Fighting the Korean War

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Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Victor is the Martin and Nealia Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He is an author, scholar, and news commentator.

And on the weekends, we do

a little bit of news and a little bit of recently warfare and wars.

And we're on the Korean War this week.

So we'll turn to that in the second segment of this episode.

But first, we'll look at a few news stories.

And Victor, before we go to an ad, I just wanted to mention one that at least might provide some comic interlude into people's lives, perhaps.

I don't know, maybe some of them will take it more seriously, but that Susannah Gibson, the Democratic candidate in Virginia for the state house,

is they're trying to get her out of running, I guess, because she does sex videos with her husband for pay, I think it is.

Have you heard of that?

Yes.

She goes on to a particular, I think it's a Dutch website, and then she

opens into your little room.

Not that I'm familiar, but I've read two accounts of it.

And then she has sex with her husband and then she invites people to critique it and give her suggestions or him and then they pay for that and that's she says that's for a good cause which is unspecified and she says that this should not interfere with her running for the virginia

legislatures the republicans have said

this have released this and run with it and she said you've invaded my privacy after i put my entire entire body in a sexual manner in the middle of Fleranto de Lecto, right in the middle of everything.

The world has seen it, but you're exposing me to ridicule and you're invading my privacy.

I did not invade my privacy by stripping down to be buck naked and fornicating in front of the world, but you did by

drawing attention to the fact that I was doing that and getting money for it.

So that's the new ridiculousness.

Yeah, okay.

Well, let's take a break.

The only thing I would add before we take a break is

the interesting question will be whether her support goes up or down.

Yeah, that will certainly be of interest.

So let's address it.

I guess it depends on the quality of the pornography.

Well, we'll go to a break and come right back and talk a little bit about Mark Levin's current show and then a Trump interview with Megan Kelly.

Stay with us and we'll be back.

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Welcome back.

I'd like to remind everybody Victor can be found at his website VictorHanson.com.

It's called The Blade of Perseus and you can come read the things on the website for free.

Join us for a free subscription and get our mail, our newsletter that goes out with the new things on the website or you can join and get ultra material and we're going to talk a little bit about an ultra series that Victor has been writing.

towards the end of this show.

So it should be pretty exciting.

Well, Victor, I know that you were recently doing an interview with Mark Levin for this Saturday, and this podcast will come out on Saturday.

So Saturday night, please join Mark Levin.

Victor is on and so is Tom Soule.

And I was wondering if you could let us in on a little preview of that.

Yeah,

because Tom Soule has a great new book out, and it's on social justice, quote unquote, fallacies, where he reviews all of his life work, and then he distills it into questions of today about race, gender, etc.

And he tries to blow up these ideas.

And I just did a podcast, a Tom Soul podcast, that a person has a site developed to it, Mr.

Wooten, I think his name is, and where I critiqued the book positively because

I mentioned that Tom and I had lunch almost bi-monthly for 15 to 16 years.

But he was on Mark Levin and he was explaining the book and it was

typical Tom.

He was bringing in data that nobody really appreciates, such as black couples between

1940 and 1960 that had a nuclear family usually had a higher income than poor white Americans.

Blacks from northern states

that were married had higher test scores entering the military service than poor whites

of a different economic status, that the wage gap between

so-called Asians and Mexican Americans is much greater than between whites and blacks.

And what's the purpose of all this?

To show you that

there's so many

criteria, so many factors that make one person have more or less than another, that creating an omnipotent government, an all-knowing, all-wise

job of the hut that's going to control everybody's lives and make sure we're all equal in the back end leads to things like Hitler, National Socialism, communism under Stalin, Kim Jong-un, Pol Pak,

et cetera.

It's a hopeless task and it does more harm than good.

It was very, I listened to, he did two-thirds of the

Live Inn and I did the last third.

And it was sort of on

questions, were about what Tom had said, but also about the Biden enigma.

And

the weird thing that we've talked about this, Sammy, that

if he has one breath of life in him,

or if you have emails, 4,000 anonymous and anonymous emails, and they all say, Hunter, put this money that I took in this bank account, it won't matter.

Or as Joe says, it won't matter.

Because the Democratic Party will be as intent on keeping him on the ticket as they will be eager to dump him once his first term is over.

The common

theme that ties those polarities together is that

you do not want Kamala Harris as president of the United States, and you do not want her to especially take up the reins of a debilitated Joe Biden the last year and a half of his term, and then run in 2024 with the advantage of incumbency.

Nor do you want Joe Biden to press his luck and run for another four years with a certainty like FDR in 1945 in March when he was inaugurated, that Henry Wallace, the communist, would have been vice president had he not been kicked off the ticket and

Harry Truman put there in his steed.

But you you cannot kick Kamala Harris off in the post-George Floyd climate.

And so we talked about that.

Very quickly, though, I was thinking the other day, I'm trying to write an article today about how Joe Biden circles the wagons.

And if you think about it, he's got all this myriad of defenses and they're working pretty well.

You know, it's standard defense in depth where you retreat into the wide expanses of antiquity, Scythia, modern times, Mother Russia.

Well, his are lies.

They're sequential lies.

I never, ever knew anything about Hunter's business.

Well, that trench failed.

That fortification failed.

So he retreated back to,

I never did business with Hunter.

That worked pretty well.

We're up, you know, four or five years, these bulwarks held.

And then then it was,

I had the, maybe there was the illusion.

I may have called.

There might have been the illusion that I was quit, but I wasn't.

And we're going to go to the next one is, oh my God, there's money in my bank account.

I have no idea who did it.

And then there's the administrative state, and that is,

that's a very valuable tool.

Whereas Donald Trump actually didn't use it.

He didn't weaponize the FBI, the CIA.

And Jeff Session just said, you want a special prosecutor?

Go ahead and get one.

You want good old Bob Mueller, Jim Comey?

Is that why you did this gambit and leaked all this stuff?

Because you wanted your buddy to go after Trump?

Okay.

And we were off to the races with,

you know, the dream team, the hunter-killer team, the all-star prosecutor.

That's not going to happen with Joe Biden.

So those 4,000 emails are not going to see the light of day if they can help it.

And those IRS whistleblowers are not noble whistleblowers like Eris Saramala, Andrew Binman.

These are horrible people and you can't believe them and we're going to take care of them.

And oh, yes, David Weiss today indicted Hunter on a gun charge.

No, no, no, that's just an excuse.

He will never go after Hunter.

He is a fox in the proverbial chicken coop.

He was put as special counsel.

He's not Robert Mueller that hates Trump.

He's David Weiss who's put there by Merrick Garland to help Hunter in a more sophisticated and successful way than he has done.

But that's a defense.

And there's the media.

And that's a defense because the media is totally corrupt.

It's lost all of its reputation.

And that empowers it.

It's like, well, we lied about Russian collusion.

We really lied about Russian disinformation.

We lied about the first.

impeachment.

So we have no reputation anymore.

So guess what?

We're liberated.

We're Prometheus unbound.

We can do whatever we want.

We can lie, lie, lie, lie.

We're under no compunction to apologize or be professional because everybody hates us because we're liars.

So that's what we do.

We're going to lie.

And they're going to be unleashed and they will do damage.

Then there's the Camilla Harris, as we said, that factor.

If all of those defenses don't work, then it's like, okay, I'm corrupt.

I'm a liar.

I'm senile.

But don't you think a corrupt, senile

octogenarian, Joe Biden, is better than an uncorrupt ignoramus like Kamala Harris for president?

And that's going to be the Nixonian Spiro Agnew defense.

There's one more, Sammy.

You want to hear it if all those fail?

Yes, go ahead.

There's the suicide vest

defense.

And that is,

well, now that I look at it, what is my son Hunter doing?

Why did he paint those stupid things and draw attention to our grifting family painting with his mouth to make a half a million dollars?

And I'm supposed to give these guys access?

Why did Hunter not tell me that there was Coke in my family?

And why did he or somebody leave it in that cubicle?

Why, if he is renting

$16,000 a month, a house in Malibu, is he contesting child support?

It only brings ill repute to me, and I can't get the numbers straight anyway, my grandkids.

And why

would Hunter

want to subpoena me, the President of the United States, his good old dad, to testify on his behalf and perjure myself that I didn't know what Hunter was doing?

Or Hunter's a great guy?

And why would Hunter on that laptop attack me and say, at least I'm not like pop who wants half of everything I make, or at least I don't, you know, I pay all of his bills for his utilities.

And so Joe then thinks of all this.

He thinks he's expendable.

And so at some point, and you say, you know, Hunter, we have you in the White House.

Now we put you on

Air Force One, as we used to do with Air Force Two when I was vice president, but you're a lightning rod.

And you are deliberately playing a weird blackmail game with me.

So as I go under further scrutiny, I have a new defense.

President Biden, did you know about this money that was deposited?

Hunter did it.

Hunter did it.

Not me.

He took cocaine.

I love the kid.

He took cocaine.

He's out of control.

He just took too much cocaine.

Hookers, you don't know what I had to put up with.

So I had no idea what he was capable of.

I love him dearly.

He's the smartest man I've ever met, but he did it all.

And I have no idea what was going on.

He was controlled.

Have you ever been a father of a cocaine addict?

You know what I mean?

This guy, my son, left a pipe in a car, a crack pipe.

My son left an improperly, illegally registered gun that ended up in a school dumpster.

My son left a pornographic,

photographic laptop at a repair shop.

So he's capable of anything.

So I don't know anything about it.

Ask Hunter.

You know what?

If Hunter has to do a little time, maybe that'll be good for him.

I think that's the last,

the last we doubt if they're in trouble.

Yeah.

But they still seem to be trying to get Hunter off on some small charge.

Because the blackmail is still working, that they're afraid of Hunter, of what Hunter might say at any given moment to anyone, anywhere, anytime.

But

if they get a lot of incriminating evidence

and you can't keep lying that he doesn't know this or this and you can't keep saying that Tony Bobolinski and Devin Archer are liars and Victor Shulkin is a liar and the head of Burisma that has the tape recordings is a liar

and the IRS whistleblowers are liars

and people call your dare and say we'd rather have Kamarilla Harris than you if you're backed into a corner then you you you have to say that if you're Joe Biden, because he has no integrity, he will say, my son is, I've done everything I can for him.

He cooked this whole thing up.

It really hurts me that he's going to have to go to prison.

But I didn't know anything about it.

He did it.

Yeah.

It won't hurt him and it won't hurt anybody else if Hunter goes to prison.

Hunter knows that too.

That's why he's painting.

And that's why, as I said, he's got the laptop stuff.

And that's why he's living in Malibu.

And that's why he turns up with Coke or his

sister or who knows in the wife.

Isn't it funny, though, that all of his mechanisms of control are already out in the

out there.

Everybody knows these things.

So the fact that Hunter can still control his dad, he doesn't have anything, any secrets like, well, that we know of.

Maybe he does have some secrets still from, or he could testify, yes, I was giving my dad money and I was using him as an influencer while he was vice president.

Yeah, it's kind of a naggle.

You know, when I was in college, Cober Ross, the sociologist, psychologist was very popular, whether it was at five stage of dying, were you shocked, denial, you know, and you go into finally acceptance and calmness.

Well, that's what having a son like Hunter is like.

Oh my God, he's a complete bad seed.

Get out of here.

Get out of the house.

Oh my God, He's my son.

He's still around.

Here, take some money.

Oh, and then you finally say, it's Hunter.

He's capable of anything, just the way it is.

And he's accepted that.

And now

it's, you know, build a last redoubt around the family from Hunter.

Hunter is the enemy.

And that's what...

I think is emerging.

That's why they brought him into the White House.

That's why they put him around.

It was stupid to do that.

But he was saying, I want to to get in the White House and I want some attention and I want to rehabilitate my image.

I want to look like I'm helping you on television, guiding you around Mexico or Finland or somewhere, because that will help me evade this criminal liability that I'm in.

Because of you, Dad.

That's his attitude.

And Joe, they're playing a weird game with each other.

I know that sounds ridiculous.

I go to column.

What game is Hunter playing?

I always notice a lot of people picked up on that, And maybe they agree with it.

And all the while he's still bringing cocaine into the White House.

Does anybody think that that was the only bag of cocaine that made it into the White House?

I don't know.

But I mean, they never said that he did it.

They said it was likely a member of the Biden family, but nobody.

within 100 miles of him that has cocaine will will be unknown to Hunter.

So he knew who in that family was doing it.

If it wasn't him, he himself, and again, if it was him, if it was he, I should say,

then he was sending a message to his dad.

You think you're going to get rid of me?

You think I'm going to shut up?

I'm capable of bringing Coke into the White House.

Think about that.

And I think he terrifies Jill Biden.

He was really critical in the email of her.

And she's...

It's half of me has real empathy.

I'm serious that you have a child like that.

And he's he's done all of these things, and you've tried to help him, but the other half of me doesn't because he aided and abetted and helped create Hunter out of his own greed.

And that was there was no way in the world he was going to get these monumental residents, either the ones he rents or owns, and the lifestyle that accrued to him on the salaries that he had as a lifetime.

you know, senator.

He just can't do it.

Yeah.

But Hunter did it for him.

And he knew how Hunter did it for him.

He can say he didn't know, but he knew and he encouraged it.

Yep.

All right.

And aided and embedded it as well.

And it worked out well until they lost.

Remember one thing about this whole scandal, everybody?

For those who don't vote, or you think there's rhinos, or there's the Freedom Caucus is too right, whatever you think, winning the house is the only thing that brought this to light.

Had you lost the house, we should have done a lot better, but if we'd lost the house, none of this would have come up and all of the statutes of limitations would have been gone.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's turn to another top person in our news, and that is Donald Trump.

Recently, Megan Kelly did an interview with him, and I thought she really held the fire to his feet on some of the questions that he wanted to

walk around.

And I was thinking what you thought of Megan Kelly's interview with Trump.

Yeah, I was asked to come on right after it.

So I watched it and then I commented on it.

I just finished a few minutes ago.

I thought he did very well.

I mean, he's 76.

He's going to be 78.

If you look at that interview and look at his animal energy and the way he has recall.

And you compare that to Biden.

He was right when he said age is not the criterion of cognitive ability.

And

he had some very strange things he said.

I thought were interesting.

She said, you know, you're going to be 78, you die, rumors about your hamburgers.

He said, it's all about genes.

My, you know, my whole family lives into their 90s.

And so that was interesting.

He

said, you know, he's very angry at Ron DeSantis, and he feels that because

in the primary,

I think the guy was the Department of Agriculture Secretary was ahead of DeSantis.

That was true, what he said.

And then he endorsed DeSantis and DeSantis week by and the rest is history that he owes

Trump

not to run.

And that would be like saying Pompeo should have never considered running.

Haley, who was appointed by Trump, should never, Pence should never, everybody should never accept Trump.

But that's not how loyalty works in politics.

Loyalty, disloyalty would be one of them making a savage attack on Trump that wasn't warranted.

I haven't seen that yet.

But obviously, Trump, for some reason, he fixates on DeSantis in a way that he doesn't on Haley or Pence.

Maybe that's because he's the leading of the non-Trump candidates.

He obviously has a long memory because he kept mentioning the Rosie O'Donnell

incident to Megan.

Megan was pretty tough on him.

She asked him a lot of questions that he kind of bristled at.

So

it wasn't a softball interview at all.

A couple of other things.

He said that

he clearly beats Biden in head-to-head matchups.

But before,

yesterday I was writing something.

So I went and looked at the polls this week.

I think that's YouGov, The Hill, NBC,

Quinnipiak,

and all of them, they're either dead even.

Trump's ahead by one or Biden's ahead by one.

But so if he is serious about that impression of the latest polls, he must mean, well, there's a built-in 10% bias.

So when I see NBC say that I'm equal, I know I'm 10%.

So he should have articulated that.

Otherwise, it's misleading.

He was absolutely right that Biden has destroyed the country and he outlined what he was going to do.

I asked Megan,

where does it?

I think she's a lot more optimistic than I am that Trump can stay out of legal jeopardy.

And she may be right.

I may be wrong.

In other words, that these people cannot force him to be on trial right away in this election style and put him in jail.

But my only excuse or my only

thing is they're capable of anything.

And at each stage, as I tried to say that they did something egregious, nobody thought they'd do it.

They said, well, you know, January 6th was a

demonstration that got riot, but now he's going to, he's going to be out of office in weeks.

No, they're going to impeach him, and they're going to try him as a

private citizen.

Everybody said, oh, they don't impeach a president twice.

We've never tried, yes, tried a president as a private citizen in the Senate.

Yes, they do.

They did that.

And then everybody thought, well, they won't raid more Augo.

They've never gone after an ex-president's home.

Look at Joe Biden.

He's got stuff.

Yes, they did.

And they did a performance art raid.

And then people said,

oh, come on, Alvin Bragg.

He's given the game away.

He ran on tormenting Trump.

He's a buffoon.

New York's a mess.

He's not going to Trump, get a little

non-disclosure form and say it's a campaign finance violation, this misdemeanor, and then make it into, yes, he is.

And Fanny Ellis, you know, he called up, Trump didn't say, go invent me votes.

He said, find me the votes.

Well, in other words, he thought, he really believed there was 12,015, I don't know how many, 11 that were out there that hadn't been found, given his suspicions.

So they thought, everybody thought, well, they're not going to indict him on that.

Yes, they are.

And then, of course, this woman he can't even remember from years ago is not going to have a civil suit that could possibly win.

Yes, it will.

And then Jack Smith, his wife has Obama connections.

He went after McDonald in Virginia, the governor, completely got overturned in his bogus process, his,

you know, his

hounding of a potential rising star in the Republican Party.

It was all overturned by the Supreme Court.

He's not legitimate.

He can't go after Trump for taking papers out of the White House, which he had the prerogative to declassify as president, especially given the contrast when Biden had maybe 10 times more papers in three different locations, not for two years, but perhaps for 10 to 15 years, and which, of course, Hillary Clinton had subpoenaed material and she didn't just abscond with it or hide it.

She destroyed it.

Does anybody think Donald Trump destroyed any of those things in the fashion of Hillary Clinton?

Did one of his aides or two of his aides who were indicted?

Did they say to Donald, here, here's a match, and I'm going to burn this up, Donald, and this computer here, or here's a hammer I'm going to break.

They didn't do that.

So they all thought that he would never be

prosecuted, and he was.

So in each case, the incredible

became the banal.

And that's what's scary about it.

So when somebody says,

we're going to start in October, November, and then I say, this is insane, and I agree with Megan, it is insane.

And then you say to yourself, well, everything else up to this point was insane, and it happened.

So the better way, I think, is to say, how would you stop it from happening?

And that would mean you're going to get a great team of lawyers, and they're going to go into a New York courtroom, a Washington, D.C.

courtroom, an Atlanta courtroom, a Miami courtroom, and they're going to find a fair and unbiased judge, and they're going to file a writ for a continuance, either to move it to Utah, change of venue, maybe West Virginia, Wyoming?

No,

they're not going to agree to that.

Or maybe 2026, when he could pardon himself if he were to be elected?

No.

Well, these people are going to go all the way, I think, and try to put him in jail.

Then the question will be, can he run a campaign that's in a way like Joe Biden's did in 2020, when Joe Biden was, what,

we go back to this, Sammy, but we've talked about it.

When he's in a car and there's like 20 cars in the parking lot and he talks from his car and then they honk their horns like they're people clapping.

Remember that?

And it was a joke.

It was a joke.

And everybody said, look at that compared to a Michigan rally.

Come on.

And so, but they got away with it.

That's what I'm trying to say.

And they'll try.

They could do that.

Can Donald Trump do that?

No, he can't do that because the media won't let him.

And they did that.

But he outsourced his whole 2020 campaign to the media,

along with Dr.

Fauci, supposedly, I think.

So I guess what I'm saying in that interview with Megan, she's really good in asking him tough questions.

He was very good in replying.

And the first thing she said, and Trump should remember that if he watches it, is she said, could anybody, could Joe Biden go through that for an hour and a half?

No.

He wouldn't last one minute.

She was, he had information.

He had it, but, and she was tough.

So that, that's, could other candidates do that?

I think Ron DeSantis could do it.

I think Nikki Haley could do it.

Mike Pence could do it.

Probably Chris Christie could do it.

These are not all people that I think are going to be viable.

But the point is the Republicans have a good field.

Trump is very qualified.

And you look at the Democrats.

I don't think Kamal Harris could do it.

I don't think Joe Biden could do it.

I don't think,

I mean, there is a reason, isn't there, Sammy?

We ask ourselves, well, how did Biden get president?

And we're going to get rid of him.

And you say, well, the reason, Victor, that he got president was: did you remember the field?

There was Mayor Pete, and there was Spartacus, and there there was Bocahanes,

and there was the Socialist,

and

there wasn't very much choice.

And so Joe Biden, compared to them, looked like, you know, the Messiah.

And so they haven't gone away.

And that was the best that he had to offer.

So I know Gavin Newsom wasn't in there, but Gavin Newsom is a used car salesman.

Every time you watch him talk, you feel kind of like, ooh, wash it, wash yourself off after him.

I know, and he's so slimy.

And he's, I have bought cars from used car salesmen who are nicer.

He's better than any of them, slimier in that sense.

I'm afraid if I got into a room with him, I'd pay him money for a clunker.

He's very slick and

he's cocky.

He's arrogant.

He lies.

And now he's at the border.

We said, you know,

he always goes into his North

Face or Abercombian Finch or whatever it is,

designer, work clothes,

LLB.

He gets out there and he looks like he's sweating.

He's cleaning up the ashes in the forest, crap of the homeless.

Now he's there patrolling the border that he opened to make sure fentanyl doesn't get across.

It's just a

construct.

He's not a real person.

No.

Well, Victor, we need to take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about the Korean War.

So stay with us.

We'll be back with the Korean War.

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We're back.

Victor, so

you're going to talk about the Korean War, and I just usually try to think of a few questions.

And I have two questions on the Korean War.

How was America able to beat back the North Korean army from the Pusan perimeter?

And then the second one is,

why were the Chinese so effective in aiding the North Koreans when they invaded in the 19th of October 1950,

but their own civil war had only just ended in 1949?

Actually, it hadn't completely ended.

There were still hot spots.

There's about five reasons for that.

Remember that

after the war, our State Department was still in a

warm, fuzzy movement about Stalin and that the Russians were our strategic partner, kind of like Biden says China is.

And

when we had the Yalta agreements in Potsdam,

the idea was we didn't know if the bomb was going to be used and we thought we would have to invade Japan and the war would go on to 46 and maybe 47.

There was 20 million Japanese under arms.

There were 7,000 suicide planes there.

Women had, you know, pikes, wooden pikes ready to be at the beat.

It was going to be a bloodbath.

So we wanted the Russians to, we were mad at the Russians in a sense, because they had not shared the burdens of the Pacific War.

So we made the strategic mistake of basically saying, you come and help us.

And of course, that meant they gobbled up Manchuria.

They promoted, they turned over all of their wherewithal that they had accumulated during World War II, 25% of which was British and American Lin-Lease supplies.

And they armed the Chinese communists who won.

And then they occupied north of the 38th parallel.

They just split Korea.

And of course, Japan had colonized Korea since, what, 1912 or something?

So remember what the situation was?

These communist cutthroats were saying,

we are your friends.

The United States is in league with the Japanese militarists.

They occupied their country.

They raped your women.

They are the enemy.

And, of course, Stalin didn't say to the Korean people,

The United States actually was the one that fought along with Britain and defeated the Japanese.

We did nothing, nothing.

In fact, we had a non-aggression pact, just like we did with the Nazis, and we honored it.

So we were in league with the Japanese in a way, hoping that they would defeat our own allies, the Americans and the British.

They didn't say any of that.

So they divided the country, and then there was a couple of things happened very quickly.

One is, you know, it's a controversial point, but at the National Press Cup, Dean Acheson reviewed the post-World War II order and

where the United States could hold the world, the line on communism.

Because, you know, you had Russia communist, you had the Arab world going communist, you had Africa going communist, you had Latin America, Cuba.

It was the post-colonial world that looked like it was all going to go communist soon.

And he said he didn't include Korea within the nuclear umbrella.

And then a couple of things happened.

One,

the Soviets got the bomb by 1950.

So we were not the nuclear monopoly that we had had.

So

that was something to consider.

Two, Harry Truman under Lewis Johnson, the defense secretary.

I can't even describe how we disarmed.

You and I talked about everybody growing up and having a war surplus store.

Well, they just took everything we had, put it on the market.

We were broke.

They were terrified that we would be back into an inflationary, stagflationary 30s-type mess.

So we had to decommission the Navy.

We went from having the largest Navy in the world to not even being able to ferry troops safely to Korea five years later.

We had the most tanks of any of the Allies to the point where when this war started, they were going into national parks, city parks, and getting iconic Sherman tanks that had not been started up in five years that were monuments, Pershing tanks, and taking them.

They had nothing.

And so between the bomb and the fact that we were completely disarmed and the fact that Dean Acheson said that maybe Korea could not be

defended, Kim Jong-soon went to Mao and said, if I invade the North, and by the way, Mao, I have helped you in the revolution.

There were a lot of Korean-born

and Korean expatriates that lived in China, about 200,000.

They were battle-hardened, and they had fought Shang Kai-shek on behalf of Mao.

And so Mao said, okay, we'll help you.

But of course, Mao had been, they'd lost about 20 million to the Japanese, maybe 5 million in the Civil War.

They had no weapons.

So they needed Stalin.

So Stalin said, I will rearm you, but I'm not going to let you go in there with that nut from North Korea and start a nuclear attack on us but as situations unfolded he started to look at the situation said wow we got china india's on our side maybe africa asia

southeast it's all going communist and they're disarmed and we have the bomb too so he greenlighted it and they invaded in june 25th and there was hardly about 8 000 americans was all that was there we were withdrawing and they just went crazy and they absorbed the entire Korean peninsula except for Pusan.

And everything that we were afraid of in World War II came true: that the Sherman tank could not stop a T-34 tank.

That we had not gotten the German scientists quickly out of Germany who had made the 262 jet.

So, our first-generation jets, the Panther

and

others, much less the P-51 piston-driven, were not up to the MiG-15.

And

that was really bad.

So they had complete air superiority.

They being, now we know, were Soviet pilots, thousands of Soviet pilots.

And our hope was to use B-29s and the Marianas and other planes, Okinawa, and bomb, but they couldn't unless we had air superiority.

So we almost lost the war in June, July.

And then Douglas MacArthur, who had not spent one night in Korea, even though he was pro-consul of Japan and the head of all U.S.

troops, Army troops in the Pacific, he came up with the idea of Incheon, which everybody thought was crazy.

That is, they were going to go way behind North Korean lines and have an amphibious

assault, land about 60,000 Americans and South Koreans behind

the North Korean lines, attacked them from the rear at the same time they were going to land troops in the Pusan perimeter and have two pincers.

They thought it was going to be a disaster because we were disarmed.

And it turned out to be one of the most brilliant military moves in American military history.

And that's really what MacArthur's reputation today rests on.

He was surprised on December 8th in the Philippines in 1941.

His Philippine campaign to recapture Luzon

did not go so well.

But this thing was brilliant.

He had the cartwheel going into New Guinea, that was pretty good.

But this was brilliant and it worked.

Then it was a question of, well, what do we do now?

It's getting

late in the year.

And people came to MacArthur and they said, Doug, that's a great thing you've done.

We've got them trapped.

We're going to get back Seoul.

The Pusan perimeter has no pressure on it because they're all fleeing back to North Korea to stop us.

So what do you want to do?

The problem, Doug, is that as we go north, it gets colder.

As we go north, we get closer to China.

As we go north, it's more mountainous.

As we go north,

our supply lines lengthen.

And as we go north, we're getting closer to November and December and January.

Remember, North Korea is not Vietnam.

It's much, much colder.

And he ignored all that and said, we were going to be home for Thanksgiving.

So we invaded.

Our supply lines lengthened.

The Chinese had no supply lines.

They were close and they had North Korean troops with them that were being re-outfitted in China.

We didn't have winter clothing.

It was getting very cold.

And

the territory, if you look at the map, it kind of looks like a fan.

The Korean peninsula gets wider, wider.

And remember that North Korea has a border, not just with China, but a small one with Russia as well.

And then they attacked in the latter part of October.

They, and eventually there would be over a million troops.

The Chinese did.

They were well equipped at first, and we did not have air superiority, at least enough to be able to bomb them.

easily.

And so I guess we had the Starfighter and we had the Pan.

They were not comparable to a Soviet pilot in a MiG-15.

And it was the longest retreat in U.S.

military history.

And we had to go all the way from the Yalu River border, hundreds of miles, back across the 38th parallel, back

south of Saigon, of

Seoul, and gave Seoul back or had it taken back.

And that was the third change of possession.

It had gone from being South Korean to North Korean

and then South Korean American.

And now it was going to be communist again.

And we retreated and retreated.

And all of a sudden, we didn't know what to do.

And one of those freak things happened.

The commanding officer Walton Walker, good World War II commander in a conventional war, but not so great in Korea so far, got killed in an automobile accident.

And then what what do you do?

Well, they came up with this idea that Matthew Ridgway,

he was a major general, finally, I think he was a lieutenant general.

And World War II, very highly respected, among 10 or 20 others, he was an expert in Spanish, and they thought he was going to be a southern hemisphere guy, never been to Asia, really.

And he was about the only guy who would want to go there.

So they stuck him there.

They didn't think he could do do his job, was sort of to have an honorable withdrawal because they thought by this time the North Koreans and the Chinese were going to push us all the way out.

And what happened?

He got there right before Christmas.

He put a mess kit on one side of his chest and a grenade on the other.

They called him old iron tits.

He walked among all of the troops on the front line.

He said, I'm going to get your mail here.

I'm going to make sure you have dry socks.

I'm going to make sure you have

warm food.

And the United States economic engine is being revved up again.

And very, very quickly, we're going to have Pershing tanks.

We're going to have the new F-86 fighter.

We're going to have more napalm than the communists can imagine.

We're going to have great artillery.

The fleet is coming back, but you got to hold on for two or three months.

And they did.

And so what he did was he said to the Americans, they have the long lines, not us.

We screwed up by going to the Yalo.

They screwed up by going all the way back into South.

It is cold.

And we suffered the cold in November, December.

They're going to suffer the cold in January and February.

We had long supply lines and couldn't get enough.

They don't have any supply lines.

We're going to bomb them and artillery, and we're going to make fortified lines.

And so they had to go through a series of fortified lines.

And each time the communists hit them, they lost 10 to 20 percent.

And finally, between the artillery and the F-86 were starting to come in, and the B-29s were bombing in the north and tactically.

And the result was they absolutely slaughtered.

the North Koreans and the communist Chinese.

And Matthew Ridgway got back Seoul and he got back the land that had been lost and he got back in South Korea.

He got back beyond the 38th parallel, maybe 10 miles.

And then the question was, what do you do?

And half of the people said to Ridgway,

you are not MacArthur.

You know what you're doing in this situation.

We have more supplies now.

We have more men.

And we have beaten and humiliated and killed a half a million to a million communists.

So let's go all the way back to the YALO and finish it and unify the country and we're done with it.

And he said,

not so fast.

I don't trust that the American people want to be in this war.

I don't think that I can sustain the supply lines.

I don't know about the nuclear factor, but I do know that I can restore the war to where it was before it started.

That is, the communists had the northern part.

By the way, the northern part was by far the most industrial.

It was the most sophisticated.

It's where the Japanese had put their money.

It had hydroelectric power.

It had roads.

The south was agrarian and poor.

And so that's why they took it.

They had the best part of the country.

And

so he stopped.

And then he was appointed.

They relieved MacArthur.

MacArthur now had gone back to Japan, even though he was overall commander in Korea.

And so in December, January, MacArthur was giving interviews, and you know it better than I do.

He was saying that Truman didn't know what he was doing.

There was no substitute for victory.

He was about as disobedient to his commander-in-chief as our four-star generals were to Donald Trump,

the ones that were retired.

And I should say that whereas MacArthur was sacked, humiliated, relieved of his

command over in Japan and Korea, he didn't do anything like Mark Milley, and that is call his communist Chinese counterpart and say, hey,

Harry Truman is nuts.

And if he wants to use the bomb against you guys, I'm going to call you in advance.

He didn't do any of that, but he was humiliated.

And then Ridgway took his place.

And then Lightning Joe Collins and other people came in, Mark Clark eventually, and we stabilized the war.

And it went on for the next two years until July of 1953.

And we didn't go any further.

They didn't go any farther.

Most of the dead had been the Marines under General Army General Allman and the Army under,

nominally under MacArthur, that had fought from, and in Pusan, the fighting from June 1950 to June 1951 was where, you know, we lost 33,000 dead, maybe 8,000 missing, 40,000 people.

3 million to 5 million Koreans were killed.

We killed probably five times more communists, Chinese, and North Koreans.

They lost two or three million as well.

But it didn't move much, is what I'm saying.

It became kind of a Cold War in Korea for the next two years.

There was pork chop hill and all the famous battles, but it was all around the DMZ.

And what was a real story, the F-86 Sabre pilots achieved

air supremacy and they drove back

the MiG-15s and the Russian pilots and that allowed the B-29s to use their new DuPont napalm and they just flattened North Korea.

They destroyed 75% of the infrastructure, the industry, the cities.

Curtis LeMay had a hand in it.

That's an authentic military genius that had no compulsions from quote-unquote bombing them back to the Stone Age.

And then we had an armistice.

Salon said to Mao, this is getting out of control.

The North Koreans are going to eventually lose this.

I don't want to give you the weapons anymore.

The Chinese said to the North Koreans, you got to stop.

We'll negotiate.

There was never a peace treaty.

There's no peace treaty today.

It's an armistice.

But you can make the argument that we were in a position to finish off the communists, and we wouldn't be in this position today of Kim Jong-un

pointing missiles at Portland, Seattle, and United States.

Or you can make the argument, do you really think that we were going to have maybe 150,000 rather than our 25,000 today

stationed along the Yalu River and along the Russian border?

Because we would have two, three army groups to keep the entire peninsula free had we gone beyond the 38th parallel when we were successful.

We would have had to take that ground, hold it, and then we would be right on the border of China and Russia.

So it's an either or, it's a hard call whether we should have gone back up or not.

But one final consideration, Sammy, is there was a reason why

neither China nor Russia invaded Vietnam on the side of the north.

People kept thinking that the Chinese Red Army was going to invade and run us over.

But when you looked at data from the Korean War, they had lost so many to American artillery and to American airstrikes, they were terrified of American firepower.

They thought, you know what?

If we go into Vietnam, they're going to blanket, they're going to bomb us with B-52s like they did B-29s, and we're going to lose a million or two million people.

People forget that, but that was one remark.

Lessons.

Don't disarm after World War II.

Don't do that.

That's what's scary now about Ukraine.

We're disarming in the sense that our strategic stocks are being emptied to give all these artillery shells, missiles, equipment, rifles, everything to Ukraine coming after the abandonment of billions of dollars.

And Kabul,

never, never disarm because the war wouldn't have started had we not disarmed.

Number two, don't give up on a war that you think is lost.

And as

Ridgway said about Vietnam, Vietnam, he became very famous and he had a checkered career.

He had had a heart attack in World War II and they thought he was all through.

He had a very tragic life.

He was married three times.

He had one son.

His son was in Canada, as I remember,

working with Boy Scouts, and he was walking with a

canoe on his shoulder, and he didn't hear a train coming.

The train hit one side of the canoe, the other side boomeranged and hit him in the head and killed him.

Yeah, it was very tragic.

He had a very tragic life.

And he was kind of the senior statesman.

And he, because of his, he saved

the Korean War.

He's one of the generals that I have in the Savior generals.

He's a great American that was underappreciated.

And, you know, during Vietnam, they called him in.

And the thinking that he did not want to go, as I said, across the 38th parallel.

And he did not want to go in Vietnam, Kennedy called him in and said, okay, General Ridgway, you're the expert on war war in Asia.

Do not go into Vietnam.

And he outlined why.

You know, communist borders everywhere, long way away.

You know, American people are not behind it, that kind of stuff.

So then when Johnson wanted to get out because

we were losing, he just wanted to flee.

which we did do in 75, but he was thinking of doing this in 66 and 67.

And they called the old guy in and he basically said, There's only one thing worse than fighting a bad war, and that's losing it.

And so that shocked him.

He always was a contrarian, but he was probably right that losing Vietnam had enormously damaging experiences.

And he was right that we shouldn't have been in there in the first place.

And the same thing, I think, is true of Afghanistan.

We shouldn't have been there for 20 years nation building, but once we were there,

it was possible to hold the Bagma Air Force Base and maybe have an enclave, or at least not leave in the humiliating fashion we did.

And leave all the material that we did.

Leave all the material there.

All the loyal contractors, all the loyal Afghans that were butchered and they were butchered and they will be butchered.

And all of those

idealistic but naive efforts to give equality to women, they're all going to be forced back into the Stone Age.

All of those weapons are going to end up in the international terrorist market.

And it's going to really hurt us.

That was Joe Biden's worst of many bad things he did.

Well, Victor, we're on a break now, but we'll come back.

I still have questions.

For example, what is the difference?

And we'll answer this in a future weekend edition, but what is the difference between the armies that they'll suffer so many more dead and the U.S.

Army doesn't generally lose as much?

And I think, again, in the Korean War, we can see this.

And so that's a curiosity of mine.

Just very quickly before we go to break, it's the Americans' reliance on firepower and air power.

And we spend a lot of money on branches other than the Army.

And that's the Navy with shore batteries and missiles.

But especially,

we've always fought since World War II with air supremacy.

And that means we can call in airstrikes and we have wonderful artillery.

We were the people who really invented and used the proximity fuse in World War II.

People forget that.

The 88 millimeter was a lethal German gun, maybe the best of the war, the early war.

But by 1944 and 1945 in Europe, there was nothing more

deadly than an American artillery.

battery with time on target coordination of various platforms, 75, 240, whatever it was, different calibers of guns, all shooting at a predetermined point at a particular time, and then later with a proximity fuse that would blow up, you know, 10, 20, 50 feet above the ground.

And there was no protection against it if you were in a foxhole,

the shrapnel that would ensue.

So that's one reason.

And the other is that

United States put a very high premium on saving their own lives.

So in Korea, they introduced helicopters.

And that meant when somebody in the MASH units, everybody remembers MASH, but that was an actual amazing break forward

hospitals and with helicopter reconnaissance and hospital courier service.

And so the Americans usually had pretty good arms, the M1 and then later the M14 were wonderful weapons.

They solved the tank problem sort of after the Pershing.

They got in the path.

They were as good, almost as good as the Soviets.

They had better artillery, at least the way it was calibrated.

And then we had air superiority.

One of the things that we

do

ahead.

Oh, go ahead.

So that's the reason that we did not lose as many as the enemy.

Do the Americans put money into inventing sort of armored type clothing for their soldiers as well?

Do you think that helps or no?

Oh, they don't.

Well, they had flak jackets in World War II.

My father wore one.

That was bomber crews would put on kind of a heavy steel plated thing or with steel pellets in it.

But today, yeah, I was embedded twice in Iraq, and I had mixed feelings about you.

Wear these vests, and they have those Kevlar plates, you know, ceramic plates, I should say, in that Kevlar helmet.

They're very heavy.

Of course, you know, that was 10 years ago, more than 15 years ago when I was there.

So I'm sure that these new fabrics, but history of warfare is challenged

response, counter response, counter challenge.

And so there's long periods where the defense or the offense is supreme.

You know, you have stone walls that you can't break down.

And then all of a sudden the catapult breaks them down.

Then they make mud, they make stone walls with wood in soil in between.

So the catapult is gone and then that's the superiority of defense.

And then the artillery comes and they can blast apart those walls back and forth back and forth right now we're in the period of offense with drones and armor piercing bullets and we're trying to catch up but you're seeing in ukraine that these drones and everything you can get the you can get a five million dollar centurion tank or abrams tank or leopard tank and a 500 drone can destroy it.

It can just hover right over it and go right into a vent or something.

You know what I mean?

Just go underneath the, you could take a drone and fly it underneath the treads and blow it from the inside.

And we don't, and we have all this money we spend on training a soldier and the health care, but we still haven't made, you know, a uniform that has metallic threads or Kevlar threads that can stop a high-powered bullet, much less shrapnel.

I think that's what, from what I understand, that's what we're working on constantly, force protection.

Yeah.

All right.

Let's go to a break and come back and talk a little bit about agriculture.

Stay with us and we'll be back.

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you're listening to the victor davis hansen show and the last segment of our weekend edition we talk a little bit about agriculture and victor you have a series right now your ultra series on your website the blade of perseus about strange and dangerous people in agriculture and having read a little bit of it i've i think you apologized to your reader at least twice in this because of the various things you divulge about the workers that came to your ranch.

And often it involved people who were liars, thieves, alcoholic brawlers, and even the sex-obsessed.

So, what

let us in a little bit on this situation?

Well, I mean, agriculture is

out in the wild, and there's no civil service.

There's no job resume.

It requires a particular type of person who has to be on call any time during the day.

In other words, if you've got a raisin crop and it's down and it's five o'clock and then six o'clock, a black cloud comes over the sky and it's raining, you've got to get people to go out there.

Or if you've got a,

you know,

a Castlebright apricot orchard and suddenly,

you know, it's a terrible windstorm and you want to get a pick before the wind, you, it's unreliable.

So you have to get a particular type of person who can work long hours, that doesn't fill out resumes, doesn't have job classifications, and likes to be outside and do physical, hard, dirty, dangerous work, period.

And you have to work next to them if you're not a corporate farmer.

So you're going to be intimate.

I mean intimate in the sense of proximity.

And that really means that you're going to be drawing from people who either do not want to work

in the easier jobs or are not qualified or have a criminal record and can't.

And so sometimes it is, we were really blessed.

When I was growing up, I've written about, we had a man,

Joe Carey, who was a full-blooded Navajo Indian, and Manuel George, who was half Hispanic and half Portuguese.

And they were wonderful people.

They lived on the ranch with us.

They were like our family.

And they taught me a lot of things about it.

When I was six years old or seven years old, and Joe wanted to to take us and make us tie up young vines, my parents didn't even think twice about us working with Joe.

I can remember when we were having a family party, the septic tank collapsed.

My mom said, oh my God, what do we do?

My dad was, he was off doing something.

We opened the septic tank and Joe taught us.

Joe and the three of us went down in the septic tank.

with buckets and we didn't have a pump and

dug the SHIT out and then put it on a vineyard wagon, then went out and dug a big pit and threw it out into the orchard.

So that's the kind of stuff we did.

And then they retired when I, but for 15 years, it was wonderful and they retired.

So then we tried to find people and you can say, why didn't you rent it out?

Well, because we were farming it.

That was my grandfather.

And so what happened is he got older and older and older.

And then my uncle, who was younger, decided he didn't want to farm anymore.

So he just stopped.

And then all of a sudden, my parents were working and they were helping to pay for the losses on the farm with their income, which wasn't a lot.

And we were working on it on the weekends.

So

the first

Joe and Manuel left.

And then I write about a guy named Bert,

huge physical specimen, part of the Oklahoma diaspora.

But he was a genuine pervert.

And

he didn't know how to do many things, but he was really strong and big.

He'd been a

crowbar.

I should say a pry bar.

I saw him do it.

And he would want to talk about sex all the time.

And we were only like 15.

And somebody would say, I think somebody said, why did your grandfather or parents let you out?

Well, that was what we were doing.

We were considered adults.

Deal with it.

And finally, he got drunk and we got rid of him.

And then another cohort, a whole family came.

And this was supposed to be the solution because they were going to be on the ranch like manual they lived right next to us and the next thing we knew they were kind of like taking over i mean i'd come home from school high school and they would be in my living room my parents were out work they would just walk in the house key was on the tree they'd unlock it they'd go in or they would shave one of their dogs like a lion so he was shivering almost dying or i would walk out in the orchard and i would see one of them using drugs.

Or suddenly, for the first time in history,

people were breaking into my grandmother and grandfather's house that I live in.

And it was that family.

And then finally, one night I went out and I heard something.

My dad said, go out.

There's a tractor out there.

And he was moonlighting on our tractor for the neighbor, you know, that kind of stuff.

And then he died.

Somebody ran a stop sign and killed him.

And the whole family,

his wife was a shoplifter.

So the sheriff would come out and say,

I just used the name Lopez.

I don't want to incriminate.

Miss Lopez has been convicted of shoplifting.

We're going to, you know, let her go because she's on your ranch, but watch her.

And that was constant.

And then we thought, well,

he died.

We got another.

And so then there was a person that I called Rodrigo.

That wasn't his real name.

And he knew everything.

But the first thing he said, my grandfather said, Rodrigo is going to use my pickup.

And we had a a beautiful 1947 International Classic.

Rodrico stole it.

He just said, I'm taking it over to my house.

I need it for commute.

Next thing he knows, I need the key to the gas pump.

And we were all at school.

I was at college by this time.

And my grandfather was in his 80s.

My grandmother was in his 80s.

Poor Lila, my aunt had died.

The house was falling apart.

My parents were desperate to help us go to college and keep their jobs.

The farm was losing money and this guy just took over.

He bullied my grandfather and he came up to me once and he said, I killed a guy in Brownsville, Texas.

I want you to remember that.

You know, what do you tell a 17-year-old kid from college?

I said, okay.

And

then

got rid of that guy and on and on and on.

And I think maybe I overdid it by relating because it wasn't all that bad, but people haven't reacted like they did the other farm stories.

I think they thought, well, where were your parents or where was your grandfather?

But it's kind of a tale of what happens to us all as we get aged and older.

I can remember my grandfather when I was four or five.

He was like 67.

He was 5'10

and he was about 180 pounds.

He was so polite and his way of authority was moral authority.

He never told anything that wasn't.

the absolute truth.

He paid his bills twice.

He was shocked about smoking.

He wouldn't want people to smoke in his presence.

He did not drink.

The idea of anybody taking, he didn't take aspirin.

And when he would walk out there, he wore this kind of uniform of a railroad stripe overalls, hat, little sleeve protectors so his sleeves wouldn't go down,

and a special type of straw hat.

He had his boot.

It was just immaculate.

And everybody was Mr.

Davis, and they all honored him.

But when he got older, and these people he knew his whole life retired, then a whole new cast of characters in a very different time.

This was not 1950.

This was the cultural revolution of the 60s.

So all of a sudden, drugs, people were, you know, fornicating out in the orchard.

They were using drugs.

The illegal alien thing had exploded.

It was violent.

It was just chaos.

And he wasn't up to it.

I had another grandfather who was just the opposite.

He drank a little bit.

He'd been a World War I veteran.

He was solid muscle.

I can remember him, we were trying to remove an air compressor from my aunt's house.

She sold it.

She gave it to him.

So he called up, can I have you boys?

Yah, you help me with the air compressor.

Very Swedish accent.

So

we took it in the back of a pickup.

My dad was really big and it fell out in the ground.

That thing weighed 300 pounds.

And so

it started rolling down the road, you know, this eight feet tall, huge compressor.

And so my dad said, well, I'll get the boys before he could, he said it, he was 79 years old.

And he jumped out of the pickup and went over there himself and like bear wrestled it and grabbed the front of it with both hands and dragged it and then lifted it onto the so onto the truck himself.

Wow.

And he, you know, he was no, nobody screwed around with him.

But that wasn't my other, my other grandfather was,

he was not big and strong like that, but he was very, I don't know what the word is.

He had a moral

authority that everybody recognized.

So when there was a dispute among neighbors and there was a fight, somebody said, call Mr.

Davis.

He will come over.

And when somebody's vineyard had a mite infest, call Mr.

Davis.

He knows what's going on.

Or when they were all...

fighting over the water, stealing it from it, they have a big pipeline, a standpipe, and that's on our place where the branches came came out of the laterals.

And they'd all say, meet there at the standpipe, and Mr.

Davis will adjudicate it.

But he had that kind of authority.

Had a great influence on me.

Some of my family kind of resented that he was stodgy or, you know, sanctimonious.

I never did.

I thought he was somebody to emulate.

Remind me of when I started.

studying classics and I read Plutarch's life of the elder Cato.

It was sort of like him.

But anyway, these people that turn up on a farm, I think I should have conveyed better to the readers that it's not, you know, it's not a guy with a BA or it's not even a high school diploma, especially in those years.

You hire people that

can put up with the elements and put up with the irregular hours and put up with the solitary confinement, and you have to work side by side with them.

You disc on a tractor with them, you prune next to them, you thin plums next to them you irrigate next to them and they start saying things like

hey i need 50 bucks come on you can give it to me you own you guys own the property no i can't well why don't you well in the old days in the 20s or 30s you would have fired him but not in the 60s and 70s apparently and then you can see where it was all leading so we got to a point where we were going to have to sell it or all of us are going to have to take part.

So I got, I waited till I got my PhD at 25, and I came home.

And I tried to restore.

And then I had a brother who's very bright, PhD program.

He dropped out and came home.

And then we had,

I think you could call it 25 glorious years where we had 12 children living on the farm and four houses, and every inch was under our control.

We had no hired labor except us.

And then

globalization came, and you either had to get big or get out.

And they tried to get a little bigger, and it didn't work.

Well, Victor, thank you very much.

I have one last thing.

Remember, we were talking about the man who wrote a little

picture of travel in the modern day.

And I wanted to read a piece of his travel narrative.

He's fabricating what it's kind of like in general, but he says that on the airline, the letter.

Yeah, yes, the letter we got.

He taught my description, by the way.

It was much better written, but also even more depressing.

Yeah, he said,

get ready for this.

All social and civilized modes of human interaction are suspended.

This is raw survival.

You will see

things in a Hollywood script.

Oh, sorry.

He means you'll see things that a Hollywood script writer could not get on paper.

Yes, the man is trying to jam a steamer trunk into the overhead bin.

Yes, the woman eating ribs at 6:30 in the morning.

Yes, the obvious

air-potted teenager wearing an ifarted t-shirt.

Yes, the babushka grandmother carrying shopping bags given the ticket when the kids chipped in so she could visit Minsk for the last time.

It is survival, not travel.

Enter the Zen-like state of the 1905 steerage.

Then you will be ready for travel in 2023.

I thought that was the Zen-like.

It is.

It is.

I go with the, I used to be a happy idiot when I was in my 40s.

Oh, I'm going to go on a plane.

Somebody wants me to go there.

It's going to pay me $450 if I go all the way across the country.

It's going to be nice to travel.

Now,

I'm kind of you are just said, okay, I got to go to the Fresno airport.

It'll be a mess.

There will be 20 wheelchairs.

The plane will be delayed.

I'll miss my connection.

When I get there, we'll have some kind of mechanical problem.

We'll sit on the tarmac.

We'll be late.

The person next to me will bring on a bunch of food that smells.

that kind of that just and when i have that attitude i'm never disappointed yeah and when i'm really happy and idealistic i'm disappointed So now I just think, you know what?

I can do this for three or four more years.

But I'm talking about, you know, I used to,

when I taught for 21 years, I would go Monday night after class and then fly the red eye to San Francisco, to the East Coast, speak for three or four hundred bucks, fly back the next night, take a shower.

on campus, go straight to campus, then teach my clap four classes on Wednesday and then do that once a week.

And it was crazy.

I thought I could do it in my 60s and it didn't.

But in all defense,

the airline industry was functional in the 70s and 80s and 90s and early 2000s.

It is not, it is dysfunctional now.

completely dysfunctional.

I don't know whether there's too many travelers, the prices are too cheap, the airlines are too incompetent, or the woke hiring has had an effect, There's no rules about attire or conduct, really, or they're not in force, but it's a force-multiplying experience of disaster.

I was in the Chicago airport, and there's a whole section there that they have a kind of a tent where homeless people are there.

They live there.

And

it's quite something to see.

Yes.

And so it's not a

something that, you know, there's just a certain type of person.

They're on their cell phone and they've got this huge, as he says, steamer trunk.

When they've told you that the carry-ons are all carried, they come in on group five

and then they stop in the middle of the aisle and they hold up 15 people while they try to slam it in with one hand while they're talking, and it's not going to work.

And that one person can

rob 20 people of making a connection.

There's no margin of error.

One baggage, you know, I'll just finish this rant with, as I said earlier, I saw a whole group of people for the first time wanting to go on a cruise in Seattle, and they had a non-stop flight from Fresno, Seattle, local group.

And one of the attendants did not show up because she had partied the night before.

And that canceled the whole flight for everybody.

And they lost that opportunity.

And that's what it is.

I've seen people, I've seen flight attendants not show up.

I've seen pilots not being able for for various reasons to fly.

I've seen

one baggage carrier during the COVID trying to unload and load up an entire plane.

I've seen the maintenance guy go to the wrong plane.

I've been on the tarmac and we're ready to go and I think I'm going to make my connection.

And all of a sudden I hear a sound and I look down and there's a leak in the tire and it's sinking.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, that's just true.

The planes have too many miles on them, and

they're not up to the rigors of the airports, they are too crowded.

We rely on computers too much,

and the airlines are greedy.

I mean,

they want to get as many people in there as possible.

They should be paying everybody

money to check their bags in.

In other words, you get $5 if you check your luggage in.

You pay $5 for each carry-on you put on the plane.

And then you would be a lot easier.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, Victor, I'd like to,

I would like to thank Leo Gordon for that.

I would like to thank also our listeners who are gardening or doing their laundry or cleaning their house or at a workout.

We hear all of those things that people listen to us then.

So it's nice.

I hear that all the time when I go places.

Thank you.

I'm working out.

Thank you.

I'm doing my 10,000 step walk every morning.

Thank you.

I'm ironing.

So I hope that helps a little bit to make sense of the senselessness of this modern world.

Yeah.

So thanks to everybody.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Sanson, and we're signing off.

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