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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

The star and namesake is Victor Davis-Hansen, and he is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

and the Wayna Marshabusky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

We are recording on Saturday, the 27th of January.

Victor, we've got some topics to bring, well, that get your wisdom on.

In particular,

I'd like to start off hearing your views about this, these news stories that have broken in the last few days about the FBI's hiring practices.

And yeah, no surprise, DEI is ruling the day when it comes to who the FBI hires.

And we'll get your thoughts on that, Victor, and some other important topics.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

Oh, hey, Victor, Miranda Devine, the great

reporter at the New York Post, who wrote the Hunter Biden laptop story, I believe.

She has a piece in the Post the other day, and other outlets have reported this.

Let me just read the beginning.

The headline is: Woke hires cracking

FBI.

Here's how it begins: An alarming deterioration in recruitment standards for the FBI has been exposed in a new report delivered to the House Judiciary Committee by an alliance of retired and active duty agents and analysts, diversity, equity, and inclusion DEI requirements, pushed by FBI Director Chris Ray, have degraded recruitment standards in all areas, including, quote, physical fitness, illicit drug use, financial irregularities, mental health, full-time work experience, and integrity, end quote, and pose a threat to the FBI's ability to protect America from harm, say the authors, the report cites cases of new agents who are so fat and unfit they can't even pass the new relaxed standards for fitness, who are illiterate and need remedial English lessons, who don't want to work weekends or after hours, have serious disabilities or mental health issues and quote unquote create drama.

This is how our nation will protect itself against our enemies.

Victor, your thoughts.

Well,

here's where we are on the whole issue, the wider issue of DEI,

the most potent and recent form of affirmative action.

We are a situation now that privately everybody believes that you should use meritocracy only

and

for your safety as we're starting to see with disturbing stories that are starting to leak out about airplane maintenance, airplane supervision, piloting, etc.

And we're starting to see stories about health care, et cetera.

There is a culture that if you say things about that,

you're going to be in big trouble.

So in my case, when I talk about it, there are people who listen to this right now, Jack, who are affiliated with where I work.

And I will get, you know, I get every once in a while polite remonstrations.

And I won't get into them, but, you know, we were even criticized for playing the battle hymn of the Republic at one point.

So I...

I understand that, and I think it's true of everything.

In other words, the American people overwhelmingly, we saw in California when 209 came up, Jack, and 16, Prop 16 was going to replace it and allow you to be racially discriminatory, people overwhelmingly rejected it, so much so that the state legislature is trying to do it again in a backdoor exemption fashion.

So nobody wants to do it,

but everybody's afraid to say something.

And that means to me,

it has a shelf life, that it's headed toward the end, that finally people who are beneficiaries of it in theory are not going to participate.

And so who is

because they are patients, they are people who drive on freeways, they are people who get into cars, they are people who fly on planes, and they want to be rest assured that the people

who offer them those life-sustaining services are there because their mastery, they have mastered their professions and not because of their superficial appearance.

So that's one thing that's going on.

The other thing is

people are starting to see that there's two things wrong with this whole racial preference stuff.

One,

in a multiracial society, you almost have to go back to the old Confederacy one drop rule.

You have to, because once you go down that, I mean, this is national socialism.

Once you say

that Jews are inferior and we're going to kill them, then

you have to come up with a paradigm.

What about the inner party Nazi member who didn't know it, but his grandmother was half Jewish, right?

And you have to come up with a...

And they basically came up with a special bureau in the Nazi party of genealogists that looked at 1 8th and 1 16th cases and then got special...

Goering was famous for getting exemptions from his friends.

So that's the sick trajectory that you're on.

And we saw the manifestations of that with Ilyan,

excuse me, with Elizabeth Warren, with Ward Churchill, with Rachel Doza.

We see it all the time, the fake identity.

And when everybody says that we live in a racist society, the barometer means to see if to adjudicate whether that's for racist or not is always ask which

to which side are people cheating?

In the 1930s or 40s in the old South under Jim Crow,

if you were half black and half white, what did you try to say you were?

For your own self-interest.

You said you were white.

And there was a show.

Remember Jack called Pinky?

It was about

a woman that was...

Lana Turner.

Yeah, Lana Turner.

And she looked white, but she was African.

There was a lot of Hollywood shows about that, showing how ridiculous it was.

And now it's just the opposite.

If you're a mixed heritage, no matter.

what your superficial appearance, you try to emphasize that you are non-white.

And that just shows you where the bias is there.

So that's the problem.

The other problem is it's not equally distributed.

So the idea is that we need proportional representation and then maybe even repertory,

but there are going to be certain institutions where you can have a disproportionate, even though that was the pillar of the civil rights movement.

We want

We want America's institutions to look like America.

And then people start saying, nah,

we don't.

We don't.

I mean, the African-American population makes up 20% or so of the post office.

Nobody has a problem with that.

Or you look at the NBA and it's 70, 68%

black.

And you look at the NFL, it's probably about the same.

And people say, well, maybe we should have affirmative action for Asians and whites and Latinos.

And they say, no, we want a merocratic system, even if all the linebackers or all the cornerbacks or all all the running backs are black.

And so,

although it's a little ironic that there's a big black movement and it's based on the pressure to have black coaches, and it has a logical disconnect, it says the black coaches must look like the NFL, right?

So if it's 70% black, you should have 70%

coaches, but the NFL doesn't look like America.

So what do you do?

You say that the NFL coaches should look like America and 12% of them should be black?

Or do you say that 70% should be black and not look like America?

Because if you use that paradigm and apply it to university professors or something, it doesn't work.

So

it's convenient for the DEI people to say, and sometimes that the goal of DEI is to make it look like America and sometimes it's not.

In the case of Stanford University, where I work, and that's the obvious referent,

they triumphed, they trumpeted, excuse me,

to fanfare on their website that the incoming class admitted this spring was 20%, Jack, white.

And when you look at white males, it was about 8.5%.

And if you're going to let in people who identify as white males, and you're only going to let 8.5% or maybe 9% of the student body, and you've got to allot for the president's son and the provost's nephew and the big grandees in Silicon Valley that give $10 million, $20 million a year, and then your athletes, and then the guy who says,

my great-great-grandfather went to school with Leland Stanford, you know, or he was a Stanford.

You let all those people, there's absolutely zero room for the guy from Dayton, Ohio, whose parents never went to college.

He's a straight ACE student, and he took the SAT and ACE it at 800 because

they reject 70%,

65% of perfect SATs that are sent in optionally.

So there you have it.

The whole thing is a mess.

And the best way to do, when you have a Gordian knot

that can't be unraveled, the best way to do it is the Alexander the Great method.

You just cut it.

And you just say, me,

I cannot unravel it.

Well, how are you going to unravel it, Alexander?

I'm just going to cut the SOB and just cut it in half and do away with it.

And then things become simple.

We just go back to treating people like they're human and we don't care about how they look.

It'll take time for this to bleed out

through these, should be important agencies like the FBI.

We're going to have a decade of

those handy-ass

agents.

I don't know.

The FBI is completely, I didn't even get into that.

It's completely politicized under,

I mean, look at the last four directors.

They're pathologically misleading or liars.

You had Robert Mueller testify to the House Intelligence Committee that he had no idea what views in GPS and the dossier were.

That's an outright lie.

Those were the twin catalysts that created a special counsel appointment.

Then his successor, James Comey, on 245 occasions, he went before that same committee and said, I don't know.

I can't remember.

If you did that to an FBI agent that came into your house to investigate you for fraud or racketeering, and you did that 245 times, they'd arrest you.

And then we had a replacement.

Remember him, Jack?

Andrew McCabe?

He lied four times.

He said he lied.

And, you know, I didn't really hate Bill Barr.

I was all a lot of the MAGA people can't stand him.

And I kind of liked him.

But when he decided, you remember that, that he was not going to prosecute Andrew McCabe?

And that would be magnanimity in a time of tense polarization, I thought that was a big mistake.

And then we had Christopher Wray, and Christopher Wray just stonewalls.

And then every once in a while, when he gets tough, he just says, I got to go to a meeting.

He gets in his Gulfstream FBI and he flies to his

Ariane vacation home and splits.

So they haven't been an impressive crew.

And if you throw

Strzok and Lisa Page into the paradigm.

And I think, by the way, Jack, I think she was one, and our listeners will correct me because I'm doing this by memory.

Wasn't she one that didn't want to go in when she was subpoenaed?

Lisa Page.

I think she just said, I'm not going to show up.

Well, Lisa, if you did do that, and correct me if I'm wrong, you might be facing a four-year, four-month prison sentence.

Yeah, like

she just talked about him on the last podcast.

Yeah.

Well, Victor,

A little more on this across the pond, if you don't mind.

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Victor, I don't know if you saw, I sent it to you.

I don't know if you saw it, but there's a great publication, by the way.

It's called The European Conservative, and I heartily recommend it to our listeners.

I quote from it from time to time in the weekly email newsletter I write: Civil Thoughts.

But, you know, these

DEI application to the FBI, well, over there, DEI application by a quote-unquote conservative government, which has run England for the last decade plus.

Here's the headline of this article.

It's titled, No Army for White Men,

Britain's Self-Inflicted Recruiting Crisis.

And, you know, I always thought Britain was, I don't know, we had to pick a color with pigmentation.

It's a white nation.

And the leadership there in the military, again, leadership based on a Tory/slash conservative run government for the last decade plus, have actual, you know, efforts to, well, they call it diversity, but we don't want any more white guys flying our fighter jets, et cetera.

So they've had a terrible fall off

in recruitment.

And, you know, really, when it comes to war, does this, I was going to say a curse word.

Does it matter?

Does DEI matter?

I guess it does matter because it'll put you in a worse position.

Anyway, Victor,

I just raised this.

I don't know if you saw the piece about it.

I did.

I did see it that you sent me.

And

General Wool, I always thought the Europeans were a little bit, because of their aristocratic traditions, they were a little bit less receptive to racial gerromanding and quotas.

But I think in the last 10 years, they've either passed us or they're at least as egregious as we are in using race instead of other criteria of merit.

But

that story, of course, there was also even, I think you saw it in the Navy.

So it used to say the Marines and the Navy and the Air Force aren't that bad, but they're all in the United States facing a collective.

Depending on what you read, it's hard to know.

35 to 45,000 people,

you know, it could be

three or four divisions of people are not showing up.

And when you look at the statistics, it's very hard to find, Jack, but if you really work at it, you can see that the Latino enrollment is about the same.

The black enrollment is about the same.

Women are about the same.

And then I suppose the gay, trans.

And so when you're talking about being short, 30,000 to 40,000 people, who are they?

And when you look at the white enrollment, it's way down.

And when you superimpose that statistic on the general reduction, it explains almost all of it.

And this is something that, as I keep saying, that when you talk to military officers of a high rank, they won't talk to you.

And what the paradigm is, is that if you want to be a lieutenant general or a full general, three or four stars, or an admiral, and you have to be billeted at some point in your career, in the Washington, New York area, East Coast, Washington mostly, and you know you're going to retire, and that is where the defense contractors and the big bucks are, to a lesser extent Silicon Valley, and you know that the flavor of the day is DEI, DEI, then you're going to push that, even though it's unpopular with everybody in the ranks, because you're going to be promoted and you're going to get

publicity and post-retirement offers on the degree to which you're considered progressive.

That's

sort of the Israeli, you know, most of the generals in Israel are progressive as well.

So my point is that they

don't have support.

And we saw it with the vaccinations where they dismissed 8,400

U.S.

military officers and enlisted men who refused for, I think, legitimate reasons.

And I didn't refuse.

I wish now I had refused to get the mRNA vaccination, not because I don't think it was efficient had some efficacy, but I think the risk for people

that had an immune problem, and I do have an immune problem, are more or greater than the risk.

It's not acceptable because I had a terrible reaction to the second, and I got along COVID after a COVID bout.

But my point is this,

that we lost those people.

Now we're trying to beg them back.

And then you went into the full DEI mode.

And all of the commercials were DEI.

And

then there was Mark Milley and Austin in their, remember that Jack 2021 summer testimony where they and Mr.

Admiral Gilday, and they all said they were going to recommended,

not all, I think it was Milley said he recommended everybody reading Kendi,

Faker, who got his big research center at Boston University and had zero output for all the millions he got.

And then

so they basically said that they were going to investigate investigate white rage, white supremacy, white privilege.

They set up a special investigatory.

It was big.

It was a lot of publicity.

I remember we talked about it at the time.

And guess what?

It had a report in December, Jack.

Nobody heard about the report.

Remember what the report said if you looked at it?

There was no white conspiracy.

There was no anti-government.

minute moon, you name it, disparagement.

There was no, as John McCain said, there were not a bunch of crazies and hobbits and bizarros.

Or as Joe Biden said, there were not a lot of dregs and chomps.

Or as Hillary said, there were not a lot of deplorables, irremediemables.

And you know, they're, you know, Islophomic, Islophomic and homophobic and xenophobic, that stuff.

And then there was clingers that started it from Obama.

There was none.

to speak of, at least not in disproportionate numbers.

And so they did a lot of damage because they told a whole demographic, you're suspect and you're illiberal.

And the demographic was trying to tell them, hey, wait a minute, my great-grandfather,

my great grandfather was at D-Day.

And my

grandfather was at Korea and he ended up in Vietnam at the end of his career.

And my dad was in the first Gulf War.

And

I was a veteran of the Iraqi invasion.

I'm 55, 60.

Why are you doing this?

And then that person said, My son is not going to join this outfit.

And that's what happened.

And then they say to themselves, okay,

good riddance.

Now that we're going to get DEI.

And they say, and then somebody taps them on the shoulder and says, hey, by the way, go look at the dead in Iraq.

Go look at the dead in Afghanistan.

Who died?

Who was in the combat?

Who is inordinately represented in combat units?

Who inordinately volunteers to go to god-awful places like Kandahar, Fallujah, who, not that people

of color do not die and fight there, they do, but in numbers twice their demographic, they die.

White males, mostly from the middle, suburban, middle, and poor classes, mostly inordinately represented from rural and south of the Mason-Dixon line America.

And to go after those people was like cutting off your hand.

And I don't think they're going to get them back.

And I've noticed something, Jack.

I don't know know if you've noticed that.

Have you noticed that the commercials are starting to change now, be all-you-can-be type of commercials?

And they look like there's a lot of white males in the commission all of a sudden.

There's not anything about the two gay women and the pregnant woman and all this stuff.

It's not there anymore.

Yeah.

And so.

Remember the Marine Corps celebrating its birthday a few years ago with like one of those

flags with a million colors?

Yeah, absolutely.

So

I don't know.

I think that there's something, I don't know what to say.

There's something wrong with the military.

Let's put it this way.

They have gone after white males and they say they don't.

And

when the recruitment drops, they know the cause because they change their ads and recalibrate them to get back that combat constituency.

But if anybody says what you did or I just did, then they are ignorant.

You're not in the military.

How do you say, why do you say that?

It's because people are fat.

They're on drugs.

They're in gangs.

They're lazy.

We lose them to the private sector.

Unemployment rate's 3%.

What do you expect?

They'll say anything, but they caused it.

It's self-inflicted.

Those are exactly the people, though, that they'll hire at the FBI.

You can be fat, lazy.

No, it didn't stop the FBI from hiring them.

And then when you look at the other problem they have is they spend $800 billion

and

they're short.

They spend $800 billion.

They're short on 155 millimeter shells.

They're short on Patriot stocks.

They're short on javelin stocks.

They don't have a sophisticated supply chain.

They build too few weapons that are too expensive rather than a lot of cheap weapons that are available and can flood the zone.

They don't believe in that anymore.

And the officer class is highly politicized and they go right out.

They, the top, the celebrities go right out of the military and then they revolve right into

Raytheon,

you know, General Dynamics, Lockheed, Northrop, you name it, Boston, whatever that thing is, lobbying group.

And

they say we're going on here because we are invaluable strategists and we've had a, yes, that's true.

But the primary fact you're on the board or you're in charge of lobbying is because you have hundreds of people in your 30-year career that you came across that are still in procurement in the Pentagon.

And they listen to you.

And you can use your influence to make sure that this weapon system is bought and not the other one.

There's something wrong.

I don't know.

I wrote op-eds saying that we should waive the requirement,

two op-eds, for particular generals to serve as

defense secretaries.

And I think there was a reason why we had that requirement and it should no longer be waived, should be enforced.

Lloyd Austin convinced me of that.

There was no reason to put somebody who was just out of the military and

basically a lobbyist board member for Raytheon right back onto the, and had had not had a distinguished had a very undistinguished record in Iraq

and there was no need to do that except for DEI I like what Lloyd Austin he's a pleasant person I hope he gets better but

and then

you know

if

if I don't go to my job for 10 days or if I don't answer the phone I

I'm I'm not done and the soldiers who are listening to this they know that if they don't show up for,

you know,

roll call, they're done.

And for the Secretary of Defense not to tell people where he was

or to have a commander-in-chief who didn't care as a top-ranking officer in the civilian sector, it's just commentary.

And then, you know, finally, Jack, to get the end this rant,

we have a $35 trillion

national debt and it's no longer being financed at 1% or 2%.

It's up to 3.5%, 4%, and it's up to over $800 billion.

And that's bigger than the defense budget.

So basically,

we've got more money we have to pay on interest to people who hold treasury bills or bonds from the government than we do can spend on the military.

And the military just keeps asking for more money.

We just say, show me how you're using it wisely, please.

Because we don't think that these DI programs are very costly.

How many people administer them?

Wouldn't they be better to be transferred into combat roles?

Well, Victor, the money being spent poorly is not just in the Department of Defense, it's also in the Department of Veterans Affairs.

And we're going to get your thoughts on that right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

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Anyway, Victor, this podcast,

Happy Home

is

Just the News, John Solomon's Just the News.

And John's

got a piece up here this week.

Again, we're recording on the 27th.

and it's about how

the Veterans Affairs Department is prioritizing illegals over veterans.

And here's how this story begins.

U.S.

Senator Marsha Blackburn reveals an astonishing statistic that due to the Biden administration allowing Veterans Affairs resources to be used to help process health claims and health services.

for illegals has caused veterans claims to grow to a backlog of

million.

So Victor, the aforementioned, you know, the 55-year-old guy who fought in Iraq and the still, you know, the Korean War veteran who's aged,

and why aren't they getting the help at the local VA?

Well, maybe it's because,

you know, some guy who illegally came in over what used to be our border is getting treatment instead of him.

This is how we're treating

veterans in America.

Victor, any thoughts on that?

You know, I won't mention the reviewer, but when I wrote The Dying Citizen, I said that, that

not just that the distinction between a resident, legal or otherwise, often illegal, was blurred between a citizen.

And the only difference I could see was holding office.

And I think that's going to erode, just like voting has, because there are school board elections and people who are here illegally can vote.

But I think in many ways, they're treated better.

And this is a good example of what you mentioned with the VA.

But

what I mean by that is if you

two years ago in California, three years, they said, remember that real ID thing, Jack,

that everybody had to have a real ID by 2020.

Then COVID came along and they said, we'll give you another extension.

It's a license that has a little rubric on it.

And I think the, doesn't the law take effect in 2025 now?

And it says that, you know, we just got to control it.

We just got every Comdick and Harry getting on the plane with these fake IDs.

So when you get on a plane, you're going to have to have a real ID.

And that real ID has got to be certified by a passport or a birth certificate, not just your old driver's license.

And then you've got to have proof of residency in your state.

You have to have a

property tax statement, power.

So we did all this.

I went to Hanford, California.

There's a big line.

And I got it.

And I thought, oh, wow, this is good.

And then I realized that they were never going to enforce it because if they did, half of the place where I board would not get on the plane.

Can't have that.

And now I learned that when you go to these airports, if you're illegal and they want to fly you, you just go right through.

You don't have to have any picture ID.

None.

None.

And then I, then, you know, in addition to that,

when you see

This is what is really striking is that when I go out of the United States, I show a a passport or an ID.

They won't let me come back in without a passport from Canada, to take an example.

I have to, and maybe you can have a passport card.

I have one of those, but I've had to show it every time.

And they say in the plane, everybody should know you're going to have to have a passport or equivalent.

But if you're illegal, you don't.

Do you think any of those people that are walking across 12,000 a day have a passport?

Do you think anybody's there with a little passport uniform like you come into the airport?

It says, excuse me, I don't see any identification.

Oh, you have a Mexican license?

That doesn't count.

We need a passport.

This is the sovereign territory of the United States government.

No, no.

And so, yeah, they do get special preferences because of their sheer numbers.

And so somebody asked me the other day, you know, they said this, Jack, I said, we heard you say that Hillary Clinton, I said it today to,

I think it was with Sammy, with Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden and Bill Clinton, what they said in the 92 and 96 was pretty restrictionist in the good sense.

I don't mean the pejorative use of that word.

And they said,

how can you, you know, how can you say that?

That

these,

why do you say that?

Maybe you're right, but why would they say that?

Why did you say that?

And they don't say it now.

And I said, go back and look it up if you don't believe me.

And, you know, okay, I believe you, but why are they different?

And I just said one thing, numbers, numbers.

We hear there's 11 million.

When I wrote Mexicornia in 2023, I was told there was 11 million illegal aliens.

And then I was told the Yale study said there was 20 million 20 years later.

I don't think anybody has any idea other than rough estimates that we have the highest percentage in our history, percentage-wise in numbers of people who were not born in the United States, 27% of the population, California, maybe 55 million people.

So you're not going to see a politician.

Those are numbers.

And given the fluidity and the lack of transparency and the porousness of our voting system,

politicians are just reacting to numbers, numbers, numbers, numbers.

And

there's, that was Joe, Barack Obama, he was, I think we always underestimate.

He was always the pioneer in all of the nonsense and craziness.

I can remember, remember that Arizona governor that tried to enforce immigration law and Obama went after her?

And he said,

get her name.

Yeah, and he's a blonde woman, about 70.

And she was really good.

And he said, well, you know, we're not going to have a country where we're just walking along the street as a little kid having ice cream and they pick you up and jail you.

And I don't know when that has happened.

But

I don't know.

But, you know, even that, if you're here illegally and you're walking in the street of any age, did you think that when you fly in,

I flew in from Israel not long ago and I flew in.

Do you think if you're seven years old or eight years old and you don't have an ID, they're going to say, well, you're just having ice cream.

You should go right through.

No.

They're going to say, where is your ID?

So yes, asymmetrical with the sheer numbers explain that they have to make these allowances, they feel.

And you notice that the bipartisan,

don't anybody ever listen to the word comprehensive immigration reform?

That is a left-wing euphemism for blank and amnesty.

And when they say, the other day,

Karen Jean-Pierre said, and we just want to get some money.

They don't give us the money.

Well, what do you want the money for?

And she said, we need more officers and more processing.

What she means is we like the 8 million, but we got to get them in.

We've got to get them legalized.

We've got to get them institutionalized.

We've got to open that border and regulate it so we can get more people and more efficient.

And we can't have pictures of people defecating and urinating on the ground and kids in cages that would Obama bill.

We just got to, that's what they mean by comprehensive immigration reform.

Two things, Victor.

One, that was Jan Brewer.

That was the

who was the governor.

And now reminiscing,

half of my mind is a Turner Classic movies.

There was a great 1940, 41 41 movie with Charles Boyer and Olivia de Havilland called Hold Back the Dawn.

And it's a great movie and it's a romance, but it involves the border.

And it really speaks to what the mindset of America was once upon a time, that this was

a border and you could not cross it at all.

Is that the movie where there was a, he's a giggolo or something?

He's a gigglo,

I just remember it vaguely.

He's trying to find some

single American woman to fall in love with and marry so he could become a citizen and get over the ball.

No, I never understood one thing, though.

Why did Olivia de Havilland, when she, you remember the movie The Eiress that they made?

Yeah.

She was not.

Yeah.

And in this movie, it's like she has this, she's taken advantage of, right?

But she wasn't ugly.

She's beautiful.

But why did she suppose she was like 5'1 or something?

Why did they always suggest that she's a beautiful actress, but she's not that pretty?

And

they did that in Hollywood.

You know, another one they did it too, just to get off the you remember,

not O'Marina O'Hara, who was beautiful, the redhead, but Marino Sullivan.

I was watching Turner Classic.

One of my favorite movies is The Tall T with Richard Boone.

And

what's his name?

Did you ever see that movie?

I've never.

No.

No, it's a great movie, but

you know, the guy that was in Ride the High Country?

I'm just blanking out.

Oh, sure.

Oh, Joel McCrae.

Joel McRae, sure.

And the other guy who was supposedly Carrie Grant's lover.

Well, I think he was.

And

anyway.

I'm drawing a blank.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'm drawing the point too, but I'll.

I'll find the name while you're talking.

I remember who he is.

It's Randolph.

Randolph Scott.

Randolph Scott.

Yeah.

And so anyway, my point is in this movie, movie, Maureen O'Sullivan, she's very pretty, but she was always considered a wallflower in the movie.

And she's never had kissed, and she's homely.

There was another one with John Wayne that had an actress in that, was it

one where he marries her and he kills her husband by accident, and they say she's not very pretty.

And I never understood that.

They get these very pretty actresses.

I guess they didn't have any homely actresses.

So

that was fun.

Our favorite movie was on the other day, Victor.

With Jean Arthur.

Shane.

And

is it sort of implied in there that she's not beautiful?

Or she's too.

That was her last movie, wasn't it?

That was.

52.

Oh, she's.

Oh, my gosh.

She was a beautiful woman.

Of course, she was beautiful.

That's why Shane had a thing for her because she was.

I think she had a thing for Shane.

Well, maybe.

Shane was.

Shane knew it.

Yeah.

Oh, my gosh.

I love that movie.

It's so beautiful the way it's

filmed.

The horses are even great actors.

That was George Stevens, right?

He was a great director, George Stevens.

Well,

he was just a great director.

That was a great movie.

You know,

this particular episode is coming out, as I said earlier, on the 30th.

And a few days from now, it's...

Groundhog Day and a totally different movie, but I love that movie.

Oh, my gosh.

And I am.

The more that I think of it, the two best directors were actually George Stevens and William Wyler.

They were just brilliant.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, my gosh.

Well,

what's his name?

Who did

this terrible British act?

David Lean.

David Lean was very good.

So was

they all hated him, but Frank Copper was good too.

He made some great movies.

Yeah.

There's nobody liked them today.

I watched Turner.

You know why I watched that show?

Because

you see incidental glimpses on location and you can just see that

people are well-dressed of all different classes.

They're polite.

Their diction is better.

The streets are cleaner.

And not everybody's like, oh, well, actually, you know, it was a racist society and they were toxic fumes coming out of the smokestacks.

Yes, I understand that.

But given all

there was, it was

it brings in this phenomenon that I've mentioned in another person's podcast that this generation, I was listening to Gavin Newsom the other day, and he was talking, and

he just lies all the time.

He really does, as you saw with the DeSantis thing about how great California is.

And

you give him the evidence, these people, this is how many people have 280,000 left in the last 18 months.

It's Florida.

Florida's got, you know, paying off its debt.

It has a surplus.

You've got a $60 billion.

You go through the whole thing.

But this self-congratulatory, oh, God, we're winning California.

And you want to say, what has your generation done?

And I'm talking about my generation and the generation below me that are say people from, I don't know, 35 to 75, what have you done?

What's so good?

NASA is better than it was ever.

The U.S.

military is winning wars like we did in World War II and World War I.

And we fought to a standstill in Korea.

We're just much better now.

And

I don't know, our universe, Claudia and Gay, and she, gosh, these people are much better presidents than we had in the 1950s and 60s.

And San Francisco looks spotless compared to what we saw in Dirty Hairy, even in the 70s or Vertigo.

Just a much beautiful, much more beautiful city.

No, the answer is no.

Trains are, they were just so...

Compared to high-speed race,

no, no, no.

Your generation has done very, very little.

You siphoned, you were a parasite off previous productive generations, and then you added insult to injury when they're dead.

Then you took their statues and changed their names, and you said they were racist, racist, horrible people.

And you never could explain that the United States they turned over to you is a magnet from people all over the world who do not look like the people who are dead that you slandered.

And you can't tell us why these people want to come to this legacy of these people that you hate.

Can't.

Right.

Back, you know, Victor, if I may just say one other thing about movies, though, and the well-dressedness, et cetera, we see in movies from the 40s and 50s.

I think of the treasurer

Ciara Madre with Humphrey Bogart wanting to get that shave.

Yeah, that was John Houston.

He was another great director.

Oh, he was.

Yeah, he was in the movie, too.

He was the guy that gave him the money.

But it questions like we don't see slovenliness.

I'm sure there was slovenliness, but it wasn't a virtue.

And now, when you have

award ceremonies for Oscars, even the slovenliness is on the people up on the stage.

You know, it's very funny you said.

I was thinking that the other day,

when I went to undergraduate, everybody was a slob.

I liked our professors at UC Santa Cruz, but they came in in sandals and jeans and t-shirts.

And I I remember going up to one professor and I said, Professor, no, it's John Victor, John.

And then I went to another one, Professor Berber.

No, it's Harry, Harry.

And then when I went to Stanford, it was a little bit more formal in the 70s, but it was all.

So when I taught,

if any student came out of parochial school, they said, Dr.

Hanson, I said, no, it's not Dr.

Professor Hanson.

No, no, no.

I said, you can call me Mr.

Hanson if you want to call him.

And some people even call me Victor.

But that was a mistake.

And I would always wear

kind of Costco pants, you know, and a shirt.

I never, and sometimes a sport coat, but I never wore a tie.

I never wore Oxford shoes.

And in the summer, I might even wear,

you know, jeans.

Okay.

And now I find myself, not just because I'm old, but because of the status of the country.

I think everybody listening feels the same way.

When you go on a flight now and you see the person next to you and they've got the sweatsuit on or they've got pajamas.

What is the thing with pajamas, Jack?

Have you figured that out?

All these people are wearing their pajamas.

They wear pajama bottoms.

They wear them everywhere.

I can't believe it.

And they, I saw a guy in Kingsburg, California, of all places at the supermarket with pajamas and slippers on.

at 10 and 10 and 11.

It doesn't make any sense.

But my point is this.

And when I go to, I was always very carefree and I never thought, I thought formality was a construct.

I was really screwed up.

But now as I get older, very old, when I go to the market, I always put my cart back when they're parked.

But now I make sure it's perfectly back.

And when I look in, I pick up trash.

And when I go in, I try to be well-dressed.

And I make sure that when I go out in public,

I go in to look in the mirror.

I comb my hair.

I brush my teeth.

You know what I mean?

If I hadn't taken a shower in five hours,

in the summer I'll jump in the pool or jump.

It just, you feel, all of us feel that the whole society is eroding and the veneer is chipped off and it's pretty ugly underneath.

And all of us want to do something, be polite, follow rules of decorum.

You know what I mean, Jack?

It's like we're all compensating for, we're in 450 AD and we know the society is, we hope not irrevocably, but we feel it's it's crude.

And so we want to say, not this pig.

We're going to be be well-dressed to fit the occasion.

We're going to pick up trash.

We're going to do everything to keep the remnants of civilization, the veneer.

And I think that's really important now.

Amen, my friend.

Well, we have time for maybe one more, maybe one and a half topics.

And one of them has to do with that great, great institution, the United Nations.

And we'll get your thoughts on this story, Victor, right after these final important messages.

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

Victor headline in

what day was this?

Oh, today's today's paper, January 27th, the New York Post.

U.S.

cuts

relief agency dollars over staff taking part in Hamas massacre.

12, 12 United Nations workers

the

United Nations Relief and Works Agency.

12 of them

participated

in the, I hate to, even the word participate means like you're in a basketball game or something.

They were part of the October

7th brutalities, Hamas terror attacks in Israel.

This agency, by the way, had Trump cut it off

after his final two years, nothing.

And when biden uh became president uh you know he undid everything donald trump did and i think in the three years biden's been president uh this agency has received over one billion dollars and we didn't even cut it off did we just pause do you see that we didn't even cut him off yeah and you know who did cut them off

britain united kingdom and and i think uh Australia did, and I think Canada did.

And about, I think there were seven.

Italy did.

Switzerland, I think, did.

Switzerland wasn't even a member.

They were smart.

They weren't even a member until 2001 or two.

They joined the UN.

And

it's a no-brainer, right?

Why would you give money to people who go in and rape and kill and mutilate and

destroy young life, you know, infants in microwave?

Why would you give them any money?

We're getting to the point now.

I mean,

I don't see any advantage anymore.

I used to, you know, everybody said, get us out of the UN and all that.

And I said, well, it's a debate.

Maybe some people have to find some.

Well, you know, you have Zoom now, right?

So you get into an international tension, you could have the international Zoom board where there was, it's like the hotline in the Cold War, right?

So instead of just having a red phone next to you, you could just have a platform where if we have international tensions, everybody gets around a table and shouts and yells and works it out.

But other than that,

I don't see anything in the UN.

It exists now for for one reason, just one reason, and that is its 180 or so members hate Israel.

And half of all their resolutions of condemnation are pretty much directed at Israel.

And they are

a shakedown operation of African, Latin American, and Asian nations to get money out of so-called guilty Europeans, former Commonwealth countries, and the United States.

Carbon admission, you name it.

And they're controlled mostly now by China because of the Silk Road, Belton Road, whatever you want to call it.

And so

the fact of its existence helps then create these other NGO

entities, which I'm an NGO.

Well, you must be doing something good.

Except many NGOs,

whatever money they raise, in particular in the Middle East, they're spending it on Gaza and it's ending up in Hamas' hands and building tunnels and funding luxury lives of Hamas leaders.

But so the NGO aspect of the UN has also, I think, been a horrible,

almost a cancer that's come out of it.

Yeah, it is.

Its demerits

vastly exceed any redeeming value that it has.

And if you can't, if some of you say, well, we need it, okay, just get it out of New York.

Put it in Rwanda or go put it in Lima, Peru, maybe some romantic place with all these guilty Westerners can think of.

I don't know.

I put it in Cairo.

Put it in Cairo.

Old Cairo.

I've been to Old Cairo a lot.

Go there and see how you like it.

Just go there.

There won't be any CBS news,

prime time, little speech you can give if you're a diplomat.

There won't be some five-star restaurant you can go.

Just go there and be with the people.

And just get it out of the United States and sell off the building because it does a lot of harm.

And they're so self-righteous.

And

there's a long tradition of cosmopolitanism.

That's the Greek word for globalism.

And Socrates, in a very late source, said he supported it.

It was a controversy in the classical world between people like I.

Socrates and others who said, you know, sovereignty is very important.

And the other people said, well, there's no difference between Persians and us.

And that's a strain of the Western mind that the more leisured and safe that constitutional government and capitalism produces, safety and leisure and money, affluence, the more likely you are going to say, yeah, this was my birthright.

It just kind of happened organically.

Now I'm so enlightened.

I'm not like my grandfather went out there and pruned vines all day.

And, you know, my parents had a, you know, a used car.

And I'm just enlightened.

And I love the world and we don't need borders.

And who's to judge the UN?

And Israel, Hamas, they're the same thing.

They just go tit for tat.

No one's better than the other.

That kind of whole wishy-washy stuff is what the UN is as far as the West goes.

And then the non-West, which is the majority of it, hates the West.

They hate the West so much, Jack.

They hate the West in Libya.

They cannot stand it in Somalia.

They despise it in the Sudan.

They loathe it in Gaza, and they do it so much they want to risk their lives to come to the United States and Europe.

It's the weirdest thing I've ever seen.

Hey, the first head of the UN was Alger Hiss, folks.

Don't forget that.

He had a lot of his former deputies that worked at the Hoover Institution.

in the 1940s and 50s until Herbert Huber got really pissed off and came in.

Yes.

Oh, wow.

I didn't know that.

Oh, wow.

You know what?

It was the Hoover Institution for the first, it's 100 years, 100 and it's 105 years old.

But for most of its life, it was a very valuable archival and library.

And Huber, from his relief efforts in World War I, brought back just tons of stuff, especially about the Bolshevik Revolution.

And

all during the 40s.

Solzhenitsyn spent a ton of time there.

That was our trade trading.

But

it was archival research.

The idea of a modern commentary and think tank

was after

in the 1950s and 60s.

And that was Herbert Hoover when he was in Septuaginary.

And he went back and he was going to have his presidential library at Hoover.

And then he started looking at it and he saw that there were a lot of liberal people from the Alger Hiss School of Diplomacy working at Hoover.

And he got in a big fight

with Stanford University because he felt they were trying to control it.

And

he did one thing.

He took off out his presidential library.

It's not there anymore.

I think it's in Iowa, isn't it?

It's in Iowa.

Yeah.

And he has an office when he was labor secretary

for Coolidge, I think.

But my point is this.

He was the one that dreamed up, how would you create a conservative free markets, constitutional government, personal liberty in the realm of

war, revolution, and peace.

So he went out and he searched everywhere.

And in the early 60s, he came up with Glenn Campbell, a brilliant guy in his 30s who was an economist who was hard right.

And he thought, this guy's healthy.

He's young.

He'll be here for 30 years.

And he was.

And then his deputy, John Rayson.

So we had basically almost 60 years of two guys.

And they were very, very conservative.

And they created the idea that Hoover would be a think tank.

And they understood immediately that if it was on the Stanford campus and it had the best position on the Stanford campus and

it was center right.

and you were going to have a think tank, the faculty that surrounded this little atoll, the ocean of anger, it was going to be a perennial fight.

And Hoover hammered out a relationship, and then it was modified and enhanced that gave Hoover semi-autonomy.

But when people call me up and said, oh, you know, I read the Hoover Daily Report and this guy is a Marxist.

You have to say, we're not completely autonomous.

We have our own board of overseers.

We have our own endowment.

But for me to be tenured as a senior fellow, I had to go to the classics department at Stanford University.

So for us to make a senior appointment, a lifetime tenured appointment, we have to have the permission of the faculty.

And ostensibly, it's going to be based on our research ability

and our body of writings.

But, you know, human nature being what it is, it's going to be political as well.

And,

you know, it's, it's, and that's, that's what we forget sometimes.

But that was a long rant because

if Herbert Hoover hadn't have intervened, we would be an Alger Hiss, traditional

Rockefeller or something like that, Ford Foundation.

Well, Victor,

I think this might be difficult to ask you to do in a short amount of time, but you'll give it the old college try.

I've just been wanting to ask you military questions come to mind since it was

roughly

last week, the 80th anniversary of

the Anzio

attack in World War II.

And I looked through your great book, The Second World Wars, and you had some really interesting things to say about

how the Allies followed up the victory in North Africa.

And I think, mistakenly, if I read you right, and I just thought with this on this roughly this anniversary, you might want to share a thought or two about, yeah,

did we screw up

the follow-up?

I mean, we did win the war after all, but

a lot of

men died and were maimed in Italy,

and it might not have been the best policy.

Can you educate us a little bit, Victor?

Well, we lost, that was the January, I think to June campaign.

Anzio was the ancient, it's not too far from Ostia.

It's the general maritime area on the coast from Rome.

And the landing site was a swamp, which meant you could get bogged down before you could set foot on solid ground.

It was surrounded by a mountain range.

It was a bad idea to go there.

We lost, I don't know, 45,000 casualties, 7,000 or 8,000 dead.

What was the idea behind it?

Well, after North Africa worked out pretty well, November 42, Operation Torch,

we got rid of the Vichies or they joined us.

We met, you know, under,

that was Patton's greatest moment.

And we met the British coming from the east and we got a larger group of German prisoners than was lost at Stalingrad.

About a quarter million of them we captured.

So then what do you do?

And people said,

well, you go into southern France or you just hold and then go into western France.

And we weren't able to go into Western France.

We weren't able, believe me, we didn't have the equipment or the know-how.

But the idea was, well, we'll go and knock the weak link out of the

Pact of Steel.

We'll get rid of the Italians.

And the closest place was Sicily.

So we invade in summer of 43, Patton Montgomery, which was pretty successful, although Montgomery, I think, was culpable.

We let about 100,000 Germans escape across that six-mile strait into southern Italy.

Now, here's the problem, Jack.

Anybody who looks at the history of Italy sees the Apennese Mountains in the middle.

And there's two plains on either side, but there are also cross-mountain ranges that extend in places.

And the Gustav line and a series of

defensive fortifications meant that when we were coming up, it's like going up a long staircase.

And people can block it all the way.

There's no room to maneuver.

So the greatest minds of antiquity, i.e.

Hannibal, got the opposite idea that if you're going to do it, you come from the north down and you don't have to go into Sicily.

And that's what, but we did this slow slog.

So after about

six months, Jack, we were taking Monte Cassino.

We were taking enormous casualties and we still hadn't got Rome.

And we had another problem.

And that was a German Luftwaffe officer, Kesserling, had transferred into the infantry land forces.

And unfortunately for us, he was a military genius.

He was a nut.

I mean, I think at one point,

an artillery barrel hit him in the head and knocked him out and gave him a fractured skull.

And he was back in action almost immediately.

He was indestructible.

And

he was a master of defense.

And he bled us white in Italy by slow retreat.

So the idea was...

go around them

go around them and there had been earlier discussions that we should have gone into Sardinia or Corsica because then we could have made a big landing base, sort of like in England, and then conducted amphibious assaults.

And people said, no, it's an island.

Well, you could have gone way up to Corsica.

It was lightly defended.

Then you could have just gone straight across and trapped everybody.

Whoever goes into Italy can trap people because it's a long, narrow peninsula, depending on your own position.

But the Germans were very good on defense.

We never took all of Italy.

We never got into Austria from Italy

until

the surrender.

It was a bloodbath of nearly a million British and American casualties.

And the idea of the Anzio campaign was to land outside of Rome and go straight east and take the city

and trap the Germans below.

Kesserly knew that.

So he said, Mark Clark,

they had a genius, and we had a mediocrity, a nice guy, the big eagle.

He looked like the golden eagle.

He was very handsome, tall, very smart, but he was indecisive.

And he fell for the baits.

So then when they landed at Anza, they went right for Rome, and they should have just gone, made a loop north of it and trapped all the Germans.

Why we went to Rome, they snuck around and got out.

They being hundreds of thousands of German soldiers to the south.

There was another problem.

I don't know how this happened in World War II, but we had some of the most brilliant commanders that have ever seen warfare.

I mean, George Patton was an authentic military genius.

Curtis LeMay was an authentic.

MacArthur had his low spots, but low points, but he was a good commander.

But we had people like Lucian Truscott at the core level or Manton Eddy.

These people were really talented.

And they came out of the officer training schools in the United States.

And Marshall was, but we also had, I don't know how we did it.

We these apparatcheks from the peacetime armor and one of them was John Lucas and he was the commander of the Anzio and he he ran Anzio like the British ran Gallipoli he lands there just like the British did at Gallipoli for a brief two or three days the Turks are unorganized or German advisors don't know what's going on they could have gone right up the Gallipoli peninsula and taken and they just sat and that's what they did they just got to Anzio and they didn't move.

And they could have just broken out.

And by the time they did, the Germans were ready for them.

And Lucas was culpable.

They had to relieve him.

And Mark Clark was not much better.

And we did the same thing in North Africa.

We had a guy named Lloyd Freydenhall.

And Eisenhower loved the guy.

He looked like a perfect general, but he had a bad habit.

He liked to be 30 miles away in a bunker when combat took place.

And he was the one responsible for the Kaiser and Pass disaster.

So, and we had, you know, Leslie Magnero was the highest ranking officer to be killed in World War II in the European theater.

Simon Bolver Buckler was in the Pacific theater, but he was killed during the

breakout from D-Day's, the Bokage after about, you know, we landed on the

6th of...

of June 1944.

We didn't break out to the end of July.

So we had that awful two months where we suffered 80,000 casualties and we were trapped in the hedgerows and we had to bomb our way out.

And when we bombed our way out, we killed a three-star lieutenant general.

But he also was not, I mean, he was the person that came up with the crazy idea of a tank destroyer rather than a Pershing tank.

Everybody knew that Sherman had to be updated.

Its gun wasn't big enough.

It didn't have enough armor.

Very reliable.

But we came up with this idea of putting

a artillery piece on a mobile platform without much armor.

And they would rush up and then shoot and then rush back.

It didn't really work out too well, the Wolverine, et cetera.

But my point is this, that

we had some mediocre, nice people, but mediocre at very high levels of command.

And John Lucas is one of them.

And unfortunately, he was in charge of the Anzio campaign.

And Mark Clark was our theater commander.

Alexander was very good.

He was a British co-commander of the theater.

Clark

relieved him too late and did not put people like Truscott in who could have done a lot better.

Or

we had a lot of really talented people.

Matthew Ridgway was a two-star general.

He would have been wonderful.

And we kept with the mediocrity and we paid a big price.

And the whole Italian, that was Churchill's idea.

It wasn't our idea to go into this underbelly.

The idea was that you'll just be fighting Italians and the Italian population will come over to our side.

They're Catholic.

They're Christian.

They're not like the Germans anymore.

They're not Nazis.

Mussolini was National Socialism light.

We'll just go right up and

we'll go right into

we'll break off and go into Genoa, but we'll also go into Eastern Europe from northern Italy and then Trieste and things.

And guess what?

We will save Eastern Europe.

Tricky little Churchill, he had this idea.

He was far thinking in 44 that he knew the nature of the Soviet army.

They hadn't gotten to Eastern Europe, and we would be there to attack the Germans from the east, and the Soviets would be behind us, and they would be fighting over places like Ukraine or Belarus, and we would be freeing Romania and

what was Czechoslovakia and Poland and Hungary.

And we would make sure they were democratic and part of Western Europe, and they would come out and support us.

And we never got there because the Germans took over from the Italians, and they were masters of defense.

They had a brilliant commander and they had pretty good rail lines from northern Italy right into the ruhr of Germany and they were well supplied with good equipment.

And we had our eye on the ball at going into Normandy in 1944.

So it was a disaster of the Italian campaign.

Folks, if you're interested in this and more, I

heartily recommend you get, if you haven't yet, the Second World Wars,

Victor's classic best-selling work.

Victor, that's about all the time we have today, other than to thank our listeners for listening and thank those who on Apple and iTunes take the time to rate the show zero to five stars.

And they rate the average as 4.9 plus.

So

we're, you know, you're delivering and people are appreciating it.

Some leave comments, and

here's one.

It's titled

A Most Illuminating Podcast Today.

Victor, thank you for all you do.

Receiving your wisdom is a blessing.

Especially love your interview with Kash Patel.

God bless.

And then it's signed by B D J K S K.

There's so many.

It's just kind of gibberish.

But whoever you are, thanks for taking the time to leave that.

And by the way, folks, if you didn't hear Victor's discussion with Kash Patel, go find it.

It is a...

He's a very articulate, smart guy.

He is.

And he's been underestimated his whole career.

And people who underestimate him make critical mistakes.

He helped outsmart

the whole Russian collusion farce, the people who were promulgating it.

And boy, if you want a strong conservative in a position of authority in defense or national security, it'd be a very good appointment in the next administration.

Yeah.

Amen.

Well, thanks,

Victor, for everything, all the wisdom you shared today.

Thanks, folks, for listening.

And

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

Bye-bye.

Thanks, everybody, for listening.