Bunglers and Crackerjacks

Flu season is here and COVID cases are still climbing across the country.

When people start getting sick, medications disappear fast.

And that's why we trust All Family Pharmacy.

They help you prepare before it's too late.

Right now, they've dropped prices on ivermectin and mabenzazole by 25%.

Plus, you can save an extra 10% with the code VICTR10.

You'll also get 10% off antibiotics, antivirals, hydroxychloroquine, and more of the medications you actually want on hand.

Whether you're fighting off a cold, protecting your family from flu season, or staying ready in case COVID makes its way into your home, having a few months' supply brings peace of mind and control.

They work with licensed doctors who review your order online, write the prescriptions, and ship your meds straight to your door.

Go to allfamilypharmacy.com/slash Victor and use the code Victor10 today.

Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

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

I'm Jack Fowler.

I'm the host.

I get to ask Victor the questions, the kind of questions I think you'd want Victor to answer.

I'm just as curious as you are, dear listeners.

So a couple of things we're going to talk about today.

Hey, John Bolton.

John Bolton, the former ambassador to the UN,

former national security advisor to Donald Trump.

Former memoirist of his time in the White House that really went after Donald Trump.

Well, John Bolton is sort of throwing his hat in the ring for 2024.

And we're going to get Victor's thoughts on that and other topics when we come back right after these important messages.

If you're a homeowner, you need to listen to this.

In today's AI and cyber world, scammers are stealing your home titles and your equity is the target.

Here's how it works.

Criminals forge your signature on one document, use a fake notary stamp, pay a small fee with your county, and just like that, your home title has been transferred out of your name.

Then they take out loans using your equity and even sell your property, and you won't even know what's happened until you get a collection or foreclosure notice.

So, when was the last time you checked on your home title?

If your answer is never, you need to do something about it right now, and that's why we've partnered with Home Title Lock so you can find out today if you're already a victim.

Go to hometitalock.com/slash victor to get a free title history report and a free trial of their million-dollar triple art protection.

That's 24-7 monitoring of your title, urgent alerts to any changes, and if fraud does happen, they'll spend up to $1 million to fix it.

Please, please, don't be a victim.

Protect your equity today.

That's home titlelock.com slash Victor.

Audival's romance collection has something to satisfy every side of you.

When it comes to what kind of romance you're into, you don't have to choose just one.

Fancy a dalliance with a duke, or maybe a steamy billionaire.

You could find a book boyfriend in the city and another one tearing it up on the hockey field.

And if nothing on this earth satisfies, you can always find love in another realm.

Discover modern rom-coms from authors like Lily Chu and Allie Hazelwood, the latest romanticy series from Sarah J.

Mas and Rebecca Yaros, plus regency favorites like Bridgerton and Outlander, and of course, all the really steamy stuff.

Your first great love story is free when you sign up for a free 30-day trial at audible.com slash wondery.

That's audible.com/slash wondery.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

So, Victor, yeah, you know, I know John, you know John.

I like John.

I don't know if you can speak about it, whether you like John or not.

I served on a board with him.

I don't know him as well as you do, but I have met him.

Yeah, okay.

Well, you know, came on a few national review cruises.

Yes, I used to run on the page.

He was awfully nice and

Mrs.

Bolton very nice.

John has always, I think, sort of seen the President of the United States looking back in the mirror, always

on the right.

I think particularly within the last few years, his very aggressive stand against

Obama's policy and now maybe Biden's policy related to Iran and his support of of Israel, all very, very important and cheerworthy.

But,

you know, he seems to have popped a bubble with many of his conservative supporters.

He did work for President Trump begrudgingly, reluctantly, maybe even angrily while he was there, seemingly

taking notes every night.

So he was going to write a book as soon as he got out the door.

And when he got out the door, he did write a book.

And its objective was to kneecap

Donald Trump.

Well, the Daily Mail has a piece that John had an interview with British media where he essentially said he was going to run in 2024.

And essentially to,

in one part, to block Donald Trump.

But even Donald Trump didn't get in the race.

He was going to run anyway.

And I think John Bolton thinks he would be

a good president of the United States.

So, Victor,

I know you have some thoughts about this.

Would you like to share them?

Well, I think

with all due respect to John Bolton, I think he understands he's not going to get the nomination.

So

we don't nominate ex-National Security Advisors that have never been elected anything unless they have spectacular success in a particular field or they're celebrities like Trump.

So that's not going to happen.

Number one.

Number two, I don't think you're going to get 16 or 17 people in this race.

You're probably going to get six or seven.

Maybe Christy Noam, Mike Pompeo, Donald Trump, DeSantis,

I don't think Tom Copp, Nikki Haley, and maybe John Bolton and a couple of others.

And it's going to be, you never know because of the Scott Walker phenomenon where a very good candidate kind of that was leading.

and among the pundits in the polls just sort of imploded on the second debate stage.

So we we don't know what's going to happen.

But for right now, there's going to be designated candidates.

If Chris Christie, to take one example, decides to run, it's been a long time since he's been governor, he has some problems, he has a checkered relationship with Trump, it'll be to take Trump out.

It's what I'm trying to say.

So there will be designated people who will try to warn the country about the Trump resurgence, and that's what he is doing.

So I think he will try to run, and then he will make the case for something he believes sincerely in, and that is a proactive,

I guess, neoconservative foreign policy to get engaged abroad in a preemptive fashion against suspicious

enemies, et cetera.

Okay.

But.

He will try to use his expertise about Donald Trump from an insider's point of view to warn about Donald Trump.

And then I think if he can do damage to Donald Trump, get into some debates one-on-one,

and Donald Trump should lose, then historically that role as the attack dog is rewarded in some fashion.

And I think he's always wanted to be Secretary of State.

I want to put an asterisk.

You know, I have nothing against John Bolton.

I think he's a very bright guy, and he's, you know, he's written a lot.

And

the Bradley Foundation, of which I'm on board, we've given him before my tenure

a Bradley Prize.

But

I don't know how to say this, Jack, but at some point, it seems to me that people who were the beneficiaries of Trump largesse or goodwill or magnanimity have some modicum of restraint.

in their subsequent behavior.

Now, what I mean by that is John Bolton was nominated as UN ambassador under Donald, George W.

Bush, and the left hated him.

They despised him.

They hated the very ground he walked on.

And he was an intern, remember that recess appointment for one year.

They would never confirm him.

And he was never going to get back into

what he wanted to be: a national security advisor.

or Secretary of State.

Okay.

So Donald Trump came in, and he, like the Republican establishment, opposed him vehemently.

And we had a national security advisor, H.R.

McMaster.

And I think

that you could make the argument that H.R.

McMaster was different than the other foreign policy, the other, there were four generals that he appointed.

Remember, there was Flynn.

Brian Kelly and McMaster and Mattis.

Flynn's a separate situation because he was a transitional figure and he was framed and treated terribly.

But I think you could make the argument that the other generals thought

that they had to convince Donald Trump to their way of thinking.

Okay.

Including McMaster or not?

No.

No.

Not McMaster.

Okay.

No.

So what I'm saying is their view was that Donald Trump was probably dangerous.

They were willing to serve.

If you were Maddis, you were going to try to tell him these are the existing protocols that have been long tried and time-tested.

And my job is to win you over to, you don't say a word about NATO, da-da-da-da-da.

And Kelly's was, I'm going to bring order and sobriety and judiciousness into the management of the Opal Office.

Okay.

I think McMaster was a little different.

His view was,

I'm here to serve.

I understand your MAGA foreign policy, no better friend, no worse enemy, don't tread on me, Jacksonian punitive foreign policy.

So you do not want to go in and nationbill.

Okay.

My job is to take your foreign policy and translate it into the existing framework of how to implement it.

So this is NATO.

This is

the alliance that we have with Japan.

This is your MAGA agenda.

I will implement it in a way that's that reflects your values, but is also workable.

Now, of course, at certain times, he thought that Trump's ideas were not workable, but I don't think he was.

What I'm trying to say, I don't think he was insubordinate.

He did not try to sabotage them, or he did not try to speak to the media and trash him.

Even after he left his service, he really didn't.

He's,

I mean,

if anybody wants to go on to Goodfellows, it's a podcast, the Hoover Institution, Errors, you can see that I had two interactions with it, were quite vocal.

Right.

Heated, I guess, is the euphemism.

So I'm not invested in just, you know,

saying only nice things about H.R.

McMaster.

But in this case, I am going to say a lot of nice things because I think he was dutiful and he was trying to translate Trumpism into what he knew of the military's way of doing business.

Rather than just say, you know what, this guy's nuts.

We got to stop him.

He's dangerous.

Rosa Brooks type, you know, write an article in foreign policy.

You can get the 25th Amendment.

You can peach him.

We're going to have a coup.

That kind of stuff.

You know,

our Mark Milley, I got to call my Chinese counterpart and warn him that I diagnosed my president as crazy, that kind of stuff.

So he didn't do that.

And the other generals and admirals, to be quite frank, were very entirely critical in a very candid way.

He wasn't.

Okay.

So he was doing, but John Bolton really wanted that job.

So John Bolton had been very critical of McMaster and he had used all of his acumen

and savvy.

And he's quite adept at the Washington

fish tank.

He knows how to swim in it.

And he,

his allies wanted McMaster out and they wanted him out in the idea that he was a bureaucrat, he was a PowerPoint guy, and you needed a strong Jacksonian.

But what happened was when they maneuvered McMaster out,

and, you know, they got a guy who was not a MAGA person.

His idea of Jacksonian toughness was,

you know, a lot different than Trump's was.

Trump, his attitude was, we're not going to get any wars or overseas commitments because they've been disastrous and we don't know what the hell we're doing.

And we're not going to go into another Afghanistan.

We're not going to get into a shooting war with North Korea.

We may all of that stuff.

And

Bolton's was: you know, we're going to use the full extent of American power and resources

to spread freedom and our way of life and our values all over the world, regardless of the cost.

And that was a direct confrontation.

So, what I'm getting at is you would think, and I know that he fired him, but you would think that John Bolton might think like this.

Okay,

I disagree with Trump,

but I helped maneuver McMaster out,

and Trump appointed me, and this was the only chance that I'd ever have to be either a, you know, a deputy or a full national security advisor.

Probably the second most powerful person in foreign policy, along with the Secretary of State.

So he got that.

And he was never going to get it from George W.

Bush, whom he was very close to.

He was never going to be confirmed as Secretary of State.

That was the only job he was ever going to have because he didn't have to be confirmed by the Senate.

And they were never going to confirm him.

They couldn't stand him, they left.

And so what I'm getting at, at some point, and he was, what, 70 years old when this happened, you would think that he would, you know, so he had differences and

you would think that for all of his animus and anger at Trump, he would have a moment of reflection.

I think I would, and I'd say, well, you know, Victor, you were, you were not going to get what you wanted, and you were in the eddies and backwaters and tide pools of Washington.

And this guy puts you right on the crest of the wave, what you've always wanted.

And for those months, you were the guy.

And that was only due to Donald J.

Trump.

So when this,

you you know, phone call impeachment and what, that was just completely bogus, you know.

It really was.

You would try to impeach a president because of Mr.

Vinman calls up the quote-unquote Caramella or whatever his name was, whistleblower, and says that Donald Trump used personal things.

And then you would have to...

To believe the impeachment, you would have to believe that A, the Biden family wasn't corrupt, B, Biden hadn't in the past intervened to fire people that were investigating his son, or that the Biden family wasn't getting rich, or that Donald Trump didn't sell offensive weapons like Obama did.

But you were left with the reality that he ended up selling offensive weapons that the Obama administration would not.

And he delayed them because he had legitimate concerns in a crude fashion, albeit about the Biden family.

Okay.

So why then

would John Bolton, with a wink and a nod, write his remember his writing his memoirs and whether it was he was

the government was auditing him to see if he was disclosing confidential information.

The left all of a sudden was bragging on him.

You remember that?

Yeah.

Oh, John Bolton's going to be the magic bullet that sold the Mueller failed, and then all of a sudden the impeachment didn't get the conviction.

But

this

book was going to do it.

And the book was very, very harsh.

That was the intention of the book, too, I think.

It sold.

It sold.

It made him a lot of money.

And

it was very harsh.

But these are not my sentiments alone.

I must have had 20 calls from people who are of the donor class, and they said things like, I can't support this anymore because

it's disloyal.

He doesn't show any gratitude.

It's not magnanimous.

He could have easily said,

I'm going to, you know, I'm going to write my memoirs like Bill Barr did

after the 10 years it'll come out after Trump is, you know.

Yeah, I would put it this way.

I'm going to write these memoirs so Joe Biden will become president of the United States.

That cannot have appeal.

By the way, I think

that is a valid way of

looking at it.

And

why would that have any appeal to a Republican base?

Well, like everybody said, what is wrong with Bolton?

Does he not like the border?

Does he not like the deregulation?

Does he not like the leasing of new natural gas and oil leases?

Does he not like energy self-sufficiency?

Does he not like, you know, taking out ISIS and getting rid of it in Syria?

Does he not like standing down North Korea?

Does he not like jawboning NATO to spend an extra $100 million?

Doesn't like rebuilding that rickety fence 500 miles plus with a new wall.

What does he not like?

And

that was the problem.

And so,

and especially when

the reason John Bolton had come to prominence more so than a gifted diplomat, an experienced diplomat, which he was,

was that he understood the mind of the left, and he was combative and unapologetic.

So he knew what the left does.

And yet he allowed himself to be used as a tool of the left to weaken a president that they had gone after

with a phony Russian collusion, which was a complete joke, and a first impeachment, which was a complete joke, and the Hunter laptop disinformation, which was a complete joke.

And he knew all that.

He knew better than anybody what they were doing.

And yet he allowed himself.

quote unquote on principle because he said trump was a danger to the constitution to be used like that.

In his way of thinking, he was using the left to get rid of Trump, perhaps.

Yeah, but, you know, for what?

What fills that vacuum?

What did he give us?

What did he give us?

So I would like to say to John Bolton, so you won.

You wrote a memoir, and maybe you can take some modicum of credit that you convinced the electorate that Donald Trump was a danger, an existential danger to the Republic.

Now,

I would ask two two questions of you.

Was it worth it in the sense that is the border 5 million entries good?

And do you like the idea that gasoline reached historic highs in California and we drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserve?

Do you like the woke movement and the crime wave that we're suffering?

Do you like that we're going to be headed into a major recession any month now?

Do you like what happened in Afghanistan?

Is that what you wanted?

Because that's what you got with Biden.

And then,

you know, that's, and then my second question would be, so your argument was that Donald Trump was an existential threat to constitutionalism.

Okay.

You knew that Barack, did he do what Barack Obama did?

Did he, A,

surveil the Associated Press reporters?

Did he go after James Rosen at Fox News and monitor his email data?

No.

Did he go over and have a hot mic with the president of Russia and said, basically, tell Vladimir that if I dismantle

missile defense, then he gives me space during my election, then we'll have a good deal.

And, you know, we got rid of the Czech and Polish project.

We have no missile defense in Eastern Europe, thanks to Obama.

And Putin did not invade in 2012 and 13.

He went into 2014, as promised, I guess.

Was that a good thing to do?

Did Trump do any of that?

Or better yet, when we were looking at the

Michael Schellenberg or Matt Taibbi or Elon Musk trove,

did under Donald Trump's watch, were these FBI at his direction or were they against Trump?

The FBI I'm talking about that was contracting out to

to Twitter to violate the First Amendment rights of people as a contractor and the steel dossier.

And did Donald Trump's people forge a FISA document?

And did Donald Trump's people lie under oath, like Andrew McCabe?

And the answer is: I can't see how he abused the system, partly because he was under scrutiny to an unprecedented degree.

He couldn't sneeze because there were thousands of reporters who wanted to get a pull a surprise by getting Trump.

But whatever the reason was, if you compare his tenure from what we're learning about the Obama years, but more importantly, about what the rogue administration did under Trump, how they tried to subvert him, and Anonymous, the guy that was writing, you know, I'm going to, I'm inside the deep bowels of the Trump administration.

I'm going to subvert everything I feel that I can.

And he turned out to be a low-level person in Homeland Security.

But my point is that when he looks at all that, so when he announces

his election and he puts it in terms of basically stopping Trump because of his excesses or his danger to constitutional freedom, I don't know where the data is.

If he really believed that, he would be out right now campaigning against Joe Biden.

And he would be warning the world what the FBI is capable of.

And he would be writing op-eds about we need to

make James Comey and Andrew McCabe responsible and culpable.

And

we have to make sure that nobody ever, like them again, deceives or leaks or lies as they did, or signs off on steel dossier, basically cut and paste material that deceived a FISA judge.

And then one case was doctored.

But no, none of that.

So I'm confused about, other than, as I said from our initial conversation today, that I think he has a role to be the guy that knows the Trump and then that'll be capable and skilled enough to embarrass Donald Trump and weaken him.

And then

the eventual winner will reward

that service with fealty and honor and loyalty to John Bolton and John Bolton will get a big appointment.

That's not necessarily a dig at John Bolton because they all do that.

Everybody in the primary either

takes out an enemy or drops out at a convenient time, whether it's Kamala Harris getting the VP nomination or Pete Buttigig, the incompetent, or you name it,

they get something.

Victor, if we can wrap this up, I'm curious.

One last thing on Bolton Out.

I don't want to infer you

were involved in any intrigue in foreign policy and

the ways and means going on in the State Department.

But I know you know people there, and I'm sure you Mike Pompeo when he was Secretary of the State.

I can't say I'm sure, but I assume on occasion you might have spoken to him.

I also assume you probably generally have a positive view of Mike Pompeo.

Do you have any thought about the relationship between,

do you know anything, the relationship between Pompeo and John Bolton while both were serving at the same time?

Was there

any,

was it oil and vinegar there or oil and well, I mean, you have to put in the context, going back to Henry Kissinger, that the

National Security Advisor is always at odds with the State Department.

And

it's an even Stephen rivalry because each wants to run foreign policy.

And the State Department

Secretary of State has that advantage of thousands of embassies and thousands of embassy workers and thousands of bureaucratic and a huge budget.

And the National Security Advisor has the year of the president.

And he's with him more.

And he's not, you know, he doesn't run a big, huge, cumbersome department.

And so they're always at each other's throat.

But I have, you know, I think the problem was that,

again,

it was kind of like the

Mattis-McMaster tensions.

as reported in the press.

I'm not saying I know anything privately, but just as reported into the press.

And I think it was the same thing where Mike Pompeo, who, you know, he had been in the Army and he had been director of the CIA.

He,

you know, he had a distinguished record in the Congress as a representative.

I think he saw, and he was probably in the Bolton camp as far as foreign policy, but he saw his role, like McMaster, how to translate Trumpism

into State Department bureaucracy.

So when Trump said, get out of the Irandio, he said, this is how we're going to do it.

When Trump said, move the embassy to Jerusalem,

tell Israel they're going to have the Golden Heights, cut off the Palestinians at the United Nations,

he said, this is how you do it, Mr.

President.

And then he said, I want those SOBs and NATO to pay their fair share, and that's how you do it diplomatically.

But

John Bolton, I think, would be more like the Pentagon people.

He would say, that is crazy.

I'm not going, I'm going to go over and say, you know what, I have to deal with this Trump guy.

In other words, that's what there was two approaches.

One was you incorporate the MAGA Trumpism into the existing bureaucracy as your commander-in-chief.

And the other one was, I have to preserve.

the United States while this lunatic is president.

And that's why I'm here.

Very different ideas.

So

radically.

Yeah.

And Trump, you know, when he appointed people, he never really was able or was unaware or was not able to ascertain which of those mindsets they were.

Were they, I don't really care what you think about me, Mr.

Appointee, but your job is to translate MAGAism into

policy and you have these skill sets.

Are you willing to do that?

Versus

I can't appoint you because I know you disagree with what I'm trying to do abroad and you will use your knowledge of these bureaucracies to subvert me.

And how that would translate in their everyday is that

a Pompeo might go over to a diplomat and say, look, this is the way the United States is looking at this thing.

And here's what we're going to do.

And I want to hear how you object

and what's the problem.

And then he would call Trump up and probably say, Mr.

President,

this is what they want.

This is what.

And this is how I think we can outfox them.

Or this is how I can fulfill your mission.

Or this is your vision of Foreign Paul.

And I think Bolton was more in the other camp.

And he would go over and he would lament and say, you know what, I got this president.

And that guy is volatile.

Even if it was bad cop, good cop.

But my point is that it's very different.

So I know that Pompeo was in that former category.

He was trying to use knowledge of Washington.

So was Devin Nunes when he was trying to work with the president on the Russian collusion hoax.

He was trying to tell Mr.

President,

this is the stuff I can do and this is how we can do it and pursue this.

But he wasn't trying to undermine it.

You mean the things he was doing that David French wanted him

thrown out of Congress for?

No, we can't go down that rabbit hole.

Can't go down.

Yeah,

David French wrote an op-ed in the National Review asking for Nunes to resign.

Yeah.

Remarkable.

He resigned because he was pursuing

a fantasy or conspiratorial idea that the Russians did not interfere in a very, not just, you know, $300,000 worth of bought ads, but I'm talking about serious intervention, i.e.

Hillary Clinton hired a foreign national,

and then that foreign national was paid through three paywalls to disguise her fingerprints.

And then lazy SOB that Christopher Steele was, he just hired this Dolan guy in Moscow and the guy at the Brookings and just made up a bunch of lies and then passed it off through James Baker at the FBI and Sussman and some other guys to get it out before the election.

That's what David French said

was proof that Donald Trump and Putin had a deal, I guess, and that people who exposed that were like

Demon Nunes than

worthy of resigning.

Right.

Well, some people are never worthy of Maya Culpas on these kind of outlines.

That's a good point.

They never say that.

You know, they just go on to the next roadrunner,

Wiley Coyote incident.

They never stop and say, you know what?

We were wrong about those alpha

bank pings.

They never existed.

We were wrong

about Russian collusion.

We were wrong about the laptop.

It was authentic.

We see that now.

We understand that.

We understand you can't give $419 million like Mark Zuckerberg did stealthily to warp an election.

We understand that.

We understand we went in.

and we sued these state legislatures, just as Molly Ball had outlined, just so we could change into a remote election balloting voting dash data.

They never say any of that.

It's always on to the next one.

It's like,

you know, it is like that Wiley E.

Coyote that each time he fails to get Roadrunner, he comes up with a bigger bomb and a bigger chainsaw and a bigger machine gun.

And the answer to all of the failure is if you're Adam Schiff,

the mindset, I didn't lie enough.

I did not lie enough.

I didn't, you know, get enough compromise and all this crap.

So if only if only a big rock fell on their head in the meanwhile, we had a little, a little thrill, but that doesn't seem to have happened to any of these folks.

Hey, Victor,

we're going to talk next about

something that came in today's mail, and I'll tell you about it right after these important messages.

You buy a pair of socks, that's two socks.

You buy a pair of bomba socks, that's four socks.

Because one purchased is one donated.

Socks are the number one most requested clothing item in homeless shelters.

So when you buy a pair of super comfortable bombas socks, you're also donating a pair.

Bombus customers have powered over 150 million donations.

So Bombus would like to thank you 150 million times, but we only have like 30 seconds.

Go to bombas.com and use code audio for 20% off your first purchase.

That's B-O-M-B-A-S.com and use code audio at checkout.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Hansen Show.

I'd like to remind our listeners to visit VictorHanson.com.

Not only visit it, subscribe to it.

Okay, it costs what?

Five bucks to test it out, $50 for the year.

But what are you getting for your 50 bucks?

You're getting a couple of books worth of exclusive content that Victor writes only for VictorHanson.com.

If you love what Victor writes, and I'm pretty sure you do, then you're doing yourself a disservice by not subscribing.

So go there.

You'll find links, by the way, to Victor's other appearances, other podcasts, radio shows, interviews, links to all his books.

So many appearances that Victor makes here and there and everywhere.

So that's VictorHanson.com.

Check that out.

What else?

Oh, me, Jack Fowler.

I am the,

I'm a senior fellow at the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic, and I write a free weekly email newsletter called Civil Thoughts.

It gives 12, 13, 14 recommended readings, things, worthwhile things I've come across the previous week.

Here's the link.

Here's an excerpt.

There's nothing transactional about it.

Again, it's free.

We're not building an email list.

I just think it's stuff you like.

So why don't you sign up for it, civil thoughts.com.

And what else?

You can hear my dog maybe snoring in the background.

He just ate and he's fed and he's so happy.

So, Victor, I'm happy too.

Why?

I went to my mailbox, and what was there?

The new issue of the new criterion.

And the lead

essay is by a guy named Victor Davis Hansen.

It's on the cover.

It says Military History.

But the title here is The Uses and Abuses of Military History.

And I have to admit, this is, you have to subscribe to the New Criterion.

Go to their website.

Maybe, maybe they offer you a freebie.

I'm not sure.

I do subscribe.

But, Victor,

I haven't read it yet, but why don't you tell us about what are some of the uses and abuses of military history?

And I think you get into current wokeism trends as one of the abuses.

Yeah,

that essay was part of the New Criterion has a writer in residence, and that was for 2022.

I think I'm going to do it for 2023, just for a two-year tenure.

And I was supposed to write six essays, and one was on an obituary for three classicists, Donald Kagan, Leslie Threet, and John Lynch.

Another one was

the deplorable state of classics and how people are destroying it.

Another one was on an essay on the deterioration of Western civilization.

I wrote one on Black Lives Matter, which is pretty damning to it.

That was even before the disclosures disclosures about their

financial problems.

Imaginations.

Yeah, I wrote one on neo-Confederate ideology that sanctuary cities, nullifying federal law, one-drop racial obsessions were very Confederate, that the left was becoming like the South that

they hate, the old South, not the modern South.

And then I wrote one on Petronius's Satyricon.

And this was the last one on military military history.

And my argument was that history was synonymous with military history.

Inquiry, Herodotus, Persian Wars, Thucydides, Peloponnesian Wars, Xenophon, the war in Persia, the Anabases, the last

eight years of the Peloponnesian War, Polybius, Libby, Tacitus.

It's always about war.

That was what they considered rightly or wrongly to be worthy of historical inquiry.

And the word history means inquiry in Greek.

And so,

and why has it failed?

Why aren't there not PhDs programs in it?

Why are there not military history courses?

I say why not?

Because when you have a movie about war,

whether it's a great movie like Saving Private Ryan that is a blockbuster or maybe sort of a B movie, remember the Brad Pitt tank movie Fury?

That movie was a big hit.

And when you go into Barnes and Noble and you look at the history shelf, it's military history.

So there's an, when I was teaching, if I offered a course in military history, I could out,

I mean, I would get more enrollees than almost any course I taught in any other subject.

So there was this natural public interest, but the academic world hated it as if,

you know, an oncologist goes into, as I point out so many times, an oncologist goes into

cancer therapies because he loves cancer rather than to stop the problem.

And so military history is a way of understanding why people go to war and how it ends.

And it doesn't really exist.

It started in the Vietnam War where people said all war was evil.

Even though war has saved a lot of lives.

I mean, I don't know how you would have stopped Hitler without a war.

Maybe somebody can clue me in that there was a peaceful solution to the Third Reich.

But a lot of evil has been eliminated by war, but the Vietnam period told us opposite.

And then there was the postmodern period where there are no facts and the Western civilization was at fault.

So it was all these white people were colonizing and, you know, imperialist and such, and that hurt it.

And then

the woke movement came that, you know, the

racist, racist, racist, it just drowned out everything.

So the result was there was not a lot of military history, and it's a tragedy because it's very important.

And what, and then the last part of the essay is, and what things would it, if we had some knowledge of it, what would be valuable?

And I gave, you know, a couple examples.

So

Russia is going to invade on the 23rd of February.

Everybody says, oh, oh, Ukraine is dead.

They're done for.

They're over with.

And we saw them have this

Thunder Road shock and awe effort to decapitate the government in Kiev, and it was an utter failure.

And people might have said, well, wait a minute, when Russia leaves its borders, whether under the Tsar or under communism or under the Russian Federation, they're not very good.

They don't go well into Japan in 1904 and 205.

They don't go

well when they're invading Poland in 1921.

They don't do very well when they go into Finland in 1939.

When they go into Russia, I mean, Poland earlier, again in 1939, they didn't do all that well.

They had to be helped.

However, and they didn't, of course, like us, they don't do well in Afghanistan.

But

you put an army on the border of Mother Russia.

If you're Charles XII of Sweden, you go in there, or you're Napoleon, and you go in there,

or you're Japan in 1939 on the Mongolian border, and you start to get close into Russia, then it's a whole different story.

Suddenly, it's Mother Russia.

So, my point is: if you understood that phenomenon, you might suggest that Russia is going to have a lot of problems going in

in an expeditionary fashion to take Ukraine.

However, if Ukraine thinks that it's going to go in and destroy fuel and supply depots inside Russia or in territorial waters of the Black Sea that are Russian controlled and destroy ships, capital ships of the Black Sea fleet, and they're not going to mobilize the Russian people,

I think that's naive.

So we've got, my point is we've got to be very careful that if Ukraine feels it has to be preemptory and on the offensive, and that definition applies to going into Russia, then they're going to change the entire complexion of that war.

And if somebody's going to say to me, as they have, okay, Victor, well, then you just believe it should be one-sided.

Putin gets to blow up and terrorize and stuff, and then they can't do tit for tat.

They can do it.

I'm just saying that Russia's advantages in population, GDP, and area will come into play because the morale will suddenly shift.

And everybody that's in Russia will think

they are being attacked.

Putin can't convince them of that because they're on the offensive in a very morally compromised position.

But you change the propaganda.

So that's an advantage.

Another example, I'll just quit with that because I had a lot of them, is that we get captives of technology.

So we think that technology changes everything.

But human nature remains constant.

So technology is just, I keep using using that metaphor, a pump.

And I go back to what my grandfather told me once when I was out irrigating with him.

And I was trying to understand how many valves per pump would be,

would we be able to run?

Pumps water under the ground, puts it in a pipeline.

And he was explaining to me the role of irrigation.

And he said, it's very simple.

And we had a hand pump he had.

So when we got back in, he said, you know, you pump this.

I got three gallons.

You take a bucket and you take it to that tree over there.

And I go flip on the switch, we get a thousand gallons a minute.

And

we irrigate 100 vowels.

But he asked me, he said, is the water changed?

Still water.

The whole principle that plants need water is timeless.

It's just the delivery system you have to catch up on.

And that's what nuclear weapons have done.

Everybody said, well, you know, there is no such thing as conventional war anymore because nuclear weapons.

So we disarmed basically after World War II.

And then people said, well, if you can't use them and Russia can't use them,

then how are they going to fight?

Well, they're going to fight with conventional weaponry with surrogates in Korea and Vietnam.

And then you're going to have to have tanks and bullets and nothing's really changed.

And if you think that Iran is going to use nuclear weapons and it's going to change everything, maybe, but there's going to be anti-nuclear weapons.

Just like,

you know, for thousands of years, there were stone walls and you couldn't penetrate fortifications in the ancient world.

And all of a sudden, catapults did, and then walls were thickened, and then cannon were used, and then they could knock down stone walls.

So then two stone walls were put 50 feet apart, and dirt was placed in, and the cannon couldn't do it.

So it's always in flux, challenge, response, challenge, response.

Armor versus crossbows versus bullets versus Kevlar.

And that's the same thing with nuclear weapons.

Unfortunately, the moment of error, the minute of a mistake

is compressed because

you launch a nuclear weapon, if you can't shoot it down with a sophisticated laser, it'll do more damage.

But the principle remains the same because human nature doesn't change.

Victor, despite the decline, as you say, in military history or the treatment of military history, I'm a young kid.

I know what I want to do.

I want to be a military historian.

And I want to go to a college

that is going to have a great professor that I can study under, which I think is a valid way of approaching something.

Look,

if it was 30 years ago and I wanted to be a classicist, I would say, I want to go and study under Victor Davis Hansen.

So,

in the

2023 world of academia, if you were the student so determined,

what's one or two military historians or historians with

expertise in military history who are teaching today at

an undergraduate level or at a graduate level

who would

teach well and train a great military historian of tomorrow?

Well, there's places, you know,

there's places like like the Citadel or I think Marquette or

U.S.

Military Academy.

Obviously, that's not open to everybody.

But there's also the University of Kansas has not only an undergraduate, but it has a graduate program.

Maybe the most famous is the Ohio State PhD program that was run by for years Alan Millette.

and

Jeffrey Parker.

It's a very distinguished program.

I had a student that graduated from there, very talented Katie Becker.

She wrote a PhD thesis on the use of

mass formations from the phalanx to the Spanish tertiary to the Swiss phalanx all the way into the Napoleonic columns, stuff like that.

They were very good.

Mr.

Warrow in Texas has a program.

I think that's it, Texas Christian.

I have to remember that, but it's a very good program.

I've been on the PhD examination board in one case.

The

Yale used to have a great program when

Charles Hill and Donald Kagan and people like that,

Paul Kennedy were involved.

It was grand strategy, but it had a lot of military components.

I don't think it's got quite the luster that it had when those three were very active.

And there's a new program.

There's two programs I think that are

very good.

One is the new Hillsdale College.

It's under the auspices of Ed Rodriguez, very talented young historian.

They've got some very, they have an endowed professorship of military history.

And when I go there, I've been there the last 21 years.

I either teach courses on Greek and Roman mythology or history, but also World War II or war.

And I worked a lot with Thomas Conner, Tom Conner, he's now retired, but he was a wonderful World War II historian.

He wrote a really good book on the American Battle Monuments Commission, which I was a member for almost a year.

It oversees all the military cemeteries.

It's a very good book.

It's a history of how that commission was formed and how they operate.

And we have one at Hoover.

It's called the Military History and Contemporary Conflict Project.

And that was started.

I started that in 2012 when our director was a wonderful man, John Racy, and just a saint,

said to me, you know, you're a military history person, Victor, and you've been here 10 years.

And

our motto is war, revolution, and peace.

And war and revolution and peace have something to do with conflict.

But we don't have a military.

You know, we have programs where.

Officers would come.

We have good security fellows every year.

We take one member from each branch, but we don't have an academic component.

So

he and I I

raised a lot of money because it was going to be, he said to me, I want the top military historians in the United States and analysts, and I want them from all walks of life.

I just don't want academics.

But to do that, you have to pay people to come out, to have a symposium, and pay people to write for an online magazine, Strategica.

We pay a dollar a word.

That's pretty much, as you know, from your own publishing experience, that's more than pretty damn good.

Exactly.

So I would give John Mason a list.

And, you know, we had the late Angela Cotavilla.

We had

Ralph Peters, just a brilliant guy who was at one time Bill O'Reilly's military correspondent, commentator.

He was very good.

We had Andrew Roberts.

We have Andrew Roberts.

We have Neil Ferguson, Jim Mattis, Gary Roughhead.

These are Chief of Naval Operations, Head of the, you know,

Secretary of Defense.

We have H.R.

McMaster, National Security Advisor.

We have people, Mark Moyer, the military historian.

We have Bing West, who wrote a lot.

We have a lot of analysts inside the Pentagon.

Joe DeFry to get Europeans, Joe Joffe.

We had Walter Russell Meade for a while.

And then we also,

in addition to all that, we try to encourage

discussion to the point of difference or disagreement, which is easy to do in the age of Trump.

And we don't try to censor anything.

So they're pretty volatile conversations,

especially on things like China and Ukraine and Russia.

We have Gordon Chang on China, Miles Yu from the State Department, U.S.

Naval Academy, a lot of Chinese experts.

Barry Strauss, ancient classicist, Paul Ray, classicist.

We have about 40.

And what we do is we publish each three-week period an essay.

This next one is going to be on

Fischers and NATO.

And did the Ukraine

war make NATO more

cohesive or less so?

And then we're going, and that's called the Backgrounder, where we get a distinguished scholar to write about the historical, say,

problems and advantages of NATO.

And then we have a pro and con, sometimes on the same subject, sometimes not, but we're going to have one.

Yes, it did make NATO

more unstable in the sense it contributed to the Turkish problem, Turkey selling weaponry to Russia.

and having joint arms ventures with Russia and now threatening to send missiles into Athens and the whole southern flank could be ripped wide open with a Turkish-Greek war.

And if you listen to what Erdogan has been saying lately, you know, one night you're not going to know what's going to hit you and the Dodecanese islands that were acquired or given back to Greece, they were Greek since antiquity,

he's now questioning the legitimacy of that sovereignty, you know, that maybe they should be Turkish and you can't, we're going to overfly them with our jets, but

you can't arm those islands to protect themselves.

That's against the treaty and stuff like that.

So that's going to be one of the essays, and the other will be on Germany.

And that will be:

did the war bring Germany back into the fold of NATO to a greater degree once it was disabused of its naivete about Russia, Russian energy supplies, and is it rearming?

Is it a better NATO?

So I assign these topics, and then David Berkey, the managing editor, who works as a research fellow at Hoover, then he does the real work of contacting the particular scholars and,

you know, kind of focusing these questions I've posed.

Then they, then he and Bruce Thornton, another research are responsible for editing the essays.

They appear.

It's a lot of work.

I know it's a lot of work because when I first did it, I did it once, did it all myself.

Yeah.

I couldn't do it.

So I know they're doing a lot of work, and then they get illustrations and they get it out.

And it's, it's, and then we once a year or sometimes twice, we bring that whole consortia to Palo Alto or to Stanford.

And it's very expensive because we have to bring fly everybody in.

We have top accommodations, and then we have this circular table.

And we pose questions about

the contemporary political and military situation.

I pose four questions, and then everybody weighs in.

But to participate and to be paid, they have to write a 300-word essay on four topics.

And then we bank those so during the next year I know what the issues will be mostly.

And then each issue we can draw back on those.

So every strategic issue has backgrounder essay, pro, 750 this, 750 con,

and then maybe five or six mini essays that were accumulated during the conference.

And so it's pretty wild.

It's really wonderful to have people.

We had the brilliant David Goldman.

Oh, I love.

Yeah, I love David.

Great.

David's a polymath.

Right.

Oh, right.

He's right about classical music, Hebraic law, and China.

Financial wizard.

Yeah.

He writes under the pseudonym Spingler

for the Asia Times.

But he came, you know, and he came out and would give a different view about China.

And so Sammy and I talked about him when we were discussing China the other day.

And I think, you know, on Ukraine, somebody like that or the late Angela Coteville would have a very different view than Bing West or

H.R.

McMaster or Jim Mattis or

somebody like that.

And then we'd have, so we would get very spirited conversations and disagreements.

And that was the whole point of it.

And then I try to bring in maybe 10 or 12 visitors, sometimes through Zoom and then sometimes fly them in that have expertise.

So for this next one that's scheduled in March, it'll be on Ukraine.

We're going to have people who actually

are involved in weapons development.

They know exactly what our arsenal is that we're giving Ukraine and what degree is it going to be effective or dangerous or irrelevant, except stuff like that.

And so it's, it's, we had a little bump, as everybody did during the Trump years, because

it tended to be that

anybody with a, how do I say this without being self-incriminatory?

Go ahead, be self-incriminatory.

Well, anybody that had a reputation as weighing in on military history or diplomatic affairs, or just as a public intellectual or something,

identified with Trump was suspect

that way.

And so

if that group of maybe 40 or 50, there were maybe eight or nine of us that voted for Trump and were unapologetic about it given the alternatives.

And that kind of created a little bit of tension.

But not, I thought it was helpful that people were very polite and had different views.

Right.

Well,

yeah, we try to get Europeans.

We have a lot of people that come in with a very strong Turkish, pro-Turkish or pro-Greek, pro-Israeli, you name that pro-Europe EU view.

And so the whole point is to get discussion and not to censor anybody's views.

And the very funny thing was, is

I don't know how to put this, but when I got the original 25, I showed them to the director, John, and he said, does anybody not like you in that group?

Meaning, I don't know if he even remembers this now, he's retired, but he didn't want you to get your old buddies, you know what I mean?

And then I'm, and then,

you know, how that works, that incestuous thing where you write a book and you, not that it's always bad, but it's

log rolling, a log rolling Daisy Chain on the back cover blurbing.

So, you know, it's like, well, Victor, are you bringing all your buddies out?

And I said, no,

I said,

Here's 25 and this guy trashed me in a review.

This guy said something terrible about me.

This person said in print that I was an idiot.

This person can't stand my sight.

So that was good.

And a lot of those people

probably still feel the same way, but they've never been rude about it.

I can't believe, Victor, that anyone exists who doesn't like you.

But that said, we've only got a few minutes left and we've got to take a little break.

And we got one other.

I don't think it's important, but I think it's important topic to discuss.

And that's, I can't believe I'm saying this, Prince Harry.

And we'll be back and get Victor's views right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

By the way, our happy home on the internet is John Solomon's justthenews.com.

That's just the news.com.

So check that out.

So, Victor, look, you know, I read the

Daily Mail

throughout the day.

And some days, we have to remember it is a British publication.

And when little Harry here has his memoirs coming out, you're going to go to the Daily Mail website and see 30 stories about this.

And he looked cross-eyed at his brother about this.

And he had a frostbite on his wiener.

Here he killed 25 Taliban.

I mean, any any, everything from Puriant to.

But what bothers me, or what I'd like to hear from you on, is this guy is the, if you look at recorded history, the 1% of the 1% of the 1%, very few people, very few have had the privilege and the prestige and whatever you want to say

that this Harry, whatever the hell is his last, is it Windsor?

It must be his last name.

Harry Windsor.

Megan Markle's husband has.

And yet, and yet he is so freaking

whiny and portrays himself as a victim, constantly mega-wealthy, despite all his victimhood.

And I find him to be kind of a pin-up boy for our times.

Yeah, I mean,

we always looked to the British.

to be a little bit more sophisticated in the positive sense than we were.

They weren't as therapeutic, in other words, but he's an Oprah light.

You know,

it was no accident that Oprah interviewed his wife because they had the same shared therapeutic mindset.

And so

the problem was, is that

after

making a ton of money and buying this Montecito mansion and then hawking their name, because if anybody can tell me what the expertise of Harry is, or a C-list actress like Megan Markle, if anybody can tell me how otherwise they would have been so rich and so much in the news without this

stamp, this brand from the royal family, I don't know.

I don't think that would be possible.

So here we are.

They're creatures that were created by the royal family, right?

He's part of the royal family.

And

he's like the second son, the third son, or the fourth son of the British aristocracy.

He's angry because he's not going to be king and he's going to be second fiddle by an accident of birth.

And so he adds, you know, he says he's had this drug use and he was rebellious and his mother was, you know, tragically died.

I think he hints that she may have been murdered and conspiracy.

He goes into seances.

And so the person is not stable and he says things you should never say.

You know what I mean about

killing people.

He says he kills 25 Taliban that he knows of.

Okay, so

that's very dangerous to say if you're in the royal family, because in the age of Islamic terrorism, somebody may be related to somebody who was killed and maybe thinks he was killed at a certain time or place by Herodi, and it's not a good thing to say.

You never say that.

You know, my father flew 40 missions over

Japan and he was on the March 11th fire, 910th fire raid that, incinerated 100,000 people, and he shot down three Japanese fighters, I think two Raidens and one Tony, and he never mentioned it.

He wouldn't talk about it.

And he just didn't want to think about it.

He didn't mean that he was escaping the responsibility, but he took no delight in it.

He took a lot of delight in helping win the war for the United States and saving lives, but he didn't want to dwell on the people he killed.

So it's really kind of weird when you say that, 25 people he killed.

And I think he was saying that almost to suggest that he had been in actual combat, whereas his father and his brother had been in the military, but not, you know, on the cutting edge, so to speak.

So

what I'm getting at very slowly, Jack, is that he recites all of these

grievances he has against this family.

They're racist.

They weren't nice to Megan.

And he had to play second fiddle to his brother.

And his father was having an affair with Camilla, why is his mother and all of these terrible things that have happened to him?

But they're always at the expense of the royal family.

So now, thanks to Harry, we've had public interviews and he had the Netflix.

Remember that?

The real TV docu drama?

And now we have memorial.

I watched one episode and I just, just for the hell of it, I'm like, I cannot believe people are so self-centered.

Yeah, he's completely narcissistic and obsessed.

And

now he's got a memoir.

And the only reason anybody's going to read it is not because they think Harry's interesting.

They want to read gossip and dirt and,

you know, sensationalism about the late Queen Elizabeth or King Charles or whatever.

So he is a creature, is what I'm trying to say, of the royal family.

And he has used that relationship to become very, very wealthy by exploiting it through media, documentaries, online interviews, memoirs, you name it.

He's not done anything on his own since his military service that makes him uniquely gifted.

I mean, I like maybe she has as an actress, but not lately.

So they have one job, and their job title says,

peripheral members of the royal family that will on any given day allow you to interview them, film them for criticism and attacks on the royal family.

That's it.

That's their job description, to trash the royal family.

Well, after doing all this, what I don't get is then he laments that he can't reconcile with his father.

He can't reconcile with his brother.

He can't reconcile with his sister-in-law.

He can't reconcile with anybody.

Why would they do this to him?

You know, it's a perennial brother you have or cousin or somebody who's told everybody in town you're an ogre and writes you that you're an ogre.

And there are families like that.

And then all of a sudden says, and you won't talk to me, you know.

And I don't get where he's coming from.

He's done more damage to that royal family since Edward, you know, in the 1930s and Hope Simpson.

And so I don't know, he's very like his, I guess that would be his great-great-grandfather, great-great-uncle.

Oh, great, great uncle.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's done just, he's very similar.

Kind of an outspoken young guy, kind of handsome, but completely a wastel.

And

you know, well, it's not, it's not a clear connect, but you know, I've mentioned before that Sharon and I, that's Mrs.

Fowler, were at that infamous Yale event about seven or eight years ago, a free speech conference.

And when the police let us out of the building from the wanna rioting students who are screaming at us,

I thought, these are the most privileged people

in history, right here.

There's students at Yale, and yet all they do is they're filled with hate and anger.

and see themselves as victims.

And this guy strikes me as exactly the the same.

I mean,

he is a prototype

for

the young woke culture.

Woe is me.

I've never had it so good.

It's crazy.

And you know that if they told him

If they told him, you can come back and we're going to make a special role that we've never done before for the second son of the king, and we're going to make you a roving diplomat with plenipotentary power and anything.

He would jump at it.

You know,

it's like Joy Reed getting on MSNBC and going into her tirades about white people.

Then the commercial break, you know, she's going over there.

What are my ratings?

What are my ratings?

And this is

all these people, they act,

they're all pampered and elite and careerist.

He's a careerist.

And upon multi-million.

And so is his wife.

And I think everybody knows that their marriage is going to end badly because she's an egomaniac and a narcissist, too.

And she has been responsible for all this.

And she's half black.

If you saw her, you wouldn't necessarily be able to tell she was African-American.

Not at all.

Not at all.

And yet she's now carved out

two niches.

One, she's the American, and two, she's the person of color, and that makes her a victim.

So you end up in the theater of the absurd, whereas I said earlier, she's in Montecito, and she's in one mansion, and Oprah's in another mansion, and Oprah says, Come over to my mansion.

So she comes over to Oprah's mansion, and then the two of them start talking about all of the how oppressed they are.

Nobody wants to listen to that.

I think people realize we're in the 21st century.

So

there's this other question that also dovetails into the whole cyclodrama, and that is that the African-American elite

is also, whether you're LeBron James or Joey Reed

or Ellie Mostel or any of these people,

they don't understand that it's not 1965.

And when you look at

upper-middle-class women with bachelor's degrees that are African-American, you look at their salaries, they're pretty comparable, if not more, than their comparable white counterpart.

if you look at the american suicide rate white males except for indigenous people american indians have a much higher suicide rate than uh latinos or blacks if you look at so-called white rage and white privilege and you want to quantify that by using doj data and you say okay

mark milley's right professor kenti let me go look and see all the hate crimes the whites are committing well they're they're underrepresented there's 68% of the population.

They commit about 56%.

African Americans are about 12%.

They commit about 25% of hate crimes.

And that 12%

commits about 53 to 55% of violent crime and murder.

So what I'm getting at is you've got a very fluid situation where LeBron James and Oprah and Michelle Obama are not victims.

So when Oprah says she's oppressed because somebody doesn't show her an alligator

crocodile, $37,000 purse in Switzerland boutique, it's hard to stomach.

Or Michelle says that when she goes into a store and a short white woman asks a very tall black woman to pick up a package for her and doesn't recognize her, that's a proof of how racist this country is.

Or when Megan Markle says that

somebody in the staff says, we don't know what color her child will actually be, and therefore it's very hard to to take because these are don't you like the one?

And I'm sorry to interrupt, but when you're in a supermarket or someplace and someone says to you,

could you help me get this?

Would you mind

I just came back on a plane.

I just came back on a plane and there was a short woman of Asian descent and she said to me, She turned around.

I was sitting next to her and we landed and she said, could you get my package, my suitcase and package?

I said, I already did because I had got up and got mine and they're right here and I pushed them right there.

It's a nice thing.

It makes you feel good.

I didn't think she was just stereotyping me as a white person that was stupid that had to do that.

So yeah,

that's the problem.

When you postulate that there's a victimized population, and you don't have enough victimizers, then you end up, you're into Jussie Smollett territory.

You're either in Jussie Smollett territory or Duke La Crosse or Covington Kids territory,

or you're in Michelle Obama, Oprah, Crocodile Bag, Megan Markle territory.

In other words, you have to fabricate real racism.

I mean, you have to say that this is real, this fantasy, just a smollett.

MAGA people running around in the middle of a frigid morning with a bleach and a rope, defying the laws of chemistry that bleach won't freeze as you throw it at you to bleach you white, and then yelling out about Empire, a show that nobody ever watches, and in particular, a MAGA person, I suppose, wouldn't.

Or

you're just trying to find things

that you think may have existed.

And so I guess what you're trying to find, what's the overall explanation, the analysis, the whole exegesis?

And I think it is that once

you start to gravitate to a quality of result, or you say diversity for diversity's sake, or

you have something other than merucratic criteria, then you're never going to

fully convince a person that they're not a victim or a beneficiary of some type

non-merocratic, and that creates doubt.

And, or that's the good take on it.

The bad take is: if a person believes that they have been,

that their race is essential rather than incidental to they are, and it's been very helpful or beneficial in their career trajectory, like Megan Markle, maybe,

then they're going to feel that the more that they emphasize that again and again and again, the more

you can, you know, sort of get dividends.

And that's what mine that vein of ore.

And that's what Michelle does constantly.

And that's what

certain people do.

That's why when you see someone like a Tom Soule or Shelby Steele,

and

they have the exact opposite or Clarence Thomas, their ideas, I'm going to be in the field of ideas in which I work.

And my race is, I have some insight as a member of that race, but I'm going to try to show you how pernicious this is when people do this.

And my views are based on my writing and my argumentation, and you can accept it.

But I'm going to compete in that arena of ideas, and they're superior.

And so when you talk to them, they don't have any of this.

They don't have any of this.

Actually, like Shelby says something like, race is like number 17 on my list of problems.

It's just like.

When I would talk with Shelby Steele for our luncheons, we talked about Israel.

We talked about foreign policy.

When I

talked to Tom, we'd go to lunch, you know, every two weeks for 15 years.

It was, hey, Victor, are you worried about battlefield readiness in the military?

And Victor,

what's going to go on in Iraq?

Or Victor, I'm really worried about this tax proposal.

And do they have any idea what $20 trillion in debt means?

And who are these crazy people talking about switchgrass and sugar cane making oil or gasoline when we have all this oil?

Just stuff like that.

It was never about race, never.

And then, to the degree that even race came in, it was always

comic.

They would laugh at somebody who tried to use all of their racial features for advantage.

But what I'm getting at in this long, and I'll finish, is that this is 2023.

And

when you look at per capita incomes of various ethnic groups, and you look at both positive and negative,

positive and negative stereotyping, that's what these people do.

It's a boomerang, Jack.

So once you say that I'm white or I'm black or I'm yellow or I'm brown, and you want to identify with that as a collective and not as an individual, then you're going to take the downside too.

You are.

So if you say I'm black and I'm black and I'm black and I, this, this, and somebody's going to say, well, then why don't you address the 70% illegitimacy?

And they're going to say, no, you're stereotyping.

I'm like, well, no, you're stereotyping because, you know, somebody like Joy Reed can't finish a sentence with talking about white people.

And so

no one should ever do that.

No, if you're white, you shouldn't say, well, white people,

you know, white people gave us Thomas Edison and Alexander.

Well, you know, we have the highest suicide rate, too.

You don't want to separate yourself as an individual and say, I'm no longer an individual.

I'm part of a board, a collective.

Because it will boomerang on you.

And it has a bad historical present.

It leads to Rwanda or Yugoslavia eventually or Iraq or some kind of multi-racial, multi-religious chaos and war of everybody against everybody.

And that's where we're headed.

But we are in a period in which a lot of brilliant people have said that when you start to approach equality, then people who had feel that they had been victims in the past

do not want to downplay that because the racism is not there anymore.

They're going to start to apply adjectives as needed, systemic racism, not aggression, but microaggression.

And they're going to try to emphasize segregation like the Berkeley off-campus housing where it's signed says no white people allow.

Basically, they have a pamphlet.

Can't walk into the housing

if you're of a particular color.

So that's where we are right now.

And it requires everybody to speak out against it because it's

where we're headed is that LA hot mic city council conversation where those three councilmen started to just their whole worldview was each particular race other than their own.

It was subhuman almost, the way they said something, calling him little monkey or a bitch.

And that's what we're headed for.

Those were all sterling members of the multiracial, multicultural, woke political establishment in California.

Yeah, they sort of

flipped intersectionality on its head by mocking the gay guy with the black sun, right?

Yeah, they called him a white bitch.

They called the sun monkey.

And

they called people from Oaxaca little ugly people.

And they were abject racist.

And so I think we're going to get to that point where everybody is sick of it.

They're sick of it.

They're sick of people who identify by their race and who it's essential to.

And they're going to start holding people.

So when this, what was her name, Representative Bass the other day said that Representative Criminals?

Yeah.

He said

that he was a token.

Yeah,

the lady from Ferguson.

Yeah.

And she said he's a token

tool of white privilege.

Well, then she's a racist.

People should say that.

They should say that she's a racist and they should hold people accountable.

So when a professor, as one did recently,

not too long ago, I think it was last year

at Rudker said that we want to kill all the white mother blanks, then she should be held accountable, just as if she was white saying that about black people or brown people.

And if somebody,

you know, like Ellie Mostell, who's a talking head on MSNBC, says, you know, I got kind of tired of white people.

I don't want to see them anymore.

I just keep away from them.

Then he should be treated as well or not as

somebody.

Or if you're Sonny Huston and what the view, and she says, oh, I can't understand why these suburban white women voted for Trump.

It's kind of like cockroaches going to raid, using that nice Hitlerian imagery about a gas and a a person being reduced to an insect.

So people are going to have to hold her,

they're going to have to say, look, we're in a multiracial society and we're headed toward Armageddon and Yugoslavia unless you stop it.

So if you're not going to stop it and you're not going to stop calling people racist and posing as a victim,

then we're going to intervene and we're going to call you out on it.

And we're going to be completely transparent, completely transparent.

And I don't think people want to do that because you look at what's happening in Chicago, and I think people need to say to Jory Reed, if you're going to talk in collective terms, not as individuals, but as black, or you're going to say that white people, remember she said after the shooting, Kyle, what was his name, Rittenhouse?

She said, well, white people turn, white people, especially white males, they just turn on those tears.

She was gloating, you know.

And if you're going to talk talk like that, then and you're going to divide the world or you're Mark Milley and you're going to talk about that,

then you're going to, it's going to boomerang you.

People are going to say, okay, Joy, you tell me right now why the African-American community is committing hate crimes against the innocent at double their numbers in the population.

Explain it to me.

or why the illegitimate rate is 70% or what goes on Chicago is more deaths than was going in the worst year in Afghanistan per year.

You explain that.

Of course, she doesn't have to because she's an individual.

She's not responsible for all that as an individual.

But once she makes herself responsible for it by claiming that we're all just

little cogs in these racial gears, then she is responsible.

And she's going to have to account for that if she wants to take on that role.

But you can't have it both ways.

You can't have it both ways.

And you can't be LeBron James and be in the NBA that's somewhere between 65 and 70% African American when that's 12% of the demographic and then start lecturing people about disproportionate impact and racism and all this in larger society.

Somebody's going to say, okay, where's the Latino center?

And he's going to say, well, it's a merocratic situation.

And the Latino community is going to say, no, it's not.

It's diversity.

Diversity is our strength.

So we want 12%, 15% of the NBA.

And then the Asians Asians are going to say, and the whites are going to say, we want our members too.

And LeBron's going to say, what's going to hurt the meritocratic?

Because we were like that one day when it was mostly white.

And it was a very unexciting game compared to today's game, which is based entirely on merit.

And then somebody's going to say, LeBron, okay,

yes.

So you're saying that merit should not be the qualification in

United Airlines training program and

admission to Harvard Medical School, because those are irrelevant, but merit must be essential for really important things that make the United States work like the NBA.

Is that it?

So you can't have it both ways.

You see what I mean?

And that's

Victor, that's what's happening.

Yeah, we, the, the, you know, the rabble-rousers and the, the elites who want to foment this kind of stuff flies in the face of, and I know we have to end this show, we're way over, but you know, this poor

Buffalo Bill

defender who got hurt, seriously hurt the other day, DeMar Hamlin, and a nation comes together,

a predominantly white nation comes together to pray desperately for this hurt black man and immediately finds ways to show some support by like millions of dollars flooding into his charities.

Just some tangible way that we can show some support for this guy.

I mean, that's a wonderful thing.

And it's probably what America still is at its core, but

not in the mind of Joy Reed and not in the mind of.

Well, we're a multiracial society right now.

And we're an integrated, assimilated, intermarried society where we don't, we'll need a DNA badge to give the racial background of every member in our family.

If these people on the left think that for the next 30 years, you're going to be able to give special preferences based on two criteria, your superficial appearance and the historical grievances of your particular community.

And you've got about 30 of those communities, and they're all going to fight it out.

And you're going to tell what?

The blonde-eyed, blue-eyed, third-generation Argentine immigrant named Jose Diaz, that's basically Italian or German that was in Argentina, and he's going to come here with no prior record of

discrimination.

And you're going to tell him that he's

eligible for affirmative action, but not somebody who's a Punjabi scientist, you know, computer major or a poor white kid from Tulare, California that's never had anybody going to go in his family to college.

And you're going to tell him, wait, you can't go to Stanford it's 23% only white and for white males it's 48% of that 23 so it's about 11% we got a lot of legacies legacies legacies legacies so you're not you may have a perfect SAT score but we reject 70% of the perfect and may have a straight A average you may be the first in your family but you are not going there because of your gender and race even though that 12% is one-third of your demographic in the general population But we are going to admit an African-American orthodontist with a much lower test score kid up from an orthodontist, and that's not going to be tenable.

It really isn't.

Just like the whole Jim Crow fining fell because it was a bankrupt amoral system.

And this is the 55th year.

I mean, we're in the sixth decade of the civil rights movement.

And somebody's going to, finally, somebody's going to say the emperor's naked and the civil rights law says you can't discriminate on the basis of race.

Right.

Well,

somebody should inform the human resources departments of American corporations about that.

Now, Victor, we've got to close shop here, and we thank our listeners.

But did you know, Victor, what

Classic Stein wrote as a comment on Apple Podcasts?

Would you like to hear that?

I think you would.

It's titled,

good.

It came with five stars.

And thanks to those who go to Apple Podcasts and iTunes, who can leave five stars.

They can leave zero stars, but practically everyone leaves five stars.

We're very appreciative of that.

Classic Stein wrote this.

It's titled Historical Interpretation.

VDH

articulates current news with the inspiration of history's failures and successes.

As he approaches an event, there is a lighted path towards truth and knowledge with reflection instead of rehearsed verbiage.

Progress is is planted on informed

content instead of a biased path slanted with greedy deception.

Thank you, Victor.

Not for your movie choices.

That was from your podcast the other day.

But Sammy, otherwise, an 11 out of 10.

Thank you, Classic Stein, for the kind

reflection and to all others who do the same and leave comments.

We read them and we appreciate them.

Even I appreciate the criticism.

Shut up, Valor criticisms.

Take it to heart.

So, Victor, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom

today.

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

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

Much appreciated.