Causes of Civil War and More

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Hello to the listeners of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

This is the Saturday edition, and so we like to do a little bit of news, but then we follow it by a discussion of warfare and then some discussion of agriculture.

So the top news stories today are

Gal Luft, sorry, he is an Israeli whistleblower, and the U.S.

drones are being used to hit Moscow.

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

Welcome back.

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

Victor has a website victorhanson.com.

It's called The Blade of Perseus.

Please come join us there.

A subscription is $5 a month or $50 for the year, or you can come and just subscribe to our free subscription for all the free stuff on the website as well and get on our mailing list so you know what's current on the Blade of Perseus.

Victor,

do we have anything positive today before we go into Gal Luft?

Because that sounds very dangerous.

The tone of your voice, I want to tell you that I've been traveling and a couple of people came out and said, Oh,

do you have anything positive to say?

Sammy is so upbeat and you are such an Eeyore and you're so depressing.

And just

give the benefit of the doubt to poor Sammy.

Yes.

Yes.

Okay.

What's good?

Well, I'm back in the United States.

And every time I come back to the United States, I feel very appreciative of what we have given the alternatives, even though, as I said, our major cities are

a wreck, but the people are very resilient and redundant.

It's a beautiful country.

We got a great system.

The people would just appreciate how lucky they are.

But

that's the biggest challenge right now, that we're leisured and affluent.

And we don't know the alternative is much bleaker because a lot of people don't go abroad or they take this as a birthright or they don't reinvest in the country.

But it's a wonderful country.

Everybody should be feeling pretty great about it.

We survived COVID.

We survived this disastrous lockdown.

We survived the 120 days of George Floyd.

We survived the whole Trump derangement and all of that stuff.

And we have a clean slate.

So I hope we can get together.

The biggest worry we have are people are self-selecting by state.

And that's a force multiplier, as we know from the Civil War, which we're going to talk about

this episode, that anytime you have a geographical dimension to civil tension, and we're sort of reformulating, you know, it's not quite the Mason-Dixon line blue-gray, but we're getting red and blue.

And they're starting to resemble two different countries.

If you go to Minneapolis or you go to Tallahassee or you go to San Francisco and then you go to, I don't know,

rural Tennessee, it's just a different world.

Yes.

So we have to work on that.

But I'm in a pretty good mood.

It seems like you run across people all the time that either want a signature, an autograph, sorry, on one of your books, or just to tell you that they're big supporters.

So just for your listeners out there, I think they should realize that there's a lot of people like you.

And so you should be encouraged by that.

Yeah.

I mean,

I'm just here

on my farm and somebody just showed up at the, that happens a lot.

I just showed up on the farm.

I don't, you know, one of the books signed.

And so we have, and these people, it's not me.

They just have a common solidarity that they think something's wrong and they want to help.

And what can they do?

Because they feel they woke up one morning and they didn't recognize the United States.

And they have to remember that

all of the things that are worrisome is not the norm.

It's not the majority.

This is a hijacking of the country by a very small but very wealthy, influential bi-coastal elite.

But they are not, not the United States, no matter what they say

and uh so people have to you know stand up and say you know what we've let you guys have two or three years and you did your thing and now it's time to reassert that this is the united states there's a constitution and we're not going this is not we we have no problem with dylan mulvaney let him do his thing but the country it will not survive with Dylan Mulvaney's.

You have to have families, you have to have children, you have to have, that's the majority.

And

we're not discriminating against people who choose not to embrace that paradigm.

But without that paradigm, there's nothing is what I'm saying.

You can't kill everybody in Chicago on a Saturday night.

And the country won't go on if everybody does that.

You can't have an open border and have 7 million people come that have no...

no affinity, no knowledge of the United States.

That's not going to work.

So when we have an open border, when we have shooting and mayhem when we have this whole transgender that's fine as long as you remember that there's a millions of people who don't say a word they just get up every day and they they frack and they mine and they grow food and they're long-haul truckers and they're teachers and they don't do that but that's what the whole system depends on that there is a majority that is a majority that goes against the bounty.

I'm not trying to judge people that don't want to join that paradigm.

But if, you know, like I said on our last podcast, the whole premise of the violence in France, if you're from North Africa and you go to France, is that there's a majority who are not doing what you do or you wouldn't want to go there.

And so what I'm suggesting for the people, the 7 million that came across the border,

you don't want people to do what you did.

You broke the law.

And you broke the law again when you resided here illegally.

And you broke the law a third time when you got ID that was not proper, probably.

But you assume that most people don't do that, because if they did do that, it would be like Mexico, where there is no law.

Yeah.

Where you just ran away from, yes.

Yeah, exactly.

You don't want to recreate Mexico here.

So it's dependent on people following the law and following the customs and traditions.

But the problem is, if you look at the Byzantine Empire or the Roman Empire or the Greek city-state, when you have a majority of the people who are not following the traditions that made that city-state or that empire or that republic viable and attractive,

then there's no reason for it to continue.

So, you know, you can say it's really neat to go,

I don't know, shoot somebody in Chicago occasionally, or you can say that it's really okay to smash and grab, or it's okay to have,

I don't know,

what would we call it a prison infirmary instead of

Walgreens or Rite Aid?

But that is not sustainable.

And if everybody has that attitude, then this country won't work.

So it depends on other people,

just who we ridicule.

We ridicule.

Mark Milley can say all he wants about white supremacy and white rage and all that, but you take away that third, fourth, fifth generation family who don't really think of race.

But year, generation, decade,

they go to places that are pretty god-awful.

They go to Vietnam,

they go to Korea, they go to Vietnam, they go to the First Gulf War, they go to Afghanistan, they go to Iraq, they go to Syria.

I'm not saying that all the other people don't, but they do it in numbers double their demographic as far as mortality.

And when you start

impugning that they're racist or sexist or transphobic, then they won't participate.

And if you think that's oh, so what?

Well, then you better get a a lot of Dylan

Mulvaney's to take their place.

I can't see that guy with a

gun in it with the gun in his hand.

You don't think he would be good on patrol.

Who knows?

I don't want to judge people by their sexual orientation, but all I'm suggesting is if you think that the person who

at three in the morning is at heat hit in Iraq or he's in Fallujah, And I know a lot of people that went over there and

you think that, well,

they're suffering from white rage, okay?

Take out, get rid of them, and then see what you have to replace them.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, Victor, let's turn then to the that was upbeat, that was upbeat.

I know you, you're, you're a magician.

You managed to turn my upbeat into a little bit of tragedy, usually.

That's all right, because okay, yeah, it is.

Um, let's turn to Gal Luft.

Um, Miranda Devine has a great article, I think think it was yesterday, about

Luft, who is basically a whistleblower.

He was part of the Israeli Defense Force,

a colonel in the Defense Force, and he has a lot of information about deals between China and the Biden family syndicate, if I can call Hunter and Jim Biden that syndicate.

But

so there's a lot to the story.

There's money that has been paid to Hunter and to Jim Biden that he knows about.

He knows about an FBI mole that Hunter has called One Eye and a couple of Chinese

contacts, both of which one was arrested in China and the other one who was arrested here.

So it's a pretty complicated story.

What are your thoughts?

Well, I mean,

Gal Luft is known to the Washington establishment.

It's not like, I think he has his own, he's a direxis,

I think it's called the Institute of Analysis of Global Security, but he's an energy

expert.

I ran across him when I was a professor 20 years ago at the Naval Academy.

I think he contacted me.

I don't know if he remembers that, but we talked.

I think I met him.

He's been in the IDF.

He's a professor.

He's not some crazy person.

And he's now holed up in Cyprus because he feels that

he mentioned things about the Biden family that he ran across vis-a-vis their contacts with foreign energy companies that he felt were improper.

And all of a sudden, the U.S.

says he's an arms dealer and has a subpoena out for him.

And I guess that's

a euphemism.

But the way to look at this is that there's this Biden camel,

and almost every day there's a straw that's put on its back.

And so we were told by the left that whistleblowers are sacrosanct.

You don't dare suggest that Michael Vinman broke the law by leaking a classified presidential call to Mr.

Zelensky.

You don't dare say that.

You don't dare say Eric Saramella.

You don't say that they are connived.

Okay, so whistleblowers are sacrosanct.

Only they're not because they've been attacking the IRS whistleblowers or attacking Mr.

Liu.

So there is no such thing to the left as a whistleblower.

There's a whistleblower who's sacrosanct that they find advantageous in their constant attack against conservatives.

And then there's whistleblowers that they find disadvantageous and they're no longer whistleblowers.

They're rats.

They're treasonous.

They're criminals.

And that's where the category that he falls into.

But the long view, the long view is: so you got Hunter Biden.

He leaves a crackpipe and a rental car.

He's lost three laptops.

He's lost a gun.

He's lied on his government gun registration.

He's lied about his taxes.

He's stonewalled and stonewalled.

And his entire life has been predicated on using Joe Biden.

And I have to be careful here because I say using Joe Biden to enhance the Biden Consortium, but nobody uses Joe Biden.

Joe Biden wants to be used.

So Joe Biden is at this nexus of the whole family.

And when he keeps saying again and again and again, he has no knowledge of Hunter's laptop or he has no knowledge of any of this stuff, any business.

And you see him with, what, business associates of Hunter in a picture on the golf course.

You see

Bobolinsky, Tony Mobolinski saying that Biden was very involved.

You get these transcripts that Hunter says the man next to me, i.e.

his dad.

So each one is a straw.

And now this back is starting to break.

And then these are peripheral stories, you know,

the cocaine that's found.

But you know what?

It was not found where people,

and it was found near the situation room.

And it's not that easy to get into the White House.

So somebody...

who brought that cocaine in either

had some exemption and wasn't searched.

It's not a tourist that goes in there, believe me, that gets near the situation room.

And the same thing about these other stories that you keep hearing about Hunter Biden gives a painting so he doesn't have to pay child support.

I think at some point people say, you know what?

I'm damn tired of this crooked, corrupt family and everything they've done.

And we want them gone.

They politicize the government.

And the guy is non-composment.

And this whole media corrupt syndicate that that keeps lying to us that the Bidens are not corrupt and they look the other way, and Joe Biden has no cognitive problems.

They're just tired of it.

And I hope to God the Republicans, the conservatives, can offer an alternative.

Yes.

But we'll see.

We'll see.

We'll see what happens.

So, Mr.

Luft,

anybody who comes in contact with Hunter Biden or the Bidens in any capacity whatsoever is going to be destroyed.

Every single one of them will be destroyed eventually because that's how the Bidens operate.

When you have Joe Biden and he brags to a session of the Council on Foreign Relations that he fired a prosecutor that was looking into burismo and he said, son of a bitch, fired him.

And he's bragging about that.

This is not delaying foreign aid as Trump was accused of.

This is canceling it that was approved by Congress.

And he's bragging.

it, and he gets away with that.

Well, then you can see

what the problem is.

So you go against him, and you're going to deal with the FBI, the CIA,

the IRS, you name it.

And all of these people, all these agencies are pad whistleblowers.

And I think at some point, it gets, we reach a

point where it's not sustainable anymore.

And people say, you know what?

I've had it with the Bidens.

I think their only hope right now is the statute of limitations.

It's not a matter of did they commit felonies?

They did, but as long as they're in power and they have Merrick Garland, who's a very flawed individual, damaged individual, he's not going to appoint a special prosecutor.

And then they hope that by the time they're out of office, which will be, I think, in 2024, the Statue of Limitation on these crimes that took place when he was leaving the vice presidency during the Trump First Amendment will be over with.

And they have been for Bunker in some cases.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, let's hope that

I don't know.

We don't have any hope there, Victor.

Actually, they probably will end up that way.

It's really disturbing for people who love this country that we could descend to having a criminal syndicate in the White House.

Yeah, this is.

What is Jim Biden?

Who is Jim Biden?

He's Billy Carter with a suit on, right?

He's Roger Clinton with a suit on.

But nobody ever thought that Roger Clinton or Billy carter would be in the white house directing things that like these people have been doing

yeah this is the stuff of monarchies or things like north korea and it's it just happens who date kuse

and it's and it's really scary because

there's something wrong with this foreign policy there really is about china when you have Yellen saying, you know, we want to do this and this, and we have Blinken, and you say, wait a minute,

This corrupt communist government unleashed, maybe accidentally or otherwise, a virus that killed a million Americans.

And we want to know how, why, the origins.

And we don't have anybody in our government that's concerned except to lie to us.

We've gone through the bat story, the pangolin story.

We're going to cite you for misinformation for even suggesting that it came out of the lab.

And then the balloon story.

Oh,

it was over the water.

It was too hard to find the balloon in Alaska, or when Montana, one of the most

least densely populated, we couldn't shoot it down and hurt somebody, or it didn't go near a base.

We're just sick of all these lies about China.

Yes, we are.

At some point, you ask yourself, what is it with the Bidens in China?

And does it have anything to do with these

tapes that are starting to emerge, these transcripts that the House investigatory committees are starting to find out about the Biden family in China.

Do they get or not $10 million?

Does China know that?

Does China have records?

Has China told them subtly,

you know, if you don't play ball, we're going to, on our end, release things that would be very damaging.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, Victor, let's look then at another foreign policy issue, and that is, of course, the Ukrainian war

or the sorry, the Ukraine war.

And apparently, drones that have hit

Moscow are U.S.

drones.

And so they're using U.S.

equipment for offensive purposes pretty openly now.

Is that true?

I don't know if it's true or not, but I do know that we've sent them a million artillery shells, and we've sent them HIMARS, our most sophisticated missile systems.

We've sent them our most sophisticated artillery systems.

We've sent them our tanks, Abrams, and we're in the process of doing that.

We've sent them, or we're going to send them upscale of 16s.

So we're all in, as they like to say, and we've sent over, we're getting up to $130 billion.

As I said before, that makes them the third largest defense budget in the country.

Okay.

When we tell them don't use our weapons for preemptive attacks into Russia, there's a dilemma there, Same, because military logic, such as it is through the ages, says if you want to expel an invader from your homeland who has attacked you,

you don't limit the battlescape just to your own territory.

You try to do things in their rear.

You see what I'm saying?

So if you want to go into,

if you're...

If you're

the Russians and Hitler on June 22nd has invaded your country, then you find ways to do something to Hitler.

You tell the Americans you open a second front and you bomb Berlin, something like that.

You try to do something to relieve the pressure, but the pressure that the people who are going to relieve the pressure is us.

And I'm not sure that 100% of our aim is identical to this corrupt government in Ukraine.

I have sympathy for it.

I deplore the aggression.

I want them to repel the Russians.

But if they're going to use our weaponry, I'm not sure they do, so I'm being hypothetical, to stage the type of operations which are necessary to get Russia out, but nevertheless are attacks on the mother soil of Russia.

And it's through us.

And here's what I mean by this.

So

yesterday in the news, we heard some commentary that in Syria we had a modus operandi with the Putin Air Force that works basically at the bequest of the Saad kleptocracy.

And there's al-Qaeda there and other terrorist groups, and we need to monitor them and to hit them because of our interests after trying, you know, investing in Iraq and whatsoever, Israel, et cetera.

And all of a sudden, the rules of engagement have changed.

And so Americans are outraged.

They're saying, you know what?

Russian planes are releasing the fuel and they're buzzing our very very expensive and sophisticated predators

and they're trying to break the rules.

And we used to notify them when we were using the battle space.

They notified us.

And we're supposed to get very furious.

And I am furious about that.

Except,

well, what would you do if Russia

is, if they think that American arms are hitting the Kremlin.

So what I'm suggesting is when we were fighting in Iraq and we're not fighting on the borders of the United States and Iraq and Russia was pouring stuff in, which they may have been doing via Iran, we got really angry about.

But just to envision that if we're fighting a war with Mexico and Russia is supplying Mexico with the most sophisticated weapons in the world

and then

all of a sudden

we complain or they complain.

I mean, of course

they're going to disrupt our space and our viability in Syria because we're

giving their existential enemies the most sophisticated weapons in the world.

I have no problem with that, giving them the weapons.

Well, what gets me about this whole thing is this puritanical American outrage.

How dare they're Russians?

Can you imagine they buzzed a predator?

Well, yeah, we're giving them 130, we're giving their enemies that are killed, 300,000 Russians, the weapons to kill them.

And And so, yeah, we support that, but you've got to expect some pushback, and we don't want it to be nuclear.

But this sanctimonious stuff, you know,

it's really weird.

And if you really are worried about

pushing, pushing the battle space, then you better look at China, because China is not pushing at predators.

They have been buzzing our ships.

They have been buzzing our planes.

They have been sending a spy balloon.

They trump Russia and spades what they're doing.

And they're not 144 million people with a bankrupt economy that's losing a war.

There are 1.4 billion people that have an economy that's approaching our sides.

And they hate our guts.

And they're a communist, hardcore, racist country.

And if you, and why the Biden family will not get tough on them, and yet we're supposed to be outraged because

the Russians in Syria are doing things they shouldn't do do to our drones and they shouldn't be doing it.

But compared to what the Chinese have been doing to us, if you're listening today, which is the greatest outrage, having a predator buzzed in Syria or having a U.S.

plane buzzed by the Chinese, a real live pilot in a, or better yet, having a virus on leash that killed a million Americans, or better yet, a spy balloon that went right across with impunity.

And so yes, let's get angry at Russia for buzzing our our predators or raptors or whatever they are, but let's put it in perspective.

Yeah, let's be enraged at China.

Yes, and let's understand that

if you expand the mission in Ukraine, and we have, it's no longer to go back to the 2014 borders.

It's a new mission now.

It's to go back.

to the pre-2014 borders.

In other words, we're now saying to Russia that Barack Obama should have been angry when you took Crimea and the Donbass, and he should have to help Ukraine get it back.

And we're saying to Donald Trump, Donald Trump screwed up.

He should have immediately armed Ukraine to the teeth so they could have taken back the Donbass, which they're trying to do now, and Crimea, which is now their mission.

And they should have been very angry at Joe Biden.

We should, because the real mission from January of 2021 to February

of 22, the real mission was always to get back the Crimea and the Donbass, because that's what our mission is now.

It's never stated that before, but suddenly the war created a new mission, not just to repel the Russians who invaded, but to take back things that they had taken much earlier, six years earlier.

And I hope the American people realize that mission.

It's not to repel Russians from February 2022.

It's to repel them from

2014, an agenda that we apparently, through three administrations, never really embraced.

Yeah.

All right, Victor.

Let's go ahead and take a break and come back and talk a little bit about another war, the U.S.

Civil War.

You're listening to the Victor Davis-Hanson show.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

Welcome back.

So Victor, this Saturday or this weekend,

the topic is the U.S.

Civil War and it's a huge war.

So I thought maybe we would approach it in three parts and look at the causes first today and then maybe the nature of the war the next episode and then look at the consequences of the war later.

So

I'm wondering what exactly what do you think were the causes of the war with for the U.S.?

Well, the cause was slavery, but there were manifestations of that.

I mean, the founders knew that slavery was contradictory to the Declaration of Independence, right?

All men are created equal.

But for people who say, well, they counted African Americans as three-fifths.

No, they didn't.

That was the South's demand that they get representation in the House of Representatives on the basis of slaves that had no civil rights.

And the North said, we're not going to do that.

We're not going to reward you by having, you know, four, five, six, seven million slaves.

And then you get extra representatives in the House so you can perpetuate your slave agenda.

We're not going to do it.

So the compromise was, so they didn't have a civil war, it was three-fifths.

Okay.

They didn't mean, the Northerners didn't mean that black people were three-fifths of a person.

They meant we're dealing with an existential crisis and we've just created a new revolutionary America and we don't have, after almost losing the war to the British, we don't have the wherewithal right now to have a civil war.

That's the subtext.

So the issue was there from the beginning and it was a divisive issue.

And so.

Yeah, Victor, just so your listeners, what the South themselves wanted was that each slave was counted as one so that they could have that many more representatives and keep the

if you read what the founding fathers said they said we're not going some of them we're not going to be hypocritical in other words you say that a slave that you don't consider human fully human should be fully human as far as getting more per power in congress and we say take your pick

if you want that person

to be represented in the census for the purposes of more representatives in the House, then give him what he deserves, civil rights.

And they said no.

And they were not ready to go to a civil war.

So they had this crazy compromise.

Yes.

So

that was what I'm getting at.

It was there at the beginning.

And from 1776 to 1860,

You know, they had

84 years and they couldn't work it out.

And the problem, one of the problems was

that

they were expanding westward.

And they tried

with the, you know, the Missouri Compromise, the great compromiser, Henry Clay, in 1820.

They tried it again with 1850.

And the point was the South wanted access to Western states so they would be slave states, or at least they could have popular sovereignty, as Stephen Douglas called it.

And the North said, we're going to contain it.

And so these compromises, one slave state, one free, were not going to work.

Partly because

a lot of the new states, even though they had large southern territories like California, if you look at the latitude of California, San Diego is pretty

southern, but they were not going to become slave states.

So that tension was put upon it.

And then, you know, at the end of the 18th century, with Eli Whitney's cotton gin, this, what was it, 380,000 people out of 11 million souls in the South had slaves.

But they were the, I think people forget, they were,

in terms of wealth, they were like the Apple Google fortunes today.

I'm not suggesting ideologically they were like that, but they were the richest people in the history of civilization.

They were supplying the looms of the Industrial Revolution in England.

And it was a high-quality cotton, and it was very productive.

They were opening virgin lands in the Mississippi Basin.

They were opening lands in Texas, Louisiana, well beyond Virginia.

And they had now a machine that allowed you to process and gin the cotton.

And there was only, as I said, about a third of a million people owned slaves.

And they were very, very powerful.

And there were a lot of things that were recommended.

to stop them.

And how do you stop them?

Well, we'll buy the slaves.

No, why would they, in their way of thinking why would we give up slavery when we it's so lucrative

and

it had a lot of negative effects on the south they it didn't really have a middle class in the way that northern yeomanry had and the power of that elite was enormous it was sort of warped like silicon valley has warped california it's the same idea you had a very small group of people that were the wealthiest people in the world.

And they were very smart people and they were not going to give up this institution.

So they lived with it, and they tried to find ways of buying slaves or sending slaves back to Africa, all these crazy ideas.

And then

when the compromise of 1850 failed, then you started to see where this was going.

And where was it going?

There was no Whig Party.

There was a Republican Party that was starting to form.

And by 1860,

even though it was not a majority vote, Abraham Lincoln won the election.

And this new Republican Party was foundational anti-slavery, first one.

It was not going to tolerate slaves.

So as soon as he was elected, you could see what these 350, 380,000 people were going to do.

They were going to

institutionalize slavery as a cause.

In other words, they were telling everybody in the South, this is not about our profit.

This is about our rights to do what we want within our state boundaries, states' rights.

And then we had a second problem was, and we have it today, when Donald Trump, remember when Donald Trump was trying to

adjudicate what would happen in

Yosemite as far as lockdowns, for example, the state of California said, no, Yosemite, how do you get to Yosemite?

You have to go through state territory.

And what do you do with a sanctuary city?

There's 550 of them, Sammy, and they all violate federal law.

If the government wanted to, they could go in and say, you know what?

If you are Portland, Oregon, and you are not going to allow the federal government to arrest this felon that you have who is here illegally, then we're going to cut off all of your transportation money or everything.

Well, that was the issue in the South.

The South didn't own the South entirely.

They didn't own federal forts, Fort Sun.

They didn't own federal post offices.

They didn't own federal armories.

And so one of the ways that Lincoln brought this to

Boyle was he said, you know what?

You don't own those places and we have a right to enforce our ownership.

And that would lead to the bombardment of Fort Sumner.

The other problem was

the other problem was kind of a, and this is, you can read it in Sherman's memoirs.

He wrote it very clearly.

If you look at the graduating classes of the military academy at West Point, and you look at who was graduating and who was considered the top people, the Albert Sidney Johnston or Robert E.

Lee,

and some of them weren't as good as everybody said they were, but James Longstreet and

A.P.

Hill and all these people.

So the, I mean, Grant was near the very bottom, I guess, of the class of West Point.

So the point was that the southern Scotch-Irish military tradition had been a force multiplier of revolutionary fervor.

And in the Mexican War, the officers from say

captain all the way up to major colonel had been from the south.

They had a stronger military tradition.

They had less immigration.

And they had roots, more people claimed roots back to the founding.

So what I'm getting at is they deluded themselves into thinking that even though there were going to be 11 actual states, that they had the greater martial tradition, and that one southerner was worth three northerners, that the northerners were characterized, well, they're just a bunch of Irish guys that came off the boat, or they're from Eastern Europe, they're not even, or they're a bunch of dumb Swedes up there in Minnesota, they don't know anything about fighting.

What they didn't realize and what Sherman, and he was the first commandant at the Louisiana State, what would become Louisiana State University.

And he said to them, it's a very famous exchange, when he resigned his presidency, he said, you don't know the northerners.

These are very crafty people.

He said, you guys can't even make glass insulators on your telegraph pole.

They make everything.

And indeed, the economy was four or five times bigger, and even more so when you take cotton out of the equation.

They used the term king cotton.

That was not, you know, a term for any other reason saying that cotton runs the United States.

And without the income from cotton, the United States will be poor.

So we are in the driver's seats.

And what they didn't realize is everything changes during a war.

And people become very inventive.

And they make things like Dahlgren guns.

And they make things like the monitor.

And they make things like the Sharps or Henry repeating rifle.

And

that is going to take place in places like Springfield Armory in Massachusetts or in the

industrial area of the East Coast.

And so they didn't really, the people in the South didn't realize that although they may have had the best soldiers man for man, that they had

about one-fourth of the available manpower.

And they had about 10 to 15% of the fabrication and assembly industries of the North.

And they didn't have the access to sea power.

So when Winfield Scott was going to look how to win this war, big fat fat old Winfield Scott, who probably was one of the best generals in the history of the United States, his anaconda strategy was pretty smart.

And that was simply to blockade all of the ports in the South, whether it was Mobile or New Orleans, you name it, or Charleston.

And that meant that no cotton was going to go out to Great Britain, and they were not going to get foreign exchange, and no

firearms, gunpowder, et cetera, cannon were going to come into the South.

And then they had to reboot their economy and they were not able to do that.

And then a final thing is

they didn't understand that there was

the United States in 1861 was not the caricature of the East Coast.

By that, I mean there were entirely different Americans in places like Ohio and Indiana and Iowa and Michigan and Wisconsin.

So when to flash ahead a bit, when William decomposes Sherman

from November after taking Atlanta all the way to December in Savannah, when he marches through, about 90% of his regiments, they're not Irish immigrants, not to take anything away from the Army of the Potomac, but the Army of the West was yeoman farmers.

And they were pretty tough people.

They lived on the frontier, and the South hadn't quite seen anybody like them.

And the other thing to remember was that

necessity is a mother of invention.

And once you get into a war, then the fact that you're General Halleck or General McClellan or General Hooker or General Burnt doesn't matter if you can't win.

And all of a sudden, you're looking for talent, and the North is much bigger.

And there's a lot of people in the West that are very talented.

And they're not based, their position doesn't, it's not based on who they know.

It's based on talent.

And so you can get a manic depressant like William Tecumseh Sherman who's a genius, or a semi-alcoholic supposedly like U.S.

Grant,

or somebody like Sheridan, who's, you know, little Bill Sheridan,

or General Thomas, the rock Chickamauga.

You can get people that'll come to the fore, and they did.

And by the end of the war, the great minds on the battlefield were not Robert E.

Lee.

They were people like Grant and Sherman that thought geostrategically and economically and understood the great picture.

And they were brilliant people.

And people they were leading

were every bit as tough as the gallant Southern soldier.

But the problem, anyway,

the South wasn't expecting what the North had

no idea.

Why?

They didn't think, they thought it was going to be sort of

one or two

decisive battles, bull run.

They were going to whip the Yankees and then the Yankees were going to quit.

And they didn't quite understand that the Yankees were not going to quit because they had reached a point after,

as I said, 84 years.

They were not going to allow slavery to be part of the United States.

So, but

you just got to something.

I have a question.

Why didn't they just split the United States and have a break?

That was a very good point.

That was a very good point.

I don't see it, because if something like that happened today, I don't think that people would be interested in fighting with each other.

They'd just say, go ahead, Texas, you've got the clause, and California, you've got to.

That had been a

question that had been there at the founding.

And there had been a lot of people who thought about it.

And one of the things about the American idea was they were not going to recreate Europe.

In other words, North America was a bit larger than Central and Northern and Western Europe, and they'd had the Hundred Years' War, the 30 Years' War, all of these wars going back to the Middle Ages.

And they said they always fight, and we're going to have one uniform country.

So there was this embredden, the idea that we were not going to be a warring people.

And people would say, well, there was no difference between the Austrians and the Germans and the Swiss, and yet they kill each other.

Or the Portuguese and the Spanish kill each other.

So why did they do that?

And so their idea was it was going to be all or nothing, at least in the northern mind.

But the South made a lot of

eloquent arguments, and some of them were sophisticated.

They said, why don't you just let us be?

And they even gave dates.

We're going to eliminate this in 1920,

1910.

We want to do it gradually.

And the North said, no, we're not going to let you do that because you are not separate from us.

And by the way, when you say today, red and blue, they might separate, it would cause a civil war.

Because as soon as they did,

what would somebody in Tennessee say?

He would say to California, I'm not going to let you take Yosemite.

And then someone, Tennessee, would say, you know, Wyoming's in the north and Yellowstone's mine and maybe Wyoming wouldn't do it.

And then we'd hear in California, we would say, Well, yeah, we have 40 million people and 30 million are crazy left-wingers on the coast, but the most right-wing people in the world are the 10 million in California.

And I can tell you, when I go places and I meet a guy that comes out of, I don't know, Tulare, California, or I meet somebody up in Chico, they are more conservative than conservatives anywhere in the country.

And so they're going to have a mini-civil war inside California, right?

And that happened.

And so it's not so neat.

And so when the South said, well, we'll just succeed, the North said, well, you're not going to do that because we have citizens that don't believe in slavery and you only have about 1% of the population who owns it.

And you're rigging through the power of cotton money.

And we have representatives in there.

That was one argument, not a very good one.

But more importantly, we have federal property that you're taking from us.

You're stealing it.

Yes, but why not just settle for a price and let them buy it?

They did.

They offered a, I think really to get back to it, cotton had been lucrative, but it hadn't been lucrative to Eli Whitney's cotton gin.

And no matter, I mean, the price, if you look at the price of slaves and adjust it for inflation from, say, 1790 to 95, and then go in when they stopped, the British Empire stopped, you know, slavery on the high seas.

And there was an in about 1810, 1808, it was no longer bringing slaves in.

And then you look at the amount of money people were making off of that.

They were not going to give that up for anything.

And more importantly,

Scotch Irish pride said, you know what, you're not going to tell us what to do.

You set a constitution.

You said that

anything

that

this federal government didn't spell out, 10th amendment, goes back to the states.

And then in 1857, you had the Dred Scott decision.

And they said, you have to, you said the Supreme Court, you people founded the country, you said the Supreme Court has a rule of law.

And so, they've said that if we have slaves that go up to the North, you've got to give them back to us.

Well, the North wasn't going to do that.

And so,

there was, it was just inevitable what was going to happen.

And there were people by eight, I think you could make the argument in the terrible summer of 1864,

down fighting down by Richmond, there had been a 100,000 hundred

Union casualties.

And

you were getting up to about 500,000 dead on both sides.

Even

Lincoln, Mary Todd Lincoln, said that Ulysses S.

Grant was a butcher.

And she was very critical of him, hated him.

People hated Grant at that point.

And in early summer, late spring, John C.

Fremont was running to get the Republican Republican nomination from Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln himself said he probably wouldn't win the general election because McClellan was voicing what you're talking about.

He had kind of the copperhead plan.

He said, you know what?

We've tried.

I'm a general.

They believed me, but I got further south than anybody did after the terrible battle of Antietam.

And I know better than anybody.

And you can't defeat these people.

So why don't we just go to the status ante quote?

We'll go back to where we were.

And people in the North said, Yeah, yeah, that's what.

And Lincoln was going to lose the election.

And all of a sudden, crazy Uncle Billy Sherman said, You know what?

He's going to lose the election.

And Grant's not going to save him because Grant is bogged down.

And one thing we know about Robert E.

Lee, he may be a terrible general when he's on the offensive and destroy his army at Gettysburg, but the guy is a mad genius when he's on the defensive.

And there's no way in the world, no matter how many many troops you have or cannon or fun, you cannot get Bobby Lee out of Richmond and the defenses around it.

And they never did.

And so Sherman came up with the idea, I'm going to go down and make Georgia howl.

I'm going to go down and take Atlanta.

I got to take Atlanta before the election.

And he had to face John

Bill Hood, who was kind of crazy.

And luckily, He got rid of Joe Johnson.

Joe Johnson's idea was to

slow down Sherman.

He's got a bigger army, slow him down, bleed him to death, keep him in the wilds of Georgia, slow him down before the election.

And then they got rid of him and they put in crazy John Bell Hood and he destroyed the defenses and he took Atlanta on September 2nd.

What did Sherman say?

Atlanta is ours and fairly won.

At that point, there was no longer a McClellan viable candidacy.

People said, oh, my God.

The North, it's right in the middle.

It just took the second greatest city in the South, the transportation hub of the Confederacy.

They burned down the Sun, but that's what they were saying.

And it was just, you can't even imagine the euphoria.

And there was no longer in New York or in San Francisco, there had been a union club and a Pacific Union, a Union League club, all of these splinter groups, whether you like, it was kind of like Trump today.

You hate Trump or you like Trump or you don't.

Well, you either hated Lincoln as a butcher or you wanted McClellan, but all that disappeared.

It just disappeared when Sherman took Atlanta.

And then when he, you know, he took off.

And then everybody said, oh, my God, he's got 65,000 people and they're going to destroy him because the Southern papers were saying this is like the this is Napoleon's army and we're the Cossacks.

And they didn't hear from Sherman.

And they asked Lincoln.

They asked Grant, where is he?

You know, he didn't communicate.

There was no way to communicate.

They'd cut the telegraph lines, and Lincoln said something to the effect: well, he's like, he went down one hole and he's underground.

I have no idea what hole he's going to pop up in.

Well, he popped up in Savannah, Georgia, right in December, and he cut, he did a 50-mile swath, and he deliberately burned plantations, and he humiliated the Southerners.

It was a pretty brutal swath.

He didn't kill very many people, but the humiliation and the damage he did to property so enraged the South.

And that was the point of it.

That today, if you mention to a Southerner U.S.

Grant or Billy Sherman, they don't say U.S.

Grant killed thousands of our soldiers.

He killed thousands of them.

He was a butcher.

They say, I hate Sherman a lot more because he came in and he burned plantations and he went through the Carolinas in Georgia.

So getting back to

the war,

it was sort of inevitable.

I don't know how you would have stopped it uh given the power of that the tragedy is that

when people say

the united states was slave owning and we're talking about reparations

you could say that the majority culture was racist as they are in every every society they are but the actual numbers of people who own slaves and the actual numbers of people who oppose slavery was pretty clear that people in general did not oppose the majority of Americans did not have slaves.

They opposed slavery.

When you look at diaries of Sherman's army when they're in Georgia, you know what's so weird?

They had never seen a black person before.

They had never seen a black person from Michigan, Minnesota.

They didn't know what to expect.

And they got very angry because they enlisted 20,000.

freed slaves as engineers, miners, people to Corduroy Roads.

I don't mean engineering and planning them, but labor.

And they got along with them and they said, my God, we've never met black people before.

And they were favorably impressed.

And then you look at the majority of the South, 97%.

I know this is very controversial.

I've got to be very careful, but they did not own a slave.

And they felt that they were fighting for their virgin territory.

the soil of the South, the honor of their ancestors.

They did not like to be told what to do by Yankees.

But, you know, they were ruled by people like Wade Hampton, these huge

fortunes.

Cobb, General of Georgia, and

excuse me, governor of Georgia.

And

I don't know what

you could do to stop it.

So to

review what were the causes of the Civil War, slavery, slavery, slavery.

Okay, I said it.

And then it was the right of a state to do or not to do what it wants in violation of federal law.

Two,

federal property

within southern territories.

Number three, what do you do

when the country is expanding at an exponential rate and you're bringing in areas that are larger than existing states?

you know what do you do with a missouri or what do you do with utah or what do you do with arizona What do you do with all these places that are going to be envisioned someday as states?

Are they going to increase the power of the North?

Are they going to increase the power of the South?

And there's only so much that Henry Clay can do.

And then you have a Republican Party that finally says, you know, we either have principles or we don't.

And so we can't compromise anymore.

So the principles of the Republican Party are

not popular sovereignty.

Let everybody state, every state divide.

It's Abraham Lincoln.

A house divided cannot stand.

And so get it over with now.

That was the idea.

And if you're suggesting that the South was trying, the moral, where's the morality lie?

The South was trying to say to the North, leave us alone and we'll solve the problem in our own way and don't tell us what to do.

And the North was saying, you're not an individual nation.

You're part of the United States.

What you do is in our name.

and we have property in your state, and we have people in your state that support us and don't tell us what to do.

And we put up with it for 84 years, and we're not going to put up with it anymore because it's a violation of human decency.

And how do you reconcile those two views?

I don't think you can.

No, I don't think they can.

We see it today, and it's pretty scary when everybody, I get a lot of letters from people that say, why don't people just let us go?

Why don't we just, you know, why doesn't people get to go to to Tennessee and they just, or Florida, just ignore the United States?

They don't, we never go to Minneapolis.

We have no desire to go to Seattle.

We don't like people from Berkeley.

Yeah,

but it's not that simple because

they own property in your state and you own property in their state.

And you have a brother who's a doctor in Florida and they have a cousin who's

you know, a lawyer in New York.

So

it's really complicated.

It doesn't seem complicated, but when you start to actually divide the country, it is.

And I mean, I have three,

I guess you could say I have two brothers and two first cousins I grew up with.

And I would say if there was going to be a division, all four of them would be on the opposite side that I would.

Yeah.

If you divide it by hard left versus conservative.

Yeah.

And, you know, I don't know.

I don't know what the issue today that would divide us, like slavery.

I don't know, Roe versus Wade, affirmative action.

I don't know what it would be, but I hope that there wouldn't be an issue like that that would divide us.

Historically, was there ever any conflict over slavery

in the way that the United States fought a war, such a huge war over it?

Do we have any other wars fought over to stop slavery?

The Spanish Empire in the New World by the 1890s in places like Brazil, once the United States had solved this problem in the sense that they were willing to lose 700,000 people, people forget that when they say, oh, you know, your ancestors had slaves.

What do you so I was listening to the Reparations Committee, you know, in California.

Oh, you're,

what do you tell a guy whose great-great-great-grandfather was fighting for the North, who had never seen an African-American in

a very primitive state of communications in the sense that the United States at that point did not have

sophisticated telegraph or telephones or television or social media.

So if you were living up in Lansing, Michigan, you had no idea and you would never have an idea what life was like in Alabama.

But

that guy was willing to go all the way down to Alabama and get into the business of Alabama and die to say to people in Alabama, Your state has been hijacked by slave owners and they are contrary to the Declaration of Independence.

And we're all one people, and I'm here to kill those people.

And, you know, a guy who never had slaves in his entire life in Alabama said, no, you're not.

This is my territory.

And I don't really like a slave owner necessarily, but you don't come down and tell me you're going to kill him.

And so that was the problem.

And so it's very complex.

And

when you add, as I said, Western expansion and the Dred Scott and

the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, the funny thing is, the nullification,

just finish on this and I'll stop.

There had been a nullification crisis, as you know, in 1832 with the state of South Carolina.

They said to Andy Jackson, we're not going to obey this terror.

And he threatened as a southerner to go in there with troops.

And then on the eve of the Civil War, they were starting to nullify federal laws in their jurisdiction.

But the problem was that once the Norse said that the principle of nullification is insurrectionary and we're not going to stand it,

well, the Supreme Court had the rule of law.

That had been established by John Marshall with a ruling.

So when they ruled,

when

Taney ruled that there was a Dred Scott Fugitive Slave Act, And if you were in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and there was a guy who was African-American who had run away at 12 years old.

And now, you know,

he was 20.

And suddenly the master said, hey, I found out that that kid that ran away at eight is now owning a print shop in Cambridge.

And I want him back.

They're not going to give him back.

He's a citizen of Massachusetts.

But according to the law, They had the legal right to do that.

And to oppose that, you had to what?

Nullify the law.

But if you nullified the law,

you were a hypocrite because you said that South Carolina couldn't nullify the law.

You see what I mean?

Yes, I do.

That was a mess.

The whole thing was a mess.

And we were very lucky that there was a guy who was an authentic genius like Abraham Lincoln.

And he had a sense of perspective and humor and tragedy about him.

Whatever people think about

Abraham Lincoln, he's a great man.

And he did did not go into the White House to make money.

And he was not, I mean, he gave out, and he did certain things that were regrettable.

He suspended habeas corpus in many states and jurisdictions and things like that.

But the point was he understood that, and Frederick Douglass got angry at him because he didn't have the Emancipation Proclamation only

applied to the border states and everything.

But he pushed the envelope as far as he could with public opinion, and he did it increasingly, incremanely.

And he had a vision that was not going to be punitive.

I know now that Reconstruction is very popular among the left, and they think, you know,

they should have been even more punitive.

But Lincoln would have, I think, demured a little bit.

He was trying to bring the country back together.

Yeah, he was.

He was a great man.

He really was.

And he was a very astute

strategist.

He understood when people, you know, said

after the Battle of Shiloh, Grant has been drinking.

And, you know, and then Halleck

delayed and let the Southerners escape after Shiloh.

Grant got to, I mean, Lincoln got to the point, well, whatever he's drinking, give to the other generals.

Or when McClellan wouldn't move, he said, if you don't want to use the Army of the Potomac, can I borrow it for a while?

So

he had a really great sense about him about how to deal with all these people.

I don't know how the North won, to tell you the truth, because the Confederacy, in terms of territory, was about like the English Channel all the way to Germany or more.

And how you take that huge geographical mass with very primitive technology, and there were not a lot of railroads in the South at that time.

And you equip an army of 300,000 people, 400,000 people, and you go into the South and occupy it.

They don't have to do that.

And I'll just finish by before we, on the causes and the preliminaries to the war, remember the big existential point.

The South does not have to go into the North other than to hurt them so they don't go into the South.

I mean, Robert E.

Lee went into Pennsylvania.

He didn't have to do that.

He did it so that they would get out of the South.

But my point is this, the South just had to exist.

The North didn't.

The North had to be aggressive, attack, and destroy the Confederacy.

That was their war aim.

The Southern's war aim was not to go in and destroy the Union.

It was to make war so miserable and costly for the invaders, they would say, you know what?

Let those SOBs go.

They're just a pain in the butt.

We don't want them.

That was a very much easier strategy.

given the size of the South.

I don't know how they did it, to tell you the truth.

I look back at the Civil War and I I think, my God,

given the primitive state of the U.S.

military in 1860 and the need to create a huge army and then to equip it and to find the generals and then to go down into the South and to defeat probably the toughest people in the world, the Scotch-Irish military tradition of the South.

How could you do that?

It would be impossible.

And people said it was impossible.

And yet, by 1865, when they had the final military march in Washington, D.C., the German military attaché watched Grant's army and he watched Sherman's army go by and he turned and said, this is the most lethal army in the world.

My God, I hope they never have anything like it in Europe.

And they did that in five years.

It was amazing.

Yeah, that is amazing.

When we'll save the nature of the war for next week,

let's take a break now and then come back and talk a little bit about agriculture.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

We're back.

Victor, we usually end this weekend edition with some discussion of agriculture and your discussions are always very enlightening.

I think you wanted to talk on the dangers of repetition in agriculture this

weekend.

Yeah, I mean, there's all these elements.

We've talked about self-reliance, I think, but one of the great challenges

in agriculture is if you look at an orchard or a vineyard or a grain field, it's replication, isn't it?

It's one grain stalk and then millions of them.

It's one almond tree and then 120 of them per acre.

So whatever you're doing with one, if you find the successful protocol, it's repeated.

and has to be because they're identical.

I mean,

there are trees that are individual like people, but not not so much.

But on the other side, if you do something wrong and you're not aware of it, what are you doing?

You're doing it again and again and again.

I can give you an example.

I planted a young Santa Rosa orchard once.

That's a plum variety, and it was on sandy soil.

And I went in to get fertilizer.

And I talked to Salma Ag guys.

They were really smart.

And I thought I could cut corners.

So I didn't use ammonium nitrate and I didn't use calcium nitrate because ammonium sulfate was cheaper.

And I said, well, I'll just put a half a pound a foot or two away from the tree.

I said, yeah, that'll work.

Don't worry.

But what I didn't tell them, it was on very sandy soil with very low nutrients in it.

In other words, and very permeable.

So I went down, I put,

I very carefully spread about a half a pound of ammonium sulfate, excuse me, yeah, ammonium sulfate in a circle around each young tree, about $10 and probably $10 of labor and planting it and mapping out the orchard.

And I didn't do what I should have is put it on and waited, what, four days or three days?

I was just, I got stuff to do.

I think I did 400 trees.

And then the next day I noticed, whoa, wow.

I turned on the, you know, I irrigated them.

I thought, wow, those

got a little fertilizer burn.

The next next day, hmm,

next got a little fertilizer burn more.

And then day three, they were all dead because the ammonium sulfate had been, it wasn't designed for that type of soil.

And it was, sulfur was hot, and it burned it and destroyed the entire orchard without exception.

Oh, my gosh.

Without exception.

Without exception.

And I can tell you another example.

You put gibrellic acid, it's a chemical to

a bunch a grape bunch and so in other words if you have grapes and the bunches are in a year that the they actually pollinate self-pollinate and they get very heavy and thick and you think that the berries will be too small to make a good raisin or a fresh grape and more importantly the bunch will be so thick that if a

you know if you get a worm or a fruit fly that will break one of the top berries the juice drips down and you get what we call botrytis, a rotten,

you know, fungal moldy disease inside.

So you want to thin it out to let air in.

And one of the ways you do it, right at bloom, right at bloom, you put jabrellic acid and that kills a few of the berries that don't form.

And then the bunch looks sort of, you know, it's, there's a lot of aeration in the bunch.

It's loose.

And the berries get as big as your finger and it's nice.

But you got to be very careful.

There's so many

determinants.

And this is not, I mean, we're not talking about corporate agriculture where you got guys in PhDs that know exactly what they're doing and their protocol is standardized by people with a lot of money.

You're just talking about a guy with a 20-year-old FMC spray rig that's not calibrated because it's so ancient.

And then you've got to go out there and you got to get the right temperature at the right day.

And you have to spray, calibrate it at the right speed of the tractor and the right pressure of the nozzles.

And I can tell you that's harder than reading Aeschylus in Greek.

It is, believe me.

It's like reading linear B.

And so I had a big tank of 500 gallons.

I had the right mixture of gibrellic acid.

I put it in fifth gear.

I had my 28 pounds, whatever it was, of the pressure.

I watched the temperature very carefully.

I looked at the day, and then I realized I had just enough time to go cover 20 acres.

Usually, you know, you can do five acres a day and fifth year plowing or so four hours.

I wanted to get a little, so I did it and then it got a little hot and then I kind of cheated.

I said, well, I did my four hours, but I got stuff to do.

I'll try to do another four hours.

But I was going and then

My neighbor came up and he goes, what the hell are you doing, Mr.

Hansen?

I said, well, he goes, it's 104 out there

and you're putting jabrella it's it's too early

you're going to burn it up i said no i'm not

three days later each vine like dominoes that there were just a stem left you know what i mean they looked like the stems but there were no little tiny uh flower berries there anymore so when it

you know, when it, what do you do for the next, what do you do for all of June, July, and most of August when all your neighbors got a great,

got a great crop and you've got a great crop everywhere except where you put the gibrellic acid on, and there's five or eight acres out there, and all you are growing is stems.

Or I remember there was a ditch timber.

Harold came up there.

One thing I like about farmers, they don't traffic in euphemism.

or hurt feelings.

They're not therapeutic.

So he was coming out.

He came by to check the ditch.

Hey, Victor,

well, you did a number on your own vines, didn't you?

How many hours does it take to put that crazy acid on?

Oh, I don't know, maybe seven or eight.

Well, hell, you could have stayed inside and did nothing, and you would have a beautiful crop.

So, you got rewarded for all that hot work out there by burning your crop up.

How much do you think that cost you?

I said, I don't know.

Well, I can tell you, you had two tons an acre, $1,200,

$2,500,000 $2,500 that acre?

You did what?

Five?

Well, I'd say you lost $10,020,000 for doing something so stupid.

I gotta go.

Take care.

Okay, Harold.

Thanks for making me rub it in.

You know what I mean?

And the same thing is with sulfur, too.

When you're sulfuring and you don't do it right.

And the way to do it is to do a little bit and to step back.

And then, but you can't because your days are just jam-packed.

So you've got to be a scientist.

You've got to be a mechanic, you've got to be a botanist, you've got to be a biologist, you've got to do all of that, at least if you're not doing it like today where it's all corporate and you've got years of research and you've got unlimited budgets and you've got the best equipment.

But in those days when you were farming and it was up like your bootstraps and your rig, you know, you were, you've got

ad hoc repairs on your old spray rig and your tractor heated up and you didn't have protective, you know.

You know, I remember one time I was putting the same thing when I'm putting

pre-emergent

herbicide on in the winter on the berm of vines.

And I didn't realize that there was a little leak that was spraying

a type of pre-emergence that had

agent orange.

I suppose it had an element in it.

very bright orange.

And I had been poisoned one the year before, but I thought that I was really smart now I knew what to do and all of a sudden

each time I went down the row the little spray rig the real uh the leak was sort of like a squirt gun you know and it was spraying the back of my neck and all the way down my back and so I'd go and at the end of

you know and my dad came up to me and

He helped out.

He was a college administrator, but he knew more about farming than a lot of people.

He'd farmed and he came up and goes,

What did you do to your back?

Are you bleeding?

When did you get orange blood?

And I said, What do you mean?

He said, Look at you.

Look at you.

And I pulled off my shirt.

It was very cold in the winter, and my whole shirt was completely bright orange.

And then I got kind of paranoid, and I tried to scrub my neck, and it was in my skin.

And but the point is, each time you did something, it got worse and worse and worse.

So, and then you're, it's a solitary fashion, you're not with a lot of people.

So, when you

say to yourself, okay, I'm going to make a decision to pick this,

I'm going to pick this, I don't know, Shinseki pear orchard on this day.

And if I do it and I get the labor, it'll get the first crop will get 50, the first picking will get 55%.

But who do you talk to?

I don't know.

You just, you're, it's kind of like Smeagel Gollum, you know, in Lord of the Rings.

Half of you is talking to the other half of your brain.

Smeagel says, No, no, no, no, no, no, Victor.

If you take another day or two, so you get a bigger picture.

No, no, no, don't do that.

You'll rot.

You'll rot.

If you wait one more day, you're going to lose stuff.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

And I've done both.

And that is in your head all the time.

And then, luckily, if you have a brother or cousin, you kind of work it out.

But a lot of times you're on yourself.

Or, you know, and

it's, uh, it's really, I

growing up and doing that most of my life, I gave, I got an enormous respect for people who do it.

I've never met people

who are more

versatile and brighter than farmers.

They're just a special category, especially the guys that are self-employed.

I say that as somebody who did it and didn't, in a financial, I came into farming on a really bad time, but my point is I continued while I was teaching and I was part of a family, and I did not excel in it.

I thought I did pretty well as a classical scholar, but everybody says, wow, you can read Greek or Latin.

Or I know when I was in graduate school, people in the history department, you guys write in Latin and Greek?

And I said, yeah,

we can translate Latin and Greek and write it like English.

That's what we thought we could do.

But that was easier than doing farming.

It was much easier.

And the stakes were much lower because you were going to get a fellowship or guaranteed money.

There was no guarantee.

And I went into the federal, I'll just finish this one out.

I went to the federal land bank

and we had lost a lot of money.

And the banker there was a really sharp old guy.

He wasn't necessarily a likable guy, but his whole point, his whole existence at the Federal Land Bank was to be a prick so that you wouldn't destroy yourself.

You know what I mean by that?

Yes.

So you wouldn't go in and say, well, I lost 70,000, but I got a new plan, how to make another 70 to pay it back.

And he wouldn't listen to it he he just was bottom line guy and so I went in there and he said

okay

I heard it and let me tell you something here's about as many hours as I think that you worked this year and you just paid yourself

you borrow he said you borrowed from me twelve dollars an hour for every hour you work

I said what no no no I worked I was working really hard doesn't matter you could we would have been better to stay inside and do nothing.

You understand farming, Victor?

You're young.

You went out and worked like a dog.

You worked 14 hours a day, but the end of the day, you lost money.

It's just like if you had a pizza parlor and you worked all day serving pizzas, but your operation was losing money every day.

And so every day you were having

you were saying to the bank, can I please work all day in the pizza parlor so I can pay you $12 an hour?

Yeah.

So he said, you worked all day,

every day.

You got pesticide.

You got dirty.

You were doing, and all you were doing was borrowing the money and paying me.

And now you owe me the money and I want it.

I said, you know, it's kind of like Marx, but there's a labor theory of value.

It was noble.

Somebody in my family said that.

He said, it doesn't matter what the economists say.

We were noble.

We were.

And I thought of that line from Virgil when I think Aeneas said, there will come a day when it'll delight us to remember this.

And I always say, well, there'll come a day when it will make us happy to remember what we went through, but that day hasn't come yet.

Oh, no.

Oh, well, Victor, thank you for all of the wisdom today.

And your tales of agriculture are usually the best.

So I appreciate that.

And I'm sure that your listeners do too.

I hope so.

Yeah.

I mean, I hope they continue to farm because we we won't eat unless there's people who farm.

No, that's for sure.

So, thank you very much, and thanks, everybody, for listening.

Thank you.

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