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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, the star, namesake.

Victor Davis-Hansen is the Martin and Elaine Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

And he's also the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

And it happens to be that Victor is at Hillsdale College teaching as he does early in the fall semester.

He's done for the last 19 or so years.

And we anticipated his absence from being able to do these podcasts with me and with Sammy Wink during that time period.

So, we pre-recorded, you sent in a lot of questions, and we're getting to some of the questions you've submitted to get Victor's take on a whole variety of subjects.

The first topic we're going to discuss is Vietnam, and then I believe we're going to have some time to get into societal decline.

So,

what Victor's views are on the American war in Vietnam, that will be the primo topic right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This particular podcast should be up on September 13th.

So, Victor, a few questions came in on Vietnam.

Let me put two of them together here and you have your,

you know, correct the opinion that one of these folks have has.

Richard writes,

What I've always wanted to understand or have clarified is Professor Hansen's view on how and why he does not consider the U.S.

defeated in Vietnam.

And then if I may, may, kind of related

is a question from Sailboat Scott, who writes, considering his breadth and depth of knowledge on seemingly all things military history, I rarely hear Victor make reference to or explore themes and figures from the Vietnam War in his podcast.

Is there a particular reason why Victor does not discuss this war much so victor before you answer anything i do want to say i've been doing these podcasts with you now for over two years sammy has also and i i i have never really posed any questions to you about vietnam so uh if there is an explanation in part yeah it might be part of it and i don't think i ever said the united states i don't know where the first the first questioner imply that i thought they why didn't i why did i say they lost yeah essentially if i haven't spoken about it I don't know how he thinks that I've said they lost.

But a couple of things.

When you talk about win or lose, you're talking on three levels.

Tactically on the battlefield, does the United States defeat the enemy consistently?

And I think if you look at the Tet Offensive or the Khe Song campaign, or even in the Mekong Delta, Tet was an overwhelmingly injurious defeat for the North Vietnamese.

Okay.

So I think the same is true of Iraq.

Anytime the United States forces came in contact with the enemy and any sizable force, they won.

And the same was true in Afghanistan.

And I'll add a corollary to that.

Had the United States not had political, diplomatic, moral, spiritual, cultural reasons not to restrict their full use of force, they would have never,

strategically, there would have been no question.

Okay,

so the West wins, and the United States in particular, in these unenvivable optional wars abroad, they win individual battles.

Then the key is: can you translate those victories into strategic success as defined as

in the modern or postmodern Western world in a cost-to-benefit analysis?

Is it in the American people or its strategic planners' interest to spend X amount of blood and treasure to achieve a strategic goal.

And therefore, these tactical victories will lead to it.

And our problem is that tactically and strategically, we were not on the same page.

What do I mean by that?

In Vietnam, did anybody go to John Kennedy or Lyndon Baines Johnson?

They did to Richard Nixon.

Creighton Aprons did, but say the following.

We have a certain amount of people that we're probably going to be able to lose lose and treasure we're going to be able to burn through.

And we have a certain

strategic goal, and that is to make a viable, defensible South Vietnamese government that analogous to South Korea with a small contingent of maybe 30 or 40,000.

Americans can protect the South from this terrible neighborhood that it finds itself in close to Russia and China.

Okay.

And of course, the North Vietnamese, and as well as North Vietnamese.

And the answer was: nobody really decided that they were going to think in those terms.

So they just poured more men and more treasure from 1963, four, five, six, seven, ruined the Johnson president.

Then Nixon came in and he was worried about if we lost there, the loss of deterrence.

Good reason to worry.

We saw what happened in Afghanistan.

But nobody said, what is our goal?

And at what price?

And then finally, Nixon came in.

He said the following.

Our goal is an independent Vietnam that can defend itself.

And

we can't lose any more people because it'll be politically impossible, if not morally suicidal.

So we're going to Vietnamese eyes.

So he did.

And he used air power.

to and then the generals came to him and said this is crazy you cannot win tactically and lose strategically so the heart of darkness is in Hanoi and bombing people in the village who are just opportunistic peasants or they have a gun to their head and said, You're now Viet Cong, it's not going to work.

So you've got to go where you've got to go.

And that's the hierarchy of the North Vietnamese.

And damn it, if there's Russian advisors on anti-aircraft batteries, that's their problem.

But you go in and bomb them.

And we did.

And it worked.

It was in Christmas of 72.

And guess what?

There was a peace agreement and they won the Nobel Prize, Li Doc Do and Henry Kissinger.

Okay.

At that point there was a viable South Vietnam.

It was sort of like South Korea around 1953 and we said we're not going to have any more ground troops and we had de facto by 1974 none and it worked.

We had air power.

Okay.

And then there was something called Watergate.

And Nixon lost his office and Jerry Ford came in and the Vietnamese knew that and they thought, you know what?

We're going to press, press, press.

And they started to violate the peace agreement and people came to Jerry Ford and said, you know what?

You've got to enforce the agreement.

You can bomb, bomb, bomb.

You can stop him just like Nixon did.

And he said, you know what?

I pardoned him and I'm not in a position to do that.

And, you know, I'm a moderate Republican.

And he didn't do it.

And they cut off, and there was a series of Senate resolutions that cut off aid and cut off off aid and cut off aid.

So we took that hard-won tactical victory.

We translated it into strategic success.

We had a South Korean model.

And then the change in government, people decided, you know, 58,000 dead.

And, you know, the equivalent today of $2 trillion, it wasn't worth it.

An independent South Vietnam was not worth it.

And that was a decision that was made by the Democratic Party and the left in America and acquiesced to by Jerry Ford.

Kissinger tried to convince Ford to, you know, go bomb, and there was no support for it.

Did Ford have any

kind of

advisor whispering in his ear

to not bomb?

Or do you think this was...

just the man looking back at him in the mirror that that

was the cause for this?

Well, at that point, I think because of Watergate, people wanted, in the pardon, they wanted to distance themselves from anything that Richard Nixon's fingerprints were on.

And Kissinger had lost a lot of influence.

And there were people in the Republican Party that were very worried about the 1976 election.

And so they thought that,

you know, that if you get out,

if you lose Vietnam, people are going to, if you keep, if you're in Vietnam in 1976, you're going to lose.

That's what they told them.

And in Vietnam meant, you know.

And you got to remember another thing about that period.

There was, it wasn't just Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden.

There were people in the Democratic Party and some people in the Republican Party that said, you know what?

Ho Chi Minh is Uncle Ho.

He had been Uncle Ho and Li Doc To

and General Jiao.

They're just,

they're just sort of socialist.

They're not hardcore.

Yeah, they're nationalists.

They were like Michael Moore when he called.

Remember, he said that the insurrectionists in Iraq, the Islamists, the Islamic fascist people were like the founding fathers.

They were saying that.

So they all stayed.

There was a journalist that stayed in Saigon in 1975.

And they were hardcore Stalinists.

And they probably killed a half a million.

And they put a million and a half, you know, in education camps.

And another half million went to the ocean as boat people.

But everything they said about North Vietnamese, the North Vietnam was a lie.

And remember, they didn't come through the jungle or there wasn't a national uprising.

They took a traditional armored column right down Highway 1 into Saigon.

And that had

any president wanted to obliterate that column, they could have in two seconds, like they had done in Kaiser.

So that was a point where everybody was exhausted.

It was like Afghanistan.

Only, you know,

not

25, 2,800 dead, but 58,000 dead.

So a little town like I grew up in.

I was a freshman in high school in 1967, 68, you know, and there were already seniors in high school that were dead.

Yeah.

And nobody wanted to be there anymore.

And

so that's the answer.

Tactical victories don't mean anything until you can translate them into strategic success.

George W.

Bush was to topple Saddam, but there was no plan that was viable to turn over a pre-prepared Iraqi government.

And the reason there wasn't is that there were people politically in the Republican Party and the Democratic Party especially who said, you know what?

Unless you get a liberal democracy over there,

then you are culpable.

And so when they got rid of Saddam, it was a war of everybody against everybody.

And there was no government that had any credibility.

And they knew that we weren't going to stay.

So who was going to take over?

This may be unfair, Victor, but not to you, but 58, I think 58,000 Americans thereabouts died.

And

is it fair to say that

too many of them died because the tactics

of warfare in the battlefield employed by Americans

were

insufficient or needed needed improving.

And actually, after the war, they were improved.

They were improved.

I wrote about this in Carnage and Culture.

If you want to look at

what happened in that period, oh,

when Creighton Abrams was the chief of staff of the U.S.

Army in 1972, and he died earlier, and he did command a military operation, I think in in 1969 to 72.

There was a change in tactics and strategy.

So the search and destroy mission under William Westmoreland, where you from 67, 66,

66, 67, that idea, you take people from a postmodern suburban society or rural America and you put them in a very foreign place.

foreign landscape, foreign food, foreign weather, and they stick out like crazy and they have no idea who's who.

And you put them as targets and they're supposed to go out and have a body count and they kill more than we lose.

Then you have this theory, this terrible arithmetic where, well, we've killed a million of them.

They're going to run out.

That was doomed, doomed.

And the idea that he was going to run sort of a counterinsurgency where he was going to find out who was who in the south and he was going to cut off the supplies of the Viet Cong.

and i think you could say that by 1969 there was no viet cong they destroyed it after tet completely destroyed it in the south and then the idea that you were going to the north and you were going to make the people who were waging the war pay dearly by bombing of all of their supplies all of their assets was successful.

And then you were going to, by that process, give an inspirational boost to the Army of South Vietnam.

And so I think you could say that by 1973,

during the January Paris Peace Accords,

there was only, I don't know, 23, 24,000 Americans there.

I know when I registered for the draft, I got my

lottery number,

there was no war going on.

And

it was all due to Creighton Abrams.

He was a great commander.

So there was a pathway there.

The problem was he came too late.

And people were sick of the war by the time he had taken over.

And we had the wrong strategy, as you pointed out.

You can't do that, search and destroy.

We kind of did that in Iraq

under, I won't, you know, Casey and the other people.

Whatever people say about David Petraeus, he did have a kind of a Creighton Abrams idea that

he was very kind of brilliant what he did in the surge, the same thing.

He said, oh, we're going to win hearts and minds, and we're going to plant parks, and we're going to try to work with the Arab Spring people

and the, you know, the Islamic Awakening and all that stuff.

And then he went out and killed thousands of Baptists, Saddamites, and Islamic terrorists.

He did.

I was over there.

I was embedded twice.

And I can tell you that's what happened.

They were killing the bad people and then telling everybody they were nation building.

And that's what we did in Vietnam.

But if you nation build without getting rid of of the bad people, or you just get rid of the bad people, you don't offer a carrot.

So it was a very Roman strategy, and that was what was sad about Iraq.

Because by 2008, if you look at the casualties, they were fewer.

At the end of when Barack Obama took over, there were fewer people getting killed in Iraq than the accident rate in the U.S.

military per month.

But, you know, people were tired because it had gone on too long.

And so the message is:

we don't, we're not 1946, we're not 1960, we're not that country anymore.

We're a very divided, multi-ethnic, multiracial country with a very hard left.

We're much further left than Europeans are even.

And there's not, and you're not going to have any optional war that is viable, I don't see, unless there's an existential threat.

And Donald Trump from the right basically said, we're not going to go over there and die.

Not one, quote,

you know, Bismarck, the bones of an American soldier, they're not worth the bones of an American soldier.

Any of those people.

They're not going to go over there and get in the middle of their age-old primordial religious cultural squabbles and try to do this.

And,

you know, it ended up in, it went from tragedy to

tragic comedy or parody when in the last days of Afghanistan, the American public was treated to the spectacle of George Floyd Merles on the streets and the pride flag and gender studies at Kabul and military impotence.

As I said earlier, at least the British, when they went in to NSUTE in Indy,

everybody listened to them

because they were going to use their power to what they thought was a civilizing mission.

But when you go in there and you lecture people about your superior culture, especially the left did, and then you don't have the power to fear, to instill fear to people, accept it, then you get contempt.

So, as we were running away from Afghanistan and people were falling off airplanes, the pride flag flew grandly from the embassy.

Staggering.

Hey, Victor, we have some questions on, as you're starting to get into yourself, societal decline, and

we'll get to them right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show recording in late August.

This program will be up on the 13th of September.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

I'm blessed to be the host, blessed to be able to ask Victor questions twice a week about all kinds of current matters.

And now

the questions of concern to an interest to our listeners, I write a weekly free email newsletter called Civil Thoughts.

It's published by the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic.

And if you're interested in it, it gives a dozen or so suggested readings of really worthwhile stuff that's been published in the week before.

I have some excerpts from those pieces.

Sign up.

It's free.

No risk.

Your name's not going to be sold or anything like that.

CivilThoughts.com.

Victor Susan Lindsay writes, has there ever been?

Go ahead.

Okay.

Susan Lindsay, she's a listener.

Has there ever been a civilization, government, country, or society or whatever

similar to ours that has declined so much in all or many of the ways we have, and they've been able to recover.

Maybe a simple answer, no, but

I mean, I think Germany is a great society in the 19th beginning of the last century, and gosh, they were rubble

within years.

And

thanks to the Marshall Plan and others recovered.

But is there anything, even ancient history,

something that was great in decline and pulled itself out of the city?

There is

it's cyclical.

I'm not saying the cycles don't each descend.

The cycles of recovery and renewal and renaissance don't get more and more difficult as a society ages.

The Greeks, you know, Herodotus, and there was a great classical scholar, Jacqueline de Romilly, that wrote about the aging of civilization in the Greek mind.

It was like a body.

You know, the United States was a teenager in 1777, and then they were an adult in the 1850s, and then they were an aging adult in the mid-20s, and now they're senescent, you know, they're senile.

That's what the Greeks would say.

But the point is, it happens.

If you just give you two examples off the top of my head, anybody that reads Suetonius or Tacitus' histories would...

say that Rome was all over with after the death of Augustus, because when you look at Tiberius and then Caligula

and the year, and Nero, and the year of the four emperors, it's pretty bad stuff.

They get a little respite with

Vespasian, but who would have ever predicted that you would get Nerva and

Hadrian and Trajan, Trajan and Hadrian, and Antonius Pius and Marcus Aurelius for a hundred years?

It's what Gibbon said.

If you had to pick a time to live in the history of civilization, the best time would be that era of the so-called five good emperors.

And the same thing is true in Byzantium.

If you looked at the collapse of the Western Empire, say in the 460s, 470s, the ultimate collapse, then you would have thought, well, the same arithmetic is going to apply to Byzantium because it has even a greater Eastern problem.

They don't have a, they have, you know, the Black Sea, but they don't have, they don't have a a Rhine or Danube.

And they're being overrun by tribes from the east.

And how can they survive?

And then all of a sudden, this guy named Justinian comes and emperor.

There's no reason.

He's probably not even a Greek speaker and a native Greek speaker.

And then he has this general called Belisarius.

And the next thing you know, there's a comprehensive legal code that still is the foundation for a lot of Western legal systems.

There's the greatest church for the next thousand years at Hague Sophia.

There's the Hippodrome.

There's

a beautiful city, Constantinople.

It has a regenerative, and then all of a sudden Belisars is let loose and the fearful vandals are wiped out.

He destroys the Vandal kingdom in North Africa, southern Italy, Sicily.

He has at Ravenna, there's still Byzantine churches there.

And had the great plague not happened at Constantinople that wiped out a half a million people, you could argue they would have re-recaptured all of Italy.

Narciss did his best, the eunuch general, and they would have probably got Spain and the world might have been a little bit different.

But

it was, and that's hard for us to accept because they doubled down.

They did not dilute.

The Western kingdom was,

you know, there were Goths and Viscos and Vandals and Huns and people came across the rivers and then they were semi-Romanized, and

Catholicism, or Christianity, I should say, at that time, was splintered in heresies.

And it was a very, what historians like as late antiquity, a very dynamic place.

And the idea was you can't go back.

Well, the Byzantines were reactionaries.

There was going to be one Orthodox monolithic church.

There's going to be one emperor with power, and we're going to revitalize

our tactical systems, the way we fight.

We're going to have mounted heavy cavalry.

We're going to introduce Greek fire.

And there was a doubling down and they had a confidence that was lacking in the East and they lasted for a thousand years, a thousand years after the decline.

You know, basically from 1470s to 1453, they were there.

And so, yeah, you can do that if you want.

United States can do it right now.

We all know what the problem is, Jack, is not that you don't know what to do, but you know what to do, but the medicine in psychological or philosophical or ideological or economic terms is considered worse than disease.

So let's just answer the person's question in this way.

They know, they who asked these questions, and we know who were asked to answer them, what the solution is.

We owe $30 trillion.

So we get the Simpson-Bowles paradigm, dust it off, make some adjustments, say, okay, both parties, this simplifies the tax code into three income levels.

You can fill it out in a day.

It cuts a government spending very gradually, but steadily without any apostasy.

And it has the revenues right here.

And you will have a balanced budget in five years.

And in 10 years and 15, you'll be paying off the debt.

You could do that right now.

And then people could get together and they can say, okay,

we're the greatest natural gas producer and the greatest oil producer and the second largest coal producer.

And we created nuclear power.

We're going to use all of them and we're going to transition into renewable fuels.

It might take 50 years, but we are not going to shut down these industries and let India and China use the same industry and gain advantage.

over us.

So we're going to transition, but we're going to do so that does not endanger the middle class.

And then we're going to get the military together and we're going to say, look, we don't know whose fault it is, but after

Vietnam and after the two Iraq wars and after Afghanistan and after the Libya thing,

we're just not up to fighting these optional wars.

And if you want to fight them, you got to do this.

And we're going to have to say.

you know, we're not going to have $13 billion, $15 billion aircraft carriers.

We can't afford it.

We're going to have drones.

We're going to have a lighter, more mobile, more complex formations.

We're going to have a lot more ships.

We're going to have drone ships.

We're going to have a lot more missile defense over the homeland.

So we don't get countries like North Korea.

We say to North Korea, if you send a missile over, it's going to be knocked down and you're going to be attacked in kind and it won't be knocked down.

And we're going to have to look at hypersonic missiles and all of the space defense.

We could do that.

And we're going to say, you know what?

We would like to have subsidized transgender surgeries and pregnant women in airsuits and women in, we're not going to do it because we don't have that margin of error anymore.

Sorry.

We're going to make the U.S.

military extremely lethal and lean and tough.

And then we should tell generals, you know what?

If you are a general, you're not going to be on any corporate board coming in.

I'm sorry.

We're not going to point anybody in the Pentagon in the civilian position that has come from a defense contractor lobbyist.

And when you go out, you're not going to be on a corporate board that has anything to do with military affairs for five years.

So there's things we could do, absolutely.

Energy-wise, inflation-wise, budget-wise, and schools, we could tell the universities, you're not getting any more federally subsidized loans.

We're sorry, we're out of the business.

And you're going to have to increase inflation based on your own calculations, but not using the federal government to subsidize your poorly run university.

I don't think we can do it, though.

Right, you have to have the stomach for it to do that.

You need a great leader, and he has to be great in every aspect.

I agree.

He has to be Lincoln-esque.

I don't agree with any of Roosevelt's.

I think he did a lot of damage, FDR, but during World War II, he had all the skills necessary.

He knew how to coax, charm people, and delight them, even.

He was a great public speaker.

He had a personality that was not considered obnoxious.

He was a great leader, and Teddy Roosevelt was, and Lincoln was, and Washington was, Jefferson was.

And you have to have that type of, they can't, they have to be,

there's a very little margin of error.

So you need somebody who can speak well, who's funny, who's nice, who's not vindictive, but is tough and bright and young and vigorous.

And so it's very hard to find people like that.

I don't mean young in the sense of age, just

robust, like church yeah in his 60s so it's very hard to find them and and and on an individual level i think i believe also victor the willingness to um i don't know lose friends be castigated let it roll off you be called a racist be called whatever and not cower and feel

because so-and-so might not invite us to whatever anymore you know that's that's maybe the price we're gonna have to pay to when i was a young professor that was exactly what somebody told me a colleague he said you know you can go for the next 20 or 30 years and you can nod at the meetings and you can say when somebody is unfairly denied tenure because they don't like his politics you can just go to say well shrug it's that's just the way it goes they shot off his mouth or you can say what you want if you say what you want you're going to get private respect but public condemnation and what is it going to be your decision And he said, and then most people will say this, Victor.

I remember what he told me.

He said, they can always find a justification for not being outspoken and brave.

They're always going to say, well, I have a family to support.

I could be fired.

I'm the only breadwinner.

It's that kind of existential choice.

So you got to take risk, I think.

And I think the American people, I mean, with somebody, somebody's going to have to say things that are just absolutely untenable.

They're going to have to say, you know what?

50 million people in the United States were not born here.

We have an enormous challenge of assimilation, intermarriage, integration, and we have all have to be on one identity page.

You are an American.

You can have

great ethnic, racial chauvinism, gender chauvinism in your private life.

The more diverse food and music and, you know, entertainment, the more richer, the richer we are.

But there is one constitution, and when it comes to basic ideas about American governance, there's only one way, our way, or the highway for you.

And we can get everybody in the same page.

And then we can also say, you know what, life's not fair.

We don't have to be perfect to be good.

We're better than the alternative.

And if you don't like it, I'm sorry, but we're going to press ahead.

And I think you'd get a huge resonance of people.

I think there's a lot of people who are tired of the whole ethnic separatism.

I know there's a lot of African-American people that I talk to that write to me and they said, you know what?

I think that laxity is a problem in the inner city, not too much discipline.

And I think that you people are all afraid of being called racist.

So, you know, this is kind of where well in.

So I was watching Tucker last night.

I was too.

I thought you were going to be on after that.

Well, I was.

It was so unnerving that it wasn't.

I know.

My live view camera in my studio is melted down, so they have to get the part.

So I'm going to be all.

I was scheduled all week.

Yeah, by the way, so our listeners to remind them, we're talking about, we are actually talking right now in late August.

So this is a Tucker segment about carjacking and other madness.

And almost every, not all, but almost every single person there,

and it's not Tucker, so don't say he's a racist, but when you look at TikTok or you look at, and I read with Sammy the DOJ, I think with you or Sammy the DOJ statistics.

With me, right.

Yeah, it's 55%.

So you have about 6% of the population, African-American males, they're committing over half the violent crimes.

And you see these young kids and they're turned loose.

They attack the Asian community, they attack the Jewish community.

And when you just say what I say, you're going to be called a racist.

But everybody knows it.

So you have two realities.

You have the reality that people use to guide their.

This is what I was replying to Todd Nahisi Coates we mentioned.

You have the

certain street smarts that you know where to go in New York, at what time, and where not to go at what time, and who to be careful about and who not to.

And it's unfair stereotyping and generalization.

But if you see somebody who's poorly dressed, and an African-American young man that's 17 versus an Asian woman that's 70, you might make the necessary adjustments in your level of vigilance.

Is that racist?

No, but is it stereotyping?

Yes.

And so that's why people don't like to do it.

And so they have two different personas.

So Tucker talked about, but

he's not able, given his position, to say that we have a problem in the African-American young male community that people no longer

feel that there is a consequence to violent crime

because of social economic reasons or past history.

By the way,

the kids that were...

Yeah, they were, and it's true.

They literally know that.

I say

they're ugly, but the kids who are, I'm going to carjack because I know there are going to be no criminal consequences to me carjacking.

And who's the ultimate?

Not that I want to bring race in it, but who's the ultimate arbiter?

Who's the ultimate person that allows this to happen?

It's your basically wealthy, affluent white person because African Americans are 12% of the population.

They

don't set.

policy in the sense that no 12% percentage of any population has as much influence as 68%.

So my point is this, that there's a lot of very affluent, well-credentialed professionals that are involved in academia, the media, politics, foundations, and they have come to the conclusion that they are going to defund the police or they're not going to allow people to talk honestly about race without canceling them or they're going to have separate graduate, whatever it is.

They know that.

But it's all predicated on one thing, one thing only,

that they're not going to be there when the ensuing consequences of their ideology become manifest.

So the person who thought up defund the police is not going to be routinely carjacked.

No.

And the person who said that you're not going to have to take attendance in school or you're not going to punish a 10-year-old who screamed and yelled, his kid is not going to be in that class.

Right.

Just the way it is.

And who are those people?

It's people who who are very selfish and for psychological or personal, I don't know what their catalyst for their ideologies are, but it's predicated on they're not going to ever suffer.

It's going to be some poor person of color in the inner city or some poor white working class or Asian woman trying to get her groceries and being swarmed by a bunch of teenagers that try to kill her.

No one's going to say a word.

No one's going to say a word.

It's just, it's, we all live with it.

It's, you know, George Floyd, I don't want to get into that, but George Floyd reminded us that if you're a policeman and you're involved in violence for any reason and somebody dies as a result of that violence or alleged violence, i.e.

a knee, it doesn't matter if he's in fentanyl or prior history of metamphetamines, doesn't matter, but your picture is going to be immediately everywhere.

But if you shoot Ashley Babbitt

and we don't shoot people, I mean, that was, nobody said that it was a deliberate shot to the head of George Floyd, who was resisting arrest and was in committing a felony,

counterfeiting.

Right.

Two felonies and had a long history of eight felonies, including putting a pistol to a pregnant woman during a home invasion.

I don't know how that won him angel wings and a

halo on murals, but nevertheless, Ashley Babbitt had a 14-year military record with no arrest.

So when she's going through a window, which she shouldn't have done, which is illegal, but it's not a felony, and you have an officer shoot her lethally when she posed no threat because there were armed SWAT people facing her and they didn't feel there was

a threat, and that officer's identity is not released for months, and none of the operational details are released, then you got something wrong in the country.

You really do.

And we know what it is:

it's a selective reporting because of fears of racism, basically.

Or it's ideological, and that filters down to the street, and it ruins deterrence.

So the police have no respect, and people are cynical, and

it's not working.

It's not working.

I know so many very, very, very left-wing people

in the community in which I work

who were big Obama supporters.

They love Joe Biden.

They despise

the very name Trump.

But when you look at their lives and how they talk privately about what's safe and what's dangerous for their children

and where they're going to go, they're segregationists.

They're segregationists.

I can tell you that.

They've never been to certain places.

Yeah.

You know,

a friend of mine, this kid walked in what would be called the wrong neighborhood in Milwaukee.

And he was a student at Marquette

and was totally beaten up mercilessly, hospitalized, et cetera.

Of course, when the cop came,

what the hell were you doing in this neighborhood?

Very down-to-earth practical.

And that is the same kind of thing the parent that you just were talking about and the leftist community would say.

because it's it's human nature to to say that but if they heard the cop say it, they would accuse me.

Well, you know what we're living in?

You remember the night, I think it was 1984, that famous Apple commercial?

Yeah, sure.

Where the athlete comes in with a ball and chain,

and throws it into Big Brother's screen and shatters it.

And that was supposed to be what Apple was doing, I guess, to IBM and the state computer industry.

Okay.

The same thing is kind of that metaphor works for us right now because everybody listening knows the truth and we can't say it.

But if everybody just said, you know what, I give up.

I'm not going to play that game.

I'm not going to, I think it was,

I'm not going to live in an empire of lies anymore.

So you wouldn't have no cancel culture.

Right.

You would have no, and Tucker, of all the people out there in the popular media, is the one who's getting closest to testing that theory.

Right.

Because he's just saying things.

They're not racist, but he's being called a racist every day.

He didn't care.

He's telling the truth.

And people,

I don't think they can cancel him because he's got five million listeners some evening and he's not a demagogue in this sense he's not revving up he's just showing this and he's getting african americans sober and judicious the majority of the african american population and they are saying this is not our community and we're we are the ones who are suffering firsthand from this youth crime wave and we're sick of tired of other people telling us how

uh what's the effect and what's the punishment and what the crime we don't don't need your lectures.

We need help because we don't want to be slaughtered by these people who carjack.

So, you know, and I think that applies to everything on cancel culture.

I know that

when

comparing great things to small, when I was at the Hoo Institution not long ago and people in Stanford faculty went after Neil Ferguson and Scott Atlas and myself for nothing other than, I guess you've been on Fox News too much, I suppose.

And if you just say, I'm not going to play by your game, you do your worst and I'll do my best.

We'll see who.

And that's a much better attitude.

I can tell you there were not a lot of people that came forward and say, this is outrageous.

And when the Stanford community tried to cannibalize Scott Atlas, there were not a lot of people that came out and said, he will be proved right.

Or Jay Bacharia will be proved right.

They weren't.

But you can do that.

If you just say, you know what, I don't care.

Right.

I'm not apologizing.

I didn't do anything.

we were talking about the head of sweet the head of the ha if he had just american historical association he had a great chance to be famous

if he had just said i wrote something that is i'm a little embarrassed because it was so mild and orthodox of what i might have said it's plaguing this industry this history look at your enrollments look at your department uh enrollments see how many history majors see how many people you're playing you're killing this field i'm not going to shut up that's not if you want to fire me fire me and then have a manifesto what he believed in kind of a jordan peter peterson right

yeah so got to be a rock star why didn't he do that because he's a weenie because he's afraid he's afraid don't please don't call me a racist i'll do anything because you know ultimately

if we all together collectively listeners and you and I, if you walk it back, you can see what we're talking about.

It's go to the next level, down to the next level.

It's okay.

I speak out.

They fire me from the AHA.

And then what?

I die?

No, I'm still a professor.

Okay, they make, then I'm the guy who got fired at the AHA.

Well, maybe someday that would be a good thing to be, but not in your lifetime.

And then maybe you say, well, they're not going to speak to me in the history department, the University of Wisconsin.

Okay, so what?

I have another life.

I don't care.

And then I'm a 10-year professor.

That'll be very hard for them to fire me and I will fight them tooth and nail, but maybe they do.

You can do it.

And you can say, you know what?

I'm an individual.

So what?

I can do something.

I'm not the end of my life, but I'm not going to live by lies.

I'm not going to do it.

I think if everybody had that attitude, it would be like that commercial.

You'd throw a ball into that glass screen.

That was the theme of Souls and Eatson, even in the gulag.

It was

the same.

Don't live by lies.

I wasn't a big fan of Dave Chappelle, but he did that.

He just said, you know what?

I haven't said anything that's wrong.

You go ahead and do whatever you wanted.

I don't care.

And,

you know, it's that that's that's all you do.

If you're always on the side of the truth, you're never going to lose.

I mean, you might lose materially in this world, but you're not going to lose in the long run.

And I think that's very important.

You can speak out and say,

you know,

I used to talk to Scott a lot about that when they were really, I mean, I don't think our listeners know what they did to him.

And he had a very good attitude.

You know, he was right.

He was blunt.

He never apologized.

He wrote a book about it.

And he, and Fauci.

And now we're left with Fauci announcing on television that he never said to shut down the country.

Why there are dozens of videos where he's saying when he's boasting about shutting down the country?

That says it all.

That says he is such.

All right, Victor, we're going to

have to end because we're going to go.

We saw talking about Fauci.

We're going to go on another another hour.

Hey, Victor, this has been terrific.

I want to thank our listeners, of course,

for listening.

The audience keeps growing.

Thanks for sending in questions.

We have one or two more of these

listener question podcasts to record,

and we're going to do that in a day or two.

And, Victor, I want to thank you again for sharing all the wisdom you've shared with us today.

We'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.