Victor Answers Your Questions

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

You are here to listen to the wisdom of Victor Davis-Hanson, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Waynamar Shabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He's also the man with an official website, The Blade of Perseus.

The web address is victorhanson.com.

I'll tell you more about that later in this episode, which is a special episode.

It's the listener-provided questions.

And you fair listeners have been really wonderful sending in questions.

And I've got four questions to pose to Victor today.

Some about the founding,

some about military history, and one that's even about grapes.

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

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

So Victor, let's see, where should we

begin?

You know what?

This is a little eclectic.

And you're a bike rider.

Actually, we were talking on our last,

uh when we were recording a recent podcast and you were well you've talked a lot about riding bikes over over the years and some of the accidents you've had and attacked by dogs on them so anyway I thought this question was really cool and you'll take it on it's from Kent

here's a puzzle here's a subject far off topic for the show but it's a nagging question and a cause of puzzling wonderfully wonderment for me as a disabled driver thanks to the political class's obsession with climate change, parking spaces have been replaced with bike lanes all across America.

This is largely taken away from my mobility.

It seems much like the quick and speedy overnight COVID lockdowns, the uniformity of the implementation of bike lanes reeks of central planning.

Love to hear Victor's thoughts.

You know, Victor, I agree with this guy.

Like everywhere you go you know what

he has a very good point i had not been to new york uh and i went uh when the dying citizen i think that's maybe i saw you there but i had not seen those bike lanes so when somebody if i i had to do about five or six fox shows so from the hotel they pick you up and drop you off and when they open the door you they put you in the bike lane they have no choice And those people are nuts.

You know what I mean?

They just go through.

They can hit you.

Isn't that right?

I think it was the Avenue in the Americas, Seventh Avenue.

That's 6th Avenue.

That's where Fox is.

Yeah.

I mean, it's just,

there's bike lanes everywhere now.

And people are on those motorized scooters and stuff and motorized bikes.

It's just crazy.

I'm a biker, so, you know, but there is a bike group chauvinism that's scary.

I don't know if the bill passed, but there was a bill in the California legislature not too long ago that said if you were a biker and you went into

a four-way stop and there was no apparent traffic, you could run the stop sign.

Do you believe that?

I can.

To show you how much people hate bikers,

I was with my wife and we were riding in one of the busiest, I don't know, I wouldn't do it today, 10 years ago.

I've had three bad bike accidents, and this was the first.

And I was going down

and there,

I was going

right down a major thoroughfare in a bike lane.

A car coming the other direction was going to make a left turn, you know, across me, and there was no stop sign.

So I just kept going.

And that guy made a left turn right in front of me.

And I slammed on the brakes, and I was like a

like a little frog that went across the hood, you know?

Oh, yeah.

And luckily, he hit the front tire and it, my back tire went up.

And instead of me, I just smooth, I just went right across the hood and it destroyed the bike and I flipped over and hit my head and I got knocked out for just a second.

And everybody ran over, da, da, da, da, da.

And there was a wonderful woman who was an insurance adjuster for car wrecks, you know, and she came and gave me a card.

She said, I saw the whole thing.

That man

just fuck, he just front frontally hit you.

The front of his car just hit you.

I said, yes.

And he had no, you had the right away, and I will testify.

So I got up, they called the ambulance, I sat in the ambulance, I said, I'm fine.

I think that's about the third bike concussion.

I've had three concussions, and they all came from bikes.

And anyway, my point is, the police came, President P.D.,

and they tell me, I said, are you going to do that?

Are you going to do anything to him?

And he was angry at me, Jack.

He barely spoke English, but he had a,

it was something like a customized GTO, you know, classic car.

And there was a microscopic chip where my bike hit it.

And he was telling the, he was going on and on and on.

And the policeman says to me,

you're, you're you're lucky I don't write you a ticket.

I said, what?

And he said, when you're riding a bike, you must stop at every cross street, even though you don't have a stop sign.

I said, are you serious?

He said, you're a pedestrian.

So do a pedestrian just walk across.

I said, if they have the right of way, they do.

And there's a stop sign on the other side.

So what he was basically saying.

that every single boulevard that I was riding on to my right when there was cross streets with stop signs, I could not go through.

Wait, wait, wait, wait.

Do you believe that?

No, I said,

they were

new hires.

Yeah.

And there was a Southeast Asian officer, Hmong, who was very good.

And he said to the other person who was

Hispanic, older officer, you're wrong.

He said, no, I'm not.

And I said, you know, I want to tell you something.

You're not going to cite that guy for hitting me?

And he said, no.

And I said, I should sue you.

I should complain.

And the other guy said, please don't.

And he said, we'll handle it.

But they didn't write him a ticket or anything.

He just pulled out right in front of me and he made a rolling stop at the left in the left turn on the opposite direction.

He just came in.

He made a rolling stop.

He hit me.

And then he was screaming and yelling at me when I was on the ground and that I had damaged his car.

And his wife was angry.

And there was almost no.

And they destroyed a $1,200 bike

and I was shaky and that was right before I had to go it was my second trip it was right before I had to go on a trip uh for tour companies so biking is and then I you know I was riding my bike up in Santa Rosa on a bike lane and a homeless person was picking

blackberries along, I could see him ahead.

And I slowed down and just as I got near him he jumped out in front of me.

I don't know if he tried to do it intentionally or he didn't see me and I either was going to hit him or I had to swerve on the other side and there was an irrigation ditch and I went right into the ditch and flipped over and broke my shoulder and got a concussion.

I was up all night and then the third time was my catastrophic one where I was riding and the

I must say that in all three of them, that wasn't my fault.

But

you're riding 100 miles a week in those days and you're riding on those thin little 23 millimeter whatever they are tires and you're a road biker you know clicking in it's just insane and the third time the fork broke it was a carbon fork and it just broke just like and i went head over heels broke my

took out my four bottom teeth

broke my nose, cracked my cheekbone, got a really bad, I was out completely, but the worst thing was my teeth went right through my lower lip and they completely severed them.

And my lower

picture you sent me.

Catastrophic.

Yeah.

My lip was separated.

I could put, you know, there's one half of my lip on the left and one half, and I still can't feel anything in between.

Same thing with the upper one.

It was separate.

It was like a watermelon hitting the ground.

And then I had just

huge lacerations in my face.

And I had 160, 80 stitches on my face and 80 inside in my cheek.

And

I had to go to Europe in eight days to lead this tour of Eastern Europe.

And

the emergency guy said,

you know, you have a concussion and you shouldn't go fly.

And I was okay in a Pretin brand new plane.

And then we went to Europe.

It was a non-pressure eyes.

And I just almost died.

dizzy.

I was going to vomit.

Yeah.

And I have never, I've had that crystals in the air, they call it

benign position, BPV,

benign positional vertigo, where you crack the little bones and then you have to do the Epley maneuver

back in.

I have to do that all the time.

And every time I bend down to

work, you know, in garden or something, it starts to swirl again.

But the thing about that was

this guy gave me really, this was 2014, and he gave me great advice.

I was sitting there and temporarily I'd had a swollen, I landed, I had no feeling in my legs for about three hours.

It was kind of swollen, and I got the worst something called Hermit sign or Hermit syndrome, where two months after the accident, you bend your neck down, you get electrical shocks, you know, when you stretch a bruised signal.

Yeah.

I didn't know what it was.

And I went to a guy in Michigan, and the guy in Fresno didn't know what it was.

Every time, all of a sudden, three months later, I bent my head down and I'd go into electrical shock.

And I thought I had MS or something.

And that's what the guy in Fresno said you might have.

So I went to this guy in Michigan when I was at Hillsdale.

And he just, it's the weirdest thing in the world.

He said,

oh, you had an accident.

I said, yes.

Did you get whiplash?

I said, yeah, I had a catastrophic head injury.

Oh, you did.

And this was 100 days ago?

I said, yes.

And he said, you stretch your, when you go, bend your head down, you start getting electrical feeling in your hand.

I said, yes he goes you got hermit sign

her mitzin i said what is that and he said it's a bruised spinal cord and it's healing and it's interrupted the myelin sheath i said well what happens he said oh about a year it'll go away usually maybe not but most of them do that was it two minutes and one year to the day almost it went away He was really good.

And so anyway, I was sitting in the emergency room when this happened.

The doctor came in, said, you got a bruised spinal cord, you have a concussion, you've had 160 stitches, your teeth are knocked out, your nose is going to have to be straightened.

Could I tell you something, Mr.

Hans?

I said, yes.

He said, I have two things on Valley Medical Center.

It was the Fresno Community Trauma War.

He said, I get people who get bucked off horses, and guess who else I get?

He said, road bikers.

And they have much less injuries than you do to their face, concussion, and they're paralyzed.

You were very lucky.

So can I make a modest suggestion?

I said, yes.

He said, you're doing this to lose weight.

I said, I keep in shape.

So you, let me get this straight.

You get the most lightweight bike you can.

that's all carbon and little tires and then you click in and you have to do how many calories you have to ride i said we ride 24 miles three times four times a week and he said then you

you got to ride more

Would you just like a modest suggestion?

I said, yes.

Why wouldn't you get, let's say, an all-aluminum bike that wouldn't split apart?

It's a good idea.

And rather than bend down and have to have weird vision and not good for your back, why don't you get handlebars that are normal and sit up?

And instead of getting these little, you know, razor-thin tires, why don't you get, you know, not big balloon, but maybe twice, 33 millimeter?

I said, yes.

And instead of going 20 miles an hour, why don't you go 12?

And then it would be harder to pedal.

The bike would be heavier.

The tires would be, but you would be safer.

And then when you would ride, instead of going 23 miles, you might only have to go twice a week,

18 miles, and you would know the road much better.

You would be going much slower.

and you would be burning the same amount of calorie.

Unless you think you're a racer and you don't seem to be one, you seem to be, I don't know,

you know, you're out in front of your skis.

And I said, that is a wonderful idea.

So I took my racing or road bikes, gave them away, and I bought a hybrid bike.

And I've ridden it ever since.

And it was the best advice I ever had.

It's much safer, and I have never had a accident on it.

I think an ultra series

on Victor and bikes, not only these stories.

I want to tell you something.

Every single person that I know who has ridden a bike for more than 20 years, I started in 2003.

So I don't do it as much now, but 20 years.

Every single person I know who's had a road bike has had a accident, major.

Maybe not hurt, but major accident, falling down, flipping over.

I know a person who's airlifted off the four lane.

I know another person who was in a bunch of people and they smashed into her.

I know, you name it.

And the people I rode with, one of them, he was going through Woodward Park and Fresno and he hit a wet slick and he just went

and could have hit, he almost hit the metal sprinkler.

And another person I know, he was riding and he was going very slow.

He was clicked in and some people crossed into the bike path and stood there with dogs.

And he came in and he had to go very slow.

And, you know, when you're clicked in, you can't click out suddenly.

He flipped over right on top of their dog.

And he could have been bitten and da-da-da.

Well, that's what I was going to say.

Not only about your own accidents, but where you're crashing or falling off, but then you've had a number of bike-related dog attacks, too.

So

you used to do something that is different.

I was, yeah.

I was thinking that it was

1970 in the San Joaquin Valley when we had somebody called the constable and the dog authority, and SBCA was active.

So every single dog here was inspected.

They came out to your ranch, farm.

They said, Mr.

Hansen, you have,

are your dogs licensed?

If not, they would give you a 30-day warning and you had to get them licensed.

You had to have raby shots.

And it was an enforceable misdemeanor for your dog to go out on the road.

If your dog went out on the road and somebody got hit at, you were liable.

So I thought that's what I grew up with.

So I started riding around my farm.

I mean, like 20 miles.

And then I would go by these compounds where people who came across the border were renting houses and they had dogs.

And they would come out and jump up on your bike.

And I would shoot them with

little, you know what I mean, bear spray?

Right.

And it wouldn't do anything to them.

And finally, one of them,

I don't know what, there were three Australian shepherds and they just knocked me over.

And I went to the door and they said, no habla englais.

They shut the door.

And as I was standing in the screen door, bloody, my knees were all bitten.

And then

another dog came up and bit me.

And then I said, this is four now.

And no, no intendes inglés.

No intendio and that stuff.

And so I called the sheriff.

He said, yeah,

that's not our problem.

And I called the SBC, we don't do that anymore.

So I called the sheriff again.

I said, these people have

got dogs that have no license.

And it's against the law, if they're not leashed, to have them out in the middle of the road and attack people.

He said, well, you want to file a complaint?

I said, I do.

So he did go over there.

And he said, I don't know which dog is which.

If you want to pay for them to be transported to the pound, we can charge.

I said, no.

So I called, I won't mention the congressperson's office.

I said, I'm going to write a column about

your district.

And the next thing I knew, I got a call and it said that we have gone out with a portable pin.

We put all of the dogs, five dogs in there we found, and we locked it with a seal.

And we will tie them up for 21 days.

And will you pay for the dog food?

I said, yes.

So you would think the owners would pay for it, right?

And you think that they would yell at the owner.

They didn't do anything to the owners.

I said, how do you know they're not going to let them go?

I said, well, we put a, we warned them and we put a seal on the cage.

And then

I called a doctor that I knew really well, wonderful doctor, and he said,

you don't really want raby shots.

You have an immune problem.

So let me do some investigation, call back and said, there was about, I don't know what it was, 2 million bites reported in California.

And there were three rabies.

And one of them was from somebody who returned from Afghanistan.

One was a wild cat up in Northern California that came into a campground.

And the other was somebody in a bat cave, right?

So I said,

You mean there was not one dog

bite that was rabbit in California?

No.

Except

people, unless the dog was from Mexico, because there are, I think you said 16 dog bites in Mexico.

So I said, well, there's 2 million people and 16.

They're going to tie them up for 21 days.

So maybe, you know, because

dogs show symptoms before their

gestation period of the virus is much different than a human.

So when you're bitten and you tie a dog up for 21 days, it will develop symptoms before you run out of time to get the vaccination.

Right.

So anyway, I took my chances.

You survived.

Again, proof that you, Victor Davis Hanson, are indestructible.

It was the weirdest thing in the world.

Everything was bad about that.

So what's the next question I went off for?

Well, I just want to end on the bike question by saying, Kent,

I feel that you're...

I agree with him 100%.

Yeah.

And I think there's much more about screw-you drivers, like in the big cities cities that take out two lanes on a, you know, West 44th Street in New York City to make sure there's one lane and now one bike lane.

And who the hell?

I was just telling Kent that, tell Kent that, Kent,

I was just telling my wife that we should start riding our bikes more regularly again.

And now I'm not going to do it.

You take that as a win, Kent.

All right, Victor, we're going to talk about

Ariel Sharon and General Zukov, and we'll do that when we come back from these important messages.

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Back with the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Quick reminder to all, especially our new listeners, to visit Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus, the web address, VictorHanson.com.

What are you going to find there?

Links to everything Victor writes for American Greatness, weekly syndicated column archives for these podcasts, his books, including the new best-selling, The End of Everything,

and Victor's other appearances.

You'll find links to them, and his ultra articles.

Victor writes two or three pieces every week, exclusive to the Blade of Perseus.

You can't read them unless you subscribe.

Do that.

$5 gets you in the door.

It's discounted for the full year at $50.

Those are ultra articles.

I think cumulatively over a year, it's about two or three books worth of original content.

So

VictorHanson.com, please do visit that.

Victor, Rob writes, I'm a huge fan of the show.

I feel fortunate to listen to VDH four times a week.

A couple of topics to consider for the podcast.

And these two are not necessarily, well, Victor the military historian.

What is Victor's opinion on the complicated life of Ariel Sharone?

And was Zhukov the best general in World War II?

And could the U.S.

have defeated the Soviets at the end of the war?

Maybe you just want to focus on the latter question about

Ariel Sharon.

Remember, he had that stroke.

He was prime minister for four or five years in his late 70s, 2000, I don't know what it was, four to nine or something, but he got a stroke and he lived into his mid-80s.

And then he was incapacitated for six or seven years.

So you got to go back to when he was in his late 70s.

He was morbidly obese, remember, at the end.

And

he did some very good things in that

He appointed Benjamin Netanyahu as his economic minister.

And at that time, the Israeli

economy was one of the most highly regulated and socialistic of all the constitutional systems in the West.

It really was.

And it was static and ossified.

And

it was Benjamin Netanyahu, who gets no credit for it, for doing a Reagan

deregulation and opening the economy up.

And it boomed.

And foreign investment poured in.

And, you know, I think last time I was in Israel, two summers ago, I counted the cranes, and there was like 17, 18 cranes I could see in Tel Aviv and five or six on Haifa.

It was just booming traffic.

It was just, and that was one of Sharon's good things.

The other thing to remember is that

the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the first four days were catch and go.

They knew about it, but they didn't preempt, and they didn't get the reservists called up in time.

And they were attacked with huge forces from Egypt and Syria with updated Soviet weapons in the case of anti-tank weapons comparable to ours.

And they took enormous hit.

And yet Sharon persevered.

And when

the fighting was very intense, he was the one

that

They had knocked down the big wall around the Suez Canal, remember at Sinai, that protected.

They used water can, brilliant, the Egyptians.

An Egyptian engineer figured that out and blew a big hole.

They came through, surprised the Israelis.

And

Sharon, Frost, while they were in still fighting the Third Army, he crossed the Suez and he took off like he was George Patton or Gladarian or you name it at Rommel and he went straight toward Cairo.

And

he kept going with a division, an armored division.

He was about 45 miles away when the ceasefire.

And it really,

that that offensive did a lot to force negotiations and that was good he's most controversial because he was the person who

decided to get out of gaza that turned out i think to be wise but at the time there was what 20 000 israelis a very

They had a very sophisticated export business, greenhouses to Europe.

They abandoned it.

Our American philanthropic people came in and bought it and gave it to the Palestinians.

They destroyed it and destroyed the whole hot house winter vegetable market that had been very lucrative.

It was handed on a platter to them, but he got everybody out.

That was, remember those scenes where we were yanking people out of their homes and everything?

And then

he changed.

He changed from being the champion of the settlers to promoting a two-state solution.

So he went from rabid right to center, maybe center left, kind of.

So I don't know.

He was a very brilliant general, but I don't want to comment.

I'm not equipped to comment or make a historical assessment on his entire career.

As far as Zhukov,

Zhukov's problem was that he was very, very talented.

He was kind of candid, and he had to be very careful

about taking credit for anything he did

because of

because of Stalin, and you would get punished.

But in any case,

he was very prominent in the 1940 war on the Manchurian border with the Japanese, and he defeated them.

And that forced them in April of 1941 to seek a non-aggression pact.

And then he took over

the defense of Moscow, And that coincided with the Trans-Siberian Railroad and the bringing of 200,000 troops that had been.

What I'm trying to get at is that because he was so effective against the Japanese, and because the Japanese dropped the idea of invading from the West, because of Sukhov's success, they were able

in late November, December, to transmit

2,000 miles of reinforcements that helped Zhukov save Moscow.

And then he went systematically on the offensive.

And, you know,

it wasn't that

he was brilliant, but he was the master of Soviet

mass charges.

And we know what the Soviet way of war was.

It's the Russian way of war today.

It hasn't changed.

In other words, he would mass Katushka Roskatz, artillery, send them over, blast, blast, blast, and then in that blast field, concentrate on one area and then send people through en masse.

There's a very revealing, as I'm thinking of it now, passage in Ike's Crusade in Europe where he meets Zhukov and he says, you know, German mines are the most lethal.

Ike is talking about that.

How did you guys, you know, the minefields, when Germany was on the defensive, they were just, he said, well, we do what you wouldn't wouldn't do.

We just send troops through and they blow up and they blow the mind up with them.

And then after we lose them, and we just send the people right over the body is.

And Ike was just, you know, aghast at that and said, you know,

that

he couldn't believe that that would be possible.

And one of the things, I guess to summarize Zhukov, he was not scared of Stalin and he was on the outs with him a lot.

And

it was about what to do about telling the truth and he basically said in a very famous exchange as I remember

is to

tell

the frontline commanders that are being in retreat against the Germans exactly what the situation is exactly what military

logic requires and then once we do that tell you But we cannot tell you in advance and then have you order us what to do because you're removed from the battlefield.

And that helped

save Moscow.

And then in 1942,

he was the one that really saved Stalingrad, or he destroyed the German Sixth Army with that envelopment.

And then more importantly, he was the one that was instrumental because of his success in getting rid of the Commissar system in 1942.

But he was a wonderful general.

I don't know how he would compare.

And the second part of that question was,

how would we have done against the Russians?

Could the U.S.

have defeated the Soviets at the end of the war?

Well, the problem was this, that the Soviet military passed through 12.4 million people.

in their military.

We did 12.2.

We were the largest second.

And ours was much more impressive because we only had 145 million and they had 220 in the Soviet Empire.

Or maybe it was 185.

Any case,

so we, in theory, had a mobilization, but at the end of World War II, our troops were spread all over the world.

They were in Italy.

They were still in North Africa and air bases.

They were in the Pacific.

And Russia fought a one-dimensional war.

What do I mean by that?

They had no strategic bombing campaign.

They had no submarine campaign to speak of, somewhat in the North Sea, but very little.

They had no surface ships campaign.

They had no Lend-Lease program.

They did not fight the Italians.

They did not fight the Japanese.

All they did, and that's a lot of all, is they fielded 400 divisions.

They lost 20 million people, and they killed two out of three three out of two out of three German soldiers on the Eastern Front by massive head-on attacks.

And that was very now.

If the question is at the end of the war, how would we have done

if we had to fight that juggernaut?

Well, we were going to fight them because they swallowed up,

they just told us that communism was going to be in Eastern Europe and they broke every agreement with us possible.

They kept every agreement with the Nazis.

They kept every agreement till the end with the Japanese and the Italian, but not us.

But the point I'm making is when they absorbed Eastern Europe and they were threatening to go from East Germany into the West, that question came up

right after the war.

And it was decided that all of the allies, and there wasn't many allies, it was the British who had disarmed and we were pulling out some, but new French divisions and we were trying to rearm the Germans by 1946-7.

Could we have stopped them?

They had 400 divisions.

We would have been lucky to have 100 at that.

I don't think we had that many.

And then if you look at

shocking the

Sherman tank, which I'm a big advocate of it because it was so easy to repair, and you have to take into consideration that we were an expeditionary army, so it was very hard to transport a tank that weighed over 30 tons.

It is today.

So, Shermans were, they could pick them up with a crane and put them on a Liberty ship.

And they had a trapdoor in the bottom, and with the

Firefly

17-pounder gun the British put on it, it could penetrate a Tiger tank.

So there were certain good things, very reliable, but it was not a T-34 Russian tank that had better armor, sloping armor, Christie suspension, higher, most of them, the gun was better, and it had an aluminum diesel engine.

And it was a better tank, and the Katushka rockets were better than our comparable.

But where we would have beat them is air support.

They began to have some wonderful MiG

fighters, but when you look at what the Third Army was doing with

P-51s and P-47s with close air support, and we were using even conventional bombers as Operation COVID to break out of Normandy,

they wouldn't have won because we had overwhelming air power, at least in 1946 and 47.

We had a nuclear monopoly too for a while.

So I think,

would you want to fight the Soviets?

No.

They had better artillery, probably.

We had proximity fuses and, you know, time on target and all of that.

Very good artillery, but they had massive artillery, many more pieces than we did.

They had better tanks.

They had battle-hardened troops.

They were very good on the defensive.

For us to fight them, it would have been very hard.

But I think we would have won only because we had air supremacy and our fighters were at that time far more numerous and better.

That would change, of course, in the Korean War when they came out with the MiG-15 that was better than our F-80.

We really, you know, we had a year and a half before we could get the F-86 Sabre jet in that was comparable,

maybe

in some ways better if it was under good, in a good pilot's hand.

We had better pilots than Soviets in Korea.

And they had nothing like the B-29.

They copied the B-29, Xerox did, but they didn't have a bomber

like ours.

Very quick corollary question, Victor, before we take another little break and get into our final question, because you mentioned Korea.

Have you ever been to Korea and any of the battles?

No, I've never been to Korea or Japan.

I want to, but I never have.

Okay.

i spent most of i think i've been as i mentioned once i've been to every european country

but i i except scandinavia i i want to go to sweden i've never been there i've never been to scandinavia and i've been to all of the middle east with the except i've never been to iran

and

i've never

i don't know which of the emirates i took well you can't count you know changing planes which i've done right

but um i haven't been to some of the emirates.

I haven't been there.

I haven't been to Oman.

And I've been to Morocco, Tunisia, mostly on cruises, you know, when I spoke.

Yes.

I was in Libya.

I went, I got malaria in Egypt.

I went with some students to Jordan.

I've been to Israel, Beirut.

Well, I think when Donald Trump gets elected president, he might make you an emissary to Sweden and South South Korea at the same time.

So we'll

get those covered on the government.

Don't you remember Clint Eastwood?

I keep quoting a man must know his limitation.

I would not be very good at anything, talking about it.

Right.

Well, you know, I know what you are good at, Victor, and that's growing grapes.

You were once upon a time.

Actually, I wasn't.

I farmed for a number of years.

I knew how to grow them, but I didn't know how to make a profit out of it.

Well, that's two different things.

But we have a really interesting question from one listener uh directed at farmer hansen and we'll get to that after this final important message

we're back with the victor davis hanson show again this is one of the special uh podcasts these questions have been submitted by our dear listeners and we thank you for doing that victor this is from

Cochise.

Jack, my good man, could you please ask Mr.

Victor, where have all the grapes gone?

Please allow me to explain.

As a young boy, every Saturday during the summer, I would go with my Papa, grandfather, to the open-air push carts in Boston's north end.

That's the Italian section, to buy my Nana's weekly list of produce.

After filling out Nana's list, whatever money we had left over, Papa would always and only buy various varieties of seeded table grapes to include Calmeria, Almeria, Emperor, Ribiera Italia, Moscata, etc.

Now, years later, I go to the local grocery store and only see the popular Thompson Green Seedless and Blame Seedless.

Would Mr.

Victor have a thought as to why this is?

My personal thought is perhaps a cultural change.

In closing, Jack,

Papa never dared return home home from the market without my Nana's beloved Andy Boy Broccoli and Broccoli Rob.

May God forever bless you and all your number one fam from the great state of Maine.

You know, Victor, I've told you in the past, I used to work on a fruit and vegetable truck as a kid, and there were a lot of varieties of grapes.

But

I get what Coach East is saying.

Same thing.

Go to the store.

Well, it's a very easy explanation.

Very easy.

Go ahead.

So

most of the grapes, not all, there's some in Arizona and things, and increasingly in Mexico, but most of the grapes are grown in the San Joaquin Valley of California.

And I was a table grape grower from 1980.

I was involved till 1990.

And we had something called Ruby's Seedless.

And I wrote about the shipwreck of our dreams.

It rotted and everything.

But anyway, it was a red grape.

They don't make it any, it's not in existence anymore.

And then the Thompson Seedless.

Those are the grapes that are made into raisins.

Everybody knows them.

They're green and seedless.

There's very few of them now.

They have hybrids.

And you girdle them.

That means to produce a good table grape for eating and not for drying or for wine.

They also crush them into, they used to make them at bulk winery.

Their law said that you could be 80% Thompson juice and then you'd put a little chardonnay or something, but you can't do that anymore.

But anyway, my point is that you take a knife and and you cut it around the bark, either of the individual canes or the stump, and that forces the water not to come back into the outer Cambian layer, okay?

And it makes the grape get bigger.

You also put something called jabrellin on at bloom.

When the bunch blooms, you put it on and then you water it.

Like if you're having a raisin vineyard, you only irrigate

twice a month in May, June, and July, and you cut the water off.

And that makes the stress and those berries turn golden and they're small and they make good raisins full of sugar.

And then you can irrigate after harvest once.

But if you're making table grapes, you don't diss the soil because you cut up the feeder roots.

You don't have to dry anything on the ground.

And you let the grass grow and you water almost every week.

So you pump up in the water, you girdle it, you jib it, and you get those huge berries.

And the problem with it,

Jack, is that by the time you do that, and that was with the Thompson, you're spending in today's dollars about $10,000 an acre.

And then you have to pick it again and again and again

and prune it and thin it.

You thin the bunches

and you have to spray and they're chemically dependent

because you know you don't want mildew or bunch rot.

And it got to and then the labor went from $5 an hour, it's about $25 an hour now.

And people got out of the business.

They just went broke.

They couldn't, the price was $10 for a 23-pound box.

It never went up.

So what happened is at the same time this happened, the raisin industry collapsed.

I wrote about that too in Fieldsbot during the Great Raisin crash.

So we went from about 600 acres of Thompson seedless that were used for wine and table grapes, but 400 at least 1,000 for raisins.

And raisins, you know,

cran raisins destroyed the market.

People didn't.

And the result was that thousands of acres of Thompson seedless were pulled out and then hybrid varieties replaced them.

But the point is that no one had the capital to engage in plums, peaches, nectarines, and table grapes because of the labor.

And so what happened, you had to get new varieties that got a huge production from maybe a Thompson, 900 boxes an acre.

You got to get up to 1,600.

So now the flame has been replaced, Thompson's have been replaced.

And who has the money to do the investment where you can no longer just put them on a wire like ours were with a crossarm and you know, you'd walk down, they'd be about as high as your shoulders.

Now they're in a trellis.

And so

just the wood

or the metal to have these huge poles and it's high-tension wire you can't cut with, you know, with food intures.

It's very hard, very expensive.

Just the trellising system can be 10 to 15,000 an acre.

Plus, you're talking about 10,000 an acre to produce it, maybe 15,000.

And it's very risky.

One rain, you know, in September will wipe you out.

So what I'm getting at is that you went from thousands of small 40, 60, 80 acre growers that had 10 or 20 acres of table grape.

My grandfather did it.

My uncle did it.

We did it.

I don't think we ever made any money on it.

And so it was too risky.

And so what happened was,

I don't think I'm exaggerating.

Today, there's about five people that do it, five people in the sense of five corporations that I know.

The best is Fowler Packing.

It's a wonderful family-run corporation.

It's probably a billion-dollar corporation.

Four brothers founded Parnegians.

They're wonderful people.

They treat their employees like kings.

They make, you know, they've turned farm labor into what it should have been along, a highly technical skill.

So they hire people that have that skill to pick and pack, and they pay them.

an exorbitant amount of money and they provide on-site dental and medical facilities.

They've got a huge packing plant that's all automated, and they ship thousands, and they have a beautiful product of the latest varieties.

But the point I'm making is they have so

much invested in that that the price is now, you know, used to be 99 cents, 59 cents a pound.

I just went in the other day, and Thompson, a Thompson seedless variant was $5 a pound.

And the way it works is it starts in Mexico in February and March, and then you just work your way up.

So these American four or five companies have vineyards.

Actually, they have them in Chile

as well.

And then, but when we get into North America, you just work your way up.

Every week you go north about 100 miles.

And I think right now we're in May, we're probably in the Cochilla Valley near Indio.

And there's vineyards there.

And then we'll get into the Bakersfield area.

Then we'll get into the Delano area.

Then we'll get into the Fresno area.

Then we'll get into Stockton, then we'll get up to Sacramento, and that will give us fresh table grapes.

But there's only a few people doing it.

The same is true, by the way.

If you look at the acreages of fresh peaches or plums or nectarines, it's just there's only about 10, 15%.

The labor of pruning them and thinning them and picking them is $25 an hour.

You can easily spend $15,000 to $20,000 an acre before you get one penny, and you can lose that with one hailstorm.

You and Sammy last year had a,

I thought, fascinating discussion about plums and

all the challenges.

And

just, you know, from a guy from an apartment in the Bronx, I still find it

really, really cool.

The larger problems you have, that farmers have in America that we don't have.

We had a four-acre Santa Rosa, which is an old-fashioned, beautiful plum, but they don't produce it, but it's very hard to ship.

And we probably had 800 boxes maybe that year.

It was full and they all sized, and they were on a sandy type of loam, which was early.

And the price in the early 80s was astounding.

I mean, it was a terrible market, but that particular year there'd been hail and weather damage.

and it was $12 a box.

And we had probably 700 or 800 of them, maybe 9,000 thousand in nineteen eighty dollars

and at that time it was probably four or five thousand acres so we could have cleared five or six thousand maybe

four acres twenty five that was a fortune for us

and i swear right around this time of year there was a thunderstorm and you could see blue everywhere and there's black clouds interspiced and this black cow cloud came right for the orchard and it sat over it for about three hours and hailed.

And I was on the other side of the ranch.

I ran over there and I said to my brother, well, what's that?

He was very solemn and unlike myself, didn't speak much.

Probably good because he wasn't a motor-mouthed like I am.

And he said, they're gone.

I said, what do you mean they're gone?

Take a look.

And they were all pitted.

The whole thing was.

I said, well, what do we do?

He said, they're gone.

We're going to have to pick them, get them off, and throw them on the ground because they'll be mummies during the winter.

So they're all gone.

They're no good.

Maybe the birds will eat them.

Just gone.

That was what tree fruit was.

And I really ended up,

I kind of resented corporations for gobbling, you know, small farms up in the tree fruit.

There's only about four tree fruit growers that can do it and table grape.

It's like going to Vegas, only it's more risky.

Right.

Risks are enormous.

And yet when I meet these guys that do it,

I mentioned the Parnegian brothers.

I went to high school with a guy named Harold McCarty, HMC.

He had nothing when he started.

I mean, nothing.

And he built it into a global empire by taking risk.

And every one of those people, they're not some anonymous corporation.

They're local people that grew up.

And they started out as small farmers.

They mastered, you have to be vertically integrated in a global market.

They mastered brokerage.

They mastered trucking.

They mastered

palletization, they mastered packing, they mastered cold storage, they mastered shipping.

I mean shipping everywhere, sea, air, and once they understood that,

they didn't care.

They did care, but you could lose money growing it and make money on

what the old middleman used to take.

out of it so that when you get it in the Bronx, the farmer got about 10 cents of the price, let's say in the 99 cents, if that.

So anybody who was just like us that was just farming, maybe packing, we packed on site, couldn't make it.

But a few people said, ah, I'm going to do what they do, only I'm going to, I'm going to be farmer, middleman, broker, distributor, shipper.

And they did, and they were good at it.

Not everybody could do it, but the smartest, toughest guys could, and they made a fortune.

And some of these family San Joaquin Valley farms, they farmed 10,000, 20,000 acres.

And so it's consolidated now.

And it's a very risky business.

And that's why it's so high priced.

The labor, it's just,

I wouldn't want to do it.

It's much harder, put it this way.

Trying to make a profit on 40 acres of table grapes was a lot harder than reading Thucydides in Greek.

Well, Victor, uh that's fascinating again i want to recommend folks google somehow or other you can google victor in this show victor davis handson show and plums and if you like this victor's discussion with sammy the great sammy wink of that aspect of farming is available to you also victor you've been wonderful uh today i want to thank our listeners for submitting their questions and I want to thank those who, of course,

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Victor, you've been great, folks.

Thanks for listening.

And we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

Much appreciated once again.