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June 18, 2021 - Sebastian Gorka
41:35
The Subversion of the US Military. Victor Davis Hanson with Sebastian Gorka
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Welcome, dear friends, to a very special edition of America First with me, your host, Sebastian
One of our most popular regular guests is, of course, Professor Victor Davis Hanson, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute.
I wish I had enough time to list all of his publications.
Let's start with the latest that you can order right now.
It is The Dying Citizen.
How progressive elites, tribalism and globalization are destroying the idea of America.
But any work by this man, whether it's about the Strategoi of ancient Greece or the Trump phenomena, is worth your read.
And especially his regular articles at places like AmericanGreatness and Greatness.com.
Professor Davis Hanson, welcome back to America First.
Thank you for having me.
So you are in a unique position, I believe, because of the remit and the perspective you have of looking at the evolution of militaries through the millennia, to discuss what I deem to be an incredibly, incredibly to discuss what I deem to be an incredibly, incredibly divisive topic that has bubbled to the surface in the last four months since the new administration has arrived.
And that is the wokeification of the U.S.
military.
That sounds like a jovial term, not a serious term, but let's start with perhaps taxonomies.
Is there a better word for what we are seeing happen with the U.S.
military of late, this insertion of politically correct ideology?
What is your terminology for what we are witnessing?
Well I think in the vernacular they're trying to create a people's army or we would call it an ideological army.
Sometimes it works and you get greater efficacy.
You know it was the revolutionary fervor of the Napoleonic era that allowed France to exercise such military influence because people felt they had a stake in society.
And maybe you could even argue for a brief period the Soviet army was an ideological people's army in 41 to 45, or Mao had a greater ideological zeal than did Chiang Kai-shek.
But it's not a sustainable idea that you select people for promotion or you select strategy and tactics or weapons on the basis of ideological grounds other than military ethics.
It doesn't mean you don't represent your wider society.
That's important.
Sherman had an ideological army that went into Georgia.
It was Midwesterners.
They were angry at succession and the trouble it caused.
They felt that the Cavalier class of the South was bankrupt, and they were dirt farmers from the Middle West, and they were far tougher people than the people they encountered in Georgia and North Carolina.
It was a very, very deadly army.
But we're talking about a people's army where the Pentagon now feels, I think, that the profile that traditionally provided
The rank and file, that is, more or less in a majority society in which 70% of the population is white, that a large number of the non-commissioned soldiers were from either south of the Mason-Dixon line, or they were conservative Hispanic families, or they were religiously inclined, or they were from rural America, or they were from black America, traditional black conservative families, that they don't need those people anymore.
And through their advertising and their recommended reading and their system of promotions, they're going to want the Antifa type, not the terrorists, but the type of people who have grave doubts about America's past, present, and future.
I just don't think it's going to work.
I don't think they're going to get the numbers.
I think they're going to turn off people, but they're not going to attract a new profile into the military.
You use the description of a people's army, where that phrase is applied in the past.
It has been exclusively one-party states that were following the ideology of Karl Marx or maybe the variations of North Korea and so forth, but these were communist regimes.
In this case, what is the ideological framework?
It's not communism in the classical sense, and you mentioned it is this Having an issue with America, can you describe in its totality what the ideological matrix is that is being enforced upon our armed forces?
Yeah, I would call it bi-coastal progressivism, and this is a oligarchic aristocratic boutique idea that certain theories, none of them empirical necessarily, are going to be applied from the top down to America.
They can be everything from the military buying biodiesel fuel at $27 a gallon because of climate change.
You don't question climate change and the efficacy of these radical restructuring of the economy if you're in the military.
It's identity politics, racial reparations that you try to pick and choose people on the basis of their racial background.
Or it's you don't question whether we need sovereign borders and the military can be used as an adjunct for border security.
You don't ever suggest that the military can be used now to put down civil disobedience when local law enforcement is overwhelmed, as has happened in the past.
But where I'm confused, Sebastian, is I don't know to what degree this represents the majority of The military, whether we have a huge silent majority, which is my suspicion.
And then secondly, I'm not even sure it represents the majority of officers, lieutenant colonel, all the way to four star in their sincerity.
What I think is more likely, this is a one, two, three, four star phenomenon.
And it's people who rotate in and out of Washington and they testify from in front of Congress.
They go and attach themselves to the NSC.
They are familiar and they navigate within the Washington administrative state and they feel that their careerist trajectories are enhanced by publicly taking these positions that delight the progressive legislator because he says or she says, my God, we don't want to argue subsidized government, transgender surgeries.
We don't want to argue repertory racial Hiring in missions because it's too messy.
They have a chain of command.
They can just implement it by fiat.
And so there's an attraction in a way there hasn't been before to the left.
And then I've mentioned this before, but I do think, and I'm not trying to be conspiratorial, but I do think the left has de facto dropped their traditional military industrial complex.
They were very suspicious of it.
Their animosity to all things military.
Yes, they've dropped it in the sense that they have added another noun to that.
It's the military-industrial-intelligence complex.
And in exchange for being woke or progressive and helping enact the progressive agenda, they're going to withhold their traditional criticisms of appearing on TV with a security clearance and then arguing and monetizing your past government service.
Or going into the Pentagon from Raytheon and then, quote-unquote, not even knowing what Raytheon is doing as it bids, and then going right out back to Raytheon or General Dynamics or Lockheed or Northrop.
And they don't seem to be talking about that.
They used to be obsessed with that.
So, in their view, this woke military offers potentialities that they can't find in normal give-and-take legislative debate.
I want to ask you, I will ask you when you thought you think that switch occurred and why, but if I may respond to what you said about how much of this woke attitude may be reflected amongst the members of the military.
As somebody who was five and a half years a DoD civilian teaching counter-terrorism, then two and a half years at Quantico, it's my contention that the situation, the problem is even lower than One Star's.
It's anybody whose major or below is good, is sound, hasn't become a political actor.
As soon as they get a half colonel or full colonel, they're thinking about that one star.
And if I may just share with you my personal experience.
2015, perhaps the last year of the Obama administration, I was asked to run an exercise for a group of like three, four dozen colonels whose MOS was strategists.
So their actual military specialization was being a strategic thinker and planner.
And they were in the bowels of the Pentagon in a strategist billet.
So they were there writing plans for the defense of Korea or what have you.
And they'd spent nine months in a postgraduate education geopolitical structure.
And I was asked to run a three day exercise as the culmination before they got their piece of paper.
So I had a very simple idea because I'm about praxis, not just theory.
Friday night, broke them into cohorts.
And I said, you and your cohorts decide what the primary threat to America is.
2015.
Saturday in your cohorts, you decide.
You write down the strategic plan to defeat that primary threat.
And then Sunday morning, you brief it to me and your fellow colonels.
Yes.
Professor Hanson, Sunday morning I had more than half the cohorts.
Brief me that global warming and climate change was the primary threat.
That was six years ago.
That was on the cusp of a nuclear Iran, China with its two mile long, you know, runways on fake atolls, Russia had invaded Ukraine and I was angry and I told them as much that this is the politicization, this is you trying to make Your political masters happy.
So I think it's even potentially worse than most people consider.
So that's just my personal experience.
I want to share with all of our viewers and listeners.
I would agree.
I agree that in my experience and I've spoken numerous times at the War College to the net assessment to the Pentagon to the CIA.
over the years.
And I see a seminal change, 2009, where people said, you know what, we can employ the military, it's not suspect anymore, and we can indoctrinate it.
And then there became this sort of nexus between military types going in and out of the Brookings Institution, Washington think tanks, Council on Foreign Relations, and it became acceptable to You were no longer Iraq war murderer or Afghanistan criminal.
And then for me, it was reified and institutionalized when Trump came in.
And I would direct everybody to a very seminal article that was written, I think 11 days after Donald Trump was elected.
It was written by Rosa Brooks, who had been a member of the Obama administration and High level in the DoD and she's well connected in Washington think tank circles.
I think she works for one of the Soros think tanks.
She wrote an amazing article.
How do you get rid of Trump before the next election?
And she outlined impeachment, which she dismissed because it was too messy.
It would take too long.
25th amendment, kind of very prescient because both of her earlier two considerations actually happened.
The third was a military coup.
And she said, now don't get angry about this.
There are many peoples in the military.
And then when you, for me, that kind of made it okay to think about a woke military in opposition to an elected president.
And then everything started to tumble.
And by that, I mean, we had Evelyn Farkas in the defense department and she was leaking things about how they were rushing to declassify information that might prove Embarrassing to Trump and to hide others that he couldn't use and then we had of course Anonymous who claimed he was a high official and then we had the Pentagon retired military I've never seen anything like that that all these people who were quite decorated in esteem that were considered Center or center, right?
Suddenly Barry McCaffrey is saying that Donald Trump is analogous to Mussolini or General The former Hayden Michael Hayden.
Yeah, he's he's he's tweeting or putting on Facebook pictures of Auschwitz to describe the so-called cages at the border and then Stanley McChrystal is is is weighing in and then it just was a not and then General Mattis and it was just Then they were signing petitions and then when the hunter Biden laptop came out these and former military intelligence They swore that it was Russian disinformation, which was absurd.
And I don't know, I felt I think they felt that now it was not just okay, but it was acceptable.
And there would be rewards psychic and both career wise, whether that was media, books, corporate boardships, whatever how it's defined for being a woke military person.
And I think that's where we are today.
Would you say that in historic perspective, Obama was seminal in normalizing that co-optation of the military and the intelligence community from after decades of saying, you know, that's the man, he's evil, don't trust the feds.
Is it the Obama administration that turns that switch on?
Yeah, I think what he did was he took the traditional The traditional impression of the military is a seven-days-in-May conspiratorial group of right-wing nuts or Dr. Strangelove stereotypes, and he said, you know what?
These people can be agents of social change.
They've got a lot of money, and they're coming out of the academies.
I taught for a year as a Chiffrin professor at the U.S.
Naval Academy, and I can tell you that the general The themes and atmosphere and landscape in the humanities at the Naval Academy was more liberal than anything I had encountered as a visiting professor at Pepperdine or at the CSU system or the UC or as I was a visitor at Stanford.
It was that woke then in 2002-2003.
The academies were turning out and they had been focused on, fixated on by the left.
Who oversees those academies, they were turning out a different type of graduate than they had in the 1990s for example.
We're talking to the author of numerous works.
Let me just read a couple of them.
One of my favorites, Who Killed Homer?
Then Why the West Has Won, recently The Second World Wars, and now his new book, you can pre-order it right now, is The Dying Citizen, How Progressive Elites, Tribalism and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America.
Professor Victor Davis Hanson, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
You talked about your experience at the Naval Academy, which is perhaps one of the most progressive military academies outside of the Air Force Academy, which is the first academy to have a Wiccan, yes, a Wiccan temple built for the cadets at the Academy.
Let's stay with the Navy.
We had just this week the man who's name or his title is Chief of Naval Operations, the man who is mandated to make sure the Navy is fighting fit and capable of destroying America's enemies, testified before Capitol Hill about his reading list.
Every service chief, the commandant of the Marine Corps, annually gives out a list of books that his Troops should read.
Admiral Gilday included one, Mike Gilday included one by Ibrahim Kendi, which maybe shouldn't be on that list.
Cut one, play cuts.
This book states that capitalism is essentially racist, and Kendi is clear that racism must be eliminated, so yes or no?
Do you personally consider advocating for the destruction of American capitalism to be extremist?
Here's what I know, Congressman.
There's racism in the United States Navy.
Admiral, you recommended every sailor in the United States Navy read this book.
It's a yes or no question.
I'm not forcing anybody to read the book.
It's on a recommended reading list.
Admiral, did you read the book?
I did.
Okay.
In college, Kendi stated that white people are a different breed of humans and are responsible for the AIDS virus.
Yes or no, do you personally consider the conspiracy that white people started AIDS to be an extremist belief?
Sir, I'd have to understand the context.
That is a simple question.
Admiral, this is a book that you recommended every sailor in the United States Navy read.
Sherry picked quotes from somebody's book.
I'm not going to do that.
This is a bigger issue than Kendi's book.
The chief of naval operations saying you don't have to read the book, but I recommended it that says white people are a different breed or different race.
And America and capitalism is the problem.
You mentioned the ideology that is being pushed is very much The one that is propagated by the 1619 project of America being problematic and especially of white Americans being inherently racist in the history of military history.
Has there ever been a successful military that taught its members to detest the nation they're meant to defend, Professor?
No, not at all.
I mean, even in the most raucous days of Athenian democracy, when the Athenian Navy went out, the idea was, even though it was split ideologically between radical Democrats and oligarchs, there was tension, but there was no idea that part of the Navy would go over the enemy or would not have their heart into it.
So, that happens, but it doesn't ever happen in a successful context.
There are ideological differences.
There was in Vietnam, but I think everybody realizes to the extent there were ideological differences on the field of battle in Vietnam, it did not enhance military efficacy.
But that clip is important because I think the Admiral is telling us that he didn't get to be Admiral by Agreeing with a member of the minority party in Congress.
In other words, two things would have been different.
Had that questioner been the majority party, then the admiral would have made a simple calculation and say, these people have control over promotions and they have control over budgets.
This guy doesn't.
I do not want to disown Kendi and then get called up by the House Armed Services Committee And have a bunch of woke congressmen grill me over and impair my budget or my promotion list.
And then second, of course, he's asymmetrical.
If that question had said, you recommended a author and this person, when he was in college, said things that were anti-black and said blacks were, and just changed the word white and black, then he would have showed his outrage.
We would know.
I didn't know that.
I had no idea that's getting off the list.
And so he knows that.
So he makes a calculation based on what he thinks is good for the service, maybe, but also for his good career.
And he's not going to, he said in his way of thinking, it's, I can put up with five minutes of embarrassment by some right-wing congressman as he thinks it is, but I do not want to sacrifice my career.
And I know who's in power now.
I know what the Biden administration is doing.
I know what secretary Austin is doing.
I know of the Obama dash.
Warren, Dash, Sanders, people who are in the Pentagon, and I'm not going to get on the wrong side of them.
And more importantly, I didn't work this hard to ruin my retirement possibilities, because the corporate world is woke as well, and I'm not going to come out here and be the Admiral at Trash Kendi, and then when I retire, turn around and have Northrop saying, we have a bunch of people on social media that are after you.
We can't appoint you to a board slot, or something like that.
I'm cynical, but it's only because I've been shocked the last year.
Just one other aside.
I always had problems with some bases being named after mediocre and racist Confederate generals, OK?
But I understood the context in which that happened.
The broader political context.
Yes.
So there was Fort Bragg after a mediocre racist Braxton Bragg.
OK.
Everything that Braxton Bragg touched on the Confederate side was mediocre.
But when after World War One, and slightly before in some cases, when the United States started to have a permanent military, and they needed bases, and we were in the divisions over the Civil War still, appropriations to become a world power, especially in the World War I period before and after, to get those bills passed with that Southern Democrat Jim Crow lock on legislation,
People who were internationalists went to them and said, would you support a standing army of a caliber that could stand up to Europe?
Would you stand for an army air service?
Would you have a global blue water fleet?
And they said, yes, but we want those bases in economically depressed places and we want to name them.
And that's how we got these names.
Not all of them who were illustrious or moral figures.
Okay.
I have no problem with that.
But if you want to change them, get a board and go through it.
But when I see illustrious people like David Petraeus or Stanley McChrystal just shocked suddenly in the year 2020 and say, my God, I didn't realize that I was empowering this racist, stereotypical movement by going to Fort Bragg.
I was there for 30 years.
I didn't know it.
Or when Stanley McChrystal said, My God, I had a picture of Robert E. Lee.
I was taught he was a revered figure.
I just threw that picture down.
Oh my God, when I walked to the West Point, there was a statue of Lee.
I didn't understand.
I just don't believe that.
I do not believe that.
And also, it's so disingenuous.
There's even a question of being dishonorable here, because as somebody, I don't know how many times I've taught at Bragg, I still teach for the Special Warfare School.
If you say the word Bragg, In any, and I mean any military context.
You could be in Coronado, you could be outside with, in NATO headquarters.
You say the word brag, the only thing associated with the word brag is not Southern revisionists and the South will rise again.
The only thing associated is Special Forces Green Berets.
End of story.
So you're denying the reality of the word, if you want to get all Wittgensteinian.
And that's exactly why that nasty attempt to change it stopped, because literally tens of thousands of people in special forces came out of retirement and said, listen, Bragg is an institutional brand, it has nothing to do... 9 out of 10 people have no idea that it's related to Braxton Bragg.
But what I'm getting at is this... General McCaffrey... The drug zone, right.
All of these people have had very lucrative post-Pentagon careers.
They all have.
Stanley McChrystal is a multi-millionaire.
I have no problem with that.
But what I don't like is then coming back and right in an opportune moment to suddenly say things and criticize things and institutions as if they had not been approving and participating in them their entire careers.
Had he said when he was a two-star general When he was questioned about things that bothered him in the military when they were evaluating his performance, whether to go to three-star, he said, you know, I got to be honest with you.
We got a problem with Fort Bragg.
We got a problem with Robert E. Lee's canonization.
But they don't.
And so the implication or the inferences by ignorant people like me is, well, you don't do it Except when you feel that it's in your career interest because your corporate clients, like if it happens to be Coke or Delta, they're on a particular woke mission and you don't want to be antithetical to that because you won't have them as clients.
So that's what's happened.
But there's also a deeper aspect here.
McChrystal, I know McChrystal and, you know, the idea that he leaves the army And builds his multi-million dollar enterprise on a lecture about leadership and probity in leadership.
That was McChrystal's thing, how to be a leader in business.
And now he's virtue signaling.
I mean, all he's doing is virtue signaling and making sure he gets more contracts from the corporation.
So there's this this disjuncture between I'm a great leader.
I would say if I was Stanley McChrystal, and I've met him, I like him, I respect him, he had a brilliant military career.
We all are in debt to his efforts in Iraq.
That being said, if he's really interested in self-improvement, and he feels that his ability to inspire leadership depends on whether or not a picture of Robert E. Lee hangs from his wall, then maybe he should say this, that when you're a commanding officer, and the commander-in-chief Is the President of the United States, no matter who it is, and people in your immediate vicinity start to deprecate him or his administration, then you don't allow it.
Remember, he was relieved of command because in a room, supposedly, he brought in a Rolling Stone reporter who he gave immediate access and complete access to, and that reporter suggested that one of his top
Aides, a officer said, Joe, Joe bite me for Vice President Biden was calling and Stanley McChrystal did not say you don't, you don't address the vice president of the United States in that derogatory and obscene form.
He didn't do that.
And that was disclosed and Barack Obama relieved him.
And so that's something that I think we could all agree on was wrong, but There's something, I guess what I'm saying is, in the last 10 or 15 years, there is something gone wrong with the U.S.
fee days, but that, when there were chances to approve it, he didn't do it.
And so that's my, there's something, I guess what I'm saying is, in the last 10 or 15 years, there is something gone wrong with the U.S. military, and it is not at the rank and file.
It's at the Lieutenant Colonel DeForestar, and it's become a professionalized clique.
And I'm very worried about it because it's happened before in the United States, and it's not healthy.
And we need Mavericks.
We need Curtis LeMay's.
We need George S. Patton.
We need Matthew Ritchie.
We need Ajax.
If you haven't watched it, you need to see Professor Hanson's lecture on Patton, the modern Ajax.
I was watching it again earlier this Morning to prepare for today's interview.
However, I agree with you, it is the general officer flag collars, it is the senior colonels, but they want to change that and make sure that this is inculcated, this political matrix, this filtering is from the bottom up.
The best evidence we have is from the US Army, a recruiting video about a young corporal in the army.
Just play a little clip and then we'll ask your response.
Play video cut four, please.
It begins in California, with a little girl raised by two moms.
Although I had a fairly typical childhood, took ballet, played violin, I also marched for equality.
I like to think I've been defending freedom from an early age.
In that minute-long video from the corporal who says she has two mothers, which is a biological impossibility, she never mentions duty, honor, service to the nation or threats to the United States.
Let me ask you from the perspective of the red cell.
The U.S.
Army and now all branches have this red cell component where we try and think like the enemy.
We look at our plans and we dissect them from this perspective of Beijing or Moscow or the mullahs in Iran.
When our enemies see that video, what do they think is the future of the US military, Professor Hanson?
Well, I have kind of a strange take on it.
I think they think like this.
Our regimes cannot exist in North Korea, or Iran, or China, or to a lesser extent Russia, unless they're ideological.
In other words, all of the Russian high command, or the Chinese high command, or the North Korean or Iran, Whatever the ideology in those four countries is, they will step to it.
They have to.
And that hurts their battlefield readiness and performance.
And they had looked at the United States where that was not true.
It was a meritocracy and there was no ideological litmus test.
And therefore, when they came up against the US military, they didn't do as well as they would have liked.
Now they see that the United States military is starting to emulate their straitjacket, click your heels to an ideological norm.
And I think they feel relieved.
They think, well, you know what, they don't have that advantage that they used to have because anybody who is a maverick and somebody who comes up in a battlefield situation says, I have this strategy.
Or I think this weapon is not as good as that weapon.
Or I think tactically this is nonsense.
Somebody is going to say, well, you better be careful because you just, the person who you're attacking is gay or the person under your command who's very unhappy is black.
Or that you may be called a white supremacist.
So that's my problem.
My other problem with that ad is, if they want to target individual profiles, I have no problem with that, but let's have one for let's say a traditional agrarian family in Utah that are Mormons, or let's go into Central California and say we've always tried to recruit people from the farm or people who were fundamentalist.
They don't do that.
So their selectivity gives the game away, I think.
And also the majority of the armed forces come from those working class, salt of the earth, non-bicoastal families.
They do.
And I think this was the subtext that people didn't speak about in the military, but they accepted it.
And it went something like that.
The Scotch-Irish martial tradition that ended up in rural America and often south of the Mediterranean, and yes, was a component of the Confederate army, not the racial component, but the amazing ability of Southern armies to fight in a way that sometimes was not matched by the Union army.
Union army was a better army, but maybe man-to-man in certain situations, not.
So what I'm getting at is, throughout history, that type of profile, as Vegetus, the Roman strategist and compiler, showed us, that those rural virtues or certain tribal characteristics make people fight well.
And the military understood that.
So when you start looking at who were the great commanders at the major level, the captain level, the non-commissioned officers, Often in our wars, they were rural people, they were devout people, they were people south of the Mason-Dixon lines, they were Scotch-Irish, not necessarily my pacifist Swedish ancestors.
So that's just the way it was, and we didn't encourage that, but there was a natural drift from that group, and now we have equated that with white supremacy, and it's not that we're neutral about it, we are deliberately discouraging those people through these messages that you just played.
that offends their religious sensibilities or their traditional devotion to the military.
We are trying to not get them to come.
And that poses the question, who's going to replace them in numbers and quality?
And I don't have that answer.
Maybe the Pentagon has some secret study that says we're going to get some very wonderful and we're going to get tens of thousands of gay people to come in and they will be sort of like the Theban Sacred Band at Lutra, you know, or Somewhere else.
Those deadly drag queen regiments.
I wonder if that study has been written.
We're talking to Professor Victor Davis Hanson, the author of the new book, The Dying Citizen, How Progressive Elites, Tribalism and Globalization are Destroying the Idea of America.
Follow him right now at VD Hansen on Twitter.
Professor Hansen, we have to go in our last few minutes.
The most important question of all, always, is the so what question, translating the analysis and the theory into praxis.
And I want to play one more cut.
This is from the man who shouldn't be Secretary of Defense because he was in breach of the requirements for the period of time out of human form before you could become a cabinet member.
But he is now the Secretary of Defense.
His name is Lloyd Austin.
And this is what he had to say in his confirmation hearings before he entered the Biden administration.
Cut three.
And if confirmed, I will fight hard to stamp out sexual assault and to rid our ranks of racist and extremist and to create a climate where everyone fit and willing has the opportunity to serve this country with dignity.
The job of the Department of Defense is to keep America safe from our enemies.
But we can't do that if some of those enemies lie within our own ranks.
So declaring war on enemies is followed up, or should be, by the destruction, the killing of those enemies.
We have a Secretary of Defense who says we have enemies in our own ranks.
And when he talks about extremists and racists, we've seen the material, I've seen the material, it's unclassified.
None of it talks of Black Lives Matter extremists or Antifa.
It is conservatives, it is this boogeyman, this myth of white supremacy in the U.S.
armed forces.
I'd like to ask you the so what question.
Are we condemned, if it's at the highest level, Secretary of Defense, are we condemned for the next four or eight years to witness this politicization of the military?
Or is there something that can be done to lessen it, to slow it down?
What does America need to do to keep our armed forces the best in the world?
I think every American needs to get out, register to vote and vote in this next midterm.
Because if the conservative Republican wave comes and they take back control of the House Armed Services Committee, the Intelligence Committee, then these generals will have to come up and their salaries, their budgets will be held by a majority.
And if they take the Senate, all the greater.
The reason I'm a little bit cynical is.
He talked about larger climates among the leaders, about racism and the tolerance for racism.
He's talking in a week when the president of the United States' son was said to communicate with his own lawyer, not once, not twice, but on numerous occasions, the N word.
And then when asked by his first cousin, the president's niece, and she said, I'm not going to set you up no way with Asians.
And he, the president's son said, no yellow.
Then you could make an argument that racism is endemic.
It's systemic.
It's everywhere.
And it even has infected the president's family.
But when you have the president going overseas and then looking at the world on global television and saying, we had a racist or a white supremacist effort to take over the Capitol that killed an officer that was an exact lie.
And we're supposed to say, okay, you lied there.
But your son has been spouting for a long time racist things of a word that you have said condemns a person and gives you away as a racist.
And your own niece and your son have been talking about and deprecating Asian Americans at a time when you said Asian American hate crimes are systematically representative of a racist culture.
Then I could believe the Secretary if he said, look at what this has happened.
So all of this, All of this is calibrated and adjudicated ultimately by what I can say to advance my own stature and what I can't say.
I don't believe any of the pontification, the moral preening, the performance art, unless they're going to be equal across the board.
If the Secretary had said, it even affects the First Family, I would have been a great supporter of it.
I said, go to it and I will support you because you're not selective.
But he is selective.
It speaks to a deep, deep level of cynicism.
I have to, since we've touched upon it, or we've sidled up to the political so many times, I have to ask this question, since you're the author of the book, The Case for Trump, as well.
I know the President values your scholarship and your opinion very highly.
Were the events of 2016 A one-off anomaly?
Or has the political landscape in America changed irrevocably?
Yeah, that's a very good question.
Because the agenda that was formulated by Donald Trump on questions of symmetrical trade, China, closed borders, re-industrialization, questioning optional wars in the Middle East, energy... That has now been institutionalized by the Republican Party.
And by that I mean not one candidate can run against that.
That's dead.
There's not going to be any more Bushism or Romneyism or McCainism.
But the $64,000 question is, do we have other leaders that are younger in the next generation to follow Trump?
And then more importantly, everybody doesn't have the answer because they think, well, Donald Trump tweeted too much or he offended the independent voter.
Can we capture that voter?
But on the other hand, if we find somebody who doesn't do that, are they too traditional?
A politician, they won't get 50,000 people out in the freezing cold in Michigan.
And so we're looking, we're looking to see, because Donald Trump will be Joe Biden's age, 78 in 2024.
And people are saying, we like Trump's agenda.
We like Trump's outsider status.
We like Trump's aggressiveness and doesn't care attitude about the swamp, but we want to get, make sure we get 51% of the vote.
And how do we do that with Trump or without Trump?
They don't have the answer yet.
Thank you, Professor Hanson.
I want to thank you for several things.
First, your regular dedication to my radio show, America First, for all the things you've done in the interest of truth and pushing back on what is it you call the therapeutic academic environment we have developed.
I personally am very grateful to you and I'm sure the millions of listeners that tune in every week to hear you on my show are as well.
Thank you, professor.
Please, if you're listening, if you're new to our Rumble channel, start with Why the West Has Won.
Check out the professor's work, The Second World Wars.
And to all of you, because it's his latest work, please order right now, The Dying Citizen, How Progressive Elites, Tribalism and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America.
And follow the good professor at VD Hanson on Twitter.
Thank you kindly, Victor Davis Hanson.
Thank you, Seb.
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