The Classicist: Winds, Whirlwinds and Coup Porn

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show, The Classicist.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, and we are recording on Wednesday, December 29th, 2021.

Another terrible year, almost in the rear view.

Mirror Victor Davis Hansen is the star and namesake of the show.

He's the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He's the author of many best-selling books, including the most recent one, The Dying Citizen.

You'll find a link for that at victorhandson.com.

We'll talk more about that in a little bit.

And also in a little bit, we're going to talk about porn, coo porn, right after this important message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson show, the classicist.

Hey, I'm a lucky man.

I get to host this.

I get to host the traditionalist.

And then there's another great segment of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

That's the culturalist, which the great Sammy Wink hosts.

So, Victor, for American Greatness,

which you write for twice a week, you've written a piece about coup porn, and you're talking about a couple of generals who are just so damn worried about what might happen in the next couple of elections.

Would you talk about that piece?

Yes.

Remember where we are, though.

We are in a climate where

the left programs the media and vice versa.

They're fused, they're joined at the hip.

And so, as Biden's popularity erodes, then the shrillness about the system increases.

So if Joe Biden is not doing well, then democracy is not only not working, but it will be destroyed in 2022, or there'll be no democracy in 2024.

And part of that theme has been Donald Trump will try to destroy the country if he should be re-elected.

In that

movement, this fusion media left-wing movement to distort reality, there has been a lot of military people.

And the latest were three retired generals in the Washington Post.

And they wrote that there was a good likelihood, likelihood, that should Donald Trump run

and win, he would have a coup and take over the country.

There's no evidence for that.

But what was ironic, and this is why I was talking about coupon, is

the military now has been weaponized.

It's no different than any of the other agencies.

And that's why only 45%, according to a recent Reagan Library poll, express confidence or trust in the U.S.

military.

Now, what do I mean by weaponized very quickly?

These three

retired officers can warn the country that there will be a military coup on behalf of officers

that do not believe in the system and either will not allow Donald Trump to lose or will not allow Donald Trump to step down.

They will think he's necessary.

It's sort of a seven days.

Okay, why are they doing that?

It's because they created coupon, they broke down the barriers.

And let me be very systematic.

Donald Trump was president for 11 days in 2017.

Rosa Brooks

in Foreign Policy Journal wrote the following, how do you stop Trump?

There's three ways.

You can impeach him.

In fact, I think it was 60 House members filed articles of impeachment as soon as he entered office.

What did Donald Trump do in the first 11 days that suggested he should be removed from office?

Nothing.

The second thing was, you know, impeachment takes a long time.

They would subsequently, of course, impeach him twice.

She said you can remove him by the 25th Amendment.

And guess what?

That was influential, too.

We had the conversation between Andrew McCabe and Rod Rosenstein about the possibility of wearing a wire.

We had, was it Bandi Lee, Jack, Dr.

Bandy Lee, the Yale psychologist, who testified that you needed an intervention and he should be forcibly restrained.

So much was that talk circulating in Washington that finally Trump got...

upset.

He took the Montreal Cognitive Assessment and he aced it.

I took it online, a version of it.

It's not that easy, although I do know the difference between a rhinoceros and a hippopotamus.

But maybe in my, I don't know, my dottage, I'll forget that.

But Joe Biden didn't take it.

So that talked cool.

So the third alternative was these two are going to take a long time.

But you know, just maybe a military officer, just maybe, maybe promises, promises, might just not refuse an order.

That proved to be very influential, that article.

She was a top official in the Obama Pentagon, legal official.

Okay, and then what did we have over the next three years?

We had after

the

so-called riot in the park across the street from Washington and the burning of the Episcopalian church, St.

John's, we had Donald Trump talk about federal troops and all of a sudden he used tear gas.

Well, the inspector general of the interior department said that was a lie.

No, it didn't stop General Milley, did he?

He just went right out and said, I was used.

I shouldn't appear in a photo op

with Donald Trump.

And so he was weaponizing the military.

I'm thinking, is there one chairman of the Joint Chiefs that hasn't been in a photo op?

Am I having amnesia when the late Colin Powell during the Rodney King riots told George H.W.

Bush, if you want to send those troops in, I'm here or just give me a call.

And they sent in 5,000 Marines, as I remember, to Los Angeles.

So it was all a lie that we don't do that and the president's observing power.

It didn't matter.

Mealy knew where the

power was, the cultural power.

It was with the media.

It was with the left.

And so he was virtue signaling in a way that he shouldn't have.

He went on, remember, to violate the chain of command and interfere outside his legal parameters.

He's an advisor, the chairman of the Joint Chief, an advisor.

He does not interrupt in the chain of command.

If Trump wants to stage an offensive action against China, he calls the Secretary of Defense who calls the theater command.

Well, Millie interfered with that.

And he said, if anything comes, scary order, this is the only president in the last, what, 20 years that hasn't involved us in a major war.

But if a scary order comes against China, you

are a nuclear, you go through me.

It all goes through me.

Illegal.

And then he called his Chinese counterpart and tipped him off.

You know, I'm going to be on your side basically against my crazy president.

Okay, against the law.

And then Joe Biden, in this whole context, said,

well, if Donald Trump doesn't accept the verdict of the elections, I'm going to get the former terrorist of the joint teams.

Remember, there was Myers and Dempsey,

not Dempsey, but it was Myers and Powell and the four of them.

And they said, you know, Donald Trump, you know, and Biden said, these are my guys.

We're going to get him out.

Okay, that was a weaponization of the military.

And then we had our illustrious 10, 12.

We've talked about this ad nauseum jack who violated Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

All of a sudden, we started to see these military people who are under

obligation if they are subject to recall, i.e., reactivation in times of a national emergency, or if they are receiving apparently a federal pension.

Their pension, they are not to disparage the commander-in-chief.

Did that bother him?

No.

All of a sudden, Michael Hayden was tweeting that Donald Trump had built Auschwitz-like cages on the border.

We heard

some people that I know very well who said

that Donald Trump used Nazi-like tactics, just like the Allies faced Andide.

There were others, I think it was General McCaffrey, said he was a Mussolini-like figure for canceling a public prescription.

And then we had Admiral McRaven that said he should be gone, quote unquote, sooner the better.

So that opened it up.

Then we had retired Lieutenant Colonel Nagel and Yingling.

The two of them wrote an op-ed

and it said to the effect that the military, i.e.

General Milley, addressed to him, he had no, remember, operational responsibilities, but it was his duty to galvanize the military and get rid of Trump if the election was, you know, there was any supposed interference.

And so this military then

has been talking about extra-legal, and I mean extra-legal, because all of these things are in violation of a particular law or code, whether it's Nagel violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Article 88, or the other generals

are

merely violating Goldwater Nichols and legislation that goes back, I think, to 1951 and 53.

So

we lowered the bar for that kind of talk.

And as the left always does, then it projects those pathologies onto others.

So if you've done something quite unusual in the 2020 election, i.e.

102 million mail-in or early ballots, then you say that it's going to, we have to worry about voter fraud and ID.

If you have been talking ad nauseum again about coup, coup, coup and breaking the law and getting the military weaponized, then you project that on to the right and say there's going to be a coup.

The whole thing is simply this.

If Joe Biden is unpopular, then the military has been instructed by its left-wing masters to say that there's a danger of a coup.

If he's popular, then the military must keep out of politics.

You've got to keep out.

That's not our purview.

And that's really sad because we're in an existential struggle with China and to a lesser extent with North Korea and especially with Iran and with Russia.

And because of these things, what these people are doing by writing these op-eds and going on television, I haven't even got into retired General Clapper who said on national TV that the then current president of the United States was a, quote, Russian asset, an asset, a traitor.

And then he went right in under oath.

to this House Intelligence Committee and he was asked, would you produce the proof that would justify your your charges that your president is a traitor?

And he didn't have any.

He said he didn't have any.

We know that it leaked out.

It's in the public domain.

I won't even mention that he lied under oath to the U.S.

Senate about,

if you remember, the NSA surveillance of American citizens.

So, this is what is very scary because, at the very moment, where we need the U.S.

military more than ever, and at the very moment when privates, and corporals, and sergeants and captains and probably majors and lieutenant colonels are the best soldiers in the world and they perform brilliantly in all of these theaters of conflict that we've lost, whether it's Afghanistan or Iraq or Libya,

we have no confidence in the people who are making the decisions how to use them, these precious assets, because they're politicized.

And when you have Secretary of Defense

talking about white rage and going through the rosters of the Pentagon and trying to ferret out people that, what, have tattoos on their back or something like that, or you have General Milley talking about white rage and reading all of these Kendi works, it's really scary and something we've talked about, but we have to keep talking about it because.

Well, Victor, yeah, let's talk about you say we all say the military as if it's one thing.

It really seems that the generals you mentioned maybe see themselves less as military, but more so as part of this class, right?

They're part of the elite class, mostly operating out of Washington because they're all, as you get into the web of the Pentagon, and then you become a

post-retirement

lobbyist for

major manufacturers.

But I see what you're saying about up to captain, up to major, but the leadership of the military got there because they see themselves different.

They see themselves as part of the ruling class.

You don't want to lump all 400 or so four-star generals or how many there are, but there's a sizable number

of one, two, three, four-star admirals and generals

who feel

that the system is so controlled by woke ideology that when they file efficacy reports, efficiency data, whatever it is, that they are going to be adjudicated just as much on diversity, inclusion, equity as they are getting artillery shells on the target or how few pilots

couldn't make the landing on the carrier in three.

That doesn't matter as much as what was your diversity profile.

Did you have a

racial bias complaint?

All of that.

I'm not saying it's not necessary, but they feel that's how you get promoted.

And they feel that if you're a white male conservative,

you're not going to be promoted.

And therefore, they have to virtue signal that they're on the team.

And they also do it not just for promotion, but they understand that the corporate culture where the big money is, and I'm talking now of Raytheon, where General Austin came out of,

or

General Dynamics, where General Mattis came from

or

locked

or northrop any of them that that corporate culture does not want blood and guts george pattons or curtis lamet types they want people who are sensitive to the corporate market and will be presentable to the left-wing congress in terms of going up you know calling them up and saying you know this particular fighter this submarine is really the best in the market oh no no i have never i have never said anything about George Floyd or anything.

And so that's the culture that they understand has the power and the money, and they make the necessary adjustments.

And, you know, and it's very cynical.

And before anybody says, how do you know?

You know, I know a lot of generals and admirals.

And I know a lot more enlisted people.

And one of the weird things I get about every three days is a long letter of anguish from a person in the military.

I won't mention any names, and they say what I just said, but to a much more emphatic degree.

And they say, you have no idea what it's like.

And so that's why the military is starting to lose now recruitment and re-enlistments from the very constituencies that it is, in a way, attacking, yet relies on, for combat frontline troops.

And that is basically the lower white middle class who, generation on generation, for reasons of patriotism joins the military.

And now they feel that if they're in the military, they have a target on their back.

And if they have a target on their back in terms of that they're not welcome, then they don't feel necessarily that they should also have a target by the Taliban or the Al-Qaedis in Iraq or whoever they're asked to fight.

They can't fight two groups.

That's a very inflammatory thing to say, but I'm very careful about what I say.

There's a very serious problem in the U.S.

military.

And this entire leadership from the very top of the advisory

millie has to be, it has to be not just replaced,

but the culture that produced it has to be changed.

If it's not changed, we're going to lose a lot of wars.

And everybody knows it.

Everybody in the military knows it.

We're going to go on to another piece you've written for American Greatness.

But before we do that, could you just tell our listeners the precise name of the, I'll call it apparatus or project that you oversee and have overseen for quite a while at the Hoover Institution that's related to the military.

Our formal name is the Hoover Task Force on Military History and Contemporary Conflict.

And I've overseen it for nine years.

And it was deliberately designed to,

I had to raise a lot of money so that we could compensate people to come out to Stanford or to Washington, D.C.'s Hoover office and twice a year discuss questions such as, will China attack Taiwan?

Are you worried about where is the weak link in NATO?

Should Ukraine be a part of NATO or not?

And the point was we were not an advocacy group.

Notice that all of these things were posed as a question.

So people would come out and for a day or two, we would go through all of these questions.

And we tried to get a diverse group, not just in terms of gender or race, although there was diversity there, but in terms of ideology.

It was center-right, but

there was just vociferous disagreement on all of these issues.

And I was sort of the moderator or the referee.

And you had people, we do have, we had the late Angelo Coteville.

You have the biographer Andrew Roberts.

You had the historian Neil Ferguson.

You had generals like General Mattis or Admiral Ellis or Admiral Roughhead.

We had Walter Russell Meade.

We had Bing West.

We had people who were very controversial in Max Boot.

We had people of all different, and the idea was to create a Ralph Peters.

They were all very, all we asked was that you be candid, you not be personal, you don't hold hold grudges.

Any disagreements that you had prior to the meeting or after would not be voiced in the meeting.

There could be no ad homene.

And then as a sidebar, we created something called strategica with a K, strategica, Greek word for general-like things, things of the generals, but it really means in modern English, strategic questions.

And every three weeks, and we've had a problem with COVID with our staff and some of our contributors, but we're late for the first time in, I think it's nine years.

But every three weeks we publish this journal and it has, this is the issue, how do you deter North Korea?

And we have a background essay about the history of the problem.

And then we have two op-eds, 750 words.

You must be more conciliatory or you must have greater deterrence.

And then we have questions that people might want to ask, a poll that polls people,

which is very usual.

And then study questions.

And then we have the group in advance.

I try to map out six or seven issues in advance.

And as part of their requirement to join the group in the open session to be compensated, they have to write little mini essays on topics of 300 words.

And so then we have a file of them, of dozens of them.

And each issue we have five or six related articles from a sidebar.

And it's been very successful.

And we're very lucky.

We've had a lot of people support it.

And it's almost 100% 100% supported by gifting to the Hoover institutions on the basis that we will get, I talk to the donors all the time, and I get basically the same refrain.

I want the best people there.

I don't care particularly where you're going as far as their conclusions.

although most people are traditionalist and more conservative than not, but I want them to be well-reasoned.

I want them to be full of historical data.

And just to summarize with one last thought, the idea is that contemporary conflict can only be understood through historical examples, that we've been there before.

Names change, dates change, the details change, but the concepts remain the same.

And so everybody is asked to not just spout off, but to give some historical examples, whether it's the Spanish Civil War, or the Persian Wars or the 30 Years' War, anything that can enlighten us in the present.

You know, listeners who are interested, Strategica, as Victor said, with a K, or go to the Hoover website.

And there are 75 or so issues of Strategica that have been published so far.

Another one's coming up soon.

So, Victor, I just mentioned you've written another piece for American Greatness, and some of the themes we just talked about with the military are in this piece, but there's ample other material that's not.

This piece is about the left being consumed by its own hatreds and hubris, and it's titled Sowing Winds and Reaping Whirlwinds.

And you talk about the ups and downs.

And I think it should be just downs.

I don't know what ups there are in the Biden administration, just on COVID alone, how it's handled that.

Never mind how it's handled Afghanistan and other pieces.

Quickly, you write, what's the moral of Biden's current troubles?

From the Bible and the Greeks and throughout the Western tradition, there is a constant refrain of being wary of hubris, the lying and arrogance that are innate to it, and the divine power that ultimately levels things out.

Victor, if you could talk about that theme of this piece, and also specifically, it's the lying related specifically to Donald Trump.

And you talk about the relationship that Churchill and de Gaulle had.

And if you lie about somebody else in such a way, just for the sake of lying, it's going to to come back and bite you in the tail.

Anyway, that particular angle of looking at hubris and comparing it to Biden and the general hubris and payback problems the left are facing and are going to face in this piece in American greatness.

I think it's very difficult for all of us to look at a policy and try to adjudicate it on the basis of its merits and not politics or ideology.

I was very critical of Donald Trump in one really major regard.

He spent too much money.

And the other thing that he did I objected to was he talked down interest rates.

Every time the Fed murmured that we might have inflation, he talked down interest rates.

And we had negative interest rates essentially.

And I think we're going to really pay for that, especially under Biden.

And he had deficits.

Okay.

Anybody on the left who criticized that, and most of them did, I agreed with that particular criticism.

Of course, they didn't mean it sincerely because now Joe Biden makes Trump's deficits look like, you know, an amoratory endeavor.

But

that's very hard to do.

But when Joe Biden,

I remember it so clearly when he said that Donald Trump should step down when there was about 240,000 deaths.

They were at his feet.

I thought, oh my God.

If this guy wins, does he really want to set that precedent?

And then he questioned the efficacy of the vaccinations and tried to undermine that policy, not as much as Kamala Harris, but he did so.

And then he said that really the only solution was the federal government.

And any other

outsourcing of responsibility was Articles of Confederation, i.e.

a

failed system that predated the Constitution.

Well, then when he became president, I know there was some divine power that says, you threw that little seed up into the wind and it didn't get planted.

And so you're going to get your sickle and try to reap the whirlwind because you're not going to get a harvest or you're going to get a harvest you're not going to like.

And so no sooner had he done that than now we have to hold Joe Biden to his words.

You said a president should not be president when there were this many deaths.

You've had more people die on your tenure than did Donald Trump, despite your benefit of having inherited vaccinations that were very successful, at least through the first and probably through the second variant.

You had therapeutics.

You had a system of supplying test and protective equipment.

You said that you're responsible.

Or

you're mad that people don't get vaccinated.

You think that has anything to do with your own propaganda that you couldn't trust the vaccination?

You said there was only going to be a federal solution.

Now you're saying what?

That the federal government can't solve it?

And I do believe there's a force in nature or a divine force that watches over all of us.

And it's a very Greek idea, but it's a Christian idea too.

So the wind reaped the whirlwind is a Christian idea.

And

it's also the foundation of the Greek idea of Eubis and Nemesis.

And when Hillary Clinton started to say, I was robbed, The voting machines, Jill's signs showed that voting machines

should not be

sanctioned or they're not authentic or they're not legitimate voting machines.

This is before Dominion.

And we were told that Trump was not a legitimate president.

And we were told by her that Joe Biden should under no circumstances concede.

And she brought out every has-been actor to make a commercial.

Remember that?

That the electors should unconstitutionally refuse to honor the vote tallies in their own respective states.

I thought to myself, okay, you're sowing the wind.

And so Donald Trump came along.

And when there were real questions and he did exactly what Hillary Clinton did, only to an nth degree and everybody went crazy.

So that was the theme that I was trying to talk about.

And I mentioned that what we had just mentioned about military coups.

And

you talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk about military coups.

And military needs to do this and military does that.

You better be careful because somebody will take you seriously.

Then you're going to have to write another one.

But you shouldn't have a military military coup because we've talked about it, but we didn't mean you guys can talk about it.

Same thing with sanctuary cities, 550 nationwide.

We say that inside our jurisdictions, you cannot arrest or at least deport an illegal alien.

We are morally superior to the rest of the country.

However, none of your other jurisdictions can say that federal gun laws that require strict registration and waiting period apply don't apply within your county in Virginia Or you guys in Utah, you cannot say that the Endangered Species Act does not apply to you because we, we, we alone can nullify federal law.

That's not a sustainable idea.

And BLM was the same way.

BLM basically said to us, we can shake down corporations for $100 million, but we hate corporations.

Our three founders are cultural Marxists by their own admission, or I shouldn't say admission, or their own reggaeo.

And that's okay.

And we can buy four houses for Ms.

Quellard's.

That's okay.

And you know what?

Jesse Smollett was innocent.

And that trial that found him guilty of fabricating, they were all racist.

And we can say it at Litton House, white on white violence was about race.

And we're not going to talk about smash and grab.

And we're not going to talk about car hijackings.

We're not going to talk about the disproportionate rate of black crime that is spiking.

And we're not going to talk about Waukesha that, you know,

any of that, Mr.

Brooks.

Okay.

Then you're going to reap the whirlwind.

And what's the whirlwind?

Black Lives Matter is

way down there with Biden's popularity.

His lost all the goodwill of the independent voter and most of all of the other constituencies, Latinos, Asians, whites, and they have self-destructed because they were hubristic and they were arrogant and they were not empirical and that's a law of the universe and it happens to everybody i kind of finished that essay as i remember by trying to suggest that it's very hard but very necessary

to

admit that some people that you don't like have contributed.

And I gave, I think, two or three examples.

The most prominent was George Patton.

George Patton did not like Bernard Montgomery.

Monty was a vain, vain, you know, remember, I think that,

you know,

Churchill said something to the extent indomitable in defeat and insufferable in victory.

And he was a braggart.

He was anally tentative.

I've used that word before, but he was just obsessed with detail.

He, the set piece.

The point was that he's not the guy you turn loose from the Normandy beaches that's going to be in Berlin.

He was timid, and part of it was a reflection of the resources of the British Empire at that time that were waning.

But

if you needed somebody to organize an unorganized army, and you needed them to use the assets that they had in a set position on the defensive, and you needed them to dig in and have layers of artillery and air support and mines, as happened at LM, then he was your guy.

And so George Patton found him arrogant.

and way over his head and completely unsuitable for pursuit.

But did George Patton say Monty is just an idiot?

No.

He said Monty has certain traits that at certain times are invaluable.

And I think that was

very important for people to do that.

And a lot of the people on the right in World War II, they found that FDR was dangerous.

If you objected to FDR in the New York Times, then he went to you and say, maybe you would like the trust laws changed.

If you were a Japanese American, then Earl Warren and

FDR were your greatest existential threats because they put you in camps.

If you were Jewish and you were fleeing Europe and you wanted to get in the United States, you were not going to get in due to FDR.

If you were a political enemy, he would destroy you.

But

it's very hard to see how anyone could get people like Henry Knudson and Henry Kaiser and Henry Ford, get them all together and say, you know what?

We're going to win the war and we can't do it with a socialist New Deal mode of production.

So we're going to turn you loose at the Kaiser shipyards in Portland or Oakland or Seattle.

We're going to turn you loose at Willow Run to make B-24s.

We're going to turn you loose to do whatever you need to do.

You're going to profit.

You'll have imminent domain.

And the result was the United States had a greater GDP within four years.

than all the major belligerents put together and they had created a new navy that had more ships than all the major belligerents put together.

And people said FDR did that.

He was a wonderful wartime leader in that aspect, even though they had nothing positive to say about anything.

So I think that's very important.

And what happened with Biden and the left is anything that Trump did, anything, Operation Warp Speed.

You know, let's get protective equipment out.

Let's get ventilators.

Let's get the Javits Center with a portable hospital.

Let's get the hospital ships off the coast of LA and off the coast of New York City.

Let's do anything we can during the COVID.

Let's get rid of ISIS.

Let's bomb the crap out of them and eliminate them.

Let's get rid of that roguish Sula Mani.

Let's get rid of Baghdadi.

Let's get pre-COVID unemployment.

Let's get it recorded.

Those were positive things, and no one on the left said one word of anything positive about Trump.

1776 Commission, right?

You know, this

Keystone Pipeline.

Can't say a word about him.

And yet they were all the beneficiaries.

I know so many people on the left.

I have a lot of friends on the left.

And they cannot to this day say one positive thing about him.

Right.

Not one.

And if Joe Biden tomorrow says we've got to balance the budget, I will praise him.

And I'm trying to think right now, Jack, maybe you or my listeners, our listeners can help, but has he done anything positive?

If he has, I will praise him.

The only thing I can think he's done positive is

he's at the beach 32 times.

And so he hasn't done a lot of damage.

But I can't think of an appointment that has been inspired.

Well, Victor, you've written a few pieces.

We're going to talk about two of them.

There's a lot of exclusive material on VictorHanson.com, your website.

I would like to encourage folks to check it out, consider subscribing, and you will not regret doing so.

So, Victor, one of the pieces is titled Honest Labor.

I'd just like to back into it by saying there's a survey out yesterday from Scott Rasmussen

headline: 59% believe economy being hurt by those who are vaccinated, but reluctant to re-engage socially.

Now, I think this means not only socially, but also by work, right?

I mean, people who can go back to work.

You've written a piece for your website.

It's titled The Importance of Work and the Benefits of Honest Labor.

And let me get into it by asking a question.

Just, I'll read a question you asked in this piece.

Have we lost the idea that a collectively hardworking America is needed more than ever to remain competitive with rival nations?

Victor, talk about that, answer that.

and talk about the importance of work and the benefits of honest labor.

Well, in the piece, I try try to suggest that we have a problem

when there's 63 or 64, 62, excuse me, 62% of the available labor force is not working.

That's been a stubborn statistic, but it's even getting worse.

And what are those deleterious effects?

Well, one is we're like a V8 engine that's running on six cylinders.

So if we're going to stop inflation, we not only have to stop the printing of money, we have to produce produce more goods and services.

But when you see empty shelves and then you see people at, I don't know, nine to five at the shopping mall buying stuff during the middle of the week, then you're losing those people.

They have to be productive.

So they have to have incentives to work.

And they're not going to be in this therapeutic culture, they're not going to be shamed into work.

If somebody says to you,

well, my nephew, my niece, my son, my daughter is not working.

They're just staying home playing video games.

And you would say to them, well, they're lazy.

Oh, no, they're not lazy.

They're troubled.

Okay, they could be troubled and lazy.

But you can't use that vocabulary of shame anymore.

But we're losing a lot of productivity.

And we have a lot of competitors like China.

who are becoming more and more productive.

They have a lot of problems.

And we're still more productive than they are.

After all, we're 330 million people and they're 1.4 billion and we produce more goods and services still than they do, i.e., one American worker or one American person versus four of theirs or more than that.

So we're not there yet, but we've got to get more people doing it.

The second thing is that when you're working, it gives you, you're accomplishing something.

You get a sense of achievement.

I had a very interesting professor, I won't say wonderful,

because we didn't get along in graduate school, but he said said something once to me when he was talking about another professor.

And he said, that guy is very angry, so you better watch him because he doesn't produce anything.

He doesn't publish.

He doesn't take things seriously.

So he's always angry and he's idle.

And what he was saying is that when people are idle, they get no sense of achievement.

They get a sense of inferiority.

And then the bad type of jealousy, remember, Hesi had said there's two types of jealousy.

One is envy that makes you want to work harder to buy that Mercedes like that guy.

And the other is you want to go kick in the tires because you don't have one.

And he was saying that idleness creates that bad sense of envy.

And then

a society that's not fully employed by volition,

it's kind of a, I don't know, a tentative society, Jack.

It's a timid society.

So we like the Hoover Dam, but we can't build another one like it.

We, I say we like it.

There's people that don't like dams, but they use the electricity.

They like the storage.

The California Water Project was one of the greatest things that mankind has ever built, still is.

We transferred water from the one-third of the state where the people live, but two-thirds of the precipitation falls to the other 400 miles away where two-thirds of the people live and one-third of the precipitation falls.

Successfully.

We can't even fix it.

We haven't built a dam in California in 40 years.

When's the last time an American just said, you know, screw it, I'm going to the moon?

We can't do that.

And so we're a very timid society.

Can you imagine if we were back in 1918 and we had a million and a half soldiers on the battlefield in Europe in World War I

and the Spanish flu hit, this society would bring them all home.

Or they would take them off the battlefield and put them in quarantine.

We didn't do that.

We lost half the soldiers probably and won the war.

Half of the 117,000 that were killed probably died of illnesses on the battlefield or at least a high percentage somewhere near that.

And so

it's just a bad, bad thing to voluntarily restrict the idea of working and being participatory both on the collective level and individually.

And then it's not an easy thing to forget.

Your brain gets imprinted with the idea.

You get up in the morning, you paddle around your house, you do your video game, you turn your TV in, you order your pizza, you've got cash from the government, and you get a sense that somebody owes me all this.

And if you dare suggest that that entitlement has a shelf life on it, and you're going to be cut off.

Oh, how dare you do that?

You racist, you xenophobe, you sexist, you classicist, I mean the classist, classist, I should say, and it's going to be very hard to take that away.

And so it's just a bad deal that we're doing.

We're going to ruin an entire generation of people.

And this, I'm not picking on the young people because I know so many people who in their mid-50s are retiring.

This is a good time to retire.

And then you get to the other idea that we have the people who are making the money.

The real big money are assets, assets, assets, assets, real estate and stocks.

That's what's going up in value.

And it's not the middle-class pass book holder.

They're losing money.

Okay.

These people, by and large, do not work with their hands.

And they are making a policy about masks and social distancing and booster shots and this.

And they're home

and they're not getting out and afraid.

This is in relevance to what you said, that a lot of people are COVID shy.

But

something is very wrong when I go to a very upscale restaurant and I have, I confess that in Palo Alto lately, or even in Fresno.

And I see a lot of very wealthy people without mask on

and all of the help has mask on.

All of them do.

And they're not making all of that much.

And I'm thinking to myself, how many people with their mask off,

and I'm not talking about putting it back between courses, I'm just saying they don't have it.

They take it off.

They have a kind of a masquerade where they go in on it, look around, then take it off, they eat.

And this servile class, I shouldn't say servile, but this servant class is not subject to the same latitude.

Why don't they say that the help?

I've got COVID and I'm bringing it around my table.

Then why does a waitress have to have it on?

And maybe they want to, that's fine.

But what I'm getting at is there's also a class dimension to this idleness on one end.

And that end is the very affluent have choices to stay home and hermit or cocoon, but expect others cannot do that.

And yet they set the policy and they adjudicate how others shall behave in a time of pandemic.

And I think that's at the heart of a lot of the rage.

It's fixed on class distinctions and animosities.

Well, Victor, we have time for one more subject to discuss.

And you know what it's going to be about?

The idiocy.

I have no idea.

I'm telling you.

You wrote about it.

It's the idiocy

of Victor Davis Hanson.

And we'll get to that right after this important message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show, The Classicist.

We're recording on December 29th.

I'm assuming you're going to be listening to this in the new year of 2022.

So happy new year from us here so on his website victorhanson.com victor has a two-part series under the eeyors cabinet feature and it's titled knock knock knocking on heaven's door or the wages of recklessness and stupidity and this is an autobiographical victor writes about four

idiocies.

It's your term, not mine, Victor.

Because I know many of your listeners cannot believe you you could engage in anything that would be idiotic.

But you say you did.

And actually, you have come close to losing your life on several occasions, usually overseas in strange places where I assume the healthcare is not equivalent to what you would find in an American hospital.

Victor, you don't have to go over all four of these.

Actually, maybe just pick one of them.

But tell us why you wrote it at the point of this two-part series.

I wrote it to help our listeners in time of pandemic.

And the idea was that we make choices in our life.

Sometimes we're not even aware that will govern whether we're going to live or die.

And we have the fate of ourselves in our hands for a large part.

I know that doctors and hospitals are absolutely critical, but...

We make a lot of choices.

And I'm not just saying live a healthy lifestyle.

You can all the time, but you have to be aware of that.

And when you get my age at 68, you recall people who had warned you.

And I had a wonderful mother.

And I remember in the piece I say that she said, I got to go into the PTA meeting, Victor.

Do not get on the handlebars.

I was seven or eight.

I had nice big buck teeth, permanent teeth, and I got on them and broke two of them off.

And she sat me down and said, you're reckless.

Your father is a saint, but he was impaled on a hay rake on a farm when he almost died.

He's fallen off.

the roof twice because he used a three-legged peach ladder.

Don't do that.

And I didn't listen to her.

And so I gave examples.

I think I've had nine lives where it could have been easily avoided.

I went to Greece.

Okay, well, one thing you don't want to do is go to Egypt right after the Amkipper war.

It wasn't in March.

And then when you do, you just prance in, you get your visa and they say, you need some inoculation.

And you say, okay, fine, I'm 20.

And then you look at this thing and they give you 10, cholera, typhus, typhoid, yellow fever, smallpox.

You get them all at once and you get deathly ill and you don't even plan.

The next day, you got to go to Egypt and you're wiped out.

And then they give you chloroquine tablets.

You say, I don't need that.

And you get malaria and you end up in a hospital in Upper Egypt, or I should say down on the Nile in Luxor.

I almost died.

Or I'll just give you two very quick ones.

If you've had a sore spot in your abdomen for a year, And every time you get stressed, you vomit, and you go to a doctor, and I went went to three of them in various cities.

They said, oh, here's take some antibiotics.

You have, at some point, you've got to say, would you please give me a CAT scan?

I never did.

I've got some kind of infectious enteritis or something.

And that went on.

And then I was asked to speak in Libya.

on the mosaics after Qaddafi opened up the country.

And then I could blame the contractor, the cruise company that asked me to do that.

They got the visa messed up.

So when I got to Libya, I could not get on the boat.

I had two Soviet-style minders with me and I had to drive up and down the coast of Libya, which is 400 miles, to meet the cruise ship because they wouldn't let me get on because I didn't have the proper visa.

Okay.

But the point was my appendix apparently had something that's rare called chronic appendicitis, where at certain times it'll slightly burst.

the material will float out, it'll cause an infection, and you take antibiotics and it'll make a cyst.

And I didn't know that.

So for the whole year, that was what it was.

And when I was there, the tension and whatever, it blew up.

And I was 300 miles from Tripoli.

And my minders threw me on the mercy of the ship, said, you've got to take them.

We're gone.

And they said, we can't do anything for you.

You've got to ruptured appendix.

You're going to die.

So then the minders came back and drove me all night and dumped me off at a Red Crescent.

And the guy said, you're going to die.

You have a ruptured appendix for over a day.

You're in shock.

And sorry, you don't even have an AIDS test cut off.

He just lets nobody have an AIDS test.

We do not have sodium pinothol.

Sorry, we do not have, you guys, you Americans, boycotted us, embargo.

You were for the war.

We know you were.

It's your fault.

You're going to die.

So one guy came in his pajamas, said, You're not going to die.

I don't know how to take out, you know, ruptured appendixes, but I do know how to take out appendix.

So if you're willing to try it, I am.

And we have some ether somewhere around here.

So he put me on a table and cut me open and he took it out, took some of my colon out, had gangrene.

He saved my life.

But that was a preventable.

I'll just finish very quickly with another.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

You said in your piece, you woke up three times during the operation?

There must not have been a lot of ether there.

I don't think they really knew how to use it.

I think that they were short of sodium pinothol and the successors of sodium pinothal.

The moment they put that mask on me, I remember.

the smell of that because when I was six, I had my tonsils out and it didn't hurt.

But when I woke up, they announced that because of the United States, they had no opiates and Qaddafi would not allow opiates.

There were no Advil.

There was no antibiotics.

And I had really bad periantinitis.

And then another angel appeared out of nowhere with a suitcase, a Libyan-American that was contacted.

And he gave me flagell and Cipro that saved my life.

Finally, very quickly, the same thing happened.

I had something, I didn't know it.

It's chronic oxalate formation.

I've had it, people in my family, you create kidney stones.

I've had 30, but the first one I ever really knew about, I had a sore abdomen, and I was in Greece excavating at Corinth.

It was very hot.

I did not drink water.

And then I had some family that came over.

I drove them all around Greece.

I was getting dehydrated.

And when I say this, every once in a while, I'd have pink urine.

And I was 24, you know, and I'd go down to the Greek doctor and they'd say, you know,

Run up and down the stairway.

Maybe you can dislodge a ha.

And it wasn't that bad.

And then I got, I ate some strawberries that were grown with night soil, i.e.

human excretement, and I got E.

coli.

And I was in the hospital for two weeks, got dehydrated.

It was not really the hospital.

It was an infirmary without IV.

And I got out.

I thought, I finally beat it.

And I got a staghorn calculus.

It's about the size of your thumb.

And it was clogged in the kidney, and they didn't know how to take it out.

And so the doctor, who was really good, nice guy, said, we're going to do everything we can.

You're going to drink one and a half gallons of water a day and you're going to have an IV.

And he put me on morphine for four weeks.

And I sat there in this bed in agony and I drank water.

And it finally started to move out of the kidney, which was good, but it was bad.

The two horns hit the side of the ureter and poked two big holes in it.

Took this primitive x-ray and said, you've got urine leaking into your abdominal cavity and your ureters shredded.

And he said, you're either going to die or I have to take out the kidney.

And so I said, what do I do?

And my poor mom and dad, there was no cell phone.

So I called him.

And my dad was such a wonderful guy.

He thought he was on mission number 41 going over Tokyo in his B-29.

So he telegrammed me and said, here's some money.

Sent me $400.

He didn't have it either.

And he sent me $400.

And you get on a TWA plane.

And here's the ticket number.

And I got on the plane.

They gave me a whole packet of morphine hypos.

There was an old professor at the American School of Classical Classical Studies where I was a student.

That's why I was there.

She said, I got to go to the United States, West Coast.

I'll go on the plane with you.

She was wonderful.

They let me on because of her.

I got to San Francisco and my father was there in his old station wagon.

He'd made a bed and he said, now we're going to go on the ride of your life.

And he got in that.

thing and he picked me up at one in the morning and he drove me at 90 miles an hour to Fresno.

He didn't care.

And we pulled into the emergency room.

I got out.

A guy named Dr.

Schiff was there waiting.

He said, it's, you know, 3.30 in the morning.

Are you ready to be operated on?

And an hour later, I had about a seven-hour operation.

They went in.

They took out all the fragments in my kidney, the stones.

They got all the broken stones in my bladder and ureter.

And they resected the ureter and

pumped me up with antibiotics.

And 12 days later, I got out.

130 pounds, and I survived.

But what I'm getting at, and I could go on with, I had another problem with a catastrophic bike accident, where I had checked the tires, I thought, but I didn't understand that the frame was cracked.

And I had 170, the reason I lisp right now, it's not because I've had, I'm transitioning.

Transition,

you're not lisping.

Well, but I had my lips severed.

I had four teeth knocked out.

I saw the pictures.

No one would want to see the picture you did.

And that was avoidable because I stopped my bike and said the tire is rubbing, but I didn't realize that it was only rubbing when I put my weight on it because the frame was collapsing.

So I went over the handlebar.

But my point in all of this was to tell the reader, I'm not saying that I was absolutely culpable, but if I had just gone in and just instead of being so reckless, saying, you've got probably a kidney stone, drank a lot of water, I just didn't think about it.

I was too busy writing my thesis or doing it.

If I had just said, don't go to Egypt, come on, the war was just over a few months earlier.

They're not letting people in.

They've had some epidemics down there.

There's malaria's back along the lower upper Nile.

Don't do that.

Or, you know what, Victor, it's the fourth time you've gone speaking somewhere, you're traveling, and you went into the emergency room, they all tell you they just hand you some antibiotics and say, You got

that has to be more to that, or you wouldn't have this chronic appendicitis.

It's not a kidney stone.

And don't go to Libya,

you can go to Greece, but don't go to a place that just opened up that they're, you know, you're the 58th American that was let in.

Don't do that.

So, we're not rational, but we have to be rational about things.

And it took me, I have about five more of those.

I think my wife said, you've had nine lives, or maybe you're on your 11th life.

But it's all caused by, I feel like, recklessness.

And my father had that.

He fell off roofs.

He was impaled, as I said.

If you're in wartime, everybody when I was growing up who said they knew my father said he was the greatest central fire control gunner in any of the entire B29 wing because he was reckless.

He would climb up in the B-29 and he would sit there in that bubble and he didn't care.

Or if there was a napalm bomb that was trapped in the bomb bay and the plane was about ready to blow up, he would go out

on the bomb rack, look right over Tokyo with a big, you know, lever crowbar, and he would pry that bomb out before it burned him out.

He loved things like that, but he was reckless in peacetime.

I'm probably cowardly in war, probably, if I were, but reckless in peacetime.

And I'm trying to improve before it's over.

And I think I've done a lot better the last four or five years.

But I don't do things like just jump up on a ladder and go up to the top floor of my old 150-acre two-story house anymore.

I don't go up to the shovel snow off a two-story house without

a rope or anything.

I used to do crazy things and I can't.

Mrs.

Hansen do that.

Right.

Yes.

Or I don't, you know, I don't get on a 500 tank mixed mixed with parathion or paraquat with no protective equipment and then wonder why I'm sick when the plump blows up and I get splashed with it.

So I learned, but it was Aeschylus had a very great phrase.

Pothé mothos, it's from Prometheus.

It means learning through pain.

Pothé through pain, mothos, learning.

And I think that's everybody's.

can avoid those things if we just listen to our parents, listen to your father and mother.

You're indestructible, Victor.

I've said it before, and that there are maybe another half dozen of such stories is hard to believe, but no, I do believe it.

Well, anyway, that's almost all the time we have, as we do at this point towards the end of our podcast.

I'd like to thank the listeners who leave reviews on iTunes.

And here's somebody who actually left a comment.

It's Steve 0729-2.

And it's titled Intelligent and Thoughtful.

I love this podcast because it is always thoughtful, knowledgeable, and respectful of both the listener and the subject matter.

Victor Davis Hansen is one of the few commentators who can discuss an issue by providing insight into the history, the current details, current problems, and the unintended consequences of the proposed solutions.

Hansen does not yell, but will speak.

speak with calm passion.

A good podcast for those looking for understanding of the complexity of the issues.

Thank you, Steve.

It is 0729-2.

As for me, Jack Fowler, please visit and sign up for my weekly email newsletter I write, Civil Thoughts.

Go to civilthoughts.com.

That's produced by the place I work at, American Philanthropic, Great People.

I run the Center for Civil Society there.

We are trying to strengthen civil society.

Victor Hanson, not Victor Davis Hanson, VictorHandson.com.

That's Victor's website.

Please visit that.

Thank you, everyone who has listened to this and other podcasts, The Traditionalist and the Culturalist, which is hosted by the great Sammy Wink.

And Victor, it's still you and me talking today.

It's 2021, but I'd like to wish you and the great Mrs.

Hansen and your dogs and your Amitries a very happy and healthy 2022.

And the same to our listeners.

Thanks for listening.

Thank you, everyone, and thank you so much for listening.

I hope to talk to you soon.