocrisy involved in cultural procreation.

She got so angry.

Get back.

Get out.

Yeah.

All right, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about your book, The End of Everything.

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We're back.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show, and Victor has a new book out that's selling.

It's an Amazon number one, and it also was on the New York Times bestsellers list, which is a very difficult thing to do

for a conservative author.

It's right now on the

number five.

So it's, I was surprised because the first 10 days I really did a lot of media, and my wonderful assistant, Megan Ring, had worked with basic books, and I'd had maybe six or seven lined up, and then I had to lead that last tour, so I was gone 14 days with no media at all.

And then I came back ready to dive in, and poor Megan had booked four or five really good podcasts a day and interviews, and then

the unmentionable hit me.

I don't mention its name, I'm so angry, at this Chinese-engineered gain-of-function unmentionable.

And it's been seven days, and I feel like I was out on Mountain View and Avenue, and a semi-truck hit me.

And like those cartoons where you get up and you're a pancake.

That's how I feel.

Does that sound like a Roadrunner cartoon?

And then I put my faith that somebody said, you should take, you got long COVID, you should take Paxlava, it'll help.

Stop it.

I took it.

Oh, no.

And I got aluminum mouth and chronic diarrhea, so I quit.

I did the dose, nine out of the ten doses, and then guess what?

As soon as I quit, I got a headache again and runny nose nose and slight temperature.

So what was the point?

Qui bono.

Who does that benefit?

Anyway, the only way to get it is confidence and get happy and that's where I am.

So I'm very happy, but I feel disappointed I let the book down and I'm hoping to get back next week completely well and I'll start doing interviews again.

Yeah, we're on Constantinople though in this.

I got sad writing that

third, the first chapter was Thebes.

I knew that area pretty well.

Carthage, I knew it it pretty well.

I knew Constantinople.

I didn't read the, I can't read Turkish.

I didn't read the original sources in Ottoman Turkish, but I did read the Latin.

There's some Latin accounts, but most of them are in Byzantine Greek, which is pretty easy to read.

It's like Catharvasa.

And the Italian is pretty easy of that age, you know, 14, 53.

I got very depressed reading it.

I don't know what it was about that one chapter.

The Aztecs scared me, just the whole human sacrifice, cannibalism, and the vivid descriptions of having their comrades, you know, hauled off to the Great Pyramid.

But something about it was eerie.

This is a

city was founded in 330, and here it is, 1453.

It's over

1100 years.

It's the outpost of Christendom in the east.

I shouldn't say the east.

It's considered the west.

There were no Celtic Turks there when the city was in its heyday.

And it's Byzantine culture, the remnant of Roman Empire,

and it's Hellenism.

And yet, in 1453, given the Fourth Crusade that weakened it in 1202-03, and then just the falling birth rate, the Great Plague of the 13th century,

14th century.

So there was only 50,000 people, but it could have, it had the greatest walls in the world, the Theodesian walls.

If you go there today,

it's just mind-boggling.

The city is a triangle on the ocean, and the Golden Horn Estuary was locked off, so they couldn't get in that way with a chain.

And then the Sea of Momoro walls are pretty high.

I mean, you'd have to have a D-Day-like amphibian landing on solid rocks, right?

And then scale it.

You couldn't do it.

So they went into the land walls, the mile, almost excuse me, three miles.

But you have to go over a mound and then into a fossa or trench, and then you've got to go over a 25-foot wall,

and then you've got to go through a killing ground, and then you've got to go over a 40 or 50 foot wall.

And it's a tripartite system.

Nobody had ever done it.

And that's where they decided to focus their attack on May.

And they started on April 6th.

And by May 29th, they were exhausted.

They lost over 100,000 men.

There were still people on the walls.

7,000 or 8,000 was all, but only 50,000 people were left in the city, and they were going to win.

And they said, one last time.

And that was it.

It worked.

Can I ask you before you go on, why do you think Theodosius II built those walls in the early 5th century?

Why in the first place even build them?

Did he think he was protecting a city from Eastern barbarians?

Were they lacking?

Yeah, well, the point was that he was living in a period where the West had had it.

So the 5th century A.D.,

the 4th, 5th, and 6th centuries A.D., it was the destruction of life as everybody had known it in the West.

But Constantinople had certain advantages.

It was further away from the barbarian nuclei, nucleus of, you know, the Viscos, the Goths, the Huns,

the Vandals.

And it had the Hellespont or the Dardanelles.

So it had that natural seaway.

And it had the Golden Horn on one side.

And so the capital was naturally impregnable, but it had one weak spot, and that was a

land wall.

And so he decided to build the greatest fortification, bigger than Carthage.

So it was the greatest fortification in the ancient world.

I think you could argue

it was the greatest fortification that's ever been built as far as its magnitude and breadth, and it was unconquerable.

And had they had enough people to man the walls, 30 or 40,000 rather than seven, and only in the land wall, maybe three,

it still would have held.

And it had held for two months.

And then Giovanni Giustiniani and the brave Genovese, he got hit by some kind of pellet, whether it was a crossbow pellet or Arco bus, who knows?

And he was wounded.

The Genovese, who were the bulwark of the defense, they were the masters of fortified

fortification defense, they panicked.

And they wanted to get to the Golden Horn and get a galley and get him out of there.

And once they fled, everybody looked over and said, oh my gosh, the experts are fleeing, and they fled, and then they fled.

And then they didn't close the doors.

And when they got to the inner wall, and the janissaries came over the wall, followed them through the inner wall, and was off to the races to hunt to Hagia Sophia.

One of the things I got a little upset about was that there's a lot of post-woke historiography that tries to nullify the sources.

If you read the sources, George Frazni's

Leonardo,

if you read a lot of them, they're pretty unanimous that what happened on that day in the next three days was pretty horrific.

The raping, the killing, the decapitation, breaking into Haggiosophia,

just the killing of the Grand Duke Notaris, megadukes.

And yet, when you read contemporary things written in English by English-speaking academics, it's, well, this is anti-Islamic propaganda.

This didn't really happen.

It's not as bad as

the Fourth Crusade, what the Franks did.

In other words, there's special pleading, and I'm not suggesting, so, I mean, it was very bitter.

There were some Italians that tried to break out, and Mehmet II, the Sultan, impaled them in front of the walls.

I think there were 40 or 5 of them.

That means they drove a stake through their neck, down all the way through their anus while they were still alive.

And so, what did the

Constantine XI ordered the same thing with Turkish prisoners?

That was the kind of war it was.

But

it was very sad because they knew they were the last generation of Westerners in the great Byzantine had once stretched all the way to the Persian Gulf.

It had stretched, it had recant, under Belisars and Justinian, it had reconquered 75% of the Roman Empire.

And there was this idea that Haggius Sophia was going to anchor this Renaissance and the Justinian law code and Belisarus the brilliant and Narcissus the brilliant generals.

And it did work.

And they had 25 million people at one time.

And Greek was spoken all the way from the Nile, all the way from what is today Tunisia, all the way to what is today Baghdad, all the way throughout the Balkans, all the way up to northern Italy, all the way to Spain.

And then it just unwound.

And they were overextended.

They had two terrible bubonic plagues.

And

there was a big split.

What was very sad is they thought, well, maybe the British will come.

Maybe the French will come.

Well, no, they're in a Hundred Years' War.

Well, maybe the Spanish...

No,

they're fighting the Reconquista.

They're in their heyday and they've got to defeat Islam in Spain.

Well, maybe the Italians, all the Italians, no, you're still in a great schism with Catholicism and you won't unite with them for a lot.

So there was plea after plea for the prior two years.

If they could just get help, they could survive.

And all of the classical learning would survive and the great monuments and they could be reborn.

And yet they almost did.

It wasn't a sure thing they were going to fall.

It could have been something like Singapore.

Well, you say...

City-state.

You say at one point, not since the army of Julius Caesar had an ancient military fielded such diverse, well-trained, and highly specialized forces.

What do you mean?

Because in your description, obviously, they fell, but they were really highly specialized forces.

And I'm wondering if they were...

Do you mean the Ottomans?

No, the...

You say that about the Byzantine naval.

I think they were the best defended city in Europe at that time.

They had the greatest fortifications, and they had some of the most brilliant people of the early Renaissance from Genoa.

Genoa was known as a place of mercenary

besiegers and the art of preserving a city.

So when you have Giovanni Giusti

Iani, who was the most famous of them all, and he comes with 700 of them, and they all have beautiful armor, and they have gunpowder, and they've got crossbows, and they've got everything.

And they turn over the defense of the walls to him, and then you've got another

thousand

Venetians, and you get 30 or 40 ships, and then you've got the best of the Byzantine forces, and you've got the 40,000 non-combatants every night building the walls.

They had a good chance.

The problem was they were facing probably 150,000 troops and another 100,000 support,

and they had money.

So they had bought some of the best artillery in Europe, and they had the famous Orban or Urban, as he's called, the Hungarian engineer, who built the big basilica, the cannon that could shoot

oh, a mile and a half a ball that weighed probably 500 pounds.

And so they battered the the walls and they would repair them.

And then they battered the walls and they would repair them.

And what happened after,

I don't know, 55 days, people were worn out.

They couldn't sleep.

They got up every night and they worked all night long filling in the walls with dirt.

And then they would get, so they just battered them down.

But finally, you know, it was getting warm and they were afraid of plague out beyond the walls and they didn't have good supplies of fresh water.

And they were worried that a Venetian fleet would come up to the Hell's Point and attack them and they were going to quit.

And unfortunately, they tried one last time, and they sent in all their Christian serfs, which they had conquered, they as cannon fodder, and they fought them off.

And then they sent in

their

Ottoman regular troops, and they fought them off.

And then there was only one last chance, and that was the Janissaries.

Those were the Christian people who had been kidnapped at kids and indoctrinated or transmogrified into the most fierce Muslim warriors in the world.

And they were fighting them off.

And then the Genovese panicked at the wounding of their leader, and there was a little fissure, and they swarmed through, and then people said, I've got to go save my family, I've got to get out of here.

And they all collapsed.

And there was a method to retreat from the outer wall through the pavilion into the inner wall and close the doors, and they didn't do it.

They just opened the gates of the inner wall, and the Janissaries followed them right in.

They had open season, they looted the city.

They probably enslaved 50,000 people.

They raped, they killed, they mutilated.

I would like to read a part of your book on that scene that you're just talking about, the looting of the city, and especially the Hagia Sophia, just because your sources are very rich, but you also speak very eloquently about this tragic scene here.

And you write, after breaking down the ancient bronze door of the Hagia Sophia, that is, the Turks burst in, executing the old and infirmed, looting the cathedral and carrying off the survivors as slaves.

Turks fought among themselves over the more attractive boys and young women, often binding them for later enjoyment, enslavement, or offers of ransom, then moving on to fight over additional captives.

Within hours, the church was completely ransacked, as even the floors and walls were smashed in search of treasure.

Soon, Metmah himself dramatically rode into the church, chastising those destroying valuable parts of his soon-to-be national mosque, and had his men deal with looters of what was apparently already Ottoman state property.

Anyway, very beautiful discussion.

It's very tragedy in Hagia Sophia.

And it fit the pattern I talked about in earlier broadcast, why the city was taken.

They had no idea what Mehmed, they said, oh, he's only 21.

He can't do what no other sultan for,

you know, 300 years can't do.

They tried, his father tried it and failed.

You can't get over the Theodosian walls.

And even if you could, the Venetians will come, the Christian Genovese will come.

Who knows?

The Florentines may come, the Spanish may come, the Franks may come and help us.

We can unite Catholicism.

We can do it.

We're not that decadent.

Oh, wait, let's look out over the horizon.

Surely there's a Venetian fleet coming.

And it was the same

delusions of Thebes and

any targeted city.

And as I say in the epilogue, it's very similar to the United States that right now

you're talking about a Russian fleet off the coast of Florida, but at the same time we're talking,

there's a full-wage war in Gaza, and we can't, we're just unable to say, you know what?

Israel is a democracy.

It is our ally.

It was at a time of peace.

You attacked it.

We don't think there's a difference between the Gaza civilians in part and the killers because you're putting their hostages in civilian abodes.

And civilians are guarding them.

And civilians participated in this attack.

We're not trying to target them, but we're going to support the Israelis, period.

And we're going to get our defense up to 5% GBP.

We're going to to get rid of woke.

And we're going to get our financial house in order.

We're going to secure our borders.

We're going to have a renaissance.

This is going to be a Byzantine renaissance.

And we can't do that.

Yeah, that's why kind of I was asking you about Theodosio II's walls and his motivation.

Why can't we just build a wall for the 1,500 miles?

I mean, we have the.

Because

somebody says, this is racist.

And then they file a court injunction.

And that holds it up.

Where do they get the money?

They get the money from the Gates Foundation, the Zuckerberg Foundation, the Tides Foundation.

Then somebody else says, pass the torch to me.

There's a,

I don't know, a three-bellied lizard, three-toed lizard with spots on it, and he crawls back and forth across the border, and you've stopped his mating path.

Sue.

And then another person

says, how many LGBQ people are going to be hired on this project?

Sue.

And so we're paralyzed.

And then when somebody just says, I don't care what you're going to do, I'm worried about American people.

And it doesn't change really until things happen.

You know, I mentioned, I may have mentioned I had been gone for two weeks, so I

tried to take a COVID

brief walk to the edge of the property, and here some contractor had thrown

the same old stuff, just came in during the night and just littered throughout this beautiful orchard, probably a thousand square feet of old, wrecked, used, laminated flooring with all kinds of canisters of glue, toxic materials, you name it.

I walked through the rubbish and see if I could find

a letter or something that would have the address.

I saw a lot of Spanish advertising and stuff I usually do.

And I just thought to myself, if they would just dump it on Joe Biden's lawn just once.

No, not just once.

Every week, like out here, he would say, who are these people doing this?

Who do they think they are coming to our country and just go out in the country and defile the environment and throw their trash out here?

Who do they think is going to pick it up?

And the same thing with Nancy Pelosi.

So a lot of these policies, when you say, why don't we just do it, is because the people think that it doesn't affect them.

So Joe Biden says, I don't really care if I go to a doctor.

I have a concierge, but I don't have to sit in a waiting room with 500 people in the ER, you know, at Fresno.

I don't have to deal with trash that's been dumped.

I don't have to worry about my kid being attacked on the border by an illegal alien who came across.

I can afford gasoline.

I don't need to do that.

It's all free for me.

That's how they look at things.

Yeah.

Well, you have one more thing that I would like to ask you about before we go to a break.

This observation about history's obliterators.

In truth, most of history's obliterators were not completely nihilistic.

They usually reformed and sorry, refounded or rebuilt what they had destroyed, both because the sites of their conquests remained choice locations across time and space, regardless of the civilization that occupied them, and because greater glory accrued to the conqueror if his own culture absorbed and trumped the vanquished, iconic imperial city of his enemies.

And that seems something different to say about Constantinople than you said about either Thebes or Carthage, because I think that that's very much true with the Ottoman military, that it was more useful not to completely destroy it.

No, they wanted it.

In fact, when Mehmet II broke through and rode into the doors of Hagia Sophia and his men were raping and slaughtering and enslaving the 7,000, very sad.

7,000 people went in there praying to the archangel.

And they say that the priests were marvelized as they jumped into the wall.

Maybe the emperor himself, that's not true, he was probably beheaded, killed and beheaded.

But nevertheless, when he went in there, we saw people destroying the building.

He said, wait, wait, wait, wait,

you can rape, you can kill, you can do anything for three days, but do not touch my building.

And the point is, they looked at the walls of Constantinople.

They looked at

the

palace.

They looked at the Hippodrome.

they looked at all of that, and they said, we can't build anything like this.

They had done the same thing at Adrianople.

That was their capital, the Hadrian city up in Thrace.

They had taken that over.

They were a parasitical culture.

They came in and they wanted, if you ask yourself, well, why would they want a city that's on the border?

Why wouldn't they go into where Ankara is today?

Well, they wanted a...

absorption point for Western culture.

They were getting metallurgy and cannon and technology.

In fact, that was one of the arguments the Byzantines made.

Why would you want to destroy us when we turn over everything from the West to you?

Your window on the west.

But it was very sad.

The Romans had confidence and they just, I mean, arrogance.

They destroyed the city and said, you know, we'll build one just like it.

And the same thing with Alexander the Great.

This is just a city we'll blow up.

And the same thing with Cortez.

Notice the spots are all very important, and we're not talking about the actual city.

Carthage is an absolutely strategically important point and the closest point to Europe on the Mediterranean on a peninsula.

And Thebes is a crossroads of the great Boeotian Valley.

And no need to say anything about Constantinople.

Mexico City was centrally located to Nochtelon.

So they wanted the locations when they rebuilt the city, but of the four, this was different.

You're right, that they just

it was like dropping a neutron bomb and it killed everything or taking one of your insect foggers and putting an old barn and having everything killed, and then using this structure again.

Yeah, that's what they wanted.

So they put minarets on.

And it's very funny.

I keep thinking, I'm kind of haunted by it.

I lived in Greece.

I think I told you once that I was woken up on May 29th of 1978,

and I had a kidney problem.

And the concierge came in and said, wake up, wake up.

The great city has fallen.

The megala idea

is still here.

The great idea we're going to reform, that was the idea in the 20s.

You're going to go back and take Constantinople after World War I, take the cities along the coast that were ancient Greek Ionia, Alexandria, Crete, and then you'd have a lake.

That was the idea.

And they didn't have enough men, of course, to do it.

But it was kind of a crazy idea.

But people in Greece still, at that time, I don't know if they do today, were celebrating, or I should say, lamenting, May 29th, 1453,

especially midday when the fit when the walls fell, they all knew when the walls fell.

I lived on a street called Osios Mikros, Mikross, Ossios,

Asia Minor Street, where people had fled Smyrna in 1920.

So

it was very sad, and

it gets me a little upset when I hear Erdogan,

he just threatened the Kurds again.

He threatened, he said the Armenians, and I mentioned this in the epilogue of the book, he says he has a 19th century solution for the Armenians, or more likely more specifically, he said our grandparents knew how to handle them.

We know what that meant.

Then he told the Greeks, you're going to wake up one morning and you're going to see a sky full of Turkish missiles coming down on Athens.

And he talks about Ottomanism has a right to the Aegean, and all the islands from Rhodes to Samos are really Turkish.

And you want to say to him, well, do you have a right to Constantinople?

You may have had it for, I don't know, 500 years plus, but

600 years, nearly.

But according to your logic,

the people who had it the longest should have it.

You're an interloper.

And he has a lot of similarities, I was thinking to Mehmet.

Yeah.

Same insecurity, same fascination and fixation on the West, but hatred of the West.

Same idea that he's not Arab or he's not radical Easterner, but he's a cosmopolitan semi-Westerner that can show the West superior Islam, but it's full of...

It's draped in insecurity.

And that's what he is.

He's very insecure.

So he always has to bluster and threaten people and say how much better Islam is, but then he tries to at the same time westernize.

Well, Victor, let's go to a break and then come back and talk a little bit more about the day's news, the 51 intelligence authorities that signed on to the lie before the last election.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

We're back and this is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

So Victor, recently Fox News has contacted those 51 intelligence agents that said that the laptop was Russian disinformation, and none of them seemed to regret their lie.

And I was wondering if you had some reflections on that.

Aaron Powell, I don't quite understand that.

It was most prominently apparent months ago when they asked Leon Panetta on television, is there anything you would like to say now that you know the laptop was authentic?

Because remember, the FBI was called in as a witness, one of their forensic specialists, during the Hunter-Biden gun trial.

And so it was the official position of the FBI that this had always been authentic by forensics.

And so Hunter, remember, had come up with this ridiculous defense

to nullify the incriminating evidence on the laptop by saying,

I'm not saying it's mine, I'm not saying it's not, but I find it incriminating if it were mine that you're spreading it.

But

nobody believed that.

And so when the U.S.

government says that it is Russian,

not Russian disinformation, and when these 51 former intelligence, and really we're talking about three, let's be honest, we're talking about four people that were responsible for this.

Let's get down to it.

It was Leon Panetta's prestige as former CIA director and secretary of defense.

It was John Brennan, who was director of national intelligence.

Excuse me, he was CIA director.

It was James Clapper, the director of national intelligence.

And it was Mike Morrell, the former deputy CIA and interim CIA director.

Those four people cooked it up.

And so they got their other people to sign it.

Everybody knows, including themselves, that they were wrong.

It was not Russian disinformation.

I know they hedged a little bit, all the hallmarks out, but everybody knows it affected the debate because if you go back, I hope Donald Trump, when he debates Joe Biden the first question, he says, Joe, this is what you said in our first debate last time.

You said that I was lying and that a laptop has been proven to be a thing.

Do you want to still tell that to people?

Would you please apologize to the American people?

Because you lied to them.

See what he says.

I bet you five bucks, he says, it's still

flush and disinformation.

So they know it, but they can't apologize because in their way of thinking that we would rather not be embarrassed and not give Trump the satisfaction of being right

when he questioned our expertise than being servants of the truth.

They're just despicable.

All fifty-one of them are despicable.

And one of the things about this whole transition is I think a lot of us have just radically changed our view, unfortunately, of the CIA, of the FBI, of the DOJ, of the Director of National Intelligence.

I'm not talking about the political appointments that come and go.

I'm talking about the elite in Washington, and even to a degree the Pentagon, because they felt when push came to shove, and they know the Constitution is designed to protect not the popular, but the hated,

not the orthodox, but the unorthodox, not the calm, rational, sober, and judicious, but the wild person.

That's what the First Amendment's for.

That's what the Fourth and Fifth and Sixth Amendments are for.

And you get a guy like Trump who's highly controversial and wants to make radical changes in their world.

That is the point where they don't tamper with the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon.

And what did they do?

All of them gave in and

forsook their

pledges to protect the Constitution.

And then adding insult to injury, they projected that Donald Trump was the was the insurrectionist.

No, they were the insurrectionists.

They were the people who doctored a FISA warrant, an email, Kevin Klein Smith.

They were the people who knew that he'd done that.

They were the people who knew that George Papadopoulos hadn't done anything wrong.

They were the ones who ruined Michael Flynn for no reason.

They were the ones who cooked up a sweetheart deal for Hunter Biden had a judge not intervene.

They were the ones that

turned a buffoonish riot on January 6th into a way to incarcerate people for years on bogus charge.

They were the ones that

gave us woke.

They were the ones who violated their uniform code of military justice and basically said that the supreme commander, their own commander-in-chief, was a war criminal.

I'm just saying what Michael Hayden said, that he was an architect of Auschwitz-like structures.

Another person who will not be named said he was Nazi-like.

Another said he was Machiavelli,

Mussolini, excuse me.

Another said he was an abject liar.

All of that.

It didn't have to happen.

It didn't have to happen.

All they had to say is he's very controversial and we disagree, but I'm going to honor my oath and I'm going to be disinterested.

And if I see abuse in any way, either for or against Trump, I'm going to stop it.

None of them could do that.

Yeah.

Well, speaking of lies,

the reports on hostages coming out of Gaza with the Israelis and the fight on the way out seems to be subject to a lot of controversy.

And I was wondering your thoughts on the recent hostage.

Well, here's a narrative.

I'm getting a post-COVID rush of energy.

I'm angry.

The narrative was that there were four hostages and they were held in this poor refugee camp.

And then, without any planning, the shoot-em-up out west

settler colonialist imperialist IDF just barged in and blew up everything and then just started using blackout down like sweeping barrages and killed 274 civilians, right?

Yeah.

And got the,

that is a complete lie.

The IDF has released more information and there's a good article by a former IDF commander who's a journalist and if you don't believe that completely, there's enough

incontrovertible evidence you can piece together what happened.

They knew that the hostages were being held by a journalist in the home of his father who was a doctor.

So let me get this straight.

These hostages are being tortured and treated inhumanely in a home of a doctor who says he's a civilian whose son works for Hamas.

And Hamas knows where they are and they know where the young woman is.

And they're in the middle of a refugee camp.

So how do you get them out?

Well, they put undercover teams of people who probably were Arab-Israeli that spoke beautiful Gazan Arabic, and they just scouted out and walked around, lived among the people, and they came back and said, we know where they are.

And they thought there would be nobody there, because they didn't see a heavy guard in the apartment building.

So they went in,

they very quietly knocked on the door, they got it, there was some,

they got the hostages out, and guess what?

They had a militia or they had a rapid response team to every one of those hostages, apparently, because as soon as they found out that the apartment building was, there was gunfire,

100 people came up with RPGs and just started laying down fire.

They blew up their armored vehicle.

They couldn't get out.

So then the IDF had to fight their way out of alleys to find a place

where they could be airlifted out.

And so when they got airlifted out, they were being surrounded by this huge force of heavily armed, and they just called in helicopter gunships and they just basically made a circle of fire around them, and then they were airlofted out.

And the IDF says there was less than 100 killed, and most of the hundred were armed.

Militia, yeah.

Yeah, and who knows what is an armed,

what is the difference between a terrorist and an armed civilian?

I don't understand.

I mean,

if you are

putting hostages in your home and you are berating them or torturing them or trying to aid Hamas and you're part of Hamas

and then they break in and shoot you, are you a civilian?

I don't think so.

And it's very paradoxical of this government to start lecturing Anthony Blink and he should read his history.

I don't need to mention Dresden, which was largely a British operation.

I don't have to mention March 11th and Tokyo.

I can go in the Korean War.

You can go

into Fallujah.

You can go into Mosul.

But anytime there were Americans and they were fighting house to house or that they were attacking an enemy who was trying to build weapons, kill them in a particular name, they didn't care.

They just took them out.

And

we did as much to Mosul as the IDF did to Gaza.

And we did more to Fallujah than the IDF did to Gaza.

I walked through Fallujah.

There's nothing there that was inhabitable.

And Mosul, I had been there when it was not attacked.

It was a thriving city, but it was taken over by ISIS and they were not going to leave.

And you should see what the B-29s did to Pyongyang during the Korean War.

When Curtis LeMay got done, 90% of the industrial capacity of Japan was inoperative, either to being mined by ports, the ports were mined, or the city cores were destroyed.

And when they they asked him why he did it, he said, I dropped leaflets and they had dispersed all their aircraft, artillery, industries through neighborhoods where people that were civilians were actively engaged in creating weapons that were going to kill us.

So I gave them leaflets, I said, get out, and then I knew they probably wouldn't get out, and I destroyed it.

And you can argue about the morality of it, but I don't hear anybody telling,

I don't hear anybody in Israel saying this.

How dare you Americans, tell us that we can't go into a civilian area and try to rescue hostages or kill killers when you

were past masters of that very strategy in World War II, in the Korean War, and in Vietnam.

That's what you did.

And you had no apologies.

And then go look at Black Hawk Down and see what we did there.

I don't think anybody in those helicopters who were trying to save trapped Americans radioed back and said, hey, what do I do?

There's people on the roof and they're shooting down at you guys, but I see two who may not be militants.

They're just with them.

They didn't do that.

No, of course not.

Well, Victor, last thing, just because it's going on right now, but Mexico's president seems to be more willing in these last five months to help the United States slow the border, at least.

And I was wondering your reflections on that.

And just to bring it up to our listeners, like Mexico now for five months is going to be on top of this border thing.

Well, Mr.

Obador wants an open border, right?

Every Mexican President

wants an open border.

Why do they want an open border?

Don't listen to me.

Listen to what they say.

Mr.

Obador said, isn't it a beautiful thing that we have 50 to 60 million expatriates in the United States?

Isn't it a beautiful thing we have 20 million plus illegal aliens?

And why does he say that?

Because the illegal community sends 60

billion to him untaxed.

And that makes up for all the corruption that that government is characteristic of.

It doesn't help its people, but the people help its people because they send their young men up here and they send $60 billion.

We don't get anything out of it because many of the families and men who are sending the cash back to Mexico are what?

On public support.

So we are subsidizing the freeing up of cash to go to Mexican nationals.

So he doesn't want that.

He likes the idea that they are a powerful DEI lobbying force.

So in almost every community in the southwest of the United States, there are people on the left who say that if you try to question immigration or

you're a racist.

And he likes that.

And that's what one of the aims was.

Again, he likes it because he knows that if his government is corrupt or the cartels run things or he doesn't provide social services or efficient economy, people don't march on Mexico City.

It's not the revolution again.

There's no poncho villa.

There's no Zapata.

They march up here to get out.

And it would be sort of like California, you know what I mean?

Everybody is angry at Gavin Newsom, but the reason we don't change, they get out.

They can go to Tennessee or Florida.

If you couldn't go and the border was closed from California, you'd have a revolution in California.

He knows that.

And he knows that Joe Biden is going to keep that wall open if he's re-elected.

So he also knows that 65% of the people not only want the wall finished, they want to deport everybody.

So now, after four years, Joe Biden calls him up and says, Can you do something?

We do not want an end to this.

We just want something.

And his little slowdown is he's getting people, he's getting, rounding up everybody as they walk.

Oh, I'm so tired.

I walked 150 miles from the Yucatan Peninsula, excuse me, 900 miles from the Yucatan all the way up to Texas border, and they pick me up and

they put me on a bus back to the Yucatan Peninsula.

So, what he's doing is, as they go northward, he just intercepts them and says, Hi, everybody, here's some sandwiches and cokes, get in the bus, and I'm going to take you back the same route you walked the last six weeks.

And that's what he's doing.

And the idea is, we're not going to stop it, but you got to wait till Joe's re-elected, and then you can go across.

And it takes its place among the student loan

buyout, bailout, excuse me, amnesty.

It takes its place along begging Saudi Arabia to pump more oil, granting the Strategic Petroleum Reserve,

suddenly saying tariffs on electric vehicles are good, suddenly telling Israel that it's evil and that you have to not go into Gaza for the Michigan voters.

You know what I mean?

It's just the same old pandering and, well, we can't do anything.

We don't have the executive orders, even though he reversed 60 or 70 of them.

And now we're supposed to think this has nothing to do with politics.

All it is, I wrote a column last week about the left does not believe in the left.

If they did, they'd say, you know what?

We don't have to do anything.

The open border was a great idea.

Look at all these people we got.

We're proud of it.

Open it wider.

And you know what?

Shutting down the Keystone was great, but we got to get gas, like Stephen Chu said, up to $8 a gallon.

And we've got to shut down more nuclear plants and get that 50 cent kilowatt an hour power.

And you know what?

We've got to get out of all these places.

So, you know, Kabul was a smashing success.

We need more of those.

And you know what?

We love Hamas.

Let's give some aid to Hezbollah and let Iran be an informal ally of Iran.

Why don't they just do that?

But they don't do it.

They do it, do it, do it.

And then when the voting comes, they say, uh-oh,

all the stuff that we want doesn't work and people don't like it, but we like power more than ideology, so we're going to fake it for a while and backtrack on everything because we have contempt for the American voters' ability to distinguish what we're doing.

And that's what they're doing.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, thank you for all your wisdom on this Father's Day, and thank you for being a father.

And I think it's a whole weekend that we just honor the men in our lives.

And so

what if somebody would just, I'm such a whiner, but after a year and a half of long COVID, and then to get this and start to, after seven days, it's not that long, but isn't there some?

I mean, can I be marbilized and saved at the last moment by the Archangels and

get over COVID?

I'm just feeling it.

You're going to get over it.

I know, but I'm just such a little whiner, though.

We're coming to everybody straight from the COVID asylum here.

I know it.

I know it.

It was just like five days of fever.

Pachlavoi was worse, then a rebound, and then I'm wiped out.

And it takes a little while to get your energy back.

I'm experiencing that lack of energy.

It's called a year and a half.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, Father's Day is a good day to enjoy, and hopefully your kids will give you a call.

I hope so.

Yep.

And thanks to all the men in our lives and on this podcast.

We enjoy everybody.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis.

Thank you all.

Thank you all for your letters that we read very religiously.

I really appreciate it.

Everything.

Hope you come back and hear us next time.

Yeah.

This is Victor Davis-Hanson and Sammy Wincke and we're signing off.