Is There Hope for The Dying Citizen? Interview with Historian Victor Davis Hanson | TRIGGERED Ep.94
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hey guys welcome to another huge episode of trigger
Tonight's episode is one I've wanted to do for a long time.
Historian, author, professor, Victor David Hansen is joining us.
Victor has been one of the most influential political theorists and conservative thought leaders for years.
He also wrote an incredible book called The Dying Citizen, which pretty much Predicted so much of what we're seeing play out across the country today, and it's great to have him on to do a deep dive into the problems we face, and more importantly, how we can actually fix them.
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Well, guys, joining me now is military historian, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, author of The Dying Citizen, Victor David Hansen.
Victor, thank you so much for joining us here today.
I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me.
Well, listen, I think it's a timely time to have you on because we're seeing absolute insanity across the spectrum.
And first off, I want to get your 30,000-foot view of sort of the declining credibility of academia in America and what long-term impacts The growing pushback, whether it's the pushback against anti-Semitism at schools like Penn, my alma mater, the woke insanity that we see at Harvard, where if you're a recipient or a beneficiary of DEI practices, you're totally absolved from...
Racism, insanity, plagiarism scandals, all of the things that would have otherwise, let's say, thrown you afoul of the ethical standards of what it meant to be in Harvard.
What is going on?
What do you see happening?
How long has this been going on?
And what do we do about it?
Well, it's been going on for a long time, and there was kind of a deal worked out in the 1940s and 50s that a college education, especially after World War II, was going to offer two years of general education for half the population and train people In graduate programs in law, medicine, business, etc., to create kind of an American preeminence.
And so we were going to overtake German universities, British universities, and we did.
And part of that bargain was we gave them enormous leeway in exemptions, for example.
We always knew they were a little bit political, but we said, you know what, they're non-parsons, so 503C or whatever the term was, we allowed them to have no income tax on their endowment.
We allowed them to get donations, even though some of the money was used for politics, with tax write-offs for the donors.
We got what came to be a $2 trillion student loan.
Guaranteed loans. Of course, they raised the rate of tuition higher than the rate of inflation.
And of course, we would probably give them $45 billion in research money.
And they broke the bargain.
So they didn't do the two things we asked.
They didn't remain disinterested or nonpartisan.
And they didn't teach I think part of it was affirmative action led to DEI. That was a big change from trying to restore historical inequality with Blacks And we expanded it during the Obama administration with this word diversity that just meant anybody that wasn't white.
That was 30% of the population.
And then we said, you know, this Marxist binary, they're oppressed, they're victims, therefore they get an exemption.
And we started to have not just proportional representation as far as admissions, faculty, hiring, retention, but I guess you'd call it repertory.
So when you look at Stanford today, where I work, Only 20% of the incoming class is white.
And that's why, even though that's 67% of the population.
And when you look at white males, it's about 9% because 54, 53% of the population incoming are women.
So what do you do?
That's not the end. When you bring in people on the basis of their race or sexual orientation or gender, and at the same time you throw out the SAT or make it optional, and you don't adjudicate comparative GPAs from high school, So I went to a rural poor high school and I got a 4.0, but I don't think I would have gotten that from a very prestigious prep school or something that was much more rigorous.
It doesn't matter now. So then what's happened in these universities, they've got all this money that's tax-free.
It's coming out of their ears.
They have money to hire administrators.
At Stanford, there's almost one administrator for one student.
They're not teaching. You've got a lot of students who under their own criteria would not have been admitted.
They're very angry when they get to the university and they think, well, I was admitted to Harvard or Yale or Stanford.
These courses are racist.
They're sexist. I can't do them.
So then the faculty says, I can either inflate the grades like Yale or Stanford where 80% get A's,
or I can water down the courses, or I can bring in new courses with DASH studies,
environmental studies, black studies, peace studies, etc.
Or I can just maintain standards, classes, workloads, and I'm going to be called a systematic
racist. And then on top of that, we brought in a third of a million Chinese students, but a
third of a million from the Middle East, all on oil.
of the truth.
Tuitions that pay 100% of the tuition with no discount as they give to Americans.
So when you look at these campuses, you've got a lot of people who feel that somehow it's unfair that the workload after they got into Yale or Penn, they get there and they think, wow, this is very hard.
This is unfair.
I don't have to do this.
And then they go gravitate to courses that are therapeutic and say, you know what?
You don't have to do those courses.
It's a racist system, and these are the courses.
And you put in the foreign students in the mix, and suddenly you've got an explosive, arrogant, and ignorant population, and that's what we've had.
Yeah, I actually, I tweeted about the Stanford thing where 20% of the undergraduate population was white, and, you know, I commented, it's sort of odd, right?
And a bunch of the woke, I think it was some writers at the New York Times, how do you know that, you know, 80% of the white population wasn't just magically underperforming?
And, you know, it's just not the nature of statistics.
I'm sure you can see a point or two here or there, but you couldn't as a As a graduate of Penn, I went to Wharton undergrad, and Wharton was sort of the carrot that they would give, whether it was athletes or something like that.
Like, oh, we'll put you through Wharton, and you'll go to the best business school.
The problem with that, when affirmative action that I witnessed with certain friends who were let in because of those things is, you know, at Wharton, like, you had to get through engineering calculus, and if you didn't have the foundation for that, you weren't going to do it.
So they were trying to do someone a favor.
They were trying to recruit, but in the end, a lot of the people who didn't end up graduating at all...
It was because they couldn't handle that workload because there was still something that you had to do.
And, you know, I think there's the Hemingway quote about, you know, how do you go bankrupt?
You know, you do it gradually and then suddenly.
Will we see a realignment in academia now that donors are getting involved?
You see what Bill Ackman's doing at Harvard.
You saw, you know, $100 million being threatened at Penn.
That led to action.
Unfortunately, it's that same, you know, $100 million that drives too much of politics and manipulates too many politicians.
I'll probably talk about that in a little bit, but...
In academia and at Penn, when it was a white woman, it moved a needle.
At Harvard, it doesn't seem to be moving a needle, where the president says, despite a plagiarism scandal which would violate the code of ethics, despite turning a blind eye to flagrant antisemitism.
And again, they've tried to cutely say it was about free speech, but it was never about free speech.
It was about code of conduct.
And the same people who have been crying about words or violence for the last few years probably don't have much of a leg to stand on as it relates to free speech.
Does something now happen or does it matter?
I mean, at Harvard, it seems like Claudine Gay is going to stay there because I believe she's gay.
No pun intended, whatever.
And she's African-American.
So, like, you know, plangerism doesn't matter.
Breaking the code of conduct doesn't matter.
You're totally immune and absolved because the first rule of DEI is you can't take away from a beneficiary or recipient of it because if you do, the whole thing collapses.
Yeah. Well, just before I answer, you might tell your Stanford critics that they gave a press release two years ago that said the SAT is optional, but we're very proud that most of our students nevertheless took it.
And the.01 who got a perfect SAT score We rejected 70% of them.
So they were happy about that.
So when they say, how do you know that the 20% doesn't reflect people who are not doing well, we just asked Stanford.
If you do very well and you're rejected with 70% of all the perfect SAT scores, you reject.
And we know most of those SAT scores came from the Asian and white population.
I think it's a good start because that's a lot of money, 100 million, but when you look at 50 billion at Uh, Harvard or 40 billion at Yale or 38 billion or 25, 28 at Penn. They still have a lot of money.
They're getting a billion, 2 billion, 3 billion in annual revenues off the endowment.
And then they match that with giving.
So I don't think it's going to change until the government comes in and says, you know what?
You're not a nonpartisan institution.
You're a political force, and we're going to be watching you.
But in the meantime, maybe small universities that have a billion or $2 billion endowment, we're going to allow them to have the income tax for you, but not you.
You're going to have to start paying income tax on it until we can determine that you're nonpartisan.
Same thing with research grants.
And I think the same thing, we might have to take away the tax-free status for donation.
And that would shock them.
But who's going to do that in government?
I love the concept.
The only people that can do that in government is you're going to have to have a Republican White House, a Republican Senate, and a Republican House.
That's the only way it's going to happen.
And then you'll have to fight it in the courts.
But that will at least put them on the defensive.
They're on the defensive now just with these $100 million, $50 million threats to withhold funding.
And... The problem with it is that they are destroying meritocracy, so we're not going to be preeminent in the world anymore.
And people will not feel, and I think maybe it's good, they will not feel an MBA from Stanford or a BA from Yale or A JD from Penn, it won't mean anything anymore because if you give 80% of the grades are A at Yale, and it's the same most other places, and you're passing people that have to be passed because you let them in without the qualifications that you said just five years ago were absolutely essential.
If you want to go to Harvard, you've got to have 770 SAT. You've got to have a 4.5.
Otherwise, you won't be able to do the rigorous work that we demand to be the best university.
If you just throw all that out, then your name is going to go like Bud Light or Disney very quickly, and it's happening.
So a lot of employers, and I think that will change them because when employers say, you know what?
If I get a Stanford coder in Silicon Valley or I got a Georgia Tech coder, the chances are the Georgia Tech coder is better.
And more importantly, they're not going to go on the first day to HR and start causing me problems.
Yeah, there's a drama factor, I think, that you're going to get with these Ivy League.
They've been so coddled.
I remember for me at Wharton, you know, when I was at Wharton undergrad, I mean, we were in there, you know, I was taking finance 101 with guys that worked at Goldman Sachs for five years getting their MBAs.
You know, you'll learn how to use Excel really quickly because you're forced because our...
I don't remember exactly what the curve was, but basically, if you're not in the top 25% of your class, you're starting at a C, which wasn't great.
And when those guys were sort of pass-fail, but they'd have all that real-world experience, it created a structure that made you work, that forced you to actually try to excel, not just whine and complain and figure out how to manipulate a system with some sort of fake grievance.
Yeah, I agree. And I think it's already starting to happen.
They feel that they have four centuries of stature and they can never go the way, as I said, of Target or Bud Light.
They can very quickly.
If you destroy meritocracy and then you do things like at my university, Judge Duncan came to speak.
You drive him out. You say you hope his daughter is raped.
You see these people can't even condemn anti-Semitism.
You start to see our president at Stanford had to resign because of allegations of Dishonest research.
I don't know if they were proven or not, but he was forced to resign.
When you have the president of Harvard, she says she didn't plagiarize.
I looked at the data. Maybe it wasn't egregious, but according to their own standards, she would have been forced to resign had she been any other faculty member.
So when you have all of that bad publicity and it's happening every day, It's cumulative.
And I think I have mixed emotions about it because I want us to have the best doctors, the best engineers, the best lawyers, the best business.
And so we've got to almost strangle these universities to the point where they give up but not extinguish them because they have the core.
We've got to get new people in there and use that infrastructure to get back to where they were 30 or 40 years ago.
It definitely feels like if China or one of our enemies actually created a real meritocracy and actually started educating and putting some money behind this thing, they could actually create a system that would, a university system that would shut down the nonsense that we have here.
And I feel like that would be an incredible opportunity for them.
You know, I don't want it to happen because, you know, I've sort of, I love the hegemony that America has had over our adversaries for now perhaps hundreds of years, but that's waning very quickly, and it feels like that would be an opportunity if others wanted to actually put some money behind it, create true A true meritocracy which doesn't exist here anymore and it would be disastrous for our system and ultimately our way of life as our finest talent starts going abroad and likely staying abroad for the future.
Yeah, well, the irony is that in the 1980s and 90s, China understood that.
So they began copying, especially in the sciences and STEM courses, our universities of the 1980s and 90s.
And they ditched the Maoist model that was commissars and ideology, etc.
That had destroyed their country during the Cultural Revolution.
And the irony is now we're adopting their system that led to failure in the 60s, and they're adopting our system in the 90s that was very successful.
There are people trying to do stuff.
The University of Austin, as you know, is trying to be meritocratic.
It doesn't have DEI. It's a brand new university.
Ralston College in Savannah is starting.
There are some schools, and you know them well.
Hillsdale College is just swamped right now, Don.
They don't know what to do with the amount of admissions.
Typically, they have 1,600 students, 400 entering.
They're getting thousands of applicants, and it puts a great burden on them because the applicants that are applying to a St.
Thomas Aquinas or Hillsdale are not just traditional conservative students.
These are the students that are straight A's, perfect SAT, but they did not get into Williams or Harvard or Brown, and they want to go to a meritocratic place, and they're liberal.
And they want to go to Hillsdale, but if you let them all into Hillsdale, You might change the brand of Hillsdale and sort of like the phenomena of all of us in California leaving to go to a state and then replicating why we left California at the new place.
So there's a lot of transition going on, but the traditional schools are starting to be They're coming to their fore.
A lot of parents I've talked to in Silicon Valley and Atherton, Mountain View, Menlo Park, their kids didn't get into Stanford and they accepted it now.
They sent them to Michigan State or Auburn or University of Alabama, Tennessee.
They don't care anymore. They're done with it.
And they think their kids will get just as good an education.
Yeah, no, I think without question, I mean, University of Austin may face some issues just because of the demographics surrounding the campus and the undue pressure, you know, that would put on, you know, the little communist state within Texas.
But, you know, I've been fascinated sort of reading, you know, some of your long-form tweets about what's going on.
You know, in Israel right now and the Palestine conflict.
Can you provide a little perspective for the audience and context as to why places where we see the pro-Hamas extremist The most are actually on college campuses.
I mean, how did that become an issue?
I mean, you know, again, for me at Penn as an undergrad, I graduated in 2000, you know, 25-30% of the, you know, Caucasian undergraduate population was Jewish.
You wouldn't think that it would be a place that would be a hotbed of Hamas extremism.
And yet, 20 years later, here we are.
How did that happen?
I think there was a trifecta there.
First of all, when we went to DEI admissions, the group that was hurt the most were Jewish because they were white and they were lumped in, but they had traditionally outperformed almost every other demographic.
And so there was a time just 20 years ago if we had looked at Penn or Harvard or Yale or Stanford, they were 25 to 30 percent of the student volume.
They're down to 15 or 10 percent now.
They really got killed on the new DEI admissions.
That was one thing. So a lot of the anti-Semitism is felt to be exempt from consequences because there's not that many Jewish students that can rally in numbers to stop it.
The second thing is we let in Under our immigration policy and our university, tens of thousands of people, because of the Iraq War, the Afghan War, or the wars in the West Bank, etc. But we're getting tens of thousands of students from Egypt, Syria, Iraq, the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, and they come with Gulf money.
And in addition to that, Gulf money is endowing Middle Eastern professorships, Qatar especially, $10 billion, all over.
So you're getting this huge pocket of Middle East students on student visas that are having their own sort of enclaves with Middle Eastern endowed professors.
You're having fewer Jewish students.
And then you've got the DEI group.
And the DEI group It comes in, and that's 30 to 40% of the enrollment.
And they have bonded with the radical Hamas students from the Middle East on the idea that, well, you're not white.
We're not white. Therefore, we have a common victimhood.
We're both oppressed.
And the result is there's no constituency on campus.
To speak out against them.
Everybody's afraid of them. The faculty's afraid.
The administration's afraid.
And when you final, the final tester on that mosaic is they don't know anything because, as I said, any class with the dash that has studies after it, Middle Eastern studies, peace studies, you know, Gender studies is my favorite.
Gender studies, exactly. Black, Latino, Asian studies, etc.
So when you see these students, and UC Berkeley, as you probably heard just last week, found that about half the people who were chanting from the river to the sea didn't know the Jordan River, the Mediterranean Sea.
So they don't even, at Stanford, if you walk across campus, you see these kids and you ask them anything about the Middle East, they know nothing.
And yet they're Highly active, partisan.
So it's ignorance and it's the demographics of the university campus have just, I mean, I can't even exaggerate how radically they've changed and how the faculty is terrified, the old faculty.
How do they accommodate these new students?
These students are very...
Aggressive. They feel insecure because they were admitted and told they were brilliant.
They get in here. The classes are not as easy as they thought.
They gravitate toward a therapeutic curriculum.
They get active. At Stanford, they have a blacklist.
So if you're a professor and you insist on punctuality or deadlines, then you go onto a list of professors and courses that people are supposed to avoid.
How do you handle being...
I mean, you're at Stanford.
How do you feel on campus?
What do you see?
How are you treated? What is that experience?
I'm a little lucky... We have one enclave at Stanford.
We have the medical school, law school, but we also have the Hoover Institution.
So while we're tenured professors, we're called fellows, we don't have to teach unless we want to.
So I teach at Hillsdale instead.
I take a month off and I go and teach intensively, or one or two days a week I'll teach at Pepperdine online and go down there a few times.
At Hoover, we're under enormous pressure because we have a beautiful campus in the center of the tower.
We're the only faculty members that really don't have to teach if we don't want to.
Our salaries are competitive, if not better.
Our facilities are better.
So Stanford, 360 degrees, pressures us.
They say, well, you know, Professor X is not that He's not that liberal.
Once you take him over to Hoover, and we'll have a joint appointment.
As soon as that Professor X comes over here, he says, well, I want to bring over Professor Y. He's not that...
And then we get...
They're absorbing it.
So we're a little protected, but I'll give you an example of how crazy it is.
If you and I had this conversation three years ago, and I was walking across the campus with Scott Atlas.
Yeah. The advisor to your father.
Of course. People would walk the other way, or they would say something.
In fact, the medical school faculty voted to censure him, and the medical faculty tried to take away his medical license for three or four things he said.
That have all been proven true.
He said the lockdowns would cause more economic, medical, psychological damage than the virus.
He said eventually, while the vaccinations had utility, they would not be the only way to get immunity.
That would not happen until people had natural immunity.
And then finally he said that he felt that Unfortunately, the economic downturn would destroy the country for years, whether defined as students missing courses or people getting into the habit of Zoom or things like the George Floyd riots, people coming out of apartments and cloisters and then suddenly out in the street.
He predicted all of that.
And yet...
They never have apologized to him.
And that's what Stanford is now.
And they tried to ruin his life.
He had to get security cameras at his house.
Yeah, no, I mean, he literally called everything.
And it wasn't like the predictions he made were so radical.
I mean, it was, you know, if you look at it today or in hindsight, or if you're a reasonable individual, like perhaps you or myself looking at it at the time, like...
They were always the most plausible answers.
Of course that was going to be.
I always use the example of the Wuhan lab leak.
Of course it came from the Wuhan lab.
No, no, no.
It came from two feet outside of the lab, Victor.
It came from two feet outside of the lab.
It didn't come from the lab that studies the exact virus in question.
If you were at Stanford and you had a research grant, Anthony Fauci, who seemed like Let's call it an underperformer throughout his academic and medical career at best, but he was the best bureaucrat by far.
In terms of protecting his own and snaking anyone who would get in his way, of course they were the most plausible, but it didn't matter because we don't live in a meritocracy.
We don't live in an area where common sense is at all common anymore.
It is. And the sad thing about all of this, I was asked, I'll just give you an example.
I grew up on a farm. I still have a farm.
I'm sitting here on a farm.
So I was asked to talk to a hydrology class, which means at Stanford, it's farming is bad and water should be let out to the ocean for fish.
But when I walked in, a couple of things, this is hydrology.
I asked them, What are bowls on a pump?
What's the difference between a gravel pack pump and an open bottom well?
How many gallons a minute?
Would you get with a 15-horsepower pump at 100 feet?
Just basic stuff that any person who wants to irrigate should know.
What's drippers? What's misters?
All of these questions. None of them.
Not one. Not one student knew anything about it.
When I got to the question of, should we release 90% of the snowmelt on the San Joaquin and Sacramento Rivers into the Delta?
Because of the Delta smell.
They all had theories. They were not good theories, but they all had theories.
So even a course that's based on science is manipulated and polluted.
And that's what happened in the Soviet Union in the military.
It happened in the Cultural Revolution under Mao.
It happened in Europe.
In the 90s under the EU, and if we go that route, it's going to radically alter our standard of living.
I think it already has. Whether it's pilot training, it finally gets into the, I guess you'd call it the essentials of life.
If you're going to hire air traffic controllers, if you're going to hire people in the military, if Mark Milley says that he's going to investigate white rage and have people read Professor Kendi or...
He's going to call up his Chinese counterpart and warn him about President Trump's proclivities in a crisis.
Or we have retired generals who call the commander in chief a Nazi or Mussolini.
You add all of that together, And now we have, what, 40,000 military people?
We're sure we can't get them to go.
Because who's going to go fight for that?
I mean, you're told...
Who's going to go fight for that?
Trans operators make our SEAL teams stronger.
Now, we're not sure how.
We keep hearing diversity is our strength.
No one's exactly explained why.
When it comes to air traffic controllers, I don't care if you're brown, green, purple, blue.
I'd like someone who's actually competent, not someone who's aggrieved and put into a position for that.
But But that doesn't matter.
So, I mean, is this something, you know, that's all stemmed from, you know, critical race theory, right?
You know, critical theory seems to be the underpinning a lot of the woke DEI madness that we see at these universities.
You know, what is critical theory?
And how did it gain this power, this sort of, you know, immeasurable power inside our major universities?
Critical theory came from the Frankfurt School, and these were people who fled Germany in the 1930s.
And Herbert Marcuse is one of the best known.
And basically it says critical legal theory, critical race theory, modern monetary theory.
It says that all of the roles by which we govern racial relations are the law, are constructs.
They don't resemble any reality in nature or human nature.
And therefore, they're suspect because they're created by wealthy people.
So, for example, if you and I walk into a store and we steal a candy bar, it's against the law.
Critical legal theory says, well, that's because a bunch of white, powerful people never steal candy bars.
So, of course, they made rules to hurt other people and suppress them because they never have to steal Adidas or candy bars.
Or in the case of critical race theory, it just simply says they created a construct Of white people.
It doesn't have anything to do with the Protestant Reformation or the work ethic or 95% of the people at the founding were white in the United States or anything.
It's just an arbitrary construct.
And therefore, everything that permeates society depends on that white monopoly bending and creating rules for their own privilege.
And that's what it is.
It's not based on reality.
So when Lloyd Austin, for example, says, I want you all to read Professor Kendi, and I'm going to look to find out if there's white rage, he knew there was no white rage, at least at an epidemic level.
No one ever heard of it before that.
A whole group of people.
No, they didn't. And so what happened?
All of a sudden, when you look at that drop-off, and if you look at the data very carefully, it's overwhelmingly white males from rural, suburban, middle class, lower middle class groups.
And they died at 73 to 75% of their demographic, of all the demographics of the dead.
And if you say that, and I have to generals that get very angry, We don't keep data on the debt.
They do, but they just don't want to mention it.
So if you're telling the group that goes over to Iraq and Afghanistan and these god-awful places, and they'd like to be in combat, and they're dying at 72% of all the deaths come from 35% of the population, and then you go out and you belittle those people as...
Vax deniers, Vax conspirators, racists.
They are the one demographic who is not re-entering and explains the general drop-off.
And there's no basis to anything of the accusations against them other than this theory that on racial hierarchies, they're victimizers because they come from the majority population.
Why would you fight for a government that hates you?
I mean, I don't know.
That's the explanation. I mean, a key tenet, it seems, of patriotism is actually being able to credibly believe in what you're fighting for.
And when you see this nonsense and you see the drivel, I remember seeing that speech.
It was like, I want to learn, I think it was Millie, I want to learn about white rage.
I'm like, really? Like, I'd never even heard the term before, but like, now I'm pissed off now.
Now I have rage because it's so ridiculous.
It's so insane. And, you know, perhaps it's because the military off ramp is now getting a board seat at Disney rather than at Raytheon because, you know, other than since the advent of sort of the Ukraine crisis, you know, I think the general populace of America is no longer interested in the never ending wars.
They're trying to change that desperately.
But, you know, and so maybe that's why sort of the leadership of the military has gone woke because that's how to get their board seat and that's their retirement plan.
But it is crazy.
I'm very worried because I know a lot of these people from the rural San Joaquin Valley, these families, and whether their father got kicked out because he had COVID three times but he didn't get a vaccination, or their son was over in Afghanistan and was wounded and saw what happened in Afghanistan, or another one kid listened to Millie or Austin.
Whatever the reason is, they're not re-enlisting or joining the numbers they have in the past.
And then what's even more disturbing, you talk to a four-star general or admiral and you mention this, and I have on numerous occasions, they say, well, it's because of gangs, or it's because everybody's obese, or it's because there's a short...
They'll come up with every reason to avoid this truth because they're terrified Of questioning DEI or the Washington establishment.
I think one of the reasons that you cited is that we have these revolving doors where they go out to these very lucrative positions in lobbying, defense contracting, and they don't want to offend the board.
Also, you notice in the old days, somebody like Elizabeth Warren would really press a general.
The left would. They say, you know what, General X and X, you're retired now, and you're weighing in on this issue of, say, gays in the military 20 years ago, but you worked for Northrop, or you worked...
And they would hammer them.
Now they get a complete pass because they know that...
That if these generals and admirals that are running the military are woke, or at least act like they're DEI people, they will give them a complete pass on their retirement activities, their lobbying, their conflict of interest.
It's really insidious what happened, that the whole idea of making a lot of money after being in the military when you retire is now deeply embedded within the left-wing project.
It really is.
Yeah, that's what seems so interesting about American academia.
It's the attack on capitalism, the attack on free speech, and all of these important values that they themselves seem to actually rely on to make their living.
It's almost as if when a society reaches a certain point of success, it breeds this class of intellectuals who often don't Really have to face any real consequences for their terrible ideas, like abolishing the police.
What could possibly go wrong, Victor?
I mean, it seems like a brilliant plan, and then when it goes wrong, they're absolutely shocked.
It's also, from my experience, a lot of people in academia They're very highly educated.
They're not all that bright, and they're very anti-capitalist, anti-money, but a lot of that is some kind of strange psychological effort To square the circle that they think that because they're articulate and they speak well or they have a lot of letters after their names, they deserve a lot of money and they're obsessed with money and they want to make money and they're envious of money.
They'll say things, you know, you go to have a coffee with somebody and says, you know, I don't make any more than a guy who works on 7-Eleven.
Well, a guy to 7-Eleven is a genius to run those stores.
But more importantly, you can see it with the Bankman Freed.
So that law couple at Stanford, his parents, they were the most radical, too, on the Stanford law.
And she was a bundler for dark money in Silicon Valley.
He wrote about tax law and how it was unequal.
And then we find out that they were siphoning money from his son to buy $16 million annually.
In Bahama real estate, there's a text exchange where he says, Sam said that I could be a consultant for a million dollars.
I'm only getting $250,000 this year.
And they were obsessed with money, and he was too.
And yet, they all package it in that we're going to be philanthropists, and we're going to be You know, postmodern philanthropists.
But there's something there with the left.
Same thing about race.
They do not like to be with people that don't look like them or from a different class, and they create these edifices in the abstract that they're so anti-racist.
But boy... When you go to these places around Cambridge, Mass, or you go to Atherton, California, around Stanford, these people hang out with themselves, and the only time they see Latinos is when they mow their lawn.
And so, I think a lot of the academic problems are that you have a lot of people in there that are dysfunctional, and they know they're dysfunctional, and they create these, as I said, they project their weakness and worries on other people.
And you can really see it, you can see now with your father and Trump's a dictator, Trump's a dictator, Trump's a dictator.
As soon as the polls are unfavorable to Biden, as soon as the legal jeopardy increases around Biden, as soon as the dementia is now undisguised and accepted, suddenly Trump is a dictator.
But then you look at it empirically, And you say, did he weaponize the FBI? Did he have people lie under oath to the FBI? Did the CIA director lie under oath as Obama's did?
Did they have Russian collusion, Russian disinformation?
Did they have an anonymous?
Did they warp the system?
Did they try to cancel student loans before the midterm?
All these things. So then you ask, well, why are they doing it?
And I think the answer is, the left right now, politics, media, academic, they say, if I was in his position, After what we did to him, and he was on the cusp of perhaps getting the nomination, getting elected, then I would do something to my enemies to make sure it never happened, even though I don't think Donald Trump ever did.
That was what was remarkable.
He never went after anybody.
So then they're saying, he's got to be like I am, so I would really go after and screw people over, so I'm going to accuse him of it, because that's how I think.
And that explains a lot of it.
The projection, you know, should be noted.
I mean, everyone has to understand this is what the left has done forever, right?
It's sort of the, you know, Saul Alinsky rules for radicals, right?
Accus those, you know, of doing the things that you're actually doing to cover up your own thing.
And you're right, this is, and we're living under a party, the Democrat party today that does censor and silence
anyone who doesn't go along with them.
They are trying to jail for a thousand years and possibly the death penalty,
their leading political opponent.
The list goes on and on.
If we wanna do the sort of the dictator checklist, they're doing it and yet they project, right?
I saw the Atlantic article.
Oh my god, it's going to happen.
You saw the Washington Post.
You see noted liberal scholar Liz Cheney.
She's out there and the left is more than happy to welcome Liz Cheney, of all people.
Her father, Darth Vader, after the endless wars and all of these things, now she's a noted liberal scholar, someone who's 100% in tune with the conservative mindset, and is given a platform by the left to do anything they can to try to stop Trump.
I mean, the projection is insane.
I mean, is it so ridiculous that everyone gets it, or are people just, you know, it's hard.
I've taken this stuff personally.
I see what they- I think the latest polls show that About 85% of Republicans, which are about half now of people who register, know that these legal proceedings are law fair and they're unfair and about Of the independents, it's about 55 to 60%.
And what's remarkable is if you look at Democrats, about 40% now, even higher, 45% feel that the legal proceedings are being used to punish Trump.
And so when you get to those numbers and they continue, they're going to have a problem, I think, if they get convictions because most people are just saying, and the way they rationalize or the way they try to approach this asymmetry, they say to themselves, Has Joe Biden or has Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, have any of these people overvalued real estate?
Have any of them ever made a call to a registrar and saying, there's got to be something you're missing?
Has anybody ever had a campaign donation?
Hillary was fined in 2016 for hiring a foreign national, Christopher Steele, which is illegal.
No problem. So I think they're looking at a comparative standard of justice, and they can't find it.
And so they know what's going on.
And the left then would say, yes, okay, there's no comparative standard of justice, but Trump is such an existential threat, we have to make a special case.
Then they say to themselves, As we said earlier, well, exactly show me how he had government overreach.
When they told him he couldn't build the wall, they put him in lawsuits.
The DOD backed off.
He didn't try to just bulldoze it.
Some presidents would have just bulldozed it and finished.
He said, okay, this is what I have to do.
I have to fight in the courts to get permission to do this.
It's really funny about that issue because On the one hand, the hard right was criticizing Trump and saying, you're not tough enough or you're not vindictive enough.
Many wanted him to be a dictator, but he wasn't.
He wasn't. He wasn't.
I've said that to many people.
I said, you don't understand. Donald Trump, he's a business person.
And in business, it's not always wise to hold existential enemies forever.
And he has a practical, realistic state of mind.
And when I wrote the book for Case of Trump, I think I read 11 of those books, you know, Case for Trump, Comeback.
And that was one of the biggest problems, I think, that Trump had was to convey the idea That he wasn't like Hillary.
He wasn't vindictive like Obama.
He liked to troll people.
He liked to say stuff, but they just wanted him to be like themselves, and he wasn't.
It's hard to overcome that narrative also, right?
Everyone understands.
It's actually fairly easy to be a conservative in Washington, D.C. if you give up when it matters most.
You know, you're allowed to be conservative.
You can have as long as you fold, you know, when it matters.
But that's led to so many other problems.
I mean, that's the difference between our side and their side.
They just fight so much more aggressively than us.
We do what we can to be loved.
Now, I do want to...
You mentioned one of your books, but in your book, The Dying Citizen, you talk about the destruction of the middle class.
This is one of those concepts that Trump really keyed in on, because strangely enough, even the billionaire from New York got it, and yet our representatives don't.
But, you know... The decline and the destruction of the middle concepts, concepts like patriotism and citizenship, which have been so critical to America's success.
How do you assess the state of the middle class today and where the country got off track?
And, you know, can that be fixed or is it too far gone between the elites that are making decisions, right?
The D.C. Republicans, you know, they know what their people want.
I talk about the Ukraine war and I've done the survey in front of thousands of people in live audience, probably 30,000 people.
Not one of the Republican survey thinks Ukraine and funding indefinitely is a top ten priority.
But if you ask Mitch McConnell, if you ask people in the House, it's a number one priority for Americans across the country.
How do you fix that disalignment?
Well, I think part of it is until 2017, we'd had 12 years of static income.
Now we have an erosion of income the last three years of the middle class.
So the average person in America, 50%, dies with less than $10,000 in net worth.
And when you have that Stagnation in wages, then it starts to affect everything.
The age when people get married, it's up to, it's gone from 23 to 29.
The age when they first have children, 26 to 33.
The number of children, 1.7 versus 2.5.
The age when they buy or can afford a house, all the way up to late 30s.
And it's down to about 60% of the population.
And that's economically driven.
And when you have the universities that step in with these $2 trillion of loans, and the university never says to the student, I'm kind of a car salesman, so here's before you sign on the dollar line, this is the majors that will allow you to pay the loan back.
This is what the compound interest will be.
This is where you'll do it.
And you got to pay me back because I'm going to back this loan with my university endowment.
If they would do that, Then people would be much more selective.
But no, the government will make up the difference.
30% of you default. We're going to keep rising prices because you're a captive audience.
So you put all that together and you've got this phenomenon, especially among men, where a lot of Young men don't feel that they can make wages to get married, to have children, to buy a home.
They're not viable. We've got a whole vocabulary among our elite, deplorable, irredeemable, dregs, chumps, clingers.
And I'm very fentanyl, 100,000 deaths.
The white lower middle class suicide rate is the highest per capita in the country.
Life expectancy for lower class whites is taking the sharpest turn of any demographic population.
So there's something to that group, and they were, years ago, addressed by the lunch bucket union Democratic politician, JFK, those guys.
Not anymore. Harry Truman.
And the Republicans never addressed.
And I don't know what Kevin McCarthy meant.
I like him a lot, but he said the other day that the Republican Party is...
A country club.
And I think he was right four years ago, but I do think the Republican Party is now starting to be a nationalist, populist, middle-class party.
And I think that's really important.
The Democratic Party is the very, very wealthy on the coast and the very poor, subsidized.
But it's written off the middle class.
Completely written it off.
Yeah. So it's a big problem of how to...
And how do we get wages higher?
We try to get fuel cheap.
We get electricity cheap.
We make sure that we don't put mandates that warp the market like EVs when they can buy a cheap, clean-burning gas car with plenty of gas that's $2 a gallon instead of here, $5.50.
Things like that. Or shutting down American energy independence while then giving the money to Iran and Venezuela.
Who we didn't even recognize as a legitimate regime.
But it's that stupidity, again, that it's hard to believe it can exist, and yet it's rampant.
It is. It's ideology.
In California, we're blowing up.
We passed a bond to build more dams so we would have more water, more clean burning hydroelectricity, more recreation, more flood control.
And we used a lot of that, $500 million of that dollar to blow up four dams on the Klamath River that provided 80,000 or 90,000 households with clean electricity and they're beautiful lakes.
So it's almost a nihilism on the left of the elite left.
And they have this idea that we have the Al Gore's of the world or Tom Steyer or the Silicon Valley people.
We have so much money and we've reached nirvana.
That we're going to force everybody to adopt our ideas of race, the environment, energy.
Well, Bill Gates' carbon footprint doesn't count because he's doing good with it.
So it's okay for him to fly a G650 all over the world by himself, creating a larger carbon footprint in eight hours than the average American would create in their lifetime.
But that doesn't matter.
I don't think these people realize that when you look at the classical Greek city-state or the late Roman Empire or 15th century Byzantium, when you have a group of aristocracy or plutocracy and they have no...
Interest in creating or protecting a middle class, the entire society starts to fall apart.
And when I say no interest, it's we're going to use the capital of the society to pursue goals that we think are very important.
But they have no resonance or no support among the middle class.
They don't do anything for them.
How is that narcissism?
Because that's all I can explain.
It's narcissism, right? Because they'll tell you, they'll mandate what you must be doing, but no one's actually leading by example.
The thought leaders of those movements, frankly, are the biggest hypocrites in existence.
Well, that's why they're movements.
They feel that here in California, if you live on the coast, it's 70 degrees all year round.
They want to have 30 cents a kilowatt.
If you're down in Bakersfield or Fresno at 112, who's in Walmart?
Poor Mexican people are in Walmart to get free air conditioning.
My office at Stanford, there's no air conditioner in the office.
There's never been needed.
If you talk about charter schools...
They hate charter schools.
Their kids are all in prep schools.
Crime. Critical legal theory, you saw what happened with the Soros attorneys, prosecutors in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
But when you look at the types of homes and security systems in the Bay Area or Los Angeles, and even that is not enough sometimes.
So all of these utopian bromides are based on the idea that we have the wherewithal to protect ourselves where we experiment on the middle class.
Yeah. And the middle class kind of deserve that experimental treatment because they're not as smart as we are.
They're not as culturally sensitive as we are.
They're not as open-minded as we are.
So we're going to experiment on them.
They're all going to live in high-rises.
They're all going to take mass transit.
They're all going to be in EV vehicles, but we're not.
Yeah, you'll own nothing and be happy is what they tell you.
And there seems to be a general sort of lack of happiness that's coming on.
I guess, you know, there's a book called Bowling Alone, which chronicles the decline in Americans, you know, In-person social activities and the decline in membership in what would be, you know, in the past, you know, key civic institutions.
You know, there's young men that, you know, they don't even bother to get their driver's license, even if they could afford a car, because they would rather sit there and play video games.
I mean, can you talk about this declining...
Let's call it social capital.
You know, how it impacts how we view our fellow citizens, our community, our world, the efforts that we would make to succeed and do anything.
Or does that just sort of breed, you know, a blob, which seems to be what the governments want because you're dependent and they can control you and therefore it's okay.
We've had such...
Traumatic dislocations in our economy with, say, the internet and technology, cell phones, that all of these appearances, they entice people to go into a solitary world, you and your cell phone, TikTok, cancel culture, deplatforming, all in a distance where you didn't have to see anybody or associate with anybody.
And at that moment, we should have doubled down on American institutions, Lions Club, Elks Clubs, Little League, all of those things that kept us.
And yet, those were sort of written off as white patriarchy, ossified relics of the past, whatever.
But it was considered not cool to have any of those social institutions.
And all women were going to be single until they were 40, maybe have one child, maybe during that process it would be accepted three or four abortions, they were going to be working hard.
And nobody ever asked themselves, well, what are men going to do?
Men can just date without any Without any commitment, and sexuality is free for anybody, and we're kind of biologically different by birth.
What does this do to women?
You've got this situation where all these young men are not working, you say, living in the basement.
They kind of date this person for a while, that person for a while.
They don't buy a home. They feel that the system's rigged against them.
They're on the internet all day.
They're playing video games.
And... That is one of the greatest, I think, crisis in this country is the war on or the inability of men to function, young men.
And we've got to do something.
I think part of it, I have a lot of nephews who've never married.
They don't own homes and they're in their 30s and they date, but they're not committed.
And you talk to them. And they'll say, well, it's impossible for me to buy a house or it's impossible for me to, you know, work and have kids.
I wouldn't be able to afford it.
I don't know if that's true or not, but that's a perception.
And we really need to find ways to lecture them about their responsibilities, but also create an economy of the middle class that allows them some...
When you have 7% mortgage rates like we do now and the price of housing has gone up, you just ostracize a whole class of people from buying a home.
It's crazy.
Well, but it also feels like by design.
And so if we're going to talk about all of these things, which feel like they're on purpose, meaning the decisions that are being made clearly seem to be designed to actually hamper people from being able to get ahead.
And without all that, we can't We're good to go.
You know, America's an idea, but it's more than an idea.
What's your view on immigration and what we should strive for from a policy perspective right now with what's going on?
Well, we're on unknown ground because the highest we've ever had in numbers, But especially percentages was 13% of it.
And now we're up to 15%.
And over 50 million people were not born in the United States.
In California, 27% of the entire resident population was not born here.
And that requires an enormous investment in assimilation.
And we're not doing that.
And more importantly, about 70% of the immigrants of that 55 million came here illegally.
They reside illegally.
They don't know English.
They didn't have skills.
They're not diverse. And they didn't come in numbers that were pliable or amenable to rapid assimilation.
So we're creating these huge enclaves of different constituencies.
And they don't know.
And we, the host, have no confidence in giving them civic education.
So where I live, which is about 95% Hispanic, we have people who just come from Mexico.
But in the schools, no one's teaching them what the Star-Spangled Banner is, or what happened at Shiloh, or what the Gettysburg Address is, or the tripart system of government.
They're teaching them just the opposite.
You came, and you're going to face discrimination.
You're part of the diversity.
And it's a prescription for disaster.
So we need to close the border.
I think we need to deport the 8 million that came under Biden.
We need to have about 200,000 meritocratic admits every year, legally, that have to go through a process of adjudication and authentication.
We've got to have bring back refugee status, Determined in your own home country, stop, catch and release, increase the border, finish the wall.
The last year of the Trump administration, we pretty much, after all the court, all the acrimony, the system finally started to click.
The bad wall was being replaced.
Some of the new wall was being built.
Catch and release had stopped.
Mexico was on warning that if they continued To greenlight the cartel smuggling of humans, we were going to do some very bad things to them, whether renegotiate NAFTA or tax remittances.
They're terrified of that.
They get $60 billion, and they know that $60 billion comes from mostly illegal aliens that are on sizable U.S. government support that lets them free up cash to send home.
So they're terrified Of what the government could do to stop it.
And I think the system, the paradigm is all there.
But when Joe Biden in 2019 said, surge the border, we want you to surge the border, he said that as a candidate.
And then we'd systematically broke this down, because I think the Democratic Party said to itself, We have an agenda that 51% does not want and never will want, and we have to change the constituencies in this country.
And 8 million people, we get angry about it, and Mayorkas, what he did, but I guarantee you, five years from now, people on the left will say, my God, Mayorkas was a genius.
He got 8 million people in here, and now they've got a whole new Democratic Party.
Yeah, it seems like, you know, there's that big racial, you know, they always go after you, oh my, great replacement theory.
I mean, you can't, how can you possibly say that?
It seems... I don't know the racial underpinnings of it, but it seems pretty clear that of course they want people that are dependent on government.
That's the entire basis for voting Democrat.
If you have people that are dependent on them, they're going to vote Democrat.
They're going to change a demographic in Texas, which would in turn change the national vote, which would in turn change the makeup of the Supreme Court.
If you say these things, you're clearly racist, but isn't it Like, there's no, again, we talk about plausibility.
There's no other plausible argument, whether you call it the great replacement theory or anything else.
Isn't it pretty obvious that's what the Democrats are doing?
Yeah, I think it is. They don't seem to be hiding it.
I mean... I mean, they really went after...
Tucker Carlson, say, a year ago on television, did a series...
Of commentaries where he just took the paper by the left.
So a book called Demography is Destiny or The New Democratic Majority.
That was their terms, not his.
And he says they're very confident that they're going to create new constituencies through immigration.
No sooner he has said that than he said he's a racist advocate of the Great Replacement Theory.
But the Great Replacement Theory is their theory.
And they only use, they're a little bit smarter, they use a euphemism for it.
And everybody knows that.
The only irony is that every once in a while, as you see with crime, even their cocoon is not enough to protect them.
We saw Martha's Vineyard and now we're seeing in San Francisco, Los Angeles, that it might backfire because we have a lot of second and third generation Hispanics California, 42% that I think could vote 40% or 45% Republican because they're on the front line.
So in my town, when you have all this surge coming in, what does it mean?
People come up to a Hispanic kid, third generation, doesn't speak Spanish.
They call him a gringo. M13, Norteños, Sermenos comes up.
They're in the schools.
They have to have English as a second language, no longer advanced placement.
And so a lot of people...
Are starting to see that this elite project of open borders is really hurting minorities of the lower and middle classes.
And if the Republicans are gifted enough, they could really take advantage of that.
And I don't mean take advantage in the negative.
They could really create a fusion party, and I think they're already doing it, of middle class people.
And if they can brand this as an elite project, Of elites to bring in people they'll never have to encounter, but expect everybody else to encounter without, you know, I think it's, put it this way, if the Hispanic population votes 45% or 50% Republican, they will close the border.
They will close the border.
There's an old adage in politics that, you know, all politics is local, but it seems like nowadays it's actually the opposite, right?
All politics is national.
You know, I remember why, you know, John Fetterman was literally struggling to speak, you know, during a campaign for Senate, a United States senator that he won.
When I questioned that, I was called an ableist.
Apparently, I discriminate against those with disabilities because I expected a United States senator to be able to complete a sentence.
That said, I've got to call balls and strikes.
In the last three weeks, he's called the border policies of the Biden administration ridiculous.
He's done some pretty solid trolling of the Hamas caucus in Congress, so it's sort of hard to believe.
Maybe he's come around, and maybe I was wrong.
I doubt it. But what's your view on...
How political discourse is changing that way, with the ease and access of information compared to the past.
Well, I think there's a lot of people in the Democratic Party that are starting to wake up and they're saying, you know, not for the right reasons, but they're starting to say, we bought into the AOC squad line, the Elizabeth Warren, the Bernie Sanders, the Obamas, but there's not enough people because we have so alienated the white working class that we have to have 95% black vote.
We have to have 70% We've got to have 60% Asian vote.
But we have policies that are increasingly seen as elitist and anti those groups, and they're starting to peel off, and you don't need very many of them to peel off.
Because of the, as I said, the figures on the white working class voting propensity are staggering.
They're Republican fealty.
I've never seen anything like it.
When I grew up, every Democrat that I knew was a white guy that worked at a factory in San Joaquin Valley.
But they have been completely wiped out, and they're voting conservative without exception, 60-70% of white males.
And they're a huge demographic.
So I think the Democratic Party is in panic now, and they don't know quite what to do.
So a guy like Fetterman is starting to, or SEMA in Arizona, they're starting to say, you know what, we've got to do something very quickly, because if we don't, Our own constituencies are going to turn on us.
And I think that's...
The other thing is the cultural issues are really bothering minorities.
The trans issue, the radical abortion on demand, all of those, if they're handled right by Republicans, it takes some skill.
Big if, yeah. We're not historically known for doing well with that, unfortunately.
No. We haven't won 51% of the popular vote since 1988, when George H.W. Bush did.
And that was only because...
He had an absolute genius, Lee Atwater.
And Lee Atwater looked at Michael Dukakis, who was 17 points ahead in 1988.
And he ran the Willie Horton ad.
He ran the Boston Dirty Harbor ad.
The tank ad with a helmet.
That was brutal. I remember it, and I was like 10.
Yes, when he got done, Michael Dukakis got slaughtered.
And then you know what the Republicans said?
We never want to do that again.
That was mean on our part.
We won, and they never did it again.
And they've never won.
They've done very well at the Senate and the House and the state legislature, governor level.
But the RNC has never really backed a tough-hitting campaign ever again.
And meanwhile, the left just, anything's wrong.
Anything goes. So I think in the next election, we have to be a lot tougher on the left, but we also have to find ways of populism and appealing to people across racial lines.
I would like to see All of the people up for election, Senator, everybody, to go into the ghetto, or I don't even want to use that term, go into the barrio and say, you know what, you are part of our middle class project, and we're going to help you, and your leaders have betrayed you as much as our leaders have betrayed us.
And I think it would be really, they could really do something.
And I think the left is terrified of that.
I love that because I think in the context of the 2024 race, that would be a philosophical underpinning of the America First movement.
I think we've shown we are actually the party of tolerance.
We are welcoming to these things.
It takes a long time to break those molds.
You say within the African-American community, I think the Trump administration and policies did far more than the Democrats ever did for them, and yet you didn't necessarily see a movement.
But now I think you're right with the radical trans agenda.
Parents should not be involved in their three-year-old's decision-making process about undergoing what I call genital mutilation, but what they would call gender-affirming care.
The radical nature and the radical underbelly of the Democrat Party today is being exposed, and I think that creates a great opening for us to appeal to people of reason.
I think if Republican candidates went into South Central LA or they went into Chicago and they said...
I am more worried that you don't have access to needed social services because you're a fellow American than I am worried about somebody who walked in here from China or Somali or Guatemala.
I feel for them, but they're going to go back where they came from because I'm worried about you as an American citizen.
I think it would really resonate.
Yeah, and you're seeing that in Chicago, right?
They were revolting because the undocumented migrants are throwing out Americans and they're throwing out war veterans out of housing and they're spending millions and millions of dollars.
So I think there's something there.
But I got to ask you, as a military historian, my father often cites generals like George Patton, etc.
Yes. What generals...
How about you?
I think the man who saved the Civil War was William Tecumseh Sherman, because after his resurrection at Shiloh, he crafted a grand strategy that was complementary to Grant.
He basically said to Grant, who was a Klaus Witzian, you're going to hold Lee in Virginia and you're going to take an enormous cost.
100,000 casualties, and I'm going to go all the way down, cut my supply lines, and go into Georgia, get Atlanta, go all the way to Savannah, go all the way to the Carolinas, and in this process I'm going to I'm going to destroy plantations, I'm going to destroy government, but I'm not going to touch a hair on the head of the middle class, what there was of it in the South.
I'm going to free slaves, and I'm going to maneuver around and humiliate the chivalry of us.
And it worked. It was brilliant.
He didn't kill that many people.
John J. Pershing was not a great tactician, but he had a vision that the American army, after declaring war in 1917 in April, with no army to speak of, could get a million men within a year.
And they put a million men in France.
And by 19, the end of the war near 1990, they had 2 million, and they didn't lose any, not one, on the transit.
And he was able to keep an American army independent that had never fought in that type of war before.
Patton, I think there's no doubt he was the finest infantry armor officer in World War II. He was better even, I think, than Guadarian and Rommel.
He was brilliant. Mm-hmm.
And without him, I don't think we would have.
Had we let him do certain things, we could have end the war, I think, in 1944.
But as it was, I don't think we could have won the war easily without him.
Two others are very quickly is Matthew Ridgway.
We had lost the Korean War in December 1950.
It was completely lost.
And if we had not had that man to go over to Korea and turn everything around, I think we would have lost the war.
And then we had an Air Force officer.
He was very caricatured.
He ended up very unhappy.
He was the model of Dr.
Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick's movie.
But Curtis LeMay saved the B-29 program.
We talk about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but what really made the Japanese...
Crumble was he destroyed the industrial center of Japan.
He did it in about Three months by rebranding or rebooting or recalibrating the B-29 program.
So we've had some really great generals that came out of nowhere, and they all have one thing in common.
In peacetime, they were all suspect.
People thought they were too profane or their language was not up to standards, but they were authentic military geniuses, and we were very lucky to have them.
Yeah, we could use a couple of those guys now.
But as a last sort of thought, you know, there seems to be, if we're talking about war and generals, there seems to be this endless appetite for war inside the swamp.
Because as it turns out, amazingly enough, I guess there's a lot less money in peace.
Many Americans, especially now on the right, have drastically sort of shifted their, you know, formerly hawkish views about America's role in foreign policy.
You know, what role do you see For America now in places like Ukraine, in the Middle East, and Taiwan, because it seems like there's been a huge shift on the mindset and the views of people.
Maybe that's because they've been exposed to sort of reality and the truth and the lies they've been sold have come out as lies.
Where do you think we are there?
Well, I am an advocate of sort of a don't tread on me, no better friend, no worse enemy, Jacksonian.
In other words, we have to build up our defense.
We have to have the best technology.
We have to recruit the best soldiers.
And then, now and then, without getting on the ground, without getting in an optional war, without nation building, We have to do things.
So I thought what Trump did, getting rid of Soleimani or getting rid of ISIS, those were things that had to be done that the prior administration had been paralyzed.
Once we did that, we didn't have men on the ground, and yet we warned them that if they retaliated in a manner that threatened or we were going to do something.
So then all good things happen when you do that.
You create deterrence.
So then Vladimir Putin, who had gone into Osatia and Georgia in 2008, he'd gone into Crimea and Donbas in 2000.
He didn't go in. He would again in 2021.
The Taiwanese were not being threatened every day by China.
China was not sending a balloon.
Hamas was not going in.
And the common denominator of that was Wow, the United States is spending a ton of money, again, on the military.
The military is not getting blogged down in Iraq or going into these cul-de-sacs in Libya.
When it's used, it's absolutely deadly, and it's in their interest, and it's allies' interest.
And therefore, we do not know what they're going to do at any given time other than it's not going to be good for us.
We were unpredictably tough.
Tough, but never knew exactly what happened.
The doubt was on their side.
Now, they think we're predictably not going to do anything, and we're going not to retaliate.
And if we are going to get involved, we're going to get involved in a way That unfortunately exposes our weaknesses rather than our strengths.
So deterrence is very hard to obtain and it's very easy to forfeit.
But I think all of us are getting to the point where we want a much stronger, much more effective military, much less politicized, and then it's used at key moments In a way that reflects our strengths and we can control it and not get bogged down and help our allies and ourselves.
And you don't have to keep doing that.
That's the key to it. You just have to do it.
When we got rid of Soleimani and we bombed the proverbial SHIT out of ISIS. That was pretty much it as far as kinetic force.
We really didn't have to do much.
Yeah, it's amazing what resolve, a little bit of resolve and a little bit of unpredictability can actually do.
I mean, the nature of predation throughout history, throughout the animal kingdom is you prey on the weak.
And so when you have a weak leader, when you see them falling down stairs, when you know they're hamstrung by woke ideology, That's the nature of a predator, is to strike and to pounce when that happens.
And so, yeah, we could certainly use a lot of change on that front right now.
I think so. Yeah, I do.
And it doesn't take a lot.
It has to be consistent.
It has to be applied without doubt.
And more importantly, they have it all wrong about our allies.
They always say... Well, you have to go consult your allies.
You have to do this. The allies like to be consulted, but what they really like is the idea that The United States will use force to protect them that shares value.
So the Chinese go to Japan, they go to South Korea, they go to Australia, they say, the United States is a setting sun.
They won't protect you. Why don't you join us?
It's better for us, for you.
We'll protect you.
And when we're strong, we don't have to even get, we just say to them, If they screw around with you, we're going to react in a way that's going to protect you and protect us and then we're not going to have to keep doing it.
The biggest problem is that this bipartisan foreign elite that comes out of the particular diplomatic graduate programs or this ecumenical globalist rules-based order stuff, they don't understand human nature.
And more importantly, they're dangerous because they want to put our troops into places where it's not our national interest and expose them to types of warfare that's not our forte.
We do a lot of stuff really good, but one thing we do not do is go into a Fallujah or Mosul or street-to-street fighting like the Israelis have to do.
That's going to be difficult for them, and they're going to win, but it's going to be difficult.
And so I think smarter and stronger, and we'll be fine.
Well, Victor, thank you so much for doing this.
You know, guys, check out Victor David Hanson.
It's some of the great commentary on Twitter.
A lot of long-form thought, you know, depth going into this thing.
Also, check out his books.
But a true fighter and, you know, someone you should definitely be checking out.
Victor, thank you so much for doing the show.
Just really appreciate it.
Thank you, Don. We'll see you.
We'll see you soon. Be well, man.
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