Elites and The Lobster Bucket

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This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

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

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

You'll find everything Victor writes at victorhanson.com, which is a place you need to go to and a place you should subscribe to.

And I'll tell you more about that later.

Hey, we're going to talk at the beginning of this podcast, which is being recorded on Sunday, June 12th.

I'm assuming it's going to be up on the World Wide Web on Thursday, which is, I can't add, Victor.

I don't know what Thursday is going to be.

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Anyway, we're going to start off.

You hit it.

Oh, did I?

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We're going to start off the program talking about what's the headline on today's Drudge report.

Democrats are starting to whisper campaign against Joe Biden 2024.

That and plenty more is on the agenda.

And we'll get to that, all that, right after these important messages.

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So, Victor, again, Sunday the 12th this morning, checked out, you know, Fungino report, Drudge, Power Line, usual suspects.

Big top item up on Drudge Report was about Biden 2024.

And it linked to a piece, DNU, YUZ, Dini.

I didn't even know what

that might mean, Dinias.

But it says, should Biden run in 2024?

Democrat whispers of no start to rise.

And the story says something about talking to, yeah, interviews with nearly 50 Democratic officials from county leaders to members of Congress, as well as with disappointed voters who backed Mr.

Biden in 2020, reveal a party alarmed about Republicans' rising strength and extraordinarily pessimistic about an immediate path forward.

So, Victor, the natives are restless and they're starting to talk about it.

And as we mentioned before, we recorded, you know, Biden has already said quite early on, my recollection, that he is going to run for re-election.

I don't know how he gets

pulled away from this, but regardless, Victor, what are your thoughts about the angst of the party with the man at the top of the ticket and what other options they may or may not have?

Well, Joe Biden will not run for re-election.

That's not an issue.

The donor class, the billionaire donor class, the Democratic Party and the hard left will not allow that.

Their biggest problem right now is can he finish the next two and a half years of his term?

I would say that's a 50-50 proposition.

And it depends to the degree that Jill Biden does a Woodrow Wilson.

That is, the family puts him on ice somewhere where he doesn't have to go out.

He can't go out like a president and do press conferences.

And they're in a, we talked about that before, an existential dilemma because he's not in the arena defending his indefensible agenda.

But presidents have to do that so that he goes out and they've tried it once or twice, Jimmy Kimmel or something.

He looks like a buffoon.

He can't.

So he can't do it and he has to do it.

And that's not sustainable.

So he's not going to run again.

And he's taking them down with him.

I mean, if you look at the Rast Muslim, it's not two or three.

It's up six or seven in the generic Republican Democrat.

When it's dead, even the Republicans win.

But you're talking about...

Well, I guess you're talking about a mosaic that's starting to form of a catastrophic wipeout.

And they're not going to let him continue, but then they don't know what to do.

Because once you go down that, we're only going to look at people by their race and gender for vice president.

This is what Ilya Shapiro got in trouble vis-a-vis his inelegant tweet.

But

his point was that if you start to restrict 93% of the population from being considered for an office, then you pay the price.

If you just said, you know, we're only going to let white males of, you know, a certain age or something, you're not going to have a full.

full so when they said that they biden as handlers the only real viable black woman for vice president was a senator and that was

that was camilla harris and they didn't better and so now they're stuck and so yeah they don't know what to do and he's not going to run and he can't speak and he has to speak and they have an incumbent that usually will run and they don't know what to do with him he's jimmy carter

And Jimmy, I shouldn't say that.

That's unfair to Jimmy Carter.

Jimmy Carter could finish a sentence.

The irony is that Joe Biden in 2012, 2016,

he knew that he was too old, that he had cognitive issues.

In 2016, when Trump run, he didn't run against Hillary.

He knew that, you know, that was six years ago when he was, what, 73.

He knew he was too old.

He couldn't do it.

He knew that when he was at halfway as vice president, that's why people said, you know, don't underestimate Joe's ability to screw things up, being euphemizing.

But they knew that he wasn't up there.

He knew that he'd run for president on two prior occasions.

He was exposed as a plagiarist, a liar, a cheat, and he knew that.

So he was damaged goods.

But remember, for every problem, there has to be self-introspection.

So how did this miserable candidate end up as the nominee and president?

And the fact was that the party moved so far to the left, they exposed their hardcore progressive socialist tendencies throughout the primaries and the debates.

And people looked at Beto and they looked at Elizabeth Warren and they looked at Benry Sanders and Decorey Booker and they looked at Julian Castro and they looked at Camilla Harris.

And they said, these people are certifiably crazy and we are going to lose.

So let's get Joe Biden this mannequin and resurrect him.

And that's what Jim Claiborne did.

And then he

won.

And that was the only reason he was there.

And all these other people that thought, ah, I'll jump in like Mike Bloomberg or Hilley was,

they were not the solution either.

So that's how they got him.

And they're stuck with him.

And he's an albatross around their neck.

And he's not going to run.

And

that's the story.

Victor, let me ask you about, you mentioned that Jimmy Kimmel appearance.

I'll put you on the spot if you didn't watch it, but I assume you saw some of it.

Any thoughts about this?

Biden's introduced

roar from the crowd,

ask hissery questions, embarrassing, I think.

But here's a guy.

I think that whoever planned this did a real disservice to him.

because it put him in a bubble that he could only think,

yeah, hey, I'm knocking it out of the park.

Everybody loves me but what would you do if you were a biden handler say you're quit

say you're a biden any of those old democratic hacks you know what i mean and and you say okay here's the candidate here's the day that you're

you know i mean i i kind of empathetic because i had all these lectures scheduled i'm trying to do them but i had this reaction to covet and

If you go out there, you're worried you can't think and you're going to embarrass yourself.

If you don't go out there, you're canceling and disappointing people who said they wanted to go.

So, if you're president, you got to go out there.

But if you go out there, he's going to make things worse.

But if he doesn't go out there,

it's like he was on the campaign.

You can't run a presidency the way he did a campaign.

And they all knew that.

They wouldn't have put him on ice during the campaign and put him in isolation.

So, Jack, they don't have any choices.

If he goes out there

to get on the stump and say the border is secure and we've got a handle on inflation and gas prices are going down and Ukraine will not lead to a wider war and we have restored military deterrence and we're going to

stop inflation.

He's going to have to explain why or go do an interview.

And there's only so many softballs.

Jimmy Kimmel had to go to a break, remember?

Because

you can't do that on the stump.

You can't just say, oh, oh, the guy lost it this minute.

Let's go to a commercial.

And they're damned if they do and they're damned if they don't.

And so I don't know which side they'll err on.

My guess will be

they'll say, We got to go for Broke and put good old Joe Biden from Scranton out there and he'll warm people's hearts.

But he was never nice.

He was always a nasty piece of work.

And they're going to say, let's bring him back in.

It's like a lure that didn't catch any fish, roll it, reel him in quick, and then just put him in the tackle box and just, you know,

let it rust.

Pray that a fish will jump into the boat because that's where they are.

Well, Victor, another topic to happen now, I'd say around 10 days ago from when this is actually being aired, is this fight at the Washington Post.

And there's a great rundown of this by Steve Hayward at Powerline, but the story involves a tweet by a guy named Cam Harless.

Here's a joke: Every girl is bi.

You just have to figure out if it's polar or sexual.

Okay.

And that kind of bar, joke, laugh is funny.

David Weigel, a reporter for the Post, retweets that.

Uh-oh, shouldn't have done that.

He's called out.

Yep, shouldn't have done it.

Removes it.

Apologizes.

Stupid of me.

But

a colleague at the Post, Felicia Somnez,

who seems to be pretty pretentious.

And

well, anyway, she, and that guy, I gotta watch what I say.

She calls him out publicly and kind of piles on, you know, what kind of, what's it like to work with somebody with this kind of mentality, the Washington Post lambasts him.

Of course, the Post originally responds by putting Weigel on ice for a month, suspended without pay for a month, despite his apology and immediate mayoculpa.

But then they fire Somnez for all the disruption she caused, violating Washington Post employee principles, et cetera.

So, this is a

drama of the pinnacle of the media elite.

I think it's worth your thoughts on just that alone.

But I wonder, Victor, also if this particular event, and there may have been a couple of other things more recently, I don't want to say in a similar vein, but is the woke fever breaking in America?

So, Jack.

I think it is.

You've got to remember what woke is, Jack.

Although it's polluted the country, it's essentially an academic media

political enterprise.

And it's a war between rival elites.

So when you see a Joy Reed or an Al Sharpton or a Don Lemon, I don't say Lamon, and you see a Chris Cuomo or all these people, they're fighting with each other for the spoils of elitism of the left.

If you see at where I work at Sanford University, a particular professor who's associated with Antifa and he's attacking me or he's attacking Neil Ferguson or he's attacking Scott Atlas, he is doing something to enhance his position within the university community.

When you see Joshua Katz and all these people go after him at Princeton and try to outdo each other and, you know, and condemning him as he's like some scapegoat of a

tribal society, They're trying to virtue signal.

They're trying to protect their position or advance it.

That's what wokeism is.

And they do that by canceling people, deplatforming them.

But it's basically, and that's what this Washington Post is, it's about two left-wing elites who feel that either their position should be unquestionable and the rules shouldn't apply to them that they apply to others.

Dave Wiegland or whatever his name is.

He has tax everybody.

He's a voice of moral smugness.

And yet, every conservative out there, I don't think, would say women are either bipolar or bisexual.

It's not true.

I know a lot of women in my life.

I just take all the people in my family.

I had two daughters.

I had a mother with none of them were bipolar.

None of them were bisexual.

They were wonderful people.

In fact,

I am around women all the time.

I don't think I've met very many bipolar women in the sense of more than male bipolar people.

In fact, I've had bipolar people in my family and they've all been male.

And so that was just a stupid, wrong thing to say.

But he said it or he tweeted it because he thinks he's a moral paragon and he can do that because he took out woke insurance.

As far as the other person,

I think she's a Harvard graduate and she feels she isn't entitled to be kind of the cutting edge social media provocateur

and she can do whatever she wants.

And And so she's attacking people.

And it's all about who is the most woke and the most virtuous.

And as they scramble, they're sort of the way to look at it is like a bucket and they're lobsters.

And they all look alike and sound alike.

And some of them are going to get out of that bucket and crawl off the pier and go back into the water and thrive.

And some of them are just going to be slitting, you know, grabbing each other's claws.

And that's how this thing started.

And that whole diversity, equity, and inclusion industry is about certain people that want to be provost who couldn't make it the regular way so they're going to carve out a kingdom with staff and assistants and then they're going to call people racist or illiberal or colonialist or protect whatever the word is to advance their own elite trajectory this has nothing to do

with stopping 800 African Americans being slaughtered in Chicago every year, or 7,000, you know, or

not flooding a million people into Mexican-American communities from an open border, or stopping

the slaughter on our California freeways that are so unsafe.

Had nothing to do with that.

It's confined to elites that squabble and bitch and jostle in their lobster bucket.

I love the imagery there.

The lobster bucket

woke America.

That's terrific.

Hey, Victor, we're going to talk next about two pieces or series that you've written for your website.

So let me just say, there'll be the Razor's Edge series and Shrugged Off, okay?

And we're going to talk about that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

So, you know, Victor writes original content for VictorHanson.com that can only be read at VictorHanson.com.

You have to subscribe to read it.

It's $5 a month to $50 a year.

Why are you not doing if you're a regular listener to this show and why are you not subscribed?

If that I cannot fathom, but it's terrific content and it's pretty darn copious.

So as of today, Victor, we're recording on again on Sunday, June 12th.

There's the second part of a, let's talk about these pieces separately, America on the Razor's Edge.

And you lead off the second part by asking, how did it all go to hell so quickly?

How did we Sovietize the U.S.?

What caused this final expression of national insanity?

So, a lot of questions you ask.

Tell us about this America on the Razor's Edge series that you've written for Victorhanson.com.

Well, I start with the premise in this multi-essay series that we don't have a margin of error.

We have 330 million people.

We're one of the rarest multiracial societies that tries to live under constitutional government in history.

Brazil can't do it very well.

India can't do it very well.

The Romans or the Ottomans or the Soviets had to use a degree of coercion.

We're trying to do it.

And

it's very essential to keep the standard of upward mobility and consumer confidence that we produce the stuff of life, food, shelter, fuel, energy, and security.

And if you don't do that first, then you can't worry about climate change or you can't worry about transgenderism.

Those are all fluff.

But what's happened is because we were so successful and because of the globalization of the American economy, there were levels of affluence that were undreamed of.

And we created a bi-coastal elite who believe, and I wrote about this in the Dying Citizen, that they have surpassed, transcended the stuff of life.

They don't have to worry about building a reservoir or an oil refinery or a formula plant or a tampoon plant.

That's not their, that's for the stupid people to worry about.

They're the Zoom class.

And so that was part of it.

I think the George Floyd and the COVID perfect storm made for two years, people didn't see each other.

They were locked in.

They were captives of rumor and gossip and their internet and TV cable news.

That was part of it.

And then part of it was the media completely lost their mind over Donald Trump.

They never once said, Jack, I don't like this person

and I don't like him any more than Republicans didn't like barack obama but they did not try to impeach barack obama and they did not get a special prosecutor to go after barack obama and they were tough on him but they did not impeach him twice they didn't say when he left office we got to impeach that sob

and yet he lorded over the most anemic recovery in history from a recession so I get all that.

And so you put it all together, COVID, George Floyd, this bicostal global, and you get this very fragile society.

And then you got Joe Biden.

And this is one of the rare times in history, Jack, that we turned over the reins of government, House, Senate, White House, executive branch to hard leftists.

Jimmy Carter almost did it.

George McGovern wanted to do it.

Michael Dekakis wanted to do it, but they didn't.

LBJ did it for a while and destroyed the Democratic brand.

JFK was a conservative, more or less, traditional centrist or what a Harry Truman centralist kind of left, but centralist.

We haven't seen anything like the crazy people around FDR in 33, 34, 35, 36 before the war.

So that was the final thing that broke our backs, that we did this critical race theory, critical legal theory, new monetary theory, all this stuff, modern monetary theory, and we destroyed the stuff of life.

And so I'm trying to remind people that there is no border.

It's not the border is porous.

There is no border.

It isn't 8% inflation.

If you calibrated inflation the way we did in 1980, or you looked at what matters, that is billing materials or meat or eggs.

or diesel fuel or gasoline or kilowatts or the rent or house price it's not eight percent it's more like 16

right And I'm trying to suggest that we're touch and go, right on the razor's edge, unless we stop this and say, you know what, whether you're left, right, Democratic, we got to have a border.

We cannot accommodate 2 million people coming in, unvaccinated, untested, unaudited, poor, no English facilities, with a distrust and dislike of the United States and sent here deliberately as an act of Mexico's and Central American foreign policy.

We can't give 40 million to protect Ukraine's borders if we can't even protect our own.

So that's what I was talking about.

Right.

Victor, thanks.

There was another ultra piece that you've written called Shrugging at the Intolerable.

And this is the first part and means there will be several more parts coming to this.

This piece you wrote on June 10th.

So, Victor, just let me read the beginning and then you take on the one subject matter of this terrific essay.

You begin by writing, one day Americans will look back at the nightmare of the last two years: COVID, the lockdowns, the riots, 102 million mail-in ballots, Biden catastrophe, utter lawlessness, and the woke revolution, and properly understand it as one of the strangest and most dangerous periods in their modern history.

The toll will be tabulated in the millions of destroyed lives and trillions of dollars of destroyed capital.

At best, we went through a collective madness.

At worst, a now failing left-wing revolution.

If we were to periodize the disasters, I would define the chaos as starting in March 2020 with COVID and the usurpation of power by the unelected and ending, I pray, in November 2022 with the end of left-wing congressional majorities that will sidetrack Biden's neo-socialist agendas.

But what damage we suffered and what indifference to our elites expressed?

Here are three crises that the country somehow shrugged off.

You only talk about one crisis, and that's the Wuhan lab and the federal health bureaucracy.

So Victor, talk about, if you don't mind, this particular shrugging off of the Wuhan lab and give us a little taste of what the other things shrugged are coming in your ultra series.

Well, I think if I had rewritten these pieces, I wouldn't have used the word shrugged.

I don't mean that people just didn't worry about it, Jack, but I think what I'm saying is that when you're in the middle of a catastrophe, a disaster, a cataclysm, you don't have the historical perspective to see how bad it is.

So this period between March of 2020 and what I think will be November of 2022 was extraordinary.

We've never seen a period in my lifetime at 68, anything comparable to it.

And think for a second before I go to the Wuhan very quickly.

We let unelected officials say to a middle-class guy who was living in Stockton or Santa Cruz or Monterey, who had a house with a kind of a walk-in apartment in the back, you're not going to be able to collect rent from that person.

He's a victim.

And Anthony Fauci has said that this is a national emergency.

So you're not going to be able to collect rent.

Now, he's going to pay taxes on that.

And if you complain that the hot water heater is out, he will fix it, but he's not going to get any rent.

Or if you have a flower shop or a little shoe repair shop, we're going to shut you down.

We're going to have a quarantine.

But if you want to get shoes or flowers, just go over to Target or Walmart.

They're wide open.

We made that decision, even though you can watch the people who come into your store far better than the people who work for Walmart.

And so that was a surprise of power that we've never seen by these unelected,

basically unelected officials like Fauci and Collins, who then had their recommendations reified into actual law.

Or we're going to cancel this

contract that you had for $10,000 of your debt that you borrowed as a student.

Now, all you other people that we harassed you and harassed you and sent you letters, or you had a private lending agency and you paid 7%

and you passed on that new Honda Accord and you bought a thirdhand car so you could pay off, you're a sucker because you paid it off, but we're not going to care.

We're not going to give you any money back.

No, no.

So, this is what happened.

And so, I was trying to look at three things historically in this series, maybe four, because I haven't finished it.

And one was the Wuhan lab.

I mean, think about it.

We have Peter Dasick, the Echo Health, who was getting money, $600,000,

and then he was channeling it to the Wuhan lab, and it just happened to be in Wuhan.

We've never found an animal prior to the infection that had this SARS-I particular SARS virus.

And we won't,

if it was a pangolin or a bat, the Chinese government would have said, here, come in, look at our records.

It'll show you it's about, they won't let anybody look at anything.

People had disappeared who spoke out against it.

This virus mysteriously seems to be one of the most infectious viruses we've ever seen.

It seems to mutate faster than a lot of viruses, and it has a propensity to disrupt the immune system in a way that we've never quite seen.

I mean, maybe with Ebola and these serious ones, but not with a flu or a cold.

So everybody gets post-viral flu fatigue, but not this stuff.

And so it's just staggering that we allowed these people, the Chinese, the World Health Organization, Anthony Fauci, and remember that.

frenzied exchange of communications, even though much of it was redacted right after it was found out that the lab might be suspect, where they were worried that they would be blamed for subsidizing gain of function research that was essentially outlawed in the United States.

And then even worse, Jack, Dasik et al.

sort of got Lancet.

Remember, they had that investigative group to go over to China and they did that phony investigation, which even the participants have now rejected and disowned.

So why would they do that?

So when they say, well, it was a natural, if it was a natural occurrence, then Lancet would have a bipartisan group of conservatives, Democrats, everybody, and they'd go over there and they'd say to the Chinese, we're going to help you because if we find the origins and how it was done, maybe we can talk to the people who

did this or who found the bat.

And they can't do that.

So we know that basically the Chinese government, either through laxity, I'm not going to get into intent, but let's just say laxity, unleashed upon the world in general in the United States.

a virus that really destroyed life for two years and is going to destroy it.

When we talk about labor participation, right, I was talking to an electrician that comes.

He had this six months ago and he feels like he can barely work today.

And this is not just neurotic yuppies.

These are people one of five or one or six.

So I was just thinking that I'm so blessed that I can do this for a living or write for a living.

But if I had to go out, I tried to work in the yard the other day, I don't think I could make it as a landscaper, not maybe for a few, take a few more months.

But my point is, we're asking, we don't know why our labor participation is so low.

I've said it was because we're subsidizing non-productivity with COVID checks, but maybe it's also there's about five or six million people that are listening to me and they just don't feel right after supposedly getting a minor Omicron variant or a Delta, whatever it was.

So this had enormous ramifications,

and we didn't really understand, and we won't understand until this is over.

If somebody had said in January of 2020, Americans, in the next 90 days, the Chinese are going to have a virus that was manufactured.

It is going to escape mysteriously from a lab, most likely.

They are going to lie about it.

They are going to stop all travel in and out of Wuhan within China, but not to Europe or the United States.

It is going to spread.

It is going to destroy one of the most successful presidential administrations in recent memory, the Trump administration.

It is going to radically change the way we vote with mail and in early ballots.

It is going to create enormous powers for the unelected.

We are going to destroy the school system and children's education for two years.

And this is all going to happen, but we're not really going to worry about how it happened or the origins.

We're going to worry about it, but we're still not going to ever get answers about.

They would say that's incredible.

So what I'm trying to do, the same thing, I think it comes out tomorrow with with the fuel prices if we said we're right in the middle of it if we said you're paying 250 a gallon but i want to warn you we're going to enact a series of policies deliberately cancel pipelines harangue frackers harangue lender and institutions not to support horizontal drillers or whatever, cancel new federal leases, put Anwar off, Keystone, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, at a time when natural demand for fossil fuels is rising.

And we're going to kind of think it's a good idea.

We're going to use words like transitioning, we in the government, and that's going to make it almost impossible for you to run a business when you're paying double and what will probably be soon triple for fuel.

Nobody would believe it.

They'd say, well, nobody'd be that crazy.

So we're right in the middle of that as well.

And I'm going to do the border as well and just say, you know,

if you had dreamed in November, October 2020, when the border was finally solved, that 2 million people in six months are going to walk across on audited, unvaccinated, without English, impoverished, with no skills, and are going to walk into a country where the citizen has to prove until recently that they were negative before they can even re-enter their own country, unlike the 2 million foreign nationals.

And we're going to be basically waged war upon by Chinese fentanyl manufacturers, cartels, and the Mexican government.

No one would believe it.

No one would believe it.

Are we going to have the Biden administration nullify federal law?

Are they going to, in the dead of night, put illegal aliens on planes and drop them in communities and not do it in broad daylight because there'd be national outrage?

And we're going to have 550 sanctuary cities and counties where federal law is nullified in the manner of South Carolina of 1832.

That's where we are.

But we're in the middle of it.

So we shrug.

What are we going to do?

But that's where we are.

These are historical transformations.

I mean, I could go on with inflation in Afghanistan.

Maybe I should just say: did anybody ever believe that the United States military would just up and run away and leave their NATO allies who they begged to come and join them in Afghanistan?

Would they ever believe they would spend nearly $400 million improving the largest airbase in Central Asia and just give it up?

Do they ever believe that at the moment they turned over

70 to 80 billion billion dollars in military hardware, equipment, and services to transportation, et cetera, to a terrorist organization, more than the aggregate amount of money that they've given Israel probably in 50 years?

Right.

Ever believe that why they were flying pride flags on the U.S.

Embassy or painting George Floyd Maria

right in the middle of a traditional Muslim society or inaugurating and perpetuating gender studies in Kabul University when they needed technology courses, engineering, math, etc.

Did anybody ever believe we'd do that?

And yet we did it.

And then when right in the middle of it, we killed people and say that was a righteous strike.

Or we lied about that.

Or we said, you know what, at least this was a logistical success, i.e.

the flight.

Or we said, don't worry, these Afghans that are coming into the United States will be met with traditional correct food

when they land.

This is insane.

And I, you know, so, but we're in the middle of it.

So we shrug and say, kind of, you know, the black plague is normal or,

you know, this war is normal.

But I don't know.

Yeah, I get very upset.

I mean, I was in a very contentious Goodfellows

podcast in which one of the interlocutors and I got into it.

I was kind of calm, but I wanted to see what he was saying.

He was essentially saying it's okay to send the Ukrainians shore to ship missiles with ranges up to 75 or 80 miles that would be able to destroy the Russian Black Fleet as ships left their ports, and that that was something that we should do.

This is a nuclear power who's engaged in the first war in history on the European continent, which a nuclear power is engaged directly.

So these are very rare times.

I think everybody's got to have some historical perspective and say, this got to stop.

It has to stop because it's destroying civilization.

And we're going to find the answers and find the remedies because we're not lost yet.

And Victor, you know, with the Afghanistan withdrawal, when that was happening, and even, you remember, even MSNBC was like, oh my God, the first few days, this is a poop show.

Heads are going to roll.

No heads have rolled.

Heads don't roll anymore.

The only head that rolled in Afghanistan was that Marine colonel who, you know, bitched rightly about the dishonor brought by the withdrawal.

But there's just no,

no one pays a price for

their role in these massive calamities.

Anyway, that's two cents for me.

And speaking of such, we're going to talk about communism and its calamity and its getting off to some degree scot-free

right after these important messages.

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Back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show recording on Sunday the 12th.

Hey, if you're interested in the things I do, and I hope a few of you are, why don't you subscribe to Civil Thoughts?

That's the weekly email newsletter I write for the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic.

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You should be visiting victorhanson.com, subscribe, five bucks a month, fifty dollars for the full year, and that entitles you to read these pieces like the shrugging, razor's edge, and many other things that Victor writes exclusively for that site.

So, Victor, I would like to just bounce off a little bit an event that happened earlier this week in Washington, the week that we're recording, and that's the museum open, the Victims of Communism Museum.

And this has been a 35-year effort led by Lee Edwards, who is a scholar, historian, scholar at the Heritage Foundation.

And

Lee's not a young man.

I think he wrote an article for National Review in 1957, but he has dedication.

And this effort began 1993, I believe.

The organization, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, actually created a memorial.

It's near Capitol Hill in Washington, but that eventually led to this museum.

Folks can Google, obviously, or check out whatever search engine you prefer, Victims of Communism Museum, and find out more about it.

But I like to bring it up in this context that, of course, it happened, it's happened, but you know, why did it happen?

And because of Lee and other people thought there is a naivety, there is a somulence or something about communism and what it has done.

Now, whatever we culturally think and vilify Nazism

is totally correct.

But damn, the Soviets and the satellite states, the folks behind the Iron Curtain, no one ever really paid a price for the terror and bloodshed and depravity that they inflicted on hundreds of millions of people.

Of course, we still have that going on in Red China right now.

So anyway, Victor, I'm just curious, why did communism

historically get such a pass from our cultural mavens?

Well, we've got to start with the data.

So the greatest mass murder in the history of civilization, as far as we can tell, I mean, there were people like Tamerlane and et cetera, the Mongol.

was, but in modern period that we have data was Mao Zedong.

He probably enacted policies in the Cultural Revolution and during the revolution that led to the death of 60 to 70 million Chinese through starvation, execution.

The second largest killer in the history of civilization was probably Joseph Stalin.

Whether we count the millions that died under the collectivization of the farms, a great famine, or the liquidation of political enemies, or the sending people through the system out to Siberia, or the show trials, or the destruction of the Soviet military or the incompetent June 41 to June 42, incompetent, deliberate military blunders that got millions of people killed was Joseph Stalin and Soviet communism.

And then we go to the third great mass murder was Adolf Hitler.

So your question is, well, we rightly condemn this madman, creepy Hitler, but we don't apply the same standards to the greater killers.

So we have to have an explanation.

Now, what is that?

One,

when people kill and murder, whether it's Pol Pot or whoever, for the principle of equity, i.e., we're all doing this for the peasants, we're not just doing this for the Aryan race like Hitler, then we give them a pass.

The body count does not matter because we feel that their intentions way, way down the line in some obscure way, were good.

That's a false, that's crazy.

They did it for power and their own narcissistic group of advisors and the clique, the nomenclature, et cetera.

But that's one reason why we don't apply the same standard.

The second,

there's kind of a Eurocentric bias that Hitler was a product of Western civilization.

Germany was in the West.

So we feel we know better.

And yet this horrible aberration, this monstrosity occurred right within Europe.

So Europe has to deal with this.

On the other side, we have this condescending view.

Well, that's what the Chinese do, or that's what the Russians do.

But this was Europe and they applied a scientific,

horrific manner of killing people in industrial fashion.

And so that's another reason why we focus rightly on the Nazis, but often to the neglect of greater mass murderers.

And that's important too.

And then third,

we feel that we could stop it.

In other words, there was an ability to stop Nazi Germany, or we we could have allowed more Jewish refugees to escape Nazi Germany, or we could have bombed Auschwitz.

But nobody believes in 1947 or 48 that we really knew what was going on.

We tried to back Shang Kai-shek, or in the 60s, there was no way we were going to go into Red China.

And, you know, we'd fought them in the Korean War and killed a million Chinese, but...

we were not going to do that.

And Stalin, who helped cause World War II, remember World War II was caused by European and British appeasement of Hitler and American isolation and non-engagement, but most importantly, collaboration with Joseph Stalin that empowered them under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

But there was a sense that Russia is stopping Germany.

So therefore, if you look at those propaganda films that Hollywood put out, they were pro-Stalin all during the 40s.

They didn't stop till 46 or 47.

So there were a lot of reasons that prevent us from doing that and taking a hard look at what these communist monsters have done through history.

But I don't think it's necessarily a good comparison.

We're right on in condemning Hitler, and we should condemn ourselves that we could have stopped him earlier.

We should have bombed Auschwitz when we had the ability.

We should have let Jews in the United States, no doubt about it.

But

we should have had a much tougher attitude toward communism.

We could have helped the Soviet Union without glorifying Stalin in World War II.

We could have isolated ourselves more from from china when i went to uc santa cruz jack in 1971 the first thing my father said is said oh my god that guy just walked by with a mao hat on with a star of beret

and i said look at the poster dad in the hallway and it was a picture of mao he said he's a mass murderer i know it

so We glorified it, and there was no excuse for that.

And we always do that with the left.

We always contextualize their sins because their sins, they say, committed on behalf of the other, whereas the right commits sins on behalf of the few.

It's not true, but that's what we're told.

Well, Victor, my friend, we've got just like three or four minutes left.

And I'd like to just briefly take this on.

I saw this piece on Powerline today.

It's by John Hendraker.

It's called A Heartwarming Headline.

It says, it comes from the UK via the London Times: quote: Ministers quietly abandon, quote-unquote, green crap as focus shifts to food security.

The threat of starvation, like the prospect of hanging, concentrates the mind.

This is what John wrote.

And what turns out is that Boris Johnson, who just survived, barely survived, a confidentiality vote by members of the Tory Party, had plans to take an enormous amount of farmland, food-producing farmland, out of production and turning this land back into some forest primeval or other

insanity.

Just how Boris Johnson, who people here consider a quote-unquote conservative, could be engaged in this kind of policy is

nuts.

But anyway, they backtrack because, well, Ukraine, where's the food coming from the Ukraine?

But still, the fact that there was some plan to take farmland out of production permanently, I find shocking.

And I thought farmer Hansen,

you may have some thoughts on this weirdo scheme and Johnson himself, if you feel like it.

I don't think people who have never farmed, I'm looking out the window at almonds right now, and they're $1.53 a pound, so they're below the cost of production and they're coming out.

And yet...

For all the criticism of almonds, they make butter and they make almond oil and they,

you know, almond everything.

It's not just eating almonds.

It's a substitute protein for a lot of things.

So it's very valuable.

And yet, I mean, it serves a world need and yet they're not going to get to port.

And if they got to port, they're not going to get out of LA.

Are there people going to pull them out and say, why should I irrigate them below the market price?

So what I'm getting at is farming is never certain.

I think in the 20 years or so that I was both actively and part-time farming, I lost maybe eight or nine crops.

Hail wiped out a plum orchard four days before picking.

Rain destroyed two entire raisin crops, just rotted them on the tray.

A frost took out entire table grape.

And this happened to everybody.

And so the idea was, Jack, in farming, because of market uncertainty, financial uncertainty, weather uncertainty, labor uncertainty, you always have additional reserve acreage.

You take away that acreage, and what we're doing in the United States by cutting off water to farms is what the British were doing with their wild wetlands and return to nature stuff.

Then you have no margin of error.

Farming is like a large baby formula factory.

If you don't have anything that's vital to live one more day, if you cut off food, you can't live another day.

You'll have riots within.

two months.

So you've got to cherish farming.

But when you make it sound as if it's on autopilot, and who did that?

Michael Bloomberg.

Remember, Jack?

Just drop a little seed in the ground.

It takes no intelligence and up pops the thing.

If you put Michael Bloomberg out here, he wouldn't know what to do.

Nobody around him would know what to do, but he does like his food delivered to him every single day.

And so that's what I'm worried about this affluent post-Western, post-modern Western society, that it takes for granted the stuff of life.

And it's always a gamble.

So you always need more oil and gas.

You always need six or seven power generators that can be brought online.

And you need another nuclear reactor just in case.

You need another 2 million acres of farmland that you can bring in and out of production.

You need more reservoirs than you need.

If you don't, you get to this critical fashion that we're in now, this critical landscape where we don't have formula, we don't have tampoons, we don't have food.

Mentioned,

I saw a guy that looked at meat the other day, and he thought it was a petting zoo, sort of.

He wanted to go look at it and touch it, I think, because he couldn't afford it.

It was such a rare sight to see a big fat rib steak or tri-tip that was beyond his purchase, but just the very sight made his mouth water.

And so that is the reality now.

And people got to remember that it's the same thing with the coronavirus.

It didn't take long for a national lockdown to make this country into escape from New York or escape from LA.

Absolute chaos.

Nobody thought Chaz would go take over downtown.

That whole area would be a takeover of downtown Seattle.

And so we got to get back to the idea that life is very fragile.

And the more sophisticated and complex and Mycenaean

or pyramidal a society becomes, the more Aztec it becomes, the more it's subject to a systems collapse because you don't have expertise disseminated over a large number of people.

You take away diesel fuel.

There's very few people that know how to hitch up a horse and plow to get by for a year.

You take away farmers.

There's not a lot of people that are farming today that know how to raise pigs and chickens.

And somehow we denigrated those people and we denigrated the people who build things and pump things.

And we need to do this.

We need to take that whole woke class and say to them, I think we can live another month without your gender studies course at the university.

I think we can live without your political consultantship.

I think we can live a little bit longer without your Facebook monstrosity.

I think we can live a little bit longer without your Sunday morning.

show,

but we cannot live without a carpenter, without a plumber, without an electrician, without a farmer, without a semi-driver.

These are the noble people.

These are the people who work out there when they're sick.

These are the people who work out there when they're going broke they keep doing it and we've got to really reevaluate a lot of people said how could you ever support trump giving us tweets i always would say he said our truckers our farmers he had an empathy i don't know where it came from but anybody who shows an empathy for the muscular classes has to earn our support so what they're doing in england is they had this lunatic left-wing idea that they had passed they were at the end of history and we're going to make it marry-o-england like shakespearean times.

You know what?

It doesn't matter.

We have 60 million plus people.

It's going to be a wonderful old time.

We're going to walk out in the meadows and we're going to see wildflowers and birds come by.

And then we're going to go stop at a little bed and breakfast and get a big, hearty English breakfast.

That's what they thought.

And they thought, wow, who are the guys farming?

I've never met a farmer.

That's what they said.

But Boris Johnson, the so-called conservative prime minister,

fell for this stuff or advocates it or promotes it, who came to power on the basis of his opposition to the EU and a champion of Brexit is really iffy.

You know what I mean?

He better be very careful because he's going to destroy his conservative support.

I kind of like him because he can recite the Odyssey, the first lines in Greek, and he was a classics major, but he's going to have a Leo Amory moment very soon.

Leo Amory was a guy, as I recall, just thought of him again.

He was kind of an undistinguished member of parliament in the late 30s, but he was a brilliant guy.

He had a very tragic life because his son became a pro-Hitler apologist.

And he was a very distinguished family.

And his son was hanged after the war.

And his father supported, I mean, he didn't object to it because he was a pro-Hitler mouthpiece.

But my point is this, that he had, he was viceroy, I think, of India during the war, but he had a knack for the moment.

And when Chamberlain, when you had that in 1939, when they had to go to war, a member of parliament said,

and speaking for labor, and he just out of nowhere, he shout up and said, speak for England, speak for England.

And that just shattered the Chamberlain mystique.

And then later, when things got really bad, the invasion of France, and Chamberlain started to

he got up again and he quoted Oliver Crama.

Right.

He said, we've had enough of you, be gone, be done with you, out.

And it destroyed Chamberlain.

So, there's going to be a Leo Amory moment somewhere with Boris Johnson.

He's not, if he keeps doing this, somebody's going to say, You know what?

Because you get those rumors in the story you're referring to.

I think it was in multiple outlets where people said the green crap, enough of the green crap.

Somebody's going to get up in one of those, you know, ministerial reports to the House of Commons and say, Enough of you, be done with you, or

enough of this, or speak for all of us, speak for the people who are hungry, speak for the people who need food, not for this little clique that you associate with.

I'm welcoming that happen.

That was what was so wonderful about the collapse of the appeasers that people around Churchill got, you know, Anthony Eden or Leo Amory or General Smuts, all these people.

He had a brilliant group of people.

and they said, enough of this.

We be done with you.

And that was it.

And then they went to war against Hitler in a really serious fashion.

And that's what we need to do.

We need to say, you know what?

Enough of this woke stuff.

Enough of it.

You're destroying the fabric of our life.

We'll be done with you.

Go back to the faculty lounge where you came from.

Go back to the media cut room where you belong.

Go back to the political consultantship.

We're done with you.

We're going to get on with America.

We're going to produce food we're going to produce oil we're going to produce gas we're going to make our streets safe we're going to honor the policeman we're going to honor the firemen we're going to honor the truck driver we're going to honor the uber driver we're sick of you and i think that's coming

it's going to be explosive because all you need is one leo amory and i think we're going to have somebody like that yeah that has i think i'm i think i'm talking to him by the way

you're talking to a guy who couldn't get over a simple little cold

yeah it wasn't it wasn't a simple little little cult yeah all right anyway we've got to wrap this up so uh i do want to thank our listeners who particularly those who listen via apple podcast and go to the function where you're allowed to rate the show most people leave five stars we thank you for that and some leave comments and we listen to the comments or we read the comments we listen what you're saying and here's one go-to podcast this is by someone who signs it as dutch Rolls.

Victor has a common sense approach that seems to just come natural to him.

The description of everyday experiences that I can relate to are just plain fun.

His blend of current affairs and history is his forte that never disappoints as a military veteran.

I always look forward to his military history descriptions with the details only he can apply to the analysis.

of world history.

That said, by the way, Victor, it may be a little late.

This is coming out on Thursday the 16th.

But you know what?

If you know someone to our listeners who really thrives on military history, there's probably still time to go to Victor's website, find the book section, click on the link for the Second World Wars, which is one of several books you've written about military history, and order it for that.

special someone in your life.

Father's Day is coming up.

So maybe it might make a nice gift for a father that you know.

Anyway, thanks to our listeners, Victor.

Thanks again again for the great amount of wisdom.

And thank you, Jack.

And you mentioned World War II.

I should have mentioned one of my favorite Churchill advisors was Duff Cooper.

He was great.

And he was the father of First Count, Viscount Norwich, whom I met once.

He was a brilliant historian of Venice and Constantinople.

So what a group of brilliant English people and advisors there were in 1939 to 40.

And by God, we need people like them right now.

And with that, thank everybody for listening.

It's very, very, very deeply appreciated.