The Culturalist: China Rising

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

This is The Culturalist.

It is dedicated to the events and people, past and present, that have influenced the way we live and the things that we value.

This is a Friday edition.

Victor is a classicist, philologist, military historian, and a pundit of all things modern.

Let's just put it that way.

And his supporters find him sober and judicious, and his critics, well,

they get a little angry.

So you can read their remarks, though, on his website under a rubric called the Angry Reader.

His website is victorhanson.com.

And please come and see.

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And the Angry Reader is part of the subscription.

We have a show on China today, but first let's hear a word from our sponsor.

Welcome back.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

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

His podcasts are published by John Solomon's Just the News and on the ART19 platform.

And Victor has a new book out called The Dying Citizen, which has done very well and has been on the New York Times bestsellers list.

Victor, how are you doing today?

Very good.

Very good, Sammy.

All right.

Yeah, I'm Sammy Wink, and we have a day this morning or this afternoon, depending upon when you're listening to it, on China.

And so, Victor, I wanted to just look at a few things that are going on in the news since there is so much about China, and then maybe get some of your reflections on the significance of the current events and China's seems to be a rising star here.

But let's review some of the things that have happened.

A hypersonic missile has been launched by china and our general millie seems to have come out of his shell and he finds this quote concerning and close to a quote sputnik moment taiwan's president has recently said that china is increasingly threatening every day

the China telecom has been banned from operations in the U.S.

due to national security concerns.

China itself is burning more coal and worried about its own citizens' energy for the winter and keeping its factories going, which seems to be something very different from our own president.

And they're also planning on a property tax, which

for purposes of reining in speculation and redistributing wealth more evenly, which I find very funny because those in the Chinese party, Communist Party, seem to be the wealthiest among them.

And it seems to to me they're going to just get wealthier.

And then finally, things like Beijing marathon is postponed, Chinese restrictions due to COVID are still being enforced in China.

So perhaps they know something we don't.

I don't know.

But all of that in the news.

And I was wondering if you could maybe reflect on the broader meaning of the Chinese perhaps ascendancy here, or is it even an ascendancy?

Well, there's a lot to talk about, but we got to start with the basic premise.

China has 1.4

billion people.

We have about 330.

So they're nearly five times the size of us.

Their continental space,

their territory, their area is about comparable to the United States.

Maybe with Alaska, we're a little bigger.

So you see right away that when this country emerged from its pre-civilizational Maoist Grape Leap Forward disasters of the late 50s, 1960s,

it began to adapt a Western mode, I should say quasi-Western mode of production.

And that meant when it looked around, it said, my gosh, we're going to need stuff.

And so far, what it has done the last 30 years has invited Western investment in and people outsourced or offshored or relocated manufacturing and assembly into this cheap labor market.

And then people lived very, you know, frugally as they always had done in China and it was working.

But that didn't last too long.

The wealthier and wealthier they got and the more markets they appropriated and the more they stole patents and copyrights and juggled around their currency and ran up surpluses, etc., etc.

People became wealthier and they wanted air conditionings and cars and freeways and

nice vacation homes.

And they started to have a Western mode, not of production alone, but of consumption.

Okay.

So then they look around the world and they think, well, wow, we don't have what we need.

So they've started this Belt and Road or Silk Initiative where they go through Latin America and Africa, Southern Europe and make ostensibly good deals.

But actually, when you look at them, when they take over Naples or the Piraeus or they go into Africa and mine rare earth, it's always exploitive.

And they're bullying Japan, they're bullying Australia because they feel that with their population and the size of the country and their technology and the money they're making, they're going to overwhelm the West.

They both hate the West and they covet the West.

They want the Western technology and university systems, etc.

But they don't like like the system.

Okay, so that's where we are.

Now, as far as Taiwan goes, it's got, what, 20, less than 30 million people, 25 million.

It's got the lowest birth rate in the world.

It's about 1.3.

It's shrinking.

It hasn't armed itself.

Its prior governments felt that it would piggyback upon China.

It bought into this bankrupt idea that was promulgated here in the United States by both parties, that the more concessions you gave to Communist China, the more they would repay that magnanimity magnanimity with reciprocal kindness and gratitude rather than contempt.

Taiwan didn't understand that either.

And now we're in a situation where you've got 1.4 billion people with this fantastic amount of military hardware.

I think by tonnage, they've got the biggest navy in the world.

And they're sitting right there off Taiwan, and they can take it.

They just don't know whether it's worth the disruption in their markets, their international reputation, the blood, etc.

But they can take it.

it, and we can't stop them from taking it.

We can deter them, but only by the use of nuclear weapons.

And it's ambiguous where our treaty commitments lie to Taiwan.

But now they feel that Joe Biden, after the Afghanistan skedaddle and the disruptions in the U.S.

economy, and the dependence, apparently, on Chinese goods, as we see in the port of Los Angeles or Savannah, where ships are backed up to the horizon, that this might be a very opportune time.

So it's a dangerous period.

Second, because of this huge amount of money that has been created through manufacturing and assembly and low consumption on the Chinese part, that is, they make a lot of money and they haven't spent until recently a lot on themselves, they have their tentacles throughout the United States and Western Europe.

What do I mean by that?

It just takes some people in the news.

General Milley, how in the hell does the chairman of the Joint Chief feel that he could just get on the phone and call the head of the People's Liberation Army and say, you know, Donald Trump is messy democracy.

Talk to Nancy Pelosi.

If he orders something, I'm going to warn you about any preemptive aggressive action.

That's crazy.

And if that's not enough, we have a president of the United States that Hunter Biden climbed on his...

Air Force II and they went to China when he was vice president.

And Hunter still owns, I guess he owns

10% of a Chinese company.

If that's not enough, during the recent presidential race, remember that Michael Bloomberg was going to be the savior of the Democratic Party.

He spent a billion dollars, but he had been giving the Chinese 10 billion in market capitalization funds to start up companies.

About half of them were related to the Chinese Communist Party.

So what I'm getting at is that It's very strange.

I mean, here we are 75 years after World War II, and we still fight whether Standard Oil in the 1930s was having contracts with the Third Reich.

Yes, they probably were.

Okay.

But China, they're so deeply embedded in the military, economic, corporate, cultural, academic life.

They've got 330,000 students here.

I mean, 1%.

would get you several thousand people who were operatives to the Chinese government.

And where I work at Sanford University, there was a neuroscientist, a visiting lecturer that was dismissed quietly, not national scandal, but she was a military, a Chinese military asset teaching at Stanford.

$50 million.

The Department of Education alleges Stanford did not report that came from gifts from Chinese companies that had likely

Chinese party affiliation.

I could go on.

Can I ask you, didn't you also have in your office at Stamford a young Chinese fang fang come?

Yeah, the same one as that.

I did.

But in my defense, my antenna kind of perked up in 2015 when somebody called me from the console and said, you got to stop writing these anti-Chinese diatribes and we want to send somebody down.

And I said, okay, I can talk to anybody.

And then all of a sudden, this is mysterious because it's an hour drive to downtown San Francisco to the Hoover Tower.

And the next thing I know, 20 minutes later, this young woman shows up in sort of valley girl attire with a value, you know, with a very thick Chinese accent with a lot of gifts.

And then my assistant, two assistants were there.

Door was open.

We said we cannot take the gifts.

We don't want to pose for any.

I'm not going to ask to go if I wanted to go to dinner at a very exclusive restaurant.

No, I don't want to do that.

And then, no, I don't believe that I have anything to apologize.

So that sat down.

And then the next thing I know, the Chinese accent disappeared.

And all of a sudden, the valley girl came back.

Hey, man, like you're a loser, man.

Like, your country sucks.

And, you know, the boots, skin-tight pants tucked into boots.

white blouse buttoned almost too low, sunglasses tucked into the blouse, and then just a diatribe of, hey, man you guys you can't stop us and you know we're flying over Japanese territory we're going into Australian territory why don't you stop us they were talking at that time about the last year of the Biden I didn't know who it was

But she was the same one as that

Congressman Eric

Walwell.

Yeah, but her name was not Fang Fang when she gave me a card.

And I don't recall her exact title.

But when she came on, both my assistant and I said, that's the woman that came in a few years ago.

Her exact title was seductress.

How about that?

I guess she thought she was Madi Hari, but it was pretty, put it this way, just the phone call from the consulate, Chinese, if somebody calls you from the Chinese consulate and says they want to talk about something you've written, well, the only reason you would do that is to explore the Chinese military strategy or whatever they are.

That's why I said, but I'm not stupid, not entirely.

So I had, you know, I had people there with me because I don't know what the person was going to do.

And I assumed that it would be at first an old guy about 90, but I wasn't sure about that.

So when this person walked in that was in her 20s, I thought, wow.

First thing I said to her, where is the consulate?

or the vice.

Oh, I am man.

But it didn't say, I am man.

At first, it was,

I don't want to be insensitive, but she had a very thick Chinese accent, as if she didn't understand.

And then it went, and then she said, oh, man, I've been to school, CSU, man.

I've been everywhere.

I know your country better than you do.

You know, I don't understand your damn president referring to Obama.

Every country has a president that has his national interests, but you don't react when we push you.

We push you.

So what's the point?

I said, you tell me.

I think you're trying to lure us into do something stupid.

And I said, this was in the Obama administration.

Yes, yes.

Her whole point was that I didn't understand that China was a friend to the United States as embolized by her being a valley girl, a valley in the sense of San Fernando Valley, you know, up on American popular culture, and that I was too aligned with what she said, criminal Japanese World War II fascism.

And she wanted to correct those beliefs, but she came in with a tea set,

haiku

book.

Gosh, she wanted to go down an El Camino, very swanky restaurant.

And

I thought,

very quickly, what I thought was, who would be stupid enough to fall for this?

Eric Squalwell would.

Of course he would.

And he was a representative, you know, up there in Danville or somewhere, you know, 50 miles away.

And then we learn that he's on the House Intelligence Committee.

He's never denied that he had carnal relations with her.

So just think of that.

Here's a guy on the House Intelligence Committee, and he still is.

And this operative goes all around the Bay Area, dropping in at campaign functions, trying to ingratiate herself with people who write columns or in politics.

And that idiot thinks that he's so what, masculine, good looking, debonaire, that this naive Chinese woman is infatuated and they have relations and ha ha.

We still don't know what she learned from him, but he's an idiot.

And anybody who would fall for that, it's got to be a narcissist.

And he is a narcissist.

But wasn't there also that economist that went over to China and they sort of took him around and entertained him?

And then he wrote columns on

how great.

I was trying to remember the

Michael Bloomberg said that China was a consensual society, that the Communist Party rules by the consent of the government.

He said that.

And so when you have, what, the fifth richest man in the world or fourth richest in the United States, and he's at one point was considered, you know, had a considerable chance to be the nominee of the Democratic Party.

And what did Bill Gates say?

Bill Gates said in March, I think it was, of 2020, that China had done a great job in its handling of the virus.

I thought, oh, that's really nice of you, Bill.

So the people who let it out after engineering a killer virus and then let it out whether accidentally or whatever, we're supposed to, what, thank them after they basically blackmailed the WHO to lie about their complicity.

And he says, and he was one of the first big major investors in China.

So they've compromised the entire American elite, and they really concentrate on universities.

I taught at a...

a very well-known university.

I won't mention the name.

It's a

graduate program one day a week for five years.

My daughter had been a student there and i had a lot of wonderful chinese nationals people from china that were students but it was very clear to me that during the exams they would talk to each other they would compare notes uh

they would cheat and then i would ask the powers that be what do i do because the i should fire them all or flunk them all and said no they pay 110 of tuition what can they know well how can they help i mean they're not going to to get A's, are they?

And I said, no,

it'll be hard for me to give them a C-.

And I'm not being ethnocentric.

I couldn't, I would get an F if I went to China and tried to take an exam in Chinese.

So I had a lot of admiration for them, but they were all children of very important people or wealthy.

I remember one that was a very pleasant person, and she came up to me and said, I want your advice on American cars.

I said,

who am I to say?

I was driving a Honda, still am, the same same car, 12 years old.

And she said, well, I want to know Lexus, BMW, or Mercedes.

And I said, I don't know.

They're all seemed overpriced for me.

I didn't tell her that my father, who had fought the Japanese, and my mother, who was very anti-German because of World War II, said, do not buy a German or Japanese car.

So I never had until my parents died and I bought a condo or a Mazda first.

Anyway, long story short, I said to her, I don't know.

a day later she came in with a two-seat Mercedes.

She goes, I got a steal.

I said, how much?

She said, $81,000.

So this is student.

So there's something going on there is what I'm trying to say that members of, it's so ironic because these left-wing academics brag that of diversity, inclusions, and equity.

And then they have 350,000,

Chinese students here in the United States.

And then the China is, at the same time, these students are here, China China is doing this drumbeat propaganda that we are racist, racist, xenophobic, racist, racist, racist.

And you want to say to them, okay, we understand that you're trying to mimic or emulate the left to ingratiate yourself.

But if we're so racist, why would you put 330,000 of your privileged top people, many of them single children, very dear to their parents, why would you send them to this racial cauldron?

And of course, they don't believe it is.

Otherwise, they wouldn't send them.

And so here they are, and here the universities are very liberal and they're trying to manipulate this very wealthy elite by charging them premium rates, no scholarships, just pay cash, and they're not worried at all when somebody gets arrested for espionage or for complicity with the Chinese government.

And the vast majority of them, as even left-wing Axios magazine has written, I think the editor, a co-editor wrote that, an article.

The vast majority of them are either high-placed children of high-placed government officials or they are high-placed corporate leaders.

It's very expensive to come over here.

And yet we're told that it's very insensitive to criticize this program.

But what you seem to be telling me then is this China, communist China, the much valued classless communism, is actually a very hierarchical society and very class.

It always was.

The only difference now is magnitude.

Mao and his clique were just like the Soviets who had their DACA's on the Black Sea.

You should read about World War II Stalin dinners that he put on.

I mean, they were always, that's what communism is.

It's a bunch of elite ideologues who say, you're going to do the following, but the

ramifications, I'm not subject to them because I need privileges to make everybody fair.

And that's what's so scary about the left today when you start to hear John Kerry say, I need my jet to to better promulgate global warning policies, or you see Nancy Pelosi in her Napa ice cream factory house, or you see Dianne Feinstein up in her Presidio Heights, Pacific Heights, later castle, or you see Gavin Newsom can't even pay promptly the property tax on his two mansions.

All of these people.

What is Gavin Newsom saying?

I want to have a more progressive capitalism during the COVID lockdown.

Okay, start with yourself.

Go out and get a real job

and pay your taxes like everybody else.

But that's what communism is.

It's not really, it's a very cynical idea.

That's what is so frustrating about it.

It's always for a little elite, and that's what the Chinese are doing.

They have this, you know, they have a, well, it's a big elite in China, given the half-back they have 1.4 billion people.

The thing that's even scarier right now, when we're doing this, equity, inclusion, diversity, all of this McCarthyism, look what our chief antagonists have have said about us.

Here's Vladimir Putin with this big chess hair smile saying,

Wow,

you guys are going full Bolshevik, aren't you?

We did it before, and it didn't work out.

It blew up finally in 1989.

But you know, I think you guys should go ahead and start destroying people's lives over incorrect thinking, start having ideological constraints on market realities, start

giving exemptions for politically correct incompetence.

That's what we did.

And I'm happy to see you do it.

I'm just trying to be the wise old Vladimir Putin.

That's what he said.

And then we had this kind of

said everything like that.

And he was kind of smiling.

There were two points in his little lecture to us.

One was, ha ha ha, don't ever lecture us about being illiberal when you've suspended your Bill of Rights and various First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, Fifth Amendment.

And then I kind of like what you're doing because I know from the Bolshevik experience, it weakens a society, both militarily, economically, and also politically, socially, and culturally.

And that's good for us.

That's his message.

The Chinese message was just as delightful, but they were a little bit more subtle.

Their message is, hmm.

So this country is now in a Maoist state.

And they're tearing each other apart, just like we did with a great leap forward from 58 to 67.

And they have a cultural revolution.

they're putting dunce caps more or less to speak on people and attacking people for being quote unquote privileged this is pretty good because just as it destroyed us it will destroy them so you know what let's add fuel to the fire so every time we say anything about covet or we say anything about chinese market manipulation racist racist racist 19th century yellow peril

encampments of poor japanese who they hate more than than they hate anybody.

You put the Japanese in internment camp.

You hate Asians.

And then they have this big Chester smile on their face and saying, hmm, keep going because every time General Milley says he's going to investigate white rage, you screw up in Afghanistan and we launch another hypersonic missile.

So we don't know how it got there.

Maybe it was ours.

We don't know.

But the point is that they love the commissariat,

this idea that you take a large chunk of GDP, labor and capital, capital, and investment, and you put it into functionaries whose main job is to destroy economic activity.

Only we call them, what?

We call them diversity czars, provosts of diversity, equity, and inclusion, HR directors, but we have millions of millions of man hours.

per day that are spent in having people look over their shoulder and saying, oh, let me look at my syllabus.

Do I have the word equity in?

I got to put it in.

Uh-oh, I'm working in this corporation.

I look around the boardroom and it's not proportionally represented.

What am I going to do?

So, we're doing a lot of things that make no economic sense other than they retard economic growth.

And they love that because they've been through it and they're not going to do it again.

Yeah.

So, can I just ask, so given all of that, what should the United States be doing to deal with this if, as our government has recently said, banning their telecom, that it's a national security concern.

So,

you know, how do you deal with China?

You know what?

I read, as the editor of Strategica, we have entire issues on this, and we have brilliant minds.

Chris O'Day, we have Miles Yu, we have Gordon Chang,

you name it.

And I'm at...

you know, I'm at the Hoover Institution, Elizabeth Common.

We have all these experts.

But the one I prefer is David Goldman.

I mean, he has actually been in the real world as a banker, a financier, an investor, the co-editor of the Asia Times.

And I read him all the time.

I know him.

And he's not a Pollyanna or Sunnybrook Farm type of person.

He's just warning us.

He says, you are headed, you, meaning us, he's not separating himself, but you, America, are headed for stagflation.

You are printing money at a historic rate.

We've never seen that amount of money poured into an economy.

And what you've done, whether you don't know it or not, is you have showered Americans with money and then you've destroyed the incentive to work, either by supplementing income for doing nothing or by discouraging employers in a era of possible high inflation from investing.

Okay.

And China's not doing that.

And your R ⁇ D budget proportionally is smaller than China's and they've got five times the people that you do.

And when you look at latest technologies or you look at artificial intelligence or you any of these barometers of what's to come or the educational system, we're throwing out meritocracy.

We're throwing out the SAT.

We're throwing out the ACT.

We're throwing out all of these things.

We're saying they're constructs.

We're adopting critical race theory that says if a department of physics If a medical school, if a hospital surgery board does not look exactly like the racial components of the United States, then somebody's going to pay.

And that message then means, oh,

well, this guy did 58 brain surgeries without a hitch, but he's white.

Got to get rid of him.

And that's going to hurt the entire country.

And we've seen where it's happened before, whether the most extreme case of, you know, Yugoslavia or Rwanda.

Or we can see what's happening in our own country right now, and it's not going to end well.

And so he's trying to goldman's trying to warn us how to deal with japan get our financial house in order stop printing money start investing in research and development research and development research and development do not become energy sufficient again so you have plenty of gas and natural natural gas and oil do not

get involved in optional military engagements that drain capital and labor in places like iraq or Afghanistan or Libya or Syria.

Do not do it because that's not where your existential threat is.

You can handle it without going on ground.

If you want to get rid of Solomoni, get rid of them.

If you want to get rid of Baghdadi, get rid of them, but you don't have to go in there and create

a gender studies program at the local university, a pride flag, or a George Floyd mural.

And so I read him all the time.

And

he's a very serious person.

There's a lot of people like them, and they're very arch patriots.

And they warn us that what we're doing is not going to work.

And we've got to get tough and get back to our values of thrift and

delayed consumptions and not satisfying our appetites with borrowed money and getting more unity and civic education and meritocracy.

And it's a very weird thing, just to go off topic for a second, that we have this meritocracy, but we don't.

I mean, we do have it, say the NBA.

Can you imagine what the NBA would be like if we had racial quotas?

I can because we used to do it.

And that was when we denied African Americans an equality of opportunity.

And I used to watch those games.

They were very nice in a way.

Everybody was white and they kind of passed all around and they shot from their chest, you know, double shots from court.

But it wasn't the exciting, dynamic game that it is now because it wasn't based on meritocracy.

It was based on racial exclusivity.

And so that's a meritratic game.

So is the NFL.

So is entertainment.

So is stand-up comedy.

So is all of these things, except in areas where there's a disproportionate.

We don't say in America, LeBron, we want you to have one Asian American on your team and one Hispanic and one white person.

You understand that?

And they're going to represent, oh, you know what?

We'll go further.

70% of the country is white.

We want 70% of the NBA.

Who would ever do that?

And yet that is what he and other people in critical race theory, because of, you know, historical grievances, many of them justified, want.

Okay, if you do that, everybody is going to be poor.

And we always thought, well, you know, we don't do that in brain surgery or air traffic control, but now we do do that.

It's going to be...

It's dangerous.

It is going to be dangerous.

And you know who's going to, you're going to start to see some weird things in the United States.

You're going to to start to see people ask questions.

I'm going to take this flight to Chicago or I'm going to take this flight to Dallas.

Does anybody know about the makeup of the flight control, whether they're merucratic or whether they're selected on the basis of their superficial appearance?

How about the pilots, et cetera?

It's going to be absolutely catastrophic for harmony, for excellence.

Yeah, the weird thing about it, it was not needed because we were starting to achieve a natural equality of opportunity that resulted in a pretty advancing and progressing equality of result where we started to see people in the highest levels of, you know, when I look at the Hoover Institution and I look at the many people there, who have I been closest friends?

Because I admired them.

I like Chiron Skinner.

I liked Shelby Steele.

I like Tom Sowell.

Those are basically the three people that I talked to my entire 20 years there.

What do they all have in common?

I don't even know what they have in common.

They're very interesting.

They write a lot of good books.

They're very well read.

They also happen, incidentally, to be black.

It doesn't even register to me.

I think I've been with Tom Sowell at a hundred different lunches over the last 20 years.

We used to go every two weeks.

I don't think he ever mentioned once to me that he was black.

He did mention about all the faulty logic in people that were of all different colors, but it wasn't essential to him what color they were.

And I've been with been with Shelby Steele almost as much.

And I don't think we've ever talked about, oh, I'm black or I'm white.

It just didn't occur.

It didn't occur because their ideas were comparable or superior to people where I work.

And they did it all on their own.

They were very accomplished.

They were.

And I think my experience from teaching mostly minority kids is there's zero difference in IQ or DNA at all.

I've had mostly Southeast Asian students, Mexican-American students, Mexican national students, poor whites, and African-Americans.

And I look back at 21 years of teaching, and to the degree there were any differences that mirrored superficial appearance, or it was cultural, or it was nobody in the family had been to college, or especially with poor whites.

If you've got somebody from Tulare that nobody had ever been in the family, and there had been a history of this and that, it was your challenge as a professor was to inculcate study habits.

And you could do it.

You could do it.

And the same thing was true of other people, but I never saw any difference in natural intelligence.

That's where we need to get back to.

Yeah, so can I sort of sum up what it sounds like you're saying to me that all this racializing of everything in America is leading to a mediocritizing of our culture and, you know, the produce of that culture, the outcomes of that culture, while we're facing a putin and a xi jing ping yeah who are focused on national strength which rallies their citizens around them the average and and they are the most two most racist countries in the world

putin the russians are very race conscious and the chinese are more race conscious they've got a you know over a million and a half weighers who they

you know they're in forced labor camps not just because they're Muslim, but because they feel they're not Han Chinese.

And as I mentioned earlier, during the initial days of the COVID pandemic panic, they began, you know, rounding up African students in Beijing to have them tested as if they were not letting them into McDonald's.

So they are a racist country.

And yet they are accusing us of being racist, a pluralistic, multiracial society.

And believe me, if I or you want to go say, you know what, I've loved Chinese history, I love Chinese culture, I'm going to go move over to Shanghai and be a full-fledged Chinese citizen.

In the very manner that people from communist China come over here, they get a degree.

I like America, I want to be a citizen.

They can do it, you and I can't.

And if you, by some mechanism, had a billion dollars and they said, well, if you have a billion dollars, you can become a Chinese citizen.

They still would never accept you.

You could never, ever be a top official in the Chinese Communist Party because they have a racial, racial component to how they evaluate people.

And that's what's so frustrating is that these stupid Americans are the most racially tolerant people in the world, the most pluristic, and they are being lectured to by racist countries and they take that lecture seriously.

And it drives me cuts.

And we're in the middle of an existential, as you say, Cold War.

Yeah.

And

so on that note, stupid Americans, unless you want to add something to that, we are at the end of our time right now, Victor, but thank you for laying out all of the peculiarities of our international relations with China.

We appreciate that.

And thank you for having me.

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