Venetian Wars, Soros DAs and Leftist Angst

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Hello, everyone.

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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 Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

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Victor, so we usually try to start off.

This is the Saturday edition, so we are going to be talking about historic, at least at some point, a historical

moment in history.

And this time it's going to be the Venetian wars and centered on the battle at Lepanto.

And so we'll get to that.

But I wanted to start off, as we usually do, with something positive.

And I thought that the resignation of the Soros-backed Rachel Collins, a

GA, a prosecutor, she's resigned after a month-long investigations for ethics issues.

And that's a great thing.

We got one of those Soros DAs.

Yeah, it's funny, though.

You know, she, but what I don't understand, why was she allowed to resign unless they're going to have an, I mean, why wasn't she indicted?

She took tickets as a quid pro quo to a basketball.

She lied to investigators.

She interfered in a local election.

And there was a lot of things in that.

that inspector general's report that were clear violations of the law.

So I hope that this resignation, they said you can quit, but

we're going to be looking at you for indicting you.

But I'm afraid they said, if we won't indict you, if you quit.

And so, again,

if that's true, it's asymmetrical because, I mean, what she did makes Alvin Bragg's case against Donald Trump or Letita James

case look like nothing.

So let's hope that something more follows.

It's glad that she resigned.

And, you know, when you look at all these prosecutors, 75 of them, they got rid of Boudin in San Francisco.

Gascon was recalled, but, you know, he can, you know, they fiddled around with the signatures and they threw them out.

And he'll be up, I think, for another recall.

Kim Fox is the one that was finagling around with, you remember, Juicy Smollett,

and she doesn't indict people who are guilty of crimes.

And we had the St.

Louis prosecutor who went after that couple with the guns, Alvin Bragg.

They're all over.

And there's one in Lewden County in Virginia.

And the strategy was really brilliant that nobody pays much attention to these races for city or county or attorney.

And for a very little amount of money,

you can impact

or achieve social change very

easily.

So a guy like Boudin ruined San Francisco.

That's what they want.

That was his job.

He did it.

Gascon has ruined Los Angeles.

Kim Fox has made sure that nobody wants to move into Chicago.

And on and on and on and on.

So it was, that was his strategy to get the most social deterioration for the least amount of money.

And he did.

And I think, and I think he played into every stereotype that he

the Soros people promulgated that myth that

both before and after George Floyd's death, that the police routinely killed black men, and there was no data to support that, at least inordinately in greater propensity than their statistics of coming in contact with police.

They said that black officers

don't shoot white people as many as black officers shoot.

white officers shoot black suspects.

That was not true.

And they got rid of basically the whole three strikes, broken windows mentality that had made these inner cities and downtowns very safe.

They destroyed it as they had planned.

And so

there's going to be a pushback because

the United States has about 40 or 50 of these great cities that are nexuses of commerce and finance and media, and they're dysfunctional.

They're either shut down or people are moved to the suburbs or they've just abandoned them.

And I say that as somebody that was recently

in places like, you know,

Washington, D.C., New York, but especially when I went to Seattle or Portland and San Francisco and Los Angeles, they took

they took the work of generations and destroyed it in just a couple of years.

And a lot of that has to do with their prosecutors and their mayors, and they both were recipients of Soros money.

He's a very strange person.

He's a nihilist.

In other words, as he gets older, he just wants to destroy things.

I guess he's bitter and he's angry, but he's a nihilist.

He's not quite, he's not even an anarchist.

And

it's.

Do you really think so?

You don't think he thinks in his mind he's doing good for people?

I don't think so.

I think he thinks.

Well, to the degree he's running it, I mean, he has people that dole out his money, that he has children.

No, I think he broke the Bank of England.

They really want to destroy the United States.

Well, he broke the Bank of England.

He understood that his speculation that, you know, he's a multi-billionaire and he's a felon in France.

And all of those things he did, he understood they have started out during World War II, you remember, as a young boy who helped his

mentor

merchandise or sell confiscated furniture and stuff from Jews.

Yeah.

So his

just something sinister about him that he likes to prey on

weak people or the naive, or he likes to disrupt things that are working that he doesn't feel,

I don't quite understand, or he wants a notoriety or he likes to be hated.

They've kicked him out of Eastern Europe for a variety of things, but

he's just a nasty person.

He belongs in one of the mouths of the devils in Dante's Inferno is what you're trying to tell me.

And that he doesn't

he's done a lot

he's done a lot of he's done a lot of damage I mean Mark Zuckerberg's done a lot of damage but he's done more and more maliciously so probably the most despised person in the United States George Soros yeah absolutely well let's turn then to the Chicago community leaders that we've been watching on our videos who are worried about these illegal immigrants coming into their community for two reasons they say we have no resources and money to take care of them and you're destroying our voter demographic.

And I thought that was very interesting that for me, I felt like that's a little bit too little, too late, you know, but what do you think, Victor, on that?

Well, there was, it was very embarrassing because,

number one, they confessed all these activists that were screaming at these rallies.

They were mad because they said we have a lockhold on our tribal monopoly vote.

And we can promise in our districts, we'll give a candidate basically 90%.

And then they give us stuff.

And you're going to come in and

very cynical

because they know the mind of the left because they are the mind of the left.

We're going to probably give you amnesty and you're going to be voting.

And then you're going to dilute our monopoly.

And then you might get a candidate elected that doesn't give us stuff.

He'll give you stuff.

So we don't want you here.

That was one thing.

It was

the other thing was

how cynical they are that as long as it's Hispanic communities along the border, they were just the black version of the white Martha's Vineyard people.

It was, oh, yes, I'm out, I'm Eric Adams in New York.

I'm going to go out to the buses and greet these young, wonderful illegals.

Ha ha, Donald Trump.

We're the city that can.

And then all of a sudden, there's one, two, 10, 50, 100 buses, and they're everywhere.

And the black community is angry at him.

And so that was, as long as they were somewhere else, then everybody in Chicago was for it.

But when it started to hit home to them, then they were against it.

And then the third irony was,

again,

this was supposedly the writ against white people, like the Martha's Vineyard people, that not in my backyard.

but other people of color and marginalized communities were, they believed in social cohesion and brotherhood and helping and the Rainbow Alliance.

So, under their paradigms, Hispanics are oppressed people of color, right?

This is the new diversity coalition.

But they were acting like,

you know,

Buffy and Mitt, some Ivy League couple or something that said, I don't want these people around me.

Their culture is different.

And that was very ironic.

And you can see the whole diversity thing is going to to start as the white population decreases.

And here in California, there's no

the white population is not 51%.

No group is, but Hispanics are getting very close.

As that starts to happen and other groups start to contest, you're going to see a lot more tension than people had anticipated.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, in addition to that, just broadly, the border,

this is getting really crazy just watching the droves of people that are coming in.

And it just amazes me that,

and you can tell me I'm crazy, but that our government isn't doing anything.

I mean, they got 1,500, I guess, soldiers that they've sent down to go do data entry and administrative things at the border, but there's absolutely no effort to

slow it down, go down there and build a whole bunch of huts for the people coming in.

I don't know what the left wants to do.

I know the right, we have the example of Donald Trump, who really stopped the border, but what's going on here?

Well,

it's that old Latin phrase of

that when you try to find out who the criminal suspect is,

the Roman inspector would say, qui bono or qui prodest.

Who does it benefit?

So when you look at the scene of the crime and you say it's just awful or we can't, yeah, because we don't have an interest in it other than being citizens and we don't want to profit off it.

But we as citizens, we're concerned that it hurts the country because we don't have the money to bring in six, seven million people without English, without a high school diploma, without capital, without diversity, and without legality and assimilate, integrate them very quickly into productive citizenship.

It's very hard to do with those numbers.

And they're going to tax and overwhelm our social services at the expense of American citizens.

So that's our interest.

But

the reason it exists in the Roman sense is who are the people who are benefiting after more than the people

who object, then it's going to keep on going.

So we start with the Mexican government.

I couldn't believe Joe Biden the other day said his partner was President Obrador.

No, he's not.

We talked about that.

He's not.

He gets $60 billion in remittances.

He's got 40 million people he brags about that he sent to the United States, he and his predecessors.

And he says that they should vote Democratic.

And if you're one of an expatriate, I know a lot of people who were born in Mexico, they talk very nostalgically about Mexico.

As long as they don't have to go to Mexico, none of them go back to live in Mexico.

And he knows that.

So he's creating a powerful lobbying force that he

expelled and bragged about it, basically.

And he loves them to leave.

And this type of wave, unlike the 1950s and 60s and 70s, is not northern Mexico.

These are people from Chiapas.

And as I said,

Indigenous people that have a lot more need

and a lot more, they need a lot more help.

And so

he doesn't want to help them.

He doesn't want to spend social services in those

states of southern Mexico, down on the border with Guatemala.

So he sends them all here as a safe, Frederick Jackson Turner safety valve theory of the West, you know, that you're not going to have a revolution in America because go West is where Greeley said.

Well, go to his attitude is go north, young man.

Don't go to Mexico City and protest.

So they benefit from that.

And then the cartels,

$10 billion, that's a good thing.

If they kill off 100,000 Americans, they kind of think, oh, that's payback for the Mexican war.

Ha ha.

And what he say the other day, Obador?

Well, it's not like your people are forced to take the drugs.

And that's why they, and that's why they deliberately, in some cases, use them to flood out the Xana.

I don't think they're deliberately killing the people, but they put them in Xanax or Atavan or coding forms so that people get a little hot, think they'll get a high and they're buying code or Attavan and they can expand their market.

And then, so the Mexico, and then who are the people in the United States?

Well, if you've got a big corporate farm, you need strawberry pickers, you got a meat packing plant, or you're a landscaper and you're remodeling homes, you need hardworking people, or you're in construction, you need roofers or framers, or

you're in, you got a big hotel, and you need cooks, and maids, and cleaners, janitors,

or you're Mr.

Upper middle class and you want somebody to cook your meals or watch your kids.

All of those people feel that they like people who work from anywhere from $10 to $15 an hour.

They're not unionized.

They get ill or sick.

You just throw them back into the social network and the public takes care of them.

So if Maria has been, you know, she's been cleaning your house when she was 18, she works for 10 bucks an hour.

You pay her in cash.

She's done a wonderful job.

And then all of a sudden she gets a tumor when she's 36.

She's illegal.

You just say, well, that's what Medi-Cal is for.

Go, we'll see you.

I'm sorry.

I can't keep paying you.

There's no retirement, nothing.

But I gave you a bunch of clothes.

I gave you a bassinet and stuff.

So bye.

Hey, by the way, on the way out, can you tell me if you have a cousin who'll come up and take your place?

That's how it works.

I've seen it work that way.

So

there's Americans, and then you've got the political,

you've got the political class.

So you've got the most extreme are the la razas

and they

la

razistas and they feel this is psychologically payback for the Mexican War of 1846 to 8 that you know you took our land, we'll take yours.

I mean most of them have never been to Mexico.

Many of them don't speak Spanish anymore, but they have a vague idea of karma or payback.

But more importantly, they want a large Latino community because they're self-appointed Chicano studies professors or Chicano activists, Chicano caucus this, Chicano caucus that,

and they feel they're losing numbers to insidious upward mobility, assimilation, integration,

intermarriage.

That the Mexican-American community is the most likely, now more so than Asians, to marry out of their ethnic legacy.

So in the way of that leadership says, we got to get bring in fresh recruits if we're going to have permanent grievances against the dominant

culture.

So, and we're also flipping states.

And the Democrats say, well, yeah, well, that's okay.

But, you know, we flipped California, we flipped Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico.

We're almost ready to flip Texas and Arizona and Georgia.

So keep bringing them in.

We start getting periodic amnesties.

We

water down the voting laws, mail-in ballots.

10 million ballots are missing in California from the last election.

You can vote if you're illegal.

Don't worry.

And that's what the Democratic Party wants.

And the Democratic Party, if you read, as I said earlier, their earlier speeches in the 90s, they were worried about unionized workers that were against this, but not now.

So all those interests collide or collude.

And that's why Joe Biden thinks thinks he can get away with it yeah yeah but but if it gets so egregious that the black community says i don't like this because you're dumping them in my community or the suburbanite says you know what maria's a very good cook but i go down el camino and there's 50 or 200 winnebagos and they're starting to be parked in our neighborhoods and we don't like this and people have nowhere to shower go to the bathroom and there's junk everywhere And this is in Palo Alto, of all places.

Next thing it'll be in Woodside or Atherton.

How dare them?

Then it starts to get a, you know what I mean?

It's another problem.

And we're getting there.

And that's why I think some of the Democratic Party are starting to think, wow,

who's going to go tell old Joe?

Well, you can't tell old Joe because he doesn't know where he is.

So go talk to Jill and tell Jill that this transgendered stuff is starting to get some feminists angry because they

crusaded for women's sports.

And there's a lot of soccer moms.

Their kids are really good and they're sprinters and they're swimmers.

And all of a sudden, a guy shows up and it destroys all the work they've done.

They're not going to get into Harvard or Yale or Stanford or Overland or wherever they want to go on a scholarship.

They don't win.

And then all of a sudden, somebody goes to Joe and says, the black community in the larger cities

don't want all of these illegals.

It dilutes their marginalized person industry, and we don't want to do it.

And a lot of Hispanics are coming into the Biden and say, you know what, we have little villages, towns, communities,

cities that are Hispanic.

And all of a sudden, we get all these people, and you very condescendingly, in a racist fashion, say, well, they're your people, deal with it.

And we don't have the money or the resources.

And we don't really know these people.

We haven't been back to Mexico in 50 years or three generations in some cases.

You kind of like saying, hey, Victor, we're going to bring in a bunch of white people from Europe that are very poor.

They don't speak English and they have no skills.

And we're going to dump them in your community and you're going to like them because you're white.

No, I'm not.

I'm sorry.

And so that's a racialist condescension on the part of the left.

So they're getting it from all sides.

Can I ask you a historical question?

Yes.

It seems to me, I've mentioned this on earlier podcasts, that when you look at the pictures of people coming in, or they recently did a thing where they showed the rooms where they were keeping the illegal immigrants in, and they said, well, here's the young men, and it was just like packed way beyond what the room could hold.

And then they said, well, we have a room for pregnant women and there's a few in there, and we have a room for children, and there's a few more in there.

But this room with all these young men, 18 to 35 years old was absolutely packed which tells us again right that there's this large population of young men coming in and my historical question is isn't you know i don't know if there's a formal historical study or anything like that but isn't there a common knowledge or a common sense understanding that if you bring in a population of young men 18 to 35 years old and i'm i don't mean to be ageist here but it's significant significant that you got a lot of problems on your hands, especially if they're uneducated.

If you're saying what gender and what age group commits 75%, 80% of crime, yes, it's a male of any background

from 15 to 40, absolutely.

So that is a community.

If you're not going to audit them and you don't know who they are, what they've done in Mexico, and they're young men coming in here, that's going to be a problem.

But Joe Biden thinks they're not going to be up at Delaware, and Barack Obama thinks they're not going to be in his house in Hawaii or Martha's Vineyard.

And Diane Feinstein said they're not going to get up to Knob Hill or Presidio Heights or

her former Tahoe property.

Nancy Pelosi thinks, you know, we've got a nice wall at our place.

I stayed up in Napa, and we're going to do something about our San Francisco mansion so that break-in doesn't happen again.

That's how they think.

So they don't care.

But yes, it's very dangerous to bring in an asymmetrical young men.

And look what it's doing to Chiapas and Michokan and Oaxaca.

You're draining the young men, the future, you know, the family pillars out of those families.

So you're just leaving women and,

I guess, and kids and households with no male.

And we know from the inner city that that's disastrous to have males abandoned families.

It just doesn't work.

The children don't grow up with the same opportunities and are more liable to fail in school or to commit crime.

It's bad, bad, Sam.

Everything about it is bad, bad.

We haven't even talked about the poor legal immigrant from South Korea or Finland or

Uruguay who fills out the paper.

Yes, I can support myself.

Yes, I can speak English.

Yes, I have a high school diploma.

Yes, I have a cousin who sponsor me and will guarantee that I'm not on public support.

That's what asked them.

And you bring, and they can't get in.

They're backlogged.

And so it's really evil what's going on.

It's terrible.

And it's all designed by Joe Biden and the Democratic Progressive Project to get in constituents and to change the electoral makeup of the United States.

And then they brag on, as I keep saying, Lanny Davis and James Carvell and John Judas, they all wrote books on this.

They had variations in their subtitles or chapters or book titles.

They were called either Demography is Destiny

or they would call the New Democratic Majority or the New America.

And the subtext of all was, hey, white America, you're aging.

You're over with.

We've flooded the zone.

You're done.

Los Angeles is gone.

Southern California is gone.

California is gone.

Nevada's gone.

Just get with it.

Get over it.

And if you dare say that we're right, we're going to slander you as proponents of the great replacement theory, a racist concept.

That's how they operate.

Yeah, that is how they operate.

But I was thinking, you know, if we were to look back in history, I would say, well, okay,

we do see problems with young, you know, males when they're brought together in a...

you know,

an intensified unit, I guess you'd say, in places like Vietnam, for example.

I mean, not that our military was extraordinarily bad or anything in Vietnam, but they did bring pictures out like Milai, when you have, you know, that age demographic.

And in this case, in the case of Milai, well armed and, you know, unsure of what's in front of them.

I understand that.

And so, you know,

a little bit.

My point is they went a little,

but we do see in history that these points are, I was wondering where these scenes where we do have, we can evidence the problem of the

15 to 35.

They don't care.

I was wondering if you,

they don't care.

And they're getting the Republican establishment.

Did you hear what

Debbie Blabbermouth Schultz, quoting the late rush, Debbie Blabbermouth Schultz said the other day?

We're not, all the crops are going to rot in the field.

Nancy Pelosi kind of stumbled around.

Well, you won't send them north.

We need them down here.

And so, yes, males 15 to 40 inordinately commit crimes, but they also are 90% of the muscular labor.

And this society at this time, at this moment, there is no such thing in these twisted people's minds as a noble carpenter or a noble framer, a noble plumber, a

noble assembly line worker, a noble meatpacker worker.

That doesn't exist.

You got to, you know, Joe said that.

Hey, if you don't like to work in the oil field, you got to learn coding.

And Hillary said that when she went to West Virginia, we're going to get rid of all your jobs.

And so, yes, they need muscular labor because Americans don't feel it's ennobling or it doesn't, it's not compensation.

So this is why they're doing it.

They're basically telling these people: if you get to the United States, I've got a cousin or a brother or a friend who will get you a job in landscaping, meat packing, janitorial service.

You'll get on a roof.

You name it.

There's jobs.

We have a 3.2% unemployment rate.

And after COVID,

we have 5 million people, Sammy, who are out of the workforce with long COVID.

And people suggest that's half of the real number.

Speaking as somebody who had it and sometimes gets bouts of it, I can see that right now, if you said, Victor, I know you're 69, but will you get on your roof like I used to do last year before I got it and fix?

I say, no, I'm too dizzy.

So there's all sorts of reasons why we, and we have people who got accustomed to Zoom.

We got people who got accustomed to not showing up for work and getting free stuff.

So they haven't gone in the workforce.

So we're labor short.

So that's why it's one, that's really the main catalyst for this, that the Republican Chamber of Commerce right

and the political, tribal, ethnic left colluded.

And they each said, you know, open.

Why didn't the

Republicans never really made a big issue of it until it got so bad the optics were embarrassing?

I wrote Mexifornia the article in 2002

and the book in 2003.

And most of the critics, if you want to see who attacked that book, go read James Q.

Wilson reviewed it in the commentary and basically said I was a nativist.

It was all about bringing in people legally, assimilating them, integrating them, intermarrying them into the body of American citizenry.

And he said I was the late James Q.

Wilson said I was a nativist, essentially.

I got attacked more from the conservative right than the left, even.

And I had a lot of people call me out that were farmers, big farmers, big, big farmers.

Hey, what the hell are you doing, Victor?

Why'd you do stupid stuff like that?

Juan's the best tractor driver I've ever had.

You should see Lorenzo, man.

He can pick plums faster than anybody.

Why are you doing this?

So, yeah,

that's why it's open.

And the only constituencies against it is the American public, overwhelmingly, 65% wants the border closed and secured.

They don't have the cloud.

But the optics are so bad and it's such an insult.

insult to our collective intelligence to just see people walk across.

And by the way, I'd like to correct

one mythology.

I tried to do it with Mexico as the benevolent helper, it's not,

or the wonderful employer who wants to give people a chance to make, no, he's not.

He's cynical.

He wants the cheapest labor and the less benefits as possible.

And there is no rainbow coalition diversity people.

They want a tribal chauvinist population.

But this idea of the noble, I hear it on Fox all the time, the noble immigrant.

When you look at the board, oh, these people, what are they going to do?

What are they going to do?

They said to themselves, we're going north.

I know it's against the law to cross the border.

I don't give a blank.

And I know it's against the law to reside in that country without legal sanction.

I don't give a blank.

And I'm going to find a way, whether it's a fake ID or what, to continue because I'm out of here because

things are bad.

My cousin says they're great.

And that's not so noble.

If you had right now 6 million American poor Americans, what if you said to all the people in Fresno County or Appalachia that are very poor and white, just go down to Mexico?

What would they do?

Well, they would say this.

If you want to come to Mexico and build a big, beautiful home at Cabo

or along Baja Coast or Guadalajara, come down with all your money.

But if you're a poor white guy and you think you're going to come down here and try to get a job in our economy, no, we don't want you.

they would they would build the wall themselves

they sure would oh they would they would they they uh it's another big thing that people do not talk about and that is the spanish matzizo indigenous person matrix that has led to a lot of racial prejudice I've worked with a lot of people.

I can remember, I won't mention his name.

He said to me, we were working side by side in the fields.

He said, Victor,

you have a long shirt in your house.

And I said, why?

It's 95 degrees.

And I was very dark.

And he was too.

And he said, I don't want to look like a N-word.

And I have to keep, I don't want to look like an N.

That's what he said.

I've heard that a lot.

I've had

people who say,

I've had people who say, well,

yeah,

Herlinda has three children, and that's the Blanco one, and that's the blank one, and on skin color.

So it's a very racialized society going way back to the 15th century, 16th century.

And that's another thing that we don't talk about, but there's an element of racial prejudice because the people who are coming are not the Mexican city that lead.

These are not the people you meet in the university that brag about that they're related to Pedro Alvarado or something.

The bloodthirsty consequisto.

I had had a woman tell me that once.

They are indigenous people, indigenous people, dark people, short people, people who are at the butt of the end, the butt of a Mexican prejudice.

And that's why they are being encouraged to leave.

One of the many reasons by the elite in Mexico City.

And that's another thing we don't even talk about.

Yeah, we sure don't.

Well, Victor, we're going to take a break and come back and talk about the Venetian Wars and Lepanto.

Stay with us, and we'll be right back.

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This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show you're listening to, and this is the Saturday edition or the weekend edition.

And we look at a historical, we're on a campaign of historical battles.

And

today we want to look at the Venetian wars.

And that's something that I'm particularly interested in because Venice was, you know, as we all know, a small city-state, and yet it was so powerful and so skilled.

I just find, I hope that, Victor, as you talk about it, you can answer for us.

Why were they so skilled in what they did?

One thing that I remember from the Inferno is that in, I think it's Canto 22, Dante

creates an image of a

city that's building ships, etc.

And it's basically supposed to be Venice.

And so he puts that Venetian

war

shipping

military city in the lower or the middle cantos and circles of hell.

And so I thought that I always found that very interesting, but it certainly.

You know, Venice was not a prominent city in the Roman Empire because it was malarial and marshy, but during the collapse of civilizations, if I could be so reductionist in the fifth, sixth, seventh, the marshes were places of,

you know, it's up there on the top of the Adriatic Sea.

So it was kind of

out of the way and it was malarial, but that was of value because people, the way that they had controlled the entrance to the city was very hard to get into.

But the question you, why did it become so powerful?

It's the answer is why did the Genoese become so powerful or why did the Florentine?

And the answer is that they were able very early on to create

constitutional states or republics.

They were aristocratic republics in the sense that there was not a lower house.

They usually had a doge or an elected leader, but they had a senate and they were consensual.

And so they had people that interrupted

and tried to take power.

But Machiavelli, you know, Cesar Borgia or the Medicis or

Savarono, all those people.

But by and large, they were constitutional and that gave them stability and it brought in a lot of talent that people could participate in government.

More importantly,

they didn't do things that other places did in Europe and in the Mediterranean.

They didn't water

a golden Florentine or Venetian Ducat, whatever they were, they were sound currency.

They were not adulterated.

If you had a contract with the Venetian, it was a laborious process, but that contract was dot every I and cross every T and honored.

And the Doge had

a name of being honest and transparent.

And so that was why they flourished.

And then

remember the Battle of Rapanto was October 7th, 1571.

And until that point, there was not really any way to stop Ottomanism because it had united the Muslim world and the Seljuk Turks that were the original Ottomans if I could be so broadly speaking they were very warlike they were a tribal warlike society and they were very insidious as we talked about they had the ability to co-opt uh people to serve in government they A lot of the grand viziers were European.

A lot of the mothers of the sultans were Europeans.

A lot of the people, as I said last time, I think there were probably more Christians attacking Constantinople in 1453 that were on the walls defending them.

But all of that said,

the problem with Christendom was that

there was a lot of schisms.

There was a lot of people, the remnants of the Byzantine Empire and people in Russia were very angry.

that they felt that Western Europe had not been fair to Orthodoxy.

That was one schism.

And then, as you know, the Protestant Revolution, Reformation was off by the end of the 15th century.

So, by 1571,

you had a lot of the people who were so-called defenders of the West that had been fighting Protestants, the Habsburgs, especially.

And so

Christendom was trisected into Orthodoxy, Catholicism,

and Protestantism.

Ottoman was united, and they decided that they were no longer going to honor these century-long deals they'd made in the eastern Mediterranean because the Venetians on the coast of Greece,

on the coast of the Adriatic, in Dalmatia, and all the way out to Cyprus and the Dodecanese islands, they had trading posts that capitalized on east-west trade, and they were fabulously rich.

And the Ottomans finally said, you know what, we're going to take all of them.

So they systematically, in the 16th century, began to, I guess you'd call it, take care of business.

And the Pope was beside himself because he could not unite Europe with these factions.

And

again, you've got Britain and France.

Britain is Protestant.

France is double dealing.

You don't have a unified Europe politically.

You don't have it religiously.

And finally, The straw that broke

the camel's back was they had a year-long siege in Cyprus.

Most beautiful city in Cyprus is Famagusta in the northern part.

And

it was in a Venetian, sort of like Noplion or Napaktos.

It was a Venetian trade column, very prosperous.

And the Greeks,

the island of Cyprus as is today was predominantly Greek-speaking, but this was the beginning of the Turkish-Ottoman presence there.

And they be...

they besieged that city and for one year they held out.

One of the things that people understood about the Venetians and to a lesser extent the Genoese

and the Florentines, they were master craftsmen and they were master defenders of cities and they were master besiegers.

And it was when you put Venetians especially in charge of a city, you couldn't take it.

And that's why 300 of them

almost, excuse me, 700 of them almost saved Constantinople.

Mehmet II thought, I don't know if I, what are we going to do?

And it wasn't until the Genovese and the Venetians, with the Genovese withdrew and the Venetians panicked that Constantinople was taken.

So my point is that in 1570, they began to besiege

Cyprus and Famagusa.

They took Nicosia,

and they couldn't take it.

It took them a year.

And in August, finally, Marc Antonio Bragadino, he's a brilliant guy, said to

the Ottomans, we will surrender if you give us safe passage.

And of course, they said,

of course we will.

You can go to Crete.

You can go back to Greece.

You can go back to Venice.

We'll give you passage out.

All the Greeks.

So the Greek speakers started to leave, and the Venetians started, and then there was...

some back talk and the Ottomans said, hey, wait a minute, why are we doing this?

They killed 50,000 of us trying to take their city.

These people will go back and they'll fight us later.

And so they broke the degree of armistice.

And they took Ragadino and they cut his ears and nose off.

And they put him in a cell for two weeks so it would fester.

And then they took his captains that had surrendered with their contingents and they beheaded them and they lined their heads up.

And then they

put him in a backpack with stones.

Now he has no ears and no nose, festering infected wounds, and he had to carry rocks around the city and look at these beheaded people.

Then they killed him

and they eviscerated him and they took his skin and stuffed it with straw and they paraded that around.

And he was one of the most important families in Italy, especially in Venice.

And it just enraged people.

And it excited the Ottomans.

And the Pope had begged everybody to go out and save Cyprus.

So this time,

of all people,

Philip II, the son of Charles V,

said Spain will stop for a minute its Habsburg rivalries with Protestants and its efforts to subdue

Muslims across from Gibraltar, and we'll try to get a coalition.

Remember, the Spanish hated the Venetians and the Genovese.

And so

they had this brilliant bastard son of Charles V, the brother of Philip.

And believe it or not, they didn't liquidate bastard children in Spain.

So when Philip took the throne, he was very kindly to his bastard brother, half-brother, Don Juan.

Don Juan.

Yes, that's what Byron wrote about.

And the guy was an absolute military genius.

So he brought a huge contingent, 60, 70 galleys

and put them in service of the Pope.

And Philip II offered to bankroll the whole thing from his money from the new world,

as long as his brother, Don Juan, would be overall commander.

And he brought a lot of really brilliant, this is right before the Armada set sail, a lot of brilliant, the Duke of Santa Cruz, Marquise of Santa Cruz, and they joined the Venetians.

And the Venetians had the majority of their ships, I think 70 or 80 of them.

And then they got the Papal States, and they got the Genovese, and they cobbled together this huge fleet of over

210 galleys.

And they said, you know what, we're going to have it out with the Ottomans finally.

And nobody had beaten them in a century.

And we're going to do it by sea.

And we have more guns than they do.

And we have better guns.

The metallurgy is better.

They're more accurate.

And we're better gunners.

And we have free sailors.

We don't have slave sailors.

And the sultan, fresh on his victory in Cyprus, sent a bigger fleet, 240, 230 to 240.

So it was the largest sea battle since the Battle of Echnomus in antiquity during the First Punic War.

It was huge.

And there was probably 50, 60, 70,000 on each side.

And they collided right off.

uh Napictos at the entrance to the Gulf of Corinth on the coast of Greece in October 7th.

And

they should have been beaten because the Ottomans had a huge advantage in numbers.

The winds were blowing their way.

And around noon, the wind stopped and it started to shift the other way.

And of course, people said that was God and his benevolence had helped the Christians.

And they had four galleases.

They built these huge, they were kind of like the influence by the Spaniards of overseas galleons, the age of sail.

And remember, this is a backwater now as far as international commerce because there is no new world in Istanbul or Constantinople that's going to become Istanbul.

I mean, it's taken by the Turks.

They're going to change the name.

And the Venetians are not going to be players because they don't have Atlantic ports, but Spain is.

So is France, so is Britain, so is Holland.

They have Atlantic ports and they're miles ahead in nautical engineering because they they have ocean-going vessels.

There's not a lot of wind on the Mediterranean, but they towed four of these big galleases and they filled them with guns and they floated them in no man's waters and they just, they were high deck and they blasted apart the Ottoman fleet.

And then behind them with wind

at their backs, the Christian with free rowers, they went right through the Ottoman fleet.

There was a few tense moments, but they freed the Christian.

Most of rowers for the Ottomans were Christian slaves.

They really didn't have their heart in rowing at the command of these Muslims.

And they freed them.

And when it was all over, they wiped out about 30,000 of them and destroyed the entire fleet.

It was the greatest battle in the history of Christendom up to that time against the Ottoman.

And that stopped.

any idea that the Western Mediterranean, I mean, the Ottoman galleys had been all the way up the Adriatic at times, raiding the coast for slaves and thought they could get into Venice and destroy it.

At that point, it stopped.

And they turned, they had been in Vienna in the 1520s.

They were going to come again

later in the 17th century to the gates of Vienna again, but they had no more

ability, not because they couldn't replace the fleet.

As the Grand Vizier Sokolu said, well, you just trimmed our beard a little bit because we can build another fleet,

but we cut your arm off at Cyprus.

And so they were still there in the eastern Mediterranean, but they knew that anytime they got on the water and they fought the Venetians and the Spaniards, Papal States, the Genovese, they would be against better seamanship, better built galleys, free rowers,

and better ballistics, metallurgy, and better cannon.

And so they didn't, that was it.

And it just, it just changed,

it gave everybody a sense in in Europe that there was hope, that Islam would not take over Europe.

And it really magnified the presence of the Venetians.

And that, you know, it's sort of like if you go anywhere in the eastern Mediterranean, you see the lion of St.

Mark everywhere stamped on castles.

You can go to

Noplion, you can go to Montenegro, you can go

all the way down to the

Methonia and the Peloponnese, and you will see that stamp somewhere.

And that was the overseas commercial empire of the Venetians, very well run,

wonderful currency, contractual obligations honored.

And the Venetians had a name of being very crafty, but also

more or less lawful

traders.

And they were soon that.

The sultan was having them back into Constantinople, where they got concessions and they continued to trade.

But that was the high watermark of the Ottomans.

Do we know what percentage of the army at Lepanto was Venetian, Genoan, or

Spanish?

The largest contingent was the Venetians and by galleys, and then the Spaniards, and then the Genovese, and then the Papal States.

And probably there were 60

galleys

from Spain, probably 100 from Venice, probably 30 or 40 from

Genoa, and then the rest of them, small states in Italy, contribute them.

But the key was that Philip II was willing to pay for the whole shebang.

And that's what the Pope needed, somebody who would pay the crews and get them united.

And it was late in the year.

They were so angry because they didn't hear about

what really galvanized them was the way that

Falmagusta fell.

When they found out that all of these Italian aristocrats had willingly surrendered on the idea they would get a free passage back to Venice, and they were mutilated and killed, and hundreds of them were killed.

It got them, you know, got them furious.

So, is that why the Spanish were willing to go in, or did they have other motives?

Was it, what was Philip II's strategy?

His strategy was that he was in a war with Protestantism in Northern Europe as part of the Habsburg Empire.

And whether he liked it or not, the Venetians were Catholic.

And so the Pope, of course, was begging him to unite Catholicism.

And so in his way of thinking, he was arguing.

The reason they hadn't done it before is they said, we have Islam is all along North Africa and they're raiding our coast.

And we've got to deal with them.

And we've got this new world that we've got to deal with.

And we've got to deal with the Dutch and all of these crazy people up in Northern Europe that are Protestants.

And we don't have the resources or time to do this.

And the British are raiding all of our ships.

And they were already thinking of the armada to go in and deal with the British.

But they were losing 25% of their transport back from the New World.

And more importantly, they had told the Pope and they told the Venetians and they told the Genovese, I'm sorry, you guys, but Constantinople fell in 1453.

And this is a dead end.

We and the Portuguese are going all the way to China.

We're going to India.

We're being fabulously wealthy with silver and gold mines.

We're controlling the new world.

There's nothing here that we want.

I don't give a damn about the Ottomans.

If you want to go to China and India and get spice or silk, you can do it cheaper by

ship.

The Atlantic, yeah.

Yeah, and we and we go around the Cape of Good Hope.

We have the Philippines, Indonesia.

We have have all kinds of ways to bypass the Ottomans.

And finally, so that's why they didn't do anything.

And finally, the Venetians said, yeah, you do, but we don't.

And we're still masters of galley warfare, and they have galleys.

This was the last major galley

fight in history.

After this, it was all obsolete.

And this is kind of the downfall.

I mean, it's the greatest moment in Venetian history, but you can see what's happening that the center of commerce, wealth, power, military technology is starting to shift to the barbarian areas of Europe, not the old classical nexus in Italy and stuff.

It's starting to go to Western Spain, it's going to Britain, it's going to France, it's going to Belgium, it's going to France, it's going to Holland.

These are people who have had to

develop a very sophisticated navigational and nautical science to be able to go to North America, South America, India, China by sea.

And they considered the Ottomans just a nuisance.

And so every time they would say to the Spanish that, you know, if the Poles or the Serbs would say, look, we're holding back.

Ottomans, we've been doing it for 300 years.

Help us

because we're keeping you safe.

And we're, you know, Albanians, they're converting us and they're stealing our children and our daughters and our boys are ending up in the janissaries and Greece, the Greeks are moving up in the mountains and you guys are making money.

Help us.

And finally that appeal did work.

And the Spanish, if the Spanish hadn't have joined the Venetians and the Genovese and the Pope, they wouldn't have won.

And they didn't have Don Juan.

I mean,

as soon as they got the fleet together off Cisco, they were fighting and killing each other, Spaniards and Venetian.

And this one guy was able to stop it.

He even hung Spaniards if they were involved in fights before the battle.

And he had that famous phrase, they were all squabbling.

And he said, this is the

time to that famous quote, the time of talking is over, the time of fighting is upon us.

And he made the decision late in the year.

when it was stormy to go all the way and leave the comfortable waters of the Adriatic and go down

the coast of what is now the Balkans into

down the coast of Albania, down into northern Greece until they could draw out the Sultan's fleet that was triumphant from its victory in Cyprus a month earlier, two months earlier.

And it was brilliant.

And the Sultan thought he had told Ali Pasha,

the commander of the Ottoman fleet, just, I don't care what you do, you incite a fight because they've never beaten us.

We don't want them to get away.

We got them all in one group.

They're all united now.

It's easy for us to wipe them out.

And then when we wipe out the fleet, it's easy.

We can just sail wherever we want.

And, you know,

it was Te Deum was played, you know, to you, God, was played everywhere in Europe.

You go today in Spain, or you go to the Vatican Museum, or you go to any major museum in Italy, especially Venice, you see those wonderful paintings and tapestries of the Battle of Lepanto.

I think

who was the great poet, Byron, you know, about Don Juan of Austria, that was a great poem, but also was that Chesterton wrote a poem about Lepanto.

It was

just something,

it changed the course of history in this sense that although

They didn't have enough unity.

I mean, if they destroyed the fleet, right, in theory, they could have just gone right up the Hellspont, the Dardanelles, right into Constantinople and taken the city because there was no fleet left.

But they didn't have enough unity and it was late in the year.

There were some

Venetian galleys that did that.

They went all the way up to the Sea of Marmora just to show you could do it.

But had they taken that huge 200-galley fleet with 70,000 people,

After they obliterated the Ottomans, there was no stopping them.

All they had to do was four days rolling, and they could have gone up the Hellspont and besieged a city.

But they didn't do it.

They didn't have the unity.

They didn't have the time.

It was too late in the year.

And so it was kind of a lot of people say, well, it didn't make that much difference because

they were in Vienna.

You know, they were in Vienna

100 years later.

They were still in Vienna.

trying to take Vienna and they still had the Balkans and Greece was not free till 1821, et cetera, et cetera.

But it did stop the Ottoman aggression.

Yeah, you know, usually we say that when the Battle of Panto was won, that now the Spanish Armada had control, not just of the Western Mediterranean, but the Eastern Mediterranean as well.

But I find it interesting that it seems like, with your account, that the Venetians had much more interest and more ships even at the battle to illustrate of maintaining their empire and trying to reify some trade, I guess, into the Black Sea if they could have, but they didn't quite, weren't able to do it.

I don't know.

They had been,

they had systematically lost the Venetians.

They were the only people after the Byzantine Empire fell, all of these very lucrative, rich places.

If you go today to Chios or Lesbos

or Rhodes, you see these magnificent fortifications.

Or if you go to the west coast, excuse me, the east coast of the Peloponnese, a place like Monovasia,

you can just see it.

It's different than Byzantine and it's certainly different than Ottoman architecture.

It's just beautiful.

The fortifications.

And so systematically, they were losing those things, those outposts, for two reasons.

Number one,

they were all alone against the Ottomans.

There was nobody else out there fighting them except the Venetians and maybe the Genovese, which they hated.

And Italy wasn't united.

They were had all these squabbling.

You know, if you read in Machiavelli, it's just a mess.

And they got the Protestant problem.

But more importantly,

they understood that if you were an Italian from Genoa, let's say, and you had ideas about making money, and then you went to Spain, if you're Christopher Columbus, and you were the one that got the fleet, but from the Spaniards, not from the Venetians or the Genovese.

It was a backwater.

They didn't have the skill to go across the Atlantic, and they weren't geographically positioned to do that.

And so this was kind of an 11th hour twilight moment for both the Ottomans and the Venetians.

You know,

I was thinking

it was by Chesterton because,

oh, 15 years ago, I think it was National Review had a cruise, or maybe it was Hillsdale.

I can't remember.

Somebody who will listen might have been on it.

But we were sailing, steaming, I guess you say, for the cruise ship down the coast

of

the balkans and we got not too far from

the um

gulf of corin and the battle wasn't at napiktos but the

but the turkish fleet had

docked there that's right across the gulf from patra Patros.

So anyway, my point is I was on this cruise and Paul Johnson, the famous British biographer, historian, journalist, very brilliant guy, very, at that point, he had a wonderful wife, but he was very cranky.

And I think I had mentioned once he had attacked a book I wrote, The War Like No Other and the Peloponnese War.

And so his wife very kindly said, would you have dinner with us?

I know Paul was very unkind to your book, but he wants to explain why.

So I went over and sat down and had a long talk with him.

And he said, Christopher Hitchens blurbed your book.

Christopher Hitchens is an evil man.

Christopher Hitchens attacked me.

And if he attacked,

I said, well, did you read the book?

He said, well, I did, but I was so angry to see his name on your book.

Isn't that funny?

But anyway,

the next day, they asked us to talk about Lepanto.

So he came up to me and he said, what are you going to do?

I said, I'm going to

talk about

what caused the battle.

who was there, how many troops, why they won.

What did it say about Western Christendom at the time, what were the effects?

Oh, okay, that's a lot of work.

I'm not.

I said, what are you going to do?

So I'm going to recite a poem.

And he got up there after I gave my talk and he recited that whole Chesterton long, long poem by heart without any, without any, and

he had to be 80 then, at least.

Oh, yeah.

And it was a really impressive performance.

I was just, then I remember

after it was over, his wife, I forgot her name, was it Goldberry or Maryland?

It was a very nice name.

And she came up to me and she said,

well, Paul didn't have to do all the work you do.

That was kind of unfair.

You had to think and bring in facts and data.

He just, and I said, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Believe me, Paul Johnson, if he had time, could

talk about the battle.

But if you gave me a year,

I could not recite that.

I don't know how many lines it's got to be 2,000.

You know, it said, We wait Hispania.

And then every time you had the kind of chorus, you know, where it was in

Don Juan of Austria is hidden in the smoke, or Viva Hispania.

Don Juan of Austria set his feet full-free.

Domino Gloria, all that glory to the God, you know, that he just would throw his hands up and scream out loud.

So everybody liked it.

I think the audience liked it a lot more, better than my presentation, but

that was really a famous performance he did.

Anyway,

it's a sad battle because it's the end of an era and

it didn't lead to a strategic resolution.

But for a brief moment, all of Europe at that time, or at least southern Europe, was united and it was an amazing effort to stop Islam.

Yeah.

And you said it's the end of an era for the Venetians, right?

This was the beginning of sort of a slow decline of their trade empire.

Yeah.

I mean, if you're going to trade with India, think about it.

If you're a Venetian, how did they do it?

What they did was

they had to

do one of two things.

They either had to go

through what...

That's how Constantinople had come.

You'd had to go through the Dardanelles, then you had to go through the Sea of Marmora, then you had to go through the Bosphorus, and then you had to go on the Black Sea, and then you had to meet a trading station in the northern Black Sea that somebody had gone through Russia, right?

All of Russia,

and had traded with the Chinese, or you had to go down into the Lebanon and the Middle East,

and you had to go through

Syria, Iran, the Persian Gulf that way.

And the point was it was a lot of land travel, and you're dealing with Ottomans Ottomans that control the entire

networks there.

Yeah, yeah.

There's the Asia and there's Europe and there's Ottomanism in between.

And yet, if you're a Spaniard guy, you can get a ship and you can go in three months, you can get around and nobody's going to bother you because they don't have the ability to.

There is no Ottoman seagoing galleons that are going to attack you, maybe pirates, maybe the British.

But

if you're the British or the French or the Dutch,

or the Portuguese, especially, they're the first to do it.

You can get around the Ottomans and the Venetians just couldn't compete with that.

And then when you add Islam and you're thinking most of their military budget at the Arsenal of Venice is turning out galleys to fight Muslims, where Britain is an island and all of Western Europe's got the Venetians and the Genovese stopping Islam from getting to Vienna and inside Europe.

They had it made.

And then you had the new world with all this gold and silver and free land and wealth that was even wealthier than going to China or India.

And so that was the end of Venice.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break here and come back and talk a little bit about agriculture.

And you can finish off if you have something more to say on this.

No, I don't.

Okay.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

So Victor, I know that at the end of this Saturday episode, you want to or you like to talk about something different or new or unusual about agriculture for a few minutes.

So I'd like to hear what your thought

is today.

Yeah, in the past, I've talked about all the different skill sets you need.

for agriculture.

And I've talked about the funny people you meet, very skilled, and you don't really expect that in something that involves muscular labor.

I talked about in the third episode about the combination between mental acuity and physicality that's combined in all these tasks.

But, you know, the other thing is

it's both a benefit and a curse.

So all of these farmers all over the United States, many of them, I mean, they sell out and go corporate.

I understand that, but many don't.

So let's say you've got a big wheat farm in Nebraska or Kansas or here in the San Joaquin Valley, you inherit a lot of land.

I, you know, I have a little 40, but one time we had almost 188 acres, close to 200.

And what if you want to do something else?

You know what I mean?

My grandfather would always say to me, well, boys, I know you're all college graduates and your mother went to Stanford.

I sent all my children to college, but I know you think less of me.

We say, No, we don't.

He goes, Well, you know, I was salutorian and salutarian of my high school class, but my mother died of cancer,

and

nobody was here to run the farm.

And

my father was kind of all alone, and he had some health problems.

So, I didn't go to University of California, stayed here.

And, you know, he was

born and died in the same room.

And I know that when I graduated,

I was 26 with a PhD.

I didn't know what to do.

My mom called me up and said, you know, your grandmother's living in this old house by herself, the farmhouse, the center of the whole farm.

And

your brother's kind of sacrificed.

He had been in a PhD program.

And is there any way you could just come down for the summer?

Well, that summer lasted the rest of my life.

So what I'm getting at is that you're tied to that land because you feel that you're one link in a chain.

And who's going to be the weak link to let it go?

Even if it's diminished, you don't want to let it go.

So, what I'm saying is, you do things that are not economically rational, if you know what I mean.

You have 80 acres of the family farm.

Let's say I'm taking a hypothetical, and all of a sudden the city's getting near it, and a developer comes to you and said, I'll buy that for a million dollars an acre.

And you're thinking, hmm,

I think I could do it.

Or you keep farming and you don't make any money.

Or you want to give it to your kids.

And you think, well, I know what they'll do.

They'll just sell it.

So there's all these pressures, but you stay on it, is what I'm saying.

And

I think as I get older, there's so many irrational things I do.

I mean, on this little, what's left, 40,

43 or 44 acres, there's a lot of buildings I should just torn down.

I mean, they're just empty.

They're old packing house house or tractor garage.

But what do I do?

I go out and reframe the interior, put a brew new roof, get it painted, make it look nice.

For what?

Nobody's, my children aren't going to live here.

But I guess it's this agrarian idea that you have memories, that you're tied to the soil.

So when you walk out there, you think, wow, I can remember my grandfather.

I can remember my aunt.

I can remember my cousin here.

I remember we climbed up on the roof.

It's reference points that ground you.

And you always know you're from this place.

You're not transitory.

People always say, where are you from?

And I say, I'm from Salma right here, but I don't think of other places I've been.

I mean, other than graduate school, I lived two and a half years in Greece.

And I lived in Palo Alto, I guess, four years and Santa Cruz

four.

But those were just.

you know,

hiatuses.

They were just interruptions from where I've been here my entire life.

I don't know if that's good or bad, but what it does, it does ground you and you're a prisoner of memory.

And then you start to

make money off the farm to blow it on the farm.

And so

that's what, you know, they have that joke.

If you win the lottery, you can farm another 10 years.

There's no money to be made farming.

It's just out.

That's another thing is

I think I said an earlier brought, you just look at all of the money that goes out and it doesn't come back in because it's so hard to make money.

And food is still very cheap.

But if the guys that are very brilliant, the family farmers that got big, I mean, they don't really make the money on the actual growing of the product.

It's the trucking, the merchandising, the selling, the packing, the cold storage, the brokerage.

That's where the money is.

I think the farmer gets about three to five cents per dollar of every agricultural produce that's consumed.

Yes.

And so I remember many talks by different people in the valley that you'd go to them and they would always talk about how the farmer is getting two cents on the dollar here, three cents on the dollar there.

It is.

It is.

And they've never been able to solve that problem unless individually they have.

There's a lot of individuals that,

you know, I know a lot of brilliant people and they look at everything and they say, ah, I've I've done this for two years.

There's where the money is, and that's where I'm going to be.

And there's other people who say,

I'm not here for the money.

I don't give it just so I can survive.

I like to be out in the field.

I like to prune by myself.

I like to watch the seasons.

I like to have memories of my family.

I want my kids to grow up here and learn the value of hard work and familial duty.

So they're just two different.

And the ones that have the latter view tend to be a little eccentric.

They tend to be poorer, more tragic.

And the people who get smart and say, this is how to make it.

And I don't know where the morality is.

You know, my mom always said to us when we were kids,

okay,

one of you is going to be a lawyer and one of you, and that person will do all the law work for the family.

One of you is going to be a doctor to make sure that we have good.

you know, all the extended family will have good medical.

And one of you is going to be in accounting or something that can run a business.

So when I was at

UC Santa Cruz and I came home and I said, I think I'm going to get a PhD.

She goes, can you please go to law school?

Why are you not going to Stanford Law School?

Why are you going to the Stanford PhD program?

This is,

you know what I mean?

It was like, oh, I'm sorry.

And then when I got my degree and I came back, she says, you're only 26.

You can go to law school.

You can still go back to Stanford and go to law school.

So, I don't want to go to law school.

I do not want to go to law school, period.

I want to farm and I want to be a professor or writer or something.

And she goes, Okay, but that's not going to save the ranch.

That's not going to save the farm.

And that's what she did.

Your mother sounds like she was very practical.

Yeah, yeah, that's what she did.

And, you know, my brother was in a PhD program, very bright guy in biology and probably medical school.

And he came home and she said, but that's not going to help us

i'm sorry i said smart

i i i just said i'm not lee ayacola i remember i said that to her at the time because he was in the news as the brilliant businessman that saved christ versus

i said i i wish i had those skills and i could save the farm but She had kind of done it herself because she had been a judge and used most of her income to make up for the yearly losses.

But that's a bad way.

You know, that's not a good way to live.

I always said, well, you have to make the farm pay.

You don't want to have it subsidized because it creates bitterness.

If the farm can't pay, it's not viable.

And so I learned that very late in life in my late 40s.

And so in my share of the farm, I said to myself,

I'm going to either farm it or rent it out, but I'm not going to lose money.

But the three acres and the complex is another story.

I mean, I could kind of justify that also when a lot of listeners have homes where they put a new kitchen or a new bath or and when they sell the house, it's not necessarily going to pay off, right?

But they do it because it's comfortable and it's nice while they're there.

And that's why I've kind of fixed up this compound because I'm still here for a little while longer.

And, but

what I'm getting must be something

even to the quietness out in the countryside relative to having a house in town.

It is.

I get

hustle and bustle.

I just got back from

Washington, D.C.

So I drove to Fresno, got on the plane, flew to Phoenix, waited,

flew to Washington, D.C., took the taxi in for the Bradley ceremony.

I was at the Waldorf, the old Trump Hotel.

And then I reversed all that three days later.

But there were just things like being on the plane with everybody.

I've done that so many times, thousands of times, but this time.

I guess I'm getting old.

I'm not compare that to being out here on your own and then with rooms full of people and

you're in a city, you don't know.

And when you just think of the tranquility out here and nature and birds and even bees, it can kill me now, I guess.

But all of this stuff is just such antithetical to all that.

You don't want to.

So what I try to do now is people say, hey, Victor, why don't you fly to North Carolina?

We got a good gig.

No, I'm not going to do it.

I'm sorry.

Oh, you think you're too wealthy?

I said, no, I'm just not interested.

Hey, why don't you come down to Alabama?

We got a great.

No, I'm not doing it.

Sorry.

I'm 78.

I'm going to be 70.

No, can do.

And the answer is I don't have, you don't have that much time not to do things you don't want to do.

But more importantly, the city starts to wear you down, all of the travel, especially, and the people that are city people.

You just want to.

get away from it all.

And, you know, when you're here, you're master of your own universe.

You walk on your property.

I should say that today, walked on the property and I was taking the dogs for a walk.

And what do you see?

A big refrigerator thrown in the middle of the almond row by somebody.

Oh, no.

I was afraid of that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

A big old white freezer that little kid could crawl into and get suffocated.

So that's what you're master of now.

all the crap that people throw on your

yard and you're not supposed to say anything about the police don't come the sheriff doesn't come it's your problem what do you do with a big freezer i'm trying to think of that right now do i call my renter and say it's yours not mine it's hard to know what to do i don't have anywhere to put it but the guy and as i told you not too long ago i was walking out and a guy comes up and i look in his car and he's got bags of trash ready to throw out And, you know, in broken English, he tells me he's looking for a bicycle.

Oh, yeah, you're walking out in the middle of nowhere on dirt roads for a bicycle, but you're really trying to

dump all your trash that you don't want to pay to be taken away on my on my little orchard.

And you, and you see that he's got, you know, he's covered with tattoos.

He's got that little teardrop on his eye.

So what do you do?

You confront him over, what, six bags of trash?

Well, that's the

downside of it.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

There's a lot more upsides than downsides.

I think farmers farmers are prisoners of memory most of all.

They think of all the generations they've heard about and they knew, and they think it was a good way of life.

And I must say that people that I know like that,

they tend to be eccentric, but they're very good citizens.

They're very stable people.

They're very hardworking.

And that's at a very short premium and a very rare commodity right now.

We don't have that many citizens that can counteract the madness.

Well, Victor, I have one more thing from a

He has labeled your podcast excellent all the way around.

His name, Miles the Terrible.

And he says, probably the most rational voice left in our society.

I've never been disappointed listening to Victor, even when I disagree.

My only request would be that he also recommend a book or two on the historical data he presents each Friday so that I can have my homeschooled students expand their knowledge on the subject.

Yeah, that's a good point.

You know, two good books that everybody should read at one point on history is John Keegan's The Face of Battle.

Boy, that's one of the most beautifully written books about what it was like to be at the Somme or the Battle of Waterloo or Agincourt by a masterful historian of the peak of his powers.

That was his greatest book he ever wrote.

It's what made him famous.

And then there's another great book, Stephen Runciman, the great Ottoman historian, very eccentric guy.

He was involved in government, etc., etc., had a very strange lifestyle, but he wrote these massive books on Ottomanism

and Eastern Mediterranean.

But he wrote a really short book called The Fall of Constantinople, and it's just riveting.

It's just a brilliant book.

So maybe we'll do that,

talk about historical there's two of them.

Yeah.

Yeah, we'll talk every time on a couple of books on history that are really good or literature, either one.

That'd be good for us,

yeah, for our weekend show.

Yeah, that sounds like a good idea.

All right, Victor, well, thank you very much for all the discussion today.

I really loved the discussion on the Venetian wars and the new things I found out.

So, thank you, and I'm sure your listeners will thank you as well.

Okay, everybody, thank you for listening.

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