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Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor is a columnist, author, and political commentator.

And today we're going to look at a lot of questions from our listeners and our readers that have come from the comment site of the Victor Davis-Hanson website.

I should say you can find that website at victorhanson.com and it is called The Blade of Perseus, and there's a comment section on it.

So we're going to look at what our readers have to ask Victor today.

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

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Welcome back.

And I want to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor, we have lots of questions today, and I'm glad to let you know that we have one that's on the positive side first.

So we'll just go, we'll just start right into the questions since we have a positive one first.

This is from Jim

Eliasberg, and he says, I do have one question.

On numerous occasions, I have heard VDH express optimism about the future of the United States.

My question is simply, what is this optimism based upon?

And then he goes in to talk about the innumerable problems with the universities and the economy, et cetera.

So then, how do it?

So he wants me to suggest.

that I was correct in having some hope for the future.

He would like to know, because you have said that you do have optimism, especially in the political landscape.

And he was wondering, what do you base that on?

Well, I'm a historian, so I say to myself,

let's go back to when there was no hope.

Well, we're not where we were in 1861, where 11 states had declared their independence from the United States.

And we were going to have a war with 700,000 Americans killing each other over the question of slavery.

And then, you know,

we haven't declared the end of habeas corpus,

and we didn't do things like that yet.

So, and we're not

in 1932 when 25% of the available workforce was not working and wanted to work.

We're not there yet.

And that went on, remember, from 1929 all the way to 39, 40.

So we're not in 11 years of the worst economic depression in history.

And we're not where we were in December of 1941, where our army was smaller than Portugal's, or it had been.

And we

would soon,

by

the end of the year, even though we were on the rebound in Guatemala, have one aircraft carrier available.

One.

Just one.

The Wasp was sunk.

the Hornet was sunk,

the Saratoga was torpedoed,

the Lexington was sunk, and we just had the Enterprise.

So we're, and, you know, we're not looking at

during so-called peacetime for America, we're not looking at May of 1941, where

From the English Channel all the way to the Russian border and from the Arctic Circle all the way to the Sahara Desert, it was all controlled by Germany.

And Japan controlled half of China, all of Indonesia.

And so we're not there.

And yet we rebounded.

And we're not in the Cold War where you could make the argument by the late, middle 1970s, we were losing.

Russia had a larger deterrent force.

China was nuclear.

We had been humiliated in Vietnam.

Jimmy Carter was telling everybody we have no inordinate fear of communism.

So my point is that we're resilient.

And you're going to say, well, that was a different America in those days.

Yeah, it was, but it was a different America in 1932 than it was in 1965.

And it was different

in

1846.

Yeah,

45 was different than...

1932, etc.

So we have to have hope that the innate system, if we can inculcate enough people to understand it and follow the constitution that we can rebound.

And the biggest threat right now is this woke revolution because it is a pre-civilizational tribal chauvinism that means that we're going to all identify into racial groups, even if you're multiracial or even if you don't want to.

And we've seen that in Rwanda, we've seen it in the Balkans, and it leads to perdition.

And we have to all, according to our station, speak up against it.

Yeah.

You know, you answered that differently than I thought you would, because I thought you would say, well, I have a fundamental confidence in the Demos to pull through, but that was not the answer.

Well, I do.

If they have a constitutional system, they do.

Yeah.

I do have confidence because

I don't live where I work.

I have no confidence in the people of Palo Alto.

None.

I have no confidence in the Stanford faculty.

I have no confidence in San Francisco.

none whatsoever.

They were the ones that created this mess.

But I do have confidence in the people of Ohio and in Pennsylvania and I do have in Utah and the San Joaquin Valley of California.

I do have a lot of confidence in my Mexican-American neighbors, at least the ones over 50

who

pay for the consequences of left-wing ideology.

Maybe not students, but that's students anywhere.

So I do, and I do feel there's a change coming.

There's never been a higher number of people who are polling conservatives in the last 15 years

than are now.

And there's a lot of citizens, you know, when Hybrid Patrolman's beat up in LA, a lot of Mexican-American people jumped out and helped him.

Mr.

Penny took a lot of risks, but he did.

I know he's going to be punished, perhaps, but he was a hero in my book.

And

people are leaving these blue cities or moving.

They don't want any part of them.

And

whether it's Bill Maher or Elon Musk,

a lot of people on the left have had it.

And maybe they've been burned.

Maybe their kids didn't get into school, but you name it, a lot of people.

Nobody watches the Oscars anymore.

Nobody watches the Tony's, the Grammys.

Nobody, unless nobody's going to watch it.

The Oscars just announced, of course, they're going to do everything by racial quotas from now on as far as their awards.

So

confidence in the demons.

Yeah.

All right, Victor, how about this one?

My suggestion for a future topic, and this is John Vasquez.

China has been buying up property in the United States, but have we seen China involved in U.S.

infrastructure development?

Ecuador, Pakistan, Angola, and Uganda have partnered with China on housing and hydroelectric

projects, respectively.

Wouldn't you know it?

The quality issues are popping up.

We need to ensure our politicians do not sell out to the communists and line their pockets.

What are your thoughts, Victor Davis-Hansen?

Well, we're seeing

a lot of

Chinese intrusion, whether it's joint ventures with American capitalists to make battery

factories or buying up, what is it now, a quarter million acres of farmland, kind of conveniently located, it seems,

next to top secret military bases or facilities.

I think Joe Biden just greenlighted that, what was it, a Chinese EV battery

plant that was in Michigan.

And so

Biden invited the Chinese in.

And the Chinese don't do anything unless there's a national security defense angle to it, right?

And so, yeah, I'm worried about it.

I'm worried with Bill Gates, as I'm speaking right now, is

kowtowing to Qi in China, even though if you said to Bill Gates, hey, Mr.

Gates, they just spied on our country.

They just killed 50 million people.

The PLO's control of the Wuhan lab.

They are buzzing our planes.

They're threatening to destroy Taiwan.

They

try to ram our ships.

And they have an active espionage espionage network in the United States.

Why are you there telling him what he wants?

Why is Jamie Diamond?

What is going on?

And would you do this in 1938, right

when National Socialism was in control?

Or would you do it in 1928 with

the Soviets?

Because these people are as bad.

They really are.

Yeah.

So,

yeah, I mean,

I think

the commentator is absolutely right.

We should be worried.

Yeah.

All right.

This is one from Brett Johnson and another one that might be of interest immediately to our listeners.

The problem is the conservatives, and meaning mostly Republicans, they say, do nothing about crimes of the left.

They have ammunition right in front of them, but the majority stay cowards and do nothing.

Starting with the leader, Mr.

McConnell, I ask if you could expose the incompetency of the Republicans to stand up for their party and country in your research and writing.

I stand as an independent leaning right, and I fear that we may need a new party.

Okay, so let's look at that.

When you get questions, it doesn't do any good just to spout off.

You got to be analytical.

So

let's look at what...

the left has done and what the response.

So let's just don't go within the past.

I agree with the past.

The Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, who's the fusion party.

But right now,

you have Mr.

Mayorkas,

who has completely destroyed immigration law on the prompt of Joe Biden.

And you have information coming out, Joe Biden that's in the Constitution is an impeachable offense.

We don't know.

So what would you do?

Would you, the Republicans may or may not, they have about it.

depending on who's absent, five to nine seats period.

And they have fractures.

They've got about 10 to 15 rhinos from purple districts, and they've got about 25 to 50 Freedom Caucus people who don't like the mainstream Republican leadership.

But that, given it as it may,

we're going to get a majority to impeach Joe Biden right now.

I mean, I would like to see him impeach.

We can peach him for the peach Mallorcas, and then you're going to do what?

You're going to shift all the attention from the budget and the campaign.

Will they impeach him if Joe Biden

is shown to have taken money?

And by that, I mean that Mr.

Comer's committee can find

evidence.

Not immediately.

They'll try to appoint a special prosecutor.

I don't think Mary Garland will do it.

In other words, we don't have the House and Senate, getting back to what I said earlier in the podcast about Georgia.

Would we, if we had the majority, I would hope so.

Because

why would I hope so?

Because they're never going to change unless you have the fear of God into them.

I don't know what the statute of limitations are on federal offenses, but Andrew McCabe lied four times under oath, three times under oath.

James Clapper lied under oath.

John Brennan lied under oath.

James Comey, you could make an argument.

I did in a column that came out two days ago, that

if Walt Nauta is guilty of saying, I don't know, then what is James Comey, the former FDI director, guilty of when he said it 245 times under oath?

So I'd like to see all those guys prosecuted.

And

I don't know if they're going to do it or not, but they have to win, win, win.

They've got to get the House and Senate.

Then they can do it.

So what we need to do is hold their feet to the fire and try to get the House a bigger margin, not lose it, and win the Senate and then win the president.

And if they don't do it, then yes, they deserve whatever they get.

But we got to remember one thing: we had that.

There have been two occasions in my adult life when we had that.

One of them was in 2001.

George

W.

Bush came into power with the Senate and the House.

And after 9-11,

that is,

by November of 2001, he had a 70% approval rating.

And they had the House and the Senate.

And what did they do?

They passed No Child Left Behind.

They passed prescription drugs.

They ran up.

There was a balanced budget.

They ran up to the huge deficits.

And then

we had it one other time.

2017.

We had the Senate, we had the House, and we had the presidency.

And we were going to, as we had promised, to get rid of Obamacare and replace it with private company consortia.

And John McCain tabled it.

And there were other rhinos that helped him.

And then we ran up the debt.

We borrowed a trillion dollars before COVID, $600 billion, I should say.

And

we didn't do it.

We could have built the wall.

Why didn't the Senate and the House get on board?

And the writer has a good point that Mitch McConnell was not on board.

He hated Donald Trump's guts, hated everything about it.

Donald Trump basically had campaign on the enemy being somebody whose profile Mitch McConnell fit perfectly.

Mitch McConnell was married to Elaine Chow.

She's the heir to a huge Chinese shipping company, some of it with a sizable business with Communist China.

She is a billionaire, basically.

He's very wealthy.

They have been in politics all their life.

She was a cabinet minister.

Donald Trump thought he could pacify her by giving Elaine Chow

an appointment.

And it didn't work.

And

Mitch McConnell ran the Senate.

He was brilliant in his

understanding, not since Robert Byrd has anybody been so Machiavellian and know how the Senate worked.

He got all those judicial appointments for Trump through that no one else would have got through.

But he hated Trump and he hated the maggot agenda.

And he was sort of a conservative version of

a Democrat.

That's what he is.

And Paul Ryan was Speaker of the House.

He hated Trump's guts.

He's on the news scoreboard right now.

He hates Tucker Carlson.

Tucker Carlson may have been fired on the prompt of Paul Ryan.

Who knows?

But my point is that when you have Paul Ryan as the Speaker and Mitch McConnell as the Senate majority leader, you're not going to get through a maggot agenda.

No.

Even if Donald Trump had not tried to go to war with him, which he did.

Yeah.

And he didn't understand you can't go to war with the people in your own party that run the Senate and the House.

And then he lost them in 2018.

He lost the House and he lost the Senate in 2020.

And that was the beginning of socialism for us.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then we'll come back for some more questions and maybe we'll go to some historical ones after we return from this break.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

You can find Victor at his website, victorhanson.com.

It's called The Blade of Perseus.

So come join us, and lots of great information on the website at any given time.

You can also connect with Victor on social media.

His Twitter handle is at VD Hansen.

His Facebook handle is Hansen's Morning Cup.

And there is a Victor Davis Hansen fan club, which is not associated with us, but they do an excellent job of bringing up current and past lectures and writings from Victor.

So you can find him in all sorts of fashions on the internet.

Victor, let's turn to some historical questions.

And I'll go in chronological order from the earliest.

So this one,

one of your readers has talked.

has prefaced this and I'm sorry to all the readers I can't read everything that you write.

I try to get to the question as quickly as possible, but he's prefaced it by

the current administration, the current leadership in our country is basically morally bankrupt and has used COVID to manipulate the people and has supported, I think he says, poured money into BLM and

also the Ukrainian war, he sees as a manipulation, but

immoral lying, right?

And so he says, could you please do a show based on the immorality-caused decline of the Greek Empire as documented in Thomas K.

Hill's book, Sailing the Wine Dark Sea?

I don't know when you say empire,

that

term

hegemony meant heg, our word hegemony, I guess, comes from it.

It's the closest or federal state, maybe,

but

there's a word for it in context, as I remember it, only of the Athenian archae,

which is the Greek for empire, but it doesn't really characterize

the era of the city-state between 700 and 338, except for Athens, perhaps.

There was a Spartan Empire, but not really in the overseas maritime context.

And then there's Alexander's Empire.

So let's just say that we're talking about the Athenian Empire and maybe the Greek city-states.

And that's what the questioner means.

Why did they fail?

And did they fail?

Well, at the Battle of Chaeronea, 30,000 people from the north came down in 338 BC and they destroyed an Athenian and Theban army.

At that point, all of the city-states were within the next three years subjugated under the Macedonians.

And that was the end of a free Greek city-state.

They had periods of revolt and breathing spaces, but that was pretty much the end.

And you're going to say, well, wait a minute.

In 490, they defeated Darius's army, Mardonius, the Persian invader.

But more importantly, in 480, they had 250,000.

And the city-states were much poorer.

in 480 than they were 150 years later.

So how in the world did they stop 250,000 people when they were poor

and more divided than they were 150 years later when they couldn't stop 30,000?

Well, you can say Macedonians were tougher than Persians, et cetera, et cetera.

But the problem was interior.

So, what do you do?

You read the plays of Aristophanes, there's 11 of them, and you can see there's certain themes: the Ecclesia Zusai, the Thesmorph for the Zeusai, the Lysistrata,

the Plutus.

And the argument is that

they're divided, that the leadership,

that people are trying to avoid taxation, it's too high, that the Athenians have started out with paying people in the fifth century to serve on juries, and by the time of the fourth century, they're paying people to vote, that the entitlements are overwhelming.

They're still exhausted from the Peloponnesian War.

I don't think that was accurate, but that's some of the traditional exegesis.

And you can read Demosthenes and all of the Attic orders, and you can read Xenophon, and you get the impression

that there is a big divide between the wealthy and

the poor, and the Messoi or middle class are starting to disappear.

And the old formula that a male citizen voted in the

Ecclesia, He was a hoplite in the phalanx, and he had a small farm of roughly 10 acres, the size of everybody else, is starting to fade.

Land aggrandizement is beginning, and mercenary troops are beginning to appear in much more frequent fashion.

And

the voting is

there's attacks on the franchise.

There's violence in the ecclesia, as it happened to Theramenes, for example.

So it's internal.

And there's big fights in the corpus of Attic Orators about this.

The theoretic fund was

supposedly a theater fund.

And that paid people to go to the theater.

And

they needed defense to stop Philip.

And people were not spending money.

on triremes and one drachma day soldiers to fight in the phalanx.

They were spending money on entertainment, sort of bread and circuses in Roman fashion.

Anytime you see a loss of

prestige or power from a dominant nation, you are an empire, you ask what happened.

It's very rarely in history is it a foreign challenge.

The British Empire

basically started at the end of the Napoleonic Wars in, say, 1815, and it ended around 1946.

But the ingredients that made it a power were still there.

I mean,

there was a reason in 1939 why that small country still had the biggest navy in the world.

It did.

And by 1946, it had it.

It lost fewer, it lost about half in World War II, less than half than it lost in World War I.

But things had changed.

Britain went completely socialist right at the end of the war.

And

it was unionized.

And my gosh,

you couldn't do anything.

The healthcare was nationalized.

The coal was nationalized.

The shipbuilding was nationalized.

The utilities were nationalized.

You can argue that there was inequality in class and all that, but it chose a path that led it basically into impoverishment and world

diminution

until Margaret Thatcher, I think, sort of stirred things back up again.

But these things are self-induced.

Constantinople was taken in a way that it would never have done, even when it had recovered from the Fourth Crusade.

By 1300, before the Second Battle of the Place,

the Ottomans couldn't take it.

They had just started with a Seljuk turf.

They could not take it.

But 1453, it was a different Constantinople.

There were weeds growing within the walls, whole vast areas, kind of like San Francisco today.

So what I'm saying is that if you went to San Francisco in 2019

and you went today, you would think somebody dropped a neutron bomb on the city, but nobody did.

We did it.

If you went and looked at Detroit in 1944, it had the highest GDP

of any major American city per capita.

That was the nexus of Willow Run, the B-24 plant.

That's where General Motors was.

That's where Ford was.

That's where Chrysler was.

It was the most prosperous, forward-looking city.

It had a great opera, symphony, everything, architecture, renaissance.

And you looked at Hiroshima in 1945, it was Cinders.

And you look at it

1985, and that looks like somebody had dropped a neutron bomb on Detroit, and Hiroshima had never been nuked.

So, what I'm getting at is

internal decay is much more potent than a nuclear weapon.

And what happened to San Francisco,

if the Chinese had sent one nuclear bomb, say one megaton, and it hit somewhere in Mountain View near San Francisco, it wouldn't have hurt San Francisco as much as what we've done to San Francisco.

It just wouldn't.

And so we megatoned our own cities.

And that's what happens in history.

Rome had every ingredient

by the period of 100 to 200 during the five good emperors to continue that in perpetuity.

They reached

a level of scientific achievement which was not emulated till the Renaissance

over a millennium later.

And yet

by 470, there was grass growing in the forum and they couldn't do it.

So they don't pass on their customs and traditions.

And usually the culprit is luxury and leisure and money.

So

if you go back in 1960, somebody who was 14 was not glued in his room with the door closed, playing video games about sex and violence all day long.

And

in 1965, a father might say to an 18-year-old who is lounging around the house in the basement, he might say to them, you know what?

You get on the track, boy.

You're going to get up and you're going to get a job and you're going to get married and you're going to buy a house and you're going to buy kids and get with it.

Come on.

If you did that today, you would have normal credibility.

Your kids would say, oh, you're racist, you're sexist.

So it's internal.

But we know the ingredients that make a society continue in perpetuity.

And that's what's and usually the culprit is they get too wealthy and leisure and they forget how they got that advantage.

And I think that's an accurate assessment.

So we have another person

who has asked along that same line that

if you think America in 2021

is going in the direction of Constantinople or Rome in their latter years is

I'm paraphrasing, but since you were already discussing that,

do you think America is there?

Is it there yet?

No.

We are still the most powerful nation in the world economically.

Not by

much,

but we are.

And we should also remember we only have 335 million people.

We don't have 1.4 billion.

So when our GP GDP is about, under some measurements, about 25% still bigger than China.

What you're saying essentially is

one American is producing 25% more product than four Chinese counterparts.

That's still pretty impressive.

And our military is still the greatest in the world, declining rapidly, but still the greatest in the world.

Our universities, there's nothing in China like MIT or Caltech, even on Narnadir.

And I think we're destroying Stanford and Harvard and Yale and Princeton.

I don't worry that we're destroying the sociology departments, but we're starting to get into the medical schools and engineering and computer science.

And let's hope that places like Georgia Tech or Texas A ⁇ M save us.

Yeah.

But

we still have an advantage,

and we know we're declining.

Our biggest

dilemma right now is the medicine worse than the disease.

Everybody listening knows what you have to do to save the country.

You've got to go back to meritocracy.

You've got to go back to a deterrent crime policy.

You've got to get the military and the intelligence and investigatory bureaucracies out of politics.

You've got to start judging people on the quality of their character, not the color of their skin.

You've got to punish criminals.

You've got to say to the American people, we have about 20 years of very rich oil oil and gas, maybe longer, at full production.

And we're going to go full blast with the idea that we're going to transition to nuclear power and batteries or hydrogen, something.

But we're not going to destroy the middle class by getting rid of fossil fuels during this trend.

Not when China is out to get us and they're building coal plants.

Sorry.

So that type of leadership could save us.

I don't know if it's there or not.

Yeah.

Well, here's another one.

Tony says you have fascinating comments on Japan and state control against the U.S.

and innovation, and I believe he means in World War II, because he says, I'm sure you know about the Battle of Milne Bay, where the Japanese invasion force was totally defeated because the Japanese lost the initiative against a coordinated and innovative air and land defense of the United States.

Do you know that battle, Victor?

I think I do.

If it's M-I-L-N-E, it's in Papua New Guinea.

And I think that was in August of 1942.

But I'm doing an off the cuff, but I'm pretty sure that that was

a very important role of the Australians.

And that was in reaction to protecting Darwin.

And the Japanese had put a lightly equipped force

in Papua New Guinea, and they did not understand that there were some veteran Australian seasoned troops there in the vicinity and that they had air support.

And they destroyed this small amphibious.

And that was important because from Pearl Harbor in January, February, March, April, May, at least until the Battle of Coral Sea, and maybe not until midway in June, the U.S.

had lost, and Australia had lost,

oh,

they had lost

about 5,000 sailors and they'd only killed about 200 Japanese and they'd lost destroyers and cruisers and carrier.

British had lost the carrier.

And then at Coral Sea, it was still a

standoff and they lost the Lexington and the Yorktown was damaged.

It wasn't really till midway that the real tide turned.

I think you could argue that Millen Bay was not yet the tide turning on land.

That was at Guadalcanal.

And that was over, you know, December, January, February.

And there were five enormous sea battles fought off Guadalcanal.

And after the fifth

and

the

security of Guadalcanal, I mean, there were still terrible things to come,

whether it was Tarawa or Ibojima or

Okinawa.

But essentially, after Guadalcanal, the Americans were going on the offensive, and we were finally producing what we were capable of.

And we were getting technologically superior weapons that we had not had in the post-Depression.

So we were producing

Essex carriers and starting to see Hellcats and Corvairs,

and we were starting to see

escort carriers, light carriers,

updated B-17s along with B-24s, but B-25s, B-26s,

superior

submarine classes, and so on.

And then we were about to, you know, get into, we were getting the

Missouri or Iowa-class battleships coming online, the North Carolina class battleships.

So in every category, we were producing five or six times the munitions or the wherewithal as the Japanese, and they were technologically superior and we were really beefing up.

People forget we only had 145 million people and about the we were in 1941, I want to be careful, we were about the size of the Russian Federation today.

So the Russian Federation has put about a million men in arms that can be available to the Ukrainian.

We put 12.3 million people under uniform and we had almost 7 million of them went overseas.

So that was an enormous effort.

And that's what won the war.

But the turning point was really the Guadalcanal campaign on land and the Battle of Midway at sea.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take our last break and then come back and we'll talk about the Suez Canal crisis in 1955 to 56.

And then a couple of maybe what you would call soft t-ball questions

on the podcast and other things.

But

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

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Welcome back.

Victor,

I have one question on the Suez Canal, but then I have some other ones that are interesting that are not necessarily historical.

So here, Isaac has written, I enjoy very much listening to your analysis of various wars throughout history, particularly the modern ones.

However, I've never heard you analyze the Suez crisis of 1955 to 56.

I would also be particularly interested in your view on a controversial and in my opinion, or I think he means in my opinion, controversial, Paul Johnson's short book, the Suez Crisis.

Looking forward to listening to this subject in one of your upcoming podcasts.

And that's from Isaac.

I think that was, I want to be careful because I'm doing this on the fly.

I think that was Paul Johnson's first book, that book on Suez in 1956 or seven, I think it was.

And that was a weird book.

He was a journalist, and that was really the beginning of his popular histories that really caught on.

And finally, you know.

history of the American people, history of Christianity.

He made a fortune.

He was very, at one point, you could say by 1980 to 2000, he was probably the most popular journalist-historian historian in the English-speaking world.

I mentioned before, I met him a long time.

He really reviewed

A War Like No Other very negatively, but he didn't really say anything about the book.

He just attacked me personally.

I never understood that.

And then I was on a cruise.

I think I related.

He had a wonderful wife.

And she said, Paul would like to talk to you.

But I said, I don't really want to talk to him.

He'd really,

she said, well, he wants to explain.

So I went over there and he wouldn't look at me looked to the side he'd had a couple of drinks and he said

it was very funny i'd never talked to a person who had his cheek facing me but he said you had that horrible hitchens

and he blurbed your book and anything that that man would i could not stomach so i associated with him and i shouldn't have done that but i did And of course, he was referring to an article that Christopher Hitchens wrote.

I don't know whether it was in The New Statesman or something, where Paul Johnson had written a biography of intellectuals, a compendium, and basically trashing their personal lives as adulterous and

depraved.

And so Christopher Hitchens, who didn't like him, followed him around one day and basically said that he saw him in a club drunk and he had illicit liaisons with women.

And he put that in print.

And it was really a

mean thing to do, but I think some of it was, most of it was accurate.

So he was very angry about that.

But he wrote about Suez, and his theme was that

this was kind of the end of the British Empire.

It had ended earlier in the 40s, but this was the end.

Because remember what happened?

The British and the French were very worried about their colonial holdings in North Africa.

The Italians had basically been, after World War II, Libya was,

you know, it was basically over for them.

And there had been the Algiers War going on.

And then the British had still concessions in Egypt,

as they did in Transjordan.

They were losing that.

And they had the Suez Canal.

And they

nationalized it.

And that meant that Europe would not necessarily get oil imports.

into Europe if they closed the Suez Canal, at least not easily.

And Israel was fledgling and dependent, and it would not get its oil.

So Israel and

Egypt and France landed troops and the idea was to go in and seize the Suez Canal and internationalize it until either the Nasser government came to its census or was overthrown.

And it all depended on the United States.

And it was up to Ike.

And he was very sensitive because he had been very very critical, as I recall.

I want to get my dates right, but I'm doing this again by memory.

I think he'd been very critical of Stalin going into,

not Stalin, but I guess it was...

Hungary.

Yeah, Khrushchev, I guess, had gone into Hungary, and we had condemned that on moral grounds.

And he felt that if we supported our allies, then we would suffer from hypocrisy in the Cold War and lose allies.

So he pulled the rug from Anthony Eden.

And that he, what he didn't realize is

a couple of things.

That destroyed the British government, and that destroyed

Britain's influence in the world.

And that showed that they were no longer a partner, but a subsidiary of the United States.

And the French never forgave us.

And they would go on to get, you know, the force to Frob.

Their nuclear deterrent would be distance from America.

De Gaulle would, you know,

de Gaulle was very, very angry about who could come into NATO and who could not come into NATO after that.

And I think Eisenhower didn't realize, for better or worse,

you don't let any daylight between Britain and the United States because it's the country in the world that has the most affinities with the United States.

It's a consensual society.

And what we could have done, we could have

either stayed out of it or helped like we we could have done what we did in the Falklands.

A lot of people in America thought this is is crazy.

The Britons are going all over to get that no-good island.

And the British were saying this is not why we're doing it.

We're doing it for a point.

You don't steal people's property.

And we want your help.

So what we did do is, I think Alexander Hague was kind of off the reservation, but what we did do is we gave them very invaluable information, intelligence, satellite, reconnaissance, et cetera.

And I think we stealthily supplied them stuff.

And we told them, they had 31 nuclear weapons that they took to the Falklands, and they were willing to do whatever it took to get them back.

But the point was, we didn't publicly, Reagan didn't publicly oppose it because he knew that if he did, it would have destroyed the Thatcher government.

And I think Eisenhower made a mistake on that.

And Paul Johnson was

essentially saying this was a mistake on Britain, but it's a mistake for trusting the United States, as I recall the book.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

I think this one's almost from beyond the grave here.

His name is Alan Poe, and he was a highly educated, I believe a math teacher, well-traveled, and he was on his deathbed when he wrote this.

And it is on the U.S.

people lost most of their freedom in 1865.

The Civil War was the reclamation of the United States by the totalitarians, now referred to as the woke.

And he says this, this: now as I lay dying with nothing to lose, and I again rise to speak, you, the United States, can do either, sorry, can either do as the 1930s Jews did, ignore and deny reality, or rise as Israel has and fight.

If you want to get advice from Netanyahu, the fourth-term

Israeli prime minister, this is what he thinks.

The call for peace gets you nothing but death and no peace.

You must take action and don't be surprised.

A host rises behind you as a host rises behind you.

What are your thoughts on that?

That was interesting.

First of all, I hope the writer is in good will we cover and is not on his deathbed or is still with us.

Very moving story.

But I think he's talking about you have to have confidence in your national character.

You can't say that you have to be perfect to be good.

You have to believe that you're good without having to be perfect.

That's number one.

And that's what the left demands, perfection, anything less.

We really see that in the question of slavery.

We got rid of slavery.

We

had Reconstruction that didn't work out.

Then we dealt with Jim Crow, and then we had the Great Society, $20 trillion in

reparatory transfers of payments into entitlements based on Great Society.

We had affirmative action.

We've had identity politics.

So there's mechanisms of self-correction, but you have to believe that we're better also than the alternative.

That's why people are coming.

If you don't believe that, history says you get no exemption.

that if you don't believe that you should continue as you are, you won't continue.

And that's what happens to society.

So, until we can get

you can't be paralyzed by

and ossified or calcified because you can't have to be perfect, you can never make a mistake.

And when you make a mistake, you have to make sure that your successes are more than your failures.

But,

what do you think of the long view of history that he has?

That all of this started from 19 after the Civil War in 1965 to the present.

That's progressivism oh go ahead okay so

what he's referring to is

that

in that existential civil war

by the terrible summer of 1864

uh

the union could not take richmond to end the war

spring and summer of it without suffering a level of casualties

that would be not commiserate with victory.

In other words, Robert E.

Lee was lousy on the offensive.

But once you put him in Richmond, it was very hard to get him out.

And Ulysses S.

Grant was sending armies to get him out.

And we lost 100,000.

We being the Union lost 100,000 casualties.

And then Sherman came up with an alternative strategy, and the rest is history.

But

in that period, got to remember, you got to go back to that period.

In 1864,

there was a challenge from Lincoln, I guess you would call it from on the left or maybe the Union side from John C.

Fremont.

And he was saying that Lincoln hadn't done enough that he should, first of all, the Emancipation Proclamation should apply to the border states, not just the Confederate apostates.

And the United States needed to call up more people, and they needed to punish the South.

That failed, but then immediately George McClellan, who hated Lincoln for being relieved, was

running, I don't know if right's the right word, but his argument was that they had lost 250,000 dead and they hadn't taken Richmond and they would never take Richmond.

They would never take Richmond because they were incompetent and they needed to negotiate with the Confederacy on the following premises of the

status ante quem, ante quo.

So they were going to tell the South,

you

can have your Confederacy, we will have our Union, and we will be friends and we'll forget bygones be bygones.

And the border states can adjudicate that.

That was the McClellan.

That would have been the end of the United States as we knew it.

And Lincoln made the argument that everybody who had died up that point died for nothing.

And they were on the verge of victory.

And McClellan might have won, except on September 2nd,

crazy Uncle Billy took Atlanta.

And he sent a telegram, Atlanta is ours and fairly won to Lincoln.

And at that point,

they asked him what he was going to do, and he made it pretty clear he's going to keep going.

And there was nobody who could stop him.

He was going to pull up behind Lee and that would be the end.

And it was an it was, you know,

it was the end in April, just a few months later.

So that won.

But at that point,

before he took

Atlanta, there was a huge group of people who supported McClellan.

They were called Copperheads.

And they were in the Midwest a lot.

not the die-hard Yankee abolitionists.

And they were advocating what McClellan did, or they were suggesting that people resist the draft,

or they should resist the war.

So what Lincoln did was he simply declared an end to habeas corpus

in

Ohio and other periods of the North.

And they just basically said, I have the right to suspend the Constitution under martial law.

That meant you have no bill of rights protection.

We can jail you for what you said.

And a lot of them fled to Canada.

Some were jailed.

That continued after the war.

Andrew Johnson in 1867 said, we have to get rid of the Klan and Nathan Bedford Forrest and these crazy southerners.

So I'm declaring them, I'm declaring habeas scorpus does not exist.

You have no right to have any rights when arrested in the entire state of Tennessee.

So I think the writer is saying that once under the exigencies of war, we did something that was unconstitutional.

We kind of lost our freedom.

That green lighted under, say,

Woodrow Wilson, who suspended basically First Amendment freedoms during World War I

and put in jail people without habeas corpus rights.

Or you could argue that

Earl Warren, the

Earl Warren was the Attorney General of California in 1942

on his prompt and and military commanders and FDR, they incarcerated or interned, I should say,

thousands of Japanese and about 60% of them were U.S.

citizens.

They were not resident aliens and that was contrary to the Constitution.

And so

the other thing is the federal government has grown, grown, grown, grown, grown, grown.

So it was no longer just the protection of the individual citizen, but it was engaged after the Great Society to, excuse me, after the New Deal and then enhanced during the Great Society, its mission was to make us equal on the back end.

So that's what the person's talking about.

And then you could add a force multiplier.

It was all electrified with Silicon Valley because of social media and Google and Apple.

So whatever powers the federal government had that were restricted across time and space no longer existed anymore.

They could find out anything about you at any time, anywhere.

Yeah.

Okay.

And the last one, the T-ball question,

although it's probably kind of interesting.

Your

music for this show with Sammy Wink,

a listener, Don Blajac, asks about it, and he thinks that it's related to a movie, Badlands, where Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek star.

And he asks, the soundtrack

coursing through the film is the same soundtrack for your podcast with Sammy Wink.

That film, at least for me, is one of my favorites that a lot of folks never seem to.

I'm thinking you must appreciate the film, if not the haunting music.

Thank you for everything you do to keep the U.S.

from slipping into chaos.

I think the essential question is: how did you choose the music for your podcast?

Well, Sammy, which

don't we have two?

Uh

we have

from True Romance.

Yeah.

Right.

And yeah, yes.

And then we have

our fight song, right?

Yes, but that's Jack's in yours.

So he's talking about the one for us.

And I go ahead and explain the true romance.

Well,

we took it from that upbeat.

song when any in that uh Quentin Tarantino wrote that.

I think that was a Tony Scott movie that had a lot of stars in it.

Remember

it the guy that died, the

Italian gangster, he always plays an Italian gangster, James

Garrett.

In Seismore was in it too, and Sean Penn's brother was in it.

And

Brad Pitt was the

stoner.

Was that

which arquette was that that played her?

She played brilliantly in that yeah patricia arquette i think yes and

and your favorite actor gary ollman gary ollman was terrifying as usual in that movie and then we had uh dennis hopper was great in that movie remember oh yeah and christopher watkins that thing about eggplant would never be

i guess you can even say val kilmer was in it wasn't he wasn't he the voice yeah he was the voice and he was i think samuel jackson was in that wasn't he

He was the guy they killed at the very beginning,

the drug dealer.

No, that was Gary Ullman.

No, but he had a black guy that was, I think he was killed.

I think he's the guy they killed.

Oh, yes.

He was the pimp.

That's right.

And then there was all those.

Tom Sizemore just died.

That was kind of sad.

Remember?

He was the cop with Chris Penn.

Yes.

Wasn't he in that?

I wonder who was the actor who played

Make It All Go Away.

I don't know the name of that actor, but that was.

And his boss was a famous actor too.

And I can't remember him, but I.

But he was

Elliot.

Elliot.

I don't think that guy ever

that's played Elliot.

I don't think he ever

was a big star after that.

No.

But

he was in another movie.

It was either

Beverly Hills Cop or one of those like that.

And that's, I never, he's got to be,

boy, that he was so young there, but

I bet he's in his 60s now.

And that diddy comes from the tract by Hampshire.

Yes, yes, that's the point.

Yes.

That was the song from.

I haven't seen Badlands, so I didn't know that they used that again.

That happens a lot.

It wasn't the track in.

Well, just to make sure everything's clear, we didn't actually take it from Hans Zimmerman's You're So Cool.

The Diddy actually comes from a German composer, Karl Orff,

and so who was a long time ago.

So it was easier to get that small piece from his work, which apparently Hans Zimmerman probably used to.

And that was, and why was that, that we couldn't get it directly?

Well, you'd have to pay Hans Zimmerman for it.

And I'm not sure anybody knew how to go about doing that or that we would possibly get it at any price we could pay.

That would probably be about it.

And

he had

more hit songs, I think, than any other composer that, you know, that had,

that was in the movies.

Oh, yeah, he's been writing for all sorts of movies.

I believe he wrote for Gladiator

as well.

That's funny about, I didn't know the replication, but that happened with,

what was her name, Lisa Girard,

that song that was the theme song of Gladiator.

And then it also appeared, I guess, Ridley Scott did Gladiator.

And Man on Fire.

Wasn't it a similar

song?

It was the same song.

I think it was Lisa Gerard, the same song.

And it was kind of Now We Are Free, wasn't that the name of it?

And it was in both those movies, back to back by the two brothers.

Anyway, that's the story on the songs to the degree we know it.

We had,

I had,

I think it was Battle Hymn of the Republic with Jack when we first started under National V and we were asked to take that down by people who mistakenly thought it was Dixie

when it was a song of liberation, but we had some people that complained and said we were playing southern music when we're playing Union music.

So I was asked to take that down.

And I don't know what we had for the classicists.

I don't think we had any when I did it with Stanford with Hoover.

Yes, but Gary Owen is what we do with Jack.

I think that's because we all like that Errol Flynn movie, They Died With Their Boots On.

That was a theme song.

And I think

we all like uplifting, uplifting songs.

Yes, they're trying to be uplifting.

Yeah.

yeah i know that uh i used to do

a weekly radio interview in indiana with greg garrison who's a wonderful guy and i think they asked me for a theme song and at first i put in bob dylan knocking on heaven's door and i thought that was after i think one episode was a little bit too

too bleak knocking on heaven's door, you know.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, I have one more comment.

Okay.

This time it's a compliment, but it's kind of a backhanded compliment.

I get a lot of those.

I'll take it backhanded whether they're in the face.

I get, if you look at our website, I get a lot of people angry.

All right.

So, Larman

Peschica.

And he says, Dear Dr.

Hansen, I first found you quite a while back from one of your appearances on Tucker or Laura and fell in love with you like so many of your fans.

I didn't think I could like you any more than I did, but now you have gotten quite grouchy since your affliction with long COVID.

Sorry about the long COVID, but I love the grouchy VDH even more, even more.

More great humor, more great knifing.

God bless you and hope your good

farmer health comes back to you soon.

I'm getting brilliant.

Yeah.

Long COVID is a very strange thing.

You know,

it's an autoimmune response and it manifests itself with microclotting and inflammation.

I guess because the spike protein never is cleared.

So you get your immune system goes nuts.

For people who had prior immune problems, which I did, in your head or your lungs or your gut or your nerves.

So I do think, though, if anybody's listening and have it, I want to be optimistic.

I do think over time it wanes.

And I do not know whether that's stuff I did.

I had a a couple of prescription drugs I tried.

I took acupuncture.

I took 10 or 15 supplements.

I kind of forced myself, no matter how lousy I felt, to exercise.

I tried not to stay in bed one day.

I tried to keep working.

I don't know if that made it worse or not, but it did tell me that people had told me

most of the people they saw, unfortunately, and I got really kind of upset when I was told at four months, they have over 12 months to 14 months or 16 months.

But once you get up to nine months,

12 months seems like heaven.

But in my case,

I think I'm 80 to 90% over it.

I have bad days, but it's been 14 months.

But you have to be optimistic.

That's very important.

And I hope I wasn't too depressed, grouchy.

I know that before my parents died, they both gave me some final wisdom.

And my father said, you're not going to advance career-wise commisurate with your achievement if you continue to dress the way you do.

Come on, Victor, you're sloppy.

You don't get haircuts.

I had a lot of hair in those days.

And you've got to get suits and ties and dress well, but you dress like you're just t-shirts and jeans, and that just won't cut it.

I'm sorry.

That's wonderful coming from a man who did 44 missions over Tokyo.

Yeah.

Your clothes matter.

Yeah, absolutely.

It was very funny because when I went back after farming,

this is funny.

This is so funny.

And I can detour.

So I had no clothes, right?

I was just farming.

I didn't go anywhere.

I didn't go to Fresno or Selma for a year almost.

I just stayed out.

I had long hair.

I just farmed.

I was kind of out of it after nine years of academia and living overseas, all that.

So I came back to the farm.

I just...

All I read was ag magazines and mechanics and welding, anything I could do to catch up, I thought, because I thought I was going to be doing it the rest of my life.

But anyway,

when I got one class at Fresno State, they didn't want me there, I could tell, but they finally gave me one Latin class in 1984.

My dad, who never threw away anything, had a bunch of clothes.

So he said, what are you going to wear?

I said, I have no money.

He said, well, here's some.

And he brought me polyester stuff from kind of Love Boat era, 1970s.

You know, that polyester with kind of bell bottom.

Oh, yeah.

And I didn't even know that that it was.

So I got on kind of a, it wasn't green or blue, but I mean, chartreuse, but it was kind of blue and it was polyester and a vest.

And I thought I looked okay.

And I went up there and I didn't know who Bruce Thornton was, my colleague and friend for years.

And he was teaching part-time.

And so he came in to introduce himself.

And he said,

he said, are you an extra for love boat?

Where did you get it?

All that angel flight on.

Yeah, he said,

where in the hell did you get your concoction?

Did your parents give you that out of the 70s?

And that's exactly what happened.

So that's what my father told me.

And then my mother said,

you will be as successful as you smile, but you grimace, you frown, you look like you're angry or depressed, and you're not.

I know you're happy, but you don't express that.

So you have a smile.

Use it.

And I tried to do that.

So

you're doing a good job of it.

That's a good point.

You have to be upbeat.

But I guess uh sometimes i get a little carried away and get angry

i don't i don't hold grudges yeah no you don't do you're not you're not a very angry person at all everybody says i'm too mellow or something yeah yeah absolutely so too mellow in the bad sense no

in the good sense too mellow anyways Thank you very much, Victor Davis-Hanson, for all of the wisdom today.

We really appreciate it.

Me and the listeners.

Thank you, everybody, for listening once again.

And this is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hansen, and we're signing off as the dogs are telling us to.