NATO, Submarines and Looking Back on Tragedy

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Hello, ladies, hello, gentlemen. This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.
I'm Jack Fowler, the host, and the star, and the namesake. That's Victor Davis-Hansen.

And he is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. He has an official website.

It's called The Blade of Perseus, and you'll find that at victorhanson.com. I'll talk more about that later in the podcast and why you should be subscribing to it.

The aforementioned Hoover Institution is the home of

Strategica, which is the online military,

I'll call it online military journal that Victor oversees as part of a broader military project at Hoover.

But there's a new issue out, new issue of Strategica is out, and it talks about NATO expansion. And we're going to get Victor's thoughts on the pieces in this new issue.
And we'll get to that.

right after these important messages

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

So Victor, you have gave us the full title again. I know you've said it many times of

the military group that you oversee at Hoo. And one of its aspects is Strategica, an online journal, which is, I think, issue number 85, 86 thereabouts.

And this particular issue is about NATO expansion and a lead piece by Paul Ray.

And

Ralph Peters

has a piece of that. Norman Nymark has a really good answer.
Yeah.

So it's, yeah, NATO expansion is happening. And is it a good or a bad thing?

A troubling thing. Why is it happening?

Victor, this happens, I guess, a little bit under your watch. So tell us about the new issue of Strategic and why this,

what's to be recommended about these pieces in it.

Well, what we do is every three and a half weeks, we try to get a contemporary issue and then illustrate the nuances or the problems with it or the controversies over it by examples from the past, given the Thucydidean dictum that things change, but human nature remains constant, therefore ancient.

And

all history in general has something to say of value in the present. And in this particular case,

we had our big

annual meeting. It was really,

it was just an amazing meeting. We had people from Ukraine, we had people from the military, all aspects of the conflict.
And it's off limits to the media. It's not, nobody can quote anything.

There's no written materials that can be published out of those discussions. We had some very powerful intellects there, I thought, and that

it was a joy to kind of chair it. And for that issue, we talked about NATO expansionism.
And so Paul Ray, the Hillsdale historian, who's

engaged in this massive project of,

I think it's on volume eight of the Peloponnesian War history. And then he wrote the background or giving us the contours of the controversies and things about expanding NATO.

And then we had Norman Namark and Ralph Peters. And usually those can be adversarial, but they were pretty much in line.

And I guess what was interesting is when we say NATO enlargement and we look at this original alliance, it's got like 30 members, right?

And

you wonder,

was expansion a wise thing?

And most people now feel that because of Article 4 that pledges, at least it doesn't say you have to, but it does suggest that people in the alliance, I think there's actually even 31 members now, but people in the alliance have to come or should come to the aid of somebody in extremists.

Okay, so they said, well, we expanded after the Cold War, and we took advantage of the Russians,

you know, the Berlin Wall collapsed. They were in chaos.
Yeltsin was

fluid. And all of a sudden, we got all of the East, the Warsaw Pact, flipped, flipped in a variety of senses.
They went from being communist to democratic.

They went from being the Soviet bloc into the EU bloc eventually. And they became not Warsaw Pact 2.0, but NATO members.
And then the question was: well,

NATO seems to be operating beyond its original charter, as in the war against Milosheviks in the Balkans, when NATO planes bombed him out of power.

The Soviets resented that attack on another Slavic person, even though there was criminal, you know, it was genocidal activity on the part of his government. And

in addition, people felt, well, when you put places like Slovakia in or Lithuania, if you're going to do that, then

you're picking very vulnerable frontier states that could be overrun in a surprise attack by Putin in an hour or two, and then you're pledging us to go to war.

Or in the case of Ukraine, if you want to put Ukraine right now, as Zelensky wants, into NATO, they're in an active war.

So if you put Ukraine into NATO right now, they would, by any logic,

invoke Article 4, and we were all 31 countries be at war with nuclear Russia. So that was perilous, but what these articles are trying to argue is that because

Putin overshot and thought he could do a thunder road shock and all and take Kiev before we knew what was happening and it turned into Verdun.

In that conundrum, we got two very powerful members. One, the Finns, and the Finns have a long history of fighting the Russians, not successfully because of their small size, but doggedly.

And they are probably the man-for-man,

some of the toughest fighters in the world. And they have their own arms industry, and they've got some of the best artillery in the world.

And then you add Sweden, which we always thought was a neutral, and going back to Vietnam would ankle-bite us, but now it's a front line with this long border.

And it's got SAB fighters. It's got some of the best military hardware.
These are the people who make Volvos, you know.

And when you put in

Norway, Finland, Sweden,

Sweden doesn't have, I don't think they have F-35s, but you add Denmark in there, and that's the largest aggregate group of F-35 fighters in the world outside the United States, even larger than Japan.

So what I'm getting at is

It didn't happen this way, but the old issue, don't put any more

nations into NATO. It's too big, and that means that we're all going to have to get on the same page, and we're not on the same page, has been modified somewhat by

this war, has prompted two countries that were very carefully reluctant not to join NATO, very eager to join. And that's been a big boon given what they bring to the alliance.

They're not weak countries, and they have borders with Russia.

Can you explain France's exact role with NATO, by the way?

It goes back to

Charles de Gaulle

and the pick that he had that, you know, you go to a

war museum in Caen today, you'll say D-Day, June 17th, the day de Gaulle set foot, not June 6th, the when we liberated France. But

it was a very distinguished country. It has a wonderfully majestic history, and

it's, you know it's the Napoleonic aura about France that its military has so

when the Cold War started de Gaulle didn't want to be wedded at just another European country so he created this force de Frop which is an independent nuclear deterrent about 180 I think guided missiles at the time with nuclear warheads so he could make foreign policy with the Soviets or the Chinese

in a different way. And then he got out of NATO full participation for a while.
And then he tried to oppose Britain

in various ways. And he would always oppose what Britain, the United Kingdom, the Anglo-Saxons, the Americans, the Canadians, and the British.

But

take away all that.

And the fact is that France, even in those years that was ankle-biting NATO, was never to the point where the Soviets said, we have 6,000 nuclear weapons, the United States has 6,000, and then there's the French with 180, and they're just a wildcard.

No, they always said the 180 in a war would be used with the United States. And so a lot of it was verbal and rhetorical.

And

until the Second Iraq War, they usually bitched and moaned, but they were with us. And

I don't know.

Given where I grew up and given I get kind of angry sometimes about French scholarship in my field, postmodernism, Lacan, Erida, Foucault,

all in all, the French people are a majestic people, as I said. And it's great to have them as allies.
And

it requires a little bit of patience given how great they were, and now they feel they're just one among equals. You've got to remember also,

when Lord Ismay, when NATO was created, that famous phrase is still important.

Keep the United States in,

because without us, there wouldn't be a NATO. If the United States wasn't in, they would have taken over Ukraine and Putin would be on the border of Poland right now.
I mean,

into Europe. Not that he's not already, but he'd be right into Europe.
And so the United States is in, and then the idea was to keep Russia, not Soviets,

keep Russia out of Europe because of the traditional hostility between the two, and then to keep Germany down.

And if

there was not a NATO alliance, I think Germany would have gone nuclear by now.

And it would be doing in the military, I think it would be bossing people around the way it does economically.

But NATO is a great leveler, so we have to...

It's a costly investment, and they don't pay their way, and it's flawed. And we've got Turkey that's an anti-democratic Islamic country that triangulates against.

Given all that, this war did help solidify NATO and brought in two valuable members. And that's what they're talking about.

Yeah.

From the perspective, by the way, Victor, of a Russian, and maybe I hope you can answer this regarding Finland. Is there

a of course they're neighbors, right? So they're us in Mexico, right? But do they have a

the Russians have a respect for the Finns?

Yes. In November of 1939, we talked about that a little bit with Sammy.

They, under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, they felt that each side would take advantage of the other, or they were allowed to take advantage.

So they told Hitler, we're going into Finland to carve off some key border places. And Hitler let them do it.
And so they invaded. But the problem was

it was cold, and it's it's very cold. And the Russians are used to cold, but they're not adept to it like the Finns.

So the Finns had, you know, almost 800,000 troops of a country, I think it was only 5 million. And they had white winter clothing, very warm.
They had some of the best marksmen in the world.

They were on skis.

And this big, clumsy, just like we see in Ukraine, Russian juggernaut comes in

and they

had terrible morale like today.

They were poorly led like today. They didn't have the strategic objectives defined clearly.
Do they want to absorb the country? And they had a brilliant guy opposing them, Mannerheim,

much more capable than Zelensky. I'm not making fun of Zelensky, but he was great.
And they fought November, December, January, February, March.

And finally, the Soviets just poured a million men in and ground them down. And they had to sign an armistice.

But the subtext subtext of the armistice was, yes, we'll give you some land and concessions so you can say you won, but we're still independent, and you can't crush us because you'll pay a terrible price.

And of course, then they were very careful in World War II. During the siege of Leningrad,

they did not go into, they could have closed that circle by going in on that corridor into Russian land. And they had given their word to the Soviets.
that

they could fight with Germany, and they did, and they would oppose, but they would not take Finnish troops and put them in Soviet territory. So they fought their side.

They supplied the Germans, and they flew a lot of Finnish pius, and they kept that shoulder around St. Petersburg, Leningrad, but they did not go in and annex.

And then after the war,

Stalin decided he did not want another winter war. So, yeah,

they're very tough.

And

I just heard an address by the Finnish ambassador,

consul, soon to be, I guess, ambassador.

They're very proud people, and they want to remind the world how tough they are. And

because of their defensive mentalities,

they do certain things very well.

I think the greatest marksman in World War II, contrary to

enemy at the gates and all that stuff, was not German or Russian, but it was Finnish. I think a Finnish marksman had the macabre statistics of

the most lethal marksman in the history of warfare. And then when you look at today at the Finnish artillery, I think they have

700 major artillery pieces, and they're well made, and they're well.

So it's a plus to get Sweden. I'm not being chauvinistic, but it's a plus to get the Swedes and the Finns into NATO.

And

I think

that's what Norman Nymark and Ralph Peters are trying to,

I think, successfully trying to convey.

Yes,

we've, in the

past podcasts, have talked about Strategica. So, folks, go to the Hoover website, hoover.org, and

type in Strategica in the little

search box, and you'll come across it. So, hey, Victor, maybe we should stay on things military, because I wonder if the Finns or the Swedes and the other

military forces in the world think that abortion is central to what they do.

We're going to talk about Admiral Kirby and some of his tirades and get your thoughts on that, Victor, right after these important messages.

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

So, Victor,

two

U.S. military stories that, if you can address both of them.
The first has to do with John Kirby, who is a retired Rear Admiral. He's the spokesman for national security matters

in the Obama administration. I think he was the spokesman for the

State Department. I don't know that as a Navy officer, if he ever was non-communications related.
I think he was always a PR person.

There he is. He's also

pisses me off. Pardon my French.
He's another Catholic out there, just like Austin, believe it or not, he's a Catholic. And there they are advocating for abortion.

He was asked a question at a press conference within the last week or so. I'm so glad you asked me that.
And he talked with real passion

about just how important the military's

Biden administration military preoccupation is with abortion rights and providing abortion to

service women. So that's one topic, Victor.
You might want to comment on that. And the other kind of shocking story has to do with

our submarine force, the Navy. There are just

31

ready attack submarines. I believe 40% of the submarine force is in a bad way right now.
So, but, you know, let's talk about abortion instead. Victor, your thoughts.

Well,

we have Senator Tuberville putting a hold on appointments.

Is it the Marines only, or is it all?

I think.

I think it's all, but I can be wrong.

And his point is that with limited budgets and short shells,

we don't have artillery shells, we don't have javelin shells, we don't have a short-term ship missile

sufficient reserves given our largesse to Ukraine.

Why is the military in general going under these woke issues that are extraneous to combat efficacy? But in particular,

if you have a military base within the confines of a state that after Roe versus Wade

has decided they have limitations on abortion. And if a female soldier within the military wants an abortion and she happens to be stationed in a state that is more restrictive than, say,

open, no rules at all, basically, like California, and

what does she do?

And the answer is the military will, what, subsidize her flight and fly her out of

the base in which she is in to a more conducive base, supposedly, or I guess to, I'm not sure about the statute, whether they're also just sending them to civilian non-military hospitals that give abortion on demand.

And that's very expensive, but then so is transgendered surgeries and stuff. So I think

the point that they can't answer is

after you gave away $50 billion in weapons to the Taliban, and after you've given over $120 billion to Ukraine

and we're short on all the key critical

statistics of artillery shells, as I said, missiles, hatred, everything,

why in the world would you spend thousands of dollars per soldier?

to fly a person out so that they could exercise their right their abortion rights when it's really problematic whether somebody is in the military who is pregnant can be on active duty anyway.

And that used to be the attitude of the military in the early days of allowing women, you know, to go into all that stuff. So that's what John Kirby is trying to fumble about.

And

he was a spokesman for Hillary Clinton when she was in the State Department.

I first came exposed to him, as many of our listeners did during the Benghazi mess.

And the more he talked about the Benghazi killing and debacle, the more it was clear to me that Hillary Clinton was highly culpable. Right.
So I'm not impressed. It was about a video, right? Yeah.

Yeah. I'm not impressed with anything he said.
Yeah. And

that's one of the great public lies of recent times. Yeah, it was.
It was. But

she was ready, and we have these internal memos, but she did not want to upgrade the security because they felt that it might show that

in a campaign year they weren't prepared. And then more importantly, they lied about the cause of that violence.
They kept telling everybody that it was an

ad hoc

spur-of-the-moment GPS mortar attack on Americans in the embassy earlier. And due to a right-wing Coptic video maker in the United States that put a video on.
No, that wasn't why. It was a pre-planned

Qaeda-related, ISIS-related hit.

And no matter what some of our officers said, the general consensus was that those guys had planned it. They were adept with a mortar.
They put the mortar on the target and killed our soldiers.

They knew what they were doing. It wasn't just about a riot.
And that's what Obama, that came up in the, remember when Candy Crawley intervened with Obama in the debate. Oh,

what a critical point that was, moment that was. Yeah, hijacked the

bleed. And then Mitt Romney, all he had to do was pull a Reagan.
When Reagan grabbed that microphone and said, I'm paying for this.

He could have grabbed that thing and said, damn it, you're not the debater. You're the moderator.
Shame on you. Instead, he just,

no, no, it was a terror. You know, it's just,

I got so angry when I watched that. Yeah.

Well, submarines, Victor.

Well, submarines is funny because

we are challenged in so many areas. The Chinese have more surface ships than we do.

I think they have a larger, much larger army. We have these issues, as I said, with Woke.

But, but

there has always been one area where the United States is preeminent, and that's submariners, both nuclear-tipped muscle,

you know, so the old Poseidon, Polaris Poseidon, an on-and-on

missile-guided submarine, or

just the fact that American submarines could dive deeper, could go on, could stay longer,

could travel faster. It's kind of a myth that we keep thinking that the Germans had the best submarines in World War II.
That's not true.

I mean, we had this Balejo-class submarine that, in terms of overall depth, speed,

and reliability, it was better than the first U-boats. They came later at the very end of the war in very small numbers, very sophisticated U-boats.
But we got to the Gatto class in World War II.

It was even better.

They were used in the

versions of the Gatto class were used into the 50s, late 50s. So we had the best submarines.
I think we sank

more than half of all shipping that was called Axis shipping.

It was a very costly campaign, but that was our trademark. And then we were the first people to go under the ice pack.
We were the first to have successful nuclear reactors.

We were the first to launch sophisticated missiles from submarines during the Cold War, our triad bombing, bombers, and everybody remembers.

the bombing B-52 fleet, the land-based missiles, and the third leg of the triad was a missile that couldn't be detected. So that was our forte.

And now to learn that some of these submarines, I mean, we only have about a third that are out there, and the other third is under repair.

And we've got another third that's got labor shortages, part shortages, supply chain. We had one of our most sophisticated submarines crash.

The captain crashed it into an underwater obstacle. It's still not repaired.
And multi-billion dollar piece of equipment. So

it's not just submarines, it's what the United States did best and which most effectively created deterrence in the Cold War because our submarines had the accumulated firepower to destroy entire nations, a single submarine.

And they couldn't find out where they were. They went too fast.
They were too stealthy. And they were the best in the world.

And the idea that we just would abandon that legacy and just let them idle in a shipyard as we're waiting for parts or we're short labor or we don't have the money. It's just insane.

Do you think

within the Navy

is there,

I don't know how I'm going to say this, an anti-submarine element as opposed to a pro-ship element as opposed to a pro-aircraft element. Yeah, it was always that way with surface ships.

So in World War II, it was the battleship lobby because when you see something like the Iowa-class battleship, the USS Missouri or Iowa

or Pennsylvania, you know, they were in the first Gulf War. They looked beautiful, but that profile and those huge big guns is a symbol of power.

So when the aircraft carrier came along, at first they resisted it, and we were way behind.

The Japanese were, when Pearl Harbor broke out, we only had in the Pacific, we had just got the Hornet, and we had the ancient Saratoga and Lexington. They were battlecruisers that had been converted.

And then we had the Enterprise.

And so Saratoga, Lexington, Enterprise.

And

Hornet, we only had four. They had eight, ten.
And you could make the argument that maybe in terms of value or efficacy, they had better planes and they were better.

And so that was because we had stayed too long with battleships. And so did the Japanese.
They had the Mushasi and the Yamoto.

And those were considered, you know, those were just the biggest battleships that have ever been built, 73,000 tons. They called it the Hotel Yamoto.
It was so expensive to

operate, they just stuck it out of a ball and let it sit there for most of the war before it was sunk. So there's always a battleship.
And then when the carriers started to come into

popularity in World War II, and they were very valuable because, you know, a 16-inch battleship volley will go about 18 miles.

And suddenly you have these bombers, dive bombers, torpedo bombers that can go 300 miles from the carrier and back. Even in some cases, the drop tanks 400 miles.

So that's like an artillery shell that can go that far. So, at a battle like Coral Sea, that was the first battle in history where neither side saw the other one when they attacked.

They were so far away. So, that was the idea that, wow,

now we have a carrier. And then, when you look at World War II, all of the carriers, there was only one in the Norwegian war, a British carrier, that was sunk by surface ships.

Every other one was either torpedoed by a submarine or

bombed into oblivion by another carrier's Air Force. But my point in this is: so there was the battleship was obsolete, then came the carrier, and they cost now about $15 billion.

And it was always that the United States would have 10 to 11 carrier groups, and we would have three to four operating, and we would have three or four in reserve, and then three or four would be refitted and updated.

And that came in in a zero-sum budget.

That came at the expense of submarines, even though submarines, John Keegan wrote a book on naval warfare, and that was his argument that in terms of a bang for the buck, you could get four or five sophisticated nuclear-powered and

nuclear

missile-equipped submarine for one carrier. And I think when

Hyman Rickover, the submarine advocate, 30 years ago, they asked him, remember that famous retort?

Somebody said, well, an ally of his in Congress said, well, how long would our carriers last in a shooting war with Russia? And he said, five minutes.

And what he meant then is true now, that if you're going to protect Taiwan and you put the USS Gerald Ford, for example, in the South China Sea, they have weapons that can sink it.

And what would those be? Those are volleys of six, seven thousand small missiles, probably the size of your leg, that would be launched at night about two inches above the water below

radar, and then they would dip down and they would punch big holes, you know, all through the hull, and you couldn't stop it.

And so

we've got to, I think people are understanding that just as the battleships had to change, and by that I mean it's good to have surface ships. So we have frigates now.

They're basically light cruisers in World War II, but they're jam-packed with missiles and with anti-aircraft missiles, and they're very valuable.

And the same thing's going to have to happen with these fleet carriers. By that I mean they're going to have to go back to the World War II idea that you might want to have, instead of

13,

12 big fleet carriers, and maybe there's eight or nine marine carriers, why not have 70

what we call jeep carriers, light or escort carriers, maybe 10,000 tons with a little platform and have drones on it? So you could put, instead of 5,000 guys in a $14 billion platform, you could put

maybe, I don't know, 150 people with a whole fleet of drones with bombs, and they would be spread out all over the South China Sea.

It would be hard to get them all. So

that's some of the current trends that are arguing that

submarines

are very valuable right now. And if we're going to keep surface ships and aircraft carriers, they're going to have to change.

There's too few and they're too expensive. And if we lost a carrier defending Taiwan, we wouldn't have the wherewithal to repair it, really.
That's the right replace.

Just curious, Victor, before we move on to more topics,

have you ever been in a submarine?

Have I ever been? No.

I have been on a fleet carrier out in in the Atlantic. I was on the John Kennedy in 2003

and watched landing and takeoff for two days, three days, I think. I've never been in it.
Have you? No, no, no, not at all. I know people that work at General Boats.
Oh, I take that back, Jack.

I was at a 1960s ride in

Disneyland, and everybody went to this little submarine. It went down, and then the fish swam, and then they bought it up.

I always want to get one of those submarines in the back of the comic books. They're like $6.97.
Get your own submarine.

I don't think that after the Titan collision, a lot of people are going to want to go into a private enterprise submarine. Yeah, right.

Especially when the company says it doesn't want any old white guys with military experience in submarines guiding your program. Yeah, people with intelligence need not apply.

Well, Victor, we're going to move on to a cultural woke matter, and then we're going to to talk about something you've written for The Blade of Perseus.

So let's get to that woke topic right after

this important message.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson show. So Victor, I saw this.
Oh, well, let me mention first, The Blade of Perseus. That is your official website.

Go, listeners, especially if you're new, go to Victor Hanson Sun, S-O-N, VictorHanson.com

and check it out. You'll find

plethora of links to Victor's appearances, other podcasts, radio interviews, maybe some

Fox segments, although I'm not too sure there are many of them, links to his books. archives of this podcast.
And then you'll find these pieces,

also his American Greatness articles, syndicated columns, and you'll find ultra articles. You'll click on it.
What's ultra? You'll try to read it. You won't be able to.
Why?

Because you have to subscribe. These are pieces two or three a week, exclusive to the website that Victor writes.

And if you're a fan of Victor's writings and you're not reading the Ultra articles, you are depriving yourself. There's

a ton of this kind of content that Victor produces over a year. So I heartily recommend that you do subscribe.

And we're going to talk about one of the pieces series that Victor's written right after, you know, later in this podcast. So, VictorHanson.com.

And if you're, hey, if you're on Facebook, check out the Victor Davis Hansen Fan Club. It's not related officially, but it's there, and good people run that.

And

look for VDH's Morning Cup, sign up for that.

And if you are on Twitter, at VD Hanson, that's Victor's handle. So, Victor, I have to, I I just misplaced this.

Oh, here's the headline. Yeah, there's a headline.
I'd like to get your

take on this. I call this the cultural rock, paper, scissors, which we know that game, rock, paper, scissors.
So

black lesbian Harvard law grad,

I would think that's at the top of the hierarchy, Victor, is censored by a blogging site, by blogging site, name of Medium, for quote-unquote hateful posts saying transgender women should not be allowed to compete in women's sports.

Victor,

there's this tension within the gay community, the lesbian community, but

I'm not joking about this, but

the black lesbian law professor, I think, kind of outranks me and outranks most things in this woke culture that assesses people, but I guess it doesn't anymore.

Well, the transgender movement has been very successful in climbing the ranks of intersectionality. They've kind of started at the private first class and they're up to four-star general.

And they've been promoted and promoted over the gay community, the black community, the Latin, the Latino community,

the so-called feminist community, and then even the force multiplier. So, you know, every once in a while, some right-wing guy shows a graph that he, you know, which

force multiplier trait gets you up to four-star, and that would be things like, as you say, black, female, lesbian.

You can't beat that, and yet you can, apparently, on these issues about transgenderism.

And so, any

all of these things are based on a central principle that white males,

white males who are heterosexual, and if to the degree they're still Christian, are exploiters and they have a history of exploitation and they owe

gays, transgendered, female, and people of color reparations, whether that's affirmative action or actual reparations, who knows.

The problem with it is they don't talk about class.

So it doesn't mean anything. So you get this ridiculous with the black lesbian female Harvard law graduate is a greater victim deserving of compensation than who?

The person in Bend, Oregon, who's a chainsaw earlier his whole life and never made more than $40,000 a year.

It's because he, you know, an old broken down white guy like me, you know, so not me as far as what I do, but

as being a white male 69, and it doesn't make any sense. And when you make a coalition based on victimhood, and there's so many multiplicities of victimhood, then you can't figure it out.

And I always thought that black lesbian

women could not be culpable with anything because of the intersectionality rules. But apparently, if you're insufficiently

sympathetic to transgender people in sports, then all of your protective armor vanishes and you're vulnerable. It just shows you the

ridiculousness when we start looking at people as A, collectives, and at B, as stereotype cardboard cutouts of race and gender. Notice I didn't say class.
Remember when you were in college?

Race, class, gender, race, class. Now there's no class.
It's always race, gender.

So it's absurd.

It's just that way. And when you're hiring today in the university, you know what people are talking about.
It's,

well, we have a guy from India. He's very dark, and he's not, but is he a protected repertory candidate? Oh, well, we have a black guy.
Well, then, well, we have a black woman.

Oh, well, wait a minute. That's a flush in the full house.
Well, we have a royal flush. We have a black,

I guess, black

gay female transgender would be a full.

Is the royal flush the highest hand you could?

I believe so. Yeah.
So if you have that, that's you have all four. Yeah.
And again, the common denominator is we're not looking at individuals.

We don't care whether the person is a nice person, a bad person, a capable person. No, it's just your outward appearance and your sexual preferences.
Yeah.

You mentioned class, by the way, Victor. I'm sorry, go ahead and finish what you said.
Well, it's the road to Armageddon.

I mean, it's, you know, if you destroy meritocracy, and country will vanish in a generation.

Speaking of meritocracy, and I hate to unrace, no, I don't hate to, but I sent you this. We weren't going to talk about it, but I saw

a

tweet series

by a guy named Richard Hananya that talked about

this hospital in Los Angeles,

the Martin Luther,

the Drew Medical Center, the King Drew Medical Center,

which

doesn't exist any longer. And it was, it's from 1972 to 2007.
And it really was a race-based hospital in

hiring. And

it turned out to be a dreaded hospital.

Yeah, I mean, think about how the whole mentality of the great society worked. So there's been a history of oppression against blacks.

And therefore, in the black community, we're going to build a special black hospital to address their needs. So, check, check, check, so far, so good.

But

the employers who happen to be black will not be subject to the quote-unquote racist laws that affect all other hospitals, like

very strict investigations of any disability claims, strict enforcement of sick leave and days off,

complete firing of incompetent doctors.

Once you get rid of that meritocracy and you substitute race, then you get into an Orwellian situation where a black youth is shot and he's in an ambulance and he tells the driver, don't take me to Martin Luther King because I'll die there.

And they had a much higher incident of botched surgeries,

people dying on the operating table, just killed in the emergency room with the wrong dosage, not because the majority of the employees were black, but because the philosophy of the entire hospital was repertory.

Everybody in this hospital has been a victim, and therefore we do not have to achieve standards and maintain them like other hospitals.

And who were the people who, as they always are, the people who paid the price were the inner city. Right.

I mean,

my East Coast prejudice or biases, and

I never heard of this. The Los Angeles Times actually won a Pulitzer Prize for writing about this, but that was almost 20 years ago.

I doubt the Los Angeles Times, if this hospital was around today, would ever dare to do an extensive piece on it. It was

quite interesting about meritocracy in America. Hey, Victor,

we've got one other topic to talk about, and that's an ultra article. a series of articles that you've written for the website.
And they're about, they're titled the Mystic Chords of Memory.

And we're going to get your,

you know, talk to you about here these pieces and why you've written them. We'll get to that right after this final important message.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show. So, if I may say, Victor, there's some beautiful writing here.

You talk about

family and life on the farm, etc.

And this is a two-part series.

And

it talks, I think, deeply about memory and how we,

how, you know, decades after, how we consider important events in our life, how

the classics taught about memory, what they taught about memory. So, why did you write this piece, Victor? These pieces, and what are they about, essentially?

I think maybe it was the brain fog from long covet i would have these kind of drifting of cognitive kind of like joe biden

and you you might be president someday

i think i have not turkey gobbled in a young girl's cheek so i wouldn't qualify oh yeah i didn't go on to a strategy number two after my turkey gobbling failed that is the blow the hair trick right yeah and of course that that was never covered because you're not a sniffer right yeah joe doesn't do those those things.

But anyway, I had this thing. I was thinking,

I remember couples that my parents knew in their zenith. That would probably be their age, 50 to 60.

And I was farming, and every time people would come out here to the farm with my parents, you know, and

I thought, wow. And they were very friendly.
They were, you know, other farm couples or judges or whoever they were. And

I started remembering them. And I thought, wow, I've got to call the Martins.
And

wow,

I remember Ray Gonzalez. I got to talk to him.
And then I just, for brief seconds, I thought, well, wait a minute, Victor, that was 1980.

What the F are you doing? Are you an idiot? 18, that is 43 years ago. That's like 1900 to the middle of World War II.

They're dead, Victor. They're dead.
Because they were in their mid-50s. They'd have to be 98 now, maybe some are alive.
But then I snap out of it.

But I can remember the conversations as if it's frozen in time. I think all of us get into these,

I guess you call them a time warp, where your mind suddenly goes through some kind of time door or window, and you're back there. And you can remember every single thing.

And I can remember all these things that were like

that. You look back and they're just tragedies.
They're just crazy. I remember I'm at school and I wrote about that and my mom called me and she said, Victor, we have 105.

And I had helped get the crop down with my siblings. Remember, we have 105.
I said, what's up? It's nice and sunny here. She said, there's a big tropical storm.

I said, oh, I saw that, mom, but it will miss us. Don't worry.
Oh, no, no, it's starting to rain.

And they're predicting two inches. Well, we had all borrowed money and that was the whole crop.
So I got in my little putt-putt

car and went over Pacheco Pass and all of a sudden it was raining and here we were trying to get, and

we picked way too late. It was sour.
So instead of August 25th, we picked like September 10th to get the necessary sugar.

And my God, we were out there in the mud trying to roll these paper trays with the half-dried grapes into bunches, I mean into balls, cigarette rolls we called them, or biscuits sometimes, put them under the vine as if they would ever dry out.

Then you'd have to pull them back out.

And I did that for a week, and then all of a sudden you look around, there's a whole family out there, and it's all.

And

I had thought of that line at the time because I was

a beautiful line, by the way. Yeah,

even this, there will come a time when even this will bring a joy for you to remember. And it's from

the Aeneid.

And I thought of that. And

I know that line very well. It's Aeneas tells the scattered Trojans after everything is going badly that

they have been so heroic in their tragedy and their defeat that someday they have to keep fighting because someday

that will be a source of comfort to them. And it is for me.
So I remember thinking that at the time. I thought I was out, I was all muddy, I was rolling.
I was, oh boy, 1980,

79, 80, and it did again in 76. So there were these secrets, the big reign of 76, the big reign of 82,

and 78. So this happened on three occasions.
And I would come back in

76, I'd come back in

78, I was overseas, so I came later. I left right before, excuse me, I left right when it was raining, and then to Greece.
And then in the big one one in 82, I was actually farming.

But in each case, I remember thinking, wow,

this is a disaster. And yet you'd see your whole family and everybody out there, kids,

people in their 60s, and they're all on their knees trying to save this. And it's impossible.

It's just one of those things that there were so many negative forces.

Did you know it was impossible while you were doing it, but you had to do it anyway? You had to. You couldn't just sit there and have a drink and say, it's gone because

in those days you had about $300,000. You had about

$800, $1,000 an acre, maybe more than that, $1,500 an acre. And you had 100 acres, 100,000

trays. And then you had all borrowed at.
Jimmy Carter, 14%.

We had no money. And all of a sudden, you see it all go up.
And the insurance was no good,

as we learned in 76. But then there was a good thing in 82,

we saw that was coming, and we were

adapt. Then, my siblings and I, we picked a little earlier, and one of the neighbors, yeah, you didn't get 20, those are going to be weedies or sour.
And I said, It's going to rain, I can feel it.

And the long, oh, it never rained. I said it rained, and all of a sudden we had 100,000, and they were almost dry.
And so

we had the, you know, it was no no weather, national

weather service. Beep, beep, beep.
You had these radios, you know what I mean, for rain alerts.

And if you're on the ag station, there is a southern hurricane that we felt was going out westward out to the Hawaiian area.

However, it has just detoured and it's on a track to reach the Santa Barbara coastline and into the Central Valley in seven hours, at which time a northern storm coming from the Alaska track will probably intersect with it somewhere over Fresno.

And we anticipate it could be two to four inches of tropical moisture.

And, you know, you think, oh, well, an open raisin tray can take a quarter inch at most. And then the bugs come in, the sand gets embedded in the fruit.
It's no good.

And you think four inches, it's going to float down the row. So we got out and everybody said,

you know, they call us. We said, you go do this.
You go get to that labor contract. You go get all your friends you knew in high school.
You go get this guy.

And we all come back here in an hour, get everything. If you have to get it, go into the unemployment office, go to Home Depot, find anybody that can walk.
And you offer them. We got this huge crew.

We're all working with them. They say, oh, we're tired.
And at that time, it was $28, I think, a thousand rolls. Okay, $32.
No, how about $40?

And they said, oh, damn it. And I'd got a little calculator inside that.
What would be the amount we could pay? $50. And all of a sudden, everybody kept working.
And then

we'd say to my brother, go get, you know, 100 Cokes, get

100 packs of Twinkies, get everything.

If guys are Mexican, go get as much of the best Mexican food. And that was just all day long.
And we started at 3 in the morning. And at 2 in the morning, we looked around.

We thought, oh my God, we rolled 105,000 trays that were not rolled this morning, all by hand. And then the boom came.

Literally 20 minutes later, thunder, and it was like, you know, it was like the Philippines or something or the Marianas. It just rained and rained and not, and it just wouldn't stop.

And then everybody was open.

And they were, these poor guys were just like us in 76 and 78, and they were all ruined. And then all of a sudden, we weren't.
And all of a sudden, the price of raisins went sky high.

And you look at the raisins, it was so, you know, I have dirt rose. And within three days, there was Bermuda grass growing up through the paper in the roads because it was just crazy.

And then we went out and we did the same thing. We opened all 100,000 up.
And then it got sunny and then they dried. And then we got them in.

And then any of them that were damaged, we built a raisin dehydrator ourselves, huge thing out of the building.

And then we shoveled all of them onto wood trays and dollies, and we turned on the natural gas.

I would get up every three hours for four days, you know, 10 o'clock at night, 2 o'clock, 6 o'clock, and go check the raisins and switch the things. And

we dried 50 tons ourselves and mixed them in with the other ones. And then we put them in,

nobody used sweat boxes anymore, but they would sweat and they would even out. So we got these old huge 150-pound boxes.
And we did this till November 1st.

And when it was all over, I said, oh oh my God, we didn't. I did all these calculations.
We spent, Victor, we spent $21,000 more than we should have on the harvest, but we saved, you know,

200 tons. So I can't believe it.
We got $300,000 in revenue.

And it was all based on collective misery of somebody else, as we had.

So I said to myself, we lost everything in 76, everything in 78, where some guys became very wealthy because they picked early, even took a chance.

And now we did, even though it was a sour wear, and we and we paid off all the debts of that and we were even first. And then the whole

Jimmy Carter economy in 82 that had

that Reagan inherited, he decided, you know, it can't go on. So he

we had that recession. It was terrible.
The interest rates went up to about, you know, Paul Volcker, Reagan said,

Paul, go to it.

And I just remember that in 83 the whole raisin market crashed but it was really important because we had paid off all our debts and then when the price of raisins went from $14.40 a ton to $400 the next year and it cost about $900 to produce it you just cut off all the canes and just sat there and didn't produce anything and just took the loss but anyway that was really a good moment I really think about that

when I every are you everybody everybody's listening to this I know that that you've had those moments where you look back and there was a tragedy and the family, and everybody comes together and you almost defeat

the improbable. You pull it off once in a while, and then you remember it the rest of your life.
That's what you're saying. You know, this is something else.

I was trying to say, he was trying to say that in the Aeneid.

You also talk about a little bit about... Well, you have a paragraph in here about demographics, you know,

so many, and now it kind of is an upside-down pyramid in a way. And I just wonder,

you seem to have a collective memory of

so much of your great-grandparents and grandparents. Are you the repository of your

family's memories and conscious of the fact that

there's not that many people to pass it on to and that memory should be passed on?

Well, I had a twin brother who was very close with my grandparents. I'm an older brother.
And then we had first cousins too that their mother died very early.

So they were sort of raised as our siblings. And so my first cousin Dash's sister is very interested in it.
So she'll send stuff to everybody. Okay.
But not about, she was too young.

She's younger than I am. She was,

she knows things academically about the history of the family, but the actual growing up.

When my grandparents were from the, I mean, they had 19th century accents.

They had vocabulary that nobody,

Victor, come in here, we're going to give you the Dickens if you don't, or way out yonder, go out yonder there, you know, or when are you going to ride down and see me on the wheel?

They call bicycles the wheel. And so that was.
Didn't one of them come to town on a stagecoach?

Yeah, I mean, my grandmother got Alzheimer's and she'd go out on Mountain View and say, Victor, where's the stage?

So, I mean, they got married in 1911 and in this house. And my grandfather was born in the house in 1890.
And

his grandmother built it in 1870. So there was a big town for,

well, a version of it. So, yeah, I have that, but I have really good memories of both my father's grandfather, my father's father, a Swedish horsebreaker that broke horses.

And then they were very different. My maternal grandfather was very

businesslike, polite. He was just like out of a gentleman.
I mean, mean, he never, I never heard him say a cuss word. He never smoked a cigarette.
He never had a drop of alcohol. He never had a

he paid, when he died, he was paying his bills twice. He was so worried about.

And he was just this kind of Cato-like Roman. And then my other grandfather was just, he was out of a John, I mean, the John Ford movie.

He was this solid muscled Swedish guy that in his late 70s would get on like a Mustang and break the horse in front of you, you know.

And he had him, we'd go down there and he, he, we have to cut chickens' heads because he had his own chickens. We slaughtered hogs because he had his own hogs.
He had fox terriers all around.

We had mules. We had donkeys.
We had to ride bareback. And we were riding very early.
And I swear, I...

And then when he died, we brought the horses up. But I never have ridden since then because

at a very early age, we were riding bareback. We knew a saddle lot, but I just got bucked off so many times.
You know, I thought, I'm never going to ride those blank horses again.

But he was doing it in his late 70s, even though he had this big tumor from World War I where he'd have been gassed and it ate out his mouth.

And he was disabled in his stomach, and he wouldn't get it cut out.

And so finally, my dad said,

Hey, dad,

here it is. Now, you're going to have that thing and you can get it cut out once.
But if you don't, it's going to fester and stink, just like those cysts on that horse. Okay, that's right.

That's a good idea. I do not want anybody to smell it.
I get it out cut once. And they went in and cut it out.
And it came back in, I don't know, two months.

But they were both. I wanted you to smell like a horse, Dad.

That was one of the reasons I got interested in classics because when you started reading Hesiod or Virgil, Georgics, Ecologues, that was the whole world of the ancient world.

And that's why I wrote a couple of books on ancient farming.

The Other Greeks was the one I spent the most of any time, any book I've ever written. It was about the agrarian discovery of Western civ.
But

there's passages throughout there that resonate, especially

I was a Hellenist, but I loved Latin as well. I taught Latin more actually than I did Greek.
But there were some passages like that. I mentioned one in the essay about

Ovid's, excuse me, and

Eurydice and Orpheus when he looks back. It's kind of like the lot myth, but it's in classical antiquity, and she turns into nothing.
It's all about have confidence when you're on a perilous mission.

Don't double-guess yourself. And he's told he can bring her back up to the real world.

If he just doesn't look back, if he looks back and doesn't have confidence that she's following him, and nobody would have confidence, so of course he's going to look back. Right.

Hey, Moses tapped the rock twice, right?

Exactly. And so,

but classics is because it's frozen, it had the same kind of values. That was what I discovered.
And I think a lot of people feel that way, too.

I know that every generation looks back and said, oh, I walked in snow and these kids are spoiled. And Horace had, as I said in the essay, they had a term,

you know, laudator temporis acti, a praiser of the time past in a derogatory sense.

And all of these warnings about not doing it. But I think it's healthy as long as you don't stay in that time window, that work.

So I'll be reading or I'm working in the yard and I'll be... gardening, I'll find a horseshoe, you know, or I'll find an old...

We had a guy that was helping us remodel and he found this weird thing in the dirt out here. And it was, he had to look up on the internet.

It was some type of tool they used in 1880, a hand tool, for I think it was calibrating weights or something.

And so every once in a while you get that, and it's kind of eerie that all these people were here, and you don't really know.

When I dug in Corinth, you know, in the 70s as a. graduate student, the same thing you find housing utensils in antiquity, but it was the same here, too.
Yeah. So that was kind of good.
And

it's been good for me. Yeah.

I'm very lucky, very lucky to have

those voices in your head all the time. Although it could be a good idea.
It's a really beautiful article. They're beautiful articles, Victor.

I'm not trying to.

hawk subscriptions to the website, but this is the kind of stuff that it's regularly.

I would just caution everybody, it's very healthy to go back, lay down, and think about these wonderful moments with these people that are dead that gave you so much. The only problem with it is

it is a time warp.

You've got to come back.

And sometimes you don't want to come back. And you get dreaming and you start living in that other world.
You can't do it.

You'll be absorbed.

I think it'll kill you if you get romantic or nostalgic for the past. You always have to be ready to fight in the future.
But I agree. You're right.

When I was 18 to 25, I lived with my grandmother, her sister, who was 10 years older,

and her brother-in-law, these three old Italians.

And everyone would come over every day at 3 o'clock.

I'm so glad I was

steeped in that

experience. And I think of the lovely people.
But then again,

it's like 45 years ago, 50 years ago. It's time to...

But

it's calming and it's wonderful to know that. You know, I just want to, I'll just finish today.

You had a letter, and I did too, from a couple people that when we were talking about the South, they thought I was

talking about memories

about

the Civil War. I was a little bit critical.

The thing about the South, it's very ironic right now because people from the most liberal places in the United States,

the Bay Area, for example.

or the Los Angeles Basin, for example, or Manhattan, are moving to states of the old Confederacy,

such as Florida, such as Tennessee, such as Texas.

And once that burden, that stain of slavery was removed, and once Jim Crow died out, then the South was, what I was trying to say, the South was able to

kind of be the true voice of the, you know, you read, I'll take my stand, that famous book by Robert Penn Warren. He was in it, right? The Southern Agrarians.
And they were defending.

Oh, he wrote King's

King's button. Yeah.
All the King's Mutton. Well, there were ten great scholars.

A couple of them were kind of crazy, but their argument was the South had the and it was it's in Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home, Look Homeward Angels, that they have a unique, stable,

polite culture.

It's more slow, and it's a critique of modern industrialism. Okay, it's kind of simplified, but nobody could that that argument was stained by slavery and racism.
But once that

disappeared, then you were into a whole new rubric, and that is, black people and white people had known each other intimately for much longer than in the North, because that didn't really happen in the North until World War I and World War II and the great industrialization and the need for labor.

And so once you got the prejudice out, then you had a familiarity between the races

on equal terms. If you look at Atlanta or Georgia, but more importantly, the positives of the South could reassert themselves without the stain of slavery

or racism. So what's happened is people look now at the South and they said, you know, people are more polite there.
Yeah. And they honor tradition more.

And they're more interested in human things. And the hustle-bustle of Silicon Valley is a crasser

and more anonymous existence.

And so I think it's not just we have confidence in our local communities, we're going to have lower taxes, we're going to have less regulations, we're going to have more freedom for you, but it's also when you go there, people are friendlier.

And now that the South,

the North doesn't know what to do because they look at these old Confederate states and think, wow.

Blacks from Detroit are moving back to the South.

Left-wing nuts from Haydasbury are moving to Tennessee. Now,

they may have different reasons, but part of the reasons is they're looking for a stability, a family-centered tradition, greater religiosity. So

it's one of the strangest things that you've ever seen that this old blue state Confederate stronghold is now solidly Republican. And there's a lot, it's the locus classicus for black Republicans.

Tim Scott's a good example, yeah. Clarence Thomas is a good example.
Tom Sewell grew up in part in this in the South. North Carolina, right?

I think he was born there and moved to Harlem. To New York.
And so, but I'm getting, that's what I wanted to say. This is I'm a big supporter of contemporary southern culture.

Every time I've gone to the south, and I go there a lot, I've been to every southern state, I've had nothing but

hospitable treatment from both black and white. It didn't matter.
Right. Much more so than in the North or the West.

Victor,

I lived in Fredericksburg, Virginia at the top of the battlefield, Maurice Heights. And before that, Sharon and I lived in Spotsylvania, where there was

Spotsylvania Courthouse and kind of vectoring through Chancellorsville.

But we lived there six years.

And

I think it's fair to say, relative to where I actually grew up in the Bronx, that there was much more sense of race.

And someone is of a different race and therefore racism in New York, liberal New York City than there was

in rural Virginia.

There was just a more blended and

collegial neighborhood. Hello, ma'am, hello, sir.
However, you know, that guy said hello to me.

He just happened to be black, as opposed to someone had seen a black person walking down the streets of Woodlawn and the Bronx, it would have been a problem. That's what the library understood.

Anything that's artificially constructed with race failed. You have all these, the secret to the whole screwed-up woke movement to reduce it down to its essentials.

It's mostly led by upper, upper class and upper, upper middle class, bicoastal, professional, wealthy, privileged elites and they don't feel comfortable with or they haven't grown up with

poor people of all colors and all races and they patronize people that's joe biden you know telling charlemagne the black uh guy you ain't black because you know what i mean and yelling at the other guy and calling him a gentleman they they're condescending and they they're not comfortable but will you take poor white people that grew up

with Mexican-American people or Asian people or black people,

they don't have that problem because they don't see them as anything other than people.

Whereas the other people see them as totems or people that need their help on their conditions and their requisites.

And that's why the affirmative action thing never worked, and that's why it'll never work, and that's why the woke thing will eventually fail.

When you see these provosts and these college, completely privileged white people writing these like

commissariat communiques about diversity and inclusion and this people and that they don't they don't live with people middle-class people they don't feel comfortable and that's why they create that facade yeah

i think they're

yeah and so you know final thing i i was at a place not i want i can't say where i but i just uh i also a guy i kind of like a lot is, you remember Jason Woodlock?

Yeah. He was that sports guy.
Yeah.

He went on Tucker a lot, you know. Right.

I always liked him, and I met him for the first time.

And we talked for a while. I really like him.

What I liked about him was he...

He has strong religious faith, and he wasn't apologetic about it, right?

He would evoke it at certain times, and you don't do that on national TV, supposedly. And then he was very loyal to Tucker.

And

I haven't seen him on TV recently. And he used to be a regular on Tucker, and I think that's probably because Tucker, but he's very intelligent.
And

the reason I mentioned it is we were talking about race and things. And

I think

when we say

people who are non-white are being successful, we always look at the academic or, you know what I mean? Like they mirror image their white academic or they're more of a sophisticated or Don Lamon.

But when

there are some brilliant people that

come up on their own hard work and they're not academic and they're not the reason that

they are so unique is they're not beholden to that white

guilt-ridden, patronizing elite.

Another person is, is it Tyrus that's on the gut feel?

I love him. Yeah, that guy has got a natural aptitude.
I mean,

I don't know what his football. He played, I think, college football.
I think just

don't. Yeah, but I mean, he has a natural aptitude that's

much more sophisticated and better than most academics I've met. Oh my gosh, he cuts through the BS.
You know, people ask me all the time, Victor, who should we get to speak at our fundraiser?

I said, why don't you ask that Tyrus guy?

He is so good. He will put asses in the seats.

He's got a wicked sense of humor. Yeah.

I'm really glad that

by sheer, he's like Jason Whitlock, those two guys.

And

that was why I get so frustrated with race because it always has to be defined and seen through the lenses of

these woke.

shysters and grifters.

And

gosh, when I got to Hoover,

we have brilliant people there, but the two most brilliant that I thought were always Shelby Steele and Tom Sowell. Every time I listened to Tom Sowell, he'd say something that sounded very simple.

And I thought, wow,

how did he come up with that? You know what I mean?

It just cut to the quick.

And I was trying to figure out something. He said, is this what you mean? And the same thing with Shelby.

So I have confidence about racial relations if we just take it out of the university, we take it out of the hands hands of the white, bankrupt, bicosta, left-wing elite, and just let people be people.

And you'll get people like Tyrus and Jason Whitlock that come to the fore on their on their just enormity of their own talent. Yeah.
Very kind guys.

I've met both of them. I think I met him when I did Gutfield, maybe not.
Gutfell, yeah.

I did meet Jason the other day. And I just wanted to say that I really was impressed.
He's such a nice guy. That's terrific.

I hope he was a fan of Victor Davis Hansen. Also, hey,

we're at the end of the show, Victor. So we thank our listeners for listening.
And if you're new, great. Thank you.
Keep coming back. I hope you enjoyed this.

Victor does at least four podcasts a week, two with

me,

the marble-mouthed black.

Can't get a straight sentence out of his mouth if you listen to some

comments. I saw our loyal friends, Jacques, and they didn't say that.
They were getting. Yeah, well,

you must have been all drinking

with

the Facebook group, the Sophie. But then the other two were the great Sammy wink, and she's terrific.

I also got one of those, by the way. I get so sick of it.

What? People criticizing you of your

poor treatment of Sammy. Oh, yes.
Oh, Victor, poor little Sammy. She's got such a pleasant voice, and she's

you just have to let her take over and dominate you. No, no, no, no way, Sammy.
Poor Sammy,

she, Victor, you know what she did the other day in your show? And what would that be? She asked you permission again if she could speak. Why does she have to ask you permission? She doesn't.

She's obsequious. Maybe she's beaten down, but she's got to be more dominant and formidable.
Well,

you just try to beat down Sammy. No, I don't.
And that was funny. Somebody gave me a life to a bump.
Oh,

wow.

Wow,

that was interesting, folks.

Claire, we're still recording.

Hey, Victor,

Victor, though, I have to read a comment because, you know,

some people who listen

on Apple, they rate the show. You can do that on Apple and iTunes.
Zero to five stars. Again, practically everyone's giving you five stars.
And some people leave comments. And

here's one. It's from it's titled The Dean of Conservative Thought.

The title says it all. Victor is remarkable as a scholar, probably as a farmer, and an incredible voice of rational thought.
I do not watch Fox News or any other television news shows.

So I discovered Victor probably a year ago when one of the Conservative Daily Emails featured an article by him. I immediately go to search and found out about his podcast.
I am now,

and I have, I guess have been, a listener and also an ultra subscriber. Oh, that's nice.
The low fee is worth it. I'm disappointed that he supports

that he supports President Trump and elected again, since my greatest fear is the Trump nomination will lead to a landslide victory for the Democrats.

I know. Let me just finish.

I just got an email from somebody that said, shame on you. You're not supporting Donald Trump.
You're an apostate. You're a traitor.
Well, I know. That's

if you folks listen to the

recording

with Sammy that went up, I think on July 23rd, or 22nd.

And I don't know why people think you have endorsed anybody because you haven't. You give it away.

We're going to have that. We did before, you and I, but we're going to have an update where you and I will go through all the candidates.
Okay. We will talk about the dynamics.

We'll start with Joe Biden and Kennedy and why they're leaking about him and what they want to do with him and who else.

And then we'll talk about no labels, the role of a third party Joe Manchin or Cornell West. And then we'll talk about Trump vis-a-vis his indictments, not indictments.
And we'll talk about DeSantis.

And then we'll talk about the human

torpedo or suicide vest, as one person said, Chris Christie, and all the others that may or may not be running for vice president. We'll get it all out there.

And you'll see that I'm trying to be very objective. I want

open debate. I think I want to see everybody out there.
And

I only have one prejudice.

I want whoever gets,

whoever comes in second or third, to swear that they will support the nominee because we have no margin of error.

And they didn't do that to Donald Trump last time.

And so I want, if it's Trump,

if it's DeSantis, I want Trump to say, you know what?

I support our nominee, whoever it is.

That's absolutely critical. If we're going to keep

the House, we've got to have Kevin McCarthy in the House, and we've got to get a Senate that is reasonable. All right, Victor,

we're going to just have to control ourselves here and end it because the podcast gods have dictated that. So thanks for all the wisdom you shared today.
Thanks.

That was Gretzky's dad who left that comment. We thank him and everyone who leaves comments.
Thanks for your wisdom today, Victor.

And we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show. Bye-bye.
Thank you, everybody.