Conquistadors and Border Disruption

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Hello, you're with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

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

This is our Saturday edition and we have a lot going on this week.

So we'll be talking about some of the latest stories, but our historical part of this podcast will be on Cortez who meets up with the Aztecs and will defeat their empire in two years.

So very much a curiosity, I think, in military history.

So I look forward to hearing about that.

But first, let's take a few moments to listen to a few messages.

We'll be right back.

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You're back with the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Welcome to everybody.

Victor, we'd like to start on a positive note.

And this weekend is Mother's Day weekend.

And I know that you and I both have mothers, very great mothers, I would say, in both cases.

But did you have any reflections on mothers in history or mothers in general?

Yeah, I do.

I mean,

the key to a family is, I hate as a male, it's kind of ironic, but is a strong mother, a partnership, but a mother.

I was very fortunate.

My mother was a perfect complement to my father.

They were very different, but they were kind of like a duo or a team.

And she was kind of a remarkable person.

She was born here in the house I'm living in in 1922.

She was the first student body president in the history of her high school.

I think she was saluted Victorian.

And she had a scholarship to go to Stanford, but she met my dad and she went to the University of Pacific to follow him

because he was on a football scholarship.

And then she went to Stanford and got a second BA and then a law degree, which is kind of weird in the 40s.

And then

very hard for her to get a job as a woman with a Stanford law degree in 1946.

So she came back to the farm.

They had no money.

He started out as a high school teacher and farming, and they moved an old 800-square-foot home, and we lived in that for a while.

My grandparents lived in the house that I'm in now at that time.

And then she raised us

till she was 40 years old.

I just remember her playing

Rogers and Hammerstein's South Pacific.

She played Peter and the Wolf, all these operas.

She taught us the names of them.

She read stories.

And then she would always go to Fresno at Dodson's bookstore and bring back the latest landmark young adult biography and then make us read it.

And she had a very strange idea.

She thought we should not go to the country school, which was mostly white, of farmers' kids in that year, but to the Hispanic.

We were right on the border of the Hispanic school, because she thought it would be better for us to, you know, meet different people.

And we did.

And I think

I talked to her once a week growing up.

And then when I got to be an adult, and she was, I think we talked every day.

She died very early at 66 from a meningioma tumor that was benign, but then it turned cancerous.

It was very bad.

But

I can't say enough about her.

I owe so much to her.

Every time I'd say, I don't think I'm ever going to get a job.

I think I'm going to go broke on the the farm, you know, Eeyore.

And she'd say, no, no, no, no, no, no.

That kind of reaffirmation.

Mothers, so, I mean,

there's a lot of famous mothers in antiquity and the present.

And they kind of,

I don't know.

If you don't have a good mother, then the whole family falls apart.

I mean, father, women can survive.

Bad men leave.

But if you've got a mother that's not a good mother, and I've known some,

but when you get a good mother, it anchors the entire family.

I think when my mother died very early, 66, we had this farm and we had all the, everything sort of fell apart for a long time because of her absence.

And nobody really realized how much she had done for everybody.

But she was a state appellate courts judge.

She was the second woman in California.

She was the first juvenile woman judge.

She was a superior court judge.

And

with all of that, she was the brains brains behind keeping 180 acres of farming going.

And

gosh, when she passed away as a grandmother, mother, wife, everybody fell apart.

And that was, and they never, and I don't think they ever quite recovered.

But anyway, going on to bright news, you asked me for some bright news, right?

Well, I have some other bright news that Donald Trump has,

well, the way that

I think it was,

yeah, no, it was breitbart they were really jubilant about this donald trump hijacked cnn interview with caitlin collins was their title so they felt like donald trump in that cnn interview had really walked all over caitlin collins but i was wondering what your views were

i watched i watched uh excerpts and i tried to watch extended excerpts yeah he did i mean CNN is under fire because they went so hard left.

They have an audience between 200,000 and 400,000, and they've got a very heavy payroll of wannabe experts, you know, Anderson Cooper types that are way overpaid and have almost no audience.

And they wanted to tack back to the old days of CNN.

So they dreamed up this idea of getting this Collins, who's supposed to be the new, I don't know what she is, the new Walter Cronkite, supposedly.

And they thought they were going to kind of rig it and put it in a college, St.

Anselm's College, and you know how that is.

And Donald Trump showed up, and they thought they were going to embarrass him.

And I mean, think about right now, just we've got the border.

We've got inflation that's a historic high almost.

We have interest rates that are 7%.

We have the Afghanistan mess.

We've got the Ukraine war.

We have deteriorating racial relationships.

We have the whole blue state, blue city model imploding.

We gave up energy and

efficiency.

We've got the most corrupt president and his family in history.

And what does she want to talk about for most of the time?

January 6th, January 6th, January 6th, January 6th.

Are you going to accept the election?

And, you know, Donald Trump said it was rigged.

But,

you know, Molly Hemingway wrote a book called Rigged, and rigged can mean a lot of different things.

Molly didn't say that the Dominion voting machines were rigged.

I don't know if Trump believes that or not.

What Molly said was that in March and April of 2020, a whole team of subsidized DNC lawyers changed the voting laws to such an effect that 70% didn't vote on Election Day.

They voted not on Election Day.

And that had an impact because the authenticity and the audits of those votes came into question in a way they had not in the past.

That's indisputable.

Mark Zuckerberg put in $419 million.

The CIA,

we know now, helped the retired 51 officers, i.e., intelligence authorities, on the prompt of Anthony Blinken to

Mike Morrell, the former interim CIA director.

What did they do?

They deliberately suppressed a very important story that was accurate so they could, in a pre-planned fashion, give Joe Biden a shred of cover when he was going to be nailed on that laptop, which was very incriminating.

Mr.

Big Guy, Mr.

10%.

And so, yes, that's called rig.

And Donald Trump, he could have done better, I think, in articulating that.

But the idea that all of a sudden he was talking about QAN.

And I saw this clip from Anderson Cooper.

He was just whining, just pathetic.

And then they had these little, you know, they had Representative Donalds who just tore apart these CNN talking heads.

He was really good.

And they were just anguished because Donald Trump went into that thing and he just

hijacked it.

And he didn't, he asked, he answered what he wanted.

He didn't answer what he didn't want.

And then the crowd was supposed to be a college left-wing.

You know how those debates are.

They're all at universities.

But they weren't.

There was a bunch of MAGA people came in and they don't like the Klingers.

So it was an ongodly disaster.

The only good thing for CNN, it got out of the national news cycle, the Biden corruption, I suppose, for a day.

But other than that, it offended its shrinking left-wing bays.

It enraged all of its hack-talking heads.

And it gave Donald Trump an attention.

So whether you were reading a left-wing blog or a right-wing blog, it didn't matter.

They all said Donald Trump hijacked that and intimidated CNN.

And that's only a plus for him.

Yeah, that sure is.

And I mean, National Review got angry about a lot of people said, look, he could have done, yes, he could have.

I understand that.

But he's obsessed because he's facing

Alan Bragg and Letita James and Willis and Smith.

And they're all politicized attacks.

And he's sitting there with this entire crime syndicate that is soft on China, compromised on Ukraine, and got millions of dollars into the pockets of the Biden family.

And nobody does anything.

And it's the greatest example of the asymmetry, whether we're talking about papers at Mar-a-Lago or in Joe's garage.

Everything is asymmetrical.

And we've got a wide open border with a

Homeland Security, Mr.

Mayorka head, that is completely subverting, willfully so, the law, letting in people, people, people by design.

And they should have impeached him and he should have been removed a year ago.

So, yeah, he's frustrated.

A lot of us are.

But

I guess the moral of the story to conclude is: if you think you're an intellectual, or if you think, like Miss Collins, that you read all of your clippings, how great you are, and you're being groomed to be the new master, and Don Lamon's out of the way, and Anderson Cooper brags on you, and you're in that little echo chamber, and you think you're going to get this crude, crass

president who was impeached twice and supposedly just, you know, he just lost a civil suit and you're going to put him in there and humiliate him, you got to, he doesn't give a blank, blank.

He really doesn't.

And he's going to rip you up unless you prepare and you go and you can go mono to mono with him.

If you don't believe that, just go look at the tapes of the 2016 debate stage when you had some of the brightest, most capable Republicans.

I mean, Jeb Bush did a good job.

I don't agree with him a lot, but he did a good job in Florida.

And then you had Scott Walker, and you had Marco Rubio, and you had Ted Cruz.

You had Carly Fiorina, you had Chris Christie.

And

he ate them all.

He literally destroyed them.

John Casey, he destroyed them on the stage.

And if you don't like it, I'm sorry, but

that's what he did on that

other evening on CNN.

Yes.

And the Breitbart article was dancing its own little jig around the fact that Caitlin Collins could only come back with, that's wrong.

That's not right.

That's wrong.

She didn't have the correction at all.

He had more

feet for that.

Trump can be guilty of bombast, but he had more details than she did.

She just thought, I'm in front of my left-wing college audience, and I got my CNN left-wing people, and I can just be the crusader that stood up to Donald Trump, but I don't have to go bone up on anything.

And when you heard Anderson Cooper's little editorial, oh, you shouldn't be

at CNN and those QAn protesters on January 6th.

And, you know, he

called the police person who shot Ashley Babbitt, what, a thug.

And I think it was Anderson Cooper.

And this is just a telegraph racist

characterization.

No, Anderson.

the officer who shot Ashley Babbitt executed a person who went through a window and committed a misdemeanor.

And you and your colleagues, anytime in America, a police officer lethally shoots an unarmed suspect committing a misdemeanor, you call racism.

And in this case, his identity was hidden.

Was he a thug?

No, probably not, but he had a checkered record.

And he was known as a bully among his compatriots.

And he left a loaded gun in a bathroom and lost it in the Capitol complex.

And he was not really cited.

If you're a police officer patrolling in the Capitol Police and you ensure the safety of the Congress and you leave your loaded service weapon in a bathroom,

then you should be dismissed.

And then they, of course, they suppressed his identity because,

and, and Anderson knows very well that as soon as a officer shoots a suspect, lethally so, their picture, their name, every biographical detail is splashed across every news account you can find, except this one.

And then this guy had the gumption to get on what was it, 60 minutes, one of these left-wing outlets and kind of whine months later, oh, this is so terrible.

They're threatening me.

No, they're not threatening me.

They're not threatening you to the degree that they're going to put you in jail and solitary confinement for a year, which they did with a lot of people who they later did not always charge.

So I get, you know, I think everybody's tired of it.

And Donald Trump,

I wouldn't have used the word thug, but he was trying to what?

Incite them.

And that's what he does.

And this is going to be a choice for everybody as we go into this primary.

And I want a primary because I want everybody to come out and get excited.

But is it going to be cool, efficient Ron DeSantis?

Is it going to be volatile, explosive Donald Trump?

And some of them say, I want to get angry, and some say I want to get even.

And there's two different strategies.

We'll have to see them play out.

Yes, definitely.

And that's what Donald Trump is,

he's kind of like,

you know, the magnificent seven that was

rode out of town by Eli Wallach the first time.

Remember, they had the kind of the villagers kind of didn't support them and they all got disarmed and they were riding out.

And then the second time they came back, they were kind of crazy.

Well, the same thing with a wild bunch, remember?

They dealt with Mapachi and they had to deal with him.

And then they killed their friend, and they were all, they got the money, they're ready to go out, they're out of power.

And then they say, why not?

And they all come back.

And then, you know, Peck and Paw's finale.

And that's what Donald Trump is.

He's coming back.

And they know

they're sort of the townspeople.

And they kicked him out.

He was kind of the gunslinger they hired to clean up the town.

And he cleaned it up too well.

And he bashed some people's head on the saloon bar, you know, and he drew his weapon at the mayor and all that stuff.

So they conspired and they said sorry gunslinger sorry shane or whoever you are you're out and he rode off and now he's coming back and they see him on the

on the horizon they said oh

what is he going to do

and that's how they're in panic right now because look they know

they know what they did in those two phony impeachments they know what they did with the laptop disinformation lie they know what they did with a russian collusion lie they know they just went crazy over them.

And they know that they told everybody that they were going to replace him with good old Joe Biden from Scranton, who's going to unite us.

They knew he was senile and they knew he was incompetent, but they thought he would be a good little scab to the wound of socialism.

And now, two and a half years later, it's an utter disaster and they've almost destroyed the country.

So they have no argument.

We're going to get a uniter.

And then they look around and they think, oh, well, we'll get him.

No, we cannot get Kamala Harris.

No, no, no, no, no.

Maybe Amy Kobuchar.

No, no, no, no, no.

How about Gavin?

No, his deficit just went from 24 billion, what, to 40 billion?

Or

all you'd have to do to run against Gavin Newsom, if you just put Florida, California.

How many people are leaving California to Florida?

How many people leave Florida?

What is the deficit in Florida?

What's the tax rate in Florida?

What is the standard?

see what I mean?

So that's their.

Yes, I do, but they also,

just like you say, they also know that all those things worked.

And they, as you called it, they have the ability to rig an election through all sorts of local laws and get out the votes.

I know, I know.

And they're confident in that.

They are.

Jeffrey Katzenberg,

what is he's that big Hollywood producer?

He just kind of announced that he will spend whatever it takes to destroy Donald Trump.

You know that Mark Zuckerbergel thought, you know what, that 419 made me famous.

I stopped Donald Trump.

So he's going to give probably a billion dollars.

A billion for him is nothing.

So yeah, it's going to be a mess.

If Trump gets a nomination, it's going to draw out every single

billionaire that hates him, and they're going to go nuts.

And this time, they're not going to say, well, we're going to have a uniter.

We don't hate Trump.

We just want to bring the country back together we want some moderate no they've seen joe biden they're not even going to make that argument they're not even going to say well he can't go out of his office because of covet they're going to say you know what he's senile f you what the hell you care he's senile yes he was a disaster yes we don't care all we want to do is stop this orange man and that's that that's what their argument going to be And the question will be whether they convince those

independents one way or the other.

And that'll be interesting to see.

But it's also interesting in the terms of the money put into things.

And currently in Pennsylvania, they have a DA election going on.

And the various

the two candidates won, the Democrat raised $76,000 and the Republican candidate raised $227,000.

But George Soros came in with $700 plus thousand for this Democratic DA.

And it'll be interesting to see who wins in that because it'll really tell you what money can do.

Well, we know what it did.

He ruined the major cities in the United States by funding not just incompetent people for these city and state prosecutors, but mean-spirited, angry people who wanted to get even with America.

And their way of getting even was letting criminals out.

And again, the attitude was,

what are you going to do about it?

What are you going to do about it?

And so that's what's scary.

And

let's face it,

Gascon is just, his attitude is, I'm going to let people out.

And I'm going to go out and search my books and see if there was ever a case dropped against a policeman.

I'm going to reopen it.

And I don't care that the downtown and LA is deserted.

And Boudin got recalled and he didn't care.

He ruined San Francisco.

And they don't care.

And I think

we have to get that attitude that, that, you know, I said the other night on Sean's, he said,

people had said, well, the Bidens were completely unprepared.

No, they weren't unprepared on the border.

They wanted that.

We think, well, they're unprepared.

It's embarrassing.

Yeah, but they get back and they talk about, they said, oh, those stupid MAGA people, we let in six and a half million illegals since we've been here.

And if they stop us tomorrow, we did more than anybody's ever did to destroy that border.

And we're proud of it.

And what are you going to do about it?

That's their attitude.

Yes.

And the fraying of civilization always occurs to or happens to the middle class first.

So it's not going to affect them and it's not going to affect the absolute poor whose only direction is up.

But that middle class and lower middle class

all these people in their neighborhoods and just destroy them.

Their school systems just destroy them.

It's just why don't we do why don't we detour to that since I brought it up, that topic, because the the borders open, 10,000 people arrested as

42 per day, yes, and more getting across.

And let's just dispel some of the mythologies.

The first mythology is Joe Biden said yesterday that we has a partner in Mr.

Obador.

No, you don't.

He's not your partner.

He's not your partner.

I mentioned that.

We talked about that earlier.

He's bragging that he sent 40 million people in here.

And he's bragging that he wants them all to vote Democratic.

And he knows that he's not going to touch the cartels.

And if they kill 100,000 Americans, what does he say?

It's America's fault.

Don't create the demand for our cartel product.

And they're all over the United States.

$10 billion in revenues they make every year.

He gets $60 billion from remittances.

Does he care that

the U.S.

taxpayer who's listening to this is sending health, education, food, housing, legal help to people here illegally so they can free up cash to send back to Mr.

Obador's Mexico?

No, that's the point.

He doesn't care.

That's number one.

Number two, we all romanticize.

the immigrants.

We all say, well, if I was in Oaxaca or Chiapas or Michel Khan, I would come too.

Maybe, maybe not.

But I don't think I would deliberately break the law when I knew that people did not want me to come.

So when you see all of those, mostly males coming in across the border, and you have this idea, oh, this is so terrible.

These people are so wonderful.

No, you don't even know anything about them.

If you think that's true and they're so wonderful, then go to an LA

Lakers or an LA, any sports event.

Go to a 49er game and look at that crowd and say, oh, they're all so wonderful.

I'd like any one of them to come in mind.

You don't know anything about them because there's no audit, there's no background check, there's no legality.

You know one thing, one thing.

They are coming into the United States when they know A, it is illegal to cross that border, B, it's illegal to reside in the United States, and C, they will do whatever it takes to

sustain that illegality.

whether it's social security numbers or false or drivers, they don't care.

That's number one.

And number two, they know that there's people

among them that are drug dealers and felons and everybody's coming in.

They don't care.

And when they come in,

they are not going to, as soon as they cross that border, kiss the soil and say, thank God I'm in the United States.

I love this country.

That's why I wanted to come here.

And then they're going to say, and what do I have to do?

Oh, I have a little tag that says, oh, you gave me a free cell phone and it's going to buzz me when my hearing.

I love this country so much that first thing I want to do is follow the law.

You think that's going to happen?

No.

When they get their hearing, they're going to say, F you.

And then they're going to count on the ethnic lobby and the DNC and the whole thing.

And so I get rid of that second myth.

that the illegal immigrants are wonderful people that we are empathetic and they should come in.

No, they're breaking the law.

They know they're breaking the law.

And if they really want to enact change, then they should stay in Mexico and work for change.

And they don't want to do that.

And Mr.

Obador, if he really wanted to solve the problem, then he would redirect his budgetary interest to something else, or he'd clean out his government of cartel people.

And he can't or won't do that.

The third

you didn't state that a lot of these people are coming over and they owe their transport to the cartels.

So they're going into our cities to work for the cartels.

That's a disaster.

And the third, third, so that's myth of Mexico, myth of the noble illegal immigrant.

And the third myth is the Republican Party is against illegal immigration.

Yeah, maybe the MAGA party finally is, but I liked Ronald Reagan, but he signed the Simpson-Mazzoli Act of 1986 that destroyed border enforcement.

And he allowed them to come through.

I like Alan Simpson, too.

And yet that thing was the most deleterious thing impossible.

The little I-9 forward was, they were all forged within weeks, and there was no border enforcement.

And

why was that?

Because the Republican corporate Chamber of Commerce, Cato Institution, let's get cheap labor.

It's so wonderful.

And get cheap labor, cheap labor.

So if I've got a meat packing plant, I've got a landscaping service, I've got a hotel, I've got cooks, or I don't have, or I have, you know, I work at the DMV or I work at the disability or I'm a bureaucrat.

And we'll bring in people who are illegal.

They'll work.

And if they get injured or they get old or they want to quit, we're going to throw them back on the social services and get somebody else.

And we don't give a blank, blank about society at large.

It's just the truth.

And that constituency has

really prohibited the Republican Party from doing anything.

They keep talking about, well, we're going to sit down with conference.

George Bush was the worst, George W.

Bush.

We're going to sit down and do comprehensive immigration.

No, you're not.

You don't.

Comprehensive immigration is.

reform is a euphemism for amnesty.

Amnesty, amnesty.

That means you're going to sit down with the left and they're going to say we want an open border and you're going to say well can we have it 88

open

just so cover that's because we want the same thing you do you want voters we want workers and we want profits and then the final thing is myth number four is the empathetic uh humanitarian left no they want there's 550 sanctuary cities they all get on their soapbox and their megaphones I'm for sanctuary cities.

Bring us, you're tired, you're hungry, you're poor.

No, when they go to Martha's Vineyard or Chicago, that's it.

Right now, as we speak, there are protests of African Americans in Chicago because they have a measly little 500 group of illegals that were bussed in there that are in a gym.

And they think they're going to, quote, dilute the vote.

They're going to dilute our vote.

You mean you guys vote on the basis of race, so 94% of your vote is directed toward a black candidate, and you're afraid that 500 people will come in, and you don't really care about their poverty.

Okay,

so don't tell me that you're the empathetic sanctuary cities.

And if you think I'm picking on poor black people, go look at Martha's Vineyard, wealthy, wealthy white people.

Did you see those people, those clips when they first were bussed in?

They all got together and they thought, hmm.

We're going to go give them food.

We're going to bring them clothes.

And they bought boxes to this little migrant center they set up.

And then after about, and then after about three days,

Buffy and Preppy said to each other, hey, this is ruining my malu.

I don't want these people here.

We're going to get together and really get them a nice bus ride out of here immediately.

And then

I saw Mallorca say, it's really, I really don't like the idea that Governor Abbott is using human people for political purposes.

What do you think you're doing?

You created the situation for political purposes.

You knew what was going to happen.

You did it because your master said that you wanted to break the law and destroy it.

And so finally, finally, finally, a governor says, if you want to destroy

federal immigration law, you're not going to destroy our state.

I'm sorry.

I'm going to send them all over and you're going to get your wish as a sanctuary city.

And it shows you how racist the left is.

They really are.

They don't want any of them there.

None.

None.

They want illegal immigration for two or three reasons.

Number one, they want to flip the state's glue so that they can win the Electoral College, but they don't want to live in the areas where Hispanic illegal aliens are.

Number two, they

want to make sure they come in without audit, without background checks, so they don't need to speak English.

They don't need to have a high school diploma.

They don't need to have definable skills.

they don't need to have legality, and they will throw themselves at the mercy to obtain parity on the social services industries.

And that will require a GS11, a GS-12, a GS-15 to attend to the needs, which means bigger government, bigger government, more taxes,

and destroy the private sector more and more.

That's their goal.

And then, number three, they are guilt-ridden elites, and they know it.

They know that from their white enclaves

in Chevy Chase

or

Brentwood or Malibu

or

Woodside, they feel just terrible about the world.

So they support and they abstract the idea of letting anybody poor come to this great country, as long as they don't have to be around them.

And

the poor deplorables or the renegade Hispanics or the

black conservatives that don't show no gratitude, they can deal with it, but not us.

No, that's their attitude.

So it's a rotten, it's a whole rotten thing and it's full of mythologies and lies.

It really is.

And as I just mentioned, Mexico, if you could define an enemy, think about it.

What country in the world is responsible for deliberately allowing a weapon to come in that kills 100,000 people?

What country in the world sends its narco agents to control the other country's drug business?

And I mean it, you can't hike in some areas of the Sierra Nevada because you'll run into a cartel dope farm.

And what country in the world exports human capital deliberately?

as a source of foreign exchange and doesn't give a damn about your laws or anything.

And if you say Mexico, then you would say they're an enemy.

They're not an ally.

They're not a neutral.

Everything they do would be qualified as a belligerent.

They are.

They're doing much more damage to us, I think, than North Korea is.

So, you know, it's time to just stop all of the platitudes, stereotypes, generalizations that we're spoon-fed about illegal immigration and look at it for what it is.

Absolutely.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and come back and talk a little bit about Cortez and the Aztecs, if we can do that.

We'll be right back.

Welcome back.

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

It's called The Blade of Perseus, and you can join for free and get on our newsletter, and we'll send you the free free stuff that comes onto the website, which is copious, American greatness articles, and his podcasts, and then other things that appearances that he has.

And then you can join for $5 a month or $50 for the year.

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So please come on and join us.

We'll be happy to have you.

Well, Victor, it's our historical weekend

here.

So let's, I know that the Aztecs or Cortez, who comes in and conquers the Aztec Empire, that's a big moment in military history, partly because it took so, it was such a short period and it was so absolute, if I can put it that way.

So I was wondering if you could explain to us how it, how it happened.

Well, we've been talking about, we started with the Persian Wars, Peloponnesian Wars, Alexander the Great, the Roman conquest, the Roman Civil Wars,

the barbarian invasions.

We got into the Byzantine wars in existence.

We talked about the Hundred Years' War.

And so, right about this time, 1519,

Hernan Cortez was a minor, minor,

Spanish official at Cuba.

And he had heard tales that there was a monumental empire in the interior of Mexico, but he had not been given regal permission to go in there.

But he organized an ad hoc group and he cobbled together about 500,

to be frank, glory hunters, and they wanted golden glory and some priests.

And they landed at what is now Veracruz.

And they almost immediately were opposed by various

allies, neutrals, and enemies of the Aztec Empire.

Even the Tlex Calans fought them.

And they won almost every battle.

They were outnumbered at a magnitude of 10 to 1.

But it was the unfortunate

experience, destiny, fate of the Aztecs and

their original allies that they were encountering a very peculiar, weird group of people.

And these are people that...

had some of the greatest arms factories in Europe with the truly of steel swords and armor.

They had arquebuses,

early

personal firearms.

They had bronze cannon.

They had a nautical genius, Martin Lopez, that knew how to build ships ex nilio.

They had

people who knew how to fabricate gunpowder from local ingredients,

salt pepper.

carbon.

And most importantly, they had some absolute fanatics.

One was Hernan Cortez, who was a kind of a clerk accountant and had no military experience, except they all had, they were Castilians, and they had been fighting Protestants for 20 years and Muslims for 400 years.

And they were some of the most accomplished warriors of Spanish tertio in the world.

And when they unleashed them, when they went in there,

they were murderous and you couldn't stop them.

And there was some cultural confusion as they made their way inland toward what is now Mexico City, Tenochtitlan, the city on the lake.

It was kind of like Venice.

And, you know, if you look, read Bernard Diaz, the original impressions, they thought it was bigger than Venice.

There may have been 200 to 400,000 people living there.

And it was very well designed with locks on the lake and monumental architecture, sophisticated astronomical reckoning.

As they made their way in and defeated these preliminary tribes, they learned that all these people hated the Aztecs, even though it was a loose confederation of over a million people.

They learned that the Aztecs harvested their young people.

In other words, they had so-called flower wars.

Two sides met each other, they went out, and they had large leather thong ropes, and one side then would attack the other side, knock a warrior down, drag him, put his feet on a thong, and drag him out to a pre-selected destination.

And then they would withdraw.

And then the guy who got the most was a very famous warrior.

And they sacrificed him.

They took him up to the

plaza major at Mexico City in the case of the Aztecs.

They treated him as royalty.

They painted him in the proper way.

They took him up to the priest.

They put him on a stone table.

The priest cut open his chest.

They took out the beating heart for a second, offered to the gods.

and then they kicked the corpse down the steps.

They

cut pieces off the thigh and arm.

People ate it.

They made basically guacamole out of it.

And then

they fed the carcass

to the royal zoo.

And

the Spanish were shocked at this.

They'd never seen...

cannibalism and human sacrifice so institutionalized.

And then there was, they'd never seen what they called sodomy what we would call homosexuality ritualized and it became kind of a fanatic thing to stamp this out but also to profit from it and to get rich and so they began in typical roman fashion divide and conquer they were able to appeal to the self-interest of all these people who hated

the Aztecs.

In the case of the Plax Calon, the largest anti-Aztec group, they made a pact with them and said, we're going to win and we're going to control this country and we're going to make you exempt from slavery, tribute, everything.

And they kind of kept their word for after they fall.

And then

at any given time, they never had more than 1,500 conquistadors.

They at times swelled up to 2,500, but they were quickly whittled back down.

And

they almost got got wiped out in the so-called Nocha Triste, the unhappy night where they got trapped in the city and Montezuma Zuma, who they took hostage, the king, emperor, was killed.

I can't get into that how.

We don't have enough time, but they had to, at the middle of the night in a rainstorm,

get out on the dikes.

and go on the causeways out of that lake and they were greedy and they were laden down with gold and they lost about 500 of them fell in the lake or were butchered and then there was only about eight or nine hundred left and that was there's these moving and three or four sources are these moving accounts in Spanish about these conquistadors and they're on the they're almost they're wounded they've been outnumbered 10,000 people attacked them in canoes they're shredded and they're looking back at the the silhouette and they're seeing their former friends our friends and they're all painted and they're dressed up with feathers and they're all shrieking as their hearts are torn out.

And then the Aztecs are surrounding them.

And what would be the attitude of most people?

You would run or give it not Hernan-Cortez.

So what they did was they did what they always did.

They had horses, which the Aztecs had never seen.

They thought originally that...

a Spanish conquisador and a horse was one person, a centaur, and they'd never seen mastifs before.

These were not just like, you know, a Chihuahua.

They had some experience with small little dogs, but these were these huge dogs.

You see them today.

They weigh 150 pounds and they were trained as, you know, war dogs.

They'd never seen steel before.

And this was not just steel.

It was Spanish Toledo steel.

It was razor sharp.

They'd never seen men in armor before.

And this was Spanish armor.

They'd never seen or heard gunpowder before.

And they had kind of a scatter shot, grape shot load in these small cannons.

And they'd never seen lancers before.

And so,

and they'd never seen fanatics, but they were fanatics, but they didn't understand the Spanish version of Catholicism that was embattled against Islam and Protestantism.

And so, when you put those ingredients together and you get a hundred conquistadors and horses and lances with that fanaticism, they would, instead of running away, they just turned around and went right for at the Battle of Otumba, right after the Nochit Trista, and they just wiped out all of the Aztec captains and stopped the

pursuit.

And then what did they do?

They went back.

They were

completely decimated.

They were sick.

They were wounded.

And they got reinforcements from Veracruz.

They went back and they said, you know, the reason we lost, we don't have ships.

And they built brigadines.

They built kind of sloops and they numbered the parts.

They took them apart and they carried them on the backs of the Tlaxcalans and they went back into Tenochtitlan.

They put a fleet in there and then they announced that they were going to take the capital city and the empire.

And they had this horrific fight and they demolished this entire city block by block.

And like every conqueror, they always say afterwards they didn't mean to.

And, you know, he had to apologize to Charles V and say, I didn't really mean to do this.

But of course he did.

And then on the ashes of Tenochtitlan, they built Mexico City.

And they used the enslaved Aztecs to the degree they were any left.

We don't know how many were wiped out, probably over four or five hundred thousand

because

they had also had people from

Africa and the tropics with them that had smallpox.

And while they weren't completely immune, they got sick, whereas

people in Mexico died immediately because they had no natural defenses of whooping cough, smallpox, et cetera.

So between disease and gunpowder and horses and dogs and Spanish steel, they were almost invincible, no matter how few they were.

And then that was the beginning of this

new idea, and along with Pizarro in South America, that that was the end of.

a monumental, cohesive, independent Mexico.

The Mexico is the word that they use.

I don't think they ever called themselves Aztecs.

That was a word the Spanish used for them, based, I think, on a village.

And so it was pretty traumatic, but by 1521, you're right, he did it in less than three years.

And then they had, you know, typical of the Spanish

conquest, then they fought for, he died at 62.

So for the next 25 years, all he did was argue back and forth about whether he, after he was governor, governor, then he was dismissed.

Did he have a royal writ?

He was in court.

Did he steal money?

And

he died in Castile pretty poor.

And he had a lot of children from Indigenous women.

And he was very loyal to his mixed kids of mixed parentage.

And Melinche, the famous

Dona Maria, was a Native American that he picked up on the coast of Veracruz who had knowledge of indigenous languages and Aztec or Mexico, but more importantly,

she could speak.

At first, she spoke an Indian dialect that one of the people who understood it could then, in a roundabout way,

understand what the Tlaxcalans or the Aztecs were saying.

In other words, she would translate into a more common Indian dialect that somebody who knew Spanish would.

But then she learned Spanish or she knew it better.

And so she was the key to it because all of the communications he had with the Aztecs were

through her.

She's, I think, in Mexico called the great trader today.

And then Spain, probably

not so

bad a reputation.

But basically, Montezuma had no idea what he was up against.

I know originally people said, well, the Aztecs were so culturally confused, they never galvanized because these ships came in.

They thought they were gods.

They had white skin and red hair, the Spanish, many of them, partly, but they caught on really quick who they were.

I don't think they understood very quickly.

They sweat, they defecated, they fornicated.

They were human and they were greedy.

And they had a particular religion like, you know,

as the Aztecs did, they just wanted to imprint their religion on people.

The Aztecs didn't really know how to fight them.

You know what I mean?

They would never, they had never seen a Western ties, a Western military mentality where the purpose is to kill or wound or destroy as many of the enemy you can, drive them off the battlefield, and then use military victories for strategic or diplomatic ends.

And that's what the Spanish thought, like Romans.

So when they got in a war, they didn't,

you know, you got these

grotesque scenes where a conquistador would be knocked off his horse on rare occasions, a Pedro Alvarado or

Salvador or Cortez, and then they would swarm him and they could have killed him, but they were trying to drag him so he would be a prize sacrificial victim.

And that gave enormous advantages to the Spaniards because they just whacked off.

There's descriptions with, you know, they had obsidian blades that were just as small.

just as sharp as Spanish steel for one or two blows.

But they couldn't do much against armor.

But and after three or four blows, they lost their edge.

But these steel swords, they were taking off whole arms, heads, everything.

And so it was a pretty gruesome, brutal, and it was a very different colonial experience.

And I think it explains today why people are coming from Mexico here, and you don't have a lot of people here demanding to get into Mexico.

It's not race.

It's not anything, but a very different history of the European experience in the New World of Northern,

you know, I would say Britain, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, vis-a-vis, Spain.

And

they were a religiously diverse group.

The Spanish were monolithic

Catholic.

Southern Europe and Eastern Europe kept Islam out of Europe, and they became much more combative and absolutist vis-a-vis enemies than even the French or the Dutch or the Belgians or the British.

And when they went to the New World,

there were people going from Britain to escape religious persecution.

or they wanted to have more land or they were starving.

But people who were going from Spain were going to make money and take conquest and were mostly, not always, but a much greater percentage were male, young male.

That's how you made your future in Spain in the 16th century.

You went to Cuba, you went to Yucatan, you went to Mexico, you went to Peru, and you got a big hacienda, you got enslaved Indians.

They brought in a lot of Laz and North American African slaves.

But you didn't bring your entire family is what I'm saying.

Yeah.

Can I take you back a little bit to the fighting with the Aztecs?

And

they say usually that the Aztecs probably had about 100,000 warriors.

So give or take, I'm not really concerned so much about that number.

But, you know, when you look at it, they also talk about disease took approximately, and this is a broad statistic, 90% of the population.

I think that's a good idea.

Modern scholars have downsized that a little bit to about 65%, 60%.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And what do you think it did to the

Aztec military?

Do you think it was affected the size of it by much?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

There's a lot of contemporary Aztec art where people have these horrific pustules all over their body, and we have accounts from the Spanish.

It was also,

they had never seen a European disease like that.

And the Europeans had been dealing with it since antiquity, you know,

the Great Plague at Athens.

So they had, they didn't have a cellular

science.

They didn't quite understand infection as we know it today, but they did understand empirically how to treat it.

And so they believed in quarantines and some rudimentary hygiene.

What does that mean?

That meant when a conquistador got smallpox,

they would remove him from the other conquistadors.

And there were monks monks with military, I mean, with medical knowledge.

They put honey on it, or they put salve on the wounds, or they knew how to

keep the fever down, or they had a herbal

pharmaceutical arsenal to use.

When they asked Tex God, they never seen it before.

They didn't know what it was.

They had never seen such a deadly disease.

And so they did things, especially the priestly class.

So what happens when you killed

a victim, they usually flayed them, and the priest would wear cloaks out of human skin, or they would take some of the blood and flesh and grind it up as kind of, as I said, a guacamole-like sprinkling on meat and things.

Well,

that's what wiped out the priestly class, because when they found somebody that was infected with smallpox, they didn't know what they were doing, and they were spreading the disease.

So, a lot of they didn't have any experience is what I'm saying with it, it, as the Spanish did.

And then immunologically, the Spanish had some,

had been exposed to it for centuries.

So they were not as

vulnerable.

But before we, just to finish, that's kind of a left-wing narrative now that the Europeans came in and they brought all of these horrible things and they destroyed paradise.

History doesn't work that way.

It's not melodrama.

It's tragedy.

When you have a collision of two dynamic warlike societies, like the Aztecs and the Spaniards.

So there's a cultural exchange, and it can be good.

The Spanish brought a lot of things that, you know, they brought horses, they brought cattle in.

There were no large herbivores in Mexico.

A lot of people have argued that was one of the catalysts for

cannibalism.

But they brought in cattle, they brought in horses, they brought in pigs.

And there was another exchange.

So, did they get, they were just helping the Aztecs?

No, they didn't want to help the Aztecs.

The Aztecs didn't want to help the Spanish,

but

they brought a quality.

So, the Spanish brought back what?

Tomatoes?

They thought they were deadly nightshade for 100 years.

They brought back a potato, but it wasn't all positive.

So, when you say, well, the Spanish introduced disease, well, you can make the argument that the Aztecs introduced an indigenous people, they introduced cocaine to

Europe.

In the case of Africa, they introduced coffee.

In the case of China,

they introduced tea.

They introduced venereal disease.

That's very common.

There had been some venereal, but not this virulent form that seems to have been only found in Europe after the conquest of the New World, or at least the experience with the New World.

And so

sugar was not really known very much in Europe.

It was coming from the tropics.

So

I had a debate 20 years ago with a prominent scholar, and he was lecturing me about all the pernicious things that the Europeans brought.

And I just said, well, you know,

what is considered unhealthy today in Europe or the United States?

Obesity?

Sugar?

Too much chocolate?

Ah, too much caffeine.

People drink too much coffee.

Ah, drugs.

They take too much Coke.

Oh, they're too promiscuous.

They have sexual.

Where did all that come from?

See what I mean?

It's just.

And I wasn't trying to defame indigenous people.

I'm just trying to say that

it's a complex process.

There's no good and bad.

And the Aztecs were absolutely as fanatic as the

Spanish were.

But the Spaniards thought they were.

If you read contemporary chronicles, the Spaniards thought they were satanic because of the human sacrifice, the cannibalism, the homosexuality, and Spanish had no problem with slavery.

But

they

so that that didn't bother them.

They were as amoral on that issue.

And then the Aztecs, when they looked at the Spaniards, thought that they were not,

they knew they weren't finally divine, but they thought they were sort of horrific overclass or over supermen,

and that they were evil and they were dangerous, and they had these devilry, these dogs and horses and guns and steel, and they were very powerful and they had no anecdote against them.

Yes.

I have my second question is this, and I know we have to go to a break, but

to what extent does the was the spanish castilian military based on the roman military would a roman from the let's say the fourth or fifth century have recognized a thousand years later this castilian military understood its organization understood its strategies and tactics

well what do you think that that might be too big to answer because it is a thousand years.

Well, almost contemporaneous with

the Reconquista.

And remember, 1492 is just 30 years before

Cortez lands.

So

they have only had the idea of a unified, cohesive Spain for about three decades.

And the Protestant Reformation really doesn't get going until 1500 or, you know, takes off.

And so they were right at the cusp of feeling that they had been beleaguered by Islam, as I said, and religious

schisms.

And one of the things was that

they went back and the Roman legionary system was diffused after the West fell.

It continued in different forms with the Byzantines, and that's why they survived for 1,100 years.

And there were elements in the West that were diffused that people

that were remnants.

So the Gauls broke off and they became Franks and the Spaniards,

you know, and the Lombards and Viscos and everybody broke off.

Okay, so one of the things they did is they had cataphractos.

That's just a Greek word for covered, completely covered.

So they had heavy cavalry and it was even mailed.

And so the Spanish kept that tradition alive.

They didn't use the word equus.

They had a new word, you know, they had the Iberian word caballos, caballo.

But the point is

they had the idea of a mass cavalry attack with horses that had protection on them, with a fully armored rider with a lance, not a spear, not a javelin, a lance.

And so when they unleashed these corps, and they were very small because they had to, you know, how hard is it to take a horse 4,000 miles, keep it alive?

But when they brought these horses over and they weren't you, and they weren't just little Shetland ponies, these were from, you know, these were Arab horses that they had got from the Muslims.

They were big and they had, you know, had

conquistadors.

The conquistador horse was sort of a

derivative of the old Crusader heavy cavalry.

So when they unleashed them on the assay, you couldn't stop them.

It would be like a tank, a modern tank.

And that had come from the Eastern Roman Empire, That one of the things that kept it going until the fourth or fifth century were cataphracts.

The other thing was, of course,

the Greek phalanx, and then it was, you know, the moderations that ended in a more flexible legion.

But the point was a foot soldier who fights in close formation.

And this was the beginning right at this time.

They recreated something they called the tercio.

And

these were formations, you know, of professional,

they were professional soldiers, and they started right around the 15, 1490s, 1500s, and tactically, administratively, they were unstoppable.

They were pikemen, and they fought in close formation.

And

once you, if you could protect the flanks and you could let them

keep in formation on level ground, you couldn't stop them.

And so again and again, when Cortez is trapped,

what he does is he gets 30 or 40 cataphracts or Spanish lancers on each wing, and then he reforms the men in close array, and they're armored, and they have lances, and they march step by step against the Aztecs.

And then the cavalry

keeps their flanks protected.

And then behind, as Alexander the Great, behind the Tercio, there are missile troops.

So what does that mean?

They might have 100 Spanish crossbows, crossbowmen, or they would have another 100 arquebuses.

These would be kind of like a musket with a little stand on it.

And it was very clumsy.

It took about a minute and a half to load and fire, but they were of large caliber, full of kind of shotgun buckshot.

So if you imagine all of these lightly armed, cloth-armored Aztecs

just outnumbering them 10 to 1 and thronging all around them, but they're trying to take captives.

They're not trying to kill them.

They want to take captives.

They will kill them if they have to, but their prime directive is to get captives to get individual prowess and honor and recognition that you got the most people sacrificed.

And so when they were thronging them, they couldn't stop these.

Tercios.

They just butchered them.

And then at key moments, the men behind would would concentrate with their arrows.

They had bows, they had crossbows,

and they would blast apart people.

And at key moments, Cortez would then yell, Castile, Castile, or the battle cry.

And then they would just rush out, you know, 50 horsemen,

horse to horse.

And you couldn't, I mean, it would be like a lawnmower.

And they just

went through.

And usually they targeted the Aztec leader would have a banner.

And that was where when you brought your, it was kind of like turning in

your harvest or something.

When you got your six or seven Spaniards and you were tied up, then you dragged them over and deposited them.

And that's where they went.

They went and wiped out those regional battle commanders.

So they were thinking tactically and strategically like Romans all the time.

And when they wanted to take Tenochtland, they had maps of the city, they understood.

They had an amphibious, combined amphibious land force.

And the Aztecs just had a very different

worldview about war.

You know what I mean?

They had only fought people like themselves, and they were considered the most fierce of all the indigenous people.

But the other people did, the other tribes they defeated had sacrifice, but not like the Aztecs.

Something had gone wrong in Aztec culture at the end of the 15th century, where they started to sacrifice people not in twos and threes, but the 40s and 50s a day.

and they were really harvesting people from in local tribes children and they had created a great deal of ill will and so in typical roman diplomatic fashion cortez played on that and he said you know if you'll follow me into this city i will destroy it and you will be i'll have a new overlord but he won't ever have human sacrifice again.

A lot of scholars say, oh, you know, you can't say that.

You don't know that.

But it's in the sources.

And so you get this ridiculous situation that when he went back in, he only had 1,500 people, if that,

but he had 20,000 Plax Callan warriors.

And they brought in another 5,000 to 10,000 other allied people who lived around.

And if the Aztecs weren't so hated,

they might have survived.

That's what's so complex.

It's like the final siege of Constantinople.

You had 7,000 Europeans on the walls, Greeks, Genovese, and Venetian, but there were more Christians fighting

the Byzantines outside the walls than the Byzantines on the walls.

They had all of these Hungarians and Balkan people and converts that the Islamic people had been able to, through coercion and enticement, draft into their army.

And the same thing with Cortez.

How did they use those Tlaxicalan auxiliary troops?

Was it kind of like the Wagner group, throw them out there, let them get slaughtered, and then we'll...

They took heavier losses, but no, they weren't cynical about that.

What they would do is they were,

because they were,

it's hard to capture the mind because they've been so demonized.

And the Spanish, if you go to Spain, talk to Spaniards or you're there, they're very sensitive about today.

But they've been so demonized by the Mexican government and everybody, but they were just,

if I could redirect, maybe next time we'll talk about the Battle of Lepanto, but when you go back 50 years ahead of this, 1571, and you look at that fleet that destroyed the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto, about 40% of it were Spaniards.

And the actual, the Venetians were wonderful.

seamen, but when you look at the actual fighting deck to deck, it was Don Juan and the conquistadors that made the difference.

I mean, there were nobody like them.

Partly, they were, if you read about Satorius or Scipio Africanus and their experience in the province of what would become Iberia, they had a terrible time.

The indigenous people there were so violent and so effective as warriors.

And then, when they were assimilated, integrated, incorporated into the legions, they were very good legions.

And that military tradition, when you,

again, when you fortify it or energize it with Catholicism, and it's on the other side of the Pyrenees from Europe, and it's not protected like France or Britain, France by the Pyrenees or Britain by the English Channel, but it's exposed.

It's right, you know, eight miles from North Africa, and you've got this Islamic sweep from the 7th century, 8th century right into Europe.

And

they had fought from, you know, 750 all the way to 1492.

For 700 years, they had fought Islam.

And

they were pretty good at what they did.

And they had this idea that they saved Western civilization.

And the decadent Northern Protestants were using them as the bulwark.

They had the same attitude as the Eastern European Byzantines,

that Orthodoxy and Catholicism were on the front lines against Islam, and and that the Protestant Northern Europeans got rich and they were safe,

but they were not on the front lines fighting Islam and they didn't sacrifice and they were not, you know, that's

as someone, you know, in the United States,

there's this strong Protestant tradition.

We kind of give short shrift to that, or we say they were fanatics, but

I don't know how they did it.

I mean, Cortez was about 5'7,

probably weighed 130 pounds.

He probably wore 40 or 50 pounds of armor.

We know that he was hit in the head and had a concussion.

We know people lost their hands, their fingers.

They just kept going.

They were sick.

They suffered from yellow fever.

They weren't experienced with yellow fever very much.

And they had strains of malaria they had not encountered in Europe.

So they were all sick, just as sick sometimes as the Aztecs, only there were fewer of them.

But how they survived, it's just amazing.

And when you read Bernal Diaz,

one of the historians, or Gomorrah, these people,

religion for them wasn't as it is for a modern America.

It was a live, breathing, daily, hourly

connection, relationship with Jesus Christ and God and the Holy Virgin.

And they felt they saw them everywhere.

They talked to them.

They were converting souls and saving indigenous people from Satan.

And that

these satanic practices had to be stopped for the good of mankind.

I can call it warp, but they did believe fanatically so.

And,

you know, the Aztecs were very amused.

Yeah, they were amused.

They thought that

they didn't quite understand.

For them, gold was just something like silver or iron ore that

they knew something about.

They didn't have sophisticated metallurgy, but they could collect it in rivers and stuff, and then they could smelt it.

And they understood that gold didn't rust and it was more, it was rarer than silver.

So they liked gold, but it wasn't obsessive.

They had other means of currencies.

And when they said, the first thing the conquistadors said was, where's the gold?

Where's the gold?

We want the gold.

And they didn't understand that.

They thought they ate it at first.

They said, well, do they eat it?

Is that why they're so strong?

They didn't know why anybody would be so obsessed with gold.

And they were just totally obsessed with it.

In fact, on the Nochatriste, Navarez, these were the later conquistadors that came to arrest Cortez and he flipped them.

He flipped them all over to his side and put Navarez in jail.

He was an absolute Machiavellian genius.

But the point is, those were the guys who didn't know much about the Aztecs because they hadn't been in Tenochtland for eight months.

And so when they met the Cortez conquistadors,

the Cortez people said, be careful.

These people are not backward people.

You think they're backward.

They are deadly and they're treacherous and they're going to try to kill us.

So we're going to escape.

And I wouldn't take so much gold.

And most of the five to six hundred or four hundred and ninety,

we don't know the exact number that perished on the Nochitriste were Navarez's men who

were latent with gold.

So that when they fell fell over the causeways into the lake, they couldn't get out.

They had armor and gold.

People for years later were looking for Cortez's gold in the lake bottom.

All right.

Well, Victor, we need to take a break and come back.

And I think we'll talk a little bit about agriculture when we come back.

You're listening to the Victor Davis Hanson show.

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And

I'd like to remind everybody that Victor is available on Facebook at the Morning Cup, and he has a Twitter account.

So come join us at

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And you can catch him too on a Facebook page called the Victor Davis Hansen Fan Club page.

It is not affiliated with us, but they have lots of things that Victor does, even way beyond what we put on the website.

People dredge up old things that they've found of Victor's

talks, et cetera.

So, Victor, we agreed to talk a little bit about agriculture each time.

So, I know that you had a topic you wanted to do today.

So, I'll let you go with it.

Well, we're talking about what would be lost if the agrarian

profile is lost.

And we're at 99% of the people who are not engaged in farming.

Is there going to be anything lost given 90% of the people who founded this country were farmers and I suppose

imbued the American mentality constitution with a particular type of values.

Last time I thought about some of the things that you have to do

that can be kind of odd in one profession.

You have to be an accountant.

You have to know something about the law.

You have to know something about chemistry with pesticides or herbicides.

You have to know something about biology.

You have to know something about getting along with neighbors.

You have to know something about how to labor.

You have to understand profit and loss.

So it's quite unusual.

And then I mentioned also, you have to have a tragic view of the world that if you're working with nature,

you have to expect that at particular times you can't control everything.

And that gives you a humbling experience.

And I mentioned last time, as you remember, that you can

thin fertilize everything, get a beautiful plum crop ready, and then all of a sudden out of nowhere, hail can destroy it.

And I'll give you another example of what I was talking about.

You can have 100,000 trays on the ground, your entire work for a year, and you know that 95% of the time in late August and early September, it does not rain in Central California.

But nonetheless, your entire crop can be out there, and all of a a sudden a hurricane from the Gulf of Mexico

or up through

the Sea of Cortez can come up and just wipe it out in three hours.

That is rain to such a degree that you get mold or rot and that's gone.

And then you have to, you know, you wonder why this is happening.

But out of that tragedy comes an appreciation.

about nature and the tragic view of the human experience, which I think is really good to have because we're a therapeutic society.

The wealthier, more leisured and affluent we become, and the more divorced between

that we are from nature, we have this unrealistic idea about the human experience that we can control.

And then when we can't, we get very angry.

Another thing is, there's a human need to have nature.

Have you noticed that people,

the more they get divorced from nature, the more they want to be part of it.

So I was always amused when I was farming, when I would go up to North Fresno and I'd see people who were very affluent and they would have a range rover

or a land cruiser just to drive around Fresno, but it had

mud tires and it had a hitch on it or a jeep.

And I thought, wow, they're prepared to go anywhere in the world, but they go nowhere.

They're just going on streets.

But it was, or they would wear.

sub-zero, you know, those

special types of pleated, really expensive jackets, or they had $300 hiking boots just to go to class or professors.

So there was a need, I think people thought, well, I'm going to get, I'm going to be with nature.

So there is a need.

The other thing, what I'd like to just finish with that I didn't talk about last time is that you get rid of the romance of nature once you, you know, when you have to live with polar bears or you're a cattleman, you deal with wolves, then you have a different view of the botanist at UC Berkeley, or the biologist, or,

you know,

the

zoologist.

And so it's the same thing with farming.

So when you see a

grape skeletonizer, and you have worked your whole year, and you see this particular type of worm come in, and within a day or two, he can denude an entire

row of vines, or you see a a particular new species of leaf hopper come in on your grape crop and completely defoliate it, then something that you don't like, like a pesticide,

you might want to use to fight nature.

You'd say, well, why don't you just use natural things?

Yeah, that would be nice, hot pepper and things like that.

But that doesn't really work.

If you only want to stop that that day to save your crop, you might want to use Dibrome 7, which is a very, I mean, I've used it.

I couldn't breathe for a couple of weeks normally after I used it.

So my point is that you get a different attitude about nature, or when you're out there working

and you have your dog and you're pruning vines and you see a coyote that kind of limps.

or gets close to you and you have no idea whether it's a rabbit or not, but there's something wrong with that and you want to get rid of it very quickly.

Or you're irrigating, surface irrigating before the age of drip, and you have furrows that go down a quarter mile, and you've set all of your traps, of your valves, and you've got the head of water perfectly regulated.

You've got 100 rows on 20 acres or 30 acres.

and all of the rows and you look at your furrows and just perfect.

And you've worked so hard to level the ground with your scraper and you've brought in a laser leveler sometimes.

and that water is going all the way down a quarter mile, and it's going to make it to the end in maybe 45 minutes.

And you can leave it on for a night.

And it's a very efficient way, contrary to popular belief, to irrigate.

If you turn on that water at four in the afternoon and you've got a perfectly level field, you can wake up at seven in the morning, and the whole field has been irrigated with furrow irrigation.

The roots are out in the middle of the road.

It's very good, and there was very little

loss of

transpiration or loss of the water to the atmosphere because it was at night.

But, but if you've got some damn squirrels or gophers and they have tunneled all through your vineyard, and that happens, especially on sandy soil, and when that water goes down, it hits one of those holes.

and it never reaches the end and it goes onto the vine and it washes another one out.

And then all of a sudden you wake up and you only have three days to use the water and you drive there and everything was perfect at eight o'clock that night on a July night.

And you come back the next morning and 30 rows never got, a third of the row never got their water.

And you say, God, what are those damn, then what do you do?

You go get gopher traps, you go get gopher bombs, you go get cyanide, and you go kill those things.

And you're fighting nature.

And so.

It's man against nature all the time.

And you don't have any moment.

And it's not that you don't exploit nature because you have to to live with nature.

And unlike somebody in town who, the food, you know, when you're in town, and I've lived in town, I don't know where my sewage goes.

I don't know where my water comes from.

I don't know where my power comes from.

I don't know where my food comes from.

But if you're farming and you're living out in the country, you know where your sewage goes because you have to pump it out.

You know where your water comes from because you pump it out of the ground and you do not want to pollute that water.

And you want your sewage to be away from your well and you are not going to go spray

parathion on your peach orchard when your kids are out there working in it.

So, you develop a respect for nature, and you work in tandem with nature, but you don't romanticize it.

And that's very good.

That balance is, I think, really important.

And we've lost completely that balance in a suburban, urban society where people they either dress like they're going to go hike up, you Mount Everest and they never leave the suburbs, or

they go up to Yosemite one day a week and then they say, We don't want anybody going to Yosemite.

We're just going to keep it off as a natural preserve,

or

you know, we're going to end logging.

And they don't understand that

you can be a logger and work with nature and clean the forest and get rid of bad trees and prevent fires.

So they have this romantic view that actually is quite deadly in many avenues.

And then just to finish, you know, we had 180 acres, but we had 30 acres of organic.

So we had

eight farmers' markets.

This is between 1980 and 2000, 20 years.

And I used to drive not as much as my brothers did, but because I was teaching for 15 years of that time.

But my point is this,

that

when you say you're going to go organic, you should realize something that there was a reason why people are not

all organic.

In other words, we were all organic to start with, but then for some reason, people didn't go organic.

And that's because it's labor-intensive and it's prone to more insect damage, and the fruit does not look as good.

So, when you have 30 acres,

we had 12 kids among the four of us, and when they

wanted to have organic tomatoes or everybody weeded that you had to weed by hand.

You couldn't use Roundup, you couldn't use Paraquat, you couldn't use

pre-emergent herbicides.

So, you were out there.

And then, when you wanted to fertilize, you were using manures and it stunk.

Even though it had been dry, it stunk.

It wasn't as nice as those little calcium nitrate pellets.

And when you went to pick those tomatoes, these folk, my, I remember my daughter, Susanna, would say, oh my God, dad, look.

And she'd come in for lunch and she'd have one of those big, ugly, you know, those big, ugly green tomato caterpillars.

They would be on her arm, biting her.

And she'd say, oh my God, it was the size, you know, it looked like your size of your index finger.

And

she said, why didn't you spray?

I said, if we spray, we can't have, you can't, you know.

So organic was not, and we were very meticulous.

We never sold one grape, not one Asian pear, not one persimmon, not one Alberta peach that had a taint of herbicide on it, or fertilizer, or pesticide.

If you went to Monterey or Santa Cruz and those, you bought from us, it was organic.

We were very careful about it, but boy, it was so much more expensive and so much time consuming.

And when you put, we had one, we were, we separated the van.

We had traditionally grown, say, Santa Rosa plums and Alberta peaches peaches versus organic.

Guess what?

The Alberta peaches that were, I mean, they weren't polluted.

They were used with chemical fertilizers, ammonium nitrate, ammonium sulfate, calcium nitrate.

And they had winter spray, oil, and diazonon, and maybe one spray at most of, say, oh-mite for mites.

So there wasn't very much on it.

But when you looked at that compared to the organic, those were big, they were shiny,

there wasn't a blemish on them, no insect damage.

And you put them on the table and you say, organic, non-organic.

Guess what?

The organic was more expensive because

everybody swarmed the nice, beautiful fruit that was.

And we were, these were old varieties.

We specialized on this 30 acres of stuff that wouldn't ship.

So when we were growing up as kids, everybody had Alberta peaches, they had Santa Rosa plums, Bramosa plum, all of these old varieties,

hail peaches,

and nobody could grow them anymore because you had to get rock hard fruit that tasted awful and ship it to New York, pick it green, because there was no local markets.

But if you only had to go over, say, 200 miles to Santa Cruz or San Francisco or Los Angeles or Santa Barbara, then you could pick it

that night and get in the car and drive all the way to Monterey and get a motel and get up at five in the morning and go to the farmer's market.

And there was this beautiful fresh fruit.

And they were old varieties.

So they were delicious.

And

they were bred to be delicious.

They weren't bred to ship.

And believe me, if you didn't sell them all, by the time you got home in a day, they were rotten.

But they were much more tasty.

And the people loved them.

They really did.

But they didn't like the look of organic fruit.

Well, it sounds like the dogs have ended our time here, Victor.

I hope you don't mind that.

Nope.

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

Thank you everybody.

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