The Left Are the Great Destroyers of Civilization

When empires debase their currency, citizens who hold gold survive the transition.

That's not opinion, it's documented fact.

Trump's economic warning isn't speculation, it's pattern recognition.

The same signals that preceded every major currency crisis are flashing now.

Unsustainable debt, foreign nations dumping our bonds, and central banks hoarding gold.

But Trump's also revealing the solution.

The IRS strategy he's used for decades is available to every American.

It's how the wealthy preserve their fortunes when paper currencies fail.

American Alternative Assets has documented this strategy in their free 2025 wealth protection guide.

It shows exactly how to position yourself before the turbulence Trump's warning about arrives.

Call 888-615-8047 for your free guide.

That's 888-615-8047 or visit victorlovesgold.com.

The patterns are clear.

Make sure you're on the right side of them.

Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I am Jack Fowler, the host, but the star, the namesake.

That's Victor Davis-Hanson.

He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and the Wayna Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

And you know, Victor was on the recent Hillsdale College cruise, and he gave a really, really interesting talk while he was there, and it's been published.

in Imprimus, which is the, gosh, I think everyone in America gets Imprimus.

Victor, I think about six to seven million people receive this.

But this came in the mail a couple of weeks ago.

I've been meaning to get Victor to talk about this particular

essay or speech, and it's on imperialism.

And we will get Victor's thoughts on that.

The new issue of Strategica, hopefully, some lunacy going on at some American colleges, all that and more right after these important messages.

Like you, when I bought my last pair of shoes, I looked for stylish comfort and beautiful engineering.

And that might make you think Italian, but if you're buying sheets, it should make you think bowl and branch.

The colors, the fabric, the design.

Bowl and branch sheets are made with long-lasting quality, offering extraordinary softness to start and getting softer and softer for years to come.

Bowl and branch sheets are made with the finest, 100% organic cotton in a soft, breathable, durable weave.

Their products have a quality you can feel immediately and become even softer with every wash.

Plus, Bowl and Branch comes with a 30-night worry-free guarantee.

I've been sleeping like a baby in my bowl and branch sheets, which keep me cool on those hot summer nights, and they're the perfect place for sunrise and morning coffee.

So, join me.

Feel the difference an extraordinary night's sleep can make with Bowl and Branch.

Get 15% off plus free shipping on your first set of sheets at bowlandbranch.com/slash Victor.

That's Bolin Branch.

B-O-L-L-A-N-D-B-R-A-N-C-H dot com slash Victor to save 15% off and unlock free shipping.

Exclusions may apply and we'd like to thank Bowl and Branch for sponsoring the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

If you're like me, you have a lot of product on your bathroom counter.

Well, I have found the secret serum, and it's vibrant Super C Serum.

The ingredients in this one bottle can replace your day creams, eye creams, night creams, neck creams, wrinkle creams, and even dark spot reducers.

Made in the USA with the highest quality ingredients, including vitamin C, hyaluronic acid, vitamin B5, and vitamin E, Super C Serum delivers noticeable results.

Simplify your skincare routine, get a healthier complexion, and minimize wrinkles and age spots with Vibrance.

I just began using Super C Serum last week, and I love it.

My skin feels so much better, soft, moist, and fresh.

And by the way, it smells beautiful like the orange blossoms outside my kitchen door.

Give it a try, and you'll love it too.

And if you don't find it better than your current skincare routine, you'll get a full refund.

Go to vibrance.com slash Victor to save up to 37% off and free shipping.

That's Vibrance.

V-I-B-R-I-A-N-C-E,

vibrance.com slash Victor.

And we'd like to thank Vibrance for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor, this

was very happy when my mailbox here comes in Primus, and there's you right on the cover.

And Imperialism: Lessons from History.

This is the name of

the talk you gave.

And

it's based off of this idea that some suggest today that America is behaving imperialistically.

And of course, Victor, you go back through history and especially with the Athenians and others and discuss what it means to be imperialistic.

And

how does America compare in these historical terms?

Would you tell us about this really, really engaging essay?

What?

We were on the Mediterranean this summer, and I was asked to speak about what we were witnessing in places such as

Istanbul

and

Cyprus.

and Greece that were all either subject to, at some times times in their history, to imperialism or themselves imperialist.

Because we were looking at all these different castles on roads and who built them, the Venetian Empire, the Genovi, et cetera, et cetera.

And I was trying to get a coherent theme that would bind all of them.

And basically, it was that the imperial power, in history, when you have a particular type of state, that has a successful formula, and that means it produces goods and services that are not commiserate with other populations of equal size, but they're wealthier, or they have a superior method of the military, or they're energized by their political system or their religion in the case of the Ottomans or the Caliphate.

or whatever the particular reason.

And they start to spread that culture because they are convinced, either of one or two, but mostly a mixture, that A,

their superior culture will help other people, what Kipling called to his

now modern riddle, the white man's burden.

He was talking about Northern Europeans going throughout Africa and India and supposedly enlightening people with constitutional government,

habeas corpus, or

clean water.

medicine, whatever the particular

defense was of imperialism, or a uniform language and culture, in the case of India.

Or

they feel that more nakedly, and this tends to be something like Hitler and the Third Reich, that they need from people who have not been successful like they have, those people then don't have a right to the resources or population that they enjoy.

And therefore, the Third Reich has a right to go into Ukraine and take their food,

or they have a right to go into

North Africa and take their oil because they're using it for their own superior purposes.

And most of them, it's a mixture of both.

And usually the imperialist power has a whole facade of

well-being and humanitarianism

that disguises or veneers their more self-interested agenda.

But the weird thing about it was I was trying to point out as well, is it doesn't really pencil out the amount of money, whatever the motive is when they go overseas and they set up, you know,

extra,

you know, consular officials or praefits or tribunes or whatever.

They send people their whole machinery overseas, like Rome, or they have

episcopoi, if you're Greeks, they send them out.

The cost never is really recaptured.

So you have Britain that in 1850 was really almost right at the

cusp of the Industrial Revolution.

It was the wealthiest country in the world that controlled, I guess, 70% of the world's landmass.

But

Dickens was writing about, he was writing David Copperfield or

Bleakhouse or Great Expectations about a hollowed out London.

Or you have the United States as we speak and we've got 600 military bases all over the world.

And you look at San Francisco or the border and you wonder why are we doing this?

And

you can say the same thing about the Ottomans.

They were killing people and they spread in the Balkans and they were doing all these things.

But at their core,

they were hiring Venetians and Genovese and Jews and Greeks to run Constantinople,

which would become Istanbul.

Not till the 20s was that term used, but nevertheless, they didn't have a viable core at the center.

And that's because I think a lot of the expenditures.

So

that's something that contradiction, I think, was kind of a warning I wanted to.

to suggest that and I quoted that great poem by, I think it was 1902 by

Kipling at the Grand Jubilee ceremony of Recessional.

You know, he's looking at the British Imperial fleet at the turn of the century, and it looks so majestic,

and he's basically predicting quite accurately that this is the high point, and it's going to go downhill, and that nobody appreciates what Britain brought to the world, and it's too costly, and you have to believe.

the British population no longer believes in that imperial

burden.

And so I think that's what's happening in the United States.

People are saying,

we don't want any more optional wars because the people hate us.

The more we think we do well for them, they hate us.

You tied it to

East Palestine in the peace, Victor.

Yes.

I mean, the people, if you think about it, it's kind of like Dickinsey in London, where

the crown wasn't really interested, and the people lived on the streets and the slums of London.

They were more interested in getting a railroad to work in India.

And

so we have all these people in East Palestine, and they're deplorables, irredeemables, chump.

That is, they're the lower white working class that did not vote as they're supposed to for Joe Biden or the left-wing agenda.

And they have this toxic fume, which is a no-go zone for the left.

I mean, my God, it's proof of

the industrial complex poisoning all of us.

So

that happens, and Biden doesn't show up.

And you want to say, well, wait, you're not showing up to these people?

Why is that?

These are the people who are engaged in the imperial project.

Little towns like this in the Midwest, they're sending their sons and daughters, especially their sons,

to god-awful places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

They die at twice their numbers in the demographic.

So when the coffins come home from war zones, 75%

of the dead are white males, but they're only 35% of the population.

And so these communities have given their all, and yet you have nothing but contempt, but yet you rely on them for your imperial ambitions.

And that's the point I was making.

And

the same thing about the Roman army.

One of the reasons that during the Roman expansionism, you were sending out these legionnaires all over the Mediterranean and beyond, the Persian Gulf, all the way to Scotland.

But when you looked at the actual Italian countryside from which this group originally came from, it was being destroyed because the more conquests that occurred, the more slaves, one million in Gaul alone, were being flooded back in to Italy.

And then absentee small farmers were in the legions.

And so people bought up the land cheaply and they used slave labor that was free, basically, very inexpensive.

And it became a lot of funia or corporate agriculture and the whole basis or the whole agrarian ethic of the roman republic vanished

and so when you look at what we're doing and i was just seeing the just to update that article my gosh we're it's not that we're just giving you know patriot battles or high mars to ukraine we're into now

getting into their administration and their medical care.

And we're doing all of these things as we were doing in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And if that's true, I wish they'd come to my hometown and go to the emergency room.

And it needs help.

And again,

I don't want to hear any more elites give people, shake their finger and say, we can do both.

That is so stupid.

It's only $120 billion.

Are you an idiot?

For $120 billion,

we're triting 5% of the

you know, 5% of the Pentagon budget gives us 50%

destruction of Putin.

Okay, then let's do both.

Let's all go on to Moscow and let's first just close the border.

It's cheap, just do it.

It's not a matter of money, it's a matter of psychology.

You don't want to do it, but you do want to go over there and patrol that border, but you won't do what to the Ukrainians what you're doing for your own people.

And then you make fun of people who make that argument, and you say, oh, look at the arithmetic.

It's just a minuscule amount of money.

We're not talking about money

to simulate Joe Biden.

We're not talking about money.

We're talking about what?

We're talking about attention span.

You spend more of your time worrying about the Ukrainian disputed borders that have been disputed from time immemorial than you do about the U.S.

border.

And you tell us why first, and then we'll go on to Moscow.

You just tell us why you're doing that.

And they won't.

And they won't.

And I get letter.

I got a letter from a very

person I have a great admiration.

And he was basically saying,

how can you go on Laura?

I mean, you go on Laura Ingram and she's going on and on about Ukraine and you don't object.

Well, first of all, my segment had nothing to do with Ukraine.

And I have objected before in a very pleasant, you know, we had a pleasant exchange, but I have enormous respect for her.

And she makes arguments.

She's not an isolationist.

She just tried to make an argument like I just said, that it's a matter of resources.

And everybody's, well, there's no resources, Victor, going over to Ukraine.

Yeah, there is.

You know, we emptied a quarter million shells from Israel, artillery shells, to send over there.

We're short six years of javelins.

And the Chinese want this thing to go on and on and on.

But more importantly,

for the amount of time and energy we spent on Ukraine, we could have had a wall from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf, and there would be no problem right now.

And we wouldn't be spending billions of dollars in New York, and we wouldn't be kicking veterans out of hotels to put illegal immigrants on.

And I wouldn't have to walk last night and meet somebody in my own orchard that I have no idea who they are.

And they're on an electric bicycle, of all things, and they don't speak a word of English.

And I try to ask them in my broken Spanish, why are you on my property?

And what are you doing with an electric bicycle riding in a vineyard?

I mean, an orchard and that's every day and it's chaos and it's kind of like agrarian republican rome versus lot of

and that's what it is now these people don't care they don't care at all there's something really sick about this country right now and that is this this la jolla to seattle

Boston to Washington corridor mentality.

And it's all based on letters after your name and titles and where you went to college and how much money,

but not just how much money, how you spend it.

You know, if you have to have the perfect taste, you have to know certain things.

And they don't care about other people.

And they have these certain agendas, the net zero agenda, the ESG agenda, the DEI agenda, the trans agenda,

the Soros critical legal theory agenda, agenda, the critical, they don't care about how that trickles down to other people and ruins our lives because they think they have no say in a democracy because these people are their moral and electrors.

And they give us lectures about democracy.

Democracy dies in darkness, why they try to kill it and strangle it.

They do it all the time, whether it's hiring, as I said, hiring Twitter or it's

trying to flip the electorate to 70% absentee ballot.

They don't believe in democracy.

And they're starting at least to write that now in New York Times op-eds and stuff.

I was shocked locally, they had to cover the absentee ballot scandal in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the Democratic primary.

They'll do it to themselves.

It just comes naturally.

But what we've talked many times before, Victor, you've shared wisdom, but whatever they're bitching about, that's projection.

That's actually

what they're doing.

But speaking of Russia and the war,

we should get to

the new issue of strategic.

But before that, I'd like to take a moment, Victor, to

recognize

one of our relatively new sponsors for the Victor Davis-Hansen Show, and that's AMAC.

AMAC is the Association of Mature American Citizens.

I am a member myself, and it proudly champions Americans' rights to free speech, religious liberty, and the Second Amendment.

AMAC defends parents' rights to protect their children and is fighting to restore America's election integrity.

With more than 2 million members nationwide, imagine that 2 million dudes paying members.

That's pretty damn important.

AMAC is pro-faith, pro-family, and pro-freedom.

Yep, I'm proud to be an AMAC member, and I encourage you to join today.

So let's send the AARP a strong message that they don't represent conservative seniors, even though I'm 63.

I guess I'll qualify.

Join AMAC today at A-M-A-C, AMAC, AMAC.us

forward slash Victor.

That's A-M-A-C.us

forward slash V-I-C-T-O-R.

We thank AMAC for sponsoring the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

And I had a little exchange earlier this week with Rebecca Weber, an email exchange.

I really like Rebecca.

She runs AMAC.

Her father founded it and she's running it extremely well.

I think were you on her podcast the other day, Victor?

I just did a podcast with her.

Yeah, great, great soul.

No, thanks, AMAC.

So, Victor,

yeah, the new issue of

Strategica is out.

It's titled The Russian Way of War.

It's the typical issue of Strategica to remind our...

our listeners.

It's the online publication that you oversee.

We'll call you the editor-in-chief there, Victor, comes out every month or two months or so with an important issue.

Participants and the writers are military historians and historians who add their perspective to important pressing issues.

So the pressing issue here is

the Russian way of war.

That's the theme of this issue.

And of course, Victor, you can talk about, it's your show.

You can talk about whatever you want.

But I would say the lead piece in this is by Ralph Peters.

And our listeners may remember Ralph, the colonel in the

arm, I think it was in the army.

He used to be on Fox frequently, but he's got a piece called The Crusade Against Ukraine: Eurasia's Last Medieval Power at War.

It was a long title, but it's in his analysis of the psychology of Russia and the history of Russia at war, predating

the Soviet Union, how Russia acts when a war is afoot, its strengths, its weaknesses.

It's quite opinionated piece, I must say, and really well written.

But anyway, Vicky, your thoughts on that or any of the other

articles in this issue.

We were trying to get a diverse group of opinions.

And I have one that I wrote a little earlier called, Have We Forgotten the Russian Way of War at the bottom of those three columns.

One is by Ralph Peters.

One is by Peter Mansoor.

Very bright guy, a colonel, was I think a chief of staff for David Petraeus.

He was number one in his class at West Point.

And he's writing about

why the Russians fight the way they do.

And

finally, Chiron Skinner is talking about it.

There are a lot of commonalities on those three and the one that I wrote.

And they're pretty, Ralph Peters pretty,

he outlines them pretty clearly, but all of them do.

And it's don't underestimate the Russian army.

It is incompetent in two aspects, in the initial phase of any war, anywhere.

And

it's not as competent.

abroad.

So when it goes into the winter war in Finland in 1939,

or when the Russian Navy goes all the way over to Japan in 1905,

or

they go into Poland in 1921, or

they're laggard when they go into Poland in 1939 compared to the Nazi invasion, or they go into Afghanistan, they don't do well.

Or at the beginning of a war on their home soil, whether it's Charles XII

or Napoleon's invasion or the German Nazi invasion, they don't do well in the beginning.

But they have a certain resilience, and that is they have a huge number, they're able to mobilize a lot of people.

And they are oblivious, not I mean, not completely, but they're oblivious in the Western sense to casualties.

So dead and wounded that would have destroyed another army does not destroy the Russian army.

We saw that

from June 22, 1941 until Christmas, where they lost 4 million combat and probably 10 million population, and yet they held the Germans off.

And so

when we look at Ukraine in that context, yes, Ukraine is doing wonderfully.

They stopped the Thunder Road capture of Kiev.

But in the wider context,

As incompetent as Russia was, you saw that train of vehicles where just people were sitting on the hoods while their tanks and trucks were being blown up.

And as bad as their generalship is,

and as poor morale they have, at some magic point,

Mother Russia kicks in

and they start to firm up when they get to an existential point.

And so if...

applied to Ukraine, it means, yes, when they try to go all the way to Kiev, they're not going to do very well.

If they're fighting to take more of Ukraine, they're not going to fight very well.

They're going to have poor morale.

They're not going to combine their armor with artillery, with air power.

Technologically, they're always going to be a step behind Europe or the United States.

However, you fight right in Ukraine,

on the Ukrainian border, right next to Russia.

or in Crimea, where there's 70% of the people are Russian speaking, ultimately you're going to have a problem.

And that's what's happening.

And yet, nobody said that would happen.

And we had two alarmist views in this war.

The one side said, oh, Putin's going to just take Kiev.

I didn't think he would.

And because of what I just said.

And the other side, and then the other,

I think, misappreciation was,

well, now that they saved Kiev, they're going to have the spring offensive and it's on to Moscow.

No, that's not going to happen either.

Ralph Peter's version of that,

and each one has different emphases, but his version is a little different.

He makes a cultural argument.

I think that's what you're probably referring to.

But his argument is that

the Soviets destroyed

the tradition of Tolstoy or

Pushkin or Dostoevsky or Catherine the Great, the Western tradition, the Russian Enlightenment,

or even you had kind of the Social Nitsyn.

And after

what Communists had done, this is a different Russia now.

And it's pretty bleak what he says.

It's a tough, heartless,

and it doesn't have the cultural value that it used to.

Am I misreading that?

I think that's what he said.

Yeah, but he also, you know, there's this.

He also has some

thoughts about Putin himself.

Like,

we need to think,

what's motivating him?

Listen to him.

The facts of what's happening on the ground are what they are.

But what he writes is just a simple sentence.

What matters is what those at war believe.

And he doesn't think that is being factored enough into the equations of the U.S.

backers.

Anyway.

I guess the contribution is he's trying to

take the facts of the Russian military and its incompetence and yet its doggedness, and he's trying to put it into a larger cultural, literary,

social environment or explanation.

So

if I could just read, if I could find it, he says,

you know, Russian oligarchs may have splendid yachts and European mansions, as did many a czarist-era nobleman, but their toys do not make them modern or Western.

I think everybody can agree with that.

Romantic admirers of Russians' contributions.

Here's the controversial.

Romantic admirers of Russia's contribution to the arts miss the point that the DNA of those achievements was exterminated in the gulag.

And relevant here, not one of the artistic disciplines in which Russian authors or composers excelled was native to Russia, which remains a copycat culture, not a creative one.

Heirs to endless grievances, a frustrated destiny, and ferocious envy of Western success, Russians can find neither peace nor place in the postmodern world.

Historical time is out of sync between Moscow, Brussels, and Washington.

Ukraine, we are not opposing a contemporary power.

We face a sullen people trapped in the Middle Ages and led by yet another false messiah.

I think

I think you could argue

that Russia was part of the Western Enlightenment and that in certain areas of technology, they were pretty sophisticated.

They were backward compared to Europe, but not to the rest of the world.

I know that when Hitler went in in 1941,

there were elements of the T-34 tank that had been borrowed or purchased or stolen, i.e.

the Christie suspension that we had underappreciated, which they adopted, or the diesel engine from Germany.

But the ability to mold all those components together and fabricate them en masse was something the Germans couldn't do.

And the Germans discovered that when they met the T-34 or the Stalin tank or 155 millimeter huge batteries.

So there was always something about Russian or the AK-47, the Kalishnikov rifle.

There was always that element within Russia.

And I think it's still there.

And that's why they can make sophisticated drones.

They don't just buy them from Turkey or Iran.

They can make their own.

And there are people in Russia that are very, very bright and are very well educated.

And

there are pockets or areas of Russian that are very Western.

But Rao's point is different.

I'm not going to argue with him.

He just suggests that we keep thinking that Dolchievsky's country should be like us, and they're not.

They're more of a different, darker period of history.

And that's what we're fighting.

We have to understand that Putin represents a destructive culture.

And it's not Tolstoy's culture that lost its pathway for a few years.

And I think Peter Mansour's is basically more empirical.

Ralph's is very empirical, but I mean, it's just concentrates on

don't get caught up in the daily or weekly media hype or cycle.

Look at the

long term, and that is

that.

The mistakes strategically, tactically,

technologically that Russia makes is not all,

they're predictable, but they're not always an indicator of how things are going to turn out.

And so

his last two sentences are: don't count the Russians out just yet, for they time and again have proven their ability to suffer and survive.

Undoubtedly, those two qualities are also part of the Russian way of war.

And

so I think that's what people need to remember: that when you talk about all the

we have people

where I work that are

that have been telling us since March the war is just about over, that the spring offensive.

And I've read that in these columns by, I mean, I've been,

you look at Bill Kristol or Max Boot and in

March, it was the Russians are going to collapse and they're going to get some kind of Ukrainian patent or Gwadarian and they're going to go all the way to Moscow.

That was, and I'm exaggerating, obviously, but that was this euphoria.

And it was just historically

ignoring the terrain, the geography, the culture of Russia.

And nobody will fight for Putin.

They hate him.

His country, his regime is going to fall.

Not if they don't see that they're fighting for Putin.

What if they think they're fighting for a Russian tradition?

And what if they think that when they look at the people they're fighting, they like them less than they do Putin?

And that's possible.

Just possible.

I'm just throwing it out there that the average Russian mother who sends her son to a cauldron, which is a stupid, insane war, she've never done it.

But she still, when he's fighting, feels that the Western European American back

Ukraine is not preferable to Putin.

And that's, it seems like that is operative, or the Russian army would have collapsed months ago as we were told that it inevitably would, but it didn't.

And it's not collapsing now.

And they're going to pour more and more resources.

And when people say, well, we destroyed 50% of his end, you know, I think the Bill Crystal group is running a lot of these ads.

We destroyed 50%, Republicans for Ukraine, I think it is.

50% of the Russian military at only 5% of our budget.

Well, 50%,

just say if you just use that loose figure, so if 144 people say 50% of its wherewithal is gone, you got 122 people fighting a country that's got only 29 million people left.

And you've got a lot of Europeans that just about had it because they're not up to this.

And

I don't get the armchair general drive, Victor.

What

psychologically, the crystals and the boots, what has possessed them along the way to make them so passionate about

blood?

Well, I mean, part of it was they have that

evangelical, I don't mean in religious terms, but that evangelical ecumenical

imperial vision that the United States is so morally superior in terms of their democracy that they have a burden, kind of a British 19th, to spread it everywhere, to democratize everybody and to teach them of the beauties of American life.

And we're going to talk in a minute about figures in Poland who look at us and say,

open borders.

critical legal theory, critical race theory, modern monetary theory, your popular culture,

hip-hop music,

San Francisco, that's not what we want.

And they hate that.

And they can't believe anybody doesn't think that we're superior.

So they were part of this

project for a new American century.

Remember that, Jack?

In the end of the millennium?

Yeah.

At the beginning of the 20th century.

And the idea was that they were calling for the removal of Saddam Hussein in 1994 and 95 with a preemptive war.

And the idea was we were going to go in.

And I supported the Iraq war, but only in the context of after 9-11 and only Afghanistan after 9-11.

But theirs was a broader agenda that they wanted to Americanize and democratize.

And in their computations, they never really said,

well, who's going to do the fighting and who are these people?

And do they have, are they stakeholders in America?

Of course, the America they wanted to spread around the world in 1994 is not the america they advocate for 30 years later they're so hell-bent on the whole leftist agenda also the same armchair generals crystal and and boots uh yeah i mean and they're an abortion they didn't like there

and they're not people who say i mean david from

from our former employer I thought he wrote a very unfair article.

You remember that, the disloyal Americans during the Iraq War?

Yeah.

Unpatriotic.

Yes.

And I didn't agree with Pat Buchanan on a lot of stuff.

And I didn't, I got attacked by paleos all the time for supporting Iraq, but I never said they were unpatriotic.

I just felt that it was a waste of American resources and a cost-to-benefit analysis.

And

so that's

sort of

we're trying, I'm trying to find, there's one other element we haven't talked about very quickly.

And some of our listeners are saying, hey, Victor, you missed the boat,

because Ukraine, for them, is the successor to Russian collusion and Russian disinformation.

So what they've been trying to tell us is the Russians interfered with our elections and elected Donald Trump.

But you guys, you know,

Mueller couldn't prove it.

And so we went into the laptop.

And that laptop was manufactured in Russia.

And it was disinfected.

No, well, we lost that one.

But now,

now we can show how evil evil putin was as if anybody ever said he wasn't so for them russia and this is the left too because they are on the left now these guys that were formerly neoconservative republicans

this is the holy grail the final russian denuement and the point that's so ironic about this is it was the left It was the left in 2009 that criticized George W.

Bush for his melt-toasty little little sanctions against Russia for going into Georgia and annexing Ossatia.

So they were the ones who pushed the fake jacuzzi button in Geneva, mispronounced, I think, reset

and in Russian, and then

sold us on dismantling missile defense to make sure Obama was re-elected by pandering to the Russians,

not selling javelin missiles to the Ukrainians, cutting back on our oil so Russia would get rich, probably got rich.

They were the ones that appeased Russia.

And then suddenly when that all blew up, they flipped and you mentioned projection and they projected their appeasement and romance with Putin and Russia onto

the conservative Republicans on Trump.

And then when you looked at the actual record,

I had an interview not too long ago with a foreign journalist, and he said to me, Can you explain something to me in your country?

I said, Yeah.

Why do they think that Trump was soft on Putin compared to Obama and the rest or Biden later?

And he said, Didn't he do?

And we talked about what he did.

He got out of an asymmetrical, unfair missile treatment.

He killed 200 mercenaries.

Trump did.

He flooded the world with cheap oil that Putin could not stand.

He

was the guy who really put the harsh sanctions on oligarchs.

He was the one that said, don't to Germany, don't do the Nordstrom

pipeline.

He was really tough on Russia.

And compared to the earlier reset or Biden, where he said, hey, Vladimir, if you're going to hack our stuff, don't hack hospitals.

Or, hey,

if Putin goes in, it's a minor offensive, so yeah, we're not going to do much.

And Zelensky, hey,

they're going to take care of, but we'll give you a ride out.

Come on, go get on one of our planes, we'll just turn over the country and we'll get you out of there.

That was Biden, right?

So

it's very strange.

Well, Victor, we're going to

talk a little more about that.

A Polish administration,

you

tipped tipped off about that as a topic.

There's some college-related stuff worth talking about.

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

So you just got back from summer vacation.

Maybe you might have even had to book two rooms because of your snoring.

Some vacation, huh?

Snoring can be an underlying cause of high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, and even memory loss.

Here is my advice.

If you want every night to be a true vacation, you need to get yourself Zipa.

That's happy Z, spelled backwards.

Zipa is a doctor-designed mouthpiece that not only moves your jaw forward, but is also the only device with a patented tongue seat belt to keep your airways open and the snoring away.

The snoring can stop as soon as the first night.

Zipa was proven in a 600-patient clinical trial and sold over half a million units.

From now until the end of October, show your family you actually care by purchasing a limited edition pink Zipa.

Not only will you save $10,

but Zipa is on a mission to raise $50,000 for breast cancer research and they will donate another $10,000 to the Susan G.

Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

Go to zyppah.com and use the code PINK or text Victor to 511-511.

Put your snoring on a permanent vacation and help a worthy cause with the snoring device we trust by visiting ZYPPAH.com and use the code PINK or text Victor to 511-511.

Remember, Zipa is happy Z spelled backwards.

Text fees may apply and we'd like to thank Zipa for sponsoring the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

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

Victor, before we talk about, we'll stick to

Europe,

I do want to take a minute here to welcome back one of our sponsors from

a couple of previous podcasts, and that's Cardi and Company.

Cardian Company is a family-operated and nationally recognized fixed-income investment firm with more than 50 years of experience.

If you want control of your financial destination and decisions, but you also want an experienced and knowledgeable person's guidance based on your risk tolerance and your financial objectives, well, then you just have to visit cartico.com Generally, for investments of $5,000 and up, find the investment that's right for you by visiting cartiko.com.

That's CARTI, C-A-R-T-Y-C-O.com.

One more time.

C-A-R-T-Y-C-O.com.

Carti and Company.

We thank them for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen show.

Victor, I saw many, it's got

a lot of

views and hits on various social media from last week or maybe within the last 10 days or so.

A Polish minister, Dominik Tarzinski, who was

his English is better than my English, I think.

I'm pretty sure he was talking at the European Union, and he was sticking it to the left who hate Poles, same people that kind of hate Hungarians.

Why?

Because they won't take in

the

migrants.

They're illegal aliens.

By the way, Poland has taken in 2 million

Ukrainians.

But

they don't bring in illegal aliens, terrorists.

Their economy, the Polish economy, is doing better

than any other economy in Europe post.

COVID.

The Poles are very proud.

They've been bullied lately.

Zelensky tried to bully the prime minister and attack the Poles.

And it was kind of refreshing to see

someone defending the sovereignty of the country, defending the concept of borders in a country.

So

anyway, he reminded me a little bit, Polish version of, say, Nigel Farage,

who had the same kind of tone and humor and frankness with the European Union Parliament.

Anyway, Victor, your thoughts about Dominik Charzinski?

Well, he's making this argument that for too long, the Western European United States version of

modern 21st Western civilization is the A, successful and B, the only model that works, and that is greater statism.

ever larger government, fixations on race and tribalism, open borders, globalist ecomenical ideas that were all

beyond the 19th century idea of parochial borders or common language, common people,

and

green, mandatory green energy because global warming is destroying the planet.

And the Poles and the Hungarians and the Czechs who have A suffered

from 1939 to 45 under the Germans in World War II, even though their governments may have been aiding them, and then suffered from 45 all the way to 89 under communism.

They know something, the Western Europeans really, they've got a better lesson.

And they were the ones remember as well, Jack.

that during the Ottoman expansion of say 1400 to 1700, Eastern Europe and the Balkans were the shield of Western Western Europe.

That's where the Ottoman wave broke.

And Europeans, and they remember that, from Greece remembers that, the Bulgarians remember that, the Serbs remember that, the Romanians, the Hungarians, the Poles, siege of Vienna, etc.

So they have a very different history vis-a-vis Western Europe.

In their view, and this Polish leader was articulating it,

they feel that illegal immigration ruins a country and that you have to have borders.

You can't have unlimited ambitions to spread your culture all over the world.

You have to have it in a finite time and place with historical roots and customs.

And they believe that walls work.

And they believe, after seeing what totalitarianism does, they don't trust socialism as an economic model.

And they don't trust socialists who run it because they feel they're hypocritical and they're never subject to the disasters they inflict on others.

And they do believe that there's nothing wrong with

having Poles that looked like Poles 100 years ago.

And they don't have to let in Africans and Asians just because

people that live on the Mediterranean coast in big homes tell them to.

And so the people in the United States and Europe hate their guts for that.

And they hate them especially because their paradigms are more attuned to reality.

So the the world is looking at Italy and Greece being flooded and Spain with immigrants and the United States and Britain, and they're saying, yep,

they are right more correct than the grandees in the West.

And then they're looking at tribalism and racial fixations and essence, and they're saying it doesn't work.

The diversity

salad bowl approach does not work.

And then they're looking to creeping socialism and huge debt and on sustainable entitlements and national annual debit.

And they say it doesn't work.

And

they're more right than we are.

And so we used to make fun of them.

And it was kind of, they're all right, they're paleo-right.

But the more that we fail in the West, and the more that they don't fail,

that paradigm of Western civilization seems to be

convincing more people that it's the true.

And they're much more religious.

So that's another point.

We should really make the point that atheism, secularism, agnosticism is the religion of Western Europe, the United States.

It's not of Eastern Europe.

They believe in a transcendent Christianity.

You have a soul and your

soul is undying and its place in the hereafter depends on its corporal existence here and whether it was good or bad and that's something that we just can't tolerate in the west

he did say in his in his talk you know we won eight elections our party or the parties with these philosophies and essentially screw you to the eu that absolutely had no problem remember with italy they were just like no we're we're we're we're

i think it was like 2015 or something we're we're telling you who's going to run your country who's going to govern your country yeah what he's saying is who elected you people

we we we represent what polls want because we had elections and we keep keep running on these issues again and again and again and we keep winning but when you people have an election and you lose you want to have an you want to have an election only until you till you win

and you don't let people out and you don't listen to criticism because you're anti-democratic as all elite leftist groups are and you believe you want to surrender European sovereignty to

I don't know, the Davos group or the United Nations or some unaccountable corrupt organization.

So, yeah, I mean, they're very popular now, as everybody knows, and they're not failing, which our left said they would.

And so when you look at Prague or

Budapest, and then you look at parts of, you know, beautiful cities, but in the interior of London, or you look at

what's going on in the Paris suburbs or out in Amsterdam or San Francisco or Minneapolis or Los Angeles, you can make the argument that their paradigm is working better than ours.

You know, I'm not going to mention his last name.

Our mutual friend Robert, who lives in London, is like, I'm out of here.

People realize it's not,

well, San Francisco is San Francisco, but

great cities are trending that way.

New York is, London is.

Yeah.

but

Krakow is not, and Budapest is not.

Well, anyway, Victor, they are.

And

these are cities that bore the brunt of World War II and the Soviet recapture of Eastern Europe and communism.

They were destroyed by the Soviets systematically.

by communism, and yet here they are.

And

I think everybody on the left and all Americans should just just take a deep breath and look at San Francisco.

And I know there's a writer, she was just, she was, I used to read her, I'll remember her name, and she was telling us how dangerous it is.

And the New York Times hired her, Jack, and she's telling us how wonderful San Francisco is and how it's exaggerated.

Take a disinterested view and just go there and walk around Union Square and Market Street and along Fisherman's Wharf and just

soak it in and then remember the way it was.

And that paradigm is what, that's the ultimate expression of progressive politics.

It really is.

And just listen to what London Breed said in 2019, 20 and what she says today.

That's all you have to do.

And just

it's easy to understand.

Look at what Bill de Blasio did compared to Michael Bloomberg and Rudy Giuliani.

And Eric Adams is now, does he think that Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg's New York is what he wants to revert to?

Or does he want to revert to Bill de Blasio?

Ask Eric Adams that, a man of the left.

Yeah.

As you point out many times, it's easier to destroy quicker and easier than to.

That's what California is.

We're California the destroyer.

You take a you want to build a high-speed rail, 15 years,

$16 billion, not one foot of track is laid.

You can't do it.

You want to go up in the Klamath River and in the most sensitive ecosystem in the world, blow up four dams and spend a half a billion dollars?

You can do it in a summer.

You just say, we're going to do it.

We're going to destroy.

We're going to let this river run free.

We're going to go back to pre-civilization.

Yeah, let's do it.

Well, maybe these guys will sue for, screw up this.

We're not going to listen to it.

We're a liberal judge.

We're not going to have those lawsuits.

these are guys with power boats that have homes on the lake these are old fossilized hydro guys get rid of them these are farmers who cares about them they do what they want when they want to destroy you want to destroy market street you can do it quickly all you have to do is say no more rules they can live transit rules doesn't matter, drug offenses doesn't matter, let's destroy it.

And that's what's so weird about them.

They can't build anything.

They fight, they bicker, they regulate, they

delay, they do everything, and they don't build high-speed rails.

My hometown, Jack, there's an on-ramp, all they got to do is make an on-ramp, yeah, and they can't even do it.

And we got

traffic backed up every all the way back a mile to get on the 99 freeway, and they don't care.

Yeah, I drive from

Selma to Palo Alto.

It's like Odysseus trying to get home from from Troy to Ithaca.

It is.

I mean, I go down, oh, detour, high-speed rail construction,

new bridge being built, go around,

get back on.

Uh-oh, pavement gone, do this.

Okay.

Uh-oh, on-ramp, close down, go down 10 miles to another one.

Uh-oh, two lanes on I-5, get behind a caravan of semi-trucks in both lanes, and then all the way.

It's a four-hour odyssey.

They can't build anything, but boy, you tell them, hey, destroy a mural at a school in San Francisco that was a classic, beautiful piece of artwork put during the WPA.

They will destroy it in two seconds.

Go into Golden Gate Park or something and destroy a beautiful statue of Cervantes.

They can do that.

Bam.

And

let the forest burn and destroy thousands of people.

You want to have a beautiful

mine and then just don't clean it up and just say climate change makes us inevitable and let it burn.

Aspen fire up in the central Sierra, all of us were hiking for years.

Hey, you better clean all this brush up.

Better clean it up.

Let the loggers come in and get this valuable timber.

Nope.

Goes up.

Oh, climate change.

We can't fight fires.

Climate change.

They are the...

greatest destroyers of civilization around the left.

They love destroying what they inherited.

But you ask them to build something.

They can't do a freeway.

They can't do a dam.

They can't do a rail line.

They can't do anything.

They sue, they sue, they regulate, they bicker, they fight, they accuse, they libel, but

they can't build.

Yeah.

Well, they also commit crimes and then they get rehired.

And that's one of the final topics we're going to talk about, Victor, in the few minutes we have left.

And we're going to get your thoughts on this right after this final important message

we're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show quickly folks visit Victor's official website the blade of perseus at victorhanson.com just talking about destruction and you'll find a link when you go to the home page there is a you'll see on the right-hand column a link for Victor's forthcoming book it's out in May it's the end of everything How Wars Descend into Annihilation.

And

Victor's talked about the themes of this book on this podcast today and other podcasts.

So do check that out and realize when you click around the website and you're clicking on these ultra articles and they won't open for you.

Well, you have to subscribe.

Victor writes two or three pieces exclusively every week.

For the Blade of Perseus, it's $5

to subscribe and $50 discounted for the year.

Do that.

You'll find links to various other pieces that Victor's written for American Greatness, syndicated columns, archives of this podcast, many more things.

Blade of Perseus.

Hey, if you're

on Facebook,

VDH's Morning Cup,

search for that, sign up.

Unaffiliated but friendly fan club, the Victor Davis Hansen Fan Club, you should join that.

And if you're on Twitter/slash X, that is at VD Hanson.

That's Victor's handle.

So, Victor,

that

New York City professor from Hunter College

got some national attention a few months ago.

Her name is Shelene Rodriguez.

She's from the Bronx.

I apologize, folks.

She's from the Bronx.

She's the one that tried to disrupt a pro-life

table and

some student center at Hunter College.

And Hunter College is considered the elite college of the New York City college system.

So she was a teacher there.

And because of what she did there, and it was caught on video, a New York Post reporter went to her apartment to

interview her about this.

And she came out of the apartment with a knife and she held it across the guy's throat and

threatened to

slit his throat.

And she was arrested.

Honestly, I don't know what the hell happened legally.

I don't think anything, but Cooper Union, famous college where Lincoln gave one of his great speeches

before he became president.

Cooper Union has hired her.

Gosh, Victor, this is the if we did that, if one of our guys, if you did that, Victor, do you think some college would hire you to teach?

No, I know the answer.

Go ahead, my friend.

Well,

if

she was a black conservative, let's say that Shelby Steele or Roland Fryer did that, they would not hire her.

They'd be in jail for that.

If it was a white male, they would be in prison for five years.

And she knows that, and everybody else knows it.

And that's why she did it, because she knew she could fly off the handle and threaten somebody to cut his throat as a professor.

She knew that.

And she knew knows that she would be deemed edgy for it and she would get a job.

And that's why she's leftist.

And so a lot of our listeners say, I get this question a lot.

Hey, Victor, why is 95% of the people you work with in academic leftist, leftist?

I know that originally the idea of guaranteed

guaranteed tenure and nine month

month year work,

nine months out of the year, and then no accountability.

So nobody monitors if you're late for class or you miss office hours.

And it's all peer review and faculty governance, where you rub my shoulder, I rub yours.

Okay, I get that.

That makes you unrealistic and utopian, and therefore leftist.

But why are they able now to enforce all that so that normal people who go into it become, and you know what the answer is?

That,

that you go into the university and you are confronted with a choice.

Some little devil with a red union suit says, hey,

just mouth all these crazy things and we brand you.

And when people see that brand, you're protected.

And then the little angel says, but you can be honest and speak out.

And then the little devil says, yes, and you will be fired and you will be tormented and you will be ostracized in this community.

And that's a no-brainer.

So you'll have people tell you, and I must get maybe

a couple of letters a month where people will write me and say, I'm up for tenure.

Do you have any advice on what I should say or do?

Meaning, can I just act like I'm a left-wing nut for a while?

And I always say, do what you do for your family.

But remember, when you play act, that

persona can become your real.

You can't take off your costume.

It can enter your DNA.

And it's, and I keep, you know, I don't want to.

I'm Cherokee Indian, even.

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

And I don't want to demonize play the actions.

I don't want to demonize formal students, former students, but I can tell you that

when I was at Cal State, I can see now I had a lot of students who were very conservative, not because I was conservative or my colleague Bruce Thornton, because they felt they were from a rural conservative area.

And we, you know, you teach 10 classes a lot of years I taught five a semester, and then you give 10,

eight to 10 to 12 independent studies a semester.

You, and you count the hours.

You have no time from seven in the morning to seven at night, five days a week.

And then you come home and correct papers.

And on weekends, you try to write a book.

And it was kind of.

a nutty existence, but we're doing it for this, for these students who are

that, you know, you don't want to do your research, you don't want to do this, you want to build a program and teach kids to read and write and think and discover the wonders of Western civilization, their heritage.

And when you do that, and then they are all successful, and then you start hearing that

student X then decided to become the diversity coordinator and student Y became an advocate of this radical thing, then you wonder why they did it, because you knew them for five, six years, getting a bachelor's and a a master's.

And they were superbly educated.

Why?

And that's the answer.

I'm not saying they would never take a knife, but they understand that when you're in this herd,

when you cross the river, you've got to be part of the herd.

If you're the lone water buffalo, the lion picks you off, and they don't want to be that lone lion.

And so they make the necessary adjustments.

As I saw one student,

student, I won't reveal their gender or name.

They just said,

you're not going to like what I become, but I had to.

Okay, you had to.

And

I said, well, maybe I should become that way too.

And it'd be a lot easier.

And all our conservative listeners are thinking, hmm, I'm at work and I get ostracized.

Hmm, I speak out.

Maybe I should just.

start praising Joe Biden and say that Professor Kendi is my idol.

And so everybody has a Faustian bargain, and you have to be who you are and take the consequences.

But so that's why that professor was given a second, third, fourth chance from her felonious behavior.

And she knew it in advance.

That's why she said.

She'll get a fifth, sixth, and seventh.

There's no deterrence.

There's no deterrence.

That's why the DEI law school

czar at Stanford University hijacked Judge Duncan's lecture with a preconceived and pre-written script and told him basically to shut up and sit down while she read a script off praising the people who were screaming and yelling and disrupting him.

She thought that she had gotten the right to do that.

And they should have fired her to that moment.

They put her on leave finally, but only because of alumni fur that threatened to stop their donations.

And then she's left.

But the reason she did that is because she understood the culture.

and she took out adminity insurance, which means, hey, everybody, I'm a loud DEI leftist.

Therefore, I can do what I want.

She'll land on her feet, Victor.

And those Oberlin College administrators who they ended up with plushy jobs in other institutions.

They ran away to

pots of gold.

If Donald Trump harassed some woman 30 years ago and had sex with her and she can't remember when it was or where it was, but if it really did happen and it was against her will, then more power to her.

But if Tara Reed is telling the truth that she was sexually penetrated by our President of the United States and that Senator Hirono told us during the cabinet, women must be believed, and Camilla Harris said she believed it, then

what's the difference?

Well, the difference is that Joe Biden has abdominity insurance.

Right.

And that's the difference.

And that's a powerful narcotic for a lot of people career-wise.

Well, I don't own it.

Neither do you.

And hopefully, we'll never get it.

We'll help turn this country around.

Victor, we only have a minute or two left, and we have to conclude a little early today.

I appreciate your tolerating my stuff to the stuffy nose here.

We appreciate our listeners for listening, no matter what platform you come to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show on.

Thank you.

Do visit Victor's website.

For me, civilthoughts.com, go there, civilthoughts.com, and sign up for the free weekly email newsletter I write for the Center for Civil Society at Anfil.

Many of you do and write me nice notes.

I thank you for that.

Speaking of writing things, if you listen on Apple or iTunes, You can rate the show and you can also leave comments.

We do read the comments.

I do.

Victor does.

And many of them are very kind.

And here's one from MJ, MJ from Fremont, Colorado, who writes headline, National Treasure.

Professor, you are a national treasure.

Your observations are insightful, your wit mordant, and your patriotism unimpeachable.

I wish that we had a million more of you.

May God continue to richly bless you and your efforts to reignite love of this greatest nation in history.

Professor Hansen is the indispensable stage of sanity.

Thank you, MJ.

I don't know if you heard in the background, that was George, my dog.

Thank you, George.

George, for contributing.

Victor, thanks for all the wisdom you shared today.

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

Bye-bye.

Thank you again for your loyalty and your listening.

It's very much appreciated.