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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, star, and namesake, the great Victor Davis-Hanson,

the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshabusky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

This man writes, he writes a lot, and all of it can be found at his website, victorhanson.com, about which we will talk later.

Today is Sunday.

July 24th.

This particular podcast should be up on the 26th on the World Wide Web for your inspiration and illumination.

Victor, there's so much to talk about.

We're looking ahead this week to what is expected to be bad news on the economy and a series of announcements that will not reflect well about the American economy.

I don't think you would be surprised or anyone would be surprised, but that's the first topic we are going to discuss on this program right after these important messages.

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

Victor, my friend, it's good to talk to you again.

I know you were away for a couple of days, but you're back in beautiful Selma, California,

amongst the

waterless.

almond trees.

I think we're going to record another podcast today.

We will talk about the water situation.

Actually, you've written about that for the website.

But, Victor, today at Pajama Media, which is one of the websites you go to regularly to gather your news, is a piece by Rick Moran.

Actually, it was published yesterday.

It's titled Biden Administration Bracing for a Tsunami of Bad Economic News Next Week.

So, what's ahead?

During the week, we're talking about actually today,

numbers are going to come out about consumer confidence the fed is then going to meet to decide on interest rates

and it says the first reading on second quarter economic growth drops on Thursday and the latest numbers on our vexing run of historically high consumer price inflation close out the monster run of data on Friday.

In a note to clients today, analysts at Deutsche Bank suggest the flood of information will, quote, leave you breathless, end quote.

Hey,

Victor, I think

many Americans are already breathless about what is happening with this economy.

We've discussed it, of course, many times, but given that this is going to be a week of particular uh interest in economic news, I don't think there's anything wrong with venturing once more into your thoughts about what is happening to the United States?

Well, I think everybody realizes that if the consumer price index was compulated the way it had been during the Carter and Reagan administrations, it would not be 9.1 annualized this month, last month, but it would be more like 15.

And when you look at food, what matters?

Not the price of pencils.

It's the rent and the price of homes.

And it's the price of food.

And it's the price of electricity, and it's the price of essential goods, healthcare, it's the price of gasoline and natural gas and things like that.

When you look at that, my gosh, they've gone up

gas 40%, food, 12%, 13%.

It's already 10 or 15%.

And what that means, Jack, is that all of this money, that was the Recovery Act of Biden, which was $2 trillion, added on to the trillion plus that trump had as an incentive to avoid a recession during the lockdown is that that three trillion of floating money can go out very fast if you've got that raging inflation in those critical areas where people spend money so i think that after two years near we're nearing the second year of the biden administration I think economists are starting to say, you know,

there's not a lot of money out there as there was.

We printed a lot.

We infused it in the economy.

That created such consumer demand.

At the very time we were incentivizing not to work with COVID release checks.

I think people have vastly

underestimated the fear of COVID.

I know so many people that are housebound because they are afraid of long COVID.

And I know a lot of people, including myself, that have had long COVID.

And the idea that you would be able to go out there and get on a tractor and diss for 12 hours with this is just ridiculous.

We have a lot of walking dead or zombies, maybe 7 to 10 million, and then we have supply shortages.

So what I'm talking about is an economy where labor is hard to get and expensive.

Commodities are in hot demand and they're not there.

We're having supply shortage.

And the result is a raging inflation, which is eating up the discretionary income of a lot of people.

And so when the Democrats, their activists and their political handlers are all over the media and they're saying the following, Jack,

well, there's indications that gas went down 15 cents.

And maybe by the fall, if you Republicans count on high gas prices, it might be 450, 420.

Well, the point that they fail to point out is it's still going to be far higher than when Joe Biden entered office.

But the reason that the gas price is going to go down a little bit isn't because Joe Biden opened ANWAR or it's not because he can continually drain the strategic petroleum reserve.

I think he's done over half of it.

I mean, it's finite.

He's not going to build Keystone.

He's not going to open up federal leases.

We know that.

He's not going to get the Saudis with his fist pump to pump oil.

He's not going to get Russia to pump more oil.

He's not going to get Venezuela or Iran.

The reason that gas prices may go down a little

is that people are running out of money.

We're headed into a recession.

I assume that we're going to have zero or negative economic growth for the second quarter, which is a classical definition that we're in a recession.

So prices are going to stay high on almost everything because we have a supply problem.

But people are driving, I think I read 8% less.

They cannot afford to drive.

And that's going to increase.

And pretty soon they're not going to be able to fly either.

And when that happens, some prices will go down because we're in a recession.

I think a lot of younger people don't remember the 2008 crash and the subsequent failure of the Obama administration to get a steep recovery after a steep recession, but they incentivized labor non-participation with all of these gimmicks they had, and they didn't really allow the economy to recover fully in a rapid manner.

But more importantly, people should remember, and I remember with horror, Jack, the 1980 to 83 recession.

And I can tell you, I had people I knew very closely that killed themselves farming.

And one of my good friends, he was so depressed about the crash in commodity prices, young farmer, that he hung himself.

He turned on the car in the garage and he shot himself, all three.

And I had another person who was a ditch tender who killed himself.

And a lot of people just moved away.

So

we haven't had anything like that.

And what I mean by a recession is a near-depression where commodity prices crash and people cannot find a job.

Yes.

We've been there before.

We've been there before.

I mean, this generation hasn't, it's not acculturated to it.

And that is a classic antidote for hyperinflation.

I wish it wasn't.

If Joe Biden had not had the Recovery Act and just said, you know what?

We're coming into an era now of natural demand.

People are starved for restaurants and travel.

And COVID is sorting, we're getting tired of it.

So whatever the actual status of the pandemic, they're going to go out there.

And

Trump printed a lot of money.

So we have a liquidity in the economy.

So let's just let it go.

But no, he had to go with this agenda.

And had he done build back better,

hadn't been for Joe Manchin, we would have hyperinflation right now at 15, 20% recorded.

I don't think these people realize that, you know, it wasn't that that long ago that if you got a 16% car loan, you thought you were doing pretty well.

Oh, my God.

I did.

My cousin, I remember, got a 19%.

I said, I beat that.

I got 14.9.

Wow, we got our first mortgage was 12%.

We thought we were lucky because two or three years earlier, it had been 19%.

I can remember that.

And so that's what we're looking at.

And this generation doesn't, I don't think it's prepared for it.

And

so

when you talk about this article that suggests this week is going to be bad news,

it's going to be bad news and it's going to reflect that there's a static slowdown and gas prices may go down.

That's all the Democrats are talking about.

But they're not talking about a formal recession of negative economic growth.

They're not talking about further declines in labor participation.

They're not talking about probably the consumer price index, even if there is a fall down in gas prices, will be high and we'll have classic stagflation.

And let's see what the labor market is.

I've been just noticing it because I've had this ongoing saga since January of having all these different plumbers and electricians and

sewage people, everything.

And I just talked to them about their

their outlook and I can just sense for the first time that they're worried that the demand on them as they have expanded and tried to get new trucks and new equipment, they're a little bit worried that they don't feel the demand will be there by Christmas as it has been so far.

And

they're answering calls now when you call them.

Right.

I had a guy, my mother may be coming to live with us regularly.

And so

I have to redo the bathroom.

It's a shower.

It has to turn into a walk-in shower.

And the thought of getting a tile guy to come and talk maybe four weeks i was expecting and it was that afternoon and so i was kind of pleasantly surprised but i said so is business booming he says well it's um it started to slow down two weeks ago so uh it is and you can see with housing it's not so much the price I kind of to prepare for things like this, I try to read the real estate listings, and it's not so much that a house in Monterey that was way overpriced at $1,000 a square foot, you know, a little 1,200,

say Monterey or Santa Cruz, 1,200 square feet, 1.3 million.

It's not that it's gone down to 900,000.

It's gone down to 1,100,000.

But when you look at the days on the market, you don't see two in three or four days.

You see 30, 40, 50 days on the market.

And so in other words, that's always a classic signal that there's a price crash coming because people get used to that inflationary spiral and they say i'm not giving up this house when my friend over there two months ago or six months ago got all this money and i and they never quite accept that they missed the the bus and now we're in a different spiral so they just keep that house overpriced on that market and then finally you know, if they have a family need, they have to move or relocate, they just, they'll sell it at whatever they can get.

Yeah, it's the crashing is going to come.

By the way, Victor, this wasn't part of that article, but separately just noticed continuing news about

baby formula just not available despite Biden's

flying it in from Europe or wherever.

There is, you're talking about commodities.

That's a commodity.

Isn't Mayor Pete?

He's our transportation secretary.

He's the one in charge of the port of LA, getting these huge ships bristling, full,

overloaded with formula coming from around the world to save us and bring formula.

And he's took maternity leave, so he understands the essential role that formula plays.

Yes, unless he

says he's not talking about life.

Yeah, he's not talking about life.

He's talking about what?

Abortion.

That's what he's talking about.

Well, that's a bad thing to do, Pete, when people are trying to get formula for life, for young life, and and you go on television and hit the media circus talking about abortion, that's not quite in your purview.

So why don't you just do this, Pete?

Why don't you make sure that a person can find a car or a rental car or the highways are safe or when you fly, you don't have a 10-hour delay or a cancel flight.

And the ports, when you go out and look out at these ports, whether it's Norfro or New Orleans or Port of Oakland or Houston, whatever they are, or Los Angeles, you don't see cargo ships stacked out to the right.

Just do that first.

And once you've mastered that, then you can pontificate on abortion.

But you pontificate on abortion because you can't do that.

Just as I've always said, Bloomberg used to always talk about supersized cokes and the danger they posed for the public because he couldn't get the snow off the streets.

Right.

Distract.

Well, Victor, let's move on to another important matter it uh this past week there was another prime time showing of the january 6th special committee so two two things two people let's talk about steve bannon and his relationship to this and let's talk about donald trump on bannon i'd just like to read quickly here a a tweet from buck sexton By the way, Buck Sexton, Jack Fowler, and Anthony Fauci all graduated from the same high school.

He tweeted, so Steve Bannon could spend more time in jail for respecting executive privilege in the face of a show trial than Comey, McCabe, Strzok, Paige, Brennan, and Clapper got for all their illegal soft coup efforts against Trump combined.

Very important and salient.

point.

So, Victor, any thoughts you want to share about Steve Bannon, what's happened to to him, about him, and then separately,

the focus on Donald Trump's response, time, delay, lag to

the rioting at the Capitol,

surely intended to harm him.

I think it possibly and probably has,

whether it's fair or not, whether this committee should be meeting or not.

You know,

there are consequences to political consequences.

That's my opinion, may not be yours.

So, how are these hearings, particularly this week, affecting the political future of Donald Trump, on top of your thoughts on Steve Bannon?

Well, I think the

hearings are having zero effect on his base.

So, you're not going to see rallies that are smaller, or you're not going to see

him go down

in popularity below 40%.

But I think it does have some effect on the suburban voter, the swing voter, the purple state voter, the never Trumper who feels that he got had by joining the Biden group and might want to sneak back in, or,

you know, any moderate person or a Democrat, if there is such a thing as a blue dog Democrat, a Democrat who looks at this.

you know, slate, it might hurt Trump with some of the minorities that have crossed over, that kind of stuff.

But it doesn't have any effect at all on his base or his ability, I think, to win the nomination.

But it has given additional support for DeSantis and others.

The problem with the whole thing is there's no cross-examination, there's no dissident voices, and that's by their own volition.

They don't want anybody there.

So when you hear these stories, when somebody said, I heard that this person did,

and then you call these people in and they're threatened with all sorts of expensive legal costs,

or they're threatened, as Steve Bannon, with a possible prison sentence, and they say a sort of

sort of might have, should have done maybe.

So they're all contextualizing.

And we don't know because nobody on the stage up there on that panel says,

okay, you say this.

Here's a witness that says no, that he was sitting next to Donald Trump and he didn't watch it all day.

Or he said, there's none of that, none.

So it's not a legitimate inquiry.

And as I said earlier, everybody knows that to be on that committee, if you were a Republican, you had to, A, vote to impeach Donald Trump and as a private citizen, have a hearing in the Senate.

And B, you have no political future in the Republican Party.

And those two criterion allowed you to be on that committee.

Anybody that didn't fit that was not on that committee.

It has no

legitimacy.

And so then you look for the equal application of the law, which is the cornerstone of American jurisprudence.

So when Steve Bannon is threatened with a prison sentence, you say to yourself, how many people

have had a congressional subpoena?

to testify or to produce evidence or to bring records and they have refused.

I can think of one, Eric Colder, the Attorney General of the United States.

Did anybody arrest him like they did Peter Navarro or something?

No, nobody did that.

So this is a new one and it joins, Jack, a whole group of asymmetrics.

And it'll be very, very interesting to see what happens come January.

And by that, I mean when the Republicans win the House, and they will win the House,

how many investigations are they going to open open up?

And I think there'll be a dozen of them.

And they're going to have subpoenas that are going to flood the Congress and make this look minor.

And what is going to happen when you get people like Jake Sullivan subpoena to talk about what his role was with Russian collusion, the hoax?

Or what's going to happen when you get Hillary Clinton coming in and asking her to explain all of these, the president is not legitimate, don't concede the election.

Or when you get all of these people who organized the May 2000 and June and July and September 2020 riots and who coordinated it on social media, what's going to happen to them?

Are they going to resist?

We'll see.

But my point is they're making precedents that we've never seen before.

They're making precedents that they're jailing people who don't follow these sort of witch hunt subpoenas.

They're making precedents that they can, that the majority leader, the speaker of the house, can pick and choose what the minority leader can do as far as nominations to committees.

They're making precedents that they're going after political enemies and using the FBI and sort of a show trial to put people in handcuffs or to strip them down to their underwear in the middle of the night.

or to bring a SWAT team and surround their house or to retrieve the lost Biden gun or the lost Biden crackpipe or the lost Biden laptop or the lost Biden diary.

They're going to tear up.

I guess we have a new president that the speaker tears up the State of the Union address the moment it's handed to him from President Joe Biden.

So they have a lot of precedents and we'll see, just as I said before, I know that the listeners have heard that, we'll see how much

how far Old Testament, the Republican majority wants to go.

Well, Victor, there's a lot more to talk about today, including military recruitment.

I know you've published a

written at least new piece.

I assume it's for American Greatness, but you can tell us about it.

But let's talk about that and related also on the military front

piece up on American Greatness from a week ago.

That's pretty critical of General.

Mattis, and we'll get to them, your thoughts.

Anyway, that's the plural then.

Your thoughts right after these important messages.

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

Before we

get on to this military-related topic, I'd like to remind our listeners that Victor's writings are to be found at VictorHanson.com.

More than his writings, links to his books, links to podcasts and other appearances.

Victor's got, he writes a lot of exclusive pieces.

They're called ultra.

And for example, this week there's one on COVID afterthoughts.

There's another one on

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I mean, it's like clockwork and it's voluminous, and you can't read them unless you subscribe.

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maybe intellectual inspiring educational so that's civilthoughts.com and i do that for the center for civil society at American Philanthropic.

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And if that interests you, centerforcivilsociety.com.

Thanks very much.

So Victor, tell us two things.

I hope I'll only take half a minute on this American Greatness piece.

This is about General Mattis.

This is secondary to your own piece to discuss the

sharp decline in recruitment

for our military.

There is a gentleman, Fred Galvin, former Marine, who's written a book called A Few Bad Men.

And he really goes after General Mattis in this.

I assume in the book, I haven't read it, but in this article, it's titled How Mattis Betrayed His Fellow Marines at the Behest of the Deep State.

Like, that is a, you know, what a title for a piece.

And it's based on

the Marines going into action, being ambushed.

the Taliban then using its PR connections with BBC to say that the Americans, the Marines, killed civilians, which did not happen.

And then the military, and this was in 2007, and then the Marine military leadership, which was General Mattis, creating a investigation process that clearly lacked due process, that clearly hung these Marines out to dry.

It went on for two years.

I got to believe there's another side to the story, but this is a really, really

harmful analysis of General Mattis as a general in the field, not when he was, you know, commander in, not commander-in-chief, but

chairman of the joint chiefs.

So anyway, that's a bit of a backdrop.

But more importantly, what are your thoughts

about this decline in military recruitment?

I'll be honest with our listeners.

I'm a friend of Jim Mattis.

I've known him for some time.

He's a colleague at the Hoover Institution.

When we've talked, it's never really been on politics.

It's been about about military history.

He's an avid reader.

He reads classical texts like Plutarch or Thucydides.

So we've talked mostly on those subjects.

And the same goes through.

We have a program at the Hoover Institution where we have a group of generals, four-star, that upon retirement sort of go to the Hoover Institution and are fellows there.

So over the last 20 years that I've been there, I've probably been friends with, and I wouldn't have been friends otherwise because I wouldn't have had an opportunity to see them

but i've met probably

20 of them and i've gotten along with them fine i i taught a year as a visiting chifin professor at the naval academy i met a lot of admirals i went out on a carrier that was a very nice experience i was embedded 2006 with a group of people for i think four days

and then in 2007 i went back to iraq with H.R.

McMaster and I went on his tour of the uprising and trying to get the sons of Saddam to flip.

So I've met all of these people

and I like them.

But what I'm mystified is what's going on in the military.

And I don't know the individual's role and eat what is going on, but I'm very worried about it because I like the military.

And everybody out here are traditional supporters of the military, but something is revolutionary.

I think that people don't understand, Jack, what's going on.

They did not get, as you pointed out, 40, they're 40%

down on their recruitment.

They can't get people to join the Army.

The other branches of the service say that they're going to either come close or in the case of the Marines, they might make it.

I think the Coast Guard will be down, the Air Force will be down a little bit.

I don't know about the Navy, but the point is, why is this happening?

And there's a lot.

And when you look at the exegesis from the military, they have some good reasons.

You know, people are obese, they use drugs, COVID scared them, they don't want to go out in public.

Some people don't want to get vaccination.

There's people with long COVID, but it doesn't, those individual explanations don't account for this huge drop-off.

If this continues,

your military is going to be halved.

So what we're talking about is the greatest revolution in the U.S.

military since Vietnam.

People are not wanting to go into the military.

So that demands an explanation.

And I can think of three.

One,

the Afghan

debacle was the worst humiliation for the U.S.

military and indeed the country, I think, in the

21st century period.

Maybe the 1975 departure from Saigon Embassy Wolf was worse.

I'm not sure.

But the idea that the U.S.

military

left a $1 billion new embassy without protection, abandoned a $300 million completely outfitted Air Force base that was defensible and was the largest in Central Asia with the most strategic position vis-a-vis Iran or China or Russia.

And the fact that it left, this is disputable, and I understand that, $60, $80 billion of military equipment, if you count the infrastructure around it, which is, you twice what we're giving the Ukrainians.

And then we lost 13 brave Americans that were killed by terrorists.

And then we skedaddled out there with leaving hundreds, if not thousands, of loyal Afghans and American contractors, not to mention our allies.

And then in righteous anger about the death of Americans, we conducted a strike and blew up 10 innocent Afghan civilians, which our chairman of the the Joint Chief, I think he called it a righteous strike.

And then we had people falling off the airplane.

And that humiliation turns people off, especially, and this is what I'm getting at.

We heard in July and early August that everything

was going well.

When Joe Biden said, we're going to get everybody out.

They were.

Austin was interviewed, Millie, yes, it's defensible.

At the time that they were saying that, at the captain, at the major, at the lieutenant colonel, at the colonel level, there were leaks to the press that this was going to be an ungodly disaster.

And that suggested that to lubricate this Biden agenda, our top echelon was not telling the truth, just about how precarious and dangerous this would be.

And so then we got this god-awful

skedaddle.

And I say god-awful in this sense, Jack.

Just a few months later, Vladimir Putin went into Ukraine.

And that was directly following this humiliation and the apparent global sense that the military was no longer a deterrent.

Not long after Iran started to announce, I should say, wink a nod, that it had enough fissionable material to make its first bomb in its possession, North Korea began to resume these inflammatory missile launches.

And of course, China, and the first time I can remember, talked openly about going into Taiwan and warning people to keep out.

That was all predicated on this humiliation.

And so then we have to ask, why was this humiliation?

So we go to the second reason that these enrollment are down so much.

And the second reason is.

While this thing was developing, this plan to get out of Afghanistan, and while our top military officials were warning us that this is going to be okay, despite what they were hearing from the grassroots,

we had a number of officers, but most prominently the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Mark Milley, and the Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Dawson, get before Congress and start to pontificate about white rage and possible cells of white rage.

And you have to understand Professor Kendi.

It's sort of like Marks Milley said, the great intellectual from Princeton.

You've got to read what you don't like or you're not familiar with.

But what is Professor Kendi?

It's a crackpot idea that the entire American body politic right now, that means LeBron James and the Obamas and Camilla Harris are denied an equal say and it's systemic racism.

And the only way you can combat that is reverse good racism.

That's his message.

That's critical legal theory.

Critical legal theory says that every law, every cultural artifact, everything has to be seen through the narrow prism of race.

And race in the sense that we were flawed at our beginning, we were flawed in our maturity, we're flawed now, and you have to have what

clueless people would call racism to correct it, what they would call it anti-racism or good racism.

And he pushed that in front of the Congress.

And so he said, and Austin said they were going to look at the ranks.

Okay, so what are the ranks?

They believed in proportional, even repertory representation in the ranks.

Okay, they have a transgender agenda.

They were talking right after Roe versus Wade later that there might be some commitment to abortion on federal basis, some people were doing in response to Congress's cries.

So the point is this.

that while we were losing deterrence and battle efficacy, our top generals were talking about things that are either irrelevant to it or antithetical to military readiness.

And more importantly, if you go down that road of proportional representation, that every type of command must be as diverse as America, then why are you targeting collectively a white male rubric that has died in the various conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan at somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all fatalities?

It's two two points.

If you're going to be proportional

representative, then you wouldn't have that many people in harm's way.

I don't think any of them complain.

That's why they join.

They want to fight for their country.

But the second thing is: how smart is it, Jack,

to get before Congress and virtue signal to this progressive majority that you're going to go after a rubric that is the people inordinately that fight and die for you.

And so that group, if you look at why these military recruitments have plummeted, guess what?

It used to be of every recruit, four out of 10 were from families in the military, parents.

That's gone down to 13%.

And so you could argue that most of the drop off

in military recruitment, especially for the Army, are people who feel that the military will target them.

They'll either think they're not vaccinated and they're sort of crazy people, or they're right wing, or they need some instruction in transgenderism and they need to understand the commitment to radical abortion, or they need to know about Professor Kendi and the need for the Army to perhaps be discriminatory for good purposes.

And they will be under a shadow of a doubt because white males are the people directly,

directly accused by Millie and Austin as a type of people that were active on January 6th and maybe in the Army.

And they didn't produce one iota of data.

Neither Millie nor Austin said, I hold before you in McCarthy fashion a list, and these are all the people in the military we know that are organized.

They didn't do that because there was no evidence.

So the mother, the father of these very brave traditional families, when their 18-year-olds say, I'd like to go into the 10th Mountain Division, I'd like to go to the Rangers, I want to go to Special Forces, they'll say,

no,

no, no, no, no, I'm not going to, and no, for two reasons.

One,

they're going to have their eye on you.

You have a target on your back as a white male.

They're going to accuse you of things.

They're going to make you indoctrinated.

They are going to pursue a left-wing agenda and social change as if they can do it rapidly through the chain of command.

And they're going to do that and you're not going to be happy because you're going to be under a cloud of suspicion and they're going to give you no credit if you go over to an afghanistan or you go back into iraq or you go to some god-awful place and you get killed and double your numbers in the pop that doesn't mean anything you're still going and they're not going to go they're just not going to go and they're not going so that they'd be branded for life too they'd be branded for life and then the third thing that's going

there is a perception that the rules that apply to these young men whose families have traditionally died and bled for this country the rules that the army applies to them do not apply to their top command

what do i mean by that it says in statute that the chairman of the joint chief is an advisory role.

He has no operational command,

none.

And so this.

So Mark Milley, we're told from the Woodward book, and he didn't deny it because why should he deny it, Jack?

It was a cause celeb among the left.

And why would he want to appease the left?

Because he's going to go rotate out after his retirement, right?

And we know where they all go.

We know where Lloyd Austin was and Raytheon, General Dynamics, Lockheed, you name it.

They all do that.

And to do that, you have to have a particular ideological agenda, mindset that the corporate world, the Disneys, the United Airlines, the Coca-Colas, that they approve of, but especially the defense contractor.

They do not want a Curtis LeMay with a big cigar talking about packing bombs on a B-52.

That's not the corporate profile for a lobbyist or a board member to get a Pentagon procurement.

It's more like we're going to get a contract.

for a transgendered enlightenment seminar, something like that.

Okay, I'm being a caricature, but that's where I'm getting at.

So, when Mark Milley said

that he contacted without presidential authorization or knowledge, his counterpart in the People's Liberation Army to warn him that he had fears.

Now, Mark Milley, remember, Jack, is a doctor, an MD.

He has judged his own commander-in-chief as unstable to the point where he's going to warn the Chinese that if he gets an order that he finds provocative, he's going to tip them off.

And then he's going to compound that

disastrous move by saying to his theater commanders: if you get an order, i.e., if you get a constitutional order that goes through the Department of Defense and out to the, you know,

CENTCOM or something to use a particular weapon in a crisis, you can't do it.

You go through me.

Well, that is disrupting.

the chain of command.

That's inflammatory.

That's incendiary.

You can't do that.

He should have been summarily dismissed.

Yeah.

Most Darnold got paid at least.

When you're dealing with the leadership of your enemy, it's insane.

And then we find out what?

That

there is something called, we've known this for years,

Article 88, and I've hit this nail on the head so many times, but there is an Article 88.

It applies to a retired officer.

You shall not use contemptuous words.

Okay.

So

all of the luminaries that we've seen in this period, and now remember the central topic, I'm not just making a point about Article 88, I'm making a point why people are not joining the military.

And I've said it was the Afghanistan humiliation and the targeting of a particular gender and race group as suspect and guilty without any evidence who are contributing an inordinate amount to the U.S.

military and are not being appreciated by their top officers.

So we had officers, and we all know who they were, who called the President of the United States, who got roughly almost half the vote in 2016, a Nazi, Mussolini-like, capable of Auschwitz-like cages, a liar, a contemptuous human being, who should be removed sooner or later.

We had two military officers, Jack, who wrote an op-ed urging Mark Milley, if Donald Trump contested, to remove him, remove him in November.

We had three military officers in the Washington Post who suggested that Donald Trump, if he won, would be an insurrectionist and would try to have a coup and not, I guess, step down after four.

That was, I mean, that was insurrectionary.

Those were five officers that basically said the military has to take action, extraordinary, extra-legal action.

And then we had a very brave and decorated admiral who said that Trump should be removed sooner than later, or sooner the better, excuse me, sooner the better.

So what am I getting at?

That message then went to half the country.

And

the

high echelon of the military, retired, but reflecting a broad sentiment, as we see from Millie and Austin, was telling half of America,

Your candidate that you voted for is a Nazi, is Mussolini.

And some people were going to interpret that as they were too for voting.

Right, absolutely.

So if you want to recruit people, how stupid is it?

How stupid is it to insult half the country?

And that half produces twice the number of people in combat units.

And that's what they did.

So you add Afghanistan, and then you add this.

politicalization and this indoctrination and then you add this commentary from the the elite elite of the military, and you get a picture that these people are going to be suspect or are not like.

And then there's that asymmetric application of justice.

We had this lieutenant general, retired Veliski Jack,

he wasn't an employee.

He was just simply a contractor that supplied a service to the Pentagon.

And he tweeted something saying that Jill, Jill, Jill, excuse me, Jack, Dr.

Jill Biden was a hypocrite for, on the one hand, suggesting that women were not biological, but on the other, talking about women's right to an unfettered abortion.

He was just saying, are there women?

Are there not women?

And he tweeted something.

And he was fired from his consulting contractual job with the Pentagon.

I thought to myself, okay.

you're firing him under Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

He insulted, and I read the statute, he insulted a cabinet member, prominent member of Congress, or the commander-in-chief.

No, he didn't.

He insulted, and he didn't even insult.

Did he call her a Nazi?

Did he call Joe Biden a fascist?

Did he say they were Mussolini family?

No.

He used none of the invective that had been freely circulating for four years.

He just simply said that the First Lady, a private citizen, was hypocritical in the way that she approached, and he was fired.

And when you get that message, then you look at this military and to sum up:

why aren't people joining the military?

Because they feel that the progressive Congress and the progressive president have weaponized the Pentagon in the fashion they have the CIA, the IRS, the FBI, and they see this as a utilitarian institution for fast-tracking agendas without without the

give and take, Sturm and Drang, I've used that term of Congress.

And in that process, if you are a white male given January 6th or given the Trump phenomenon, you are suspect.

And you will go in there and you will be told, this is your vaccine mandate.

This is your transgendered seminar.

This is your Kindy seminar.

This is your enlightenment.

And now we want you to go up to the Hindu Kush and we want you to fight for the greater glory of the United States, and you're going to be overly represented.

After hearing a long lecture about we don't want under or over-representation, when it gets out into the nitty-gritty of getting killed in the middle of nowhere, you're going to be over-represented, and we're going to insult people like you, retired and active, who voted for this idiot.

That's what they would say, or I should say that.

It's a euphemism, this Nazi, this Mussolini, this liar, and that's where we are.

And then you expect people to have normal recruitment at a time of a pandemic?

It's not going to happen.

And they're going to have to do something.

And it's not them, it's us.

Because we all love the military.

This was the greatest military in the history of civilization.

I think I've written,

I don't know, 100 op-eds about the wonders and brilliance of the U.S.

military.

Well, how many books have you written about them?

I've written, and I think 12.

Right.

13, 14.

And I've written that General Mattis should get an exemption when he was nominated as Secretary of Defense because he was a fine military officer.

And H.R.

McMaster should be the National Security Advisor, even though he had just stepped out of the military.

And I thought General Kelly

should

be there as well as chief of staff when the left was saying there were too many military.

They were militarizing.

and i suggested as well michael flynn should have been national security advisor and so the irony about this is that no president had taken such exposure in nominating so many generals he nominated four

and i think you could argue that uh

that he had a great commitment to the military.

If you look at the increase in the military budget and the fact that on his watch that Russia did not go into Ukraine and Iran did not announce it was going to have shortly a bomb and et cetera, et cetera.

So I don't understand.

To do their share.

Yeah, I don't understand this whole thing.

I really don't.

I don't know what is driving the politicalization.

I don't know why a general like Clapper

after lying under oath to the Senate would go on television every night and swear to the American people, wink, nod based on his security clearance information that the president was trapped with the walls closing in, that Russian collusion was real, all of that, and that he was a Putin's asset general in the United States Air Force, telling the people that Donald Trump was an asset of Putin.

And so I don't understand what they're trying to do, except

I don't know what the ethos is anymore.

I really don't.

What is the ethos?

You go to become a general and then suddenly you want in your closing sunset years, you want a virtue signal because you feel that the corporate culture has become woke and therefore you'll be acceptable.

The knowledge that you have of the intricacies of the Pentagon can be monetized by this corporation or this defense lobby, and you're willing then to speak out in violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, or if you're still active, that you're going to promise progressive members of Congress, you're going to ferret out white supremacists who you have no evidence for that charge whatsoever.

You cannot say to a congressman or a senator, female senator, you cannot say, I have evidence that the white male soldier has a greater propensity.

for racism and racial chauvinism than the Latino soldier or the black soldier or the Asian soldier.

I have evidence of that.

And then you're expecting that after making that charge, you're expecting that person to die in twice their numbers of the population.

I get it animated because it seems so suicidal.

It doesn't make, and then you're going to sacrifice the battle efficacy of the U.S.

Army?

You and I have talked about this, Jack.

I know some people are going to say, Victor, you guys have talked about it, but we haven't talked about it quite like this in terms of military recruitment.

Would it take any idiot, Jack, from what we were warning people to say, come August, you guys aren't going to have the people to defend the United States?

Victor, this is, it's not, the many important issues and pressing issues we talk about, logistics and supply chain and abortion and constitutional rights and whatever.

But I mean, this is the motherload here.

We're a nation and its central obligation is defense of the country.

This is what's at stake here.

It behooves being discussed at length.

It is.

I mean, the military can make a argument and say, we do not want social dissension.

We don't want to go back to the days of discrimination in the military because we're interested in battle efficacy.

That's a legitimate thing to say.

But when you focus and you get ahead on social justice, quote unquote, issues, and you devote so much time and interest and you demonize particular people and you immediately when any issue comes up, whether it's transgenderism or gay marriage or Roe versus Wade, and immediately people in Congress say to the military, are you going to have abortions on bases?

Are you do you have workshops on transgenderism?

Are you subsidizing sex changes?

They instead of saying these are volatile issues that are divisive in America, and we are going to follow the consensus as directed from our civilian superiors.

But our main interest is deterring the enemies of the United States.

It's helping our friends and punishing our enemies and sending a message to neutrals to be on our side.

And that's what we're here to do, to protect the United States.

And if you can say, well, they can dance and chew gum or something.

Apparently, they can't, because why they were doing all this in four Congress, a few weeks later, they suffered, as I said, the greatest military humiliation in a century.

So they can't.

And they can't deter China from going into Taiwan.

And they can't stop Iran from getting a bomb or they can't stop North Korea from pointing a missile at San Francisco.

And so, and then the other thing what really got me about Millie was

just ask yourself this.

Has Donald Trump been known as an adventurer in the Middle East?

Has he been known as an expeditionary leader who likes to take U.S.

troops and send them to Afghanistan, into Syria, into

Iraq?

No, he's been ridiculed as a neo-isolationist that doesn't want to send U.S.

assets overseas and optional war.

So the idea that he's eager, he didn't even reply to Iran.

He called off that military strike when they hit Saudi Arabia.

And so the idea that he was the trigger-happy person was against their own criticism.

But more importantly, Jack, ask this.

You think Mark Milley, right now, given what we've seen of Joe Biden, does anybody believe that Joe Biden would pass the Montreal cognitive assessment right now?

Did anybody listen to him on the teleprompter?

Does anybody think he says things that are dangerous, such as we should remove Vladimir Putin?

He should be removed from office?

Is that a wise thing to say to a leader who has 7,000 nukes?

My point is, did Dr.

Mark Milley then say to himself, hmm, I've watched Joe Biden call up Secretary A.

Lloyd.

I've watched Biden.

He doesn't know where he is.

He fumbles things.

He's talking about getting rid of Putin.

He's dangerous.

He's saying things that just don't make sense.

I don't know what we're going to do.

I got to call up the head of the PLA.

I got to call him up and warn him that if this crazy guy who's senile and cognitively challenged gets angry and he talks about moving removing putin or something we could have a nuclear scenario the russians are already talking about it i'm going to call up the pla and say you know what

if biden says another crazy thing i'll warn you in advance and then he's going to say and you know what just as a safety measure i'm going to call in the Africa Com, I'll call in CENTCOM, I'm going to bring all these theater commanders to my office.

I'm going to say, I don't give a damn about my statutory role as an advisor.

We got a crazy nut as president.

So, you, before you get a order from this crazy, senile, cognitively challenged president, you go through me.

And then you think when that was legal, how long would that person, Mark Milley, be chairman of the joint chief?

He would be gone in one nanosecond.

You would get a glaring New York Times operating, coup,

Washington Post, insurrection, CBS, he must go, and he'd be gone.

And that's why people are angry, because they understand there's a great asymmetric fashion in the way justice is administered in our popular culture as it involves the military and our politics.

And they don't want any part of it.

And that is very, very dangerous and has to be remedied and addressed because whether you like

to say it or not, some of the most ferocious fighters in the history of warfare are in the U.S.

military.

They are people that are capable of inflicting a lot of damage on the enemy, and they go through enormous sacrifices to do that.

They're not psychopaths.

They're hyper-patriots.

They come from families that their father served in the Gulf War.

Their grandfather was in Vietnam.

Their great-grandfathers were in World War II.

This is a family tradition that defines who they are.

And you're telling that group that has been so amazing on the battlefield, and this is what's really angering a lot of people, is that on the tactical sense, you put those people in Afghanistan, you put them in Iraq, you put them anywhere they win.

Now, when you want to translate those battlefield victories into strategic advantage, that's a whole different story, but that's not their fault.

It's a fault of the officers

who are

essentially disparaging them by suggesting that they are part of a group that needs to be watched for potential white rage and chauvinism.

So

somebody's just got to come in in the next administration or the next Congress and say,

we're destroying our military.

This is not going to work.

We've got to have a complete overhaul, just like we did after Vietnam.

And I think we can do it.

I think we can say to every general, when you retire,

you cannot serve on any defense contractor board or as a military lobbyist for five years.

And we should say in the military, there shall be no use of race or gender to discriminate either negatively or positively toward anybody.

It's going to be a racial and gender-blind military.

And then we need to really adjust our

sense of military justice.

If you have a commander

and he oversees this debacle in Afghanistan, he should be fired.

He should be fired.

Nobody was fired for what happened in Afghanistan.

They should be,

at least five of those people should be fired for that.

And if they said, well, we were just following Biden's crazy orders, then you should resign because what you did harmed the military in a way that we can't even fathom.

But that's not happening.

So yes, to conclude, I like military officials.

Some of the best people I've ever met in my life have been lieutenant colonels, majors, colonels that came through the Hoover program.

I was close friends.

I am close friends with a number of general admirals.

I admire their sacrifice.

They can be away from their family and tough conditions.

Jim Mattis is a guy who slept on the ground.

in Iraq and got ill because of the dust and infection, and he's sacrificed his health.

I don't think the guy had, when he was Secretary of Defense, slept more than three or four hours.

So I have great admiration for that sacrifice.

But for all of our own good, everybody needs to be introspective and discuss this from every angle.

Or we won't have a military.

Yeah, what you said,

your

first cure essentially comes to decoupling

retirement and the pot of gold.

I know you'd limit it to defense industry, but

if there was a textbook for a two-star general like how to cash in on this,

it would be, you know, you've got to be acceptable to a corporate world that is guided by wokeism.

So, of course, this is the mindset and that filters back on how they oversee their jobs.

So decoupling to me, and

I'm just a schmo here in Milford, Connecticut, but decoupling

the retirement from the almost like an expectation of the right to cash in.

That to me has to, the break has to come there.

It has to.

It really does.

And in the old days, Jack,

an Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders would go after these guys and they would say, we've got to break up the military-industrial complex.

So they were always suggesting that generals not do this because they were afraid of the power of the corporate military apparatus.

Not now.

What they do is they sit in hearings and they wink and nod at these guys and said, if you enact a social agenda and you promote gay marriage or women in combat or pregnancy Air Force suits or transgendered surgeries

or Professor Kendi's work, I'm not going to say a word when you rotate out.

You want to go work for a corporation?

I don't care because you are helping me enact social justice progress without the mess of a legislative debate.

Because you have the chain of command and you can do it for over a million people as if you were a mayor of a city.

And that's what you get.

And they're not criticizing that now when they go out.

The left doesn't have, the left loves the FBI, the left loves the CIA, and the left loves the military because they perceive that they've been able

to create a climate in which all of these people loudly attack Donald Trump, MAGA, Middle America, etc.

And then enact woke change, and then they all get rich and they're tied in with Silicon Valley, etc.

And Middle America says, okay,

you got your military, you got your CIA, you got your account me out.

And we'll see, let's just see.

how well the people in San Francisco or how well the students at Harvard or how well the women's soccer team or whoever these these groups of people are who are so critical of everything, let's see how well they fight when they go over there.

Because these people endure hell and they're the most brave and courageous people in the world.

And I mean the world.

I've seen them.

One of the things I've traveled all over the world and one of the things, whether it was in Australia or Greece or North Africa, I always try to talk to people and visit.

foreign militaries.

I've spoken to so many foreign military groups and they say the same thing, Jack.

They say, wow, American soldiers are the best soldiers in the world.

We want to fight with them.

And, you know, you mentioned this article that was kind of a hit on General Mattis, who I want to emphasize, a friend of mine I admire.

But there's another one by Michael Anton, who, and it's a different article.

It's in the Claremont Review.

You should all look at it.

He's reviewing a book, kind of a cult book, by, it's kind of a a novel by a mid, by a soldier in the field who's very well spoken and writes a great novel, apparently.

And it's a critique of just what we've been talking about.

And in this process,

Anton, and who, and remember, he was a loyal spokesman under the Trump administration on the National Security

Council.

He was the public information officer for H.R.

McMaster.

So it's not like he's grinding axes.

Apparently, he's a great friend of McMaster's.

So he's not attacking the military out of personal venom, but he's listing, and he names specifically a number of retired officers and how they got extremely, extremely rich and how they've been extremely, extremely vocal on social justice issues and how their ostensible targets are people that we've talked about, the deplorables or the irredeemables or the dregs or the cleaners?

And so I just don't feel comfortable when a four-star general writes in Atlantic that

he had a picture of Robert E.

Lee most of his career on his wall.

And then suddenly he decided that he was not just going to take it down and put it away.

He was going to throw it down and break it and put it in the dump.

And then he's going to say, Robert E.

Lee is in the dump this morning.

I'm reborn.

Well, why is that?

Right now at this time, why not a year ago, three years ago?

He's a very intelligent person.

He can make that decision.

Why did all these generals come out suddenly during the last two years when we had Charlotte and the statue topping and the epidemic of iconoclysman and the 120 days of rage and then the January?

Why now do they come out?

And why do they say suddenly, oh my God, I was at a base.

He's named after Braxton Bagg.

That guy was a racist.

Oh my God, I walked across Point all those years and I never really realized there's an image of Robert E.

Lee and not one of Ulysses S.

Grant commiserately.

Why?

I didn't know.

Why do they do that, these confessionals?

And I have a feeling, to be frank, that it has something to do with their current employment.

Yeah, silence is compliant, so they are not silent.

Anyway, this is a rant, but I think it's very important for this reason that everybody listening, it's absolutely critical that the United States and the next decade, especially, North Korea is not going to stop launching missiles.

And China will try to do something with Taiwan.

And this Stalingrad in Ukraine is going to continue, this Verdun, this Somme.

And Iran,

when it gets two or three bombs, the problem with Iran is not getting the bomb.

They don't see the problem in using it.

They saw the problem in getting it once they get it they feel everything's easy now we can use it they will use it and we're going to be faced with some of the greatest challenges that this country has ever faced and at that critical point we need the best soldiers that we've always counted on and unfortunately they are leaving the military in droves and no one in the military has the guts or the honesty to say why that is.

I know, I understand that it's COVID.

I understand

that people don't want to get vaxed.

I understand that people don't want to get infected.

Are they got a long version?

Whatever.

Are they too obese?

So they're playing video games, et cetera.

Or demographically, we're shrinking as a nation.

But

there's another big elephant in the room that no one's talking about.

Anyway,

that wasn't a rant.

That was a great soliloquy.

And I thank you for that.

And we're going to wrap up, but we're going to do that right after these important messages.

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

This episode we're recording on Sunday, the 24th, and it should be up on the World Wide Web on Tuesday, the 26th.

Victor, we've really gone quite over.

So, a couple of topics I want to wrap up.

Yeah, we'll wrap it it up but i have a special i think a special wrap-up it's one of the cooler comments that have come in and i found this on chartable chartable is where people who rate the show through uh either iTunes or apple podcasts go there you can leave a five one to five star rating most people uh

98 leave a five star rating we we thank you very much for that of course we thank anyone everyone wherever they listen to the show Google Play, Stitcher, et cetera.

Thanks.

Kindly.

Show's doing very, very well, up again in the top 10 of the Americas Political Podcasts.

But this was a really interesting comment left by someone, Victor, and it's titled Required Reading for Disruptive Innovators.

I came across one of Dr.

Hansen's early scholarly books on ancient Greeks as an undergrad taking classes in history of ancient Greece and ancient Rome.

Years later, while flipping through channels, I came across a C-SPAN book TV interview and became fascinated with this unassuming yet competent farmer and scholar.

Later on, when I was an executive at a Silicon Valley company charged with radical innovation in the company's product line, I made Soul of Battle required reading for all managers and engineers.

The product from that exercise is now one of the most widely used data-centered chips deployed today.

It gives me immense satisfaction that the inspiration for my team's inventiveness came from VDH's writings on Sherman Patton and Epaminondas.

I hope I said that goodness, Epaminondas.

Epaminondas.

He's all of our heroes.

Every time I listen to VDH talking to Sammy or Jack, the podcast stream is most probably processed by one of the microprocessors that VDH inspired, signed Epaminondas the Chipmaker.

I think that's really,

I know, I feel really humbled by that.

That's good news.

That was a book that I wrote on the careers of Sherman, Patton, and I started with Epaminondas and the idea that although war is hell, they had an ideologically

idealistic agenda, that is, to free innocent people from the death and destruction of pretty nasty people.

I got a little criticism about Sparta because they felt that it wasn't in the same league as Confederates.

But I think if you looked at the slave, I should say the hell out population of Messenia, they were pretty much analogous.

But there was a lot of

anyway.

I liked writing that book.

And

I just want to tell the author of that piece, I don't know the name, but hey, my email is jayfowler at americanphilanthropic.com.

So if you're listening to this,

give me a holler.

I'd love to know more about this.

Okay, Victor.

Well, I think that's about it.

Again, thank you for all the wisdom you shared today.

And thanks to our listeners, of course, for listening.

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

Bye-bye.

Thank everybody for listening.