The Culturalist: From Milley to Minaj

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Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This is The Culturalist where we look at events and people in the past and how they influence our lives today.

Our topics today are General Millie and Nikki Minaj.

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Welcome back, and we're glad everybody's here for Victor's show today.

We've got an interesting subject, or two subjects, General Millie and Nikki Minaj, who's been making the news the last week.

And we're kind of curious about Victor's thoughts on a general who has been accused of treason and colluding.

in other words, with General Lee, who has been accused of becoming political and taking up after January 6th with Nancy Pelosi and her lot, and also just simply lying about the capabilities of the Afghan military.

And we're curious today, Victor, we know that this all leads back to the Uniform code of military justice.

And I was wondering if you could go ahead and explain for the audience the connection to the Uniform Code of Military, or the history really of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

And then maybe we can talk a little bit more about the Joint Chiefs of Staff having to take over military command as our General Milley seemed to think he was supposed to do.

Victor, what are your thoughts on this?

Well, thank you.

I'm here with Sammy Wink, and it's sort of dark times because

we have a general who's the chairman of the joint chief and remember before i mentioned the uniform code of military justice he has a serial record going back to 2015 in various capacities in the military he has assured us of progress achievement and the enormous gains that the afghan military had achieved and most notably in this spring and summer of this year so whatever was really going on and we know what was really going on from joe biden's conversations with the afghan president when he said you basically should not tell the truth if things are really bad, which they were.

And in addition, remember General Milley, there was a photo op of June of last year after the burning of the St.

Episcopal Church and calls for Donald Trump to restore order.

Remember, we were in the midst of 120 days of looting and rioting and arson, attacks on a federal courthouse, a police precinct, all over the country, $2 billion in damage, 14,000 people arrested, 28 killed.

There was a sense of chaos.

And that crowd in Lafayette Park threatened to go into the White House grounds.

So Donald Trump had talked to use the military, but he didn't.

But he had a photo op, as all presidents do.

And General Milley wore his battle dress.

Nobody told him he had to do that, but he wanted to.

Then the left got angry.

And then General Milley, of course, then said that was improper.

He didn't

tell me or you or anybody in our audience why why it was improper.

I.e., did Colin Powell

have a photo op with George H.W.

Bush all the time when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs?

And more importantly, he volunteered to send Marines to Los Angeles after the Rodney King riots.

So there was no

problem with using federal troops if the commander-in-chief felt that there was domestic violence in the streets.

And of course, after January 6th, we had the greatest militarization, 30,000 or so federal troops in the capital since Jubal Early threatened to march on Washington and did in July and almost came close to the very city itself.

Milley didn't say a word.

So his outrage about using federal troops was selective and it was partisan, it was political.

We know that because he also leaked to the media that He was considering resigning.

I could just say promises, promises, General Milley.

If you were threatening to resign over a photo op embarrassment, why didn't you do it given your record lately?

And then, of course, there was the testimony to Congress when he said about white supremacy, white rage.

He was trying to understand it.

And that was incoherent.

It was totally incoherent because he said that he reads people like Mao

and others to find out hostile to the United States, to find out what they're thinking.

But he was using that argument to suggest that Professor Kendi, he was sympathetic to.

Think of that.

Well, I read this because I wanted to understand, just like I wanted to understand all of our other enemies who write, that he's not an enemy because I'm going to emulate what he's doing.

So he made a fool of himself and he virtue signal.

And then, of course, in Afghanistan, he wants to be responsible for the chain of command, and then he doesn't.

We'll get to that in a second.

So when

others screw up, then they screw up.

because the chairman of the Joint Chief does not have operational command.

He's an advisory role.

But when he wants to have an operational command he's also too willing to do so okay so then we get this bob woodwork who by the way i reviewed a couple of his books in the past he's a pathological fabulist sources tell me i was told and then he puts quotation of marks around two people in a room who were speaking often in his books with no

no advice to the reader, no information to the reader, how he knows what they said in the privacy, except he has a principle that's very effective sammy he goes to the grandees of washington and he basically says the following i'm going to write about you

and there are there are people who say bad things about you but

and i can half the time that's not true but if you tell me what really happened then you're going to get your fair portrayal in my book so General Miley Milley has this tendency to pick and choose when the joint chiefs have a particular operational or advisory role, depending on how it's useful to himself.

So he's a politicized general.

And now we get this book, as I said, with Bob Woodward.

And he has this methodology of selective quotations and basically a methodology that tells everybody, if you don't talk to me, you may be portrayed badly, but you can get...

your fair share if you do talk to me.

And in this book, we are told a number of disturbing things, that he was very critical to a lot of people of his commander-in-chief.

We were told that Nancy Pelosi called him, maybe stealthily recorded it, but they discussed how to bypass the commander-in-chief in the use of nuclear weapons.

Then we were told, and now he has confirmed and not only confirmed, but boasted about it, that He had talked to his counterpart in China, whom he says he's known for five years.

And he said, you know what, democracy is messy in these two phone calls.

I'm trying to condense the two.

But we're not going to attack you if you think Donald Trump is crazy, you know, wink nod, ha ha.

We do too, basically.

But we'll warn you.

So let me just put that in context.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States calls a foreign belligerent.

and apprises him that the United States, in his opinion, is in a state of chaos and tells the Chinese Chinese that because we're in a state of chaos,

you may think that we'll lash out.

But if we lash out and preemptively do something,

I will warn you.

Now, what's wrong with that?

Number one, Donald Trump has never started any war.

He didn't go to Iraq.

He didn't go to Afghanistan.

He doesn't want to go to war.

He's a businessman.

Not so much a moral issue with him.

It's a cost-benefit issue.

He thinks it doesn't pay.

It's bad business.

So he doesn't like to start wars.

Wait, wait, wait, wait.

But can I ask you about Syria?

He did send some bombs into Syria.

He did in a reactive way.

And so he said that he was not going to have a very big imprint.

When people were beheading and killing with impunity, these are the so-called JVs that Obama let loose in Iraq and Syria.

He said he would take care of them.

So he bombed and killed Baghdadi.

He bombed the ISIS back, and he did it with a very small imprint of advisors on the ground that were giving the coordinates and information to our pilots.

He killed Soleumani in Iran.

When we were attacked, the small base in Syria, he gave the go-ahead, the commanders had free reign to kill 200 Russian mercenaries.

Think of that.

And what I'm getting at is that there was no evidence for Milley's conclusions that he was trigger happy.

In fact, you could argue that George Bush was trigger happy, that Barack Obama killed a lot of people.

You can argue that Joe Biden just killed a family that he mistakenly thought were Taliban or ISIS connected in Afghanistan through a drone strike.

So, first of all, the whole thing was nonsensical.

The second thing, he has no business talking, whether he was called on or not with the de facto highest-ranking opposition leader.

So, you have a non-partisan general talking to a Democratic speaker about how to circumvent a Republican president from from somebody who says he's non-political.

Three, when he apprises, as I said, the Chinese of weakness in the United States chain of command, he's essentially telling an enemy that we have lost to Turin.

And so he doesn't know how the Chinese are going to react to that.

The Chinese might have said to themselves, huh?

We just got a private secret phone call from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs that everything is in chaos in Washington and they won't react.

maybe,

and he'll tip us off, maybe, maybe it's time to go into Taiwan.

So that was, I don't know not just insubordination, but it bordered on treason.

And now we get back to your initial question.

What was the uniform code of military justice?

Well, in World War II, we were all guided by these series of articles of war.

They go back to the revolutionary period.

But we'd never had 16 million people in the military revolve in and out with a standing military World War II, about 12 million, and there were civilians and there was discrepancies.

If you were in the Marine Corps and you hit an officer, you were treated different than an Army Air Force.

If you were in the Navy and you didn't show up for work, you were treated differently.

So there was the idea that we needed a uniform.

I think they called it drumhead or something.

The idea that they didn't want just charting out policy on the head of a drum out in the field.

They wanted a systemic, systematic, systematic, comprehensive way that all branches, okay.

So they passed the Uniform Code of Military Justice after World War II in 1950 to 51.

And they sent it to Harry Truman.

And the context was that people that had been in the military from walks of life that had never been in the military wanted the same clarity and consistency as civilian law.

Okay.

But there were two other things going on in 1950 to 51.

One was the McCarthy period.

People were paranoid about how the Soviet Union, our quote-unquote ally, had gobbled up Eastern Europe, tried to take Berlin, and of course we lost China.

Who lost China was the question.

And in that conundrum,

June of 1950, the communists, with Chinese and Russian aid, the North Koreans, invaded South Korea.

And at that time, people were very critical of Harry Truman, Douglas MacArthur in particular, but he had been critical all during the 40s.

In the six months after World War II, until he died in December of, late December of 1945, George Patton had been relieved of command for politicizing and criticizing the president's policies on the occupation of Germany, but particularly on our newfound alliance with the Soviet Union and basically saying we fought World War II in 1939.

That's where it started to liberate Eastern Europe from autocracy.

And we confirmed that it would live in autocracy at the end.

That was George Patton.

And then we had Curtis LeMay, the SAC commander after World War II, who was creating SAC.

And he said some very outspoken things and did things.

So there was the idea that Harry Truman wanted a uniform code of military justice.

And so did the Congress.

And they passed it and he signed it in law about a year later.

And under that, it specifically says that all branches of the military shall be treated, and it talks about what officers can and cannot do.

On Article 88, it says that no one can disparage the Commander-in-Chief, the Vice President, members of the Cabinet.

Okay, it's very clear about that.

And it applies to retired officers on the principle that because they are receiving federal military pensions and in many cases they're subject to immediate reactivation, as was MacArthur in World War II from the Philippines, that they are subject.

And it worked pretty well.

Every once in a while, you know, General Zinni criticized George Bush in Iraq.

We had a couple of generals that were out of line.

Stanley McChrystal made fun of Joe Biden and called him, I mean, he heard they were using language like, Joe, bite me.

He resigned, not from the military immediately, but from his post.

And then he sought retirement.

Okay.

But remember, it was designed during the period of Harry Truman, the most unpopular president when he left office than any other president until George W.

Bush and Donald Trump.

And they were not quite as unpopular.

I think Truman left with 23%, 24% popularity.

Even Bush did not, I think, get that low.

Okay, here's the point.

You cannot insult the commander-in-chief for obvious reasons.

And if you have a chain of command, you take orders from them.

But if you're going, and what happened when Donald Trump came?

And I want to be very careful because I know many of these participants who did things, but we had General McCaffrey the other day on TV praising General Milley.

General McCaffrey said that because Donald Trump canceled the New York Times for some federal agency, he was Mussolini.

Michael Hayden, the former Air Force general and CIA director, said the cages, cages, remember these were built by Barack Obama that Donald Trump employed at the border were similar to Auschwitz and he tweeted a picture of Burgenthau.

Auschwitz cages.

Just think of that.

We had another prominent general who said that Donald Trump is emulating Nazi tactics.

General McChrystal said that Donald Trump was a liar.

Admiral McRaven said he should be removed sooner or later.

And they were all clear violations of the code of military justice.

No one said a word.

And they weren't in isolation.

Where did these people come forward?

Why?

Because right after Donald Trump was inaugurated, before anybody knew what he was going to do, a former legal counsel to the Undersecretary of Defense in the Obama administration, Rosa Brooks, wrote an article, I quoted at Adnauseum in Foreign Policy, and she said, we've got to get rid of this guy.

Let's see if we can get the 25th Amendment and say, declare he's crazy, or we can impeach him right away.

For what?

He hadn't even been president yet for just a week.

And then she said, of course,

get this.

Of course, we could always have a military coup.

And so that lowered the bar.

When somebody with that prestige in the Washington bipartisan swamp said that, then it was off to the races.

So then these generals came out and they did it on every single issue.

If you're disparaging and calling the president of the United States a Mussolini, murderous dictator because he cancels a New York Times subscription, you will say it about anything on any time to anybody, anywhere.

And that same general was just on television doing the same thing, praising the insubordination of General Milley.

Okay, we had two colonels, Colonel Yingling, I think Lieutenant Colonel, Colonel Nagel, and they wrote an op-ed saying that in October of 2020, these are retired officers, that General Milley should use military force if he feels, not if there's a finding, that Donald Trump did something wrong.

Think of that for a minute, Sammy.

If he thinks, if they think.

So we have checks and balances in the Constitution.

If you think he's crazy, then you invoke the 25th Amendment.

If you can't do that and you still think he's crazy, then you impeach him.

And they did.

And then you try him in the Senate and they tried that as well too.

So there are constitutional means to correct that.

And we're going to get to in a second, I think you mentioned the actual legal prerogatives of the Joint Chiefs.

But those two officers were essentially arguing for a coup.

So what we've got to finish is there was a whole climate around these officers that violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Because it's not enforced for people over one-star rank.

Remember, we had a lieutenant colonel who just criticized Joe Biden in Afghanistan and had to resign.

He was relieved of command.

We have generals all the time who tell us that if you tweet something about the president, if you show a derogatory picture about a high-ranking official, you're gone.

But that law does not apply to one, two, three, and four-star.

It's a private club where they protect each other.

And

in the case of General Milley and others, it just simply, and these other retired officers, it doesn't, James Clapper is a retired officer.

He said that Donald Trump was a Russian asset.

He said, think of that.

The former head of director of national intelligence said that the president of the United States is a traitor.

And then he lied under oath about the surveillance to the Senate and no repercussions, none.

And so we've got something terribly wrong with the Pentagon top brass, analogous to the failures in Vietnam and where we had to rebuild the military by the time of, you know, 15 years later in the Gulf War, it worked.

But if you want to know why we're not doing well abroad, the Libyan misadventure, stalemate in Iraq, defeat in Afghanistan, a mess in Syria, maybe it's because this military is politicized.

Yeah, you know, can I just add something?

Because you've touched on everything, but Millie seemed to be the next logical step.

But what shocked me about the quote to General Lee was that he said that there's not going to be a surprise.

And it seems to me that is really stepping into military affairs since surprise is usually the most important thing for a military and its tactics

and strategy.

It's what deterrence rests on.

Deterrence is a mixture of the psychological, the spiritual, matter of will, and the material.

So the reason that people do not attack the United States is A, we have the biggest military in the world.

Number two, we're unpredictable.

We can kill Baghdadi tomorrow or we can hit Solomania.

So you do not want to get the United States mad at you.

And spiritual, we have a will to use that power if it's in our interest and our defense of our own country.

When you take one of those elements away and you say, you know what, we're never going to act irrationally.

or what they think is or we think or one person does that and conducts foreign policy he's destroyed deterrence

and we were lucky that the chinese did not move on Taiwan.

We're lucky that we found out about this, because he didn't deny it, which brings up the topic, as you mentioned before, who are the joint chiefs and what's their rules?

Everybody gets on talk, you know, radio and

TV and they say something, well, it's wrong, but why is it wrong?

And the answer is that during World War II, we created something called it had never existed before.

And Roosevelt wanted military advisors.

So they got Admiral Leahy, the admiral, and then they got Ernie King, chief of naval operations, and then they got Hap Arnold, head of the Army Air Force, and they got George Marshall, Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff of the Army.

And they then got policies.

And they said to Franklin Roosevelt, I think we should have Europe first.

Pacific secondary.

Or they thought, let's not have MacArthur fight with Nimitz.

Let's use the cartwheel strategy to take the Philippines and go to Japan.

And let's have the island hockey of Nimitz and the Navy.

Or they said, let's not invade in 42 like we wanted.

Let's listen to Churchill invade in 44.

So they were advisory.

But then they started to creep in and started to direct operations and tell military commanders what to do, even though in that frame of mind, they were of different services.

What do I mean by that?

Ernest King, as chief of naval operations, cannot tell the Army or the Army Air Force what to do but perhaps maybe as chairman of the joint chiefs he thinks he has superplenipatory power and that was wrong so in 1947 they reiterated these are advisors they're like that what would become the national security 1953 they even said you know what they're advisors and you guys said in times of national emergency they have certain exemptions.

They have no exemption.

They are advisors.

And where did this come from?

This came from the branches of the service because they did not want four-star generals in the field having the chain of command interrupted.

By that, I mean the president says, I think we should take Iwo Jima.

That's what my advisors suggest to me.

And I agree in this case.

Then he directs what would be the Secretary of Defense or Secretary of War at the time.

And then they say,

carry out.

President Roosevelt, President Truman, President Eisenhower's policies, and they direct those policies to the concerned or relevant, you know, what would later become African Command, Central Command, et cetera.

Okay, that was the idea.

And then in 1986, under Goldwater Nichols, they reiterated a third time.

The Joint Chiefs is an advisory, advisory.

So what did Milley do?

He got a group of high-ranking officers.

without consulting the President of the United States, and apparently not consulting the Secretary of Defense.

And he said, you're going to follow the protocol, the procedure.

Well, what is that?

There's no procedure that he has.

Because if there's going to be a nuclear da-da-da, and he was overriding the president of the United States, and he was taking his position as chairman of the joint chiefs, and he was forcing himself into the chain of command, which under three statutes was illegal.

So he broke the law and he did so knowingly.

And you cannot have a chairman of the Joint Chiefs freelancing and not especially not freelancing in connection to violating the chain of command.

You should have been relieved immediately when that every one of those people in that room should have said, sir, I am not going to obey an order from you because you are violating the chain of command.

I take orders from superiors in my branches of the service who get their orders from the Secretary of Defense, who get them from the president.

What you're doing is insurrectionary.

Not one of them said anything.

They all nodded.

And of course, he knew that he couldn't deny it because there were people there.

And let's put that all in the context, Sammy.

Bob Woodward and Robert Costa have no credibility as accurate journalists.

But in this case, Millie was not a hostile source.

They reached out to him, or he reached out to him.

And the expectation was that after January 6th, everybody so hated Donald Trump that Millie wanted to be an American folk hero and turn on CNN or MSNBC today, and he is.

So this was all orchestrated by Woodward and Costa and Milley to show how awful Donald Trump was to further discredit his administration, the Republican Party, by showing that Millie was a

what, a whistleblower, a maverick,

he was a voice of sanity in a world of insanity.

And what they did not anticipate was,

because in their arrogance and their ignorance they didn't care or they didn't know that he violated the law he violated the chain of command he violated three uh statutes 47 53 and 86 about the chain of command he violated article 88 of the uniform code of military justice he should be relieved immediately So you're suggesting to me that under all of that grump and gruff and curmudgeon is really somebody seeking the limelight in this General Milley?

Yeah, is there anything brave about what he did?

No.

I want to be very careful.

I don't want to insult, because some of the best people I've ever met are officers.

I have a great deal of respect for the military.

But

if you want to find a consistent pattern to his aberrant behavior, there is one.

And that simply is when everybody says that the talking points are Afghanistan is going great, then you just say it's going great.

You're not empirical.

You don't look at the truth, even though you're warned by outside consultants, think tanks, scholars that it's not going great.

But you do it.

If you have a photo op and you want to go out there and you think probably it's a good thing to show the country that the military is there if you need them and this lawlessness is not going to reach the White House.

But the next day you look in the Washington Post and the New York Times and, oh, we're federalizing the Capitol and he's insurrectionary dawn.

Then you say, I apologize.

We've never had a chairman of the Joint Pete apologize for appearing with the president, but he did because he thought that that's where the power lay.

And then he leaked, he leaked or his staff leaked that he was considering resignation over that.

So out promises, promises.

Think of that.

Thinking of resigning, but he wasn't really thinking of it.

But he wanted us to know that he was so angry at Donald Trump that he might resign, but he won't resign when he broke the law.

And then when you look at, and then if you look at white rage,

and I'm understanding white rage, and he gets in front of the Congress and he showboats because he's in the middle of the George Floyd post-woke hysteria.

And he thinks this is going to reflect well on him.

So he joins the mob.

And think of what he's doing then.

He starts to say,

you know, Austin and he are going to go through the ranks and they're going to find out where the white supremacists are.

There are no white supremacists organized cabal in the military.

I'll tell you what they all are.

As I said before, that if you look at the dead in Afghanistan and Iraq, 73 to 75% were white males of the working class, and their numbers were twice those of the population.

And I don't care about that and they don't care about it because this is not a racial tribal society.

But apparently General Milley does and General Austin, retired General Austin Secretary, do because all they talked about was marginalized and disproportional.

We're going to make America, the Pentagon look like America.

We're going to make the Army look like, okay, where does that stop and where does that begin?

The dead are going to look like America.

So why would you insult in your tribal way of thinking a tribe that has inordinately died on the battlefield the last 20 years and say that they're somehow the prime suspects for weeding out white supremacy?

He did that because that was what he felt was 51%.

And after January 6th, when all these people were grandstanding and say, we're going to impeach him.

We're going to convict him when he's a private citizen.

We're going to impeach him.

We'll impeach him twice.

We don't need a special prosecutor.

We don't need hearings.

We don't need a Supreme Court justice.

We're just going to violate all the customs and traditions and constitutional advice about impeachment.

He got into that.

That's when he called the Chinese.

That's when he got all of the grandees in the military together and said, I, Mark Milley, I'm going to set a new precedent for how we operate the use of nuclear weapons in times of crisis.

And you will not ever obey an officer's order in the chain of command if I say don't.

Well, that's a coup.

And I don't care how many of these decorated four-star generals get on MSNBC and CNN and say otherwise because it's disloyal.

This is something I'll finish

my rant,

but it's really disturbing because

there's also an element that we have created a Washington, New York, Virginia nexus where people in the military realize that promotion in the last five to ten years is not predicated on victory and disproportionality.

If the enemy lobs a missile, then you lob two to make sure they never do it again.

It's been this PC,

climate change, critical race theory stuff.

And that's how you get promoted.

And everybody knows that.

Or if you want to be Lieutenant Colonel Vinman, you go in the National Security, and then you're a quote-unquote quasi-whistleblower and you get in the limelight and you get a book out or whatever it is.

There's a sense among the officer class that the fast track is trying to be left-wing, progressive and political.

And then there's this nefarious element in it that once you are that way, then you get Elizabeth Warren off your back and Bernie Sanders off your back.

Instead of saying that you're a part of the revolving door military industrial intelligence complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned us about, you're not.

You're a progressive person whose chain of command is very useful.

You don't have the sturm and drag of a legislative back and forth.

You can just say, we're going to subsidize transgendered surgery.

We're going to have gay marriage.

We're going to have women in combat.

We're going to have pregnancy suits.

Whatever these people in Congress want that's left-wing, we're going to do it.

And if we do that, when we retire, we're going to make millions of dollars at Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop, Lockheed.

It's all waiting for us because these are woke boards.

But

if we say one thing and say, you know, I don't believe in critical racial theory.

I think it's racist.

It's contrary to the melting pot and the idea that race is incidental, not essential to who we are, you're not going to get a corporate board.

Or if you do, Elizabeth Warren's going to say you're part of the revolving door and let's have a waiting period.

So there is turmoil now in the Pentagon, as General Milley, he was right about one thing.

There is turmoil and democracy is messy, but it was created by people him.

And he just couldn't leave it alone.

He couldn't just go to the president of the United States and said, Mr.

President, here's what he should have done.

I am an advisor to you.

I am not in the operational chain of command, but my duty is to say: if you want to get out of Afghanistan, here's what happens when you have 10,000.

Here's what happens when you have 5,000.

Here's what happens when you have 2,000.

Here's what you happen, in my considered opinion, when you have zero.

And if you're going to get out, here are the requirements, here are the conditions, here are the punishments you can impose on the Taliban.

And then these are a one-year, two-year, five-year.

That's what he was supposed to do.

And then when the president made a decision, he should have said, I think that's the decision that we should all support.

And in my advisory role, when called upon by Congress and when active commanders in the field, I shall reflect your position.

And if he can't do that, then he's got to resign.

But he didn't do that.

He didn't do that.

He did all he could with Nancy Pelosi and the Chinese military and people in his own cadre to undermine it.

It's very dangerous.

I'll say something I've never said on radio, that after the photo op of last summer, I was very critical and I have a private cell phone number.

The next day I got a private call.

I said, who are you?

And said, I'm Major So-and-so.

I said, how in the hell do you have my private cell phone?

He goes, well, you know,

I said, well, what are you calling?

Well, I'm on the staff of General Milley, and he wants to know

if we can consult you about what you wrote.

And I said, No, wait a minute.

Do you know what you're doing?

You are a military officer.

You're not a public relations person.

You're not a politician.

And you maybe

your intentions are well-founded, but what you're essentially doing is somebody writes an op-ed that is critical of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs for politicizing a photo op.

The next day, that journalist, op-ed writer, opinion writer gets a call from a government official on his private cell phone.

How you found my cell phone number, I don't know.

And you're saying you want to talk about it.

It's like the mafia going into somebody and saying, oh, I think we need to talk about the fact that you're critical of the boss.

And so he said, well, I didn't mean it that way.

And he probably didn't.

But that's the type of chilling atmosphere that we're in now.

And no, no staffer of General Milley has any business calling up people who have been critical on their private cell phone numbers and saying, we'll put you, as I think you said, we're going to put you in a consulting body of scholars.

Well, what is that?

Is that a list?

A Nixonian list?

So there is something pathological with one to four stars, and nobody once has the guts to say it.

And because, and you know, finally, they're really getting very close to chaos because the traditional support of the U.S.

military, whether it's good or bad, fair or unfair, aberrant or normal, came from Red State America.

These were the people who said, let's get a big defense budget.

These are the people who said the best people in the world are military officers.

These are the people who said, honor, duty, country.

These are the people who sent their children to places like Afghanistan and Iraq in numbers greater than theirs.

And they have alienated that group.

They have alienated it by politicizing the Pentagon and the military and the rank and file.

From private to about captain or major, there is a huge political cultural gap.

And when this military decided to politicize it, de facto, they made a choice to alienate 50%

of the country.

And that's why you're not supposed to do it.

And the conservatives shouldn't do it either.

You know, you've been with General Miley.

You've been from, well, I think he might have thought he was doing what's good for the country too.

He's looking for his retirement with corporate boards.

What do you, I mean, my hedgehog to your fox, what do you actually make when it all comes down to it of his character?

Or is there a historical character that you see that's similar circumstances?

Every one of these generals has made a mistake.

But the reason that Millie is much different is two reasons.

George Patton saved hundreds of thousands of lives in World War II.

He was absolutely right that we were naive about the Soviet system.

He was absolutely right that we sold out Eastern Europe, that Finland and Austria were right on the borders of what would soon become NATO, and that was dangerous in their neutrality.

But He didn't have the right to publicly attack

his commanders or the government, and he paid a terrible price for that.

I don't know, nothing to do with his death, just his reputation.

Douglas MacArthur was always caught on guard.

He was off guard.

He was caught off guard in the Philippines.

He was caught off guard right after Pearl Harbor.

Okay.

But for all of his faults, his vanity, his ego, he was a very talented commander like Patton.

That Enshon operation in 1950 was absolutely brilliant that he achieved.

Contrary to a lot of his superiors on the Joint Chief, not his superiors, but of similar rank.

But he was absolutely wrong giving interviews to newspaper people about the pathologies of Truman's foreign policy.

No substitute for victory, absolutely right.

But when he saw that his views were not going to be the officials' views, the U.S.

government, and believe me, he was treated very badly when he went up to the Yallow River.

They wanted him to go up there.

And people had said to him in his command, do not go up there because it gets wider.

It's November.

It's cold.

Your supply lines lengthen.

The Chinese communists will shorten and they will come across the border without pretent and a million.

And they did.

And then everybody who said go up there turned on them.

And then Matthew Ridgway came in and didn't do what he did.

Matthew Ridgway did not attack the president of the United States.

He did not attack his superior officer.

MacArthur did.

I could go on to Curtis LeMay in the 60s.

He was a brilliant, this guy was the most brilliant colonel major in the B-17 campaign.

He developed everything from new squadron, stack formation.

He saved the $2 billion B-29 project.

He created the strategic air command, but he was starting to say things during the Cold War that were outside his purview.

Okay, but they all had one redeeming feature.

They were brilliant and they had a record of brilliance.

They were not Edmund Walker who did it, who was kind of a nut and

anti-civil rights, who was the only general, I think, who was forced to resign, not just from his command, but from the military in general.

I'd be very curious to see if there's ever been a ranking general who said, I quit, or it's been forced.

Not McChrystal,

I'm being relieved of command or Mattis of CENTCOM, but I'm talking about I'm quitting the military.

before the age of retirement.

He did, and he should have, but he didn't have any redeeming counter virtues.

But what I'm getting at, I don't see in General Milley a Patton, a MacArthur, a LeMay career.

I see mediocrity upon mediocrity upon mediocrity.

And so he's not a national icon.

He's not a national figure.

He's a adept bureaucratic infighter.

And he always senses.

People think, well, he's a buffoon.

No, he's not.

He's a very clever political operator.

Everybody thought he was going to deny

Bob Woodward's usual fake accounts, but he knew that there was probably a transcript in the NSA of that call with China and somebody would leak it.

And he knew that when he tried to violate the chain of command, that there were, what, five, 10, 15 officers in that room, not all of whom could be trusted to lie on his behalf and say that he didn't violate the chain of command.

So he came out with a brilliant strategy yesterday.

Yeah, I did it.

What are you going to do about it?

Donald Trump is a nut, basically, is what he's saying.

I called China and saved the world.

And

CNN and the network news went gaga.

And that's what he's trying to do right now.

He's trying to say, I'm a whistleblower.

I'm a voice.

I saved America.

I violated the law.

Maybe so, but I saved America.

That's what he's trying to do.

And it's pathetic.

Yeah, it really is.

I was going to ask you a little bit about that, the left view of Miley, but I think we better move on to our next subject, if you don't mind.

Can we talk a little bit about Nikki Minaj?

Yes.

And she really gives me a good introduction because she's not one of my favorite entertainers.

She seems to,

she seems to be very brave, actually, on the one hand.

And on the other hand,

she's all part of this coarsening of culture that we see in our popular music.

And but I sort of admire her that she's blowing up the Joy Reed Karen subculture of that pampered neurotics, or so it seems.

They're just gone crazy from what she's said.

What are your views on Nikki Minaj?

Let me first suggest I'm ignorant of rap music.

I find it to be, use a PC terminology, racist, misogynist, homophobic,

and I don't understand the appeal other than I understand that it appeals.

So I'm not going to dismiss the hundreds of millions of people who find resonance in it.

And in that genre, I think she's now either at the level of Beyonce or Beyond, one of the best-selling artists of all time.

So whatever she's doing is very successful.

And I admire people who are successful.

And I don't, from what during, I didn't even know much about her.

Now that she's in the limelight, I mean the limelight in the sense of the general public limelight outside of the hip-hop community, we're learning that a lot of the stuff is pretty crude.

Okay.

But she hit on something when she said

that she didn't want to be vaccinated and that the people punished her for that.

And she didn't want to, and then she said some crazy things about a cousin or something whose testicle swelled up and then his girlfriend dropped him.

But what she was basically saying to

the bi-coastal globalist liberal elite who

can't be coherent on vaccinations.

Remember, I got vaccinated, I think it was in February, on the idea that everybody should be vaccinated because you can't trust people not to get vaccinated because it's 96% effective.

And you don't really care what another person does with his private life.

If he chooses not to be vaccinated, fine, but it doesn't affect you.

You're vaccinated.

Just like with the, you know, smallpox or all the others.

Okay.

But it didn't happen that way.

We're finding out that it loses its efficacy.

And we're finding out people who have had COVID, whether they know it or not, if they do have antibodies, they tend to last longer and they're more robust in fighting the disease.

But that doesn't matter.

In other words, if you have had a bad case of COVID, you have antibodies.

Dr.

Fauci and the CDC and NIH and Joe Biden say you've got to be vaccinated.

Think of that.

That's like saying, okay, you people that haven't had COVID, which means you haven't had natural antibodies which are superior to your vaccination.

And since because we're now requiring even people that have had COVID to get vaccination, we're requiring everybody who's vaccinated to be exposed to COVID.

So they get natural antibodies and vaccinated, because that's what we're saying to the people who haven't been vaccinated.

And maybe they're going to say to us, well,

sorry for you.

You have an inferior form of immunity.

I've got a superior natural form.

You better get mine as well as your vaccination, just like you want me to get to.

So that's how absurd we are.

This powerful person says, I'm not going to do that.

I have my reasons, my health reasons.

I don't, she, you know, some of it was misinformation, a lot of it was.

And the community basically said, you are endangering all of us.

And I thought to myself, well, that would be a good argument if you could tell us that males from 18 to 25 had a much greater chance of side effects and lasting rare but lasting side effects from

getting COVID than they do from the vaccination and our problems with cardio swelling, et cetera.

But you can't because we know that people who are young, robust males have very little side effects.

But if they do have rare side effects, it's more likely from the vaccination than from actually getting a case of COVID.

Or we do know that children, even with a Delta variant,

are not going to be very serious, 99.8 or 9 if they're exposed.

But this doesn't matter because now we're into this, everybody's going to buy a pet rock sort of idea.

Everybody's going to buy a Hulu.

We're all going to get vaccinated.

Okay.

And she says no.

And the problem the left has is she's black.

And they have been telling every single person that Donald Trump's white legions are the reasons that we still have the Delta mutation because they didn't get vaccinated because they're a bunch of yokels and toothless deplorables, chumps, dregs, you know, the whole Biden, Obama

vocabulary.

And it's not true.

Because if you look statistically, Asians are the most vaccinated.

Then come so-called whites.

Then come Latinos, and African Americans are last.

But she understands, I think she does, she's pretty bright.

She understands the bankruptcy of the white liberal progressive.

mindset, that so-called Karen, that anal retentive, obsessive, compulsive, we're going to change every aspect of your behavior.

And she understands that they're hypocrites and that they don't go after black women or black people because of historical reasons.

They just want to find some white person, even though statistically that's not the problem.

Maybe in local pockets of, you know,

rural areas, people are not getting vaccinated.

But generally,

the problem is that 13% of the population in large numbers is only about 35% vaccinated.

Okay.

And she's saying, you know what, I'm not going to do it.

And then it's a pause.

It's kind of like that scene in the wild bunch.

You know, Mapache and Bill Holden,

they don't know who's going to shoot whom, and then they start shooting.

And now

the white Karen community said, wait a minute, this is one of the most powerful, popular black women in America.

And she's saying it's a matter of personal choice that she, even though she's vulnerable, I don't think it's wise because I, as a 68-year-old male, I think it's safer to get the vaccination vaccination than to get COVID, but it's just a matter of choice.

And she's saying, what are you going to do about it?

And

they go after her and she says, you know what?

I don't have to listen to this.

And now that this Karen community is kind of perplexed.

Wow, we are liberal.

We've done all this for black people.

They owe us fealty, political obeyance.

And here's this

very powerful woman with, I think Joy Reed said 22 million followers on social media.

And she's saying she doesn't have to listen to her white benefactors.

And when they attacked her, she hit right back and hit right back and hit right back.

And they're thinking.

She pulled out her other gun on Joy Reed.

That was pretty funny.

Saying, this isn't Tom Sowell.

This isn't Shelby Steele.

This isn't Larry Elder.

This isn't Claren Thomas, brilliant black people who are conservative.

This is one of us.

And we can't say anything because we patronize black people.

But she's attacking everything we believe in.

And they don't know what to do with her.

And she knows they don't know what to do with her.

So she's rubbing it in.

And no one ever does the science.

That's what Scott Atlas was right about that.

He said, follow the science.

The science says that about 99.2 to 99.8, depending how you calibrate it, are not going to die from COVID or be seriously ill.

That's still...

a number of thousands of people in a population of 330 million that will.

But they also say that the vaccination loses its potency.

It has some side effects for some people

and they should apprise everybody the risk.

But the idea that we're all going to use these new vaccinations and we're going to destroy COVID and vaccinate it out of existence, as we were told, look at Israel.

They can't do it.

They've got a very high level of vaccinations.

They cannot get people in the Orthodox community.

They cannot get people in the Arab community to get vaccinated in the same ratios as the general population.

But more importantly, two shots of the Pfizer do not give you the immunity that we were told when it first came out at 96%.

Just doesn't do it.

It fades.

So now they're going to give a third one and then a fourth one.

And believe me, if you're taking three to four to five vaccinations and you're told that this is the pathway to,

that's like saying,

We're going to eliminate the flu.

We're just going to keep vaccinating you and vaccinating you every fall with a new flu shot.

And finally, there will be no more flu.

Well, the flu is still here.

And speaking as somebody who always gets a flu shot, and I think in my life I've had 10 to 12 terrible flus, I don't believe that the vaccination works.

I think it gives you a marginal advantage.

And in my case, I think that the fact that I got two Moderna shots, and I urge everybody to get vaccinations if they feel that it's safe, I think it gives you a little edge.

Finally, she brings up another point.

I don't know know if she did it inadvertently.

Why did we equate vaccination that does not give lasting immunity or even immunity for over a year?

Why did we just drop all the other things?

Why didn't we say, here's a protocol.

You can have the monoclonal antibodies, which the Biden administration is mysteriously selectively cutting back on areas where there's need, i.e.

the south, and then for quote-unquote equity based based on other criteria other than medical demand or redistributing it.

And that's not a paranoid conspiracist thought, it's the truth.

But why didn't we just say this is the protocol?

This is the protocol.

And then why didn't we say, if you don't believe in medical protocols, there are scientific studies now, not comprehensive, but there's some suggestions if you want to take quercetin, you want to take Pepsid, you want to take NAC, and any of these things may give you some marginal utility in preventing COVID.

Or why don't we say,

we don't know about

hydroxychloroquine, we don't know of ivermedsin, but there are studies abroad that suggest that it has some prophylactic use, as they're discovering.

We don't think it's necessarily going to kill you.

Hydroxychloroquine is a very safe drug.

I've taken it when I went to Egypt for malaria.

I took chloroquine, which is more powerful.

And ivermedicine is not an animal dewormer.

They have a human-refined dosage.

It's not like you're going to the veterinarian.

Maybe some people are, but it's not a dangerous drug, apparently.

But they can't do that.

They can't just say, here's choice one.

We say it's there for you.

We don't recommend it.

Here's choice two.

There's some evidence.

We don't recommend it.

But here's choice three: the vaccination and social, but quarantine complete lockdown.

And here's, but, and we're going to have to fuse all of these alternatives in this very complex fight.

Because after all, masks were good, and then they were bad, and then they were good, and then two were better than one, and then herd immunity was 60, 70, 80, 90%.

And then there's no gain of function research going on about this virus.

Well, there's sort of related gain of function research.

This came from a bat, this came from a pangolin.

Well, it may have come from a bat or pangolin in the laboratory.

Well, maybe it didn't.

So we've got nothing but misinformation that has been politicized, and yet we're asked to believe them.

And when we express any doubt, then this legions of Karens comes out to demonize people.

And

Manji knows that.

And she also knows that people are sick and tired of the hypocrisy.

And just think for a minute.

Who are the most prominent Democratic progressive grandees in the United States?

Let's go down the list.

Nancy Pelosi?

Yeah, she's one of the biggest Karens in the country.

What did she do?

She snuck out to get her hair done and violated social distancing, quarantining, and masking.

Oh, maybe it's the governor of California, Gavin Newsom.

He violated his own statues by having a French laundry, one of the most expensive restaurants in the United States without a mask so he could talk with lobbyists, lobbyists.

Maybe it's Chuck Schumer.

He was on camera the other day sneezing and having debris come out of his nose with no mask.

And I could go on.

The mayor of San Francisco, Chris Cuomo, who always, always lectures everybody and staged his breakout, was completely staged when he said, I've been in quarantine.

I'm coming out for the first time when we know that he was out with the virus.

and not in quarantine because he yelled at somebody who reported that.

So what I'm getting at is that a lot of people are saying if the people who are in charge of our government are, look at Obama, let me interrupt myself.

Obama, his party.

I cut down, you know, from 700 to 500, but you look at the pictures from his party.

And by the way, there was a spike in the Martha's Vineyard area of COVID after his party.

But all of the staff, the servants, had masks on, but not the Obama entourage.

Nobody did.

And if you look at that Vanity Fair Metropolitan Galo the other day, all of AOC with tax the rich, no mask.

All these people were parading and prancing around.

And guess what?

All the people who were serving them, apparently they had to wear a mask.

Wearing a mask is not just, oh, I wear a mask, I don't wear a mask.

You know, I just got off a plane.

I had a 20-hour delay, delay, delay, delay, delay, delay to Detroit, and, you know, 12, 14 hours back.

And when you have a mask on in an airport or a plane that long,

you really start to feel the oxygen deprivation and the discomfort.

And so we're making the service class go through that.

And

if that's what the science says, and it's disputed, but if that's what it says, and that's what the elite who make the policies want to follow themselves, then there's a logic to it, but that's not what they're doing.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, I think we better call it a day here.

I want to remind people that your website has just been renewed at victorhanson.com, that you are the Martin and Nilly Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Bolski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, that you can be found on Facebook at V D Hansen's Cup and on Twitter at V D Hansen and on

Parlor at Victor Davis-Hansen.

And thank you so much for all of your wisdom this day,

which is September 17th, I believe.

So thank you so much for that.

And we'll see you next week.

Well, thank you, Sammy.

And I think your dogs,

wherever they are, whatever they are, are chiming in that they say it's time to leave.

Yes.

A lot of the things that I've discussed,

I wrote a book called The Dying Citizen.

And I wrote it right before the George Floyd and during, I finished it.

And it's kind of uncanny where a lot of the things we talked about today have one commonality, and that is a resident seems to have equal rights and responsibility, no responsibilities, but the same rights as a citizen.

And tribalism, no borders, destruction of the middle class,

administrative state globalization, all of that explains what we're seeing.

And so for me, I tried to make sense of it in a comprehensive, long project.

I hope that people might want to look at the book because I think it'll put all of what we're talking about in a larger context.

So thank you.

Yeah, thank you.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen, and we're signing off.