The Culturalist: Shiloh and Wuhan

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.

Welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen show, The Culturalists.

Victor Hansen is the Martin and Lily Anderson Senior Fellow in Classics and History at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Busk Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He is the author of 24 books and has a 25th book coming out, The Dying Citizen.

He has a website, victorhanson.com, where he publishes everything that he writes, plus his podcasts and lots of other things.

So please come to victorhanson.com.

He is also available on social media, Facebook, Twitter, and Parlor.

And his podcasts are published by Art19 and John Solomon's Just the News.

The Culturalist is a podcast devoted to the historical and current events and people sketching the cultural significance of them.

And today we will look at the significance of the Battle of Shiloh in the Civil War and the Wuhan virus.

But first let's hear a word from our sponsors.

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 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 Bowl and Branch.

Get 15% off plus free shipping on your first set of sheets at bullandbranch.com/slash Victor.

That's Bull 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.

Welcome back to this edition of The Culturalist.

We are exploring the Battle of Shiloh with Victor Davis Hansen and then the significance of the Wuhan virus to culture.

Victor is an author author of the book The Ripples of Battle, and that book is about three battles, Okinawa in World War II, Shiloh in the Civil War, and Delium, which was fought between the Athenians and the Thebans in the Peloponnesian War.

So we would like to discuss with Victor that Battle of Shiloh, Chapter 2, where he explores not just what happens on the battlefield, which of course is related beautifully by Victor, but also the the cultural significance after the battle was won by the Union Army.

So I would like to start this with a quote from your book, which I found interesting.

We all know that the Battle of Shiloh secured the Mississippi for the Union Army, but you state, yet despite the undeniable strategic significance of the Union victory, the enduring fascination with Shiloh lies elsewhere.

in the human story of the soldiers who fought there.

Who are we talking about?

And then what was the cultural significance of the battlefield to American history?

When you look at Shiloh, it was fought on April 6th and 7th of 1862.

If you see it appear in military histories or histories of the Civil War, it's usually noted as a key, if not the key battle of the Civil War for two reasons.

Maybe three reasons.

It was the first major battle of the Civil War in the sense that more people were killed, missing, captured, or wounded at the Battle of Shiloh than all of the battles that the American nation had fought in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War.

So it was just incomprehensible that you would have 13 or 14,000 casualties.

Casualties, remember, includes wounded, not just dead.

So that was one reason that Shiloh, we say today, Shiloh Church, Shiloh, just horrific battle.

And it was photographed.

So people for the first time saw sort of a preview of what they should get used to at Antietam and then World War I and World War II.

The second thing was a strategic element, and that was no one thought that the Confederacy, after they had lost control of the upper Mississippi at Fort Henry and Fort Donaldson, remember those were the two battles where Ulysses S.

Grant came out of nowhere, the so-called drunken ex-grocer from Galena, Illinois, and turned out to be brilliant.

But after those victories, the South was desperate.

And so they marched up into Tennessee from northern Alabama and Mississippi.

And the idea was that they were going, this tributary of the Tennessee River, they were going to take control of it and then maybe even go up into southern Ohio and threaten places like Cleveland if they could.

And they had a huge army.

40,000 people, and they were led by the well-known Albert Sidney Johnson.

Remember, before the Civil War, he was the head of all U.S.

armies, and he was the one that put down the Mormon revolts, quote-unquote, revolt of early

1850s in Utah.

And he was a mythical person.

He was 6'1.

He'd been offered a high command by Lincoln.

And he had his array of generals that had done pretty well at Bull Run, Beauregard, Braxton, Bragg, etc.

Okay, so this big army comes up and they fight.

And on the first day, they surprise the Union Army on the west bank of the Tennessee River and they shatter it.

And they shatter William Tecumseh Sherman's right wing.

Remember, he had been declared crazy and was given a second chance by Grant.

He performed heroically, but he was overwhelmed.

And they pushed and they pushed.

And by evening, Grant had his back up against the wall.

And there were people on the southern side that said, We can finish him off.

It was late in the evening.

Had they listened to minor characters at the time, Colonel, believe it or not, Nathan Bedford Forrest, they probably could have won the battle outright.

But they were exhausted.

And so their high command went to sleep, put everybody to bed.

During the early morning, a huge army of General Boy

came across the Tennessee.

And then Lew Wallace had a contingent of 7,000 reinforcements.

And we'll get to that in a second.

And the second day, remember that famous quote where Sherman said, we've had a hell today, General Grant.

He said, yep, lick them tomorrow.

And that's exactly what they did.

So that's why we talk about Shiloh.

But as you said,

in this book, I was trying to suggest that the unique circumstances of major battles are so psychologically devastating or life-changing or graphic that art, music, literature sometimes can be traced to the people who fought it.

That when you talk to them in later life, they said, this was because I had to go through, you know, a B-17 missions over Germany or I was at Verdun or I was at Antietam.

Well, this particular battle, because it was so large and it was the first major bloodbath, it affected a lot of people.

So there were four important people, I thought, who changed history at Shiloh.

And among them were the novelist Lou Wallace, the general Nathan Bedford Forrest, and William Tecumseh Sherman, and Nathan Bedford Forrest.

And what happened to them at this battle?

William Tecumseh Sherman had been discredited.

He'd been declared crazy.

He had not done as well as everybody thought he would after Bull Run.

And he got to know Grant and Grant gave him a second chance at Fort Donaldson.

He did pretty well.

But in this particular battle, even though he was surprised, even though he should have known that the Confederates were only a mile away, he stood like a rock.

He got three horses shot.

He got his shoulder strap shot off.

He got shot in the hand.

He did not budge.

He kept his cool way.

Everybody lost theirs.

And he emerged from this battle as really the hero of Shiloh, not Grant.

Grant was considered maybe he had been drunk, maybe he was surprised, maybe he screwed up the miscommunications and orders with Lew Wallace and reinforcements.

But Sherman saw his star rise again and he did something quite unusual.

He was magnanimous to Grant.

Grant, he said, when I was crazy, he gave me a chance, and now when he's considered a drunk, I'm going to give him a chance.

And that was important.

That forged the partnership that would emerge in two years where, as Sherman put it, I came around the back of the house while the kitchen was on fire in Virginia, or Grant held Lee and I came around to kick him in the rear.

So the point was that the long marches through Georgia and Carolina were not antithetical to the bloodbath before Richmond in that terrible summer of 1864.

They were complementary or they were synchronized.

One, the long-term strategic tactic of destroying the morale without fighting major battles.

The other, Klaus Witzy and Grant idea of destroying the battles.

And for the two, they won the war.

Had he not been at Shiloh or had he panicked, that would have never happened.

If you go to a very strange guy, Nathan Bedford Forrest, they just took down his statue in Tennessee.

As I pointed out when I went there in 1999 at the conclusion of the book, it was kind of tragic because Martin Luther King Museum was there.

There was nobody in there, but there were people in the rain putting roses and carnations and all sorts of flower on the grave and monument of Nathan Bedford Forrest in the park across the street.

Why would they do that when he was the founder of the Ku Klux Klan?

He was illiterate.

He was a slave trader before the war.

He enlisted as a private.

He's a very wealthy man and he made it through the despicable job of selling and buying slaves.

But he was also a military genius, an authentic military genius, a cavalry thruster in what would later characterize people like George Patton in the mechanized age.

And through a series of battles, he was becoming known.

And then at Shiloh, guess what happened?

During the so-called Hornet's Nest, where the South had surprised the North.

But because of the North's greater numbers, they had the uphill ground.

The assault was starting to wane in the afternoon.

In the Hornet's Nest, the union troops were shooting down on them sherman had helped stabilize the line and guess what nathan bredford forrest said i'm not going to sit back here at the creek and watch horses as a mere colonel where my boys are getting killed so he took 500 cavalry and he rushed down and he cracked open the hornet's nest changed the temple of battle number one number two when they pushed the union army back he got up in the middle of the night and he went to back braxton bragg and bolgard and polk and he said lynn i want to tell you something you're full of yourself right now.

But our boys are going to lose tomorrow because they're tired.

And these Yankees are going to come across the river with a whole new army and we've got to destroy them right now.

And had they listened to him, they would have done that.

And then finally, when they were defeated and they were retreating, he formed the rear guard.

And there was a heroic, I don't know how true it is, but when Sherman was chasing him with a huge number, seven or eight hundred skirmishers, he only had 150 cavalry, he turned around and charged and got isolated in the middle of the Union skirmishers.

And he was surrounded and swarmed.

And one person walked up and shot him right through the hip.

And the bullet lodged near his spine.

They tried to pull him off the horse.

His horse was shot.

He would die.

And then he was doomed.

His other people had to leave, his other cavaliers.

And he did something that seems superhuman.

How could somebody with a bullet in their spine and being pulled down on a horse that's about dead pick up with one hand a Union soldier and use him as a guard shield and then ride out?

And he made it out.

He recovered.

He would die probably of liver cancer shortly after the war.

But my point is that at that point, everybody start in the South said Bolgard, Braxton, Polk, all of these people disappoint us.

Albert Sidney Johnson is dead.

And guess what?

This guy, this private, this unlettered slave trader almost saved it.

And they made him heroic and he became a general, the only officer on either side of the war to start a private, end up as a general, get their fastest with the Mostas, that famous saying of his.

And he became iconic.

And the next three three years, he gave the Union Army hell in Tennessee and northern Georgia sometimes.

And he became the most effective cavalry officer of the Civil War.

And that gave him the credence to be the authentic

working man's hero to the poor white South that was discredited, disreputable after the war.

And he became their spokesman in a way that the aristocratic Cavalry elite military class was not.

And he was then appointed.

It's a long story, we won't need to get into it by whom and how, but he basically became the face of the Ku Klux Klan.

Had he not had that start at Shiloh, he would have never had that career problem, never been given that chance.

So heroism at Shiloh unfortunately gave the South an iconic figure to really make the Ku Klux Klan, that Greek word Ku Klux circle, a viable.

Remember, they dressed in white sheets because they were supposedly the Confederate dead that were white ghosts.

It wasn't because they were white race necessarily.

It was because they were dead and they were coming out of the graves to attack radical Republicans and freed blacks in the South.

And the weird thing, just to finish that, is that after they suspended habeas corpus in Tennessee, Andrew Johnson did, and they broke the Klan.

Forrest, who paid for all of his soldiers out of his own pocket during the war, was flat broke.

Slavery was over.

He was discredited.

You think he was bitter.

He said some really crazy things.

You know, start the war again if you want.

I don't care.

But as he was dying, he repudiated the Klan and most of what he had said earlier.

And he became sort of, I don't know, repentant after all the damage he'd done.

Can I ask you before you go on, why do you think he became repentant?

Well, if you were cynical, you were thinking that railroads were sort of like high-tech in that day.

Everybody wanted to have a trunk line and they were going to make a lot of money.

And the only people that had money were northern investors.

And he was trying to tell them every southerner was saying we can get the cotton export market back, but we we need a railroad.

Sherman destroyed them all, and he needed investors.

And the investors didn't want him anywhere near that, given his record.

At Fort Pillow, he'd killed black soldiers and prisoners in the war, and he was a slave to ex-slave traders.

But you could say that he modified these views.

But I think another thing is when he died, there was hundreds of freed slaves that went to his funeral.

And I think that's because

he either felt sincerely or he was devilishly Machiavellian.

But he distinguished white Republican abolitionists in New England from poor blacks in the South.

And he made the argument that we're all poor people, white and black in the South, and these people are coming in and taking over.

So it's kind of a ridiculous argument, but it resonated.

And he felt, actually, when he died, I think you could say he felt more affinity with free blacks than he did with Republicans.

And he made some pretty outlandish statements.

And if you read, we have a transcript of his congressional testimony.

He said, if you really want to have free blacks, I suggest we bring all of our African-American citizens up to the North.

You have better schools than we do.

You have more money and you'll get much, we're depressed.

We can't do it.

And of course, that was cynical as well, but no one took him up on the offer.

And then finally, also Lou Wallace.

Yeah, we had two very quick other people who changed history because of their hours.

One was Lou Wallace, and he was a 35-year-old guy.

He was one of the people from Indiana.

Remember when the war started, the Northerners, Ohioans, Indiana, Illinois, especially in the West, they formed what would be called state armies.

And before they were federalized into the Union Army of the West or the Army of the Potomac, their officers were appointed by political officials, and then they were given federal rank.

And it was really kind of weird because you'd get people with no military experience or little that would be generals of the Army of Ohio or Indiana.

as was Wallace.

But when you got into the federal army, what do you do when you've got people like Grant or Sherman or Halley, all these people with West Point degrees that were professional military men?

And yet these guys outranked them because they had been earlier in these militias.

So Lew Wallace was a general and yet he outranked some of the people that were ordering him.

And that didn't work well.

He was a neurotic guy.

He's very talented.

And he was there with his division, Indiana, division of six, 7,000 troops in reserve.

And when the whole mess blew up, Grant was upstream.

He came down.

He got off at Pittsburgh Landing.

He said, oh my God, what's going on?

There were rumors he'd been drinking.

He was late to the battle.

He saw Wallace.

He said, you know what?

I hear Sherman, he's being attacked.

You go over to Sherman and get over there right now and send that division and hold him.

If you don't, I'm going to be stuck here and we're going to be overwhelmed.

Whelm.

And so he didn't, and there's a big controversy.

Did he say go overland?

around or did he say go along the river?

Grant said he said go along the river.

Wallace said he didn't.

There was something called the shung pipe.

It was a long circuitous route.

So he started on the route.

But by the time he got halfway, Sherman's wing had collapsed and he was going to end up behind the Confederate army.

So he turned around and made a complete U-turn.

And he got there basically too late.

And Sherman had to stand on his own.

And Grant was thinking he was going to be pushed in the river.

And then he shows up when they, you know, passed the point of danger.

And Grant says, all you did was march around all day.

And Lou Wallace said, oh, but you know, that's what you told me to do.

And I think Wallace actually was correct, but he was so hypersensitive that it became the thrust of his life.

So people, after the battle was over, as Grant's stature grew and Sherman's grew, they blamed Wallace for the first day.

Had nothing, he was not culpable.

You could say he was culpable for not lending assistance earlier.

But he was a very, I mean, he had, he stayed in the army.

They gave him lesser commands.

They put him on boards of inquiry.

He stopped Jubil early for a day during that early raid in 1864 in D.C., but he wanted to get his word out.

And he turned out that he had talent, he found out, as a writer.

And so he started to write after the Civil War.

And he wrote this novel called Ben-Hur.

And in it, I made the argument.

I don't think people have made the argument before.

I think it's been accepted that Ben-Hur is a allegory for not just the life of Lou Wallace, but his experience at Shiloh.

In other words, think think about it.

Grant, he blamed for destroying his career by unjustly suggesting he did something wrong when he didn't.

And later in his life, he became very religious.

He tried to live down.

He tried to become very wealthy.

In the novel, Ben-Hur is this handsome, young Jewish guy in occupied Roman Judea.

And he

incurs jealousy from everybody, Massilla, his Roman friend, and he mistakenly, there's a roof tile that falls off his house and it disrupts a parade and endangers who?

Gratus, almost the same name as Grant.

And Gratus takes it out on him.

Massilla takes it out on him.

They put him in exile.

He becomes a galley slave.

You've seen the movie.

Maybe you've read the novel.

And the result of all that is after this long odyssey, his parents, his mother, his sister are put into a leper colony.

Every one of those experiences, whether it's being a commandant or an investigator of horrific conditions in camps in the Civil War, or finding God the way that Lou Wallace did, or being treated terribly by the authorities, or being young and handsome and bold as he saw himself, or the ingredients have been hurt.

That became the best-selling novel in the history of America after Uncle Tom's Cabin until Gone with the Wind.

It sold four or five million.

It became the model for the movie spinning off advertising, promotion, plays, movies.

And with Charlton Heston, it became a world-famous movie.

All of that came out of Shido.

Let me just finish very quickly with another person that has also changed history at that day.

It's Albert Sidney Johnson, I mentioned earlier.

So he gets there and he's a big man, six feet.

He's on his horse.

He starts to charge the enemy.

They're dug in.

It's the beginning of the hornet's nest.

And he says, you know, we can break them.

Can you imagine a guy that big?

And he's the commander of all of these state contingents at Shiloh on the Confederate side.

And he exposes himself.

He rides out

at the apex of the battle.

and he said, boy, we're going to get him this time.

And then they get repulsed and he rides back and he says, well, we're next time we're going to regroup.

And he just says, I feel a little tired.

And he sits down for a second and he got a bullet right behind the knee in an artery.

No one saw it because it bled inside his knee boot and he went to sleep.

They woke him up and he was dead.

Imagine that, the commander.

And he was beatific in his death.

And he was young.

And he was the most important, famous guy on either side of that war in 1862 1862 because of his service in the union army before the war and everybody after the war said that was the lost battle we were winning we were winning winning we had surprised him due to albert sidney johnson we had broke sherman due to albert sidney johnson we were just about to break the hornet's nest this is when forrest came in to save it after johnson was shot but albert sidney johnson in his youth in his beauty was shot by an accidental just a freak accident and therefore we lost the battle and then it became not the lost battle but the genesis of the pernicious lost cause.

We were winning.

We were winning after Fort Donaldson and Fort Wilson.

We were going to go into Ohio and we would have crushed the Union Army.

We had this huge army of invasion.

And guess what?

Albert Sidney Johnson died at the high watermark of Shiloh and therefore the Confederate cause was lost just for an accidental bullet.

And that fed into the idea that the South really won the Civil War.

They had the more brave people, but a fluke's bad accidents and Albert Sidney Johnson's Johnson's death at Shiloh caused something that otherwise wouldn't have happened.

That's not true, but it really created a sense in the South that they never for years came to terms with why they lost, because they thought they were braver, they were better soldiers, but first of all, they were outnumbered.

They had no manufacturing, they didn't have the equipment, but more importantly, as Sherman tried to tell them,

They didn't have a middle class.

They had a poor white class and a wealthy plantation class, but the people who were in the Army of the West that burned Atlanta and went to Savannah for the Carolinas, 80% of those regiments were from Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Minnesota, Michigan, and they were small farmers and they were tough people.

And when they got into Georgia and the Carolina, they were tougher than anybody in the world.

In fact, when they went on parade after the war, the day after the war, week after the war, the German military attaché said he'd never seen an army like that.

It could take all of Europe.

But Albert Sidney Johnson's death at Shiloh really created a romantic dream in the South that they had never lost, but they had been unfairly deprived of this godlike general.

Well, thank you, Victor, for explaining really

some of the cultural significance of the Battle of Shiloh.

And it's really fascinating, in fact, to hear about Johnson's significance, because we often wonder why the South clung so tightly to its old culture after the war was over and they had been defeated.

And we can see some of the reasons for that.

If I may turn us then to the Wuhan virus, which might be a little bit more difficult to show or discuss the cultural significance, but an interesting topic nonetheless.

What are your thoughts about the cultural significance for the U.S.?

And I have a question about China itself and maybe the significance there.

Well, you have to start with this narrative and remember what it is.

The narrative was from January of 2020

to January of 2021 that a bat or a pangolin had been chopped up in a wet so-called market in Wuhan, and a virus was exposed that mutated and then jumped into the population.

And the fact that there was a level four virology lab there in Wuhan with partnership oversight by the People's Liberation Army of China had nothing to do with it.

That's what we were told.

And furthermore, if anybody questioned that narrative, you would be yanked off YouTube or Facebook or Twitter.

And if you persisted as Donald Trump did in March, then you were a xenophobe and a racist.

Remember, the Chinese government, in a very sophisticated way, channeled the progressive complaints against Trump.

Trump's calling it the Wuhan virus.

Trump's calling it the China.

It's a racist.

Anybody who says that came out of that lab is a racist, racist, racist.

But culturally, politically, military, economically, people kept wondering.

You know, Jon Stewart had that great skit the other night on the Colbert show where he said, you know, hello, it's called the virology lab and hello, this is a virus and they're right next to each other.

But there were certain things that didn't fit the narrative.

And this came up for a whole year.

Number one was, forget Donald Trump, whether he said it, you're just rejecting science because you hate the guy and you don't want to empower him.

We understand that, but look at the science.

No animal or pangolin has ever had this SARS particular virus, the COVID-19 virus.

It didn't exist, unlike earlier strains of coronaviruses.

So whatever it was, you've got to find the bat or the pangolin that has it, but you've never found that.

And the suggestion was you won't because there was no animal.

And second, usually there's a series of mutations that you can trace that finally ends up with a magic mutation that can enter the human immune system.

They couldn't find any of the prior mutations.

And then they said this virus, its gene sequence is a little different than other coronaviruses, SARS viruses even.

And it is more infectious.

It has a devilish or satanic fashion, how it can get into the immune system undetected.

And it is particularly effective in compounding the comorbidities of people who have pulmonary or cardiac or cancer or any comorbidity.

So there you have it.

That's where we were.

That narrative then was used politically to say that Donald Trump and his supporters are racist.

And it had a lot of mammoth.

And we're getting to this shiloh effect of how an event can change history.

So the result of it was you could be an Asian American and you could be walking in San Francisco or New York and an African-American for no reason could hit you.

And this could happen at a rate of incidence.

that was disproportionate to the African-American population.

By that means, it wouldn't be 6% of the population was committing these crimes against Asian Americans.

It would be 60% of those crimes or maybe 70% were committed by 6% of the population of African-American males.

You couldn't say that.

The media blocked it out.

They said instead there is a climate of anti-Asian hatred because of Donald Trump, because he used the word Wuhan virus or kung fu virus or China virus.

And so that that narrative really hurt us.

And then it fell apart.

Why did it fall apart?

It started falling apart with science writers that used to work for the New York Times, Nicholas Wade and others.

And what did they say?

They said the obvious.

First of all, they said Donald Trump's not president now.

And so if you want to endorse a possibility that this was an engineered virus, you're not empowering Donald Trump.

So the censorship, the Orwellian audit is out.

You can think freely for yourself and be empirical.

And then the second, I think, was really important.

People said, we don't have to accept the idea that because China says it's racist to connect their lab, that it is racist.

And we're starting to see that the anti-Asian racial narrative, race hate crime narrative is fabricated here in the United States and it may be fabricated everywhere.

And then people started to say, and this was the key, it wasn't just the World Health Organization that was warped by the Chinese.

And that, I mean, Mr.

Tedrasos.

It wasn't just them who lied to us and said the virus was not transmissible to humans or that the virus would not jump from China or that travel bans are racist.

But we had people within the United States government and its medical affiliates, specifically Dr.

Anthony Fauci, the head of the Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, and Peter Dasak, who was the head of Echo Alliance, and he was a friend of Fauci.

And we were funding $6 million

to examine gain of function research on viruses that was outlawed in the United States as not only terribly dangerous to take a virus and make it A, more communicable or infectious and more lethal, but there was never any evidence that had ever helped anybody to find out how viruses work or to make vaccines.

So it was kind of a perverse line of of research, and that's why it was banned.

But these two were channeling money to places that were still engaged in this research worldwide, apparently, but among them the Wuhan virus lab.

And 600,000 went to so-called Bat Lady, the Chinese research team that was specifically working on coronaviruses.

And then all of a sudden it started to click by March of this year or April of this year.

No animals have ever had this, no prior mutations.

This virus is far more infectious.

It mutates far more quickly once it gets into the human population.

And we helped subsidize this type of research, which was, we thought, banned in the United States and most of Western Europe.

And then it got even worse.

When there was an investigatory committee set up, an international committee, Dasak himself headed that committee, or at least he picked the members, and he got friends of his to write in the prestigious medical journal Lancet that the idea that this this was a lab thing was crazy and Fauci is now backpedaling but if you go back and look carefully what he said he said there was virtually no chance that this was an engineered or a non-natural virus and so here we're left with this dilemma and that is we've been lied to so much.

The Chinese wouldn't let the investigatory team have access to the records that were necessary to determine the origin.

Everybody said, well, why would they lie?

All these people got killed.

They destroyed the world economy.

They would want everybody to know it was an accident so that we wouldn't blame them.

But no, they didn't want the role of the Chinese military known.

They didn't want to know that it was engineered, that it was artificial gain and function creation of theirs.

And they felt that because there were people in the United States that were setting policy in reaction to the virus who had helped subsidize the research that led to the virus, that the United States would pull their punches.

And indeed, that's what happened after Trump left office.

And so now we're left with this mess.

And I don't see it at 80 years old anyway.

And he was wrong on mask.

He was wrong on herd immunity.

He became addicted to network cable appearances.

His emails are very self-incriminating.

I don't see how he's viable anymore as a national spokesman or appointment on this virus given his compromise conflict of interest position.

And I think when this is all over, we're going to finally wake up out of our slumber and say, wait a minute.

The people who were in charge of trying to advise us how best to confront the Chinese and how best to deal with an engineered virus that they created and which leaked were themselves involved in subsidizing the creation of this virus while they assured the American people, 600,000 of whom are now dead, that it was impossible that this virus was created by humans, even though they had tried to ensure that something like it would be created.

And

it's

we're in a dilemma now.

Yeah.

Can I ask you just something about Fauci's trajectory, maybe?

Is he a Lou Wallace or a Nathan Bedford Forrest?

Where is it all going with him?

I know he's 80 years old, so he may be Johnson, but it may all end.

Well, one thing I did in the Ripples of Battle with all three battles, Okinawa, DM, I not only talked about obscure people like Nathan Bedford Forrest or William Tecumseh Sherman was a little bit less obscure who became very famous because of their performance, but I talked about people who were pretty well known that either died or were diminished in stature.

And in this case, it was Albert Sidney Johnson in particular.

And you're going to make the argument, Lou Wallace never got over it.

Even Lou Wallace in his 70s said, Oh, how I suffered from Shiloh.

Oh, what they did to me.

Oh, what a crime.

He wrote these letters.

The poor guy went all the way to see Grant as he was dying of throat cancer.

So please, please, please don't put me in a footnote that it wasn't my fault.

Very tragic figure.

But in a case of this virus, I can't exaggerate the stature that Anthony Fauci had in February of 2020.

He came back on the scene.

He was the guy who guided us through the AIDS virus and told us what we should be doing.

And he weighed in on the various swine virus, Ebola.

He was our guy.

So, but what he didn't realize was...

the classical connection between hubris and nemesis.

He was always a man of the left and he was always political.

And if he had been wise and sober and judicious, he would have just said, I'm going to be apolitical.

I know Donald Trump is eccentric, it's an outline, but I'm not worried about that.

Dr.

Burks and I are not going to get political.

And he started out that way.

And he went on Fox one night, CNN, MNS, NBC.

But then as the campaign heated up, I think he felt Donald Trump A was going to lose, that his fides with the left was suspect, and he was going to become more partisan.

So in his emails, if you read them very carefully, it's very clear that he was saying one thing publicly and communicating to the medical and political communities quite another.

And if you want to know why people lost confidence in the lockdown, it was people like Anthony Fauci taking his mask off at a baseball game.

It was people like Gavin Newsom who was going to the French laundry in violation of his own quarantine.

It was people like Nancy Pelosi having her hair done.

It was the Michigan governor Whitmer, all of them.

And Fauci was indistinguishable for them.

So he was saying one thing to the American people and he was living something else.

He was the highest paid paid public servant in the United States.

And after his performance, wrong on mask, or, you know, he said masks have no utility, even though there was research that said they did in certain cases.

Then he said, they do have utility.

Then he said, you have to wear two of them.

And then he said, herd immunity is 60, 70, 80, 90.

And when caught, he basically retreated to the noble lie of Plato's that certain elites, because of their education and their concern for the general welfare of the ignorant, are allowed to lie.

And he said, well, I lied.

Because if I told told you that masks were necessary, all you idiots would have, I'm paraphrasing, would have gone out and bought them and we'd have been out of masks.

If I told you what real herd immunity, it starts to check in at 60 to 70, you wouldn't have got vaccinated because that's how you're stupid.

That's what he was saying, essentially.

And so he's lost all credibility, but I'd just like to finish on him.

And it's even worse than that because there are certain protocols that science, quote unquote, does not support.

And he says that he is Louis XIV, the state is me.

He says science is me.

My diktats are scientific and they're not.

I'll give you a couple examples.

One is we know now, and we've known for a long time that if you get COVID in almost all of the cases, your antibody levels will be the same or even in some cases better than vaccination immunities.

And so you wouldn't really need them.

And that was critical in February and March.

even in January when we were really trying to get these vaccinations out.

And we were telling frontline health workers, many of whom had been infected and doctors, you still have to get the vaccination.

Well, they were being vaccinated at the expense of somebody 75 years old in a rest home who was waiting in a queue.

That was a crazy idea.

That came from Fauci.

The second thing is we learned very early from the reactions, especially the Pfizer and Moderna shots, that people who had high antibody levels were subject to more severe reactions.

And in some cases, they could get infections or inflammations of the heart, platelet disruptions, all sorts of strange and bizarre symptoms.

So you you really didn't want to vaccinate.

And yet our policy that today

says that you have to have a vaccination to go to this meeting or to go on that plane, international flight, it doesn't make sense if you have antibodies.

So instead of our vaccination card, we should have had a vaccination card and a and R, I should say, an antibody card.

Very easy to do.

If you have a test that shows you have 80 or 90 or whatever the level is of antibodies, just as good as a vaccination.

We didn't do that.

And then finally, a lot of research says that even with the most current variants that are more lethal and maybe more infectious, that still people under 16, 17, 18, but especially under 12 have some innate immunity.

And they should be very careful about vaccinating them because we know that healthy young people have a minuscule chance of dying from any variant of COVID.

But we're starting to see, I think we've had 5,000 deaths nationwide of people from vaccinations.

It seems to be very dangerous for some young people, a small percentage, but it really brings into question that Fauci could ask or at least discuss: maybe the population under 12 should not be vaccinated right now until we find out whether this vaccination is more dangerous to them than the virus is.

And the fact is, they're probably not going to get the virus and they're not going to spread it.

But he doesn't allow any of that.

It's just, I'm Fauci.

This is the rule.

So,

this was his Waterloo moment.

And he showed that he's kind of a tragic figure.

He had these traits, but they never were exposed under pressure or crisis.

And once they were, he did not rise to the occasion.

I would add, he's another casualty of Donald Trump.

I mean, when you think that of all the people in politics and medicine and punditry, and I'm talking about Bill Crystal or George Will or Jeff Flake or Liz Cheney or Dr.

Fauci or any of these people, they could have just expressed their disagreement with Donald Trump.

They could even express their dislike, but they weren't, that wasn't enough for them.

They had to go and say, he is the worst ever.

It's the most unusually bad person ever.

This person is a danger.

This person, and they went in such excess and superlative, they were got consumed by it.

So they couldn't write about anything but Donald Trump or talk about anything.

And so Fauci got obsessed with Donald Trump.

And what they didn't understand is Donald Trump knew that.

And Donald Trump doesn't care what you say about him.

Donald Trump grew up in the most, I don't know, I call it the real estate jungle of New York.

He dealt with every sort of mafioso, phony identity

politics group, phony environmental, whatever they are, mayors, corrupt officials.

He knew how to handle them.

He actually wrestled in a big-time wrestling ring.

So he doesn't care.

So these people thought, well, you know what?

I'm Senator Jeff Flake.

I'm Liz Cheney, or I'm Dr.

Fauci, or I'm Bill Crystal.

And I'm just going to tell him what I think of him.

And then when they started trading barbs, people thought, wow, we expect Trump to do that because that's good.

We didn't expect you after all those lectures you gave us about dignity and science and professionalism.

And so they went down to Trump's level and he'd cloppered them.

He's got a whole, I mean, there's a whole line of political corpses and intellectual corpses that mark his presidency.

And so people should have learned, but their emotions took the best of them.

Yeah.

You know what?

I wanted to ask you, because

we're out of time, really, but I just, this is a conspiracy or not conspiracy question for you on the Wuhan virus and China and its cultural trajectory.

So China, our pundits can't decide whether it accidentally came from the Wuhan lab or it was purposeful.

That seems to be the divide.

That's one thing.

The second thing is that China for the last few decades has been investing all over the world and we see lots of results of that, right, in Italy or in Greece, but also in Africa and Latin America.

And we're also seeing that this virus is affecting, especially, I just recently read a Wall Street Journal article about the numbers that are dying in Latin America right now.

I know it's the winter down there, and comparing to the numbers in Africa.

And if you add all that together, the Chinese expansive investment, the death toll, and then finally that China has recently scuttled its one-child policy in 2016 for a two-child policy, and then very recently, May 31st, I believe they did it, scuttled even the two-child policy for a three-child policy.

Am I a conspiracy theorist that China is looking in the long term at some greater presence, to put it mildly, or control of places like Latin America or Africa.

Is that conspiracy or not?

And we should finish off with that.

Those are a lot of questions.

Right now,

the status of the Wuhan lab is this, that the people who assured us that anybody who dare suggest that the virus was not naturally transmitted or evolving from a bat or pangle was a conspiracy theorist.

And therefore, they conflated a legitimate skepticism of that natural genesis theory.

And the way they did that, to discredit people, said, well, you people believe that it was a bioweapon that was deliberately let out.

Why would they do that?

Okay.

Nobody really said that.

I mean, you could find it on the internet maybe, but people that were in the medical community, the scientific community, they were saying, we're not saying that it was deliberately leaked.

We were saying that this virus in scientific terms and in logical terms was engineered by people experimenting, maybe for good purposes, maybe for not.

Okay, that's where we were.

The next evolution of this argument, then there was another element, and that was the Chinese military was involved, and they were overseeing research.

Now, you could say, well, maybe they wanted a virus vaccination program to protect the ranks if a coronavirus ever broke out.

You could say that.

But if you say that, then you have to explain why they would not let any information out.

Because they could live with a leak.

or they could live with being identified, but what they can't live with was that it was a bioweapon that leaked.

And so that's the question.

Why is this particular virus so much more virulent than others that we know of in the natural bat or pangolin world?

And that's what people are arguing.

Now, the final manifestation of that is something that nobody wants to talk about.

And that is that the Chinese military knew that there were people in their scientific community, in this virology lab, that they helped organize and oversee, that were being encouraged both by the Chinese military military and their own government and with outside subsidies from Westerners to experiment with engineering viruses to make them more lethal, but not

necessarily wipe out everybody.

And that they thought that there was a potential for a bioweapon.

Stop, hard stop.

And there are some who say,

well, they...

they released it because they felt that it would stop the Trump confrontation with China.

It would end the trade war.

It would get Trump out of office.

It would destroy his economy.

Or they say the Chinese population is so large.

And there's even some conspiracists who say, well, it's an elderly population they wanted to whittle down or whatever.

There's no evidence for any of that.

That's the last frontier of conspiracy.

But everything up to that point, i.e.

that it was an engineered virus, that it leaked and the Chinese military may have had a role, are now legitimate discussion and debate points, but not the final one.

Will the final one change?

I don't know.

It depends on whether this defector that we think is in the custody of the Defense Intelligence Agency, we're told, comes out not just with fantastic charges that it was a bioweapon that may not have completely been accidental, but whether they have proof.

I don't think it will.

I think that's so hard to gauge the effects of that.

But of course, I'm not a communist Stalinist that doesn't think that way.

As far as South America and the Belt and Road Initiative and China's prestige, It works two ways.

In this recessionary times, China is not being paid by the Greeks as much, or the Italians, or any Europeans that they build harbors for, or the African.

They don't have the money.

And yet, China and China charges interest.

They develop infrastructure, rails, ports for these countries on the idea that they could win their goodwill, they could get their natural resources exploited more efficiently, and they would be in hockey to them.

We don't know how this recession and the comeback will affect that.

And then they're starting to get a really bad reputation because there are various sino vaccinations that they gave to everybody and they thought that this would be like building a harbor or a rail line or a highway.

They're not very good.

So when you see outbreaks in places in Asia and Latin America, in countries that were assured that the China's virus would be comparable to the Johnson 71% or the Moderna 94 or the Pfizer 95% efficacy or the Aztec, It hasn't happened and there is some reports that they're more dangerous.

So they've really taken a hit on that.

I think the answer to the question large is the more people become familiar with the way the Chinese Communist Party operates, the more they get turned off.

And that means if you're an African student and you're in Wuhan or Shanghai when the virus hits and they're going to put, they're going to borrow you from McDonald's.

That means if you're a Muslim citizen, they're going to put you in a camp.

That means if you're a student, you're called in by the Chinese Communist cadre and say, okay, you're at Stanford, you're at Berkeley.

You either give us information or we're going to talk to your parents.

So that type of activity turns people off.

But on the other hand, they think, and this is where I'll end.

Okay, say they think it's like Germany in 1939 or the Soviet Union in 1952.

So what do people in the world do?

They understand the threat, they understand the power, but they're looking for an alternative.

Otherwise, they have to make the necessary adjustments.

So if you're an Australian with this huge country right next to you and you've got all this gas and oil and coal and food, or you're Vietnam with this rich exporting technological sector or rice and agriculture, or you're Japan or you're South Korea or you're the Philippines, you say to yourself, where's the United States?

Where's Europe?

Am I under the U.S.

nuclear umbrella?

Is a particular fleet of the United States, a seventh fleet, going to come and help me?

Are they going to say the territorial integrity of Taiwan is equivalent to that of Oregon or Washington or California?

I don't know.

But the problem of propaganda has been one.

Everybody now sees that China probably had a leak and that they engineered this virus and their vaccine is no good and they lied and they polluted and corrupted the WHO and maybe even people within our own medical establishment and they don't like it.

But on the other hand, a lot of their elites got rich with joint corporate ventures and they're scared of the Chinese military, especially if they're in the vicinity of China.

And they're waiting for an alternative and they don't don't think it's there right now.

Yeah, we know what the chips are, but we're not sure where they're going to fall.

Everybody wants to be on the women's side, even if it requires humiliation to join it.

Thank you, Victor Davis-Hansen, for your time today.

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

Thanks a lot.

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.