Lefty Laws, Educated Rustics, and Military Madness

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

And the star and the namesake is...

Of course, Victor Davis-Hansen, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshabusky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor has an official website, The Blade of Perseus, which is found on the World Wide Webs, at victorhanson.com.

You should go there a lot.

And I'll tell you more about that later in this podcast today.

Much to talk about the nagging of the bureaucracy against Americans when it comes to your kitchen and so much else.

And I think, though, Victor, we'll first start off by talking about fat.

And New York City has now passed a new law to protect fat people from being, I don't know, discriminated against.

Victor, it's crazy as usual, but we'll get your thoughts on this and so many other things when we come back from these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

So, Victor, you know, I could lose 40 pounds or 50 pounds myself.

Just want to.

Before you continue, I have a perfect suggestion.

Go ahead.

Well, I lost 38 pounds.

And it's very easy what you do.

You get COVID and then you get long COVID.

And it takes away your appetite.

And your body just sort of is on hyperimmune response.

So you don't have to exercise because it's burning all the calories all the time.

And lo and behold, I weigh today what I did the day I was married.

in 1977, thanks to long COVID.

And I keep thinking that I still have traces of it after my encounter with Mr.

B allergy, and it's still working.

So I eat whatever I want, more or less, and I can't gain any weight.

Try it.

Well, that's.

That's one way of looking at it.

There's always a

silver lining in your long-tortured cloud

figure.

And it has been long and tortured.

Hey, let me just read this headline from the Daily Mail.

Fat people will be protected from discrimination under law passed in New York.

As critics warn it opens the door to, quote, sue anyone

and everything.

Subheadline, the bill will outlaw height or weight discrimination in work and accommodation.

You know, Victor, I

don't know what this will lead to, except suits as is alleged.

New York does have a few conservative Republicans on its city council, council, believe it or not.

They mostly come from Staten Island.

But

can you see someone not suing because,

yeah, I weigh 479 pounds, but I want to be a fireman.

Or I'm, you know, I went to

a movie theater in New York and I'm sorry, these seats, I can't fit in these seats.

How about I was on a plane not too long ago, and I flew all the way to

the Naples area airport from Dallas, from Fresno, Dallas, and I sat next to somebody who was quite large, quite, quite large, as in obese.

And what could I say?

I'd be discriminatory, so I didn't say a word.

But my handrest, I had one handrest and he had two handrests.

And I had one foot space.

He had three foot spaces, but he had two.

He was very large.

But it's very funny.

I'm always interested in these cultural collisions.

And by that, I mean the left point of view up until three or four years ago was that there was an epidemic of childhood obesity.

And this was caused by junk food, the McDonaldization of America.

Remember that, Jack?

And that we were endangering the lives of young people because they were fat.

And they were fat because corporate America was giving them trans fats.

And we have to stop that because obesity is a killer.

Right.

Can I interject,

Victor?

Just remember Michelle Obama?

We changed

school lunches.

Absolutely.

They had to include

broccoli or whatever, which of course the kids always dumped.

Absolutely.

And then all of a sudden we go now to the opposite extreme.

It's analogous to

the decades I was a professor, all I heard at the faculty proverbial lounge, that is our meeting rooms before our meetings, or I'd go out to have coffee with faculty.

It wouldn't like this, Jack.

I'm just using pseudonyms.

Dean Smith doesn't do anything.

They always make deans, you know, they populate like rabbits.

You get a dean, and then he's got an empire bill, then he gets assistant dean, an assistant, assistant, dean, and then he doesn't do anything.

He's lazy.

And they always get the guys that were failures as teachers, failures as scholars, and they promote them upward.

And then as soon as they get there, they're padding the resume with bromides and shibboleths.

And we're overstocked.

And, you know, you look at the statistics, and our department has only had,

you know,

50% replacement while the administration grew at 150%.

That was the mantra.

And now, diversity, equity, inclusion.

It's wonderful.

We should, you know, we should have diversity, equity, inclusion.

They are spreading like rabbits, and there's not a peep, not one peep out of this faculty who was so angry and mad at the administrative bloat.

Suddenly it's sort of like the same thing with obesity.

What I'm getting at is it reminds me so much of the so-called party line directives that come out of communism.

Until June 22nd, literally to the hour, Stalin's red communiques were that Germany was a national socialist party, Hitler was, and Hitler had taken out the corrupt Western bourgeoisie democracies that were exploitive capitalist powers in Norway and Belgium and Holland and France.

And then all of a sudden it was a,

you know, this is comrade, they're attacking the motherland, these fascist monsters.

And that's what the left is doing with these issues like obesity.

and administrat you know administrators and all of this stuff and big pharma, I always thought they hated big pharma.

And then all of a sudden, Moderna and Pfizer come along.

And all of a sudden, the vaccination, if you dare question big pharma's profits or profit margin or whether they really had as careful testing as possible or the incidence of heart problems for males between the ages of five and 20 that got vaccinated or women with cyst and stuff.

That's just heresy.

You cannot do that.

Or if you say

big pharma is endangering the lives of young children because they're injecting them with these very, very dangerous

hormonal drugs to transgender from one sex to another.

And the big American Medical Association, which the left hates, the American Medical Association is greenlighting these very dangerous surgeries of removing breasts, removing genitalia.

This is just big pharma and big medicine pushing down very dangerous untried bromides onto the American consumer.

And what?

Nothing.

It's the same thing.

It's a party line.

Yeah.

Victor, one other

thought

on the fat front and

having just...

You can't say fat.

Well, okay.

Chubby, I don't know what to say anymore.

I don't think we can even use the word the.

So I'm not, you'll just have to

beautifully ample.

Okay.

All right.

Well, everyone who's beautifully ample knows and who's still alive today after coming through COVID knows that they dodged a bullet, right?

I mean, so it wasn't that

all that long ago.

I don't mean I was giggling there about this,

but

if you were if you were obese or hyper-obese, the odds are with COVID was that you were a goner.

So we know the

downside of all this, and especially in New York City, right?

Where there was such

the initial

onslaught of COVID, even though it was national, was

kind of glorified in a media sense there because of Andrew Cuomo and his and his actions.

But, you know, people know this is a problem and to glorify it now and glorify it culturally and you will have your your influencers come out and i know they already exist i don't follow them but uh you know fat is is is uh beautiful and beautiful in a way to be imitated part of it is uh it's the it's the internal relentless 24-7

search for victimhood and being oppressed.

And there's not enough oppressors and victimizers to fulfill the demand of the oppressed and the victimized.

We have renewed, after George Floyd, a new racial oppressed class,

and that's why we end up with just these juicy small incidents or Duke La Crosse or, you know, things like that, because they have to concoct these.

Same thing with sexists and the Me Too finding.

Me Too started legitimately.

They had legitimate complaints about creeps like Harvey, and then it got into the Say Them Witch trials.

They couldn't find enough oppressors.

And the same thing now is the transgender movement.

Now it says, well, wait, civil rights movement's not over with.

America's still racist.

America's still sexist.

It's still homophobic.

You had the gay movement.

You had the women's movement.

You had the civil rights movement.

But you guys forgot the transgender.

And now we're full blown.

And then the obese come in and say, hey, wait a minute.

There's a whole group of us.

We're the biggest of all.

We're the biggest group of people of all.

And we have our rights and we're not going to be body shamed.

And you know what?

Sports Illustrated is going to put people, they should put people in with bikinis where you can not even see the bottom part of the bikini because the stomach protrudes.

That's what beauty is.

We don't believe your white Christian male exploitive constructs of beauty.

They're just arbitrary.

They have nothing to do with nature.

That's what they're telling us.

Normal is evil.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, you know,

if that is,

you know,

the thing now, at least in New York City, there'll be a lot more dirty plates around.

They'll have to go in dishwashers.

And we have news from the Biden administration, new standards for dishwashers that they are to use less water.

and less power.

And I think that means what we're going to get out of dishwashers is dirtier dishes.

We also have regulations.

I think the

old general electric light bulbs are not to be allowed at all or produced at all, permitted in the United States.

What the hell else was oh, of course,

shower heads, right?

Gas stoves.

So, you know,

toilets don't flush, as you said.

But some of that predates

predates

Biden, actually predates Obama.

I think with the light bulbs, it was the Bush administration that was so into those.

We need those corkscrew light bulbs.

So, this is all in all, it's

nit, it's not nitpicking, it's an assault on how we live in our homes to make

less ability to see, less ability to be clean, less ability to clean, less ability to cook.

It's uh, it seems intentional.

Well, I don't know why they don't they don't let the private sector if I mean

if you have a light bulb and it's three times more expensive and it takes 10%, then people will go, but even though they'll pay that, but that's a choice they can make.

So maybe the person can say, you know what, I've got a regular

type of light bulb with a filament in it and I'm just going to wait till it burns out.

And when it burns out, I will buy a little bit more expensive one that saves my electric bill and doesn't get as hot and let the people decide let the the market offer alternatives but they never do that because they think they're stupid and the people who are making these rules are all people in Malibu or Cambridge Massachusetts or Atherton who knows where they're from but they're not subject to the consequences of their own politics and ideology.

They don't, I don't, I will bet, I don't have to bet.

You remember that we learned that the aggregate, the aggregate volume of the Obama's estate was 2,000 gallons of propane that had to be filled up for the Obama's in that, what, there's four of them in that Martha's Vineyard, $14 million estate.

Why do they need

two, is it to heat a pool?

Is it to do what?

And you can bet your britches that his Hawaii mansion like Al Gore was one of what Al Gore was something like 500 times more of of the

use of electricity than any other person of comparable family size.

So, you know, it's like John Kerry getting back to him.

He needs the jet to go fight for climate change.

It's sort of the ruling class has all of these ideas for the nobodies, and we're going to mandate them.

And then

it all, you know, Well, it all comes around.

And I think a lot of people ignore it.

And

I don't know what to say.

I just think these people have been so discredited.

The people on the media, the people in the universities, the people in the federal bureaucracies, the people in the corporate boardroom, the Disney people, the Delta Airlines people, the Anheuser-Busch people, the Ivy League faculties, and they all have one thing in common.

They love America's capitalist bounty.

The more they hate it, the more they make fun of the middle class, the more they try to warp it, the more they want stuff.

I've been looking at my daughter's going to move.

So she is going to move up in the foothills, right?

Kind of a liberal area outside Sacramento

for a variety of reasons.

But I've been looking at houses for her, and it's striking

how the upper classes have created a really nice aesthetic for new homes.

And they're all about the same.

There's no wall-to-wall carpets, which I like because I'm allergic to stuff, but it's beautiful hardwood.

And you go into the kitchen, and they're not like the kitchen I grew up or you grew up, these little tiny cramped things.

They're the size of living rooms.

And then the more burners, gas are electric, the better.

There's not four.

Remember, we could go up with two and four.

They're like 12.

And then the refrigerators are kind of, of they look like part of the wall and they're right they're not 18 or 20 cubic feet which i think ours was 12 or 10.

they're 40 i mean they're huge like nancy pelosi's ice cream 40 000 back-to-back refrigerators but there's an there's a and then stain stainless steel everything

and

beautiful imported ceramic tile hardwood floors and at least 3 000 square feet and these are very wealthy and mostly liberal people that like that aesthetic.

And yet, how could you be in that profile and then say

that

everybody should, you know, take the subway and live in a high-rise and have electric-only appliances when you're not subject to that?

I don't understand it.

And I mean,

who are we talking about?

We're talking about the John Kerrys of the world, the Elizabeth Warrens, the Bernie Sanders.

Bernie Sanders, remember, has three homes.

The Barack Obama's, he has three mansions, not home mansions,

from which Michelle, every fourth night, ventures forth and tells us how racist America is from her Hawaii or her Colorama, Washington, or her Martha's Vineyard estate.

And Joe Biden is the same thing with his three homes.

Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden.

It doesn't matter what their politics are.

Anybody who harks and hectors and snarky and tells people how they should live in a really anal retentive way usually doesn't abide by those bromides.

Just a rule.

They don't.

Projection is

what they're all about.

Well, Victor,

somebody does care about the middle class or the people oppressed by the regulators, and that somebody is Victor Davis Hansen.

And we're going to talk about some pieces you've written for your website right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, Victor has an official website.

It's called The Blade of Perseus, and it's found at VictorHanson.com.

It's loaded with links to his books and appearances on other podcasts and radio shows and the articles he writes for American Greatness in a syndicated column.

And also the pieces, they're ultra, they're called ultra pieces that he writes originally and exclusively for the blade of Perseus.

And to read them, and if you're a fan of Victor, you should be reading everything Victor writes,

including these pieces.

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And we're going to talk now about one of the pieces, the exclusive ultra pieces that Victor has written.

He's always writing.

And this is

right now up to part two.

Victor, I don't know if you'll have any more parts in this series, but it's called The Unappreciated Rustics, Historians in a Motor Shop.

And then you have a second part.

So, Victor, this is great stuff as usual.

It's a little, obviously, it's not so, well, you talk about how policy and the like works into this, but much of this is a reflection of your own life.

So, why don't you tell us about the unappreciated rustics?

Why you've written this and what you've written.

Well,

I think our intelligentsia has this idea that people with inquisitive minds or trained minds or naturally talented minds gravitate to Wall Street or law school or academia.

They don't.

They don't necessarily.

So when you take a field like farming, everybody thinks, well, they're just farmers.

They're just the guys that are grumpy on trackers.

And I was just trying to think

that in my experience on farming, did I encounter people that were as bright or brighter than people with PhDs that were involved in farming or farm-related

mechanics.

And the answer was yes.

So I remember when I was a little boy, there was my hometown, there was an older guy, and he had an electric motor shop.

And in those days, you know, we all had electric motors for pumps from centrifugal pumps or

any turbine pumps.

And you would take the pump, the head and the motor off, take it into him.

Or if you had an electric grinder or if you had an old generator in your car or if you had uh some type of pump on the ranch etc etc etc you took it into him he took off these they were very heavy you remember they were really heavy uh steel and then he would rewind them and fix them and then but it was so dusty and he had this dank little place in there where he would sit there by himself and rewind these and then all over when you went in the shop there were just all these

it was like a menagerie just every imaginable type of electric motors like one horsepower 20 horse big things huge and tiny with the little tag you know with a wire tag in the paper that wilson pick up you know and some of them they weren't picked up and then we would pick up, I would help my grandfather carry the electric motors.

He would all, he always paid,

he never mailed a check, never.

He would drive all the way to Fresno to hand the check over to the person.

He'd look him in the eye and say, this is your payment, Mr.

So at one point, I remember I went to college and I went overseas and I came back.

And, you know, my grandfather passed on and I was farming.

I went into this because I was now my grandfather needing these things rewound.

And this guy had died, but I had remembered that when I was in graduate school, I had come and helped my dad get one.

And there was a Mexican-American guy there that was his apprentice.

And by the time I got got back, I gathered that this guy

owned it with his brother.

And they were very good because I'd hear farmers.

When I got back, I said, well, where do you get your electric motors?

Because I was gone for eight or nine years.

Oh, you go to the same place.

And I went in there and I talked to these guys.

And by this time, I was also teaching ancient history.

And one time I went in there and the guy said,

Hey, I got to ask you something.

And I thought, oh, wow, it's going to be about electric motors.

He goes,

you teach, don't you?

I said, yeah.

He said, I got to ask this, which is the best history of Alexander the Great?

And I said, what?

And he says,

well, I like Peter Green's, but it seems like it's kind of flashy, but it's not in-depth.

And I said, well, do you know Will?

Oh, yeah, I know Robin Lane Fox, the Fox guy.

Yeah, I like that too.

It's big, but I want to know which is more.

And I said, have you ever looked at this old one, Droys?

And yeah,

I have that one.

So then he said, come on in.

So I went into this dank place I had remembered as a child, right?

With a guy, and they were his brother were still rewinding motors, but you wouldn't believe it, Jack.

The whole wall was filled with ancient history books.

And these two Mexican-American mechanics, who were excellent technicians, then would I had a little table and they said, sit down.

And then they said, God,

what was the wrong with the first triumvira?

Why did Crassus Crassus end up dead and Caesar's on top?

And I said, well, what do you mean?

And he said, well, that book, Mommson.

And I said, you read Frederick Mommsen?

Yeah, the last volume.

And I could not believe it.

I'd never had an in-depth conversation on ancient history at Cal State Fresno like that.

So I was thinking, you know, of that the other day, because

last year I had some landscapers, fast forward 20 years.

And I get all these, everybody gets stuff in the mail.

So you get, publishers will send you books to blurb or to review, right?

And they're those bound, you know, bound galleries.

Yeah.

Sometimes they're, but I get maybe, I don't know, in my office at Stanford or here, I probably get 10 or 15 a week.

And I try to, sometimes I try to blurb them, sometimes, but they just pile up.

So I had been cleaning out the storeroom and I just, these bound, I must have had 50 there.

I threw in this, we we have a big ag bin, right?

Like those dumpster bin.

Right.

And then one of these landscapers, another guy, Mexican American guy, he was in the dumpster.

And I thought, wow, that's weird.

I better tell him, you know, that I throw my dog crap in there.

And he was going through these.

And

I said, and he, he thought I was going to get mad.

So I walked around.

He said, I'm still working.

I'm not trying to tell you.

I said, no, no, I just wonder why you're in the dumpster.

He goes, I love these books.

And I said, really?

He said, yeah, I love Sappho.

And you've got a new translation.

This new book says translation of Sappho.

And I said, you like the Iliad?

Yes, I like the Iliad, but I like the Odyssey.

Everybody likes it.

And he gave me a long discussion about classics.

And then he asked if he could take as many as he wanted.

And he took about 50 of them, put them in a box, and put them in his truck.

And so at the end of the day, he drove off with all these classics books out of my dumpster.

But he was not a dilettante.

He was informed.

So I thought.

Did he know who you were, you think?

No, no, he didn't.

He didn't.

The electric motor guy knew that I was teaching at Cal State Fresno, but this guy didn't.

He just thought it was weird that he saw

all these books.

Bonanza.

And I was thinking of that all.

So I wrote this piece on things like that.

And we had a neighbor, and I wrote about him.

I'll use a pseudonym in Fields Without Dreams called Bus Berzagis.

but he was a PhD candidate in English literature at the University of Colorado.

This is sort of like Camry Rowe.

Remember with Doc and that character?

He was kind of like that character, kind of an eccentric, but really brilliant guy.

And he was farming, but he didn't, he just didn't farm.

He did all of the work himself, pesticides, welding, you name it, tractor.

But he just didn't decide, he decided not to turn in his

final chapter.

So he was an ABD.

And then he had kind of a really great year at Cal State Fresno.

And then, you know, politics, he didn't get renewed.

So he went and farmed, got sick of academia.

He hated academia like I did.

But one time, you know, he came in.

I hadn't seen him in years, but in the early 80s, he came in with his truck.

It was all torn up, old diesel pickup, loud.

Those are first, you know, Cumming.

Perkins engines really made those noises, and so did Cummings engines.

But anyway, he came in and he just started talking about he'd gone up to Oregon,

you know, to the Shakespearean Festival.

And he's, and he was telling me he saw Macbeth.

So

I don't know much.

I, you know, I know, I'd read the plays and everything, but I said, well, which is his best play?

And what followed was like one hour while he's leaning on his shovel with all this crap in the back of his pickup.

And he's giving me a long, scholarly excursus of plot, characterization, language of Macbeth versus Hamlet and why Macbeth was a better play.

And then he said, but of course, I thought he was done.

Then he went into King Lear

and that was his favorite.

But

it was just brilliant.

And yet he's out.

Nobody ever talked to him because he was out just by himself.

And I can think of a Japanese American guy.

who ran a pesticide company.

And I thought he would die because every time I would go in there to get pesticides on a Monday morning,

they'd, you know,

lift up the garage door, you know,

and say, and then

come out.

Oh, my God.

It was like Zygon B came out.

And anyway, I thought that guy, but I think a lot of them were fungicides because he and his brother lived in their 90s.

So maybe that had the opposite effect of preservation.

But anyway,

anyway, he was a Japanese American and his

as a little boy, he had gone to the Manzanor camp, I think.

And he was very angry still, but he was very, I liked him.

A lot of people didn't like him.

I really liked him.

And he gave me, he started talking about the 1930s and how Japan

gravitated.

toward anti-American fascism.

And he gave me the most complete description of the debate over the Roosevelt oil boycott of Japan, that we wouldn't sell them oil and we didn't sell them rubber, and then that they had some grievances.

And then, more importantly, he gave me a nice description of,

as well as that, he gave a nice description of that

after 1940, and I had written about this in an article, but it was very, you know, if Japan had just been careful, he said, if Japan had just been careful and taken the Dutch East Indies and the breadbasket of Vietnam,

and maybe, maybe or not, the rubber of Malaysia and not attack Singapore and the Philippines, they would have had the whole European orphaned

natural resources because Holland didn't exist anymore.

It was under German occupation.

France was on German occupation.

Vietnam, Cambodia didn't exist.

And he said they could have just, but what?

And he was, you know, lamenting it.

It wasn't quite pro-Japanese militarism, but it was a very sophisticated.

It made sense, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Here was a guy that came out pulling a fertilizer dome that was going to drop off to me.

And as he started to talk, he said to me, Hey, you, didn't you just come from Stanford?

I said, Yeah.

And he said, I want to ask you something.

And then followed this sophisticated geostrategic layout of what Japan was facing from 1936 to 1941.

And that happened all the time.

You know, and I thought, wow,

you never judge a man by what he does or necessarily that can help, never how he dresses, never his accent, never his race, never his wealth.

And if you don't do that, you'll be surprised.

But you all recognize talent and intelligence.

I've always tried after I had that experience, I always tried to do that teaching.

You know, I met some of the most brilliant kids that you wouldn't think were brilliant.

You just wouldn't expect it.

Their poverty or their tattoos or

their hair, you know, or their clothes.

So that was one good thing about America I really liked.

And I wrote about it, and especially in the agrarian context.

Well, Victor, it's a wonderful.

Well, it's a two-part series as of today.

I don't know if you're doing

more, but again, I want to encourage our listeners to visit

victorhanson.com, The Blade of Perseus, and sign up.

And that sort of stuff is relentless

on the website.

Hey, Victor, let's switch to.

I heard you're a military historian, right?

You know, a thing or two about the military.

Actually, if you wouldn't mind in just half a minute, and I really mean half a minute, would you explain again

the military operation, that's the wrong word, program you run at Hoover?

Well,

Very quickly, can we do this in one app time?

The former and beloved director who just recently passed away, John Raceyan, said to me, hey, we're war, revolution, and peace, Victor.

That is our motto.

And we don't have a military history program.

This was in 2009.

So I am delegating you.

You travel with me for a year and we're going to raise money, but you have to, so we went everywhere.

They were wonderful donors, very generous.

And so I came up with the idea to have a symposium of the best military analysts, officers, historians who would look at contemporary problems, but not like most people do, you know, game theory or contemporary geostrategy, but in context of history.

And so I called it the Military History Working Group, or the official term was Military History and Contemporary Conflict.

And then we, I created a magazine called Strategica, S-T-R-A-T-E-G-I-K-A.

And I had the idea of having a background essay on a topic.

I think this month I still have tanks on there.

Are tanks obsolete?

Background on it, and then yes, they are obsolete, or maybe they're not, and no.

And then I have commentary and who contributes.

I have about 30 people.

that are members and I raise money and then I fly them all out to Stanford

and put them up in a nice hotel and dinner and then for a whole day used to be two days but it got to be kind of too long we can we discuss this happened this march on Ukraine in the context of what are what the past can tell us about what's going to happen in Ukraine and I deliberately try to get a variety of different opinions.

So we have former Fox commentator Ralph Peters.

We have Bing West, H.R.

McMaster, Andrew Roberts, the historian, Neil Ferguson, the historian, Jim Mattis, the former Pentagon Secretary of Defense.

And

we have just, we had Angela.

We have

robust discussions.

Yes, and there are very learned people there.

And because they have, there's neocons, paleocons, cons, libertarians, isolationists, interventionists, nation builders, you name it.

And there's a lot of Democrats and

some left-wing people.

And

it gets kind of heated sometimes, but the level of intelligence analysis is really great.

And then

my assistant, David Berkey, who's a research associate, he edits, he's the managing editor.

And then we have these other periphery things.

We have book reviews of all the classics.

This group

contributes about 500 words on, say, Thucydides History or Machiavelli or Sun Tzu.

You can go online at our website.

It's affiliated with the Hoover Institution, Hoover.org.

And you can find book reviews.

And we have something called History in the News, where one of the members volunteers for four weeks and every picks in a major event that's going on the day, such as Ukraine or overflights, as I said, in the last of the Aegean, and tries to explain that from something that happened similarly in the past.

Okay.

And

that's what I do.

That was about three minutes.

That was

six times as long.

Just to give particularly our new listeners

the

understanding of your,

you're not just

an ancient classics scholar.

In addition to that, you are very immersed in things military.

So I just wanted that from time to time,

our new listeners should be apprised of some of these things.

And I think it's a lead in also for

Sammy has, as we're talking on our other other two, as you know,

I'm supposed to, according to her prompt, start with the Persian Wars, then go all the way to the present.

So we've given 10 minutes to 15 on Persian Wars, Peloponnesian Wars, the wars of Alexander the Great, the wars of the Roman Republic, the wars of the two triumvirants and the Roman civil wars, the barbarian invasions, the rise of the Byzantine Empire, the challenge of Islam, the fall of Byzantium, the Crusades, the Hundred Years' War, and we just finished the Spanish conquest of Mexico.

And I guess we're now about 1550, and I hope we go back to Lepanto or something.

Yeah, we're doing that as well.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, in a more modern context, as in this week,

let's talk about the Navy, the United States Navy.

And I'm looking at, you hear the newspaper in the background.

This sounds a little like Rush Limbaugh, the Epoch Times, which I get.

I subscribe.

I love the Epoch Times.

Some people say the Epoch Times, but

I know the people there call it Epoch.

Navy says it needs a budget, not stopgat funding to meet China threats.

So, you know, as we're talking today,

we're in this suspended budget situation.

The Navy really, though, wants not to have annual continuing resolutions.

Boy, we need to fight China.

We need

a budget that's distinct for military spending etc this is uh

admiral uh michael gilday he's the chief of yeah i remember operations that name rings a bell doesn't it jock

why why does it ring a bell victor uh i think he testified during the millie austin yeah uh white supremacy white rage white privilege and he is the chief of naval operations made similar allegations yeah so that's that's what i want to get into a little bit here and has to do with the navy the navy drag queen the navy's digital ambassador we've seen these stories this story now is about over a week old by the time this podcast is out is maybe two weeks old um joshua kelly yes a yeoman second class joshua kelly um

is also known as harpy seals

and he is the navy's digital ambassador in drag.

And Victor,

why

are military, in this case with the Navy, which has such priorities, right, because there are such drastic threats against America, would

two Americans

who

they need the support of them

portray the Navy in these

just,

you know, woke ways, cartoonish ways, insane ways.

And how do they not think that Americans, you know, dispirits Americans?

Now, when you need Americans to rouse and demand, yes, we need to spend more money on

the Navy in order to keep up with China's relentless daily threats.

It just

I think I have the answer.

It's the Budweiser phenomenon.

Why would Budweiser, who deliberately used to have a bunch of big horses, Clydesdale's, and talk about American freedom and tradition and honor on July 4th and appeal to the working muscular classes to buy Bud Light and Bush, why would they redirect and get some Ivy League isolated PR person to hire Dylan Mulvaney to talk about transgenderism,

unless the point was to destroy your brand.

So if I were going to be facetious, I would say this, that you're right.

The Navy, the Air Force, the Marines, and the Army are up against it.

Even though they spend more money in absolute dollars, and they spend

probably

almost as much in GDP, if not more, than China.

They don't have as many ships as China.

They don't have as many hypersensitic weapons.

They don't have as big a military as China.

So, to rectify that, it seems to me that you would go to the people through thick and thin that always are for large military budgets, 4%, 5% of GP.

That is the bedrock working middle class that exudes patriotism, conservatism, military families, et cetera, right?

The conservative side.

So

why are they doing all these things?

So if you put it this way, maybe

I'm just being facetious, but to show you how ridiculous it is, maybe the military said,

huh, this is our goal.

We want to make sure we have a recruitment shortfall

recruitment shortfall we want to be at least i don't know we want to be at least a division short in the army we want to make sure we don't have enough planes

We want to offend all of our Republican people in Congress that were our bulwark supporters.

And we want to make damn sure that we go after white males in the military that have died at double their rates in Iraq and Afghanistan are the traditional

locus classicist classicus of people who go to Vietnam, First Gulf War, Second Gulf War, et cetera.

We want to do all of that.

So how do we do it?

Well, let's start having a drag queen recruit people.

Let's have mandatory woke indoctrination.

Let's let in six and a half million people at the border with no vaccination, but kick out any veteran with combat experience that doesn't want to get a vaccination, no questions asked.

And let's

leave $50 billion of military hardware to go into the international terrorist mart in Afghanistan.

And let's promote on the basis of race and gender.

And let's talk about having electric tanks, for example.

And that will so alienate our traditional source of support that we will not be adequately funded.

And if that's not enough, let's make sure

that every Secretary of Defense, Assistant Secretary of Defense,

Associate Secretary of Defense, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, member of the Joint Chiefs, that when they retire, they rotate into Raytheon, General Dynamics, Lockheed, Northrop, Boston Consulting Group, and make a lot of money

selling their influence.

And if we can do all that,

maybe, maybe, maybe we'll lose the support of the American people at a critical time.

And that's all I can think of, Jack.

That's it.

It had to be deliberate.

I mean,

who's the genius in the Pentagon?

If you thought of a way to destroy the military, you couldn't have done a better job.

Could you?

You could leave.

You had the example of Saigon 75, so why would you repeat it?

Kabul

21, only it was a lot more.

We didn't leave $50 billion of stuff

or maybe, you know, fly the pride flag from the embassy or.

gender studies at the University of Kabul or pregnant, what is it, pregnant air suits for women aviators And just emphasize all that.

So the point is, I guess, that we don't want Jack Armstrong from Des Moines, Iowa.

We just don't want him.

We don't want a guy that looks like Mr.

Penny,

the Samaritan who put the guy in the headlock, unfortunately, who died.

We don't want that guy.

He's too big.

He's too white, too conservative.

He probably was a lousy Marine.

That's what they're probably thinking.

We would rather have the homeless guy, Mr.

Needley, in our.

He's a person of color.

He's got a different background.

He shows talent.

He had showed talent with the Michael Jackson impersonation.

I think that's all I can come up with.

I'm serious.

They're just

doing every single thing.

And you can see that China's delighted.

Yeah.

Delighted.

And

I don't know.

I mean,

it's sort of like the halftime show at the Super Bowl, or how, if you were in the NBA, how could you get 70 million people in the final

NBA game audience, televised audience global in 1998?

And how would you say in 1998, hmm,

I would like in 25 years to reduce this audience down to 4 million and brag about what an increase we'd had over 3 million the year before.

Now, what do we have to do to get 70 million viewers to 4 million?

And somebody would say, hmm,

well, maybe we could get the team not to stand up for the flag.

That's a good idea.

Maybe we could get the best stars of the age to say America was racist.

That's a good idea.

Maybe we could get a coach to start defending the Chinese and crap on America.

Maybe they could all refuse to go to the White House.

That's a good idea.

And that's where we are.

These people are deliberately destroying their own product.

They're eating their seed corn.

They're cannibals that eat their own arms off.

Well, it's one thing if the NBA wants to do that.

We can live without basketball, but

it's hard to imagine.

Somebody, at some point,

I make a prediction.

There are

20,000 of the best fighters in the world that went through the cauldron of Afghanistan, Iraq at some point over the last 20 years.

And they have been promoted

to lieutenant, I mean, major, lieutenant colonel, colonel, maybe even one star.

And they are being held up because of the woke revolution.

In other words, the fact that they have stellar battle records or their artillery unit had 98% accuracy or their air wing

never had to have an aborted flight, that doesn't matter.

But

in extremists, at the 11th hour, we're going to get a normal presidency back and we're going to get a normal defense establishment back.

And they're going to go back through those ranks and they're going to say, that guy, that guy was a hero in Afghanistan.

That guy was wonderful.

And this guy was the best.

And they're going to say

They're not obsessed with transgenderism.

They're not obsessed with race.

They're just normal people, but they're wonderful soldiers and they're very smart.

And they're going to have to come in and save the military.

Yeah.

Well, it needs to be.

Sort of what happened

in World War II.

I don't think Marshall really did have a black book.

He said he did.

It's controversial, but George Marshall was made Army Chief of Staff.

Right.

And he looked at the peacetime army.

And he said, these people are all too old.

So he took a guy like Eisenhower in his late 40s, early 50s, and promoted him over 240 people.

And then he started to look around and he said, there's that crazy Patton out in a backwater and they don't, he's a natural armor man and they promoted him.

And they started looking at these division commanders and all of a sudden there were people like Matthew Ridgway or James Gavin or new people.

And they just

created a whole new army that all come out of the Army War College or Fort Leavenworth Infantry, et cetera.

And it turned out by the end of World War II, you could make the argument that the United States had the best one, two, and three-star generals in the

entire world.

Those division commanders that were commanding divisions or corps, one and two stars or three stars.

You know, Gavin.

Lightning Joe Collins and Troy Middleton.

And then, you know, I'm I'm not a big fan of Omar Bradley, but he was solid.

And George Patton and

all of them.

And then look at the Army Air Force, Army Air Corps that became the Army Air Force.

They got Touhee Spatz and they got Hap Arnold and the mad genius that probably was smarter than all of them, but although he was hated, it was Curtis LeMay.

But that was a meritocratic system.

And so we'll have to go back there or perish.

So I'm hoping that if Trump or whoever the Republican candidate is that can win this election, that one of the things they do, they consult with traditional military commanders and they find people who have a record of military efficacy and excellence.

And they don't care what color or what gender they are.

The new Marshall Plan.

Well, Victor, we're going to

talk about one more, maybe two more things quickly, but including the Bradley prizes.

And we're going to get to that right after this final important message.

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get more than just savings.

Get more with Geico.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This episode should be up on the

18th or so of May, Thursday-ish.

Frankly, by that time, even though Victor and I are talking now, he's out in his farm in california and i'm in my bedroom in milford connecticut we will have met in washington dc on uh tuesday because that is a a big day for

can you promise that that the flight from fresno to uh phoenix will be on time so i can make my hour connection well victor knowing that you're going to be on the plane i am sure it's going to need to to stop in mexico for extra gas and then that's happened before and i've i've been on my all-time record at the fresno airport i think was 14 wheelchairs and we missed it missed the flight i thought you told it was it was 19 that's no no that was

in the palm beach yeah yeah i was in palm beach victor and i traded some i have i think i mean i i had a ruptured appendix and that's i was in a wheelchair on the way home from libya but one of the things i i i i think it's great what we do but my only rule would be this if you board a plane

first

on a wheelchair,

and

you have a lot of luggage, so you have access to accessible empty overheads, and

you're put in there.

And each time,

it can delay a flight if there's 10 of them, 10 wheelchairs.

But my point is, when the plane lands, would you please request wheelchair service so that you can come out?

But that doesn't happen.

I see so often people that go on first

and then somehow mysteriously during the flight, there's, I guess, the oxygen and the recirculating air duct or whatever it is creates mythical fountain of youth.

It's close to the angels.

I think that can be what it is.

I have seen people right behind me that had trouble getting, you know, they had to be in there.

And then all of a sudden, they got a lot of space and then zoom, I got a quick connection.

I got to zoom out out rather rather than be the last person to board uh first to board and last to leave with wheelchair so it's a miracle it's a miracle i said that i said that to one person and they got really angry at me because they said well

uh

if you if you have a bad leg or you're gut vertigo and you get to sit for a while that's okay and then

you can probably make it out and extremists when you have to get a connection but I don't know why that.

You either either need assistance or you don't.

Now, I know people that did this on the national review cruises, they were wheelchair-in and then, you know, they were out dancing that night.

So it's, there's a, there'll be, it would be interesting to see if the airlines ever did a study on how, you know, is there a 10% faker level on this?

Anyway.

Anyway, we are hopefully meeting on Tuesday, the 16th, because the Bradley Prizes

awards happen that day.

It's a wonderful, I've been to them a couple of times.

It's Old Home Week.

See a lot of old friends there.

But three people

win the Bradley Prize.

And Victor is on the board of the Bradley Foundation.

And Victor, would you mind telling us who the recipients are and

why they why they have been awarded?

And the award is pretty, it's about, isn't it $300,000?

No, it's $250,000.

It was going up.

It's $250,000, but, and it used to be four people got it, and now it's three.

And we have a selection member, I can't say who's on it, but of board members, some board members, and then we invite outside participants.

And we kind of, we don't have formal categories, but we have two guidelines.

And one is a person is, although they're being rewarded for past service to traditional America,

they have to have a potential that once they get the prize, it's not a retirement medal, that they're going to be,

that the prize is honoring what they did do and

is preemptively honoring for what even greater things they will do in the future.

And then the second is we don't have separate categories, but there does seem to be

one slot for somebody in the academic world that publishes books or history, science, economics that's affiliated with a think tank or Canby or a university.

One person that's involved with organizing or movement,

and then one person who has had a pretty high profile in government corporations or something like that.

And sometimes it doesn't quite work out that way.

But this year we had, and you know her better than I do, Nina Shea.

She's a

religious freedom attorney for the Hudson Institute.

The day the news came out that she won, by sheer coincidence, she was

getting on an Amtrak train in Washington that I was getting on.

And by sheer coincidence, and her husband is Adam Meyerson, who's a great friend, and Adam used to run the Philanthropy Roundtable.

They sat in front of me, and I talked to Nina for a while, and

she was

hoping to get more information about, for some reason, for a talk on Souls and And

I sent her some Solzhenitsyn books.

So yeah,

she's been a great

champion, a frequent writer for

religious freedom,

press Christians and press Jews around the world.

She's a wonderful lady.

And then we have a colleague at the Hoover Institution of mine, John Cochran.

He combines

the best of both worlds.

He's a very well-known scholar.

He was formerly of the University of Chicago Business School and Economics Department.

Now he's at the Hoover Institution.

And he's written books on fiscal policy, especially things about what causes inflation, what to degree.

Is it printing money, the money supply, or

deficit spending, et cetera, et cetera.

But he also has a very popular blog called The Grumpy Economist that everybody kind of logs into

when they want

information about the here and now.

But he's not a grumpy guy.

He's a happy warrior.

No, I don't know why he taught.

Yeah, he doesn't, I don't know.

I think the grumpy economist is supposed to suggest it's a contrarian.

It's not just conventional wisdom, that he's willing to say things.

He's outspoken, but he's one of the nicest, most affable people at the Hoover Institution.

So it's just the opposite.

It should be called the on-grumpy or the affable economist.

But I think the nature of his advice might, to some people, appear grumpy.

And then we have a very high-profile people,

Betsy DeVos, Honorable Betsy DeVos, who was Secretary of Education of Donald Trump.

And she wasn't just Secretary of Education because we don't give the award to every Secretary of Education, obviously, but she took on a lot of unpopular, very unpopular, questioning the dominance and the monopolies of teachers' unions, promoting charter schools, promoting

homeschooling, promoting

choice, and questioning the government's role in mandatory, you know, critical race theory or indoctrination classes.

And so that she was on the front lines to the point when she speaks somewhere, she often draws pickets and

protesters.

She's a, I love her.

She is a

wonderful person.

She's a wonderful person.

She's a famous lady.

Yeah.

And prior to her being the Secretary of Education, as you allude, Victor, she did tremendous for a decade plus.

There are a lot of kids who have choice now in Florida, Tennessee, and other states because of what Betsy DeVos did.

She's vilified by the left.

She's vilified, you know, as a racist.

I bet there are a lot of black kids in America today who have choice because of what Betsy DeVos did.

Well, I mean,

she knew firsthand because she's from a very very distinguished wealthy family the DeVoses and they're known for their philanthropy and she lives in Michigan so she obviously had firsthand knowledge and interest in the Detroit public school system

and

you know a lot of school systems in the old industrial belt of Michigan and Ohio and Wisconsin and how those cities are run, the school systems are run by the teachers unions and how people who cannot afford to get out of those inner city schools are done injustice.

And so she was trying to offer them alternatives, whether that was parochial schools or schools choice, and that drew the ire of the teachers union.

So there's three really wonderful people.

And then on Tuesday night, much different than the left-wing version of the Oscars or the Tonys

or the

White House correspondent.

There's no soapbox opera, opera etic speeches or any of that crap, politicalization.

I know it's center-right, but we have a wonderful master of ceremonies, Kimberly Strassel from the Wall Street Journal.

And she

goes out and gives, tells a joke or two, and then she introduces and she guides us through the evening.

And then

we usually have a chorus

or a music, music of some sort, band or singers, very old-fashioned American, you know, traditional patriotic songs, folk songs.

And then in between these events, we bring out one of the three.

We have a little film about their life.

They

accept the award.

They give a brief talk.

And then we wrap up the finale with Kimberly interviewing the three of them in sort of a

we make an ad hoc living room when they're on couches and she talks about issues of the day.

It's really good.

And then there's kind of an extravaganza.

It's become,

I've been on the board, I think, 10 years, and it's become kind of famous now.

It's

It's a huge reception, lavishly supplied, and it seems to get almost every conservative

in the whole country that shows up there.

And my only problem is that I usually have to fly out the next day at six in the morning, so I don't stay very late.

Well,

you turn into a pumpkin.

I do.

Well, yeah, it's a great night.

It's a Bradley Foundation is one of the bedrock institutions of conservative movement and supports so many good nonprofits and other institutions.

The awards is a wonderful ceremony.

That's really good.

I've been on a lot of boards,

both government boards, the American Battle Monuments Commission, the 1776 Commission, the Harry Guggenheim Commission.

Foundation,

and a couple of others, all nonprofit.

But this something about the Bradley Foundation, I've never seen the board members take it so seriously and be so qualified.

And they're across the legal world, the corporate world, the academic world.

But boy, when you go to a meeting, everybody is prepared.

It starts exactly on time.

It's run by Rick Graeber, who's a masterful administrator, and people wear a coat and tie.

They're formally dressed.

Everybody's polite.

There's no shouting.

There's some disagreements on the grant proposals, and the staff is just wonderful.

And it just runs like clockwork.

And

if the Bradley people say this is going to start at eight and it's going to end at noon, it will end at noon.

And so

it's really amazing.

And I've been on other

boards and things with, hey, when do you want to start?

Hey.

And then somebody goes off in a tangent for an hour and nobody stops them, you know, but not this board.

Well, um, kudos to the winners, and um, I'm now I'm looking forward to seeing you on Tuesday.

And this, of course, will air after we have met.

Hopefully, your plane gets you there.

So, Victor, I want to thank our listeners for listening.

We've come to the end.

I got a little bit of a long

reader comment.

And of course, this comes from iTunes and Apple, where our listeners,

I said reader comment, listener comment, where our listeners can rate the show zero to five stars.

Nearly everyone gives it five stars.

Some people leave comments, and this is one, and it

kind of plays back to what we're just talking about with Betsy DeVos.

It's titled, Thank You for Teaching True History.

I've been a

secondary school world history teacher in my state for 17 years.

Thank you for your April 15th episode on Islamic conquest and the Ottomans.

I found that teaching this subject in my world history classes is like walking on landmines of woke responses from students who've been indoctrinated by the left.

When I was in high school in the 80s, I never remember challenging a teacher on the facts we learned from our books.

But now the textbooks are so sanitized on Islam that they don't talk about the brutality of the Muslim conquests.

When I point out that Islam was primarily spread through warfare in its early years, compared to Christianity's first 300 years, which was spread through preaching up until

Constantine, I've gotten student complaints that I am spreading anti-Muslim hate speech.

No, I am not.

I am just pointing out the different historical circumstances of the rise of Islam versus the rise of Christianity.

At this point,

I think ideology has so tainted education that parents ought to homeschool or very carefully seek private education.

I'm seeking different kinds of work now as I find it difficult and frustrating functioning in an environment where ignorant wokeness is

given a voice over empirical historical research.

Incidentally, one student I had even defended,

the Indian,

one student I had, even defended the Indian Hindu practice of sati, which the British eventually outlawed, on the grounds that this is ethically wrong to ever criticize a non-Western culture.

Yes, this is high school in America.

The nonsense in colleges has trickled down to us now.

So I'm done because administrators are cowards and listen to this nonsense and accuse thoughtful and informed teachers of prejudice when these are simply historical facts.

Thank you, Victor, for being brave and standing up for true truth and true scholarship.

Two Angels Mom.

That's signed off.

So

thank you, Two Angels, Mom.

I think that what you've written here will probably resonate with a lot of other listeners.

I'm sure it resonates with the star of the show, Mr.

Hansen, Professor Hansen.

So thank you for that.

Thank you for all who write.

We read your comments.

One last note.

Yeah, go ahead.

Go ahead, Victor.

Well, I was just going to say that, I mean, if you look at when I talked about the Ottomans, you talk about the 16th century.

And I know that,

you know, what Venice or Florence or people like like the Borges or the

Savonarola were like, it was a violent world, but there wasn't anything quite institutionalized like the death sherme

or the

use of eunuchs in the harem or the forcible.

abduction of young girls 10, 12, and then brought forcibly into the harem or then the succession of one sultan to another involved the, I guess you would call it the institutionalized liquidation of the half-brothers or the idea that janissaries were, you know,

taken from Christian European boys for the most part, kidnapped when they were eight or 10, and then indoctrinated with radical Islam and then separated from their families to create the most zealous psychological terrorizing unit of the Ottoman Empire.

So there were things in there that don't have quite the, or the same thing I could say about Tenochtitlan and the Aztecs.

And so if you weren't going to talk about that, you're not talking about history.

Right.

And we all, we all talk about the sins of the Holocaust as we should and the

other things that were excesses, slavery accepted.

But

this system institutionalized slavery.

in a way that even the Europeans were already discussing ways of manumission and liberation.

And, you know, even in the 15th and 16th century, there were dissonant voices and not

in the sultanate.

Well,

Victor, you're going to get in trouble for telling us the truth there.

Speaking of,

well, we're at the end of the show, except I'm going to say one last thing.

Visit civilthoughts.com, sign up for civil thoughts.

That's the free weekly email newsletter I write every week for the Center for Civil Society at Anfil, where we are trying to strengthen civil society.

I'll leave it at that.

You're going to like it.

Victor, thanks for all the wisdom

you shared.

And thanks, folks, for listening.

And we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Thank you and bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody.