Hunter's Millions, China's Tentacles, and How They Fought WWI

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Victor is a man of wisdom, both trained and instinctual.

Victor provides commentary on politics, society, and culture.

And this is our weekend episode and we do a little bit of historical work on the weekend and we're looking at World War I, so we will get to that.

But before that, we're going to talk a little bit about the Maui fire, Hunter's Millions, and China.

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He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

So, welcome, everybody.

Victor, the Maui seems to have suffered from a terrible fire.

So, before we start, I thought maybe you had a few minutes we could talk about that.

If you have anything to say, well, I don't think they know the cause of it, do they?

I mean, I've been to Maui once, always on work-related matters, but

I guess it's partly some type of dry hurricane conditions that brought up Santa Ana-like-like winds.

And then, you know, when you go to Hawaii, there's two different climates.

There's the upper elevations on the mountains that's lush and cool.

And then when you get down to the bottom, it can be a dry wind and it can be a dry wind and it's not, it's kind of parched so i assume that's where the uh the wildfires are but

this is something that the left

almost automatically discounts the the actual immediate cause so here in california we had the aspen fire and i had a house up at huntington and we know the likely culprit were marijuana growers and then we just forgot about it.

And we know what fueled the fire was improper forestry.

In other words, they didn't clean out dead trees and such and allow the timber companies to selectively log.

All we heard was climate change.

And the same thing up in the Napa fire, the Paradise Fire.

And then we're hearing this already.

But there has always been fires.

And the problem we're having is we don't have 500 years of records.

We just have since the, basically since the late 19th century.

And we don't ever calibrate or project back to find out what the frequency of these fires are.

Instead, they're used for political purposes.

So I don't know.

I don't think anybody knows what caused this fire.

They don't know to what degree forestry practices played a role.

They don't know to what degree this unseasonable high wind was due to what has been alleged was climate change.

It's just too bad because every single

fire, every single tornado, every single hurricane, every single everything

is calibrated in terms of global warming for political agendas.

The only thing different about this fire is that the Hawaiian islands are isolated.

So they don't draw on the immediate resources of surrounding states.

They can send in fire crews or set up, you know, they have electricity, they can redo the grid or they can have water trucks.

They're on their own.

It's an island Maui, you know, it's isolated.

So if the power grid goes down or they can't get water, it could be thousands of people that are stranded or die.

I think six have died.

I think it's good it didn't hit the hotels

that region near the beach.

So I guess they'd have the tourists leave, they would have spaces that people that are homeless could live in.

But

anyway, it's just a reminder that we're always on the razor's edge.

We think that we have this

very thick veneer of civilization.

It's very thin.

It's very thin.

And it's just another reminder that

civilizations have to invest in the stuff of life, the basic necessities, transportation, power, fuel, food.

And they have to have good infrastructure and then they have to have reserves for these things to meet these catastrophes.

And we don't do that.

We spend it on all these other things, you know, these

diversity, equity, inclusion, and transgendered issues and all of these distractions.

And we don't,

you know, we say, oh, let's go to Ukraine and help Ukraine.

Okay, I have no problem.

Let's make sure we have a huge munitions industry and we have five or six million, 155 million millimeter shells so we can send them 2 million rather than send them everything we have.

But that's how we do stuff.

And I guess that's characteristic of democracies, but it's just

so weird that this complacent society doesn't inculcate self-sacrifice or planning

or preparations.

There's no Boy Scout, be prepared attitude anymore.

Maybe because there's no Boy Scouts, but it's sad, you know.

Yeah,

one of the great things my father taught me was when I went somewhere, like I had this

1962 ladybug Volvo with like 200,000 miles on it.

And

the SU carburetors would break down.

The clutch was only good for 20,000 miles.

But he not only taught me how to fix it, but he had, now you're driving home from sons, from school's son.

So here's what you need.

And he'd have a little flashlight, you know what I mean?

And then he'd have gloves.

So if I had to go into that car, and then there was no cell phones, but he had some bottle of water.

You always, he was that way.

I guess that came from being World War II, but

nobody thinks like that anymore.

They don't teach young kids.

If you're going to go down to LA on the 99, what happens if you have a flat?

Or if you're going to go hike in the Sierras, do you have excess water?

Do you have, what are you going to do if you twist your ankle?

Nobody thinks like that anymore.

I guess it's because of the affluence and leisure of our society.

But that other generation that went through the Depression and fought in World War II was

they were ready for any contingency.

Yeah.

Well, let's turn then to Hunter and what the Select Committee is revealing.

And it's revealing now up to 20 million in payments from foreign sources to Biden companies.

And those foreign sources tend to be places like Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine, China.

And either our enemies or at least unsavory, corrupt governments.

And it just seems like the more that this select committee unwinds the web of the Biden finances, the more the Republicans look impotent to me.

And I was wondering if maybe you could comment on what we should think.

Well, I mean, there's only one way to crack that because they're just going to lie and say.

The left's going to lie and say that they didn't do this.

So there's only one way.

So what does the IRS do when they go after someone who they believe in the period of eight or nine years has made 50, 60, 70 million?

They do two things.

They audit them by looking at all of their income tax returns to see what they reported.

And then they go out and do a forensic accounting and they look at houses, boats, cars,

investments.

bank accounts, offshore, and to see

where that profitability ended up.

And

if there's some kind of commiserate equivalency, they leave them alone.

They say, well, he made $60 million.

He spent it, but he reported it and paid taxes.

So my point is, if this was a normal investigation and the IRS whistleblowers have already alleged that it wasn't, then you would have these accountants, they would go through the laptop, they'd say, frame one, stop, prostitute, investigate how much she charged.

Is it on a credit card?

Because we know what they were using credit cards, because he lost it.

And look, okay, cocaine.

What is the price of cocaine?

Do this.

And just go through his whole lifestyle.

And do the same thing with Joe's square footage of his various houses and his cars and his vet and just look at his bank accounts.

And then say, this is the amount of money.

that he had at his disposal and here is what he reported.

But you can't get those records.

And I don't think they're going to get them, not with Merrick Garland's,

Janet Yellen's Department of Treasury, and the IRS or Department of Justice.

But that's the only way you're going to get him on any of that because he's just going to say that he didn't get any money.

But it has to be somewhere.

If they're correct, that this is 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 million, where did it go?

It has to be somewhere.

It's in a safe in cash or it's somewhere or they send him a Porsche.

Find the, you know, he had a Porsche and there has to be some record of it.

So when Hunter Biden says on an email to his daughter, at least I'm not taking half

of your income the way that my father took half of my income.

Is that true?

I don't know why they can't, I don't understand why they don't go to.

depose him and say, I need to deposition.

Were you just joshing or did you, is that true?

But they can't do any of that.

And that's why the problem with the Republicans, they know it's true and it is true.

But the more they get angry and they say these are going to happen, the more they sound like they're carrying a twig and talking loudly.

Whereas

if it was me, I would have gotten all the documents first and I wouldn't have said a word.

And then

Then when I had all the proof, I would have started sounding off.

But

then the other thing that's just Orwellian and surreal are these left-wing Democrats who impeached Donald Trump over a phone call, cooked up the entire Russian collusion hoax where there wasn't a shred of evidence, cooked up the entire laptop disinformation hoax.

And now they're saying,

well, yeah, Joe called.

He called oligarch A and oligarch B, and he was in the room, and Devin Archer says he did, and the phone record says he did, and Hunter says he did, and the oligarchs said he did, but he was just talking.

Well, nobody believes that.

And they're basically saying, unless Joe called up and said, listen, I am going to go to Barack Obama and make sure I'm point man on Ukraine, and I'm going to fire Victor Shokin,

and I'm going to do this and get my son on that.

And this is the quid pro quo, and I want this amount of money.

That's not how it works.

You know, it doesn't work.

It doesn't work that way.

I can tell you that there's the world of quid pro quos doesn't work that way.

So these Democrats know it, but it's really weird.

The subtext of this whole thing can be boiled down to

under no circumstances will Joe Biden step down before his term.

Because if he were to do that, we have Kamala Harris, and that is an ungodly disaster that will set us back a decade.

So we don't care if there's cash in the back pocket of Joe Biden when he walks around the White House.

We don't care if you go into his office or his home and they find a safe full of five million.

We don't care.

He is not going to be impeached or convicted.

And after that,

sure.

Finish his first term.

We'll help you get rid of the SOB.

We don't want him either.

if he did win, then we've got Camela Harris because there's no way in hell he's going to finish the second term.

So what we want you to do is to

collapse your investigation, let Joe finish the

term.

If you want to go out and kill a dead horse, beat him to death, fine with us.

He's not going to be the nominee.

Gavin's coming in and he will annihilate Camilla Harris in a primary.

And we say we wanted Camilla.

We'd like a woman of color to be the first female black president, but she just couldn't win.

Gavin came in and took it from her.

That's what happens.

So Gavin's our nominee.

That's the whole thing, the subtext.

So

they will be as adamant right now of denying.

You could bring in Joe's Carvette.

and drive it into the congressional halls, and you could say that they could find $5 million stuffed into the upholstery.

And they'd say, that happens all the time.

Joe just saved a dollar here and a dollar there and it added up.

And yet

if he was going to run again, they would drive the Corvette in there themselves to get rid of him.

And the only thing that's mysterious to me is the role of the Obamas because it's pretty clear when you start looking at individual appointees, not just Susan Rice, but a lot of them.

They're Obama appointees.

And Obama never moved the country as left as he wanted to.

He was too timid and he felt that he wasn't yet ready.

He would hurt his legacy if he didn't get reelected or what.

It was too dangerous.

So now, with Joe Biden, he's living his dream.

Remember what he said?

He's on tape.

He's on tape.

And that was in the interview we discussed about the David Garrow book.

My dream is to phone in the presidency.

I would like to have a third term, but not if I had to work.

I would just like to sit in my basement and

just tell people what's going to do.

And he said it, and that's what he's doing.

Right now, the Obamas are running the country.

When my point is, they want Joe Biden the way he is, and they would like him to run for another term because he's a construct.

And he's just a cardboard person they cut out and they plopped him down in the basement and they make him move once in a while.

And then they run all of the agency.

Obama's responsible for the border.

He's responsible for the whole crime epidemic, the whole deteriorate.

This is what he wanted.

And Biden was very

useful.

So my concern.

Oh, go ahead.

I don't think Gavin Newsom would be because he's got a bigger ego than Obama.

And so they couldn't.

My concern is the Republican Party, though, and people like Comer and Jordan, do you think that they're behind closed doors saying, We don't want Kamala president, so let's keep this slowed down?

Because what they're doing is they're getting the general

populace's blood boiling, and then we don't see any results from all these.

They would be

getting him out and having Kamala be in there so that more people would vote Republican.

But you got to remember

they control by what eight or nine seats,

one

half

of one third or one six in other words of government yes they're not the supreme court they're not the presidency they're not the senate they're just the house and they have a very thin they got a lot of rhinos in purple districts that can't were are not going to go back to their suburbanite voters and say i'm going to impeach

Joe Biden.

And their town hall people are going to say, well how about the 31 trillion dollars in debt and the crime don't you have more pressing issues than to go back and you know and so they're not going to do it i don't know if they could get a majority to so they have to get evidence and they're trying their best but they've got a they've got the most weaponized doj in history so you got merrick garland we know this that joe biden said and was quoted as such in the New York Times that he's very upset at Merrick Garland.

He was, not now, because Merrick Garland didn't go after Trump.

So Garland got the message.

He didn't want to be fired.

He lost his Supreme Court nomination.

He didn't want to be a two-time loser.

So he thought, oh my God, he may fire me.

So that's what he's doing.

He's weaponized the DOJ.

So how do you,

what do you do?

If you have a criminal referral where these guys are lying and you send it to the DOJ, they're not going to indict him.

So they don't have a lot of power.

And I think they're doing a pretty good job myself, given the limited means they have.

They just need to get the eye, they got to follow the money.

That's the only thing.

You've got to get the bank data and the bank records and the IRS tax returns.

And if he, as I think he probably did, if he reported one or two million dollars when he was making 30 million, they'll have him.

Well, he's already, they already know that that sweetheart deal was half of it was IRS fraud, and they were going to let him off.

And people are listening, they'll say,

that SOB Hunter, I got audited one year for $6,000, and they were going to put me in jail over it.

Yeah,

that's what's so strikingly dishonest about this whole thing, that they gave him a, they were perfectly willing to give that guy a complete pass for ripping off the U.S.

government for millions of dollars in back taxes.

And Joe Biden as well.

I don't know.

One good thing about this, I don't think anybody on either side is going to say anymore.

Oh, that's just good old Joe Biden Scranton.

Kind of a blowhard, but he's a good old guy.

He's nice, good old moderate, reached across the aisle, great friend to everybody.

No, no, no.

He's an mean S-O-B crook.

He's a racist.

He's a mean person.

He'll do and say anything.

And we've seen that with the

invocation of his son

as a way of using the death of his son to mitigate his criminal exposure.

And his surrogates are doing that nonstop.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's then turn to China.

I have three stories, and then you can comment on any one of them that you want.

I think the biggest story is that Russia and China in joint operations, naval operations,

conducted or had 11 ships sail near the Aleutian Islands in Alaska.

And the United States sent four destroyers.

And so that sounds like a very provocative situation given Ukraine and Taiwan.

The second story is China has attended the Ukraine peace talks in Saudi Arabia and was an active participant, according to some.

And the third story is that there's a lawsuit against Cisco, which is a Silicon Valley tech company, one of the largest, that alleges they aided China in hunting down and arresting Falun Gong members with their technology.

So they were giving China technology that would allow them to do that.

They all do that.

They've all done that.

They've done that for five.

They've given them facial recognition.

They've given the ability to tap into iPhones.

They've given them surveillance, collective, instantaneous camera ability.

It all came from the United States.

But then everything came from the United States originally.

Yes.

Even their COVID gain of function virus was impossible without Anthony Bauci.

Yes.

So

that's clear.

So why did this 11

ship armada go right into Alaska?

There's about three or four reasons.

Number one, they're telling us, you're not a global power anymore.

So

you steam all around the Black Sea.

You go into the South China Sea.

Well, we're going to go right off the coast of Alaska.

And I can guarantee you, when we read that only half of your submarines are serviceable and your fleet is way half of what it was in the Reagan era and your shipyards are ossified and can't repair or produce new ships, we're going to outnumber you right off your own coast.

In the Reagan era, there would have been 10 frigates, right?

And probably a carrier there to say, you know,

be careful, but not now.

And then the other issue is it's Joe Biden.

And you can take it either way you want.

You can just say he's befuddled or incompetent.

Yes, Victor Anthony Blinken and Jake Sullivan went to China.

I mean, they went to Anchorage, Alaska, right?

Alaska.

Remember Alaska, the last time it was in the news with China?

They were in March of 2021, and they sat there while the Chinese Secretary of State and his diplomat just tore them to pieces.

You are racist, you are this, you are that.

We don't screw you.

And they just sat there.

And so they think that we're weak, or if you're

mildly conspiracist, you think, wow, well, Victor,

Hunter Biden was flying on Air Force II for years, but Vice President Biden, we'd think that he may have got 10 million bucks.

He's compromised.

Is it any coincidence that given the Russian money and this crazy mayor of Moscow that had ties and Ukraine and Romania and China that

when there was talk of a Putin invasion and they asked Joe Biden, he said, well, I won't object if it's not

you know, if it's not a major invasion or when Zelensky was trying trying to rally the troops in the initial Thunder Road Russian effort to decapitate his capital, Biden said, we'll get him a right out.

Get him out.

We'll just get him out and collapse the country.

Or when they attacked us with cyber warfare, please don't attack hospitals.

Keep that off your attack list.

So there was

something there.

And then you ditto China.

So you have all these companies that feel that in this administration, they can act with impunity in these investments and joint ventures with the chinese and then you look at the spy balloon that just floated with impunity across the continental united states taking pictures you look at the farmland that's being bought up you look at the chinese fentanyl that's fueling a hundred thousand deaths by being in processed by the cartels and shipped into the united states and it doesn't make any sense when janet yellen or lincoln or people talk of china as a partner so it does suggest that in in the case of Russia, the case of China, and you get to Ukraine, and the Ukraine was paying through

burisma and oligarchs, and

it doesn't make any sense.

Some of us, I mean, you can support Ukraine.

Everybody supports the defense, but

exhausting your ship-to-shore, your shore-to-ship missiles, your javelins, your artillery shells, your patriot,

that's kind of dangerous to do that.

And you get the impression that these countries have something over Joe Biden.

I really believe that.

And we'll see because

we'll see if there's starting to be leaks.

The big $64,000 question is when an oligarch in Ukraine says that he taped 17 conversations and two were with Joe Biden, and he has documents of that.

A, will he release them?

And B, has he made the fact that he has them known to the Biden family in the past?

That would be very interesting to find out.

Yeah, that sure would.

What do you think of China at these peace talks for the war in Ukraine and Saudi Arabia?

I mean,

it's what China does.

It goes to Australia, it goes to South Korea, it goes to Taiwan, it goes to Japan and says, look, the United States is the setting sun.

We're the rising sun.

You want to be with a winner?

You want to be with a loser?

Because

look at their country.

Look at their cities.

Look at Minneapolis.

Look at San Francisco.

Look at their riots.

Look at this transgender.

Look at all this.

Look at their military.

You really believe that they're going to stand up to us and we're going to be no better friend to you or no worse enemy.

So you should join the new greater East Asia co-prosperity sphere that we're taking over from the old militarist Japanese.

It's going to be better, Belt and roads, silkwork, whatever you want to call it.

And that's what they're doing.

And

that's why they're everywhere.

They're dangerous.

Well, I mean, we don't confront them.

And you can't confront them by suddenly saying, oh,

we're not going to import any more stuff or we're not going to have joint ventures.

No, you have to be systematic.

And by that, I mean, You've got to get rid of woke in the universities and go back to a strictly merocratic admissions and evaluations in our top universities.

So if you go to MIT or Caltech, Caltech's an exception, but Stanford or any of these major electrical engineering, computer engineering, we get the best people.

That's number one.

And you've got to use government research funds to start.

pushing more R ⁇ D.

Number two, you can't give it away to them.

So you need to shut down all those Confucius institutes at universities.

You've got to cut back that 350 to 380,000 students from China.

I would cut it back to 50,000.

In fact, I would just say this.

How many students are in China from the United States?

50?

Okay, we'll let you let you have 50,000.

And if

you find in Readley, California, a biolab or a Chinese...

communist affiliated country company under the guise of making COVID or measle test kits or whatever has all these pathogens, toxic, just laying around.

Then we're going to say, if you're going to have a Chinese company that does, we're going to do the same thing.

If you're going to have a balloon coming across, we're going to send 10.

If you're going to buy up land, then we want to buy up land, right?

And we'll tell you where we want to buy.

And if you don't do that, they're going to have no respect for you.

So it has to be absolutely reciprocal.

Yes.

And that's, and we should, you know, it's.

We should insist on that.

Well, it looks at Mexico.

Mexico is where you, oddly enough, Mexico is where you start because that's where the fentanyl is killing 100,000.

What's the most pressing problem?

It's not Ukraine right now.

It's 100,000 Americans being killed by fentanyl that's disguised.

It looked like everything from valium to ecstasy.

I mean, they just deliberately put that in anything they want.

Okay.

It's cheap to make.

It gives you a high if it doesn't kill you.

You make every drug fentanyl.

But

it's coming from China and it's packaged by the cartels.

And the Mexican government knows it.

And probably 30% of the Mexican government's on the take.

Mexico's telling us, don't you dare treat our immigrants this way.

And then we've got to get a whole refashioning of the whole illegal immigration.

Everybody's got to take a deep breath.

It is not a moral.

enterprise.

Mexico is not our partner.

It is not our neutral.

It is our enemy.

It is deliberately exporting 7 million people to get off its dole.

It wants them to come here and it wants an expatriate community that will not be assimilated or integrated or intermarried to be a voice for Mexico.

That's why they have so many damn consulates in the United States.

They're deliberately doing it.

They would never allow Guatemala to do to them what they're doing to us.

They just wouldn't.

And you've got to shut shut the border.

And the illegal immigrant is not a noble,

heroic, iconic person.

You can see that in New York when they protest about, we don't want this food, or we want this hotel room, or you owe us this phone.

No, no, when you come across a country's border and they tell you not to come across,

no matter how lax it is, and they break that law, and then they break the law by residing in the company, and then they break it a third time by getting phones.

That's it.

And you could stop this whole thing, the whole fentanyl thing and everything in two seconds.

All you'd have to do is say, anybody who came across the U.S.

border illegally in the last five years will be summarily deported the moment we find you're here, but we're going to give you a 60-day amnesty.

So we wish you all with self-deport.

We're not talking about 10 or 15 years, just the last five years.

If you came illegally, it's probably 10, 10 million.

Would you please leave?

Because you're taking valuable sources from American veterans and poor

and entitlements from other people who are legally here and citizens.

If you did that, I think it would stop all the problems.

And then you would tell the Mexican government: look, Donald Trump renegotiated NAFTA with you, but we're not going to play around with small stuff.

Either you stop the immigration illegally into the United States,

as you did before with Trump, but this time we want nothing, no illegal immigration.

If you don't do it, we're going to do the following.

We're going to deport and send back to your hotels,

to Mexico City, to Guanajo, to Guadalajara, to Cabo.

We're going to send back en masse 10 million people.

We're going to bust them in.

Number two, you get $60 billion

from remittances.

That comes from your illegal aliens largely.

And

a large percentage of them are on federal and state and local assistance.

And they use that assistance to free up $200, $300 each per week to send back to relative.

We're going to tax that.

So that $60 billion,

we're not going to let it come back.

We're not going to let it be wired.

We're not going to let it go through a computer.

We're going to trace it and we're going to take a 15%

cut.

So we're going to take about 10 billion bucks and we're going to build the biggest wall you've ever seen from coast to coast, from San Diego all the way to the Gulf.

And it's where you're not going to get in again.

And that would stop the fentanyl.

That would stop the illegal migration.

And you know what would happen?

Mexico would begin to like us.

They would.

They'd say, wow, wow, that's a powerful country.

That country is really proud of itself.

You can't push that country around.

We better be careful with the United States.

Yeah.

And

why do we do this?

So why do we do this with China?

Why do we do this with Ukraine?

I don't know.

But

we've got to completely redirect our idea of the Mexican government.

It is totally corrupt.

It's anti-American.

It's killed more people than any country in the world.

More Americans have died due to Chinese and Mexican agency than any other hostile power.

Not Iraq, not Afghanistan, not any of these countries.

Not bin Laden.

It's fentanyl.

And they know they're killing us, and they keep doing it.

Yes.

Yeah, we definitely need to wake up.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break for some messages and then come back and talk about World War I, the battles in World War I.

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Welcome back.

Victor, so with World War I, we talked about the causes last week, but we wanted to look at the battlefield itself for the nature of the war.

And I just have two questions.

One's about the nature of the war.

Why do you think it was so unexpected given that

they had had a Boer war in South Africa before and the United States had had a civil war for four years?

I think those precedents would have

made it less unexpected than than it was.

But that was one question.

And then one actually question I have is on consequences.

What was the impact on Western culture?

If you could talk a little bit about that.

Well, last time we were talking about what caused the war

and

I gave various, just a very quick recap, we said it was the unification of Germany and the successful Franco-Prussian war and the angst that this new

Prussian-run Germany had an economy larger than France or larger than Britain, maybe not larger than the entire empire of Britain.

And

it felt that it had not got commiserate respect, colonies, and dominance in Europe, and it had been very successful.

Number two, it had a radical

revolution in arms.

The German military was the best trained, it had the most efficient rail system in the world, and it felt not only did it have a moral right to exercise its clout, but it had the ability to do so.

In addition to that, we had the entire

Ottoman Empire from Greece to Thrace to all of Eastern Europe as it was in the Balkans collapsing, collapsing.

So there was a vacuum.

And in addition to that, there were empires that were fragile.

The Russian Empire was not as strong as everybody thought it was.

Austria, Hungary was not as strong as anybody.

The ally,

its ally was Germany, and Russia under Bismarck was an ally of Germany.

And that broke down under Kaiser Wilhelm when he got rid of Bismarck.

So you had

these catalysts for a decisive war.

The second thing was there had been

You mentioned the Boer War, there had been a radical change in military affairs, even since 1871.

Henry Shrapnel created the exploding shell that killed most people in World War I.

And they had become much bigger and much more efficient.

And more importantly,

they were the weapon of choice.

There were no longer solid shot anymore.

It had happened in the Franco-Prussia, but never to this degree.

There were very good artillery, fast-firing 75-millimeter.

That's basically a three-inch gun.

But the Germans had larger six and eight and 12-inch artillery pieces, huge guns.

And they had refined the machine gun.

So it wasn't just shooting 150, but it was 600, 800, 1,000 bullets a minute.

And they had started to experiment with phosphine gas and mustard gas and chlorine gas.

So

if they had a world war, they'd never had one before, they had the wherewithal

on the offensive side to do damage to the defensive side.

There's always these cycles, offense, defense.

Now it was the age of offense.

And they were also entering the dawn of two other things, submarine warfare, which people couldn't stop, and air warfare, which was new,

just starting to kick in in 1914.

So when this war broke out,

You ask why did people think it was going to be over very soon?

Well, there was a lot of crack, the great, there was a lot of crackpot books being written suggesting that this was the first globalization and Germany needed all these imports and the Russia the Royal Navy could blockade it and

the economies of France and Germany were intertwined and Germany needed French coal and da da da da da and they wouldn't dare go to war and ruin the gay 90s.

That's just crazy because people act.

It's like saying people never act illogically or irrationally.

So there was a lot of naivete.

And then when the war started, Germany started the war on the principle that the Schlieffen plan would work.

And they didn't realize that it had been, the younger Moltke and others had altered it so that it wasn't going to be this huge cartwheel, but a semi-cartwheel without enough force.

to complete the circle.

So they were going to go way into France and make the circle around Paris.

They got to win, I don't know, 25 miles of Paris,

and then they stopped.

And then you had a race to the sea where each side tried to outflank the other with trenches, and then it just went all the way from Switzerland to the North Sea.

And at that point, at the end of 1914 and 1915, there you had it.

There was no way that either side would have the capability to break through and have a war of maneuver like what we saw in World War II.

But they didn't have tanks.

In other words, motor vehicles were not advanced yet, and they didn't have close air support that would allow a blitzkrieg.

So it was stationary.

And then we went into the second war, and that was characterized in the latter part of 1915.

Ypres, the first battle of Ypres, second, but most importantly, Verdun.

And that was this huge fortress that that the Germans thought they could bleed the French army because the French had less manpower than Germany did.

And they felt the British would not come to the rescue.

And then the British tried to divert it months later with the Battle of the Somme, 20,000 people killed on the first day.

And then it started to become a meat grinder by the end of 1915 and into 16.

So then the idea was there has to be a way to break this log jam.

We either have to do it technologically technologically or with

ancillary theaters.

So the British said, well, we can knock the Ottomans out.

So let's extend the war to the Middle East and break away the Arab countries, what is now Syria, Iraq,

Saudi Arabia, Jordan.

We're going to break them away from the Ottomans.

And they have oil, a lot of these countries do.

And that was largely under Lawrence and Alan B.

successful, but it wasn't determinative.

And then the second idea was Churchill's, let's go into Gallipoli.

That might have worked if it had been implemented.

It wasn't a crackpout idea.

Let's land in the Dardanelles and have a lightning quick and take out Constantinople.

And we'll get the sick man of Europe out of the war.

That's one down.

And then we'll have the Italians tie down the Austrians.

And they did.

They fought very well.

And then Serbia fought well.

And so the central powers, and we're talking about Germany, Austria, Hungary, later Turkey, Bulgaria, they were tied down.

And then there was the Russian juggernaut.

And as long as Russia was in the war, there was no way that Germany was going to have military superiority on the Western Front, which it needed to be on the offense, because Britain and France together could field almost as many divisions as

Germany could on the Western Front.

So that was what was going on.

And then these new technologies came into play.

The dreadnought tried to and was successful in cutting off all supplies into Germany.

Germany needed oil, Germany needed food, and 800,000, according to the Germans, who believes them, but that's what they claim, died of starvation or malnutrition because the British fleet blockaded all of the ports of Germany.

And they couldn't get things in from Ukraine, etc., because of the Russian front.

And they couldn't get supplies.

You know, they had 70 miles of Belgium and France, but they couldn't get anything else.

So they were strapped.

And so then they

started unrestricted submarine warfare.

They sank the Lusitania, which probably had munitions on it in 1915.

And then in 1917, they just declared, you know what, we're going to lose the war unless we just go after everything.

And they were pretty tough.

I mean, if they sank a

allied ship, they would bulldoze the lifeboats.

And then there was a Zimmerman telegram.

It was kind of, you know, if Mexico helps us invade the South, we'll give them, you know, they helps us, then we'll give them parts of what they lost during the Mexican War.

And that was kind of a non-starter, but it inflamed America.

So the pacifist Woodrow Wilson, That was really stupid because as long as America didn't get in the war, Germany, if you look at the comparative GDP

and population base between France, if you look at France, Great Britain, Italy versus Austria, Hungary,

Germany,

and the Ottoman Empire, it's not that different.

You put Russia in the war the whole time.

and the United States gaining, then it's no-brainer back to World War II.

It's forward to do World War II.

So that was the pillars of German strategy.

Do not get America in on the war and knock Russia out.

And for a very brief moment, it looked like it was going to work.

So

they knocked Russia out of the war basically by November 1917 because of the Bolshevik revolution, which, you know, Lenin was on a car out in Germany, a rail car.

So he stirred it up and he signed a humiliating peace at Brestlatovics.

and they lost 50 million people in a million square miles.

If the Germans had not been greedy by January 1918,

then they would have given that area that they annexed.

They took all the Baltic states, they took all of Ukraine, they took European Russia.

They would have turned it over to their surrogates.

But no, they tried to occupy it and run it for three or four or five months.

And that took 2 million soldiers, which they needed on.

So they only really transferred about 700,000 soldiers.

But they were in a race then.

So they knocked out Russia.

Finally, Ludendorff and Hindberg said, you know what?

Maybe we can still win this awful war because now we have military superiority on the Western Front.

We outnumber.

outnumbered and we've killed more British and French than they've killed Germans.

And now we've got no need for a full German army in in Russia.

Their biggest mistake was two things.

They didn't bring everybody.

So they left, as I said, a million and a half to two million soldiers in occupation duty was nutty.

And then they had the so-called spring offensive.

The United States declared war in April, but we had no army.

So they assumed rightly that it would take about six to eight months for us to mobilize and get an army over there of any size.

In fact,

we sent 2 million people over by September.

But in that brief window when Russia was knocked out, before America had the strength and the training and the munitions to be formidable, they had a spring offensive in March.

And the idea was they were just going to get the new Eastern army, combine it with the West before America got in, and steamroll the exhausted French and British armies that had lost over 2 million people and their republics were sick of it.

And you had a you'd had a French, the Neville offensive had caused wide-scale 20,000 French soldiers mutinied.

And the problem was they had no objective.

So they said, we're just going to invade from the trenches and push them back to the sea.

And

where?

Dunkirk?

Calais?

Prest?

What are you going to do?

What's the purpose?

Are you going to cut off the British

army from the French as they tried in World War II?

They didn't have any plan.

And they had stormtroopers and they had superior artillery and they made a huge salient, you know, 60, 70 miles, and they ran out of supplies.

And the salient was going to be cut at the base.

And then they ran out of time.

And by June, July, August, the American army started to come in.

Very controversial because had they taken the American army, and I wouldn't have thought that would be a good idea, but the French said to us and the British said to us,

give us Americans as they get off the boat in division sizes, those World War I divisions were 18,000 to 20,000.

Just give us 18 to 20,000.

And you can have a corps commander or a two-star general in charge of them, but we'll put them under Patang or we'll put them under Hague and we'll integrate them with our and we'll train them because we fought, we know what it's like and Wilson and Pershing said no no no no no no this is the American Expeditionary Force it keeps itself separate and it's under the complete control of the United States

and that meant it took a lot longer to train and the Americans had this crazy idea that

We trained everybody for months with Springfield 1903 rifles.

We were great marksmen.

They were superb shots with our four or five clip guns.

And we believed on the offensive.

We were Yankees, so we were going to get out of the trenches, run at full speed, and shoot these Germans.

And they said, don't do it.

Don't do it.

You don't understand modern shrapnel.

You don't understand the power of creeping artillery barrages.

You don't understand poison gas.

You don't understand what a German machine gun will do to flesh.

Please don't do it.

And we didn't listen.

And we took horrendous casualties.

And finally, you know, at Chateau Therie, Bella Wood, finally, we got some experience.

And then by

August, September, October, the American Army was really good.

And it was over a million and a half people.

And so we made the difference and crushed them.

And then

the inexplicable happened.

Woodrow Wilson, as all progressive, self-righteous utopians started mouthing off that he had 14 points.

I think Clemenceau said even Jesus only had, even Moses only had 10.

And he wanted a negotiated surrender.

And he was not going to be punitive, even though Germany had started the war and Germany should have been occupied.

And Germany was in French and Belgian territory.

And no American, Frenchman, or British had ever set foot on German soil.

So the worst thing you could do was have an armistice on the 11th month of the 11th day, the 11th hour of 1918.

That's what we did.

And then the peace treaty, the real surrender, if you will, was going to be in Versailles, but not until the next June of 1919.

In the process,

almost all the British Army had left, and half of the Americans had been shipped home, and the French had demobilized.

So then all of a sudden,

the Germans looked up and said, hmm,

they're saying that we started this war and we have to pay all these indemnities

and

we have the war guilt clause in the treaty.

And I don't see any Allied soldier in Germany, do you?

And I see German soldiers were in France and Belgium.

Didn't they surrender?

So that started the stab in the back.

Communists and Jews.

So no German politician had any future or or even survival if he signed that treaty.

And the ones that did were totally disgraced and they renounced it.

And what did they do?

They just started printing money.

They were perfectly willing to bankrupt their own economy with inflation.

They paid their war debts with worthless currency to help cause the Americans were not very reasonable.

Coolie said, they rented the money, didn't they?

They have to pay back every penny.

We were the big bankers by 1918.

So it was pretty clear that you were going to humiliate Germany, but not punish them.

And you were not going to occupy the country.

You were not going to attack Prussian militarism,

but you were going to make them feel that they had been stabbed in the back and they were going to try it again.

And then you ended up with the irony that the people who won the war were exhausted and would do anything, anything

to prevent another great war.

And the people who lost the war were eager to try it again.

And that's kind of strange.

And when you look at the dead, it's very similar to World War II.

World War II, the Allies lost so many more people than the losing Axis.

The same thing in World War I.

The winners probably lost 9 to 10 million, and the losers probably 7 to 8 million.

Probably 17 to 20 million people were killed.

Not the 65 to 85 in World War II, because there was no Asian theater, and Russia was knocked out pretty early compared to World War II.

But nevertheless,

World War I and World War II saw the Allies take the greater number of dead and wounded in victory and Germany take the lesser number in defeat.

And then the second thing was the determinative factor is always as it is in these world wars is GDP.

If you look at the GDP of World War II, it was just so asymmetrical.

The United States had a bigger GDP by 1945 than all of the combatants.

Russia,

Italy,

which had been knocked out of the war, Japan, Germany, a recovered France, and Great Britain put together, put together, same thing with its fleet, was larger than all the fleets of the world put together.

But in World War I,

the Allies themselves had an economy, aggregate economy,

that was double, more than double the size of the central powers of Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, Ottomans, and Germany.

And this is even more important to remember about World War I.

The British Empire, if you count Canada, Australia, and its domains in India, South Africa, and Britain itself, had a larger economy and a larger military budget than did Germany.

And when you put them all together and you add the United States, the United States was only in there from April 1917 to November

1918.

And yet, it almost spent as much money as Germany did.

Can you believe that?

That's incredible.

It is.

Yeah.

And it was creating more at the end of the war.

It was, people forget that, that we, it was incredible mobilization.

We were making more artillery shells at the end of the war than was France and England combined.

And so

the final thing is, what was the final legacy or the lessons of World War I?

Yeah, how did it impact us?

Yeah.

Well,

politically, Marshall Folk said this isn't an armistice.

This is just a guarantee, a prelude to the next time around.

So Germany was defeated, but not humiliated and defanged.

And it was...

you know, it found an excuse with the Jews and the communists, and they thought they were synonymous.

So you had the whole

Germany had not been any more anti-Semitic than Poland or Hungary.

But after World War I,

that anti-Semitism that had to find some scapegoat for the humiliation of, you know, being on the offensive, knocking out Russia and being on the offensive and then surrendering, they blamed a stab in the back.

So that was the beginning of the whole Hitlerian lie about they could have won World War I if it wasn't for communist Jews.

It was also the beginning of

appeasement and socialism.

So

Tom Sowell in his books on economics has a lot of good descriptions of that.

It was outlawed.

The French would not allow the Battle of Verdun to be talked about in school books.

It wasn't a discussion.

So what had been, you know, they shall not pass this wonderful French patriotic

but bloody defense by 1925, you didn't even, it was taboo.

In Holland and other countries, they wouldn't even allow destroyers.

They renamed the word destroyer because they thought destroyer was too warlike.

And Hague, who everybody hated, but it was better than the alternative, he had the greatest funeral in British history up, I think, since the Duke of Wellington, when he died in the late 20s.

So, so,

but

that was, people were very appalled by it, you know, and then in 1936, the Oxford debating,

the proposition, would you fight for king and country again?

And they voted overwhelmingly no.

And so we forget that World War I created such an anti-war and socialism in the West

who won, and it created militarism in Germany that lost.

And the other thing is Italy felt that it got screwed.

It lost almost over a half a million, and it really did its part and held Austria from expanding and hurt Austria.

It tied down the Austrian army so it could not function in Serbia or it couldn't really send troops to the West.

And they thought that they should have gotten a lot of the disputed land with Austria, and they didn't get what they wanted.

And that made Mussolini sort of

you could see where he was coming from, that

we got screwed over by France and Britain and America.

And we did all the heavy work

on the southern front.

And he had a lot of respect for Hitler, you know, and Germany, because he thought he bought into Germany, he really didn't lose, and it knocked out Russia.

So that was, we lost Italy as an ally.

Part of it wasn't our fault.

He was a dictator.

The other thing is it fostered modernism.

I mean, I'm not saying there wasn't Impressionism

or representational art, but it was,

I guess you would say, Cézanne

or Van Gogh

or

any of those, Gaugon

or

all of them,

that Impressionism was a way of making

outlines, subjects, objects, people, nature in motion.

You know what I mean?

It looked like it was moving, but it captured what the eye saw

no longer.

In the anger and the depression and the chaos, the Paris art scene, this was Picasso and on and on and on.

Surrealism,

modern art.

It was the idea that we don't have any faith anymore in the virtues of classical art because

we don't want to see what

the eye saw in World War I.

And we believe classical virtue ended up with 18 million people killed.

And it translated into poetry.

So you could make the argument that before World War I, I mean, there were Walt Whitman and others that didn't rhyme or they didn't have classical meters, but they were rare.

But after World War I, a poet like Kipling was kind of out of business because a great person who could rhyme and had classical iambic pentameter or dactylic eczemeter or trochies,

whatever.

The whole canon was Ezra Pound or T.S.

Eliot, you know.

These were masters.

I mean, not Elliott, not Pound, but Eliot could have,

he was a master stylist.

But when you look at this love song or J.

Alfred Prufock or The Wasteland, my God, it's

the hollow men here the hollow men.

It's a downer.

And when you look at some of the World War I poetry that Robert Graves and his memoir of goodbye to all that,

it's pretty down.

And poetry was no longer going to be poetry.

And now

when we get angry today and we see some guy who writes dogwill and he just splits the line in any old fashion and says he's a poet, and there's no distinctive vocabulary, there's no ability to rhyme, there's no ability to find a meter that idea that that's still a poem comes from the chaos and the despair and the carnage of world war one and the and the repudiation of western culture the same thing with art the same thing with music and the same thing with personal behavior it started so the idea that

you know

I had a,

this is kind of rap gross, but I had a professor at UC Santa Cruz that talked about art and modernism in World War I.

I remember what he said.

It's kind of weird.

He said, there wasn't really an idea that people lived together, right,

before they got married in the 19th century.

I mean, there was, I'm not saying Petronius's satiricon.

There have been periods of risque,

rampant sexuality, but basically men and women didn't see in the especially rural areas

they didn't see each other naked until they were married.

They didn't even think about certain things.

There was romanticized love.

So

a young man in 1870,

he would look at a woman, but he had no idea what her breasts were like or her rear end or anything.

He just liked her, and she was the same way.

You could see his shoulders, maybe, but

this whole idea that suddenly that romantic relationship involved premarital sex, mutual nudity, experience with other lovers.

It gave sexuality an edge over romantic marriage, is what I'm saying.

And it started the idea of abortion on demand and

easy divorce, women's

good emancipation and free love.

That started after World War I.

And that was the result of the chaos, the death, and destruction.

So basically, the left and the reform, whatever areas said, you guys were the establishment.

You were all the grandchildren of Queen Victoria, and you all committed for what?

Dicum decorum es propatrium is the old lie, you know,

that it's a fine and noble thing to die in your country, as Horace said, the old lie.

So when you had Alan Seeger and all of these poets that were ridiculing traditional classical virtue because it led to 18 million people dead.

It really was the first,

and

you'd had Hegel and people talking about the intrinsic problems with Western culture, but then you had

the nihilists, Spingler, you know, the decline of the West.

That was the big hit in the 1920s that World War I was the manifestation of what was intrinsically wrong with Western culture.

It was decadent.

It was popularized by the masses.

There was no longer an aristocracy with taste.

There was ramp inequality, too much leisure.

Look what it had done.

It was a bankrupt society.

And it really

also paved the way for these fascist movements in reaction.

So we want to know, why was there fascism in Italy or fascism in Japan or fascism, Nazism in Hitler?

It was kind of

a reaction toward the reaction.

It was a reaction of the novelist to 1920s and Paris, the reaction of the Weimar cabaret scene and 1920s Berlin, etc., etc.

And novels changed too.

I mean, the novel was the rise of,

you know, Hemingway and Faulkner and Steinbeck and

all of these guys.

And then you're getting into Camus and existentialism.

existentialism.

That took off after World War II, especially, but you're getting into the anti-hero is what I'm saying.

It's no longer going to be just

19th century heroes.

There are no,

you get blown up.

You get blown up with shrapnel.

The strongest, most handsome guy on a horse is going to be machine gunned down just like a peasant.

It doesn't matter anymore.

Yeah.

So Robert Graves' goodbye to all that kind of

was right.

I mean, it seems like the quintessential work that signaled that World War I was the radical break from the 19th century.

The 19th century and all its optimism of the Enlightenment ended right there.

And then we get all of this, as you're pointing out, literature and art and questioning political things, like questioning the benefit of a nation state.

I mean, we have all the way up to today that Megan Rapineau that we talked about on Friday.

Absolutely.

That all came after World War I.

It's modernism.

And you had modern architecture.

You got the Bauerhaus.

You got these ugly square buildings after World War.

It was not that, you know, I'm an admirer of Frank Lloyd Wright, but it was the beginning of modernism and functionalism.

Functionalism that

when you made a chair, you didn't have an, you know, you didn't have legs that looked like lion claws, right?

Or when you had a house, you didn't have

some type of bead and reel or some type of pediment on it with engraving.

Or if you build a building in downtown New York, you were no longer going to have a freeze course on it.

And, you know, it's getting back to that, as I said, Wilfred

Owen, and it's making fun of horses.

It's a fine and noble thing to die for your country, the old lie.

And so that was.

It was.

Traditionalism.

Rupert Brooke, the soldier, if you read that.

And it mainstreamed a lot of things.

You read that poem by Rupert Brooke, and he's talking about the roughness of a male kiss.

And a lot of these guys were homosexuals, and that became what had been in the closet started to come out during the three years in Paris.

And everything changed.

You wouldn't,

you know, you went from Kipling to T.S.

Eliot.

Would you say in that sense that World War I was more significant than World War II?

No,

because World War II

was

it was a

World War I wasn't a global war.

I mean, there's a lot of people, but all but 17 countries in the world fought World War II, and there were probably four times as many people killed.

And it gave us the atomic bomb,

and it

it really

it created a 50-year period of horrific Cold War after it.

And it

basically changed a lot of countries.

I mean, it destroyed, it led to the Communist Revolution in China.

And

Stalin was all through in the 19,

I think he was all through in the 1930s.

There were massive revolts.

There had been the great famine, the purges.

He was unpopular.

And had World War II not occurred, I think he would have had a lot of domestic problems.

But what gave the communism another 50 years was

that they had,

yes, they had been the great patriotic war that stopped Hitler.

And

it gave us the Holocaust.

That's the main thing to remember about World War II.

It gave us the Holocaust.

6 million.

Nobody had ever thought that the German genius for organization and science would be turned into the art of death on a mass scale.

So

it gave us postmodernism.

What do you do after you destroy all the cannons?

Once you say that you're going to sculpt a statue or paint a picture or write a poem that doesn't look like a poem or a person,

then what do you go after that?

You go postmodern.

So in other words,

you have a beautiful classical portrait and then Picasso comes along and makes it representational, but you can still see certain things.

And then the next reaction is to what, throw a bunch of Jackson Paul, just throw paint on the canvas.

That's a postmodern reaction, or the

modern piss crisis or manure or stuff like you see in a modern art.

And then

whatever you want to say about, as I said, T.S.

Eliot or

some of the

modern poets,

Wallace Stevens or even crazy nutty fascist Ezra Pound, they were gifted and they at least knew something about classical poet, but the postmodern were reacting against that.

So they were just writing, they were, you could just write a sentence and then arbitrarily break it up and call it a poem.

And the same thing with novels.

And so,

you know,

there is no canon anymore.

That was destroyed in World War I.

And then the reaction to the canon was destroyed in World War II.

And now you've got chaos.

Although, Although, you know, I met

a very gifted artist the other day at Stanford, John Peck,

and he teaches in the continuing education, and people like him are trying to restore classical canons, if you know what I mean.

So there was a whole lost ability of proportion and the shadows and

the ability without instrumentation to capture what the eye sees.

And when you look at his portfolios,

they look like people, but they're beautiful.

They're representational.

They're not just like a photograph.

But my point is, and you can see that with sculpture, too.

There's a new school, a new generation of young people who are saying we're tired of postmodern and even modernism, and we're going to try.

And you can see it with architecture, too.

There's a somewhat return to classical tropes.

I noticed at Stanford University, we have the Romanesque sculpture of the late 19th century and early 20s and then

when I was a student they were building, I guess it would be called modern Romanesque.

It was the same color buildings and they had maybe some arches in it, but it was prefabricated cement.

And there was the Hoover building, there was the art library, and they're tearing in the Meyer undergraduate.

And then they're tearing those down.

And when they're rebuilding them and the dorms in Eskinito Village they're trying to have kind of a classical

you know what I mean they're buildings that are modern but they they have classical lines to them and you can see there's an effort to make them more like a

like a class what a classical building would look like and they're and that that's kind of encouraging Yeah, that is.

Well, Victor, that was a long segment and definitely an interesting segment.

We need to go to a break and then come back and we're going to talk a little bit about agriculture.

Stay with us, and we'll be right back.

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Welcome back.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

And the last part of our Saturday or our weekend edition, we usually talk a little bit about agriculture.

And I know that we had a question from one of our listeners on why you don't have a winery here in the valley.

And we both thought that it would be a good idea to talk about why you plant some things in some places and why others in other places.

And so

let us hear it.

Well, that can be answered in two ways.

Every farm is a captive of the heat, climate, weather, water conditions of its locale.

But depending on its size, it can vary within that locale.

So we had 180 acres in two parcels, but we were in the central San Joaquin Valley.

So there were limitations on what you could grow.

You could almost grow anything in this place because you had heat, heat, heat.

And if you had irrigation and it was dry and the weather was completely predictable, it wasn't like the Midwest.

So this was the raisin capital of the world because if you could take a Thompson seedless grape, and irrigate it, it would produce 10 to 15 tons of grapes and then you would have a drying period.

So, this was everybody planted raisins once you had water.

You got water in the 1890s to 1920s with the building of dam,

especially in the 1920s and 30s with the Central Valley project

and local water projects, a big creek project, a good example in Central California.

So, this was the, it was also the peach capital because you could grow deciduous fruits.

When I was growing up, every farm had plums, peaches, nectarines, apricots,

grapes, and those were usually a

red grape, not the new varieties, but they were Madeiras or they were

Thompson seedless or muscats.

And you could either dry them or make a bulk cheap wine or make them into raisins if they were Thompson seedless.

And they had currants too.

And

that was what you worked with.

The old days had been the wheat capital before irrigation.

Traver, California was the wheat shipping capital of California, right near here.

So then what do you do when you have those choices?

You have to look at your place and the farmer makes all these decisions.

And the first decision you have to make is, am I going to specialize or I'm going to be diverse?

And one has an advantage over the other and the other has an advantage over the other.

If you specialize, let's say you have 200 acres, I'm just going to plant it all in grapes or almonds, and I'm going to have a unicrop, and I will be an expert in that.

So I just buy one type of tractor, one type of spray rig.

I have my season out for bang, bang, bang.

I get those grapes picked in August.

And

if I'm making them raisins, they're gone at the end of September, and I'm done.

And I have my year off.

And then the other little, as I said before, with my angel devil, and then the little

angel says, but wait a minute, be careful.

The devil says, you, ah, be efficient, be, you know, profit, you'll be the best.

Yeah, but what if it rains and you lose your entire crop?

What if you get a nematodes or what if you get phylloxera?

You put all your eggs into one basket and and the climate can be somewhat changing and the soils are not uniform even on two little 200 acres.

So the other

soldier says to you, diversify.

So you've got 20 acres, 200 acres, may have 10 acre blocks.

So get five varieties of peaches, five varieties of plums, five varieties of apricots, five varieties of grapes and have them sequence.

So you start in May and they finish, get some citrus or nut trees, and you've got your little income coming, each one.

So all of a sudden it hails on your peaches.

You say, okay, I've got my plums.

The plums get worms.

You say, I got my nut crop.

So you're diversed.

You're diverse and you have different labors.

And so, and then you say, well,

if I had all the labor, they could just come in at once.

But you say, you know, I don't need all that labor at once.

So I'll get 10 really good guys and I'll help them.

And I'll, you know, when I was growing up, it were poor people people from Oklahoma or from the Philippines and then later Mexico.

But every farm had houses and they lived there and they would just be just enough to do a little parcel if you were diverse.

And you would have all this different equipment.

It was kind of weird.

You'd have different types of discs, spring tooths, furrows, listers, spray rigs.

It was very complicated.

And those were the two.

And then you had soil types.

So on our particular place, we had what we called white ash, deep loam soils.

They would grow anything, but we had an artesian pond and everything around it for millennia had been underwater.

So we had sandy soil with very little nitrogen.

Sandy soil is very hot.

So whatever you plant there, the soil temperature is going to be three to five degrees warmer, which means that crop will come in three or four days early.

but

it won't sustain a crop that needs a lot of nitrogen.

So do not plant peaches.

And you also get nematodes, the little worms that can, they love sand.

They don't get stuck.

And if you plant something there,

you're going to have nematodes and you're not going to have, you're going to be fertilizing and fertilizing and fertilizing.

So if I had an orchard of plums on sand and I had one on heavy soil, I maybe did one ammonium nitrate on the heavy and then I was

pouring it on the sand.

Or I had to put manure because manure would stop nematodes.

They get stuck in in the manure, supposedly.

And you would get an early crop.

So you'd always get an early crop and put it on sandy soil because it would be very early and you could beat the market.

That was the key.

If you had very heavy soils, you tried to get a late

harvested crop because it would be later than the average.

And then you might come in at the end of the year where the, you know, the housewife in Lansing, Michigan wanted a last peach for her Halloween party and she couldn't find it.

Here this late variety peach came in from California.

So, that you had to either

look at your soils, different soil types.

You had to look at what type, whether you wanted to insure yourself against disaster, and you'd make a little money, or you wanted to go to Vegas and make a killing on one crop and then be wiped out one year and save your money.

And

I was sort of, I had a sibling who was really a much better farmer than I.

He wanted to be specialized into tree fruit and make it big.

And I was more timid.

I wanted a bunch of little things to use at farmers market.

So we kind of split.

But

now that doesn't exist.

There is no diversity anymore.

If you go to the San Joaquin Valley, it's all uni-blocks.

So every farm is 60, 80, 100 acres of almonds.

and sometimes grapes, but not too often.

There are no deciduous orchards anymore to speak of maybe 20,000 acres at most when they used to have 100.

And then the corporations own those blocks.

They bought them or rented them out.

So

say you're corporation X, you probably have 10,000 acres of almonds and you've conglomerated maybe,

I don't know,

you might have

conglomerated for, you know, 40,

50 farms.

and taken over their, you know, you bought them out and then you tore out everything on their place, you leveled it laser leveled it and then you rented out the farmhouse to people from mexico who might want to work for you and then it's part of a tessera and a huge mosaic and it's all one crop and then you become the world's masters at it

at almond almond growing so i i'm a tessera in someone else's corporate mosaic my little 40 something acres that's left after my siblings sold out moved away and i watch it I really am interested because I used to farm the same ground.

I know it.

I know it by heart.

I can walk down any row and tell you exactly which where the almonds will produce heavier because I grew up there, but I couldn't farm like these guys do.

It's a science.

They have the latest variety.

They have the latest protocol.

There's no labor whatsoever.

It's all mechanical.

There's no pruning.

There's no thinning.

There's no hand picking.

There's no cultivation.

there's no really, you don't even see them fertilize, it's all done through the drip.

And the drip, I don't even know when it goes on, it goes on by a computer.

I guess hydrometer turns it on.

But it's all on, I think a person who's farming it could just

take a sleeping pill and wake up three weeks later.

It wouldn't give me fun.

You know, I would be paranoid.

I get in the pickup, I drive out, check this valve, make sure it's got to the end of the row.

Oh, look at this tree.

No, it's all uniform.

And it looks much better.

It looks like a beautiful farm, but it's different.

And you have to have a lot of capital.

You have to be tied in with the university research stations and stuff.

And you have to get the right varieties.

What makes a farm, the old farmers go broke, they would plant a Bormosa plum orchard and it was the hottest plum.

And then somebody would make a red butte that came in four days later.

and was brighter red.

And then they would have an early red butte and they would just pull out orchards and you'd have an orchard that would make two acres would make $3,000 and the next year it'd be worth nothing because a new variety knocked about.

So then you would tear it out and take four years and it would just make you go broke.

Yes.

You were just

tearing out orchards all the time.

It was sickening.

And finally, you know, we did pretty well for a while because we had Alberta peat.

We just said we're not going to play that game on 40 acres.

So we had the best eating peaches in the world, Alberta peaches and hail nectarines and, you know, old-fashioned beefsteak tomato patches and

old-fashioned types of Santa Rosa plums.

And we would just take them to the coast.

We'd pick them just before they were, you know, fall.

They were just so ripe.

And we could get them to the coast in three hours.

We'd put them on a big table and say, a dollar, pick whatever you want.

It would be like a horde they would just people would be in line in in monterey and santa cruz or morrow bay and they would just take it and you could make a lot of money but

it was a lot of work and i think our children would always say you know we're peddlers dad

but it was pretty good not such an ad not such an awful

I think it was really good for the 12 children that grew up here

because when you take a kid who's 16 or 17 and you put him in a used telephone van you bought from Bell Telephone at an auction and you fill it through 3,000 pounds to the low maximum and you just point him in the right direction and said you've got to drive four hours to Santa Cruz over Pacheco Pass and we need every dime and oh by the way you'll check in to a hotel and stay there and then you have two kids with them one's 12 and one's 10 and the 16 year old's in charge they grow up really well.

Yeah, that's for sure.

Once in a while, they call and say, I've got a blowout on the Jayco Pass, and it's 104 degrees this afternoon.

And what'll I do?

You know,

but otherwise, it was very good.

I think it gave them a lot of, they didn't like it at the time.

And now, you know, it's, I hear from my

mature children in their late 30s, early 40s.

That was the best years of our lives.

You know,

oh, that's good.

Victor, we're at the end end of our time, unfortunately.

So we need to close off here.

Thank you for all of your work and your time that you spend with us.

And thank you, everybody, for listening.

I appreciate it very much.

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

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