How A Democracy Fights

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Speaker 2 Hello to the listeners of the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Victor is a commentator and

Speaker 2 analyst of political and military affairs. He's also a historian and a classicist and a philologist.
So we talk a lot about words and battles and ancient Greeks and Romans in this podcast.

Speaker 2 So welcome to all our new people and for all of those who are continuing with us.

Speaker 2 Today is a a weekend episode, so we are going to look at a few news stories and then we're on a three episode odyssey of the Civil War and the Civil War today will be the nature of the Civil War.

Speaker 2 So we'll be looking into that. So stay with us and we'll be right back.

Speaker 2 Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show. And Victor, I'd like to start with something positive.
It seems that the White House investigation into cocaine has been ended.

Speaker 2 So we all know what that means, that indeed it probably was Hunter.

Speaker 3 I don't know who it was, but the reason I said I don't know who it was is

Speaker 3 the White House, for some inexplicable reason, was

Speaker 3 deliberately misleading. They gave us three different locations where the material was found.
And then they hinted that, given the camera surveillance fingerprint forensic superiority of the FBI

Speaker 3 they would quickly find out they didn't and then they were asked Jean-Pierre was asked point blank

Speaker 3 can you roll out say that the Biden family was not involved she said no I it's probably some person on the national security staff or somebody like that but I don't know why they

Speaker 3 why why they would create such doubt. That's what I'm trying to say.

Speaker 3 And then we know that Hunter, especially given Hunter, wasn't just that he was a cocaine head, crackhead, or whatever the slang is, that he had a propensity, as did his sister, for leaving things.

Speaker 3 So the sister just leaves her diary in a rental, right, with incriminating passages about showers with her father.

Speaker 3 And then Hunter's wife, he gets in a fight and his illegally registered gun turns up in a dumpster. Then he rents the car and he just leaves a a crack pipe in the car.

Speaker 3 And the laptop wasn't the first that was missing. So people that are addicted to drugs feel that that's a normal situation and everybody is like them.

Speaker 3 So they lead thing, drug paraphernalia or drugs everywhere. So it's not impossible that it was his.
And that's it. All they have to do is say it wasn't his.
And they can't do that.

Speaker 3 I don't know why he's in the White House. He's got all this money, supposedly.
He was renting a Malibu apartment, I think, for $20,000 a month.

Speaker 3 So the only reason reason he's there is either to help his father navigate the steps

Speaker 3 or he's hiding from some subpoena. I don't know.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And to add to your evidence, he does walk in and out of the White House with a backpack that looks suspiciously like he might have some stash in it.
Nobody else does.

Speaker 2 Does Joe Biden wear a backpack?

Speaker 2 So he's in and out of that with a backpack. And

Speaker 2 nobody else in the White House would have any incentive to leave cocaine around.

Speaker 3 That's your job. It's not that incentive.
The point, though, Sammy, is young staffers under 35 in the D.C. culture on the left have a high propensity to be stereotypical of using Coke, right?

Speaker 3 And they get into a normative fashion, so they don't think it's any big deal.

Speaker 3 So they may, and there's a lot of those types of left-wing Washington swamp creatures that work at the White House going in and out, in and out, in and out. And so they're acculturated.

Speaker 3 So I don't know. I mean, in some ways, they're not the extreme version, but they're like Hunter.

Speaker 3 And so I can't say that it's Hunters, but all I can say is the White House could have ruled it out from the beginning, and

Speaker 3 they didn't do it. I don't know if it's some kind of

Speaker 3 weird strategy to lure people in to say that it was Hunter and then get them on record and then in a week from now say, oh, we got the culprit. Look at you conspiracy.
But I doubt that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, me too. Well, okay, let's turn to Elon the Musketeer, if I can call him that, and Zuckerberg, which strangely, if you turn that Z to an S, it probably is a sad,

Speaker 2 sad, if you were a kid, you wouldn't want that last name, would you? But they seem to be having a conflict, Elon Musk and Zuckerberg.

Speaker 2 And apparently, Musk is trying to sue him for his new platform, Zuckerberg's new platform, Threads. But you know what? I read something very interesting from our favorite

Speaker 2 liberal newspaper, The Guardian. A guy went in to use threads, and then he was reporting on his experience with threads, and they were surprisingly critical of Zuckerberg's new platform.

Speaker 2 And he says, when I open up threads, all I see is a series of posts that read like fortune cookies. They are a series of positive affirmation.

Speaker 2 It's lots of people offering therapeutic solves that purport to help everyone. One of the first threads, the best thing I think of is to call a post in threads.

Speaker 2 Oh, sorry, he calls them threats. I think that's what he wants to do.
But anyway, he says, I read was,

Speaker 2 Today's reminder, don't forget to take a deep breath. A few

Speaker 2 scroll motions later, I found broken crayons still color.

Speaker 2 The vapidity of the threads experience makes me yearn for the trolls of Twitter.

Speaker 3 I love them.

Speaker 2 Anyway, that's

Speaker 2 off of a left-wing platform and very critical of Zuckerberg's. What did Zuckerberg say that he was going to have a platform where

Speaker 2 you can go and it's a peaceful, loving place or something?

Speaker 3 Yeah, well, that means we know what that means. That means we're all in left-wing utopia and fantasy land.
No,

Speaker 3 they've already barred his disinformation people who post things.

Speaker 3 He went after Donald Trump Jr. and his followers.
So we know what it is. It's the left-wing

Speaker 3 it's the resurrection of the old Twitter on a new platform because the old Twitter is now supposedly a different Twitter. So they they can't handle that.

Speaker 3 And I don't think it's going to work, but maybe it will. I mean, Facebook's got, I just don't think people are going to go in there and use it.
And

Speaker 3 if it's not going, if it's going to start censoring people, and who would believe Mark Zuckerberg says anything? I mean, he put $419 million of his own money into the 2020 election.

Speaker 3 And what did he do it for? To warp the work of the recent workers. He absorbed them in key precincts.

Speaker 3 So that was a half a billion dollars to warp the election in a partisan fashion to get Joe Biden elected. And then when he says, I want to create a plague No, you don't.

Speaker 3 You want to create a left-wing haven for people who are disaffected with Twitter, because you hate Elon Musk. You used to like Elon Musk.
All the left loved Elon Musk as long as he voted Democratic.

Speaker 3 And he was the guy who gave you your electric car and your space exploration and all of these

Speaker 3 tunnel boring he was

Speaker 3 and he was a man of the left. And then he finally got tired, and then they turned on him, and now he's probably going to be number one.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, if I had to bank on either one of them, I might bank on Elon. He has a new idea of a new app that will do everything from tweets to shopping to banking to whatever you want to do.

Speaker 2 And I thought, wow, that's a really cool

Speaker 3 app. Yeah, go ahead.

Speaker 3 Compare them. So Mark Zuckerberg

Speaker 3 created Facebook, and then that took off to his credit. And he had a big fight with the people who were the co-founders.
We don't want to adjudicate that. But then he bought up 200 companies.

Speaker 3 That's what he does. And then

Speaker 3 he just took that product and he did it. And then when it started to face competition,

Speaker 3 he got this meta idea, alternate universe, right, or whatever it is.

Speaker 3 And it's not working. So now he's got a new plan.
But

Speaker 3 if you look at he's confined within certain parameters, Elon Musk isn't. I mean, he's doing tongue-boring.
He's doing

Speaker 3 space exploration. He's doing social media.
And he was the first one. GM couldn't do it.
Ford couldn't do it. Chrysler couldn't do it.
You know, the Lee Son Leaf couldn't do it.

Speaker 3 He took an electric car and he gave you 300 miles of driving. Yes.
And it's safe and it's reliable. And no one can do that.
He did it. So

Speaker 3 his achievements in so many different fields dwarf those of Mark Zuckerberg.

Speaker 2 Yeah, don't forget Starlink, right?

Speaker 3 And Starlink, too. And

Speaker 3 it's the peculiarities of the left that the Ukraine war effort depends on Starlink

Speaker 3 internet service for all kinds of weapon systems and communications.

Speaker 3 And he's giving that service free to Ukraine, and the left hates him, even though Ukraine is their pet project right now, because they hate him so much. And why do they hate him? Because

Speaker 3 he took over Twitter from them, and he said, We're not going to work with the FBI anymore and censor free expression, and we're going to let people get on and say what they want.

Speaker 3 And you can't do that on the left.

Speaker 3 And I don't even know what the left is. When I say left, I'm talking about

Speaker 3 kids that are half educated from 20 to 40 and the bi-coastal elite. They're in corporations, corporations, they're in government, they're in universities, they're in media.
And

Speaker 3 as a general rule,

Speaker 3 they're less likely to have two kids and be married than their conservative counterparts. And they're less likely to have any experience with physical work in the sense of

Speaker 3 truck driving or

Speaker 3 farming or mining or construction or any of them. I'm being stereotypical.

Speaker 3 And they're less likely to know what a gun, they're more likely to lecture the country on guns, but less likely to ever shot one. That's what I'm trying to say.

Speaker 3 So that's who the left is. And then the old

Speaker 3 geriatric left, like Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi, they're just scared of those people. So the new left is really AOC, those types of people.

Speaker 3 She's an ignorant ramus. She really is.
And that shows you you can get a master's from...

Speaker 3 international relations from Boston University and not even know what the countries are in the map of the Middle East. So

Speaker 3 she's typical of that generation of leftists.

Speaker 2 She seems to be taking 50% of the population off the cliff with her, though. That's my concern.
Not so much as yourself.

Speaker 3 It's hard to know. I mean, there's a lot of things going on right now that we can't chart.
And I've been wrong before because I thought that they would coalesce in the 2022 midterms.

Speaker 3 I think I was wrong in part because

Speaker 3 the Republicans were not prepared for

Speaker 3 non-election day voting, still weren't prepared. And their candidates got buried on that.
But

Speaker 3 the point I'm making again is that when you start to look at these flop movies from Disney, right, the latest

Speaker 3 Harrison Ford movie,

Speaker 3 and you look at Snow White and the Seven Dwarves or the Mermaid, and then you collate Target and Anheuser-Busch and the LA Dodgers,

Speaker 3 and you look at Joe Biden's polls, and then you look at his polls on the economy. It's 35% approval.

Speaker 3 You doesn't mean that you're going to, Donald Trump's going to be the beneficiary of this necessarily, but you look at that,

Speaker 3 and 65% think he's corrupt. You start to get the impression that there's a lot of anger out there at the direction of the country.

Speaker 3 And I don't know why these corporations are embracing the transgender movement, but

Speaker 3 that's a movement that does not have popular support. That turns off feminists, J.K.
Rowling, swimmers,

Speaker 3 people who don't like biological men taking over the female domain and using their biological strength and muscularity to win in sports.

Speaker 3 And then this whole immunity. So we don't hear that the shooter who turned up at Justice Kavanaugh was a troubled transgender person.
We don't hear about the Tennessee Transgender Shooters Manifesto.

Speaker 3 We don't hear any of that.

Speaker 3 That's off limits. We can't talk about it.

Speaker 3 And that bothers people.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that does. And you're right.
Those are all things bothering. But at the same time, on the right, we seem to have a lot of the foundations of the bulwark of the right crumbling.

Speaker 2 For example, Rush Limbaugh died. Tucker got fired, right? Drudge Report went left.
What are your thoughts on that?

Speaker 3 Well, we've talked about that as well. Yeah, we've talked about that before, and

Speaker 3 it's,

Speaker 3 if you, let's analyze those a little bit because they're different. So

Speaker 3 Rush was sui generous. I mean, there was nobody that everybody mistake

Speaker 3 mistook what Rush was. He wasn't just a talk show host.

Speaker 3 If he had wanted to be a stand-up comic or a mime or a mimic or any of it, he could have done any of that.

Speaker 3 When he voiced certain people's voices, or he went, I remember the first Gulf War when he played martial music and it was sort of, or the way he made fun of the voice of Ross Perot.

Speaker 3 He was a master stand-up comedian. He was a master of

Speaker 3 taking complex issues and getting to the heart of it. He had a natural cunning, so he was very suspicious of rhino-Republicans.
He knew what their agenda was, and he was lethal to them.

Speaker 3 He just nailed them. So my point is, and he was devoted to the subject.
I mean, he made a lot of money, but that wasn't what he was interested in.

Speaker 3 He was interested in talking to 20 million Americans every day or every week and trying to

Speaker 3 convince them they're not nuts, that they are, A, the majority, and they're on the right path of history. That's what he did, and he had so many different skills.

Speaker 3 And when you lost that, you were never going to replace him, it just wasn't going to happen. And so, that was a terrible loss, and people haven't really calibrated the effect of that.

Speaker 3 And I say that because I know people who are on the left that listen to him, they didn't like to say they listened to him, but they found him funny.

Speaker 3 Yes, you know, he would just say things that nobody would say because they were scared. Tucker, people forget the thing about Tucker,

Speaker 3 Tucker's ratings were very high

Speaker 3 because he said things about the capital and all that. Sometimes he got off in conspiracies about the dam, who blew up the dam in Ukraine and all that.
We don't know.

Speaker 3 But he was right on some of them, too.

Speaker 3 I think he was pretty much right on the Nordstrom pipeline that the Ukrainians themselves are with aids of the Europeans or somebody blew it up, not the Russians,

Speaker 3 as was alleged. But my point is that he

Speaker 3 was funny. He had the gestures.
He had the calmness. He treated guests with respect.
Even if he didn't like somebody, he said, thank you for coming on.

Speaker 3 And that was different than

Speaker 3 another thing he did, I don't want to mention names, but he didn't go into his own persona.

Speaker 3 You know what I mean by that? He didn't say, here's a picture of my child.

Speaker 3 Here's what I'm doing at the beach today, like a lot of people do. He didn't.

Speaker 3 So it wasn't about Tucker, and yet it was about Tucker. So he had unique gifts.
And I think people are wrong about the binary.

Speaker 3 They say, oh, if Tucker's not there, Fox is going to fail, or Fox will do well without Tucker. It's not that.

Speaker 3 It's that slot that he had is prima facie

Speaker 3 a successful slot, and they just

Speaker 3 have the right host, and they will do okay, but they won't do as good as Tucker did.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 that's the point. And Tucker will do what the left right now has

Speaker 3 a whole industry of trying to convince us that Tucker has no followers because he went from 120 million viewers to 20.

Speaker 3 As if 20 million is, well, that's Fauschlimbaugh's audience. And he's on Twitter.
He doesn't have any resources. He doesn't have a network.
He doesn't have yet guests.

Speaker 3 He will.

Speaker 3 So that was something to lose that voice

Speaker 3 on top of Tucker. Drudge is

Speaker 3 that psychodrama he's angry because he wasn't shown i think he's angry he wasn't shown proper deference by the

Speaker 3 he's kind of like ann coulter you know she wrote a book about you know that trump was almost divine she said the same thing about romney but trump you know he called her crazy and when she got very angry about the border because her and her

Speaker 3 view, if the border wasn't closed, it was Trump's fault because he promised to close it, right?

Speaker 3 But he did after three years.

Speaker 3 But the reason he didn't build the wall wasn't that he didn't want to, that he had people in Homeland Security, as we know from Anonymous, that just didn't follow any orders that he did.

Speaker 3 They were insurrectionist, in the real sense of the word, Anonymous was.

Speaker 3 And we knew that the people in the Pentagon, when they were asked to divert, they wouldn't do it. And there were lawsuits.
So maybe he wasn't as zealous in defeating those forces until the very end.

Speaker 3 But she got angry at him. Well,

Speaker 3 the same thing was true with Drudge. So, in their anger, they completely flipped.
And then there were the neoconservative. So that was another voice of Drudge.

Speaker 3 Because what happened is all those cable shows and radio talk shows nationwide, they would go on every morning and look at the Drudge,

Speaker 3 you know what I mean? They would look at collage and they would see what to talk about. Yeah.

Speaker 3 So that was another thing on top of Rush and Tucker. And then there were the magazines and National Review, which I wrote for 21 years.

Speaker 3 Something happened to it with Donald Trump. And so writers like Jonah Goldberg or Jay Nordstrom or David French or Ramash Pomero

Speaker 3 or

Speaker 3 Charles Cook, all good writers, they just could not support the Republican nominee.

Speaker 3 And if you were to suggest to them, had everybody followed their advice, all the issues that they used to convince us that were dear to the Republic, such as

Speaker 3 repealing Roe versus Wade, ending affirmative action, etc. That wouldn't have happened under Hillary Clinton Supreme Court, and we would be doomed for the next 30 years.

Speaker 3 But you couldn't convince them of that. And so that was a conservative voice that was lost.
And then there was a Weekly Standard Neoconservative voice.

Speaker 3 And people forget there were great writers there. There was Christopher Caldwell, who was a great writer.
There was Lee Smith. They were great writers.

Speaker 3 They were losing influence because they did not suffer from Trump derangement syndrome. But when that collapsed, they lost that voice and then

Speaker 3 they transmogrified. And unlike the people at the Dispatch, I think that are still nominally conservative or independent at least, but the people at the bulwark went completely the other way.

Speaker 3 And so it was very mystifying because it wasn't that Jennifer Rubin or Bill Crystal or Charles Sykes hated Trump like George Will did,

Speaker 3 but they associated George Will with all the conservative, and so they renounced them.

Speaker 3 And so you go to that website, and it's basically a left-wing website, and it depends on Pierre Amador's largesse.

Speaker 3 And we'll see what happens when he cuts them off. Eventually,

Speaker 3 he'll cut them off. We'll see.

Speaker 3 But all of that together, and then there's Fox News, and

Speaker 3 it lost a lot of viewers right after the election.

Speaker 3 Fox News is like, in some ways, the Wall Street Journal. So when you look at their lineup, just take the new lineup.
So you've got Laura at four, a solid conservative.

Speaker 3 Jesse Waters at five, a solid conservative. Sean Hanney at six,

Speaker 3 right? I'm talking about Pacific Time, a solid conservative.

Speaker 3 Scott Fields Group at seven now, solid conservatives. And you look at people like Shannon Brahm on the week, solid conservative.
But you look at the actual news,

Speaker 3 I don't want to mention their names, but the actual reporters out in the field, they're not conservative necessarily.

Speaker 3 And the same thing as the Wall Street Journal, with the exception of a few people like Peggy Noonan or stuff, but you read Bill McGurn

Speaker 3 or people like that,

Speaker 3 they're top-notch conservatives. But you look at the actual news aggregators, the reporters, and those news stories are pretty left-wing.

Speaker 3 So you're right. There's something, the conservative media voice

Speaker 3 has been weakened. And, you know, there's podcasts, but you look at the top hundred podcasts, say, political podcasts.

Speaker 3 You know, sometimes we're up to seven or eight or nine, depending on when one of these things comes out.

Speaker 3 Except for Candace Owens and Stephen Bannon, I mean, most of them are liberal. Yes.

Speaker 3 You know, there's Ted Cruz and people like that, but there's Pod and America, whatever that thing is, and

Speaker 3 Peace Don't, Trump. They're pretty liberal.
And so

Speaker 3 and then

Speaker 3 is there a newspaper you could even get an honest

Speaker 3 Epic Times is the only one I know. I mean, New York Times,

Speaker 3 Chicago, New York Post is, of course, reasonable, but Chicago Tribune,

Speaker 3 LA Times, they're all left-wing.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they are. Well, you should mention the Washington Examiner tends to be a little bit more.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but that's online. It's online.
It's only online. And the online things, the Federalist, American Greatness,

Speaker 3 Washington Examiner, Washington Free Beacon, that's a Daily Caller, Daily Wire, Red State, Hot Air.

Speaker 3 One of my favorites is Ace of Spades. People get angry at that website, but it's Powerline blog as well.
Powerline's my favorite. I always go first to Powerline.
Those guys are very smart.

Speaker 3 John Henoker and Scott Johnson and Steve Hayward.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah. They're very.

Speaker 2 So there are things popping up, but not quite the

Speaker 2 same strength as a Limbaugh or a Tucker.

Speaker 3 No, we don't have those overwhelming. The two great voices have been the last 20 years have been Limbaugh.

Speaker 3 And for a while it was Bill O'Reilly. He's out.
He has a podcast. He's doing pretty well, but he's not,

Speaker 3 you know, he's not where he was. That perch was pretty powerful when he had it.
And then Tucker, we'll see what Tucker does.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he's supposed to be creating his new media corporation.

Speaker 3 Yes, he is. He's supposed to, and I've talked to people from his organization, and they're going to have guests.

Speaker 3 He has two studios, remember, one in the north and one in the south. And a guest will come out and tape elements if he can do that.
It's very hard to get to one of them.

Speaker 3 And then he's going to have Zoom interviews like he did.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 then he'll have clips and media. It'll be just like Tucker Carlson Tonight, that show.

Speaker 3 But it'll be, I think he'll evade legal sanction because it won't be in network fashion,

Speaker 3 at least till the years of his contract still apply. Anyway,

Speaker 3 but the voice has been weakened.

Speaker 3 And I'm a little worried because I'm on the Bradley board. It's a wonderful foundation.
It's a conservative foundation. The SCAI Foundation is conservative.
There's a lot of them.

Speaker 3 But boy, when you look at the endowments of Rockefeller or Ford or Soros or Tides Foundation, it's just a slaughter. The left is just

Speaker 3 20 times the market capitalization of conservative.

Speaker 3 And when you look at media, it's the same way. I mean, everybody talks about Fox and to a lesser extent Newsmax, but MSNBC, CNBC,

Speaker 3 CNN, ABC,

Speaker 3 PBS, NPR, NBC, C, you know what I mean?

Speaker 3 It's just overwhelming left. And then when you look at the university, Hillsdale, yes.

Speaker 3 The new University of Austin, maybe.

Speaker 3 Pepperdine sometime. But, you know, I mean, St.
Thomas,

Speaker 3 you're talking about Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, all the money, the big endowments, that's all left. Then you look at the Fortune 400 of billionaires and

Speaker 3 you learn two things. The fortunes are no longer agriculture, mining, you know, transportation, construction, fabrication.

Speaker 3 It's sometimes a little bit of oil, but it's finance, finance, finance, insurance, insurance, tech, tech, tech, media, media, media.

Speaker 3 Sometimes real estate, and they're all left-wing.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 3 that's a challenge to get that message out. It's very hard to do.
And you add the bureaucracy they control, and as we know from Disney and Target and the L.A.

Speaker 3 Dodgers and Anheuser-Busch, they control the corporations. They have they, you know, Delta Airlines, American Airlines, et cetera, et cetera.
It's very hard to find an institution.

Speaker 3 K through twelve, no.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 Hollywood, no.

Speaker 3 In professional sports, absolutely not. So there's no institution that the conservatives have as their own institution.

Speaker 3 It used to be talk radio, but both the media, that media is being challenged by podcast,

Speaker 3 and then more importantly, you've lost the king of it, Bush Limbaugh. And he was only, you know, in his late 60s, there was no reason why he couldn't have gone for another decade.

Speaker 3 There was no diminution in his abilities.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and we'll be talking about the Civil War.
Stay with us and we'll be right back.

Speaker 2 Welcome back.

Speaker 2 I would like to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin and Ely 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.

Speaker 2 Victor, so the Civil War, I guess we're on the nature of it.

Speaker 2 Last week, we talked about slavery, states' rights, and

Speaker 2 yeah, the causes of the Civil War, which ran even deeper, of course.

Speaker 2 But this week, on the nature of, I know that most of our audience probably understands that 600,000 people, maybe up to 750,000 people were killed in this war. So it wasn't a bloodbath of four years.

Speaker 2 And I was wondering if you could just set that straight,

Speaker 2 the statistic on how many dead.

Speaker 3 It's very similar to the World War II dead, which had been 50. When I wrote the Second World Wars, I fixated on a figure of 65.
And the years since that publication, it's gone up to 70.

Speaker 3 And the reason why that is before people looked at the archival information, you know, that either the graves registration types of data or the

Speaker 3 regimental list of casualties, and they realized those were incomplete.

Speaker 3 They were fragmentary.

Speaker 3 And so what they did, what they have done recently, more recently, is looked at aggregate census deaths in years, right, say the year before the Civil War, and then adjusted toward natural population.

Speaker 3 Sort of like we did to COVID. How many people died of COVID? Well, you don't really know because do they die with it or from it, or

Speaker 3 incidentally with it, and do they report it?

Speaker 3 So, one of the ways you determine that is you look at total deaths the year before, or the average, or you get a computer model for how many people died before COVID, and then you tinker with it for the necessary population increases and if there's any natural disasters.

Speaker 3 And you come up with what people should be dying, the number, and then you say there's either excessive or not excessive deaths. And then you attribute those excessive deaths to COVID.

Speaker 3 And that's what they do with World War II and the Civil War. And when you do that, you say, these are the people who died in 1860, here was the population increase,

Speaker 3 and then you look look at, and you get up to about 750,000 or 800 even, some people have argued.

Speaker 3 Now, most of those were disease or, you know, just getting a bunch of young people camping out in the cold or the excessive heat and drinking polluted water and epidemics, but there was a lot of others.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 it was more dead than any other war. in American history.

Speaker 3 And I want to add any other wars all in aggregate put together. And so it's a little important to remember because there's about 50,000, 40,000.
It's hard to know how many blacks died.

Speaker 3 But so when you look over, when people say this is a racist country, it was,

Speaker 3 but they have to explain, because that was the issue. Slavery was the issue.
I know that there were internal improvements was argued prior. There were states' rights.
There was Dred Scott. There was

Speaker 3 federal property within Southern jurisdictions. We have all those, there was a cultural, Scots-Irish resentment against the, what they call the

Speaker 3 motley immigrant population of the North, or the industrial harshness or callousness versus southern gentility. There were cultural factors.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 ultimately, you get down to 650 people killed, 650,000 destroy each other over the question of eliminating slavery. And

Speaker 3 that is always forgotten today.

Speaker 3 And so that's what when people say this was an endemically racist country, it's horrible, we want reparations, you should say, well, there were people, the vast majority of Americans, probably 98%,

Speaker 3 if you conclude the North and South, never had a slave. And there was millions of people who had never seen a black person.

Speaker 3 And yet those people were willing to go down to the South.

Speaker 3 and march with Sherman or to go with Grant down to Richmond and get killed or die for the principle of getting rid of slavery and preserving the Union.

Speaker 3 But we talked about the strategies, and

Speaker 3 there's a big debate among Civil War historians. If the South had done everything

Speaker 3 perfectly,

Speaker 3 could they have won?

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 what would that mean, that statement? That would mean

Speaker 3 they had 5 million free citizens. They only had about,

Speaker 3 I guess they had about

Speaker 3 five to six million free, four to five slave.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 the North had 21 million. So they were outnumbered, at least as free citizenry, four to one.

Speaker 3 90%, almost every category from rail to steel to production to fabric, everything, they were 90%

Speaker 3 of that assembly was in the North. They were a one or two

Speaker 3 commodity economy. And by the time the

Speaker 3 Onaconda strangulation of the ports going all the way south of Washington around in the Gulf of Mexico and including

Speaker 3 ports in the south, Texas, there was no way they could export. And the funny thing was that the North was

Speaker 3 one of the biggest wheat producers in the world. I think it was by that time.
And there was a great demand for northern wheat in a way that outpaced the demand for cotton.

Speaker 3 So they didn't have the wherewithal. So they only had

Speaker 3 really two ways of winning that war. One was superior leadership.

Speaker 3 And you could argue at the beginning when you had Albert Sidney Johnson and Joe Johnston and Robert E. Lee and James Longstreet and Breckenridge, people like that.
They were pretty good.

Speaker 3 And the Northern command, with Halleck as sort of a nominal figure that occasionally took actual battle command. But when you look at it, McClellan,

Speaker 3 Burnside, Rosecrans, McDowell, Hooker,

Speaker 3 it was pretty mediocre. And you really didn't, until 1863, 4,

Speaker 3 you really didn't get the caliber of Southern officers until you got really four or five people. One of them, of course, was Grant and Sherman and Thomas and Sheridan.

Speaker 3 There were some other good ones too. Meat was not bad.
But once you got those people, and they kind of emerged in April of 1862 at Shiloh, and that was Sherman's great moment that resurrected him.

Speaker 3 And it was Grant, he was disgraced, but he wasn't relieved. I mean, he was temporarily relieved, but not extinguished.

Speaker 3 And then those people took the West, and they understood something that the war was going to be one in the West

Speaker 3 because that's how you cut the South off. Once you got control of the Mississippi, they lost their Western Confederate, you know, Texas, the countries like that.
They lost them.

Speaker 3 And they couldn't communicate. So they, and

Speaker 3 that was the work of Ulysses S. Grant, Fort

Speaker 3 Henry, Fort Donaldson, and then captured

Speaker 3 it was capitalized with a win at Shiloh in April of 1862. At that point,

Speaker 3 these Western commanders that were dealing with vast territory or vast size scope, and they were strategic thinkers, and they weren't tacticians like McClellan was.

Speaker 3 They could see in a vast scope how you defeated the South. So once that happened, that the South

Speaker 3 you could no longer have leaders that were superior because there was and it wasn't just that Grant and and Sherman were better than Southern leaders. They were far better.

Speaker 3 And they were probably the two greatest military minds the United States produced. They were very different,

Speaker 3 but they got along with each other and they worked in tandem strengths, complementing each other.

Speaker 3 But once you got those two guys, the two prominent generals, and one was in the West, Sherman, and one was in the East with the Army of the Protection.

Speaker 3 Then it was pretty certain that the only way they could have won was to have gone into a completely defensive mode of war and had sort of irregular warfare, sort of insurgency warfare.

Speaker 3 And they didn't do that. So Lee went in, you know,

Speaker 3 he went into Maryland, and then he went into Pennsylvania. And then Albert Sidney Johnson and Hardy, all those guys at Shiloh, they were aiming to go into southern Ohio.

Speaker 3 Well, they didn't have the wherewithal to do that. And they have just, you know,

Speaker 3 hoarded their resources and made the North come in. I think they would have had a chance because remember what they were saying.

Speaker 3 They were saying,

Speaker 3 we don't have to win the war. We just don't have to lose it.
We don't really care about the Union. They can do whatever they want.
We just want to be free.

Speaker 3 But the Union's aims were completely different. It was, we just can't let them be alone.
We have to go down there in a size, almost the same size as Western Europe.

Speaker 3 We have to to beat their military, we have to occupy their territory, and we have to nation build and change them. That's a horrendous burden to do that.

Speaker 3 And yet they did it. But they did it in part because Lee wrecked his army of Northern Virginia, basically going

Speaker 3 into Pennsylvania after Gettysburg. And Johnson, they wrecked those armies going into

Speaker 3 Tennessee and trying to get into Ohio. And that was a mistake.
It really was.

Speaker 2 So would you say the legacy of Gettysburg is the beginning of the end for Lee?

Speaker 3 Is that...

Speaker 3 That's the traditional exegesis that the high watermark of the Confederacy was Pickett's charge. Because,

Speaker 3 you know, Pickett said, that old man wrecked my army, wrecked my division. And what he meant was that army that went in, they were fresh out.

Speaker 3 You know, they had been successful.

Speaker 3 They had Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, and they had lost Stonewall, but they went in there, and for a brief moment, there was no army between them and Washington, D.C.

Speaker 3 Meade was on the wrong side, and the northern...

Speaker 3 And so they paused. And then the Union Army took the solid ground, but they still were on the shoulder.

Speaker 3 And that famous comment of Longstreet that he could have gone around the shoulder and come in the back of Washington. Lee didn't think that way, though.
Lee was a Klauswitzian.

Speaker 3 He felt the way to win the war was to destroy the military forces of the enemy, and then everything would be all right. Sherman was, you know, a Liddell Hart type of person.
He said, you know what?

Speaker 3 You destroy the economy and you shatter the population's morale, and then this army dies on the vine.

Speaker 3 Grant was a Klauswitzian. He said, you go down to Richmond and you destroy Robert E.
Lee's army, and then they

Speaker 3 And Sherman said, no, they'll still create another one. You've got to humiliate them and go into their inner sanctum and destroy their rail network, destroy their government, and

Speaker 3 they will quit.

Speaker 2 It seems like one doesn't work without the other, though.

Speaker 3 So Sherman said,

Speaker 3 Sherman said that their house was, they were worrying about the kitchen, and he was letting the house on fire. In other words, or he said that, what did he say? He said that Ulysses S.

Speaker 3 Grant grabbed them and

Speaker 3 held them so he kicked him in the rear with his, you know, with his boot, meaning he went down like a bulldog and just sat there with those horrible summer, you know,

Speaker 3 Spotsylvania, the seven days, and ruined the Army of the Potomac, 100,000 casualties. But he did one thing.
He just locked on to Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia.

Speaker 3 And while he was locked on, they didn't have enough armies. I mean, they had Joe Johnson for a while, John Bell Hood, Hardy,

Speaker 3 Bragg, all those people, but they didn't have enough people to stop the Army of the West. It was 65,000 people.
It's a huge army. It was probably better than any army

Speaker 3 in American history until 1918. And it just went right through Georgia.
And

Speaker 3 you read the paper clippings, they said,

Speaker 3 we're going to make them

Speaker 3 into Napoleon stragglers. We're going to be Cossacks.
Sherman just said, do it. And he had a very, he said, you know, there's 350,000 cavaliers.

Speaker 3 And he meant the plantation-owning class that we have to kill off.

Speaker 3 Either have to kill them off or humiliate them. And there's no way around it.
And he was talking about Wade Hampton and

Speaker 3 politicians that were slave owners. And he just took a 50-mile swath and he burned every plantation

Speaker 3 in the railroads and he deliberately left the white poor alone. And then he got to Savannah and they said, well, that was pretty bad.
He said, I'm not done yet. I'm going to go through the Carolina.

Speaker 3 It's swampy.

Speaker 3 It's wet. It's winter.
He corduroyed the roads. And he went all the way through the Carolinas.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 nobody could have done that. And in the process, he just destroyed the morale of

Speaker 3 the southern population. You know,

Speaker 3 when he got to Georgia, people came up to him and said, would you please go over to South Carolina? They started it, not us. Just leave us alone.

Speaker 3 And when they got to South Carolina, which was the firebrand of the Confederacy, the first to succeed, they had talked about it for 20 years.

Speaker 3 You know, they burned down Columbia. They were, somebody did, but they went and they punished South Carolina.
And that was the heart, Brett, the heart of slave-owning Southern culture.

Speaker 2 It sounds like as you're talking that, because I often ask you, and you write in many of your books about what makes a good commander, that one thing here is that the commander like Sherman sees his ends clearly and then he's willing to innovate on whatever he needs to do to get to those ends, whereas the Klaus Witzians have an idea of, well, this is how war is fought, and so I'm going to go according to whatever the convention is, right?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I think that's true. I wrote a book solo battle like that.
So you take a commander like Apaminondas.

Speaker 3 He has a view when he said the way to stop Sparta from invading every year into Thebes, marching 170 miles, is to go down and pay them back.

Speaker 3 Now, how do you pay them back? Well, they rely on a hell-out population of over 200,000 people who farm for them in Messenia.

Speaker 3 And they supply their food so that they can have this crack army of 12,000 people. And they have this idea that they're invincible, and that's very important to create a mystique about them.

Speaker 3 They don't even have walls around their city. They say they're right arms of their soldiers or hoplites of their wall.
The third thing is they have an alliance of the Peloponnesian League.

Speaker 3 But what if you went down and you liberated them and you walled their cities, just like you do Messinae and just you do Mantinea and the new city of Megalopolis, and you fence them in.

Speaker 3 So when he took that huge army in 370, in the winter no less, 70,000 people, he went right into Sparta. He didn't quite get into the city, but he just, it was catastrophic psychologically.

Speaker 3 He was on sacred ground, and then he veered over Mount Taegetas, and he freed the Hellots of Messenia.

Speaker 3 And then they built this huge, enormous city with some of the most impressive fortifications. And that was the end of Spartan free food.

Speaker 3 And then he went into the Peloponnesian and subsequent and three subsequent, and he built these fortified cities of democratic, pro-Theban, pro-Athenian Peloponnesians. And that was the end of Sparta.

Speaker 3 They didn't even show up at the Battle of Chaeronea

Speaker 3 40 years later.

Speaker 3 35 years later. And so he had a vision, and he had the tactical wherewithal to follow that.

Speaker 3 Same thing with Patton.

Speaker 3 When Hodges and the First Army or Bradley were thinking, okay, we're here and our mission is to get to Germany.

Speaker 3 We're going to go frontal, frontal, frontal on a broad front, Montgomery, Bradley, and then Patton, Hodges, and Bradley. And then

Speaker 3 Patton is saying, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go. We've...

Speaker 3 And what was he thinking about? They weren't even thinking like like he was. He was thinking,

Speaker 3 July, warm, long days, long air cover. August, warm, long air cover.
September, less so. October, getting cold.

Speaker 3 November, a disaster. So, I've got over a million men.
Do I want them outside in November? No, I don't.

Speaker 3 They'll have wet socks. They'll get trench foot.
I have tanks that have high profiles and narrow treads. They won't do well on sloppy roads when the terrain gets rough going into Germany.

Speaker 3 Got Got to move, move, move, move, move. These are young kids.
They're natural mechanics. They love fixing trucks and jeeps.
They love tanks. They're the greatest mechanic.

Speaker 3 We've got to get them moving. Don't stop.
That's what he did. And his idea was to get in.

Speaker 3 He didn't do it, but his idea was to cross the Rhine with a narrow thrust and to shock the Germans and make a grand loop. I don't think it would have worked, maybe, but he had a strategic vision.

Speaker 3 And I think that was superior to what Montgomery and Bradley were thinking of. The market garden was a complete disaster.
And it was ill-thought out from the beginning. And it

Speaker 3 cost us dearly. We didn't get Antwerp.
We didn't get the ports we should have. And Hodges went into the Hurton for us and just

Speaker 3 let us white.

Speaker 3 And had they let Patton supply Patton rather than Montgomery, I think he would have done a lot better. And he saved us at the Battle of the Bulge.

Speaker 3 And even then, he was thinking, you don't push a bulge at its tip, like pushing

Speaker 3 a plastic knob,

Speaker 3 like on a machine that you pump gas into. You don't push it from the back end.
You cut it off at the base, and then you trap a quarter million Germans. So let me go not

Speaker 3 right to

Speaker 3 Bastong, right at the middle or near the tip of the spear. Let me me go behind them.
If they can take a few more casualties, I will cut them off and we'll trap the whole bounce.

Speaker 3 Well, what they don't realize is he was right. They lost more casualties after Bastogne during the Baltch campaign than before.

Speaker 3 And so they had strategic ideas

Speaker 3 of how to defeat the enemy. And Sherman, he said that.
He said, these people have a mystique about them. They're the best fighters in the world.
They're most courageous fighters.

Speaker 3 He loves southerners, but he said they have flawed notions.

Speaker 3 They don't understand, they're outnumbered, they don't understand history, and even though they're not culpable for owning slaves, they kowtow or they show obeyance to the slave-owning class.

Speaker 3 There's only one way to defeat these people. They're an agrarian people.
You've got to go and you've got to take Atlanta. And that's their say.
And then you've got to go to Savannah.

Speaker 3 And then you've got to go right through the heart of the Confederacy. And you have to humiliate, humiliate, humiliate the slave-owning plantation class.

Speaker 3 Burn their plantations, dare them to come out and fight, defeat them when you can, but you don't have to go hunt Robert E. Lee entrenched around Richmond and like a ram, beat your head against him.

Speaker 3 But you're right. Grant,

Speaker 3 he never said.

Speaker 3 He never said, Grant's a fool. He costs us 100,000 troops.
He always said, Grant is why I'm doing what I'm doing, because I don't have to meet meet the Army of Northern Virginia.

Speaker 3 Grant's titers tied him down. They worked in tandem, and they did politically.

Speaker 3 When they asked, you know, Sherman, Sherman was more popular in 1864, remember, much more popular than Grant.

Speaker 3 Grant was not liked because I quoted Mary Lincoln before, but she said that man was a butcher. He killed 100,000 of our troops.

Speaker 3 And what she meant was that after that summer of 1864, the sheen of Fort Henry and Fort Donaldson and those victories and

Speaker 3 taking the Mississippi,

Speaker 3 that had worn off. And

Speaker 3 he didn't give them victories. He tied Lee down, but Lee was, that's where Lee was at his best in that type of warfare.
And Sherman was moving. He saved Lincoln.
He won.

Speaker 3 Atlanta on September 2nd, as I said, and said, Atlanta's ours is fairly won. And all of a sudden, the Fremont challenge from the left had dissipated, but it was done.

Speaker 3 And then McClellan, it was over with. That was it.
Lincoln was going to be re-elected after that. Everybody wanted a piece of Sherman, and Sherman said he was a Lincoln man.

Speaker 3 And then

Speaker 3 he understood that he had to do that to get Lincoln elected, but other people weren't thinking like that. And he was a geelist.

Speaker 3 And then when he, after it was over, so he was much more popular and everybody thought he would want to run for president, especially after the disastrous or the perceived disastrous term of Andrew Johnson.

Speaker 3 He said,

Speaker 3 if nominated, I will not run. If elected, I will not serve.
That was the most complete denial of an ambition to be president you've ever had.

Speaker 3 And he, I don't know if he would have made it. He didn't think he would be a good president.
He was too merial and blunt.

Speaker 3 But he was very worried about his friend Grant because he felt that Grant had one weakness, and that was the inability to say no to people that he was loyal to and they took advantage of him that's what he said yeah I know I know that the left has resurrected Grant as a great president now because of Reconstruction but yeah is there

Speaker 3 it was a it was a pretty scandal ridden still was scandal ridden administration yeah um is there anything we can say about

Speaker 2 why the

Speaker 2 war was so bloody on the battlefield. I know that the overall strategy was

Speaker 2 stalemate because the North had the strength and the South had the position basically or the home turf. But on the battlefield, for example, you know, why was Pickett's charge so

Speaker 3 it was a beginning, right? Yeah, it was a beginning of

Speaker 3 it wasn't any longer just Napoleonic cannon. So there were Daldwin guns, there was a beginning of revolution in artillery.
And they started, they weren't just shooting cannonballs.

Speaker 3 Some of them had explosive charges, but there were all sorts of cluster shot, rape shot, anti-personnel shot, and there were more cannon than artillery than we've ever seen, especially on the northern side.

Speaker 3 So when you talk about Pickett's charge,

Speaker 3 you're talking about, you know,

Speaker 3 being shredded by artillery, for one thing.

Speaker 3 And then

Speaker 3 late in the war,

Speaker 3 you started to see with Sherman's troops and other Sharps and Henry rifles that were repeating. So instead of being able to shoot two or three

Speaker 3 musket balls

Speaker 3 or a rifle, you know, maybe a rifled musket each minute, you're talking about shooting 10 or 12 shots from a carbine. And that really increased the...

Speaker 3 death toll. The other thing was

Speaker 3 it wasn't until Sherman, it wasn't a

Speaker 3 it wasn't really fought necessarily over

Speaker 3 territory. They had been schooled at West Point on Napoleonic tactics and Clausewitz, who had, you know, was active during the Napoleonic Wars.

Speaker 3 So when you look at those battles, Bowron, Chancellorsville, Fredericksville, Shiloh, yes, they were moving in certain areas, but they deliberately sought each other out.

Speaker 3 They didn't have to fight the battle of Gettysburg. There was a way to avoid that.
If Bobby Lee had been,

Speaker 3 if he had been William to come to Sherman, he would have gone into Pennsylvania. He would have ravaged and destroyed a great swath.

Speaker 3 He might have gone into Pittsburgh or pivoted to Philadelphia and burned it, and then he would have come back on the back side of Washington. But he would have avoided

Speaker 3 the Army of the North under Meade. He would not have tried to have a Plauswitsian struggle.
And that's what was wrong. They were all trained in that doctrine.

Speaker 3 So these were climatic battles that we hadn't seen before

Speaker 3 anywhere. You know, when you look at the death count, Shiloh, there was more people.
It wasn't even the worst battle.

Speaker 3 It killed more people at Shiloh than all the battles since the Revolutionary War combined. And the worst was Antietam.
I mean, 20,000 dead. It was a precursor to World War I.

Speaker 3 And that was largely because of fixed positions and the idea that you ran right in the face of concentrated musket fire and artillery to take that position and destroy the enemy army.

Speaker 3 And the idea that you have a great flanking army that is self-equipped.

Speaker 3 And the irony was Napoleon could do that on occasion. But that didn't come in really until

Speaker 3 Sherman did it. If you look at the way that Army of the West was organized, organized, it was organized to be self-sufficient.
And it was sort of like a Napoleonic column in one sense.

Speaker 3 It could operate without rail supplies, is what I'm trying to say.

Speaker 3 And it had independent divisions, three divisions. And it was very flexible.
And the idea was territory, territory, territory. They didn't stop and say, Hardy is coming.

Speaker 3 We've got to wait for him or John Bell. They did one time and they regretted it.
Kinshaw Kenshaw Mountain. They tried to have a pitched battle, and Sherman said, I'm not going to do that anymore.

Speaker 3 That was a mistake. But

Speaker 3 they didn't search out Joe Johnson. They didn't search out John Bellhood.
They said, you know what,

Speaker 3 they're just like fleas. They're just going to bite us here and there, but we're not going to stop this and turn around and fight them in a Klaus Witzian head-to-head battle.

Speaker 3 Because that's not the purpose.

Speaker 3 The purpose is to get Atlanta and destroy it as a transportation hub and send the message to the South that Abraham Lincoln's not done yet, that his army is winning the war and he's going to be reelected, and the Southern strategy of bleeding Grant that whole summer to get Lincoln out of office.

Speaker 3 That was the whole point, wasn't it? That Grant was losing too many men and they were in the papers and that he was a butcher and Lincoln was fueling that butchery.

Speaker 3 As I said, Fremont ran from during the, was going to to run from the primary, and McClellan thought he was going to be elected. And you had copperhead governors in Ohio that were insurrectionists.

Speaker 3 So had Sherman not done that, I think Lincoln wouldn't have been elected.

Speaker 3 And so that was, he was thinking like that. And that was the difference.
Territory, envelopment, wide scale of operations,

Speaker 3 not necessarily to entrap the enemy, not to destroy him in a head-on conflict.

Speaker 3 That was the world, unfortunately for the Americans, that was

Speaker 3 very hard for them to accept Sherman-like leaders.

Speaker 3 I mean, Norman

Speaker 3 Schwarzkopf did it in the First Gulf War. He had a Y pivot.
He faked them out like the Marines were going to go into Kuwait and have a Verdun-like battle, and then he just outflanked

Speaker 3 the best of the Imperial Guard of Saddam Hussein, and that was in the tradition of

Speaker 3 Patton. But that's not liked in American circles.

Speaker 2 That's interesting because would you say that Sherman took less lives than Grant?

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 I mean, I don't know. He had 65,000.
He probably finished with 60,000. And he gained 25,000 black people who he used as camp help and aides and engineers.

Speaker 3 So when that army pulled in to Virginia, it was in better shape than when it left because they were suntanned, they were well-fed, they lived off the land, they were all farmers.

Speaker 3 So when they went into the south, they knew exactly how to kill hogs and cattle and dress them out. They understood

Speaker 3 how to live off the land.

Speaker 3 Immigrants off the boat from urban cities in Europe couldn't have done that. And that was the Army of the Potomac in some sense.
So

Speaker 3 it was in better shape. And as I said earlier, we have descriptions of that.

Speaker 3 I think I wrote a chapter in the Solar Battle about the parade at the end of the war. And people in the North were scared of that army.
People remarked, because Sherman was really angry at

Speaker 3 Secretary of War.

Speaker 3 And he felt Stanton.

Speaker 3 Yeah, he hated him. And Stanton had humiliated them.

Speaker 3 Stanton had gone down to Savannah and lectured him. That how were these black slaves treated? He had a couple of racist division commanders that when they crossed

Speaker 3 into

Speaker 3 eastern Georgia at Certain River, a lot of blacks died, and they felt that that could have been prevented. So he was, he actually got black leaders and

Speaker 3 separated them from Sherman and said, we want to know, do you think he's a racist? Did he do this? It's kind of strange. And they all supported Sherman.
But

Speaker 3 Sherman hated his guts, and he told him that. And actually, when he got up on the parade stand, Stanton shook his hand.

Speaker 3 He very famously

Speaker 3 extended his hand, and Sherman wouldn't touch it. And everybody just, gosh, how could you do that?

Speaker 3 You're an army commander. He's your civilian superior.

Speaker 3 That's against all

Speaker 3 what would later become the uniform code of military judgment. It would be a violation of it.
But people were afraid that this army was going to take Washington because Sherman was so mercurial.

Speaker 3 And then he went on the other side of the Potomac and he camped. And he wanted to almost create that impression for a day or two, and then he dismissed it.

Speaker 3 But all these European military attaches said if that army was loose in Europe, it would defeat any European army.

Speaker 2 Wow, that's interesting. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And then it was vanished and it didn't reappear until World War I. Yeah.
An American army like that.

Speaker 2 Well, Victor, I know that we could go on and on on the nature of the Civil War, but let's go ahead and take a break and come back. And next week, we'll go on to the legacy, maybe in the South, right?

Speaker 3 So the Reconstruction to Jim Crow.

Speaker 3 Yeah, we can do that. Okay, that sounds good.
That's going to be funny because a country, a region that was so impoverished and had such a legacy of slavery in Jim Crow,

Speaker 3 we're going to have to explain why people from the North today

Speaker 3 want to go down there or why, and it's not because of race, because a lot of northern African Americans are going down there in droves, especially places like Atlanta. And so

Speaker 3 it's almost like that the South

Speaker 3 that had a genteel tradition of family, religion,

Speaker 3 civility,

Speaker 3 stability,

Speaker 3 agrarianism that had been marred and blemished by slavery. Once you took away the stain of slavery,

Speaker 3 then

Speaker 3 those

Speaker 3 traits were liberated to be fully manifested as positives. So today, when you talk to Californians that say,

Speaker 3 I will not go to I was talking to some at a Hoover event this week, and they had flown in from Tennessee, Texas, Florida.

Speaker 3 And you said to them, are you going to move back? No.

Speaker 3 Not going to move back to California? No, never.

Speaker 3 Why not?

Speaker 3 I love Tennessee. I love Texas.
I love Florida. And you ask them why, and they say they're not crazy.
It's low taxes, less government, of course. But they say things that make sense.

Speaker 3 So they have no roads. No, the roads are better.
Bridges are better. Everything works better.

Speaker 3 And the people are nicer. They're more civil.
And they like that, you know, that southern culture better. And that's so ironic because it had been so tarnished because of slavery in Jim Crow.

Speaker 3 But when African Americans feel that it's more advantageous for their families to be intact and to be stable in a southern environment than under

Speaker 3 a northern liberal city,

Speaker 3 it's pretty odd. And this is really controversial because there were the same critiques of northern

Speaker 3 industrial

Speaker 3 heartlessness the south tried to make, but they couldn't really make it because of the

Speaker 3 problem of slavery. But they say, you know, if you read Southern Pamphleteering in the 1850s, these are heartless people.
They have slaves.

Speaker 3 The big argument they made was, well, we have slaves and we treat them well and we feed them and house them, but they have slaves called immigrant, you know, loom workers or steel workers, and they're treated like dirt and they're wage slaves, they called it, and they don't get anyhow.

Speaker 3 It was kind of a bogus argument, but their argument that the North was just full of greedy capitalists and dreary,

Speaker 3 transient people coming and immigrants that were not fully assimilated and no common culture. That was the argument they made.

Speaker 3 But again, it could never be successful because of the liability of this horrific institution of slavery.

Speaker 3 But once that was out, you know, you can argue that the southern agrarians had tried to

Speaker 3 write and restore that reputation at a point.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, Victor, let's hold off until next week for that and let's take a break and come back and talk a little bit about Senator Tommy Tuberville.
Stay with us and we'll be back.

Speaker 2 Welcome back. This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.
You can find Victor at Twitter or on Twitter at V D Hansen and on Facebook at Hansen's Morning Cup. So you can connect there as well.

Speaker 2 Victor, so we have a Senator Tom or Tommy, sorry, Tuberville, who is blocking military promotions. And his reasoning for that is that he's protesting the Pentagon's abortion policy.

Speaker 2 Have you heard anything about this?

Speaker 3 Yes, I have. I have indeed.

Speaker 3 What are your thoughts?

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 Lloyd Austin attacked him the other day and said, you know, that he was endangering military readiness because,

Speaker 3 first, I don't quite believe that today's military has all these geniuses that would reform the military. if they were just given quick, you know, green light to assume command.
But

Speaker 3 he said again, it's not about race. He just said,

Speaker 3 I don't understand that if there's a Supreme Court ruling that says that the states should establish, it's kind of a civil war issue, should establish their own rules of abortion.

Speaker 3 And you've got military bases within those states.

Speaker 3 and they are subsidizing abortions. That's not the role of the federal government to do that, especially as it's against the wishes of the state in which the federal base is there.

Speaker 3 And so that's the issue, that why is the federal, the Pentagon taking a stance that is essentially pre-Road v. Wade? You know what I'm saying?

Speaker 3 It's kind of a murky subject, isn't it? Because Roe versus Wade said that individual states establish laws about abortion, not the federal government, right?

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 there are domains of the federal government, and those are military.

Speaker 3 Those are not the only ones, maybe national parks, but we're talking about the federal government as people that live on federal property.

Speaker 3 And he and Lloyd Austin, by fiat, is saying on those federal jurisdictions, which are in states, then we're going to facilitate our green light abortions.

Speaker 3 But you could argue, well, the Supreme Court was a federal institution, and when they said the federal government had no business in it,

Speaker 3 that meant that

Speaker 3 the Pentagon has no business in it. You know what I mean? If anything, you would say that the Pentagon should reflect the values or the state laws in which it is in.

Speaker 3 So if you've got a base in California and they have many,

Speaker 3 and somebody wants to get an abortion on the base, maybe they can say it's state law that says you can do it. But if they're in Alabama, they shouldn't be able to.

Speaker 3 But that's not the Pentagon's position. So Tuber Wilt said, you know what?

Speaker 3 I'm not going to, I'm not,

Speaker 3 you know, and the way the Senate works, a person can put a hold, one senator can put a hold on an appointment. And that's what he did.

Speaker 3 And it's just that larger question. At the same time he did that, we had this crazy secretary of the Army, right?

Speaker 3 And she came out. She was an old Clintonite, an Obamaite.

Speaker 3 And it was just amazing what she said, that she is now discouraging people from joining the army if they were generational. I think that's the term she used.

Speaker 3 I mean, if their parents had been in the army, she didn't want them.

Speaker 3 I'm kind of simplifying or maybe exaggerating, but

Speaker 3 that's crazy because you want multi-generational people who have that military ethos. And that's not what this Wormouth, I think her name is Wormmouth.
I remember her when she was

Speaker 3 in the Obama administration. She's a hardcore leftist.
And now she's Secretary of the Army, and she's discouraging...

Speaker 3 The Army's short, 25,000, 30,000 people. And she's discouraging people to enlist whose parents or grandparents have enlisted.
And that's what we counted on.

Speaker 3 And so that's exactly what all these generals are lying to when they're saying, oh,

Speaker 3 we can't get people

Speaker 3 because they're too fat or they're playing video games or they're in gangs or

Speaker 3 they're just not the type of material we need and they don't make our standard. That's not true.
No,

Speaker 3 it's their policy enlistment. It's their policy.

Speaker 3 It's things like Mark Milley telling everybody to read Professor Kendi or it's Lloyd Austin ranting and raving about abortion or transgenderism or Air Force commercials about

Speaker 3 new airsuits for pregnant women, all that stuff.

Speaker 3 It's the

Speaker 3 Mulvaney syndrome. And people don't want

Speaker 3 the Scots-Irish military tradition doesn't want to adopt that. They don't want any part of it.

Speaker 3 And when you add the humiliation of Afghanistan, the way we treated people who had fought there for 20 years, we just said, nah, it was all for nothing.

Speaker 3 Sorry about you lost a leg, but we're just going to sketch out it. We're not going to keep Bagram or anything else.
So

Speaker 3 that's what happened. And

Speaker 3 I didn't think anybody would admit it. When I've talked to high-ranking officers, they deny that.

Speaker 3 Oh, no, no, no. It has nothing to do with that, Victor.
No, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 3 No, no, no, no, no. People are not in, they're not enlisting because

Speaker 3 we've got this basement culture, you know. And then we've got a lot of guys and criminals, and they just don't meet our standards.
And then we've got a workforce that's 3%

Speaker 3 on employment. So we're competing against employers, and they're raising the wages too high.
Well, maybe, maybe not. But I think it's

Speaker 3 the grandfather in Vietnam, as they said, tells the son in the First Gulf War, who tells his son in the Iraq war, who tells his son, don't enlist, because you'll have a target on your back.

Speaker 3 And you'll get a guy like Lloyd, you get a colonel or a major

Speaker 3 who listens to what Austin or Millie says, and he knows that's how he's got to kiss up to that type of ideology, and he's going to take it out on you. And

Speaker 3 they don't want to do it. And now it's kind of reified and confirmed by this Christine Wormer when she says that.

Speaker 3 She does not want generational army, I guess, generational soldiers. And she's talking about reform and all of this stuff.
And

Speaker 3 it really shows you what the left is looking at now.

Speaker 3 Kind of in a French revolutionary, you know, when they had these revolutionary armies that were extensions of the revolution, they were pretty good at first.

Speaker 3 But what they're trying to create, I think, is kind of a transgender, gay, single mom, feminist, you know what I'm saying, identity politics, revolutionary a nation in arms like that.

Speaker 3 And that is going to be the tip of the spear for,

Speaker 3 you know,

Speaker 3 transgendered women get to be in male sports or we go back to affirmative action de facto or

Speaker 3 gay marriage. It's all going to be enforced by the military.
That's going to be the protective of it, the armed forces.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 that's going to create all of this brotherhood and increase morale.

Speaker 3 I don't see it.

Speaker 3 I look at that effort in Kabul with the pride flags and the murals and the gender studies, and I don't think it created a nation-in-arms, so to speak, a left-wing nation-in-arms, that was effective.

Speaker 3 But that's their idea. And you can see it.
You can see it with Bernie Sanders and the Obamas and Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. They never criticize the military.

Speaker 3 They don't don't criticize the revolving door. They don't care that generals go in to raid the on and then they come back as

Speaker 3 secretary. It's all okay now because these are left-wing agents.
That's how they see it.

Speaker 2 Yes, that's true. Well, Victor, we're at the end of our show, so I would like to thank you for all of your wisdom, and especially the discussion of the Civil War.

Speaker 2 I love to talk about the nature of war, and that was particularly excellent. So thank you very much.

Speaker 3 Thank everybody for listening.

Speaker 2 This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hansen, and we're signing off.