The Traditionalist: Liberals Err and Err Badly

When empires debase their currency, citizens who hold gold survive the transition.

That's not opinion, it's documented fact.

Trump's economic warning isn't speculation, it's pattern recognition.

The same signals that preceded every major currency crisis are flashing now.

Unsustainable debt, foreign nations dumping our bonds, and central banks hoarding gold.

But Trump's also revealing the solution.

The IRS strategy he's used for decades is available to every American.

It's how the wealthy preserve their fortunes when paper currencies fail.

American Alternative Assets has documented this strategy in their free 2025 wealth protection guide.

It shows exactly how to position yourself before the turbulence Trump's warning about arrives.

Call 888-615-8047 for your free guide.

That's 888-615-8047 or visit victorlovesgold.com.

The patterns are clear.

Make sure you're on the right side of them.

Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show, The Traditionalist.

We are recording on Friday, June 25th, in the year 2021.

The namesake of our show is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busk Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor Davis-Hansen is also a best-selling author.

We're going to tell you how to get his forthcoming important book, The Dying Citizen, in a minute.

We're going to tell you a lot more about Victor and a lot more about what we're going to be talking about today on the traditionalist.

But first, this message.

Like you, when I bought my last pair of shoes, I looked for stylish comfort and beautiful engineering.

And that might make you think Italian, but if you're buying sheets, it should make you think bowl and branch.

The colors, the fabric, the design.

Bowl and branch sheets are made with long-lasting quality, offering extraordinary softness to start and getting softer and softer for years to come.

Bowl and branch sheets are made with the finest 100% organic cotton in a soft, breathable, durable weave.

Their products have a quality you can feel immediately and become even softer with every wash.

Plus, bowl and branch comes with a 30-night worry-free guarantee.

I've been sleeping like a baby in my bowl and branch sheets, which keep me cool on those hot summer nights, and they're the perfect place for sunrise and morning coffee.

So join me.

Feel the difference an extraordinary night's sleep can make with Bol and Branch.

Get 15% off plus free shipping on your first set of sheets at bowl and branch.com slash Victor.

That's Bowl and Branch.

B-O-L-L-A-N-D-B-R-A-N-C-H dot com slash Victor to save 15% off and unlock free shipping.

Exclusions may apply.

And we'd like to thank Bolen Branch for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

We're back with the Traditionalist again.

We're recording on June 25th, 2021.

I'm Jack Fowler.

I'm the co-host, the former publisher of National Review, but right now I wear the hat of the director of the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic.

We are deeply concerned about strengthening civil society, and I hope we're going to be doing that increasingly over the next year or two.

But who cares about me?

Let's talk about the namesake of the show, Victor Davis Hansen.

Listen, folks, Victor has a tremendous website.

I want to encourage all of our listeners to visit it regularly.

It's VictorHanson.com.

Hanson, S-O-N, that's the Swedish way of saying it.

Yes, it is.

Private papers.

And Victor writes a tremendous amount almost daily.

He writes original material.

You're not going to find it anywhere else.

Various links, though, to it when he appears on other programs.

Victor is, what else, Victor?

About your bio farmer, classicist, military historian, essayist at American Greatness.

You also oversee Hoover Institution's very important online journal, Strategica.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to follow Victor on Twitter, at VD Hansen, that's his handle.

If you're on Facebook, check out.

VDH's Morning Cup.

There's a great fan club on Facebook called originally the Victor Davis-Hanson Fan Club.

Quite an original title.

Back again on the website.

Go to the column on the right on the homepage.

You'll find a link there to subscribe to Victor's newsletter, The Week in Review.

So, Victor, today we've got a lot to talk about.

Let's start off talking about General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was on Capitol Hill, as was the defense secretary for the Biden administration.

And this week, they got into it with Republican members who were pressing them and criticizing the use of critical race theory in our academies and applicable elsewhere through the defense agencies.

There was pushback from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

He was critical of even the insinuation that commissioned and non-commissioned officers would be called woke.

He implied that, well, critical race theory was one of those things worth finding out more about.

White rage was something he thought as a white man, he was interested in finding more more about.

And he connected that immediately in his pushback to some of the congressmen with the January 6th attack or craziness at the Capitol.

And he had a lot more to say that was, I think, specious.

So, Victor, what are your thoughts on the performances of our military leaders on Capitol Hill this week?

Well, I was really disappointed.

That's an understatement.

I think he, General, I don't know whether it's Miley or Milley, but I think it's probably, as you said, Milley.

His performance is a good reminder while we've had very few generals in politics and those that did try to run for office or considered running for office, Wesley Clark, even for a moment, David Petraeus, Curtis LeMay, with the exception of Dwight Eisner, don't make good presidential candidates or even presidents.

And more importantly, I have been in error by suggesting that we waive requirements on length of service.

tenure disconnect.

That's a bad way to say.

Yeah, about how soon a military officer can be Secretary of Defense.

I suggested that we should give Jim Mattis an exemption, which we did, we being Americans in the Congress.

But I don't think that it was wise in retrospect.

I don't think it's wise we did that for Lloyd Austin, too.

Generals are just not adept.

They're creatures of the chain of command.

And we have some brilliant generals that like to remark on political events.

And we've had them with, as I said, Curtis LeMay and Doug MacArthur and George Patton, but they always get in trouble when they do because they're not sensitive to politics.

So what did General Milley say?

I think I can say that every single statement he said was false.

He said, when thousands rushed the Capitol for an insurrection or to take over the government, essentially, there were not thousands.

There was about 500 people who went into the Capitol.

That was unfortunate.

Some of them engaged in violence and vandalism.

That was even worse.

We all want them prosecuted if they were guilty of something.

But again, we've said this, Jack, so often.

There was nobody armed.

There was nobody using a weapon.

There was no blueprint for an insurrection.

There was no reason to use the military to post 25 to 30,000 troops in the aftermath or barbed wire or fencing all over Washington in a way that generals themselves had warned we should not do after the 2020 June riots.

There was no reason, I think, that Ashley Babbitt, an unarmed intruder, needed to be shot and killed.

She could have been detained, arrested.

There were people in full white gear not far from her who could have handled her easily.

We don't know the name of the shooter.

We don't know his rank.

We don't know his race.

We don't know his age.

We don't know anything of him in a landscape in which that was considered essential anytime a police officer shoots a man.

The one cop shooting in America that the left is not interested in.

Absolutely.

So everything he said was false.

And it's even worse that they use that as a pretext, they being the military, to go on this witch hunt through the ranks.

So that was wrong.

And then he wandered into the Three-Fifth Clause.

I don't know how often we have to remind people that are half-educated, like the general, that it was not in the Constitution.

It did not mention race.

The word black or Negro is not mentioned in the Constitution.

What the Three-Fifths Clause was, was an abolitionist, a New England-led effort to A,

save the nascent union after the Declaration of Independence in that critical, critical 13-year period where we will have the Articles of Confederation and it was not working to get a union and not have a European-like squabbling group of rival states on the North American continent.

So, what they did was they said to the Southerners, you are hypocrites.

You will not give freedom to your slaves, which we want freed.

And then you turn around and want full representation in the Senate, in the census for each slave so he can get more House representation based on this new constitution.

And we're not going to do that and they negotiated a three-fifths count it wasn't that they were giving three-fifths of personhood it was the abolitionists and the majority of the states in terms of population said

we don't want to go to war right now with the south and we can't have a rival nation right on our borders so what does it take to convince these racists these slave owners to join us and they want full representation for each person even though they deny them personhood and we don't want that and they won't take zero representation.

So they settled on three-fifths.

And here's Mealy talking about that ad nauseum.

And then I thought it was even worse when he said, I think you remember it, Jack, he said, that he reads all of these revolutionary texts and he does so.

He's read Mao, he's read Marx.

He does so to learn about what he's up against.

And he's up against white supremacy.

So I don't know if there are any books on white supremacy.

I assume there are.

Well, why didn't he read one?

The reason he didn't read one is he's not really interested in finding out the intricacies of this pathology to break it because A, it really doesn't exist very much in the military.

And B, if he put that on the list, he knows the left would castigate him as much as they're now praising him.

So everything he said was either based in ignorance or calculated for political woke effect.

And yes, he is woke.

And then finally, it doesn't behoove him to sit there with a chest full of metal in full uniform and lose his temper and start kind of getting angry and suggesting that people who dare question the military's recommended reading list.

Remember, we had the chief of Magvala operations saying, Well, these are just a list.

Well, if they're a list and you're not supposed to read them, like what would happen if a soldier said, you know what, I'm not going to read one damn one.

They're just recommended.

They're not required and they're not even really recommended.

So these officers are telling us just what we've talked about a lot, Jack, that to be promoted to two, three, four star rank, you will not be adjudicated or judged or graded on the combat efficacy alone of your unit that you commanded in the past, but the degree to which your political views are synchronized with those of the progressive landscape in the New York-Washington corridor.

That's just a fact.

And they will do and say anything to that effect.

And more importantly, just when you think that these people are revolutionaries and avatars of fundamental change as they pose, I guarantee you, just in the manner of General Austin, who is now Secretary of Defense, and just in the manner of past Secretaries of Defense and past heads of each of the branches of the military, Mr.

Milley, upon retirement, will use that expertise in wokeness and he will go to a defense contractor corporation and advise them.

It won't be on wokeness.

It will be on the intricacies and the labyrinth of Pentagon bidding for multi-billion dollar contracts.

And the left will not say a word because he has bought woke insurance.

And that protects him from any criticism and even ensures he'll be praised as he is now on social media, by the way.

Well, there really is a pot of gold at the end of this ramp.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Well, Victor, let's move on to, we have a few more topics to talk about on the traditionalist.

I'd like to remind listeners that there's also two other weekly podcasts, The Classicist and The Culturalist.

I'm blessed to do the traditionalist and the classicist.

And Sammy Wink, the great Sammy Wink, does the culturalist.

So folks should subscribe to all of them.

But today on the traditionalist, we're going to talk about our great president.

Two things.

This, I'm slipping in.

I didn't tell you about this ahead of time, but I just like your thought.

It was Joe Biden at two press conferences.

One is this, where he did this weird whispering.

thing about, I think it was about the infrastructure bill.

It just was like crazy town.

And And then his blaming crime,

the shocking increase in crime across the nation on guns.

Nothing to do with defunding police, nothing to do with police essentially being forced out of their jobs or their hands tied by local district attorneys who won't prosecute crimes.

The broken windows theory seemed to work.

Now it's the opposite of it, but none of that is the problem.

It's guns.

So, Victor, your thoughts on Joe Biden's performance in these two ways or any other way this week that interests you?

Well, like the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he's not interested in reflecting reality.

He's talking for political purposes and agendas.

He knows, even Joe Biden knows, that the FBI's crime statistic ledger shows you that of all the people who die through the use of a gun, whether that's an accident or a suicide or a murder or whatever, the vast majority over about 95%

are shot or killed or commit suicide by handguns.

Okay, so if he's really interested in fixating on guns, then he would say, and we've got to get, and you know what?

A lot of leftists have.

The Brady bill was aimed at handguns because that's where the carnage occurs.

That's the instrument in which people who have that propensity use more so than a knife, although knives are used to kill people, I think, more than rifles or assault weapons.

But the point is, he would fixate on that, and then he would look at the gun control laws in Chicago, and Baltimore and Los Angeles and yes Fresno that has a 180% rise in violent crime and I think double last year's murder rate already and he would and he would say ah that's the problem there are lax laws they don't have laws in the books to protect inner city youth and he would find that their gun control laws are far stricter than Utah's or Texas which have far less violence by guns.

So then what would he come up with?

He would say, if he were honest, he would say, well, the answer is they've got strict laws against handgun use.

It's illegal.

You can't possess a handgun unless it's registered.

It was bought.

It was certified.

You're not a felon, et cetera, et cetera.

You don't have so many bullets in the magazine or your clip is not so large.

All of those laws are on the books.

And then he would say, ah, now to enforce those, we're going to have to arrest people to save the innocent.

And I'm going to warn the country that it's going to be asymmetrical, that the arrests are going to fall most heavily on people people of color because statistics, not my own prejudiced or my corn pop ideology, is one that suggests that black males inordinately use guns that are either stolen or not registered or not in compliance with laws as far as capacity or caliber, etc.

But to do that, he would have to arrest a lot of black males.

And that would be racist.

It would be discriminatory.

So what he's basically saying is, I'm going to lie that handguns are not the prime culprit.

I'm going to suggest that it's assault weapons.

I'm going to lie that the laws aren't tough enough.

And I'm going to lie that people to solve this problem should not have to focus on African-American youth.

And I'm going to do this because I don't have a choice.

That's what progressivism is.

It's the noble lie.

And it doesn't, it's interested in humanity, but it's not interested in humans.

It doesn't care about the average African-American six-year-old girl is walking down the street in Chicago and a stray bullet or an intentional bullet hits her in the head or that Puerto Rican couple that was pulled out of a car and executed by people with guns.

Not interested in that.

I didn't see that guy pull out of an assault, a legal assault weapon and start shooting them.

And so that's what it's all about.

And that's what General Millie was all about.

And we live in an empire of lies.

We really do.

It's codified.

And we see it with Dr.

Fauci, we see it with the military, we see it with Joe Biden daily.

And you know, the Washington Post used to have a lie check or a lie counter for Trump.

Remember?

I don't think they have that for Joe Biden, but he can't say a word without saying something that's untrue.

And I guess the fallback defense is, well, he's addled, as if it's better to be confused and make something up because you're demented than to deliberately say something that's untrue while cognizant.

Right.

Well, Victor,

on another podcast, we're going to elaborate on that observation about how Joe Biden is handled by the media.

But let's talk about a few more things today on the traditionalist.

One is New York City's mayoral elections, maybe of importance, maybe not.

A former police officer who was essentially

campaigning as pro-police against a phalanx of other candidates who were to fund the police seems to have, he is prevailing, although New York has this incident, which you may want to talk about also, this crazy ranked voting.

So you can vote for, I think, up to five candidates in a ranking.

Sounds like a Hall of Fame balloting.

Maybe it works with Cooperstown, but to

elect the leader of a major city, I don't see how.

But the initial results are being portrayed as a blow to progressives.

Do you have any thoughts about the New York City mayoral elections?

Well, I think that most people, humans being what they are, their prime directives are to be secure, to be happy, and to be prosperous.

And you can't be any of that in New York because of oppressive policies that have emasculated the police, punitive taxation that has stalled the economy, and just the idea you're in a huge city anyway.

And it takes extraordinary efforts to make you feel like you're in Yosemite or something.

And all of that means that these people are worried and these people are liberal and they've voted for these policies.

And now they either thought, you know what, I voted for these with the understanding that my ideology would never come back to haunt me.

And I have security or I live in a good neighborhood.

And now there is no good neighborhood.

There is no security.

No one is exempt.

And more importantly, and this is what I think is really behind it.

There is a perception in America that the law is no longer equally applied.

And that means if you are a perpetrator and you are a person of color, your crime will be contextualized.

If you're a victim and you're white, then you're probably not going to be lamented.

I'll give you an example very quickly of what I mean.

The other day in Portland, I think yesterday, there was a police shooting.

And of course, BLM and Antifa said, riot down at the police precinct because there's a police shooting of a person of color.

Well, once the mob assembled to do their violent thing, it was turned out that the officer in question was black and the victim was white.

And guess what?

The whole thing dissipated.

The police were muscular and they broke up the crowd that was left because they thought there's no downside to this.

Nobody cares if you hit some scraggly, sallow-looking Antifa hit people in the head who are here under false circumstances.

So they did.

They got rid of them.

I don't know if they hit them on the head.

So it really, that's where we are.

And so if you're in New York and you're thinking, say you're a mid-level business person, you're walking, I don't know, down 94th Street or something, six o'clock in the twilight in the spring and somebody jumps out, you think this.

A, this person has made a cost-to-benefit analysis that stealing my wallet and even shooting me gives him a better chance of enrichment and advantage than the threat of being arrested, of being indicted, of being successfully prosecuted, of being convicted and being incarcerated.

He thinks there's zero chance of that.

So he's going to take that minimal risk.

And then he thinks, secondarily, what if he shot me right through the heart?

Would the New York Times say this is a tragedy?

I built up a business from nothing.

I hired 400 people who wouldn't have had a job.

I protected my family in front.

No.

He would be a statistic.

And they might even say something like, it was not known why he would walk alone in a particular time in a particular place.

But they would find a way to make it to blame the victim.

So when you have that idea permeating the entire city, then a lot of people say, I'm going to talk left-wing, but vote right-wing.

One of the things I've really been amused by, I've had very sincere people email, text me, call me, not a lot, but several, say to the effect, I'm a swing voter, I'm a liberal, but I can't take this anymore.

And it's for all sorts of reasons, the progressive hypocrisies, paradoxes.

They have a grandchild that had perfect scores, perfect grades, perfect everything, and was turned down by elite universities.

That gets them angry.

Or their cousin came back and he and his Asian wife were attacked, if they're not Asian,

in Minneapolis.

Or somebody comes back and says, I tried to go to Venice Beach and I couldn't walk them.

I couldn't walk down Venice Beach.

I could not believe it.

Victor, do you know that they are defecating right in front of me?

So I think progressivism doesn't work because it doesn't understand human nature and it tries to implant an ideology in place of reason, empiricism,

and induction.

Yeah, Victor, that swing voter type is also emerging.

Seems anecdotal, but I have a feeling it's broader and emerging in the

back on woke and critical race theory where,

you know, finally, we had a year and a half where the public was not able to formally protest what was going on in government.

I mean, meetings were being held by Zoom and trying to

rebut some of the idiocies was a very difficult, if not impossible, thing, but now it is.

And parents who are not necessarily

known for being right-wing Republican town committee members, et cetera, are showing up at these public school board of education meetings saying, what the hell are you doing?

doing here you're you're telling my kid essentially he's a racist and we're going to have none of it so

what you're talking about, Jack, is that the same impulse that after being cooped up for a year and a half and not finishing that garage remodeling project because you couldn't get materials, it sends you to Home Depot to buy lumber at any price and spikes the sheet of plywood up to near $100.

Same thing with travel or eating out.

And we would go down the freeway the other.

I've never seen California's 99 bumper to bumper at two o'clock.

But people are reacting in a way that's almost crazy.

Well, that same pent-up frustration as you mentioned about politics is starting to be released.

So they sat there for a year and a half and they watched Antifa and they watched BLM burn, loot, maim, kill in some cases with exemption.

And then they heard all of this leftist rhetoric and they didn't say a word because there was nobody to talk to, nobody to see face to face, nobody to have over for dinner, no way to vent your frustration.

Many of these people don't participate in social media, 90% of which I think is conducted by about about 8% of the people who even look at it.

Right.

And they're all left-wing.

And now they've been released.

And I think the left is terrified.

I really do, because when you look at some of these polls and you look at the reaction, San Francisco just arrested that notorious person that went on a bike, laughed at the security guard, filled his bag with $950 worth of stolen items and rode his bicycle out of Walgreens.

And everybody thought that was a joke.

Ha ha ha.

There is no, he got arrested.

I don't know if he'll be prosecuted, but there is going to become a pushback.

Jack, the $64,000 question is whether in the midterm election, and that's the only reification or manifestation that counts, whether they will take back the House.

And I don't mean by one or two cents, to send them seats that for to send a message, they're going to have to have a 2010 margin, 50, 60 seats, take back the Senate, and then put the fear of God into the Democratic Party and say to themselves, you're going to get even worse if you go down the AOC pathway.

Right.

Well, I'm not wishful thinking,

but I do think that there is the potential for that.

But between now, we have another year and a few months to have before that election.

Well, I don't know.

People might start voting in January.

You never know with some of these states.

Or now.

Maybe they're voting now.

Victor, let's talk about one more domestic thing and then move on to two foreign stories.

The NCAA, the Supreme Court came down in a somewhat important case, it seems, against the NCAA, saying it can no longer bar colleges from offering its student athletes some marginal things, such as laptops or postgraduate internships, etc.

Did not rule on a question that's been on sports media for a few years.

These athletes should be paid.

Billions of dollars are being made by the NCAA, by the institutions, by officials, etc.

None of it seems to trickle down to the students.

Of course, they are getting scholarships, so there is some obvious benefit.

but victor i i i'm personally of mixed minds of this i mean i think there's the concept of an athletic scholarship is kind of mocks the word scholar and scholarship that are many of our colleges seem obsessed with with sports and not true education of our students is is mind-numbing but do you think this decision was important in any way or it was inevitable

yeah go ahead it was inevitable for a variety of reasons the first is that as people turn away from professional sports, the NFL's attendance and viewership has gone down about 10%.

NBA is down by 30 or 40%, even Major League Baseball, mostly because the athletes insult their viewers and call them idiots essentially and will not show a minimum of respect for the flag or the national anthem.

But also in the case of people like LeBron James and Stephen Cru,

they indulge like General Millie in pop psychology and politics and they show their ignorance.

So that's one thing.

And so college sports are getting the windfall because they pass themselves off as pure that they're athletes and not professional mercenaries, so to speak.

But they are.

You know, I taught 21 years at a state college and I taught entry-level humanities 10, which in the general education curriculum is required.

And I noticed that every year I only had one or two athletes.

And then one day, one person, he was a big linebacker and he didn't do anything.

He didn't show up.

I gave him an F and I got a call from the academic advisor for athletes.

He said, well, you know, you got to give this guy a C.

It's not his fault.

I said, why?

He said, well, you, Professor Thornton, your colleague, are on a list and you're a no-go professor because you actually grade.

And so we have all these courses and he didn't know.

So he walked into your managers of the Western world.

He sat in the back and he tried to show up three or four times, but he didn't understand a word that you were saying.

I said, well, the other 60 people had no problem.

It wasn't, you know, an upper division class.

He said, well, you know, I don't want to know.

I just want to see.

I said, I can't do that.

He said, can you drop him?

And I said, it's past the drop time.

He said, do you know who he is?

I said, no.

Have you gone to a Fresno State football client?

I said, one in my life.

So that's how it works.

So it's a fraud.

They're professional athletes.

They're making now more than ever multi-millions of dollars for very liberal institutions who give the nation lectures about purity and equity, equity, and equality, and care for the working classes.

And these guys go out and they practice.

I mean, it's a hard thing to do.

I only played high school sports, but I can tell you it's really hard.

And then these people work with very little compensation.

And I think it's just much more honest to gravitate toward the major league baseball, you know, the farm leagues and AAA and double-A.

And just when a kid is 18 and he wants to play football or baseball or basketball seriously, then why not just join a farm team?

And why go through the charade of going to a college?

And if they did that, I think it would be much more honest.

I think that's what's going to happen.

with this ruling that the colleges are going to turn into farm teams.

Now there's one other thing too is that, and this is really important, Jack, and it's not appreciated.

There is going to be a scandal as we as a nation digest what's happened in college admissions.

They were based on proportional representation after the advent of affirmative action.

That meant and disparate impact.

If you were an African-American, they were going to admit 12% African-American.

If you were Hispanic, they were going to have 9%.

If you were Asian American, 6 or more.

And if you were white, 68%.

And then maybe 55% women and 45 male.

That's out the window now.

Under wokeism, it's disproportionate representation based on the idea of reparation.

So this year, in some of these Ivy League elites, the African-American percentage went up about 18%.

And so did the Latino went up, very doubled.

And they didn't want to touch the Asian overrepresentation because of traditional discrimination that's getting them in trouble.

They can't touch a majority.

So I think white males are down to about 13 to 15%

of the incoming classes.

And so there's going to be a lot of outrage that people that have

4.3 GPAs based on advanced placement, perfect ACT, or 99% tail, SAT, all these community development, who were the children often of very woke, progressive, professional parents, didn't get in.

And then we're going to say, well, they didn't get in because only the only white males that really can get in are two types of people.

Those who give $10 million to the endowment of the university, like Stanford or Princeton, or those who are athletes.

And I'm not being facetious.

I mean, we had a big scandal at Stanford three or four years ago where all of these so-called minor sports were selling athletic scholarships to a lot to white males, some white females, to get in because they are otherwise they wouldn't have.

And so, I think there's going to be a push and said, Why do we give scholarships to athletes when they're not serious students, when they can just go get a lot of money and play in a farm league?

You know, Stanford or Princeton, or I don't know, Duke, they could just say, We have the Stanford Athletic Club, or we have the Duke Athletic Club, and make it a private quasi-corporation.

I absolutely agree.

Baseball used to be, you know, factory teams.

I mean,

why does this have to be affiliated with educations of higher learning?

It's just not, it's not a, the dots do not connect easily.

Well, Victor, with a little time left, let's just say we're going to talk about two foreign matters, and I'll throw them both out at the same time, and you can talk about them as much as you want.

China has killed the Apple Daily.

Jimmy Lai, who's in prison, that is now dead.

That was a great voice and vehicle in Hong Kong defending freedom.

And then separately, Russia and Britain had a dust up off the Crimea.

Russia claims is now Russian territory, what most countries say is not, and a British warship, warning shots were fired at it.

So I don't know, Victor, what you might think that...

that incident, if what it might speak to in foreign relations between the NATO, if it even is NATO, I'm going to assume US and Britain are still allies and somehow or other this matters to us, this dust up.

Anyway, speak about that and speak about what's been going on in Red China.

I think we're in, in the case of China, we're entering a new phase after the COVID pandemic and lockdown eases.

Before,

the idea was that China was going to masquerade its ambitions and it was going to consolidate its power and capital, its belt road initiative.

It was going to get all these choke points throughout the world, Gibraltar, maybe, or African coast entry into the Mediterranean, Suez, Panama Canal, major ports in Europe.

And then someday in the future, 10, 20 years, when their power was overwhelming, they were going to spring this trap in a time of crisis.

That was the fear.

They're not doing that now.

I think they're rushing in the way that Japan did in 1940, 41, where the greater Asian co-prosperity sphere really wasn't worked out very well.

But they were so greedy because of the demise of the Netherlands and France.

And they looked at the Pacific and they said, thanks to the Germans, there is no Vichy, there's no French, there's a Vichy, it's very weak, and we're just going to take Southeast French Asia.

And they did.

And they said, there's no Netherlands, it doesn't exist.

So we'll take the Shell oil fields in the Dutch East Zinsi.

And they did.

And Britain's onto the blitz, so we'll just take Singapore.

And they did.

And yet, that was an illusion that the British Empire and the United States had so much latent power and resources and economic vitality that they quickly crushed Japan within four years.

I don't think China's up to it, but their attitude now is, why wait?

Because we're catching up at a geometric rate.

And more importantly, as we look at your countries in Europe and the United States, we see classical decadence.

We see people who won't work.

They have to be paid by the government.

We see a declining birth rate.

We see women not having children, not getting married, violence in the street, racial animosity and sectarianism, and you're just not up to it.

And more importantly, they further concur that if we were to say that to them rather than hide our contempt for them, then that would create even greater deterrence.

It reminds me in high school when there was a guy who was a disruptive outlaw, so to speak, pretty tough guy, and he wouldn't say anything, but he would try to pick fights.

and then kind of deny he did it and then finally he decided you know what it's much more effective if i just go up to people and he would go up to you and say, this is what's going to happen to you.

I'm going to beat the fuck out of you.

And I'm going to do it at four o'clock in the afternoon.

You got about three hours to think about it.

You understand that?

Because there's nothing you can do.

And so that was the deterrence he's created.

And so China is basically saying to us, we're going to overfly Taiwanese airspace.

We're going to occasionally intrude on Japanese waters.

We're going to bully the Australians and say, you know what?

Better shut up.

We're going to tell New Zealand who's going to help you in times.

We're going to go into islands in the Pacific that aren't ours.

We're going to bully the Philippines and South Korea.

And what are you going to do about it?

And that is a crisis of confidence when you have a president like Joe Biden.

So expect that there's a new cockiness that they emerge from the virus that they started, whether accidentally or not, and they're more powerful.

And the economy favors them in the post-COVID era.

And they're going to rub our noses in it because they think it gives you either greater deterrence as people watch on.

So in case of Hong Kong, clamp down and say to the British, we violated every agreement that was necessary for us to retain or to regain, I should say, autonomy of Hong Kong and incorporate it in China.

What are you going to do about it?

Bratley Islands, they're increasing their defenses even greater.

They're starting to enforce territorial waters around them as if they belong to China.

What are you going to do about it?

So we're going to see a lot of that.

And related is Russia.

I mean, Britain is a nuclear power.

I think they have two or three or 400 nuclear weapons, which is enough to destroy any nation.

And Russia's got about 7,000.

I don't know how many first-line weapons they have.

So this won't escalate under normal times to a full-fledged war.

But what it shows is that the Russians are telling the world that we may not be able to reclaim the Soviet Empire after 30 years.

However, we are going to reclaim Soviet areas of influence.

So in the old days, Crimea, and remember

1942, they waged one of the worst battles in World War II.

The Soviet Army did to reclaim Sevastopol.

So in their way of thinking, we lost 100,000 dead Russians and 100,000 additional casualties, taking Sevastopol part of the Crimea.

And it goes back to the Crimea war in the 19th century.

They feel it's theirs and they feel the Black Sea is theirs.

Sort of like we feel the Caribbean is ours.

They're going to start suggesting that you don't go up into the upper Baltic regions.

You'd be very careful about putting troops on the frontiers of Russia.

And they're going to forge alliances more overtly with China, with Iran, probably with North Korea again.

And we're not going to do anything.

In the old days, they probably wouldn't have done that.

They probably wouldn't have done that with Trump as president because they didn't know what he would do.

And they understand the United States fleet, even in its diminished state, is probably more effective than all the fleets of the world combined.

And so they wouldn't do that.

And nor would Britain have done that.

Britain would have said, they would have called up an American president, Trump, or maybe even Obama and said, you look, somebody's got to do something.

We only got a couple of ships, so it falls on your shoulders and we'll join you if you will.

But you've got to reclaim sovereignty of the seas, international waters, and then the Americans would do something.

But now with Joe Biden and the left in control, they're on their own.

And so this was kind of a cry of the heart and saying, somebody's got to do something.

And we are the nation of Nelson and we've got some new carriers coming online and we're not diminished yet.

And we're going to confront people who violate international law and then maybe you'll come to our assistance.

I'm thinking, Joe, when they say Joe Biden, there's a Russian ship and a British ship in the Black Sea.

He's going to say, well, yeah,

you know.

Why don't they get some, who's got the tanks to help them?

Or, you know,

anything like that.

He may say, I never liked that game of Stratego anyway.

Yeah, I'm laughing, but Jack, I'm not laughing.

I'm not, it's not funny.

It's not funny.

It's dangerous.

Well, Victor, before we end today's show, I'd like to do one more thing.

Let's not throw a question at you, but thank our listeners who have rated the show on iTunes.

And it's got a five-star, you can give up to five stars, and it's got an average of five stars.

I think there are so many that there's one or two that hasn't given it.

And usually, the reason for that is the lousy co-host.

But I'd like to read two reviews because some people also post their thoughts about this podcast.

And there's a guy that goes by

the moniker WSJ Fanatic, and he wrote this week, he calls it the bridge.

Victor, I've listened to him so much, I feel we're on a first name basis.

Victor has the unique experience in life to bridge his vast knowledge with that of a farmer.

That perspective of common sense with an evaluation of current elitist initiatives is refreshingly honest, accurate, and easy to understand.

As a farm kid myself, whose career moved into a professional category, I appreciate the honor he bestows upon the common man.

I've seen the arrogance of some elites, and like Victor, I've seen right through them too.

Victor is my kindred spirit.

And one other, if you don't mind, Victor, this is by Cuban MD is the label, five-star review, and says simply, great podcast.

I am Cuban, and I'm horrified how similar are the ideas the left is promoting in the USA to what I was taught by the communists in Cuba.

VDH

has a unique perspective in these issues and is able to articulate a critique from an academic point of view.

There are many, hundreds more like that.

So we do thank those who have given the show five stars and those who have left their thoughts.

We do read them and appreciate them.

And I appreciate that as well.

I'll just end by saying that it's not that I trust the people versus the experts, the people.

I trust a certain type of person more than this, of the experts.

And by that, I mean people who get up in the morning and work, especially those who are self-employed or they go to a job and work for somebody else.

They go there on time.

They make cost-benefit analysis.

They're practical.

They're rational.

And that collective wisdom on matters of crime or education or the topics we talked about today is invaluable because they live that life.

And if they make a mistake or they put ideology before empiricism, they pay.

That is their business fails or their car doesn't start and they can't get to work or their child in you know it's hard enough to raise children but if they have a particular dr smock attitude then they pay the consequences firsthand whereas experts they tend to make the arguments on the basis of theory and by authority so dr fauci is anthony fauci he's not dr fauci he's anthony fauci he's a living breathing human being and when he says no mask one mask, two mask, herd mask, 60, 70, 80.

And you know what?

I just came up with a brilliant idea.

I'm going to fund gain of function research with those trustworthy Chinese researchers in the biology lab controlled by the Chinese military because somebody in their stupidity outlawed it here in the United States and thought it was dangerous.

I'm just suggesting to you that the guy that runs the local hardware store, the guy who's an independent trucker, the teacher who gets up every morning and has to go teach onreel kids, the farmer who, you know, I've been on a tractor for 10 and a half hours with an eight foot, nine foot tandem disc.

And by hour six, you're thinking of a lot of things other than just discing.

So I admire those people and their collective wisdom.

And that's about 100 million people in this country.

Yeah.

Well, thanks, Victor, for everything you said today, including that last statement.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show, The Traditionalist.

Please also listen to The Classicist and the Culturalist.

We will be back next week with another edition of The Traditionalist.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

You might be wondering, when is the right time to add collagen to my diet?

How about today?

Calagen production starts to dwindle in your 20s.

By the time you've hit your 50s, decreased collagen contributes to wrinkles, sagging skin, and joint discomfort.

Native Path Calagen can help.

It's packed with only type 1 and 3 collagen fibers, the ones your body needs most for healthy joints, skin, bones, hair, nails, and gut.

Plus, it's third-party tested for purity with no fillers, no additives, and no artificial junk.

Two scoops a day of Native Path delivers 18 grams of protein.

Mix it into your coffee, tea, or any drink.

It's completely flavorless and easy to use.

Right now, get a special deal at a fraction of the retail price, plus free shipping.

Available at getnativepath.com/slash Victor.

With over 4 million jars sold, thousands of five-star reviews, and a 365-day money-back guarantee, this is your moment to take control of aging before symptoms get worse.

Go to getnativepath.com/slash victor now.

Supplies are limited and demand is surging.

And we'd like to thank NativePath for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.