Rhetoric, a Legacy, and Abandonment

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Hello, listeners of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This is another weekend episode, and Victor is, of course, our favorite commentator and analyst of current political affairs and cultural issues.

He's also trained as a classicist and philologist and historian, and has written many books, a total of 27,

many of them on historical.

topics.

So he is a historian as well.

So for those of you who are new, that's what you've come to listen to.

And we've got lots on the agenda today.

We're going to look at some of the political, current political affairs with the left wing and Donald Trump and DeSantis.

And then we'll get into our weekend episode historical topic, which is the Civil War and the legacy of the Civil War is what we're looking at today.

So stay with us and we'll be right back.

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Thank you for joining us.

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

Victor, I confess today I don't have anything positive.

I know we got a critique on being positive.

I was wondering if you had any positive thoughts

before we start in.

Positive.

Well,

it's amazing to be in California, even with this heat.

It's scheduled to get up to 113, I think, this week in the San Joaquin Valley, how much water there is.

I was driving across California, and the aqueduct is just

full.

The San Luis Reservoir is full.

The West Side farmers have holding ponds.

And I drove through the various regional

irrigation districts.

They're full of water.

I've never seen anything like it.

And this is, and it's still a tragedy because this is a once-in-a-lifetime year we've had with this huge snowmelt.

and uh we didn't we didn't have the wherewithal or the capacity that we should have known in advance because californians voted seven billion dollars years ago to build reservoirs and of course knew some in the left they don't care about the law or what the people want and they didn't build the sites of the los banos grandes or the temperance flat reservoirs so About 90% of this water is going out the San Joaquins and its tributaries and

the Kings

and the

Sacramento Rivers.

They all meet in the Delta.

Well, at least the Kings is filled up.

The Kings River is filled up, I should say, Clary Lake.

It's a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon.

It's over 100 miles long now, almost like it was in antiquity.

Wow.

And it's incredible.

So

that's good that we have all this water.

And then the other thing is, personally, I was very lucky because i have a small house at 7 200 feet

and

it survived at one point you couldn't see the house it would just look like an igloo and i had a guy i was kind of angry i won't mention any names but he supposed to dig the roof but he

started not at the bottom and worked up he started at the peak and his crew removed the stove from the peak, but they didn't throw it off the sides.

They threw it onto the eaves.

So instead of having 10 or 12 feet of stove in the eaves, at one point there was 20.

And those eaves started to buckle, and then they threw it on other gables in the front that broke off.

So

I'm,

I guess, 75% fixing up.

We fixed the

deck balconies.

I mean, the banister is fixed.

We have the courtyard wall to fix.

I've got to redo the stone facing that was just

ice was like a knife through butter.

It just cut the stone and separated it from the house.

And we've got to fix an E, but I think it'll probably

for the garage door.

He hit it and crushed one of the panels, knocked it off the crack.

Very angry at that.

I won't want to mention names, but he was supposed to repair it.

He never did.

That's and so I think when the whole thing's done, I'll probably have $15,000 worth of damage, which is getting off light in a once-in-a-lifetime year of 9,800 feet of cumulative snow.

Yes.

So I'm happy about that.

Yeah, nice.

Well, let's turn then to some topics,

current topics, before we get to our Civil War saga.

On Trump's rhetoric, I wanted to ask you, because I just looked at an article titled, Republicans Threaten to Revive First Red Scare.

And this is in Newsweek and, you know, so a kind of a left-leaning

news source.

But what I was noticing is Trump's is making it very easy to caricature the right.

And he wasn't the only one they quoted, but, you know, they quoted him on getting rid of or throwing out or making sure communists, Marxists, and socialists don't have their tentacles in us.

And those are my words, not his, but Trump has made it very easy for the left to caricature the right.

And I was wondering your thoughts on that kind of rhetoric.

Well, I mean,

it opens a larger issue.

And

we might as well talk about it.

And that is what is the conservative reply to the Biden catastrophe.

And Biden is polling, you know, 35% on the economy, 36% on the border, an overall rating of 38 to 42.

He keeps talking about the economic miracle, but

he doesn't talk about cumulative inflation.

That's 25% since he took office in key sectors of the economy.

He doesn't talk about the price of energy.

He doesn't talk about interest rates.

He doesn't talk about any of that.

And so he's very vulnerable.

And so you would think

that

Trump,

in a perfect world, Trump has been in office four years.

He excited the

he didn't do it, but

they were crazy to the point of being deranged with the impeachments and all that followed.

So you would think that

this time around,

he would

get right to the point.

And that would be every single lecture, issue, discussion, campaign would be to point out how wanting Joe Biden is and what he's done to the country and let bygones be bygones.

But when you look at his

rallies that are very successful, they've got all these people, but a lot of them are just the litanies of all the injustices done to Donald Trump.

And the problem that I see with that is that it's kind of what we did in 2022, right?

Yeah.

And

the Republicans are not getting candidates, or at least not yet, are issues that show the weaknesses of the left and get people angry at what they've done to the country because they're fixating on Donald Trump, the person.

And so I would

we'll see what the campaign is going to be like.

It's still early.

We don't know what's going to happen to Trump and how he will react to what I think will be four different court indictments by four different prosecutors.

We don't know who will do well or poorly in the debates.

We don't know if Donald Trump will participate in the debates.

So there's all these known unknowns that are out there.

But right now, when you look at these polls and you see

Joe Biden 42, Donald Trump 43, or even Ron DeSantis 43,

it just seems inexplicable to me.

I know he's incumbent Biden, but he should be behind by 10 points, given his disastrous record.

And so

it's partly,

you know,

I just came back from a group of pretty well-heeled donor class, I guess the conservatives, and I would ask them the question discreetly,

are you going to vote for Joe Biden?

No, of course not.

Would you vote for Donald Trump?

And the answer, I hope I don't have to.

I hope I don't have to.

And what that means is they want Scott or DeSantis or something, but it means they probably will, but they won't give him money.

And so

that's going to be a big problem.

Trump, a person, I'm not really answering your question.

I'm just trying to.

But I can rephrase my question for you.

Do you think that the anti-communist, anti-Marxist, anti-socialist rhetoric of Trump is hurting him with the independents and all those people that are that's what I'm trying to say is that why is he not

why is he not 10 points ahead of Biden?

And the answer is that when he tweets, he puts all capital letters as usual, and he has, and he makes fun of people's looks, and he does all that.

And that turns off the people that you're referring to.

And the reason I didn't answer it's explicitly, I'm not sure if it's anti-Marxist, anti-socialist.

You see what I mean?

Yeah.

It's just their way of saying that type of constituency, which is, I don't know, 4% to 8% of the

electorate, which he needs, he needs.

You start breaking down these polls and you can get a calculus where Trump can get 44% of the nation.

Maybe he can win if there's a

third-party candidate, but he can't win otherwise.

He needs without that constituency.

And that constituency doesn't want to hear that.

Everybody's a communist.

You know what I'm saying?

This, this, this, this, they don't want to hear it.

they don't like that.

They don't like Marxists.

They know they're Marxists, but they don't want to hear it.

And they just, and I have so many

people I deal with that have been disillusioned with the left, and yet they will vote for a Republican candidate other than Trump.

And I don't know how that's going to work out.

I don't know if Trump's, what you talk, anti-socialist, anti-communist, that hardcore rhetoric gets an additional 3% to 5% of the electorate out.

The base gets riled up in a way that they didn't completely come out maybe in the midterms or in 2020, but although he had a record number of people that voted for him.

But see, what I'm getting at is that if you talk to Trump people,

this is what you hear.

A, Victor, Victor, Victor.

He got more votes than he did than any other president who was elected.

Got that?

Victor?

Yes, but he didn't get as many of Joe Biden.

Well, he didn't get as many of Joe Biden because, two, it was a rigged election.

Okay,

I don't know whether it was or not, but I have a suspicion that the inability to have an election day vote, 70%,

so to speak, rather than 30% hurt Donald Trump.

I agree with that.

But then, number three, but this time

he's going to win,

fill in the blanks.

Okay.

And I say, okay, now what is he going to do?

Is he going to get 70 percent of the people to vote on election day?

I don't think so.

I don't think they can.

And number two,

is Donald Trump going to get an additional MAGA

group to come out?

I don't know how big.

Maybe it's been tapped.

And number three,

does he really think that the supporters, and I'm, you know, I voted for Donald Trump, I support him, but do you really believe that you're going to get people who are appalled

at transgender men in sports, women

in sport, male sports, or who are a Democratic working-class family, they wrote great Democratic tickets, and their daughter comes home and says, there's a guy in high school with testicles and a penis in our shower, and I can't take that.

Or

I just don't want to look at a bud.

I just don't like to be preached to by this Mulvaney character.

Or

I'm a small shop owner in San Francisco.

It's dystopian.

It's Road Warrior.

It's Mad Max.

It's nuts.

This isn't even a city.

They've destroyed it, the left has.

Or a mom who says, I vote for Biden all the time.

And my daughter came home and said, the teacher said, have you considered transitioning?

What business is it of hers?

Or another, you know what I'm saying?

Yes.

Those are constituents that are turned off by this new Jacobin left.

And

they're not even independents.

They're Democrats.

But along with independents, they could give Trump a 10-point lead.

Yeah.

And all he has to do is say,

I'm running a national unity ticket.

I don't care what party you are.

I don't care if in the past you hated my guts.

I don't care if you're left or right, that this country is an extremist and we got to save it.

And I have been unjustly treated, as you know.

They've gone after me in an asymmetrical fashion.

Just say it one time.

And they've impeached me twice.

They tried me as a private citizen.

They sucked sick Mueller.

They've got the, this is wrong, but I'm not going to dwell on it.

I'm not going to dwell on it.

That's it.

I'm going to fight as best I can.

I want to warn you that in the next 18 months, I may be indicted,

but I'm going to fight for you.

And what am I going to do?

Here is the economy.

We're going back to the Trump economy.

Deregulate, but this time we're going to pay our bills.

We're going to try to

get to a balanced budget in four years.

And we're going to close the border.

And we are going to build a wall.

We're not going to talk about who's going to pay for it.

We're going to build the wall.

I guarantee it.

And we're going to cut off funds to sanctuary cities and jurisdictions because it's contrary to federal law it's it's federal nullification and we're going to even increase more

oil and gas exploration and we're going to fix this military not only are we going to get our submarines fixed our artillery shells and javelin arsenals replenished we're going to have a huge effort at war military production we're going to be so strong that nobody's going to dare attack us, but we're going to get rid of this woke contagion in the military.

If he just did that

and don't talk about the past, no more tweets with all this, you know, he's ugly or she's an ugly boyfriend, he's got an ugly boyfriend, or that he would win.

Yeah.

I think that's answering your question, but I mean it in a larger sense.

It's not just he's calling, you know, communist, Marxist, and all that.

It's, it's the whole package.

Yeah, absolutely.

So I try to, I try to convert people when I know, when I see disaffected liberals,

and they'll come up to me and say,

gosh, I'm not responsible for this crazy stuff.

And I said, well, why don't you vote against it?

I can't vote for Trump.

I cannot vote for Trump.

And then that introduces the question of DeSantis, right?

So yeah, I had a question on that before you go into it, because I have a story on a former Disney executive, Ike Perlmutter, who's worth, they say, $3.9 billion,

who seems to be cozying up to Trump and away from DeSantis.

So I was wondering, that's just one story, but you see a lot about

DeSantis campaign either imploding or at least not on the tracks for a good

showing in this new season.

So I was wondering.

The quote unquote big money, and those are people who are capable of giving $1 million

donations, right?

And usually those people are in the 500 million and up class.

I shouldn't say just one, one to five million is what they give.

Okay.

They were giving to DeSantis, and DeSantis was running eight to ten points behind Trump early in the year, and maybe in some states, almost even.

And then the indictments came down, right?

And that created an anger, but also a swell of support for Trump.

And he was very effective in fundraising off it, and he got a lot of money, okay.

And then he started to attack DeSantis, and he's got a very good

hit team.

And they started, you know, those bobblehead DeSantis and this and this and this and this.

Partly DeSantis had to take care of Florida business, right?

The legislature was in session.

But then there had been a criticism because there had been a lot of press that the big money, the Romney money, the Bush, I don't mean Romney's money, but the money that had gone to John McCain and Romney and the Bushes was now going not to Trump, but to DeSantis.

And therefore, he would be in the palm of rhinos.

So I think that campaign accentuated his conservative fee days.

Got it?

So what did we hear the last three months?

We heard that he took on Disney and the jurisdiction of Disney, and he won probably.

And then he took on the transgender nonsense and he took on the school board and critical race theory, right?

And textbooks.

And

he

said he had said things about trans that were tough.

and he was going to change immigration.

But that led to a narrative that the left promulgated that he was mean or he was vindictive or he was just getting into cul-de-sacs, right?

These were issues that didn't translate well into the national arena.

And he had been successful during what?

Budgetary discipline in Florida, surpluses without an income tax.

strong support of the police, strong public schools that were not indoctrinating people,

cities that did not have large numbers of homeless people, excretement all over Viawa, Los Angeles, or Portland or San Francisco.

And

a willingness, yeah, and he was a veteran, so strong talk about the military.

So everybody thought at some point, those issues would transmogrify into the national stage.

And he would not be a Florida governor, but a national president candidate.

And by that, I mean he would be weighing in on

this is what went wrong in Kabul.

And I was in the military, and there's no reason that we didn't keep that base.

We wouldn't have lost a soldier.

We would have, we built it, we rebuilt it, we had a good embassy, and we could protect that.

And that would have allowed us to conduct operations from time to time to let everybody know that we're not going to give up on 20 years of that.

Or more importantly, we're in a position of, God help us, if we ever have to conduct

military operations from nations that threaten us in that area, we have one of the best places to do it.

A reinforced bunker, hangar, wonderful base.

And he could say that.

And he could say, now we're going to turn to Ukraine.

And I like Zelensky.

I like what they're doing.

They were invaded.

That was a violation of law.

And we gave them defensive weaponry.

In fact,

the Republicans were the ones that restored the javelins, not the Democrats.

They didn't want to give them javelins.

The Republicans were always on record of giving offensive weapons for their protection.

But now we're in a quagmire.

And

some of us warned that that offensive was not going to break through a,

you know, kind of

Gothic or Siegfried line sort of fortifications without.

And we have given them Heimars.

We said we weren't.

We have given them GPS accurate artillery.

We said we weren't.

We're giving them F-16s.

We said we would.

We're giving them Abrams.

We said we would.

We're giving them close.

Does everybody see a pattern here that they have the third largest budget of any military in the world right now?

And for them to liberate all of occupied Ukraine, I'm not talking about post-4

February 23rd, 2022.

We're talking about the borderland that was seized in 2014, including Crimea.

For them to get all of that back, and that's what they want, although no other president has said that was an agenda, they're going to have to conduct the type of operations with our equipment that are very dangerous, whether that is, as happened this week, downing Russian planes inside Russia, sinking ships of the Black Sea and Russian waters, or hitting areas around Moscow with drones.

And I can't sanction that.

I cannot sanction that.

And so, what we need to do is

make sure that Russia can no longer advance into Ukraine, but we are not going to give and deplete our arsenals and make us vulnerable vis-a-vis China.

so that we can give Mr.

Zelensky, who has a long history, that Ukrainian government of interference in domestic politics, going way back to 2016, writing op-eds about who should win the presidential race,

barisma, bribing Americans

with high political connections for political benefit, Mr.

Vinman,

I use that term again, the tip of the spear on the impeachment of a U.S.

president while he was being offered by the Ukrainian government as a reward, Minister of Defense.

now he's a middleman, basically an arms dealer, capitalizing on his notoriety to profit by the war.

So

we're not going to get into that anymore.

And I think that would be effective and nationalize that campaign and not talk about critical race school books or

transgender guys.

And you know, I mean, that's over with.

Now, it's a proven fact that he's actually running to the conservative side of Donald Trump.

The Trump campaign is attacking him on things like

too quick to cut budgets,

doesn't want to talk about sensible gun control, needlessly restricted abortion to, you know, six weeks,

et cetera, et cetera.

And

they're attacking him from the left.

So he established that.

Nobody's going to say, well, I can't vote for

Ron DeSantis because he's too liberal.

Nobody's saying that now.

They might have said it before.

So now he's got to nationalize and say, I am a national candidate.

And it's not going to be the same as Florida, but that same ability to balance a budget and keep taxes low and build infrastructure and promote energy and keep crime low that it makes people in the thousands want to come to Florida, is a blueprint that I can implement for the country.

And then that's half of it.

And then there's the personal, you know, I mean, it's very hard to be out more charismatic.

I know his

charisma turns people off, but who else can get 50,000 people at a rally but Donald Trump?

He's funny.

You know what I mean?

And people say he's vindictive.

He's mean-spirited in his language, but he you can ask Geraldo, who hates his guts.

They asked him the other day in the View, don't you hate Donald Trump, basically?

No, I don't.

Well, he's a racist,

one Puerto Rican and Jewish, and he never was racist to me.

I mean, Geraldo trashed Trump and said he was bad.

He wasn't going to vote for him, but he couldn't really say that Donald Trump had been mean and vindictive to him.

See what I mean?

Yes, I do.

And he's not mean and vindictive.

No.

And that's part of his problem.

He doesn't hold grudges.

And so what I'm getting at is that

he's a formidable, and at least among Republican

groups, he's a formidable candidate.

So

what DeSantis has mastered, it seems to me, when you look at his press conferences and his combative interchanges with people, the media, he's an expert at repartee.

He has a lot more facts at his fingertips than Trump does, and he rattles them off but it's not enough to crush a reporter you have to do it as i said empathetically yes and you know i keep going back to the regan and i've mentioned that with jack and the air traffic controllers he never said i fired those sobs they deserved it he said i i just don't i just wish they wouldn't strike they work hard they've got a lot of stuff to do they're great people but if they do strike they have violated their oath and their contract and unfortunately they will be terminated It gives me no joy, but they will be terminated.

And then everybody, he won the whole country on his side.

So

if

DeSantis said,

I have some pretty tough laws on illegal migration.

No more driver's license for illegals.

Maybe some deportations out of Florida.

Okay.

I didn't want to do that.

That was done by other administrations that allowed illegals to come in here.

But I have to restore the law.

It gives me no pleasure to do that, but I have to do it.

And so, if you're Juan Gonzalez and you work very hard,

you've got to go back to Mexico if you came here illegally in the last two years.

If you've been here for 10 years and you still are illegal, maybe we can allow you to stay if you're gainfully employed and you're not taking federal or state monies and you have no criminal record.

And we'll give you a green card, not citizenship.

Something like that

would help him enormously.

And that is to be as tough as he is, but to

package that toughness with an empathy for the middle and lower classes, is what I'm saying.

I think he can do it because he came from

that's what was so successful about Donald Trump.

He was a billionaire, but he was able to connect with people from Michigan, Pennsylvania.

And he said, I know what you're like.

And it wasn't phony.

You could talk to people in New York that said that

he would get his, you know, his wingtips and his black suits, and he would go out and talk to these people and get dirty at his construction sites.

He liked them.

He liked people who watch, you know, big-time wrestling, so to speak.

So that wasn't, and that was something that made him.

And so I'm trying to be disinterested and show you that if Donald Trump didn't have to do what you suggested, Sammy, and that is to alienate the independent or the renegade Democrat, he would win easily.

And if ron de santis can now pivot from these

i don't know what you would call them these local regional issues that establish his conservative fides but they tend to turn off independence but and then go national uh with his successes and with a contract for america and then to be a little bit more empathetic when he puts people down i think he would do very well.

And then you would, you know, you, they would both do well.

And that would be very interesting, wouldn't it?

If you had the two front runners who were exchanging leads all through

the primary, each with a different strength.

And at some point, somebody would say, hey, would you move out of state for 90 days and registered in New York or whatever, one of them?

And then you could have them both on the same ticket, whoever won is what I'm saying.

I can't see Trump, though, being a vice president or DeSantis either.

Yeah.

That's sad.

But let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about the legacy of the Civil War.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

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We're talking with VDH

and he's going to discuss the legacy of the Civil War.

And I just have one thing to say before I was thinking that we might focus on the South, the Reconstruction, Jim Crow, civil rights, and then all the way up to the modern day of the South, the impact of the Civil War.

But then I thought maybe you might have something to say about the legacy in the North, too.

So go ahead, Victor, though.

Well, I mean, the war was over in 1865, and then you had the Gilded Age that was in

10 to 15 years, didn't you?

So

the war effort and the enormous increase in steel production, railroads,

innovative, I mean, everything from

things like the Dahlgren guns, as I mentioned, or turrets, or the monitor, or the Henry and Sharps rifle, or balloons and reconnaissance, or mass use of the telegraph.

All of that was an accelerant of industrialization and sophisticated technology.

And without this,

it was kind of like the shadow hanging over the country, right?

It was like, I don't want to even deal with slavery.

How can you deal with it?

These people are so,

these slave owners are so wealthy and powerful.

And to get rid of them, you'd have to go into the South.

And then you'd be warring on the non-slave.

I just don't want to think about it.

But it was something that held back the United States.

So in the North, there was a sense of euphoria that it was no longer there and that they had won.

And they had won

not by just strangling them economically, but Grant and Sherman and Sheridan had beat the South on the battlefield.

And that gave the North enormous confidence that they were not just industrially powerful and financially rich, but they had created soldiers that were as good or better than the South.

That was something nobody thought could happen.

But at the end of the war, the Union armies were not what started the war.

They were

growing and they were stronger and they were better equipped and they were more confident.

And then

it solved the problem of the West because the problem with the West was

bleeding Kansas or Missouri, each time you opened a new territory, it was quid pro quo, slave or free.

That was over now.

And that became a kind of a liberating experience, even for the South.

So people who were the dispossessed in the South went to places like Oklahoma and the Land Rush and Arkansas.

And so it was the West turned out to be kind of a relief, as it always had been, but to a greater degree, kind of a relief valve.

And people could say, you know what, I'm going West.

And then

if you read, you look at those classic Westerns, John Ford Westerns or others, it was a melting pot of East and

West, but also of North and South.

When they got West, they were all Westerners and they would kid each other about who fought for what.

You know, the searchers, John Wayne had fought on the South, and he deals with the Northern cavalry, etc., etc.

And that was,

it was going to be a northern-dominated country.

In the South, it was humiliated and it was impoverished and

it had no industry and nobody, and then it suffered,

you know, from this.

Carpetbagger was the northerner and then the scalywag maybe it meant was the indigenous Republican.

I i don't know what but there was a lot of tensions and we had a decade of reconstruction which everybody champions today but it was not

when you have 40 percent of the population you can't control 100 of the offices and so eventually people who had served in the confederate army were going to vote and they were going to be bitter and angry at the at the north and

they were going to take it out on blacks who'd been very powerful who had got a chance finally to have political representation.

And so you went from almost an all-black Reconstruction ticket with white Republicans to an all-Democratic, white and angry class.

And then what started

within 20 years was this Jim Crow

de facto apartheid.

that went all the way to 1960 and nobody wanted to invest in the South because of that issue.

But once that started in the 1960s to dissipate, then

you started to get re-establishment.

And

Toyota or Honda, all of these companies wanted to go to the South because they thought the workers were more industrious and they were not going to have unions and it was a better place to invest with as far as taxation and regulation.

So it did have the last laugh.

One of the other things that's really important, I wrote about it in the

Ripples of Battle, was this idea of the lost battle or the lost cause.

So how does the South explain their defeat, right?

Sometimes they blame certain people.

If Longstreet had obeyed Lee and he was, you know, defiant or he didn't, he should have told Lee and gone quicker, he'd hesitated at Gettysburg.

That's not true.

But there was also, well, if this had just happened.

So the lost battle was at the high point of the Battle of Shiloh in April, early April 1862, Albert Sidney Johnson, who was, remember,

the ranking officer, he's the one that put down the so-called Mormon Rebellion a decade earlier.

And he was 6'1, and he was handsome, and he was muscular, and he was the embodiment of the South.

And he had left California and defected to the Confederacy, given up his

federal billet and traveled to Texas.

And he became de facto the highest ranking.

And he led this huge army.

And

they had a lot of people in it, General Hardy and General Bragg.

And they, you know, what would

Nathan Bedford Forrest, who would become very famous at Fallen Timbers in the aftermath.

And this thing slowly trudged up the Tennessee River and its shit church.

It was winning.

It was winning.

The first day it actually won, but at the high point,

Albert Sidney Johnson said, follow me.

Can you imagine getting out in front of everybody?

And he got shot in the popular artery behind his knee, and nobody even knew he was wounded.

It was a clean shot.

But unfortunately, what should have been maybe a serious but not incapacitating wound hit hit his popular artery.

And he couldn't see it because of his boot.

And he fainted.

They thought he had fainted.

They put him under a tree and he died.

And that created the myth that at that moment, just think, if Albert Sidney Johnson had not been

shot,

That last strike would have gone through the Union lines and they'd already pushed them back a mile and a half and they would have sent them all the way into the Tennessee River.

And at that point, Buell would have not been able to save them.

Grant would have been humiliated.

Sherman would have probably been killed or humiliated.

And they would have gone all the way and taken Cincinnati, and they would have won the war.

That's not accurate, but that became the lost battle, then became the lost cause.

And it amplified another really detrimental idea that

either the South should or could have won because they were the morally superior

people.

And man to man, they fought better and they believed in something, southern values, and they were not just a bunch of motley immigrants.

And that was really pernicious because the truth of the matter, they had been beaten in every aspect.

Their generals were not as good as the North.

And you could make the argument that in those later battles with the Army of the West, you get a yeoman guy from Michigan or Indiana or Iowa, and they were as good or better fighters man for man than people in the Southern Army.

And so, but nevertheless, they clung to that idea, and that made it very hard for them to realize how wrong this Civil War had been and how they had miscalculated.

And that when you have that excuse, it's kind of like the Germans, you know, if we hadn't just gone into Russia, we would have won.

I met Germans in Crete after World War

in 1973 when I'd be there, and they'd say, you know, we took Crete.

I talked to a lot of them, former paratroopers.

They were having a reunion there.

I think it was their 32nd, 33

reunion.

I talked to them in a beer hall in Crete, and they said, we know this country better than anybody.

We occupied it.

We beat the British.

We beat the Greeks.

We weren't evicted to the war ended.

And had we just not gone into Russia?

We had over 3 million men.

Just think of it.

They were our allies.

We could have just swept the Middle East.

They could have sent millions here to Crete.

We could have sent millions.

We could have taken Malta.

We could have gone into Algeria, Morocco with the Vichy friends.

They wouldn't have folded.

They would have been on, we would have swept all the way to Suez, taken the Suez Canal, and we would have...

We didn't need to go into Russia.

We would have got to the Caspian Sea and the oil that way without even bothering the Russians.

And that's kind of crazy, but that's what they believed.

They had an inability to think that it was inherent that

Hitler would be doing something stupid like that given his career.

It was inherent that the South had a rendezvous with disaster.

But then again, as I said at the conclusion, there's so much paradox and irony that

Northerners now are saying, the descendants of the Union Army are saying, I want to go live in the South because the racial issue is no longer there.

And to the degree that there, there's more economical racial relations in rural Texas or rural Florida or

urban Georgia than there sure is in Detroit or Newark.

You know, so

Chicago or Chicago, I want to go down there and live.

And then you say, well, why are

I said this to a person this week?

I said, you're leaving California and you're going to Tennessee.

So what is it you like about Tennessee?

He said, people are more sane.

There's more nuclear families.

There are people, he said, I'm not religious, but people go to church and that's good.

And he said, there's less social tensions and they don't put up with the nonsense because they have traditions and it's more rural.

And so that is so ironic that they would want to go to the former Confederacy and abandon the former Union.

And you wouldn't see what had happened earlier where Southerners to get jobs, especially blacks, had migrated to the North.

And Southerners migrated.

I mean, the poor whites left the South after the collapse of the Confederacy.

They went to Arkansas, Oklahoma, as I said, Texas.

And now

the other thing is very strange, it's paradoxical, they're Republicans.

And the old idea that if you were in the South, it was a uniparty of Democrats is over with.

I mean, if you look at those maps that used to be in the FDR at Kennedy or LBJ elections, they were bright blue all through the South.

And they're just red now.

And they're Republican.

And they're the party of Abraham Lincoln.

It is making sense in some sense, but it does in others, because the Democratic Party is, you know, it's a funny thing, it's still for nullifications of federal laws.

It's still for sanctuary cities.

It's still for race, race, race, just like it was during the Confederate days in a weird way.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take another break and then come back and talk a little bit about the historian Zhi Yu Wang, who ended up in Iran and arrested in Iran for three years.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

We're back and you can find Victor at his website, victorhanson.com.

The name of the website is The Blade of Perseus and you can join us.

for $5 a month or $50 a year subscription and you will get the VDH Ultra material.

And so read

more,

I was going to say more than three, two to three articles a week, usually three,

that Victor writes exclusively for his website.

So please come join us.

You can also join for free just to get on, and you'll get a newsletter about three or four times a week that tells you the new things that are on the website.

Victor,

so I

was reading about this history and I was kind of fascinated that he was being trained.

So he was a PhD student.

He was doing his research in Iran, and the Iranians arrested him for pursuing regime change

and

he went he came back and he was just shocked that the Princeton his Princeton colleagues were still very soft on Iran even though his own experience as a historian seeking evidence etc for his dissertation was arrested for three years i was wondering if you had any thoughts on the current current state of education.

Well,

I think he had a really good point.

He said, you know, for his graduate degree, it's very common, you know, when you're in classics and you're writing about Greek history, they tell you to go to Greece, right?

And there's a facility there, the American School of Classical Studies.

It's where we all went.

So when you're writing about Iran and you're in Princeton, they say, go to our Iran center, right?

And he did.

And even though it was, you know, during this

controversy, conundrum, tensions about the Iran deal and the nuclearization issue.

And so he goes over there and he asks questions.

He does his research.

And lo and behold,

I guess he said, didn't he say it wasn't exciting?

He was happy.

It was what he thought it should be.

And all of a sudden,

we start learning that he gets arrested and there really is no Princeton Iran center.

I mean, it doesn't matter.

It doesn't do any good.

They didn't even know what to do with him.

They didn't even help him.

No, they didn't.

And

he was released in 2019.

So I think the Trump administration is who got him out.

They did.

And the Princeton didn't, Princeton didn't put any pressure on the Trump administration.

They kind of freelanced.

They did nothing.

And then they, I shouldn't say they did nothing.

They tried to,

didn't they try to suppress any information about him?

Princeton wouldn't cooperate with the media.

He was there for, I don't know what it was, 12, I guess they said 1,200 days.

He was in prison.

And then they exchanged him.

Trump exchanged him for, didn't we have a

spy scientist or somebody that was Iranian that we caught?

And we, and we traded.

And

then when he said that, you know, I couldn't finish my thesis because

I was in prison, so I need more time.

They didn't give him any time, did they?

That's what I understand.

That they're not even sympathetic for letting him to

get an exemption so he can finish his thesis.

And so that's, you know, it's,

I don't know.

I guess they didn't.

The question is, why, though?

Is it because Princeton had a reputation of being a place where Iranian scholars came?

They were on their faculty and they didn't want to,

they they thought that he was some conservative activist or something.

He wasn't, but they felt that he was a threat to their specialized relationship with the Iranian government that had these mutual exchanges.

And this guy keeps coming up in the literature, John Haldane, you know.

Yes.

He was the guy that was director, I think, of that Iran center, and he doesn't even.

He doesn't even talk about it.

So it's lucky that the guy is still alive.

He was there.

I mean, if you're 1,200 days in Iranian prison,

and then

I guess part of it is it's very embarrassing

that

you have to be bailed out by Donald Trump as far as Princeton, right?

So they're thinking, well, why did Princeton bail you out?

I mean, why did Donald Trump bail you out?

You should have stayed in prison for the whole 10 years, right?

I guess it would be in the Princeton academic mind,

it would be worse to be bailed out after 1,200 days by Donald Trump than it would be to sit there for 10 years.

That's his real crime.

It seems to me that he was,

there was, the Trump administration took efforts to get him out of the clutches of this insane regime who unjustly had detained and

incarcerated him when he was doing this field work.

And I guess it was on,

you know, it was on how Muslim areas are researched.

But the real thing is, think about this.

If you're

a student at Princeton and you're a graduate student and you submit a thesis topic on how

Iran or any Muslim country governs at the local level and you want to focus on Iran and you have a Iranian center over there, right?

Don't you think people would advise him?

If I was and I'm pretty ignorant about Iran, I would say, hmm, Mr.

Wang,

I want to be very careful.

You're going into a revolutionary society.

It's at tensions with the United States.

It may or may not have an exchange of missiles with

Israel.

It is paranoid.

It has a long history of locking people up, especially Americans.

And sometimes they disappear.

We can't guarantee your safety.

Do you still want to go?

And if you do go there, we'll have to have somebody monitor.

They didn't do any of that.

None.

They just, oh, okay, we have an Iranian center.

You know what I mean?

And it was, it was, you know, he was a U.S.

citizen.

He wasn't Chinese.

He was Chinese, but he wasn't a Chinese citizen.

He was a U.S.

citizen.

You think that

the government,

I don't know, the government or somebody would have helped him or Princeton University would have felt that he was one of their own and they had a moral responsibility responsibility to help him.

But I guess they thought he's just a small pawn.

Why ruin this good thing when

you know what I mean?

And why we have this good relations with this revolutionary government?

And

why would we let this guy

and the guy that got him out was, I met him before,

and he was

Brian Hook.

He was very high in the State Department.

He was one of Pompeo's point men on Iran.

And they had people, why this was happening, they had Iranians like that Musavian,

who was, I mean, he was at Princeton, and I think that

he was voicing the threats against Brian Hook.

Brian Hook had to have

security.

They threatened to kill him.

And you had people

on the Princeton faculty that were participatory in those, on that radical, they were members of the, they were megaphones for the Iranian regime.

So in some ways, Princeton was more conducive to radical anti-American Iranian officials that were teaching on its faculty than it was to their own graduate student who needed help in Iran.

Yes.

I think it's

just an indictment of the whole academic culture.

Yeah, exactly.

I think it just shows the danger of the rhetoric.

So the rhetoric at Princeton is Iran's not such a bad place.

It's good, wonderful.

This happens to this guy.

They have no ability to react to it given their own rhetoric and the people that are there, obviously, that have no interest in exposing the problems with a theocratic regime that's, as you call it, insane.

So I think.

And the guy, the guy was, he was experienced too.

I think he'd been.

Didn't he work as a translator?

I think he knew a lot of Middle East languages.

He'd He'd worked for the Red Cross

and he was no slouch.

He was in his late 30s.

And

I remember when he got arrested,

that guy,

remember him, the president?

He comes up again, Ice Gruber.

He was the guy with the Joshua Katz matter.

Remember that fired Katz?

for suggesting that the people who took over an office at Princeton were terrorists.

And then all of a sudden, when they really couldn't get him, because that was a free speech issue, he was a marvelous classicist.

He was an expert in early Greek dialects, and he had won teaching awards.

And then they went back to his entire past and found that he'd had a consensual relationship with a student who had never lodged a complaint.

And yet that was rebooted.

And after a year of harassment, they fired him.

Well, that same president he i don't think he ever

he never told anybody that the guy was arrested i don't think the u.s government knew about it for months and he was so afraid that this was going to uh endanger our little deal we have with radical iran where princeton is the go-to place if you want to have contacts with uh

you know with iranians Yes.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, this is the end of our podcast for this weekend episode.

And I have a couple of comments from listeners for you.

One is titled Entertaining and Enlightening.

It's by Davey Dreyer.

He says, My expectations of a podcast are fairly straightforward.

Educate me and do so in a way that's an enjoyable experience.

Professor Hansen does both in spades.

He is humorous yet humble patriot who grasps the history in unparalleled, whose grasp of history is unparalleled and who provides unique perspectives on current and past events.

Highly recommend to anyone out there who loves this great country of ours.

So very nice comment from somebody.

I think it's spot on myself, but of course I'm always your cheerleader.

Well, thank you.

And then we have another one, and I'm going to paraphrase for her.

She loves your podcast.

She gave you five stars, but she said, I have a problem with Sammy Wink, and I'm going to paraphrase her.

Good.

I want to hear her.

She says yes, yes, yes, all the time and then has a hard time articulating herself.

And that's a longer paragraph, but a paraphrase of it.

So I reply to that, that yes, Sammy Wink, indeed, you're correct.

And she's working on it.

She's got a lot of work to do.

Well,

I

yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

That's what she said.

She says you agree with me too much.

Yeah, so I'm agreeing with you.

And then when I do come on to speak or say something, I have a problem articulating myself.

And that's probably

pretty accurate.

I'll give her that.

People, well, I can tell you that

I did an angry reader.

I mentioned that with Jack or you, that

it's so obscene and angry that one of my assistants said, I don't think we should put it on.

And I said, put it on.

So I think I'm waiting for it.

And if you're out there, put it on.

So I want it to be on, but I get that all the time.

And it's not just,

you know, when people really want to insult somebody, it's usually

they go into detail about the way you look or the talk or something like that, not just F you, F you.

So I get a lot of that.

But, you know, when you go on four hours, we do probably an aggregate, these shows are going longer in an hour sometimes, probably six hours a week, you're bound to.

Rush Limbaugh told me that once.

He said, you know, they go after me a lot, but I do 15 hours of unscripted talk a week.

And if you do that

each month, you're doing 60 hours.

And if you do that, you know, you're doing 720 hours a year.

And those 720 hours, you're going to say some stuff that you regret.

Yeah.

And that's what's where you have to be really careful about that.

One thing we try to do in this show, we don't try to,

I don't think we promulgate charges that we're not sure that, you know, that

conspiracy or ad hominem without some evidence.

And then I try not to use

schatology or vulgar language or lose my temper or any of that.

Yeah.

So that's important.

I think people

don't yell and scream and all of that stuff.

It's funny.

I have people who, I'll be in this,

you know,

I've had people who've advised me from networks and said well you know when you go on tv you don't yell and you don't get emotional and you don't interrupt that's the way you do it that's you fight for airtime and you just sort of you know you can speed it when i listen to you on fox i speed it up

i change the the tempo you know i think you can do that electronically you know what i mean yes you can yes so and then i've had other people say i'm glad you don't you scream and yell so

And you talk at a pace that is soothing.

I've heard that too.

Soothing?

Yeah, not at a fast pace, like trying to keep up with everything.

But I have one more

writer that had a critique.

He said the other day, and I think we try to address this.

So here he is.

The other day you talked about Bidenomics and just

passed everything off as terrible, but without giving insights into what his supporters would argue.

This is fine for an already converted audience, but I come across liberals and read articles in Real Clear Politics that do point out the positive spin on the current agenda of Biden, I think he means.

I think it would be better to equip your audience to

mention what opponents think is positive and refute the claims as opposed to just saying everything is terrible.

I think we try to do this.

I try to play devil's advocate and say, here's what they would say to you, Victor Davis-Hanson.

I think we do that sometimes, maybe not enough.

Yes.

Well, first of all,

I would say that

let's look at bidenomics.

Okay.

So what did I say that was wrong with it?

I said the following.

Joe Biden was bragging that bidenomics has lessened or reduced the inflation rate from a high of 9% down to between 5 and 3%, right?

And I said

that's a misleading statistic.

If you look at

people

that were earning or buying or whatever in January of 2021,

now in June of 2023,

two and a half years later nearly, and you look at what they spend on essentials, meat,

dairy products,

processed food, gases, it's gone up, not 2% or 3%.

It's gone up anywhere from 25% to 30%.

It's aggregate.

So those months when you were getting 9%, 8%, 7%,

that's not just in isolation.

That's tacked on.

So when you get the inflation rate for the year of 7, you get another one, 7%, that's the whole inflation rate.

And that takes things that are in plentiful, they didn't go up that much, but it does mean some things went up, not 12 to 14 percent, but they went up 30 percent.

And those things are things like lumber and gas and food.

And nobody talks about that.

And wages did not keep up with that.

They did keep up with inflation during the Trump administration.

They hadn't in the prior 12 years.

That's one thing.

If you were going to buy a house in 2021 on Inauguration Day, you could have got a loan for 2.8 on a 30-year mortgage, right?

If you get a loan right now on a mortgage, you're going to pay anywhere from 6.5 to 7.2.

And that's going to mean that your monthly payment, as far as the interest goes, is going to be three times more expensive.

That is what Joe Biden.

If you were in California, and I can say it goes the same spread as nationwide.

On inauguration day when Joe Biden was here, you could buy gas for about $3 a gallon.

I filled up yesterday on a major gas station, not in downtown LA or San Francisco, but on an interstate route.

I paid $5.10.

It's gone up $2.10, and that's going down.

It was nearly $550.

Gasoline is much much more

higher.

I remodeled this entire home.

I shouldn't say remodeled.

I did the innards.

And a piece of plywood that was $12 was $70.

And Romex wire that was $33 was $170.

Yes, it's gone back down, but it hasn't gone back down to where it was.

And you have to calculate the money that was wasted spending on that hyperinflation.

And we're not out of it.

If you look at the debt, yes, Barack Obama doubled the debt.

George Bush increased it by 70%

in his

eight years.

And yes, Donald Trump almost doubled the debt in his four years.

Shouldn't say almost.

He didn't double the whole debt, but he made it at the same rate that Obama and Bush.

And yes, I'm giving credit to

Bill Clinton.

He had the smallest growth in the debt of any president in the recent memory.

And he was the only president, along with help from Newt Ginrich

in the House, that had three years of surplus.

So I'm giving him credit for that.

He did raise taxes to do it, but Ginrich did get him to cut.

So my point is this,

that Joe Biden printed $4 trillion

in just two years.

And that's part of it.

And now we go to the border, because that's an economic issue.

He let in 7 million people.

If you look at what New York is experiencing, if you look at what Illinois and Chicago is experiencing, you look what California, they are broke.

They cannot house.

They cannot give medical care to 7 million without the expense of other people.

So when I look at interest rates, When I look at inflation, when I look at energy prices,

it's a disaster.

Now, somebody's going to say, well,

he pivoted.

Yes, he did pivot, but he only pivoted before the 2022 elections.

He drained 40% of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

He has not filled that back up.

He canceled Keystone.

He wrote off Anwar.

He canceled New Federal.

And then all of a sudden he said, oh, my God, I've raised gas to almost $550 and California is going to go up to $7 higher than Europe.

So I better switch.

And then he secretly went to the frackers and horizontal people and said, here's leases.

And right now, if you look at it, we're starting to get back to where we were.

Even as John Kerry says, that

we're going to be green, green, green, and cancel.

But I don't see what is so good about

Bidenomics.

Now you're going to say, well, it's 3.5.

It's even lower than the Trump's basically zero unemployment.

When you get down to three something,

yes.

And that's because partly we had a lot of people that are,

I don't look at the unemployment rate.

I look at the labor participation rate.

And that is, has Joe Biden taken

a 61 or 62 that he inherited and now it's 70?

No.

The labor participation rate is the same or lower than it was under Trump.

And why the number of jobs after COVID?

under Biden is pretty much not that much more given adjustments for population growth than it was coming into COVID.

So when he says, I created all these jobs, no, most of those jobs are people who were laid off or quit or dropped out of the labor force and are filtering back in.

And so

this is not even talking about the intangibles of economy, the huge migration that's shaking this country to the foundation.

4 million people are moving.

in a really radical, costly fashion from their homes to other places.

We've never seen anything like it in the 21st century.

Got to go back to the Oklahoma diaspora, and even that is not as great as what's happening now.

And you look at the economic devastation of our inner cities.

You go to San Francisco, it looks like somebody dropped a neutron bomb.

Go down to inner Los Angeles at 3 o'clock on a weekday, and you tell me that that city looks like it did.

And some of you are going to say, well, that was COVID.

Yes, that was COVID.

And the lockdown started on Trump.

And he continued it.

And the crime rate spiked under Biden, and it drove people out.

And

so you tell me, I don't see it such a great economy when I look at inflation, when I look at interest rates, when I look at social services, when I look at migration, when I look at

the actual number of people working before and after COVID and the labor participation rate, and I don't see a 5.6 point GDP growth, you know what I mean?

So I don't, and I, and I don't, I think we're headed into a recession still.

I still do.

And this is the, everybody said, well, the stock market's back.

Well, that's after it, it lost trillions of dollars of capital.

A lot of people had to live, they're cashing in their 401ks now.

And they didn't do it at a high level.

And you talk about people's standard of living and it doesn't matter what I say.

To my reader, it doesn't matter what I say.

You can criticize me all I want, you want, but I did point out what was wrong with Bidenomics.

But it doesn't matter what you say or what I say.

It's what people say.

And right now, if you ask, as the Associated Press did this week, do you support, favor the Joe Biden economic program?

What did they say?

35%.

65% of America think it's failed.

That's not listened to because they listened to Victor.

That's because they looked at their pocketbook and they looked at inflation and they looked at wage stagnation and they looked at interest rates and they looked at the price of gas and they looked at a ribeye steak or a sirloin steak and they can't believe the price.

Or they go to a restaurant to eat out and they can't believe the price.

And it's, you know, I can give you one example.

I want to mention names.

Before COVID, I went in and got a haircut.

It was always $12.

Always.

I went in three weeks ago.

You know what it was?

$26.

$26.

100%.

A little bit more.

That's what.

And so that inflation doesn't even capture what the official inflation categories don't.

People know, and that's why they say they don't like bidenomics.

Yeah.

But I.

Okay.

Well, I think that the,

so just to so you understand the critic, it wasn't really critical of your ability to articulate the terrible things about Bidenomics, which you did just perfectly right now.

But

he was asking that maybe

either before or after or during, that the those who would support Bidenomics, their position be reflected in your podcast as well.

And so there's not much, as you've said, to say that's good about bidenomics, but I know that its supporters or people who are trying to tout it say, well, the rate of interest rates is getting less, right?

So that's what they do.

That's what they do.

You know what I mean?

That's what they do.

So gas.

Well, gas goes up $2 in a year.

And then all of a sudden, at some point, you won't be able to drive at $5.50 a gallon.

And then all of a sudden, it goes from $5.50 to $560.

And they say, this is one of the smallest increases in history.

And the same thing about jobs.

He said the other day, we create more jobs.

Well, you go back and look at the 2019 jobs at the end of the year, right?

And it was close to 160 million active people, right?

Yeah.

And then you look at 2021-22, it's almost the same.

And when you add population growth, it's no different.

So all Biden did was he came into office when

the COVID epidemic was slowing down and people were going back to work and the economy was naturally going to recover because there was no longer a lockdown.

He prolonged it a little bit with all of his, you know,

COVID still here and all of this.

But basically, it's, we're back to where we were before Biden came in.

He did not create these new jobs.

In fact, if you look at he increased taxes, he's increased regulation.

He's made it harder for employees, employers to hire new people.

And you're going to see it in California.

They're going to raise another 1% on the state tax, on the unemployment tax.

And that's going to get de facto people up to

14.5%

state income tax total.

And you'll watch, if you think 400,000 people leaving in a year was anything, there's still going to be people leaving.

This whole state is going to leave.

And that is the left-wing Newsome Biden economic approach.

Yes, it is.

And, you know, the people

understand that.

So

I understand

what they're saying, how they talk about Biden economics.

But if people agreed with that, then you would be getting at least 50% of the country, but they're not.

So when you get 35% approval, that doesn't cover the Republican opposition that may be Pavlovian and opposition.

That's independents and Democrats to get that 65% of the country is angry at the economy.

And they're angry, as I said, because there's no more jobs than there were before.

Unemployment, yes,

is low, but it was low under Trump.

It's a little better, but it's basically the same phenomenon.

But the difference is that we borrowed an additional $4 trillion.

The deficit is bigger than it ever has.

The annual

debt, the aggregate debt is bigger than it ever.

That money should have just created utopia.

Everybody had it.

All it did was spike the inflation rate to 7% per annum.

That was the highest in 40 years.

And the same thing is true of

interest rates.

It's not funny to pay 2.7% for

a 30-year loan and then have to pay 7%.

That's a lot.

That's five percentage points in some cases, depending on how well you qualify.

But, you know, when you've got a mortgage of $3,000 here in California a month, and now you were getting it for $2,000 or $1,800, and you're paying that in interest,

that's a lot.

And

I don't understand that way.

I've made that clear with you and Jack all the time.

And I was just got off yesterday

from a Fox business show, and they asked me, could you explain why you said on Laura Ingram basically that Bidenomics was bad?

And I said, I explained it.

It's clear.

No more people, Willie, are working than before, but their actual buying power is much less because we've had an aggregate seven and then we had six, five, and you put it on essentials.

And

the amount of increase since January of 2022 is somewhere between 20 or 30, depending on what basket of essentials you include.

If you look at energy, it's skyrocketed.

Interest rates, debt, it's all bad.

But,

you know,

it's pretty clear that the American people agree with that assessment.

Nobody believes.

I mean, when he says, well, the libels say

it's going good, The reader says,

well, you must realize when you say that, you're talking to one out of every three people

who say that,

because

35% of Americans don't believe that.

So maybe you're only talking to left-wing people, and maybe it's 50-50 with them.

65%.

Yeah.

65% don't believe that.

35 do believe that.

Yes.

So

even to get 65%,

you've got to get almost 50%

Democrats don't believe that, or at least independents.

So, the reader, when he's talking to people,

he's going to find a lot of Democrats and independents that think it's lousy, is what I'm saying.

Everybody thinks it's lousy, and it's self-explanatory.

The main thing is not just the interest or the annual deficit, the printing money craze, the supply shortages, the energy increases.

It's the stagnation in

wage purchasing power where

wages went up, but not nearly as fast as prices.

So these people are going.

I see them at the local supermarket.

They go and they look at the steaks.

I never in my imagination, I've ever seen steaks, all of them.

$15 a pound, $16 a pound?

A little tiny ribeye steak, $24.

I go see grapes, $399, $4 a pound for fresh

grapes.

I look at canned dog food.

It used to be 80 cents a can.

It's a $2.04 in California.

That's what they're mad about.

They're doubled, tripled.

And it just,

the only thing that's been cheap is Bud Light.

Well, Victor.

Let's go ahead and end this podcast as we usually do.

And especially after I'm helping Jack out because he'll be back after a week, so there's going to be a week hiatus.

This will be aired a week after we've recorded it and a little bit more.

So,

just so everybody knows, we are recording a week in advance.

But thank you very much for your discussion, especially of the legacy of the Civil War.

We really appreciate it.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

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