War, Italians, and Gender Dysphoria

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

The namesake of this show is the great Victor Davis Hansen, my friend who I was able to see a few days ago

up in Selma.

Visit with him.

It was terrific.

He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, and we've got some interesting things to talk about on this episode, as we do with every episode.

One of the things that Victor does under his Hoover Senior Fellowship is to oversee a very important online journal.

It's called Strategica, and there's a new issue out.

And we're going to talk about that.

Issue number 80, I think.

Number 80, the big 8.0.

And we're going to talk about Edward Lutfock's lead piece on military.

It has a significant military history aspect to it.

We'll talk about that.

We're going to talk about Italian elections, trans stuff, maybe even

a Cuomo.

Since we're talking about Italian stuff, let's stick Cuomo in there.

We're going to do that.

Start talking about that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hanson show.

I have to add, Victor,

that I visited.

I know people,

I really treasure your friendship and your kindness and hospitality.

Mrs.

Fowler was with me.

Just you and Mrs.

Mrs.

Hansen were so kind to us.

We want to thank you for being able to catch up with you in the Central Valley and driving through the state.

You know, when you're from Connecticut here in the Bronx in Connecticut, you really when you drive through California, you think this is, I'm on a different planet.

I can't believe, I cannot believe the beauty of the barren hills and the

beautiful.

It's beautiful.

But we made paradise into

a nightmare of people.

Yeah, Well, infrastructure and homeless and forest fires, lack of

airports are terrible.

Everything is, everything we did is as bad as everything our grandparents did that was wonderful.

Well, when I left your house, I saw, as you mentioned on other podcasts, the Stonehenge kind of

abandoned.

I don't know.

I hope it's not abandoned.

Well,

you don't want people pissing more money away into it.

We sort of, we do in California, we got sort of kind of maybe sort of work today a little bit.

Okay.

Well, and remember, all contractors have to have the specified number of homeless and transgender in their workforces to get a contract.

Oh, wow.

Really?

You have to have?

Yeah.

Oh, gosh.

Wow.

All right.

That should be a whole episode unto itself.

Also, but just driving.

So look at that creek.

There was no water in them there, creeks.

And then the big, big

clouds of smoke smoke in the distance and you're uh the airports right but but still victor such a great such uh such beauty um one of the one of the uh good things about california is that it is the home of the hoover institution and then and again at strategica is the online journal that uh you were called the uber editor of and this particular um uh new uh episode number uh 80, I've called it an episode edition, it's how the war in Ukraine ends.

And, you know, to our listeners on our last episode, you talked

at length about the war, and we're not going to revisit that per se.

But Edward Lutwach had a very interesting lead essay for this issue of strategic, and it's titled Our

21st Century, 18th Century War.

And I don't know, I'm not a military historian, but I like military matters, and it's just an interesting perspective.

What does he mean by what is an 18th century war?

And of the wars we know more about, popularly, Vietnam, World War I, World War II,

what isn't an 18th century war?

Well,

he's saying that, and he quotes this quote, he actually mentioned, I mean, he wrote it in classical Greek, Heraclitus' War is the Father of Us All.

And what he was saying, saying, it's sort of like an 18th century war is sort of like a classical Greek war among Greeks, city-states.

And it means that every once in a while in the 18th century, a bunch of coalition, small little duchessies and states and kingdoms in a fragmented Europe would band together, oh, with the Great Britain and France or with Spain.

And they would, or they have, you know, the War of Austrian Succession, I guess that was 1740,

or the Seven Years' War.

That was kind of a major one, you know, and that was in 1756.

But the point he's making is they did not disrupt the

pattern of life or the trajectory of Europe, or they were not like 19th century wars where you had a nation in arms.

So you had

the nation of France under Napoleon, you know, drafting drafting a million people and fielding at one time or another 600,000 soldiers on the field of battle in two or three different converging armies or the coalition.

You know, you could see at Waterloo, you get 200,000 people there in an age of

smooth bore musketry.

or even rifled musketry was starting.

So

an 18th century war was something that broke out and involved

a cast of maybe 10 or 12 of the larger countries, nations, whatever you want to call them.

They were not just France and Austria, Sweden, but they were Savoy and Saxony and all these Naples that don't exist today.

And then they would conglomerate together and they would fight over religion or a succession to a particular crown.

And it would go on.

and on because they were too evenly balanced or there were too many agendas that were not clearly known to all the belligerents.

And the point was that Europe tolerated that.

It went on.

And so I think what Ed is saying, he's a very gifted, he's been with our group for over a decade.

He's a polyglot.

He's

an Israeli military veteran.

He's been in the arms sales business.

He's been all over the world.

So he is a very, he's written a really couple, I've reviewed one, the grand strategy of the Byzantine Empire, but kind of was nursed as a graduate student on the grand strategy of the Roman Empire.

So he's very accomplished.

He wrote a handbook about how to conduct a coup d'état.

What would you do?

And he actually outlined what you do.

And a lot of people thought that that gave some coups some inspiration.

But the point he's making is that

we got to calm down, okay?

So in his view of this war, it's going to have contours of its own.

It's kind of evenly matched.

But what we don't want to do is enlarge it to a global war that would involve nuclear weapons.

Or more importantly,

we do not want to destroy Europe on the altar of Ukrainian sovereignty.

I guess by that he means,

those are my words, not his, but I think that his essay is saying

that Europe can go on like it is.

Let them buy Russian oil.

Just let them buy it.

So what?

They just buy Russian oil and what's the difference?

And then they can take Russian oil and use,

get their industries working and sell Ukrainians leopard tanks.

And don't be worried about the hypocrisies and the paradoxes and the contradictions.

And each side can, within certain parameters, feed their proxies and we'll see what happens.

But do not think that this is Armageddon and you have to destroy pure evil and Vladimir Putin and you've got to ruin all the economies of Europe by cutting all their natural gas off to Putin, who will find other customers and has found other customers, and then take the United States and rearm it and square off with the idea of Joe Biden's that you're going to get him out of office.

That's not going to happen.

And it would be very dangerous to do that.

So what he's trying to do is, how do we de-escalate?

And one of the ways that we do it, we diminish the importance of the war.

We all pull back.

back, we stop a little bit of our excitement, we don't give them quite as many arms, Putin's got his own problems, and then they will slowly

trite each other and get to some type of, well, we are tired, like they did in the 18th century.

Let's find an agreement.

And the agreement, as he ends that article, will be some type of plebiscite.

And

I wrote an article on that.

I mean, in 1935, everybody said you can't trust the Germans, you can't, but the Saarland was all German.

They didn't want to be independent.

They didn't want to go with the French.

They wanted to go back to Germany.

And they had a plebiscite, and the Saarland voted, I think, 90%.

And it was probably an accurate vote, but nobody wanted to die over the Saarland.

And you can argue, well, that just wetted his beak and he went into the Sedatin land.

Yeah, probably so.

But I think that's what Henry Kissinger advocated.

I think that's what Lutwock advocated.

I think Neil Ferguson has advocated that.

He's got an issue, a paper in this issue.

But there's a lot of people who said, you know, if these 70% Russian areas,

I'm not saying that constitutes the

part or all of the Crimea, but they do right on the border with Russia, the land border.

If they want to join Russia and you think there can be a fair election, unlike his forced plebiscites.

And maybe I think Ralph Peterson in the same issue was arguing maybe, just maybe, Ukraine would be in a stronger position to cede these areas to Russia because then they wouldn't have to deal with restive minorities

who are basically Russians and speak Russian.

And they would have a more cohesive state.

And they could then

go into a deterrent posture and build a huge fortified border or something where on one side there were people who were

far and away, majority Ukrainian speakers in Ukrainian.

Victor, you're a classicist, not only of languages, but also classic historian and also military historian, which is many people like you for selective reasons.

Many people enjoy listening to you for all reasons.

But as Peter's, excuse me, as

Edward Lutvach writes in this article, and you just mentioned it, about

Heraclitus,

who wrote, War is the father of all things.

And Lutvach hyphenates,

hyphenates, excuse me, italicizes all.

War is the father of all things.

Could you explain that a little bit to

well,

I have a book, a collection of essays actually with that title.

I think I published it in 2010, and it was called War is the Father of Everything.

And I think he has it quoted there, as I remember, it was Palamos Ponton Men Pater.

And I can't even remember the fragment number, 53.

53.

Yeah, but in Diels Krantz, it is.

But the point, he was called the obscure one.

We don't, you know, Heraclitus, everything flows.

Nothing is the same.

No river is the same once you get in.

So

he was one of the pre-Socratic philosophers.

And in one of these fragments, he was trying to tell us that the

stuff of life or the human experience whether you like it or not is predicated on the ubiquity of war which is never going to be eliminated that's the kind of idea that it's in and there's and that that resonates throughout classical literature there's a good passage i think it's in the second book of xenophon's hellenica when

Xenophon is writing about discussion in the Athenian ecclesia or assembly and somebody stands up and says, ah, yeah, wars, so what?

They're breaking out everywhere.

There are always one beginning, there's always one ending.

And what they're saying is that

these

empirical observers were looking at conflict.

And it wasn't like Amazonian indigenous people ritual where you come of age, you know, and you scar yourself up with tattoos and you paint your face and then you go out on a hunting patrol and kill two people from the other tribe or you throw spears at each other or you're the Tlaxcalans fighting the Aztecs where you're in a flower war where you're trying to take captives for sacrifice no rituals although people have suggested that was a element of classical greek warfare but what they're saying instead was these autonomous little city-states were very jealous of their own property their ground and borders and when they had disputes their hoplite or heavy infantrymen would meet on, as Herodotus says, the fairest and flattest plain, most level, and they would collide.

and it was pretty tough stuff.

And then they would adjudicate who gets what.

And that would break out on many times.

There's a first Peloponnesian War, there's a second Peloponnesian War.

And you get a car today, Jack, and you...

go up to Boeotia, you can go see the first battle of Coronea.

You can see the second battle of Coronea.

You can see the first battle of Chaeronea.

You can see another battle of Chaeronea.

You can go to Delium.

It's not too far from Oinou or Oinofita or Haliartis or not too far from Marathon.

So what I'm getting at is these places, these little plains again and again become the spots where these armies meet.

And in Lutwock's choice of that word from Heraclitus that reflects that reality, he is saying

that our concept of World War II or World War I or even Vietnam and Korea, where you get these huge Napoleonic armies and you get this huge industrial commitment and you send them abroad in the hundreds of thousands and they have these catastrophic economy ruin ramifications.

That doesn't have to happen.

You can say to the Ukrainians,

just go back to what you were doing.

And I'm not saying that I agree with this.

I just want to be fairly characterizing because you're a question.

He's saying to the Ukrainians, go back to where you were in 2014 to 2022 when nobody gave a blank, blank what was going on in the borderline.

You know what I mean?

Because they were fighting Russians and they had come to a point where let's have a cigarette, some tea, and then at two o'clock we'll go out and shoot some rounds off, right?

And they didn't come to us and say, we want your most sophisticated weapons.

We want intelligence to assassinate Russian generals.

We want the ability for shore-to-ship missiles to sink another billion-dollar Russian ship.

None of that.

And Putin was not talking in those period time about nuclear weapon.

So So that was what he's trying to get at when he used Heraclitus and when he referenced the 18th century.

And you can live with it in a way that you cannot live with the 19th and 20th century.

You can't live with a civil war.

You just can't lose 600,000, 700,000 people

in a country the size of the United States in 1865.

One more of those, it would destroy us.

You can't live with 80 million dead in World War II with nuclear weapons, and the economy is just producing 80% of their output is militarily related.

But you can live sort of, I suppose, that's what Afghanistan was.

It was an 18th century war.

It was kind of

every once in a while it flared up and then it died down.

The problem with all of this is the 19th and 20th century mindset, that is immoral to have a professional class of warriors just to go out and get killed for what?

If we're going to have a difference and that difference is worth something and we're going to go to arms over it then we're going to get everybody involved and get it over with right that was the 19th and 20th century concept 21st century of total war

story

but napoleon yeah go ahead i'm sorry go ahead no it did i mean he was the first person who said to the aristocratic uh monarchies of europe your problem is that you represent

your own class and then you pay soldiers to fight for you.

But we we're a revolutionary society after the revolution and i can get people to fight for principles and for fraternity and egalitarianism and liberty

and that's what i'm going to do and i'm going to appoint generals on the basis of merit and i'm going to reconstitute the army in a very modern way and we're going to get a nation a people's army sort of like mao or what lenin or trotsky thought Right.

So he suddenly got these huge armies, and Napoleonic 19th century warfare was to line up at Leipzig or,

you know, Jena or Austerlitz and just destroy everything in his wake and then dictate terms.

That was not 17, 16, 15, 16.

Partly it's technological.

He had that, you know, when you get in cannon and rifled muskets and you're on your way to cartridges in 50 years, you can see what's going to happen.

Victor, to our listeners, that you'll find Strategica, and I will spell it, I'll try and spell it without bumbling, S-T-R-A-T-E-G-I-K-A.

That's Strategica.

You'll find it at the Hoover website, hoover.org.

And as Victor mentioned earlier, there are 80

issues, we'll call them issues of Strategica, and many of them are are timeless or evergreen.

So if you haven't ever

checked it out, do so and you'll find you'll find a treasure trove there

so victor um

things italian things italian by the way first of all have you ever heard of a of a of a a left-wing person being elected uh the this country x just elected an ultra left winger i i i don't recall anyone ever being characterized in such a way of course you know conservatives are once in a while we say that of cuba or venezuela

Well,

we need the same conservative centrist

in the United States.

But if your point is, does the left-wing media ever say left-wing?

No.

No.

Of course, they've been saying ultra-right-wing or fascist, semi-fascist, whatever.

All the terms that are used, probably racist, too, for all I know, about Giorgio Maloney,

who is the new...

a leader in Italy.

I'm no expert, but I've seen a video or two.

You know, I'm half Italian, but I don't speak, unless I heard my grandmother call me drunk, priagon, or something like that.

I know a few words.

But

watching her video with

subtitles on it,

I've found her very engaging.

But also she's talking about uh deeper issues than just the economy and tax cuts and stimulating women.

She's talking about the underlying fight for civilization and many of the issues we talk about on this show.

You know, we're, this is a,

we don't want to be a government that says that we want to be people that say that's a man and that's a woman, or that, you know,

a baby that's

30 weeks into gestation is

a baby or even prior.

So she's a very broad cultural conservative, and she won.

And of course, she's being vilified.

Victor, I don't know how much you've

read about her or investigated, if that's the right word.

But do you have any thoughts about

this woman who has now become the leader of one of the European powers, Italy?

Yeah, I mean, there are certain types of politicians on the center or the right that absolutely terrify the left.

And that means, to a lesser extent, Marie Le Pen, remember her,

Marine Le Pen in France, the Bois.

Marie.

She's a little long in the tooth.

Excuse me, I'm not trying to be sexy.

I think she's in her mid-50s, but she has sort of, she had that.

She's been around a while.

Yeah, she had Marion, remember the niece that was sort of very good-looking, blonde, and very articulate.

So when these types of figures appear, and Maloney is in her mid-40s, she's a journalist.

So she understands journalism and she understands the left and how it uses and manipulates the media.

And she's very well spoken and she's a totalist.

And by that, I mean it's not just politics, she's saying.

She's trying to say she's warning the West

beyond Italy's borders.

And that's why they find her dangerous, because they feel that she's charismatic and has a message that is not confined to local Italian politics.

But they look at her and they say, well, uh-oh, uh-oh,

she's more charismatic than AOC.

And unlike AOC, she's no dummy.

And she's been around and she understands how we do business and she knows how to counteract that.

And she's a totalist.

For her, in her mind, it's not just conservative governance that's there, but it is

you're never going to win or you're never going to restore the primacy of Western culture and all the good things it does for the world and for its people, unless

it's not just

to close the borders, so you're not the dumping ground of the world.

I use that term, I mean, that's what the Europeans have used it.

It's not just that you're not going to commit economic suicide by shutting down natural gas plants or nuclear power plants.

It's not just that you're going to disarm and allow your enemies to threaten you, but it's also these people on the left despise the history of Europe, the church, its traditions, and they want to destroy it.

And she's trying to warn people as a very young, charismatic, attractive young woman who, as I said, has been in their business.

I mean,

I think her favorite author is J.R.

Tolkien, and she went to something called

Hobbit Camp or Camp Hobbit.

I saw her on TV the other day.

And so if you look at the

token-esque view of the world,

you know, it's sort of influenced by the tragedy of World War I and the 20 million people who were killed in the trenches that created cynicism and sarcasm and modernism, modernism.

And, you know, when you look at that novel very carefully, you're looking back and saying we live in a debased age and there used to be men that lived 200 years and Gondor used to be

you know and now we're and the elves and all these wonderful people.

And then this black cloud came called Sauron, which was, and then Saurumon.

And these were totalitarian philosophies, the one being, I guess, modern Nazism or the betrayal of the West and Saurman, and the other being the red communist menace in the Red Tower, the Dark Tower in Mordor, which he, I think, in Tolkien thought was even a greater threat than Hitler, who could be defeated and was defeated in Tolkien's life, just like Sauerham was.

So she looks at all that and says, this guy understood that for the West to revive again, it has to have a fertility rate of 2.1 or 2.2.

It does not need immigration.

You cannot assimilate, integrate, intermarry millions of people from North Africa.

It won't work.

She's saying it has to have secure borders.

It has to have a strong defense.

It's got to have a national pride, not just some murky, who do you call head of EU kind of stuff, because everybody's our taker and nobody's a giver.

And that type of conservatism, which is 24-7, 360, it's cultural, it's economic, it's financial, it's social, it's political, it's military.

That is scary.

And it has a lot of appeal, a lot of appeal to people who are drifting along in modern society in sort of prolonged adolescence.

It's kind of a

reification, or I should say a distillation of the Jordan Peterson phenomenon in the United States.

And why did he take off?

Because he stood up and said, I know the left better than you do.

I've been with them my entire life.

I flirted with their ideologies myself.

I teach in a university, and I can guarantee you that it leads nowhere.

but to unhappiness and moral and cultural relativism and nihilism.

So I'm offering you a handbook, a guide, a pathway out of it.

Right.

And that's what she's trying to do.

And that's why people hate her so much.

Right.

And we'll see if that agenda of hers

can solve other problems that transcend it.

And that is the Italian economy.

Because what she's basically

going to have to do is saying we're going to have to be Italians.

But we can't be complete Italians and borrow all this money and not have a productive work week comparable to other European countries.

Right.

We'll see.

Italy is.

I hope she succeeds.

And when you see a figure like Victor Orban's another one, the left goes crazy.

They cannot stand them.

You can get some socialist that stands up in Cuba and kills 20,000 people.

communists like Casco, and Michael Moore will go down there and say he's a great man.

But you can't just some kind of right-wing reformer, conservative reformer, they go nuts, but they go especially nuts when they're bright, they're attractive, they're young, and they're well-spoken.

And you're right.

When you listen to those speeches and you see them and what the text of them is pretty powerful.

And then the idea that she doesn't take anything off anybody, when you have this sort of Trudeau on steroids, Macron,

who weighs in on everything with this haughty Gallic arrogance, and he sort of says, oh, yeah, she is a threat to the entire European.

And she just says, don't lecture us.

We know what you're doing in North Africa.

You know what you're doing in there.

You're exploiting the North Africans.

You're in Africa.

You're taking their precious metal for batteries.

You're in your old former imperialistic colony.

We don't do that in Italy.

We don't go into Somalia.

or Ethiopia or Libya, but you French think you still have rights to do that, to tell you Africans how to be French.

We don't do that, and don't lecture us.

And so she really took after him.

Yeah, she's

very

inspiring.

Even I'll say one thing about, by the way, Tolkien was

a great Catholic, and much of what he wrote was based on his faith.

And she's a faithful Catholic.

I think about the fall and redemption and the afterlife.

There was a lot of

Catholic

symbolism in Lord of the Ring.

Right.

I feel for Maloney trying to

be more Italian than the Catholic Church, even though the head of the church, well, he's probably

Italian via Argentina, but you have a very liberal church and

a Catholic leader who's more Catholic than the church.

So it should be interesting dynamic.

What's fascinating for me is when I've been reading about her, she's getting most of her flat, not from the left, but from the left-wing church,

because

they're for open borders.

Well, even worse, Victor, I know, you know, this we shouldn't go down a Catholic rabbit hole, but just as a Dan Mahoney, our friend wrote this terrific piece in the American Mind

last week or the week before, but it was about the church.

You know, there's a head of the, under John Paul II, he created a, essentially, it's a pro-life office within the Vatican.

And now the pro-life office is run by a bishop who said Italy's abortion law, which is no nation's abortion law, was as promiscuous as America's under Roe v.

Wade, but is a settled matter and we should just accept it.

It's kind of hard, like, wait a minute, abortion in Roman Catholic teaching is an abomination.

It's why you would be excommunicated if you were involved in abortion.

It's taking of a life.

And to have a Catholic bishop,

a heading of a pro-life bureau in the Vatican say this.

And it's symbolic of how diseased

the church at its hierarchical level is and

how clericalism is also.

I can feel why my Protestant brothers wanted to reject, wanted a reformation.

And

I think we may be heading to that.

But she's internally within Italy.

You know, that's, of course, the culture is steeped in Roman Catholicism, even though most people don't practice it, but it's still very much part of the culture.

I just remember that she said

that famous speech

that got her attention.

She said things that were absolutely logical, that were the foundations of Western civilization creed, but it's an enactment to the left.

She said, I'm a woman, you know, I'm Italian.

So I'm a woman.

There's only two sexes and I'm one of them.

And I'm Italian.

I'm not a Euro citizen.

I'm a citizen of a particular country with an illustrious history.

And I'm a mother and we have a low fertility rate.

So I have children.

And then she said, the worst of all, I'm a Christian.

And I believe in a hereafter, in the duality of body and soul.

And

it requires faith other than besides reason.

And we don't care how reasonable the modern world.

claims it is, it still can't quantify why we're here with data or math or physics.

It requires faith in the Christian tradition.

So she, that was, and then, you know, everybody said,

that's what Mussolini said.

No, he didn't.

He said, you know,

fatherland and all of that stuff.

Right.

She's scary.

She's volatile.

She's revolutionary.

She's well-spoken.

And when these figures appear on the conservative side, you know, whether it's the younger Le Pen, who was kind of a little bit more savvy than Maureen was, right?

She kind of dropped out after her failure.

Or you see a guy like Reagan, or you see a woman like Thatcher,

they just despise them because they're very charismatic figures and they appeal to people across the political spectrum.

And one of the things, as I remember, she said, I'm here for everybody.

So she was basically saying, I'm not here to advance a right-wing agenda.

I'm here to convince you that traditional conservatism and traditionalism will be in your benefit.

And I'm going to show you how, and you're going to like it.

Also, Victor's, I mean, appealing to Italians as Italians who still must be smarting from several years ago when the I don't know, he still, I don't know how the hell they did it.

The EU imposed Italy's leader on them, you know.

Well, I mean, let's be honest that Portugal, Portugal, Ireland,

uh, Spain, Greece, and Italy were run by the Deutsche Bank.

Yeah, right, right.

They ran it.

They told them exactly what their budgets were going to be, what the interest rate was, what their tax schedules were going to be.

And

let's be more honest and say

the Germans knew that there were more Mercedes per capita in Athens, bought on time, than any other city, and they were perfectly happy to send them Siemens and all of these Mercedes in BMW to this consumer little country of 12 million.

And just so they got the high interest rate, 7% to 8%.

And they knew they couldn't pay it back.

But it was the idea that it was a Ponzi scheme.

We'll give you our stuff at high prices.

You buy at high prices.

We'll loan you the money.

Just keep paying the interest.

And then when the whole thing blew up in 2008, it's my God.

these people, what's wrong with them?

They take siestas.

They used to have southern Europeans.

Well, they're gambling in Casablanca.

Hey, Victor, let's talk about another Italian, Italian-American, Chris Cuomo, and we'll do that.

I thought you were going to say Balchu.

We'll do that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

Uh, my good Swedish friend, Victor Hansen, S-O-N, do not do S-E-N.

Go to Victor Hansen.

We always tell our audience Swedes or Danes with their brains blown out.

So I'm told.

Well, go to his website.

It's victorhanson.com.

It's not VictorDavisHanson.com.

It's Victor Hansens.

We're a dying ethnicity to Swedes in America.

Well, you still make great.

Sweden's overseas.

Swedes are overseas.

Every once in a while, you know, it's very funny.

I've had this happen maybe two or three times in my life.

This guy from Sweden has showed up at my house,

or I've been in an airport and I meet a guy from Sweden, or there's a doctor I just met, a famous doctor, Martin Kohldorf.

uh that's swedish

then i don't speak swedish my father didn't speak it very well But

they feel brotherhood with

BDH.

I want to.

Yeah.

But my mother would always chastise me and say, just a minute.

We may have these old Volvos and we have to buy Electrolux vacuum cleaners and we have to eat rye crackers.

And, but we're half Welsh-Irish.

So remember that.

Rhys Davis was your grandfather.

Rhys Davis.

And you're a Davis.

So these have, these halves, but they have their own time and season.

They bubble up.

Well, anyway, you do have a website, Victorhanson.com.

And there is

one will go, one who goes there will find

Victor's appear videos of Victor's appearances, links to, and actually the full text of many pieces that he's written.

And there's also

there are articles under the banner of Ultra.

That means they're exclusive to the website and they can only be read by those who subscribe to VictorHanson.com.

And how much is that?

It's five bucks a month and it's a lot.

Victor writes a ton of original, exclusive content every week.

So I want to encourage you, and many have listened to this, and I'm going to do it.

I'm going to do it.

Well, finally do it.

Go.

Subscribe.

$5.

Stick your toe in the water.

Test it out.

It's $50 for the full year.

You will not regret it.

The only thing you will regret is not having done it sooner.

As for me, Jack Fowler, I work for American Philanthropic's Center for Civil Society, and we try to strengthen civil society.

And one of the things I do every week, rain or shine, no vacations, I always, whether I'm on vacation or not, I write a free weekly email newsletter called Civil Thoughts.

Sign up for it, civilthoughts.com.

It offers a dozen or so recommended readings from thought journals and just worthwhile things that are floating around out there.

I think you might find them enjoyable, educational, inspirational, et cetera.

It's free.

We don't sell your name, so no risk.

That's civilthoughts.com.

Victor, I was listening this morning.

Carl, I forget where the hell I was going.

But anyway, I heard an ad on the radio that News Nation, which is the old WGN, the Chicago superstation that's been around

for years, back in the infancy of HBO, et cetera.

Now it's News News Nation, and Ashley Banfield is on it.

And I think

Dan Abrams and some others.

But they've just announced a new hire, Chris Cuomo.

He's going to show there.

And

Victor,

this is a big lob up the middle, but

this guy was fired from his job because

he was

a shameful journalist.

He used it for partisan

what he says incestuous incestuous purpose

did he sexually harass people apparently he did yeah did he try to deny it at first yes he did did he uh go on camera and claim that he had been in isolation because he was infected with covet and he wanted to stage his triumphant return

when we know that that was untrue, that he'd already been out earlier, in fact, and gotten a confrontation with somebody who saw him, and that was all a fraudulent scene?

Yes.

And did he interview his brother at his brother's, the governor, Andrew Cuomo's time of, you know, accusations and turmoil, where several women said that he pawed them variously.

And then did Chris Cuomo interview him without telling us?

that there was no firewall between them.

In other words, that he was publicly on TV during the day, sort of disinterestedly supposedly interviewing his brother why in the morning and night they were on conference calls strategizing how to get him out of his uh sexual harassment trouble

and so yeah so he's he's completely discredited right but there's no shame in journal people who go awry in journalism we've talked about these things before plagiarists that we've we we we know and and here how does a thing called news nation hire somebody who's whose uh profession

has been anathema to what journalistic ethics are?

He did one thing that was smart.

And all of our listeners know what that one thing is.

When we go into our professions, whatever you're listening out there, whatever profession you're a high school teacher, principal,

reporter, CEO, whatever it is, at some point in your life,

somebody's going to offer you a deal.

And the deal is this.

Shut up, nod your head, faint.

We don't care what you really are, but go through the motions that you are woke, you're left, you're part of the team, and you are issued indemnity insurance.

However,

snarl, scowl, roll your eyes, be a contrarian,

a Lone Ranger, a Steppenwolf, whatever it is.

suggest you're conservative in these institutions.

And they are all the institutions.

They don't, when I say these,

we've been through that before.

But, and then you have no exemptions.

So, Chris Cuomo was a man of the left, and Andrew Cuomo is a man of the left.

And for a brief moment, the Me Too fought with that reality.

Now, Me Too trump, there's a hierarchy on the left of their intersectionality.

Feminism trumps generic leftism,

but

gayness usually trumps feminism.

Minority status vies with gayness, but for now, transgenderism is at the top

that's untouchable, as we know.

So Chris Cuomo had the right insurance policy, but he was up against the Me Too and all of that stuff.

So, but he did take it out as a matter of life.

So he's got a second chance.

I will guarantee you that Andrew Cuomo, his brother, will have a second chance.

whereas another person is all done with finished poop.

And

that's going to happen and he violated about four canons from sexual harassment to lying about the quarantine to lying about what was really his relationship with the brother that he was interviewing etc etc right and i think he had the he was of a very poorly rated network on top of a bunch of losers he was the king of the dung heap and so he had the higher ratings i mean because he didn't have much competition don Lamon, maybe.

Right.

So he,

I don't know.

He, he, he had that little shtick where he filmed himself and he was always lifting weights and he was trying to pose with sort of half of his, remember he had that little scene where he walked naked or something?

Or he was, he was a narcissist.

Right.

He just went and beat up the guy, man.

Don't call me Fredo.

That's like, that's like

thought he was Mr.

Tough Guy.

He was Mr.

Tough Guy, left-wing guy.

Kind of like Biden in that regard.

You know, there's a Biden who's a little bit more.

I remember one thing

exactly.

Deterrence makes the world go round.

That's just a simple concept we should all remember.

Deterrence makes the world.

When you're not deterred,

then you're capable of anything.

And deterrence can be religion can deter you from your appetites.

But when these guys have no religion that's real, or they have no social creed, and they're not afraid of the media and they feel that their transgressions will be contextualized because they're men of the they'll do anything and they get away with it up to a point

Kevin Spacey Charlie Rose all those people got get away with it finally they get too egregious and they get caught Joe Biden got away with it if Joe Biden you know I mean with his Tara Reed and I mean you got a guy that was for 30 years had some sick attraction to preteen girls and squeezing them and blowing in their hair and pressing them.

And then, you know, taking showers with his daughter.

God, it was.

And if he had been anybody else,

yeah.

Anyways,

are you going to talk about speaking of taking showers?

Yes.

Yes.

We have this transgender thing that went on, right?

Yeah.

So let's talk about that.

Let me, let me, let me set this up so I can read it because I got this all prepared.

Well, there's a piece in the Daily Mail,

which I read several times a day.

Oh, I check it out.

Vermont girls' high school volleyball team are barred from their own locker room after complaining about a transgender student who uses it and who made inappropriate remark to them.

And here's how the story begins.

You guys just suffer through my Bronx accent for a half a minute.

Members of a Vermont girls' high school volleyball team have been banned from using their own locker room and now have to change in a single bathroom stall after they complained about a transgender teammate.

Some teammates allege that the transgender player at Randolph Union High School made an inappropriate remark to some of them while they were changing in the locker room.

They now want the school to relocate the transgender player who hasn't been named.

No details of the remark or blah, blah, blah.

But Vermont state law means that students can play sports and use the locker, which corresponds to the gender to which they identify, et cetera.

You know, Victor, there's probably, this is one story.

there's probably,

you know, a hundred of these stories likely could be written in

America today.

And we've gone from a few years ago,

the glorification, and maybe in many ways, rightly so, of girl sports and Title IX,

some desire to achieve some

balance there, and of course, with the use of public funds.

But damn, I'd hate to be a girl athlete, a high school athlete in America today.

You are going to be tormented not only on the playing field by your transgender teammates or opponents, but in the locker room where

Johnson is

swinging around and you're supposed to accept it.

Yeah, I think that's a good point, crude as it is, Jack.

But the point is that all transgenderism isn't equal.

So if a woman is transitioning to a male,

she's going to be vulnerable in a locker room of other males.

They're going to be,

there is some problem if she's not fully transitioned.

She has female genitalia,

but she's not going to be the one that's the aggressor, given the difference in the male sex drive and bodily strength, is what I'm trying to say.

But when you get males that are biological males, and we know this from prison, Jack, that when you put biological transitioning women, even if they are genuine, not genuinely transition, and you put them in female prisons, we have case after case of rape and assault, especially in Europe and Britain.

And we know that, and we're already reacting to it.

So when you bring in a biological male with testicles and a penis and you put them in to a environment where a lot of women have to shower and feel kind of awkward anyway, naked among other women, probably.

But at that age, everybody is awkward.

But then you put somebody with male genitalia in there and he says something to the effect that we don't know quite what it was, but it's obviously sexual in nature.

Then

you can't just drive them out and say that they're transphobic.

It just doesn't work that way.

I'm sorry.

We had, up until this transgender hysteria, we had come to

a plateau where we had finally said

that

having sex or discussing sexuality with preteens or teenagers is wrong.

I know there's a whole movement to sort of

break down that taboo, but it's wrong.

And people are not fully aware of their sexual capabilities till they're 17, 18, 19, 20.

We do have things in states of the age of consent, 16 to 18, for a reason.

And adults do can be predators.

So we try to protect that group that's coming of age and discovering their sexuality, and they're not comfortable with their bodies, and they're going through hormonal transitions.

And so that should be a place for women that have to, by the nature of their sport, to undress.

It should be a sanctuary for them.

And they shouldn't have to have somebody come in

with male genitalia and then snicker or whatever they're doing.

And if we do think that that person is now a female, even though biologically he's not a female, then it's up to him or up to the school to find a place for that one person.

Right.

Separate.

And I never understood one thing about this whole transgendered idea.

If there is really three sexes, right?

Or there's multiple sexes.

150

last count.

Exactly.

Why didn't we we just say these are male sports?

These are male dorms.

These are male prisons.

These are female dorms.

These are female prisons.

These are female sports.

And if you're transitioning, that is that you feel you're trapped in a body that is not yours.

And these

biological sexual.

organs are not yours and you're either going to keep them but

I guess nullify them hormonally or you're going going to re,

I don't know, engineer them, then you're transgendered and you're going to have a separate category.

And we would have no problem.

We would just say these are transgendered.

It would be expensive, but we can say these are transgendered sports, male to female, female to male.

And if we were to do that,

it would be my cynical supposition

that what is probably statistically before 2010, let's take an arbitrary number, maybe 0.2

at most or 0.3 of humans are suffering from gender dysphoria.

And we wouldn't have this sudden onslaught of this topic because people would say, okay,

you're transgender.

Do you feel that you're transgendered?

This is the age.

uh of consent when you then you're able to make these very permanent decisions about very serious dangerous drugs and irrevocable surgeries.

And then, when you do that, you are a transgendered person and you can have your own,

you can have your own gender.

We have no problem with it.

Right.

But

you're putting a whole lot of things into one bucket because what if I'm

I identify as a, but I don't want to go through surgery, but therefore, but I still expect distinct civil rights as whatever one of these hundred cis gen, whatever the frick, you know, it doesn't matter if you want to say you're transgendered, whether or not you've altered your genitalia

or secondary sexual characteristics, you can be in that group.

You can have your own.

You can let that is a problem for the gen the transgendered community to work out.

Yeah.

But you're not telling the majority of young girls that this is the way it's going to be.

And you're going to sit here

why a man that has budding breasts walks around with an erection in front of him.

It's not going to happen.

We're going to have five guys that

we're going to say to males: this person is not going to be in the gym and suddenly take off his clothes, and you're going to see a vagina right in front of a young man.

It's not going to happen.

And you can deal with these much more amicably and responsibly within the transgender committee.

And we'll give you the resources.

We're going to have every dorm.

We're going to have a smaller little dorm that says this is for transgender.

It wouldn't be hard, but it would do one thing.

It would take the patina off of it.

It would take this idea that it's so cutting edge.

It would just be a normative decision that we would all kind of say, you know, nature has weird idiosyncratic ways of working.

And every once in a while, a person who has a brain and a central nervous system that is one gender is put into a body of the

opposite gender.

Sometimes we can't determine that because they may be homosexual or lesbian.

We don't know.

But often these people are in a separate category and they need separate facilities for them.

And I don't think anybody would care.

I would,

nobody would care, but I do care when they destroy female sports, when all these young girls have all of these heroes and heroines, I should say, that have made all of these wonderful strides in female sports and swimming wrestlings and equestrian

swimming records and equestrian achievements.

And suddenly you bring a biological male with a different frame, stature, muscularity, skeletal system, and then they just destroy all that.

Right.

It's wrong on so many levels.

Victor, well, we've seen a one-on-one in swimming at UPenn, but

I think we'll see sooner than later, five guys, Fresno State, just to pick a school in your vicinity.

So we're all women.

We're trying out for the girls' basketball team and we're going to be the national champions.

I don't think so.

i think no i think

i think the problem that this advocacy has is it's butting up against certain elements of the leftist coalition it's butting up against lesbianism it's butting up against the gay community it's butting up against feminists it's butting up against uh

the left wing And so you can't quite say that these are right-wing nuts that are bigots that are after transsexuals or, you know, transgender people.

You can't.

Actually, Victor, there was a guy.

Did you see this story?

The guy, he was at that, what was it, the Stonewall, but way back where, you know, where the gay movement publicly started, and he was beaten up at some

rally, some

trans parade.

I forget where it was.

It was, I don't know, it was in the Northeast about a week ago.

And he held up something, listen, you know, stop stealing, essentially a sign, like

stop stealing the gay movement or compromising it.

That was not what the sign said, but it was essentially like that.

And they literally beat him up.

The trans, I mean, so you're right about the gay movement, but

the lesbian.

What I think what's so strange about the trans movement is that they have this

historical ignorance that they feel that suddenly in the 21st century in America, people came of sophisticated sophisticated age and knowledge and greater humanity and they appreciated this.

No, it's an ancient question.

You know, if we had time, we could go back to the poet Catullus.

And,

you know, he wrote 50 to 30 BC, and he has a poem called Attas, A-T-T-I-S.

And it's about

the

importation of the rites of Sibyl, and a young Western Italian Roman decides to join this call, and he's sexually ambiguous, and he goes into the ecstatic rites, and they hit the drum, and he does this, and then in this ecstasy, he cuts off, I think in Latin in the poem, as I'm calling by, it's ponderous, the neuter plural is ponderous.

He cuts off his testicles, castrates himself to become a feminine.

figure and all of a sudden the poem switches and he's referred to get this

uh as Illa rather than ille, that he has the feminine pronoun halfway through the poem.

Okay.

And then the rites, the wine, everything

ends and he's stuck.

And so he looks out at the coast and he regrets what he did.

The point that I'm making at the self-castration, the point that I'm making is that The Romans were quite aware of gender dysphoria.

They were quite aware of transitioning.

They were quite aware of people who wanted to remove their sexual organs, even in the age of pre-surgery.

And if you go look at the satiric on a novel written somewhere, I don't know, it must have been written 50 to 60 AD in the Neronian age by a Roman aristocrat Petronius, you can see that cross-dressing, men wearing white makeup, just flagrant everyday gay sexuality, sodomy, anything.

And you can see people who are transgendered and transvestites.

And they make a distinction.

Men that are heterosexual but like to wear female clothes and men who like to wear female clothes who are passive,

what the Greeks call kanidoi or passive homosexuals and men who wear female clothes who feel that they're actually women.

and want to alter their.

So it's all been known and it all represents a small percentage of the population.

But this idea that suddenly in 2022, there's going to be an epidemic of the schools are going to be instructing and teaching because it's a great civil rights.

You get the impression that this affluent, bicostal, upper, upper, upper white wealthy class has gone through the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, the feminist movement.

and they need another movement.

And they've taken an ancient phenomenon, an ancient

biological fact of gender dysphoria, and they've made it into this great

issue of our times.

And

I'm not trying to deprecate it, but it isn't.

And it can be dangerous because when people are coming of age and they're starting to have hormonal release,

it affects them.

And sometimes a 12-year-old or 11-year-old or 13 is not completely an adult in terms of judgment.

And when you tell these young people that your destiny is in your hands and we're going to take your breast off at 14, or we're going to give you a heavy dose of big pharma hormones.

And we're not going to tell your parents.

And we're not going to tell your parents.

Then you want to say to the left.

Wow, you were the people who always told us that children had to be protected.

Nancy Pelosi always said we do it for the children.

You were the ones that always told us that doctors and the corrupt medical were always doing unnecessary, intrusive operations to get witch on it.

You were the ones that told us big pharma was always passing these highly dangerous drugs that had not fully been examined for the side effects on younger people.

And now it's all okay?

I don't get it at all.

I think we're going to get, I'm really sad because I think what's going to happen, there are truly transgender people, obviously.

They're a very small, small, small, small percentage.

But we're going to get a lot of people who are going to get caught up in it.

And they are going to take steps of sexual altercation, alteration, excuse me, that are going to be irreversible.

And they're going to have problems and regret it.

Absolute victims are already plentiful.

I didn't say plentiful, but ample

anecdotes of people who've gone through it and say, oh my God, this is a terrible mistake.

I was just a kid and I should have, I was going through a period, going through a phase, and looking at me, I can't reverse it.

Or data about the suicide rates, which I think is a very important thing.

I wonder if I can sue the school district or the counselors,

you know what I mean?

Who advise them to do that, or the doctors?

Or the medical associations that

have become an audience.

I don't understand why, of all places, it seems like Vanderbilt, right?

Yeah.

Right.

Yes.

The college?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And, you know what, I just remember that poem, you know,

when he castrates himself and then the ecstatic

mood,

you know, passes and the cruel god Sibyl is, you know, he understands what he's done.

he, you know, at the end of that Catullan poet, and Catullus is very candid about his sexual ambiguity.

He's got a lot of poems about a homosexual lover, so he's no prude and he's pansexual.

He says in this poem, you know, that let,

I'm doing it, I know the Latin, but I won't do any good.

He's saying, let other people be driven into frenzy,

but not me.

And

so what he's suggesting is that this urge

to,

I don't want to use the mutilate because that's sort of the Roman idea, but the idea that you're going to alter your sexuality is something that's irreversible, and it's sort of a fit that you're in, unless it's carefully done and you're going to regret it.

And this is somebody writing, as I said, around 40 BC, who must have seen people do this under the guise of being servants of Sibylle, is what I'm trying to say.

Right.

And it happened.

But, you know, you start reading about these people, and you,

I don't want to be,

I don't want to break confidence, but I would say in my own experience, the last three years, I must have been, you know, at the airport, right?

Or people come up to me at a book signing.

I must have had 15 incidents or people I know and they'll come up and say the following.

My daughter is transitioning.

She just came home and told me she doesn't want to talk to me.

She's transitioning and she's getting this advice and she's now in the hands of the school district or her doctor.

And they're talking about 12-year-olds or 30.

Can you imagine being a parent

and having your child essentially stolen from you for that purpose?

Yeah.

And then to have the larger society demonize people who show concern.

Right.

And it's one of the strangest things.

I always thought that the liberal community was on the side of powerful women.

and did not want men in prisons with our people with male genitalia in prisons.

I thought they were fighting for generations to make female sports comparable to male sports in terms of investment and expenditures.

And I thought that they were trying to distinguish and reassure the gay community that they would not be subject to systematic discrimination.

And yet this thing comes along and it kind of blows up all of that work.

If I was a young woman right now and I was

you know, playing tennis every single day and my whole dream was to get a scholarship to go to Berkeley here in California or USC or something.

And somebody who's a male could just appropriate that.

I don't know.

It would be hopeless.

It's not, it's not fair.

It's not just swimming.

You see it in track, especially.

Yeah, big case, Connecticut, the high school, the kids, a little more, you know, there are lots of parents who think their kids, high school sports is going to be

a scholarship pathway.

Obviously, that happens to a significant number of people.

There are many more that doesn't happen to that have those dreams.

But yeah,

you would be the state champion as a woman, as a young girl, except, well, this dude just won, and I'm not the state champ.

And there goes my dream of the scholarship.

It's just terrible.

It's terrible.

Hey, Victor, I just wanted to, I found

what I mentioned before about the guy.

It was in Burlington, Vermont last week.

Veteran gay rights protester, 75, 74 years old, who was at the 1969 Stonewall riots, was attacked by pro-trans mob at Pride event for a sign dismissing transgenderism as woman face, a la black face.

So it's, yeah, there's real contention between

these movements that many people would think,

oh, they're all on the same side, aren't they?

Sort of?

No, they're not.

Anyway, Victor, we're about out of time.

I want to mention, Victor, I forgot, I haven't done this in a bit.

If any of your listeners who are very active on Facebook should check out the Victor Davis Hansen Club.

It's

not affiliated officially in any way with you, but they're very friendly folks and they're very

they find out all videos that you were done did 15 years ago is a treasure trove of that sort of sort of stuff.

And also back on your website, people who sign up for a weekly email you do,

the

weekend review.

And also folks who are on Twitter at VD Hansen

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So maybe follow you there.

Now, Victor,

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Victor, thank you for sharing all the wisdom you did today.

And we'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Thank you for listening, everybody.