Systems Collapse

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Welcome to the listeners of the Victor Davis Davis-Hansen Show.

This is the weekend edition where we sometimes like to do a little bit different, something a little bit different.

And it usually is historical.

And so we have something special prepared for you on the issue of systems collapse.

And Victor wrote an article for the EPUC Times and concluded with this, just to give you a little hook.

Who will stop our descent into collective poverty, division, and self-inflicted madness.

So come on back to the show after a word from our sponsor and we're going to discuss this topic and its historical legacy as well.

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Welcome back.

And Victor, can I ask you how you're doing today?

Is the weather good?

How are things going?

Very good.

I'm very worried because after a very wet December, almost record levels of snowfall, it's now into late January.

We have not had one drop of rain or snow since late December.

And the snow is melting, the ground is dry.

We need three or four big storms or we're going to be in trouble.

Yeah.

So we'll all put it in our prayers and thoughts that we get some more stormy weather in California.

I would like to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin and Ily Anderson, Senior Fellow in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

So our topic today is system collapse and I just wanted to go through some of the statistics on what might be considered part of system collapse to remind the audience and then we'll turn it over to you.

But immigration has illegal immigration has neared 2 million in 2021.

Train robberies in LA County have hit 90 containers per day, which is incredible.

FedEx and UPS are in fact trying to route to avoid LA County.

Murder rate, as everybody knows, has gone up a lot, but the general statistic is about 13% with 836 homicides in Chicago.

521 Philadelphia by early December, 443 in New York in early December, and then LA County had 352 in early December.

Our inflation rate seems to be going sky high.

The official rate is 7%, but anybody who's been buying gas or meat at the grocery stores and other items knows that that 7% seems a little bit low to all of us.

The unemployment rate is officially at 3.9%, but again, as we all know, COVID has put a lot of people out of the job market entirely.

And also, supply chain has been disrupted.

And most of us know that at the ports in LA and other big ports in the United States, that containers can't be unloaded.

And we've got lots of ships waiting outside.

Government corruption is probably one of the biggest things that we've been noting throughout the COVID crisis, the weaponizing of COVID, the IRS, the FBI, the CIA.

So I know, Victor, you've talked about a lot of these things.

And you've referenced in your recent Epoch Times article that these are all indications of systems collapse.

And so I'd like to hear you talk about that.

And we'd like to also then look at the historical precedents for systems collapse.

I wrote a syndicated column, the Epoch Times picked it up.

It goes out to 40 newspapers.

But the gist of it was that 2021 was not just, you know, the usual yin and yang of politics that each Democratic-Republican party in power is criticized by its antithesis.

What I was trying to say was that something is different this time, that the very stuff of life,

and you enumerated them, Sammy, is in jeopardy.

We're having 1890s out west robbery on the train tracks.

We're having 1970s crime in the cities.

We're having 1960s

refutation of the law, that people are just walking out with stuff.

They don't follow the law.

They don't expect to be prosecuted for not following the law.

We're back foreign policy-wise to 1975 with helicopters, you know, leaving the Vietnam Embassy, and which led to a whole decade of terrorism abroad, invasions, and mayhem.

And you were right about the Consumer Price Index.

It doesn't formally list gasoline, which has doubled in some states, or things like food and meat has gone up 40%.

And so I know that the other indicators are important, but there's nothing more important in the stuff of life.

It doesn't include housing either.

So housing, food, transportation have gone way up, maybe 9, 10, 12, or even higher.

And so what I'm getting at is something happened.

And what is that happened?

Why did Venezuela, who has the largest oil reserves in the world, suddenly under Yugoslave just implode?

Why did we see something like England, Great Britain, around 1973 to 76 in the pre-Thatcher days, go to a three-day work week or have blackouts or

its GDP fell radically, its unemployment went up?

Was it nationalization of industries?

Was it the final wage of unionization?

Was it the attack on meritocracy?

What was it?

Why did Greece, let's say to take one more example, following the financial meltdown in 2008, from 2009 to 2016, and I visited there quite regularly, it became almost a third world country in the sense that the the everyday assumptions of a modern European post-Western society were shattered.

You could not find Advil in a pharmacy.

If you needed to be operated, you could not get drugs, anesthesia.

It was more like being in Libya than Athens.

So what happens?

All the elements for Roman civilization to continue on for a thousand years were present in the 470s, and yet it imploded.

The Byzantium corollary went on for another thousand years.

So what happened in the Western world and what makes societies all of a sudden not work?

And when you look at them historically, it's kind of scary when you apply those lessons to here, because one chief element is the law is either not followed, can't be followed, the police don't arrest people, they can't arrest people, prosecutors, attorneys do not indict them.

If they do indict them, they can't convict them.

If they do convict them, they let them out early.

They don't incarcerate them.

But there is no longer a deterrence, whatever the cause for the law.

And you are seeing that right now.

When you look at the murder of the poor woman on the subway in New York, you look at the poor nurse that was murdered at a bus stop in Los Angeles.

If you look at the graduate student who was murdered in a kind of a high-end furniture store in a relatively safe neighborhood in Los Angeles, they have one common denominator.

The people who did that were out on parole or they were not prosecuted.

In the way that the mass murder at Waukesha had also rammed his car and had been let out, we could go on and on about this, but

this profile of a big city district attorney funded by George Soros, who believes in critical legal theory that laws are constructs and it's the DA's prerogative to act as legislator and overturn laws that have been approved by the people

is dangerous.

Another thing is that There's a loss of expertise and it's cumulative, but it appears abruptly.

And by that I mean when you ideologically pervert the universities or you destroy meritocracy from K through 12, you begin to pull out, turn out people that lack the basics of reading and writing.

It was struck in the Trayvon Martin trial.

You remember his girlfriends couldn't read and said she'd never had learned to read cursive, couldn't read it.

She was, I think, a high school graduate.

And when you're starting to see engineering and math and science PhD programs following the woke model, that they're looking at equity and diversion inclusion rather than just merit.

And what I'm getting at is that you get the impression that stuff is no longer reliable.

You get in a plane and you're not sure it's going to go to the destination.

Either there's going to be not enough well people to pilot it or to staff it, or as I mentioned before, I think three flights I got into a flight and there was no fuel.

It only happened to me twice, once in Mexico and once in Egypt.

And yet we we had to go in the wrong direction to go find fuel in San Francisco to head to Dallas.

And on the way back, we had to stop, I think it was from Chicago to Fresno, we had to stop in the middle of the night to Denver to find enough fuel for the next morning's flight.

So when that happens, and you're starting to see it right now, if you want to go to an emergency room for COVID, or you have a surgery that's scheduled,

or you see people who go into a store and they take things and they walk out out and smile and no one says a word when they shoplift.

And so the rule of laws, once it's ignored and once we revert to tribalism, that is each particular group has to self-police or find its own security.

And usually it's at war with another group and we are re-tribalizing, then this fabric can unwind very quickly.

There's nothing in history, there's nothing.

in our future that says, you are blessed, you Americans, and you will always have an America that's law-abiding, prosperous, secure, fair, equitable.

It doesn't exist,

it depends on each generation's inheritance from the prior and its commitment to pass on something better to the next generation.

And we're not doing that.

Everybody knows it, no one can say a word.

And so, this column was trying to suggest that historically, we're starting to emulate some of these societies, ancient and modern, that imploded.

And out of nowhere, for no reason, they simply don't work.

And had we gone to Venezuela in 1995 rather than in 2021 or two, it would have been a very different country.

And that's just the way it is.

Greece in 2006 was a very prosperous place in a way that it wasn't in 2010.

So progress is never linear historically.

It's cyclical.

And you know, they say that about Afghanistan too, that in the 1940s and 50s, it was the cities were being built up.

It had a lot of Western aspects to it.

But today, you go, you know, well, at least you look at it and you see everything seems to be blown apart in Afghanistan.

I mean, I know they were rebuilding it to some extent while they kept the Taliban out.

We'll see what happens to the new Taliban in.

I don't know.

Yeah, I mean,

I've mentioned this before, maybe not on a podcast, but I think a person objected to what I said.

But if it was 1945 and you looked at Detroit and looked at Hiroshima, you would have found that Hiroshima had just been nuked.

80,000 people had been killed.

There was radiation damage.

Its central core was wiped out.

And Detroit,

you could make the argument had the highest per capita GDP of any large municipality.

It was gaining in population.

The General Motors headquarters and the automotive Consortia were sponsoring some of the best opera symphony in the United States.

It was one of the safest places to be.

And if you looked at it today,

you would have said that Detroit must have been nuked because grass is growing, they're destroying abandoned buildings, it's not safe.

It's much better than it was 10 years ago.

But nonetheless, if you looked at Hiroshima, you would have thought, well, that was Detroit 1945.

And Detroit is Hiroshima, 1945.

What men and women do can be more fatal to a civilization than a nuclear weapon.

That's what I'm trying to tell you.

Yeah.

Can I ask you something about, you've been referencing the 1970s.

So perhaps you're expecting that there'll be a Ronald Reagan or a Margaret Thatcher that will correct this system collapse or be a response to in our future.

Is that I'm trying to be optimistic.

I think there is.

I think.

If you look at Rome, if you looked at the Julio Claudians, and by that I mean the successors to Augustus, not the bad, just the bad Tiberius and the so-so Claudius, but when you start looking at Caligula and you start looking at Nero and the year of the four emperors, it was pretty bleak.

And then all of a sudden you get Vespasian

and you get Titus and then you've

you're on to pretty soon, not too far away from Antonius Pius, Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius.

And you've got 100 years of the best period in civilization, according to Edward Gibbon.

And we had that cycle of renewal in the late 2nd and mid fourth century.

And if anybody looked at Byzantium in five

15, they would have been very worried.

If you looked at it at 540, you'd say, wow.

This crazy Justinian's got a codified law code that's accessible to everybody.

Now it makes sense.

And there are no more factions like the blues and the greens and

whites and et cetera.

And wow, we've got Hagia Sophia, the largest church in the world, the largest building in the world.

And we have Belisaros, who's reconquered half of the lost Roman Empire.

And it would go on for 900 years.

Nobody would have anticipated that.

So yeah, we know, I mean, Donald Trump, who was widely despised for a variety of reasons.

But one thing I think everybody admits, that if you look at the data that you just quoted at the beginning today and said, was inflation lower his first year, second year, or Biden's first and second year?

Was crime on the rise or was it going down?

Was Afghanistan in better shape or worse shape?

Was U.S.

deterrence better or in worse shape?

Was gasoline and natural gas prices more affordable then or now?

You can go down and whatever your ideology is or your feelings about he was successful.

was the border more secure in 2020 or in 2021?

And so there's a pattern there that people can emulate and say, you know what?

You cannot print money.

Inflation destroys a society.

It helped destroy Rome.

Can't do it.

Everybody agrees on that.

You've got to, if you have oil and gas, you have to use that to transition to expensive alternate fuels.

You have to have deterrence, both at home with the police and abroad with the military.

If you don't, bad actors come out of the woodwork to destroy civilization.

It's that easy.

Everybody knows it.

What we're witnessing is an ideological movement, the woke movement, that's not grounded in reality and has no pretensions that it's grounded in human nature.

It's a top-down revolutionary movement like the Jacobins or the Maoists or the Bolsheviks that wants to remake society contrary to human nature.

And to do that, it requires a lot of coercion.

And we know what that coercion is.

It can be statue toppling, it can be blacklisting, it can be cancel culture, it can be doxing, it can be ostracism, it can be Trotskyization, but they have the mechanisms to enforce something that no one supports and is scared to say so.

And that's where we are.

But it will crumble.

The question is: how much damage will it do before it does?

We're starting to see cracks in the woke facade.

It would just take somebody that's brave enough with a sledgehammer to hit it one more time and shatter it because it's, it's, remember this, Sammy, it's not a kind creed.

It's a cruel creed.

Wokeism says if you're a young Asian student or you're a poor white student in Kentucky that you've got straight A's and you work so hard, even though your parents never went to college, and even though nobody in your family is connected or wealthy, we're not going to let you into Stanford.

We're not going to let you into Harvard because we're going to let people with a different color we think are more deserving because you're culpable.

If you're Asian, you're culpable because you guys study too hard.

If you're white, it's because we have more pressing white people that are wealthier and more connected, not with better test scores necessarily, not with better grades, but we're going to destroy your aspirations.

If you're an elderly, you know, sick person with three cold morbidities and you happen to be white and you go into a clinic in New York, we're going to say, now, wait a minute, we're not going to give you monoclonal antibodies or this new Pfizer drug because you're of the wrong you.

Or we're going to tell somebody, you know what?

If you go to a shopping center

or you are on a subway, you better be careful because we don't believe that we're going to punish criminals and we're letting them out and they may prey on you and we don't really care about you.

If you're a bystander in Waukesha and you get run over, that's your problem.

But we're more interested in Mr.

Brooks and we want to make sure that he didn't suffer any ill treatment for all the crimes he's committed.

And that's what wokeism is.

It's very cruel.

And I think we've made a big mistake by suggesting that's just an ideology.

It is a mean-spirited, unkind assault on human nature.

And it has collateral damage and it doesn't give a damn about.

Can I add to that that it's very deep in our government institutions, however?

And so I'm wondering about that.

Like if you go to look at any of the institutions, let's say community college, for example, and you go look at California community colleges and those people that head it, and all the rhetoric and training and everything that they do at the state level is geared for this diversity, equity, and anti-racism agenda without exception.

So it is deep in the government institutions.

I imagine in FBI, CIA, all those institutions that replicate that same

depth of infiltration of woke ideology.

And I'm wondering, what do you foresee with that?

Well, we already, we have the answer to that.

Think what it did.

It ruined them.

It wrecked them.

So what can the diversity, equity, inclusion movement show us for the last two years?

Did they stop the murder rate when we had 50% of commercials with African Americans?

Did that encourage people and give them a sense of belonging?

So there wouldn't be 800 people murdered last year in Chicago.

Did the producers who engineered that disproportionate representation, were they doing it because they were worried about 800 people being murdered in Chicago?

Did they go to Chicago?

Did they have answers?

No.

This was an elite.

top-down movement for elites, for the Opras of the world, for the Whoopi Goldbergs of the world, for the Obamas of the world, for the George Soar, all of those people, all different races.

So they haven't shown us what they have done in a positive fashion.

I can tell you what they have done in a negative fashion.

Let's look at all of the once distinguished federal health agencies, the Center for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

They have no credibility.

They were not able to honestly deal with China because they thought

that would be contrary to woke tenets that you don't make fun of Chinese because that's racist, even if they're communist and they apparently were so lax that a virus leaked and has killed 850,000 Americans.

You still don't mention their culpability.

Or they were the ones that suggested that being non-white was a comorbidity and therefore we had to have good racism to correct bad races.

Or the health professionals said, you cannot go out in May of 2020.

This is a deadly epidemic.

You have to wear a mask.

You stay home.

You social distance.

However, if you want to flood the streets and go in protest and confront the police and burn, well, we're going to let you do it.

That's what it did.

And that's what it did to the health agency.

Look at the FBI.

Does anybody believe in the FBI anymore?

I mean, James Comey,

after saying he couldn't remember for 245 times while under oath anything about the Steele dossier, pretty much lied under oath.

Andrew McCabe, we know, lied under oath to federal investigators.

The FBI reflects that culture now.

They go down to Texas and we're told the first day that they heroically rescued the hostages and this had nothing to do with anti-Semitism and anti-Jewishness, this Pakistani terrorist.

And then it trickles out that, in fact, it does have a lot lot of reason to do with it.

Why do you think they didn't attack a Baptist church or a Catholic church?

Why did they go after a synagogue that represents about half of 1% of the population of Texas?

As radical Islamists have a long record of being anti-Semitic.

And why didn't we learn on day one, hour one, that the rabbi himself threw a chair at the terrorists and he engineered the escape?

Because that agency has no credibility now because of these woke ideas and its weaponization.

Same thing with the CIA, John Brennan CIA, who also lied under oath.

Same thing with the NSA, James Clappert, who also lied under oath.

Same thing with all of these, the Pentagon.

They all got away with it, right?

They did.

Well, that's the point, but they ruined their institutions.

So what I'm getting at is what was the most revered institution in America was the U.S.

military until about three years ago.

So there was a recent poll by the Reagan Library.

Do you have confidence in the U.S.

military?

45%.

That's less than half Americans trust their own military.

Now, why is that?

I can tell you why it is.

Because Mark Milley gets up in front of the country and says he's hunting out white rage and he recommends that we read this Marxist track by Professor Kendi.

And then Lloyd Olson said he's going through the ranks.

And people in the country are saying, but

just because you have a tattoo or you voted voted for Donald Trump doesn't make you're a white supremacist.

And you know what?

My family has five generations are saying on the front lines, and the people you are slandering, so-called young white males, are dying at twice their proportions in the general population, disproportionately, to use their word, in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And then when we hear about the whole transgendered issue and all of this foisted and are going after people

who are not vaccinated as if it's some religious jihad,

Again, I've been vaccinated twice and have antibodies from COVID, so

I'm not trying to undermine vaccinations as a way to stop the worst effects of COVID.

But my God, when somebody in the military has had COVID and has antibodies and chooses not to get a vaccination, he is going to be drummed out, supposedly, under this mandate.

And somebody walking in from Guatemala who may have COVID, but will never be tested and never be vaccinated and is doing this illegally won't.

That's woke and it's destroyed the reputation.

And I'm not even going to get into, because I beat that horse to death, but all of those retired military officers who violated the code of military, uniform code of military justice, Article 88, when they called their commander-in-chief everything from a virtual Nazi to Mussolini to a liar who should be removed sooner or later.

So they've destroyed that reputation.

At least 45%,

if you call that a reputation that's what we have now but what i'm thinking is that those guys came up to the top of their institutions on the foundation that was built on a lot of the things that become woke and so the ordinary agent is still besought with trying to prove you know that they are diverse in their hiring of their underlings and that they are equitable and that rhetoric continues so this is why these leaders felt that they could get out there and pursue this woke agenda without

any sort of paying for the consequences of it.

Absolutely.

And so when is it?

My question is just when is the foundation

when that's the point of this, when it has, when we reach systems collapse.

What is the systems collapse in the military?

It's called Afghanistan.

When the entire U.S.

military gives up a $1 billion embassy, a $300 million

refit of Baglam Air Force Base, and hands over anywhere from $50 to $80 billion

in weaponry and expertise to use that weaponry to the world's most prominent terrorist group, the Taliban, one of them, who will shop that stuff around to Al-Qaeda, ISA, everybody, Iran.

That is a systems collapse.

And that means that the people in charge were promoted for various reasons other than military efficacy.

And I'm I'm going back to when they were majors, lieutenant colonels, colonels, they said something like the following.

I achieve diversity, inclusion, or race, class, and gender quotas in my battalion, brigade, etc.

And they were never asked, did your artillery unit put 99% of the shells on the target?

Did your wing command, your carrier air group, did they have very few missed first tries on landing?

Those were not questions that were preeminent.

And they didn't ask generals, what is your strategic view?

Let me read a paper you wrote that you have a solution to Iraq.

You don't know how to deter Putin.

They didn't use that criteria.

And the result is you get Afghanistan.

They didn't use that criteria in the federal health agencies.

And the result is wear a mask.

Don't wear a mask.

Wear two masks.

Vaccinations are ironclad.

Don't worry about the guy not vaccinated.

You get a booster.

maybe get a fourth booster.

Oh, they sort of stopped serious

illnesses, but oh, herd immunity is 60, 50, 70, 80, 90, 20.

I don't know, but I'm just going to throw stuff out there because their interest and their priorities are on other issues.

It's kind of like when you look at the Soviet system in war and peace.

And when they started to promote generals on the basis of their Marxist-Leninist ideology and loyalists to Stalin and the Kremlin,

there was a reason why they didn't perform.

And when they stopped that in extremist, and Stalin did stop it for two years, and you had people like Zhukov come out, right, and others, then they started to do well.

But they went right back to it after the existential threat from the Nazis was over.

And they never really performed well after that.

And their society did not perform well.

And just like Cuba and Castro,

the Castro regime and Maduro and Chavez.

Anytime you put ideological criteria out there as the arbiter of excellence, you have a rendezvous with systems collapse.

Yeah, and you know, you just mentioned the Soviet Union, I was thinking, yeah, you're right, 1989 and the whole 1980s is a good example of that systems collapse.

because their economy stopped functioning in the 1980s to the extent it functioned even before that is questionable.

It got worse.

Their military failed in Afghanistan.

How can you ask an American citizen to keep paying taxes, to obey every letter of the law, and when he's 68 and got a bad back and he lumbers down with a COVID fever and he asks to see if he can get a test or a monoclonal antibody treatment?

They say, I'm sorry,

we're using your entire profile, and one of them is race, and you don't quite get enough points.

I'm sorry.

You can't do that.

Or how can you say to people who have been here how can you tell a mexican-american citizen who pays taxes has been in the marine corps that when he takes his mother to a dialysis clinic for life-saving treatment and there's 15 people ahead of you from oaxaca that came here illegally and are residing sorry you've got to wait in line it's not a sustainable proposition and that's why there's this widespread non-compliance.

And you know, when you see, again, when you see that trash on the ground, that's a metaphor on the Union Pacific Rail Lines.

And I kind of get angry about the coverage because they sort of are nonchalant.

Oh, this is terrible, ha.

They go, the guy holds up an Amazon, says, look, here's an Amazon.

And I say to myself,

Well, that's a test result probably from some guy sitting by the mailbox waiting for that COVID test.

And he's never going to get it.

It's here in the dirt.

Oh, that's some mechanic that ordered a key break esoteric part for his semi, and he's waiting at home.

He's never going to get it.

That's a medicine that could be life-saving by somebody out in the front lawn looking at the mailbox every day.

Never going to get it.

And that's what's the problem.

It's a very cruel, unkind creed that leads to that.

And it is a result of what when Mr.

Gascon

the district attorney of Los Angeles County decided that he would not, he as judge, jury, and executioner would not follow the law.

And he listed all of the laws that he wouldn't prosecute.

Some of them were assaulting a police officer.

And the ones that he did prosecute, he downlisted them from felonies to misdemeanor.

That sent a message.

And he started under the guise of COVID, releasing people from jail.

And on the parole boards, they followed suit.

That sent a message to a criminal.

It said, if you want to go take something, hit somebody, kill somebody, in your old cost benefit analysis of whether you get away with it or lose your life or pay a large price of a time block of your time in prison the odds are in your favor now and they came out of the woodwork and they warred on people that were collateral damage mr gaskin doesn't care about the poor woman that was killed in the furniture store he doesn't care i think that the universities really have a grip on the nuts of the whole problem, if I can put it in that fashion.

And so perhaps, you know, your military may turn around as you suggest, or for the reasons that you suggest.

But the universities, this woke agenda is really deep in its core.

And I mean that you're either left in the university or you're hated if you have any sort of indication of a right-wing leaning, just to give a start to it.

But you can see it runs all the way through administration down to faculty.

How does that change?

Not Not going to end well for them either.

This was the university's pact with America from the 1930s, 40s, but especially the 50s and 60s, when we got up to ratios of half of all 18-year-olds were in college.

This is what they told us.

Send your child to school.

Allow him or her four years out of their busy schedule of marrying, having children, buying a home, getting a job, and we will educate them.

We're going to do this for two reasons.

We're going to enlighten them about literature and philosophy and history and the general education and science and math, and they'll be a better rounded, more inquisitive model citizen.

And we'll teach them about the constitutions.

And then we will give them in their upper division courses a

interest, a skill, so that they can be doctors on the, they can go into med school or law school or the professions or PhD.

Or if they graduate with a BA, they can be teachers, but they will be skilled.

They'll have expertise that the on-college educated don't have, the non-college educated.

And as part of that cost, it's going to cost this country a lot because these people are going to be disconnected from the workforce.

And we said, oh my gosh, these are our heroes.

It worked.

And then it started very soon in the 60s that these people told us, ah, we've got half of America's youth and we have them for four years.

And guess what?

We accuse you, America, of being racist, sexist, imperialist, neocolonialist, xenophobic, protectionist, nativist, and you are going to have to pay.

And so they took that and they said, and we are not biased.

They took that proposition and said, we are not biased.

because you are biased, you corporations, you churches, your government, your small towns, your Neanderthal ways.

So we can be really far left to balance you.

Okay.

And then it just snowballed.

And today, 93% of professors are pole left wing or hard left or democratic.

And most of the students do.

And every bad idea that comes, filters out of the faculty lounge, I think it takes about four years, critical race theory, critical legal theory, modern monetary theory comes from the university, as it always does.

And guess what?

People say,

my God, they have no moral hazard.

They have $1.7 trillion student body in debt.

$1.7 trillion?

These kids leaving the university are not marrying in their early 20s.

They're not having their first child in their late 20s.

They're not buying homes.

They're stuck in their basement with $60, $70, $80, $1,000 of student debt.

And this happened because of what it happened because the university said ah the federal government insures your loan not us so we increased the rate of tuition room and board higher than the annual rate of inflation and that's what they did and did they deliver Sammy did they say now when you graduate not in four but on an average of six and a half years guess what you can read and write and think and analyze dispassionately and you're far better educated than that crazy plumber or that guy who's been welding for four years or that truck driver who listens to podcasts.

And the answer is no.

And you know it's no, because if you suggest, well, here's an SAT when you're 18, take one when you're 21 with that golden BA and see if you go up any, it would probably go down.

I'll never do it.

And so they have failed in their primary part of the bargain to take resources away from Americans and, in exchange, give them a better investment of an educated youth.

And

almost every pernicious development that we're looking at, dependency, staying at home, prolonged adolescence, delayed marriage,

falling demographic rates, originates with this idea that you're going to take six years out of your life and go into horrendous debt and get a dashed studies inferior education.

You know, it's not you and me ranting on a podcast.

It's people in private, you know, Phoenix Universities type.

It's online classes, it's online degrees, it's podcast lectures.

A lot of people are saying, you know what?

Nobody likes these people.

They don't like professors.

They don't like cancel culture.

They don't like the suspension of the Bill of Rights.

They don't like racially segregated dorms.

They do not like safe spaces.

They do not like censorship.

They do not like shouting.

They don't like universities.

And they will find a way to train and give expertise to people and avoid the $250,000 bill for six years of mediocre, if not pernicious education.

Yes.

And I hope you're right because you seem to be suggesting that the market is going to adjudicate all this, that people are slowly going to start figuring out that the universities are not delivering, that the price is too high, that there are other avenues.

I think that that's probably where my question lies, that there are other avenues to finding your career.

And I don't know that that's presented to students at this point.

I think it is.

I think a lot of people are seeing that, especially after COVID, that who is more valuable to society, the 27-year-old, three units short of his sociology bachelor's, owing $85,000, or the 27-year-old who for seven years has mastered plumbing.

and he can plumb any house there is.

Who do you need more in society?

Think about about it.

Do you really think the AOC model of that type of education, I mean, she had a map and she didn't even know where Israel was on it.

Or Nicole Hannah Jones, she thought the Civil War began in 1865.

This is a woman who told us that she was an expert in history and that 1690, unknown to anybody but her, was the actual date of America.

So that's the type of education and where it leads to versus people who just said, I'm done with it.

And we find out we do need right now, what's what's saving America are not sociology and psychology majors indebted, or the guy staying home while he waits for his university to reopen.

It's the person braving traffic and COVID on the freeway with a

semi, or it's the woman who gets up every morning at five o'clock and goes down to your local grocery store and sits there and sees 100 customers every three hours and sells and takes risk and gets food to the table.

Those are the heroes.

And they're not people with bachelor's degrees.

And so I think it's been a shock to all of us that this Zoom elite college educated culture.

And that's just half of the equation, Sammy.

Think of the other half.

What we're witnessing, and they're not telling us, is that Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT, Stanford, I go on, most of the major elite so-called universities, they have taken the idea of proportional representation.

That is, we're going to let in 12% of our incoming freshmen as African Americans, because that's the percentage in the population.

And we're going to have 9% Latino, and we're going to have more than Asian because they're so overqualified.

That's their term, not mine.

And we're going to have about 55% of women, and we're going to have about 35% white males.

That's what they do.

And we're not going to look at grades and test scores and competitiveness.

And now, guess what they did?

After the terrible year 2020, they adopted disproportionate admissions, that is,

reparations and admission, reparatory admissions.

And if you look, and they're very careful, but you can find information that these

people who apply are now being let in on the basis of race and ethnic backgrounds, exceeding.

their numbers in the general population.

So what as a professor, I can tell you, I saw it happen.

And what do you do if you're a professor?

If all of a sudden you have people who had, by traditional criteria, cannot do the work because they haven't been prepared.

They have the aptitude probably, but they're not being prepared.

And you have two choices.

You can die on the altar of idealism and say, you know what, you're going to get an F.

You're a C, D, C minus.

And then you're going to have a pattern of racial prejudice.

That's what you're going to be accused of if the people who are not getting average grades are of a particular group and are, you're going to say, you know what?

I'm not going to do that.

I'm 50 years old.

I got a good job.

I'm a very prestigious professor.

I'm going to give people C's.

I'm just going to cut down the reading load.

I'm not going to penalize people who don't show up for class.

I could care less whether they turn papers in on time.

That's the reality.

And I'm going to adjust for my own survival and advancement.

And that's what we're seeing in most cases.

And that has a toll, doesn't it?

Because

what are you going to do?

What does a Stanford or Harvard or Yale BA mean anymore?

It doesn't mean a lot.

And what do you think happens to the people who did qualify?

Do they go to St.

Thomas Aquinas?

Do they go to Hillsdale College?

Do they go to other places?

So you're going to have a radical transformation of the whole system, well aside from its rejection by half the population who find it just a drag and not worth the cost.

Yeah.

You know, I can add to your statistics or your picture.

I know I'm usually the skeptic on the other side that systems collapse can't be addressed in our culture, but I have a good friend that works at a community college and they have a real drop in white males that are going to community college and males, I think, broadly.

And then you have your own daughter's experience with the, I guess I would put it, the war against the white male, where her young son has been, she's had to suffer critique of her young son for his four, five-year-old boyish ways that somehow it's inappropriate.

And so we see a lot of people reacting against that kind of thing.

Well, African Americans were treated as third-class citizens under Jim Crow in the South and maybe second class in the North in some places, not all, but in some places.

And then during the civil rights movement that ended.

Did anybody really think that they wouldn't be embittered by that?

Are they all going to be sober and judicious and say, yeah, let's just put, so we went through three generations now of affirmative action.

But let's just keep that in mind when you now are about 20 years into the feminist attack on masculinity, that men are mean, that you don't need men, that they're hyper-masculine, that they're rough, they're crude,

and they get paid more than they're due.

And let's get into

the practical side of that.

We're going to restrict their numbers.

We're going to have more women.

I think 57% of all BAs go to women.

And if you look at PhDs in the humanities, for example, it's well disproportionate.

And then you're going to be told, well, you make white males

have to lose jobs so we can be more diverse.

And they're saying, well, wait a minute.

Is the NBA diverse?

Is the NFL diverse?

Is the post office diverse?

No, that's not diverse.

And so when you continually demonize any group, you're going to have a disaffected mentality emerge.

And what I'm worried now is we've got a lot of white male young people.

I know hundreds of them.

I encounter them when teaching.

I encounter them in business.

I know families of them.

And they

feel that they do not want to go to a college.

Why?

Because they feel that if they date a girl, and that would lead to sexual Congress, and maybe as a male, they feel that they don't want to get tied down.

Who knows?

But let's say the relationship did not progress in a manner that the other partner wished it would.

And I'm stereotyping.

I agree with that now.

I want to be careful.

That the female participant is going to be far more likely to complain post facto that this was asymmetrical and may involve coercion in a way that she wouldn't had they been dating later on.

And then, if that happens, and it happens a lot, that person will not be given a right to cross-examine his accuser or even see his accuser in formal proceedings.

He will not be allowed to have a formal hearing that emulates American jurisprudence.

He will be suspended probably for a while and have his life ruined.

And every parent knows that, and everybody knows that.

And so if you are a professor and you say certain things and you're a white male versus a non-white male, you're going to have to be very careful.

And they know that.

So what's happening is there is a great deal of cynicism.

The left calls this, I guess, Van Jones.

Remember, he's the unifier that Jeff Bezos gave $100 million to reward his

unification theories and brotherhood.

This is a guy who called the 2016 election whitelash, and Republicans were assholes, and that white people committed mass murders at a higher rate, all that.

Remember,

remember that this was a white lash.

So,

but whatever we say is that if you continue to demonize some people,

then they're going to react.

And they either react in two ways, they drop out of the system.

And I think everybody has a family where the nephew, the cousin, the grandchild, they just can't figure what's going on.

The kid is 26.

He's got a lot of university debt.

He's not currently taking classes.

He kind of has his parents as if he's seven or eight doing his laundry, cooking his meals.

He lives not necessarily in the basement, but in the spare room or the attic or somewhere or trailer behind the house.

And, you know, he dates now and then.

He gets maybe, you know, a job once in a while,

asks his parents for money, and he's just not with it.

He's what.

Tocqueville's called the prolonged adolescent, the person that democracy has coddled and said, we'll take care of your needs.

That was the old explanation, but I think the woke auxiliary or corollary works pretty well.

And they've dropped out.

Now, the other alternative is they are fighting back.

And they don't do it openly now.

It's cynicism, sarcasm, skepticism, all those pernicious beliefs that destroy idealism.

And they're not very idealistic people.

I talk to them all the time and they'll come and say to you, I took this class and I wrote this paper.

Do you want to look look at it?

Or they'll call you on the phone or they email.

What do you think I should do?

I got my PhD in history, but I don't think anybody's going to hire me.

Or then I said, no, nobody's going to hire you.

That's for damn sure.

Unless you are left wing and you went to Harvard, Yale, or there's not that many jobs.

They're laying people off.

So they are angry.

And they're caricatured as, oh, they're just mad because they're no longer on the top rung.

They were never on the top rung.

The people on the top rung were the bi-coastal white elite.

They're still there.

But just as you had an emergence of African Americans and Hispanics into the upward mobile category, so too you had

the Oklahoma diaspora people, the Okies.

You had the working classes.

And they are the ones that are being blocked right now by the white elite and the minority elite.

And they are the deplorables.

They're besmirched.

They have a special vocabulary of disparagement, scum, dregs, crazies.

Just Google what Hillary and Barack Obama, the Klingers, and John McCain and everybody, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, the smelly, the toothless, et cetera.

And that's just the fact.

Yeah.

You know, I think we're going to have to stop here with all that because we need to get to other people.

That's a rant.

Is that a polite way of saying that was a rant?

It was, I'm sorry.

But, you know, you gave us a lot of information on system collapse and that you see, I like that you're optimistic and you see that there's conditions have changed such that it's the beginning of the end.

Is that fair to say?

Yeah, I think it is.

I think any system,

any

ideology that's based on a lie can't sustain itself.

And the lie was that this country was born out of racism, was always racism, is worse now than ever, will always be a discriminatory idea, and that people have to suffer in the present to pay for the sins of the supposed past.

And guess what?

Good racism in the present corrects bad racism in the past.

That's not sustainable, not in a multiracial democracy.

It won't work, never work, unless you want to become India or Brazil and try it.

That's where we're headed if we don't do it.

So I'm optimistic because it can't go on because it's starting to affect people.

And people are starting to say, I can't fill my car up.

I don't have $100 to get 20 gallons of gas.

I just don't.

I can't buy that sirloin steak, much less a ribeye or a T-bone.

I just don't have the money anymore.

I can't turn on the air conditioner, not with electricity prices that high.

I can't afford that car.

I can't pay $4,000 over the sticker price.

I'm sorry.

Just can't do it.

I have to shut the pool.

We saved.

We got a swimming pool.

I can't pay for the chemicals anymore.

I just can't do it.

And when that starts to happen, people get angry.

Yeah.

You know, do you think they're going to start thinking that elections make a difference and they're going to go in, not just to vote, but to participate in the campaign?

Because I think when all of those votes that came in and they're not changing those state laws, it's going to make a difference for people to actually participate in the camp election process.

I think everybody says, you know what, I've been asleep at the wheel.

I didn't realize what the left was doing in March and April of 2020 when they changed the rules about vote harvesting, correct addresses, postmarks, and they got up to 202 million ballots and the error rate dropped by a magnitude of 10 in most states.

And that can't go on.

So not only am I going to vote, I'm going to give to candidates, I'm going to be an election watcher, I'm going to be informed, I'm going to stop this.

And if I'm in line and somebody walks in and there's an ID requirement and he's ahead of me

and they just say, you don't need an ID.

I'm going to say you do need an ID.

That type of vigilance, I think, is going to happen.

It's not you or me, Sammy.

There's 30 Congresspeople with long resumes and long service in the Congress, and they're enjoying plum assignments as majority members and heads of committees and subcommittees.

And guess what?

They're retiring.

You know why they're retiring?

Everybody's got it wrong.

They're not just retiring because they're old.

They're not just retiring because the Republicans are coming back into office.

They're not just retiring because they don't want a minority party.

You know what they're retiring for?

They are scared to death that the Republicans will do to them what they've been doing.

That the Republicans, that Speaker McCarthy will say, I'm sorry.

You can't be on that committee, Mr.

Democrat.

You're too left-wing.

You started it, I finished it.

You know what?

I didn't like that state of the union.

I'm going to tear up that Joe Biden address on national TV.

Oh,

I don't think Joe Biden followed the law when he deliberately, unilaterally, and illegally decided that federal immigration law was inert.

I'm going to impeach him.

And if I don't convict him, okay, I'll do it again.

If he's a private citizen, I'll go do it again.

Oh, by the way, I'm not going to get a special counsel.

I'm not going to have cross-examination.

I'm not going to have witnesses.

I'm just going to impeach the SOB and I'm going to try him.

You know what?

I'm not even going to have the Supreme Court justice.

And if I don't like the system, it's not working well for me.

I'm going to look at the Supreme Court.

Maybe court packing is a good idea now that we have a majority in the Senate and a Republican president in 2024.

Maybe we should get more justices.

And you know what?

Maybe we should let in more states.

Let's break up Wyoming and Montana into different states.

Not that the Republicans will do that or that I'm advocating they should, but the Democrats who think like that are terrified that they know what they've been doing and they're scared to death that people will emulate their own tactics.

And that's why they're running and jumping off this sinking ship.

And I think it's going to be a 50 to 70 seat correction.

And I think they're going to take back the Senate.

And I think the Democrats are going to be terrified because that's just the political aspect.

But when you print five, seven, eight trillion dollars, you know what's going to come.

This inflation is either going to get up to 10 to 15, 20%,

or this anemic banking industry, the Federal Reserve, is going to say, you know what?

We've got to raise interest rates and raise them fast.

And when you start doing that, you're going to get a terrible recession.

It's coming.

Joe Biden said winter was coming.

He doesn't know what he means.

Yeah.

You know, I have a question about that.

I've been wanting to ask you the inflation.

So the Federal Reserve is sided with the left wing, more or less.

They're in a real tough situation.

They're only in year one of Biden's administration, and they can't keep these interest rates low for another three years.

It doesn't seem to me, but I don't see them wanting to start raising it because they're going to cause a recession that will get Biden unelected.

But I don't see where they're going to go with that.

I think they call that a paradox, a dilemma.

are

damned if you do and damned if you don't.

My best metaphor is called musical chairs.

They know when the music stops, somebody's going to be in trouble.

And they're hoping, hoping that they can flood the market with printed money and cheap interest and quantitative easing.

And it will be an artificial boom until at least the midterms.

And then it's going to blow up.

And they even will even try it more to keep it to the neck.

But somebody somewhere at some time is going to be caught when the music stops.

And that's going to be stagflationary recession.

Okay, I'll tell you what they're going to do, though.

They're going to keep this inflation going until the midterms.

And then quickly, after the midterms, they're going to up the interest rate enough to bring some heat off of it.

And then they will, in a year, let that interest rate go down again.

And I don't think it works that way.

I live through it.

I was farming in 1980 to night.

you know, in the 80s, and I can tell you that once inflation keeps going, it takes on a logic of its own because everybody says, I'm not going to be the sucker.

I'm not going to have my employee demand $2 more and pay more for my product and then not raise the high price of hamburgers.

And then the guy that buys the hamburgers said, I'm not going to pay another dollar and a half for hamburgers and not tell that guy at Starbucks I need more money.

And that's how it starts.

And then when you stop it, it's kind of like a flood.

You don't put your finger in the dike, the whole damn burst.

So then the only way to stop it is to raise interest rates and and stop demand and let supply catch up.

And that's hard to do when people who are suppliers are paying extraordinary interest rates.

I watch it happen.

Well, we'll see because the Fed can raise those interest rates really slowly and try to keep that.

I don't think so.

I went to the Salma Production Credit Association in 1981 asking for a $250,000 crop loan for 180 acres.

And after pleading and pleading with this non-profit government quasi agency, he put his arm around me.

He's a wonderful guy, the banker, and he said, Guess what?

I trust you guys.

And you've got some collateral.

You've got about every member of your family, I think five families signed the dotted line plus their spouses.

I think we had 15 co-signers of everything we had was still wasn't 250.

And nevertheless, he put his arm around me, said, You just won yourself the loan.

And you know what the loan was for?

12.5, 12.5

12.5 and one of the members of the family came back and bought a car and said i got a great car said what was the interest rate 19.5 that's what destroyed inflation was when paul volcker on the orders of jimmy carter and then continued by ronald reagin broke the back of inflation but he broke the back of a lot of lives and when i saw that happen it's no exaggeration i'm looking out the window at a farm not too long away where a guy was farming and he decided that he couldn't take it any longer.

And so, to make sure that it wasn't a failed attempt, he put a rope around his neck, he closed the garage door, he let the car run with carbon monoxide, and he took drugs and he shot himself.

And he, wow, I saw another person who was a, I won't get into because these people's families are around, who was a ditch tender who shot himself, who was also farming.

And I saw people drink and I saw whole lives wiped out in that correction from 15% inflation and 6%

interest to 17% interest and 2% inflation.

And, you know, it's necessary, but it's going to do a lot of damage.

And who's ever in control of the government at that moment when the music stops and that transition begins, they don't care about the history.

They take the hit.

Now, Ronald Reagan in 1981 was a very unpopular president.

He lost seats in 82.

He was a very unpopular president in 83.

And guess what happened?

He took the strong medicine.

He broke inflation.

He cut taxes.

He deregulated, and the economy took off.

And by the time that he was going to run against Mondale, he was behind Mondale in some polls 10 months before the election.

Mondale was the putative candidate.

But when that economy grew 7%

in a 12-month period, it was a landslide.

But had that election been in 83, he would have lost.

And so, and he was a statesman that had courage that was willing to do it.

So I don't, I think what we're doing is we're going over the cliff.

And Biden is basically, to the extent he's, you know, cognitively aware, he thinks this is going to end badly, but I am not going to take the fall for this.

So I'm going to keep pouring money in.

and order that Federal Reserve that's not really as independent as we think to print money.

And maybe I can get by the midterms and maybe I can even get into 2024 before it blows up.

Okay, on that, Victor, we better take a short break and come back and look at a few more of your books.

But thank you very much for that discussion of systems collapse.

I think we covered a lot in the modern day and also historically.

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Welcome back, And I would like to remind people that they can join Victor at his website for his writings and his podcasts at victorhanson.com.

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And those, of course, are exceptional.

Victor, we were looking at your books on my show, and we're on to Mexifornia and Ripples of Battle.

And I was hoping that you could give us a little discussion about the production of those two books.

Mexifornia was an article written for City Journal, and one of the people requested it because they thought that open borders would be good that reflected Orthodox, you know, Bush doctrine at that time.

And I was watching it happen when the borders were open.

And remember, both parties did it.

The Republicans to get cheap labor, the Democrats to get constituents, and La Raza people to get ethnic solidarity and enhancement of their agendas, Mexico to get remittances and to get rid of potential dissidents.

So everybody was involved in it.

And I said, I can't write that article, but I can write you on how pernicious it is.

There were other things that were never mentioned, that most of the immigration from Mexico had been from northern Mexico, where people had greater experience of the United States.

They tended to be a little bit more affluent.

They had some knowledge of English.

But with the collapse of the Mexican economy in the 21st century, especially, we started to see people south of Mexico City from Chiapas or Oaxaca start to come.

More indigenous people, poor, without English skills, without a high school diploma, and in greater numbers and less diversity.

And I suggested it was not going to end well, that people were too cynical, and that I saw too many people

who were using human capital for selfish reasons.

The Mexican government despised its own people.

It wanted them gone.

The moment they were gone, they said, you know what, get on welfare of the United States, free up $300 of cash, send it to your mom or your brother or your wife back here.

That way we don't have to pay for for them.

And you know what?

We'll glorify you.

And when we visit, you can all go to a soccer match and wave the Mexican flag.

And I saw corporate people that said, give me cheap laborers.

These guys work like crazy from Oaxaca until they get, you know, 40 and ill.

And then we'll just throw them onto the social net and bring in a new cohort.

And then I saw people on the left say, you know what?

We're going to get a La Raza studies.

We've got too many Mexican-American people who have assimilated that don't know English.

They're becoming indistinguishable from other Americans.

We need more people from Mexico that are poor and more victimized and speak Spanish and are fodder for our racial agendas.

And I saw the Democratic Party said, wow, we were flipping California.

No more Pete Wilson, George Decmajion, Ronald Reagan.

We're flipping New Mexico.

We're flipping.

Nevada, we're flipping Colorado.

Let's get more people here illegally.

So it was a pretty tough stuff.

And the curative for it was more assimilation, more integration, more intermarriage, more merocratic, skill-based immigration, less immigration, exclusively legal immigration, more diverse immigration.

And

it was also part memoir of what I saw growing up as a minority person, because I could think I could make the argument.

that from kindergarten to sixth grade, I was at 10% of the population of the school, ethnic-wise.

And when I got into junior high school, it was about 50-50.

And when I went to the only high school, it was about 50-50.

So I had a view.

And I'm speaking to someone who, for most of my life, the people who have been my friends have not been white.

They were Mexican-American.

Yeah, and all of those curatives for the immigration problem are obviously being washed aside in the current administration.

And we don't have time to talk about that.

Can we then turn to Ripples of Battle, which is an excellent book?

That was my favorite book.

And I was looking at the What If series, and I contributed, I think, to three of those volumes, edited volumes by Robert Cowley.

And it was What If This Had Happened?

And I thought, well, why don't you just say what did happen?

But don't do it just from military points of view.

Let's get three battles throughout history and say, what was the art, the literature, the novels?

the science that came out of that experience in individuals.

It's pretty bad experience to be at Shiloh or Okinawa.

So I picked three, an ancient battle called the Battle of Delium.

It's a very obscure battle.

It was very bloody and decisive between the Athenians and the Thebans.

And I said, wow, this battle is referred to

in Aristophanes.

Socrates was there.

He was heroic in the Athenian defeat and keeping the rear guard intact.

And when you look at the laws and the Republic, there are references to that battle.

Euripides' suppliants, it seems to be a battle that when you look at some of the descriptions of mythological fighting, it's based on the Battle of Delium.

Wow, there's all of these stele's in the museum that are extant that came out of commemoration for the dead from that battle.

So I tried to suggest that that battle changed tactics, strategy.

It created...

the idea of the indominal Theban army, but it also affected individuals.

I looked at Shiloh and I said, wow, does anybody realize that Ben-Hur, Lou Wallace, the Union general, that is a metaphor for his own anger, what happened to him at Shiloh when he was blamed inordinately?

And so his nemesis was Grant.

The person in the novel who's the bad guy is Gratus.

Ben-Hur sort of becomes a convert like Lou Wallace does, and one little rooftile fell and doomed him to galley service and obscurity as a slave.

And Lou Wallace didn't take the right road, or maybe he did take the right road, but he was blamed.

And after that, he went into obscurity.

He became a Christian and et cetera, et cetera.

I also said that without the Battle of Shiloh, the career of Nathan Bedford Forrest would have never taken off.

And he went on to found the Ku Klux Klan.

I can't think of anybody who got more mileage out of that battle than.

Nathan Bedford Forrest.

And he became an iconic folk hero because of that battle, where he did a superhuman feat in the retreat of the Confederates after they lost the battle.

So I talked about the rehabilitation of William Tecumseh Sherman there as well.

So I have about six of those stories.

And finally, very quickly in Okinawa.

My God, Ernie Pyle was killed at Okinawa.

And that was the end of the Ernie Pyle dispatch.

And

the highest-ranking soldier in the Pacific was killed by a freak accident.

And there was no really investigation of the debacle.

Remember, that April 1st, 1945 battle was a complete disaster in terms of 50,000 American casualties, almost 13,000 killed, 17 ships sunk, carriers damaged.

The entire 6th Marine Division almost rendered, you know, not competent, not sustainable.

It ceased to exist as a fighting unit.

And the decisions that went into the strategy at Okinawa were deplorable.

I mean, they were almost criminal.

And yet there was no investigation because Simon Bolivar Buckner, the commanding officer, was killed.

And after the battle was essentially over by a freak accident, people said, you know, let's not get into it.

We've got a three-star general dead.

That's enough.

He was the guy that planned it.

I'm not blaming him, but I'm trying, I was showing that whether it was Ernie Pyle

or Simon Bolivar Buckner, the commander,

or it was Victor Hansen, my relative who was killed there on May 19th on Sugarloaf Hill after a very distinguished career and in the 6th Marine Division, UOP graduate, all-conference football player, who was the first cousin of my father, who was adopted when his mother died in childbirth and his father was blinded in a farm accident.

And that death at 22 ruined that entire Swedish family.

And then when I was growing up, I was handed his bat.

You have to be as good a baseball player as Victor was.

You have Victor's inscribed bat.

I said, the guy was 6'4, 220, was a natural athlete.

What am I?

Skinny little kid with glasses, left-handed, dork.

And then I was given his briefcase.

He was a straight A student.

You have to do that.

You have to do that.

You have to.

And I took that.

you know seriously and that's really changed my life because i thought whatever i do i'm not going to disgrace my namesake or the family name But it just shattered the old Swedish Hansen Gar.

They were never the same after that.

And I finished that story with saying that I wrote a precursor to that in an article.

And his 93-year-old commanding officer out of the blue read that and sent me

a ring that was cut off his finger.

because his body was swollen when they brought him down in May 20th of 1945.

And in

November of 1945, he came back after the war and he called, he said, a heavily accented Swedish old man that was my grandfather and said, I don't want to talk about the boy and hung up.

And that ring came in the mail to me in 2002.

Very sweet guy.

And then his commanding officer who wrote the letter to my family about his death was still alive in 94.

And he sent me a copy of the letter, which i still have and guess what i mean what would be the chances of somebody i never know what was the ring it was a roman legionary ring with a obsidian cutout of a roman soldier and that was what that battle did in a personal level to one family but on the national level another thing it did is it said to the marine corps you better be very very careful about putting your troops under army command it happened again in the korean war by the way but when the army gets stuck and the the Marine Corps is called in, they don't let the Marine Corps adjudicate amphibious landings that might have worked behind Japanese.

They just take you guys and they point you in the right direction.

And they think, you guys are tough SOBs and you're going to go through coral and cement and you're going to beat the Japanese and we don't give a damn how many it takes.

So they destroyed, as I said, what was supposed to be a super division of college graduates.

Half of them were in the 6th Marine Division.

When it was over, it was tragic.

And then finally, very quickly, Sami, it launched something in the mind of E.B.

Sledge, who was a quiet young guy from Alabama who went through hell at Guadalcanal, but more importantly on Okinawa.

And he wrote about that.

And it's called With the Old Breed.

It's the finest memoir of World War II I've ever read.

And he lived to be quite old.

And he was

an insect expert etymologist.

But he writes about what it was.

And people had, I wrote the introduction to that, Oxford, I think it was the Penguin edition.

And people had misjudged that book as saying it was an anti-war memoir because of the horrors that he accepted.

It wasn't.

It was, these are horrors, and they could have been prevented had we had more inspired leadership, and we could have had a more strategically realistic policy toward Japan.

So we wouldn't have been here in the first place, but we're here.

And once we're here, we have an obligation to do what we did.

And it's a horrible tragedy.

And yet that's part of the price of being an american for a very limited few who have to pay it so it's one of the most moving brilliant books i've ever read i urge everybody to read eb's sledge with the old breed well thank you victor we're at time's up i think about 15 minutes ago but that's okay we'll go ahead and end it here thank you so much for everything that you've been talking to us about today it just makes me want to read to tell you the truth and so thank you thank you and i'm sorry i went over i'll be more time time-considerate in the next podcast.

All right, this is Victor Hansen and Sammy Wink, and we're signing off.