The Revolution in the Colonies and in Tractors

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Welcome to the listeners of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

This is our Saturday or weekend edition, and we usually do things either cultural or always usually historical and often military.

And today we are on our course of looking at military warfare in history and

we will be looking at the American Revolution.

But first we have a couple of news stories to talk about.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

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

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

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trying to think of something positive

i do think that Donald Trump came out, and we're recording right when he's just given his speech after his indictment.

And he came out fighting and

illustrating the injustice of the accusations against him by looking at the record of everybody else that has done even worse things with classified material than he himself has.

So

the fact that he really didn't,

since he was president, he had the legal right to do what he did, whereas others did not.

So I thought that was a very good speech.

What were your thoughts on it?

Well, it concentrated, there's two wars going on.

There's the legal war and there's a political war.

The political war says this should have never been,

this indictment should have never been filed.

And Trump's point in that speech and elsewhere is you could do this with anybody.

You could have done it with Hillary.

You could have done it in Bill.

Any one of us, if you take a federal prosecutor and said, I'm going to find out if I can indict Victor for something, they're going to find something.

Not that I did anything, but any one of our listeners, that's Trump's point, that if he wasn't Donald Trump, then they wouldn't do it.

And then the legal matter is, I think his chief point is that he was trying to make the

Presidential Records Act basically, as we said on earlier, there's no there there.

It's just a bureaucratic transgression, or it's a civil matter, or it's, you know, it's something like, oh, when he said to one person, suppose I could have

declassified that, what he's going to say is, I could have gone through the rigamoreau of doing it, but I didn't because I consider it was my papers, right?

And he, and, you know, he, the only thing I would caution him about when he calls the special prosecutor a thug, I'm not saying Mr.

Smith isn't because he's a political and he should have accused himself.

If I had been special prosecutor and I had a record like he did

of going against prominent Republicans and, by the way, failing, and my wife had just done a

glamorous, obsequious, toadish biography, documentary of Michelle, I would have accused myself because I couldn't be disinterested.

He didn't.

That's his job.

He's a hitman for the left, but you don't have to call him a thug.

So when he called him a thug, thug, thug, you're getting very close to

obstruction because you can't attack a federal prosecutor person if you're a Republican.

Remember during the Ken Star probe, special counsel probe with Clinton, James Carville got on TV every night and said, Ken Starr is just a he's just a tobacco lawyer.

That's all he is.

He's just owned by Marlborough.

That's all he just attacked him personally.

And I thought, wow, that's obstructing justice.

You can't do that.

My mom was a pellet court judge, and she used to get very angry because

when they had some

high-profile cases, every once in a while

a lawyer would say something about a judge, you know, attack them personally or a prosecuting attorney with the idea that you can demonize them in the public realm and that influences a jury or their reputation.

So that's something I think he should be careful about, even though not that he doesn't deserve it, Mr.

As I said, but other than that, you're right.

He has a two-prong, he's got good lawyers.

I think he's got the weight of the law on his side, and he's got a wonderful political argument.

And then

the subtext of this whole thing is: there's a tick, tick, tick, tick, tick bomb, and it's called Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, Burisma, Ukraine.

And it's just, it's ticking.

And if that thing blows up, it's going to make water.

We've never had, we've never even been close to this, that a sitting president of the United States of America was offered a bribe by a foreign government, and he took it and it's on video or excuse me it's on audio or there's some written documentation of that and I don't know how you get out of that you say well I was he was he was vice president United States he can't take money from foreign governments so we'll see and I'm not going to prejudge it but if that is true that's the biggest story of my lifetime we'll see

and that makes it makes it all sense and if he's if that's true then everything he his justice department is doing against Trump just fades it's just, I'm trying to take out somebody because I'm going down kind of narrative.

And he's going to blow up the Democratic Party.

If that blows up,

how will that impact our commitment to the Ukraine, do you think?

That's going to be a very good question because

as I said on an earlier broadcast, Ukraine has the third largest military budget.

It's not theirs.

They didn't earn it.

They didn't create it.

They're dying heroically to defend their motherland, but it's from NATO, but mostly from the United States.

And it's, you know, it was over 100 billion the first 12 months.

And now I think it's, as we start the next year, I think it's going to, it's on a schedule to be over like 120 billion.

We've given them 1 million artillery shells.

We don't have them.

1 million, 155 millimeters.

We had depots in the Middle East in case there's a Middle East war, and we have to get over there quickly.

And so Israel was a depository.

We've depleted those deposits.

Yes.

Don't tell Iran that.

Yeah, well,

it's going to take five years for us to gear up.

This country is slothful and fat, and it's spending all of its money on popular culture, video games.

We do all this pop, you know, I'm so sick of it.

And then we don't do the things that really matter, like have a war production board and defense industry.

It can gear up.

We're going to be short Patriot missile battles, Patriot missiles, javelin missiles, everything.

So at some point, people are going to say, who endangered us and put us with Taiwan on the horizon, China, et cetera?

Who put us in this precarious situation and gave away everything to Ukraine?

And why did he give everything to Ukraine?

And people are going to say, well, he fired a prosecutor, Mr.

Shoko, that was...

that was investigating his son and himself.

And then he bragged about and

the presence of the Council on Foreign Relations.

And then on top of that, the next person's going to ask, how's that going to affect our China policy?

And there's going to be somebody that's going to stand up and say, well, when you put your son on Air Force II and you and your son go to China and he conducts a multi-multi-million dollar business with Chinese energy companies and you end up enriched yourself, well, then maybe that's why you allowed your

your subordinates Sullivan and Blinken to be humiliated in Anchorage in March of 2021.

They didn't even fight back when the Chinese dressed them down.

And then maybe that's why they're ramming our jets with impunity or getting close to them.

They're trying to ram ships.

They're warning us about a nuclear conflagration if we go defend Taiwan.

They had a Chinese balloon that goes across the United States, and all the administration did was serially lie for eight days.

Oh, it was too high.

Oh, it was over water.

Oh, it didn't see anything.

Oh,

complete lies.

And then we haven't even gotten into the Chinese Wuhan virology lab where

Biden just goes,

I guess I was wrong.

I told everybody it was a pangolin and bat.

We're working with China, but apparently, according to this Sunday Times, it just came out.

What did they say?

That the whole bat pangolin thing is bogus, as we always know.

We had our guest, Stephen Kway, essentially say that, and he was quoted in that article.

Oh, wow.

But more importantly, the People's Liberation Army was in control of

that laboratory.

And more importantly, even there, there was almost as if there was a hint that we were lucky that the SARS-2 virus leaked out that kills 1% of its infected because they were working on viruses

that could have killed 25% of everybody who's infected.

could have wiped out whole societies.

And they're still working on them, apparently.

But

they got out, and I don't know what the effect of this will, but if you read between the lines in the Sunday Times article, there is a very strong suggestion that the Chinese military was working on some kind of bioweapon.

Yes.

And

Miles Yu has already hinted in an article, I think.

that there may be some indication that they were working on virology enhancement vis-a-vis DNA, i.e., maybe we can find a bioweapon that would protect that would protect people of Chinese ancestry in China, but they wouldn't be as susceptible to other people.

So it was a pretty, it's pretty dangerous right now.

And this president seems to be oblivious to both the Ukrainian and Chinese threat.

And you can draw your own conclusions.

We'll see.

Yeah, yes.

Well, given all that, and given the fact that there's record numbers

that consider themselves independent, a Gallup poll has that at 90, sorry, 49%

of the voting population are considered independents.

I was wondering, what do you think is the possibility of a third party in 2024?

70% don't want Biden to run,

and he seems to be the Democrats' only hope.

So

they keep saying, the left keeps saying that Trump will vote if he doesn't get the nomination.

I don't believe that.

I believe that,

as I said, at least two occasions, that they should all pledge right now to support the nominee.

Trump should do it because, A, he's ahead and he thinks he's going to get the nomination.

It would be good for DeSantis to endorse him now.

And then, B,

they broke their word in 2016.

People like John Casey, Carly Fiorina, Other people who had failed to get the nomination had sworn they would all back the nominee with the idea that Trump had zero chance of getting it.

And when he got it, they said, screw you, we're not going to do it.

And then I think if DeSantis wins a nomination, Trump would be bound to honor that commitment.

I don't see him at 78 years old going out and starting a bull moose.

And the last time that's happened

with a president that came back, that was, as you remember, Teddy Roosevelt in 2012.

And all it did was destroy William Howard Staff's Republican reelection efforts and hand the election to one of the most leftist presidents we've ever had, by the way, a racist Woodrow Wilson, who won that 2012 election.

And when you look at the vote tally, Taft came in third, as I recall, but Taft and Roosevelt overwhelmingly combined vote would have beaten Wilson easily.

So it's not a good, it's not a good model to follow if you're Trump.

So I don't think he's going to do it.

I think it's more likely on the Democratic side, because if Joe Biden says, I'm not going to debate Robert Kennedy Jr., no way, no how, and he's pulling 25 to 30 percent of the electorate, and

Joe Biden is non-compos mentes, then I think you might see something.

The only thing that's protecting Biden is you can't get to the left of him.

So he rebooted himself.

It's no longer good old Joe Biden from Scranton, the Catholic anti-abortionists,

the school busing is a racial jungle and all that crap, phrasing segregationists trying to go to the democratic right, way democratic right, i.e., neo-Confederate, as he did in the past.

Now he's given a blank check.

His attitude is basically, Jill, I'm so tired.

Just tell them whatever they want.

Just

give me the script.

I'll do it.

I just want to go.

I want to be home at 2 o'clock.

Every weekend I want to be at home.

I just have to do it.

So you tell the squad, you tell Michelle and Barack, you tell Elizabeth Warren, you tell Bernie, whatever they draw up, just put it into the teleprompter.

And then I'll get angry and I'll say semi-fascist and ultra-man.

I'll do whatever they want, but just leave me.

I just want to finish and be left.

That's his attitude.

Yes.

And that's very valuable to the left.

That's better than having an independent thinker, just kind of a prop, which is what he is.

He's a construct.

Yeah, I wonder if somebody will come up on the left to run against him.

I know the only one that looks like he might be able to is RFK, right?

They're not going to go.

Yeah, they're not going to go to the left.

Robert Kennedy won't go to the left of him.

He will be an idiosyncratic, you know.

Maybe he'll go to the middle rather than

he'll go to the middle left.

He'll say the vaccination were dangerous.

The lockdowns were disastrous.

We're killing people on the border.

We need a, you know, he's probably for a wall, things like that.

He'll kind of go back a little bit to Bill Clinton in the 90s.

Yeah.

The old Bill Clinton.

He would be a good third party well if he goes if he if he were to run i mean they're going to be offering him first they're going to remember the democratic playbook first they try to destroy you so they're going to bring up everything about his annulment where his second or first wife was catholic and she killed killed herself after he divorced her and

they're going to imply that he had some type of pre

why he was married he had an interest in his present wife i think she was a tv TV actress.

They're going to go after her.

And then when that doesn't work, if it doesn't work, and then they're going to try to buy him off.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and get some of that.

I don't mean literally by money.

I mean, they're going to bring him in or give him, I don't know, some federal appointment or a medal or something.

That's what they do.

Yeah, exactly.

You know, they always say they...

that they bought off Bernie Sanders

when Hillary was running.

And I would just always felt like

they literally did buy him off.

Yeah, he ended up with three beautiful homes,

one on a lake in Vermont, a Washington ice condo, and then I guess he had a Burlington home.

And his wife basically bankrupt a college campus and walked off with a big settlement when it imploded under her directorship.

But he remember that once Jim Clyburn engineered the black vote, which was 40% of the electorate or more in South Carolina, Biden was flailing.

He wasn't any good in Iowa, New Hampshire.

And then he was flailing.

And then all of a sudden they got the black vote.

And Clyburn told him, if I get out and

we in Nevada and the Hispanic Workers Union in Nevada and the black vote in South Carolina, if we give you the election, then we own you.

And he said, yeah, you own me.

And then he won.

And then they just lined up everybody and they said,

Elizabeth Warren, you're out.

Pete Buttigig, you're out.

And

Bernie, you're out.

Now, what do you want to get out?

And that's what they meant by buying off.

Pete,

I want to be a cabinet secretary.

Elizabeth Warren, I want to have veto power over appointments.

Bernie, I want to have my agenda.

And that's what they did.

And it's pretty much their agenda.

They won.

Yeah.

All right.

Let's take a break and then come back and talk about the American Revolution.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

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Welcome back.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

And

this weekend edition, we want to look at the American Revolution and place it in the greater scope of both warfare in general, the history of warfare, but also just its significance in Western civilization.

So, Victor, as you would like to talk about the American Revolution, but I hope we can answer those two things as well in your conversation.

Well, we know what was fought.

And

we Americans were very lucky that our mother country was Britain and not Prussia or Russia or France.

Let's be honest, because it was a parliamentary monarchy and it had a liberal enlightenment.

And so there were some atrocities, but they didn't do what most colonial powers do to rebellious subjects.

That's one thing.

Second thing is

the grievances were about taxation without representation and autonomy.

And remember, they had a...

In most of those 13 colonies, they had a British governor, but they had a colonial legislature.

And they kind of created their own Frankenstinian monster.

Once the British and Scottish Enlightenment had begun, and they were philosophers and politicians talking about liberalizing and empowering the British system, that filtered in to the Americans said, well, we just want to do what you do.

And so we want our colonial legislatures to, what,

be more powerful than an appointed and unelected British colonial governor.

And that was kind of the issue along with taxes.

But they were pretty well off.

They were very affluent.

America is a much richer country than Britain.

And they had something else they understood, and that is

they didn't have to win the war.

All they had to do was lose it.

The distance from northern Massachusetts all the way down to South Carolina.

is, you know, it's 1500, 1,700 miles.

And how can you cover all that?

And they were even now at that point they were starting to go on the other side of Appalachia.

So there was no way in the world that an army at maybe its greatest was 35,000 or 40,000, and a lot of them were Hessian missionaries that could cover and occupy.

So the strategy was that every time the British took a town, they took Philadelphia, they took New York, but they had to occupy it.

And when they occupied it, they had to have troops from somewhere.

And

all the Americans had to do was two things.

They had to, when they declared their independence, 1776, but when they started fighting at Lexington and Concord, they didn't have to lose.

And they didn't.

They fought them to a draw, you know, Paul Levere's ride, the shot heard around the world, all that stuff.

And then at Bunker Hill,

they repulsed a frontal assault at Bunker Hill.

They inflicted a thousand casualties.

At that point, Britain,

you know, they hadn't really,

they had fought the so-called Seven Years' War from 17, I guess it was 1756 to 1763.

And we called it here a little bit earlier, but we called it the French and Indian War.

But basically,

Britain and Prussia had fought France and Australia and Spain, and they tend to be more the Catholic countries.

And the British had won.

But the point I'm making is the result of that version, that was what Churchill called the First World War, because everybody got involved worldwide.

And the theater in North America was over French Canada.

And the French only had about 50,000, 60,000 settlers.

And the British, of course, had 2 million,

2.5 million.

So it was not going to be a French victory.

But the point I'm making is it gave the colonials a lot of battle experience.

And they were very good militia.

And they helped.

And they understood how the British fought.

That was very important.

And then, more importantly, they alienated the British, did the French.

And so, when this war started, the moment Britain couldn't put a lid on it, and they were waiting for one big battle.

And when they won at Saratoga in 1777, then I think it was over because they had the Prussian von Steuben

came in, and he was a Prussian drill.

He wrote the drill book.

He drilled the American troops for conventional battles.

Then you had the French cutting a deal with us 1777 to 1780.

They had formal treaties.

They brought in all of their

some of their Robanchot.

They brought in Lafayette Rambacho or whatever his name was.

They brought in supplies.

They brought in the French fleet to keep the ports open.

The Spanish then

were still bitter that Britain had taken a lot of their North American territories.

They were allowing arms and supplies to come in from Spanish-controlled territories.

So basically France and Spain were on our side because of the French and Indian, or what we call the Seven Years' War, and because they didn't extinguish it in its end.

They had to strangle the the American infant in its cradle and they couldn't do it.

And by the time they couldn't do it, French and Prussians had helped drill the American army.

So at the two the the the war was decided at two battles.

And one was, as I said, 1777 at Saratoga, when we defeated a conventional British army.

And then, of course, the main one at Yorktown in 1778, when Cornwallis surrendered and they supposedly played, you know, the world upside down,

the British flutists, but the war didn't end for the next, you know, it went on to 1783, but it was over with at that point.

And

so

And then we had people like Francis Marion with unconventional swamp fall, all that.

But what I'm getting to is when you have a huge colony like that, and you have people with more natural wealth than the mother country, and they're up to two or three million people, and they're spread out almost 2,000 miles in prosperous settlements, and you have to control that.

You basically have to do one of two things.

You're going to have to kill a lot of people, and the British had no record of doing that, really.

And then, two, you had to win one of three groups.

There was the revolutionaries, the neutrals who were waiting to see who won, and there was the loyalists.

And unfortunately for them, they didn't get more.

The revolutionaries were almost 40 or 50% of the population.

So they needed them to be about 20%.

So the loyalists, and then they left to Canada, a lot of them did.

And they left the field of battle.

So what was it.

It wasn't going to work.

They didn't have the

savagery to put it down.

They couldn't appeal to enough colonists to be loyal or neutral.

And

it was basically,

we are an enlightened British parliamentary system that is moving toward checks on our own crown, but you can't do what we're doing.

And that's not a winning message.

No.

And

it really made a big difference because

as you know, this was the prelude then to the French Revolution, Napoleon, and

the challenge to British power.

Because people looked at the American Revolution and said, if they can do it, then maybe we can do it in Europe and both have a revolution and challenge British power, sea power.

In France, Napoleon thought he could do it.

It was much different.

One thing to remember about the

American Revolution is that it wasn't a class revolution.

It wasn't the poor are are being exploited in a colony or the population is being oppressed by the monarchy in the sense of the French Revolution.

It wasn't a totality.

It wasn't a 360 degree revolution.

There's no word, you know, give me liberty or give me death.

Liberty, freedom, but there's no equality, fraternity.

Liberty, fraternity, equality in the French revolution.

That revolution was holistic.

It was, we're going to make everybody equal on the back end.

And the French Enlightenment that spurred that, encouraged the French Revolution, was very different than what people, John Locke was writing about, or David Hume

in the British Isle Enlightenment.

They were much more radical.

And, you know, nobody in America was saying we're going to change

the days of the week or the month or the foundational year or we're going to change the names of people or we're going to let out prisoners or we're going to destroy the Catholic Church or the Protestant Church.

None of that.

It was a beginning of a very capable middle class that felt they had worked very hard.

They had all this open land.

They were prosperous.

And they felt that people far distant away A, had no business to tell them that they had to be taxed for their own protection because they didn't feel they needed any protection.

The French and Indian War had told them they fought pretty well.

So why should they be taxed to pay for a colonial governor they didn't need and troops they didn't want?

And so it was a pretty good message.

And Britain's idea was, well, your subjects, and people had warned George III and Lord North, you can't win.

There's no way in the world.

I mean, Washington, you could argue, lost every battle he fought almost, but he was central to the victories because he had that one.

If I can survive at Valley Forge, forget about Philadelphia, that's just one city.

Forget about New York.

We can take it back, but don't give up and just make sure we get French support, Spanish support.

And at one time, there was only, after Valley Forge, there was only 5,000 people.

That was when

we almost lost.

But as long as he was able to keep the revolution going, all of the long-term factors that would determine success were in our favor.

He was a great man, Washington.

He's radically underestimated because we don't know as much about him as we do Lincoln and other presidents.

But the idea that he kept that coalition of, you know, he had some pretty brilliant generals, too.

If you look at Gates and Green and Knox, you know, and compare them to Cornwallis and Gage on the other side.

So we were very lucky that we had good commanders.

Well, I have a question about that because you said they understood the British way of war.

And yet, when the British first show up, and I think it's the Battle of Brooklyn, it's, you know, out on the island, and

they fought, but

the British commander just sent George Washington's troops into disarray.

I mean they they couldn't do anything against that.

Yes, but they had they but by the time they were forming

because the revolution broke out in 1775

and they won the Battle of Saratogan at 1777

and they'd won decisively Yorktown, I guess, 1778.

So it wasn't very long.

They learned, they had known about the, it was really because they had a Prussian drill masters that taught them how to drill and order, and they had French

supplies and encouragement, but they understood, they had fought with the British in the French and Indian War, and they understood how the British fought conventional weapons, but they warfare, but they also waged a simultaneous

unconventional war.

That wasn't going to determine that, yeah, if to you're going to win the war, you have to take a huge British army of 17,000, 20,000 people and destroy them on the field of battle and humiliate them.

They did that.

They didn't destroy them, but they just humiliated them at

York.

And that was it.

But part of the, that was why the revolution was going to win.

But part of the reason the British got disheartened is they could not stop insurrectionary activity outside the battlefield.

That means if they had a colonial outpost in a small part of Massachusetts or New York or

Virginia, it could be attacked in unconventional ways by American raiders, the Green Mountain Boys

or Swamp Fox and those people.

And they had popular support.

And

there were atrocities, you know, that were committed against the population, not to harbor them, but not to the extent that modern warfare, as you saw in Germany or Italy or Japan, what the Japanese did in China or what the British did, I mean, the Germans did in Russia or Poland, for example.

So

we were very lucky.

We were very lucky we had Washington as a commander, both political and military.

We were very lucky we had, as I said, people like Knox, the artillery officer, John Paul Jones on the high seas,

very great.

military, naval commander.

And then you had people who were they weren't the peasants that stormed the Bastille is what I'm trying to say.

They were very educated, hardworking,

a leadership, and they had a yeoman class of farmers that were independent, autonomous, and were very capable.

Yes.

And when they won, they were also very capable of writing a constitution.

They're often referred to as the constitutionalists.

So they had a whole class of people that were used to writing such constitutionalism.

That's what I don't understand about the whole left-wing movement.

When you look at the people, John Jay, John Hancock,

Madison, Monroe,

Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, there's never been people like that before.

They were just amazing.

They were a product of the British legal and political tradition and the confidence of, you know,

almost 200 years on their own in this brutal North American continent.

And out of that mixture, they created these very confident, very educated, very practical people who had a very cynical view of human nature.

And they created this checks and balance system.

Nobody's ever been able to emulate it.

And how

you would attack those people as racist, slaveholder, what would be the alternative?

What is the alternative?

There's no alternative.

You can go anywhere around the world.

What was Africa doing at this time?

What were

Native Americans?

They always talk about the Iroquois Council.

That was just a bunch of people getting together and saying, How do we split up the loop?

And then that's not democracy.

I'm sorry.

And, you know, Plato said that.

He said, Yeah, democracy is in everybody's brain.

When thieves blob a bank, then they split up the loop.

But that doesn't, that majority vote is innate to people, but it's not a system.

And

so there was no alternative.

There was nothing like them.

And so, and yes, some of them own slaves.

And the word slave is from Slav.

And during this period, from essentially 1500 to 1800,

there was about 17 million slaves sent from Africa to the Middle East.

And there was about 11 million sent, or maybe 10 million, I think that's a high number, to the New World, many of them to Brazil and the Caribbean.

But the Ottoman Empire had enslaved, for its 500 years, probably about

somewhere between 40 and 50 million southern Russians and Balkan people.

And that's where the word came into currency.

And

so

slavery wasn't necessarily, it had been there from antiquity.

It was not race-based until the exploration.

Then when people resurrected the Aristilian

idea that there were people who were natural slaves that deserved it.

That's what Aristotle said.

Slavery is morally acceptable if people use enslaved the right people.

And people kind of rejected that in antiquity.

Alcadamus, the rhetorician, said no man was ever born a slave.

So they went to Africa, they saw people who didn't have sophisticated navigation, middle aged, and they said, well, they're natural slaves.

It wasn't based on race base, that

they're black.

They could have been pink.

And the Ottomans had the same idea that people who were not Muslims are morally inferior, racially inferior, and they were poor people in the Balkans, and as I said, around the Black Sea, and they just enslaved them en masse.

Whether it's the sultan's mother in the harem or the janissary who's kidnapped at six or the grand vizier or the people who were the miners or died being worked to death on Islamic farms.

But

that's too complicated for America at this point in its life surround.

We just have to have a binary of you're a victim, you're going to pay, and

you're a victimizer, you're going to pay, and you're going to have to confess and apologize, and I'm a victim, and I get stuff from you, and we're going to make new rules.

And that doesn't work.

Well, since you brought up slavery, some of the, there were slaves that fought, I think, on both sides

in the American Revolution.

So

how significant was that?

I think at Yorktown, maybe.

There was a lot of American blacks that had a prominent role as early as Bunker Hill, Lexington.

But

that goes back to antiquity.

You know, every Greek coplite had a, I guess you'd call him a Batman, a doulos, or an oikites, a household or farm slave that went to war with him.

And the Spartans had the Helatai, the Helots, and there were 10,000 of them that

may or may not have showed up at the Battle of Plataea, depending on the source.

But slaves were always attached to their master, and they tended to follow

that master's political beliefs.

The British had a propaganda idea that they were going to liberate slaves only because

they didn't need them.

But

the British were very enlightened people.

They were soon to outlaw the slave trade.

But this idea that the American Revolution or the discovery of America was based on the

to perpetuate slavery and the British were these anti-slavery idealists fighting these racist Americans.

It's just a joke.

Yeah.

And finally, then too, how about the Native American role in this revolution?

Well, that was a tribal role.

It depended on the particular tribe you belonged to, Iroquois or Mohawk.

But that started with a French-Indian War in 1753 because as I said, the French were outnumbered 30 to 40 to 1 in North America, in Quebec.

And they wanted their independence.

And of course, Britain was going to consolidate all of North America.

It kind of given South America to Spain, but it wanted to get, I think the deal was that

they were trying to get Spain out of

everything east of the Mississippi.

And then Spain would have west of the Mississippi in the south, and France could finagle in the northern part.

But it was to get the entire eastern seaboard from way up in north all the way down to Florida as British.

And that was a result of

the Seven Years' War in its theater in the United States.

And so

when you have If you're in the American Revolution, if you're fighting the Seven Years' War against the British to maintain an enclave of an autonomous France in the New World, then

you have to have Native American troops.

And that's what they did,

irregular.

So the French were able to appeal much more easily to Native Americans because their message was we hate the British and they're colonialists and just we just want to be free like you do.

So if we win, you get to have everything.

And they didn't have enough people.

They had no idea that they were ever going to have two or three million people and colonize and make a huge French nation here like the British did.

So obviously, if you're a Native American, you should throw in your lot with the French because if they win, then you win.

And

they had a common hatred of the British.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, the treaty was signed, I think, in 1783.

It's called the Treaty of the Treaty of Paris.

And I think that that was one of the things that the Native Americans were very lucky that the colonists came from this contract tradition that was honored.

So when the treaty was signed, it was going to be honored.

And when the Americans then in turn made treaties with the Indians,

they were honored.

And

I think that was, I always say, I know that

they were treated very badly, but given that the period of the times,

when you have one Native American to 200 200 square miles in North America and you have 200 Europeans per square mile in the slums of Dublin or London, you know what I'm saying, or Paris,

and they have the ability to go to this other land and the people in that land don't have the ability to navigate to go to Europe or vice versa, then you have a nation, and that's what happens.

That's the same thing with Native American tribal wars.

So it wasn't that one side was morally superior.

It was just that

there was all this open land and there was very few Native Americans, given the size of the land.

There were millions of them, but as far as population density, it was very small.

And so there was obviously going to be an exodus of exploited poor people from Europe that would get on ships and go and find all this land.

When you say it all, all of the 70 years of the fierce American-Indian wars, when it was all said and done, here we are, and there's nine million, I think, nine or ten million Native Americans today.

And

reservation land, as I understand it, is larger than 30 states.

If it was an independent state, it's almost autonomous, it's larger than 30 of the independent states, not put together, but equal.

So

the Native American reservations, I think, rank something like 29 of all the states.

Excuse me, they make about 19 as far as autonomous region and square mileage.

And of course, that's a lot of land.

A lot of it's very rich.

And they continue to,

you know, the casinos and everything.

So

it's not a nice, it wasn't an easy thing.

It wasn't,

there was atrocities on both sides, but the point was that

that tradition treated native peoples

a little better than the alternative.

If you look at what they're talking about,

that was my point.

I was going to say, if the Chinese had conquered them, there would have been no contract tradition by which they could or the Spanish or Cortez.

When Cortez went into Tenochtitlan,

he oblittered it.

He obliterated it block by block.

There was an Aztec nation of 4 million people.

And when he was done, there was probably 50,000 people left.

And, you know, I mean, in the Mexican subcontinent, there was probably

over 70 years, seven to eight million people died of whooping cough or pneumonia or malaria or yellow fever, etc.

But

on the other hand, if you read Bernal Diaz or Gomorrah or any of these early chroniclers, they looked at the

Aztecs and they said, we can beat these people because they're horrific people.

And the Flax Calons are their big rivals and they're harvesting thousands of young children and sacrificing tearing their hearts out eating them they're cannibals and they sacrifice they're murderers in an industrial sense and so that cortez only

we're getting off topic but he never had at any one time more than 1500 people

His army at one point got to 2,500, but that was after it was 1,500, then it went up, and then it was completely obliterated at the Nochatriste.

Not complete, but he lost 800 men.

And then when he went back the next year and conquered them, he only had 1,500, but he had 40,000 Clax Cowan.

And so

when people look at history like that, people that say, well,

Cortez was a monster, maybe, maybe not, but they should ask themselves, why did so many Native Americans want to exterminate the Aztecs?

They had wanted to before Cortez got there.

What did the Aztecs do to their neighbors that made them hate it?

Well, was it because they sacrificed people?

No, they all did that.

Was it because they ate people?

No, they all did that.

But the difference was they did it on a scale that nobody had ever seen before.

Thousands of people.

And that was intolerable.

Yeah.

Well, to get back to the Native Americans, so they were,

I mean, I know, like you said, there were atrocities on both sides, and there were contracts made with Native Americans that were broken at times.

But nonetheless, what they could get, they could eke out because of that contract tradition, which they wouldn't have been able to do with any other power that had

the same thing today.

That's human nature being what it is.

The more magnanimous you are, the more you're hated.

I mean, there's an old,

I grew up farming with Sikhs, very capable Indian immigrants.

And I once was talking about somebody, I was out irrigating, and I said to my Sikh neighbor, whom I liked a lot, a great deal.

I liked him a lot, tough as nails, but he taught me a lot about human nature and farming.

I came home one day and I said, hey, this SOB,

I voted to hire that guy.

And then he came into my office and bitched about how people were cruel to him and the department.

I went over and talked to the chairman on his behalf.

And then,

you know, I told him I was supposed to peer review his class.

And as soon as that guy got tenure, he turned on me and

he's trying to get me fired.

And you know what the guy told me?

My Sikh friend,

well, what good ego?

I'm going to emulate his accent.

Victor, Victor, Victor,

what good deed have you done to him lately?

Tell me what it was.

I go, what do you mean?

He said, well, tell me what you did that was good.

Because when you do something good, they hate you.

And he said, this is an old Sikh saying, what good thing have I done to earn such hatred?

I mean, every culture has that aphorism, but the way he just automatically said it

was shocking.

Well, we had a lot of people.

It's a little bit revealing.

Well, I mentioned, I think, on a podcast that he stole my water for five years on a communal ditch.

And each time that I I let it go, he took more and more.

And finally, I got a shotgun and locked it with a padlock and went out and confronted him.

And he said, now we can be friends.

Now we can be friends.

In other words, you've been very nice to me.

So I have nothing but utter contempt for you.

But if you're going to pull your shotgun on me, I want to be friends with you.

Yes.

So my point is that.

I am a Christian that believes in the power of the Sermon on the Mount, but I understand that most people don't in the world outside of the West.

And so, Victor, we are going to go to a break and we're going to come back and talk a little bit more about agriculture in the West and tractors in particular.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

We're back.

And Victor, so in this segment, this weekend edition, we usually try to get some agriculture in.

And I know that you wanted to talk about tractors today so

go ahead let us know about the importance of tractors

well i was born on this where i'm speaking today in 1953

and i had three brothers i had a twin brother and he was very athletic alfred he's a wonderful athlete and i had a cousin that we kind of

Their mother died very early and they kind of, we were kind of like brothers.

So he was their Reese and he was very athletic.

And then I had an older brother who's a writer now.

All three are still alive.

And he was very athletic.

But I was kind of, I don't know what you'd call it, the ugly duckling.

I mean,

they had 20, 20 eyesight, and I had 2,400, and I was almost blind.

I had thick glasses.

They were all right-handed.

and I was left-handed, right?

And they were naturally, I was not a bad athlete.

I played sports, but you know, if we played football, I was on the JVs and Alfred, my twin, who was smaller than I, was on the varsity.

If we went out for baseball, he was first string shortstop and I was second string first base, right?

So I went into things like wrestling just because I thought I would be better at it.

But my point is, they would always ask me to play because we had two and two, right?

We needed two guys to play two guys in basketball.

And I'd always say, no, I want to read a book.

So my mom goes, he's just different.

Leave him alone.

He's reading Gibbons' Decline of the Roman Empire.

And I was like, nine.

And they said, oh, you're come on.

He's

quitter.

And I would go out and play.

And then, but one of the things I always was inquisitive.

So I'd go to my grandpa.

What's that tractor's name?

So

I tried to get an encyclopedic knowledge.

And so we grew up.

with Ford tractors at first.

And my grandfather would always tell me, we had these things called 9N.

I know some of you are listening grew up in a form.

A 9N was really the first revolutionary tractor in the world.

Ford put it out, and they'd had, the Ferguson Company in England had invented something that was radical.

It was called the hydraulic three-point hitch.

You probably know that, Sammy.

You grew up on a farm.

And that meant you could put a disc, you could put a cultivator, you could put a spring, a harrow, anything, and you just back up to it.

And it has a three-point.

You put the two prongs on the side, you put the tongue in the middle, and then it had a hydraulic lift.

You could lift it up.

That means you could back up with it because the implement would go above the ground.

That was revolutionary.

Oh, I didn't know the name of it, but yes, we did have a tractor.

There were these little tiny Ford.

You know, where I got so attached that like 1983, I was farming, and we needed things to pull bins.

So I said, Dad, we should just go buy a 9N.

And he said, Yeah, he grew up on one, my father.

So he and I went to an auction and bought one for a thousand bucks.

And they were 25, no overhead valves,

horse I think 20 horse

it didn't have an alternate course you could you could fix the brushes yourself on the generator when they'd go out about every I don't know 200 hours it was really simple and it started up and it was a little four cylinder putt putt and then my grandfather got excited he said they got an 8N that was in

that was before I was born this this 9N came out in 39 so when I was about 12 my they let us drive

the ADN.

And you could put your foot

on the struts that, you know, so you didn't have to touch the steering wheel.

You could put your, it had long struts.

When you turn the wheel, these long shafts guided the front wheels, but you could do it with your own feet.

We used to do that.

And it would pull these little tiny discs.

And then suddenly, I think it was 1946, they came out with this Jubilee, and they had, as the Ford Jubilee, the NAA, and that was a radical

invention because it had overhead valves and the horsepower went up I think to 38 or 40 with that four-cylinder engine.

And more importantly, my grandfather would talk about, and that's the one that I started driving a lot, it had an independent PTO shaft, power takeoff.

And the power takeoff is that comes off the crankshaft.

It's the back of the tire, and you can put things on it.

So it spins around.

You can put a pump on it.

But on the old ones, it was the same as the hydraulic.

So if you were using the hydraulic lift, that came off the PTO shaft.

And you couldn't use the PTO, but with the

Jubilee, you could put an implement like a sulfur machine on,

or you could put hoses on the

separate hydraulic.

So he had a separate hydraulic system that didn't rely on the PTO shaft.

And that was the foundation of the modern tractor.

And then, gosh, when I started, I think I was 11 or 12, they let us go.

My grandfather and the hired men, Manuel George and Joe Carey, who's a Native American, and Manuel was part Mexican and Portuguese.

And they taught us how to drive a tractor.

And we would, not the big disc, but we would furrow out furrows with it.

And I remember my brother, I had a

Ford 600, and that was up to 40 horsepower.

This was like a 1963

Ford, and we had a little all over gas, and then things really heated up by the time I got to high school.

Boy, we got a Ford 4000, and that was a three-cylinder British Ford that had, I think it had 48 horsepower, and that would pull a pretty good disc.

And then I got fascinated because there were all these brands.

Tractors were great because they were not just, you know, monopoly.

It was like the early days of cars so my neighbor chuck had a david brown that was a british tractor and that was before i think david brown um

david brown sold out to

hold on alice chalmers oh wait i'll get it straight there was a david brown that was absorbed and then there was the oliver was olivers were originally

an American company, but they had Italian affiliates.

And we had one of the first diesel Olivers.

They were wonderful tractors.

I drove that for hours.

And then it was bought out by White.

And then

I think David Brown was bought out by Case,

Case tractors.

But I saw, we had neighbors with David Brown's.

We had neighbors with Olivers.

We had neighbors with White's.

And we always had Ford's.

And then when I started farming, My brother really liked Massey Ferguson's because they had this Perkins engine.

It was wonderful diesel.

So we had Massey 265 that was at like 60 horsepower at the PTO.

And then we had a Massey 275.

I don't know if we had a 285, but

they would really have a lot of power and they didn't heat up.

Weren't they dangerous though?

Like their front tires could pop off the ground.

The thing about all tractors is, yes, the thing about all tractors is if you have flat land and you know what you're doing, they're perfectly safe.

But we have a lot of hills on our, we had a lot of hills.

And you have tractor weights, 50 pound, 100 pound, 150, that you put on the bumper, the front.

And a lot of guys

feel

that they,

you know, they take a lot of horse, they take some of your horsepower and your fuel efficiency to have all that weight, two or three hundred pounds.

Yes.

But they, because the tractor back tractors are so big, they're inherently unstable, right?

Yes.

This is before a four-wheel drive, but so a lot of people would take those weights off.

And I know at least two neighbors that put very heavy sulfur machines on the back of the tractor, and then they started to go up and they started to tip over

on a hill.

And I had one case where

I

had gopher holes all over the orchard, and I didn't know it, and they were right below the surface, and there had been a leak in the pipeline, and the water was going, and I was going, I had tractor weights, and the two back

wheels fell into like a little cavern about three feet deep.

And I had the tractor pointed up in the air.

And luckily, and the wheels were spinning.

But it's very dangerous because you've got so many things going on at once.

You've got the hydraulic system, you've got the PTO.

I'll give you just two examples.

And

I was in a very nihilistic mood when I graduated with a PhD because there was no jobs for white males.

And there was no jobs anyway from a classical philologist.

Can you imagine that in the San Joaquin Valley?

And I wanted to come back.

I was taking care of my 93-year-old grandmother

who had Alzheimer's.

And anyway, to make a long story short, I was learning, relearning how to drive a tractor from my youth, but they were much more advanced and powerful.

I had been away from, I lived in Europe and I was at graduate school for 10 years.

When I came back, my brother was farming and my other, and I had to learn again.

And boy, that first year, I'll give you two examples.

I had a beautiful Airedale dog.

And one thing you never do, if you've got anything pulling, turning on that PTO, you don't have a dog go with you.

And this dog was a wooden mind.

And I had something called a pack tank.

That's a 150-gallon spray where you spray Roundup with a wand as you're driving.

And the PTO powers it, turns around.

It has a plastic cover.

And I

stopped because there was a leak, and I went around the back.

The PTO shaft was still, I turned the pump off, but it was still turning.

And my dog, and in friskiness, when he got off the tractor, that dog ran over and she had such thick hair, it caught in the collar of the PTO shaft in one nanosecond.

It took her one

circle, one rotation around, and threw her 10 feet in the air and broke her neck in two seconds.

And it was

I know it.

I just freaked out.

And then the next year, I was putting on a very toxic,

it was surfland, it was pre-emergent, but I can't remember, it was Paraquat, I think.

And I was having, probably getting pressure.

And one thing you never do is you go back to

a spray tank and

when it's under pressure, you should turn it off or you should put it, you know, cut the pump off if you're running it to agitate.

You have to keep agitating or the chemicals will collect at the bottom.

So I was agitating, but I wanted to have the pump on so I could see where the leak was, you know, because my pressure was going down and I couldn't hear.

Nobody in those days wore protective equipment.

We're talking, you know, 45 years ago.

I had no earmuffs.

I had no protection.

I had no goggles, no mask, no plastic suit like they have.

There was no closed system where you get your chemical

can and you put a hose into the sprayer and you don't touch it.

You just took it like it was milk and poured it in and splashed everywhere.

And anyway, the point is with these tractors are very powerful.

They have big pumps.

And I went back to look at the leak and I could see a pin hair.

It was shooting up in the air and I touched it and it blew apart.

And I had

150 pounds, 100 pounds of pressurized pesticide, pre-emergent herbicide and on paraquat spray my entire body and

almost immediately

I could taste like a salmon taste in my mouth.

It was that strong.

And

unfortunately, that was the year I had a part-time Latin class.

I had just started.

So, from my wrist to my shoulder, it was pure orange.

It's kind of like Agent Orange.

And I went to cloud and somebody said, Well, they thought I had put tannin ocean on.

I went to the doctor and, you know, I had a really good doctor.

And he said, Well, you know, they say this has an element of, he looked it up, said, it's got a little bit of

Agent Orange, but you'll be okay.

You're young.

You're not developing as a kid.

You won't get cancer.

But

I was dyed orange for about a month, and that was very dangerous.

And we had an Alice, I loved Alice Chambers.

We got an Alice Chambers 7000.

We call it Big Boy.

I mean, it's not very big, but for us it was.

And it's 100 horsepower.

Remember, horsepower is torque, really, in a diesel tractor.

So that thing won't stop.

And so it had a bad habit of going into gear when you put it neutral.

And my cousin got off it to go take a leak, so to speak, and he left it neutral.

And we ran out there and it went into gear on itself.

And it headed the tractor shed was

maybe 20 yards away.

It hit the tractor shed and then it dug in and it started to go up the wall.

And then it flipped all the way back on its back with everything and it was still going

how did you guys turn it off we did we climbed in it but we i thought it was just going to plow it off right but it didn't i thought it would go through it but it had it was one of the it was my grandfather's original shed so it had an old one by 12 redwood and then we had another layer and then we'd had plywood on it so it had three walls so it didn't break it it was going so slow it just it went and made a 360.

and can you imagine that thing it was it would have killed anybody we did all sorts of stuff like that.

And, you know, my brother cut the tip of his finger off once.

And my dad was kind of reckless.

He thought he was always back on a B29.

We had a display that wouldn't come off.

I tried and tried.

And his answer to everything is: put heat on it.

I said, Dad, it's got internal bearings.

It's got grease in there.

Put heat on it.

We had a neighbor, one of our best friends, came over and he said, Bill, be careful.

So my dad heated the display up, right?

And

it expanded the grease inside the bearing.

Oh, okay.

And it just shot across and it hit Chuck in the stomach and the chest.

It saved his life, the disc, but it was lucky because it was the curved surface.

So it was like a hoplite shield.

And it just went across the shed and hit him and knocked him flat, knocked the air out.

I thought we killed him.

Yeah.

And I said, Dad, I think we killed Chuck.

Oh, my God.

He goes, wow.

No, you just got the air knocked out.

We got the nail.

We got the disc blade off.

That's all.

Oh, my God.

It was pretty tough.

He was pretty tough, my dad.

Boy.

You know,

he was really, but I learned about, I love tractors.

I would, I would just, I would go scout around.

We bought all sorts of used tractors.

I loved Cases and David Brown's and Alice Chalmers and Massey Ferguson's and Ford's and White's and Cases and everything.

And it was really, that's what made the ranch go.

And my grandfather, when I always talked to him, he said, boys, I have 135 acres.

And

when I woke up one morning and I got a 9 in in 1939, guess what?

I had the old Fortson and I had 60 acres put into production.

I said, what do you mean, production?

You owned it.

He said, well, where do you think I got the hay to feed all the horses to plow the vineyards in the orchards?

Oh,

that makes sense.

Yeah.

Half this farm was producing alfalfa just to fuel the horses.

And my poor aunt that was crippled from life at seven, Lila, she was such a wonderful person, and she was brilliant, but she was completely contorted.

She couldn't walk, and she'd gone to the Shriners Hospital in San Francisco, and they did 17 operations to break her bones in those days, and it just made her into a shell of a person.

But she was brilliant.

She'd always say to me, oh, I wish we had Molly Buster back.

I said, who are Molly and Buster?

Well, we used to have the most

biggest horses, these big work horses, and daddy would put the plow on it.

It was so wonderful.

They weren't like these stinking diesel tractors.

Oh, yes.

But it does show you what fossil fuel consumption does, horse.

I know.

It almost immediately tripled or doubled production because land was no longer fed for animals.

And the horse population just

diminished, and we were using much more production.

And then the second thing, of course, was nitrogen fertilizer, chemical fertilizers.

And

all of you there who say, well, we should use only organic fertilizers.

I did that on 20 acres.

And I loved manure.

It stopped nematodes, but it brings in weeds and it's stinky and it's bulky.

And something about just going on a tractor in fifth or sixth gear with

a fertilizer rig on the back when you're putting little droplets of calcium nitrate in, you know, and pressure,

everything gets bigger.

Same thing with

organophosphate and organochloride pesticides.

I didn't like them, but when you've got hopper that desiccating all your grape leaves and you go through there with that satanic Dibron 7 dust and they just fall on the ground behind you, you know, that was where Bhopal Paul India, that terrible accident in India, was at a seven seven plant.

That was a horrible, horrible thing.

But

I don't know.

I keep thinking that that period between 1965

and 1978,

85, before we got serious about the dangers.

You know, I was just thinking of all the people that grew up in this farm.

My mom

died at 66 of a brain tumor.

My daughter died at 27 of leukemia.

My sister-in-law grew up in the farm here.

She died at 51 of leukemia.

My aunt, who grew up, died at 49 of breast cancer.

I just wonder if that was genetic or it was just all that period.

Because now, I mean,

by a magnitude of 10, we lose less pesticides.

I watched the guys that put it on the almond orchard.

They put on less a year than we used to put on a month, everybody.

And there's so many things that are banned now.

They don't have anything like arsenic or nicotine or,

you know, diazonon.

Well, they still use diazona, but dimethoate and parathion.

I saw my neighbor with parathion.

That thing scared me.

That was kind of a Zygon B and it was a successor to the...

the German chemical industry that was used in the Holocaust.

But when he had a tank of parathion in and it leaked, because they all leak, they say they don't, but they used to all leak.

Dropped off.

It was right after a rain, and he came by and started talking to me, and he had his rig, and I could see it dropping.

There were puddles all along the alleyway, right?

Yeah.

And he went away, didn't think of it.

The next day, I found two dead birds in those petal puddles.

They had drank it.

Yeah.

Yeah, they just keeled over.

It was, Ike always called parathion and paraquat liquid death.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, we're at the end of the show.

I'd like to thank you and a nice wander through the past and through the fields of agriculture.

French and Indian war and tractors and paraquat and Donald Trump's indictment.

Well, thank you and thanks to the listeners as well.

We're trying to be eclectic.

I got a good, I'm getting sensitive because I got a good

email from someone.

It said, don't mention Clapper and

Brennan anymore, Victor.

You made your point.

Well, Well, we didn't mention Clapper or Brennan in this episode.

I like people.

And

we're going to do some shows because I got to go for Hillsdale.

I really love Hillsdale College.

And I'm going to go on this three, 17-day speaking part on their cruise to Istanbul, 16-hour flight to Istanbul

and on Turkish Airlines, and I'll come back.

And we're going to broadcast some question and answers from everybody.

We haven't done that.

Jack has done that with me a little bit, but we have a lot on the website.

All right.

Well, we'll do that.

Yeah.

All right.

Thank you very much.

And thanks to our listeners.

Thank you, everybody.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen.

We're signing off.