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Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor is a scholar and commentator on political and military affairs.

His scholarly work was done in classics, and he is above all else, I think, a philologist.

So, welcome to our show.

if you're new you can find Victor also at Victorhanson.com it's called the blade of Perseus

and all of Victor's writings go there and his writings that go nowhere else are the VDH ultra articles and you need a subscription for that at five dollars a month or fifty dollars a year so come join us you can join us for free and get on our mailing list for his newsletter which is you know four times a week or so and it's the recent articles and things that are on the news site so come join us well victor hey wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait samma you said did i say a news site i didn't mean to no no that's fine you said four times or so i take pride in

that in the

paywall Every day there's a column, right?

Yes.

American Greatness and the Tribune Syndicated column.

But then rather than doing four new people, I try to do three, but I do 800 words usually.

So we're trying to give them anywhere from 2,000 to 3,000 words of new content every day.

And I mean, every week.

Every week, yeah.

So I was thinking that in the two years that we have done it,

at 52 weeks times 3,000,

we've given our altar readers 300,000 words of new content or three books worth.

I know that's kind of a frightening thought because that's too much lageria, but that was part of the bargain we made with our readers.

And I haven't missed, by the way, I haven't missed one week yet.

So every single week, there's been

anywhere from 2,000 to 3,000 words of new content.

Wonderful.

And so everybody come join us.

And then we do these podcasts too.

So you can find Victor at both places.

Victor, we have a lot on the agenda.

I know you just got back from your trip to Israel, Greece, and Turkey.

And we're going to talk about that.

But if we could address the 4th of July and some of the irreverence for the 4th of July, or as you wrote in your article, what the 4th of July is not, we're going to do that first.

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

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Welcome back.

Victor is the Martin and Neale 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.

So, Victor, we just passed the 4th of July, and you and I haven't had a chance to talk about the 4th of July, but I did notice a lot of things in the presses about a second American revolution and the right to revolution.

But I know that you also wrote your own article on what the 4th of July was not.

You write a conclusion in this article that says, so on this 4th of 4th, let us cherish the 4th of July for what it promised and what it thankfully did not.

And I was wondering if you could comment on that right now.

Well, there have been a lot of people in the recent years in general, in particular this year.

And I should say that I've been abroad for 21 days, so I literally just got home.

And I'm not up on the actual Fourth of July experience this year, other than reading about it from Greece and

the Mediterranean.

But there's this idea that the American Revolution guaranteed equity or equality of

result on the back end, our fraternity.

And I guess that's by extension this notion that the French Revolution that was

well over 12 years later was completely different in its aims and its agendas and its methodology.

They were the one that said liberté,

egalité,

fraternité, fraternité.

This idea that it was going to be liberty, no problem with that.

That's a Roman idea.

And by the way, there is a difference between liberty and freedom.

Freedom is the ability to do as you please in a natural landscape.

It's natural to persons.

Liberty is more

the protections of the individual within a state or a social context.

German, and that's why

they have different roots.

You know, we always go back to philology,

and liberty comes from libertas, the Roman Republican idea.

And

freedom comes from Freiheit, a German idea.

And, you know, when the Tacitus, when he wrote his Germania or Caesar, when he wrote his Gallic Wars, Romans remarked on the fact that tribal Germans in large landscapes did as they pleased.

American Indians had a type of freedom, but it's a very different thing than freedom within the context of a social organism, congestion, conflicting agendas and opinions.

So we have no problem with liberty, but

our Constitution never said we were going to be egalitarian.

They said they were going to give people, everybody was, the declaration said we were born equal.

All men are created equal, created equal, not die equal.

And the second thing, of course, is fraternity.

There was no idea that we were going to have

some kind of group bank or social union or a huge rotary club or a huge church or there was no

government interest

in doing that.

And so that to do that, and why wasn't there?

Because to make people equal on the back end

are egalitarian, by coercion requires a degree of government that the founders were afraid of.

And they thought, you know what, there's some things that we don't have the power to do.

And if we were to do create a new man, then we'd be in trouble.

So I know they had Noah or

a

Noah Ordus Ordo Seculorum, a new order, Novus Order, Secularum, a new order of the centuries.

And Annuit Coeptus.

These are from Latin.

That's from Virgil's ecologue.

But he smiles on our undertakings.

So we had this idea there was something new, but we did not have a year zero.

1776 was 1776.

It was not year zero, like the Jacobin Revolution in France that said, you know what, 1789 is year zero, or it might have been 1792.

It was a year zero.

We didn't say that everything was obsolete until we came along.

And there was no, you know, that 1789 that the UN kind of patterned out the Declaration

of the Rights of Man.

I guess that had a lot of what?

Rousseauian influence, Voltaire.

That was a very different idea.

And they had words like social distinctions in proportion to their means, disturbing the public order.

We didn't get into any of that, not at all.

So, you know, the idea of the Declaration was these are the grievances we have.

And we declare ourselves equal

as God created us and we're free.

And then we had the Constitution that outlined what our rights were protected.

And any rights that were not

clearly defined or delineated were given to the states or for other.

But they were not.

The idea was that you had rights other than what was given in the Constitution and there was no obligation.

each and two to their own means.

That came later in the United States, maybe with the Progressive Income Tax or stuff like that but yes we were very modest and you know

if you look at the constitution that followed the declaration on the fourth

it was the logical culmination of the cretan constitution as it transmogrified into

the roman constitution as it went through the enlightenment and with monascu that is a legislative body checked by an executive with a check the legislative with an independent court system.

And you had that in Sparta with the Gerusia

and the Ecclesia and the Ephors and the two kings as executives.

Same thing in Rome.

But we didn't, and that led to a natural, given the Electoral College, pretty soon it transmogrified into a pretty clear system

that

each body of government could check the other, and they did through either impeachment or elections or vetoes or overriding vetoes or nullifying treaties,

cutting off funds,

etc.

But more importantly, it led to regular elections, and that's in the Constitution.

It specifies every four years.

And we had a two-party system.

So what we avoided,

we don't have this multi-party parliamentary system that

consensual governments do have.

But think about it.

To get power, it's not that you are going to get 51% or you're going to get 51% of the votes in particular states.

You have to have a majority of votes in the parliament.

And that means that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the popular vote.

You make backroom deals with 10, 20 different parties, and then they quit or they put you over a barrel and say, if you you don't do this, our eight members of our eight party

coalition is going to leave.

So I don't know what Italy's had since 1945 with their new government, but I think they've had over two dozen governments.

And you can see Margaret Thatcher was never, the people of Britain never said that they didn't want Margaret Thatcher.

She came into a room one day and John Major, they had an internal coup and threw her out.

But that was the Conservatives that did that.

That wasn't the British people.

They just said, you're no longer the head of the Conservative Party and therefore we're in power and therefore you're no longer prime minister.

So what I'm getting at is that we were pretty lucky of what the founders wrote on the 4th of July.

It was mostly Jefferson,

and we're very lucky that that led into the Constitution.

And it did not lead, I think it was good that it did not lead to a parliamentary democracy.

or a holistic, we're going to create a new man in the way that the French Revolution tried.

Anytime Anytime you hear that word, year zero, new man, be careful because they're going to kill a lot of people.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, Victor,

in addition to that, since we're talking about our government, they recently found cocaine in the White House.

And I know that Tom Cotton was pressing the Secret Service for information on that because, of course, it's a big security concern.

And the press secretary, Corine Jean-Pierre, has been avoiding any specific discussion of it, not surprisingly.

But this sounds like a new Hunter Biden rabbit hole, but I'm not really dead sure about that.

Well, I mean, conservatives and the media had a good point.

It was kind of half serious, but not completely non-serious, comical.

It is, I think their logic went something like this.

Hunter Biden now moves into the White House de facto.

Cocaine found almost immediately after his new digs.

Pressed the ergo, therefore it's his.

We don't know whether it was his, but the problem with the story is all they have to do is tell the truth.

So we learned at first

that it might have been in an area that was restricted or it was in an area that was restricted to staff and there was pretty careful security.

And so we don't, they didn't quite, they said it was in a cubby hole or something like this.

And then later, when people thought, hmm,

if it's in an area that staff and some staff got by, how could they get by dog-sniffing German shepherds or Secret Service?

Oh, it must have been somebody that they just waved through.

And who would that be?

Well, it would be either the vice president's family or the president, supposedly.

And therefore, they have to come out and say

it was not Joe Biden or Hunter.

But of course, when they asked that, the press secretary said, we can't do this.

It's the Hatch Act.

I've never heard a Democrat say it's the Hatch Act, which just says that a government employee cannot comment on a political question.

I don't think that's a political question.

I mean, whether the President of the United States knows how somebody brought cocaine into his residence.

I mean, I have a house, right?

Yes.

I have people come in.

If somebody comes in and he leaves, I find a bag of Coke on the dining room table.

I don't think it's political to say, what the hell?

How did that happen?

And I would have a pretty good idea, maybe, who brought it in, given I would just examine the people who'd been around.

But so they changed the story, is what I'm stumbling around with jet lag to say.

They changed the story.

Now they say it was in a more public place.

They got the narrative down, and we know what the left does.

The next cycle or iteration will go.

How dare you suggest that?

Hunter Biden is that that's just

beneath us.

We're not, that's what they're going to do.

Well, poor old Hunter is going to be blamed whether he did it or not.

Hey, he's an artist.

He just gave a painting and got out of child support with one of his Da Vinci or makeup Michelangelo masterpieces.

He is an artist, but that's not his art, Victor.

I don't know.

Remember that line in Man on Fire?

Yeah, his art has something to do with drugs, sex, rock and roll, I think.

If you were going to take the line that my favorite actor, Denzel Washington,

was said about Denzel Washington and Man on Fire, you would say something like this.

Hunter Biden is a master F up.

You cannot imagine how he could screw up with drugs and prostitutes and money.

And bringing Coke into the White House was his greatest masterpiece.

Yes, exactly.

Well, again,

we have to confess we don't know who

we don't know.

We're not going to rush to judgment.

Yeah, we're not.

All right.

So let's go ahead and look at your trip then.

You went to Israel, and I wanted to talk to you a little bit about, did you notice anything that

would have forewarned of the Jenin attacks that we received?

Yes, I did.

I did.

We went to Israel.

It was a...

I'm giving a plug, I suppose, for Hillsdale, which I am happy to do.

It was a Hillsdale long long trip, 17 days.

From the time I left my Selma farm door until I got back, I think I was gone 19 days.

But

we went to Istanbul.

We'll talk about Turkey, if you wish, and then to Israel and then to the Greek, some of the Greek Dodecanese islands, and then, of course, Cyprus, and then Santorini and Crete and Athens.

And I read the papers in each country and talked to people.

I talked to a very high official, or not official, but a very,

i don't know how to explain it somebody that is well known in israel as a commentator put it that way uh about things

and um

it was very interesting what did he say

yeah yeah well i got off the ship to the authorized port and walked around haifa for example but then i couldn't come back in And they said that, no, no, you have to wait till a certain time.

And then I said, well, I'll take a taxi.

So I got a taxi cab driver driver thinking he could get into the port.

And he was familiar with that.

And he said he couldn't.

But he said it was absurd because of the passenger.

And I don't want to give away two security deal, if anybody's listening.

But

then he went to the security people and then they said you couldn't get back in.

And then they said, you've got to walk two miles over to this other place.

It was about 100 degrees.

So I walked over to the other place

and then there was nothing there.

So then I kind of panicked because the boat was going to leave.

So then I called the ship or one of the travel facilitators, and they gave me an address over the phone.

And then I went to another

place that was a purported bus stop that would be authorized to go through Haifa port security.

And that wasn't the place either.

Now it's three hours I've been doing this.

So then finally, I saw a person I thought resembled somebody in the crew.

So I asked her, and she directed to me to what she thought was.

And so I walked over there and then there were some few people there.

So then I got back in, but the whole port was locked down.

And then the next day or the day after the Israelis went into Jenin and then

I watched CNN or the BBC and all of it was

Jews are killing children.

Not 17 or 18 year old terrorists are killing Jews.

So just being abroad, I think everybody should realize that.

If you don't have, everybody faults Fox News, okay, I get it.

But if you don't have that type of, I know Sky News is okay, but if you don't have an alternative to the BBC or World CNN or these state medias in Europe, you're not going to get the truth about Israel.

Just not going to do it.

And so, and so that was, and then when, you know, when you go to, I went to Israel last year and I've been there before,

When you hear this Palestinian to the sea, and we're going to push the Jews into the sea, and this is not going to happen.

I'm sorry.

You look at that country.

It's got over about 11 million people.

And I would say that when I first went there in 2004

or three during the suicide bombing, it was a prosperous country, but it is nothing like it is now.

It is nothing like it is now.

It is booming.

I've I've never seen anything like it, the levels of wealth.

I walk around the Israeli cities and I, and I did that last year, even though I had long COVID pretty bad.

But

I said to myself, where are the homeless?

Is this like San Francisco?

Is there smash and grab?

Do I see people run out with shoplifting?

If you go to a pharmacy, is everything behind bars?

And this is supposedly a militarized state.

And the answer is no, no, no.

I think what Joe Biden and Gavin Newsom need to do is to call up a member, a high member of the Israeli government of either party and say, could you come over here?

We're 243 years old, this country, and you guys are,

you know, just since what, 1947?

But you have a lot better ideas than we do about drugs, about shooting people, murder in your streets of your own citizens, of homelessness, of excretement, shooting up.

Could you please advise us what to do?

Because we don't have a blank clue.

Because that city,

all of the cities are clean.

And

there was a lot more security there.

I hadn't seen that much security.

And then when we left, of course, they went into Jenin, which they hadn't been in.

They had withdrawn for years.

And they broke up a bomb-making factory and a terrorist.

plant and they you know they went in on all sides surprise they had elite troops they accomplished the mission and of course then the palestinians relied on the narrative and the narrative is always if anybody gets killed for any reason by an israeli then it's an act of israeli terror

and nobody seems to care when terrorists go out and deliberately shoot israeli citizens and they've shot almost 50 of them this year killed them stabbed them No one says anything until Israel reacts.

And by the way, there's another thing I think everybody should ponder.

Things are getting violent in the Middle East because the Biden administration has done what?

The first thing they came in is they tried to renounce the Iran deal lists.

They tried to say, Donald Trump got out of the Iran deal.

We're going to put Robert Maui.

And by the way, that special envoy has been suspended.

He's in suspended animation right now because our envoy to make a new Iran deal that John Kerry was Logan acting around during the Trump administration, he is now suspended for leaking classified information, supposedly.

And I think that would probably be something along the lines of letting some people look at it who shouldn't be looking at it.

But in any case, they tried to renounce the whole Trump idea of getting out of the Iran deal.

The Iran snubbed them.

And then they restored the

U.S.

money that we route through the UN to Palestinian, many of whom are radicals.

They made it known that they didn't approve of the Netanyahu government.

And what happens?

Anytime you push the United States away from Israel, then in that void, people get the message in Jenin, for example, that, hey, the United States has sold you guys out.

Sorry,

we're going to start doing what we always do.

We're going to start killing Jews.

And you can't do anything about it because the United States supplies you with weapons.

And

they're on our side now.

Look at the Iran deal.

They're begging Iran to get into the Iran deal.

And look at the Saudis.

They've even, you know, they're done with the Abrams Accords, that kind of stuff.

So you're going to see a lot more violence as long as this administration's in power.

And

I don't get the left.

When I was a young person and, oh, I think I was.

14 in 1967, I followed as a young kid the Six-Day War, and it was very funny because it was American Jews on the left, or at least the Democratic Party, that were very pro-Israel.

Republicans were sort of, let's not get involved.

And today, without the Republican conservative movement, there would be no support at all for Israel because the left despises it.

Yeah.

Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and we can talk about Greece and Turkey, which are an odd lot, if you really think about it, to have a cruise and to go to both

countries, which are so

or at least there's always a lot of tension between the two but let's go for a break and we'll be right back

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Welcome back.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show and we're turning now to talk a little bit about Greece and Turkey unless you had anything else to finish off with Jenin.

No, Janine,

nothing, no, it was just

it's a garrison state.

And Israel knows that if it does,

what it does is it has a magical number.

So

Palestinian goes in and about 100,000 Palestinians go through across the wall into Israel.

So think of that for a second.

It's not,

the attitude is not, okay, this was a historical disagreement, but we're in the seventh and eighth and you know what I mean, decade, we're in a new century, so we're going to show you Jews.

We've got the West Bank

and we're going to out-produce you.

So we're going to

survey the entire Arab Middle East and the oil company.

And we're going to quid pro quo with the Kuwaitis and the Saudis and the Libyans.

And we're going to get so much, and the Emirates, we're going to get so much Arab oil money.

And we're going to make a blank, blank bonanza here, a utopia.

We're going to make Dubai right next to Israel.

And we're going to show everybody what we can do.

And they can.

They're very bright people.

That's not the agenda.

The agenda is we're going to kill Jews and we're going to push them into the sea, and that's not going to happen.

And so

they understand that

they don't have the power to do that.

And they have 100,000 people who are going into the awful

Israel, so to speak, sort of like

we can talk about the immigration because the same time this was going on, there were furious riots in France.

And the idea, again, is if I'm from Morocco or Tunisia or Algeria or Somalia or Chad, and I immigrated to France and I didn't obtain parity because I was doing menial jobs.

Yes, that's true.

And the French majority population is prejudicial.

Yes, that's true.

That happens in majority tribal populations, human nature being what it is.

But therefore, I'm going to riot and destroy $1 billion because I hate this place so much that what?

I don't want to go back home.

You know, it's almost like you people colonized my country.

So in 1958, 57, we threw you out, 47, because we despised what you had done to my country in Algeria and Morocco.

Okay.

And then, but we had to come to your country.

So I can understand human nature being what it is if their attitude was, you colonized my country.

And we won't get into whether colonization was a net plus or minus for the colonial powers, because there's a lot of scholarship that suggests they didn't really come off like bandits like everybody thought they did.

But, nevertheless, put that aside.

But their attitude is:

you colonized my country

and

you screwed it up.

So, I want to what go back to France?

And is that their attitude?

So, I can screw your country up as payback.

That could be, I mean, that would be a bad thing, but it's human nature, right?

You could understand that.

But

it's not that.

It's,

I don't like my country in Algeria.

I don't like Chad.

I want to go to Europe because it's wealthier and it has more opportunity and it functions and there's a sewer system that works and there's medical care and there's food that's and I want to go there.

But once I get there, I want to romanticize the country under no circumstances that

I don't want to go back to.

And I want to have now immediate complaints about the exploitation because I did not achieve parity.

Sort of like our illegal immigration.

Yes.

And I always go back to that incident.

I know people are sick of hearing it, but I had a very bright student.

And one day in 187, during that protest, remember a Prop 187, it was going to deny state services for those who were here illegally,

which, by the way, passed overwhelmingly.

And the Supreme Court, I mean, the California

9th District was all prepared to throw it out before it even passed.

And they they threw it out in, I think, three days.

So the people spoke, and then they didn't speak.

They were robbed of that voice.

But nevertheless,

the student was burning, was in a protest of 187, burning the American flag, and they had a big Mexican flag.

And I said, you know, I tutor you.

Why in the hell are you waving the flag under no circumstances you want to go back to that country?

And you're burning the flag of the country that you're angry that you might not be able to stay in.

And he just said, it's irrational.

I remember.

He said, doesn't make sense.

I agree.

Well, that's the same thing.

If you don't like France and you hate the colonialists and you feel you're victims of oppression, well, then go back to the utopia in North Africa.

It's easy to do.

It's not that far.

But same thing with all of these European countries.

I don't understand what they're doing.

There's this huge influx of people from the south to the north, and and there's got to be a rationale for it.

Is it because the European socialist EU experiments failed and they're like H.G.

Wells Eloy, their fertility rates in some countries are 1.3.

They're a bunch of old decrepit white people that

their ancestors created this great system.

Heroic people at Verdun, heroic people in the RA.

I don't know.

But it's very bizarre that A, the Europeans would welcome illegal aliens in and the millions, unlike the people they despise in Hungary or Poland or the Czech Republic, that don't have these problems because they're so-called not as sophisticated as Western and Northern Europeans.

But nonetheless, they bring them in and then these people want parity.

That's what the West tells them.

And the left says, you know, here's the

rights of man.

And you have right to fraternity.

And

Oh, you just came and you're dirt poor and you don't know French and you have no skills, but our constitution promised you fraternity.

And so, yeah, it's your fault, France.

It's your fault, French people, that you didn't give these people parity immediately, so they're going to riot.

And I know I'm simplifying it, and there's exploitation and racism.

I get that.

But there was no reason to go to France if you don't like France.

You know, unless, unless, unless, and again, I'm getting back to that, unless your agenda is to take over France.

If these people who are rioting are saying, you know what, they came and took over Algeria and we took them out, kicked them out, and we hate them so much, now we're bringing the war home to them.

And this is offensive, and we're going to multiply.

And Islam is going to be the dominant religion, and we're going to push them out of the country.

It's going to be a reconquista in reverse.

Okay, I don't approve it.

I think that would be horrendous.

But if that's their logic, I can understand human nature being pretty pathetic.

But I don't think that's their logic.

I think it's, I got to get out of Algeria because everything is a mess.

And I want to go to France because everything's good.

But then I want to live in France like an Algerian.

And

implicit in that rationale is

there's got to be a lot of us in our community from Algeria or Morocco in France.

So we have our own community.

But

secretly, we don't want to be the majority if we don't assimilate and integrate and become Frenchmen.

Because if we do, then we're going to turn it into what we left, right?

So we want 51% of the population to be French with antithetical civilizational ideas to the ones that we brought from Algeria.

Now, some of you say that is solely a liberal victory.

That's race.

It has nothing to do with race.

It has everything to do with culture.

And like I said,

you know, there's another

anecdote I could simplify.

I had another friend that I went to first grade with, and about 20 years ago, his son was playing on a team opposite my son.

And we were in about five Hispanic communities.

One of them

was very, very poor.

And it was 100%

Hispanic, but mostly from illegal aliens.

It had a high crime rate.

And I said, hey, Raul, how are you doing?

He said, oh, I'm just here.

My son used to go to this high school.

I said, well, what did you do?

He said, well, he moved to another town.

And I said, why?

And he said, well, this is more diverse, meaning it's not all Hispanic from Mexico, unassimilated.

And I said, well, why would you do that?

And he said, well, why do you think I left Mexico, Victor, when I was a kid?

I don't want to recreate it here.

And if this school that my son is at becomes like that school,

then I'm going to move to another school and another school and another school because I left Mexico because I did not want to live in Mexico.

I like Mexican food.

I like Mexican music.

I like Mexican fashion.

I like some attributes of Mexican society.

But whatever, the totality of Mexican culture is Mexico.

And that didn't work for me.

This country works for me.

I thought that was pretty honest for him to tell me that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, speaking of

different places,

Greece and Turkey on your visit are very different and antithetical places.

And I guess Cyprus is the example of that.

But what reflections did you have on those two countries?

I had a sense of melancholy because I love Greece.

I lived there almost three years as an undergraduate, a graduate, and then I went back and forth.

Probably been there 20 times or more.

Got to be careful about that.

Joe Biden said he'd been, what, to Afghanistan or something, 71 times.

So I don't know how many, but I think it's been about 20.

And

Greece has 50,000 square miles.

So once you get out of Athens, where about 40% of the population live, and when you count Thessaloniki, which is a beautiful city, you've got about 60%

of that 50,000 square miles, and you've only got about 11 million people.

So it's uninhabited.

I don't mean that literally, but the people per square mile, especially when you get up to Thrace and areas, we've got to remember how Greece was formed after the revolution.

in the 1820s, 30s, 40s, as it started to be recognized as a successful nation.

It wasn't Greece of today.

It didn't get Crete until the 20th century from the fall of the Ottomans.

It didn't get a lot of northern Greece until the Greek and the Balkan Wars, 1910, 12, 13.

It didn't get the Dodekin these islands, really, until the fall of the Mussolini government in World War II.

So

these were all naturally Greek, but they don't have the population in a very dangerous world to be secure in what is theirs.

It's kind of like Israel, although Israel is nuclear.

So when you go to Turkey and it's a NATO country, and you look at this city of Istanbul, it's as westernized, it's 15 million people.

Istanbul is the largest city in Europe.

It's four times larger than Athens.

I mean, it's on all the shores of the Dardanelles, the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmora, the Golden Horn.

And it's Muslim now.

I don't mean it wasn't before, but under the adaturk legacy the secular legacy hagga safiya was a was a un historical site it's a mosque now

and there he's islamicizing in his third decade the whole country and so just six months ago he threatened athens by saying one morning you're going to wake up and you don't know what's going to sort of like

It was kind of a riff on Chuck Shermer to the Supreme Court.

Remember that?

Gorshitz, Kavanaugh, you sowed the wind, you're going to reap the whirlwind,

what's going to hit you.

Well, that's what's basically he said that only he described a new

Turkish missile that he said would come into Athens.

And he said that the islands in the Dodecanese, and then

especially the triad of Lesbos, Chios, and Samos that are right near the Turkish coast will be Turkish, and he has overflight.

So when you see this beautiful country of Greece, and I'm not criticizing Turkey, the coast of Turkey, which was ancient Greek Ionia, is

very prosperous, unlike a lot of the interior, but it's suffering a lot.

It has a very high inflation rate.

And I felt kind of bad because

when I went places, the Turkish tourist industry is really hurting.

I don't know if it's a mixture of COVID.

I don't know if it's a reaction to Erdogan.

I don't know if it's the economy.

I don't know if it's the Ukraine war that's not too far away and it's allegiance de facto with Russia or it's whatever it is, the hotel, I stayed at a very beautiful hotel

and it was empty.

And they were very nice, though.

I mean, I've always liked Turkish people.

But when you go to Athens, it's just, gosh, it's just booming.

If you go to, I always swore ever since I went there in 1973, 50 years ago was the first time I ever went to Greece.

I just turned 20, 19, and I turned 20 there, but I always swore I would never go to Santorini dash Thera in July, and I did this time.

And it was,

it was like Disneyland on the 4th of July in the old days.

You couldn't even move.

It was so crowded.

But my point is, Greece, supposedly the weak man of Europe, and it's got all these economic problems and it's got German bankers that hasn't paid.

It was booming, booming, booming.

And I went to a lot of my old haunts, and it just went up to the top of the

Grand Batania Hotel and had dinner.

And look at the Parthenon.

It was something else.

And I love Greece.

I love the Greek people.

It's just amazing culture.

It really is.

I had kind of a, again, a sense of Eeyore melancholy because I had just finished The End of Everything and I had written this chapter on the fall of Constantinople.

And I had just written and read in Byzantine Greek

and some Italian

descriptions of what had happened the seven years following Black Tuesday, May 29, 1453, when the Morea, that's the medieval term of Franks for the Peloponnese, but

the

the Greek principate that was kind of divorced.

It was part of the Byzantine Empire, but it was hard to connect physically, given Turkish galleys and the Mediterranean and the Aegean.

But Mistros was a beautiful Byzantine city, and they tried to defend the hexamilion, the six-mile fence, pretty much where the Corinth Canal is today.

And they were overrun by 100,000 Ottomans, and a lot of people were wiped out.

And then the Ottomans took over all of Greece and held it all the way until 1821.

And so when you read that and you're writing about it, and you're there in Greece, and everything looks beautiful, and the country is booming, and they're such a confident people.

Another thing that struck me, I got this irrational anger at Gavin Newsom.

No, I did.

I did.

It's not irrational.

Trust me, it's rational.

But I hope if any of you listeners are living in California, when you go to Greece, we have almost

where I live on this farm has almost the same latitude as Fremont, California.

And it's we're in a Mediterranean climate.

It looks the San Joaquin Valley and the foothills look like Greece.

And Greece is a very, it doesn't have the advantages that we have.

It's not a big country.

It doesn't have oil and gas.

It doesn't have coal like we do.

It doesn't have any agriculture flat.

I mean, there's nothing like the San Joaquin Valley.

Maybe a little bit in Thessaly, a little bit in

Messenia, maybe a little bit in Macedonia, but in Thebes, the ocean, but it doesn't have our natural resources.

And when you look at the Greek roads, the national highway, I know that somebody's going to say, well, Victor the Swiss bore those tunnels, or the Germans did it, or they have concessions, or they get the toll for X number of years,

or they didn't do it for free, or it was EU money that came in.

I don't care.

When you navigate around Greece, the roads are much nicer than Californians.

And that was not true when I went in 1973.

I remember leaving California in 1973 and driving down the 99 freeway and many parts were already six lanes and there was no traffic.

I can remember the newly opened I-5.

I would cruise around there at 70 miles an hour.

It's not, you know, I came home.

Today, it's not getting behind, you know, a line of semi-trucks in the left lane.

And then you look at Greece in the 19th century took me six to seven hours to drive to Sparta in the old days from Athens.

It took three hours to get out of the city.

It still has a beltway now.

You can get from Athens to Corinth in less than an hour.

You can get to Anopolion in an hour and 45 minutes or less.

with a new road.

You can go all the way down to Mantinea and the big junction there in two hours.

It's just striking.

So what did we do in California?

What did they do right?

They invested in roads and we invested in Medi-Cal.

Basically, if you look at the budget, we went from 30 to 35% infrastructure, dams, aqueducts, highways, six or seven percent Medi-Cal

to almost half the budget.

And

it's just a tragedy.

And then we've got Stonehenge right seven miles from the farm.

And on the way home, you know, we can't come down.

It's been four years now.

I can't drive down Mountain View Avenue because Stonehenge is there.

And Stonehenge doesn't move.

It just sits there like Stonehenge, this big overpass that's being slowly, you know, and then they have to wash the graffiti off.

It's already old before it's new.

And

it doesn't work.

They haven't laid one foot of functional track.

And they're up to $15 billion.

It's going to be a debacle.

If they had just said, you know what, let's hold off Stonehenge for 20 years until we're sophisticated enough how to build it, or we'll have to go over and look at what Germans and Italians and French do, and we'll copy them because we don't have that type of expertise anymore in high-speed rail.

But in the meantime, we're still really good with highway builders.

So we're going to get all those guys that are 80 or 90 in the rest homes, and we're going to come back and say, can you come back here and tell us how to do it?

You're like mice and ends, and we're in the dark age, and we need to know how to put a lion gate or a tholos tomb in.

And we've forgotten how to do it.

So could you do it?

Just show us how.

And here's the money.

We want six lanes 101, six lanes I-5, six lanes 985, and then we'd be fine.

Yeah, yeah, I don't see that coming.

Well, Victor, let's take our last break and then come back and talk a little bit about policy going on in America.

I think there's some new

story on reparations for African Americans.

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

We're back.

You can find Victor on social media as well as his website.

His handle at Twitter is VD Han at VD Hansen.

And you can find him on Hansen's Morning Cup on Facebook.

So come join us.

There's also the Victor Davis Hansen Fan Club, which is not affiliated with us, but they do a great job of posting things that Victor does and finding them from the archives as well.

So it's a really great fan club to join.

Victor, they've recently come out with something new on this reparations for African Americans.

I think it is that black men should not have to pay for child support for some reason.

It seems to me that would start to even erode more, if it's possible, the family structure and the black community.

You think?

Well, first of all, I don't think a lot of people comply with child support, but to the degree they do, the reparations, our California Reparations Commission, has decided that that puts a hindrance on black people, black men, because they're supposedly having children and they're not around to give their time, and therefore

they get fined because they didn't meet their obligations and therefore they can't get competitive work because they're either under court order or they're giving too much of their income.

And of course, what's missing in this equation is one honest man saying, wait a minute, black people are as bright or brighter than anybody else.

We don't need special consideration.

Instead of worrying about the government excusing us from our legal responsibilities, let's not ever incur any legal encumbrance.

Let's make sure that the black family's divorce rate is comparable to any other group.

And to the degree it's not, let's work at it.

You know, it's so tragic because, as I keep saying, I went to the Hoover Institution.

I'm not just trying to patronize people, but I can tell you that there were some very brilliant people there.

But the two most brilliant people I met,

hands down,

were Tom Soule and Shelby Steele.

And I would have lunch with Tom on a regular basis.

And he just laid it all out.

We didn't even talk about race very much, but there was always a sense of tragedy because he was trying to explain how brilliant the black community had been under real oppression.

And they were sort of like the Greeks under Ottoman rule.

They persevered, they endured.

And the last thing they needed was Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program to come in and destroy that responsible ethos and say, we're going to take care of it.

And remember what LBJ said, everybody, remember what he said, because we have his tapes.

He said on tape to a Democratic, I think it was a senator,

when they asked him about the great society, he said, we're going to have the N-word for the next 200 years voting Democratic.

So he was not the great liberator or enlightenment.

He was a cynical SOB who was an out-and-out abject racist.

But my point is,

When you read what Tom wrote on economics or you read what

Shelby wrote way back about teaching at San Jose State and grading papers and

it was it's very tragic because all people had to do was just there it was there it was all outlined this is what's happened the government did it we're a resilient group of people we have it within ourselves to excel and we can do it and then what was the reaction for all the people who were beneficiaries of the affirmative action and all these great society bureaucratic positions?

Oh, you're a sellout, you're an Uncle Tom.

Well, what the subtext of that was,

yeah, we can do it, but why should I do it when they're giving it to me?

And you are gonna, you're ruining that pipeline of government funding.

You're poking holes in it, so we're gonna hate you.

And so,

not only did they have the

wage of being a Cassandra of speaking the truth in the desert, so to mix metaphors with the New Testament, voice crying out in the wilderness, but

people vilify them for that.

It's just, it didn't make sense.

And who, and when I say people, I mean people other than blacks, like white liberals.

White liberals cannot stand brilliant conservatives because they have this sense of patronizing.

You can feel it.

It oozes out of them like oil.

It's like, wait a minute,

I am so liberal and I vote for all these programs with my tax dollars to give to you people.

And

you don't appreciate that.

After all, what do I do for you?

What the subtext was, I don't want to be around black people.

That's what they're thinking.

So I give you all this money rather than I'm not going to give you any money any more than I give anybody else, but I'm going to work with you and integrate and assimilate and work in the inner city and try to get competitive schools and school choice and take on the teachers' unions with you.

None of that.

They don't want to do that.

No.

It's really tragic, this reparations committee, because all they're doing is alienating people.

So it's just, you know, we had the NBA woman star.

And she said that this was a trashy country because it's, you tell me what a multi-millionaire

professional sportswoman in a sport that is dominated by African-American women and not subject to disparate impact

or

I don't know proportional representation nobody has a problem with the women's

you know National Basketball Association being predominantly black

nobody cares but if baseball doesn't have you know 70% black or 60% black, then all of a sudden it's racist, and it's got to reach out.

And that means, well, whites are underrepresented and blacks are underrepresented and Latinos are overrepresented and Asians are way underrepresented.

But

we have to worry about blacks being overrepresented again.

It doesn't make any sense.

And we don't you know, we don't want Asians overrepresented at Harvard, but we want blacks overrepresented in more than 13% of the American, the Major League Baseball.

That doesn't make sense.

And so we have this 4th of July.

This got me, and there was another African-American singer who was singing that went on viral about putting new lyrics into the

national anthem to show her rage at America.

It's the same thing.

I don't get it when people, you know, Oprah is very, she gave a graduation speech and went off on United States and racism.

This all started with Obama.

It really did.

I mean, there was tension and anger from the 60s, but Obama mainstreamed it and institutionalized it.

And remember what he was doing.

He was a guy who grew up half black.

His grandmother was a

banker, and he went to prep school.

I never went to prep school.

He went to prep school.

He went to Occidental.

And on a scholarship, he went to Columbia, on a scholarship.

He went to Harvard Law School on a scholarship.

He got immediately in a tough job market, a job at the University of Chicago.

He didn't fulfill his book on contracts, of course.

And then he's lecturing people about how he suffered and how people like him have suffered.

And it just, it just gets at some point, it just the reparations when you watch those clips and some guy stands up, you owe me this, and you owe me this, and you owe me this, and you owe me this.

And then you turn on the TV and,

you know,

there's rioting in France.

And we had the George Floyd riots.

And you want to say, you know what?

We're six generations from anybody that had a slave in the South.

And we're six generations from anybody who was a slave.

And

I challenge you to tell me whether your great, great, great grandfather was a slave and who that great, great, great grandfather was enslaved to.

Please tell me that.

They can't.

And when you get into slavery, one of the weird things is I've been reading a lot about Turkish history, Constantinople, the Ottoman Empire.

About 20 million people, they think were enslaved.

And these were Europeans by the Ottoman.

When they swept into Greece and they swept into the southern Balkans and then the northern Balkans, and then they got all the way up to Austria and they

swept into North Africa.

There were a lot of people who had been Roman there, who were Italian and other people that were not today's Arabs.

There were either indigenous people or they were Europeans that were living there.

They enslaved them all.

And so nobody today says, oh,

I hold Mr.

Erloyan's government culpable because he said the other day that he feels that he is the continuance of the Ottoman Empire, which, except for the Arab Caliphate and Arab nations, was the biggest enslaver enslaver in the history of civilization.

And I don't know, there's an argument whether 14, 11

million people were shipped out of Africa to the Middle East versus the 10 to 11 in the New World.

A lot of people have made the argument there was more shipped to the Middle East, but I can guarantee you that you're never going to get an apology out of the Saudi government.

You're not going to get an apology out of the Egyptian government.

You're not going to get an apology out of Jordan.

You're not going to get an apology out of Hamas.

and you're not going to get an apology out of the Palestinian Authority of having slavery

institutionalized in their culture.

Yeah, they still do it today, basically.

I mean, they call it human trafficking, but it's the same way.

There's slaves in Africa.

There's millions of people who are indentured servants in Africa.

The word slave comes from Slav.

It was the idea of the Ottoman.

The Ottomans went up and down.

The Barbary pirates, the Ottomans, officially, they went up and down the coast of North Africa.

They went to the southern coast of Europe.

They went all the way.

They got near Venice.

And what did they do?

They went up and down Dalmatia.

They raided.

They destroyed Christian villages.

They kidnapped people.

They took people that were old and killed them.

They put people who were able-bodied, they made them slaves.

Good-looking boys, they castrated them for the various regional harems.

Good-looking girls, they used them in the harem.

That's just a fact.

Nobody today is holding Turkey responsible for that.

I'm not even getting into

the 1.5 million Turks, I mean, Armenians that the Turks killed.

I'm not even getting into

the Greeks that were set on fire at Smyrna and the 1 million people that were pushed into the sea, basically, with the failure of the great idea.

Don't even get into that.

But I tell you, the Turkish government doesn't care.

It doesn't apologize to anybody.

And when Barack Obama and his apology tour went over there and he started apologizing for us in front of Erica.

You know, that was pretty humiliating.

Yeah.

The

greatest history of enslavement in the world, and he's over there apologizing for us.

And

it made me cringe, but anyway,

there's a lot of historical ignorance.

And the problem with all of this historical revisionism is that once you start looking and fixating on the past,

and you do it for contemporary political, economic, social advantage, then

it's over with.

All you do is regurgitate and vomit out the past.

You don't look at the present.

You don't look at the future.

You blame all of your worlds.

What it is, is the collective,

it's the collectivization of the therapeutic mind.

So in the 60s, we had, you know, a young man who gets his PhD or his JD, his MD, his parents sacrifice.

He's a doctor, he's a lawyer, he starts in, and he doesn't do well.

He takes Coke, he gets divorced,

he's a failure at 40, and what does he do?

He goes to analysis and says his dad was mean to him one day, or he said his mom didn't give him enough love, and it's all their fault.

That 60s, blame your parents, hate your parents.

That on the individual level has been reified collectively with this.

I'm not happy with my life because my ancestors were not treated well by your ancestors.

Rather than life is tragic, history is tragic, everybody's got

struggles.

Yeah.

Person who was enslaved or indentured, get over it, get on with your own life, be productive.

But it'll never work if you keep doing this.

It'll never work because human nature is, as Thucydides says, it's constant.

And it interprets certain types of magnanimity as weakness to be exploited, not to be reciprocated and kind.

And you don't see anybody in those reparations saying,

well, wait a minute, I object to reparations because the Great Society was founded by the Democratic Party to help African Americans.

And there's been $20 trillion, 20 trillion transferred to African American communities and Great Society programs since their

inauguration in 1964 and 1965.

And we've had now

We've had 60 years of affirmative action and millions of African Americans who didn't qualify qualify for GPA or SAT were given an opportunity because of systemic racism.

And we think that was so good to allow that to happen.

No, nothing of that, nothing.

It's worse now than it ever was, you have to be told, to perpetuate what is mostly an elite phenomenon.

All these reparation people.

I was listening to that commission on the radio, the television today.

None of them are talking about the bloodbath on a Friday or Saturday night in Chicago or Baltimore or Memphis or Los Angeles or why that happens or what they can do about it.

None, none, zero, zillion.

Or not why 70% of African-American males do not stay with a family that they created

way higher than other particular ethnic groups or racial groups.

Why don't they just say, you know what, we're going to try to get that down to comparable levels with other groups.

And we're going to try to make sure that at least one person

in some of the Chicago schools is reading at normal grade level rates, because there's none in some school districts.

And once we do that, we're going to come back to you and say we still haven't achieved parity.

And it's because of systemic racism.

But if you're not going to do that first, because you say you can't, because you're imbued with racism everywhere, you can't see it, but it's systemic.

It's like air.

We know it's there, but only

DEI investigators have the proper tools that can calibrate it in the air.

That's what it is.

I understand.

Yes, it is.

It's like

my daughter said, there's a leaky gas at the house.

And I said, can you smell it?

I think I can smell it.

Well, let's get an expert in.

So an expert came in with his dials and instruments.

Monitor, monitors, and said, no, there wasn't actually.

Well, that's what the DEI person is.

You can't see the racism, you don't have evidence of it, but it's systemic and it's in there.

And I have the little dials and devices, and I'm trained to find out and to accuse people of it.

That's what, that's the whole premise of it.

That is, that's why we have media anywhere, right?

You can take it.

Yeah, you have to have adjectives.

You have to have adjectives.

If you don't have the word systemic

or you don't have micro,

then you don't have an aggression and you don't have racism.

You've always got a diminutive adjective,

or it's an insidious adjective.

So I think people, like I keep saying that, I think people are, it goes nowhere.

It's an intellectual dead end, political dead end.

And so people are finally,

all of this is starting to come to a perfect storm.

Dolvin Declan, excuse me, what's his name?

Mulvaney's first name?

Oh, Dylan.

Dylan Mulvaney, yeah.

Dylan Mulvaney, Target, Los Angeles Dodgers, another losing Disney PC movie,

Disney transgendered agenda.

You name it.

It's just,

it's like the Biden whole thing.

People are getting sick of all of it.

Yeah, they're threatening to

Bud wise Ben and Jerry's because Ben and Jerry said that America is built on nothing but stolen land recently on the 4th of July.

And they want to get back

Mount Rushmore.

Ben and Jerry's had an ice cream.

It was a neighborhood phenomenon.

It went viral.

I guess they had funny names.

I don't like the ice cream, but they sold out for over a billion dollars to a big company.

And now they had their contract.

They get to mouth off and still be billionaire leftist, right?

So we want to get all this money.

So we made this product.

It's great.

People like it.

You can have the name.

Give me a billion dollars, but I have to be able to mouth off like I'm still a leftist, but I want the money, and so that's what they do.

And give back,

hey, Ben, hey, Jerry, why don't I agree with you?

This was Indigenous land, one person on average for every 200 miles.

Why don't you give them all of your homes first?

Just call up the nearest Indigenous tribe and say, you know what?

I'm putting my money where my mouth is.

Take my home.

They never do that.

No, they're not.

They never do that.

That's not the end of it all.

Well, Victor, we're at the end of the show, and I have two comments from your readers since I forgot to ask you for the positive thing.

We'll get the positive thing here at the end.

One of them is titled My Secret Life with VDH, and this is by KK the Night Away.

And she writes, I realized I was quoting Victor a little too often when a woman in my neighborhood asked me if my husband got upset about me spending so much time with this Victor person.

Oh, wow.

So that was an interesting one.

And then we have from Mike Wilford.

He says, More Jack.

Great podcast.

I, of course, enjoy hearing Victor's view of issues.

I also enjoy Jack's input and would be happy to hear more.

So for

the great Jack Fowler, nice plug there.

Yeah, Jack is very knowledgeable.

Everybody should realize that.

He's very, very knowledgeable about politics, and

he doesn't talk about that.

But I met Jack in 2001, right after I was asked to, you know, I think everybody knows that story.

I wrote guest columns.

I wasn't a regular columnist until I think Rich Lowry called me up five hours after 9-11 and said, would you write a column for us?

We'll see how you do it.

And I said, Okay, but why?

And he said, Well, Ann Coulter wrote one about nuking Mecca and converting everybody to Christianity.

We can't run it.

She's mad at ass.

So she designed.

We have an open slot.

And it's, by the way, Victor, it's $50.

And you can do it twice a week.

So I made $100 a week.

I couldn't believe it for, you know, 3,000 words.

At that time,

boy.

It's amazing.

That was

able to help my son at college, but

well, not too much at $50 a column.

But my point is, that's when I met Jack Powell.

Yeah.

And we had a good relationship of Eeyore versus, it's not that bad, Victor.

And

we went through the whole iterations of the Never Trump Phenomena National Review.

I think that made us even closer friends.

But anyway, he knows a lot, and I enjoy all of his insights on politics.

We talk about him three or four times a week with nothing to do with the podcast, just other stuff.

Yeah, he's doing a great job.

American philanthropic, I believe, is who he works with.

And he's doing a great job for you on the podcast, too.

He is.

He is.

And so I appreciate that comment.

And we'll try to get more of Jack in.

All right.

Right news, good news.

Well,

as I said, I think it's 19 days from when I left my home.

I came back,

and the people who were here did a wonderful job.

House sitting, I'll just give his first name, Matt.

It looks beautiful.

The dogs seem

not as nostalgic for me as I thought they'd be because they probably like Matt better than me, but they are fine.

The yard is in good shape.

My truck, by the way, I have a, as I said, a 1500 RAM echo diesel, turbo diesel can pull 12,000 pounds.

Torque is amazing.

No, no, no.

I hear the words of my father.

Don't ever pull anything with a six-cylinder, don't matter what, they say.

So my son heroically pulled it up,

only 7,000-pound trailer, blew the turbo.

It's been sitting in the garage for six weeks because Chrysler Corporation can't service the

or can't supply parts for the product, which I still owe money on.

I said last time it was like a

pacemaker.

You know, we have a recall on that defective pacemaker.

You got to get out, it's going to kill you, but

we don't have the part.

And we can put a new one in that'll kill you later on, but you would void the warranty.

So we're not going to do that either.

And you can still drive it now, but it's a little bit dangerous.

It has no turbo.

And so the whole idea, just to finish quickly, is that we're not making V8s anymore.

I think the Toyota Tundra doesn't even make a V8.

We've got a new principle that we're making these high-compression V6 engines that instead of getting 16 on the freeway, they get 22 to 25.

In the case of diesel, they get 30.

And then when you need to pull something like a truck, because they are half-ton trucks,

they go into turbo mood, sort of like, I don't know, Road Warrior, we used to see that

and compress, you know, they compress air and fuel at a higher rate, and they boost the RPM and the

torque and the horsepower.

And that allows you to have the power of a V8 with the economy of the six, but it doesn't, you've still got a six-cylinder.

And so, when you're using that turbo and you're going uphill, even if you're not pulling the 12,000 that's rated at, but only half that, it's not reliable.

So, what am I happy about?

Happy is I made about five phone calls today,

and some polite, some angry.

They say the turbo after six weeks has arrived.

So, I'm going to take my brand new

dogface line pony truck, and I'm going to take it in and get it fixed.

And then I'm never, ever, ever going to pull anything with it ever again.

Chrysler, you did not tell us the truth.

And then when I get my recall for the fuel pump that is liable to blow up at any time because it's defective, a Bosch German part,

but they don't have it, I'm going to pray that they have it.

And then when I get my new fuel pump, I will not have another landmine in the truck.

And so

I'm happy that I'm making progress.

Happy is as happy does.

Yes, yes.

I'm happy that I'm actually at six weeks, get a truck for which I'm paying every month interest.

Oh, no, not very much interest.

It was a good deal, but it's a beautiful truck and it gets 30 miles.

I drive it to work, 31 miles the gallon.

Decent.

But just don't, if you have one, don't believe what they tell you.

Do not pull anything with it, especially uphill.

It doesn't pull 12,000 pounds.

I'd be surprised if it pulls a thousand pounds uphill.

Yeah, that sounds like the moral of the story.

Well, Victor, thank you.

Thank you.

And thanks to our listeners, too.

Yes, thank you, everybody.

All right.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hanson.

We're signing off.

We'll see you next time.