The Spanish-American War, California's Water, and Epstein's Exploits with Universities

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You've joined the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

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

He is a scholar, columnist, essayist, political, and cultural critic, and also a provocateur of the left.

So you've joined the right show.

This is our weekend edition, and we talk about, we've been on a series of talking about wars.

And this edition, we will be talking about the Spanish-American War, but we'll start with a few current topics before that, and then we'll get to the Spanish-American War.

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

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

So Victor,

I understand in California that

The environmentalists have finally gotten through the destruction of four dams on the Klamath River.

And I was wondering what was going on there.

Doesn't seem wise, in other words.

Well, it was a state and federal effort.

And it's the start of an as they're inaugurating a new idea in the Pacific Northwest because they're going to follow it up in Washington, maybe later in California.

And so, Native American tribes on the lower Klamath River

want to have 19th century salmon runs.

And I mean there are salmon bridges around lakes and everything, but they feel that if the river flowed with 19th century velocity then and breadth and depth and volume, then these salmon would get big like man-size almost and go all the way up to the Klamath Mountains.

As if California A, didn't need recreation and record heat, and that means it doesn't need more reservoirs.

And people who live along those lakes, there's four of them, don't really enjoy it, so we can just tear them down.

And we don't really need to have people boat or, you know, go out and swim.

It's so nice and pleasant in the summers in California.

Or, you know, we don't really need hydroelectric clean power.

I mean, there's only 80,000 households that get electricity from this.

rather smaller dam.

And we really don't need flood control because we really haven't had flood oh yes we did this year didn't we uh terrible flooding and we don't really have drought oh yes we did the last three years and we but so the point is the purpose of reservoirs was flood control recreation hydroelectric and agriculture water to store water

and of course the challenge for the state California and the federal government was to lie about all of these things.

Well, the water, there's very little water irrigation use, or yes, these people have recreation, but they're kind of middle, upper-middle-class people.

And yes, there's hydroelectric, but it's only 70 or 80.

And when the dam is not full with water, because it doesn't work too well, as if solar and wind work 24 hours a day.

And,

you know, well, flood control won't really make that much difference.

That's how they work.

And the irony is they rub your snout in it because Californians passed a water bond with the idea, at least as the legislation was written on the ballot, that they would get more water storage.

And they're using almost, I don't know, half the money, over $200 million comes out of that bond.

So we voted,

yeah, I'm Victor.

I'm really a California voter.

I went into the polls and voted for a water bond so we can get, you know, Temperance Flat, Los Banos Grandes Reservoirs built.

But I really didn't mean that.

I really wanted to destroy and dynamite four dams at a cost of a half a billion dollars and the greatest destruction of dams in the history of dams.

That's what they're doing.

It's outrageous.

It is.

And they're going to call, you know, it's like, I keep quoting poor little Irish nationalist or Scottish nationalist,

Calgagus in Tacitus's

Agricola.

And he says, the problem with the Romans, they make a desert and call it peace.

The problem with the environmental is they blow up stuff and call it progress.

And that's what they do.

And it's part of a larger trend of de-civilization.

That's a good word to know.

We use decolonization.

Let's have a new word called de-civilization.

And it's everywhere with the left today.

Smash and grab.

Soils prosecutors don't decriminalize the statutes, defund the police, turn over large swaths of the inner city and downtown to homeless people.

Don't worry about defecation, urination, fornication.

etc.

right on the streets of the big brown flumes that go out into the bay in San Francisco and LA

and let the forest burn.

Don't know, don't preemptively go in there and let the logging companies clean up the forest.

You wouldn't want to do that.

Let's get rid of natural gas, go back to wood, you know, I don't know, just cold showers.

It's probably good for our Vegas nerve.

We don't need, you know, natural gas.

Let the Chinese build coal plants at two or three a month, but we'll cut back on clean burning.

That's what we're doing.

And we'll have rolling blackouts.

Yeah,

it's de-civilization.

You can see it in our schools where we're,

there's a new math statute that says basically we're not going to teach algebra in these hard courses because they're discriminatory against people of color.

How condescending is that?

Let's go back to the pre-algebraic age in school.

So we don't have, we'll go back to math as it existed in 1850.

And that will be really good.

And then when somebody in

the popular culture says, says, hey, my cell phone is not what I want,

or I downloaded something, it doesn't work, or I tried to play a video game and it was poor quality.

Well, you said, well, you got rid of algebra and calculus and math.

What'd you expect?

That's what they are.

They're de-civilizationers.

Yeah.

Back to those dams.

Did you know that the Pacific Corps ran those dams and that they pitched in millions of dollars.

And that Pacific Corps is actually owned by Warren Buffett or his

company.

So I thought that was kind of interesting that Warren Buffett had his foot in the destruction of the city.

I did know.

In fact, I did know that.

And I did know that they didn't say that publicly, but they said

that

the requirements for

salmon runarounds or bridges or

repertory or remediary efforts weren't going to be licensed.

And the dams were, some of them were old and they had to be relicensed.

And, oh, by the way, we're only providing this and that.

Yeah, of course.

But then the point is, isn't it, that

if you

will ask our listeners again, if you go into a bureaucracy, federal government, administrative state, like Interior Department or Water Resources, state or federal, and you see somebody there with a master's degree from Berkeley or UC Santa Cruz or something, environmental studies.

And then you go into Wall Street and you see somebody with an MBA from Harvard, Yale, Stanford, I don't know.

And then you go into finance or Warren Buffett's and you find this.

Do you think they're going to be any different anymore ideologically?

No.

No.

They're all the same.

They're all very, very protected species, whether it's job tenure and retirement in the case of high-ranking state employees or in the case of finance with money.

And they like to experiment on the middle class as if it's a white rat in a lab and they're the scientists.

And they tinker around with the middle class all the time.

Well, we'll just get rid of your homes on that lake.

It's your problem.

Oh, by the way, we'll just not clean up that forest and let it burn.

Your problem.

We're just going to outlaw hot water heaters and we'll lie and say that electricity will be cheaper, even though we're going to shut down nuclear plants and we're not going to allow any natural gas plants.

But we're not going to have any electricity after dark, but we're going to import coal-fed generated electricity from our neighbors.

That's how they think.

We're not rats for them.

Yeah.

Well, also for your listeners, I think I should

tell them that this seems to be what the environmentalists are hoping will be the model for destroying other dams in the future across the United States, that a dam or a few dam system

will

grow old.

It will come and they will start to put all these regulations that it costs too much for the company running them to make adjustments to keep the dams up.

And then that's what they're hoping to do.

That's one of the reasons that they use the word aging.

These are aging dams.

Everything is aging, by the way, but these are aging dams.

And therefore, if you make all of these requirements on them, then

the company, electric company, the hydroelectric companies or

whoever owns them or operates them

will agree that it's, and they'll probably be bought off too.

There'll probably be provisions in here where they get some kind of final payoff or something.

But remember, we're spending half a billion dollars to blow up stuff that's going to to give us less flood control,

less recreation avenues, less hydroelectric power, less water for possible irrigation.

That's what we're doing.

And we're doing it so we can have, in theory,

not fact, in theory, 19th century salmon runs.

That's what we're doing.

Just so long as everybody knows it, that's what we're doing.

And we're doing it across the board.

They're going to be more and more and more of it.

They don't care.

They don't really care.

We're going backwards.

And

people who keep voting these people in deserve what they get.

And

that's what we're getting.

Meanwhile, we're getting a lot.

21% of California lives below the poverty line.

And two out of every three welfare recipients in the United States live in California.

We have over half the nation's homelessness.

So we've got a large, you know, 65% of all births in California are medi-cal.

So we've got a large poor population, and they depend on affordable energy, plentiful, clean water.

They don't like to be flooded out.

We live about, I live, 15 miles away from a new Tulare Lake basin.

It's about 100 square miles of flooded agricultural land because we didn't build enough flood control reservoirs in the past.

I think they're going to take the entire California Water Project and the Central Valley Project and start to dismantle it all.

I just wish they'd start with Hetch Hetchy.

There's some left-wing nuts that always talk about blowing it up because John Muir, you know, told us that Hetch Hetchy

Valley was more was more picturesque or scenic than Yosemite Valley.

And Yosemite, yes.

And that aqueduct, a pipeline, goes all the way about 140 miles from Hetch hetchy right into san francisco supplies about 60 percent of san francisco's water in some of the surrounding communities and then the other pipelines coming from the california aqueduct they fill up crystal springs they should just stop all that if they really had the convictions they said you know what

we've got to stop hetch hetchy and we've got to stop shasta and orville and then we don't need their dam water take your dam water we don't want it

badges

stinking water get rid of it you know

we don't need no no stinking badges.

We don't need no, you're stinking water.

We want scenic rivers and indigenous people fishing, and we don't need it.

We can drink our urine, and that's what they, that's what they're,

but they will never do that.

No, it will become the Hetch Hetchy is a glorious old dam and artifact of a glorious civilization.

Yeah, exactly.

As long as it keeps giving water to Nancy Pelosi and Diane Feinstein's home, Gavin Newsom.

Well, Victor, let's turn to Jeffrey Epstein.

He hasn't been in the news very much, but

there are cases going on.

And so every once in a while, a news story pops up.

But I have to say, The Nation, which is

a very left-leaning magazine, has a article on Epstein.

And it started out that Epstein gave lots of money to universities, educational institutions.

And in fact, for example, between 1998 and 2007, Epstein donated 9 million plus to supporting Harvard faculty and programs.

So I was reading this article.

I was thinking, oh, wow, they're going to try to make Jeffrey Epstein look like this great guy donating to all of these universities and bringing in people who also gave millions.

So he introduced people that would give millions.

But then it got down to, wow, we're going to look at Leon Black and Les Les or Leslie Wexner.

Leon Black hired Epstein as his financial manager.

And he was also hired on by Les, hired, quote unquote, on by Les Wexner.

And both of them, one giving $158 million to Jeffrey Epstein and Les Wexner gave 200 million.

I was just like shocked for you couldn't tell what.

So Jeffrey Epstein was getting lots and lots, millions and millions from

individuals who had a lot of money.

And I was wondering your reflections on the whole Epstein scene in general.

I don't think we've heard the whole story yet about his exploits.

Well, I don't think he was known in his earlier career as a brilliant bonds trader or financial investor or hedge fund operator.

No, I mean, he dropped out of college.

He taught,

I think he taught at a private school in New York, and he was known as a big

flirtatious teacher, but he went into that,

what was the name of it, went bankrupt, Bear Stern.

He went bankrupt.

And he was a floor guy.

And then he started his own little firm, and he had a propensity of seeking out people that had trouble with the law, you know what I mean?

Khashoggi and people like that with a lot of money.

And he got to be, he got to

he got a reputation that he was willing to work with anybody.

And then he started to,

God, I don't know what he, I can't remember.

Remember, he had when they arrested him, they had all those stories about he had fake names and passports, and he was kind of a cloak and dagger guy.

He bragged that he was an intelligence agent.

And then he got into,

and you mentioned Wexner, he got in with these people

that were very powerful.

And once you get in with that crowd and you're seen at parties, and everybody thinks you wouldn't be at this party of elites unless somebody had vetted you, and they don't care that you were never vetted.

Just the fact you're there gave you fee days.

And then he started to

invest and rub shoulders with people.

And suddenly,

and he had this problem all along, people knew about it, that he cultivated and groomed young girls.

And that was, you know, in 2006, they caught him and they gave him that Miami deal.

But my point is that

he transmogrified into something we're sure we're still not sure what it was.

You know what I mean?

When you have this, Leon Black is in the news, the billionaire investor, but there were a list of these very, very wealthy, prominent people that were paying him huge amounts of money for consulting.

He didn't have any expertise in

tax strategy.

Black gave him $150 million or something or more.

And then there were these huge donations from these people that were flying on the

Epstein Express down to his Caribbean,

I don't know what that was, stronghold fortress.

And he did that in New York.

And so you get the impression

that

he would befriend people, especially people in trouble, and say, I know all these people.

I think he even had an office for a while at Harvard.

He did, yes.

Yes.

And then he would

be surrounded by beautiful young women, and he would have

this Maxwell person, sell Maxwell.

She would groom for him and find people that were vulnerable and young, often underage, bring them in, feed them, support them, teach them the arts of seduction, I guess.

Prostitution is a more vulgar term, but that's what some of them were engaged in, coerced or not.

And then he would get very powerful people to visit, and he'd be surrounded by women, and one thing led to another.

And these things were often photographed and chronicled and detailed.

So

the obvious conclusion, and that's what you're referencing in the Nation magazine, is that he had the goods on a lot of powerful people.

Yeah, and university people, that's what I guess was the big surprise.

Intellectuals,

intellectuals, intellectuals as well.

Anybody who took a ride on that plane, there was no reason to take a ride down to the Caribbean.

When he got arrested, and of course, I didn't know how they were going to kill him.

You didn't either, but our listeners didn't.

But our listeners and everybody knew they were going to kill him.

I mean, they were going to get rid of him because this time he was not going to get off because his latest revelations dovetailed with the Me Too.

Remember that?

So

everybody was re-examining the Harvey Weinstein behavior of years or the Kevin Spaceys, and he came up, and he was the most egregious offender.

And so you knew he was not going to get off this time as people started to distance themselves from him.

And he was angry about that.

And he was headed for a lifetime in prison.

And so he,

why did he have all of those video cameras and all those recordings?

And why did Giselle Maxwell kind of wink and nod that she had records?

And

she has not been in danger yet.

I think a lot of people who would like to do to her what they may have done to Jeffrey Epstein won't touch her because I think she's made precautions that she has information.

That's just speculation on my part.

That will be available upon her death, right?

Has she said that?

It can't be traced now, but will be, yeah.

And

people,

why would these people allow him to come in and manage for a fee their huge fortunes and without that type of world-class expertise?

Or they gave him, or they paid him millions of dollars.

He was worth billions of dollars, supposedly.

And so, in some ways, he was just a con artist that was a blackmailer.

And that's what we don't know because

we just can't figure out how someone with such a terrible reputation and

these known pathologies was able to ingratiate himself with these very, very powerful people.

And,

you know, and that they had this weird partnership, the two of them, Giselle Maxwell and him.

And, you know, he, gosh, he,

he was, he knew Michael Bloomberg.

He knew the Kennedys.

He knew actors, I think, you know, he knew,

I think

George Stephanopoulos, even I saw that once.

He knew everybody.

And he knew Donald Trump.

And

I think Trump said he has, he's surrounded by beautiful women on the younger side.

Remember that?

Trump said.

Yeah,

this article said that a Harvard professor, Martin Nowak, received $6.5 million to

Nowok's program from Epstein.

And the program was called Program for Evolutionary Dynamics.

And I just was like, I wonder what kind of evolutionary dynamics they were studying.

I hope it wasn't the evolution of the position of women in society, that's for sure.

Yeah.

And I think

we don't know how much money he had.

Maybe it was 500 million, maybe it was a billion, 2 billion, but we don't know was he making 10, 20, 30 million a year?

And why was he being paid?

Why was he being paid in a way that's not normal for normal investors and financial analysts?

And the answer is that they don't surround themselves with sexy young girls that are pre-pubescent or underage.

And that's what he, that was his trademark.

And he's basically said,

come with me and I'll have a good weekend.

We'll fly down to my place.

There's no windows.

They went in there and they had certain sexual activities, apparently, which was recorded.

And then he knew that if he ever got in trouble, he knew the type of people who had access to

And we, you and I in the prior podcast were talking about how Hunter Biden was given preferential treatment.

We'll just put that on steroids because these people were even wealthier than Hunter and they had more access, perhaps, perhaps, maybe even the Bidens.

But the point is,

our system is porous like that.

And he knew that.

So he was developing these contacts.

And then, if anybody got in trouble, he could leverage exemption, which

he did do in his first run-in with the law.

He got just a suspended sentence and some house monitoring, very light sentence for the types of crimes he committed in Florida.

And

so

I think it was

basically a shakedown blackmail operation.

At least it transmogrified into that.

And we're never going to know the full extent of it unless there's somebody out there that he passed off these videos to and everything.

He did leave a huge compensation fund.

I mean, he didn't, but the estate was tapped by authorities.

It's in escrow.

So I know that they're paying out millions of dollars to these young women who are suing.

As they come forward, yes.

That would be very problematic in itself if you were someone who had sexual relations

under coercion as groomed by Jeffrey Epstein by a very, very powerful person.

You did.

Let's say Prince Andrew, yeah, for example.

It would be very difficult to come forward because you don't know the extent of their influence to make your life miserable.

Yeah.

All right, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk about the Spanish-American War.

Stay with us and we'll be back.

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Victor's on the weekends, we always do a, or so far we've been doing military history, and we're on the Spanish-American War, a war that lasted, it looks like a little more than three months, three and a half months, in 1898.

And the Spanish was in the throes of the end of its empire and losing just the very last of it.

And I was wondering your reflections on the war

in general.

And Alyssa, that famous quote from the Secretary Secretary of State.

Hey, it's a splendid little war.

I think he meant by then that there was a lot of people died of disease, you know, a couple thousand on the United States and, you know, six or seven times that on the part of the Spanish.

But as far as actual combat, I think the total number of people who were dead in Guam or the Philippines or Cuba was less than a thousand.

So it was a very brief 14 weeks, and it wasn't particularly violent, and it marked the formal end to the Spanish Empire overseas.

After that, this empire that really grew up with the discovery of the New World was over with.

The Reconquista, the Counter-Reformation,

the unification of Spain,

the Columbus and Cortez and Pizarro, all of that stuff.

and all the way in Asia and the New World, that was over with.

And the Philippines were liberated.

Cuba was liberated.

I think they had that Teller Amendment where they were not only liberated by the United States, but believe it or not, there was a provision in the Senate that said the United States would not gain control and not rule Cuba in the aftermath of its liberation.

It was modified a little bit by saying, but they can't bring in another country or something like that, or they can't be a hostile power in our hemisphere.

But it was pretty idealistic.

And the weird thing about it, you know, when you were in high school, you always learned about yellow journalism from Pulitzer and Hearst that genned up the war.

And the USS Maine, that battlecruiser, first-generation armored battlecruiser, blew up in Havana Harbor, and nobody really knew how it happened.

We were supposedly told that it was blown up by a Spanish mine

or saboteur.

But, you know, it was, remember, the Maine became the Pulitzer Hearst motto to get us in war.

And McKinley, as kind of an old-fashioned

Republican, kind of an isolation, didn't want to go.

So

it was an idealistic war, is what I'm trying to say.

And there was a lot of currents that led into it.

that

we are not an imperialistic power like the Europeans.

This is a European power, and this is our Monroe Doctrine domain, and Spain is here, and they shouldn't be here.

And we have a lot of sugar and other interest in Cuba, tobacco, and

it's our friend, i.e.

dependent.

And so there was economic, cultural, military, security issues.

And it was right.

It was really the first big war after the Civil War.

So there were a couple of very prominent black

companies or brigades, I think, that fought very well.

Kind of racially condescending, but maybe

not factual, that blacks did not suffer because they had developed, and white people as well from the South had developed some resistance to malaria, yellow fever, unlike northern counterparts that had never experienced tropical diseases.

So they were very prominent in that war, heroically so.

Booker T.

Washington played kind of a big role and was trying to emphasize the the role of black soldiers.

He's a very underappreciated person.

That autobiography, Up from Slavery, I read it when I was 10 years old.

It was quite fascinating, brilliant book.

But he was reviled in the age of civil rights.

And I think maybe he'll be reappreciated.

But he was very prominent in wanting black soldiers to be appreciated for their role.

And they played a prominent role.

And then Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders.

You know, the Marianas, I have a little bit of of interest in that because my father flew from Tinyon and there was Guam, Tinyon,

that were the whole Marianas site plan, I suppose, were all three

de facto absorbed.

The Philippines, the tragedy of the Philippines, went damn the torpedoes and Admiral Dewey and all that stuff, and we sank two big fleets.

We sank the Spanish Caribbean and the

Pacific fleet in the Philippines, or at least a lot of them.

And then

even though Spain had had European-style battleships that could have blown some of our ships out of the water, but they didn't make it in time.

And the war was adjudicated in Paris.

And I think we paid them an indemnity, probably worth $700 or $800 million

in today's currency.

But the tragedy, it led into when we were in the Philippines, we were going to be the

what's the word, paternalistic caretaker and shepherd them to consensual government.

But But there were so many different religious and tribal fault lines that the Moros and

kind of Islamic peoples and Christian and everything, it was kind of a mess.

And we thought we could go in there as a benevolent dictator and just settle stuff.

And we were in there for years.

It was horrible.

Americans were considered Yankee imperialists.

That was really the beginning of the idea, since we had no prior colonial history that we were imperialists.

But we went into the Philippines and made it a protectorate, albeit with the idea that we're going to give it its freedom as soon as it's viable.

But

there's a little micro-history that grew out of that, too.

I used to get stories.

I had a grandfather that fought in World War I, and his training rifle he bought with him

in Fort Lewis, Washington.

It was a 30-40 Craig.

I used to call it Craig Jorgensen, but it was the precursor to the 1903

Springfield.

And my other uncle had a 1903 Springfield, which really kicked, shot a 30-06 shot, kind of.

But it was weird.

It loaded from the side and not top.

And it didn't really have a magazine, but it was considered a smokeless powder.

It was the first high-velocity, I don't know, 2,000 feet a second or something, first high-velocity accurate gun.

I used to shoot it a lot.

It had a very large slug.

And we also would shoot my other uncle's 1903.

And that was something else.

That replaced it.

But both those guns came out of Hispanic, well, put it this way, the 3040 Craig

was

a big

advance on the earlier 1893 Springfield.

I never saw one of those.

Those were black powder guns.

But it was very slow firing.

I can attest to that.

It's very hard to load and eject compared to its replacement, which didn't come until after the war.

But my point is, the Spanish had something called the Spanish Mauser, and the Mauser brothers had built

a very good rifle, which was copied or was a precursor to the 1903 Springfield that they used all the way up until the eve of World War II.

Very accurate, very deadly.

But

the irony is, we went into Cuba with Craig Jorgensens,

or I think they were, they call them Craigs, and they were not nearly as good as the Maoza or the Spanish have.

And so we kind of paid a small price.

And when you look at that war, it's very reminiscent of our ill-preparedness in World War I.

and World War II.

We didn't really understand tropical medicine.

We didn't really know how to transport them there.

We didn't give them good supplies.

The Spanish had better rifles than we did.

And they had two capital, two or three capital ships.

Had they come in time, they would have blown some of our ships out of the water.

And then we reacted and won the war.

Same thing with World War I, same thing with World War II.

We always do that, kind of like the Russians, only we don't lose as many people as the Russians.

We start out ill-prepared, inept, and then we

always do it just in time.

And after World War II, we said we'd never do that again, and we were going to be permanently in a deterrent mode.

And I think that had been true for most of the Cold War until the Obama administration.

Trump was a hiatus.

He rearmed.

But, gosh, when you read the status of the submarine fleet or the number of capital ships that we have or

30,000 short in the Army, 40,000 in the whole armed services, if you count the Air Force and the Navy shortfalls.

the political agenda, you get the impression that the military is sort of

it was on the eve of the Spanish-American War.

You know, when everything was weird about that war,

there was kind of an ecomenicalism.

When Sherman went through Georgia, there was a cavalry commander, I think his name was Wheeler, and he was kind of like

the

he wasn't as famous as Jeb Stewart

or

Nathan Bedford Forrest, but he harassed Sherman.

I think he called him the devil

Wheeler.

Is that his name?

I think so.

Anyway, and a lot of Southern generals,

Fitzhugh Lee, they were still alive.

If they had been 30, you know, at the end of the,

say, in 1865,

they were in their 60s.

And there were some people that were still there.

And so it was kind of a, it was played up in the paper that the South had been very valuable in winning the war.

They came from a climate that was both

proximate to the climate in Cuba, and it was geographically nearer, and it was good to have the South because of these

multifaceted advantages that the Southerners had.

And it was really the first time in 30 years that America was supposedly back together again.

And that also should remind everybody that

it seems inexplicable that we named bases after incompetents like Braxton Bragg, right?

But

we did that so that the Southern hold on the House appropriations for military expenditures would be in favor of rearming in a permanent fashion, both before and after World War I.

And then, of course, the climate would, you could have outdoor maneuvers

more months of the year than in the North.

But there were practical reasons, I'm saying, to turn over the administration and the implementation and even the naming of those military bases to Southerners in exchange for having them support, which they were very skeptical of,

you know, supporting internal improvements.

That had been sort of

one of the causes of the Civil War.

And they were very skeptical of the power of the federal government, especially in terms of the military.

But one of the reasons that we were able to make those bases and permanently rearm and have an expansionary peacetime army was because we allowed Southern legislatures to

really create bases in their own jurisdictions and name them and stuff.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, I was looking,

isn't the

war, the nature of the home front on the war sort of a precursor to World War I in the sense that, as you said,

it's called yellow journalism, but these newspapers,

Hearst newspaper, I forget what it was called, but anyways, and I think even the New York Times, they ginned up national support.

And it was broadly nationally supported by the United States citizens, I think, to go into this war.

And I think you see the same thing when we get into World War I, that these nations really get behind their leaders when

there is a decision to go to war.

You don't see so much dissent prior to World War I.

Is that true?

Yeah, I think so.

I mean,

I've quoted that before, but there's a very famous passage in the historian Herodotus that marks that irony.

When

we talked about this when I was giving the initial lecture on the Persian Wars, when

this delegates from Ionia come to mainland Greece and they argue they need help, they go to the two preeminent powers, Sparta and Athens.

And they think that

it'll be very

problematic for this cosmopolitan seafaring country to get involved in a land war in Asia vis-a-vis the Spartans that are warlike.

But of course, the Spartans are critical.

They're oligarchic.

They talk about money, distance, and then all of a sudden it's on to Ionia, kind of like onto Ukraine and Herodotus at Athens.

And

immediate

immediate support.

And he kind of dryly remarks, it's easier to

persuade 30,000 Athenians in the assembly to go to war than it is,

you know, a few thousand Spartans.

And that's true.

You can see it with Ukraine.

I mentioned once cynically that when I walked through my Stanford University neighborhood, when I'm there during the week, I would see this house doesn't support racism, or this house is, I don't know, anti-Trump.

And now they have Ukraine flags.

It's almost like it's

the new cause celeb that's just taken hold.

And so when you had Hearst,

I think it was the New York Journal and then Pulis or the New York World.

And one of the ways they gemmed up circulation was

who could find a more dastardly story about Spanish imperialists and concentration camps.

That was a big cause in the Spanish movement.

They have camps where they move the population.

And it was coterminous or simultaneous with the Boer War, at least some of

the early ideas of what the British would have to do in the Boer War.

And so concentration camp became the yellow journalism.

And then Hearst

would say, the Maine was blown up.

And we've had about five investigations.

The irony is, I think the last one that they did suggested, National Geographic suggested that the explosion came from the sides of the ship were blown inward, not outward.

Oh, I thought it was the other way.

That's what everybody I always grew up with, that it was just an internal combustion.

Combustion, yeah.

Yeah, that just spontaneously blew up, and we blame the Spanish, and it was all yellow journalism and lies.

But I think one of the more recent said that some of the plates that they found showed

propulsion inward as if they hit a mine or if somebody has saboteur.

But I'll have to check that.

Maybe some of the readers know better than I do.

But that was the idea of

how

they created a war hysteria.

And they did the same thing with the Lusitania.

Not that it was illegitimate in World War I

and then Pearl Harbor.

All of these were

well, they had those divers on the Lusitania that went down and they found, in fact, military arms on the Lusitania.

That's the last.

That's all the American project.

No, no, that was a scuba diving

to explore it.

Oh, they knew it at the time?

Oh, yeah.

There were records on the Lusitania that showed that there were war arms being

trafficked between, yeah, they were buying North American

munitions and,

you know,

other things as well, supplies, food, et cetera, for the war effort.

And the Germans knew that, and they announced unlimited submarine warfare.

And that was bound to happen.

And Wilson was looking for a reason.

You know, he said he wasn't, he was like FDR, we're not going to go into war.

And he wanted to be the progressive.

He wasn't like Vozel.

He was a far

less,

less capable president than FDR.

And he was an out and out racist.

No doubt about it.

And he put back the integration of the armed forces for a generation.

But anyway, once he got into it, he wanted to craft a utopian peace scheme under the League of Nations.

So he was really the first progressive nut we've had as president.

And the irony, of course, was that when I was in college, he was a liberal heartthrob that you could not say a word about.

He was beloved, the Princeton School of Public Policy, except Wilson School, excuse me, at Princeton, the Wilson School, and now his name is he's persona non grata.

They've Trotskyized him out of all the universities,

George Floyd.

Yeah.

Do you know, back to the Spanish-American War, do you have reflections on the Filipino commander Emilio Aguinaldo, who seemed to secure a large area for the United States and then fought against the United States as an insurgent after the war?

And I was wondering if he had any thoughts about his skills.

He was very skilled.

And

he had thought that in the manner that we had told the Cubans, the Teller Amendment that I mentioned earlier, that

after the liberation of Cuba, they would be independent.

After the liberation of the Philippines, it would be independent.

And

in both cases, I think

the reason that they differed was the United States had the wherewithal in that area to keep Europeans out.

But in the case of the Spanish, I mean, I just mentioned the Spanish Mauser.

It was a German rifle, and it was a superb rifle, but the Germans were very, very interested.

They had

almost, you know, they had been in

very tense relations with France and Britain about colonialism.

They felt that they had been cheated out of North African colonies, cheated out of Central African colonies, cheated out of Asian and Pacific Ocean colonies.

And they were intriguing with the Filipinos to

they were helping the Spaniards.

They were giving giving them munitions.

But when the Spaniards started to fade, they felt that they would come into that vacuum.

And the United States thought, well, we're not going to liberate the Philippines and kick out the Spanish and then go home and let the Germans take over this strategically important place.

So they

didn't do what they said they were going to do in the case of Cuba, although they did.

The Americans did say that they were going to shepherd them as a protectorate on the way to independence, which they did honor right after the World War II.

But we were, that developed a very close relationship with Filipino fighters, and those relationships,

despite the Philippine-American war that

followed, where it was

horrific war, I think, you know, as I said, we lost, I think, 10,000 dead and thousands of Filipino.

And that was, all these guns are known.

I mean, all these wars have their guns that become iconic and emblematic of them.

But that was the 1911 1911.45 automatic supposedly that was created because the Americans could not stop Islamic Filipino insurgents who would take

types of drugs,

uppers, so to speak, and then put tourniquets on their limbs.

So if they were shot by a.32 or 38 caliber, they could still kill or they found Americans that supposedly, that was yellow journalism as well, had massive stab wounds on their corpses, but the enemy had three or four bullet holes, but kept on.

So they needed an automatic handgun with a huge slug, and that's where the 45 automatic came in, which

when I was in bed in Iraq, I saw a guy

wearing one.

And they were very popular in World War II.

And as I mentioned earlier with my ancestor, Victor Hansen, I had that strange letter where he's writing right on the eve of the Okinawa invasion.

My grandparents, he's asking them if they can send him in 1945,

a 1911-45 Calvin.

He draws a picture of it because they were Swedish.

I guess they didn't,

I weren't acquainted with American firearms, but they went up to Fresno or to a pawn shop and bought one and mailed it to him.

That's incredible.

And they do and have a letter about he sends them $50 to Western Union.

Yeah.

I don't know if he ever got it.

Anyway.

Anyway, last question, because on leadership, we usually talk about a

military leader or two in these wars.

Was there anything?

I know Teddy Roosevelt and his rough riders, but that always seems sort of kind of iconic rather than real.

And I was wondering if you had any reflections on any of the commanders

of American commanders.

Yeah, there was some, the person who became very famous was George Dewey, and he was,

he wasn't young, you know what I mean?

When the war started, he was 60 years old or so, and

he was the hero of Manila Bay when he went into

bringing the American fleet into Manila and

stop land troops, and he was in charge of the protection of it.

They called mines then torpedoes, you know.

And so he was

famously when he was told that

he couldn't, this is kind of ironic because in World War II, there were times when the Marines were kind of at Pelelu, for example, they were dumped off Tarawa, maybe as well.

They were dumped off way

short of their embarkation because the Navy was afraid that they were going to

They were, you know, they were going to hit mines.

But

Dewey was very famous for just full speed ahead.

He had a very iconic quote, George Dewey did.

Remember, he said, you may fire when ready, Gridley.

So it's that calmness.

It was kind of like Admiral Nelson calmness under fire.

You may fire when ready.

It's kind of like Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo.

He said, My God, I think you've lost your leg.

Somebody next to him went a cannonball took it off.

Oh, gosh.

It's that idea of calmness under fire.

And

so

that made him very famous.

And

he and Teddy Roosevelt emerged as the big American heroes

out of that war.

Yeah.

Well, it was the end of the Spanish Empire and the beginning of the, as they say in history books, the beginning of the American Empire, such as it was,

which was not very much.

The Philippines, Guam, and

Guam, and there's another island out in the South Pacific.

It's in the Marianas.

It was Guam,

Saipon, and Tinyan.

I don't think there was anybody on Guam, though.

I think we just kind of sailed in there post facto, and a couple of guys said, ah, the Spanish aren't even around.

Okay, you're ours now.

It was kind of,

there was no major fighting in that theater.

But that's always, you know, they always, you know how you have this periodization in history where you

say the great great Pentacante Aetea, the great 50 years of the Athenian Empire began

in 479

and it ended

with the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in 431.

And they always say the American century, the American century started

at the end of the Spanish-American War.

And then it really ended, to tell you the truth,

kind of like, I don't know, some people end it in 1968 with Vietnam or they end it with the oil crisis of pick your year, 1973 or 1974, 1980,

or the stagflation.

But

it's the sense that the Gilded Age, it was the Gilded Age.

We got over the panic of 1893.

We just won a war against a European power.

We had dynamic people, young like Roosevelt.

He was, I think he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and he went out there and fought.

And Dewey, and he was a very high-ranking officer.

So it was the idea that everybody pitched in.

They got swarmed when they announced the, we only had about 20,000 troops.

It was a constable area.

It wasn't even an army.

And they said, hey, they blew up the main, everybody.

We need troops.

And I think about, what, 200 or 300,000 people enlisted?

Wow.

And they went to god-awful places where they had no idea what malaria and dysentery and

yellow fever were.

And they gave them sort of inferior weapons and said, go to it.

And they did.

Did we get, was the Puerto Rico, did it become a protectorate as well?

At that, I can't remember.

It wasn't fought over like, but it was with the

flight of the Spanish, it became a protectorate and then a commonwealth.

And

we had a lot closer ties than

with the Cubans.

There was a greater American presence there.

Cuba had been the jewel of the Spanish Empire and the New World.

That was where Cortez, for example, left to go into Tenochtitlan.

That was the governor or the

viceroy of the New World and the Spanish Empire for centuries.

It was based in Cuba.

That was one of the first places they settled, and there were very few indigenous people there compared to elsewhere, so they were able to very quickly get security and it was very centrally located it was right near the United States and Florida and it was in right in the center of the Caribbean and that became sort of

a very legendary Spanish hole that was where if you're going to fight Spain and the New World

That's where you go.

And we got drawn into it because, of course, it was 90 miles from Florida.

And we had, as I said, tobacco and sugar interests, tourism, all of that, even at that early date.

But more importantly, it was kind of an idealistic,

idealistic,

even Catholics that you would think that would side with the Spanish, they were pro-Cuban.

It was the idea that Europeans have colonies, Americans liberate people from colonies.

And that was the idea.

And it was very, and it kind of soured by the time

we stayed on in the Philippines and began the Filipino-American War, which was not like the Spanish-American War at all.

It wasn't quick.

It wasn't bloodless, basically.

It was messy and long and a precursor to more like Vietnam.

Yeah, and America at that time had a very large, I don't know, group party,

the Anti-Imperialist League, I think it was called.

And it had a pretty broad following.

And it must have been because that war in the Philippines was so long drawn out and brutal hunt yeah I mean it was the beginning really of the and I mean I shouldn't say that there were people I think Thoreau right

was very much against the Mexican war Mexican war Lincoln was against it I think Grant who fought in it said that it was a waste of time

and it was a bad war.

And Sherman,

he was against the Mexican War for, you know, for racist points of view.

He said, the last thing we want is Mexico.

But

I don't know.

I think when you think of,

and I'm doing it by memory, but I think it was Mark Twain that had that long poem called The War Prayer.

And he wrote that in,

I guess it was in between the Spanish-American War and right during the Filipino-American War, Philippine-American War.

And then it appeared later after he died.

But

it's a very anti-war,

kind of a prose poem.

And it was used.

The only reason I'm, I'm not, I mean, I know a lot of Mark Twain's works, but I didn't know that very well until I went to UC Santa Cruz and during the Vietnam protest.

I remember somebody read it out loud.

It was kind of,

there were pictures of Mark Twain in the 1960s with, you know,

evil war, you know, his picture, and then a Vietnam slogan, give peace a chance,

superimposed on his picture and on the idea that he had been the first vocal intellectual to oppose a colonial war.

And that was from that, that's where

he became kind of disliked in America by the establishment, but kind of a hero to the

youth movement by opposing vigorously that war on the idea that Americans are not colonialist.

There was a very strong movement in America, and I guess it's because of the whole self-determination from the American Revolution forward.

It probably would be the biggest influence that

we had so much.

We were not going to do to others what they had done.

When you break away from England and say, no taxation without representation, then you turn around and do that to other people.

It doesn't work very well.

So that was the idea that we were not going to be a colonial power.

When Obama went on his apology tour, you remember he kept telling everybody, we're culpable, but we're not completely colonial powers when he apologized to almost every country he bumped into.

That was the idea that America didn't do that.

And that's kind of a strong, we saw it in Pat Buchanan when he ran against, I think it was 19.

Wow, in 1992, he primaried George H.W.

Bush.

He said, a republic, not an empire.

We're not colonialists.

We don't want to go all over the world and slay dragons.

I think that was Adams' phrase.

Optional wars to slay imaginary threats.

And then that's sort of what made Donald Trump resonate.

That was not just China and not just

MAGA, make America great again, but also we're not going to have optional wars in the Middle East.

We're going to be energies self-sufficient.

And we're not going to go fight wars and take out the lower middle classes and have them go die in some god-awful places where we don't win.

And we're mired, and we're called all sorts of names for trying to be naively nation-builders.

That was a very powerful message that got him elected.

And it's still central to the MAGA identity.

And

it's just bitterly resented as isolationist.

And it's not.

It's not.

I don't think so.

I mean, after 9-11, you could argue that the United States had good reasons to go after places that had harbored bin Laden, but

the idea that we were going to be dependent on the Middle East in perpetuity for oil and be over there all the time

wasn't a winning strategy at all.

No.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take our last break and then come back and talk a little bit about agriculture.

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

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

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Please come join us there.

Victor, so we often, at the end of this weekend edition, we talk a little bit about agriculture and you usually have a topic you want to talk on.

And I know that you were saying solitude and the decision-making process.

And so go ahead.

I mean, every one of us makes decisions that we have to live with for the rest of our lives.

whether to go to college, what major, what job to take, what job to turn down, the friends you each, you don't know it at the time, but when you look back, and I'm going to be 70 in September, when you look back, you can see that those decisions

really were life-changing for good or evil.

But the thing about them was they were always collective, or you were not necessarily entirely in charge of your own destiny.

You worked as a professor.

So there were, I guess you could say,

guardrails.

You could get tenure.

You worked at the DMV.

You'd have lifelong support.

You inherited a lot lot of money.

So if you ran a company, you weren't, there were people

in business that make decisions that they're entirely responsible, but they're dealing with business.

The problem with agriculture is you're dealing with business and you're dealing with nature and you're alone.

If you're a self, not a corporate employee, but if you own the land and you're responsible to the families that live on it, and you have to make those decisions and you're in solitude.

And if you make the wrong decision, you pay for years.

Now, what do I mean by that?

Well, I'll give you one example.

We had some very good land in Kingsburg, and we had planted two crops

when we converted it from the, it had been rented out.

We wanted it back.

There were four of us at the time.

So we decided we want

a new plum.

So we went to a local nursery, and this guy said, this is going to be the best plum.

It is early like the Red Butte plum, but it tastes like a Santa Rosa.

And it's called a Royal Red.

And he showed us this row of trees and they were just covered, covered with royal res.

And we did all this investment.

Well, we'll bow, we'll plant 1,500 acres at 120 trees.

I mean, 15, excuse me, 15 acres, you know, and you're getting up to

17, 18, 1,900 trees.

And then we said, and then there was this grape.

It was called the Royal Ruby Seedless.

Red Seedless, Royal Red Seed, Ruby Seed, all these different names people had.

And it was better tasting than the flame grape, which was a great grape.

And it came later in the year, so it could go into cold storage.

And we checked it out.

We looked at it.

It looked great.

So we made a decision to plant this ranch and those two things.

And each of us made decisions along the way that were solitary, how one person would make a decision what type of trellis or how far you park but my point is that royal red turned out to be sterile

I mean

that guy may have had and then when I went back to complain the nursery was closed

I couldn't find anybody I said wait a minute so every time I went in the bank they said hey did your plum set I said nope did you get more bees yep Did you try to do anything?

Yeah, I sprayed sugar water in the spray.

I cleaned out the spray wing for two days and I sprayed the whole thing with honey and water, and it didn't get one damn bee.

They don't like the taste of that damn plum, or it's sterile.

But you'd get these big,

and then every once in a while you'd get these big, beautiful plums, not enough to break even, but they were beautiful.

And they were not like a red butte.

They were like a late Santa, early Santa Rosa.

They were just fragile.

They would look beautiful at 8 in the morning.

And if you didn't pick them right then,

if they started to turn red by 4 in the clock, they were purple and mush.

and they ruined the whole packing belt.

It was just like packing jam.

And so then you thought, wow, we have the red seedless.

The thing about them was they had these huge bunches two feet tall, and they were packed, and they were delicious, but they were so tightly packed.

And it was so late in the year that you get one little nick by a gnat, a bird, or mold, and the whole thing would rot.

And you had to go in there.

You had to pull leaves by hand so that the air could get in there.

You had to thin the bunches.

You had to use a jabrelic spray.

You had to put Botran and all of Captan and all these deadly fungicides on it.

You had to tear in your water.

If you didn't have drip and you ran the water, you could not let that water sit.

You had to take a sulfur machine and not only sulfur every week, you had to put sulfur on the berm so that you wouldn't get mold down.

It was just a mess.

And you'd get these beautiful things.

You'd say, this year, look at those bunches.

And you would spend $8,000, $9,000 an acre.

And between those two crops,

it was really the reasons we went broke.

And you would be alone trying to figure it out.

And you'd say, I got this idea.

I'm going to put this mixture of this

fungicide in with this one.

And then it would, you know, it wouldn't work, or you'd waste money.

Or it was just like that with farming everywhere.

You had to make these decisions decisions on what to plant.

And then, if you screwed up, the people who suffered were, you know, you'd look at your kids and say, I'll get braces for you next year.

You couldn't get braces because you were in hock.

Like, you knew you'd start over, and then you'd lose the confidence of the backer, the banker, and for good reason, you screwed up.

The same thing about, you know, when picking.

I remember I was thinking,

wow,

we picked

early

and we were so paranoid about picking grapes for raisins.

We picked on the 30,

22nd, excuse me, of August, and the sugar was 18.

It should have been 20.

And an old guy drove by and he said, I love those old farmers.

He said, hey, what's your name?

Victor something?

I said, yeah.

I said, you're picking on the 23rd of August.

You got a brain in that head of yours?

And I said, why?

He said, do you have 20 sugar on those trees?

I said, No, but I'm not going to get them rained on like last year.

Well, you're going to have weedies.

You know what weedies are?

They aren't going to be raisins, mister.

In 10 days, it's going to be 110.

They have no sugar in those grapes, and they're just going to dry up like weedies.

You better hope there's not a big wind.

It'll blow your whole quad.

And he drove off.

And

sure enough, I had all these intricate things figured out.

I need 100,000 trays at this many trays per ton, and I can pay the bank back, and I'll end up with a $9,000.

and guess what it got a hundred and eleven

and those things did not have enough sugar and that crop went from 190 tons to 140 tons

in about six hours it just scorched them and then the next year

i thought can't do this

and so we've got to pick late Let's get 20.

And everybody'd say, well, there's two hurricanes.

The same guy came by.

I won't mention his name.

There's going to be a hurricane.

You were kind of right last year.

You got 100 and something tons, didn't you?

I said, yeah, but I'm going to wait to, oh, you're going to lose it.

So we waited, waited, 20 sugar, September 6th.

And they were the most beautiful sweet raisins.

In between every row, it was tray to tray.

It was two and a half ton, three tons per acre.

It would be 240 tons.

It was great.

And then it got a little cool, and then it got a little cooler.

And then the biggest northern and southern storm collided.

It rained and it just destroyed it.

And we saved some of it, but I mean, it was like, and you made that decision, you know.

Yeah.

How long do you go on with this decision?

Like, how long did your

plums go

before you pulled them off?

Well, what do you do?

You'd have, you know, they were, the weird thing about them is

they look beautiful because there was no crop on them.

So people would come by and say, is that, how old is that orchard?

Five years.

That's the biggest.

You guys are the best farmers in the world.

They look like they're, it's just amazing how beautiful that orchard is.

And then the weird thing was that on the edge of the orchard by the road, because there were other plum orchards in the area and bees and there was wind from the cars, you know, they cross-pollinated.

So right along the road, they would set really heavily.

So people would come by and say, hey, what's that variety?

I want to get one like that.

Man, you loaded with the most beautiful plums.

And they they were selling for like $30 a box.

But you need about 900 boxes an acre and you were getting 200 to break even.

And then as I told one guy, he drove by once, I want the name of that patented plum.

I said, okay, could you get out of your truck?

He said, yes.

I said, let's walk 10 rows in.

I said, you see any plum?

He said, oh my God,

what happened to you guys?

I said, it's sterile.

He lied about it.

It's a sterile plum.

It's no good.

So then what do you do?

You pull it off.

So we graft it.

And then you have to take a chainsaw.

We did that ourselves.

We went, my brother and I, we went down the whole row, 1,600 with chainsaws, and cut every limb off but one, you know, for the feeder limb.

Yeah.

And then we got a guy in there to graft Kelcia green plum.

It didn't work too well.

He didn't fit too well.

But what do you do when you screw up?

Because you see, in farming, you can't.

it can't be instant.

So, you know, when you're at school and you

miss a class,

you can adjust, you go to the next class, right?

But when you put the wrong herbicide on or you miscalculate on the date to pick or you can't get the labor when you need it, or

an advisor comes in and tells you to put so much jabrelin on so many,

so much ounces per acre, and he doesn't really have any consequences, and you do what he tells you and it burns the grapes up.

That's your fault.

And what you're asking, how long does it last?

Well, it lasts for a long time because you have to look at yourself every day because you're not going to work in town.

You're sitting there.

No, but I mean, when do you pull it out and say, this was a mistake?

We need to go on.

Like, when

it's like all of our stock investors that are listening, when do you

sell a

money losing stock and don't put good money after bad?

yeah well you have to decide pretty quick to pull it but i will say that there was about a 10 acres when somebody said to us you've got to plant this nectarin it is the best nectar and we planted it and it was beautiful but the only problem was now don't you like big colorful fruit i do i do anybody and don't you like delicious fruit i do and how big is a nectarin or a peach should be about the size of your fist a little bigger yeah something like that what if if it turned out to be the size of a grapefruit oh my god

i would not believe i would

i wouldn't believe it had any flavor to it no it did it just looked like a grapefruit and when we packed it everybody go what the blank is this

same thing happened with asian pears we got this idea i'm not going to be i i could said to myself i'm not going to be a plum or peach or nectarin farm or apricot or grape they're all just lose money i'm going to be an exotic fruit farmer and and go to farmers market.

So I planted 10 acres with my brother and Asian pears.

And it worked for a while.

They were delicious.

And we've studied and we were masters farming.

We'd get five, six hundred boxes.

We take them San Francisco, Santa Cruz, San Luis Obispo, Los Angeles, and just make a lot of money.

And then I thought, well,

there's this type of apple pear that nobody else has.

So I'll order it.

So I ordered another one.

And it was the most beautiful pear.

And unlike the other ones that were kind of scraggly, there was Shinseki and all these different varieties we planted.

I can't remember the name of this one, but it came out and it looked brown like a hosui.

Those are really delicious.

And it looked so great.

And then it didn't start, it didn't stop growing.

It was supposed to be october.

So it got bigger and it was like a watermelon.

I'm not kidding you.

And I don't, and it would fall off and you

you couldn't peel it.

The skin was about as thick as your finger, and it tasted like leather.

And I had this whole thing, and everybody would go by, that's a peculiar crop you're growing.

Unfortunately, it was right by the road.

And I would try to take it to farmers' market, and they'd say, What is this?

And I said,

Well, we love your apple pears.

I said, Well, why don't you try one of this?

And they go, Ah!

And then you look at it, you think, wow, I bought $10 a tree.

There's $121 per acre.

What the blank do I do with them?

And then one day I just decided I had a little thing to get rid of this.

I was not going to hire a bulldozer.

I wasn't going to spend any money.

I just took this weird chain, like a 40-foot chain.

I just wrapped it around,

I just made, wrapped it around about 10 trees at once.

And then I'd put that, I had a 285 massey.

I'd put in logo and I just pulled 10 out at once.

Say,

they weren't, you know, they weren't huge trees, but

I was determined not to spend one penny on any more on that.

But my point is that when you're all alone

and you're, you hear different things and you get, you're told, this is the brilliant thing.

No, this is a stupid thing.

You have to make these decisions.

And when you're farming, they affect families and kids and spouses, everybody.

And there's no going back because it's permanent.

And because of agriculture, it takes so long, especially with permanent crops or even during the year, and it drives you nuts.

And so everybody would say to me, wow, when I was teaching at Cal State, those farmers are kind of nutty.

I said, yeah, they are, but you would be too.

Because if you have to make all those hundreds of decisions, that's why when people make fun of people, you know, like academics, I'd always hear, oh, I don't know, we're underpaid.

That guy that owns, I mentioned that before, that guy who owns a supermarket or a service station or a 7-Eleven, they don't, they make more than I do.

And I'd always say, there's a good reason they make more than you because they're a lot smarter and they have to make those decisions by themselves.

And if they screw up and order the wrong product or something, then they pay for it.

That's part of our problem with the left.

They get into these big law firms and big media firms and big social media and internet and academia and there's no consequences.

So they pontificate, they screw up.

I was thinking that the other day.

I mean, could you imagine if Anthony Fauci was a farmer?

Look at that error, you know, subsidizing gain of function research and help birth the Wuhan COVID virus.

There's no conquering.

Did he pay for that?

No.

How about all these guys that lied under oath?

Think they paid for it?

No.

Joe Biden tells everybody for three years, I have never had business with Hunter Biden.

Is there anything?

No.

That guy was farming and

He said something or thought something or did something completely incorrect, he would pay for

years.

That's why I really admire farmers, especially you have to admire stuff you can't do very well.

I mean,

the thing is, you can't overthink in farming.

You can't read and be scholarly.

If you're writing a book, you can do research.

But you're good in farming and you think you're going to outsmart somebody that has years of experience, or you have to have common sense and pragmatism.

You have to say things like, hey, Victor, have you seen any of these big, big, fat nectarines or apple pears in the real world?

No, there isn't, is there?

There's a reason for that, isn't there?

And

you don't think like, well, I've read this manual from UC, and they suggest that this new patent, no, no, don't do that.

Because

you think you have to

fumigate the soil, you have to rip the ground, you have to buy the trees, you have to plant them, you have to cultivate them.

There's going to be a lot of weeds because there's no shade.

You have to water twice as much.

You've got to get very careful how you fertilize it.

And you're going to have to do this for three years or four years before you get any crop, and five or six before the crop will pay.

And you screw up.

In any step, you're going to pay a big sum.

So when I see guys, especially tree fruit, when I, there's a guy who went to high school, Harold McClarty, HMC,

and he started with nothing.

And he became one of the most successful tree fruit, tree fruit people in the entire world.

And how did he do that?

And there's guys at Fowler Packing the same way.

They started, you know, with, they kind of created the

mandarin citrus variety industry.

And you see people like that that have that talent and

you really admire them, but they have to make decisions that they will pay for if they're wrong.

And sometimes they're not talking to a lot of people.

And then especially small farming, because they don't have any margin of error.

And

they become very eccentric.

You become very eccentric if you're just on the land by yourself for day after day, year after year, and you're not getting, and you're making these decisions and you get kind of paranoid.

You call the ditch.

I need the water.

It's my turn on the ditch.

I need it for six days.

I have to have it for six days.

It's my turn.

I want it Monday to Saturday.

Okay.

You call the old guy, Harold.

Okay, that's okay.

You betcha.

We'll get her done.

And then the next day you go, I need that water.

Hey, Harold, I need that water.

And you repeat yourself about five times.

You know, you say, fine, I think I heard you the first time.

And that's what makes you crazy.

And so.

Yeah.

I'm glad I'm not farming anymore, but I admire tremendously people who have that talent that I lack to do it.

Well, Victor, we're at the end of our show.

Thanks so much for all your discussion.

I don't ask me about farming anymore.

It brings up so many bitter memories.

But it's so fascinating nonetheless.

And

so, thank you, and thanks to our listeners, as always.

Okay, thanks, everybody, for listening.

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

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